Vikings Read online

  The ties forged by the Shetland Bus lasted for lifetimes, and even longer. Nowadays the friendships made during the war years are maintained by the children and grandchildren of those who actually took part. It is just another chapter of the long story of connections between the tribes of Britain and of Scandinavia. Having been colonised by Norwegian Vikings in the eighth and ninth centuries, Shetland and Orkney remained part of the Norwegian kingdom until the fifteenth century. If today’s islanders consider themselves anything other than Shetlanders, then most would say they are Norwegian rather than Scots, far less British. The men and women who welcomed Iversen and the rest of the thousands of dispossessed Norwegians to the Shetland Islands during the Second World War were therefore no strangers, they were family — and those family ties were a thousand years and more in the making.

  The simple truth revealed by history is that the North Sea has for long been more of a bridge than a barrier for those living either side of it, and the peoples of Scandinavia have always found many different reasons to look westwards.

  When I dreamed myself a Viking it was mostly a Norwegian Viking that I had in mind. I first encountered their stories in childhood (I preferred to call them Northmen, then), but as an adult I learnt some of the complexities of it all: that they were not one unified people but three, and that each had their own long, unique histories, identities and — most importantly when it came to fathoming all that had happened in the Viking Age — their own motivations and needs for putting to sea in their ships.

  I once thought they had appeared out of nowhere in the last decade of the eighth century, with axes in their hands and murder in their hearts; now I know that, by then, they had already preoccupied the imaginations of their European and British neighbours for decades at least.

  Charlemagne of the Franks encountered them during his attempts to subdue and conquer the Saxons who lived on the northern and eastern borders of his expanding demesne. Whether he knew it or not, his own experience was in many ways the same as that of the Romans eight centuries before. While the legions toiled to impose their version of peace on the Germanic tribes, they sought the co-operation of those living in the Scandinavian territories beyond, in hopes of trapping their most stubborn foes in a pincer movement. And so it was, at least to some extent, with Charlemagne. He battled the Saxons with the sword in one hand and the Cross of Jesus Christ in the other — and as he did so he was right to keep an eye on the Danes and the rest of the most northerly pagans on Earth.

  I learnt, too, that the Swedish Vikings were quite different from their neighbours — if not in their motivations, then in their tactics and behaviour. They travelled east and not west and they were men of the rivers rather than the seas. The Swedes, and to some extent the Danes, were also beneficiaries of geography. They faced the east and so found themselves at one end of an ancient trade route that was thousands of miles long. By venturing back and forth along it, loaded with white furs and golden amber, they could reap a harvest of Arabic silver. Armed with great wealth, their greatest chieftains could win and maintain the loyalty of many swords back home — and so in time make kings of themselves.

  Medieval Europe in the eighth century was a continent invigorated by change and by new ideas. Charlemagne, like other powerful men at that time, was determined to exploit the potential of wealth, politics and Christianity to drive his ambitions and the headlong advance of his kingdoms.

  By dint of their location in the world, looking out across the Baltic Sea towards the sources of the energy, the Swedes and Danes were quickest to notice the benefit. There were already chieftains and dynasties in all the Scandinavian countries by then, the product of centuries and millennia of social climbing by the few; but it was in Sweden and Denmark first of all that men of ambition learnt how to follow Europe’s lead in shifting their dreams of dominance up a gear, towards statehood and kingship.

  Life for the Norwegian Vikings was always different, and harder. Their place on the edge of the world, facing into the North Atlantic, meant they lay in the shadow of eastern Europe warmed first by the rising sun. The chieftains of the west had their great halls like all the rest, places built to mimic the basilicae of the Romans, where they feasted and made their sacrifices. They had learnt from their ancestors that the loyalty of followers was the product of a complicated relationship that relied, at its heart, on the exchange of gifts. A warlord, a king in the making, adorned his warriors with silver and weapons; he plied them too with drink from wondrous glass vessels. In return they sat before him in his hall and promised him the strength of their arms, while the poets among them recited verses extolling his virtues — his courage and, best of all, his generosity.

  The Viking lords of Norway knew all this every bit as well as their neighbours east and south, and were no doubt excited by the thought of the great river of foreign silver flowing through ports like Birka, Hedeby and Ribe. The men of the west, of the north way — the Nor Way — had to find their own ways of growing rich. As Alex Woolf explains: ‘A need among Westland chieftains to provide their followers and clients with the same access to foreign luxuries drove them overseas … The attacks on northern Britain and Ireland in the 790s were thus driven by a need to keep up with Joneses (or perhaps the Johanssons, in this case).’

  In understanding all of this I also finally knew what it was that had drawn me to the western Vikings all along: they were the underdogs — and the best underdogs always come out fighting. Let the Swedes have their silk-clad merchants with their market stalls — give me patched-cloak warriors in dragon ships every time.

  For all the hand-wringing and self-pity of Alcuin and the rest of the British churchmen, the desecration of Lindisfarne was almost a false start for the age of Vikings to come. For decades afterwards the authors had little to report but raids on isolated monastic communities. The European mainland was quieter still, until around 830 when the Vikings began to appear more often and in greater numbers.

  As far as the records seem to show, the British Isles did not experience large-scale Viking attacks until about the middle of the eighth century. The countries we know as England and Scotland did not exist in any meaningful sense then and Wales, dominated by its own little kings, never did attract much in the way of significant attention from the Vikings.

  Until the ninth century, England was divided into what is known to historians of the period as the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy — the seven petty kingdoms of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex and Wessex. Of these, four mattered more than the rest. Anglo-Saxon Deira and Bernicia had come together early in the seventh century to form Northumbria, stretching at times from the River Forth in the north to the River Humber in the south. Mercia occupied what would now be described as the Midlands. The territory of East Anglia formed a third entity in the east of the country and in the West Country was the kingdom of Wessex.

  The territory of Scotland was even more of a patchwork, but essentially split between a Gaelic kingdom of Irish origin in the west and a Pictish kingdom, descended from the ancient hunter-gatherers of prehistory, in the north and east. Finally, occupying lands west of Northumbria and south of the Gaels, was the kingdom of the Britons, those who had known Roman rule and now controlled a territory occupying an area broadly similar to that of modern Strathclyde.

  After all the mentions of raids on monasteries, an attack on Britain recorded in the Annals of St Bertin under the year AD 844 sounds more significant than anything that had occurred before: ‘After a battle lasting three days, the Northmen emerged the winners — plundering, looting, slaughtering everywhere. They wielded power over the land at will.’

  Since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes the same event as having happened in 840 it is hard to be sure precisely when those Vikings struck, but it is made to sound like rather more than a hit-and-run raid targeting a few tonsured monks. Whatever it was and whenever it happened, it was still only a foretaste of what was headed towards the English kingdoms in the following decade.
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  In the year 850 there are reports of Vikings over-wintering in England for the first time. By then, of course, the Irish had learnt to accept a relatively permanent Norse presence in the form of the long ports. The Vikings who spent the winter of 850—51 on the island of Thanet, off Kent’s east coast, surely employed the same tactics. Within a few years more of them would pull off the same trick on the island of Sheppey, on the Thames.

  It was for the year AD 865, however, that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle first made mention of a force described, almost chillingly, as the mycel here — the Great Army. Sometimes, just to make matters crystal clear, the authors write about the mycel heathen here — the Greath Heathen Army. Here then was the arrival of something quite different. Rather than opportunist, small-time raiders, travelling in two or three ships, the Viking force known as the Great Heathen Army amounted to at least 3,000 men and must have arrived in a fleet numbering in the hundreds. Furthermore the Great Heathen Army was effectively here to stay. And while its individual members came and went — dying in battle or heading home rich — it would remain in Britain as a unified entity for the next 30 years, travelling east, west, north and south at will and with devastating consequences for the ruling elite.

  It is at this point that it is worth marvelling at the brevity of the annalists and other writers of the period. The annals were books of records, kept year by year, of any notable events. But they are brief in the extreme and usually frustratingly light on detail. The writers of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle too were given to missing out information we would consider essential. In the case of the Vikings’ activity, for instance, individual leaders are often named only if and when they are defeated; victors in battles remain anonymous.

  From what we can discern, the men of the Great Heathen Army spent their first winter in East Anglia. They apparently came to peaceful terms with the locals but only on receipt of precious valuables and supplies. By 866/67 they were in Northumbria, exploiting a civil war there to their own ends. In his History of the English Kings, Symeon of Durham recorded how: ‘In those days, the nation of the Northumbrians had violently expelled from the kingdom the rightful king of their nation, Osberht by name, and had placed at the head of the kingdom a certain tyrant, named Aella.’

  Having perhaps stood by while the opposing sides — both Christian — tore each other apart in battle, the heathen Vikings stepped into the aftermath: ‘Nearly all the Northumbrians were routed and destroyed, the two kings being slain — the survivors made peace with the pagans. After these events the pagans appointed Ecgbert king under their own dominion …’

  It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how much was being achieved, and how rapidly. Apparently within just a couple of years of its arrival the Viking army had got its way in two of the four English kingdoms — ‘pacifying’ one and placing a puppet king on the throne of the other. Since a unit of as few as 30 men was routinely described as an ‘army’, a fighting force of 3,000 might not sound especially ‘great’ by our modern standards but would have had devastating potential in ninth-century Britain.

  They might have called themselves kings, but the dominant men in territories like Northumbria and East Anglia hardly exercised total control over their populations. There were no professional standing armies worthy of the name and therefore the Great Heathen Army held many advantages. Each of its warriors was a man far from home and in such circumstances every one of them understood their survival as individuals depended upon their staying together as a group. Petty differences and personal loyalties might be set aside, at least temporarily, until the greater goal was reached. Mutual dependency can be a powerful glue and in the face of piecemeal opposition, thrown hastily together before being thrown in the direction of the foe, the Vikings’ commitment to their common cause may well have been all the advantage they needed.

  As well as a common bond the men of the Great Heathen Army were united by the lure of wealth. By the middle of the ninth century every ambitious Scandinavian would have known the names of the trading towns grown rich from import and export. In addition to Birka, Hedeby, Kaupang and Ribe closer to home, they would also have heard of Canche, near Boulogne, Dorestad, on the Rhine — and of course Southampton, London and York in England. Merchants had grown fat from the proceeds and the whole lot of it might be for the taking by determined men of war.

  In the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford I spent some time marvelling at the little wonder that is the Alfred Jewel. Found in 1693 in North Petherton in Somerset, and made sometime in the ninth century during the reign of Alfred the Great, it is a potent demonstration of the wealth of a nation in the making. Just two and half inches long, it is a teardrop of filigree gold crafted to hold a single, glass-smooth piece of rock crystal. The crystal acts as a magnifying lens for the tiny image of a man held beneath it. Fashioned from cloisonné enamel, it is thought to represent either ‘sight’ or Christ in Majesty. The notion of sight is related to the interpretation of the Alfred Jewel, by some at least, as the handle for a pointer or aestel. A thin shaft of some suitably precious material, like ivory, would have been held in the mouth of the stylised representation of a beast’s head that forms the point of the teardrop. Around the edge of the piece are incised the Old English words, AELFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN — Alfred ordered me to be made.

  It is known that King Alfred commissioned a number of such tools — used for pointing out the lines, word by word, in holy manuscripts — and had them sent to each of his bishops along with translations into English of the Regula Pastoralis, or ‘Book of Pastoral Care’. Alfred championed the literacy of his clergy so as to improve the transmission of the Word of God to his subjects.

  Whatever its function — and explanations have ranged from the centrepiece for an elaborate headdress or crown, to the jewel for a pendant — its real importance lies in all else that it represents. The art of the Anglo-Saxons is regarded as one of the greatest contributions from these islands — ever — to the history of artistic accomplishment. Tiny bauble though it is, the Alfred Jewel is almost an arrogant demonstration, not just of one artist’s skill but also of the abundant surplus of the society that produced him. Perhaps it was indeed the handle for a pointer and if so, then that such care and expense might be lavished upon an inconsequential trinket surely leaves us wondering what else glittered all around in England before the Vikings came.

  Elsewhere in the same gallery of the Ashmolean other treasures of the period are on display. Gold and jewel-encrusted crosses and finery glimmer sumptuously from behind theft-proof glass. The contents of any one case are enough to captivate the viewer and yet they are only the fragments of what once was; crumbs from the masters’ tables. By far the bulk of it was gone long ago, melted down and made into other things, and all we have are whatever few pieces were buried in graves, for safe-keeping in times of strife. And so medieval England must have seemed especially tempting, out there on the far side of the North Sea and weighed down with gold and precious stones, as well as with treasuries stuffed to the rafters with coins and bullion. Look upon the Alfred Jewel and it is greed that is reflected by the polished quartz. No wonder Vikings came prowling.

  I had long enjoyed the notion of the Great Army having set sail from Norway in their fleet of dragon ships, but it seems they travelled to their original landing in East Anglia from entirely the opposite direction. Alex Woolf is one historian who believes they arrived in England from bases established a decade and a half before in Ireland. The Ivarr who died in 873 and who was recorded, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, as king of the heathens of all Ireland and Britain, may well have been the Viking at the head of the 3,000 warriors. This then would be the same Ivarr who, alongside his brother-in-arms Olaf of Norway, had established himself first of all in Dublin during the 850s.

  If it is a small world now, in many ways it was smaller then. A man who had made himself king in one land had no reason to stop there and so when the wealth of England became irresistible, it may well have been Ivarr that set sai
l into the east with all the strength he could muster.

  By the end of 867 the Great Army had turned on Mercia, the third of the English kingdoms, and it appears they made peaceful terms with the population there. The available records paint a picture of the Vikings always on the move at this time, roaming up and down the English countryside, seemingly at will. Northumbria was already enthralled. By 869 the kingdom of the East Anglians had collapsed under the weight of them too and their king, Edmund, was dead by Viking hands. Only Wessex had evaded their attentions, but from 870 onwards it was in their sights as well and the scene of numerous battles.

  Always the paucity of detail in the annals and in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes it hard to picture the reality of all that was going on. Repeatedly we read about the Vikings ‘making peace’ with the kingdoms they threaten but it is anyone’s guess who actually paid the price. If kings had to hand over bullion, coins and treasures — along with foodstuffs — then we can be sure that royal suffering was transferred down the hierarchy until the poorest folk ended up bearing the burden, as usual.

  The town of Repton is a quiet place today, somewhat off the beaten track, and yet to the Vikings it represented the key to the kingdom of Mercia. A monastic community had been established by the River Trent in the middle of the seventh century and several Mercian kings had been buried there. St Wystan’s in Repton is every inch the perfect English church. When I visited the place the porch was stacked high with copies of the parish newsletter, awaiting delivery, and a gardener and her young children were tending the flowers and shrubs in the churchyard.