The Vikings

by Robert Wernick

  In the early days, it was a rare occurrence for a ruler to succeed in passing his crown to a son unless that son was prepared to fight for the right to keep it. The Vikings had no long-established aristocracy. The bondis recognized only force of will and arms. As free men and warriors as well as farmers, many among them nurtured ambitions of becoming jarls or even kings.

  The dominant preoccupation in a bondi’s life was family. His first duty was to his relatives. His primary aim was to increase their wealth and prestige and to defend their honor against the greed and affronts of others. That honor might be challenged any time a quarrel broke out and over any pretext: the size of a dowry, the theft of a sheep, the rights to a stranded whale. Such a challenge demanded satisfaction. Thus, blood feuds were part of the normal pattern of the Norseman’s life.

  At any moment, say the sagas, the daily round of farming, herding, and fishing might be torn asunder. A single spark of violence might set off an endless succession of duels, ambushes, pitched battles, murders, maimings, and burnings. These blood feuds were pursued with deadly intensity as each fresh killing stoked the hatred. “I would ask this of you, that you forgive me for whatever I have done against you,” said Thord Andreassson in a saga when he had fallen into the hands of his enemy, a jarl named Gizur. “That I will do as soon as you are dead,” replied Gizur in the cold, dispassionate tone that had been his since the day his entire family had been massacred by Thord and his friends. Thord tried to break away but was felled by an axe stroke in the back of the neck delivered by one of Gizur’s followers.

  Anyone stood ready to help sustain a feud - even a king. Another saga tells how one day at the court of King Magnus the Good of Norway, Asmund Grankelsson, one of Magnus’ men looked down to the harbor and saw his enemy Harek of Thjotta alighting from his ship. “I will pay Harek for my father’s murder,” cried Asmund, brandishing his weapon, which was only a slight kind of hatchet. “Rather take this axe of mine,” the King said to Asmund, “there are hard bones in the old fellow.” And he gave him a thick axe with a handle like a club. Asmund took it without a word, went down and plunged it into Harek’s skull with such ferocity that the axe edge was bent by the blow.

  The Viking woman was raised to be the mate to such a man. She had to be durable and self-reliant, for she might have to assume responsibility for family and farm while her husband was away fighting or seafaring. And she was a stickler for family honor - understandably, for there was hardly a Viking woman who had not seen a father or brother or husband carried home broken and bloody from a fight. Unlike the men, she did not bear arms and could not take out her grief and rage in physical violence. But she could insist that the men return her an eye for an eye.

  A saga recounts how an Icelandic chieftain named Flosi made an unusual attempt to stop the killings between his family and that of a neighbor named Njal. Flosi had been willing to accept a payment of money in atonement for the murder of his niece’s husband Hoskuld. But his move to pacify the quarrel got him nowhere. His widowed niece Hildigunn taunted him with being a coward and threw at him the terrible, blood-clotted shirt in which her husband had been slain. She goaded Flosi into slaughtering Njal and all his sons. That act, in turn, led Njal’s son-in-law to take threefold revenge on Flosi and his family and friends. There seemed to be no way to end such feuds; they went on and on in perpetuity - or until one family was totally wiped out.

  The sagas make so much of the incessant feuding and bloodletting that it is a wonder the Vikings had any energies left to work their farms - to say nothing of joining forces to raid abroad. Possibly the ancient storytellers gave an exaggerated idea of the extent of the feuds, although they were certainly a large factor in Viking life.

  In any case, death held no terrors for the Viking warrior. If he fought with valor, he could expect to be summoned by the god Odin to join his fellow heroes in the golden, celestial realm of Asgard, the capital city of the Norse Gods, and live in the great hall of Valhalla, where a man could feast and fight forever. The Viking gods who presided over the heavenly and earthly arenas were lusty fellows cast from the same rough mold as the Vikings themselves. Leading the pantheon was Odin, the one-eyed magic god of wisdom, war, and frenzy - a spirit of great cunning and bravery, protector of chieftains and poets alike. Then there was Thor, a stormy-tempered redhead who, as a slayer of giants and ruler of winds and rain, was a favorite among soldiers, seafarers, and farmers. And there was Frey, a lascivious god of fertility, kinship, and peace who helped to ensure a bountiful harvest on land and sea. Frey possessed the most enviable of Viking equipment - a collapsible boat that could be folded up to fit into a small pouch when not in use and expanded to accommodate the entire company of the gods at Frey’s command.

  These Viking gods had won their treasures of silver and gold by conquest and theft, by feats of daring and guile - just as did the mortal Vikings. In Scandinavian literature, the Viking god Thor is the essence of the hard-drinking, pugilistic Viking Age. In one poem, he devours an ox, eight salmon, and three cups of mead (a wine made from honey) at a single meal. In others, he smashes enemy giants and demons by hurling boulders, thunderbolts, and his boomerang-like hammer into their enormous skulls.

  By the early ninth century, some earnest Christian missionaries had begun to compete for heathen Viking souls by teaching them the Gospel.

  Louis the Pious, the French king who reigned in France when the Vikings were beginning to settle there, periodically staged elaborate baptismal ceremonies to receive them into the Christian faith. The Vikings were willing enough to add yet another god to their pantheon, and many of them seem to have gone cheerfully through any number of Christian rituals for the prize to be had. On one occasion, there were so many Christian converts that there was not enough cloth for the long, white baptismal gowns that were traditionally given out on such occasions. So the fabric was cut into small pieces to make it go further. The oldest of the Vikings was then heard to complain loudly that this was the twentieth time he had been baptized, and he had always gotten a handsome gown out of it, but this sack they had issued to him was “fit only for a cowherd, and if I were not ashamed of being naked, you could immediately give it back to your Christ.”

  In time, Christianity won some followers among the Vikings - but even then the Norsemen took to the new religion with ambivalence. Of Helgi the Lean, son of a Swedish sea rover and an Irish princess, it was noted “he believed in Christ and yet made vows to Thor for sea voyages and in tight corners and for everything that struck him as of real importance.”

  Even to their own gods - who remained powerful long after the rise of Christianity in Scandinavia - the Vikings pledged their trust only on condition of mutual benefit. The saga of Hrafnkel illustrates how a Viking could rage when he felt betrayed by a god. Hrafnkel worshipped the god Frey. So solicitous was he of Frey that, when a harmless shepherd unwittingly made the mistake of riding a stallion that Hrafnkel had consecrated to the god, Hrafnkel killed the poor shepherd. But then, against all expectations, the lowly shepherd’s family succeeded in getting support from another wealthy landowner, who set out to avenge the slain shepherd. The landowner and the shepherd’s family caught Hrafnkel by surprise, stripped him of all his worldly possessions, and cast him out into the bleak land.

  At that point, Hrafnkel angrily declared that he no longer would worship either Frey or the other gods if they could not take better care of him. Having decided to trust only to his wily, ruthless nature, he painfully won his way back to material prosperity and then opened a new cycle of violence by seeking a bloody revenge on his foes.

  The Vikings loved such tales of fortitude and independence in the face of adversity. They roared with approval upon hearing of the old bondi who boasted: “At one time, the peace had lasted so long I was afraid I might come to die of old age within doors upon a bed.” They preferred to think of themselves in the image of such dashing figures as Gunnar Hamundarson, one of the heroes in the sagas, “a tall, powerful man” whose sword s
trokes “were so fast that he seemed to be brandishing three swords at once.” Gunnar had looks as well as talents, with his “fair skin and a straight nose slightly tilted at the tip, keen blue eyes, red cheeks, and fine head of thick flaxen hair.”

  Another popular figure was Skarphedin Njalssan. One day, he caught sight of his hated rival Thrain Sigfusson standing with a throng of followers on an ice floe across a great gap of running water. Skarphedin made a gigantic leap over the water, holding his axe over his head, and came sliding along the ice so rapidly that Thrain was still putting on his helmet when down came the blow that split his skull open to his jaw, “spilling the back teeth onto the ice.” Jumping over a shield that was in his way, Skarphedin slid onto safety before any of his enemies could strike a blow at him.

  Honor and daring, valor, strength and agility, all these were qualities the Vikings prized and upheld. There was another, somewhat less admirable side to their nature as warriors that the Vikings were only too pleased to highlight. This was their brutality toward their foes. Indeed, they seem to have exaggerated it deliberately in order to intimidate their enemies. Just as they carved the prows of their ships in the shape of dragons and other ferocious beasts to terrify the superstitious as they came surging out of the sea, so they cunningly circulated stories of their own savagery. One horrifying tale describes how, after a battle between Danish Vikings and two English kings in 867, the Norsemen broke open the rib cage of the captured King Ella of Northumbria and ripped his lungs out of his back - something they called carving the blood eagle, an allusion to the two lobes flapping like wings with the last dying breaths of the victim. Stories of such tortures, passed by the Vikings and the vanquished alike, conveyed the clear message to peoples everywhere that it would be wiser to yield than to try to thwart the relentless drive of the Norsemen.

  Such cruelty was not the figment of a saga writer’s imagination; it occurred all too often. So did another kind of unruly behavior attributed to the Vikings, the bizarre actions with which some of them swarmed into battle. They would roll their eyes, bite the edge of their shields, and utter beastly howls. They would charge toward their adversaries without consideration of pain or danger and sometimes without any protective armor. A warrior who behaved this way was called a berserkr, an Old Norse word that has variously been interpreted as “bare skin,” meaning without a shirt, and “bearskin,” in possible reference to animal skins some of the men might have worn. Anglicized to berserk, the word came to symbolize the Viking terror. Not every Viking fought that way, of course. Some modern scholars suggest that such behavior may have been the result of drunken rages brought on by consuming huge drafts of ale or wine just before battle or of paranoia or perhaps of genetic flaws in individuals.

  Whatever the cause, a number of Vikings - no one knows the percentage - did go berserk when they fought. And some kings and jarls found it useful to have bodyguards made up of these men or to use them as shock troops or simply to spread terror wherever they went.

  With fighting occupying so much of their time at home and abroad, it would seem that the Norsemen lived by no laws at all. But such was not the case. Viking laws, like Viking literature, evolved out of age-old traditions. They were committed to memory, transmitted orally, and, when the occasion demanded, were recited aloud by a learned lawgiver.

  Under Viking law, a jarl or bondi charged with a crime such as theft or murder was brought before a tribunal of judges made up of his peers. The accused could plead either guilty or innocent, and, if the latter, he could go on to argue his case by calling witnesses to testify both to the facts and to his honesty and good character. To further substantiate his case, he could seek - or the judges could require - trial by ordeal.

  Such an ordeal usually began on a Wednesday, the day of Odin, god of wisdom. The person was given a handful of red-hot stones or scraps of metal to hold for a horrible minute or two, and then sent off with a bandage until Saturday, when the judges reconvened to look him over and reach a consensus. Their decision was based not on whether his hand was burned, which it invariably was, but rather on the severity and the cleanliness of the burn. If it was clean, the defendant was deemed to be innocent. If it was festering, he was pronounced guilty and given a sentence that ranged from a fine of money or goods to being banished.

  A man found guilty of wounding one of his peers in a brawl was required to make “bone payment” to the victim in silver coins - one eyrir for a small wound, six for a large one - and to pay for the cost of treatment. “If a wound needs cauterizing,” the law stated, then the same eyrir “is payable every time cauterizing is necessary. But as physician’s fee, one eyrir is to be paid every month and two months’ worth of flour and two of butter. He who did the wounding must pay.”

  Another law decreed a series of fines for improper touching of a woman: four ounces of silver for touching her wrist or her ankle, two and two-thirds ounces for touching her elbow. But a touch above the knee, the law went on, “is called the fool’s clasp; no money is payable for that - most women put up with it when it goes that far.”

  There was certainly no humor to the other penalty to which miscreants might be condemned, and that was outlawry. A man found guilty of murder might be declared an outlaw, either for a limited period - a few months or a few years - or forever. As an outlaw, he could not fish, trade, join a Viking expedition, or seek help in an hour of need - not even from a member of his own family. Permanent outlawry was tantamount to banishment. Men on whom that lonely sentence fell had no choice but to flee. Outlawry was, in fact, the reason that many a Viking left his homeland.

  As in most early societies, right went hand in hand with might, and enforcement of the laws depended, in large measure, on who was strongest, complainant or defendant. A king or powerful jarl might seek to uphold the laws as a matter of self-interest in order to strengthen his power. But where no such enforcement existed, a Viking might refuse to accept the judgment of a court or might refuse to appear altogether. In that case, the injured party - and his angered family - had no recourse but to seek restitution, if necessary in blood. And this was one of the primary reasons for the fighting and bloodshed that raged throughout the Viking Age.

  The question remains: Why the sudden burst of Viking energy at the end of the eighth century? Not the least impressive thing about their achievements is that there were so few of them. Scandinavia was not thickly populated. No more than 2 million souls could have been living there when the Viking Age opened at the dawn of the ninth century. That was only a small fraction of the population of the empire that Charlemagne bequeathed to his son in 814.

  One overriding reason for expansion overseas was that the Scandinavian population, although small in absolute terms, was growing rapidly - too rapidly to be peacefully absorbed into Norse society. Medieval ecclesiastics of other lands, observing this sudden explosion of Vikings out of the North, ascribed it to the sexual prowess of the northern heathen. They were polygamous, said Adam of Bremen, and had swarms of children. They had wild, promiscuous rites of spring every year, insisted the Norman chronicler Dudo of Saint Quentin, and thus ensured an annual crop of babies.

  A likelier explanation for the increase in population was a change in the climate. Northern Europe was perceptibly warmer around 800 A.D. than it had been in preceding centuries. The glaciers receded all over Scandinavia. There was more land that could be used for crops or pasture. The winters were shorter and milder. So significant a factor was winter in the life of northern countries that the Vikings counted time not in years, but in winters.

  A long cold winter would mean that the provisions put away in the fall might run out while the weather was still too harsh to replenish them by hunting or fishing. It also would mean that the weak, the old, and the young would die. Gentler winters meant that more babies would survive, more would grow up to swell the active, turbulent pool of younger sons who - since the property generally went to the oldest - were landless, foot-loose, bursting with energy, and ready for a
ny adventure.

  The mild winters also provided the Norsemen of the eighth and ninth centuries with an unusually protein-rich diet - their herds of cattle and flocks of sheep prospered, and more fish could be caught. This made the Vikings bigger and stronger, which gave them a significant advantage over their adversaries. European chroniclers tended to see them as Goliaths: “Never did I see a people so gigantic,” the Arab traveler Ahmad ibn Fadlan wrote. “They are tall as palm trees.” That wasn’t true, of course, but male skeletons in Scandinavian graveyards of the period average five feet eight inches, an impressive height for the time, when few people stood taller than five feet five.

  The sagas had a more imaginative explanation for the Vikings’ advance on the world than diet and climate. Snorri Sturluson - the thirteenth century Icelander who set down a collection of sagas recounting the reigns of gods and kings from the beginning of time to his own day - ascribed the migration of the Vikings to the bloody deeds of Harald Fairhair, first known as Harald Halfdanson.

  Around 860, he inherited a minor kingdom upon the death of his father and vowed not to groom his shaggy head until he had brought to heel a handful of jarls who contested his right to rule. The jarls did not submit meekly. One, named Herlaug, had himself buried alive in a funeral mound rather than submit to Harald. Those who seized their swords and summoned their retainers did so only to die on the battlefield. One by one, a number of others found resistance futile and followed the example of Herlaug’s brother Hrollaug, going on their knees to Harald. Then, the tale continues, the king called for his scissors and comb, had his long blonde locks cut off, and emerged from the barber as Harald Fairhair.