The Vikings

by Robert Wernick

  Scarcely sixty miles west of England, across a shallow sea, lay, another somewhat smaller island, fertile and well watered, and an early object of Viking attentions. This was Ireland. It was a country of contrasts, enormously wealthy in some things, abysmally poor in others, virtually leaderless yet indomitable, the easiest prey of all but, in the end, the victim that most frustrated the Norsemen, for the Vikings, despite all their force of arms, encountered qualities of canniness and resilience in the Irish that they found both befuddling and exhausting. They never did conquer Ireland in the sense that they subjugated England or carved a state for themselves in France. Indeed, in 1014, after the climactic Battle of Clontarf, the Irish could claim with some justice to have been the first to have thrust the Vikings back to the shores from whence they had come.

  When the Vikings arrived on the island around 800, Ireland had the most intellectually advanced culture of the West. Its lush hills were crowned with uncounted monasteries; the bell towers of nearly 100 such institutions survived as late as the nineteenth, and no one knows how many more succumbed to the ravages of war and weather. These centers of study delved into all manner of subjects, from astronomy to theology, and contributed to the learning of England and the Continent. It was to Irish monks that Charlemagne turned when he founded a school at the Frankish court, and it was from Irish script and illumination that the exquisitely crafted Carolingian volumes of his descendants were derived.

  But, for all the monks’ erudition, the great mass of the Irish were behind in affairs of this world. Economically, Ireland had no commerce more sophisticated than barter. Technologically, the Irish had no ships worthy of the name, only hide-covered fishing craft, and their weapons were inferior. The Viking invaders, says an old Irish poem, wrought havoc “because of the excellence of their polished, ample, treble, heavy, trusty, glittering corselets; their hard, strong, valiant swords; and their well-riveted long spears.”

  Politically, the Irish had been living in virtual isolation since the beginning of history. They had not been visited by the Roman legions that had swept over Continental Europe and England in the first century B.C., and so they had not even the primordial vestiges of the legal codes and administrative practices that helped to forge the modus vi vendi between Vikings and natives in England and France.

  Nor had they any experience in putting aside petty quarrels long enough to sustain a common cause against a common danger. Their only hierarchy was a kaleidoscopic collection of rival petty kings, whose ancient jealousies and quick tempers kept them at odds with one another and with the nominal high king who reigned at Tara, about twenty miles from the eastern coast. “Alas,” mourned one early chronicler, “it is pitiful for the Irish to continue the evil habit of fighting amongst themselves and that they do not rise together against the Norwegians.”

  Throughout the seven sparsely settled provinces of Ireland - Ailech, Connaught, Leinster, Meath, Munster, Oriel, and Ulaidh - the only enemies the Irish had ever known were their neighbors, and the only strategies they employed in combat were expedients of the moment, frequently based on cunning and trickery. It was in that spirit that the Irish met the first serious Viking incursions in the 830s. And wondrous to say, that spirit of guile had its effects.

  The first Viking invader of record was a Norwegian prince named Thorgils, who arrived with a fleet of 120 ships carrying 10,000 warriors. He quickly seized Armagh - the ecclesiastical polestar of Ireland and the wealthiest monastery of all. He drove out the abbot, installed himself as pagan high priest, and threw up a chain of earthworks running clear to the western province of Connaught more than 100 miles away, signaling his occupation of the northern quarter of the island.

  It might have seemed as though the conquest of the entire land was scarcely a battle or two away. The Irish had no Charles the Simple to bargain with the Vikings for fealty in return for a duchy, no Alfred the Great to contain the invaders behind a well-guarded border. But then, according to legend, a curious thing happened to Thorgils, something he was powerless to defend against for all his thousands of retainers. The crafty King Maelsechlainn of Meath, sent out his daughter with fifteen warriors disguised as maidens, lured Thorgils and fifteen Viking captains to a lakeside tryst, and drowned the lot.

  However it happened, it seems certain that Thorgils met his demise. Though his death left the Vikings in Ireland without a leader, they were not without a foothold. His troops had anchored their ships in estuaries all around the Irish coast and erected wooden forts there to secure themselves. Those little forts eventually expanded up the hillsides overlooking the coasts. They were the embryos of the cities of Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, and Wexford. And for the next three centuries, these cities were to be the focus of a drama that would pit not only the Vikings against the Irish, but Vikings against Vikings, and, strange to behold, Vikings and Irish against other Vikings and Irish.

  Indeed, the first sizable invasion fleet to follow Thorgils’ came not, as might have been expected, from fellow Norwegians bent on avenging themselves against the Irish but from rival Danish Vikings who smelled a good source of plunder in their cousins’ newly established enclaves. In 849, these piratical Danes swept over the horizon in a fleet of 140 ships and fell upon the Norwegian builders of Dublin. For three years, the contending Vikings waged a tug of war over the city. And the opportunistic Irish took a hand, assisting the Danes from time to time in the prayerful hope that the newcomers would oust the detested Norwegians.

  But it was an alliance to make an Irishman shudder. In the aftermath of a massive battle that lasted three days and three nights in 852, during which the Danes annihilated the Norwegians, messengers sent by King Maelsechlainn - he of the seductive daughter - came to the Danes’ encampment to offer congratulations on the splendid victory. To their horror, the emissaries found the Danes, with perfect Viking sangfroid, cooking their food in cauldrons placed on heaps of Norwegian dead. Sparing no gory detail, an Irish chronicle describes the scene, “with spits stuck in among the corpses and the fires burning them so that their bellies burst, revealing the welter of meat and pork eaten the night before.”

  But the Danes seem to have redeemed themselves somewhat for that barbaric performance by handing over to the Irish a chest of gold and silver coins for Saint Patrick’s shrine at Armagh - a deed suggesting to the chronicler that “the Danes had at least a kind of piety.”

  To the great pleasure of the Irish, it seemed as if the fratricidal Viking struggle might go on and on when a fresh contingent of Norwegians arrived the next year, this time under a prince known as Olaf the White. But before long the Irish had to look to their own devices. For Olaf soon routed the Danes - and then trained his lustful eye on bigger game. Gathering his forces, he launched a full-scale attack on the interior.

  By now the Irish fully understood the ultimate Viking threat - absolute conquest - and they were also beginning to learn something about warfare. For the first time in the memory of Irishmen, the incumbent high king at Tara, Aed Findliath, managed to persuade his fellow kings to cease their interminable squabbling and rally behind him. A great army of Irish warriors was gathered, and they drove the Vikings out of the countryside, inflicting terrible casualties until the Norsemen reached safety within the walls of Dublin.

  And then what transpired in this wildly convoluted saga of Irish and Viking? The victorious King Aed did not lay siege to Dublin in an effort to crush the Norwegians once and for all. Instead, he entered into negotiations with Olaf the White, at the end of which the king magnanimously offered Olaf the hand of no less an Irish maiden than his own daughter. How and why this stunning romantic alliance was brought about is not recorded. It may be that the king was shrewd enough to understand how fragile his coalition of Irish clans was and wished not to fight the Vikings again. Or perhaps he simply recognized the Vikings in their growing city centers as more or less permanent additions to the Irish scene, and he desired to benefit his people with Viking culture and trade.

  Wha
tever he had in mind, the alliance had welcome effects on both counts. The raids on the Irish hinterland did diminish in the second half of the ninth century. But even more momentous, Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, Wicklow, and the rest were to bring the Irish their first exposure to urban life, with its amenities of flagstone streets, timbered walks, and fresh water brought in conduits of hollowed tree trunks. In the Viking cities, the Irish first became acquainted with the standardized weights and measures that were the basis of sophisticated trade. There they got their first taste of commerce based on coinage and gained their first experience with goods brought in Viking ships from every corner of the known world. It is a measure of the Viking separateness from - and simultaneously their contribution to - Irish life that, although the Scandinavian language was not to permeate Gaelic speech as it did English, some significant words entered the Irish vocabulary through the Vikings, among them margad for “market” and pingin for “penny.”

  For a hundred years after the marriage of Olaf the White to a princess of Tara, Irish and Viking life continued its dizzying progression of will-o’-the-wisp alliances and hotheaded animosities. Not until the middle of the tenth century was any sustained attempt made to put the struggles to rest and forge a stable union that could be called a state. And when that did occur, it originated in an unexpected quarter - not with the Vikings but with the Irish and in the person of the son of a little-known king of Munster. The son was Brian Born, who made a life’s career of trying to tame Vikings and Irish alike - and he nearly succeeded.

  Brian was born about 941 in the Munster countryside, the youngest of twelve brothers who grew up smarting under the sting of raids from the Vikings of Limerick, the major city in the area. And Brian devised deadly counterattacks, springing with his followers from caves and copses to ambush the Vikings on their way to and from the city. In time, the Vikings were driven from Limerick, and the provinces of Munster and neighboring Leinster were united under Brian. By 999, after some twenty-five battles fought over almost four decades, Brian had won sway over all the native Irish kings and had even captured Dublin, making a vassal of Sigtrygg Silkbeard, a one-eyed, half-Norwegian, half-Irish chieftain then ruling Dublin. Soon thereafter, Brian was styled Emperor of the Irish.

  In that role, he brought a blessed end to the fighting. Ruling over a peaceable confederacy of kingdoms, he restored Ireland’s devastated churches and founded schools. He built causeways from the sea islands, bridges over the rivers, and highways over the land.

  But the peace was too frail to last. After barely a decade, one of the Irish kings, Maelmordha of Leinster, reverted to type and plotted to overthrow Brian. In 1012, Maelmordha formed an alliance with Silkbeard, who had never truly accepted Brian’s suzerainty. The dampened hostilities flared up, and soon the country was in chaos. The climax came at the Battle of Clontarf - the epic battle of Ireland’s war-torn history.

  Ireland’s social fabric was by now such a patchwork quilt that practically everyone had relatives on the adversaries’ side. Sigtrygg had Irish blood from his mother, a princess named Gormflaith, who had been married many times, once to Brian Boru, which made Brian one of Sigtrygg’s stepfathers. Sigtrygg, in turn, had married one of Brian’s daughters by another Irish wife, which made him a son-in-law of Brian’s. To top it off, the rebellious Maelmordha of Leinster was Gormflaith’s brother, which made him Brian’s brother-in-law and Sigtrygg’s uncle.

  The political and geographical threads were as tangled as those of the family relationships. An Irish chronicle claimed that opposing Brian was an army “of all the foreigners of the Western world.” And, indeed, Sigtrygg had sent emissaries to Vikings everywhere, seeking allies and promising rewards of money, land, and adventure. He offered to two separate Viking Chieftains marriage to his mother (Brian’s ex-wife) and for a dowry the city of Dublin. Among those who answered the call were Brodir, ruler of the Isle of Man, a menacing fellow who tucked his long black hair into his belt, and Sigurd the Stout from the Orkneys. Each came with shiploads of warriors, bringing the forces of Sigtrygg and Maelmordha to 20,000. But rallying to Brian’s cause were 20,000 warriors representing all the clans of Ireland except those in the rebellious Leinster and a clan or two that remained neutral - plus one foreign Viking, a brother of Brodir’s named Ospak, who hated his sibling.

  The two immense armies came together on Good Friday in April 1014. All day long they fought on a triangular plain at the confluence of the Tolka and the Liffey Rivers, just outside Dublin. When the day was over, 7,000 Leinster rebels and Viking allies were dead, and, although the Irish loyalists of Brian Boru lost some 4,000 men themselves, they claimed victory. But the seventy-three-year-old Brian was not on hand to celebrate. In the late afternoon, he had been struck in the head with an axe by Brodir, who, according to one account, caught the old man as he knelt at prayer in his tent in a nearby wood. Brian’s Irish followers took revenge worthy of Vikings by cutting open Brodir’s belly, tacking his entrails to a tree, and forcing him to march around the trunk until he died.

  The Irish ever after celebrated the Battle of Clontarf as the supreme moment of national unity and liberation, the definitive triumph of the famed hero Brian Boru over the Leinster separatists and the Vikings. It is true that, after Clontarf, never again did a major Viking invasion fleet appear off the coast of Ireland. The Vikings apparently accepted the futility of trying to conquer the intractable Irish. But Viking influence was anything but dead in Ireland. The Vikings remained and learned to live in peace with the Irish. A number of them even continued to rule their city kingdoms and, as sagacious traders, brought profit to both themselves and the Irish. The Norwegian half-breed Sigtrygg Silkbeard, for one, survived the disaster of Clontarf and remained on his throne in Dublin all the remaining twenty years of his life.

  His heirs, like those of other Viking chieftains, married Irish princesses until, over the years, they were assimilated into their adopted land and became as Irish as their mothers. As for their cities, Dublin, Waterford, Wexford, and the rest grew and prospered as a legacy of the Viking sojourn in Ireland. Rimming the southerly corner of the island, these cities gave the isolated Irish what they had never had before - a window onto England and the Continent and the world of trade beyond.

  The Vikings were fond of portraying themselves as the ultimate warriors. And quite possibly they were. But there was much more to them than this one-dimensional image. They were, in fact, as much merchants as marauders. Their battle swords went hand in hand with the tiny and delicate scales they used to measure the silver that represented commercial gain. And it was in their mercantile endeavors that they made some of their strongest contributions to civilization.

  The Scandinavians were traders long before they became Vikings. The initial source upon which Scandinavian commerce was founded was a marvelous substance that had come as a godsend to the eastern shore of Jutland and the southern Baltic coast. This was amber - the clear, fossilized resin of pine trees that had died millions of years before on land that was, in this case, covered by the waters of the Baltic. The sea washed it ashore in chunks, and it eventually accumulated in such quantities that several thousand pounds of amber could be extracted from an area encompassing only a few acres. Amber was the diamond of its day, fetching premium prices from European ladies, who loved the golden play of light on the strings of amber beads that they wore on their bosoms. It was rendered even more valuable by the fact that when rubbed it took on a highly magnetic charge, a property that seemed magical. In fact, the English word electricity is derived from the Greek elektron, which means amber.

  The Vikings traded in amber almost from the start of their history. As early as the second millennium B.C., they were carrying it in crude crafts down the coast of the North Sea and into central and southeastern Europe by way of the Elbe and other rivers. As the Bronze Age faded into the Iron Age, the variety and range of commerce expanded in relation to advances in Norse shipbuilding. The Viking longship and its commercial cousins, the various
ly sized knarrs, all of them highly maneuverable, enabled the Vikings to probe trade routes never before open to merchant traffic.

  Indeed, it required no conflict of identity for the Vikings to lay down their swords and pick up their scales. To realize a profit from their plunder, the Norse raiders sold it in the marketplace. It was said of one of the characters in a saga - a merchant named Thorolf Kveldulfsson - that he divided his time between Viking raids and trading voyages and that the two were often indistinguishable: A Viking merchant bound for the marketplace did not hesitate to turn pirate if he spotted a weaker, commercial-shipping vessel along the way.

  This raid-and-trade duality was manifest in many ways and on many occasions. When Viking freebooters established a settlement on the island of Noirmoutier near the estuary of the River Loire in 842, they had more in mind than a base for raids in France. Noirmoutier was situated in an area of lush vineyards and marshes whose waters, when drained and channeled into separate, shallow basins, could be allowed to evaporate leaving layers of salt. Since Roman times, Noirmoutier had been a center for trade in wines and salt - and the Vikings simply took over the franchise.

  Three years later, Danes directed by a king named Horik staged one of the most spectacular of all Viking invasions. Horik was an exceedingly ruthless leader - as evidenced by the fact that he survived as the ruler of a notably unruly people for twenty-seven years. He was also of eminently pragmatic mind, and he realized that both power and wealth could be better attained by massed forces than by the individual, glory-seeking forays that the Vikings so loved.

  In 845, Horik assembled a fleet of some 600 vessels - which, even allowing for generous exaggeration, must surely have been a fearsome armada. The target was Hamburg, key to the Elbe, and Horik’s Danes burst through its massive quadrangle wall in a frenzy of destruction. When they were done, according to accounts of the time, no single stone in the town remained standing upon another. Yet, they left untouched the most vulnerable target of all: the wooden houses and shops of the merchants’ quarters along the river outside the wall. The omission must have been deliberate - probably Horik’s direct order. Whether any Viking actually made use of the market area is unknown; if they did, it was only briefly. For Horik’s main force soon ventured up the Elbe into the interior, where it was soundly defeated and driven from the land by an army of Saxons.