Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  Some nine hundred kilometres to the south of Staraja Ladoga in modern Ukraine, another major node on the river trade grew up on the Dniepr, at what is now Kiev. According to the Primary Chronicle, it was founded by one Oleg (Helgi), a Scandinavian relative of Rurik, who expanded the Rus’ territories along the river and needed a more southerly base. This was to have long-lasting effects; as the fledgling state continued to grow, it would come into increasing contact and conflict with the steppe nomads inhabiting the area to the south along the Volga River. These peoples, as well as others on the lower reaches of the Dniepr and Dniestr Rivers, were themselves vying for power while attempting to maintain an amicable relationship with the Byzantine Empire, which was also concerned with strategically expanding its territories in the Black Sea region. By the late tenth century, Kievan Rus’ was a power to be reckoned with.

  Kiev seems to have developed as a fortified centre at some point during the late ninth century, and expanded rapidly thereafter. The settlement began as a series of small villages that slowly grew and eventually converged. A fortified centre was established on Starokievskaja hill, and on the banks of the Dniepr lay the waterfront community in what is now the Podil neighbourhood. While there seems to have been a minority Scandinavian elite presence in the city, here again there also seems to have been a relatively rapid assimilation of local culture.

  Around the year 900, the hillfort at Staraja Ladoga was destroyed and replaced by a wall that enclosed the whole settlement. The ‘Deadwood’ of the East had become almost respectable—a consolidated, fortified strongpoint at the entrance to the Volkhov. Around the same time, another river route opened up along the Daugava through what is now Latvia, guarded by systems of hillforts.

  In the fifty years from around 875 to 925, western European merchants gradually stopped coming to places like Birka and the Mälar Valley, and new contacts emerged almost wholly oriented towards the east. In Denmark, however, the trade remained focussed west and south. These shifts are reflected in many proxies, such as the fashion for Frankish clothes in the ninth century, overtaken by baggy pantaloons of eastern cut in the 900s.

  In the early to mid-tenth century, the settlement at Gorodishche expanded to the nearby site of modern Novgorod, literally the ‘new fortress’, though to the Vikings it was still Holmgarðr. The settlement that lies on the two southernmost hills there, one on each bank of the Volkhov, has been dated to the 950s, with the earliest phases of occupation on the kremlin hill some twenty years later. Excavations since the time of Stalin have uncovered deeply stratified, waterlogged deposits that have preserved minute details of life in the city during the Viking Age and the medieval period. These included superimposed layers of wooden planked streets, laid down on top of each other as the ground rose within the settlement due to the accumulation of waste and everyday detritus. Structures within fenced enclosures were preserved to such a degree that it is possible to identify porches, yards, and even evidence for different architectural techniques. These included various types of timber joins, as well as several different models of wooden guttering that were installed by the citizens of Novgorod on the roofs of their houses. Also preserved are more personal items—including musical instruments, masks, toy weapons, and dolls—allowing daily life within the settlement to be reconstructed with vivid clarity.

  The tenth century also saw the rise of another major Rus’ settlement, at Gnezdovo, near modern Smolensk at the confluence of the Dniepr and Svinets rivers. This was the point at which boats were portaged from the Volkhov and Lovat system a short distance south to enter the main Dniepr flow, allowing them to travel all the way to the Black Sea. Gnezdovo supported the familiar multi-ethnic population, with Scandinavians predominating, and grew eventually almost to the size of urban Hedeby in Denmark. It had several focal centres surrounded by cemeteries of different character, and the feel of the place would have been familiar to travellers from the North. Gnezdovo was somewhere to resupply, refit, and rest before continuing the journey north or south, but it was also a destination in its own right—a trading site where one could make a living. Like early Ladoga, it was probably pretty rough.

  From the mid-tenth century onwards, many of the Scandinavians who made the journey south arrived in Constantinople seeking employment in the armies of the Byzantine Empire. In time, the emperors’ personal bodyguard would come to consist almost entirely of Scandinavian warriors. This so-called Varangian Guard was named after the Old Norse word for an oath, vár (as in the English ‘vow’). Identifiable by their characteristic battle-axes (and famed for their drinking), the guard was constituted in the late tenth century and remained dominated by Scandinavians for a hundred years, until increasing numbers of English exiles began to join in the wake of the Norman conquest.

  Numerous sagas record individuals travelling to Constantinople to join the guard, and a number of runestones from Sweden also name individuals dying abroad in ‘Greece’, most probably in the service of the Empire. One of these, from Kyrkstigen in Uppland, is dedicated to a man named Ragnvaldr, who was apparently a commander of a troop within the guard itself. Of all the Scandinavians who ventured south to fight for the emperor, the most famous was Harald Sigurdsson, later King Harald ‘Hard-Ruler’ of Norway. Having earlier found employment in the armies of Kiev, he served as a captain in the Varangian Guard for several years during the 1030s and 1040s (and was even rumoured to have had an affair with the empress) before returning to Norway to make his bid for power.

  While little physical evidence for the Scandinavian presence in Constantinople is evident today, some striking examples have survived in the Ayasofya, or Hagia Sophia, cathedral. Originally built as an Orthodox basilica in the sixth century, Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque following the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453; today it serves as a museum. In the Viking Age, it was the main place of worship for the imperial family. Several runic inscriptions have been found there, scratched into column bases and the like, including many etched into the balustrades of the upper gallery. This is where the imperial family were seated when attending public ceremonies, and they would have been accompanied by the Varangians. One imagines guard members standing on watch—bored by yet another interminable service in a language they didn’t understand—using a palmed blade to surreptitiously carve their names for posterity.

  The Rus’ saw military service not only in Byzantium but also in Kiev, where they furthered the expansionist policies of the local dynasties and quickly settled. Their military structures are still poorly understood. In Khazaria, the realm of the steppe nomads by the Caspian Sea, Rus’ had been captured in battle and then incorporated into the Khazar armies as something not far from slave-soldiers, as seen in the Russian Primary Chronicle and the important account of al-Mas’ūdī. There seems to have been a ‘Varangian Guard’ there too, perhaps even earlier than its counterpart in Byzantium. Rus’ mercenaries also served in Georgia, among the Volga Bulghars, even in Poland and Hungary. Many Viking weapons have been recovered from the Danube, and two swords have been found during excavations in the far south of Turkey along the eastern Mediterranean coast—one at Patara, the ancient capital of the Lycia region, and a second at Yumuktepe in Mugǧla. These are sparse traces, to be sure, but they are nonetheless material evidence of Rus’ activity along and beyond the imperial frontiers.

  From the early 900s onwards, there were also a number of large-scale raids in the Caspian Sea region. Al-Mas’ūdī, writing in his Meadows of Gold and Mines of Jewels, notes that around 912 the Rus’ came from the Sea of Azov, where they had a base, and devastated the lands around the Caspian. His account includes many interesting details. We learn that the Rus’ were made up of several different groups, that they lived in the lands of the Khazars and around the Caspian littoral, that they had many merchants but no king, and that they burnt their dead on enormous pyres. Crucially, al-Mas’ūdī seems to have heard of the great raids on Iberia launched from the Loire bases, and he is one of the writers who explicitly
says that these people—that is, Scandinavian Vikings—were the same as the Rus’.

  Another Rus’ eastern raid, in 943, seems to have been conducted with the intention of establishing hegemony over the Caspian. During this raid the Rus’ captured the city of Bardha’a, in modern-day Azerbaijan, where they spent several months plundering the city and the surrounding countryside. It was only due to an outbreak of dysentery among the fleet that Islamic forces were able to drive the Rus’ out of the region. A leading scholar of Viking warfare has perceptively suggested that there is actually little difference between these large, mobile military expeditions of the Rus’ and the pirate polities of the West, such as the Great Army. Researchers have become accustomed to using different terminologies to describe them, but in reality they may well have been very similar. Just as the Rus’ evolved politically, there may have been many variants of the form that their power took, and perhaps there were hydrarchies in the East as well.

  These raids almost certainly contributed to tensions between the Rus’ and the Khazars, through whose lands the Rus’ had to pass in order to access the Caspian. In the 960s, Sviatoslav of Kiev—a man of clear Scandinavian descent—went to war against the Khazars and destroyed their capital at Atil, paving the way for Rus’ dominance over the entire length of the Volga. Raiding expeditions into the lands that lay between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea would continue into the eleventh century, at which time, during the reign of Jaroslav I, Kiev was enclosed within a massive circuit of earthen defences. Its walls were pierced by elaborate and monumental fortified gateways, one of which, the Golden Gate, still survives in heavily reconstructed form, topped by an Orthodox church.

  As the power of the Rus’ grew, the influence of the eastern routes to the Khazars diminished, and the north-south riverine trade was reorganised and streamlined as a mercantile venture with Kiev as one of its major focal points (the other one being Novgorod). It is at around this time that a true state-based Rus’ identity seems to have emerged. The late tenth century would see the Rus’ polity become a leading actor in an increasingly complex and fluid political arena of diplomatic negotiation, betrayal, and warfare. Crucially, it was deeply integrated with Europe, and from the tenth century onwards the rulers of eastern Scandinavia were sending their daughters to new husbands among the princes of Novgorod and Kiev. The river route even had a specific name in Scandinavia, Garðariki, ‘land of the settlements’.

  The political machinations of this period have left other monuments, too, such as the unique group of more than thirty runestones in central Sweden that record men who died “in the east with Ingvar”. A commander of that name is the subject of a particularly fanciful legendary saga, where he is given the nickname ‘the Far-Travelled’, but there are other sources that enable a fragmentary picture to be pieced together. Ingvar seems to have been a young leader from central Sweden who in 1036 led an unusually large fleet into the East. The stones clearly commemorate a real expedition; it was obviously something out of the ordinary, different from the regular Rus’ journeys to the Black Sea. Ingvar seems to have headed to the Caspian and then somehow gone beyond the borders of the known Rus’ world and thus, in the Viking mind, into a sort of semi-mythical place. This may explain the drama of his saga, the impact that it had back home (as we can see from the runestones), and also, not least, the fact that in 1041 Ingvar died out there with most of his men. More prosaically, his expedition has been interpreted as a concerted political act, conducted with an aim of expanding the Rus’ sphere of influence into the area of modern-day Georgia.

  Ingvar’s expedition clearly lived a very long time in the memory of the North, and rumours of it must have spread far and wide (even Adam of Bremen mentions it, thirty years after Ingvar’s death). There is no runestone to Ingvar himself, but one to his brother Harald survives at Gripsholm on the southern shore of Lake Mälaren in central Sweden. It is a rare example of a runic inscription with a verse of poetry, and in its laconic elegance is one of the finest epitaphs of the Viking Age:

  Tóla had this stone raised in memory of her son Harald, Ingvar’s brother.

  They travelled like men far for gold,

  and in the east gave [food] to the eagle.

  [They] died in the south, in Serkland.

  Over time the Rus’ grew more belligerent and aggressive in asserting their rights to the river trade. Although they depended on the markets of the Byzantine Empire for their continued survival, disputes between the Rus’ and the imperial forces led to frequent conflicts, and Byzantine sources record them as conducting several major attacks on Constantinople itself. After one such assault, having been unable to breach the massive walls of the city, the Rus’ leader is said to have nailed his shield to the gates in contempt.

  A magnificent though rather inadvertent monument to the Rus’ survives in the form of the monumental Piraeus Lion, a massive marble statue of the fourth century BCE that is now outside the Arsenal in Venice (plundered in an early modern war) but which once stood on the dockside at the harbour of Athens. Its shoulders and sides are covered with several very elaborate runic inscriptions that must have taken time, effort, and skill to carve. In a new interpretation, they read:

  They cut [the runes], the men of the host [ … ] but in this harbour those men cut runes after Haursi, the farmer [ … ] Svear men applied this on the lion. He fell before he could receive payment.

  Young warriors cut the runes.

  Åsmund carved these runes, they, Eskil [?], Thorlev

  and [ … ]

  One can almost see it—the Aegean sun on the water, the great lion on the quayside, and perhaps the locals looking on nervously as a group of young Varangians climbed all over it, chiselling away in honour of their dead friend. This was a memorial that nobody who came to the port of Athens could miss. This is relevant because the Piraeus inscriptions testify to other qualities and priorities too. The fact that a man was honoured appropriately—noting that he had fulfilled his oaths and would have been paid, had he not been killed—was important, as was the fact that his memorial was made on so prominent a landmark (the port was even known as the ‘harbour of the lion’) that it could have been visited in the future. The group of Varangians also clearly included a poet, again pointing to the weight placed upon a proper record. Scandinavians who served abroad did so in the knowledge that, if they never came back, someone would still remember them.

  At least in the early tenth century, it is possible that some of the Rus’ were essentially river police, the guards who guaranteed the trade. Recalling the people in the Birka chamber burials—the mounted archers with their recurved bows and special thumb rings—the Rus’ appear as military elites who have adopted the best equipment and tactics of those they might have to fight. Ornate silks and kaftans have been found in graves across Scandinavia, and depictions on Gotlandic picture-stones of warriors wearing the wide, baggy trousers that characterised Persian and Arab fashion similarly imply that Viking dress codes were infused with an element of foreign flair. The same individuals also had armour of Byzantine type, as well as the lamellar that was particular to the mounted steppe nomads of Eurasia—all while the isotopes and genomic analyses indicate they themselves were of Scandinavian origin. In a way, this almost appears to be a uniform—not in the sense of identical clothes but in a recognised repertoire of symbolism and style, what one scholar has called a “Turkic military outfit”. As before, one image stands out: the chapes of their sword scabbards marked with a falcon swooping to attack, the badge of the Rus’.

  Numerous runestones, such as this one from Turinge in Swedish Södermanland, evocatively record men who died in the East:

  Ketil and Björn, they raised this stone in memory of Thorstein, their father; Ônund in memory of his brother and the huskarls [i.e., the retinue] in memory of the [… and] Ketiley in memory of her husbandman.

  These brothers were

  the best of men

  in the land

  and abroad in the lið,<
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  held their huskarls well.

  21. The sign of the Rus’. A bronze scabbard chape found in the urban area at Birka, Sweden. Its design combines the diving falcon motif characteristic of the Rus’, with a human figure transforming into the bird—perhaps the god Odin stealing the mead of poetry. Photo: Gabriel Hildebrand, Swedish History Museum, Creative Commons.

  He fell in battle

  in the east in Garðar [Russia],

  commander of the lið,

  the best of landholders.

  Here is another, also from Södermanland:

  Styrlaug and Holm raised the stones next to the path in memory of their brothers. They met their end on the eastern route, Thorkell and Strybjörn, good retainers.

  Other runestones give us glimpses of a dangerous life in the river towns, as in the monument raised to one Sigvíth, who “fell in Holmgarðr [Novgorod], the ship’s leader with the seamen”.

  Even those who came home were altered by what they had seen and done in the ‘land of settlements’. Although they are a late source, several sagas describe the difficulties experienced by men who returned to Iceland from lengthy periods spent out East on Varangian service. They seem to have acquired qualities abroad that set them apart from their former neighbours, a different moral compass perhaps, even a legacy of battlefield trauma that we might call PTSD. These eastern veterans had problems fitting in, finding themselves changed men in an unchanged land.

  In the East itself, burials throughout the river systems also show the presence of the Rus’. Excavations at settlements and cemeteries, including Staraja Ladoga and Gnezdovo, have identified Scandinavian-style finds. At least twenty-four sites on the upper Volga contain Scandinavian material, often in great quantity, including weapons, jewellery, and amulets relating to Norse beliefs. Graves there exhibit burial rites familiar from the Viking homelands. New archaeological work has shown that the distribution extended well beyond the proto-urban centres, indicating how the Rus’ expanded their control over the river basins. On the waterways themselves, small fortifications probably acted as customs points.