Vikings in America (5 page)

The sack of Lindisfarne shocked England. It represented the end of the first English cultural flowering. The monks fled with their treasures, and even with the bones of their saint, so that after many adventures St Cuthbert ended up buried in Durham Cathedral. They fled with their most precious book, the
Lindisfarne Gospels
, now in the British Library in London. Generations of historians have reported that the English prayed ‘from the fury of the Vikings, Good Lord deliver us'. Whether this prayer was ever used in quite this form is open to question, but the sentiment is correct. For 200 years after the pirate raid on Lindisfarne, the Vikings attacked England in more and more locations, and with ever greater bands of fighters. English
national pride is enhanced by the story of King Alfred, who against the odds fought to defend his part of England from the Vikings. The storytellers forget that Alfred's work was undone in the generation that followed, and the Vikings came to rule the whole of England. The pinnacle of Viking rule was reached under King Canute – King of England, King of Denmark, King of Norway. Under Canute the Vikings demonstrated their power as sea-kings of the North Sea, able to rule wherever the sea-road took them. All of England was ruled by the Vikings; the north and the east was settled by them. The indigenous people of the British Isles today are, in terms of their genetic heritage, as much Viking as they are English, and the descendants of European migrants around the world who claim British ancestry likewise carry Viking genes.

The Viking expansion also took in the islands of Orkney and Shetland, the northernmost islands of the British Isles. Today they are frequently perceived as bleak, windswept and poor, yet to the Vikings they offered everything that was wanted for comfortable living. The climate discourages tree growth, leaving the islands clear of the obstruction of woodland, exactly the sort of landscape the Vikings wanted for meadowland and grazing. Clearing well-established forests to create meadows and pastures was a massive undertaking, ongoing in more southern parts of Britain even into the twentieth century. By contrast the naturally cleared lands of Orkney and Shetland were exceptionally desirable. The islands also offered bird cliffs, a ready source of food exploited until the 1940s, though now out of fashion as tastes have changed. The seas provide rich fishing, as well as seals and whales. Despite modern perceptions, Orkney and Shetland are rich lands. Indeed in the eighteenth century, Orkney was judged the second most prosperous county in Scotland; only Lothian, the county of Edinburgh, was richer.

Orkney and Shetland were not empty lands. Archaeologists have struggled to sort out the layers of civilisation from some of the world's densest archaeological remains, and are still without firm conclusions. Shortly before the Vikings came, a people called the Picts
⁴
had been living in both groups of islands. They had built around 100 brochs, apparently fortified towers which served almost as villages, providing accommodation, village industries, and perhaps emergency corralling for sheep. The Picts remain one of history's mysteries. We don't know their ethnicity, nor do we know their first language, though later generations spoke Celtic, and though they were a literate people, very few decipherable inscriptions have survived. Nor do we know when they died out. At the time of the Viking arrival in Orkney and
Shetland – conventionally given as around 800 – the majority population was Pictish. Alongside the Picts were the Irish. The expansion which had taken the Irish up the west coast of Scotland had taken them also to Orkney and Shetland, and in these islands they had reached an accommodation with the Picts which saw Irish settlers living alongside the Picts in brochs, and the Pictish writing system transmitted back to Ireland as the enigmatic Ogham script. And there was one other, the English. The English migration from the continent of Europe to England in the century and a half following
AD
449 is well recorded; what is often overlooked is that the late Roman historian Claudius Claudianus states that the English were in Orkney in
AD
363.

Into this ethnic melting pot the Vikings entered. They dominated, ruling both archipelagoes, and making Orkney the jewel of their British possessions. Orkney and Shetland together were rich in grazing land, in the food resources of the bird-cliffs and the sea, but also they were the ‘Grand Central' of the Viking world. East was the shortest crossing to Norway. South was the coast of Scotland, just a dozen miles across the Pentland Firth, to the Vikings simply the Southern Land, today the county of Sutherland. Further south the coast led along the North Sea littoral, to the rich lands of Scotland and England. West was an easy voyage along Scotland's north coast, to Cape Wrath. To today's romantics the name implies storms and angry weather, which are frequent enough in these northern latitudes, but the name has a prosaic meaning given by Viking navigators – Cape Turning. Here the Vikings turned south, to the Western Isles of Scotland, to the Isle of Man and, most of all, to Dublin.

In Dublin the cultures of Viking and Celt came head to head. Dublin was a Viking city in foundation and rule, but sitting on the edge of a Celtic Irish kingdom. Its reason for existence was trade. The Vikings brought in gold and silver, originating in the eastern Mediterranean and transported through the rivers of Russia, across Scandinavia, then to Orkney, and finally to Dublin. In exchange they bought slaves, Irish men and women who were destined to labour on the farms the Vikings were establishing in Scotland, Orkney, Shetland – and in their Norwegian homeland.

Perhaps this might have been the limit of Viking expansion if it were not that from the northernmost hills of Shetland, or from a boat fishing the rich seas just north of Shetland, the massive cliffs of the Faroe Islands can just be seen. The Irish settlers they encountered in Shetland had already been there. Inevitably the Vikings explored these neighbouring islands.

The Viking settlement of the Faroe Islands is recorded as a coherent story in a manuscript dated about 1380 – the
Flateyjarbok
– and in fragmentary form in a few other manuscripts from around this period. These historical sources are hundreds of years after the Viking settlement, but there is no reason to doubt the broad outline of the story they tell. The very first Viking settlement on the Faroe Islands was made by Grimur Kamban in or just after the year 800. Like the Vikings who sacked Lindisfarne in 793, Grimur Kamban was exploiting the new designs in shipbuilding which made long voyages practical. Like those Vikings he was presumably driven by the hope of gain, driven from Norway by a lack of land to farm and a need to seek his fortune overseas. Tradition has it that he travelled to Dublin, before heading north via Cape Wrath, Orkney and Shetland to the Faroe Islands. His ship would have held at most two dozen men and women, and the bare necessities needed for building shelter and getting a subsistence living from the land. He landed at Funningur on the island of Esturoy, and there set up his farm. Grimur Kamban is treated by the Faroese people today as their common ancestor, and it is likely that all Faroese people today are descendants of this one man, a true nation founder. Curiously, his name is a hybrid of Norse and Celtic. His first name, Grimur, is the familiar north European Grim, one of the names used by Odin in his guise as ‘the masked one', and a thoroughly Viking name. His second name however is not a Norse patronymic but rather an Irish–Norse hybrid.
Kam-
is an Irish root meaning crooked;
ban
appears to be the Old Norse for bone. The name means something like ‘the crooked' or even ‘hunchback'. Grimur appears to have spent long enough in Ireland to have picked up an Irish nickname.

The Faroe Islands were not an empty land. The Irish had certainly visited.
⁵
Their discovery of the Faroe Islands dates from the mid sixth century, around 250 years before Grimur Kamban's landfall. But while the Vikings arrived in family groups, the Irish migration is usually asserted to have been a male-only matter. In contrast to the Viking wooden ships capable of carrying two dozen or more people, the Irish were using coracles made of leather over a wooden frame, typically requiring a crew of less than a dozen, and Irish custom dictated that the crew of such boats should be men only. The Irish had reached the Faroe Islands, and brought their sheep, which ran wild over the islands, but they had not established permanent settlements there. Indeed, the Irish appear to have regarded the Faroe Islands as a form of religious retreat rather than a land to be settled. Grimur Kamban and his
settlers soon swamped these Irish ascetics. Faroese tradition has it that the Irish left of their own accord.

For several years in the late 1990s the Faroe Islands led the UN league tables as the most prosperous country per capita in the world, their wealth based on fishing supplemented by husbandry. This has always been an area abounding in natural wealth, and the Vikings were quick to see the economic value of the Faroe Islands with their magnificent natural resources. There is abundant sheep pasture, Europe's biggest bird cliffs providing an almost endless supply of food, and the seas offering what were then some of the world's richest fishing grounds. The Faroe Islands flourished in Viking times, as they do today.

It is possible to travel from the Faroe Islands to Shetland, Orkney and the Scottish mainland and thence to almost anywhere in Europe without losing site of land. Yet the reality of travels in these northern latitudes is that fog and rain means that the sailor will often be out of sight of land. Additionally there is the human tendency to take short cuts. The shortest route from the Faroe Islands to the old Norwegian capital of Nidaros is not via Shetland, but to sail due east across the open sea. Similarly a voyage due south is the shortest route to Cape Wrath and Ireland. Settlement of the Faroe Islands gave a stimulus to this sort of traveling, where navigators deliberately set a course out of sight of land. Faroese ballads have almost as a theme the calm and unemotional acceptance of the perils of long journeys out of sight of land. Thus in the
Ballad of Sigmundur Brestisson
⁶
we hear:

This is a punishing journey in an open boat with no shelter made at latitudes north of 60°. The distance is perhaps 250 miles – a straight run from Cape Wrath perhaps. The Vikings made their voyages both summer and winter, so a voyager might face the very long nights as well as the cold and damp of the North Atlantic in winter.

Grimur Kamban and his fellow Vikings had no technology to help their navigation. They had neither compass nor sextant. The navigational limitations they faced are common to all North Atlantic Viking voyages, and a feature of subsequent voyages to America. When possible they remained in sight of land, navigating by sightings of conspicuous headlands. Without the pollution of the modern world, visibility was significantly greater than is
usual today. Thus, for example, the 21st-century visitor to Greenland, one of the few accessible truly wild northern locations, is amazed at the clarity and distance of naked-eye vision, which is frequently in excess of 80 miles; in Viking times this sort of visibility would have been possible everywhere. Nonetheless, there are limits to the possibilities of naked-eye vision. Where sight of a distinctive coastal feature was not possible the Vikings made intelligent use of the sun and the stars – though they were without calendars or star charts, and were therefore using the heavens only as a rudimentary direction guide. Knowledge of the weather patterns created by land masses over the horizon is recorded as a guide used by Vikings. Additionally, at least sometimes, they took ravens on their voyages. As a land bird, a raven set loose from a ship will fly up until high enough to see land, then fly towards the nearest land, which helped the Vikings to identify which direction to go in. The final navigational aid open to the Vikings was fleas. Humans in the Middle Ages habitually had fleas, and the Vikings spent much of their time plucking these annoyances from their hair and clothes. It seems that human fleas have a use – as a crude direction finder. The Vikings discovered that if the fleas are placed in a box, the fleas hop towards the north side of the box. The phenomenon has recently been confirmed by the Smithsonian Museum, though as far as I am aware no explanation has been advanced as to why fleas should act in this way.

Grimur Kamban and his Faroese Vikings had these basic means of navigation. These tools were useful, yet not sufficient to give certainty to the location or direction. Sailing on the Atlantic searching for the rather small targets of the three island groups, Orkney, Shetland and Faroe, was in the most part an act of faith. Mistakes in navigation inevitably happened. Indeed, Viking voyaging was a series of best guesses, with efforts to correct navigational errors once land had been sighted.

It is not far from the Faroe Islands to Iceland. The sagas tell us that the first sighting of Iceland was made in 850 by Nadd-Oddur. Nadd-Oddur had no intention of discovering a new land; indeed he probably wished himself at home in Norway. Born in southern Norway, at Agder, Nadd-Oddur had got into trouble in his homeland, with the result that he was sentenced to outlawry. What he had done is not recorded, though usually killing someone, in a duel or otherwise, was the crime that led to this punishment. The
exiled Nadd-Oddur set his course for the Faroe Islands. Perhaps because he did not know the route, perhaps through bad luck, he missed his way and was storm-driven to the south-east coast of Iceland. He made a landing there, and even named the land – Snaeland, in English ‘Snowland' – but he was not sufficiently encouraged by what he saw to stay, and back-tracked to the Faroe Islands.

The Faroese Vikings gradually became aware of the existence of Iceland. Nadd-Oddur made his home in the Faroe Islands and doubtless told the story of his chance sighting. The Irish who had been on the Faroe Islands before the Vikings arrived would have known about Iceland – and presumably communication took place between these Irish ascetics and Grimur Kamban's Vikings. Grimur Kamban and many of his companions must have had some knowledge of the Irish language through time they had spent in Ireland, and probably also had Irish brides, so communication was practicable.