The farther these girls were sold from their homes, the more valuable they became (they were less likely to run off or to be ransomed or rescued). In one saga, a group of captive Irish girls in Norway are priced at eight ounces each—eight bangles, or eighty dirhams—though one girl is sold to an Icelandic chieftain for three times that amount. Viking traders sold girls on the Volga River, according to Arab sources, for a hundred dirhams. Conveyed as far as Baghdad, however, captives with certain sought-after qualities could be sold for five thousand, ten thousand, even a hundred thousand dirhams.
* * *
The Vikings were no more nor less brutal than their contemporaries when it came to trafficking in humans. As one historian notes, “Early medieval narratives make it plain that wars were slave hunts.”
Gudrod, the Viking king of Dublin, staged such a hunt in 921. His target was the rich Irish town of Armagh, and he timed his raid for the festival of Saint Martin—the Christian version of the Winter Nights feast, held on November 11—when everyone would be wearing their best clothes. The town being well inland, Gudrod could not call on the swiftness of his ships for surprise, but otherwise his battle plan was that of Vikings elsewhere: Gather intelligence and choose the best time to attack. Sneak up on your target without being seen. Fan out, blocking all exits. At the sound of the ox-horn trumpet, attack: running, shouting, beating your shields. Going berserk is a great way to unnerve your opponents. Slaughter anyone who stands fast—not because you are by nature bloodthirsty, but because terror-stricken people do not think well. Herd them into a trap, like the church, from which they cannot escape. Eliminate anyone who acts like a leader. If you planned well, the town was yours. You could ransack it for valuables at your leisure, before burning it down.
At Armagh, Gudrod left the last step a little too late. He had captured a massive booty of well-dressed soon-to-be-enslaved locals, but he was not content. Settling in to Armagh, Gudrod divided his army into three and sent them out to pillage the hinterlands. But word of the town’s troubles had gotten out. The Irish attacked one of Gudrod’s contingents and wiped it out. The Vikings might have been, as that wordy chronicler of The War of the Irish with the Foreigners wrote, “shouting, hateful, powerful,” and thirty-three other adjectives, including “without mercy” and, strangely, “blue-green” (for the color of their clothing?), but meeting an Irish army, he said, was like “swimming against a stream; it was pummeling an oak with fists.”
Image of a Viking woman, from Tisso, Denmark.
The Irish, on this occasion, did not bother to take captives, to enslave or ransom. They slaughtered. But when they sacked the Viking towns of Dublin in 944 and Limerick in 968, they listed among their booty not only gold, silver, jewels, and beautifully woven cloth (including silks and satins), but people as well: The Irish raiders led away the Vikings’ “soft, youthful, bright, matchless, girls; their blooming silk-clad young women; and their active, large, and well-formed boys” to be sold as slaves. “Every one of them that was fit for war was killed, and every one that was fit for a slave was enslaved.”
Nor were the Irish particularly gentle with their captives. At the sack of Limerick the Irish led out “a great line of the women of the foreigners.” The Vikings’ “soft, youthful, bright, matchless, girls” were “placed on the hills of Saingel in a circle, and they were stooped with their hands on the ground.” In that position, they were approached en masse “by the horseboys of the army” and raped from behind, “for the good of the souls of the foreigners who were killed in the battle.”
What woman wouldn’t choose, if given the opportunity, to be the raider, not the violated captive? What woman, once violated, wouldn’t yearn for revenge? It was revenge that brought the valkyrie Lagertha to Ragnar Lodbrok’s army, writes Saxo Grammaticus. The Swedish king who killed Ragnar’s grandfather had taken Ragnar’s kinswomen and “exposed them to public prostitution,” in Saxo’s polite phrase—likely what the Irish did to the women of Limerick. When Ragnar invaded, “Many women of quality, who had lately suffered abuse to their bodies … began to dress themselves as men and flock in eagerness to his camp, vowing that they would put death before dishonor.”
* * *
According to the Icelandic sagas, when Eirik Bloodaxe was ousted from the kingdom of York (for the first time, in 948), he and Gunnhild took their court back to Orkney and there celebrated the marriage of their daughter Ragnhild to the son of Thorfinn Skull-Splitter. Then Eirik took up the Viking life again, perhaps turning his ships south to Dublin—no one knows exactly where he spent the next four years. “Go south to Dublin: That’s where everyone’s going these days,” was the advice of a Norwegian chieftain to his troublesome son in Egil’s Saga.
If Dublin was Eirik’s destination and Hervor went with him, she would have fought alongside the Red Girl, who was then among the Vikings harassing Munster, enslaving the Irish and selling them abroad. Was Hervor herself captured, raped, and enslaved? That’s one possible story. If so, she managed to escape.
Whatever happened, she did not stay in the west. She did not return to York with Queen Gunnhild, when Eirik Bloodaxe regained the throne there in 952. She was not in the warband of Eirik’s sons when they challenged their uncle, Hakon the Good, for the kingship of Norway after Eirik’s death in 954. Given no facts, I can only imagine how Hervor made her way from Dublin to Birka, from the far western node on the Viking slave route to a node in its center, on the doorstep of the East Way to Byzantium, Baghdad, and beyond. I can imagine Hervor left her foster brothers’ warband and joined the Red Girl’s, for as Saxo points out in his story of Alvild, women “of the same persuasion” liked to keep company. I can imagine that she sailed east with a shipload of captive girls to sell in the slave markets at Birka.
13
SLAVE GIRLS
Hervor is bored. The sea is fair, the wind steady, and there is nothing to do but blister under the sun and be dizzied by its bright sparkle on the waves. She leans down from her rowing bench and lazily traces her left foot on the floorboard with her eating knife. Shifting her weight, she cuts the footprint deeper, then starts on her right foot. She is just squiggling in toenails when a shadow blanks the fine lines out.
What are you doing?
The bailing scoop lands by her feet with a hollow clap. She sheaths her knife and picks up the tool.
Cutting my toenails, she says. What’s it look like?
She is still smiling at the sly double meaning when she reaches the bilge to take her turn at bailing. What had she been doing? Carving I was here into the ship, as the ship has carved its presence into the calluses on her hands and the cramp in her calves and the creak in her back.
And this is a dry ship, a seaworthy ship that needs only one person to bail.
It is much preferable to the first ship the Red Girl put her on in the Irish Sea. Caught in a contrary wind in that old, leaky vessel, they bailed day and night—warriors and captives together—their hands cramped with cold, their shirts soaked through, until they were exhausted, and still they bailed. They needed two buckets, one going down while the other came up, over and over, taking turns, dipping and dumping until the danger passed.
Today, on a sunny day under sail, bailing is almost a pleasure—at least it breaks up the monotony. The bilgewater is cold on her toes; the wooden bailing scoop, like a dough trough with a handle, is perfectly curved to match the hull of the boat. No hurry to hoist the full bucket to the deck, haul herself after it, and cross between two sea chests—themselves well designed for their double task as rowing benches and trunks for clothing, food, and loot. Each chest is wider at its base and tapers up to a rounded lid carved from a hollowed half tree trunk, stable in a tossing sea and sturdy enough to sit on. There is just enough room between the benches: When the oars are out, each rower can tap the shoulder of the one in front. At anchor or under sail, the floorspace between the benches makes a snug sleeping berth or, as now, an aisle linking the bilge to the gunwale.
Before
she bends for the next bucketful, she lets her eyes slip over the slave girls, huddled aft of the mast in the little shade cast by the sail. She wonders who they were before they were caught.
But for battle luck, she could be in their place, she knows.
Though perhaps not. This set of girls was carefully picked. They are buxom and big-hipped with silken hair and good teeth, none too tall or too small, too young or too old, the best of the hundreds of women the Red Girl has captured—the ones destined for the East Way.
They’ve made themselves a nest in the midst of the cargo, among bales wrapped watertight in sailcloth tarps, and lie at their ease like queens, not slaves—though it is easy to see who was born noble and who was not. The nobles’ limbs are sunburned and peeling. At night the Red Girl rubs them with grease to keep their skin soft—and their sale value high. For the same reason, she has a handsome dress packed away for each girl—a dress to parade in through the marketplace, not one to soil on the voyage. On the ship, they are stripped to their linen shirts.
Treat them like horses, the Red Girl told Hervor. High-bred young fillies worth ferrying overseas. Speak calmly to them. Feed them well. Keep them clean.
And if they complain of the cold?
The Red Girl grinned. You can share your sea cloak. But don’t get attached. They’re not your fillies; they’re mine.
Some cold nights Hervor shares more than her sea cloak: The skin sleeping bags the warriors use are sized for two. No fighting, no forcing, is the Red Girl’s rule. There are not enough slave girls for every warrior to have a bedwarmer, so the men double up in their sleeping bags. Occasionally one asks Hervor to share her bag with him, but she always declines. Pregnancy is too much of a risk to indulge herself that way. Sometimes she sleeps with the Red Girl. Mostly she sleeps alone, and cold.
She shrugs. Men have another advantage on board ship: The gunwale is low enough they can piss over the side. She drops her trousers where she stands and pisses into the bilgewater, then continues her work, lazily scooping it into the bucket and tipping it into the sea.
* * *
Some years before Hervor became a slave-dealer in the Red Girl’s crew, a noble young Irishman named Findan was sent to Dublin to ransom his sister, captured in a Viking raid. He traveled with an interpreter, a bodyguard, and a bag of cash. He never made it to town. Along the way Findan was set upon by a Viking band, tied up, and taken to their ship. After a cold, hungry, uncomfortable night in fetters, he convinced the Vikings his capture dishonored them. Says the Life of Saint Findan, “The foreigners held a conference and some, whose attitude was more reasonable and in whom God had inspired, as we believe, humane feelings, argued that people coming from Ireland for the purpose of ransoming others ought not to be forcibly detained.” Findan was set free.
His luck did not last long. His family got caught up in a feud between two Irish chieftains, one of whom attacked Findan’s farmstead. “They came at night, surrounded the house with their forces and threw firebrands onto the roofs.” They killed his brother at his side, but Findan escaped—for a time. The two clans called a truce. Findan was paid blood money for his losses. His enemies invited him to a feast—only to betray him. Vikings “seized him from the midst of the guests, as they had contracted with his enemies to do, bound him in the closest bonds and carried him off.” He was sold—once, twice, three times—before finding himself on a ship headed for Orkney.
On the way, they met another Viking fleet. One of the ships’ captains came on board, peacefully, to gather intelligence about Ireland, he said, but he was recognized by a man whose brother he had killed. A fight broke out. Findan, though tied to his oar, fought as well as he could on his master’s behalf. Other Vikings in the two fleets broke up the fight, and when Findan’s ship sailed on, his master rewarded him for his efforts. He untied him and promised to treat him well.
When they reached Orkney, Findan was allowed to go ashore with the Viking crew “to rest, to roam about exploring, and to wait for a favorable wind.” Rather than cast his lot with the Vikings, though, Findan looked for a way to escape. He hid in a sea cave until the Vikings gave up searching and left without him—even though it was freezing cold and he almost drowned each time the tide came in. Saved from slavery and the cold sea, Findan pledged the rest of his life to God, which is why his story was written down.
* * *
It could have had quite a different ending.
In the mid-900s, an Arab traveler named Ibn Hawqal visited Islamic Spain. Al-Andalus was a fertile land, he wrote, and its people—even its artisans—were wealthy. They wove beautiful linen and silk cloth. They made marvelous musical instruments. They bred the best mules: Each one sold for three thousand dirhams, twice as much as a horse. “A well-known export,” he continued, “is slaves, boys and girls captured in France and Galicia, as well as eunuchs.” Ibn Hawqal believed that “all the Saqaliba eunuchs in the world” came from Spain. These eunuchs were worth even more than mules. In Baghdad, a girl pretty enough for the harem might sell for five thousand dirhams. But a fine eunuch could fetch twenty times as much.
The Arabic term Saqaliba, often translated as “Slavic,” may have applied to any fair-skinned Northerner. According to the Italian chronicler Liudprand of Cremona, the boys were brought to Spain not by Vikings, but by merchants from the north of France. Writing in about 949, Liudprand listed the gifts he presented to the emperor of Byzantium: “nine excellent cuirasses, seven excellent shields with gilded bosses, two silver gilt cauldrons, some swords, spears, and spits, and what was more precious to the emperor than anything, four carzimasia, that being the Greek name for young eunuchs who have had both their testicles and their penis removed. This operation is performed by traders at Verdun, who take the boys into Spain and make a huge profit.”
Eunuchs in the Arab world were not expected to chop wood or herd pigs. Some were recruited into the army. Others became house servants or were trained as bureaucrats and court officials—posts with significant power. Castration, as the ninth-century writer Al-Jahiz of Basra explained, focused the mind. Take two brothers, even twins, he said:
When one of them is castrated, he becomes a better servant and smarter in all kinds of activity and manual work.… You will also find him more intelligent in conversation—these are all his qualities. His brother will remain in his innate ignorance, natural stupidity, and Saqaliba simple-mindedness; he will also be unable to understand foreign languages. His hand will be clumsy and he will not become skillful.
The result of a boy’s castration, Al-Jahiz concluded, “is the purification of his intelligence, sharpening of his acumen, strengthening of his nature and stimulation of his mind.”
Such was the future Findan feared, perhaps, when he braved the high tide in an Orkney sea cave to elude his Viking captors. But what happened to the sister he had been sent to ransom? The Life of Saint Findan says nothing more about her.
* * *
Some women captured by Vikings, though sexually violated, though lacking any way of fighting back, still preserved their honor and self-respect. Yrsa was “swept up along with the cattle” when Vikings raided her estate in Saxony, Snorri Sturluson writes in Heimskringla. She was “a young woman of amazing beauty,” he says, and the raiders soon found out she was also intelligent, well educated, well spoken, and of royal blood. “People thought a lot of her; the king most of all.” Yrsa became a queen in Sweden and “was considered an excellent leader.”
Astrid was a queen in Vestfold, Norway, when Gunnhild and her sons came to power there in the 960s, killing Astrid’s husband, King Tryggvi. Pregnant, Astrid escaped. By the time Gunnhild’s spies hunted her down, in Sweden, her son was a toddler. Gunnhild offered to foster the boy; Astrid refused. She did not want him raised in the house of his enemies—or worse, killed. She did not trust Gunnhild. She fled again, this time in a merchant ship sailing across the Baltic to Russia, where her brother served the king of Gardariki.
She never made it. Vikings from Est
onia captured her ship. When they divvied up their loot, they separated three-year-old Olaf from his mother. The boy would be traded for half a goat, then a good cloak, and would suffer six years as a farmer’s field slave before being recognized and redeemed by his uncle. He grew up to become King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway.
His mother became the booty of a different warrior and went home with her captor to Estonia. In a slave market there, Queen Astrid was recognized by a trader from Viken—“though she looked a bit different than the last time he saw her. She was pale and thin and poorly dressed.” When he called her by name, she recognized him too. She asked him to buy her and return her to her kin. “I will on one condition,” he said: “that you marry me.” Knowing he came from a good family, was accomplished and well-off—a worthy match—she agreed. According to Snorri, she did not enter his bed until they reached Norway and her kin had consented to the marriage.
* * *
The most famous captive in the sagas is Melkorka, an Irishwoman of exceptional self-control. We meet her on Burnt Island (near modern-day Gothenburg, Sweden) around 940, at an assembly to which “people came from nearly every country we’ve ever heard of,” the saga says. Among them was an Icelander, Hoskuld, whose wife, Jorunn, was well educated, capable, and proud of it—or as one translator puts it, “headstrong.” She and their four children, however, were back home, and Hoskuld was on Burnt Island enjoying himself: meeting distant relatives, drinking and indulging in festival food, betting on horse races or wrestling matches, and perusing the foreign goods for sale. In one splendid tent set off by itself, he met Gilli Gerzkr, a well-dressed merchant on his way east to Gardariki.
The Real Valkyrie Page 19