A Brief History of the Vikings
Read A Brief History of the Vikings Online
Authors: Jonathan Clements
J
ONATHAN
C
LEMENTS
, is the author of
The Pirate King, The Moon in the Pines
and
Confucius: A Biography
. He divides his time between Jyväskylä and London and his website is
www.muramasaindustries.com
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF
THE LAST PAGANS OR THE FIRST MODERN EUROPEANS?
JONATHAN CLEMENTS
ROBINSON
London
In Memory of
Thorkill Clements
born in Reykjavik, died in London
Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
This edition published by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2005
Copyright © Muramasa Industries Ltd 2005
The right of Jonathan Clements to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1–84529–076–3
eISBN 978-1-47210-775-6
Printed and bound in the EU
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 2 4 6
Introduction: Britannia Deserta
The Dark Ages
1 Songs of the Valkyries
Myths and Legends of Scandinavia
2 Fury of the Northmen
From the First Raids to Harald Bluetooth
3 Great Heathen Hosts
Highlands, Islands, Ireland and England
4 Brother Shall Fight Brother
Harald Fairhair and Sons
5 The Road East
Vikings, Russians and Varangians
6 Advent of the White Christ
From Harald Greycloak to Olaf Crowbone
7 Beyond the Edge of the World
Iceland, Greenland and Vinland
8 London Bridge is Falling Down
From Svein Forkbeard to Olaf the Stout
9 The Thunderbolt of the North
The Life and Legends of Harald the Ruthless
10 Children of Thor
One Thousand Years Later
Appendix: Rulers during the Viking Age
Trelleborg Fortress.
C M Dixon/Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Ltd
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are already several excellent books on the Viking Age, such as the works of Magnusson, Brønsted, Sawyer and Roesdahl, and my personal favourite for all-round factual information, Gwyn Jones’ revised
History of the Vikings
. Accordingly, I have tried to steer a course between the other available authorities, concentrating on the personalities of the Viking era, who made up that remarkably small handful of families and interlocking dynasties who were the prime movers of the Viking expansion. In order to accomplish this, I have included several family trees to aid the reader in appreciating the Viking Age not as the clash of armies but as a series of family dramas, complete with feuds and reunions, as descendants of local leaders in Scandinavia entwine with the kings and queens of medieval Europe. In a small way, I hope to achieve something of the sense of the sagas that preserve so much of Viking culture for us, showing the people of Scandinavia
through their personal lives, or at least, as romanticized and distorted by their later descendants in Iceland. When saga claims veer far from the evidence of archaeology or other orthodox sources, I have endeavoured to strike a balance.
I have stayed clear of some of the more famous passages that can be found in the works of others. Ibn Fadlan’s infamous treatment of Rus funeral rites, human sacrifice, gang rape and all, features largely in the works of Brønsted and Jones, and need not be repeated here. Instead, I have concentrated on a passage in Ibn Fadlan that I find far more evocative of the Viking experience in the East – an account of declining trade and the desperation that can ensue. Similarly, nothing encapsulates the Vikings’ relationship with the Native Americans better than Gudrid’s heart-rending conversation with a Skraeling in her tent, which I have chosen to quote in place of the more usual tales of Vinland. With such an approach, I hope this book will provide a new perspective even for those who already familiar with other studies.
I have used some names that are anachronistic to aid ease of recognition. I refer to the great bay in southern Norway as ‘the Vik’, as the Vikings did themselves, but also make reference to its northern shores as ‘Oslo’, a town not founded until the time of Harald the Ruthless. I use the term Trondheim to describe the area that the Vikings called Nitharos or Hlaðir, preferring to use the term applied to it from the time of Olaf ‘Crowbone’ Tryggvason and only widely used long after the Viking age was over. It is easier, sometimes, to refer to ‘Estonia’ for example, than it is to refer to ‘the region of the Aesti, part of which would at some future date be known as Estonia’. It is only where the medieval distinctions were of crucial importance, such as in the separate states that made up what we now refer to as ‘Great Britain’, that I have clung to the terms as used by the people at the time.
Regarding Norse names, the available texts are a confusion of Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic renderings of the originals, many with contradictory ways of romanizing elements of the
futhark
runic alphabet. In most cases I have dropped the diacritic marks that distinguish vowel forms for Norse speakers, and followed the editorial policy of the 1997
Complete Sagas of Icelanders
for transliterating the ‘thorn’ rune and other unusual phonemes.
I have done my best to differentiate the many similar names; it is easier, both editorially and narratively, to refer to Harald Greycloak as ‘Greycloak’, and so avoid confusion with the numerous other Haralds in the text, even though he only gained the ‘Greycloak’ sobriquet relatively late in his life. In most cases, I have dropped patronymics, although I do occasionally use them in place of surnames when no nickname is readily available. In some cases where two figures share the same name, I have deliberately employed acceptable variants to differentiate them, as in the case of Olaf Crowbone and Olof (
sic
) Skötkonung. Norse writers rarely distinguished between the
Sámi
people of Lapland and the
Suomi
people of Finland, calling them all
Finns
– I have endeavoured to use the correct terminology where possible. In the case of Harald Bluetooth (
Blátönn
), it is now widely agreed that the colour intended was closer to ‘black’ in medieval Norse, but I have retained the more popular usage. This is not only because he is referred to as Bluetooth in other English sources, but in recognition of his newfound fame in the twenty-first century. When looking for a name for a wireless technology allowing disparate Scandinavian computers to communicate with each other, someone decided that the name of Denmark’s first kingly unifier would be nicely appropriate. It seems churlish now to change his name to the more semantically correct Blacktooth.
References to Icelandic sagas are mainly to the excellent Leif Eríkssonur five-volume
Complete Sagas
(CSI + volume number in my notes), or to the landmark University of Texas translation of
Heimskringla
by Lee Hollander. The over 200 endnotes are there for any reader who wishes to expand this necessarily ‘brief’ history into an examination of my sources.
The family trees are heavily simplified, and often show only partial counts of offspring. Vikings both pagan and Christian had many wives and concubines, and it is impossible to fully match their dynasties with the claims of the saga authors. The trees are just detailed enough to demonstrate the interconnections of the Viking Age from a Scandinavian point of view – there are even more links on the English side, but they belong in a different book.
Much about the Viking world is best understood by experiencing it first-hand. I am fortunate to have travelled from south-west Norway to the icy wastes of Lapland. Members of the Mäki-Kuutti family have been my guides and companions for wanderings in Finland and Sweden, and their support has been invaluable. Back in England, University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies proved particularly useful for its collection of rare nineteenth-century and Finno-Ugric sources on the Vikings’ interactions with their eastern neighbours. I am indebted to the SSEES, its superb Language Unit, and my long-suffering teacher Elina Rautasalo. I was also able to gain access to rare Native American, Inuit and Muslim materials, thanks to the holdings of the nearby School of Oriental and African Studies.
