Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  Trade does not seem to have played a major role during the early years of Sigtuna or Roskilde: they and other towns were established primarily as royal administrative centres rather than marketplaces. The shift from Birka to Sigtuna was not a direct transfer of people and function but a discontinuous process—because this new town was not an emporium but the symbolic focus of a new kind of power. It is no coincidence that the founding of Sigtuna was almost exactly contemporaneous with Harald Bluetooth’s grandiose projects in Denmark, and in different ways both undertakings reflect the ambitions of young Christian rulers who subscribed to new models of kingship.

  The process of state formation may have been a collaborative undertaking shared between monarchs, loyal nobility, the Church, and the new urban centres. Towns were focal points for Christian burials and services, and the prime locations for churches, shrines, and sites of pilgrimage. The association of urban centres with the cult of saints was encouraged by the Church, and the early royal heroes of the conversion were rapidly canonised in order to serve as national figures and rallying points for religious unification. These late towns can be seen as ‘ports of faith’: secure entry-points for Christian ideas and practices under royal patronage and protection, supported by an authority that emphasised the official line in belief.

  The new towns had eclectic populations. The people of Sigtuna contrast sharply with those of rural communities, in that they came from a wide geographic area from northern, central, and eastern Europe, and the British Isles. Crucially, this is a product of mobility—people moving around in their daily lives—not a matter of permanent migration. Roughly half of the Sigtuna citizens were non-local, with a tendency for women to travel more than men. Runestones in the town mention what appear to be guilds from Frisia (the modern Low Countries), joining the Baltic and Finnish diaspora that had been expanding in southern Scandinavia for centuries.

  This new urbanism did not mean that all power had been wrested from the countryside and secured in the hands of the king and Church. Local chieftains retained the loyalty of their communities, and tensions between these different levels of society are evident long into the Middle Ages.

  Perhaps because of their old links to the rural population, the earlier market centres such as Birka and Hedeby had long half-lives. At least some kind of activity continued there after their primary mercantile functions had moved on. The last coin was minted in Hedeby in 1086, and the town’s products continued to turn up along the familiar trade routes. The hierarchy of markets was still alive, with the difference that these once-grand emporia had been overtaken by the royal towns.

  As Scandinavian society changed under all these external influences, the new rulers were presented with both opportunities and challenges. In the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, at least within their North Sea world, it is no exaggeration to say that the new Viking kings began to entertain imperial ambitions.

  Harald Bluetooth was among the first of them, consolidating his hold not only on modern-day Denmark but also over parts of southern Sweden and Norway. But as we have seen, the heavy-handed exercise of authority that must have accompanied his enormous construction projects, and perhaps his muscular view of conversion, ended in his deposition and death. However, things would go better for the man who brought him down—his son Svein Forkbeard.

  Late tenth-century Scandinavia was riven by a new series of civil conflicts, a seemingly unchanging situation in the North. In a sense these were large-scale versions of the inter-kingdom rivalries that had always been a part of the late Iron Age political scene, but this time played out as wars between what were fast becoming nation states. Denmark’s crown holdings in Norway, the manifestation of Harald Bluetooth’s claims, had been held in trust by the Lade jarls—the rulers of a semi-independent territory of that name in the north of the country. However, around 975 their leader, Hákon Sigurdsson, cut ties with Denmark and for that reason did not come to Harald Bluetooth’s aid during the rebellion.

  While Svein Forkbeard was consolidating his reign in Denmark, from the 980s onwards, Viking attacks on England began again. Unlike those of the late eighth and ninth centuries, however, the assaults that took place during this period were perpetrated by large, well-organised fleets under the command of Scandinavian royals, new and powerful players in the North Sea region.

  In 991, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the arrival of a Viking leader named Ólaf Tryggvason. A descendent of Harald Finehair who had spent his youth in exile in Kievan Rus’, he commanded a fleet of ninety-three ships in a series of raids against southern and eastern England. Ólaf’s campaign culminated in a battle at Maldon in Essex, immortalised in an Old English poem, where he destroyed a large army of local militias and was subsequently paid ten thousand pounds to leave. This was the first of many bribes—termed danegeld, ‘Dane-payment’, in the sources—that were made to Viking groups over the following years. The scale of the extortion would increase rapidly over time, as attested by the large number of hoards of eleventh-century English coinage found in Scandinavia.

  These raids have left violent evidence in the archaeology. At Weymouth and Oxford, both in the south of England, two mass graves of execution victims seem to represent reprisals against Scandinavians. In the Weymouth burial, the decapitated bodies of fifty men had been thrown in an old quarry pit. The grave has been dated to 970–1025, with isotopic analysis indicating that the majority of the men came from regions as varied as Arctic, subarctic, and southern Scandinavia; northern Iceland; Russia; and the Baltic coasts. This is a very similar geographical spread to some of the large armies from the days of the hydrarchy, a century earlier. At another site in the grounds of what is now St. John’s College, Oxford, thirty-seven men had been brutally slain and then dumped in a ditch. Radiocarbon dates indicate that they were murdered at some point around the year 1000, and given their broad ‘Viking diasporic’ origins, it seems likely that they were raiders whose hamingjur luck spirits had abandoned them.

  For ambitious and successful warlords without a crown, men like Ólaf Tryggvason, the large payments made by the beleaguered English could provide the means for an attempt on a Scandinavian throne. In 995 Ólaf did just that, returning to Norway and establishing himself as king following the death of the Lade jarl Hákon Sigurdsson. During Ólaf’s rule, the first coins were minted in Norway. Based heavily on contemporaneous English issues (familiar to the Vikings for all the wrong reasons, because they had been bribed with so many of them), Ólaf’s coins featured Christian iconography and an inscription proclaiming him to be king of the Norwegians.

  Ólaf’s reign proved to be short, and he was consumed by the same internecine politics that had brought him to power. Sources like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle make it possible to follow Viking movements of the ninth century fairly well over a period of months, with a level of resolution that provides a basic orientation in the forces and commanders involved. A hundred years later, it is a measure of change that events now emerge as recognisable ‘history’, albeit largely of the drier kings-and-battles variety; the medieval saga material also fills in the detail, with varying reliability.

  The war that brought Ólaf down was complex and vicious, but a close look at its intricacies reveals the inner workings of these late Viking-Age kingdoms.

  Ólaf had made many enemies. In taking the Norwegian crown when Jarl Hákon died, Ólaf had alienated the natural successor, Hákon’s son Eirík. Fleeing to Sweden ahead of Ólaf’s assassins, Eirík took shelter with Ólof the Tax-King in Sigtuna. At the same time, Svein Forkbeard had not forgotten the territories in Norway that had once belonged to his father, Harald Bluetooth. These three men—a displaced Norwegian heir, an ambitious Swede hungry for land, and a Dane nursing a grudge—formed an alliance against King Ólaf of Norway.

  The crunch came in the late summer of 999, or perhaps the following year (the sources are unclear). At Svöldr in the southern Baltic, Ólaf was ambushed at sea by a combined fleet of Danes, Norwegian exiles, and
their Swedish allies. It was commanded by Eirík in his flagship, the Iron Ram. The resulting sea battle was one of the largest of the Viking Age and lived long in saga memory. Faced with overwhelming odds, all but eleven of Ólaf’s seventy ships fled, leaving him outnumbered more than ten to one by the opposing fleet. King Ólaf Tryggvason made a final stand on the deck of his flagship, the Long Serpent, but seeing the battle was lost, he leapt into the sea in full armour. With Ólaf’s death, Norway was divided between Svein Forkbeard and the Swedish king, Olof, but much of it was held in fief by Eirík Hákonsson and his brother (confusingly also called Svein).

  Svein Forkbeard then turned his attentions to England, where he conducted a number of large raids that escalated from 1004. Other Vikings, such as the famous warrior Thorkell the Tall, led their own attacks from 1009 to 1012. Some scholars regard this period as effectively a second Viking Age: a new period of catastrophic raiding but unfolding in a totally different political context to the assaults of a century earlier. The attacks grew steadily worse; in 1013, Svein Forkbeard launched a full invasion of England.

  It was a feature of the first large-scale raids, in the ninth century, that the political targets were either empires riven with civil war and therefore divided into factions (like Frankia), or regions containing many small kingdoms (like England). In either case, the effect was the same—advantage to the Vikings but also a strange form of protection in that if one polity, province, or river valley fell to the Scandinavians, it was a regional rather than national loss. Svein’s invasion of a united England was itself partly a long-term result of earlier Viking attacks, but it also meant that success in war would have dramatic consequences.

  The Danish forces advanced rapidly, seizing strategic targets and generally spreading chaos in a country already weakened by years of massive attacks. East Anglia, where they landed, went down quickly, followed by Northumbria and Lindsey in the north. The old Danelaw territories, full of people of Scandinavian descent, pledged allegiance to Svein. The Viking army divided into two divisions—led by Svein and his son Knút—for a two-pronged assault on the south. Winchester fell, but the Londoners resisted; in an ironic throwback to the confusion of the old Frankish campaigns, they were assisted by Thorkell the Tall, whose Vikings had signed on with the English as mercenaries. It was not enough. Svein threw his whole army against London (the famous nursery rhyme, ‘London Bridge is falling down’, is supposedly a memory of the Viking attack on the strategic link across the Thames). The city surrendered. One consequence, after years of raids, was that the people had lost confidence in their leaders, especially the king, Aethelred, and as a result the English monarchy collapsed. The royal family escaped abroad.

  Having won Denmark by force in fatal rebellion against his father in the late 980s, and regained his lost Norwegian inheritance at Svöldr in 999, Svein became the first Viking king of England fourteen years later.

  The bizarre coda is that he died, apparently of natural causes, just five weeks afterwards in February 1014. The result, predictably, was decades of dynastic fighting that would engulf the thrones of England, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

  At first, the English rallied and Aethelred returned, driving Svein’s son Knút back to Denmark, which was under the temporary rule of Knút’s brother Harald. By 1015 the family were ready to go west again, and together they led another invasion of England with the whole Danish fleet. Aethelred died at this time and was succeeded by his son, Edmund Ironside, who led months of fierce resistance to the Vikings. In October 1016, however, Knút won a decisive battle, and Edmund Ironside himself died soon afterwards, possibly of wounds sustained in combat. With Knút on the throne, England was once again in Danish hands.

  In 1018 or 1019, Harald died back in Denmark, and in order to secure the kingdom, Knút travelled home that year. To pay for the costs of his fleet, he levied a massive tribute from the English that even left its mark on Swedish runestones. On a memorial from Orkesta in Uppland, one can read of a man named Ulf who “took geld in England” from three leaders—Tosti, Thorketil, and finally Knút himself.

  Upon accepting the Danish crown, Knút gained control of what was, in reality, a North Sea empire, which he ruled as a true Christian monarch in the European style. Norway was reabsorbed into the Danish holdings in 1029. Knút’s ambitions, his projections, are commemorated in one of the most extraordinary images of the Viking Age: a confraternity book donated by the king and his wife to Winchester New Minster (effectively the national cathedral) in 1031 as a demonstration of lay support for the Church. On the dedication page of the Liber Vitae is the first from-life portrait we have of a Viking king. Knút is shown standing by the minster altar, a crown being placed on his head by an angel pointing upwards to God in heaven; the king rules with direct blessing of the divine. Knút’s right hand grasps a huge altar cross that he has given to the monks; the gold leaf still shines today. His royal generosity is evident, a model patron of the Church and the arts. But his other hand firmly grips the hilt of his sheathed sword: he goes armed in the minster—the realpolitik that backs up his claim. To add still further to the scene, on the other side of the altar stands Knút’s wife, Emma, the widow of King Aethelred, against whom he first fought for the kingdom; in marrying his late enemy’s wife, the Viking legitimates his ‘Englishness’.

  Knút remained on the English throne until his death in 1035, but his empire had already begun to loosen in his lifetime and did not survive him. The largest territory ever controlled, up to that time, by a single Scandinavian ruler was once again divided. Norway and Denmark had been given by Knút to two of his sons during his lifetime, but they either died or were deposed within a few years of his death. A third son, Hardaknút, inherited England and made an uneasy treaty with the new king of Norway, Magnús Ólafsson, stating that their combined territories would be ceded to whichever of them lived longest (hardly a recipe for peace).

  In 1042, Hardaknút died of a stroke while drinking, and Magnús accordingly laid claim to Denmark. The English nobility seized the opportunity and took back their throne, installing Edward the Confessor, Queen Emma’s son by her first marriage to King Aethelred. Edward reigned for more than twenty years, but after his death in 1066, the resulting claims on the English throne—from Norway, via the descendants of Magnús; from Normandy, via a somewhat tortuous connection with English royalty; and from the Saxon nobles themselves—would set the stage for the twin invasions of Harald Hard-Ruler and William the Conqueror. Two hundred and seventy years from Lindisfarne, more than three hundred from Salme, western European history would swing on a pendulum between a Norwegian former commander of the Varangian Guard and a fifth-generation Viking descended from Rollo’s army of the Seine.

  The Viking Age, even in its artificial sense of a historical construct, was never a straight narrative sequence.

  In the arena of Scandinavian politics, its end really began with Svein’s death and was completed with the passing of his son, Knút. Even these men were quite familiar—if not quite yet as equals—to the European royalty of the Continent. The same can be said of Scandinavia itself. At one level it was transformed beyond recognition from the mass of tiny polities that had clawed their way up and out from the crisis years of the sixth century. By the mid-eleventh century, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were political realities, with only parts of Svealand and its centre at Uppsala holding out against at least a formal adoption of Christianity.

  But, at another, deeper level, the North still ran in the old ways of thinking, and of being. The descendants of the diaspora still prospered in other lands, and not all of them were under the sway of the Scandinavian kings—a different, older Viking Age was still alive. Some people had not yet forgotten their fylgjur, the spirit-women inside every person, and the final chapter of the Viking saga concerns a place where they still reside today.

  17

  LANDS OF FIRE AND VINES

  WHILE NEW NATIONS WERE BEING constructed in Scandinavia, combining the idea of a
single kingdom with power that ultimately derived from the Christian God, entirely new worlds were being opened up in the North Atlantic.

  From its settlement in the ninth century, Iceland grew and grew, offering a chance for a bold social experiment that was in many ways the direct opposite of what was happening in the Vikings’ homelands. Like the militant hydrarchies before them, the Icelanders too were shaping a social order of their own, something different and new. The wild and fiery landscape of the island, dotted with volcanoes, great plains of black lava, and glaciers, suited the culture that would emerge there.

  Iceland was also a staging ground for exploration and colonisation even farther west over the ocean. The Norse travelled for familiar reasons, in search of land, resources, and wealth, but also for the winning of a reputation worthy of praise and remembrance. Voyaging over rough seas, uncharted coasts of ice-bound rock and fresh grass were found first in Greenland. When its valleys and fjords were thickly settled with farms, some went west again—sailing past a shore of broken stone and miraculous kilometres of white beaches, to finally arrive in a place they called Vinland, the ‘land of vines’. Although they never knew it, the Norse had reached the continent of North America.

  As with most undiscovered territories, the North Atlantic was an arena where people could remake themselves, or at least try to do so. Here, the Vikings experienced tensions with the lives they had left behind them, with who others wanted them to be. They also encountered the unexpected, in meeting the inhabitants of places they soon realised had not been empty after all.