Vestfold was one of several kingdoms in Viken, from which the word Viking—meaning “people of Viken”—was once thought to have come. Viken means “the bay”; it described what we call the Oslo Fjord, its coastal lands now split between Norway and Sweden.
In the Viking Age, Denmark claimed Viken. Around the year 800, the Danish king Godfrid established a town in Vestfold to anchor what he considered his northern border. He did the same in the south. Among his many skirmishes with the emperor Charlemagne was Godfrid’s descent on the Frankish town of Reric, a major port on the Baltic Sea. Given the choice of death or a change of venue, Reric’s merchants and artisans moved to the newfound Danish town of Hedeby, at the mouth of the river Schlei; the site is now in Germany.
Guarded by a hillfort and encircled by a rampart, Hedeby had wood-paved streets and more than twenty jetties. You could buy a flute or game pieces made in the town out of Norwegian elk antler or walrus ivory. Or you could buy a leather belt with metal strap ends made in England. You could pay for your purchase with hacksilver: bits of rings or chains or ingots weighed on a scale. You could pay with a silver coin struck in the town itself. Or you could pay with a silver Arab dirham.
In Vestfold, the site Godfrid chose was Skiringssal. Here, on that rocky hillock above a harbor, some generations before, a chieftain had erected the first Shining Hall, flattening a grave mound—the barrow of a powerful woman, though he may not have known that—and bringing in tons of soil to create a large platform. The wooden hall he built could be seen far out to sea, its whitewashed walls and yellow pine-shingled roof shining in the sun. This chieftain was one of the Ynglings, said to descend from the fertility god Freyr. Calling himself Yngvi, Freyr had established a dynasty at Uppsala in Sweden in ancient times. From there the Ynglings, or “people of Yngvi,” had moved west, bringing with them the fashion for building feast halls on platforms.
By the time King Godfrid claimed Vestfold and established Kaupang at Skiringssal, the Ynglings had moved their royal seat north to Borre, where the Oslo Fjord narrows—or Godfrid may have pushed them there. The Danish king held a new concept of lordship, a Christian concept he learned from Charlemagne: A king did not lead warriors; he controlled land and ruled over everyone who lived there. A kingdom was a fixed territory. It had borders, and these needed to be watched.
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Kaupang became Godfrid’s port of entry, a place to tax ships plying the ancient North Way: the thousand-mile trade route that gave Norway its name. Sheltered by barrier islands from Viken nearly all the way up the west coast of Scandinavia to the arctic, the North Way was a thoroughfare bringing goods and people south to Denmark and, from there, along the East Way, to Byzantium and beyond.
Godfrid was even more keen, though, to skim off profits from the new route west, linking the North Way to the isles of Britain.
In 793, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Vikings arrived like a “bolt from the blue” at an English abbey seventy miles south of Scotland:
In this year dire forewarnings came over the land of the Northumbrians, and miserably terrified the people: There were excessive whirlwinds and lightnings, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these tokens; and a little after that, in the same year, on the sixth of the Ides of January, the havoc of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, through rapine and slaughter.
English histories often begin the Viking Age on this date—despite the dragons, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle generally counts as a historical source. Yet archaeologists noting changes in the imported goods buried in Viking graves, the style of their houses, and the fashions in Scandinavian art suspect Vikings were engaging in trade throughout the British Isles for a half century before that.
An inch-wide pendant in the Borre style of Viking art, named for Borre in Vestfold, where the first examples were found. This pendant from Birka, Sweden, matches one found in Norfolk, England.
This new trade route into the west began at Avaldsnes, a royal estate on an island near modern Bergen. Avaldsnes had long been a node on the North Way. There, where the shipping lanes narrowed, a row of burial mounds up to sixteen feet high announced the island’s ancient authority—an authority put into practice by halting every ship that passed. In return for a fee, the rulers of Avaldsnes offered a safe port. At the trading post by the chieftain’s hall, sailors found a place to bunk, a horn of beer (the island warehoused barley and malt), and an opportunity to discuss the weather, for the next day’s sail, no matter your destination, was the most dangerous. To the north was Stad, the windiest promontory in Norway. To the south was the high surf off Jaeren, where low-lying fields and white-sand beaches met storms head-on. To the west was the “vicious tumble of short waves for which the North Sea is famous”—but to the west lay also the lucrative new Viking markets of Dublin in Ireland and York in England.
Godfrid’s neighbors in Vestfold, the Ynglings and their allies, were not pleased to have him muscle in on this new West Way. Before Kaupang was established, merchant ships had always sailed to the royal estate at Borre, situated beside another bottleneck marked by a high-roofed feast hall and rows of ancient grave mounds.
It was worth going to war over. In 813, Godfrid’s sons skipped a meeting with Charlemagne’s emissaries; instead, the Danes “set out for Vestfold with an army,” the Frankish Annals report. “That region is at the edge of their kingdom, located between the north and west, and, facing into the North Wind, looks toward the top of Britain. The leaders and people of that region were refusing to be their subjects.” The geography lesson is clear: To the Danes, Vestfold was key to controlling trade on this new route between the Franks and the British. And the Danes, that time, must have won: for Kaupang was not destroyed.
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Kaupang at Skiringssal was the first true town in what is now Norway. Earlier markets were held on any handy beach, or timed to coincide with rituals and assemblies. Traders were based on family farms, traveling in the slack time between sowing and harvest. Artisans worked on chieftains’ estates, where their silver, steel, ivory, and other valuable supplies were safe.
Protection did not presume total control. Artisans prized their independence, as the story of Volund shows. An elf, Volund was “the finest craftsman of anyone in the ancient sagas,” explains the poem Volund’s Song. He was married to a valkyrie named Hervor the Wise (not Angantyr’s daughter), who could transform herself into a swan. After nine years of marriage, this Hervor flew away to take part in a battle, leaving Volund at home to work gold and jewels into rings to please her when she returned home. But when an evil king learned the artisan was no longer protected by his valkyrie wife, he captured him. He slit Volund’s hamstrings so he could not leave, but was forced to stay and craft treasures for the king. Volund’s vengeance was awful: He killed the king’s sons, turning their skulls into silver-footed drinking cups, then flew away on mechanical wings he had made.
At Kaupang, King Godfrid did not force artisans to stay in his towns. Instead, he offered them more independence than they had previously enjoyed. Traders, likewise, were freed of the necessity to farm. The king, or his representative in the Shining Hall, saw that the town was supplied with food from the countryside and protected from attack (for a price). Their connection was to the advantage of each—though not to the Yngling chieftains, who saw their ability to reward their “friends” with well-crafted and exotic gifts impaired.
A town not only concentrated population; it focused power—which is why King Godfrid was so thorough. To lay out his towns, he engaged professional planners. Kaupang and Hedeby look very much like Ribe, an earlier Danish town, or Birka in Sweden, with which the Danes had strong trade connections. The sloping meadow below the Shining Hall was leveled—dips filled in with sand and clay, banks shored up with walls—before the house plots were laid out.
Along with town planners, Godfrid may also have recruited merchants and artisans—or, as at Hedeby, captured them. By the artif
acts found inside it, archaeologists can tell that one large house by Kaupang’s harbor belonged to a family of Frisians. They may have come from Dorestad, a large market town on the Rhine River, near modern-day Utrecht in Holland. Controlled by the Franks, Dorestad was at its peak around the year 800, commanding trade routes west to York in England and east through the Baltic Sea to Birka. One of its specialties was wine; another was cloth, especially fine diamond twill, a luxury wool fabric with a metallic sheen. Both came to Kaupang in quantity, as did Frankish swords, Irish horse harnesses, Baltic amber, jet from York, lead from mines in southern England, glass goblets from the Rhineland, copper ingots from the Middle East, and beads of carnelian and amethyst from the Orient. Blacksmiths and glass-bead makers worked at Kaupang, as did shipwrights and metal casters, who mass-produced cheap brooches of brass. Iron ingots, soapstone pots, and whetstones of light or dark schist (the light for grinding, the dark for polishing) were produced nearby, while from the Norwegian arctic along the North Way came furs, hides, feathers and down, falcons, dried fish, walrus ivory, reindeer antlers, and ships’ rigging of sealskin or walrus hide.
Kaupang’s heaviest traffic, however, was in humans—as was true for most Viking towns. Slavery was a main driver of the Viking economy. Along with looting and pillaging, one purpose of a Viking raid was to capture people to sell into slavery. Anyone, if their luck failed, could become a slave. Rich or poor, male or female—but usually young and healthy—anyone could suddenly lose their freedom and find their status reduced to the lowest rank in society. The reverse was also true in the Viking world: Kings’ sons and daughters became slaves, but slaves also became kings or queens. Slaves were mistreated and looked down upon, but they were not considered subhuman. “Slave” was a role a person could fall into and, with luck, climb out of.
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Trade—especially in this kind of slaving culture—requires trust. To acquire exotic goods means dealing with strangers, whose ideas of right or wrong might not be yours. Trade is essentially risky: Each side hopes to profit at the other’s expense; each side hopes not to be cheated. While a generous gift radiates goodwill, an easy sale invites suspicion: Buyer beware. Are the goods flawed? The coins counterfeit? (In Kaupang, as well as in Birka and Hedeby, archaeologists have found fake Arab dirhams, the silver tainted with baser metals.)
It was to reduce the risk of trade that Kaupang looked to the Shining Hall.
First, the merchants’ physical safety must be assured. In Vestfold’s clan-based society, strangers had few rights or protections except while in Kaupang, where the chieftain’s well-armed warriors policed the marketplace. Graves containing weapons (both men’s and women’s graves) are more common at Kaupang than anywhere else in Norway. Though no hillfort or ramparts protected the town, as at Birka and Hedeby, the harbor was barricaded with underwater shoals and stakes. The area was protected by the townspeople’s ancestors and deities as well. On the far side of the Shining Hall sat the assembly grounds, beside a sacred lake, watched over by the Holy Mountain. Weapons were taboo there and in the graveyards that ringed the town, guarding every entrance. In such places of peace, robbers or murderers would be cursed or outlawed.
Second, the rules of trade must be made plain. In some Viking markets, the chieftain fixed commodity prices. In others, witnesses were required for all sales. Elsewhere deals were sealed with a handshake or a drink. No one knows Kaupang’s rules. But buyer and seller needed to be sure the same ones applied to both stranger and kin; to both Christians from Dorestad and pagans from the arctic north; to those who bartered goods for goods, those who paid with silver arm-rings, and those who paid with silver coins; and to those who weighed that silver with the old-style rounded weights, based ultimately on the weight of a barley grain, as well as to those who used the new-style eight-sided cubes, based on the standard weight of an Arab silver dirham.
Finally, those coins and weights and measures must be periodically checked for accuracy, and cheating punished.
But after Eirik Bloodaxe killed his brother Bjorn, he did not—as expected—perform Bjorn’s duties. Neither he nor Gunnhild stepped into the Merchant King’s shoes. They did not have the chance.
For Bjorn the Merchant was not the last of Eirik’s brothers to challenge him and Gunnhild for the kingship of Norway. Harald Fairhair’s youngest son, Hakon the Good, was still safely out of the way in England, where he was the foster son of King Athelstan. But Bjorn’s full brother, Olaf Haraldsson, remained at large in Vestfold, and Sigrod Haraldsson, who ruled the region around Trondheim, was on his way south to aid him, according to the reports of Gunnhild’s spies.
Eirik and Gunnhild sailed off to confront them, and Hervor, perhaps, went too.
4
LITTLE “HEL-SKINS”
As soon as they are well underway, the warrior unties the cord binding Hervor’s hands and lets her use it as a knife belt. She peels off Hervor’s extra clothes, rinses the soiled dress in seawater, and bundles everything up with her own gear. She takes the long string of beads that burdened Hervor’s neck and stuffs it into her own belt pouch.
Then she lets Hervor loose.
Hervor runs from one end of the great ship to the other, back and forth, from the high, coiled dragon’s head at the prow to the high, coiled serpent’s tail at the stern.
She climbs onto the steering deck—but the captain orders her off.
She climbs over the bales and bundles and barrels of cargo in the ship’s broad waist, leaps from rowing bench to rowing bench, dips a drink of water from the butt at the mast, shinnies up a little way to look at everything from that angle, and pauses for a moment to listen to the story with which Queen Gunnhild, in the shade of the upturned rowboat, is holding the other captive children transfixed:
With his new friend Hildir, Arrow-Odd continued his journey. Hildir was a mountain troll. He offered to row, and no one rows better or faster than a troll. But Odd had weather-luck and the wind was fair, so he raised the sail. The mountains raced past so fast it made Hildir dizzy. His courage snapped. He leaped for Odd and wrestled him to the deck.
I’ll kill you if you don’t stop this magic! he said. You’ll sink us!
Calm down, Odd replied. You’re just not used to sailing. Let me up, and I’ll show you.
He lowered the sail, and the mountains stood still.
Hervor laughs. She’s never sailed before either, but she isn’t a coward like the troll.
She climbs a little higher, staring back the way they’ve come and ahead to where they’re going, and now, from this height, she notices the fleet has split.
She slides down the mast, turns around—and there is the warrior who captured her, leaning on the gunwale, watching. Hervor realizes the warrior has not let her out of her sight since they left Kaupang harbor. She wonders if she is this warrior’s booty now—her slave—or just her responsibility. She glances down at her knife, now strapped to her hip. Slaves aren’t given back their knives. Especially not knives with jeweled sheaths, are they? She pushes the question out of her mind and turns to a more pressing one:
Where’s everyone going?
Just as she reaches the boat’s side, a great gout of spray drenches them both—and both of them laugh. The warrior lifts Hervor up so she can hang on the gunwale from her armpits, toes kicking the strakes, and side by side they watch as the first of the great striped sails disappears behind the islands.
They’ll go up the fjord to Tunsberg, the warrior says, while we loop out and around and pinch off the Thread.
What thread? Hervor asks.
The Thread. The waterway that connects Tunsberg to Viken farther north. If the brothers flee by ship, they’ll go that way.
The brothers are Olaf and Sigrod, two more of Harald Fairhair’s sons who stand between Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings and the throne of Norway. Hervor has learned that already, listening to the rowers chat as they lounged between the benches, playing dice while the sails did their work.
Now, hanging ov
er the gunwale, tired and wet and happy, watching the other sails shrink in the distance, Hervor remembers another question she wanted to ask: Can you sink a ship by sailing too fast?
If you sail the keel loose you can, the warrior replies. I’ve seen it happen. The ship was racing along and suddenly it lifted its prow out of the water like a horse rearing. The keel lost its grip. The ship spun sideways, plunged into the trough of the wave, and filled with water. The sailors were caught in the net of Ran, Queen of the Sea, and sank to her watery feast hall, where the lamps are lit by gold, not fire, and the beer serves itself. Not a bad death, really.
Were they our friends?
Our friends? The warrior smiles. No, they were not.
Their ship plunges into a trough and the bright spray drenches them again. The bow chisels the smooth sea into spraystorm, the warrior chants, her voice lifted into the rhythm of poetry. The sea thuds on each side. Froth piles in heaps, the sea swells with gold, the waves wash the frightening dragon’s head. The mane of the serpent glitters.
Hervor repeats the lines until she’s memorized them, the poetry sweet on her tongue.
They pass Sand Isle and Birch Isle, Goose Isle and Whale Isle, the great Island of Nut Trees, and enter the Thread. But then their ship and two others leave the fleet and turn up Slag-Bank River, skirting Tunsberg, the Fortress Rock, where Eirik Bloodaxe hopes to bring his brothers to battle. Queen Gunnhild’s ship rows up the narrow river as far as it can go and docks beside a great burial mound circled with oaks.
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When Snorri Sturluson wrote his sagas of the kings of Norway, Heimskringla, he saw no problem in making up dialogue for people long dead. Does that make his history unhistorical? It depends on how his readers understood it. Did they read Snorri’s dialogue as direct quotes? As the gist of what was said so long ago? As obvious fakery—or artistry? No one knows. Quotation marks—the tools we use today to denote direct speech—weren’t invented until the 1500s. The sagas had no such punctuation (though modern editors and translators add it). There was no way for a saga author like Snorri, writing in the thirteenth century, to indicate what he intended or how words of dialogue should be understood.
The Real Valkyrie Page 6