As Snorri did, I’m compiling a history from snatches of poetry and scraps of tales told and retold for centuries. I use quotation marks or italics if I’m citing an existing text, medieval or modern, and reference my source in the endnotes. Otherwise, you can assume I’m making the dialogue up—based, like Snorri’s work, on the best sources I can find. From these I can guess what it felt like to sail on a Viking ship for the very first time, thanks to the Saga of Arrow-Odd. I can hear the Vikings’ love of their ships in the lines of poetry Snorri and his peers collected. Plus, I have an advantage Snorri didn’t: I can sail on a reconstructed Viking ship (and have done so). Until one was unearthed in 1880 from a Vestfold burial mound, no one knew what a Viking ship looked like.
But no poems or histories or archaeological finds tell me that Hervor, the warrior woman buried in Birka grave Bj581, as a young girl sailed north with Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings past Tunsberg, where Eirik Bloodaxe fought the battle that made him (briefly) Norway’s king. The texts say nothing about Gunnhild’s whereabouts during the fighting. The fates of the captives from Kaupang and the Shining Hall (assuming Hervor was one of them) went completely unrecorded. Was Hervor put into the care of Gunnhild’s bodyguard—and did that guard include warrior women? I can only conjecture.
Did she embrace her new life so readily, leaving Kaupang and her mother behind so blithely? If she had the bold and aggressive character I imagine, it’s likely she did. Though sources on childhood in the Viking Age are few, both texts and archaeology do give me some clues.
It seems the mother-child bond was not particularly strong. For example, in the Saga of Hervor, young Hervor leaves the company of her mother, who tried to teach her sewing and embroidery, “as soon as she was able” and went off to learn to fight “with a bow and a sword and shield.” She doesn’t approach her mother after that except to demand her inheritance.
Young children of every class, it seems, were raised communally. In one tale, Princess Ljufvina of Permia, in northern Russia, was captured by a Viking and forced to marry him. Her twin infant sons were raised with a slave’s son of the same age, and not until they were three years old did the Viking ask which boy was his own. Ljufvina pointed to the slave boy. The father was disappointed. The handsome, fair-skinned boy was “a puny-looking thing,” in his opinion, while the two swarthy twins looked strong and sturdy. He called them “Hel-skins.” Maybe he meant they resembled the powerful queen of the underworld, Hel, who had an ugly face, half-dark, half-pale. But maybe the word meant “hell-raisers” or “hellions,” a description that fits the boys’ behavior. When Ljufvina admitted her deception, their father was delighted to acknowledge the little Hel-skins as his own.
Though the sagas do depict loving mothers, Viking children often seem to form closer attachments to the nurses and guardians and tutors they called their foster mothers or foster fathers. Two who grew up in their parents’ homes, Egil and Hallgerd, were raised by slaves or servants of whom they became particularly fond. Egil’s foster mother taught him songs and magic and how to write runes, and saved his life once during a ball game that turned deadly; when she was killed, he avenged her murder as if she were kin. Hallgerd’s foster father petted and spoiled her and killed anyone who slapped her. She loved him in return, shielding him from retribution until he killed a man she was fond of; then ruthless Hallgerd sent him to his death.
Often Viking children were not raised in their parents’ households. Sending a child away to be fostered was a way to cement relationships among families. It was also considered good for the child. One-year-old Halldor, who had several older brothers, was sent away to be raised by his father’s elderly kinsman. Bersi had no children to inherit his farm, so the infant would become his heir. Because Bersi was a poet, a vignette of the infant’s life was preserved: “That summer Bersi took sick, and he lay in bed a long time,” the saga says. One day, while everyone else was out hay making, Bersi and the baby were left alone in the house. Halldor lay in a cradle, but he was apparently learning to stand and hauled himself up. “The boy tipped the cradle over and he fell”—screaming—“onto the floor, but Bersi wasn’t able to do anything about it.” As Viking heroes often do when they get into tight spots, Bersi made up a poem about it:
We both
lie abed,
Halldor and I:
We’re no heroes.
I’m too old,
you’re too young.
You’ll get over it.
I won’t.
Later, the saga says, someone came in and picked Halldor up off the floor, no harm done.
Both men and women were responsible for childcare. Several fathers or foster fathers, like Bersi, end up babysitting in the sagas. One took his infant son along when he went fishing. He dressed the boy in a sealskin bag that covered him, neck to toes, to keep him dry, and laid him in the prow of the boat. Luckily, little Seal-Thorir stayed at home in his mother’s care on the next fishing trip, when his father drowned.
Sometimes mother and father were both irresponsible: The marriage between an Icelandic chieftain’s daughter, Thurid, and a Norwegian merchant, Geirmund, was not a happy one. Geirmund was a dapper warrior: He wore a red tunic, a gray sea cloak, and a bearskin cap, and always carried the sword Leg-Biter, with its walrus-ivory hilt. He decided to leave Iceland and go back to Norway, but he not only refused to take Thurid and their one-year-old daughter with him, he refused to leave money behind to pay for their keep.
Thurid was outraged. Geirmund’s ship was loaded and waiting for a fair wind when she snuck aboard late one night, carrying their daughter. She slipped the little girl into the skin sleeping bag in which Geirmund lay, grabbed Leg-Biter, and returned to her boat. Geirmund did not wake until the baby began to cry. He tried to go after Thurid, but she had drilled a hole in his ship’s rowboat. As she and her crew rowed away, he called out, “Take the girl with you and whatever else you want from the cargo. I’d rather lose my fortune than my sword.”
“Then you’ll never get it back,” said Thurid. She never saw Geirmund—or her daughter—again, as their ship sank off the Norwegian coast.
* * *
Whether raised by their kin or fostered out, Viking children were given a great deal of freedom. Boldness and initiative were rewarded. Risk taking was encouraged. Being a troublesome “Hel-skin” was not a bad thing—even when mischief devolved into violence.
When the heroine of the Saga of Hervor was a teenager, she ran away to the woods to escape her embroidery lessons. Briefly, she lived as an outlaw, attacking travelers and even killing them for their money. Her grandfather forced her to come home—but didn’t otherwise punish her. As the description of another young saga heroine shows, such boldness and courage were valued in girls. Said to be the finest marriage prospect around, Hildigunn was not only handsome and a talented artist, “she was the fiercest of women and the most strong-willed”; she was both a skörungr and a drengr, the saga says—both a leader and a warrior.
A rare saga portrait of a much younger child gives us Egil’s exploits as a boy of three (though he is said to be as big as a six-year-old). When forbidden to accompany his parents to a feast, he caught a horse and, though he had trouble managing the beast and almost got lost in a bog, rode nearly ten miles to the party. Greeted warmly by his grandfather, little Egil composed a poem about his adventure, for which he was rewarded with the gift of a seashell and three duck eggs.
When Egil, age seven, was bullied by bigger boys, Egil’s mother praised him for fighting back. The scene was a ball game. Egil whacked his opponent with the bat. The boy threw Egil roughly to the ground, and the other boys jeered. Egil got an axe and, when his opponent was running with the ball, darted onto the field and struck him on the head. The boy died. Egil’s mother said her son would make a fine Viking when he grew up. Egil was so proud he composed a poem:
My mother said
to buy me a ship,
a fast one, with fine oars;
to set off with Viking
s:
to stand in the stern,
to steer the vessel,
straight in to harbor,
and kill a man or two.
Outright rebellion was tolerated as well. Olaf (who grew up to be Saint Olaf, king of Norway) was asked to saddle his stepfather’s horse. When he saddled, instead, a billy goat, he was not punished. Grettir (who grew up to be an outlaw) was asked to take care of his family’s flock of fifty geese. “It wasn’t long before he learned how hard it was to get them all going in the right direction, with the slow-moving goslings and all. He got very annoyed at this.” When passersby reported seeing geese with their wings broken and a pile of dead goslings, his father stoically announced, “We’ll find another job for you.”
* * *
According to an Irish legal text from the Viking Age, children were taught skills appropriate to their status. Sons of farmers (and most Vikings were farmers) were taught to dry malt and to cut wood. Their sisters learned to grind grain, to sieve the flour, and to knead the bread. Both were taught to take care of animals. Noble boys, by contrast, learned to play board games and to handle weapons, while their sisters learned to cut out and sew clothing and to weave decorative tapestries. Their status also determined what they ate: children of farmers flavored their porridge with buttermilk and salted butter, noble children got fresh milk and sweet butter, while royal children got milk and honey. Likewise, status determined the color of their clothing: farm children wore yellow, black, or undyed cloth; noble children wore red, green, or brown; royalty wore blue and purple. Babies of any class wore dark colors (to hide the stains).
Though these Irish laws come from a Christian culture, not a pagan one, people from Norway had been in Ireland since the late 700s, raiding and trading and marrying into Irish families. In the early 800s, they founded the city of Dublin. By the time Hervor was born, the Irish and the Norse had been influencing each other’s cultures, as their artwork shows, for more than a hundred years. Some of these Irish rules might have applied to her.
But the strict division of tasks by gender—boys dry the malt, girls grind the flour, boys cut wood, girls sew—seems to me to be very impractical. Nor do the sagas support the idea. In one of the few descriptions of making bread, boys are charged with the task. When his sister’s ten-year-old son wished to join him in his outlaw lair, the hero Sigmund tested the boy’s mettle by handing him a sack of flour. “You make the bread, and I will go fetch firewood,” he says. When he returns, the boy has done nothing. He didn’t dare touch the flour because something was squirming in the sack. He was sent home. When his brother Sinfjotli reached ten, he too was tested. This time, when Sigmund returned with his load of wood, he found fresh-baked bread awaiting him. “Did you find anything odd about the flour?” he asked. “There was something alive in it when I began kneading,” young Sinfjotli replied, “but whatever it was, I kneaded it in.” Sigmund laughed. “It was the most poisonous of snakes,” he said, and suggested the boy eat something other than poisoned bread for supper.
Vikings were travelers, and any traveler, male or female, needs to know how to split wood to make a fire and how to sew well enough to repair ripped clothing or patch a sail—which may mean first spinning the thread and carving a bone needle. Other things Hervor needed to know were how to sharpen a knife (and sharpening a sword is not so different); how to raise, capture, kill, butcher, and cook an animal; what plants can be eaten, which are poisonous, and which have medicinal uses; how to train and ride a horse; how to cut and dry hay or find other fodder for one’s animals; how to row and sail and keep a boat seaworthy; and how to build a house—or at least fix a leaking roof.
Simply by being around when an extra hand was needed, Hervor could have learned a craft, such as making combs, pots, rope, or shoes, weaving, metalworking, wood carving (at least enough to repair a ship or reshaft a scythe), and blacksmithing (at least enough to shoe a horse). While some crafts required greater strength or dexterity than others, none were restricted to males or females. In some sagas, women are praised for their skill in carving scenes on wooden doors or fashioning art objects out of walrus ivory. Archaeologists have found tools for metalworking in several female graves, while textile-working tools are sometimes found buried with men. Tools, in general, are among those artifacts that can’t be reliably sexed.
All these crafts were practiced in and around a chieftain’s hall. Hervor, living near the town of Kaupang, may also have learned from a young age the basics of trade: how to value an item; how to weigh hacksilver with a handheld set of scales and convert it to a number of coins; how to dicker; and how to tell an honest trader from a thief.
Finally, Hervor was taught to memorize poems and stories and genealogies and laws—for the human mind was the repository of culture in the Viking Age. Only well after Christianity came to the North was the memory replaced by the book, and learning became something done seated, indoors, with quill in hand.
* * *
In many ways, Viking children seem to have raised themselves. Older children taught the younger ones to play those rough games with a bat and a ball in grassy meadows or on ice-covered lakes. They wrestled and learned to swim. They ran footraces and had jumping contests, raced on ice skates (made of a cow’s shin bones), on wooden skis, and on horseback. They flew kites and had snowball fights. They competed in picking up heavy rocks and pitching stones. They learned to juggle (preferably with knives). They challenged their balance: One day, they might be dared to walk on the moving oars of a longship.
They played as warriors, too. Archaeologists have found small swords and axes, spearheads, arrows, bows, and knives at Viking sites. Play weapons were made of stone and clay, sized for a child’s hand. Practice weapons were made of wood, carved to look like real weapons currently in fashion. Fully functional children’s weapons, of iron and steel, have also been found.
In the stories, Viking children proudly carry such weapons. Young Hervor in the Saga of Hervor, as we’ve seen, “practised more with a bow and a sword and shield” than at her embroidery. Kjartan was fascinated by the pool of blood spreading from the wounds of a dead man who had been dragged into the bushes. He “had a little axe in his hand. He ran up to the bushes and dipped the axe in the blood.” Sviatoslav learned to cast a spear from horseback; the first time, it struck his leg and “barely cleared the horse’s ears.” Herjolf, a few years older, put his spear to good use: At eight, he killed a bear that attacked his favorite goat. Arrow-Odd “would never play games like other children”; instead he was obsessed with archery. He “asked everyone who was good at it to make arrows for him, but he was careless with them afterward, and left them lying around on the benches where people sat. Many people were hurt by them when they came into the dark room to sit down.”
Viking children had toy ships, carved out of wood, and toy horses, of wood or bronze, that they took into imaginary battles. They laid out miniature farms on grassy hillsides and inhabited them with bones: Certain bones represented sheep, others cows or horses. They molded clay, making miniature pots. They played board games that taught them to think strategically: Some games required only two handfuls of pebbles and a gameboard scratched in the sand.
Sometimes, like modern children, they played “make-believe.” On a rainy day, says one saga, two boys and a girl were playing on the floor beside the fire while their parents entertained some guests. The children were acting out a lawsuit heard by the judges at a recent assembly. The girl played Unn, who was suing her husband, Hrut, for divorce. Their marriage had been cursed by Gunnhild the Witch, Queen of Norway. “He cannot have sex with me because he was once her lover.”
One of the boys played Unn’s lawyer: “You must return her dowry, you gelding.”
The other boy, playing Hrut, replied, “Not unless you can beat me in single combat!”
The people sitting around the fire laughed, tentatively at first, so the children repeated their play. Their silliness increased and the laughter grew raucous, until o
ne of the onlookers picked up a stick and struck the “lawyer” in the face. “Get outside and stop ridiculing us,” he shouted.
He was the real Hrut’s brother, and Hrut was sitting beside him. Hrut took a ring from his finger. “Come here,” he said, and gave it to the chastened boy. “Go away now, and never make fun of anyone again.” The boy thanked him and ran out into the rain, his playmates hard on his heels.
* * *
Queen Gunnhild’s love for Hrut—and the curse she laid on him when he lied to her, according to Njal’s Saga—came well after Eirik Bloodaxe’s death. Now, in our story, Gunnhild is a young woman pushing her husband Eirik to become sole king of Norway. As Snorri Sturluson writes in Heimskringla, Eirik’s brothers Sigrod and Olaf were still mustering their forces when Eirik’s fleet arrived: He “got such good winds he could sail day and night, and no news of his coming outran him.”
He attacked his brothers just south of the great burial mound at Oseberg, beside the steep craggy hill where, much later, the fortress of Tunsberg was built. “Eirik had a much bigger army and won the victory,” Snorri writes. “Both Olaf and Sigrod fell there, and each is buried in a mound on the slope of the hill, where they died.” Eirik Bloodaxe could finally call himself king of Norway.
Snorri, again, says nothing of Gunnhild’s whereabouts during the fight at Tunsberg. But twenty-some years later, when her sons won the kingdom, he places her on the battlefield itself. There, her errand runner is credited with killing the rival king somewhat magically—or perhaps the archer was Gunnhild herself. At a crucial moment, says Snorri, an arrow of an unusual kind “hit King Hakon in the arm, just below the shoulder. And it is said by many that Gunnhild’s servant, the one named Kisping, ran through the crowd shouting: ‘Make way for the king-slayer’—and shot the arrow at King Hakon, but others say no one knows who shot it.” The arrow hit an artery and King Hakon the Good bled to death.
The Real Valkyrie Page 7