by Neil Price;
The smaller of the two vessels was a rowing craft approximately eleven and a half metres long and two metres wide, perhaps a sort of ship’s boat. Its mortuary crew had been placed sitting up on the benches: six of them in three pairs at the oars, and the seventh, and oldest, at one end—probably the steersman in the stern. The men were buried with a variety of tools and utensils, a few weapons (although not enough for each of them), large quantities of meat, and the headless bodies of two hawks.
The second vessel was much larger: a true oceangoing ship seventeen metres long and three metres across the beam. At one end of the boat, probably the prow, thirty-four men were buried in four layers, laid side by side down in the hull. On and around them were at least forty-two swords, many of high-quality workmanship with jewelled hilts and gold decoration. One of them even had a blade inlaid with designs in gold, something entirely unknown before the Salme find. The men wore jewellery of simple cloak pins, implying practical, hard-wearing gear for use at sea—nothing fancy. The exceptions were a few wearing beads and two with necklaces of bear’s teeth; they would have looked striking. The bodies were strewn with gaming pieces. Some had fish carefully placed over them; others held sea birds in their arms. Some of the men had chops of veal, mutton, and pork stacked on their breast. The deck was heaped with cuts of beef and pork.
The whole pile of bodies was covered by a wooden ‘burial mound’ made from shields, placed with overlapping boards to form a timber dome over the dead. Each shield boss had been hammered flat, the boards were slashed, and many of the weapons were deliberately bent. The mound had been covered by a single piece of coarse textile, and the only such item large enough presumably would have been a sail. It had been weighted down with a curb of stones. Three birds of prey had been laid over the ‘shield mound’. Six dogs, cut to pieces, had been draped over the shields around the perimeter. Two swords were stuck vertically in the top of the mound.
The Salme burials had clearly been preceded by fighting of some kind. Many of the bodies, especially in the upper layers of the ‘shield mound’ and in the smaller boat, exhibited either blade, penetration, and/or blunt-force trauma, with slashes to the face and arms, arrow wounds to the hips, and more. In the centre of the mound lay a man with some of the worst injuries and also the finest weapons, including a ring-hilt sword—the mark of a very high-status leader. Unlike the other bodies, his had not been covered with gaming pieces; instead, he had only one, the king, and it had been placed in his mouth.
The dead ranged in age from late adolescence to maturity, with the majority in their thirties—they were men in their prime. They were also unusually tall. Isotope studies of the teeth suggested that (with only a handful of exceptions) their place of origin was somewhere in the Mälar Valley of central Sweden, a conclusion supported by the parallels between the Salme weapons and equipment and those of the Uppland boat graves.
The clear suggestion, reinforced by massive wounds on many of the bodies, is that the Salme burials resulted from a Svear maritime expedition that ended in violence—in other words, a raid. It has also been argued that this was a diplomatic mission; hawks were commonly used as prestige gifts and were extraordinarily difficult to keep alive in transport. If this was the case, the diplomacy must have failed, to put it mildly.
The care taken with the dead, the time and effort, and the resemblance to the ship rituals of the Swedish mainland all suggest that the dead were buried by their friends, and thus that whatever had occurred, the Swedes ultimately prevailed. DNA studies also show a broad pattern of relationships implying that most of them came from the same, albeit very extended, local and familial background. Four were actually brothers, buried together in a group. Taken together, this looks very much like part of one of the family dynasties that formed the main power blocks in the eighth century.
That the Austmarr—the ‘Eastern Sea’, as it was called in Old Norse—was a key arena of Scandinavian maritime power play, including raiding, should not surprise us in the least. Snorri’s semi-mythical history of the Ynglinga dynasty clearly describes the central Swedish kingdom’s operations there. The Danes had probably been doing something similar along the southern Baltic coast. The conclusion needs to be stated again: Viking raids, in the literal and exact sense of the term, were initially a phenomenon not of the West, but of the East. They were also, to a great extent, a ‘domestic’ activity that occurred in Scandinavian ‘territorial waters’, to use a modern anachronism that nonetheless fits. This is why, even later in the period, there are runestones that speak of guarding against Vikings: they were equal opportunity predators.
One of the Ynglinga kings, Yngvar, even died on such an expedition, as Snorri says:
King Yngvar made peace with the Danes, and then began to raid around the Baltic [Austrvegr]. One summer he took out an army and went to Eistland [Estonia] and raided during the summer, at the place called Steinn. Then Eistr [Estonians] came down with a large army, and they had a battle. The native army was so numerous that the Svíar could put up no resistance. Then King Yngvar died and his army fled. He is buried in a mound, close by the sea. This was in Adalsýsla district. The Svíar went home after this defeat. So says Thjódólf [the poet of the ‘List of the Ynglingas’]:
It was said
that Yngvar was
by Sýsla people
put to death,
and off ‘Sea’s Heart’[sea’s heart: rock: Steinn]
the host of Eistr
slew the leader,
the light-hued one,
and the eastern sea
sings the lay
of Gymir to cheer [Gymir: personification of the sea]
the fallen king.
The Adalsýsla district is the mainland directly opposite Saaremaa, but the location of Steinn, the rock in the heart of the sea, is uncertain. It may be that the answer can be found in the Historia Norvegiae, a Latin history of Norway older than Snorri’s Heimskringla, and which explicitly says Yngvar “was killed by the inhabitants while campaigning on an island in the Baltic called Eysysla”. The place-name is the origin of the modern Ösel, the Swedish name for Saaremaa—in other words, when these sources are combined, Yngvar seems to have died and been buried in a mound by the sea on that island. Yngvar’s reign is usually dated to the early seventh century, a hundred years before the Salme burials, but one wonders nonetheless, not least in view of the man with the gaming king-piece in his mouth.
If this initial eastern, rather than western, focus is understandable, it is equally clear that the idea of launching serious long-distance expeditions over the open sea and thus beyond the Vikings’ immediate cultural comfort zone (as it were) was directed westwards to the British Isles and almost simultaneously south-west to Frankia, what is today France and the Low Countries.
The Vikings ominously enter the written record in the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the court record of the Wessex kingdom, for the year 789:
Here Beorhtric took King Offa’s daughter Eadburh. And in his days came first three ships of Northmen from Hordaland: and then the reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king’s town because he did not know what they were; and then they killed him. These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race.
The Annals of St. Neots specify the location as “the island which is called Portland”, which lies just off the Dorset coast near Weymouth. It must be said that the date is not secure, in that this only locates the event in the period of the Wessex king’s reign, 786–802; the encounter was therefore not necessarily in the year of the annal, which was compiled retrospectively. It is also not entirely clear whether Portland was a raid at all, rather than some kind of customs-control misunderstanding, or why shiploads of Scandinavians would have come so far south without previously making landfall. The confusion is increased by the identification of their origin as Hordaland in western Norway, but at the same time, the scribe says they were “Danish”. The catch-all of Dani (and pag
ani, ‘pagans’) for Scandinavians would repeat throughout the English sources on the period. Finally, the entry contains a blatant error, perhaps a deliberate untruth: we know Scandinavians had already been in contact with the English for at least a century and probably much longer. The possible reasons for the Chronicle’s discretion here will become apparent.
The Chronicle’s version of the earliest raids needs to be supplemented by the evidence from contemporary letters and charters, which suggest Portland might not even be the first of them. In 792 a charter of King Offa of Mercia refers to Kent, and the need for military service against “seaborne pagans” (who can only be Scandinavians) in migratory fleets that had presumably been active for some time.
The first securely recorded western raid came in the following year, and is of course the famous assault on Lindisfarne, the Northumbrian monastery dedicated to Saint Cuthbert and located on Holy Island, which was connected to the mainland by a tidal causeway. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it:
In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen men destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.
The Annals of Lindisfarne amend the date to June 8, which makes more sense in terms of weather. This second description of the attack, more a reaction, is also among the most-quoted passages of the whole period. In a letter written to the king of Northumbria by the English cleric Alcuin, then in temporary residence at the Frankish court, one can read:
Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples.
Later accounts describe how the monks were killed outright, thrown into the sea to drown, or enslaved, and the church plate was carried off.
Alcuin returned to the Lindisfarne raid several times in his letters and notes, but one theme emerges consistently—the idea of surprise, the sense that this had never happened before. Scholars used to press regularly on this point, but it began to be challenged already in the 1980s, when the first real archaeological evidence was found of pre-Viking North Sea trade, implying close links between the peoples that predated the raids. Attention turned to another passage in Alcuin’s same letter to Aethelred of Northumbria:
Consider the dress, the hairstyle, and the luxurious habits of the princes and people. Look at the hairstyle, how you have wished to imitate the pagans in their beards and hair. Does not the terror threaten of those whose hairstyle you wished to have?
In other words, the Lindisfarne raiders came from a people already familiar enough to their victims that they had once been seen as fashionable role-models—which, of course, requires close observation. Scholars have long argued over the word navigium, conventionally translated ‘inroad from the sea’, as above, as evidence of an unprecedented act. Another hand in the manuscript has amended it to naufragium, a ‘disaster’, and while this is probably a later addition, the sense may be the same: Alcuin meant an aggressive marine incursion, not just maritime contact of any kind. What astonished Alcuin and his contemporaries was that their Scandinavian friends brought swords, not goods to trade, and it is this that marks the real behavioural turning point of the Viking phenomenon—at least in its overtly violent aspects, as outsiders saw them. When Alcuin offered to negotiate the return of the hostages taken at Lindisfarne, in his letter to its bishop, Higbald, it is evident he somehow had a line of communication to their captors, which again suggests he knew them.
The Vikings were back the following year, and they knew what they liked: isolated, undefended, but very rich monastic houses. They were probably well familiar with them from trading ventures, as markets were sometimes held near such institutions. Any Scandinavian entering a church of this kind—rather drab on the outside and served by ineffectual-looking men with silly haircuts—must have been astounded at the gold and silverwork within. Motivation is not an issue here. Another monastery was hit, the twin Northumbrian houses of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow. During the raid, one of the Viking commanders was killed, and some of the ships were “broken up” by bad weather that drowned a few of those aboard; when the surviving crews staggered ashore, they were massacred by the locals. Even at this early date, these were not entirely one-sided affairs.
In 794 the Annals of Ulster record massive raids in Britain, although in general terms. After the Monkwearmouth setback, conventional wisdom has it that the Vikings’ attention turned to Scotland, and in 795 the island abbey of Iona was sacked with many casualties among the monks (struck again in 802 and 806, it was eventually abandoned). However, by 797 Alcuin was writing to the citizens of Canterbury to lament how he saw “a pagan people becoming accustomed to laying waste our shores with piratical robbery”, which does not sound like the reflection of only a handful of raids in distant Scotland and across the Irish Sea. He records fighting with maritime aggressors in Frankia in 799, and only a few years later, there is a mention of an astonishing two hundred ships attacking Frisia (today’s Netherlands).
Ireland was first assaulted in 795, the same year as Iona, at a similar site on the Isle of Rathlin. The raids continued on the west coast, also at more insular monasteries—Inishmurray and Inishbofin. Holmpatrick on the east coast was assaulted in 798. By the early 800s, Ireland was being raided almost continually, when again and again coastal monasteries were targeted as easy prey. In 808 the Royal Frankish Annals note how pirates captured a papal envoy for ransom; as the aftermath of Lindisfarne makes clear, there was some form of diplomatic relations with the Vikings. The same Frankish sources also mention particularly intensive attacks in Ireland between 811 and 813.
At the same time in southern England, the picture becomes clearer still, when Kentish charters covering the period from 811 to 822 on several occasions mention defences against the Vikings, who seem to be moving west along the coast. There is a suggestion of fortifications and possibly shipborne deterrents. One charter of 811 even refers to the destruction of camps, implying the Vikings had actually set up some kind of landward bases; other charters make it clear that there were fortifications against the pagans and others that were made by them. In 814 the charters make similar references to anti-pagan defences, suggesting repeated incursions presumably each summer. The raids were beginning to accelerate in frequency. In 822, attacks are mentioned at Milton, which is fifteen kilometres inland. This same charter refers to “pagan enemies”, which raises the question as to whether there might also have been pagan ‘friends’. All the charters refer to the construction of bridges, which might have served as river blockades (a tactic used with success fifty years later in Frankia).
Interestingly, none of this appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which first mentions escalating Viking attacks from the mid-830s onwards. However, the Chronicle was the court propaganda arm of the Wessex dynasty. It seems that certain kinds of news were unwelcome, or perhaps the aim was to skate over the ineffective defences of the early ninth century in favour of Wessex’s ‘heroic’ efforts against the Danes decades later. Despite this, in the charter evidence the same pattern repeats in Mercia in the English Midlands. The suggestion of negotiations with the Vikings, and the odd silences of the Chronicle, have even led one historian to suggest that Ecgberht of Wessex’s takeover of Mercia in 824 might have been achieved with Scandinavian military assistance.
An obvious question concerns where the Scandinavians were coming from, and how. The first raiders were primarily from the west coast of Norway, but it has always been assumed their route to Britain was directly south to the Northern Isles of Shetland and Orkney. From there, it was thought the raiders s
ailed either to the east down the English coast to the Northumbrian monasteries, or to the west and into the Irish Sea, in either case turning back afterwards for home. In view of the new interpretations of the Kent coast charters, utterly missing from the Chronicle and thus distorting our perceptions of events, it has plausibly been suggested that the Norwegian raids instead hugged the European coast past the shores of Denmark and the Low Countries, before heading across to the British Isles by the shortest route. From there they cruised northwards back to Norway, either directly along the English east coast and past Northumbria, or into the Irish Sea from the south (occasionally even passing to the west of Ireland), thereby looting their way home.
An isolated attack on the mouth of the Loire in 819 sounds very much like a side effort on one of these westward voyages around the south-west of Britain before it headed up into the Irish Sea. Dorestad, the great Frisian trading centre, reached its zenith in the 830s, and for that reason was also thereafter the site of frequent Viking attacks, which makes sense if the raiding fleets were travelling this southern route.
The combination of the Salme boat graves and new work from Britain represents a radical revision of how the early Viking impact unfolded. From the Baltic to the North Sea, this in turn was inevitably linked to where those raiders came from and why—all of which was intimately bound up with the political economy back in Scandinavia. In addition, market forces, demographics, and ideology all played a role, and it is in this constellation of contributory factors that the real origins of the Viking Age can be found.
