INTRODUCTION

The Hammer of the North

“Wake early if you want another man’s life or land. No land for the lazy wolf. No battle’s won in bed.” 

– Edda of Sæmund the Wise, a collection of the sayings of Odin

Just off the west coast of present-day Scotland, lies the small island of Iona, a grassy promontory with white sandy beaches, rising up out of the North Sea. Today it is a place of quiet contemplation, relatively undisturbed by the tour groups or visiting school children wandering among its enchanted ruins. Even for those who know, it is easy to forget that twelve centuries ago, these idyllic shores were the scenes of unimaginable violence. 

The monastery of Iona is the symbolic heart of Scottish Christianity, one of the oldest and most important religious centers in Western Europe. It was founded by the Irish monk Columba in the sixth century and became the focal point for the spread of the faith throughout Scotland. 

In the early centuries, the monks came to seek seclusion among the ‘desert’ of the Atlantic Ocean, and built simple beehive-shaped stone huts where they could concentrate on their prayers and vows of poverty and obedience. Over time, however, the small community became a major pilgrimage site, and a great medieval center of learning. It developed into a training school for monks with special rooms for the copying of manuscripts called scriptoriums that produced works of art famous throughout Europe. Chief among these was the ‘Book of Kells’, an illuminated collection of the four gospels that was described by its Irish contemporaries as “the most precious object in the western world”. 

In addition to its religious treasures, Iona also boasted an unrivaled collection of royal tombs. Most of the early Scottish kings, including the two made famous by Shakespeare – Macbeth and his victim Duncan – were interred in the monastery’s crypt. 

For centuries, the island was an oasis of peace, protected by the faith of its inhabitants and the vast ocean surrounding it. In 794, however, a ripple of fear penetrated the tranquility. Rumors reached the monks of terrible raids to the east, sister monasteries devastated by strange northern pagans. Early the next year, while the monks were celebrating a holy day, ships with prows carved to resemble serpents and dragons slipped onto the beach below the main abbey. 

Leaping onto the white sand of a shoreline, which would later bear the name ‘Martyr’s Bay’ in memory of the slain, the raiders headed for the buildings, cutting down the monks they found along the way. Smashing open the doors, they killed anyone who tried to resist, drenching the stone floors of the chapel with blood. Anything that looked valuable was seized, including rich vestments which were ripped off of the bodies of the dead or dying. 

As the surviving monks fled in all directions, the attackers set fire to the great abbey and then raced down to the beach with their considerable loot. Seemingly in the blink of an eye they were gone. Left behind were bloody corpses, burning buildings, and a shattered community. 

Virtually the only thing left intact was the high cross of St. Martin’s, one of a dozen or so large carved monoliths that had dotted the landscape. In the side facing away from the devastated church was carved the biblical figure of Abraham with his sword raised high – as if in warning of the terrible events that had just unfolded. 

The raids on the British Isles were only the beginning of a great hammer blow that fell on an unprepared Europe. The broken bodies and the blackened shells of buildings in places like Iona would be all too common in the centuries to come. 

The suddenness of the violence left many occupants of Europe disoriented and anxious. The shock and despair can still be felt in the words of Alcuin, an Anglo-Saxon monk writing from Charlemagne’s imperial capital of Aachen after one of the first raids.  

“…never before in Britain has such a terror appeared as this we have now suffered at the hands of the heathen.” 

The fact that the word ‘Viking’ still conjures up that image of blond-haired barbarians leaping off of dragon ships to plunder a monastery – is a testament to the trauma inflicted on Western Christendom during the three hundred years of the Viking Age. It is burned into our collective memory. 

There is, even now, something alien about those northern warriors. The origin of the word ‘viking’ itself is unknown. Contemporary ninth century records call the raiders ‘Northmen’, ‘Danes’, ‘Norse’, or ‘Heathen’. The Anglo-Saxons, frequent targets of their attacks, did have a word ‘wicing’ which meant ‘sea-raider’, but it first appears only in the eleventh century. A better explanation comes from the Vikings themselves. In Old Norse vic meant inlet or bay and the Vic district near the Oslo Fjord was a main source of iron used in sword production. The word ‘Viking’ probably started off as a reference to men from the Vic district and gradually came to include all Scandinavian raiders.

Endless speculation has centered on the question of why the Vikings suddenly erupted from their lands in the eighth century. Theories have ranged from overpopulation and political pressure to climate change and technological innovations.¹  What is clear, however, is that there was a cyclical nature to the great waves of northern Europeans leaving their homes. The first recorded migration of Scandinavian people actually predates the ‘Viking Age’ by nearly five centuries. As the Western Roman Empire tottered toward its final collapse, the Goths, a people originating from what is now southern Sweden invaded the empire, eventually settling in southern France and Spain. 

But the Goths wouldn’t have recognized themselves as ‘Scandinavian’ or ‘Viking’ any more than the raiders of the eighth century would have. Although they had a common language, the Vikings were never a single people, and most of those who lived in Scandinavia during the Viking age never left home. The raiders were a somewhat suspect minority with multiple reasons for adventuring. Single explanations, therefore, are bound to be incomplete. Further complicating matters is the fact that the Viking story has largely been told by others – histories compiled by their victims, references in the annals of the older, more civilized nations to the south and east, and the tantalizing glimpses that archeology gives us. 

The Vikings vanished partly because their artists worked in wood. Summers were spent felling trees, which were turned into the feasting halls, ships, and later stave churches that made up their civilization. Of these, only the last remain more or less intact, and they represent the twilight of the Viking world.

The Vikings themselves wrote very little down. Their runic alphabet was more suited to magical spells and marker stones than epics or histories. By the time the great Icelandic bard, Snorri Sturluson, composed his Heimskringla – The Lives of the Norse Kings – more than four centuries had passed since the Viking Age had ended. 

But those stories reflect a much older oral tradition, and they allow us to hear the spirit, if not the exact words, of the tales that Viking poets told to pass the long northern nights. They illustrate the Viking mindset in the same way that the Iliad illuminates that of the ancient Greeks: a true warrior went out, gained riches, built great halls and handsomely rewarded his loyal followers. Glory – and kingships – could only be won on the battlefield.  

Fired by this mindset, young Viking men sailed out to the glittering lands to the south and east of Scandinavia to win everlasting fame. A measure of their success can be found in the anxious prayers that soon echoed from European churches. The abbey of St. Vaast on the northern coast of France included in its daily chants the phrase “Deliver us, God, from the savage race of Northmen which lays waste our realms.”² It was a sentiment that many would soon share, from Constantinople in the east to the Americas in the west.