by Neil Price;
There is no doubt that the raiders who hit the shores of England in the late 700s, and shortly thereafter those of Scotland and Ireland, came from this region of Norway—finds of insular loot and monastic treasure, often broken and repurposed, are abundant in the contemporary burials there. However, this does not address who these ‘Vikings’ actually were and why they were not integrated into the societies these new sea-kings were building—after all, one person’s pirates can easily become someone else’s navy. By contrast, I believe we can see the sea-kings as the actual originators of the western raids, and that the ‘Vikings’ were a fully integrated part of their power-base; there was little daylight between them. In any case, whether as catalysts for Viking aggression or as active participants in the raids, the effects of the sea-kings’ ambitions were much the same.
Something similar can be seen in the Svear drive east and south across the Baltic. The economic stimuli included the role of the eastern river routes as sources of potentially enormous wealth, revealed in the course of the early eighth century through a growing number of expeditions into this region and interactions with the people there. From the 750s onwards, the petty-kingdoms of Scandinavia were ready and able to act on this information.
At the same time as these ‘kings and Vikings’ were actively looking for opportunity beyond Scandinavia’s borders, the people they were looking at were experiencing a time of unprecedented vulnerability. At the level of relatively small-scale communities in England and Frankia, civil defence was disorganised and wholly unprepared against fast-paced attack. At a state level, both the Empire and the English kingdoms were either at the point of civil war or simply not able to react rapidly enough. However, it also went the other way. Notwithstanding the traditional focus on Viking aggression, for much of the period, the peoples of southern Scandinavia were under near-constant threat from the belligerence of their Christian neighbours. The Frankish Empire was being carved out at the point of a sword by Charlemagne’s expansionist wars in the late eighth century, and the North would have been feeling these social pressures at the time of the first raids (the ‘great man’ died in 814, decades after the seaborne attacks had begun). The ninth-century division of the Empire following years of civil war did nothing to alleviate the tensions along the Danish frontier, and there is little to suggest the slowly expanding Viking polities ever felt entirely safe from southern assault even into the new millennium. Scandinavian military endeavours almost always included an element of proactive defence alongside their more immediately mercenary ambitions.
Taken together, this presents us with a total worldview of encultured violence and expansive competition that stretched from the Danish heartlands along the respective coasts of Norway and Sweden. But with Salme and Ladoga as symbols of something larger, we begin to see an underestimated component of the Viking phenomenon, namely that by the mid-eighth century this had already begun to be projected outwards, not to the west but to the east, in what were essentially home waters. The raiding, trading, and land-taking that would become familiar features of the Scandinavians’ western adventures were already established patterns of behaviour in the Baltic, the ‘Eastern Sea’ of the Norse world.
The intersection of all these socio-economic factors, converging from the mid-700s until the end of the century, explains what was happening. Against the background of long-term trends towards political consolidation both within Scandinavia and among its neighbours, the competitive kingdoms of the North needed sources of revenue and portable wealth to fuel their expansive ambitions at home. The surrounding cultures were politically fragmented even within their larger state structures, and largely unable to mount coordinated defences against rapid hit-and-run attacks. The result was a perfect storm of opportunity and desire, supply and demand.
The same date range—the years around the middle of the eighth century, 750 or so—recurs again and again in all these discussions, forty years before the Lindisfarne raid. This is when Birka was founded in Sweden, following Ribe’s example in Denmark. This is when Ladoga was established as a gateway to the eastern rivers. This is also when the Norwegian sea-kings were making fast their hold on the coast and gradually starting to extend their range overseas to the west. And this is the date of the Salme expedition. Economics, politics, and their ‘extension by other means’, maritime violence: it was a powerful combination.
The final component of the Viking raids is in many ways the most obvious: the raiders themselves. At a time when the notion of the individual was socially elevated and acknowledged—in poetry, ritual advice, moral codes, and runic epitaphs—personal agency was also critical. It is to them we now turn.
11
WARRIORHOODS
A SINGLE PROFITABLE RAIDING EXPEDITION—ONE need not necessarily be away from home for more than three weeks—might change a life (and end many others, of course). Its beneficiaries spanned a range of social classes, and what they got out of it, their priorities, differed accordingly. But there was much more to this than opportunism, and individual greed was activated within the bigger schemes of others. The enterprise was directed, to a greater or lesser degree.
This is important because we must dispense with the notion of spontaneity, of an element in the Viking ‘character’ that sent them out raiding. Any such action requires considerable planning in terms of resources, logistics, and personnel. It also presupposes the possibility to spare the ships’ crews from activities at home and the willingness of others who could take up their responsibilities while they were away. There were also considerable technological necessities and constraints—and all this when any violent encounter was still on the distant horizon.
The Viking raids were not only about material reward, a matter of loot and plunder. In a culture that privileged fame, prowess, and demonstrable achievement, they also offered opportunities for gaining all these things. As one scholar puts it, “The act of acquiring silver was as important as the silver itself”. A mentality geared for war, and the deeply ingrained militarism that accompanied the rise of the new elites, combined with clear notions of preordained fatalism to produce a frame of mind that drove the Viking attacks with militant fervour—almost a form of holy war.
This may have been almost literally the case, in the context of countering expansive Christian missionary ambitions in the late eighth century, generating a need to appropriate and weaponise the traditional beliefs of the North in the service of the elites. As individuals bought in to this ethos, they became an effective medium of its aggressive expression.
There was also a personal level to these processes. Take the raids on targets such as Lindisfarne, places where Scandinavians had been trading and thus had seen with their own eyes not only the wealth of the monasteries but also how unprotected they were. It is not hard to imagine some young merchant—or perhaps that merchant’s bodyguard—thinking hard about his situation in life, how it could be improved, and then tentatively suggesting to his friends, “Why don’t we just take it?” Why not, indeed? After a winter of brooding on the idea, it must have become more tempting by the day. Perhaps they even believed they had thought of it themselves, as the local sea-kings discreetly kept the notion alive in their minds.
Being a warrior in the Viking Age was a matter of status as well as action. Deeds were done with a view to their immortalization and a concern for the afterlife of reputation. Warriorhood could be symbolic as well as practical, conferred through identification with its attributes—especially weapons. Burials containing large amounts of armaments may be the graves of actual warriors, or of those who bore the trappings without ‘living the life’, or even of people for some reason given this identity solely in death.
All this can be seen in runic inscriptions, which provide a glimpse of the martial ideal in the form of memorial texts for the dead. A selection can give the flavour of this warrior ideology, and reveal much of how it was expressed and reinforced through such very visual monuments. Again and again one sees runestones erect
ed by survivors in memory of fallen comrades, honouring the dead and at the same time themselves through association; often those commissioning the stone are mentioned more prominently in the inscription than the one commemorated.
The Battle of Fýrisvellir, fought near Uppsala in the 980s between the Swedish king Eirík and his nephew Stýrbjörn, seems to have left a particular mark on the consciousness of the time, even though its historical truth shades into legend. Here is one of three stones from Hällestad in Skåne, now part of Sweden but then in Viking-Age Denmark:
Áskell placed this stone in memory of Tóki Gormr’s son, to him a faithful lord.
He did not flee at Uppsala.
Valiant men placed in memory of their brother
the stone on the hill, steadied by runes.
They went closest to Gormr’s Tóki.
Two other stones at the same site also mention retainers of the same Tóki. Fýrisvellir is referred to again on one of the three Högby runestones from Östergötland, although this time it is probably a man on Eirík’s side who is commemorated. The stone is also notable in that it records the violent fates of an entire family:
The good man Gulli got five sons.
The brave valiant man Ásmundr fell at Fœri [Fýris];
Assurr met his end in the east in Greece;
Halfdan was killed at Holmr [Bornholm?];
Kári was [killed] at Oddr [probably north-west Sjælland];
also dead [is] Búi.
Another runic allusion to Fýrisvellir is one of the most well-known stones of all and comes from Karlevi on Öland. Combining prose with the oldest recorded example of a skaldic verse in the metre fit for princes, it seems from the dating to have been raised (perhaps on their way home) by the retinue of a Danish lord who had died in the battle. The Karlevi stone also includes among its wonderful kennings the name of a Valkyrie. It is one of the most spectacular ‘war memorials’ of the Viking Age:
This stone is placed in memory of Sibbi the good, Fuldarr’s son, and his retinue placed on [ … ]
He lies concealed,
he who was followed
by the greatest deeds
(most men knew that),
a battle-tree of Þrúðr1
in this mound;
Never again shall such a battle-hardened
Viðurr-of-the-Carriage of Endill’s2 mighty dominion,
rule unsurpassed over land in Denmark.
In addition to basic comradeship, and the ambiguous meaning of ‘brother’, inscriptions of this kind often take care to place the living in social relationship to their lord. This applied whether he was alive (demonstrating loyalty) or dead (honouring his achievements
and thereby keeping their oaths). Something similar is recorded on another famous Skåne runestone from Sjörup:
Saxi placed this stone in memory of Ásbjörn Tófi’s son, his partner. He did not flee at Uppsala, but carried on killing as long as he could hold a weapon.
‘Partner’ here carries the sense of shipmate, resonant of a phrase on the stone from Aarhus in Denmark that was probably raised to a man who died at the Battle of Svöldr in 999. In the crucial context given in its closing words, it is among the most concise of properly Viking memorials:
Gunúlfr and Øgotr and Aslakr and Hrólfr set up this stone in memory of Fulr, their comrade-in-arms. He found death [ … ] when kings were fighting.
The notion of military fraternities—brotherhoods of warriors—has been around a long time in Viking studies. There are slight indications of such things in the sagas, with all the usual caveats, including a somewhat lurid tale of an entire tenth-century community of them supposedly based at Jómsborg, near Wolin in what is now Poland. As we have seen, several runestones mention the notion of comradeship, of brothers-in-arms, but it is hard to pin this down any closer, compelling though they are. On the other hand, clear archaeological evidence exists for a symbolism of masculine skill in battle: a culture, almost a cult, of decorated weapons and war-gear, with connections to the poetry of violence and divine inspiration for its underpinnings.
Deeper exploration of the topic has long been hindered by the enthusiasm for such military ‘secret societies’ exhibited by the Nazis (and their modern successors) as part of their general infatuation with the Vikings. These attitudes are politically compromised in the worst ways, bracingly free of factual connection with the past, and they can be dangerous—but they should also not be allowed to distract from what actually occurred around the business of war in the Viking Age.
The central concept in the organisation of Viking warrior groups—as one scholar calls them, ‘bands of brothers’—seems to have been the lið, a term that cannot be precisely defined but is usually taken to refer to a shipborne host or team of warriors sworn to a leader whose responsibility it was to feed, equip, and reward them for their service. The size and nature of lið appear to have ranged from a couple of ships’ crews up to forces numbering one to two hundred individuals. These groups likely formed the core of the early raiding parties and, later, the smallest components of the large Viking ‘armies’, which were coalitions of lið rather than united groups under the command of a single leader. The lið’s discrete and autonomous nature is emphasised in the Annals of St. Bertin, which in 861 describe Vikings in a fleet made up of sodalitates, ‘brotherhoods’, that dispersed from the main force to overwinter in various ports along the river Seine. A lið can thus be considered an armed fighting group, loyal to a single autonomous leader, that operated on a seasonal or permanent basis.
The formation of a lið, and its effective activities, could have only taken place with significant levels of cooperation, manifested in various ways including through material culture. Although the lið represents one of the most basic forms of armed collective—a warband in its literal sense—it cannot be said with any certainty whether its formation was based on familial or other social relationships (remember the four brothers in the Salme ship grave), or whether it comprised individuals who shared no pre-existing social or political ties at all. Recruitment into these groups transcended not only kinship but also ethnicity; a lið might have incorporated individuals from multiple locations within Scandinavia itself and beyond.
There is a sense in which raiding was a way to relieve domestic social tensions that might otherwise get out of hand. This could even be the case within and between the lið, caused by the delicate networks of ‘friendship’ and kinship. These carried with them such complex webs of mutual obligation, extending across the borders of political rivalries, as to hamper the expansionist policies of the elites when they competed with each other ‘at home’. However, warriors who did not have to worry about fighting their ‘friends’ could be harnessed as a unified force for the outward projection of power. This could also snowball, creating turbulence in the political balance in Scandinavia. If one kingdom started to do this, the others may have wished, or needed, to follow suit.
The leading specialist in the rigid codes of Viking friendship has speculated that one additional rationale for the raids was precisely because the likely targets excluded those who might fall within the protective frameworks of the Scandinavian social compact. By extension, plunder abroad could be used to further cement such relationships at home and even to extend one’s circle of ‘friends’ in this specific sense. Linked to this is the disturbing conclusion that the primary export of Viking-Age Scandinavia was not commerce, but violence—a sort of capitalism of aggression. From the Vikings’ own perspective, seen from within their embedded mind-set of a militarised society, theirs was the ‘best’ sort of violence, the preferred choice of destruction. This must have been a major incentive for the elites, a social safety valve that could be harnessed to their benefit.
The violence associated with the raids could take other, even uglier forms, for reasons that were rooted in social custom and connected to the warrior life.
A very early idea about the reasons for the raids focussed on a supposed rapid rise in
population across Scandinavia, beyond what the land could sustain, especially in the marginal agricultural regions of Norway. This also shaded uncomfortably into the notion of a ‘wave of advance’, whereby the Germanic peoples somehow irresistibly expanded and conquered, and even that it was somehow ‘in their nature’ to do so. There is an uneasy feeling here of inherent colonialism that is, to put it mildly, best avoided in connection with the Vikings, whose culture has already been so politically abused. Demographics is perhaps the least convincing of the explanations put forward for the raids, not least in that there is no real evidence of population pressure at all. If anything, the region was still recovering from the massive decline of the Migration Period, and the population would also grow much greater after the Viking Age with no truly dramatic shifts in agricultural production. An abstract notion of ‘land pressure’ and legal arguments around inheritance patterns do not explain the raids either. There was a transition to absentee landholding, up to a point, but there was no sudden tipping point of disinherited youth.
However, there was an important connection between landholding and wealth, which were intertwined with honour, status, and the essence of self-respect. All this was, in turn, connected to the family and the things that held it together, especially marriage. One aspect of this was relevant to the raids above all others.
As we have seen, Viking-Age societies practised polygyny, whereby men could each legitimately marry more than one woman, but women could only have one male partner. If we assume an equal number of men and women (the ratio should be approximately 1:1 given normal birth rates), then polygyny will leave a significant proportion of the male population without socially sanctioned possibilities to form partnerships with the opposite sex. In terms of social practicality rather than physical possibility, this results in an imbalance in the relative numbers of sexually active men and women who are able to form liaisons. As Viking-Age culture also included the institution of concubinage, on a similarly male-dominant basis and in addition to the possibility of having multiple wives, this biased the ratios still further. Even when accounting for sexual orientation and preference, and the fact that illicit relationships could occur, the conclusion is still inescapable: potentially very large numbers of Viking-Age men could not hope to marry or find partners at home.
