by Neil Oliver
During the first millennium BC the crisis in the world of bronze was reaching fever pitch all across northern and western Europe. Increasingly the metal was being dumped — quite literally. In France archaeologists have found pits containing tens of thousands of bronze axe heads cast aside even as the Bronze Age itself drew to a close. In most cases the axes had been discarded as soon as they were cast, their sockets still plugged with the clay from their moulds. Often the metal of which they are made has been deliberately corrupted with large quantities of lead so that they are brittle and useless anyway. Archaeologists have been working for a generation and more to come up with a satisfactory explanation for this seemingly senseless waste.
With or without a solution to the problem, the facts are fairly clear. As the last millennium BC wore on, bronze lost its magical hold over society. By around 500 BC in Scandinavia, tools made of iron began to replace those made of bronze. Like much else in the north, the new technology was imported from elsewhere in Europe, but for the first time the raw materials were readily available at home. Bog-iron, as it is known, was common throughout much of Denmark, Norway and Sweden — ready to be collected and used in the production of all manner of weapons and tools. It was not of the highest quality but then it did not have to be. The naturally occurring ore was riddled with impurities, but these could be removed. Having first been crushed into a gritty powder, the ore was heated in a furnace built of clay. Temperatures capable of nudging the metal into a molten state were beyond the technology of the Early Iron Age, but the blacksmiths learnt to use charcoal — which burns hotter than wood — to generate temperatures sufficient to persuade the powdered ore to come together as an unprepossessing lump known as a ‘bloom’.
The smiths would then use fires agitated by bellows to heat the bloom to a point where the impurities — known collectively as slag — became liquid once more. These were then driven from the bloom by constant hammering until eventually the heat, coupled with sheer human effort, conspired to produce a lump of ‘wrought’ iron. As long as the newly purified iron was kept red- or white-hot, it could be shaped into whatever tool was required.
In the city of Herning, in Midtjylland, in central Denmark, I experienced some small part of the reality of early Scandinavian iron-working. Archaeologist Martin Olesen showed me just how commonplace bog ore actually is in parts of Denmark by taking me for a walk beside a stream just a few miles from the city centre. The stream was cut through a landscape that can fairly be described as typical Denmark — low-lying, often soft underfoot and cut by countless small waterways. A closer look at the sediments in the bank of the stream revealed layers the colour of rust — and rust is effectively what it was. Martin explained that iron-bearing groundwater, from deep underground, reaches the surface in the form of a spring. Contact with the air — and, more specifically, the oxygen within it — causes oxidation of the iron. The iron forms into a hard crust and appears within peat bogs as solid, irregular-shaped rust-coloured lumps.
After just a few minutes’ digging into the stream bank with a trowel, we unearthed several pieces of bog ore. Back in the grounds of Martin’s university in Herning, some of his colleagues were already hard at work toiling in front of a home-made clay furnace. The bog ore we had found was roasted first of all in a wood fire. Judged to be dry enough after some hours, it was then transferred into the furnace itself and covered over with the first of many layers of charcoal. It was a bitterly cold February afternoon — and to add to the discomfort of it all a heavy rain began to fall. There was a cutting wind as well but none of it was of consequence to the furnace. Squatting in its pit in the lawn, it breathed and roared like a living thing. Two of Martin’s students were conscientiously pumping away at bellows positioned to push air into the heart of the flames, but in truth the wind was doing the job for them.
Despite the assistance of the weather, iron-smelting is a labour that consumes time most of all. The transformation of ore into iron bloom is the stuff of hours and all the while the magic was under way, the human helpers had to endure wind, rain, cold — and eventually the darkness of a winter’s night as well. Their faces and hands were blackened by smoke and soot, their boots and clothes slathered in mud. As the hours wore on, all vestiges of their twenty-first-century selves seemed to dissolve until by the end of the process they might as well have been creatures of the Iron Age — timeless servants of the furnace.
Iron offered another crucial advantage over bronze. Once a bronze tool was broken, it had to be melted down and recast. But iron tools could be repaired. A smith could simply heat the broken pieces over his fire and then hammer them back together again. Here then was a material altogether more amenable, literally more flexible than its fickle predecessor. It was a technology quite different from that used to create bronze objects — and since the ore was readily available it freed people from the long-distance obligations that had been integral to obtaining bronze. Rather than being a metal of the elite, iron was a commonplace metal of the people; and once again the Scandinavian smiths finessed their technique until they were capable of producing some of the best iron tools and weapons in Europe.
In the schoolboy approach to the great ages of ancient history — Stone, Bronze and Iron — the assumption is that each new material must have been found superior and that it quickly superseded whatever had gone before, so that bronze was found preferable to stone, and then iron was found preferable to bronze, and so on. We now know the truth is more complicated. To begin with at least, iron tools and weapons were not necessarily even as good as those made of bronze, far less superior to them. The big advantage of iron, however, was the ubiquity of the raw material. Why bother trading for distant sources of copper and bronze when a perfectly good knife or sickle might be fashioned from bog ore collected from the shallows of a nearby lake?
Archaeologists have been struggling with the evidence for the past 30 years and are no closer to a consensus. Whatever else, the birth of iron was protracted and painful. It is also a crucial moment in the story of Scandinavia — because it was the Iron Age that would, in time, give birth to the Vikings themselves.
Environmental evidence suggests the transition from bronze to iron took place during a time of deteriorating climate. In Scandinavia as elsewhere, this likely meant the farmers’ fields became less productive, and it is easy to imagine how people’s standard of living would have been lowered as a result. Archaeologists look back on the Bronze Age in Britain as a kind of climatic ‘golden age’ — with temperatures generally warmer than those of later periods, long productive summers and gentle winters. It is thought British farmers then had never had it so good. The same may well have been true in other parts of Europe as well. The situation in Scandinavia — particularly the more northerly parts — was probably somewhat different. The weather and the environment were always slightly harder on the people there, less conducive to farming. So when the climate took a downward turn, from around the middle of the first millennium BC, circumstances that were already difficult may have become harder still.
Because traces of Iron Age settlement in Scandinavia are as scant as those for the Age of Bronze, it is extremely difficult to know for sure. What archaeological evidence we do have, however, suggests people continuing to live in longhouses built of large upright timbers and walls of wattle and daub. At Grentoft, in western Jutland, generations of farmers lived together in a village comprising, at its peak, around 30 houses. The homes were of varying sizes and the archaeological evidence makes it clear livestock and people lived under the same roof. By around 200 BC some of the farms were enclosed within an encircling fence that set them apart from their neighbours.
Just over a mile from Grentoft, at a place called Grønbjerg, archaeologists found traces of a much smaller settlement that had been occupied during the same period. It comprised just two longhouses and an adjoining smithy — suggesting there was no uniformity of village size during the early part of the Iron Age.
Yet another variation was found at
Hodde, in central Jutland, where a farming community had apparently grown around a large and imposing longhouse surrounded by its own timber palisade. Eventually there were nearly 30 longhouses at Hodde, but all of them smaller than the original building and presumably housing people who owed some kind of allegiance to the family occupying ‘the big house’. Every house had its own store and workshop and neat fences separated each property from its neighbours.
Despite the variations between settlements it is possible to get a sense of the prevailing atmosphere (at least in Denmark, where most of the excavated remains are located) in the first centuries of the Iron Age. The Bronze Age had witnessed the rise of an elite — those capable of controlling surplus food and other commodities to ensure an ever-increasing supply of the bronze and gold that marked them out as special. They took most of it to their graves or offered it up to their gods, but always the intention was to make clear they stood apart from the mass of their fellows.
I spent the night apart from my fellow crew members for the duration of one memorable night in Denmark, in February 2012. During the filming of Vikings I reluctantly accepted an opportunity to sleep — all alone — in a carefully reconstructed Bronze Age house. The fact that it happened to be the night of my 45th birthday only added to the strangeness of the experience. It wasn’t just any Bronze Age reconstruction either, but a massive timber longhouse built a stone’s throw from the giant burial mounds of Borum Eshøj — the same that yielded the family group now housed in the National Museum in Copenhagen.
With the day’s filming complete, the crew packed their gear back into the cars and headed off for a night in a hotel some miles away. As I watched their vehicles’ tail lights vanish into the darkness, it started to rain. Not long after the rain began, a wind picked up — so that by the time I closed the heavy wooden door of my own billet I had the distinct and unsettling sensation of being the only person left alive in the world.
One of the house’s modern caretakers had earlier informed me the builders of the place — a team of enthusiasts working nearly 20 years ago — had buried the body of a dog beneath the threshold. He didn’t elaborate on quite how the dog had come to meet its end, but he seemed to imply that the intention had been to ensure the home was protected for ever by a benevolent guardian. I was in two minds about being accompanied by the spirit of a departed Scandinavian hound as I set about banking up the two log fires that would provide me with most of my light and all of my warmth for the next 10 hours.
My bed was a pile of reindeer- and sheepskins, and I kept on most of my clothes as I climbed gratefully into the four-season sleeping bag that was my only concession to twenty-first-century sensibilities. And so it began, my Bronze Age night. I lay in the firelight, listening to the logs crackling and settling ever deeper into their own embers. The wind and rain laid siege to the thatched roof and the wattle and daub walls and my thoughts drifted — first and fleetingly to the dead dog buried beneath the doorstep, and then, for longer, to those folk that had lived there long ago. It is impossible to recreate the past, of course, or truly to experience even a moment of it, but at least I was lying on a hard clay floor, listening to the dying breaths of fires on the hearth and breathing air laden with woodsmoke. That much would have been achingly familiar to the mother, father and son who lived and died at Borum Eshøj the best part of 4,000 years ago.
I had expected a sleepless night but in fact I slept straight through. Waking up in a Bronze Age house, however, was a lot less comfortable than going to sleep in one. Danes and other Scandinavians talk a lot about a concept they call hygge. It is almost impossible to translate and, anyway, almost every person you ask has a different idea as to the precise meaning of the term. From what I have gathered over the years it seems to me to involve a deep sense of cosy warmth and safety — the sensation that all is right with the world and that one is in just the right place at just the right time. I have even wondered if our own word ‘hug’ might derive from some of the same idea. Lying in the fire-lit dark the night before, I had been overcome by a feeling of well-being. Impervious to the wind and rain, warmed by a crackling, snapping fire, I had only felt safe. The absence of all other people, all other distractions (once I had turned off my mobile phone) had only added to the splendid isolation. Whatever might have been happening elsewhere, I was blamelessly oblivious to it. In as much as it is possible to be, I had been lost in time. Hygge.
But the morning … I have to say I awoke, around dawn, as far away from well-being as it is possible to get. The fires had long since died and the interior of the house, exposed to the grey, wintry light of early morning, looked and felt as lifeless as the cold ashes piled on the hearth. Most depressing of all was the smell — the cloyingly rank miasma of last night’s smoke. It clung to my skin, my hair, my clothes, my bedding — everything. I have never wanted a shower so much in my life — nor been so far from having one. Without a fire — or any other source of heat — there was no chance of even a hot drink to improve my mood. The only option available seemed to be a breath of fresh air, and so I piled on all the layers of clothing I could find before opening the door and venturing outside.
We had arrived at Borum Eshøj the day before, in the semi-darkness of dusk, and so had had no opportunity to explore beyond the house itself. Now the significance of the place, its appropriateness as the location for a reimagined Bronze Age house, was clear to see. Rising from the fields in front of me were three huge turf-covered mounds. The tallest of them, I knew, had once been the resting place of the mother, father and son I had spent time with in the museum in Copenhagen just the day before. Rather than wait for the return of the television crew I walked briskly across the sodden field — with the intention of getting my circulation going, if nothing else. As I drew close to the larger of the mounds, I could hardly help but be struck by the scale of them. Time has eroded and lowered them — and nineteenth-century antiquarians have further diminished them by burrowing clumsily inside — but that they are still massive even now is testament to how mighty they were originally. Archaeologists have calculated that the family’s grave would once have been in the order of 115 feet across and 30 feet tall at the highest point. It comprised some one and a half million individually cut turves — the equivalent of 14 football pitches’ worth of topsoil. Those who commissioned such monuments to their own lives and deaths were powerful indeed. Rather than scratching a living from the land, they were masters and mistresses of it. Just one of the Borum Eshøj mounds would have kept a team of 150 people busy for as long as three or even four months. Clearly the deaths of people able to command, feed and shelter so many people for such a long time would have resonated far and wide.
The three mounds visible today are impressive enough, but in the middle of the second millennium BC they would have been surrounded by around 40 more. Situated on an area of relatively elevated land, they would have been visible from miles away. Hundreds more would have been dotted across the landscape and archaeologists have found evidence for around 45,000 Bronze Age burial mounds in Denmark alone.
It was bitterly cold on top of the mound. A brisk, chill wind was blowing and it was with some relief that I spotted, approaching along the road beyond the house, the cars carrying the crew. Leaving the Bronze Age behind, I climbed back down onto level ground and set off to meet them.
The world of bronze had been one dominated by a clearly defined elite — those with the power and the will to control resources like locally produced food surplus and luxury imports like foreign metalwork. The early part of the Iron Age was quite different. It appears to have been a time when people lived quieter, less ostentatious lives. Climate change was making life harder, concentrating minds and hands. Rather than bronze from far afield, people relied now on tools made from raw materials collected close to home. After millennia of connections to the wider world — and of a steady flow of foreign ideas and influences — the Scandinavian world seems to have drawn in upon itself and become altogether more selfrelian
t. It may have been a time of consolidation, when society adjusted to altered circumstances and looked inwards rather than out.
At least one tradition continued, however: that of making offerings to the gods. It had begun at least as early as the Neolithic period with deposits of tools and trinkets, as well as the occasional animal sacrifice. During the Bronze Age it was about weapons, and also domestic items like cauldrons and cooking pots. Often those items were deliberately broken — cauldrons crushed, sword blades bent double. It would have been plain to all who witnessed the destruction that those items were no longer for the use of people; now and for ever they belonged to the gods instead. But as the Iron Age got under way, the appetites of the gods grew sinister indeed.
Maybe the deteriorating climate seemed like a punishment from above. The incessant rain made the soil heavy, leaching it of its nutrients so that crops failed to thrive. All was doom, gloom and desperation. It may well have occurred to some that the time had come to make a new peace with the unhappy gods — even if it meant paying a higher price. If things were no longer enough to ensure the goodwill of unseen, all-powerful forces, then perhaps life itself would have to be given away.
Whatever the explanation it is certainly true that the first centuries of the Iron Age were a time when Danish men and women were being put to death by their fellows so that their bodies might be offered up as gifts to the gods. Lakes and bogs had been deemed suitable for other votive offerings — swords and cauldrons and so on — and it was to those same places that the victims of human sacrifice were taken. Tacitus himself recorded evidence of the gory spectacle among the Germanic Semnones tribe, during the first century AD:
At an appointed time all tribes meet … in a forest consecrated by their ancestors, surrounded by fear, sacred from the dawn of time. There, on behalf of those assembled, they celebrate the commencement of their barbaric cult with a human sacrifice.