by Neil Oliver
T H E
V I K I N G S
A H I S T O R Y
N E I L O L I V E R
PEGASUS BOOKS
NEW YORK LONDON
To Mindy Alexa-Rose Hutton and Sonny John Wallace at the start of the journey
CONTENTS
MAPS
INTRODUCTION
ONE: By Rock and Ice
TWO: Stone, Bronze and Iron
THREE: The Wider World
FOUR: Pagans from the North
FIVE: Swedish Vikings in the East
SIX: The Endless Stream of Vikings
SEVEN: The Great Heathen Army
EIGHT: A Rising Tide
NINE: Cnut the Great
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
IMAGE GALLERY
PRINCIPAL VIKING CHARACTERS
CHRONOLOGY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
Viking Scandinavia
INTRODUCTION
Some years ago I spent a day on the island of Canna, off the west coast of Scotland, in search of sea eagles. Once widespread throughout the British Isles, they were killed off by livestock farmers who saw them as no more than vermin, a threat to their flocks. The north and west of Scotland became their only redoubt, but the last of the native birds was gone — poisoned, trapped or shot — before the outbreak of the First World War.
In 1975 the Nature Conservancy Council embarked upon a reintroduction project. During the following 10 years 82 eaglets were raised in captivity on the Inner Hebridean island of Rum, and gradually released into the wild. Since the British population had been completely exterminated, the project had depended upon sea eagles sourced elsewhere. In fact, the birds that have gradually repopulated the north and west of Scotland came from Norway.
Although the reintroduction has been a success it still takes some effort — and not a little luck — to catch a glimpse of the birds themselves. I had been on the lookout all day and, while I had spotted a nesting site, it was abandoned. It seemed that was as close as I would get, until all at once a great black shape appeared in the sky, backlit by the setting sun. Unless and until you have the privilege of seeing a white-tailed sea eagle in the flesh, or rather feather, it is hard to do justice to the experience. The adult birds are three-and-a-half feet long from hooked yellow beak to stubby tail and have wingspans well in excess of eight feet. In flight they have the shape and bulk of flying barn doors. Imperious in the extreme, the shadow drifted past with scarcely a beat of those wings. Trapped by the surly bonds of Earth, I was beneath his contempt and he paid me no heed. As he sailed by, king of the sky, I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck. He was out of reach not just because he soared so high, but also because he was wild. Grounded below, I was a domesticated creature, cosseted and docile.
In the intervening years I quite forgot about my sea eagle, but he came to mind once more as I began to contemplate this project about Vikings. How appropriate it seemed that we had turned to Norway in hopes of reclaiming, restoring some part of our former wildness. A thousand and more years ago, it was another group of strangers from Norway who arrived to show what might be done by travellers who recognised no limits, no borders. The Vikings, too, had descended out of the blue, eagles of the north, and their presence changed us for ever.
So when I started writing this book, I had a grand plan. What had always been apparent to me about those ancient Scandinavian interlopers was the sheer force of their personality. No matter how hard I had striven for objectivity and a clinical, scientific approach to the age that bears their name, I never quite escaped the simple power, the thrill of the word … Viking. I hear it and all at once my imagination conjures up dragon-headed long ships, brightly painted round shields and bloodied battleaxes, long-haired and bearded wild men bent on rape and pillage, monasteries engulfed in flames. Then there are the names of the men themselves (and they are always men): Eirik the Red, Leif Eriksson, Harald Hardrada, Eirik Bloodaxe … it’s all there, fully formed, like a scene in a pop-up book for children. I cannot think of another people from history — Goths, Huns, Moors, Mongols, Normans, Tartars, Vandals — whose name alone evokes such a complete picture.
It seemed obvious that what was needed was a biography of the Vikings. Since the image is so potent and so clear, surely it would help to think about them not as a people, but as a person. In the manner of a biographer, I would start with the world from which they emerged, the events that shaped the society that, in turn, shaped them. As I said, it seemed a grand plan.
On the face of it there appears to be enough information available to allow for the composition of a lifelike portrait of the Vikings. There are three main sources: written records, plentiful coinage and archaeology. Most captivating to begin with are the words — of the sagas, the chronicles and annals, the poetry and the rune stones. There is certainly plenty of material to be going on with; but the problems for the scholar range from the completeness or otherwise of the manuscripts themselves, to the objectivity and accuracy of the account contained within. Common to all is the inescapable fact that with the exception of the rune stones — which, anyway, provide little more than names and boasts — not a word of it was written by the Vikings themselves. The sagas and poetry were at least composed either by Scandinavians or people of Scandinavian descent, but centuries after the events recounted. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the church annals, the accounts of Arabic travellers and all the rest came from people to whom the Vikings were incomprehensible strangers at best and Godless, pitiless murderers and destroyers at worst. All of it makes for reading that is stirring, unforgettable, beautiful, harrowing and horrifying by turns — but all of it is the work of authors with their own axes to grind.
The men and women we call Vikings came not from one country but from three, namely Denmark, Norway and Sweden. To add to the confusion, they emerged into the wider world at a time before those countries had labels. Part of all that resulted, from the so-called ‘Viking Age’, was the very creation of those states — or at least the laying down of their foundation stones. Perhaps it might even be best to set aside the word Viking in favour of ‘Northman’, from Nordmenn or Nordmanni, the names preferred by many of those that encountered the travellers and adventurers who descended from the top of the world as the eighth century gave way to the ninth.
Having considered the written sources — and learnt to be wary of them — a would-be student of the Vikings might turn hopefully to the evidence of the coins. There are plenty of them as well — indeed tens of thousands scattered across Europe from east to west and north to south. Many of them are the coins of peoples the Vikings encountered, and the results either of honest trade or plain robbery. Plentiful, too, are those they made and stamped themselves. Such finds might seem to offer a sense of order, some fixed points within the otherwise whirling maelstrom of uncertainty. They have upon them, after all, the mute faces of kings, along with both their names and the names of places where they were made. Surely their testimony must be honest, and without bias?
At first they were made to mimic the coins of other realms — England, France and the lands of the Middle East — but later they had their own identity. Once self-assured Viking kings emerged, they took to underlining their own power and position by making sure their likenesses were known to all. But while the coins themselves can often be accurately dated, those dates provide little in the way of certainty about the contexts in which they are found. Put simply, a coin only gives a date before which it could not have arrived in a grave, or in a building’s foundation, or in a hoard set down for safekeeping. To some extent, then, the faces upon the coins too float rootless through our narrative, offering no more than clues and rumours.
As an archaeologist, I would of course hop
e my own chosen discipline might bring the light of scientific truth to bear, and in many ways it has. But, just as is the case with the sagas and the coins, sensible caution must be applied at all times and in all places. Despite the necessary caveats, archaeologists have found — or at least attempted to make sense of — Viking towns like Birka in Sweden with their houses, workshops, streets, byres, middens and smithies; Viking graves with their boats, ships, weapons, jewellery, household items, textiles and bones both human and animal. We therefore have a sense of what the people looked like and what they wore; what they ate and drank; the houses they built, the fires they warmed themselves beside and the beds they slept in; the things they needed in the home, the workplace and on the battlefield; what seemed to matter to them in this world and in the next.
But for all of that, whatever information has been suggested by words, coins or other artefacts, we know where the Vikings came from but not necessarily when, far less why. We know they travelled to the ends of the Earth, as they understood them (in the case of the North Atlantic, they pushed beyond those limits until they found a whole new world). They sailed the High Arctic, through the Pillars of Hercules and right up to the walls of Constantinople. But what they made of those places remains a mystery.
They acquired silk from India and Persia. They carried silver dirhams from Baghdad and Samarkand all the way to their graves back home. But not one of them kept a journal along the way nor wrote down an account of it all while sitting by the faltering fireside of old age. A few straight lines cut into stone, stick or bone are all that remains of what any of the Viking people thought, or felt.
Having learnt that much, I realised a biography of the Vikings would be a challenge, to say the least. The men and women I wanted to understand and, faithfully, to portray, seemed determined to remain just out of clear sight.
How fitting that a people so often caricatured as villains — international criminals with rap sheets as long as their heavily muscled arms — had fled the scene undetected. And if only the chalk-outlines of the victims remained, then different lines of enquiry would have to be pursued.
I was determined that, while trying to close in on those fugitive Vikings, I would interview as many witnesses as possible — find out who else was at the scene of the crimes at the material time, as it were. And if the grownup version of the Vikings was hard to pin down, what clues might I find about their modus operandi if I investigated their childhood, even the lives and times of their parents and grandparents? Bear with me then as I seek to track them from the distant past and to identify their telltale fingerprints and DNA on all the surfaces they touched.
During January and February 2011 I spent three weeks sailing the Southern Ocean aboard a 50-foot yacht. I was part of a seven-man team following in the footsteps of the early-twentieth-century polar explorer William Speirs Bruce, and it was the only way to get from the Falkland Islands to South Orkney, where he had established his base.
For all their great voyages, no Viking ever reached 60 degrees south (at least as far as we know), but that journey of ours was as close as I expect to get to their vanished world. The experience of spending many days out of sight of land, in a small boat upon a trackless, mountainous ocean, confronted me with the reality of being beyond help. We had all the modern paraphernalia, of course — ship’s radio, satellite-enabled navigation, emergency beacons in the event of an accident — but if anything unforeseen had befallen us, we were many days from rescue. We sailed all day and all night, taking turns to look out for icebergs and their smaller offspring, in many ways more deadly to vessels such as ours — the dreaded ‘growlers’. When it came to spotting those hazards, modern technology was of no help whatsoever. Like mariners of the past we had to rely on our eyes.
We had only ourselves for company and for support. Our little vessel, though tough, well designed and well built, was vulnerable always to the restless power of the sea, and of the ice.
Skilled and experienced as he certainly was, even our skipper had never actually visited our destination before. It seems the little archipelago of South Orkney is so overlooked, so forgotten at the end of the world, that none but the most intrepid and determined have ever been there before. Ours was a voyage into the unknown, towards a land we had heard of but which none of us had seen, just like those long-ago Vikings who set out for Greenland and beyond.
Those of us without the skills required of navigators, felt lost for most of the time. But to be lost, for would-be historians and for travellers alike, is not always a bad thing. It forces us to look upwards and outwards, to read the landscape anew in search of direction. I’ve thought about that journey — a round trip of perhaps 1,600 nautical miles — many times. But when I embarked upon my latest voyage, in search of Vikings rather than forgotten Scottish pioneers, I was able to look back on my time aboard that yacht with fresh eyes.
How appropriate that the greatest travellers the world has yet seen should remain just beyond the horizon — out of reach to the last.
CHAPTER ONE
BY ROCK AND ICE
‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.’
Roy Batty, Blade Runner
I imagined myself a Viking. I daydreamed wonders I might have seen during a life lived a thousand and more years ago: sea unicorns fencing with corkscrew horns in the ice of the High Arctic … motes of incense in shafts of sunlight through windows in the dome of Hagia Sophia … snarling, wrinkled lips on the faces of marble lions on Delos … the aurora borealis pulsing across the dark, welcoming me home … and best of all, no explanations for any of it.
I might have been the first of my kind to see the sun setting in the west behind the American continent, watched icebergs calving from Greenland’s glaciers in a springtime long ago, or served in the private bodyguard of a Byzantine emperor. The possibilities kept coming but there was a sadness about it all — because the chance to live a life like his or gaze upon a world such as he knew was long gone.
We know the sea unicorns are only narwhals. The Church of the Holy Wisdom of God is just another museum in Istanbul. Only seven of Apollo’s lions remain on their terrace at the heart of the Cyclades, smoothed and blinded by time — the rest robbed away as trophies of war — and now we understand the magical curtains of light in northern skies are no more than particles and atoms colliding in the thermosphere. Tears in the rain.
For over 200 years between the end of the eighth century and the middle of the eleventh, some of the peoples of Scandinavia became the greatest adventurers the world had yet seen. Perhaps they were the greatest there will ever be. In elegant timber long ships powered by oars or by sails, they put to sea. Mastery of simple but effective navigational techniques would grant them a territory stretching from Iceland in the north to the Mediterranean Sea in the south, from Newfoundland in the west to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea in the east.
In Civilisation the historian Kenneth Clark acknowledged that while the Vikings were ‘brutal and rapacious’ they nonetheless played a crucial part in shaping the destiny of the western world. In so doing, he said, they won for themselves a place in the greater story of European civilisation: ‘It was the spirit of Columbus,’ he wrote. ‘The sheer technical skill of their journeys is a new achievement of the western world; and if one wants a symbol of Atlantic man that distinguishes him from Mediterranean man, a symbol to set aside the Greek temple, it is the Viking ship.’
They are still among us — ghosts and shadows, fragments and fingerprints — in all sorts of different ways and in many different places. One October evening in 2011 the top story on Britain’s national news was about the discovery in Ardnamurchan, a remote peninsula on the north-west coast of Scotland, of the first undisturbed Viking boat burial ever found on mainland Britain.
A thousand years ago a revered and respect
ed elder was laid to rest inside the hull of a timber boat, one crafted with the so-familiar sweeping prow and stern. His shield was laid upon his chest, his sword and spear by his side. He also had a knife and an axe, together with an object archaeologists believe to be a drinking horn. The boat had then been filled with stones and buried beneath a mound of earth.
Initially overlooked as nothing more than a clearance cairn — a pile of rocks gathered from the land by a farmer keen to spare his ploughshare from damage — it was not until 2011 that excavation of the mound began to reveal its secrets. The timbers of the boat had long since decayed but their lines were clearly visible, impressed into the subsoil upon which they had lain for a millennium. At just 16.5 feet long by five wide, it seems on the small side for journeys back and forth to Scandinavia. But the fact that its sole occupant was deemed worthy of such treatment in death suggests he was of the highest status — and no doubt a seasoned traveller in life. Also found alongside him were a whetstone of Norwegian origin and a bronze ring-pin fashioned by an Irish craftsman.
I try and picture the scene on that day when his family, friends and followers dispatched him on his final journey. First the sleek little craft was hauled into position out of reach of any tide. The location of the grave was no accident either, no random selection: archaeologists had already found other dead nearby, from other times. Those close to that deceased Viking had decided his mortal remains would lie for ever near both a 6,000-year-old Neolithic grave and one raised during the Bronze Age. Here was an unlikely fellowship of death. Then they placed him on board, accompanied by all they thought he might need wherever he was going, and sent him on his way.
Ardnamurchan is still a place reached more easily by boat than by road. It feels remote now but there was a time when familiarity with the water would have meant it was close to busy seaways. Whether that Viking was a permanent resident or a passing chieftain visiting his relatives may never be known — but my fascination with him lies at least in part in wondering what he really meant to those who saw fit to say their farewells that way. Did they fill the hull with ballast with a view to fixing him in place in a landscape that plainly mattered to them? We cannot ever know, and why should we? He is not ours.
