Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  Beyond the three main areas of Scandinavia and their coastal archipelagos, each of them divided into numerous small polities at the start of the Viking Age, there were also a number of major Baltic islands that supported their own distinctive cultures but were nonetheless part of the broader Nordic sphere. These include Bornholm, to the east of Danish Fyn; the islands of Öland and Gotland lying off the southern and central shores of Sweden; and the extended chain of the Åland islands between Sweden and what is now Finland. All enjoyed temperate climates suitable for agricultural settlement, and all were well-situated within maritime networks that extended across the Baltic and beyond.

  This book is largely concerned with the majority population of what we now call Scandinavia. Problems of terminology and labelling aside, the Vikings were speakers of Indo-European languages, with ultimately north Continental origins, living in the territories of modern Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. But they were not alone there. Although they do not play a primary role here, the semi-nomadic Sámi people ranged widely as hunters, fishers, and gatherers and interacted extensively with their ‘Germanic’ neighbours.

  The origins of the Sámi are unknown, although genetic and linguistic evidence suggests they migrated northwards from southern Europe into Scandinavia during the Stone Age. Much energy has been wasted on the acrimonious debate as to who ‘arrived first’ in the region and thus which of the Nordic or Sámi peoples may lay claim to being the indigenous population of Scandinavia. It is clear not least from language that the two groups had fundamentally different identities and cultures. In recent years, there have been suggestions that their ethnicity developed much later during the Iron Age, effectively as a division between a settled agrarian existence and a mobile hunting-based economy. However, although these different subsistence strategies certainly coexisted, there is no evidence that they were mutually exclusive and even less to suggest that they represent in themselves some kind of Sámi-Norse dichotomy.

  By the Viking Age, it is entirely certain that the Norse and Sámi had both been established in Scandinavia for millennia. The Sámi homeland today, known as Sápmi, ignores the geopolitical boundaries of the Nordic countries and stretches across the northern areas of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, with a small extension into Russia on the Kola Peninsula. In the Viking Age, however, the Sámi ranged much farther south. Burials conducted with what would elsewhere clearly be understood as Sámi rituals, the characteristic remains of circular tent encampments with central stone hearths, and isolated finds of objects decorated with art styles common among the Sámi have been found around Trøndelag county in the Norwegian central region and even just to the north of Oslo, and in central Sweden they were present in Uppsala. Identity is a more complex matter than patterns of ornament or the burial rites of the dead, but in combination the mass of data is compelling, especially contrasted with the surrounding settlements of equally typical ‘Norse’ type.

  Some Sámi herded domesticated reindeer (the animal called caribou in North America) and used every part of the beast, including its milk for daily sustenance and ultimately its meat and the raw materials provided by its body. Others hunted and trapped for food and furs, or fished the rivers, lakes, and coasts. The Sámi were people of the mountains, as in their popular image today, but also of the waterways, the boreal taiga forests, and the tundra to the north.

  Above all, the Sámi were people of the drum—the sacred instrument that was the primary tool of their noaidi, or what anthropologists would call a shaman. Their spiritual beliefs and practices were deeply connected to those of other circumpolar cultures, and differed markedly from those of the Scandinavians. In the early modern period when missionaries tried to convert the Sámi to Christianity, often by brutal force and the intentional destruction of their ancient spiritual values, a word was coined to represent the rapidly fading past of the old ways, encapsulating traditions that went back to the Viking Age and beyond: goabdesájgge (in the Lule Sámi language), the ‘Drum Time’. Throughout the narratives of this book, it should always be kept in mind that the time of the Vikings was also the time of the drums.

  Viking-Age Scandinavia thus supported two distinctive populations living in close proximity and in relative cooperation—occasionally in the same settlements or even households—but following their own ways of life and employing substantially different kinds of material culture. The Sámi seem to have taken little active role in the political consolidation of the North, although they were integrated in its economy. However, support from their communities in the forests and mountains may have been a critical factor in maintaining stability and a grip on power.

  In Norway, the early polities centred on fjords, with a view towards control of the sea lanes, and on the small strips of farmland along the valleys. In Sweden, their areas were larger around the central and southern plains and lakes, but smaller and concentrated on the river mouths in the north, straddling the water routes down from the mountains. In Denmark—a region both spatially smaller and flatter, and also closer to the great power blocs of the Continent—the fledgling polities were larger still, following the shadowy push towards faster political cohesion that can be sensed there earlier in the Iron Age.

  These realms in miniature seem to have been conceptualised as kingdoms, but very small ones to modern eyes. A key factor in the new structures of power was the right to own land, which in turn hinged on how that land was obtained. In the social order that rose after the ‘Fimbulwinter’, land tenure seems to have been newly concentrated into the hands of the few rather than the many and then parcelled out in a form of tenancy. Absentee landholding seems to have begun well before the dust veil in 536, but clearly accelerated afterwards. A transition of this kind may have occurred by force, or perhaps vacant farms—empty because their inhabitants were either dead or gone—were simply appropriated, another context in which the passage of arms may have provided its own legitimacy.

  This de facto seizure of landed wealth was then enshrined in a complex layering of consolidation. It can be seen in the construction of great halls and ‘royal’ residences for the new ‘monarchs’. It appears in the allocation of estates to trusted military retainers, whose loyal violence provided both the pathway to power and the ultimate guarantee of its retention. It can be perceived in the energetic support given to foreign and domestic exchange and markets, which provided luxuries needed to pay the retinues. It has left a trace in the creation of spurious ancestral traditions of rightful office—associated with the gods and mythical forebears, supported by religious rituals that honoured such divinities of war. And at its mortal conclusion, it was manifested in the building of burial mounds greater than any ever seen before, a permanent record of power unavoidably established in the landscape for all to witness. All this effort focussed on individuals, the self-appointed representatives of collectives that were in part their own creations, and as the first steps in the founding of family dynasties to carry them into the future.

  The vacuum of Roman power that had once served as a political role model was consciously filled by these new elites, who even emulated the symbolic language of the former imperial authority—the divine lineages, portraiture, and a Scandinavian version of their grandiose monuments. This is not surprising because they or their immediate ancestors were well acquainted with the Empire and its visual world. They were never entirely cut off from what Rome became. Power in the North became synonymous with its display, in a visual language crude enough to make its meaning self-evident to anyone.

  Given the ecological pressures of the sixth century and their aftermath, there is an entirely literal sense in which the new elites were products of their environment. More to the point, every self-styled Scandinavian ‘king’ thereafter made his environment an extension of himself, as he and his militias stamped their imprint on land and people alike. In the two hundred years immediately preceding the Viking Age, some version of this system was built up across the North and was augmented and consolidated by each success
ive ruler in every petty kingdom. This process also embraced all their war leaders, their men, and their families and tenants. Such rulers and peoples populate the poetry of the Viking Age, ancestral histories and tales that kept the past close. Although it is an Old English text, the epic of Beowulf tells an exclusively Scandinavian story of the Danes and Swedes and Geats, of their wars and rivalries, and of the honour-fixated culture that sustained them. Muddled echoes of the same shared memories, and sometimes the same individuals, appear in the Icelandic legendary sagas. In every case, the main protagonists are members of family dynasties: the Ynglingas, the Skjöldungas, the Völsungas, and others. They were the nouveau riche and self-made men of the late Iron Age, who had fought their way to power and made tiny worlds in their image. One historian has called such warlords “violent chancers”, and he is right.

  This way of life became encoded in monumental landscapes of mounds and great halls of which remnants can still be seen today at places such as Gamla (that is, ‘Old’) Uppsala in Swedish Uppland, Borre in Norwegian Vestfold, and Lejre near Roskilde in Denmark. They represent a confluence of factors familiar from more recent times, especially an emphasis on exclusivity and the importance of membership within a defined group. Their militaristic ethos thrived on notions of honourable companionship, bound through obligation and oaths of mutual support, and in a sense represented a refinement of identities that had been present in Scandinavia since at least the Bronze Age. Built around what one scholar has called “the warrior’s beauty”, it combined a violent aesthetic with sworn loyalty and a dazzling material culture of killing.

  The royal mounds at Uppsala were all cremation burials, and thus the riches they once contained have been reduced to burnt fragments, but archaeologists can still reconstruct the golden collars, helmets, weapons mounted with garnets, and imported luxuries. From other sites, such as Högom in Norrland, it is possible to see the clothes they wore: whole suits of bright red cloth, with gold buttons, and gold and silver thread bordering the cuffs and hems. It would have caught the light as they moved; this was not clothing for the modest.

  A few kilometres away from Uppsala is the grave-field of Valsgärde, the burial site of what appears to be an extended family group over the entire Iron Age. Some fifteen funerary boats have been found buried there, one per generation, with magnificent regalia: enormous shields, sometimes three to a grave, their boards covered with decorated mounts in the form of animals and interlace; heavy war spears; and gilded weapons decorated with the characteristic red-on-gold patterns of cloisonné garnets.

  The ultimate symbol of the social code was the ring-sword, mentioned in the poetry and represented by many archaeological finds—a weapon with a literal gold ring locked into its hilt. This was the token of loyalty in battle, sworn and accepted, the mark of a war commander. In the great boat burials of the sixth and seventh centuries, most impressive of all are the helmets, each a war mask covering the face (and sometimes the entire head and neck in a curtain of mail). Their surfaces are composed of dozens of small plaques, each decorated in relief with scenes from Northern mythology. There are tiny fighting men on foot and horseback, monsters, winged creatures, shape-shifters, and what seem to be the war gods themselves. These men were a walking illustration of their ideology. The graves also contain the remains of fighting dogs, with spiked collars and chain leashes, as well as hunting birds trained to the wrist. The boats were surrounded by slaughtered animals, such as horses and cattle, which must have soaked the ground with their blood. Even the vessels themselves were decorated, the gunwales bristling with curving spirals of iron, perhaps leading forward as the mane of a figurehead dragon.

  These were men whom nobody would fail to recognise, who stood out from the crowd wherever they went—a literal embodiment of hierarchy.

  In Sweden, the first of these sites to be discovered—the boat burial field at Vendel, in Uppland—has given its name to a whole time period, c. 550–750, the two centuries that led into the Viking Age. Terminologies vary; in Norway the Vendel Period is known as the Merovingian, while in Denmark it is combined with the Migration Period as the Germanic Iron Age.

  The new social order implicated everyone in the community, not just the predominantly male elites. At Valsgärde, the boat graves were interspersed with cremations and chamber burials, many of which contained women who were interred with high-status objects similar to those of the ship-lords. It is only modern prejudice that sees the ‘spectacular’ boat burials as being of greater importance than the others. Indeed, the poetry of these kingdoms explicitly celebrates the power of queens, the leading lights of the halls, bearing drinks in jewelled mead cups to the self-styled heroes.

  The scale of these mortuary landscapes also needs to be appreciated. In the central Swedish provinces of Uppland, Södermanland, and Västmanland alone—the territories bordering Lake Mälaren and thus the gateway to the Baltic—there are nearly three hundred monumental burial mounds more than twenty metres in diameter. This is far larger than any conventional barrow, and these graves are the tombs of the new ‘kings’, their elite supporters, and the highest-ranking members of their retinues. The pattern is repeated in the west of Sweden, and on a much smaller scale in the north.

  Mapping these burials allows us to estimate the size of the retinues that the warlords could command. Judging from the grave mounds, the Uppsala region could probably support forty to fifty leaders of the kind buried in the Valsgärde boats, backed up with a host of perhaps five to eight hundred warriors. If they wanted to take to the water, some fifty or so Valsgärde-type boats would be required to transport them. This was the ‘army’ that the Uppsala kings brought with them to war.

  There are also aspects of the monumental burials that raise other questions, as some of the great boat burials contain Sámi tent covers made of birch bark with characteristic burnt decoration. These were used to swathe some of the funerary ships; from the Sámi perspective, this would turn the whole vessel into a burial wrapped according to their practice. It is hard to know what this means—perhaps a diplomatic gift, like a foreign dignitary laying a wreath at a modern politician’s funeral, or something more interactive? A close relationship between the Scandinavians and the Sámi at the highest levels nonetheless seems established.

  The social transformation of the North extended into the homes of the farmers, even the layout and design of the buildings changing to fit the new norms of domestic life. There was a shift from open-air communal feasting and the use of cooking pits to the interior culture of the hall, which was replicated on a smaller scale in the houses of the countryfolk and their families.

  Built architecture was especially crucial to the new ideologies of the North, as these new dramas of power required expansive performative spaces to enact them. The rise of hall culture can be traced from this time. Essentially a development of the traditional Scandinavian longhouse, the living area was redefined as a communal space made for public display. Cooking areas were partitioned off at one end, out of sight, while the private quarters of the lord were at the other, also screened from the main hall itself. These structures had different entrances for guests of different rank, and sometimes reception areas or vestibules where armour and weapons could be removed before admittance.

  Long fireplaces ran down the centre of the hall, with platforms on either side where guests would sit on benches. Later, after the fittings had been cleared, they would bed down to sleep there. Either at one end of the room, or at the middle of a long side, was the high seat of the hall’s lord—the focal point. Guests were welcome; indeed, their presence was partly the point, bound up in the grim logic of obligatory and reciprocal hospitality that was part of the elite code. These were arenas for mutual recognition, for the telling of tales over feasts and drink (especially drink), for the giving and receiving of rings and other tokens of largesse with which the lord controlled his men, who in turn enforced his wishes among the people. Such buildings were also highly gendered places, replete with sy
mbolism linked to the roles of men and women.

  The hall had its own verbal currency, a special language of self-honour and commissioned public praise that best mediated the messages of power the building was designed to convey. The hall was the primary milieu of poetry and of its masters, the skalds. In a sophisticated oral society such as that of Vendel, and later Viking, Scandinavia, one of the poets’ main tasks was to find memorable language in which to distill what was necessary to know, enabling people to retain what they needed of their collective past. This project grew with time, part of the self-perpetuating mechanisms that kept these societies in motion. Today we might ask what a poem ‘means’, but this would itself be meaningless for the work of the skalds. In sketching their complex word-pictures, they simply allowed the things they related to be more truly themselves.

  There is a sense in which this story-world of the late Iron Age depended for its vitality on the stage set of the dwelling, the wavering circle of light around the hearth—whether in a farmer’s longhouse or in the epic space of the hall. Indoors was the closeness of tellers and listeners, and outside, the dark. In the greatest early medieval poem of all, Beowulf, a famous building of this kind is almost a central character. Here, the hall is civilisation, light, fame, honour, memory, history, and joy—beyond its doors, and in the poem literally smashing through them, are the monsters of chaos and the night.

  Many of the Old Norse poems set out detailed, complex narratives of kings’ deeds and heroes’ prowess, often contrasted with the less worthy acts of inferior men. They functioned through many elaborate metres and rhyme schemes, through imagery and wordplay. There is also the richly textured world of similes, or ‘kennings’, in which two or more nouns and descriptors are combined to evoke an object visually or metaphorically. Thus, the ocean was ‘the whale road’, a ship was a ‘wave-horse’, and a person’s thoughts were ‘waves on the shore of the mind-sea’. Trees were frequent metaphors for humans, almost certainly playing on Ash and Elm. In this poetic imagery, people were the ‘trunks’ that supported other things—thus men could be spoken of as ‘trees of weapons’, women as ‘trees of jewels’, and so on, while arms and wrists were ‘branches’ on which objects could alight like birds. When describing the play of light on weapons or armour, they saw it as being “like the sun on a field of broken ice”. Again, anyone doubting the sophistication of the late Iron Age Scandinavian mind need only turn to its poetry, an inexhaustible fount of wonder. Such skills had a myth all their own.