Vikings (9 page)

The suggestion that bronze was undone by a Europe-wide collapse of public confidence is quite appealing at first glance. Most experts agree, however, that it is also just a bit too glib – and not nearly enough to explain the complexities of all that was going on.

As the Bronze Age approached its climax, the situation grew more and more complicated. In the latter part of the period it was not enough simply to own bronze objects; what mattered then was to possess bronze objects that had been acquired from contacts far away. In Britain at this time, the largest hoards of Late Bronze Age objects are often found farthest from any natural sources of the metal itself. By contrast, people living in Cornwall, or north Wales, for example – home to prodigious quantities of tin and copper respectively – seemingly valued only imported Continental bronze. For archaeologists working today, some of what was going on in the Late Bronze Age is simply unfathomable.

What seems clear, though, is that during the Late Bronze Age individuals, and the societies around them, demonstrated their power and status by being able to show they were obtaining their finest things from the most distant places imaginable.

In the case of powerful Scandinavians, it seems the source of much of their metalwork was the same territory that attracted the lord of Kivik. The Carpathian Basin is a huge shallow bowl of fertile loamy-loess soil – so fertile indeed that from time to time it has been claimed the whole of Europe might be fed from the fields there. The Alps, the Balkan Mountains, the Carpathian Mountains and the Dinaric Alps provide the
rim; the bowl itself is bisected by the Danube River, ensuring a steady flow of incomers travelling by boat or taking advantage of the low, level ground of the river’s banks. Blessed with natural deposits of metal ores and workable stone like chert and obsidian, it has attracted and held people since the end of the last Ice Age. All these advantages combined – fertile soils and bountiful natural resources in a location close to the heart of Europe – have conspired to make the Carpathian Basin a hub of human activity. Key routes for people headed north, south, east or west across the European continent passed through the territory – and those living there were always in a position to take advantage of the traffic. By the end of the third millennium
BC
the bronzesmiths working there were making some of the most desirable weapons and jewellery on the Continent.

Around 1000
BC
, however, this comfortable system of trade and exchange was disrupted by the arrival in the Carpathian Basin – and in much of the rest of central Europe besides – of large numbers of new people. These were the nomadic tribes from the Russian steppes, known to history and archaeology as the Scythians and the Cimmerians. Among other things, their sudden, unexpected presence in central Europe seemingly disrupted the ages-old trade networks, so that quite quickly the movement of bronze and other luxury items north and west towards Scandinavia and the homes of other eager consumers ground to a halt. Bronze was also available from the territories of the western Alps, however, and it appears that when supplies from central Europe dried up, Scandinavia looked south rather than east for its luxury items. Here were people grown accustomed to acquiring the good things in life from elsewhere, and at the same time becoming knowledgeable about what was available – and where.

The proto-Vikings’ homelands were fertile enough to feed their stomachs, but too poor to satisfy all of their ambitions.
The peoples of Denmark, Norway and Sweden were well aware of fashions and mores elsewhere. Like everyone else in Europe during the Bronze Age, they wanted to adorn themselves with fine things, to demonstrate their status. They needed bronze to appease their gods and to equip their dead for the next world. Unfortunately none of it was to be had from the rock beneath their feet. Geology had left them wanting. And so two and a half millennia before that raid on Lindisfarne – a raid driven in part by the desire for other precious metals – the ancestors of the Vikings had learnt a vital lesson: whatever was missing at home could be obtained from the neighbours.

During the first millennium
BC
the crisis in the world of bronze was reaching fever pitch all across northern and western Europe. Increasingly the metal was being dumped – quite literally. In France archaeologists have found pits containing tens of thousands of bronze axe heads cast aside even as the Bronze Age itself drew to a close. In most cases the axes had been discarded as soon as they were cast, their sockets still plugged with the clay from their moulds. Often the metal of which they are made has been deliberately corrupted with large quantities of lead so that they are brittle and useless anyway. Archaeologists have been working for a generation and more to come up with a satisfactory explanation for this seemingly senseless waste.

With or without a solution to the problem, the facts are fairly clear. As the last millennium
BC
wore on, bronze lost its magical hold over society. By around 500
BC
in Scandinavia, tools made of iron began to replace those made of bronze. Like much else in the north, the new technology was imported from elsewhere in Europe, but for the first time the raw materials were readily available at home. Bog-iron, as it is known, was common throughout much of Denmark, Norway and Sweden – ready to be collected and used in the production of all manner of weapons and tools. It was not of the highest quality but then
it did not have to be. The naturally occurring ore was riddled with impurities, but these could be removed. Having first been crushed into a gritty powder, the ore was heated in a furnace built of clay. Temperatures capable of nudging the metal into a molten state were beyond the technology of the Early Iron Age, but the blacksmiths learnt to use charcoal – which burns hotter than wood – to generate temperatures sufficient to persuade the powdered ore to come together as an unprepossessing lump known as a ‘bloom’.

The smiths would then use fires agitated by bellows to heat the bloom to a point where the impurities – known collectively as slag – became liquid once more. These were then driven from the bloom by constant hammering until eventually the heat, coupled with sheer human effort, conspired to produce a lump of ‘wrought’ iron. As long as the newly purified iron was kept red- or white-hot, it could be shaped into whatever tool was required.

In the city of Herning, in Midtjylland, in central Denmark, I experienced some small part of the reality of early Scandinavian iron-working. Archaeologist Martin Olesen showed me just how commonplace bog ore actually is in parts of Denmark by taking me for a walk beside a stream just a few miles from the city centre. The stream was cut through a landscape that can fairly be described as typical Denmark – low-lying, often soft underfoot and cut by countless small waterways. A closer look at the sediments in the bank of the stream revealed layers the colour of rust – and rust is effectively what it was. Martin explained that iron-bearing groundwater, from deep underground, reaches the surface in the form of a spring. Contact with the air – and, more specifically, the oxygen within it – causes oxidation of the iron. The iron forms into a hard crust and appears within peat bogs as solid, irregular-shaped rust-coloured lumps.

After just a few minutes’ digging into the stream bank with a trowel, we unearthed several pieces of bog ore. Back in the grounds of Martin’s university in Herning, some of his colleagues were already hard at work toiling in front of a homemade clay furnace. The bog ore we had found was roasted first of all in a wood fire. Judged to be dry enough after some hours, it was then transferred into the furnace itself and covered over with the first of many layers of charcoal. It was a bitterly cold February afternoon – and to add to the discomfort of it all a heavy rain began to fall. There was a cutting wind as well but none of it was of consequence to the furnace. Squatting in its pit in the lawn, it breathed and roared like a living thing. Two of Martin’s students were conscientiously pumping away at bellows positioned to push air into the heart of the flames, but in truth the wind was doing the job for them.

Despite the assistance of the weather, iron-smelting is a labour that consumes time most of all. The transformation of ore into iron bloom is the stuff of hours and all the while the magic was under way, the human helpers had to endure wind, rain, cold – and eventually the darkness of a winter’s night as well. Their faces and hands were blackened by smoke and soot, their boots and clothes slathered in mud. As the hours wore on, all vestiges of their twenty-first-century selves seemed to dissolve until by the end of the process they might as well have been creatures of the Iron Age – timeless servants of the furnace.

Iron offered another crucial advantage over bronze. Once a bronze tool was broken, it had to be melted down and recast. But iron tools could be repaired. A smith could simply heat the broken pieces over his fire and then hammer them back together again. Here then was a material altogether more amenable, literally more flexible than its fickle predecessor. It was a technology quite different from that used to create bronze objects – and since the ore was readily available it freed people
from the long-distance obligations that had been integral to obtaining bronze. Rather than being a metal of the elite, iron was a commonplace metal of the people; and once again the Scandinavian smiths finessed their technique until they were capable of producing some of the best iron tools and weapons in Europe.

In the schoolboy approach to the great ages of ancient history – Stone, Bronze and Iron – the assumption is that each new material must have been found superior and that it quickly superseded whatever had gone before, so that bronze was found preferable to stone, and then iron was found preferable to bronze, and so on. We now know the truth is more complicated. To begin with at least, iron tools and weapons were not necessarily even as good as those made of bronze, far less superior to them. The big advantage of iron, however, was the ubiquity of the raw material. Why bother trading for distant sources of copper and bronze when a perfectly good knife or sickle might be fashioned from bog ore collected from the shallows of a nearby lake?

Archaeologists have been struggling with the evidence for the past 30 years and are no closer to a consensus. Whatever else, the birth of iron was protracted and painful. It is also a crucial moment in the story of Scandinavia – because it was the Iron Age that would, in time, give birth to the Vikings themselves.

Environmental evidence suggests the transition from bronze to iron took place during a time of deteriorating climate. In Scandinavia as elsewhere, this likely meant the farmers’ fields became less productive, and it is easy to imagine how peoples standard of living would have been lowered as a result. Archaeologists look back on the Bronze Age in Britain as a kind of climatic ‘golden age’ – with temperatures generally warmer than those of later periods, long productive summers and gentle winters. It is thought British farmers then had never
had it so good. The same may well have been true in other parts of Europe as well. The situation in Scandinavia – particularly the more northerly parts – was probably somewhat different. The weather and the environment were always slightly harder on the people there, less conducive to farming. So when the climate took a downward turn, from around the middle of the first millennium
BC
, circumstances that were already difficult may have become harder still.

Because traces of Iron Age settlement in Scandinavia are as scant as those for the Age of Bronze, it is extremely difficult to know for sure. What archaeological evidence we do have, however, suggests people continuing to live in longhouses built of large upright timbers and walls of wattle and daub. At Grentoft, in western Jutland, generations of farmers lived together in a village comprising, at its peak, around 30 houses. The homes were of varying sizes and the archaeological evidence makes it clear livestock and people lived under the same roof. By around 200
BC
some of the farms were enclosed within an encircling fence that set them apart from their neighbours.

Just over a mile from Grentoft, at a place called Grønbjerg, archaeologists found traces of a much smaller settlement that had been occupied during the same period. It comprised just two longhouses and an adjoining smithy – suggesting there was no uniformity of village size during the early part of the Iron Age.

Yet another variation was found at Hodde, in central Jutland, where a farming community had apparently grown around a large and imposing longhouse surrounded by its own timber palisade. Eventually there were nearly 30 longhouses at Hodde, but all of them smaller than the original building and presumably housing people who owed some kind of allegiance to the family occupying ‘the big house’. Every house had its own store
and workshop and neat fences separated each property from its neighbours.

Despite the variations between settlements it is possible to get a sense of the prevailing atmosphere (at least in Denmark, where most of the excavated remains are located) in the first centuries of the Iron Age. The Bronze Age had witnessed the rise of an elite – those capable of controlling surplus food and other commodities to ensure an ever-increasing supply of the bronze and gold that marked them out as special. They took most of it to their graves or offered it up to their gods, but always the intention was to make clear they stood apart from the mass of their fellows.

I spent the night apart from my fellow crew members for the duration of one memorable night in Denmark, in February 2012. During the filming of
Vikings
I reluctantly accepted an opportunity to sleep – all alone – in a carefully reconstructed Bronze Age house. The fact that it happened to be the night of my 45th birthday only added to the strangeness of the experience. It wasn’t just any Bronze Age reconstruction either, but a massive timber longhouse built a stone’s throw from the giant burial mounds of Borum Eshøj – the same that yielded the family group now housed in the National Museum in Copenhagen.