The Vikings

A consequence of the return of a superpower to the region was a revival of the border tensions that existed between Danes and eastern Franks, and of the efforts Christian rulers had been making since the days of Charlemagne to bring the Danes into the fold. Ferociously and cruelly, according to Adam of Bremen, King Gorm resisted the mission of Bishop Unni.² His son, and for the last fifteen years of his reign his co-ruler, Harald, known as Bluetooth, was more receptive to the new faith.³ In 948 a papal letter addressed to Archbishop Adaldag of Hamburg reasserted Hamburg-Bremen’s position as head of the Church in all Scandinavia, and gave the archbishop the rights of investiture across the territories. Three bishops were appointed that same year to the sees of Århus, Ribe and Hedeby in Jutland, that part of Danish territory over which Harald’s writ ran.⁴ Horit, Liafdag and Reginbrond were their names, suggesting German or Frisian origins rather than Danish. The appointments would seem to confirm both Harald’s early interest in and tolerance for Christianity, as well as Otto the Great’s use of the Church as a political institution.

Though his enthusiasm initially stopped short of baptism, it seems religious discussions remained a part of the conversation among Harald’s hird, for it was as a result of one of them that his conversion presently came about. The circumstances are described in some detail in an almost contemporary source, the Res gestæ saxonicæ, a history of the Saxons written by the monk Widukind of Corvey in about 970. Widukind asserts that the Church had long considered the Danes to have accepted Christianity, while recognizing that Christ had, in fact, only been admitted to a pantheon. Christianity’s crucial insistence on exclusivity remained unacceptable. At table at Harald’s court one evening a discussion arose on the relative merits of the gods. The Heathens agreed that Christ was a divinity but only a minor one, and less able than either Odin or Thor to enact miracles and give proofs of his power. Poppo, a missionary bishop at the court, rejected this and went on to claim that these others were not gods at all but demons. Harald challenged him to demonstrate the truth of what he was saying by submission to ordeal. In everyday life the ordeal was a last resort in legal or disputed matters where the process of compurgation had failed.⁵ In the bishop’s case, it seems, the last resort was also the first. Poppo is reported to have accepted the challenge without hesitation.

The ordeal was a trial of physical endurance carried out under controlled conditions that was designed to solicit the judgement of supernatural powers on the matter at issue. It could take a number of different forms. One obliged the plaintiff to walk through fire. Another required him to stretch his bared arm into a cauldron of boiling water to retrieve a ring, stone or other small object from the bottom. In an ordeal by cold water the accused was bound and thrown into a pond or stream, to sink if innocent or float if guilty. The logic held that in the latter case the pure nature of the water would reject the impure nature of the accused. In another variant, the accused was compelled to eat crumbs of dry bread and cheese. Choking on these was a sign of guilt. The particular ordeal Poppo volunteered to undergo required him to carry a lump of hot iron in his hand for a set number of paces before throwing it. Its use was rare and restricted to matters involving religion.⁶

Harald had Poppo kept under observation until the time appointed for the ordeal. A passage in Gregory of Tours’ Books of Miracles explains the necessity for this.⁷ Gregory describes an earlier ordeal, arranged to show which of two rival claimants held the favour of Christ, that required each man in turn to reach into a cauldron of boiling water and retrieve a ring from it. One lost his nerve overnight and, rising early the next day, tried to fix the outcome by smearing his arm with a protective ointment. Clearly people would not have used a test that always provided the same answer, and one has to assume that a number of such protective measures were known about, and that steps were taken to prevent them being used. There were variables too: in the case reported by Gregory, the temperature of the water may have varied considerably as the successful ordealist took an hour to locate the small ring as it swirled about in the cauldron. Even here there were nuances of divine judgement at work that discouraged cheating: when he afterwards observed that the water at the bottom of the cauldron was almost cold and that at the top only pleasantly warm the other responded by plunging his arm in up to the elbow. Instantly, says Gregory, the flesh was seared to the bone.

A passage in the laws of the Skåne district, known in their earliest written form from the early thirteenth century, may give some idea of the conduct of the ritual that Poppo faced. The hand that he had chosen to use would have been washed and he would have been instructed afterwards to touch nothing until the moment arrived to take up the iron. If the ordeal involved ‘throw-iron’ he would have had to walk nine paces before throwing it. Widukind says only that Poppo carried it long enough to satisfy Harald. Afterwards a mitten was placed over the ordealist’s hand and the wound kept sealed for four days. The mitten was then removed and the wound examined: a clean wound was an affirmation of protection, truth, power or whatever was the appropriate response to the type of question being asked. A dirty wound was interpreted as rejection or failure.

These various steps in the process of Poppo’s ordeal are clearly identifiable in a series of seven gilded bronzes from the early thirteenth century, discovered in 1870 affixed to the pulpit and covered in a thick layer of oil paint, in the church at Tamdrup, in Horsens. A first image shows Poppo and Harald together, the former urging conversion on the king, the latter rejecting it. The second image shows the iron heating above the flames. In the third picture the bishop shows the king his hand after the removal of the mitten, and in the fourth we see the momentous result of the ordeal: Poppo baptizes the naked king, who is standing in a barrel of water. The next image shows the Danish king genuflecting in front of an altar. A sixth image is damaged but has been interpreted as showing the king and his queen together making the gift of an altar decoration to the church.⁸ Widukind tells us that Poppo’s hand was unblemished by the ordeal. However, one must suppose that here, as in many such cases, the demeanour and courage of the ordealist during the appalling few seconds of the trial must also have had some bearing on how the result was judged. Poppo’s bearing and his willingness to suffer for his beliefs perhaps impressed King Harald every bit as much as the state of the bishop’s hand following the ordeal.

In this way Poppo brought to fruition the work of a long line of Christian missionaries sponsored by Christian kings, from the Anglo-Saxon Willibrord, who had attempted to convert the Danish King Angantyr in about 720, to Ebbo of Reims, and Anskar and Autbert, who had tried to help Klak-Harald introduce the faith to Denmark with the assistance of Louis the Pious in the first half of the ninth century. Harald recorded his conversion in a most dramatic way, commissioning the erection of a great, pyramidal rune-stone in Jelling, in central southern Jutland. Saxo Grammaticus tells us that, on a Jutland beach, Harald came upon the massive red and black granite stone, nearly 2.5 metres high and weighing almost ten tons, and had it dragged to Jelling by men yoked to it like oxen.

The Jelling stone is among the most remarkable and instructive of all Viking Age documents. Normalized, the runic inscription that dominates one of the three sides, referred to as the A side, reads: Haraldr konungr bað gera kuml pessi ept Gorm, fôður sinn, ok ept pyrvé, móður sína, sá Haraldr er sér vann Danmôrk alla ok Norveg ok dani gerði kristna (‘King Harald had this monument made in memory of Gorm, his father, and in memory of Thyrwi, his mother; that Harald who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian’).⁹ The hands of two men have been identified in the carvings that cover its two other sides and it has been estimated that the complete set of decorations took them about a year to finish. The B side depicts a struggle between two animals that have been identified as a lion, though its mane and head more closely resemble those of a horse, and a serpent with its tail in its mouth.

On the C side of the stone is the first significant native representation of Christ to have survived in Scandinavia. The suffering Christ had no immediate appeal to a warlike people whose gods included masters of violence like Odin and Thor, and from the beginning the missionaries’ focus in the Scandinavian fields was on Christ’s power and his warrior-like attributes. This, after all, was the power Poppo was defending when Harald challenged him to carry the iron, and this was the power that persuaded Harald to convert. So the Christ of the Jelling stone is the Christ triumphant, fierce-eyed and ready to do battle with the demons of Heathendom. This may explain why the figure on the stone is depicted with arms extended but no visible cross to support him. Indeed the whole looks more like an exultant stretching than a scene of execution. Instead of a cross his arms and body are looped around by stylized branches, as though he were hanging from a tree. An interpretation that relates the stylization to mainstream Christian and European iconography suggests that these might be vine scrolls, familiar in Christian iconography from as early as the fifth century as symbols of both Christ himself and the Church.¹⁰ Another possibility is that the carvers regarded the cross as an optional background framing device for the image of the man. It is also possible that the design reflected the persistent syncretism that transformed the Christian lion into a Scandinavian horse and the Christian snake into the world-encircling Midgard serpent, and that to a contemporary Danish spectator the figure on the stone would seem to be hanging in the branches of a tree, perhaps recalling to him or her Odin’s nine days and nights hanging in Yggdrasil as he waited for the chance to swoop down and steal the runes. Whether by design or not, the iconography of the stone thus encouraged an acceptance of the new god by portraying Christ as a shamanic god, engaged in a ritual with which the spectator or ‘reader’ was already familiar. In contemplating the resonance the great stone must have had for contemporaries, it is useful to recall that, like other rune-stones, it was brightly coloured in red, blue, yellow and grey.

As we noted earlier, Dudo’s history of Normandy was an advertisement for the cultural assimilation of the duchy’s Viking founders and a statement by Rollo’s grandson, Richard I, of his self-identification as both Christian and European. The crucial distinction between the Norman document and the Danish document was that, while the latter too advertised the ruler’s Christian modernity, it did so in a form that was ancient and resolutely Scandinavian. The first known runic alphabet consists of twenty-four letters; from the first six of these it derives its name, the futhark, the term being modern. By Harald’s time it had been known in Denmark, Norway and Sweden for several centuries. Snorri Sturluson gave us the mythological explanation of its origins. Rational explanations include the suggestion that the letters derived from the Latin and Etruscan alphabets, adapted to avoid curves and horizontals so that they could more easily be inscribed in stone, wood, metal and bone. It is believed that knowledge of them was taken into the north by the Rhineland Heruli, along with the worship of Woden.¹¹ A spear found in a warrior’s grave on a farm at Øvre Stabu in Toten, in Norway, with a word made up of eight runes etched on the blade and meaning something like ‘the tester’, is the earliest known example of the use of runes in Scandinavia.¹² The written word was held to possess an innate magical power and many of the numerous surviving bracteates - coin-like objects of gold with images punched on one side only and worn as necklaces or amulets - were stamped with runes that were believed to carry a protective medicinal power.¹³ ‘Beer’, rich in vitamins from the malted barley from which it was made, is found frequently. So is ‘onion’.

The use of metal and stone as a medium gave runic messages a greater durability than vellum or parchment, but limited the length of message it was possible to write. If this was regarded as a problem, then it was partially solved by a rationalization among Scandinavian runemasters in about the middle of the eighth century that reduced the original twenty-four letters to the sixteen of the so-called ‘younger futhark’, in which a single rune represented several of the more common sound values. As with homonyms, the sense emerged from the context. In a later development, diacritics were added to change the sound values of certain runes.

Runes could be used to identify the possessor of an object, or sometimes its maker, and finds from the quayside in Bergen include wooden pins that had either been stuck into or tied on to piles of goods as markers by merchants. Some used them to claim the simple immortality of graffiti: ‘Halfdan was here’, carved a wandering tenth-century Scandinavian on the balustrade in the gallery of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in what is now Istanbul. As the runes from the Oseberg find appear to show, graffiti could also take the form of a moment’s existential meditation. Some runic inscriptions are more enigmatic than others. The Rök stone in Östergötland, carved in the ninth century by Varin in memory of his dead son Vämod, has 760 well-preserved runes covering its five sides; after the father’s simple tribute comes a long passage which includes a poem with apparent allusions to long-lost heroic lays and legends, and passages using displacement and clandestine runes to further obscure the meaning of the message and, perhaps, intensify its occult power. Poems are also found on the Turinge¹⁴ and Gripsholm stones,¹⁵ and the Karlevi stone dated to about 1000, from the island of Öland in Sweden, which preserves a complete stanza of skaldic verse.¹⁶

The north had a long tradition of raising unmarked stones or bautas as a way of memorializing the dead. In Denmark in the tenth century this practice developed to include the inscribing of such stones. The Jelling stone is a rare example of the rune-stone as record of a specific and momentous affair of state. More frequently, runic inscriptions followed a simple, conventional formula: X put up this stone in memory of Y, his brother/father/son/mother/comrade-at-arms/travelling companion. This might be supplemented with a short comment praising the bravery of the dead man. The Tirsted stone, from the Danish island of Lolland, exemplifies this tradition. A suggested interpretation of the script is: ‘Ástráðor and Hildungr raised this stone in memory of Fraði, their kinsman. And he was then the terror of men. And he died in Sweden and was first in Friggir’s retinue of all vikings.’¹⁷ For its time it is remarkable only in a rare contemporary use of the word ‘viking’.

The magical power that was believed to reside in the runes was sometimes used by a runemaster to try to protect a grave from the attentions of robbers with the threat of a curse: the inscription on the Stentoft stone in Blekinge warned any potential robber that his reward would be a state of ceaseless wandering and an ostracism which even the dead would observe after his or her death. Besides protecting the dead, curse-runes were also carved to bind the occupant to the grave and prevent him or her from wandering and causing trouble among the living.¹⁸ Memorial stones raised by Heathens might occasionally include an allusion to religious beliefs. One such is the Læborgsstenen in North Jutland, from the later years of the tenth century, which tells us that ‘Ravnunge-Tove carved these runes for Torvi her queen.’¹⁹ The inscription is decorated above and below with Thor’s symbol, the hammer, to much the same protective end as Christians would decorate gravestones with a cross. The names indicate that both the carver and the memorialized woman were devotees of Thor.²⁰

The story behind the inscription on the stone raised by Harald’s father Gorm to honour Thyrwi, his wife and Harald’s mother, remains enigmatic: Gormr konungr gerði kuml essi ept yrvé, konu sína, tanmarkar bót (King Gorm made this monument in memory of yrvé, his wife, Denmark’s salvation). Sven Aggesen says that she foiled an attempt by Otto the Great to compel her to marry him so that he might incorporate Denmark into his empire,²³ while the Saga of the Jomsvikings records a tradition that it was Thyrwi’s foresight that saved the Danes from famine.²⁴ She had the rare distinction of being honoured twice on separate rune-stones, and it is a pity we do not know more about her. Respect for the past is a fluctuating phenomenon and her stone had been moved several times before 1590 when it was found, half-buried in the ground south of the church at Jelling. It was rescued and placed beside Harald’s larger stone. Coming several decades after Ottar used the name in the account of Scandinavian territories he gave to Alfred the Great, the occurrence of tanmarkar on her stone is the first known use on native soil of the name Denmark.

Following a general runic convention, the lettering on Thyrwi’s stone reads vertically, from the bottom upwards, though there was no real consistency in the layout and direction of inscriptions. Often the shape and size of the stone would dictate whether they be written left to right or right to left, with the orientation of the runes making it clear which way to read. For lengthier inscriptions, alternating lines might be written in opposite directions, going left and then snaking to the right for the next line. Sometimes the lines bent around at the end, so that one line reads left to right and the next right to left and upside down. By contrast, the inscription on Harald’s stone adds to its syncretic intensity by following strictly the conventions of Christian Latin tradition to read from left to right. The peculiarity suggests that the designs may have been copied and adapted from a Latin manuscript.

But perhaps the most vivid expression of Harald’s determination to marry the new Christian teachings to familiar and traditional Scandinavian forms lies in the work he did to transform the complex of monuments at Jelling into one single great monument. Now only a small tourist and farming community, in Harald’s time and for centuries before that Jelling was a power centre for Danish chieftains, and the site of an enormous ship-setting that may have been Gorm’s monument to Thyrwi. Measuring 170 metres from stem to stern it is the largest such monument known in the world. Examples from other, smaller settings in Denmark suggest that Thyrwi’s stone may originally have stood at the prow of the setting. Harald set about the task of obscuring the imagery of this Heathen monument in the spirit of his new faith. He raised large mounds about 70 metres in diameter and some 11 metres high at each end of the ship, obliterating without entirely dismantling it. A number of the bautas were uncovered during excavations of the south mound in 1941-2.²⁵

During a drought in the summer of 1820, the well at the top of the older, north mound ran dry. Attempting to dig deeper, the Jelling villagers were astounded to discover that the mound was hollow. The sheriff was summoned and a descent made into what turned out to be an oak-lined burial chamber. A half-metre-high deposit of earth, disturbed by the digging, covered the floor. A small silver cup was found, along with sundry metal fittings and the carved wooden figure of a man, about 15 cm high. Traces of paint show that his coat had been coloured blue and his hair and beard red. Of the original occupant of the chamber there was no sign.

Viking Age literature is rich in descriptions of haugbrott, the act of breaking open and entering a mound containing the remains of the dead. Very often the grave was entered as an act of exceptional daring with the aim of retrieving some object, often a sword, of symbolic military and political power. Perhaps the most compelling example in saga literature describes the descent of Grettir the Strong into the mound of Kar the Old, a site of hauntings and mysterious night-time fires. After a desperate struggle with Kar, Grettir succeeds in cutting off his head and putting an end to his revenancing. Among the wealth of grave-goods he then hoists up to the waiting Thorfin is a sword of outstanding beauty. Grettir covets it but Kar’s son Thorfin recognizes it as a family heirloom and will not let Grettir have it.²⁶

Sven Aggesen and Saxo in their ‘Histories’ both describe how King Uffi’s father led his son to the hiding place of a sword of special powers that he had buried in a mound. The Book of the Settlements relates how the Icelandic pioneer Leif went raiding in Ireland just prior to the first great voyage of emigration with Ingolf. In his travels there he came across ‘a big underground house, which he entered. All was dark till light shone from a sword which a man was holding. Leif killed this man, and took the sword from him and great riches too, and from there on was known as Hjorleif, Sword-Leif.’²⁷

Literature was here reflecting a familiar aspect of Viking Age life. The nineteenth-century excavators of the Gokstad ship-mound found evidence that they were not the first to have disturbed the grave. Nikolay Nikolaysen shared an assumption, common at the time, that the motive for such an act can have been nothing more profound than robbery, and in his published account of the excavation he paid little attention to it. The Oseberg mound likewise had been entered, although here aspects of the break-in gave Gabriel Gustafson food for thought. With a precision that suggested forehand knowledge, the shaft had been dug directly into the burial chamber where the bodies of the dead women lay, and their remains dragged out into the shaft and left there in a disordered state. The beds in which the bodies had reposed had been not merely broken but comprehensively destroyed. It looked as though ritual disordering, rather than the search for treasure, had been the purpose of the entry, and the urgent need to make the grave uninhabitable for the dead.

From the size of the shafts it was obvious they could not have been the work of a couple of local thieves emboldened by an evening’s drinking. Entry must have been a prominent and public act that took many days and many hands to complete.²⁸ Most of the mounds in the burial grounds at Borre, not far from the Oseberg site, show identical signs of having been broken open at some point. It is possible that Viking Age grave-mounds were raised as symbols of political power in the landscape, and that a ritual attack on them was also an attack on a specific political power. As we noted earlier, this may account for the partial destruction of the Borre mounds of the Danish kings Klak-Harald and Hemming on their trip across the waters of the Vik back in 813 to reassert their authority over rebellious Norwegian tributaries.²⁹

Another suggested motive for haugbrott is that it may have been done to retrieve the bones of especially brave or powerful men that could then be used in the forging of a weapon which would, in a literal sense, partake of the dead hero’s courage and power. To the same end of enhancing the spirit of the sword or the spear, the bones of bears or wolves were used in the firing process.³⁰ The blacksmith’s is one of the very few trades explicitly mentioned on a rune-stone and beliefs like these might go some way towards explaining his high and sometimes almost mystical status in the Viking Age.³¹

And yet none of these possibilities seems applicable to the empty north mound at Jelling, which bore no signs of disturbance from the outside. The excavation of the south mound carried out in 1941 revealed that it had never been used as a grave at all, and its purpose remains obscure. Perhaps Harald intended it for himself, but the circumstances of his death made burial there impractical or impossible. It may be that Poppo or some other Christian advised him against it, on the grounds that the Heathen symbolism of a mound burial would be inappropriate for a Christian king. A large post, standing at its centre and positioned on the central axis of the outlined ship-setting, shows how carefully Harald’s engineers worked to incorporate the original shape into their design. Harald positioned his great stone where it still stands today, exactly midway between the centres of the two mounds, and on the central axis of the ship-setting, and another possibility is that the south mound was raised simply to complete a symmetry and focus the whole monumental complex on the stone.

In the space between the Jelling stone and the north mound Harald built a church. It burnt down, as did the two oak churches that followed it. A stone church built around 1100 has survived to the present day. A serendipitous result of the installation of a heating system in 1976-9 provided what is in all likelihood a solution to the mystery of the body missing from the burial chamber beneath the north mound. A grave-chamber discovered below the floor of the first church contained the bones of a middle-aged man about 5 feet 8 inches (173 cm) tall, haphazardly spread about the chamber.³² Among the material finds were several hundred fragments of gold thread, probably the remains of a costly garment, and two strap decorations, with beautifully ornamented animal heads, in conception and execution identical to the heads depicted on the silver cup found in the north mound. These decorations were in a style so distinct from other examples of Viking Age art that art historians of the Viking Age have given it its own name, the Jelling style. Its significance for this story is the high degree of circumstantial evidence the cup and the strap decorations provide that the north mound was the original resting place of the bones discovered beneath the church, and the further likelihood that they were those of Harald’s father, King Gorm the Old.

We may reasonably doubt the sincerity of Rollo’s conversion to Christianity as part of the price paid for his land in Normandy, and we may point to political reasons why Harald Bluetooth may have found it advisable to embrace Christianity, not least Otto and the revived presence of a superpower on his southern borders. But this act of translation, if such it was, in all its filial piety, seems to show a genuine commitment to a new and Christian set of beliefs on the nature of the afterlife.³³ Gorm the Old had the possibly unique distinction of being buried for a third time on 30 August 2000, beneath the latest version of the Jelling church. Among those present at the re-interment of his remains was the Danish queen, Margrethe II, herself a member of the Jelling dynasty, honouring the memory of the founder of the line twenty-nine generations earlier.³⁴

If the complex of monuments at Jelling tell us something of Harald Bluetooth’s inner life, then other monuments that survive from his reign reveal more of his political concerns. The series of five ring-forts known as trelleborgs, from the first of them to be identified, and the wooden bridge at Ravning Enge appear to be intimately connected with the claim Harald made on the Jelling stone, that he had ‘won for himself all of Denmark and Norway’. They may also shed light on the obscure nature of the relationship between Denmark and Germany during the rule of Otto the Great, and on the tensions focused on the borders in southern Jutland.

In the Short History of the Kings of Denmark Sven Aggesen tells us that Harald inherited the kingdom from his father Gorm the Old.³⁵ Under the circumstances it might make the claim on the Jelling stone that Harald ‘won for himself all of Denmark’ redundant or even hollow. Denmark was favoured among the Scandinavian countries on a number of counts. The land was more fertile than land in either Norway or Sweden, and the cluster of islands to the east of the Jutland peninsula gave it control over trade relations between the Baltic countries in the east and mainland Europe. Naval power enabled it to maintain control over this trade route, and through naval power it was able to maintain its hegemony over the west coast of Sweden and the province of Skåne as well as the region around the Oslo fjord.³⁶ This regional prominence was a fact of Scandinavian political life by the beginning of the ninth century, and probably for some time before that. Harald Finehair’s primitive unification of Norway was achieved during the final decades of the ninth century, and it was undoubtedly facilitated by the dynastic instability among the Danes that lasted from the death of Horik the Younger until the advent of Gorm the Old, whose rule ended in about 935. We shall shortly examine in more detail developments in this newly unified Norway following the death of Harald Finehair in about 940. Here it is enough to say that, as was the case with Charlemagne and the Carolingian inheritance, Harald’s many sons turned out to be a curse rather than a blessing. As Norway’s fortunes declined so did Denmark’s ascend. We have no record of any military activity launched by Harald Bluetooth across the waters of the Vik; yet some such activity seems a logical explanation for the claim on the Jelling stone that he had ‘won Norway’, if we interpret this to mean that he won back the tributary status of the people living in the south and east of Norway that had been lost under Harald Finehair. Significantly the stone stops short of claiming that Harald also made the Norwegians Christian.

The unification or reunification of Denmark, and the restoration of Denmark’s regional power around the waters of the Vik and the Kattegat, were probably both served by the creation of the trelleborgs. In 1934 a motor-cycle sports club in Slagelse, in Zealand, were looking for a new arena in which to practise. They applied for permission to use the interior of a nearby large, circular earthen structure, to which no one had previously paid any particular attention. The National Museum of Denmark withheld permission until they had satisfied themselves that it was of no great antiquity, and the finds from the preliminary excavations turned out to be so unexpected and extraordinary that the club never did receive permission. For the next fifty years the site became the focus of intense archaeological activity.³⁷ The Trelleborg was the first of several similarly enigmatic structures to be identified as Viking Age forts in subsequent years, and its name was used as a generic for these at Fyrkat in Hobro; Nonnebakken in Odense; and at Aggersborg on the northern side of the Limfjord in northern Jutland.³⁸ The Slagelse Trelleborg was 136 metres in diameter, the fort at Aggersborg even larger at 240 metres. Two other forts, at Borgeby and at a second site, also known as Trelleborg, have been found in Skåne. Each of these earthen forts, moated around the sloping outside walls, was built to a pattern, perfectly circular and with gates at each of the cardinal points of the compass connected by two perfectly intersecting roads. Inside the Slagelse fort each of the four quarter-circles formed by the bisecting roads contained four identical square buildings, 30 metres long and with the bowed walls characteristic of the long-house of the period. In a perimeter beyond the walls that was protected by a second earthen wall and a moat, the remains of another fifteen similar buildings were found. A cemetery was located here. Though they varied in size and in individual points of detail, each of the other trelleborgs conformed to this basic pattern and there can be little doubt that they were the product of the same engineering vision. The Slagelse fort was built in the winter of 980-81. Tree-ring dating of the other forts confirms that they were built at about the same time, in the later years of the reign of Harald Bluetooth.

The name trelleborg may derive from trel (pl. trelle), meaning the wooden staves that lined the earthen walls of the fort both inside and out. Or it may indicate that they were built by slave-labour. A treaty of 1269 between Novgorod and the Hanseatic towns referred to a settlement of pilots on the Volkhov as Kholopij gorodok, a name that translates literally as the town of slaves. In the Latin version of the treaty of 1270 the name was rendered as Drelleborch.³⁹

A greater mystery concerns their purpose. Recent excavations in the extended vicinity of the fort at Slagelse have shown that some kind of service community grew up around it. Weights, silver coins from the east and pieces of hack silver and jewellery are all evidence of trading activities, and the find of a so-called casting-cone of bronze shows that handicrafts were practised on the site.⁴⁰ The remains of nails at the fort and between the fort and the nearby river might indicate that ships were repaired there. And yet, by contrast with buildings in other Viking Age settlements that have been excavated in recent years, the trelleborg forts and their houses show no signs of having been either repaired or maintained. The finding has proved difficult to reconcile with what was, for a long time, a popular theory that the forts were built as training camps and garrisons for Viking youths involved in raiding in the west and in the Baltic.⁴¹

The same enigmas attach to another of Harald’s extraordinary feats of engineering, the bridge at Ravning Enge that crossed the swampy valley of the river Vejle, 10 kilometres south of Jelling. It was built at the same time as the trelleborgs and its construction showed the same mastery of precision and symmetry. Five and a half metres wide and capable of bearing loads up to five tons, Ravning Enge remained, at 760 metres, the longest bridge ever constructed in Denmark until the erection of the Lillebæltsbro about 1,000 years later in 1935. Ropes stretched between hazelwood poles guided the builders in their work with such accuracy that across the full length of the bridge the deviation from a perfect straight line was never greater than 5 cm. In all, 1,120 piles were lowered into the water until they hit solid ground or a load-bearing obstruction and then levelled off to the same height to take the transverse planking. Yet for all the obsessive care lavished on this magnificent construction it too, like the trelleborgs, shows no signs of ever having been repaired. Archaeologists have estimated its functional life as at most five years.⁴²

As extraordinary as it might appear, the trelleborgs and the Ravning Enge bridge seem to have been nonce constructions. The pious inscriptions on a number of rune-stones in Sweden make it clear that in post-conversion Scandinavia the building of a bridge was considered a peculiarly Christian sort of good deed. Ravning Enge, however, was almost certainly not for the benefit of the local community. As an essential element of Harald’s unification strategies it made it possible for his soldiers to cross the Vejle marshes in all seasons and to connect with the Army or Ox Road. For the duration of the Viking Age and after, this was the overland ‘motorway’ between the north and continental Europe, stretching from Viborg in the north of Denmark to the trading centre of Hedeby in the south. Along with the L-shaped disposition of the trelleborgs across Danish territory, from Jutland in the north to Skåne in the east via Nonnebakken, it may bear physical witness to Harald’s claims on the Jelling stone to have won for himself all of Denmark, with the enormous and overawing Aggersborg in the north facing directly across Skaggerak and the Vik to Norway.

Only a year or two after his conversion, political anxieties aroused by threats from Otto in the south in 968 led Harald to develop the venerable Danevirke in the area around Hedeby into a single, coherent fortress settlement. These precautions were seemingly enough to forestall any intended attack, and with Otto’s death in 973 it was Harald who attempted to exploit the situation by invading the land south of the Eider. The Germans repelled his attack to such good effect that by the following year they were in possession of all of southern Jutland, including Hedeby and the Danevirke. By the end of the decade, with the trelleborgs and the Ravning Enge bridge in place and assuring his rapid logistical access to the south, Harald was able in 983 to launch a successful counter-attack and recover the lost territory. Border tensions evaporated, and with them the need to maintain the great garrison forts and the Ravning Edge bridge.

Harald was a remarkable king indeed, industrial, restless and forward-thinking. Inevitably, his decision to embrace and promote Christianity proved controversial and his unification campaign unpopular with the powerful. It is possible that, in the last years of his life, disaffected conservative forces looked to his son Sven to depose him, in the hope that Sven would revoke Harald’s reforms. Sven is said to have risen against his father and driven him out of the country. Weakened by an arrow-wound Harald made his way with his hird to Jumne, at the mouth of the river Oder, and died there in 987. In the Short History of the Kings of Denmark Sven Aggesen mentions, almost in passing, that Harald renounced his faith at the end of his life.⁴³ The fact that he was not canonized despite his work for the Christian Church might indicate the truth in the claim. For Adam of Bremen, however, Harald remained a model Christian king until the day of his death. He hailed him as ‘the first to order the Danes to become Christians, the one who filled all of the north with priests and churches, innocently wounded as he was, exiled from his own land for the sake of Christ, and it is my certain hope that he will one day bear the triumphant crown of martyrdom’.⁴⁴

Jumne is believed to have been on the site of Wolin in present-day Poland, and has been identified as the location of the fortress Jomsborg, home to the Jomsvikings, heroes of the thirteenth-century Saga of the Jomsvkinga and among the most potent literary legends of the Viking Age. If the story of Harald’s being driven into exile is true, then the origins of the tales concerning this dedicated band of warrior-heroes may lie in the further fate of the now leaderless remnants of the hird who survived him, and for whom return to Danish soil was not a practical alternative. If the trelleborgs did, indeed, house garrison communities of some sort, the codes of conduct operating within them may have provided a historical basis for the laws of membership and conduct that are noted in the saga as being those of the Jomsvikings:⁴⁵ that membership of such military brotherhoods was restricted to men between the ages of eighteen and fifty; that family connection were to count for nothing in deciding whether or not to admit new members; that a member might not flee from an opponent as brave and as well-armed as himself; that the expression of fear was forbidden no matter how hopeless the predicament; that members were to avenge each other as they would their own brothers; that all booty taken on an expedition, regardless of value, was to be put into the common store; that it was forbidden to start a quarrel inside the fort; that women were forbidden to enter the fort; and that absence from the fort for more than three days was not permitted.⁴⁶

Dudo gave us the story of Rollo’s man who stood up to kiss the foot of King Charles the Simple and sent him tumbling on to his back. The Saga of the Jomsvikings gives us another emblematic tale of Viking fearlessness. Following their defeat at Hjórungarág by a fleet under the command of Norwegian earls, the Jomsvikings are captured and called to their execution, one after another. Some go haughtily, some insolently. All go bravely. One is a seventeen-year-old ‘whose hair was long and golden-yellow like silk’. Asked how he views the prospect of death the youth replies, with a splendid mixture of stoicism and vanity, that he has lived the best part of his life and has no desire to survive his companions. Pride and reputation, however, continue to concern him and he makes a special request of his executioner:

A man steps forward and twines the long fair hair around his hands. As the executioner Thorkel brings down the sword the youth jerks away and the sword slices off the assistant’s arms below the elbow. The young man coolly inquires whose hands these are in his hair. Youth, sharpness of wit, bravery and vanity are the essential qualities of the heroic Viking and the young man has shown all four in abundance. He is reprieved and invited to become a member of Earl Erik’s hird. And yet the realities of Viking Age war are hardly glamorized by scenes in the saga of men interrupting battle to remove items of clothing because the heat of the day has made them uncomfortable; nor of ships that return to shore to pick up fresh supplies of stones, the stone for throwing being the weapon of choice for the average foot-soldier or sailor throughout most of the Viking Age.

Such details remind us of how differently things were done in the past. The distinction is emphasized by a naming culture that has handed down to us Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Erik Bloodaxe, Halfdan the Black and Ivar the Boneless, and scores of other personal names that dramatize the cultural gap between the Viking Age and our own times. For reasons best known to marketing people, ‘Bluetooth’ has recently been resurrected as the name of a form of wireless communication (never blåtann, always English ‘Bluetooth’, even in Scandinavia). If King Harald did indeed have a prominent blue or black tooth at the front of his mouth this may have been a simple case of dental decay. There is, however, a slight possibility the name might be related to the recent discoveries of twenty-four skeletons of young Viking Age males, in locations spread across Denmark and Sweden, whose teeth have horizontally filed furrows on the frontal upper part of the tooth crown. The work appears to have been done by people skilled in the practice. The furrows are usually several, though single furrows occur, and the modified teeth are at the front of the mouth. Their significance is obscure, but a suggestion put forward by the researchers is that the furrows may have been coloured to make them visible from a distance, perhaps in an erotic or a warlike signalling, in which case Harald’s would have been blue.⁴⁸