Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (8 page)

In the semi-legendary Icelandic saga traditions the Ynglings were descended from the fertility god Freyr and his consort, the giantess Gerðr. The dynasty’s name comes from Freyr’s alternative name, Yngvi (Yngling means ‘descendent of Yngvi’). The site most closely associated with the Ynglings is Gamla Uppsala (‘Old Uppsala’), which, in the Viking Age, was a major cult centre dedicated to Freyr, Thor and Odin. The site lies a few miles north of the modern university town of Uppsala on the fertile plain of the River Fyris. In the Viking Age, Gamla Uppsala was easily accessible by ship from Lake Mälaren to the south, which was at that time a long, shallow fjord penetrating deep inland from the Baltic Sea – the gradual post-glacial rebound of the land turned Mälaren into a lake around 1200. The most striking monuments at Gamla Uppsala are three enormous burial barrows traditionally associated with the Yngling kings Aun, Egil and Adils. The two mounds that have been excavated, those associated with Aun and Egil, each contained the cremated remains of a high ranking male and warrior gear including poorly preserved helmets decorated in the Vendel style. Hundreds of smaller burial mounds surround the three great mounds. These are just the few survivors of centuries of farmland improvements: originally there were as many as 3,000 burial mounds around Gamla Uppsala. Those burials that have been investigated date consistently to the sixth century or later. A low flat topped mound to the east of the great barrows, known as the Tingshögar (‘thing-mound’), is probably where the Disting was held in historical times. This was the annual thing (‘assembly’) of the Swedes, which got its name because it was held at the same time as the late-winter Dísablót, a sacrifice in honour of the Dísir, a group of female fertility spirits. Underneath Gamla Uppsala’s twelfth century church are the remains of an earlier wooden structure. These are thought to be of a wooden temple that contained idols of Freyr, Thor and Odin: the temple was said to covered with gold in the late Viking Age. According to the German ecclesiastical writer Adam of Bremen (d.
c
. 1080), a festival in honour of the three gods was still being celebrated in this temple in the 1070s. The festival was held once every nine years around the time of the spring equinox and lasted for nine days. On each day one human male was sacrificed, together with other male animals, including horses and dogs, so that all together the gods were offered seventy-two living creatures. The bodies were hanged in a sacred grove near the temple and left to putrefy. On one occasion, according to saga traditions, the Yngling king Domalde was sacrificed to appease the gods after he had presided over two years of failed harvests. Recent excavations have discovered the traces of two rows of wooden poles, the longest of which is around 1,000 yards (915 m) long. Probably erected in the fifth century, the rows’ purpose is as yet unknown but some of the post holes contained animal bones, possibly from sacrifices.

In the sixth century a large feasting hall, around 164 feet (50 m) long, was built on an artificial platform south of the temple. The hall had a bow-sided plan, similar to the halls at Gammel Lejre, and may have looked rather like an upturned boat. The hall had several grand entrances, one of which was decorated with wrought iron spiral ornaments. The hall burned down in the eighth century and was not rebuilt. The area around the hall was densely populated by craftworkers. There is evidence of gold, silver, lead, bronze, glass and garnet working.

The kingdom of the Swedes was connected to an extensive network of trade routes through the island trading post of Helgö in Lake Mälaren, which developed in the fifth century. Helgö means ‘holy island’ and gold foil plaques decorated with gods and monsters similar to others found at religious sites in Denmark, suggest that the island was a pagan cult centre where markets were held at festival times. No other site in Sweden of the period has produced so much evidence of trade and manufacture. Jewellery making was a particularly important activity: thousands of broken moulds used for casting bronze brooches have been found. Iron working was also carried on. A hoard of seventy-six sixth-century Byzantine gold coins suggests that Helgö had trade links with the Mediterranean, possibly it was a market for furs. In the seventh and eighth centuries, more exotic objects turned up, including a bronze crosier from Ireland, baptismal spoons from Egypt, and a bronze statuette of the Buddha from India. These objects may have passed through many hands on their way to Helgö, so they are not evidence that Swedish merchants were ranging as far as India. However, Swedish merchants had already begun to establish bases east of the Baltic and explore the Russian river systems, which in the Viking Age they would follow to the Black and Caspian Seas. Grobina in Latvia, where three Scandinavian cemeteries dating to 650 – 800 have been found, was one of the earliest Swedish colonies in the east. One of the cemeteries contained warrior burials with artefacts similar to those found in the Vendel cemetery, while artefacts from the other two shows links to Gotland. There is evidence too that a Scandinavian colony was established at Elblag in Poland as early as
c.
650.

Swedish penetration of the Russian river system began early in the eighth century and by 750, Scandinavian merchants were living side by side with Finns and Slavs at the fur trading centre of Staraja Ladoga, on the Volkhov River near where it flows into Lake Ladoga. Scandinavians also headed east to plunder as a remarkable double ship burial found recently at Salme in Estonia spectacularly demonstrates. All previously discovered ship burials contained the remains of only one or two people – a high status individual and sometimes a sacrificed slave to accompany them in the afterlife. These two ships between them contained around forty individuals, all well-built mature males, many of them with obvious battle injuries. Weapons and jewellery decorated in the Vendel style identify the dead as Swedes and date the burial to
c.
750. The ships were poorly preserved but enough evidence survived confidently to identify the larger of the two as a sailing ship, the oldest so far found in the Baltic region.

State formation in Norway

Norway’s rugged geography proved to be a major obstacle to state formation. Overland travel through the mountains was all but impossible for much of the year because of snow so the main links between regions was by sea. Thousands of islands and skerries created a sheltered inshore passage along the coast, the ‘North Way’ from which the country got its name, but despite this seafaring came to an end every October and did not resume until the end of March. Ships were hauled onshore to be stored for the winter in boatsheds and
nausts
(sheltered hollows). The relative isolation of communities bred local independence and the impressive archaeological evidence for state formation in the immediate pre-Viking period that is seen in Denmark and Sweden is absent from Norway. However, here too political power was gradually being centralised. The best evidence comes from Borre in the Vestfold, the sheltered region on the west side of Oslo Fjord, where there is a cemetery of seven large barrows and twenty-five smaller ones (the
Borrehaugene
). There probably were once many more as some are known to have been destroyed by quarrying for road stone in the nineteenth century. One of those destroyed contained a warrior’s ship burial but it was not scientifically excavated. In the same area, a great timber hall was built at Huseby in the mid-eighth century. In the Viking Age the area around Huseby was known as Skiringssal, a power centre associated in the saga traditions with a Norwegian branch of the Yngling kings. Less than 2 miles from Huseby at Kaupang (‘trading place’) on Viksfjord, a semi-urban trading place and craft centre had developed by 800, no doubt due to the stimulus provided by the nearby royal centre. Evidence for state formation is more limited but a major barrow cemetery with several burned ship burials, now largely destroyed, at Myklebust on Nordfjorden, points to another power centre in the west of Norway, and other impressive barrows are found at Raknehaugen in Romerike, north of Oslo, and at Svenshaug in Hedmark, in east-central Norway.

The Viking impulse

At the end of the eighth century, the Scandinavian kingdoms were all still highly unstable. Scandinavia had a relatively numerous class of men who could aspire to kingship. In theory, Scandinavian kingship was elective and any man possessed of royal blood, whether from his father’s side or his mother’s side, was eligible for kingship. Illegitimacy was no bar. However, as power became ever more concentrated, as chiefdoms were subordinated to kingdoms and lesser kingdoms were subordinated by larger kingdoms, the opportunities to rule were becoming ever fewer. With many potential claimants for a throne, succession disputes were common. Joint kingship was a common solution where two rival claimants enjoyed equal support and were willing to compromise, but disputed successions often led to destabilising civil wars. If they were fortunate enough to survive, the losers of these conflicts would be forced into exile but, being possessed of the charisma of royal blood, all was not lost to them. Early Scandinavian rulers were primarily rulers of men rather than territory so any man of royal blood who could attract a warrior following might be recognised as a king by his men even if he did not actually have a kingdom. These ‘sea kings’ could turn pirate and, with luck, might win a fortune, a reputation as a great warrior, and loyal armed following with which to make a new bid for power at home. Or, as the Viking Age progressed, win a new kingdom for himself abroad. A reigning king might also find it expedient to go on Viking raids, to bolster his own reputation and to gain extra wealth to reward his own warriors and keep them loyal so that he could fight off challenges to his authority. Members of the chieftain class, the jarls (regional lords) and hersar (local chiefs) were faced with the same necessities as the growth of royal power began to encroach on their traditional independence. Any man rich enough to own a longship and raise a crew to man it had a strong incentive to go on Viking raids. At the same time western Europe was becoming an attractive target for Viking raids. The long economic recession that followed the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century was coming to an end as political stability began to return. As trade with the north increased, Scandinavian merchants had ample opportunities to learn about western Europe’s rich, and largely unguarded, ports and monasteries. The potential spoils of raiding the west would amply repay the increased risks of sailing further afield. The violence that for so long had characterised Scandinavian society was about to spill over into the rest of Europe.

CHAPTER 2

L
INDISFARNE
, A
THELNEY AND
Y
ORK

T
HE
V
IKINGS IN
E
NGLAND
789–954

Early in 793 the people of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria witnessed strange apparitions in the sky. Immense flashes of lightning terrified the people, and fiery dragons flew through the air. Famine followed. Bloody rain fell from a clear sky onto the northern end of St Peter’s cathedral in York, Northumbria’s capital. It was a sign, surely, that something terrible was going to come from the north. Then, on 8 June, the dreadful omens were fulfilled: Viking pirates sacked the wealthy and influential Northumbrian monastery on the island of Lindisfarne. In a letter written shortly after the attack, the distinguished Northumbrian scholar Alcuin (
c
. 735 – 804) expressed his anguish and shock:

‘We and our fathers have lived in this fair land for nearly three hundred and fifty years, and never before has a such an atrocity been seen in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people. Such an attack was not thought possible. The church of St Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God, stripped of all its furnishings, exposed to the plundering of pagans – a place more sacred than any in Britain. ...Who is not afraid at this?’

(trans. Stephen Allott,
Alcuin
of
York
(York, 1974)).

If there was anyone who was not afraid, they soon would be, for this was just the beginning.

The holy island

Low lying and largely covered with sand dunes, Lindisfarne lies in the North Sea, just a mile off the mainland to which it is joined for a few hours twice a day at low tide by sand flats. Today Lindisfarne feels remote, especially when the tide is in and tourists cannot reach it, but it is only 5 miles by sea from Bamburgh castle, one of the main strongholds of the Northumbrian kings. It was because of its closeness to this seat of power that Aidan, an Irish monk, founded a monastery and bishopric here in 635 as a base for the evangelisation of the still pagan Angles of Northumbria. On his death in 651, Aidan was buried at Lindisfarne and was soon recognised as a saint. A veritable factory of holiness, Lindisfarne’s next eight bishops were also recognised as saints, the most famous of them being St Cuthbert (d. 687), so gentle a man that he was supposedly even befriended by the local otters.