A Brief History of the Vikings Read online

  JONATHAN CLEMENTS, is the author of The Pirate King, The Moon in the Pines and Confucius: A Biography. He divides his time between Jyväskylä and London and his website is www.muramasaindustries.com

  Other titles in this series

  A Brief History of 1917: Russia’s Year of Revolution

  Roy Bainton

  A Brief History of The Birth of the Nazis

  Nigel Jones

  A Brief History of The Boxer Rebellion

  Diana Preston

  A Brief History of British Kings & Queens

  Mike Ashley

  A Brief History of British Sea Power

  David Howarth

  A Brief History of The Celts

  Peter Berresford Ellis

  A Brief History of Christianity

  Bamber Gascoigne

  A Brief History of The Circumnavigators

  Derek Wilson

  A Brief History of The Crusades

  Geoffrey Hindley

  A Brief History of The Druids

  Peter Berresford Ellis

  A Brief History of The Dynasties of China

  Bamber Gascoigne

  A Brief History of Fighting Ships

  David Davies

  A Brief History of The Great Moghuls

  Bamber Gascoigne

  A Brief History of The Hundred Years War

  Desmond Seward

  A Brief History of Infinity

  Brian Clegg

  A Brief History of Medicine

  Paul Strathern

  A Brief History of Mutiny

  Richard Woodman

  A Brief History of Napoleon in Russia

  Alan Palmer

  A Brief History of Painting

  Roy Bolton

  A Brief History of The Royal Flying Corps in World War I

  Ralph Barker

  A Brief History of Science

  Thomas Crump

  A Brief History of The Tudor Age

  Jasper Ridley

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF

  THE VIKINGS

  THE LAST PAGANS OR THE FIRST MODERN EUROPEANS?

  JONATHAN CLEMENTS

  ROBINSON

  London

  In Memory of

  Thorkill Clements

  born in Reykjavik, died in London

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  This edition published by Robinson,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2005

  Copyright © Muramasa Industries Ltd 2005

  The right of Jonathan Clements to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 1–84529–076–3

  eISBN 978-1-47210-775-6

  Printed and bound in the EU

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 2 4 6

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Preface and Acknowledgements

  Introduction: Britannia Deserta

  The Dark Ages

  1 Songs of the Valkyries

  Myths and Legends of Scandinavia

  2 Fury of the Northmen

  From the First Raids to Harald Bluetooth

  3 Great Heathen Hosts

  Highlands, Islands, Ireland and England

  4 Brother Shall Fight Brother

  Harald Fairhair and Sons

  5 The Road East

  Vikings, Russians and Varangians

  6 Advent of the White Christ

  From Harald Greycloak to Olaf Crowbone

  7 Beyond the Edge of the World

  Iceland, Greenland and Vinland

  8 London Bridge is Falling Down

  From Svein Forkbeard to Olaf the Stout

  9 The Thunderbolt of the North

  The Life and Legends of Harald the Ruthless

  10 Children of Thor

  One Thousand Years Later

  Appendix: Rulers during the Viking Age

  Family Trees

  Maps

  Further Reading

  References

  Index

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  The Gokstad longship (wood), Viking, 9th century/Viking Ship Museum, Oslo, Norway.

  Bridgeman Art Library

  Fragment of a painted stone showing Odin on his eight-legged horse Sleipnir. Gotlandic, 8th/9th century.

  Photo: akg-images, London

  Carriage from the Oseberg grave (burial mound with stones shaped like a ship), Norway, ninth century AD.

  Photo: akg-images, London

  Oseberg ship, oak ship from a grave mound (9th century), which included the grave found in Oseberg, Norway.

  Photo: akg-images, London

  Wooden post with carved animal head. From the Oseberg grave. Norway, ninth century AD.

  Photo: akg-images, London

  Trelleborg Fortress.

  C M Dixon/Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Ltd

  Reconstruction of the Viking barracks at the fortress of Trelleborg. It is considered to have been built by Harald Bluetooth. Slagelse, Denmark, AD 980–981.

  Werner Forman Archive

  Interior reconstruction of the Viking barracks at Trelleborg, built following the pattern of the original foundation post holes. Trelleborg, Denmark, AD 910–1020.

  Werner Forman Archive

  St Olaf, patron saint of Norway (Olaf Haraldsson), Norway, 13th century, found in Gotland.

  Werner Forman Archive/Statens Historiska Museet, Stockholm

  Smith’s mould for casting both Christian crosses and Thor’s hammers.

  Werner Forman Archive/National Museum, Copenhagen

  L’Anse aux Meadows National Historic Park (Newfoundland, Canada), Viking settlement, c.AD 1000: (oldest known European settlement in North America).

  Photo: akg-images, London/Jürgen Sorges

  A berserker, chewing on his shield, amid the piece of the Lewis chess set.

  C M Dixon/Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Ltd

  The Lindisfarne stone, depicting a raiding party of Vikings.

  C M Dixon/Ancient Art & Architecture Collection Ltd

  PREFACE AND

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  There are already several excellent books on the Viking Age, such as the works of Magnusson, Brønsted, Sawyer and Roesdahl, and my personal favourite for all-round factual information, Gwyn Jones’ revised History of the Vikings. Accordingly, I have tried to steer a course between the other available authorities, concentrating on the personalities of the Viking era, who made up that remarkably small handful of families and interlocking dynasties who were the prime movers of the Viking expansion. In order to accomplish this, I have included several family trees to aid the reader in appreciating the Viking Age not as the clash of armies but as a series of family dramas, complete with feuds and reunions, as descendants of local leaders in Scandinavia entwine with the kings and queens of medieval Europe. In a small way, I hope to achieve something of the sense of the sagas that preserve so much of Viking culture for us, showing the people of Scandinavia through their personal lives, or at least, as romanticized and distorted by their later descendants in Iceland. When saga claims veer far from the evidence of archa
eology or other orthodox sources, I have endeavoured to strike a balance.

  I have stayed clear of some of the more famous passages that can be found in the works of others. Ibn Fadlan’s infamous treatment of Rus funeral rites, human sacrifice, gang rape and all, features largely in the works of Brønsted and Jones, and need not be repeated here. Instead, I have concentrated on a passage in Ibn Fadlan that I find far more evocative of the Viking experience in the East – an account of declining trade and the desperation that can ensue. Similarly, nothing encapsulates the Vikings’ relationship with the Native Americans better than Gudrid’s heart-rending conversation with a Skraeling in her tent, which I have chosen to quote in place of the more usual tales of Vinland. With such an approach, I hope this book will provide a new perspective even for those who already familiar with other studies.

  I have used some names that are anachronistic to aid ease of recognition. I refer to the great bay in southern Norway as ‘the Vik’, as the Vikings did themselves, but also make reference to its northern shores as ‘Oslo’, a town not founded until the time of Harald the Ruthless. I use the term Trondheim to describe the area that the Vikings called Nitharos or Hlaðir, preferring to use the term applied to it from the time of Olaf ‘Crowbone’ Tryggvason and only widely used long after the Viking age was over. It is easier, sometimes, to refer to ‘Estonia’ for example, than it is to refer to ‘the region of the Aesti, part of which would at some future date be known as Estonia’. It is only where the medieval distinctions were of crucial importance, such as in the separate states that made up what we now refer to as ‘Great Britain’, that I have clung to the terms as used by the people at the time.

  Regarding Norse names, the available texts are a confusion of Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic renderings of the originals, many with contradictory ways of romanizing elements of the futhark runic alphabet. In most cases I have dropped the diacritic marks that distinguish vowel forms for Norse speakers, and followed the editorial policy of the 1997 Complete Sagas of Icelanders for transliterating the ‘thorn’ rune and other unusual phonemes.

  I have done my best to differentiate the many similar names; it is easier, both editorially and narratively, to refer to Harald Greycloak as ‘Greycloak’, and so avoid confusion with the numerous other Haralds in the text, even though he only gained the ‘Greycloak’ sobriquet relatively late in his life. In most cases, I have dropped patronymics, although I do occasionally use them in place of surnames when no nickname is readily available. In some cases where two figures share the same name, I have deliberately employed acceptable variants to differentiate them, as in the case of Olaf Crowbone and Olof (sic) Skötkonung. Norse writers rarely distinguished between the Sámi people of Lapland and the Suomi people of Finland, calling them all Finns – I have endeavoured to use the correct terminology where possible. In the case of Harald Bluetooth (Blátönn), it is now widely agreed that the colour intended was closer to ‘black’ in medieval Norse, but I have retained the more popular usage. This is not only because he is referred to as Bluetooth in other English sources, but in recognition of his newfound fame in the twenty-first century. When looking for a name for a wireless technology allowing disparate Scandinavian computers to communicate with each other, someone decided that the name of Denmark’s first kingly unifier would be nicely appropriate. It seems churlish now to change his name to the more semantically correct Blacktooth.

  References to Icelandic sagas are mainly to the excellent Leif Eríkssonur five-volume Complete Sagas (CSI + volume number in my notes), or to the landmark University of Texas translation of Heimskringla by Lee Hollander. The over 200 endnotes are there for any reader who wishes to expand this necessarily ‘brief’ history into an examination of my sources.

  The family trees are heavily simplified, and often show only partial counts of offspring. Vikings both pagan and Christian had many wives and concubines, and it is impossible to fully match their dynasties with the claims of the saga authors. The trees are just detailed enough to demonstrate the interconnections of the Viking Age from a Scandinavian point of view – there are even more links on the English side, but they belong in a different book.

  Much about the Viking world is best understood by experiencing it first-hand. I am fortunate to have travelled from south-west Norway to the icy wastes of Lapland. Members of the Mäki-Kuutti family have been my guides and companions for wanderings in Finland and Sweden, and their support has been invaluable. Back in England, University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies proved particularly useful for its collection of rare nineteenth-century and Finno-Ugric sources on the Vikings’ interactions with their eastern neighbours. I am indebted to the SSEES, its superb Language Unit, and my long-suffering teacher Elina Rautasalo. I was also able to gain access to rare Native American, Inuit and Muslim materials, thanks to the holdings of the nearby School of Oriental and African Studies.

  This book was commissioned by Nicola Chalton, who was always supportive and ready to champion my unorthodox approach with her colleagues, while my agent, Chelsey Fox of Fox and Howard, was able to channel the spirit of Freydis whenever work needed to be done with an axe. Becky Hardie of Constable & Robinson was a patient and flexible editor, who diligently made this book better than it should have been, while Roger Hudson was benignly ruthless in excising my unnecessary kennings. Edward James made many helpful comments on the manuscript, and pulled me up on several important issues of nomenclature and classification. However, I did not take his advice on every occasion, and made several decisions which may indeed turn out to be my own mistakes, certainly not his. Although this book manages to incorporate some research material published while it was still being written, this might also be a good point to mention that many of the relevant books in my collection are over 25 years old – notably a Magnusson and a Brønsted given to me as a child by Penny Clements and Stephen Jones. So they are at least partly to blame for my obsessions.

  This book would not have happened at all were it not for Kati, whom I met on Saint Olaf’s day in a place called Harald’s, and who will claim endlessly not to be an inheritor of any sort of Viking tradition, despite combining all the very best traits of Aud the Deep-Minded, Gunnhild Kingsmother and Thorbjorg Shipbreast.

  My grateful acknowledgement goes to Penguin Books for permission to quote from The Vinland Sagas, translated by Magnus Magnusson and Hermann Palsson, from The Vikings by Johannes Brønsted, and Byzantium: The Apogee by John Julius Norwich; and to Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a division of the Orion Publishing Group, for permission to quote from The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, translated by Michael Swanton. Quotation from Orkneyinga Saga, translated by Hermann Palsson and Paul Edwards, published by Hogarth Press, has been granted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd. The University of Wisconsin Press acknowledges that my quotation from The Kensington Stone: A Mystery Solved by Erik Wahlgren is within the bounds of fair dealing, for which I am also grateful.

  INTRODUCTION: BRITANNIA DESERTA

  THE DARK AGES

  Sometime in the fifth century AD, a group of soldiers had a farewell party. We have no record of precisely where it was held or what the menu may have been. There is no evidence of any remarkable after-dinner speeches or entertainment. But we still know the party took place, because they clubbed together and bought a token of their appreciation for their leader, Aurelius Cervianus. A local British craftsman was hired to engrave a bronze dish, its lower half showing a collection of exotic beasts, including a pair of peacocks and a somewhat boss-eyed lion.1 The upper half has a number of troops under Cervianus’s command, with their legion insignia and designations – XX Valeria Victrix, and II Augusta. Between them lies Cervianus’s name, and a message from the boys: Utere Felix, ‘Use this Happily’.

  Valeria Victrix and II Augusta had long histories, but both had spent much of their operational lives in Britannia. Originally a frontier legion on the banks of the Danube and Rhine, the men of Valeria Victrix had garriso
ned the British island for centuries. They had gained their title, ‘Valiant and Victorious’, after serving the empire well in the suppression of the revolt of Queen Boudicca.2 II Augusta was even older, with a regimental history that may have even stretched back into the days when Rome was still a republic. Both legions had formed part of the original Roman invasion force, and had made Britannia their home for many generations of service. Now they were leaving.

  The Romans were deserting their farthest outposts. The soldiers were required closer to a ‘home’ which some of them had never even seen. We do not know what happened to Cervianus, but his hardwearing dish eventually turned up, intact, in what is now France.

  Most books about the Vikings begin long after this time. The ‘Viking Age’, such as it was, is taken by most authorities to span the period from the infamous raid on Lindisfarne in AD 793, to the death of Harald Hardraada in 1066. But the dates were not quite so clear-cut as that. The Vikings did not spring fully formed on to the international stage; they were the inheritors of a long tradition.

  There is much to be gained from ignoring such arbitrary barriers as the end of the Classical period, or the start of the ‘Dark Ages’ – students of the Vikings can learn much from what happened both before and after this historical watershed.

  Scandinavia was one of the last places in Europe to be settled. The Ice Age lingered longer in its mountainous, northern regions, and much of its atavistic power can still be felt in a Scandinavian winter. In times of great plenty, when the climate was warm, a few hardy souls ventured further northwards. But when the weather took a turn for the worse, many of those northern explorers were forced back to their ancestral homes. Hardened by their harsh northern existence, they were often more than a match for their southern kinsmen – population overspill is a common factor in Scandinavian history. The first members of the society to head elsewhere were usually those with little investment in the place of their birth – the young men, deprived of land, wives and wealth, coalescing into gangs that sought new opportunities. If they had the means of mobility, horses perhaps, or boats, then their adventures would take them substantially further than the next settlement.