The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Besides gifts, another way Harald Fairhair turned his enemies into friends was to marry their daughters. When he contracted to marry Eirik Bloodaxe’s mother, Ragnhild the Powerful, Harald divorced nine of his wives, Snorri says: Ragnhild was the granddaughter of the king of Denmark, a most useful ally. By then the danger of his earlier strategy must have become clear. Through his many marriages, Harald had indeed united Norway under his own rule. But when his sons grew up—twenty of them, with seven different mothers—he was forced to divvy it up again.

  By Norwegian law, any king’s son could be elected king, with the consent of the chieftains and the landed farmers. That only an eldest son could inherit, and that only one marriage at a time was legitimate, were Christian ideas; they did not apply. In 930, when Hervor was born, there were nine Norwegian kingdoms—not twenty only because some of Eirik’s brothers were dead, some had agreed to share the title of king, and Harald’s youngest son was being raised in England. Each of Norway’s nine kingdoms had to pass on half its taxes and tolls to Harald Fairhair, the high king.

  * * *

  Eirik Bloodaxe was Harald’s favorite son, meant to be high king after his father’s death. But the old man seemed in no hurry to die. Meanwhile, Eirik’s brothers were entrenching themselves in their kingdoms. Eirik and Gunnhild decided to take matters into their own hands and kill off as many of Eirik’s brothers as they could. Gunnhild arranged for one to be poisoned. Eirik burned two in their halls.

  Brother Bjorn, king of Vestfold, might have avoided that fate if he’d been more hospitable. One autumn, Snorri says, Eirik swept into Vestfold with a fleet of dragonships and confronted his brother, demanding Bjorn give him the revenues owed to King Harald. He demanded Bjorn feed him and his warriors and, above all, get them something to drink.

  Snorri, writing in the 1200s, says this confrontation happened outside Tunsberg, twenty miles north of the Shining Hall. But archaeologists say Tunsberg was not a center of power until late in the tenth century, nor are there signs that a feast hall was burned there in the 930s. Eirik’s likely target was the Shining Hall and the rich market town, or kaupang, at its feet, for Bjorn was known by the nickname “the Merchant King.”

  Bjorn was no fighter. He was intelligent, calm, and “expected to make a good ruler,” Snorri says. He owned a fleet of merchant ships “and so acquired for himself the various treasures and other things he thought he needed.” Bjorn did not let Eirik upset him. He had always delivered the Vestfold revenues to their father himself, and he intended to continue doing so. Nor was he prepared to play host to Eirik’s rowdy Viking band. The brothers quarreled. Eirik did not get his way and left in a rage.

  Late that night, in the episode I’ve dramatized, Eirik surrounded the hall where Bjorn was staying and set fire to the roof. Bjorn and his warriors were still up drinking, the saga says. They armed themselves and burst out of the building.

  In Heimskringla Snorri does not describe the fight, but a similar scene appears in Egil’s Saga, when Eirik’s father killed his ambitious friend Thorolf.

  The king, like Eirik, came late at night, when everyone had been drinking for some time. He surrounded Thorolf’s feast hall, unfurled his standard, blew his trumpets, and shouted his battle cries. Thorolf and his friends ran for their weapons and armor. Thorolf’s wife, Sigrid, left the hall and petitioned the king. He agreed to let the children and old people, the slaves and servants, Sigrid and her women—everyone except Thorolf and his warriors—leave the building.

  “Is there no chance of reaching a settlement between you and Thorolf, my lord?”

  “If Thorolf gives himself up and asks me for mercy, I’ll spare his life. But his warband must be punished.”

  Sigrid conveyed the king’s terms to her husband. He refused them.

  “Set fire to the hall,” said the king.

  The trapped warriors broke down the partition separating the main room of the hall, with its high ceiling, from the entryway. “They took one of the beams, as many as could grab hold of it, and rammed one end of it at a corner post so hard that the joints gave way and the walls burst apart,” Snorri writes.

  Thorolf’s warriors rushed out, but the king’s troops held them pinned against the burning building. For a while, they used it to shield their backs. But as the fire blazed hotter they pressed forward, and soon many had been killed. Thorolf himself charged at the king’s banner, striking out to left and right. He reached the shield-wall—the braced shields of the warriors who surrounded the king—and killed the standard-bearer by the king’s side. “He was wounded by both swords and spears, but the king himself dealt him his death-wound, and Thorolf fell dead at the king’s feet.” His last words, in suitable Viking fashion, were, “I’m just three feet short.”

  At once, the king stopped the killing—as Eirik Bloodaxe did when his brother, Bjorn the Merchant, was dead. As the hall burned to the ground, the king gave quarter to the warriors who survived, provided they swear fealty to him and join his warband. He had the dead buried, the wounded treated, and the queen of the hall quickly remarried—it is Sigrid in Egil’s Saga who “realized that as things stood she had no choice and must let the king have his way.”

  * * *

  Eirik’s attack on his brother’s hall was not a Viking raid (though he certainly plundered the storehouses). Eirik intended to rule the people of Vestfold as king of Norway. Setting fire to Bjorn’s feast hall was symbolic.

  Feast halls throughout the Viking world were much alike. Though some had roofs of thatch and others of bark or shingles, though some had thick outer walls of well-insulating sod and others thin wooden walls of tarred or whitewashed planks or the basketweave of twigs plastered with mud known as wattle and daub, their basic layout changed little for hundreds of years. They were oblong—roughly boat-shaped—and divided into three parts (not counting the occasionally attached stables): the kitchen and storeroom, the ruler’s private quarters, and the open public space where lordship was symbolically enacted.

  Within the hall were held the rituals through which the bonds between rulers and people were renewed. Some rituals were religious, held to propitiate the deities or speak with ancestors, to foretell the future, decide a course of action, pray for good luck or a good harvest, or give thanks for a victory. Others were political: The order in which people were seated or given something to eat and drink. What they ate or drank and how much. The storytelling, poetry, music, boasting, and oath taking that accompanied the meal. The gifts received on arrival or departure, such as clothing and jewelry, chests of silver coins, ships and horses, weapons and armor, control of estates and harbors, opportunities for plunder and monopolies on trade, offers of marriage alliances, or prospects for revenge. All these were ways in which individuals were melded into a people, and all took place, at least in part, inside the feast hall.

  Feasting itself was a gift—being invited to accompany your ruler to a feast was a mark of high status. For a hall was not a palace. A Viking ruler had no fixed abode, but circulated among several halls, each on an estate managed by a chieftain who counted him- or herself among the ruler’s friends. It was these friends who provided the meat and drink for the feast. Friendship had little to do with affection and much to do with politics.

  A chieftain’s hall was costly to build. Like a grave mound, it announced the chieftain’s command of labor and wealth. It was a statement of power. Its exceptionally high roof, like those of later cathedrals, made the inside space feel larger than expected and, consequently, made those who entered feel small. Its position in the landscape added to this effect: A chieftain’s hall was set on a hill, to see and be seen. Exposed to wind and storm, it was placed not to be comfortable, but to be commanding. It metaphorically oversaw the realm, controlling trade routes and access to resources like iron ore, fertile fields, and timber.

  And so its destruction by fire was equally commanding. When the Shining Hall was destroyed, the merchants and artisans living in the town below watched it flare and
flame like a fiery dragon. But they did not fear it. Like Bjorn’s queen they had understood that, “as things stood,” they would have to change their allegiance. Even before the fires were lit, they had, in essence, done just that: Gunnhild’s ships rocked at the town’s wharves, waiting for plunder; Eirik’s warriors patrolled the town’s lanes. The townsfolk did not foresee that this change of rulers (unlike the last one) would mean the end of the town they called Kaupang. They could not know that this time the Shining Hall would not be rebuilt.

  3

  THE TOWN BENEATH THE SHINING HALL

  Hervor tries to wriggle around so she can see forward, but the wagon is too tightly packed with boxes and barrels and bags. And with other children. All the children she is used to playing with. Even some of the older ones. They look like strangers to her: dirty, exhausted, resigned, frightened. Some of them, like King Bjorn’s overdressed little daughter, scream and struggle as the wagon draws away from the Shining Hall, away from the people clustered around Bjorn’s queen, a queen no more. Hervor looks away.

  They drive south through the graveyard, where King Bjorn’s barrow will soon rise, and enter the town. Squeezed here between the wattle fences surrounding each house plot, the lane is deeply rutted, the mud churned up, so many carts and herds have passed through ahead of them. Their going becomes painfully slow. She could run to the sea nine times in the time the wagon will take.

  But from her slow-moving perch, nothing escapes her. She sees pigs running loose, rooting through rotting garbage. Geese and goats being herded out to pasture by shouting children and barking dogs. Every house has a tall loom standing near the door, to catch the best light, and a pair of weavers hard at work. As the wagon crawls toward the harbor, she watches jewelers drawing beads from glowing rods of glass, carving them from amber, and setting nuggets of red stone into nests of gold. A combmaker cuts delicate teeth from reindeer antler. A ropemaker plaits hempen cord. A silversmith melts coins to mold a silver ingot. Above the whine of the wind and the seagulls’ chatter, Hervor hears blacksmiths’ hammers and shipwrights’ axes, the rumble of querns and the shriek of whetstones. The crowded boardwalks are filled with people haggling in all different languages—and ignoring the wagonload of captives passing by. You’d never think the town had just been conquered. The only change Hervor can see is in the warriors patrolling the beach: They bear different symbols on their shields and sheath ends.

  At the tide line, Hervor and the other children are ordered out onto the sand. She struggles to hop down, with her hands tied and her legs tangled in layers of extra clothing. With a casual wave, Gunnhild orders a warrior to assist her. She does—and, grinning, drops Hervor unceremoniously into a foul-smelling pit of human feces. Hervor shouts with rage until she recognizes her: It is the warrior she stabbed. Then Hervor grins back. The warrior grabs her tied hands and hoists her to her feet. While their wagon continues on into the water, clattering over the cobbled landing stage to a ship whose workers wait to load the plunder, Hervor lets herself be led along a wooden jetty to another ship.

  When Gunnhild’s party is all aboard, the rowers run out their oars, and the ship, guided by a pilot from the town, makes its winding way past the rows of sharpened stakes, and the rocks and shoals and silted-up channels that guard the marketplace. They raise the sail and head out to sea. The last Hervor sees of the place of her birth are the rows of rounded grave mounds at the harbor’s mouth and the dark pillar of smoke still rising from the ashes of the Shining Hall.

  * * *

  The Shining Hall, or Skiringssal, is mentioned in an Anglo-Saxon account: Ottar, a Norse merchant who presented King Alfred of England with a gift of walrus ivory in the year 890, frequented a market, or kaupang, there. It was a month’s sail south from his home in Halogaland—the northern district Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings also came from—and five days, with a fair wind and few stops, from there to the Danish town of Hedeby, he told the English.

  The truth of Ottar’s tale was unknown until archaeologists investigated a coastal farm named Kaupang in Vestfold. Beginning in the 1950s, they unearthed thousands of artifacts from across the Viking world. They found, too, a curved grid of house plots, each about twenty by thirty feet and stacked two deep, paralleling the tide line. On each plot had been built a house of wattle and daub. Combining living space with a workshop, it had an earthen floor, a fire pit, and a door in the gable end that looked toward the sea. Outside there was room for a kitchen garden, a pig pen, and a garbage pile.

  The houses were small, smoky, cold, and damp, but the town itself showed proof of careful planning: The plots were fenced and ditched. Lanes and boardwalks led up to a timber-cased well at the foot of a hill and down to wooden wharves that fingered into the sea. Where the shore was soft, cobblestones were laid in a great fan, fifty feet into the water, to make a stone paving onto which carts could be rolled. Pits had been dug along the tide line: They still smelled of feces a thousand years later. “People were evidently not particularly concerned about matters of modesty,” the archaeologists note.

  In 1999, the ruins of the Shining Hall itself were uncovered. Rising from a flattened platform on the crest of a ridge a half mile from the harbor, the structure was 120 feet long and roughly boat-shaped, thirty-eight feet wide in the center, tapering to twenty-six feet at each end. Lines of sturdy posts set on stones held up its roof and defined its walls, which, like those in the town’s much smaller houses, were fashioned of wattle and daub—though the hall’s were likely lime-washed to shine bright white. The wings of the building housed living space and a textile workshop. The central space was a vast, high-ceilinged hall where the chieftain’s warriors feasted and drank: In the floor litter were found bits of glass beakers and fine pottery jugs, armor-piercing arrows, and a fragment of a silver amulet portraying a valkyrie.

  Burned bits of daub testify to the hall’s fiery end sometime after 925, though the town below shows no signs of having been plundered or burned. Yet between 930 and 950, the settlement entirely disappeared. All that was left were its graves.

  Like Birka in Sweden, where Hervor was buried, the Viking town of Kaupang was surrounded by graveyards. Rows of grave mounds guarded the harbor’s mouth; more barrows bordered the road to the hall. Travelers approaching the market were meant to be cowed by this display of power. The message was clear: Kaupang had wealth to burn (or bury). Kaupang’s graves also displayed its notable equality. Many of the richest ones gave no hint of gender—then or now. But some clearly did: Some rich women were buried in long oval barrows, some rich men in barrows that were round. The women’s barrows match the men’s in splendor, location, and size, and nearly in number. Kaupang’s women were buried as powerful landowners and as members of the chieftain’s retinue, some with weapons. Kaupang’s men were buried with cooking equipment and keys as often as its women were; tools, horses, and equestrian gear were also not gender-linked. And while Kaupang’s women were more often buried with weaving tools—and seem to have controlled a vast textile industry—these tools were found in men’s graves too. “The Kaupang burials speak very clearly of a society where gender was unlikely to have been a determining factor in choice of occupation,” writes one archaeologist. Nor did it determine one’s status.

  Hervor would not have noticed Kaupang’s gender equality. The modern idea that a woman could not be a landowner, warrior, artisan, trader, or political leader would never have occurred to her—for the women she grew up around performed all these roles. As was true throughout Scandinavia in the Viking Age, the town’s girls and women were as healthy and well fed as the boys and men. Testing teeth from more than a hundred sites in Europe spanning two thousand years, researchers found Viking women to be unusually “strong, healthy, and tall” compared to women elsewhere. Said one scientist, “Such women in the Nordic countries may have led to popular myths about the valkyries.” Or to more than “myths.”

  When Hervor was born, before the burning of the Shining Hall, Kaupang was at its peak of populati
on. Up to a thousand people lived and worked in the town. Six to eight hundred fertile Vestfold farms provided them with beef, mutton, and pork, which they preferred to eat stewed, not roasted; milk, drunk as buttermilk or sour whey or eaten as butter, yogurt-like skyr, and several varieties of fresh and dried cheese; cabbages and other vegetables, often pickled; dried peas and beans; turnips, which also could be dried; herbs and flavorings like angelica, caraway, coriander, dill, garlic, leeks, mustard, thyme, juniper berries, and spruce buds; and grains such as flaxseed, wheat, rye, oats, and, most of all, barley, which they ate as porridge or bread and brewed into beer.

  They drank lots of beer. They also imported wine from vineyards along the Rhine River; the number of broken wine jugs found in the town proves not all of it was drunk in the Shining Hall by the chieftain’s noble guests. Mead, considered the best liquor, was harder to get. The Norwegians did not keep bees, so making mead depended on finding a wild swarm in the woods or trading for honey with England or other lands where beekeeping was practiced. Thanks to its town of traders, the Shining Hall likely did serve mead on occasion—a Viking feast hall is often referred to as a mead hall, after all.

  * * *

  Vestfold, the kingdom surrounding the Shining Hall, was the warmest, most fertile part of Norway. Its population throughout the Viking Age was dense, its chieftains rich: From the 600s on, more than 147 rulers in this one kingdom alone were buried under great barrows more than sixty-five feet across, each grave mound, like an Egyptian pharaoh’s pyramid, representing a spectacular outlay of labor and wealth.

  But Vestfold could afford it: Its grain fields were wider, its harvests more reliable; its pastures supported greater and more diverse flocks and herds than most other parts of Norway. Vestfold had thick forests of shipbuilding timber and ample supplies of iron, too, while its island-studded coast offered rich fishing grounds and innumerable safe harbors for cargo ships.