Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (3 page)

Appeasing the gods

In the myths they told about their gods, the Norse never held them up as examples of morality worth emulating. The Norse gods were above human morality, they happily cheated and lied if it suited them, especially in their dealings with the giants. Nor did the Norse claim divine authority for their law codes, maintaining an orderly society was a human responsibility and one they took seriously despite the mayhem they created abroad. Of the gods only Odin was seen as a source of wisdom. Odin gave humans the knowledge of runes, the gift of poetry, the battle fury of the berserker, and the dangerous magic called
seiðr
, which gave the gift of prophecy and other more sinister powers. Odin’s wisdom is embodied in
Hávamál
(‘The Sayings of the High One’), a collection of anonymous Viking Age gnomic verses supposed to have been composed by Odin and preserved in a single thirteenth century Icelandic manuscript.
Hávamál
is not concerned with metaphysical questions, only with the kind of pragmatic common-sense wisdom valued by practical people. Cultivate friendships, never take hospitality for granted and repay gifts with gifts. Do not make enemies unnecessarily or pick foolish fights. On campaign, keep your weapons close to hand. Do not drink too much mead or ale, it robs a man of his wits. If you do not know what you are talking about, keep quiet: it is better to listen. Exercise caution in business and always beware of treachery and double dealing. Always deal honestly yourself except with your enemies: deceive them if you can. The advice is sometimes contradictory:
Hávamál
berates the coward who thinks he will live forever if he avoids fighting while also declaring that it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion.

Like all pre-industrial farming peoples the Norse were desperately vulnerable to the vagaries of nature and they looked to their gods for help in their struggle to survive. The gods always needed to be propitiated and could only be won over with prayers and offerings. Central to worship were the sacrificial feasts, called a
blót
(‘blood-offering’), which were held in autumn, midwinter and spring. Norse paganism had no priesthood, so these sacrifices were presided over by the local king or chieftain. Pigs and horses were the animals most often sacrificed. The blood of the slaughtered victims, which was splashed on the idols of the gods, on the walls of temples and on the participants themselves, was believed to strengthen both gods and humans. Afterwards, the meat was boiled in great cauldrons and eaten at a sacred feast at which the gods were believed to be present. Prayers and toasts were offered for fertility, good health and prosperity. Human sacrifice, usually by hanging, was also sometimes practiced, particularly in honour of Odin, who had sacrificed himself by hanging from Yggdrasil for nine days to discover the secret of the runes. Cold and calculating, Odin was favoured by kings, warriors and poets, but he was feared rather than loved. The most popular god was probably Odin’s son, the mighty thunder god Thor. Thor was rather short-tempered and none too bright – most of the stories told about him humorously illustrate the limitations of brute strength – but he was unambiguously well-intentioned towards humans. Thor protected humans against the giants, who stood for chaos, smashing their brains out with his magic hammer, Mjöllnir. Farmers and seafarers prayed to him for good weather. Miniature Thor's hammers were worn as protective amulets by travellers, rather like Christian St Christopher medallions. The fertility god Freyr controlled the sun, rain and the fertility of the soil and was prayed to and sacrificed to by those seeking peace and a good harvest. Of the goddesses, Freyr’s sister Frejya, who was associated with sex and love, and Odin’s wife Frigg, invoked by women in childbirth, were probably the ones most actively worshipped. Sacrifices were also offered to the dísir, a group of nameless supernatural females who were associated with fertility and death. Dísir could assist at childbirth and each human family had its own protective dís. If angered, however, the dísir were dangerous so they were appeased by an annual feast and sacrifice known as dísablót, which took place at the beginning of winter in Norway and Denmark and in late winter in Sweden. Elves could make a nuisance of themselves in various ways and they were sometimes also appeased with blood sacrifices.

Fame is the one true afterlife

The promise of Valhalla did not, as might be supposed, make most Viking warriors reckless in battle. Although it may have been a comfort to a warrior facing death in battle, what he really wanted to do was live and enjoy the fruits of victory. Only for the berserkers, fanatical devotees of Odin, was death in battle actually desirable. Before going into battle, berserkers worked themselves into a trancelike rage (
berserksgangr
, ‘going berserk’), howling and biting their shields, which left them immune to the pain of wounds. They wore no armour and their complete disregard for their own safety made them terrifying opponents, but most inevitably found the violent death they craved. Aside from the concept of Valhalla, Norse beliefs about the afterlife were vague and mostly rather gloomy. The common practice of burying grave goods, sacrificed animals and even slaves with the deceased suggests that the Norse believed that the afterlife would resemble this life, complete with its distinctions of social status, and that the dead somehow lingered on as ghostly presences in their graves. Alongside this there was a belief that those who died of illness and old age, that is almost everyone, would go to the freezing-fog realm of Niflheim, where they would spend a cheerless afterlife sharing the meagre fare offered by the decaying goddess Hel. The souls of un-wed girls were claimed by Freyja, who took them to dwell in her own realm of Fólkvangr: Odin allowed her to take a share of his warriors to keep them company. Death by drowning was an obvious risk for a Viking warrior. The souls of the drowned were netted by Rán, who took them to dwell in Hlésey, the hall of her husband the sea god Aegir. Happily for those destined to spend their afterlives with him, he was the best brewer among the gods. Perhaps as a result of Christian influence during the Viking Age, Norse paganism developed a concept of reward and punishment in the afterlife, although this was a judgment of the dead without a judge. The souls of the righteous would dwell in the golden-roofed hall of Gimlé in Asgard. Or perhaps they would go instead to another hospitable hall, Sindri in the underworld’s Niðafjöll Mountains. Oath-breakers and murderers had the miserable time they deserved in Nástrandir, a frightful hall in Niflheim made of woven serpents dripping with venom. The most wicked souls were cast into the underworld well of Hvergelmir, to be fed on by the serpent Niðhöggr, the corpse-tearer. For most people these various afterlives offered nothing to come that was better than what they had in the here and now – even the most favoured warriors faced ultimate annihilation in a battle they could not win – so it was best to live for the present day.

Knowing that nothing was ever forever, not even the gods or the afterlife, gave the Viking Age Norse a fatalistic outlook and an indifference to death. The Viking warrior was expected to face death with a shrug of the shoulders and some black humour to show that he had kept his presence of mind and not given in to fear. Life was not so much to lose and if it was his fate to die, there was nothing he could do about it anyway.

The pagan Norse believed that female deities called Norns were present at the birth of every child to shape its life. Their fate-making was likened to spinning a thread or making a mark on wood and once a person’s fate had been decided it was unalterable. The Norns were the highest power in the universe and not even the gods could challenge their verdict. In some cultures such beliefs might have encouraged apathy. However, with the Norse they encouraged the spirit of risk-taking and enterprise without which the Viking Age would never have happened. For good or ill, the Norns determined a man’s fate but they did not determine how he faced it. He could play safe and keep as far away from danger as he could but this would not save his life: he would die at his appointed time whether he was snug in bed or in the thick of battle. The man who recognised and accepted this knew he had little to lose by taking risks. Death came to everyone and all that would survive of a man was his reputation, which, therefore, was far more important than his life. When a Viking warrior fought to the death alongside his lord and comrades, he did so not because he hoped to go to Valhalla but to protect his reputation from being dishonoured by the taint of cowardice. A man without honour was a
niðingr
, literally nothing, who would deservedly be forgotten even by his own family. The man who risked nothing achieved less than nothing. Better by far to be bold and adventurous and strive to win fame, wealth and glory by daring voyages and heroic deeds in battle. Such a man could die secure in the knowledge that the skalds (‘court poets’) would sing his praises in the feasting halls for generations to come: this was the only sure afterlife a man could hope for.

CHAPTER 1

T
HULE
, N
YDAM AND
G
AMLA
U
PPSALA

T
HE ORIGIN OF THE
V
IKINGS

The Vikings did not spring into life fully formed at the end of the eighth century, even if it may have seemed that way to their startled and appalled victims. In reality, the breaking out of Viking raiding was the consequence of centuries of social and political evolution, which had created in Scandinavia a violent and predatory society. If these developments passed largely unnoticed in the rest of Europe it was only partly because of Scandinavia’s remoteness. In the literate Greco-Roman world of Classical antiquity, a deep cultural prejudice against the ‘barbarian’ meant that the peoples of northern Europe were little studied and rarely written about. This prejudice survived into the Christian era, when Scandinavians were doubly damned for being pagans as well as barbarians. As Scandinavians themselves did not develop a fully literate culture until after their conversion to Christianity at the end of the Viking Age, contemporary written evidence of Scandinavia’s historical development before the Viking Age is extremely scarce: Scandinavia’s prehistoric period was a long one.

Pytheas’ voyage to Thule

Scandinavia’s earliest known literate visitor was the Greek explorer Pytheas of Massalia, who made a long voyage in the northern seas in the years around 320
BC
. On his return home Pytheas wrote an account of his travels entitled
On
the
Oceans
. Unfortunately, this was lost in antiquity and is known today only from extracts preserved in the works of later Greek and Roman geographers. These show Pytheas to have been a scientifically minded traveller who estimated the latitude of the places he visited on his journey by measuring the height of the sun at noon and by the length of the days. In his own time, however, Pytheas was believed by many to have invented the whole story, so fantastic did it seem.

Pytheas’ home port of Massalia (now Marseilles), was founded in 600
BC
by settlers from the Greek city of Phocea. The sheltered natural harbour was an obvious attraction and it was close to the valley of the river Rhône, which at that time was a major trade route bringing British tin and Baltic amber to the Mediterranean. The Phoceans had the reputation of being the most adventurous Greek seafarers. Soon after founding Massalia they had sailed through the fabled Pillars of Hercules – the Straits of Gibraltar – into the Atlantic Ocean to trade with the mineral-rich Iberian kingdom of Tartessos. One of them, Midacritus, was rumoured to have gone even further and brought back tin from Britain. However, around 500
BC
the Phoceans were shut out of the Atlantic when the powerful North African city of Carthage gained control of the Pillars of Hercules. Carthage lived by trade and did not welcome foreign merchants in its sphere of influence. Pytheas’ expedition, therefore, was probably commercial, to seek out new trade routes for Massalia in areas not controlled by Carthage.

When he set out, Pytheas probably bypassed hostile Carthaginian territory by travelling overland from Massalia to the Bay of Biscay and there chartered a ship from one of the local Celtic tribes to take him on to Britain. The Veneti of Brittany were particularly well-known for building sturdy wooden sailing ships with which they carried on a brisk trade in tin with Britain. Pytheas landed at Belerion – Land’s End – and travelled the whole length of Britain. Everything the Greeks knew about Britain up until then was based on hearsay. For the first time Pytheas added some reliable facts. His estimate of Britain’s circumference as around 40,000 stades, approximately 4,500 miles, is remarkably close to the actual distance of around 4,700 miles. The next stage of Pytheas’ journey took him far beyond the edge of the known world. Setting out from an unidentified island off Britain’s north coast, Pytheas sailed north for six days until he reached the land he called Thule. Pytheas’ observation that the sun was below the horizon for only two or three hours at midsummer fixes Thule’s latitude at about 64° north. However, Pytheas had no means of calculating longitude.There is no doubt that Thule was a land in the far north but where exactly? The uncertainty of its location has made Thule more a symbol of ultimate hyperborean remoteness than a real place.