River Kings

by Cat Jarman

  The key is that these incoming groups were able to understand and take advantage of internecine politics, conflicts and dynamics. The Slavic tribes were farmers, not warriors; their societies were run on a small scale. They were already being exploited and controlled by the Khazars, so the Scandinavians were simply interlopers who offered a different form of oppression, likely a situation in which the locals had no choice but to submit. To be able to do so, the Vikings would have needed good local knowledge and information, excellent strategies and a reputation such that the threat of force may have been enough to convince the population to submit. Even in these distant territories, news would have travelled fast.

  Another crucial point is that the Scandinavians in eastern Europe didn’t have a single, coherent territory, but were spread across a very broad region, like little pockets among the varied groups and tribes. This pattern would have been mirrored in the west, in England, Ireland and Frankia. The Viking strength lay in their ability to adjust and to adapt, and to find (or rather, appropriate) their own niche. As such there are some consistent patterns of culture, identity and behaviour that are maintained both in the west and in the east over several hundred years. These could only have been so persistent with a constant flow of people between the different territories, going not just out of the homelands, but also back in.

  While our overall understanding of these trading ports and their wider political organisation is increasing, there remains little evidence of the protagonists, and not least the roles of women. But one place might yield more answers. Not far from Vypovzyv lies another site, Shestovitsa – the better known of the two because it has been so extensively researched. Excavations were first carried out there in the 1920s. Shestovitsa is situated on the right bank of the Desna, about fourteen kilometres south-east of Chernihiv, and it contains two hillforts and a settlement, along with hundreds of graves. Today much of the site is covered by dense pine forest, planted in the 1950s to the detriment of much of what is buried underground; the tree roots poke through the sandy soils, moving and disrupting whatever lay silently underneath for a millennium.

  Still, we have a good picture of what went on there. It was originally a Slavic village, and sometime before 900 there was an extensive fire. Afterwards the site was fortified with a hillfort built on a headland situated above the river: a clearly defensible location with views across the floodplain. The area is now dry, with the Desna flowing a short distance away and what was once the slower-flowing tributary river a field of sunflowers. The fort on the hilltop was soon joined by a settlement that grew up around it to the west, with extensive cemeteries of burial mounds to cater for the growing population. Evidence of iron and pitch production has been found within the buildings, hinting at craft production with a very specific purpose.

  The choice of location is striking too. Both Vypovzyv and Shestovitsa are strategically placed at sites with a high point offering views over the surrounding landscape and near a tributary of the main river, which would have made it easier to unload ships and boats. What many of these sites have in common with settlements and emporia around the Baltic is that they are located where modes of transport could be changed, be that travelling from the sea to the river or perhaps from the river inland. In the twelfth century Vypovzyv was the place to change your horses when riding between larger cities, and it’s very possible that some of these locations were also chosen to enable you to travel onwards on land in the wintertime.

  This leaves us with an interesting thought about the ships. If you couldn’t take the same vessel all the way on a long journey, you would be dependent on a safe harbour to leave it, potentially for quite some time, and on the availability of another mode of transport to take you onwards. In addition to the strategic use of waterways, the plains would have required horses and mounted warriors to control them; which is another similarity with the Mälaren region around Birka in Sweden, surrounded as it too was by an open landscape that needed monitoring.[6]

  Yet it is the graves at Shestovitsa that are the most spectacular and that tell us most about who the inhabitants were. Just as elsewhere in the Viking world, some of the graves contained cremations and inhumations, many of them under mounds. Scandinavian artefacts appeared frequently: jewellery and weapons of distinctive types. Clearly, a number of those buried had Scandinavian affiliations of some kind, though there were also graves that revealed only local Slavic burial rites. The Scandinavian connections in Shestovitsa have been strongly disputed in the past, with the USSR sending the archaeologist Y.V. Stankevich there in 1946 to excavate in part to prove that there were no Scandinavian burials. However, the catalogue of finds from excavations over the years includes items from weapons to glass gaming pieces – both simple versions reminiscent of the lead pieces from England and several blue glass figures identical to Swedish versions. DNA evidence has now shown that two individuals from the same Shestovitsa burial mound most likely had ‘Swedish-like’ or ‘Norwegian-like’ ancestry: the two were brother and sister.

  Remarkably there were also around thirty chamber graves at Shestovitsa that bear strong similarities to those found in Sweden – particularly at Birka. One, a subterranean, timber-lined chamber, contained a body along with a horse at its feet, kitted out with a stunning leather bridle decorated with gilded silver fittings, a saddle and stirrups with silver wire inlays. There was a lot more: an axe, a sword with a scabbard chape decorated in a Scandinavian-style twisted dragon design, a luxuriously decorated fighting knife, the remains of a cloak, and a Samanid dirham dating to the early tenth century. Most striking, however, was that the excavators found by the burial’s head – the only remaining fragments of the deceased were a few pieces of skull bone – a mass of organic material representing a fur hat tipped with a beautifully ornate conical silver cap mount, almost identical to that worn in death by Bj.581, the warrior woman in Birka. There was jewellery too: a necklace of forty-one gilded glass beads in a bag and two silver rings. We don’t know the sex of this person, as the skeletal markers were inconclusive. The parallels with Bj.581’s grave, though, are irrefutable, making a strong connection between the two: the warriors of Birka belonged to the world of the Rus’. One way or another, women were part of this too.

  THE WOMEN OF THE DNIEPER

  There are other clues to women’s roles in Shestovitsa. A number of women there were buried with the striking oval tortoise brooches that elsewhere are taken as proof of a Viking woman’s presence. If we apply the same logic as for the female dress jewellery identified in England, that the artefacts accompanied migrant women, then the women here too may well have travelled from Scandinavia. The brooches are even mentioned by Ibn Fadlan, who, when describing the Rus’ and their neck rings, also said that the women carried a ‘box’ on their chest. This could be the same as the common tortoise brooches or it could be a type of box brooch often found on Gotland. Who were these women, then: were they Scandinavian too?

  I am reminded of the paragraph written by the monk Nestor on the brothers who first came to this region: in the Russian Primary Chronicle he stated that they brought all their kin and the rest of the Varangian Rus’, who ‘migrated’. In other words, if we believe what he says, this really was a family-based migration rather than an all-male expedition. This part of Nestor’s account is rarely commented on, but we should have no reason to doubt that entire family groups travelled east. The archaeological evidence backs it up. At other sites too, like Gnezdovo, several graves clearly contain women, not only with Scandinavian affiliations, but also of high status.

  Often, too, women are mentioned in descriptions of double graves in Ukraine, just like those that are familiar from other parts of the Viking world. Among these some seem particularly touching; they depict two skeletons side by side, a man and a woman, either holding hands or with the man’s arm around the woman in what seems like a loving embrace. Each grave is carefully and deliberately arranged; a tableau frozen in time. There are two stories being told here. One is of t
he couple and what was presumably their relationship in life, as well as their aspirations to stick together in the afterlife. The other is of the mourners who placed them there and of the theatrical funeral performance that must have taken place. Such graves hammer home the point that a burial was for the benefit of the living as much as (or even more than) it was for the dead.

  Yet there exists a more sinister side to this practice: the suggestion that in male–female double graves these were not accidental joint deaths, but rather a case of death and the sacrifice of a woman to follow her man into the afterworld. It’s not clear when this interpretation arose, but it’s one that has persisted. The record of Ibn Fadlan’s funeral scene is partially to blame, but so is Norse mythology: for instance, when Baldur, one of Odin’s sons, was about to be cremated, his wife Nanna was so overcome with grief that she died at once and was buried alongside her husband.

  There are some graves where sacrifice seems to have been likely, such as a grisly example from Norway in which a burial is accompanied by other individuals whose hands and legs have been bound together: it suggests that those people were being forced to their deaths in some way. Yet this isn’t the same as the care that was taken to show the couples at Shestovitsa as being together, both treated the same, with grave goods, jewellery and weapons. The common interpretation of a woman following a man into death is also clearly inspired by ethnographic comparisons to the practice of suttee in Hinduism, as practised in India until it was banned under British colonial rule. Here a mourning, bereaved wife would throw herself onto her deceased husband’s funeral pyre to follow him into death. These women were associated with the goddess Sati, wife of Shiva, who flung herself into a fire to protest her father’s lack of respect for her husband. The word sati, the name for those who sacrificed themselves in this way, comes from the Sanskrit word meaning ‘a good woman’. Intriguingly, the mid-tenth-century accounts of Al-Masudi make a direct link between the Rus’ and Indian burial rites, describing that among the Rus’ who lived in Itil, the capital city of the Khazars, a woman was ‘incinerated while still alive’ after her man died (but not the other way around). This was something she herself desired in order to enter Paradise in a custom, he says, that was similar to those found in India.

  An account that might support this is that of the tenth-century Arabic author Ibn Rustah, who also described the funerary customs of the Rus’: he said that if someone of importance died they were placed in the grave like ‘a large house’ (presumably, a chamber grave), along with precious items, food and offerings. He further explained that ‘a woman he particularly favoured is buried alive with him, the grave is then shut and she dies there’. It’s unclear how much attention we should give to his words, though, as he didn’t make any of these observations in person, having been described more as an ‘armchair geographer’. Presumably, the slave woman described by Ibn Fadlan was buried next to her master as if she were his wife, and it is unlikely that we would know anything about her former status from that type of burial. For here, she was essentially turned into his beloved partner in death and little would belie that appearance. The method by which she was killed by the ‘Angel of Death’ in the account would have left little trace on a skeleton, and certainly not after cremation.

  An observation about Ibn Fadlan’s report that is rarely made, though, is that in his account a slave was asked to volunteer to be sacrificed and this choice was offered up to both slave boys and girls, although according to the writer it was usually the girls who volunteered. This short note is important because it strongly suggests that it wasn’t the slave’s gender that was of significance, it was the need for someone to accompany the chieftain in death. It might be difficult to reconcile this with the elaborate sexual exploitation that the ‘volunteer’ was subjected to before being murdered, but it could have made it less likely that the sacrifice of a woman specifically to follow ‘her’ man in death was the norm: there simply needed to be someone there alongside him. We should also remember that the Oseberg ship burial contained two women and not a husband and wife; there was clearly no need for the primary woman among the two to have a husband in the afterlife. Maybe gender wasn’t such a big deal in death after all.

  But all of this is problematic, because the assumptions about gender roles make it difficult to understand women’s roles in these territories more broadly and to contextualise reports like the Greek historian Skylitze’s remarks of women having fought in battle among the Rus’. With the presence of the eastern connections in Bj.581’s grave and the evidence of trading women, we also have to make a place for a Rus’ian world where women could play a significant part. This may even be explicitly spelt out in the written sources. In the list of envoys witnessing the Byzantine treaties, the fact that many of them have Scandinavian names is often discussed but what is usually ignored is the fact that the list includes the names of several women. This must be seen as strong evidence that women could be in positions of power in tenth-century eastern territories, and some of those women may have been Scandinavian.

  Within this environment, there is one very powerful woman with a particularly fierce reputation, namely Olga of Kyiv. Olga was the wife of Prince Igor, son of the legendary Rurik. The name Olga is derived from the Scandinavian name Helga, although many dispute her Scandinavian heritage. In the Primary Chronicle, she is depicted as being a particularly vicious and devious ruler, intent on avenging her husband’s death in some rather creative, if gruesome ways. Igor had been murdered in 945 by the Drevlians (a tribe of eastern Slavs) when out collecting tribute. Olga took the throne in place of her son, Svyatoslav, who was too young to rule for himself. She took it upon herself to seek revenge by means described in graphic detail in the Chronicle, although it is fair to assume that much of the account is fictional.

  Olga’s payback was threefold and Machiavellian. First of all, when asked to marry Prince Mal, one of the Drevlians, she agreed. But when a delegation arrived in Kyiv by boat, she had all the men thrown into a deep pit and buried alive. She then sent a message requesting that the noblest of the Drevlians should accompany her as she travelled to her husband to be, as it wouldn’t be fitting for her to journey on her own. When the aristocrats arrived in Kyiv ahead of the wedding, they were invited to wash in the bathhouse, at which point Olga locked them in and set fire to the building, killing them all.

  If that wasn’t enough, in a final step to finish off the remaining Drevlians, Olga travelled to their capital, Iskorosten, with a large army. Her unsuspecting future husband Prince Mal had not yet heard the fate of his men, so he had prepared a large feast for them in good faith. After eating, Olga and her army slaughtered as many of her foes as they could manage, but even this wasn’t enough. Those who survived begged for mercy, offering to pay tribute. Olga agreed but said that she wanted only three sparrows from each household: after all, she could see how much they’d already suffered from her onslaught. The Drevlians willingly complied. When the birds arrived, Olga instructed her men to attach a piece of thread to each sparrow along with a piece of sulphur. In the evening, the birds were released, flying home to settle back in their nests in the rafters of the town’s buildings. The sulphur made the roofs catch fire, burning the city to the ground.

  The description of Olga’s merciless killings of the Drevlians provides a chilling parallel to the fateful Salme ship, whose occupants had likely been part of a diplomatic mission: the Drevlians sent twenty of their ‘best men’ – who were killed in their boat – to try to convince Olga to accept Prince Mal’s marriage proposal the first time around, then a group of chieftains the second time. It’s also interesting that in both cases the Drevlians were clearly expecting to be welcomed and did not question Olga’s demands nor her invitation to wash in her bathhouse before their meeting. It seems such arrangements were commonplace and part of diplomatic relationships, and that too fits well with the way the Salme men were buried.

  Strangely, despite her sadistic legacy, today Olga is still vene
rated in both the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church. This is because after her acts of vengeance, she converted to Christianity, the first ruler of the Kyivan Rus’ to do so. She also worked hard to convert the rest of her people, although her son, Svyatoslav, remained a pagan. When she died Svyatoslav arranged for her Christian funeral, according to her wishes, despite his own feelings about the religion, and Olga became a revered saint. According to the Chronicle, it was the reigning Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus who managed to convert Olga, although, as he wanted to marry her, it seems that his intentions weren’t entirely noble. Olga turned down his offer of marriage, but returned to Kyiv bearing gifts of gold, silver, silks and ‘various vases’. When she arrived home, she received a letter in which the emperor reminded her of her promise to send back to him presents of slaves, wax and furs, as well as soldiers. Olga declined, saying that she would do so only if he were to spend as much time with her in her territory as she had spent on the Bosphorus.

  If a woman could have this much power among the Rus’ in the tenth century, while only a few decades earlier we have the actions of the militarily powerful Aethelflaed in Mercia, why would we question the possibility of someone like Bj.581 or indeed the Oseberg ‘Queen’ having a similar degree of military status and power? There seems to be no question mark in the written sources over Olga having commanded this position, or that any of the Rus’ would have had problems taking orders from a woman. The Chronicle doesn’t comment on or question her gender in any way. Obviously her rise to power was necessitated by the fact that her son was too young and no other leader could legitimately take his place in the meantime, but the fact that she was not only willing but also able to assume such a role – not to mention that she was supported in doing so – should tell us something about women’s roles at this place and time.