A Brief History of the Vikings

by Jonathan Clements

  While such an imprisonment represents the end of the road for Loki’s troublemaking, it also marks his expulsion from Asgard and his feeling a new hatred for the gods that have treated him so. Next time he appears in Viking myth, it is in the apocalypse, as an agent of the enemies of the gods.

  By the time a written record was made of the myths of Viking End Times, it is possible that the mythology had been seeded with ideas and concepts from Christian stories of the apocalypse. But the Viking world-view seems curiously terminal, with many elements aimed not at avoiding disaster, but at meeting it head-on. This may partly relate to a cycle of death and rebirth, a wheel of the seasons repeated on an annual basis. It may also have certain roots in climactic conditions in the Middle Ages. As the long summer of the Little Climactic Optimum began to tail off, the descendants of the Vikings lived amid palpable signs of declining temperature. Particularly in Iceland, where Snorri compiled his sagas, the seas were filling with pack ice at earlier times each year, and to a greater extent. This, then, might have had some influence on Snorri’s concept of the fimbulvetr, a long period of great cold, in which the world inexorably became locked in ice – if this is the case, then his elaborate apocalypse owes more to his time than that of the Vikings whose myths he hoped to record.

  As the climate cooled, the sagas claimed, there would be other signs of the End Times. Three cocks crow, one at the place of execution, another in the halls of the dead, a third in hell – the similarities with St Peter’s infamous denial of Christ are too obvious. The world is engulfed in far-ranging wars, brother fights brother and rapes sister. The Fenris wolf either breaks free of its chains or is set free by an evildoer, and rampages through the earth and sky, eventually eating the sun. All chained beasts and monsters somehow escape their cages, and Naglfar, a ship made of the nails of corpses, puts out to sea, crewed by angry Jotnar, and helmed by Loki himself, the trickster god finally showing his true colours and defecting to the enemy. Other giants charge across the rainbow bridge of Bifrost, overwhelming Heimdall the faithful watchman, although he is able to blow his horn in warning – there are shades here of Gabriel’s trumpet, or the Song of Roland, which would have entered popular consciousness a generation before Snorri compiled his Edda, but not necessarily of actual Viking myth. The weight of the fire giants causes the rainbow to collapse, and they fall to Earth, ready to join their ice giant cousins in a final battle on Vigrid, the plain of ice.

  This, then, is Ragnarok, the doom of the gods to which Snorri claimed Norse mythology would strive, as each god meets his diametric opposite in a fight to the death. Odin, the Lord of Hosts, leads his undead warriors out of Valhalla – this is where the Vikings saw themselves on that fateful day, charging towards the hordes of giants with their fellow warriors at their side, amid an unearthly army of screaming Valkyries. Heimdall fights Loki (so much for the ship, and Heimdall’s post at Bifrost). Thor fights his nemesis, the mighty World Serpent, smiting it with his hammer but drowning in its poison. Tyr faces Garm, the hound of hell he once bound. Or was it Fenris? No, it cannot be, because Fenris is fighting Odin himself. The wolf kills and eats the ruler of the gods, but Odin’s son Vidar has a magical iron shoe, with which he stamps on Fenris’s jaw, lifting up with all his strength to tear the wolf asunder. Frey fights Surt, the lord of the fire giants, and seems easily bested by him. But at the end, after the battle to end all battles, only Surt stands, flinging flames to all quarters, consuming the world in a terrible fire, itself only quenched when everything that was once the world of men is engulfed by the sea.

  Once again, such an image could owe something to Christian iconography, but the images of fire and water as recorded by an Icelandic scribe offer another explanation. Of all the places in the Viking realm, Snorri’s native Iceland was the place where the precarious nature of human existence was most obvious. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that such revelations of the apocalypse should issue from a place where geysers of steam shoot from the ground, and volcanoes push forth molten rock from the earth. As recently as 1965, when charged to come up with a name for a new volcanic island that had suddenly boiled forth from the sea two years previously, the Icelandic government settled on Surtsey – ‘Surt’s Isle’.

  But the terrifying end of the Viking world was not complete. As with winter giving way to spring, it offered hope of redemption. Odin and the old gods might all be dead, but Ragnarok, we are told, does not mean the end for all life on Earth. Somehow, a handful of the younger gods have survived – particularly the god Balder, who was thought slain by an earlier trickery of Loki’s, but who has now come back from the dead. In the shade of Yggdrasill, the World Tree, a man and a woman come forth, revealing that they have somehow weathered the fire and the flood that followed. In the sky, there is a daughter of the Sun, brighter still than the star that fell. Life begins again, in what could be an analogy of the changing of the seasons, or a faint apprehension that an old way had passed, and now was replaced with a new religion. That was certainly the case in Snorri’s Iceland, which had set aside the old gods by vote in AD 1,000. Although pagan elements persisted for several generations, particularly among fortune-tellers and seers, Iceland had become Christian, and Snorri wrote of his ancestors’ beliefs only after refracting them through the critical lens of Christianity. There is a certain symmetry in this, since it was through Christian eyes that the Vikings first appeared in chronicles of the west 500 years earlier. However, in AD 793 when they are first mentioned, they are far from the quaint forefathers of Snorri’s compilations. To the people of Christendom, they were themselves a sign that the end of the world was nigh.

  2

  FURY OF THE NORTHMEN

  FROM THE FIRST RAIDS TO HARALD BLUETOOTH

  The eighth of June 793 was Médard’s day, when the monks of Lindisfarne remembered a bishop who had bravely made a stand against paganism.1 Two hundred years earlier, Médard had helped a Frankish queen flee the clutches of her violent husband, and had supposedly been sheltered from a storm under the wings of a great eagle. Stories led to superstitions, and it was said in some parts of Europe that bad weather on St Médard’s day would remain for weeks on end.

  The forecast was not good. Northumbria had recently been plagued by terrible weather, such that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles reported ‘immense flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air’. Earlier that year, superstitious parishioners in York had reported blood dripping from the roof of St Peter’s church.2 St Médard’s day looked bad enough, but for many of the monks of Lindisfarne, it was their last. Quite without warning, a flotilla of sleek longships sailed out of the storm and on to the beach at the sacred island.

  They came . . . to the church of Lindisfarne, and laid all waste with dreadful havoc, trod with unhallowed feet the holy places, dug up the altars and carried off all the treasures of the holy church. Some of the brethren they killed; some they carried off in chains; many they cast out, naked and loaded with insults; some they drowned in the sea.3

  The Vikings were not appreciably fiercer than any of the other races warring for control of Europe in the period. What distinguished them was their willingness to regard the clergy as legitimate targets. Whereas mundane towns and villages boasted defensive walls, forts and local militia, monasteries in particular stood exposed and undefended, their occupants not expecting attack, and consequently unable to put up much resistance. In many places, monasteries accumulated wealth simply because they were regarded as safe from attack – who would donate an ornate Bible or silver candlesticks if they expected thieves to carry them off?

  It is unlikely that the raiders left their Norwegian fjords, pointed their ships to the south-west, and sailed in a straight line. Even by the late eighth century, navigation was a timid affair. The ships hopped from Scandinavia to the Shetland Islands, then south to the Orkneys. From there, vessels could sail on to the Hebrides and Ireland, or south along the east coast of Scotland and England. The Vikings knew these routes because they had us
ed them for some time. Their earlier presence may not have been recorded because a few bands of roaming foreigners might escape the notice of chroniclers for a generation or more, particularly if they did nothing but sell amber or animal furs. The early Vikings clung to Britain’s most distant areas, sheltering behind islands from Atlantic storms, just as they did along the Norwegian coast.

  The Sack of Lindisfarne marks the official beginning of the Viking Age, but came after portents far more convincing than the omens of the chroniclers. For some time, there had been scattered whispers of trouble, many only recalled after it was too late. An archbishop in Kent wrote to his son ‘of the thick infestations of wicked men in the provinces of the Angles and Gaul’, while Irish chroniclers recorded settlers returning home from island colonies, forced to abandon them ‘for the sake of the thieving Norsemen’.4 A shield boss of Norwegian manufacture has been found in the Hebrides and dated to before 750 – it might have been a family heirloom, but its arrival in Scotland could have occurred at any point thereafter.5

  More concrete evidence is available. Four years before the Sack of Lindisfarne, three longships arrived in the harbour of the Wessex town of Portland. They were met by a handful of horsemen, led by Beaduheard, the reeve of Dorchester. Assuming that they were travelling merchants, he berated them for not landing without the permission (and presumably, taxation) of Beorhtic, the king of Wessex. The strangers killed him on the spot, in what was the first Viking attack mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles.6 But even this minor incident does not appear to have been so isolated. The Vikings revealed that they were from Hardanger Fjord in west Norway, (at the time, the Norse and Anglo-Saxon languages were similar enough to permit rudimentary communication), and yet other reports called them merely Norsemen, or indeed Danes, suggesting that the slaying of Beaduheard was mixed with other incidents.7 The Vikings were already known, as traders and, if one monk is to be believed, trendsetters – a letter of Alcuin mentions that Viking hairstyles were all the rage in Northumbria in the years before the attack.8

  In 792, a year before the ‘surprise’ attack on Lindisfarne, the Mercian king Offa had ordered the construction of coastal defences in the east of England – hardly the act of a monarch unprepared for an attack. Mercia’s preparation paid off, and kept it safe for many years. Northumbria, however, was not so lucky. In later generations, Vikings would attack in England in forces as big as armies, but there is no need to imagine that these first raiders were anything of the sort. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Norse traders were already in the Hebrides, where could be found Lindisfarne’s parent monastery of Iona. The following year, raiders hit another monastery in Jarrow, south of Lindisfarne, but a substantial number died in a storm.

  In 795, significantly emboldened, a different group went on a spree in the Irish Sea, attacking Iona itself, Rathlin Island off the coast of Ireland, and Morganwg in South Wales. Other attacks followed in the same region. A modern-day criminal profiler would triangulate the attacks and look for an epicentre, concluding that these raiders did not sail each year from Scandinavia at all, but were already based somewhere in the west of Scotland. The Vikings always favoured islands just offshore for their winter bases, and the Hebrides seem to present the ideal location. It is also likely that there were more raids that remain unrecorded – large areas of Scotland and Ireland were poorly defended, and one of the Vikings’ prime interests was in acquiring slaves – an activity that would have ensured no witnesses were left to report these hypothetical earlier attacks.

  It remains possible, although unlikely, that those same three ships that caused the end of Beaduheard were responsible for most of the Viking attacks, including that on Lindisfarne, reported in the period at the end of the eighth century – after all, how many armed warriors would it really take to terrorize a church of peaceful scholar-monks? Our sources for the period are primarily the records and letters of the clergy, who felt the terror of the Vikings more than anyone else. The scholar Alcuin, then dwelling at the court of Charlemagne and fully aware of what waited beyond, was even moved to quote Biblical prophecy: ‘Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth on all the inhabitants of the land’ (Jeremiah 1:14).

  Viking life revolved around the war-band, called a comitatus by Latin chroniclers, who used the term in their own language for a general’s personal retinue. A war-band comprised a leader, often a self-styled ‘king’, and his cronies. Sometimes barely enough men to fill a single longship, sometimes a veritable army, it was the defining unit of Viking life. A Scandinavian community without a war-band was simply a cluster of huts – it would eventually find itself facing aggressors, and be obliged to submit to someone else’s war-band or to form one of its own. The war-band was an organism that lived to acquire possessions – it would roam in search of a territory of its own. It could be destroyed by a more powerful adversary, or it could seize the territory of another, acquiring land, women and wealth for itself. At that point, it would have fulfilled its basic function, and could be expected to fizzle out, losing its vitality. A war-band was not so much a parasite upon a community as an outlet for a community’s bad seeds. A generation after the original raiders gave up on the raiding life, their many wives and concubines would have raised another horde of hungry mouths. Eventually, a new war-band would form, and go off in search of plunder, repeating the cycle once more.

  To travel, they required the infamous Viking ship. As a community developed, and its wayward sons first turned to trade, a ship would permit them to travel further afield. In lean times, when traders had less to sell, and buyers had less to barter, ships became the vehicles of aggression, permitting the Viking group to remove itself from its own homeland to ruin somebody else’s. The raiders of the eighth century were rulers of nothing but their own ships and men, either because they had never had anything else, or, as increasingly occurred, because they had been ousted from their homeland by another group of rivals.

  One of the most famous Viking ships is the vessel found in 1880 in a burial mound in Gokstad, south Norway. Sometime around AD 900 a great Viking chieftain had been buried inside his vessel, intact in every detail but for the mast, which was hacked off to fit under the roof of the burial chamber. Whoever he may have been, the middle-aged man was laid to rest with a significant number of sacrificial animals: 12 horses, 6 dogs, and even a peacock.9 The Gokstad ship was an improvement on earlier vessels from the Dark Ages. It had 16 pairs of oars – enough for a small crew of traders or, doubled-up, sufficient transport for a good-sized war-band. Along the gunwales were 32 shields, implying it was used for the latter purpose. There were, however, no seats for the oarsmen, leading archaeologists to presume that Vikings brought their own sea chests, somehow strapped them down, and used them in lieu of benches.

  The Gokstad ship was remarkably preserved, despite the damage done by a party of grave robbers that had hacked through its side. Its state made it possible to seriously contemplate a replica, leading several modern entrepreneurs to build their own versions. The first and most famous was the Viking, constructed in 1893 as part of Norway’s entry in the Chicago World Fair. The project was led by Magnus Andersen, the editor of a shipping magazine, who was determined to prove that the Vikings were not only superb seamen, but had sufficient technology to allow them to reach America. Some critics accused Andersen of taking a few too many liberties with his ‘replica’, including adding extra topsails, and giving it a deeper keel than the original Gokstad ship. Nevertheless, the Viking would eventually make the crossing to America in less than a month, with relatively little alteration to its ninth-century design.10

  Actually building and sailing a Gokstad replica allowed Andersen to experience Viking sailing methods first-hand. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the ship’s construction was the use of clinker-building techniques, overlapping planks rendered watertight with tarred rope. Such construction made the ship highly flexible in rough seas, and may have given it precisely the advantage the
Vikings required. If a ship could make it from Norway to Shetland, it could make it from there to the Faeroes or Scotland, and from there to Iceland or Ireland. The engine of the Viking invasion had been created.

  The popular image is of Viking warships, fronted by a fearsome dragon’s head, but such craft were of less practical use in making a long sea crossing. In fact, in the later days of the Viking Age, some communities deemed that dragon’s heads were too frightful for local nature spirits, and had to be removed before a ship was permitted to approach land.11 Many of the most famous Viking voyages were instead undertaken in a longship, with more capacity for booty, or a craft called a knorr – a much more conventional trading ship, with enough space to hold cattle or other livestock. The majority of Viking vessels were much broader at the front, leading to the Norse term of endearment knerra-bringa – ‘a woman with a chest like a knorr’.12

  Regardless of whether they moved by oars or sail, in a sleek longship or a rounded knorr, another mystery of the Viking expansion lies in their means of navigation. The Vikings did not have compasses, and no evidence has been found to confirm stories of a sólarsteinn, a crystal that somehow enabled Vikings to work out the position of the sun on cloudy days. Others have suggested that a broken wooden disc, found in Greenland in the twentieth century, might be the only extant example of the Vikings’ secret weapon – a form of sundial that enabled them to compute compass points based on the shadow cast by a central spindle.13 Such solar compasses were in use in Arab Aleppo in the fourteenth century, but that does not explain how one would end up in Greenland. The use of the solar compass is certainly a possibility, but why are there not significantly more examples? Or was this another of the secrets of Odin?