by Neil Price;
Heill nú, vel skalt hér kominn ok gakk í hǫll
Hail to you, be welcome here and come into the hall!
The other main realm of the dead was Hel (pronounced approximately like the English word ‘heal’), with a problematic etymology that may or may not relate to its Christian near-namesake. Located in the north, it was ruled by a being of the same name—a woman whose body is half that of a beautiful goddess and half blue and dark, the colour of a corpse. She is Loki’s daughter by one of his complicated liaisons, and is said to be gloomy and downcast. Her halls are ‘high’, very large, and very many (which implies the need for space and a growing population). The most detailed descriptions come from Snorri and other late texts, but both the place and its host are also mentioned in Eddic and skaldic poetry.
The long and difficult road to Hel appears as a specific motif several times in the poems. This is the path taken by Odin on Sleipnir, desperate to find an explanation for the troubling nightmares that have disturbed his son Baldr. He wakes the dead sorceress by the eastern doors of Hel’s hall to ask about Baldr’s dreams (which have their own poem of that name), only to be horrified as he sees the benches inside being cleared for the boy’s reception. There is even an Eddic poem called Brynhild’s Hel-ride—the tale of a dead, lovelorn Valkyrie who travels there in the wagon in which she was burnt on her pyre.
Whether Hel really was a ‘bad’ place has long been a central question in the untangling of the Norse afterlife. There are many negatives—its ruler’s appearance and demeanour, the connotations that the north held in the Viking mind, and the long road ‘down’ to it, nine levels deep into the dark and mist. It doesn’t sound nice. But on the other hand, these may be Christian interpolations of the later texts, especially given the similarities of the name. It might have been hard for the medieval authors to make it anything other than the opposite of Valhöll, a concept they understood. This is emphasised by the rhetorical flourishes Snorri can’t help but add: Hel’s knife is called Famine, her bowl is Hunger, she sleeps in Sick-Bed, the portal of her hall is Stumbling-Block, her servants are Lazy-Walkers, and so on. No other aspect of the Norse afterlife, or any divine abode, is described using this kind of blunt-instrument vocabulary.
In fact there is no early indication that Hel was an unpleasant place; indeed, there is very little to indicate one’s deeds in life affected where one went after death (other than battlefield heroics). Not least, Baldr, the brightest god, goes to Hel after he is slain by his brother Höd, and even Egil Skalla-Grímsson—saga hero, quintessential Viking, warrior-poet, and Odin worshipper par excellence—says himself that Hel is waiting for him “on the headland of his old age”. In the earlier poetry, dying men are said to be entering “Hel’s embrace”. There is every suggestion that a lot of people went there, that they expected to do so, and that they were in no way depressed by the thought. We should be wary of equating ‘Valhalla’ with some kind of Christian heaven, or Hel with its dark twin.
One unsettling fact that emphasises just how little is known of Norse ‘religion’ is that we have little idea where women went after death. Presumably most journeyed to Hel, just like the majority of men, but does this explain the many high-status female burials that are in every way the equal of the male equivalents? Perhaps the female counterparts to the einherjar were also welcomed by Freyja, travelling to her halls in the wagons that are found in their graves. A single female character in the Saga of Egil Skalla-Grímsson says as much, but this is the only instance. Alternatively, this may be the proof that Hel (the place) was not negative or dark, simply a different destination that welcomed allcomers.
As if to further emphasise the gaps in our knowledge, a single line in the Eddic poem Harbard’s Song suggests a whole world, with attitudes and assumptions behind it of which nothing is known. As the poem says (with my italics):
Odin has the noblemen who fall in battle
and Thor has the race of thralls.
So, there was an eternity for the enslaved, too, apparently in the care of the storm god.
There was also an afterlife of the sea, set apart for those who died there. The drowned—all of them—were caught in a net by Rán, the sea goddess married to Aegir, lord of the ocean. Their unnamed underwater hall may have been in some senses a marine equivalent of Valhöll or Hel, although it is not known if a terrestrial death was actually a requirement to go to those places (what of a great warrior who died in a sea battle, for example?). The water deities were old, as they are mentioned in both Eddic and skaldic poetry. Rán had nine daughters, the embodiment of the waves, who sometimes carry a suggestion of the slight erotic charge that attaches to the Valkyries. In the texts, their father, Aegir, seems friendly enough, hospitable and generous, whereas his wife personified the treacherous, unpredictable nature of the sea.
Just as the einherjar would fight for the gods at the Ragnarök, the drowned also had their station, although a terrible one that they do not seem to have earned. As all the powers gather at the end, something will stir on the ocean floor, the greatest Viking ship ever made. Its name is Naglfar, ‘Nail-Ship’, so called because it is built from the fingernails of everyone who has ever died; the vessel thereby naturally grows larger by increments over the millennia until by the time of the Ragnarök it will be vast beyond imagining. As the roosters begin to crow, announcing the coming battle, Naglfar breaks loose from the sea bed and rises to the surface, its waterlogged timbers green and rotten. Its cargo will be all the dead of Hel; its captain is the giant Hrym; Loki stands at the helm. The drowned are its crew.
Finally, there are also episodes in the Icelandic sagas that present more terrestrial afterlives—physical places in Midgard where some of the dead reside (beyond the localised sense of them ‘living’ in their graves). These are almost always mountains or strangely shaped hills, outcrops that rise suddenly from flat plains and the like. Their names are usually some variant of Helgafell, ‘Holy Mountain’, and there are several such places in the Icelandic landscape that you can still visit today. Each is clearly linked to a particular district, and often to its leading clans. In essence, the holy mountains function as a sort of family vault combining the familiar connections with the land and an actual afterlife destination. This may be the kind of place that lay on the other side of the ‘doors’ opened by the Gotland picture-stones. One wonders if this is a relic of an older, more personal set of beliefs, and susceptible to a greater degree of local control than the more abstract afterlives of Asgard, Hel, and the halls of Rán. In any event, the world inside the holy rock seems pleasant and is depicted as a feast of warmth, food, and drink—a scene of literal life after death.
16. Holy Mountain. The site of Helgafell on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in Iceland is one of several such sacred outcrops, that in the Viking Age were believed to function as abodes of the dead. The heroine of the Saga of the People of Laxardal, Gudrún Ósvifrsdóttir, is supposedly buried below the rock. Photo: Creative Commons.
Attractive though some of these places sound, there was nothing ‘deserving’ about most of the Norse afterlife. It is hard to find a moral scheme in the Viking mind or in the actions of their gods. Anybody can drown, and not everyone is a battlefield hero—and yet the inhabitants of both Hel’s and Aegir’s halls end up fighting for evil at the doom of all things. For the living, it must have been strange to imagine where a family member lost at sea really was, and what would happen to her or him in time.
The Vikings’ knowledge concerning the ultimate destination of their souls (for want of a better term), of the fate of every person—their doom, in the proper sense of the word—and the coming war of the Ragnarök gave them a very different outlook from anyone alive today.
This difference was one of spiritual beliefs and death rituals, of worldview and how reality itself was perceived; it extended further still, across the social strata and inside every individual. But what happened when that difference met the outside world of their own time?
Of course,
the Scandinavians had connections with the surrounding regions going back far into the Iron Age and still deeper into remote prehistory. They were no strangers to foreign parts, and to an extent they were familiar figures immediately beyond the diffuse borders of the North. But in the middle decades of the eighth century, a number of factors came together to both propel and draw the Vikings overseas in new ways, and in ever greater numbers.
They would appear in the annals first as raiders and pirates, a threat that eventually escalated to the scale of fleets and armies. As traders they moved farther than ever, ultimately into the depths of the Eurasian steppe. As colonists they established themselves across western and eastern Europe, while as voyagers they settled new lands in the North Atlantic all the way to the shores of the Americas.
To get inside this ‘Viking phenomenon’—to understand how it began and then slowly rolled across the northern world—requires nuanced thinking. There is no point in seeking illusory ‘triggers’ and ‘smoking guns’ where they did not exist. Instead, we should explore the rationale for the raids; the nature of the market forces that drove them; and the political economics of warrior culture that underpinned it all.
In short, it is time to put the ‘Viking’ in the Viking Age.
THE VIKING PHENOMENON
9
INROADS
THE START OF THE VIKING Age is often visualised by means of a map, not least in books such as this one. It will use arrows to show the routes, dates, and targets of the ‘first raids’, usually broken down into discrete chunks of time—a half century, say—and thereby also tracing the progression of the maritime attacks that for so many define these three centuries. The movements of ‘Vikings’ are most frequently shown in a rather abstract sense, perhaps indicating a point of origin, and thus also successive ‘waves’ of assault.
Many of these maps have as their starting point the raid on the insular monastery of Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumbria in northern England, which was attacked in June 793—the first securely recorded example. Thereafter, on further maps, follows an escalating series of attacks on other monastic houses, vulnerable settlements, and eventually whole regions accessible from the coasts and rivers of the British Isles and the north-western European Continent. Many scholars have tried to divide the Viking Age into phases, usually determined by changes in the patterns of maritime violence. The conventional view sees an initial period of sporadic raiding from c. 789 to 805, and then a focussed shift to targets in Ireland and Scotland until 834, before the rise of true Viking armies with overwintering campaigns after that date.
This is a pattern I tend to follow, although I am constantly aware that it is an imposition of hindsight, not reflective of life as lived. And of course, we know that there was much more to the Viking Age than this, not least in the centuries that lay behind its ostensible beginnings. These were people with their own richly textured cultural world, the inheritors of sophisticated Scandinavian traditions, practices, and worldviews built up over millennia. Vikings had their own motivations and rationales for what they did. Not least, their actions overseas fitted with political trends and ideologies that were entirely embedded in the societies at home in Scandinavia.
In human history it is occasionally possible to discern what systems theorists call singularities—relatively small social changes in themselves but with long-term and large-scale impacts. They can be hard to get a grip on, often the result of many separate elements suddenly coming together in what may be a more-or-less random manner. Once set in motion, however, they can be difficult or even impossible to reverse—the proverbial tipping point. Archaeology deals with material culture, literally with things that have survived from the past into the present, and as such the buried record rarely preserves singularities directly. With effort and care, though, they can be discerned in the patterns that form around them, and this is possible for the beginnings of the Viking Age.
Before venturing there, however, there is something else, almost a moral imperative. The ‘cartographic’ Viking Age, the raids-as-mapped, is a useful but comfortably distant way to approach these events. A violent reality check is needed—a corrective and necessary acknowledgement of what that maze of dates and place-names and labelled arrows really meant.
At their most immediate, on the spot, on the day, for many the raids were the most bitter of endings. Behind every notation on our maps lay an urgent present of panic and terror, of slashing blades and sharp points, of sudden pain and open wounds; of bodies by the wayside, and orphaned children; of women raped and all manner of people enslaved; of entire family lines ending in blood; of screams and then silence where there should be lively noise; of burning buildings and ruin; of economic loss; of religious convictions overturned in a moment and replaced with humiliation and rage; of roads choked with refugees as columns of smoke rose behind them. Of utter, ruthless brutality, expressed in all its forms.
In explaining their overseas attacks, it should never be forgotten who and what Vikings—actual Vikings—really were, beyond the compelling intricacies of their worldview and the wonderful fact that they each carried within them the personification of luck and a female spirit-guide. In poetry, the English called them wælwulfas, ‘slaughter-wolves’, and with good reason—but the Vikings even said it themselves. Here is the great tenth-century Icelandic warrior-poet Egil Skalla-Grímsson, describing his raiding experiences (in an effort to impress a woman at a feast, which also tells you something about him):
Farit hefi ek blóðgum brandi
svá at mér benþiðurr fylgði,
ok gjallanda geiri;
gangr var harðr af víkingum.
Gjǫrðum reiðir róstu,
rann eldr of sjǫt manna,
ek lét blóðga búka
í borghliðum sœfask.
I have gone with bloody blade
where the wound-partridges [ravens] followed,
and with screaming spear;
Vikings fought fiercely.
Raging we gave battle,
fire ran through men’s houses,
I let bloody bodies
sleep in town gateways.
In the latter decades of the eighth century, a singularity composed of intricate, intersecting streams in Scandinavian society—and its interaction with the wider world—began to emerge. There was no convenient single event or factor that set ‘the Viking Age’ in motion; instead there were many of them in combination. In seeking to understand what all these components were, and how they came together with such large-scale and violent drama, the emphasis must always be on multicausality and complexity.
Crucially, at the core of it all was an export of the trends and behaviours that had already been happening inside Scandinavia for centuries—the long trajectory from the end of the Migration Period to the eve of the Viking Age. This cultural package had long included international contacts and interactions. In practice, the Viking raiders were never a bolt from the blue, unknown barbarian sails on a North Sea horizon. Their victims had encountered Scandinavians many times before, but as traders rather than agents of chaos; the surprise was in the violence, not the contact.
By the eighth century, the conflict that had been endemic among the petty kingdoms of Scandinavia for most of the late Iron Age had become unsustainable, especially along the Norwegian coasts. Tensions escalated to the point of requiring a larger arena for their resolution. It is not hard to see the expediency in seeking material wealth overseas to the west, using such ventures to expand the military forces available, and sustaining them through the promise of reward. There were also economic stimuli in the mercantile ambitions of the Norwegian sea-kings and also their counterparts in Denmark and Baltic Sweden. Looking both west and east, they saw opportunity in proactive overseas trade. Coupled with this were social pressures—the effects of polygyny creating an underclass of young men disenfranchised by the laws of inheritance and with minimal marriage prospects. A summer or two of maritime violence offered the potential
for life-altering change in many directions. Lastly, there was the traditional Scandinavian worldview itself, and its weaponised expression in an assault on the Christian cultures that really were bent on its destruction.
But before exploring these underlying causes over the following chapters, it is first necessary to understand their effects.
In approaching the individual events of the early Viking Age, rather than at the level of longer-term processes, it is easy to slip into a kind of tyranny of written sources. More-or-less contemporary texts such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle preserve handy lists of annals, stating clearly what apparently occurred and when (such as the Lindisfarne raid in 793). For all the scholarly critique there has been of detail, it is unsurprising that the picture they contain has become the focus of attention.
However, the earliest actual evidence for a Viking raid is not textual at all, but archaeological. Crucially, considering that it predates the Lindisfarne attack by more than forty years, it does not come from the West and the British Isles, but from the East, and the Baltic.
Around the middle of the eighth century, c. 750, a Swedish maritime expedition came to violent grief on or near the island of Saaremaa off the coast of Estonia. We know this because of the chance discoveries from 2008 to 2012 of two boats full of dead warriors, buried by the seashore in what is now the village of Salme. They had been set up parallel to the water some forty metres apart on an isthmus, at a strategic point where ships would pass. The graves would have been a visible landmark—they were intended to be seen, and remembered. Before the excavation of the Salme find, the largest number of bodies previously known from a Viking boat burial was four, arguably five. The first of the Salme vessels, the smaller of the two, contained the corpses of seven men; astonishingly, the second Salme ship contained no fewer than thirty-four bodies. Taken together, the Salme boat graves are unique, not least for the insights they provide into the earliest raids, and are therefore worth taking time to explore.
