The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  King Harald made for Thorir’s ship, knowing him to be a terrible berserk, and very brave. The fighting was desperate on either side. Then the king ordered his berserks, two men named Ulfhednar, forward. No iron could hurt them, and when they charged nothing could withstand them. The whole ship from stem to stern was cleared and her fastenings were cut, so that she dropped out of the line of battle.[53]

  The battle-axe was the specifically Norse weapon, suited for such aggressively individual warriors. And challenges to single combat were naturally not uncommon.

  It was the custom then in England, if two strove for anything to settle the matter by single combat; and now Alfin challenges Olaf Tryggvasson to fight. The time and place for the combat were settled, and that each should have twelve men with him. When they met, Olaf told his men to do exactly as they saw him do. He had a large axe; and when Alfin was going to cut at him with his sword, he hewed away the sword out of his hand and with the next blow struck down Alfin himself.[54]

  But the war system could be used for collective action by the farmers against the king. When Olaf Tryggvasson was burning temples down, including the one at Lade where Earl Hakon had had a great gold ring hung on the door, ‘as soon as the bonders heard of it, they sent out a war-arrow as a token through the whole district, ordering out a warlike force and meant to meet the king with it.’[55]

  The sacral character of war appears in the imagery connecting it with Odin-Woden and merging the battle-fury with the tempests of nature:

  The sword in the king’s hand bit through the weeds-of-Woden [mail] as if it were whisked through water, the spear-points clashed, the shields were shattered, the axes rattled on the heads of the warriors. Targets and skulls were trodden under the Northmen’s shield-fires [weapons] and the hard heels of their hilts. There was a din in the island, the kings dyed the shining rows of shields in the blood of men. The wound-fires [blades] burnt in the bloody wounds, the halberds bowed down to take the life of men, the ocean of blood dashed upon the swords’ ness, the flood of the shafts fell on the beach of Stord. Halos of war mixed under the vault of the bucklers; the sword-tempest blew underneath the clouds of the targets, the lees of the sword-edges [blood] pattered in the gale of Woden. Many a man fell into the stream of the brand.[56]

  The weapons assume a daemonic life of their own and the universe is constructed in the guise of their dynamic energies. The raven-flag also had its spirit-life. An interpolation in Asser tells us: ‘They say further that in every battle, wherever that flag went before them, if they were to gain the victory, a live crow would appear flying in the midst of the flag; but if they were doomed to be defeated, it would hang down unmoving; and this was often proved.’ In songs eagle and raven hover forever over the battlefield, thirsty for blood: ‘the raven-friend in Odin’s dress’ (full armour) while the wolf, the Horse of the Valkyrie, roams about. The ravens were the steeds of the witch-wolves. Beowulf contains this imagery. Recounting the feuds between Geats and Swedes, the poet cries: ‘Music of the harp will not awaken the heroes. But the black raven, flapping over the dead, will be garrulous and tell the eagle of its luck at dinner, when along with the wolf it plundered the dead.’[57]

  Though the raven of battle is common in Anglo-Saxon poetry, it was essentially Norse in its sacral character. We noted its importance on the war-flag. The Chronicle records the capture of the Danish flag called the Raven under the year 878; the flag was said to have been woven by the two daughters of Ragnar Lothbrok, whose death shows signs of having been patterned on the victim-dedications to Woden. The Saga of Olaf Tryggvasson tells of the ravenflag made by Eithne, Jarl Hlödver’s wife, which flapped above the Viking invaders of Ireland; at the battle of Clontarf Hrafn the Red called it the Devil because all its bearers were killed (as if victims to it). The raven (corvus) also appears as the devil or his emissary, stealing a page of script from Wilfrid when he was St Guthlac’s guest; but a miracle recovered the page. The raven was an emblem or embodiment of Odin, who was known as Hrafnass or Ravengod; he had two other ravens (Thought and Mind) as his companions — names that suggest the bird’s prophetic powers. A tale in the early Life of St Gregory shows a clear propaganda-effort to disprove these powers. One Sunday as King Edwin of Northumbria was on his way to church, a crow ‘sang with an evil omen’. Everyone halted. Bishop Paulinus bade a servant take good aim and shoot an arrow; and he later brought bird and arrows into the hall and showed them to the heathen catechumens as proof that the bird could not prophesy, since it had failed to foresee its own death. Obviously then it could not prophesy to those ‘baptised in the image of God’. (A crow on a tree prophesied to the king of the Warni, in about 500, that he would die within forty days.) A bird usually taken to be Odin’s raven replaced the Roman winged Victory on Scandinavian gold bracteates of the sixth and seventh centuries. (We may note that the seal of the port-reeve at Colchester, which seems certainly pre-Norman, bears the design of a raven; the port-reeve was the chief official there before the bailiffs of Norman times. The town was occupied for a while by the Danes until in 912 it was retaken; but if the raven is Danish it probably derived from the presence of Danish traders there later on.)

  There was a strong belief in an after life in which people carried on in much the same way as on earth. Sacrifices were made at funerals. An Arab geographer describes the funeral rites of a Swedish chief on the Volga. A third of the dead man’s possessions were burned on the pyre, a third used at the feast, a third went to heirs. There was once a tradition that the wife was buried alive with the body. The Saga of Olaf Tryggvasson tells how Sigrithr the proud insisted on divorce from a Swedish king because a law stated that royal widows should be set beside their dead husbands in the barrow. The Arab geographer says that poorer men had a small boat made specially for their cremation, but chiefs were buried in their own vessels. The image of the dead journeying in a ship went back to Bronze-Age monuments in Gotland, and was carried on in ship-burials or by setting over a grave rows of stones in the outline of a ship.[58]

  The idea of the death-journey appears in later runes, after the conversion to Christianity, when land-owners are praised for clearing roads and building bridges as well as establishing places for the Thing to meet in. The roads and bridges (mainly causeways over marshes or stone-laid fords over waterways) were encouraged by the missionary church so that people might attend church in all weathers. To construct them was thought to help the soul to pass through purgatory fires. larlabanke had these stones raised in memory of himself while he still lived; and he built this bridge for his soul’, at Täby, Uppland. At Aby, brothers raised a stone to their father’s memory and ‘made the bridge to please God’. The soul-bridge was a very old image, here made to do Christian service. We may compare this effort to drive a roadway to the church, to heaven, with the efforts of Norman barons to found or endow a monastery — to buy a plot of land in heaven.[59]

  Thus in a charter of Binham Priory under Stephen we read:

  I have done this at the advice and with the approval of many wise men, moved above all by the exhortation, the request, and the counsel of the lord Theobald archbishop of Canterbury and primate of all England, who showed me by the most reasonable and unanswerable arguments that a noble gentlemen who has the fee of six knights should give not only the third part of a knight’s land to God and Holy Church for the soul’s health of himself and his kin, but the whole of a knight’s land or more than that, adding also that if this man’s heir should try to take away the alms which is interposed as a bridge between his father and Paradise, by which the father may not be able to pass over, the heir, so far as he may, is disinheriting his father from the Kingdom of Heaven, and therefore should not obtain the inheritance which remains, since he who has killed his father has proved himself no son.

  Just as death was a sea-passage to a new world, so in the minds of Vikings, as they listened to scaldic songs or drove into strange seas, the dreams of piratic gold may well have merged with fantasies of otherworid adventu
re, of journeys to paradise. When, coming from their hard and rough northern world, they reached Byzantion, they even felt that they had broken through to Asgard, the site of the gods, and, returning home, they talked excitedly of this magnificent otherworid. The urge for piratic or trading journeys shaded off into the urge for pilgrimage, which was increasing in the early medieval world. The Chronicle under 891 tells of three Scots (Irishmen) who ‘came to king Alfred in a boat without any oars from Hibernia, whence they stole away because they would go on a foreign pilgrimage for the love of God, they recked not where. The boat in which they came was made of two hides and a half; and they took with them food for seven days. And within seven days they came to land in Cornwall, and soon afterwards went to king Alfred. They were named Dubslane and Macbeth and Mawlinmun.’ An Anglo-Norman poet, Benedeit, patronized by Maud, Henry’s queen, wrote a Voyage of St Brendan, first in Latin, then (at Maud’s request) in French. Here the Irish tale of Brendan’s voyage to paradise was vigorously recounted, and paradise appears ‘like a very royal palace to see, an emperor’s very rich fee’.

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  Linked with the free and impulsive character of the Vikings was their readiness to undertake long and dangerous sea-voyages, in which again their capacity under certain circumstances to combine initiative with discipline was of great value. We have dealt with their raids on Britain, Ireland and Gaul, but we must now add that by the ninth century they had settled in the Shetlands and Orkneys, and moved down the coasts of Scotland as far as Lincolnshire on the east and the Isle of Man on the west. Though defeated in Ireland in 1014, their power there was not broken until the Anglo-Norman attempt to conquer the island under Henry II; and Scotland did not regain the Isle of Man and the Hebrides till 1266, the Shetlands till 1462. The Swedes largely turned east, to the Gulf of Finland and the river-routes to the Black Sea. The Danes took the route down the Channel, round Brittany and Cape Finisterre into the Mediterranean, ravaging the coasts of Spain and even Italy. They burned Lisbon, Cadiz, Seville, and sacked Pisa, and came near to locating and looting Rome. The Arabs refer to their red-sailed ships and called the crews ‘heathen wizards’. Few important rivers were not exploited. Besides the Thames and the Seine, they sailed up the Loire and the Gironde. The Norwegians ventured on the ocean with a persistence and courage unknown to any previous people. About eight hundred Norsemen reached Iceland, where a few Irish monks seem to have preceded them; they colonized the wastes of Greenland from about 985 and may have finally merged with the natives to produce the Esquimaux; they even got to Labrador and Nova Scotia, perhaps sailing yet further south.[60] The vik of Viking has no link with the Latin vicus, village; it means a creek or inlet where ships could find a haven. In Iceland, which of all the Norse areas has kept most clearly the primitive form of placenames, many names end in -vik; later in Britain and on the continent it appears in connection with trading-points.

  The long narrow clinker-built ships, sixteen-oared and masted, dragon-carved, could each hold some forty fighters. Lower in the middle and pointed at the ends, they were well devised to sail in open seas, yet were easily beached and could navigate far up rivers. On landing, the warriors often rounded up the horses nearby and turned into a mounted force which scoured the country. There was seldom any effective resistance and no navies to cut off retreats. At most a local levy might gather, with inadequate weapons and unlikely to catch the fast-moving riders; if they did catch them, they would be beaten. As raids were often made in summer or autumn when peasants were trying to get crops in, the result might be a winter of starvation.

  The Norwegian raids, started in the last years of the eighth century, were earlier than the Danish. Why? There appears to have been a considerable population increase in Norway, to judge by the number of graves.[61] Placenames ending in -setr, -bolstad, -land, seem to mark the inner expansion, representing sites taken over by members of families who found the homesteads crowded and moved to outlying sheds or shielings. In the Shetlands and Orkneys the colonists again gave names to sites with these endings.[62] It was about this time that ships were developed which were able to cross to those islands with fair safety. In Denmark the local resources were used up to the limit. There was an expansion in Skåne, where in time the Danes had to compete with the Swedes.

  Other theories to explain the emigrations have been propounded, such as the Frankish weakening of Frisian seapower. But the Frisians never dominated the seas by force; and the Franks, if anything, encouraged their trading. Charlemagne made some attempts to better the defences along the Frisian coast, but the Viking raids were not provoked by the Frankish conquest of Saxony. Nor did the dissensions in the Carolingian empire set the Danes on the move, though they made the raids easier and thus no doubt stimulated them. Both Norwegians and Danes were essentially in search of land; and it was in Norway, with its harsh, rocky, mountainous country and its difficult communications, that the pressure of population was first felt. The age saw in general a steady expansion of populations in western Europe, to which people in many regions responded by what we may call internal colonization, a movement into wastelands and forests; but the Danes and Norwegians responded by turning to the sea.

  The Swedes too turned to the sea, but their problem was not quite the same. They had much rich land, though the lowering of the water-level in middle Sweden slowly but steadily exposed the alluvium. The people, without neglecting piracy, were more concerned with trade than their Atlantic-facing neighbours. Already by 839 Norse warriors dominated the north of Russia, extorting tribute from the natives and using it for trade with Byzantion, Khazaria, and Bulghar on the Volga, where Moslem traders came. Their effect on placenames was limited to the river-routes and they did little settling — though the early princes in Kiev had Scandinavian names, Igor, Oleg (Helgi), Ingvar.[63] In 942, however, a son of the ruling dynasty had a Slavonic name, Sviatoslav; and even under Norse rule the town had little contact with the Baltic. The chiefs, who lived by the trading of tribute, may have made up quite a small group; in any event Kiev must have had a long history; traditions embodied in the Povest, such as that of a ferryman-king and his role in making Kiev a river-port, derive from the period when the Khazars were dominant in the area. The eastward move of the Vikings did not last for a long time; but it was very active while it lasted and it was of great importance in establishing links between northern (and so western) Europe and Russia, with the Moslem and the Byzantine east. It brings out sharply the way in which the Vikings in a short space of time expanded the whole horizon of western Europe.[64]

  The runes give us vivid glimpses of the men and their movements. One ninth-century inscription (Kälvesten, Ostergötland) tells how Ojvind ‘fell eastward with Ejvisl’. But most of the stones date from the eleventh century. The land mainly named is Greece, Grikkland, i Grikkum, a term that includes all the north-eastern lands of the Byzantine empire. At Ed, north of Stockholm, on a huge boulder is the inscription set up by Rangvald for his mother, ‘God help her soul’. As for the cutter, ‘He was in Greece, he was leader of the host’, perhaps a reference to the Varangian Guard. Such journeys were so common that the inheritance laws declare a man ‘can receive no inheritance as long as he stays in Greece’. Rangvald had come home, but many warriors died afar. A stone of Ulanda says, ‘He went boldly, he gained wealth, out in Grikkland, for his heir.’ A stone brought to Oxford in the seventeenth century was cut by Torsten for his father and brother, ‘They had gone out to Greece’. The stone raised by Ljut the skipper to one of his sons states that ‘he steered the ship, he came to Greek harbours’.[65] He might have gone by the channels of the Neva to Ladoga, where trade-routes diverged, one to the south, one to the east. The usual route was by the Volkov down to Old Ladoga, the Norse Aldeigjuborn, where stood a trading-post from the ninth to the mid-eleventh century. If a man went down the Dneipr he had to face cataracts, sandbanks, dangerous shoal-waters, past Kiev on to the island of Berezanj. The wanderers had great experience of portage; for they usually preferred to dr
ag a ship, if possible, over a promontory that lay right in their course. They thus avoided the difficult voyage round Jutland, carrying the ships from the river Eider to the Sli estuary in the Baltic. Here the water system at the time worked so that only a short haulage over land was needed. In the same way river-falls and rapids were evaded. The place name Drag, common in Norway, records a haulage-point. When a current ran too strongly, the ship was often pulled upstream from the banks by means of poles.[66]

  Norsemen visited Byzantion which, as we saw, they even identified with Asgard. By 930 they served in the imperial army, and by the early eleventh century there was a special Norse regiment, the Varangians, whose men had a habit of spending their leave on a trip to Jerusalem. The first whom we know went there was Kolskeggr, in 992; Harald Hardrada, most famous of the Varangians, was there in 1034. Many men spent fifty or more years in the service, then made the pilgrimage before returning home. Friends, stirred by their tales, came south to see the same sights. The apostle to Iceland, Thorvald Kodransson Vidtförli, was in Jerusalem about 990. The half-Danish Sweyn, son of Godwin, set out with a company of Englishmen in 1051 to expiate a murder; he went barefoot in penance and died of exposure in the Anatolian mountains next autumn. Lagman Gudrodsson, Norse king of Man, who killed his brother, went on a similar penance-journey. Many pilgrims liked to make the round trip, coming by sea through the Straits of Gibraltar and then back overland via Russia.[67]

  Other Norsemen did not go so far east or south. A boulder at Esta tells us, ‘He fell in Holmgard [Novgorod], the ships captain with his crew’; a son raised the memorial. A rune from Sjusta, Uppland, states, ‘He died in Holmgard in Olaf’s church’: the rune must date only a few decades after the death of the martyr-king Olaf Haraldsson at Sticklestad in 1030. A Mervalla stone says: ‘He often sailed to Semgallen’ in Latvia, ‘in dear-prized knarr round Domesnäs’, the northern tip of Kurland. The knarr was a roomy sea-going ship heavier and stronger than the long-ship. (Cnearr is the term in Old English, the verb knarra being cognate with our obsolete word gnar (1), to snarl or growl. The name thus refers to the creaking and groaning of the timbers in a big sea.) Domesnäs projected into the Gulf of Riga and carried on as a reef, a great danger point. Another man was ‘killed in Vorland’, the north-east part of Estonia on the southern shores of the Gulf of Finland. ‘God and God’s Mother help his soul.’ Many personal names show the lure of the east: Est, Estulv, Estfare (Estonia-farer). Est was probably a slave-name. A rune in Vastergotland says of a ‘young man active and able’ that he was ‘killed in Estonia’.[68] The saga tells how Olaf Tryggvasson and his mother were captured in the east Baltic. Her brother Sigurd had been long abroad in Russia with King Valdemar (Grand Duke in Novgorod at the time, 971), and was held there in high consideration.