Vikings

by Neil Oliver

  In June 2008 archaeologists were called in to excavate a large swathe of land in Dorset earmarked for the building of a new road to improve access to Weymouth and the Isle of Portland. In what proved to be a mass burial pit they found the remains of 51 Vikings — all of them decapitated and butchered. Their bones revealed multiple wounds including defensive injuries to hands and arms. There were separate piles of skulls, ribcages and leg bones. Two heads were missing, prompting the archaeologists to suppose those might have been kept as trophies — perhaps displayed on spikes. Scientific analysis showed they were all men, aged from late teens to mid-twenties. Their tooth enamel proved beyond doubt they had grown to adulthood in Scandinavian countries and radiocarbon dates revealed they met their deaths sometime between AD 910 and 1030.

  Taken captive by the local Anglo-Saxons, they were stripped naked and messily executed. Perhaps they were raiders caught in the act, or wouldbe settlers made unwelcome in the most extreme manner imaginable. Either way, their dismembered remains recall a time when the men from the north were often regarded more as foe than friend. These were travellers who lived and died by swords and they were not always on the winning side.

  In 2006 I took part in a television project called The Face of Britain. Using samples of DNA collected from volunteers all over England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, a team of scientists sought to find out how much the genetic make-up of the modern population had been affected by migrations and invasions during thousands of years of history.

  While people came forward claiming all manner of inheritances — Celtic, Pictish, Saxon, Huguenot, Norman and many others — the largest single group of volunteers were those believing (or at least fervently hoping) they were descended from Vikings. For many it was based on no more than a family trait of blue eyes or fair hair. Some, however, had a claim based on altogether more intriguing physical characteristics. Dupuytren’s Contracture is a deformity that causes the fingers of the hand to curl towards the palm. The condition is also known as ‘Viking Claw’ and several people came to the trial certain their hands carried proof of ancient Scandinavian ancestry. But despite the nickname, the condition is relatively common all over northern Europe and by no means limited to those whose families hail from Denmark, Norway or Sweden. Even more interesting than the scientifically provable reality, though, was the passion with which so many people clung to their hopes that the blood coursing in their veins was that of Vikings.

  There was a time too when every British child learnt the names of at least a few Viking heroes — real men once, but made so famous by their exploits they seem more like figures from bedtime stories or nursery rhymes: Eirik the Red and his settlement of Greenland … the voyage of his son Leif Eiriksson to Vinland, presumed to be some or other part of the Newfoundland coastline … and Cnut, King of England, Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden, and famed for an audience with the incoming tide.

  Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday — four out of our own seven days — are named for the Viking gods and goddesses Tyr, Odin, Thor and Freyja. Whole swathes of Britain’s place names are Viking too. Any ending in ‘by’ — like Ferriby, Whitby, Grimsby, Selsby and Utterby — recall homesteads established by the incomers. Anywhere with ‘thorpe’ or ‘thwaite’ is Viking too. Then there’s ‘beck’ for stream; ‘fell’ and ‘how’ for hill; ‘holm’ for island; ‘kirk’ for church and ‘slack’ for stream — the list goes on and on, marbled like fat through the flesh of Britain.

  Caithness, Scotland’s northern quarter, is the way Vikings described the head of the cat. The Great Orme above Llandudno remembers how they saw the headland there like a giant worm swimming out to sea, and just about every village, town, hill, headland, waterway and bay on the islands of Orkney and Shetland bears a Norse name.

  Make your way along the passageway of the great burial mound of Maes Howe on Orkney Mainland and your breath will be snatched away first of all by the wonder of the Neolithic architecture in the chamber at its end. Spend a little more time inside, however, and faint lines and shapes etched into stones here and there might catch your eye: a dragon-lion, a knotted serpent, a walrus. These were cut by Vikings 4,000 years and more after the last of the monument’s builders were dust on the wind.

  Then there are the runes — at least 30 sets identified so far. Some are just boyish graffiti like: ‘Thorni bedded Helgi’, or ‘Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women’ (the latter beside a rough etching of a slavering hound). At least a few are more enigmatic, though, like: ‘It is true what I say, that treasure was carried off in the course of three nights.’ Even the runic letters themselves — all straight lines suitable for slicing into wood or stone with sharp swords and daggers — conjure images of the sort of men who made them, men who sheltered from hellish storms there from time to time, surrounded by the shadows of ancient and forgotten dead.

  In the twelfth-century Orkneyinga saga — a history of the Orcadians — the scribes tell of one Earl Harald and his men travelling from Stromness when the worst of winter weather forced them to beach their boat. Reluctantly by all accounts they took shelter beneath the mound they called Orkahaugr — Maes Howe — and as flames flickered and winds howled, two of their number went insane with the terror of it all.

  In Stirling, where I live with my family, the town coat of arms features a snarling wolf. It seems there were Vikings here too once, right at the heart of Scotland, or at least very nearly. The accompanying legend recalls another dark winter’s night, this one in the ninth century, when a sentry tasked with guarding the sleeping town fell asleep at his post. While he snored, a war band of Vikings made their stealthy approach, no doubt bent on rapine and thievery — and, as luck would have it, disturbed a sleeping wolf. The beast howled, waking the dolt, and the town’s defenders were roused in the nick of time. The Vikings were driven off and the howling wolf was granted a place in immortality.

  High on a wall of one fine building in the town is a niche holding a sculpted wolf. A verse below it, in golden copperplate, reads:

  Here in auld days

  The wolf roam’d

  In a hole of the rock

  In ambush lay.

  A narrow escape from Vikings, remembered for a thousand years.

  In towns on Shetland the locals mark the darkest depths of winter with a party they call Up Helly Aa. By the evening of the last Tuesday in January each year the finishing touches have been put to the centrepiece and focus for the whole affair: a stunningly authentic-looking dragon-headed Viking long ship erected in a park near the centre of Lerwick, the principal town on the islands. The street lights are extinguished and all at once the place is plunged into velvet darkness. For the next hour or so the only illumination is that provided by hundreds of flaming torches carried in procession by marching, costumed Shetlanders. At the head of the line and in pride of place is a ‘squad’ of 60 or so men extravagantly and expensively turned out as Viking warriors, with helmets, chain mail, shields and swords and led by their ‘Jarl’ or Earl.

  In a surreal twist all the rest of the torch-bearers are garbed not as Vikings but in all manner of fancy dress — cartoon characters, super-heroes, reality-show contestants and the like. Children squeal and adults cheer as the marchers weave their way down crowded streets, preceded always by their own long, flickering shadows. In the absence of the clinically cold, sulphur-glow of street lights, the faces of marchers and spectators alike are bathed only in the unmistakable warmth of living flames.

  As a finale the whole horde gathers in a great circle around the long ship in the park. Soon the pack is 20 or 30 deep, the heat from their torches almost frighteningly intense and casting bizarre shadows through the children’s swings and climbing frames nearby.

  The Vikings step forward first and to deafening roars they launch their flames into the ship. An inferno rages almost at once and now the rest of the squads add their own torches. It is a stunning sight, with flames rising tens of feet into the black night, quickly devouring the mast and s
ail. Soon the air is thick with a veritable storm of sparks and flaming fragment — shot enough to burn holes in clothes and singe hair — and all too quickly the whole ship, the work of months of careful craftsmanship, is reduced to nothing.

  Any outsider watching the spectacle would be forgiven for assuming Up Helly Aa was a thousand years old or more — that it recalls the moment when those first Viking invaders decided to burn their boats and remain on the island as landlords. In fact, the truth of the matter is altogether different. Far from an ancient tradition, it is an almost entirely modern concoction.

  There are records of some fairly rowdy goings-on in wintry rural Shetland in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars there were veteran soldiers on the islands. Having seen a bit of the wider world, they had developed a taste for the wilder kind of Christmas party and there are reports from the 1820s of singing, dancing, drinking, fighting and the firing of muskets and pistols long into the night. By the middle years of the century some of them had taken to filling barrels with buckets of tar, setting them alight and dragging them through the streets of villages and towns, including Lerwick. It seems it was very much an affair of young working-class men and in time the aspirant middle classes grew tired of all the wildness — not to mention the presumed danger to life and property posed by barrels of molten, burning tar dragged through darkened streets by young men the worse for drink.

  By 1870 or thereabouts a new movement had taken root in Lerwick at least, and a few of the town’s residents — those with a taste for history and pageant — managed to take control of the winter festivals. Having banished the tar barrels they came up with a new name for the festivities — Up Helly Aa — and ordained that the islands’ Viking past be grafted onto what had hitherto been little more than an excuse for drinking and fighting. Almost at once a tradition was born and by the later decades of the century the ‘guising’ — short for disguising, or dressing up — had become a key element, along with the burning of the long ship, known locally as the ‘galley’. Only in the early twentieth century was the honorary role of ‘Jarl’ created, and now, in the twenty-first century, the festival is designed to bring together the whole community during those darkest and coldest days in the Shetland calendar.

  For anyone looking for Vikings, then, even an event as convincing as Up Helly Aa has only a vague connection to those warrior travellers of a thousand years ago. Around and among us they may be, but the truth about them remains strangely elusive.

  The real Vikings appeared for the first time in AD 793, at the Church of St Cuthbert on the tidal islet of Lindisfarne — for long the intellectual as well as spiritual heart of the kingdom of Northumbria.

  In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle it was recorded that: ‘In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria, and miserably frightened the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these signs; and a little after that in the same year the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.’

  The Holy Island of Lindisfarne is quite literally a dot on the map — just two square miles of dry land — and, since low tide reveals a causeway linking it to the mainland, it is not even truly an island at all. It was St Aidan who founded a Christian house there, in AD 634, and it was from within his community that the conversion of the local pagans was successfully undertaken during the seventh century. Geographically insignificant — dot or not — by the end of the eighth century Lindisfarne shone out of the map of the Christian world like a lighthouse on a lonely shore.

  Such was the fame and importance of the place that word of the attack soon spread the length and breadth of Europe. The news reached the Northumbrian-born scholar Alcuin, at his desk in a centre of learning set up in Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) by the Frankish ruler Charlemagne. The outrage of the homesick cleric echoes down the years: ‘The pagans have contaminated God’s shrines and spilled the blood of saints in the passage around the altar, they have laid waste the house of our consolation and in the temple of God they have trampled underfoot the bodies of the saints like shit in the street.’

  The Vikings resisted Christianity longer than any other people in Europe; and that such unclean hands, the worst and the last, should have pawed at the bones of saints was unforgivable and unforgettable.

  In 794 it was the monks at Jarrow, on the Tyne, who felt the Vikings’ wrath, and then the following year similar treatment was meted out to religious communities on the islands of Iona, Rathlin and Skye, off the west coast of Scotland. Having made their entrance, the seaborne pagans showed no signs of returning to the shadows. The age of the Vikings had begun.

  But their story hardly starts on Lindisfarne — or indeed in the eighth century — any more than the story of America starts in 1492 with a Genoese sailor called Christopher. The truth of the matter is that by the time a marine raiding party from Hordaland in western Norway was so purposefully and so dangerously on the move towards an islet off the east coast of England, they and their fellow inhabitants of Scandinavia were already in their adulthood as peoples (at the very least they were in the throes of a troubled and ill-tempered adolescence).

  The populations inhabiting the lands we know today as Denmark, Norway and Sweden were, by the end of the eighth century, the descendants and inheritors of those European tribes that had already contributed to and been part of a much longer narrative. Before we can understand and appreciate the actions of those peoples of the north we need to hear the back-story, the first scenes of which had been written tens of thousands of years before, by rock and ice.

  In a very real sense we have been subject to one long Ice Age for the last three million years (for as long, in fact, as there has been any sort of upright ape abroad on the Earth). There have been periods — sometimes very long periods — when the glaciers have retreated to the poles and warmth has returned to much of the planet, but always the ice has come back. For the last three-quarters of a million years the cold glacials have been markedly longer than the warm interglacials that punctuate them. Those cold periods have in turn been more severe, more intense.

  Our ancestors’ ancestors were driven to find boltholes in the south. In those warmer climes — in Spain or northern Italy perhaps, or around the Mediterranean Sea — they made new lives and told their children about a lost world far to the north. Given their eventual return, it seems all was not forgotten. But while some part of them was bound, as though by Ariadne’s thread, to the world left behind, for thousands of years it had to wait. For millennium after frozen millennium the wind howled; ice and rock screamed and cracked, grumbled and moaned and for the most part there was no one to hear it.

  Scandinavia’s experience of the Ice Age was more extreme than most. Geologists estimate that for a period lasting from one and a half million years ago until the start of the Holocene approximately 12,000 years ago, the lands that would become Norway and Sweden knew no respite whatever. Always the ice stayed in place, crushing the terrain there beneath sheets and glaciers a mile and more thick. Relief came first to a swathe of dry land containing the territories that would one day be Jutland and Denmark, and by 13,000 or so years ago there was virgin territory there for Stone Age hunters to explore and exploit.

  The first Norwegian impact on British shores came 7,000 years before the Vikings. It was not warriors, but a great and unstoppable wave of water. On one spectacular day around 8,000 years ago an undersea landslide off the coast of Norway — an event known to geologists as the Storegga Slide — unleashed a tsunami. When thousands of cubic miles of seabed jolted suddenly into the deep, along a shelf 200 miles long, the wall of water generated by the shudder ripped across the North Sea at hundreds, or even thousands of miles an hour. Much of the eastern seaboard of the land that would become Britain was briefly submerged, and by the time the wave withdrew the map of northern Europe had been redrawn.

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p; Until that awful moment, ‘Britain’ had been a peninsula of north-west Europe, a part of the main. That single catastrophic instant — the greatest natural disaster in northern Europe since the end of the Ice Age — had changed everything. While the east coast of Britain was under water for a few moments, elsewhere the effects were permanent. What had been a huge landmass linking the south-east of ‘England’ to the Continent was drowned for ever beneath tens of metres of seawater. A territory referred to as ‘Doggerland’ by archaeologists was, now and for ever, seabed. Dutch fishermen would subsequently find that the shallow waters of that southern quarter of the North Sea offered especially rich pickings. Since their trawlers were called ‘doggers’ they would name the fishing ground Dogger Bank.

  It was not until about 10,000 years ago that the whole of Norway and Sweden were open for exploration by pioneer hunters and by then a total Scandinavian territory of around a third of a million square miles was there for the taking. Those incomers were the men and women who lived and died during the thousands of years known to archaeologists as the Mesolithic — the ‘middle’ Stone Age of the hunters, that lasted from the end of the last glacial until the advent of farming.

  There had been human beings in northern Europe before the ice returned 25,000—30,000 years ago, two species in fact. The Neanderthal people were coming to the end of a long tenancy by then. While Homo Sapiens forged themselves in Africa — from around 200,000 years ago — our Neanderthal cousins had Europe and elsewhere to themselves. By perhaps 50,000 years ago modern people had spread north into Europe as well, so that both versions of humankind — the elder and the younger — were forced to share the same hunting grounds, at least for a while. Whether that mingling was happy or not will never be known, but the fact remains that while both species were alive in Europe when the last Ice Age started, only one survived the exodus. When the ice finally retreated, and the time came to explore the virgin woodland of a northern hemisphere made anew, only people like us were available for the return. The time of the Neanderthals was, by then, long past.