by Neil Oliver
It must have seemed we had the world to ourselves — each band bound only by family ties — and yet the places touched then by those handfuls of hunters bear their fingerprints to this day. In the case of Scandinavia, the Mesolithic arrivals were the last colonists of note. No subsequent folk movements had those places for their destination and so the men and women who made their way onto the land that would one day be Denmark — and then, over the succeeding millennia, into Sweden and Norway — were the forefathers not just of the Vikings but of the mass of the population living there now. New ideas washed across the land from time to time, but no new people.
The countries there are hardly populous even today. As a whole Scandinavia is home to just 17 million people — five million in Denmark, four million in Norway and the balance, about eight million people, in Sweden. Those are still hard territories from which to win the stuff of life, and were surely infinitely more challenging 10,000 years ago. Hard though it may be to believe, however, these were not empty lands when the new hunters arrived. They were not even empty of people.
Although the ice had driven life before it, not every man, woman and child had loosened their grip upon that most demanding territory. The incoming hunters established themselves first of all in the southern, less hostile parts of Norway and Sweden. But in the northern reaches — in the sub-Arctic and Arctic zones — were people known today as the Lapps, or more correctly the Saami.
We do not know for certain whether they once occupied the south of the peninsula as well, only to be dispossessed by the more numerous new arrivals. But the Mesolithic hunters who penetrated the landmass of Scandinavia 10,000 years ago encountered a people who had ridden out the storm of ages. Just as Emperor Penguins remain behind to endure the Arctic winter, when all other warm-blooded creatures flee southwards, so the Saami had stubbornly retained a toehold on their demesne throughout the period of the last glacial.
Genetic science still has questions to answer but it seems the Saami are a separate people. They are closely linked by culture and language to the natives of Finland and of the Arctic regions of Russia, but appear to be genetically different from both, and they are certainly not related to their southern neighbours in Norway and Sweden.
The Saami stayed put during the Ice Age, perhaps by clinging to the coastal zones and finding ways to survive around the unfrozen rim of the northern ocean. In any event it seems they developed independently of any other European groups for thousands of years. Cut off from all the human populations that had moved south — and kept from them by the ice for as much as 15,000 years — they became a folk apart. The debate about their origins is ongoing. Some ethnologists believe that the ancestors of the Saami must have come once upon a time from some part of Asia. Many of the modern Saami living there now have physical characteristics — darker skin and hair, wide Mongoloid facial features — that make them appear similar to populations further to the east. But there are also those with paler complexions and more Caucasian faces. There is a strong argument that says the Saami developed their unique and separate personality and characteristics in the very territories they still occupy today.
Their isolation was such that even when the incomers arrived the resident population remained apart. While the ancestors of the Vikings continued upon their own path — one that would lead eventually to a life of farming, and of ocean-going adventure — their northern neighbours were already set in their ways. There was always contact between the two — mostly cordial, judging by the written sources — and the Vikings, and their ancestors before them, would come to rely upon the skills of the Saami hunters when it came to acquiring the most sought-after pelts.
Sometime around AD 890 a Viking chief called Ottar — or Othere — arrived in the court of King Alfred the Great, of Wessex, with tales to tell of his homeland. Among other things he said the Saami (in his own tongue, the Finnas) lived on the borders of his own realm, mixing and trading with his own folk. It seems the wealth and prestige of men like Ottar depended, to a great extent, upon the furs obtained by the hunters and handed over in the form of ‘tribute’.
According to the account recorded by Alfred’s scribes, each of the Saami chiefs paid Ottar ‘according to his rank’. ‘The highest in rank has to pay fifteen marten skins, five reindeer skins, one bear skin, ten measures of feathers, a jacket of bear skin or otter skin and two skip-ropes, 60 ells long.’
The Romans were the first people to write about the Saami, during the centuries either side of the birth of Christ, and it is clear their ways seemed primitive and alien to outsiders even then. In his work Germania, completed in AD 98, Tacitus made the very first written observations of the tribes living at the top of the world. He labelled them the Fenni, and his amazement and fascination are apparent even now:
In wonderful savageness live the nation of the Fenni, and in beastly poverty, destitute of arms, of horses, and of homes; their food, the common herbs; their apparel, skins; their bed, the earth; their only hope in their arrows, which for want of iron they point with bones. Their common support they have from the chase, women as well as men; for with these the former wander up and down, and crave a portion of the prey. Nor other shelter have they even for their babes, against the violence of tempests and ravening beasts, than to cover them with the branches of trees twisted together; this a reception for the old men, and hither resort the young. Such a condition they judge more happy than the painful occupation of cultivating the ground, than the labour of rearing houses, than the agitations of hope and fear attending the defence of their own property or the seizing that of others. Secure against the designs of men, secure against the malignity of the Gods, they have accomplished a thing of infinite difficulty; that to them nothing remains even to be wished.
Five centuries later, the northernmost dwellers on Earth were still provoking strong language from observers. Procopius of Caesarea was born and raised in Palestine. Remembered by history as one of the great Byzantine scholars, he accompanied General Flavius Belisarius during his campaigns on behalf of Emperor Justinian I. In his History of the Wars he found space for a description of the same people who had so appalled and captivated the Roman half a millennium before:
But among the barbarians who are settled in Thule [the end of the Earth], one nation only, who are called the Scrithiphini, live a kind of life akin to that of the beasts. For they neither wear garments of cloth nor do they walk with shoes on their feet, nor do they drink wine nor derive anything edible from the earth. For they neither till the land themselves, nor do their women work it for them, but the women regularly join the men in hunting, which is their only pursuit. For the forests, which are exceedingly large, produce for them a great abundance of wild beasts and other animals, as do also the mountains that rise there. And they feed exclusively upon the flesh of the wild beasts slain by them, and clothe themselves in their skins, and since they have neither flax nor any implement with which to sew, they fasten these skins together by the sinews of the animals, and in this way manage to cover the whole body.
The visitor from the shining city of Constantinople referred to the Saami as ‘Scrithiphini: a Greek word that translates as ‘the skiing Finns’, revealing that a mode of transport so familiar today has been relied upon in the north for thousands of years.
The Mesolithic hunters making inroads on Scandinavia from the south were therefore in the vanguard of a northward movement that had lasted for many generations, slowly reclaiming the land while the ice retreated. Much of Europe had been treeless for thousands of years before the newcomers’ arrival and instead of forest, a variety of open habitats had evolved ranging from tundra around the fringes of the ice itself to steppe lands of grass, mosses and herbaceous plants further south. Great herds of mammoth, woolly rhinoceros and bison had drifted across those vast expanses, migrating back and forth as the seasons demanded. There were wild horse and reindeer then as well, all prey to the hunters who went before: the men and women who lived and died during the latter millen
nia of the long period known to archaeologists as the Old Stone Age — or, more specifically, the 30,000 or so years of the Upper Palaeolithic.
While the ice sheet was at its most advanced — and the climate at its worst — humanity had mostly retreated into the territories described, rather grandly, as the Last Great Maximum Refugia, in places like the Balkans, Italy and parts of the Iberian peninsula. But from around 16,000 BC, as the climate began to improve, forest and open woodland spread northwards.
Again this process lasted for thousands of years and all the while as the trees grew, the human populations evolved new hunting traditions. The mammoth and the woolly rhino had dwindled and then disappeared, driven to extinction. Other plains-loving species like elk and reindeer were pushed north in pursuit of the snow and ice — and, more importantly, the open, treeless spaces — that better suited them. In their place, finding shelter and cover in the dappled shadows of the woodlands, were red and roe deer, wild pigs, and also aurochs, the towering ancestors of modern cattle. It was all these beasts that were now the focus of human attentions. Away to the north, deep into the tundra of the Arctic and sub-Arctic, the hardiest of the hunters went in search of the bears, Arctic foxes, lynx and pine martens that provided valuable and sought-after furs.
Cold-climate trees like aspen, birch, juniper and willow had colonised the empty territories first, followed eventually by those species that prefer it slightly warmer, like alder, elm, lime and oak. Gone into the realm of folk memory were the wide-open steppes and the great congregations of animals that once thronged there. Now it was a question of stalking creatures that concealed themselves in the shadows and undergrowth, and the hunting parties that reached as far north as Denmark and the rest of Scandinavia were of precisely the same stock that walked dry-shod into the peninsula that would become the British Isles.
Strange though it may seem, the new forests and woodlands were home to far fewer animals than had inhabited the steppes, and even the tundra. While the migratory herds had been colossal in number, the deer, cattle and pigs taking refuge among the trees were far fewer and further between. Likewise the Mesolithic hunters were not only living in a different way to their Palaeolithic predecessors, and in a wholly new environment — they also amounted to a much smaller population.
When I imagine the life of the Stone Age hunter, I always prefer to picture myself in a forested environment. Accustomed as I am to living most of my life indoors and beneath a roof, I take comfort from the thought of leafy branches overhead and tree trunks in all directions to distract me from the vastness of the outside world. But the truth is, woodland and forests have their limitations when it comes to keeping a family or a hunting group supplied with the stuff of life; they demand from their human customers a considerable amount of discipline and forward-planning.
The principal problem, with the deciduous forests at least, is the way they shed their leaves and go to sleep during the winter months — that time of year that is hardest anyway. Human population levels were therefore restricted by the amount of food the forests could provide. Even with due attention paid to laying down stores of dried fruits and nuts, smoked fish and meat, the woodland of the European Mesolithic likely supported a smaller, more widely scattered population than had the grasslands and tundra inhabited by the peoples of the Upper Palaeolithic.
And so it was, for the men and women making their way further and further west and north across the European mainland between 12,000 and 6,000 years ago. The ancient ancestors of the Vikings were hunters of wild game and gatherers of wild foods for thousands of years. For some few of them the pickings in the virgin territories of Scandinavia were rich enough — towards the end of the Mesolithic period at least — to permit the establishment of relatively permanent settlements.
For long periods before, the people had been entirely peripatetic, moving along the coastlines of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, or penetrating the river valleys. All of their movements were dictated by the seasons — by the expectation, in different places at different times, of shoaling fish, or ripening fruits, of nesting birds or land-locked sea mammals. Fish, shellfish, seabirds, marine mammals like seals and walrus, together with the larger fauna that roamed the woodlands nearby were all there to be exploited.
Archaeologists, like all scientists, are on the lookout for patterns — for similar behaviour shared by people spread across wide areas and existing at more or less the same time. Once they find such clusters, suggestive of many people living the same way, they generally round things up and call it all a ‘culture’. In the case of the later Mesolithic in a zone taking in northern Germany, the northern Netherlands and southern Scandinavia, the culture in question has been named Ertebølle — after the so-called ‘type-site’ where finds, beside the shallow sound of Limfjord, in the part of the Jutland peninsula that connects Denmark to mainland Europe, amounted to extensive traces of human occupation lasting several generations. It seems people thereabouts had grown accustomed to — even semi-dependent upon — the plentiful supplies of shellfish available for harvesting at low tide.
Where they occur in vast quantities, and year-round, winkles and periwinkles, cockles and mussels are a useful source of food. They are not, however, particularly nutritious — especially compared to red meat and fish — and must be consumed in considerable quantities if they are to keep body and soul together. Harvesting of enough shellfish to feed a family takes time and not even a bountiful supply of oysters is enough to prevent such a diet becoming downright mundane unless other foods are available to supplement the endless supply of slimy seaborne snails. The people practising the lifestyle that would, in the twentieth century, be labelled the ‘Ertebølle culture’, were therefore using their permanent or semipermanent settlements on the coastline as bases from which they could roam inland in search of variety.
It was the mounds of empty shells that first drew the attention of archaeologists. The mound, or ‘midden’, at Ertebølle is over six feet high, 460-odd feet long and nearly 70 feet wide. It represents generations — perhaps hundreds of years — of near-continuous occupation. Secure in the knowledge they could always fall back on a reliable (if dreary and relatively labour-intensive) food supply, the hunters could roam far and wide in search of a staggering variety of more interesting alternatives: seals, dolphins, porpoises and the occasional beached whale; all manner of sea birds as well as other airborne migrants like swans and geese; fish from both salt- and freshwater locations. And in among the glamorous and exciting targets was a whole array of tasty lesser morsels ranging from birds’ eggs to seasonal fruits and from seaweeds to nuts, seeds and tubers. Taken together, the marine and inland sources of food provided the later Mesolithic populations of Scandinavia with a veritable smörgåbord. They lived in nature’s fridge-freezer — but it was well stocked.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden are, anyway, hardly uniform in terms of the habitats and environments they provide. Those pioneers spreading ever northwards were confronted both with opportunities and with obstacles as they penetrated further and further into the peninsula. All three territories were quite different, one from another, and each prompted distinct responses from her human inhabitants. Those who would in time become Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were separate peoples, with their own ways of doing things.
Denmark is by far the smallest of the three countries, the land mostly low-lying. When first encountered by hunters 10,000 years ago the interior there would have been a patchwork of deciduous woodlands dominated by birch, bogs and marshlands, lakes, rivers and streams. Relatively modern farming techniques — principally effective drainage — are responsible for the modern expanses of arable fields, and until three or four hundred years ago much of the country’s interior would have been dishearteningly soft and wet under foot. Strongly on the plus side, however, compared to its neighbours further north, Denmark has the gentlest climate — much more akin to that of the rest of northern mainland Europe.
Sweden is the largest of the three, wi
th an interior dominated by gentle, fairly low-lying contours cloaked in the main by coniferous forest. While it is true her eastern border is on territory as mountainous as anything in Norway, the landscape of most of central and southern Sweden has much in common with that of Denmark, in that is low-lying and flat. By the time the technology of farming penetrated the country it was there, around the lakes of Mälaren, Hjälmaren and Vattern, in the valley of the Göta River and on the flat lands of Halland, Skåne and Östergöland, that it took permanent root.
To my mind it is Norway that presents the landscape most people visualise when they hear the word ‘Scandinavia’. Here is the vast curl of near-impenetrable mountains and glaciers that people living further east in the peninsula would in time call the Norovegr — literally the ‘north way’ leading down to the softer lands of Denmark and the rest of the south, with its wildly and deeply indented 15,000 miles of coastline. The most northerly third of Norway is within the Arctic Circle, and while the coastline itself is comparatively hospitable and ice-free for much of the year, bathed as it is in waters warmed by the Gulf Stream, the interior is mainly mountainous. The jagged outbreak of peaks reaches, for the most part, well above the tree line — creating a barrier of naked rock and ice that presumably made land travel as near-impossible 10,000 years ago as it still does today. There is good upland pasture to be exploited; but while it is capable of supporting livestock in the summer months, it is unsuitable for crops. Settlements would eventually take hold in the small patches of low-lying land clinging to the sides of the fjords or forming at their necks, but the country was never going to be capable of supporting many people, and never did. Norway certainly offered the toughest upbringing of the three lands, and her children would learn early on that what their mother could not give them they would have to get for themselves.