Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  Several tenth-century graves with clear Scandinavian material components contain double interments of a man and woman together. Their body positions are hard to interpret but suggest an intimate relationship between the people in life, and moreover one that was deliberately signalled. In the Shestovytsya grave-field near Chernihiv, in Ukraine, for example, a chamber grave contains a man with his left arm around the shoulders of a woman laid out beside him, both dressed in eastern fashion. At Podgortsy, near L’viv, a man with Scandinavian weaponry was buried linking arms with a woman; in another grave from the same cemetery, a couple hold hands. In several cases the women are substantially smaller than the men—perhaps teenage girls. Are these gestures of affection, of possessive control or literal ownership, of intimacy or coercion, or of still other relationships?

  For the Scandinavians operating in Kievan Rus’, life in the East, as in the other Viking colonies, introduced new challenges and possibilities. Cultural traits and social customs can develop their own unique trajectory when part of a frontier lifestyle, and it has been suggested that women might have adopted new roles among the mercantile groups of the East. They are mentioned several times in ibn Faḍlān’s description of the Rus’, with his first-hand observations of their fashions and jewellery. This implies that parties of Scandinavian merchants travelling south to the Byzantine Empire, like those who lived among the large raiding fleets of ninth-century Europe, included families—an interesting observation that has not received the attention it deserves. Interactions went both ways, of course. A famous Viking of the late ninth century, a man called Geirmund Hjørson, was the son of a Norwegian trader and a Samoyed woman from northern Siberia. He was so dark and unusual in his looks that he earned the nickname heljarskinn, ‘black-skin’. Not only did he suffer no notable social detriment, he became one of the leading men of Iceland.

  Over time, the river world of the Rus’ changed dramatically—from its origins as the arena of Viking voyageurs to a mighty state that would ultimately play a part in the evolution of Russia itself. The decisive shift came in the late tenth century, when the Rus’ archon (war leader) Vladimir married into the Byzantine royal family, accepted baptism, and adopted Christianity as the religion of the state. The Rus’ would be further drawn into the Byzantine world. The emergence of the word ‘Varangian’, used by them to denote new arrivals from Scandinavia, suggests that by then they wanted to explicitly distance themselves from their Baltic roots: the Kiev state was shaping its own future, and in the process perhaps judiciously rewriting its past. By the end of the Viking Age, the lands of Kievan Rus’ extended from the Black Sea to Lake Ladoga.

  Having reached the Byzantine Empire and the south-eastern shores of the Caspian Sea, the Scandinavians found themselves on the very doorstep of the great Abbasid Caliphate. At the height of its power in the ninth century, a great swathe of territory from modern-day Tunisia to Uzbekistan was ruled from Baghdad.

  There is no knowing how many Scandinavians made the journey into the interior of the Caliphate, but some certainly did so. Several runic inscriptions commemorate individuals who travelled to Serkland—‘Saracen Land’—the same place named on the Ingvar stones. This was a vague term for what was probably a rather vague region, at least as seen from a Swedish farm. Just as with the ambiguities of the Rus’ label, Serkland seems to have referred to somewhere ‘way out east’, although with general connotations of Arabia.

  As early as the 840s, in his Book of Itineraries and Kingdoms, the Arab geographer ibn Khurradādhbih noted that Rus’ merchants would bring their goods overland to Baghdad by camel from the Caspian Sea shore. They had Slavs with them who served as interpreters when they wanted to speak to Arabs, but there are also signs that some Scandinavians also spoke Arabic. The script became part of their visual culture, when it was written (usually incorrectly) on merchants’ weights—an indication of how ‘proper’ balances ‘ought’ to look. In Baghdad, ibn Khurradādhbih goes on, the Rus’ pretended to be Christians so as to pay lower taxes as monotheists—even in the heart of the Middle East, they had useful local knowledge that enabled them to game the system. The implication is that by the early ninth century, the Rus’ were already quite well known around the Caspian and the region north of the Caucasus.

  Just as with the Scandinavian encounter with Byzantium, the sheer impact of a place like Baghdad must have been enormous. It had been established by the Abbasids in the early 760s and was thus a relatively young settlement. Visitors would first pass through extensive suburbs, irrigated via canals that drew precious water from the Tigris. The city itself was entered by four monumental gates that pierced a double wall of defences. Inside, the main commercial and residential areas of the city formed two concentric rings within the fortifications. In their centre—surrounded by extraordinary gardens—lay the caliphal palace, the administrative buildings, and the main mosque. At its zenith during the ninth century, Baghdad and its hinterland supported a population of up to nine hundred thousand people, making it one of the largest cities in the world at the time and even bigger than Constantinople.

  Scandinavian contacts with the Caliphate have left few material traces, but those that remain can be dramatic in their implications. The inscription on a rather nondescript runestone from Stora Rytterne in Swedish Västmanland records a most unusual place-name:

  Gudleif placed the staff and these stones in memory of Slagvi,

  his son, who met his end in the east, in Karusm.

  The last word has been read as an Old Norse approximation of Khwārazm, an oasis area south of the Aral Sea in what is now Uzbekistan—a long way to go for a young man from a Mälar farm. The very modesty of the stone is telling in that this was not a record of an extraordinary journey; it was something normal. Moreover, the very fact of its existence not only testifies to a youthful adventure with a tragic end; it also shows that somebody else made it back to tell the family. Like many such memorials, the stone was set up in the absence of a body; the story came home to Sweden when the man did not.

  Some scholars have seen evidence for a failed Islamic mission to Scandinavia in the large numbers of imported Arab objects found there, often inscribed with religious messages. These include a censer and a number of bronze flasks excavated in Sweden and the Åland islands, all bearing Islamic religious inscriptions. It is possible that these were originally made for some liturgical function—perhaps to purify the water used in washing before prayer. Not least, every single Arab coin carried an exhortation to God. Although hard to prove, such an endeavour would be in keeping with similar efforts to convert the steppe peoples to Islam.

  22. Journey to the Aral Sea. Eleventh-century runestone Vs 1 from Stora Rytterne in Västmanland, Sweden, set up by a father to commemorate his son Slagvi, who died at the Khwārazm oasis in what is now Uzbekistan. Photo: Berig, Creative Commons.

  Some travellers from the Middle East clearly did visit Scandinavia. There is the woman apparently of Persian origin in the Oseberg ship burial, who it should be remembered was jointly afforded the most extravagant funeral ever documented in Scandinavia. Other Arab visitors also met a favourable reception, as seen in the affections lavished in Denmark on the handsome Andalusian diplomat al-Ghazāl, ‘the Gazelle’. There must have been exceptions, of course, but tolerance seems to have been a Viking virtue.

  The core of the trade with the Caliphate was in silver. It has been estimated that up to 125 million dirhams, representing approximately 340 tons of metal, moved into northern and eastern Europe in the tenth century. It is unsurprising that many other middlemen between Arabia and the Baltic wanted a cut of the trade. The Rus’ exchanged with them all, at markets where merchants of all lands gathered to buy and sell. It was at one such place, in 922, that ibn Faḍlān recorded the pragmatic prayer of one of these Rus’ travellers, who was making offerings to wooden pillars at the Bulghar market by the Volga shore:

  I want you to bless me with a rich merchant with many dinars and dirhams, who will buy from me wh
atever I wish and not haggle over any price I set.

  The dirhams were brought to Scandinavia in packages direct from the mints, without being separated, as can be seen from the die-linked sequences of coins. The island of Gotland was the primary Baltic node in the routes to the east. During the tenth century in southern Denmark, Hedeby formed another of the vital European conduits for the dirham trade. As well as providing tax and border tolls, the town connected Scandinavia, the Continent, and the Baltic, all areas into which the eastern silver was redistributed. Arab silver has even been found in the ingots of the Danelaw, perhaps brought over as bullion by southern Scandinavian immigrants to England. There was a hiatus in the flow of silver for the last thirty or forty years of the ninth century, before it resumed in the form of Sāmānid dirhams. From around 890 to 930, the silver stream to Scandinavia was continuous, and massive. Most of the examples from Gotland and Estonia are whole coins, while they get progressively more fragmented as one moves, in turn, through mainland Sweden to Denmark, Poland, and what is now the Czech Republic. The trade route moved anticlockwise around the Baltic, with Sweden (and probably Birka) as the key point of entry after the transit through Gotland.

  These locations may also mark the intermediaries of the slave trade, for which the flow of silver provides a detectible proxy. It left other signs, too, for example the massive programme of hillfort construction in the Polish Pyast state, which links to the influx of the first dirhams there in 940. It seems the Poles were building defences against the predatory slave-raiding of the Rus’ that is mentioned in the Arab sources.

  The sale of captives could bring a variety of goods in return, especially on the eastern routes—including livestock, textiles and clothing, even salt and spices. However, slaves were always a risky commodity, prone to ill health and potentially dying en route. For this reason, slaving was most often a component in a more diversified trade. This aspect of the Viking economy, and the mind-set behind it, can be traced throughout their diaspora, but nowhere more so than in the East.

  There were, of course, other wares, especially silk. It has even been suggested that the word ‘Serkland’ itself may have referred to the fabric, as denoting the place where (silk) shirts, serkr, came from. Some twenty-three sites with excavated silk are known from Scandinavia, all from the ninth and tenth centuries. The number of individual finds is staggering, impressive in themselves, but all the more so because of what they imply about how much was originally there. At Birka alone, there are sixty-one graves containing silk, mostly from the Near East and Byzantium, with some that had travelled all the way from Tang Dynasty China; silk is present in about 30 percent of all Birka burials in which textiles survive. In the magnificent Oseberg ship burial, there are more than one hundred silk fragments, from up to fifteen different fabrics of varying quality. Some of the pieces had been reused, showing the high value placed on even tiny scraps. Even the burial chamber on the deck was lined with silk. At Valsgärde in Swedish Uppland, most of the Viking-Age boat graves contain silk clothing details used to trim cuffs and collars, or to provide facings on jackets. The mixture of styles suggests that the meaning of the motifs had not been transferred along with the fabric.

  The Tang silks may have come to the North via the Persian Gulf. As ever, the evidence is very sparse, but it has been suggested that the best explanation of rock carvings found overlooking the waters at Jabal Jusasiyah in northern Qatar is that they depict Viking oared ships. There is no certainty here, but they would not be out of place given what we know of the Rus’ connections to trade routes extending farther east to the Indian Ocean and beyond.

  Two twinned objects illustrate the breadth of the diaspora, linking East and West in the most human of ways.

  In the Viking-Age colonies in England, some decades ago archaeologists excavating well-preserved, waterlogged deposits made two remarkable finds. In the urban centre of York, and also in Lincoln (one of the Danelaw’s Five Boroughs), tenth-century occupation layers produced fragments of silk that originally were part of delicate caps worn by women over their hair. Repeatedly repaired and well cared for, they must have been precious things indeed. The cloth seems to have originated in Persia or, just possibly, China. Almost incredibly, analysis of an unusual fault in the weave has shown that the pieces come from the same bale of silk. The sheer improbability of making two independent discoveries that connect in this way is one thing, but it also suggests that the trade may in fact have been relatively small. A single enterprising merchant, with luck and judgement, could have brought back a bolt of cloth big enough to go a very long way when sold in modest lengths.

  Goods journeying from the Silk Roads to northern England: it would be hard to find a better image of the Scandinavian achievement over just two centuries, and of individuals’ places within it. The final acts of the era, however, focussed inwards. A new faith and new models of rulership would combine to permanently transform the North itself, and, in the process, bring an end to the age of the Vikings.

  16

  THE EXPERIMENTS OF MONARCHY

  THE TWIN POWERS OF CHURCH and state, and the degree of separation advisable between them, have been two of the basic building blocks of western European nationhood for at least fifteen hundred years. They were no less fundamental in the rise of the Nordic nations and in the consolidation of their rulers as monarchs at the head of unified kingdoms. As ever, behind these forces of social and political change were other drivers rooted more crudely in the economics of profit, and the power to use it. The cycle of raiding, slaving, and trading fed the diaspora and was in part responsible for it—but it also enabled transformation back in Scandinavia itself. The later Viking Age saw a far greater direction of cause and effect than in the ninth and early tenth centuries—a deeper understanding of the governmental demands that new forms of overseas ventures could supply. This political awakening harnessed and activated the new economic potential of the North, and set Scandinavia on the path to Nordic monarchies in the arena of literate, Christian Europe.

  There was no linear process of mission and conversion in the transition to a new faith, nor can we necessarily speak of the replacement of one religion by another, even in the late Viking Age. That some people believed in a single God, his ever-living son, the Holy Spirit, and the community of saints was known to Scandinavians from at least the seventh century and probably much earlier. They would have encountered the Christian pious abroad in their travels as merchants, and would have seen priests in the settlements they visited. Christians occasionally appeared at home, too—foreigners were nothing new in late Iron Age Scandinavia, and the beliefs of such visitors encompassed a whole spectrum of different gods, including the one they called the White Christ. In fact, this conversation had been going on in Europe at least since the days of the later Roman Empire, when Christianity, Judaism, and an array of alternatives had been offering their own competing propositions on the Other World(s) to a populace that in practice usually preferred to pick and mix.

  Even in the first raids, the monasteries were chosen as targets precisely because the Vikings knew what they were, or at least had a good idea what they contained. It must have been clear that the cloisters and chapels had to do with religion and the worship of a deity, and the notion of ritual buildings where one entered the presence of the divine was entirely intelligible.

  There seems to have been a modest attempt to bring Christianity to Scandinavia even before the raids, in the early eighth century. The Danes’ proximity to the faithful of the European Continent ensured they were the first recipients of the Word. Alcuin, the same English cleric who wrote with such outrage about the attack on Lindisfarne in 793, also compiled biographical notes on past evangelicals, including Willibrord of Northumbria, who crossed the Danish border in about 710. Willibrord does not seem to have convinced many, but he was nonetheless allowed to leave with some thirty youths who presumably were to be trained in the gospel. For a century after Willibrord, there are no records of missionary activ
ity in the North, and by then the raids had not only begun, but had started to escalate.

  This is important because it is clear that monks and lay brothers were among the captives taken on the Vikings’ plundering expeditions. We do not know what happened to these people, but it is conceivable—even likely—that for some in Scandinavia, the nervously expressed ideas of their new thralls were a first contact with the Christian faith. In the 820s, Archbishop Ebbo of Reims was sent into Denmark at the behest of not only the Frankish emperor but also the pope himself. During his year there, he managed to baptise a few converts; a modest beginning, it is true, but this was more than any of his known predecessors had been able to do.

  The Christian message could also be communicated through objects, either actively or by chance. A high-status settlement on the island of Helgö, in Lake Mälaren, Sweden, was occupied into the early Viking Age, and finds from the excavations there include a Coptic scoop and an Irish crozier head. The latter is especially striking as it must have been the personal property of a bishop, and hardly an item to be willingly given or traded. How these items arrived at Helgö is unknown, but it is possible they came as loot with raiders returning from the west. Equally, it could be that the sacral nature of these objects was known to the Scandinavians, and this is why they were taken. Helgö actually means ‘Holy Island’, and other ritual artefacts from different faiths had also found their way there. The most spectacular was a sixth-century bronze statue of the Buddha, made in the Swat Valley on the Afghan border and presumably brought to Scandinavia along the early versions of the eastern trade routes. The Buddha had been adapted to Northern religious taste, being provided with leather rings around its arm and neck, just like the contemporary wooden figures found in Danish bogs, presumed to represent deities.