The Long Ships (2 page)

The book offers, therefore—as you might expect from a novel with the potential to please every literate human being in the entire world—something for everyone, and if until now
The Long Ships
has languished in the secondhand bins of the English-speaking world, this is certainly through no fault of its author, Frans Bengtsson, whom the reader comes to regard—as we come to regard any reliable, capable, and congenial companion in the course of any great novel, adventure, or novel of adventure—as a friend for life. Bengtsson re-creates the world of 1000
AD
, as seen through the eyes of some of its northernmost residents, with telling detail and persuasive historiography, with a long view of human vanity, and with the unflagging verve of a born storyteller—but above all, and this is the most remarkable of the book’s many virtues, with an intimate detachment, a neighborly distance, a sincere irony, that feels at once ancient and postmodern. It is this astringent tone, undeceived, versed in folly, at once charitable and cruel, that is the source of the novel’s unique flavor, the poker-faced humor that is most beloved by those who love this book. Though at times the story, published in two parts each consisting of two parts over a span of several years, has an episodic feel, each of its individual components' narratives is well constructed of the soundest timbers of epic, folktale and ripping yarn, and as its hero grows old and sees his age passing away, that episodic quality comes to feel, in the end, not like some congeries of saga and tall tale but like the accurate representation of one long and crowded human life.

Nor can blame for the neglect of
The Long Ships
be laid at the feet of Bengtsson’s English translator, Michael Meyer, who produced a version of the original the faithfulness of which I leave for the judgment of others but whose utter deliciousness, as English, I readily proclaim. The antique chiming that stirs the air of the novel’s sentences (without ever overpowering or choking that air with antique dust) recalls the epics and chronicles and history our mother tongue (a history after all shared, up to a point, with the original Swedish), and the setting of parts of the action in Dark Ages Britain further strengthens the reader’s deceptive sense that he or she is, thanks to the translator’s magic and art, reading a work of English literature. Toss in the novel’s unceasing playfulness around the subject of Christianity and its relative virtues and shortcomings when compared to Islam and, especially, to the old religion of the northern forests (a playfulness that cannot disguise the author’s profound but lightly worn concern with questions of ethics and the right use and purpose of a life), and the startling presence, in a Swedish Viking story, of a sympathetic Jewish character, and you have a work whose virtues and surprises ought long since to have given it a prominent place at least in the pantheon of the world’s adventure literature if not world literature full stop.

The fault, therefore, must lie with the world, which, as any reader of
The Long Ships
could tell you, buries its treasures, despises its glories, and seeks contentment most readily in the places where it is least likely to be found. My encounter with
The Long Ships
came when I was fourteen or fifteen, through the agency of a true adventurer, my mother’s sister, Gail Cohen. Toward the end of the sixties she had set off, with the rest of her restless generation of psychic Vikings, on a journey that led from suburban Maryland, to California where she met and fell in love with a roving young Dane, to Denmark itself, where she settled and lived for twenty years. It was on one of her periodic visits home that she handed me a U.K. paperback edition of the book, published by Fontana, which she had randomly purchased at the airport in Copenhagen, partly because it was set in her adopted homeland and partly because there was nothing on the rack that looked any better. “It’s
really
good,” she assured me, and I would soon discover for myself the truth of this assessment, which in turn I would repeat to other lucky people over the years to come. Gail’s own adventure came to an end at home, in America, in the toils of cancer. When she looked back at the map of it, like most true adventurers, she saw moments of joy, glints of gold, and happy chances like the one that brought this book into her hands. But I fear that like most true adventurers—and unlike Bengtsson’s congenitally fortunate hero—she also saw, looking back, that grief overtopped joy, that trash obscured the treasure, that, in the end, the bad luck outweighed the good.

That is the great advantage, of course, that reading holds over what we call “real life.” Adventure is a dish that is best eaten takeout, in the comfort of one’s own home. As you begin your meal, as you set off with Frans Bengtsson and Red Orm and the restless spirit of my aunt, I salute you, and bid you farewell, and even though I have just finished reading the book for the fourth time, I envy you the pleasure you are about to find in the pages of
The Long Ships
. When you arrive at its bittersweet, but mostly sweet, conclusion, I trust that you will turn to your shipmate, your companion in adventure, and swear by ancient oaths, as I hereby swear to you: It is
really
good.

—
MICHAEL CHABON

THE ACTION of
The Long Ships
covers, approximately, the years 980-1010 of our era. At that time the southern provinces of Sweden belonged to Denmark, so that Orm, though born and bred in Skania, regarded himself as a Dane.
1

The Vikings harried the countries of northern and western Europe more or less continuously for a period of over two hundred years, from the end of the eighth century until the beginning of the eleventh. Most of the raids on western Europe were carried out by Danes and Norwegians; for the Swedes regarded the Baltic as their domain, and at the end of the ninth century founded in Russia a kingdom that endured for three hundred and fifty years, until the coming of the Mongols. Ireland was, at first, the favorite western hunting-ground of the Vikings; it was not until 838, forty years after the first attack on Ireland, that they began to raid England in large numbers. For the next sixty years, however, they— especially the great Ragnar Hairy-Breeks and his terrible sons— troubled England cruelly, until Alfred withstood them and forced them to come to terms. Then, from 896 until 979, England enjoyed eighty years of almost unbroken respite from their fury. In France the Northmen were so feared that, in 911, Charles the Simple ceded part of his kingdom to them; this came to be known as Normandy, the Northmen’s land. Vikings peopled Iceland in 860, and Greenland in 986. In the latter year a Viking ship heading for Greenland went off its course and reached America, which, because of the good grapes they found there, the men named “Wineland the Good.’ Several other Viking ships sailed to America during the next twenty years.

The Battle of Jörundfjord, or Hjörungavag, so frequently referred to in the following pages, was one of the most famous battles fought in the north during the Viking age. It was fought between the Norwegians and the Jomsvikings. The Jomsvikings (to quote Professor C. Turville-Petre) were “a closed society of Vikings, living according to their own laws and customs. None of them might be younger than eighteen years, and none older than fifty; they must not quarrel amongst themselves, and each must avenge the other as his brother.” No woman was allowed within their citadel, Jomsborg, which was sited on the southern shore of the Baltic, probably in the region of where Swinemünde now stands. According to Icelandic sources, Canute’s father, King Sven Fork-beard, invited the Jomsvikings to a feast. As the ale flowed, King Sven swore an oath to invade England and kill Ethelred the Unready or else drive him into exile. The Jomsviking chieftain, Sigvalde, swore in his turn to sail to Norway and kill the rebel Jarl Haakon or else drive him into exile. All the other Jomsvikings, including the two Skanian chieftains, Bue Digre and Vagn Akesson, swore to follow him. They sailed to Norway with sixty ships, but Haakon got wind of their approach and, when at last they turned into Jörundfjord, they found him waiting for them with a fleet of no less than one hundred and eighty ships. At first, despite being thus outnumbered, the Jomsvikings looked likely to prevail; but the weather turned against them and, after a bitter struggle, they were routed and slaughtered almost to a man.

This was in 989. In the following spring another vital battle was fought in Sweden, on Fyris Plain before Uppsala, when the dreaded Styrbjörn, the exiled nephew of King Erik of Sweden, sought to win his uncle’s kingdom, but was killed by a chance spear in the first moments of the fight. It is to the echoes of these two battles that
The Long Ships
opens.

M. M.

1.
Denmark also claimed suzerainty over Norway, though the Norwegians regarded themselves as independent.

THE LONG SHIPS

Harp Song of the Dane Women

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in—
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you—
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken—

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables—
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

RUDYARD KIPLING

MANY restless men rowed north from Skania with Bue and Vagn, and found ill fortune at Jörundfjord; others marched with Styrbjörn to Uppsala and died there with him. When the news reached their homeland that few of them could be expected to return, elegies were declaimed and memorial stones set up; where-upon all sensible men agreed that what had happened was for the best, for they could now hope to have a more peaceful time than before, and less parceling out of land by the ax and sword. There followed a time of plenty, with fine rye harvests and great herring catches, so that most people were well contented; but there were some who thought that the crops were tardy, and they went a-viking in Ireland and England, where fortune smiled on their wars; and many of them stayed there.

About this time the shaven men had begun to arrive in Skania, both from the Saxons' land and from England, to preach the Christian faith. They had many strange tales to relate, and at first people were curious and listened to them eagerly, and women found it pleasant to be baptized by these foreigners and to be presented with a white shift. Before long, however, the foreigners began to run short of shifts, and people wearied of their sermons, finding them tedious and their matter doubtful; besides which, they spoke a rough-sounding dialect that they had learned in Hedeby or in the western islands, which gave their speech a foolish air.

So then there was something of a decline in conversions, and the shaven men, who talked incessantly of peace and were above all very violent in their denunciation of the gods, were one by one seized by devout persons and were hung up on sacred ash trees and shot at with arrows, and offered to the birds of Odin. Others went northwards to the forests of the Göings, where men were less religiously inclined; there they were welcomed warmly, and were tied up and led to the markets in Smaland, where they were bartered for oxen and for beaver skins. Some of them, upon finding themselves slaves of the Smalanders, let their hair grow and waxed discontented with their God Jehovah and gave good service to their masters; but the majority continued to denounce the gods and to spend their time baptizing women and children instead of breaking stones and grinding corn, and made such a nuisance of themselves that soon it became impossible for the Göings to obtain, as hitherto, a yoke of three-year-old oxen for a sturdy priest without giving a measure of salt or cloth into the bargain. So feeling increased against the shaven men in the border country.

One summer the word went round the whole of the Danish kingdom that King Harald Bluetooth had embraced the new religion. In his youth he had done so tentatively, but had soon regretted his decision and recanted; this time, however, he had adopted it seriously. For King Harald was by now an old man and had for some years been tormented by terrible pains in his back, so that he had almost lost his pleasure in ale and women; but wise bishops, sent by the Emperor himself, had rubbed him with bear’s grease, blessed and made potent with the names of apostles, and had wrapped him in sheepskins and given him holy herbal water to drink instead of ale, and had made the sign of the cross between his shoulders and exorcised many devils out of him, until at last his aches and pains had departed; and so the King became a Christian.

Thereupon the holy men had assured him that still worse torments would come to plague him if he should ever again offer sacrifice or show himself in any way unzealous in the new religion. So King Harald (as soon as he had become active again and found himself capable of fulfilling his obligations toward a young Moroccan slave-girl, whom Olof of the Precious Stones, the King of Cork, had sent him as a good-will present) issued a proclamation that all his subjects should get themselves christened without delay; and although such an order sounded strangely from the lips of one who was himself descended from Odin, still, many obeyed his command, for he had ruled long and prosperously, so that his word counted for much in the land. He meted out especially severe punishments to anyone who had been guilty of violence against any priest; so that the number of priests in Skania now began to multiply greatly, and churches rose upon the plain, and the old gods fell into disuse, except in times of peril at sea or of cattle plague.