Vikings (22 page)

Wrote Woolf: ‘The attack on Dorset was probably one of the secondary raids from the Irish base. The use of the term
Denisc
, “Danish”, for the Horoar in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, should not worry us too much. As late as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Icelanders, for the most part themselves descendants of migrants from the Norwegian Westland, referred to their language as the “Danish” tongue and on one level “Dane” seems to have been synonymous with “Scandinavian”.’

Most important is the likelihood that the warriors who struck at Lindisfarne hailed from the west coast of Norway. For it was into the west, to Shetland, the British Isles, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and North America, that the Norwegian Vikings – arguably the most intrepid of all the Scandinavian pioneers – would eventually penetrate. The land from which they had set sail was by no means a unified nation. Instead it was a collection of territories, home to separate, often warring tribes: Horoaland, as mentioned by Woolf, and others like Agder, More, Rogaland, Trøndelag. Even the name ‘Norway’ was first of all a geographical rather than a political concept, meaning ‘the north way’ or, more precisely, ‘the way to the north’. Rather than a term understood by the people living there – between Skagerrak and Tromsø – it was used by those occupying southern Scandinavia to refer to the long coastline stretching away from their own territories towards the very limits of human occupation.

The crossing from the west coast of Norway to the Shetland Islands would have taken little more than 24 hours in good weather. From there it was a short hop south to the Orkney Islands and then onwards, across the Pentland Firth, to Caithness. Once ensconced either in the Northern Isles or on the Scottish mainland, the Vikings were ideally placed for journeys west and south towards the Western Isles, Ireland, the Isle
of Man and the west coast of England, or south along Scotland’s east coast and on to Northumbria and the rest of northern England. For much of the time the landscapes – especially in the west – must surely have reminded the raiders of home. By keeping in the lee of the many islands they could move easily from bay to bay, harbour to harbour, putting ashore either when they needed provisions and fresh water or to take advantage of whatever vulnerable communities might catch their eyes. For men well used to sea travel, the opportunities presented by bases in Shetland, Orkney and Scotland must have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Having left home in spring, when the crops had been planted and the weather turned fair, they could spend an entire summer raiding at will before making the return journey in the late summer or autumn.

In the short term, however, we do well to try and imagine the depth of the shock felt by those first Northumbrian victims. While it is true to say the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been established in the aftermath of the Roman occupation – by invited guests who turned violently upon their erstwhile hosts, becoming conquerors of the Celtic Britons – by the eighth century they ruled over a relatively peaceful and prosperous demesne. They were also Christian, their populations no doubt persuaded by their priests that faith in God was the only protection they needed. That the priests and monks themselves had been helplessly cut down by heathens – and in the holiest of holy places in their kingdom – would have been shattering.

Given all that shock and awe in the west, it is surely fascinating to learn that by the end of the eighth century other Vikings had been abroad in lands to the east for the best part of half a century. It is impossible to say with certainty when the first pioneers made landfall on the Baltic coastline of northern Europe. No doubt for as long as people had been making and using boats there would have been opportunities for contact in
both directions – by Scandinavians travelling south and east across the Baltic Sea and by northern Europeans heading north and west. Graves containing Scandinavian material have been found at Grobin, in Latvia, some of them with dates as early as the middle of the seventh century. Jewellery from the island of Gotland was found there, and also in graves excavated in Elbing, beside the mouth of the River Vistula in Poland. This after all was the natural direction of exploration and expansion for people living along the eastern seaboard of Sweden. Having crossed the Baltic they would soon have found the mouths of several rivers, like the Oder and the Vistula and others, providing access to the interior of the eastern European mainland.

It hardly matters who among them was first to set out into the wider world, whether it was Danes heading south, Norwegians heading west or Swedes heading east. We know they did it – put to sea in their ships, crossed the beckoning water heading in all directions – but less clear is
why.
They had the seagoing craft and the know-how to undertake considerable journeys. Long exposure to contact with their neighbours meant they were familiar with a range of peoples and cultures. Those in Norway were aware of lands to the west; those in Denmark and Sweden already had long histories of contact with Frisians, Franks, Saami, Finns, Balts, Slavs and others. Some of their neighbours had already colonised parts of the British Isles and so they were well acquainted with the idea of a world of opportunities – but none of all that was in any way new. What exactly was it, then, that fired the starting pistol and sent them all – Danes, Norwegians and Swedes – so forcefully on their various ways?

Within a couple of centuries of the first waves of expansion, foreign chroniclers were laying the blame – for all that had befallen them at the hands of the Northmen – fairly and squarely on over-population in the Scandinavian homelands.
The Vikings were well known to have an insatiable appetite for women after all, and it therefore made sense to imagine that too many couplings had fathered more offspring than could usefully be absorbed at home. All those illegitimate sons and daughters had had to go elsewhere in search of living space and land to farm. Added to over-breeding has been the idea that naked, barbaric aggression by peoples ignorant of Christianity simply inspired the pagans to put to sea in their thousands in search of Godly people to terrorise.

None of this seems entirely satisfactory, however. While there may be some truth in what many of the later Icelandic sagas declare – that men set off on those first Viking voyages in search of the honour and wealth they needed to make names for themselves back home – the activity of the Scandinavians makes much more sense when examined in the context of what else was happening in Europe around the same time.

From the seventh century onwards there had been a quite rapid expansion of trade and the growth of what can only be described as international markets. As we have already seen, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England were relatively stable and prosperous and Charlemagne’s efforts in Frankia had unified and pacified a large part of the population of northwestern Europe. By the eighth century there were well-established ports and trading centres at Southampton, London and York in England; Dorestad on the Rhine; Quentovic on the Canche, south of Boulogne; Birka, Hedeby, Kaupang and Ribe in Sweden and at various locations along the Baltic coasts of Germany, Poland and Russia.

For all the fascination exerted by the possibility of fecund over-population by heathen savages, and the questing for wealth and glory by ambitious young blades with nothing to lose and all to gain, there may be a more straightforward explanation for the sudden Viking expansion. They simply looked out from
their own fjords and bays, saw how well the neighbours were doing in their marketplaces, and set about claiming as much of it as possible for themselves. Close to the mouths of the Oder and the Vistula rivers (tempting routes leading via the Danube to the Black Sea and beyond) were yet more trading centres. Tribes like the Obotrites, the Rugieris and the Wiltzi, in what is now eastern Germany, or the Pomeranians and the Wolins in the territory of modern Poland, established important and influential port towns around their own parts of the Baltic coastline.

By the middle years of the eighth century adventurers hailing from the east coast of Sweden had grown familiar with a route that led into what is now described as the Gulf of Finland, on Russia’s north-eastern coast. At the neck of the gulf they had found the mouth of the Neva River and from there it was a short jaunt upstream, past what would one day be the site of the city of St Petersburg, and into Lake Ladoga. By as early as
AD
753 there was a trading centre at a site known now as Staraya (Old) Ladoga, on the banks of the Volkhov River where it is joined by a tributary called the Ladoshka. This is Russia’s oldest town, established by various peoples who had developed an interest in using the river systems as a route back and forth across the interior. There were certainly Balts, Finns and Slavs there at that early date, but at least a few of the founding fathers were Swedish Vikings.

Russia’s oldest permanent settlement it may be, but it is a strangely forlorn place today. The nearby town of Volkhov is desperately run down, flanked on its outskirts by factories or power stations belching smoke from tall chimneys. The homes of the inhabitants are either simple wooden buildings or the sort of soulless concrete blocks of flats, arranged in grid patterns, that spring to mind at the mention of ‘Soviet Union’. The streets are as potholed, and the pavements as shattered and
collapsed, as anything in the poorest rural market towns of any southern African country.

In need of some provisions at 7 a.m. on the morning after we arrived, we called in at the only open shop we could find – a tiny ‘24-hour’ place that bristled with barbed wire. Inside, illuminated by naked bulbs, the counters and shelves carried a depressing selection of unappetising processed foods as well as the ubiquitous Snickers, Mars bars and Cokes. Maybe we were just in an especially poor part of town, but it seemed typical of the whole. The passage of 20-odd years since the fall of the Iron Curtain does not seem to have done any obvious favours for the people living thereabouts. The area clearly mattered during the Viking Age, and Staraya Ladoga has been described as the first capital of Russia – but that time is long past.

Apart from a break for the Second World War, the site of Staraya Ladoga itself has been excavated annually for the last 101 years. Russia is proud of its early founding and its Scandinavian heritage and much has been done to make the most of the archaeological evidence. It may be a bit much to call it a town – at least in the way we understand and apply the term. But it was certainly both a way station for travellers and a thriving centre full of workshops and yards dedicated to all manner of crafts and trades. The date of
AD
753 – the time of the first permanent buildings – was obtained by dendrochronology, carried out on surviving structural timbers; but far more impressive is the scale of the traffic that once passed through the settlement. Finds of Arabic dirhams minted between 749 and 786 indicate that valuable commodities were travelling westwards, down the Volkhov, in great quantities and possibly from an earlier date. It has been estimated that around a quarter of a million such coins passed downriver through Staraya Ladoga during the Viking Age, all of them headed for Scandinavia. The vast majority seem to have ended up in Sweden, where around
80,000 dirhams have been found, mostly in the form of hoards. Some 4,000 or so have been recovered in Denmark and only a few hundreds in Norway, where most trade was based around the exchange of goods rather than payment with coins.

On the opposite side of the river, and just visible from Staraya Ladoga, is the only exclusively Viking, or at least Scandinavian, cemetery in all of Russia. This is the site called Plakun where the excavation of graves has produced, in the main, finds of cremated human bone in clay pots and urns. There have been grave goods too, although nothing remarkable. The earliest dates are from the middle of the ninth century.

Artefacts excavated from Staraya Ladoga are stored today within the State Hermitage in St Petersburg. Having been established by Catherine the Great in 1764, it qualifies as one of the oldest museums in the world. A staggeringly over-the-top confection of a place – painted white, lime-green and gold so that it has something of the look of a gigantic wedding cake – it is home to a collection of more than three million objects, only a fraction of which are on display. Well away from the public gaze, in cupboards tucked safely behind the scenes, are the Viking finds from the nation’s first town.

While the gold, silver, jewels and priceless works of art in the Hermitage’s many rooms and galleries are undoubtedly jaw-dropping, the things left behind by Russia’s earliest Scandinavian settlers are at least as affecting, if only because they are on a human scale. A hoard of iron tools dating from the middle years of the eighth century included all manner of tongs and other bits and pieces of a skilled craftsman’s equipment – all in such good condition they were still usable. The hoard had been buried inside a wooden box, on top of which was a bronze amulet of approximately the same date. Just a couple of inches long, it was in the form of the head of a bearded man with long, neatly dressed straight hair. On top of his head are two curling
horns, topped with what are thought to be ravens. The piece may once have been part of a key, or perhaps the handle of a pointer, but the head is thought to be a depiction of the Norse god Odin. According to tradition, Odin sent a pair of ravens into the world every day so that they could report back with any interesting news. The object may have been buried with the hoard so that its contents were protected.

Many of the artefacts recovered are fascinating because they reveal it was not just Viking
men
at Staraya Ladoga, but their women and children too. More than a way station for itinerant merchants, it was home for some of them.

One of the objects I was allowed to handle was a startlingly well-preserved leather shoe. Its size and its elegant styling made it plain it had once been worn by a woman, or a girl. Crafted from several pieces of leather, carefully and neatly stitched together, it was much more than a functional item, something worn just to keep the foot dry and warm. Someone had taken the time to incorporate various intricate details, twirls and curls that had no practical function and served only to make the shoe look impressive, even expensive. Handling it, looking at it, made it easy to imagine how it must once have been part of a carefully styled outfit put together and worn with pride by a woman keen to look her best and attract admiring glances.