Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  These same features can also be seen among the gods, especially in connection with Odin. It is always clear that his knowledge is bought at great price, and is also contingent: he knows, while others do not; he may pass on what he has learned, but equally may choose to withhold it. Odin teaches the runes (it is no accident that the word also means ‘secrets’) to the favoured. His spells and charms can be learned by a very few, while his advice is for all. There is an intimidation in this use of wisdom, information, and memory, and their translation into a particularly pure form of power that is nonetheless different from that of the lettered Christian priesthood.

  While many people stayed at home, in and around the farm, and never really went anywhere, a fair proportion of the community were at least periodically on the move.

  The landscape was crisscrossed by numerous routeways—unpaved dirt tracks and hollow ways, worn clear by constant use and following the terrain as they had done for centuries. People travelled by wagons or wooden carts, with solid wheels locked in place with pins, rolling down the lanes behind a pair of draught animals. Some of the horse gear was extraordinarily fine, with harness bows and distributors to keep the reins from getting tangled, all covered in interlace ornament, animals, and mythical beings; a few were even worked in gold. The wagons were made with detachable cargo bodies that could be loaded up separately and moved around. People rode on horseback (again, with a range of fantastically ornate harness) or simply walked, weaving their way along ridges, around the edges of high ground, or through passes, crossing rivers via fords or bridges where necessary. Some Viking-Age cemeteries still preserve the lines of the paths that traversed them, and similar folkways can still be traced across heaths, circumventing marshes, and through the rural landscape along the routes that have been most obviously sensible and least arduous for millennia prior to modern vehicular transport.

  Since the earliest settlement of the region, Scandinavian societies have naturally been characterised by their intimate relationship with water. This connection manifested itself not only in the exploitation of rivers, lakes, and the sea as a means of subsistence and transport, but also in ritual expressions that included the deposition of material wealth, weapons, everyday objects, and even people in peat bogs and other watery contexts.

  The importance of water to these communities, however, is most apparent during the Viking Age. A truly maritime culture, the Vikings’ reliance on water governed many aspects of everyday life. Changes in sea level, for example, had important consequences throughout the Scandinavian Peninsula, with crucial and continuously evolving implications for communications and settlement. In contrast to the view of many people today, water was not perceived as a barrier to communication and transport but rather as a means of facilitating it. Island and coastal communities would not have been considered remote and inaccessible, but instead as being closely connected to each other through an extensive network of maritime routes.

  A key concept is that of time-distance, through which transport is perceived not in terms of the measured physical separation of places but by the time it takes to travel between them. Accustomed as we are to viewing geography through maps (which digitisation has not changed), it can be hard to grasp that England and Norway can be ‘closer’ in perceptual terms via water than an overland journey of thirty or forty miles. Recent Danish experiments in the Sea Stallion, a replica longship based on an eleventh-century example excavated near Roskilde, have demonstrated that with favourable winds it is easily possible to travel from Denmark to the east coast of Britain in just a few days. Weather permitting, a return trip of a fortnight or so is by no means impossible, emphasising just how closely connected the communities of the North Sea were to one another. When these kinds of calculations are applied within Scandinavia, the ubiquity of marine transport becomes clear.

  The rivers, fjords, lakes, and coastal channels of the North formed the primary means of movement in Viking-Age Scandinavia, but this travel did not have to be waterborne; a significant amount of journeying was made along the same routes in winter by means of ice transport. Sleds, sledges, and horse-drawn sleighs, including large examples made to accommodate several passengers, have been found in Viking-Age graves. Individuals used ice skates made of cattle bones bound to the shoes with hide thongs; the wearer moved forwards with the aid of a single stout pole much in the manner of a punt on a river. Both humans and animals used iron crampons, folded over and fixed to hooves or footwear. Skis were also used, single or double planks with tapered ends that were often richly carved and, again, propelled with a single pole.

  Of all the images associated with the Viking Age, one of the most powerful is that of their ships, especially the great dragon-prowed oceangoing vessels that have been popularised in movies and other media. However, it should be remembered that they represented just one of many kinds of watercraft utilised throughout the period. The most common Viking-Age vessel of all was the humble dugout log boat, a simple craft that could have provided almost anyone access to marine transport and communication routes. Hollowed from a single tree trunk, these could vary in size from a one-person runabout to a larger boat up to ten metres in length and with room for both people and cargo. These vessels are often overlooked in the wider literature on the Viking Age, but their original presence in large numbers testifies to the maritime mobility of the time. Another relatively common vessel was the rowboat or skiff, owned perhaps by prosperous fisherfolk. The important farmers of a district might well have stretched to a sail-powered boat ten metres long or more.

  Larger ships would have been commissioned either by major landowners and their families, consortia of merchants, or the nobility. They were long known only from images on coins, wall hangings such as the Bayeux Tapestry, and graffiti. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the post-medieval world got its first glimpse of the real thing. Damaged fragments of an eighteen-metre longship with twelve pairs of oars had been found at Tune in Norwegian Østfold in 1867. These were exciting, but hard to reconstruct; the vessel was later dated to around 910. However, in 1880 at Gokstad in Vestfold, the first of the great intact funeral ships was discovered. Seemingly matching the textual accounts of such burials, it contained an adult male, but most of the accompanying objects had been plundered in antiquity. The ship was twenty-four metres long and five metres amidships, with thirty-two oars. Its regular crew was perhaps forty, but it could carry seventy or so people if necessary. Dendrochronology has dated its construction to c. 890—the reign of Harald Finehair—and it was a true oceangoing warship.

  In 1904, a third, even more spectacular ship burial was found at nearby Oseberg, in what is still the richest Viking-Age grave ever excavated. Buried c. 834 when it was a few decades old, the Oseberg ship was twenty-one and a half metres long and five metres across, with fifteen pairs of oars. Slightly smaller and older than Gokstad, it was perhaps an aristocratic barge for offshore use. Oseberg was the grave of two women, one in her eighties and the other some thirty years younger. We do not know which, if either, was the ‘primary’ burial, but the status of the grave is surely commensurate with royalty. Was this a queen and her maid, and if so, which was which? Or were they social equals? Radiocarbon indicates they died at or about the same time, and isotope studies show they enjoyed similarly rich diets. Recent DNA analyses have suggested the younger woman had quite close family descent from the Middle East, possibly Persia, a testament to the realities of long-distance travel and contact, and an important reminder that—to put it mildly—not everyone in the North was blond-haired and blue-eyed. Both the Gokstad and Oseberg ship funerals were accompanied by lavish animal sacrifices.

  Throughout the twentieth century, the corpus of rediscovered Viking ships, mostly preserved only as rivets after the timbers had decayed or burnt, grew exponentially. They include the boat burial fields of Swedish Uppland—initially at Vendel and Valsgärde—but these were joined by comparable graves from Ultuna, Tuna Alsike and Tuna Badelunda, Arboga, and many m
ore, including Gamla Uppsala itself. Boat graves have also been found in the territory of the Götar, in south-western Sweden, showing it was a pan-cultural rite.

  In a different context again, in 1962 an innovative coffer-dam excavation revealed five ships that had been deliberately scuttled in the eleventh century to form part of a sunken blockade controlling access to the Roskilde fjord in Denmark. They proved to be of types that had not been seen before in the archaeology, but which expanded the typology of Viking shipping in ways that correlated well with the written sources: a small warship of the snekkja type; a bigger, thirty-metre-long war vessel with a draught of only one metre and a crew of up to eighty; and three cargo ships of different sizes, two of them for offshore use and journeys in coastal waters and the third a deep-sea trading vessel of the type known as a knarr. The latter was the sort of ship that carried settlers across the North Atlantic—less well-known than the beautiful longships but, in truth, the workhorses of Viking-Age maritime power. Several other large cargo ships have since been found at Klåstad in Norway, Hedeby in Denmark, and Äskekärr in Sweden.

  13. A Viking workhorse. The remains of the Skuldelev 1 ship, excavated from Roskilde fjord in Denmark but originally made in western Norway c. 1030. A vessel of the knarr type, this was the mainstay of Viking-Age shipping, used for open sea voyages and cargo. Photo: Casiopeia, Creative Commons.

  Work has continued in the same area by the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum that was established to house the five excavated vessels, and has uncovered still more ships, including the largest longship ever found—thirty-two metres long, with a single-watch crew of eighty that could have been doubled for war. Dating to the early eleventh century, it is of the dimensions the sagas give for the highest rank of royal warships.

  In Denmark there are also dramatic ship graves from Ladby, Hedeby, and other sites; in Norway numerous examples have been found at Borre, Avaldsnes, and at several locations along the coast. There are now small Viking boat burials from the Orkneys, mainland Scotland, and the Isle of Man, as well as a spectacular example from the Île de Groix, a tiny island off the Breton coast. Most recently, two unprecedented mass graves in boats were found at Salme on the Estonian island of Saaremaa. Dating to c. 750, the larger of the two vessels provides the first conclusive evidence for the use of the sail in Scandinavia; its point of origin seems to have been central Sweden—the same region as the Uppland burials and the heart of the then-emerging Svear kingdom.

  The sheer number of remains, together with the organic survival of the Vestfold vessels, provides many clues as to the evolution of Viking ships. The Salme find demonstrates that sailed warships were available to the Scandinavians by at least 750, and that they presumably complemented the rowed vessels found in the Uppland boat graves. Smaller rowing boats like Salme I, perhaps also with the possibility to step a mast, acted as tenders and ancillary vessels. They could certainly accompany the bigger ships into the waters of the Baltic. As one maritime archaeologist has suggested, it is possible that the ‘late’ introduction of the sail may have actually been just another manifestation of the rising aristocracies in pre-Viking Scandinavia—one more component in their toolkit of dominance. If this was the case, the demonstrable command of sail-driven vessels can be seen as part of the architecture of power no less than the great halls and the monumental grave mounds. Like them, the sail filled a need, and required special technologies that were highly visible both in their application and in the resources needed to create them.

  In the late eighth century, it seems that ships became broader and roomier—was this to facilitate oceangoing voyages (especially across the North Sea) rather than the more regional travels of the Baltic that had been the norm until that time? The fluvial waterways of western Europe had not been closed to earlier Scandinavian ships, but the minimal tides of the Baltic would certainly have been more manageable.

  Over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries, there was a massive acceleration in the development of shipping technology, in the areas of efficiency, capability, and diversification. Whereas the broader ships of the early Viking Age seem to have been multipurpose, capable of transporting both crews and cargo, from the late 800s, there is evidence of specialised vessels ranging from offshore patrol boats to the equivalent of royal yachts, deep-sea cargo haulers, fishing smacks, and—of course—a range of slim, predatory warships of different sizes. The latter varied from craft suited to defence or pirating along the coasts and fjords, to oceangoing longships designed for major raiding expeditions and real marine warfare. Given these variations in size and function, Viking vessels must have held a crew of anything from a single person to well over a hundred, and in the large warships the complement of crew could be enlarged for short-range combat missions.

  Archaeology and visual images provide striking details. Several weather vanes made of gilded copper alloy and designed to be fixed to a ship’s prow or mast have been found. Decorated with the ‘great beast’ typical of the eleventh century, they also have rows of holes from which ribbons would have fluttered in the breeze. One of them even has dents apparently caused by projectiles. An unusual carved bone from Bergen shows the prows of an entire fleet, resting at anchor side by side, and on some of the stems such vanes can be seen. The strakes of ships—the long, horizontal planks of the hull—may have been painted in alternating colours (seen on textiles), and the sails may have been chequered or sewn with the symbols of their captains.

  A handful of figureheads have been found dating to the early Iron Age, but none so far is known from the Viking Age itself. However, there are several carved and engraved depictions of such things—dragons’ heads and other animals—that extend to a curling tail at the stern. On the Oseberg ship, both stem and stern terminate in the coils of a carved snake, an integral part of the vessel that could not be removed. The Ladby and Groix ships, and perhaps some of the Valsgärde boats, contained a number of iron spirals that match the manes of dragon-figures depicted on metal dress-pins from Birka and other sites; it seems these ships also had dragon prows, which were carved in wood but with metal details picked out.

  What resources were needed to sustain this level of maritime power? The obvious need was timber, which would have been grown in managed woodland over many years, with a corresponding requirement of stewardship and forestry skills. Then there was the iron for the rivets and tools, involving a multistage process of resource procurement and manufacture. Among the organic materials, one must remember the rigging and fittings, all the wooden bailers and pins and clamps, the oars and their rowlock covers—in short, the complete equipment of a seagoing vessel. The textile requirements would have included foul-weather clothing for the crew, and something to change into. Above all, of course, the sails. The commitment of time and labour was immense, and was matched by the organisation and investment capacity required to set them in motion. Making a ship and everything it needed was a very serious and expensive undertaking indeed. Building a fleet was an industry.

  Ships also had to be maintained once launched. To take just one example, vessels of all kinds needed tar to insulate their hulls and waterproof the woollen sails. The servicing of watercraft would have been a constant feature of dockside activity. Around the jetties at Birka and Hedeby, in particular, archaeologists have found dozens of broken-off brushes with heads of rags and textiles, thickly coated with the tar into which they were presumably dipped just before a careless stroke snapped the shaft and sent it all into the water, where they would be discovered a thousand years later.

  Our final image of Viking-Age ships can be a dimmer one, and again, a snapshot of the past that is not usually considered. In the Saga of Magnús Barelegs, part of Snorri’s Heimskringla set in the eleventh century, one can read of the royal ships drawn up in Trondheim fjord:

  In spring, near Candlemas, King Magnús set out at dead of night, and stood out with his ships tented and with lights under them [the tents], and sailed to Hefring Head, where they stayed the night, and the
re made great fires up on the land.

  Imagine a Viking fleet riding at anchor for the night, its deck canopies illuminated from within, the water glowing with soft points of light like an Asian river festival.

  Let’s leave them there in the fjord, and move to different arenas for the performance of power, actually into other worlds—those of the gods and other beings, and their many disturbing points of contact with the realm of the living.

  7

  MEETING THE OTHERS

  THE CONCEPT OF RELIGION, IN the sense that we tend to mean it today, was something that a Viking-Age person might have had difficulty in grasping. This was also one of the tensions between the traditional spiritualities of Scandinavia and the book-based faiths they encountered in the form of Christianity and Islam. The distinction between belief and knowledge is significant for the Vikings’ relations with the invisible population with whom they shared their world. However, both these attitudes to the ‘other’ are also somewhat abstract—they are located in the mind, not in the tangible realm of action and practice.

  Put another way, it is one thing to understand how the Vikings thought about their gods and all the other (super)natural beings of the nine worlds that made up the Norse cosmos, but what did they do about it? To take examples from some familiar world faiths today, a pious Christian, Muslim, or Jew would be entirely comfortable with the notion of a life structured by religious observance, the enactment of rituals (including prayer), and regular visits to holy buildings, be they churches, mosques, or synagogues. Did the Vikings have an equivalent to this, and if so, what was it?

  To navigate this numinous landscape of religious practice is to encounter a world of special places dedicated to communication with the powers. These could be buildings, settings of stone, strange platforms raised on islands in the marshes—or even just groves of trees or fields, their otherness manifested in ways that were not immediately visible. They were sites of sacrifice, of giving up precious objects, or blood, or time, to curry favour with the beings who could bestow it.