A Brief History of the Vikings

by Jonathan Clements

  Why, then, do the Vikings continue to exert such fascination for us? During the the Viking Age, Western Europe was a backwater. The most powerful and cultured civilizations on Earth were China, Byzantium and Islam. As Christianity struggled amidst the ruins of the Roman Empire, yet another group of rough barbarians stole and murdered on the margins. Why do we still care?

  For some, the tale of Viking expansion is one of incredible bravery and dynamism as, after centuries of timidly hugging the coastline, men in fragile wooden ships sail into a watery void, eventually discovering a New World. Then again, almost three million Scandinavians emigrated between 1815 and 1939.19 Such settlers are why Minnesota’s football team is called the Vikings, and why the Viking Age continues to interest a large proportion of the American populace – not all white Protestants are Anglo-Saxon. But although the Vikings’ landings in America are no longer disputed, the extent of their sailing skills still is. Were the Vikings pioneers of maritime navigation, or is it fairer to describe them as foolhardy blunderers, who made the majority of their ‘discoveries’ by getting lost and crashing into previously unknown coastlines?

  For others, the Viking Age is a tale of supreme victory, not for the Vikings, but for the Christian world they sought to plunder. Within a few generations, the savage marauders were brought into the fold of Christianity, turned into respectable Europeans, vanquished in the war of the soul, even as they bragged of their physical conquests. Modern scholarship finds much to debate here, since the nature of famous conversions is still open to question. Were the Vikings savage beasts tamed by the love of God, or opportunists who paid lip-service to convenient local customs, while still keeping several concubines, owning slaves and killing their enemies?

  As supposed rule-breakers, explorers and anarchists, they have injected a barbaric frisson on the cultures of the Europe their attacks helped create. Their martial prowess has become legendary, although their most humiliating defeats were at the hand of Finnish archers and Inuit fishermen. The Vikings have become symbols of all that is dangerous and exciting in the European soul – an attitude that gains even more credence in modern times as DNA tests establish exactly where they went. In many cases and many countries, our enemies did not go away. They stayed, and prospered, and eventually became part of us.

  1

  SONGS OF THE VALKYRIES

  MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF SCANDINAVIA

  The Vikings appear in the accounts of their enemies as fearsome invaders, devoid of culture or conscience, prepared to commit the outrageous sin of killing Christian monks. They were the savage heathens that Christianity sought to convert, symbols of the Other and the Devil. Such accounts may present a realistic vision of the terror the Vikings could instil, but reveal little about them personally. Of the Vikings’ own literature, we have a rich inheritance of saga narratives, but most date from the later Middle Ages, when the distant descendants of the original Vikings huddled around a fireplace in an Icelandic winter, and told and retold tales of the glory days.

  Before the modern age, the most important man in the transmission of Viking culture was arguably Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), a wealthy Icelandic politician who committed many such oral traditions to paper for the first time, accompanied by remarkably astute editorial observations and criticisms. Snorri’s work preserves the mythical Edda, and the Heimskringla, a long cycle of biographies of Norwegian kings. Both works are crucial to any study of the Vikings, although they present many methodological problems of their own, since even the original material was ‘spun’ in a way designed to please crowds. Snorri collated kingly biographies sung by skalds, the court entertainers of the Vikings – to draw modern parallels, one might imagine Hollywood film-makers, commissioned by modern dictators to tell the story of their lives, supposedly without fear or favour but in reality with an armed focus group who had recently set fire to a church in the vicinity. Snorri himself was able to present a mitigating argument, that since the recitations were often before crowds that comprised the people mentioned and their colleagues, this would itself serve as some form of editorial rein on hyperbole. That, however, cannot save us from the kenning, the Viking habit of replacing solid terms with poetic metaphors in the purplest of vocabulary.

  If there is a ‘solid’ form of evidence for our studies of the Vikings, it lies in archaeology. But even then, we are hostages to chance – a single find can transform our previous understanding of Viking culture and deeds, and even scientists cannot agree on all of the evidence presented. Accordingly, there are several parts of this book that deal in some detail with the history of our history of the Vikings, outlining some of the controversies that continue to this day. One of them concerns the subject of this chapter – what the Vikings believed.

  During the twentieth century, the Jungian tradition encouraged attempts at universality, with its sense that human beings share common traumas and psychological experiences, relived through their gods and beliefs. However, linguistic evidence from other cultures, and confusions within Scandinavian mythology itself, present a very different picture of the Norse world. The Norse myths are trying to tell us something, and much of it may be astronomical. The priceless missing piece of the Viking puzzle is a quantifiable knowledge of their astronomy. They did not use the Babylonian constellations common to western European culture, but certainly still paid attention to the stars. To the proto-Vikings, they might have been of relatively small consequence, but as the population spread out across the western hemisphere, on long voyages with few means of reliable navigation, the stars above must have gained vital importance. Vikings from Vinland to Baghdad would have looked up and seen the same stars in the sky, the same five visible planets, the same recurring phenomena, and some of this must have rubbed off on to their mythology. All that we have today are occasional mentions in myths of entities ‘thrown into the sky’, and a few contradictory stories associated with the evening star. Other sources, particularly the Grimnismal in Snorri’s Poetic Edda, are strange enough to be garbled references to cycles of the heavens, but until such time as a physical representation can be matched with a poetic one, we are left with little but conjecture.

  If only we knew the constellations of the Vikings, or which of their rock carvings might not be mere pictures, but star maps, then we should understand much more about their myths, many of which may be mnemonic devices designed to fix the patterns in the sky. Some names may have changed over time, such as which gods were great enough to be identified with a planet, but others may have remained constant throughout the Viking Age. Somewhere in the night sky, the Vikings saw a World Tree, three sisters, a one-armed god, a god with one bright eye, perhaps in a chariot, perhaps hanging from a tree, a hound, twin brothers, a pair of goats, a squirrel, an eagle, a small snake, a much bigger serpent and many other figures familiar from the sagas. If any researcher can crack this code, then it could become the Rosetta Stone of the Viking mind.1 The answer lies somewhere on an obscure rune stone, or drawn on the shamanic drumskin of a Sámi sorcerer. Until the day it is found, we are left with confusions, dead ends and folklore, retold chiefly by non-believers. Snorri, a leading source for many of the tales of Viking mythology, seemed keen to force some order on the chaotic world of his forefathers, introducing quaint notions of a family of twelve gods and goddesses, seemingly modelled on the pantheons of ancient Greece and Rome. Such a council of twelve may have been inspired by Indo-European religion, or perhaps its ultimate root, the houses of the zodiac. Snorri may, however, have simply superimposed Iceland’s traditional assembly-quorum of twelve on to his ancestors’ beliefs.

  Snorri was also a Christian author. Heimskringla reports the deeds of those who worship the Norse gods, but Snorri has no time for their supposed divine status. Instead, he is ready to suggest that Odin, the leader of the Viking gods, was once a great chieftain, who arrived in the Scandinavian region and carved out a kingdom for himself. His tribe, if he ever existed, was the Aesir, a name that gives itself to the chief family of Nor
se gods. The Aesir, a name that Snorri equates with an Asian origin, supplanted the Vanir, a weaker tribe whose origin Snorri placed at the Vana Fork, close to the place where the River Don meets the Black Sea.2 The elders of the Aesir, and a smattering of Vanir survivors, formed the ancestors of the Scandinavians, and, so Snorri concluded, the models for their gods.

  Odin is presented as the leader of the gods, his wife Frigg at his side. As in other cultures, lesser deities have their domains and responsibilities – Thor, the god of thunder; Frey and Freya, the twin gods of fertility; Heimdall the Watchman; Aegir, the ruler of the sea; Njord, another god of the sea; Bragi, god of poetry; Loki the god of fire and Hel, his daughter, the queen of the underworld; Tyr the god of war, and Ull, the god of archery. This list is not exhaustive, but covers the main bases – writers on Norse religion have often tried to herd the disparate elements into a unified whole deserving of the term ‘religion’, itself an invention of later times. As to how much of Snorri’s late medieval depiction would have made sense to a Viking audience, that would rather depend on where the audience was from. Study of place names tells us that ancient peoples in what is now Denmark were more likely to worship Tyr. Worshippers of Ull, the archer, were once paramount in southern and central Sweden. Thor-worship became common all over Scandinavia, with the notable exception of the Trondheim region, whereas place names in honour of Odin are far more widespread in Denmark and Sweden than in Norway or Iceland.

  The relative ranks and powers of the Norse ‘pantheon’, as defined by Snorri, were based on legends swapped by the descendants of only a couple of these contending strains of belief. However, since the ancestors of Snorri’s informants presumably comprised a large number of people with access to ships rather than farmers left behind in the old country, it is likely that in his compendium of myths there are many tales that would have been recognized by the Vikings of old. There is also a possibility that, as a higher-class god, Odin attracted the attention of social climbers – would-be rulers and their warrior cronies.3

  We get a sense of the savagery and bleakness of the life of the proto-Vikings from Snorri’s myth of creation. For them, the nascent universe had but two elements, the searing heat of the south and the bitter cold of the north, separated by Ginnungagap, the great void. Life began in the middle, where these two elements met, thawing Ymir, a titan from whom sprang the first of gods, men and giants. Ymir is fed by suckling on a cow, Audhumla, which has somehow also appeared out of the ice. The cow licks nearby ice for its salt content, and thereby releases another man, Buri, whose grandchildren (he somehow reproduces) are Odin, Vili and Ve. The myth is confused, certainly, but in the sense that it appears to combine several origins – quite possibly the origin-stories of several tribes, some of whose descendants would eventually become the Vikings. In a primal tragedy, Odin, Vili and Ve killed Ymir, his body forming the earth and his skull the dome of the sky above it. The realm of men, Midgard, is shielded from the realm of the giants by a wall or mountain range, made of one of Ymir’s eyebrows. The world of men is inhabited by the descendants of two trees on the shore (not descendants of the men already created from Ymir, another possible remnant of ancient rivalries?). The gods, suddenly invested with the power to create things, go on to make the Sun (a female) and the Moon (a male), who pelt across the sky in chariots pursued by wolves.

  In accordance with a world-view informed by fjords and islands, separated by seas and mountains, the Viking universe is a series of self-contained domains, reachable only by prolonged effort. At the centre of everything is the giant ash tree Yggdrasill. A tree, of course, forms the centre of the Garden of Eden in Christianity, but Yggdrasill owes its origin to something much earlier, perhaps a prehistoric religion of sky worship, in which heaven was held up by a giant column. If this is the case, then it may have a symbolic cousin in Irminsul, a pillar in ancient Saxony, held to keep the sky from falling, and the Sampo of Finno-Ugric myth, thought originally to be a pillar that held up heaven.4 Snorri did know of the myths of the Finns and Saxons when he wrote his work.

  The tree has three main roots, one in the world of the dead, one in the realm of the frost-giants, and the third in the land of the Aesir, the Norse gods themselves. Near the base of this third root is the Well of Fate, and Fate herself, Urd, dwells nearby with her two sisters Verdandi (Being) and Skuld (Necessity). These traditional translations of their names are misleading, as they represent three Norse concepts of tense, that which should happen, that which has happened, and that which ought to happen – the goddesses, in linguistic terms, of the Subjunctive, Indicative and Optative. These three sisters are the Norns, who weave a tapestry of the world’s fate, presumably with Urd and Skuld providing the possible warp and weft, and Verdandi embroidering the way things actually come about. Their knowledge of where things have been, and sense of where things are going, makes them powerful prophetesses and they are consulted often by the gods. Eastern traditions of the Finno-Ugric peoples also posit a World Tree but dispense with the Norns, instead using the tree as an analogy of life itself, with the souls of children stored in its seeds, and the fate of men engraved on its leaves. The fall of each leaf equates with the death of someone in our world.

  The Norns thus appear to be a later European addition to an Asian concept. As divine oracles and repositories of knowledge, the Norns bear some resemblance to other European triple goddesses, most notably the Graiae of ancient Greece, although the Graiae were depicted as old women, far less easy on the eye than the maidenly Norns. The Norns, like other women of the Vikings, we may assume, are kept busy. They must water the tree, and cake it in rich mud to keep it young, and also shoo away the animals that feed on its leaves and bark. They may be seen as an allegory of the daily round for many early Scandinavian women – limited animal husbandry and tending of plants, and occasional encounters with forest animals – the most impressive of which are the eagle in the branches of the tree and the snake at its roots, who constantly jostle for position, and trade insults via a squirrel messenger who scurries up and down the trunk.

  The myths of the Vikings are those of a people who have travelled far. They begin with wanderings in snow and ice, and end with forestry, goat-herding on mountainsides and simple farm life. They present a view of several different bloodlines and traditions, coming together sometimes in friendship but also in bloodshed. At the end of it all, one god is paramount, but his fellow deities are fractious and argumentative, forced to meet each day at the base of the World Tree to argue out the issues at hand in council. There is talk among the gods of affairs and intrigue, there is jealousy among the goddesses when their husbands take lovers from other races, which they do with great regularity.

  What can we gather from the legends Snorri recorded? The Nordic region was untouched territory, almost endless tracts of virgin forests and lakes, which first attracted wandering nomads. In the beginning, there was plenty of space to go round, and the inhabitants were mobile. We may look upon the Sámi in Lapland, who migrate alongside the reindeer herds that are their main resource, as a living example of this lifestyle. There are two routes into Scandinavia proper – one from Asia, through Finland and around the top of the Baltic Sea. The other is from Europe, up through Germany and across the islands that link Denmark to southern Sweden. In earlier times, southern Sweden was itself an island, and then barely a peninsula, connected to Scandinavia by bogs and marshes amid perilous forests. But this region is also the most habitable area – the bulk of the arable land in Scandinavia is clustered in Denmark and southern Sweden. Here arose a people who found the land to be worthy of settlement, transforming from wanderers to farmers, worshipping a fertility god they called Frey or Yngvie – his sons, the Ynglings, were the ancestors of the kings of Sweden.

  Frey might have been a harvest god, but he was also savage. He bestowed a mandate on the early Swedish kings that entitled them to rule so long as he was kept appeased. When crops failed or winters grew too long, Frey required additional encouragement, wi
th animal sacrifice. The horse, in particular, was sacred to him, and there are several saga mentions of Freyfaxi, a horse named for a particular kind or colour of mane (we don’t actually know), that destined it for the god’s altar. From clues and hints in Viking sources, it would seem that in particularly lean times, the king would be expected to sacrifice himself, submitting to a ceremonial blood-letting that may, in the earliest times, not have been all that ceremonial.5 Frey’s cult was also associated with the worship of the boar, which may link the Swedes back to Eastern Europe, since a similar cult existed among the Aesti (proto-Estonians), and may also have existed among the Cimbri in north Germany.

  Somewhere during the sixth century AD, the Swedish region of Uppland gained a ruler called Angantyr (to the English, Ongentheow) – it also had an increase in population. The Iron Age had given the locals sturdier axes, suddenly making it possible to clear far wider areas for farmland and settlement. But large parts of Scandinavia are mountainous, and space in Sweden may have already been tight. It was, notably, not Angantyr himself, but instead his unruly ‘sons’ who, the legends tell us, preyed upon the neighbouring Goths, inviting retaliation and tit-for-tat raids that escalated into a war. The Goths were put to flight, and their leader Hygelac perished somewhere in an undetermined place called Ravenwood. But strife continued among the Swedes, with the sons of Angantyr fighting over their birthright. Despite being only a legend, elements of the story ring true from what we know of the Vikings’ later modus operandi. In a pattern that would be repeated throughout the Viking Age to come, disaffected claimants sought aid overseas, leading to further wars between Swedes and Swedish pretenders with foreign backing.6