The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Like Gilli, several Gerzkr-named merchants in the sagas wear distinctive gerzkr hats. Translators call these “Russian hats,” and reenactors generally make them out of fur, which is a good guess; but they could also be gaudy silk caps topped with filigreed silver cones, like the one Hervor and another Birka warrior were buried in.

  The Saga of Hervor is one of the few to set a scene or two in Ladoga itself. The story begins in Estonia, where the king of Ladoga seized two dwarfs before they could slip inside their house-sized stone. To ransom their lives the dwarfs were forced to make the king a sword “that would never rust. It was to cut iron and stone as easily as cloth, and bring its bearer victory in all battles and duels.” This was the famous Flaming Sword, Tyrfing, which Hervor later took from her father’s grave on the isle of Samsey.

  When he grew old, the king of Ladoga gave the sword Tyrfing—and his daughter—to the Swedish warrior who captained his garrison. (Another version of the saga says the warrior stole the sword and ran off with the princess.) The pair set up house in Sweden and had twelve sons. The eldest, Angantyr, returned to Ladoga to marry Svava, the daughter of the earl who then ruled the town. After the wedding feast, Angantyr left her, pregnant, to go fight and die on Samsey.

  The widowed Svava gave birth to a beautiful girl, the saga says, and named her Hervor, “Aware of Battle.” The girl grew up in the earl’s household and became “as strong as a man.” She was also as strong willed as a man, as we have seen: “As soon as she was able, she practised more with a bow and a sword and shield than at sewing or embroidery,” even though, the saga adds, “she did more harm than good.”

  Perhaps, like the hero Arrow-Odd, she left her arrows lying around on the benches for people to sit on in the dark, or, like the hero Egil the Poet, she murdered her opponents in the ball games. Was she as annoying as the hero Grettir, who broke the wings of his family’s geese, I wonder, or the hero Olaf, who saddled a billy goat when asked to ready his foster father’s horse? “One time, when Hervor was outside,” the saga says, “she was standing near some slaves; she was abusive to them, as she was to everyone.” One of them—no deferring servant this—lashed back at her: “It’s only to be expected that you would behave so badly. That’s why the earl forbids us to mention your father. He’s ashamed for you to know that the lowest of his slaves lay with his daughter and you are their child.”

  Outraged, Hervor confronted the earl, who said the rumor was wrong. Her father was not the swineherd; he was a Viking raider, a hero held in high esteem. He had died in battle and was buried with his brothers on the isle of Samsey.

  Instantly Hervor decided to seek out their grave and retrieve the treasure buried with them. She told her mother, “Prepare for me, as quickly as you can, everything you would give to a son.” Then, “taking a warrior’s gear and weapons, she went alone to a place where there were some Vikings.” She joined their band, calling herself by the masculine name Hervard. “After a little while,” the saga says, “this Hervard became the leader of the band.”

  * * *

  Our Hervor is not this Hervard-Hervor. Her bones say the warrior woman buried in Birka grave Bj581 grew up in the west of the Viking world, not here in Ladoga, in the east. It’s unlikely they met each other, either, as in the scene I’ve imagined at the beginning of this chapter. But the archaeological and the literary sources inform each other. The saga brings the skeleton to imaginative life; the burial gives a foundation of reality to the tale: There were warrior women in the Viking Age. They did carry “a warrior’s gear and weapons.” They did become the captains of their bands.

  In addition to proving the saga is not fantasy—though it may be fiction—archaeology can reconstruct the town where the saga’s Hervor grew up, even depicting for us the house in which she was rebuked by the enslaved woman.

  The small, square buildings archaeologists have unearthed in Ladoga, built out of horizontal logs with dovetailed corners like log cabins, are a classic Slavic style of house. They generally have only one room, about ten feet square, with the hearth in one corner. Some have attached porches. Objects found inside them show that some of these small houses were used as workshops, others as dwellings.

  Ladoga’s larger, more oblong houses, though also built log-cabin-style, incorporate Swedish architectural features. They have central longfires and broad sleeping benches along the side walls. Their roofs are held up by rows of internal posts, and they have wooden floors. Most have a storeroom attached. The biggest of these Swedish-style houses were built as a house within a house: The longhouse, with its longfire and benches, was surrounded on three sides by a covered gallery; on the fourth side a long storeroom was attached. These big houses were often surrounded by a group of the small square houses; each cluster may have been the compound of a different trading company.

  The largest of the big houses, set a bit apart from the others, was built just before 900 using wood from a dismantled ship, then rebuilt, bigger, in the 930s. It might have been the earl’s hall, where the Hervor in the saga grew up; some archaeologists call it “the prince’s palace.” More than eighteen hundred square feet in size, it housed ten to twenty people. Lost or discarded within it, for archaeologists to find a thousand years later, were weights from a trader’s scales, spindle whorls, combs, game pieces, beads and bits of amber, broken glass drinking cups and pottery, an iron Thor’s hammer, and a gold finger ring. Whoever lived there was quite well-off.

  Like Birka, Ladoga was home to many religions and ethnic groups. Its graveyards include high, conical mounds with many people buried together; low, round individual barrows; and wood-lined chamber graves. Some of its people were cremated, others buried whole, with extensive grave goods or without any.

  Many of Ladoga’s residents were artisans, like those in Birka, and shared common practices: The method of making knives in Ladoga, from a sandwich of different kinds of iron, for example, was a Swedish technique, not known elsewhere in Eastern Europe before 900.

  Like Birka, Ladoga drew visitors from the cold, coniferous taiga region to the north. Lured by the market’s jewelry, weapons, tools, cloth, and pots, they paid with high-quality furs. From the south, visitors seeking fur and weapons paid in silver: Archaeologists estimate that 90 to 95 percent of all Arab silver dirhams found in Sweden passed through Ladoga.

  Both townspeople and visitors were guaranteed a fair market by Ladoga’s warriors, who mirror those of Birka: A tenth-century chamber grave in Ladoga held a warrior (thought to be a man) buried like the woman in Birka grave Bj581—though not quite so richly. With him in his grave were two horses, riding tack, arrowheads, a knife, a bucket, a bone pin, and a Byzantine bronze buckle—but no sword, spears, shields, or scramasax. A falcon sword-chape was found elsewhere in Ladoga.

  While only three spears and no swords have been unearthed so far in the town (nothing like the abundance of weapons found in Birka), it’s clear that Ladoga, too, was a martial society. A rune stick with an inscription of fifty-two runes, written in the short-twig Swedish style, seems to praise a dead warrior (though some scholars read the runes as a description of an arrow or a shield, and still others say it’s a magical inscription, invoking the aid of an elf). Finally, lending more credence to the Saga of Hervor, archaeologists found seven wooden practice swords or toys in the town—implying children were trained in martial arts.

  * * *

  At Ladoga, lapstrake Viking ships were repaired—near the waterfront archaeologists found a smithy that made iron rivets. But shipwrights were also busy making local boats, to sell or rent to travelers arriving in deep-keeled Norwegian ships unsuitable for the shallow Russian rivers.

  The Russian chëln was an expanded dugout canoe, similar to those the Sami used in Lake Malaren. Keelless and double-ended like a modern canoe, and steered with a paddle at each end, they were very light and maneuverable boats. Empty, a thirty-foot chëln could weigh half as much as the oak Viks Boat of the same length, but it could seat the same number of rowers and carr
y the same amount of cargo.

  Adopting the local boats may have simplified the traders’ logistics. The route south from Ladoga to the Black Sea was well mapped by the time Hervor arrived in the mid-tenth century, and the land was called Gardariki, or Kingdom of Fortresses, for good reason. With no roads through the dense forests, trade followed the rivers. Where rapids were impassable, or the route crossed between watersheds, there were portage paths guarded by warriors and staffed by porters. For their use, merchants paid a toll to the Rus captain in the nearby hillfort. Possibly only the load was carried. Boats suitable for each river, or for each stretch of a river, might have been provided as well. A perk of belonging to a Rus merchant company in the tenth century, it seems, was gaining access to such services—for a price, of course.

  For that price the Rus also, in theory, promised peace along the waterways. They did so by suppressing the surrounding population of Slavic farmers and fur trappers, forcing them to pay a tribute of one squirrel skin and one rabbit skin per hearth. In the 860s, the Slavs of Gardariki rose in rebellion, says the Russian Primary Chronicle. Refusing to pay tribute, they drove the Rus warbands “back beyond the sea” and began to rule themselves. The attempt failed; the region fell into chaos. “One clan fought another, and they warred and captured, and there was endless bloodshed.” Ladoga was burned to the ground. It was soon rebuilt, with the same mix of house styles, most likely by the very same people. But the conflagration marks the time of the Slavic rebellion and the subsequent founding—according to this tradition, at least—of the Russian state.

  After years of war, reports the chronicle, the Slavs held an assembly: “Let us seek a prince who may rule over us and judge us according to the law.” They sent envoys west to the Rus—whom the chronicler explains were not Swedes, Norwegians, English, or Gotlanders—to recruit three brothers, Rurik, Sineus, and Truvor. They brought their families and warbands and took control of three fortress towns along the trade routes.

  Generations of scholars—and demagogues—have argued that Rurik and his brothers were Scandinavian or German Vikings and that, as one haughty German opined in the eighteenth century, “Wild, boorish, and isolated Slavs began to be socially acceptable only thanks to the Germans, whose mission, decreed by fate, was to sow the first seeds of civilization among them.”

  Yet the trade routes through Slavic lands to Byzantium, Baghdad, and beyond were traveled long before Rurik arrived. Some hillforts and portages were then a hundred years old; other towns, like Kyiv, were much older. The Rus were merely the next wave of warriors seeking control over the long-standing exchange of northern furs for southern silks.

  Nor were the Rus a race: The distinguishing trait of every Rus town is its mix of peoples. Rus, like Viking, was an occupation, a way of life, not a nation or ethnic group. It’s more likely the three brothers were Slavic, or half-Slavic, than Scandinavian or German. Sineus is Slavic for “Bluebeard”; Truvor means “Hornblower.” Rurik has no apparent Slavic meaning, but in one source he goes by the Slavic name Yeryek. The Rus, of course, included Slavs in their multiethnic mix. There’s no contradiction in Rurik being both Slavic and Rus—and a Viking.

  Rurik’s fortress, now called Gorodishche, or Little Fortress, lies a few miles upstream from the town of Novgorod (New Fortress), known in the sagas as Holmgard, or Island Fortress. Founded in about 930, Holmgard would become the seat of Queen Allogia, under whose protection the young Olaf Tryggvason, redeemed from slavery, learned to be a king. Novgorod was famous for law and order: Killings were punishable by death. One day while he was wandering in the marketplace, nine-year-old Olaf met the man who had enslaved him—and who had killed Olaf’s foster father for being too old to be a useful worker. “Olaf had a little axe in his hand,” writes Snorri in Heimskringla. “He hit Klerkon in the head, so the axe sank into his brain.” Olaf outran the immediate hue and cry, and his uncle took him to the queen.

  Queen Allogia ruled Novgorod alongside her husband, King Valdamar (or Vladimir), and it was their custom, Snorri writes, that “the queen should keep half of the warband, providing for the warriors at her own expense, and assessing whatever taxes and tribute she needed to cover it.” Queen Allogia’s “warband was no smaller than the king’s, and they were often in competition for the best warriors.” The queen took a liking to the courageous boy. When she learned he was a king’s son in exile, she paid blood money for the killing and kept Olaf by her side—until he turned a handsome eighteen and slanderers wondered aloud “what he and the queen were always talking about together.” Then she sent Olaf away to become, after many adventures, king of Norway in 995.

  In Hervor’s day, Novgorod was still a rough frontier town. To reach it from Ladoga, Hervor’s convoy of Birka merchants in their riverboats and canoes rowed 130-some miles up the Volkhov River and crossed shallow Lake Ilmen. At the lake’s southern end the river braided through a maze of islands. On one stood the town, on another Rurik’s fortress, their situation memorably described by the Persian geographer Ibn Rustah in 903, after his visit to the Rus: “The island where they live takes three days to walk across and is covered with forests and wetlands, unhealthy and so waterlogged that if a man only steps on the soil, it quivers.” In Novgorod, archaeologists have noted, all the streets were boardwalks.

  The filigreed silver cone found next to the skull in Birka grave Bj581.

  * * *

  Once the soil iced up, however, it made a good sledge road. For the next segment of the journey, south of Holmgard, it was better for the Birka convoy to wait until winter. Gnezdovo, their destination, was three hundred miles south, near the modern city of Smolensk. Though the Lovat River flowed from the right general direction, it was not easy navigating upstream. Journeying by boat, the traders could expect a month of constant unpacking and repacking, and an extra-long portage near the end, crossing from the river’s headwaters into the next watershed. With horse-drawn sledges over ice and snow, the trip could be accomplished in half the time. Again, it was a perk of a Rus merchant company to easily trade boats for horse transport and to know new boats awaited at Gnezdovo, for sailing down the Dniepr River to Kyiv.

  Gnezdovo, though it’s gone now, was a crowded and powerful town in the tenth century. With its hillfort and garrison of warriors—some displaying the Birka warrior’s falcon sword-chape—its busy workshops and bustling river harbor, its apparent disdain for agriculture, its litter of lost (or hoarded) Arab and Byzantine coins, its waterlogged wooden houses and muddy streets, and its Swedish welded-steel blades, Gnezdovo was a twin to the other Rus towns Hervor had visited. Like them, it was a travelers’ service station.

  Its vast graveyards, now hidden beneath dense pine forests and tall grass, present an eclectic mix of Slavic, Baltic, Swedish, Byzantine, Magyar, and Khazar costumes and rites. Archaeologists have found warriors buried with arrows, spears, swords, and horses. They’ve found couples cremated in lapstrake Viking-style boats. And they found a fabulously rich woman buried with a birch-bark box in which were folded a blue linen dress, a silk shawl, and two luxurious Chinese silk dresses, one light brown, the other a warm orange-red with a dramatic pattern of a griffin and dragon worked out in gold threads.

  A jeweler in Gnezdovo, not in Kyiv, may have made the fancy silver cone for the top of Hervor’s silk gerzkr cap. Its filigree technique is typically Slavic, and Gnezdovo is well known to Viking Age archaeologists for its many crescent-moon-shaped lunula pendants, made of sheet metal and decorated with the same filigree-work.

  Hervor’s cone, too, was made of sheet metal, in this case a sheet of silver, cut, curled, and soldered into a cone two and a half inches tall. Its flared bottom was snipped into four deep, rounded lobes, each with a hole punched for sewing it onto the cap. Its pointed top was embellished with a knob. Then came the filigree work: The knob is encrusted with diamond patterns made up of tiny silver dots. On each of the cone’s four sides, silver wires surround twenty-two nested Vs of dots. More dots edge the wires and circle the sewing
holes. It’s a rigidly geometric design—not at all like the looping, dizzying interlace of most Viking jewelry—but still dazzling in its complexity. Shining in the sun, it must have sparkled like a dewy spider’s web.

  21

  QUEEN OLGA’S REVENGE

  She sewed it to the peak of her silk gerzkr cap as soon as she returned to her lodgings, and this morning she expected to turn heads. But instead of staying another day in Gnezdovo, they caught a fair wind and are now sailing down the Deep River, wide and smooth and pleasant on a fine spring day, and there is no one to notice her headgear but her own few shipmates. They barely give her a raised eyebrow before the weather grows too warm to wear any hat at all.

  Stripped to their linen shirts and trousers, she and her crew sail day and night and sleep by turns. It is the easiest stage of their voyage since they left Lake Malaren, with wind and current both speeding them along.

  Before she knows it, they’ve turned a bend in the river, and there, where a stream flows in from the west and the ferries make their crossing, she sees a fortress on a hilltop shining high above a town: King’s Fort, or Kyiv.