Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  In the Saga of Ragnar Hairy-Breeches a beautiful princess called Thora is given a snake by her father, but unfortunately it grows up to become a dragon and soon is eating an ox a day and sitting on a hoard of gold which they’ve been forced to give it in appeasement. The father declares that whoever can kill the monster will be rewarded with Thora’s hand in marriage, and so up steps Ragnar, son of the king of Denmark. He has some special trousers made which are coated in pitch, so that when the stabbed dragon dies and a huge tidal wave of poisonous blood floods everything around it his clothes protect him. Dragons feature regularly in Viking myth, and indeed their vessels were called “dragon ships” by the English, because of their shape, and because they often featured images of the creatures down the side.

  In 865 Ragnar’s son, Ivar the Boneless, captured the Northumbrian capital Eoforwic and established it as a permanent Danish kingdom, the town Danified as Jorvik, or York. Mercia and East Anglia were quickly conquered, the latter’s king Edmund shot to death by arrows. This was at least more humane than with his Northumbrian counterpart, Aelle, who had his lungs ripped out while still alive, a notorious form of execution called the Blood Eagle. By the late 860s, all but one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been conquered. Then in 871, the Vikings invaded Wessex, and soon its inexperienced young king was hiding in marshland with only a small band of followers, desperately fending off the invaders. His name was Alfred, grandson of King Egbert and from the line of Cerdic, but as he was the youngest of King Ethelwulf’s five sons Alfred had been groomed for the Church rather than for battle. After years of Danish pressure, Wessex’s situation was desperate, and on Twelfth Night, January 6, 878, the last English king barely escaped with his life after defeat by the Vikings, fleeing with his army, or fyrd, to the Isle of Athelney in Somerset. During his darkest moments in these marshes it was said that dead saints visited the king.

  But in an unlikely reversal of fortune, the young king then won a series of battles, starting with Edington in May 878. The two groups of soldiers would have stood in lines, round shields interlocked to protect them, both armies in triangle formation behind the front row. Insults were thrown and then men in the second and third lines threw their javelins at the enemy, after which the sound of shields clashing would have echoed alongside the screams, as men desperately stabbed at the foreigners with spears, so close to the enemy they could smell his breath. At the center was the king, even if he was king of only a few dozen men, surrounded on each side by his closest followers—for if he fell, they were doomed.

  Battles in the ninth century would have had little in common with the grand spectacles of the late medieval period involving large and well-equipped armies. The soldiers owned no armor, and many wouldn’t even have a sword, instead fighting the invaders with whatever was at hand on the farm—knives and staves and cudgels. Unlike the Norsemen, Alfred’s fyrd was not made of soldiers but farmers and few would have had combat experience before the Great Heathen Army arrived. They fought not for coins but for their lord, their families, and their land.

  And yet Alfred the scholar and his band of farmers drove the Danes out of Wessex and made peace with the Viking king, Guthrum, an agreement whereby the Norsemen would keep the east of the country and recognize Alfred’s rule in Wessex and western Mercia. In 886, in the newly rebuilt city of London, Alfred was declared king of all the Anglo-Saxons not under Danish rule. He died in 899, succeeded by his son Edward, recognized as fader (father) and lord of all the island. Edward’s illegitimate son, Athelstan, the product of his liaison with a shepherd’s daughter, would then succeed him in 924 and, after a spectacular victory at Brunanburh against a Viking and Celtic army, he finally united the once-seven kingdoms of England.

  One of the themes Martin borrowed from medieval Europe was that of the royal ward. In his world, fostering is an important aspect of kingship, and in real life the sons of princes would often be sent out to live with their father’s lords. Ned Stark and Robert Baratheon grew up as wards of Jon Arryn, part of a web of aristocratic adoption networks that helped to build loyalty to the lord and bind leading families together. Sometimes, as with Theon Greyjoy, these wards were also hostages. Athelstan, though childless, fostered a number of royal princes, from as far away as Brittany, Scandinavia, and Ireland, although as with the Starks and the Greyjoys, there could be ambiguity about the difference between fostering and hostage-taking. Fostering was designed to build political bonds out of families who might need each other; it was sometimes within a family’s interest to foster a child out to a powerful lord, but it also encouraged good behavior among potentially troublesome vassals.

  In ancient Egypt, the sons of Nubian chiefs to the south were forcibly taken to be educated with their Egyptian masters, which would encourage them to learn Egyptian customs and an Egyptian worldview but also ensured their families behaved.7 Likewise in ancient Rome, the sons of tribal leaders were often raised as hostages and given a Roman education; the Alemmani leader Serapio was named after the Greco-Roman god Serapis, following his father’s time as a ward.8

  Athelstan united the realm, although Anglo-Saxon kings were not content with the simple “King of England.” Just as Westerosi monarchs are known as “King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and of the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm,” English rulers claimed lordship over all the peoples of the island, rather than just the territory. Athelstan’s great-nephew King Eadred went by the title “Reiging over the governments of the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons, Northumbrians, Pagans and British.” His successor Eadwig the Fair was “King by the Will of God, Emperor of the Anglo-Saxons and Northumbrians, governor of the pagans, commander of the British,” by which he meant ruler of the English, the Vikings, and Welsh. After this, the standard title became the more prosaic “King of the English,” with King John (1199-1216) the first to be called King of England.

  REALMS OF ICE AND FIRE

  The Norse deities were cruel, led by Odin, god of both battle and poetry, two activities seen as intimately linked in Viking eyes, since all their poetry was about fighting. Odin had one eye and two pet ravens, and was known for his wisdom, but also his skills and ruthlessness in battle. Among their other gods were Thor, the god of thunder, Loki, of chaos, and Freya, as well as Hodor, a blind son of Odin and Frigg who was tricked by Loki into killing his own brother with an arrow. In the Havamal, a collection of aphorisms and Icelandic poems written down in the thirteenth century, there feature a number of Viking mottos credited to the god Odin, literally “The Sayings of the High One.” Among them is: “Cattle die, kindred die, we ourselves also die, but the fair fame never dies of him who has earned it.”9 Or as the Valyrian saying goes, Valar morghulis—all men must die.*

  In Viking mythology, the world begins with Ginnungagap, the “yawning void,” and the Icelandic poet Snorri “tells us of two realms of ice and fire, Nifleheimr and Muspell,” from which eleven of twelve rivers flow “into the emptiness, mixing and condensing in the mist.”10 It ends with Ragnarok, where “everything will burn . . . whatever gods and humans may do. The outcome of our actions, our fate, is already decided and therefore does not matter. What is important is the manner of our conduct as we go to meet it.”11 For the Norsemen, winter was coming with Fumbulvetr, three intense winters which precede Ragnarok, signaling the end of the world. But then if you live in Scandinavia you’re probably going to be conscious of the cold.

  The religion of the Iron Born also borrows from Celtic and Norse folklore. Like the Druids, they baptized their babies in water to protect them from spirits and fairies; Ailill in the Irish epic The Tain was submerged in Druidic streams, just as the Welsh legendary hero Gwri was immersed in water (this long before Christianity arrived). The Celts may even have drowned people in sacrifice to their sea gods Manannan, Morgen, and Dylan, although since no one at the time could read or write it’s likely to remain speculation. And whereas Celts would make oaths to “sea, stone and sky,” the Iron Born call for blessings for s
alt, stone, and steel.

  Just as in the Drowned God’s halls heroes will feast while mermaids serve them, so in Valhalla divine female figures called “Choosers of the Slain,” or Valkyries would serve mead and ale at a feast presided over by Odin, having first taken them to this afterlife. Odin lives in this Valhalla, “Hall of the Slain,” with roofs made from warrior’s shields, resting on rafters made of spears. In contrast Hel, goddess of death, rules over the other hall, where those who did not die in battle are sent—a considerably less enjoyable place.

  The other gods live in Asgard, which was connected to Midgard, that is earth, by Bifrost, the bridge of the rainbow. In the east was Utgard, the home of demons and trolls, while to the north was Jotunheimr, land of the Giants. But even on earth it was believed that Great Sweden—today’s Russia—was filled with giants and “beasts and dragons of enormous size.”12 Being a land of endlessly barren frozen wasteland, men’s dark imaginations would fill it with grumkins and snarks.

  THE ARMY OF THE DEAD

  Terrifying things came out of the north. Vikings believed in draugr, or walking dead, the deceased returning to life if there wasn’t a proper burial, and always malovelent, even if the person had been good in life.13 Although often guarding their burial mound, the draugr might also rise up and walk, attacking lifestock and people, ripping their bodies apart with their sheer brutal strength, and killing their victims so they, too, turn into draugr.

  In the worst imaginings of the Norsemen,

  the armies of Hel march back from the grave. Every giant of fire and frost, all the trolls and underground things, all hasten to the Ragnarok to fight out their age-old enmity with the gods.14

  In Norse mythology the Naglfar, or Nail Ship, was “made from the fingernails of the dead and crewed by all those who have ever drowned. We can picture a longship vast beyond imagining, muddy and rotten with weed, salt water pouring off its decks as it breaks the surface after the long rise from the bottom.”15 Because of their belief in the Nail Ship, Scandinavians were careful to trim the nails of a dying man or woman, so as not to aide the Army of the Dead.16

  The most famous of these wights is Glam, from the fourteenth century Grettis saga, “a huge, grizzled, unsocial man, happy to take the job of shepherd at a farm high up in a lonely Icelandic valley where some inexplicable disappearances had already occurred.”17 Glam headed into a storm one evening, never to return and eventually his bloated corpse was found, blue and black, and then buried where it lay. Soon “it became apparent that he was walking again. Men fainted or lost their minds when they caught sight of him, and he started to ride on the farmhouse roof at night. His successor as shepherd was found with a broken neck and ‘lamed in every limb.’”18 Eventually a hero called Grettir cuts out his eyes but gazing into them he saw “the most terrifying thing that he’d ever seen in his life.” Glam’s head is cut off and burned, although Grettir afterward is cursed and becomes a shadow of his former self.

  But all these dead will rise again for the final battle when the day comes, when cosmic wolves race across the sky in pursuit of the sun and frost giants and fire giants fight alongside Loki’s hideous army of corpses, risen up from Hel.

  Saxons and Norsemen alike believed in alfar, or elves and their dark cousins, dvergar, dwarves. Indeed “demons are so common in the North that they even perform menial tasks—like cleaning the stables,” according to Olaus Magnus, a sixteenth century priest who wrote an influential book on Scandinavian folklore.19 All northern peoples believed in helpful household spirits—in Germany they were the Heinzelmannchen, to the Scandinavians the tomte, while the Slavs called them domovoi and the Gaels the gruagach. To lowland Scots and northern English, they were brunaidh, or brownies, small, hobgoblin-like creatures who would help around the house in exchange for food but didn’t like to be seen. The house elves in the Harry Potter franchise are based on brownies, while the junior section of the Girl Scouts is also named after them.

  Then there were trolls, monstrous quasi-human figures who lived in mountains or caves and were usually hostile to humans. The origins of this myth are much debated, but one curious theory is that they represent lingering folk memories of a long-dead race of creatures who inhabited the north before the first men. Just as the Children of the Forest arrived before humans, so the Neanderthals had inhabited Europe before the appearance of their cousins, homo sapiens. Neanderthals ceased to exist around thirty-five thousand years ago, but it is possible that relic populations survived in more inhospitable pockets of the north. Trolls were often referred to in Scandianvian tales as “the old ones,” and described as uglier versions of humans, but yet human-like, and in the 1970s Finnish paleontologist Björn Kurtén first suggested that trolls trace their origin to oral traditions relating to the long-dead Neanderthals.20 (It was believed, until very recently, that Neanderthals were an entirely separate species, but it has since been confirmed that they could mate with homo sapiens, and thus Europeans and Asians today are about 2 percent Neanderthal).

  The Vikings also practiced human sacrifice, a grizzly aspect of life in Westeros that was once all too common. There is evidence of live burial or ritual killing at a number of sites, such as Bollstanas and Birka in Sweden, and Oseberg in Norway. Women have also been found in the graves of Scandinavian warriors at Cernigov in Ukraine and the Isle of Man, possibly sacrificed because only by dying violently could they follow their masters to Valhalla. The tenth century Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan witnessed a horrific Viking Rus funeral in which a drugged slave girl was buried along with her master; the girl was gang raped by six Viking men, half-strangled, and then stabbed repeatedly, the Vikings banging their shields to drown out the sound of her screaming. However grim George R.R. Martin’s imagination, far worse stuff happened in real life.

  Ibn Fadlan was a native of Baghdad, then a city of 500,000 and the world’s greatest center of learning, and was horrified by the blue-eyed barbarians, who rarely washed and openly copulated in public without shame. His chronicles later inspired the Michael Crichton novel Eaters of the Dead and the film adaptation The Thirteenth Warrior, about the Rus battling terrifying “mist-monsters” or “wendels,” near-human creatures who may be relic populations of Neanderthals.

  The Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (Circle of the World) relates how one year the harvest failed in Sweden and so oxen were sacrificed in Uppsala. The following year it failed again so they sacrificed men. By the third year they got together and decided they would sacrifice their king, Domaldi, and so they reddened the sacrificial ring with royal blood. It seemed to work, and this is also what they do in Pentos if things go wrong.

  SPEAR WIVES

  The Free Folk have spear wives, women who take part in battle, and although the idea of Viking female warriors is a popular one and “shield-maidens” often appeared in sagas, convincing evidence of their existence is lacking.21 Iron Born would not tolerate a female ruler, and the same was true of Vikings, whose leaders had to wield an axe or sword. Women did, however, have greater freedom in Scandinavian society than almost anywhere else, including the right to divorce and take half their husband’s property.

  Like the Free Folk, Scandinavians regularly stole wives, a common practice that survived long after Christianization. As Jon Snow says: “Amongst the free folk, when a man desires a woman, he steals her, and thus proves his strength, his cunning, and his courage.”22 Today the annual Wife-Carrying contest held in Sonkajarvi, Finland each June is a legacy of the tradition.

  But the Iron Born also include some later Christian elements; the “god who died for us,” as the islanders call him, sounds very Christian, as does their maxim “What is dead may never die, but rises again, harder and stronger.”23 Indeed, during the tenth century the Vikings had begun to adopt Christianity, and were sometimes quite devout, although often clinging on to elements of the old religion and the custom of having second wives survived for some time. It goes without saying that their behavior, also, hardly improved,
and the most Christian of Viking kings, Canute the Great, mutilated and killed enemies and innocents alike.

  These newly Christian Vikings made an unwelcome return during the reign of Ethelred the Unready, son of Edgar the Peaceful, unready meaning literally “badly advised” in Old English and a pun on his name, ethel-red or “well-advised.” Medieval monarchs often had epithets, as they did in Westeros, where there was Baelor the Blessed or Joffrey the Ill-born. In Europe there were a number of monarchs called “the Bad” and several “the Blind,” “the bold” and “the Brave” and numerous “the Conqueror,” “the Fat,” “the Good,” “the Old” and dozens of “the Great.” There were also four monarchs nicknamed “the Mad,” among them Charles VI of France, the grandfather of England’s own mad king.

  Among the less common were Vasili II the Crosseyed of Muscovy, Constantine V the Dung-Named of Byzantium, Wilfred I the Hairy of Urgel in Spain, Henry IV the Impotent of Castile, Eric XI the Lisp and Lame of Sweden, Ivan I the Moneybags of Russia, Wenzel IV the Drunkard (king of Bohemia in the fourteenth century), Eric II the Priest Hater of Norway (he did not enjoy very good relations with the Church), and Ivaylo the Cabbage of Bulgaria. Worst of all was James II of Ireland, the “Be-shitten” or “shit-head,” the term given to him by the Catholic Irish (Seamus a Chaca) after he was feebily defeated by his Protestant son-in-law William III.

  Ethelred was unlucky as well as ill-advised, facing a formidable opponent in Sweyn of Denmark, known as “Forkbeard.” Ethelred came to power in 978 after his half-brother Edward had been killed in a courtyard fight, possibly at the behest of Ethelred’s mother Elfrida. Such was the horror associated with killing a king that afterwards a column of fire was reported over the wasteland where his body was left and when his brother was made king “a bloody cloud was seen many times in the likeness of flames; and it appeared most of all at midnight.”24