Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  The situation in Scandinavia seems to have been so bad that it left a mark on religion itself, in what scholars call geomythology, whereby natural events and disasters are given meaning through their articulation in sacred tales. Geomythology is by its very nature an inexact concept: inherently unproveable, prone to confirmation bias, and hampered by a lack of precise dating in both textual and archaeological sources. However, there is a compelling case to be made for such a connection here, a paradox in which parts of the Viking Age may have originated, precisely, with the imagining of its end.

  One of the more widely known narratives of the Norse myths concerns the fall of the worlds—the cataclysmic final battle at the Ragnarök in which gods and humans will perish forever. The prelude to the Viking apocalypse is actually quite specific in its details, as recorded in a variety of poems. Here is Snorri, from his Edda:

  First of all that a winter will come called Fimbulwinter.

  Then snow will drift from all directions.

  There will then be great frosts and keen winds.

  The sun will do no good.

  There will be three of these winters together

  and no summer between.

  The description of this terrible distortion of the seasons, the Fimbulwinter, or ‘Mighty Winter’, is remarkably similar to the cycle scientists postulate for the immediate effects of the eruptions. In several of the Eddic poems, such as the Seeress’s Prophecy, the same is found:

  Black become the sun’s beams

  in the summers that follow,

  weathers all treacherous.

  A few verses later one can read again that “the sun starts to blacken”; there are clear and surprisingly precise descriptions of a dimness in the heavens as a prelude to the Ragnarök. The “ruin of the moon” comes in the form of the wolf that has hounded it since the beginning. As the sun vanishes, the stars fall into the sea, where their heat raises a great steam that covers the sky.

  There may be something similar in a neighbouring mythology, the Kalevala of the Finns, who have a legend of an ongoing darkening of the celestial bodies and the sky caused by the Mistress of the Northern Land who captures the sun and moon. The descriptions are eerily alike:

  What wonder blocks out the moon

  what fog is in the sun’s way

  that the moon gleams not at all

  and the sun shines not at all.

  [ … ]

  Still the sun is not shining

  nor the golden moon gleaming

  [ … ]

  The wealth [i.e., the crops] grows chilly,

  the herds get into a dreadful state

  strange to the birds of the air

  tiresome to mankind

  that the sun will never shine

  nor will the moon gleam.

  Another version of the text, the so-called Old Kalevala, says that the sun was gone for years:

  Now the night was perpetual,

  long, dark as pitch, a deep place unreached by the sun.

  It was night for five years, no sun for six years,

  no moon for eight years.

  It seems unlikely to be coincidental that at this time the image of the burning sun-wheel, which had been a central motif in Scandinavian sacral iconography for several thousand years, disappears. The sun had gone, and people turned to any alternative they could think of. The new offerings of gold bracteates (sun discs?) and other precious metals can be seen as crisis rituals, increasingly desperate attempts to invoke the aid of higher powers in averting the terrible fracturing of society that was only gaining momentum. This too is visible in Old Norse poetry, not only with civil strife and fighting, but also in the destruction of the framework of custom and propriety. Again from the Seeress’s Prophecy:

  6. The setting of the sun. A so-called picture-stone memorial from the island of Gotland, dating to the fifth or sixth century and showing the characteristic burning disc thought to denote the sun, with the moon and stars. During the sixth-century climate crisis, such imagery disappeared as the sun lost its power, never to return in the Iron Age art of the North. This stone is from Sanda church and stands 3.5m high. Photo: Fredrik Sterner, Gotlands Museum, used by kind permission.

  An axe age, a sword age

  – shields are riven –

  a wind age, a wolf age –

  before the world goes headlong.

  The poem specifies how brothers murder brothers, cousins “defile the bonds of kinship”—a reference to incest—and families are ruined. The crises of the mid-sixth century must have led in the North to a widespread sense of dissolution, as the social cement that bonded Scandinavian communities began to lose its effect. In many respects, the fabric of life evidently came apart.

  An obvious argument against the dust veil as the model for the Fimbulwinter is that the Scandinavian world did not, in fact, end in the mid-sixth century. But this depends on perspective and hindsight—in a very real sense, one model of society really was destroyed in the upheavals of the time. It is clear that the volcanic winter was not the sole cause, perhaps not even the primary one. But it added fuel to an existing fire and certainly played a very significant role indeed. What emerged from the chaos was in a sense a new world, founded on quite different sociopolitical principles than the old. This renewal is also reproduced in the larger myth of the Ragnarök, of which the Fimbulwinter is the beginning—but that is to get ahead of ourselves.

  Even veterans and civilian victims of modern wars would have difficulty contemplating the deaths of fully half the population, and the consequent collapse of social institutions. Today, even the worst disasters with the most appalling casualties nonetheless play out against a wider arena where these things are not happening. It is not hard to imagine how the Scandinavians of the sixth century felt that their whole world was falling into ruin, and slipping back into the primal emptiness from which it came. In a culture reliant on oral traditions for preserving and mediating history, it would not be surprising if, two hundred years later, the trauma was still clearly embedded in stories—a terrifying vision of endings and beginnings that were also part of a longer cycle. After all, the preordination of fate, the inevitability of the Ragnarök, and the gods’ knowledge of their coming doom form the constant pulse of Norse mythology.

  Not everywhere was equally affected, at both regional and local levels. In parts of eastern Norway, there are perceptible differences even from one district to the next, dependent on local topography, political structures, and the external factors of climate change. In the far north of Scandinavia, the picture is different again, perhaps due to the availability of marine resources that were less affected by the climatic events of the 530s and 540s. In some areas, there was no settlement abandonment at all, and few other signs of decline. Some areas suffered greatly, while others may actually have prospered at their expense—for example, there appears to have been a shift of power from western Norway to the eastern region around the Oslo fjord, today’s Østfold and Vestfold with their sheltered access to the sea. Some even seem to have truly thrived, seeing an opportunity and adjusting a new reality to their own ends.

  For the Scandinavians of the Migration Period, the ‘Fimbulwinter’ (in combination with other, slower-burning factors) was an ending—but also a beginning of something else, which is the key point. The new societies that built themselves up from the bleak landscape left behind by the years without summer did so on a new model, creating fundamentally different structures of power and community, and with them altered ways of life in which lay the seeds of the Viking future. Over time, then, archaeologists have come to see the transformations at the beginning of the late Iron Age not simply in terms of recovery, but more as deliberate choices, the adoption of new political strategies, and the emergence of new forms of power—specifically, the rise of militarised elites.

  This new world was Midgard, the home of the people from whose collective consciousness it emerged: the Scandinavians. But what did it look like?

  In
the popular imagination, especially when contemplated from a distance, Scandinavia is still a place of ice and snow—the archetypal frozen North. The reality is very different, with variations in landform, climate, and seasonal conditions that are among the most extreme in the world. However, in one sense the stereotype holds true, in that it was the effects of the last Ice Age that created the landscape we still recognise today.

  In all of Europe, Scandinavia was one of the areas where the glaciers lingered longest, burying the land under a mile thickness of ice even when much of the Continent was settled by mobile hunters, fishers, and gatherers. As the glaciers began their long melt around thirteen thousand years ago, when the North began to warm, it was their retreat that scoured out the fjords, rivers, and lakes that were to become so characteristic of the Vikings’ homelands. This also set in motion another ongoing transformation that would continue for millennia, manifested in changes to the relative level of the sea. As the glaciers melted, they released water into the surrounding ocean at the same time as the relief from their immense weight caused the land itself to rebound and rise. The rate of change fluctuated and also differed by region, but the net result was a steady drop in relative sea level: since the time of the Vikings, parts of central Sweden have risen some five metres above the then waterline. This means that the people of the time experienced rivers that could take more boat traffic farther inland than these same waterways can today, deeper harbours offering better access to larger vessels, and lakes that have since become dry land. The process continues even now, as central Sweden rises at a rate of a few millimetres per year. In the Viking Age and the preceding centuries, the landscape was in places substantially different to its appearance today and had a great many more open bodies of water.

  Of all the areas of Scandinavia, it is present-day Norway that most clearly bears the imprint of the ice. As the glaciers slowly moved westwards, they scored deep valleys into the bedrock, which then flooded and became the fjords that remain the defining feature of the Norwegian terrain. Over more than twenty thousand kilometres of indented shoreline, these products of the last glaciation have made Norway a supremely maritime environment, its population always largely dependent on the sea for their livelihood. Offshore, chains of small islands created sheltered passages that protected shipping from the worst of the ocean weather and turned the sea-lanes into a major transport route. The bulk of Norway’s landmass is occupied by mountains that run in successive ranges to form a great north-south spine of high ground along the length of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The climate there has always been difficult and inhospitable, with lethally cold winters and deep snow cover that remains for many months of each year interspersed with cycles of frost and thaw. In the far north of the country is a treeless zone of tundra, but farther south the fjords were bordered by woodland.

  Sweden was naturally separated from Norway to the west by the mountain ranges. Spanning the Arctic Circle in the high latitudes, some 60 percent of the country is known today as Norrland (literally ‘Northland’) and lies within the taiga zone that ultimately stretches far to the east and on into the plains of Siberia. The landscape here is characterised by rolling hills covered with vast coniferous forests that made the region virtually impassable in the Viking Age. In northern Sweden, agrarian settlement was therefore largely restricted to the banks of the rivers that cut sweeping valleys eastwards to the sea—a pattern of subsistence broadly similar to that found along the Norwegian fjords.

  In the central and southern regions of Sweden, the coniferous forests thinned out and merged with deciduous species, creating a more open woodland environment more akin to parts of the European Continent. Fertile clay flatlands overlying granite bedrock form the agricultural heart of the country, which is dotted with lakes that again resulted from the effects of glaciation. Gravel ridges left by the ice formed natural transport routes alongside networks of navigable waterways and rivers. The climate here was very strongly seasonal with a remarkable annual variation. In the late Viking Age, the time of the Medieval Warm Period, it would not have been unusual for a person living in central Sweden to experience a temperature range of fifty to sixty degrees Celsius in the course of a year, from snowy winter to blazing-hot summer.

  The landscape of Denmark is markedly different from that of its northern cousins, consisting almost entirely of low-lying agricultural plains with light but rich soils, dotted with lakes, bogs, and marshes. In the Viking Age, much of the region’s gently rolling terrain was covered with deciduous forest, but it was nonetheless a core producer within the Scandinavian agrarian economy. Although different in scale and topography, Denmark supported a maritime society just as extensive as Norway, and nowhere in the country is more than forty-five kilometres from the sea. Especially in the north, deep fjords penetrate the land, although they are bounded by gentle hills rather than mountains. Despite lacking the large game of its northern neighbours, Denmark combined the resources of the sea with the extensive cereal production made possible by the fertile soils of the plains.

  During the Migration Period of the fifth and sixth centuries, it is estimated that some forty to fifty polities became established along the coastal regions and inland agricultural centres of Scandinavia. They can be traced in the archaeology, correlated (up to a point) with very dim reflections in later written sources, and linked to geographical areas largely defined by topography.

  It is hard to know what to call them, these little centres of power. The first native ethnonym—a name for a people—that we have from Norway comes from the Viking Age itself and, in fact, from the first description of Scandinavia that has survived from one of its inhabitants. This is preserved in a remarkable English document that records the conversations between Alfred, the king of Wessex, and a visitor to his court in the 880s, as mentioned above in the prologue. Named there as ‘Ohthere’, he was almost certainly called Óttarr in his own language and seems to have come from the region around the Lofoten islands in Arctic Norway. According to the English scribe who recorded the encounter, Óttarr called his country Norðveg, which in Old Norse would have been approximately the same and retained the same meaning: ‘the North Way’. This was quite literally the passage one followed to the north, clearly referring to a marine route along the coast of Norway. Those who lived there, Óttarr’s own people, were the ‘Northmen’, and exactly the same sense is retained in the modern terms for ‘Norway’ and ‘Norwegians’. In Óttarr’s words, filtered through the Old English text:

  He said that the land of the Northmen was very long and very narrow. All that they can either graze or plough lies by the sea; and even that is very rocky in some places; to the east, and alongside the cultivated land, lie wild mountains.

  It is hard to think of a more succinctly accurate description.

  Unlike Norway, there is no known universal ethnonym used by the population living in what is now modern-day Sweden to describe their land, or themselves, during the first millennium CE. There is some evidence to suggest that both political and probably also ethnic identities were regionally oriented in the centuries immediately preceding the Viking Age. South-central Sweden, essentially the territories south of Norrland, was broadly divided between two folk groups, although it is difficult to accurately find a name that reflects the nature of their polities. Farthest south, spanning the great lake lands of Vänern and Vättern, and bordering on the forest barrier of Småland, were the Gautar or Götar (sometimes anglicised, problematically, as Goths). They occupied the region of Götaland, broadly reflected today in the eastern and western provinces of that name.

  North of them, centred on the Mälar Valley and the extensive plains bordering it, were the Svíar, spelled today as Svear. There are many forms of the name, but one that has found common use is the Old West Norse Svíþjóð, the ‘Svíar people’, a term sometimes employed for their territory, Svealand. These are the people who came to give their name to the whole country (in modern Swedish, Sverige literally ‘the kingdom of the Sv
ear’). Despite nominal unification, Sweden would remain politically fragmented along these lines well into the Middle Ages, and the sociopolitical relations between Svealand and Götaland remains a divisive issue generating a degree of tension even today.

  In all this, the political structures of the Viking Age in Sweden differ significantly from those of Norway, where the process of political unification began at a much earlier date, and even more so from those of Denmark, which seems to have achieved a degree of social and political cohesion long before its northern neighbours. The earliest record of the name Denamearc comes from the same English text mentioned above: the Norwegian Óttarr’s description of his homelands and travels on the occasion of his meeting with King Alfred. The Latin term for its inhabitants, Dani (‘Danes’), has longer antecedents, and it is clear from archaeological finds that a regional identity formed relatively early.

  Part of the reason for this lies with geography, in the connection of the Jylland Peninsula with mainland Europe and the archipelago of more than four hundred islands that guards the entrance to the Baltic through the Skagerrak and Kattegat straits. This whole area developed very close social links at least half a millennium prior to the Viking Age, with a broadly coherent culture that extended from Jylland through the larger Danish islands of Sjælland and Fyn and onto the mainland of what is now southern Sweden. This latter region was separated from the central Swedish lake lands by a natural border of dense forest and hills, essentially today the province of Småland. The area to the south, consisting of Skåne and parts of Blekinge and Halland provinces, was considered to be culturally and politically part of Denmark until well after the Middle Ages and was not formally incorporated into the Swedish nation until the late 1600s.