River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  In the west, conversion was used as a deliberate political tool in the interaction between Vikings and Saxons. After leaving Repton, for example, Guthrum, one of the leaders of the Great Army, agreed a truce with King Alfred at Wedmore in the year 878. As part of the deal, Guthrum agreed to convert to Christianity and be baptised by the king. Whether he really kept to the Christian ways he swore to that day is unknown. Only a decade or so before, however, the Great Army may have specifically targeted the beliefs of their Saxon enemies, if we are to believe the legends: in one King Edmund, ruler of East Anglia in the 850s and 860s, was killed on 20 November 869 and, according to the sagas, his death came about after he refused to denounce his Christianity. His killers, led by Ivar the Boneless, tied him to a tree, shot him full of arrows, beheaded him and threw his head into the forest. A compelling story, but most likely another example of medieval propaganda.

  We do know that Christian missionaries made the effort to go to Scandinavia to try to convert those northern heathens. The first of these described in some detail in a broadly contemporary source is Ansgar, the first archbishop in Hamburg-Bremen, who travelled to Birka twice in the ninth century. The first time, he succeeded in converting a royal steward to Christianity and building a church. Apparently, the locals weren’t too impressed and soon reverted to paganism, forcing him to return a couple of decades later to make a second attempt. While this story may not be entirely true, it is very likely that such attempts at conversion were relatively common. Yet detecting evidence of religious belief in the distant past is difficult, especially without written sources.

  Forms of burial may give us a clue to past religious beliefs, but these are often mis- or over-interpreted. A traditional view is that burials without grave goods represent Christians, and those with, pagans. But the real picture is far more complex and nuanced. While the Christianisation of Scandinavia happened towards the end of the Viking Age, the process took place in different ways and at different rates across Scandinavia: this was not one overarching event, but a gradual spread. So although, for example, in Denmark King Harold Bluetooth is credited with the final, full Christianisation of the country, no single event made it all happen. In Norway it’s assumed that Christianity largely came from the west, through contact with England and Ireland, and in Denmark and Sweden that it came through contact with Germany.

  For most people, religions may even have persisted side by side in an overlap period. Sometimes we find symbols of religion that may suggest as much: like graves containing both a Christian cross and a Thor’s hammer – maybe because the owner believed in both or maybe because the objects had no religious meaning to them whatsoever. The most pragmatic and perhaps most likely explanation for the presence of small items like the Buddha statue and the Allah ring, which may or may not have had religious significance, is that they were traded, exotic items. It is nevertheless important to remember that ideas could easily spread along with the objects too.

  If we are to understand how both exotic objects and ideas went back and forth, a key consideration is that of the people: who they were and how much they moved around. In the Viking Age objects from the outside are thought to have been brought in almost exclusively by raiders or maybe traders returning home, which is in contrast to many other periods in history, where it’s often thought objects were brought in by migrants. An excellent analogy that shows how complicated such assumptions are has been provided by Susan Oosthuizen, an archaeologist studying the emergence of the English in the middle of the first millennium.[11] What if, she suggests, two thousand years from now, our written records have disappeared, and all we have is archaeology and you start to look at the distribution of IKEA stores around the North Sea as a way to understand migration? You’d notice just how much of an impact IKEA had on British furniture design, but the further you got from the shops, the number and concentration of IKEA sofas, crockery and tea lights would diminish. This might lead you to conclude that sometime in the late twentieth century a significant number of Swedes had colonised Britain and the shops were ‘central places designed to state and preserve Swedish identity’. But as Susan argues, flat-pack furniture isn’t linked to Swedish ethnicity in Britain and even where Swedes are living in this country, there isn’t a high percentage of them working in IKEA stores. This reaches the root of the difficulty that we have in understanding the spread of objects, ideas and people in the past. It’s very easy to look for correlations, but it’s equally easy to misinterpret the distribution of objects as evidence of past population movements.

  THE SCANDINAVIANS

  So who really were the Vikings, these people of Scandinavia, and how much do we know about their migration patterns? It is often thought that prior to the Viking Age they had little contact with the outside world, and that even throughout the period the main, if not the only, direction of movement was out and not in: in other words, that people from elsewhere did not come to settle in Scandinavia. The make-up and ethnic background of the Vikings has been notoriously abused. The concept of an ethnically superior and racially homogenous Scandinavian past was at the forefront of Nazi Germany’s Aryan race policy: in Nazi-occupied Norway, the Borre Viking Age burial mounds provided the backdrop to public propaganda meetings held by Vidkun Quisling, leader of the fascist Nasjonal Samling party in the 1940s. The party deliberately drew parallels between its efforts to create a new superior state and the unification of Norway by Harald Finehair towards the end of the Viking Age.

  The glorious blond-haired and blue-eyed Viking warrior was, of course, a very fitting poster boy for Hitler’s ideals. In fact, the Nazis were so engaged with revealing the superiority of the Vikings that in the 1930s Heinrich Himmler’s Ahnenerbe der SS, Nazi Germany’s think tank, funded major excavations at Hedeby as one of its main research projects.

  Recently, though, new bioarchaeological methods have begun to provide answers in a different way. In 2020, the results of the first-ever detailed ancient DNA study of bones from the Viking homelands was published.[12] A team based in Copenhagen had scoured museum collections to put together an extensive collection of material in order to try to define, genetically, what the population of Scandinavia looked like during the Viking Age, as well as to say something about those who migrated. Studies of modern DNA focus on what populations in the world look like today: if you decide to have your own ancestry analysed, you can easily order a kit on the Internet, swipe a cotton bud along your inner cheek, and send it sealed in a little tube to a lab. A few weeks later you will get your results as a percentage, or you may even get a map, that tells you where your ancestors came from. Except, strictly speaking, this information isn’t true: what it really tells you is where in the world people matching your genetics are living right now.

  This doesn’t necessarily represent an ancient population. We are, after all, a species that has been on the move since day one. In other words, if we simply look at present-day patterns we can’t quite know what the influence of later migrations has been: this could, for example, explain the discrepancy we saw between the modern and ancient DNA studies of Iceland’s settlers, in terms of the proportion of male and female migrants from Scandinavia and Britain, where the ancient DNA suggested more of a balance in numbers from Scandinavia than the modern dataset. It also explains why it is so difficult to pin down an exact number of Scandinavian Viking Age migrants in England: genetically, most are so similar to those we refer to as Angles and Saxons, who migrated from regions in and near southern Scandinavia just a few hundred years earlier, that we cannot disentangle the separate migration events.

  The results of the Danish study of ancient DNA confirmed much of what we thought already, but it brought a few surprises too. The researchers found groupings in the dataset that they referred to as ‘Norwegian-’, ‘Swedish-’ and ‘Danish-like’, yet these genetic patterns didn’t accurately reflect the country boundaries we see in Scandinavia today. Genetically speaking, for example, the ancient populations of south-western Sweden were
more similar to those of what is now Denmark than they were to groups who lived in eastern parts of the Swedish mainland at the time. Intriguingly, the researchers also found representatives from what they described as a ‘British-like’ or, more accurately, a ‘North Atlantic’ ancestry group in Scandinavia. The suggestion is that these were individuals originally from Britain or Ireland who had at some point moved to Scandinavia. This indication is compelling because it shows geneflow coming into Scandinavia, a story that we typically aren’t told.

  One explanation is that these people could be the slaves we struggle to identify but, as before, we have to consider whether such enslaved people were likely to have passed on their genes to a detectable extent. More probable is that these are either straight-up migrants who had headed east or the result of alliances; intercultural marriages.

  What’s more, the Danish team also found individuals dating to the Viking Age with large amounts of South European ancestry in both Denmark and south-west Sweden, something that is entirely new. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise us, knowing as we do how much people moved about at the time, but this evidence isn’t mirrored in written sources. These people could have been born in those areas and subsequently migrated north, or they could have been the descendants of someone who had. In any case, the finding is important because it proves Scandinavia to have been a place that people came to from the outside – not just the other way around. This, of course, has implications as well for all those exotic objects that came into the Viking homelands, because it makes it less likely that they arrived through trade alone.

  The genetic study isn’t the first proof of migration in the Viking Age, however. Isotope analysis at the site of Sigtuna in Mälaren, the town that came to take over from nearby Birka when it declined at the end of the tenth century, showed that among those analysed, a full 50 per cent were not from the local area.[13] Likewise, at Birka, strontium isotope analysis showed a mix of people who could have grown up locally and many who were clearly immigrants: as at Sigtuna, they were about half and half.[14] One particular burial was that of a man and woman together, in a chamber grave with rich grave goods including weaponry and gilded jewellery, and a leather bag containing gilded silver mounts of a type known from eastern Europe. There were trading weights, a fine set of scales and, nestled among the other objects, a beautiful set of glass gaming pieces and bone dice. The isotope analysis suggested that the man was not local to Birka, but that the woman could well have been of local origins. Whoever these two were, they clearly had international connections.

  In fact, the genetic diversity seen in the late Viking Age cemetery at Sigtuna was greater than in many prehistoric groups and, according to the researchers, on a par with that found among Roman soldiers in England, a result that is surprising for a population often considered to be unusually homogenous. The bad news is that although we can be certain that these people were not local, we can’t pin down exactly where they were from. Just as in Repton, the information boils down, quite literally, to a single figure which corresponds to a form of geology, and there are numerous places across Europe that could yield such a value. Yet with all we know about the eastern contacts we should undoubtedly consider those regions as possible sources: eleventh-century Sigtuna is rich in imported goods too, including glass finger rings of Russian origin, and even a ceramic so-called resurrection egg from Kyiv – a high-status religious artefact. Pottery from western Slavic territories was also found in Sigtuna, though it is far more likely that much of it was made locally by potters working in Slavic traditions than to think that everything was imported.

  Intriguingly, the Danish ancient DNA research team found cases where ancestry from outside Scandinavia was detected in individuals buried in what we would consider a distinctly ‘Viking’ way: burials that we would otherwise have no qualms about identifying as Viking. For example, at three sites in the Orkney Islands, typically considered to be culturally Viking, only a small proportion of the individuals had Scandinavian-type ancestries while the rest were considered local, genetically speaking. Examples of Sami ancestry – the indigenous population of northern Scandinavia – have been found in typically Viking graves in Norway too.[15] This shows that genetics is not going to give us the ultimate answers: cultures and identities are far more complex and there is no such thing as a ‘genetic Viking’.

  Amid all this new information about migration, there is a particularly curious finding, and it relates to sex: the Sigtuna dataset showed that among those who were migrants, as many were women as men. This is important information because for such a long time Viking migrations have been seen as almost exclusively male affairs. Nevertheless, the Sigtuna study was not the first example of female migration. Elsewhere in Scandinavia evidence has been found not just of female migration but also of significant power and status among women. The most notable example can be seen in one of the richest and most elaborate Viking discoveries ever made: the Oseberg ship. Today the ship is housed in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, a building designed in the 1920s to resemble a church. The museum’s arched ceilings and whitewashed walls form the perfect backdrop to let you take in, spectacularly, three ships that are displayed in the cruciform arms of the building. The Oseberg ship is arguably the most beautifully crafted, with a sleek, streamlined hull made of oak, elaborate carved decorations, and a spiralling prow. Measuring twenty-two metres in length, the ship has fifteen pairs of oars and a thirteen-metre-tall mast. In or around the year 834, it was buried in the ground as part of an elaborate funerary process, as testified by the extensive list of grave goods: as well as everything you’d need to rig and row the ship, the burial included cooking equipment and food – even buckets of apples and blueberries – clothes, chests, boxes, six beds, tents, sleighs and a cart. Animals had been sacrificed as part of the funeral, including two cows, fifteen horses and six dogs.

  Soon after its initial burial, the mound was robbed (evidence includes eighteen wooden spades thought to have belonged to the thieves), which probably explains why there were no items of jewellery, precious metals or weapons. Nevertheless, the grave contained several exotic objects. Among these were imported silks from the eastern Mediterranean, most likely Byzantium, and the so-called ‘Buddha bucket’: a bucket with a fitting in the form of an enamelled, seated figure with crossed legs. Although he looks very much like a Buddha, the consensus now is that this object was made in Ireland. In any case, it too fits the category of ‘exotic’ very well.

  The Oseberg grave is completely unique and this, the richest of all Viking burials, was the grave of two women. Considering the extensive wealth displayed by the burial, they must have been of very high status. The two were both relatively old – the younger was likely just over fifty and the older seventy to eighty. For a long time, it has been debated which of the two was the main burial and it was thought that the older woman was the younger’s attendant or even slave, or perhaps the other way around. Because they both died at the same time, it is often assumed that one may have been sacrificed to accompany the other, a practice that some argue took place in the Viking world. Then, in 2006, an article was published that described the results of an ancient DNA study of both of the women’s skeletons. While the genetic signature of the older woman couldn’t be determined at the time, the results showed that the younger woman carried a mitochondrial haplotype most commonly found in the Black Sea region. The implication is important: could one of the most significant Viking burials be that of a migrant woman from the east – or was this an indication that the younger woman had been a slave?

  As these tests were carried out in the early days of ancient DNA analysis, they will be refined in the future, not least to look for a family relationship between the two women.[16] Whatever the outcome, this whole burial and the genetic evidence forces us to rethink the roles that these women played – or at least it should – and not just in Viking Age society, but in the movements to and from Scandinavia. Should the River Kings also include River Queens?
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  VALKYRIE: RIVER QUEENS?

  DENMARK, 2012

  He had almost given up when the tell-tale high-pitched sound caused him to pause. Unmistakable, the numbers on the display panel made it clear that this was not another scrap of iron but bronze at the very least – possibly even silver. Taking off his gloves, he propped his metal detector against the spade dug into the ground and carefully loosened the dirt on the surface. The object came to light quickly, buried only a few centimetres down in the frozen soil: a small, stylised silver head looked back up at him. As the icy earth had created a hard shell around the rest of the figure, he decided to take it home and leave it on a radiator to thaw. Later, he patiently removed the remaining soil. A neck and shoulders appeared, and hands holding a double-edged sword and a shield, in a style that clearly belonged to the Viking Age. The figure had long hair, with a face that was unmistakably feminine. There was no doubt that this was a woman, bearing arms. Who was she? A Valkyrie, shield-maiden, warrior; mythical or the representation of someone real?

  IN SEARCH OF VIKING WOMEN

  The Viking Age, as we are used to hearing about it, is overwhelmingly filled with men. With his grizzly beard and gritted teeth, the Viking warrior is imprinted on the modern mind: the Repton warrior with his hammer and sword fits precisely the image we have in our heads. The very word Viking is by definition male; its old Norse origins are gendered to make a vikingr a man. Even so, as one researcher put it, although this makes the Viking woman a linguistic impossibility, she is also a biological necessity. Of course there were Viking women too. Yet surprisingly, it’s only relatively recently that the Viking woman has been given much attention; now, in the twenty-first century, she seems to have come back with a vengeance.