by Neil Price;
3
THE SOCIAL NETWORK
EVERYONE IN VIKING-AGE SCANDINAVIA ULTIMATELY lived within the extended orbit of the farm and the family, and also within the social codes that bound them together. Most important of all were the bonds of kinship, whether by blood or acquired through institutions such as marriage. Men in particular were also connected by a special kind of formal friendship, and by political alliances embodied in personal ties. All these links were complex and far-reaching, but firm. Every aspect of life—from one’s possible choice of partner to the ordering of the hearth and home, even what a person wore and ate—was dependent on the social network and someone’s place within it. These structures, these relationships, and all the many, many objects in daily use lay at the absolute heart of the Vikings’ social world—physically located around the farm and within the household. They must be explored together.
Some surprises quickly appear. Many Viking marriages were polygynous, for example—men were able to marry more than one woman, although women could each only take one husband. In addition, there was an institution of concubinage, which in the Viking Age was very far from the sexual subservience conjured by an Orientalist harem cliché; this, too, bound men and women to one another in complicated and varied ways.
Archaeology enables this social network to be reconstructed in detail, from the types of architecture to the food on the table, as well as the behaviour that went on there. It is perhaps here that the Vikings are revealed most clearly as the opposites of the ‘hairy barbarian’ cliché. In fact, Viking-Age men and women were well-groomed, even fastidious in their appearance—appropriately so because they lived in a thoroughly visual world. Their clothes, possessions, furniture, vehicles, and buildings were all decorated—as was their skin. The notion of ‘art’ does not do justice to this all-enveloping world of symbolism and display, and is just one more reason why the Vikings so often stood apart from their contemporaries.
The majority of the Viking-Age population encountered in the archaeology, and in the written sources, were ‘free farmers’, in the often-repeated trope. This is true, up to a point, but it is important not to mistake it for equality. The societies of the Viking Age were deeply stratified, with an individual’s place in the stack largely dependent on the resources available to her or him—in the form of land, property and, not least, the support of other people. A landless person was only a half-step above the unfree and the utterly impoverished.
Kinship, family, was the glue that held the communities of the Iron Age together, which can be seen most sharply when it began to loosen, as in the crisis of the sixth century and its aftermath. Most people belonged to the rural middle class of bœndr (farmers), living within the protective environment of the hjón, the household. This was not always independent, but could encompass the concept of tenancy and an obligation to pay dues or tax of some kind to a lord. It also included the protective sphere of the family who sheltered under that cover.
This intimate bond between people was also extended to the land. Claims to ownership could be staked by the burial of personal possessions, which were sometimes broken to emphasise that the occupants were there to stay. It may be that deposits made within the property were for the ancestors, while those over the line were for other beings. In time, as such actions accumulated over the generations, together with burial mounds on the boundaries and stone memorials to mark out the borders, “the property owned the owners”.
It is hard to know how many people lived in the ‘average’ Viking-Age household, but it was probably similar to the farmsteads of the preceding centuries. The usual guestimate for a smallholding is perhaps seven to ten individuals, comprising a nuclear family of parents and children, an elderly relative or two, and possibly two or three labourers. On the larger estates, the occupants might rise to thirty or forty, including extended family constellations together with retainers and a much greater number of enslaved people.
Family life was enshrined and perpetuated in the condition of marriage, but this concealed multiple layers of nuance. In the Viking Age, marriage was primarily a contract between families, rather than individuals. It represented a means by which kin structures, identities, and both social and political hierarchies were formed and adapted. The emphasis was on carefully planned relationships as much as on blood ties; indeed, the former may have carried more weight than the latter. A favourable marriage, for example, was not only essential to securing the social and political status of individuals and their relatives but also, in some cases, to ensuring survival during times of conflict. Men employed a variety of strategies to secure marriage partners that enabled them to dominate matters of family diplomacy. These in turn had implications for intra-household relationships, policy, and conflict.
Negotiations were complex manoeuvres, and girls could be betrothed early—as young as thirteen—although marriage was often delayed until the bride-to-be reached sixteen. In the Saga of Gunnlaug Snake-Tongue, one Jófríd is already a widow when she marries Thorsteinn at the age of eighteen. This was not unusual. Men were often much older when they married, which meant that, in time, many women became widows and remarried. Women retained their own property rights in marriage. Dowries were paid not by the bride’s family, but by the groom’s, as mundr, or bride price. In the Saga of the Confederates, a man laments that none of his daughters are yet married because no man is rich enough to afford them.
All these networks became more intricate, and loaded with potential consequence, the further one moved up the social scale. At these higher levels, marriages were first and foremost family alliances—leverage and collateral in power strategies designed to further the long-term interests of the elites. Actual marriage customs also seem to have varied in practice across the social strata, and what the nobility thought proper might have been very different to the way things were done ‘in the country’. The List of Ríg Eddic poem describes an elaborate high-status wedding with fine linens and much ceremony. At the other extreme, an episode in the Saga of Egil Skalla-Grímsson relates how a farmer buys the daughter of another for an ounce of gold, for “a sort of marriage”; it is not hard to imagine the rest.
Divorce was not uncommon, and a wife could initiate proceedings as well as a husband. She could cite a variety of reasons, including simple dissatisfaction, all strongly in her favour. In the Saga of Burnt Njál, a woman leaves her husband due to his impotence, which was regarded as formal cause. In the Saga of Gísli, a woman threatens divorce when her husband objects to her adultery. Extreme poverty—the fault of the husband because he did not support his family—was also sufficient grounds. Violence within a marriage was a significant feature of divorce petitions, although the severity of the injuries cited in such cases is so great that it seems the threshold of tolerance for male aggression was high.
Of primary importance is the fact that Viking-Age marriages could be polygynous. The existence of this practice has proved controversial in academia, which is puzzling because the evidence is persistent; this perhaps points again to the resilience of stereotype, suggestive of the kind of Viking Age people are prepared (or not) to accept. There are references to men with multiple wives in the first-hand accounts of Arab travellers who encountered them in Russia in the tenth century. More than a hundred years later, around 1070, the German cleric Adam of Bremen wrote of the Swedes that “a man according to his means has two or three or more women at one time, rich men and princes an unlimited number”. Earlier in the same work, he related the troubles of his friend, the king of Denmark, who had been censured for marrying his cousin, saying that soon after “he took to himself other wives and concubines, and again still others”. This is first-hand information about a man Adam knew. It is significant that these sources seem to distinguish between wives and concubines.
Polygyny is also found in the Old Norse corpus to a limited extent. The Eddic Poem on Helgi Hiovardsson begins with a prologue describing the four wives of a king. In the Saga of King Harald Finehair, on
e reads that he “had many wives” in a passage that then goes on to name three of them. It is further specified that one of his marriages brought with it the stipulation “that he put away nine of his wives”. A skaldic verse relates the various districts of Norway that these women came from, and earlier chapters make it clear that he had concubines in addition to his wives. In the Saga of Harald Sigurdsson, there is also a brief mention of the king taking a second wife.
Polygyny is really quite unambiguous in the Icelandic legal sources, continuing far into the Christian period (and it can hardly have been an innovation introduced by the Church). One lawspeaker was simultaneously married to a woman and her daughter. The pope was forced to write twice to the Icelandic clergy protesting against the practice (by the clergy, amongst others), and priests were buried with multiple wives and children as late as the 1400s, for example at Skríðuklaustur. The institution was euphemistically known as bi-fruar, translating approximately as ‘side-wives’. Two Icelandic bishops were eventually canonised in part because they were the only clergymen to remain celibate in the entire country. Marriage was always subject to control as a primary tool of power, which is why polygyny lasted longer among the ruling class than the general populace.
The late Viking-Age corpus of runestone inscriptions from central Sweden includes many texts mentioning marital relationships, but almost none in which more than one wife is named. This is not as contradictory as it sounds. First, it is clear that polygynous marriages almost always have internal hierarchies of relative status between the wives, and it is by no means certain that anyone more than the ‘first wife’ would be named in inscriptions that often have to do with inheritance and land claims. Second and most important, the Swedish stones are almost all from the eleventh century at the end of the Viking Age, and they usually have a clear Christian context. Given the Church’s outspoken and legally enshrined rejection of polygyny, it would be surprising if the stones did actually mention such relationships. There are two exceptions—from Uppinge in Södermanland and Bräcksta in Uppland—that both have inscriptions mentioning two wives of the same man. Numerous half-siblings are also mentioned on the central Swedish stones, presumably with mixed parentage, combined with the routine of several family sponsors for a single memorial. This contrasts with the inscriptions from the south of Sweden, which converted much earlier, and where only single sponsors are the norm.
Outside marriage and its prelude in betrothal, concubinage offered another kind of formalised relationship. The institution was important in the literal context of sexual politics, and embraced several categories of agreement by verbal contract, each with their own vocabulary. These included liaisons arranged for the purpose of connecting powerful families, strengthening political ties, or for fine-tuning the complex networks of mutual obligation that were central in Norse public life. Other types of these relationships were essentially confined to sexual companionship; a few involved bonds of genuine warmth from their inception (or grew to acquire them).
Viking-Age women did not formally initiate or drive these relationships, although it may be that, on occasion, they were a means by which emotional attachments could be shaped together with a degree of social sanction, outside what must sometimes have been loveless marriages. Nevertheless, in the legal codes it is clear that men (who made the laws) assigned themselves the dominant role in such arrangements. Furthermore, a woman who became a concubine thereby relinquished the right to obtain a bride price for her family, in that she was not getting married but was now ‘spoken for’.
It is significant that a man could have more than one concubine, in addition to more than one wife, all at the same time. Each of the women involved, of every status, was bound to the one man alone. To the arguable extent that they can be trusted, the family sagas also include several of these relationships. In the Saga of the People of Laxardal, a married man purchases an enslaved woman to share his bed as a concubine. In the Saga of the People of Vatnsdal, another married man clearly has a formalised sexual relationship with a concubine, who later bears his child. In the Saga of Burnt Njál, the earlier extramarital affair of the titular character is openly acknowledged in front of his wife, again involving a child of that union.
Concubinage could be enforced against a woman’s will, although this was technically illegal. There are instances where local rulers either kidnap the daughters of their tenants or otherwise leave them little choice but to hand the women over. They are usually held for a time and then released. There are suggestions that this is a power play—a form of protection racket—on the part of the elites, or even that the tenants are trying to curry favour (there are unequivocal cases where farmers offer their daughters to kings). Equally, there is poetic evidence that this practice might have to do with fertility rituals for which the lord was responsible as a divine proxy. The reality may well have been somewhere in between, or variable, but, in any case, without regard to female consent. The contemporary generalising word for concubine, frilla, continued into early modern times as a pejorative suggestive of casual sexual conquest, promiscuity, or even outright prostitution, all on terms defined by men.
The enslaved could also be concubines, elevated (though perhaps not much) above the sexual abuse that often accompanied their miserable station. The sagas mention a few who managed to use such relationships as a ladder to a better life, such as the Irish noblewoman Melkorka, who, in the Saga of the People of Laxardal, is seized on a raid and enslaved before eventually marrying in Iceland. In Beowulf, even the stately Danish queen Wealhtheow, mistress of Heorot hall, always bears with her a very different backstory as a war captive: her name has been suggested by some to mean ‘foreign slave’.
Alongside marriage and concubinage, with their impact on kinship through connection, there was also another component of the social network in Viking-Age Scandinavia, which in the later written sources is termed vinátta. Literally meaning ‘friendship’, it had subtly different connotations to our modern concept. Norse vinr, ‘friends’ (the modern Scandinavian languages have venner and vänner), combined the closeness of ‘brothers in arms’ with the same kinds of complex ties as the social bonds of kinship. The mechanics and social impact of friendship, in this special sense, are clearest from the tenth century onwards, but its fundamental codes can also be perceived at the start of the Viking Age. While these were masculine networks, there was also a female equivalent; women, too, could draw on support systems among their ‘friends’.
Viking friendship was yet another means of structuring mutual assistance, within communities that otherwise did not have fully reliable guarantees of security and support. The resulting overlap of social networks was the key to a (relatively) peaceful society. Friendship was cemented through gift-giving, as between lords and their retainers, with a legal obligation to reciprocate.
A key element of these relationships (for men) was an understanding of mutual protection—not just physically in battle but also in the sense of generally looking out for the interest of one’s friends. This could include support in legal proceedings, but also fed into the complex dynamics of war. A man might be bound to a lord through vows of loyalty, the world of obligated violence that permeated hall culture. However, if a man’s friend was seen to be present in an enemy host before battle was joined, there are references to truces being negotiated in order to avoid the delicate problem of forcing ‘friends’ to fight one another, and the consequent test of relative loyalties that would be to nobody’s advantage. This in turn linked with systems of formalised friendship between chieftains and kings, and even with the gods.
Families—however composed—presuppose family life and the household that was its arena. The basic settlement unit in Viking-Age Scandinavia was the farm, the garðr or gård, the familiar concept that denoted an enclosed, inhabited place. It was here that (almost) everything happened in the cycle of rural life that was little different to that of later centuries. Some of the Eddic poetry even preserves a sort of homespun phil
osophy, a series of aphorisms about how to live on the land. From the Sayings of the High One:
By the fire one should drink ale,
on the ice one should skate;
buy a lean mare
and an unpolished blade –
fatten the horse at home,
but your dog at a neighbour’s.
There would have been a central building, either a rectangular longhouse or a shorter structure, most likely built of timber. The roof was supported by upright posts forming three aisles inside, and the walls were made of wattle panels covered with clay daub. Wood was not in short supply, and some wealthier people made their house walls of solid planks, either fitted horizontally between upright posts or resting upright on sill beams. If available, stone might be used as the foundation of a timber wall, keeping the wood from the damp of the ground. In areas of harsher climate, insulation was an issue, and the walls would be thicker, with stone cores and heavy coverings of stacked turf that might extend over the roof. Bark could also be used as a weather protection, even under roofs of thatch. For those truly with resources to spare, a great hall might be roofed with thousands of wooden shingles.
Most domestic activities took place in this communal space—eating, sleeping, and indoor craft work. The interior could be easily transformed, with bedding dragged out, blankets wrapped up, or things cleared quickly away. A few basic stools might have been available if an extra seat was needed. Possessions were stored in boxes and chests, securely locked (padlocks are a not uncommon find on excavations), or sacks. Meat and herbs were dried up in the roof, smoking over the fire. Things of all kind could be stored on platforms built into the rafters—not a formal second storey as such but a useful place to tuck loose items away. Foodstuffs were packed down, and often preserved, in barrels.
