Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  INTRODUCTION: ANCESTORS AND INHERITORS

  WHAT DOES ‘VIKING’ ACTUALLY MEAN? Should it be used at all, and if so, how?

  The Scandinavians of the eighth to eleventh centuries knew the word—víkingr in Old Norse when applied to a person—but they would not have recognised themselves or their times by that name. For them it would perhaps have meant something approximating to ‘pirate’, defining an occupation or an activity (and probably a relatively marginal one); it was certainly not an identity for an entire culture. Even then, the word was not necessarily negative or always associated with violence—these overtones would begin to accrete round it in the centuries after the Viking Age. Similarly, it did not refer exclusively to Scandinavians; it was also applied to Baltic raiders in general, and the word was even used in England. By the same token, the Vikings’ targets were by no means only outside Scandinavia; maritime robbery with violence rarely respects such proprieties. Even as late as the eleventh century, a Swedish runestone could commemorate a man—one Assur, son of Jarl Hákan—“who kept the Viking watch”, standing guard against incursions from the neighbours.

  The exact derivation of the term is unknown, but the most widely accepted interpretation today builds on the Old Norse vík, a bay of the sea. Thus Vikings may originally have been ‘bay-people’, their ships waiting in concealment to strike at passing marine traffic. Another alternative links the term to the Víken region of south-western Norway, from which the earliest raiders were once believed to have come; this too may have some validity.

  In the modern Nordic languages, vikingar or vikinger is still used only in the exact sense of seaborne raiders, while in English and other tongues it has come to serve for anyone who had, as one Cambridge scholar resignedly put it, “a nodding acquaintance with Scandinavia ‘in those days’”. There have been many attempts to get around the problem, with little success (such as the late historian who ranted for several pages about what he saw as his colleagues’ terminological carelessness, only to content himself with ‘Norsemen’—thereby excluding Swedes, Danes, and, indeed, women). Some scholars now use lowercase ‘vikings’ to mean the general populace, while reserving title case for their piratical acquaintances. In this book, big-V ‘Vikings’ is employed throughout but defined through context.

  This is much more than semantic nitpicking. In speaking of a Viking Age at all, using a term that would have surprised the people supposedly labelled with it, there is a sense in which historians have created an unhelpful abstraction. Of course, the past has always been divided into conveniently manageable chunks of time, but when scholars argue about when the Viking Age ‘started’, this is not the same as debating, say, the origins of the Roman Empire, which was very far from a retrospective concept.

  It is good to bear in mind that no other contemporary peoples ranged over the then-known Eurasian and North Atlantic world to the same degree as the Scandinavians. They travelled through the territories of some forty-odd present-day countries, in documented encounters with more than fifty cultures. Some scholars have tried to claim that in this the Vikings were in no way remarkable or significant in themselves, merely the regional manifestation of Continental mobility and general trends in the reorganisation of the post-Roman economy—essentially a kind of burgeoning early medieval European Union with some particularly aggressive negotiators in the north. It is true that raiding and maritime warfare undoubtedly existed around the Baltic and the North Sea for centuries (and probably millennia) before the time of the Vikings. However, there is no doubt that the flow, scale, and range of seaborne piracy gradually but dramatically increased from the 750s onwards, culminating in the full-blown military campaigns of the ninth and tenth centuries that would shatter the political structures of western Europe. At the same time, there were parallel and intertwined movements of colonialism, trade, and exploration, especially to the east. In short, the ‘Viking Age’, hindsight construct of researchers though it undoubtedly is, has genuine validity.

  There have also been other attempts to write the Vikings out of history, ironically focussing on how they have been written into it. The idea is that this piece of the past was ‘colonised’ by the future and bent out of shape to suit its needs—essentially that the Vikings were creations of later peoples’ imaginations. This makes little sense to me. Yes, nationalist Romanticism, Victorian imperialism, and their even darker European successors all certainly had an impact on how the Vikings were seen afterwards, but they actually say nothing at all about what really happened between the mid-eighth and eleventh centuries—only about how it was subsequently appropriated and sometimes weaponised (which, of course, should not be ignored).

  With all this ambiguity and such a long background of sociopolitical abuse, it is therefore vital to be clear that the concept of the Viking Age has a testable, empirical reality that can be illuminated by close study. The three hundred years from about 750 CE onwards were above all else a period of social transformation so profound as to ultimately shape northern Europe for the next millennium—a process that in itself justifies the notion of a discrete Viking Age.

  Synthesising all this is a daunting prospect. A narrative track, running chronologically, is necessary to understand the events of these three centuries in context, but there is no single strand to follow across the vast and varied arenas of the Viking diaspora. There have been longer books than this one written solely on Scandinavian interactions with what is now European Russia, to take just one example, and the same can be said of the rest of their world. Inevitably, something will be lost when using such a wide-angle lens. Readers seeking detailed discussion of Viking art, typologies of artefacts, ship-building methods, and much more have many well-illustrated, technical studies to choose from and can use the references at the back of this book as a point of entry. Similarly, if the Scandinavians encountered more than fifty cultures, even a thousand words on each would easily take half a book of dry description alone. While the bigger picture is always in the background as one walks with the Vikings, the most productive focus can be on simultaneities, on snapshots and brief visits in different times and places.

  This approach opens up new possibilities but also acknowledges limits. In particular, the notion of Viking exceptionalism (which is not the same as difference) is problematic and, I believe, should be avoided where possible. To take an image that they would have liked, northern European folk tales often revolve around a search for someone’s secret name (the fairy story of Rumpelstiltskin is an obvious example). The Vikings have left clues to theirs, the true self hidden beneath the surface. A strong sense of the numinous place courses through Norse poetry and even runic inscriptions, created by minds in tune with their environment. The same mind-set is visible in their material culture, in every available surface—including the human body—covered in interlaced designs, writhing patterns, animals, and other images that were imbued with meaning. Their world hummed with life, but its boundaries, both internal and external, were in many senses more permeable than ours, always and constantly connected by winding paths to the realms of the gods and other powers.

  However, alongside the stories that unfold throughout this book, it is important not to lose sight of the absences, the things that are not known. Some of them are details; others are fundamental. The resulting gaps can seem curiously random. It is possible to fill these blank spaces but only through informed speculation (and history is nothing if not a suppositional discipline, sometimes akin to a sort of speculative fiction of the past).

  Little is understood, for example, of how the Vikings measured time. Their music and songs are a mystery; here there is a potential starting point in the few surviving instruments, with tonal qualities that can be reconstructed, but what the Vikings did with them is another matter entirely. It is unclear where women were believed to go when they died. Why was so much silver buried in the ground and never recovered? These and other questions go on and on, and have vexed scholars for centuries. Some questions are more tent
ative, and their answers may be unknowable. But they are still worth asking. If you truly believed—in fact, knew—that the man living up the valley could turn into a wolf under certain circumstances, what was it like to be his neighbour? What was it like to be married to him?

  We will probably never speak the Vikings’ secret name, but if we are open to their voices, to their concerns and ideas—in a word, to their minds—I believe it is possible not only to truly explore these ancient lives, but to write a new story of how we became who we are. This, then, is the Viking Age of the children of Ash and Elm: a set of vantage points from which to look out over people, place, and time, inevitably finite but also in constant motion. Of course, it is also in a sense my Viking Age, informed by more than thirty years of research but—as with the work of any professional student of the past—equally constrained by my own biases and preconceptions.

  But how to get there? In practical terms, what sources of evidence can be used to get closer to the Vikings?

  Like many fields of scholarship, Viking studies is occasionally convulsed by interdisciplinary squabbles, especially between those who work with texts and their archaeological colleagues who approach the past through things and places—an argument that never really settles, but just keeps rumbling along like the irregular tremors on a fault line. The production of text is, of course, also a deeply material act—the cutting of signs into stone or wood, or painting them with a quill onto vellum—a process that requires direction, effort, resources, preparation, all naturally with purpose and social context beyond simple communication. Some of the very rarest sources, such as the great epic poem Beowulf, for example, exist in only a single manuscript; they are, quite literally, artefacts.

  Students of the Vikings tend to specialise in one particular bandwidth of signals from the late first millennium, but they need to be conversant with many more, often stretching far later in time: archaeology, saga scholarship, philology, runology, the history of religions—the list goes on, now with increasing contributions from the natural and environmental sciences, including genomics. A knowledge of the modern Scandinavian languages is essential, as is at least a working familiarity with Old Norse and Latin.

  As an archaeologist myself, it is hardly surprising that much of this book is based on the results of excavations and fieldwork. Whether concerned with objects, buildings, burials, or samples for scientific analysis of varying kinds, all this essentially relates to things—or to use the academic term, ‘material culture’, which captures it quite well.

  Some of these things, especially the contents of graves, have survived because the people of the time made deliberate arrangements for their disposal: put simply, they have been found because they were intentionally left where they were placed. In burials it is possible to directly encounter the Vikings themselves, in the form of their skeletal or cremated remains. However, for the most part, what archaeological studies uncover are fragments, broken and badly preserved, that have survived by chance through loss, abandonment, discard, or decay. These include the occupation layers of settlements with all the bits and pieces that found their way into the ground over the years that people lived there: smashed pottery, food waste, things that were dropped or else left behind when it was finally time to move on. Archaeologists also find traces of the buildings themselves, preserved as dark outlines in the soil where timbers have rotted away or as the holes that once held posts supporting roofs and walls. On rare occasions there are stones from foundation sills, or the trenches where they had lain before somebody took them away for recycling.

  Archaeology is a highly interpretive undertaking, a constant balancing of probabilities and alternatives. One can speculate with varying degrees of confidence, but it is not always possible to be sure. An essential prerequisite for a good researcher is the willingness to be wrong, the invitation of constructive critique. Nevertheless, while conclusions must be framed carefully, it is pointless to caveat everything to oblivion, to believe that it is impossible to really know anything about the past. In this, archaeologists are aided by an impressive theoretical apparatus, one that is always evolving and contentious and quite often impenetrable from outside, but vital nonetheless. It can be positively astonishing, and uplifting, to compare our understanding of the Viking-Age (and global) past even fifty years ago with what we know now. The Vikings I studied in college in the 1980s were quite different from the people I teach undergraduates about today, and the same will certainly be true of their students in turn. This is how it should be.

  There are other issues too. Common to most archaeological sites is the question of preservation, which largely depends on the local soil types and their relative acidity. Stone is the material most impervious to damage, although it may well have become chipped or eroded if exposed to the elements over a long period of time. Metal and ceramics are both quite likely to have survived (albeit corroded or otherwise degraded), while bone is only variably preserved. Rarest of all are the organics—things made of textile, leather, wood, and the like—which have almost always disappeared except when the soil is waterlogged or else in other ways excludes oxygen.

  This all applies to things in the ground, but archaeologists also record the visible landscape—most obviously for the Viking Age in the form of earthworks, fortifications, or burial mounds but also including standing stone monuments, field boundaries in the form of ditches or drystone walls, and so on. The topography itself may have changed, as rivers have altered course, shorelines have risen or fallen, wetlands been reclaimed, and in rare cases where natural events such as volcanic eruptions have effected more drastic impacts—but the evidence is there. As landscapes can be ‘read’, so can what lies hidden beneath them, using non-destructive reconnaissance techniques such as georadar and a variety of electromagnetic methods that can penetrate the soil to reveal buried features, trenches, postholes, and hearths.

  As we combine excavation, field survey, and geophysical prospection, the wider arena of Viking-Age settlements can be pieced together, down to the minutiae of people’s lives. This can reveal how they lived, what they wore and ate; it can show the things they made and used. Archaeologists can reconstruct what their homes and farms were like, how people made a living and sustained themselves, and can gain an idea of their economies. One can also paint a sketchy picture of family structure and social hierarchies—an approximation of political systems and the way in which power may have been manifested. Archaeology can furthermore recover ritual activities, both for the living and the dead, that can open windows into the mind and the landscapes of religion. Not least, all this can also illustrate how these peoples of the Viking Age interacted with each other, both within the huge territory of what is now Scandinavia and also far beyond.

  Over the past half-century, archaeological science has dramatically altered our understanding of the past, in the Viking Age no less than for other time periods. The analysis of strontium and oxygen isotopes in human teeth and bones can locate the places where people spent their formative years, tell us whether they moved around, and also reveal what they ate. Materials science can identify objects and substances so badly preserved that previously their nature could only be guessed at. Scientific analysis can trace the origin of the metals, clays, and minerals used in manufacturing; the species and habitats of the animals whose fur, bones, and ivory were employed as raw materials; and exact dates from the growth rings of trees, sometimes giving the year and even season of an event. Archaeologists can excavate a sunken ship in Denmark and determine that it was built in Ireland. Analysis of ancient DNA can make reliable sex determinations of the dead, tease out their family relationships, and even reveal the colour of their eyes and hair; it also makes possible the wider tracking of migrations and larger demographic change. Environmental studies can recreate the flora of settlements and landscapes, determine whether an area was cultivated or under forest and what crops were grown, and provide a scale for alterations in land use over time.

  No single speci
alist can master all these fields, but the combined teamwork of archaeologists in the field, laboratory, and library now has greater potential for recovering the lives of past peoples than ever before.

  But the evidence for the Viking Age relies on more than this material culture and the other natural and physical traces of the time, although the data is varied and always growing. What about written sources? The cultures of Scandinavia at this time were predominantly oral in that they did not make literary or documentary records—the Vikings never wrote their own histories. This is not the same as being illiterate; the use of runic script was widespread in the North from its beginnings in Roman times to a flowering of inscriptions in the Viking Age itself. Nonetheless, this material is limited. There are thousands of brief memorials and epitaphs carved in stone, sometimes with a few lines of poetry, and also rare examples of everyday notes and labels scratched into slivers of wood. But there are no lengthier texts from inside the Viking-Age societies of the North.

  Instead, their culture is what is called protohistoric, in that its ‘history’ comes from what some of their foreign contemporaries wrote about them. This, however, presents problems that are in many ways at the core of all the modern stereotypes of the Vikings, for the obvious reason that most sources of this kind were authored by people on the sharp end of their aggression. The bulk of these records take the form of court annals, usually compiled in Latin, for the ruling dynasties of western Europe. A number of different texts, often named after the monasteries where they were produced or kept, cover the Frankish and Ottonian (German) Empires on the Continent, and variant Old English manuscripts of the so-called Anglo-Saxon Chronicle cover England. There are counterparts from the Arab world, especially the Caliphate of Córdoba in Andalucía, and from the Byzantine Empire that ruled from Constantinople, to name but a few.