Vikings Read online

  For the living, it was word from further afield that mattered most. In such an atmosphere, with the attendant necessity to reach out beyond the visible horizon, mastery of the seaways was already paramount. If the need for ships and the men to crew them was being carved into the bedrock in southern Sweden, then it was also finding expression in different ways elsewhere within Scandinavia. In Late Bronze Age Denmark it was common to engrave metal objects — sometimes swords but more often razors — with depictions of long ships similar to those being etched into stone. Again there are the upraised prows and sterns, the close-packed vertical lines representing rowers, but on the surfaces of the metal objects the ships are often accompanied by other subjects — animals and fish and also discs most often taken as symbols of the sun.

  Archaeologist Flemming Kaul suggested it was possible to discern the direction of travel of many of the engraved ships. Those moving left to right, he wrote, were often associated with depictions of horses — and so symbolised the passage of the sun across the sky during daytime. By contrast, the vessels sailing right to left, accompanied by fish or snakes, represented an ancient belief in the star’s journey beneath the sea, back to its starting point, during each night. All of it points to a lost religion that lay embedded within one society after another for thousands of years. Aboard ship or chariot across the sky by day, escorted under the sea on the backs of fish, snakes and water birds by night, it was an endless journey that provided a framework — a scaffold that supported the very fabric of existence.

  Preoccupation with the journey of the sun is therefore deeply rooted and widespread. The great stone circles of the British Isles — the Ring of Brodgar, Avebury, Stonehenge and many others besides — are also in place to track its passage. For the ancestors of the Vikings it seems to have been bound up with watching the sea as well. On the island of Gotland, the significance of the ship and the journey finds an expression that borders on the obsessive. During the latter part of the Bronze Age the islanders took to building ships of stone.

  Archaeologists call them ship settings and have catalogued nearly 400 on the island. They occur elsewhere in mainland Scandinavia and on the Baltic coast of Europe, but the sheer volume on Gotland suggests the sea and the journey across it were uppermost in people’s minds there. There are variations on the theme but essentially the builders in each case recreated the eye-shaped outline of a long ship with a setting of upright stones. The raised prow and stern are sometimes represented by taller stones at each end and on Gotland the apparent pairing of similarly sized boulders across the long axis of the ship has been interpreted as depictions of pairs of rowers sitting side by side. Sometimes the vessels occur singly, sometimes in fleets. They may be found close by other monuments like burial cairns and often cremated human remains are buried inside. From time to time only the prow and stern are marked by stones, enigmatically suggestive of empty vessels.

  Surely mention of the word ‘Viking’ summons up one image that is stronger than all the others — that of the ship engulfed in flames as it bears the body of a great warrior on his final journey out to sea and beyond? Archaeologists have suggested that at least some of the ship settings — on Gotland and elsewhere — are representations in stone and on dry land of just that, of the journey into the world of the dead. The inclusion of burnt human bones — testament to a great fire designed to send the deceased on his or her way — completes the picture.

  Archaeologists Richard Bradley, Peter Skoglund and Joakim Wehlin allowed for the possibility that the people of Gotland had an especially acute sense of their connection to the sea: ‘Gotland is long and narrow and comes to a point at its northern and southern extremes,’ they write. ‘That is very similar to the outline of the largest stone vessels. Is it possible that the greatest ship settings of all were meant to represent the island as a whole? Was Gotland itself imagined as an enormous vessel in the middle of the ocean?’

  Just as fascinating is to wonder how early the great voyages, for which they became so famous, actually began — and how far some of the ancestors of the Vikings might have travelled. If the Danish Egtved Girl is a celebrity of the Scandinavian Bronze Age, then the Swedish burial cairn called Bredaror, ‘the broad cairn’, is equally famous. Located near Kivik, in the south-east of the country, the tomb’s history, since its discovery, is almost as fascinating as the marvels it contains. Radiocarbon dates suggest it was originally constructed around the middle of the second millennium BC, but by the time local farmers started using it as a source of building stone in the middle of the eighteenth century, it cropped up only in stories to frighten children. Spirits of the dead were said to haunt the place, in the form of flickering lights, and local folklore had it that horses and other animals would shy away from the mound at sunrise or sunset.

  In 1748 two local farmers — Anders Sahlberg and Lasse Pärsson — had the misfortune to break through into the large burial chamber that had been the point of the structure all along. They had come only in search of more building stone but when word spread about an empty burial chamber, rumours circulated that they had made off with some kind of treasure. They almost certainly had not, but when the gossip reached the authorities the pair were duly arrested and charged with denying the Swedish State its lawful property. The men were tried the following year but acquitted for want of evidence.

  It was only in 1756 that someone finally noticed the rock art on the walls of the empty burial chamber discovered by Sahlberg and Pärsson. Bredaror was not subjected to any kind of scientific archaeological excavation until work there by Gustaf Hallström in 1931, but nothing was found to compare with the wonders depicted on the ancient stones, and left exposed all the while. The cairn was subsequently reconstructed — and it is anyone’s guess whether the finished result bears much of a resemblance to what was there in the Bronze Age.

  But nothing can diminish the impact of the story told by those pecked and carved images. There are eight decorated slabs in total and upon those, in simple, elegant style, is a record of sights surely witnessed during an epic journey long ago. There are the long ships powered by oars … stately processions of robed and hooded figures, some blowing horns and lurs. Better yet is the man riding a chariot with two spoked wheels and pulled by a pair of horses controlled by long reins — a mode of transport unknown in Scandinavia before that time.

  The monument had long been known as the King’s Grave (despite the fact that Hallström’s excavation revealed the burnt and unburnt remains of several people), but on account of the artwork, known as petroglyphs, it is now thought to be a memorial for someone who was, at the very least, a great traveller. ‘Just like Ulysses, the Nordic chief that voyaged all the way to the Mediterranean, who saw and understood the new and strange, was already a legend by the time he returned home,’ writes archaeologist Kristian Kristiansen. ‘This status was enhanced if he had with him never before seen curiosities such as chariots, knowledge of new casting techniques, of wagon- and ship-building, perhaps even the foreign crafts people themselves, as well as the stories about far-off settlements and gods … One such man was the chief of Kivik.’

  Some experts have speculated that that Bronze Age chief may have journeyed as far as the Mediterranean Sea, to the civilisation of Mycenae; but British archaeologist Sir Barry Cunliffe suggests a voyage into the territory centred around modern-day Hungary would have been enough to provide those Swedish artists with their inspiration. Known to archaeologists as the Carpathian Basin, the lands there were home to Bronze Age tribes that were already in possession of all the technologies pictured at Kivik: ‘A possible scenario is that in the sixteenth century BC the lord of Kivik led his warriors on an epic journey, sailing south from home via the island of Bornholm to the mouth of the Oder, and thence by river and overland portage to the Carpathian Basin,’ writes Cunliffe. ‘On their return, scenes from the adventure and the mysteries they had witnessed were painted on cloth to adorn the lord’s residence, thereby endowing him with great power in the
eyes of all. On his death the scenes were carved on the stones of his burial chamber and a huge mound of boulders — the Bredaror — was piled up over it, dominating the view across the sea to the south and visible to all sailors approaching the coast: a fitting memorial to a great voyager.’

  When that lord of Kivik set out on his travels, it was bronze that was king — in Scandinavia and much of the rest of Europe besides. It is hard for us to imagine how fundamental to society the alloy of tin and copper actually was 3,500 years ago.

  Before the advent of those first metal objects, power had depended upon knowledge. Farmers lived by the seasons, the cycle of the year, and of life itself. It dawned on some of them that the journeys of the sun and the moon were predictable, that they followed regular cycles of their own — and with that realisation came a preoccupation with the movement of the lights in the sky. In the British Isles, the great stone monuments of the Neolithic were built with the sky in mind. Like the stone circles, passage tombs including Maes Howe on Orkney and Newgrange in Ireland were designed to mark significant moments in the passage of the sun through the heavens. Those early astronomers became a theocracy of sorts, a priestly class to whom others looked for wisdom. In those centuries towards the end of the Stone Age, then, the basis for power over people was what you knew.

  Bronze changed all that. Since both copper and tin were hard to come by, obtained from a handful of locations scattered across the globe, most people had no direct access to them. In order to get their hands on those bright, shiny things — or the raw materials from which they might be made — most folk had to make and maintain contacts with communities far away. The day came when it was accepted a man was nothing and no one without an axe or sword made of bronze. From that moment on, power was based on access to and control of metal and once that notion had crystallised, what mattered was not what you knew — but who.

  Ties between groups separated by distance were made, and then continually reinforced, by the giving and receiving of gifts — gifts made of bronze as well as other materials no doubt. As well as exchanging things, those connections might also be strengthened by providing brides and husbands for one another’s sons and daughters. In this way bronze, the foundation and mortar of everything else that was going on, acquired a value far in excess of the sum of its chemical parts.

  Increasingly it was the trappings of the warrior that were being manufactured by the smiths. Bronze swords, axes, shields and helmets were required in ever increasing volumes as men sought to show off their prowess and bravery. A chief would demonstrate his power by acquiring the weapons to equip his fighting men, as well as gifts with which to flatter his bravest and most loyal warriors. Rather than just wholesale warfare by massed armies, it seems the Bronze Age was also the time of the hero, and of single combat between champions. Weapons would accompany such men in life and in death. Whenever it was deemed necessary or appropriate, some swords and shields would be set apart from the world of men and placed into rivers, lakes and bogs where they became the exclusive property of gods, goddesses and spirits.

  The heavily armed warrior was also depicted in rock art — and in Scandinavia it makes for a heady mix. In the Bohuslän district of southern Sweden the artists used outcrops of granite as the canvases for thousands of images including animals, cup marks, circles, wheeled vehicles, trees, ploughs and mazes. But predominant among them are depictions of armed men, and the ships to carry them. Always these are recurrent symbols — and not just in Bohuslän — so that as early as the Bronze Age the quintessential hero of the most northerly lands on Earth was the warrior who travelled far overseas and returned home laden with riches obtained from violent raids.

  Having held sway for thousands of years, bronze ultimately fell from grace. A system that had bound society together for longer than the reach of memory, in a complicated web of relationships and obligations spread over thousands of miles, began to unravel. Later in the first millennium BC, people turned away from bronze and sought out other ways, other media for the expression of their ideas about themselves and others.

  As well as abandoning bronze, they apparently changed the way they thought about death. After centuries and millennia of inhumation — the burial in the ground of the intact body — by the end of the Bronze Age the journey from the world of the living to the world of the dead was completed with fire. Once the bodies of the dead, together with their most precious possessions, had been burnt on great pyres, the crumbled bones and melted treasures were collected into pottery vessels and buried. It was a change of rite that spread all across Europe and by the first millennium BC the fashion for cremation was well established in Scandinavia as well.

  Some archaeologists have suggested bronze was ultimately vulnerable to the vagaries of fickle human nature — that in time, and for reasons unknown, there was a loss of confidence in the bronze market not unlike that which afflicted the financial markets of the twenty-first century. Most people understand that we have somehow moved beyond money now, or at least beyond the real value of gold, property, oil or any other tradable commodity you care to mention. What matters — all that matters, in fact — is that we believe something has value. If everyone involved maintains their confidence in the system and holds their nerve, then everything will be all right. But if enough people begin to have doubts that their wealth and well-being are safe in the system, then it might all come down like a house of cards.

  The suggestion that bronze was undone by a Europe-wide collapse of public confidence is quite appealing at first glance. Most experts agree, however, that it is also just a bit too glib — and not nearly enough to explain the complexities of all that was going on.

  As the Bronze Age approached its climax, the situation grew more and more complicated. In the latter part of the period it was not enough simply to own bronze objects; what mattered then was to possess bronze objects that had been acquired from contacts far away. In Britain at this time, the largest hoards of Late Bronze Age objects are often found farthest from any natural sources of the metal itself. By contrast, people living in Cornwall, or north Wales, for example — home to prodigious quantities of tin and copper respectively — seemingly valued only imported Continental bronze. For archaeologists working today, some of what was going on in the Late Bronze Age is simply unfathomable.

  What seems clear, though, is that during the Late Bronze Age individuals, and the societies around them, demonstrated their power and status by being able to show they were obtaining their finest things from the most distant places imaginable.

  In the case of powerful Scandinavians, it seems the source of much of their metalwork was the same territory that attracted the lord of Kivik. The Carpathian Basin is a huge shallow bowl of fertile loamy-loess soil — so fertile indeed that from time to time it has been claimed the whole of Europe might be fed from the fields there. The Alps, the Balkan Mountains, the Carpathian Mountains and the Dinaric Alps provide the rim; the bowl itself is bisected by the Danube River, ensuring a steady flow of incomers travelling by boat or taking advantage of the low, level ground of the river’s banks. Blessed with natural deposits of metal ores and workable stone like chert and obsidian, it has attracted and held people since the end of the last Ice Age. All these advantages combined — fertile soils and bountiful natural resources in a location close to the heart of Europe — have conspired to make the Carpathian Basin a hub of human activity. Key routes for people headed north, south, east or west across the European continent passed through the territory — and those living there were always in a position to take advantage of the traffic. By the end of the third millennium BC the bronzesmiths working there were making some of the most desirable weapons and jewellery on the Continent.

  Around 1000 BC, however, this comfortable system of trade and exchange was disrupted by the arrival in the Carpathian Basin — and in much of the rest of central Europe besides — of large numbers of new people. These were the nomadic tribes from the Russian steppes, known to history and a
rchaeology as the Scythians and the Cimmerians. Among other things, their sudden, unexpected presence in central Europe seemingly disrupted the ages-old trade networks, so that quite quickly the movement of bronze and other luxury items north and west towards Scandinavia and the homes of other eager consumers ground to a halt. Bronze was also available from the territories of the western Alps, however, and it appears that when supplies from central Europe dried up, Scandinavia looked south rather than east for its luxury items. Here were people grown accustomed to acquiring the good things in life from elsewhere, and at the same time becoming knowledgeable about what was available — and where.

  The proto-Vikings’ homelands were fertile enough to feed their stomachs, but too poor to satisfy all of their ambitions. The peoples of Denmark, Norway and Sweden were well aware of fashions and mores elsewhere. Like everyone else in Europe during the Bronze Age, they wanted to adorn themselves with fine things, to demonstrate their status. They needed bronze to appease their gods and to equip their dead for the next world. Unfortunately none of it was to be had from the rock beneath their feet. Geology had left them wanting. And so two and a half millennia before that raid on Lindisfarne — a raid driven in part by the desire for other precious metals — the ancestors of the Vikings had learnt a vital lesson: whatever was missing at home could be obtained from the neighbours.