Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

by Neil Price

A central concept, found in the medieval laws of Norway and Sweden and much disputed as to its possible Viking-Age origins, was the óðal, or allodium. If a parcel of land had been owned by members of the same family for a longer period of time (six generations was the convention), their heirs had an inalienable right to it, and sale to others was blocked. One interesting effect of this was to protect the inheritance rights of daughters, who could keep the land over the rights of male relatives outside the immediate family.

There is a curious sense in which the very notion of a Norse religion may actually be in part a Christian product. This seems contradictory at first, but has parallels in other cultures where incoming missionaries attempted to supplant traditional beliefs with a regulated church. Something codified, organised, and effectively systemic (everything Norse belief was not) is much easier to oppose, because it is a coherent target and might be suppressed as a single entity. And if this was not already there, then it could be formed in that image. This was the beginning of the process that eventually turned the living, organic story-world of the North into ‘the Norse myths’—a kind of pagan scripture that never actually existed. It does not help that the Christians also seem to have misunderstood much of what they encountered and, in turn, incorporated their misconceptions into the retrospective pagan orthodoxy they created.

Reviewing the national registers of ancient monuments, some twenty-eight thousand cemeteries are known from the period from 100 to 1000 CE in Sweden and Norway, of which perhaps half date to the Viking Age. To this one must add Denmark, and then Iceland, Greenland, the Faroes, and the colonies in occupied territories across the rest of the diaspora. Together this represents a number of individual burials in the low millions, presenting a ‘big data’ challenge all its own in terms of analysis and interpretation. This is a task to which archaeology is not yet fully equal.

The first thing he noticed was that the funeral preparations were so elaborate as to require a full ten days following the man’s death. During that time his body was interred in a temporary grave—with temporary grave-goods, including food, drink, and a musical instrument; there is a strong suggestion that all this is intended for his entertainment pending the final funeral, and thus that the dead man is somehow aware. The same ten-day period sees continuous festivities in the Rus’ camp, involving music, sex, and heavy drinking; almost the entire band is perpetually drunk. Special burial clothes are also made for the dead chieftain, on which no less than a third of his wealth is spent (this has worrying implications for the archaeologist, in that these things are made for the grave). Another third of his wealth goes to the brewing of appropriate quantities of alcohol, while only the remaining third is inherited by his heirs. All these proceedings are presided over by a middle-aged woman, heavy set and angry, whose title (as ibn Fad.lān understood it through his interpreter) means the ‘Angel of Death’. This is interesting in that the term in the text is Malak al-Mawt, the Quranic angel whose purpose is to choose the dead and take them to their assigned places—it may not be coincidence that this is very close to what might be said or understood if someone was trying to translate ‘Valkyrie’ into Arabic. Around the ship, which has been propped up on shore using timbers carved l...

Ibn Fad.lān describes a ten-day funeral at the end of which it all seems to hinge on a naked man, who is the only one to approach the pyre, taking precautions as he does so. He seems to expect something to be active in there; in protecting all the openings of his body, it seems that he believes it can move. The moment he lights the funeral fire, it is apparently safe, and everyone comes forward to add a burning torch to the conflagration.

If later folklore can be believed, the family dead were also invited to important festivals among the living—notably the celebration of jul, or Yuletide. Elaborate meals would be made for them and set out on the table at night, the scene illuminated by specially made candles. This dinner would be preceded by a bastu, a rural wood-fired sauna in a cabin still very common in the Nordic countryside even today, in which the steam-filled room would be prepared and then emptied for the dead to cleanse themselves before eating.

places like Gotland, where at least one silver hoard has been found on almost every farm, this cannot be the only explanation: it is simply not credible that virtually all homeowners concealed their family cash in the backyard and then died before telling anyone about it.

Sessrúmnir, ‘Seat-Room’, was “large and beautiful”, according to Snorri, and it does seem that this was truly a parallel Valhöll. In one poem the goddess is even called Valfreyja, ‘Freyja of the Slain’, a similar formulation to that of the Valkyries themselves. This tallies with a passage in the Eddic poem Grímnir’s Sayings where Odin clearly states that each day Freyja chooses half of the slain, and that she does so first, while he ‘has’ the other half. Fólkvangr means ‘field of the host’, a kind of supernatural parade ground, where the poems claim the goddess decides who shall sit on the benches of her hall. Freyja’s role as a deity of war is often overlooked.

These fantasies are fun to entertain, but this really was a world of genuine opportunity. 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. Interactions operated at two levels of institution. In formal terms, mercantile exchange must have been bounded by jurisdictions, regulations, codes of conduct, and laws. Informally, these were shot through with the expectations of equally local traditions, cultural norms, ritual observations, and so on. Perhaps the most fundamental of all was the provision of a secure environment where all this could take place—a market wholly without guards would not last long. The currencies of these exchanges were furs, silver, and slaves—a trinity that would repeat for centuries.

The Icelandic family sagas speak vividly of the disaffection among many of the Norwegians, who were unhappy with the new royal order that drew more and more power to itself—at the expense of the agricultural class. In the retrospective (and surely biased) history of the medieval saga-writers, these independent-minded landowners were some of the key movers behind the decision to settle a new colony in the North Atlantic, and establish the republic of free farmers that would become Iceland.

One of the most enduring components of the Viking myth can be found in the berserkers—the frenzied warriors who fought naked, consumed with uncontrollable fury while out of their minds on mushrooms. This is, as they say, a truth with modification. There is no doubt that the berserkir were a Viking-Age reality, but almost every other aspect of their nature is open to interpretation. The word itself refers to a shirt (serk) with either a bear- or bare- prefix, thus giving an image either of an ursine warrior or a man shirtless in the sense of being unarmoured or even naked.

Again, it is worth pausing to reflect on this. Less than a century earlier, perhaps a few dozen men ran up a beach to burn the monastery at Lindisfarne in an attack that was probably over in less than a day. At Paris, a fleet of thousands of Vikings, in hundreds of ships, besieged one of the greatest cities of Europe for a year, and fought pitched battles with the best soldiers the Empire could field. The speed and scale of the escalation is breathtaking.

The presence of women is particularly telling, and here there is also supporting evidence from beyond the camps. A comprehensive analysis of female jewellery of Scandinavian design, recovered with metal detectors throughout eastern England, suggests there were very large numbers of women wearing foreign fashions in the Danelaw. It does not seem that the brooches and other items were all imported, but rather were made to Scandinavian taste using partly local materials. Of course, the iconography of jewellery is not the same as ethnicity, and anyone can wear a brooch—is this indicative of ‘Danish fashion’ becoming popular (or even advisable) in an area under Scandinavian control? This was tested through a DNA survey, and a strong Scandinavian signature was found—in other words, there really were numerous foreign women in these areas. The numbers of individuals involved are startling in themselves: at a conservative guess up to thirty to fifty thousand Scandinavian immigrants of both sexes may have arrived over the three decades following the establishment of the Danelaw. This is a revolutionary conclusion.

The logistics of this system were complex. As the fur trade declined after about 860 or so (it may not be coincidence that this is when Rurik was supposed to have assumed control at Ladoga), there emerged on the eastern rivers what economic historians call ‘high-power money’. This is a currency (that does not have to be literally coinage) with a value that is universally regarded to be more stable than the alternatives. In today’s world, the US dollar widely holds such a position, but for the Viking-Age river trade, it was silver. For most of the ninth century, the source of silver was the mines and mints of the Abbasid Caliphate in today’s Middle East. Importantly, so long as the standard was agreed upon, silver did not even have to be universally available, although there hardly seems to have been a shortage of dirham coins for much of the period.

The first Viking attacks on Spain are recorded as taking place during the mid-ninth century. Having sailed south in 844 from their base at Noirmoutier at the mouth of the Loire, a large Viking fleet conducted raids along the northern Iberian coast before heading south into Muslim territory. The Scandinavians sacked targets in what is now Portugal and southern Spain, including Lisbon, Cadiz, and Algeciras, before turning to enter the Guadalquivir River. Their eventual target may have been Córdoba itself, but in their path first lay the city of Seville. The subsequent assault is documented by Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad al-Rāzī, who tells us of the seven days that raiders spent sacking the city, killing the men, and enslaving the women and children. As word spread into the surrounding countryside, the emir, ’Abd a-Raḥmān, mustered a large army and marched to meet the Viking force, which was now ensconced on the Isla Menor. The Vikings were drawn out of their camp and the city by decoy troops who led them to Tablada, some two miles south of Seville, where they were ambushed and slaughtered by the bulk of the Muslim army. The surviving members of the Viking force fled to their ships and departed, leaving thirty vessels behind, while the dead were hung from the palm trees of Seville.

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. In some cases, traces of them at a certain place and time are suggestive of a larger event. One such study has mapped the presence of the common house mouse, especially those with a particular genetic signature associated with Denmark, in different areas of Europe. Tenth- or eleventh-century mouse bones of this species—which at that date are only found in places where Vikings had travelled—have now been confirmed from Madeira. There is no written record of a Viking presence there, but the brief landing of a Danish ship is the only explanation that fits, and it would not be geographically surprising. For a culture so fixated on memory, on the legacy of achievement, how ironic it is that the only trace of ‘Viking Madeira’ should be a mouse.

According to the written sources, the Norse settlement of Iceland—the so-called landnám, or land-taking—occurred somewhere around 870. The first to stay were supposedly exiles who refused to live under the rule of the Norwegian king Harald Finehair, the most successful of the west-coast sea-kings. Until recently, this was largely supported by a form of scientific analysis that in the Viking world is unique to Iceland, in that the horizontal deposits of volcanic tephra resulting from the island’s frequent eruptions can be closely dated, very usefully if they happen to seal archaeological remains. For a long time, all known evidence for the settlement of the country post-dated a layer of tephra that fell in 871, plus or minus two years.

In the Hebrides, despite more than a millennium of earlier Celtic occupation, there are no non-Norse place-names at all. This suggests a total break without any continuity of habitation, and provides disturbing support for the theory of total population removal or replacement. In the Scottish islands as a whole, there is a high proportion of female genetic lineages shared with Norway, implying that Scandinavian women eventually settled in large numbers.

The Viking fleets began to return in the early years of the tenth century, bigger and now also driven by what seems to have been a lack of targets in the rest of Europe—there was not much mileage in Scandinavians attacking England, Ireland, or the Scottish isles unless it was in direct alliance with their countryfolk who were already there. In Frankia, the new raids were much more focussed than before and hit the estuary of the Seine repeatedly. The situation grew so quickly unstable that, following a battle at Chartres in 911, the Frankish king, Charles the Simple, was forced to negotiate with the Vikings, and in the process made a fatal mistake that was to shape his nation even down to our own times. In some desperation, and with considerable lack of foresight, Charles granted the Scandinavians a swathe of territory in what was then called Neustria, along the northern coast of the kingdom facing England. Because of its new overlords, it would soon gain a new name, one that it has kept to the present day: Nordmannia, ‘the land of the Northmen’, the province we call Normandy.

From the mid-tenth century onwards, many of the Scandinavians who made the journey south arrived in Constantinople seeking employment in the armies of the Byzantine Empire. In time, the emperors’ personal bodyguard would come to consist almost entirely of Scandinavian warriors. This so-called Varangian Guard was named after the Old Norse word for an oath, vár (as in the English ‘vow’). Identifiable by their characteristic battle-axes (and famed for their drinking), the guard was constituted in the late tenth century and remained dominated by Scandinavians for a hundred years, until increasing numbers of English exiles began to join in the wake of the Norman conquest.

There are also runestones that confirm Scandinavians were making pilgrimages to Jerusalem in the eleventh century, which is also recorded in the Icelandic sagas. This would have been a truly enormous undertaking, and hardly represents the actions of people with only a limited understanding of their faith.

Svein threw his whole army against London (the famous nursery rhyme, ‘London Bridge is falling down’, is supposedly a memory of the Viking attack on the strategic link across the Thames). The city surrendered. One consequence, after years of raids, was that the people had lost confidence in their leaders, especially the king, Aethelred, and as a result the English monarchy collapsed. The royal family escaped abroad.