The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings

by Lars Brownworth

  Horik had no choice but to give in. As galling as it might have been for him to submit, there was at least one upside. He now had an official excuse to confiscate the spoils that had made Ragnar dangerously popular in Denmark. The Parisian loot was soon on its way to Louis the German along with all of the Dane’s Christian prisoners, and although Horik had no control over individual Viking raiders – most of Ragnar’s men seem to have left his territory – he did withdraw his official support for their attacks to mollify Louis the German. This submission seems to have been serious on Horik’s part. Not only did he send regular gifts and embassies for the duration of his reign, but in a clever political move to get rid of potential rivals, he allegedly rounded up the few of Ragnar’s men that had stayed in Denmark and had them executed.

  Ragnar himself seems to have survived the purge, although accounts differ as to what exactly happened to him. The Franks claimed that he died of dysentery, but this is probably wishful thinking since he is mentioned by later English and Irish chroniclers as successfully raiding the shores of the Irish Sea as well as northern Scotland and the Western Isles.44

  His exile, whether self-imposed or as a result of official banishment, provided fodder for his myth to grow; a legendary warrior haunting the shores of the Atlantic seaboard like an early Francis Drake. His wealth must have been the stuff of Viking dreams. In the twelfth century an inscription to him was carved into the wall of an ancient tomb in the Orkneys, an archipelago in northern Scotland by a traveling scholar: “This mound was raised before Ragnar Lothbrok’s (tomb)… His sons were brave, smooth hide men though they were… It was long ago that a great treasure was hidden here. Happy is he that might find it.”

  That reference to his sons, four boys who would follow in their father’s footsteps, do not seem to have brought Ragnar much comfort. According to a thirteenth century Icelandic Saga, he admitted that his desire for fame and fortune was partly out of fear that his sons – especially his oldest, Ivar the Boneless – would eclipse him. Perhaps it was this that drove him relentlessly on.

  In any event, the family was soon allowed to return to Denmark. In 854, Horik and most of the royal household were slaughtered by a disgruntled nephew, and the exiles were welcomed home. Ragnar may or may not have made the trip; his end is as obscure as his beginning. Almost all the stories, however, agree that he died as a proper Viking should: while raiding. Several stories are told of his demise, from being killed by a botched attack on the Isle of Anglesey, to dying in turf war with other Vikings off the coast of Ireland.

  The most famous story, however, is that he was shipwrecked off the English coast in a freak storm. The Anglian king Aella of Northumbria, who’s lands had been a favorite target of Viking raids, overwhelmed the survivors as they scrambled up the beach, and seized Ragnar. Relishing the opportunity to dispatch his tormentor, the king came up with a unique form of execution. Ragnar was thrown into a pit of vipers and left to die.45 When his famous breeches protected him from the bites, Aella hauled him out, had him stripped, and threw him back in again. The old fox, now lying naked and mortally wounded, looked up at Aella unbowed, and sang a Viking battle hymn:

  “It gladdens me to know that Odin makes ready the benches for a banquet. Soon we shall be drinking ale from the curved horns. The champion who comes into Valhalla does not lament his death. I shall not enter his hall with words of fear upon my lips. The Æsir will welcome me. Death comes without lamenting. Eager am I to depart. The Valkyries summon me home. I laugh as I die.”

  The Thirteenth century Icelandic Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok

  His final words, gasped out as he was dying, were a warning to Aella. “When the boar bleats, the piglets come.”

  The story is undoubtedly apocryphal, but it is true in at least one respect. Lindisfarne and Iona had only been a taste of the Viking storm that was about to break on England. When Ragnar’s son Bjorn Ironside heard of his father’s death, he supposedly gripped his spear so tightly that it left an impression in the wood; his younger brother Halfdan crushed a chess piece so forcefully that it made his fingers bleed. If the Northumbrian king did indeed kill Ragnar, then hopefully he enjoyed his triumph while it lasted. The piglets were on their way.

  Chapter 4

  Thorgils the Devil

  “The sea spewed forth floods of foreigners over Ireland, so that no haven, no landing-pace, no stronghold, no fort, no castle might be found, but it was submerged by waves of vikings and pirates.”

  – The Ninth century Irish chronicle, Annals of Ulster

  The great Viking invasion of England originated at least partially in Ireland. Men of Horik and Ragnar’s generation had looked to the Frankish kingdoms for their raids, but their children began to look for greener pastures to the west.

  It wasn’t that the Franks were getting any better at defending themselves, rather, the seemingly inexhaustible supply of Frankish gold was starting to dry up. Within fifteen years of Ragnar’s raid on Paris, all the main rivers of western Francia had been visited by Viking raiders. At first they had conducted smash and grab maneuvers, seizing whatever communion vessels or reliquaries were on hand. Quickly, however, they had realized that there was more money to be had in extortion. The Abbot of St. Denis, for example, was ransomed for six hundred and eighty six pounds of gold and three thousand pounds of silver – quite a nice haul for a single prisoner.

  Others found windfalls in mercenary activity. When some Vikings began raiding on the Seine, a Norseman named Weland offered to drive them off in exchange for two thousand pounds of silver and some livestock. Charles the Bald accepted, but took such a long time raising the funds that Weland upped his price to five thousand pounds. After it had been paid, he dutifully confronted the Seine raiders, but instead of attacking, he agreed to let them depart in peace for six thousand pounds of silver. Without unsheathing a sword, Weland had made himself a wealthy man.

  By the end of the century more than forty thousand pounds of silver had been poured into Viking pockets, and Frankish kings were starting to debase their coinage. The coasts were beginning to be deserted as populations moved inland, and some religious communities were seeking refuge in more protected areas. Even worse, from the Viking perspective, was the fact that local resistance was beginning to stiffen.

  To his credit, Charles the Bald had finally applied himself. His two main palaces were in northern France, near Picardy, and he began a systematic campaign to defend them. Fortified bridges were built across the Seine and the Loire, drastically diminishing the Viking’s ability to strike. The bridges acted as choke points on the river; they could be easily defended and prevented the Viking ships from moving further up rivers. The only way past them was to take them by seige, something which the typical lightly armed Viking raider was not equipped to do. Castles were built near the most threatened areas. These precautions didn’t stop the attacks, but they succeeded in turning the tide, and the Vikings, faced with diminishing returns, began to look for easier targets.

  In the years after Lindisfarne, most Viking attention had been directed toward the Frankish empire, but now it shifted back to the British Isles. While not as wealthy as the Frankish kingdoms, England, Scotland, and Ireland were politically divided and well stocked with monasteries. Ireland in particular, with its abundance of monastic houses was a tempting target. The island was overflowing with precious materials that had been exported to most of northern Europe. It had rich deposits of gold, silver, and copper, as well as emeralds, sapphires, amethysts, topaz, and freshwater pearls. High quality metalwork had been produced by Irish craftsmen since at least 2000 B.C., and ‘Kerry diamonds’ – glittering stones that could be found along the rocks of the coast – were used to adorn reliquaries, jewelry, and even book covers.

  This native prosperity, coupled with Gaelic religious devotion, had produced a great cultural flowering. Ireland was in its golden age. Irish monasteries were bright centers of learning in an otherwise darkening Europe, producing gorgeous illuminated manuscript
s and brilliant scholars who exported Irish learning to all corners of western Europe.

  Politically, the island was slowly drifting towards a kind of unity as well. Tribal warfare was vicious, but over time a number of petty kingdoms had formed. These were loosely formed into two main confederations. The sub-kings of the north looked to the king of Tara, while those of the south were dominated by the kings of Munster. Traditionally, Tara was the more powerful of the two, and occasionally its sovereign was recognized as Árd Rí, or ‘High King’.

  This proto-unity, however, failed to prepare it for the Viking onslaught, because there were severe deficiencies when it came to defense. Most of the petty kings only paid lip service to their superior and even under a strong High King, the army was essentially uncontrollable. Any force that was fielded consisted of a number of tribes, each commanded by its own chief and acting as an independent unit rather than a cohesive whole. However brave or skilled individual soldiers might be, such an army was unreliable against a more disciplined opponent. Even if it could win a victory, it would be unable to exploit it.

  While the Danes were busy pulling apart Charlemagne’s empire, their Norwegian cousins rounded northern Scotland and hit Ireland. Just two years after the Lindisfarne raid, they sacked the great island monastery of St. Columba on the northwestern coast of Scotland. The communities of Skye, and Kells forty miles north of Dublin, were plundered in quick succession. The monks were slaughtered, the buildings were burnt, and most of the livestock was carried away. Within a decade the Vikings had rounded the northern headlands and begun plundering their way down the west coast bays.

  These early raids, like their counterparts in England and the Carolingian Empire, were usually small, no more than two or three ships testing the resistance of the locals. They followed the by now familiar practice of favoring victims who were isolated and within easy reach of the sea. Even the most famous of Irish monasteries could be raided and left before any local fighting men showed up.

  The success of the raids drew increasing numbers of Vikings and the next two decades saw a glut of assaults that sent the brilliant Irish renaissance up in flames. Even remote Skellig Michael, a seemingly impregnable monastery eight miles off the southwestern Irish coast and five hundred feet above sea level, was vulnerable. In 821 a group of Vikings managed to scale its craggy face, sack the gold-rich cloister, and kidnap the abbot.

  Although this particular group of Vikings amused themselves by starving the holy man to death, others began to copy the Danes and look for ransoms. This extended to non-human objects as well. The first raiders had been drawn primarily to the gold and silver encrusted cases created for holy objects. The things they contained were of no use; relics were tossed aside, and the jeweled covers of books were pried off. The mutilated manuscripts were then tossed into fires, discarded in the mud or dumped into the sea.

  Gradually, however, the Vikings realized that the Irish cared more for the relics and gospels than their coverings, and that they were willing to pay exorbitant sums to retrieve them. Even more valuable, were the Irish themselves. Those who were not important enough to be ransomed could be sold as slaves in Baltic or Islamic markets. Viking ships now began targeting human quarry. When the village of Howth, at the head of Dublin Bay, was attacked, the Vikings specifically targeted women, dragging off a large number to their ships. Attacks on Kildare brought in two hundred and eighty captives, while Armagh yielded a thousand.46

  The psychological impact of these new tactics so thoroughly unnerved Irish monks that they began to pray for bad weather. In the margins of a commentary on Latin grammar, a ninth century monk in the Irish monastery of St. Gall wrote: “The wind is fierce tonight, it tosses the sea’s white hair. I fear no wild Vikings crossing the main.”

  As miles of undefended coastline were plundered, rumors of richer prizes further inland began to reach Viking ears, and their raids became more daring. In 828 they reached Ireland’s east coast, venturing up the Boyne river into Louth where they captured a local king.

  Not all of these raids were successful. While exploring the west coast, the crew of one ship was massacred, and another was driven off by angry monks. But instead of winning the beleaguered defenders a respite, these failed attempts were always followed by attacks in greater numbers. When the monks of one monastery sent troops to defend their property, it merely alerted the Vikings to the presence of treasure. The next year saw three raids in a single month, all of which were successful.

  Attacks began to shift from sporadic, unorganized hits on the monasteries of the coast, to large scale, efficient penetrations up rivers to inland targets. On Christmas Eve of 836, a group of daring Vikings travelled more than twenty miles inland through the difficult terrain of the Avonmore valley to sack the central monasteries of Glendalough and Clonmore. That same night, a hundred and sixty miles away in the north-east, another party of Vikings hit Connacht, seizing the monastery’s most valuable relics which had been brought out for high mass.

  That year also saw the appearance of Thorgils, the most notorious of all Viking raiders.47 The Irish called him Turgeis, the Gaelic form of his name, and he arrived with so many ships that Irish chroniclers referred to them as a ‘royal fleet’. He seems to have had dynastic connections in Scandinavia, and was accepted as the leader of all the Vikings in Ireland. In 839 he set his sights on the island’s holiest shrine.

  The Irish version of Jerusalem was Armagh in northern Ireland. St. Patrick himself had chosen it as the spiritual center of Gaelic Christianity, had been appointed as its first Bishop, and had died and was buried there. Many of his personal effects were kept as relics, and over the years the area around his tomb had developed into a massive complex of schools, monasteries, and a cathedral.

  Thorgils personally led the attack, slaughtering the monks and students who had been unable to escape in time. The altars were shattered, the tombs and reliquaries were hacked open, and the relics torn apart in the search for valuables. As an encore, Thorgils smashed his way into St. Patrick’s cathedral and conducted a sacrifice to Odin on what was left of the high altar.

  The outrage ensured that the Viking sea-king became the most despised figure in Ireland. To the Irish he was a cruel and monstrous servant of Satan, a blasphemous tormentor who must be stopped at all costs. Thorgils, however, was unlike any other Viking that they had as yet faced. He had greater plans than simply grabbing loot. He anointed himself ‘King of all Foreigners in Erin’ and it seems that he aimed at the outright conquest of the entire island.

  His timing couldn’t have been better. The sub-king of Munster had attempted to claim the high-kingship, but had only succeeded in plunging central Ireland into chaos. By capturing Armagh, Thorgils had found the resources necessary to make a sustained push into the interior. Instead of simply plundering the monastery, however, he set himself up as its new master, and started collecting the customary duties. The holiest site in Ireland to all intents and purposes now had a pagan abbot.

  Viking fleets were sent up rivers and along the shoreline to weaken resistance. So many of his ships prowled the coasts that monks began to complain that there was no place without a fleet of Vikings.

  While his forces were busy eroding the strength of the native Irish kings, Thorgils began looking for a more defensible location to base his operations. On the east coast of Ireland, in a sheltered bay of the Irish Sea, he built a longphort – a shore fortress – and spent the winter in Ireland. It was an ideal location, easily defended and offering immediate access to the sea. Located on a splendid natural harbor at a spot that offered a convenient fording place across the Liffey River, it lay within direct reach of both the interior of Ireland and the west coast of Britain. The local name for the spot was “the black pools” – “Dubh-Linn” in Gaelic – and it stuck. Thorgils laid down heavy timbers for the streets and built houses in the Viking fashion with wickerwork and mud-daubed walls. Surrounding these was a thick, earthen wall, topped with a wooden palisade. Dublin was not
meant to be a simple base of operations. It became the center of the first Viking state established in western Europe, with Thorgils as its ‘king’.48

  From these headquarters, Thorgils stepped up his attacks. In 844 he led sixty ships up the Shannon River to present day Limerick. From there he split up his forces to sack sacred sites throughout central and western Ireland. Thorgils himself burned the monastery of Clonfert and then attacked the abbey of Clonmacnoise, famous throughout Europe for its seminary.

  Here Thorgils seems to have repeated his earlier behavior at Armagh. After killing the monks and looting the abbey, he brought his wife Ota into the main church. Wiping off the splattered gore, Thorgils helped Ota to climb on top of the shattered high altar. She was known as a völva or prophetess, and from her perch she amused the assembled Vikings by demonstrating her gift of prophecy in a ceremony to Odin.

  The ritual defilement of the two holiest places in Ireland was not a coincidence. Thorgils was asserting the supremacy of the Viking gods, and doing so in a manner which would have shaken the faith of the medieval Irish mind. A monk in the south lamented that “many of the Irish forsook their Christian baptism and joined the ‘fair foreigners’ in plundering churches.”49