A Brief History of the Vikings

by Jonathan Clements

  Oaths clearly did not mean the same to Guthrum as they did to Alfred. The treaty was soon broken, and the Vikings were on the move again. Eventually, the large war-band reached Exeter, their backs to the sea, and agreed to a second treaty. Guthrum had been hoping to meet up with a second band of Vikings, arriving by sea, and so effect a cunning escape at the very moment Alfred thought he had them cornered. The elements, however, allied with England, and sunk 120 Viking ships before they could meet up with their colleagues.

  It was hardly a victory for Alfred. His part of the bargain involved bribing the Vikings to leave – an early precursor of the danegeld of later, less feted rulers. The removal of the Viking threat may have brought temporary respite to Wessex, but simply shifted the problem elsewhere. Guthrum’s army instead plagued the Mercians north of Alfred’s border. Other Vikings, it seems, had given up on fighting – in around 878 many of them began settling in the East Midlands, in a region that became known as the Five Boroughs, the largely Danish settlements of Lincoln, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and Leicester.

  Guthrum still coveted the treasures of Wessex, and seemed to appreciate that the chief barrier to an acquiescent Wessex was the king himself. Accordingly, the Vikings mounted a surprise attack in the middle of winter. A large part of the Saxon army had been disbanded, and the resolutely Christian defenders were coming to the end of their twelve days of Christmas celebrations. Alfred and a small party of his soldiers were wintering in Chippenham in Wiltshire, where they were caught off guard by a Viking assault – pagan Yule celebrations went on for just as long, but seem to have been cancelled in order to allow for hostilities.

  With Alfred on the run in the marshes of the West Country, Wessex was effectively overrun. What happened next is mysterious, almost miraculous. Alfred was reduced to hiding in disguise – there is a famous legend that he ended up promising to watch a peasant-woman’s baking for her, and somehow caused the cakes to burn. The story, if it has a grain of truth, may have more to do with his role as the provider of ‘bread’ to the West Saxon people.13 Somehow, Alfred scraped up an army in the west, waiting until the late spring, when the local farmers would have sown their crops and had more free time. He led his army against Guthrum, who had occupied Alfred’s former wintering place at Chippenham. It was a last stand for the Saxons, as final as that once fought in the west by the British against their ancestors.

  The West Saxons ‘won’ the Battle of Edington in 878, although how well they won it is open to debate. Some time later that they signed a treaty, whose terms implied that the battle was not all that decisive after all. A borderline was established between the realm of the Saxons and the area that had been settled by Vikings. It was understood by both parties that the Vikings would not be leaving eastern England, but would instead be settling there permanently. The island was effectively partitioned, along a line that ran up the Thames Estuary, north from the River Lea in what is now east London, and then north-west across what is now the Midlands. The land to the east of it was the Danelaw, a place where any remaining Saxons were now obliged to accept that Scandinavians lived among them, and had their own laws and customs. The Scandinavians would never leave.

  By acknowledging the extent of Viking incursion into what is now England, Alfred was able to put a temporary stop on the raiders. The next time Vikings attacked (and war-bands were back before the decade was out), the newly settled Danes in the east would have just as much an interest in defending ‘their’ new home as the Saxons. Alfred’s compromise also left the possibility that a later ruler would be able to reassert Saxon control over the Danish lands, incorporating them into a greater ‘England’. This, in fact, was what Alfred’s son Edward was able to do. Alfred’s grandson Athelstan would become the first true king of England.

  But Athelstan would be able to accomplish such things partly because by the time he did so, the settlers of the Danelaw were embracing the same religion as him. Alfred had been prepared to give Guthrum exactly what he wanted – a kingdom of his own, so long as Guthrum accepted that Alfred’s god was better than his own. Guthrum has evidently thought eastern England was worth the price of Christian baptism. Not everyone believed it. A generation later, Pope Formosus would get extremely agitated at the number of reports he received of pagan rituals persisting in eastern England.

  While Guthrum’s army may have disbanded after the treaty, there were still other, smaller war-bands roaming England. When one enjoyed some raiding success on the south bank of the Thames, the Danes of the Danelaw were unable to resist the temptation. They marched on Essex, meeting up with the new arrivals on the coast at Benfleet. The threat arose of a Viking assault on London, but then the Viking group broke up, supposedly after arguments on jurisdiction and plans. Alfred, however, could not let the moment go unpunished. A small fleet of English ships sailed to East Anglia and raided the Danelaw coast, wiping out a flotilla of 16 Viking vessels in the Stour estuary. The Danes of East Anglia banded together quickly enough to destroy the victorious English fleet before it could make it back to Kent.

  The experience was enough to convince Alfred of the importance of London. Although the city was in Mercia, not Alfred’s homeland of Wessex, London was the bridging point of the River Thames. Whoever controlled London controlled the river that ran right into the heart of Wessex, and the 880s saw the city change hands several times, as Alfred fought off successive Danish assaults. Eventually, in 886, Alfred occupied London for good, ordering that the people should repopulate the deserted Roman part of the town. In his desire to hold London against Vikings, he found himself asserting his rule over Mercia, and consequently much of modern England. We remember Alfred for being ‘Great’ thanks to his mastery not of Vikings, but of other Saxons. Uniting against the Vikings, Wessex and Mercia formed the bulk of what would become modern England.14

  But this brief history should be told from the Viking point of view. To the war-bands who left Norway and Denmark in search of foreign plunder, the era of the heathen hosts was highly successful – a complete victory for the Vikings. For an outlaw from the Vik, fighting his way around Europe, pillaging foreign lands, and to finally settle down as a farmer in East Anglia with a couple of Saxon concubines must have seemed perfect. It did not matter to him what religious symbol a distant, unseen leader wore around his neck. He had what he wanted, and if he paid protection money to a local ruler, it mattered little whether the cash eventually ended up in the possession of a Saxon or a fellow Dane. From the Orkneys to Essex, the eastern coast of the British Isles was a Viking domain.

  In the long perspective, we might call Alfred and the English the ultimate victors. Christianity and civilization did their slow work, undermining the brutal codes of the war-band. The battle-religion of Odin only made sense to roving bands of warriors. Take the Viking out of the longship, turn him into a farmer, and suddenly he worries about crops, disease, trade and family. He welcomes law and order; a war-band is something he wants to be protected from. His children grow up speaking English to their mother, and his grandchildren find his accent hard to understand. When he dies, he leaves barely any sense of his Scandinavian origins, save for a scattering of place names – like Grimsby, ‘the farm of Grim’. Old age was the ultimate enemy of the Viking hordes – to a culture prepared to play a waiting game, the old enemies eventually faded away.

  English history credits Alfred, rightly, with mounting a heroic resistance to the Vikings, and with a diplomacy that saw his greatest enemy accept his religion and his guidance. But that must have meant little to the dead and the dispossessed in the region now known as the Danelaw. To a Dane, laying claim to a stretch of land that used to be Saxon and being allowed to keep it, the Vikings had won.

  4

  BROTHER SHALL FIGHT BROTHER

  HARALD FAIRHAIR AND SONS

  The Vikings of the Great Heathen Host and their fellow raiders were fleeing something back home, a change in political circumstances that made distant raids seem like a more acceptable option than
staying. Debate continues over what caused so many men to leave Scandinavia at around the same time, but is not helped much by the available evidence.

  Our chief source, for example, for this period of Norwegian history is Snorri’s Heimskringla, written some three hundred years after the events it describes, and Heimskringla’s chief message about this period is the now contested claim that the rise of king Harald Fairhair irritated enough independent-minded people to make them seek somewhere else to live.1

  Halfdan the Black’s son Harald Fairhair may have been only ten years old when he inherited the lands of southern Norway around 870. The true power rested initially with his regent, his maternal uncle Guthorm, who led the war-band against several incursions. The most threatening was from a nearby war leader called Gandalf, whose forces were eventually routed at Haka Dale, north of modern Oslo. Heimskringla graciously implies that the young Fairhair fought in some of these battles, but while he took the credit, much of the hard work must have been uncle Guthorm’s.

  As Fairhair grew to maturity, he sought other means of acquiring territory. With Gandalf dead and his immediate environs devoid of enemies, Harald sought a union with Gytha, the daughter of the ruler of Hordaland. Heimskringla makes much of her great beauty and Fairhair’s romantic desire, but we may assume that political expedients governed both his suit and her rejection of it. Her answer was that Fairhair was a petty princeling undeserving of her love, although she might find him more attractive if, instead of clinging to a small fjord in south Norway, he were to make a play for the entire area, as the famous Gorm had done in neighbouring Denmark.

  Snorri himself seems surprised at Fairhair’s reaction. Instead of railing against a haughty and insolent reply (as many of his descendants would in similar situations), Fairhair took it for the diplomatic offer that it undoubtedly was. He swore to leave his hair uncut until such time as he had conquered all of Norway, a condition that would be regarded as attained when he was able to extort protection money from all the major landholders.2 The nickname ‘Fairhair’ was a euphemism for the shaggy mane of the king as he undertook a series of aggrandizing expeditions. ‘Tangle-hair’ is another reasonable translation. Gytha’s reply contained within it an element of truth, that thus far all the ‘kings’ of Norway were unworthy of the name. Tribal feuds and squabbles over small patches of land might have sufficed in the days when there was no comparison with other regions, but the Vikings were becoming increasingly well travelled. Reports drifted back of far Constantinople and the young kingdoms of Western Europe. Konung, in Old Norse, simply meant a scion of a noble (i.e. powerful) family. It is during the reign of Harald Fairhair that it came to mean king in our modern sense. But Fairhair, despite the claims of some, was never the king of all Norway. He remained a king in Norway, chiefly dominant over the south.

  Fairhair’s conquest was conducted on a larger scale than before. He rejected the simple rounds of occasional extortion favoured by his ancestors, replacing them with a tax-farming system:

  He appointed an earl [jarl] for every district, whose duty it was to administer the law and justice, and to collect fines and taxes. And the earl was to have a third of the taxes and penalties for his maintenance and other expenses. Every earl was to have under him four or more hersar, and every hersir was to have twenty marks of revenue. Every earl was to furnish the king sixty soldiers for his army, and every hersir, twenty.3

  So claims Heimskringla, although the reality may not have been as neat and tidy. Evidence in Heimskringla is nonexistent, but it is backed up at least in spirit by the later Gulathing Law. This decision, voted on by a Norwegian assembly, agrees that ‘free’ farmers were nevertheless obliged to provide men and materials for the defence of their homeland.4 Fairhair and his cronies certainly had a better-organized system of extortion, even to the extent of possibly organizing a ship-levy for ‘defence’. He collected a tax on the trade with Iceland and Lapland, and cleverly steered debates at assemblies so that even those who claimed independence from him would support his policies by vote.

  The system transformed the king from the most powerful roving troublemaker to a centralized holder of wealth, with an army levied from all over the territory he claimed. It installed his agents at the local level as lawmakers, arbiters and tax collectors. It also contained within it the implication that the land on which the Norwegians lived was not their personal property, but a possession of the king in return for which they had to serve, both directly as soldiers, and indirectly through taxation. In the past, it had been possible for a ‘king’ to be a distant, unseen figure, whose claims of his own greatness could have little impact on the average farmer or fisherman. Now, a king was a palpable presence in daily life, whose minions were close at hand, with a vested interest in collecting what was their due.

  Heimskringla’s account of Fairhair’s successes has some archaeological support in Kaupang in south-west Norway. Although the original coastline has long since silted up, excavations between 1950 and 1967 uncovered what was once a port, with multiple stone jetties, over 60 lavish burials (of what appear to be successful merchants), and, most notably, no fortifications. Flourishing at the height of Fairhair’s power, the town shows evidences of a trade network that, for some reason, did not need immediate protection – the borders lay not at the outskirts of the town, but elsewhere, guarded by Fairhair’s ships. The town was called Skiringssal in Fairhair’s time – kaupang simply means ‘place of trade’, cognate with kaupangr in Icelandic and kaupunki in Finnish. Skiringssal is thought to have been the port mentioned as Sciringes heal in Orosius’ Universal History, written in the time of Alfred the Great. Whatever Fairhair managed to achieve, it inspired enough confidence to create a booming economy. The more trade was protected, of course, the more it could be supervised and taxed.5

  In some places, local leaders relinquished any claim on the term ‘king’, which, as Gytha had amply demonstrated, didn’t mean what it used to anyway. They rebranded themselves as Fairhair’s earls, kept their local power, and set about collecting the levies and taxes on Fairhair’s behalf. Icelandic farmers might claim that their high-born ancestors had been dispossessed by Bad Men. The truth is less romantic – the wealthy of the Norwegian petty kingdoms likely remained so, and it was the smaller landholders who were squeezed out. Harald’s consolidation of the Norwegian coast and hinterland created Norway the kingdom, but it also created hundreds, if not thousands of disaffected Norwegians, unable to pay the protection money, or deposed from their lands for refusing to do so, particularly in the fiercely independent Trondheim region.

  Plenty did not like the way the political wind was blowing, and poured across the North Sea to relatives and associates in the Orkneys, Scotland and the Faeroes. Whole communities of Icelanders falsely traced their origins back to those who fled Fairhair’s domination, and some sagas paint a picture of mass movements not only west, but also to the Finnmark, Finland, the south Baltic coast and points east.6 It is better, perhaps, to blame one’s presence on a flight from oppression, than to admit one’s ancestors took their land from someone else – even if the Vikings were refugees, they were refugees with a sense of self-important entitlement that displaced many original inhabitants. It is also worth mentioning that these very places of supposed ‘refuge’ were also the sources of much of the trade coming into Skiringssal; far from scaring people off, it might be that Fairhair’s reforms encouraged them to trade farther afield, and that some of them may have eventually settled in these distant places, their descendants forgetting the more positive impetus that originally led their ancestors there.

  However, it would appear that the most troublesome element in Norwegian society did not run far enough. To Fairhair’s annoyance, a number of Vikings regrouped on offshore islands and then attacked western Norway. After a time, it became clear that the main base of these recursive attackers lay in the Shetlands and Orkneys and that one of the repeat offenders was a son of Fairhair’s associate Rognvald – Hrolf the Walker.7 He got
his name, it was said, because no horse was big enough to carry him. Hrolf had devoted much of his time to bullying the peoples of the Baltic, but had recently tired of his old hunting grounds and returned to Norway, where pickings were richer.

  Hrolf eventually took his men and ships away, stopping first in the Hebrides and Ireland, before carving out a new kingdom for himself on the southern shore of the English Channel. He found a partly willing ally in the form of Charles the Simple, king of the Franks, who granted him land around Rouen in 911 if he undertook to keep other Vikings from attacking it – thereby forming a buffer zone between the coast and inland France. Hrolf’s banishment is a matter of legend, but his arrival in Frankish lands is a matter of fact, his power confirmed by the treaty of St Clair-sur-Epte.8

  Hrolf became the head of a new Viking aristocracy in north France, which swiftly lost many aspects of its Scandinavian culture. Many members used two names, one ‘true’ Viking sobriquet, and a second, more Frankish-sounding one for dealing with the locals. Under Hrolf’s son William Longsword and grandson Richard the Fearless, the Viking-held lands grew in prominence until they could play a powerful role in European affairs. The Vikings in the area lost their Scandinavian language within a few generations, but maintained their prowess in battle and brutal politicking. In a corruption of the term ‘Norsemen’, they became known as Normans, and their territory, Normandy.

  Back in Norway, Fairhair had many women, and the tally of his sons ranges from a conservative nine to a not-impossible twenty. Fairhair’s concubines came from all over the Baltic region, and many seemed to dwell in their home regions with their offspring – their ‘marriages’ to the king enduring only until he headed off to pastures, alliances and bedmates new.