The Vikings

by Robert Wernick

  They came out of the cold and hostile north on a June day in 793 A.D. - long, low, black ships with large, curving prows and broad, red-and-white sails, dancing over the waves toward the English tidal island of Lindisfarne off the coast of the medieval kingdom of Northumbria. The ships plunged right onto the beach, and out poured a band of mighty, tangled-haired men, howling like animals and waving their long, broad swords. They charged up the island’s grassy slopes, where sheep and cattle grazed.

  Lindisfarne had much to attract the invaders. On the island stood a venerable Christian monastery to which generations of sinners had bequeathed riches for the salvation of their souls. In its chapels and on its altars lay a bounty of gold crucifixes, linen and silk tapestries, and books encrusted with jewels.

  To the monks who lived amongst these treasures, the monastery was more than a repository of worldly wealth. It was a center of learning, a sanctuary for contemplation. The monks spent their days praying, chanting, inscribing manuscripts, corresponding with fellow monks throughout the Christian world, and chronicling the events of their times. They had no weapons to defend themselves, and they could not believe that anyone on the island would try to harm them.

  The monks were no match for the intruders from the sea. These men had no reverence for the Christian God, no scruples about plundering a Christian sanctuary, and no regard for human life other than their own. They cut down some of the brothers in front of their altars. Others were thrown into the sea to drown, and still others were stripped naked and driven out of the monastery to hoots and jeers. The sacred buildings were looted - their gold and silver, illuminated manuscripts, and precious stones carried down to the beach, where the invaders loaded the treasures onto their waiting ships. Long before an alarm could be sent out, the vessels, now laden with plunder, vanished over the dark waters of the North Sea from whence they came.

  This was an atrocity unprecedented in the memory of people of the time, and the shocking news flew as fast as messengers on foot, horse, and ship could carry it throughout the scattered Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the south and east of Britain and beyond. Before long, knowledge of the event had crossed the English Channel to the land of the Franks on the Rhine. There another Anglo-Saxon monk and ranking scholar of the age, Alcuin, was supervising a revival of learning at the court of the Emperor Charlemagne at Aachen. Expressing his alarm, Alcuin wrote, “It is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited in this most lovely land, and never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as this that we have just suffered from a pagan race.” To Alcuin and his contemporaries, the desecration of the monastery was not only appalling but remarkable - remarkable that at a time when sailors would not venture out of sight of land “such an inroad from the sea could be made.”

  Alcuin could not have imagined the terrors yet to emerge out of the sea during his lifetime and many lifetimes to come - terrors that would make Lindisfarne seem like a minor act of vandalism. The pagans to whom he referred were the Norsemen, people with whom British and European merchants already had a nodding acquaintance as traders. Soon these raiders would be known as the Vikings and viewed as a scourge to the civilized world. In the Vikings’ melee of death and destruction, many like Alcuin saw the fulfillment of the words of the Old Testament Prophet Jeremiah - “out of the north evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land” - and thought the Day of Judgment might well be at hand.

  The summer after the assault on Lindisfarne, the Vikings descended upon Jarrow, about fifty miles down the Northumbrian coast, and struck a blow at the monastery that once was the residence of the Venerable Bede, perhaps the greatest historian, theologian, and astronomer of his time. In the summer of 795, the Vikings ravaged Iona, off the coast of Scotland, and Morgannwg, on the southern coast of Wales. In 797, it was the turn of the Isle of Man, and, in 800, of a monastery just south of Jarrow, and another, more distant, on the west coast of Scotland. Before long, it was said, the monastery chapels and village churches of England rang with a new prayer: A furore Normannorum liberu nos, Domine (“From the fury of the Northmen deliver us, 0 Lord”).

  And still the Northmen came. Those sudden, hit-and-run, summertime assaults at the close of the eighth century were just the first stirrings of what was to become an epic campaign lasting nearly 300 years. From about 800 onward, the Vikings swept south, west, and east as if on a tidal wave - swelling in numbers and spilling farther and farther afield. “The wild beasts,” wrote the French monk Abbo, “go through hills and fields, killing babies, children, young men, old men, fathers, sons, and mothers. They overthrow, they destroy, they ravage; sinister cohort, fatal phalanx, cruel host.”

  Sometimes the Vikings struck the same places again and again. The famous Irish monastery of Armagh - chosen by Saint Patrick as the base of his church in the early fifth century - was to be plundered five times - three of them in one month in 832. The port of Dorestad, on the Rhine, the biggest commercial center of northern Europe, was robbed, wasted, and depopulated at least six times. No one knew where the Vikings would strike or when or in what numbers. Hamburg was sacked. Paris was burned. As fear and foreboding enveloped Europe, “it seemed,” wrote one monk, “that all Christian people would perish.”

  The Irish author of a dire twelfth-century book entitled The War of the Irish With the Foreigners spoke for all Europe when he cried out from the depths of anger and anguish: “Although there were a hundred hard, steeled, iron heads on one neck and a hundred sharp, ready, cool, never-rusting, brazen tongues in each head and a hundred garrulous, loud, unceasing voices from each tongue, they could not recount, or narrate, or enumerate, or tell what all the Irish suffered in common, both men and women, laity and clergy, old and young, noble and ignoble, of hardship and of injury and of oppression in every house, from these valiant, wrathful, purely pagan people.”

  Such was the picture of the Vikings drawn by monks. Yet, Vikings had another side. It was one that worried monks could not see or recognize - a hugely productive and creative side. And in the long run, this aspect was far more consequential than all the fire and fury of their raids and incursions.

  The Norsemen may have begun as raiders, but they developed into skilled conquerors and competent administrators. They established long-lived states at the ends of Europe - east, west, and south. They taught the wild Slavic people of what is now Russia the rudiments of civil government. The Duchy of Normandy in northern France was a Viking creation that, by the standards of the time, was a model state with a more tightly centralized government than anything the West had seen since the overthrow of Rome centuries before.

  The Vikings were capable tradesmen as well, canny, enterprising, risk-taking merchants, always on the lookout for new routes of commerce to open or old ones to revive. They brought fresh goods and fresh ideas to the West and played a pivotal role in spawning the new class of feudal lords that would arise in the Middle Ages.

  Although they came from an almost entirely rural society with no more than a few towns in all their land, they became town builders when the occasion demanded. Plundering the primitive agricultural kingdoms of Ireland, they found it advantageous to create a series of market towns all around the coasts that became cities and, for the first time, provided the Irish with the inspiration and challenge of urban life.

  The Vikings were foot-loose, adventurous, and brave as lions, all qualities that made them desirable mercenary soldiers for foreign rulers. When the ruler himself was brave and generous, they fought for him to the death. Vikings formed the personal bodyguard of the Roman emperors of Byzantium and helped their doomed but dazzling realm to survive for another half millennium.

  All this the Vikings could achieve because they were the most mobile people of their age, masters of those greatest
of highroads, the seas and rivers and lakes. The Viking genius was born of water. They were never more at home than when scudding along distant courses in the ships they had built with immense thought and craftsmen’s attention, the fastest and finest vessels the world had ever known.

  At their most daring, they took these superb ships out across the Western oceans into waters where, so far as they knew, no one had ever sailed. And when they found empty lands in the northern waters, they turned into persistent colonists. In desolate Iceland, they built the first republic of modern Europe, and then they ventured far beyond to become the first Europeans to set foot on the vast ice-capped mass of Greenland and on the more appealing shores of North America.

  Much about these lusty, feisty, inquisitive, wide-ranging adventurers remains a mystery - including the very name by which they are known. No one is sure where the word Viking came from or what it originally meant. Various etymologists have traced it to various Old Norse words - from vik, meaning “inlet,” because the Vikings’ Scandinavian homeland was riven by fjords; from vig, meaning “battle,” because they were so skilled in making wars, and from vikja, meaning “to turn aside, to deviate,” a comment on their wiles and wanderings.

  Whatever its origin, the word quickly acquired for the peoples of Europe a meaning it has never lost: a seaborne rover, raider, and conqueror, full of courage, guile, and brute strength. It meant much the same to the Vikings themselves. When a Norseman said he was “going a Viking” - as bold and ambitious men in the Scandinavian lands dreamed of doing throughout the ninth and tenth centuries - he meant that he would equip a ship to sail over the high seas in search of plunder and adventure. Both of these to the Vikings were eminently respectable goals. Yet, there was always an ambiguity about the term. Vikings were just as likely for one reason or another to turn their prows against their own neighbors as against distant foreigners. And when they did, those who had been harmed would scour the seas to punish them. Once a party of Vikings settled down and made a territory their own, they did not like being preyed upon any better than anyone else. Earl Magnus, a Viking born in the Orkney Islands in Northern Scotland, was praised in a saga as being “severe and unsparing” toward robbers and sea raiders.

  The origin of the name Viking is only the first of the puzzles associated with the Norsemen. Virtually everything that is known about them comes from vague and incomplete ancient sources and from modern archeology, which has only begun to piece together their history.

  The most nearly contemporaneous of the written sources are the manuscripts of the clerics, such as those of Alcuin, Abbo, and Adam of Bremen. Their writings, combined with secular histories like the Anglo-Saxon and Russian chronicles, present hundreds of firsthand commentaries and reports. But at the same time, these records are likely to be biased since they were written by the victims of the Vikings or by partisans of the victims. Other written accounts were left by acquaintances of the Vikings, such as the Arab merchants who encountered them in marketplaces around Scandinavia and continental Europe. But these proud Muslims were not much more favorably disposed toward the Vikings than were the Christian monks. Coming from an infinitely more settled society, they looked upon the Vikings as crude and uncouth. “They are the filthiest of God’s creatures,” wrote the Arab traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan. “They do not wash after discharging their natural functions; neither do they wash their hands after meals. They are as stray donkeys.”

  Alas, the Vikings themselves kept neither logs at sea nor ashore. Until the eleventh century, they rarely wrote anything except runic inscriptions on grave and crossroad markers. The only surviving accounts in their own language are the sagas - the legends of their heroic age, which were transmitted orally from generation to generation and not written down until long after the Viking Age had ended.

  However, the sagas are a treasure-trove of information. They reveal much about how the Vikings lived, loved, worshipped, waged war, hunted, traded, and explored. And the picturesque names by which they knew their epic figures conjure up much about their character and their behavior: King Eric Bloodaxe and Thorfinn Skullsplitter, known for their prowess in battle; Onund Treefoot, who had a leg cut off in a sea battle and stumped around on a wooden one thereafter; Olaf Peacock, who loved fancy clothes; and Sigurd Sow, who, although he was a king, dressed in old clothes and was always rooting around in his fields like an ordinary farmer.

  As might be expected with histories committed to paper centuries after the fact, the sagas are riddled with contradictions, ambiguities, and mystifying obscurities. The authors often tended to be maddeningly brief and matter-of-fact about the most notable of events. Nevertheless, for all their shortcomings, the sagas remain the truest sources for understanding the values the Vikings lived by and for viewing their heroes and villains through their own eyes. Moreover, archeology has confirmed some of what the sagas recount - as it has the events recorded in the Christian chronicles.

  At the dawn of the ninth century, when they began their raids on coastal Britain, the Vikings, who erupted out of Scandinavia, were essentially one people. They were then barely on the brink of dividing into the three nations of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. They spoke the same language, Old Norse. They lived the same rough life on isolated farms, usually near a body of water. They worshipped the same gods, and their bards sang the same songs to honor the same warrior ancestors.

  They were descended directly from the Germanic tribes that fanned out over continental Europe between the first and fifth centuries A.D. and brought down the Roman Empire. But earlier ancestors of the Norsemen can be traced much further back to 6000 B.C. By that date, men and women were paddling in makeshift crafts among Denmark’s 600 islands into the deep, narrow fjords that cut from the sea through Norway’s craggy mountains and over the thousands of lakes and rivers that lace Sweden. The people who used these vessels were nomads moving from one hunting ground to another. Presumably, they paddled offshore in pursuit of seal, porpoise, and whale.

  Two millennia later, these nomads were joined by a new wave of migrants and settled down to sow crops and live in permanent dwellings, but, still, hunting from boats provided their main form of food, which was fish. By 1500 B.C., they had loaded their crafts with flint tools and Baltic amber - some of it worked into jewelry, some of it raw. They ventured as far as Britain and Ireland to barter for gold, copper, and tin. No oceangoing vessels of that period have been found, but goods, unquestionably Scandinavian, have been uncovered in the British Isles.

  Paradoxically, the seas and fjords that from time immemorial inspired the Scandinavians to build boats - thus making possible both travel and communication - simultaneously bred in them traits of separateness and regional pride. Living in isolated pockets of land - where they wrested a living from an ungenerous, rock-strewn, and often frost-bound earth - they developed proud independence and fierce loyalties to their communities.

  A Viking farmstead cultivated oats, barley, rye, and cabbage to supplement the catch from the sea, and it raised flocks of geese and herds of cattle, goats, pigs, and sheep to provide both food and raw materials (feathers, horn, skin, and wool) for tools, clothing, and the boat that was sure to be among its goods and chattels. On the farmstead stood a large building that perhaps housed as many as a dozen people, including two or three slaves, who labored as farm hands and general helpers. The house might be faced with timber, stone, sod, or wattle and daub, depending on what materials were at hand.

  Indoors, benches lined the walls of the central hall. The center seat was often raised to create a sort of throne of honor, and it was flanked by two pillars that were more symbolic than practical. The sagas claim that all of the indoor woodwork (and especially the high-seat pillars) was heavily carved, often with geometric and floral designs and sometimes with representations of a deity such as the ever-popular, hammer-wielding Thor. In such a hall, presiding in his high seat and surrounded by his sons and followers, sat the bondi. He was the self-sufficient patriarch and proprietor of the
farm.

  A Viking community might have a group of such houses huddled together, village fashion, or it might have some scattered over a valley that reached from the waterside to a mountain boundary. In either case, the community was predominantly populated by a family or several families, who were related down to third cousins, even fourth cousins - people who shared a common great-great-great-grandfather.

  These extended families formed federations with other extended families that occupied neighboring territories. Such federations shared hunting and fishing, defense and trade - and as the practice grew after the end of the eighth century raiding into foreign lands. Each extended family had its chieftain, known as a jarl, or “earl,” and, in times of stress, natural leaders emerged from among the chieftains. Such a leader might be known as a konungr - Old Norse meaning literally “man of noted origin” and related to the English word king.

  In the early Viking days, such a minor king was by no means a national monarch. He was merely the central figure in his region, large or small. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden began to emerge only after the strongest of these minor kings had subdued and unified a number of lesser kings and jarls, often after long and fierce fighting. Not until the middle 870s, some eighty years after the raid on Lindisfarne - did Norway acquire a king in the person of Harald Fairhair. Denmark and Sweden lagged more than a hundred years behind Norway, with Sweyn Forkbeard ascending in Denmark in 985 and Olaf Skotkonung coming to rule Sweden in 993. Even then the boundaries of the three nations continued to shift far after the Middle Ages, and the role of the kings themselves depended upon the acceptance of their people - or their own strength and skill in forcing that acceptance.

  A Viking leader, whether a king leading an invasion or a jarl instigating a local brawl with another chieftain, was expected to be in the forefront of the fight and to perform feats of strength beyond the capacities of other men. Bloodthirsty, greathearted Olaf Tryggvason, who ruled a part of Norway at the close of the tenth century, was one of the most admired Viking kings. One reason, as the saga devoted to his life says, is that he could hurl two spears at once, one with each hand, and jump over the gunwale of his immense, dragon-prowed ship and leap from oar to oar while his men were rowing.