Vikings

by Neil Oliver

  There are written records of a powerful Danish king called Ongendus, who violently opposed attempts made by Frankish Christians to convert him and his people to the new faith during the early decades of the eighth century. By AD 808 the Danish King Godfred had occupied the trading port of Hedeby, on the eastern coast of the Jutland peninsula. He went on to destroy the nearby Slavic port of Reric before forcibly transplanting all of its merchants to Hedeby, and commissioned a defensive wall stretching from the Baltic to the North Sea. Efforts are still being made by archaeologists to piece together the dates for the various stretches of the Danevirke, but it is at least fair to imagine its construction was provoked by military and political posturing by powerful individuals in the years either side of the start of the Viking Age.

  Kings among the Danes then, and the Svear too, at least as early as the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. Perhaps it is still too early to imagine a single king of a unified Denmark, far less of a recognisable Sweden, but the leaders of the dominant dynasties — the Ynglinga of the Svear among them — were certainly kingly. Norway was always the hardest country of the three, all but impossible for men to subdue and claim as their own, yet even here the archaeology reveals the emergence of elites.

  Once the royal dynasties were established, their legitimacy underlined and reinforced by successive generations, opportunities for the personal advancement of other men became increasingly hard to come by. As the handful of kings and queens expanded their territories, those families lacking the clout and wealth to challenge them found they faced a stark choice: either to kowtow and accept the status quo, or seek the wherewithal to change the situation in their favour. If that meant embarking on hazardous sea journeys in search of the riches that might underwrite a claim on a Scandinavian throne, then so be it.

  The Historia Regum Anglorum, edited in the main by an English monk called Symeon of Durham, has in it the most vivid account of what happened to the religious community on the tidal island of Lindisfarne in 793 AD:

  In the fourth year of King Ethelred, dreadful prodigies terrified the wretched nation of England. For horrible lightning and dragons in the air and fiery flashes were often seen to gleam and fly to and fro; and these signs signified a great famine and the fearful and indescribable slaughter of many men which followed … In the same year pagans from the north-eastern regions came with a naval force to Britain like stinging hornets and spread on all sides like dire wolves robbed, tore and slaughtered not only beasts of burden, sheep and oxen but even priests and deacons and companies of monks and nuns. And they came to the church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of holy church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters, many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea.

  Symeon of Durham was at work around 1110, and yet for all the passage of time between the events themselves and his own writing, the grief and outrage seem undiminished.

  When it comes to considering the Vikings’ spectacular appearance centre-stage, there is something else in the words of Alcuin of York, surely the most famous chronicler of the legendary affront to Christianity, that is of crucial interest. As well as identifying and accepting the wrath of God, he seems to make it plain no one on the east coast of Britain in the eighth century saw any reason to fear attack from the sea.

  Presumably people there were so wrapped up in worrying about strife from their neighbours on land that they had forgotten the sea might one day bring trouble as well. So when Alcuin expressed the shock felt at the source of their grief — ‘nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made’ — he highlighted the special impact of the Vikings’ modus operandi: amphibious assault aboard ships the like of which the western world had not yet seen.

  The ship was part of the Scandinavian world for thousands of years before any Viking ever put to sea in one. Even the symmetrical outline of what became known as the ‘dragon ship’ — a long, sleek vessel with upwards-thrusting prows at each end — was popular among the rock artists of the Bronze Age. But during the last couple of centuries before the raids on Britain’s eastern seaboard, ship-builders working in Scandinavia hit upon an innovation that would change everything, pulling the future towards them like a fish hooked on the end of a line.

  From their first depictions during the second millennium BC up to the early seventh century, Scandinavian ships were without sails. While sails were in use earlier elsewhere, Baltic mariners always propelled their vessels with paddles or oars and the muscles of many men. The beautiful Hjortspring Boat — given up to the pagan gods sometime between 400 and 300 BC — serves as a classic early example of the favoured style: around 30 to 40 feet long and with a narrow, upturned prow and stern and room aboard for perhaps two dozen oarsmen.

  But during the seventh century AD the Scandinavian boat-builders invented the keel, a single large timber running the length of the vessel and acting as its backbone. The English word ‘keel’ — like the French quille — is derived from the Old Norse word kjolr and the difference the feature made to the seaworthiness of ships is still one of the great contributions to the world by those ancient mariners. The earlier vessels, without keels, had been flat-bottomed and so ideal for navigating shallow rivers. They had lacked the strength and stability required for voyages far into the open sea, however, and their sides had also been too low to prevent them being swamped by the Atlantic swells.

  The Hjortspring Boat was clinker-built, with the side planks (or strakes) overlapping one another and stitched together with fibres made of twisted bark. Later boats were pinned together, first with wooden pegs and later with iron nails or rivets. But always in the case of the earlier craft the hull depended, for its rigidity, upon an internal framework of timbers. Vessels assembled in this way were heavy and also structurally weak. Since the addition of a mast tall enough to support a large sail would only have added to the stresses upon the whole, rowing was effectively the only option.

  Once the value of the keel was understood, it became the starting point for the whole construction process (hence the expression ‘to lay the keel’, which is often used to describe the vitally important first part of any big project).

  Fashioned from the trunk of a single oak tree (or other hard wood), the keel was either stressed to provide the familiar curved profile, or else had specially made timbers fitted to it at either end to provide the symmetrical prow and the stern. While the technique meant the size of the finished ships would always be limited by the height of the available trees, the addition of a flexible spine enabled the craft to respond, like a living creature, to the powerful forces exerted upon it by the sea. The side strakes were added next, gradually building up the elegant U-shaped hull. All of the shaping — of keel, strakes and all the other timber fittings — was achieved by the skilled use of axes. With a keen eye, the carpenters selected naturally curved trees and branches that already bore a similarity to the shape desired for the finished pieces. Rather than sawn, the strakes were split radially from the logs. All of this axe work took advantage of the natural grain of the wood, with the result that every part of the finished vessel was stronger and more flexible than anything cut out with a saw.

  Another familiar English word is derived from the practices of the Norse sailors. A modified paddle, called the ‘steer-board’ (the Vikings would have said styra — to steer) was the means by which the craft was steered. Mounted always on the right-hand side of the hull, towards the stern, it performed the same function as a rudder. The familiar maritime word for the right-hand side of any vessel — the ‘starboard’ — is thus a corruption of the Vikings’ steer-board.

  The mast, anything up to 60 feet high and usually crafted from the tall, straight trunk of a pine tree, was mounted exactly in the centre of the ship — ‘amidships’ — meaning it could be sailed backwards or forwards at will. One o
r two crossbars supported the weight of as much as 1,000 square feet of sail, and rigging too served to keep it firmly in place. Held in position by a wedge of wood, the mast could be lowered towards the stern when the sail was not in use. These new ships of the Scandinavian design were structurally stronger than anything that had gone before; and since the hull was stronger it could support a larger mast and sail that in turn provided a greater turn of speed. If the wind dropped or, worse still, was against their direction of travel, the men had no option but to take to the oars. These were pushed through closable holes in the sides of the ship and then, seated either upon specially fitted benches or simply on the chests and boxes that contained each man’s personal belongings, they set themselves to hard, rhythmic rowing that could propel them almost as fast as the sail.

  While the world has long since grown familiar with the iconic idea of the Viking ship, there were in fact several different types of vessel, employed for specific types of voyage. The craft pulled hastily ashore on the beach at Lindisfarne by heavily armed, ruthless raiders was a drakkar — a quintessential ‘long ship’ — and the sort that most fully conforms to the description above. Subsquently labelled dragon ships by their victims and enemies (after the carved dragons many had for their figureheads), they were fast-moving ships of war designed and used by fighting men. By the standards of the day they were large vessels — as much as 120 feet long and able to carry perhaps 80 armed men at a time when the English chroniclers were accustomed to describing bands even 30-strong as ‘armies’. The easily raised and lowered sail offered valuable flexibility for military manoeuvres and for seizing the element of surprise in lightning attacks; combined with a spectacularly shallow draught, it made it easy to pass beneath bridges and across shallow rivers. Also invaluable was the option of switching at will between sail and oars. If the dragon heads were not enough to strike fear into the hearts of those watching the approach of such vessels, the warriors also placed their shields into specially designed shield-battens fitted onto the outer edge of the topmost strake. If anyone doubted the violent intent of the men pulling on the oars, the sight of the brazenly painted shields, appearing like dragons’ scales, would have made it plain bloodshed was in the offing.

  The advantages of the dragon ships were certainly numerous, but it is worth bearing in mind that speed had been achieved at a heavy price. Such craft had relatively little space either for provisions or cargo (or rather booty) and offered next to nothing by way of shelter for the crew.

  Some of the best insights into Viking ship-building technology came in 1962, with the discovery of the wrecks of five Viking ships in the harbour at Skuldelev, by Roskilde, in Denmark. They had been deliberately scuttled nearly 10 centuries before, in a bid to block access to the Roskilde fjord, and their millennia in the mud of the seabed ensured remarkable preservation. In 2004 a reconstruction of one of them set out upon the 1,000-nautical-mile journey from Roskilde to Dublin — where Viking craftsmen had built the original vessel (known to archaeologists as Skuldelev 2) all those years before. Named the Sea Stallion, she is the product of four years of painstaking work by modern craftsmen carefully replicating the techniques of their ancient predecessors.

  As part of a project for the BBC, I travelled with a television crew to intercept the Sea Stallion, as she made her way across the North Sea, at a point some scores of miles north of the Orkney Islands. Etched into my memory is the moment we first caught sight of our quarry, from the rain-lashed deck of the modern vessel we had boarded many hours before in Kirkwall. Suddenly, on the horizon and still some miles distant, appeared a glimpse of a lost world. Reconstruction she might have been but she was a dragon ship just the same. The best part of a hundred feet long, her fragile-seeming silhouette was heartbreaking and heart-stirring at the same time. Rather than dragon ship, perhaps there was somehow more of the dragonfly in the way her long, lean hull sat so lightly upon the swell, as if ready to take flight at any moment. Our own ship seemed only utilitarian by comparison, built just to get a job done and lacking anything in the way of panache or flair. As we drew closer we could see that the Sea Stallion’s sail, bulging with the weight of the wind, was brightly, arrogantly striped — orange and yellow. Her gunwales too were painted in rainbow colours.

  Almost garish to modern eyes, it seemed the paint-job was of the sort that would indeed have been fashionable a thousand years ago. Included within the Encomium Emmae Reginae (written by a monk working in the monastery of St Omer, in Flanders, in the 1040s and styled to honour Queen Emma of Normandy) is an account of a visit to Normandy in 1013 by the fleet commanded by King Svein Forkbeard of Denmark:

  When at length they were all gathered, they went onboard the towered ships, having picked out by observation each man his own leader on the brazen prows. On one side lions moulded in gold were to be seen on the ships, on the other birds on the tops of the masts indicated by their movements the winds as they blew, or dragons of various kinds poured fire from their nostrils. Here there were glittering men of solid gold or silver nearly comparable to live ones, there bulls with necks raised high and legs outstretched were fashioned leaping and roaring like live ones. One might see dolphins moulded in electrum, and centaurs in the same metal, recalling the ancient fable. In addition I might describe to you many examples of the same embossing, if the names of the monsters which were fashioned there were known to me. But why should I now dwell upon the sides of the ships, which were not only painted with ornate colours but were covered with gold and silver figures? The royal vessel excelled the others in beauty as much as the king preceded the soldiers in the honour of his proper dignity, concerning which it is better that I be silent than that I speak inadequately. Placing their confidence in such a fleet, when the signal was suddenly given, they set out gladly, and, as they had been ordered, placed themselves round about the royal vessel with level prows, some in front and some behind. The blue water, smitten by many oars, might be seen foaming far and wide, and the sunlight, cast back in the gleam of metal, spread a double radiance in the air.

  After much jockeying for position, at a speed of 10 knots or so, our vessel came alongside the dragon ship just long enough for me and the camera crew to clamber aboard. All in a moment we became aware just how demanding a craft the Sea Stallion actually was. She was crewed by volunteers — some with an interest in sailing, together with the necessary skills, and some without. But seasoned or not, their very being, after many days at sea, made clear just how uncomfortable and trying an experience the crossing was proving to be for people used to the comforts of the twenty-first century.

  Since she was making good headway under sail, the crew was mostly redundant — no pulling on the oars required — and so were doing their best simply to protect themselves from the drenching spray from waves crashing relentlessly against the hull. With only stretched tarpaulins for shelter, every man and woman aboard, together, it seemed, with all of their belongings and provisions, was utterly soaked. Within minutes I became aware how the salt water stung the eyes and worked its way past the collars and cuffs of even the best modern sailing gear. Nothing could have been more wet, or colder for that matter — not even if the vessel been proceeding underwater. These were proud Scandinavians in the main, as keen to be aboard as any man or woman alive, and yet the prevailing mood could only fairly be described as one of abject misery. They were days out from Denmark and facing many more ahead before landfall in Dublin. It might well have been one of the experiences of a lifetime — but surely better looked back upon later, rather than truly enjoyed at the time. The hour I spent aboard was more than enough to demonstrate at least some of the physical and mental challenges posed by those voyages made long ago. It struck me forcibly that by the time the ancient Vikings made landfall on the British Isles, their mood would have been harsh and unforgiving, to say the least.

  Although they travelled aboard the most technically advanced vessels of the age, the Vikings nonetheless pitted themselves against some of the most dang
erous stretches of water on Earth. Staying in sight of land as much as possible minimised perilous time spent in the open sea. From a suitable point of departure on the Danish west coast to a destination on the east coast of Britain is a journey of no more than a day and a half (weather and winds permitting, of course). The more legendary, though eminently achievable crossing of the Atlantic would have exploited the possibility of using Iceland and Greenland as stepping stones along the way; and a journey from Norway to Iceland could have been broken with lay-overs in the Faroes or on Shetland.

  The Vikings also made use of a number of relatively simple navigational techniques to help them reach their destinations. As well as observing and making reference to the movement of the lights in the sky — principally the sun and the moon — they also made use of a primitive type of astrolabe to estimate latitude. Calculation of longitude was many centuries beyond them, but there was also the experience acquired by others and passed on, generation after generation. Speed through the water — and therefore distance travelled — might be estimated by taking account of the force and direction of the wind. There were also more subtle cues and hints: the rhythm and timing of waves against the stern, variations in water colour as they approached land, the presence or absence of birds and the behaviour of fish and other sea creatures. All of it provided crucial information that could, in the hands of experienced mariners, make the difference between life and death in the open sea.