Authors: Neil Oliver
It is the thought of those land-locked boats I find most affecting of all. Each of the honoured dead was supplied with weaponry and armour made by the most skilled craftsmen of the age. There were cooking vessels too, cauldrons and drinking glasses for feasting, hunting gear and the horses and dogs to make the hunt possible in the next world. But somehow the beautifully crafted vessels, revealed in the main by iron rivets and shadows in the soil, are the most loaded portents. Central to the thinking of these people was the boat journey – in life as in death. Where else could they go, but out into the wider world?
The very existence of a class able to contemplate such an afterlife – confident of their control over both the resources and the dependent population willing to generate the necessary surplus – suggests stability. The boats in which the best of them chose to be buried should also be interpreted as symbols of power. Wealth was based in large part upon control of trade and in such a world it was the people in possession of the boats (and their crews) who called the shots.
Across Scandinavia archaeologists have identified around 1,500 fortified sites from the pre-Viking era. The majority remain unexcavated and therefore difficult to date, but those
that have been subjected to excavation began life during the fourth and fifth centuries, while much of Europe was in the grip of the Migration Period. At first glance such places might seem to suggest turbulent times. But archaeologists and historians have come to see the forts as the hubs of an organised and largely peaceful society.
By the time of the Vendel Period some of those centres were at the heart of wide-ranging, long-distance trade. In the years immediately prior to the Viking Age a settlement on the small island of Helgö, offshore from Ekerö on Lake Mälaren, was a thriving trading centre. In many ways it is an unremarkable site – the buildings were of the size and sort expected of any agricultural settlement in post-Roman Iron Age Scandinavia and the graves in the nearby cemetery contained only modest grave goods. But excavation has revealed the population living in Helgö was unusually busy making jewellery and decorative items of all sorts, as well as swords, tools and other domestic objects. Along with traces of the finished items themselves, archaeologists have recovered hundreds of the crucibles used for weighing and measuring metals, as well as moulds for casting them.
More exciting however are the imported items, which reveal contacts far and wide. More than 80 gold coins have been unearthed, including a hoard of 47 collected from territories in both the Eastern and Western Roman empires.
Archaeologists also found a little trio of objects that are known collectively as the Helgö treasure. Perhaps the most surprising is a three-inch-tall bronze Buddha, seated on a lotus throne. It may well have been made as far away as North India, in either the sixth or the seventh century, and yet it was somehow passed from merchant to merchant all the way to a little island in a Swedish lake. The rich green patina of age gives it the look not of metal but of jade, and close inspection reveals it was
once richly detailed – blue crystal for the eyes, flashes of colour on the lips and eyebrows, a caste mark on the forehead containing silver. Like all statues of Buddha, the face is softened by that familiar, inscrutable smile.
Next is the beautifully crafted and richly inlaid bronze headpiece of a bishop’s crozier, likely made in Ireland in the eighth century and taking the form of a monstrous beast swallowing a cowering man. It has been interpreted as depicting Jonah in the belly of the whale – symbolic of resurrection or rebirth. It is surprisingly small, but certainly beautiful; testament to the dedication and skill of yet another anonymous craftsman. You look at it and wonder just how it came to be here, in a museum in Stockholm. Given the likely importance of Helgö, perhaps the crozier arrived there in the hands of the bishop who owned it. In any event its appearance in a village on a Swedish island is as surprising as would be the discovery of a pair of Swedish skis beneath the paved floor of a Thai temple.
Best in my opinion, or most captivating at least, is a bronze Coptic ladle from somewhere in North Africa, perhaps Egypt. The size of a teacup, it has a pleasing, substantial heft in the hands. Like the Buddha it has a rich patina but in this case a much darker green hue, like that of deep water. All three of the items in the treasure are the products of faith, and in the case of the ladle it is that form of Christianity that preceded the advent of Islam into Africa. In its day it would have been used during baptisms, for the pouring of holy water onto the heads of those being welcomed into the Church. It has been dented slightly out of shape at some point in antiquity, but the damage does nothing to lessen its appeal. In fact for me it enhances the attraction. It has the look of something well used, and presumably well loved – connected by its function to hundreds or even thousands of people long dead.
As well as working bronze and iron, and importing gold coins
that could be melted down and recast as jewellery, the people of Helgö exported commodities sourced locally and also brought in from the far north of Scandinavia – animal furs, eiderdown, amber and oils – all of it being gathered at places like Helgö ready for onward transportation to markets south, east and west. In the years both before and after the start of the Viking Age the settlement was a key hub around which revolved a truly international trade network.
There is also evidence at Helgö of the production of little figurines associated with pagan worship, so that the significance of the settlement was enhanced by its role as a spiritual centre. The name Helgö in fact means ‘Holy Island’.
The existence of such places – royal palaces and burial grounds, noble strongholds, centres for the import and export of luxuries, centres of worship – presupposes the presence of the kings and queens themselves.
Monarchs are also enthusiastic about defining and extending the boundaries of their kingdoms and it was during the first half of the eighth century that work got under way in Denmark on the great boundary wall known as the Danevirke. One of the largest ancient defensive structures in northern Europe, it was raised in the borderlands between Denmark and the territories on the southern parts of the Jutland peninsula occupied by Saxons and Slavs. There are no written records detailing why the Danevirke was built, or by whom; but the earliest phases of its construction coincide with a period when a variety of political and military muscles were being flexed. The various lengths of ramparts, ditches and timber revetments stretch the best part of 20 miles and dendrochronology has revealed that the trees used in the building of the earliest parts of it could have been felled no earlier than
AD
737. Charles Martel, ruler of the Franks, went to war with the Saxons in 738. His grandson, Charlemagne, did likewise during the 770s and 780s, eventually
bringing the Saxons to heel and so making neighbours of the Danes.
There are written records of a powerful Danish king called Ongendus, who violently opposed attempts made by Frankish Christians to convert him and his people to the new faith during the early decades of the eighth century. By
AD
808 the Danish King Godfred had occupied the trading port of Hedeby, on the eastern coast of the Jutland peninsula. He went on to destroy the nearby Slavic port of Reric before forcibly transplanting all of its merchants to Hedeby, and commissioned a defensive wall stretching from the Baltic to the North Sea. Efforts are still being made by archaeologists to piece together the dates for the various stretches of the Danevirke, but it is at least fair to imagine its construction was provoked by military and political posturing by powerful individuals in the years either side of the start of the Viking Age.
Kings among the Danes then, and the Svear too, at least as early as the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries. Perhaps it is still too early to imagine a single king of a unified Denmark, far less of a recognisable Sweden, but the leaders of the dominant dynasties – the Ynglinga of the Svear among them – were certainly
kingly
. Norway was always the hardest country of the three, all but impossible for men to subdue and claim as their own, yet even here the archaeology reveals the emergence of elites.
Once the royal dynasties were established, their legitimacy underlined and reinforced by successive generations, opportunities for the personal advancement of other men became increasingly hard to come by. As the handful of kings and queens expanded their territories, those families lacking the clout and wealth to challenge them found they faced a stark choice: either to kowtow and accept the status quo, or seek the wherewithal to change the situation in their favour. If that meant embarking
on hazardous sea journeys in search of the riches that might underwrite a claim on a Scandinavian throne, then so be it.
The
Historia Regum Anglorum
, edited in the main by an English monk called Symeon of Durham, has in it the most vivid account of what happened to the religious community on the tidal island of Lindisfarne in 793 ad:
In the fourth year of King Ethelred, dreadful prodigies terrified the wretched nation of England. For horrible lightning and dragons in the air and fiery flashes were often seen to gleam and fly to and fro; and these signs signified a great famine and the fearful and indescribable slaughter of many men which followed . . . In the same year pagans from the north-eastern regions came with a naval force to Britain like stinging hornets and spread on all sides like dire wolves robbed, tore and slaughtered not only beasts of burden, sheep and oxen but even priests and deacons and companies of monks and nuns. And they came to the church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of holy church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters, many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea.
Symeon of Durham was at work around 1110, and yet for all the passage of time between the events themselves and his own writing, the grief and outrage seem undiminished.
When it comes to considering the Vikings’ spectacular appearance centre-stage, there is something else in the words of Alcuin of York, surely the most famous chronicler of the legendary affront to Christianity, that is of crucial interest. As
well as identifying and accepting the wrath of God, he seems to make it plain no one on the east coast of Britain in the eighth century saw any reason to fear attack from the sea.
Presumably people there were so wrapped up in worrying about strife from their neighbours on land that they had forgotten the sea might one day bring trouble as well. So when Alcuin expressed the shock felt at the
source
of their grief – ‘nor was it thought possible that such an inroad from the sea could be made’ – he highlighted the special impact of the Vikings’
modus operandi:
amphibious assault aboard ships the like of which the western world had not yet seen.
The ship was part of the Scandinavian world for thousands of years before any Viking ever put to sea in one. Even the symmetrical outline of what became known as the ‘dragon ship’ – a long, sleek vessel with upwards-thrusting prows at each end – was popular among the rock artists of the Bronze Age. But during the last couple of centuries before the raids on Britain’s eastern seaboard, ship-builders working in Scandinavia hit upon an innovation that would change everything, pulling the future towards them like a fish hooked on the end of a line.
From their first depictions during the second millennium
BC
up to the early seventh century, Scandinavian ships were without sails. While sails were in use earlier elsewhere, Baltic mariners always propelled their vessels with paddles or oars and the muscles of many men. The beautiful Hjortspring Boat – given up to the pagan gods sometime between 350 and 300
BC
– serves as a classic early example of the favoured style: over 60 feet long and with a narrow, upturned prow and stern and room aboard for perhaps two dozen oarsmen.
But during the seventh century
AD
the Scandinavian boat-builders invented the keel, a single large timber running the length of the vessel and acting as its backbone. The English word ‘keel’ – like the French
quille
– is derived from the Old
Norse word
kjolr
and the difference the feature made to the seaworthiness of ships is still one of the great contributions to the world by those ancient mariners. The earlier vessels, without keels, had been flat-bottomed and so ideal for navigating shallow rivers. They had lacked the strength and stability required for voyages far into the open sea, however, and their sides had also been too low to prevent them being swamped by the Atlantic swells.
The Hjortspring Boat was clinker-built, with the side planks (or strakes) overlapping one another and stitched together with twisted fibres made from tree roots. Later boats were pinned together, first with wooden pegs and later with iron nails or rivets. But always in the case of the earlier craft the hull depended, for its rigidity, upon an internal framework of timbers. Vessels assembled in this way were heavy and also structurally weak. Since the addition of a mast tall enough to support a large sail would only have added to the stresses upon the whole, rowing was effectively the only option.
Once the value of the keel was understood, it became the starting point for the whole construction process (hence the expression ‘to lay the keel’, which is often used to describe the vitally important first part of any big project).
Fashioned from the trunk of a single oak tree (or other hard wood), the keel was either stressed to provide the familiar curved profile, or else had specially made timbers fitted to it at either end to provide the symmetrical prow and the stern. While the technique meant the size of the finished ships would always be limited by the height of the available trees, the addition of a flexible spine enabled the craft to respond, like a living creature, to the powerful forces exerted upon it by the sea. The side strakes were added next, gradually building up the elegant U-shaped hull. All of the shaping – of keel, strakes and all the other timber fittings – was achieved by the skilled use of axes.
With a keen eye, the carpenters selected naturally curved trees and branches that already bore a similarity to the shape desired for the finished pieces. Rather than sawn, the strakes were split radially from the logs. All of this axe work took advantage of the natural grain of the wood, with the result that every part of the finished vessel was stronger and more flexible than anything cut out with a saw.