Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  To these can be added the drier legal documentation of land grants and charters, some of which preserve incidental information of the Vikings’ activities, such as references to the sites of their former defensive works or camps. There is also the law itself—the early medieval regional legislation written down a century or more after the time of the Vikings but often encoding a variety of useful information that is clearly very old. The same cultural milieu also produced a smaller number of more personal texts written by monks and priests, travellers, diplomats and merchants, spies, poets, and others who encountered the Vikings at home or abroad.

  All these kinds of documents will be taken up in the following chapters, but it is important to understand two of their qualities above all else. First, although they originate in contemporary and sometimes eyewitness accounts, in their present form they were almost all compiled, edited, or transcribed at a later date, and critical questions must be asked of that context. Second, while they often give the appearance of straightforward reportage, they are always written with a purpose—frequently outright propaganda, not only showing their authors in a favourable light that casts shade on the Vikings but also to the disadvantage of other neighbouring kingdoms or peoples. In short, they must be treated with care.

  Besides the broadly contemporary written sources, there are perhaps the most famous tales of all: the extraordinary body of Icelandic texts that has given the North its own literary tradition. For many people, the Vikings are so synonymous with ‘the sagas’ that they are surprised to discover that, in fact, these vivid narratives date from centuries after the events they claim to describe. For anyone wanting to understand more about the Viking Age, coming to grips with these texts is a complex matter.

  Saga simply means ‘story’, literally ‘what is said’, both in Old Norse and in the modern Scandinavian languages. As with any storytelling tradition, there are numerous narrative styles and genres, composed at different times and places and for a wide variety of purposes. The first Old Norse sagas were written down in Iceland during the late 1100s, more than a hundred years after the nominal end of the Viking Age. The tradition continued for centuries thereafter, although with a creative floruit in the 1200s, and new sagas were still being composed beyond the Reformation and into early modern times. The deceptively simple term thus embraces a range of texts from formal histories to bedtime stories for listeners around the hearth, with many stops along the way.

  The two genres of saga-writing most often cited in connection with the Vikings are the sagas of Icelanders, also known as the family sagas, and the so-called fornaldarsögur—literally ‘stories of ancient times’ but more often referred to as the legendary sagas. Both genres are actively concerned with the Viking Age, but in different ways and with varying degrees of reliability, although the question of their ‘accuracy’ depends on one’s approach to these medieval texts.

  The sagas of Icelanders usually focus on individual families of settlers in that young North Atlantic country, and frequently on a smaller region such as a valley or district. The colonists’ genealogical heritage is traced in detail, not only back to the settlement of Iceland but to their earlier ancestry in Scandinavia. The sagas vividly follow these people’s lives and adventures, sometimes over decades, and in the process sketch a compellingly convincing picture of Iceland at the time: a unique political experiment, a republic of farmers in an age of kings. Feud and revenge are common themes, with neighbourly quarrels escalating to theft and murder, as competing lawsuits attempt to stem the tide of intergenerational violence that usually follows. These themes are interwoven with affairs of love and war, and the full range of human emotions in tightly wrapped rural communities with international contacts. Beneath the skin of most of the tales beats a steady pulse of magical contacts with the Other World, of sorcery and seers, of spirits and supernatural beings, although rarely the gods in any direct sense. From the tenth century onwards (according to the sagas’ internal chronologies), such activities are increasingly contrasted, and sometimes conflicted, with the growing influence of the ‘White Christ’, their name for the figure of Jesus. All these events are often played out against uneasy tensions with the royal families of Norway, who were watching Iceland with territorial envy, and the ever-present backdrop of political events in a wider world.

  As their name implies, the legendary sagas include elements common to tales of the fantastic—heroes battling monsters, the curses of evil witches, and so on—but often inserted into stories that nonetheless bear some connection to known history. In particular, the legendary sagas sometimes include narratives that ostensibly concern events long before the Viking Age, stretching back to the time of the great migrations when the post-Roman map of Europe was violently transformed. Figures such as the Hun warlord Attila appear (rather approvingly), along with fifth- and sixth-century kings and military leaders struggling for dominance. Unlike the family sagas, in these stories Iceland is not always the primary focus, and they span the European world with extensions far into the East.

  There are other, more contemporary forms that deal with the time of the saga-writers themselves, including the Sturlunga saga, a collection relating the political fortunes of the eponymous family; the Bishops’ sagas; several flavours of Christian morality tales; and more. Medieval Iceland was far from isolated, and there are also sagas that clearly bear influences of the European fashion for chivalric Romance, with stories of dashing knights rescuing princesses from dragons and the like. Even the popular epic of the Trojan War was recast in an Old Norse version, Ektors saga, which revealingly focusses on the doomed Homeric hero rather than on his assassin, Achilles—perhaps an insight into Scandinavian notions of martial honour.

  There is also another important category of Old Norse text, namely poetry. This too comes in several different varieties, sometimes composed as free-standing verses but more often as commemorations of events or, most of all, as praise poems. Poetry was also used as a medium for the storage and communication of mythological lore and as a repository of heroic tales.

  Unlike the prose texts of the medieval sagas, it is generally agreed that the Old Norse poetic corpus may be considerably older and could actually preserve the voices of the Viking Age. This is because of the extremely complex structure and rhyme schemes of Norse poetry, which mean that if the verses are to function at all they need to be remembered and repeated largely intact. Poetic ability was a very highly prized quality in the Viking Age, an admirable skill for a well-rounded person to master, and especially for anyone aspiring to leadership. This too has contributed to the poetry’s survival. Individual memory—the legacy left by a good name after one’s death—was crucial, and was deliberately fostered by the upper strata of society who either composed verses in their own honour or else acted as patrons to those who could do it for them. These professional poets were the famous skalds, and it must be said that they did their job: the subjects of their elegant, commissioned boasting are still being talked about a thousand years later.

  There are three main sources of Old Norse poems, one of which is the saga corpus itself, which occasionally preserved them as the reported speech of the protagonists. Much of the rest has survived in two medieval Icelandic works known as Eddas. The word’s derivation and meaning are uncertain—many explanations have been proposed—but either by definition or metaphorical allusion it seems to refer to the production of poetry.

  One of them, known as the Prose Edda, is a discrete work by the scholar, historian, and politician Snorri Sturluson, written sometime around the second or third decade of the thirteenth century and preserved in several later manuscripts. Snorri’s Edda is literally a handbook for poets, a manual of style divided into three sections with a prologue, the whole text covering genre and metre, with discourses on the subject matter appropriate to different occasions and purposes. Containing a huge wealth of information as prose asides, the key fact is that Snorri mainly makes his points through quoted example. The Prose Edda thus in
a sense belies its name, in that its pages are filled with poems, cited whole or as fragments and often with the authors’ names. Some of the material is known from other sources, but much of it comes only from Snorri. The text is especially rich in skaldic verse, allusions to mythology and the traditional religion, numerous fragments of tales, and lists of alternative poetic terms for a wide range of things, including supernatural entities (such as the many names of Odin, for example). Snorri’s Edda is one of the most remarkable literary documents of the Middle Ages.

  Alongside this handbook is another medieval work known as the Poetic Edda, although (as for Snorri’s book) this is a modern title. Largely preserved in two manuscripts with variations between them, alongside later copies, this is a wide-ranging collection of anonymous verses with mythological and heroic themes. Little is known of how they came to be collated in this way, by whom, or why. It has even been speculated that the main manuscript (the so-called Codex Regius, kept in Reykjavík) was the work of a collector of curiosities, which might explain why it is a physically small, scrappy little book made of reused parchment—hardly the stuff of prestigious record. Who knows what made a thirteenth-century Icelandic Christian so carefully preserve the core tales of her or his pagan past, but it is fortunate that they did. The poems are ambiguous, elusive, and hard to interpret, and they speak obliquely of powerful sacred knowledge for the already initiated. They are also difficult to date, although the earliest are thought to have been composed towards the end of the Viking Age, building on more ancient models. For all its complexity and source-critical problems, the Poetic Edda is the primary foundation for what is known of Norse mythology, cosmology, the tales of the gods and goddesses, and the great heroic lays of the North. Fragments of ‘Eddic’ poems also appear in Snorri’s writings and occasionally in sagas, making a corpus of some forty works altogether.

  With the exception of runic inscriptions, all the surviving Old Norse texts date to the centuries after the time of the Vikings, and were written down by Christians. They are, therefore, separated from the pagan Viking Age they claim to describe by significant barriers of time, culture, and ideological perspective. Many of the sagas are also focussed on Iceland, either by narrative locale and/or production, thus introducing a geographical bias into what must originally have been a much wider, pan-Scandinavian world of stories. Furthermore, each text was unique and written for specific reasons, not all of them immediately obvious to a modern reader. Even to this, one must add the vagaries of preservation: texts have become corrupted through faulty copying over time (we almost never have the ‘original’ manuscripts); passages have been lost, edited and changed, or simply censored; and, of course, the matter of a work’s survival at all is never assured. Sometimes the fragmentary nature of a text is obvious, as well as how and why. On occasion the names of sagas that have not survived are known, along with brief summaries of their contents. In many cases it is impossible to know what has been lost.

  Before approaching the sagas, or indeed any other works of Old Norse prose and poetry, it is necessary to answer a deceptively simple question: what do you want to do with them? For many studying a saga text, whether from the perspective of literary or material research, there is often (as Tolkien put it with regard to Beowulf) “disappointment at the discovery that it was itself and not something that the scholar would have liked better”. As the name implies, the sagas were stories first and foremost, meant to be told aloud, but for their intended hearers they also had a context. Viking lives were structured around relationships, not just within families but between them, and extending much further across society in webs of mutual dependence. The sagas anchored people in time and gave them a link to the past—to what Tolkien again called “that sense of perspective, of antiquity with a greater and yet darker antiquity behind”.

  This perception has not disappeared. Part of the family sagas’ dislocating effect on a modern audience is the way they feel so real, as if they somehow let the reader experience what it meant to be alive in that alien world, in all its laconic drama and heightened sense of things. In Iceland, their homeland, the sagas are even now entirely living works, familiar to all. Everyone can (and should!) enjoy these tales as the true masterpieces of world literature they undoubtedly are—but it is when one wishes to go beyond that, to ‘use’ them in some way, that more fundamental issues arise. The most basic question of all is one of focus: are we interested in the actual, real, lived Viking Age that the sagas have as their theme, or do we want to know how this ancient experience was mediated and appropriated in the medieval environment of the sagas’ composition and social context? These are utterly different questions.

  A reasonable first step must be to ask whether it is even possible to perceive genuine Viking-Age lives under the medieval textual patina, or if they were present to begin with. It is worth considering what a fully negative answer would mean. Even the most sceptical of literary researchers, those who generally reject the Old Norse texts as viable sources (however remote) for the actual Viking Age, do not always go on to confront the question this viewpoint requires: why, in that case, would medieval Icelanders have created—over several centuries—the most remarkably detailed, comprehensive, and consistent corpus of historical fiction in the world? While some have argued for Christian allegories in the sagas—the Odinnic warrior-poet Egil Skalla-Grímsson as an avatar of St. Paul, for example—why the elaboration of such a device when the Norse were perfectly capable of assimilating the biblical stories directly? If the intention was retrospectively to link Christian virtues with ancestors who could still be admired because they could not have been expected to know better, how does this explain a genre of storytelling that at its moral core promotes a pagan view of life utterly at odds with the prevailing norms of medieval thought? Far beyond the hazy golden age of an Iliad or the commissioned foundation myths of an Aeneid, these are entire cycles of tales that deal in detail with the doomed nobility of people from whom the Church of the saga-writers’ times would have recoiled.

  This book rejects that viewpoint as far as the Old Norse texts are concerned, and attempts a clear-eyed but not uncritical journey along the other path—the one we hope will lead us to the world of the Vikings themselves; we will not linger very long in its later, medieval shadow. Nevertheless, the obstacles in reading the sources in this way are considerable. Broadly speaking, medieval writings of all kinds can almost never be read as straight-up, trustworthy, and reliable reportage of what they claim to describe. There is always an agenda of some description, although the degree to which this is true is individual to each text, and always debatable. The sagas and other textual products of the Old Norse mind are marvellous indeed but must be interpreted with an abundance of caution; we must always be aware of the gaps (sometimes more like chasms) in the knowledge they can impart.

  The sources provide terms of reference, but before proceeding it is necessary to set down some terms and conditions—of social context, intellectual responsibility, and ethics. Just as anyone’s experiences of living in the present are always subjective, the same is true for history and its study. The Vikings could easily serve as exhibit A.

  Over the centuries, a great many people have eagerly pressed the Vikings into (im)moral service, and others continue to do so. However, this intensity of interest also reveals that their ancient lives still speak to us today. I strongly believe that any meaningful twenty-first-century engagement with the Vikings must acknowledge the often deeply problematic ways in which their memory is activated in the present. Viking scholars will recognise the feeling of yet another piece of fact-resistant nonsense surfacing in public or private discourse, and it is therefore important to be unequivocally clear here at the start.

  The Viking world this book explores was a strongly multicultural and multi-ethnic place, with all this implies in terms of population movement, interaction (in every sense of the word, including the most intimate), and the relative tolerance required. This extended far back into N
orthern prehistory. There was never any such thing as a ‘pure Nordic’ bloodline, and the people of the time would probably have been baffled by the very notion. We use ‘Vikings’ as a consciously problematic label for the majority population of Scandinavia, but they also shared their immediate world with others—in particular, the semi-nomadic Sámi people. Their respective settlement histories stretch so deeply into the Stone Age past as to make any modern discussion of ‘who came first’ absurd. Scandinavia had also welcomed immigrants for millennia before the Viking Age, and there is no doubt that a stroll through the market centres and trading places of the time would have been a vibrantly cosmopolitan experience.

  The Vikings cannot be reduced to a template, but if abstract concepts can describe their impact upon and interactions with the world around them, then one should look to curiosity, creativity, the complexity and sophistication of their mental landscapes, and, yes, their openness to new experiences and ideas. To seriously engage with the Vikings and their time is to embrace all these, and absolutely not to flatten them with stereotypes. They were as individually varied as every reader of this book. At the same time, no one should look away from what we would see as their less palatable sides, particularly the aggression that, in part, fuelled their movement into the wider world—beyond the clichés of ‘Viking raiders’, this aspect of the early medieval Scandinavian cultures was very real. They were warlike people in conflicted times, and their ideologies were also to a marked degree underpinned by the supernatural empowerment of violence. This could take extreme forms, manifested in such horrors as ritual rape, wholesale slaughter and enslavement, and human sacrifice. We should not read the Vikings backwards from our own time, but anyone who regards them in a ‘heroic’ light needs to think again.

  At the core of any modern relationship with the Vikings must be a commitment to clarity. To observe that these Northern peoples really did bend the arc of history is neither to approve nor condemn, but simply to acknowledge an ancient reality with legacies still perceptible today.