River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  The maritime skills of the northerners were noticed by many observers. In the account by Ibn Rustah, he makes a point of saying that these people didn’t raid from horseback, but raided and fought in ships. It seems the clinker-built boats were superior in these territories too. Many have argued that full, keeled Viking ships could not have been used on these rivers and it’s certainly unlikely that larger ships were used here, as the rapids and portages clearly would not have been suitable for them. But while it’s very possible that local boat types may have been used for some of the journeys, if you were going to cross larger seas, like the Baltic, the Black Sea or the Caspian, you could not have managed with a small river vessel. This is where the design of the smaller boats and Viking ships come into their own; their shallow hulls are easy to drag in and out of the water and can even be taken apart if need be. It’s likely that those used by the River Kings were smaller vessels known as karvs, essentially a kind of barge. Tenth-century Byzantine writers use the word karabos, from which karv is derived, to describe Rus’ ships in the Byzantine fleet. We also hear the same name in many accounts of travel to Constantinople, which suggest that it was particularly suitable for river transport.

  A useful source dating to the eleventh century is a runestone from Uppsala in Sweden. The stone was erected by a captain named Ljótr in memory of one of his sons who had died abroad: he was called Aki and had steered a cargo ship, referred to in the runes as a knorr, in Greek harbours (the ‘Greek’ referred to here is the word used in Scandinavia for the Byzantine Empire).

  Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, in his description of the travels of the Rus’, gives another perspective as he talks about monoxyla, which are a form of log boat (from the Greek mono meaning ‘single’ and xylum meaning ‘tree’), being used on these journeys. He describes how the boats were cut up in the mountains in wintertime and brought down to the neighbouring lakes in spring when the ice melted; from there, they entered the Dnieper. Next they were taken to Kyiv where they were finished off and sold to the Rus’. The Rus’, in turn, bought them as ‘bottoms only’ and fitted them out with oars and all the tackle needed to travel the Dnieper in June. This could mean that what started as a log boat was also fitted out with strakes, turning it into something more like a Viking-style boat: this was, after all, how those ships are thought to have developed in the first place. Expanded log boats or dugouts are known from Scandinavia and what is described here is very similar to boats depicted on picture stones from Gotland around AD 500. While they would have been no substitute for a full-sized Viking ship, such vessels would have had obvious benefits. They were light and strong enough for the rapids and some have even argued that they could hold a substantial number of people.[5]

  In one of the sagas, the protagonists launch thirty ships from Sweden, travelling all the way to Gardarike ‘without lowering a sail’. However, looking at the map and at the vast distances being talked about here, it is hard to believe that it would have been possible not just to bring your own ships all the way from the Baltic across these natural barriers, but also to have enough boats of a decent size to launch attacks like those described later on. Over the years a few people have tried their own experiments to see if it was really possible. The first came in the early 1980s when a Swedish expedition attempted to travel all the way to Istanbul using an eight-metre-long boat based on one of a Gotlandic design. Unfortunately, the mission was hampered by a lack of permission to travel through Soviet territory at the easternmost Polish border. The team successfully reached their destination by travelling the rivers of a more westerly route, eventually reaching Turkey through Bulgaria.

  After the Iron Curtain was raised in 1991, numerous other voyages were carried out in the 1990s and early 2000s, mostly on selected legs of the journey from the Baltic. None, however, made it all the way in one go and all had to resort, at some point, to modern conveniences like towing by truck or taking a car ferry across part of the Black Sea. One particular journey from Sigtuna in Sweden to Novgorod, while successful, took a full forty-one days, although it could perhaps have been completed much more quickly with more experience and in better conditions. Even so, the implication is that to travel from Scandinavia to Constantinople in one go would have taken the best part of a season, and that was before you started to worry about attacks by unfriendly locals.

  Having in-depth knowledge of the local river conditions would have been essential to success. Apart from the obvious problems of knowing where a stretch of waterway was wide or deep enough, you’d also have needed to keep an eye on the water table: this could change radically from year to year, and from season to season. In the spring, as the snow thawed, the currents would have run more swiftly and the rivers would have filled with meltwater and autumnal rains, making travel more straightforward. On the other hand, a warm and dry summer could lower the water table significantly, which would make the risk of hitting the bottom, even in a shallow vessel, a genuine threat. You’d also have had to make sure that your journey was completed before winter set in and the waters froze solid.

  Travelling overland for part of the route would clearly have been necessary, just as many of the written sources suggest. This may have required the use of horses to help pull both the ships and their cargo. Taking slaves with you would have been convenient, as they could be used to carry goods and supplies and to move the vessel. Some archaeologists have proposed that sledges could have been an alternative mode of transport in wintertime, taking advantage of the snow and of frosty, ice-covered rivers. Historically, travelling 100–150 kilometres by sledge in a day was not unusual in Russia, which would have made this a perfectly viable way of moving long distances. Archaeological evidence backs this up; as for instance in Novgorod a near-complete sledge dating to around 1000 has been discovered along with hundreds of parts of others, some as long as three metres.[6] Other pieces have been found in Staraya Ladoga, right from the early phases of settlement. Three elaborate sledges – likely used for ceremonial rather than practical purposes – were found with the Oseberg ship burial too. Clearly, this technology was available, and it was used for travel and to transport goods too.

  A BRUTAL LIFE

  Life out in these territories could be harsh, not least because of the extreme temperatures and conditions that had to be endured in the winter. This, however, was something the Scandinavians would have been used to, so it’s not surprising that they were able not only to succeed, but also to thrive in such an environment.

  Apart from information on logistics, the Arabic texts tell us about certain customs and details of everyday life that are absent from any other sources. The most famous account is that of the tenth-century traveller Ibn Fadlan, whose enthralling narratives include vivid details of the customs of all those he encountered on his journey. His accounts are riveting reading; first-hand observations of an almost ethnographic character that describe the customs of the Vikings in the east, although this was far from his intention. Ibn Fadlan’s journey had essentially been a missionary one. His convoy had been tasked by the Abbasid caliph Al-Muqtadir to travel to the Volga Bulghars to instruct them in the Islamic faith. Ibn Fadlan was also meant to help them build a mosque to worship in and a fort to defend them against rulers who opposed them. This was in response to a direct request from the Bulghar ruler, who had very recently converted to Islam.

  The journey started on 21 June 921. Along with Ibn Fadlan travelled a whole delegation, including some who had been chosen because they had first-hand knowledge of both the languages and customs in the places they were to encounter along the way. It’s unclear exactly what Ibn Fadlan’s role was, but it seems to have been an important one. It turned out that the actual mission was nowhere near successfully accomplished – in fact, it became a bit of a comedy of errors, in which money that was meant to be delivered never was, and the intended correction of aberrant religious practices didn’t go quite to plan. Regardless, we have been left with an invaluable travelogue and anthropological study
that may have been intended as an official report to be returned in some formal capacity to Baghdad.

  Ibn Fadlan’s account is at times sober and descriptive, at other times personal, odd and downright peculiar. There are sections that are clearly embellished, filled with exaggerations and the supernatural, yet at the same time vividly dramatic and humorous. Ibn Fadlan provides us with the only surviving contemporary eyewitness description of a Viking funeral and in this there’s little doubt of the link between the Rus’ and the Vikings.

  Much of the time Ibn Fadlan describes what he sees with quite some horror. The Vikings are dirty, have no sense of even basic hygiene and display some particularly dubious idolatry of their strange gods. In his own words: ‘Indeed they are like the asses which err.’ Most seriously, he observes that the Rus’ don’t wash after going to the toilet or after eating or, even worse, to get rid of the ritual impurity caused by having sex. To top it all off, he describes that every morning when they do wash, it is with water that is dirty and filthy: a servant provides a master with a bowl of water in which he washes his hair, blows his nose, spits and does ‘every filthy thing imaginable’. Afterwards the bowl is passed to the next man who repeats the actions before passing it on once again. For a Muslim used to a high level of personal hygiene and with a strong sense of purity, this would have been an abomination.

  An alternative view has been given by Ibn Rustah, another writer (who never actually saw them himself): he says that the Rus’ clothing was always clean and they were kind to their slaves, whom they also equipped with good clothes because they were going to be traded. Ibn Rustah described the baggy trousers worn by the Rus’ and which are mirrored in images on Gotlandic picture stones. Ibn Fadlan depicted the Rus’ as the most perfect physical specimens he had ever seen – tall and ruddy – with green tattoos of trees and figures covering their bodies from their necks to their fingertips.

  Of their customs, Ibn Fadlan was particularly outraged by the Rus’ sexual practices, which were starkly in opposition to those he was used to back home in a Muslim context. It should be mentioned that it wasn’t only the practices of the Rus’ that he objected to: he was similarly shocked by the lack of sexual morals and common decency displayed by other people he met on his journey. In an encounter with a Turkish tribe, the Oguz, for example, Ibn Fadlan was horrified to see that while he was in conversation with a man, his wife bared her private parts and scratched herself in front of everyone watching.

  Life among the Rus’ was brutal and subject to a series of rules that ensured justice was meted out. A thief, for example, would be hung by a rope from a tree and left there, exposed to wind and rain. They were also allegedly a treacherous group among whom mistrust was high: in one account it’s stated that none would go to answer a call of nature alone, but would be accompanied by three companions to guard him so that they could protect him with their swords. ‘For if a man has even a little wealth,’ said Ibn Rustah, ‘his own brother and his friend who is with him covet it and seek to kill and despoil him.’ Presumably this is why we find so many keys, padlocks and buried hoards across the Viking world.

  You would need to trust the people you worked or traded with, but sometimes even that could be difficult: a runic inscription from Gotland describes a man who died on an expedition far from home after he was betrayed by the blakumen (possibly the Wallachians, inhabitants of present-day Romania). Presumably, these were people he trusted and had some kind of professional relationship with, and his family back home showed their upset and displeasure through the statement ‘God betray those who betrayed Him’.[7]

  Other accounts describe the Rus’ in more favourable terms as fierce people hailing from a formidable nation, their men huge and courageous. ‘They do not recognise defeat; no one turns back until he has killed or been killed,’ says the philosopher and historian Ibn Miskawayh. In one story, a group of five fair-faced Rus’ took on a large number of Daylamite fighters (from modern-day Iran), each killing large numbers until eventually they were defeated. But even then the last of them climbed a tree and ‘stabbed himself in the vital organs’ rather than be captured. Clearly, these people were notable for their fighting abilities.

  It is in Ibn Fadlan’s account that we find a reference to neck rings; those torques – Permian rings – that have turned up in hoards in Scandinavia and England:

  Round their necks, they wear torques of gold and silver, for every man, as soon as he accumulates 10,000 dirhams, has a torque made for his wife. When he has 20,000, he has two torques made and so on. Every time he increases his fortune by 10,000, he adds another torque to those his wife already possesses, so that one woman may have many torques round her neck.

  Ibn Fadlan’s observation demonstrates two things: first, that silver was used as a portable currency among the Rus’, in a way that made an overt statement about your relative wealth (although the 10,000 is likely an exaggeration, as this would make each necklace weigh around three kilograms). In Scandinavia, arm rings often cut up as hacksilver were used in exactly the same way. Second, it confirms that the rings had a weight-based value that directly corresponded to a number of dirhams. This is important because weight systems were integral to the bullion economy, including that used by the Great Army, and this can tell us about the long-distance trading networks. While it’s not entirely certain how and where the weight systems used by the Vikings in the ninth century originated, it’s clear that they were closely related to those of the eastern worlds. This narrative, then, has left us with some invaluable links between those described as Rus’ and those we call Vikings; without Ibn Fadlan’s account, we wouldn’t have understood the social side to the neck rings’ use.

  Ibn Fadlan used an interpreter on his journey, as he often described how he got his information in this way. The interpreter translated not only conversations but also customs, so he must have been someone with intimate knowledge of those cultures. In Fadlan’s telling we don’t know if the interpreters were part of the expedition or locals, although in another ninth-century account we hear that when they travelled all the way to Baghdad, the Rus’ used Slavic-speaking eunuchs – slaves – to translate for them.

  DEATH OF A CHIEFTAIN

  One account above all the others that he wrote has made Ibn Fadlan famous: that of the funeral of a Rus’ chieftain. This event was something that Ibn Fadlan observed first-hand by chance because he happened to be present at a camp when a leader died, somewhere near the Volga. The description is grisly and horrific, but at the same time it conveys an intricate pattern of behaviour and ritual that we would never otherwise have been able to reconstruct. The sequence of events that he describes is sleek and well orchestrated; a performance of death rituals carried out as much to the advantage of the dead as to the living.

  The funeral took place in the warmer part of the year because the ground was not yet frozen. Ibn Fadlan and his caravan had stopped, and he was observing the Rus’, who had come up the river in their boats, camping by the Volga, in order to trade. The boats would have been laden with goods, perhaps saved up for months to take advantage of a strategic and convenient riverine market. There were men, women, children and countless slaves: some slaves were for sale, some were for the traders’ own needs; some for whichever purpose was the most beneficial at any given point in time.

  The camp was extensive and had grown beyond recognition. Ibn Fadlan walked among them, accompanied by his interpreter, observing how, apparently, upon arriving at the camp, each trader stepped off the boat with offerings in hand: bread and meat, onions and milk, which were taken to an idol. He would have observed and listened to the interpreter describing how the idols – wooden sticks carved with a man’s head – represented their god, who would make sure the trader got a good deal and wasn’t conned in the process. When Ibn Fadlan sat in his tent at night, quill scratching at the pages as he put his observations down in words, he laughed to himself quietly at the foolishness of these traders. They didn’t realise that their gifts of
sacrificed animals – heads of sheep and cows placed on wooden stakes driven into the ground to feed the hungry god – were, in fact, eaten by feral dogs at night. The naïve Northmen, he wrote, returned the next morning pleased to see that their god had accepted their offerings.

  Then Ibn Fadlan would have been informed, perhaps one morning after he’d noticed a different atmosphere in the camp, that one of the leaders had died. He observed that the preparations for the funeral were lengthy, taking ten days to complete: there were clothes to be sewn and a funeral pyre to prepare. The funeral itself was conducted by a woman referred to as the ‘Angel of Death’, and Ibn Fadlan described her and her responsibilities as follows: ‘She is in charge of sewing and arranging all these things, and it is she who kills the slave girl. I saw that she was a witch, thick-bodied and sinister.’

  The ‘things’ he refers to are the coverings on a bed that had been placed on the boat, dressed with cushions of Byzantine silk brocade. Interestingly, alternative translations state that the Angel of Death was a ‘gloomy, corpulent woman, neither young nor old’. Could this be what was referred to as a volve, a travelling woman of religion like those we learn of elsewhere in the Viking world? An important part of the ceremony was that someone needed to accompany the dead chieftain into the afterlife. According to Ibn Fadlan’s account, a slave girl or concubine volunteered for the task and went through a long series of rituals as part of the event. Initially, she was treated relatively well, being given two attendants to look after her. She was described as merry and didn’t seem, at any point, to object to her treatment, in Fadlan’s description, in part probably because she was plied with alcohol and maybe drugs throughout the process.

  Next the slave girl took part in a curious ritual where she was lifted above a doorframe, claiming to see not just her parents but also her master in Paradise calling to her. According to the description, she didn’t seem to object either to having sex with a large number of the chieftain’s men who, bizarrely, proclaimed that they only did this for the love of their fallen comrade. It is possible that as a concubine or slave, this sort of treatment may have been commonplace for her. By volunteering for this particular task, her status was also elevated from that of a slave to the bride-in-death of a chieftain. For someone whose life had few prospects, this might not have been as bad a choice as we think. For her to have this level of agency, both in terms of her own future and as someone playing a central role in a significant event, is important if we are to understand the role of women here.