River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  Two years later, excavations of the second ship began, and this turned out to be one of the most spectacular ship graves ever discovered. The ship itself was larger, approximately 17.5 metres long, with a keel for sailing, a size that would typically have held a crew of around thirty. After more than a millennium in the ground, most of the ship had rotted away, so all that remained were several rows of rivets, just like those ship nails discovered in far-flung places like Repton. The ship’s skeletal outline reflected the harrowing discovery inside it: the remains of no fewer than thirty-four individuals, their bones stacked at one end in four layers ‘like firewood’, the bottom layer of skeletons lying across the ship and the remaining three layers at right angles to the one before. This truly was a mass grave, evidence of a catastrophic and tragic event. The bodies were all those of tall and relatively young men, with many displaying injuries from sharp blades. Others had been decapitated.

  There was no doubt that they had met a gruesome end, yet their burial showed that great care had been taken to give them a respectful interment. The bodies, although stacked, had been arranged neatly and in both boats any displaced or damaged body parts had been carefully put back in their correct anatomical positions, sometimes in an almost theatrical display. One of the men, aged around twenty-five to thirty-five, had been buried with his head turned to the left, his left hand placed underneath his head and his right arm outstretched: underneath that, the excavators found the beautifully decorated hilt of a sword, made of gilded metal with a pommel containing precious stones, alongside the head of a sacrificed dog. Was this man its owner, taking his loyal friend with him to the next world? Strontium evidence showed that both this and several other dogs buried in the ships had travelled with the men. Whatever the reason, there is no doubt that the manner in which they were buried was a crucial part of a belief system relating to their destiny after death. Perhaps, too, it had been done to communicate a message to those who observed the funeral performance.

  If the circumstances of the burial were exceptional, so too were the grave goods. In total, the second ship contained forty swords, many of them gilded or bejewelled. The burials were covered with iron bosses from shields and large pieces of woollen cloth that may have come from the sail. Combs, shears, beads, padlocks, even bear tooth pendants were found among the remains, while a second dog skeleton, cut in half, was also inside the hull. There were multiple arrowheads, many of them still stuck in shields or in the wood of the side of the ship, in an echo of the fateful final journey of the men on board. Interestingly, scattered among the bodies were also a number of gaming pieces made from whalebone and walrus ivory. In the smaller boat, at least seventy-five pieces from two sets or more were found, along with three antler dice. One of the men buried in the bottom layer of the larger ship had an entire set in his lap; another had a collection of several pieces near his head, with the final piece, one that had a metal pin in its top, probably the king piece, in between his teeth. All in all, the ships contained 326 gaming pieces.

  It’s probably not a coincidence that there were so many in a burial of this type. While games may have been an important part of passing time on dull, lengthy ship journeys or when camped out during the winter months in a muddy field in Derbyshire, they also played an important role in Viking Age society, both strategically and diplomatically; the fact that they are often placed in weapon graves and in boat burials attests to this. At Birka, Bj.581 had a complete set too, which has been taken as evidence of her role in planning military strategy. The Salme burial with a king piece in his mouth is evocative; was this the body of a leader or did the piece signify a captured enemy? Even Norse mythology includes board games: in Völuspá, an Icelandic poem that describes the beginning and end of the world, the Aesir, the gods, can be found playing with golden gaming pieces at the dawn of creation until their game is rudely interrupted by giants. After Ragnarok, the end of the world, the gods discuss whether golden playing pieces will be found in the grass of a newly created earth. Games could be taken deadly seriously by the living too. According to the sagas, the eleventh-century Cnut, king of Denmark, Norway and England, had his brother-in-law Ulfr murdered after a board game turned sour.

  So who were these men? The artefacts buried with them weren’t of local origin but had parallels across Scandinavia, many being similar to those that had been found in inland Sweden. In an attempt to find out, scientists used strontium isotope analysis, and the results were pretty conclusive.[8] First of all, it turned out that most of the men came from very similar geographical backgrounds to one another and certainly weren’t local to Estonia. Their values did indeed match origins in inland Sweden (maybe the Mälaren region, where Birka is located) just as the artefacts suggested. We know that there were links with Sweden in later times, as several runestones dating to the eleventh century describe people who either travelled to Estonia (sometimes they are nicknamed Eistfari, ‘Estonia-traveller’) or died there. An exception was a group of five men who could either have been local or, the scientists concluded, have come from Gotland.

  A few years later the bones were to give up even more secrets, when the team from Copenhagen analysed their DNA as part of the large-scale Viking study. This revealed that the general ancestry of the men was of types common in Scandinavia; importantly, just as with the isotopes, their profiles were very similar to one another. In other words, the men had belonged to a very homogenous group of people, fitting the profile suggested by the isotopes. Yet it was when looking for evidence of kinship among the dead that the geneticists made the most unusual discovery: four of the men were in fact brothers, and not only that: the four had been buried side by side. Not far from them lay the body of a third-degree relative – a cousin, perhaps. As with the father and son in Repton, here was proof that these raids had been family affairs. It is tempting to suggest that the burials can be linked to the death of the Swedish king Yngvarr, but there is no way of finding proof.

  The Salme graves did not seem to be the end result of an ordinary battle. The men were accompanied by ornate and beautifully decorated, high-quality weapons; they were kitted out in finery, taking gaming pieces of precious materials like whalebone and walrus ivory with them. The animal remains were important too, the hawks and the dogs. Would such animals have accompanied a group on an ordinary war raid? The excavators didn’t think so. They believed this was a diplomatic mission of some sort, perhaps one carried out or accompanied by an elite warrior group.

  Systems of diplomacy and negotiation would undoubtedly have been well established at the time, something hinted at in several western sources from the eighth century. For example, after the attack on Lindisfarne, in the second of his two letters, Alcuin the scholar wrote to Higbald, who was the bishop of Lindisfarne at the time. He said that he would go to Charlemagne to ask for help to recover youths taken captive by the Vikings who had attacked the monastery. This reveals two things. First, that hostage or slave taking by the Vikings was common and well known. Second, and more important in this context, that Charlemagne had some way of negotiating to help get them released, quite possibly through diplomatic contacts.

  Even outside crisis situations, the use of interlocutors and intermediaries must have been common. They would also have acted as translators, both in a literal sense and as guides to local customs, religion and cultural traits. Objects would likely have been shared as diplomatic gifts; gift exchange has always been an important part of establishing and maintaining relations. Exotic objects from the decades prior to the Viking Age have been interpreted in exactly this way, such as the Coptic bowl found at Helgö in Sweden and objects from Anglo-Saxon England – even the Byzantine finds in the Sutton Hoo grave in Suffolk. Along similar lines, marriage alliances would often have been made for diplomatic reasons: there are countless examples of this from historical records. After all, what better way was there to establish a bond than to create a literal one, written in blood through a new and subsequent generation? Nothing says alliance quit
e like the word family.

  This brings us back to the many female graves that have been found containing associations with the east – could they have been the result of deliberate alliances, formed in the name of diplomacy? Where we have written records, there is no shortage of examples of marriages like this in the higher social strata. Take Sithric, for example, the Viking leader of Dublin, who was the grandson of the notorious Imar, founder of the Irish Uí Imair dynasty that came to rule much of the Irish Sea region from the ninth century onwards. Sithric later became the king of Northumbria and in 926 he married the sister of Aethelstan (who was dubbed the first king of England) in a deliberate move to forge an alliance between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons.

  Regardless of who those buried in the ships were, what’s especially important about them is the date. The ships date to a period at the cusp of the Viking Age, around AD 750: a few decades before those fiery red dragons appeared in the sky above Lindisfarne. This is key for two reasons. First, because the larger ship is quite possibly one of the first to have used a sail in this part of the world, an adaptation of technology that is often considered instrumental to the Viking Age. Second, because this grave manifests so much of what we think of as classic Viking traits, but it is early, and it is in the Baltic, not the west. As the coin evidence shows, the trade routes that began to emerge and were very rapidly developed and extended at this time all had their foundations in established networks that operated on a more local level. What started as a quiet trickle of silver in the late eighth century soon turned into something more akin to a tsunami. This was like a gold rush. During the Viking Age, these areas in the eastern Baltic were not so much destinations in themselves but rather gateways to the east. The trading sites were more than convenient stopping-off points, they were nodes in an established, extensive network and part of its wider coordination. The very existence of those smaller trading sites around the Baltic Sea from long before the Viking Age is essential to understanding how the long-distance networks could arise so quickly.

  EASTERN SETTLERS

  Here, then, at the rim of the Baltic Sea, is the gateway to the older eastern routes that could take you along the rivers across eastern Europe and to the south. By the eleventh century this system appears to have become a continuation of the Baltic itself, because in Adam of Bremen’s description of it he says the sea stretches to the regions of the Scythians and even to Greece. The Greek historian Herodotus said of Scythia (broadly meaning the lands to the north-east of the Black Sea and towards central Asia) that it had ‘few really remarkable features, except its rivers, which are more numerous, and bigger, than anywhere in the world’.[9]

  If you look at the map today, it seems impossible to travel all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea by boat. Though the thin, spidery veins of the river network reach through the forested plains, there isn’t a single, clear route that you can trace with your finger from north to south: certainly not one that it would seem plausible to move an entire fleet of ships through. To get to Ukraine from Scandinavia, you would have to travel through trading towns in the eastern Baltic, through Novgorod and using an extensive network of rivers like the Neva, Volkhov, Lovat and Dvina. The route requires you to traverse, in many places, from one river to another by portage, whereby boats are transported overland. The same was true in the ninth century; yet by the time of Adam of Bremen’s description, these routes had become so well established that they had developed into the two main arteries feeding the silver trade: the Volga and the Dnieper routes.

  It all began, in more ways than one, at the site known as Staraya Ladoga or, in the Icelandic sagas, Aldeigjuborg/Aldeigja. This was the starting point for both the route that went down the Volga and towards the Caspian Sea and the Dnieper route that led to the Black Sea. It was also the first truly eastern settlement with evidence of Scandinavian input. Today Staraya Ladoga is a sleepy inland village on the bank of the River Volkhov, about two hours’ drive east from St Petersburg. If you wanted to travel here by boat from Scandinavia, you could sail to the easternmost Baltic to find the mouth of the Neva river, nipping across to Lake Ladoga and south on the Volkhov. As you were sailing you would see burial mounds dotted along the riverbanks; differently shaped ones representing separate burial traditions.

  Aldeigjuborg was a melting pot of people, cultures and ethnicities from the very start. The first settlers here were Slavic and Finno-Ugrian people, many of whose livelihoods were dependent on the densely forested areas stretching towards central Asia. By the mid-eighth century, as trading and the movement of people began in earnest, Staraya Ladoga developed to become one of the first connectors between the Vikings and the Silk Roads. There’s evidence for a Scandinavian presence here from around 750, and extensive evidence of craftwork: there are large timber houses that may have been used as workshops for craftsmen working with materials like glass, bronze and antler. There would have been itinerant craftsmen, such as a comb-maker who worked at different sites around the Baltic. Fragments of fabric have been discovered, from clothes like those that would have been worn by Scandinavians: for instance, leather shoes of types that match those worn by the women who were put to rest on the Oseberg ship in Norway. There are gaming pieces scattered about in Staraya Ladoga too. Later on, in the ninth century, somebody dropped an object here, an enigmatic spindle whorl of wood that was discovered in 1950, with a runic inscription whose translation no one can agree on.

  The first evidence of long-distance trade at the site comes in the form of dirhams and imported glass beads. Later, carnelian beads turn up as well as curious dung beetle-shaped carnelian pendants, matching examples found in Birka and in Dagestan by the Caspian Sea, evidence of contact with both the north and the south. Intriguingly, the early settlement here seems to have been peaceful, as there are no signs of fortifications around the town in its first 150 years of existence. There is no defended garrison like that at Birka, and few weapons have been found. Early life in Staraya Ladoga appears to have been quiet.

  The importance of all this evidence is that in the eighth century, in a region that has far-reaching contacts, we have a settlement with a clear Scandinavian identity where both craftwork and trade were taking place. Not long after, similar outposts started popping up along the river routes. If you continue south from Staraya Ladoga along the Volkhov river, you will eventually reach Lake Ilmen: small, grassy heights on the riverbank mark your arrival, appearing like an archipelago of little islands. These are precisely what gave this region its name to the Vikings in later years: Holmgardr, after the Scandinavian word holm meaning ‘island’, ‘islet’ or ‘peninsula’.[fn2] In the ninth century the settlement of Rurikovo Gorodische was established at a major crossroads where the Volkhov meets Lake Ilmen.

  But by this time things had changed. In stark contrast to early Staraya Ladoga, Rurikovo Gorodische was heavily fortified from the word go. This, then, was no longer a time of peaceful trading and the exchange of craft goods: the reality had stepped up a notch. Staraya Ladoga became fortified around the same time and fortified settlements appear elsewhere too. From Lake Ilmen there are two directions to travel: either east, reaching the Volga and eventually the Caspian Sea, or south to the Dnieper in the direction of the Black Sea. Either way, we are deep into the world of the River Kings or, as the written sources refer to them, the Rus’.

  PART THREE

  EAST

  7.

  NECK RINGS: THE TALES OF THE RUS’

  VOLGA RIVER, C.938

  After getting dressed she puts them on carefully, one at a time. She has made sure the latest additions were made slightly bigger so that each neck ring stacks alongside the others, resting neatly against her chest. She runs a finger slowly along their spiralled surface, each in turn, taking care not to leave greasy fingerprints on the polished metal. She loves seeing them on evenings like this, knowing the effect their reflections have on everyone who sees her in the dim space lit only by the fire; the glint of metal sparkling across
the smoky room. They’ll all know how much each is worth, and she can’t resist the opportunity to show them off. She’s expecting several more when her husband arrives back from Miklagard. They should be back before long as the leaves have started to turn, and the air is sharp; this morning the pail of water outside the house was covered in a thin, glassy layer of ice. The scouts have been sent on horseback downriver as there are rumours that something is brewing near the rapids. They won’t be the only ones expecting ships laden with wealth.

  THE RUS’

  When you start to study the Vikings’ journeys eastwards, one thing immediately becomes obvious. On the map, sites stretch across the region showing a clear distribution along the rivers that snake their way through the landscape, reaching inwards to the vast expanse of land from the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south. It appears unquestionable that these realms belonged to those who controlled the rivers and, importantly, to those who knew how to navigate them.