C.J. Adrien's Blog, page 23

How Norse Paganism Shaped Scandinavian Society

Each hyperlink is attached to an article which expands upon the subject being discussed below.  Feel free to read around. “It was an age of belief,” historians will say in regards to the Medieval Period.  The proliferation of Christianity in Europe — beginning with the last century of Rome, and culminating in the church acts The Peace of God and The Truce of God — led to an environment in which religious dogma was unquestionable.  Yet as late as the 11th Century, the recently converted populations of Scandinavia continued to practice forms of worship not akin to the well structured hierarchies of the Christian leadership further south.  To understand the early problems in the church in Scandinavia, it is important to delve into the prior religion, Norse Paganism, and its role in early Scandinavian society. Belief in Norse Paganism differed from one area to the next.  While not much evidence remains to tell us the details of individual sects’ beliefs, a few aspects to the religion may be inferred based upon other knowledge we have of other polytheistic religions.  In Egypt, Rome, and Greece, polytheism gave rise to numerous religious sects within the belief in their unique pantheon.  Individual settlements chose patron gods based on their needs.  In this way, it may be inferred that the Norse chose patron gods to suit their needs.  A village dependent on hunting, for example, would have likely chosen to worship the god of the hunt Freyir.  Based upon which patron god a settlement chose, religious practice would have looked slightly different.  A cult worshipping Odin would have been more likely to sacrifice humans, as another example, than a cult worshipping Thor.  This is because Odin required live sacrifices, whereas Thor apparently did not.  In this way, Norse Paganism would have been diverse in its beliefs and practices, contrary to the desperate need for consistency exercised in the Christian church. With each community differing from the next to some measure, the Norse Pagans did not establish a separate class of society whose role it would have been to officiate religious practice.  Instead, the leaders of separate communities took under charge various roles to observe festivals and rituals. 

Leadership in Norse Paganism

While the christians developed a systematic hierarchy for the organization and standardization of religious worship, the Vikings tended to be less diligent.  As far as scholars know, religious ceremony and administration was performed by the local leaders of communities.  The Jarl of a farmstead took on the duties of administering the Thing — a monthly or yearly meeting of the entire village to discuss law — and to conduct ceremonies related to the seasons, new births, accessions, deaths, etc.

Variations of this societal construct did exist.  For example, in the writings of the Arab chronicler Ibn Fadlan, the Vikings had mystical figures called Angels of Death who performed such acts as telling the future from a pile of bones, healing the sick with various earthly compounds, and helping in the sending off of a king.  These mystics were typically women: women were seen as the keepers of magic and the dark arts, to be wielded to their advantage when needed.  Of course not all women were wielders of magic, but magic was their domain.  Angels of Death are not prolific figures in historic writings and are not well documented.  Ostensibly, they would have been somewhat inaccessible to any missionary who might have encountered them.

The greatest triumph of Norse paganism was its acceptance of other faiths.  As a pantheon, Norse Paganism included worshipers of many gods.  It was therefore commonplace to accept a person who worshipped a different god from oneself since it was accepted that there were many gods.  Not until the spread of Christianity did this religious tolerance vanish.  Arguably, the intolerance of the Christian faith spurred the hostilities between the Vikings and the Christians.  The acceptance of the existence of other gods also led to Norse Paganism’s decline.  Tolerance of other gods made the Norse people easy to convert.  Christian missionaries were excellent at exploiting this.

Further Reading:

Abram, Christopher.  Myths of the Pagan North: The Gods of the Norsemen.  A&C Black, 2011.

Cassard, Jean-Christophe.  Le Siècle des Vikings en Bretagne.  Éditions Jean-Paul Gisserot, 2006.

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Human Sacrifice in the Viking Age

It is a chilling thought to envision the sacrifice of another human being.  Yet, the recent popular television series Vikings by the History Channel elected to include this seldom acknowledged part of Viking culture.  In the show, a prominent character offers himself as a human sacrifice to help gain favor with the gods.  But is this portrayal accurate?  Sources indicate a slightly different picture.

In the writings of the Arab chronicler Ibn Fadlan, the funeral of a Rus king is briefly described.  Part of the procession involves the sacrifice of a salve girl who ostensibly would follow the king to serve him in the afterlife.  The ritual revolving around the sacrifice includes a thorough cleansing of the girl’s body and plenty of alcohol.  Once prepared, the slave girl spends the night visiting the king’s warriors to initiate intercourse with each of them.  This act is described by Ibn Fadlan as an act of respect, although the chronicler himself protests it.  Once the ritual concludes, the warriors bring the slave girl to the ship where a so-called Angel of Death – a mystic of sorts – prepares a knife to kill the girl.  The warriors bang on their shields to drown out the sound of the slave’s screaming as the Angel of Death inserts the blade into her bosom.

Ibn Fadlan’s account provides clues to the prevalence of ritual killings in Viking Age Scandinavian culture.  We must remember that he met only a small group from the far reaches of the eastern territories who likely had different customs than their Western counterparts.  As far as his writings are concerned, human sacrifices did not involve the killing of the free warriors, only the killing of much lower caste denizens such as slaves.  Then again, the remnants of human sacrifice found in other areas of Scandinavia tell us that perhaps no one was safe from sacrifice.

At a site called Trelleborg – in modern Sweden – the remains of sacrificed animals and humans have been found.  Interestingly, the site contains the remains of children between the ages of four and eight.  These remains have been found buried within deep wells, yet another clue to the reasoning behind the sacrifices.  In myth, Odin sacrificed his eye in the well of Mimir in order to attain knowledge of the future; a well, therefore, may have represented a vessel through which to appease Odin.  Nevertheless, the site contains the remains of children indicating the importance of human sacrifice in Scandinavian culture.  If the Vikings sacrificed their own progeny, then human sacrifice must have been of the utmost importance in their rituals.

Despite these findings, human sacrifice remains a contested concept among historians.  The accounts explained above may be isolated cases practiced by fringe groups who coincidentally left a lasting legacy.  An analogy to this would be if future excavations unearth Jonestown, and those who find the site interpret our era as being particularly suicide-happy.  Nevertheless, we know human sacrifices were in practice in the early Viking Age, but how prevalent the practice would have been is up for interpretation.

In my novel, The Line of His People, an Angel of Death performs the ritual depicted in the Ibn Fadlan account during a burial ceremony.

Follow in the Vikings’ Footsteps!

Viking Armor: What Did They Really Wear?

A few recreationsists who are wearing fairly accurate clothing from the Viking Age.

Hollywood culture would tell us that the Vikings were a bunch of leather-clad wanna-be bikers.  Recreationists would have us believe they were iron-clad.  What a Viking would have actually worn would have depended greatly on his status in society, as well as the region where he lived.  It is true that during the Viking Age, many Norsemen stole armor from the dead they had slain, and they indeed would have worn a mix-match of armors from where they had visited.  Most Norse warriors would have worn a combination of the following types of armor.  

Chainmail:

Chainmail was not new.  The Romans had invented a basic interweaving pattern of chainmail relatively early in their own rise to power to help protect vulnerable parts of the body not covered by their other armor; they attached small trimmings to shoulder guards and the bottom of cuirasses.  Vikings, however, neither perfected nor improved upon any designs of chainmail.  The Viking Hauberk, for instance, was a replica of the Frankish chainmail weaving pattern learned during exchanges between the Danes and the Franks.  Therefore it is no surprise the warriors of Jutland (Denmark) were far more likely to don a chainmail hauberk than the warriors of Vestfold (Norway).  Interestingly, a recent find in Ukraine has revealed a Hauberk carried to the East by a Varangian (Swedes), but made precisely of the Frankish weave.  It is surmised that the hauberk was purchased in the west, informing scholars that the man who wore it had some financial power.  Still, chainmail shirts would have been worn only by the wealthiest of the Vikings, and thus were rare.  

Leather:

Leather armor was also rare for the Vikings.  Animal husbandry in the Viking Age was incredibly expensive; so expensive, in fact, that the primary fertilizer in the fields was human excrement, with the occasional seaweed depending on the season rather than the much later practice of using animal excrement.  Animals’ value to individual farmsteads would have made them no small consideration to kill.  Leather, therefore, was not a commonly enough produced good in Viking Age Scandinavia to warrant the production of armor.  Vikings would have preferred to fashion gloves, shoes, and various leather tools for ships out of their limited supplies of the fabric.  

Cloth:

What most Vikings would have worn as armor is a mixture of tightly woven cloths with enough thickness to pad a blow from a weapon.  This cloth armor was actually more effective than leather because it protected a warrior from any slicing by an enemy.  Unfortunately, cloth armor did not protect well against stab wounds — hence why the Franks eventually preferred the spear over the sword in their engagements with the Vikings.  Cloth armor was quite prolific during the Viking Age.  The Saxons in England, the Irish in Ireland, and even the Moors in Iberia all fashioned variations of cloth armor to suit their purposes.  

Sources:

Christiansen, Eric.  Norsemen in the Viking Age.  John Wiley and Sons, 2008.

Hadley, D.M.  Everyday Life in Viking Age Towns.  Oxbow Books, 2013. 

Oakeshott, R. Ewart.  The Archeology of Weapons: Arms and Armor from Pre-History to the Age of Chivalry.  Courier Dover Publications, 1960.

 

Love the Vikings?  Try my book!

Trade or Die: The Viking Business Model.

What were the Vikings?  Were they pirates who set out for plunder and looting?  Or was there more to their activities in Europe?  As it turns out, the Scandinavians who travelled the world originally did so to trade.  Interestingly, it would appear their more violent ventures were in part due to restrictions on their trade.  The story of how the Viking business plan developed is one which begins long before the Viking Age.

During the collapse of the Roman Empire, the region known today as Bretagne — in Western France — took in a massive swath of refugees who desperately desired to escape the clutches of invaders who had seized the island of Britannia.  The influx of people brought two positive changes to a previously peripheral roman territory: more man power, and more gold from the retreating Roman prefects.  The Saxons contented themselves with Britain as their prize, but another germanic tribe yearned to seize the opportunity to profit from the demise of the Romans.  A fleet of Frankish ships sailed and pillaged the coast of Bretagne, beginning a tradition spanning much of the 5th and 6th centuries.  During this time, the region of Bretagne developed an identity of its own; they became fiercely independent and anti-Frank.  It is therefore no surprise that when the Franks descended into former Gaul as land conquerors, not seamen, the Bretons resisted them wherever they could.  

The same seafaring tradition which had allowed the Franks to pillage the coasts of Bretagne and the Saxons to travel to Britannia helped to influence the seafaring tradition we today identify as typically Viking.  To their detriment, the germanic tribes abandoned their seafaring traditions in favor of their land-based ambitions.  This allowed the Scandinavians to develop their technology relatively unchallenged in the Baltic Sea.  Trade routes were established in numerous places by the late 8th Century, including in the region known as Bretagne.  The writings of an obscure cleric named Bertrand in the 8th Century tells of a people from far to the north who traded luxurious furs for wines and salt as early as twenty years before Lindisfarne.  They traded peaceably, he wrote.

As this cross-cultural exchange began to take shape, the bellicose Charlemagne banned trade between his Christian empire and the “savage, unbelieving brutes” from Scandinavia.  Ports closed off access to the Scandinavians who, following decades of trade with the west and increasingly difficult conditions at home, had become dependent on trade for their livelihoods.  This event marks one of the leading causes for the Vikings Age’s start.  Immediately, the Frisian coast fell victim to raids by angered Danes.  Thus began the period most associated with sudden catastrophic attacks for the sake of plunder.  

Despite this change in the relationship between the Scandinavians and Franks, trade continued to be a defining characteristic of the Vikings across the known world.  In the East, the Rus established numerous trading posts to maintain consistent and reliable trade with the Slavs.  In Spain, the Vikings attempted to trade with the Moors.  Evidently, the Moors were rude and unwilling.  Shortly after their first contact, the Vikings sacked Seville.  All the evidence suggests that the Vikings were mostly interested in trade, but attacked when unfairly refused.  Trading was paramount to their endeavors.

Were the Vikings conquerors, or tradesmen?  It appears they were both.  During several of the more tumultuous periods of the Viking Age, some chroniclers wrote about Vikings who mercilessly pillaged some villages, only to turn to others to trade with them the acquired goods from the raids.  Initially, the Vikings appear to have desired peaceful trade.  Only after the hostilities between the Danes and the Franks did they begin their infamous entrance onto the world stage as pirates.  Eventually, the Vikings did conquer certain areas such as Normandy and Ireland.  Permanent settlement became their long term goal rather than riches.  One fact remains certain: if a Viking asks you to trade, it would behoove you to play along. 

 

Further Reading:

     Cassard, Jean-Christophe.  Le Siecle des Vikings En Bretagne.  Editions Jean-Paul Gisserot.  1996.

What’s That Smell? Three Facts You Did Not Know About Viking Poop.

This is shit.

An often overlooked aspect of history is how societies have dealt with the issue of excrement and waste during the development of fixed settlements and urbanization.  All too commonly, the issue of poop inevitably escapes our minds as we are generally averted to the subject.  Yet, the issue of waste management can either make or break a civilization.  

Take for example the Greenland Norse whose rise and fall serves as an excellent example of how improper waste management can lead to disaster.  The Greenland Norse settled a harsh region in which crops yielded little food, and the indigenous Inuit Nations sought to eradicate the newcomers.  Although several issues have been identified as part causes in the demise of the Vikings in Greenland — including the import of invasive species, lack of adaptability to the harsher cold of Greenland, and the refusal to cooperate with the Inuit — one among them deals specifically with poop.  It appears through archeological digs of former settlements that the Greenland Norse, in an effort to stay clean and healthy, attempted to use the same methods of waste management as their counterparts in Scandinavia: cesspits.  While this method worked further south, it created a problem the Norse had not foreseen.  The pits managed to contaminate the little fresh groundwater they had because the porous ground during summer thaws circulated the waste, thereby poisoning the settlement.  

What the Greenland Norse do show us, however, is that the waste management systems in Scandinavia followed a predictable and commonly prescribed system which, for the most part, worked well for them by the medieval period.  This system developed as a result of the push towards agrarianism rather than the traditional hunter gatherer lifestyle.  Evidence of the crisis which took place to invent a viable waste management system in pre-Viking Age Scandinavia can be seen in the well preserved bogs in Denmark where a variety of wastes have been found.  They show that successively, as the cesspit became more viable, Scandinavians used the bogs to rid themselves of waste less, until they eventually no longer had to travel so far to pop a squat. 

Poop can tell scientists and historians a great deal about what Vikings ate as well.  In fact, one of the prized possessions of the Jorvic Viking Museum is a fossilized coprolite (pictured above), otherwise known as poop.  It reveals something interesting: the producer of the log ate mostly breads and meats, and had a particularly vicious case of a parasitic infection.  What do the parasites tell us?  The host was not particularly clean, and must have, at some point, ingested fecal matter to acquire the parasite.  This is not surprising since animals were expensive to raise and feed, so human poop was used as the primary fertilizer for fields throughout the Middle Ages.  

It turns out poop is as interesting as it is disgusting.

Further Reading:

     Albee, Sarah. (2010) Poop Happened! A History of the World From the Bottom Up.  Walker Publishing.

     Diamond, Jeremy. (2013) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive.  Penguin UK.

     Miller, Frederick P. (2010) Lloyd Banks Coprolite.  VDM Publishing.

The Stinky Truth: How Clean Were the Vikings?

A skaldic verse from Egill Skallagrimson paints the picture of what once was considered the perfect Viking; created impatient from birth, presumptuous, and with a burning desire for a far-off adventure:
“My mother promised me, and soon she will buy me, a vessel and oars, to leave to distant lands with the Vikings…and to strike and fight.”

These early explorers are today remembered as brave, rustic men with long beards and flowing hair.  As historians of the 19th century would have it, the Vikings were uncivilized in their pre-Christian culture, thus making them unclean.  The notion of the Romantic Savage prevailed until well into the latter half of the 20th century, and arguably remains part of popular culture’s view of the Vikings.  What most people do not know, however, is that grooming was a central feature in Viking Age Scandinavian culture.

The Arab chronicler Ibn Fadlan, who encountered the Rus along the Volga River, described them exactly as we might expect: dirty.  His testimony has proven quite detrimental to the image of Vikings among scholars.  Yet, we must not forget to consider the cultural lens from which the Arab chronicler wrote.  In Bagdad, his home, Ibn Fadlan was a writter.  His position earned him a high place in society, and he considered himself an above average figure.  Arab society at the time — especially among the elites — prided itself on cleanliness.  In fact, their fixation with cleanliness and elaborate costuming was heavily chastised by their Christian Byzantine neighbors for being vain.  It is then not surprising that Ibn Fadlan would consider the Rus as dirty, but he did help us in understanding their customs by describing a few of their grooming habits.

First, the grooming began with combing of the hair and beards.  Second, they rinsed their mouths and faces with fresh water from the river.  Some even bathed fully in the river in the morning.  If read in the proper context, Ibn Fadlan’s account provides us with a fantastic insight into how the Vikings viewed and practiced grooming.  They were, in fact, quite clean for the times.  Although the Rus are one among many different tribes of Scandinavian, it can be deduced that many of the Vikings had similar grooming practices.  For example, in what is modern day Finland, archeologists have found and dated Viking Age saunas used to bathe.  It is surmised that many villages across Scandinavia would have known how to build and use saunas for cleansing.  There is even evidence that saunas were built in the new world settlements as well, which hints heavily as to the importance of cleanliness in Viking culture.  

How then did Vikings earn a reputation for uncleanliness?  Several theories exist to answer this question, but the most convincing is the theory of negative propaganda.  Most of what we know about the Vikings is still taken from what was written about them.  The only people capable of writing anything of substance at the time were priests who were the Vikings’ preferred victims.  It must be recognized that the Christians of the time avoided bathing specifically because they considered too much cleanliness to be a sign of vanity, which was sin.  Thus the infamous smelliness of the medieval period began.  Not until the christianization of Scandinavia did the people from that region stop grooming as extensively as they had previously done.  

Were the Vikings dirty?  I suppose by today’s standards they would not appear as clean as, say, a person who showers and shampoos every day; but for the times, they appear to have been the cleanest of the European cultures.  

In my novel The Line of His People, the Vikings bathe regularly in saunas built in the distant lands they colonise.  

Further reading:

On Ibn Fadlan:

Frye, Richard N. (2005) Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia: A Tenth-Century Traveler from Baghdad to the Volga River. Princeton: Marcus Weiner Publishers.

Flowers, Stephen E. (1998) Ibn Fadlan’s Travel-Report: As It Concerns the Scandinavian Rüs. Smithville, Texas: Rûna-Raven.

On saunas in the Viking Age: 

Nordskog, M., Hautala, A. (2010)The Opposite of Cold-The Northwoods Finnish Sauna Tradition. University of Minnesota Press.

For more information on cleanliness in the Middle Ages in Europe, read this fun article about how Buddhists and Muslims thought of the Christians as dirty:

http://www.salon.com/2007/11/30/dirt_on_clean/

A Most Interesting Question

C.J. Adrien holding the Viking shield he made before painting it, and holding an old hatchet he found in his garage.

It has been nearly one year since the release of my debut novel, The Line of His People, and much has transpired since its release.  I recently visited my grandmother who inquired about the performance in sales of the book.  Rather than crunch the numbers (because my reports are monthly and there is no way to get an ‘all time’ report) I simply shrugged my shoulders to say that I wasn’t getting rich by any means.  Then the question began to beckon.  How many books had I sold?  Surely not that many, my pockets are in no way lined with gold.  Yet I felt the impulse to add everything up to see how my book was actually doing.  

I compiled all my reports since September and began counting one by one each transaction in each sales territory (US, UK, Canada, and surprisingly…Germany).  Everything looked exactly as I had remembered until I opened the reports beginning in March and…HOLY SHIT…where did these come from?  Beginning about the time Vikings on History Channel aired their second season, the download rate for the book soared.  An impressive 2600 copies were downloaded in March alone!

How, then, had I missed this?  Why had I not noticed this unusual and admittedly miraculous jump?  Simply put: life.  I had a bad year.  Yes folks, the ever cheerful Viking expert from France with an unwavering passion for history spent the last 11 months exactly where he shouldn’t have.  I got married to a small town girl, she found me a teaching job in her home town, and all seemed perfect until…we got there.  Although I have plenty of fodder to rant about, I shall spare everyone since life experience tells me everyone has problems, therefore complaining of any sort is futile.  I would just like to take this brief moment to share with the mighty interweb that a grave injustice hath been done, and humanity is the lesser for it.  Hopefully the extra terrestrials surveying the planet are not paying attention to that small town because they most certainly will never say hello to we humans based on their behavior.

Bref, je continue: The Line of His People is finally beginning to rise in the manner I had hoped.  My social media is rife with people — kids, adults, and even other authors — complementing my work and wanting to chat.  I am all for that, I love chatting.  

I am especially proud today to say that after compiling all the numbers, the mighty Abriel Haraldsson of Herius’ story has been downloaded (this does not include physical books) over 5,000 times!  My publisher Voyageur Books is ecstatic because they say this is just the beginning.  

To my fans: THANK YOU.  To my future fans: WELCOME.  

“Our training must be difficult so that we may have an easy war,” says Oddr.  And yes, this is a quote from the sequel.

I bid you all a good night as I am off to write some more of the sequel In The Raven’s Wake.

Cheers,

C.J.

P.S. The Line of His People is only $0.99 on Kindle and Nook.  Now that you know it’s going somewhere, give it a try so you can say, “I read it before it was cool”.

You can also get the paperback at Barnes & Noble here, or on Amazon here.