by Neil Price;
The Christian powers of Continental Europe used any method available to effect conversions. Three years after Ebbo of Reims came back from Denmark, a political exile named Harald Klak turned up at the Frankish court. He claimed to have been forced from power following a civil conflict in Denmark and requested assistance from the emperor. The imperial response was apparently to make practical aid contingent on baptism, and Harald and his followers were duly welcomed into the faith. Heading back to Denmark, his party was accompanied by the missionary Anskar, who founded some kind of monastery in the region north of the Elbe River. This man was to play an important role in the conversion story.
The main source for Anskar’s mission is a biography by his contemporary, Rimbert. It relates how, in 829, Anskar was invited to visit Birka as a guest of King Björn, who seems to have been in charge there. He spent eighteen months in and around the trading centre and baptised many people, including the royal agent. He returned to the Frankish Empire in 831 and was appointed archbishop of Hamburg, which was amalgamated with the see of Bremen following a Viking attack on the city in 845. Anskar maintained an interest in evangelising the North and returned to Sweden twice before his death in 865. Further missions to the region were conducted by his later successor, Gautbert.
At Uppåkra in southern Sweden, the long-lived cult house went out of use in the early ninth century, perhaps the result of a targeted Christian mission. Among the finds on the site were several objects with Christian symbolic themes, and this could be evidence of an attempt to actively influence the religious thought of the local people.
It was probably no accident that all the initial missions seem to have been pitched through Scandinavian rulers. Viking-Age elites held both secular and ritual power, and were thus potentially able to influence their people’s view of such things. The Church was careful to work first on them, attempting to accelerate the conversion of the North by working from the top down (as had happened in the Roman Empire itself in the fourth century). The patronage of a baptised Scandinavian king would lead to thousands of ordinary converts, as the missionaries were quick to realise.
Anskar’s successes at Birka may have left a trace in a number of graves near the hillfort that have been argued to reflect Christian practice. The burials include both adults and children, also unusual for the site. Cross pendants have been found in some graves, along with a type of cross-decorated jug from the Rhineland that some scholars see as a liturgical vessel. But these were modest achievements, and it is clear that for all Anskar’s efforts, Birka never became a Christian settlement but remained firm in its adherence to the old beliefs.
Fascinating insights into the nature and reality of the early missions can be had from sources such as Widukind’s History of the Saxons, written around 968, which describes the conversion of a later Danish king. From the ambiguous way in which he charts the context of the royal baptism, it is clear that while the Danes are in many senses Christians, they also happily retain many of their earlier beliefs. The task of the missions was not conversion, as such, but the practical demonstration of Christ’s power through action.
There is a remarkable glimpse of how this worked in practice through a document known as Heliand, ‘The Saviour’. Written in Old Saxon during the first half of the ninth century, it is a paraphrase of the gospel for a Germanic audience, tweaked for their sensibilities and pitched almost as a Norse saga though with biblical heroes. Thus we read of Jesus’s birth in Galileeland, his later travels to Jerusalemburg, and how the Lord lives in a great hall in the sky (clearly Valhöll). The Lord’s Prayer is in ‘secret runes’, Peter is given command over the gates of Hel (with one L), and so on. Satan’s temptation of Christ takes place in a northern wilderness filled with vague forces, ‘powerful beings’ that seem to live among the trees, and one wonders what this implies of the traditional Northern beliefs that were known to the Christian clerics. By the same token, Jesus’s disciples are ‘warrior-companions’, framed in the language of a warlord’s retinue, and the Last Supper is the ‘final mead-hall feast’. Even God is called by Odinnic epithets such as ‘Victory-Chieftain’ and ‘All-Ruler’. This is the kind of message that was taken into Scandinavia by the first missionaries—a doctrine meshed with the ancestral stories of the North and following a model found in many other conversion histories.
It has sometimes been suggested that the Scandinavians’ adoption of Christianity was mostly a veneer—lip service to the outward trappings of belief combined with regular church attendance, but in reality merely a thin covering over the old ways that persisted beneath. In all the debate concerning afterlives and the varying destinations offered by the traditional customs and the new religion, one wonders whether Viking-Age people might actually have decided where they wished to go after death. If so, what did they make of a faith in which the fate of a person’s immortal soul was dependent on living a certain kind of life? It is hard to overstate how alien this concept may have seemed, although a cornerstone of many world faiths today.
The religious context of the sources is crucial here and affects the material culture as well. Much of what is known about the pre-Christian thought-world of the Vikings comes to us through the writings of, precisely, Christians. Even the framing story of this book—the creation of Ash and Elm—is relevant to this retrospective filter: how much of a coincidence is it that the ‘first couple’ in Norse cosmology have names beginning with A and E? Although the meaning of Askr/Ash is unequivocal, Embla is less certain. ‘Elm’ is the most commonly accepted translation, but the actual noun for an elm tree (almr) is masculine, and the etymology is convoluted. ‘Vine’ is another possibility, though this requires an ultimate derivation from Greek, and from there the scholarly debate starts to meander into the thickets of postulated Indo-European linguistic heritage. This kind of unresolved confusion—the ambiguities, contradictions, and possibilities—are all typical of the Viking-Age spiritual palimpsest, as we see it dimly in the rear-view from more than a millennium in its future.
The influence exercised by Christianity in the North was closely related to regional politics. Throughout the Viking Age, the number of small polities across Scandinavia was steadily decreasing, as the leading players in the region’s power games absorbed the territories of their neighbours and rivals. Seen from the other end of that equation, other statelets found themselves coming under the rule of these rising kings. As part of the same process, the relative size of the Viking-Age polities increased. While the overall trajectory towards an eventual unification of the Nordic kingdoms seems relatively clear, what happened along the way was anything but linear and straightforward, and its progress is not easy to track. To take but one example, King Harald Finehair supposedly brought Norway under his control in the 870s, but it is obvious that practical power was retained at a local level until well into the tenth century.
Ascribing a date to the political unification of Denmark and Sweden is more difficult. In Denmark, centralised rule seems to have been achieved by the mid-tenth century, although by whom is uncertain. Danish kings such as Godfred were evidently able to initiate large-scale public works by the early 800s, and the consolidation of the kingdom at this time cannot be ruled out. However, the extensive political upheaval and civil war that is recorded as taking place in Denmark during the mid-ninth century implies there was still much to fight for in terms of power and territory. Sweden would remain fragmented well into the Middle Ages, despite the efforts of successive kings to assert their power over strongly independent regional elites. This situation is probably reflected in the fact that real progress in Christian conversion does not seem to have been made until the tenth century—in most regions, the catalyst for the spread of the new religion was the baptism of the kings themselves.
Christianity was attractive to Scandinavian rulers, although not necessarily to those they ruled, for several reasons. One was the more efficient collection of tax, made possible by the ordered division of territory that followed the establis
hment of parishes and dioceses. Stewardship of these entities lay in the royal gift, and provided another layer of incentive with which to motivate the retinues that ultimately buttressed a monarch’s power. The impact on the populace was more profound, as the Church would come to restructure their lives, beginning with the rhythm of the day itself. A ringing bell was an aural imposition that could not be ignored, and was clearly resented (at Hedeby, a bell has been found in the harbour, where it must have been thrown; such an expensive object would otherwise have been recovered). The Christian ritual calendar was tightly regulated, governing what people could eat and how they worked and behaved; even the intimacies of their lives came under ecclesiastical scrutiny. This was a potent tool of power, as the kings were quick to recognise. At the highest level, the position and rights of the king were also given divine sanction, in a subtly different way than the descent they had earlier claimed from Odin and the other Norse gods.
The Church gained political influence through advising the crown, and in time became indispensable to the administration of the kingdom. Churches and monasteries ensured that the presence of Christian power was widely distributed, and these institutions were sometimes populated by men who in practice were secular elites and their kin.
Although this relationship between a would-be incoming Church and a burgeoning state might seem secure, the reality was more vulnerable—not least because of pushback from a rural populace that might have quite different ideas about the nature of power, where it came from, and how it should be wielded and distributed. Changes in the balance of regional forces, civil war, and political assassinations all had the potential to disrupt or even halt the spread of Christianity until rulers more congenial to the Church’s objectives rose (or were assisted) to power.
The consolidation of the Danish kingdom in the tenth century shows how this worked in practice. Geographical location ensured that Denmark would see the first sustained efforts within Scandinavia for organised religious missions, with proximity to the German bishoprics providing easy access across the border. However, these seem to have met with relatively little success for the whole of the ninth century (Anskar’s establishment of a church at Hedeby in 850 apparently did not last—remember that bell). The key change seems to have occurred a century later, with the accession of a new king who had very clear ideas of where he wanted Denmark to go. Around 960, Harald Bluetooth inherited power from his long-lived father, Gorm the Old, and appears to have been baptised only five years later. Harald’s reign was characterised by the spread of Christianity across his kingdom, as well as by a marked cementation of royal authority expressed through an extraordinary programme of monumental engineering.
The core of Harald’s power lay at Jelling, in the middle of the Jylland Peninsula. Effectively a capital, it was founded on land that was already well-settled, and there had been villages throughout the Jelling valley from pre-Viking times. Major excavations there have revolutionised our understanding of what Harald did at this site. Today, the most visible monuments at Jelling are two massive mounds—the construction of the northern barrow is dendrochronologically dated to 958–959 and its southern counterpart to the 970s. The northern mound, itself built over an existing Bronze Age funerary monument, may have been the original grave for Harald’s father, but archaeological investigations revealed the burial to have been emptied in the Viking Age—possibly in order to extract Gorm’s remains and place them inside the church that Harald later built between the mounds. The south barrow never contained a burial, which has been the cause of much speculation. Was it originally constructed in advance for Harald himself, but abandoned as a pagan monument after the king converted? Or was it simply part of the site’s ritual symmetry?
Jelling was the site of the national assembly of the Danes, and lay no more than four days’ travel from anywhere in the kingdom. Harald’s first great project was an administrative centre rather than a royal residence, signalling acceptance of Christianity but on local terms. Its monumentality also evinced a rather nervous relationship with the imperial powers of Europe, modelled after their trappings of power but with a clear eye to ‘authentically Danish’ traditions. A link to the past was provided by a runestone set up by the late king:
King Gorm made this monument in memory of Thyre, his wife, Denmark’s adornment
Harald chose to build upon this in a similar medium, with what has become the ultimate symbol of the site: the famous Jelling runestone. Raised between the two mounds, in honour of his parents (and himself), the inscription reads:
King Harald ordered this monument made in memory of Gorm, his father, and in memory of Thyre, his mother; that Harald who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.
Most telling of all is the stone’s unique design: the runes are laid out in horizontal lines, unlike every other regular stone, but exactly like a Latin text. The interlace motifs even act like the illuminated initials found in manuscripts. Harald was not only proclaiming his sovereignty and conversion of the country, he was doing it on a stone book.
Whether Harald truly ‘won’ all of Denmark, instead of expanding or merely inheriting his lands upon his father’s death, is open to debate, and in this the Jelling stone should probably be seen as a piece of political propaganda rather than a realistic record of his own achievements. Harald was an expert at self-promotion.
The king’s new model power centre enclosed the mounds within a massive palisaded enclosure, around twelve and a half hectares in size. Wood remains dated using the preserved tree rings give a range of 958–985 for the enclosure; the later dates probably indicate timbers used for repairs. Over a thousand trees, each at least a century old (and thus the product of careful management), were felled to make the palisade. Harald clearly commanded immense resources.
Around the inside of the enclosure walls, and aligned parallel to them, were longhouses of a new type that began to be built all over Denmark at this time. It seems that the royal taste was influential—either through emulation and fashion, or by command. Excavations have shown that the two mounds were built over the longest stone ship setting ever recorded in Scandinavia, some 360 metres in length and about 70 metres ‘amidships’. Perhaps this was the ‘monument’ to Gorm’s wife, mentioned on the stone he commissioned as her memorial. The north mound was sited exactly where the ‘mast’ of the stone ship would have been, and at the precise centre of the palisaded enclosure.
Administration aside, it is not entirely clear what the Jelling complex was actually for. Its date coincides with the refortification of the Danevirke, the defended earth and timber rampart along Denmark’s southern border. It was at this time that its line was linked up with the walls of Hedeby, thus integrating the market centre into a coordinated frontier installation. At least in its earliest incarnations, Hedeby seems to have formed a kind of discrete cultural island south of the Danevirke, and may even have been a politically neutral free trade zone. It later became a key element in the defensive system of which the Danevirke was a part. The land route it controlled at the base of the Jylland Peninsula was critical due to the extreme natural hazards of the shipping passage through the Skagerrak into the Baltic. The Danish kingdom faced increasing threats from the Ottonian Empire to the south, and the construction of the enclosure at Jelling can in part be seen as a show of force for the benefit of this German audience.
Given Harald’s ambitions and the attention he evidently paid to the trappings of power elsewhere in Scandinavia, the empty south mound at Jelling was possibly the start of an attempt to shape his own royal capital along the ‘proper’ model of much earlier foundations such as Gamla Uppsala and Lejre. Some twenty-two hectares of turf were dug up to construct the south mound at Jelling, representing the deliberate destruction of arable land—a significant demonstration and commitment. Even the location of a ship setting adjacent to a mound can be paralleled at places such as Anundshög in Swedish Västmanland, another site within the traditional territory of the
Ynglinga dynasty. If the combination of hall buildings and ancestral barrows was the going fashion, Harald may have decided to join the kingly club on a monumental scale unrivalled in Scandinavia—a pattern of dictatorial architectural egotism familiar from more recent times.
King Harald’s energetic commissions did not stop with Jelling. Towards the end of his reign, he expanded his programme of monumental constructions with an extravagance that indirectly led to the rebellion that eventually toppled him. While building work was still ongoing at Jelling, he also ordered a huge bridge to be set up some ten kilometres to the south-west at Ravning Enge. Like the stone ship, it is the largest of its kind ever found in Scandinavia: 760 metres long and 5 metres wide, broad enough for two carts to pass each other. Made of a timber walkway elevated on piles sunk into marshy ground, the posts were so large as to essentially be shaped tree trunks. The strangest thing about the bridge is that it takes an unnecessarily long route across the marshy valley. Could it have been a deliberate folly, or purely a statement of power?
The most spectacular remnants of Harald’s reign (or megalomania) are the famous Trelleborg-type fortresses, of which five are known so far. These include Trelleborg itself and Borgring on Sjælland, Nonnebakken on Fyn, and Aggersborg and Fyrkat in northern Jylland. A sixth fortification of uncertain relationship to the others has left traces at Borgeby in Skåne, southern Sweden, which was then part of Denmark. All of them were exactly circular with massive ramparts, faced on both sides with vertical logs and topped by palisaded walkways. Inside, each had a cruciform plan made of intersecting streets leading to gates at the points of the compass. Exactly surveyed courtyards were laid out in the four quadrants of the interior, filled with high-end longhouses of the same type as at Jelling. Most of the fortress ramparts still stand and are of near identical dimensions, about 120 metres in diameter, the exception being Aggersborg, which is much larger at 240 metres. All of them are prominent in the landscape and served as highly visible symbols of power.
