Authors: Neil Oliver
It occurred to me that it is, in part, that absence – the apparent disappearing act performed by the Vikings after two centuries and more of high visibility – that has made them so fascinating. Their fingerprints are all over the foundations of Europe and the East and yet after all those epic journeys and contributions to state-building they somehow conspired to vanish almost without a trace.
The tale of the Swedish Vikings is, nonetheless, a remarkable one. Apparently embarked upon their own adventure nearly half a century before their neighbours, by the tenth century they were certainly doing business with the Greeks of the Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad. Finds of silk back home in Sweden suggest they had penetrated China and the Indian subcontinent by then as well.
Sometime around the middle of the eighth century, the town of Birka was founded on the north-western side of the island of Björkö, in Lake Mälaren in west-central Sweden. During the Viking Age ‘Lake’ Mälaren was actually an inlet or bay of the Baltic Sea, so that ships from all points east, west and south might take advantage of a visit there via the outlet at Sodertalje. Contemporary with the Danish port town of Hedeby, Birka was of similar importance and for around 200 years it was a busy centre both for the export of goods manufactured by craftsmen on site and for the import of exotica from all over northern
Europe and the East.
Extensive excavation since the 1990s of the so-called ‘black earth’ of Birka – the layers of soil darkened by two centuries of human occupation – have yielded huge amounts of information of lives lived there during the period when Swedish Vikings were making their presence felt far and wide. For one thing, it seems clear the whole town was planned and laid out in advance – suggesting the presence of a powerful local chieftain with the clout to order and oversee the creation of an emporium to rival those already operating elsewhere around the Baltic and North Sea coastlines. The much older settlement of Helgö is only seven or eight miles away to the east, showing that Lake Mälaren was a hub for Swedish life both before and during the Viking Age. Scores of houses and workshops were laid out in their own plots of land at Birka, carefully and deliberately separated from one another by passageways and ditches. Artefacts recovered reveal many of the town’s inhabitants were jewellers and metal-workers, as well as those skilled in the preparation of animal skins and furs. Finds of large amounts of Arabic coins and bullion testify to the presence of traders who had contacts with the Middle East.
The town was laid out along the lakeside, with houses and workshops stretching inland to cover several acres. During the 900s, the need to protect the place from raids inspired the construction of a semi-circular rampart. From then on the only access to Birka was via wooden jetties built out into the lake to receive boats and ships, or through several heavily defended wooden gateways through the rampart. All of it speaks of a flourishing, wealthy and well-organised settlement of people who were well aware of the international status of their town.
Birka is surrounded by a vast cemetery of burial mounds and it was those that first attracted archaeologists to the place. From the early 1870s until almost the turn of the twentieth century,
over 1,000 mounds were excavated – a third of the total – and they yielded a revealing array of grave goods. Amber, imported pottery, carnelian beads and jewellery are all well represented and certainly testify to the wealth of those buried. But it was the discovery of the very expensive silk fragments found in many of the graves that has been most impressive of all. Collars, cuffs and inset panels of silk added real glamour to outfits worn by people in Birka in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the way in which the silk was woven tells archaeologists that most of it originated in the Middle East. Elsewhere in Sweden, at Valsgärde, close by Uppsala, a ship burial of a warrior had two pieces of Chinese silk among other grave goods.
Birka was abandoned sometime towards the end of the tenth century for reasons not yet fully understood, and its mantle taken on by the nearby settlement of Sigtuna, to the north. Perhaps Birka had been comprehensively raided and its population displaced for good. In any case the entire island of Björkö remained abandoned from that time on so that for a thousand years the only inhabitants have been sheep.
The intervening millennium seems to have mattered hardly at all. Walk up onto the ramparts today, or through one of the gateways leading into the stone fortress (known as the
Borg
and once occupied by Birka’s defenders) and the Vikings do not seem so very far away. There is nothing to be seen of the houses, workshops and jetties that once buzzed with life and trade, but the burial mounds are everywhere. If so many people died and were buried in Birka, clearly many once
lived
there too. Most of our modern cities, towns and villages are the continuations of much older places. Squatting on top of ancient foundations, they make the past hard to see, let alone to feel. But the abandonment of Birka for a thousand years has quietly preserved an atmosphere that would otherwise be smothered by the present. In many of the ways that matter it is as they left
it – a Viking Brigadoon – and of all the sites I visited in search of those people, it was easiest to imagine them there.
Silk is delicate stuff too, easily destroyed, and its survival in the graves of Birka only adds to that sense of a past uniquely preserved. I was able to see some of the Birka silk in Stockholm’s Museum, close by cases containing the Helgö treasure. They are poor scraps now – whatever vibrant colours they once had have long since faded away or been stained dark grey and black by the chemistry of the soil. But although most of their luxury is gone, the mere fact of their continued existence after as much as 1,200 years in the ground seems miraculous.
It is in the Stockholm Museum that the remains of one of Birka’s Viking inhabitants are displayed too, and I will admit I found the sight of them hard to bear. Birka Girl, as she is known, was found during the nineteenth-century excavations of the burial mounds. She had apparently been laid to rest in what was effectively a family plot, in the shadow of the Borg fortress. It is a prime location, looking out over the town and the lake beyond, and that even a tiny portion of it was set aside for the burial of a child says much about her status in life. Her grave was also in the shadow of a conspicuous white stone obelisk built into the ramparts of the fortress. It stands like a giant tooth, clearly visible from all over Birka and believed (by archaeologists at least) to mark the grave of one of the town’s founding fathers – perhaps the great chief himself. In any event, Birka Girl was granted an intended eternity in a place of honour.
She once lay among the great and the good, but she is displayed now in a little glass case. Her excavator had the wisdom – unusual indeed by the general standards of nineteenth-century excavation – to remove her in one piece. This he achieved by cutting out the whole rectangle of soil upon which she lay, still among the fragmentary remains of her wooden coffin pinned
together with iron rivets. She had been laid down wearing a dress of expensively made material, and with her in the grave were a gilded circular brooch on her chest, 21 brightly coloured glass beads around her neck and a small container, crafted from animal bone and holding sewing needles. Everything declared that she had been a person of some significance, not just to her grieving family but also to the community as a whole.
Most striking of all about Birka Girl is her tiny size. The bone specialists who have examined her skeleton most recently estimate she was no more than six years old when she died. Less than half of Viking Age children are thought to have lived to the age of 10, but Birka girl was not granted that much time on Earth. Even for a six-year-old, however, her skeleton is so fine as to appear almost birdlike. The fragility of her being is exaggerated by the bones of her skull. Found crushed into fragments by the weight of the soil, it has been painstakingly rebuilt – and the effect is haunting. Specialists in facial reconstruction have built up an approximation of how she must have looked in life and the little figure that stands by the skeleton, an image of how she may once have appeared, is heartbreaking. The mannequin wears a red dress – an expensive and luxurious colour that seems fitting given the relative richness of her burial – but it is the face that lingers in the memory.
If this was indeed what Birka Girl looked like, then she could safely be described as otherworldly. Her eyes are set quite far apart and there is something unfamiliar about the space between the bottom of her nose and her top lip. The specialists who have studied her have recently wondered if she suffered from some sort of syndrome – perhaps the result of her mother having consumed a lot of alcohol during her pregnancy.
That she was granted such a high-status burial after so few years of life suggests she had managed to matter a great deal to those who saw her every day. For some reason I have been
unable to shake off the image I have of her: slight as a sparrow, clad in her bright red frock and skipping barefoot along the wooden walkways and alleyways of Birka; bright and eyecatching as a string of carnelian beads, and as fragile. Did she seem unique and therefore special to the townsfolk she lived so briefly among, so that they came to regard her as a lucky charm? Was her early death a source of heartbreak for her neighbours as well as for her family?
It is in these personal connections that the past is brought to life, and made to matter I think. It might be impressive enough just to visit a site like Birka in the knowledge that there, a thousand and more years ago, lived people who knew all about goings-on in Russia, in Byzantium and in China and India too. They prepared exotic furs and fine jewellery and sent them off in ships, expecting Arabic silver and silk in return.
But having a sense of what one of their number actually looked like – a little girl who bobbed and skipped along jetties lined with ships and boats unloading strange cargoes and stranger passengers – adds immediacy to it all, as well as intimacy.
If the Danes and Norwegians took that little bit longer than the Swedes to start making their mark upon the world, when they finally set sail they proved every bit as daring, ambitious and intrepid. While the Swedes concentrated their efforts in the east, the Danes made their presence felt at first along the southern coast of England and around the English Channel. By then the Norwegians were already hard at work of course, all around Scotland – east, north and west – and down into the Irish Sea as far south as the Isle of Man.
Strangely enough, one of the first Viking blows inflicted on the mainland of western Europe – at Schleswig, on the border between Denmark and Frankia, in
AD
810 – was rather more than the smash-and-grab raid that usually typifies the
first appearance of the Vikings. Instead it served to demonstrate the power and confidence of the Danish King, Godfred. Having already used force to establish an emporium of his own, at Hedeby two years before, and underlined his authority by extending the Danevirke border defences between himself and the empire of Charlemagne, he was apparently prepared to go to war. The emperor responded to the Dane’s sabre-rattling by building a new fortress of his own, on the Frankish side of the border, and was busy massing his forces there when Godfred ‘came with a fleet with all the cavalry of his kingdom’. According to The Frankish Annals there were 200 Viking ships and before Charlemagne knew what was happening Frisia had been plundered. It took a hefty payment of silver – in tribute – to make the invaders back off. In response Charlemagne marched an army to the banks of the Weser River and battle seemed inevitable until, in a bizarre twist, Godfred was assassinated by one of his own men. Charlemagne was succeeded as emperor by his son, Louis the Pious, who successfully sued for peace instead.
It is worth pausing to notice how far down the road to statehood Denmark had come by the turn of the ninth century. During the seventh and eighth centuries all three Scandinavian countries had seen the rise of powerful chieftains and dynasties. But the reign of Godfred of Denmark demonstrates a further step – this time towards the emergence of a unified country with a sense of its own identity and of its separateness from its neighbours. The rise of kingship was noticeable first in Denmark but would spread to Norway and Sweden as the Viking Age progressed. If the rapid development of international trade had played a role in inspiring the avaricious activities of some, then the emergence of kings was also a contributory factor. Once power was centralised in the hands of just a few individuals – and being passed down to their descendants – men whose
ambitions felt thwarted at home might look abroad for opportunities for self-advancement.
Godfred’s posturing in 810 was nonetheless an exception and the rest of the early Viking jabs and feints were directed at undefended targets. Isolated religious communities elsewhere in the western extremities of the Frankish Empire received unwanted attention in the last year of the eighth century and on into the early decades of the ninth but it was arguably the British Isles that bore the brunt early on. By around 850, however, the Viking virus had spread right down the Atlantic coastline and even through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea.
Just as the Swedes had done in the Baltic, the Danes and Norwegians used the great rivers to penetrate the interior of the lands that had captured their imaginations. From the seventh century onwards the town of Dorestad, in the Netherlands, had established itself as one of the key emporia of north-west Europe. Fought over again and again by Franks and Frisians, it was a hub for trade goods moving in all directions. Despite sitting approximately 50 miles inland, its location by both the Rhine and Lek rivers meant it was easily within reach of Viking dragon ships and knarrs – and was raided repeatedly during the 830s. Rouen on the Seine was likewise a target in 841. Up and down the Atlantic coast and all around the southern and eastern coastlines of the British Isles it was the same story, with the raiders picking off targets seemingly at will. Hamwic (Southampton) and Quentovic (possibly modern Étaples-sur-Mer or Montreuil-sur-Mer) were raided in 842, probably by the Danes, and in 843 it was the turn of Nantes on the Loire. Toulouse, on the Garonne, was attacked the following year and then, on 28 March 845, Easter Sunday, it was the turn of Paris.