The Long Serpent and a few escort ships followed Sigvald’s vessel into the channel behind Svold Island near Vinland, where the combined enemy fleets waited in ambush. Watching from a hilltop on the island, Eirik and the kings of Sweden and Denmark saw the parade of longships approach, and among them was one great ship with a large dragon head that was richly gilded. The Danish king boasted: “That dragon shall carry me this evening high, for I shall steer it.” But Earl Eirik, in a voice loud enough for many people to overhear, sneered, “If King Olaf had no other vessels except that one, King Sweyn would never take it from him with the Danish force alone.” Indeed, the forces of the Swedish and the Danish kings were to prove insufficient, and it was Earl Eirik who would seize the initiative in the battle.
The ambushers hurried down to their fleet and prepared their warriors for battle, striking tents and gathering weapons and shields.
As the Long Serpent neared Svold Island, the enemy fleet came rowing forth to the sound. In great alarm, King Olaf’s escort converged on the Long Serpent, the men begging their ruler to flee if he could and not risk battle with so formidable a force. High on the afterdeck where he stood at the steering oar, King Olaf replied: “Strike the sails; never shall men of mine think of flight. I never have fled from battle. Let God dispose of my life, but flight I shall never take.”
Olaf’s men then ordered all loyal ships to form the usual Viking line of battle: prow to prow, tail to tail, to be lashed together at stem and stern in such a way that they formed a veritable fortress-like raft. But Olaf’s ship was so large in comparison with those on either side that her prow protruded far beyond the prows of the other ships. This posed a grave danger to King Olaf’s leading warriors, who would be fighting in the prow of his dragon ship and would thus be exposed on both sides.
“We shall have hard work of it here,” grumbled Olaf’s greatest prow man, Ulf the Red. The Norwegian king was furious at the complaint. He drew his bow and aimed an arrow at his own prow man, but Ulf responded, “Shoot another way, king, where it is more needful. My work is your gain.”
From the enemy fleet, King Sweyn was the first to reach the Long Serpent’s prow, but he suffered tremendous losses when he attempted to board. Then came the Swedish king, and he, too, was beaten off and sustained horrific casualties. But Earl Eirik was not to be thwarted. Attacking the flank with many ships, he worked his deadly way down the line of defenders, hewing and hacking each vessel clear of her warriors and then cutting her loose from the rest. Outnumbered and weakened, King Olaf’s men began to panic. They clambered from their smaller ships to the bigger ones at the center of the line. Their numbers grew fewer and fewer as they retreated before the attackers until at last all the survivors were gathered aboard the Long Serpent herself.
Surrounded and now doomed, Olaf and his men stood behind their shields as a hail of missiles from the enemy ships crashed down around them. When at last Eirik pulled alongside the Long Serpent, Einar Thambarskelfir - another of Olaf’s brave men - drew himself up by the Long Serpent’s mast and tried to get a clear shot with his bow and arrow at Eirik. Einar’s arrow hit the tiller above Eirik’s head so hard, recounts the saga, that it drove into the wood up the length of its shaft. Einar drew his bow again, but an arrow from Eirik’s ship hit his bow and split it in two.
“What is that,” cried King Olaf, “that broke with such a noise?”
“Norway, from your hands,” answered Einar.
Olaf threw him another bow, but Einar spurned it: “Too weak for the bow of a mighty king!” And he fought on instead with sword and shield.
King Olaf, who was hurling spears at the enemy, noticed his men were landing multiple blows with their swords but rarely making a mortal wound. They called to him that their swords were dull after hours of battle. Olaf opened a chest and passed out sharp new swords - but as he did his men saw blood running down his arm and under his steel glove. He was wounded, but they could not tell where and dared not ask. Aboard the Long Serpent the toughest men were fighting in the bow and stern, where the ship was highest. In the center, Olaf’s men were thinned by slaughter. Using this gap, Eirik’s Vikings stormed the Long Serpent.
At last, there was only a small band of defenders gathered around King Olaf in the stern of his magnificent ship. The deck was soaked with blood. More and more of Eirik’s men climbed aboard and closed on the stern, hacking with broadaxes and swords. When Olaf and his remaining men saw that the battle was lost, they leaped into the sea with their armor, shields, and weapons. The enemy tried to seize the king before he sank. But he pulled his shield over his head and vanished beneath the waters.
The Long Serpent became Eirik’s booty, along with a share of Norway. Under Eirik, she was for many years a symbol of Viking prowess. Two hundred years later in the thirteenth century, when the chronicler Snorri Sturluson recorded King Olaf’s saga, the Long Serpent’s oaken bones were still visible beside Trondheim Fjord, a reminder of the greatness of the Viking mariner and the boldness of the Viking warrior.
In the month of November 885, an immense fleet of 700 Viking vessels - one of the largest naval assemblages of the entire warrior age - sailed up the River Seine, penetrating into the very heart of France. At its head were Sigfred and Orm, two Viking chieftains who had been raiding in Frankish lands throughout the decade. On and on they led their fleet, and they pillaged as they went, until, on the twenty-sixth day of that bleak month, they were 100 miles inland and before the walls of Paris. The city was then concentrated on the boat-shaped Ile de la Cite in the middle of the river and already crowned with a cathedral and controlled the Seine and waterways beyond. From this all-important island city, two fortified bridges arched over the river. The Vikings could proceed no further without taking them.
The ruler of Paris, Charles the Fat, a great-grandson of Charlemagne and nominal head of the dwindled Frankish empire, was preoccupied elsewhere with fractious cousins trying to secede from the empire. All that remained to guard the bridges were 200 Parisian knights and their men-at-arms under Count Odo, marquis of the province of Neustria, and Bishop Joscelin, the city’s ranking cleric.
Against this scanty defense, thousands upon thousands of ship-borne warriors hurled themselves into action. “Horrible spectacle!” exclaimed the monk Abbo, who witnessed the event from inside the precincts of the cathedral. In moments, the air was a blizzard of arrows. The stones of the fortress towers resounded with the clang of thousands of spears that were hurled against them. After the Vikings heaved flaming torches at the battlements, the whole city blazed with flames that, in Abbo’s words, painted the sky “the color of copper.”
Still, at day’s end, the ruined island city remained miraculously in the hands of its brave defenders. The Viking onslaught subsided - only to be renewed three days later. Then day after day, week after week, the Vikings pummeled Paris while Count Odo and Bishop Joscelin and their handful of stalwarts clung tenaciously to the walls of their city.
For all the ferocity of the attack, the Vikings did not succeed in taking Paris. But they did seize both banks of the river, and from there they held the city under siege for the better part of a year, simultaneously ravaging the French countryside for miles around. Not until late in 886 did Charles the Fat bring overdue assistance to the embattled Parisians, who by now were facing famine and pestilence. And then his action was that of a craven victim of blackmail. Instead of fighting off the Vikings, he granted them safe passage up the Seine, flouting the bravery of the Parisians - and, in addition, paid the warriors 700 pounds of silver to go and harass his rebellious subjects in Burgundy.
The long siege of Paris and its stunning aftermath exemplified how great Viking power and Viking ambitions had grown since the first few shiploads of warriors had descended howling upon England’s Lindisfarne monastery less than a century before. Those early summertime hit-and-run raids were the merest of larcenies compared with what the Norsemen learned to visit on the lands of northwestern Europe. As shrewd and pragmatic as
they were violent, they soon saw the wasteful folly of returning home to Scandinavia, or even to the Shetland or Orkney Islands, after each raid. Instead, growing numbers of Vikings established quarters in easily defended islands in the mouths of the principal rivers that led inland from the sea, and they used them as bases for their murderous forays all year round.
Finding the land and the climate to their liking, these Vikings took to remaining as uninvited guests for longer and longer periods of time. And now in the last quarter of the ninth century, they swarmed out of their longships in ever-growing numbers, seeking not merely to loot but to conquer and carve out extensive territories to rule.
The mighty Viking invasions of France - and of England and Ireland as well - opened a new and fascinating chapter in the era of the Norsemen. The nature and history of the beset lands, the traditions and character of their peoples, and the strengths and weaknesses of the various Viking leaders made each of these three invasions markedly different from the others. And each produced a different - and sometimes surprising - result. In sum, they forever altered the course of medieval history.
Nowhere did the Vikings reach deeper, plunder with richer rewards, or settle more effectively than in the vast inchoate empire once ruled by Charlemagne. When Charlemagne died in 814, he left an enormous inheritance that reached from the Atlantic coast of France east to modern Hungary and from the North Sea south to the Mediterranean. All this went to his son Louis the Pious, so called for his ardent devotion to Christianity. In 823, Louis dispatched missionaries to Denmark in an early attempt to Christianize the pagan Vikings in their homeland. But he paid too little attention to the affairs of his earthly state - and to his own family. When he died, he left three quarrelsome sons - Charles the Bald, Louis the German, and Lothair, who for some reason seems to have escaped an epithet. These brothers went to war among themselves, which tore the empire asunder. Lothair retained the title of emperor and roughly the lands that are today Burgundy, Frisia, Lombardy, and Provence. Charles the Bald got the rest of what is now France while Louis the German got the lands roughly corresponding to modern Germany, which accounts for his name. And all three acquired packs of wolfish nobles as eager for plunder as the Vikings themselves. Naturally, the Vikings found this turbulent mass irresistible.
Typical of a number of brief alliances and rapid conquests made by the Norsemen was an incident that occurred in June of 842 along the River Loire, where an ambitious nobleman named Count Lambert was leading a rag-tag army in revolt against Charles the Bald. The count had been trying to capture Nantes - an old, Roman-walled city on the river - which would give him command of the province of Brittany. But his men could not breach the walls, and they had no way of attacking from the riverside - until the Vikings arrived in the area.
The Norsemen, in an expedition of sixty-seven longships, had sailed out into the Atlantic and down the west coast of France to the estuary of the Loire. There they stopped, confronted by a bewildering maze of shallow channels that meandered among brush-choked islands for a hundred miles upstream. They were apparently encamped, wondering what to do, when an emissary from Count Lambert arrived with a proposition. The count saw the Vikings as the answer to his prayers and offered to pilot them upstream to places of plunder in exchange for their help in capturing the city of Nantes. The Vikings, always keen to pounce upon any scheme that suited their purposes, readily agreed.
The date chosen for the combined attack was June 23 - and a shrewd option it was. June 23 was Saint John’s Eve, the shortest night of the year and one marked since prehistoric times in Europe by bonfires and fertility rites welcoming in the summer. For that reason, the people of Nantes would be too preoccupied with celebrating to notice what was happening on the river. The boats of the Vikings glided silently to a halt on the banks of the Loire at Nantes. There, with guttural roars now all too familiar along the coastlines of Europe, the warriors stormed into the merrymaking crowds, striking down people left and right and setting the tower afire.
Count Lambert, having wrested Nantes from Charles the Bald, then disappeared from history. Clearly, he gave the city no relief from the Vikings, who were to attack it in the future as they chose.
As for the immediate Vikings, after a few days they retired to the mouth of the Loire with all their booty. Then, instead of going home to Scandinavia, they settled on the large island of Noirmoutier just south of the Loire. From there, they scoured the countryside on both sides of the river, destroying towns, pirating merchant pack trains, and robbing farmers of their cattle and crops. “The number of ships increases, the endless flood of Vikings never ceases to grow bigger,” wrote the scholar Ermentarius about these years in the 840s. “Everywhere Christ’s people are the victims of massacre, burning, and plunder. The Vikings overrun all that lies before them, and none can withstand them. They seize Bordeaux, Perigueux, Limoges, Angouleme, Toulouse. Angers, Tours, and Orleans are made deserts. Ships past counting voyage up the Seine, and throughout the entire region evil grows strong.”
Charles the Fat’s ploy in 886 of paying the Vikings off in silver - such tribute came to be known as Danegeld, or “Danish money” - was neither the first nor the last futile attempt to encourage the Vikings to depart by making them rich. Between 845 and 926, French kings taxed their people unconscionably to make thirteen payments to the Vikings totaling more than 43,000 pounds of silver and 685 pounds of gold. And still the plunderers came back. So frequent were their visits that little was left of cities like Nantes, Orleans, and Rouen, which, from their locations on the Seine and the Loire, had served as marketplaces for the hinterland. The noblemen either fell in battle or fled from the marauders. The monks all deserted from their abbeys, and magnificent monasteries, such as Jumieges, which had kept alive a flickering flame of culture after the barbarian victory over Rome, were now only roofless, windowless walls.
But sometime at the end of the ninth century or the beginning of the tenth, there arose a Viking leader of extraordinary prowess and sagacity who shaped an entirely new destiny for the Vikings. His name was Hrolf, and he must have been an extremely large man: He was nicknamed Gongu-Hrolf, Hrolf the Walker, because no horse could carry him. According to a plausible legend, he was a Norwegian, scion of a family that had fled from Norway to northern Scotland to seek their freedom and fortune there. From that land’s fog-shrouded coastline of cliffs and narrow, rock-bound inlets, Hrolf took part in many raids, going sometimes to the coast of England, other times to that of France. By the early part of the tenth century, he and his followers had overrun and occupied part of the old Roman province of Neustria on the Seine.
It was a place worth having - rich with orchards and lush meadows that must have looked like paradise to a man brought up in the grim North. And Hrolf was evidently interested in more than loot, for he stayed on.
After many years that are veiled in darkness, the light of history flashes on for a brief moment in the year 911. At that time, Hrolf, his name by now changed to Rollo, reached an agreement with the Frankish king. He was another Charles, grandson of Charles the Bald, who had fought his brothers for the empire and won the lion’s share of France. This Charles - a youth in whom the blood of Charlemagne ran so thin that his subjects derisively called him Charles the Simple - was induced to sign a formal treaty with Rollo at Saint Clair-sur-Epte on a small river running into the Seine between Paris and Rouen.
By the terms of the treaty, Charles formally agreed to cede to Rollo what the Viking had already more or less taken - the broad valley of the lower Seine, soon to be called Normandy after the Norsemen. With it went the title of Count of Rouen, a designation Rollo’s descendants would magnify into Duke of Normandy as they expanded their holdings to a broad swath on the northwest shoulder of France, about 175 miles by sixty and bounded by the principal market towns of Bayeux, Chartres, Evreux, and Saint Lo. In return, Rollo was to swear fealty to the king, to look to the defense of his own domain, and to be baptized a Christian and defend the faith of the realm.
It is not difficult to imagine the contrast when these two ill-matched leaders met - Rollo, the giant of a Viking sea lord, his towering frame jangling with golden arm rings and amulets stamped with the hammer of Thor; Charles, elegant in linen shirt and breeches and a cloak decorated in silk, his head perhaps buzzing with illusions of imperial grandeur but no doubt haunted by fears of rebellion.
Despite their differences, both men recognized that they had certain goals that were reconciled by the treaty. Charles the Simple had the not-so-simple task of holding down more than a dozen fractious nobles in his own realm and dealing with repeated raids from the Vikings as well; Rollo wanted land to rule. The treaty served them both. For Rollo, it made lawful his presence in Normandy; for Charles, it provided a buffer between his beleaguered kingdom and new Viking arrivals from the sea.
Rollo could be a cruel man. According to one tradition, when some peasants sought the right to hunt and fish in Rollo’s woods, lakes, and rivers, he dispatched his uncle, Count Rudolph, to cut off a hand and a foot of each of the would-be poachers. But he was also sharp-witted and practical. He let himself be baptized, and he lost no time in restoring the churches that he and his fellow Vikings had sacked. His newfound Christianity probably did not significantly affect his personal beliefs one way or another. It was later recounted that, on his deathbed, he asked to be buried in the cathedral of Rouen and ordered large sums of gold to be given to Christian churches. He also called for human sacrifices to be made to the pagan gods. Presumably, then, whether Saint Peter or Thor met him in the hereafter, he would be assured of a welcome.
The Vikings Page 5
