The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings

by Lars Brownworth

  Runciman, Steven. A History of the Crusades, Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951.

  Also by Lars Brownworth

  The Normans

  From Raiders to Kings

  “Lars Brownworth’s ‘The Normans’ is like a gallop through the Middle Ages on a fast warhorse. It is rare to find an author who takes on a subject so broad and so complex, while delivering a book that is both fast-paced and readable.”

  Bill Yenne, author of Julius Caesar: Lessons in Leadership from the Great Conqueror

  There is much more to the Norman story than the Battle of Hastings. These descendants of the Vikings who settled in France, England, and Italy – but were not strictly French, English, or Italian – played a large role in creating the modern world. They were the success story of the Middle Ages; a footloose band of individual adventurers who transformed the face of medieval Europe. During the course of two centuries they launched a series of extraordinary conquests, carving out kingdoms from the North Sea to the North African coast.

  In The Normans, author Lars Brownworth follows their story, from the first shock of a Viking raid on an Irish monastery to the exile of the last Norman Prince of Antioch. In the process he brings to vivid life the Norman tapestry’s rich cast of characters: figures like Rollo the Walker, William Iron-Arm, Tancred the Monkey King, and Robert Guiscard. It presents a fascinating glimpse of a time when a group of restless adventurers had the world at their fingertips.

  Also from

  A Short History of the World

  Christopher Lascelles

  ‘A clearly written, remarkably comprehensive guide to the greatest story on Earth - man’s journey from the earliest times to the modern day. Highly recommended.’

  Dan Jones, author of

  The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made England

  There is an increasing realisation that our knowledge of world history – and how it all fits together – is far from perfect. We might all know about the odd event, but there is a good chance that if we had to talk about what was happening in the world before or after, or even at the same time, we would not be quite as knowledgeable.

  A Short History of the World aims to fill the big gaps in our historical knowledge with a book that is easy to read and assumes little prior knowledge of past events. The book does not aim to come up with groundbreaking new theories on why things occurred, but rather gives a broad overview of the generally accepted version of events so that non-historians will feel less ignorant when discussing the past.

  To help readers put events, places and empires into context, the book includes 36 original maps to accompany the text. The result is a book that is reassuringly epic in scope but refreshingly short in length. An excellent place to start to bring your historical knowledge up to scratch!

  OPEN

  David Price

  ‘From every perspective OPEN will open your mind to some of the real implications of digital technologies for how we live and learn in the 21st century.’

  Sir Ken Robinson, world-leading expert on education and creativity

  What makes a global corporation give away its prized intellectual property? Why are Ivy League universities allowing anyone to take their courses for free? What drives a farmer in rural Africa to share his secrets with his competitors?

  A collection of hactivists, hobbyists, forum-users and maverick leaders are leading a quiet but unstoppable revolution. They are sharing everything they know, and turning knowledge into action in ways that were unimaginable even a decade ago. Driven by technology, and shaped by common values, going ‘open’ has transformed the way we live. It’s not so much a question of if our workplaces, schools and colleges go open, but when.

  Packed with illustration and advice, this entertaining read by learning futurist, David Price, argues that ‘open’ is not only affecting how we are choosing to live, but that it’s going to be the difference between success and failure in the future.

  Notes

  1. Historically this has been the most popular explanation. As Will Durant rather poetically put it “The fertility of the women… outran the fertility of the soil.”

  2. The version of this prayer that is usually quoted, “O Lord, deliver us from the fury of the Norsemen” was never actually used during the ninth century.

  3. These three illuminated manuscripts – and the Lindisfarne Gospel in particular - are widely considered among the greatest achievements of British medieval art.

  4. The Palatine Academy eventually became the University of Paris.

  5. Reliquaries are containers for holy relics

  6. The modern Netherlands and Belgium

  7. Roughly 150,000 islands lie off the Norwegian coast.

  8. Hnefatafl was a chess-like ‘hunting’ game, and Kvatrutafl resembled backgammon.

  9. He was Olvir Barnarkarl, the brother-in-law of the man who discovered Iceland. His story is told in the medieval Icelandic Landnámabók.

  10. At least by the standards of the time. The Arab writer Ibn Fadlan describes the Swedes in Russia as ‘the filthiest race that God ever created’, and gives lurid details of their behavior - not wiping after going to the bathroom, having sex in public, and washing with the same water they blew their noses in.

  11. Polygamous marriages were relatively common among the rich. Marriages in general were usually arranged by the parents. The Vikings took the custom of asking permission seriously. According to the twelfth century Book of Icelanders, if a man tried to marry a woman against her parents’ wishes he could be legally killed by them.

  12. If the husband failed to give a good reason for the divorce he could be killed by his wife’s family. Crossdressing, for example, was considered a good enough reason. Both breeches on a woman and a low cut blouse on a man were grounds for divorce.

  13. Perhaps the best example of the autonomy that women could achieve is provided by the Arab historian Hasan-ibn-Dihya, who wrote about a Muslim embassy to Viking Dublin. They happened to arrive when the chieftain Thorgils the Devil was away, so his wife Odda received the ambassadors and performed ‘all the duties of a king’.

  14. This could at times lead to trouble since a host could essentially force his guests to drink against their will. Egil’s Saga has a story in which the titular hero attends a feast where his devious host keeps passing the horn. When he realized he couldn’t take any more, Egil seized his host, pushed him up against a pillar, and nearly suffocated him in a gush of vomit.

  15. The closest they came was sithr, which meant ‘custom’.

  16. They also appear to have had a few ‘godless’ men who rejected all gods and believed that death was the final end. This can’t have been too common, however, since virtually all Viking burials included goods for use in the afterlife.

  17. The Laxdæla Saga tells of Thorolf Clubfoot, a violent and unsociable farmer who came back to life to haunt his family one winter as a cross between a zombie and a vampire. His son, who eventually exhumed the body during the day to burn it, described his father as “incorrupt but terrible to look at, more like a troll than a man; black as pitch and as swollen as an ox.”

  18. The Danish Skloldung dynasty claimed Odin as an ancestor.

  19. Huginn means ‘thought’, and Muninn ‘memory’.

  20. Odin was not above stooping to low cunning to win a contest. One famous example is his battle of wit and lore against the ice giant Vafthrudnir. When he discovered that the giant’s knowledge of the various worlds matched his own, Odin cheated by asking what words he had whispered to his dead son before lighting the funeral pyre - a question to which only Odin could possibly know the answer.

  21. The famous image of a Viking funeral - a blazing ship sailing to Valhalla - comes from the pen of an Arab writer who witnessed the funerary rites of one of the Swedish Vikings on the Volga River. Although they both were practiced, burial seems to have been preferred to cremation.

  22. The Viking alphabet has twenty-four symbols (literally ‘mysteries’
) roughly based on the Greek and Latin cursive scripts. These are designed to be carved into hard surfaces, not written fluidly and are therefore not suited to literature. Most epic poems were memorized and circulated by traveling poets called ‘skalds’.

  23. This is the first reference to the ‘land of the midnight sun’.

  24. Roman sources hint that they also used small sails as early as the 3rd century, but this is not universally accepted. Undisputed use of sails doesn’t occur till the mid eighth century.

  25. It was, however, still a significant investment of time. Modern estimates are that experienced Viking craftsmen could build a longship in about seven months, representing roughly forty thousand hours of work.

  26. Oak is found across Scandinavia, but particularly in Denmark. A single oak trunk would make up the keel with the major branches forming the ribs. This was an advantage since the Vikings didn’t use saws, but instead split the wood with the grain to give it greater strength.

  27. This is slightly menacing as the Vikings themselves had little need of this feature since the fjords are remarkably deep. Norway’s Sognefjord, for example, reaches a depth of 4,291 feet below sea level several miles inland. The average depth of the North Sea, by contrast is 312 feet. The longships were clearly intended for foreign shores.

  28. They were also quite thin. Roughly an inch of wood separated a Viking sailor from the Atlantic ocean.

  29. As Ragnar Lothbrok demonstrated in 845. In 1893 a replica of the Viking Gokstad ship, crewed by only twelve men, sailed from Bergen in Norway to Newfoundland in twenty-eight days.

  30. This apocryphal story, written by a Swiss monk named Notker the Stammerer, was part of a collection of stories about the emperor composed for his great-grandson Charles the Fat - a man who was all too familiar with Vikings.

  31. Modern Wijk bij Duurstede in the Netherlands and La Calotterie in France.

  32. The Roman Empire in the west had collapsed in the fifth century with the forced abdication of its last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, in 476 AD.

  33. For many of these projects, Charlemagne’s ambition outstripped the technical abilities of his engineers. The canal was soon abandoned, and the ineffective fleet was left to rot in its harbors by his successor.

  34. Some historians speculate that Godfred’s attempts to consolidate his power in Denmark pushed out weaker rivals who turned to piracy, thus in part inspiring the early Viking raids.

  35. Now the westernmost city of Germany.

  36. A member of the king’s bodyguard.

  37. Ansgar was eventually canonized for his efforts and is known as the ‘Apostle of the North’.

  38. Louis’ rebellious son Lothar later rewarded Harald Klak with an island for ‘doing so much damage to his father.’

  39. Ironically, however, it was this very policy that doomed him. He was assassinated a few years later by a nephew who he had expelled for treason.

  40. In modern day Belgium

  41. Virtually the only remnant of it is the name of the modern French territory of Lorraine.

  42. Although Ragnar is a historical figure, some historians consider ‘Lothbrok’ a creation of legend.

  43. Louis the Pious’ youngest son.

  44. This has given rise to the theory that death by diarrhea was the origin of the nickname ‘Lothbrok’. His feces-stained breeches, blackened and sticky, would have looked as if they had been boiled in pitch.

  45. This would have been difficult, as England does not have a ready supply of poisonous snakes.

  46. The most famous example of a Viking slave is probably the Irish saint Findan. He was captured by the Vikings twice but managed to escape when they stopped in the Orkney Islands. He wandered through continental Europe, eventually settling in Switzerland where he lived out the last two and a half decades of his life.

  47. The Old Norse name was Thorgísl which can be rendered either as Thorgest or Thorgils.

  48. The northern district of Dublin is still called Fingall, meaning ‘place of the Fair Foreigners‘, the Irish name for the Vikings.

  49. The ‘Fragmentary Annals of Ireland’, a tenth century chronicle from the kingdom of Osraige, present-day County Kilkenny.

  50. This was a dissatisfying end to Ireland’s great tormentor, so the Irish made up a much better story. The High King lured the Vikings onto an island in the middle of the Lough Owel river by promising Thorgils and fifteen of his men beautiful brides - in reality young Irish soldiers in drag. When the Vikings went to embrace their new wives, the ‘women’ threw off their disguises and stabbed the Vikings to death.

  51. The modern area of Galloway in Ireland derives its name from this word.

  52. This was supposedly due to a curse. His mother Aslaug had been told by Odin to wait three days before consummating her marriage. Ragnar, however, wouldn’t wait and as a result his son’s bones were replaced by cartilage.

  53. The future Alfred the Great

  54. Not surprisingly, the French were less impressed. A Frankish chronicle reported rather laconically that the Vikings were ‘beaten with the aid of Christ’.

  55. Modern estimates put it around three thousand fighting men – although the numbers would vary dramatically over the years.

  56. There is considerable debate about the blood eagle. Since no contemporary account of its use exists, some have concluded that it is the fanciful invention of later writers.

  57. The brutality extended to both sides. Several towns in southeastern England supposedly upholstered their church doors with the flayed skins of captured Vikings. Although it is almost certainly false, even Westminster Abbey in London at one time boasted decorations of Viking hides.

  58. It should be noted that this diet is a bare minimum. Daily meals of nothing but cold gruel and water wouldn’t have kept morale very high.

  59. They had been brought over by the Romans in the Claudian invasion of AD 43.

  60. According to the local chronicle there was only one survivor. He was captured, but managed to escape while Ubba was distracted.

  61. According to legend, Edward the Martyr’s head was found by some locals who were assisted in finding it by the howls of a large wolf. They found the head safely between the beast’s paws, and were allowed to retrieve it and reunite it with the body. Unfortunately the head’s human guardians were not as capable. It was stolen in the thirteenth century by some French knights.

  62. He had stopped long enough to raid a monastery. The nuns, in an attempt to preserve their virginity, supposedly cut off their noses and upper lips. Ivar set fire to the building, nuns and all.

  63. The exception was the king of Strathclyde who was taken back to Dublin while a suitable ransom was raised. Unfortunately for him, it was offered by a political enemy – not to rescue but to murder him.

  64. His corpse was allegedly transported from Dublin and interred in English soil. In the seventeenth century a grave was found in Repton containing the intact skeleton of a remarkably large man - supposedly nine feet tall - surrounded by the disarticulated remains of two hundred and fifty Vikings. Since it dates from the right time, and is clearly a figure of importance, some have speculated that the bones are - ironically given his nickname - the remains of Ivar the Boneless.

  65. The most colorful account has Halfdan fighting his way to Russia, only to be captured by a Slavic tribe. When asked to choose how to be executed he rather bizarrely selected burning.

  66. Within a generation, the descendants of the Vikings who had killed king Edmund were venerating him as a saint.

  67. One encounter had nine English ships pursuing six Viking longships. Three escaped, two were beached, and only one was captured. When an actual Viking fleet appeared, the English ships usually didn’t bother going to sea.

  68. This would be a bit like telling modern politicians that they had to pass a test in advanced Calculus or they’d be relieved of duty.

  69. Legion IX had a distinguished history. They fought for Caesar at Pharsalus and for August
us at Actium, two of the most important battles in Roman history. They also served with distinction in the Claudian invasion of England.

  70. He had already murdered one brother who had gotten in his way.

  71. The later saga Eriksmal has a grand description of Bloodaxe entering Valhalla and being welcomed by the gods.

  72. The Vikings of Ireland were assimilating in a similar manner as their English counterparts. Vikings allies from the Hebrides fought on both sides, and the ‘native’ Irish Vikings had started calling themselves ‘easterners’.

  73. He supposedly killed Ivar of Limerick - probably a great-grandson of Ivar the Boneless – in single combat.

  74. Some historians credit Sitric’s mother Gormflaith as the true mastermind of the rebellion. A ferocious Irish princess, she was either married to or directly related to every major participant.

  75. According to tradition, both Brodir and Sigurd were recruited by Gormflaith. Brian had imprisoned her and she had promised to marry whichever hero killed Brian and liberated her, giving them Dublin as a dowry. Sitric’s thoughts on the matter aren’t recorded.

  76. In addition to his Irish mother he may have had three Irish grandparents.

  77. Such courage was to be expected from Sigurd who was a son of the terrifyingly-named Thorfinn Skull-Splitter.

  78. According to a Norse saga, an Irish warrior named Wolf the Quarrelsome hunted down Brodir and enacted a terrible revenge. A slit was made in Brodir’s stomach and one end of his intestines was nailed to a tree. The dying Viking was then dragged around until his entrails were looped around the trunk.

  79. This should not, however, be pushed too far. It was a violent age. In the first quarter century of Viking raids, Irish sources record twenty-six attacks on monasteries. In the same period they list eighty-seven assaults by fellow Irishmen.