Vikings Read online

  Perhaps the reflective surfaces of still water seemed like portals, places where the boundaries between worlds were weak, and therefore penetrable. In any case it is precisely because those dead were placed into water that so many of them have survived into the present day. The bodies settled into the sediments of the bogs or lake bottoms and were protected there from the processes of decay. Acids and tannins in the mud penetrated the skin and soft tissues and all but stopped time. What were lakes and marshes in the past have often been transformed into peat bogs — and most of the discoveries of so-called ‘bog-bodies’ have been made by people collecting fuel for their fires.

  The most famous bog-body of them all was unearthed in 1950 by two brothers cutting peat in the Bjaeldskovdal bog near the village of Tollund, in Jutland. They had brought their wives along to help and as one of them busied herself piling sods ready for loading onto their cart, she spotted a man’s face in the glistening wall of the cutting. So fresh did it seem, so newly dead, a call was made to the local police station, at nearby Silkeborg, and a murder reported.

  Investigation revealed an unlawful killing right enough — but one committed sometime in the fourth century BC. Empires had come and gone while Tollund Man lay entombed and mummified within the peat. He is older than Christianity or Islam. He is on display now in the Silkeborg Museum and the only word to describe him is beautiful.

  The flesh of Tollund Man’s hands and arms had mostly decomposed — likely a result of partial exposure to the air in the days and weeks before he was spotted. The rest of him, however, had been largely unaffected by the passing of two and half millennia. The tannins that preserved him had darkly stained him too, so that he seemed made of polished stone, or coal. He was naked but for a pointed cap of sheepskin on his sorry head and a thin leather belt around his waist. Scientists found the contents of his last meal still languishing in his gut — a simple soup of vegetables and seeds.

  Around 12 hours after he had finished eating that thin gruel, he was put to death. Still around his neck was a braided leather rope, and analysis by the local coroner determined Tollund Man had been killed by hanging. Not for him the mercy of a snapped neck and a quick death, however — rather the evidence showed he had suffered the special misery of strangulation.

  Only his head survives today, fastened onto a skilful reconstruction of the body modelled from photographs taken in the 1950s; but it is a marvel just the same. His eyes and mouth are closed so that at first sight he seems peacefully asleep. Under his cap his hair is cropped short and as he had recently shaved, his chin and upper lip are covered with a light stubble.

  The Irish poet Seamus Heaney was fascinated by him as well. In ‘The Tollund Man’ he writes:

  Some day I will go to Aarhus

  To see his peat-brown head,

  The mild pods of his eye-lids,

  His pointed skin cap …

  Naked except for

  The cap, noose and girdle,

  I will stand a long time.

  Bridegroom to the goddess,

  She tightened her torc on him

  And opened her fen,

  Those dark juices working

  Him to a saint’s kept body.

  Tollund Man is certainly the best known of the bog-bodies, but he is one of many. Grauballe Man, his hair stained red as a robin’s breast by the peat, was found just two years later and only a few miles away. Also naked, and after a similar meal of seeds and vegetables, he had his throat slit from ear to ear. His millennia in the mud have crumpled his face so it has the look of an old leather bag. Elling Woman was found in 1938 just 80 yards from the spot where Tollund Man would come to light a dozen years later. She was wearing a woollen cloak and had a cowhide wrapped around her legs. Her hair was long and worn in a ponytail. Like her near neighbour, she had been hanged with a leather rope. Other bog-bodies have been unearthed there and elsewhere, and all in similar, gory circumstances. Two men’s corpses were found in Borremose bog, in Himmerland — the first in 1946 and the second the following year. Borremose Woman was found in 1947.

  In the National Museum in Copenhagen I came face to face with Huldremose Woman, revealed by peat-cutting, at Ramten, in Djursland, in 1879. She was fully clothed when she met her death — possibly the result of being throttled with the long woollen cord found wound several times around her neck. Her right arm had almost been severed as well, at the time of death, by a blow from some lethally sharp weapon. In her stomach were found the remains of a last meal — a soup of rye and seeds from the weed spurrey. While Tollund Man seems peaceful in death, there is something distressing about Huldremose Woman. Her feet, alarmingly well preserved, seem to bear witness to a final struggle. The toes are flexed, splayed and pulled upwards — rather in the manner you might expect of someone who has been pulled up off the ground by a cord around the throat. Perhaps it is only an effect of centuries in the peat, and then more recent drying in the air of the modern world, but she has about her an air of suffering.

  The Iron Age practice of human sacrifice, followed by disposal of the body into a bog, was not limited to Scandinavia either. Similarly executed souls have been unearthed in Germany and there have also been several such finds in the British Isles — including the famous Lindow Man, in a bog in Cheshire in 1984, and two from Ireland in 2003. Lindow Man had been dispatched with two blows to the head, probably from an axe. One impact had been heavy enough to drive fragments of his skull deep into his brain and to shatter one of his back teeth. He had also been throttled, the rope left around his neck when his body was placed into the bog that preserved him. The luckless Irishmen — called Clonycavan Man and Oldcroghan Man after the names of their last resting places — were victims of cruel violence. The former had been struck repeatedly on the head and chest with an axe before a blade was used to open a gaping wound across his lower abdomen; the latter was stabbed through the heart by someone standing in front of him and likely looking him in the eye.

  It might seem reasonable to assume that those men and women were criminals in life, rightfully executed. This is not, however, the view shared by most archaeologists. For one thing, ancient writers including Tacitus noted the northern tribes were given to offering up their fellows to the gods. Despite the fact that he had been hanged, Tollund Man had been treated with some care. His last meal of gruel, unappetising though it sounds, was a mixture of wild and cultivated seeds that would have been hard to come by. Such an effort for a criminal seems unlikely and suggests instead a dish prepared for a special occasion — perhaps for a special person. Someone had taken the trouble to close his dead eyes and mouth so that he appeared peacefully at rest. He was also laid carefully down into the bog, curled into a protective foetal position. All of it paints a picture of someone selected to die — but accorded respect in death.

  A world overseen by gods hungry for human sacrifice is hard for us to imagine. But those ancestors of the Vikings had, anyway, a fragile hold on life and surely a completely different understanding of the workings of the cosmos. There on the northern fringes of Europe they were at the mercy of nature, most of them battling every day to feed their families. If they had questions about the meaning of life, then in the absence of science and reason the answers doubtless involved the will of the gods. As farmers they depended upon the soil for all the stuff of life — food, fuel, shelter — and they accepted there were prices to be paid for all that was taken from the earth. If life came from the ground, then from time to time life might have to be returned to it.

  For all that they were farmers now, living repetitive lives bound to the soil and the seasons, the continuum was also punctuated by interludes of warfare. Yet more finds reveal that long before the Vikings turned their murderous attentions on the wider world, their ancestors were acquiring the skills demanded by the raid, by attacking one another. In 1921 a party of peat-cutters working in the Hjortspring Mose (bog) on the Danish island of Als unearthed the remains of a beautifully crafted timber boat measuring well over 60 f
eet long and between eight and nine feet wide. The so-called Hjortspring Boat was ‘clinker-built’ — meaning the long limewood planks had been fitted together so their edges overlapped. In later periods the planks would have been fixed with wooden dowels or metal rivets, but in the case of the Hjortspring Boat the builders used twisted fibres made from tree roots to ‘sew’ the timbers together. It is the oldest clinker-built vessel found so far in the whole of Scandinavia.

  At least as fascinating as the boat itself is the huge hoard of Iron Age weaponry and other equipment it contained. Piled inside the vessel were scores of iron swords, iron spearheads, lance heads of iron and bone, and more than 60 wooden shields. There were also perhaps a dozen coats of iron chain mail as well as many small bronze objects and wooden equipment including axe-handles, clubs, the crafted nozzle for a pair of blacksmith’s bellows, round plates, spoons and cups. Careful excavation revealed the boat and its contents had been dragged overland to a small lake, and there deliberately sunk. Radiocarbon dates indicated the whole lot was deposited sometime between 350 and 300 BC.

  There in the Hjortspring bog, then, is a snapshot of a single, bloody day in Danish prehistory. Given the amount of weapons it seems likely a war party, an army even, set out to attack the island of Als. Perhaps the chain mail was worn by the squad leaders, marking them out as men of rank and status. Under their command, in four or five similarly sized boats, were a further 60—80 fighting men. Despite being armed to the teeth, despite the potential for a surprise attack afforded by their sleek and speedy craft, it seems the day went badly for the raiders. It looks as though the defenders of Als were able to stop the attackers in their tracks. Presumably the raiders were either cut down or fled the field. The victors then gathered up the weapons of their foes and heaped them into one of the boats. This they dragged to the shore of a little lake, comfortably inside their tribal territory and already important to them as the home of a deity. Knowing full well their victory had been gifted to them by their benevolent god, the people of Als were careful to repay the debt by making him a gift of all their booty.

  The Hjortspring Boat makes plain that in the Early Iron Age the tradition of sea travel had continued and developed — but it is not quite a long ship. It reveals a stage in the development of those legendary ocean-going warships of the eighth century AD and later, but there was still a long way to go before the Scandinavian ship-builders would make vessels capable of crossing the North Sea, far less the North Atlantic Ocean. Neither is there enough in the way of archaeological evidence to suggest the existence in the Scandinavian territories, in those last centuries before the birth of Christ, of even fledgling states or kingdoms.

  It would take the influence exerted by civilisations developing far to the south to create the conditions suitable for growing little kingdoms in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and little kings to rule them. From around 800 BC, people living around the shores of the Mediterranean Sea witnessed the emergence of societies that would change the world for ever. The Phoenicians rose in the east, on land occupied now by modern Lebanon and Syria. Around the Aegean were the tribes that would in time give birth to Greek civilisation. Northern Italy was then home to the Etruscans who, by 800 BC, were skilled blacksmiths. They were already in command of the written word as well, using an alphabet adapted from that of the Greeks. The origins of the Etruscan people are still debated today but some scholars suggest they may have arrived in the Italian peninsula from a homeland somewhere in Asia or the Middle East.

  While the Scandinavian tribes were living in their little villages of timber longhouses, hacking an existence out of the forests with tools of bronze, Etruria was an alliance of cities ruled by petty kings. Although the Etruscans had centuries-old trading links with the Greeks, intermittent strife between the two populations had, by the sixth century BC, severely weakened them. It was in such an atmosphere of cultural exhaustion that Etruscan civilisation was abruptly overwhelmed by a population they had long dominated. If the Etruscans had indeed arrived from the east, then they would have found the place already inhabited by local Latin tribes, whom they forced into a state of near-slavery. Sometime around the end of the sixth century, a date traditionally given as 509 BC, the Latin underclass of the city of Rome rose up and threw off the rule of the last of their Etruscan kings. From then on the Mediterranean world bore witness to the irresistible rise of Rome.

  All of this activity around the Mediterranean Sea — the establishment and growth of states — fundamentally altered the fabric of the entire European continent. The so-called ‘Classical world’ that developed there, ultimately dominated by Rome, had the same effect on the wider world as does a dazzling new star upon the lesser bodies surrounding it. Everything and everyone felt the draw. Rome’s hunger — for food to feed her citizens, for precious metals to pay her armies, for base metals to make their weapons, for any and every commodity in fact — caused shortages north, south, east and west. If the flow of metals around Europe had been disrupted by the arrival of the nomads in the Carpathian Basin at the turn of the first millennium BC, then the rise of Rome skewed the picture yet again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE WIDER WORLD

  ‘All the world’s a stage,

  And all the men and women merely players:

  They have their exits and their entrances …’

  William Shakespeare, As You Like It

  For all that Scandinavia is the birthplace of the Vikings, the modern countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden can feel like unlikely cradles for men and women such as those.

  Take Copenhagen, the Danish capital: it’s hard to imagine a city less threatening, more safe … more peaceful. Nowadays bicycles are the life-blood of the place, and always have the right of way. Toddlers account for half the passengers on two wheels, in seats mounted behind their parents’ saddles and either pulled or pushed in all manner of trailers and capsules. Bikes are routinely left outside on the pavement overnight, many without locks of any kind. Cars are often unlocked on the street.

  The citizens seem calm and collected too, going quietly about their business without any apparent attitude. There is a conspicuous absence of strutting machismo, even jaywalking. While the streets of other European cities can feel like catwalks for swaggering, self-appointed hard men, the adult males in Copenhagen seemed altogether less vain, less competitive. It isn’t that they lack confidence — just that they apparently find it unnecessary to advertise it by the way they dress and walk. In some ways they seem more grown-up. That Denmark once spawned generations of robbing, raping, pillaging shock-troops, famed and feared throughout the known world, is hard to credit now.

  Denmark is famously a land comprising hundreds of islands. Boats and ships were identified as a prerequisite of daily life early on and it was the resultant, uniquely advanced maritime skills that prepared the Vikings for their epic voyages. Even that aspect of Danish culture — so crucial to our story — is easily forgotten, or at least overlooked. A voyage around much of modern Denmark is achieved by car. I flew into Copenhagen but none of my journey thereafter — around the island of Sjælland, onto the neighbouring island of Fyn and finally onto the Jutland peninsula — required any kind of sea travel whatsoever and so the hours spent in the back seat of a hired Toyota estate car were as unremittingly flat as the landscape. Denmark today is for the most part a land not of boats and boatmen, but of bridges and tolls.

  So low-lying as to seem barely above sea level for much of the time, the country’s highest points are actually the tops of the 833-feet-high concrete pylons of the 11-mile-long Storebælt (Great Belt) Bridge that links the islands of Sjælland and Fyn. Skimming along the smooth ribbon of tarmac stretched between them like a liquorice-whip, I had to remind myself to look out of the car windows every once and a while, so as to spot some vessels passing beneath. A Viking world of storm-lashed islands linked only by the steadfast efforts of mariners, in hardy little craft, feels long ago and far away.

  Despite our mo
dern perception of the Romans (more specifically the Roman army) as invincible, the truth is different. They certainly did not always have things their own way. The mass migrations into central Europe around 1000 BC of nomadic peoples originating further east, caused ripples that were still being felt centuries later. Throughout the millennium that followed the first wave, uncountable numbers of people were periodically on the move. As one group arrived in an area, so others departed to make room.

  Around 400 BC a land-hungry northern European tribe called the Senones crossed the Alps and settled on the north-eastern coast of the Italian peninsula. A decade or so later they were besieging their neighbours in the city of Clusium — and the residents turned to Rome for help. The Romans duly obliged by sending an army, which was annihilated by the Senones at the Battle of the Allia River. The Senones chased the remnants of the Roman force all the way back to Rome itself and tore much of the place apart. It was an event that would live long in Roman memories.

  By at least as early as the fourth century BC the Romans had learnt to fear the peoples of the north. So when two tribes from the Jutland peninsula — the Cimbri and the Teutones — joined forces sometime around 120 BC and headed south in search of land and spoils, the citizens of Rome understandably feared history was about to repeat itself. For more or less the next two decades those northerners roamed across much of southern Europe and the Iberian peninsula, seemingly at will. Roman armies confronted them on three separate occasions, in 109, 107 and 105 BC, and were soundly defeated every time. Only after a restructuring of the Roman army under the talented general and consul Gaius Marius — remembered ever after as ‘the third founder of Rome’ — were those roving tribes finally brought to heel, at two conclusive battles in 102 and 101 BC.

  Fear of the tribes of northern Europe was therefore well ingrained in Roman minds as the first millennium BC drew to a close. They were ghosts haunting the shadows, whose strange and barbaric ways were relayed back to the Mediterranean in the form of rumour and myth. Julius Ceasar faced and fought the Germanic tribes on their own ground, around the middle of the first century BC, and his experience served only to reinforce their reputation as a people obsessed by war. It was therefore convenient simply to label them barbarians and leave it at that.