The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  No matter. From what she’s heard—from what Eirik is telling the warbands—there is loot enough in the Irish Sea for all.

  It’s two weeks of easy coastal sailing from Orkney to Dublin. Easy, that is, for an experienced sailor like Eirik, attuned to the dance of wind and sea, of sea and sand. For Hervor, crewing a warship for the first time, there’s much to learn. To ignore her stiff muscles and blistered hands, she learns to read the water as well as the weather: There are maelstroms—“sea holes”—known to swallow ships on the ebb and cast up their fragments at flood tide. Mists that hide whole islands. Narrow necks to portage across, rather than risk the tide race at the cape. Channels that close twice a day, turning an island into mainland and the reverse. Submerged rocks blocking bays and inlets; sandbanks shifting from storm to storm. From deep water to dry land, the passage crosses marshes and mudflats, through intricate networks of turbulent shallow channels. Disembarking? Watch out for the quicksand.

  At length they reach the river Liffey: wide and shallow and swift running. They row upstream on the incoming tide, past the great standing stone that marks the entrance to the harbor, past the burial mounds of illustrious dead ranged along the riverside. Where the Liffey meets the river Poddle is a haven for dragonships, a tidal basin called by the Irish Dubh Linn, or the Black Pool. The town named for that pool occupies the tongue of land between the two rivers, rising from the waterfront to a low ridge with long views over the countryside.

  To Hervor, once she’s had some days to look around, Dublin seems like a bigger Kaupang, with superior defenses. Its busy lanes are paved with planks, logs, or woven wattle. Its thatch-roofed houses are set gable end to the streets, which wind up from the riverbanks to a royal feast hall on the height of land overlooking the Black Pool. Though densely packed inside the town’s earthen ramparts and wooden stockades, each Dubliner’s house plot has room, inside its fence, for storage huts and workshops, a garden, a byre, and a cesspit. Unlike those in York, the dwellings seem to be all the same: long, rectangular houses with central longfires flanked by sleeping benches. They are so uniform there must be professional housebuilders in town—and house owners who care little for the residents’ comfort. All but the best houses are damp, even waterlogged; some in the lower plots, where Eirik has found lodging for the warbands, flood when the tide is high. The posts and thin branches of the wattle house walls are rotting and need to be replaced. The bones woven into the lowest sections of wattle fail to keep out the rats. Fleas and lice infest the dirt floors; Hervor’s feet sink into mud despite the layers of sawdust and straw Eirik has ordered spread.

  But the Dubliners she sees seem not to know they live in squalor: They act rich. They wear caps and scarves of figured silk imported, she learns, from far-off Byzantium and beyond. They wear jewelry fashioned in the town itself, out of amber, ivory, and exotic gemstones, their arms brilliant with silver bangles. They build warships and pay extra to have them gaily painted bright yellow and black, blue, red, or green.

  Where does their wealth come from? It doesn’t take Hervor long to find out. As she wanders through town with Eirik’s sons, armed and swaggering and watching one another’s backs, Hervor sees signs of slave dealing everywhere. Though Dublin is half the size of York, it seems to have twice as many people roped and chained and penned up for sale. Young women like herself, strong and healthy—and stripped to their linen shirts—are being bought and sold in merchants’ yards and houses, in the streets, and on the quay. Young men are treated the same way. By the river, in a pen she thought was a cattle yard, a crowd of dirty, half-dressed people of all ages huddle, peering listlessly at passersby and scratching their flea bites. Some captives are sold right off the ships: These newest arrivals are, in general, better dressed, their clothes being part of the purchase.

  Hervor and Harald, Eirik’s son, are sparring with staves on the riverbank one day when another slave ship runs its prow onto the sand. They break off and watch as the slave-dealers swarm it—several richly dressed people on the ship are bought, or perhaps ransomed, right away. Then the rest are led, roped, down the gangplank by a well-armed warband, its leader a tall warrior with bright red hair.

  They’ve resumed their sparring match when something about the leader catches Hervor’s eye—long enough for Harald to get past her guard and give her a stiff crack across the ribs.

  She hears the wild, high laugh of a girl ring out as she hits the dirt, rolls, and is up again before Harald can follow up his advantage. Backing out of range, she stops the fight to stare at the red-haired slave-dealer, who has stopped too and is staring back at Hervor, grinning.

  When you learn how to fight, the newcomer says, come see me. I’d like another girl on my ship. Ask for the Red Girl, she says. Everyone in Dublin knows who I am.

  * * *

  According to Saxo Grammaticus, writing his History of the Danes around the year 1200, there once was a woman named Alvild who “changed into a man’s clothing and from being a highly virtuous maiden began to lead the life of a savage pirate. Many girls of the same persuasion had enrolled in her company by the time she chanced to arrive at a spot where a band of pirates were mourning the loss of their leader, who had been killed fighting. Because of her beauty she was elected the pirate chief and performed feats beyond a woman’s courage.”

  Peeling off two hundred–some years of clerical misogyny, I can hear in my mind’s ear the version of this tale Hervor heard: In it, virtue and piracy were not at odds, and Alvild’s peers elected her their leader for her feats and courage, not her beauty.

  Saxo also writes of a Viking chieftain known as Rusila, or the Red Girl. According to his account, she was raiding in the Irish Sea when she learned her brother had allied with the Danes and proclaimed himself king over the Trondheim region of Norway. Sailing east to challenge her brother’s right to rule, she met his Danish allies and overcame them. She then took her victorious fleet south and attacked Denmark itself. On the Danish king’s home ground, however, Rusila was outmatched. “Defeated, she ran from the fight, withdrew to her fleet, and made away over the water with only thirty ships, the rest having been seized by the enemy.” Her brother attacked her in this weakened state but still couldn’t best her. He “was robbed of his whole army, so that he only escaped by traveling on foot” over the mountains of central Norway back to Trondheim. “So Rusila turned her flight into triumph,” Saxo writes.

  The Danish king, however, persisted, and Rusila was not allowed to enjoy her victory. “When the Danes appeared among the islands where she had expected safe refuge, she turned tail without offering resistance. The king hotly pursued her, intercepted her fleet at sea and utterly destroyed it.” Even so, Rusila “slipped away with a small number of other vessels, her boat, rowed at high speed, furrowing the waves” until she ran into her brother again: His new, Danish-backed fleet “cut her to pieces.” For killing his sister, he was allowed to govern Trondheim as a puppet of Denmark.

  Two of Rusila’s friends, Saxo writes, had remained with the Vikings in Ireland. Hearing of her death, the two men set off to avenge her. They challenged the Danish king to single combat. Two of the king’s champions fought in his stead, and one of Rusila’s friends was killed. The other, when he was healed of his wounds, swore fealty to the Danes—for no Viking wanted to be a lone wolf.

  Historians relegate Saxo’s Rusila to the “misty world” of legend. The only datable name in the Danish cleric’s Book Eight, in which he writes of the Red Girl, is that of King Godfrid, who founded Kaupang around the year 800.

  But these same scholars also connect Saxo’s legend to Irish reports of the Inghen Ruaidh, the Red Girl, who harassed Munster in the mid-tenth century.

  Did Saxo get his dates wrong? Quite possibly. Like Snorri Sturluson, he was creating history from poems and folklore, along with the writings of his contemporaries, who included Snorri’s friends and family members. In his History of the Danes, Saxo praises these Icelanders; he admits to having “scrutinized” their
“store of historical treasures and composed a considerable part of this present work by copying their narratives.” One of the Icelanders Saxo met was Pall Jonsson, Snorri Sturluson’s much older foster brother. Pall was consecrated bishop of Iceland by Saxo’s boss, the archbishop of Lund, in 1195. He is thought to have written the Saga of the Orkney Islanders. He also wrote a history of Denmark (now lost), which he may have shared with Saxo. Unlike Snorri, Bishop Pall was not a misogynist. He’s a likely source of legends of strong women.

  But to assume that Saxo’s Rusila is the same woman as the Irish Inghen Ruaidh is sexist: What’s more likely? That Saxo flubbed his dates, or that there were two famous female Vikings known for their red hair (or their bloody swords) in a hundred-year span?

  I understand the urge to conflate the two women. I’m susceptible too. It’s the same urge that makes me conflate the revenge of Queen Asa, from Snorri’s Heimskringla, with the Oseberg grave mound. It’s the urge to apply a good story to a historical or archaeological fact.

  For there’s no story of the Inghen Ruaidh: This Red Girl is just a name in a list of Vikings roving the Irish Sea in the years leading up to 949.

  * * *

  The whole of Munster “was plundered by them, on all sides, and devastated,” says the twelfth-century Irish chronicle called The War of the Irish with the Foreigners. Ireland’s southwest corner was “filled with immense floods and countless sea-vomitings of ships and boats and fleets” of sea raiders. There was “the fleet of Oiberd, and the fleet of Oduinn, and the fleet of Griffin, and the fleet of Snuatgar, and the fleet of Lagmann, and the fleet of Erolf, and the fleet of Sitriuc, and the fleet of Buidnin, and the fleet of Birndin, and the fleet of Liagrislach, and the fleet of Toirberdach, and the fleet of Eoan Barun, and the fleet of Milid Buu, and the fleet of Siumin, and the fleet of Suainin, and lastly the fleet of the Inghen Ruaidh,” the Red Girl.

  Despite their Irish spelling, several of these names are Norse. Erolf is Herjolf. Sitriuc is Sigtrygg. (None of them translates into “Eirik Bloodaxe.”) But by the mid-900s, the Vikings had been in Ireland well over a hundred years. So many Norse had taken local spouses that the nationality of names cannot distinguish raiders from defenders. In the tenth century, the Norse fought on both sides in most battles in the British Isles. Their warbands included not only Irish, English, Scottish, and Welsh fighters, but those from the far reaches of the Baltic Sea, from Russia, Saxony, and France, even from Spain and Africa, for captured warriors were invited to switch sides, and the enslaved could win their freedom by fighting at their masters’ sides.

  Nor did a masculine-sounding name mean the warrior was male: In the Saga of Hervor, Angantyr’s daughter called herself Hervard while leading her Viking band. The Red Girl may have used a male name as well, but her gender was clearly no secret to her enemies. Still, other than listing her last, the Irish chronicler makes no distinction between her and the other Viking captains. Male or female, these “furious, ferocious, pagan, ruthless, wrathful” raiders showed no mercy. “The evil which Erinn had hitherto suffered was as nothing compared to the evil inflicted by these parties,” he wrote of the Red Girl and her companions.

  “In short,” he concluded in The War of the Irish with the Foreigners, unlocking his ample word hoard,

  until the sand of the sea or the grass of the field or the stars of heaven are counted, it will not be easy to recount or to enumerate or to relate what the Irish all, without distinction, suffered from them: whether men or women, boys or girls, laics or clerics, freemen or serfs, old or young—indignity, outrage, injury, and oppression. In a word, they killed the kings and chieftains.… They killed the brave and the valiant … and they brought them under tribute and servitude; they reduced them to bondage and slavery. Many were the blooming, lively women; and the modest, mild, comely maidens; and the pleasant, noble, stately, blue-eyed young women; and the gentle, well brought up youths, and the intelligent, valiant champions whom they carried off into oppression and bondage over the broad green sea.

  Or, as a Viking king’s praise poet put it more succinctly, recalling a different raid in a different land, “Bright fire burned their houses.” Many lay fallen; many fled to the woods; many were captured:

  A lock held the girl’s body,

  fetters bit into her flesh.

  For you, many women

  were led to the warships.

  I’ve always thought of the Vikings as raiders and traders. I knew there was slavery in the Viking Age, though romanticized accounts gloss over that sordid fact. The history of Dublin makes it brutally plain: Raiding and trading and enslaving were all one to Viking warriors. Vikings raided to gather wealth. Like most warriors of their time, they went to war to make a profit. They traded to turn one kind of wealth into another. Captured people were a kind of wealth. They were loot. If Hervor was a Viking warrior, then she was a slaver.

  * * *

  Viking Dublin was the largest slave market in the British Isles. In Dublin, thousands of men, women, and children caught in Viking raids were sold into slavery. Shiploads of captives came to Dublin from as far as Africa. After a battle near the Strait of Gibraltar, an Irish chronicle reports, Vikings brought “a great host of Moors in captivity with them to Ireland,” adding, “Long were these blue men in Ireland.” An island just south of Dublin was a human warehouse site. What initially looked to archaeologists like a livestock pen on Dublin’s waterfront was found to have a hearth and human fleas.

  When Hervor arrived, the town was about a hundred years old. Vikings first raided Ireland, the annals say, in 795 and settled in Dublin around 841. They chose the site for several reasons: The Black Pool made a safe harbor; the ridge rising between the rivers Liffey and Poddle provided good lookout posts. But more important was the famous hurdle-work ford a little upstream, where the Irish had laid down mats of woven branches, or hurdles, with posts fixing them to the bottom of the Liffey. At low tide, people and animals could cross on this sunken bridge without sinking into the mud. Nearby stood a monastery, a way station for travelers, for at the hurdle-work ford four of Ireland’s five great highways met. These roads, wide enough for two horse carts to pass, led to Limerick, Annagassan, Waterford, and Tara. The Vikings seized the monastery by the ford in their first attack. Limerick, Annagassan, and Waterford soon sprouted Viking forts, and their trade roads proved to be fine funnels for bringing coins, cattle, church ornaments, jewelry, weapons, horses, and, most of all, human captives to the market the Vikings established on the river Liffey’s beach.

  Along with raiding, Dublin’s Vikings hired themselves out as mercenaries. The Liffey valley was one of the three most fertile river plains in Ireland; it marked the boundary between the Irish kingdom of Leinster, to the south, and that of Meath, to the north. In 853 the Viking king of Dublin sided with his northern neighbors, marrying a princess from Meath. In 902, the king of Leinster burned Dublin to the ground. To avoid becoming slaves themselves, Dublin’s Vikings “abandoned a good number of their ships and escaped half dead after they had been wounded and broken,” an Irish annalist crows.

  Some of these Dubliners regrouped on the island in Dublin Bay called Ireland’s Eye. Some fled across the Irish Sea to Wales, from which they were pushed into English Mercia. There the Lady Aethelflaed decided it might be useful to have a force of Viking mercenaries near at hand and granted them land near Chester, but they soon grew greedy and attacked the city. Aethelflaed famously fought them off. As the Vikings tried to scale the walls, her people pelted them with rocks, doused them with boiling beer, and even, legend says, threw beehives into their midst, loosing swarms of angry bees.

  A third group of Dublin refugees landed near Cuerdale and headed overland, through the Pennine Hills, for York, first burying their war chest by a riverbank. They never came back for it. In 1840, workers unearthed it: The hoard contained seventy-five hundred coins and thirteen hundred silver ingots, rings, and hacksilver bits—eighty-eight pounds of silver in all. Most of the coins had been m
inted in the Danelaw; others were English, French, Italian, or Byzantine. Fifty coins are Arab dirhams, minted in Spain, Baghdad, Afghanistan, and the Himalayas. The cash had been bundled into bags, sealed with bone pins, and buried in a lead-lined chest.

  The biggest Viking hoard found in Western Europe, the Cuerdale Hoard equaled the purchase price of about five hundred captured and enslaved people. Yet, in one monastery-raiding spree in the 950s, Dublin’s Vikings brought home three thousand captives.

  What did a town of fewer than five thousand citizens do with three thousand captives? They shipped them abroad as soon as they could.

  Slavery, of course, was not a new concept to the Irish. Long before the Vikings arrived, every wealthy Irish household used slave labor to milk the cows and make the butter, grind the grain, chop the wood, and herd the pigs. Soldiers captured in war and the families of the defeated, merchants unable to pay their debts, farmers’ children in a famine year—all might be reduced to slave status. Before the Vikings introduced a cash economy, the Irish used the price of an enslaved girl, or cumal, as a standard of value. But they don’t seem to have sold people abroad—that was the Vikings’ innovation, hinging upon their extensive trade network connecting Dublin to Iceland, in one direction, and Baghdad, in the other.

  In Viking Dublin, a cumal—a young female captive—was worth eight to ten cows or three ounces of silver. Originally pegged to the weight of a barleycorn, the Viking ounce by the tenth century had been recalibrated to the weight of a standard silver coin—the Arab dirham. Ten dirhams equaled one ounce. Rather than carry around jingling coins, however, the Dubliners melted them down and cast thin silver bangles, each one weighing an ounce. It was more convenient—and impressive—to wear your wealth on your sleeve. Each girl captured in a raid, then, was worth three bangles—in Dublin, that is.