Vikings without the horns on their helmets

Back when I was young (dinosaurs had only just stopped roaming the Earth….), it was all fairly simple.  The Vikings were a Bad Thing, violent pagan thugs who came out of the north to wreak havoc on peaceable folk all the way from County Cork to Tuscany and every coastal settlement in between.   The specialised in rape, pillage and disembowelling people in gruesome ways.    And they had horns on their helmets- that was axiomatic.  

Not everything about them was utterly reprehensible.  It was admitted that they were supreme sailors who got as far as North America (perhaps more a point in their favour in England than, say, in France) and fearsome warriors.   Their mythology was vivid and memorable (even if they weren’t directly responsible for Wagner’s Ring Cycle).  They created some very fine literature with their sagas, even if these were long on violence and feuding and dark pagan reminiscences.  They had a sturdy egalitarian streak- the Isle of Man called its parliament after a Viking popular assembly and Icelanders were for ever going on about how they had the longest running democracy in Europe (the Danes, by contrast, were apt to claim that their royal family descended in unbroken line from rulers of the Viking age).  On the whole, though, they were people you didn’t want as neighbours- at least not until they’d been tamed by Christianity and the civilising influences associated with an adoption of wider Christian/feudal cultural values.

Of course I’m writing from an Anglophone perspective here (though views in France and Italy seem to have been pretty similar; German approaches were more complex for a number of historically contingent reasons).  Obviously Scandinavians didn’t see them in quite the same way- nor did people in places where descent from the Vikings was a major element in local identity, as the Guizer Jarls and blazing longships of Shetland’s annual Up Helly A demonstrated.   On the other hand, I don’t suppose the decision by the Waffen SS to call their unit for Scandinavian volunteers “Wiking” and the extensive use of Viking imagery (horned helmets and all) to recruit collaborators for the Third Reich did their image even in Norway or Denmark much good post 1945.

By the time I was at university it was clear that the Vikings were getting a major image makeover.  The big name on this rehabilitation process in the English speaking world was a historian called Peter Sawyer (I met him once; a thoroughly charming man who wouldn’t have blood-eagled a goose).  I suspect the fact that he was married to a Swedish archaeologist may have given him a different perspective- and indeed the new interpretations drew heavily on archaeological evidence.   Out went the rape and pillage, in came a world of wide ranging trade links, peaceful peasant settlement of conveniently empty lands round the North Atlantic rim and deep into Russia.   Instead of being culture destroyers, they were culture bringers, the makers of states like the Kievan Rus, intermediaries who linked western Europe, Byzantium and the Islamic world- symbolised by the piles of dirhams from the Caliphate dug up in trading sites in Sothern Sweden alongside material from England or the Frankish empire and silk from Iran found in a dig in Dublin.   Interestingly there was something of a geographical reorientation here, with more emphasis on those Vikings who went east (reflecting a greater degree of Swedish input into the picture?).   At times the results of this rehabilitation could be downright bizarre, as when I encountered a book which, to judge from the blurb, sought to argue that the Vikings were in fact the first Europeans and the spiritual ancestors of the modern European Union (I wasn’t inspired to purchase the book so I don’t know if the content was quite as off the wall as this suggests).  In fairness, this was to go well beyond anything that the Sawyers and or “serious” academics influenced by their approach would ever have claimed, but the general tone was that the Vikings were decent sorts at heart,  sometimes a bit rowdy after a few beers but basically amiable types- a bit like Danish or Swedish football supporters, in fact (even though these latter continued to wear plastic horned helmets despite conclusive proof that these were a myth inspired by early productions of  the aforementioned Ring Cycle).

Inevitably there’s been a bit of a swing back in more recent years- you can’t seriously write violence and pillage out of the Viking story altogether.   One serious scholar even advanced the argument that the Viking raids in the west targeted monasteries and other Christian cult sites not just because they tended to be repositories of valuable loot but as a conscious act of pagan resistance to Christianisation and Frankish expansionism.   She didn’t find much support but helped to put violence very much back into the picture.   More sophisticated approaches noted that trade and raiding were not actually mutually exclusive.   Traders were sometimes “encouraged” to shift markets from one place to another by pretty heavy handed means.   It was noted that disruptions on the trade routes towards Byzantium and the Caliphate around 990 seemed to coincide with a surge in raiding activity and the extortion of ever larger sums of Danegeld in England (see some of the silver pennies extorted from English taxpayers below).

Commerce and war intertwined in complex ways.  Trade negotiations could easily turn violent; it may be significant that the first recorded victim of a Viking raid in England was the royal customs man at Portland in Dorset.   Viking raiding parties and, later on, the bigger Viking “armies”, would open markets to sell their loot almost in parallel with grabbing it.   Above all, one of the biggest lines of “peaceful commerce” that Scandinavian merchants engaged in was slave trading (a point easily lost sight of as, give or take the shackles which do indeed turn up in the archaeology, slave markets and the slaves sold in them don’t necessarily leave a lot of unequivocal material traces behind).    It hardly needs pointing out that this is an inherently violent trade, whose “stocks” would normally be people removed from their homes at swordpoint.   Similar stories blending commerce and violence can be told of the eastern lands down the Dneipr and Volga and Don to the Black and Caspian Seas.

Even the sturdy peasant farmers of the English Danelaw or Normandy must have got their land by displacing- or exploiting- previous occupants.   Iceland and Greenland were unusual in being more or less uninhabited (bar a few possible Irish monks- the Dorset people of the Arctic hadn’t pushed far enough south in Greenland to be in occupation when the Vikings turned up).   There’s an ongoing debate in Orkney and Shetland about what exactly happened to the pre-existing Pictish populations of the islands.   The “Orkneyinga Saga” is written as if the islands were uninhabited when the first Scandinavians arrived and one, rather convenient, view is that this may actually have been the case (again bar a few Irish monks) due to the effects of war or disease.   The alternatives are either that the locals reinvented themselves as Vikings so comprehensively that not a single indisputably Celtic place name survives (unlike the Hebrides where Vikings were talking Gaelic within a few generations)- not ideal for a population which self-identifies very much in Scandinavian terms and has been increasingly inclined to do so since Scottish devolution- or that they were comprehensively exterminated- again, not a comfortable thought.  For what it’s worth, genetic analysis shows that the modern Orkney and Shetland populations have an exceptionally high level of Scandinavian ancestry, mostly traceable to a limited area in west Norway.   It’s even higher than equivalent data for Iceland, where analysis strongly suggests an original settler population made up of mostly Scandinavian males and mostly Celtic women- slaves and concubines raided from Ireland and the west of Scotland, presumably.   One inference is that the first Norse Orcadians brought their wives and families with them and didn’t intermarry with locals to any major extent (suggesting there weren’t many of them?); another is that the supposedly ultra-Viking world of Iceland was inhabited by people with as many ancestors from Ireland as from Norway.   The overall result is a rather blurred and complex; no doubt intellectually satisfying to academics but a bit confusing.

This complexity is all too clearly reflected in the Viking exhibition currently on at the British Museum and due to move on to Denmark and Germany.   Several reviewers have complained that, although it’s full of interesting items, it seems a bit light on a clear organising structure; having seen it, I’m inclined to agree. Despite its sub-title "Life and Legend", it's also rather light on the legendary side of things.  There’s a sense in the accompanying book (as seems to be the way of the material produced with British Museum shows, this is both more and less than an exhibition catalogue- strong on wider interpretation and context but not covering every object in the exhibition) that the people behind the exhibition would rather like to junk the V-word altogether.   It’s not agreed what it means- there are several possible etymologies but which one you go for depends on the view you take on the violent thug versus peaceable trader dichotomy.   It’s reasonably certain that “viking” is really a verb in origin- one goes viking-ing.  But what you do in this process is a lot less clear and it’s possible to create derivations which point either to raiding or trading.   The time frame is equally messy, particularly at the end.   Conventionally the rise of more centralised kingdoms in Norway and Denmark and, rather later, Sweden, have been seen as the end of the true Viking era.  On that basis, though, figures like Knut (the English Canute, of waves fame) or Harald Hardrada (or indeed Thorfinn the Mighty, Earl of Orkney) aren’t Vikings- which feels absurd.   The exhibition officially fizzles the Viking era out in 1066, but that’s very Anglocentric and not consistently applied.  Indeed if you took it seriously some of the most charismatic items in the show (the Lewis Chessmen, the wonderful image of a Viking fleet scratched on a piece of wood dug up in Bergen in Norway) would not be there.  In Scotland we were taught to date the end of the Viking era to 1264 and the failure of Haakon IV’s attempt to reassert Norwegian control over the Western Isles (I can’t help interpreting the Bergen find as showing this fleet about to set off southwards…).   The problem is that there isn’t a satisfactory alternative term- and I can’t imagine the British Museum selling out tickets for a show billed as dealing with the later Scandinavian Iron Age.

The exhibition does certainly have a lot to say about trading links- dirhams in Scandinavian hordes and all the other material evidence for wide ranging trade links make their expected appearance.    Indeed there’s a lot of trade- related material which hasn’t been seen in the west before, either because it hadn’t been dug up the last time there was a major Viking exhibition in London back in the early 1980’s or because it was sitting in the vaults of museums in the then-Soviet Union as it contradicted the state line which tried to minimise the Scandinavian origins of the Kievan Rus in favour of Slavic lineages.  I suspect that this material may now disappear back into the vaults when it gets home, at least in Putin’s increasingly nationalist and xenophobic Russia where Scandinavian roots for the first organised “Russian” state are unlikely to be welcome; Ukrainian nationalists might possibly be a bit more receptive to a lineage which anchored the first organised “Ukrainian” state in the west.   Appropriate to the favoured academic discourse of our times, there is  quite a lot about cultural borrowings and the openness of the Vikings to adopting influences from elsewhere- a runic title deed written on birch bark, the preferred writing material in the Slav lands, Viking merchants using Islamic measures, themselves derived from the Roman ounce, the brooches adopted from Irish and Pictish sources and worn as status markers by men as well as women (some so massive that their pins almost look like an attempt to get round “no weapons allowed in this house” rules in Viking pubs), 

the top quality sword blades imported from the lower Rhineland and fitted out to Viking tastes in the way of hilts and decoration (it was faintly gratifying to find that trade mark piracy was a problem in the ninth century; many of the “Ulfberht”-labelled blades found in Viking burials turn out to be low grade imitations). 

  Some of the “cultural hybridity” looks plausible enough- the brooch dug up at Hunterston in Ayrshire with an inscription in runes identifying someone with a very Gaelic name (Maelbrigda) as the owner (the runes are on the other, less decorated, side, stylistic borrowings to and fro between peoples along the Baltic coast.

Sometimes it’s rather less convincing and looks like an attempt to remake Vikings in a 21^st century image; one contribution to the exhibition book suggested that female weapons burials might actually be the graves of female warriors after all.   “The Vikings- Equal Opportunity Plunderers”?  

The violent side is there too.  There are lots of swords and axe heads and shield bosses on show.   One of the more gruesome exhibits reconstructs a recently excavated grave pit from near Weymouth in which the bodies of some fifty adult males had been thrown, with their severed heads piled up to one side.   Analysis of their teeth shows they were of Scandinavian origin; the assumption is that this is a raiding band which came to a messy end at the hands of the locals.   An Irish shrine reliquary has a runic inscription scratched on it- the guess is that this is a piece of loot given as a present to a wife or girlfriend  (“ It’s so cute and just the right size for my earring collection; it’ll look great once I’ve washed the blood off”).   The Lewis Chess set includes a berserker chewing on his shield rim. 

This is perhaps a reminder that men (and women?) who went off “Viking-ing” may have had a complex relationship with wider Scandinavian society for all the prestige attached to courage and military skills in that culture.   Even at the height of the raiding age in the ninth century the majority of Scandinavians were subsistence farmers.   It’s not entirely clear how far going off for a raid or two was part of the normal growing up experience for all young men of a certain economic status- a violent kind of gap year before one settled down to life on the farm- or whether those who sailed off to plunder down the Atlantic coasts formed an identifiable, even somewhat marginal, sub-culture within Scandinavian society.  Perhaps both situations applied, with raiding crews made up of a hard core of “professionals” supplemented by a changing cast of lads doing it for a year or two, men temporarily at a loose end from more legitimate trading enterprises etc- that, after all, is how 17^th and 18^th century privateer ships assembled their crews, including men who under other circumstances would have worked on outright pirate vessels.   There is some evidence that these “hard core” Vikings were identifiable by their dress (there are certain types of knee buckle designed to pull in very wide trousers at the knee- an extravagant use of cloth which has been associated with the ostentatious display associated with successful raiders) and even by body markings.  Obviously the tattoos which adorned their bodies are long gone, as indeed is the make up which (according to puzzled Arab commentators) both genders made use of.   One rather strange custom does however leave archaeological traces- tooth filing.  A skull with filed teeth is in the show- the filing taking the form of a series of parallel grooves filed at the top of the teeth.  It sounds (and looks) a pretty gruesome process.   The grooves were filled with coloured material to give a suitably ferocious look.   It’s suggested that the nickname of the early Danish king known as Harald Bluetooth reflects this sort of display rather than defective dental hygiene.  The exhibition book explicitly makes analogies with groups like Hell’s Angels- though whether the cultural baggage which that analogy carries today applies to ninth century Scandinavian is another matter, as indeed is the question of whether attitudes shifted over time.

The Lewis berserker, part of a chess set which includes a bishop and therefore produced in a Christian society, also raises issues about Viking spirituality which the exhibition tries to tackle. 

It’s now a commonplace to point out that the “conversion” to Christianity which occurred over time was a long and tortuous affair with a lot of syncretism in which individual Vikings took the Christian God into their belief systems alongside their local deities- nicely symbolised by a casting mould which could turn out crosses and Thor hammers at the same time (interestingly in a ratio of two to one in favour of the former)..   Just who these “local deities” were is another matter.   There now seems to be a lot less confidence that the “traditional” view of the “Norse Gods” I grew up with reflects what real live pagan Vikings believed.  After all, many of the core texts articulating this model were written down by Christian Icelanders a couple of centuries or more after Iceland voted to adopt Christianity.  Just how Odinn and Thor and all the rest of the inhabitants of Asgard fitted together is subject to considerable debate.  There may have been considerable local variation- and (a point which I don’t think ever gets enough consideration) considerable variation over time as a direct result of interactions with the Christian world over the course of several hundred years.   At a very simple level, I can’t help wondering whether wearing a Thor hammer was a cultural response to the cross-wearing of the Christian world and something which only became necessary when there were enough Christians around to make a visible declaration of allegiance meaningful.   There’s enough evidence from other parts of the world in more recent times of how the presence of Christian (and indeed Muslim) holy men can have major impacts on how other religions structure themselves (there are for instance scholars who argue that modern  Hinduism is very largely the result of attempts by educated Brahmin elites from the late eighteenth century onwards to structure an amorphous mass of intensely local belief systems and customs into something coherent enough to resist Christian and Muslim pressures).   Thinking you needed somewhere like Asgard for the gods to live in a (relatively) neatly organised society with clear divisions of labour between them might well have been a reaction to Christian preaching, an attempt to impose a meaningful structure on “the old ways”.  What wearing a Thor hammer meant to the wearer in 1050 might have been very different from what it did a hundred years earlier.

The intellectual fashion now seems to favour a pre-Christian religious world which was a lot more disparate, localist and fluid, with sprits present everywhere in all manner of potential relationships with humans.  The Valkyries are now viewed as simply one group of such figures, one which got recognition by later writers. 

Add in belief in shape shifting into various animal forms and forms of communication with the dead and you find yourself waiting for the first sighting of “shamanism” as part of the interpretative material.   To their credit the people organising this part of the exhibition are very cautious about employing this grossly overused term, which has become a lazy shorthand for all kinds of very different belief patterns and practices used by very different societies from Siberia to Amazonia (whether some of those whose work they are drawing on have been as methodologically scrupulous is less clear; the modern “reconstruction” of a shrine whose photograph is in the show has a “Native American” look in line with current fashion).   There are certainly individual burials which hint at special people with special powers- the grave goods of a female burial form Fyrkat in Denmark include white face paint and hallucinogenic/poisonous herbs like henbane alongside more enigmatic items (amulets, a wand, a box full of owl pellets and animal bones) which may have some ritual functions.  Her good also include bowls which may have come from Central Asia- a link back to the trade connections of the Viking world.

In the end you can’t credibly do a Viking show without ships.  They are woven through the culture- in jewellery and in children’s toys.  They were as lavishly decorated as the people themselves, as the “weather vane” below shows.  It’s only appropriate that the undoubted star of the show is the longship whose remains dominate the latter part of the exhibition.   Only a quarter of the timbers actually survive but, when placed in a suitable framework, they are massively impressive.  The ship was dug up near Roskilde in Denmark (ironically during building works to expand a museum of Viking ships- the waters round Roskilde are full of ships, some of them sunk as blockships to control the channel leading to the port) and it’s the biggest Viking ship ever found (nearly 38 meters long).   Its sheer scale suggests it was a royal ship, though it’s less clear which king might have owned it as the wood which it is made of was cut in Oslofjord around 1025, when that area was the focus of intensive fighting between Knut of Denmark and Olaf Haraldsson (later remembered as St Olaf) of Norway.   Either might have had it built.   And it’s very much a war vessel.   Even without horns on their helmets you can’t ever convincingly take the sword out of the Northman’s hand for long.