There were no jetties: Arrow Sound was a lagoon harbor, where traders simply beached their boats—easy for a round-bottomed Swedish boat—or anchored them offshore, if they were deep-keeled Norwegian ships. Near the shore archaeologists found signs of fortifications and the remains of a workshop: iron ship rivets, a spindle whorl, beads, bits of amber and raw glass, whetstones, and fragments of silver coins. Some of those coins were Arab dirhams.
In the sagas, this part of Finland is called “the watchfire coast” for the beacons lit on rocks and cliff tops to warn of Viking raiders. Those Norwegian marauders nearly trapped in Lake Malaren, Snorri writes in Heimskringla, later landed in southwest Finland and raided there, but the locals had been warned. They had “fled into the woods, leaving their houses empty of all valuables.” The Vikings “found little loot, and no people at all.”
When evening drew on, the raiders turned to go back to their ships. “But as they entered the woods,” Snorri writes, “enemies came at them on all sides, shooting at them and attacking hard. The Norwegian king told everyone to take cover and try to fight back if they could. But that wasn’t easy, because the Finns used the woods to protect themselves.” Like a real-life game of hnefatafl, the surrounded Norwegians lost many warriors before the king broke free and reached his ships.
Nor was that the end of their difficulties: “That night the Finns raised a storm at sea and other furious weather by their magic. But the king had the anchors taken up and the sails set, and all night they beat along the coast.” The Finns followed their progress along the shore, watchful in case they tried again to land.
* * *
Leaving Arrow Sound, Hervor’s convoy entered the Gulf of Finland, a 250-mile-long arm of the Baltic, pointing east. The gulf’s northern shore offered complicated sailing, through rocks and reefs and shallows. Nor was that part of Finland’s coast well populated. Few harbors offered fresh water, firewood, and food or shelter from “furious weather”—which was common, no magic required.
Hardened sailors likely amused themselves telling newcomers like Hervor tales of such terrible storms. One story is preserved in the Kalevipoeg, the Estonian national epic, reconstructed from folklore in the 1800s. The hero “was sitting on top of a cliff watching the clouds and waves,” the story begins, when “suddenly the sky became overcast, and a terrific storm arose, which lashed the breakers into foam.” The Thunder-God was out hunting. “He hurled down flash after flash of lightning from his strong right hand against a company of wicked demons of the air, who plunged from the rocks into the sea, dodged the thunderbolts among the waves, and mocked and insulted the god.” The demons he hit littered the shore, burned into “a disgusting mass that even the wolves would not touch.”
Wary of meeting such weather without a harbor in sight, Hervor’s convoy of Birka merchants crossed the gulf at its narrowest spot, forty-three miles, and headed for Tallinn Bay. The town there was shielded from winds and storms by two jutting peninsulas and two offshore islands, which offered ample room for the crew of a merchant fleet to camp. The harbor was marked by a sheer-sided tableland, its white limestone cliffs rising 150 feet. The Rus called this landmark Rafala, from the Swedish for “cliff”; later it became Toompea, or “Cathedral Hill,” in the center of the city of Reval, now Tallinn. In Estonian mythology, the hill was the burial mound of the giant Kalev, erected by his grieving wife, Linda. Perhaps, camped in sight of this striking white cliff, Hervor heard Linda’s tale.
It begins when Kalev, the “father of heroes,” came to Estonia riding an eagle. He had two brothers: one was a merchant traveling the East Way into Russia, the other a warrior in Finland. Kalev married Linda, who had already rejected marriage proposals from the Sun and the Moon, as well as from the sorcerers of the Waters and the Winds. Kalev and Linda had three sons, but while Linda was still pregnant with the youngest one, Kalev fell sick.
Linda took her round brooch and bound it with a thread—like the thread-wrapped brooch archaeologists found in the holy grove at Hitis. She spun the brooch like a top, sending forth a spirit beetle to ask for help from the Sun and the Moon and the Evening Star and even from the Wind-Sorcerer. But they gave no help. By the time her spirit beetle returned, Kalev the Eagle-Rider was dead.
Linda fasted and wept. She bathed his corpse four times. She brushed his hair and dressed him in silk. “She herself dug his grave thirty ells below the sod” (forty-five feet deep, according to Viking Age measures). She mourned for four months; then “she heaped a cairn of stones over his tomb, which formed the hill on which the Cathedral of Reval now stands.” Only then did Linda retire to the house and give birth to her youngest son, the hero of the epic.
As Linda is the shaper of Estonia’s landscape, her sons are its fertility gods. One day they went hunting with their dogs, killing bear, elk, wild ox, wolves, foxes, and hares. They hunted in forests of pine, oak, birch, and alder and through fields of rye. They walked on well-trodden paths; they waded through deep sand and mossy bogs. They “sang till the leaves of the trees shone brighter than ever … the golden ears of corn swelled, and the apples reddened, the kernels formed in the nuts, the cherries ripened, red berries grew on the hills and blue berries in the marshes.” The birds “joined the concert”; the waves beat time on the rocks. When they came home, their mother was gone—the Wind-Sorcerer had stolen her away. The epic follows Kalevipoeg, which means “Kalev’s son,” as he goes in search of her.
* * *
Unbeknownst to the hero, who wanders into adventures but never finds his beloved mother, the Thunder-God had already come to Linda’s aid. He turned her into a huge stone and set her on top of Mount Iru, site of the hillfort that guards the rich farming settlements in the river valley a few miles upstream from the harbor at Rafala. From Linda’s stone, lookouts on Mount Iru could spot ships as far away as the Finnic archipelago; the beacons they lit would spread the alarm. As at Birka, with a garrison constantly on watch, no one could approach the harbor of Rafala unseen.
Linda’s lookout post is not the only prominent stone near Tallinn Bay. More than a hundred house-sized boulders stand nearby, allowing us to locate another folktale. According to Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, King Sveigdir of Uppsala once swore an oath to find the war god Odin. He sailed far to the east to an estate called At Steini (At the Stone), where, Snorri explains, “There’s a stone as big as a house.” One evening, as Sveigdir made his way to bed, dead drunk, he looked over at the stone. A “dwarf stood in the doorway and called to Sveigdir, inviting him to come in if he wanted to meet Odin. Sveigdir ran into the stone, and the doorway closed behind him. Sveigdir never came out.”
It’s probable that no dwarf, no magic, was involved. Another Uppsala king, Yngvar, attacked At Steini in a Viking raid, Snorri tells us. Archaeologists note that the hillfort at Iru was burned down at least four times during the Viking Age, so Yngvar’s attack was not unique. Hoards of silver dirhams have been found near Tallinn Bay, and Rafala’s slave market was well known. It was at Rafala that Queen Astrid, captured by Vikings from Saaremaa, was put up for sale again and bought by her Norwegian countryman, after she had agreed to marry him. And it was at Rafala that her brother, in service to the king of Gardariki, discovered and freed his young nephew, who would grow up to become Norway’s King Olaf Tryggvason.
Like the Shining Hall at Kaupang in Norway, or the royal manor at Adelso near Birka, At Steini housed the chieftain or war leader whose might, at least in the early days, protected the trading post—as King Yngvar of Uppsala learned. When he attacked At Steini in the seventh or eighth century, his forces were overpowered, and he was killed. He was buried under a mound, close by the sea, Snorri writes. A Latin chronicle says his grave lies on Saaremaa. Is he among the thirty-four warriors buried together in their ship and unearthed in 2012? Is he their war leader, with the ring-hilted sword and the hnefatafl king piece in his mouth? “One wonders,” says a prominent archaeologist.
* * *
The myth of Linda reveals so
mething else Hervor might have noticed about Rafala: As at Birka, women were not second class.
Estonian folklore revolves around women, and while its pagan culture was warlike, women were not excluded from that facet of life. In ancient Estonian burials, bodies were buried in communal tombs, marked, as Linda did Kalev’s, by cairns, or coverings of stone. The bodies were allowed to rot before burial; then parts of skeletons of all ages and sexes were so intermingled that archaeologists cannot distinguish individuals, much less determine their gender.
The Estonian language makes the same statement. Like all Finnic languages, it uses only one personal pronoun—no she, he, or it, just tema. Even today, an Estonian trying to learn Russian or another Indo-European language will stumble over which pronoun to use; says one, “it sounds irrelevant.”
Estonia’s communal burials held few or no grave goods, but in the middle of the tenth century—Hervor’s time—individual burials like those found throughout the Rus world became popular. Yet even in these individual graves, filled with weapons and jewelry and a skeleton capable of being sexed, gender remains irrelevant. Estonian women and men wore identical jewelry—unlike in neighboring lands, where men, though gaudily bedecked, had their own jewelry styles. Likewise, weapons are found in up to 30 percent of female graves in tenth-century Estonia, along with nongendered objects like tools, implying that women had equal access to power.
In Estonian society, power was corporate. It resided not in one individual, but in a council. The power of a single council member was limited—even if that councilor was the king or war leader. A charismatic war leader from a strong clan could persuade and encourage, but the decision to go to war rested with the council.
Nor could the council be co-opted by the men. Property, in Estonian society, was also collective; clan-based, it was passed down through the female line. According to a law recorded in the thirteenth century, when a man marries, “he shall then let all his goods follow his woman. If he wishes to leave her, he will lose arable land and goods.” A man joined his wife’s family, which made daughters as valuable as sons—or more valuable. In folklore, the mother of an only son is derided as nearly childless. To raise her status, she must bear a daughter.
This clan-based society, where power was shared and women were esteemed, was confusing to the Christians like Snorri Sturluson and Saxo Grammaticus who wrote about it in the thirteenth century. The church disapproved of—and had worked hard to eradicate—such societies for hundreds of years. Man was meant to rule woman, Christianity taught. A single, God-anointed king was meant to rule society. An elected council at which power was shared by men and women was unworkable—if not evil. With whom should a Christian king negotiate? With whom could he make a treaty?
Yet before Christianity conquered the North, it’s likely the Estonian way was more common. Throughout the Rus world in Hervor’s time, from Birka to Kyiv, a single warrior culture applied. Men and women all along the East Way, on its various routes, no matter their ethnicity, wore the same silk costumes, animal-patterned jewelry, and elaborate belts. They carried the same weapons and sported the same insignia, including the Birka falcon. They buried their dead in similar ways. Would it be surprising if they also shared myths, songs, and values?
20
“GERZKR” CAPS
Land and water merge at the sea’s eastern edge. Past Rafala the margins grow increasingly boggy, impossible to farm, impassable except when iced over. Few people inhabit these shores, Hervor learns. There are no friendly harbors for Birka merchants.
They press on, rowing up the wide river Neva, its waters cold and clear, past reefs and shoals to a great inland sea much larger, even, than their own Lake Malaren. They skirt the lake’s southern shore and row a few short miles up the Volkhov River, its high banks, hemmed by dark forests, growing nearer and nearer as the waterway narrows. Hervor watches for archers among the trees but spots none; nor are they attacked, though surely they have been seen.
They float a difficult set of rapids, overlooked by the ruined stone walls of an abandoned hillfort, and reach the Rus town of Ladoga, its earthen ramparts and wooden stockades an exact match to those at Birka. Here, where the Low River branches off from the Volkhov, it seems to Hervor, Birka rises again. She laughs: Has she traveled for days only to return to her starting point?
It’s no accident, her companions say. Ladoga was founded by Birka merchants. Our people have traded here for generations.
Hervor wonders if the Ladogans would claim, instead, that they were the ones to found Birka.
The warrior who leads them up to the warehouse is a Birka warrior: His sword’s scabbard is capped by a falcon sword-chape. A horse archer like her friend from Birka’s Warriors’ Hall, he sports a silk-trimmed kaftan and a Byzantine bronze buckle on his belt. On his head is a tight-fitting, silk gerzkr cap like the one she admired in Birka, though its peak bears no silver filigreed spike. Instead, the earflaps of his cap are fastened up with buttons of intricately coiled silver wire.
Passing through the marketplace, her mind on silver cap fittings, Hervor sees numerous examples of fine metalwork. Among the charms in their bead necklaces, the women hang small filigreed crescents, like little moons encrusted with twisted silver wire and sprinkled with silver dots. Merchants bear gilded Finnic cloak pins with faceted heads. A large, portly man in a dark brown kaftan, splendidly finished with twenty-four bronze buttons down its front—Hervor stops to count—wears a large pendant cross with a pattern of dots punched into the silver. He sits in his doorway cracking hazelnuts and glowers at her as she stares. On a rug at his feet fine birch-bark boxes are displayed for sale—but he’ll hardly sell any looking at people like that, Hervor thinks.
The windows and doors of the workshops are thrown wide in the fine weather. Peeking in as she passes, she sees a potter making fine jewelry molds out of clay, great lumps of it in a basket at his feet. As she watches, he scores in the tail of a Birka falcon. Farther down the lane, a glassmaker turns a glowing rod over a fire, pinching off glass beads. A leatherworker sews a shoe. A combmaker picks through a pile of antler discards, hoping he’s overlooked a usable length. A candlemaker rolls beeswax strips into tall tapers. A pair of weavers, their linen shirts sweated through, pause for a drink of whey before returning to their length of fine ring-woven cloth.
The knife maker, like the horse archer, might have come straight from Birka. Hervor bought a new knife there of an identical design, made from three layers of iron, the blade etched in beautiful patterns, the cutting edge polished steel.
And, as in Birka, the slave-dealers in Ladoga’s center display their wares under colorful awnings, the girls well dressed, the boys bare chested and made to flex their muscles as the newcomers walk by. Fur dealers, too, flaunt their offerings, inviting Hervor and her companions to feel the softness of their samples: sable and miniver, fox and otter. Her newly trained eye is surprised to see so much beaver for sale, and at good prices too; in Birka beaver is rare.
But when they reach the compound where they will stay, Hervor’s confident sense of familiarity flees. Ladoga’s dwellings are like none she’s used to. There are two types of houses: large and small. Their walls are mere piles of logs, roughly hewn to connect at the corners. The small houses are square, the large ones oblong, more like a normal longhouse, yet they are all linked together, large and small, in clusters around courtyards, with covered galleries connecting each house to the others.
As Hervor approaches the main house in the compound, intent on the architecture, a small girl dressed as a warrior, with a Magyar bow and closed quiver on her hip, comes rushing out and slams into her.
Out of my way, filthy merchant scum, the girl shouts and, pushing her way past, flees out the door.
A servant slips through the crowd after her. Hervor grabs the woman’s arm. Who is that?
The servant shrugs her off angrily. Hervor, the swineherd’s bastard, she says, and rushes after the girl.
Hervor is dumbfounded
. The other Birka warriors burst out laughing. Yes, says her steersman, that’s your namesake. Hervor of Ladoga, daughter of the earl’s daughter and whoever herds the pigs in this place.
* * *
The city of St. Petersburg, founded in 1703, now occupies the drained swampland at the Gulf of Finland’s eastern end, but the Neva is still navigable between the Baltic Sea and Europe’s largest lake, Ladoga. In the mid-700s, at the same time Birka was founded, a town protected by a hillfort grew up along a tributary south of the lake. Birka and this town, now known as Staraja Ladoga, or Old Ladoga, had been trading for two hundred years by the time Hervor’s convoy of merchants arrived. Scandinavian objects are found in the very deepest archaeological layers of the settlement, while isotope studies of Ladoga burials show that a third of the town’s people were born by Lake Malaren.
Ladoga was a major transportation hub on the Vikings’ East Way. Several routes lay south and east from the town. From here the Rus merchants described in Arabic texts navigated the Volga River and the Caspian Sea, then traveled by camelback to Baghdad or beyond it on the Silk Roads. Another route led from Ladoga south to Kyiv, then down the Dniepr River to the Black Sea and, across it, to Constantinople. But past Ladoga, a deep-keeled Norwegian-style Viking ship like the Gokstad ship, seventy-six feet long, carrying eight tons of cargo and thirty-five people—or Frans Bengtsson’s fictional longship of even greater size—could neither sail nor row. The Viking ships that opened up the East Way were the light Swedish boats like the Viks Boat, carrying crews of eight to ten and a cargo of up to a ton.
The name Ladoga, first used for the tributary, then the town, then the lake, comes from Alode-joki, Finnic for “Low River.” Aldeigjuborg (Low River Fort) is mentioned several times in the Icelandic sagas—not as a destination, only a point of transit. Travelers going east left their ships there in dry dock, transferring their cargo to riverboats or horse-drawn sleds. Those going west waited out the winter there, readying their seagoing ships for when the Baltic ice broke up. Ladoga was the gateway to Gardariki, the Kingdom of Fortresses, from which traders nicknamed Gerzkr brought back “exceptionally fine cloth” and “precious furs,” says Snorri Sturluson in Heimskringla. Traveling east, these merchants trafficked in humans: On Burnt Island in the Kattegat, Gilli Gerzkr sold the Irish princess Melkorka, who kept her dignity by refusing to speak, to the Icelandic chieftain; the other eleven girls for sale in Gilli’s tent may have traveled on to Gardariki.
The Real Valkyrie Page 28