Vikings

by Neil Oliver

  Within a couple of centuries of the first waves of expansion, foreign chroniclers were laying the blame — for all that had befallen them at the hands of the Northmen — fairly and squarely on over-population in the Scandinavian homelands. The Vikings were well known to have an insatiable appetite for women after all, and it therefore made sense to imagine that too many couplings had fathered more offspring than could usefully be absorbed at home. All those illegitimate sons and daughters had had to go elsewhere in search of living space and land to farm. Added to over-breeding has been the idea that naked, barbaric aggression by peoples ignorant of Christianity simply inspired the pagans to put to sea in their thousands in search of Godly people to terrorise.

  None of this seems entirely satisfactory, however. While there may be some truth in what many of the later Icelandic sagas declare — that men set off on those first Viking voyages in search of the honour and wealth they needed to make names for themselves back home — the activity of the Scandinavians makes much more sense when examined in the context of what else was happening in Europe around the same time.

  From the seventh century onwards there had been a quite rapid expansion of trade and the growth of what can only be described as international markets. As we have already seen, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England were relatively stable and prosperous and Charlemagne’s efforts in Frankia had unified and pacified a large part of the population of north-western Europe. By the eighth century there were well-established ports and trading centres at Southampton, London and York in England; Dorestad on the Rhine; Quentovic on the Canche, south of Boulogne; Birka, Hedeby, Kaupang and Ribe in Sweden and at various locations along the Baltic coasts of Germany, Poland and Russia.

  For all the fascination exerted by the possibility of fecund overpopulation by heathen savages, and the questing for wealth and glory by ambitious young blades with nothing to lose and all to gain, there may be a more straightforward explanation for the sudden Viking expansion. They simply looked out from their own fjords and bays, saw how well the neighbours were doing in their marketplaces, and set about claiming as much of it as possible for themselves. Close to the mouths of the Oder and the Vistula rivers (tempting routes leading via the Danube to the Black Sea and beyond) were yet more trading centres. Tribes like the Obotrites, the Rugieris and the Wiltzi, in what is now eastern Germany, or the Pomeranians and the Wolins in the territory of modern Poland, established important and influential port towns around their own parts of the Baltic coastline.

  By the middle years of the eighth century adventurers hailing from the east coast of Sweden had grown familiar with a route that led into what is now described as the Gulf of Finland, on Russia’s north-eastern coast. At the neck of the gulf they had found the mouth of the Neva River and from there it was a short jaunt upstream, past what would one day be the site of the city of St Petersburg, and into Lake Ladoga. By as early as AD 753 there was a trading centre at a site known now as Staraya (Old) Ladoga, on the banks of the Volkhov River where it is joined by a tributary called the Ladoshka. This is Russia’s oldest town, established by various peoples who had developed an interest in using the river systems as a route back and forth across the interior. There were certainly Balts, Finns and Slavs there at that early date, but at least a few of the founding fathers were Swedish Vikings.

  Russia’s oldest permanent settlement it may be, but it is a strangely forlorn place today. The nearby town of Volkhov is desperately run down, flanked on its outskirts by factories or power stations belching smoke from tall chimneys. The homes of the inhabitants are either simple wooden buildings or the sort of soulless concrete blocks of flats, arranged in grid patterns, that spring to mind at the mention of ‘Soviet Union’. The streets are as potholed, and the pavements as shattered and collapsed, as anything in the poorest rural market towns of any southern African country.

  In need of some provisions at 7 a.m. on the morning after we arrived, we called in at the only open shop we could find — a tiny ‘24-hour’ place that bristled with barbed wire. Inside, illuminated by naked bulbs, the counters and shelves carried a depressing selection of unappetising processed foods as well as the ubiquitous Snickers, Mars bars and Cokes. Maybe we were just in an especially poor part of town, but it seemed typical of the whole. The passage of 20-odd years since the fall of the Iron Curtain does not seem to have done any obvious favours for the people living thereabouts. The area clearly mattered during the Viking Age, and Staraya Ladoga has been described as the first capital of Russia — but that time is long past.

  Apart from a break for the Second World War, the site of Staraya Ladoga itself has been excavated annually for the last 101 years. Russia is proud of its early founding and its Scandinavian heritage and much has been done to make the most of the archaeological evidence. It may be a bit much to call it a town — at least in the way we understand and apply the term. But it was certainly both a way station for travellers and a thriving centre full of workshops and yards dedicated to all manner of crafts and trades. The date of AD 753 — the time of the first permanent buildings — was obtained by dendrochronology, carried out on surviving structural timbers; but far more impressive is the scale of the traffic that once passed through the settlement. Finds of Arabic dirhams minted between 749 and 786 indicate that valuable commodities were travelling westwards, down the Volkhov, in great quantities and possibly from an earlier date. It has been estimated that around a quarter of a million such coins passed downriver through Staraya Ladoga during the Viking Age, all of them headed for Scandinavia. The vast majority seem to have ended up in Sweden, where around 80,000 dirhams have been found, mostly in the form of hoards. Some 4,000 or so have been recovered in Denmark and only a few hundreds in Norway, where most trade was based around the exchange of goods rather than payment with coins.

  On the opposite side of the river, and just visible from Staraya Ladoga, is the only exclusively Viking, or at least Scandinavian, cemetery in all of Russia. This is the site called Plakun where the excavation of graves has produced, in the main, finds of cremated human bone in clay pots and urns. There have been grave goods too, although nothing remarkable. The earliest dates are from the middle of the ninth century.

  Artefacts excavated from Staraya Ladoga are stored today within the State Hermitage in St Petersburg. Having been established by Catherine the Great in 1764, it qualifies as one of the oldest museums in the world. A staggeringly over-the-top confection of a place — painted white, lime-green and gold so that it has something of the look of a gigantic wedding cake — it is home to a collection of more than three million objects, only a fraction of which are on display. Well away from the public gaze, in cupboards tucked safely behind the scenes, are the Viking finds from the nation’s first town.

  While the gold, silver, jewels and priceless works of art in the Hermitage’s many rooms and galleries are undoubtedly jaw-dropping, the things left behind by Russia’s earliest Scandinavian settlers are at least as affecting, if only because they are on a human scale. A hoard of iron tools dating from the middle years of the eighth century included all manner of tongs and other bits and pieces of a skilled craftsman’s equipment — all in such good condition they were still usable. The hoard had been buried inside a wooden box, on top of which was a bronze amulet of approximately the same date. Just a couple of inches long, it was in the form of the head of a bearded man with long, neatly dressed straight hair. On top of his head are two curling horns, topped with what are thought to be ravens. The piece may once have been part of a key, or perhaps the handle of a pointer, but the head is thought to be a depiction of the Norse god Odin. According to tradition, Odin sent a pair of ravens into the world every day so that they could report back with any interesting news. The object may have been buried with the hoard so that its contents were protected.

  Many of the artefacts recovered are fascinating because they reveal it was not just Viking men at Staraya Ladoga, but their women and children too. More than a way station for i
tinerant merchants, it was home for some of them.

  One of the objects I was allowed to handle was a startlingly well-preserved leather shoe. Its size and its elegant styling made it plain it had once been worn by a woman, or a girl. Crafted from several pieces of leather, carefully and neatly stitched together, it was much more than a functional item, something worn just to keep the foot dry and warm. Someone had taken the time to incorporate various intricate details, twirls and curls that had no practical function and served only to make the shoe look impressive, even expensive. Handling it, looking at it, made it easy to imagine how it must once have been part of a carefully styled outfit put together and worn with pride by a woman keen to look her best and attract admiring glances.

  My favourite was an object that might have appeared, at first glance, as no more than a stick of wood, about a foot long. It was in fact a distaff, the tool used to hold woollen fibres ready for spinning into thread. What made the Staraya Ladoga distaff especially evocative were the finely incised runes etched by hand into a carefully created facet on one side. Onto a smooth surface just two or three inches long and a quarter of an inch high, a Viking woman had expressed some fragment of the outpouring of her poetic heart. The translation of Viking runes is more art than science. Rather than just a case of sitting down with a dictionary of runes, it demands a degree of interpretation — even intuition — on the part of those who would make sense of such inscriptions after all this time. Despite our best efforts, their world is not our world and their sense of themselves, and their place in the scheme of things, is quite beyond our reach. A leap of faith, however, gives the following meaning to those particular marks:

  Drawn from above, the spindle is spinning. Starry-eyed maiden will have a long and thin thread. Neflaug possessed this distaff.

  Artefacts turned up on archaeological digs beg many questions. Who made it … owned it … lost it … and so on. But in the case of the distaff from Staraya Ladoga we are actually granted the owner’s name — Neflaug. But knowing who owned and used it only makes it more tantalising. Whatever Neflaug meant, whatever the truth of her runes, it is the discovery of a real person’s real thoughts — made permanent a thousand and more years ago — that makes the object irreplaceable.

  Neflaug would have had many chances throughout her day to watch travellers moving up and down the Volkhov River that passed by her home. In winter when the water froze, many feet thick, it would have been people on skis or sledges. They would have used the icebound river as a convenient roadway to transport slaves, furs, amber and oils into the south and east, and silks and silver into the north and west. For the rest of the year it would have been navigable by boats.

  The craft that plied up and down Russia’s rivers, however, were different from those used by Vikings for journeys across the open sea. No doubt the traders set out from their homes in Sweden and elsewhere aboard dragon ships and merchant vessels designed to cope with big waves and the rest of the dangers likely to be encountered out of sight of land. But travel up rivers was a different matter and required specialised craft. For one thing they had to have a shallow draught to cope with stretches of river that might only be a couple of feet deep. For another they had to be small and light enough to be lifted out of the water for manoeuvring around obstacles like impassable rapids and sand bars. Furthermore, once the Vikings had set their sights on destinations east as far as the Black Sea, the Bosphorus, the Caspian Sea and even beyond — to Baghdad and the source of the silver dirhams — then they had to be able to switch between rivers. None went as far south or east, in one continuous stretch, as the Vikings wanted to go. So their vessels had to be suitable for the technique called portage, whereby a boat is lifted out of the water and either carried or rolled on logs overland until it can be put into the next waterway. Using this technique the Swedes would have been able to transfer their boats to the Dniepr, a river leading directly to the Black Sea itself. Although the journey was possible, it was a challenge to boatmanship, since the sailors would have had to navigate a way through dangerous rapids en route. An alternative route to the same destination was provided by portage between the Vistula and Dnestr rivers.

  It was close by Staraya Ladoga that I had arranged to meet a group of Viking re-enacters — those who dress and behave (at least within reason) like their historical heroes. So it was that I found myself joining a sevenman crew and helping them to manhandle their boat — based, they assured me, upon traditional Viking lines — between a row of burial mounds high above the Volkhov. We made a strange-looking team, I in modern clothes, the rest of them in faithfully recreated Viking garb of leather tunics, fur and woollen trousers. Among their number were a maker of wooden furniture (who had helped craft the boat), a geology student, a factory manager and an accountant. All but one of them lived in St Petersburg, some two hours’ drive south, but they were unanimous in their reasons for spending as much of their spare time as possible in the wilds of Russia, dressing and acting like their ancestors. A few had recently taken part in a river journey of 2,000 miles. ‘There are not so many chances to behave like … men,’ said one of them, during one of numerous breaks for cigarettes. ‘We like drinking, we like women and we like … fighting!’

  They all laughed, but I could tell they meant what they said, that they envied the freedoms and uncertain destinies of the men they claimed as their forefathers. Who among us is free now — free like the first Vikings were? We have democracy and the rule of law, we live behind walls raised by governments and manned by troops to keep us safe from enemies known and unknown. But most of us are in thrall nonetheless — to mortgages and bills and the jobs to feed them … to the taxman and the petty tyrannies of PAYE, CCTV and the sulky diktats of local authority. Not for us the magnetic draw of uncharted territory or the promise of wealth and glory beyond the horizon. Most of us are slaves by any other name, and we have forged our own shackles.

  As it turned out, the presence of ice floes on the river, drifting downstream, meant it had been judged too dangerous to put their boat into the water. I was as relieved as they were. They even went so far as to pour beer into a drinking horn and then toast the river for carrying ice that day and so sparing them the risk of a freezing dunking. I wondered briefly if real Vikings would have been so easily turned back. Even just the task of moving their 30-foot-long boat was an education in itself. Rough-hewn logs were used as rollers, laboriously lifted up one by one as they appeared from beneath the stern and then carried around to be placed in front of the bow. At all times the boat seemed heavy enough to cause real injury. Progress was slow, no more than a few feet at a time. All at once the Black Sea felt like a very long way away indeed.

  The Swedish Vikings who helped settle Staraya Ladoga were also the people referred to by others — Arabic writers like Ibn Fadlan in particular — as the Rusiyyah, or more commonly, the Rus.

  The tenth-century Persian writer Ahmad Ibn Rustah wrote of a ‘city’ of the Rus he visited within the territory of the Slavs: ‘The Rusiyya [sic] live on an island surrounded by a lake. The island which they inhabit extends for three days’ march through forests and marshes … when a man places his foot on the ground, the ground wobbles because it is so damp.’ Ibn Rustah also recorded how the Rusiyyah were in the habit of rounding up the local Slavs and carrying them off to use and sell as slaves. On the subject of their general livelihood he added:

  They have no arable lands, but merely eat what they bring back from the land of the [Slavs]. When a son is born to one of them, he presents the child with an unsheathed sword and casts it before him saying, ‘I shall not leave you property to inherit. You have nothing but what you can acquire for yourself with this sword of yours.’ They have no estates, villages or arable lands; their sole occupation is trading in martens, squirrels and other furs. They sell them to their purchasers and take for the price coins which they tie up in their belts.

  In stark contrast to Ibn Fadlan, who encountered his Rusiyyah among the Bulghars of the Volga a
nd found them to have disgusting personal habits, the Persian offered a quite different view:

  Their clothes are clean, and their menfolk wear gold bracelets. They are considerate to their slaves, and are fastidious in their clothing because they are engaged in trade … They are generous to themselves and honour their guests, considerate to those strangers who seek refuge with them: they do not permit any of their number to oppress or maltreat those who visit them regularly; they assist and defend those who come to them because of some insult or wrong.

  The Rus, the Swedish Vikings, were hardly the only people moving across the landscape of eastern Europe at that time. Writers like Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Rustah must have had all manner of tribes to consider when it came to making their surveys of the populations likely to be encountered. Clearly the ways of the Rus — with their physiques like palm trees, their sometimes questionable approach to personal grooming — were notable enough to catch the eyes of those taking the trouble to record the many comings and goings. But in keeping with the savage reputation of Vikings elsewhere, there is often an undercurrent of horror.

  Ibn Fadlan’s account of a funeral ceremony for a great leader of the Rus is worth repeating in full, because the traditions he so carefully describes would have worked themselves deeply into the memories of any who witnessed them.