The Vikings (31 page)

10

The master-builder

By the early tenth century the effective independence of Brittany, Flanders and Aquitaine and the gift of Normandy to Rollo had further fragmented what remained of the legacy of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. Its decline was paralleled by other disruptions. Following the death of Horik the Young in 870, central authority among the Danes went into eclipse for some sixty years. Chieftains named Sigfred and Halfdan did not share their predecessors’ cautious interest in Christianity and are known only as leaders of Viking raiders. Sometime around 900 the brothers Gorm and Hardeknud returned from England to emerge as leaders of the Danes. Hardeknud’s return to England left Gorm as the most prominent Jutland chieftain and under him a gradual revival of Danish regional power began.

Among the eastern Franks, the death in 911 of the German King Louis the Child brought the Carolingian dynasty there to an end. Power in the region passed into the hands of a small number of dukes, and with the emergence of the threat from the Magyars these men sought leadership to organize resistance. Their choice eventually fell on the Saxon duke, Henry, called the Fowler, and in 919 he assumed the title of king. Henry won back Lotharingia from the western Franks and established new marches along the Elbe after a series of victorious campaigns against the Wends. In 934 he campaigned against Slesvig and compelled the baptism of the chieftain Gnupa. By 934 he was able to claim overlordship over Denmark. As a result, Bishop Unni of Hamburg-Bremen and a group of monks from the abbey at Corvey resumed the missionary activity of the Christian Church in Denmark.

Henry’s successor Otto, known as the Great, restored the Church to crown control and sought a return to the order and authority once associated with Charlemagne. There was a symbolic aspect to his crowning at Charlemagne’s old capital Aachen in 936. At his coronation banquet the nobles were required to serve him as vassals, as in the days of the emperor. Otto formally accepted the Christian connections between secular and religious power. Later he invaded Italy and claimed the imperial throne for himself. The pope initially declined to crown him as emperor; in 962, however, after he had responded to pleas for help from Rome against the threats of Berengar of Ivrea, a self-styled king of Italy who had occupied the northern Papal States, the coronation duly took place. Otto styled himself
augustus
and gave the name of Sacrum Romanum Imperium, or Holy Roman Empire, to his collected territories. The king of the eastern Franks was now ruler over a coherent swathe of territory that extended from Germany in the north to Italy in the south. It was not as large as Charlemagne’s empire, but after a century of chaos its creation symbolized the return of order to central Europe. For another 1,000 years it would remain a part of the political map of the continent.
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A consequence of the return of a superpower to the region was a revival of the border tensions that existed between Danes and eastern Franks, and of the efforts Christian rulers had been making since the days of Charlemagne to bring the Danes into the fold. Ferociously and cruelly, according to Adam of Bremen, King Gorm resisted the mission of Bishop Unni.
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His son, and for the last fifteen years of his reign his co-ruler, Harald, known as Bluetooth, was more receptive to the new faith.
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In 948 a papal letter addressed to Archbishop Adaldag of Hamburg reasserted Hamburg-Bremen’s position as head of the Church in all Scandinavia, and gave the archbishop the rights of investiture across the territories. Three bishops were appointed that same year to the sees of Århus, Ribe and Hedeby in Jutland, that part of Danish territory over which Harald’s writ ran.
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Horit, Liafdag and Reginbrond were their names, suggesting German or Frisian origins rather than Danish. The appointments would seem to confirm both Harald’s early interest in and tolerance for Christianity, as well as Otto the Great’s use of the Church as a political institution.

Though his enthusiasm initially stopped short of baptism, it seems religious discussions remained a part of the conversation among Harald’s
hird
, for it was as a result of one of them that his conversion presently came about. The circumstances are described in some detail in an almost contemporary source, the
Res gestæ saxonicæ
, a history of the Saxons written by the monk Widukind of Corvey in about 970. Widukind asserts that the Church had long considered the Danes to have accepted Christianity, while recognizing that Christ had, in fact, only been admitted to a pantheon. Christianity’s crucial insistence on exclusivity remained unacceptable. At table at Harald’s court one evening a discussion arose on the relative merits of the gods. The Heathens agreed that Christ was a divinity but only a minor one, and less able than either Odin or Thor to enact miracles and give proofs of his power. Poppo, a missionary bishop at the court, rejected this and went on to claim that these others were not gods at all but demons. Harald challenged him to demonstrate the truth of what he was saying by submission to ordeal. In everyday life the ordeal was a last resort in legal or disputed matters where the process of compurgation had failed.
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In the bishop’s case, it seems, the last resort was also the first. Poppo is reported to have accepted the challenge without hesitation.

The ordeal was a trial of physical endurance carried out under controlled conditions that was designed to solicit the judgement of supernatural powers on the matter at issue. It could take a number of different forms. One obliged the plaintiff to walk through fire. Another required him to stretch his bared arm into a cauldron of boiling water to retrieve a ring, stone or other small object from the bottom. In an ordeal by cold water the accused was bound and thrown into a pond or stream, to sink if innocent or float if guilty. The logic held that in the latter case the pure nature of the water would reject the impure nature of the accused. In another variant, the accused was compelled to eat crumbs of dry bread and cheese. Choking on these was a sign of guilt. The particular ordeal Poppo volunteered to undergo required him to carry a lump of hot iron in his hand for a set number of paces before throwing it. Its use was rare and restricted to matters involving religion.
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Harald had Poppo kept under observation until the time appointed for the ordeal. A passage in Gregory of Tours’
Books of Miracles
explains the necessity for this.
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Gregory describes an earlier ordeal, arranged to show which of two rival claimants held the favour of Christ, that required each man in turn to reach into a cauldron of boiling water and retrieve a ring from it. One lost his nerve overnight and, rising early the next day, tried to fix the outcome by smearing his arm with a protective ointment. Clearly people would not have used a test that always provided the same answer, and one has to assume that a number of such protective measures were known about, and that steps were taken to prevent them being used. There were variables too: in the case reported by Gregory, the temperature of the water may have varied considerably as the successful ordealist took an hour to locate the small ring as it swirled about in the cauldron. Even here there were nuances of divine judgement at work that discouraged cheating: when he afterwards observed that the water at the bottom of the cauldron was almost cold and that at the top only pleasantly warm the other responded by plunging his arm in up to the elbow. Instantly, says Gregory, the flesh was seared to the bone.

A passage in the laws of the Skåne district, known in their earliest written form from the early thirteenth century, may give some idea of the conduct of the ritual that Poppo faced. The hand that he had chosen to use would have been washed and he would have been instructed afterwards to touch nothing until the moment arrived to take up the iron. If the ordeal involved ‘throw-iron’ he would have had to walk nine paces before throwing it. Widukind says only that Poppo carried it long enough to satisfy Harald. Afterwards a mitten was placed over the ordealist’s hand and the wound kept sealed for four days. The mitten was then removed and the wound examined: a clean wound was an affirmation of protection, truth, power or whatever was the appropriate response to the type of question being asked. A dirty wound was interpreted as rejection or failure.

These various steps in the process of Poppo’s ordeal are clearly identifiable in a series of seven gilded bronzes from the early thirteenth century, discovered in 1870 affixed to the pulpit and covered in a thick layer of oil paint, in the church at Tamdrup, in Horsens. A first image shows Poppo and Harald together, the former urging conversion on the king, the latter rejecting it. The second image shows the iron heating above the flames. In the third picture the bishop shows the king his hand after the removal of the mitten, and in the fourth we see the momentous result of the ordeal: Poppo baptizes the naked king, who is standing in a barrel of water. The next image shows the Danish king genuflecting in front of an altar. A sixth image is damaged but has been interpreted as showing the king and his queen together making the gift of an altar decoration to the church.
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Widukind tells us that Poppo’s hand was unblemished by the ordeal. However, one must suppose that here, as in many such cases, the demeanour and courage of the ordealist during the appalling few seconds of the trial must also have had some bearing on how the result was judged. Poppo’s bearing and his willingness to suffer for his beliefs perhaps impressed King Harald every bit as much as the state of the bishop’s hand following the ordeal.

 

In this way Poppo brought to fruition the work of a long line of Christian missionaries sponsored by Christian kings, from the Anglo-Saxon Willibrord, who had attempted to convert the Danish King Angantyr in about 720, to Ebbo of Reims, and Anskar and Autbert, who had tried to help Klak-Harald introduce the faith to Denmark with the assistance of Louis the Pious in the first half of the ninth century. Harald recorded his conversion in a most dramatic way, commissioning the erection of a great, pyramidal rune-stone in Jelling, in central southern Jutland. Saxo Grammaticus tells us that, on a Jutland beach, Harald came upon the massive red and black granite stone, nearly 2.5 metres high and weighing almost ten tons, and had it dragged to Jelling by men yoked to it like oxen.

The Jelling stone is among the most remarkable and instructive of all Viking Age documents. Normalized, the runic inscription that dominates one of the three sides, referred to as the A side, reads:
Haraldr konungr ba
ð
gera kuml pessi ept Gorm, fô
ð
ur sinn, ok ept pyrvé, mó
ð
ur sína, sá Haraldr er sér vann Danmôrk alla ok Norveg ok dani ger
ð
i kristna
(‘King Harald had this monument made in memory of Gorm, his father, and in memory of Thyrwi, his mother; that Harald who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian’).
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The hands of two men have been identified in the carvings that cover its two other sides and it has been estimated that the complete set of decorations took them about a year to finish. The B side depicts a struggle between two animals that have been identified as a lion, though its mane and head more closely resemble those of a horse, and a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

On the C side of the stone is the first significant native representation of Christ to have survived in Scandinavia. The suffering Christ had no immediate appeal to a warlike people whose gods included masters of violence like Odin and Thor, and from the beginning the missionaries’ focus in the Scandinavian fields was on Christ’s power and his warrior-like attributes. This, after all, was the power Poppo was defending when Harald challenged him to carry the iron, and this was the power that persuaded Harald to convert. So the Christ of the Jelling stone is the Christ triumphant, fierce-eyed and ready to do battle with the demons of Heathendom. This may explain why the figure on the stone is depicted with arms extended but no visible cross to support him. Indeed the whole looks more like an exultant stretching than a scene of execution. Instead of a cross his arms and body are looped around by stylized branches, as though he were hanging from a tree. An interpretation that relates the stylization to mainstream Christian and European iconography suggests that these might be vine scrolls, familiar in Christian iconography from as early as the fifth century as symbols of both Christ himself and the Church.
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Another possibility is that the carvers regarded the cross as an optional background framing device for the image of the man. It is also possible that the design reflected the persistent syncretism that transformed the Christian lion into a Scandinavian horse and the Christian snake into the world-encircling Midgard serpent, and that to a contemporary Danish spectator the figure on the stone would seem to be hanging in the branches of a tree, perhaps recalling to him or her Odin’s nine days and nights hanging in Yggdrasil as he waited for the chance to swoop down and steal the runes. Whether by design or not, the iconography of the stone thus encouraged an acceptance of the new god by portraying Christ as a shamanic god, engaged in a ritual with which the spectator or ‘reader’ was already familiar. In contemplating the resonance the great stone must have had for contemporaries, it is useful to recall that, like other rune-stones, it was brightly coloured in red, blue, yellow and grey.

As we noted earlier, Dudo’s history of Normandy was an advertisement for the cultural assimilation of the duchy’s Viking founders and a statement by Rollo’s grandson, Richard I, of his self-identification as both Christian and European. The crucial distinction between the Norman document and the Danish document was that, while the latter too advertised the ruler’s Christian modernity, it did so in a form that was ancient and resolutely Scandinavian. The first known runic alphabet consists of twenty-four letters; from the first six of these it derives its name, the
futhark
, the term being modern. By Harald’s time it had been known in Denmark, Norway and Sweden for several centuries. Snorri Sturluson gave us the mythological explanation of its origins. Rational explanations include the suggestion that the letters derived from the Latin and Etruscan alphabets, adapted to avoid curves and horizontals so that they could more easily be inscribed in stone, wood, metal and bone. It is believed that knowledge of them was taken into the north by the Rhineland Heruli, along with the worship of Woden.
¹¹
A spear found in a warrior’s grave on a farm at Øvre Stabu in Toten, in Norway, with a word made up of eight runes etched on the blade and meaning something like ‘the tester’, is the earliest known example of the use of runes in Scandinavia.
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The written word was held to possess an innate magical power and many of the numerous surviving
bracteates
- coin-like objects of gold with images punched on one side only and worn as necklaces or amulets - were stamped with runes that were believed to carry a protective medicinal power.
¹³
‘Beer’, rich in vitamins from the malted barley from which it was made, is found frequently. So is ‘onion’.