The Real Valkyrie

by Nancy Marie Brown

  When not Sami-style, the burial boats of Middle Sweden, male or female, are much like the Viks Boat: The keel is wide and low, and the boat has a rounded bottom amidships. The burial boats can be larger or smaller than the Viks Boat—one had sixteen pairs of oars, equal to the Oseberg and Gokstad ships. But their shape is entirely unlike these Norwegian burial ships. The beauty of the Gokstad ship, its poetic quality, comes from its curves, the hull swelling out from the gunwale, then closing tightly back in, making a distinctive V-shape down to the deep, straight keel. These concave curves improve the ship’s sailing ability at sea. But the keel cuts too deep to float a shallow, stony stream. Over a portage, even the minimal keel of the Viks Boat replicas needed to be protected with an easily replaceable covering of birch, as had been found on the original. The Old Norse name for this false keel was drag. To “set a drag under someone’s pride” was to encourage arrogance.

  Historians and archaeologists of the Viking Age have long benefited from an ideological false keel. With the Viks Boat taking its rightful place as an exemplar of the Viking ship, and the number of Viking women buried in boats proving they are not exceptions to some arbitrary rule, it’s time to knock off that damaged drag and replace it. Says the restorer of the Viks Boat, “We should get used to a completely different picture of the Scandinavian traveling eastward in the Viking Age, one that is far from the traditional image of the male Viking warrior in the prow of a big warship.”

  * * *

  The Baltic sailing season was confined by sea ice to the six months between May and October. All winter, goods came in to Birka on the ice roads. Bars of iron and tubs of black pine tar came from the west, dragged across the frozen lake on sledges by reindeer or by horses with ice nails pounded into their hooves; the traders themselves wore iron crampons or ice skates made of polished bone. Furs came from the north, traded for salt and other goods at the Sami winter villages, where the solitary hunters came together for the season. Seal products came from the east, from hunters who haunted the edge of the sea ice, as late winter melted into spring. Seal oil was used to light lamps or, mixed with pigments, to make paint; sealskin was made into shoes, sacks, and sailors’ foul-weather gear.

  Birka lay at the crossroads of these trade routes, its markets busy all year. And as summer arrived, the Birka merchants’ fleets set off along the East Way, in search of silver and silk. Bengtsson’s fictional crew, in their unlikely forty-eight-oared ship, numbered about the same as the groups of Rus allowed to enter Constantinople, according to the treaty Oleg negotiated in 907: fifty, with an imperial escort. Given vessels the size of the Viks Boat, fifty Rus would require a fleet of six to eight ships. In June, the weather in Middle Sweden is balmy: seventy degrees and sunny, the meadow flowers blooming, butterflies fluttering, the hay ready to cut, ducks and geese rafting on the glassy surface of the lake, a solitary swan, a sea eagle circling overhead. It was hot, thirsty work rowing even a light, streamlined ship. According to Adam of Bremen, writing in the 1070s, it took five days to travel from Birka to Russia. But the Viks Boat replica Fornkare took sixteen days in 2012, rowing when necessary, sailing continuously by day and by night when the wind held, and making as few landfalls as possible.

  The first stage of the voyage, to today’s Stockholm, took Fornkare one day, rowing half the time. Weaving eighteen miles through a shallow-water maze of islands and peninsulas, the travelers passed the island of Helgo, where the sixth-century bronze Buddha was found. They passed several places now named Ekeby, or Oak Village, where in the Viking Age groves of oaks were protected and allowed to grow tall enough for ship timbers; to make the Viks Boat’s strakes took a straight oak tree more than 230 years old.

  Traveling that route in the tenth century, Hervor and her crew passed fishing boats casting small nets for roach, whitefish, and perch. They passed farms growing peas, beans, flax, hemp, and oilseed crops. They saw dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, horses, and cows, which some farmers were ferrying over to a small island to graze on the spring grass, having set loose planking into their thin-shelled boat to give the beasts better footing. Some four thousand small farms, each home to ten people or so, lay scattered about the lake’s edges, some solitary, others clustered in small villages: The Malaren valley was the most densely populated part of Sweden in the Viking Age. It was a rich area, and its riches were well protected. The routes leading into the lake were narrowed with pilings and barricaded with poles, as so many modern place-names reflect by incorporating the word stek or stok or steg or stig, all cognates of the English stick. At Stoksund (Barrier Sound), where the city of Stockholm (Barrier Island) now lies, the lake joined the East (now Baltic) Sea.

  Stakes and stockades were not the lake’s only protections: On prominent cliff tops along the route were watchfires, pyres ready to be lit if an enemy were sighted. This line of beacons, each within sight of the next, stretched from Birka east, across an arm of the Baltic, to the Kokar hills in the Aland Islands, once the easternmost point in Sweden, 125 miles away. From Kokar, a warning could reach Birka, by beacon, in one night, while the enemy ships were still some two days away.

  Each pile barricade, each cliff-top beacon, was likely guarded, as well, by a company of Birka warriors outfitted with horses and Magyar bows, excellent for patrolling the waterways and picking off targets while staying out of range. It was a challenge to creep up on Birka. Yet, as Snorri Sturluson relates in Heimskringla, Vikings loved a challenge.

  Snorri calls Malaren “Logrinn,” meaning the great lake, or the inland sea. From all over central Sweden, “the water runs into Logrinn,” he writes, “but it has only one mouth out to the sea, and that outlet is narrower than many rivers. Thus, when the rain and snow-melt are heavy, the water rises so high and flows so furiously there are rapids through Stoksund and the land is flooded all around.” A small fleet of Norwegian raiders trapped in Lake Malaren by the Swedes, who had drawn chains across the strait and brought an army to its bank, escaped over the flooded fields by lifting their rudders clear, hoisting their sails to the tops of the masts, and steering with their oars. When the Swedish warriors sought to bar their passage, the waterlogged banks of the strait collapsed, Snorri writes, and the warriors drowned. “But the Swedes say otherwise,” he judiciously adds, “and call it nonsense to think people died there.” The Swedes, after all, knew their straits.

  When Hervor set off on the East Way in the 950s or 960s, her convoy would have caught the spring runoff at Stoksund as well, running its rapids into the Baltic Sea, where a further maze of thirty miles through islands, skerries, and shoals awaited them off Sweden’s east coast. Then the Birka merchants turned north—for the southerly route to Russia was controlled by their rivals on the Baltic islands of Gotland and Saaremaa.

  19

  AT LINDA’S STONE

  The waves keep growing. Her ship slows, struggling to sail against the wind. Suddenly a gust spins them side-on to the swell and nearly pitches them over. Hervor, flush as if under attack in battle, is about to yell Strike the sail! when she glances over at her steersman. He is the oldest in her crew of eight, the one whose sea skills she trusts most. He is unconcerned, even though his steering oar is all the way underwater.

  Douse the fire! she shouts instead. The cook is making the midday meal, feeding reeds and twigs into the larger cauldron, over which the porridge pot swings on its frame. At Hervor’s shout, he slips the small pot off its hook and sets it into the cauldron, where it nests tightly, extinguishing the flames. They’ll wait to eat until the sea is calmer.

  The waves are a handspan from lapping over the gunwale on one side. Without being told, her crew shifts their weight to rebalance the boat. It bobs over the swells like a duck, its pliable hull undulating under their bare feet, and, once the portside oars can again reach the water, it swivels to catch the wind. The sail bellies out again and the boat darts through the high sea, only a little spray splashing in to wet their faces.

  It is truly an exceptional little boat.
Any of the big ships Hervor has sailed on, along the North Way or in the Irish Sea, would have sunk if caught crossways like that to the waves, sail up in a storm wind.

  But, thanks to the contrary wind, they are no longer heading for the night’s harbor they planned, and which she can see ahead, its stone-built cairn a knob on the horizon. All around, she sees the other boats in the Birka convoy adjusting course as well. They are angling farther north, toward Oak Island, instead of toward the main market on Aland. It will take them a bit out of their way, adding a day’s journey to their sail to Arrow Sound, but it’s unavoidable with this wind.

  Hervor hopes the merchant leading their fleet has friends on Oak Island. If not, she and her warriors will find themselves sleeping on board tonight, slumped against the sides of the ship, the sail flung over the yard and pitched with poles to make a tent, porridge again to eat, lookouts waking in shifts. Or, if the Oak Islanders are the merchant’s enemies, they’ll be raiding that night, not resting. She glances at the spears propped in the boat’s stern. Either way, she’ll be ready.

  * * *

  Once past Stockholm’s barricades and out in the Baltic, if Birka’s merchants had been on good terms with the people of Saaremaa, Hervor’s convoy might have turned south and entered the Gulf of Riga, which is guarded by this big Estonian island. Saaremaa means “Land of Islands”; its name in Swedish, Osel, derives from its name in the sagas, Eysysla, or “Island District.” To the saga writers, it was a nest of sea raiders (and flying dragons).

  Saaremaa was where Queen Astrid of Vestfold was sold into slavery. In Heimskringla, Astrid sailed east from Sweden with a party of merchants headed for Russia. She was trying to keep her young son out of the clutches of Queen Gunnhild Mother-of-Kings, but instead delivered him to slave-dealers from Saaremaa. “They took the people as well as the trade goods, killing some, but some they kept to divvy up as slaves.” Astrid’s son, Olaf Tryggvason, the future king of Norway, fell to the lot of a Viking named Klerkon, along with Olaf’s old foster father and young foster brother. Klerkon didn’t see the old man as much of a prize: “He didn’t think he had much hard work left in him, so he killed him.” Klerkon took three-year-old Olaf and the older boy to market and traded the pair for “a rather good goat.” Olaf’s new owner sold the littler boy on (for “a rain cloak”) to an Estonian farmer, who treated Olaf well and became very fond of him, the saga says.

  The royal slave boy’s new family may have farmed on Saaremaa, but the island is heavily forested and its little arable land did not support its large population in the tenth century. The island’s economy relied, instead, on raiding and trading—to the extent that another name for Saaremaa was Kuresaar: Kura in Estonian means “something wicked, evil.” In usage, Kura parallels the words Viking or Rus.

  Culturally, too, the three groups blur; already by Hervor’s day, they’d been entwined for centuries. The earliest archaeological record of a Viking raid is two lapstrake ships unearthed on Saaremaa between 2008 and 2012. Buried in about 750, the smaller ship was a rowing boat, thirty-eight feet long, fast and narrow and light. The larger one, fifty-five feet long, had a sail, marking the beginning of the design we call the Viking ship.

  The smaller ship held the bodies of seven warriors with their weapons, placed rather haphazardly and covered with their shields. The thirty-four warriors in the larger ship, however, were buried in a way that seems to combine the kind of ship burial elsewhere reserved for a Viking leader (as at Oseberg and Gokstad) with the communal graves favored by Estonians. These warriors were stacked three deep inside the ship, each with a sword (or two) and some with game pieces, their layers separated by sand. Their shields and the ship’s sail made a roof over their grave, weighted down with stones. The ninety-one arrows found in the ship, some embedded in the wood, seem to show how the warriors died; many of their bones also exhibit battle trauma. Isotope tests tell us the warriors came from Sweden, near Birka; four of them were brothers. One skull—of the war leader?—was found with a hnefatafl king piece in the mouth. By his hand was a handsome ring-hilted sword.

  Despite the warrior culture they shared with Saaremaa (or because of it), Hervor’s convoy from Birka risked ending up like Queen Astrid’s merchants or these buried warriors if they chose the southern route east. Without guarantees from Saaremaa’s chieftains—obtained via friendship, family ties, taxes, or bribes—no one could pass the narrow straits into the Gulf of Riga. They were barred from what later became known as the Great Route East: This route followed the Daugava River past the mighty hillfort of Daugmale. Each of the river’s hundred rapids forced the merchants to unload their cargo and portage past the barrier—and pay a toll. After another long portage, they’d reach the Dniepr River a little north of Kyiv. South of the city, the Dniepr offered its own hazards, in the form of rapids and raiding tribes of nomads, before it reached the Black Sea and Byzantium.

  The Great Route from the Gulf of Riga was the most popular East Way in the eleventh and twelfth centuries—after Birka had disappeared. In Hervor’s time, though, the Great Route was dominated by the Vikings of Saaremaa and their allies on Gotland. Merchants from Birka in the mid-tenth century had to find another way.

  * * *

  That way sent Hervor north along the Swedish coast to Roslagen, home of the Ruotsi, or “rowers,” as the Finns named them, then east some twenty-four miles to the main island in the Aland archipelago.

  Aland means “Land of Water”: Its sixty-five hundred islands include big Aland itself, with its golden beaches and shallow harbors, another three hundred inhabitable isles, including hilly Kokar, where the watchfires burned, and thousands of rocky islets, skerries, sea stacks, and shoals rising above the waves like the backs of sleeping whales. Aland has bays full of fish and seals, swans and seabirds; hayfields, orchards, and excellent pasturage; and shadowy forests of rowans, hazelnuts, junipers, birches, firs, and pines, home to deer and other game. Locked in by ice through the long, dark winters, the islands are within easy reach of the Swedish coast for capable rowers on a sunny day. To sail there in June can be a pleasure cruise: the Aland Sea glassy smooth, water and sky both vivid blues, the breezes soft and hardly salty. As one sailor said in 2009, “We experienced a substantial stillness.”

  But the Aland Sea is not always still. In June 2000, the Viks Boat replica Talja encountered sudden high winds—what the restorer of the boat termed “an opportunity to study [its] capacity to deal with a very high sea.” Talja “proved excellent for the purpose,” even somewhat overloaded with a crew of ten. As in the scene I’ve created at the beginning of this chapter, the Viks Boat replica “was so light that she was floating like a cork on, not in, the waves,” which reached ten feet. The boat’s freeboard—the distance between the gunwale and the waves—was ten inches. Yet Talja was not swamped; the only water taken in was spray.

  The wind did require a change in plans. Reaching their intended harbor on Aland proved impossible. Sailing against the wind, Talja lost speed, becoming so slow its side-mounted steering oar could not engage the water. The boat swiveled parallel to the waves—a dangerous position. “Then the very worst can happen,” writes one Viking ship expert. “The ship can plunge sideways from a wavetop down into the valley in front, and then be filled with water by the wave from which it has fallen.” Previous Viking ship replicas in such a fix have sunk.

  “This was never a problem for this light boat,” wrote Talja’s builder. The only difficulty was turning the ship to refill the sail, for the oars on one side were completely submerged while the others waggled in the air. Finally the ship caught enough wind to sail to a different inlet, some distance north. After nine hours at sea, Talja reached the shallow, sandy harbor at Eckero (Oak Island), where the crew learned two modern fishing boats that day had called for emergency help. Their stiff hulls were in danger of cracking in the rough seas, while Talja’s lapstrake hull, built of radially split planks, bent and flexed with the waves.

  * * *

  From the Al
and Isles, Hervor’s convoy continued along Finland’s island-studded southwestern coast, with its sheltered bays and narrow sounds, stopping each night at one of the many scattered coastal hamlets. Near deserted in the wintertime, these settlements became busy summer trading posts to which the inland Finns brought, among other things, excellent pottery—thin walled, dark, and smooth—and bronze-handled fire starters, their handles depicting horses and riders.

  Archaeologists have found these Finnic pots and fire starters in Birka, along with the characteristic Finnic cloak pin, the terminals of its open ring sporting knobs shaped like the standard weights for weighing hacksilver. Identical scales and weights appear in Birka as in this part of Finland too. The Finns were also paid in coin. Archaeologists often find Arab silver dirhams in tenth-century sites in southwestern Finland; after Birka died, around 975, however, they become scarce. Falcon keys are found in Finland as well, speaking to a trade network connecting the two places.

  Family ties likely connected them as well, for the culture of coastal Finland in the tenth century looks, to archaeologists, much more like central Sweden than like Finland’s interior. A smart Swede sailing Finland’s complicated coast would want a local pilot; a smart trader would arrange for safe harbors on the way. A logical way to do both was to marry into a local family.

  Orsund (Arrow Sound) on Hitis is one of the harbors in which Hervor may have spent the night. The island derives its name from the Finns’ god of the hunt, Hiisi, and in a holy grove there archaeologists found offerings buried in the sand or set under stones: a sword, a spear, a broken chain, a pin with a bull’s head, and a round brooch bound with thread.