The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Hoskuld glanced at Gilli’s fine wares. When nothing seemed to satisfy the Icelander, Gilli asked if he was looking for something special. “Yes,” said Hoskuld. “I want to buy a slave girl, if you have any for sale.”

  Gilli lifted the curtain that closed off the back of the tent: Twelve women sat there in a row. “Go in and see if any of these girls suit you,” Gilli said. Hoskuld looked them over thoroughly. He liked the looks of the one sitting on the end of the bench, though she was poorly dressed. He asked how much she cost.

  Gilli named an exorbitant price: twenty-four ounces of silver. Hoskuld untied his money pouch and told Gilli to bring out his scales; his ready cash weighed exactly twenty-four ounces. Hoskuld took it for an omen and purchased the girl, even when Gilli told him of her defect: She could not speak. “I’ve tried everything I could think of, but I’ve never gotten a word out of her,” Gilli said. To Hoskuld, the man with a headstrong wife, that may have seemed a bonus. Hoskuld took the girl back to his tent and raped her. The next day he dressed her in finer clothes. “Gilli Gerzkr didn’t spend much on your clothing,” Hoskuld said, “but it’s true he had twelve to dress, and I have only one.”

  Back home in Iceland, Jorunn obeyed her husband’s order to treat the girl well. But she gave some orders of her own: After returning home, the saga says, Hoskuld “slept with his wife every night.” That winter the girl gave birth to a son, without making a sound. Hoskuld acknowledged the baby as his own—which made the boy free, not of slave status. “Like everyone else, Hoskuld thought he’d never seen a prettier or more noble-looking child.” He named the boy Olaf (it was a very popular name).

  When Olaf was six months old, Jorunn said the girl must start working around the farm or leave. Hoskuld made her a house servant, causing her to be in Jorunn’s presence day and night. Jorunn never heard her speak.

  Two years later, Hoskuld was out early one morning when he heard a strange voice by the stream. He walked down the hill and came upon the girl teaching her son Irish. She had never been mute. By refusing to speak, she kept her innermost person—and so her honor—safe; she remained a noblewoman, not a slave. Pressed to reveal her lineage, she announced that her father was King Myrkjartan of Ireland and she was the Princess Melkorka, captured by Vikings at age fifteen.

  Hoskuld was impressed. Returning to the house, he bragged to Jorunn of his concubine’s noble kin. Jorunn was less pleased. That night as Melkorka helped Jorunn off with her shoes and stockings as usual, “Jorunn snatched up the stockings and whipped Melkorka on the head.” Rather than slavishly cringing, Melkorka punched her mistress, giving Jorunn a bloody nose. Hoskuld had to physically separate the two women.

  Instead of punishing Melkorka, he set her up on her own farm and let Olaf grow up there until he was seven, when he was sent away to be fostered by a rich man who was childless. He came to be known as Olaf Peacock for how well he dressed.

  When he was eighteen, Olaf Peacock arranged for his mother to marry—behind Hoskuld’s back, though with the connivance of another of Hoskuld’s sons. Olaf then set off to find King Myrkjartan of Ireland, carrying a gold ring Melkorka had been wearing when she was captured. (Don’t ask how she managed to keep a gold ring during her years as a slave: Sagas don’t always make sense.)

  Olaf first went to Norway, which was ruled by Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings and her sons, according to the saga’s somewhat flexible chronology. The queen took a fancy to the handsome young Peacock. When he could find no passage to Ireland, Gunnhild stepped in to help. “I will give you everything you need for this voyage,” she said. She requisitioned a ship, hired and equipped a crew of sixty warriors, and sent him on his way in style.

  Despite a near shipwreck, Olaf made harbor in King Myrkjartan’s realm. Because he spoke fluent Irish and was versed in Irish law, Olaf was allowed to land and make his case to the king, who recognized the ring and acknowledged Olaf as his grandson. Olaf Peacock stayed the winter in Dublin, the saga says, helping to fight off attacks by Vikings. Yet when offered the kingdom, he declined: His mother would not be happy, he explained, if he did not return to Iceland. Once back home, he married the daughter of Egil the Poet and became one of Iceland’s leading chieftains.

  * * *

  Romanticized as it is, Melkorka’s tale is reinforced somewhat by other sources, including the accounts of Arab travelers who met slave-dealing Vikings, or Rus, as they called them, along the East Way. According to Ibn Rustah of Isfahan, who wrote a seven-volume encyclopedia between 903 and 913, the Rus “treat their slaves well and dress them suitably, because for them they are an article of trade.”

  Like Melkorka, some of them were sex slaves. Ibn Fadlan, who met the Rus along the Volga River in 922, noted that “with them there are beautiful slave girls, for sale to the merchants. Each of the men has sex with his slave,” he added, though unlike Hoskuld they didn’t retire to a private tent: “Sometimes a group of them comes together to do this, each in front of the other. Sometimes the merchant comes into their presence to buy a slave girl from one of them and he will chance upon him having intercourse with her, but the Rus will not leave her alone until he has satisfied his urge.”

  The sex slaves also had light household duties, like Melkorka. In a famous passage illustrating his disgust at the Northerners’ filthy habits, Ibn Fadlan notes that a slave girl brings in a large basin of water every morning. Her master “washes his hands and his face and the hair on his head in the water, then he dips his comb in the water and brushes his hair, blows his nose and spits in the basin.” Then comes the disgusting part. Without changing the water, the girl “takes the basin to the man beside him and he goes through the same routine as his comrade. She continues to carry it from one man to the next until she has gone round everyone in the house, with each of them blowing his nose and spitting, washing his face and hair in the basin.”

  Unlike Melkorka’s relatively happy old age, with a successful son, her own farm, and a tolerable marriage, other women captured and enslaved by Vikings faced a bleak future. Recounting the funeral rites of the Rus, Ibn Fadlan notes that a poor man was placed inside a small boat and cremated. For a rich man, his possessions were divided in three: one third was for his household, one third provided his grave goods, and one third was spent on “alcohol which they drink on the day when his slave girl kills herself and is burned together with her master.” Later, in what appears to be an eyewitness account of such a funeral, Ibn Fadlan makes it clear that the girl (or sometimes boy, he notes) does not kill herself but is intoxicated, raped, and ritually murdered.

  Archaeologists have found Viking burials that somewhat fit Ibn Fadlan’s description, including one on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea of a rich man buried with a young woman’s bludgeoned body laid on top of him, alongside the remains of slaughtered animals. Other graves containing apparent human sacrifices have been found in Sweden and Ukraine. When those graves contain weapons and both male and female skeletons, the researchers routinely describe them as male warriors and female sacrifices.

  Some scholars have even argued that Birka grave Bj581—the grave of our Hervor—is in fact the grave of a male warrior whose body was either never buried or has since gone missing; they view the dead woman as simply one of the invisible man’s possessions, equal to the dead horses. Dismissing that interpretation, the 2017 analysis of Bj581 reports: “The distribution of the grave goods within the grave, their spatial relation to the female individual, and the total lack of any typically female attributed grave artefacts disputes this possibility.” They add, “Male individuals in burials with a similar material record are not questioned in the same way.”

  To be sacrificed to accompany a slave owner to the otherworld was not a fate exclusive to girls, Ibn Fadlan noted, and at least one Viking Age burial backs him up: On the Danish isle of Zealand, a woman laid to rest with a spear by her side was buried with a man whose wrists and ankles had been tied, as if he were a slave in fetters.

  * * *

  Wri
ting about the route the Rus slavers took from Kyiv to Byzantium in the mid-tenth century, the emperor Constantine VII paints a dark picture of slave trading in action: To negotiate the largest of the river rapids, he wrote, the Rus first put ashore sentries to guard against attacks by the nomads. Then, while some of the Rus portage the ships, “the rest of them, picking up the things they have on board the ships, conduct the wretched slaves in chains six miles by dry land until they are past the barrier.”

  The Icelandic sagas mention slaves in chains or fetters as well—in stories of heroic escapes. When his guards fell asleep, one saga hero, captured in battle, “rolled over to where an axe lay, and was able to cut the rope off his hands. Next he knocked off his fetters, though it required taking off both heel bones too. Then he killed all the guards. He dove into the sea and swam to land.” Given the damage to his feet, these fetters seem to be iron rings or shackles clasped around his ankles, joined by a chain. (A page later we read that his heel bones “healed so well that nothing stood in his way.”)

  The same plan works for two brothers in a more realistic saga: “There was an axe on the ground with its edge turned up. Grim crawled over to it; he succeeded in cutting the bowstring off himself with the axe, though he wounded his hands badly.” Then he freed his brother and they slipped overboard. They made it to land, managed to break off their fetters, and walked some distance, before being rescued by Vikings they knew.

  If slavery was the economic driver of the Viking Age, I’d expect as many iron ankle shackles to turn up in excavations as swords, but they do not. A set of iron chains was found in Ireland, attached to a heavy iron neck collar. Iron shackles were found in Dublin too, as well as in Birka, Hedeby, and along the East Way, but the finds are few.

  Were Vikings not buried with these tools of their trade? Or did slavery not require shackles and chains? Rope works just as well to bind a captive (unless you leave axes lying around), and spare rope was always available on a Viking ship. In a pinch, it seems, a bowstring will do.

  The Vikings also invoked magic to bind or loose a captive. In Norse myth, the evil wolf Fenrir, who will eat the god Odin in the last battle, was bound by fetters made from “the noise of a stalking cat, a woman’s beard, a mountain’s roots, a bear’s sinews, the breath of a fish, and the spit of a bird.” All but the bear sinews are impossibilities, but fear might work as well to psychologically bind a captive. Valkyries in battle were said to be able to cast “war-fetters” to paralyze their foes with shock. They could also use charms or runes to break the fetters that bound them or their friends. A tenth-century German charm speaks of these warrior women, calling upon their aid to escape:

  Once sat women

  They sat here, then there

  Some fastened bonds,

  Some impeded an army,

  Some unraveled fetters:

  Escape the bonds,

  Flee the enemy!

  Likewise, The Words of the High One, when listing the runes the god Odin could carve, says:

  If my enemies

  bind me in bonds,

  I chant a charm

  that frees me:

  Fetters spring from my ankles,

  locks fall from my wrists.

  Better than iron shackles for keeping captives from escaping, better than charms, better than rope, was the open sea. No one would escape on those long summer days when the wind was fair, the sun was shining, the shore was a hairline of blue in the offing, not an enemy sail was in sight, and even slave-dealers like Hervor could grow bored. On the deck boards of the famous ship buried in the Oseberg grave mound, a bored Viking carved several scenes: the prow of a ship, a herd of horses, an elk with an arrow in its throat, and a hunting dog. On the deck boards of the Gokstad ship, also buried in Vestfold, Norway, the graffiti is more personal: the outlines of two feet, left and right, complete with toenails.

  No captive would think of escaping in the kind of storm described in Grettir’s Saga, when the bailers “needed two buckets, one going down while the other came up.” No, enslaved or free, everyone on that ship would be grabbing up a long-handled bailing scoop, like the one buried with the Oseberg ship, and pitching in to save the ship from sinking and themselves from drowning.

  But on the main slave routes from Dublin to Orkney, and then again from Kaupang in Norway south through the Danish straits and past the island of Samsey to the town of Hedeby—or, alternatively, hugging the coast of Sweden, swinging east to the isle of Gotland or north to Lake Malaren and the town of Birka—on these routes that Hervor sailed, a captive could dream of escaping nearly every night.

  The Vikings not only preferred to sail within sight of land; they preferred to sleep ashore in tents—though several sagas reveal how risky that could be, when enemies sneak up on a sleeping camp, cut the tent ropes to drop the heavy fabric on the sleepers, and beat them with cudgels. Along hostile shores, Vikings slept onboard, anchored in a harbor, using the tent fabric to rig awnings over their sleeping berths to hold off the rain. This, the sagas show, was only slightly less risky: Those tent ropes, too, were cut.

  The Vikings went ashore, as well, to cook their meals. One saga includes a camp scene that would be funny, if it did not lead to an ugly feud. Thorleif Kimbi, an Icelander traveling with Norwegian traders, drew the short straw and had to cook for the captain and crew, but another Icelander was hogging the porridge pot. His porridge “wasn’t thick enough, and he kept stirring it while Thorleif stood over him.” The Norwegians “shouted from the ship that Thorleif better get going with his cooking, or was he as slow and lazy as every other Icelander?” Thorleif Kimbi lost his temper. He grabbed the pot off the fire and dumped the porridge on the ground. The other man whacked him with the hot porridge ladle, burning his neck—at which point they glared at each other and vowed to meet again with proper weapons.

  While all the camp bustle was going on, setting up tents, fetching water and firewood, cooking and eating (or arguing about it), someone had to keep an eye on the cargo—especially the human cargo. All night, while the rest of the crew delighted in a stationary bed, someone had to guard the captives left on the ship, anchored offshore, while someone else watched over the camp.

  14

  THE SLAVE ROUTE TO BIRKA

  One night, a stranger shows up while Hervor is on watch. She has news for the Inghen Ruaidh. Hearing the Irish, Hervor lets her in to the camp.

  Your brother’s Danish friends are lying in wait for you at Burnt Island, the stranger says.

  Is Trond with them? the Red Girl asks.

  No. The stranger grins. Your brother’s right here, anchored not far off, with only two ships. He took tribute off my father last night. He tried to take me, as well.

  Would you like to join us when we pay him a visit?

  I’ll fetch my weapons. I left them in the woods with my brother.

  Fetch him too, if he’s a fighter, the Red Girl says.

  They rouse the crews and clear two ships of loot. They reload them with round beach stones for throwing. With the sails lowered and the oars double manned, they slip silently toward the harbor the stranger spoke of.

  It is well before dawn, still pitch-dark, and the fog thick, but the stranger and her brother know the waters well. Trond’s two longships lie abreast, anchored in the lee of an island, though some distance offshore. Their awnings are up, their crews fast asleep on board.

  Silently, the Red Girl’s ships flank their prey. Her warriors chop the awning ropes with axes and drop the heavy fabric. As the sleepers startle awake, they find themselves pelted with stones and pierced by arrows. Many, naked but for their shirts, leap overboard and swim for the island. The Red Girl’s archers and stone throwers target their splashes, but some make it to safety.

  Less than half manage to grab up their weapons and roll free of the awnings. Few have time to unhook a shield from the rails on the ship’s gunwales before the Red Girl’s warriors grapple to the enemy ships and board them. The shouts and cries and battle yells, the c
lash of steel on steel, grow deafening.

  Trond’s warriors are as tough and unflinching as his sister’s, but they are outnumbered, and they know it—and there is no sign of Trond himself on either ship.

  A great black-bearded brute rushes the Red Girl. He strikes her shield and splits it in two—but at that moment a stone hits his hand and he drops his sword. The Red Girl seizes her advantage and hamstrings him, then deals him his death blow as he falls. With that, the rest of Trond’s warriors lose heart. It is easy to surround them with shields and disarm them.

  Some of you I recognize, says the Red Girl. And I think you know me, too. I’ll give you a choice. You can swim to shore and hunt out my straw-hearted brother, or you can switch sides and fight for me.

  They look at one another. There are eight of them. The smallest—and keenest—speaks up. You’ll lay no load of shame on us?

  None, says the Red Girl. You fought well. You can keep your weapons, and you’ll take equal shares in the loot.

  They share glances again, and he nods. We’ll join you, Rusila.

  Then let’s clear the bodies off these ships and get out of here, the Red Girl says.

  They have just enough hands to manage four ships on the return, two of them heavy with the weapons and clothes and loot of Trond’s warband, the other two hampered with their own dead and wounded.

  Rejoining the other ships in their fleet, they find the camp quiet. The stranger slips off for home—her brother has been killed—and returns with salves and a healer for the wounded, horses laden with food and drink, and her father, who gravely accepts the return of the tribute that Trond took, or at least most of it.

  Stay here as long as you like, he says, and accept our thanks. He cradles his son’s body before him on the saddlebow as he rides away.

  They take two days to bury their dead, bind up their wounds, and reorganize the fleet—now seven ships, not five.