by Neil Oliver
By the onset of the Viking Age proper, the people of those islands were farmers and fishermen, using iron tools and living in settlements of roundhouses. Their culture might be described, for want of a better word, as Celtic. Sometime before the coming of the Vikings — perhaps a hundred years or more — Christian missionaries, remembered by the locals as papar, had brought their faith to the islands, but in all practical respects they remained remote, as they still are today. Shetland’s modern capital Lerwick is more than 130 miles north-west of Dunnet Head, the most northerly point on the Scottish mainland, and the islands beyond have always been worlds apart.
If, as seems likely, they had been reached by the culture of the mainland Picts, then the pre-Viking islanders on both Orkney and Shetland would have spoken a language that is completely lost to us now. ‘Eeny, meeny, miny moe’ is said by some to be one, two, three, four — all that remains of a pre-Roman counting system. If it is Celtic — and therefore Pictish — it has survived by being fossilised within a children’s rhyme.
While much of our history is in the ground, waiting to be recovered by archaeologists, a huge amount of it lies buried in the language we speak every day. Unexplained and largely redundant, like the vast majority of our DNA, the remains of who we used to be are all around. Some of what resides in the languages and dialects of Britain may have drifted from the mainstream, but is retained by the memories of a few. In the hills and valleys of the north of England there were, at least until recently, shepherds who counted their flocks using words unrecognisable and downright alien to all but a handful of people living today. ‘Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip, azer, sezar, akker, conter, dick’ are the numbers one to ten in a single example of a score of dialect variations spread from Cumbria in the west to Northumbria in the east, and through Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire and County Durham besides. The origins of these words are as uncertain as eeny, meeny, miny and moe but linguists suggest they might be Anglo-Saxon.
On the Scottish mainland the Celtic, Pictish culture merged in time with that of the Irish Gaels. Together, the two ways of being became onethe identity that became Scottish. The coming together of Picts and Gaels was complete by perhaps AD 900, but in the Shetland and Orkney Islands the old Celtic, Pictish way of life may have been subverted and replaced at least 100 years before.
Some of the sagas, written much later, claim it was the rule of Harald Fairhair, first King of Norway, that gave many men cause to flee their homeland. Ruler of the country between around AD 872 and 930, Harald’s determination to consolidate and extend his power brought him into open conflict with other ambitious Norwegian men. Some traditions make Harald the grandson of the Ynglinga Queen Aase — said by some to be the younger of the two women buried amid all that finery in the Oseberg Ship — and the dynasty’s children seemingly perpetuated the family tradition of claiming total authority. Harald’s aspirations were such that his own reign was said to have driven many men to head west in search of new lands to settle. It was in this atmosphere, according to the sagas at least, that Norwegian Vikings first set foot upon Orkney and Shetland as well as the Western Isles of Scotland and Caithness, on the mainland.
Another document, the Historia Norwegie — the History of Norway — written sometime in the second half of the twelfth century, has it that:
… the Pents, only a little taller than pygmies, accomplished miraculous achievements by building towns, morning and evening, but at midday every ounce of strength deserted them and they hid for fear in underground chambers … In the days of Harald Fairhair, king of Norway, certain Vikings, descended from the stock of that sturdiest of men, Ragnvaldr jarl, crossing the Solund Sea with a large fleet, totally destroyed these people after stripping them of their long-established dwellings and made the islands subject to themselves.
Right away we see the yawning gap between history as we understand it, and the stuff of myth and legend as enjoyed by readers in the High Middle Ages. Four hundred years after the Vikings arrived in the islands, the indigenous people encountered there — the Picts — have become little more than pixies.
The twelfth-century Orkneyinga saga — composed in Iceland and also known as the History of the Earls of Orkney — goes so far as to claim King Harald sailed west from his stronghold in Norway so that he might bring to heel the rebellious inhabitants of Orkney and Shetland. It is a dramatic notion and certainly inspired the saga writers, but Harald’s reign simply comes too late in the day to coincide with the first Viking encounter with the inhabitants of the Northern Isles, far less Viking settlement and colonisation.
While twelfth- and thirteenth-century Scandinavian writers placed the exodus in the second half of the ninth century, the annals make it clear that Viking raiders were targeting Scottish monasteries like Iona from the last decade of the eighth century onwards. And while some of the sagas even claim Orkney and Shetland were uninhabited, archaeological investigation makes this preposterous.
The writer or writers of the Historia Norwegie at least allowed for earlier inhabitants — be they Pents, Picts or Pixes — and the archaeology of the islands makes plain they were settled continuously for thousands of years before the arrival of any Scandinavians.
The site of Jarlshof, on the southernmost tip of Shetland, near Sumburgh, has some of the most famous Viking remains in the Northern Isles. Authentic though the name sounds, ‘Jarlshof’ was the literary creation of Sir Walter Scott, who was inspired by the ruins of the stone farmhouse there. Originally built in the sixteenth century, it was modified by members of the Stewart family until, by the early seventeenth century, it was known as the ‘Old House of Sumburgh’.
In his 1821 novel The Pirate, Scott imagined the place had been home to ‘an ancient Earl of the Orkneys’. ‘It has long been entirely deserted, and the vestiges can only be discerned with difficulty; for the loose sand, borne on the tempestuous gales of those stormy regions, has overblown, and almost buried, the ruins of the buildings … It was a rude building of rough stone, with nothing about it to gratify the eye, or to excite the imagination.’
The medieval ruin, however, is only the last of the homes made among the dunes on that sheltered inlet. Archaeologists have unearthed evidence of settlement of the site from at least as early as the Bronze Age. Until the end of the nineteenth century only the farmhouse was visible, but then a great storm ripped away the overburden to reveal the wonders beneath. Because so much has survived the ages, the site is a difficult one for visitors to make sense of. Earliest of all are the Bronze Age remains, including a smithy, as well as distinctive cell-like houses with living spaces created by internal partitions of stone. A later village of Iron Age date was built on top of the older foundations. Again the houses are circular but the most conspicuous structure of the period was a broch, a great circular, tower of stone that was likely as much as 40 feet tall when first completed. In the later Iron Age the broch appears either to have been allowed to collapse, or to have been substantially lowered so the stones of the upper courses could be reused in the construction of a ‘wheel-house’. Wheel-houses take their name from the stone piers radiating outwards from the centre and providing support for the roof, and the one at Jarlshof is a particularly fine example. By the later centuries of the first millennium AD, the settlement could more accurately be described as Pictish, the culture of the islands having much in common with all that was going on further south, on the northern and eastern mainland of Scotland.
Perhaps less obvious to the untutored eye is the sudden arrival, into this long-established Pictish settlement of Sumburgh, of Viking colonists. For archaeologists, the coming of the foreigners is as obvious as the squatting of a cuckoo in a nest. There, among the circular buildings of the locals, are the foundations and lower courses of large, rectangular, Norse farmhouses and byres. This was the arrival of something quite new, alien; and once the Viking style of living took hold, at Jarlshof and throughout the islands, it was there to stay.
The most obvious o
f the new buildings at Jarlshof are indistinguishable from those on the Norwegian mainland dating to the same period, around the ninth century. Along the long sides are benches that would have been sat on during the day and slept on at night. A rectangular, central hearth provided heat for cooking and warmth and, crucially in a building featuring little in the way of windows, light to work by. At one end was a room used for drying crops ready for storage; in the centre was the main living space for the family and at the other end a large area set aside for livestock. The archaeologists also unearthed a considerable quantity of stones cracked and broken by the heat of fires — suggesting the newcomers brought their tradition of the sauna with them along with so much else.
Social historian Ian Tait met me close by the site with some of the Viking Age artefacts excavated from Jarlshof and elsewhere on the islands: weights for spinning thread; an exquisitely made bone comb; bowls carved from local soapstone; whetstones for sharpening small blades. Especially evocative — and the item Ian happily confessed he would save if all else was lost — was a wooden scoop made for bailing out a leaky boat. It was a simple thing, carved from a single piece of timber. The point where the handle met the scooped bowl, clearly an identified weak spot and likely to snap, bore the nail holes and staining left behind by an iron band that had once reinforced the piece. But what made it special was the clear evidence of wear on the tip of the scoop. Ian demonstrated the action used when bailing water from the hull of a boat; and since the wear was all on the left-hand side of the leading edge it must have been used by a right-handed boatman.
The last item Ian revealed was part of a woven Viking glove. Unearthed by peat-cutting decades ago, it looked for all the world as though it might have been lost last year, or last month. The magical chemistry of the peat had preserved the fabric so perfectly it was still soft and flexible. Instantly obvious was the thumb, skilfully formed and indistinguishable from the same part of a glove you might buy in a shop on the island today. The thought that it had once contained a Viking thumb, kept warm a Viking hand, seemed impossible to accept. I have been lucky enough over the years to hold many finished objects fashioned by ancient hands, but the experience of feeling the same soft fabric that was last worn by a Viking more than a thousand years ago was unique, and unforgettable.
Much was revealed too by the whetstones — made not for putting an edge on swords and axes but just little blades — and by the bowls and spinning weights. What they conjured up was the presence of women, and therefore children. Despite our abiding image of bands of roving men, the majority of Viking people lived lives centred round their homes and fields. Too young, too old (or indeed the wrong sex) for piracy and pillage, they farmed the crops, tended the animals and made and used all the stuff of settled, peaceful lives. Even the majority of Scandinavian men in their primes would have been disinclined to go a-viking (as a verb, rather than a noun) and even if they were minded to rape and pillage, such exploits would have remained unfilled ambitions for most. It is also worth remembering that many Danes, Norwegians and Swedes back home were victims of Vikings like everyone else in western Europe at that time. Violent men in need of gold and silver are likely to claim it wherever they can find it.
What the Norwegian adventurers had found in Shetland, and on the Orkney Islands to the south, was new land for themselves and their families to colonise. But, despite the reasonably fertile soils of the Shetland Islands and the seas surrounding them filled with fish, whales and seals, Viking skeletons unearthed in a cemetery just a couple of miles north of Jarlshof reveal that the living was tough.
Excavations around the chapel and burial ground on St Ninian’s Isle in 2000, led by Glasgow archaeologist Rachel Barrowman, recovered many human remains including the skeletons of several infants. Five of the babies had died during their first weeks or months of life and close examination of their bones revealed clear evidence of rickets. Once a scourge of lives lived in the northern latitudes, rickets is a weakening of the bones caused by lack of Vitamin D. The tragic little skull fragments recovered from St Ninian’s Isle showed pitting, tiny little holes all over their surfaces. The ends of the rib bones were the same — with what could best be described as a porous, fragile appearance — and some of the teeth showed problems with the development of enamel, another symptom.
The radiocarbon dates suggested the infants had not all died at the same time, but during the course of three or four generations spread across the tenth century. Rickets would therefore appear to have been endemic among the community living in that part of Shetland during the middle of the Viking Age. Human beings require Vitamin D in order to metabolise the calcium in foods like milk and cheese, which is needed for bone growth. Vitamin D can be absorbed by exposure to sunlight as well as from fish like salmon and sardines. The St Ninian’s Isle babies were so young they would still have been dependent to some extent on their mothers’ breast milk, and the so the fact that they were suffering from rickets suggests their mothers were malnourished as well. With ready access to fish and shellfish, the prevalence of rickets might seem mysterious. But analysis of the skeletons of the Vikings who lived and died on Shetland reveals they were not eating much of either. Living, as they were, on islands condemned to long dark months of winter every year, they were especially vulnerable to Vitamin D deficiency.
Back in Scandinavia their people were fishermen as well as farmers. For whatever reason, those Shetland settlers seem not to have been consuming food from the sea. Concentrating instead on a diet based around what they could farm — arable crops and the products of their animals — they were unknowingly committing themselves and their children to a life-threatening disease.
Shetland today is home to around 22,000 people. Archaeological and historical evidence, coupled with best guesses, suggests a population during the Viking Age of between 10,000 and 15,000. No tentative foothold for a hardy few, it was populated to more or less the capacity of an agrarian society. The Orkney Islands were even more attractive. More fertile than Shetland, they offered the prospect of a slightly easier life, and as the ninth century progressed so more and more dragon ships and knarr arrived bearing hopeful settlers.
The British archipelago — and it seems reasonable from the point of view of seaborne raiders to describe the islands, great and small, in such a way — was split between two very different brands of Viking. If it was Danes in the eponymous Danelaw, then it was Norwegians in the north and west, in Scotland, the Scottish islands, in Ireland, the Isle of Man and eventually in some parts of Wales. But if the place name evidence is a reminder of a Viking past in northern and eastern England, then it is even more blatant in the Northern Isles. The sinister fact is that in Shetland and Orkney hardly a Pictish name survives, suggesting that one civilisation was completely supplanted by another.
Oddly enough it is the very name ‘Orkney’ that testifies to a Pictish past, since the first syllable ‘ork’, or perhaps more accurately ‘orc’, seems to have been a tribal name based on the image of a young boar. The Vikings chose not to replace the local name for the island grouping, but it seems that was all they left untouched.
Birsa … Brinyaquoy … Buckquoy … Burray … Eday … Egilsay … Eynhallow … Fersness … Harra … Gairsay … Hoy … Kirkwall … Quoy of Teveth … Stroma … Stronsay … Tingwall … Veness … Warness … Warsquoy … Wyre … the litany of purely Scandinavian place and farm names goes on and on. Orkney and Shetland were made tabulae rasae, blank slates upon which something new might be written, in words as well as in deeds.
Since the time of the Historia Norwegie there have been claims of a genocidal ‘year zero’ for Orkney and Shetland. Just as the Norwegians appeared as cuckoos at Jarlshof sometime in the ninth century, so more of them made homes for themselves at Brough of Birsay, a tidal island connected to West Mainland by a strip of sand, within an already established Pictish village. Once again the jarring rectangles of the invaders suddenly appear amidst the roundhouses. More sinister yet, Pictish artefac
ts were found inside the Viking houses, suggesting the interlopers helped themselves to the personal belongings of those they had arrived among.
Sampling and examination of the DNA of the modern population of Orkney was carried out by the Oxford geneticist Sir Walter Bodmer in 2006. While most of the women appeared to be descendants of ancient stock — the population of post-glacial hunters that began to recolonise all of Britain between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago — almost all the men’s veins coursed with blood of Scandinavian origin. The evidence was not enough on its own to prove the Viking settlers had slaughtered the Pictish men, but it certainly suggested they were kept away from their own women. Perhaps they were just marginalised, driven away from the islands by invaders intent on taking the available women for wives, but wholesale slaughter remains a possibility. In the modern era, white colonial settlers in Tasmania systematically wiped out the local population — and there, none of the aboriginal place names survived.
A find made in Shetland in 1958, at the same early church on St Ninian’s Isle that would later yield the skeletons of malnourished Viking babies, also suggested ancient violence — and fear. Archaeologists were seeking to locate the limits of the church building itself, and helping them was a local schoolboy named Douglas Coutts. Beneath a sandstone slab incised with a cross he found what has become famous as the St Ninian’s Isle treasure. A hoard of Pictish silver bowls, cups and jewellery lay jumbled in a heap, amid the fragments of the wooden box that once contained them.
Further excavation revealed the box had been buried beneath the floor of the church, possibly upside down. Taken together, the various elements of Douglas’ discovery told a story both sad and frightening. The silverware was dated to sometime before AD 800, and its hurried burial suggested the little church’s community of monks had found themselves suddenly under attack by Vikings. For the moments that some of their number were able to hold the door closed against the foe, one or two of them frantically dug a hole in the floor and flung in the community’s most precious objects. That no one returned to recover them seems to make plain none who knew of their existence survived the day. Hidden during the last moments of a few men’s lives, they remained out of sight for more than a thousand years.
