With his hair cropped close to his head and typically clad in wool that was not dyed, the thrall, as he was known, was an object of such common contempt that it was a legal offense in some regions of Norway to libel a free man by calling him a slave. Even in the exercise of minimal legal rights, the slave was degraded: Thus, a Norwegian law stipulated that if a thrall found another man in bed with his wife, his only recourse was “to go to the brook and take a bucket full of water and throw it over them.” In the poem Rigspula, the sons of a slave family were given such names as Coarse, Cleg, Foul, Lump, Thickard, and Laggard; among the daughters were She-lump, Clump, Crane-shank, Tatter-coat, Beaked-nose, and Thicklegs. As for the father: “rough were his hands/with wrinkled skin,’ with knuckles knotty and fingers thick;/his face was ugly,/his back was humpy,/his heels were long.”
The Norse sagas are filled with references to slavery, as are the chronicles of churchmen. Throughout the ninth century, Irish prisoners were transported “over the broad green sea” to the centers of Viking slave trade such as Hedeby and Magdeburg to the south. In 837, recounted a poet, Walcheren at the mouth of the Scheldt was sacked, and “many women were led away captive.” When raiders from Denmark struck France some years later, a scribe wrote: “They seize the country people, bind them, and send them across the sea.” In 870, the Frankish Archbishop Rimbert was at Hedeby, where he was so moved by the sight of Christian slaves that he sold his church vessels to buy their freedom. Once he saw a miserable group filing by in chains under armed guard. Some of the wretches cried out that they were Christians, and one woman sang psalms to show that she was a nun. For her freedom, Rimbert traded his horse and saddle.
The loathsome institution was no respecter of rank. Even Norway’s Olaf Tryggvason, great-grandson of Harald Fairhair and himself one of the most feared of Viking kings around the turn of the millennium, spent his boyhood in slavery. After his father, King Tryggvi Olafsson, was overthrown and killed, Olaf’s mother Astrid attempted to flee with her baby boy to the realm of the Rus, where her brother Sigurd held high power. Halfway across the Baltic, they were beset and taken by pirates, who imprisoned the fair Astrid and sold the three-year-old Olaf into slavery “for a stout and good ram.” Six years later his uncle Sigurd, on business in Estonia, saw a handsome lad in a marketplace, asked who he was - and ransomed Olaf.
A sequel to the story of Olaf’s liberation from slavery demonstrates the equivocal relationship that existed between a master and even the most trusted of his thralls. In 995, after a career that had brought him fame and fortune as a Viking raider, Olaf returned to his homeland to lay claim to the throne that had been wrested from his father. The usurper, Earl Hakon Sigurdarsson, was swiftly forced into flight, accompanied by his slave Kark.
They had been born on the same day, these two, and had gone through life together, Kark sleeping at the foot of his master’s bed in peacetime and carrying his arms into war. Now, as they found final refuge in a pigsty, they heard Olaf loudly proclaiming that he would richly reward the man who found and killed the earl. At that, Kark’s face flushed with greed, then blanched in fear of the consequences of the act he had in mind. “Why are you so pale?” Hakon demanded. “And now again as black as earth? You don’t intend to betray me?”
Alas, when Kark presented Hakon’s head to Olaf and claimed the reward, he found the great Viking to be most ungrateful. Although - or perhaps because - he had been a slave himself, Olaf knew that the structure of Viking society could not withstand the forgiving of a slave who lifted his hand against his master. He immediately ordered that Kark’s head be chopped off.
The Vikings would take slaves wherever they found them. But their primary source of supply was in the East, where numberless tribes of Slavs - the name from which the word slave was derived - were still living in the Stone Age and were easy prey for the raiding parties that swooped down on them in forest or steppe and led them away in long fettered lines.
The role of the slave in the courts of Viking rulers in the far reaches of their Russian domains was not unlike that of slaves in the Caliphate of Baghdad or in the sheikdoms of Arabia. In 922, a Moslem trader by the name of Ibn Fadlan, who was probably on a slave-buying expedition himself at the time, described one such court of the Volga Rus, as the Russian Vikings were known: “It is customary for the king of the Rus to have a bodyguard in his castle of 400 reliable men willing to die for him. Each of these has a slave girl to wait on him, wash him, and serve him, and another to sleep with. These 400 sit below the royal throne, a large and bejeweled platform that also accommodates the forty slave girls of his harem. The king frequently has public intercourse with one of these.”
As was the custom of the day, these chattels accompanied their master in death in an elaborate ceremony. As Ibn Fadlan recounted the ritual: “When a chieftain among them has died, his family demands of his slave women and servants: ‘Which of you wishes to die with him?’ Then one of them says, ‘I do’; and having said that the person concerned is forced to do so, and no back out is possible.”
In one case, the Arab traveler relates, the doomed slave girl’s attendants kept her generously primed with nabid - probably a strong Scandinavian beer - and before long she was moving in a drugged trance from tent to tent throughout the encampment. “And the owner of each tent had sexual intercourse with her, saying, ‘Tell your master I did this out of love for him.’”
After ten days of this, the deceased Viking was finally placed on a pyre beneath a tent aboard a small ship that had been specially constructed for the ceremony. Then arrived a crone, called the Angel of Death, who was to preside over the proceedings. The slave girl was given a beaker of nabid, then another. “But the old woman told her to hurry,” recounted the Arab trader, “and drink up and enter the tent, where her master was. When I looked at her, she seemed completely bewildered. She wanted to enter the tent, and she put her head between it and the ship. There, the woman took her head and managed to get it inside the tent, and the woman herself followed.
“Then the men began to beat the shields and wooden sticks to deaden her shouts so that the other girls would not become afraid and shrink from dying with their masters. Six men entered the tent, and all of them had intercourse with her. Thereafter they laid her by the side of her dead master. Two held her hands and two her feet, and the woman called the Angel of Death put a cord round the girl’s neck, doubled with an end at each side, and gave it to two men to pull. Then she advanced holding a small dagger with a broad blade and began to plunge it between the girl’s ribs to and fro while the two men choked her.”
Thus, the slave girl followed her master into death.
Wherever they traveled, with whatever good and chattels, the Vikings, at least in the early years, were rude and crude customers, utterly insensitive to the niceties of mercantile conduct, ever ready to enforce a price or bring about a bargain at the point of a sword. As time went on, Viking conduct in the marketplace became more sophisticated. By the thirteenth century, the unknown author of a Norwegian work called the King’s Mirror could even offer an informal code for prudent and ethical merchant’s behavior.
“When you are in a market town,” advised the King’s Mirror, “or wherever you are, be polite and agreeable; then you will secure the friendship of all good men. If you are unacquainted with the traffic of the town, observe carefully how those who are reputed to be the best and most prominent merchants conduct their business. You must also be careful to examine the wares that you buy before the purchase is finally made to make sure that they are sound and flawless. And whenever you make a purchase, call in a few trusty men to serve as witnesses as to how the bargain was made.
“You should keep occupied with your business till breakfast or, if necessity demands it, till midday. After the meal, you may either take a nap or stroll around a little while to pass the time and to see what other good merchants are employed with or whether any new wares that you ought to buy have come to the borough. On returning to your lodg
ings, examine your wares, lest they suffer damage after coming into your hands. If they are found to be injured and you are about to dispose of them, do not conceal the flaws from the purchaser; show him what the defects are and make such a bargain; then you cannot be called a cheat.”
In journeys abroad, said the King’s Mirror, the “man who is to be a trader will have to brave many perils.” Why should he wish to take such risks? To the author, the answer lay “in man’s threefold nature. One motive is fame and rivalry, for it is in the nature of man to seek a place where great dangers may be met and thus to win fame. A second motive is curiosity, for it is also in man’s nature to wish to see and experience the things that he has heard about and thus to learn whether the facts are as told or not. The third is desire for gain; for men seek wealth wherever they have heard that gain is to be gotten, though, on the other hand, there may be great dangers, too.”
In so saying, the writer with a merchant’s mind and a Vikings heart was referring specifically to the great Norse movement across the North Atlantic to Iceland, Greenland, and beyond.
His name was Naddod and, for exploits unrecorded but doubtless rude, he was known as a vikingr mikill - a “Viking of note.” By about 860 A.D., however, his violent presence was no longer welcome in his native Norway, and, in the words of a chronicler, Naddod with a few companions “went off to make a home for himself in the Faroes for the good reason that he had nowhere else where he would be safe.”
Thanks partly to Naddod, the barren, wind-swept Faroe Islands northwest of the Shetlands would one day become vitally important as a navigational turnoff point for Viking voyages of exploration and settlement in faraway lands. But now the tiny chain served only as a lair for others of Naddod’s ilk, Norse marauders who occupied their energies raiding Ireland and Scotland to the southeast.
On the way to this place of refuge, Naddod was caught in a terrible storm and, although his square-cut sail ordinarily could hold the ship’s curved prow on a desired heading, it was no match for a North Atlantic gale. Naddod was blown far off course - as it turned out, some 240 miles northwest of the Faroes. His landfall came on a forbidding coast, riven by swollen rivers and dominated by ice-encrusted mountains. Naddod and his men climbed to a summit and gazed out at the contorted wasteland for some indication of human habitation. But “they saw never a sign,” reports the chronicler. As they sailed away, shaping a course to the Faroes, heavy snow began to fall, leading Naddod to call the place Snowland.
And that is all the chronicler has to say about Naddod, the exiled Viking - presumably because he did nothing further of note.
At about the same time and by similar accident, another Norse rover reached that same hostile shore. He was a Swede named Gardar Svavarsson, who was sailing for the Hebrides when a storm struck him in the Pentland Firth, the narrow sea passage between the Orkneys and the mainland of Scotland. The storm carried him far westward to a hook-shaped promontory - now known as the East Horn - about fifty miles south of Naddod’s landfall.
But unlike Naddod, Gardar and his crew did not, after making a brief inspection, turn back. Whether seeking safe shelter or driven by the compulsions of a true explorer, Gardar steered southwest, hugging a ragged coastline and passing a wall of ice looming 5,000 feet high and stretching more than fifty miles from east to west at the terminus of a great glacier. He groped along the southern shore, virtually treeless, harborless, and desolate. He came within sight of twin volcanoes, monsters that breathed smoke and flame, causing the earth to tremble and the sea to roil, siring vast lava fields where thousands of snow-white sea birds nested amid the hardened black and twisted rock formations. Bearing northwest with the curve of the coast, Gardar threaded between the mainland and a group of islands whose dark, brooding cliffs would within a few years take a morbid place in the region’s lore.
Rounding a peninsula that extended due west thirty miles from the mainland, Gardar passed the largest and best harbor in all the land. He may not even have seen it, for it was later to be named Reykjavik - meaning “Smoky Bay” - and it was often misted over by the vapors from a witch’s brew of surrounding geysers, steaming springs, and boiling mud holes.
Gardar pointed his prow to the northwest and sailed across a bay sixty miles wide, its waters gleaming in reflection of the surrounding snow-crowned mountains. The little Viking vessel crossed and perhaps prowled into the mouth of the vast fjord, where the profusion of rock islets and swirling currents reminded Gardar of home. The ship then clawed around the contorted fingers of a northwest peninsula and sailed back east along a relatively benign shoreline, broken by fjords that offered haven and by valleys green with grass.
Gardar passed them all by. Summer was ending and the hour was fast approaching when he must beach his ship for winter. Yet evidently within him was an urge to press on, to see what lay around the next bend, to explore beyond the next promontory. At last, arctic blasts told him he must stop. One of the least hospitable places along the northern coast, it was to be known as Skjalfandi, or the “Trembler,” for its proximity to a volcanic area. There, on a cliff above a bay that lay open to the arctic ice floes, Gardar built a hut for himself and his weary crew.
Winter can only have been wretched for these Viking explorers. The chronicles, perhaps mercifully, do not go into it. In any case, at the first sign of a fair spring breeze, Gardar put back to sea, departing so hastily that he failed to search for and find a crew member named Nattfari, along with a slave and a bondwoman who had become separated from the main party. (Somehow Nattfari survived, for his name is mentioned in the chronicles as an early settler; what befell the other two is unknown.) Gardar now sailed northeast around the Melrakkasletta headlands, then generally south and east back to his starting point at the East Horn. He had followed a coastline that, with its countless deep indentations, measured no fewer than 3,700 miles. Gardar apparently liked some of what he had seen - at least to the point of naming the vast, strange island he had explored after himself: Gardarsholm.
In such Scandinavian trading towns as Birka, Hedeby, and Skiringssal, in the expatriate Viking communities of Ireland and Scotland, at raiding bases in the Faroes, Orkneys, and Shetlands, wherever Norsemen gathered to boast of high adventure, word of the discoveries of Naddod and Gardar spread. Before long, possibly within a year or two, another seafarer set forth. Like Naddod, Flóki Vilgerdarson was a Norwegian vikingr mikill. Unlike either Naddod or Gardar, Flóki purposely set his red-and-white striped sail for the new-found western island - evidently intending to settle there, for he had loaded cattle and family members aboard his ship.
Flóki’s route set a pattern for future voyages: Sailing from southwest Norway, he first landed at the Shetlands (where, under circumstances now unknown, a daughter drowned), then steered west and slightly north for nearly 200 miles to the Faroes (where another daughter was married). These stops behind him, Flóki headed for the island of ice and fire, nearly 240 miles to the northwest. Perhaps because Naddod and Gardar had been understandably fuzzy about directions, Flóki had on board some navigational aids once embarked by the Biblical Noah - three birds. In this case, they were large ravens, and when released from their cages, they could be seen in silhouette against the pale sky and followed for miles as they flew presumably toward the nearest land.
Before departing, Flóki had taken the precaution of making a great sacrifice - the accounts do not relate whether man or beast - to the gods so they would smile on his winged guides. Now, out of sight of the Faroes, Flóki released his first raven, which soared into the sky, took its sightings, and set a straight course for the Faroes. Undaunted, Flóki sailed on, released the second raven and watched bemusedly as it flapped about in a few circles, then landed on the ship. Onward forged Flóki, his faith still with his birds. And his trust was amply rewarded: The third raven flew west, leading Flóki - henceforth to be known as Raven Flóki - to the East Horn of the western island at almost the same spot where Gardar the Swede had begun his circumnavigation.
Alas, Raven Flóki was a better sailor than a settler. The fjord was alive with salmon and cod and seal, the grass grew lush along its shores, and, while his cattle grew fat, Raven Flóki fished and hunted to his heart’s content - all the while neglecting to put up hay for winter. As a result of his negligence, his livestock perished before spring. Raven Flóki bitterly blamed the land for his own imprudence. Then he packed up, and, late that second summer, he sailed for Norway. But dreadful southwesterly gales howled across the waters for much of the time, and Raven Flóki could not get around the most southerly headland. He and his men had to spend another awful winter shivering in a primitive camp. Not until the next summer did they pass the guardian headland and reach home.
Although they had all endured the same hardships, not all Flóki’s followers shared their leader’s negative feelings. One of them, a man named Thorolf, told of butter dripping from every blade of the island’s grass. For that obvious embroidery on the fabric of the truth, he won a derisive nickname - Thorolf Butter. Precisely what Thorolf meant remains a mystery. He may have been talking about the exceedingly heavy dew at night caused in subarctic lands by rapid cooling and high humidity. Or he may, in a flight of fancy, have been alluding to the lush grass from which cows would give rich milk for cheese and butter.
The Vikings Page 9
