River Kings
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RIVER KINGS
A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads
Cat Jarman
Copyright
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2021
Copyright © Cat Jarman
Cat Jarman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Artwork by Richard Osgood
Maps by Martin Brown
Cover images © Shutterstock
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008353070
Ebook Edition © January 2021 ISBN: 9780008353094
Version: 2021-01-20
Dedication
Til Mormor
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PROLOGUE: CARNELIAN
PART ONE: WEST
1. HAMMER OF THOR: BONES
The Viking warrior
A house for the dead
The juveniles
2. DIRHAM: SILVER FOR A SLAVE
Exchange
Ripples from the east
New discoveries
3. SHIP NAIL: RIVER KINGS
Sea steeds
The wanderer
Towns on the move
Intelligence
PART TWO: HOMELANDS
4. BUDDHA: THE ALLURE OF THE EXOTIC
Imported objects
Trading towns
Eastern connections
The Scandinavians
5. VALKYRIE: RIVER QUEENS?
In search of Viking women
Warrior women
Migration
6. KING PIECE: HEADING EAST
Austmarr: the Eastern Sea
Towards the Silk Roads
Salme
Eastern settlers
PART THREE: EAST
7. NECK RINGS: THE TALES OF THE RUS’
The Rus’
Steppe roads
A brutal life
Death of a chieftain
8. BEAD: CROSSROADS
Political minefields
Commodities
Warrior states
The women of the Dnieper
Mixed identities
9. DRAGON’S HEAD: TO MIKLAGARD AND BEYOND
Miklagard
Constantinople
Graffiti
The Caspian Sea
The unexpected effects of globalisation
EPILOGUE: GUJARAT
PICTURE SECTION
FOOTNOTES
NOTES
INDEX
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Carnelian bead
Charnel grave in Repton
Grave 511, the ‘Repton warrior’
Juvenile grave in Repton
Chamber grave of Bj.581
The Vale of York hoard
Ring with Kufic-style inscription
Silver cap mount from Birka grave Bj.581
Cap mount found in Shestovitsa, Ukraine
Spillings hoard from the island of Gotland
Excavations of the Oseberg ship burial
The Oseberg ship as displayed in the Viking Ship Museum, Oslo
The so-called ‘Buddha bucket’
A runestone found on Berezan Island
A runic inscription from Hagia Sophia, Istanbul
Four views of the figurine of a woman bearing weapons
PROLOGUE
CARNELIAN
In 1982, during the summer that I was born, archaeologists excavating a Viking winter camp in the sleepy Derbyshire village of Repton found a small orange bead among the jumbled-up bones of nearly three hundred people buried there in a mass grave. For the next thirty-five years, the bead’s existence was all but forgotten. Tucked away in a plastic box, it waited to be deposited in the depths of a museum archive or displayed in a brightly lit cabinet: to be marvelled at by curious children and hassled parents on a rainy Sunday afternoon. In 2017, that bead found its way into my temporary possession. At that point the task of disentangling the stories of the Repton dead had become a significant part of my life: I had spent over half a decade forensically examining their bones, piecing together fragmented information from pathology reports and chemical analyses, attempting to understand who they were and where they came from. I didn’t know it at the time, but this bead would take my search for the Vikings in a whole new direction and radically change my understanding of the Viking Age.
I found it in a large Tupperware tub, nestled among hundreds of bags, boxes and envelopes in the Repton artefact archives. A colleague had lugged all of this to my house the evening before, and on that morning I was gradually working my way through the boxes to get an overview of the work to be done. Four decades’ worth of specialist reports, illustrations, and the records of more than nine thousand objects uncovered during excavations in the 1970s and 1980s had been passed over to me so that I could help to bring the archives to publication. Along with them were a large number of artefacts that had yet to be fully analysed, drawn and photographed before being sent to Derby Museum. The excavations in Repton covered more than 1300 years of history, representing a real-life journey through time: from the site’s prehistoric and Roman origins, and its Anglo-Saxon monastery desecrated by the Vikings, stopping briefly at its Norman castle and Augustinian priory, to its present vicarage, church and well-known public school. The objects in those boxes stemmed from each and every one of these periods: there were Roman enamel brooches lying next to fragments of decorated medieval window glass, and a nineteenth-century bone toothbrush alongside an Anglo-Saxon comb. I felt like a child let loose in a toy shop after hours.
The bead itself was carefully wrapped in tissue paper within a clear polythene bag. Its orange colour bordered on brown; it was approximately a centimetre long and half a centimetre wide, with neatly cut, faceted corners and a polished and shiny surface. Apart from a few scars on one side, and some dirt still stuck in the hole bored through it, the bead was in perfect condition. Nothing about its appearance revealed its age: you’d be forgiven for thinking it a piece of twentieth-century costume jewellery. I couldn’t tell how old it was just by looking at it. I took out its cardboard tag from the bag, which included a series of numbers, words and letters decipherable only to the initiated. On an archaeological excavation, every single object is meticulously recorded, its context documented with military precision so that its final circumstances can be reconstructed decades or even centuries later.
29.8.82, Tr8. 3710, 703 [circled], very dark black
Translating these codes into plain English told me that the bead had been found in the late summer of 1982, in the same trench as the mass grave: the grave that I had dedicated six years of my life to analysing
. The circled number 703 referred to the specific context or layer in which it was discovered; the description to the colour of the soil – a very dark colour indicated a high organic content or, in other words, an area rich in human activity. I turned to the eight-volume list of finds from the excavations to check if the bead had been found alongside the Victorians, the Vikings or the Romans. The same layer had yielded a variety of finds, including a fragment of Anglo-Saxon window glass, a finely lattice-carved piece of bone that had probably come from a Saxon book cover, metalworking waste, and nondescript fragments of iron, but nothing dating to more recently than the ninth century. In other words, the bead had been found within the detritus of a Viking terror attack, alongside the remains of the 264 people I believe were some of the Viking Great Army war dead. Why had I never heard of this bead before?
Looking more closely, I could see the word ‘carnelian’ written faintly in pen across the top of the bag. My knowledge of this material was a little sketchy, but the word alone seemed exotic and enticing. Searching online, I learned that carnelian is a mineral commonly used as a semiprecious gemstone, a variety of the silica mineral chalcedony. It had been fashionable among Vikings in the late ninth and early tenth centuries but would originally have come from India or the areas that are now Iran and Iraq. As such, beads like this provide evidence of contact with the Islamic caliphate and the trading routes that formed part of the Silk Roads, the ancient trading networks that stretched like spidery veins across large parts of Asia and central Europe. This was a world I knew little of but one that felt deeply alluring. While Viking expansion through eastern Europe and along trading routes bringing goods back to Scandinavia is well known, the Vikings who arrived in England have typically been considered a distinct movement. In history books, maps illustrate this spread with bold arrows: eastwards from Sweden, westwards from Denmark and Norway. Repton was no different – the accepted interpretation of the bones that I’d been working on seemed to fit neatly into the traditional Viking Age narrative: that of the Norsemen and Danes who travelled west[fn1] in the late eighth century, launching a savage attack on unsuspecting monks at Lindisfarne in 793 and kick-starting the Viking Age in the process; and that of the hit-and-run raids of the succeeding decades that eventually, in the ninth century, led to ambitions of political conquest and settlement. This, it had been agreed, is what brought a certain Great Army – a military force active in England between 865 and the late 870s – to conquer Repton and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia in 873. A neat story, but this small piece of carnelian was beginning to make me wonder if it painted the entire picture. The general consensus has been that the eastern trade routes played little part in the western Viking tale. So what was a Middle Eastern or Asian carnelian bead doing in rural Derbyshire in the ninth century?
My part in this story had begun five years earlier on a crisp, wintry morning in January 2012, when I travelled to Oxford in a borrowed Land Rover Defender built for far more adventurous journeys than a trip down the motorway. I had come to meet two renowned men. The first was one of the UK’s most eminent professors of archaeology, whose accolades include a CBE for services to British archaeology, and whose record of excavations reads like a gazetteer of the greatest archaeological sites. The other was one of the most infamous Viking warriors in England.
I was coming to the end of my Master’s degree at the University of Oslo, where I had been studying the diet and migration patterns of Norwegian Vikings by analysing their skeletons (concluding that they (a) often ate a lot of fish and (b) were pretty mobile, neither of which was particularly surprising). A few months before, while I was looking for a suitable PhD research topic, one of my old undergraduate professors had introduced me to Professor Martin Biddle and to the Repton Viking camp. Maybe, he suggested, I could apply my newly learnt forensic skills to the unresolved questions surrounding the Repton dead that Martin and his late wife, Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, had excavated in the 1970s and 1980s. Martin, in his Oxford office, was everything I, as a child in Norway, had imagined England to be (although disappointingly it was not in a Hogwarts-style wood-panelled college but a 1970s concrete block in Summertown). Fast forward five years and my PhD was coming to an end, with the analyses of the Repton dead nearly complete, when the carnelian bead came into my possession.
To me, there was something compelling about that tiny bead. The smooth, almost translucent material; the sharply cut corners; the faceted shape with angles that looked so perfect and so modern. I couldn’t help but obsess over all the hands, all the lives, that it had intersected with over more than a millennium including, now, my own. Who had it belonged to? Was it dropped accidentally, or placed in the mass grave deliberately? How did it end up in Repton and were there other links to the east there that we had not previously considered – could this be a major new discovery? Certain parts of my research into the bones from Repton didn’t quite fit into the traditional picture. And in the past few years our knowledge of the Vikings in England had started to increase radically, especially through the discoveries made by metal detectorists painstakingly searching muddy fields at the weekends; finds like ninth-century Islamic coins turning up in the middle of nowhere. Along with such discoveries, could this tiny bead demonstrate a greater connection between the eastern and the western worlds in the Viking Age than we previously thought? But this was, after all, only a single bead. Surely an object like this did not have the power to retell a major narrative? It is unlikely (albeit not impossible) that the bead travelled with one person all the way from Asia to Repton. So what was the connection, the common thread that had brought it to England?
In this book I retrace the journey I believe the carnelian bead travelled to get to its final resting place in Derbyshire, going back to its likely origin in Gujarat, India. Following the trail of the bead deliberately misses out parts of the Viking phenomenon, such as the Vikings’ exploration of the North Atlantic towards North America, and the elaborate political dynamics of Viking Age Britain, Ireland and France. Those stories have been told extensively before, but the stepwise movement eastwards, searching for specific connections between east and west, enables a different perspective on the Vikings. My approach here is that of an archaeologist, first and foremost working from the objects and remains left behind, focusing especially on the new, scientific methods that are revolutionising our knowledge. From these, the stories uncovered can be woven into the rich narratives we have from other forms of evidence, to search for traces of the people who migrated in and out of Scandinavia more than a millennium ago in search of riches, power, adventure, or simply a new life; some willingly and some who had no choice. It was this line of thinking that led me to the world of the River Kings. Along the way, a series of objects act as stepping stones, with each representing a particular aspect of the narrative. For every object, I start with a scenario of someone whose life might have interacted with it: some real, some imagined. I will leave it to the reader to decide which is which.
PART ONE
WEST
1.
HAMMER OF THOR: BONES
REPTON, C.874 AND 1986
For five days he had held onto it, safely tucked away in the leather purse hanging from his waist. With the necklace in his hand, he traced the outline of the hammer and turned over the beads that were threaded alongside it a couple of times, before tying the leather thong around the man’s neck. His skin was cold and pallid, covered in an oily sheen from the liquids anointed onto it to prepare the body for transport. Kneeling on the pebbly surface at the side of the grave, he pushed the hammer into place, so it nestled just below the man’s collarbone – just as he’d worn it in life. One by one, the other objects were placed around the body, each presented as an offering carrying meaning about both who he had been and who he was about to become.
Eleven hundred years later, the necklace saw daylight once again. The stony and loamy soil covering its surface was gingerly brushed away by a volunteer excavator who mistook it for an anchor.
You could understand her error: its upside-down T-shape, with a pointed lower edge, is certainly reminiscent of something you would have used to moor a ship. Yet the pendant is small and delicate, with neat, straight lines. You could even describe its design as understated, especially when you know what it represents: a portrayal of Mjölnir, the hammer of Thor forged in a smouldering furnace by the dwarves of Svartálfaheimr.
THE VIKING WARRIOR
According to the traditional narrative, the Viking Age began when a band of Vikings attacked the wealthy monastery at Lindisfarne in Northumbria on 8 June 793. The attack, technically not the first accounted Viking raid on English soil, was described in a letter to Ethelred, king of Northumbria, by Alcuin of York, a scholar living in what is now Germany: ‘Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor is it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made.’
The Viking attacks are typically thought to have been brought about by a combination of pulls and pushes: the lure of undefended Saxon monastic riches coupled with the pressures of Scandinavian population growth, poor agricultural land in Norway, political disputes and perhaps even a lack of marriageable women back home.[1] As a result, a new era emerged. Records like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle[fn1] describe the toils of the Angles and Saxons over the next centuries, focusing largely on the royal families and the ongoing battles for control of the numerous kingdoms making up what was to become modern-day England. The narrative presented in the Chronicle fits well within the established tale of the Vikings who turned from their Norwegian and Danish homelands and travelled west to raid, pillage and conquer throughout Britain and Ireland, wreaking havoc both there and elsewhere on the continent of Europe. By the end of the Viking Age, in the mid-eleventh century, the Scandinavians’ impact on Britain would be profound, affecting everything from the development of towns to the currency, culture, language and art.