A Brief History of the Vikings (29 page)

The years after Stamford Bridge saw the players in the Viking drama slowly recede into history, leaving their ‘Viking’ heritage behind. Magnus and Olaf ‘the Peaceful’, the sons of Harald the Ruthless, ruled Norway between them, and renewed hostilities between their lands and the Danish holdings of Svein Estridsen. For his part, Svein married Thora, the widow of Harald the Ruthless. While Olaf the Peaceful remained in Scandinavia, a coin bearing his face somehow made it all the way across the Atlantic to Godard Point, Maine, either through shipwreck, or trade between Arctic Inuit and Greenlanders, or perhaps even one final, unrecorded visit to Vinland.

Svein Estridsen and, after his death, his son Canute (later St Canute) plotted to send a massive Danish fleet against England. Canute was assassinated before he could act on it, and the threat to England from Scandinavia faded permanently. If
Vikings counted on any support from Northumbria, they could forget it after 1080. William the Conqueror laid waste to northern England, to ensure that it never rose up in support of any rebels against him.

Edgar the Atheling, the grandson of Edmund Ironside and the true heir to the English throne, made a half-hearted attempt at claiming the throne of England, before becoming a patsy of the new regime, fighting in Normandy on behalf of the Normans, and accompanying William the Conqueror’s son on a crusade to Jerusalem. Eastern Europe was the destination of many other exiles. Tostig’s sons stayed on in Norway with King Olaf’s blessing, and their descendants fell into obscurity there. Godwinson’s daughter Gytha remained in Russia, as the wife of the prince of Kiev, Vladimir II. Kiev continued to send Varangian mercenaries to Constantinople, but in the years after 1066 the Byzantine army was swelled by many Englishmen fleeing the new Norman order to seek their fortune elsewhere. The ‘Viking’ nature of the Varangians was permanently diluted, and the Varangian guard henceforth gained a far more Anglo-Saxon character.
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Others were rumoured to have permanently settled on the coast of the Black Sea with the Emperor’s blessing, at an unknown location that may have been the Crimea, which they called
Nova Anglia
– New England.

In Scandinavia, the rulers of the areas we now call Norway, Denmark and Sweden continued to jockey for position. As Christianity took firmer hold, they found new causes to unite them. Throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they continued to war and raid in foreign lands, but in eastern Europe, and in the name of the Lord. The Northern Crusades turned swathes of the southern Baltic kingdoms into vassal states of the Swedes and Danes. As the family trees branched and interwove, a time came in the fifteenth century when a
single monarch presented a reasonable claim to all the thrones of the region; Sweden, Denmark and Norway were joined for a century or so in the medieval Kalmar Union, before Sweden broke away again. Denmark and Norway continued to function as a single entity, before Norway seceded after the Napoleonic wars to form a union with Sweden. The union was eventually dissolved in 1905, supposedly because the Norwegians were unhappy with being ruled by a foreign power. As an indicator of just how confusing and contradictory this was, when the newly independent Norwegians decided to find a new king, their choice settled on a
Danish
prince, who ascended to the Norwegian throne as Hakon VII.

Norwegian influences continued among the people of the Celtic fringe. Viking expeditions continued in the Irish Sea, some led by the grandson of Harald the Ruthless, King Magnus Barelegs, who gained his name after he showed a predilection for wearing a kilt. Viking influence in Ireland had, however, been curtailed by the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, although modern historians dispute its importance – the Vikings had already been going native by that point.
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Their mixed-race offspring remained separate enough to gain their own identity –
Ostmen
, a name derived from their dwelling predominantly in the east of Ireland, but local intermarriage and Christianity wore away Viking elements. Although the Vikings have been blamed for destroying countless treasures of monastic Ireland, their function as traders and the founders of towns did much to bring it into contact with other parts of Europe.

As late as 1171, Orkney islanders with names as un-Scottish as Svein Asleifarson made seasonal raids westward towards the Hebrides and Ireland, and preyed upon English shipping. The twelfth-century leader Somerled, who counted Scots and Vikings among his ancestors, kept Argyllshire and Caithness
free from Scottish sovereignty, preferring to pay his allegiance to the king of Norway. According to popular myth, Land-waster, the fabled banner of Harald the Ruthless, somehow made it into Scottish hands as the ‘fairy flag’ of Clan MacLeod, carried in battle as late as the sixteenth century, but now kept in Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye.

But the Viking spirit was waning, and the families of the isles were steadily losing their connections to their distant homeland. The nascent Scottish kingdom gradually retook the Norse-dominated areas chief by chief, until 1263, when the Norwegian King Hakon IV felt obliged to lead a fleet to remind his Hebridean subjects who he was. After his death in the Orkneys, his son sold the Isle of Man and the Hebrides to the Scots. The Orkneys followed in 1472, in lieu of a dowry for Margaret of Denmark, the wife of the Scottish King James III. The highlands and islands of Scotland finally became possessions of that kingdom, and would remain so, although Norse words persist in Shetland and Orcadian dialect. Despite being the
northernmost
region of Scotland, the region known as
Sutherland
retains a name based on its position relative to Norway and the isles, not Britain itself.

The Vikings were similarly edged out in other parts of the world. The ill-fated voyages to Vinland were not repeated, although vessels continued to make occasional trips to arctic Canada to collect timber for the Greenland colony. By the beginning of the twelfth century, the Earth’s climate had taken a turn for the colder.
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The first places to feel the effects were the Viking colonies on Iceland and Greenland’s western coast, where farmers noticed that the winters were becoming significantly harsher. Drift ice, once merely a seasonal hazard, became increasingly prevalent off the north coast of Iceland. In Greenland, it began to clog the northern fjords for much of the year, and made the voyage east to Europe ever more perilous.
The old straight route to Europe, pioneered by Leif the Lucky, was no longer possible. Navigators were forced to swing farther to the south to avoid icebergs, and the trip became even less appealing than it already was.

Greenland and Iceland were officially made dominions of Norway in 1261, an acknowledgement of the stranglehold on communications held in olden times by the port of Trondheim, and in later years by the flourishing harbour at Bergen. The king of Norway promised to send one ship a year to Greenland, but even that annual lifeline became irregular as Norwegian trade was undermined and surpassed by the German Hanse in the later Middle Ages. The Germans had no family ties with the remote Viking colonies of the north Atlantic, and Greenland in particular suffered from the lack of communication. By the fourteenth century, the length of time between ships had reached dangerous proportions – once, nine years elapsed with no communication between Greenland and the outside world, causing some to speculate that the colonists had turned their back on Europe, and on Christ. In fact, although no bishop could be persuaded to go there, Greenland remained resolutely Christian, its inhabitants holding fast to every single aspect of the faith from their glory days in the eleventh century.
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As the ice grew worse, and they clung suicidally to a way of life that only really worked in temperate Europe, the former raiders found themselves subject to incursions by unwelcome visitors. Perhaps crossing new bridges formed by new ice, perhaps following seals as they headed south, the Skraelings came to Greenland. It is unlikely that the people who came to Greenland were the same tribe of ‘wretches’ who had fought with the Vikings in Vinland. Instead, these new arrivals were Inuit from the Arctic regions, fully adapted to life in an unforgiving climate. Around 1200, the Inuit occupied an area
of fjords and islands termed the Northern Hunting Grounds by the European settlers. It is thought that there was some trade between the Inuit and the Greenlanders – iron ship rivets have been found deep in the Canadian arctic, where any metal object was highly prized.
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Such trade also led to conflict, as the 1379 records of the Icelanders demonstrate – ‘The Skraelings attacked the Greenlanders, killed eighteen of them and carried off two boys, who they made their slaves.’
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Some have assumed a gradual thinning out of the Greenland colony, until the last few stragglers left, perhaps on a forgotten voyage back to Iceland that never made it. Some have assumed a friendly assimilation, with the Greenlanders adopted into the Inuit way of life, melting into the arctic wastes with their newfound allies. However, there has yet to be any genetic proof of extensive medieval intermarriage between the Greenlanders and the Inuit. In fact, Inuit legends often sound more like the more violent of the Viking sagas. One tells of an Inuit hunter coming across a Greenlander collecting shells, and immediately killing him with a spear. This act of murder was followed by Greenlander retaliation, and still greater Inuit revenge, in a series of escalating atrocities. Another recounts the activities of two outlaws who kidnap and assault a Greenlander girl, and their successful repulse of a punitive raid by the girl’s kinsmen.
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In the later Inuit accounts, we hear of a Norse leader, Ûngortoq (thought to be an Inuit corruption of Ingvar), fleeing from his burning house, and casting his infant son into the icy waters rather than leave him to the pursuing Inuit.
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By the late fifteenth century, when parties of Inuit arrived in the Eastern settlement, they found it devoid of human habitation. Gardar, across Eriksfjord from the settlement of Erik the Red, where the people of Greenland had once proudly built a cathedral, was now empty. The Inuit called it
Igaliko
, ‘the deserted cooking place,’ a name it bears to this day. But, setting
aside for a moment the unreliability of mere anecdotal evidence, if the Inuit
found
it deserted, then where did the Greenlanders go?

For a generation after 1420, Iceland and the Faeroes were subject to a series of attacks by English pirates. The chief aim of such attacks was, it seems, the kidnap of young and able-bodied boys and girls, something which became a source of some embarrassment to the English crown. Pope Nicholas V even brokered a return of some of these unfortunates to their native land. It is highly likely, if Iceland was subject to major raids by English marauders, that Greenland could have been too, and with no ships to carry the news back to Europe, the Greenlanders had no protection.

This would certainly explain another Inuit story, related to a Christian missionary many centuries later. According to this version of events, Inuit heading south ran into the Norse Greenlanders on the western coast, and lived peacefully alongside them for some time. However, the settlement was attacked by three ships, which the Greenlanders only forced away with great loss of life. Many more ships returned the following year, stealing the Greenlanders’ livestock and possessions, and causing a large number of the Greenlanders to sail away permanently – presumably in search of help from Iceland – leaving the remainder in the care of the Inuit. When the raiders returned in even greater numbers, the Inuit fled. When they returned, the last of the Greenland settlements was a smoking ruin – Herjolfness on the southern tip, is still known today to the Inuit as
Ikigait
– ‘the place destroyed by fire’. The only survivors were five women and a few of their children left for safe-keeping with the Inuit, and co-opted into the tribe as wives of local men.
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But not even these were truly the last of the Vikings in Greenland. As late as 1540, an Icelander sailing in a German
vessel found himself blown off course from his native land, and made landfall at the southern tip of Greenland. When he went ashore, he found a dilapidated town devoid of inhabitants. Lying face down on the ground was a dead body – a man clad in sealskin clothes, left where he had fallen because there was nobody to bury him. This Norse hermit, an antique metal knife lying by his side, must have been the last descendant of the Vikings in the New World.
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During the late Middle Ages, Iceland was similarly cut off from its roots, with a sharp fall in the number of vessels plying the increasingly dangerous waters, particularly after the eclipse of Trondheim as the port of contact with the north Atlantic. The Icelanders were not completely isolated from the world like their counterparts in Greenland – far from it, since although their home had a reputation as an unpleasant place to live, the cold, dry gales were perfect for drying catches to make stockfish, a staple food of the late Middle Ages.

On several occasions, Iceland was seriously considered as another extraneous arm of the Scandinavian world that could be lopped off in much the same way as Shetland and the Orkneys. Still reeling from the dissolution of the Kalmar union, the Danish king scrabbled for means to bring new money into his treasury. Danish levies were imposed on traffic in the Baltic, and there was a plan to use Iceland as the collateral for a permanent loan of 100,000 florins from England’s King Henry VIII.
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Although nothing came of this offer, Iceland was offered to England a second time in the 1780s, as a straight swap for Crab Island in the Caribbean. For a burgeoning maritime power, the acquisition of a territory in the north Atlantic was a sound strategic move, and presented a possible alternative to distant Australia as a suitable place to banish convicts. However, the plan came to nothing due to a sudden improvement in relations with Denmark. A later
proposal, that Iceland be ceded to Britain if Britain backed Denmark’s bid to hang on to the Schleswig-Holstein region in the 1860s, also came to nothing. Iceland maintained its reputation as Europe’s remotest point, until the nineteenth century, when its rich repository of sagas and stories rekindled interest in medieval Scandinavia and created the image of Vikings that persists to this day.