Questions of scale raise one of the most famous controversies in Viking studies. In the past, there was a strong tendency to interpret the Viking Age in the light of traditional perceptions of the classic Germanic Völkerwanderung. Tens if not hundreds of thousands of people were thought to have been on the move, driven on by a lack of resources: a deluge that drowned western Europe in an unprecedented orgy of violence. The old schoolbooks reproduced the famous Anglo-Saxon prayer ‘From the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord deliver us’, and more scholarly equivalents are easy to find. A textbook of Latin grammar, copied in Ireland in about 845 and eventually brought to the continental monastery of St Gall, has written into its margins this short but wonderfully evocative poem in Old Irish:
The wind is fierce tonight
It tosses the sea’s white hair
I fear no wild Viking
Sailing the quiet main.37
Battle with such views was joined with a vengeance in the 1960s by the most prominent of current anglophone historians of the Vikings: Peter Sawyer. He argued that the traditional views were wildly overstating the likely size of Viking forces. Most of the chroniclers who produced the surviving historical accounts of Viking violence were churchmen, if not monks, and, as we have seen, churches and monasteries provided rich, ‘soft’ targets for predatory Vikings. Hence, he argued, there is an inbuilt tendency for the sources to stress Viking violence, when the Dark Ages were generally pretty violent anyway. The only thing that was perhaps new in the period was that the pagan Vikings attacked Christian religious establishments with a greater sense of freedom than was usual. Equally important, these monastic chroniclers ignored other important kinds of Viking activity, such as trading, which were less or non-violent, and their estimates greatly overstated the numbers involved. In his view, the more specific evidence suggests smaller forces: witness the three ships, maybe ninety or a hundred men, who were involved in that first incident at Portland. There is also, Sawyer argued, precious little evidence of women and children being involved. Viking activity was carried on not by ‘whole’ migrating peoples, but by warbands, whose manpower should be numbered at most in the hundreds.38
This argument was a necessary corrective, and its validity for the early phases of ninth-century Viking activity has been generally accepted. The argument that the Viking period largely involved males in warbands also seems largely, if not without some exceptions, correct. But as Viking activity in the west intensified from the 830s, there is good reason to believe that larger forces than Sawyer originally had in mind became involved in the action. The Chronicle of Ireland, for instance, records in the 830s that two Viking fleets of sixty ships each were simultaneously in action in Irish waters. The beautiful ninth-century Gokstad ship excavated in the Norwegian Vestfold in 1880 and now on display in Oslo could have carried thirty men, or just a few more, without a problem. At thirty-plus men per boat, each of these fleets would have fielded over a thousand, and this general order of magnitude is consistent with some convincingly specific casualty figures recorded in the same source. In 848, three engagements were fought by different Irish kings against separate Viking forces, who suffered losses of 700, 1,200 and 500 men. And when the fleets of Scandinavian kings started to hit western waters from c.850, then Irish, English and continental sources all – with great consistency – describe them as leading fleets numbering between one hundred and two hundred ships. This would suggest armed forces of a few thousand men.39
The point is only reinforced by the evidence from the Great Army period. These armies were composites, each bringing together several independent Scandinavian kings and their followers, together sometimes with more warriors under the leadership of independent jarls. The original Great Army assembling in East Anglia in winter 866/7 comprised, probably amongst others, the forces of Ivar and Olaf – who disappeared from Irish waters between 863 and 871 (Ivar is probably the ‘Ingvar’ of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) – and the Vikings who had been harassing the Frankish world of the River Seine for most of the previous decade. Continental sources indicate a gap in Viking violence between 866 and 880, which corresponds to the first phase of Great Army activity in England, and the Norse departure from Frankish waters was probably hastened by Charles the Bald’s construction of fortified bridges across the Seine which made it much more difficult for the Vikings to penetrate inland. Apart from Ivar, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also mentions by name two further kings, Healfdan (probably a third brother of Ivar and Olaf) and Bagsecg, and five jarls (two called Sidroc, the older and the younger; Osbearn, Fraena and Harold). These kings and jarls led independent contingents within the confederate army. In 875, they were reinforced by three more kings – Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend – making a grand total of eleven Viking contingents gathered in England. Yet more Vikings arrived just a few years later to overwinter at Fulham in 879/80. The same multiple, composite pattern holds true of the later Great Armies as well.
Not all of these different contingents operated as part of a single army at the one time. Contingents came and went according to their perceptions of the best available opportunities. But five kings, at least five earls (jarls), and other forces besides clearly amounted to a substantial body of warriors. In 878, Healfdan was killed in Devon with 840 (or 860 in another version) of his followers, which suggests that royal contingents may have been somewhere in the region of a thousand men. The Chronicle also notes that this force was carried in twenty-three ships, making about thirty-six men per ship, which fits nicely with the carrying capacity of a Gokstad-type ship. Estimating each of the Great Army’s main contingents in the high hundreds or roughly one thousand mark is also in line with the kind of forces operating in Ireland after the 830s when raiding intensified. If this reasoning is correct, the Great Armies – each composed of half a dozen or more such contingents – must each have mustered several thousand warriors, though probably not much more than a maximum of about ten thousand. This is an entirely appropriate size for armies able to conquer whole Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.40 And there were, moreover, several of them. As we have seen, two well-documented Great Armies attacked England: one between 865 and 878, the other from 892 to 896. Encompassing some of the same manpower, there were also another two armies which assaulted the north coast of the continent in the 880s; and the forces operating in Normandy and Brittany, and back and forth to Ireland in the last decade of the ninth century and the first twenty or so years of the tenth. All told, and even allowing for overlaps between the different forces, we must reckon with a minimum of twenty thousand warriors on the move.
This is directly relevant to the scale of Viking migration because, in eastern England and northern Francia, it was the Great Armies who turned victory into settlement. Whether this was part of the original design or not, the first Great Army destroyed three out of the four independent kingdoms of ninth-century Anglo-Saxon England, and reallocated substantial parts of their landed resources to its own members. These original settlements of the 870s were then reinforced by more pulses of settlers from the later Great Armies. One is explicitly recorded in 896, and there may have been others. On the continent, further Great Army activity eventually led, as we have seen, to settlements in Normandy and Brittany, one licensed, others not. What percentage of Scandinavian manpower participating in the Great Army action eventually settled in the west is unknowable, but the numerous different settlements are likely to have involved well over ten thousand individuals, even allowing for the fact that some surely preferred to take their wealth back to the Baltic. This is substantial, but not massive, given that the total population of the areas affected must be reckoned in the high hundreds of thousands at least.41
The Great Army settlements took a particular form, however. Highly suggestive is the entry of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 896, recording the break-up of the second Great Army to attack England: ‘In this year, the host dispersed, some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria, and those without wealth got themselves ships there, and sailed south over the sea to the Seine.’ This is not without its puzzles. Does the reference to wealth mean that the Vikings had to buy estates in Danelaw rather than just seize them? I strongly doubt it, but either way, the entry makes powerful links between membership of a Great Army, amassing wealth and subsequent settlement. Individual Vikings did not drag themselves overseas to fight a series of thoroughly dangerous engagements far from home, in order then to settle down as moneyless peasants. The point of all the effort, for those who wanted to settle in the west, was to amass sufficient resources to establish themselves in a desirable socioeconomic niche. If they had just wanted to be peasants, there was no need to fight. Anglo-Saxon landlords were always looking for labour.42
How relationships within a particular Great Army contingent may then have translated themselves into a settlement pattern, when lands were distributed, is suggested by case studies of the detailed evidence for Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw county of Lincolnshire. Lincoln itself was one of the five boroughs of central Danelaw, from which some kind of independent political power was exercised; there were kings in Danelaw after 878, but never a king of Danelaw. The centre of Lincoln itself perhaps saw some Viking settlement and certainly expanded considerably in the later ninth and tenth centuries. Outside the town, Viking settlement seems to have come in two forms. Some of the greater estates were received intact by leading Vikings. These are marked by place names of the famous Grimston hybrid variety, where a Norse personal name (Grim-) is combined with the Anglo-Saxon suffix for a settlement (-tun), and are by and large to be found on the best-quality land throughout the Danelaw counties. Other pre-existing estates were then broken up, it seems, to be parcelled out in individual holdings to Vikings of lesser but still free status. The evidence for this is provided by the coincidence between the distributions of Norse place names (ending in -by and -thorp and, again, very often combined with a Norse personal name) and that of smaller landowners with unusually high status – called sokemen – in the official documentation for Lincolnshire generated after the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon state incorporated the county into its territory. The same sokemen also seem to have kept their Norse-derived tastes in the decoration of everyday metalwork well into the tenth century.
If Lincolnshire can be taken as more than a one-off case, as does seem likely, then Great Army contingents seem to have kept something of their social shape upon becoming landed, since settlements were organized by the leaderships for those who had already amassed enough booty to satisfy their aspirations and pick up a small landed estate pretty much like the normans. Those who hadn’t, presumably, took their booty and went looking for a new leader to follow. The landed estates used in the settlement had all been confiscated from Anglo-Saxon owners. Some were taken from secular landowners who had been killed or exiled – although there does not seem to have been a complete extinction of the old Anglo-Saxon landowning class in Danelaw – but there is good evidence too that many estates were taken from Church institutions, which by the ninth century may have owned up to one-quarter of England’s landed resources.43
If Lincolnshire can be taken as a particular example of the general rule, then the following model could be suggested for Danelaw and northern Francia. The basic migration unit was the individual Great Army contingent of up to a thousand men, or just a bit more in the case of kings, less in the case of jarls – not the army as a whole – whose leaders organized the allocation of lands to those who were ready to settle. Some of the relevant issues – who would qualify for any land, and on what scale – were presumably discussed in the original negotiations which brought the Great Armies into being. These settlements took a form analogous to the kind of partial elite replacement we have encountered in some of the fifth-century Germanic settlements in former Roman provinces in Europe, except that the sokemen with their -bys and -thorps may have represented the insertion of a smallholding elite at a lower social scale than anything suggested by the settlements on Roman soil. The main reasons for thinking so are the smallish size of their holdings recorded in Doomsday Book, where their descendants survived until 1066, and the fact that they generated a bigger cultural change on the linguistic and other fronts than anything analogous in the post-Roman west.
Certainly in northern Danelaw, at least, Norse became the prevalent language, whereas Germanic languages never replaced Latin and its dialects except in Anglo-Saxon England, where the elite replacement had been more or less complete. When it comes to explaining the linguistic change and all the Scandinavian place names, some have supposed it necessary to envisage that the settlement of Great Army contingents was followed by further – undocumented – settlements of Scandinavian peasants. This seems unnecessary. Given that certainly ten thousand Vikings – and potentially considerably more than that – had to be accommodated in the distribution process, this was enough to generate a Norse-dominated landowning class at a sufficiently local level to explain the cultural changes. In comparison, the Norman Conquest involved accommodating only around five thousand new landowners, and that over the whole – not just part – of England, so there is no doubt that the new dominant Norse class lived much more cheek by jowl with their Anglo-Saxon peasant labourers than the Normans who were to follow.
Great Army contingents were responsible, however, for only one part of Norse migration into the west. In Ireland, settlement took a different form. There Scandinavians never managed – perhaps never tried – to destroy the coherence of whole kingdoms and make possible the large-scale redistribution to themselves of landed assets. Instead, we see only niche settlements, limited to a few coastal towns: Dublin above all. These were quite large, and economically powerful. After its re-establishment, rival tenth-century Irish kings competed with one another to exercise hegemony over Dublin’s valuable mercenary and monetary assets. Nonetheless, although the migration unit must again have taken the form of organized warbands, permanent Norse settlement in Ireland can only have amounted to a few thousand individuals at most.44
In the northern and western isles and north and western Scotland, the mode of settlement was much more like Danelaw, in the sense that an intrusive Scandinavian population took control of much of the areas’ landed assets. We have no documentation here of the numbers involved, nor any narrative of the settlement, but its effects show up in the place-name evidence. In the northern isles – Shetland and Orkney – no pre-Scandinavian place names survive at all. Every older stratum of name-giving has been eclipsed by the cultural effects of Viking-era settlement. In the western isles and affected areas of the Scottish mainland the wipe-out was not so complete, but again there is a dense spread of Scandinavian names. What scale of ninth-century settlement is required to explain this remarkable outcome?
When the place-name evidence was first assessed, the researchers thought that the complete disappearance of any older name-giving stratum had to mean that the indigenous, probably Celtic-speaking, populations of the area had been completely eradicated – early medieval ethnic cleansing. More recent approaches to place names have emphasized, however, that the modern spread of Norse names reflects all the intervening centuries of Norse-speaking domination of the area, not one apocalyptic moment of takeover. Norse settlement was clearly substantial, and the place-name effect could not have been achieved by much less than a complete takeover of land ownership by dominant Norse, who must have intruded themselves into local society on a level of intensity at least similar to that achieved by the sokemen of Danelaw. This would not require ethnic cleansing, though, and some of the recent archaeological evidence has confirmed the point. Even where distinctively Norse house-types replaced earlier Pictish forms, such as at Buckquoy, detailed excavations have shown that many small items of indigenous manufacture continued in use, suggesting that the old populations were living alongside, if subordinate to, the Norse settlers.45
In the western isles and Scottish mainland, some continuity of the indigenous population was always supposed, since the place names betray more mixed cultural origins. More than that, the Irish annals record, in a series of entries from the 850s, the activities ofGallgoidil: ‘Scandinavianized Irish’. These mystery men have been much discussed, but they seem later to have given their name to Galloway and the consensus view places them in the Hebrides, as Celts who quickly reached an accommodation with incoming Norse settlers.46 DNA patterns among the modern populations of these areas confirm the point. Forty per cent of the modern population of Shetland possess DNA types which show them to have been descended from Norse ancestors. In Orkney, the percentage is 35 per cent, and in Scotland and the western isles about 10.47 It is dangerous, as we have seen in the case of the Anglo-Saxons, to read modern DNA patterns as fossils from the moment of settlement. There have been too many events in between that might have caused one strand of DNA to spread preferentially. Nonetheless, this evidence does show that while there was a substantial Norse migration flow into these areas, it did not involve the total ethnic cleansing once supposed. A more precise indication of the kind of migration unit operating in these contexts is also provided by evidence from the final area of western Norse settlement: the North Atlantic.
Scandinavian colonization of the Faroes is completely undocumented, but since that of Iceland began in the 870s, and the Faroes are en route, then presumably it was under way by the mid-ninth century at the latest. For Iceland, there is much more information. There, from the early twelfth century and in complete contrast to Viking communities established anywhere else, its Norse colonists began to write down their own history, primarily, it seems, to document claims to landownership. Around the year 1100, the Icelandic Norse traced the settlement of their island back to four hundred main colonists, each of whom established one of the large farming establishments which at that point dominated the island. These four hundred establishments were the centres of larger, interconnected networks of agricultural activity, not single farms, and it has been estimated that there were more like four thousand actual farmsteads of varying sizes in existence at this date. Each farmstead supported a family and some dependants, so that we get a figure in the low tens of thousands for the population of Iceland in c.1100. The Icelandic literature also preserves some sense of the kind of migration units by which the settlement had been made. The costs involved in getting from Scandinavia (or indeed from the British Isles, the intermediate point from which many of the settlers came) to Iceland were prohibitive. The major colonists all seem to have been wealthy men, able to fit out or hire the necessary ships to transport the people and equipment that would be required for a successful farmstead. Poorer men could either not take part at all, or had to attach themselves to the train of one of these grandees. As such observations suggest, we are certainly talking here of extended flows of migration rather than the more distinct moments of settlement that occurred in England and Francia when a Great Army contingent settled down on the land. No numbers are preserved for the aristocrat-led fleets that made their way to Iceland, but one such fleet in the later push on to Greenland consisted of twenty-five ships, thirteen of which in the end failed to make the crossing.48
In Iceland, of course, there was no indigenous population to subdue, so the settlers could safely come in dribs and drabs, rather than in the much larger Great Army contingents required to create political Lebensraum in Anglo-Saxon England. This was probably also true of the northern and western isles. There, as we have seen, indigenous landholders were certainly subordinated, but any pre-Viking political structures in these areas seem to have been on such a local, small-scale level that large Norse forces were not required to win major battles. It may well have been possible, therefore, for an individual or small groups of aristocrats and their retainers to bite off a piece of territory. Again, in the absence of direct narrative evidence, there remains a strong element of supposition about this, but it is the case that a larger political structure – the Earldom of Orkney – emerged among the Norse of the northern and western isles only at the end of the ninth century, long after the initial settlement process was complete. The emergence of this earldom was enough to make some of these Norse push on to Iceland where they could re-establish their independence. Both points lend further weight to the argument that the subsequent migration flow onwards to Iceland and Greenland was similar to the one that had created the original Norse domination of the western and northern isles in the earlier ninth century.
Despite many gaps in the evidence, then, it is possible to come to some conclusions about Scandinavian migration flows towards the west in the ninth and the early tenth century. Two very distinct types of unit are evident, each appropriate to its context. Where large indigenous political entities had to be subdued for settlement to proceed, then the typical unit was the major warband, operating with up to a thousand warriors or just a few more. These warbands were also capable of banding together to take on really big targets such as Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Elsewhere, where there was no indigenous opposition or where it was organized only in small sociopolitical units, much smaller aristocrat-led migration units could achieve adequate domination. All told, the total numbers involved in the different migration flows were substantial. Well over ten thousand Norse warriors, and perhaps double that, were accommodated in the settlements carved out by Great Army activity in England and on the continent. A few thousand more settled in Ireland, and probably rather more in the northern branch of the Scandinavian diaspora which spread over north Britain and the Atlantic islands.
But there is one other important issue we haven’t yet addressed. How many of these armed males brought dependent women and children with them from Scandinavia? If an adult male’s dependants are to be reckoned at between four and five, the usual convention, the presence or not of dependants could increase your estimate of the total migration flow from a few tens of thousand of people to over a hundred thousand. For the Great Armies we have little information, but, perhaps surprisingly, there is some. Part of the second Great Army to attack England in the 890s left its women and children in Danelaw for safe-keeping while it launched its attacks. What percentage of the army had such dependants is unclear, and also where these dependants originated. Had they come from Scandinavia, or were they picked up en route?
Some information on the latter point has emerged from recent work on the DNA of modern Iceland. Iceland has not seen a huge amount of either immigration or emigration since the Viking Age, so that there is a better than usual chance that modern DNA patterns will reflect those of the original colonists. This work has looked at both Y chromosome patterns transmitted only through the male line, and mitochondrial DNA transmitted only through the female. A fascinating contrast has emerged. Amongst the male population, 75 per cent possess Y chromosomes whose particularities can be traced back to Scandinavia, and only 25 per cent those suggestive of an origin in the British Isles. The mitochondrial evidence, however, is very different. Thirty-six per cent of the modern Icelandic population descends from Norse womenfolk, whereas 62 per cent possess DNA suggestive of female ancestors from the British Isles. Substantial numbers of female colonists, maybe something like one-third, had come all the way from Scandinavia, therefore, but maybe two-thirds were women picked up by Viking males on their travels.
Similar results have been obtained from the Faroes. In Viking Scotland and the northern and western isles, however, the pattern is different again. In these regions, there is no substantial dichotomy between the percentages of Norse male and female DNA among the modern population, suggesting perhaps that, in these zones of earliest Norse colonization, the basic migration unit was familial, with similar numbers of male and female colonists coming from Scandinavia. By the time colonization moved on to the Faroes and Iceland, however, Viking males increasingly obtained women from the British Isles. What the proportion of indigenous to Scandinavian females was among the womenfolk of the Great Army warriors we cannot tell, but the DNA evidence from further north would indicate that there were certainly some of the former present. We clearly shouldn’t be multiplying our estimates for Scandinavian males by four or five, therefore, to take account of accompanying dependants, but maybe by two or three.49
Viking migration into eastern Europe took substantially different forms. The Norse diaspora into Russia shows no sign at all of conquering armies creating the political Lebensraum for subsequent settlement, and little of minor aristocratic farmers setting up independent farmsteads. As it shows up in the archaeology, there were two main phases of Norse intrusion. For the first – the later eighth and the early ninth century – substantial traces have been uncovered at only two sites: the oldest levels of Staraia Ladoga and the fortified site of Sarskoe Gorodishche on the Upper Volga. Only half a hectare of Staraia Ladoga has been excavated, however, so we have no real understanding of its size at this early date, and no estimate at all of the Scandinavian population of Sarskoe Gorodishche. This does not amount to much, and it would be tempting to think that only a very few Scandinavian traders had started to explore the river routes of European Russia at this time, were it not for the fact that the existence of a Norse-dominated Khaganate in northern Russia is reported as early as 839.50 This could not have come into existence without either substantial numbers of Norse immigrants, or a considerable degree of organization. There may well be more archaeological evidence of eighth- and early ninth-century Scandinavian immigration waiting to be found.
As was also the case in the west, the flow of migrants picked up considerably in the second half of the ninth and the early tenth century. At this point, Scandinavian migration was clustering in three distinct zones (Map 20). The first ran along the River Volkhov between Lakes Ladoga and Ilmen. At the northern end, Staraia Ladoga was rebuilt and grew to its maximum size of ten hectares. Further south lay Gorodishche (the Holmgard of Norse sagas), as we have seen, the main power centre of the region – a fortified site surrounded by stone walls three metres high and three metres thick. Its third known major Scandinavian centre was Izborsk-Pskov. The cemeteries of all three centres have thrown up enough Norse material to suggest that they had real functioning Scandinavian communities of men and women, who had imported much of their way of life with them. The countryside round about – the Priladozhie – has also produced enough stray finds of Scandinavian materials to suggest that this region may have seen some Norse farmers and well as traders.51
A second clustered Scandinavian presence is known from sites along the Upper Volga. There, nineteenth-century excavations produced Norse materials from Yaroslavl, Pereslavl and Suzdal-Vladimir. The methods employed were too haphazard to be able to say anything very precise. More recent and more careful work at a number of other sites in the region, however, has confirmed a substantial Scandinavian influx. A late ninth- to early tenth-century settlement at Timerevo, for instance, eventually spread over ten hectares. Excavations there have uncovered over fifty dwellings and a cemetery. This site was eventually occupied by Finns and Slavs as well as Scandinavians, but the Norse were there first. A substantial Scandinavian presence has also been established at Petrovskoe, where there were two settlements, and at Mikhailovskoe, where a cemetery containing four hundred burials (63 per cent of them cremations) has been excavated. Most of the Scandinavian materials here date to the tenth century.
The third zone of settlement was centred on the River Dnieper, although this should perhaps be subdivided in two, for whereas the Upper Dnieper region could still give access to the Volga route, routes from its middle reaches led unambiguously to the Black Sea and Byzantium. The biggest Scandinavian site uncovered so far is Gnezdovo on the Upper Dnieper (probably the Smaleski (Smolensk) of the sagas). In the 920s, it tripled in size and grew fortifications, and its cemetery, now partly damaged, contained a minimum of three thousand graves and perhaps twice that number. The original Soviet investigator claimed that only about a thousand of these were of Scandinavians, but that greatly understates the reality. Gnezdovo was a Norse-founded and Norse-dominated site, which, following its tenth-century expansion, had a population of about a thousand. Further south, on the Middle Dnieper, Kiev – as you would expect – has produced some Scandinavian materials. Three of its hilltops beside the river were occupied by Scandinavians from the early tenth century. Much more plentiful Scandinavian materials have emerged about 100 kilometres to the north, however, at Chernigov and Shestovitsa, which were, again, substantial tenth-century sites.52
These geographical clusters of Scandinavian sites make perfect sense given the nature of Norse activities. The cluster on and around the Volkhov in the north controlled, and had easy access to, the main trade route out into the Baltic; the Upper Volga and Upper Dnieper sites gave settlers easy access to the main trade route to the Islamic world; and the Middle Dnieper led, eventually, to Constantinople. Scandinavian settlements clustered around the major trade routes, therefore, and these excavated sites were presumably all trading centres, from where individual traders established relations with local fur trappers in the surrounding countryside, and set off in the spring either for Bulgar or for Constantinople.
All of this is straightforward enough, but it is not possible to derive any sense of the actual numbers of Scandinavians caught up in these eastern migration flows. For one thing, all the excavated remains relate to trade centres. Did Scandinavian farmers also establish rural settlements, as they did in Iceland and the northern and western isles? Stray finds from the Volkhov region might suggest that there at least they did, in which case we would have to multiply our conception of immigrant numbers considerably. There is also good reason to doubt that anything like all the Scandinavian settlements in Russia have been identified. Staraia Ladoga and Sarskoe Gorodishche would not be enough to support the reported Khaganate, but they are the only two sites known so far to have been in existence by 839. Similarly I doubt very much that even the fourteen or so known Scandinavian sites of the tenth century are telling the full story. The proportion of women to men among the immigrants is also unclear, although the presence of Scandinavian women is evident in all the tenth-century settlements, except for those of the Middle Dnieper. There are far too many unknowns to hazard much of a guess, but, by the tenth century we must be talking again ten thousand-plus male immigrants, and this is likely to be a gross understatement.
When it comes to understanding the Scandinavian migration units carrying forward the Russian colonization, there is again an absence of historical sources. At least some, however, are likely to have taken the form of small-scale merchant adventurers, like Ottar and his companions, who either owned one boat, or just a share in one – a pattern recorded on at least one runestone. A famous group of over twenty runestones, likewise, was put up in Svinnegarn in Uppland in the mid-eleventh century to commemorate a group of local merchants who failed to return from an expedition led by a certain Ingvar.53 This was obviously later and larger, but, originally, a flow of Ottar-type figures down the Russian river systems was probably a common sight. At the same time, we must also reckon, at least from the ninth century, with larger and more organized intrusions: jarls or kings, with retinues in the hundreds. It would have needed a group more on this scale to establish the first Khaganate already in the ninth century, and, as we have seen, coinciding with the Great Army era in the west, much larger Scandinavian forces began to operate on the Russian rivers.
Scandinavian migration into Russia thus probably combined a steady flow of small-scale merchants, some of whom eventually settled there, with more sporadic intrusions of larger armed forces. As in the west both types, presumably, sometimes brought their womenfolk with them, but we have no idea how often. The overall effect of these migration flows, however, was very different from in the west. Scandinavians came to Russia to exploit the wealth that could be generated by trading its natural resources, not to steal its movable wealth and/or to seize farms from existing owners and take control of its landed assets. There is no sign in Russia, therefore, of even a partial elite replacement. In Russia, the Norse formed a new kind of elite, which made its fortune by connecting up areas rich in the requisite raw materials with established centres of consumption in western Europe and the Near East.
While it is important to sift through the evidence, not least to establish the different types of Norse migration flow, the numbers game, as so often in the first millennium, fails to get you very far. Either we have no idea of how many migrants there were, or we don’t know their ratio to the indigenous population, or both. But, again, taking a qualitative approach is much more revealing. The flow came in several forms. The land-grabbing in the north-west was led by small-scale local elites who could afford ships and gather small armed retinues, Danelaw and north Francia were settled by kings and jarls at the head of much larger warbands, while a mixture of merchant adventurers and kings or jarls was responsible for different aspects of the diaspora into European Russia. Even where landed assets were being seized, none of this looks at all like the Hun-generated migration into the Roman Empire of the later fourth and the fifth century. Viking migration everywhere came in the form of extended flows, sometimes over a century and a half, rather than one big pulse of mass movement. What some of it most resembles, in my view, is what can be constructed of the spread of northern Germanic groups south and east to the Black Sea region in the second and third centuries, or the Boers among more modern examples. And particularly in the west, we are seeing a flow that changed form and grew in momentum as understanding of the range of opportunities now available grew among Scandinavian populations.
Despite these variations, Viking migration administered a substantial political and often cultural shock, as well, to all the areas it affected. In the northern and western isles, together with Danelaw and Normandy, local political and socioeconomic structures were bent completely out of shape. Local elites were either fully or partially replaced in their control of landed assets, old kingdoms were sometimes destroyed, and new political structures created. The amount of violence here must be properly acknowledged. It is a striking fact of Anglo-Saxon studies that almost no pre-ninth-century charters survive from the old kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia that fell into the hands of the Vikings as Danelaw. They are not that numerous elsewhere, but some survive. They fail to survive from Danelaw because the monasteries, where they were kept, were burned. We know too that the kingdom of Northumbria, the home of Bede, built up a powerful Christian intellectual tradition in the seventh and eighth centuries. Alcuin, the greatest scholar of the early Middle Ages, was a Northumbrian cleric, and has left a detailed account of the library at York. Again, the Vikings destroyed all the books along with the institutions that housed them. In certain places, even bishoprics – highly durable institutions – were extinguished. Three old English sees never resurfaced after the Viking period.54
Some of the settlements of the Great Army era did not last long as politically independent entities. In the early tenth century, Wessex subdued Danelaw to create a united English kingdom. But even this is a sign of the political shock generated by Norse migration. There is no sign, had the Vikings not previously destroyed the power of Mercia and Northumbria – its two main rivals – that the Wessex monarchy would have become so predominant. Equally important, Wessex’s conquest did not lead to the return of many of the seized estates to their former owners: the sokemen were still there in 1066. Much the same is also true in Scotland, where the emergence of one united kingdom in place of three previously independent polities – the Dalraida Scots, the Picts and the Strathclyde British – owed a vast amount to the damage inflicted on the latter two by Viking attack.55
Elsewhere, the political fruits of the Viking diaspora were longer-lived. Much water would flow past it down the Seine in the meantime, but the settlement at Rouen was destined to become the Duchy of Normandy. The northern and western isles of Britain, together with northern Scotland and the Atlantic isles, likewise, became part of a long-lived Scandinavian commonwealth. And the interrelations of its many different Scandinavian merchants, along with the kings who came to take a percentage of the wealth they generated, would eventually stitch together the first Russian state, to which we will return in the next chapter, and whose history continued its more or less stately progress down to the Mongol invasions. Of all the areas affected by Viking assault, it is only arguably in Wales and Ireland that the effects were less than earth-shattering, but even in these cases it is at least arguable that, because of the Norse, political development took new and complex trajectories.56 To get too worried about numbers of migrants in the Viking Age is to miss the wood for the trees. In qualitative terms, the ‘shock’ administered to all the societies that played – usually unwilling – host to Scandinavian migrants is clear enough. In that sense, we are once again looking at a set of migration flows that can only be labelled mass migration. But this is to explore only one dimension of the Scandinavian migration process, and big questions remain. Why did the Scandinavian diaspora occur when it did, and why did it take so many different forms?