Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (48 page)

The Danes stayed loyal to Magnus because he proved himself to be a good defender of Denmark. For two centuries and more, Scandinavians had sailed out to plunder the Wendish tribes of the southern Baltic with complete impunity. By the early eleventh century, however, the Wends had learned Viking shipbuilding methods and were launching pirate raids of their own on Scandinavia, and the Danish islands proved particularly vulnerable. In summer 1043, Magnus led a fleet across the Baltic and sacked the Wendish stronghold of Jumne – Viking Jomsborg – in retaliation. Later in the year, he crushed a Wendish invasion of Jutland at the battle of Lyrskov Heath, to the north of Hedeby. An anonymous history of Norway known as
Ágrip
, written around 1190, tells the story that the night before the battle Magnus’s father appeared to him in a vision, reassured him of victory over the pagan Wends, and instructed how to deploy his army for battle. Being the son of a saint only added to Magnus’s lustre.

While Svein Estrithson was in Sweden, contemplating his next move, Harald Hardrada turned up, fresh from his service with the Varangians, with a claim to the Norwegian throne, a chest full of money, and a fearsome reputation as a war leader. Svein and Harald immediately formed an alliance but Magnus just as quickly broke it up by offering Harald a share of Norway. Magnus fell ill and died in Sjælland in 1047 aged only twenty-four: he had no male heirs. On his deathbed he expressed the wish that Harald should inherit Norway but that Svein should have Denmark. Svein was delighted but Harald’s ambition was not satisfied with Norway alone. For the next four years Harald fought to dislodge Svein from Denmark, launching great Viking raids every summer, culminating with the sacking of Hedeby in 1050. This was intended to strike a blow to Svein’s revenues, but Hedeby was not as important as it had been. The larger ships that were coming into use in the eleventh century found it increasingly difficult to reach Hedeby and after it was sacked again in 1066, this time by the Wends, it was abandoned in favour of Schleswig, which was built near deeper water across the Schlei Fjord.

Harald won every battle he fought against Svein but a decisive victory eluded him. Defeat never discouraged Svein, whose humane spirit endeared him to his subjects. In 1050, Svein went so far as to throw away a military advantage during a sea chase when he stopped to rescue drowning captives who Harald had thrown into the sea even though he knew this would allow his mortal enemy to escape. To fund his wars, Harald imposed a heavy burden of tax on the Norwegians and it was the ruthless way he dealt with opposition that earned him his nickname Hardrada, meaning ‘hard-ruler’. Harald gave Denmark ten years of peace while he fought over Norway’s border with Sweden, but he returned to the attack again in 1060. At the River Niså (now the River Nissan), near Halmstadt in Halland, Harald destroyed the Danish fleet in a night-long sea battle. Svein was lucky to escape with his life but even this disaster did not break Danish resistance. By now Harald’s subjects were getting restive and in 1064 he finally made peace and recognised Svein as king of Denmark. This was a decisive moment for both kingdoms, a parting of the ways. By the time dynastic marriages reunited the two kingdoms under a common ruler in 1380, each had acquired its own indelible national consciousness.

After his setback in Denmark, Harald Hardrada did not opt for the quieter life his subjects so obviously wished for. When King Edward the Confessor died in 1066, Harald gathered an army and sailed to England to pursue the tenuous claim to the English throne he had inherited from Magnus the Good only to meet with defeat and death at Stamford Bridge. Harald was succeeded jointly by his two sons Magnus II and Olaf III (r. 1067 – 93). Magnus died young in 1069 leaving as sole king Olaf, who gave up his father’s aggressive foreign policy, made peace with England and Denmark, and spent the remainder of his long reign in Norway improving the administration of his kingdom. His grateful people remembered him as Olaf Kyrre, Olaf the Peaceful. It was in Olaf’s time that Norwegian laws were first committed to writing and it was he who introduced the system of trade guilds to Norway, which formed such an important feature of urban life in medieval Western Europe. Since St Olaf’s time, bishops had been part of the royal household: Olaf gave Norway a regular diocesan structure, with bishoprics at Nidaros, Oslo and the newly founded town of Bergen. By the time Olaf fell ill and died in 1093, Norway was, to all intents and purposes, a regular medieval European kingdom.

The same could also be said of Denmark by the time Svein Estrithson died around 1074. Not the least sign of Svein’s own personal assimilation to Christian European culture was that he was the first Scandinavian king who could read and write. Although Svein pursued, in a halfhearted way, his claim to the English throne, supporting the English rebellion against the Normans in 1069 – 70, his reign after the end of the conflict with Harald Hardrada was mostly peaceful and dominated by efforts to build friendly relations with the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III and with the papacy. In his dealings with the popes, Svein, a prolific church-builder, had two main objectives, both of which would ultimately be achieved by his sons. Firstly, he pressed for the Danish church to have its own archbishop so that it would be independent of the German archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen. This ambition was finally fulfilled under his son Erik the Evergood (r. 1095 – 1103) in 1103, with the elevation of the bishopric of Lund to an archbishopric with responsibility for all of Scandinavia (Norway and Sweden got their own archbishoprics in 1152 and 1164). A second ambition was to have his great-grandfather Harald Bluetooth canonised for his role in converting the Danes, so that the Danish monarchy would have its own royal saint to bolster its authority. This would be fulfilled rather too literally by Svein’s son Cnut the Holy (r. 1080 – 86).

Denmark’s last Viking king

Cnut succeeded after the brief reign of his brother Harald III (1074/6 – 1080). A popular ruler who was remembered as a legal reformer, Harald brought the end of the Viking Age a step closer by making piracy effectively a licensed activity, permissible only if the crown was given a share of the plunder. As a youth, Cnut had led Viking raids against the Wends, and led two invasions of England in 1069 and 1074 in support of his father’s claim to the English throne. Cnut ended the crown’s dependency on war booty by increasing the royal revenues from taxes and tolls, and enforced the payment of tithes (one tenth of income) to support the church. Cnut also cracked down on freelance Viking raiding, hanging Egil Ragnarsen, the jarl of Bornholm, for piracy. Not surprisingly, Cnut’s reforms made him unpopular with his subjects. Their discontent was magnified in 1085, when Cnut introduced a poll tax to pay for a planned invasion of England to pursue his claim to the throne. The fleet gathered in Limfjord but the threat of a German invasion kept Cnut in Schleswig, and in late summer his army broke up as his discontented warriors went home to see to the harvest. When Cnut ordered the fleet to gather again in 1086, a rebellion broke out in Jutland. Cnut fled to Odense where, on 10 July, the rebels killed him, together with his brother Benedict and seventeen of his followers, in front of the altar of St Alban’s priory. No Danish king would ever again raise a fleet to invade England.

Denmark had been officially Christian for 120 years when Cnut was killed, yet the aftermath of his death hints that pagan sentiments were not entirely extinguished. Cnut was succeeded by his brother Olaf Hunger (r. 1086 – 1095). Under Olaf, Denmark suffered several consecutive years of crop failures, widespread famine and starvation, earning him his unenviable nickname. To the Danes, it was all too obvious that the disaster was an expression of God’s anger over the sacrilegious killing of Cnut on consecrated ground. When Olaf died in August 1095, it was in very strange circumstances. According to the chronicler Saxo Grammaticus, Olaf ‘willingly gave himself to rid the land of its bad luck and begged that all of the guilt [of Olaf’s killing] would fall upon his head alone. So he offered his life for his country-men.’ This mysterious explanation of Olaf’s death has clear echoes of the fate of the semi-legendary Swedish king Domalde, who was sacrificed to appease the gods after two years of failed harvests (see ch. 1). Could it be that Olaf was sacrificed as a scapegoat for the guilt of the Danes? Or might Olaf have tried to atone for their sins by committing suicide (a very un-Christian act in itself)? Saxo’s statement certainly implies that Olaf met his death voluntarily and that he was neither murdered nor died of natural causes. It only adds to the mystery that Olaf’s burial place is unknown. It has been suggested that his body was cut up and distributed throughout Denmark in the belief that in some way this would help restore the fertility of the land. The sequel to Olaf’s death was, however, unambiguously Christian. His successor Erik the Evergood lobbied the papacy to have their brother Cnut recognised as a martyr and he was canonised in 1102. Erik had already begun to build a cathedral, in the pan-European Romanesque style, to house Cnut’s remains, close to the site of his martyrdom. Cnut’s skeleton, and that of his brother Benedict, can still be seen in the cathedral’s crypt: the bones show only too clearly evidence of the violent death of Denmark’s last Viking king.

The kingdom of the Swedes

Sweden was the last of the Scandinavian kingdoms to emerge as a unified state and, compared to Norway and Denmark, relatively little is known about its early development. Swedes did not participate in any great numbers in the settlement of Iceland, so their history was of peripheral interest to medieval Icelandic historians and saga writers who had so much to say about the kings of Norway. Nor do the Swedes feature much in contemporary annals from Western Europe because their main field of activity was in the east.

The earliest Swedish king we know much about was Erik the Victorious (r.
c.
970 – 95). Erik’s own ancestry is difficult to trace because the sources are confused and contradictory. There is no evidence that either he or his immediate successors claimed to be members of the Yngling dynasty and the semi-legendary saga traditions hold him to be a descendent of Sigurd Ring, the victor of Bråvalla, who founded a new dynasty at Uppsala around the middle of the eighth century. Erik earned fame for his victory over his nephew Styrbjorn Starki and his Danish allies at the Battle of Fyrisvellir, a marshy plain near Uppsala, some time in the 980s. No truly reliable account of the battle exists but it is described in several Icelandic sagas and in the Danish history of Saxo Grammaticus. In addition, two late tenth-century runestones in Skåne (now in Sweden but then in Denmark) commemorating men ‘who did not flee at Uppsala’ probably refer to this battle, as may a contemporary runestone on the island of Öland, commemorating a Danish chief who was buried there, perhaps after dying on his way home from wounds suffered in the battle. Even more convincing is a runestone at Högby in Östergötland that commemorates Asmund, ‘who fell at Fœri’ (i.e. Fyris), perhaps on Erik’s side.

The exact boundaries of Erik’s kingdom are still hazy. In the Viking Age, Sweden ‘proper’ consisted roughly of the modern Swedish province of Svealand, with its heartland around Uppsala and Lake Mälaren, and the far southern part of Norrland (roughly the modern provinces of Gästrikland and Hälsingland). The area to the north, extending up beyond the Arctic Circle was populated mainly by Sami reindeer hunters and only became incorporated into Sweden later in the Middle Ages. The Swedes traded with the Sami and also raided them to collect tribute in furs. Between Sweden and the Danish provinces of Skåne and Blekinge was Götaland, the homeland of the Götar (the Geats of ‘Beowulf’). Despite inhabiting a large area and being an apparently numerous people, virtually nothing is known about the Götar in the Viking Age. There is no archaeological evidence of political centralisation to compare with the royal centres at Jelling or Uppsala, so they were probably divided into many local chiefdoms or petty kingdoms. The Götar do not feature prominently in saga traditions, are not mentioned in contemporary literary sources as taking part in any Viking raids, and even those who actually visited the Baltic, such as Rimbert (the biographer of St Ansgar) and the merchant Wulfstan, had almost nothing to say about them. This may simply be a result of confusion over identities – the Götar were not culturally or linguistically distinct from the Swedes – or, more likely, that they were under the political domination of the Swedes. Legendary traditions, like those preserved in ‘Beowulf’, certainly refer to wars between the Swedes and the Götar; and some kings of the Götar, such as Alrik, who, according to the Sparlösa runestone, ruled in Västergötland
c.
800, were members of Swedish royal dynasties. Also in a loose association with Sweden was the large Baltic island of Gotland, whose inhabitants were independent but paid tribute to the Swedish kings in return for rights of free travel and free trade. Gotland would not be fully incorporated into Sweden until the thirteenth century, by which time the Viking Age was over.

Birka

Viking Age Sweden benefited from its proximity to the important trade routes across the Baltic to Russia and beyond to the Islamic world and the Byzantine Empire. While Uppsala was the kingdom’s main political and religious centre, its main trading centre was Birka on the island of Björkö near the mouth of Lake Mälaren about 20 miles west of Stockholm. Birka developed around 800, replacing the earlier Vendel period trading place at Helgö, about 5 miles to the south-east. Birka covered around 17 acres (7 hectares) and probably had a permanent population of between 700 and 1,000 people. In the tenth century, Birka was protected by a rampart and a small hillfort, and a row of wooden stakes restricted access to the main harbour. Further barriers of wooden stakes and rocks were used to obstruct access channels to prevent pirate fleets making quick attacks on the town. Such defences were necessary as the many islands and inlets along the approaches to Birka were notorious hiding places for pirates. Among their victims was the missionary St Ansgar, who was robbed of all his belongings while sailing to Birka in 829.