Vikings

by Neil Oliver

  * Runes appeared during the first and second centuries AD, the earliest of them probably in Denmark. For the most part it seems they were raised in tribute to, or in memory of, loved ones, brothers-in-arms, great chieftains and their retainers. Above all they seem intended to demonstrate continuity. Rune stones were most often erected where they could be seen by all — on high ground or beside roads and river crossings. As well as being engraved, the stones were painted in bright colours. Those who have studied the script believe it was contact with the Latin alphabet — the language of Rome — that inspired peoples in southern Scandinavia to come up with writing of their own in the first place. Just as exposure to artworks, jewellery and high-status symbols arriving from elsewhere is likely to prompt the locals to find a reply, so literacy is capable of spreading like a virus. But it surely says something about unchanging human nature that the first runes were used for little more than writing the names of the people who set in place the stones bearing them. Having acquired the limitless possibilities of the written word, finally given the means to express their deepest thoughts in permanent form, the first statements of the rune-carvers amounted to little more than ‘Kilroy was here’.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PAGANS FROM THE NORTH

  ‘Therefore we are going away to another place, where a man isn’t crowded and can come into his own. We are not little men — so we are going away to be kings.’

  Peachy Carnehan, The Man Who Would Be King

  The little Swedish island of Fårö lies just off the northern tip of Gotland, like a raft that has slipped its mooring. Even mainland Swedes tend to misinterpret the name Fårö — hearing in it their word får, meaning ‘sheep’. Since ‘ö’ means island they tend to assume the place is called ‘the island of sheep’ — and given the number of sheep there, it is an easy mistake to make. On Fårö, however, there is a distinct dialect of the Swedish tongue, called Modern Gutnish, which has been spoken in some of the islands since at least the medieval period. Modern Gutnish is derived, as might be expected, from Old Gutnish, another branch of the Old Norse language. For Gutnish speakers on Fårö (and they are few and far between now, among a present total population of fewer than 600 souls) the word for sheep is lamm. On Fårö får has connotations of distance travelled, the journey, and so the name is better understood as either ‘the travellers’ island’ or, even more precisely, ‘the island that must be travelled to’. Since it lies marooned off the coast of an island off the coast of Sweden, it seems like a suitable name.

  The much larger island of Gotland is famous for, among other things, the 380 or so Bronze Age ‘ship settings’ dotted around its coastline. The sea level has lowered during the past 4,000 years and some of the monuments, having once commanded views out over the Baltic, are now strangely land-locked. A visit to the largest of them, at Ansarve, south of Visby, involves walking into the middle of a modern forest. But while ship settings are commonplace on the island, rock art from the period is not. Carvings of ships, people, animals, weapons, lurs and more — existing in their thousands in several parts of mainland Scandinavia — are all but absent on Gotland. Local archaeologist Joakim Wehlin offered to show me the best of them — but explained it would involve making a crossing to Fårö.

  A pair of open-decked car ferries shuttle back and forth across the Fårö strait. The crossing takes just a few minutes but the distance is made more somehow by the flatness of the island as you approach it. Nothing seems to rise above the height of the conifer trees fringing the shore, so that Fårö appears as no more than a thick line on the horizon. The reclusive Swedish film-maker Ingmar Bergman made the island his home — as well as the setting for several of his films — and since his death in 2007 his grave there has become a place of pilgrimage for thousands. Apparently it was something about the quality of the light there that caught his eye, that and the silence. There are no shops or banks on Fårö no policeman and no doctor. One islander who outlived Bergman — an elderly farmer — had never bothered to visit mainland Sweden. Bror Bogren lived alone in the house his great-great-grandfather was born in, with neither electricity nor running water. Fårö is that sort of place. For want of any other guardians, the coastline is watched over, here and there, by rock formations carved out by the last Ice Age. Called rauks, they are actually small sea stacks and they cluster at points along the shore like companies of fossilised sentinels.

  We made our way along one of the few roads on the island until Joakim spotted a barely discernible track heading off to the right into the mostly featureless moorland that spread out on either side. It was no more than a pair of ruts left by some other vehicle and we crawled along it at walking pace for a few hundred yards before coming to a halt in a location safely described as the middle of nowhere. It was a late afternoon in March and the sun was already low in the sky as we got out of our 4x4. Joakim gestured towards a frozen pond in the near distance.

  ‘I’m worried,’ he said. ‘That’s frozen floodwater and it’s lying exactly where the rock art is.’

  He explained the site had only been known about since 1987. An artist out looking for inspiration had stumbled instead upon the work of another. In fact the tableau of artworks we had come in search of had almost certainly been the work of many ancient artists, created over many years. Fårö in the Bronze Age, a heyday of rock-carving, would have been even smaller and more remote. Little more than 40 square miles of low-lying dry land today, the higher sea level then would have ensured it amounted to no more than a fraction of that total 4,000 years ago. Joakim said the spot we were making for, now well inland, would once have been within clear sight of the sea — a watery location that made sense of at least some of the subjects favoured by the artists. As a result of the wider crossing from Gotland, Fårö in those days would have more than lived up to its name as the island that must be travelled to; whoever was making the pilgrimage to this point during the Bronze Age was in thrall to a powerful gravity.

  ‘This would have been a perfect place to meet to discuss important things,’ said Joakim. ‘It required effort and some skill just to get here. People gathering for a meeting would know they had come to a special location, someplace far away.’

  It was cold, with our shadows lengthening by the minute in the lowering sunlight, but the calming silence focused our minds on the job in hand. We walked around the edge of the ice, with Joakim slowly shaking his head. He gestured at a point a few feet out beyond the dry ground, beneath the ice sheet.

  ‘I’m worried,’ he said again. ‘It should be right there.’

  The crust of ice sat on top of just a few inches of water and it seemed worthwhile to risk creeping out just a little, to improve our chances of glimpsing anything lying beneath. Despite the unpromising circumstances I had been feeling strangely optimistic ever since we got out of the car — and with good reason as it turned out. The ice was as transparent as polished window glass and all at once I spotted the unmistakable outline of a long ship, etched into a patch of bedrock just four feet in front of us.

  ‘There! I see it!’ I shouted. ‘Right there!’

  Joakim looked where I was pointing and grinned, almost disbelieving.

  ‘Amazing!’ he said. ‘It’s perfect!’

  And it was perfect. Somehow the ice seemed to affect the low sunlight, sharpening its rays so the carving appeared in stark relief. It all but shone.

  ‘It’s actually easier to see like that,’ said Joakim. ‘It’s clearer through the ice than when I’ve seen it before.’

  From where we were standing the carving was upside down, the ship’s occupants, depicted merely by a series of vertical strokes, appearing like the victims of a capsizing. But it was as clearly visible as the day it was made, cut deeply into the limestone of which Fårö is made. Joakim said there were something like 35 separate carvings on the bedrock there — more ships and also animals, people, swords and bowl-shaped hollows. We were more than content to have spotted just one, and we waited until the last o
f the light left the sky before crunching back onto dry land once more.

  There was something magical in the air around that plain of bedrock trapped beneath its protective shield of ice. The sun was gone, replaced by a bright silver disc of gibbous moon that turned the crust from clear to white. How many sunsets and moonrises had cast their light and shade across that ship carving since its maker walked away from it all those thousands of years before? We see it now just as they saw it then.

  Having made their pilgrimage to the island beyond the island, some of those Bronze Age visitors had felt the need to make and leave a permanent mark, perhaps as visible proof of their attendance there. Still without any version of the written word, pictures and symbols were their only option. Central to what they wanted remembered after they had gone were the boats and ships that brought them there, and carried them away again.

  The Vikings were a long time coming. The product of 8,000 years’ worth of lives lived — hunters, farmers and metal-workers; masters of boats, carved in stone and crafted from timber; traders in amber, furs and oil; warriors and kings; clients of Rome.

  Learned though he undoubtedly was, Alcuin of York either did not know or chose to omit the fact that the despoilers of England’s holy places, in the last years of the eighth century, were very much their own men and women, embarking upon their own adventures for their own reasons. When news reached him of what had happened to his beloved Lindisfarne — and also to the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow — he sat down at his desk in Charlemagne’s academy at Aachen and set about explaining the raids in terms of God’s wrath. The Northumbrian churches had grown rich and bloated during the eighth century, their altar tables creaking under the obscene weight of silver, and the time had apparently come for a reckoning.

  In a letter to King Aethelred of Northumbria he wrote:

  Behold the almost 350 years that we and our ancestors were inhabitants of this fair land, and never before has such a dreadful deed come to pass in Britannia as the one we have now been exposed to in the hands of a pagan people, nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold the Church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples … Can it not be thought that these punishments of blood came upon the people from northern lands?

  These punishments of blood … so that in the mind of an expatriate Englishman like Alcuin, the Vikings were somehow less than real people with their own ideas and ambitions. Instead they seemed to him no more than creatures conjured up by an angry God determined to teach his errant flock a lesson.

  In some respects, that churchman’s pen was mightier than any Viking sword, or axe. For while the nation-shaping significance of the Vikings has been all but forgotten, the caricatured, one-dimensional perception of them created by men like Alcuin has lasted into the present day.

  Archaeologists and historians have learnt to see them as the sons and daughters of a complex, hierarchical society, ultimately inspired by the aspirations of kings connected to the world of international politics; as travellers who ranged from one side of the North Atlantic to the other and from the High Arctic in the north to the Mediterranean Sea in the south, west as far as North America and east to Baghdad. They were warriors and mercenaries of international renown, even the bodyguards of choice of the Byzantine emperors; they were colonisers, builders and engineers who helped shape the destinies of almost every land they touched, and that modern Europe looks and sounds as it does today is due in no small part to Scandinavian men and women who turned their backs on their homelands and set sail for distant horizons.

  Most folk hear the word Viking today, however, and think only of boatloads of axe-wielding, helmeted barbarians.

  They were certainly violent — given to all manner of cruelties and atrocities. But in the context of the medieval Europe of which they were both a part and a product, they were hardly remarkable in that respect. All of the misunderstanding — or rather misrepresentation — sprang first of all from the minds of Christian churchmen for whom the violence of pagans was always unforgivable.

  But while the European men of God saw only Godless villains, the marauders leaping from their long ships onto English beaches had higher aspirations by far. They were men who would be kings — men who had learnt that power could be bought as well as seized and that if they were to reach and maintain positions at the very top of society, then they needed to find the wealth that would make it all possible.

  In the two centuries or so that followed the collapse of the Roman monopoly on power, there arose in parts of Scandinavia a class of men and women who had decided they were without equals (they certainly recognised no superiors). More than just warlords able to retain control as long as their physical strength lasted, they had found ways to ensure their earthly powers outlived them. It was during the sixth and seventh centuries that Scandinavia gave birth to its first true dynasties, lineages through which the magical current of power might pass from one generation to the next.

  The archaeological evidence from Gudme and Lundeborg on the Danish island of Fyn, a settlement at its peak during the fourth century, suggests the rise to dominance of a chieftain who exercised control over trade and religion across a wide area. It is even suggestive of the continuity of that control over time. But on the banks of the River Fyris in Sweden, close to where it flows into Lake Mälaren, is an altogether more impressive site. Gamla (‘Old’) Uppsala is revered by modern Swedes as nothing less than the wellspring of their nation.

  In Germania Tacitus wrote of the Svear, a powerful tribe located in territory centred on Lake Mälaren. The dynasty in question was that of the House of Ynglinga, immortalised in the Ynglinga saga written by the Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson during the 1230s as part of a masterwork called the Heimskringla. According to Sturluson, the Svear were directly descended from the Old Norse God Frey, who took care of fertility, pleasure and peace. Whatever the earthly truth of their origins, the sons and daughters of the House of Ynglinga were dominant in part of southern Sweden by the 500s AD, and it is from the name Svear that the name ‘Sweden’ is derived.

  According to the Ynglinga saga the ruling family were concerned only with battle, hunting and sports. Not for them the daily grind of growing crops or tending animals and instead they had gathered around them willing subjects ready to take care of those mundane concerns on their behalf. The word uppsala refers to the ‘raised hall’ that once dominated the site and, since it had been erected on a man-made platform of clay standing 10 feet above the surrounding farmland, would have been visible for miles around.

  Swedish archaeologist John Ljungkvist, of the University of Uppsala, has conducted several seasons of excavation on the site and has recovered breathtaking evidence of the scale of what he describes as a ‘royal palace’. With walls more than 30 feet high, enclosing an internal space of well over 2,000 square feet, it would likely have dwarfed any other structure in the land. Sometime around AD 800 the building was carefully emptied and cleaned, before being razed to the ground. As a consequence of the burning, the carbonised stumps of the roof-bearing posts were astonishingly well preserved. Also surviving were traces of the lower levels of what had been wattle and daub internal walls of the hall. Still visible were glimpses of some kind of lime-wash, indicating the interior would once have been bright white. John visualises the upright posts, entire trunks of pine trees, as having been carefully finished and carved and possibly brightly painted as well, to create an impact befitting the home of royalty. Four entrances, one at each end of the building’s long sides, were fitted with massive double doors. Carefully wrought iron spirals, examples of which were recovered during the excavations, had been used to decorate the outer faces and so further underline the grandeur of the residents within. Finds of iron nails from horse shoes — inside the building — raised the possibility of men on horseback entering through the double doors as p
art of ritual processions.

  The royal palace would hardly have existed on its own and further excavations nearby, on a second man-made clay platform, revealed traces of all manner of workshops and storerooms. The floor of one sparkled with hundreds of garnets, semi-precious stones resembling rubies, suggesting the workplace of a craftsman employed in the production of luxury jewellery fit for kings and queens.

  As with so many archaeological sites, the eye of faith is a prerequisite when it comes to the great royal hall of Gamla Uppsala. Nothing remains today but the raised platform that once provided the building with its lofty aspect — and most visitors would be forgiven for mistaking it for a natural ridge. Only by looking at the nearby modern timber barn, built to service the needs of the present-day ‘King’s Garden’ farm — and imagining it fitting inside the original hall twice over — can any hint of the past grandeur of the ‘uppsala’ be recreated in the imagination. Instead it is another creation of the Ynglinga kings that provides the real impact, and makes the men and women who once lived and ruled and died there seem altogether more real.

  Walk southwards from the so-called ‘Plateaux of the Royal Demesne’, beyond a twelfth-century church topped with what looks like a million handmade shingles, and you are soon in the shadow of a long curving line of ancient burial mounds. It is these that make the site world-famous and their effect is hardly diminished by the millennia and a half that have passed since the first of them was raised. Like vertebrae on the spine of a giant, curled and sleeping beneath the grass, they stretch off into the near distance.

  People have been buried at Gamla Uppsala for 2,000 years and more and it is estimated that there were once between 2,000 and 3,000 individual mounds there, suggesting a place that has mattered since long before the advent of the modern world. Most of the tumuli have been erased by the labour of farmers during the intervening centuries and now just 250 or so remain. The largest of them — the Ting Mound, the East Mound, the Central Mound and the West Mound — are on a truly monumental scale. Standing between 30 and 40 feet high and with footprints like half a football pitch, they each represent thousands of hours of human labour. There is nothing random about the positioning of the great mounds. The builders of the first of them selected a natural ridge of higher ground that served further to elevate the last resting places of those revered dead.