Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  There were sacrifices held in their honour and even mentions of special buildings for that purpose—dísasalir, ‘dísir-halls’. In Uppsala there was an annual market and dísir-assembly, the Disting, at which offerings were made “for peace and prosperity”. Rather wonderfully, it has a continuous history and is still held today, each year in early February, but is incorporated into the Christian calendar at Candlemas.

  Most of the invisible population are harder to categorise, and perhaps it is better not to try. The Norse called them vaettir, ‘spirits’, and the term seems to have meant as much or as little then as it does now. There were spirits of the land, the water, the sea, and the air. Those of the land were especially powerful, acting as guardians of place and perhaps also as stewards of its resources. One also reads of land-dísir, living in rocks. A law code recorded in the medieval Icelandic Book of Settlements notes how ships approaching shore must remove their figureheads so as not to frighten the spirits. Such legal strictures tend not to be frivolous, so this should be taken seriously.

  Then there were the more dangerous beings of the wilderness, the trolls and thurs, a difficult word to translate but meaning something like ‘ogre’. Much like the dwarves, they lived in stones and underground but in more remote places, and they were uniformly threatening. They are rarely closely described and more often seem to represent abstract hazards, an intimation of what could befall the unwary. By the Middle Ages, trolls had become nondescript monsters in stories to scare children at bedtime, but in the Viking Age, they were clearly ‘real’ enough. The sagas and poems use troll- as part of compounds that imply supernatural nastiness in general, sometimes with a suggestion of dark magic thrown in. Trolls were beings of Utgard, the realm beyond the borders. Almost uniquely among the invisible population, it is possible that an Iron Age depiction of trolls has survived on the Baltic island of Bornholm, in the form of grotesque little monsters made of stamped gold—lumpy creatures with faces in their chests, pointy ears, and oversized arms. Today they live on as tourist art and engaging silliness, symbols of the Nordic countries for external consumption, a long way from their origins as terrors of the wild.

  As perceived and communicated today, the Viking Age is an intensely visual experience: the intricate interlace art, the sleek and predatory lines of the ships, the landscapes of burial and commemoration—and, of course, the people themselves as seen through several centuries of mediation in Romantic paintings, woodcuts, and reconstructions on the page and screen. Ultimately deriving from the accounts of the literate cultures whom the Scandinavians encountered on their raids and travels, especially the English, Franks, and Arabs, this is the ‘othered’ picture that has overwhelmingly formed the popular perception of the Vikings in our own times.

  However, very different worlds were being built inside the Norse mind. Here is another distinction between appearance and reality, between the surface and what it conceals. From the problematic medieval written sources, and occasional mentions in Eddic and skaldic poetry, emerges one of the most remarkable aspects of the Vikings: the fourfold division of being and an extremely complex notion of what might loosely be called the soul.

  If you met a Viking-Age Scandinavian in the street, you would have seen their hamr—her or his ‘shell’ or ‘shape’—essentially what for us is the body. Conceived as a container for other aspects of the person, the hamr was the physical manifestation of what somebody was, but, crucially, it could alter. This is where the concept of shape-changing comes from, in the sense that the actual structures of the body were believed to flow and shift. But this was not true for everyone, only for the gifted (or, perhaps, the cursed). Most people stayed as they appeared, but some, in special circumstances—on certain nights, when stressed or frightened, in anger, or at times of extreme relaxation—could become something else.

  For men with these abilities, the alternative form was most often a large predator, such as a bear or wolf (one of the most famous Vikings of all, the warrior-poet Egil Skalla-Grímsson, had a grandfather named Kveldulf, ‘Evening-Wolf’, with all this implied). Women seem to have borne a special affinity with water creatures, particularly seals, as we learn in tales of sea-wives and selkies that have parallels in many Northern cultures. Some women could change into birds. Whatever the form of these shifters, their eyes always stayed human.

  Such individuals crossed the borders between people and animals. We do not know how they were really perceived by their contemporaries, but in our terms, they perhaps formed a very special kind of gender. Our own happily expanding spectrum includes many variations of the self, but they are all bounded by the human; the Vikings may have gone beyond even that, into what we now call posthumanism (but they got there first). However, it is possible, although strange to the modern mind, that such abilities were treated more as a sort of skill than anything else. Some people were good at carpentry, others had a fine singing voice, and your neighbour could become a bear when irritated.

  Inside the ‘shape’ of a person was the second part of their being, the hugr, for which no modern translation really suffices. Combining elements of personality, temperament, character, and especially mind, the hugr was who someone really was, the absolute essence of you, free of all artifice or surface affect. It is the closest thing the Vikings had to the independent soul found in later world faiths, because it could leave the physical body behind. The afterlife beliefs of the Vikings, which they certainly had in elaborate variety, will be considered in due course, but it is less clear what part of a person ‘moved on’ after death. As far as one can tell, it was probably the hugr.

  Crucially, some people with different, equally disquieting gifts could see these aspects of others. In the poetic fragment known as the Ljóðatal, the ‘List of Spells’, Odin boasts of his magical ability with a series of individual charms, and in one of them we see the true viciousness of his power:

  I know a tenth [spell]:

  if I see sorceresses

  playing up in the air,

  I can so contrive it

  that they go astray

  from the home of their shapes [heimhama]

  from the home of their minds [heimhuga].

  The spell is directed against the independent spirits of witches, sent out from their bodies on their mistresses’ errands. Odin’s charm is terrible in its severance of their very souls, cut away to dissipate forever.

  In the Viking mind, somewhere inside each of us is also a hamingja, a remarkable being that is the personification of a person’s luck. This was a very important attribute for the people of the North in the late Iron Age, as everyone’s path in life was determined by fate but rode on a wave of luck. A woman or man who was lucky, and seen to be so by their contemporaries as a result of their success, was a fortunate—and respected—person indeed. It is no accident that Leif Eiríksson, allegedly the first European to land in North America, was also known as hinn heppni, ‘the Lucky’. Interestingly, the hamingjur (in their plural form) could leave the body and walk about, mostly invisible except to those with the right kind of sight. There are saga accounts of men retreating from a coming battle because their opponents clearly had too many luck spirits with them, and nobody in their right mind would go against such odds. Curiously, a hamingja also had independent will and in extreme situations might even choose to leave its person. The English saying that someone’s luck has ‘run out’ is actually using a Norse proverb—except that the Vikings meant it literally.

  The last part of the fourfold soul was something else entirely: a separate being that somehow dwelled inside every human, inseparable from them but also distinct. The fylgja was a female spirit—always female, even for a man—and accompanied a person everywhere throughout life. How marvellous, and how utterly subversive of the male-focussed stereotype, that every single Viking man literally had a spirit-woman inside him.

  The word fylgja means ‘follower’, although sometimes it is translated ‘fetch’ and equated with similar beings from neighbouring
cultures. The fylgja was a guardian—a protector—but also the embodied link to one’s ancestors (in some texts, they are strongly reminiscent of the dísir, and at times the two beings appear to be the same). She moved on at death, continuing down the family line (although exactly how is unknown—did the fylgja wait for the next to be born, or could a person inherit one long after birth?). In any event, everyone carried with them—through them—the spirit of their family, watching over them and guiding their steps. The fylgjur could not be seen other than in dreams, where they appeared with warnings and advice. Of all the Viking-Age spirit-beings, these have proved the most tenacious. Modern Icelanders roll their eyes at being asked by visitors, again, if they believe in elves—but question them about their fylgjur and you may be met with a level stare and perhaps a change of subject.

  This sense of something utterly alien beneath the skin, occasionally manifesting itself in action or words, may have been one of the most significant differences between the Vikings and the people they encountered. Certainly for a European Christian, the composite soul with its shapes and shells would have been deeply unnerving. It may also have felt unnervingly familiar because pre-Christian Europe held many such beliefs, and they were deep-rooted enough to survive the coming of the new faith, buried in memory and folklore.

  By now it should be apparent that the Vikings were decidedly not the unsophisticated barbarians of stereotype. Equally, the mental (and, in their terms, the physical or natural) world they inhabited was not the same as that of the Franks, the Germans, or the English, to name but a few. When Continental Christians opened their doors in the morning, they did not see the work of elves, dwarves, and nature-spirits; their day was not ordained by the Norns; the dew on the grass was not sweat fallen from supernatural horses; a rainbow did not lead to Asgard and the sky-halls of the gods. Even battles, though bad enough, were not the playground of terrible war-women, screaming their rage and malice in the din. The Vikings, in short, were different.

  2

  AGE OF WINDS, AGE OF WOLVES

  THE VIKING AGE DID NOT begin with the famous raids on the West, with longships beaching from rough seas to chase the English and frighten the clergy. It did not even begin with Vikings, a label that sometimes obscures more than it illuminates. The world that Ash and Elm would populate took shape long before—centuries further back in what archaeologists refer to as the Iron Age. In order to understand the Vikings, it is first necessary to uncover their own past.

  The Scandinavians of the first millennium were living in the shadow of their world’s only superpower, the empire of Rome, in its heyday and also through its long, slow decline. The imperial border ran along the Rhine, cutting through the lands of the Germanic tribes not far south of Denmark. Cross-frontier trade and exchange—of ideas and attitudes as much as commodities—had been a staple of Scandinavian life for hundreds of years, especially among the elites.

  As the Western Empire started to fall apart into the fifth century, this too affected the North. In Europe, Roman power gradually dissipated and unravelled, taking new forms, breaking up old structures, and setting events in motion that convulsed the Continent. People were on the move: as militarised expeditions, as streams of refugees, in any way and for every reason that human beings leave their homes to seek new lives somewhere else. At the same time, Roman authority was partially absorbed, and enhanced, by its imperial twin to the east—what would later be termed the Byzantine Empire, with its capital at Constantinople (modern Istanbul). New politics, and new politicians, were on the rise and making their presence felt. These networks of influence and contact also reached Scandinavia, and the people of the North were always intimately connected with their surroundings.

  The overall impact on the Scandinavians of these convulsive changes to the south was one of instability, of change, but also of opportunity—often for the few at the expense of the many. What archaeologists have long identified as the ‘Migration Period’, from the fifth to mid-sixth centuries, included protracted crises with far-reaching effects. Their impact was further accelerated by a terrifying climate disaster that no one could have foreseen, causing mass mortality in the North. The deeper origins of Viking-Age Scandinavia can be found in these social and political upheavals. The recovery from a half-century of trauma was the beginning of something different, a new order of warlords and their retinues, of petty kingdoms ruled from great halls—and the whole culture of mythologised, ritual power that supported them—that would ultimately set the stage for the Viking phenomenon.

  Rome’s slow fall created unpredictable consequences that, centuries later, led to the rise of the Vikings. In a very real sense, the ‘new world’ of Viking-Age Scandinavia began in a cold, unending winter beneath a darkened sun.

  Rome was always a part of the ‘long’ Scandinavian Iron Age, as archaeologists term it. Even the current, conventional names for its chronological components are relative to the Empire, strangely beginning before its inception: the ‘pre-Roman’ period began around 500 BCE and extended to the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Caesars.

  *

  Like any imperial construct, at its apogee Roman power was a complex entity with regional administrations, a dispersed military, and an extended network economy. These elements operated with differing degrees of autonomy, and officials often pursued their own agendas alongside their formal duties. Riven by internal tensions and domestic conflict, the Empire also engaged in ‘peace-keeping’ missions within its borders and pacifying expeditions beyond its frontiers. All these things varied regionally and changed over time; the Empire was far from static. In the course of roughly two centuries—from the 370s to the 560s—this fluidity undermined the fabric of imperial power itself. The Western Empire began to fragment, at the same time as large numbers of frontier peoples, often characterised somewhat misleadingly as ‘barbarian tribes’, began to move.

  The question of the failing Empire and this so-called Migration Period continues to vex historians and generate sometimes acrimonious debate, but a number of clear positions have nonetheless emerged. These essentially occupy points on a scale that at one extreme sees an imperial structure disintegrating under increasing external pressure from mobile raiders and militarised migrations, while the opposite perspective sees the gradual internal transformations of the Empire itself as stimulating the movements of border peoples. There is little doubt that it was a time of great change, from reversals of the strategic balance at critical points on the imperial frontiers, to new social structures emerging beyond the Limes (as those borders were called) in which the influence of Rome played a part. The Migration Period was no simple timeline of invasions and depredation, the classic European map misleadingly crisscrossed by arrows of different colours to mark the moving ‘tribes’.

  From the third century onwards, imperial cohesion was more or less constantly tested—from within as much as from without. Destabilising conflicts played out in Gaul, Spain, and North Africa throughout the early 400s, while Roman power steadily frayed under the onslaughts of Attila and his Huns. These actions, in turn, caused social displacement across the Empire while a succession of military usurpers attempted to seize the imperial throne. In reality, the ‘fall’ of Rome was no single process, and there are only isolated incidents that show a sharp decline at all (though some of them were dramatic, such as the sack of the ‘Eternal City’ itself by the Goths in 410). There were good years as well as bad, occasionally occurring at the same time in different parts of the Empire. For the citizens of the state and the people beyond its frontiers but still within its orbit, all this would have been felt in a myriad of ways, some sudden and others so slow acting as to be imperceptible as they unfolded.

  Trade routes were realigned as certain goods ceased production or shifted markets, while others rose to fill the gap. There would have been shortages, certainly, things you could no longer find in the market, but also reorientations of commerce to meet changing demand or new economic realities. These pr
ocesses were catalysts for more profound change, as settlement patterns and demographics shifted around them. In modern terms, one could think of successful roadside communities that see their prosperity erode as a new highway passes them by and the traffic leaves them behind.

  People always move in troubled times, as insecurities seep into the fabric of daily life and both individuals and collectives face difficult choices. In part, the ‘Migration Period’ was just such a situation; people—in movements both large and small—took to the roads in search of positive change. Some were fleeing, and others were those they fled from. Most were looking for economic security, safety, and a quieter life, while a powerful minority were trying proactively to shape a world more to their liking. The whole was characterised by a loosening of (already decentralised) power and a constant process of local negotiation. Peoples and polities were working out ways to adapt and survive, forming new identities and ethnicities in the process.

  In Scandinavia, human settlement had always been determined by the region’s unique geography and topography: the mountainous fjords of Norway with their marginal agricultural fringes; the great forests, lakes, and fertile arable plains of Sweden; the low-lying landscape of Denmark, rich in farming potential and with total access to the sea. Once the viable agricultural land was settled and cleared for cultivation, the pattern of life stabilised into a landscape of scattered farms and small villages.