The Vikings
Page 14
“The expedition I made out of the country was a princely expedition,” said Sigurd taunting to his brother Eystein, “while you, in the meantime, sat at home like your father’s daughter. I was in many a battle in the Saracens’ land and gained the victory in all, and you must have heard of the many valuable articles I acquired, the like of which were never seen before in this country. I went to Palestine, but I did not see you there, Brother. I went all the way to Jordan, where our Lord was baptized and swam across the river. But I did not see you there either.”
Eystein answered with a negation of the whole Viking heritage. “I have heard that you had several battles abroad,” he said, “but what I was doing in the meantime here at home was more useful for the country. In the north at Vaage, I built fish houses so that all the poor people could get a living and support themselves. The road from Drontheim goes over the Dovrefjelds, and many people had to sleep outdoors, and made a very severe journey, but I built hospices, and all travelers know that Eystein has been king in Norway. Out in Agdaness was a barren waste, and no harbor, and many a ship was lost there, and now there is a good harbor and ship station, and a church also built there. I raised beacons. I built a royal hall and the church of the apostles. I settled the laws, Brother, so that every man can obtain justice from his fellow man, and according as these are observed, the country will be better governed. Now although all this that I reckoned up be but small doings, yet I am not sure if the people of the country have been better served by it than by your killing for the devil in the land of the Saracens and send them to hell.”
The future was to lie with Eystein, while Sigurd’s crusade was but the last spark of a fading fire. Even if the will had been there, the physical wherewithal for the Viking life was disappearing. What had made the Viking adventure possible in the first place was control of the seas; now other seafarers with bigger ships were supplanting the Norsemen.
Europe - partly owing to the whiplash of Viking activity - had roused from the torpor of the Dark Ages and was in a state of vigorous economic expansion, with commerce flowing along its waterways under the protection of strong and relatively stable states. There was far less need for the light Viking craft that could dart in and out of beaches with a load of luxury goods. These goods, along with bulkier products - grain, coal, cloth - could be carried more efficiently in the commodious cogs of the north German merchants grouped in the league known as the Hansa. The cogs were single-masted, square-rigged vessels, squat, unlovely, and slow, but they could carry hundreds of tons of cargo, which made up for all their shortcomings.
The Hanseatic merchants who built and operated great fleets of such cogs were tough and ruthless competitors, far better organized than the individualistic Vikings. The league was first formed in 1158 and became in 1240 an association of north German cities - Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, Rostock, Kiel, and Danzig - that banded together for mutual protection and promotion of trade. By the thirteenth century, a dozen or so Baltic ports were in the league, and even cities in the German Rhineland, notably Cologne, joined to give the Hansa an effective monopoly on north European trade.
When the Scandinavian kings needed cash to pay for their elaborate courts and castles, they were forced to borrow it in exchange for trading privileges that eventually became monopolies in Scandinavia also. By the end of the thirteenth century, the Hansa had a strangle hold on all the commerce of the North.
A Norwegian nobleman, dreaming that the world had not changed since the days of his Viking ancestors, made some raids on German shipping. Reprisal came quickly and devastatingly, in the form of a blockade of all Norwegian ports. The king of Norway was compelled to capitulate, pay a huge fine, and make vast new concessions to the Hansa, culminating in the league’s ownership of his biggest port at Bergen.
The passing of the Viking days and ways was galling enough to the Norwegians, the Danes, and the Swedes. For the Icelanders, it was a calamity.
As long as the Norse ships passed regularly over the northern ocean, transporting goods and fighting men and tales of valor, Iceland could be an organic part of the vigorous Viking life. Without trees, the Icelanders could not build their own ships; with a declining commerce, they could not buy new ones abroad. As the years went by and the climate grew colder, and the ice floes pressed farther south, the Icelanders found themselves relegated more and more to a peripheral position, neglected and half-forgotten in a distant and desolate outpost. The population declined dramatically, and it seemed entirely possible that Iceland would disappear from the map of the inhabited world. Somehow the Icelanders held on, though they lost their cherished independence.
It was during this thirteenth century period of darkness that Snorri Sturluson, one of Iceland’s greatest poets, wrote the saga of his great ancestor, Egil Skallagrimsson. As he wrote, he knew that his own days were numbered; Snorri was a colossal brawler as well as a writer, and he had made many enemies who yearned for his life. He ended his epic poem with a cry of defiance against Hel, the goddess of death, which stands as an epitaph to the whole doomed age of the Vikings:
The end is all;/Even now
High on the headland/And face my own end
Life fades, I must fall/And face my own end
Not in misery and mourning/But with a man’s heart
The largest Viking ship was more than 160 feet long and carried hundreds of men into battle.
Viking dwellings - like this one in Denmark - housed as many as a dozen people.
This Viking wood carving features two fire-breathing dragons.
Viking warriors wore helmets and carried shields, swords, and axes into battle.
This statue of a Viking warrior stands in Manitoba, Canada.
Horned helmets like this one were worn by Vikings at ceremonial events but not into battle.
This Viking church in Norway – the best preserved in the world - dates to the twelfth century.
Vikings placed stones with runic inscriptions near the graves of their dead.
This mythical beast was carved by Vikings in Denmark in the middle ages.
Three large swords honor the 872 battle in which King Harald Fairhair united Norway.
This wood carving of a Viking warrior stands in Denmark.
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Published by New Word City Inc., 2013
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© Robert Wernick
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ISBN 978-1-61230-732-9