The Vikings: Classic Histories Series

Magnus Magnusson

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780750978583
• eBook ISBN: 9780750980777
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The Vikings hold a particular place in the history of the West, both symbolically and in the significant impact they had on Northern Europe. Magnus Magnusson's indispensable study of this great period presents a rounded and fascinating picture of a people who, in modern eyes, would seem to embody striking contradictions. They were undoubtedly pillagers, raiders and terrifying warriors, but they were also great pioneers, artists and traders - a dynamic people, whose skill and daring in their exploration of the world has left an indelible impression a thousand years on.

ONE

THE HAMMER AND THE RAVEN

The mythological, literary and historical context

The so-called ‘Viking Age’ began around AD 800 and lasted for nearly three centuries. In the pages of history it is presented as a clearly defined period of high drama, with a theatrical opening, a long middle act of mounting power and ferocity, and a spectacular finale on a battlefield in England. The dates are clear-cut, too: 793 to 1066. And throughout that time, war correspondents in the shape of literate monks and clerics kept their goose-quill pens sharpened with alarm, their glossy inks dyed bright with indignation. The Vikings were cast in the role of Antichrist, merciless barbarians who plundered and burned their way across the known world, heedless of their own lives or the lives of others, intent only on destruction and pillage; their emblems were Thór’s Hammer and Óðin’s Raven, symbolising the violence and black-hearted evil of their pagan gods.

It was never quite as one-sided as that – history seldom is. But it made a good story at the time, and it makes a good story still. It is basically the story which I shall be chronicling in this book; but it was never the whole story. Today there is emerging a much fuller and rounder version, not only through modern archaeology but also with the help of other scientific and literary disciplines, which presents the Vikings in a less lurid and more objective light. It is as much a matter of emphasis as anything else: less emphasis on the raiding, more on the trading; less on the pillage, more on the poetry and the artistry; less on the terror, more on the technology of these determined and dynamic people from the northlands of Denmark, Norway and Sweden and the positive impact they had on the countries they affected.

Their influence was much more constructive, more pervasive and extensive than they are generally given credit for. They dominated much of northern Europe for long periods. They brought to the British Isles vigorous new art forms, and vigorous new settlers; they founded and developed great market towns, they injected new forms of administration and justice which have left their mark to this day. (As an Icelandic-born descendant of the Vikings, I can never resist reminding my sceptical friends that it was these allegedly pitiless savages who introduced the word law into the English language!) They crisscrossed half the world in their open boats and vastly extended its known boundaries; they voyaged farther north and west than any Europeans had ever been before, founding new and lasting colonies in the Faroes and Iceland, discovering and exploring and making settlements in Greenland and even in North America.-They penetrated the depths of Russia, founding city-states like Novgorod and Kiev, pioneering new trade routes along formidable rivers such as the Volga and the Dnieper, opening up the route to Asia in order to exploit the exotic markets of Persia and China. They served as hand-picked warriors in the celebrated Varangian Guard, the household troops of the Byzantine Emperor in Constantinople. They went everywhere there was to go, they dared everything there was to dare – and they did it with a robust panache and audacity which have won the grudging admiration even of those who deplore their depredations.

But the Vikings did not happen suddenly; nor did they simply happen. Behind the Viking break-out lay centuries of Scandinavian history which archaeology has been bringing to light – a story of technological development and commercial expansion which helps to explain why the Viking Age came about in the first place.

The word ‘viking’ is itself a bit of a puzzle. It may be related to the Old Norse word vík, meaning ‘bay’ or ‘creek’; so a ‘Viking’ meant someone who kept his ship in a bay, either for trading or raiding. Others look for a derivation in the Old English word wic, borrowed from the Latin vicus, meaning a camp or a trading-place; so a ‘Viking’ might mean a warrior or a trader – or both.

To the people of the time, ‘Viking’ meant different things, too. For the Christian communities of western Europe, a Viking was synonymous with barbarian paganism. But to the people of Scandinavia, and especially to the saga-writers of Iceland in the thirteenth century, the Vikings represented an ideal of heroism and valour: young men went on Viking expeditions to prove their mettle. The Viking life was a sort of open-air university of the manly arts, something for every youngster to aspire to:

My mother once told me

She’d buy me a longship,

A handsome-oared vessel

To go sailing with Vikings:

To stand at the stern-post

And steer a fine warship

Then head back for harbour

And hew down some foemen.

Egils Saga, Ch. 40

Egils Saga is one of the major medieval Icelandic sagas, historical narratives written in prose but often studded with verse stanzas. It is the story of a great Viking warrior-poet named Egill Skallagrímsson (cf Ch. 6), and that boyish verse was composed in his childhood in Iceland early in the tenth century. His saga, it is thought, was written by Snorri Sturluson, who lived on the manor farm of Reykholt in southern Iceland.

The Icelandic sagas, written long after the events they report, were for centuries the major documentary source for the prehistory and history of the Viking lands and the Viking Age. They rank among the finest achievements of medieval European literature, but as historical sources they cannot be taken too literally. Snorri Sturluson, one of the few saga-writers whose name we know, was the outstanding scholar of his age. As a distinguished statesman deeply embroiled in Icelandic politics of the thirteenth century, he was fascinated by the politics and people of the Viking period; as an erudite Christian intellectual he was also fascinated by the pagan mythology of the Vikings, which he helped to preserve by recording and explaining some of the most ancient Germanic myths and legends. Building his work on earlier written sources, on oral traditions and on the remembered skaldic poetry of Scandinavian court poets, he tried to create a coherent framework for the past, a context within which to understand and illuminate the Viking experience.

At Reykholt, Snorri Sturluson wrote some of the towering masterpieces of the thirteenth century. His systematic account of Norse mythology is contained in a work called the Prose Edda, or Snorri’s Edda, which is in effect a handbook for poets, designed to teach the traditional techniques of the ancients and to explain the pagan literary allusions to be found in their poetry. He also wrote a monumental History of the Kings of Norway, popularly known as Heimskringla (‘Orb of the World’) from its opening words: ‘Kringla heimsins, sú er mannfólkit byggir…’ – ‘The orb of the world, which mankind inhabits…’

What a majestic opening! I like to reflect that at the time when, out in the far east, Genghis Khan was trying to subjugate the world by the sword, up in the far north a learned Christian antiquarian was trying to subject it to the power of the pen:

The orb of the world, which mankind inhabits, is riven by many fjords, so that great seas run into the land from the Outer Ocean. Thus, it is known that a great sea goes in through Nörvasund [Straits of Gibraltar] all the way to the land of Jerusalem. From that same sea a long bight stretches towards the north-east, called the Black Sea, which divides the three continents of the earth: to the east lies Asia, to the west lies Europe (which some call Aeneas-land), but to the north of the Black Sea lies Greater Sweden or Sweden the Cold [Russia] …

Through Greater Sweden [Russia], from the range of mountains which lie to the north beyond the edge of human habitation, there runs a river properly called the Tanaís [Don], which flows into the Black Sea. In Asia to the east of the Tanaís there was a land called Ásaland or Ásaheimur [Land of the Æsir]; its chief city was called Ásgarður [Home of the Æsir]. That city was ruled by a chieftain named Óðin, and it was a great centre for sacrifices…

Heimskringla: Ynglinga saga, Ch. 1

That was how Snorri Sturluson tried to rationalise the origin of the Norse gods, the Æsir, who lived in a heaven called Ásgarður. According to Snorri, they had been an Asiatic tribe who had migrated to Scandinavia in ancient times under the chieftain Óðin, who in Norse mythology became the chief god of the Viking pantheon, Óðin the All-Father.

The cult of Óðin was a dark and sacrificial business. Whole armies and individual enemies would be sacrificed to him. He was the god of the occult, and the god of war. From his throne in Ásgarður he could see out over all the universe. On his shoulders p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Hammer and the Raven
• 2 Bolt from the Blue
• 3 ‘From the Fury of the Northmen…’
• 4 ‘Hálfdan was Here’
• 5 England at Bay
• 6 ‘Bitter is the Wind…’
• 7 ‘An Island called Thule’
• 8 The Ultimate Outpost
• 9 Empire of the North Sea
• 10 ‘Here King Harold is Killed’
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of illustrations
• Picture Section