River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  The implications are serious, because it has been proposed that the lack of women in Scandinavia was one of the main drivers of the start of the Viking Age in the first place. The first time this was suggested was in the Middle Ages, when Dudo of Saint-Quentin, a French historian who wrote a History of the Normans sometime in the late tenth or early eleventh century, proposed that the Viking raids had started because of an excess of unmarried young men. Presumably in Dudo’s time, much like now, this demographic category was over-represented in the crime statistics. His idea was taken up more earnestly in recent times; first, in a suggestion that perhaps what drove these men abroad was the fact that at home they had to compete to get a wife, as there simply weren’t enough women to go round.[11] Therefore, to stand out as an eligible bachelor, you’d have needed wealth, quite literally: bridewealth, a sort of payment due to the bride’s family (the opposite of a dowry), which was common in many cultures. A second and more recent suggestion has taken the idea further, proposing that an additional lack of women came about because of a common practice of polygyny, i.e. the taking of more than one wife, leaving fewer women available to marry.[12]

  While at face value these suggestions seem plausible, they have serious flaws. The first relates to the archaeological evidence. Does the seven-to-one difference proposed for some parts of Norway reflect a genuine lack of women overall? I think the answer to this question is no. But to understand why, we need to look at how these graves are identified in the first place. In many cases the sex of a burial in a grave will have been determined solely on the basis of grave goods, at least if the bones are not well enough preserved for this to be done osteologically. That means that the grave goods are assumed to reflect a specific gender: this is typically done by taking weapons and tools to represent men and textile-working equipment to indicate women, though sometimes it’s more specifically about dress, like women being buried with certain types of brooches, which might be more reliable than the former items. So if a grave where the bones are either poorly preserved or lacking altogether contains a single sword, for example, it is taken to be the grave of a man.

  In most cases this is likely to be correct; but as Bj.581 demonstrated, not always. What about when there are no grave goods, or when grave goods can’t be associated with a particular gender, such as a single knife? This was actually quite common, and such graves are typically not included in the statistics. If it was common for women to be buried without any grave goods whatsoever, that would significantly skew the results. It’s also worth remembering that in Norway in particular, there aren’t many big communal cemeteries in this period. Instead, graves are often found underneath mounds on the outskirts of farmsteads; these would have been family burial grounds, but not necessarily ones that every member of a household was buried in. This gives us another way in which our dataset could be skewed: if only the heads of the household were buried there, this may well have precluded women. Even more interestingly, in the infrequent cemeteries that have been excavated using modern methods, the ratio of men and women has been closer to 1:1.

  The second problem with the bridewealth and polygyny hypotheses is about numbers and statistics. One thing we do know is that throughout the Viking Age a huge number of people left Scandinavia: some to settle in new lands, who would certainly not come home again, and many to take part in raids and battles. Many of those would not have returned either, at least if we believe the numbers of dead listed in historical accounts: just a couple of examples include the 840 men killed in Devonshire in 878 and the four thousand Danes killed with the Danish king’s son at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937. If most of those who departed were men, this should have left an excess of women back home. If there really were fewer women, the imbalance to start with must have been extreme, unless large numbers of women left their homelands too. From the evidence for female migration, that now seems very possible. But even so, the hypothesis really doesn’t stack up.

  Warfare, then, may have involved some women – certainly as camp-followers and maybe as fighters or, in some cases, commanders. Yet as the evidence from the camps in England shows, trade was part and parcel of the Viking phenomenon. Most of the time the individuals who engaged in trade are invisible to us. The trader who stored precious goods in a lockable chest, who knew the products obtained in minute detail – in order to be able to assess their worth when both purchasing and selling – and who measured out the exact quantities at the market rate in exchange for silver cut from an armband, that trader remains anonymous, a shadowy character whose life went by unrecorded. We find out more about them only when scales and weighing equipment are found in graves, as we can fairly safely assume these objects relate to the role the deceased had in life. This is how we know that women were also involved in trade. In Birka, there even seems to have been a majority of women traders: 32 per cent of all finds of weights in graves were from women’s graves, compared to 28 per cent in male graves – the rest were in graves where sex could not be determined.

  Unusually, it seems to be different in other regions, like Norway, where only about 17 per cent of all weights could be associated with the graves of women.[13] Could this mean that there were regional differences – that the norm in Norway, for example, was not the same as in Sweden? There’s also a high proportion of Viking Age women’s graves in Russia that contain weighing equipment: as much as 50 per cent according to one study.[14] Infuriatingly, even this has been explained away by some as evidence of ‘farewell gifts from husbands’. However, it’s more likely that trading in the region would have been a family venture in which women could participate fully. Even in Scandinavia there is evidence that women may have been actively involved in trade in eastern territories: a woman in Birka, for instance, was buried with a weight and a purse containing Islamic silver coins, and with jewellery including carnelian and amber beads and gilded silver pendants that may have come from Hungary.[15]

  Putting the debate about the Birka woman’s warrior status and occupation to one side, there’s another point that has been largely overlooked but which, in many ways, is even more significant for understanding the world that she was part of. Although most of the organic materials in her grave have long since rotted away, some proof of what she was dressed in when she was buried remains. Just above her head, the archaeologists found five small artefacts that formed part of a hat or cap. These are four plum-shaped objects best described as tassels, made from very fine silver thread embroidery and braiding, with edgings of silver foil. They would once have hung from ribbons on the hat and would have been filled with some sort of organic material. The fifth item is even more striking: a pointed cone made of silver foil, decorated with patterns of granulation – tiny beads of silver arranged in a geometric chevron-like arrangement. Traces of silk were found inside the cone, which suggests the entire headdress could have been made of the material. The contrast with her military equipment is striking; the delicate beauty of the silver and silk against the violence inherent in the iron designed to cleave flesh.

  Headdress decorations like this were unusual in Sweden at the time. Based on other comparative examples, it seems almost certain that the cap was made in the Dnieper region of what is now Ukraine. This could mean one of two things. Either this woman wore the hat in death because it was a high-status item, something that set her apart from others buried around her and linked her to the upper echelons of Birka society. As such the garment itself could be a symbol of exoticism and wealth, her ability to obtain it and to wear it the most important signal. Or it could directly symbolise her own connections to the east and to the Dnieper region – presuming that we rule out that it was a gift from her husband. She could have lived there, or maybe even grown up abroad: strontium isotope analysis of her tooth enamel showed that she didn’t come from Birka, although the exact location of her childhood could not be ascertained. Long before Bj.581’s body was determined to be that of a woman, it had been proposed that caps like this were given as rewards for serv
ice in the guard of the rulers of the Rus’, the eastern Vikings we will hear more about later. Does her gender change or challenge this interpretation, or does it, conversely, work to support the martial interpretation of her role in life?

  When you look through all the evidence it is clear that she is not the only woman who has links to the east, the woman with the Allah ring being just one other example. Recently, it was discovered that the axe in the grave of a woman from Denmark was of a Slavic type, a fact that saw her identified by some as a Slavic woman. In light of the Birka warrior debate, this sort of identification should certainly be cautioned against. But just as there are a high number of women in Norway with links to the west, there are many women in Sweden in particular who have links to the east. Combined with the scientific evidence that women were part of the migration both into and out of Scandinavia, we really can’t exclude their agency from those worlds any longer. We have to carefully consider what roles they had; whether they were warriors, wives, traders, slaves (or slavers) or explorers. Or, more likely, people with a combination of identities that changed over time. Some criticise those who emphasise such points for going too far in the wrong direction, creating a fictitious female-dominated society in the Viking past; a matriarchal fantasy fuelled by twenty-first-century desires and sentiments. Yet this criticism is unfair and it is unnecessary. We can’t deny those women a place in the Viking world and we have to seriously and rigorously assess the ways in which we consider their agency. Whether or not they were River Queens is undecided, but they were undeniably there, an active and instrumental part of the phenomenon, and especially the part of it that was heading east.

  6.

  KING PIECE: HEADING EAST

  SALME, ESTONIA, C.750

  I remember, more than anything, one game he played years ago, against another chieftain after one of the lavish feasts held in honour of our visit. We had all had far too much to drink. That night the long hall was loud with chatter and music, singing of dubious quality, and vigorous gesticulation. Most of us couldn’t understand each other, but somehow the mead seemed to solve that problem. I was sitting next to him as they started playing the tafl game. I knew his gaming pieces so well, having watched him carve them out of bone on a previous expedition. He said they had never once brought him real bad luck: they had made him win when he needed to and lose when the gods decided it was better for his opponent to win. This time it looked to be a draw and the game was so intense that a silence settled all around them, a circle of faces waiting to see the outcome. I knew he let the chieftain win, because just before he made his final move and his king piece was captured, he caught my eye and the corner of his mouth rose up in a tiny smile.

  AUSTMARR: THE EASTERN SEA

  That exotic goods found their way into Scandinavia isn’t surprising, and these goods seem to reflect the directions people have travelled. While most artefacts from Britain and Ireland are found in Norway, Sweden has the highest quantity of Islamic dirhams in the whole of Europe after Russia. Nor is it surprising that certain Scandinavian objects – like the female jewellery discovered in England – followed travellers abroad. What is surprising is that outside Scandinavia, more artefacts of Scandinavian origin have been found in the east than in the west.[1] This is an extraordinary fact when so much of the emphasis in our usual discourse on the Vikings relates to their westward exploits, but this information implies that the movement of people and goods east from Scandinavia may have been far greater in magnitude than that moving west. To understand why and how this happened, we need to consider the first steps of that movement, across the Eastern Sea.

  The Baltic Sea today is a true connector just as it was in the past. The oldest geographical descriptions of this far northern fringe of the world come from the classical writers Tacitus, Ptolemy and Jordanes, who talked about the barbarian tribes inhabiting the ‘islands of the Baltic’. While it is clear that this in part referred to actual islands like Gotland, located off the south-east coast of Sweden, the descriptions also included what the second-century Egyptian geographer Ptolemy described and showed on a map as the island of Skandia, which was in fact the Scandinavian Peninsula. After that the written records are largely silent on these islands in the Baltic until Ohthere’s chat in 890 with King Alfred, along with the accounts of another traveller who also reported on his journeys to the king, namely Wulfstan.

  Wulfstan was a merchant and traveller thought to have come from Hedeby, and his account of the so-called ‘Eastern route’ is preserved in Alfred’s translation of the Roman historian Orosius’s Historiae adversum pagano – the ‘History Against the Pagans’. Here Wulfstan describes a journey starting in Hedeby and ending in Truso, another emporium in what is now Poland. The journey apparently took seven days and Wulfstan describes whose lands he passed along the way. Similarly, according to the chronicler Adam of Bremen, writing in the middle of the eleventh century, sailing from Wolin in Poland at the mouth of the River Oder to Novgorod and Russia took fourteen days. Clearly, these were well-known travel routes that could take you from one part of the Baltic to another at an impressive speed. There, in that sea once known as Austmarr, one location more than anywhere else demonstrates the Vikings’ thirst for silver and what both triggered and fuelled so many of their exploits: the island of Gotland.

  In 1999, on a quiet rural farm at Spillings in the north of the island, an astonishing discovery was made: two hoards containing a staggering sixty-seven kilograms of silver. Nearby, a third hoard was found, this one holding twenty kilograms of bronze, mainly pieces of jewellery. The find was sensational, and all three hoards had been buried in or around a building, probably a barn or a storehouse, in the Viking Age. The silver hoards included no fewer than a jaw-dropping 14,295 coins, most of them Islamic. The most recent coin had been minted in 870–1, just a couple of years before the Great Army plotted its attack on Repton. The bronze objects, mainly jewellery from what is now Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, had been placed in a wooden chest made of spruce, protected by a heavy iron padlock. What’s more, the Spillings hoards aren’t unique: incredibly, they are just three of around seven hundred hoards that have been found on the island. The total amount of silver dating to the Viking Age found on Gotland now exceeds a thousand kilograms – the weight of a compact car – and includes 168,000 coins. Among these is a rare discovery of twenty-three coins from Persia, linking the island directly to the Silk Roads. The silver from Gotland makes up a large proportion of Sweden’s Islamic coins. So why was so much silver buried in the ground, and why here?

  The first part of this question is perhaps easiest to understand. It looks as if many of the silver objects were hidden in the ground almost immediately after whoever brought them arrived on the island, rather than after having circulated for some time. The most pragmatic explanation – both here and elsewhere in the Viking world, as with the Vale of York hoard – is that this was the most straightforward way of keeping your wealth safe from others: particularly important when you were overseas in hostile territory or in times of conflict. Curiously, in some places like Spillings, several hoards have been buried in what was presumably someone’s home, suggesting that there might have been one hoard for each generation. Did this mean the owners were spectacularly unlucky, or that they were so wealthy that they never needed to retrieve them? There is an alternative explanation for why we keep finding these hoards in the ground: according to Snorri Sturluson, Odin decreed that when someone died and travelled to Valhalla, he could take not just what he had with him on his funeral pyre, but also what he had hidden in the ground. In other words, if you were about to go into battle, burying all your silver in a hole in the ground didn’t just have the benefit of making sure it was there when you returned if you were successful, it would also let you bring it to the afterlife, should that be the outcome.

  The second part of the question is more complex, but relates to the island’s geographical location. The Baltic Sea saw key traffic between Scandinavia and the east
both before, during and after the Viking Age, and this small island is strategically located just off the coast of Sweden. Some 90 kilometres from mainland Sweden and about 130 kilometres from Latvia in the east, the military importance of the island would have been obvious; so would its usefulness as a stepping stone between east and west. If you travel to Sweden, it’ll take you just over three hours to get a ferry from the port near Stockholm across to the island that was centre stage during the Viking Age.

  Gotland is like a little world of its own, albeit a very quiet and somewhat isolated one. The island is relatively flat, the highest point only eighty-two metres above sea level. It’s ringed by a rocky shoreline, even more dramatic in places than those you commonly find in southern Scandinavia. Occasionally, sculptural standing rocks – sea stacks – jut from the shallow waters, like nature’s own natural art installations covered in spots of white and green lichen. You might find a gem of a hidden, sandy beach, and inland you can walk through lush conifer forests, reaching the odd shallow lake near the shore. In the summer the island transforms into a bustling tourist destination, where Swedes and more far-flung travellers rub shoulders on its winding and narrow cobbled streets. Its history is highly visible, from the medieval city wall surrounding the town of Visby to the Viking graves and runestones dotted throughout the interior.

  While clearly connected culturally to the Vikings in Scandinavia, Gotland was very much its own cultural sphere, even during the Viking Age. Because of its geography, the island could be more or less self-sufficient, as the soils and flat landscape allowed for farming. It is littered with picture stones: carved sculptures of a type that aren’t found anywhere else in Scandinavia. These show graphic illustrations of ships laden with travellers, warriors and horse-mounted Vikings, and mythical creatures flying overhead. The stones represent some of the best contemporary images of the Vikings and they are also one of the few places where Valkyries are depicted. One stone shows a woman – most likely a Valkyrie – waiting on shore with a flaming torch while a fully rigged sailing ship packed with feisty warriors heads towards land. Another shows Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir ridden by a figure who is either Odin himself or a dead warrior arriving in Valhalla, being offered a drinking horn by a Valkyrie.