Vikings (6 page)

Quite why the peoples of Scandinavia abandoned hunting as their mainstay when they did, around 4000
BC
, and embarked upon the relentless cycle of sowing and harvesting, is still being debated; but there are good reasons for believing a relatively rapid rise of sea level may have been a deciding factor. If access to the familiar supplies of fish, shellfish and sea mammals was suddenly disrupted by the emergence of a new coastline, erstwhile hunters in the most adversely affected areas may have seen the wisdom of changing their ways. In any event, there was then a quite rapid uptake of farming in those parts of Denmark, southern Sweden and south-east Norway best suited to agriculture and the keeping of domesticated animals.

After countless generations of nomadic, or at least semi-nomadic, life, people began establishing permanent settlements – living in houses, in one place for all of their lives and, most conspicuously, building great tombs of stone for their dead. As well as placing the mortal remains inside the tombs, the bereaved marked the passing of their loved ones by holding feasts – behaviour revealed by the discovery of pottery vessels, whole and in fragments, left behind both inside the tombs and around the entrances.

The job of clearing and maintaining the land, sowing and harvesting crops and looking after animals required a different and more diverse toolkit than had been made and used by the hunters. Farmers needed axes for felling trees, sickles for reaping wheat and barley.

Settled agriculture led also to a steady rise in population. The life of constant toil, working from dawn until dusk to provide a repetitive diet of much cereal and little meat, may have lacked the excitement and satisfaction of the hunt – but it was generally more reliable when it came to putting food into hungry mouths. It was also a lifestyle that took on a momentum of its own: more food provided for larger families; more people could clear and tend more land; more land would provide more food, and so on. Eventually there might even be food surplus, so that not all hands were required in the fields but could be set aside to perfect other skills, like tool-making.

Those people in a position to control the extra food might be able to offer it to others from time to time, thereby placing them in debt. The commitment to farming also made the cycle of the seasons a preoccupation of mankind – in a way it had never been before. The crops had to be sown during spring . . . the summer sun must ripen them . . . the animals should be slaughtered as autumn turned to winter . . . As the time and the year passed by so the world turned and the sky spun overhead. Those few who watched and then understood the phases of the moon, the tracks of the stars, the lengthening and shortening of days, might acquire knowledge. Once they could predict celestial events, rather than just bearing witness to them, then that knowledge might become something else. It was by means as simple as these – control of the stuff of life, acquisition of learning – that some men and women gained influence, even power over their fellows.

Powerful people often like to look and dress like powerful
people, and acquire tastes for luxury items unavailable to the common folk. In the Neolithic of Scandinavia, as in the rest of Europe, the rise of powerful, special people is testified to by the appearance in graves of polished stone axes and other refined weaponry that declared the elevated status of their owners.

After around 1,000 years of farming in Scandinavia some of the people, in Denmark and elsewhere, began to take a new approach to the treatment of their dead. Whether farming had arrived in the heads and hands of immigrants, or only as a set of persuasive ideas communicated from person to person and community to community, is still unclear. What is certain is that once people began staying put in one place, clearing and tending fields, they became possessive of the land upon which their futures depended. Claims on the home turf were passed from parents to children, generation to generation, and so the ancestors – those who had worked the same land before – became a proof of authority and entitlement. What better way to advertise ownership of a territory than by storing the bones of some of the previous incumbents in highly visible stone tombs that declared to all comers: ‘This land is mine, because it was my father’s, and his father’s and his father’s . . .’

But during the third millennium
BC
in parts of Scandinavia – as elsewhere in Europe and in Britain too – there was a general abandonment of the great communal tombs of the past, in favour of burying people in single graves. Rather than ancestors and connection with the past, what mattered was the individual and the here and now. Fashion further demanded the inclusion in the grave of axes, and also of fired clay beakers – usually decorated by having had a cord wrapped around them while they were still soft. Archaeologists take such finds as proof of a culture that reached right across northern Europe. They call it the culture of the Corded Ware Beaker. In Scandinavia this tradition took root first of all in Denmark and, having found
acceptance there, persisted unchanged for well over a thousand years.

There were no metal objects in Danish graves until around 1700
BC
; but that is not to say metal was unknown to the people living there before that date. Spectacular flint artefacts recovered from some of the last of the Stone Age graves reveal the local artisans were well aware of the magical new material – and skilled enough to set themselves in competition with the best efforts of the metal-workers. Flint daggers shaped in imitation of those being cast in bronze elsewhere in Europe at the same time are testament to the levels of expertise reached after thousands of years of refinement of the techniques of flint-knapping.

Stunning or not, the flint daggers were nonetheless a last hurrah for their makers. By the time of the Late Neolithic they were appearing in Danish graves in place of the stone battleaxes that had been the earlier symbols of status. But between 1800 and 1700
BC
, the Bronze Age arrived in Denmark and then it was metal objects that were increasingly in use, appearing in graves or in hoards placed in special places like rivers, bogs and lakes as votive offerings. Given the extremes of geography, metal objects – and the technology of their production – took longer to penetrate the more northerly territories of Scandinavia. But penetrate they did, so that tools and weapons of uniform types are eventually found all over Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Apart from anything else this spread shows there were networks of trade connecting the scattered populations. Presumably the peoples further north exchanged their natural resources – animal skins and furs, seal oil and pine resin – for either the raw materials of bronze production or the finished objects themselves.

Connections between Denmark and Jutland and the rest of Scandinavia are not only revealed by the trade goods. Especially evocative are the numerous rock carvings – made during the
second millennium
BC
– of what can only be described as long ships. Such imagery is particularly common in southern Sweden but also found in Denmark and Norway. The creation of rock art there seems to have been a preoccupation for hundreds of years and subjects include people, animals, weapons, unidentified symbols and shallow circular depressions known as cup marks. Most common, however, are depictions of seagoing vessels with high prows and sterns, crewed by a score and more rowers. They appear again and again, pecked into outcrops of bedrock – sometimes single ships but often entire flotillas.

Given the mountainous, forested interiors of countries like Norway, it would always have made more sense to move people and goods around by sea. But set aside the practicalities and it is impossible not to feel the imagination stirred by those artworks made during the Scandinavian Bronze Age. That the ship is so prevalent in the imagery is surely indicative of the importance attributed, in those distant years, to the ability to make voyages across the water. No doubt the wherewithal to commission, own and crew a ship was the mark of an important individual. By between 4,000 and 3,000 years ago, then, the ship was already deeply rooted in the psyche of the men who would be Vikings.

‘Who were these barbarians who came and plundered and went again so swiftly? The people of Northumberland called them vikings, a word that meant pirates in the Old English language, and that name has stuck. Nobody knew who they were or where they had come from.’

G. L. Proctor,
The Vikings

Anyone using modern computers, smartphones and the rest in the last 10 to 15 years has run across the word ‘Bluetooth’. It refers to the technology that enables the transfer of information – photos, documents, messages – without the need for wires and cables between the various pieces of hardware. It was developed by the Swedish telecommunications company Ericsson and launched in 1994. It is now so commonplace many people take it for granted their phones can talk to their computers and their computers can talk to their televisions – all without the need for any physical connection between the bits of kit. What fewer people realise is the technology is named after a tenth-century Viking.

Harald ‘Bluetooth’ Blatand was King of Denmark and parts of Norway from
AD
958 until 987, when he was apparently murdered on the orders of his own son. He had done much to develop and strengthen the
Danevirke
– a complex of earthen ramparts and forts raised across the neck of the Jutland
peninsula in the early part of the eighth century to keep the country safe from marauding German barbarians. But more than anything else he is famous for bringing together the disparate Danish tribes into a unified whole – and then finding a way to unite them with their Norwegian neighbours. In other words, Harald Bluetooth found a way to make communication possible between groups that had previously refused to connect with one another. It was this ability to join people together that inspired Ericsson to name their unifying wireless technology after him. The little logo that sits at the top of the screen of any ‘Bluetooth-enabled’ hardware (
) is actually a monogram created from the two runes that represent Harald’s initials –
and
.

Even at the heart of one of the most quintessentially modern elements of twenty-first-century life, we find the shadow of a Viking. Look around: in the most unexpected locations you will find more of them.

On a summer’s day around 3,400 years ago the body of a young woman was laid to rest beneath a green field near the modern village of Egtved, in the south-east of Denmark. In life she had stood around five feet five inches tall. Her hair was thick and blonde, her fingernails neatly manicured. Her coffin had been hollowed from the skilfully split trunk of an oak tree, rather in the manner of a dug-out canoe, and lined with a cowhide. She wore a short woollen tunic, or bodice, with elbow-length sleeves and a knee-length string skirt, made of twisted lengths of sheep’s wool. Around her waist was a braided woollen belt from which hung a comb fashioned from a piece of horn. On her stomach was a disc of bronze, like an outsize buckle, engraved with a spiral design and bearing a long, protruding spike – perhaps a symbol of chastity. She had bronze bracelets on each arm and a finely wrought ring through one of her earlobes.