In a recommendation from 1806 on the conditions and needs of a planned Danish National Museum the Danish historian Rasmus Nyerup wrote this on the nature of pre-Christian history:
Everything stemming from ancient times and before the introduction of Christianity to these lands can properly be described as infinitely old. With the coming of Christianity we acquired better writing materials than rocks and trees, and faster scribes than the runemasters of old . . . All that happened before, everything from ancient heathen times we see swirling before our eyes as though in a thick fog, in a vast space. We know that it is older than Christianity, but if it be a few years, or a few hundred years, or maybe even a few thousand years, is all a matter of conjecture.1
When in 1816 the Danish government went ahead with its plans for a national museum, responsibility for ordering the large collection of finds stored in the loft of Copenhagen’s Trinitatis Church was given to Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, the son of a wealthy city merchant who in his youth had become interested in archaeology. Thomsen decided to try to bring some order to this vague and diffuse idea of a public past. On entering the loft for the first time, he reported, his general impression was of items randomly scattered in ‘dust and disorganized disarray, hidden away in chests and baskets, among bits of material and paper. It was total chaos.’2 He began by grouping the articles according to composition and function. They included tools and weapons made of stone; weapons and other items associated with combat made of bronze; articles made of iron; household items; ornamentation; urns containing incinerated remains; and a class of sundry other items. With the exhibits sorted into these three basic groupings of stone, bronze and iron, an exhibition opened to the public in the Trinitatis Church loft in 1819. This was the first time the tripartite division of the past into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages was used.
Thomsen’s original aim had been merely to solve the practical problem of exhibiting the finds coherently. When he began to study the implications of his own system, however, he realized that it almost certainly described a forward movement in time from an older to a younger period and began to refine it accordingly, introducing sub-divisions within each of the three groups. A full presentation of his ideas appeared in book form in 1836. Translated into English as A Guide to Northern Antiquities in 1848, its principles were quickly accepted and adopted throughout Europe. Further sub-divisions in the groupings have been made by each of the Scandinavian countries. In Sweden the Later Iron Age is divided into Wendel and Viking Ages, the former covering the period c.550-800 AD and taking its name from a number of ship burials excavated near Vendel in northern Uppland, the latter beginning with the raids by Heathen Scandinavians on Christian targets in the British Isles in 793. The Danes prefer the term Germanic Iron Age for the earlier period, and in Norway it is known as the Merovingian Period, after the Frankish Merovingian dynasty that was the dominant power in Europe from about 460 to 751. The warrant for the creation of a particular ‘Viking’ Age within the Iron Age was the number of finds from the later part of the period associated with seafaring and returning warriors. So familiar has Thomsen’s tripartite division of the past into a Stone, a Bronze and an Iron Age become, so complete the authority it has acquired, that we easily forget its comparatively recent vintage and attribute to it a degree of reality that it scarcely has a right to. If astronomers can deprive Pluto of its status as a planet then it is possible that future historians will become so frustrated by the constrictions of inherited periodization that the whole system of archaeological time will one day be overhauled, with attendant redefinitions, promotions and demotions.
And in such an event, the Viking Age would probably occasion an unusual amount of headscratching, for it eludes almost every attempt at packaging and labelling. The British start their ‘insular’ Viking Age cleanly with the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 and end it as cleanly with the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Irish would close theirs with the Battle of Clontarf in 1016. Harald Hardrada’s failed attempt to invade England in 1066 is significant in Norwegian history, but the date has no special resonance for the Danes or the Swedes. And was the large fleet under Håkon IV that was defeated by the Scots at the battle of Largs in 1263 a Viking fleet, or a Norwegian fleet? Historians of the Baltic island of Gotland would end their Viking Age in about 1020. Wales seems scarcely to have had a Viking Age, though this may reflect only the poverty of the written record.3 Some historians take the narrative up to the extinction of the Norse colony on Greenland in about 1500; but were the colonizations of Iceland and Greenland even Viking enterprises at all?4 In the 1970s the Uppsala-based British historian Peter Sawyer divided the insular Viking Age into two, with a first period extending from 793 to the fall of the Viking kingdom of York in 954 and a second from the resumption of Viking raiding in about 980 to the conquest of England in 1013 by the Danish King Sven Forkbeard and his son Cnut. As a general survey of the whole field of Viking activity this book does not take the insular perspective. The multiple beginnings and wide choice of endings mean that its parameters are fluid, but based on the unmoving fact that, at the start of the period, roughly speaking all the Scandinavian peoples were Heathens; and by the time it ends, roughly speaking all the Scandinavian peoples thought of themselves as Christian. Sometimes red and dramatically visible, at other times grey and hard to spot, the long, slow process of religious and cultural change runs like a thread throughout the Viking Age.
One might suppose the etymology of the word would tell us at least how the Vikings viewed themselves. But its origins are obscure and there is little agreement about it. It is not even certain that the word is Scandinavian in origin. It occurs several times in the Old English poem Widsid, usually dated to the end of the seventh century, and in the eighth-century Old English poem Exodus, where the tribe of Reuben are described as ‘sæwicingas’, meaning ‘sea-warriors’, as they cross the Red Sea on their way out of Egypt. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, that great compendium of historical records begun in the time of Alfred the Great, uses the term only four times before 1066, in the native English forms wícenga or wícinga, in 879, 885, 921 and 982.5
The rigidity of the structural rules governing the creation of the Viking Age court poetry, known from its makers or ‘skalds’ as ‘skaldic poetry’, means that those examples of it handed down, usually embedded within sagas written down in the Christian era, are regarded by linguistic scholars as authentic documents from the early years of the Viking Age in both content and language. Surviving examples of skaldic poetry contain some thirty references to ‘vikings’ meaning ‘long-distance sea-warriors’ in contexts which are positive and approving. In the anonymous collection of poems from the Viking Age known as the Edda that forms part of the thirteenth-century manuscript Codex Regius, now in the Árni Magnusson Institute in Reykjavik, four references have this sense. A handful of appearances on runestones from Sweden and Denmark seem to confirm the heroic and manly usage, often in some form of the phrasal verb fara í viking, ‘to go on a Viking expedition’.6 A stone at Hablingbo church in southern Gotland was erected by two of his sons in memory of their father Hailka - ‘who went west with the Vikings’. As a personal name it occurs on a score of Swedish runestones, and also enjoyed some popularity in those parts of England settled by Scandinavians. This might explain why the English language, which at different times has adopted ‘vandal’, ‘barbarian’, ‘thug’ and ‘hooligan’ to denote violent and dangerous people, never made similar use of ‘viking’. But as Christianity began to make serious inroads on Scandinavian culture towards the end of the Viking Age, negative connotations begin to appear. A runic inscription on the Bro stone, some forty kilometres north-west of Stockholm, was raised by his widow in praise of a certain Assur for the diligence with which he had ‘kept watch for Vikings’.7
Some linguists believe the word derives from the Latin vícus, meaning a ‘town’ or ‘camp’ or ‘dwelling-place’. Others suggest that the noun comes from an Old Norse verb víkja, meaning ‘to travel from place to place’. A simple and persuasive theory is that it originally denoted people from the Vik, the name for the bay area of south-eastern Norway around the Oslo fjord that also denoted the inland coastal region, and possibly included the coast of Bohuslän in present-day Sweden. There is support for the suggestion in the frequency with which the waters of the Vik appear in saga literature, suggesting it was the most heavily trafficked maritime area in the region at the time.8
To some extent the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish historians who constructed the Viking Age in Scandinavia did so for ideological reasons. Each nation was, for differing reasons, in need of a lost golden age of greatness. Denmark needed to reassure itself after being overpowered by Prussia in 1864 and forced to give up control of the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein. The peace settlement meant that she also lost the right to carry out further excavations at Nydam, a bog site that offered a wealth of well-preserved sacrificial materials from the third to the fifth centuries. It was in response to this sort of reverse that the nineteenth-century Danish historian Johannes Steenstrup urged the specifically Danish elements in the ‘European’ colonizations carried out by the Vikings in England and Normandy, asserting that Normandy’s founder Ganger Rolf (‘Rolf the Walker’) was a Dane and not, as the Norwegians claimed, a native of Møre og Romsdal on the west coast of Norway. To bolster a separate Norwegian cultural identity as part of the drive towards the independence from Sweden that came in 1905, the Norwegian Gustav Storm vigorously promoted the fact that it was essentially his countrymen who had colonized Iceland, Greenland, and established the short-lived settlement in North America in 1000. The Swedes too looked for the compensations of nationalist nostalgia to make up for the painful loss of Finland to Russia early in the nineteenth century.
Historians from all three communities adapted the evolutionary theory of the English biologist and philosopher Herbert Spencer, originator of the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’, to their own studies to discover an ‘evolution’ of peoples and cultures over historical time that led to technological and moral progress. It enabled them to place their Viking forefathers somewhere in the chain of their own development as ‘noble savages’, living out a violent period of their destiny as they moved inexorably towards the higher stage of development represented by the Christianity to which they all, eventually, subscribed. So while there were obligatory words of censure for the ferocity of the conversion campaigns of both Olaf Tryggvason and Olav Haraldson at the turn of the tenth century in Norway, there was never any doubt in Victorian eyes but that these excesses were committed for the best of reasons.
The cultural relativity of our own times makes this kind of assertion problematic. No longer able to view the violence characteristic of the Vikings as a sort of brisk adolescent workout before the onset of maturity, we prefer instead to describe and analyse their achievements as traders, travellers, explorers and founders of towns, and to extol the beauties of their poetry and jewellery. But, while all of these are entirely valid perspectives, the pendulum may have swung too far: as one modern historian puts it, the revisionist view has come close to giving us an image of the Vikings as a group of ‘long-haired tourists who roughed up the locals a bit’.9 Among the aims of this book is to restore the violence to the Viking Age, and to try to show why our understanding is incomplete without it.
Uncertainty about the proper dimensions of the Viking Age is reflected in a very conditional acceptance of the literary sources that once formed the bedrock of what historians thought they knew about the period. The main objection to the use of the histories and sagas is that they were written in most cases some 300 years after the events they describe. It is absolutely possible to show under close analysis that the objectivity of the central literary source for the settlement of Iceland at the end of the ninth century,Islendingabok or The Book of the Icelanders by Ari Thorgilsson, known as ‘the Learned’, completed by about 1130, is prejudiced by the author’s inclination to exaggerate the importance of members of his own family in the commission of important deeds. Much of what we think we know about the beliefs and doings of Viking Age Scandinavians derives from Heimskringla or The Lives of the Norse Kings by the thirteenth-century Icelandic poet, historian, novelist and politician Snorri Sturluson. Snorri’s distinction as a sort of cultural Noah who provided for the preservation of pre-Christian beliefs, ideas and events in prehistoric and early historical Scandinavia is beyond dispute; but it is not an ideal dependence, for in an era in which claims to political power were intimately bound up with family and genealogical background, Snorri was, like Ari, concerned to promote the claims to significance of his own ancestors in the shaping of Norwegian and Icelandic history. Earlier than either Ari or Snorri is Adam of Bremen’s Gesta Hammaburgensisor Deeds of the Archbishops of the Church of Hamburg , completed by about 1070 and the major source of our knowledge of events in northern Europe and Scandinavia from the end of the eighth to the thirteenth century. Writing at a time when relations between the archbishopric of Hamburg-Bremen and the papacy were in crisis, Adam is prone to simplifying the conversion of the peoples of the north to Christianity by attributing it almost exclusively to the efforts of his own church and ignoring the role played by English missionaries in the process. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, originating in Wessex, may well have overplayed the role of Wessex in organizing resistance to the Viking armies. The French monk Dudo of St Quentin wrote a history, De moribus et actis primorum normanniae ducum, or ‘On the manners and deeds of the first Norman dukes’. Completed by about 1015, it is a hugely entertaining work that is compromised as history by Dudo’s desire to flatter the ancestors of the ducal patrons who had commissioned him to write it.
But beyond a certain point conditionality defeats its own ends. Writing in 1912, at a time when modern source criticism first entered the field of Viking studies, the Danish historian Ebbe Hertzberg entered some pertinent observations against too much deconstructive rigour, warning that it would lead to a state of affairs in which the clear and connected sense of history offered by the sagas would be replaced by hypotheses on events and their causes that were at best less than convincing and at worst lacked all context and cohesion.10 Archaeology and the sophisticated research techniques of numismatic analysis, dendrochronology which permits highly accurate dating of wooden objects by tree-ring analysis, archaeozoology, palaeobotany, DNA analysis, ice crystallography and climate analysis have compensated considerably for the losses sustained to modern source criticism; but even here there are cautionary tales to be told. In 1222 Saxo Grammaticus, the Danish cleric and historian, author of the Gesta DanorumorHistory of the Danes, recorded his belief that a long series of enigmatic markings on the Runamo rock in Blekinge contained a runic account of the deeds of the pre-historical King Harald Hildetand. A later king, Waldemar the Great, exercised himself in the attempt to decipher the message, and in the seventeenth century the priest and runologist Jon Skonvig succeeded in deciphering the name of the Swedish town ‘Lund’ among the inscriptions, at that time part of Denmark. The rock was cleaned, several more runes emerged and an attempt at a full transliteration was made in the 1830s by the Icelander Finn Magnusen. A study in 1844 then revealed conclusively that the whole ‘inscription’ was a phenomenon of nature, a wonder in its own way certainly, but historically irrelevant.11Runes on a stone found at Byfield, Massachusetts, were likewise once ‘translated’ to give the exciting message Overland route, Øn set the stone. If confirmed, it would have opened a whole new chapter in the history of the Vikings in America. Alas, on closer examination these too turned out to be glacial striations.
It is inappropriate to call these observations on the nature of Viking Age sources ‘problems’. They are simply the conditions of the study. They make the pattern of Viking Age history hard to trace, and I am only too well aware that in trying to trace it anyway I may have produced in this book my own share of such phantoms, and along the way made any number of what Michael Oakeshott once called ‘concessions to the idiom of legend’. But my aim has been to provide the intelligent general reader who has an interest in the Viking Age with a study that might satisfy his or her interest without burdening it with an account of the innumerable controversies that cover every field of study of the period. I have accordingly tried to limit the number of ‘perhaps’s and ‘possibly’s which would otherwise overwhelm almost every paragraph. I hope the reader who desires them will supply these unconsciously. I am, of course, profoundly indebted to the work of innumerable expert archaeologists, translators, linguists, geneticists, runologists, topographical analysts and earth scientists whose work I hope I have not travestied too much in trying to give what is in most cases an all too brief summary.