Vikings (13 page)

By the time there were authors sympathetic to the adventures of the Vikings, hundreds of years had passed since their first appearance. Their output is known collectively as the ‘Icelandic sagas’, stories written down in the Old Norse language between the middle of the twelfth century and the beginning of the fifteenth. There are dozens of them – recounting the deeds of heroes and kings and detailing important events that unfolded during the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. The lives and times of the kings of Norway are prominent, as too are the experiences and exploits of important families living in Iceland. The earliest were written down by churchmen – some Norwegian, but more usually Icelandic – and are preoccupied with the business of the Church and the saints. It is the later saga authors who turned their attentions to warriors, kings and battles, and their writing style reveals they must have been of an altogether more secular frame of mind.

The classic sagas were written to appeal to their audiences – and are therefore as prone to bias as any other document, perhaps even more so. More problematic than the lack of objectivity, however, is the simple fact that their authors were working hundreds of years after many of the historical events contained within them had taken place. Sometimes they drew upon earlier sources that have since been lost, while others depended on word of mouth and on stories handed down verbally through several generations. Copies of copies of copies . . . the risk of Chinese whispers – not to mention the entirely human temptation to embellish events and reorder chronologies for dramatic effect – makes the Icelandic sagas a source that must be treated with caution as well as respect. They are wonderful, just the same.

Despite the necessary caveats, the sagas are just too good, and
too valuable, to be dismissed out of hand. According to Viking specialist Else Roesdahl, any account of the Vikings’ lives and times would be ‘meagre indeed’ without reference to them: ‘Although the historical framework and the chronology may be distorted or wrong, and although additions may have been made for literary or other reasons, many sagas, if read as the literary works they are, undoubtedly contain as much of the reality of the Viking Age as anything that can be reconstructed today,’ she writes. ‘The sagas were closer to the events, and were produced in an age whose ideals and outlook on life were in many ways akin to those of the Viking Age.’

Just as the search for Vikings is clouded by myth and prejudice, so the trail leading to the
start
of the Viking Age is confusing in its own right. The evidence for their ancestors – the distant forebears of those who would be Vikings – is slight, so that recreating and understanding their world is fraught with difficulty. The millennia we have looked at so far seem populated only by a handful of characters, each made famous by his or her unlikely survival in the face of so much else that has been lost, or else waits to be found. The hunter-gatherers of Stone Age Ertebølle and Tybrind Vig; the heart-stopping tenderness revealed by the graves at Vedbæk; the mysterious and seemingly far-travelled lord of Kivik; the startling preservation of Bronze Age Egtved Girl, Trindhoj Man and the family from Borum Eshøj; the human sacrifices of the Iron Age, Tollund Man and Huldremose Woman; the Iron Age villagers of Hodde; the ill-fated warriors of the Hjortspring Boat, the Hoby chieftain with his Roman friends – each of them fascinating and yet together hardly enough to fill the seats on a single-decker bus.

It is this paucity of evidence that makes it so important to consider the wider world of which the Scandinavian tribes were a part in those years before the Viking Age. Our view of the most northerly territories at that time is one made of shadows
and fragmentary glimpses. It helps therefore to remember they were always part of a busy, dynamic world. If they lived a relatively sheltered life in the backwaters until the first millennium
AD
, then it seems to me vitally important to keep in mind the rising tide of population elsewhere.

By the time Rome was encroaching upon the territories of the tribes in the far north – as well as the lands of their restless, populous neighbours around the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea – the hitherto mysterious figures in Denmark, Norway and Sweden had come to the end of whatever isolation they had ever enjoyed.

With its standing army – and, after 261
BC
, its navy – the will of Rome was hard to resist. Soon the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea – they called it
Mare Nostrum
, our sea – were either Roman or in Rome’s sights. Yet, dominant though they undoubtedly were, the Romans were hardly the only players.

The peoples that would in time be known as Celts (to archaeologists and historians, if not to themselves) emerged in central and northern Europe sometime after 500
BC
. Around the same time there were Iberians on the southern and eastern coastlines of the peninsula of the same name, and Thracians – sometime allies of the Trojans – on territory occupied today by parts of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.

For the most part it is a litany of lost names, of whole peoples largely forgotten by history, or at least hard to see in the darkness of the long shadow cast by superstars like Greece, Rome and Carthage. Among the Iberians were the Airenosi and the Andosini; the Bastetani and the Bergistani; the Castellani and the Contestani; the Edetani and the Iacetani; the Laietani, the Oretani, the Sedetani and the Turdetani. Their descendants are still with us of course, among the peoples of Portugal and Spain, but they were swallowed whole long ago.

By the turn of the millennium there were yet more characters
readying themselves to pour in from the wings. As the centuries
AD
progressed, the Germanic barbarians in the north provided strident interludes from time to time, as did the nomads riding and walking out of the eastern steppes, and plenty of others besides.

Always there was Rome, however – sometimes subdued but never silenced. Between
AD
117 and 138 Emperor Hadrian adopted a policy of securing the boundaries of empire. Rather than seeking to push ever outwards, he preferred to consolidate his demesne. It was in
AD
122 that work began on the great white wall across Britain that would bear his name. (Emperor Antoninus Pius would push further north during the 140s, commissioning work on his own barrier, the Antonine Wall, in
AD
142, but within 20 years it was accepted that Hadrian’s Wall was indeed the northern limit of Roman ambitions on the island.)

And all the while Rome strove to impose a peace of sorts – with varying degrees of success – a new glacier was on the move. It was made of people and it could not be stopped. Beyond the imperial frontiers the barbarian populations were growing, and it was the strife of overcrowding that left people no option but to push back against whatever barricades Rome might seek to build. The restless folk movements severed trade and exchange networks – east and west, north and south – that had connected disparate peoples for millennia. Europe was being reorganised, shuffled like a deck of cards. The Romans absorbed as many bellicose foreigners as possible into their army, as auxiliaries, and whole tribes were invited to settle lands within the Empire. But as the third century
AD
progressed the story of Europe was about what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

Despite Roman efforts, more and more peoples pressed against the frontiers or spilled over them, looking for space in
which to live and breathe. On the North Sea coast there were the Angles and Saxons, who would in time turn their attentions west towards Britain. In southern Germany were the Alamanni, a loose agglomeration of many different tribes; the Franks were making their presence felt for the first time in territory that would one day take their name – France. Elsewhere, and as land-hungry as the rest, were Goths and Vandals.

Rome’s fortunes waxed and waned, largely dependent upon the skill and vision of her leaders. Diocletian, an able soldier, was made emperor in
AD
284 and quickly accepted the job was too big for any one man. He split the whole into two: a western empire ruled from Rome and an eastern empire centred on the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, modern-day Istanbul. Each had its own emperor: Diocletian in the east and Maximian, also a soldier, in the west. To spread the load yet further, each emperor had a
Caesar
as second in command and heir apparent.

This, then, was the Rome that made and developed contacts with the peoples of Scandinavia from the first century
AD
onwards – an empire fighting to retain control of the core, while at the same time increasingly embattled or harassed on multiple fronts. From their lofty heights, at the top of the world, the Scandinavians looked downwards and outwards at a hectic Europe, thronged with peoples hungry for land and resources. As well as trade and exchange with Rome – an empire keener than ever to curry favour with any potential allies – there were also goods and luxury items to be swapped with the neighbours.

In contrast to the tumult gripping much of Europe at this time, life in the far north was relatively stable. The disruption of the trade routes that had connected them to the south and east enforced a degree of isolation that served to insulate Scandinavia from much of the chaos. The climatic deterioration of the Early Iron Age was past as well, and across southern Scandinavia were scattered numerous prosperous villages of
longhouses, surrounded by fields used for a mix of arable and animal farming. There is even evidence of animal husbandry being practised by communities north of the Arctic Circle at this time.

The volume and variety of Roman imports into Denmark, as well as parts of southern Norway and Sweden, increased steadily during the early centuries
AD
. As usual, a great deal of it wound up in the hands, and especially the graves, of the elite. While the Bronze Age had been dominated by those able to gain control of just one luxury material, Iron Age Scandinavia was increasingly in thrall to those in a position to take advantage of the new range of imports available from the south.

At Himlingoje on the Danish island of Sjælland archaeologists found a cemetery of graves furnished with rich collections of grave goods. Many were found to contain Roman weapons and horse-riding equipment. In the grave of a woman there were high-status Roman items together with the very best locally crafted objects – all of it dated to the early part of the third century
AD
.

At Hedegaard on the Jutland peninsula archaeologists were called in to investigate land about to be disturbed by the construction of a new gas pipeline. What they unearthed there was an Iron Age settlement occupied both before and during the time of contact with Rome. Perhaps most exciting of all was the discovery of a cemetery containing 200 graves of people laid to rest between the end of the first century
BC
and the first century
AD
. While the earlier graves contained cremations – evidence of commitment to older traditions – those buried during Roman times were dominated by inhumations of the whole body.

Accompanying one of the later burials was what initially appeared as no more than a large lump of corrosion. Closer examination, however, followed by careful conservation,
revealed a pair of iron shears – exactly like those used centuries later for clipping sheep’s fleeces in the years before the advent of electricity – a small iron knife about nine inches long and an unusual iron lance head. All were Roman in style but the prize of the collection was a large Roman dagger of a distinctive sort, known as a
pugio.
The dagger had been buried alongside, but not inside, its own highly decorated iron sheath. Clearly these had once been among the possessions of a Roman legionary; but through the process of trade and exchange they had found their way into the grave of an important member of Iron Age Danish society.

Another grave contained several small items of bronze jewellery but also a spiral of thick gold wire and two large beads of solid gold. The smaller of the two weighed 19 carats, the larger 23 carats – and both were clearly once among the possessions of a rich, high-status individual.

Elsewhere in the cemetery was a grave altogether more in keeping with our expectations of Scandinavian people. Though reduced by time and the processes of decay to no more than an impression in the soil, one of the Hedegaard graves contained a boat burial. The oak-built craft, long gone but clearly identifiable nonetheless, had been 10 feet long by around two to three feet wide.

Hedegaard had been home to a community whose leaders learnt to covet and enjoy the status symbols available to those with connections both to the Roman Empire and to their nearer neighbours in northern Europe. Farming intensified during those first centuries of the new millennium, producing surplus for trade, and there was, as always, an appetite, throughout Europe and even further east, for the natural resources of the north.

Commodities moving in the other direction – from southern and central Europe towards the northern coastlines – followed
two distinct routes. One was via the Elbe and Rhine rivers to the North Sea, from where ships and boats could depart for journeys along the western seaboard of Denmark and then onwards to the Atlantic coast of Norway. The alternative route followed the Oder and Vistula rivers to the Baltic coast, from where it was a relatively short hop to the island of Gotland. Ideally located in the heart of the Baltic, Gotland was the perfect distribution point for goods headed for Sweden.

Many archaeologists are of the opinion that it was during the centuries of the Roman Iron Age that the leaders of some powerful families in Scandinavia began to exert their authority over more than just secular concerns. Towards the end of the period it seems some of the chieftains were also positioning themselves as the intermediaries between the world of men and the world of the gods and goddesses.

A farming settlement was established at Gudme, towards the eastern side of the Danish island of Fyn, sometime in the first century
BC
, and occupation there continued for over 500 years. During that time the village grew both in terms of size and prosperity until, by the end of the fourth century
AD
, it was clearly an important centre and home to some powerful and wealthy individuals.