Vikings

by Neil Oliver

  In AD 5 Emperor Augustus had dispatched a fleet of warships from bases in northern Germany to circumnavigate the Danish peninsula. The exercise was commanded by Tiberius, Augustus’ stepson. In Res gestae divi Augusti, the emperor wrote:

  My fleet sailed all the way east over the ocean from the mouth of the Rhine to the land of the Cimbri, where no Roman had reached before that time, either by sea or land, and the Cimbri, Charydes, Semnones and the other Germanic peoples in that area asked, through envoys, for the friendship of myself and the Roman people.

  But if there was a feeling of optimism in the Roman camp in AD 5 — a sense that all was well and as it should be in the ever-expanding Roman world — it could not and did not last. It was a single, apocalyptic encounter, deep in the German forests that forced the Romans to amend their attitude towards the peoples living hidden and mysterious lives beyond the reach of empire. In Viking Empires, Angelo Forte, Richard Oram and Frederik Pedersen make the case that it was the Battle of Teutoburg Forest that changed everything for Rome — and for ever.

  ‘The Roman interest in Scandinavia was due to one cataclysmic event in Roman history,’ they wrote. ‘The destruction of three of the 29 legions of the Roman army — the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth — under the leadership of Publius Quinctilius Varus in AD 9.’

  The left bank of the Rhine had formed the northernmost limit of the Roman Empire on mainland Europe since the days of Caesar. Neighbouring Gaul was a vast amorphous territory encompassing what is now modern France, much of northern Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and part of the Netherlands. Caesar had bludgeoned Gaul into submission during his Gallic Wars between 58 and 51 BC, before Augustus finally oversaw its absorption into the Empire by 12 BC. On the far side of the Rhine, however, lay the land of the fearsome German barbarians. The Romans’ Damascene moment — when their eyes were suddenly opened to the limits of their ambitions — came when General Varus marched his men east of the river.

  Tiberius and Germanicus before him had had some success in pacifying and even occupying parts of the territory, and had subdued a handful of tribes including the Cherusci. Hermann, a son of the Cherusci chief, had been handed over to the Romans as a hostage — or at least proof of goodwill — and had grown to manhood in Rome, well versed in Roman ways and military tactics. It was Hermann — better known to history as Arminius, the Latinised version of his name — who returned to his homeland to foment rebellion and prepare a deadly trap for his erstwhile hosts.

  Arminius saw to it that word reached Varus of an uprising in territory previously friendly towards Rome. It was false information but Varus duly marched his 12,000 heavily armed and well-trained men into hostile territory with a view to whipping the locals back into line. Once they were strung out in a straggling line along a path through a forest at a place called Kalkriese, close by the modern city of Osnabrück, Arminius and his barbarians attacked. Some writers claim it was all over in an hour, others that the fighting dragged on for three or four days as pockets of legionaries fought for their lives in the face of increasingly desperate odds.

  Only a few hundred Roman soldiers made it out of Teutoburg Forest. Such was the scale of the defeat — and the disbelief when word reached Emperor Augustus — that it was six years before any Romans found the stomach for a return to the scene of their humbling. Tacitus would later provide his readers with a haunting account of what was found:

  In the middle of the field lay the whitening bones of men, as they had fled or stood their ground, strewn everywhere or piled in heaps. Nearby lay fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, as well as human heads, prominently nailed to the trunks of trees. In the adjacent groves were the barbarous altars on which they had immolated tribunes and first-rank centurions. Some survivors of the disaster, who had escaped from the battle or from captivity, described how this was the spot where the officers fell, how yonder the eagles were captured, where Varus was pierced by his first wound, where too by the stroke of his own ill-starred hand he found for himself death. They pointed out too the raised ground from which Arminius had harangued his army, the number of gibbets for the captives, the pits for the living, and how in his exultation he insulted the standards and eagles.

  Varus had taken the only path open to a Roman general in the aftermath of such a disaster — and the lost legions were never replaced. Numbers 17, 18 and 19 remained absent from the line for evermore.

  The personal, human tragedy of Teutoburg is revealed here and there by memorial stones raised by grieving families, in the hope that one day their loved ones’ remains might be recovered from the forest and brought closer to home. One is dedicated to an officer named Marcus Caelius:

  … son of Titus, of the tribe Lemonia, from Bononia [Bologna], leading centurion of the 18th legion, 53 years old. He fell in Varus’ war. If they are found, his bones may be buried here. His brother, Publius Caelius of the tribe Lemonia, raised this stone.

  There were attempts to persevere, finally to take control of the territory of the German barbarians, but by AD 16 the Romans had lost their appetite for the fight. The Rhine was once more the limit of empire, and so it remained.

  Having been unable to dominate the northern tribes, Rome sought instead to out-think them. Rather than tackling them head on, a new strategy evolved — that of reaching out beyond Germania and seeking to make friends with those peoples living even further north.

  ‘The crushing defeat at Teutoburg forced subsequent Roman emperors to focus their efforts on keeping the Germanic tribes on the borders of the Empire under control,’ write Forte, Oram and Pedersen. ‘They did so by encouraging alliances with tribes, kings and chieftains in the lands beyond those of the Germanic tribes on the Roman border. Thus the Scandinavians — the southern Scandinavians in particular — began to play a larger role in Roman politics and received diplomatic gifts and special Roman attention.’

  It was therefore Roman merchants and entrepreneurs, rather than soldiers, who began quietly transplanting the ways of empire onto Scandinavian soil. Even before the Battle of Teutoburg Forest there had been trading links reaching as far as southern Sweden and Norway, revealed by finds of Roman tableware. But during the first and second centuries AD the volume and variety of goods being exchanged steadily increased. For one thing the Scandinavian tribes were getting their hands on Roman weapons. No doubt some of this material started out as trophies of war — booty collected from battlefields. Roman soldiers continued to clash with Germanic tribesmen and the barbarians had as many successes as failures. After passing through several unknown intermediaries, many such swords and javelins would eventually have reached Scandinavia.

  But Scandinavian tribesmen were also being recruited into the Roman army during the first centuries AD — or at least serving as mercenaries. If they survived to return home then they would have come equipped both with Roman weapons and also, more importantly, Roman military know-how. Finds of Roman luxury items in Scandinavian graves of the period are further testament to links with the Empire — people using expensive items made by the elite craftsmen of the Classical world to underline their status. Roman drinking vessels of bronze and other precious metals, as well as glass, made their way into Scandinavian territory at this time and this so-called Roman Iron Age is also characterised by the appearance of everyday Mediterranean-made goods of the sort circulated by straightforward trade. The Danish islands in particular seem to have been attractive bases for Roman merchants and Gotland, ideally situated in the middle of the Baltic Sea, was just one of the key centres.

  Contact with the Roman Empire also presented economic opportunities for the people of Scandinavia. Archaeological evidence reveals improvements to farming, likely implemented with a view to producing surplus that might be exported south. Villages become larger and more numerous and the people living in them were busying themselves with more and more trades and crafts — all suggestive of exposure to a wider world and its wider markets.

  During the first centuries of
the Iron Age, Scandinavia had apparently pulled back into its shell. The long-distance connections of the Bronze Age had withered and the peoples of the most northerly lands became more self-reliant, more withdrawn. With the advent of Rome, society was stimulated. New opportunities presented themselves. Young men might seek glory by signing up for mercenary service in foreign wars. On their return they would have had skills for hire — of the sort needed and desired by men bent on power. It was during the Roman Iron Age in Denmark, and also in Norway and Sweden, that the conditions were right for the emergence of a new society — one in which power became increasingly centralised in the hands of a few of the strongest men. Those who had the will to make the most of the contact with Rome — to take control of the surpluses being generated by a reinvigorated economy — could begin to imagine themselves not just as chieftains, but as little kings.

  A grave found at Hoby, on the Danish island of Lolland, in the early years of the twentieth century, contained the body of a middle-aged man who had died during the first decades of the first century AD. Alongside him in his coffin were all manner of valuables including a silver cup, the bronze mountings for two traditional Scandinavian drinking horns, a bronze knife, a bone pin, sheets of iron and bronze, two gold finger rings, seven bronze brooches, a belt buckle, a wooden box, three pottery vessels and the bones from what must have been some joints of pork. Such an assemblage would have been enough to make the burial notable; but the so-called Hoby Chieftain’s Grave also contained the only complete Roman banqueting set ever found beyond the boundaries of the Empire. It is therefore one of the richest Iron Age burials in northern Europe.

  The set was made in Italy and comprises a large, shallow bronze dish used for washing the hands, bronze trays, drinking decanters and jugs and two beautiful solid silver cups weighing well over two pounds each. Both are decorated with scenes from Homer’s Iliad and signed by their maker, a man called ‘Cheirisophos’.

  Most intriguing of all, they are also engraved with the name ‘Silius’ — presumably the man who commissioned them in the first place. Since the Roman commander of the Rhine army between AD 14 and 21 was called Gaius Silius Aulus Caecina Largus, it seems reasonable to assume they are one and the same man. The Hoby find is therefore thought to be an explicit example of Roman diplomacy in action. As part of his manoeuvrings to keep a local magnate onside, the local commandant made him a gift of his own specially commissioned and highly expensive banqueting set.

  Among the scenes depicted on one of the cups is an encounter between the legendary Greek hero Achilles and Priam, King of Troy. Achilles had earlier killed Priam’s beloved son, Hector, and had thrown the body into a ditch to rot. Priam came before the warrior to beg leave to recover the body and take it away for a decent burial. ‘I have endured what no one on Earth has ever done before,’ he said. ‘I put my lips to the hands of the man who has killed my son.’ Achilles relented and surrendered Hector’s corpse to the Trojans.

  That Silius should have given away such a piece — depicting a humbled king kneeling to kiss the hand of a warrior — seems loaded with meaning. On the one hand it might be interpreted as a Roman joke at the expense of the Hoby chieftain. Was Silius suggesting he had appeared in the role of the all-powerful hero, to receive the submission of a lesser man? Or are we to assume the Dane was so familiar with the Classical world that even the writings of Homer were known to him? Did Silius make the gift in the knowledge that its receiver would fully appreciate the imagery?

  In any case the years of Scandinavia’s seeming isolation from the rest of Europe were over. Their natural resources had been in demand for millennia — amber, furs, seal oil, pine resin, as well as slaves — and no doubt traders had always maintained connections to Denmark, and through Denmark to Norway and Sweden.

  The earliest years of the northern European Iron Age had coincided with a flowering of the culture of the Greeks. From colonies in southern France, in Italy and in Spain, Greek craftsmen and artisans had exported luxury goods deep into the heart of Europe. Vibrant and dynamic though those trade routes were, however, they did not reach as far as the northern part of the continent, far less Scandinavia. Between 500 and 200 BC the exotica of Greek culture were unknown in the territories of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

  It was the politics and intrigues of Rome that brought those lands fully back into the fold. In seeking to further their imperial ambitions — or at least to keep their most problematic foes at bay — the Romans had opened a door to the far north. Their influence prepared the ground for kings and kingdoms there, and that would make all the difference.

  But when did the ‘Viking Age’ begin? News of their bloody arrival on Lindisfarne in AD 793 travelled fast. From then on their Christian victims made sure to record whatever predations the men from the north cared to mete out upon a God-fearing Europe. Followers of the Muslim faith encountered Vikings as well, within their own realms, and likewise tended to describe the foreigners as barbarous pagans.

  So far, so inevitable: the Vikings were not in the business of recording their own exploits and so the job was generally carried out by authors with a grudge against the protagonists, or at least a bias.

  It was not all bad news, however. The visit of the Norwegian chief Ottar to the court of King Alfred the Great contained valuable details about the way of life of peoples living in the far north. Their culture was portrayed as downright odd, but at least it was conscientiously recorded. Sometime around 1075 the German churchman Adam of Bremen was at work on a magnum opus called Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum — his history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen — and it too contained details of Scandinavian ways and mores. Among other titbits it features the only contemporary description of a pagan temple, at Uppsala in Sweden.

  Some Vikings left clues of their own, in the form of runic inscriptions etched into stones. Often, however, these recorded little more than the names of the people who raised the memorials and perhaps a few words about someone who had travelled far, and never returned. Much work remains to be done on the runes* and at present they are often more intriguing than truly informative.

  For all that pioneers from Denmark, Norway and Sweden were travelling vast distances, finding and settling new lands, establishing communities around the edges of the world, no one in literate circles had any interest in committing such achievements to permanent record. Only when those Northmen arrived with violent intentions did anyone bother to put pen to paper.

  By the time there were authors sympathetic to the adventures of the Vikings, hundreds of years had passed since their first appearance. Their output is known collectively as the ‘Icelandic sagas’, stories written down in the Old Norse language between the middle of the twelfth century and the beginning of the fifteenth. There are dozens of them — recounting the deeds of heroes and kings and detailing important events that unfolded during the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. The lives and times of the kings of Norway are prominent, as too are the experiences and exploits of important families living in Iceland. The earliest were written down by churchmen — some Norwegian, but more usually Icelandic — and are preoccupied with the business of the Church and the saints. It is the later saga authors who turned their attentions to warriors, kings and battles, and their writing style reveals they must have been of an altogether more secular frame of mind.

  The classic sagas were written to appeal to their audiences — and are therefore as prone to bias as any other document, perhaps even more so. More problematic than the lack of objectivity, however, is the simple fact that their authors were working hundreds of years after many of the historical events contained within them had taken place. Sometimes they drew upon earlier sources that have since been lost, while others depended on word of mouth and on stories handed down verbally through several generations. Copies of copies of copies … the risk of Chinese whispers — not to mention the entirely human temptation to embellish events and reorder chronologies for dramatic effect — makes th
e Icelandic sagas a source that must be treated with caution as well as respect. They are wonderful, just the same.

  Despite the necessary caveats, the sagas are just too good, and too valuable, to be dismissed out of hand. According to Viking specialist Else Roesdahl, any account of the Vikings lives and times would be ‘meagre indeed’ without reference to them: ‘Although the historical framework and the chronology may be distorted or wrong, and although additions may have been made for literary or other reasons, many sagas, if read as the literary works they are, undoubtedly contain as much of the reality of the Viking Age as anything that can be reconstructed today,’ she writes. ‘The sagas were closer to the events, and were produced in an age whose ideals and outlook on life were in many ways akin to those of the Viking Age.’

  Just as the search for Vikings is clouded by myth and prejudice, so the trail leading to the start of the Viking Age is confusing in its own right. The evidence for their ancestors — the distant forebears of those who would be Vikings — is slight, so that recreating and understanding their world is fraught with difficulty. The millennia we have looked at so far seem populated only by a handful of characters, each made famous by his or her unlikely survival in the face of so much else that has been lost, or else waits to be found. The hunter-gatherers of Stone Age Ertebølle and Tybrind Vig; the heart-stopping tenderness revealed by the graves at Vedbæk; the mysterious and seemingly far-travelled lord of Kivik; the startling preservation of Bronze Age Egtved Girl, Trindhoj Man and the family from Borum Eshøj; the human sacrifices of the Iron Age, Tollund Man and Huldremose Woman; the Iron Age villagers of Hodde; the ill-fated warriors of the Hjorstspring Boat, the Hoby chieftain with his Roman friends — each of them fascinating and yet together hardly enough to fill the seats on a single-decker bus.