by Cat Jarman
Likewise, when Ohthere of Hålogaland, a Norwegian seafarer, visited the court of King Alfred around the year 890, he described his homeland and the journeys he had taken along it. Most of his journeys were depicted in steps, based on how many days he had sailed along the coast or in different cardinal directions, using riverbanks and other landmarks to help him with navigation. It’s long been discussed whether the Vikings used specific navigational tools too, but without a satisfactory conclusion. One possible candidate is half of a carved wooden disc found at a settlement site at Unartoq in Greenland: this has carved divisions that it has been proposed were not those of a sundial as some believe, but instead some sort of way to determine directions while at sea. Similarly, in the trading town of Wolin on the southern Baltic coast, an object thought to be a solar compass was recently found. More commonly proposed is the use of so-called sunstones, legendary crystals that would allow you to see where the sun was in the sky in very cloudy and foggy conditions. A recent computer-based simulation has shown that in difficult conditions checking your location with a crystal of this kind dramatically improves your chances of reaching your intended destination.[11] Even if there is no proof that the method was used, technically it would have helped.
More realistically, though, what you would really have needed was an extensive and thorough knowledge of the natural elements. In a thirteenth-century Norwegian text, a father offers the following advice to his son for him to become a successful sailor: ‘You must observe the movements of the heavenly bodies and make a careful study of how the sky is illuminated, how night is divided from day, and how day is divided into several time-periods. You must also learn how to monitor the sea-surge and understand the significance of its ebbings and swellings, because that is essential knowledge for seafaring men.’[12]
These, then, were the sort of considerations that would have been needed by those who had arrived in Repton.
Back on the trail of the carnelian bead, I assume it travelled through Torksey and tracing the river north brings us to the Humber. Here you come to another junction, an exceptional meeting point of three rivers: the Trent going south, the Ouse going north – an artery connecting all the way to York – and the Humber, which takes you out to the coast and to the North Sea. From the mouth of the Humber, as the crow flies, the distance to the coast of Denmark is around 550 kilometres, about as far as the drive by road from London to the Scottish border. It is possible to reduce the time spent in open water by hugging the coastline north around Scotland, stopping off in Orkney, then Shetland. From there, the distance across to Norway is only 300 kilometres. Whichever route you chose, the Viking ship would have been more than capable of making these crossings and in principle the journey could have been completed in under a week in a ship sailing at full speed.
Nevertheless, it isn’t immediately obvious how the goods from the east – the bead, coins and other commodities like silk – would have reached England. If we assume that they travelled primarily by water, there are two plausible routes. First, there’s the option of the Mediterranean: we know from historical records that there were numerous Viking raids along the western coast of France, in Spain and the Iberian Peninsula, and that they reached the western Mediterranean through the straits of Gibraltar, raiding the coastline of North Africa in attacks on Morocco. From there they may also have travelled across to the eastern Mediterranean to obtain goods or even to go inland. But we have no direct evidence of this connection; we might, for example, expect to see dirhams that had been minted in Islamic parts of Spain. So far none have been found in the ground in England. Equally compelling is the fact that there are very few known artefacts from the Iberian Peninsula or the western Mediterranean in England. The second, more likely option, is that the goods, and my bead, arrived via Scandinavia.
PART TWO
HOMELANDS
4.
BUDDHA: THE ALLURE OF THE EXOTIC
STOCKHOLM MUSEUM, 2017
Quiet and serene, he sits looking through the glass from a dark alcove, lit by sharp rays of light that reflect off his shiny, green body. His lips are pursed into a gentle smile and his legs are folded and contorted on top of each other. An air of benevolence and patience radiates from his presence, even here in the small museum space that has been taken over by a rambunctious group of schoolchildren smelling of rain-soaked jackets. The figure stops you in your tracks because he is unexpected. For a moment, you wonder if he has been misplaced or if his presence in the Viking gallery is the result of someone’s modern curatorial strategy to surprise and to contrast. He’s exotic here, part of another world. Everything about him is different, from his hairstyle to his clothes. The lotus leaf beneath him conjures images in your mind of a culture and a climate you recognise from holidays and the similar statue you recently bought as a garden feature.
IMPORTED OBJECTS
In 1956, a curious and unexpected object was found on a small island in a lake not far from Stockholm. The island of Helgö had once been home to a bustling community of traders, with an emphasis on craftwork. Its name, which means ‘Holy island’, is testament to some long-forgotten former religious importance. As the small bronze Buddha statuette was pulled out of the ground in an early medieval context, its excavator thought it must be there by mistake: perhaps a souvenir lost in recent times. As it turned out, it really was historic and had likely been buried at some point just before the start of the Viking Age. The statue is now so famous that in 2015 it received pride of place on a stamp released by the Swedish postal service: in a multicultural twenty-first century, here was proof that the Vikings of Sweden’s past had been the ultimate explorers, already – more than a millennium ago – living in a globalised world with far-reaching networks.
Today the Buddha from Helgö is a curiosity, and it would have been in the Viking Age too. It’s unlikely that the Vikings had any knowledge of Buddhism; there is absolutely no evidence in written sources to suggest the religion reached this north-westerly part of Europe until several hundred years later. When it was discovered, the Buddha had traces of a narrow leather strap wrapped around its neck and left arm, suggesting that it had been carried, hung around someone’s neck or suspended from a belt.
The Buddha is actually one of three highly exotic items found at this site, the others being a bronze ladle from the eastern Mediterranean, possibly Coptic Egypt, and a fragment of an Irish or British crozier adorned with a slithering beast and a man’s head – a representation of Jonah and the whale, symbolic of the resurrection. The ladle was originally a religious object too, used as a liturgical baptismal implement. Regardless of whether these objects had anything to do with each other or if their religious contexts were even important, they fit into the same category as the carnelian bead and the dirhams: they were exotic imports that had travelled long distances. To understand why a carnelian bead turns up in Repton, we need to under-stand how objects like these fit in to the Viking world in general.
Carnelian beads begin to appear in small numbers in Scandinavia in the first half of the ninth century. Then, suddenly, it’s like an explosion: they’re everywhere. This particular material and similar beads have been used for many millennia in other parts of the world; they were certainly not exclusive to the Viking Age. Yet it was precisely during this period that their popularity increased so rapidly in Scandinavia, both because of higher demand and a new means of supply. The beads moved along the same routes as the Vikings. For this reason, beads like this are a powerful way to understand trade, networks and the movement of people, especially because of how they reflect rapidly changing fashions.
To find out more, I started searching museum catalogues for other carnelian beads and found many of them in graves all across Scandinavia. In one study, a student had trawled through 266 graves from Norway to look for patterns in who these beads had ended up with.[1] Intriguingly, she noted that carnelian beads were found exclusively in women’s graves, usually as necklaces, even though beads in general were worn
by men too (the Repton warrior being a prime example). For men, though, the beads were never of imported, luxury materials like carnelian. She also discovered that in many cases, beads in men’s graves were found not around the neck but by the hip, which could mean they had been placed in a purse or bag. Sometimes they were found with other things like coins. This, then, could suggest that beads were more of a commodity or means of exchange than they were jewellery.
To better understand what happened with these beads, I turned to the ultimate guide for anyone interested in Viking beads. In the 1970s, Swedish archaeologist Johan Callmer painstakingly gathered, studied and classified almost fifteen thousand Viking Age beads from graves across Sweden. He divided them all into types, classified their colours and shapes, and placed them into a contextual chronological system. In this way, he was able to show how trends had varied over time. Checking the chronology for beads that match that from Repton, a trend was pretty clear to me. Looking at 879 carnelian beads, Callmer showed that the first had arrived in Scandinavia in the period between 820 and 845, in a very small number: only fifteen beads found. A few decades later came a dramatic increase, with a total of 450 dated to between 860 and 885. This is, in fact, almost a quarter of the entire collection of carnelian beads that have been found across the Viking Age. The distribution of the beads then fluctuated, but this was exactly what I was hoping to find. That brief twenty-five-year period matches the timing of the Repton bead’s burial in 873 perfectly, and what’s more, it fully supports the suggestion that the bead could have reached England via Scandinavia.
So who was bringing the beads into Scandinavia, and where had they come from? All those classified by Callmer had been found in burials but in recent years many more beads have been discovered at trading sites. For example, in Norway in 2012 a brand-new site was discovered through the use of new technology: a ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey.[2] In this method, a unit sends radar waves into the ground. These reflect back to a computer every time a variation is discovered; this could be anything from a simple change in soil type to a buried wall or even a buried Viking ship. It’s one of many methods that allow us to see beneath the soil without digging a hole.
In this particular case, the GPR identified a new settlement or marketplace at Heimdalsjordet, near the Gokstad burial mound that was home to one of the most famous Viking ships ever discovered. The survey revealed a street lined with buildings, and a subsequent metal detector survey unearthed vast quantities of objects in the plough soil. This included craftworking residue as well as, importantly, trading weights like those found at the camps in England and large numbers of dirhams. Oddly, there were very few European coins: almost all the coins discovered were linked to the east. Not only that, several carnelian and rock crystal beads were also scattered across the area. All the signs suggest that this was some sort of coastal trading site where exotic goods may have been traded and exchanged, perhaps including slaves – a site like that where Ho˛skuldr bought Melkorka.
TRADING TOWNS
When the merchant Ohthere visited Alfred in 890, he described his journey to a place called ‘Sciringes healh’. It has now become clear that this was the site of Kaupang in Vestfold, Norway, on the western side of the large bay of Viken (the Oslo fjord). Viken has even been suggested by some to be the origin of the word ‘Viking’, though that interpretation seems a little spurious. Kaupang, on the other hand, literally means ‘trade bay’. During the Viking Age, Kaupang was probably as urban as you could get in what is now Norway. Its location is no coincidence. This western side of the fjord forms the chief sailing route along the coast while just a few kilometres east of Kaupang lies the mouth of the River Lågen, the main route inland. This coastal zone is among the most fertile regions in the whole of Norway. Further inland, you could reach areas that were big producers of trading goods important for export, like soapstone, minerals for whetstones, and iron.
Kaupang was established around 800 and at the time of its emergence it belonged to the realm of the Danish king in a border zone with the territory of the Northmen, which would later become Norway. There’s plenty of evidence for craft activities having taken place there, like blacksmithing and glass bead production, with the land divided into individual plots including permanent buildings that would have been in use for several years. The craftworking was specialised and refined, one plot yielding substantial evidence for the casting of metal to produce jewellery and mounts in both lead and precious metals. Outside this zone, another area was used more temporarily; tents may have been set up there whenever markets were held, giving space for transient seasonal traders. Finds from Kaupang include dirhams and carnelian beads, even if only a few.
Now here’s what’s really interesting: Heimdalsjordet, which was more or less contemporary with Kaupang, contained far more objects with links to the east, including imported beads like carnelian and rock crystal – 24 per cent of the total as opposed to only 2 per cent at Kaupang. Could this mean that different people were based here, people who had more of a direct link with eastern networks?
Knowledge of sites like this is relatively new, comparatively speaking: excavation work at Viking towns such as Birka in Sweden and Hedeby near the border between Denmark and Germany started properly in the 1970s and from this point, radical new information about urban growth in Scandinavia started to come to light. Previously, attention had been focused firmly on rich graves, raids and warfare, but in the latter part of the twentieth century, archaeologists were more eager to emphasise the less violent side of the Vikings and, specifically, their involvement in trade. As a result, we’ve gained significant information about how the exotic imports fit in. But to appreciate this fully, we need to understand the world that the Vikings as we know them inhabited.
In Scandinavia, what we refer to as the Viking Age was the final stage of the period known as the Iron Age, which stretches back as far as 500 BC. Scandinavia had never been part of the Roman Empire and for this reason, classical writers like the historian Gaius Julius Caesar described Scandinavians (along with all other Europeans north of the Rhine) as ‘barbarians’ who were both culturally and economically inferior. In his opinion, the problem was that they lacked centralised institutions, as well as the bureaucracy and wealth that came with the cities and superior social order that had shaped western and central Europe since the beginning of the first millennium.
The reality of life in the north wasn’t quite as dismal as Caesar described. Even if direct engagement with the Roman Empire was relatively limited, information trickled through and many new technologies were adopted in the borderlands with the Empire, reaching Scandinavia through long-distance exchange and networks. There is evidence of influence from the Roman world in Scandinavian agricultural and production technologies, social organisation and even military tactics, which all fed into later developments.
However, it was during the Viking Age that urbanism first took proper hold in Scandinavia. Up to this point the region had been characterised almost entirely by rural settlements, despite urban communities being commonplace elsewhere in Europe at the time. Even around the year 1000, only a handful of towns in the true sense of the word were in existence, until a second and more extensive wave of urbanism hit Scandinavia thereafter, resulting in the establishment of new towns like Sigtuna (Sweden), Roskilde (Denmark) and Oslo (Norway). But in the eighth century, Scandinavians would already have been well acquainted with the larger communities in existence a short distance away in continental Europe. Even though it led to only a tiny proportion of the population living in towns, the change in settlement patterns had a huge impact, not least on trade, and thereby also on developing economic practices. The towns were also instrumental in changing society as a whole from a series of tribal communities into the three kingdoms of Norway, Sweden and Denmark that emerged towards the end of the Viking Age.
This is important, because the political structure of the society influenced not just the success of the towns, but also the
dynamics of trade and contact with other regions. The early part of the Viking Age was characterised by political instability; in later years power became more institutionalised, with greater dependence on an established legal system. Earlier on, local rulers’ successes had been measured in their ability to attract and retain allies. This had become an essential part of a chieftain’s ability to sustain local control over an extended period of time. The saga literature is filled with examples of just how important this was and how precarious life could be; the intrigues and soap-like dramas reveal an undercurrent of power-plays on a massive scale. Having access to ample resources was key not just for the straightforward reason of being able to feed your family, but also in order to keep those under your control happy by providing feasts and supplying essential commodities like beer.