by Jack Lindsay
Astrid now had a strong wish to travel to her brother there. Hakon the Old gave her good attendants and what was needful for the journey, and she set out with some merchants. She had been two years with Hakon and Olaf was three years old. As they sailed out into the Baltic they were captured by Vikings of Estonia, who made booty of the people as well as the goods, killing some and sharing out the others as slaves. Olaf was separated from his mother and an Estonian called Klerkon got him as his share along with Thoralf and Thorgils. Klerkon thought Thoralf too old for a slave and that not much work could be got out of him, so he killed him. But he took the boys and sold them to a man named Klerk for a stout and good ram. A third man, Reas, bought Olaf for a good cloak.[69]
An Uppland stone says of a man, ‘He was killed in Finland.’ One at Söderby tells of a man who fell in a remote Finnish province, Tavastland. Adam of Bremen, in his history of the metropolitan see of Hamburg-Bremen (about 1070-80), recounts how Anund, son of Emund the Old, ‘sent by his father to extend his kingdom, came to the Land of Women, whom we think to be Amazons. There he died from a poison which they mixed in their water-springs.’ Probably the legend came from a confusion between the Land of the Kväner (part of present Finland), where kvan is a tribal name, and kvaen, wife, cognate with English quean (a common woman) and related to queen.[70]
On the Turinge stone, Södermanland, Torsten and his dead brother are commemorated in verse by the rest of their family and their retainers. ‘The brothers were best among men on land and out of the levy. They held their housemen well. He fell in action east in Gadarike [Russia], the levy’s captain, of the land’s men the best.’ Near the Dneipr’s mouth, on the island of Berezanj, Grane buried his comrade Karl. The isle with sheltered bays must have been much frequented: several stones tell of men who went with Ingvar the Far-traveller on his journey to Serkland, the Saracen Land (probably the caliphate centred on Baghdad). Gripsholm records of Ingvar’s brother: ‘They fared like men far after gold and in the East gave food to the eagle. They died southward in Serkland.’ One rune in verse mentions a man dead in Italy: ‘He to the eastward ploughed with his prow and in Langobards Land met his end.’
Mainly as a result of the voyages into Russia and down into the eastern Mediterranean, Sweden throughout this period was restlessly trading.[71] Among the known ports was Skiringssal on the Oslo fiord, a centre for the people of the Vik, also a market for furs and walrus-hides from the far north (bartered for swords, amber and objects from the East). Schleswig (Hedeby for the Danes) tapped most of the trade between the Baltic and the North Sea across the neck of the Danish peninsula. Birka on an island in Lake Mälar was the great emporium of the Swedes and was perhaps linked with a chain of other Birkas across the northern seas. Judging from the coins, it reached its height in the later ninth century. Inside a semicircular bank (which no doubt had wooden battlements) lay some twenty-nine acres dominated by a fort built outside the line of the wall. The beach was protected by stakes driven into the water; and in winter men came on skis, skates and sledges. Local goods were antler-combs, jewellery, leatherwork. Excavated objects include glass and rings. One ring, set with amethysts, had an Arabic inscription and came from lands south-east of the Caspian; a piece of fine silk had a gold pattern like those made in China. Most imports seem to derive from the eastern region of the caliphate; the line of communication was probably by the Volga rather than the Dneipr; there are few signs of links with Byzantion. Skiringssal (Kaupang) had a natural harbour with a protecting string of islands and shoals, and a defence of hills at the back; it flourished from the early ninth century to the early tenth. It has revealed ornaments from the British Isles, pottery from the Rhineland, glass from western Europe, various objects from the eastern Baltic; of six coins, one was a Mercian penny, another a denar of Louis the Pious, two were Kufic coins, one apparently Abassid, the other minted at Birka. The hinterland, rich with graves of the Viking period, shows the concentration of wealth. (Norway had several Kaupangs; the name means market and is of the same nature as the English chipping.) Hedeby was surrounded in the ninth century by semicircular walls which were several times rebuilt. Iron and glass were worked, and ornaments of bronze and silver; walrus tusks came from Norway and stone for millstones from the Eifel; there are signs of clothmaking. Destroyed in mid-eleventh century, it was soon replaced by Schleswig, which deeper vessels could reach and which in turn was replaced by Lübeck. Late in the ninth century Hedeby had been occupied by a Swedish dynasty, then in 934 it was taken by the Emperor Henry I and stayed under the Germans for the middle years of the tenth century. Later in that century its contacts seem to have been with Slav lands east of the Elbe rather than with the eastern Baltic.[72]
There was no source of silver in Scandinavia. In the ninth and tenth centuries the main supply of minted silver was Moslem; some 85,000 Arab coins called Kufic (after the Mesopotamian city of Kufah, where the coins are usually dated which is useful for correlating finds) have been found.[73] Discoveries of hacksilver in a more or less uniform condition, in the area from central Russia to the Baltic, Germany and Scandinavia, suggest that silver was used as a means of exchange; the silver mines in the east and in south Russia doubtless provided one source.[74] There are also large numbers of coin-fragments, showing the need for small change. Kufic silver was carried to the British Isles; but export from the Baltic seems to end when Hedeby came under the Germans, though Birka kept up eastern contacts.
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King Alfred has left us accounts of voyages which more than anything else help us to feel the impact of the Viking expansion on the minds of men in western Europe. We see in them a new sense of geography, of the unknown waiting to be tackled, of the interrelation of peoples; and we experience directly the bold character of these explorers. Also we see how other peoples, such as the English, were being stimulated to make their own ventures. Ohthere (Old Norse Ottarr) ‘told his lord, King Alfred, that he lived furthest north of all Northmen’. The region was marked by the islands clustering about its shores broken into long narrow fiords, its valleys and great waterfalls roaring down cliffs in the southern section, and the far-stretching glacier, the Svartisen, the Field of Black Ice. This land was long but narrow; Ohthere could use for pasture or ploughland only that part near the sea, and even that was often rocky and bare. Further inland were wild mountains inhabited by Finns (Lapps). The land ran on northwards, inhabited only by a few Finns who hunted in winter and fished off the coast in summer. In Halgoland (Helgeland) there was such good whale-hunting that Ohthere and five others killed sixty whales in two days. Across the mountains of its more southerly section lay Sweden; and facing the more northerly section was Cwenaland (perhaps at the north end of the Gulf of Bothnia). The Cwenas now and then made raids across the mountains on the men of Norway carrying the small light boats which they used for ferrying over the big freshwater mountain lakes. (These Cwenas seem to have been Finns.) They in turn were raided by the Men of the North (the Halgolanders). Ohthere himself was a leading Halgolander, ‘a very wealthy man in those possessions in which their wealth consists: that is, in the wilder animals. When he came to the king he had 600 tame deer unsold. They call these Reindeers. Of them, 6 were decoy-deer, very valuable among Finns, as with them they catch the wild-deer. He was among the first men of the land, though he had not more than 20 horned cattle, 20 sheep, and 20 swine; and the little that he ploughed, he ploughed with horses.’ Another source of income was the tribute paid in kind to him and his neighbours by the Finns: furs, reindeer-skins, skins of bears, martens, otters, feathers, ships’ rope from hides of whale and seal. The tribute was exacted from the Finns more or less according to an assessment of each man’s rank and importance among his fellow-tribesmen. (Harald Fairhair finally won power through the battle of Hahrsfjord, probably in 885; he seems to have been taking the finnskattr, the Finn-tribute, as his royal prerogative, so that many men sailed from Norway in anger at what they held to be a usurpation — perhaps Ohthere was one of these.)
He thus reached North Cape and found that ‘the land bent due east’. He sailed on to the land of the Beormas on the White Sea. This region was more populated than the wastelands where there lived only a few fishers, fowlers, hunters, all Finns. He sailed into the Sea and went on for five days, along the southern coast of the peninsula till he reached the mouth of a great river. Now he and the few men he had taken along to help him saw that the land past the rivermouth was inhabited, and they were afraid of meeting some hostile tribe if they went on as before. (The river seems to have been the Varzuga, flowing through the south of the Kola Peninsula into the White Sea.) Ohthere turned his ship up the river and found more cultivated land. Again he feared attack and did not land; but he soon came on men who lived along the Kandalaskha Gulf. These were the Beormas. They must have been friendly as they told him ‘many tales’, which he had no means of testing. He had heard of the people in his own region. The Norwegians thought of them as the folk of Bjarmaland, a remote place of magic where the men confounded enemies by means of incantations that made the heavens burst open in time of battle and hurl down floods of rain and hail.
A second voyage, lasting more than a month, took him from Halgoland to Skiringssal. Then, when telling how he sailed on to Hedeby, he interested Alfred by remarking that some islands and Jutland, which he passed, were ‘lands in which the Angles lived before they came to this country’.
Wulfstan seems to have been an English captain. He had taken a boat from Hedeby into the Baltic to the land at the mouth of the Wista (Vistula). There he met people living near the Zalew Wislany, the inlet now between Gdansk and Kaliningrad. They had many towns, each ruled by a king, and lived mainly on fish and honey. The master-class, a steppe-people, drank mares’ milk while the poor and the slaves drank mead; no ale was brewed. A corpse lay in state among kinsfolk and friends for a month or two, sometimes even six months. The higher the man’s rank had been, the longer his dead body was kept. All the time there was carousing round the bier, and funeral games were carried on. At last came the day for burial. The dead man’s treasures which were portable were divided into five, six, or even more portions, depending on their number and value; the richest portion was set on the ground about a mile from the man’s home, and the other portions at places in between — the portion of least value nearest the house. Men with the swiftest horses rode from a point five or six miles away to pick up the treasures, each portion falling to the man who reached it first. Next came the cremation of the dead man in his best clothes, girded with his weapons. As for the question of the long unburied corpses, certain men there knew the secret of refrigeration; even in summer they could keep water frozen into ice.
We see here the immemorial interest in travellers’ tales, but also eager intellectual curiosity about the world, its peoples, geography, and history. Both Alfred and the captains share this attitude. Alfred indeed had translated Orosius’s History of the World as an expression of the expanding perspectives of the later ninth century. What in particular gives a concrete basis for the intellectual awakening is the widening network of trade. Alfred sees that Orosius (a Spaniard of the early fourth century) is very inadequate in dealing with northern Europe, and he tries to get his bearings by taking as his fixed points the east Franks, who were in touch with Britain; the Old Saxons, distant kinsmen of his own people; the Moravians, who in this century had established a flourishing kingdom; and the south and the north Danes. Five of his ‘middlepoints’ lie round the Baltic.[75]
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The runes tell us of the westward as well as eastward movements by Vikings, of men like the one mentioned on the Jula stone, who ‘had been in the West, taken township and attacked’. An Uppland stone was raised by two sons to a father ‘who in the West had his place in the Housecarles’. At Tjälve we meet a ‘warrior who served with Cnut’. This stone was set up by a brother Väring, a Varangian. One brother had gone west, one east. An Yttergärde stone (1020-30) tells of a great yeoman farmer of Uppland who had three shares of tribute money. ‘Ulv took in England three gelds. That was the first which Toste paid. Then Thorkel paid. Then Cnut paid.’ Toste seems to be a chief mentioned by Snorre Sturlesson, whose son was Sigrid the Ambitious; Thorkel the Tall was chief of the Jomsvikings, involved in more than one attack on England in the early eleventh century; Cnut, king of England in 1017, paid in 1018 his last and biggest Danegeld to returning troops. Another Uppland farmer brought much money to his home in Väby. ‘He took Cnut’s payment in England.’ A Lingsberg stone tells of Gudve who went west to England and shared in the Danegeld; at Bjudby we are merely told, ‘To England had the young warrior voyaged and later at home lamented died.’ Cnut’s son seems to be referred to on the Tuna stone, which tells of Assur, ‘who was king Harald’s seaman’. A Småland stone mentions a man who held the important post of marshall, stallre, under Håkon Jarl, probably Cnut’s nephew who was drowned in 1029 in the Pentland Firth. An Uppland stone records a man to whom five brothers raised the monument: ‘He died in Jutland; he was on his way to England.’[76] These men had profited from such levies as that William of Malmesbury mentions under Harthacnut:
He imposed a rigid and intolerable tribute upon England, so as to pay, as he had promised, 20 marks to the soldiers of each of his ships. While this was harshly levied throughout the kingdom, two of the collectors discharging their office rather too strictly were killed by the citizens of Worcester. At which he burned and depopulated the city through his commanders, and plun-dered the citizens’ property, so that he cast a blemish on his fame and diminished the love of his subjects.[77]
We get the English side of the picture in the poem on the Battle of Maldon, 991. The Vikings demand gold rings in return for peace. ‘It’s better for you to buy off our raid with gold than that we, famed for cruelty, should cut you down in battle...We’ll take to the sea with the tribute you pay and keep our promise of peace.’ Byrhtnoth replies:
Can you hear, you pirate, what these people say? They will pay you a tribute of whistling spears, of deadly darts, and proven swords, weapons to pay you, pierce, slit and slay you in storm-ing battle. Listen, messenger! Take back this reply: Tell your people the unpleasant tidings that over here stands a noble earl with his troop — guardians of the people and of the country, the home of Aethelred, my prince who’ll defend this land to the last ditch. We’ll sever the heathen’s head from their shoulders. It would be much to our shame if you took our tribute and embarked without battle since you’ve intruded so far and so rudely into this country. No, you’ll not get your treasure so easily. The spear’s point and the sword’s edge, savage battle-play, must teach us first that we have to yield tribute.[78]
We see that loot or tribute was looked for in England more than trading gains; but though war here was continuous, trade must also have played a large part in the relationships of the North Sea and Baltic. In many Viking graves in Norway fragments of English metalwork adapted as ornaments for men and women have been found; some at least were torn from settings on books or shrines; and in Sweden more than 30,000 Anglo-Saxon coins in tenth and eleventh century hoards surely reflect the Danegeld. The eastern basis of Birka’s trade had been made clear when the silver supply from Bulghar was held up, perhaps as a result of Kiev’s growing power. Pirates of the Baltic’s wealth then had to look elsewhere, and they found what they wanted in the west where silver had been accumulating, especially through exploitation of the Harz Mountains from the tenth century. England’s wealth was manifested by the elaborate currency arrangements at the close of Eadgar’s reign. Probably in 973 there was a major coinage reform, and new types were issued at regular interva
ls, at first of six years, then of three.[79] London was active in the early eleventh century in trade with the Rhine; and English wealth was largely dependent on the export of wool to the cloth-towns of Flanders which were now growing; and English as well as German silver was looted in the late tenth and early eleventh. centuries. But trading also went on with the Danes. The Ely chronicler speaks of many moots held at Cambridge in the tenth century, and at one point mentions Irish traders with cloaks and other goods set out for sale. At an earlier date wares from Kent and even France reached the site, which as late as 1295 was considered a seaport. The Irish merchants we may take to be Danes from Dublin or Wexford; they landed wares at one of the wharves or hythes in the quarter long known by the Danish name of the Holm, where now stands the church of St Clement, a favourite Danish saint. So Danish occupation, recorded in 875, left a trading as well as a military imprint.[80]