The Vikings (8 page)

 

Attempts to provide a single aetiology for the beginning of the Viking Age soon run across difficulties similar to those posed in trying to set its parameters. The suggested causes are numerous and often cancel each other out. The sheer geographical spread of the Scandinavian homelands means that a suggested cause for the activities of Norwegians on the west coast of the peninsula across the North Sea in the British Isles may have little or no relevance to the impulses that drove the Swedes to cross the Baltic and, in due course, navigate their way down the Russian rivers to the Black Sea. The persistent Danish and Norwegian interest in the territories of the Frankish empire may not be illuminated by either explanation. Braving these difficulties - which are in truth insurmountable - we might suggest that the possible causes can be divided into two basic groups. The first consists of mainly abstract reasons that have a general applicability across the Scandinavian peninsula and the island territories of the Danes; the second deals with a set of more clearly defined causes, each with a specific and regional applicability. The divergences in the latter group are so great that I make no attempt to include possible reasons for the onset of a Swedish Viking Age here, saving those for a later chapter that deals with Viking activity east of the Baltic.

Adam of Bremen considered that the original cause of the Viking phenomenon was a simple one: poverty in the Scandinavian homelands. In
De moribus et actis primorum normanniae ducum
, Dudo of St-Quentin found a similarly straightforward explanation. In his résumé of the early life of Rollo, founder of the duchy, Dudo wrote of family quarrels over land and property at home that were resolved by ‘the drawing of lots according to ancient custom’. The losers in these lotteries were condemned to a life abroad, where ‘by fighting [they] can gain themselves countries where they can live in continual peace’. The drawing of lots as a way of solving urgent social problems is echoed in the Gotland
Gutasaga
, where a rapid increase in population and a subsequent famine were dealt with by a lottery as a result of which one in three families were obliged to leave the island with all their property.

Adam and Dudo both saw the movement of Viking bands about mainland Europe as what modern historians might identify as a late manifestation of the Age of Migrations. As the name implies, this was a period of intense restlessness that characterized mainland Europe for some 400 years, between 300 and 700. For reasons not yet properly understood but which it might seem natural to ascribe, as Adam and Dudo did, to poverty, shortage of land and natural disaster, successive waves of Germanic peoples began pouring across the Danube and moving westwards across Europe until they reached the frontiers of a crumbling Roman empire. The Ostrogoths, Visi goths, Alans, Burgundians, Langobards, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Alemanni and Vandals were among them. These tribes rapidly brought about the fall of the empire in the west, adapted and adopted its political structures as they took over, and redrew the cultural and political map of Europe.

Roman intellectuals such as the first-century politician and historian Tacitus had long seen this as one likely fate for the empire. Tacitus’ ethnographic study
De Origine et situ Germanorum
, known as the
Germania
, was written partly to explain to his fellow citizens why the might of Rome had failed to conquer the Germanic tribes on their northern borders, despite their lack of Roman civilization and Roman discipline. The main reason was that Germanic males were naturally attracted to violence and enjoyed fighting. Leaders among them formed warbands and maintained the loyalty of their men by the practice of constant warfare. The commitment to their leader of members of such a warband or
comitatus
was personal: while the chieftain fought for victory, his men fought for him. Reward came in the form of feasts, entertainment and the proceeds of violence. Disdainful of trading and farming, such young men thought it ‘tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they may win by their blood’.
⁸
Within such a culture, ‘the bravest and most warlike do no work; they give over the management of the household, of the home, and of the land to the women, the old men, and the weaker members of the family, while they themselves remain in the most sluggish inactivity’. Arrogant idleness of the kind described by Tacitus is also a hallmark of some of the most notable heroes of the Icelandic sagas, men like Grettir the Strong and Egil Skallagrimsson, known in their youth as ‘coalbiters’ from their habit of idling away the days between adventures at home by the family longfire, irritably gnawing at lumps of coal, annoying themselves and annoying those around them. Tacitus’ description of the
comitatus
warband remains a valid account of the way Viking raiders organized themselves throughout the Viking Age, a loyalty-for-rewards structure that carried over even into the tenth and eleventh centuries and the establishment of rudimentary versions of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish monarchies.

The late Richard Fletcher offered, with due reservations, a coherent short narrative that linked together the main features of the case for a local crisis in early ninth-century Scandinavia that led so large a number of young men to depart their native lands in search of wealth and, eventually, respectability as the colonizers of new territories:

The diffusion of the use of iron in Scandinavia gradually made possible more intense agricultural exploitation. This in turn permitted demographic growth that would in time press upon the limited resources of the Scandinavian environment. Technical advances in shipbuilding, which would produce such masterpieces of strength and elegance as the Gokstad ship, opened the sea-ways of the North Sea and the Atlantic to Viking enterprise. The influx of silver bullion from the Islamic Middle East, well-attested archaeologically and attracted by trade in slaves, furs and timber with the distant lands of the caliphate in Iran, may have had far-reaching consequences for Scandinavian society. It provided capital for shipbuilding, weaponry and trading ventures. It drove a wedge between those who were its beneficiaries and the rest. An elite of wealth and status emerged, competitive and acquisitive, whose members attracted retinues of unruly young warriors on the make; and these men, in their turn, had to be rewarded. The emergence of stronger kings in Denmark and Norway, for reasons not unconnected with this new wealth, could make life at home difficult for these turbulent nobilities. It is to some such cluster of factors as these that we should attribute the beginnings of Viking age activity in western Europe.
⁹

Inevitably, other interpretations of the material exist. By comparison with immediately preceding periods, the relative frequency of grave-finds from the Viking Age has been seen as evidence in support of a population explosion that began around 800. Yet the excavations at Forsandmoen in the Ryfylke district of Rogaland on the south-west coast of Norway which show that thriving settlements had existed there for over a thousand years between the Bronze Age and the Age of Migrations have failed to unearth a single grave from the period. It suggests that the incidence of graves found is not a reliable barometer of either the duration of a settlement or its intensity. Norwegian archaeologists have also registered a consistent decrease in the amount of iron produced in the forest and mountain regions of southern Norway during the early Viking period, and in the intensity of elk- and reindeer-trapping in the interior, and interpreted both as inconsistent with a theory that Norway was over-populated at the time.
¹⁰
Another important component of the traditional theory is that the large number of Norwegian settlement names containing the element ‘-
stadir
’ (meaning ‘place’) originated in about 800, and that these too underscore a scenario in which a population explosion at about that time occurred with severe social consequences that included a Scandinavian diaspora. More recent interpretation of the archaeological data has shown, however, that these place-names should instead be associated with a wave of settlements that started in Norway as early as the fifth century.
¹¹
Ottar, a Norwegian merchant whom we shall meet again later, visited the Wessex court of Alfred the Great towards the end of the ninth century and told the king that he lived ‘furthest north of all the Norsemen’ and made his living by reindeer farming, whaling and exacting tributes from the nomadic Lapps. The discovery in 1981 of an enormous Viking Age farm at Borg, on the Lofoten Islands off the northern coast of Norway, confirms that the area north of the Arctic Circle was considered habitable by Viking Age families willing to look beyond conventional animal husbandry for their subsistence. The population density in the whole Scandinavian peninsula during the early Viking Age has been estimated at one to two people per square kilometre. The figure is an educated guess, but one that certainly does not support a theory of over-population.
¹²

On the question of why raiding on northern Britain began in 793, and not fifty years earlier or forty years later, Norwegian historians and archaeologists have been increasingly attracted in recent years to an idea that looks outside Scandinavia for an explanation and takes into account the political tensions in northern Europe at the close of the eighth century.
¹³
The three major political powers in the world at that time were the Byzantine empire in the east, which had survived the break-up of the Roman empire and its disappearance in the west; the Muslims, whose expansion during the years 660 to 830 under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates had taken them eastward as far as Turkistan and Asia Minor to create an Islamic barrier between the northern and southern hemispheres; and the Franks, who had established themselves as the dominant tribe among the successor states after the fall of the Roman empire in the west. The Byzantine empire, with its capital Constantinople, was remote from the Scandinavian lands and would be more or less able to dictate the terms of its encounters with the Viking phenomenon. The Islamic expansion into Europe via the Iberian peninsula in the first half of the eighth century pushed European trade routes northwards, a development which increased trading opportunities for the Scandinavian lands and also created ideal conditions for piracy in the North Sea area. Of the three major powers it was the Franks who would be most profoundly involved with the Vikings.

By the middle of the eighth century most of Europe between the Elbe in the east and the Pyrenees in the west was under Merovingian Frankish - and Christian - control. In 751 Pippin became the first king of the dynasty known as the Carolingians. On his death in 768 he was succeeded jointly by his sons Charles and Carloman. With Carloman’s death in 771 Charles became sole ruler and presently set about the long series of expansionist gestures in the name of the Christian faith which characterized his reign and would gain him, within fifty years of his death, the appellation of Charlemagne, Charles the Great. His western-Europe territory was greater even than that of the Romans, who never ventured beyond the Rhine after the disaster of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9. Charlemagne took seriously the religious obligations imposed on him by his position as the most powerful ruler in western Christendom. He halted the Muslim expansion into Europe, drove the Arabs back across the Pyrenees, and established Frankish dominance in Spain and Gaul. The Lombards were driven from power in Italy, and the Slavs on the eastern border of his empire were compelled into tributary status. His authority, and that of the Christian Church, reached its limits at the Saxon marches in the north-east of the Frankish kingdom. Beyond lay the territories of the Danes and the Granii, the Augandzi, the Rugi, the Svear and Gautar in Sweden and the other more or less obscure Heathen tribes of the lower Scandinavian peninsula.

From about 772 onward Charlemagne’s chief preoccupation became the conversion to Christianity of the Saxons on his north-eastern border. In that year his forces crossed the rivers Ediel and the Demiel and destroyed Irmensul, the sacred wooden pillar or tree that was the Saxons’ most holy shrine, and probably their version of the ‘world-tree’ Yggdrasil of Scandinavian cosmology. The emperor’s determination to achieve his purpose is evident from an entry in the
Royal Frankish Annals
for 775:

The world beyond Seandinavia in 813. The 3 great political powers were the Frankish empire, the Byzantime empire, and the Muslim caliphates of the Ummayads of Cordoba and the Abbasids.

While the king spent the winter at the villa of Quierzy, he decided to attack the treacherous and treaty-breaking tribe of the Saxons and to persist in this war until they were either defeated and forced to accept the Christian religion or entirely exterminated.
¹⁴

Another invasion of Saxon territory in 775 involved ‘severe battles, great and indescribable, raging with fire and sword’.
¹⁵
In 779 Widukind, the Saxon leader, was defeated in battle at Bochult. Saxony was taken over and divided into missionary districts. Charlemagne himself conducted a number of mass baptisms, for the close identification of Christian missionary churches with Charlemagne’s military power was always made clear to the Saxons. A young English missionary, Lebuin, built a church at Deventer on the banks of the Ysel from which to lead his mission. When the Heathens burnt down his oratory, Lebuin made his way to the tribal gathering at Markelo and addressed the crowd: