Vikings (2 page)

They acquired silk from India and Persia. They carried silver dirhams from Baghdad and Samarkand all the way to their graves back home. But not one of them kept a journal along the way nor wrote down an account of it all while sitting by the faltering fireside of old age. A few straight lines cut into stone, stick or bone are all that remains of what any of the Viking people thought, or felt.

Having learnt that much, I realised a biography of the Vikings would be a challenge, to say the least. The men and women I wanted to understand and, faithfully, to portray, seemed determined to remain just out of clear sight.

How fitting that a people so often caricatured as villains
– international criminals with rap sheets as long as their heavily muscled arms – had fled the scene undetected. And if only the chalk outlines of the victims remained, then different lines of enquiry would have to be pursued.

I was determined that, while trying to close in on those fugitive Vikings, I would interview as many witnesses as possible – find out who else was at the scene of the crimes at the material time, as it were. And if the grown-up version of the Vikings was hard to pin down, what clues might I find about their
modus operandi
if I investigated their childhood, even the lives and times of their parents and grandparents? Bear with me then as I seek to track them from the distant past and to identify their telltale fingerprints and DNA on all the surfaces they touched.

During January and February 2011 I spent three weeks sailing the Southern Ocean aboard a 50-foot yacht. I was part of a seven-man team following in the footsteps of the early-twentieth-century polar explorer William Speirs Bruce, and it was the only way to get from the Falkland Islands to South Orkney, where he had established his base.

For all their great voyages, no Viking ever reached 60 degrees south (at least as far as we know), but that journey of ours was as close as I expect to get to their vanished world. The experience of spending many days out of sight of land, in a small boat upon a trackless, mountainous ocean, confronted me with the reality of being beyond help. We had all the modern paraphernalia, of course – ship’s radio, satellite-enabled navigation, emergency beacons in the event of an accident – but if anything unforeseen had befallen us, we were many days from rescue. We sailed all day and all night, taking turns to look out for icebergs and their smaller offspring, in many ways more deadly to vessels such as ours – the dreaded ‘growlers’. When it came to spotting those hazards, modern technology was of no help whatsoever. Like mariners of the past we had to rely on our eyes.

We had only ourselves for company and for support. Our little vessel, though tough, well designed and well built, was vulnerable always to the restless power of the sea, and of the ice.

Skilled and experienced as he certainly was, even our skipper had never actually visited our destination before. It seems the little archipelago of South Orkney is so overlooked, so forgotten at the end of the world, that none but the most intrepid and determined have ever been there before. Ours was a voyage into the unknown, towards a land we had heard of but which none of us had seen, just like those long-ago Vikings who set out for Greenland and beyond.

Those of us without the skills required of navigators felt lost for most of the time. But to be lost, for would-be historians and for travellers alike, is not always a bad thing. It forces us to look upwards and outwards, to read the landscape anew in search of direction. I’ve thought about that journey – a round trip of perhaps 1,600 nautical miles – many times. But when I embarked upon my latest voyage, in search of Vikings rather than forgotten Scottish pioneers, I was able to look back on my time aboard that yacht with fresh eyes.

How appropriate that the greatest travellers the world has yet seen should remain just beyond the horizon – out of reach to the last.

‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.’

Roy Batty,
Blade Runner

I imagined myself a Viking. I daydreamed wonders I might have seen during a life lived a thousand and more years ago: sea unicorns fencing with corkscrew horns in the ice of the High Arctic . . . motes of incense in shafts of sunlight through windows in the dome of Hagia Sophia . . . snarling, wrinkled lips on the faces of marble lions on Delos . . . the aurora borealis pulsing across the dark, welcoming me home . . . and best of all, no explanations for any of it.

I might have been the first of my kind to see the sun setting in the west behind the American continent, watched icebergs calving from Greenland’s glaciers in a springtime long ago, or served in the private bodyguard of a Byzantine emperor. The possibilities kept coming but there was a sadness about it all – because the chance to live a life like his or gaze upon a world such as he knew was long gone.

We know the sea unicorns are only narwhals. The Church of the Holy Wisdom of God is just another museum in Istanbul. Only seven of Apollo’s lions remain on their terrace at the heart
of the Cyclades, smoothed and blinded by time – the rest robbed away as trophies of war – and now we understand the magical curtains of light in northern skies are no more than particles and atoms colliding in the thermosphere. Tears in the rain.

For over 200 years between the end of the eighth century and the middle of the eleventh, some of the peoples of Scandinavia became the greatest adventurers the world had yet seen. Perhaps they were the greatest there will ever be. In elegant timber long ships powered by oars or by sails, they put to sea. Mastery of simple but effective navigational techniques would grant them a territory stretching from Iceland in the north to the Mediterranean Sea in the south, from Newfoundland in the west to Constantinople and the Caspian Sea in the east.

In
Civilisation
the historian Kenneth Clark acknowledged that while the Vikings were ‘brutal and rapacious’ they nonetheless played a crucial part in shaping the destiny of the western world. In so doing, he said, they won for themselves a place in the greater story of European civilisation: ‘It was the spirit of Columbus,’ he wrote. ‘The sheer technical skill of their journeys is a new achievement of the western world; and if one wants a symbol of Atlantic man that distinguishes him from Mediterranean man, a symbol to set aside the Greek temple, it is the Viking ship.’

They are still among us – ghosts and shadows, fragments and fingerprints – in all sorts of different ways and in many different places. One October evening in 2011 the top story on Britain’s national news was about the discovery in Ardnamurchan, a remote peninsula on the north-west coast of Scotland, of the first undisturbed Viking boat burial ever found on mainland Britain.

A thousand years ago a revered and respected elder was laid to rest inside the hull of a timber boat, one crafted with the so-familiar sweeping prow and stern. His shield was laid upon his
chest, his sword and spear by his side. He also had a knife and an axe, together with an object archaeologists believe to be a drinking horn. The boat had then been filled with stones and buried beneath a mound of earth.

Initially overlooked as nothing more than a clearance cairn – a pile of rocks gathered from the land by a farmer keen to spare his ploughshare from damage – it was not until 2011 that excavation of the mound began to reveal its secrets. The timbers of the boat had long since decayed but their lines were clearly visible, impressed into the subsoil upon which they had lain for a millennium. At just 16.5 feet long by five wide, it seems on the small side for journeys back and forth to Scandinavia. But the fact that its sole occupant was deemed worthy of such treatment in death suggests he was of the highest status – and no doubt a seasoned traveller in life. Also found alongside him were a whetstone of Norwegian origin and a bronze ring-pin fashioned by an Irish craftsman.

I try and picture the scene on that day when his family, friends and followers dispatched him on his final journey. First the sleek little craft was hauled into position out of reach of any tide. The location of the grave was no accident either, no random selection: archaeologists had already found other dead nearby, from other times. Those close to that deceased Viking had decided his mortal remains would lie for ever near both a 6,000-year-old Neolithic grave and one raised during the Bronze Age. Here was an unlikely fellowship of death. Then they placed him on board, accompanied by all they thought he might need wherever he was going, and sent him on his way.

Ardnamurchan is still a place reached more easily by boat than by road. It feels remote now but there was a time when familiarity with the water would have meant it was close to busy seaways. Whether that Viking was a permanent resident or a passing chieftain visiting his relatives may never be known
– but my fascination with him lies at least in part in wondering what he really meant to those who saw fit to say their farewells that way. Did they fill the hull with ballast with a view to fixing him in place in a landscape that plainly mattered to them? We cannot ever know, and why should we? He is not ours.

In June 2008 archaeologists were called in to excavate a large swathe of land in Dorset earmarked for the building of a new road to improve access to Weymouth and the Isle of Portland. In what proved to be a mass burial pit they found the remains of 51 Vikings – all of them decapitated and butchered. Their bones revealed multiple wounds including defensive injuries to hands and arms. There were separate piles of skulls, ribcages and leg bones. Two heads were missing, prompting the archaeologists to suppose those might have been kept as trophies – perhaps displayed on spikes. Scientific analysis showed they were all men, aged from late teens to mid-twenties. Their tooth enamel proved beyond doubt they had grown to adulthood in Scandinavian countries and radiocarbon dates revealed they met their deaths sometime between
AD
910 and 1030.

Taken captive by the local Anglo-Saxons, they were stripped naked and messily executed. Perhaps they were raiders caught in the act, or would-be settlers made unwelcome in the most extreme manner imaginable. Either way, their dismembered remains recall a time when the men from the north were often regarded more as foe than friend. These were travellers who lived and died by swords and they were not always on the winning side.

In 2006 I took part in a television project called
The Face of Britain.
Using samples of DNA collected from volunteers all over England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, a team of scientists sought to find out how much the genetic make-up of the modern population had been affected by migrations and invasions during thousands of years of history.

While people came forward claiming all manner of inheritances – Celtic, Pictish, Saxon, Huguenot, Norman and many others – the largest single group of volunteers were those believing (or at least fervently hoping) they were descended from Vikings. For many it was based on no more than a family trait of blue eyes or fair hair. Some, however, had a claim based on altogether more intriguing physical characteristics. Dupuytren’s Contracture is a deformity that causes the fingers of the hand to curl towards the palm. The condition is also known as ‘Viking Claw’ and several people came to the trial certain their hands carried proof of ancient Scandinavian ancestry. But despite the nickname, the condition is relatively common all over northern Europe and by no means limited to those whose families hail from Denmark, Norway or Sweden. Even more interesting than the scientifically provable reality, though, was the passion with which so many people clung to their hopes that the blood coursing in their veins was that of Vikings.

There was a time too when every British child learnt the names of at least a few Viking heroes – real men once, but made so famous by their exploits they seem more like figures from bedtime stories or nursery rhymes: Eirik the Red and his settlement of Greenland . . . the voyage of his son Leif Eiriksson to Vinland, presumed to be some or other part of the Newfoundland coastline . . . and Cnut, King of England, Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden, and famed for an audience with the incoming tide.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – four out of our own seven days – are named for the Viking gods and goddesses Tyr, Odin, Thor and Freyja. Whole swathes of Britain’s place names are Viking too. Any ending in ‘by’ – like Ferriby, Whitby, Grimsby, Selsby and Utterby – recall homesteads established by the incomers. Anywhere with ‘thorpe’ or ‘thwaite’ is Viking too. Then there’s ‘beck’ for stream; ‘fell’ and ‘how’ for hill; ‘holm’ for
island; ‘kirk’ for church and ‘slack’ for stream – the list goes on and on, marbled like fat through the flesh of Britain.

Caithness, Scotland’s northern quarter, is the way Vikings described the head of the cat. The Great Orme above Llandudno remembers how they saw the headland there like a giant worm swimming out to sea, and just about every village, town, hill, headland, waterway and bay on the islands of Orkney and Shetland bears a Norse name.

Make your way along the passageway of the great burial mound of Maes Howe on Orkney Mainland and your breath will be snatched away first of all by the wonder of the Neolithic architecture in the chamber at its end. Spend a little more time inside, however, and faint lines and shapes etched into stones here and there might catch your eye: a dragon-lion, a knotted serpent, a walrus. These were cut by Vikings 4,000 years and more after the last of the monument’s builders were dust on the wind.

Then there are the runes – at least 30 sets identified so far. Some are just boyish graffiti like: ‘Thorni bedded Helgi’, or ‘Ingigerth is the most beautiful of all women’ (the latter beside a rough etching of a slavering hound). At least a few are more enigmatic, though, like: ‘It is true what I say, that treasure was carried off in the course of three nights.’ Even the runic letters themselves – all straight lines suitable for slicing into wood or stone with sharp swords and daggers – conjure images of the sort of men who made them, men who sheltered from hellish storms there from time to time, surrounded by the shadows of ancient and forgotten dead.