by Farley Mowat
Just who were these fearsome folk?
They came of the same stock as the Teutonic tribes that overran most of Europe and contributed so largely to the destruction of the Roman Empire. Their ancestors were the war bands of Aesir (Eastmen) who invaded Denmark first, then crossed into southern Sweden where they became known as the Svear, or Suines (eventually Swedes). The first to arrive in the Scandinavian peninsula seized most of the useable land in the south and east, leaving latecomers to make the best they could of what remained, including the mountainous and fiord-riven westward bulge of south-central Norway.
It is a misconception that Scandinavians have always been great seafarers—born with salt water in their veins. The Aesir had no maritime tradition. They were inland-dwelling landlubbers until they reached the shores of the North Atlantic. Several centuries had to pass thereafter before they became familiar with the sea.
Although the remains of a number of Scandinavian craft built prior to A.D. 600 have been found, none was truly seaworthy. They were narrow, lightweight wooden shells with dangerously little freeboard, suitable only for coastal or inland waters. They were propelled almost exclusively by oars. Sails must have been rudimentary since the boats lacked effective keels, and sails would therefore have been of little practical value. Even the largest Scandinavian vessels—the aptly named longships, some of which were more than a hundred feet overall and formidable fighting craft—were fatally susceptible to swamping or breaking up if they dared to go deep-sea.
By the latter part of the sixth century, the narrow strips of arable land fringing Norway’s coastal fiords and running inland along the steep river valleys were becoming severely overcrowded. People of a naturally bellicose nature were increasingly using warriors’ weapons either to defend their own slivers of land or to engross those of their neighbours. Blood flowed. Feuds flared. And men found themselves forced to turn more and more to the sea for their daily bread.
Early in the seventh century, Northmen seem to have quite suddenly became seafarers rather than coast crawlers. I believe they accomplished this rapid transition by copying others who had long been master mariners.
The relative abundance of timber from trees native to Scandinavia, found in Shetland and Orkney archaeological sites of the Middle Ages, shows that Northern Islanders were in the habit of visiting the Scandinavian coast. It should therefore be no surprise that their vessels would become models for what would soon come sailing out of Norwegian fiords.
About the turn of the century, a new type of Scandinavian vessel, called havskip in Norwegian, later knorr, appeared in the Western Ocean. Shorter, broader, and deeper than previous Norse vessels, the double-ended havskip had much greater freeboard and, of utmost importance, a long keel to give her “a hold on the water” when under sail. Like Alban vessels, she was square-rigged and in such a fashion as to be able to point relatively close to the wind. She did not have to rely on oars as her predecessors had done. Apart from the limitations imposed by an all-wooden construction, she was probably as good a seaboat as her Northern Island equivalent, which she closely resembled in form and function.
The fiord dwellers who sailed these vessels soon became proficient in a new element and it is not unreasonable to suppose they learned the trade in good part from Alban mariners. They may even have used Alban pilots and sailing masters (willing or unwilling) when first they began to dare the Western Ocean.
Doubtless the first Northmen to reach Shetland came in peace, bringing cargoes of iron, meal, and wood. They may have made port in the excellent harbour of Bressay Sound, then as now the main entrepôt for the northern archipelago. The tales they would have had to tell, and the profits to show, on their return to Norway would have whetted the appetites of other men.
Not all of these would have been content to sail west as traders. Commerce was not every Northman’s preferred vocation. Many were happier exercising ancestral talents as buccaneers.
Marauding tended to be much more profitable than trading. A raider had no need to invest capital in trade goods; nor did he have to content himself with whatever the other fellow might choose to offer in exchange. A third and even more cogent reason for preferring raiding to trading was that few things acquired by way of trade could surpass in value a commodity best acquired by force.
So much has been made of the Vikings’ undoubted appetite for precious metals, gems, and the like that we tend to assume lust for such things was the primary motivation for their pillage of Europe. The truth is that such goods were only icing on the cake. What the Vikings sought, first and foremost, was human booty. As John Marsden puts it in The Fury of the Northmen,
trading in amber, furs and walrus ivory was a prominent feature of Scandinavian expansion . . . but their predominant mercantile activity was slave trading.2
Scandinavians became so engrossed in this lucrative business that they did not even hesitate to enslave their own kind. Circa 1070 Adam of Bremen described how Sjaellanders of Denmark bought a licence from their king to plunder foreigners but used it instead as a permit to enslave other Danes.
And as soon as one catches another, he mercilessly sells him into slavery, either to one of his fellows or to a barbarian.
Aesir society was anciently built on slavery and remained heavily dependent on it. As late as 1096 a census of Iceland listed only 4,560 free men in a population of at least six or seven times that number. Prosperous Norse households were seldom served by fewer than a dozen slaves.
Slaves not only powered the Scandinavian domestic scene, they were the backbone of foreign trade. The great Swedish trading centre of Birka was far famed for slave markets patronized by buyers from as far afield as Arabia. The Annals of Ulster for 871 preserve this revealing snippet dealing with the return of a Viking chieftain to Ireland after a raid on mainland Alba:
[He] came again to Ath-Cliath [Dublin] from Alba with two hundred ships; and a great spoil of people, English, Britons and Picts, were brought by them into Ireland in captivity.
The commercial ascendency of Dublin under Viking masters was largely due to its importance as a slave market. By the latter part of the ninth century Dublin had become the hub of a Scandinavian slave trade stretching from Iceland to the Near East. Slaves from the British Isles commanded premium prices on the Continent, and the Swedes in particular imported large numbers for their eastern customers.
The Northmen may have kept their rapacious tendencies somewhat in check during early days in Shetland, if only because they were few in number. However, it could not have been very long before the Islanders began to feel the first effects of what would come to be known throughout the Western world as the Fury of the Northmen.
Isolated as it was, Fair Isle was likely to have been one of the first to experience that fury, unleashed by men of a sort the Northern Islanders had not previously encountered. The fierce militancy of the Picts and the casual ferocity of the Gaels would pale in comparison with the behaviour of the Vikings.
Their homicidal predilections, honed through the centuries, had hitherto mostly been exercised on their own neighbours; on cousins in other Scandinavian countries; or on luckless Balts and Finns. Now the Northmen were debouching into virgin territory where, in addition to the usual delights of rape and rapine, these followers of Thor and Odin could enjoy savaging the followers of White Christ, as Christians were contemptuously styled.
The manner and timing of Christianity’s arrival in the Northern Isles remain obscure. When, in 565, Columba visited Brudei mac Maelchon, the Alban king was pagan. But it could not have been long thereafter, and it may have been earlier, that a proselytizing priest by the name of Ninian, operating from a mission called Candida Casa on the shore of Solway Firth, began making his influence felt in the north.
Janet Glover, in The Story of Scotland, envisages Ninian’s missionaries slogging over the passes in the Grampians and down the Great Glen to Sutherland and Caithness before crossing over to Orkney. It is at least certain that Christianity was fir
mly rooted in the archipelagos before the end of the sixth century.
Although there is no knowing exactly when Norse raiding became a serious menace in the Northern Islands, there is clear evidence of a malevolent presence there before the end of the seventh century. Around that time a number of brochs were repaired and some people were abandoning outlying crofts to cluster close to the nearest tower. Religious communities were digging ditches and building ramparts behind which (so they must earnestly have prayed) they would be safe from the devils assailing the land.
There was trouble on the mainland coasts of Alba as well. In 681 somebody attacked Dunbeath on the east coast of Caithness; and Dunnottar, fifteen miles south of what is now Aberdeen. Nothing else is said about these two events, but a laconic entry in the annals of the following year mentions that the then king of Alba, Brudei mac Bile, led an expedition to the twin archipelagos constituting what was still called Orkney “which resulted in much devastation.”
Who was fighting whom? Scholars have generally assumed these two incidents indicate a revolt by Northern Islanders against Brudei, but it hardly seems likely that, living under the menacing shadow if not the bloody presence of the Viking scourge, the Islanders would have chosen such a time to turn upon mainland compatriots who were their only possible source of support.
I conclude Vikings had seized some of the outlying islands and, using them as advanced bases, had begun to attack communities on the mainland. Such a development would have sent a clear and urgent signal to Brudei: he must either drive the Northmen back across the Norwegian Sea, or be prepared before long to have them plundering all of Alba’s coasts.
Brudei mac Bile would have been the right man for such a challenge. He had earlier demonstrated his military skill in successful campaigns against the Scotti in the west; and would do so again in 685 by leading his forces south to rout the Angles of Northumbria at the battle of Nechtansmere. As paramount lord of the reconstituted Kingdom of Alba, he would have had the Pictish fleet at his disposal. In the event, I believe he inflicted “much devastation” on Northmen based in the archipelagos, perhaps even driving them out.
Brudei mac Bile seems to have succeeded in holding all Alba’s enemies at bay for almost a decade thereafter. His death in 693 was a catastrophe for the kingdom. During the next three decades incompetent leaders and wars of succession brought chaos to the country.
Barely a year after Brudei’s death, raiders, who are specifically identified as coming from Orkney, again struck the mainland coasts. No other details are given, but only a powerful Alban naval force could have prevented Viking fleets from returning to the islands and striking southward. Unfortunately, mustering and maintaining a sufficient defensive fleet seems to have been too tall an order for Brudei’s immediate successors.
During the first quarter of the new century internecine strife gravely weakened the kingdom of Alba. In 711 its army was almost destroyed in a battle with the Northumbrians. Dalriadic invaders from Ireland began making new incursions in the west.
Beset from within and without, Alba abandoned the Northern and Western Islands to the Sons of Death.
CHAPTER TWELVE
FURY OF THE NORTHMEN
WRITTEN HISTORY HAS ALMOST NOTHING TO TELL us about what transpired in the Northern Isles in the seventh and eighth centuries. And that is remarkable, because something of paramount importance took place during that time.
Well into the sixth century the islands were vigorously inhabited by an indigenous people who had been there for millennia. A hundred years later they had been supplanted by Norwegians.
Some scholars contend that Norwegian immigrants came drifting into a vacuum created when the islands’ indigenes abandoned their ancestral homes of their own volition and emigrated to mainland Britain. According to Norwegian historian A.W. Brøgger, Norwegian “settlers” came to an empty wilderness which was practically crying out for the ministrations of sturdy Nordic husbandmen. The islands were, he tells us, “a veritable museum of abandoned brochs, farmhouses and outbuildings.”1
Maybe so; but I conclude the change in the occupants of the Northern Isles was effected somewhat differently.
By the early part of the seventh century, Norse fiordmen had become sufficiently versed in nautical skills to venture deep-sea. Shetland was the nearest overseas land and, as such, would have been an early destination.
Here is how I see events unfolding.
As already noted, the first knorr to find her way west probably came as a peaceable merchantman, laden with wood, iron, honey, meal, and trinkets from Baltic and Danish markets. Her crew would have been welcomed, as traders usually were. They, in turn, would have been on their best behaviour since they were few and far from home. Perhaps it appeared to the Islanders that the evil reputation fiordmen had acquired by their rough dealings with Alban vessels on their own coasts was exaggerated.
It may have seemed so at first. However, as the number of knorrin frequenting Shetland waters increased, the behaviour of their crews changed. Although continuing to trade when it suited them, some fiordmen took to pillaging outlying crofts. This led to fierce and bloody little conflicts. The time soon came when the sight of an approaching knorr was likely to send men running for their weapons.
Some Norsemen may have been content to continue making their livings as traders, but in the west these were a diminishing minority. Most found it more rewarding, and far more enjoyable, to combine their new-found maritime skills with their ancient passions for battle and brigandage. They were, after all, followers of Thor.
Although the thin-skinned vessels of the Shetlanders could outsail and outmanoeuvre the heavier, wooden knorrin, they could not outfight them. In consequence, the knorrin came to dominate the waterways surrounding the islands. But they could not spend all their time at sea. Their crews had to go ashore from time to time for food, water, and fuel; to effect repairs; and for shelter during spells of foul weather—all too frequent in the Northern Isles. However, raiders foolhardy enough to seek refuge on an inhabited Shetland shore would have been likely to meet a furiously hostile reception. In consequence, they established robbers’ roosts and pirate lairs on remote and unoccupied offshore rocks and islets.
As their numbers swelled they began to seize larger, more salubrious, even inhabited, islands such as the Out Skerries and Foula and, eventually, Papa Stour and Whalsay. From these they were eventually able to exert a stranglehold on the entire archipelago.
By the mid-seventh century scores of knorrin were crossing to Shetland and the third stage of the Norse triad of trading–raiding–invading had begun.
To seize land on hostile shores, the Norse employed a tactic called nesam—ness taking, of which F.T. Wainwright gives the following description in his Northern Isles. The invaders
landed on the sandy peninsulas and promptly threw up banks and ditches for their protection. Traces of such banks and ditches may be seen today; these cut across the narrow necks of peninsulas, and are obviously fortifications, apparently temporary fortifications, and they were clearly thrown up by people who, secure at sea, feared only attacks from the land.... The evidence is sufficient to carry the conclusion that the first Scandinavian settlers [to the Northern Isles] . . . came with swords in their hands and were ready to fight for what they wanted.
By early in the eighth century, Vikings controlled the Shetland archipelago, but probably occupied only the best ports and havens. The land about, with its bleak, peat-grown hills and miserly little pockets of arable soil, was not yet attractive to Norse crofters. In fact, it was not until late in the eighth century, after all the good land in Orkney had been occupied, that Norse farmers came to Shetland in any numbers.
Early Norse settlers in Shetland were primarily Vikings, for whom the archipelago served as a forward base for raiding to the southward. In addition to giving resident Vikings the jump on competitors living in Norway, it was a good place in which to recoup after a long raiding voyage and from which to transship loot a
nd slaves to Norway-bound vessels.
Shetland itself could never have been a significant source of wealth. Its holy places must soon have been picked bare and the few native men of property robbed blind. Local steadings were mostly hard-scrabble crofts able to support only a scattering of sheep and cattle. Valuta goods from Tilli would have been worth a Viking’s while, but once the Norse had established a permanent presence in Shetland, farfarers would hardly have been fool enough to continue bringing cargoes there.
Shetland indigenes were too few to provide any considerable supply of slaves for sale abroad. And perhaps they were more valuable as local serfs producing country food, repairing damaged ships, or serving as pilots to southern lands. Certainly the island names of Fetlar, Unst, and Yell are not Norse, nor do they belong to any other known language. They appear to be indigenous and their endurance in the overwhelming sea of Norse nomenclature that swept over Shetland and Orkney suggests the survival of some aboriginals.
Existing Shetland traditions speak of a people called Finns who inhabited Fetlar and northwest Unst for some time after the Norse occupied Shetland. This name is identical with the one by which the Norse knew the aboriginals of northern Scandinavia. It was also the name given by Shetlanders (of Norse lineage) to a scattering of Inuit who, in kayaks, materialized amongst the Northern Isles during the eighteenth century. Presumably these unfortunates had been captured by European whalers working the Greenland grounds, and either escaped or were released when the ships neared British waters. In any event, Shetlanders used the same name for these small-statured, dark-skinned strangers that their ancestors had given to the people who preceded the Norse in Shetland.
Vikings may have spared some of Shetland’s aboriginals but not all would have been so favoured. In 1958 excavators of a ruined chapel of pre-Norse origin on St. Ninian’s Isle uncovered a wooden box buried under a stone floor. Amongst other things, the box contained several silver bowls, a communion spoon, and a number of brooches, all tentatively dated to the seventh century. This treasure had presumably been hidden in fear of a raid. The failure of its owners to reclaim it can best be explained by their having been killed or carried off into slavery.
