by Neil Price;
At the end of the war of the divine families, the gods sealed the peace by spitting into a communal vessel, and from the saliva they made a man. His name was Kvasir; he knew the answer to every riddle and could untangle any puzzle of words. On his travels, Kvasir was waylaid and murdered by two dwarves, who mixed his blood with honey to make a mead that contained all the powers of poetry. After a series of evil deeds, the dwarves fell afoul of a giant and were forced to surrender the drink to escape with their lives. The fame of the mead spread, but it was guarded inside a mountain by the giant’s daughter, Gunnlöd. Having tried to trick his way to a taste of the potion (a story that with characteristic brutality involves the murder of nine slaves), Odin eventually tunnelled inside the rock in the form of a snake, and seduced Gunnlöd. He stayed with her for three nights. She gave him three draughts of the mead, but he gulped it all down. Transformed into an eagle, Odin flew back to Asgard, evading the pursuing giants and vomiting the mead into containers the gods set out in readiness.
The tale has all the hallmarks of Odin: cunning, violence, sexual deception, theft, shape-changing, and victory. Ever after, the gift of poetry was in the god’s power, and a true skald stood thus marked as a recipient of divine favour, appropriately established in the seat of a king.
The hall, and hall culture, was the machine at the heart of the new Scandinavian regimes. It is fascinating to look inside them.
Excavations at Gamla Uppsala over many years have revealed a sequence of extraordinary royal halls on raised terraces at the highest point of the site. Elevated over the surrounding plain, they would have been visible for kilometres, which is what ‘Uppsala’ means: the high halls. The main structure was fifty metres long and twelve metres wide, probably with two storeys—one of the greatest buildings of the North. The interior roof-supporting posts were whole trees, dug metres down into the underlying terrace. A wide processional ramp led up from the plain to its double doors, fully three metres across. At some point the structure had burnt, preserving many details intact, while fragments of its fittings had been carefully gathered up and buried as offerings of closure along the walls and postholes.
Providing the best picture yet of what such a building looked like, dozens of iron spirals were found along the wall lines and clustered around the doors—the smallest the length of a finger, the biggest as long as a forearm. The hall had been covered with curved iron spikes, jutting out from the timbers. They are identical to the ship-spirals in the nearby Valsgärde boat graves, suggesting this was something of an emblem for the people of the region. Even more exciting was the ironwork decoration on the doors: more spirals, flat against the wood, along with volutes and other patterns, the whole resembling medieval church doors (clearly, that tradition was much older than previously thought). And then there were the door hinges: actual spears, hammered into a curve round the door posts, laid so their blades would have rested flat on the door surfaces, the points towards the centre. The entry to the hall was thus through a portal of weapons, bringing to mind the description of Odin’s own residence, Valhöll—another resonance for the Uppsala kings.
In Lejre, Denmark, the seat of the Skjöldunga kings of Sjælland (and possible location of the Heorot hall in Beowulf), rows of royal palace buildings have been excavated at the crest of the slope, towering over the plain as at Uppsala. Again, they are nearly fifty metres long, but here the complex is surrounded by the ancillary buildings, workshops, and cultic structures that archaeologists are only beginning to perceive at the Swedish sites. The dimensions of such halls varied with the climate. The biggest of all, at Borg in the Lofoten islands of Arctic Norway, is eighty metres long—the size of Trondheim’s medieval cathedral, built centuries later. Few people today have ever seen timber construction on this scale, truly meriting the concept of epic space.
Such architecture was repeated across the North. Similar examples, if not quite so grand, occur at many sites. They are found at Borre and at Kaupang in Norway, where the place was known as Skiringssal, the ‘Shining Hall’. Finds of lime kilns indicate that the halls at Tissø in Denmark had whitewashed walls, and something similar is described by the Roman historian Tacitus some seven hundred years earlier among the Continental Germanic tribes. These great buildings would have shone in the sun.
With the assistance of archaeology, some help from the written record, and a little imagination, one can picture the scene inside them. In particular, there are later descriptions such as a marvellous episode from the thirteenth-century Saga of Egil Skalla-Grímsson. Here, the famed warrior-poet and his men are being entertained at the hall of his mortal enemy, their hatred of each other churning beneath the iron-bound rules of hospitality. Fine food is served; the ale horn goes round and round in the dim, smoky light, where it’s hard to make out exactly what is happening. The endless toasts; men passing out and throwing up, some making it to the doors, some not. Women warily watching, serving beer and food, trying to keep out of their way. Simmering tension one moment, drunken bonhomie the next; deadly violence always a possibility, spurred by a careless (or very deliberate) word.
Once again, we can turn to Beowulf, the entire epic poem a long-form encapsulation of this warrior ethos of the hall. Here is the young hero Wiglaf, son of Weohstan, defending his lord to the last and exhorting his companions to remember their oaths:
I remember that time when mead was flowing,
how we pledged loyalty to our lord in the hall,
promised our ring-giver we would be worth our price,
make good the gift of the war-gear,
those swords and helmets, as and when
his need required it. He picked us out
from the army deliberately, honoured us and judged us
fit for this action, made me these lavish gifts –
and all because he considered us the best
of his arms-bearing thanes.
This was the kind of verse declaimed around the hearth.
The firelight also had an unsettling effect that lent an otherworldly air to the lords of the hall. The poetry describes how they wore their helmets indoors, and the flickering orange flames of the hearth would have animated the covering of relief pictures on their tiny press-metal plaques. The warlords’ faces were veiled with a mass of moving figures, dancing in the shadows. Again by firelight, some of the helmet images could also be seen to lack an eye, an effect achieved by selectively omitting the reflecting gold foil backing of the cloisonné garnets on their features—a one-eyed lord for the one-eyed god, Odin, the ultimate patron of the new royalty. This may even have been taken as a possession, almost a transformation.
The same effect was cultivated by visitors. In many of the halls, archaeologists have found tiny rectangular foils of pure gold, wafer thin and stamped with images. There are human figures, alone or in pairs, making formal gestures—pointing, an embrace, a kiss—or with their arms in such specific positions that they must mean something. The figures are usually in profile but occasionally are seen from the front. Their clothing and hairstyles are minutely depicted, an important source for our knowledge of fashion, gendered dress, and social signals. They carry staffs, weapons, horns, and cups. The figures stand within borders of beaded gold, or amidst interlace patterns. A few figures are not on foils at all, but are cut out freestyle like paper dolls in precious metal. Even fewer are very clearly not human, or divine, but something else entirely: strange, swollen shapes—monsters, perhaps, or beings of another world. The foils tend to cluster round postholes for the uprights that supported the roof, and would probably once have been fixed to the posts themselves with resin or some similar adhesive.
On the few occasions where the stamp matrixes used to mass-produce the foils have been found, it is evident there were particular motifs for individual hall complexes; in other words, a specific design denoted a single place or its people. Perhaps the foils were high-end business cards, or ambassadorial tokens, presented by visitors and then affixed in place in the host’s hall
. Multiple repeated foil images on the posts indicate return visits, and thereby a generous reception. The greater the variety of foils in one place, the more renowned the lord to have welcomed guests from far and wide. In the fire’s glow, the foils, too, would have glittered, the towering roof posts appearing through the smoke as pillars of shining golden lights.
But in the end, how was all this paid for and maintained?
Long-distance trade was not new to Scandinavia. Bronze Age networks had once traversed Europe, and even after a contraction in the early Iron Age, the influence of the Roman Empire brought innovation and imports to the North. But those connections were also hit by the imperial decline—they were a real part of the Migration Period crisis and possibly even one of its causes. It has long been known that the pre-Viking warlords in some way managed to recharge, and even realign and extend, overseas connections, but recent studies have shown that these links stretched much farther than previously thought—beyond what not so long ago were imagined to be the borders of their world.
Excavations of Swedish jewellers’ workshops have revealed caches of garnets, imported as raw material from India and Sri Lanka. Elephant ivory perhaps travelled along a similar path, either through the Persian Gulf and then overland on the caravan routes or via the Red Sea to the Mediterranean ports. Roman jewellery and glass, as well as Byzantine metalwork, came the same way. There are carnelian beads from Sindh, precious cowrie shells from Arabia, even lizard skins from Bengal. At the settlement site near the mound burials of Sutton Hoo in eastern England, the exact contemporary and equivalent to the Vendel grave-fields in Sweden, was a decorated bucket from Egypt. The list goes on, and archaeologists are only now starting to discover how these networks functioned and where they extended, by tracing the items that flowed through them. The latest suggestion, and a convincing one, is that in the sixth to eighth centuries the North actually formed the western terminus of the Silk Roads that ultimately stretched to Tang China, to Silla and the North-South States in Korea, and in the eighth century to Nara Japan.
The Scandinavian elites evolved careful strategies to access these commercial networks. To participate in such far-flung trade, they must have had a ready supply of goods that were in demand abroad. What were these things, and where did they come from? In the last decade of archaeological research, it has emerged that in addition to promoting prestige gift exchange and the use of foreign goods, the new rulers also set up mutually beneficial webs of long-distance trade inside Scandinavia—the resources of one petty kingdom usefully complementing the domestic wealth of another. In practice, even the products of remote areas of the North could be redirected to the rising kingdoms of the coasts, which could then funnel it into foreign commerce.
The discovery of this transactional economy means rethinking the structures of the farm itself, which governed how commodities were produced and moved—in particular, the traditional concept of the infield (the area immediately around the home farm where crops were sown) and the outlands. The latter have often been seen as pasture and grazing areas, usually in upland meadows, marginal environments nonetheless useful for animal husbandry that were utilised either at a distance from the farm or even seasonally in more inhospitable microclimates. It is now clear that the ‘outlands’ as a notional economic zone could in fact extend hundreds of kilometres from the points that they supplied, requiring a redefinition of what they were—and, most important, what they were for.
To take just a few examples, a tar-making industry grew up on a scale that steadily increased through the late Iron Age, with exports from the Swedish forests being moved out to the sea and serving a demand for the protection of timber and sails (a trade the Swedes would continue to operate far into the nineteenth century). Similarly, bear pelts turn up in southern Sweden from animals that had been hunted in the far northern forests, their skins taken along the coast from sites at the Norrland river estuaries. A parallel trade connected the trappers of Jämtland on the Norwegian border with consumers in the Swedish lowlands. All these areas were thus ‘outlands’ of farming communities on the other side of Scandinavia, just as much as the animal pastures a few hundred metres away from their infields.
The outlands even included the deep-sea fishing grounds of the Atlantic. Thus, a whale speared in the Arctic waters off Norwegian Lofoten could provide the bone for a gaming piece with which you could win at the popular board game of hnefatafl in Swedish Uppsala, or the plaque on which a Dane would smooth a linen shirt. The catalogue of such commodities is being extended all the time.
Not all of this is a product of the ‘crisis’ and its response. The hunting of elk and reindeer using pitfall traps, for example, clearly started accelerating in the 400s before the main settlement decline. The wholesale exploitation of the outlands that began to take off in the sixth century was thus in part an adaptation of trends that had already begun, although perhaps it was applied more readily in new contexts. It is clear that at least from the 500s (and perhaps much earlier), there were mercantile connections between the far north of Scandinavia and the south, between the east and west, and also into the European mainland. But the expanded domestic utilisation of the outlands (in this new definition of them) provided the trading goods to activate foreign exchange, especially in the form of skins and furs, and largely underpinned the expansion of the petty kingdoms.
The utilisation of the outlands from the sixth century onwards thus acted as a sort of experimental training ground for the larger mercantile expansion that would come to characterise the Viking Age. The difference is that in the pre-Viking period it seems the trade largely came to Scandinavia, perhaps through middle agents to a communal trading arena in the Baltic and along its shores. In the Viking Age, the Scandinavians themselves took the trade overseas and overland to its points of origin.
From the early 500s onwards, we can also detect a marked surge in iron production—used for weapons, armour, and the rivets that held ships together. Not only does this signal the same kind of new economic initiative that can be seen in other commodities, but the specific utilizations of iron are telling: Scandinavia was arming itself.
Throughout this period of profound changes, Scandinavia was far from isolated in Europe, and such developments were not confined to the North. There were active connections to what is now Poland, the German border region, northern Italy, Hungary, and beyond. Even if it is hard to be sure precisely what form these links took, there were mobile military forces constantly exploiting the profitable aftermath of imperial withdrawal. As the ‘new North’ began to take shape, the Merovingians were similarly fighting their way to carve out kingdoms in France with aspirations that extended into parts of southern Germany; the Lombards taking power across the Alps in Italy; the Saxons consolidating their grip along the Danish border region.
This same post-Roman period also saw the first settlements of north Germanic peoples in southern Britain, who over succeeding centuries would become the English and ultimately give rise to the nation that bears their name. Connections between the Norwegian and Swedish lowlands and eastern England were particularly close, and in some ways this link was never lost. The famous ship burial at Sutton Hoo, dated c. 625, contained a helmet, regalia, and weapon set that would not have been out of place in Sweden, and indeed seems at least in part to have been imported from Uppland. One of the picture plaques on the helmet was even pressed on a matrix made in the same workshop as one from a royal grave-mound at Uppsala, buried with rituals that indicate a shared set of values and political ideas. The thought-world of the pre-Viking period, whether scholars today call it the time of the Vendels or the Merovingians, extended seamlessly across the North Sea.
The point should not be overstated, but it is striking that the key tenets of the new societies that rose from the Migration Period crisis seem to have included a marked rise in militaristic ideology, infused with uncompromising codes of honour, oath-bound loyalty, and the obligations of violent redress. These values were expressed in the
growth of an expansionist hall-based elite culture whose elevated view of itself was fuelled by a constant appetite for war. Underpinning it all was an ever-greater reliance on family and kin—a dependence on the ultimate redoubts of social cohesion and their unbreakable bonds. It is not hard to see all this as a bulwark against the distant memory of the sixth-century collapse.
These, then, were the building blocks of the Viking Age, set in place more than two hundred years earlier: the slow collapse of post-Roman power, its knock-on effects in terms of economic and military instability in the North, and the opportunistic gambits of those who tried to take advantage of them. An already unstable situation was tipped by the terrible thing that happened to the sky in the 530s—the dimming of the heavens that called into question the very foundations of the Northerners’ beliefs in their gods. As the dust veil went on and on, “three of these winters together / and no summer between”, and the crops died, the bonds of society itself began to slip. Then the starvation began, followed by the years of struggle for the scraps. Perhaps half of the entire Scandinavian population perished, the Ragnarök prefigured. Over the following decades and centuries, the North recovered but remade and reshaped itself into a different kind of world. The outline of almost everything to come can be traced back to this time: the social and political structures, the economies and connections to long-distance trade overseas, the rituals and frames of mind, and the propensity for violence.
