Vikings Page 30

  The scale of their endeavour is breathtaking. Their willingness to keep going further, reaching out beyond every horizon, meant they were even instrumental in stretching the limits of the known world. In ways that no other Europeans had properly contemplated, they made that world a bigger place. Strangely enough — especially given their proudly pagan heritage — the restless voyaging of the Vikings helped transport Christianity as well. Like a seed carried on the sole of a traveller’s shoe, it hitched a ride.

  Eirik the Red was a good pagan and seems to have stayed true to the old gods of his fathers. Thjodhild, however, was a Christian. According to the sagas, the discovery of North America and pioneering new routes to Scandinavia were hardly the limit of Leif Eriksson’s achievements. Sometime before the westward voyage that made him a legend, he travelled east to meet Olaf Tryggvason, King of Norway. Olaf was a Christian by then and, before accepting Leif as his man, he had him converted to his faith. Olaf also tasked him with converting the Greenlanders and on his return to his parents’ home Leif made a Christian of his mother. Although Eirik preferred to follow the old ways, he built a little turf and stone church for Thjodhild.

  Visitors to Brattalith today will find a fine church among the complex of buildings that make up ‘Eirik the Red’s Farm’. It post-dates Eirik and Thjodhild by centuries but is close by the slight remains of ‘Thjodhild’s Church’.

  Just as the Vikings changed every part of the world that they touched, so they were changed in return. The same pragmatism that enabled them to blend easily into new circumstances made them appreciate useful ideas wherever they encountered them. As intelligent observers of the countries beyond the borders of their Scandinavian homelands, they could hardly have failed to appreciate the potential of Christianity. On their eastern and south-eastern borders there were pagan Balts, Finns and Slavs, and there were Muslims in southern Spain and in the eastern Mediterranean, but the countries of western and southern Europe were Christian. The Christian presence was most obvious to the Danes, who looked across their border and seaways at Franks, Frisians and Saxons. Throughout the latter part of the eighth century and the early years of the ninth, Charlemagne was bludgeoning his way north, east and west with a Bible in his pocket and a sword in his hand. If nothing else, the Danes and their neighbours would have learnt early on that Christianity inspired a ferocious need to spread the Word.

  The more astute among them might have noticed something else as well: that the loudly declared imperative of converting the heathen was a perfect excuse for invasion. For Christian kings, any territory populated by non-Christians was fair game.

  Gift-giving had always been key to the success and longevity of Viking chieftains. Leaders handed out swords and other valuables and those in receipt of the gifts repaid the debt with loyalty and service. The chief who gave most, and most often, was the man around whom would gather the bravest and the best. So when Viking kings in the making observed the riches of the Christian kings — the things that might be acquired and passed on to their own followers — it was the religion itself that soon appeared like the brightest bauble of all. For a start, Christian kings were usually victorious kings. Fighting beneath their banners emblazoned with the Cross, they invariably triumphed over their foes.

  It was also a faith that was proving itself over time, showing it could last. Ireland had been Christian since the fifth century at least; the Anglo-Saxons were growing wealthier by the day and they had converted no later than the seventh century.

  From the moment the Vikings began to venture beyond their borders, they were aware that Christianity was not a contagion to be feared, but a passport to power and wealth.

  CHAPTER NINE

  CNUT THE GREAT

  ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men.

  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;’

  William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

  Gorm the Old — generally recognised as the first king of a united Denmark — had three sons. Canute was the eldest, then Harald and then Toke. To the south, beyond the Danevirke, lived the Christian Germans under their great emperor, Henry the Fowler. Gorm is said to have despised his own Christian subjects and to have tormented them at every opportunity. Since he seemed always to be gnawing at the supports of the Church, he was known by some as ‘Gorm the Worm’ or ‘the Worm of the Church’. Emperor Henry was enraged by Gorm’s behaviour and sent an army north, to warn him that if he did not change his ways, his kingdom would be invaded.

  Of the three princes, Canute was Gorm’s favourite. Cut from the same cloth as his father, he was an enthusiastic Viking and the pair had many adventures together. Harald preferred to stay close to his mother the queen, who was called Thyre. Although a pagan herself, she was kind to the Christians in the kingdom and, with Gorm’s blessing, she even had Harald blessed with the sign of the Cross. Gorm kept to the old ways, the worship of Odin, Thor and Frey, as did Canute.

  The king had little time for Harald and he began to fear he might be plotting to challenge him for the throne. Fearing for Canute’s safety, Gorm swore an oath that he would kill anyone who threatened the life of his heir. There would even be a death sentence for anyone obliged to tell the king that Canute was dead.

  So when it came to pass that Canute was murdered, while on campaign in Ireland on his father’s behalf, everyone at court was at a loss as to how to pass on the news without attracting the death penalty. Gorm was absent when the the story broke so Thyre had the king’s hall draped with dark colours, a sign of mourning. She ordered everyone to sit in silence and await the king’s return. When Gorm finally entered the hall, he knew at once what the darkness and silence must mean.

  ‘My son, Canute, is dead!’ he cried.

  ‘You have said it, and not I, King Gorm,’ Thyre replied.

  Because none but the king had pronounced Canute dead, all were spared. Within two days Gorm was dead too, apparently of a broken heart. Harald — known as Harald Bluetooth — was made king but there were many who whispered that he had always been cruel — and crafty — and that surely Canute’s blood was on his hands.

  There is something biblical, even Old Testament, about the Icelandic saga’s account of the death of the favourite, the grief of the father and of the guilty triumph of the wronged son. The writer, working in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, seemed to be lamenting more than just the deaths of Gorm and Canute; and the suggestion of Harald’s treachery may well be no more than a literary device. The authors of the sagas were Christians too by then, but perhaps they grieved the passing of some of what the old religion had meant. Belief in the brave life, well lived, may have lingered long after the Scandinavians had learnt to say they believed the best life was that promised after death.

  Christianity changed everything for the Vikings, just as it changed the lives of everyone else who encountered it. It completed the transformation of the Scandinavian countries into modern states ruled by kings. It brought them fully into the European fold, into the future. But by becoming Christians, they cut the thread connecting them to all that had gone before. In every way that mattered, they would cease to be Vikings.

  When Vladimir the Great ordered his Rus to turn their backs on their old pagan gods and follow Jesus Christ instead, in AD 988, it was hardly fear of the Cross that motivated his decision. If he had been looking to appease his nearest (and most bellicose) neighbours, then he might have done better to adopt the Muslim faith of the Bulghars or the Jewishness of the Khazar Empire. As it turned out, Vladimir chose the Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine Empire.

  The primary source of detail about the life of Vladimir — Nestor’s Chronicle, also known as The Chronicle of Bygone Years — gives an amusing, if fanciful, outline of his thinking at that time. When the Muslims said they avoided pork, he thought the restriction ridiculous. Apparently he found the idea of circumcision disgusting. But when they said they were teetotal, he was frankly appalled: ‘For Russians, drinking is their joy,’ he said. ‘T
hey cannot be without it.’ On the whole, he felt, the Muslim faith was simply joyless.

  Next he entertained the emissaries of the Jewish Khazars and after listening to their sales pitch for a while he asked after their homeland. When they told them about Jerusalem he asked if all was well there. When they told him them their forefathers had so angered God that he had caused them to be driven from their lands, and scattered across the face of the Earth, he was outraged. How dare they, he asked, lecture others about the true path to God when they themselves had been cast out by him?

  Life without pork and alcohol (not to mention a foreskin) had sounded unappealing to Vladimir; the risk of losing the lands he had fought so hard to hold, however, was unthinkable. As the chronicle would have it, the Muslims and Jews were shown the door and Orthodox Christianity was welcomed with open arms.

  All of that makes for an entertaining read, but what Vladimir really wanted of course — what all men of Viking blood wanted — was unfettered access to the wealth of the Byzantines’ markets. If by taking on their religion they might oil the wheels of commerce, then so be it. As it was for Vladimir and the Rus of Kiev, so it would be for Vikings in the West.

  The Danes were well aware what their Christian neighbours were capable of — having faced the likes of Charlemagne — but neither the Norwegians nor the Swedes were ever in any real danger of being coerced into swapping their old faith for a new one. In each case — Denmark included — the conversion to Christianity was a calculated political move, a step taken primarily because it was good for business. The Vikings were happy to fight and to mete out gruesome violence when it was strictly necessary, for self-aggrandisement, but what they really wanted was money — with which they could simply buy and sustain power. If they could obtain that wealth in the market place rather than on the battlefield, then all well and good.

  Christianity was also a religion that transformed power into authority. By abandoning pagan ways and accepting Christ, kings protected themselves from Christian neighbours who might otherwise have used their faith as an excuse for invasion. All Christian kings drew their power from God. Since their power rested ultimately in God’s hands, it could hardly be snatched away by mortal men — even mortal men who sat on thrones.

  Because Christian Europe was just across their border, it is perhaps no surprise that the Danes were the first Scandinavians officially to convert to the new faith, around AD 965. Their first historically recognised king had been Gorm the Old. As befits the king acknowledged as ‘first’, he emerged during a dynamic period in European history. Just a year after he was made King of Denmark, the fate of the British Isles would be shaped by the Battle of Brunanburh. The modern states were not yet fully formed, but the process of crystallisation was well under way.

  Claiming, as he had, descent from Ragnar Lodbrok, father of Ivarr the Boneless, Gorm was himself a near-legendary figure. By as early as the middle of the tenth century those names suggested nothing less than a dynasty. It is precisely because the modern Danish royal family claims descent from Harald Bluetooth that he and Gorm are recognised as the fathers of the monarchy.

  The coming-together of Denmark as a recognisable entity, however, had been a long and complicated process played out over centuries. Putative ‘kings’ — those named before Gorm and Harald in the sources — had come and gone. One of them, Godfred, had stood up to Charlemagne himself during the early years of the ninth century.

  By then the attempts to mark out Denmark as somewhere, something, separate were already old. Parts of the Danevirke were in place, as well as the Kanhave Canal. Created in the early decades of the eighth century, it was a cleverly designed and built waterway, cut through the narrowest part of the Island of Samsø. It is two-thirds of a mile long and nearly 40 feet wide — a stunning feat demonstrating both engineering know-how and control of manpower. The Kanhave Canal would have allowed shallow-draught ships to pass swiftly from one side of the island to the other, so that whoever controlled it also controlled the seaways east and west. Dated to around AD 726, it too is evidence of the presence of powerful men in Denmark long before the coming of Gorm and Harald.

  According to the sources, Christian missionaries were also at work in Denmark in the years before Harald’s conversion around 965. The first of them was Willibrord, known as the ‘Apostle of the Frisians’, who had tried and failed to convert the Danish ‘king’ Ongendus around the turn of the eighth century. Greater headway was made a century or so later by a Frankish churchman called Ansgar. From the late 820s onwards he was periodically active in parts of Denmark and also Sweden — with varying degrees of success. When he travelled to the Swedish town of Birka he was robbed on the way, of all the gifts he had brought to help him win favour with the locals. But in 850 he managed to get on the right side of Horik, Godfred’s son. Although Horik was a confirmed pagan, he did at least allow Ansgar to build churches in the Danish towns of Hedeby and Ribe — and to ring the bells there.

  Just as the unification of Denmark was a drawn-out process, so the coming of Christianity was more a creeping tide than a crashing wave.

  When Gorm died in 958 he was granted a lavish pagan burial by his son, and a spectacular memorial. His capital had been at Jelling, in southern Denmark, and it was there that some powerful individual, possibly Gorm himself, had earlier built a massive stone monument. Likely a ship setting, it was originally around 560 feet long, making it one of the largest of its kind, and if it was Gorm’s creation then it may well have been constructed as a memorial to his queen, Thyre. The mound’s northern end abutted a small Bronze Age burial cairn. Some decades after the building of the ship setting, a colossal mound of turf — the largest in the country — was heaped up over the northern end, also completely covering the ancient cairn.

  When the mound was excavated during the 1820s, it was found to contain an elaborately constructed stone and timber burial chamber, which had originally been dug into the Bronze Age cairn. Yet, for all its apparent grandeur, it was empty. There were a few small artefacts, including an elaborately decorated silver cup, but no human remains. There was, however, clear evidence that the tomb had been re-entered at some point in the ancient past and then carefully sealed once more.

  A few tens of yards from the ‘North Mound’ at Jelling is the ‘South Mound’, almost as large and every bit as impressive. This one, built slightly later, covers the southern end of the earlier ship setting. But it proved to be empty too. While the North Mound at least held an empty burial chamber, the South Mound is, and apparently always was, nothing more than a huge pile of turf and stone. If it ever had a function — beyond that of being an eye-catching monument to a person or persons unknown — then it may have been simply to obliterate the remaining part of the pagan ship setting. It is all wonderfully mysterious but the answers to the riddle are in fact to be found safely sheltering between the two mounds, like eggs in a nest — two carved rune stones and a white-painted medieval church.

  The quiet market town of Jelling has long been central to the Danish sense of nationhood and a steady flow of pilgrims eddies around the monuments there, now a Unesco World Heritage Site. While it undoubtedly mattered both before and during Harald’s time, its position at the centre of Danish political life did not long outlive him. It is precisely because the focus of power moved elsewhere, turning Jelling into a backwater, that the monuments have survived as well as they have.

  Archaeologists excavated beneath the floor of the church during the 1970s and uncovered the remains of several earlier church buildings. In the floor of the oldest foundations on the site, a burial. Early in the life of that first church a wooden chamber or cist had been incorporated into the floor, and a bag of bones placed inside it. The bag had been made of a material woven with gold threads and the burial was accompanied by grave goods similar in style to the silver cup found in the North Mound in the nineteenth century.

  Everything about it suggested someone of great importance — someone worthy of a second burial
in front of the altar of the new church and wrapped in golden cloth. It is even possible the ‘bag’ had once been the rich burial clothes of the deceased. Archaeologists believe the bones are those of Gorm the Old, originally buried as a pagan inside the elaborate chamber at the heart of the North Mound and then removed when his son accepted baptism.

  Having converted to Christianity — and joined the most fashionable club in town — Harald wanted membership for his father as well. Undeterred by the fact that the old man was already mouldering in his pagan grave, Harald had him carefully exhumed and then installed in a place of honour in his newly built church. The symbolism of it all is overwhelming, and its meaning obvious. The new king fully understood the importance of heritage and lineage. In order to underline his authority, he wanted his father’s memory blessed with the same eternal protection he had secured for himself. If Harald was now a Christian king, it was vital that his father should be seen to have come inside the fold as well.

  (The followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints have for many years been conducting retrospective conversions to their faith. Mormons alive today believe it is unfair that so many people lived and died before their own version of the truth was revealed in the 1820s. They therefore perform ‘baptism for the dead’ so that the opportunity to enter heaven is extended to those who died without ever knowing about or accepting the Mormon faith. The idea of bringing the dead into the Church is not a new one.)