THE SCANDINAVIA FROM which the Vikings set out on their raids was in 800 already beginning to experience a series of political changes, as the states that would ultimately form Denmark, Sweden and Norway began to coalesce. This was, though, a very slow process, with a series of false starts and premature claims of unification from writers with a nationalistic (or, more properly, dynastic) agenda.
The identities of the rulers of Denmark later in the ninth century are obscure. Two brothers, Sigfred and Halfdan, are mentioned as ruling jointly there in 873, but, given that leaders of even comparatively small bands who raided in England and Ireland are termed ‘king’, it is by no means certain that they held sway over the whole of Denmark (or even over more than a small portion of it). It is not until the very end of the century that the historical mists begin to part. A Viking army was defeated at the River Dyle (in modern Belgium) in 891 by the East Frankish king, Arnulf. This was accompanied, according to Adam of Bremen – whose chronicle of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen includes much incidental detail about Scandinavia (which lay under the notional supervision of the German see) – by the death of two Danish kings (Sigfred and Godfred) and a decline in the political cohesion of the Danish kingdom. A very short-lived King Helgi was supplanted by a dynasty headed by Olaf that originated in Sweden (and was possibly from Skåne). Olaf was succeeded by his two sons Gnupa and Gurd, who were then followed by two rulers from another family, Sigerich and Hardegon Sveinsson. All these rulers are virtual ciphers to us, but what is clear is that Denmark was suffering from political instability and that influence from the north, from Sweden, was growing stronger.
The next mention of Danish kings comes in the 930s when Archbishop Unni of Hamburg sent a mission to Gorm (nicknamed ‘the Old’) in 935, but found him an obdurate pagan. Adam of Bremen’s chronology is probably a little confused, as in 934 the German emperor Henry the Fowler is said to have defeated the Danish king, Gnupa, and annexed land as far north as Hedeby (leaving little time for Sigerich and Hardegon to rule before Gorm’s accession the next year). About Gorm very little is known, save that he established a dynasty, the Jellings, who would rule over Denmark for the rest of the Viking Age.
What we do know comes from a series of memorials established by Gorm and his son Harald (who, for reasons that are somewhat obscure, acquired the nickname ‘Bluetooth’1). These lie around the churchyard at Jelling, near Velje in south-eastern Jutland, now a quiet settlement, although in the tenth century it formed the heart of the Danish kingdom. As well as two runestones – one set up by Gorm in memory of his wife Thyri and another by Harald in memory of his parents – the site consists of two large burial mounds, the church itself and a number of uninscribed standing stones. At first sight hard to decipher, the complex illuminates the development of the Danish kingdom in the mid-ninth century, and in particular its Christianisation.
The first to be set in place was Gorm’s runestone, a weathered rectangular slab that bears the runic inscription2 ‘King Gorm made this memorial to his wife Thyri, the adornment of Denmark.’ This represents no more than a conventional tribute to the dead queen, but Gorm also raised an enormous burial mound (some 35 feet high and 230 feet in diameter) to the north of the present church, into which was set a wooden burial chamber intended for Thyri’s and (ultimately) his own mortal remains. He also erected a triangular series of stones at one end of the mound, which may well be a stylised representation of a ship (from which such monuments are given the generic name ‘ship-settings’). It is even possible that originally Thyri’s runestone was set at the ‘prow’ of the ship, although it was subsequently moved and forgotten about, being eventually discovered buried in the churchyard in 1590.
For the last fifteen years of Gorm’s life, Harald acted as co-ruler with his father, and by the time the old king died in 958, fresh attempts were already being made to bring Christianity to the Danes. In 948, three bishops were appointed to sees in Århus, Ribe and Hedeby.3 Although Harald did not become a Christian before his father’s death, it is clear that a favourable climate for acceptance of the new religion was emerging among his advisers some time before. It was just two years after Harald’s accession to the throne that Poppo, a new missionary bishop, finally converted the Danish king (although, according to Adam of Bremen, it was the Danes’ failure in a war against the German emperor rather than any religious conviction that played the central role in Harald’s willingness to accept baptism).
It all came about as the result of a heated debate around the royal feasting table, fuelled no doubt by copious quantities of beer and mead. The talk turned to which of the gods was most powerful: the Danes were prepared to accept that Christ was divine, but counted him as simply one of many, and distinctly less powerful than their own deities, such as Odin and Thor.4 Poppo could not accept this affront to the Christian religion and declared that there was only one true God, while those whom the Vikings worshipped were simply demons. To avoid the angry reaction to this offence turning violent, Harald challenged Poppo to demonstrate the truth of his argument by submitting to an ordeal.
Ordeals varied in kind, from forcing a party to a dispute to plunge his unprotected arm into a cauldron of boiling water to retrieve a ring, to binding up and throwing the accused into a pond. The latter was a technique much used in the later Middle Ages to test witches; the accused was found guilty if she floated (and survived) and innocent if she sank (and drowned). Although seeming to modern sentiments a barbaric legal instrument, ordeals were in fact reasonably common when the normal practice of taking oaths from supporters of either side to determine the truth of a case had failed, and where there seemed no prospect of satisfactory recourse to any other form of mediation.
In Poppo’s case resorting to an ordeal came first, before any real attempt to mediate the dispute. The king commanded Poppo to carry a lump of red-hot iron a number of paces before dropping it. According to the rules of the ritual, his hand was then bound for several days and the wound inspected afterwards – if it was found to be infected, then the ordeal would be judged to have gone against him. The event is commemorated in a series of bronzes fixed to the pulpit in the church at Tamdrup, south-west of Århus.5 One image shows the lump of iron being heated above a fire, and in the next Poppo removes the binding from his hand to show that the wound is clean. Harald is then depicted, duly won over, being baptised while standing naked in a barrel of water.
Harald Bluetooth may have brought Christianity to Denmark – at least to his own satisfaction – but there had certainly been Christian missionaries before his time. The first recorded was the Northumbrian St Willibrord in 714, who took time, during his forty-year-long mission to the Frisians in the early eighth century, to visit King Ongendus, who was described as ‘fiercer than any wild beast, and harder than stone’.6 The mission achieved little, not least because of Willibrord’s haughtily discourteous behaviour before the Danish king.
The next attempt at proselytising the Danes came in 823, when the Frankish ruler Louis the Pious despatched Ebbo, Archbishop of Rheims, on a new mission. Although he seems to have baptised a few converts, a richer crop came in 826, when Harald Klak and 400 of his followers accepted Christianity at Mainz (although, in the way of the times, he did so largely through his need to procure imperial assistance to gain the Danish throne rather than out of any sense of religious conviction). When Harald was finally able to return to Denmark, he fulfilled his part of the bargain by bringing with him a young Christian cleric named Anskar. The success of the mission was firmly tied to Harald’s political star, and when Harald was expelled from the country after just a few months, Anskar and his companion Audubert had to leave too; they had barely had time to establish a school to instruct a small number of youths in Christianity (probably at Hedeby). Anskar’s next journey to Scandinavia would see him travelling not to Denmark, but to Sweden.7
More than a century later, Harald Bluetooth marked his conversion to Christianity by adding dramatic new elements to the family burial ground. He is said to have chanced one day on an enormous granite stone lying on a beach in Jutland, and ordered the 10-ton block to be man-hauled all the way back to Jelling. He had perhaps already ordered the erection of another mound, slightly smaller than that for his mother and placed to the south of it. This new mound almost entirely obliterated the pre-existing ship-setting, many of whose stones were buried beneath it. Oddly, when archaeologists began investigating it in 1941, they found no burial chamber inside this new memorial, and so it can never have been intended to receive Harald’s own corpse (both ship-settings and burials in mounds clearly being pagan vestiges that were not encouraged in the newly Christian Denmark).
The runestone, which has been described as Denmark’s ‘baptismal certificate’, is a triangular piece of red-black granite carved on three sides, with a lengthy runic inscription on one side accompanied by images asserting Harald’s Christian credentials. It reads: ‘King Harald had this monument made in memory of Gorm, his father, and in memory of Thyri, his mother, that Harald who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.’ On the second side, a lion and a serpent (with its tail curled round into its mouth) engage in a sinuous struggle for supremacy that might symbolically represent that between the old religion and the new. The third face of the stone contains the earliest surviving depiction of Jesus Christ in native art from Scandinavia. In common with many runestones, the Jelling Stone would originally have been painted in bright colours, the merest traces of which have survived, and so the appearance of Christ – surrounded by interlocking knot patterns, his arms outstretched and his legs together as though on the cross, eyes wide open and with an expression of serene triumph – must have been striking indeed (some idea, though divorced from its setting, can be gained from the coloured replica of the stone that has been erected inside the nearby museum).
Almost as if an afterthought, a church – the current incarnation being a plain white Romanesque structure dating from about 1100 – nestles between the two mounds, stamping a definitive Christian note on a scene many of whose components flirt dangerously with paganism. Excavations in the north mound in 18208 found the oak-lined burial chamber, together with a scattering of artefacts including a silver cup (the decoration on which gives the Jellinge artistic style its name),9 but there were no human remains. Although it is possible that the grave had been broken into at some time and its contents stolen (a practice vividly described in the Saga of Grettir the Strong,10 where the hero enters a burial mound, does battle with the shade of Kar the Old, who is buried there, and then makes off with a treasure trove of grave-goods), the absence of human bones in the south mound suggested that something more than mere grave robbery was to blame.
The mystery was partially solved in 1976 when the church decided to install a new central-heating system. As well as the remains of two previous oak-built churches, both of which had been destroyed by fire, archaeologists discovered a grave placed just below the level of the earliest building. Interred in it were the remains of a middle-aged man, just over 5 feet 6 inches in height. The bones were not placed in an orderly fashion, suggesting that they had been disarticulated during their removal from a previous resting place. The grave also contained a large quantity of gold thread and a pair of strap decorations, which may have come from a perished garment. The balance of probability is that this burial beneath Jelling church is that of Gorm the Old, and that his remains were transferred there by Harald in a symbolic claiming of them for Christianity. They may well have been buried previously in the north mound, but what happened to the body of Harald’s mother, Thyri, is unknown. Gorm’s bones were buried, possibly for the third time, in 2000, again beneath Jelling church, with Queen Margrethe II of Denmark (his direct descendant) in attendance.
The complex at Jelling is not the only evidence of monumental building during Harald’s reign. In the 950s additional works were carried out along the Danevirke in the south of Denmark, and ten years later a wall was constructed connecting the main fortification line to the ramparts of Hedeby. Additional improvements to the defences of Hedeby, Ribe and Århus are also attributed to Harald, but the most spectacular evidence of his building campaign is a series of monumental circular fortresses scattered throughout Denmark (and in one case in Skåne in southern Sweden, which then formed part of the Danish realm) and previously believed to be mustering points for Svein Forkbeard’s invasion of England in 1013. The timbers used on them have now been dated by dendrochronology to 980–1, setting them firmly in Harald’s time.
These huge fortresses, at Trelleborg in the west of Zealand (from which the type of fortification takes its name), Fyrkat in the east of Jutland, Aggersborg in north Jutland, Nonnebakken, near Odense on Fyn and another, also called Trelleborg, in Skåne, are all built to a similar plan. They have gates situated at the cardinal points of the compass, and are equipped with timber-reinforced ramparts. They vary in size from Fyrkat and Nonnebakken, which are 390 feet in diameter, to Trelleborg at 445 feet and the comparative giant, Aggersborg, whose diameter (some 790 feet) is twice that of the others. The footings of sixteen large buildings have been found inside the smaller three forts, all around 100 feet long with curved walls, while Aggersborg’s larger dimensions were sufficient to house forty-eight such structures. The interior of the forts is divided into quadrants by intersecting roads, which run east–west and north–south to each of the four gates.
The precise purpose of such large fortifications is unclear, particularly as there are no signs that the interior buildings were ever repaired, indicating that they were probably occupied for as little as twenty years. They were all situated along the line of (or close to) major roads, and so may have been a means for Harald to consolidate royal power just after his ‘unification’ of the kingdom, but became redundant once he was secure in power.11 This idea is reinforced by a series of improvements that he ordered on the road network throughout Denmark. The bridge at Ravning Enge in the Velje Valley is one of the largest in Scandinavia, around 2,460 feet long and 18 feet wide,12 and has been dated by dendrochronology to 978. Throughout all this length the line of the bridge never deviates more than two inches from a straight line, and its construction required 1,100 piles, which were sunk into the swampy ground to bear its weight. It is an astonishing achievement of early medieval technology and must have involved a prodigious effort of the sort only available to a strong centralised power. Like the Trelleborg forts, the Ravning Enge bridge shows no traces of repair works, and so its operational life must have been short indeed – another sign that it, too, was built more as a statement of royal power than as a practical long-term measure.
Although Harald seems to have succeeded in unifying much of the Danish kingdom under his rule, he did not do so without external opposition. The threat from the German emperor Otto I prompted the Danes to strengthen the fortifications of the Danevirke, but an abortive attack southwards in 973 was followed by a counter-offensive which led to a German occupation of southern Jutland, including the line of the Danevirke itself. It took ten years for Harald to recover the lost ground, and it is perhaps to this time of crisis, and the need to emphasise national unity and his own power, that the building of both the Trelleborgs and the Ravning Enge bridge should be dated.
To the north Harald faced opposition from Håkon the Good of Norway, who in 954 ravaged the coastlines of Jutland and Zealand, as well as Danish-controlled Skåne. Håkon’s father, Harald Finehair, had begun the consolidation of the Norwegian kingdom, and his son was equally ambitious. The Danish king tried to install his own man on the throne of Norway by giving aid to Harald Greycloak, one of the sons of Eirik Bloodaxe, whom the Norwegians had expelled around 934. Several attacks by the Eirikssons were repelled, but finally Håkon was fatally wounded in a battle at Fitjar in around 960. His court poet, Evyind, who rejoiced in the unfortunate nickname ‘the plagiarist’ (Skáldaspillir), composed a sorrowful epitaph for his monarch:
Wealth dies, kinsmen die,
The land is laid waste,
Since Håkon fared to the heathen gods,
Many are thralls and slaves.13
Norway was then divided up between Eirik’s five sons, but despite this weakening of a potential rival to Denmark, Harald Bluetooth still chafed at Greycloak’s growing independent-mindedness. When the men of Trøndelag rose up against the Eirikssons, the Danish king was happy to lend the rebellion his support. Harald Greycloak fell in battle at Limfjord around 970 and Norway was then partitioned between Harald Bluetooth’s new ally, Jarl Håkon Sigurdsson of Lade, and a Danish-controlled area in the south and east.
For all Harald’s successful neutering of the threat to the north, his distinguished reign ended in ignominy. Shortly after the successful campaign against the Germans in 983, his son Svein Forkbeard rose up in revolt with the help of a coalition of discontented magnates. Harald was wounded in battle and fled eastwards to Wendland, ending up at the fortress of Jumne or Jomsborg (probably present-day Wolin in Poland), where, according to Adam of Bremen, he died a few years later. Harald had probably intended to use this as a springboard for a return to Denmark, as his second wife, whom he married in 965, was a Wendish princess named Tovi.14 He is said to have founded the fortress as a centre for an independent Viking band (known as the Jomsvikings), and may have thought to have found support from them.15
The legends that became associated with the Jomsvikings are both heroic and colourful. The fort was said to have had a harbour large enough for 350 ships and to have housed only the strongest warriors; no woman was ever allowed to enter its gates. The Saga of the Jomsvikings also gives an alternative account of Harald’s end, relating that the Danish king tricked the Jomsvikings (when they were suitably drunk) into agreeing to attack his arch-rival, Jarl Håkon of Lade. When they sobered up the warriors felt obliged to stick to their word and set sail en masse for Norway, where, despite their ferocious reputation, they were soundly beaten at the Battle of Hjørungavåg. The seventy survivors of the carnage were then brought before Jarl Håkon for judgement.
The Norwegian jarl had the Jomsvikings executed one by one, observing them closely to see if they lived up to their reputation for bravery, even in the face of certain death. One of the captives asked his comrades to watch him, saying that if there really was life after death, he would raise the axe he was holding as a sign. Yet when his head was severed, his lifeless fingers loosed their grasp and the weapon fell clattering to the ground. After nine of his comrades had been executed, an eighteen-year-old youth was dragged forward to be the tenth victim. Boldly he asked that his long golden hair be held away from his face when the blow was struck, to avoid his locks being spattered with blood. The request was granted and one of the jarl’s men twisted the boy’s hair roughly around his hand. As the axe came down, the young Jomsviking arched backwards so that the blade instead sliced through the hand of the Norwegian executioner. Impressed at his courage and resourcefulness, Håkon then spared the youth. This did not put an end to the killing, however, and an eleventh Jomsviking, Vagn, son of Áki, was selected to meet his doom. Vagn, however, managed to pull free of his captors, seized a weapon and dealt a death-blow to Thorkel, Håkon’s chief henchman, who had been overseeing the executions. After this impressive display of bravery, Vagn was invited to join the Norwegian jarl’s company, but he refused unless all his remaining comrades were similarly spared, a request that was granted. The story is almost certainly made up, but the saga itself may well preserve some memory of a Danish outpost on the Baltic in Wendland, which harboured a force strong enough for Harald to have hopes that it might be able to restore him to the throne.
The political consolidation of Norway proceeded much more slowly than in Denmark; the geography of the country was far more difficult than that of its southern neighbour, where most areas could be reached by a short journey overland (or by boat). There are few mentions of any central authority before the mid-ninth century, but the political centre of gravity of the petty kingdoms into which Norway was divided lay in the regions alongside the Oslofjord, notably in Vestfold, Raumarike, Hedmark and Østfold, which contained much of the best farming land in Norway. A second important region, the Trøndelag, lay far to the north near modern Trondheim, while a third nucleus of early political consolidation developed in western coastal Norway, around Sogn, Rogaland and Hordaland. It was the tensions between these three areas that defined much of Norwegian political history until the eleventh century and beyond.
Harald Finehair, who began the process of the unification of Norway, was the son of a petty king of the Vestfold named Halfdan the Black, and the grandson of Queen Åsa.16 His mother is said to have had a dream that her son would grow to be like a tree with red roots, a green trunk and white branches, which would spread out to cover the whole of Norway (a prediction of his future greatness). Yet on Harald’s accession to Halfdan’s tiny realm around 870, the prospects for lasting fame (or even survival) seemed remote, as almost instantly his father’s vassals took the opportunity to break away. It required years of bitter fighting to reintegrate them into the kingdom of Vestfold (which probably also included Ringerike and adjoining areas). In the meantime Håkon Grjogardsson was engaging in a similar act of consolidation around the Trøndelag, giving rise to the very real prospect of an eventual collision between their two spheres – a disaster that was only averted by Håkon’s acceptance of Harald as his notional overlord.
This arrangement left Harald free to attack the west around Hordaland and Rogaland, the very area from which the first Viking raiders to cross the North Sea to Britain and Ireland had set out. After a hard-fought campaign, Harald’s fleet caught up with the local jarls at Hafrsfjord, just west of Stavanger. Even the year is uncertain, with dates ranging from 885 to 900 being those normally accepted.17 The dating of the battle is of some importance for the chronology of the Viking expansion in the North Atlantic, since saga tradition relating to both the Orkneys and Iceland maintains that the initial settlers were men who had fled Norway to escape Harald’s increasingly tyrannical rule.18 Unfortunately the chronology does not quite fit, as Harald only came to the throne in 870, at about the time of the first Viking settlement in Iceland, and it was at least some decades before his grip on the country became strong enough to be any threat to the independent-minded men of the west.
While Harald still had enemies, and the coexistence with Håkon in the Trøndelag was somewhat uneasy, as King of Vestfold he had emerged as the clear victor in the struggle for Norway. Harald had long before sworn an oath that he would not cut his hair or allow it to be combed until he was ruler of all Norway, a vow that gave rise to his early nickname of ‘tangle-hair’. For the moment, though, he did not consider his pledge fulfilled and set out on an expedition against men who were said to have fled his rule for the Northern Isles of Scotland and were raiding the sea-lanes. Reports that his campaign extended as far south as the Isle of Man are probably an exaggeration, and there are serious doubts over the claim that Harald took control of the Orkneys and Hebrides for Norway, but some kind of expedition at least may have taken place.
Now satisfied, Harald had his most trusted follower, Rögnvald of Møre, cut his hair – a job that the earl performed with such efficacy that the king as a result acquired his better-known nickname hafagre or ‘Finehair’. He is said to have turned now to domestic affairs, carrying out a number of administrative reforms such as the appointment of jarls to oversee justice in each district, including the collection of fines, one-third of which went to the royal treasury; and the establishment of a formal system by which the jarls would provide manpower for the army. However, many of these measures are probably reading backwards from later developments.
We possess an invaluable insight into Norwegian life at about this time from a manuscript that narrates the voyages of a Norwegian trader named Ohthere (Ottár in Old Norse). His tale has been preserved because he visited the court of Alfred the Great in Wessex in the late ninth century, and the account he gave of his travels was then appended as an additional section in the Historiarum adversum paganos libri septem (‘Seven Books of History against the Pagans’), a Christian polemical history of the world by the fifth-century Spanish churchman Orosius.
Ohthere lived in the north of Norway, around Tromsø – or, as he described it to King Alfred, ‘the farthest north of all Norwegians’. He was said to have been considered extremely rich among the Halogolanders, the men of this far-flung land, since he possessed 600 reindeer, twenty cattle, twenty sheep and twenty pigs, as well as a little land that he ‘ploughed with horses’. The largest part of his wealth, however, came from the produce that he collected as tribute from the local Saami tribes. As well as furs, this included bird down, whalebone, and walrus and seal hide.
One year, Ohthere decided to find out quite how far north the coastline extended and whether anyone lived beyond the area that the Norwegians had so far explored. Setting out from the furthest point any of the whale hunters had yet reached, he sailed past uninhabited shores for three days, at which point the land veered sharply to the east. Ohthere proceeded along it for a further four days, and then the coastline turned south. After five more days’ travel, he and the crew made their way up a great river, finding evidence of habitation on each bank of the waterway. The peoples he subsequently encountered included the Finns of the Kola peninsula (whom the Old English of the Orosius translation renders as Beormas) and another Finnic group known as the Cwenas (or Kvenir in Old Norse), a constellation of groups that continued to dominate the Arctic territories in the face of Norse attempts to exploit it.
Ohthere travelled such a great distance in search of walrus ivory, a precious trading commodity. He had probably reached the area of the White Sea (off the north-west of modern Russia), and although the expedition did not lead to any long-lasting connection between the two areas, it shows the extent to which commercial motives combined with sheer curiosity may have motivated some of the furthest-flung Viking voyages.
Sailing in the other direction, on his way to England, Ohthere hugged the coast of Norway (whose very name is derived from the ‘North Way’, the maritime route along its coastline) until, after around a month’s travel,19 he reached a place called Sciringesheal, which was probably Kaupang on the western shore of Oslofjord. He then travelled for five days southwards to Hedeby, where he described the islands around it as ‘belonging to Denmark’ – a very early occurrence of the term. Finally, Ohthere made his way to England, where Alfred the Great was described as his hlaford or lord – not, most probably, because the Norwegian merchant had sworn fealty to the Wessex king, but because, as was customary, foreigners paid a toll to the local ruler and in exchange came under his protection for the duration of their stay.
Ohthere was not the only traveller whose voyages were interpolated in the Old English translation of Orosius’s work. Another merchant named Wulfstan, who may either have been Norwegian or English,20 also gave an account to Alfred of his travels to Hedeby and the Baltic. From Denmark, he sailed east to Truso on the mouth of the Vistula, a voyage that took him seven days, passing by Skåne, Faster, Lolland, Langeland and Wendland, before reaching Witland, which belonged to the Este, a tribe that subsisted on honey and fish, where the richest drank mare’s milk, leaving mead for the poor. One of their curious habits, Wulfstan reported, was to leave a man’s corpse inside his house for several days; because of the extreme cold, the body did not decompose.21
When he died, around 933, Harald Finehair left a large number of sons, by some counts as many as sixteen, but more likely to be the nine mentioned by Eyvind the Plagiarist, the court poet of his eventual heir, Håkon the Good. It was, though, Eirik, Harald’s son by Ragnhild (the daughter of a local Jutland king), who won out to become his immediate successor as King of Norway. Eirik’s marriage to Gunnhild – the daughter of Gorm the Old, King of Denmark – made him a very plausible choice as Norwegian ruler, as such a dynastic link between the two realms held out the possibility of their eventually uniting, and at the very least enhanced the prospect for peace between them.
Harald’s youngest son, Håkon, had been in England, where he had been fostered at the court of King Athelstan of Wessex (giving rise to his other nickname of Adalsteins fostri) and, on hearing of his father’s death, he swiftly returned to Norway to join up with Jarl Sigurd of Hladir, who bitterly opposed Eirik’s candidacy. In the face of this potent combination, Eirik put up no fight and simply sailed west to England, where he became established as King of York in 948, causing no end of trouble for his little brother’s foster-father. Eirik’s on–off kingship of York ended with his death in 954,22 and his sons then chose to focus their ambitions on the crown of Norway rather than on regaining their patrimony in northern England.
Håkon the Good’s rule over Norway was seriously destabilised by the alliance of the eldest brother, Harald Greycloak, with Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, but he also faced opposition to his policy of trying to enforce Christianity, the religion of his upbringing at Athelstan’s court. The coming of the new faith to Norway is remembered in the Kuli runestone found on Kuløy island off the north-west coast in 1913, which reads: ‘Thórir and Hallverð raised this stone in memory of Ulfljot, Christendom had been 12 winters in the realm.’ Representing the first use of the word ‘Christendom’ in Norwegian sources, this runestone is dated in one interpretation to the 940s, during Håkon’s reign.23
The new king tried to encourage the observance of Sunday and also sought to Christianise the celebration of Jól, the old pagan midwinter festival (which had involved the drinking of large quantities of ale and the ritual sacrifice and collection of the blood of cattle). There was uproar when Håkon announced that these practices would be abolished, particularly as the king’s role involved an ancient sacral element and so his participation was essential for the efficacy of the pagan rites. When Jarl Sigurd of Hladir and the other conservative notables threatened revolt, Håkon agreed to drink from a horn that had been hallowed with the name of Odin. When he tried to retain his Christian integrity by making the sign of the cross over the vessel, and those present protested and asked what he was doing, Sigurd reassured them that the king was merely making a sign in honour of Thor.
The Jarl of Hladir was not yet done with Håkon, however, and offered him the meat of a horse sacrificed to the pagan gods. This was a step too far for the king and he refused, also turning down the broth in which the meat had stewed. But in the end Håkon could see that his stubbornness was liable to cost him his throne and so he compromised by inhaling the smoke from the boiling horse meat.24 It was neither an edifying spectacle for the Christians, nor did it really satisfy pagan sensibilities and, as tensions rose again, Håkon finally ate a piece of the sacrificial horse’s liver and drank a hearty portion of the sacred broth. As a result, Håkon’s memory was ever afterwards associated with his ambiguous relationship to both Christianity and paganism. His wife was reputed to be a believer in the old ways and, after Eirik’s sons finally defeated and killed Håkon at Fitjar sometime between 960 and 965, his body was interred not in a churchyard (as his followers had offered the dying king), but in a pagan burial mound.
The victorious Eirikssons returned with their mother Gunhild to a Norway that was now bitterly split, with part of the east still held by Håkon’s nephew, Tryggvi, while the Vestfold (under Gudrod Bjarnason) and Trondheim (ruled by Jarl Sigurd) also asserted their independence. In effect, Harald Greycloak’s writ only ran in the centre and south-west of the country. By 970 Greycloak had defeated Tryggvi and brought the Vestfold under his rule, while Jarl Sigurd of Hladir was also killed and replaced by his son Håkon. The growing power of the Eirikssons worried Harald Bluetooth of Denmark sufficiently to forge an alliance with Håkon Sigurdsson, and in 974 this coalition defeated and killed Greycloak at Hals, near the Limfjord. For a time Norway was divided again, with Håkon Sigurdsson of Hladir holding the western provinces, while Harald Bluetooth took the east and south. The Jarl of Hladir, for all that he had notionally accepted Danish overlordship (with the promise of the payment of twenty falcons a year and the obligation to provide military service should it be demanded), fought stubbornly to preserve his independence, swiftly abjuring the conversion to Christianity that he had been forced to accept as part of the agreement on partitioning Norway.
In the end, Harald grew tired of his truculent vassal, and in 986 sent a fleet up the western coast of Norway to bring Håkon to heel. It was allegedly during this campaign that Harald was joined by a contingent of Jomsvikings,25 but their defeat at the Battle of Hjørungavåg ensured the security of Håkon’s rule for a decade more, until the arrival of another Norwegian princeling, Olaf, the son of Tryggvi of Vik, in 995.26
Sweden was the last of the three Scandinavian countries to emerge as a consolidated kingdom. Two separate realms emerged: Svealand (‘the country of the Svear’), broadly the west of modern Sweden; and Götaland (‘the country of the Götar’), in the east, including modern Gotland. Although there was once a belief that the coalescence of the two took place as early as the sixth century under the early Yngling kings,27 it is more likely that this occurred towards the end of the first millennium. Sources for Sweden are sparser than those dealing with Denmark and Norway, so much of the type of information that we possess for developments in those countries during the ninth and tenth centuries is lacking for their eastern neighbour. The earliest notice that we do have concerns the missionary activity of Anskar, sent by the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen to convert the Scandinavian pagans.
Anskar’s second mission (after his first, abortive one to Denmark) was in 829 or 830, and this time his destination was Sweden. On his way there, Anskar and his small party were attacked by Vikings, an interesting reflection on the dangers that awaited the unprotected or unwary traveller. Although they escaped with their lives, the missionaries lost all the holy books they had been carrying with them (some of which may have had bindings incorporating precious metals and jewels, making them an attractive and portable item for bandits). Finally, Anskar’s party arrived at the town of Birka on Lake Mälaren, Sweden’s only urban (or rather proto-urban) centre at the time.28 They found there a local king, Bjorn, who received them well. It may well be that he was a king of the Svear, and it is certain that his rule did not extend over the whole of Sweden.
Anskar managed to convert Hergeir, who is described as the praefectus (prefect) of Birka, and with his assistance established a small church in the town. The number of converts, however, seems to have been quite small and Anskar soon returned to Hamburg, where he became archbishop. He made a second missionary foray around 850 on hearing of the expulsion of Gauzbert, the bishop whom he had left behind, and of the martyrdom of Nithard, one of the converts (who thus became Sweden’s first documented Christian martyr). When Anskar arrived back in Birka, the king (by now a certain Olaf) explained that he would speak in support of his mission, but would have to do so in front of the local assembly or thing and that, if this gave its approval, Anskar would be able to preach, for ‘It is the custom among them that the control of business of every kind should rest with the whole people and not with the king.’29 As well as providing an insight into the organisation of Sweden’s earliest urban centres, the incident suggests that the authority of the Swedish ninth-century rulers was somewhat circumscribed.
Because of Birka’s importance as a trading centre, Christians may have continued to visit and even reside there, but for all that Anskar is known as the ‘apostle of Scandinavia’, the long-term effects of his missionary activities appear to have been slight. It was only when centralised royal authority developed in Sweden that Christianity began to make much headway, its spread supported by monarchs who appreciated the increase in their own authority that becoming a Christian might bring. Before then all we have are some scant records of Erik Segersäll (‘the victorious’) towards the end of the tenth century, who is portrayed as an enthusiastic Viking, engaging in pillaging raids against areas bordering on Uppland, the nucleus of his kingdom. More constructively, it may have been he who founded Sigtuna around 975, which became the Swedish royal capital (and the second urban centre in the country, after Birka). He is also said to have been baptised (in Denmark), had a Christian wife (the daughter of Prince Mieszko of Poland) and allowed a new round of missionary activity, although his conversion, as was so often the case with Viking chieftains, was skin-deep and he renounced the new religion as soon as he got home.30
Under Erik’s son, Olof (c.980–1022), known as Skötkonung or ‘half-king’,31 Sweden experienced a consolidation both in Christianity and in royal authority. He was probably Sweden’s first genuinely Christian king (being baptised at Husaby around 1008) and helped with the establishment of a new bishopric for the Swedes at Skara in Västergötland. One sign of the increasing power of the monarchy was Olof’s establishment of a mint at Sigtuna, which issued large quantities of coins stamped with the legend Olaf Rex (‘Olaf the king’), while the reverse often carried the inscription SiDei, which may be interpreted as Sigtuna Dei (‘God’s Sigtuna’), an indication of his public commitment to Christianity. In foreign-policy terms, Olof’s major achievement was the alliance with King Svein Forkbeard of Denmark against Olaf Tryggvason of Norway, which led to the Norwegian king’s defeat at the Battle of Svold in 1000 and the Swedish acquisition of part of the Trøndelag.32 Quite how far Olof’s power extended within Sweden is uncertain, however, and his coins refer to him as rex sveorum, suggesting that the core of his kingdom remained that of the Svear and that his authority over the Götar, if it existed, was incomplete.33
That Olof’s Christianisation of Sweden was at best partial is indicated by the tradition that he was martyred around 1021–2 for his refusal to revert to paganism. The piecemeal progress of the new religion is further suggested by a runestone found on the island of Frösö in the northern province of Jämtland. Dating from sometime in the early to mid-eleventh century, it reads: ‘Austmað, Guðfast’s son, had this stone raised and this bridge made, and he made Jämtland Christian. Ásbjörn built the bridge, Trjónn and Steinn carved these runes.’ The revealing inscription may indicate that Christianity’s advent in the far north was the work of a local chieftain and had little to do with any action by the kings at Sigtuna. Jämtland, in the border area between Norway and Sweden, seems in general to have exercised a degree of independence from both, until the defeat of the Jämtlanders by Sverre Sigurdsson of Norway in 1178 and its consequent incorporation into the Norwegian kingdom.
The comparatively weak state of Christianity in the core area of Sweden is further supported by Adam of Bremen’s description of it in the later eleventh century. An anti-Christian reaction erupted in 1066 during the reign of Stenkil (nicknamed ‘the Heathen’), while pagan resistance became focused on the great sanctuary at Uppsala dedicated to the worship of Odin, Frey and Thor. Although Adam had never actually been to Uppsala (where, as a Christian cleric, his welcome would doubtless have been distinctly cool), he relays with a palpable sense of horror the details that his informant gave him about the pagan rites carried out there. He tells of a huge series of sacrifices that were carried out every nine years, with nine male representatives of each living creature being slaughtered, and the corpses of the victims then suspended in the trees of the sacred grove for all to see. Even Christians were forced to take part in the bloody ritual, unless they paid a hefty fine to gain exemption.34
As late as 1084, when King Inge refused to participate in pagan rituals, he was denounced by his brother-in-law, Sven, who was duly installed on the throne in his place. Sven, who acquired the nickname blott (‘sacrifice’), then led the notables in a ritual repudiation of Christianity, forcing each in turn to consume a portion of sacrificial horse-meat. Inge, however, did not rest idle, and from his retreat in the western part of Götaland steadily plotted his revenge. After three years he returned, trapped Sven in a house and burnt it down, with his rebellious brother-in-law still inside. Restored to the throne, and with pagan resistance cowed, Inge finally returned to the unfinished business of the Uppsala sanctuary. In around 1090, he ordered the temple’s destruction and the uprooting of the sacred grove. This time there was little resistance and so, more than 250 years after Anskar’s pioneering mission among the Danes, the prospect of paganism reasserting itself in Sweden vanished and the victory of Christianity in Scandinavia was complete.
Scandinavia had changed in many other ways, too, since the dawn of the Viking Age in the late eighth century. Although trading emporia had flourished during the seventh and early eighth centuries in north-western Europe, and had formed one of the principal targets of the early Viking attacks, urbanisation was a phenomenon that was slow to take hold in Scandinavia. It was particularly impeded in Norway and Sweden by the poor state of communications over land, and by the sheer size of those areas, which hampered the appearance of the kind of central authority that was needed to guarantee the security of large settlements.
Most people in Viking Scandinavia continued to live in isolated farmsteads, and by the early ninth century urbanisation had made such little progress that there were only four towns: two in Denmark (Ribe and Hedeby); one in Sweden (Birka); and one in Norway (Kaupang or Skiringssal). There was a curious discontinuity with later towns, and none of these places were functioning as major trading centres after 1050 (Kaupang and Birka had disappeared altogether, while Ribe and Hedeby may have been refounded later). A second wave of town foundations from the late tenth and eleventh centuries, which included Sigtuna in Sweden, Århus, Roskilde and Lund in Denmark and Oslo and Trondheim in Norway, is more closely associated with the growth of royal power in those countries and the need both for permanent royal centres and regional towns from which to dominate outlying parts of the kingdom.
The comparatively higher density of population in Viking Denmark, and its proximity to the developed markets of Frisia, France and Germany, facilitated a development of towns that was more precocious than elsewhere in Scandinavia. There were early centres at Dankirke, where fragments of glass vessels from the fifth to sixth century have been found, and at Gudme on the island of Funen, but these were at best large farms or small clusters of buildings around a harbour and do not represent genuine urban centres. The first real town was at Ribe in south-western Jutland, where finds date from as early as 71035 (although at this stage occupation of the site seems to have been seasonal, and once the annual market was over it was temporarily abandoned).
The remains of workshops at Ribe, in which combs, glass beads and jewellery were made, are a sign of the manufacturing and trading enterprises that are a feature of all the early Scandinavian towns. It is first mentioned in the written sources in the 850s, when King Horik gave Anskar permission to preach there. Already by then an area along the Ribe River was densely settled, with around forty to fifty workshops organised into plots around 20–25 feet wide and 65–100 feet long, which clustered around the north and east banks of the river. Only around 770–780, however, did the initially seasonal occupation of the plots give way to permanent settlement. The digging of a ditch around the town in the early ninth century was probably more an indication of where Ribe’s town law applied than of any attempt to bolster its defences as the era of Viking raiding got under way, for it was too shallow to fulfil any real defensive purpose. Around the middle of the century archaeological finds stop, after which there is no definite evidence of the existence of Ribe until the twelfth century (although this does not necessarily mean the settlement was abandoned or destroyed).36
Denmark’s second town was at Hedeby in the south-east (now in Germany), which was closely linked to the Danevirke fortification across the southern neck of the Jutland peninsula. Evidence has been found of settlement there as early as 750,37 and the city first appears in written sources around 800, when King Godfred of Denmark ordered the destruction of the Obodrite emporium at Reric and the removal of all its merchants to Sliethorp, a place under his control, which probably refers to the earliest stage of settlement at Hedeby. By the tenth century it had developed into a flourishing trading centre enclosed by a large rampart. It was certainly still in Danish hands in 1049, when it was sacked by Harald Hardrada of Norway,38 but by the twelfth century it had been replaced as the regional centre by Schleswig.
The third permanent town to appear in Scandinavia was in Sweden, at Birka, situated on the small island of Björkö (which means ‘place of the birch trees’) in Lake Mälaren, a waterway that acted as a transport hub for the region and was at the centre of one of the most heavily populated areas in the kingdom. The water level was up to 15 feet higher in the ninth century, so the island was only half the size that it is today. It was preceded by a centre at Helgö on the nearby island of Lillön, where a series of longhouses were used in the fifth and sixth centuries as workshops, and where later finds include a figure of Buddha, an Irish crozier head and a Coptic ladle – indications of the international connections of the site. Finds from the cemetery on the island show that it probably supported no more than twenty people at a time, and so it cannot really qualify as a town.
By around 800 production at Helgö had transferred to Birka, and the settlement there grew correspondingly. The main areas of the Viking-Age settlement lies in the Svarta Jorden (the ‘Black Earth’) on the west of the island, an area of around 17 acres, which may originally have been surrounded by a wooden palisade. On its borders the land is dotted with a large number of cemeteries, which contain as many as 2,000 graves. Around half of these have been excavated, yielding a rich array of finds of grave-goods, including sets of scales and weights, part of the characteristic equipment of the merchant class that must have formed an important sector of Birka’s population. This section of the island is still pockmarked today with the mounds and fallen stones of ship-settings, which mark the last resting place of its Viking-Age inhabitants.
The trading connections of this now-tranquil spot extended as far as England in the west, Lake Ladoga in Viking Russia to the east, Uppsala in the north, and Hedeby and the German markets to the south. The town was wealthy and important enough to be an obvious destination for Anskar during his Swedish mission, especially given that its role as a trading centre meant that Christians might already be settled there or pass through it. The level of organisation that Anskar found there, with a royal prefect and a local thing, which exercised a clear degree of independence from the local ruler, are all indications of the town’s importance. It may also be that the Bjarkeyjarréttur (‘The laws of Björkö’), which formed the basis of later Swedish laws dealing with towns and trade, were first formulated at Birka.39
The earliest objects found on the island are combs dating to the 760s, which are similar in type to examples excavated at Staraya Ladoga in Russia. A large hoard with around 450 Islamic coins, whose final date is around 962, is among the very latest, and it seems that by then Birka had begun to lose its importance as a trading centre. Sometime in the late tenth century the island’s fort was burnt, though whether deliberately or accidentally is unclear, and after this Birka was abandoned. It still retained its place in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, however, and the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen continued to appoint bishops to the see as late as 1060. It was also the site of the death of Archbishop Unni of Bremen, while on a visit in the 930s. Most of the unfortunate prelate was buried at Birka, with only his head being sent back to Bremen.40 On the nearby island of Adelso lie the remains of a medieval manor house, which continued in use as a Swedish royal centre until the thirteenth century, but by then the main Swedish urban centre had transferred to Sigtuna.
Now a pretty town of low picture-postcard cottages, Sigtuna’s origins probably lie in the tenth century, when a small strip between the shoreline and a rocky ridge was built up (just as at Birka, the water level was 12–15 feet higher than today). By the eleventh century Sigtuna was the only town in the Mälaren Valley, and its foundation under royal patronage and status as a royal residence ensured its success. The town also acted as a royal mint, with a large number of ‘Sigtuna coins’ being minted there by Olof Skötkonung in the early eleventh century.41 On the site of the original mint site, now occupied by a somewhat overgrown lot, were found fragments of lead with the impression of a die used to strike the coins.
The range of Sigtuna’s connections is indicated by the discovery of resurrection eggs and glass finger-rings from Russia, as well as a number of pottery items from the west of the Slavic world. In common with its predecessor, many of the plots excavated in the town show evidence of craft production such as amber-working and comb-making. By the 1070s Sigtuna also had its own bishop, although the see was briefly abandoned during the pagan revival of Stenkil’s reign, and finally in the 1130s it was definitively moved to Old Uppsala 25 miles away.
The earliest town in what is now Norway lay at Kaupang, which is probably the same place as the Sciringesheal visited by the Norwegian trader Ohthere in the late ninth century.42 Situated in southern Norway, near the modern town of Larvik, its present water level is 10 feet below that in the Viking Age, exposing much land that was under water at that time. The first comprehensive excavation of the site between 1956 and 196743 uncovered five houses, although none of them had hearths, indicating that the settlement may have been a seasonal one rather than having a permanent population. The site is surrounded by cemeteries, including both a large inhumation cemetery (where bodies were buried) at Bijkholberget and an extensive cremation cemetery at North Kaupang, while both of the first major finds of Viking ship-burials in Norway (at Oseberg and Gokstad) were unearthed from mounds just a few miles away.44
Kaupang seems to have come into use a little before 803, when plots were first laid out, with fixed buildings being erected a short time later. The number of artefacts found drops sharply after the second quarter of the tenth century, probably indicating the settlement’s decline. Even after the site had been abandoned, the area continued to be of some importance, with a royal estate at Huseby less than a mile away. The slow spread of urbanism in Norway is highlighted, however, by the fact that nearly a century passed between the desertion of Kaupang and the foundation of Oslo as a royal capital by Harald III in 1048.
The story of early urbanism in Scandinavia underlines how dependent we are on archaeological sources. One of the perennial problems of deciphering events within Scandinavia (and of finding native sources about the Vikings which are not antagonistic to them) is the fact that for a long time Norse culture was pre-literate. When writing did emerge in Scandinavia around the fifth century AD, it employed not the Roman script, but a native form of writing known as runic – an alphabet of sharp angles and straight lines most suited to carving on stone or incising into wood.
The Old Norse word rún carries the sense of mysterious or secret knowledge, and may indicate that in their earliest form the signs were used to impart sacred knowledge or as part of rituals. In one of the most compelling stories in Norse mythology, Odin’s thirst for such forbidden knowledge, which he hoped would help him avoid his ordained fate at Ragnarök (the battle at the end of the world, where most of the Norse gods will perish45), led him to perform a literal act of self-sacrifice in which he hung upside down for nine days from Yggdrasil, the world-tree: ‘I know that I hung on a wind-rocked tree nine whole nights with a spear wounded, and to Odin offered myself to myself; on that tree, of which no one knows from what root it springs. Bread no man gave me nor a horn of drink, downward I peered, to runes applied myself, wailing learnt them, then fell down thence.’46 The mystical sacrifice was effective, and Odin received knowledge of the runes.
The origins of the runes are not known precisely, but the resemblance of some of the signs to those in the Latin alphabet suggests that there must have been a model that came from within the Roman empire, while similarities with signs used in scripts in southern Switzerland indicates another possible source of influence.47 The earliest example of runic writing comes from second-century Denmark, in inscriptions on fibulas from Himlingye in Zealand and Nøvling in Jutland, the first of which has been transliterated as widuhudaR, which may represent the name of the owner of the brooch.48 It is clearly in an early version of the futhark, the runic alphabet (which is named for the first three letters of the script, just as the word ‘alphabet’ comes from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet).
The first form of the futhark (known as the Elder Futhark) contained a sign for most sounds in the Proto-Scandinavian language, making a script with twenty-four letters (although only five of them represented vowel sounds). Comparatively few inscriptions using this alphabet survive, and of the 200 examples that we do have, around a quarter are from Norway, a large proportion of those from the west and south-west coast. The longest of them, the Tune inscription (found in the church of the same name in Østland), was erected in memory of a certain Woduridar, ‘master of the household’, by his heirs.
Around AD 500, a series of linguistic shifts affected Proto-Scandinavian,49 leading to its evolution into the Old Norse tongue, which was spoken throughout Scandinavia during most of the Viking Age. At about the same time the futhark also underwent modifications. These changes are in fact rather counter-intuitive, for while there are more sounds in Old Norse than in Proto-Scandinavian – including twelve vowels – the number of runes in the new version of the alphabet (known as the Younger Futhark) actually decreased to sixteen, leading to a great deal of ambiguity on occasion as to the best way to transliterate an inscription. The script lacks a sign for the sound ‘g’, and so the name of the Danish king Gorm the Old had to be spelled with an initial ‘k’. This problem is aggravated by the frequent lack of spaces between words (though dividers such as points or crosses are sometimes used) and the habit of omitting a double rune where one word began with the same letter as the final rune of the word preceding it.
The decipherment of runestones is, however, rendered somewhat simpler by the fact that they tend to be rather formulaic in nature. The great majority of surviving runes are found on memorial stones raised in honour of a deceased person and contain the formula ‘A raised this stone in memory of B, his [wife, son, brother, sister, etc.]’. Around 3,000 runic inscriptions are known from the Viking world, including a scattering in Ireland, Britain, other Scandinavian colonies such as Iceland and the odd outlier, such as the two runic inscriptions in the Aya Sofya (Hagia Sophia) mosque in Istanbul.50 The bulk of inscriptions (just under 2,300) are in Sweden, while Denmark has 400 inscriptions and Norway a comparatively sparse 138. Many of the inscriptions are in fact rather late, with around one-third dating from after 1050 (with many containing Christian formulae).51 Most of them are short, some just a few words in length, but the longest – found built into the wall of the church at Rök in Östergötland in nineteenth-century Sweden – is more than 750 characters long. Probably carved in the early ninth century, it is a memorial stone set up by Varinn in memory of his son, Vemoðr, and makes reference to traditions concerning the sixth-century Ostrogothic ruler Theoderic and a series of otherwise unknown mythological beings.
There are some differences in type between the runestones found in the various Scandinavian areas, with those in northern Sweden more likely to contain elaborate artistic elements (such as intertwined serpents, although these do appear on the Jelling Stone in Denmark). Those in Norway and Denmark are more often set out in simple rows and bands, and if they contain any device other than the runes themselves, it is often a simple cross.52 Very few runestones can be correlated with known historic events or dated precisely in any other way. The notable exceptions include the Jelling Stone mentioned above, and a few stones that commemorate men who ‘took Cnut’s geld’ in England (which locates them to around 1018), or those that were set up in memory of the men who perished during the expedition of Yngvar the Widefarer to the east of Russia around 1040.53 Even those inscriptions that seem to mention definite events are sometimes vexingly difficult to date, such as that found on Kuløya in the Trøndelag, which refers to the raising of the stone by Thórir and Hallvarð, ‘when Christianity had been in Norway 12 winters’. This has alternately been interpreted as referring to 1042 (twelve years after the Battle of Stiklestad), 1007 (twelve years after the death of Olaf Tryggvason) or around 1036 (a similar interval after a thing at Moster where Olaf Haraldsson declared Christianity to be the religion of Norway).54
Most runic inscriptions, however, are memorial in nature, raised to commemorate men (although they are often erected by women in memory of their dead husbands). It is possible that a primary purpose of these stones was to lay very public claim to the inheritance of property, in an age when the legal niceties of death certificates (or any kind of central record-keeping) were non-existent. This was particularly important in the case of men who had died overseas, often on Viking expeditions; the twenty-five runestones honouring those who did not return from Yngvar’s expedition are a particularly notable cluster.
One of the most extraordinary surviving collections of runic inscriptions is located in the interior of Maeshowe, an Iron Age burial cairn in the Orkneys that was broken into during the Viking Age by a party that seems to have spent some time there (judging by the extent of the carvings they left). This is quite probably the group that is mentioned in the Orkneyinga Saga, when Earl Harald Maddaðarson of Orkney and his companions were caught by a storm just after New Year 1153–4 and took shelter in a mound known as Orkahaugr.55 The mound itself has the curious quality that the rays from sunrise on the morning of the winter solstice travel along a low entry tunnel to illuminate the otherwise pitch-black interior (the awkward gait necessary to enter the mound giving rise to the earthy Viking joke in one of the inscriptions: ‘Many a woman has gone stooping in here’). The Vikings (who may also have been associated with Earl Rögnvald-Kali who accompanied the Norwegian Jarl Erling on crusade to the Holy Land in 1153–5) broke in from the top of the mound and left more than thirty inscriptions in Maeshowe, including a few that cannot have been made without the assistance of a ladder, a rope or by balancing precariously on the rubble that had fallen inside when the Vikings entered.
A good indication that they were indeed returned crusaders is the carving that reads: ‘Jorsalamenn [‘Jerusalem men’ – that is, crusaders] broke into this mound’. Some of the inscriptions are quite laconic (‘Thorfinn wrote these runes’), while others, in the manner of graffiti through the ages, sing the praises of particular women (‘Ingigerd is the most beautiful of women’). Another set of carvings describes the discovery of a great hoard of treasure beginning with: ‘To the north-west is a great treasure hidden. It was long ago that a great treasure was hidden here. Happy is he that might find that great treasure. Hókon alone bore treasure from this mound’ and, ‘It is surely true what I say that treasure was taken away. Treasure was carried off three nights before.’ Whether such a treasure ever existed at all is quite doubtful, however, given that the contents of most Neolithic burials would have been of little interest to Viking-Age plunderers, and the inscriptions are probably more playful than boastful.
Many of the runic carvings are made using a special form called ‘twig runes’, a type of inscription that is especially widespread in Orkney, in which the sound associated with the rune is modified with reference to a numeric code. It seems a pointless exercise in such a remote spot, where the chances of anyone else happening upon the runes was slight, and where in any case the message contained in the inscriptions does not seem to merit such secrecy. The use of this esoteric runic form is instead probably more a demonstration of the skill and erudition of the rune-carver. One of the finest carvings includes the immodest declaration that ‘these runes were carved by the man most skilled in runes on the Western Ocean with the axe that killed Gaukr Trandil’s son in the South of Iceland’. As well as an insight into Viking boastfulness, it gives a tantalising glimpse into the background behind the saga stories, as the carver could well have been Thorhall Asgrimsson, an Icelander who accompanied Earl Rögnvald on crusade. His ancestor five generations back, Asgrim Elliða-Grimsson, slew his foster-brother Gaukr Trandilsson in a quarrel and took his axe, and the presumption is that Thorhall inherited this family heirloom and took it with him to Orkney, although whether he would have blunted the blade of such a precious item by using it to carve runes into the stone interior of Maeshowe is a different question.56
Runes continued in use long past the Viking Age; a particularly fine collection was found in Norway in 1955 after a fire in a medieval area of Bergen called the Bryggen. The runic inscriptions, carved on pine and bone, survived when the roof of the storage area containing them collapsed, and date mostly from the period 1250–1330. They include religious and secular texts, commercial letters, obscene graffiti and practise exercises in the futhark alphabet, a range that indicates that even at this late stage runic writing was anything but a half-forgotten archaism.57 Runes, however, were not well suited for long texts, and as the written word spread into Scandinavia in the wake of Christianisation, the need for liturgical texts and later, secular books, led to the widespread adoption of the Latin alphabet, which soon became dominant. Yet as late as the nineteenth century the tradition of runic writing was still remembered and cherished, and Scandinavian farmers continued to make short runic inscriptions for items such as farm-names. That knowledge of them spread outside Scandinavia even in the late nineteenth century is indicated by the real possibility that the ‘discoverer’ of the Kensington Rune Stone (an alleged Viking-Age inscription found in Minnesota in 1898, which is most likely a forgery)58 had books in his farmhouse that contained information about runes, and may well have been taught about them at school in his native Sweden.59
Before the conversion of the Scandinavian countries to Christianity in the tenth and eleventh centuries (and to a limited extent afterwards), the Vikings belonged to the world of pagan belief that had once encompassed much of the Germanic world of northern Europe. A great deal of what we know about the Viking religion in its heyday is derived from later (often Christian) sources, such as the account of the conversion of Iceland in 1000 by the priest-historian Ari Thorgilsson (who wrote in the twelfth century); from references in various sagas (such as the account in Hrafnkels Saga Freysgoda of Hrafnkell’s devotion to the god Frey); from the distinctly ambivalent account of Adam of Bremen of cult practices at Uppsala in Sweden; and from references to pagan mythology in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus (writing in the early thirteenth century). A probably more authentic corpus of material survives in the form of older skaldic verses embedded in the sagas and in the series of poems referred to as the ‘Poetic Edda’60 (or ‘Elder Edda’ to differentiate them from the ‘Prose Edda’ of the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson, which also contains much mythological information, primarily as a side-effect of Snorri’s desire to write a manual for poets that incidentally preserved elements of traditional stories).
The Edda begins with a series of poems setting out the Norse creation myths and giving an account of the various supernatural creatures that inhabited them, followed by a series of heroic poems, many of which deal with a legendary dynasty known as the Volsungs. The first poem in the series, the Voluspá (‘Prophecy of the Seeress’), outlines the whole history of the Norse universe from its creation to its foreseen destruction at the end of time.
Its narrative reflects the bitterly cold Nordic winter and a corresponding preoccupation with heat and fire, telling that before the beginning of time there was only a great void called Ginnungagap, whose northern edge was a frost-bound region called Niflheim, bordered in turn to the south by a realm of intense heat called Muspelheim. Where these two contrasting sections met, the frost began to melt and the drops of water formed into a great giant named Ymir, the first of the frost giants. The thaw also created a cow named Audhumbla, which licked at the remaining ice and shaped a human-like creature called Bur. His grandchildren were Odin, Vili and Vé, the first of the Norse gods, who slew Ymir. As he died, his blood gushed out, drowning all his progeny save Bergelmir, who survived to become the ancestor of all the giants. The three elder gods, meanwhile, hurled Ymir’s corpse into Ginnungagap and formed the land from his flesh, the mountains from his bones and the sea from his blood.
The gods then turned to the creation of the dwarves: dark subterranean creatures who would, together with the giants, be their principal antagonists in many of the Norse myths. They did not, however, create humankind directly, merely chancing upon the almost lifeless forms of the first man, Ask, and woman, Embla, who lacked all ‘spirit, sense and will’ – qualities that Odin and his companion gods, Hoenir and Loður, are said to have breathed into them.61
The Norse gods were divided into two main groups: the Aesir, among whom were numbered Odin, Thor and most of the chief deities; and the Vanir, who included principally Frey and his sister Freyja (the goddess both of fertility and of war). It was a division that probably reflects the merging of the pantheons of two separate groups at some very early stage in Scandinavian history. The supernatural space of the Norse world was also populated by a series of other beings, the giants (or jötnar) and dwarves (dvergar), as well as by a lesser category of gods called álfar, who were mainly connected to the Vanar. The gods were thoroughly anthropomorphised in Norse mythology, motivated by human emotions such as jealousy, anger and love and mostly conceived of in human form.
Each of these beings had its own place in a system whose complexity and, at times, precise topography set it apart from the rather less-exact notions of the Greeks and Romans. The universe was seen as a flattened disc, divided into three sections. The inner segment held Asgard, the home of the gods, in which each of the principal deities had his own halls: Valhalla for Odin, Trudheim for Thor, Folkvang for Freyja. The middle part of the world was named Midgard, the place where humans dwelt. Finally, the outermost section of the world was called Utgard (‘the outer place’) and was home to the giants and a host of other malevolent beings.62 Around all of these regions was a great sea in which a huge malevolent snake, the Midgard serpent, lived, forming a great bounding circle by biting its tail and thus keeping the world in its place.
Towering through the centre of all three regions was a gigantic ash tree named Yggdrasil, at whose base lay Urd’s well, where three mystical women, known as the Norns, determined the destinies of every being in the universe.63 The tree played host to a variety of exotic creatures, including an eagle that sat in the topmost branches; a dragon named Nithogg, which gnawed steadily away at Yggdrasil’s roots in an effort to topple the great ash; and a squirrel named Ratatosk, which ran up and down the length of the tree carrying scurrilous messages between the eagle and the dragon; as well as four deer, which also did their level best to kill the tree by stripping it of all its leaves.
The greatest of all the Aesir was Odin, the all-father, seen as the god of wisdom. He was not, however, omnipotent, and his thirst for knowledge and power led him to make unusual sacrifices. As well as his ordeal hanging upside down for nine days from Yggdrasil in exchange for knowledge of the runes,64 Odin also sought to drink from a well guarded by a giant called Mimir, believing that its water would bestow great wisdom on him. The price of a draught of this magical liquid was one of Odin’s eyes, which the god willingly gave, and in return he received the gift he desired. On another occasion Odin transformed himself into a snake in order to enter a cave where Gunlod, the daughter of the giant Suttung, watched over three great cauldrons containing the mead of poetry. Odin turned himself back into human form and seduced Gunlod, sleeping with her for three nights, after each of which the giant’s daughter gave him some mead. Finally, after being detected by her irate father, Odin made good his escape in the form of a giant eagle, but as he approached Asgard, he found that the giant was about to catch him. The Odin-eagle then spurted some of the mead backwards to distract Suttung and, with the aid of this decoy, just made it safely back to the company of the gods, quickly spewing out the precious liquid into buckets. He shared it with the other Aesir and handed small portions out to favoured poets, providing them with their inspiration (the story gives rise to the skaldic name for poetry itself, ‘Odin’s plunder’). The small portion of the mead that fell to Earth after it had served its purpose in distracting Suttung provided the share for lesser poets who still managed to produce ‘jingles’ without divine assistance.
Armed with the knowledge and power he had acquired, Odin reigned supreme over the other gods and beings. He was aided by two enormous ravens, Huginn and Muginn, which perched on his shoulders and were sent out each day to survey the world and report back on any matters of interest. Among his other assistants were the Valkyries, female spirits who scoured the battlefields for the souls of warriors who had died valiantly. They carried the warriors back to Odin’s hall at Valhalla, where each day they engaged in single combat as training for Ragnarök (the final battle between gods and giants), while every evening their wounds healed, and they feasted on mead and the meat of the boar Saehrimnir, whose flesh was magically restored to its bones every morning.
Although Odin was in theory the most powerful of the gods, his worship was not the most widespread in Scandinavia. That honour fell to Thor, the warrior god and god of thunder, whose hammer – Mjölnir – destroyed all that it struck. Thor was described as riding through the sky in a carriage drawn by goats, and his hurling of Mjölnir caused the lightning and the falling of rain. With a magical belt that doubled his strength, Thor was the very image of a Viking warrior writ large, and, being far more approachable than Odin, was the object of veneration throughout the Norse world. His cult became more popular during the Viking Age, that of Odin having been predominant in the preceding Vendel period (in the sixth and seventh centuries) and remaining so even after that amongst the ruling aristocracy.65 One measure of his widespread appeal is the large number of Thor’s hammer amulets (with an upside-down T that mirrored the shape of his hammer) that have been found in many Viking-Age sites.
Place-names, too, may give an indication of the relative popularity of the deities in different regions: sites associated with a particular god often include his name as one element. Tyr, the god of war and martial courage, is remembered in this way almost exclusively in Denmark, while the name of one god, Ullinn (who is never mentioned in the sagas at all), is featured extensively in sites in the south-central and western regions of Norway. The name of Odin appears far more frequently in Denmark than in Norway (most notably at Odense, Oðaens-vé, ‘the cult site of Odin’), but also has a relatively high concentration in Sweden, where he seems to have vied with Frey for popularity. The cult of Thor, to judge by the place-name evidence, seems to have been most widespread in Norway and in eastern Sweden, particularly in coastal regions.66
The oral preservation of the Norse myths, transmitted as poetic fossils in the works of people for whom the living pagan religion was at best a distant memory, means that it is sometimes hard to determine if stories have been reshaped to harmonise with similar Christian tales. Often the sense we have of a particular deity is incomplete, and we cannot really recover their real role in the pantheon. These tendencies combine in one of the most famous of all Scandinavian myths, that of the killing of Baldr. Loki, the agent of Baldr’s destruction, is a highly ambivalent character, who is the product of the union of a goddess and a giant. A mischievous trickster, he seems constantly at odds with the Aesir, and his actions often seem to align him more with the gods’ adversaries – the dwarves, giants and various monsters of the lower worlds – than on the side of Odin, Thor or Freyja.
In the story, Baldr’s mother, Frigg, makes all living things swear not to harm her son, but forgets to impose the oath on the seemingly harmless mistletoe. In typical Viking fashion, the gods then entertain themselves by shooting at Baldr, secure in the knowledge that they can do him no harm. Loki, meanwhile, is aware of Frigg’s careless omission, and crafts an arrow out of the forgotten mistletoe. He approaches Hodr, Baldr’s blind brother (who, since he cannot see, is unable to join in the sport), offering to help him take part by aiming his shot. With the trickster god’s assistance, the arrow speeds to its target and Baldr drops dead. Following a magnificent funeral, the grief-stricken gods despatch Hermód, one of the lesser war deities, to go to Hel to ransom Baldr and bring him back to Asgard. After a ride of nine days and nights astride Sleipnir, Odin’s magical eight-legged steed, Hermód crosses the golden Gjöll bridge that marks the boundary with the underworld and begs its queen, Hel, to allow Baldr’s release.
The underworld goddess agrees to the request only on the condition that all living things show their sorrow for Baldr’s death by weeping. On hearing this, all the birds, beasts and even the rocks cry for the lost god. Finally the gods come across an old giantess, Thökk, who is hidden in a cave and has not yet shed a tear. The old crone is in fact none other than Loki in disguise. Unsurprisingly, she refuses to weep for Baldr, who as a result is doomed to spend the rest of time in the underworld. On discovering that it was really Loki who was responsible for his doom, the furious gods and goddesses seize the trickster, bind him to three sharp rocks and place him beneath a poisonous serpent. His faithful wife Sigyn collects the venom as it drips down, and so Loki remains unharmed, save when the bowl brims over and she is forced to go and empty it. Then, as the poison sears and burns into his flesh, Loki’s violent writhing makes the whole Earth tremble and is believed to be the cause of earthquakes.
It is possible that the tale of the sacrificed god Baldr has been modified by Norse contact with Christianity and the story of the crucifixion of Jesus. The parallels between the stories of Ragnarök (‘the fate of the gods’) and Christian notions of the Apocalypse are even more striking. After three winters in which the sun does not shine (the Fimbulvetr), the great wolf Fenrir, which has been bound for aeons, breaks free and swallows the sun. Meanwhile Jörmungand, the Midgard-serpent, moves from his position encircling the world and attacks Midgard, the central portion of the Earth. They are joined by an array of malevolent creatures, including Surt at the head of the fire-giants and Loki, who finally shakes off his ambivalent position and definitively joins in on the side of evil. Roused by the messenger god Heimdall’s horn, the gods muster, together with an army of heroic warriors from Valhalla.
Frey takes on Surt, but is killed by the giant, while Tyr, another war god, falls to the hell-hound Garm. Thor has more luck; wielding Mjölnir, he strikes a fatal blow at the earth-serpent, but the dying Jörmungand spews out venom all over the thunder god. Thor takes a few steps and falls, lifeless. Odin, meanwhile, is engaged in a bitter fight with Fenrir (said to have been the monstrous child of Loki and a giantess). Finally the wolf swallows the father of the gods whole, while Loki and Heimdall, who have been evenly matched, kill each other. With most of the gods and their opponents fallen, Surt takes his flaming sword and sets light to the world. In the ensuing conflagration, the old earth is consumed by fire.
In a possible echo of Christian notions of the resurrection of the dead on the Day of Judgement, when the flames subside a few of the younger generation of gods have survived, including Vidar and Vili, the sons of Odin, and Módi and Magni, Thor’s sons, who have inherited Mjölnir from their dead father. Hodr, too, is unscathed and is joined by Baldr, who has finally been released from his bondage in Hel. Two humans (Lif and Lifthrasir) have also somehow escaped the holocaust and, under the light of the old sun’s daughter, a version of the previous world is re-created, minus all of the creatures of darkness that had preyed on the old one.
To what extent the ordered but complex neatness of the Viking myths represented the reality of Norse worship is hard to determine. In the absence of official hierarchies and a fixed sacred book such as the Christian Church possessed, there must have been a great diversity of belief and a large number of local cults far in excess of those that are mentioned in the scanty records which survive. There were probably a large number of cult sites, although excavations at sites with place-name components which are believed to designate temple sites (such as ‘–hof’ and ‘–vé’) yielded little that could unambiguously be designated as a temple building – one at Hofstaðir in northern Iceland is most likely a longhall. However, more recently a ‘cult-house’ excavated at Borg in Sweden was found to have a number of Thor’s hammer amulets and large numbers of animal bones (particularly of dog, pigs and horses) buried outside it; and a series of bronze and gold figurines discovered in 2002 outside an Iron Age hall in Lunda, in Södermanland, Sweden, may possibly represent victims of ritual hanging. In 1984 a dig at the church at Frösö in Jämtland yielded a large number of animal bones, which have been interpreted as sacrifices made in a sacred grove (as the remains seem to have been deposited around an ancient beech tree),67 while a further pagan cult-site was identified at Ranheim, a little north of Trondheim, in 2012.
Viking paganism appears to have had no professional priestly class and hierarchy as Christianity possessed (with the exception of Iceland, where there does seem to have been such a group).68 Chieftains (and kings) were required to play a role in public rituals, which made the eventual conversion to Christianity of rulers and aristocracy even more damaging for paganism. An account in the Eyrbyggja Saga69 tells of a temple belonging to a chieftain, while the Icelandic Landnámabók refers to the obligation of chieftains at assemblies to wear an arm ring that had been hallowed by placing it on a temple altar. The rather lurid accounts in Adam of Bremen of the nine-yearly festival at Uppsala in Sweden, which culminated in a mass slaughter of nine males of every animal species, are possibly exaggerated, but they certainly preserve the sense of a major pagan sanctuary that continued to function into the second half of the twelfth century.
There are hints of local and folk beliefs in the sagas. On one occasion, King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway found himself sheltering in the house of some peasants who venerated the penis of a cart horse as a cult object. Needless to say, the disgusted king (the Christianiser of Norway) threw the strange pagan idol onto the floor, where the farmer’s dog ate it. There was also a persistently strong belief in sorcery and witchcraft, rooted in the Norse belief in the potency of seiðr, a particular sort of magic associated with female prophecy, possibly derived from the shamanic tradition of the Saami (or Lapps), with whom the Norse came into contact in the north of Scandinavia. The Gulathing Law, a law-code that was probably first codified in the twelfth century and applied to an area in the western fjords of Norway, states that people must not believe in either ‘soothsaying, witchcraft or maleficence’,70 a clear indication that the compilers of the code believed that such magical practices were still prevalent. More explicitly, the slightly later Borgarthing Laws declared that the finding of men’s hair or nails or frog’s feet indicated witchcraft and a charge should then be made, and also refers to the summoning of trolls.71 The activities of Jón Ögmundarson (the Good), Bishop of Hólar in Iceland from 1106 to 1121, who is associated with a number of sacred wells and springs, suggest that the ecclesiastical authorities sought to co-opt local beliefs in the ritual efficacy of places in the landscape and to mould them to a more appropriately Christian use.
Norse pagan beliefs about life after death were complex – those who died in battle were seen as being transported to Valhalla to live a glorious afterlife, while those who suffered the ignominy of death in bed were to spend eternity in the gloomy halls of Hel. Yet there was also a strong feeling that the spirits of the dead sometimes remained close to those they had known in life. These draugr, or ‘walking dead’, might on occasion return because the proper rites had not been carried out during their burial (so that special mooring rocks were often added to ship-burials to avoid the ship and its occupants ‘wandering’). There are also many references in the sagas to haugbui (‘mound-dwellers’), the spirits of the deceased, who continued to dwell in the mound (haugr) that had been heaped up over their mortal remains. In Grettir’s Saga the hero enters the mound of a man called Kar the Old, who is still present in his tomb in the form of a haugbui. Having helped himself to the trove of gold and silver hidden in the mound, Grettir finds himself seized by a ghostly hand as he makes his escape. Hero and haugbui ‘engaged in a merciless struggle. Everything about them was smashed.’ To and fro in the cold dark mound they fight, until finally Grettir draws his sword, Jokulsnaut, and hacks off the head of the mound-dweller. He is doubly unfortunate in having also to face a draugr, in the shape of Glam, a murdered shepherd, whom he also bests, but who lays a curse on Grettir that renders him increasingly fearful of the dark, an affliction that gradually causes him to go insane.72
Particularly important chieftains or warriors might be interred in a ship (which was then placed in a mound, either cremated or unburnt). The most spectacular account of this comes from Russia, at the eastern end of the Viking world, with the description by the Arab traveller Ibn Fadlan of a cremation ceremony. To what extent it represents a typical Viking burial – or even a Scandinavian one at all – is unknown, but the ritual was certainly a lavish one.
Ibn Fadlan was acting as secretary to the ambassador despatched by the caliph al-Moqtadir in 921 to the khan of the Volgar Bulgars, and his account of his travels includes a detailed description of a group called Rusiyyah (or Rus) whom he met on the way. While in general impressed by their physical stature, Ibn Fadlan was scandalised by their lack of physical hygiene and mystified by their habit of combing their hair each day. The funeral he witnessed was for a rich man, since ‘If the [dead man] is poor, they make a boat, and place him in it and burn the boat.’ The ceremony for the wealthy was far more elaborate, as the Vikings would ‘gather his possessions together and divide them in three parts. One third remains for his family; with the second third they cut out garments for him, and with the third part they brew mead for themselves, which they drink on the day when the slave girl kills herself and is cremated with her master. They drink the mead to insensibility day and night.’73
A slave (usually, it seems, a female one) volunteered from among the dead man’s household to accompany him into the grave. On the day appointed for the final ceremony, Ibn Fadlan went to the river to inspect the ship that was to be used in the ceremony:
around the boat had been built a large structure like a large scaffold of wood . . . Then they hauled the ship further up, until it was placed inside this structure . . . Then they brought a couch, placed it on the ship, and covered it with draperies of Byzantine brocade, and also with pillows of Byzantine brocade. Thereupon an old woman came, whom they call the angel of death, and spread the draperies mentioned over the couch. She had held the oversight over the sewing of the garment of the deceased and of their completion. This old woman kills the girl . . . When they came to his grave, they removed the earth from the timbers and raised the timbers, drew him forth in the same garment in which he had died . . . They then dressed him in stockings, trousers, boots, and a tunic and cape of brocade with gold buttons. They put a cap of brocade and sable pelts upon him and carried him into the tent that had been erected on the boat. Here they placed him upon the quilts, propped up with cushions, brought mead, fruits, and flowers, and laid these beside him. Then they brought a dog, cleft it in two halves and laid it in the boat. Thereupon they brought all his weapons and laid them by his side. Then they took two horses, drove them until they perspired, then cleft both of them in twain with a sword and laid their flesh in the boat. Then they brought two cows, cut them in two likewise and laid them in the boat. Then they brought a cock and a hen, killed them and threw them both in to the ship. The maiden who wished to be put to death went here and there, and entered each of the tents where the head of each tent had intercourse with her saying ‘Say to thy lord, I have done this out of love of thee.’
There followed the climax of the ceremony:
On Friday in the afternoon, they brought the maiden to a structure which they had erected like a doorframe. She put both her feet on the palms of the men, and was lifted up onto this doorframe, and said her piece. Then they let her down again. Thereupon they put her up a second time. She repeated what she had done the first time, and then they let her down, and let her go up again. Again she did as she had done on the first two occasions. Then they gave her a hen. She cut off its head and cast it away. Thereupon I asked the interpreter what her actions meant. He said, ‘When they raised her up the first time, she said “Behold, I see my father and mother”; the second time she said: “There I see all my deceased relatives sitting”; the third time she said: “There I behold my lord sitting in paradise, and paradise is fair and green, and around him are men and servants. He calls me; bring me to him.”’ Then they led her to the boat. She took off the two armlets that she wore and gave them to the old woman whom they call the angel of death, who was to kill her. Then the slave girl took off two anklets that she had and gave them to the two maidens who had waited on her, and who were the daughters of the old woman known as the angel of death.
Then the people lifted her onto the boat, but did not yet let her go into the tent. There came men with shields and staves and gave her a bowl of mead, whereupon she sang and drank it. The interpreter said to me: ‘With this she is bidding goodbye to her friends.’ Then she was given another beaker. She took it and sang for a long time, while the old woman was urging her to finish the goblet, and to go into the tent where her lord lay. I saw then how disturbed she was. She wished to go into the tent, but put her head between the tent and the side of the boat. Then the old woman took her by the head, made her go into the tent and also entered with her. Whereupon the men began to beat their shields with the staves so that her shrieks would not be heard, and the other maidens become terrified. Then six men went into the tent, and all had intercourse with the girl. Then they placed her beside her dead lord; two men seized her by the feet and two by her hands. Then the old woman placed a rope into which a bight had been made, and gave it to two of the men to pull at two ends. Then the old woman came to her with a broad-bladed dagger and began to jab it into her ribs and pull it out again, and the two men strangled her until she was dead.
The relatives of the dead man then took torches and set fire to the ship. As Ibn Fadlan watched this spectacle, he heard a man nearby speaking and asked his interpreter what had been said. The response was curt: ‘He said “They, the Arab communities are stupid.” So I asked “Why?” He said “You go and cast into the earth the people whom you both love and honour most amongst men. Then the earth, creeping things, and worms devour them. We, however, let them burn for an instant, and accordingly he enters into paradise at once in that very hour.”’74 At the end of all this, the dead man’s name (together with that of the king of the Rus) was written on a large birch post, and then the funeral party departed.
Although the details of the ritual described by Ibn Fadlan might have been peculiar to the particular band of Vikings he met (and possibly influenced by Slavic rituals), the late-nineteenth century saw the discovery of a number of burials in Scandinavia that confirmed the rite of interment in ships. The two most spectacular, the Gokstad and Oseberg ships, were found within a quarter of a century of each other (in 1880 and 1904 respectively), both in Norway. The Gokstad vessel (which dates from around 850) was buried near the Sandefjord, where the blue clay of the mound had acted to conserve organic material (most notably the wooden timbers of the ship) in excellent condition. As a result, the excavators were able to remove it from its burial site more or less intact. The ship is 75 feet 5 inches long, 17 feet wide and when fully laden would have had a displacement of 20 tons. It was equipped with sixteen pairs of oars, and had no fixed rowing benches (so that the crew would probably have had to sit on sea chests containing their possessions). Its mast was set on a large oak block (called the kjerringa or old woman) and a socket in this permitted the mast to be raised or lowered according to sea conditions, without the need to dismount it.75
Among the grave-goods recovered from the burial chamber were part of a bed, a game board (with antler gaming pieces), a leather purse, the closing clasp of a casket, iron fishing hooks and several metal harness mounts. A far richer haul was recovered in the front part of the ship, including three smaller boats (although what ritual purpose the inclusion of these may have had is unclear), a sleigh, a metal cauldron and six wooden beds, one of them with carved animal-head posts.76
The man buried in the Gokstad ship was, for the time, a comparative giant, at almost 6 feet tall. An analysis carried out of the bones in 2007 showed that he suffered from acromegaly, a sort of gigantism that enlarges the bones, which would have rendered his facial features very coarse, making his appearance striking indeed. It seems that he suffered an extremely violent death, first being struck a blow to the left leg, which made him fall, and then a substantial cut to his right leg, which probably caused him to bleed to death. In what desperate struggle this titan perished, however, will probably never be known.
The second, and possibly the finest, of the Viking ship burials was discovered in 1904 at Oseberg in Vestfold, western Norway. The initial discovery was made by a local farmer, Oskar Rom, who was engaged in some speculative digging at a large mound on his property (encouraged by the excitement generated by the discovery of the ship-burial at Gokstad twenty-four years previously). Rom unearthed some wood and brought a sample to Gabriel Gustafson, curator of the Museum of Antiquities at Christiania (as Oslo was then known). Initially sceptical, Gustafson undertook a test dig in 1903, and the following year began to excavate the 145-foot-diameter mound in earnest. Fortunately the summer was dry, making the digging easier, and the blue clay of which the mound was composed had helped – just as had been the case at Gokstad – to preserve the organic material (particularly wood), while the tightly packed layers of turf that had been heaped up to form it also created a seal, which had for centuries prevented water leaking inside.
The stern-post of the ship emerged first, but it soon became apparent that the ship had been broken into and ransacked at some point after the burial had taken place, and much of what the grave-robbers had left behind lay strewn across the entrance to the burial chamber. The weight of the mound and the stones that had been piled up inside it before the grave was sealed meant that the ship’s keel had split in two, and part had been forced upwards.
The ship was broken up into 2,000 pieces, which were transferred to Oslo, together with the small finds of grave-goods, many of which were in an extremely delicate state. The pieces of this giant jigsaw puzzle were then boiled in a solution of alum, which crystallised inside the wood and made it stable, albeit fragile, and these were then coated with a solution of creosote and linseed oil. Around 90 per cent of the original wood was in sufficiently good condition to be reused, and ultimately the archaeologists were able to reconstruct almost the whole keel of the ship. The sections were reassembled and moved to a purpose-built museum at Bygdøy close to Oslo in 1926. It took almost all day to move the massive bulk of the ship from the restoration workshops along specially modified railway tracks whose 100-yard length had to be removed and relaid in front of the ship each time it came to the end of the rails – a laborious procedure carried out in front of enormous crowds of curious onlookers. Here it now sits in a massive cross-shaped hall (which it shares with the Gokstad ship). Even out of the water, the immense keel of the ship looks surprisingly sleek, although the huge and perfect bulging bulk of the Gokstad ship’s sides, reminiscent of the flanks of some enormous horse, make it perhaps the most awe-inspiring of all surviving Viking vessels.
The Oseberg ship’s mast and rudder both show little or no sign of use, and other features, such as the lack of means to close the oar holes in stormy seas and the dimensions of the boat itself, would have rendered it a less-than-practical vessel for active service on raids. The probability, therefore, is that it was purely ceremonial, and may, indeed, have been purpose-built for its interment in the burial mound. The identity of the occupants of the burial chamber – two women, one in later middle age, the other younger – have given rise to much speculation. Analysis of the timbers shows that the trees used to build the ship were cut down in 820 and that the ship’s active life probably ended around 834, giving some possible indication of period in which the deceased had lived.
Despite the importance of at least one of those buried with the Oseberg ship, the bones were placed in the burial chamber in a rather haphazard way, perhaps lending some truth to Ibn Fadlan’s account of a Viking funeral ceremony that seems in large part to have been fuelled by heavy drinking.77 Initial analysis of the skeletons resulted in the conclusion that one of the dead women was in her twenties and the other much older, again providing an echo of Ibn Fadlan’s narrative, and suggesting that the younger woman had perhaps been killed in order to be buried with her mistress. In 2006, however, both the Oseberg and Gokstad mounds were reopened (having both been sealed up in 1948, with the human remains placed back in their original resting places). Apart from the alarming discovery that the metal boxes in which the bodies had been placed were by then half-full of water and that the bones were in serious danger of dissolving, fresh scientific study of the skeletons’ tooth roots found that, far from being in her twenties, the ‘young woman’ was actually in her fifties when she died. The older woman had abnormalities to the development of her leg bones that suggested extended periods bedridden as a young child, and again at fourteen to fifteen years of age, while she suffered compression damage to her left knee at some stage that probably left her with a limp. Her cause of death may have been identified as abdominal or breast cancer that had metastasised and spread to her bones, probably leaving her in considerable pain at the end of her life (and also giving her the somewhat dubious honour of being Norway’s oldest recognised cancer patient).
Although far more is now known about the physiology of the occupants of the Oseberg burial than was the case in 1904, little of this helps in pinning down their identity. The best guess is that the older woman must have been of very high social status, and quite possibly from the royal family, and that she may have been Queen Åsa, the grandmother of Harald Finehair.78
Although no jewellery was found in the Oseberg ship (presumably it was looted by the grave-robbers), the remaining grave-goods are nonetheless spectacular, including most notably a large wooden cart, complete with its wheels, along which writhing beasts spiral menacingly. Set on the sides of this are four wooden heads, one of which – that of a fierce, grimacing man – is one of the most famous images from the entire Viking world. The other items included a variety of goods that the women were thought to need in the afterlife, including axes, knives, the remains of an entire ox, beds, quilts, weaving equipment and (perhaps intended for their transportation to the next world) the wagon and sledges. Among the items interred with them were the remains of a tapestry, which had almost completely disintegrated or been compressed together into cake-like lumps that were almost impossible to disentangle. Nonetheless, part of this has been reconstructed and probably represents the remains of a wall hanging that contains images of processions of human figures walking and riding, with large numbers of smaller figures, such as swastikas, knot-shapes and birds, filling almost every otherwise blank space.
Among the finds at Oseberg was the so-called ‘Buddha bucket’, a generally plain wooden bucket made of yew, whose handle is attached to two squatting Buddha-like figures with closed eyes, each adorned with a pair of yellow-enamelled swastikas. Although at first sight seeming to be evidence of trade with the eastern world, the bucket is most likely the product of an Irish workshop, probably representing the fruits of plunder from a monastery in Ireland.79 Perhaps even more striking are the corner posts of one of the beds found at Oseberg. Each in the form of a dragon, they are individually carved, one of them unremittingly fierce and bearing more than a hint of menace, another alien and repellent, while a third has its eyes wide in an almost quizzical expression.
In their fullest development Viking vessels such as the Oseberg and Gokstad ships were large, open vessels adapted for both sailing and rowing, and whose particular method of construction made them well suited for long-distance raiding. They had very shallow keels, allowing them to navigate up riverways that could not be penetrated by most other vessels, heightening the feeling for their victims that the Vikings could appear almost anywhere there was shoreline or river bank.
The keel of the Oseberg vessel, some 65 feet long, curves gently, making the draught of the vessel greatest at the point where the hull was widest, and so increasing the capacity of the ship. The skeleton of the vessel was provided by a series of strakes (overlapping planks), which were riveted together using iron nails driven in and then secured by a small metal plate. The use of overlapping in this way produced a characteristic type of vessel known as clinker-built. The planking was then secured to timber ribs by lashing through holes bored in the underside.
The Gokstad ship is a little larger than the Oseberg, at some 75 feet long. Its stronger overall construction, with a keel cut in a single piece, would have rendered it more seaworthy. The hull is also rounder and the oar holes have shutters, which could be closed when under way to prevent water getting in and swamping the ship (whose sides are in any case somewhat higher than its predecessor, another modification that guaranteed a rather drier passage for its occupants). The dating of the Gokstad ship to around 850, up to half a century later than the Oseberg vessel, shows that significant improvements in ship-building techniques were being made as the era of the Viking raids opened.
The Oseberg and Gokstad ships (and a slightly earlier vessel found at Tune in 1867) are both examples of the longship, the classic Viking warship, although there are records of even bigger ships, which carried up to seventy oarsmen (such as the Ormen Lange, the ‘Long Serpent’ of Olaf Tryggvason, which had thirty-four pairs of oars). The Oseberg ship had a shield rack on the inside rail to which sixty-four shields could be fixed (the remains of which – round, painted black and yellow and each 3 feet in diameter – were found by archaeologists). When sailing into port, the shields would be left suspended to the side to strike fear into potential adversaries or those disinclined to accede to the Vikings’ demand for booty. Both ships had masts intact when found (although that of the Gokstad ship was incomplete). In each case the mast could be raised or lowered when necessary by use of a mast fish (a special piece of timber attached to the mast, which made it easier to move). Steering was by means of a large side-oar attached to the starboard of the vessel (the very word starboard derives from the Old Norse styrbord or ‘steering side’). This could be stowed when on land by swivelling it up inside the ship and unfastening the leather strap that bound it.
The sheer visual impact of such vessels should not be underestimated. The writer of the Encomium Emmaa Reginae in the mid-eleventh century has left an account of the departure of Cnut’s fleet from Denmark in 1015, describing how ‘the flashing of arms shone in one place, in another the flame of suspended shields. Gold shone on the prows, silver also flashed on the variously shaped ships . . . For who could look upon the lions of the foe, terrible with the brightness of gold, who upon the man of metal, menacing with golden façade, who upon the dragons burning with pure gold . . . without feeling any fear for the king of such a force?’80
We know far less about the rigging and sails of Viking ships, as very little material in the surviving vessels indicates the precise arrangements that were used, nor do the sagas tell us much. We are forced instead to rely on pictorial representations, notably the series of picture stones that have been preserved on the island of Gotland in the Baltic around 55 miles to the east of the Swedish mainland.
The island’s importance during the Viking Age is indicated by the large number of Viking-Age hoards that have been found there and by the existence of numerous small harbours such as Paviken, which took advantage of Gotland’s strategic position in the Baltic. Even more striking than these are the picture stones, often used as grave-markers, whose carving began in the Iron Age around AD 400, and which are almost unique to the island. Beginning with spirals, rosettes and a range of fantastic beasts, they developed to show mythological scenes, which sometimes included the portrayal of the disc of the sun and ships, a combination that may have some religious significance in denoting the means of transport needed to carry the deceased from the land of the living to that of the dead.81 The very earliest boats shown (up until the sixth or seventh century) are, however, propelled by oars, rather than by sail.
Only in the ninth and tenth centuries did the Gotland stones become more like conventional Swedish runestones, including inscriptions in honour of a deceased person, but the pictorial element remained amongst the most inventive and varied in the Scandinavian world. Amid Valkyries plucking dead Vikings from the battlefields, and the unmistakable silhouette of Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir, there are a number of representations of ships with their sails unfurled, most of them showing a single rectangular sail, but others with more complicated rigging. They are almost certainly warships, as most of the carvings show warriors crowding on the deck, as if eager for battle.
The other surviving (or partially surviving) ships provide us with further information about the types of Viking vessel. One found at Ladby on Fynen in Denmark (of which only the impression left in the soil and rows of metal fastening-rivets survived) dated from around 900, and was longer and sleeker than the Oseberg and Gokstad ships. Its design made it less suitable for going under sail, and so it may have been confined to coastal Baltic waters. And the discovery in 1953 of a ship sunk in an attack on Hedeby around 985 provided an example of the very large warships that were characteristic of the later Viking Age. Its length has been estimated at nearly 102 feet, and it could carry sixty oarsmen, making its crew a formidable raiding party.
The largest Viking warship of which we have any record (albeit only in a saga) is Olaf Tryggvason’s Long Serpent, which may have been more than 100 feet long. The building of the ship, probably around 998, was not without incident. The craftsman appointed to oversee the giant vessel was a certain Torberg Skafhogg (‘smooth-scraper’). One evening, Torberg had to leave the work unattended. He returned later with the king to find that ‘the wrights had already come, but they all stood there not at work. The king asked why they bore themselves in this manner. They answered that the ship was shamefully cut about and that some man must have gone from stem to stern and have cut one deep notch after another down the planking.’82 Olaf was furious and offered a reward for anyone who would inform on the perpetrator of this vandalism, where upon Torberg confessed to being the guilty party. Olaf retorted that his master craftsman had to restore the ship to the same condition as before, or forfeit his life. ‘Then Torberg went and chipped the planks, so that all the notches were smoothed and made even with the rest. Then said the king – and all the others too – that the ship was much finer looking after Torberg had made this alteration. The king then bade him do so on the other side and offered him great thanks.’
All Torberg’s improvements were to no avail, for Olaf’s fleet was overwhelmed at the Battle of Svold in 999 or 1000.83 The king was last seen at the prow of the Long Serpent before leaping into the waters, fully armoured, to avoid the humiliation of capture. Although there were some who believed he had survived, or hoped that he might return once more to liberate Norway, it is far more likely that he perished after his dramatic leap from the longest Viking longship of them all.
Another treasure trove of Viking ships was discovered at Skuldelev in Denmark in 1962, when a series of wrecks was raised from the bottom of the Roskildefjord. They had been sunk to block the access channel to Roskilde in Zealand during a raid on the town, probably in the 1070s. There were three channels into the port and the scuttled vessels permanently blocked one of them, leaving a second channel that could be defended by the local fleet, and a third, more circuitous route that needed the knowledge of local pilots to navigate safely. Now housed in a square glass-topped museum set by the side of the fjord, the Skuldelev vessels are somewhat less complete than their Gokstad and Oseberg counterparts in Norway, the metal frames that stand in for those parts which are wholly missing giving them a strikingly futuristic feel. One of them (Skuldelev 2, at around 98 feet long, and possibly holding up to seventy-five crewmen) represents the most advanced development of the longship. Analysis of its timbers suggests that it was built in Ireland, in the area around Dublin, in about 1040. This was the type of vessel known as a snekke (‘serpent’), the leviathans that carried many of the raiders in the great expeditions of the tenth and early eleventh centuries. A smaller warship, Skuldelev 5, was a comparative minnow at 60 feet long and with thirteen pairs of oars, putting it at the lower end of the longship range.
An entirely different type of vessel is represented by Skuldelev 1.84 Stubbier and sturdier than the sleek lines of the longship, this is a knorr, one of the larger trading vessels that formed the backbone of the non-military fleets of the Viking Age. These specialised boats needed only a small crew (meaning there was more room for the cargo) and had comparatively few oars, making them much more dependent on sail for their propulsion. The earliest yet discovered, from Klåstad in Norway, dates to around 990 and was found with part of its original cargo of whetstones still heaped around the carcass of the ship. Skuldelev 1 was built in Norway around 1030 and is about 52 feet long, with a cargo capacity of around 24 tons. It was vessels such as this that carried the bulk of trade around the Baltic and ensured connections with the further-flung parts of the Viking world, such as Iceland and Greenland (which was especially dependent on the Norwegian royal knorr, which was supposed to put into the isolated colony each year85).
The museum at Roskilde is one of the main centres for the reconstruction of Viking vessels, continuing a tradition that began in 1892 with the building of a replica of the Gokstad ship, which managed the crossing all the way from Norway to Chicago. Experiencing relatively little difficulty on the way, it successfully managed to upstage the 400th anniversary celebrations of Christopher Columbus’s landing in the New World that was being commemorated at the World Fair that year. A reconstruction has now been built of each of the Skuldelev ships, including most recently the Skuldelev 2, which was reborn as the Sea Stallion of Glendalough and made the voyage from Denmark to Iceland in 2008. The journey was without serious incident, despite encountering very stormy conditions, although it was found that the vessel shipped enormous quantities of water, casting a damp light on the conditions that the crew of its eleventh-century predecessor must have endured.
The Vikings employed a variety of techniques to navigate this assortment of vessels on voyages that ranged from the strictly local, coastal variety to great strikes across the North Atlantic. The simplest, most useful method for voyages in which land was always in sight was by reference to coastal features and the approximate time taken to travel between them. Many place-names along the Scandinavian shoreline (or elsewhere in the Viking world) retain a memory of this, with toponyms such as Kullen (‘hill’), a headland on the coast of Skåne, and the prevalence of names ending in ‘–ey’ (‘island’), such as Anglesey and Ramsey in Wales (an area that was only ever briefly and lightly under Scandinavian domination).86 For longer voyages, the navigator might remember a list of such landmarks and mentally cross-reference them with the terrain he was seeing on land. One such ‘chart’ is preserved in the Landnámabók, which gives instructions for the voyage from Norway to Greenland: ‘From Hernar in Norway one should keep sailing west to reach Hvarf in Greenland and then you are sailing north out of Shetland, so that it can only be seen if visibility is very good; but south of the Faeroes, so that the sea appears half-way up their mountain-slopes; but so far south of Iceland that one only becomes aware of the birds and whales in it.’ Even when out of sight of land, the Vikings could use observations of the sun, stars and seabirds, including on at least one occasion of ravens, whose instinct to fly towards land helped in the discovery of Iceland.87 Observing the prevailing winds and currents also gave experienced sailors some idea of their rough location, if other means failed, and enabled them to predict weather patterns and tailor their routes to fit them.
Less certain is the suggestion that the Vikings employed a means of ‘dead-reckoning’, which allowed them to estimate the longitude that they were at, using wooden boards with a pin in the centre (like the gnomon of a sundial). The shadow that the sun cast on this at a fixed time of day correlated with markings on the board, if the ship was on course. If the sun-shadow fell above it, then the vessel was north of the desired latitude and, if below it, the ship’s course was too far to the south. A wooden disc found in 1948 at Uunartoq close to the Eastern Settlement in Greenland, which has been dated to around 1000, has sixteen small incisions and curved markings and has been identified as a possible example of such a sun-shadow bearing-dial.88 Another more complete disc was discovered in 2002 at Wolin in Poland, but there is no definite evidence that this is what the object was used for, and there is no clear support (either archaeologically or in the sagas) for the use of such a device in navigation.
Even more unclear is whether the Vikings used a sólarsteinn, or sun-stone – a rock that had polarising qualities when held towards the sun. Although there is a mention in Raudulfs tháttr of a stone possessed by a farmer’s son whom King Olaf Haraldsson visited, which allowed him to tell where the sun was, even if hidden by cloud, there is no evidence of such an object being used as a practical tool for navigation. On more certain ground is the story of Oddi-Helgason, nicknamed Star-Oddi, who lived in Iceland in the twelfth century and was known for making a series of precise astronomical observations, such as the dates of the summer and winter solstices. Again, however, it is unclear whether his compilation is a one-off that was not generally available or known to the average Viking navigator.
Despite this uncertainty, it is not necessary to suppose immensely sophisticated navigational technology to explain the Vikings’ facility at travelling throughout the Baltic, along the vast length of the Norwegian coastline, across the North Sea and then into the open Atlantic. For those who imagine such devices being routinely available to Viking sailors, there is a warning note in the number of saga accounts of voyagers driven off-course by storms, who simply did not know where they were. One notable example is Bjarni Herjólfsson, whose navigational mishaps during his search for his father, who had migrated unexpectedly from Iceland to Greenland while his son was away on an expedition, led to his initially mistaking the coastline of North America (which he was the first European to sight) for that of Greenland.89
From the dragon-head prows of their ships to the complex decorations on their jewellery and the patterns that snake around their runestones, almost every Viking artefact shows a love of adornment. Early Scandinavian art belonged to a tradition that embraced much of northern Europe during the Age of Migrations in the fourth to sixth centuries. From the seventh century, however, the Scandinavian world began to produce art that was independently creative, with a particular use of animal ornamentation, often with beasts intertwining to create sinuous patterns of astonishing complexity and power.
Artistic styles are notoriously difficult to date, particularly those that remained in fashion over a long period of time, as styles that are supposed to succeed each other in a neat typological sequence often overlap. Some areas are more conservative in taking up the new styles, while the presence of a particular ‘dated’ style in an otherwise undated archaeological context may represent an item that has been preserved in a family for decades (or even for generations).
The first Scandinavian style of the Viking Age, classified by art historians as Style E,90 is represented by a set of twenty-two bridle-bits in gilt-bronze found at Broa on Gotland. There is a complex series of animal motifs used on them, including a stylised one with a beaked head and fork-like feet, and a ‘gripping beast’ – a type that would remain in use for several centuries, in which the claw-like feet of the animals often grip their own bodies. The most famous example of this style are the finds from the Oseberg ship; the decorations on the tent, the bedposts, the sledges and cart in particular adapt the animal motifs of Style E magnificently to the wooden medium on which they were carved.
The next major Viking artistic style to emerge is known as the Borre style, named for a collection of gilt-bronze harness mounts that were found in a ship-burial at Borre in Norway’s Vestfold.91 The characteristic ribbon plait, a pattern of interlaced circles, lozenges and other geometric figures, is further adorned by a gripping beast with a long snout (and sometimes what looks like a pigtail).There are also other more naturalistic animal types with heads bent backwards. The Borre style spread from Scandinavia to the Viking-occupied parts of the British Isles, where it appears in the hybrid Anglo-Norse stone sculptures and on metal items.
Roughly contemporary with the Borre style (which lasted into the second half of the tenth century) is the Jellinge style, named for a small silver cup dating from the mid-tenth century, which was found in the North Mound at Jelling.92 Again prominently featuring a zoomorphic style, its main motif is an S-shaped beast, elongated almost into a ribbon with very narrow hips. It seems to have evolved from the Borre style (and in time metamorphosed into the succeeding Mammen style). There are objects of the Jellinge type somewhat earlier than its name-site might suggest, and a strap-end found with the Gokstad ships has been associated with it.
The Mammen style, which emerged around 950, is named for a richly adorned axe found in a male grave at Mammen in Jutland. The inlaid silver-wire decoration features a new form of beast, more like a bird, with intertwined foliage and tendrils filling much of the rest of the space. The bodies of the bird-beasts are also infilled with a pattern of dots. Despite its name, the Mammen style is that featured on the Jelling Stone itself (and the lion-like creature on the stone is a notable example of it). Other Mammen-style objects are found widely distributed throughout the Viking world, including a sculptured cross at Kirk Braddan on the Isle of Man and brooches from the Skaill hoard found in Orkney.
Around 1000 the Mammen style was supplanted by the Ringerike style, whose name is taken from an area north of Oslo where a series of carvings on sandstones in this style were found. The most obvious features are the use of vegetative decoration, with tendrils looping out of shell decorations at the base of the stones. Above the pattern of foliage is found a boldly striding animal, and snakes amongst the tendrils often complete the decorations. Amongst the best examples of the style are metal weathervanes, such as the one found at Söderala in Sweden. Additionally, many of the finest runestones in Sweden are in the Ringerike style, including such masterpieces as the Ramundsberget Stone near Eskilstuna in Södermanland, which illustrates the legend of Sigurd, the heroic slayer of the dragon Fafnir. The whole is framed by three serpents. The runic inscription is contained in the outermost, while Sigurd himself stands outside the frame with his sword plunged into the underside of the lowermost of the snakes (which stands as a representation of Fafnir).93
The Ringerike was roughly contemporary with the initial spread within Scandinavia of Christianity, and was the first to contain Christian iconography, although pagan symbolism was still present. It spread into the British Isles, where it appears on the Winchbombe Psalter illustrations (from the 1020s and 1030s), and the style survived in Ireland long after it had been supplanted elsewhere.
By around 1050 the Ringerike had in turn given way to a new style, the Urnes, named for a stave church at Sogn in western Norway. These characteristically Norwegian wooden churches were erected during the early period of Christianity in Norway, often bearing ornate carvings, especially on the doors. Unlike elsewhere in Scandinavia, the original wooden churches were not replaced with stone versions, and therefore many of the characteristic high roof ridges topped with a turret and spire, and projecting gables adorned with dragon-heads and other ferocious beasts, have survived to the present day.94 As in all the other principal Scandinavian artistic styles of the Viking era, one of the main elements of the style is a stylised beast, including a snake-like creature with two legs, a standing four-legged beast, and a ribbon-like thread that terminates in an animal head. Unlike the preceding Ringerike style, there is little in the way of symmetry. As well as stave churches, the Urnes style is seen on a large number of Swedish runestones (with the inscription itself often appearing inside a snake) and on much high-quality metalwork, such as the gold Orø cross found at Issefjord in Zealand. It is also the first period in Scandinavian art when we occasionally know the identity of the artist, at least in the case of runestones, where the stone-carver sometimes included his own name. On one such stone from Södermanland, the master carver added to the inscription: ‘Äsbjörn carved the stone, coloured it as a memorial, he bound it with runes’ (which also, incidentally, reminds us that most runestones were originally highly coloured, and not the rather inert rocks that they can appear to be today).
The last of the main Viking styles, the Urnes, petered out in the early twelfth century; examples become much less common after 1110, although the style survived in Ireland at least until the 1130s. By then, new monarchies modelled along those in western and southern Europe had emerged in Sweden, Denmark and Norway; the last Viking raids were several generations in the past; and, perhaps appropriately, a new wave of artistic fashion had penetrated Scandinavia, with the importation of the Romanesque, which remained the dominant style for the next 200 years.