The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings

by Lars Brownworth

  When exactly Harald Hardråda found the time for a northern cruise isn’t clear, since there was hardly a year where he wasn’t fighting. After overcoming his nephew Magnus, he tried to add Denmark to his kingdom, spending the better part of fifteen years warring with its king, Svein Estridsson.

  By 1064, even Harald Hardråda was tired of the struggle. Svein had turned out to be a remarkably slippery opponent, and had worn down the Norwegians by refusing to commit to a pitched battle. The yearly raids had neither eroded Danish support for their king nor been particularly rewarding for Hardråda’s men. Since the Norwegian king was bored, and Svein wasn’t going to spontaneously quit, the two reached a peace settlement where they agreed to recognize the other’s dominions and to refrain from attacking each other.

  Perhaps one reason why Harald was willing to make peace, was that his attention was already shifting across the North Sea to England, where King Edward the Confessor was clearly dying. The Anglo-Saxon monarch had no heir, and Harald Hardråda had what he considered to be a reasonable claim to the throne. There was no greater prize to an old Viking than England, and this seemed a tantalizing opportunity.

  Official justification for an invasion was usually not even an afterthought for the Vikings, but in this case, Harald Hardråda actually had one – a possibility that must have acutely whetted his appetite.

  In Norwegian eyes, Edward should never have been king in the first place. Two decades earlier, Cnut’s childless son Harthacnut had named Magnus of Norway as his successor, stipulating that Magnus and his heirs would inherit the English crown. Before Magnus could claim his prize, however, Edward – with the help of the powerful Earl Godwin – had seized the throne instead. Magnus had never been in a position to correct this oversight, but this hardly invalidated the claim. Since Hardråda had in turn succeeded Magnus, he was therefore owed the throne of England as well.

  Of course, the English had no intention of handing over the country to the Vikings – especially not to one with Hardråda’s reputation – so when Edward died on the fifth of January, 1066, they crowned Earl Godwin’s son Harold king instead.

  The news was probably brought to Hardråda by the new king’s brother Tostig, who had been exiled from England and was trying to recruit an army to return and overthrow his sibling. In the spring of 1066, Tostig visited the Norwegian court and convinced Harald Hardråda to press his claim, most likely with exaggerated promises of native support.

  After raising a massive fleet of two hundred and forty ships containing around nine thousand men, the Vikings crossed the North Sea and raided Scotland before putting back to sea and continuing down the Northumbrian coast. They landed on English soil nine miles from the city of York, and were met by a hastily mustered Anglo-Saxon army commanded by two teenaged earls.

  The battle was a short and bloody one, and although both earls survived, the English army was routed. Hardråda entered York unopposed, carrying the Land-Waster ahead of him. Probably on Tostig’s advice, the Vikings didn’t loot the city. Before his exile, Tostig had been the earl of Northumbria, and he wanted to be restored to an intact earldom. So Hardråda only asked to meet with the chief representatives of the city to discuss terms.

  After a short conference, the city fathers agreed to hand over hostages, asking for a few days to gather the requisite tribute. They agreed to deliver both to the nearby site of Stamford Bridge, a convenient crossing of the Derwent river. Satisfied, Hardråda returned to his ships to collect supplies and rest.

  When the assigned day to collect the captives arrived, Harald decided to split his forces, leaving part of them to guard the ships while the rest marched the several miles to Stamford Bridge. Since it was a hot day, most of his men left their mail shirts and the bulk of their weapons behind on board the longships.

  When the Viking army reached Stamford Bridge, they caught sight of a cloud of dust rising from the direction of York. Tostig somewhat naïvely assured Hardråda that it was the people of his former earldom come to surrender, but as they got closer, the Norwegians could see the sun glinting off of metal. The deluded earl weakly proposed that they were bearing tribute, but instead it proved to be an Anglo-Saxon army led by the English king.

  Harold Godwinson’s march from London to Stamford Bridge remains one of the most impressive military feats of the early medieval period. The king had been in London when word of the invasion had reached him, and he had immediately bolted north, covering the nearly two hundred miles in just four days. He had then taken the precaution of posting guards on the main roads to stop any news of his arrival from reaching the Vikings. When he suddenly appeared therefore, he took them completely by surprise.

  Hardråda was now in a nightmarish position. Cut off from his ships and only half-armed, his men were scattered and disorganized. Fortunately, as he hurriedly rallied his men around the Land-Waster, a group of Englishmen rode forward and asked for a parley. At its head was Harold Godwinson, the diminutive – by Hardråda’s standard – king of the English. He begged his brother, Tostig, to withdraw, offering up to half the kingdom if he would leave in peace. When Tostig asked what the king would give Hardråda, he is said to have responded “Six feet of English soil – or, since he’s a tall man, a little more.”

  This was, as it turned out, the culminating battle in more than two and a half centuries of English and Viking battles, and fittingly no quarter was asked or given. Hardråda sent three runners to fetch the men guarding the ships – a round trip of more than sixteen miles – and went roaring into the attack, swinging a massive battle-axe with each hand.

  Even only half-armed, the Vikings at first seemed indestructible. The English came crashing into their shields, but were thrown back with terrible slaughter. In the momentary pause Hardråda led a tactical retreat across the bridge, reforming his shield wall on the other side.203 For a brief moment it looked as if Viking courage would trump Anglo-Saxon numbers. Harald Hardråda rushed forward, a lone wolf turning on the pursuing hounds. But as he raised his twin axes an English arrow struck him in the throat, stopping him in his tracks. As the ‘thunderbolt of the North’ fell, the English tide swallowed the Land-Waster, breaking what remained of the Viking army.204 The carnage was terrible. A lucky few managed to reach the ships, but most fell at Stamford Bridge, or were drowned while trying to swim to safety. Only a tenth of the ships that had landed a week before were needed to take the survivors back to Norway.

  It was, in a way, a fitting end to the Viking Age. After three pitiless centuries of the Norse winter, Ragnarok had come, leaving the old gods dead on a blood-soaked field. The Valkyries had summoned their heroes surely Harald Hardråda despite his nominal Christianity would have fit right in – and the former order had been swept away.

  There was no better representative of the vanishing epoch than the grizzled king. Harald Hardråda had traveled the length and breadth of the Viking world, from the wide Dnieper where it passed by Kiev to the mighty rapids that led to gleaming Constantinople. He had seen the legendary throne room of the emperors, dripping in gold and bristling with hidden passageways. He had walked in the orange groves of Sicily, washed in the marble fountains of Palestine, and seen the fog-shrouded islands of the north Atlantic.

  He had known the Viking world as few others had, in all the waning splendor of its twilight. He had worn the nicknames of ‘Hard-Ruler’, ‘Jerusalem-Farer’, ‘Troop-Leader’, and ‘Poet’, accolades any Viking would have been proud to bear. And when he was buried in his capital of Trondheim, the sun finally set of the Viking Age.

  EPLILOGUE

  The Viking Legacy

  “No man lives till eve, Whom the fates doom at dawning.”

  - Edda of Sæmund the Wise

  The world the Vikings left behind was fundamentally changed from the one that they had come crashing into nearly three centuries before. The part they are usually given in this transformation is one of destruction. Even now, almost a millennium after Hardråda died at Stamford Bridge, the endurin
g image of them is of wild barbarians, leaping from their dragon ships, axes hungry for gore.

  But although they were violent – and they waged war with a ferocity that their victims couldn’t equal – the destruction they brought was ultimately creative. As one historian put it, the burning of the tares makes for richer soil at the next planting. They altered the political and economic landscape wherever they went, and played a critical role in building the foundations of western Europe from Ireland to Russia.

  It was the Vikings who exposed the sprawling empire of Charlemagne, revealing fundamental flaws in the organization of that would-be-Roman Empire. As it broke apart under the hammer blows of the Vikings, the survivors were forced to create smaller, more efficient states. Out of the ashes of the Viking assault rose the four great medieval powers of Western Europe: France, England, The Holy Roman Empire, and the kingdom of Sicily.

  All four of these were direct products of the Viking age, and three of them were founded or consolidated by Viking descendants. Before the Norse arrived, England was politically divided and loosely organized. By wiping out all but one native kingdom, the Vikings ensured that it would be unified by the house of Wessex into a single nation.

  Scotland too, benefited in the long run from Viking depredations. The native Picts, Strathclyde Britons, and Northumbrians who dominated it were all destroyed, leaving the unlikely Scots – Gaelic-speaking Irish immigrants – to unify the northern third of Britain.

  In France, the Vikings founded a state, the Duchy of Normandy, that would redraw the map of Europe. Just two days after Harald Hardråda fell, William the Conqueror, great-great-great-grandson of the Viking Rollo, landed on English soil. He defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings and was crowned king of England, integrating the island into the broader orbit of western Europe. His successors invaded Ireland, whose brilliant monastic culture had been shattered by the Viking attacks, and added Scotland and the surrounding islands to the western European political orbit.

  Other Normans headed south and west, campaigning in Spain and northern Italy. They crossed to Sicily and founded the west’s wealthiest medieval kingdom there, a rival to mighty Constantinople. At the same time, Viking traders in the east were establishing the market towns and trade routes with Byzantium that would bring Roman institutions far beyond the borders of the ancient Roman empire. The centralized states that they founded would eventually develop into what is today the Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

  There was more than brute force to these sea wolves. They were makers of law – the term itself comes from an old Norse word – and they introduced a novel form of trial by jury to England. A century of innovation in shipbuilding climaxed in the great dragon ships, vessels which could cross oceans or sail up fjords and rivers. This technological achievement, one of the brightest of the age, allowed them to establish a sophisticated trading network stretching from Baghdad to the coast of North America.

  But perhaps the greatest Viking trait was not their martial or navigational skills, but their remarkable adaptability. They had a genius for absorbing whatever local traditions they encountered, combining them into new, and dynamic forms. In France, these ‘filthiest of God’s creatures’ created the model chivalric state, in Iceland they set up a Republic based on individual rights, and in Russia they became autocratic defenders of Orthodoxy.

  Where there were no native foundations to build on, the Vikings showed a willingness to experiment, combined with a stubborn practicality. They claimed that Odin himself had advised that “No better burden can a man carry on the road than a store of common sense.” In Iceland in particular, there were plenty of opportunities to put this belief into practice. When changing ecological conditions made it apparent that they would have to abandon some of their rights, they held a vote, deciding to willingly place themselves under the Norwegian crown. In the same gathering they agreed to adopt Christianity – although the majority were still pagan – in order to avoid a religious war. The Christian Icelanders, in turn, preserved their pagan past, faithfully recording both Norse mythology and the exploits of their heathen ancestors.

  This Viking pragmatism flowed back to Scandinavia as well. Cnut introduced Anglo-Saxon style coins to the Viking homelands, and distributed them by means of a government that was based in part on a Byzantine model. The knowledge of southern agriculture and social institutions that returning Vikings brought back with them transformed Scandinavia even more than the wealth that accompanied it. But the most far-reaching change was a result of Christianity, imported from continental sources as far apart as Rome and Russia. What was true of physical distance also spanned the spiritual spectrum of the new faith. Saint Olaf had kinsmen across Europe; he was baptized in Catholic Rouen and took shelter in Orthodox Novgorod.

  The very alien-ness of the Vikings to the modern world is, in a way, a testament to their adaptability. The Norse homelands today are model social democracies, known for their stability, order, and unflappable citizens. Their flags all proudly display a cross, and instead of raiding, they hand out peace prizes. They could hardly be more different than the brutal, and bloodthirsty pagan warriors who overturned the medieval world.

  And yet, there is something bewitching about that vanished age, with its blend of exotic beauty and violence, its cunning raiders and wild, untamed adventurers. The pull they still exert can be seen all around us from cruise ships to NASA probes named Viking, from common nautical terms to town names that end with -bec in France or -by in England.205 Three of the days of the week are named after Viking gods, and a Viking king’s name graces Bluetooth, the ubiquitous wireless technology that connects our phones and computers.206

  Perhaps it is a longing for, as a nameless exile once mused in the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Wanderer, a time that “has grown dark under cover of night, as if it had never been.” Or perhaps it is a resonance with individuals who pitted themselves against the world and – for two and a half centuries – carried all before them. Either way, one suspects that the Vikings themselves would be pleased with their enduring reputation. “All men are mortal“, they were fond of saying, “only a noble name can live forever.”

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