A Brief History of the Vikings

by Jonathan Clements

  Uppsala, the region just north of modern Stockholm, is a nexus of ancient Scandinavian culture, surrounded by burial mounds of ancient kings and their successors. Between the sixth and the ninth centuries, the Swedes buried their kings with horses, dogs and other animals, weaponry, grave-goods including everyday objects and rare treasures such as glass goblets. The pattern of exploration and conquest repeats itself to the south and east, where Dan, a son of a king of Uppsala, is supposed to have travelled in search of new lands. He found the islands of Zealand, Lolland and Funen, and from there the peninsula itself, all of which would eventually come to take his name, as Dan’s Land – Danemark. His brother Angul ventured even further south into the European mainland in an attempt to establish an Angul’s Land, thereby foreshadowing links between historical Danes and the Angles. This, at least, is how the story is framed in the History of the Danes, a work by the late-medieval author Saxo Grammaticus, who was determined to give Denmark a national origin myth to match those of other countries. Much of Saxo’s own source material came from writers in Iceland, and this calls into question many of his assumptions.7

  Archaeology confirms at least the general thrust of Saxo’s claims, although it also tells us that Denmark was already occupied by the time it was supposedly ‘discovered’. By the sixth century, Denmark had become almost as strong a kingdom as the Swedish Uppland that supposedly spawned it. The largest Danish island of Zealand is littered with burial sites, some dating back to the Stone Age. The most impressive are around the town of Roskilde (Hrors-kilde – the sacred springs of Hror), a few miles west of modern Copenhagen, where Dark-Age peoples once dwelt on the banks of the river Lejre, long since dried up. This, perhaps, is the Heorot of legend, the gabled hall of King Hrothgar, who features in the old English poem Beowulf. And here, according to the tenth century Saxon chronicler Thietmar, the ruler of Heorot would maintain his power by sacrificial rights. Every nine years, 99 cocks, 99 dogs, 99 horses and 99 men would be slain to preserve the king’s power. When Beowulf saves Heorot from the regular attacks by Grendel, we may perhaps be seeing a mangled account of an attempt to put an end to the human sacrifice.

  The Gotlanders, particularly the Gotlanders who travelled beyond the island of their birth to trade around the Baltic coasts, favoured a different god to the Swedes’ Frey. ‘Trade’ is a misnomer – much of their activities probably involved something closer to extortion, as they accepted tribute in pelts, eiderdown, amber and other goods. Before the Viking Age had begun, men were already taking what did not belong to them, and some did so in the name of a god of battle. Odin to the Scandinavians, Woden or Wotan further to the south, was the paramount god to the group of men whose predations are the main subject of this book. Other peoples in Scandinavia may have had their own deities of preference, but Odin was beloved of the raiders, with his only real rival in their affections being Thor. He also came to be particularly revered in Gotland and Hordaland, two regions of Scandinavia that were important centres of seaborne trade, and entrepôts for many of the traders who would become raiders in lean times.8 Odin was a god of battle, but also of poetry, so was regularly cited in the verses of skalds hoping to impress their kings. As the king of the gods, he may have also enjoyed more mentions in the royal verses that have survived down the ages, simply by way of association with the lords and earls at whose dinners his exploits were recounted – praise of the chief god was also a backhanded means of praising one’s host.

  Odin has at least 177 names and kennings,9 which allow us to see those areas where he was thought to exercise his power. As a leader of the gods, he is known as the Father of Men or All-Father, the Mighty God or simply the Chief. Later saga writers even refer to him as one-of-three, perhaps in analogy to the Christian trinity. He is also renowned for his wisdom – he did, after all, give his eye for it, sacrificing half his vision in order to take one sip from a spring of knowledge. He is called the Mighty Poet and Mighty Speaker (a ‘speaker’ being the chief councillor at an Icelandic assembly – and therefore perhaps an anachronism from Snorri’s time, not a term from the Viking Age).

  Odin’s wisdom was of secondary concern to his worshippers. He was far more popular with the Vikings for his main stock-in-trade, which was battle. For Odin, on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir, was the Charging Rider, the Spear Lord, the Army Father, the Battle Blind or the Author of Victory. Odin was also the patron of the war-band’s fearsome elite – or rather, the brawlers who could be persuaded that standing at the front was a good idea. In Viking tradition they were shape-changers, men with the ability to take on animalistic characteristics. In recognition of their shaman-like animal-pelt costumes, they were often known as ‘wolf-skins’ and ‘bear-shirts’ – ulfhednar and, more famously, berserkir. One is tempted to suggest that such men, dangerous and unpredictable as they were, were liable to attract cautious flattery from any skald who wanted to stay on their good side – they may have been glorified because when those songs were first sung they were standing right next to the singer. Later sagas, written by no-nonsense Icelanders without wars to fight, regard berserkers as dim, oafish nuisances.10

  Death in battle in the name of Odin was not a bad thing, at least in the eyes of the devout follower. For Odin was also the Chooser of the Slain, the valkojósandi. He had female assistants who bore the same name in the feminine form, valkyrjur, or valkyries, the terrifying furies of the Viking world. On several occasions in the sagas, there are comedic moments when Viking men seem meekly accepting of a situation, only to have a woman goad them into action – a woman’s worth was heavily reliant on that of her man, and the Viking wives could be fierce in their attempts to preserve it. The last bastion of Viking machismo, it often seems, lay not with themselves, but in their wish to appease their women. The Valkyries were this furious nature personified, betraying a surprising terror and reification of female power. Their names are a catalogue of the things prized most by the belligerent Vikings, the famous Brynhildr is Bright Battle, but there are 51 others in extant sources.11 As with the Inuit and their apocryphal twenty words for snow, the Vikings had many terms for discussing conflict. There was a Valkyrie of drunken brawling, Ale-Rune, and another of Taunts. To the Viking mind Battle herself was a woman, as were War, Tumult, Chaos, Devastation and Clash. The names of other Valkyries invoke images of war-goddesses to be appeased, or moments of belligerence personified: Extreme Cruelty, Sword-Time, or simply Killer. The most ominous is the Valkyrie that invokes that moment just before all hell breaks loose, Silence. Even Skuld, the Norn of Necessity, is numbered among the Valkyries on three occasions, her name perhaps better translated there as Blame. More prosaic misogyny may be found in others: Unstable, and the minor but still influential figure of Bossy.

  Odin and his Valkyries would lead wild hunts across the sky, seen from the ground as the haunting silent light displays of the aurora borealis. They would observe the bravest warriors in battle in the quotidian world, and bear the noblest warriors back to Odin’s domain, Valholl or Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain. There, deceased Vikings would hunt, drink and fornicate (the Valkyries having a dual purpose) until the end of the world, when they would go into battle at the final conflict between the Viking gods and their enemies. The appeal of this to a war-band is obvious, but Odin is also presented as the ultimate host; to those who praised him at banquets and celebrations, he was the leader to end all leaders, and an example for the kings and earls to follow. The lifestyle of Valhalla seems to be an idealized representation of the way the Vikings saw their lives – an endless round of feasting and fighting, topped, they hoped, by a glorious death in battle. It contains elements of the terrorist who expects luxurious debauchery in paradise, but also of impoverished men with nothing more to lose.

  The attitude of Odinic followers coloured many aspects of Viking life. Female corpses from the period are generally found with grave-goods increasing in direct relation to their age; the older a woman at death, the richer the goods sent with her into the afterlife by her
family. But it was quite the opposite with the male followers of Odin – as if it was expected of a man that he die relatively young in the midst of battle. The graves of young Viking men are often cluttered with wealth of objects and finery, whereas older men are found with little, if anything. Dying of old age was, among the most fanatical of the Vikings, regarded as something of a failure. It was believed by Odin’s followers that men were welcomed at Valhalla with the goods placed in their graves – a death in battle required outfitting for the long haul, but death from old age required no such honours.12

  Odin himself could be an old man, ravaged by time. He is depicted with a spear, or sometimes a staff, one-eyed or occasionally blind. He is Jolnir, the Yule-Figure invited into pagan homes at winter as a form of sympathetic magic, as if making friends with the spirit of winter offers some protection from its cold and deprivation. Through many centuries of confusion and alteration, Odin may even be a precursor to the Christian Santa Claus.13

  Like many divine figures, Odin is a symbol of knowledge and wealth. In the legends, he bestows weapons upon his loyal followers, and their acceptance of the sword implies service to the death – in an age when metalwork was an expensive operation often likened to magic, weaponry did not come cheap. Many Vikings were limited to axes and spears, which used less iron. A sword, such as that bestowed upon Sigmund the Volsung by Odin, was a valuable item.14

  Odin appears in sagas offering advice and protection, and even makes his way into supposed histories – Saxo’s History of the Danes mentions an Odinic vision by the legendary King Harald Wartooth, in which Odin appears as an old man of imposing height, and offers Harald invulnerability in the battle to come. Harald, in return, offers Odin the souls of all the enemies he kills with his sword, a somewhat Faustian pact that must have chilled the blood of Saxo’s Christian readership.15

  Odin’s love of battle included a desire to remember. It was not enough that the Vikings fight; they wanted people to talk about it. Whether this is a natural human desire, or an attempt by skalds to increase their own relative importance it is difficult to say, but Odin, as already mentioned, was the god of battle and poetry. Mastery of words made him a master of knowledge, and this in itself had implications of sorcerous capabilities. Singing Odin’s songs kept the rowers in time and brought them extra strength (singing any song would have done that, but Odin took the credit), and it is Odin who introduces new concepts of battle to his followers. By knowing words and poetry, or even the art of writing, since Odin was also the master of the runes, warriors were able to preserve new ideas instead of letting them die. Perhaps, in the Scandinavia the Vikings left behind them as they sailed off to plunder, Odin was originally more peaceful, a god whose runes preserved knowledge of blacksmithing, crop rotation or animal husbandry, but such things were of no use to the Vikings. The Odin exported into European consciousness by the Vikings was a lord of conflict. Strategy and tactics, the concepts of battle formation and signals on the field, were couched for the Vikings in terms of Odin’s battle religion. Symbols of Odin had practical advantages in battle, functioning as modern signals and codes do today, allowing armies to act as one, while their enemies remained in confusion.

  But Odin’s religion also demanded secrecy. We may only guess at the meaning implicit in the tale of Harald Wartooth’s demise. Odin took his secrets of battle and gave them instead to Harald’s rival, Hring. As their armies prepared for battle, Hring’s took up a wedge formation – ideal to force its way through the chaotic opposing forces. Harald charged nonetheless, only then realizing that his regular charioteer was absent. Instead, Odin himself drove Harald’s horses ever onward, and as Harald begged him for one last victory, he was instead plunged into the midst of enemy forces, fell from his chariot, and was killed.

  Poetic licence, of course, must be taken into account, as nobody was around to see Harald’s final conversation with his supernatural patron. Perhaps, in the death of Harald War-tooth, there is a warning against telling too much about the secrets Odin imparted. The war-band was to remain close-knit. The leader’s service to Odin was to be mirrored in the services of his men. He was to keep them in plunder and resources, and they were to fight on until the end of the world.

  Reading between the lines of Norse religion, we may see several distinct strands. One aims to explain natural phenomena – thunder in the distance, sounding like the rumbling of Thor’s giant chariot wheels; the mysterious appearance of a rainbow in the sky; the reason for the turn of the seasons or the eclipses of the sun. Tales about such occurrences become conflated with others, fragments of myth about half-remembered battles, disasters or events. As with legends and folktales all around the world, chance puns or misunderstandings contribute to the sources. As early as the twelfth century, armed with a modicum of critical distance, Snorri Sturluson was able to consider the possibility that the mythical god Odin was a genuine figure from prehistory, whose tribe enjoyed a considerable degree of success in the real world. Odin, the grandfather, entered local mythology as Odin the father-god.

  But whose locality was this? Scandinavia is not a unified whole. Borders are fluid – the Norwegians of the Trondheim region have a long tradition of ignoring the supposed rule of the Norwegians of the Vik. The land and people of southern Sweden have more in common with the arable regions of northern Denmark, and indeed, were sometimes part of that kingdom until 1657. Other regions and peoples are now assumed not to be part of Scandinavia at all, and yet have formed parts of the area’s sphere of influence for centuries. The name Keel, which describes the central mountain range dividing Norway and Sweden, does not refer to the ‘ship’s keel’ as a modern English speaker might guess. It literally means ‘waste’. Early maps of Scandinavia put Vikings on the coastline and mark as ‘waste ground’ the mountains of the hinterland, but the land was not empty at all. Throughout the Viking era, the Vikings were in constant contact and uneasy miscegenation with a very different people from a different linguistic and genetic group, not in distant lands but on their very doorstep. The natives of Lapland, the Sámi, occupy all of arctic Scandinavia, and also dwelt far to the south in Viking times, along the spine of Scandinavia’s central mountains. Linguistic archaeology, in place names for example, tells us that much of the inland regions of Norway and Sweden were Sámi territory. There are 3,000 Norse loanwords in the Sámi language, and 200 of them pre-date the beginning of the Viking Age, implying continuous and prolonged contact.16 Similarly, the Suomi, Karelians and Kainuans of Finland had so much contact with Vikings that they would later spend several hundred years as a province of Sweden, while the Baltic states have often had periods of Norse rule. Viking gods were once worshipped in what is now modern Russia.

  Throughout the period under discussion, there was no central religious authority. The old Viking religions held no conclaves like the Christian councils of Ephesus, Whitby or Nicaea, to argue over points of doctrine and establish articles of faith and belief. There was no Viking pope or organized Viking clergy. Sacred spaces were established following the usual animist procedures, accidentally, haphazardly, in places of natural beauty or in prominent sites. Temples came later, after a deity was presumed to have offered aid to the people in return for worship. It seems possible to have picked ten different places in Scandinavia and to receive a different answer each time to the same question: ‘Who is your god?’

  Odin, alleged chief of the gods in Viking times, may not have been as powerful in earlier times. Roman accounts of ‘German’ tribes detailed sacrificial rituals to Odin (or his German equivalent Woden/Wotan), but tellingly compared him to Mercury, a lesser god in the classical pantheon.17 Several centuries before the Viking Age, the most powerful Norse deity appears to have been a sky-god or sun-god, Tiwaz. Tiwaz was equated with Mars, the Roman god of war. He survived in later times as Tyr or Tiw, a one-handed deity of battle somehow subordinate to Odin. As Odin has lost an eye, Tyr has lost a hand, bitten off by a savage hound when he was the only god brave enough to bind it. Tyr
may have been successful, but he was also wounded; perhaps it was this vague reference to diminished powers that allowed the followers of another god to seize control.

  If Tyr was once the Sun, then perhaps Heimdall was once the Moon. This guardian god, possibly another remnant of the supplanted Vanir, was said to never need sleep, and to function as well during the day as others did at night. His job, according to Snorri, was to keep constant watch over the rainbow bridge Bifrost, bearing a horn to blow in case of attack. Heimdall’s senses were greatly heightened – he was able to hear smaller sounds farther away than might be expected. He could hear grass growing, and even the noise made by follicles extruding hair. As a lunar deity, he may also have been associated with childbirth and menstruation; he was said by Snorri to be the ‘son of nine mothers.’18

  Heimdall is also associated with the ram, heimdali – a headbutt in Viking days might be described as the ‘sword of Heimdall’. We have no way of telling whether the god took his name from the ram, or vice versa, or even if the names are a chance pun in differing dialects, given added colour by later skalds. But if Heimdall is a ram-god, then his time, at least in eastern Scandinavia and Finland, is the end of the year. To this day, in Baltic countries, some villages maintain the tradition of a ram effigy in fir or wicker, the kekripukki, assembled in the autumn months and dragged in a parade, before its destruction in a spectacular November conflagration. Santa Claus in Finland is still joulupukki – the Yule-goat.

  Whichever of these gods may have been the most powerful, they survive in the names of the days of the week in many European countries. The week as we know it contains reference to the seven heavenly bodies (i.e. Roman gods) most easily visible from Earth: the Sun and Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturn. In northern European countries the names have retained their pagan equivalents, Sun and the Moon remain so, but so, too, do Tyr (Tuesday), Woden (Wednesday), Thor (Thursday) and either Frey or Frigg (Friday).