by Neil Oliver
Scandinavia is also a land of many islands — and some of their populations developed their own ways of doing things, setting them apart from whichever place actually claimed them as satellites. While Swedish Öland is close by the coast of its motherland and shaped by the mores of the mainland, Gotland is far enough out into the Baltic to be almost a place apart. When the shipping lanes mattered more than now, Gotland’s position at the heart of the sea gave it a primacy and strategic advantage that would gift the island power and wealth disproportionate to its size. Likewise the largest of the Danish islands — Bornholm, Fyn and Sjælland — developed characteristics that were sometimes at variance with or in contrast to those of Denmark itself. Islanders are a breed apart, and never more so than in the case of the inhabitants of the islands of the Baltic. One site on the island of Fyn and attributed to the Ertebølle culture offers a hint of the behaviour that eventually carried the Scandinavians into legend.
Thanks to sea level rises since the end of the last glacial, the human occupation site known as Tybrind Vig lies submerged beneath approximately 10 feet of seawater, 250 yards or so off the western coast. During the latter part of the Mesolithic, perhaps 5500—4000 BC, it was a base for people skilled in the business of fishing. Any traces of the settlement itself have been completely eroded away by the millennia of inundation by the sea but, fortunately for archaeologists, those fishermen had been in the habit of throwing their rubbish into a waterlogged area on the edge of a lagoon that sheltered their homes from the sea. By the time the people abandoned their settlement in the face of rising waters, their soggy midden was already preserving much of the fishing gear they had thrown away.
Tybrind Vig was first spotted by recreational divers in 1975, and excavated between 1978 and 1988. By any standards it has been a rich find: fish hooks made from the rib bones of red deer; wooden points from specialised fish spears called leisters; evidence for the technology of net-making, in the form of traces of textiles woven from plant fibres; hazel stakes used in the building of fish weirs as well as wooden points for barbing fish traps — all have been recovered in varying states of preservation. Better yet was the discovery of three seagoing dug-out canoes, at least one of which was more than 30 feet long, each carved from the trunk of a lime tree. As well as the canoes, the archaeologists found parts of no fewer than 10 paddles, made of ash and with elegant, heart-shaped blades, four of which had been carefully decorated. A large stone, possibly used as ballast, was found inside one of the canoes. Best of all, hearths shaped from clay and pebbles had been set into two of the hulls.
The excavations at Tybrind Vig were led by Søren Andersen and his possible explanations for the undoubtedly perilous practice of lighting fires inside wooden craft at sea conjure up emotive images. At the very least they suggest the fishermen were accustomed to being at sea for long journeys, during which they needed more than furs to keep them warm; perhaps they even went so far as to cook some of their catch while still on the water. But Andersen has also suggested the fishermen may have needed fire when travelling from place to place so they could keep alive the warmth from one home while en route to the next.
The canoes are surely too slight and too vulnerable ever to have been used for voyages into the open sea, far from land. But is there a glimpse in those journeys from hearth to hearth — with flames carried over water, symbolic of life itself — of the spark of an idea for far greater seagoing adventures?
Since my days as an archaeology student my imagination has been haunted by a site discovered on the Danish island of Sjælland in 1975, in advance of building work. While the intention had been no more than the digging of a few foundations, what was eventually unearthed there, at a place called Vedbæk, was a Mesolithic cemetery containing the remains of more than 20 men, women and even babies. Artefacts found in the graves enabled archaeologists to categorise those hunters, in the way archaeologists do, as part of that now familiar Ertebølle culture. In any case radiocarbon dates returned by tests on some of the bones revealed the people buried there had died sometime around 4000 BC.
The occupants of the Vedbæk cemetery are humbling and breathtaking. Stone Age hunters seem as distant as dinosaurs. It can be hard to make them real, more substantial than ghosts. Ironically their mourned dead are easiest to reinvest with life, because they have so obviously been loved. Some of the adults were laid down with their heads or feet resting in cradles formed by the carefully placed antlers of deer. What were the intentions of those burial parties? What was the honour bestowed? Was it thought those dead had been blessed in life with speed and strength and grace, like stags … or did such grave goods imply the hope of good hunting in another life?
(Vedbæk is by no means the only Late Mesolithic cemetery in Scandinavia. At Skateholm, in the Skåne district of southern Sweden, archaeologists found not only graves of men, women and children, but also of dogs — suggesting that by the fourth or fifth millennium BC, those animals had been domesticated and were being viewed as members of the family, even worthy of an afterlife.)
But one story suggested by Vedbæk bothers me more than all the rest. Whenever I wonder how we got to where we are now I find myself, in my imagination at least, standing by one graveside in particular. I have thought about its occupants, off and on, for a quarter of a century and when I began thinking about where the Vikings came from I ended up back there yet again.
That grave contained the skeleton of a young woman. I like to imagine she was lovely. Around her neck was a string of red deer teeth — collected from as many as 40 different animals. Such a keepsake, made of trophies from 40 separate kills, speaks of a great and skilful hunter. It is not much of a leap to see it as a gift given only to the most important person in his world, his daughter or his wife. Buried beside her is a newborn baby laid upon the wing of an adult swan, the bones as light as a bundle of straws. By the baby’s hip was a little knife knapped from a piece of flint.
We cannot ever know but it seems at least likely the woman died in childbirth and her baby with her. The passing of 6,000 years does not lessen the tragedy, or its impact. Someone grieving for them saw to it that they went to their grave together, she wearing the necklace he had made for her, and their baby nestled on the wing of a white bird. For hunters — of all people the most sensitive to the ways of animals — the comings and goings of the great flocks of migratory birds might have captured their imaginations like nothing else. They represent the journey, the voyage without end.
The classic image of the Viking long ships, which came thousands of years later, has those vessels shaped and styled to suggest dragons, or sea serpents. Powered by oars or by sail, they could fairly fly across the waves. Maybe some of the inspiration for those elegant craft had come from another memory and long ago, from hunters watching long-necked birds beating their way from horizon to horizon. Travellers who demonstrated, year after year, it was possible to leave and also to return.
Any sense of separation from the people of the Stone Age — by anything more than time — is brushed away by witnessing their approach to death. Just as we try and accept and understand that transformation today, so the ancestors struggled with the same challenge tens of thousands of years ago. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: ‘For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.’ It seems that as a species we have understood this for the longest time, perhaps always — so that the dead had to be put away somewhere safe, somewhere else.
Out of the shadows then come all the most distant ancestors of the Vikings, their names as mysterious and unfamiliar as the cast of a Bergman film. Before the people of the Ertebølle culture were an earlier marque of hunter classified, by the few belongings collected from another site on Sjælland, as members of a group called Kongemose. What little is known about them includes their apparent skill at making all manner of tools from long blades of carefully worked flint. By snapping those blades into angular fragments the knappers could make awl
s, arrowheads, drills and scrapers, or assemble them as rows of barbs and serrations mounted in wood to make barbed points, or saws. From other stones they shaped axes, and they found use too for objects they made from horn and bone.
If it was people of the Kongemose culture in parts of Denmark and Sweden around 6000 BC, then in Norway at about the same time it was the Nøtvet, where geological circumstances coaxed men and women into shaping their tools from quartz as well as flint. Like everyone else they hunted and fished, trapped seabirds and collected their eggs, made shelters of saplings and skins. Earlier than the Nøtvet (and a kindred culture nearby called the Lihult) were people whose traces go into museum cases labelled Fosna or Hensbacka (if only to differentiate their leavings from the bits and pieces left behind by everyone else). Whoever they were, they eked existences, of a sort, along the western and southern coasts of Norway. In Denmark and southern Sweden the earliest of the hunters are called Maglemosian, after finds in the magle mose — the ‘big bog’ — at a place called Mullerup, in western Sjælland. Those last were among the first arrivals after the retreat of the ice, and seem to have lived their lives towards the end of the ninth millennium BC.
The traces of human occupation, found in scores of locations scattered all across the peninsula, are slight in the extreme and the many dates difficult to interpret. Perhaps it is most helpful just to imagine generations of people living off the land, exploiting natural resources and hunting and foraging whatever the habitat and the seasons provided. It was a period lasting thousands of years during which little changed for the tiny human populations making lives for themselves in the forests, around the lakes and along the coastlines of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
Hunting provided a good living in the varied environments of much of Scandinavia — so appropriate in fact it apparently kept at bay the world-changing technology of farming for a millennium and a half. The Neolithic — the New Stone Age — is characterised by the appearance either of animal husbandry, crop cultivation or a combination of the two. The technology had developed first in the so-called ‘Near East’ of Mesopotamia, the fertile lands sandwiched between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, by around 11,000—12,000 years ago.
Its push westwards was as slow as that of any glacier but by around 5500 BC there were farmers at work right across the European mainland. In the lands to the south of Scandinavia, on the southern side of the Baltic Sea, were settlements comprising great longhouses with wattle and daub walls erected around frameworks of upright timber posts. The farmers grew crops like wheat, barley and flax and kept cattle, sheep, goats and some pigs. They also made pottery and decorated it with patterns of lines cut into the clay while it was still damp. It was this decoration, and this alone, that encouraged German archaeologists to label all this as proof of yet another culture — of a people spread across thousands of miles yet apparently united by thought, language and behaviour. The label applied to all of it was Linearbandkeramik, or LBK for short.
Quite why the peoples of Scandinavia abandoned hunting as their mainstay when they did, around 4000 BC, and embarked upon the relentless cycle of sowing and harvesting, is still. being debated; but there are good reasons for believing a relatively rapid rise of sea level may have been a deciding factor. If access to the familiar supplies of fish, shellfish and sea mammals was suddenly disrupted by the emergence of a new coastline, erstwhile hunters in the most adversely affected areas may have seen the wisdom of changing their ways. In any event, there was then a quite rapid uptake of farming in those parts of Denmark, southern Sweden and south-east Norway best suited to agriculture and the keeping of domesticated animals.
After countless generations of nomadic, or at least semi-nomadic, life, people began establishing permanent settlements — living in houses, in one place for all of their lives and, most conspicuously, building great tombs of stone for their dead. As well as placing the mortal remains inside the tombs, the bereaved marked the passing of their loved ones by holding feasts — behaviour revealed by the discovery of pottery vessels, whole and in fragments, left behind both inside the tombs and around the entrances.
The job of clearing and maintaining the land, sowing and harvesting crops and looking after animals required a different and more diverse toolkit than had been made and used by the hunters. Farmers needed axes for felling trees, sickles for reaping wheat and barley.
Settled agriculture led also to a steady rise in population. The life of constant toil, working from dawn until dusk to provide a repetitive diet of much cereal and little meat, may have lacked the excitement and satisfaction of the hunt — but it was generally more reliable when it came to putting food into hungry mouths. It was also a lifestyle that took on a momentum of its own: more food provided for larger families; more people could clear and tend more land; more land would provide more food, and so on. Eventually there might even be food surplus, so that not all hands were required in the fields but could be set aside to perfect other skills, like tool-making.
Those people in a position to control the extra food might be able to offer it to others from time to time, thereby placing them in debt. The commitment to farming also made the cycle of the seasons a preoccupation of mankind — in a way it had never been before. The crops had to be sown during spring … the summer sun must ripen them … the animals should be slaughtered as autumn turned to winter … As the time and the year passed by so the world turned and the sky spun overhead. Those few who watched and then understood the phases of the moon, the tracks of the stars, the lengthening and shortening of days, might acquire knowledge. Once they could predict celestial events, rather than just bearing witness to them, then that knowledge might become something else. It was by means as simple as these — control of the stuff of life, acquisition of learning — that some men and women gained influence, even power over their fellows.
Powerful people often like to look and dress like powerful people, and acquire tastes for luxury items unavailable to the common folk. In the Neolithic of Scandinavia, as in the rest of the Europe, the rise of powerful, special people is testified to by the appearance in graves of polished stone axes and other refined weaponry that declared the elevated status of their owners.
After around 1,000 years of farming in Scandinavia some of the people, in Denmark and elsewhere, began to take a new approach to the treatment of their dead. Whether farming had arrived in the heads and hands of immigrants, or only as a set of persuasive ideas communicated from person to person and community to community, is still unclear. What is certain is that once people began staying put in one place, clearing and tending fields, they became possessive of the land upon which their futures depended. Claims on the home turf were passed from parents to children, generation to generation, and so the ancestors — those who had worked the same land before — became a proof of authority and entitlement. What better way to advertise ownership of a territory than by storing the bones of some of the previous incumbents in highly visible stone tombs that declared to all comers: ‘This land is mine, because it was my father’s, and his father’s and his father’s …’
But during the third millennium BC in parts of Scandinavia — as elsewhere in Europe and in Britain too — there was a general abandonment of the great communal tombs of the past, in favour of burying people in single graves. Rather than ancestors and connection with the past, what mattered was the individual and the here and now. Fashion further demanded the inclusion in the grave of axes, and also of fired clay beakers — usually decorated by having had a cord wrapped around them while they were still soft. Archaeologists take such finds as proof of a culture that reached right across northern Europe. They call it the culture of the Corded Ware Beaker. In Scandinavia this tradition took root first of all in Denmark and, having found acceptance there, persisted unchanged for well over a thousand years.
There were no metal objects in Danish graves until around 1700 BC; but that is not to say metal was unknown to the people living there before that date. Spectacu
lar flint artefacts recovered from some of the last of the Stone Age graves reveal the local artisans were well aware of the magical new material — and skilled enough to set themselves in competition with the best efforts of the metal-workers. Flint daggers shaped in imitation of those being cast in bronze elsewhere in Europe at the same time are testament to the levels of expertise reached after thousands of years of refinement of the techniques of flint-knapping.
Stunning or not, the flint daggers were nonetheless a last hurrah for their makers. By the time of the Late Neolithic they were appearing in Danish graves in place of the stone battleaxes that had been the earlier symbols of status. But between 1800 and 1700 BC, the Bronze Age arrived in Denmark and then it was metal objects that were increasingly in use, appearing in graves or in hoards placed in special places like rivers, bogs and lakes as votive offerings. Given the extremes of geography, metal objects — and the technology of their production — took longer to penetrate the more northerly territories of Scandinavia. But penetrate they did, so that tools and weapons of uniform types are eventually found all over Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Apart from anything else this spread shows there were networks of trade connecting the scattered populations. Presumably the peoples further north exchanged their natural resources — animal skins and furs, seal oil and pine resin — for either the raw materials of bronze production or the finished objects themselves.
