by Neil Oliver
By the start of the nineteenth century they were regarded as powerful symbols of Swedish nationalism. A visit to the mounds in 1834 by the Crown Prince was immortalised in a now famous painting. Such was the enduring relevance of the place it was only natural for a member of the reigning royal family — the future King Karl XV — to make a pilgrimage to Gamla Uppsala and thereby add a priceless veneer of legitimacy to his family’s grip on the throne. And so when learned theories began to circulate in the 1830s, suggesting they were nothing more than natural humps and bumps, many were scandalised. The Crown Prince himself demanded the tittle-tattle be settled scientifically, and an eminent antiquarian named Bror Emil Hildebrand was given the job of excavating the East Mound in 1846.
Rather than taking a slice out of the thing — as would be the modern archaeological approach — Hildebrand commissioned a team of miners to burrow nearly 30 yards towards its centre. It was a dangerous enterprise and the miners had to cope with several collapses of the tunnel’s roof. Despite hopes of finding royal finery, all that was unearthed at the end of the tunnel was a clay urn, filled to the brim with burnt human bones. Scattered around the pot were some fragments of melted grave goods. Nearly three decades later, in 1874, Hildebrand set to work on the West Mound. This time he employed a gang of labourers to excavate a deep gallery, removing what was effectively a huge slice of the cake. Towards the bottom they unearthed a small cairn of stones, beneath which were sealed traces of a funeral pyre, more cremated human bones and more pieces of melted metalwork.
For a nineteenth-century antiquarian in search of the burial of his nation’s first royal family, the meagre traces were a bitter disappointment. Faith in the Gamla Uppsala mounds as the graves of the kings and queens was severely shaken.
Nowadays archaeologists know better — and have interpreted Hildebrand’s finds as evidence of high-status burials. Before the mound was heaped up, the body and grave goods were burnt upon a funeral pyre of such intensity that little survived the flames. This had been the intention of the mourners after all — a determined attempt to transform the corpse into something belonging more to the sky than to the earth. It had been the first farmers, thousands of years before, who had alighted upon the notion of heaven above. Having decided that the best of them — leaders perhaps, or priests — deserved a different kind of afterlife, they chose fire as the medium by which their flesh and bone might be persuaded to rise above windswept heights. The transformative power of the flames was still revered by the time of the first kings and so the building of the mounds was only the final stage of a ritual process designed to put their remains beyond the reach of men. In the words of the Ynglinga saga:
Odin decided that all dead should be burnt on a pyre … He said that each one should come to Valhalla with the possessions he had with him on the pyre … It was their belief that the higher the smoke rose the higher the position he would reach and the more of his possessions that burned with him the more powerful he would become.
Included among the finds from the East Mound, the first to be excavated, were pieces of flat bronze plate bearing the image of a spear-carrier — interpreted as parts of a warrior’s helmet — along with fragments of gold thought to have been part of the decoration of a single-edged knife called a scramasax. Also present were bits and pieces of glass, a bone comb, a whetstone and pieces from a board game. Less than prepossessing to nineteenth-century eyes, the artefacts are indeed suggestive of high rank, even royalty. More intriguing is the possibility it was a woman rather than a man who was the focus of the burial.
The West Mound by contrast contained the cremated remains of a man, surrounded by those of animals sacrificed and sent along with him as provisions for the journey. Placed alongside him on the pyre, and all but destroyed by the intense heat, were a gold and jewel-encrusted Frankish sword and a board game similar to that which had accompanied the woman in the East Mound. Other traces suggested his clothes may have been stitched with gold and there were also fragments of four cameos, eastern in origin and likely once the decorations on some kind of box or casket.
Close by the Ting Mound is a modern museum, shaped like a cross between a timber-built longhouse and an upturned boat. It provoked a flurry of protests when it opened in 2000 but by now the shiplap exterior has weathered and matured so that it seems perfectly at home on the site. As well as housing artefacts recovered over the years, from the mounds and the rest of the site, it also features fascinating displays explaining what the site has meant to Sweden and Swedes down the centuries.
Here visitors will also find references to a rather more grisly aspect of Gamla Uppsala — namely the rumoured existence in ancient times of a pagan temple that was witness to human sacrifice on a near-industrial scale. Much of the ‘evidence’ is contained in the writings of the eleventh-century German churchman Adam of Bremen, who was at work during the early phase of the conversion to Christianity of the Scandinavian peoples. In his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum — ‘Deeds of Bishops of the Hamburg Church’ — he wrote at length about the geography and people of Christendom’s most northerly territories, and also about their customs.
Although he never actually visited Gamla Uppsala, by all accounts he interviewed credible witnesses who had made the trip. Armed with those second-hand details, he set about recording the beliefs and practices of the benighted pagans. With thinly veiled horror he described a great temple decorated with gold and containing idols dedicated to the most powerful of the Old Norse gods. Thor, the God of Thunder (and by some measure the most powerful of them all), had pride of place in the middle of the line-up, while Odin, the one-eyed father of the gods and Frey, master of fertility, pleasure and peace, sat either side. ‘If plague or famine threatens, sacrifices are made to Thor’s statue,’ wrote the churchman. ‘If war is imminent, to Odin. If a wedding is to be celebrated, to Frey …’
The meat of sacrificed animals was then cooked and eaten in the great hall as part of rituals and ceremonies designed to ensure good fortune for all. Even after a thousand years, however, Adam’s account of the nature of some of the sacrifices is nothing short of chilling:
The sacrifice is as follows: for every living creature that is male, nine are sacrificed, the blood of which is offered to appease the gods. Their bodies, moreover, are hanged in a grove that is adjacent to the temple. This grove is so sacred to the people that the separate trees in it are believed to be holy because of the death or putrefaction of the sacrificial victims. There even dogs and horses hang beside human beings. (A certain Christian told me that he had seen seventy-two of their bodies hanging up together.) The incantations, however, which are usually sung in the performance of a libation of this kind are numerous and disgraceful, and it is better not to speak of them.
Adam of Bremen was understandably horrified. Even if he was allowing himself a generous margin of artistic licence — the better to persuade his readers of the rightness of conversion — there is no the doubt the ancestors of the Vikings, and the Vikings themselves, were given to ritual bloodletting. Such practices were known collectively as blót from the verb blóta, meaning ‘to make strong’. Blood was powerful magic and it was customary to sprinkle some on the statues of the gods, on the walls of temples and on the rocks and trees of sacred groves, and also on the rituals’ participants. Spilled and spread in such ways, the shining crimson stuff of life was intended to ensure the fertility of earth and animals alike. It was the duty of the ruler to perform the rites and if crops failed thereafter, or if animals failed to multiply, he was held accountable. Within the pages of the Ynglinga saga there is an account of a luckless king whose rule coincided with a severe famine.
The Chieftains had a counsel and agreed that their king Domalde was the cause of the plight and that they should sacrifice him for good crops and kill him and stain the sacrificial spot red with his blood. They did so.
Whenever I read about the business of sacrifice in pagan times I think too about the Christian rites that replac
ed them — specifically Communion. After uncounted centuries during which innocent blood was spilled for the sake of the greater good, followers of the new religion were offered the body of Christ himself, that his flesh might sustain them:
Take this, all of you, and eat it: this is my body which will be given up for you … Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you …
Archaeologists have searched Gamla Uppsala for traces of the fabled temple — but with inconclusive results. Excavations in 1926, beneath the floor of the twelfth-century church close by the site of the great hall, revealed large timber posts. These were interpreted at the time as proof of the temple’s existence, but more recently it has been assumed they relate only to an earlier royal residence, yet another in a presumably long line of raised halls at Uppsala.
For all the undoubted significance of Gamla Uppsala, its centuries-long role as a spiritual and political centre, it is another site in Sweden that gives its name to the last centuries before the coming of the Vikings proper. Vendel is a cemetery a few miles away to the north, further along the River Fyris, where archaeologists have excavated graves so richly furnished they can only have belonged to kings. Another collection of high-status burials has been excavated at nearby Valsgärde and the three locations are understood to have been contemporary with one another. Kings and queens of the Ynglinga dynasty of Gamla Uppsala were buried at all three.
Both Vendel and Valsgärde were in use from sometime in the early seventh century until the end of the Viking Age itself. Vendel was excavated first, during the 1880s, and found to contain 15 boat burials. Some of the boats were as much as 30 feet long and rather than having been burnt — as were the bodies and grave goods at Gamla Uppsala — they and their occupants had gone into the ground intact, surrounded by weaponry of the finest sort. They were also accompanied by food and other provisions for the journey into the next life, as well as by the horses and hunting dogs demanded by their status and preferred pastimes. Comparisons have been made with the grave goods found in the ship burial excavated at the famous site of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk at the start of the Second World War.
(The epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, set in Scandinavia but composed in England by an unknown genius sometime between the eighth and the eleventh centuries, recounts the deeds of the eponymous hero, a warrior of the Geats [Goths]. Curiouser and curiouser, the poem makes mention of the Scyflings — a variant of Ynglinga — and also of a warrior named Othere. Near to Vendel, at a place called Husby, is a burial mound known to the locals as ‘Othere’s Mound’. An excavation there in 1917 revealed the remains of a powerfully built man who had been buried sometime in the sixth century — so the lines separating history, saga and fiction become pleasingly blurred.)
Valsgärde was excavated in the 1920s and yielded a total of 15 boat burials accompanied, like those at Vendel, by splendid weaponry. As well as the boat burials there were 80 other graves at Valsgärde, mostly simple cremations. One dated to the eighth century AD, however, was found on the highest point of a ridge overlooking the rest of the cemetery — clearly the prime location in the site — and contained the cremated remains of a woman. It has been suggested that the topography was employed to exaggerate the scale of the mound, making it appear much larger than it really is. Whoever she was — queen, priestess, seer or just dearly loved mother or wife — she seemingly mattered as much as any man in the cemetery.
It is the thought of those land-locked boats I find most affecting of all. Each of the honoured dead was supplied with weaponry and armour made by the most skilled craftsmen of the age. There were cooking vessels too, cauldrons and drinking glasses for feasting, hunting gear and the horses and dogs to make the hunt possible in the next world. But somehow the beautifully crafted vessels, revealed in the main by iron rivets and shadows in the soil, are the most loaded portents. Central to the thinking of these people was the boat journey — in life as in death. Where else could they go, but out into the wider world?
The very existence of a class able to contemplate such an afterlife — confident of their control over both the resources and the dependent population willing to generate the necessary surplus — suggests stability. The boats in which the best of them chose to be buried should also be interpreted as symbols of power. Wealth was based in large part upon control of trade and in such a world it was the people in possession of the boats (and their crews) who called the shots.
Across Scandinavia archaeologists have identified around 1,500 fortified sites from the pre-Viking era. The majority remain unexcavated and therefore difficult to date, but those that have been subjected to excavation began life during the fourth and fifth centuries, while much of Europe was in the grip of the Migration Period. At first glance such places might seem to suggest turbulent times. But archaeologists and historians have come to see the forts as the hubs of an organised and largely peaceful society.
By the time of the Vendel Period some of those centres were at the heart of wide-ranging, long-distance trade. In the years immediately prior to the Viking Age a settlement on the small island of Helgö, offshore from Ekerö on Lake Mälaren, was a thriving trading centre. In many ways it is an unremarkable site — the buildings were of the size and sort expected of any agricultural settlement in post-Roman Iron Age Scandinavia and the graves in the nearby cemetery contained only modest grave goods. But excavation has revealed the population living in Helgö was unusually busy making jewellery and decorative items of all sorts, as well as swords, tools and other domestic objects. Along with traces of the finished items themselves, archaeologists have recovered hundreds of the crucibles used for weighing and measuring metals, as well as moulds for casting them.
More exciting however are the imported items, which reveal contacts far and wide. More than 80 gold coins have been unearthed, including a hoard of 47 collected from territories in both the Eastern and Western Roman empires.
Archaeologists also found a little trio of objects that are known collectively as the Helgö treasure. Perhaps the most surprising is a three-inch-tall bronze Buddha, seated on a lotus throne. It may well have been made as far away as North India, in either the sixth or the seventh century, and yet it was somehow passed from merchant to merchant all the way to a little island in a Swedish lake. The rich green patina of age gives it the look not of metal but of jade, and close inspection reveals it was once richly detailed — blue crystal for the eyes, flashes of colour on the lips and eyebrows, a caste mark on the forehead containing silver. Like all statues of Buddha, the face is softened by that familiar, inscrutable smile.
Next is the beautifully crafted and richly inlaid bronze headpiece of a bishop’s crozier, likely made in Ireland in the eighth century and taking the form of a monstrous beast swallowing a cowering man. It has been interpreted as depicting Jonah in the belly of the whale — symbolic of resurrection or rebirth. It is surprisingly small, but certainly beautiful; testament to the dedication and skill of yet another anonymous craftsman. You look at it and wonder just how it came to be here, in a museum in Stockholm. Given the likely importance of Helgö, perhaps the crozier arrived there in the hands of the bishop who owned it. In any event its appearance in a village on a Swedish island is as surprising as would be the discovery of a pair of Swedish skis beneath the paved floor of a Thai temple.
Best in my opinion, or most captivating at least, is a bronze Coptic ladle from somewhere in North Africa, perhaps Egypt. The size of a teacup, it has a pleasing, substantial heft in the hands. Like the Buddha it has a rich patina but in this case a much darker green hue, like that of deep water. All three of the items in the treasure are the products of faith, and in the case of the ladle it is that form of Christianity that preceded the advent of Islam into Africa. In its day it would have been used during baptisms, for the pouring of holy water onto the heads of those being welcomed into the Church. It has been dented slightly out of shape at some point in a
ntiquity, but the damage does nothing to lessen its appeal. In fact for me it enhances the attraction. It has the look of something well used, and presumably well loved — connected by its function to hundreds or even thousands of people long dead.
As well as working bronze and iron, and importing gold coins that could be melted down and recast as jewellery, the people of Helgö exported commodities sourced locally and also brought in from the far north of Scandinavia — animal furs, eiderdown, amber and oils — all of it being gathered at places like Helgö ready for onward transportation to markets south, east and west. In the years both before and after the start of the Viking Age the settlement was a key hub around which revolved a truly international trade network.
There is also evidence at Helgö of the production of little figurines associated with pagan worship, so that the significance of the settlement was enhanced by its role as a spiritual centre. The name Helgö in fact means ‘Holy Island’.
The existence of such places — royal palaces and burial grounds, noble strongholds, centres for the import and export of luxuries, centres of worship — presupposes the presence of the kings and queens themselves.
Monarchs are also enthusiastic about defining and extending the boundaries of their kingdoms and it was during the first half of the eighth century that work got under way in Denmark on the great boundary wall known as the Danevirke. One of the largest ancient defensive structures in northern Europe, it was raised in the borderlands between Denmark and the territories on the southern parts of the Jutland peninsula occupied by Saxons and Slavs. There are no written records detailing why the Danevirke was built, or by whom; but the earliest phases of its construction coincide with a period when a variety of political and military muscles were being flexed. The various lengths of ramparts, ditches and timber revetments stretch the best part of 20 miles and dendrochronology has revealed that the trees used in the building of the earliest parts of it could have been felled no earlier than AD 737. Charles Martel, ruler of the Franks, went to war with the Saxons in 738. His grandson, Charlemagne, did likewise during the 770s and 780s, eventually bringing the Saxons to heel and so making neighbours of the Danes.
