A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks (20 page)

The longship as an object of beauty as well as of fear is brought across vividly in the
Encomium Emmae Reginae
, written in Latin in 1041 in praise of Emma of Normandy – the powerful wife of the English king Aethelred the Unready and then of King Cnut, and thereby mother of
Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king but one, and King Harthacnut, Cnut's successor, and herself a descendant of the first Viking ruler of Normandy. In 1015 Cnut set off from Denmark for England with an invasion fleet of two hundred ships:

So great, in fact, was the magnificence of the fleet, that if its lord had desired to conquer any people, the ships alone would have terrified the enemy, before the warriors whom they carried joined battle at all. For who could look upon the lions of the foe, terrible with the brightness of gold, who upon the men of metal, menacing with golden face, who upon the dragons burning with pure gold, who upon the bulls on the ships threatening death, their horns shining with gold, without feeling any fear for the king of such a force?

The date of the Roskilde ship and its size suggest that it may have been built for Cnut himself, King of England from 1016 and of the short-lived ‘North Sea Empire' of England, Denmark and Norway from 1028 until his death in 1035. After beginning his career in time-honoured Viking fashion by raiding the shores of southern England, and then becoming
ealles Engla landes cyning
– King of all England – Cnut set off for Norway in 1028 with a fleet of 50 ships, using his success there to secure a maritime hegemony from Ireland to Sweden in which a vessel such as the Roskilde ship would have been a powerful expression of authority. In that sense, the ship can be seen in the same light as Henry VIII's flagship the
Mary Rose
in the next chapter, as a ‘royal' ship that may have played a role in events that shaped the immediate course of history in those years of Cnut's reign and that of his successors before she ended up abandoned in Roskilde Fjord.

As well as Emma of Normandy, the ship was contemporary with three other great figures of Viking history at this period that saw the pinnacle of Norse power and geographical reach: Yaroslav the Wise, Grand Prince of Kiev from 1019 to 1054; Harald Hardrada, King of Norway from 1046 to 1066; and William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy from 1035 and King of England from 1066. The ship may still have been afloat in that momentous year, 1066, when Harald Hardrada and then William of Normandy vied with King Harold Godwinson for the throne of England, the year that ended Anglo-Saxon rule and the story of the Vikings as sea-marauders and explorers. Away from the world of kings and conquest, the ship may
also have been in existence in the lifetime of Leif Erikson, the first European known to have set foot in North America. His story and that of the Norse in the east touches on a personal voyage of discovery for me, from first seeing a Viking inscription in the Byzantine buildings of Istanbul to exploring Kiev and then travelling to the sites of Norse settlement in Greenland and Newfoundland, at the furthest boundary of the world known to Europeans at the time.

One of the most remarkable sights amidst the splendours of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul is a graffito crudely carved into the marble balustrade of an upper gallery overlooking the nave of the church. Discovered in 1964, it is worn and partly illegible but is clearly in runes, the alphabet of the Norse. The first four surviving runes read FTAN, from Halfdan – a Norse name best known from the Old English epic
Beowulf
, in which ‘Healfdene' was the legendary king of the Scyldings. The rest of the inscription probably reads ‘carved these runes' or ‘was here'. Halfdan may have been one of the Viking mercenaries employed by the Byzantine emperor as his bodyguard – the Varangians, the name given by the Byzantines to the Norse – and the inscription may date from the ninth or tenth century. It is possible to imagine Halfdan idly carving the graffito while standing with the rest of the guard watching a service involving the emperor, at a time when the Vikings in Scandinavia were only beginning to convert to Christianity and the Varangians may not yet have had reverence for the church and the liturgy they were seeing below.

The fact that Vikings had arrived in Constantinople is testament to their skill in using shallow-draught longships to navigate the river systems that linked the Baltic and the Black and Caspian Seas – from east to west, the rivers Volga, Don, Dnieper and Dniester, and their tributaries. The extent of their trading contact with Byzantium and the Muslim world is shown by the discovery of numerous Arab silver dihram coins among Viking hoards in Scandinavia, and by the establishment of settlements around the river emporia where they conducted their trade. One of those was Novgorod, which served as a hub for trade on both the Volga and the Dnieper rivers; another was at Kyiv on the Dnieper and another was near modern Kazan on the lower Volga. From the late ninth century Novgorod and Kyiv were part of Kyivan Rus, a kingdom that reached its greatest extent at the time of the Roskilde ship and had a substantial Norse element in its population.

It is from those who had dealings with Vikings in the east that the earliest written descriptions come, by people who were not afraid of ‘heathens' and divine retribution as at Lindisfarne but instead only saw traders, albeit with unfamiliar – and sometimes disturbing – customs. The most detailed account is by Ahmad ibn Fadl
ā
n, a scholar who accompanied an embassy from the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir of Baghdad to the camp of the recently converted Muslim khan of the Bulgh
ā
rs in 921–2. On the Volga, ‘at the site of a great market which is held frequently and where all kinds of precious merchandise is to be had', he met traders from Rus: ‘They were like palm trees. They are fair and ruddy … Each of them carries an axe, a sword and a knife … From the tip of his toes to his neck, each man is tattooed in dark green with designs…' The women wore circular brooches and round their necks ‘torques of gold and silver'. Most famously, he provided a unique eyewitness description of a Viking boat burial:

When the day came that the man was to be burned and the girl with him, I went to the river where his boat was anchored. I saw that they had drawn his boat up on the shore and that four posts of khadank or other wood had been driven into the ground and round these posts a framework of wood had been erected. Next, they drew up the boat until it rested on this wooden construction … Then they brought a bed and placed it on and cushions of Byzantine silk brocade …

Afterwards they brought the dead king to the boat, placed his weapons beside him and sacrificed two horses, two cows and a dog, flinging the meat into the boat, and then killed the girl as well, before burning the boat and burying the remains in a mound. There is no other account of human sacrifice in a Viking boat burial, but animal sacrifice is attested in the Gokstad ship in Norway where the remains of twelve horses and six dogs were uncovered. Fascinatingly, the Oseberg ship included fragments of silk just as described by ibn Fadl
ā
n on the funerary bier on the Volga, some of it with Persian designs. As we saw in the last chapter, the Abbasids in Baghdad played a large part in opening up maritime trade for the first time since the Romans between China and the west, meaning that silk discovered in a ninth-century ship burial in Norway could have been brought all the way from China through the Malacca Strait in Indonesia, past Sri Lanka and northern India to
Basra and Baghdad, in a network that linked the furthest reaches of Asia with a seafaring people who by the late ninth century had already gone as far west as Iceland and would soon be exploring Greenland and the eastern shore of the Americas.

The most famous of the Varangian Guard was Harald Hardrada, the future king of Norway who as a young man travelled to Constantinople and entered the service of the Byzantine emperor. The popularity of this service among young Viking men is revealed in Scandinavia by the so-called Varangian runestones, commemorating warriors who had gone to the place they called Miklagarðr – ‘big stronghold' in Norse – and fallen in battle. The Vikings were favoured by the emperors for their fealty and for exactly those skills that made them so feared in north-west Europe; a contemporary illustration in the
Synopses
by John Skylitzes, the main source for Byzantine history in the tenth and eleventh centuries, shows a line of Varangian warriors looking very much like those on the Lindisfarne Domesday stone with battle-axes raised. Harald Hardrada became Captain of the Guard and fought in the Holy Land, Sicily, Italy and elsewhere, playing a significant part in the military success that saw the Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century reach its maximum extent since the time of Justinian half a millennium earlier, and then himself returning home wealthy from the booty that was the main attraction of this service to Viking warriors.

On his way to Constantinople in 1031 Hardrada spent time in Kyivan Rus serving its ruler, Prince Yaroslav the Wise, an association that eventually led Harald to marry Yaroslav's daughter Eliziv. From their capital at Kyiv on the Dnieper, Yaroslav and his father Volodymyr before him had made Kyivan Rus a powerful intermediary between the Scandinavian world and Constantinople, controlling the river trade that was the source of their wealth. The mass conversion of Kyivan Rus to Christianity under Volodymyr in 998 strengthened the connection with Byzantium, and led to the construction of the cathedral of Santa Sophia in Kyiv – named and modelled after the great church in Constantinople, but distinctive in appearance with its golden domes and cupolas, and built by people who were Viking in origin, a remarkable cultural confluence made possible by the ships that were sailed and rowed from the Baltic past Novgorod to the emporium on the Dnieper that had been the basis for the first community at Kyiv in the eighth and ninth centuries.

The main exports of the Vikings noted in Byzantine and Arab sources were furs and slaves, but another product of great value was walrus ivory. The use of walrus ivory for carving by the Norse themselves is well-known from the Lewis chessmen, made in the twefth or thirteenth century in Norway or Iceland and found on the Scottish island of that name – from a time when the Outer Hebrides were still part of the kingdom of Norway, the last part of the British Isles to be under direct Scandinavian rule. In Constantinople most ivory had come from elephant tusks, brought from sub-Saharan Africa through the kingdom of Aksum to the Red Sea, but from the early eleventh century walrus ivory from the Atlantic was imported as well. In Baghdad it was valued for knife handles and sword hilts; the late tenth-century Arab geographer al-Muqaddas
Ä«
, whose
Ahsan al-taqāsīm fī ma‘rifat al-aqālīm
– ‘The Best Divisions in the Knowledge of the Regions' – was similar in scope to the works of Strabo and Pliny the Elder a millennium previously, lists as an import into the Arab world ‘fish teeth', the term used by the Arabs as well as the Byzantines for walrus tusks.

The role of Kyiv in this trade is highlighted by fascinating research published in 2022 in the
Proceedings of the Royal Society
. Excavations in 2007 by the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences in tenth- to thirteenth-century layers in the lower town of Kyiv, less than 200 metres from the riverfront, uncovered nine walrus skull rostra – the front part of the skulls that once contained the tusks. It was clear that walrus ivory was transported and marketed in this way, perhaps because it looked more impressive and made the source of the ivory from walrus certain. Isotope and DNA analysis at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology showed that seven of the rostra were from walrus that had lived off western Greenland, an area long assumed to have been a source of walrus ivory at this period, for which this was the first scientific proof. Other studies of walrus rostra from medieval Europe suggest a progression through time in the size and gender of animals that were killed, from large males in the tenth to eleventh century to smaller females in the thirteenth to fourteenth century, the latter with a genetic signature that is most common in the northernmost area of western Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic.

This picture fits with what we know of the Norse settlement in Greenland. First colonised in 985 from Iceland by Erik the Red – who
called it ‘Grœnland' to attract settlers – it soon had several hundred homesteads divided between ‘eastern' and ‘western' settlements, with substantial wood-and-turf houses and eventually a number of churches, several of them stone-built. The climate was warmer than it is now and the valleys of southern Greenland were suitable for pasturage in summer, but the settlers relied on seaborne trade for grain and other foodstuffs, raw materials such as timber and manufactured items, especially metalwork. In return they exported furs as well as walrus ivory and hides – walrus-hide rope was used on Viking ships for rigging and was prized for its strength. During the summer, walrus hauled out in large gatherings in coastal shallows, making them easy prey for Norse hunters and the indigenous people – called by the Norse
Skrælingjar
– with whom they made contact. But what was a ready source of prosperity in the eleventh century may have become more difficult to obtain with time, as walrus became over-exploited and hunters went further north in Baffin Bay and into the archipelago of the Canadian High Arctic.

In 2004 I visited the island of Kingittorsuaq off north-west Greenland, where explorers in 1824 discovered the most northerly runic inscription ever found – almost 1,000 kilometres north of the nearest Norse settlement. Like the runic graffito in Hagia Sophia on the other side of the Viking world, it is both intimate and enigmatic: ‘Erlingur the son of Sigvat and Bjarni Þorðar's son and Eindiði Oddr's son, the washingday (Saturday) before Rogation Day, raised this mound and rode…' Amazingly, the runestone is not the most distant Norse artefact to have been found; more than 1,000 kilometres further north, at a place off Ellesmere Island where the sea-ice used to be present nearly year-round, Canadian archaeologists excavating turf and whalebone houses of the indigenous people discovered links of chain-mail, knife blades, iron boat rivets and pieces of woollen cloth, items that could have come from trade or raiding but may have been salvaged from a shipwreck. The indigenous people had no metalworking tradition themselves, and iron would have been especially prized. That site and the runestone may both date to the thirteenth century, towards the final period of Norse settlement in Greenland, and the Ellesmere Island artefacts could reflect the dangers to those willing to take ever-greater risks to hunt walrus as times became hard for the settlements in the south.