The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  3.

  Making enemies

  Their ships were on the move from around 700 CE. The Vikings didn’t burst out of the north like some flight of arrows; they had been trading, sailing about widely enough to know where there were riches, and better yet where the riches were portable and close to the coast. They came south to find a regular connection with anyone in Western Europe who wanted skins and furs and walrus ivory. They brought luxuries out of the eastern Baltic and the rivers of Russia,1 the goods so expensive they were worth carrying in small quantities in a small ship: like amber, which was lovely and almost as obscenely valuable as diamonds now. They were the mercenaries of Byzantium, the traders of Kiev and capable of coming ashore at will in the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast of Spain and finally North America. Their connections to the trade routes gave them the local knowledge they needed to decide where it was worth going out as pirates, and also where they could dispose of the loot; because a man can’t eat a gilded reliquary or a few hundred metres of fine cloth.

  They were also less predictable than other pirates and the imperial raiders, because they knew how to tack into the wind, so they did not have to let the wind decide their course, or wait for it. A startled cosmographer from Andalucia reported that they had ‘big ships with square sails and could sail either forwards or backwards’.2 Owning a great ship that was moved solely by manpower was a sign of high social standing, but they did not depend on oars and muscle; their ships had single sails, some of them huge affairs of woven wool sewn3 together, as much as a hundred square metres for the grandest. A ship was an investment of money, time and life. It took thirty weeks to weave a sail sixteen metres square, and half a kilometre of planks to make the hull, not to mention timber for mast and spars and the iron that had to be smelted and formed for nails and rivets to hold the ship together.4 A ship didn’t just show how rich or powerful or grand a man might be; it was his being.

  Their armies leaving port would run up the sails but then use manpower to row the ships out to sea, into the strongest waves; and row on even when the sails were set higher. Rowing was good for manoeuvring a warship or the heavier freighters that came later, but sails gave ships stamina and speed. Saxons may have used them before the Vikings came, and there may have been others on the North Sea,5 but it was Viking boats with sails that became such extraordinary machines. They could cross the widest part of the North Sea, more or less six hundred kilometres, in four or five days and without any of the usual need to cling to the shore and spend the nights on dry land.

  So the world of the Norsemen was not the same as other people’s worlds, not even the world that the Frisians knew. The Old Norse texts make it clear that the centre of their world was in the North, not in Jerusalem as it was on the usual world maps further south, and their headquarters were not in Rome as the Church imagined; Vikings did not see themselves on the edge of things. They could already operate through a world much wider than the world of Romans or Saxons or Britons. They knew there was land across the ocean to the west, but they did not know its shape or exactly where it lay. They defied a strain of Christian orthodoxy just by thinking that people could live south of the Earth’s hot zones, where it is summer when the north has winter. Most likely, too, their time at sea, navigating with the help of wide horizons, had taught them that the Earth itself was a sphere and not a pancake on top of a ball as learnèd men were supposed to think. They knew how to sail out to sea so the curve of the earth would hide them from the land. They knew they could trick an enemy, as King Olaf tricked Erling in the sagas, by lowering their sails gradually so they seemed to be sailing over the horizon.6 They used every advantage that a round Earth could provide.7

  And they knew where they were going. The magnetic compass arrived in the North some time in the thirteenth century, but the Vikings already had a brilliantly simple sun compass. It worked as a sundial works, by tracking the tip of the shadows thrown by a stick at different times of day; where the shadow is shortest and the sun is highest, the shadow points north and south. It was useless in rain or snow or fog, but in the sailing season, which was the summer of endless light, it was a huge advantage. Such a compass belonged among Norsemen because the North had winter; people who were used to travelling over blank snowscapes, where the landmarks are buried and the detail is all smoothed away, needed to make such a device.8 Once they had it, they could also sail a featureless ocean as far as America.

  As for who they were, what they were, that was easy: they were enemy. They were the others, the ones not like the rest, and their brilliance at sea brought them far too close for comfort. Their sense that voyaging was something worth recording and praising and honouring9 did not make them sympathetic, as it would in later years. Their great stories had not yet been written down, not even told aloud, so their habits and their history were unknown. Since what they did – raid, plunder, slave – was all too close to what everybody else did, given the chance, there had to be some other dimension to make them a proper enemy: they had to be demons. Nobody expects to understand what demons do.

  There were clues, though. For a start, the Danes were unsettled by the steady spread north of the Frankish empire. In 734, Charles the Hammer took Frisia for the Franks and was all too close to the Danes’ southern borders. Within three years the Danes were working on their defences, building a strong oak palisade, two metres high, to cross their southern frontier, and putting a barrage across the bay at the south of Jutland. They could never have built such a barrier without the kind of powerful king who makes local nobles anxious enough to obey his commands. Somebody had to organize and commandeer a quick and large operation, not to mention the naval support it needed. That somebody had the power to be just oppressive enough to persuade local Danish lords, used to their own independent power, that they might as well take their chances on the sea.10

  Further north there was less kingship. Harald Finehair was still struggling to create a Norway he could rule, even if some men were already calling themselves ‘Norwegian’. There was less of a state, but the same squabble of nobles. So little of Norway could be ploughed and planted that even the kindness of the climate in the last centuries of the first millennium could not make the land truly valuable; it was swamp, lakes, mountain and the kind of conifer forests that ruin the soil.11 Riches had to come from somewhere else, which meant the sea; nobles who felt just marginal were willing to ship out.

  The idea of going away, being curious about the world, began before the Viking age. In a village with a couple of families running large farms, at Helgö, not far from Stockholm on Lake Mälar, someone buried objects from the sixth and seventh centuries: a Coptic bronze ladle from Egypt, which might have been used in baptisms; a whole series of love scenes cut into gold foil; and, quite astonishingly, a Buddha. His caste mark on his forehead is gold, his eyebrows and lips are painted, his cloak is finely embroidered and he sits on an intricate lotus blossom throne; he is a true rarity even in Kashmir, where he was probably made. No Scandinavian is known to have travelled as far as India, which is a huge distance over land as well as sea. There was the whole Muslim world in between and it is highly unlikely any Arab trader would risk the contamination of such a heathen and infidel object, even if he thought he could find a buyer in the West. The Buddha was known in Byzantium – he’s a character in a popular epic called Barlaam and Josaphat – and perhaps the Jewish traders working throughout Asia and Europe might have brought the statue as a curiosity and sold it on. But then why would a farmer on the edge of a Swedish lake have wanted it?12 It had no religious significance for him, it had no magic, although it has great beauty. Did it satisfy curiosity about a wider world, perhaps?

  Around the middle of the eighth century, Scandinavians began to make their way from the Baltic down the great river systems of what is now Russia. This, too, seems strange. It is one thing to raid rich and easy targets on the coasts of the North Sea or the Irish Sea, sailing off with lovely treasure. Helgö lies a good dista
nce from the North Sea, but the farm with the Buddha also owned a bronze from Ireland: an eighth-century crook from some priest’s crozier in the shape of a dragon, with blue and silver eyes and enamelled jaws, circled round a human head with a wolf and a bird in attendance. Such things could be had quite easily. But the same sort of men were making an extraordinary effort to work their way overland through swamp and forest into Russia, daring an unfriendly menagerie of creeping, stinging and biting beasts, having to push or abandon boats when they came to the cataracts that roared on the rivers and made them even more vulnerable to bandits. The famous predators had to keep armed guards onshore so as not to become prey. They did all this in territory that was miserably poor, where there were few people and no friends; there is evidence of only one town in all of north-western Russia in the eighth century. The Scandinavians – the ones whose brothers owned bronze and gold and even a Buddha – were the richest targets around.13

  There is one likely reason for their determination to break through Russia: silver. Neither Russia nor Scandinavia had sources of silver, but silver coins travelled north from the Arab caliphates in the form of the famous dirham. Opening a trade route for furs, for amber and for slaves and bringing back silver could be hugely valuable. Besides, if a man had nothing to sell he could always sell his services, as the ‘friendly’ troops of Swedish and Russian kingdoms in the East, as the palace guard of Byzantine emperors, as mercenaries for the Khazars beyond Byzantium between the Black and Caspian seas. By the eighth century, a voyage down the Volga was commonplace; within a single generation, the first decades of the ninth century, Vikings worked out how to use the great rivers to travel regularly as far as Constantinople. They opened up vast territory by daring to go through the badlands. Everyone around the Baltic would have known of silver coming north, could have met with the merchants on the routes into Asia, but only the Vikings chose to go hunting the source of that wealth.

  There is a cultural difference here, a willingness to be unsettled: men trapped by long winters, barely scratching a living out of narrow lands, found the sea their obvious escape. They had no great riches to defend at home, no neighbour enemies. They had every reason to move on and on.

  Ohthere knew that. He was ‘among the foremost men in that land’, or so he said when he met King Alfred in southern England some time in the late ninth century. The king was always eager to meet strangers who knew strange corners of the world. Ohthere brought him walrus ivory, perhaps as a sample of things to trade, perhaps to pay for protection, or simply as a gift: a formal courtesy. He was certainly a trader of some kind because on his journeys he called at trading places like the seasonal settlement Kaupang in the south of Norway.14

  He answered questions before Alfred, he explained himself and his country, and his answers were written down and slipped into the translation Alfred was preparing of the historian and geographer Orosius, his Histories against the Pagans. So we know that Ohthere had more wild than domestic animals: six hundred reindeer ‘unsold’ in his herds, for the meat and the hides, and six of the beasts who led the moving herd and acted as decoys when there were wild reindeer to catch. ‘However, he did not have more than twenty head of cattle and twenty sheep and twenty pigs, and the little that he ploughed he ploughed with horses.’ Southerners were surprised; they ploughed with oxen.

  He said he ‘lived furthest north of all the Norsemen’ beside the Western Sea, far north on the coast we know as Hålogaland; and although he does not mention it, perhaps because it seemed so obvious to him, he was living close to the winter spawning grounds for codfish, which will have fed him in the bleak months. Those long winter nights were lit with whale oil from blubber pits along the shore, maybe worked by the hunting and herding Sami peoples on the coast.15 His wealth depended mostly on those same nomads: he was worth what he owned in skins and bone and feathers (which means eiderdown), tunics of marten and otter (which sold at three times the price of sable in the South), and ship’s ropes made from walrus hide. As for farming as Southerners knew it, up north on the very edge of the zone where cereals can ripen, he said that the land ‘that may be grazed or ploughed, that lies along the sea … is nevertheless very rocky in some places, and wild moors lie to the East and above, running parallel to the inhabited land’.16

  This is a man who lived in a poor place on the very edge of the world, close to the great ocean which was supposed to encircle the world. He could travel only between April and September, when the winds were not too violent, the cold was bearable in open ships and there was light;17 and when he travelled, he kept moving through the short nights because the winds were famously unreliable and might change at any moment. On his journey south he noted Ireland, the Orkneys and the Shetlands, but he also knew his contemporaries were on Iceland (and looking west from there). He knew ‘the land extends a very long way north from’ his northerly home, although he had heard that it was ‘all waste, except that in a few places here and there Finnas camp, engaged in hunting in winter and in summer in fishing by the sea’. He told Alfred he decided to go north in part because he reckoned he might find a supply of walrus for their tusks and for the hides. But he also wanted to ‘investigate how far the land extended in a northerly direction, or whether anyone lived north of the wilderness’.

  He was exploring.

  He sailed north, which to him meant a particular quadrant of the sky rather than an exact compass point, keeping open sea to his port side. Going south, he always had seamarks to show where he was and knowledge of where best to beach and rest overnight; the further north he went, the less he knew and the more he was watching and chancing.

  He watched a wilderness gliding past him, rocky and frigid; but he kept sailing. ‘Then he was as far north as the furthest the whale hunters go,’ the limits of the usual world for men like him; he had been there before, once killed sixty whales (or it may have been walrus) in two days, or so he said. ‘Then he travelled further north, as far as he could sail in the next three days.’

  When he found that the land turned east, he waited for a wind to take him eastwards; and when he came to the mouth of the White Sea he waited for a northerly wind to take him south. He was beyond the help of maps, which showed only a maze of islands in the north and behind them a world of legends he must have heard: the land where griffins lived and the land of the Amazons and the savage peoples locked away behind a great wall by Alexander the Great.18 He met only a few fishermen and hunters camping out on the barrens, heard their more fantastic stories and was properly sceptical; he trusted only what he could see and test for himself.

  There were no settlements on the land until he came to a wide river mouth on the coast of the White Sea. He did not cross, because he could see the land was settled on the other side and he already knew the settlers were not friendly. He was ready to go out in the unknown ocean, but not to risk ship and crew against this more usual human kind of obstacle. At last he decided to turn back.

  All this is something new. Ohthere in the White Sea, far beyond the point where his countrymen sailed after whales, is a man aware of a world waiting to be found, not confined to the usual, regular routes like some sailor on the easier straits between, let’s say, Dunkirk and Dover. His voyage is extraordinary in itself, but you can see why a man might think this way. If his contemporaries had riches, they were mostly bits of animal that only Southerners valued very high; so Northmen were obliged to travel to turn their goods into money. Slaves were worth nothing where they were captured; they had to be shipped to the market. Travelling was honourable in itself but finding something new, perhaps a ship carrying valuables, perhaps a monastery full of gold and money, perhaps somewhere to settle: that was a much better prospect. Sons of a fine title went away with their followers to make both a living and a life.

  Others had the same mindset: Christian missionaries, for example. When the self-aggrandizing bishop Adam of Bremen wrote the story of missions in the Northlands, he included a book of geography that shows his own passion
to know ‘how far the land extended’. His story isn’t first-hand, it is pockmarked with legends and forgeries, and he does mention dog-headed and one-eyed cannibals blocking the way to the lands that Ohthere had managed to visit,19 but he is still read for his other information. He thought the Northerners were excellent fighters because they did not eat fruit, that they ‘more often attack others than others trouble them’ but, even so, that ‘poverty has forced them thus to go all over the world’.20 Perhaps there were too many of them at home and they had to travel to live.

  That is much too simple. Vikings weren’t just forced onto the seas. They chose to move, for profit, for occupation, to get away from the authority of kings (in the case of lords) and sometimes to escape the power of lords (if they were commoners). And yet the growing population, small as the rise seems to modern eyes, did matter very much: human beings were merchandise. They could be caught and then held for fat ransoms if anyone was available to pay. They could be kept as necessities as the Norsemen travelled, farmhands and wives and cooks. When the Norsemen began to settle the empty, ashy spaces of Iceland around 870 they took slaves from all around the Irish Sea and more than half the women on the island were Gaelic. When they reached out to the Americas and their small, fragile colony in Vinland, they took along a German slave called Tyrkir for special chores.21

  Better still, slaves could be sold on a huge scale. Paul the Deacon, writing in the eighth century, says the North is such a healthy place that the people breed and breed; Germania got its name from all that ‘germination’. He says: ‘That is why countless troops of slaves are so often driven away from this populous Germania and sold to the southern people.’ All that Arab silver in Northern hands, lost on the Isle of Skye, buried in hoards, had to be earned; all the silk that came north and the various dried spices that were needed to practise the new Arab medicine had to be paid for.