Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  If the American seaboard was a Viking terminus of sorts, it was nonetheless an extremity of a regional endeavour in the North Atlantic that, in some ways, lasted longer than Norse colonies elsewhere. We have followed the Vikings from their distant origins in the turmoil of the sixth century, through their political consolidation in the eighth and ninth centuries, to their diaspora of raiding and trading across Eurasia and the western sea. How did their world end?

  18

  THE MANY ENDS OF THE VIKING AGE

  SOME WOULD HAVE THE VIKING Age beginning on June 8, 793, with the attack on Lindisfarne; others would have it draw to a close with the Battle of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire on September 25, 1066, when King Harald Hard-Ruler of Norway died leading the charge against the English line, an arrow in his throat.

  As ever, it was not nearly so simple.

  Even in the unified nation states of the old homelands, with their divinely sanctioned Christian kings, the path ahead was not smooth. Norway and Denmark remained relatively stable as political entities, but far into the Middle Ages they were riven by civil wars that were really not so altered from those of the Viking Age. The main difference was the factional fighting for single countries and their crowns, rather than dynastic conflicts for swathes of land and little states. Overseas raiding continued, but as international politics rather than piratical ambition; in a sense this latter died with Svein Forkbeard, who so briefly enjoyed his successful conquest of England in 1014. That said, it probably felt little different on the receiving end.

  In a curious way, the medieval Scandinavian kings also continued the Viking raids in a new context—that of the Crusades. These sacred wars of the later eleventh century onwards were prosecuted close to home, among the Baltic tribes who still resisted Christianity, and of course away in the Holy Land itself. Only a generation after Stamford Bridge, the Norwegian king Sigurd led his fleet along the coast of Frankia and into the Mediterranean, plundering as he went, just like his Viking forebears. Arriving eventually in Palestine, he was instrumental in helping the king of Jerusalem capture the city of Sidon. Sigurd then turned for home, stopping at Constantinople where he was welcomed by Emperor Alexios, to whom he gave his ships. He was provided with overland transport back to Scandinavia, but in true Varangian tradition many of his men decided to stay on as mercenaries of the Byzantine Empire.

  In its overseas territories, the Norwegian crown maintained tentative control of the Hebrides until the 1260s, but assumed de facto government of Iceland at the same time, ending its centuries of commonwealth. Orkney and Shetland remained firmly Scandinavian—islands of proudly self-sufficient pirate fisherfolk—until their annexation by Scotland in the fifteenth century.

  Unlike Norway and Denmark, the Swedes would take centuries to finally come together, either as a country or (up to a point) as Christians. Olof the Tax-King had his little power base in Sigtuna, but that was far from the whole realm. The tribal enmities of the Svear and Götar peoples ran deep, and still divided the country from the central plains to the lake lands. The power of the Church gripped the south, which would remain under the rule of the Danish throne until the seventeenth century. In the Mälar Valley, however, it was another matter—the old beliefs lived on alongside the new until the 1100s, and probably, behind closed doors, for much longer than that. Adam of Bremen wrote his alarmingly graphic description of the Uppsala temple, and its pagan festivities so obscene that he could not bring himself to relate them, only twenty-nine years before the fall of Jerusalem in the First Crusade.

  The fate—in a very Norse sense—of the Viking diaspora was different again. As might be expected, the social, political, economic, and ideological motors that drove the Scandinavian transformation of the eighth to eleventh centuries wound down in different ways, at different times and paces, in different regions. There are several ways of accessing this.

  One is through the ‘archaeological’ view of Viking-ness, the difficult connections between social change and material culture. The fallacy of making a simple equation of this kind—identifying a ‘Viking’ necklace, say—was exposed long ago when types of beads that had always been firmly associated with Viking-Age settlements began to turn up on Danish excavations dated fifty years before the traditional ‘start’ of the period; did the Viking Age begin earlier than we thought? This is what prompted the scholarly debate on the Migration Period crisis and its long-term consequences, the fundamental changes of the mid-eighth century, and a more subtle understanding of history than one that rested on the burning of a monastery at Lindisfarne.

  The same is true for the trajectories of material culture in the late Viking Age and after, with everything that this implies. In central Sweden, for example, runestones of classic late Viking-Age type continued long into the 1100s. On Gotland, jewellery of exactly the same kind as Viking-Age people wore was clearly still fashionable in the 1200s. In Scotland and the Isles, the transition to a medieval economy should really be placed in the late thirteenth century, mainly on the grounds of changes in the fishing industry and a serious shift to a deep-water catch. In Dublin and the other Irish ‘city states’, decorative patterns common in the eleventh century, especially the twisting beasts and interlace of the so-called Ringerike and Urnes art styles, were actively being used a hundred years later. Then there are all the ‘hybrid’ identities. When did the Vikings on the Seine start to become ‘Normans’, for example? Judging by how they signalled their identity, this happened within about a decade of Rollo’s first land grant in 911. In the territories of Kievan Rus’, on the other hand, there is a material continuity of recognisably Scandinavian elements at least into the 1200s.

  The key is the illusory conflation of identity and things. Yes, of course, objects can be used to signal status, affiliation, preference, and more, but they can also be ambiguous, ironic, even used to mock what they ostensibly affirm. There is only limited sense in talking of a ‘Viking’ sword and a ‘medieval’ one, and we must turn to larger social processes.

  Alone among the former Viking colonies, Normandy’s boundaries have remained intact, and there is, even now, a strong sense of contrast to the rest of France—an identification with the Scandinavian origins of the province that can at times become politically charged. The dukedom continued into the medieval period proper, naturally aided by the fact that its ruler also occupied the throne of England. In the British Isles, Yorkshire and the north would retain an underlying Scandinavian character for centuries, a fierce independence that was a legacy from the time when Eirík Bloodaxe held out against the southern English; it was no accident that the north largely joined Harald Hard-Ruler’s invasion in 1066. In a more diluted form, the same was true of the former Danelaw territories. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Great Army settlers never entirely disappeared, but instead fused with the rising notion of England (a concept in part forged in resistance to the Vikings) to shape new settlements, new trading connections, and new lives. In Ireland, the Norse coastal enclaves became the primary urban foundations of the Middle Ages, as the economy and politics of the country gradually integrated. However, the town-and-country dichotomy would persist into modern times.

  In all these areas, the Vikings live on today primarily as tourist magnets, as the draw of heritage trails and ‘experiences’. The Scandinavians of the Viking Age were acutely concerned with memory; they might have been happy at this.

  The world of the Rus’ followed a different route, separate from Scandinavia but nonetheless fully integrated into European politics. The East was never separated. The continuing rise of Kiev made its princes into powers to be reckoned with. Their northern counterpart, and occasional rival, was in time even ennobled with its own aristocratic title bestowed on the city itself: Lord Novgorod the Great. Its furs kept English monarchs warm into Tudor and Elizabethan times. The Viking roots of the riverine voyageurs who had founded the trade were never fully lost, and that link was occasionally activated in alliances and the like. It was difficult famil
y history: even as late as the Soviet 1950s, the Communist Party felt it necessary to deny that the origins of Russia lay with Scandinavian ambition, rather than Slavic enterprise.

  It is in the North Atlantic that ‘Norse culture’ continued longest, to the extent that for many years books on the Vikings continued to reference Icelandic settlements and material culture that were solidly medieval in date. (I have done so here, a little, in the Norse contacts with the high Canadian Arctic.)

  These were not static societies. The social codes came increasingly under the mantle of the Church, although they were necessarily adapted to the unique sensibilities of the region. Iceland’s politics became ever more tightly bound with those of Norway. The age of the saga-writers—Snorri Sturluson not least among them—was also a time of intense manoeuvring for power among the country’s leading families. Archaeologists can tell how rural architecture and life on the land changed with new social conditions in Iceland and the needs of a colder climate, but at the same time there were real continuities with the Viking Age. It is no accident that the medieval saga-world and the ancestral Viking past can feel so similar on the page. Still today, Iceland is probably the region of the diaspora that most consciously and approvingly preserves its connection to the past.

  In Greenland, the Norse occupation did not last, but the end was drawn out and is still an enigmatic puzzle to researchers. A reorientation of the ivory trade to India and Africa in the thirteenth century affected the demand for walrus tusks—the colony’s prestige export item—and, in general, European merchants chose to do business with more accessible places closer to home. This was a major economic blow, in a place where life was never far from marginal at the best of times. The ships from Iceland and Norway grew fewer by the year. Nonetheless, the settlers clung to their farms into the 1300s, their numbers dwindling slowly. For much of that time, they still kept up with European fashion and political trends; the annual trading vessels were a rich source of information and gossip. Greenland was remote, but not a complete backwater even so. Several runic inscriptions record voyages of hunting and exploration far into the frozen north of the country and across into Arctic Canada, all the way up to Ellesmere Island. Into the Middle Ages, however, a steady deterioration in the climate meant that viable agricultural subsistence became unreliable at precisely the time when the Norse needed to depend on it more than ever. There are also unproven suggestions of conflict with Thule groups moving into Greenland from the north. Over time, people moved away, or died, and the farms just ran down.

  The destiny of Norse Vinland was linked to that of its explorers’ homelands, but there is a brief coda. In 1121, a bishop in Greenland “left to seek Vinland” and thereby disappeared from history. In 1347, a storm-tossed ship arrived in Iceland, blown off course while on its way home to Greenland—its crew had been collecting timber along the Labrador coast, the ‘Markland’ of the Norse. The memory of the far West was evidently kept alive in the North Atlantic if, by the fourteenth century, it could be noted without much interest that people were felling trees there. But after that the record is silent, until Norwegian researchers found L’Anse aux Meadows more than half a millennium later.

  24. The very end. On the banks of the fjord at Hvalsey near modern Qaqortoq in south Greenland lies the now-ruined church where Sigrid Björnsdóttir married Thorstein Ólafsson on September 16, 1408. A report of their wedding is the last reference we have to the Norse occupation of Greenland that began in the Viking Age. Photo: Neil Price, taken on the 600th anniversary of the marriage.

  The last message from the Greenland colony is a strange one. At Hvalsey church, near modern Qaqortoq, on September 16, 1408, Sigrid Björnsdóttir married Thorstein Ólafsson, the captain of a ship that had arrived from Iceland. We know of this because the legitimacy of their marriage was questioned when the couple sailed back to Thorstein’s home. It is clear that nobody in Iceland seems to have thought there was still a functioning clergy in Greenland. This sceptical note is the very last reference to the Norse occupation that began in the Viking Age, and it also includes other details brought back by that last ship—a lethal witch trial, complicated with sexual jealousy and the vicious micropolitics of a small community where enmities can get out of control. The outpost to the west was in terminal decline, and its ultimate abandonment cannot have been far off.

  Hvalsey church is surprisingly well-preserved today, surrounded by the tumbled stones of the settlers’ farms with the water stretching away in front. Exactly six hundred years to the day after the wedding, in September 2008, I was with a group of Viking scholars visiting the spot to mark this distant anniversary. In a curious and moving echo, we were accompanied by a descendant of the original couple. The clouds were low and grey, icebergs dotted the fjord, and on the way in a whale had surfaced close to the boat. It was a forbidding and lonely place, the ruined church roofless and open to a dark sky.

  Through the second and third sections of this book, from the Viking phenomenon to new lands and nations, the early medieval Scandinavians have emerged more as they are conventionally perceived: as travellers in pursuit of profit, loot, fame, or a new home. Their world was vast.

  A person born in Swedish Uppland could have walked the streets of Baghdad’s round city, the centre of the Islamic world. More importantly, they could then have gone home and told everyone about it, and shown them the wonderfully smooth, flowing cloth of shining colours they’d bought. More striking still is the fact that their family and friends might have compared that silk unfavourably with the nicer stuff that Cousin Eirík had traded from the gulf of the southern sea the year before, after it had made a long journey through many hands from somewhere improbably farther east where (so they say) people had differently shaped eyes.

  A person born in Denmark could have cruised with Vikings through the waters of Frankia and fought on the Seine beneath the burning walls of Paris, before heading out for the Midgard Sea from a base on the Loire. They could have passed the great rock at its entrance and plundered all the way to—just possibly—Alexandria, and back. Think of the tales, the stories told in the taverns of Europe, of the dazzling mosque of Córdoba and of the stone gods with animal heads in the delta of the Nile.

  One individual from the later Viking Age can stand for them all, here at the end, someone we have already met. Shortly after the year 1000, Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir coasted the shores of Helluland and Markland before landing in Vinland with her husband, Thorfinn karlsefni, and their crew. They were probably not the first Norse visitors and likely followed the path taken by others before them. Gudríd was pregnant, and while in Vinland, she gave birth to the first European child born in North America (and how appropriate to future history that he should be called Snorri). She had already come a long way, of Norwegian family from Iceland via Greenland, and from one set of beliefs to the new faith. She met First Nations people, and later—making a pilgrimage to Rome—she would almost certainly meet the pope; she had eaten wild grapes in Vinland, and she would taste Mediterranean wines under the Italian sun. By the time she reached old age as a Christian nun in Iceland, Gudríd was probably the most travelled woman on the planet.

  These are all familiar figures of the ‘Viking world’, or more properly of the diaspora, updated in the archaeological details but nonetheless the people we know. But we should not forget the first section of the book, when we saw who they really were. That traveller in Baghdad was grateful that their hamingja was so powerful, that their luck-spirit got them home safe. The raider in Andalucía made blood offerings to the gods of lightning and war, and trusted that the valkyrjur would always be there, watching and waiting. Even Gudríd knew the right songs to summon otherworldly beings at the call of a völva sorceress, before turning away from them to a vision of the White Christ. Her descendants would be bishops. Perhaps even she was content that her hugr had, in the end, truly found its home.

  The Viking mind is far away from us today, but occasionally just about tangible. When we walk th
rough a forest at night, or watch the moon rise over a black field of hraun lava, or greet the spring in the unnervingly still waters of a lake, we can touch its workings for a moment or two.

  Beyond the stereotypes, the Viking Age (and not just in Scandinavia) was a time of horrifying violence and equally awful structures of institutionalised, patriarchal oppression. Men and women, along with people who adopted a remarkably broad spectrum of different gendered identities, lived within and through these networks—building, perpetuating, and supporting them, but also tearing them down, resisting and subverting, creating anew.

  The same Viking Age was also a period of social innovation, a vivid and multi-cultural time, with considerable tolerance of radical ideas and foreign faiths. It was a period of flourishing arts, with an explicit acceptance that travel and cultural encounter broadened one’s outlook. If people today bring anything away from a meeting with the Viking Age, it should be this. We should never ignore or suppress the brutal realities behind the clichés—the carnage of the raids, the slaving, the misogyny—but there was much, much more to the Vikings. They changed their world, but they also allowed themselves to be altered, in turn; indeed, they embraced those connections with other peoples, places, and cultures.