Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (6 page)

Runes and magic

The finds from Nydam Moss illustrate another change in the north, the beginnings of literacy. The early Germans and Scandinavians wrote using runes, an alphabet of twig-like characters known as the
futhark
after the names of its first three characters. Though often inscribed on stone and metalwork, runes were originally designed to be carved on wood because the characters avoid horizontal lines, which would not have been clearly distinguishable from the grain. The oldest known runic inscription reads
harja
, a man’s name, and was found on a comb from Vimose bog on the Danish island of Fyn, which was made
c.
AD
150. The largest concentration of early runic inscriptions has been found in southern Scandinavia but it is not certain that this was the area where they were invented as runes were used by all the Germanic peoples. The origin of runes is surrounded by myth. In the Viking Age Scandinavians believed that runes were a gift of Odin, who had hanged himself, impaled on a spear, from the World Tree Yggdrasil for nine days to learn their secret. They are now more prosaically thought to be derived from Latin letters, which early Germans could easily have become familiar with through contacts with Roman merchants or during mercenary service in the Roman army.

Runes were certainly not for everyone’s use in Iron Age Scandinavia. Of the thousands of artefacts recovered from Nydam Moss only ten carry inscriptions in runes. Most are on war gear, arrow and lance shafts, a lance head, a decorative bead from a sword, a scabbard, a silver belt fitting is the only inscribed artefact without an exclusively military function. This suggests that runes were associated with high social status. The inscriptions are all very short, only one or two words, and the majority simply record names, either of the artefacts’ presumed owners, the craftsmen who made them, or the runemasters who carved the runes. For example, the scabbard – found in the pine ship, carries the inscription
harkilaR
ahti
. The meaning of
ahti
is unknown but
harkilaR
is a man’s name. Swords were rare and expensive at that time, so was
harkilaR
the defeated commander of the pine ship? One runic inscription, on a lance shaft, does not spell out a word but is just a sequence of runes and rune-like symbols. This hints at how runes were seen, that the individual characters were at least as significant as the words they spelled.

In most civilizations, the main impetus to the development of writing was the need to keep records when society became too large and complex for unaided human memory to keep all the information needed for good government. Utilitarian lists and tax records came first. Memorials, literature, historical, religious and philosophical texts all came later. The Germanic-Scandinavian world was nowhere near this level of complexity in the Roman Iron Age, so writing fulfilled a different function. Rune means ‘secret’ or ‘something hidden’, so there was something esoteric about them. In the Viking Age, runes were believed to have magic properties. Each rune had its own name, embodying gods, ideas and powers. The act of writing a rune harnessed that power. Carving one of the runes named after gods, such as the ‘T’-shaped Tiwaz rune associated with the war god Tiwaz or Tyr, was an invocation for the god’s protection. In this way the act of carving a runic charm on an object turned it into a protective amulet. However, not just anyone could carve protective runes, they had to be carved by a trained runemaster if they were to be effective. Errors would make them impotent or even harmful. In Scandinavia, the use of runes remained limited to names and charms until the Viking Age, when longer commemorative inscriptions began to be made. Viking graffiti of the ‘Halfdan was here’ variety has been found across the Viking world, from Greenland to Greece, suggesting that by that time literacy in runes had become widespread. Because they had pagan overtones, most of the Germanic peoples gave up using runes and adopted the Latin alphabet soon after they converted to Christianity. However, they continued to be used in medieval Scandinavia, when even law codes and other texts were written in runes. In the Dalarna district of central Sweden, a tradition of writing runic charms survived into the twentieth century.

Roman influence in the north

The indirect cause of Scandinavia’s changing society was Roman influence on the German tribes to the south. By the end of the first century
BC
the Germanic tribes and the Roman Empire shared a common frontier along the Rhine and Danube rivers. Despite incursions by both sides on each other’s territory, this frontier remained stable for 400 years. Contact with the Roman Empire had a great impact on those tribes closest to the border. Plunder from raids, Roman subsidies to friendly tribes, trade, and wages for mercenary service enriched the border tribes. Tribes further north raided and traded with the border tribes, so becoming enriched in turn. Those who led successful raids or gained control of the distribution of trade goods were soon set apart from the rest of society by their greater wealth and status. Roman writers, such as Tacitus, attest that the
comitatus
or war band became the central institution of Germanic society in this period. Known in Viking Age Scandinavia as the
lið
or
hirð
, the
comitatus
was made up of young warriors who entered the service of a chief or king. In return for their loyalty and military service the warriors of the
comitatus
expected to receive food and lodging, gifts of weapons and jewellery, and a share of war booty. The warriors swore loyalty to their chief for life but their loyalty was conditional on the chief fulfilling his side of the bargain. A chief who did not, or could not, reward his warriors would not have a
comitatus
for long. Chiefs who were poor warriors fell by the wayside, those who were good warriors consolidated their power because their success attracted more warriors, and a stronger
comitatus
led to more success in war. This dynamic created a violent and predatory society in which war was the surest route to wealth, status and power. Another effect was to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands, increasing competition between ambitious men within a tribe, and to encourage the merging of tribes. In some cases this was because a stronger tribe conquered and absorbed a weaker one, but just as often it was done voluntarily. Many tribes allied, forming coalitions to wage war more effectively. When their unity was cemented by success in war, these coalitions became the basis for new ethnic identities. The Saxons and the Franks, for example, both developed from tribal coalitions in this way.

The Germanic Iron Age (400 – 800) was Scandinavia’s heroic age, a proto-historical period that was half remembered in legendary traditions of dragon-slaying warriors and great battles. At the beginning of the period the process of centralisation that had transformed the Germanic world had still not progressed far in Scandinavia. Jordanes listed more than twenty tribes living in the ‘island of Scandza’ in his history of the Goths, and this doesn’t include the Angles and Jutes who lived in Jutland, which he didn’t count as part of Scandza. Jordanes’ list is based ultimately on the testimony of Rodulf, the exiled king of a Norwegian tribe called the Rani. According to Jordanes, two tribes had already become pre-eminent, however: the Swedes or, as they called themselves, the Svear, and the Danes, whose territory then included Skåne and Blekinge in the far south of modern Sweden. Also prominent were the Götar, who lived between the Swedes and the Danes in Sweden’s densely forested Southern Uplands. Around eight tribes lived in Norway; their homelands can be identified with some certainty because they are etymologically related to the names of regions of modern Norway. The Raumarici most likely lived in Romerike, the Alogi in Hålogaland north of the Arctic Circle, the Rugi in Rogaland, and so on. Rodulf’s Rani probably lived in Romsdal, the valley of the River Rauma, in the west of the country. Thanks to its rugged geography, Norway remained a land of local tribes even at the beginning of the Viking Age. Elsewhere, most of the tribes named by Jordanes had vanished by this time. The Danes had absorbed the Angles and Jutes and another tribe mentioned by Jordanes called the Heruls, who lived between the Götar and the Danes. The Swedes and Götar had absorbed the rest. This was certainly not a peaceful process. Fortresses proliferated across Scandinavia – over 1,500 are known from this period. On the 80-mile-long island of Öland, nineteen stone ring-forts were built around this time so no one would have been more than two or three miles from a refuge. At the same time there was a general movement of settlement away from the coast, a sure sign that piracy was endemic. The Viking Age may not have started in western Europe until 793 but something like it was already well under way in the Baltic Sea.

The first half of the Germanic Iron Age is known as the Migration Period (400 – 500), after the series of Germanic migrations that resulted in the complete collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The ultimate cause of the Germanic migrations was the arrival
c.
370 in eastern Europe of the Huns, a ferocious Turkic nomad people from Central Asia. Those tribes who could took flight in a desperate search for safer homelands, displacing other tribes and setting almost the whole Germanic world in motion. Some tribes were broken up and absorbed by others, and new ethnic identities were forged from ad hoc coalitions. Many tribes, including the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and Suevi, sought refuge in the Roman Empire, overwhelming its border defences and founding new kingdoms on its territory. The Huns never reached Scandinavia but the political chaos of the age created opportunities for the enterprising. Britain slipped out of Roman control in 410 and was left exposed to the Saxons, who seized land and began to settle the rich lands of the south-east and the Midlands. Saxons also took advantage of the chaos the invasions caused in Roman Gaul, settling in the Pas de Calais, Normandy, and on the River Loire. At the same time they raided as far north as the Orkney Islands, as far west as Ireland, and as far south as Aquitaine. The Angles soon joined the Saxons in Britain, settling along the east coast from East Anglia north to the Firth of Forth. So too did the Jutes, whose main settlements were probably in Kent. Another tribe from southern Scandinavia, the Heruls, launched pirate raids as far afield as Aquitaine and northern Spain but they made no known settlements. A branch of this well-travelled people had already migrated to Ukraine in the third century, and from there launched pirate raids around the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. Those Heruls who remained in Scandinavia were conquered by the Danes in the sixth century. This is most likely the period that sailing ships began to be used in Scandinavia as it is scarcely credible that the Angles, Jutes and Heruls should have undertaken such long voyages of settlement and piracy in rowing ships, taking weeks or months, when their Saxon neighbours were crossing the same seas, for the same purposes, in much swifter sailing ships.

The age of Beowulf

Scandinavian raiders were also busy much closer to home, raiding Frisia, a region on the North Sea coast now divided between Germany and the Netherlands. In
c.
528, Frisia was raided by the Scandinavian king Hygelac, who went on to sail down the Rhine as far as Nijmegen before he was defeated and killed by the Franks. It is a sign that Scandinavia was now truly beginning to emerge from prehistory that Hygelac’s raid was recorded in four independent literary sources, including Gregory of Tours’ near contemporary
History
of
the
Franks
and the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon epic poem ‘Beowulf’. Unfortunately, the sources don’t agree whose king Hygelac was. Gregory of Tours, and two other Frankish sources, describe Hygelac as a king of the Danes – their earliest appearance in history – but in ‘Beowulf’ he is called king of the Geats, that is the Götar, from southern Sweden, or even the Jutes of Jutland. In the poem the hero Beowulf is said to have taken part in the raid, swimming home after his king’s defeat, in full armour, underwater. Beowulf goes on to save the Danish king Hrothgar from the man-eating troll-like monster Grendel and his equally awful mother, become king of the Geats, and finally die slaying a dragon that was ravaging his lands. ‘Beowulf’ also describes another Danish raid on Frisia as does another early Anglo-Saxon poem, the fragmentary ‘Finnsburg’. A Frankish poem, composed
c.
570, records another major raid by Danes but this was also driven off by the Franks. No further Danish raids on Frisia are recorded until the Viking Age, so this defeat appears to have deterred them from interfering in what the Franks regarded as their sphere of influence for 200 years.

The Migration Period was a quite literal golden age for Scandinavia. In the course of their migrations, the Germans and Huns relieved the Romans of enormous amounts of gold and silver, either as plunder or payments of tribute. Much of this gold eventually found its way to Scandinavia, whether by trade or plundering raids across the Baltic, or in the pockets of homeward-bound mercenaries. One of the routes by which much of this gold reached Scandinavia was through Eastern Europe and across the Baltic to the islands of Bornholm, Öland and Gotland, where several treasure hoards dating to this period have been found. The richest hoard of the period, however, was found in the eighteenth century at Tureholm in Södermanland in central Sweden and contained 26.5 pounds (12 kg) of gold. Treasures may be buried for two reasons: ritual offerings to the gods or, in the days before banks, for security. However, in the second case, the owner’s intention was eventually to recover the treasure, not leave it in the ground as an expensive time capsule for modern archaeologists or metal-detectorists to discover. There is no evidence that most of these treasures were buried for ritual reasons so the failure of the owners to recover so many hoards is best seen as yet another sign of the pervasive insecurity of the period. These islands would have been particularly exposed to piracy and the owners of the unrecovered hoards may well have been killed in raids or captured and carried off for the slave markets.