Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (2 page)

THE EASTERN ROUTES

PREFACE

C
HANGING PERSPECTIVES ON THE
V
IKINGS

The Vikings were an unprecedented phenomenon in European history, not for any technological, military or cultural innovation that they contributed to – in most respects they were really rather backward and even their shipbuilding methods were conservative – but for the vast expanse of their horizons. No previous Europeans had ever seen so much of the world as the Vikings did. From their Scandinavian homelands, Vikings sailed east down the great rivers of Russia crossing the Black Sea to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea to reach Baghdad. In the west, Vikings were active along the entire coastline of Western Europe, founding settlements in Scotland, England, Ireland and France. Vikings even penetrated the Mediterranean to attack Italy and North Africa. Other Vikings crossed the Atlantic, leaving settlements along the way in the Faeroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland, to become the first Europeans known to have set foot in North America. It is these far-flung connections, and the daring spirit that created them, that give the Vikings their enduring appeal.

Attitudes to the Vikings have shifted over the years. The main chroniclers of medieval Europe were monks and understandably, as they were frequent victims of it, they dwelled on the Vikings’ plundering, burning and captive-taking (they had little to say about rape, perhaps because, as men, they had little to fear from them on that account, at least). Vikings remained frightening barbarians, on a par with the Vandals and the Goths who had plundered ancient Rome, until the ninteenth century era of national romanticism. The medieval image of the Vikings as all-conquering sea rovers came to be seen in a positive light. The Scandinavian kingdoms had become a European backwater, lacking influence on the world stage and playing no part in the global empire-building activities of countries like Great Britain and France. The temptation for Scandinavians to hark back to a more heroic era when it was they who bestrode the world was irresistible. It was in this period that the word ‘Viking’ subtly changed its meaning. If they used the term, medieval writers used ‘Viking’ specifically to describe someone who went
í víking
(plundering), that is a pirate, and not necessarily a Scandinavian one at that. The word is thought originally to have meant ‘men of the bays’, perhaps because that is where pirates lurked hoping to ambush an unwary merchant ship. Under the influence of national romanticism, however, ‘Viking’ became a synonym for ‘early medieval Scandinavian’ and the usage has stuck. It was also during this era that Vikings were equipped with their romantically barbaric, but historically inaccurate, horned helmets (the error originated in the misidentification by early Antiquarians of Bronze Age horned helmets as Viking helmets). The helmets too have stuck in the popular imagination.

In the second half of the twentieth century this essentially military image of the Vikings came under increasing scrutiny. Archaeology uncovered evidence of peaceful Viking enterprise in the fields of crafts, trade, exploration and settlement, leading to a more balanced view of their lives. However, there was also a tendency to underplay the violent aspects of the Viking Age as mere monkish exaggeration. Partly, this was an over-reaction to the established view, and partly because after the two horrific world wars, conquest and empire-building no longer seemed such praiseworthy activities to Europeans. However, violence was always at the heart of the Viking Age, their trade was fuelled by the spoils of war – especially their slaving activities – and their peaceful settlements were preceded by bloody conquest. This book is not an attempt to paint a balanced picture of Viking life – it has little to say about their artistic achievements, their everyday lives or the role of women, for example, rather it is intended to place the Vikings in their wider geographical and historical context, from their prehistoric pagan origins to their transformation into Christian Europeans. This approach reveals that the Viking Age begins and ends at different times in different places. In the English-speaking world the Viking Age is conventionally dated from around 793 (the sack of Lindisfarne) to around 1066 (the battle of Stamford Bridge) but history is not really so neat. In Scandinavia and the Baltic, the Viking Age was clearly underway more than a century earlier and, in many ways, had still not ended a century later. In the Scottish isles, the last recorded Viking raid did not take place until as late as 1240. In the Norse Iceland and Greenland colonies, Viking Age government institutions and social structures survived into the thirteenth century. The Vikings did not burst out of nowhere and they lived through a long twilight. It is a long journey that starts in Asgard at the creation of the world and ends at a wedding in fifteenth-century Greenland.

INTRODUCTION

A
SGARD

T
HE
V
IKING
WORLD VIEW

Cattle die, kinsmen die, eventually you will die,
But glory never dies for the man who achieves it.

The foolish man thinks he will live forever,
If he keeps away from fighting;
But old age won’t grant him a truce
Even if the spears do.

Hávamál, trans. Carolyne Larrington

Life for most Viking Age Scandinavians involved hard work on the land, constant insecurity and an early death in their thirties or forties. For those Scandinavians who chose to become Vikings in the literal sense of the word, that is a pirate or a plunderer, or who set out on voyages of trade or colonisation, life could be shorter still. All faced the very real prospect of drowning at sea as their fragile ships foundered in a storm or were smashed to matchwood against a rocky shore. Merchants always ran the risk of being attacked by pirates and for every Viking warrior who went home with a sack of silver or won a farm for himself on newly conquered land, there must have been at least another who was hacked to pieces on a battlefield or died of disease in an unsanitary winter camp. Vikings clearly were willing to take incredible risks in the quest to acquire land, treasure and fame. This daring and enterprising society was underpinned by a world view which actively discouraged the avoidance of risk. The world the pagan Norse inhabited did not exist to fulfil any purpose and, if it was true that the gods had created humans, they did so only for their own benefit, so that there would be someone to sacrifice to them. If men’s lives were to have any meaning in this world, they had to provide it for themselves by achieving something for which they would be remembered.

The creation of the world

The Norse believed that the centre of the universe was a vast evergreen ash tree called Yggdrasil whose branches overspread the heavens and linked together the separate worlds of the gods, frost giants, fire giants, elves, dwarfs, humans and the underworld. No myth tells of the origins of Yggdrasil or of its ultimate fate, its existence is taken for granted and it was perhaps thought to be eternal. Despite this, Yggdrasil does not feature at all in the Norse creation myth, in which the cosmos is born from the interaction of mutually hostile forces. At the beginning of time there were just two worlds, fiery Muspel in the south and freezing Niflheim in the north. Between the two worlds was the yawning void of Ginnungagap. Where the heat of Muspel met the ice of Niflheim, the ice began to melt and drip. The heat caused life to quicken in the drops and they took the form of a giant who was given the name Ymir. While Ymir slept, a male and a female giant formed from the sweat under his left armpit, and one of his legs fathered a son on his other leg. In this way Ymir became the ancestor of the race of frost giants. As the ice continued to melt a cow emerged. This cow was called Audhumla. Audhumla was nourished by licking the salty ice, and the four rivers of milk that flowed from her teats fed Ymir.

Audhumla’s licking revealed another giant, whose name was Búri. Big, strong and beautiful, Búri fathered a son called Bor – no mother is mentioned but she was presumably a frost giant as they were the only other beings around at the time apart from Audhumla. Bor took Bestla, the daughter of the frost giant Bölthorn, as his wife and together they had three sons, Odin, Vili and Vé, the first of the gods. Odin and his brothers killed Ymir and used his dead body to make the land, his blood to make the ocean. Then the gods took Ymir’s skull and set it up over the earth to make the sky. The gods caught some of the sparks and molten embers that were blowing out of Muspel and they set them in the sky to light the heavens and the Earth. The gods set the dark giantess Nótt (‘night’) and her bright and beautiful son Dag (‘day’) in the sky to follow each other around the world once every twenty-four hours. The gods took the beautiful brother and sister, Máni (‘moon’) and Sól (‘sun’), and set them in the sky also. By their movements, the days, months and years, could be counted.

The gods made the world a great circle. The part around the edges the gods gave to the giants as a home. This was Jotunheim, where the giants plotted vengeance for the slaying of Ymir. In the middle, surrounded by the ocean, the gods used Ymir’s eyelashes to build a fortress against the hostile giants. This they called Midgard, or ‘Middle Earth’. Finally, the gods took Ymir’s brains and cast them into the sky to make the clouds. With this, the gods completed their recycling of Ymir. Odin, Vili and Vé walked along the newly created seashore and found two logs. From these the gods created the first two humans, naming the man Ask (‘ash’) and the woman Embla (‘elm’), and from them all of the human race was descended. The gods gave Ask and Embla Midgard to live in. After they had created humans, the gods created their own realm of Asgard, a celestial city high above Midgard, and built the fiery rainbow bridge Bifröst to link the two realms so that they could pass to and fro between them. As to how long before their own day the Vikings believed these events to have taken place, the myths give no clue. Like most pre-literate peoples, the Vikings lacked formal dating methods and any events that had happened before the time of living memory probably existed in something akin to the Aboriginal Dreamtime.

Asgard, home of the gods

Within Asgard’s walls are dozens of magnificent halls and temples where the gods feast and meet in council. From the throne in his silver-roofed hall Válaskjálf, Odin watches over the whole of creation, sending his ravens Hugin and Mumin out every dawn to gather news from the world. Like any Viking chieftain, Odin has his own retinue of household warriors,
einherjar
, who are chosen exclusively from the ranks of the bravest warriors who fell in battle. The
einherjar
dwell in Valhalla (‘the hall of the slain’), a vast hall with 540 doors each of which is so wide that 800 warriors can march through them abreast. Valhalla shines with gold, has spears for rafters and a roof made of shields and mail coats. Every morning, the
einherjar
march out of Valhalla to spend the day fighting. In the evening the fallen are miraculously healed and all return to Valhalla to spend the night feasting on pork and drinking mead. The
einherjar
are waited on by the valkyries (‘choosers of the slain’), beautiful supernatural females who wear armour and carry a shield and spear. At Odin’s command, valkyries ride swiftly through the air, descending on battlefields to decide the victors and choose the warriors who are to fall and conduct the bravest of them to Valhalla. There they will be welcomed with cups of mead and tumultuous table-thumping from the
einherjar
. Viking warriors knew that they had to earn their lord’s hospitality on the battlefield. For the
einherjar
the price of Odin’s hospitality was to fight for him at Ragnarök, a great battle which he knows is fated to happen at the end of time in which the gods and their implacable enemies, the giants, will annihilate one another with fire and flood and destroy the universe itself before a new cycle of creation begins.