Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  They all seem to have been constructed at the same time, in the early 980s. The political situation in Denmark deteriorated towards the end of Harald’s reign, with tensions on the German border and civil unrest. The fortresses may have been staging points for a planned invasion of Schleswig, or defensive sites designed to protect Harald’s territory from external threats. They might even have been intended to suppress the Danish population itself, which would explain why all the known fortresses were situated in relatively densely populated areas, with good access to land routes and waterways.

  Exactly who was housed in the fortresses is also unclear—they were administrative as well as military centres, and their population certainly included women (one of them, at Fyrkat, was buried with all the trappings of a pagan sorceress, which sheds light on the realities of Harald’s claim to have converted the Danes). An isotope study of eleven individuals from a mass grave within the cemetery at Trelleborg has revealed that a number of the dead were not locals, but came from the Slavonic and north German coast, and perhaps even from southern Norway—all areas under Danish control during Harald’s reign. It may be that, as in medieval armies, King Harald relied on mercenaries to support his rule.

  He also seems to have targeted his rivals, and perhaps dissenting citizenry, through their means of ritual expression and identity. As we have seen, the opening and plundering of the presumably royal ship burials of Vestfold in Norway has been dated precisely to his reign, so it seems as if Harald was neutralising the ancestors of the people he tried to bring under his sway—a confirmation of the role these monumental graves played in the psychological landscape.

  Late in his reign, Harald was aided in his ambitions by a decisive change in the regional balance. In 983 the focus of Ottonian imperial attention shifted emphatically to the south, and thus removed what had for centuries been a critical factor in the limitation of Danish royal power. The imperial German court was a model as well as an enemy. This perhaps explains some of the developments at Jelling, which has the air of an ‘imperial’ monument to God and to Harald himself, constructed in emulation of the European—specifically German—pattern of Christian kingship.

  In the two decades of Harald’s rule, the Danish kingdom was transformed into a centralised, nominally Christian state—but not without opposition and backlash. Perhaps as a result of the extensive and sweeping changes Harald introduced, and because of the horrendous labour costs they must have required, the 980s saw increasing political turmoil in Denmark. Harald’s own son, Svein Forkbeard, led an open rebellion around 987. At some point during the resulting civil war, Harald was killed, and many of his monuments were attacked and demolished. The Trelleborg fortresses and the Jelling palisade were burnt. The locus of power in Denmark then moved eastwards from Jelling to Sjælland, which saw a pagan revival in the late tenth century in opposition to the advance of Christianity (the Odin cult seems to have particularly prospered at this time, which also indicates that it never really went away).

  The Christianisation process elsewhere in Scandinavia is harder to piece together. According to the later sources for Norway, especially the kings’ sagas, the first ruler actively to attempt to spread Christianity there was Hákon the Good, who reigned during the 940s and 950s, but the new religion does not seem to have become deeply entrenched until the 990s and the advent of kings who were not afraid to use force to effect conversions of the aristocracy. There is a late tenth- or early eleventh-century runestone from Kuli near Trondheim that combines a conventional memorial text with the evocative statement that “for twelve winters had Christianity been in Norway”. There is otherwise little archaeological evidence with which to augment the literary narrative of the conversion process.

  In some especially independent-minded parts of the Viking world, such as Gotland, the faith took centuries to find a foothold. On this Baltic island, many of the dead were still being buried with full pagan ritual into the end of the twelfth century, while Christians on neighbouring farms used their own rites. Even the opening sentence of the Guta Laws, dated c. 1220, states as the first legal stipulation “that we shall refuse heathendom and accept Christianity”, implying this was far from the norm even then. At times both religions are represented on the same funerary monuments, either hedging the bets of the deceased or perhaps attesting to a genuine fusion of beliefs.

  Similar patterns can be observed in the Scandinavian colonies of the diaspora. Ottonian missionaries were sent to Rus’ in 946 at the request of Olga (Helga) of Kiev, who was ruling as regent following the death of her husband, although Olga’s baptism at the Byzantine royal court at some point in the 940s or 950s implies links both with the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches. Her grandson Vladimir (Valdemar) consolidated the rule of Kiev, and in the process explored the potential benefits of a number of different faiths, but he was finally baptised a Christian as part of his marriage to a Byzantine princess around 988. In the 990s he ordered the construction of a massive church and palace in Kiev, and imported Byzantine builders and craftsmen for the job. In so doing, he created a new focal point of Christian royal power from which to command. By the twelfth century, the influence of Christianity had spread outwards from the main riverine arteries of the Rus’ kingdom and into the countryside. Soon, however, new power centres began to emerge. In addition to expressing their political autonomy, some settlements began to assert their own religious independence. In Novgorod, for example, the power of the diocese and the archbishops that controlled it grew dramatically throughout the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, contributing to the eventual fragmentation of the Kievan Rus’ polity.

  In Sweden, where the consolidation of the country would not take place until much later, there seem to have been some attempts by regional kings to introduce Christian models of kingship. Despite the intermittent success of early missionaries in preaching at a local level, however, the evidence for continued sacrificial rites at Götavi (and not least, Adam of Bremen’s lively description of the rituals at Uppsala) demonstrate that pre-Christian beliefs remained popular as late as the eleventh century.

  This is not hard to understand. The basic instrument of conversion was the rite of baptism, administered by churchmen as a means to nominally bring an individual or group into the Christian fold. However, a genuine change of faith on the part of the baptised was not compulsory. Even forced baptisms, such as those commanded by tenth-century kings in Norway, were considered valid by the Church. As such, while baptism was evidently an important rite, it cannot be taken as an indication of religious conversion in the sense that we understand it today. Priests seem to have been more concerned with harvesting souls than effecting long-term change on individuals.

  It was not until the eleventh century that Christianity really began to transform daily life in Scandinavia. People seemed to have followed both the old and new ways in the same communities for many decades, apparently without major tensions. The first churches, simple one-room affairs made of timber, were very small and suitable only for the elite families who commissioned them. Formal worship in a consecrated building was for the rich, and it is clear that this attitude was at least initially shared by both Church and state.

  23. House of a new god. A stave church reconstructed at Moesgård Museum, Denmark, and based on an excavated eleventh-century example from Randers. Photo: Sten Porse, Creative Commons.

  The manifestations of all this in everyday experience have left some remarkable traces. In the late tenth century at Trendgården on Jylland, some enterprising smith was catering to his or her customers by casting Christian crosses and Thor’s hammers in the same soapstone mould. That it could simultaneously produce two crosses but only one hammer provides an insight into patterns of supply and demand, and also illuminates the open duality of religious practices in the years when Christianity began to make itself felt in Danish society. Also of interest are a number of so-called Thor’s hammer crosses—rather ambiguous objects that seem to have been intentionally
made to be taken either way. Such items could have been worn to signal adherence to multiple belief systems, which might have been advantageous according to context.

  While unfurnished inhumations are not necessarily indicative of Christian burial rites (those prescriptions would come centuries later), towards the end of the Viking Age they clearly began to replace cremations and furnished inhumations, albeit with an extended period of transitional burial practices. A striking insight into ideological negotiation and transition can be seen at Birka in an elaborate chamber burial dating from the mid-tenth century. It contained a woman accompanied by a number of objects (including an iron staff) that marked her out as a possible sorceress. Around her neck, however, was a silver pendant crucifix that seems to have been strung on a necklace of beads together with decidedly non-Christian amulets. The presence of the crucifix is not incompatible with the interpretation that the woman was a practitioner of seithr magic. Given that Christianity would have likely been regarded as exotic at that time in Sweden, maybe the inclusion of the cross in the woman’s ensemble was intended to harness the arcane powers of the new religion, enhancing her ability to practise her magical art.

  In other cases, freshly converted Christians may have buried their parents with appropriate rites of the new faith but also included elements of the old religion that they knew their loved ones might really have preferred. In a society that does not seem particularly prejudiced against innovative spiritual ideas, many combinations are possible, and there is no reason why all members of a family needed to share the same beliefs (indeed, there are many saga accounts of multifaith households). Adding to this are some regional trends that are hard to interpret. For example, in the Swedish Götaland provinces it seems that Christian burial appears in the mid-tenth century—much earlier than elsewhere. Perhaps an unknown mission was active there.

  In the eleventh century, there was a surge in the erection of runestones, the majority bearing Christian inscriptions. In total, around 3,500 runic inscriptions are known from Scandinavia, of which some 2,400 are from Sweden, 450 from Denmark, and about 140 from Norway. The practice seems to have been particularly intensive in central Sweden; thirteen hundred stones were raised in Uppland alone. This geographical focus on one of the areas that converted latest may either be explained as reflecting a successful drive of missionary enthusiasm, or perhaps the opposite in that there were so many pagans the Christians felt obliged to proclaim their faith as visibly as possible.

  One feature of the stones’ distribution and content provides a clue. A consistent 2 to 3 percent of the stones have non-lexical inscriptions—either using proper runes that do not make intelligible words, or else made up of angular signs that resemble runes but are not the real thing, as if someone was trying hard to imitate the visual impact of a script they did not actually understand. Interestingly, these illegible stones are definitely not poor-quality affairs; their decoration and design are just as elaborate as that of the ‘regular’ runestones. Significantly, these strange non-lexical inscriptions are found at the outer periphery of areas where ‘regular’ runestones are most common. The implication is Christians were gathering together in communities apparently with some wealth and influence, at least sufficient to make those around them want to imitate their signals. At the very least, it shows that runestones had a visual function in their own right, partly independent from the content of their inscriptions.

  Now grey and weathered, the runestones were originally brightly coloured—their lines picked out in black (derived largely from soot) and with panels in red and white based on lead oxide. Most take the form of upright stones that were raised in a specific place, but in some cases inscriptions were carved into the faces of boulders. They commonly feature designs of crosses and prayers for the preservation of the dead person’s soul.

  Some of the stones may represent attempts to consecrate ground before it was possible to build a church. Maybe the presence of a runestone in itself signalled a form of Christian burial in cemeteries in which old-style traditional funerals were still taking place. It is not uncommon to find runestones reused in the fabric of the first medieval churches. There is no doubt that people knew what these memorials were, and it is as if the ancestors were being brought into the fold of an established Christian community that could, at last, afford a place of worship and a real churchyard.

  Some runestone images suggest a real depth of knowledge of biblical stories, such as depictions of Calvary on the Timmele stone in Västergötland, and the four animals from Daniel 7:3–7 and Revelations shown on the Måsta stone from Uppland. Such motifs are not superficial or casual. There are also runestones that confirm Scandinavians were making pilgrimages to Jerusalem in the eleventh century, which is also recorded in the Icelandic sagas. This would have been a truly enormous undertaking, and hardly represents the actions of people with only a limited understanding of their faith. A remarkable stone from Stäket in Swedish Uppland, now lost, provides context:

  Ingirún, Hard’s daughter, had these runes carved for herself. She wants to travel east and abroad to Jerusalem. Fót carved the runes.

  Not only is this woman making a clear declaration of her intentions (‘want’ is synonymous with ‘will’ in these inscriptions), but her decision to erect a runestone before heading out was also a kind of testament to the hazards of the journey: she might not come back, and may not have intended to. It seems likely that Ingirún had connections on the eastern route, people who might have been able to smooth her passage. Let’s hope she got there safely.

  There are also indications that not everyone was happy with the spread of the new faith. Several runestone texts incorporate invocations to Thor, and there is even an example where the usual central motif of the cross has been replaced with a large hammer—no doubt a deliberate response to Christian custom.

  The social position of women also altered with the conversion. Several scholars have argued that Christianity brought a focus on the individual in contrast to the patriarchal norms of traditional Viking-Age society. It is interesting that all the cross pendants known from Birka were found in women’s graves. Christian perspectives on the afterlife, which offered hope of a happy and permanent existence in heaven and the ability to influence one’s destiny through actions undertaken in life, may have also appealed to women, given that the conditions for entering Valhöll and Sessrúmnir seem to have favoured men. Evidence for increased gender equality as a result of a shift in religious belief might explain the number of runestones erected by women, or recording their sponsorship of bridges as a symbol of the soul’s journey to God.

  On the other hand, the Church was hardly egalitarian, and curbed women’s agency in many ways. The traditional spirituality of the North gave women considerable power and control of access to the other worlds, all of which was removed by Christianity. Their status within the household was also demoted. At its core, this was part of the Church’s strategy of gaining access to the family unit—by usurping female dominance in that sphere—and thus to the kinship networks that were central to the real exercise of power in Scandinavian life. In this way, the new faith was able to create a space for itself between the general populace and the elites, thereby making the Church the only gateway to the divine.

  The impact of the conversion process, however, went even further than a reformation of political and social relationships. In some regions, even economies of subsistence were being reshaped by the demands that the Church placed on communities. The introduction of a stringent religious calendar—with a large number of holy days and periods of abstinence from certain foods, for example—had a significant impact on fishing practices. There is clear fishbone evidence for riverine fishing of freshwater species all the way through the Viking Age, as well as exploitation of the marine ‘outlands’, but it is not until the eleventh century that real quantities of saltwater fish begin to appear everywhere in the archaeological record. Especially in the North Sea, there is a new emphasis on deep-water fish
ing coincident not only with Christian demand but also linked to urban expansion and perhaps the potential for trade. The same process created a new market for the international exchange of dried fish products.

  The growth of unified kingdoms, the influence of the Church, and the economic motors that bound them together also provided impetus for another development of the late Viking Age: the establishment of true urban centres. They were distinctively different from the ‘proto-urban’ markets such as Hedeby and Birka that had expanded beyond their original limits to become crucial nodes of trade. Instead, these new towns were deliberate foundations made to express the Christian power of kings, in useful service to both God and mammon.

  Several of them involved a spatial shift within a small region, the new foundation gradually assuming the functions of an older market that was slowly abandoned. Around the turn of the eleventh century, for example, Roskilde was established in Denmark as a successor to nearby Lejre. The same thing happened in central Sweden in the 980s, when Birka was eclipsed by Sigtuna. In both cases, churches were built soon after the founding of the new centres, sometimes followed closely by a mint. Sigtuna, for example, was producing coins for its founder, King Olof Skötkonung (his nickname rather bluntly means ‘tax king’), from around 995. In Norway, new royal towns were founded at what would become Oslo, and most prominently at Nidaros (modern Trondheim) on the west coast.