The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  Liudprand did not know the Rus very well. Three years later, Igor was back. His “innumerable ships … covered the sea.” Says the Russian Primary Chronicle, “When the Emperor heard this news, he sent to Igor his best boyars to entreat him to come no nearer, but rather to accept the tribute which Oleg had received, and to the amount of which something should even be added.” Part of the “something” added in the new treaty was the permission to buy five times more silk.

  It was to bring back some of this silk treasure, perhaps, that Hervor set off from Birka one late spring morning, sometime in the 950s or 960s, with a merchant fleet traveling the East Way.

  18

  THE EAST WAY

  Hers is a lapstrake boat built of oak and riveted with iron, but otherwise it has little in common with the one she captained to Birka. Boats on the East Way have to be light enough to lift and drag overland, round-bottomed to float and maneuver in shallow streams, flexible and strong to endure the rough handling of high seas. They must be swift to row and sail, quick to change course.

  Birka’s shipwrights waste no weight on comforts for the crew: no flat decks, no sea chests to sit on. Just thwarts for the six rowers, the captain, and lookout, the pared-thin shell of the boat bending and flexing under their bare feet.

  They were laughably little boats, Hervor thought when she first saw one. Less than half the length of Queen Gunnhild’s ship, with its fifteen pairs of oars and crew of thirty-two. Smaller, even, than the smallest of the warships in the Red Girl’s fleet.

  Hervor had scoffed at the idea of these eastern skiffs as warships. Then she tested one—and spent the rest of her loot from the Red Girl to buy it.

  With a breeze bellying out the light little sail in its forward-stepped mast, her boat races over the lake with the speed of a falcon. With a flick of the oars, it flies up the rivers that flow into Lake Malaren from all parts of Middle Sweden. It floats up their tributaries to where furs are sold and iron manufactured, bouncing off the rocks and rapids. With a covering of birch protecting its keel, it slides across the portage-ways the local people have prepared (and charge a fee to use) of grassy lanes or bogs firmed up with twig basketry or V-shaped ditches lined with sturdy logs sunk into the mud. Hervor has learned when to cut a new false keel of birch, and how best to hammer it on.

  The only boats that can best hers on these routes are the Sami’s dugout canoes, their round bottoms carved from a single trunk of aspen, steamed and spread wide, their sides built up with thin, overlapping strakes sewn on with reindeer sinews or spruce roots, both lighter than iron rivets, their pointed prows tipped with a beak or a knob that makes a good handle, with a hole for a drag rope.

  Hervor learns the hard way not to increase her boat’s sail. The light sails of linen or hemp sold in Birka’s market, taller than they are wide, look absurd to her Western eyes. So she borrows a good woolen sail, wider than it is high—and capsizes her boat before it leaves Birka’s harbor.

  She should have looked more carefully at the silver coins struck in the town. On one side is a lapstrake boat with a little sail stuck high on its mast, to catch the breezes on a river journey.

  A good East Way boat is so light it’s tippy. With only five strakes up to the gunwale, the height of Hervor’s boat above the keel is little more than an ell—when the boat is at rest, a rower can dabble her hand in the sea. Heeled over, under sail, the gunwale nearly kisses the water’s surface. To keep afloat, not only does the boat’s sail have to be sized and balanced correctly; its crew themselves must act as ballast, shifting their weight toward starboard or port, stem or stern, depending on the wind and the weather.

  But with a fair wind and a fine crew, Hervor’s boat sails perfectly dry. Narrow and elegantly raised at stem and stern, it has a slightly asymmetrical shape: Its hull is wider and higher toward the prow, providing a shield against waves and spray, while its narrower stern releases the water easily.

  There is only one thing lacking in such a boat: elbow room. In quiet waters, Hervor can fit fifteen people into it, even seventeen, if they don’t need to be comfortable. But for sailing night and day, cooking and sleeping on board, eight feels tight.

  And their trade goods? No iron bars in this ship. Only the lightest and most luxurious goods make sense: To the east Hervor’s ship will carry walrus ivory, feathers and down, musk from beavers for making perfume, sable and miniver and other fine furs, amber and hazelnuts, knife blades and swords, trained hunting falcons, and a girl or two to be sold into slavery. Returning west, their cargo will be carnelian beads, color pigments, jewelry and precious stones, exotic spices, silver coins, and all kinds of silk.

  * * *

  In the midst of World War II, with the Nazis extolling their Viking heritage, the Swedish writer Frans G. Bengtsson began writing “a story that people could enjoy reading, like The Three Musketeers or the Odyssey.” Bengtsson had made his literary reputation with the biography of an eighteenth-century king. But for this story he tried a new genre, the historical novel, and a new period of time. His Vikings are common men, smart, witty, and open-minded. “When encountering a Jew who allies with the Vikings and leads them to treasure beyond their dreams, they are duly grateful,” notes one critic. “Bengtsson in effect throws the Viking heritage back in the Nazis’ face.”

  His effect on that Viking heritage, however, was not benign. His story, Rode Orm, is one of the most-read and most-loved books in Swedish and has been translated into more than twenty languages; in English it’s The Long Ships. Part of the story takes place on the East Way, which the red-haired Orm travels in a lapstrake ship with twenty-four pairs of oars. Based on the Oseberg ship’s fifteen pairs of oars or the Gokstad ship’s sixteen, such a mighty vessel would stretch nearly a hundred feet long and weigh sixteen to eighteen tons, empty. To cross the many portages between the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, Red Orm’s “cheerful crew” threw great logs in front of the prow and hauled the boat along these rollers “in exchange for swigs of ‘dragging beer,’” Bengtsson wrote.

  This, say experimental archaeologists, is “unproven,” “improbable,” and—after several tries with replica ships—“not possible.”

  But Bengtsson’s fiction burned itself into popular memory. Early scholars were convinced, too: A drawing of dozens of men attempting to roll a mighty ship on loose logs illustrates the eastern voyages in the classic compendium The Viking from 1966. “Seldom has anything been surrounded by so much myth and fantasy” as the Viking ship, notes an expert on the boats of Middle Sweden. Like the myth of the Viking housewife with her keys, the myth of the mighty Viking ship is so common it’s taken to be true. But the facts do not back it up.

  In the 1990s, archaeologists attempted several times to take replica Viking ships between rivers or across isthmuses using the log-rolling method. They failed. They scaled down their ships. They still failed. Their ships were a half to a third the length of Red Orm’s mighty ship. They weighed only one to two tons, not sixteen tons. Yet they could not be cheerfully hauled by their crews, no matter how much beer was provided. The task was inefficient even when horses—or wheels or winches or wagons—were added.

  We think bigger is better, but it’s not.

  The beautiful Oseberg ship with its spiral prow and the sleek Gokstad ship, praised as an “ideal form” and “a poem carved in wood,” have been considered the classic Viking ships from the time they were first unearthed. Images of these Norwegian ships grace uncountable books on Viking Age history, uncountable museum exhibitions, uncountable souvenirs in Scandinavian gift shops.

  But a third ship of equal importance for understanding the Viking Age was discovered in 1898, after Gokstad (1880) and before Oseberg (1903), by a Swedish farmer digging a ditch to dry out a boggy meadow. He axed through the wreck and laid his drain pipes. The landowner, a bit of an antiquarian, decided to rescue the boat and pulled the pieces of old wood out of the ground. His collection founded a local museum, but the boat pieces lay ignored in the attic—unmarked,
unnumbered, with no drawings to say how they had lain in the earth when found—until 1980, when a radiocarbon survey of the museum’s contents dated them to the eleventh century. Their great age was confirmed by tree-ring data, which found the wood for the boat had been cut before 1070.

  In the 1990s, an archaeologist took on the task of puzzling the pieces back into a boat. She had bits of much of the hull: of the keel, the stem and stern and five wide strakes, even some of the wooden rail attached to the gunwale. She had most of the frames, one bite, and two knees. About two feet in the middle of the boat was missing: where the ditch went through. The iron rivets had rusted away, but the rivet holes in the wood were easy to see and, since the distance between them varied, the parts could only go together one way. The wood itself had been flattened by time, but it was still sturdy enough to be soaked in hot water and bent into shape—the same technique the original boatbuilder had used.

  When she had solved this 3D jigsaw puzzle, she engaged the National Maritime Museum in Stockholm to help her mount the pieces on an iron frame; the Viks Boat went on display in 1996. Then she created a replica, Talja, and tested it by sailing, rowing, and portaging around Lake Malaren. Talja glided up shallow streams, its pliable planks bending and sliding over rocks. With only the power of its crew, it was easily portaged from one watershed to the next, from Lake Malaren to Lake Vanern in the west, itself draining into the Kattegat.

  She knew not to use a too-large sail. For an earlier replica of a similar round-bottomed, lapstrake boat, she had borrowed a woolen sail of the kind used for Norwegian Viking ship replicas—and capsized. A smaller, lighter sail of hemp proved a better fit. Cannabis was grown in central Sweden from the seventh century on; according to pollen data, its popularity grew when the use of sails became widespread. Hemp fiber is procured from the cannabis plant in the same way as linen from flax: soaked, slightly rotted, beaten, dried, and spun. The long hemp fibers were twisted into rope, good for rigging. The short fibers were woven into sailcloth. The technology may have come from the East: The word canvas comes from the Arabic for “cannabis.”

  With a suitable sail on her forward-stepped mast, the replica ship Talja sailed out of Lake Malaren, up Sweden’s coast, and across the Baltic Sea to the Aland Islands of Finland. A second replica, Fornkare, was built in 2012 and taken on the East Way from Lake Malaren to Novgorod the first year, then south, by rivers and lakes, some 250 miles through Russia the second year. There the expedition “paused”—as the Vikings would have, to wait out the winter—intending to continue south to Kyiv the next spring, though for unexplained reasons (money? politics?) that didn’t happen. Still, Fornkare’s captain concludes, “The vessel proved itself capable of traveling this ancient route” from Birka to Byzantium.

  It is the Viks Boat on which I’ve based Hervor’s boat in the scene at the beginning of this chapter. It is thirty-one feet long—longer than two earlier replicas that failed the East Way portage test—and about seven feet wide. The Viks Boat replicas passed the portage test for two reasons. First, they were built, like the original, with strakes that were radially split, not sawn. A large oak log—its diameter more than twice the width of each plank—is notched lengthwise with an axe; then wooden wedges are pounded into the crack until the log splits in two. The halves are turned round side up and split again and again until they are as thin as possible, then the strake is shaved with a plane until it is smooth and perfectly even. Unlike sawing a log into planks, tangentially, this radial splitting technique does not cut the wood fibers. The resulting strake is easy to bend and hard to break—at less than half an inch thick. The resulting boat is equally seaworthy at almost half the weight of the same size boat built with the same lapstrake technique, but using sawn boards. Empty, the Viks Boat replicas weigh only half a ton—about as much as a horse.

  The second reason the Viks Boat replicas proved adequate for the East Way was that archaeologists had set aside Frans Bengtsson’s fantastical log-rolling technique for crossing from stream to stream. By studying the ways the Sami had portaged their light dugout canoes through the waterways of Sweden and Finland throughout history, the archaeologists began to see signs of similar portage-ways around Lake Malaren. They built some themselves and had teams race replica ships through an obstacle course of portage types: smooth grassy paths, log-lined roads or ditches (with the logs aligned in the direction of travel), and bogs layered with branches. A team of two adults and seven seventeen-year-olds finished the winding half-mile course with Talja in an hour—including several stops when someone stumbled into stinging nettles or got a cramp or the boat slipped off the logs on a curve. When the portage was straight over four-inch-thick logs sunk into the mud so they didn’t shift, the boat raced at 150 feet a minute. As an ethnographer wrote about a journey with a Sami couple in 1939, “the boat got speed over the rollers so it whistled through the bushes.”

  * * *

  Along with mighty boats and beer-fueled, rolling-log portages, The Long Ships perpetuated another myth about the Vikings’ East Way: that no women went on the voyages.

  When Red Orm set off on his expedition to the East, writes Bengtsson, his wife and daughters were left at home; they “wept loudly,” while the men leaving “were glad at the prospect of adventure.” Among these “men” was Orm’s young son: “The obstinacy of his desire to go drove Ylva” (Orm’s wife) “more than once to weep tears of grief and rage. She asked him what he thought a thirteen-year-old boy could do in a company of full-grown fighting-men.” Yet the boy got his way.

  His older sister, Ludmilla, stayed home, though clearly Bengtsson had modeled her character on the warrior woman in the Saga of Hervor. Ludmilla “disliked working at the butter-churns or on the weaving-stools, preferring to shoot with a bow, at which sport she soon became as skillful as her teacher.” She “played truant in the forest.” Her “obstinacy and boldness” pleased her father, prompting him to remark, “She will be a difficult filly to tame.” But he quickly married her off so a chieftain would agree to accompany him east, and the last we hear, Ludmilla ruled the chieftain’s household and enjoyed bossing him around, her archery skills unneeded.

  Silver coin found in a grave north of the Warriors’ Hall in Birka, Sweden.

  Bengtsson, writing in the 1940s, ascribed to the Victorian ideal: Men had adventures; women stayed home. Archaeologists in the 1990s agreed. The sketches of ships found throughout the Viking world on sticks and boards, or scrawled like graffiti on memorial stones, one archaeologist averred, were “the work of men.” Like the cars and planes modern boys doodle in their schoolbooks, ship graffiti depicts “a male field of interest,” he said, which prompted him to muse, “One important task for future research is to identify female graffiti, if they exist, and to explain why, if they cannot be found”—though he had an answer in hand: “Probably women were simply too busy.”

  There is, of course, no way to tell if the hand holding the graffitist’s knife was male or female.

  But there is ample evidence that Viking women owned and appreciated ships: They wove them into tapestries. They were buried in them.

  “According to the myth of the powerful Viking,” writes the Viks Boat expert, we ought to find “a well-armed male” in every burial ship. “When men are found in the graves, everything seems to be in order,” she writes, “but when women were found in wealthy boat burials, the picture was broken.” It did not fit archaeologists’ preconceived notions and so was explained away: Since a Viking woman “could not have had any power of her own,” archaeologists reasoned, the boat and other precious artifacts found in her grave must instead “reflect the power and wealth of her husband.”

  Yet as more and more Viking Age burials are excavated or reanalyzed, our picture of the past is evolving. Today, the likelihood of finding “a well-armed male” in a boat burial in Sweden has plummeted. The mightiest boats have women in them. The same is true for a graveyard in Russia. At the same time, in some parts of Sweden the richest men are buried,
not in boats, but in wagons or sleighs—long thought to be a feminine way for a Viking to travel.

  The preponderance of rich female boat burials in Vastmanland, on the western edge of Lake Malaren, suggests the province had not only rich women merchants, as at Birka, but women rulers as well. Tacitus deplored these neighbors of the Swedes in Roman times. Writing in the first century AD, he noted: “So notoriously do they degenerate not only from a state of liberty, but even below a state of bondage.” Their crime? “Here the sovereignty is exercised by a woman.” Some of the Viking Age boats in Vastmanland’s graves display Sami techniques: a stretched dugout bottom to which strakes were stitched on with sinews or roots. Along with boatbuilding, the people of Vastmanland may have shared other aspects of Sami culture, such as equality of the sexes. To Tacitus, this fact made the Sami “astoundingly savage.” He wrote: “The same hunt feeds men and women alike, for the latter are with them everywhere, and seek their share of the kill.” In the 1500s, long after the Viking Age, the encyclopedist Olaus Magnus described Sami men and women still hunting together and sharing the kill equally.