The Vikings

by Robert Wernick

  On such occasions, Viking raiders were clearly instruments of calculated commercial policy - and, as such, they were a vital force, a light leading toward the end of the Dark Ages that had befallen the world with the collapse of the Roman Empire and with the eighth-century Muslim assault on the Mediterranean world. Communications were disrupted, commerce withered, and the kingdoms of Western Europe entered a long gloomy time of despondence. Europe, which had boasted powerful provinces with opulent courts and thriving cities, became, for the most part, a collection of backward, subsistence-level communities, each ruled by a petty feudal lord whose vision seldom extended further than his neighbor’s barn.

  To this stagnant society the Northmen in their swift ships brought mobility, quickening the sluggish pace of life and reopening the windows of trade. In the Old World, the Vikings were not discoverers in the true sense of the word - that would come with their voyages to the New World. Instead, the Viking achievement in Europe was to take a patchwork of separate and disparate waterways - many of them long unused or even forgotten - and organize them into a network within which people and goods might move from the Middle East to the British Isles.

  Knotting the strands of this commercial network and making a whole of the parts were the Norse trading towns, shrewdly situated so as to provide accessibility to merchants as well as tactical protection against marauders - yet also located, with a sweeping strategic sense, at vital commercial crossroads.

  In foreign lands, the Vikings often set up fortified strongholds and later converted them to market towns, as was the case with Cork, Dublin, Limerick, Waterford, and Wexford in Ireland. Sometimes established towns - York in England and Rouen in Normandy, for example - were turned by the Northmen to their own mercantile use. In Russia, the settlements of Kiev, Novgorod, and Rostov became Viking trading outposts. Within Scandinavia itself, where Viking preyed upon Viking, care was taken to locate the towns where they were safe from easy attack. Thus, Norway’s Kaupang lay on the shores of a bay where islands, shoals, and narrow channels made the approaches slow and hazardous for marauding strangers and effectively prevented surprise assault. Denmark’s Hedeby, the oldest and largest of the towns, was even more favorably situated at the southern base of the Jutland peninsula, separated from the open Baltic by twenty-five miles of the Schlei inlet and guarded by elaborate man-made defenses. But of them all, the town with the most secure natural position and the most exciting trade was Sweden’s Birka, located deep in the heart of the land, along waterways that gave access to both the treasures of the North and those of Russia and the East.

  The town of Birka was probably founded around the year 800 by Vikings from Sweden, who used it both as a marketplace for local commerce and as a collection point for the rich northern fur trade that was then springing up. But such was Birka’s location and such was the rise of Viking trade that, within a period of twenty-five years, the town became a leading center whose commercial arteries spread for hundreds of miles to all points of the compass.

  Birka was located on an expansive lake called Mälaren, which offered seven key entrances and exits. The Vikings were able to travel east to the Gulf of Finland and on the Volga River, or east and then north to rivers that would take them to the White Sea or south to the prosperous Gotland and Hedeby, and beyond to England and Frisia, or west by at least two river-and-lake routes into Middle Sweden, or north by the sea or by a series of lakes, rivers, and glacial moraines by boat, horse, and foot to abundant hunting grounds.

  One of the great values of Birka was that all these waterways leading out into the world were narrow and easily defended against invaders seeking to enter. No force of any size could come upon Birka without warning. Any vessel approaching by the eastern entrance from the Baltic, for example, would first have to thread its way through a bewildering thirty-mile maze of islands and rocky shoals east of where Stockholm lies today. The vessel would then traverse a cramped bottleneck strait, which finally opened onto a vast lake, itself some eighty miles long and averaging thirteen miles in its breadth. The ship would have to skim across the shallow waters, twisting and turning among the lake’s 1,200 islands, for another eighteen miles before arriving at the island of Björkö. There, at last, would be Birka.

  Guarding the approach to the town was an outcropping of rock a hundred feet high. It fell sheer into the lake on its western side, and it was protected on the north, the east, and the south by a rampart of earth and stone six feet high and twenty to forty feet across. The enclosure served as a refuge for the town’s inhabitants during the time of an attack, and atop the rock stood a fort from which watchmen could see approaching enemy ships for many miles in all directions.

  The town itself spread over thirty-two acres, was located a quarter mile to the north on a promontory, and its bustle began at the water’s edge, or even before, as men either waded or put out in small boats to load and unload merchant ships tied to oak pilings driven into a shallow bar off shore. Behind the bar, the water deepened into the main harbor, its jetties crowded with ships. There were two other harbors on the promontory, one suitable for use by cargo vessels and the other a shallow artificial basin, which probably served as a sort of floating, open-air mart for local merchandise brought by light boats.

  Crowding down to Birka’s beaches, small wattle-and-daub houses and larger buildings of timber caulked with clay and moss sheltered not only permanent residents but transients, who numbered perhaps 1,000 at the height of the trading season. Buyers and sellers alike, haggling in as many as a dozen tongues, jammed the timber boardwalks and jostled each other in the dirt streets. Swedes and Danes and Norwegians, bumpkins from the surrounding countryside and Viking warriors fresh from gory expeditions, hunters from the frozen north and ironmongers from the lake regions, Gotland Islanders and Aland Islanders, sleek Greeks and swarthy Arabs of the East and Spain, Dnieper Slavs and Rhineland Germans, Irish and English, Franks and Frisians - all were there, many of them deadly enemies in any other setting, but here united in the common trade.

  Chaotic though the scene may have seemed, there was a form of order imposed by local law. Under ordinary Swedish law, there was a sliding scale of penalties imposed for various crimes. A man convicted of killing someone from his own province might be forced to compensate the victim’s family with a large amount of blood money. But if a man killed someone from another province, the required payment in blood money was much less. As for foreigners, they could be murdered without penalty. Clearly, this inequality could not be permitted to continue; otherwise Birka would fail to attract merchants from foreign lands. The so-called Law of Birka was adopted to guarantee safe conduct and equal protection to all. Precisely how much blood money was demanded for murder is not known, but it was the same for strangers as for residents; assault and battery cost ten marks across the board, while theft was punishable by a fine of three marks. The law was enforced by the local Swedish ruler and his minions, in return for which he was awarded the right to purchase newly imported goods three days ahead of anyone else - in effect, giving him control over higher quality merchandise.

  Under the protective canopy of the Law of Birka, local traders and overseas merchants met on equal footing, and the fruit of Viking plunder mixed higgledy-piggledy with honest wares - no questions asked. There was little trade in heavy bulk cargoes, particularly over long distances. To be sure, Birka did export bulk cargoes, particularly over long distances, and it did export some of Sweden’s good iron ore. But Viking vessels were not actually built to carry such weight, and neither, at that time, were the tubby roundships, or cogs, used by the Franks, Frisians, and Saxons of Western Europe. Instead, the iron ore was generally refined on the spot after it was extracted from the mines, which were north of Birka. The smelted iron was then beaten into bars and transported by pack animal to the smithies of Birka, where it was fashioned into tools and weapons, which could either be sold locally or exported.

  A trade route gave Norway its name: The expansive North Way ran more
than 1,500 miles from the White Sea in the north to Kaupang, the country’s main merchant town, on Oslofjord in the south. The journey was slow - it required some six weeks, even aided by fair winds - but to a Viking navigator who knew the waters it was relatively free of islands. Always they kept the jagged coast of the Norwegian mainland in sight on the port side. The precipitous coastal cliffs were broken by scores of deep-water fjords, and these offered shelter from storm and places to hide from pirates - of whom there were plenty.

  The Norwegians, perhaps because of their native land had been less generously endowed with natural resources than the rest of Scandinavia, were especially rapacious both in their home waters and in distant lands. Wrote Adam of Bremen: “Forced by the poverty of their homeland they venture far into the world to bring back from their raids the goods that other countries so plentifully produce.”

  At Kaupang - the name is related to the English name Chipping, which means market town - the trader would put into a small bay that forms a natural harbor on the west side of the great Oslofjord. Much less elaborate in its installations than either the towns of Birka or Hedeby, Kaupang was evidently used only as a summer marketplace, where merchants would peddle their wares from turf-walled roofless booths, which were sometimes tented over with the woolen sailcloth from the Vikings’ ships.

  Yet for all its lack of show, Kaupang was a notable center for one of the most popular Scandinavian products: steatite, or soapstone, which could be fashioned into such utilitarian items as loom weights, lamps, bowls, and cooking ware. The Kaupang area was blessed with natural outcroppings of this soapstone, so soft and workable that the utensils could be shaped from the living rock in much the same way that wood is carved. But the greatest business of Kaupang was in receiving the wealth of the North, and there sending it east to Birka in Sweden, south to Hedeby in Demark and southwest to the trading towns of England and Ireland.

  From the late-ninth-century travels of a Viking named Ottar, the activities of the Norwegian trader may be extrapolated. Like so many of his countrymen, Ottar was a man of several parts: farmer (twenty head of cattle, twenty sheep, and twenty pigs), reindeer breeder (a herd of 600), hunter, mariner, and, of course, merchant. During his journeys from his holdings in Hȧlogaland, one of Norway’s northern-most provinces, Ottar somehow encountered the English King Alfred the Great of Wessex. The meeting probably occurred a little after 870, when Alfred had a need for ivory and seal hides. Cut into strips, these made excellent ship ropes. Though the Anglo-Saxon king had spent much of his life warring against Vikings who sought to seize his land, he nevertheless maintained friendly relations with those who wished only to conduct peaceable commerce. Alfred must have been powerfully impressed by Ottar’s tales of his life and adventures. He had a court scribe write down the stories, and he later published them as part of a history of the world.

  One of the main sources of Ottar’s income was tribute in the form of valuable trade goods that were exacted from Sami tribesmen who came to hunt in his Hȧlogaland territory: “Each pays according to his rank,” advised Alfred. “The highest rank must pay fifteen martens’ skins, and five of reindeer, and one bearskin, and ten measures in feathers, a kirtle of bearskin or otter skin, and two ships’ cables; each must be sixty ells long, the one to be made of whale’s hide, the other of seal’s.”

  The furs were, of course, a major item on any Viking lading list. The feathers were in all likelihood the down of the eider, a large black-and-white duck that flocked by the millions throughout the northern lands. The Norsemen, as well as the Sami, took the fullest advantage of the bird’s quaint nesting habits. The gatherers of down cunningly arranged four stones in such a way as to appear to the female eider as a nesting place. Once she had decided to move in, the duck would set about busily using her bill to pluck down from her own breast to serve as a soft lining for her new home. When her eggs were laid, she would cover them with another layer of down - at which point the human hunters would steal the eggs, which were eaten as a delicacy, and collect the down.

  But the eider was a dauntless duck. Back the female would come to pluck more down and lay more eggs, and back the hunters would come for another harvest. The unequal contest continued until, as the nesting season neared its end, the duck laid her last batch. The hunters would allow these to hatch, refraining from filching the down until the young had left the nest - thereby maintaining the priceless eider population. Soft, light, and elastic, the down fetched premium prices for pillows and quilts throughout Europe.

  As for the ship’s cables, which were made from the tough yet supple skin of whales and other sea mammals, they were without a doubt the strongest and most durable rigging in the world. Both the Vikings and the Sami people fashioned them by cutting a single spiral strip out of the animal’s hide from the shoulder to the tail - and it was reported that the resulting cables or ropes were so strong that they could not be pulled apart in a tug of war between sixty men.

  How successful Ottar and the other Viking hunters were as whalers is a matter of conjecture. Alfred’s account of Ottar’s activities describes whales that were “fifty ells long.” He said that in company with five other crews he killed sixty of these in two days.

  Since fifty ells would have been 187 feet and no known whale has ever approached this length, it may be assumed that Ottar was telling a Viking fish story. His monsters were probably right whales, which grow as long as sixty-five feet. The Vikings hunted them from small boats. They would hector the immense, air-breathing mammals into shallow coves. There, foundering and unable to maneuver, the whales were harpooned. Even if Ottar killed only one-tenth of the number that he claimed, his reward would still have been immense.

  The Vikings knew how to boil the oil from whale blubber, and a single right whale would yield 275 barrels of the precious fluid. The oil was used for illumination, all manner of lubrication, and for treating leather. There would also be 3,000 pounds of whalebone, the flexible bone-like structure in the whale’s mouth through which the animal strained its plankton food; this was immensely valuable as belt buckles, knife handles, and spades. Finally, the right whale would offer ton upon ton of rich, dark-red, beef-like meat.

  There was still another whale, actually a member of the porpoise family, which Ottar may not have mentioned to Alfred - with good reason, since part of the beast’s anatomy was used in a common Viking deception. This was the narwhal. The beast itself attained a length of only about sixteen feet, but it grew from its upper jaw a straight, spirally grooved tusk that extended as far as eight feet, with a nine-inch girth at the base. Despite this awesome growth - probably a secondary sexual characteristic similar to a rooster’s comb - the narwhal was a timid animal, not difficult to hunt down and kill. The Vikings would fob the grotesque tusk off upon gullible buyers as the horn of a unicorn, a fabled horse-like creature that held human imagination in thrall for centuries.

  There was another animal the Vikings pursued that boasted tusks of solid, gleaming ivory, much like those of an elephant. These were truly valuable. The animal was the walrus, which lived in great herds in the White Sea around the tip of Norway. A trip that far to the north was a dangerous journey even in the summer; aside from everything else, hunting the walrus was risky. The huge, benign-looking beasts were placid enough when they were left undisturbed, but when threatened they became fiercely aggressive. The Vikings, like the Eskimo hunters of the far north, attempted to drive the creatures into the shallow water, where their aquatic ability was diminished, or catch them on the ice, where their vast bulk rendered their escape difficult. But many a hunter received injury or was killed by the flailing flippers, the huge tail, and the sharp-pointed tusks eighteen-inches long.

  There was one other commodity the Vikings dealt in, and it brought them the greatest profit of all - more than amber or silver or pelts, whether whale or walrus. It was neither manufactured by people nor dug from the earth nor fished from the sea nor slain on land. That commodity was human beings. For, during the da
ys of their dominance, the Vikings were slavers to the world.

  The Vikings certainly did not invent the insidious institution of slavery - it had existed in prehistory - but they exploited it on a scale unknown to any north European people before them. The survivors of those vanquished in battle automatically became subject to servitude. Slavs in the East and the Irish and English in the West were especially valued for their strength. Nor were Scandinavians by any means safe from other Scandinavians. Women found to be unchaste, debtors, and men who would have otherwise been condemned to die by the axe for crimes real or imagined, were all candidates for slavery. To wind up on the losing side in one of the Vikings’ innumerable blood feuds was a sure way to the marketplace. Indeed, feud or no feud, all that was actually necessary was to be taken unawares.

  “As soon as one has caught his neighbor,” wrote the church chronicler Adam of Bremen about the Vikings, “he sells him ruthlessly as a slave to either friend or stranger.”

  Under Norse masters, the slave by law and by custom was treated as little more than a farm animal, fit mostly to spread dung in the fields, dig peat, herd goats, and tend pigs. Under a tenth-century Norwegian law, every landed family was required to send a certain number of men to fight for the king when called, and the law suggested how many slaves might be necessary to keep the farm running in their absence. A medium-sized farm, one of perhaps a dozen cows and two horses, advised the law, might require three slaves, while the estate of a lord would need thirty or more to operate efficiently. In England, if one man killed another man’s slave, he was required to pay the owner the equivalent value in cows: eight. Under such a system of values, it was inevitable that if a slave outlived his keep, his own master could put him down like any aged or injured horse or dog.