Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  Conventional studies of the Vikings tend to be organised regionally, preserving the artificial notions of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ arenas of activity that are actually just scholarly legacies of the Cold War, with its more-or-less impermeable barrier stretching across Europe. Thus one is usually guided sequentially through the British Isles, the Continent, and the North Atlantic from the first raids to the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, followed by a separate chronological tour of the East over the same period. Along the way in works of that kind, one may also find discrete themes neatly packaged (such as chapter 4, “Religion”).

  This book attempts something different, not only in terms of promoting the Vikings’ worldview but also by emphasising that it was the same people traversing that great map of cultures and encounters—no Iron Curtain for them. In addition, their lives must be seen as a seamless whole, blending ‘religion’, politics, gender, subsistence, and all other aspects of existence into a general perception of reality itself—quite simply the way things seemed to them to be. What, for some, is ‘background’, building up to what the Vikings accomplished out in the world, is here the point itself.

  The text is in three main sections, following an approximately chronological track but acknowledging contemporaneity as well as sequence.

  The new home in which Ash and Elm awakened was called Miðgarðr, or Midgard, literally the ‘Middle Place’ (the inspiration, by the way, for Tolkien’s Middle Earth). This, of course, is our world too, though the Vikings saw it rather differently. Its geographical limits do not seem to have been defined by any means other than experience and travel. The first part explores this realm through the Vikings’ sense of self, and of their environment, and begins by delineating the contours of this landscape both on the ground and inside their heads. It explores their unique understandings of personhood, gender, and the place of the individual in the many dimensions of the cosmos. This also involves meeting the other beings with whom the Vikings shared these spaces.

  The Scandinavian experience is traced from the wane of the Western Roman Empire and its interactions with the Germanic tribes beyond its borders, through the turbulent years of the fifth and sixth centuries to the new order that was built on the remains of the old. The social arena of the early North is described here: the material culture of everyday life, the settled landscape, and the overarching structures of politics, power, ritual, belief, law, and war. The borders between the living and the dead are explored, alongside the human relationships with the invisible population around them. The timeline here takes us up to the ninth century—roughly the middle of the Viking Age as conventionally reckoned.

  The second part goes back to the early 700s, but follows a different path to seek the major sociopolitical developments and demographic factors that slowly combined to trigger the Viking phenomenon itself. This was the time of the raids and their gradual escalation from isolated attacks to invasions of conquest, in the ever-present context of expanding trade networks. The maritime culture of Scandinavia, the rise of the sea-kings, and the development of uniquely mobile pirate polities are the focus here. The beginnings of the diaspora can be traced in all directions: along the eastern rivers of silver to Byzantium and the Caliphate of the Arabs, creating a new identity in the warrior-traders known as the Rus’; west into the British Isles; south into the Continental empires and the Mediterranean; and through the opening up of the North Atlantic. This section follows these events to the start of the tenth century in a series of parallel, simultaneous narratives.

  Part three moves the story to the mid-eleventh century, as the Viking phenomenon diversified across the northern world. Its consequences included an urban revolution in the Scandinavian economies and the reorganisation of the countryside, paralleled by the consolidation of royal power and the rising influence of a new faith. Abroad, competing Viking power bases and kingdoms were established in Frankia, England, Ireland, and the Scottish Isles. The flowering of the Icelandic republic led to westward voyages to Greenland, and the European landfall in North America. In the East, the Rus’ state expanded ever further. By 1050 or so, the lines of modern Norway, Denmark, and eventually Sweden, too, were already clear, the Scandinavian peoples beginning to take their place on the stage of Christian Europe.

  The Viking Age did not ‘end’ with particular events in specific times or places any more than it ‘began’ with them. Instead, it became something else with another shift in perspective, with new points of view as the Scandinavians moved into their many different futures. This book started with driftwood on a beach as the first human couple stepped onto the sand, the beginning of us all. At its close is the final battle and the end of the cosmos, the Nordic apocalypse—the Ragnarök. Wolves will swallow the sun and moon, the white-hot stars will sink into the sea and shroud the world in steam, the powers of the night will pour through a hole in the sky, and the gods will march to war for the last time.

  But there is a long way to go before then, and the path takes many turns. It begins at the trunk of a tree.

  THE MAKING OF MIDGARD

  1

  THE HOME OF THEIR SHAPES

  TAKEN AT FACE VALUE, THE world of the Vikings appeared much the same as that of everyone around them: individuals, looking roughly like you and me but in different clothes, going about their business and moving through landscapes and settlements that—albeit rustic-looking—would still be intelligible all these centuries later. But that is all it was, surface, a screen masking something very different, very old, and very odd.

  Any attempt to understand the Vikings must first delve beneath that deceptive exterior to get inside their minds, even inside their bodies. What is found there, and its implications, provides the first key to truly seeing the world through their eyes.

  The Vikings were not alone, but very much shared their world with a multitude of ‘Others’—not just other humans, but other things altogether. The most obvious were the gods, and the plural form in itself set them apart from the monotheistic cultures of the great Continent to the south. They were also familiar with those divinities’ servants (some of them utterly terrifying) and a whole host of other beings, spirits, and creatures that have survived under the comforting label of ‘folklore’ but at the time were very real. This question of reality is important because the Vikings did not believe in these things any more than someone today ‘believes in’ the sea. Instead they knew about them: all this was as much a natural part of the world as trees and rocks. That these beings could not be seen need not have been significant.

  This shadowy population beside whom the Vikings walked also spanned more worlds than one, and here is another difference: the Scandinavians were situated at the centre of many realms of existence—far beyond the familiar binaries of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ afterlives found in many religions. In the Viking mind, these worlds were all other places for other inhabitants, but ordered and connected in a manner that made them accessible if you knew the right paths to take.

  At the most fundamental level of all, inside every Viking-Age person was not just some abstract ‘soul’ (if that is to your spiritual taste) but several separate and even independent beings. Each one was a component of the whole individual.

  Taking the Vikings ‘at face value’, then, would have been a big mistake, though one made by many of their contemporaries. A few, especially Christians, seem to have realised exactly who and what the Vikings were, and usually recoiled from the knowledge. But there is no need to do so today. By looking at the Vikings with open eyes and open minds, it is possible to enter their world.

  There is no fully comprehensible geography of the Norse cosmos, nothing that really makes coherent sense in the poems and stories. This may be a product of the tales’ long and rough journey down to us over the centuries, but equally it may reflect a lack of clarity or even concern at the time. We should not read too much into this because, after all (taking just one religious example), how many of even the most devout Christian faithful today
can sketch an accurate map of the afterlife? It is also important to understand that the Norse had never heard of ‘the Norse myths’. The collections now conveniently packaged under that name in our bookshops are the syntheses of far later times, compiled after their fossilisation as text by people who were not entirely sympathetic to what they contained. These are very different from the lively, organic world of oral stories that changed in the telling and probably also varied considerably across the valleys, plains, mountains, and waterways of Scandinavia.

  The names and natures of the worlds, and their beginnings, are described in a number of mythological texts collected in the Poetic Edda, as well as in longer narrative form by Snorri in his prose handbook. His information is particularly difficult to assess precisely because it is so detailed, so rich. Why should this canny Christian politician, acutely aware of his place in the world, take such pains to record the intricacies of a dead religion that was anathema to the Church whose interests he upheld? The answer perhaps lies in the fact that the spiritual themes in the skaldic poems he cites were almost all marshalled in a single cause: the praise of kings and the recording of their deeds. If those mythological allusions and metaphors were not actively maintained, there would be no possibility of properly understanding and perpetuating the heroic royal histories. This may be why Snorri wrote his Edda—to activate that resource in the service of memory harnessed for political ends. Fortunately for Viking scholars, Snorri’s loyalty to the idea of Scandinavian monarchy gifted us a trove of knowledge of these other worlds. Always indirectly, in the course of questions and answers or as knowledge grudgingly imparted, a fragmentary picture emerges—but it is, barely, enough.

  At the centre of it all was a tree, the Tree, that spanned all the worlds and joined them together. A great ash, its name was Yggdrasill, literally the ‘Steed of the Terrible One’. The latter was one of the many names for Odin and a hint of the tree’s wider properties, for it did not just connect the realms but also served as a road between the realms for those who knew how to ride it. That the first man was made of the same substance may not have been coincidence, implying some subtle quality of humanity that infused the universe.

  In the beginning there had been nothing but the grassless void of Ginnungagap, an emptiness that stretched forever. Though not quite empty, for deep within it lay a sleeping potential, a power and presence inside the absence, waiting to be awakened. To the north (directions are important here) was the icy space of Niflheim, the ‘dark world’. To the south lay Muspellsheim, in flames. Rivers of poison, the Élivágar, flowed from a spring in Niflheim and froze in Ginnungagap. As the sparks from Muspell’s fires met this ice, it began to melt and, in the process, change—the slowly falling droplets taking shape and form. The first being in all creation was made: the frost giant, Ymir. He was soon joined by something else, something very different, and her name was Authumbla—a great hornless cow that shambled about in the vacancy. Her milk kept the giant alive.

  Just as with the first humans who would later emerge from the driftwood, the gods themselves had a similar beginning. As cattle do, Authumbla liked to lick the salty rime that formed on the blocks of ice dotting Ginnungagap, and it was under her tongue that the first of them woke to life. On the first day, his hair was revealed; on the second, his head was freed; on the third, he stepped out of the ice and into the cold. His name was Búri, the ancestor of the Aesir, the divine family. Soon more and more creatures appeared in this desolate place. Somehow more giants coalesced from the sweat beneath Ymir’s arms. One of his legs mated with the other and produced a child. Among these progeny were Bölthorn and his daughter, Bestla, the ancestors of the giants.

  It is hard to know how the people of the Viking Age perceived these stories, with their strangeness, contradictions, and apparent absurdities. Did they sagely nod their heads at the mysteries, at ancient wisdom imparted to the privileged? Did they laugh? Were these deep, legendary truths for the elders or yarns for the very young? The one certainty is that, in one form or another, the tales survived for centuries down to our own times: someone, in fact a great many people over the years, must have felt them to be very important indeed.

  Búri, too, mysteriously had a son—Burr. From his union with the giantess Bestla came the first of the Aesir. Their sons were Odin and his two brothers, and it is they who began to shape the worlds. It was done through murder, carefully planned.

  The three young gods lie in wait for Ymir. They ambush him, kill him, literally rip him apart. Ymir’s blood rises and rises, drowning all the giants but two, Bergelmir and his wife, who float away on a raft. He and his kind, the frost giants, will make their own world; they will return, and they will remember what Odin and his brothers have done.

  As the blood begins to recede, the gods drag Ymir’s corpse into the centre of Ginnungagap. From the giant’s torn flesh, they make the land. His hair becomes the trees, and the waters flow from his blood—all the rivers and lakes filling red. His bones are the rocks and mountains; his teeth, his molars, are the boulders and scree. Above it all is the dome of the sky made from the vault of Ymir’s skull. To support its heavy weight, the gods set four dwarves at the corners of the earth: their names are Austri, Vestri, Nordri, and Sudri—the cardinal points. Then they throw clumps of the giant’s brain into the heavens, forming the clouds.

  Around it all the gods set a great fence made of Ymir’s brows and eyelashes—a defensive boundary for the world, a mighty seawall against the encircling ocean of blood. They call this palisade Midgard, the name by which the whole earth will be known, the place of Ash and Elm.

  This final component of Midgard, its boundary, is an example of a central concept in the Viking mind that is encountered throughout their view of the world. The suffix -garðr literally means an enclosed space, somewhere set about with a border. In the Scandinavian languages even today the word gård simply means ‘farm’, and this is its basic sense—a settled place, a bounded place, even a whole world; in the same meaning of enclosure, it is the root of the modern English ‘yard’. This idea of being inside the wall, as distinct from what is beyond and therefore outside one’s control, is at the core of Viking-Age concepts of settlement and order. It is an insight into their way of thinking.

  As yet, Midgard was dark, but the gods brought lights snatched from the molten embers of Muspellsheim and placed them around the firmament. At first the heavenly bodies were confused; in the words of the Seeress’s Prophecy:

  Sól [the sun] did not know

  where she had her home.

  Máni [the moon] did not know

  what strength he had.

  The stars did not know

  where their places were.

  Then the gods brought order to the sky. Ymir’s skull began to glow as the chariot of Day rode across its vault, illuminated by the sun; her brother Máni followed the horses of Night to complete the cycle (just in passing, as another insight into the Norse mind-set, it is worth noting the unusual sex of the heavenly bodies, the sun female and the moon male). To set the pace of sun and moon, even now, they are both chased by wolves, a hunt that will never end until the Ragnarök, the final battle and the fall of all things.

  It is then that Odin and his brothers go walking along the beach, where the driftwood is waiting. Where we are waiting.

  As Midgard and its people took form (the time frame is as ambiguous as ever), the other worlds around them were brought into being, the great ash in their midst. To some degree, there are at least relative locations. Up above was Ásgarðr, or Asgard—another bounded space—literally the ‘Place of the Aesir’, in other words, the home of the gods. This was a vast, rolling landscape of fields and forests, mountains and lakes, essentially a divine mirror of the human world below in which everything was appropriately scaled up in both size and grandeur, as befitting its residents.

  A road, or rather a bridge, ran between the realm of the gods and the home of humans: the rainbow, arcing across the worlds. Its name was Bifr
öst, the ‘shimmering path’, and according to the poems it blazed with flame. Known too as the ‘Aesir Bridge’ and the ‘Powers’ Way’, it was also a line of defence against the giants. Beneath it raged two mighty rivers, Körmt and Örmt, always in torrential flood.

  Flowing water also divided Midgard from the realm of giants, Jötunheim (sometimes found in the plural, ‘Giant-worlds’), that lay to the east. Somewhere on this boundary was also Járnviðr, ‘Iron-Forest’, where giant troll-women gave birth to the wolves that, at the end, will swallow the heavenly bodies.

  Even farther east was Útgarðr, Utgard, ‘the Place Outside’, a wilderness literally beyond the worlds of humans, gods, and giants, as its name implies. There is little detail in the stories, but Utgard seems to have been a churning, dark, and formless space, the home of things that could not be relied upon—trolls, monsters, and evil powers. It was nowhere you’d want to go. In the texts, both the world of giants and the world beyond move steadily northwards as the medieval source material gets further away in time from the Viking Age, perhaps a reorientation that reflected one of the Christian locations of hell.

  The Norse, too, had a special realm for the dead, although there is no contemporary suggestion that it was bad or a place of punishment. The name of this world was Hel, disconcertingly close to its negative Christian equivalent; the exact relationship between them, if any, is unknown, but Christian overtones can clearly be seen in the later sources. Some philologists have argued that in Old Norse the original name instead related to something underground—essentially a metaphor for the grave, which would make sense. According to Snorri, the path to Hel lay north and down. It was certainly a realm below, stretching nine leagues into the ground, through nine worlds of death, with Niflhel, ‘Dark-Hel’, at the bottom. It was bounded by a great fence, Nágrind, or ‘Corpse-Gate’, with a terrible hound at the door. To get there one had to cross a river churning with knives and swords, and clashing blocks of ice, over the golden-thatched Gjallabrú bridge, which was guarded by a giantess.