Barbarians- Secrets of the Dark Ages

by Richard Rudgley

  Goods and merchants came to Hedeby and Birka from both eastern and western sources, some from remarkable distances. In the middle of the tenth century an Arab traveller named Al-Tartushi wrote about his visit to Hedeby, which he describes as 'a large town at the very far end of the world ocean. It has freshwater wells within the city. Its people worship Sirius except for a few who are Christians and have a church there.' Some of the numerous Viking Age graves that have been excavated at Birka contain Chinese silk, probably obtained by Viking traders via middlemen based around the Caspian Sea. The Baltic Sea was a crossroads for the seaborne trade routes that linked the western and eastern markets during the Viking Age (from the eighth to the eleventh centuries) – and Gotland was literally right in the middle of this sea of commercial opportunities. A large island about 106 miles long and 31 miles wide, it is some 50 miles from the Swedish mainland.

  The Silver Age of Gotland

  Gotland's hoards have become widely known to international treasure hunters in modern times. Dan Carlsson, an archaeologist based at Gotland University, told me that recent attempts by foreigners and Swedish nationals to dig up hoards had led to prosecutions, and resulted in the use (but not ownership) of metal detectors being made illegal in Gotland without special permission, a ban that was more recently extended throughout Sweden. The Viking Age hoards are mostly silver and the total weight of those found so far is about 2 tons. This is far more than has been found in the whole of the rest of Sweden. There are undoubtedly many more hoards still buried in the soils of Gotland, so the ban on the use of metal detectors was imposed for good reason. A single hoard that was found recently comprised 70 kilos of silver. There are probably one or two hoards on every farm on Gotland.

  The silver that makes up these hoards is usually found either in the form of coins or so-called silver bracelets. Despite the latter's name, Dan Carlsson told me that he had never found any of them on the wrists of either the male or female skeletons that he had excavated. These silver bands actually seem to have been the nearest thing to 'currency' known at the time. They are standardised in weight and obviously were used in transactions in which their value would have been well understood. We have seen in an earlier chapter that scales and weights were used in Scandinavia long before the Viking Age.

  Numerous portable scales and associated weights have also been found in Viking Gotland, but for the larger amounts of silver being exchanged bigger scales must have existed, although such artefacts have yet to be found. Of those weights that have been found the great majority have turned up at sites that were used for the Viking assemblies of freemen – the things. Perhaps the thing was the forum where merchants could make public oaths concerning their business. It is also a possibility that the weighing of weights themselves might have been conducted in full view of the other men attending the thing.

  Before rivers of silver started to flow into the Viking world, gold (mostly in the form of Roman coins) was the main precious metal – so much so that the period from about AD 400 to 550 has been dubbed the Golden Age of the North. It was out of this that the Scandinavians developed their gold bracteates, in the traditions of the Roman medallions. As this Golden Age marked the links with the Roman world, so the Silver Age that began later, in the ninth century, showed the links that were being forged with a new superpower on the world stage: the Islamic empire of the Arabs. Most of the coins that found their way to Gotland in the earlier period of its economic heyday were Arabic coins from the east, while others came from as far afield as Sassanian Iran and Moorish Spain. Later, from around 975, the majority of coins came from the west, from Anglo-Saxon England and Germany, indicating that the eastern trade routes had fallen into decline.

  Coins from various sources were part of the trading system that flourished in Gotland, but they were not used like modern currency. Their source or their value in terms of the coinage system to which they belonged were of no interest to the Vikings – it was simply their weight that mattered. There are many coins in the hoards that have been cut in half or into quarters in order to balance the scales. The use of coins as currency did not start in Gotland until the middle of the twelfth century.

  How did the Gotlanders become so rich? It was certainly not because they had any raw materials of value to outsiders; nor was their own craftsmanship or manufacturing industry (for which see below) sufficient on its own to explain all of their wealth. The answer seems to lie largely with their role as middlemen. These days Gotland is far from the trade arteries that dominate the western world, but in Viking times the Baltic was the hub of a vibrant economy – the island's inhabitants were able to trade exotic items both ways, accumulating huge hoards of silver in the process. They were shrewd businessmen who took their cut as middlemen, but they were also daring entrepreneurs willing to risk life and limb to bring back goods from the ends of the known world.

  Rock crystal was one of the main kinds of specialist goods controlled by Gotlandic middlemen. It was imported probably from the Black Sea region or from Basra in Persia (an important eastern centre of the crystal industry), and was used, among other things, for making beads and pendants. Rock crystal is an extremely hard substance and difficult to work; how the island craftsmen managed to drill holes in it is something of a mystery, but drill it they did. The fact that the archaeologists have found raw material, half-finished beads and fully crafted beads shows that not only did the islanders import rock crystal, but they also crafted it locally rather than buying it in finished form.

  An even greater mystery are the bigger rock crystals found on Gotland; these are some 4 or 5 cm (up to 2 inches) in diameter. Rather than being simply ornamental like their smaller counterparts, they had a practical function – as magnifying lenses that would have been used by craftsmen who, after years of close work, would find their sight failing. The lens are made to a standard that modern experts in optics have found to be amazingly high. There is not sufficient evidence to ascertain whether these were also manufactured on the island or imported in their finished form. Such rock crystals must have been highly sought after and therefore, no doubt, extremely expensive.

  They also had another use as so-called sun stones. Sun stones can be used for navigational purposes when the sky is overcast and the sun not directly visible. With the magnifying glass of rock crystal, the sunbeams would be concentrated in one spot and allow the navigator to work out the position of the sun. They worked, in a way, as a kind of compass. The confusing of these dual functions of the larger rock crystals – as magnifying lens and sun stone – has led to them being interpreted as the lens for a Viking telescope, which seems extremely unlikely to have been the case.

  There is evidence that trading in iron and specifically in swords was also high among their business priorities. Arms dealing was no doubt as highly lucrative in the past as it still is today. This trade continued into the Christian era; one Pope wrote to the local bishop, instructing him to tell the Gotlanders to cease selling swords to heathens. Among the exotica that found its way to the island are four or five so-called 'resurrection eggs', made of clay. They came from Kiev in the Ukraine and indicate that some of the Swedish Vikings at least had their initial contacts with Christianity from the Eastern Orthodox church before the faith arrived from western Europe.

  Even when we realise that the hoards were the result of the Gotlanders' joint roles as middlemen and bold travellers, we still need an explanation of why they buried their wealth in the ground. It of course shows a great surplus in wealth; that so much silver could be taken out of circulation without damaging their economy is a staggering fact. It was literally disposable wealth. They seem to have typically put their nest-eggs under their houses, perhaps depositing a little each year so their 'savings' grew over time. Were they just saving for a rainy day, or to have something to pass on to their children?

  It has been suggested that they may have been placed in the ground as an offering to the pagan gods. To us today this sacrifice may seem a plain absurdity �
�� but it is not so different to what happened to their money next. The very earth on which they lived and farmed was a bank to the barbarians, yet with the rise of the new religion of Christianity among them they were to pull their money out of nature's bank and reinvest it in the afterlife promised as a return by the Church. In the first centuries of the Christian era in Gotland, the islanders paid for the building of the numerous stone churches that mark the parishes of the island. The silver that had lain in the ground was turned to stone.

  The Picture Stones: Doorways to Another World?

  While rune stones are comparatively widespread in mainland Scandinavia, Gotland has very few. Instead, the Vikings of this island raised memorials to those who died far away from home, and whose bodies had either been lost at sea or could not be brought back to be buried for some other reason. Travellers who never came back from their adventures on the Russian rivers or in the Arab trading areas are remembered by their families who put up these stones for them. These memorials are known as picture stones and are a distinctively Gotlandic contribution to Viking culture. At the base of some of these standing stones animal bones have been unearthed, suggesting that feasts or memorial meals took place at the site of the memorial. Most of the stones that were carved and once painted in bright colours (little of this pigment remains today) on their surfaces show no runes like the famous stones of mainland Scandinavia, but vivid pictures that tell us something about the lives of the Gotland Vikings as well as something about their beliefs concerning the afterlife.

  Over 400 picture stones have been found to date. New finds are not that uncommon. While I was there, a picture stone was brought in to the museum storehouse – it had been uncovered by men digging in the ground by the side of a road in order to lay fibre optic cables. Although these stones once stood proud and erect in the landscape, few now remain in their original setting. Many reside in the national collections in Stockholm, while many are also kept in the Historical Museum of Gotland in the island's capital, Visby. The earliest examples date from the fifth century (that is, before the Viking period), and the latest from the twelfth century when the pagan Viking Age gave way to the Christian era. As memorials, they were placed in prominent spots in the landscape – at the side of tracks and roads, near bridges and close to the sites used for the thing assemblies.

  Many of the picture stones were shaped like doorways, and this has led to suggestions that they can be seen as portals to the world of the dead, as markers of the transition between life and death. Others have seen some stones as symbolically shaped as axes or phalluses. Whichever interpretation is correct, they remain a source of symbolic and practical information about the world of their creators.

  Early symbols include the motif of horses confronting each other, which reflects not only the Vikings' love of stallion fighting for sport but also probably stands as a symbol for the battle between positive and negative forces, between good and evil. This motif has also been linked to fertility rites. Dragons, snakes and other monstrous images on some of the picture stones appear to be linked to Norse mythology as it is known through the early-thirteenth-century Prose Edda and other literary sources. Some of the pagan gods are also present, Odin the most prominent among them. There is a scene on one picture stone (the Hammars stone from the Lärbro parish of Gotland, dated to the period 700–800) that depicts human sacrifice. It shows an armed warrior with a noose around his neck waiting to be hanged while another man, his head face down on an altar, seems about to be speared to death.

  Many picture stones have a number of panels on them in which different scenes are shown. Typically, those at the top of the stone reflect the world beyond – many depict the deceased being greeted in Valhalla, the Viking heaven, by a Valkyrie (a female spirit who attends to dead warriors) with a drinking horn full of mead. Other stones, such as one found under a church floor in the Ardre parish, shows Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse of Odin, being ridden by a dead man to Valhalla. We have already met Sleipnir in relation to the riddles of the Anglo-Saxons, and once again there is a riddle to solve.

  It has long perplexed scholars of Norse mythology that Sleipnir is not simply reserved for his owner Odin, king of the gods, to ride. Why are dead warriors allowed to ride the god's mount? The German scholar Detlev Ellmers has convincingly solved this problem. Using continental sources that record the customs of this time, he notes that when honoured guests of a king arrived by sea they were greeted at the shore with horses to ride to the regal hall. Often, if the guest was distinguished enough, the king would send his own horse out for his guest to ride back to the hall. In this explanation, Odin as king of the gods sends his own horse Sleipnir for the deceased to ride to the heavenly hall of Valhalla.

  The Vikings of Gotland, being of course surrounded by sea, also used the ship as a potent symbol of the journey to the other world. Yet the boat depicted on this picture stone clearly represents a worldly vessel too. Nautical archaeologists, lacking material proof of the kinds of rigging used in Viking ships, have found such images very useful in their making of replica vessels. In addition to fleshing out the picture of the rigging and other practical features of the ships, we can also see that the boats portrayed on the picture stones are quite small. Typically they show crews of fifteen to twenty or even less. These kinds of boats are very different from the Gokstad and Oseberg ships – less grand but more useful for trading down the Russian rivers. The larger vessels were simply too big to be hauled overland, which was something the Norse traders with the east had to do routinely. Often there were considerable overland distances to get from one river to the next, and the ship had to be small enough for its crew to pull it.

  While I was in Gotland I was fortunate enough to have a close look at a replica of such a ship (the rigging mirrors that on the picture stone, as shown in the illustrations). This ship, named Krampmacken ('The Prawn'), was housed in a boat shed on the coast. Dan Carlsson introduced me to a colleague of his named Jonas Ström, who was one of the crew who had rowed, sailed and pulled it from Gotland to Istanbul via the rivers and roads of eastern Europe on an expedition that took place in the 1980s. With the help of wheels – which the Vikings may or may not have used to help them – and modern road surfaces, Ström and the others were able to move the boat an average of 25 kilometres (just over 15 miles) per day overland and obviously much more rapidly down the rivers.

  Although this faithful replica of a Viking trading vessel could, with some concerted effort, be brought out of its boat shed by means of manpower alone, Carlsson and Ström decided that this time it would do no harm to tow it out with the help of a Volvo. As the ship was hauled out of the shed, I remarked to Ström that it was rather fitting that this modern Swedish vehicle was pulling an ancient kind of Swedish vehicle. He turned towards me with a wry smile, and corrected me by pointing out that this Viking-style vessel was not Swedish but Gotlandic. The islanders have a very distinct identity and their dialect is difficult for many mainlanders to follow. Many of the older people have never visited mainland Sweden. This independent spirit of the Gotlanders runs very deep and certainly has its roots in the Viking Age, if not before.

  The social world of Viking Age Gotland was very different to that of mainland Sweden. There were no kings, no lords and no upper class whatsoever. It was a society of farmers who doubled up as traders. From the evidence of the distribution of the hoards (which are as common in the middle of the island as they are in the coastal areas), it seems that all the islanders had a stake in the trading network that linked them with the outside world. Treaties were made with other societies in the Baltic region and tribute was paid to the Swedish kings – the price of independence. Such a society was suited to the particular circumstances of living on an island and, in the absence of a permanent centralised power such as a king, the whole administration was run by the things. Each part of the island (which has been, since the introduction of Christianity, divided into parishes) had its own local thing; then there were a small number of reg
ional things and the althing which representatives of all parts of the island would attend. The althing would meet once a year in midsummer in the middle of the island to discuss matters of importance to the whole island community.

  The democratic leanings of this island community stood in contrast to the centralised kingdoms that were emerging in mainland Scandinavia, but they were echoed elsewhere – in the brave new world of the Nordic colonies in Iceland and beyond.

  Chapter Twenty Two

  NORTH ATLANTIC COLONIES

  Thule… the very last of named places: a place at the limits of the cosmos. The lure of such an island fired the imagination, and as knowledge of the northern lands expanded, so Thule retreated, staying always just beyond the familiar.

  Christina Horst Roseman, Pytheas of Massalia

  We have seen how the Vikings' small ships made it possible for them to raid down the French rivers and trade down the Russian rivers. The larger vessels, epitomised by the Gokstad ship, were able to spread the Viking influence further across the seas. The Vikings' travels by ship brought them into contact and conflict with numerous peoples who had their own established cultural and trading networks. While the Norsemen were bringing their own influences to bear on the existing cultural mosaic of the Old World, they were also being greatly transformed in the process. Yet there is another part of their epic story that took place far from the centres of either Islamic or Christian civilisation. Their pioneering spirit took them beyond the confines of that world into the uncharted seas of the North Atlantic.

  Ultima Thule: the Quest for the Far North

  In the fourth century BC, Pytheas of Massalia (the name once given to the ancient port of Marseilles) wrote in his book On the Ocean about a northern island that he named Thule. Exactly which place he meant to designate by this name remains a mystery. Western Norway, the Faeroe Islands and Iceland have all been put forward as candidates. The writers who followed Pytheas in mentioning this fabled northern land are equally vague concerning its whereabouts, even down to the time of Bede. A ninth-century Irish monk named Dicuil who was based in France hints that Thule may be identified with Iceland, and by the eleventh century Adam of Bremen says just this in explicit terms. A recent review of this ancient mystery by Christina Horst Roseman suggests that Pytheus' Thule may be the Faeroe Islands.