Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (39 page)

The Norse Greenlander’s hunting expeditions to the Norðsetr continued long after the end of the Viking Age proper (
c.
1100). The farthest north that the Norse can be proven beyond doubt to have got is Kingigtorssuaq, a small, rocky island about 72º north. Some time in the mid- to late thirteenth century, three Norsemen made a runic inscription on a small flat stone and placed it in a cairn on top of the island, where it was found in 1824: ‘Erlingur the son of Sigvaths and Baarne Thordars son and Enriði son, Washingday [Saturday] before Rogation Day [25 April], raised this mound and rode...’ The inscription ends with six unique runes presumed to be a secret code. For the inscription to have been made so early in the year, before the sea ice began to break up, the Norse must have spent the winter in the area. It is likely, however, that the Norse did sail much further north than this. In 1876, a British oceanographic expedition discovered two ancient cairns on Washington Irving Island, off northern Greenland, around 79º north and over 1,000 miles north of the Western Settlement. The British dismantled the cairns to see if earlier explorers had left a message hidden in them. Finding none, and not knowing of any other Europeans who had ventured so far north, the British concluded that the cairns must have been built by the Norse. If so, this may be where the Viking expansion finally fizzled out, less than 800 miles from the North Pole. Modern researchers who have examined the cairns agree that they are unlikely to be of Inuit construction.

At first the Norse had the Norðsetr to themselves but around 1170 they made contact with the Thule Inuit, who had recently migrated into the high Arctic from Alaska, displacing the earlier Dorset Inuit. The ancestors of the modern Inuit peoples, the Thule were superbly adapted to life in the high Arctic. The secret of their success was their mastery of whale hunting – earlier Inuit cultures could only exploit beached whales. The Thule pursued whales at sea in umiaks, open hide-covered boats, about 30 feet long, driven by paddles. Whales were killed using a toggling harpoon. These have detachable points that lodge inside the whale’s body and cannot fall out. The points are attached by ropes to inflated sealskin floats, which prevent the whale from diving and from sinking when it has been killed. This technology gave the Thule access to far more abundant resources than were available to earlier Inuit peoples, who had depended on seals. The Thule also used the bow and arrow, which earlier Inuit had not.

The initial encounters between the Norse and the Skrælings, as the Norse called the Inuit, are not recorded. Hunter-gatherer peoples vigorously defend their hunting grounds against interlopers and, as Thorvald had shown in Vinland, the Norse also had an instinct to fight first and ask questions later. Norse artefacts have been found on many Inuit archaeological sites in the Canadian Arctic and northern Greenland so there may also have been trade: there are however other explanations for their presence. The Inuit site that has so far produced the greatest number of Norse artefacts is Skraeling Island, a small island off Ellesmere Island nearly 78º north, which was occupied repeatedly by early Inuit peoples over a period of over 5,000 years. The Inuit were drawn to the island because of its proximity to the North Water Polynya, a large permanently ice free area in northern Baffin Bay (between Ellesmere Island and Greenland), which attracts large numbers of seals and whales. The Thule arrived on Skraeling Island in the thirteenth century and built a cluster of winter houses from stones, turf and whalebones.

The Norse artefacts from Skraeling Island include pieces of woven woollen cloth, iron ship rivets, knife and spear blades, a carpenter’s plane (with its blade missing), an awl, iron wedges (for splitting wood), pieces of mail armour, and fragments of boxes and barrels. Inuit artefacts included harpoon heads, pieces of meteoritic iron blades, and a small wood carving of a face with non-Inuit features. Similar carvings, known as
kavdlunaits
from the Inuit word for ‘foreigner’, have been found at other Inuit sites. Some are depicted wearing European-style hoods and cloaks and are thought to be Inuit portrayals of the Norse. Radiocarbon-dates for some of the Norse artefacts cluster around the middle of the thirteenth century. A similar range of Norse artefacts found at an Inuit site on Ruin Island, about 60 miles away on the Greenland side of the Nares Strait, has been dated to the same period.

Trade or shipwreck?

The presence of Norse artefacts on these Inuit sites is usually interpreted as evidence of trade between them and the Norse. This may not be the case, however. The Inuit did have the furs, hides and ivory that the Norse needed to maintain their trade links with Europe but what could the Norse offer in return? Wood was a precious commodity this far north but the Greenland Norse were always short of timber too. Iron tools might have been traded but this was also always in short supply in the Norse colonies. The Inuit had access to meteoritic iron from northern Greenland, which they worked into blades by cold hammering. Norse wrought iron was better quality but might have been harder to work with without the technology of forges. Rather than indicating a regular trade, an alternative explanation for the presence of these artefacts is that they all come from a single Norse expedition to the far north, perhaps the same one that built the cairns on Washington Irvine Island. The ship rivets were not new when they came into Inuit hands, they look as if they have been salvaged from ship’s planks. The Norse would hardly trade the planks of their own ship so they were probably salvaged from a shipwreck along with the other artefacts. Or perhaps the Inuit fought the trespassing Norse and captured and looted the ship. Back in the settlements, this was just another expedition that set out on the dangerous Arctic seas bound for the Norðsetr and was never heard of again.

CHAPTER 9

M
ALDON
, L
ONDON AND
S
TAMFORD
B
RIDGE

E
NGLAND
’
s SECOND
V
IKING
A
GE
978–1085

For England’s King Edgar ‘the Peaceful’ (r. 957 – 975) the year 973 was one of stage-managed triumphalism. Edgar was the first English king for over 150 years who did not have to face a Viking invasion: not a single Viking raid was recorded during his reign. Free from external threats, Edgar could concentrate on building the authority of his government and with restoring the damage done by the Vikings to the English church. Edgar also had wider ambitions. England was the largest, richest and most powerful kingdom in Britain and Edgar fancied himself not just as king of the English but as an emperor of the whole island. His first triumphal act of 973 was to hold a coronation ceremony, though Edgar had already been king for fifteen years and his coronation was a celebration rather than the prelude to his reign. By choosing the old Roman city of Bath for his coronation, Edgar was quite deliberately trading on its imperial associations to add lustre to his own kingship. These imperial pretensions were displayed even more clearly later in the year when he held court at Chester, a former Roman legionary fortress. There, in a magnificent piece of theatre, Edgar was rowed on the River Dee by six or eight British kings (the chronicles differ on just how many) including Kenneth II of Scotland, a Viking king called Maccus from the Isle of Man or the Hebrides, Malcolm of Strathclyde, and three or five Welsh kings, while Edgar held the tiller. The symbolism was obvious: Edgar’s was the hand that guided all of Britain.

Edgar’s triumphalism proved premature. After his death in 975, aged only thirty-two, there was not a single uncontested succession to the English throne until after the Norman Conquest. Edgar was survived by two sons, the eldest Edward by a concubine, the younger Æthelred by his wife Ælfthryth. Edward was about thirteen years old, Æthelred about seven. Edward would normally have inherited the throne unopposed but because he was illegitimate, an influential faction favoured Æthelred. Edward’s supporters were stronger, but he reigned for only three years before he was murdered while he was visiting Æthelred at Corfe in Dorset. Æthelred (r. 978 – 1016) now became king, but the suspicion that he had instigated his brother’s murder hung over him for the remainder of his life, undermining his subjects’ trust in him and making it difficult for him ever to assert his authority effectively. Edward, in life a violent and intemperate young man, came to be regarded as a martyr by his supporters. This was a lot to live down, but Æthelred did not help himself either by his unwillingness to listen to his advisors, for which he posthumously earned the nickname ‘the Unready’, from Old English
unræd
, meaning ‘ill-advised’ rather than unprepared. It was also a disadvantage that in an age when kings were expected to lead armies in battle, Æthelred lacked any military abilities whatsoever. Æthelred was, however, an able administrator and it is possible that, given peace, he might have become a successful ruler.

The Battle of Maldon

Unfortunately for Æthelred, and England, the Vikings were adept at detecting political weakness and a new wave of attacks was not long in coming. Less than two years into his reign, in 980, Vikings sacked the port of Southampton, killing many of the townsfolk and taking most of the survivors captive. In the same year, the always-vulnerable Isle of Thanet in Kent was raided and a fleet from the Hebrides or Orkney raided Cheshire. England’s quarter-century of peace was over. The raids seem to have begun on a relatively small scale – seven ships raided Southampton and three are recorded attacking Dorset in 982 – but they soon escalated. In 991, Olaf Tryggvason, an ambitious sea-king with a claim to the Norwegian throne, landed at Folkestone with a fleet of ninety-three ships. After ravaging the town and its hinterland, Olaf moved on to Sandwich and crossed the Thames estuary to Ipswich before advancing to Maldon in Essex. Here Olaf made camp on Northey Island in the estuary of the River Blackwater. Byrhtnoth, the ealdorman of Essex, took up position on the mainland opposite the island with his household warriors and the local levies. Olaf offered to withdraw and sail home if he was paid tribute. Byrhtnoth refused, saying that he would pay the Vikings only with spear points and sword blades.

The battle that followed is the subject of one of the finest Old English poems, known as ‘The Battle of Maldon’, a moving expression of the heroic values shared by both English and Viking warriors. A causeway joined Northey Island to the mainland, but it could only be crossed at low tide. As the tide ebbed, the Vikings tried to cross the causeway to attack the English, but they were easily held off by just three English warriors. The Vikings taunted the English that they lacked the courage to fight them on equal terms on level ground. At this point, Byrhtnoth made the fateful decision to pull his forces back and allow the Vikings to cross the causeway and form a shield wall on the mainland. The size of the two armies is unknown but, given the size of Olaf’s fleet, it is not unrealistic to assume that he commanded 3,000 to 4,000 men. There is no evidence at all for the size of Byrhtnoth’s army, but one late source, the twelfth century
Book
of
Ely
, says that he was outnumbered by the Vikings. The battle soon began to go against the English. Many (probably all) of the levies were untried in battle and did not even know how to hold their shields and spears properly in the shield wall. When Byrhtnoth, fighting in the front rank, was fatally wounded, some of the English warriors began to lose their nerve. According to the poem the first to flee was Godric, who stole Byrhtnoth’s horse – though he had ridden to battle, the ealdorman was fighting on foot as was usual for English warriors – and galloped off the battlefield, followed by his brothers. Others, recognising Byrhtnoth’s horse, thought he was abandoning them and fled too. Only Byrhtnoth’s household warriors stood their ground, fighting on around his fallen body. In the poem, the warriors encouraged one another in the hopeless fight. ‘Let us call to mind,’ one says, ‘those declarations we often uttered over mead, when from our seat we heroes would put up pledges about tough fighting: now it can be proved who is brave.’ They died to a man.

The poet who composed ‘The Battle of Maldon’ criticised Byrhtnoth for allowing the Vikings to cross the causeway, ascribing it to his
ofermode
, the kind of pride that got Satan expelled from Heaven. This almost certainly does not do justice to Byrhtnoth. Byrhtnoth must have recognised that, although his presence with an army certainly prevented the Vikings ravaging the countryside around Maldon, their ships gave them the tactical initiative: they could simply sail off and plunder an undefended settlement. By deliberately bringing on a battle, Byrhtnoth gambled on being able to destroy the Viking army and so save the whole country from a ravaging. In accepting Byrhtnoth’s challenge, Olaf made similar calculations. If he succeeded in destroying the English army, he would be free to plunder wherever he liked.