Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  At least part of the Viking slave trade explicitly depended on sex trafficking, especially in the East. Settlements were specifically targeted for the enslavement of women, while their menfolk were often killed on the spot. Young women were transported long distances to be sold as sex slaves and were routinely assaulted by their captors along the way. Ah.mad ibn Fad.lān, meeting Scandinavians on the Volga in 922, noted several instances of such abuse. His account is all the more brutal for being an eyewitness report. He makes it clear that the enslaved young women travelling with the merchants were chosen for their looks, with an eye for future sale as sexual servants. As part of the everyday routine, he describes the Vikings having sex with the women in groups—apparently while their wives look on, unconcerned. Even at the point of sale, a woman was sometimes raped one last time in the presence of her purchaser. Ibn Fad.lān’s text should be compulsory reading for anyone tempted to glorify ‘heroic’ Viking warriors.

  The Arab sources record that some of the Viking leaders in the East, as in the West, awarded female body-slaves to their men, in addition to other thralls for their domestic needs. Albeit cloaked in imagery of idle ‘dalliance’, the right to sexually exploit the unfree was seen as an obvious and unquestioned prerogative of wealth. For example, in the First Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani, an Eddic poem, someone insults a lord with the claim that all he’s ever done is kiss slave-women at the grindstone. The same probably applied in the relationship between owners and owned on a small farm, simply at a reduced scale.

  In the sagas, the status of the enslaved as property, rather than people, is ambivalent. In some instances, the narratives note personal qualities in favourable terms—a thrall unusually skilled at a particular task, regarded as sensible and reliable, or especially good-looking. However, when the sagas’ frequent motifs of neighbourly feuds begin to escalate beyond harsh words into violent action, this often takes the form of killing opponents’ thralls, evidently seen as a peculiarly personal form of property damage. An alternative view of this grim value system comes again from Ah.mad ibn Fad.lān, who saw with his own eyes how thralls who had fallen sick while travelling were simply discarded as rubbish and left to die. If they wished, slave-owners could also kill their own thralls without penalty under the law. Elderly thralls too infirm to work, and unwanted children of the enslaved, may have been disposed of in this way.

  The enslaved had very few legal rights, and in almost every case only appear in the law as property. Almost all compensation payments for injury or death were channelled to the owners, as the ‘economic loss’ was theirs. A couple of unusual exceptions stand out, both related to sexual offences against the wives of thralls. In the Borgarthing law of south Norway, a thrall who finds his wife in bed with another man is “to go to the brook and take a bucket-full of water and throw it over them and bid his marriage-kinsman sleep well”. This pays lip service to the severity with which offences against the institution of marriage were treated in law for free people, but simultaneously manages to convey contempt by turning the enslaved’s situation into a vicious joke. In Iceland, the situation was different; a cuckolded male thrall had the right to kill any man who had seduced his wife. What makes this especially unusual is that a slave-owner who regarded a female thrall as “his woman” (as the law states) could not kill any other man who slept with her, as their own relationship was unequal. Similarly, it was a shameful thing to die at the hands of a thrall.

  A tiny handful of texts preserve the actual voices of the enslaved. One is an eleventh-century, highly decorated runestone from Hovgården, the royal estate on Adelsö island opposite Birka market town in Lake Mälaren, Sweden. The inscription honours the king’s estate manager and is a rare example of people erecting a stone to themselves while alive:

  Read these runes! They were properly ordered cut by Tolir, the bryti in Roden, appointed by the king. Tolir and Gylla had them cut, husband and wife to their own memory [ … ] Hákon did the carving.

  The key fact here is that a bryti was a special class of thrall, someone entrusted with much responsibility but unfree nonetheless. In other cultures there are many parallels of the enslaved rising to positions of sometimes considerable power, blurring the lines of what their status really meant. On Adelsö, Tolir had clearly been able to marry (although whether this had legal standing is another matter) and to afford a magnificent statement of his position as the royal servant.

  Another stone of similar date from Hørning in Denmark tells a simpler tale, but perhaps more poignant:

  Tóki the blacksmith raised this stone to the memory of Thorgisl, son of Gudmund, who gave him gold and freed him.

  A freed thrall occupied an ambiguous status that was not enslavement but not complete liberty either. All freed(wo)men were still obligated to their former owners and expected to support them, but were never regarded as fully the equal of freeborn folk. Former thralls also had lower rights to compensation in the law codes. The stone raised by Tóki indicates his profession—a handy, useful thing to be doing—but whether this was something new or a legacy of his former tasks as a thrall is unclear. In time, the children and grandchildren of freed thralls would gain the full rights of the freeborn.

  The material reflections of slavery are meagre, but significant. At the most basic level, iron shackles have been found at the urban centres of Birka, Hedeby, and a handful of other sites connected with commerce. They are ambiguous items up to a point, in that some of them arguably could be used to restrain animals, but it is more likely they were designed to be placed around a human neck, wrist, or ankle. An Irish site has produced an extensive chain with collars. At Hedeby, the five collar finds have mostly come from the harbour area, suggesting either a loss directly off a ship’s side, or perhaps that trading in the enslaved was taking place actually on the jetties.

  9. A thrall’s life. A Viking-Age slave-collar from the island town of Birka, in Lake Mälaren, Sweden. Photo: Christer Åhlin, Swedish History Museum, Creative Commons.

  10. Realities of raiding. On this engraved stone found at the insular monastery of Inchmarnock in Scotland, what appear to be armoured Viking raiders are shown leading at least one bound captive to a waiting ship. Photo: Headland Archaeology Ltd, used by kind permission of Chris Lowe.

  At least one image seems to depict the moment of enslavement. An engraved graffito on a slate from the insular monastic site of Inchmarnock in Scotland, provisionally dated to the eighth or ninth century, shows what looks to be the aftermath of a slaving raid. Three armed figures in chainmail, including one with a beard and an extravagant hairstyle, move around a waiting ship. The bearded figure is leading a captive, perhaps a male monk, whose hands are locked together, a leash of some kind around his neck.

  A second such depiction is more formal in nature and comes from Weston in North Yorkshire. Found at the church there, this is a fragment of stone sculpture that once formed the upper arm of a freestanding cross. Originally of Anglian manufacture, it was recut in the ninth or tenth century in the Anglo-Scandinavian tradition. On one side, the cross arm is taken up by a frontal depiction of a helmeted male warrior with a battle axe in one hand and a sword in the other. On the opposite side, what looks to be the same figure still holds a sword, but his other hand is gripping a woman by the throat; her hands are together and may be bound. This is the only illustration of direct male violence against a woman anywhere in the Viking world—clearly, it was an unusual choice of motif and perhaps thought inappropriate. Other Northumbrian stone crosses in a similar tradition also depict armed warriors, and it has been suggested that they are either the patrons of the work or in some way reference militaristic scenes in the Bible.

  Of the domestic lives of the enslaved, only a single archaeological discovery has so far been made in Scandinavia. It is not from the Viking Age but from the early first century CE, back in the Roman Iron Age; there is cultural continuity, however, and the find almost certainly preserves the remains of enslaved people in a household setting. At Nørre T
randers in Jylland, Denmark, archaeologists have found the burnt remains of a longhouse of the classic Iron Age type, of which only half—the byre section—survived. The building had been completely consumed by fire. Experimental archaeology has shown that within only three to four minutes of a blaze starting, the air inside such structures becomes lethally toxic due to the effects of smoke. If a fire began at night, while the occupants were asleep, they were unlikely to get out. Something like this seems to have happened at Tranders. The archaeologists uncovered the bodies of cattle and horses that had died in their stalls, and a flock of sheep and lambs bunched up by the north door, where they had apparently blocked the exit in their panic. The animals were not alone. The body of a man was found in the midst of the sheep; a second man and three children lay at the east gable after the line of animal stalls, perhaps where they died trying to break through the outer wall. Why would both adults and children be among the livestock like this? They appear to have been fjósner, ‘stable-living thralls’, that special category in the sources, enslaved people who lived with the animals they tended. Remarkably, the ruins of the longhouse had not been cleared away, but instead the entire structure—charred bodies and all—had been covered with a mound, effectively making a ‘grave’ of the whole building. It is notable, and perhaps eloquent, that evidently no distinction was made between humans and animals. The village continued in use, so for decades after the fire, its inhabitants had carried on their daily lives with a huge burial mound in the midst of their settlement, a tomb for the thralls. Whatever happened, the events of that night must have lived on in stories.

  Most of the archaeological material is harder to read, in that it only indirectly reflects the presence of the enslaved. They would have needed housing and feeding, and their work must have been not only integrated into the economy but perhaps also a main driver of it. In the early Viking Age, for example, who serviced the rapid expansion of the labour-intensive tar production industry, along with the parallel rise in the exploitation of the outlands? Later in the Viking Age, there was further reorganisation of the economy in connection with an escalating need for sailcloth (and therefore wool, and so also sheep), with obvious implications for the consequent rapid rise in labour requirements. There were also developments in the built environments of the estates, with an increase in smaller structures (perhaps thralls’ quarters?) in addition to the main halls and ancillary buildings. As raiding for slaves escalated, their work was needed to build, equip, and maintain the fleets used in such assaults, and so on in a self-reinforcing system.

  A related question concerns the material culture of the enslaved, and whether there is anything in the archaeology of settlements that belonged to the thralls. This remains uncertain, but to judge from the finds made in contexts where it is known they worked—such as weaving huts and the like—it seems that there was no specific material marker of enslavement, but rather that the clothing and possessions of thralls reflected the lowest level of social status generally, and were perhaps indistinguishable from those of the poorest free people. It is also possible that what few items they ‘owned’ (because, in reality, they owned nothing at all) were cast-offs, unwanted by others but still an integral part of the general material repertoire of the time.

  One of the earliest archaeological identifications of enslaved people was in the burial record, and the discovery of graves where the presumed primary occupant had been accompanied in death by one or more individuals who had evidently been killed during the funeral rites. This is far from common, but there are now dozens of examples across the Viking diaspora. Each burial is different, but as far as one can generalise, the graves contain a single person, usually male, interred according to the prevailing norms. The ‘sacrifices’ were then deposited either in the grave with the primary occupant—alongside or laid over the body—or at a higher level in the same burial mound. These individuals were often bound by the hands and/or feet and had been hanged, decapitated, or killed with severe blows to the head. One of the most graphic examples comes from Ballateare, on the Isle of Man, where a tenth-century Scandinavian high-status young man was interred in a coffin with a variety of weapons. His grave was covered by an elaborate burial mound made of multiple layers of soil brought from different localities (his fields, perhaps?). When the mound was still unfinished, the corpse of a woman aged twenty to thirty was laid on top; the back of her skull had been removed with a single sharp force blow, probably from a sword. Rigor mortis had set in by the time she was brought to the mound, and she may have died up to seventy-two hours earlier. Her body was then covered by the burnt ashes of a horse, an ox, and a sheep before the mound was finally completed and a post raised on top.

  The suggestion that such unfortunate victims may be thralls, and therefore essentially just more possessions of the dead, was made early in the history of Viking archaeology. It has an obvious logic but is hard to prove; some or all of them may instead have been criminals, prisoners of war, or anyone else whose death was deemed necessary by the community and appropriate to a public ceremony. There is also no reason why the same explanation should fit all the examples. In favour of the interpretation, however, are the numerous, unequivocal descriptions of precisely this practice in the Arab eyewitness accounts of Scandinavian funerals in the East, where enslaved people of both sexes (but most often female and young) are described as being murdered during burial rituals. There are also Byzantine observations of identical practices, including the mass slaughter of war captives.

  Recent work taking advantage of new scientific methods has shown that there are, in fact, real differences between the ‘primary’ burials and the executed individuals. An oxygen isotope study of Norwegian Viking-Age burials of this type has found that the ‘sacrificed’ people had a markedly inferior diet to the other deceased, presumably indicating a lower social status. A similar study of Swedish burials has found the same, with a much greater consumption of freshwater fish among the victims. In addition, the study found that several of these individuals had the familiar dental modifications of filed grooves. Was this actually a marker of enslavement, akin to a brand on the flesh? Then again, many enslaved people were once free; their condition could change, voluntarily or not. These sacrificed men may thus have been war captives, or the filing might mean something quite different in this context.

  It seems reasonably secure that the people killed by the gravesides of others were of lower status, which strengthens the idea that at least some of them were thralls. Future work will no doubt illuminate this further, but it is clear that the miserable experiences of the enslaved extended, in some cases, even to the circumstances and manner of their deaths.

  For the enslaved, the mid-eighth to mid-eleventh centuries CE were an utterly different experience from that of the free people around them. The Viking Age was very much a time of borders—between cultures and ways of life, between different views of reality, and between individuals, including at the level of liberty itself. It was also a period when those borders were transgressed, tested, and sometimes erased: this, too, is a fundamental part of what made these centuries so important.

  The Vikings can be seen as if through a prism, each turn of the glass producing new people, new reflections. Everyone had their own identity—their self-image—and its outward projections; some of them were familiar to us, others frighteningly alien. Border crossing, in every possible sense of the word, was at the core of the Viking Age, and it is now time to move to the other side.

  5

  BORDER CROSSINGS

  BEING HUMAN IN VIKING-AGE SCANDINAVIA was not a condition restricted to the externals of the body or the interior life of the soul: there was also the individual nature of personhood itself.

  Part of the Viking image today is a caricature of masculinity—the long-haired warrior still incorporated into the logos or advertising for products appealing to a supposed ideal of manly behaviour. This is matched in popular culture by an almost equally clichéd image of the uniquely i
ndependent woman, activated either as an allegedly ‘Nordic’ archetype or (more sympathetically) as a role model for female self-confidence and emancipation. It is therefore ironic that Viking-Age reality should embrace a true fluidity of gender.

  Patriarchy was a norm of Viking society, but one that was subverted at every turn, often in ways that—fascinatingly—were built into its structures. The Vikings were also certainly familiar with what would today be called queer identities. These extended across a broad spectrum that went far beyond the conventional binaries of biological sex, and even across the frontiers of what we would call human. The boundaries were rigidly policed, at times with moral overtones, and the social pressures laid upon men and women were very real. At the same time, however, these borders were also permeable with a degree of social sanction. There is a clear tension here, a contradiction that can be productive for anyone trying to understand the Viking mind.

  Today we have developed a rich vocabulary of identity and preference, of sexual orientation and its infinite expressions, of our bodies and how we inhabit them, of our relationships with others, including our preferred forms of address—in essence, a terminology that at its best acknowledges and empowers who we each feel ourselves to be. We can also articulate what happens at the interfaces between these identities and society’s reactions to them, for better or worse. In exploring the ancient equivalents of modern lives, it can be problematic to directly transfer today’s perceptions onto the late Iron Age. Some scholars argue strongly that it is impossible to do so. The Old Norse languages did not contain words for many of the concepts we use; the people of the time may not have understood themselves in those terms or found such labels necessary; the social context was also different in some fundamental ways.