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

by Michael Pye

  And yet the Vikings were never secure in Ireland; their kingdom, even their empire, was always elsewhere or on the seas. Their towns looked outwards. In 866 their ‘great heathen army’ broke into England and took Eoforwic, which was a tiny town with a school, an archbishop and a port of sorts: the religious centre for the kingdom of Northumbria. When they left, the town was Jorvik, which became York: grown in less than a century to a thriving, stinking city,25 all cesspits and middens and waste, where the hot-metal industries were alive and thriving as they had not been since Roman times, smelting iron, silver and gold, turning lead into glass. There were craftsmen making combs from bone or antler, shoemakers and saddlers, jewellers working in amber and black jet. The scatter of houses on open spaces had been organized into streets and plots, a new plan which owed nothing to the Roman city on the same spot. The city also got its parish churches in Viking times, or most of them, for Norsemen and archbishops alike wanted independence from the English kingdoms, and power of their own, so they worked together. The Archbishop of York was once besieged alongside the Norse king, Olaf, who was on a murderous but profitable raid into England at the time; and this was when Olaf was still a pagan, not yet baptized under English influence.26 The city had such a separate character, a mix of Anglo and Scandinavian, that it was furiously resistant later to the Norman invasion of England: Norsemen’s descendants against Norsemen’s descendants.

  King Alfred, the ninth-century English hero, recognized other kings who were properly English but entirely subservient to the Danes; ‘puppets’, you could say. He tried to make a working relationship with the Norse kingdom of East Anglia: each side acknowledging that the other had the power to impose his own law, but both sides agreeing rules for the business of buying horses, cattle or slaves. Churches did deals with the Danes over land, although sometimes the deals were very circumstantial: the Abbot of Carlisle claimed he’d been visited in a dream by St Cuthbert himself, told to buy a Danish slave called Guthred and make him king, and then to ask King Guthred for the land that had once belonged to the communities at Monkwearmouth and Jarrow and other monasteries which had been extinguished. Even when the Anglo-Saxons took back the Danish lands, the Northerners sometimes stayed put and had their tenure confirmed.27

  For the moment the Vikings needed York as a military base, but ‘they were ploughing’, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 876, ‘and were providing for themselves’.28 Just as Dublin was pulling in craftsmen and merchants, laying out streets and defining zones for industry, so in York the Viking influence made a city from a settlement.

  A city means a choice of pleasures, some for the belly. There were seeds of dill, celery, opium poppy and coriander: all kinds of spices. There were puffball mushrooms to eat, a luxury out of the woods. There were bees for honey, chickens scratching in yards, oysters in quantity and sometimes mussels, cockles, winkles and whelks. There was herring and eel for everyday eating but there was also cod and haddock from the seas, sturgeon and salmon; and the state of the bones suggests that Vikings knew not to overcook fish.29 Wine came from the Rhine, soapstone vessels from Scotland, even brooches made by Pictish craftsmen who somehow escaped the various Viking slaughters of their countrymen. Through Denmark came the world: the silver coins of Samarkand, the silks of Byzantium, the cowrie shell currency of the Red Sea.

  The base coins of Northumbrian times became pennies rich in silver, coins which manage to muddle together the Viking sword, the hammer of the god Thor and some inspirational Christian messages. ‘The city is crammed beyond expression,’ the Life of St Oswald says, ‘and enriched with the treasures of merchants who come from all parts, but above all from the Danish people.’30

  There was also a point on the riverbank at York called Divelinestaynes, or ‘Dublin stones’, which suggests a landing place for ships from Dublin, still the closest thing the Vikings had to a capital city. It remained so. Even when the Norsemen were beaten out of England after the battle of Brunanburh, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle breaks into verse to show them ‘disgraced in spirit’ leaving ‘to seek out Dublin and their own land again’.31 The trouble with ‘their own land’, which is to say Ireland, was that it had belonged to others in living memory, and those others wanted it back; the Norsemen had to fight. After the battle at Limerick in 968 it was the Irish who ‘carried away their soft, youthful, bright matchless girls; their blossoming silk-clad young women; and their active, large and well-formed boys’.32 Such an appetizing list suggests a very settled and civilized place, the kind that Vikings used to raid. Dublin now became subject to fire setting, to raids and slaughter, but this time from the Irish. Finally its Norse king, Amlaíb Cuarán, went out against all the Irish kings; and he lost. The ‘red slaughter’ at the battle of Tara in 980 ended the military power of the Vikings in Ireland.

  In every other way, though, they remained. They had come as raiders, half-hearted settlers, merchants and slavers and fighters, and in setting up their business they also created towns: Dublin, Wexford, Limerick, Waterford and Cork. Those towns had a life that any Irish king would want to encourage, and of course tax; they were not going to be dismantled just because they were connected to the failing Vikings. In fact, Irish poets came to quite approve of the old enemy’s ways, ‘sailing ships skilfully over the sea, the greed and business of the Vikings’. Ireland went on buying English Christian slaves until well after the Normans took England, not least because William the Conqueror was in no hurry to change things; ‘he enjoyed a share of the profits from this trade,’ William of Malmesbury reports.33

  The Vikings had adjusted reality all round the North Sea. They ran up the Canche River and took out Quentovic, the port for British pilgrims on their way to Rome, the emporium for trade back and forth to England. They stormed the new fort on the island of Walcheren off Zeeland; they are a part of the hidden history of Domburg that the sea once briefly revealed. Their ships forced their way up the Rhine and the IJssel, reached inland ports like Dorestad and Deventer and left traces everywhere: a whalebone batten for a weaving loom left in Frisia, a whalebone T-staff engraved with Anglo-Frisian runes left in one of the raised living mounds along the coast, Arabic coins and coins with Scandinavian images.34 Charlemagne’s empire lost so much silver to the Vikings, in raids and tributes, that tight control of coinage had to be loosened and nobody bothered any more with standardizing weights and types of coin. A fair amount of silver also went underground, buried to protect it from civil unrest, or maybe as a kind of tax avoidance when the Vikings came to demand tribute.35

  They also left behind their genes. Vikings were not famous for being continent. Dudo in his History of the Normans, which was written at the end of the tenth century, wrote that ‘by mingling in illicit couplings they generate innumerable children’. Saxo Grammaticus complained: ‘they seem to have outlawed chastity and driven it to the brothel’.36

  More, they broke the limits of the usual world. They went on pirate raids, sometimes as far as the frontiers of the Chinese empire on the Caspian Sea; in the ninth and tenth centuries the Chinese outriders were surprised to meet men who were tall, red-haired and blue-eyed. They connected the Norwegian coast with the Russian badlands all the way south to Constantinople. In Constantinople itself, Vikings became Varangians, the guards who did odd jobs for the Emperor, jobs as odd as collecting his taxes and castrating his enemies. They were the muscle round the throne, big men because the emperors had grave doubts about the usefulness of small men; they were paid off with plunder and trusted, up to a point, because they stood outside the politics of the court. Their privileges could be curious, like the right to steal the palace decorations on Palm Sunday, not just the expensive hangings but also the palm fronds which carried a blessing worth money. They were riotous drinkers, a fact so famous there were satires written about it, where Varangians are the jury in the trial of the Grape, who naturally is convicted, sentenced to be cut down, trampled and have his blood drunk by men until they lose their senses. They also had a stern sense
of justice, perhaps surprising for men famous for their violence. If a man tried to kill another, he died. When a Varangian tried to rape a woman he fancied, she grabbed at his sword and stuck him through the heart; and his Varangian colleagues applauded her. They awarded her all the man’s property, and threw their friend’s body away without burial. He was, they said, a suicide.

  Many men went south to Byzantium, so many that the old Swedish law codes had to write special rules on inheritance for those who were living ‘in Greece’.37 Some of them had exceptional stories, both before and after their mercenary careers: Harold Hardrada, for example.

  Harold Hardrada ruled Norway for a time, and he led an army into the north of England in 1066 in high hopes of being king there, too. He had also been, for a time, a Varangian. When his half-brother Olaf was forced off the Norwegian throne, Harold waited for his wounds to heal and then prudently went into exile. He became a commander for the prince of Kiev, a mercenary who didn’t expect his master to interfere with his wars or his profits. After a while, according to the text called Advice to the Emperor, he took five hundred men in armoured ships and made his way to Byzantium; the sagas say he was blown to port by a cool wind, watching the shine of the metal roofs of the city. Onshore, he didn’t boast about his rank, because the Byzantine court had every reason to fret about royal and noble plotting, and he didn’t claim a great title; instead he again signed up with the mercenaries. He went out with the patrols tackling pirates in the Aegean, because Viking seamanship was a valuable commodity. He went to fight in Sicily and later in Bulgaria. He is said to have fought in Africa, which must mean North Africa. He was a specialist, sent off to take small forts, small cities with a small force of skilled men; eighty towns in Arabia alone. In one of his own poems he says: ‘I reddened swords far from my fosterland. The sword sang in the town of the Arabs but that was long ago.’

  His world went at least as far east as Jerusalem. The sagas say he ‘made the whole way to Jerusalem peaceable, slaying robbers and other wicked folk’, that ‘all cities and castles were opened for him’, that in Jerusalem he made offerings at the shrines of ‘so much money in gold and jewels that it is hard to compute the amount’. Most likely he went with the masons who were to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, commanding the guards who protected them; and since he was a Varangian, an imperial bodyguard, it’s likely he was also guarding members of the imperial family, maybe the exceedingly pious sisters of the Empress. There were robbers on the way – there always were – and he dealt with them. There was really no reason for castles or cities to stay closed to him: he was not crusading; he went in a time of peace, when the Caliph himself was the son of a Byzantine mother and quite happy to have Christians on his territory.

  He knew when it was time for him to go home, though, as Vikings so often did. He wanted to be king in Norway alongside the new King Magnus; he wanted to be recognized in the place which had sent him away. His problem was that the Byzantine Emperor was fighting off a general who was set on a coup, and also preparing to fight off the threatening Russians. Harold was much too useful to be allowed to leave.

  There were iron chains strung across the harbour at Byzantium to stop anyone moving along the Bosphorus, but he had to go through the Bosphorus to get to the Black Sea and then to the rivers that would take him home. His solution was simple. He took two ships and sailed them right up to the chains in the water. He ordered men to take the oars, and anyone who was not needed to row was to take all his goods and bedding and cram everything together at the stern of the ships. The prows rose and caught on the chains; the ships stopped dead. Then Harold ordered the men to run suddenly forward into the bows and the ships tilted down. One of them stuck fast and broke open; many men died. The other tilted and slid down into the water.

  Harold Hardrada was free to go home.

  He turned out to be a generous king, remembered for helping out the Icelanders in time of famine and for his princely gifts. He was ‘famous and excellent for [his] long and successful travels’. He was also ambitious; Norway was not enough. In 1066 there was no obvious heir to the throne of England and Harold went after the crown. His invading army ran into the defending Anglo-Saxons at a village called Stamford Bridge. Carnage followed, and Harold was among the dead.

  ‘He went out as a Viking to gain fame and wealth,’ the saga says, ‘and then took rule over all people he could conquer. Therefore he fell on another king’s soil.’

  All this was happening in the warm years when the seas were open and the Northern lands looked green, before the returning cold began to jam the Northern seas with ice. The Norsemen made the most of the opportunity. They were used to brutal, lightless winters, and they did not have high expectations of summer, but they did know about the seasons for travelling. They knew when to move.

  They did what almost no other people has done in the Common Era: they settled truly empty lands. They came to the Faroe Islands around 825 and panicked a few hermits into leaving, which accounts for the grievance of the monk Dicuil. They noticed the birds going north each year, and they guessed at land even further out. Around 860 they began cautiously exploring the coasts of Iceland. They found traces that Irish hermits had left behind after they, too, had been frightened away by the Norsemen’s reputation for being bloody and persistent. The fact that hermits had survived at all in such a remote place may have encouraged the newcomers. They saw the fish, birds and seals, the scrubwood everywhere and the driftwood, and above all open spaces in a climate that was still mild. They were herdsmen looking at empty pastures.38

  The result was a small empire without enemies for a while, an almost innocent kind of pioneering. After all, there was no law at all in either Iceland or the Faroes before the Norse, no customs and rules, no assemblies to make decisions and judge the guilty; no farms to divide up land and produce food, no trade and no burial places to keep a common memory alive. The new Iceland maintained for centuries a curious kind of democracy, rather more democratic in our modern sense than anything in ancient Greece. There was no king. Many women and men had independent farms with no landlord, and no feudal overlord. When they met in assemblies, the Alþingi, each could vote to choose which of the local chieftains he would follow.

  They had no towns, and none of the pecking order that goes with a settled town; their social order was too new for that. Authority rested not on title or name, but on what people knew or thought they knew about each other. Farmers took to writing in their own Icelandic version of Old Norse, or at least to having the priests write for them in Icelandic, because they needed a solid form of memory to tell them what laws they had made, who owned what, where boundaries ran, how they had come to Iceland in the first place and from what family. They constructed a past for themselves, which was a practical thing to do because it set the rules and decided who owned what, and then they recorded it. They also wrote down a past that was heroic and even glorious if you have a good stomach for gore: the past of the sagas. The process was costly, so it must have been very important: to write down one saga you first had to kill between fifty and a hundred calves to get the skins for vellum.39

  In time, the farms merged into great estates. The Church took over half the land. Norway’s king and then Denmark’s ruled over Iceland and introduced the very alien notion of tax. But around 1000 CE, the island itself told a story: how you could live out beyond the waters that had once been taken for the very edge of the world, how you could satisfy the hunger for land and space, and how a whole society could invent itself.

  The temptation was always to go further. The world had not yet turned colder and the waters were as open as they ever would be. Land that would in time be snowed under and iced in was still alive and fertile. And there were always people with good reason to move on. Erik the Red left Norway for frontier Iceland ‘on account of some killings’ and after a while he had to leave Iceland on account of some more killings; he needed a fresh start after his first fresh start. He had to find a new fronti
er.

  He heard stories about islands lying off a great land mass to the west, the skerries off the coast of Greenland: Gunnbjarnarsker, notorious for their brutishness to visitors and settled by a man who himself was running away from the consequences of doing murder. Erik sensibly went beyond the skerries. He came into land under the white ice of a glacier, and he tacked south along the coast looking for somewhere to settle; for three winters he went up and down the coast, claiming site after site by giving them names, choosing between the possibilities. He saw pasture for sheep and maybe some cattle, rich fishing, walrus to hunt for their tusks and the hide that made such good ropes. He also saw the emptiness of the land, just like Iceland, just like the Faroes. It would be two more centuries before the Inuit moved south into Greenland as the seas began to freeze, and began their challenge to the Europeans: a Norse sheep turned out to be much easier to hunt than a wild walrus, even with the Inuits’ special skills.

  Erik had found a place where a man could invent himself and be what he said he was, not the sum total of what other people thought. He named the land ‘Greenland’ because, as he said, ‘men would be keen to go there since the land had a good name’. And he thrived. He had room, he had land and he had life on his own terms.40 He was no outlaw any more; ‘He was held in the highest esteem and everyone deferred to his authority,’ the Saga of the Greenlanders says.41