The Viking Age

Charles Keary

• Publisher: Jovian Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781537810652
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

The present volume is concerned with that period in the history of the Scandinavian peoples when they were growing, but had not yet fully grown, into nationalities, and when, therefore, their true national history had not begun. Every historic people has passed through this early formative period, its age of Sturm und Drang; and it may be said that every nationality which is worthy of the name has looked back upon that age with a peculiar affection and with a sort of reverence. It has, in consequence, overlaid the faint traditions of it with a garment of mythology, out of which it is in most cases possible only here and there to separate a shred of historical truth. The result is that the very phase in the development of the people about which we most long to know, is the one about which we are condemned to the completest ignorance. The Viking Age of the Northern Folk differs from the corresponding epochs in the history of other nations in this - that it is illuminated by a faint ray of real history lent from the pages of contemporary but alien chroniclers, the chroniclers, I mean, of Christian Europe. Were it not for this faint gleam, the earliest age of the Vikings would have remained for us as a mere tradition, something known to have been, but not presentable in any realizable form; much, in fact, what the Dorian Migration is in the history of Greece. As it is, by the aid of the contemporary records I have spoken of, we can present the northern migration in a clearer guise.

THE CREED OF HEATHEN GERMANY

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CHRISTIANITY PASSED THROUGH THREE STAGES on her road to the conquest of Europe. From being an offshoot of Judaism, she became the religion of the ‘Gentiles,’ that is to say, of the peoples formed mainly by Gneco-Roman culture: then she extended her empire over the heathens. The second stage alone of these three is clearly illuminated for us. Of the Christian community — Christian Church if you like to call it so — while it was still Judaic under the presidency of Peter and James, of its quarrels with Pauline Christianity, we get a hint only, no clear idea. But of the acts of Paul and his writings, of the acts and writings of the succeeding ‘fathers,’ all drawn from the Gneco-Roman world, we have abundant remains. On entering the third stage darkness again falls round us. We have in reality but a very slight and fragmentary history of the contests between Christianity and heathenism, of the failures and successes of the forgotten army of missionaries who went out to convert the Teutonic races. And we are without that which alone could give full meaning to such accounts as we possess, a picture of the creed on which Christianity made war.

Were it only possible to recover in their entirety the beliefs of our heathen forefathers! But this is for ever impossible. We must content ourselves with stray glimpses of it; some (very slight ones) in the pages of classical writers; some others recovered from the recorded creed of one branch of the Teutonic nation in a later age. This creed, though it is so much later in date, must preserve some elements of great antiquity. In addition we know, and it is a great thing to know, the character of the land in which the ancient Germans lived; and we know something of the life they lived there in ancient days, before the spirit of movement had begun to breathe through all the German races, and to inaugurate that epoch of Wandering which preluded the fall of Rome.

At the present day if we wish to find a country, a district, wrapped round in a garment of myth; if we wish to see landscapes, churches, old manor-houses, an ancient tree, a solitary mere, touched and gilded by that Aberglaube which is, as Goethe says, the poetry of life, we shall not turn to the busy changing inhabitants of the neighbouring town, who have heard and forgotten a hundred tales of wonder; but to the people of the nearest villages, who have lived in them from father to son, who have treasured up with much slower apprehension, but far more faithful memories, the mythology of the place, until it has grown into their lives and formed ‘eine Kette/ Der tiefsten Wirkung.’

For a like reason it cannot have been in the power either of the Germans of the early Wanderings, or of those northern pirates, part of whose history is our special concern here, to have invented the essential beliefs of Teutonism. They were, in truth, things incapable of invention by anyone, as we understand that word; but beliefs which grew up by a natural process out of the ancestral life of the Teutons and all its surroundings.

However much the standpoint of those who looked from outside into the heathen lands may have differed from the standpoint of the inhabitants, the character of the countries themselves remained the same for both. It was accident and the popular superstition of the Gauls which converted Caledonia into a land of ghosts. But for all that Caledonia was then what it still is, stern and wild, girt by the melancholy ocean, and for all that men could know in those days, at the outer extremity of the whole world. So with Germany — or the Germanies, including the Scandinavian lands — Tacitus’s description, ‘dank and gloomy,’ applied to them all. His picture of the Germans dwelling apart ‘by stream, or grove, or plot of open ground,’ might serve best for the Germans near the Rhine or in the broken country eastward as far as the Thuringian forest and the Harz. But the vast unfruitful plains of North Germany compelled men to live apart for the sake of sustenance. There was less of choice here, but more of necessity.

All these lands must have been densely wooded. The entire country known to the Romans certainly was so. In the centre and south lay the boundless Hercynian forest, which stretched beyond the regions where even stray merchants and travellers had penetrated. It threw out a wing northward to include the Teutoberger forest, Varus’s fatal wood, the Thuringian forest, and the Cheruscan Harz (Mons Melibaecus), a wing southwest to take in the present Black Forest, the Silva Marciana of Roman days. Without doubt the plains immediately to the south of the Baltic were not less thickly overshadowed by primeval woods. The Cimbric Chersonese was densely covered. Centuries later the coasts alone of the Scandinavian countries were inhabited or tilled. Munch[43] draws a fine picture of the Scandinavian peninsula in prehistoric days, submerged under its thick black forests as under some huge black sea, out of which the bare hill-tops rose like islands, and on these hill-tops the nomadic Finns, or Lapps, the only inhabitants of the interior in those times, pastured, as the Lapps of the north do today, their cattle and reindeer. Such is his picture, needing modification, perhaps, in the last touch,[44] but none in its essential features. The early Norse sagas tell us of this or that hero who penetrated into the peninsula and created for himself, as it were, a new country, a new world, by felling a clearing in the primeval forest. Such an one was Anleifr Tretelgja, Olaf Tree-feller, who is spoken of in the Ynglinga.[45] He is half mythical; but he or his antitype must have lived ages after Tacitus wrote what he wrote of the forests of Germany.

We know, too, something of the way of life among these ancient Germans. They lived apart; yet their scattered houses formed a group which we in these days should call a village. Yet we must not picture to ourselves the English village, with its two rows of houses close side by side and ‘dressed,’ like two ranks of soldiers facing inwards, on the long village street. Even today in Germany you may find an arrangement far more primitive than this — houses scattered in so far that they face all ways, and the high-road loses itself among the multiplicity of paths between them.[46] In Sweden and Norway, wherever there is room enough, we see something resembling much more the primitive village of the Teutons, houses dotted about far apart over a considerable plain. Today this area is generally a clearing. But forest villages are still to be found. In these one house can often see none of its neighbours; each one has its own small patch of cultivated ground.

Among the various households of the village the land was distributed in such a manner that we may divide its portions into three — the allotment, the farm, and the common. Some people will have it that the principles of land tenure too resolved themselves into three — private, communal, and common: meaning by communal land that held by the community as a whole, and not in private ownership, and redistributed each year, or at stated times, by authority of the village council — council of eldermen, aldermen, or whatever it might be called. This theory of the farm land held as communal land is at the least doubtful.[47] But what is not doubtful is that beside the private allotment belonging to each house or household, beside the portion of farm-land which was held by each household but not held under quite so ‘good’ a title, there was the large district of common, or rough pasture, as it was sometimes called, in which no individual rights existed. In countries where the squirrel could travel for leagues without touching the ground, the common of the village must have been merely that portion of the forest over which the community claimed as a body settlers’ rights. The nearer portions of the forest were no doubt used by the villagers for feeding their cattle and swine.

But there was beyond them a more desolate tract which served to separate the village from its neighbours.[48] And when a number of villages were inhabited by members of the same tribe, a whole group of them, forming what the Latin writers called a pagus, and the Germans themselves called a Gau, was divided from the neighbouring Gau by a still wider and more impenetrable belt of forest. For the Gau was the tribe, the embryo state; and Caesar tells us that it was a point of honour with each German state to have as wide a tract of uncultivated land as possible between itself and its next neighbours.[49]

This surrounding belt of wood, this gloomy and waste region, in the near part of which the ancient German villagers tethered their cattle or herded their pigs, and in the farther recesses hunted wild game, had a special name in the social economy of the Teutons. It was called the Mark. As each village had its own mark, so had, in a wider sense, each country or nation. When the tiny embryos of commonwealths, the Gaus expanded into states, the marks, too, grew in importance, and became great territorial divisions, till out of them new countries were in their turn made; such was our Mercia (Myrena); such the marches between England and Wales; Denmark, the Danes’ mark (the south of Jutland originally); La Marque, which afterwards separated that country from Germany and the Low Countries; the Wendish Mark or Mark of Brandenburg, which divided Germany from the Slavonic lands. The guardians of the mark were turned into marquises, marchios, markgrafs. At the beginning these guardians were only the chief warriors of the tribe; they had often (we may believe) their home in the waste, and stood there as watchmen between the village and the rest of the world, so that none might come to the village if they came to do it harm. These were the warriors of the tribe par excellence, and in some degree they constituted a class apart.

But let us remember that the word Mark, which we think of as the boundary between two possibly hostile states, has etymologically, and therefore had originally, no other meaning than forest.[50]

We can best understand the incidents of warfare waged by more civilized peoples against the Germans of Germany, the incidents of the campaigns of Drusus and Tiberius, of Marcus Aurelius, of Gratian or Julian, or, again, of Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons, if we remember that there must have been a distinction between the ordinary villagers, the more peaceful folk who cultivated the clearings near at hand, and the men of the mark, the warriors who dwelt in the surrounding forest, who when they were not engaged in war were probably hunters merely. There would be a certain lurking suspicion or latent antagonism between the village householder and the mark warrior, analogous to the antagonism which existed between the Franklin and the Thane at a later day. No doubt from the markmen came the band of Gesellen — Comites the Latin writers call them — who attached themselves to the person of the king or general, and shared his fortunes. If the leader should desire to reward these followers of his by any grant of land (though such reward was exceptional[51]), that gift must have come from the surrounding forest; it could not be carved out of the village community itself.[52] Thus might arise a certain aloofness from civil village life on the part of the Gesellen, the prototypes of the Thanes. They were, it may be, to a great extent unmarried men; they had given few pledges to fortune; they had not (generally) acres to be trampled upon, fruit-trees to be cut down, graneries to be burned. The villagers might, if they chose, give in to the conqueror. But the prince and his comrades had escaped, had hidden themselves in deep woods and morasses, and would return and ravage the enemies’ country again next year. This is the history of most of the operations against the Germans, notably of those of Charles the Great against the Saxons and against Widukind.

The mark or forest which formed a sort of neutral territory between two villages or two Gaue would serve as the meeting-point between them; for the same reason that during the Middle Ages meetings of rival powers were constantly held upon an island or on a boat in the middle of a stream, as in the case of the island at Runnymead for one example, or, for another, that earliest of treaties made between Romans and Teutons, the treaty signed by Athanaric the Visigoth and the Emperor Valens, where the contracting parties met in a boat upon the Danube;[53] or again on the same principle whereby a duel between Norsemen always took place upon an island, a fact which earned for the duel the name of holmgang. What an island was in the midst of a boundary river, such would an open glade be in the midst of the boundary mark. At the meetings which took place therein no doubt the sanctions of religion were called into request, and the glade in the forest, or the grove close beside it, a place not often visited, came to be a sacred place.

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The Germans are described as building no fanes, making no images for worship, but in their forest recesses calling upon the Unseen Presence (secretum illud), which they honoured by the name of various gods (or by various names).[54] The word for grove is in many Teutonic languages a convertible word with temple:[55] this fact proves, better than a thousand examples, how entirely the religion of the Germans was bound up with their forest life. Grimm says: ‘Individual gods may have had their dwellings on mountain-tops or in rocky caverns, but the universal worship of the people found its home in the grove.’

From a writer of the eleventh century we have a precious-fragment of ancient belief — the description of a sacred grove in Sweden while Sweden was still heathen. This grove was at the most sacred spot in all the Scandinavian peninsula, Upsala. which has inherited (one might say) its bishopric and university of today from the sacred grove of heathendom. ‘Every ninth year,’ says our authority (Adam of Bremen), ‘a festival is celebrated at this place by all the provinces of Sweden; and from taking some part in it none is exempt. King and people alike must send gifts; and even those who have embraced Christianity are not allowed to buy themselves free from attendance. The manner of the sacrifice is this: nine of each kind of living thing is offered, and by their blood the gods are wont to be appeased. The bodies are hung in the grove which surrounds the temple.’ So that the Swedes did build temples at this date. But our author tells us further: ‘The grove itself is thought so sacred that single trees in it are accounted a kind of gods, to the extent of receiving sacrifices of victims. There hang the bodies of dogs and ...

Table of contents

• Heathendom
• The Creed of Heathen Germany
• Christendom
• The First Contests
• Character of the Vikings
• The Vikings in Ireland
• Lewis the Pious: The Conquests of Christianity
• Civil War
• Raids in the Frankish Empire, A.D. 834-45
• Defences Broken Down, A.D. 846-58
• Decay and Redintegration A.D. 859-66
• The Great Army
• Pause in the Viking Raids
• Charles the Fat, and the Invasion of Germany
• The Siege of Paris
• The Creed of Christendom
• Chronological Table
• Endnotes