A Brief History of the Vikings

by Jonathan Clements

  With Norway shakily secured, Bluetooth encouraged his son-in-law Styrbjorn to lead an attack on Sweden, then ruled by Styrbjorn’s uncle Erik. Erik earned his nickname ‘the Victorious’ from this ill-fated venture, since the Danish army and its Baltic allies was soundly trounced near Uppsala. Harald Bluetooth then turned to his other available border, expanding south-eastward into the land of the Wends. All the while, he made sure to pay extravagant homage to Otto I, the ruler of Germany, although the two-faced nature of this loyalty became immediately apparent on Otto’s death. His son Otto II was barely on the throne before Danish raiders conducted a series of attacks on Germany’s north coast. Although Bluetooth denied all knowledge of it, he was surely somewhere behind it all, testing the new ruler’s resolve. Unfortunately for Bluetooth, Otto II was resolute, not wasting any time listening to Bluetooth’s protestations of innocence, but immediately launching a massive offensive against Denmark’s southern border. Bluetooth was forced to call upon every available ally to held defend the Danevirke. Hakon the Great, embroiled in several local disputes with argumentative subordinates, was obliged to send a large force of his own men down to help, a case of pagan and Christian Scandinavians fighting side by side, and a sign, if ever there was, that blood ran thicker than holy water.

  Several Viking sagas detail the attempts by the Germans to break through the invulnerable walls and moats that defended the land. This would have been news to the German chroniclers, and indeed it contradicts archaeological evidence from the location itself, both of which make it rather clear that the Danes and their Norwegian allies were severely beaten. German troops made it through the Danevirke, the port of Hedeby suffered a brief period in German hands, and the twilight years of Bluetooth’s reign were spent as a German vassal. It was a humiliating descent from the heyday of the 960s, when Bluetooth stood a fine chance of becoming the master of all Scandinavia. His forays into Europe had cost him dear, and now Hakon was suddenly less willing to lend support from Trondheim – ready to plead he was busy on other matters, knowing that Bluetooth was no longer able to force him to comply.

  Harald Bluetooth made one last attempt to bring the pagans to heel, sailing north to the Trondheim with a mighty fleet – so the saga claims, although this national ‘navy’ was still probably no more than 60 ships. Hakon was waiting for him with a fleet of similar size, jointly led by himself and his successor Earl Erik. Bluetooth’s fleet was repulsed, and the aging Danish leader retreated to his native domains, never to trouble the north again. During the closing years of Bluetooth’s reign, the Danes finally regained some of their honour, but did so without the help of the aging king.

  Instead, Bluetooth’s final years appear to have been dogged by an unexpected nemesis – his son, Svein Forkbeard, who, if the sagas are to believed, was instrumental in deposing him. A fort built by Otto II on the Danevirke was captured and burned down in 983, and soon Hedeby itself was recaptured after a siege. The Germans beaten away, at least for now, one might have expected the Danish leaders to congratulate themselves, but it was now that Bluetooth retreated too, supposedly to die from his wounds somewhere on the southern Baltic coast. The Christian king had been defeated by his pagan son – Svein Forkbeard was firmly devoted to the savage ways of Odin, trusting more in battle than in diplomacy. He did, however, tolerate a minor Christian presence if it prevented the Germans from finding another excuse to attack. Attempts by Forkbeard to orchestrate takeovers in Norway and Sweden were foiled, since the earls or Trondheim and Olof Skötkonung were strong in their respective realms. Consequently, with Germany strong to the south, and Norwegians and Swedes uncooperative to the north and east, Forkbeard turned his attentions west, to England.

  England had enjoyed a long period of peace under King Edgar (r.959–975), a monarch with the support of several powerful Scandinavians and Celts. Through the early and unexpected death of his brother, Edgar had come to be the ruler of Mercia and Northumbria, and enjoyed relatively good relationships with the large Scandinavian populations in both his kingdoms. Squabbles among the English managed to ruin that state of affairs with Edgar’s death. His son and heir was murdered before he made it out of his teens, by supporters of his younger brother, known to history as Aethelred the Ill-Counselled (Aethelred Unraed, or more popularly, ‘the Unready’). The term ‘supporters’ is perhaps misleading – much was done in Aethelred’s name without his consent. Whoever was running England from behind the scenes operated on the foolish assumption that the new waves of Viking invaders could be bought off.

  Parties of Danes were raiding the coasts of England, often with the tacit and not-so-tacit support of their countrymen in the Danelaw, and of their cousins in Normandy. Christian envoys tried to broker some kind of deal based on shared spiritual beliefs with the Normans, but a treaty between them and the English failed to stop Normandy being used as a rest stop and hiding place for raiders on their way across the Channel.

  If anything, the English attempts to buy off the raiders only encouraged even more of them. The term used at the time for the protection money was gafol (‘tribute’) although later writers would call it danegeld (‘Dane-gold’). Once they started in 991, the English would be forced to pay such bribes for almost two hundred years, either directly to their enemies as danegeld, or to their supposed kingly protector as heregeld (‘army-gold’) a tax levied to fund the army that was supposed to make the paying of danegeld unnecessary.5

  While the English came to regard their danegeld as an insurance policy against further raids, the Danes themselves saw it as a tribute not dissimilar from that collected in Scandinavia – not a one-off payment, but instead a form of protection money that could be extorted anew. Where more than one attacker was in the neighbourhood, such extortion often afforded very little safety, as the new outlaws in town would first raid to prove they could, and only then collect their danegeld. By the time the protectors’ protection was actually needed, they were often long gone, and the cycle repeated itself with a new set of raiders.

  Sources are largely quiet as to why Svein Forkbeard, the king of Denmark, should suddenly turn up at the head of a Viking raiding expedition in England in AD 994 – although a simple search for ready cash is not unlikely. Most contemporary references to his alleged conflict with his father, while mentioning that Harald Bluetooth was dead by 987, neglect to discuss a third party who temporarily seized Denmark from Forkbeard himself for a few years. But the chronicler Adam of Bremen claims that Denmark was invaded by King Erik the Victorious of Sweden, leading an army ‘as innumerable as the sands of the sea’. The same period, claims Adam, also saw Denmark attacked from the south by Saxon war-bands intent on plundering the beleagured country.6

  There are signs here of a forgotten conflict involving Swedes and Danes at the very least, either as invaders or forces supporting a pretender, with the likely involvement of non-Vikings, too. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that the highly doubtful tale of derring-do, the Saga of the Jomsvikings, revolves around a group of raiders from what is now Germany/Poland, and their involvement in a conflict in Svein Forkbeard’s Denmark.

  The fact will not have escaped the reader that the family ties of the Norse world had become rather complicated by this point. The family trees in this book make some small attempt to demonstrate the dynastic connections that bound the Viking leaders together, but do not even come close to the whole story. Svein Forkbeard may have been the son of Harald Bluetooth, but he was also the nephew of Gunnhild Kings-mother. His sister Thyri was the widow of Styrbjorn, who led the ill-fated raid on Sweden repulsed by Erik the Victorious. Svein himself would eventually marry the widow of Erik the Victorious, making him the stepfather of King Olof Skötkonung, the ‘tributary king’ who came to the Swedish throne in AD 995, and paid Forkbeard to leave him alone. Forkbeard’s own daughter Gytha would marry Earl Erik of the Trondheim, and there were several other, lesser alliances that firmly joined Svein to the other rulers of Scandinavia. When one finally untangles the web of marriages,
in-laws, cousins and obligations, Forkbeard almost appears as the single figure most likely to rule Scandinavia with, if not the blessing of its inhabitants, at least a fair amount of toleration. The operative word, however, is almost. There was another.

  His name was Olaf Tryggvason, nicknamed Crowbone for his hobby of reading the omens, an interest that he supposedly retained even after his conversion to Christianity. Crowbone’s father was the same Tryggvi who had been killed in battle with Harald Greycloak. His mother, Astrid, had been a scion of the Swedish royal house. When Tryggvi was murdered in Grey-cloak’s purges, Crowbone was not even born. His pregnant mother Astrid had somehow eluded capture. The sons of Erik Bloodaxe scoured the countryside looking for her, all the more desperately when they heard that she might be carrying Tryggvi’s heir. But their ongoing troubles with Hakon distracted them, and Astrid was able to make her escape.

  This, at least, is the Heimskringla version, although the sons of Bloodaxe must have been remarkably stupid if they truly failed to locate Astrid in her hiding place, her father’s house. Heimskringla’s highly entertaining but also highly dubious version of events has Astrid and her infant son fleeing to the court of Sweden’s King Erik the Victorious, eluding pursuing soldiers sent by the irate Gunnhild Kingsmother. From there, supposedly, they head for Russia, only to be intercepted midway by Baltic pirates,7 and sold into slavery. Crowbone, claim his sagas, was then sold for the value of a single goat, and grew to manhood as a farmhand in what is now Estonia, before being rediscovered and freed by his uncle Sigurd.

  If there is any truth in such a rags-to-riches fairytale, it may lie in its use as a legal defence later in Crowbone’s life. For the first we hear of the adult Crowbone is in Russia, where he killed a man with an axe in a Novgorod marketplace, later claiming that his victim was the same pirate who had killed his mother’s guardian Thorolf Lousebeard (too old to fetch a good price as a slave). Crowbone’s legendary exploits then took him from Russia to the land of the Wends (Poland), where he enjoyed an all-too-brief marriage to the doomed princess Geira, daughter of the Wendish ruler Boleslav.

  With that lady’s early death, Crowbone supposedly headed west, first to his great-uncle Erik Bloodaxe’s old haunts in Northumbria, before completing an impressive (and some might suspect, poetically neat) circumnavigation of the British Isles, raiding Scotland, the Hebrides, Man, the coasts of Ireland, Wales, and then somewhere on the coast of France. Heading back for England, he stopped over in the Scilly Isles, close to the south-western tip of Cornwall, where a soothsayer, claims his epic saga, told him that he was destined for kingship, and to ‘find the true faith.’8

  Such is the idealized portrait of sagas, though the repetition of the word ‘raiding’ gives the game away. Luckily for the historian, Crowbone’s enemies provided a wholly more believeable account of his deeds off the coasts of Britain. We see increasing evidence of Crowbone, or at least men very like him, in the British Isles in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles in 981. It tells of a raid on Padstow in Cornwall, and seven ships (perhaps the same group) attacking Southampton. By 987, Anglo-Saxon records imply that the Vikings were raiding in far greater numbers, with Goda, the ruler of Devonshire, falling in battle ‘with a great slaughter’.9 It is around this point that the Chronicle records the first instance of paying off raiders from Dublin – an apparently simple solution, to a Christian bishop, which backfired almost immediately. In 993, the small raids of previous years were replaced with something much larger:

  Here in this year Olaf [i.e. Crowbone] came with ninety-three ships to Folkstone, and raided round about it, and then went from there to Sandwich, and overran all that, and so to Maldon.10

  It was Maldon where the Anglo-Saxons would mount one of their most famous stands against the Vikings. Regardless of the unpheavals at the centre of the country, there were still local leaders who were able to put on a resistance. In Essex, the land of the East Saxons, the locals had managed to resist most attempts by Danes to settle, largely by organizing themselves on similar lines. The Vikings were not the only war-bands in the area – waiting for Crowbone at Maldon was the white-haired Saxon earl Byrhtnoth. The Vikings followed their time-honoured strategies, picking an offshore island for protection. The Maldon area, however, is notorious for its mud flats and shallows; when the Saxons arrived, they climbed down off their horses and simply waited on the shoreline, while the Vikings on Northey island glumly stared down at the receding tide. A thin causeway joined Northey to the mainland, and neither side felt like wading through the mud on either side of it. Someone would have to attack along the causeway, and whoever did would be at a great disadvantage.

  If we are to believe the surviving fragment of the English poem The Battle of Maldon, there was considerable confidence to be found on both sides. The Vikings on the island called out to Byrhtnoth, asking him if he was the richest man in the neighbourhood, thereby hoping to work out whether he was in a position to offer them money. Pointedly, the Vikings in the poem refer to the bribe they demand as ‘tribute’. But Byrhtnoth was not one of the Saxons who believed the Vikings could be bought off. His use of terms and phrasing in the poem implies that he stood with a force of several hundred men, easily the equal of the Viking numbers, and with the upper hand for as long as he stood on solid ground.

  The standoff continued until the proud Byrhtnoth allowed the Vikings to come ashore. He had little choice – if he had forced them to remain on Northey, they would eventually have simply sailed away to raid elsewhere. By permitting them to come ashore along the narrow causeway and draw up in battle formation, Byrhtnoth hoped to settle things once and for all. Unfortunately, after granting them equal footing, he met his own death, as did many of his men, in a hard-fought battle on the shoreline. The progress of the battle was regarded with some bitterness by its poet, who took care to list the names of those who fought bravely, even after Byrhtnoth was cut down, as well as those who fled from the Vikings, particularly one Godric, who galloped off on the dead Byrhtnoth’s horse, thereby giving some of the other men the impression that Byrhtnoth himself was running away. Although later sources would claim that the battle of Maldon was a pyrrhic victory for the English, Byrhtnoth’s last stand was not damaging enough to prevent Crowbone conducting further raids that season, and the Vikings were also able to demand crippling tributes from the people of Essex that year.

  In 994, Crowbone returned with 94 ships, some of which were led by his brother-in-law Svein Forkbeard. Forkbeard had greater plans than a mere series of assaults – in a banquet with his allies, he swore that within three years he would invade England and seize the country for himself, driving out King Aethelred or killing him. The hordes of Swedes and Danes who had once sailed east in search of fortunes, now turned west again. Forkbeard was one of them, realizing that with the coffers of the Muslims empty, the next best source of ready coin at the edge of the Viking world would be among the wealthy English.

  Forkbeard may have had another reason. Svein Forkbeard was the son of Harald Bluetooth, but Forkbeard’s modern sources are not even sure which of Bluetooth’s wives or concubines was Forkbeard’s mother. The Icelandic Tale of Thorvald the Far-Travelled baldly states that Svein only ‘claimed to be the son of Harald Gormsson [Bluetooth] . . .’ and that ‘Svein was not settled in Denmark at that time because [Bluetooth] would not admit his paternity.’11 Is this a later slander by enemies of Svein? If true, it would certainly help explain his strange relationship with the ‘father’ he supposedly overthrew, and his long-term association with outcast war-bands like the Jomsvikings. It also casts new light on Forkbeard’s willingness to simply take England by force, without any acknowledged right of kingship. If Denmark had not been his by birthright, why not steal England as well?

  So it is that we have Forkbeard and Crowbone, raiding the coasts of England either to bolster Forkbeard’s Danish regime, or to raise enough funds to win it back from a forgotten usurper, or possibly simply because they felt like it. For outlaws intent on plunder, the
re had not been a better time to attack the English. No Alfred the Great appeared to unite the shires; instead, the hapless country was saddled with Aethelred Unraed and his coterie of self-interested nobles. As ‘England’, that confederacy of Angles, Saxons and Britons threatened to tear apart, Aethelred and his advisors were prepared to consider anything, appearing to blow hot and cold towards the raiders quite unpredictably.

  Aethelred might have ordered the deaths of entire communities of Danes, but he also seemed keen to establish alliances with other Vikings. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-Tongue goes out of its way to describe him as a ‘good ruler’, always ready to help his Viking associates – he even bestows Gunnlaug with the trusty sword, Kingsgift, after Gunnlaug sings a song comparing him to God Almighty.12 Christian Vikings, it appears, were friends that Aethelred was prepared to tolerate. He would even marry one, in a manner of speaking, when he wed Emma, the daughter of the Norman ruler Richard the Fearless in 1002. The marriage, it was hoped, would bring England and Normandy closer together, perhaps even into a union that might block the Channel and bottle up the Vikings in the North Sea. But there were other implications. Queen Emma was of Viking ancestry – her great-grandfather was the raider Hrolf the Walker, and she probably spoke reasonable Danish.13 Emma was not the only new arrival with possible pro-Danish leanings. Other nobles in and outside the Danelaw took the hint, and tried to deal with the Vikings on their own terms. The presence of the Danes in the midst of the English would eventually prove to be the most insidious assault of all – over the generations, the fearsome raiders from the sea gained a human face. The end result of Aethelred’s haphazard attempts at inclusion was to make Danish alliances, and ultimately Danish kings, seem acceptable to the English.