Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

by Neil Price

Around the jetties at Birka and Hedeby, in particular, archaeologists have found dozens of broken-off brushes with heads of rags and textiles, thickly coated with the tar into which they were presumably dipped just before a careless stroke snapped the shaft and sent it all into the water, where they would be discovered a thousand years later.

If you stroll through the cemeteries of the Viking Age today, unthreateningly gentle landscapes of grass-covered mounds that can make a nice place for a picnic, you might do well to recall Angantyr’s island and its night-time terrors of funeral fire, open graves at the gates of Hel.

When the thief digs down through the mound, he first cuts through the roof timbers and then falls into a foul-smelling space below, landing among horse bones at one end of a chamber. Stumbling forward and groping about in the dark, he feels the back of a chair, and then the shoulder of someone sitting in it—who then gets up and… Go read the saga.

He was laid out in a coffin with a massive candle placed on the top, alight, that continued to burn in the dark until all the oxygen in the closed chamber had gone.

At their most immediate, on the spot, on the day, for many the raids were the most bitter of endings. Behind every notation on our maps lay an urgent present of panic and terror, of slashing blades and sharp points, of sudden pain and open wounds; of bodies by the wayside, and orphaned children; of women raped and all manner of people enslaved; of entire family lines ending in blood; of screams and then silence where there should be lively noise; of burning buildings and ruin; of economic loss; of religious convictions overturned in a moment and replaced with humiliation and rage; of roads choked with refugees as columns of smoke rose behind them. Of utter, ruthless brutality, expressed in all its forms.

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.

Hvalsey church is surprisingly well-preserved today, surrounded by the tumbled stones of the settlers’ farms with the water stretching away in front. Exactly six hundred years to the day after the wedding, in September 2008, I was with a group of Viking scholars visiting the spot to mark this distant anniversary. In a curious and moving echo, we were accompanied by a descendant of the original couple. The clouds were low and grey, icebergs dotted the fjord, and on the way in a whale had surfaced close to the boat. It was a forbidding and lonely place, the ruined church roofless and open to a dark sky.

A person born in Denmark could have cruised with Vikings through the waters of Frankia and fought on the Seine beneath the burning walls of Paris, before heading out for the Midgard Sea from a base on the Loire. They could have passed the great rock at its entrance and plundered all the way to—just possibly—Alexandria, and back. Think of the tales, the stories told in the taverns of Europe, of the dazzling mosque of Córdoba and of the stone gods with animal heads in the delta of the Nile.

One individual from the later Viking Age can stand for them all, here at the end, someone we have already met. Shortly after the year 1000, Gudríd Thorbjarnardóttir coasted the shores of Helluland and Markland before landing in Vinland with her husband, Thorfinn karlsefni, and their crew. They were probably not the first Norse visitors and likely followed the path taken by others before them. Gudríd was pregnant, and while in Vinland, she gave birth to the first European child born in North America (and how appropriate to future history that he should be called Snorri). She had already come a long way, of Norwegian family from Iceland via Greenland, and from one set of beliefs to the new faith. She met First Nations people, and later—making a pilgrimage to Rome—she would almost certainly meet the pope; she had eaten wild grapes in Vinland, and she would taste Mediterranean wines under the Italian sun. By the time she reached old age as a Christian nun in Iceland, Gudríd was probably the most travelled woman on the planet.