Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  Children’s clothing was essentially a miniature version of adult fashion, though tending more towards simple shifts and tunics for the very small. My favourite Viking-Age archaeological find from Iceland is a small pair of children’s mittens in heavy wool, still attached to one another by a long string that would have run across the back and down inside the sleeves of a jacket. They would fit a two- or three-year-old, and one can picture some Viking-Age girl or boy playing in the cold and swinging their gloves around. At least they didn’t lose them.

  Everyday work took a variety of forms. Manual labour on the farm mostly involved sowing, manuring, and tending crops, to which can be added herding livestock and supervising their movements through the outfields.

  Animals on the farm included cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, and sometimes chickens. Roosters play a clear part in Norse mythology, where their crowing heralds great events; on the farm they must have made a familiar start to the day. Horses were draught and riding animals but also expensive to keep. They were a prominent feature of many rituals, and consuming their flesh was regarded by Christians as such a peculiarly integral part of pagan practice that it was explicitly banned. In the Viking Age, horses were also trained to fight, and matches of two stallions kicking and biting each other (often to the death) are a popular sport in the sagas; there are even depictions of such violent contests on the Gotland picture-stones. Back on the farm, dogs were kept for both herding and hunting (and, in some cases, battle—as in the Valsgärde boat graves). Cats were bred both for companionship and also for their fur.

  All this required tools, which were made of both wood and iron. Most farms would have had a basic smithy, staffed by two or three individuals: the firepit and the nozzles of bellows, the site of the anvil, and remains of waste products have all been found on many settlement excavations. In graves they find the rest: the tongs and hammers, clamps, wedges, and everything else sufficient for the production and repair of basic household ironwork, including sickles, blades of all kinds, household knives, horse gear, and other fittings. Some of the forge installations were mildly elaborated, with extras such as a unique bellows stone from Snaptun on the Norwegian border that was decorated with a carving depicting a male face with sewn lips, almost certainly the trickster god Loki—an appropriate choice for a fire shield. Most of the workshops, however, were quite simple.

  Excavations in the waterlogged environments of urban harbours—at places like Hedeby in Denmark and Birka in Sweden—have revealed the organic aspects of daily life that otherwise rarely survive, including wooden tools such as spades, mallets, and a curious kind of barrow that was not wheeled but carried by two people a little like a stretcher. There are lots of storage items, stout wooden chests, little boxes, and resin-sealed containers made of birch bark. And rope—so many kinds of rope. Objects seem to have been bundled together with twisted fibres, or carried about on harnesses for both humans and animals. Bulk goods were perhaps slung over a shoulder, or lashed onto carts. The sheer quantity of twined fixings, string, cables, and the like gives a vivid image of a practical society rushing about its daily business. Archaeologists also find the wooden handles of cloth bags, similar to those used for craftwork and knitting today, alongside a range of leather satchels, shoulder straps, and knapsacks. Wood was used for pegs, toggles, and fasteners of all kinds.

  All this activity churned up the ground, so regular pathways in the settlements were strewn with brushwood, planks over the worst parts, and—in some market emporia—even crushed stone. Everything was also covered in wood chips from all the timberwork. Once, in the Russian urban centre of Novgorod, where the waterlogged soil preserves such things well, I breathed in the scent of fresh pine a thousand years old, the whole site just saturated in the fragrance from all the woodworking waste lying where the Viking-Age carpenters had left it.

  The domestic sphere of the dwelling and estate management was primarily under the control of women. The sourcing, preparation, and serving of food took up an immense amount of time. Beyond this, however, one of the primary female activities was the manufacture and working of textiles, and their transformation into a range of products from clothing to sails.

  Wool was cleaned, sorted, combed, and then spun using a spindle whorl and distaff until ready for the loom. In Viking-Age Scandinavia the upright, warp-weighted variety of loom was used, that stood slightly higher than an adult and usually was positioned near a doorway for maximum light. Many different kinds of textiles were produced; the most common was homespun vaðmál, which was also used as a standard medium of exchange. Several varieties of twill are found, as well as other patterns. There are also fragments of fabrics, usually cloaks, made in the röggvar techniques that created a ‘fake fur’ effect. Imported silk and brocade were used on luxury clothing for facings, decorated cuffs, and collars. Fur trim was used in the same way.

  Most farms produced their own cloth and worked it up into the clothes required; there were bronze pins, bone needles, and scissors of all kinds. ‘Shopping’ in our sense would have been rare indeed, and expensive—possible only at a market or, perhaps, by purchasing from itinerant peddlers. Time-consuming but vital, textile production probably made up the greater part of women’s daily activities.

  Textile work at the higher end of the scale could also have other consequences, such as the role played by women as storytellers in their weaving and embroidery of pictorial wall-hangings. These visual narratives were stories just as much as the verbal tales, and thus repositories of social memory, politicised history, and religious lore. By controlling such media, women acquired yet another source of real power, potentially a subversive one. This was especially the case in the high-status hall environments in which such wall decorations were displayed.

  And display was important. Just as every surface of the great halls of the post-Roman warlords (and their successors) was covered in decoration, so too in almost all aspects of Viking-Age material culture. Archaeologists have spent a lot of time studying ‘art-styles’, the changing trends in visual ornamentation that are used on metal, wood, bone, stone, leather, and textiles. A small library of books addresses this subject alone, charting the evolution of the Vikings’ aesthetic expression from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. Six main stylistic groupings can be traced, partially overlapping in time and named after the sites where they were first identified.

  They range from fine-line, slightly baroque carvings in the early Viking Age, to interlocking ring chains and gripping animals that over time develop into great striding beasts and dotted interlace. In the eleventh century, the interlace art, in particular, sprouted fleshy tendrils twined around elegant, stately creatures. Whole buildings could be covered in this carved, sinewy ornamentation. There are regional variations of these styles across Scandinavia and fusions with other cultural traditions (also with hybrid forms) out into the Viking diaspora—thus the so-called Anglo-Scandinavian styles of northern England, the Hiberno-Norse traditions of Ireland, and so on.

  These art-historical schemes are useful and necessary, not least for the dating of objects and places in the absence of material for more accurate scientific analyses, but they should be studied in parallel with the human context in which they were employed. At only small risk of exaggeration, subject to constraints of time, tools, and budget, the people of the Viking Age decorated more or less everything possible. They wore clothes embroidered with ornament along with jewellery that was a mass of writhing creatures and patterns. All but the most basic wooden items were carved, sometimes elaborately. The same is true of metalwork of all kinds, with the most intricate decoration of all worked so fine that a loupe is necessary to even see it properly. The chairs they sat upon, the beds they slept in, the bowls they ate from, the wagons that carried them, the harness of their horses, the walls of their homes—images everywhere. Their armour and weapons, especially, were layered with visual symbols and pictorial codes.

  All this had meaning. When one understands how to ‘read’ some
of the interlace designs, untangling not only the different animals twisted together but also tentatively trying to match this with narratives from the mythologies and heroic tales, what emerges is a world of stories told in pictures. Some were intended for outward projection—for display and proclamation (of allegiances, opinions, or identities?)—while others were more private. There are even metalwork designs on brooches, for example, that only make sense when seen from the wearer’s perspective, looking down at her or his own body. Like the illustrated ideologies on the Migration and Vendel Period helmets, this too is a message, a collective cultural statement of who the people of the North felt themselves to be. Seen from the outside, it helps explain why the Vikings were often perceived as being so different from those they encountered.

  There were also differences within Viking-Age society. Outside their social networks, people of the time felt themselves to be surrounded by an invisible population of spirits and other beings, but there was also another, more tangible community of the marginalised and ignored, much closer to home. In a real sense, much of the ‘Viking world’ was built, underpinned, and maintained by the enslaved. For a millennium and more they have disappeared from the histories of the Viking Age, and it is time to restore them to their rightful place of prominence.

  4

  THE PURSUIT OF LIBERTY

  ONE OF THE MOST ENDURING, and politicised, components of the Viking image is the notion of freedom—the adventure of a far horizon and all that went with it. But for many this was an unattainable hope. Any true reading of life in the Viking Age first has to come to terms with an aspect of everyday experience that probably represented the most elemental division in the societies of the time: the difference between those who were free and those who were not. Beneath the social network, any other distinction of status, class, opportunity, and wealth pales beside the most basic fact of liberty and the consequent potential for choice.

  The institution of slavery had long antecedents in Scandinavia, probably going back thousands of years before the time of the Vikings. By the eighth century, there was already a considerable population of unfree people living in the North, their condition being largely a hereditary one built up over generations. In the Viking Age, this picture changed dramatically because for the first time Scandinavians began to make the active acquisition of human chattel a key part of their economy. This was one of the primary objectives of the Viking raids and military campaigns, and the result was a massive increase in the numbers of enslaved people in Scandinavia.

  Let it therefore be clearly stated: the Vikings were not only slavers, but the kidnapping, sale, and forced exploitation of human beings was always a central pillar of their culture.

  One reason why this reality has made so little public impact is that the conventional vocabularies of enslavement—as employed by academics and others working on, for example, the transatlantic trade of more recent centuries—have rarely been applied to the Viking Age. In particular, there is ambiguity in the terminology because in place of ‘slave’ a very different word has always been used: the Old Norse þræll—giving us the modern English ‘thrall’, which we now use as in being ‘enthralled’ by a person, a work of art, or an idea.

  It is impossible to know how far back in Scandinavian prehistory the practice of slavery originated. Scholars have plausibly proposed that it was at least a Bronze Age institution, and perhaps was very old even then. There is no reason to believe there was any discontinuity in the use of unfree labour and involuntary servitude all through the Iron Age. For the Viking period, a judicious combination of archaeological and textual sources can produce a relatively comprehensive picture of slaveholding.

  The term for enslavement was ánauð, meaning ‘bondage’ or ‘compulsion’—the central sense is of people subjected by force and lacking free will. There is a basic Old Norse terminology of its degrees, preserved in the Norwegian Gulathing laws. An enslaved man was a þræll, a thrall. Within that category, there was a specific term, þjónn, for a thrall who acted as a domestic servant. An enslaved woman was an ambátt. If she was primarily made to work with weaving, she was a seta; if her assigned tasks included baking, she was a deigja. There were also fjósner, ‘stable-living thralls’, a special category of enslaved people who not only looked after the animals but were also housed with them.

  It is clear that a kind of intermediate state of servitude existed that was voluntary up to a point although entered into under considerable economic compulsion—for example, as a means of clearing debts. A person could also serve as a thrall for a fixed period, following a legal judgement against them for having committed a crime. The Norse system of thralldom was not always complete chattel slavery, but most of the enslaved had little agency. As two prominent Viking scholars observed fifty years ago, “the slave could own nothing, inherit nothing, leave nothing”. They were not paid, of course, but in some circumstances they could be allowed to retain a small portion of the proceeds they obtained at market when selling goods for their owners. As a result, it was technically possible, though rare, for a thrall to purchase his or her freedom. They could also be manumitted at any time. Some scholars have argued from this that the number of actual enslaved people in Viking-Age society was relatively low. However, as more work has been done on the detailed European records of Viking slave-taking raids, the scale of the trade has been revised sharply upwards.

  Some were born into slavery, if both of their parents were already enslaved, or if a freeborn man who impregnated their enslaved mother declined to acknowledge the child. Others were taken captive, either in raids often undertaken for that purpose or as prisoners of war. Although an enslaved individual might pass through many hands in a journey lasting months or years, it almost always began with violent kidnap. Behind every Viking raid, usually visualised today as an arrow or place-name on a map, was the appalling trauma visited upon all people at the moment of enslavement, the disbelieving experience of passing from person to property in seconds.

  Not all enslaved people—indeed, perhaps only a small minority—were retained personally by their captors and put to work. The majority entered the wider network of trafficking and were transported to markets and points of sale in settlements across the Viking world and beyond. The enslaved were moved through the trading posts of Scandinavia as well as over longer distances to the emporia of western Europe. The practice was entirely legal in the Christian states. In time, slaving would also become arguably the main element of the trade that would develop during the Viking Age along the eastern rivers of European Russia and what is now Ukraine. There was no solid infrastructure of purpose-built slave markets, with auction blocks and the like. Instead, transactions are likely to have been small-scale but frequent, with one or two individuals being sold at a time in any circumstances that seemed viable.

  The enslaved appear frequently in the sagas, where the men perform manual labour and carry out the everyday duties of the farm while women serve inside the house and take care of the animals in the byre. The stories describe how enslaved women were sometimes exploited sexually by the men of the house, which could lead to tension with their wives. The numbers of thralls are hard to estimate, but two or three might be likely for an average-sized farm while large estates could house dozens.

  One of the Eddic poems, the List of Ríg, is a curious work that purports to describe the divine origin of the social classes among humans. The gist of its plot is that the god Heimdall, using the name Ríg, visits three households in turn. One is humble and impoverished, the second is modest but well kept, while the third is wealthy and proud. Ríg spends three nights at each house, sleeping between the couples living there, and in due course a series of children are born—respectively the progenitors of the thralls, the farmers, and the elites. The poem includes a list of personal names appropriate to their station in life for each of the social classes. The ‘first couple’ of the slave class are called Thrall and Thír, the latter name meaning effectively ‘thrall-woman�
�. Their sons’ names translate as Noisy, Byreboy, Stout, Sticky, Bedmate, Badbreath, Stumpy, Fatty, Sluggish, Grizzled, Stooper, and Longlegs. The daughters are called Stumpina (a feminine form of the male equivalent, with the sense of a demeaning joke), Dumpy, Bulgingcalves, Bellowsnose, Shouty, Bondwoman, Greatgossip, Raggedyhips, and Craneshanks. All clearly pejoratives, several of the names imply ill health and a lack of hygiene, and one clearly refers to sexual servitude. None of them acknowledge individual identity or personality.

  The poem also gives the tasks of the enslaved: “they fixed fences, dunged fields, worked at the pigs, watched over the goats, dug the peat”. The man Thrall also carries heavy bundles of kindling and plaits bast to make baskets. Their bodies are marked by manual labour, with wrinkled skin burnt dark by the sun, scabbed nails, gnarled knuckles, and dull eyes. Their bare feet are covered with soil.

  Enslaved women were extremely vulnerable to sexual abuse at the hands of their owners, which they experienced as a constant hazard alongside the manual tasks of daily life. By definition, a slave-owner could not be charged with raping his own slave because, as property, she had no rights within his household, and her body was his to treat as he wished. There are saga references to visiting men being offered a slave-woman to ‘borrow’ for the night, and it seems that sexual hospitality was also part of the wider institution of generosity to guests. Rulers also actively rewarded their military followers with enslaved women, clearly stated to be destined for their beds. The skaldic praise poem Hrafnsmál, the ‘Sayings of the Raven’, in honour of Harald Finehair, notes how the king gives his men “gold from Hunland and slave-girls from the east lands”.

  Male slaves could also be exploited in this way. The thrall name translated above as Bedmate, Kefser (lit. ‘servile sleeping-partner’), is masculine and listed among those for the male enslaved. The name Leggialdi, ‘Longlegs’, carries a sense of condescending approval—a sort of verbal wolf whistle—and is also masculine. Even the goddesses were known to sleep with male thralls, out of boredom, lust, or in one instance as a way of rebuking a husband.