The Long Hunt (The Strongbow Saga)

by Roberts, Judson

  Thor: The pagan Scandinavian god of thunder and fertile harvests, of strength, honor and oaths, and the mightiest warrior among the Scandinavian gods.

  thrall: A slave in Viking-age Scandinavian society.

  Valhalla: The great feast hall of Odin, chief of the Vikings' gods.

  Vends: What the Viking era Scandinavians called the Wends, a collective name given to various pagan Slavic tribes that inhabited the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, in the areas of modern day Germany and Poland. Wendish towns were frequent targets of Viking raids in the Baltic, and the Wends in turn often raided up into the Danish islands.

  wergild: The amount that must be paid to make recompense for killing a man.

  White Christ: The Vikings' name for the Christian god, believed to have originally been a derogatory term implying cowardice because he allowed himself to be captured and killed without fighting back against his captors.

  yard: On a square-rigged ship, the boom to which the top edge of the sail is attached.

  Historical Notes

  This installment of Halfdan's adventures in The Strongbow Saga is bracketed at either end by actual historical events of the ninth century. During the year 845 A.D., the Danes launched a two-pronged attack against the Frankish kingdoms to their south. One prong was an assault up the Seine River by a fleet of 120 ships—the campaign which forms the historical background for Dragons from the Sea and The Road to Vengeance, books two and three of The Strongbow Saga . As The Long Hunt begins, Halfdan and his comrades, including Jarl Hastein, have just returned to Denmark from that campaign in Frankia.

  In the second prong of the Danes' 845 attack against the Franks, another Danish fleet, led by King Horik himself, sailed up the Elbe River and attacked the Frankish town of Hamburg. According to a report of the attack in the Frankish source History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen by Adam of Bremen, the Viking army burned the town, destroying it—a marked contrast to the Danes' treatment of Paris after capturing it. Although we cannot know why King Horik treated Hamburg so harshly, one possible reason may be that it was the location from which the Franks had previously launched two unsuccessful invasions of Jutland—the first led by the Frankish emperor Charles the Great, or Charlemagne, and the second by his son, Louis. It may well be that Horik intended the destruction of Hamburg to be an object lesson for the Franks, in retribution for their earlier attempts to invade and conquer the Danish mainland.

  Also in 845, or not long thereafter—the existing historical records do not specify the exact date—turmoil was occurring in the Kingdom of the Sveas, located in what today is eastern Sweden. Prior to this time, Svealand had been jointly ruled by two brothers, Bjorn and Anund. But around the year 845, according to the Frankish source The Life of Anskar by Bishop Rimbert, the brothers had a falling out, Anund was expelled from the kingdom, and fled to Denmark, leaving his brother Bjorn as the sole Svear king. In Denmark, Anund sought supporters to help him regain the throne by promising to lead them to Birka and allowing them to pillage it. He eventually was able to secure the support of enough Danes to return to Svealand with a fleet of twenty-one Danish ships, plus eleven of this own. In the end, though, Anund agreed to accept a ransom from Birka's citizens, and the town was spared. It is these events in which Halfdan and his comrades become tangentially involved at the end of The Long Hunt.

  In trying to provide readers of The Strongbow Saga with a historically accurate portrayal of the period and of the Vikings' culture, I draw upon a wide range of sources, including reported archaeological findings, contemporary accounts such as the various Frankish chronicles and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the old Viking sagas. The latter were not reduced to written form until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—after the end of the Viking period—and thus are considered by some historians to be of dubious historical value. I personally believe that such attitudes ignore the fact that the sagas were originally a form of oral literature, and as such would have been passed down from generation to generation by professional storytellers with considerable accuracy. While some of the sagas seem clearly to have been fanciful tales created solely for the purpose of entertainment, others are strongly based in actual historical facts and the lives of actual people. Two saga sources I drew heavily on while writing this book were Egil's Saga, which covers events occurring over a period from the mid-ninth century through the end of the tenth, and the Heimskringla, a compilation drawing on numerous Viking era sagas, tales, and poems to tell the history of the kings of Norway, which was written down in the thirteenth century by Snorre Sturlason, an Icelandic skald and writer.

  When Halfdan buries some of the wealth he won in Frankia before setting out on the voyage across the Austmarr, he is doing what apparently was a common method of protecting one's wealth during a time when banks did not exist. Numerous Viking era hoards have been found buried in Scandinavia, as well as in England, which was heavily settled by the Vikings. The practice is supported not only by archeological finds, but also by saga accounts. For instance, in Egil's Saga, toward the end of his life the title character buries the considerable wealth won over his lifetime in a wilderness location in Iceland, afterwards killing the slaves who helped him bury it. Egil's Saga—or more specifically, a description of a feast contained in that work—was also the source for the practice of providing female drinking-horn partners to honored guests at a feast, as Jarl Arinbjorn does in the story at the feast he holds for Hastein on the island of Mon.

  The funeral on Oeland, in which the bodies of the slain members of Hastein's company, including the chieftain Hrodgar, are cremated on a longship dragged up onto land and burned, is inspired by a famous account, written in the tenth century by an Arab traveler named Ibn Fadlan, of the funeral of a Viking chieftain which he witnessed in what is now Russia.

  When Sigrid is sold into slavery in Birka, a historical issue I faced was what price she might have brought to Toke. Although silver coins were widely used in Viking era Scandinavia, for the most part the coinage had no standardized, generally accepted value—their worth and value in commerce was determined by the weight of silver contained in them. Some common measurements of silver did exist. A mark equaled roughly one-half pound of silver. One mark contained eight aurar (singular eyrir), or ounces, or twenty-four ortogar (singular ortug), each weighing roughly one-third of an ounce. The weight of a silver penny could vary. In England, Norway, and Sweden, 240 pennies typically equaled a mark, but in Jutland, 288 pennies did—and then there was the problem that pennies were not always struck to precise weight, or sometimes were shaved by unscrupulous merchants, making them lighter in weight than they were supposed to be. Thus a scale and set of verified weights would have been indispensable to a Viking era merchant.

  The price Sigrid is ultimately sold for, four marks of silver, was suggested to me by a passage in the Laxdaela Saga, in which a chieftain named Hoskuld purchases a female slave from a slave trader known as Gilli the Russian, and pays three marks for her—a price described as three times the normal price for a female concubine. In that story, the slave proved to be the daughter of an Irish king, stolen some years earlier in a raid, although Hoskuld was not aware of that fact when he bought her. I reasoned that Sigrid might command an even higher price because of her noble birth, virginity, defiant courage, and the market in which she would ultimately be resold.

  The Island of Mon, Ragnar Logbrod, and His Sons

  The character of Jarl Arinbjorn, who rules over Mon for the King of the Danes, is my fictional creation, as is the fact that he and his men serve as the eyes of the Danish realm in the south, watching for attack. However, Mon's location—situated just south of Sjaelland, which was the largest of the Danish islands and the seat of the Danish kings, and on the western edge of the open Baltic Sea—coupled with the fact that its eastern coastline boasts tall cliffs looking out over the sea which are the highest land in all of Denmark, suggested to me, for the purposes of the story, that Mon's cliffs might well have served as a location from
which to watch for attackers approaching Denmark by sea, from the south or east. During the Viking era, Mon and other Danish islands were certainly more than once the targets of Wendish raiders coming from those directions.

  In the story, Hastein purchases provisions for his two ships while on Mon, including smoke-preserved herring. During the Middle Ages, the town of Stege, located on the nor in central Mon, was the center of a thriving herring fishery, and of significant trade in herring. I thought it reasonable that the inhabitants of Mon might have already been curing and trading herring on a smaller scale by the mid-ninth century when The Strongbow Saga is set.

  While researching Mon for this story, I encountered an intriguing assertion that the last independent king of Mon was Hemming, a son of Sigvard Snake-eye, a son of Ragnar Logbrod who is also sometimes called Sigurd Snake-in-the eye. Unfortunately the assertion contained no attribution as to its source, and also claimed that Hemming purportedly ruled Mon in the early 800s. For a variety of reasons, I find the statement somewhat suspect. First, for Hemming to have ruled in the early 800s, it would place Sigvald as having lived in the 700s, and second, because Mon is so much smaller than Sjaelland, the seat of the Danish kings, and is separated from the larger island by a channel less than a mile in width, I find it unlikely that Mon would have been an independent kingdom as late as the early ninth century. However, the passage did inspire me to make Sigurd a character in the story, having been fostered with Jarl Arinbjorn by his father, Ragnar Logbrod. Sending a son to be raised in the household of another chieftain was not uncommon among the higher classes of Viking era Scandinavian society. Doing so not only tended to cement alliances between families, but also would serve to protect a family line, in that at least one male member would not be among those killed if an enemy attacked and wiped out a chieftain's household.

  The above-mentioned reference to Sigvard and Hemming also highlights a problem when attempting to find historical evidence of the life and exploits of the legendary Viking leader Ragnar Lodbrod—also sometimes called Lothbrok or Lodbrok—and his progeny. Because there is little concrete historical evidence of any kind concerning Ragnar, and because he figures in some sagas and poems from the period which clearly are largely fictional creations, some historians doubt that Ragnar existed at all. However, Bjorn Ironsides, one of his sons, was without doubt an actual Viking leader during the mid-ninth century, about whom there are several mentions in both Frankish and Irish sources. Ivar the Boneless, sometimes also called Ingvar, is another son of Ragnar who is both a semi-legendary figure and a historical one who figures prominently in the history of the Vikings in Ireland and England during the latter decades of the ninth century. Accordingly it seems likely that the historical Ragnar would have been a Viking leader in the early to mid-ninth century, and thus could well have been the leader of the Viking fleet that captured Paris in 845, who was—according to the Frankish Annals of Xanten—named Ragnar.

  For the purposes of the story in The Strongbow Saga, I have drawn some details about Ragnar and his sons from the Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok. Although that work is without a doubt one of the old sagas which is more fiction than fact, nevertheless it does provide a source for some of the legends which grew up about Ragnar and were popular tales during the Viking era. According to Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok, Sigurd Snake-in-the eye was Ragnar's youngest son by his second wife, Kraka, who was also the mother of Bjorn and Ivar. The same saga was my source for Ragnar having two older sons, Agnar and Eric, by his first wife Thora, and for the tale of their deaths while trying to conquer the Svear kingdom, as Sigurd relates to Halfdan.

  Sea Voyages and Piracy

  The sea voyage east in pursuit of Toke posed a number of research challenges, not the least of which was determining what the Viking era Scandinavians would have called the Baltic Sea. Some sources indicate that it was sometimes called the Eastern Lake, but passages in both the Heimskringla and the Ynglinga Saga refer to it as the Austmarr, or Eastern Sea—the name I chose to use in the story. The Austmarr would not have been considered by Viking era Scandinavians to have included the waters around northern Jutland and the Danish islands; those were called the Jutland Sea in the north, and the Great Belt and Little Belt in the south, between the islands.

  I used several sources to estimate sailing times between destinations for the story. Ninth century written records from the court of King Alfred of Wessex in England—commonly known today as Alfred the Great—include accounts by two different merchants, Wulfstan and Ottar, who sailed and traded in the Baltic, that recite the lands and peoples passed on their voyages, as well as sailing times between various destinations. Another source I drew upon was the excellent website for the Viking Ship Museum at Roskilde in Denmark. The museum has constructed a number of replicas of vessels of different sizes and types from the Viking period, and has tested and sailed them extensively. Its website includes information about the vessels' rowing and sailing speeds, which I used when writing this story.

  In the story, for most of the voyage Hastein's two ships stop each night, and their crews make camp upon the shore. While the Vikings without question at times took lengthy sea voyages on which they sailed straight through, day and night, until they reached their destination, from accounts of voyages in numerous sagas, it appears that where possible—and particularly when sailing through Scandinavian waters—they often broke their journey at night. There are several reasons for them to have done so. Longships—the type of ship used for war and raiding—had shallow hulls and open decks with no shelter whatsoever. Although the sagas indicate that when at anchor, tent-like shelters were often rigged over the decks of longships, using awnings and possibly the sail, such shelters would not have been feasible while the ship was underway. And aboard the open, exposed deck of a longship while at sea there would have been no way to cook a meal for its relatively large crew. Thus for the crew to be able to sleep in any kind of comfort out of the weather, and for them to be able to have a hot meal, it would have been necessary to anchor or beach the ships for the night.

  While computing sailing times using the ship speeds determined by the Viking Ship Museum and comparing them to the sailing times reported by the ninth century merchants Wulfstan and Ottar, I realized that it seemed probable that on their voyages, the latter took few, if any, breaks for the night between destinations. A possible reason could have been a fear of pirates. Most merchants would have sailed a knarr, or similar vessel, rather than a longship, for knarrs had deeper, broader hulls in proportion to their length than longships, and would have been able to more securely transport large amounts of cargo. However, compared to a longship a knarr would have a relatively small crew, making it much more susceptible to attack and capture.

  Pirates were a common risk in the Baltic Sea. A vivid example is found in Rimbert's Life of Anskar, which relates how, in the year 839, the Christian monk and missionary Anskar undertook a journey from Hedeby to Birka. However, the merchants with whom he had taken passage were attacked by pirates, who took the ship and all the goods it contained—including forty books Anskar and his companions had been carrying to use in their mission. The crew and passengers were put ashore, and Anskar was forced to continue his journey to Birka over land. To lessen the possibility of such attacks, some merchants probably chose to pursue a more tiring and strenuous, but safer, course by sailing far out to sea, day and night, between destinations.

  The Viking-era Scandinavians, incidentally, would not have considered their raiding to be piracy, although the victims of their raids—the Franks, English, and Irish—often referred to the Vikings as pirates. In the Vikings' warrior culture—as in many warrior cultures throughout history—raiding another tribe, people, or land in order to steal their possessions was considered an honorable and legitimate means of acquiring wealth. However, the Scandinavians would have considered sea-going bandits who indiscriminately robbed any passing ship to have been pirates.

  The Island of Oland

  In the above-mentioned a
ccount by the ninth century merchant Wulfstan of his voyages across the Baltic Sea, among the lands he mentions passing is Eowland, the land of the Eowans. He is referring to the long island off the coast of Sweden known today as Oland, and which is called Oeland in the story. Although later in the Viking era, Oland was absorbed into the Kingdom of the Sveas, during the mid-ninth century it was still considered an independent land and its population a separate people from the nearby Sveas, as were a number of other islands in the Baltic, including Bornholm—known in the Viking era as Burgundaholmr, the island of the Burgundians, which today is part of Denmark—and Gotland, which is now a part of Sweden.

  While researching my way east across the Baltic, in order to be able to write about the company's sea voyage, I discovered that Oland has a fascinating, although enigmatic, history, which I chose to draw on for the purposes of this story. Approximately eighty-five miles long and ten miles wide, Oland contains the ruins of nineteen large stone forts, built between 300 and 600 A.D. The forts were all abandoned between 600 and 700 A.D. and fell into disrepair, but during the eleventh century some were rebuilt and were used during the rest of the Viking era and into the Middle Ages. A number of Viking-era buried treasure hoards have also been found on Oland, and there are several stone ship settings, marking the sites of Viking age burials.

  Archaeologists and historians do not know who built the forts, other than the obvious—persons who lived on Oland during the time of their construction. But the answers to questions such as what was the nature of the culture and community existing there at the time, was it a militarily powerful kingdom, and why the forts were ultimately all abandoned around the same time remain unknown.