The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Another silk slider exacerbates a feud. To atone for the brutal killing of their foster brother, Njal’s sons were fined an enormous amount of blood money. They heaped up the coins and hacksilver—thirty-seven and a half pounds of it—at the Law Rock. Then “Njal took a silk slider and a pair of boots and laid them on top of the heap.” In the saga, the coat is thought quite unusual: It sparks a series of sexual insults over whether it was meant to be worn by a man or a woman—or by a beardless man easily mistaken for a woman, or a bearded man whom a troll used as a woman every ninth night.

  Could this inflammatory “slider” have been a silk-trimmed kaftan like the one Hervor wore? In the 1200s, when these sagas were being written, the Christian Scandinavian kings were waging crusades against the pagan warriors along the Baltic shores who still dressed in this style. The North’s once-active trade networks through their East Sea to Byzantium, Baghdad, and beyond were mere memories. Unisex fashions were not the only things long forgotten: Land and sea routes had become confused. When the sagas mention the East Way, their geography is horribly skewed. Depending on the saga, voyagers on the East Way end up in what is now northern Finland, northeast Poland, northwest Russia, or Ukraine. They camp on islands before well-known towns that are near no islands—and never were. They reach recognizable coastlines or rivers to which they give impossible names. Places once routinely visited become the homes of fabulous beasts: In one saga, a man nicknamed Braggart claimed to have killed a flying dragon in a place well known to the Birka warriors—a place where Birka falcon emblems have been found. Uniformly, these stories reveal their medieval authors’ unfamiliarity with that corner of the world.

  Most of all, the sagas mistakenly make the East Way sound like a single route, analogous to the North Way, which follows the coast of Norway from the Oslo Fjord to the arctic. But journeying from Birka to Baghdad or Byzantium was not as straightforward as hugging a coastline. It required negotiating various rivers and overland portages, each with distinct political and geographical dangers. The favored “East Way” in 750 or 850 was not the same way most traders traveled in 950 or 1050. In the earlier years, they headed to Baghdad or other nodes on the Silk Roads; in the later period, their goal was Miklagard, the Great City: Constantinople. Even in 950, however, to reach Byzantium the Birka warriors chose a different East Way from that taken by Vikings from Gotland.

  Their route was determined by the traders’ alliances. Trade requires trust. Both buyer and seller must feel physically safe. They must agree on rules of exchange. When trade routes cross cultural and language boundaries, symbols must signal intent. Traders along the various East Ways, for instance, used standardized scales to weigh silver. Their weights, based on the weight of an Arab dirham, were made of bronze (not easily tampered-with lead) and shaped like cubes with the corners sliced off. This same shape decorates the metal rods they used to measure cloth. It also decorates their jewelry: Traders on the East Way wore C-shaped cloak pins with terminals shaped as tiny weights. These distinctive cloak pins signaled that the traders were trustworthy. They knew how to properly weigh silver. Pins like these were found in Finland and Gotland dating from the late 800s; by 950, they were common in Birka.

  The traders’ armed guards, likewise, had to signal they were not simply Vikings, out on a raid. Hence the eclectic, urban style of dress worn in the fortresses and trading posts from Birka to Kyiv. Hervor, like the other Birka warriors, sported a silk-trimmed kaftan not because she herself came from the East, but because she had allies there. Her Western connections were also announced. Alongside the silk bands, the palmettos, hearts, and Eastern scrollwork, the Birka warriors’ gear is embellished with the last Viking style of art uncorrupted by Christian influences: the Borre style. Named for the royal estate north of Kaupang (where such designs were first found by modern archaeologists), Borre art, with its fat ribbons and pretzel knots and round-eared cats with gripping feet, was popular from Dublin to Kyiv until the mid-tenth century.

  Mixing Norse and Magyar, Byzantine, Bulgar, Persian, Arabic, Finnic, Sami, and Slavic motifs, the clothing and ornaments of the Birka warriors spoke of power, success, and access to the exotic. Like her cohort, Hervor wore a costume that declared her differentness. As a Birka warrior, she belonged everywhere and nowhere: She was a far-traveler, a hired sword in a merchant’s employ, embodying the polyethnic culture of the trade routes known to the Vikings as the East Way. She was one of the Rus.

  * * *

  In June 860, a fleet of two hundred ships sailed beneath the walls of Constantinople, “their crews with swords raised, as if threatening the city with death.” The Byzantine emperor and his army were away. “Why has this dreadful bolt fallen on us out of the farthest north?” asked Patriarch Photius, head of the Eastern Church.

  Like his coreligionists in the West, when faced with a whirlwind Viking raid, the patriarch deduced that these merciless warriors “holding bow and spear,” their voice “as the roaring sea,” were sent by God. The Byzantines had grown contemptuous, sinful. They “forgot to be grateful.” They were fat, foolish, and insolent. “We enjoyed ourselves, and grieved others.” These warriors from the North, “surpassing all others with cruelty and bloodthirst,” were the weapons of God’s anger, said the patriarch: “I am talking about the Rhos.”

  The name for these Northerners—Rus, as we spell it—may come from the Old Norse verb “to row”; as the Arab encyclopedist Ibn Rustah noted in the early 900s, “They fight best on shipboard, not horseback.” It may come from the place-name Roslagen (itself derived from “to row”), which describes a stretch of the coast of Sweden just north of Lake Malaren; the Finns called people from Roslagen “Ruotsi.” According to Bishop Liudprand of Cremona, writing in the mid-tenth century, Constantinople was menaced from the north by four barbarous tribes: “Magyars, Pechenegs, Khazars, and Rus, whom we call also by the other name of Northmen.” Liudprand thought “Rus” meant “red,” as in the name “Rusila.” The Rus, he said, are so named “because of their look”: They had red hair or, suggests another translator, ruddy skin.

  The warrior in Birka grave Bj581, as imagined by artist Tancredi Valeri, based on archaeologists’ interpretations.

  The Arab geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih, writing his Book of Roads and Kingdoms in about 840, seems to have agreed. To him, the Rus were Saqaliba, the Arabic term for fair-skinned Northerners: The “look” was what mattered, not precisely where they came from. Yet Ibn Khurradadhbih was impressed by how far the Rus traveled to sell their “beavers and black fox pelts, as well as swords.” They journey, he wrote, “from the farthest reaches of the land of the Saqaliba” down the Dniepr River to the Black Sea, crossing it to reach Constantinople, or down the Volga to the capital of the Khazars. From there they “embark upon the Caspian Sea, heading for a point they know. This sea is 500 farsakhs long”—each Persian farsakh being equal to four miles. At the southeast corner of the Caspian Sea is the city of Jurjan (Gorgan in modern Iran), a node on the Silk Roads.

  “Sometimes,” continued Ibn Khurradadhbih, “they transport their merchandise on camel back from the city of Jurjan to Baghdad. There, Saqaliba eunuchs serve them as interpreters.” Some of these eunuchs likely traveled into slavery along those same routes down Russian rivers, despite the claim by Ibn Hawqal, the tenth-century Arab geographer, that “all the Saqaliba eunuchs in the world” come from Islamic Spain. Slavery was central to the Rus economy, as it was throughout the Viking world. As Ibn Rustah wrote, the Rus “treat their slaves well and dress them suitably, because for them they are an article of trade.”

  * * *

  Trading along the East Way was the practice of the people of the North long before the Rus reached recorded history. On the Swedish island of Helgo, a little east of Birka in Lake Malaren, archaeologists found a silver Byzantine dish, a hoard of seventy Byzantine gold coins, a Coptic ladle from Egypt, and—spectacularly—a little bronze Buddha, serene on his lotus flower, embellished with silver and blue gems. It was made in the si
xth century on the eastern border of Pakistan. How it got to Sweden, sometime in the 700s, no one knows. But it may have been brought west by a Buddhist merchant. In Moshchevaja Balka, the graveyard in the Caucasus where the pattern for Hervor’s silk kaftan was found, a merchant was buried in the eighth or ninth century with a Buddhist sutra, sacred Buddhist images painted on silk, and bits of a Buddhist votive banner.

  Direct contact between Birka and the Islamic world is also attested. Quantities of silver, in the form of dirhams, began flowing north to Sweden in the 750s, when the Umayyad caliphate collapsed. The Abbasid caliphs established a new capital, Baghdad, in 762, and made peace with the Khazars, who commanded the mouth of the Volga. As Baghdad grew, the demand for fair-skinned Saqaliba slaves increased. At the same time, northern furs—marten, beaver, ermine, fox, rabbit, and squirrel—became fashionable in elite Arab circles. Among the people who supplied those furs and slaves were the Rus, with their westernmost outpost being the town of Birka. A rich woman buried in Birka a hundred years later may have come from the Arab world herself. She wore a silver finger ring with a “stone” of violet-colored glass; an inscription on the glass, in Kufic script, reads “For Allah,” or maybe the more familiar “inshallah,” “God willing.” The lack of wear on the ring implies the woman bought it directly from an Arab silversmith.

  In 860, when they brandished their swords before the high-walled city of Constantinople (whose half a million people outnumbered them seventy to one), the Rus were not, as Patriarch Photius claimed, “obscure, insignificant, and not even known until the incursion against us”—though when he adds that they were “armed with arrogance,” his description was likely accurate.

  Envoys from the Rus had met with the previous Byzantine emperor in 839. They seem to have made a trade deal, for they parted on excellent terms. Rather than returning north via the Russian rivers, the Rus envoys joined a Byzantine embassy to the court of the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious—a decision that literally made history. The Annals of St-Bertin note the Byzantines brought Louis “gifts worthy for an emperor, and a letter.” In it, Emperor Theophilos asked Louis to help the envoys—“who said they, meaning their whole people, were called Rhos”—return home. It is the first mention of the Rus in the West.

  Louis was suspicious. He had never heard of the Rus. He was certain the envoys were Swedes—and spies. Was it the language they spoke to one another? No matter what their ethnicity, a dialect of Swedish seems to have been the Rus lingua franca along the East Way. Or was it how they described their homeland? No one knows. But Louis certainly knew Swedes. It was he who had sent Anskar to Birka, ten years before, to convert the Swedes to Christianity. Anskar was now archbishop of Hamburg, his companions in Birka had become martyrs, and the Swedes were still aggressively pagan. Louis decided to detain these so-called Rus “until he could find out for certain whether or not they had come in good faith.” He sent a letter back to Constantinople. “If they were found to be genuine,” he would grant the Rus safe conduct through his empire; if not, he would send them back to Byzantium for Emperor Theophilos “to deal with as he might think fit.”

  I don’t know how this story ends—no letters tell whether the Rus envoys made it home or not. And where was home? Were they from Birka? If so, they may have been Swedes who did not consider themselves “Swedish.” That is, like Hervor and the other Birka warriors, they did not identify as subjects of the Swedish king. Instead they belonged to a multiethnic trading society that spread from Birka east along the Baltic coasts of Finland and Estonia to the town of Ladoga, in modern Russia near St. Petersburg, then south through Kyiv to Constantinople or east down the Volga to intersect with the Silk Roads and the caravan-way to Baghdad. All along these routes, archaeologists find similar hillforts, houses, graves, clothing, jewelry, insignia, weapons, money, and boats. The settlements all date from around 750 and disappear in the late 900s.

  * * *

  The Rus who ransacked the suburbs of Constantinople in 860 were indeed rowers from the North. But they were not the tools of Patriarch Photius’s angry God. They were not at all interested in the Byzantines’ sins. They had come to the Great City, their Miklagard, for Byzantine silk.

  According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, compiled between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, when they returned there in 907, with allies, their intention was unmistakable. This time, the Northern fleet was said to number two thousand ships. They beached their boats before the city walls. Then their leader, Oleg (in Swedish, Helgi), “commanded his warriors to make wheels which they attached to the ships, and when the wind was favorable, they spread the sails and bore down upon the city from the open country. When the Greeks beheld this, they were afraid, and sending messengers to Oleg they implored him not to destroy the city and offered to submit to such tribute as he should desire.”

  The peace treaty was signed by Emperors Leo and Alexander and, representing Oleg, king of Gardariki, by “we of the Rus nation: Karl, Ingjald, Farulf, Vermund, Hrollaf, Gunnar, Harald, Karni, Fridleif, Hroarr, Angantyr, Throand, Leidulf, Fast, and Steinvid”—all common Norse names. It covered the usual clauses: how to deal with the murder of a Rus by a Byzantine and vice versa, assault, theft, inheritance, escaped criminals or slaves, the transfer of prisoners, army service, shipwrecks, and ships seeking shelter from the storm. But at its heart was trade. Rus merchants, who swore to “do no violence” and to live only in the St. Mamas quarter outside the city walls, could enter by one gate, unarmed, in parties of fifty, with an imperial escort. They paid no taxes and were supplied with bread, wine, meat, fish, fruit, and baths for six months. More food was provided for their journey home, along with ropes, anchors, sails, “and whatever else is needed.”

  They were also, in 907, paid tribute: gold, “every sort of adornment,” and, most of all, silk. “Oleg gave orders that sails of pavolochity should be made for the Rus and of kropin’nyya for the Slavs.” Pavolochity, often translated as “brocade,” was a heavy silk fabric with a geometrical pattern. Kropin’nyya described a lighter silk fabric. The Rus hung their shields upon the gates of Constantinople as a sign of victory, the chronicle concludes. Then they “unfurled their sails of brocade and the Slavs their sails of silk, but the wind tore them. Then the Slavs said, ‘Let us keep our canvas ones.’” Enough silk to make a sail was an enormous treasure, not something to let the wind shred even to make a statement.

  * * *

  Not all Viking silk came from Byzantium. Some came from China, like the two-colored star-and-dot-patterned damask, made from unspun raw silk, found in Birka. Some came from Baghdad, where, according to tenth-century tax rolls, four thousand people produced silk or cotton fabrics. Some silk found in Birka and in Moshchevaja Balka is Sogdian silk, woven near Samarkand and Bukhara in modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Some may have come from the Persian city of Jurjan, on the shore of the Caspian Sea, where the Arabic writer Ibn Khurradadhbih says the Rus traded; in the mid-900s, adds Ibn Hawqal, no better silk was to be found anywhere.

  But we know most about Byzantine silk thanks to the Book of the Eparch, a handbook on commerce written in tenth-century Constantinople. The eparchs, among their official duties, set standards and prices. All the various silk guilds reported to them, and they ensured the guilds followed the rules. These were intricate (or should I say, Byzantine?); the penalties for flouting them ranged from confiscation to flogging to death. Raw silk, for example, could be sold only in public markets, not in private shops and not outside the city walls. Silk fabric from Baghdad could be sold only in specialty shops—and those shopkeepers could deal in no other goods. Certain patterns—yellow medallions, peacocks, lions—could be worn only by employees of the Great Office, servants in the imperial chamber, and the chief eunuchs, respectively. Silk dyed royal purple, using an extract from murex snails, was reserved for the emperor’s family; the trim on a single garment could require twelve thousand crushed snails. Ordinary mortals could wear only pseudo-purple, dyed with lichens. Silk dyed sca
rlet red, using crushed kermes insects, was expensive, though not impossible for a foreigner to buy—if the purchase was approved by the eparch. That it did reach the Viking world is proved by the discovery of kermes-dyed silk in the Oseberg ship burial in Vestfold, Norway. Foreigners like the Rus, before they brandished their swords before Constantinople’s walls and negotiated a better trade deal, were also limited by how much silk they could buy: up to the value of ten bezants. The bezant was a Byzantine gold coin equal, at that time, to one Arab gold dinar or fifteen silver dirhams. A good horse cost twelve bezants.

  In 944, the Rus leader Igor (Swedish, Ingvar) negotiated a new treaty with the Byzantines, increasing the amount of silk the Rus could buy to fifty bezants’ worth. It was a concession hard won. Three years earlier, when Igor’s fleet of a thousand ships threatened the city, Emperor Romanos sent out against them “fifteen old battered galleys” with “fire-throwers not only at the bows but at the stern and both sides as well.” His sailors allowed themselves to be surrounded, then “began to fling their fire all around.” This was the famous Greek fire, a sticky mixture of sulfur, saltpeter, naphtha oil, and possibly quicklime or pine tar, that was shot flaming from a pressurized tube and could not be quenched by water; rather, it burned on top of the waves. The Rus “threw themselves in haste from their ships, preferring to be drowned in the water rather than burned alive in the fire.” Some sank under the weight of their armor. Some caught fire as they swam. Those who reached the shore were captured and later “beheaded in the presence of King Hugh’s envoy, namely my stepfather, by order of Romanos,” writes Liudprand of Cremona. “As the result of this,” he continues, “Igor returned to his own country completely demoralised.”