The Vikings (48 page)

Heathens sacrifice the worst people, and push them over cliffs and crags; but we shall make our selection on the basis of people’s virtues and call it a victory offering to our Lord Jesus Christ. We must therefore lead better lives and be more careful to avoid sin than before, and Gizur and I will come forward as the victory offering for our Quarter.
¹⁷

It may have been only an exchange of words, for as the story proceeds we hear no more of sacrificing. In the morning, Thorgeir emerged from his booth and sent word that people should gather below the Lawrock to hear what he had to say. There is a temptation to regard the reproduction of direct speech in an early medieval history as a sign of literary invention. What Thorgeir had to say, however, was so momentous that parts of his speech may well have been memorized by some who heard it, and passed on to succeeding generations. In this case anyway it seems churlish to suspect the authenticity of Ari’s account:

He began his speech, and said that he thought people’s affairs had come to a bad pass, if they were not all to have the same law in this country, and tried to persuade them in many ways that they should not let this happen, and said it would give rise to such discord that it was certainly to be expected that fights would take place between people by which the land would be laid waste. [. . .] ‘And it now seems advisable to me,’ he said, ‘that we too do not let those who most wish to oppose each other prevail, and let us arbitrate between them, so that each side has its own way in something, and let us all have the same law and the same religion. It will prove true that if we tear apart the law, we will also tear apart the peace.’ And he brought his speech to a close in such a way that both sides agreed that everyone should have the same law, the one he decided to proclaim. It was then proclaimed in the laws that all people should be Christian, and that those in this country who had not yet been baptised should receive baptism; but the old laws should stand as regards the exposure of children and the eating of horse-flesh. People had the right to sacrifice in secret, if they wished, but it would be punishable by the lesser outlawry if witnesses were produced.
¹⁸

Thorgeir was a Heathen, and Heathens were in a majority in the land, and we can only suppose that his words were greeted with a stunned silence by most of those present. Yet his decision was accepted, and a mass baptism took place before the assembly broke up. Most are said to have submitted to the ceremony in the cold waters of the Öxará river that traverses the assembly site, but in what may have been a show of displeasure the people of the Northern and Southern Quarters postponed their immersion until they reached the hot springs at Reyk jalaug, in Laugardalr. The author of
Kristni Saga
duly records the baptism of the Heathen diehard Runolf, whose son was among the hostages being held by King Olaf. Runolf was probably the moving spirit behind the
frændaskömm
legislation, and is named in some sources as the man who prosecuted the case against Hjalti Skjeggjason for the blasphemy against Freyja.
¹⁹
Hjalti’s pleasure at his discomfiture is evident in the words attributed to him when Runolf’s turn came: ‘Now we’re teaching the old
go
ð
i
to nibble on the salt,’ he reportedly said, referring to the practice of placing salt on the tongue as part of the ceremony.

 

Northern Heathendom had an end-time which was called Ragnarök, or ‘the fate of the gods’. Snorri describes it in some detail in the
Glyfaginning
section of
The Prose Edda
. Synthesizing detail from ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’, ‘The Sayings of the High One’, ‘Vafthrudnir’s Sayings’ and ‘Grimnir’s Sayings’ from
The Poetic Edda
, he tells us of the belief that it would be announced by the Fimbulvinter or ‘terrible winter’, three years of catastrophic snowfall, wind and frost separated from each other by summers of black sunlight that brought no respite. Abandoning all hope, the inhabitants of Midgard would surrender to greed, incest and civil war. At the climax of this long and dreadful night the enemies of the Aesir, the forces of chaos which they had for so long succeeded in containing, would finally burst from their restraints: Midgardsormen, the great world-encircling serpent, would come lunging out of the ocean, dragging the tides in over the land behind it and flooding the world. The giant wolf Fenrir, one of Loki’s monstrous offspring with the giantess Angerboda, whose destiny is connected with the idea of swallowing the sun, and who has been captured and bound by a chain forged by dwarves from the incorporeal things of the world, like the breath of the fish, the sound made by a cat in motion and the roots of a mountain, will break free and fulfil his destiny. The frost-giants will arrive on board a ship made from the uncut fingernails of the dead. In a last act of betrayal, Loki will be at the helm. The skies will open, and the fire-giant Surt and his hordes come flaming forth across the heavenly bridge called Bifrost. These furious and violent forces will seek together and head for the plain called Vigrid with the single and consuming aim of wiping out the gods. Heimdall, the watchman of the Aesir, will sound a great warning blast on his horn, at which the gods and every fallen warrior whom Odin ever called to join him in Valhalla will ride to Vigrid to face them in a last great battle to preserve the world, even knowing they are predestined to fail. Odin, wearing a golden helmet and carrying his spear Gungnir, takes on the wolf Fenrir. Close beside him Thor with his hammer fights against the world-serpent that he once so nearly caught in an earlier adventure, when he cast his fishing-line into the ocean using a bull’s head as bait, and the serpent took the bait. Frey confronts Surt, Heimdall faces Loki. Thor kills the serpent but is himself mortally wounded by its venom. He staggers away nine paces, collapses and dies. Heimdall and Loki kill each other. The wolf swallows Odin, the fire-giant Surt disposes of Frey and then spreads fire across the earth until everything is consumed and the light vanishes. But in an elegiac coda Snorri describes how the sun returns, and reveals that not all the gods were killed, nor every human being either. Life and worship start up again, but this time the world is repopulated by a just and happy generation whose goodness is to be rewarded by the coming of ‘the mighty god from on high, who is ruler of all’.
²⁰
This coda, with its prediction of the advent of a single and omnipotent god, is one of several places at which the story is coloured by ideas of the imminence of Judgement Day, an apocalyptic mood that was especially prevalent in Christian culture in the years 1000 and 1033. The prophecy also shows the influence of Christian thought in recognizing the link between cause and effect, and an ethical acceptance of the relationship between guilt and punishment.

A recent theory suggests that the myths of the Fimbulvinter and Ragnarök may have historical origins in a huge volcanic eruption, at an unknown location but recorded in ice-core analysis from the Antarctic in the form of a distinct layer of sulphate dated to 533-534 plus/minus two years. Though the Byzantine historian Procopius does not mention the eruption itself, there may be a literary echo of it in his
De Bello Vandalico
or the
Vandal War
, where he relates that in 536 ‘a remarkable wonder was observed, for throughout this whole year the sun shone like the moon, with no radiance, as though in perpetual eclipse, its light feeble and not at all as normal. With this phenomenon came war, hunger and other mortal threats.’ Tree-ring analysis from the Scandinavian countries reflects the onset of a dramatic short-term change in the climate at about this time. The long near-eclipse, which was also recorded in China, lasted until the autumn of 537, and it has been related to the striking increase in the number of gold hoards buried across the Scandinavian north in the middle of the sixth century, with the suggestion that these were offerings made to placate the gods and bring release from the frightening and unnatural absence of a summer. The Fimbulvinter of 536-537 was followed by a decade of relatively cold summers and the pandemic of the Justinian plague of 541-542, which is estimated to have wiped out half the population of Europe. It is not hard to see how memories of this dreadful time, and the fear of its return, might have been passed down through the generations and evolved in folk-memory into the potent myth of Ragnarök, in which the decimation of the population of Europe was recast as the death of all but two of the inhabitants of Midgard, a woman named Life and a man named Leifthrasir (‘tenacious of life’), in an apocalyptic war that pitted the gods of Asgard against the forces of hostile natural chaos, symbolized in the myth by the sun-eating wolf Fenrir and the fire-hurling giant Surt, along with their company of giants, monsters and serpents, in which the gods were almost - but not quite - wiped out.
²¹

When it did arrive, the ‘doom of the gods’ bore little resemblance to the dramatic scenarios and heroic deaths of ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’, ‘Vafthrudnir’s Sayings’ and
Gylfaginning
. Instead it turned out to be a low-key affair, a sober speech delivered by a middle-aged legal expert standing beside a rock, which probably took not much more than an hour or so to deliver. Even wearing his euhemeristic hat in the
Ynglingasaga
, Snorri had given Odin a more heroic death than this: ‘Odin died in his bed in Swithiod; and when he was near his death he made himself be marked with the point of a spear, and said he was going to Godheim, and would give a welcome there to all his friends, and all brave warriors should be dedicated to him.’
²²
This was a unique day in the bloody and violent history of those times - a set of gods was abandoned and an entire cultural heritage condemned to obsolescence at the insistence of a handful of fanatics. And yet beyond some light skirmishing, no violence occurred at all. It is reasonable to ask why.

To the cynic or realist it seems obvious that the money handed by the Christian Hall of Sida to Thorgeir was a bribe, or at the very least an inducement, intended to influence the decision. Another realist explanation points to the fact that relatives of four of the most powerful men in Iceland were being held as hostages by the Christians pending the mission of 999, among them a son of the leader of the Heathens. Much the most widely accepted explanation, one that was accepted even by the author of the
Kristni Saga
, is that the decision reflected the political and cultural good sense of the Lawspeaker. In a word, Thorgeir’s was a
rational
solution to a difficult and dangerous problem. From the Birka heathens who rebuked Herigar for choosing to go it alone in becoming a Christian and accused him of cultural treason, to the thought attributed to Louis the Pious by Saxo Grammaticus, ‘that there could be no agreement between minds which embraced opposing forms of faith’, the highest demand of reason was that a society be united and integrated.
²³
This was recognized to be the overriding condition for the achievement of the most desirable of all goals, peace. In his speech from the Lawrock, Thorgeir provided what was probably a literary or legendary example of the futile warring between neighbouring kings in Scandinavia, Dagr and Tryggvi, and the contentment that came when peace was agreed between them.
²⁴
It is possible that his understanding of the dangers faced by a community divided by religion and law owed something to his knowledge of events in England following the invasion of the Great Heathen Army and the share-out of land around 880. No formal integration of the revised population had taken place between English and Danes since the 865 divisions of the land. We noted earlier certain paragraphs of King Edgar’s ‘Wihtbordesstan’ law code of 962 that acknowledged this lack of integration: ‘It is my will that secular rights be in force among the Danes according to as good laws as they can best decide on. Among the English, however, that is to be in force which I and my councillors have added to the decrees of my ancestors, for the benefit of all the nation.’
²⁵
As we shall shortly see, the continuing existence of separate Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian cultural identities on the same island had momentous consequences for the stability of English society.

Another possible explanation for the passive acceptance of Thorgeir’s decision is that northern Heathendom in general, and Icelandic Heathendom in particular, was in a moribund state by the year 999, and that a passionate minority was able to roll over with relative ease a majority grown at first insecure and finally indifferent in its religious faith. We noted earlier the possibility that ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’ was composed as an act of liturgical defiance, an Old Norse parallel to the Jewish-Christian sibyl-oracle tradition, with Heimdall as a Heathen prototype of Christ as Saviour.
²⁶
Hjalti Skjeggjason’s disrespectful verse about Freyja may have been only a prominent example of a tendency in the times, perhaps affecting the young in particular, to regard the Aesir not as awe-inspiring beings but rather, as Snorri Sturluson learnt to know them, the harmless and even half-comic heroes of an obsolete folk-tale. The eddic poem ‘Trymskvadet’, describing how the red-bearded giant-killer Thor was obliged to dress up as a very unconvincing bride in order to recover his hammer, and the tale of how Odin stole the mead of poetry in a raid on the mountain home of its owner, the giant Suttung, and of his flight home as an overweight eagle whose emergency defecation of his surplus burden brought bad poetry into the world, entirely lack the sense of the numinous that we associate with gods and are closer to the harmless fun of Rudyard Kipling’s
Just So Stories
. There is an air of almost affectionate contempt to such stories that is not far removed from the mood of Hjalti’s ditty at the Lawrock in 998.

A grave excavated at Skriddalur, on the banks of the Thórisár river in eastern Iceland, in 1995 and dated to a period shortly after 955- 957 by the find of a single English coin minted by King Eadwig, has been described as one of the wealthiest ever found in the country. The occupant, a man of between thirty and forty years of age, had been buried with his horse, his sword, shield, axe, spear and arrow points, whetstones for sharpening his sword, as well as weights for trading purposes and a flint for making fire, and it has been suggested that this comparative wealth may reflect a deliberate attempt to revive the status of Heathen practices and customs in the northern world in the face of Christianity’s advances, much as the elaborately Heathen Île de Groix ship-burial off the coast of southern Brittany may record a reaction against the Christianization of Rollo and his forces in nearby Normandy after 912.
²⁷