Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  There seems to have been almost a Scandinavian colony at Grobina in modern Latvia, and it is at this time, the mid-eighth century, that the major trade routes took perceptible form. There was an ‘amber way’ for the mercantile flow of this prized commodity, running along the Visla River via Truso (in modern Poland) and Grobina, that connected to Scandinavia through Gotland. This was paralleled by an eastern route from the Mälar Valley, perhaps via Åland, to the Estonian shore. The whole coast of today’s Baltic states was important in this context because it provided access to the eastern European interior via a series of rivers—the Nemunas, the Venta, the Daugava, and others. They were often guarded with hillforts along their length and thus required complex negotiations (and tributes or taxes) to pass, in successive stages as the waterways cut through the territories of different tribes.

  In the eighth-century Baltic, the key mercantile venture for the Scandinavians was the decision to move east—all the way east—through the Gulf of Finland and into what today is the territory of the Russian Federation. There is no doubt that this represented a development of existing cultural and commercial contacts; it was in no way terra incognita for the Scandinavians. Individuals from at least mainland Sweden and Gotland had journeyed there many times, but there is no evidence for large-scale travel in any organised sense, and certainly not of settlement. This is what would change around 750, simultaneous with the same development in north-western Europe.

  The focus of this eastward move was at a place now known as Staraja (Old) Ladoga, located at the mouth of the Volkhov River where it discharges into Lake Ladoga, Europe’s largest body of freshwater. Access from the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland was direct, along the Neva River on which St. Petersburg would be founded a millennium later, thence along the shore of Ladoga and upriver a few kilometres to the settlement. The Volkhov was the prime means of access to the river systems farther south that led to and from the Russian interior, but also ultimately into the Dniepr system, which could be followed all the way through what is now Ukraine to the Black Sea, and to the richest market of them all: Byzantium.

  The first traces of occupation at Ladoga date to 753, a precision achieved with tree-ring chronologies of the first timber structures preserved in the waterlogged soil. Thus, we see the same founding date as the other emporia of this kind, this same shift in the balance of society, trade, and power. By the end of the century, the camp was thriving.

  Laid out along the Volkhov at the confluence of a smaller tributary, Ladoga was a strongly linear development that followed both banks. The core area was where the waters met, with a mixture of square timber structures typical of the Slavic peoples, and rectangular longhouses of Norse type. This ethnic mix was there right from the start, with Slavs, Scandinavians, Finns, Balts, even Sámi, and others all jostling in the market as it steadily expanded. The settled area was ringed with basic defences, and some kind of fortress seems to have been constructed early on atop the promontory overlooking the confluence.

  The riverbanks outside the core area, and the fields behind the settlement, were covered in cemeteries, apparently ethnically zoned and with grave types typical of the different traditions among Ladoga’s citizenry. Over time, these signals began to merge and blend, no doubt like the lives of the people who made them, but it was the Scandinavians who seem to have founded the market and dominated it from the start.

  We might picture places like Ladoga as similar to the frontier settlements of the American West, growing rapidly from a few tents with ships’ supplies and basic necessities to the rudiments of small towns. They were probably rough, potentially violent, and also exciting, if that was to your taste: somewhere to make your fortune and then either stay or move on, provided you survived the risks. Think of a muddy, riverine Deadwood with greater ethnic variety, plus swords and a multitude of gods, and it’s probably not so far from the truth. The East was somewhere to make a new start, to shape a different life, and perhaps to forget a previous one. These endeavours should not be seen solely in terms of success. Imagine all the hopeful Scandinavian rubes eager to build a future on the eastern rivers, welcomed with open arms by the sharp-faced hustlers of Ladoga. Need supplies? Step over here. Thirsty? Of course, shipmate. No funds? Well, luck is always capricious, but fortunately we have credit, and on such good terms. The Ladogans are your new-found friends, a slap on the back and a horn of ale—and suddenly three more on the table, so generous!—but their eyes never smile. You shake on the deal, and then that big Slav moves to block the doorway. There was probably nowhere easier for someone to disappear, willingly or not, and there would have been a lot of unmarked graves.

  These fantasies are fun to entertain, but this really was a world of genuine opportunity. The markets and bazaars were ethnic melting pots, filled with a babble of languages that was probably smoothed out in the lingua franca of trade. Interactions operated at two levels of institution. In formal terms, mercantile exchange must have been bounded by jurisdictions, regulations, codes of conduct, and laws. Informally, these were shot through with the expectations of equally local traditions, cultural norms, ritual observations, and so on. Perhaps the most fundamental of all was the provision of a secure environment where all this could take place—a market wholly without guards would not last long. The currencies of these exchanges were furs, silver, and slaves—a trinity that would repeat for centuries.

  In the 700s, the eastern river trade was not yet fully controlled by Scandinavians—their influence would expand in the ninth century before reaching its zenith in the tenth. Ladoga was the start—the foot in the door—but for at least the latter half of the eighth century and perhaps well into the ninth, these water routes were probably something of a challenge.

  Raiding and commerce were two components, almost two varying expressions, of the same phenomenon: the pursuit and consolidation of power, expressed through the acquisition and redistribution of portable wealth. The expansionist ambitions of the Svear kings of Sweden produced places like Ladoga—but also events like those behind the Salme boat graves and the violent end of that arguably royal maritime expedition.

  In the West at the same time, specifically on the coast of Norway, the realities of power were very personal indeed, and it is here that politics merged fully with economics to produce something sudden and violent: the raids. This is the same pattern as that seen dimly in the East, but coming into much sharper focus.

  By the mid-eighth century, perhaps some fifteen small ‘kingdoms’ had coalesced along the Norwegian shorelines—through competition (violent or otherwise), absorption, expansion and alliance—some of them stretching inland along the fjords to the small areas of fertile farmlands. Within these structures, however, a more specialised sociopolitical pattern emerged, related to the region’s unique topography and economic potential, and differing in significant ways from the comparable groupings in the rest of Scandinavia.

  The region that Snorri Sturluson referred to as the Midlands, stretching from Rogaland in the south to Nordmøre in the north, has produced particularly good data. In the agricultural heartlands of Jæren is the key site of Avaldsnes, which together with the adjacent land along the Karmsund Strait makes a useful lens through which to shine light on this critical time and place. There is evidence of an intriguing two-tier political system. In the inland regions on fertile soils, there were over thirty manors and large estates—magnate farms, essentially—with agrarian subsistence economies that took advantage of the available resources. This is more or less the same settlement pattern and political structure as in the rest of Scandinavia. However, there was also an outer coastal elite, with ten or so manors based on islands and offshore locations—apparently with an eye to the maritime traffic along the shore. The latter seem to be something new in late Iron Age Scandinavia.

  One major piece of corroborating evidence for this differentiated power structure comes in the form of the ‘courtyard’ assembly sites that formed the basic level of governance. A new dating project
has shown that most of the assembly places in Rogaland (the area around Avaldsnes) declined and were abandoned in the eighth century. In other areas, such as Hålogaland farther north, the things continued in use until the Viking Age.

  In practical terms, this means that the central-southern part of the west coast—the shore facing Britain—underwent a dramatic change in power relations in the course of the 700s. This is, of course, the same period as the establishment of the market centres farther south and east, in Denmark and Sweden, and when the Russian rivers were opening up.

  It seems likely that the early Iron Age assemblies played a role in electing leaders, perhaps even the first of the kings, a function that naturally came into question when the new elites of the post-Roman period began to shape their own futures. However, as royal power grew to overtake the governmental role of the things, the assemblies began to confine their business to legal proceedings. In Rogaland, this seems to have gone even further, with the kings taking on this jurisdiction as well—a clear centralisation of power in the hands of the elites.

  Clearly, the nature of government was shifting along the Norwegian coast, but in a different way, and perhaps more rapidly, than in the rest of Scandinavia. Here, the eighth century saw the rise of another new kind of ruler, and the Old Norse sources have even preserved a name for him (they were all men): the sækonungr, the sea-king. They are mostly mentioned in the legendary sagas, in the metaphoric imagery of skaldic poems, and occasionally in the lists of poetic synonyms, as well as in Snorri’s Saga of the Ynglingas, where there is this interesting definition: “At that time [ … ] there were many sea-kings who commanded large troops and had no lands”. It is clear that their ‘kingship’ depended not on lineage—which had become entrenched by the eighth century—but on maritime military power in its own right.

  In the 1930s a list was compiled of all the sea-king personal names from the written sources, sorting out those with origins in the ninth century or earlier. This work is of immense importance in understanding who these men were. As their compiler states, the names are “miniature historical pictures”, hardly fit for the kings of the later sagas but eminently suitable as real-world descriptors of violent war leaders. They almost stride from the page: Áti, ‘Messmate’; Beiti, ‘the Cruiser’; Ekkill, ‘He Who Sails Alone’; Geitir, ‘the Goat’; Gestill, ‘the Little Guest’; Jalkr, ‘Screamer’; Mysingr, ‘the Mouse’; Maevill, ‘the Seagull’; Rökkvi, ‘He Who Sails at Dusk’—and some seventeen more. These are pirate names. One thinks of Blackbeard, Calico Jack, and the rest, analogies that are actually quite viable. The key point is that these are Viking names in the proper sense of the word, the real thing.

  Each of the sea-kings’ territories was a genuine maritorium, encompassing an entire community culturally oriented towards the ocean. Crucially, they were not based upon the control of land, beyond what was needed to supply the core manors with their needs. Places like Avaldsnes were thus warrior manors—bases for the warlords of the sea, with hinterlands that kept them in food and drink, as well as the raw materials to equip and maintain the ships. The farms of the surrounding districts could provide men for emergency defence and a ready supply of crews for the ships themselves.

  The greatest of the sea-kings was Harald Finehair, the man who would attempt to unify Norway in the ninth century and begin the process of state formation that would reach completion two hundred years later; Avaldsnes was one of his manors. Significantly, earlier in his career as a sea-king, Harald went by a different name: Lúfa, ‘Mophead’, another of the piratical, gang-leader epithets, later tidied up to form his royal nickname. Harald was notorious for his many wives and concubines, and one scholar has even suggested that these relationships were a means of linking the different regions of his hinterland in the web of alliances necessary to support his seaborne power. It is a compelling picture.

  Unlike their southern neighbours, the growing polities along the Norwegian North Sea coast lacked direct access to the Frisian markets and had no Ribe-type trading sites of their own. The sea-kings of the Norwegian Midlands seem to have compensated for this with an investment in the long-distance trade in Arctic raw materials and products—including furs, down, walrus ivory, and especially whetstones, positioning themselves as key brokers in this lucrative commodity. The trade seems to have taken off around the 720s, with peak production in the last decade of the eighth century—which coincides with the first serious raids on western Europe.

  The consolidation of the sea-kings’ power involved securing the marine passageways along the Norwegian coast, which protected shipping and ensured the continuance (and control) of trade. Their influence may have gone deeper still. In Rogaland, the courtyard thing sites seem to disappear at exactly the time when the sea-kings were entrenching their rule. If the rights of the popular assemblies were transferred to the person of the king, this was a dramatic appropriation of authority, expressed in terms that would have been felt among the populace and manifested in the abandoned gathering places that had served their communities for generations. The Icelandic family sagas speak vividly of the disaffection among many of the Norwegians, who were unhappy with the new royal order that drew more and more power to itself—at the expense of the agricultural class. In the retrospective (and surely biased) history of the medieval saga-writers, these independent-minded landowners were some of the key movers behind the decision to settle a new colony in the North Atlantic, and establish the republic of free farmers that would become Iceland.

  The sea-kings were critical to the beginnings of the Viking Age in the West, and their attempts to expand their power along the whole coastal ribbon form the political backdrop to the raids. The Lindisfarne raiders came from this area. This was the social environment that created and motivated them. It was also the home to which they returned with ships full of loot—enormous sums of portable wealth that in turn sustained the world of the sea-kings.

  At this point we should briefly consider some of the other theories that have been put forward as explanations for the raids, and therefore as catalysts for the Viking Age itself. Each of these ‘triggers’ either has inherent problems or else is an insufficient explanation in isolation.

  One of the most persistent relates to technology, specifically Scandinavian shipping design. The argument is that innovations in watercraft—the introduction of the sail and the creation of shallow-draught vessels constructed of overlapping clinker-built planks for speed and manoeuvrability—made it practically possible for the Vikings to sail abroad in this way; they would perhaps have launched the raids earlier, but did not have the ability to do so. Following this line of thinking, advances in boatbuilding provided a ‘push factor’ that drove the Scandinavians out into the world: they had the ships, so they were going to use them. There are several problems with this. First, maritime warfare was nothing new in the late eighth century, or even the 750s. The bog sacrifices of Denmark indicate serious levels of naval engagement even in the early Iron Age, and it is no great step from the Danish shore to the rest of the European coast. Similarly, the Oseberg-style boats of the early Viking Age were certainly marvellous craft, but the truly lethal warships were a development of the later ninth and tenth centuries. There is no doubt at all that the Scandinavians were master mariners, and their ships were indeed markedly better than those of the surrounding cultures of north-west Europe, but sea travel had been a commonplace for centuries, and piracy and maritime military ventures were hardly Viking inventions. Ships and sea power were at the core of what real Vikings did, but they do not alone explain the why and when.

  Then there is an environmental argument that sees a warming of the climate making new ventures into previously inhospitable environments like the North Atlantic suddenly more viable and attractive. As part of the effect, it is claimed, the outgoing Scandinavians engaged in raiding and settlement elsewhere on their travels. However, the much-debated Medieval Warm Period did not begin to manifest until over a century after the raids began�
�perhaps even longer. Iceland and Greenland were already settled by the time the temperature began to rise. The climatic influence of the sixth-century ‘dust veil’ is clear, and we have explored its contributions to the society that would eventually generate the Viking phenomenon, but by the mid-eighth century it was buried deep in the mix.

  Some scholars see the European emporia not as part of a larger economic realignment, but as a ‘pull factor’ corresponding to the supposed ‘push’ of the ships. The argument is simple: the Vikings started raiding because there was a rapid expansion in places worth plundering—what today’s militaries call a target-rich environment. However, this does not fully align with the chronology. It is clear that the emporia were repeatedly raided (Dorestad was especially unfortunate) and that as conduits for the manufacturing wealth of the import-export trade they made for both tempting and profitable objectives. But it would be wrong to see these kinds of long-distance commercial networks as solely a development of the eighth century when the raids really began, and one should not forget that the Scandinavians also themselves traded in such places as well as burning them down.

  It is when the role of the emporia is combined with the politics of Scandinavia itself that the situation in the mid-eighth century begins to come into focus.

  The internecine and aggressive nature of power in Scandinavia’s hall cultures has already been established. Some see the rise of the sea-kings along the Norwegian coast as the crystallisation of that society’s predatory aspects. As their grip on the region was consolidated, the sea-kings may have stood as guarantors of general security and thus gradually curtailed the opportunities for ‘domestic’ raiding within Norway. The idea is that the raiders’ reduced prospects at home pushed them abroad instead, and thus initiated the classic attacks on the British Isles.