Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  As we have seen, there is at least some evidence that Viking-Age communities also practised infanticide. If it was biased towards male children, this introduces the possibility that the balance of the sexes was uneven to begin with, resulting in a population with more men than women in absolute terms. The evidence for selective female infanticide is shaky, but there are certainly signs of the differential treatment of children in terms of nutrition. If all this was combined, the situation might have become truly serious.

  This could have manifested in two ways, of which the first would be a search for portable wealth to use as bride-price, and thus to ‘move up’ in the hierarchies of marriageable men; if there was an inflation of bride-wealth at this time, it would only have exacerbated these conditions. And if the currency of bride-price changed, perhaps as a result of the new forms of portable wealth entering the Scandinavian system from abroad following the raids, this too could have led to massive inflation. If young men provided their own means of payment in this system—for example, through plunder—this would have led to greater independence from their families, but also effectively disenfranchised their offspring. The circular feedback of this process is obvious, with equally clear implications as one of several factors behind an escalation of the raids.

  The second possible result of sexual imbalance is among the nastiest aspects of the Viking Age, and we have encountered it before. If a man could not find a woman willing to marry or cohabit with him, or if he could not meet the agreed economic expectations of such an arrangement, the raids offered opportunities to take women by force in sexual slavery. There is abundant evidence that many men chose to do exactly that.

  If the ‘socio-sexual economy’ was becoming unbalanced, then by the 750s it could have caused real social stress. It would have affected the cohesion of the family, and the sustainability of political structures that were in any case largely maintained only by armed force. This is not to suggest that male attempts to improve their marriage prospects were a primary trigger for the raids, but neither can they be ignored. Not least, this was occurring in societies driven by an ideological predisposition towards (and with a long pedigree of) maritime predation.

  Slaving, including for the purposes of sexual trafficking, was one of the worst practical aspects of the raids—the most brutal of profit motives combined with misogynistic gratification. But the expeditions had other tangible elements, too, not the least of which was the actual process of maritime fighting, supported by a material culture of weapons and armour.

  We need to know what a raid looked like.

  A key component in the Viking image is also embodied in the reality of the raiders: the bearing of arms. As in so many other aspects of Viking life, their weapons too have been subject to stereotype.

  The effective use of Viking weaponry relied on very much more than brute force, the opposite of the crude barbarian cliché still propagated so widely. Men would train from a young age, spending years constantly honing their abilities with a variety of weapons, each of which required different skills. To use them in combination was a kind of lethal dance, a choreographed interplay of movement, balance, dexterity, and strength—all while wielding deadly tools to cut or pierce.

  In addition to personal knives, which were ubiquitous but used only as a last resort, the most basic weapon, available more or less to all, was the common axe. It is important to distinguish between tools made for farmyard use and actual weapons—they were not interchangeable. The typology of axes is quite broad, but in general they developed into specialised weapons of war as the shafts got longer (eventually requiring a double-handed grip) and the axe-head grew heavier with a progressively longer and more vicious cutting edge. At the extreme, the great war axe of the Danes could bring down a horse and rider with a single blow. They were neither difficult to forge nor especially expensive, and thus relatively widely used. In the sagas, axes are sometimes given the names of trolls—suitably blunt for a brutal but effective killing machine.

  18. A silver pendant figure from Klahammar, Sweden, a unique depiction of a warrior armed with axe and sword. Photo: Max Jahrehorn, Oxider AB, used by kind permission.

  Spears were also comparatively cheap weapons—although not necessarily of low status—and while their heads were sometimes richly decorated with inlaid silver or even with intricately welded blades, the basic kind was not much more than a flattened or pointed piece of metal with sharp edges and a riveted socket. They came in different lengths with varying widths of spearhead, adapted for throwing or, more commonly, for use with both hands as a weapon of close combat. The slimmest lances had lean, pointed profiles and ash shafts of up to two metres, suited for a clean cast or a mounted charge. The heavier varieties had thicker heads and wider blades, sufficient to cause deep, broad, penetrating wounds. The largest added a crossbar behind the blade, giving weight to the thrust and also making it easier to pull out after a strike. To judge from depictions on metalwork, this kind could also be used on horseback, pinned between a rider’s leg and the horse’s flank, and presumably used in shock combat.

  Viking swords required time and skill to manufacture. A very basic example would not necessarily have cost the earth, but at the extremes of investment, they were the ultimate badges of military prowess and prestige. Swords were slashing weapons, designed to cut rather than stab. In the early Viking Age, it was slightly more common to use single-edged types, whereas double-edged blades became the norm later on. Most sword hilts ended in a heavy pommel, the best of them made to exactly counterbalance the weight of the blade. A variety of forging techniques could be used, of which the finest was pattern-welding, where separate bars of iron were repeatedly heated and folded together before being hammered flat. The result was a flexible, lethal blade with high tensile strength, but also an extraordinarily beautiful object, as the coils and layers in the metal were visible as fine lines. The effect is mentioned in poetry, as ‘snakes’ writhing in the iron. The edges were hardened, sharpened steel. Every part of the hilt might also be decorated—the guard, the pommel, even sometimes the grip itself if it was made from tightly bound wire or plates of metal rather than the more common leather or horn.

  Scabbards were made of wood panels bound or glued together, often lined with greased wool containing lanolin that would naturally oil the blade inside. The sheaths were sometimes covered in leather, tooled with intricate designs that might also be painted on the wood. A metal chape protected the pointed end of the scabbard, while the mouth and other sections of the sheath could be reinforced with bronze mounts. The scabbard was either suspended from a belt or worn on a baldric that crossed the body diagonally over one shoulder. Any or all of the ensemble could be decorated, and the highest end of the scale was a twisting mass of figures comparable to the prestige weapons of the Migration and Vendel Periods.

  These high-status objects were the kind of swords that might acquire names, about which tales were told—weapons with life histories, even a kind of material biography. Egil Skalla-Grímsson had Dragvandil, a name that probably refers to a blade so long it dragged on the ground. The eleventh-century Norwegian king Magnús Óláfsson Barefoot had a sword with the prosaic name of Legbiter. The sagas and poems are full of magical blades: Angrvadall, ‘Stream of Anguish’, that glowed brightly in war but shone with a pale light in peacetime, its blade inscribed with runes; there is Gramr, ‘Wrath’, the sword of Sigurd the dragon-killer; Hrunting, the supposedly invincible sword that failed Beowulf in his fight with Grendel’s mother; Skofnung, the unnaturally sharp sword of Hrólf kraki, in which were bound the souls of twelve berserkers; Tyrfing, the weapon that Hervör wrested from her dead father Angantyr, a sword forged by dwarves, with a blade that shone like flames. There are many more, sometimes with a supernatural edge guaranteed to kill a man each time they were drawn, but often with fatal consequences for the wielder. In the mythological world, Heimdall’s sword is called Man-Head; The Lay of Svipdagr mentions a blade called Damage-Twig, and so on.

/>   A feature of the Salme boat burials raises several questions about bladed weapons: the surprising fact that there are more swords than men. It is possible they are there as symbols, gifts of honour to the dead, stand-ins for individuals whose bodies are missing, or any other explanation that does not directly link them as the possessions of the men in the boats. On the other hand, these may be the weapons they owned in life, following them into death; some of them were placed in the dead men’s hands. Swords are usually reckoned as elite armaments reserved for the wealthy, due to their sheer expense—the ‘average’ Viking warrior wielded lowlier weapons, such as spears and axes. But what if this is wrong, as one reading of Salme would suggest? Another possibility is that our perception of swords as costly items is correct, and that the Salme expedition was therefore a very high-ranking, even royal, affair.

  The most coveted swords were products of Frankish smiths, imported to the North as blades and fitted with hilts there. One particularly famous Rhineland workshop that began operations in the ninth century can be recognised by the name Ulfberht inlaid into its blades. Originally (one presumes) the signature of its master smith, it became an early logo in an almost modern sense, and swords bearing it continued to be produced for another two hundred years. There were also many fake versions of lower quality and sometimes even with the name misspelled—the market-stall rip-offs of the Viking Age. More than one hundred genuine Ulfberht swords have been found, the majority in Scandinavian graves but also extending out into the diaspora as far as the Volga.

  The Viking preference for Frankish blades is easy to understand. Renowned for their workmanship, and particularly their flexible toughness, this was war-gear to which one literally entrusted life and limb. In Notker the Stammerer’s biography of Charlemagne, there is an episode in which some domestically produced Scandinavian swords are offered to the emperor as tribute and are then tested for quality. Charlemagne tries to bend a blade so that its point touches the hilt, but it snaps and he rejects it in disgust. Unsheathing his own sword, he performs the task with ease “and then let it gradually straighten itself again”. These were the Frankish swords that ibn Fad.lān witnessed among the Rus’, the best that could be obtained.

  A second blade weapon became increasingly common in the later Viking Age. It does not have a formal name, being often referred to as a fighting-knife or battle-knife, and it was essentially a development of the one-handed, long seax knife of the Migration Period. A single-edged blade with a thick back that added weight to a short, stabbing blow, it seems to have been intended as a back-up weapon. By the tenth century, battle-knives had elaborate scabbards that were worn horizontally along the belt, allowing them to be drawn across the body from behind a shield if the sword was gone; a variant hung down at an angle from an elaborate harness. It seems they may also have been worn on the back—again for a swift, over-the-shoulder draw.

  The bow was the final component of the full, ‘conventional’ set of offensive weapons. The common form in Scandinavia was a shorter variant of what would become the medieval longbow: a straight piece of ash wood bent to be strung and capable of firing an arrow over long distances with great penetrating power. In the tenth century, following the rise of Rus’ culture and eastern influences, we also see the importation of specialist shorter bows of recurved type, combined with wide-angle quivers of the kind used by the steppe nomads. Made to be rapidly fired from a horse, these were deadly weapons that required considerable training to use effectively.

  Arrows came in many shapes and forms—from broad cutting heads designed to cause copious bleeding in unprotected flesh, to narrow, pointed bodkin-like types for piercing between the links of chainmail. The most common multipurpose form had a leaf-shaped head; archaeologists occasionally find very specialised types, such as a pronged ‘trident’ used for carrying burning cloth into the sails and rigging of ships (there was one in the Salme burials). There were many more forms adapted for hunting, with types specific to individual animals.

  For defence, the basic shield was a circular wooden affair made of thin planks bonded together, usually covered with leather, and with a rim holding it all in place. Inserted into a central hole was a round boss of iron, riveted onto the board and with a crossbar wooden handle inside that extended across the reverse; this was the grip and a protector for the hand. Some shields were closely matched to their owners, bespoke items fitted to the individual. From both archaeology and literature, it is clear that the boards were painted either a single colour (black, yellow, red, and white are recorded) or with patterns—a swirl of curved lines radiating from the boss seems especially common. In some graves of mounted warriors, there are two shields, and in metalwork images of riders, there are depictions of a second shield slung along the horse’s flank.

  Shields were offensive as well as defensive weapons, used to disarm opponents or push aside their weapons, often in combination with swords or axes. If the edge was struck with force into an enemy’s neck, a shield could kill. There are also descriptions of later, more desperate stages of fighting after the wooden boards of a shield had been hacked away, leaving only the boss enclosing its owner’s fist—still deadly in a close-combat iron punch.

  Armour was mostly organic, made of padded leather or in the form of quilted jackets that provided a modicum of protection, especially from blunt-force blows or glancing cuts. Chainmail was certainly known, and would have been worn over textiles by those who could afford it. Made of thousands of interlocking rings, each of which had to be made separately and then joined, a full shirt of mail was a very expensive thing. It could be waist-length, or in the later Viking Age worn almost down to the ankles. Within the Baltic region, especially at Birka, there is evidence for the use of lamellar armour, formed of rectangular plates of iron sewn onto fabric to form a flexible, articulated defence. Worn as extended shirts, and also as protectors for the extremities, this was an Eastern tradition that probably entered Scandinavia along the river routes.

  Relatively little is known of Viking-Age helmets. Only one approximately complete example has ever been found, at Gjermundbu in Norway. This is a rounded skull cap of iron with a face protector that covered the nose, surmounted by a spectacle-shaped eye guard. The neck and probably also the lower face were covered by a curtain of mail. Helmets of this kind are shown on picture-stones, although it is possible they were of hardened leather. A few other helmet fragments have been found on settlement sites or in burials, and are shown in a wide range of images, including three-dimensional carvings. From this, two things are clear. First, helmets (of all kinds, including the cheapest) were relatively common, which is not surprising given the obvious need to protect the head in combat. Second, at least the metal varieties were considered so valuable that they almost never accompanied their owners into the grave. Needless to say, none of them had horns.

  One of the most enduring components of the Viking myth can be found in the berserkers—the frenzied warriors who fought naked, consumed with uncontrollable fury while out of their minds on mushrooms. This is, as they say, a truth with modification.

  There is no doubt that the berserkir were a Viking-Age reality, but almost every other aspect of their nature is open to interpretation. The word itself refers to a shirt (serk) with either a bear- or bare- prefix, thus giving an image either of an ursine warrior or a man shirtless in the sense of being unarmoured or even naked. That the bear connection may be the more relevant of the two is reinforced by a lupine counterpart to the berserkers in the form of the ulfheðnar, meaning ‘wolfskins’.

  In the archaeology there are the famous ‘weapon dancer’ images, men either naked or clad in wolf pelts and wielding swords and spears. These occur particularly on Migration and Vendel Period war gear, but also extend to Viking-Age objects, tapestries, coins, and a picture-stone. There are comparable images of armed figures with heads like boars or bears on metalwork such as pendants, on textiles, and even on a runestone depicting an animal-warrior, complete with floppy ears. At
Hedeby, two rather unsettling animal masks made of felt were found rolled up and used as caulking in a sunken ship, and may also have been part of a berserker’s equipment; they most closely resemble dogs or bulls.

  Something related may lie behind the inscription on a runestone from Istaby in Blekinge, Sweden, which lists three generations of men in the same family, all of whom have names combining battle terms with a wolf element. Perhaps this implies some form of totemic animal running down the generations:

  Hathuwulfr [Battle-Wolf],

  son of Heruwulfr [Sword-Wolf],

  cut these runes in memory of Haeriulfr [War-Host-Wolf].

  There are also contemporary written accounts from outside Scandinavia that describe Vikings in combat, including some suggestive details. A Byzantine chronicle of wars against the Rus’ includes descriptions of warriors howling like animals, and a commander fighting with a frenzied abandon so extreme as to resemble literal insanity; the imperial veterans had never seen anything like it. Similarly, wolf imagery is sometimes employed when discussing Scandinavian forces in the field. This may be poetic convention or, perhaps, something more.