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The analysis of strontium and oxygen isotopes in human teeth and bones can locate the places where people spent their formative years, tell us whether they moved around, and also reveal what they ate.
The two genres of saga-writing most often cited in connection with the Vikings are the sagas of Icelanders, also known as the family sagas, and the so-called fornaldarsögur—literally ‘stories of ancient times’ but more often referred to as the legendary sagas.
The sagas of Icelanders usually focus on individual families of settlers in that young North Atlantic country,
As their name implies, the legendary sagas include elements common to tales of the fantastic—heroes battling monsters, the curses of evil witches, and so on—but often inserted into stories that nonetheless bear some connection to known history.
The sagas anchored people in time and gave them a link to the past—to what Tolkien again called “that sense of perspective, of antiquity with a greater and yet darker antiquity behind”.
They were warlike people in conflicted times, and their ideologies were also to a marked degree underpinned by the supernatural empowerment of violence. This could take extreme forms, manifested in such horrors as ritual rape, wholesale slaughter and enslavement, and human sacrifice. We should not read the Vikings backwards from our own time, but anyone who regards them in a ‘heroic’ light needs to think again.
Conventional studies of the Vikings tend to be organised regionally, preserving the artificial notions of ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ arenas of activity that are actually just scholarly legacies of the Cold War, with its more-or-less impermeable barrier stretching across Europe.
This question of reality is important because the Vikings did not believe in these things any more than someone today ‘believes in’ the sea.
In the Viking mind, these worlds were all other places for other inhabitants, but ordered and connected in a manner that made them accessible if you knew the right paths to take.
At the most fundamental level of all, inside every Viking-Age person was not just some abstract ‘soul’ (if that is to your spiritual taste) but several separate and even independent beings. Each one was a component of the whole individual.
This idea of being inside the wall, as distinct from what is beyond and therefore outside one’s control, is at the core of Viking-Age concepts of settlement and order. It is an insight into their way of thinking.
Outside the great monotheistic faiths, we have somehow become accustomed to divinities being gods of something, sole personifications of the weather, the harvest, the hunt, and the like. This is not true for the Aesir and Vanir, as many of them embodied several things at the same time, often overlapping with each other in their interests and activities (rather like us, in fact).
For the Viking-Age Scandinavians, fate did not represent the absence of choice but rather the manifestation of a pre-existing truth.
Conceived as a container for other aspects of the person, the hamr was the physical manifestation of what somebody was, but, crucially, it could alter. This is where the concept of shape-changing comes from, in the sense that the actual structures of the body were believed to flow and shift.
Inside the ‘shape’ of a person was the second part of their being, the hugr, for which no modern translation really suffices. Combining elements of personality, temperament, character, and especially mind, the hugr was who someone really was, the absolute essence of you, free of all artifice or surface affect.
Rome’s slow fall created unpredictable consequences that, centuries later, led to the rise of the Vikings.
In the late 400s and the first half of the 500s, and especially towards the middle of the century, there is a remarkably steep decline in the number of settlements, graves, and, indeed, most other markers of human activity.
in the years 536 and 539/540, there occurred at least two volcanic eruptions of almost unprecedented magnitude.
Current (2019) estimates suggest a temporary temperature drop of perhaps three and a half degrees Celsius. In Norway, where only 3 percent of the land is suitable for farming in the first place, this would have been enough to render significant parts of the country uninhabitable through the collapse of viable cereal cultivation.
The situation in Scandinavia seems to have been so bad that it left a mark on religion itself, in what scholars call geomythology, whereby natural events and disasters are given meaning through their articulation in sacred tales.
c. 550–750, the two centuries that led into the Viking Age. Terminologies vary; in Norway the Vendel Period is known as the Merovingian, while in Denmark it is combined with the Migration Period as the Germanic Iron Age.
The latest suggestion, and a convincing one, is that in the sixth to eighth centuries the North actually formed the western terminus of the Silk Roads that ultimately stretched to Tang China, to Silla and the North-South States in Korea, and in the eighth century to Nara Japan.
The utilisation of the outlands from the sixth century onwards thus acted as a sort of experimental training ground for the larger mercantile expansion that would come to characterise the Viking Age. The difference is that in the pre-Viking period it seems the trade largely came to Scandinavia,
Viking men arriving in England combed their hair every day, washed once a week, regularly changed their clothes, and “drew attention to themselves by many such frivolous whims”—behaviour so astonishing that the English women preferred them to their husbands.
The Vikings were also certainly familiar with what would today be called queer identities. These extended across a broad spectrum that went far beyond the conventional binaries of biological sex, and even across the frontiers of what we would call human.
There is a sense of an outdoor realm for men, while women’s domain was inside the dwelling, but both these spheres were perceived as places of genuine power and authority.
There are, broadly speaking, two forms of the Scandinavian runic alphabet, known as the older and younger futhark after the combination of its initial letters. The earlier series had twenty-four signs. The later version, which flourished in the Viking Age, was shorter at sixteen signs, but reused letters from its predecessor:
Put another way, it is one thing to understand how the Vikings thought about their gods and all the other (super)natural beings of the nine worlds that made up the Norse cosmos, but what did they do about it?
Now I have walked between the worlds I have seen the fires circling.
The conventional view sees an initial period of sporadic raiding from c. 789 to 805, and then a focussed shift to targets in Ireland and Scotland until 834, before the rise of true Viking armies with overwintering campaigns after that date.
In poetry, the English called them wælwulfas, ‘slaughter-wolves’, and with good reason—but the Vikings even said it themselves.
maritoria, a form of power that combined the aspirations of petty kings with the control of territory, closely connected to a new form of market, and all linked by a relationship with the sea.
This reorientation, from networks of redistribution and gift exchange to more disembedded trade, was not an isolated development. The new mercantile horizons of Scandinavia were a reflection of a general north-west European phenomenon: the resurgence of the post-Roman economy with an international platform.
These beach emporia and markets—sites such as Hedeby and Birka—were manifestations of the changing economic history of post-Roman Europe, as it was rewritten by upwardly mobile societies. In the new academic vocabulary, they are seen as ‘nodal points’ in international networks, connecting different petty kingdoms and allowing them to trade as peers.
As regional trading places, they could also act as intermediaries for the wider distribution of goods from the bigger markets. In the same way, all the major coastal and riverine installations not only served the primary maritime trade, but also acted as connectors—gateways, as economic historians term them—into the overland mercantile routes of the interior.
The markets and bazaars were ethnic melting pots, filled with a babble of languages that was probably smoothed out in the lingua franca of trade.
The sea-kings were critical to the beginnings of the Viking Age in the West, and their attempts to expand their power along the whole coastal ribbon form the political backdrop to the raids.
As Viking-Age culture also included the institution of concubinage, on a similarly male-dominant basis and in addition to the possibility of having multiple wives, this biased the ratios still further. Even when accounting for sexual orientation and preference, and the fact that illicit relationships could occur, the conclusion is still inescapable: potentially very large numbers of Viking-Age men could not hope to marry or find partners at home.
In the year 834, Dorestad, the wealthy emporium at the fork of the Rhine about one hundred kilometres from the Dutch coast, was attacked and burnt, apparently by a force from Denmark. It was an astonishing move—this was no monastery or isolated community, but one of the most important places in the trading networks of northern Europe. This would be like physically assaulting one of today’s great financial hubs. The Vikings slaughtered at will and took shiploads of slaves. The surrounding region was devastated. The same was to happen every single summer for the next four years,
The real catalyst for the surge in Viking activity was civil war in Frankia—the Carolingian Empire named after its founder, Charlemagne. In 840, his successor, the emperor Louis the Pious, died. The turbulent relations between Louis’s three surviving sons, barely kept in check during the emperor’s declining years, boiled over on his death.
Even God was enlisted in the struggle, as seen in an antiphonal (a piece of music for a church service) made for use in the imperial chapel of Charles the Bald, which records a prayer sung for protection against the raids: de gente fera Normannica nos libera, quae nostra vastat, Deus, regna: “Grant us freedom, Lord, from the wild Northern people who lay waste our realms”.
It was not until 862 that Charles the Bald, having achieved a modicum of stability in his kingdom, was able to organise sustained resistance in the form of an innovation that had instant and practical effect. He ordered the construction of fortified bridges across the main arterial rivers, controlling access along their passage by leaving only small openings blocked by moveable barriers and chains.
hydrarchy’, which was expanded in the eighteenth century to become a general label for the revolutionary fulcrum of dangerously radical social ideas represented by the Atlantic maritime community. The situation the term tries to capture is one in which there are no overall leaders with whom to negotiate (there was never a pirate monarch, which was part of the point), no state structures to oppose, and indeed no formal organisation to fight.
Over time, the diaspora can foster a collective memory, even myth-making, about the notion of ‘home’, which can also become idealised.
In time, a new kind of society would develop along the riverine routes to the south, an ethnic conglomerate that evolved as a manifestation of the trading life. Known as the Rus’, these were the people from whose name the modern ‘Russia’ derives.
Over time, the sense of the word clearly changed, from what was originally perhaps a workaday description to an all-embracing ethnonym for the river traders—and, crucially, for the men who backed their ventures with armed muscle. What is fascinating is how the idea of the Rus’ became associated with a specific identity of mercantile water travel in the East.
In other words, even if people prove elusive to locate, it may be possible to track the presence of the domesticated species and parasites that moved with them.
Archaeologists have calculated that by the early eleventh century, the total sailcloth requirements of the warships, cargo vessels, and fishing boats of Norway and Denmark would have amounted to around one million square metres—in other words, the annual production of some two million sheep.
When the pastoral economy of millions of sheep is combined with the enormous demands of managed woodland, with the aim of turning these raw materials into finished products, one further resource inevitably springs to mind: the need for labour on a truly massive scale.
In the West, three areas above all show the lasting effects of Scandinavian migrations and political contact, ranging from among the earliest of their overseas ventures to the latest: the maritime worlds of Scotland and the Northern Isles of Orkney and Shetland, the Irish Sea, and the Channel coasts of Frankia.
