A History from Beginning to End

Book #1 – The Beginning of the Viking Age

Book #2 – The Peak of the Viking Age

Book #3 – The End of the Viking Age

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Book #1

The Beginning of the Viking Age

Chapter One

The Year of Rapine and Slaughter

The Vikings may be the most influential, most misunderstood people of the Middle Ages. They’re commonly regarded as the nautical terrorists of their time: a plague of men from the North who sailed in their longships to wreak destruction and fear upon the populations they victimized. But how does that mesh with the Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians who built a trading empire that did business with the merchants who were eager to exchange the furs and amber of the Vikings for silver coins and spices? The Vikings are so trapped by a false myth of their rapacious activities that their feats of commerce and exploration are often ignored or, even worse, unknown. Who were these violent, talented, fearless men who for three centuries were both the scourge of Europe and its commercial trailblazers?

The Viking Age is generally considered to be the era from the 790s, when the raids first began, until 1066 when William of Normandy conquered the island of Britain. Actually, because the tribes who traveled across the Continent in the early Middle Ages were hardly strangers to one another, in some ways the Viking relocation was a sort of homecoming. In the early 11th century, before William the Conqueror came on the scene, the throne of England was occupied by a Viking ruler. By then, the blood had intermingled somewhat; the Normans counted Vikings among their ancestors and the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, Harold Godwinson, came from a Danish lineage. The Vikings hailed from Denmark, Norway and Sweden, but the Vikings were not just Scandinavian.

Nor did they only make their presence known in Europe; there is archeological evidence that they explored Greenland, Iceland, and Newfoundland; that they traded in Novgorod and Kiev, and that they reached Baghdad, which was the center of the Islamic Empire. Their mobility and the extent of what was a trading empire demonstrate that the violent marauders who terrorized Europe were more complicated than we’d expect of the bloodthirsty raiders who held Europe at their mercy for several hundred years.

But the entire Western world was embroiled in change as the Roman Empire weakened then fell, and local lands that were no longer included in the imperial boundaries were left to fend for themselves. Rome was gone, the legions left, but the tribes in Europe were not without resources. The presence of Rome had been instructive; now they needed to rely on their own heritage to survive. As many kings replaced single emperors and married into the remnants of the local Roman nobility, some of the traditions of the empire had been retained, but with innovations from the barbarians which would prove to be a factor in a later millennium. There was more involvement in decision-making on the part of the invaders, who did not have any notions of the divine right of the ruler.

Kingship was a gritty, not an exalted, business of leadership. An effective king led by example, not ancestry, and a powerful king would leave his realm to his heirs but maintaining it was up to them, not tradition. The Vikings were led by men who were first among equals, and their invasions were a bloody proof that this primitive democracy was successful. Just as it’s impossible to envision a Europe without the lasting legacy of the Romans, so is it inconceivable to imagine England, Scotland, France, Russia, and other lands had the Vikings not left their mark.

It’s time to take a fresh look at the men from the North who transformed Europe.

After the Romans

As Europe labored to recreate itself in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, the regions which had been included within the vast boundaries of Rome were left to their own devices. The period between the fall of Rome in 476 and the Renaissance to come later was known as the Dark Ages for a reason, although it’s considered more politically correct to refer to that era in a less judgmental fashion as the Middle Ages, or the Medieval Era. It’s easy to identify the culprits who contributed to the darkness of the ages: warfare was a constant source of upheaval; famine an ever-present threat; disease rife in a time when life was truly, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Soon to be added to those deadly ingredients would be the invasions from the men of the North, who were not only violent and relentless but also, to add heathen insult to devout injury, pagan.

The void left by the absence of Rome was felt keenly in lands that had formerly known order. Although religion was becoming unified and England was gradually Christianized during the seventh century, the kingdoms of Europe were not as we recognize them today. Not only was England nowhere near being Great Britain, but it wasn’t even England yet. That small island, so often invaded, gave no evidence that one day an adjective would be attached to its name.

Deprived of Roman identity, Europe found that Christianity was destined to become the new brand. As Christianity had begun to grow in influence and in numbers, the plural gods became one single deity. The Christian religion, which was to become a vital force in rough-hewn lands where survival was at the mercy of the weather, the harvest, and by implication, divine wrath, was poised to become a sanctuary for people who, with little control over their lives, could at least find comfort in the clergy who provided solace and care.

Eventually, religious communities would also become centers of learning in their regions, as Christianity replaced spiritually what Rome had been politically and militarily. By the eighth century, Christianity had become so pervasive in England that churches saw no reason or need to be defended: who would dare to harm the property which was dedicated to God? Jesus the Christ spoke of peace, of turning the other cheek, of forgiving one’s enemies. The church was the higher power, renowned for its spiritual influence, allied to the political forces that ruled the region. It did not occur to these earnest priests and followers of religious rule then that not everyone regarded the Christian place of worship as a sacrosanct.

In truth, even as Christianity spread after the Roman Empire under Constantine adopted the faith of its own, the far reaches of the region converted gradually from their local gods. The peoples who traveled across the Continent in search of land often had their own gods and rites of worship. When they roamed from their borders, they brought their religions with them.

The Anglo-Saxons who occupied England in the eighth century had not originated there. According to Bede, the first Anglo-Saxons settled in England around 449. Bede, known as the Venerable, was writing in 731, but the information in his writings is confirmed by the findings of archeologists. The ethnic group known collectively as the Anglo-Saxons was known individually as the Jutes, who came from the Jutland Peninsula; likewise, the Angles and the Saxons were both Germanic tribes.

But the Saxons had been a problem for the Romans as early as the third century; their attacks along the coast forced the Romans to construct forts for protection; the area where the Saxons attacked was known as the Saxon Shore. But when the Romans left Britain in 410, the Britons were left to their own means for defense. According to the accounts of Gildas, a monk writing in the sixth century, Saxon mercenaries were paid by the Britons to fight the Pict raiders and pirates from northern Scotland. Saxon kings such as Hengest, Aelle, and Cerdic become the rulers of respectively, Kent, Sussex, and Wessex. But welcoming a foreign people can lead to dangerous complications. The Saxons went from being hired mercenaries to being a threat to the Britons. It’s at this time that history records the story of the leader and warrior who would become famous as the legendary King Arthur. In truth, there are historical references to Arthur, who fought Cerdic in 519 or 520; the tales were sung by famed bards Aneirin and Teliesin, which would be the equivalent today of having reporters on the scene.

Journalism didn’t exist, but the ballads and tales sung by the bards were histories and entertainment in one hybrid rendition. In the late Middle Ages, the legends would be romanticized to suit the chivalric code of the times, but Arthur’s roots are in the hardscrabble, rough-and-tumble realm of the Dark Ages, long before the Viking longships were spotted.

What we do know is that as the centuries passed, the Saxons settled to become the dominant ethnic group of the island. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms consisted of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Wessex. The small kingdoms would not begin to be united until the ninth century, when Alfred the Great, responding to the threat of the Vikings, would lead Wessex to play a dominant role in the island’s future. Later, the Anglo-Saxons would meet a Norman master named William the Conqueror and the unification of England would be achieved, albeit not in a way that would win the favor of the Anglo-Saxons. Playing an intricate role in the evolution of the nation known as Britain, the Vikings who came to conquer would eventually come to stay.

The Vikings are Coming!

In the year 789, three Viking ships landed on the shore of the kingdom of Wessex. They weren’t intent on being good neighbors; when the local reeve went to greet them, he was killed. Since the reeve was appointed by the local lord and entrusted with the management of the estate, his position was one of importance in the social structure. The event made the local news, that is, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, meriting a brief mention: “These were the first ships of the Danish men that sought the land of the English nation.” But those raids were destined to command much more attention before long.

The seers saw the approach of doom as the year 793 dawned. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, people in Northumbria started the New Year with a sense of terror which was about to be justified. Any time that there are sightings of sheets of light in the air and dragons flying across the firmament, followed by famine, it’s clear that the New Year is up to no good. Even before the first frightening prow of a longship showed up on shore, the major Viking invasion was preceded by enough bad omens to warn the people of the island of Britain that wrath of apocalyptic proportions was about to be unleashed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, after listing the ominous portents, then noted, “These tremendous tokens were soon followed by a great famine and not long after, on the sixth day before the ides of Ianr in the same year, the harrowing inroads of heathen men made lamentable havoc in the church of God in Holy Island by rapine and slaughter.”

Lindisfarne

As the centuries passed and Roman rule became only a memory, the church was the unifying, stabilizing force in the land. Paganism became the exception rather than the rule and the growth of the monastic movement created centers where the Christian faith was integrated into the local community. The monastery of Lindisfarne had been established on a tidal island off England’s northeastern coast. It was founded in 635 by Aidan (later to become Saint Aidan) from Iona, who, along with his monks and support from King Oswald, worked as missionaries among the Northumbrian English, a pagan community.

Christianity was not unknown to the British Isles; it had first appeared during the time of the Romans and according to early church father Tertullian, Christianity was founded in Britain in the third century. But after Rome fell, the pagan English, whose ancestral roots were German, spread into the region and Christianity faded. The Irish had been converted by St. Patrick and that conversion was more lasting. Eager to convert their heathen neighbors, the Irish took their faith and missionary zeal to the south with the goal of evangelizing the English. Columba, originally from Donegal, Ireland, had set up a religious community in Iona; Aidan was sent to Northumbria to go and do likewise.

King Oswald gave the monks their choice of land for the monastery; Aidan chose a spot near the king’s palace. Rulers at that time may have been the dominant secular force but they typically functioned within the fabric of the religious order. The monasteries preached peace, but a king had to know how to fight. Although Oswald was a Christian, he was a king, which meant that it was unlikely that he would die in his bed. Kings in those days were evaluated according to their military skills. Nonetheless, Oswald, who had had to fight to take back the kingdom that had been his father’s, was recognized for his piety. He and Aidan were in accord that the Christian faith was to be spread among the Northumbrians. Evangelism was no easy task in those days; for one thing, language was a barrier because Aidan’s monks spoke Irish, not English. But the monks did not isolate themselves in their monastery; they went out among the people and their evangelism became successful through service rather than linguistics.

Lindisfarne thrived and became a light of the faith in the region, with an A-list of Christian personalities who would rise through the ranks. Aidan would be named a saint, as would his successor, Cuthbert. The first known school in the area was established at Lindisfarne; reading and writing were taught, along with Latin. Literacy was a dynamic concept capable of changing a population. That meant that books were, at that time, bold inventions. Aidan’s work on Lindisfarne transformed Northumbria and shortly after his death in 651, the religious authorities decided that Northumbria would no longer depend on Ireland for spiritual leadership. The Irish monks returned to Iona and a man named Cuthbert became the prior of Lindisfarne.

Cuthbert was effective in his role but after ten years as prior, he felt that God was calling him to be a hermit living a solitary life, the better to spiritually combat the forces of evil which seemed to have gained a foothold in the country. Religious leaders were very sensitive to the prevalence of evil and hermits were highly respected for their willingness to surrender their lives to God and solitude. Cuthbert lived as a hermit for ten years, but his reputation had not been forgotten, he was asked to become a bishop.

He didn’t last as long in that office, and when he died in 687, his body was buried on Lindisfarne. His grave became the site of healing miracles, which proved to the monks that Cuthbert was a saint. In order to promote Lindisfarne as a place where a saint reposed, the saint’s relics had to be present. It was estimated by the monks that, within 11 years, Cuthbert’s body would revert to its skeletal version, so that the bones could be elevated on the anniversary of his death. But when the coffin of Cuthbert was opened, what the monks saw was a complete body with no decomposition evident. Cuthbert was not just an ordinary saint; he was clearly a very great saint, blessed by God and intended to benefit his community with the power of his holiness.

Lindisfarne prospered as news of its saint spread. Pilgrims came to be healed. It’s believed that it was around this time that the illuminated manuscripts began to be produced. The Lindisfarne Gospels are among the world’s most well-known illuminated books. They began with 150 psalms and eventually went on to the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Lindisfarne had its saint’s relics, it had its illuminated manuscripts, it had wealth and fame. Life was good, or as good as it could be during a time known as the Dark Ages, which is popularly defined by the absence of light which characterized it. As the eighth century, taking place during the Dark Ages, was drawing to a close, life was about to get much harder, thanks to the Vikings.

Vikings didn’t initially come to scout out the neighborhood for a winter home. They came for trade and for plunder, whichever came first, and the monasteries of Christian territories were ripe for the taking. Lindisfarne, on the eastern coast near the border between England and Scotland, was the intended target of a fleet of Danish Vikings who had planned this surprise raid to catch the monks off guard before they could seek aid.

The Vikings were not geared for battle during these raids. Their longships were designed to arrive quickly and depart with equal speed, loaded down with the stolen wealth of the plundered community. If they landed and the people had had time to summon help from the community, the Vikings, believe it or not, would decide that discretion was the better part of valor and return to their ships. At this stage, their objective was not to linger, but simply to take what was worth the effort and make their getaway. They did, however, have some tactics to nullify resistance by the inhabitants. Upon coming ashore, they would steal the horses and use them so that they could move swiftly on the land.

The year 793 was not the first instance of a Viking invasion, but it is used as the starting point for the years to follow, when the raids would become as commonplace, expected, and dreaded as any of the natural phenomena which rendered the lives of the English in a perilous state. For religious believers who saw every manifestation of the Bible and life in literal term, the Vikings were imbued with the regalia of divine punishment and churches prayed to be spared from the Viking raids. Lindisfarne was doomed.

When the monk Simeon of Durham recorded the events, his descriptive words were harrowing: “the pagans from the northern region came with a naval force to Britain like stinging hornets and spread on all sides like fearful wolves, robbed, tore and slaughtered not only beasts of burden, sheep and oxen, but even priests and deacons, and companies of monks and nuns. And they came to Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, and there they miserably ravaged and pillaged everything; they trod the holy things under their polluted feet, they dug down the altars, and plundered all the treasures of the church. Some of the brethren they slew; some they carried off with them in chains; the greater number they stripped naked, insulted, and cast out of doors, and some they drowned in the sea.”

Monks and cattle fell to the Viking swords. Monks’ blood spattered the altar of the church, which was stripped of its sacred emblems and its wealth and ornaments. When the longships left, they were loaded down with gold, silver and jewels, as well as potential slaves from the younger monks and the boys who had not been killed. Monasteries made such profitable raiding sites because to the Christians of the Middle Ages, sin could be absolved by atoning with money or goods. The monasteries were the recipients of all that lucrative guilt and once the Vikings found out that gold was to be had, souls were of no consequence. If the monks desired to meet their Maker, the Vikings were willing to oblige.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was unfamiliar with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome but the remaining members of the community may have suffered from a medieval version of it. Traumatized by the attack, they carried the body of Cuthbert, his relics and whatever treasures remained from the island to the mainland. Fearful of another attack, the community moved to Chester-le-Street, an old Roman town. Then they moved further inland to Ripon, putting more distance between themselves and the next Viking raid. A single raid had the power to make them flee from the threat of a second. They would eventually settle at Durham but that destination was 100 years away. The loss of life and riches was catastrophic, but fortunately for posterity, the Vikings had no interest in The Lindisfarne Gospels or the coffin that contained the relics of St. Cuthbert. Those relics were safe and would eventually be kept in Durham Cathedral.

The Viking raid on Lindisfarne would cast a long shadow. In a March 8, 2013 interview on National Public Radio, Yale professor Anders Winroth discussed the Vikings and the effect of their introduction to the Europeans as a force to be reckoned with following the raid on Lindisfarne. “The 793 raid . . . was the first Viking attack that was written about, and it was a big shock to all of Europe. . . . We see the attack through the eyes of the victims, who spread the word that the Vikings were bloody and violent. In fact, they were violent, but no more than anyone else at the time. Compared to Charlemagne’s armies, the Vikings were amateurs.” As history would prove, the Vikings, if they were amateurs, were very effective.

Vignettes of the Viking Age: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

During the reign of Alfred the Great of Wessex, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was created. The Chronicle recorded the history of events affecting the lives of the Anglo-Saxons. Multiple copies of the original were distributed to the monasteries across England and it was up to the monks to do the updating. The monks had no idea that one day their work would be studied by historians intent on learning more about a pivotal period of time shrouded in mystery, bloodshed, and piety. Objective reporting was unheard of, and while the monks were able to record the happenings of their times, their writings were imbued with their faith and their understanding of God. That meant that bad times were proof that God was angry, and sin was ever present.

The monks were diligent in their updating; there’s evidence of updating going on in 1154. Although none of the originals is still in existence, nine manuscripts survive. The oldest existing manuscript was started near the end of Alfred the Great’s time on the throne; the most recent one records a fire at Peterborough Abbey in 1116. The events are recorded by year with the earliest dating from the year 60 BCE when Julius Caesar invaded Britain. Regarded as the single most important historical source for events in England from the time when the Romans left to the time after William the Conqueror became king, the manuscripts serve much as a local newspaper would, with a few allowances for the times in which they were written. They don’t follow the rules of modern journalism: they’re biased, one-sided; some events are omitted.

The Chronicle’s original purpose was to maintain the Easter tables, which were drawn up so that Christian clergy would be able to determine the schedule of feast days in the future. As time went on, the Chronicle ceased looking like a list and the notes telling about historical events, which had formerly occupied a short space, became more significant. When the Viking invasions began in the late 700s, history became prominent and the Chronicle was there to record the events. But it’s important to remember that the monks recording history were not reporters. One account relates that a raiding ship-army came from Norway, but “it is tedious to tell how it all happened.” Modern readers long for detail, but it’s important to be grateful for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as it is.

The news network of eighth-century Europe did not have access to social media or 24-hour news, but that didn’t mean that word couldn’t spread. When the news of the raid reached the court of Charlemagne in France, Alcuin of York wrote to King Ethelred of Northumbria and to Lindisfarne’s Bishop Higbald that no horror comparable to this one had appeared in England during the 350 years that the Northumbrians had lived there. Always alert to the mystical warnings of divine displeasure, Alcuin recalled another portent from the previous Lent, when it had rained blood in York. It was clear to the devout Alcuin that the monastery needed to pursue more stringent reform in order to escape further attacks.

At a time when famine and war were indications of God’s displeasure, the Christians must have wondered what evil they had committed that justified such a terrible response from God. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, that historical document which reveals so much about the Middle Ages and a time that’s murky to most of us, reported the event with expected religious interpretation, considering that monks were doing the writing: “The ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne.”

Chapter Two

The Vikings Strike Europe

There was no European Union in the eighth century. Rome had long since fallen and with the loss of empire came the Dark Ages, an era when Christianity was the only light spreading across the lands which had been conquered by the Romans centuries before. But the invaders who broke the Western Roman Empire were merely one bookend to a lengthy period of time when seemingly disorganized groups of foreigners would attack at will. Rome was sacked in 410 by the Visigoths; by 430, the Huns of had begun their incursions into other lands and would fight their way to the Balkans, Gaul and Italy. But Rome was not the sole destination for the tribes. Britain was settled by Jutes, Angles, and Saxons; Franks, Alemanni and Burgundians found their way to northern Gaul.

The Viking invasions came at a time when the expansion of literacy meant that there were witnesses who could record the deeds and preserve them for future generations. Also, the Vikings returned to their prey again and again, and their invasions were large scale. The Vikings actually had much in common with the English that they terrorized. The English Danes had arrived at the sceptered isle in the 400s. Their gods were similar, their warrior code resembled each other’s, and their battle songs shared themes. In the lexicon of the times, that should have made them practically kin. But the centuries that intervened between the early arrivals and the later conquerors had turned them into strangers and enemies.

Lindisfarne was the most dramatic Viking incursion, a token of things to come. When the Vikings returned to England a year after the Lindisfarne raid, the villagers of Jarrow were ready. The bad weather worked to the advantage of the English. The Viking leader was captured and put to death without regard for the cruelty of the process. Chastened by defeat, the Vikings returned to Denmark and didn’t return for 40 years. But when they returned, they were ready for anything the English thought they could try.

Denmark was not the only land from which Viking raiders set sail, and if the Danes were on hiatus from the raids, their Scandinavian brethren were not. The new century picked up where the previous one left off. Monasteries were easy pickings for the Vikings; many in Scotland and northern England vanish from the records. The island of Iona, which today can claim 1400 years of history, was founded before Lindisfarne. Columba landed there in 563 with 13 followers to establish a monastery. But its history was no protection against attack; the Vikings attacked Iona in 795 and burned it in 802. When the Vikings returned in 806, they killed 78 monks. The monks who were left escaped to County Meath, Ireland, bringing with them a magnificent, illustrated gospel book that had probably been produced in Iona, but which would eventually come to be known by its new location in Kells.

Europe had been invaded before. One of the most significant battles of the era took place in 732, when Charles Martel and his Franks defeated the Moors at the Battle of Tours, near Poitiers, France. The historical significance of the battle in terms of religious conflict is that the balance of power between the Islamic-Byzantine Empire and the Western Europe which was becoming Christianized was maintained.

Following his victory, Charles Martel re-established his dominance over southern France. Charles Martel’s grandson, Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, began to expand his lands by bringing northern Italy, Saxony, and modern day France under his control and unifying those territories into one kingdom. In 800, he would be crowned Holy Roman Emperor, a nostalgic reminder of both the transformation from pagan to Christian and the vestiges of imperial might that had fallen in 476.

But the unification that Charlemagne was initiating was not duplicated in the island nation of England. The English kingdoms consisted of Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex, and Wessex; the kingdoms in Wales and Scotland as they are now known were ruled by the Picts and Britons. Ireland was a collection of independent kingdoms, perhaps as many as 150. What Charlemagne accomplished would not be readily duplicated elsewhere in Europe.

Under Charlemagne, the city of Aachen became a center of culture. Literacy expanded. Alcuin of York, regarded as a scholar and teacher, was invited to come to Aachen and bring with him the program of educational instruction that was taught in Northumbrian monasteries. Alcuin, who in his time was regarded as the most learned man to be found, was a respected figure for his work at the school in York, and had a great deal of influence in Charlemagne’s court. Charlemagne was a sponsor of the church and engaged in its liturgy and music, as well as the copying of the religious works. But after Charlemagne’s death, his heirs were not able to hold the empire together. The Holy Roman Empire would also fall prey to the Viking raiders.

Who were these harbingers of doom, these seafaring invaders who invoked the terror of biblical plague as they raided kingdoms away from their home? And why did they leave home to a search of plunder?

People without Boundaries

Historians have not come up with one single reason why the Vikings left their homes for other shores. Some archeologists credit a warming trend that began around the ninth century to an increase in population in the Scandinavian lands, meaning the young men who would not inherit the family lands had to go elsewhere to seek their fortunes.

The frequency with which the Grim Reaper visited communities in the Dark Ages did serve a beneficial purpose in a grim manner: reducing the population made it easier to serve the needs of the ones who survived in a time when agriculture was, to put it mildly, an inexact science. For those who lived on the islands and peninsulas of the Scandinavian regions, farming opportunities were limited, especially considering the coldness of the climate. When the climate changed, and more land was arable, the population benefitted. However, land doesn’t expand the way that population does. That meant that young men had to seek opportunity where they could take it. If not at home—and the early Vikings certainly did enough fighting among their own to keep the domestic scene lively—then elsewhere.

Going raiding wasn’t really that much of a stretch from what they already did. In a manly society where adventure was a rite of passage, young men were expected to challenge their wits and abilities. To go and prove their manhood and courage to a society where battle valor meant the difference between dying a warrior’s death and ending up in Valhalla with Odin, the chief Norse God, or dying dishonorably, if safely, at home of old age was a challenge they willingly accepted. Valiant young men chose valor. Nor were they expected to come home empty-handed. Bringing home stolen goods, whether it was coins, a slave, or livestock, was like bringing home a primitive form of a paycheck. There was profit to be had in those plundered countries and the Vikings were just the ones to find it.

The practice of primogeniture meant that the eldest son inherited everything that his father had, which left younger sons in need of finding a way to support themselves. Small wonder that adventurous young men, raised on the legends of courageous warriors and steeped in the adrenaline of a culture which prized bravery above all else, ventured from the home shores in search of fortune, both figurative and literal. They must have wondered why there were unprotected structures in other lands which housed costly jewels, gold, and treasures; as pagans, they didn’t understand that Christians did not protect the church because Christians would not attack holy property. The Vikings suffered no such constraints, and quickly taught those in holy orders that laying for themselves treasures on earth was bound to come to peril.

The Christians may have invited some of the Viking wrath by their exclusive trading practices, which were based upon religious beliefs and shunned trading with pagans or Muslims. Forced to find other partners, the Vikings went to new lands where religious scruples would not get in the way of honest profit.

The Vikings were opportunistic multi-taskers. When they were set out in the 790s, they were in search of trade routes that would provide a steady and lucrative source of income. As they went on their journeys, they traded their fur, amber, iron, whetstones, soapstone, and walrus tusks. When their ships brought them to a town that was well defended, they set up shop, and in exchange, they eventually accrued an impressive supply of coinage which they could use to purchase more goods. Bartering was their means for a while but the Vikings became more sophisticated merchants and the money was put to good use. But if they arrived at a monastery or church that was not well defended, the merchants were warriors, ransacking the religious establishments of their wealth and taking slaves, which they then traded as goods when they trading instead of raiding.

The slave markets of Constantinople and Baghdad in the East made a profitable destination for the Vikings, and the Franks, Irish, British and Slavs who were unfortunate enough to have been captured found themselves far from home and in the possession of a foreign master. The Constantinople trade was a prize for the Vikings, their link to the goods of the Far East, which provided them with spices, silks, fruits, wine, and perhaps most lucrative of all, Arabic silver. The Viking trade empire was impressive and covered most of the known world by the time their era was ending.

The Scandinavian lands from which the Vikings came did not represent a united society. When Norwegian King Harald Fairhair took control of Norway, not all of the chieftains accepted his rule over them. So the discontented ones left for other shores, where they could live under their own rule and profit from the wealth that was there for the taking.

If you are young, brave, and convinced that to die in battle is the best of all possible fates, there was no real risk to raiding. You either went and returned with booty or you died and went to Odin. Win-win for a Viking warrior. It was reason enough to go raiding.

But others, including Patrick Wallace from the National Museum of Ireland, made the obvious connection. “They had the best iron in the world, trees to cut down and build ships, the best swords and edges on their blades. All the factors were there. They could do it and they did.”

Vignettes of the Viking Age: Viking Warriors

It’s amazing what a helmet visor, an axe and wolfskins can do for to create a lasting impression. The Vikings wore iron helmets; some wore chain mail. Their weapons included spears, bows, axes and swords. They protected themselves with round wooden shields. When in battle, the Viking fighting strategy was to stand in rows and form a wall of their shields called a skjaldborg. When they needed a fortress, they dug a ditch and created an earth bank and then erected a wooden stockade on top.

Composed of equal parts mythology, bloodlust, and ability, the Viking warriors known as the berserkers were the ones who went into battle so possessed by the martial spirit that they were oblivious to pain, enabling them to be so consumed with power and fury that they incited terror in their opponents. The belief was that they transformed into the animal whose fur, often a wolf or a bear, they wore into battle. They frequently appear in the Nordic sagas as foils to the heroic protagonist.

However, one of the most iconic Viking symbols needs to be laid to rest. The Vikings did not wear horned helmets in battle. According to the depictions of the Vikings in battle gear from the eighth through the eleventh centuries when they were a dominant force on the European stage, they wore helmets made of iron or leather, or they were bareheaded. Evidence supports this; a tenth-century helmet that was found in 1943 on a farm in Norway has a rounded cap of iron and a guard around the nose and eyes. The famous but fictional horned helmet comes from the 1800s when artists portrayed the Scandinavian warriors in that fashion; the myth grew stronger after the costumes for Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen was staged in the 1870s.

So why the horns? The 19th-century excavations did find horned helmets, but they came from an era preceding the Vikings. The Greeks and Romans who reported seeing northern Europeans wearing ornamented helmets may have been viewing ceremonial garb worn by Germanic and Norse priests. The Vikings were pragmatist: horns on the helmet would have been useless in battle and might have actually been an obstruction if they’d gotten caught in a tree branch.

Chapter Three

The Raiding Turns to Staying

Earlier, it had been the English from Denmark who had come as conquerors and stayed to settle. Hundreds of years later, the Vikings were returning the favor. In 835, the Vikings sent their fleets, numbering 300 and 400 ships, to England, France, and Russia. England got the worst of it, with 30 years of attack. The raids continued and intensified The Vikings conquered the Irish harbors and even founded Dublin under their leader, Olaf. Swedish Vikings made it all the way to the center of Russia, where they took over the river towns and held trade for ransom. Norway’s Vikings traveled far, reaching the Scottish islands of the Shetlands and the Faroes and settling there and also colonizing Ireland as well. They made it to Greenland and Stoneland or Labrador, and sailed up Canada’s St Lawrence River. But they must not have found the pickings to their liking, because it didn’t rank with their European plunder.

Initially, the Danish Vikings raided and left. They were extremely successful in their raiding, partly because of their skills but also because there was no coordinated English resistance. The small independent kingdoms were often at war with one another, a circumstance which made it easy for the Vikings to capitalize on disunion. But as they returned to England, their summer season of plunder lengthened, and they began to build encampments. The Danish settlements at first were established as military outposts from which to launch additional attacks. As they claimed the land and kept it, choosing verdant land for themselves, they brought their families to England to stay, or, as time went on, they married with the local women.

Their bases were the towns of Stamford, Nottingham, Lincoln, Derby, and Leicester. The Vikings who left the familiar Scandinavian shores for foreign lands were not in flight from terrible conditions. Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden were no worse than any of the other places in Europe. In many ways, the Viking homeland offered as much comfort as the era provided. But as time went on, the Vikings who left their native shores were more inclined to stay where trade and plunder lured them instead of returning home.

By 850, Viking armies took to wintering in England; within a decade, they were able to amass larger, more powerful armies whose intention was conquest. East Anglia in 865 was forced to supply their army, and after their capture of York in 866, the Vikings would take over Northumbria a year later

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted the changing habits of the perpetual Viking menace, recording that In 851, Vikings who came to Thanet stayed there, and a force of 350 ships attacked Canterbury and London but was defeated by the West Saxons.

The Great Heathen Army of Danes first appeared in 865. With an estimated five hundred to one thousand soldiers, the Vikings began a new era that combined conquest with residence. They took Kent in 866. Despite the assistance of the Wessex king to the Mercian king in 868, Nottingham fell to the Vikings. In 867, York was conquered and renamed Jorvik, becoming the Danish capital for the Vikings in England. Deira and East Anglia fell in 870. In 871, the Viking target was Wessex. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, only one of the battles, Ashdown in Berkshire, was won by the Wessex soldiers.

By 865, when Continental Europe was beginning to find ways to resist the invaders, the Vikings needed to find weaker prey. They found it in England. England had built its defenses for protection against its neighboring enemies. When a chief or a king summoned a local noble, that man would call his tenants to serve as an army for as long as 40 days. Military service was not popular and when the conflict was over the army returned to its civil pursuits, with no thought given to external enemies.

But the Vikings were different. The advantage of the sea was already theirs. But even on land, they showed strategic ability. They fortified their camps. They were resourceful warriors who found it easy to fool the gullible Christians. Apparently one favored tactic was to the “feigned flight” where the English thought they had won, only to find that the Vikings held the land at the day’s end. One story tells of a Viking leader besieging a town who announced that he was dying and in need of Christian burial. Eager to claim a convert, the bishop agreed. However, when the dead Viking was brought into town for Christian burial, the mourners showed up armed. The conversion experience that the Vikings inflicted was not quite what the good bishop had in mind.

Chapter Four

Ragnar Lodbrok and the First Viking War

Genealogists of Scandinavian descent must relish researching their family history because the prospect of sharing blood lineage with the descendants of Ragnar Lodbrok livens up the branches of any family tree. It’s true that historians aren’t entirely convinced that Ragnar Lodbrok actually existed because his resume includes the mighty deeds of other historical Vikings, but this larger-than-life character takes the Viking saga and makes it even larger than life.

He’s said to have been related to the Danish King Gudfred and a son of the Swedish king Sigurd Hring. Historians trying to unravel the authenticity of Ragnar have found connections among King Horik I who died in 854, King Reginfrid who died in 814, a nameless king who ruled a portion of Denmark and fell afoul of Harald Klak; someone named Reginherus who attacked Paris in the mid-800s; Rognvald of the Irish Annais, and the father of the Vikings who invaded England at the head of the Great Heathen Army in 865.

Whoever the source and whatever the ancestry, the persistence of the tradition of a mighty Viking hero called Ragnar who was the scourge of England and France does not die. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which is regarded as a reliable source of information for the events of that time, referred to Ragnar. Other historians deny his existence but confirm that his sons lived. The sons had a father, so there’s some credence that the Viking warriors known as Ivar the Boneless, a Viking leader and berserker; Bjorn Ironside, Halfdan Ragnarson, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye and Ubba were sired by a man who was larger than life.

Ragnar’s first wife, Lagertha, was a shieldmaiden. His second wife was Ora Borgarhjortr. Then he married Aslaugh, the daughter of Sigurd and Brynhildr the shieldmaiden. Ragnar claimed to be a descendant from the Norse god Odin, and he may have acquired his iconoclastic wardrobe from the god who ruled Asgard. Ragnar Lodbrok was also known as Hairy Breeches, a moniker he owed to his wife’s tailoring, for the trousers she had made him out of animal skins. Lodbrok was a reference to the coat that he wore.

He was born to Sigurd Ring and Alfild, but his mother died when he was young. His father wooed a Jutland princes named Alfsol for his second wife and fought her family in battle. The father was defeated and not a good loser; announcing that he would rather lose his daughter to Valhalla than to Sigurd, he gave Alfsol poison to drink. Bereft at the thought of her death, Sigurd joined her on her funeral pyre.

Ragnar’s childhood is lacking in detail but when he became a warrior, he lost no time in making a name for himself. Ragnar didn’t confine his military exploits to France. He also fought civil wars against the Danes. But he wanted more and set his eyes on France, which would prove to be profitable. He raided France numerous times by sailing into the Frankish Empire. In 845, 120 of his ships carrying an estimated 5000 men sailed up the Seine.

Charlemagne was no longer alive; his grandson Charles the Bald met Ragnar and when one division was defeated, the Franks retreated, leaving Ragnar to do what Vikings did. They reached Paris by Easter, and occupied the city. When the French king paid him 7,000 French livres, Ragnar withdrew from Paris. But he didn’t regard the payment as binding and continued to raid France. Small wonder; according to a contemporary, “never had Ragnar seen lands so fertile and so rich, nor ever a people so cowardly.” Charlemagne’s Frankish empire was a memory. The Vikings stabled their horses in the cathedral which Charles the great had built in Aix, the capital of his empire. In 200 years, the Vikings would invade the land of the Franks 50 times.

Quite the traveler, Ragnar next went to England. The English were usually on the losing end of the Viking spears but when Ragnar went a-raiding against the English, he ended up shipwrecked on the coast of Northumbria. His force didn’t fare well in battle and Ragnar, with most of his men killed, was captured by Aelle, the Northumbrian king. King Aelle of Northumbria’s revenge was brutal and in keeping with the times. An account of Ragnar’s demise, written in the 12th century, claims that as he died, Ragnar sang his death song, confident that he would enter Valhalla and that his sons would wreak a violent revenge for his death. Ragnar was thrown into a pit of snakes to die, a fate which brought the vengeance of his sons who would lead their Great Heathen Army into an invasion of England to retaliate.

Ragnar knew the nature of his sons. Although they came from three different wives, they apparently were united in their duty to their father, or at least to the bloodlust which demanded vengeance. When Halfdan learned of the manner of his father’s death, he gripped the chess piece he was holding so hard that his fingernails bled. Sigurd was using his knife to trim his nails; so absorbed was he in the tale of his father’s demise that he continued trimming until he cut to the bone. Ivar wanted the detail and as he heard what had been done to Ragnar, his face colored red, blue, and pale in turn, and swelled with anger. The details from the bards tell us that Ragnar’s sons would not leave their father’s death unpunished.

The sons, at the head of the Great Heathen Army, a name given to it by contemporary English sources, crossed the North Sea in 866, rode along the Roman road and were ferried across the Humber. First on their death list was the East Anglian King Edmund; Ivar the Boneless bound him to a tree and the Vikings used him for target practice, shooting arrows into him until he died. To make the point, he was then beheaded.

The vengeful sons besieged York. The Northumbrians left behind their feud between two rival kings and united to attack the Danes. Initially, their efforts were successful and drove the Vikings back to the city walls of York. But when the defenders of York showed up, there was confusion and the Vikings were able to slaughter the troops. For his execution of their father, King Aelle was sentenced to a peculiar Viking punishment known as “the Blood Eagle.” The king’s ribs were cut by the spine, then the lungs were pulled out via the wounds in his back. The punishment’s names come from the resemblance of the ribs to blood-stained wings. Salt was sprinkled into the wounds to make the punishment even more excruciating.

However, the gruesome punishment may be no more than the mead talking; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that King Aelle died in battle.

The sons also destroyed the fortress of the kings of Strathclyde at Dumbarton. Northumbria ended its existence as an independent kingdom. Northumbria had produced Bede and Alcuin, Anglian poetry, poems of Caedmon and the Vision of the Rood. After their defeat in 867, the Northumbrians reverted to primitive barbarism, leaving only the stone crosses that were masterpieces of Anglian art as a remnant of their former status.

When Simeon of Durham wrote about the battle of York 150 years later, his words were explicit: “The army raided here and there and filled every place with bloodshed and sorrow. Far and wide it destroyed the churches and monasteries with the fire and sword. When it departed from a place it left nothing standing but roofless walls. So great was the destruction that at the present day one can scarcely see anything left of those places, nor any sign of their former greatness.”

Ivan had his land-avaricious eye on Mercia, which had been England’s powerhouse for almost a century. Knowing Ivar’s designs, the Mercian king called on Wessex for help. Coming to his aid were Ethelred and Alfred, who offered their forces in battle. However, the Mercians then decided that they’d rather negotiate. Ivar left the churches at York and Ripon untouched. A treaty ended the 868 campaign. After setting up a vassal king in Northumbria; Ivar spent the winter in York, fortifying himself in northeast England.

Ivar was a shrewd military commander who planned the campaign that conquered East Anglia, Deira in Northumbria and Mercia. Before the invasion he had been fighting in Ireland. According to the Annals of Ulster, a credible source, Ivar died in Ireland in 872 or 873; the Annals wrote that, when Ivar died, he was the King of the Northmen in the whole of Ireland and Britain. His obituary was impressive: “872. Ivar, King of the Norsemen of all Ireland and Britain, ended his life.” He had conquered Mercia and East Anglia. He had captured the stronghold of the kingdom of Brythonic Strathclyde, Dumbarton. He settled in Dublin with his loot and his reputation and died peacefully two years later. According to the chroniclers, he slept in Christ. Perhaps, if he truly converted, he didn’t mind missing out on Valhalla.

Ivar’s brother Halfdan and his Vikings conquered in Mercia in 874. He handed out the land he and his men had taken in Northumbria in 876 and in 878, he headed south to Wessex, forcing most of the population to submit. He fought the Picts in Deira and the Welsh at Strathclyde in order to secure his kingdom in the north. After settling down in 876, Halfdan was not mentioned again.

Avenging their father’s death, the sons of Ragnar had managed to place most of the island under the control of the Vikings.

Vignettes from the Viking Age: The Great Heathen Army and Edmund the Martyr

Legends say that the Great Heathen Army came for blood, to avenge the death of Ragnar; other records dispute this but no one disputes the arrival of the military force led by Ivar the Boneless. The force was made up of Danes although according to a cleric named Asser who wrote in the 10th century, the invaders came from the Danube area. But modern scholars believe that Asser mistranslated and meant to write Dania instead of Danubia, Dania being the Latin word for Denmark.

The Army wintered in East Anglia during the winter of 865 and spent their time obtaining horses for their battle. Winter over, they were ready for battle and they invaded Northumbria, already compromised by a civil war between two rivals, each claiming his right to the royal throne. After conquering York in 866, the Vikings had a valuable foothold in Northumbria. The Northumbrian foes, realizing that their claims to the throne were meaningless if the Vikings won, joined forces, but it was too late and both kings died in battle. The Vikings named Ecgberht to rule as a king in name only, who was assigned to raise taxes from the population to outfit the Viking military.

In 869, East Anglia was next on the Viking conquest list. King Edmund of East Anglia was murdered, the legends claim, because he refused to renounce his Christian faith. He is known to history as Edmund the Martyr. As one would expect of the times, and of a military force entitled by its victims as the Great Heathen Army, Edmund suffered at the hands of the notorious Ivar the Boneless. He was, the stories say, shot with arrows and then beheaded. His head was tossed unceremoniously into the woods, but a wolf alerted his followers by repeatedly crying out “Here! Here! Here!” The saga of Edmund was celebrated in coinage and by one of the chronicling clerics, Abbo of Fleury, who told the story of the martyred king sometime around 986. Ironically, it would be a Danish king of England, Cnut, who would rebuild the abbey at Bury St. Edmunds where the remains of the sainted king were housed. For a time, Edmund was England’s patron saint and the abbey prospered over the centuries. But in the 16th century, the monasteries would face something even worse than the Vikings, when the Christian King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and took their wealth as he renounced the Roman Catholic faith and the Pope who refused to give him a divorce, and named himself as head of the Church of England.

Chapter Five

Who Were the Vikings?

When the Vikings began their nautical excursions in the 800s, they were building a profitable maritime empire based on trade. Their network reached as far as China and Afghanistan, and they were no strangers to the goods of Russia, Turkey and even Canada. Wladyslaw Duczko, an archeologist at Poland’s Institute of Anthropology and Archology, describes them as “people without boundaries.”

Historians who study the exploits of the Vikings have come to the conclusion that rather than representing what Smithsonian.com describes as “a sort of Hell’s Angels of the early Middle Ages,” the Viking raiders were not just particularly effective at plundering the loot of other countries. They were excellent traders, admittedly in a somewhat extreme mode, who traveled thousands of miles east and south. They were brave and skilled and they had an agenda. According to historian Simon Franklin of Cambridge University, the Vikings who would make it to Constantinople in 945 weren’t there in an attempt to capture the city. “It was more terroristic—all about instilling fear and extracting concessions for trade.”

So who were these valiant and violent warriors who treated the Anglo-Saxons and the Franks and in general anyone they met as if they were weaklings? The word Viking itself comes from a Norse word for pirate. Not exactly a flattering term of self-description. But the Vikings do not appear to have suffered from low self-esteem.

The Scandinavians at this time were not neatly and demographically divided into what would become Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It was after the Viking Age came to a close that the different groups became distinct.

Norwegian Vikings came from Trondheim and went to Iceland, Greenland, England and Ireland. Leif the Lucky, one of the Vikings who’s actually known by name, went from Brattahlid to the Eastern coast of the United States, reaching the New World four hundred years before Christopher Columbus. They also sailed from Norway to the Mediterranean where they did their pirating all along the coast until they were sent back by Spain’s Arab kingdoms, but not before they attacked Majorca and Menorca. The Norwegians were the ones who traveled north and west, where Ireland, Scotland, Iceland and Greenland were in their path.

The Danish Vikings raided and traded down the European coast and to England and Ireland, down the French coast by Portugal and Spain, through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea and along the Northern coast as far as Istanbul the capital of the Roman Empire in the East. For the Danes, England and France and Normandy were their destination.

The Swedes went to Russia. The Swedish Vikings sailed down the rivers that ended in the Baltic Sea, traveling down the Volga River and venturing as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea. They continued on to Russia, making a lasting impression on the country, which took as its name the term for sea pirate, or Rus. The Vikings known as the Rus also had an unexpected hair fashion: according to Ibn Fadlan, the men of the Rus bleached their beards blond or more accurately, saffron yellow, by using a strong, soft soap with lye for the bleaching agent. Pliny the Elder recalled that the men of the Germanic tribes were more likely than the females to bleach their hair. “Soap is the invention of the Gauls and this is used to redden the hair. It is made from fat and ashes . . . the best is beechwood and goat fat, the two combined, thick and clear. Many among the Germans use it, the men more than the women.”

The Vikings at home had neighbors of whom to beware. To the South were the Saxons in what is now northern Germany; the Saxons and the Vikings found themselves in conflict frequently, which led the Danish Vikings to construct Danevirke as a defensive fortification. When Charlemagne conquered the Saxons during a period of war that endured for 30 years, he forced the Saxons to convert to Christianity. Slavic tribes who controlled the Baltic Sea were loyal to the Carolingian dynasty. But when Vikings defeated the Obotrites in 808 and moved their merchants and traders to Danevirke near Hedeby, the Vikings had won the supremacy of the Baltic Sea, a control which would endure throughout the age of the Vikings.

Vignettes of the Viking Age: The Viking Sailors

If you take a look at the terrain of the territory where the Vikings lived, it’s easy to see that nature had not designed the Scandinavian map for easy travel. Denmark and Southern Sweden were covered with huge forests; Norway was a region of fjords and mountains. That left one means of travel open to them: the water. Vikings mapped the rivers, seas, and waterways as if they were highways; they built their towns and markets, and their fortresses, near the water so that they had swift access to the sea. In order to dominate the waters, it was necessary to master shipbuilding, and the Vikings proved their talents in this endeavor.

A longboat could be 23 meters long. The longship was built for raiding, but the seafaring Vikings also had other ships: the faering was a little row boat and a sexaering, which had six oars, and both were for fishing. The knorrs used for trade were shorter and broader.

Clinker-built ships were made with overlapping planks. Being constructed in this manner made it stout, flexible and light with a sail and room for 32 oarsmen. A warrior boat had a keel that reached just three feet below the surface, with masts and sail that lowered so that the ship could use stealth when approaching fortifications and settlements.

Archeological findings have managed to unravel the details of the longships. In 1880, the Gokstad was dug up in Norway in almost complete conditions right down to the cooking pots. It was built of solid oak planks that were fastened with treenails and iron bolts and caulked with cord that had been made from plaited animal hair. The ship was roughly 76 feet from stem to stern with a 17-feet six-inch beam, and 16 oars ranging from 17 and 19 feet on each side. The 40-foot high mast had a long, heavy yard with a square sail. The ship carried a crew of 50 and could, if needed, carry 30 more passengers for a month.

The ship was an example of the longships that brought the Vikings to Constantinople, to Paris, Dublin, and North America. These ships were part of the Viking empire. The Viking longship, with its shallow draft, could anchor in the creeks and bays and well as sail far up rivers. It was built so that it could withstand the powerful Atlantic storms. It was the perfect vessel for trading and for raiding, as the Vikings would prove as they established their presence in lands far from home.

Book #2

The Peak of the Viking Age

Chapter One

The Raiding Turns into Staying in Dublin

When we consider the limited distances that the average person in the Middle Ages traveled, we have to be impressed with the Viking zeal for exploration far away from familiar landmarks. No group showed more intrepid spirit that the Vikings, whose longships took them from the wild frontier of the North American continent to the sophisticated enterprise of Constantinople. Collectively, the Vikings may have racked up more of the medieval equivalent of frequent flying miles than any other European group. In 860, they sailed as far as Iceland and left a settlement there. A Viking ship which was caught in a storm ended up on the coast of what is now known as Labrador.

The tale of adventure was intoxicating to a young Viking named as Leif the Lucky, also known as Leif Ericsson, the son of Eric the Red, who set sail in search of the land. He found a country which appeared to be profligate with wild grapes, so he named it Vinland. What Leif called Vinland would later be known as the coast of Rhode Island, one of the early colonies of the future United States. But the Vikings are more famous for their journeys to lands which were already inhabited; to some they came as invaders, to other as business partners, but their adventures were recorded in the annals of the period. The Vikings themselves did not record their own trading achievements, invasions, or resettling, but their story has been told; English monks wrote of the Vikings in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the traveling Arab chronicler Ibn Fadlan also recorded his observations on the Vikings with whom he interacted. The accounts differ in tone, understandably; the English saw the Vikings as vicious predatory invaders, the Arabs were engaged in profitable trading with the Vikings. Neither would have been possible had not the Vikings been masters of the waters.

The Vikings were on the cutting edge of sailing techniques, but when it came to religion, they were out of fashion. When the Vikings went a-plundering in the late 700s, their paganism set them apart from most of Europe. But Christianity, the religion of peace, would conquer in the end. As the Vikings married Christian women and lived in communities where God, rather than Odin, was worshiped, they adopted the religious beliefs of their new home. Dying in battle was not a Christian honor. The Vikings let their battle fury wane as they settled into farming, trading, and the Christian faith.

But the Vikings told their stories instead of writing them, and their legends faded. They had no idea that they had landed on a continent that would rival Europe. The Spanish conquest of the New World, followed by the colonization efforts of the English, French, and Dutch, would claim the imperial glory of Europe. Later, excavations by archeologists would prove that Columbus was not the first to step upon the shores of the New World. The time has come for history to recognize that the first footprints on the soil of the New World belonged to those much-maligned men of the North. The Vikings had already been there, done that.

Homes Away from Home

Earlier, it had been the English from Denmark who had come as conquerors and stayed to settle. In the original days of their invasions, the Danish Vikings raided and left. But as they returned to England, their summer plundering turned into resettling; rather than returning home, they remained in the lands they were controlling. They established bases in the towns of Nottingham, Stamford, Lincoln, Derby, and Leicester. As they claimed the land and kept it, choosing fertile places that reflected their farming background, they began to treat their conquered territory like home, either bringing their families to stay with them or marrying local girls in the community.

The Viking presence in Nottingham was first noted in 868 after they wintered in the city. It was a sufficiently important event to win notice in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: “This year the same army went into Me¬rcia to Nottingham and there lived their winter-quarters; and Burhred king of the Mercians, with his council, besought Ethelred, king of the West-Saxons, and Alfred, his brother, that they would assist them in fighting against the army. And they went with the West Saxons into Mercia as far as Nottingham*, and there meeting the army on the works, they beset them within. But there was no heavy fight; for the Mercians made peace with the army.” (*The city was not called Nottingham at this time.) The Mercian king gave Nottingham up to the Danes in exchange for keeping the rest of Mercia. By 873, there was a Viking settlement in the city which would later be known as Nottingham. It would not be long before Nottingham would become one of the cities included in the Danelaw, after King Alfred and Guthrum established their treaty.

Although there is not a lot of recorded evidence of a Viking settlement, archeology has filled in some of the gaps. In 1851, skulls and human remains were found in an area outside the medieval town which became Nottingham. The evidence showed that the bodies had been buried with two iron swords and a spearhead. One of the swords dated from 900-950. The presence of the sword indicated that they might have belonged to the Vikings who had been buried there. In any case, the Viking base at Nottingham lasted as a Viking stronghold until 918 when Edward the Elder captured it. The Vikings retook it, and held it until Edward the Elder took it back in 942.

But that was in the future. In the early years of the Viking Age, no one could tell how long their domination would last or how far it would extend.

The Vikings in Ireland

In 795, two years after Lindisfarne, the Vikings attacked Ireland for the first, but not the last, time. Mindful of the threat of the Vikings, this period of time saw Irish clergymen resettling to Europe or to Iceland to avoid the clutches of the dreaded Vikings. But the raiders, who were mainly from Norway, focused their raids on the coast: they landed without warning, made off with the goods and people that they could—and then returned to their bases back home in Scandinavia or in Britain. These raids went on until 813; for eight years after that, the raids ceased, probably because the raiders were busy in northern Britain, particularly with a settlement called Laithlind.

Then, in 821, there was an attack on Howth, Ireland which saw the capture of many women. This time, the raiders were more organized. Their targets had changed as well; no longer content to attack the coast, the Vikings moved inland. They began to establish encampments that allowed them to winter in Ireland rather than returning to their home base in Norway. When they launched their next raid, they did so as Vikings who had settled for good in Ireland; the base for their attack was Laithlind. By the time that Laithlind was firmly established as a kingdom in 830, the attacks on Ireland were well coordinated. In 833, the monastery at Clondalkin was attacked. Clondalkin had been founded in the late sixth or early seventh century, but its history went back into the fifth century thanks to St. Brigid’s well, which Brigid used to baptize pagan converts to Christianity.

The King of Laithlind had conquest on his mind and Ireland seemed a likely source of land and power. The actual inspiration for the conquest has been credited to a Viking named Turgesius, whose actual identity remains unproven. He’s been identified as the son of Norway’s first king Haraldr Fairhair; as a son of the Danish king Gudfred who battled Charlemagne between 804 and 810, and even as Ragnar Lodbrok because of a Viking raid in 831 which saw an Irish king captured. No conclusive evidence has been found that positively identifies Turgesius, but there was no anonymity when he was alive. His victims knew him well.

Whoever he might have been, there’s no mystery about what he did. From 832 until 845, he’s named as the Viking who plundered Christian sites in Ireland. He also established several Norse settlements, making himself the ruling power over the northern half of Ireland. At least that’s how medieval historian Snorri Sturluson records the events; later accounts do not connect him with the establishment of Dublin, although Dublin was originally a Viking settlement.

Sixty Viking ships sailed up the River Liffey in 837 to raid churches, forts, and homes. When the Vikings returned to Dublin in 841, they captured an ecclesiastical settlement so that they could establish a naval encampment close by. The site was possibly where Dublin Castle is located because it overlooked the Black Pool which would have served as a harbor. The Vikings used their Dublin base to extend their raids further into inland Ireland, as far as Leinster, the Midlands, and the Slieve Bloom Mountains. The church establishments were powerless against the Viking onslaught as Kildare, Clonenagh, Kinnitty, Killeigh, Kells, Monasterboice, Duleek, Swords and Finglas played unwilling hosts to Viking raids.

The king of Mide, Mael Sechnaill, captured Turgesius in 845 and drowned him in Loch Uair. The loss of Turgesius was a blow to Viking military fortune but a boon to the Irish, who managed to win victories against their Norse foes. Mael Sechnaill, now High King of Ireland, was able to attack Dublin and for a time, the Viking capital was destroyed. But the Vikings retaliated by allying themselves with the King of Cianachta and attacking Irish land belonging to Mael Sechnaill.

Conflicting loyalties tossed the fate of Ireland from one master to another; at one point, in 853, a Viking named Amlaib made himself king of Dublin, accepting tribute from the Irish and hostages from the Vikings. Amlaib may also be identified as Amhlaoibh Conung, or Olaf the King. Amlaib went to Britain on military ventures, returning to Ireland in 856 or 857 along with two brothers. His brother Imar has been identified by some accounts as Ivar the Boneless, the son of Ragnar Lodbrok, but evidence is inconclusive. Other accounts say that Imar and Amlaib were the sons of Ragnaill, the king of Laithlind. In 857, Imar became co-regent with his brother over Dublin.

For 15 years, the brothers made use of Dublin as a base for their campaigns, some of which were against other Vikings. They used marital means to further their martial activities, allying themselves with local Irish leaders by marrying their daughters.

After the death of Amlaib in 874 or 875, during a campaign against Scotland’s King Constantine I, the Norse presence in Ireland underwent a time of uncertainty. The colonies were threatened by their battles against different Viking factions, which benefitted the Irish who united against them. Norse settlements at Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, Cork and Limerick came once again under Irish control. Fighting continued, however, but when the kings of Leinster and Brega attacked Dublin from the north and south, they were able to defeat the Vikings in 902. Although Dublin returned to Irish control and remained so for 15 years, a Viking presence stayed behind, according to the excavations by archeologists.

But evidence of the Viking mastery and presence over Dublin is sketchy. Excavations in the area have found more than 200 houses of Viking origin, indicating that Dublin was one of the most significant sites of Norse influence in all of Europe. Viking gravesites revealed the remains of two Scandinavian warriors. Many of the grave sites contained grave goods which would have been typical of Viking burials including swords, shields, daggers, spearheads, brooches and decorative items. Other sites, excavated in the 19th century when techniques were not professionally defined, cannot provide conclusive proof of the Viking control in Dublin. Others, including the burial mounds at College Green which may have contained the remains of some of Dublin’s Norse kings, were removed in the 1600s.

Despite the lack of archeological proof, the documentary evidence is ample and confirms that in the second half of the ninth century, Dublin was a successful settlement for Vikings who had come to plunder. Norse leaders made the city their base, from which they attacked enemies in both Ireland and Britain. Almost 100 years after their first attack on the monastery at Lindisfarne, they were poised to become the conquerors of Britain.

Chapter Two

Alfred the Great

According to tenth-century historian Aethelweard, the Great Heathen Army arrived in 865 and wintered in East Anglia. Imar or Ivar, along with a kinsman named Halfdene Ragnarsson, was reportedly part of the army. In 869, the Army seized East Anglia from King Edmund after wintering in Thetford. Eastern Mercia fell in 873; in 875 or 876, Northumbria was divided, with Angles ruling the northern kingdom of Bernicia and the Danes ruling the southern kingdom of Deira or Jorvik. Halfdene was reportedly killed in 875.

Having seen the subjugation of East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria, the princes of Wessex looked to the defense of their realm. But before they were tested, Ivar the Viking leader left England for good. According to the Annals of Ulster, Ivar returned to Dublin in 870 from Scotland, carrying with him captives.

The terms of engagement were changing. In 876, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle wrote that part of the Great Heathen Army had become harrowers and plowers, meaning that instead of sailing to the land to plunder and leave, the Vikings were staying, settling, and farming. The quest for land did not diminish and it would result in a confrontation between the Danes and a Wessex prince.

The Wessex dynasty of Aethelwulf, king of the West Saxons, had five heirs who acceded to their father’s wishes to succeed to kingship in turn so that the land would be ruled by an adult capable of defending the realm against the invasions rather than having a child as king. By 870, Viking prowess in conquest had proven so successful that only Wessex remained as an independent Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Alfred began to expand his military options. He created a fleet of ships after becoming King of Wessex in 871, and victories began to accrue; that is, until the Vikings caught him off guard with a surprise attack. Despite the spin from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle affirming that Alfred was pulling the puppet strings, the truth is that the Danes held the upper hand and Alfred’s giving chase was ineffectual. The Danes had a pattern. They occupied a fortified town and waited for Alfred to negotiate. The peace treaty would involve paying money in exchange for the Danes agreeing to leave the kingdom right away. Things weren’t looking good. Alfred’s army was not trained in siege warfare and had been unable to defend Chippenham. His only option was to continue to pay them off.

The Danes were skilled at attacking fortified positions, having done so in 871 at Reading. Alfred opted to go south and prepare for battle. Guthrum was not inclined to settle down to the plow and the hearth. He returned to Cambridge in East Anglia. Beginning in 875, the Danish forces managed to get past the West into Wareham. Alfred paid the Danes off after they gave their oath that they were willing to leave the country. But instead, the Danes went to Exeter, deeper into Alfred’s kingdom. Beginning in 875, Guthrum launched attacks on Wessex; Alfred was nearly captured at Chippenham, where he had his winter fortress, by Guthrum. In 877 the opposing forces established peace, the Vikings vowing to leave the kingdom and never return. The Danes spent the rest of 877 in Gloucester; Alfred was 30 miles away in Chippenham. During the night, the Danes attacked Chippenham on January 7-8 or, as the records state, “in midwinter after Twelfth Night.” Alfred, eluding capture, retreated with a small force into the wilderness.

By 878, eastern and northeastern England were under Danish control; even a lone Danish defeat at the Battle of Ashdown was unable to halt the juggernaut.

Alfred, wintering before the Battle of Edington in the marsh of Athelney in Somerset, had some protection by the terrain. Legend enters the picture here with the famous story of King Alfred and the cakes. When Alfred and his men went into hiding in the swamps in Somerset, they depended upon the local population for their provisions. Alfred, according to the story, hid in the home of a peasant woman who didn’t know that her guest was the king of Wessex. She assigned him the task of keeping an eye on the cakes that she was baking on the fire. Alfred had his mind on his royal problems and not on the cakes, which burned, earning the royal hideaway a scolding from the peasant woman.

Battle of Edington

Alfred, who would be given the appellation of Great for his achievements on behalf of Anglo-Saxon Wessex, defeated Guthrum’s forces in May, 878 in historical combat known as the Battle of Edington. It’s also known as the Battle of Ethandun and is located in present-day Edington in Wiltshire.

When spring came in 878, Alfred and his West Saxon forces marched to Edington to fight the Danes under Guthrum in battle. Around Easter, Alfred built a fortress at Athelney. Archeological evidence confirms that metalworking was taking place at the site, indicating that the men of Wessex were forging weapons to get ready for their battle. In early May, Alfred called a levy of men at Egbert’s Stone; the men from Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire rallied to his side. Within a week, he took the battle to the Danes. This time, victory came to the Anglo-Saxons after ferocious fighting and slaughter. The Danes fled to Chippenham, although the West Saxons had taken all the food. Hungry, the Danes last two weeks then sued for peace. They made the usual promise to vacate the kingdom but with an interesting addendum: Guthrum was to be baptized as a Christian. Alfred had more leverage this time because, instead of simply stopping the Danes, he had convincingly beaten them. Alfred served as his baptismal sponsor and Guthrum took the name of Athelstan. The treaty of Wedmore had Guthum/Athelstan leaving Wessex for East Anglia, which they did, leaving Chippenham in 879. A year later, the army settled in East Anglia.

The words of the treaty begin in the following way:

“This is the peace that King Alfred and King Guthrum, and the witan of all the English nation, and all the people that are in East Anglia, have all ordained and with oaths confirmed, for themselves and for their descendants, as well for born as for unborn, who reck of God’s mercy or of ours.”

Concerning our land boundaries: Up on the Thames and then up on the Lea, and along the Lea unto its source, then straight to Bedford, then up on the House onto Watling Street.”

The land boundaries are the initial definition of the region that would become the Danelaw, which was sometimes referred to as the Five Burroughs or Seven Towns. In 886 Alfred and Guthrum outlined the boundaries of their kingdoms. Mercia was divided so that one section went to Wessex, the other to East Anglia. Danelaw was soon a flourishing region, thanks to the Danish skill as traders and craftsmen. Prior to the Danelaw, England’s currency was united due to the primary minds of Canterbury, London and Rochester. But by the tenth century, most coins were struck from the Seven Burghs and the Mercian towns of Tamworth, Stafford, and Shrewsbury. The Danelaw’s prosperity worked against them, as other Vikings who were not bound by treaties attacked them.

The treaty was able to minimize conflict between the Anglo-Saxons and Guthrum’s Vikings but at the same time, they maximized commerce and trade between Wessex and East Anglia. By the end of the ninth century, the rest of the Anglo-Danish rulers were minting coins as well, and by the tenth century, the Anglo-Saxon model of kingship became the model for the Vikings who had stayed in England.

Guthrum ruled as the king of East Anglia until his death in 890, honoring the treaty he had made with Alfred. When coins were issued, they were inscribed in the name of Aethelstan, the name he took when he was baptized a Christian. He was no longer a threat to Alfred, but that doesn’t mean that there was no conflict.

Guthrum’s power base had shrunk. Ragnar’s sons Ivar and Ubbe no longer supported the Vikings in England. In either 876 or 877, 120 Danish ships had been wrecked in a storm off Swanage. Their lack of cohesion was what Wessex needed.

Alfred had capitalized on his victory by setting up a system of fortified cities, known as burghs. Alfred also pursued military reforms that made Viking raids less successful. In 888, Alfred ordered the building of a monastery on Athelney to give thanks for his victory. The monastery would last for centuries and when it was destroyed, the Vikings were nowhere near: King Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1539 was responsible for its demise.

Danelaw

By the time that Danelaw was established, Danish settlement in northeastern England was already a fact of life. The treaty between Alfred and Guthrum created what was known as the Danelaw, a territory that included Leicester, Lincoln, Nottingham, Stamford, and Derby.

Alfred was not a man to trust to treaties to safeguard his kingdom. He built up the defenses, reorganized his army, and built settlements across southern England that were very well defended. He also created a navy to protect the coast from Danish raiders. He strengthened his internal kingdom as well by establishing a code of law that reinforced justice and order. Reforming the coinage helped to put his kingdom on a more stable economic foundation. By the 890s, his coinage referred to him not as the king of Wessex, but as the king of the English.

The treaty that established the Danelaw did not reduce the power of the Viking threat, however, although after Alfred had recaptured London, the Anglo-Saxon goal turned from defense to retaking land from the Vikings. But the borders were not secure and the new century would continue

to see them shift. Alfred’s daughter Aethelflead permitted Norsemen who had been expelled from Dublin to settle in Mercia in 902, three years after the death of King Alfred. Three years later, the Vikings failed to show gratitude when they revolted and tried to take Chester. The attempt failed and Chester was refortified in 907.

The Anglo-Saxons by 918 had taken back the southern Danelaw. By 954, the Anglo-Saxons had reclaimed the country. The same pattern was repeating itself in other parts of Europe where the Vikings had been masters. As feudalism spread across Europe, kings and lords could count on a ready-to-serve source of military might from the men who had sworn fealty to them. The Vikings, lacking this available manpower, could not compete with soldiers who were battled-tested and trained. Nonetheless, the Viking presence was still undeniably a dominant one and while Alfred managed to reach an accord through victory in battle and a treaty that contained the Vikings, a powerful warrior from Norway would demonstrate his battle prowess and his bargaining skills across the Channel.

Chapter Three

Rollo Rognvaldsson

The end of the ninth century was a momentous one for the Vikings. One of them, Rollo, fared better in France than Guthrum did in England. The Vikings had no need for a publicist because they let their names do the talking. Rollo, known as the Walker because, it was said, he was so strong that no mere horse was able to carry him, requiring the Viking chieftain to make his way on foot. A less picturesque version simply says that Rollo was so tall that he traveled farther on foot than he would have had he been mounted on the small Norwegian steeds. This was no drawback however to Rollo’s prowess.

Born a jarl around the year 860, Rollo was another well-traveled Viking. He followed the plundering and raiding route, ending up in Scotland where his marriage to a Christian woman yielded a daughter and possibly a son named William Longsword, who would be his heir when the time came that he left something worthwhile to inherit. He spent some time in Ireland, but the Norse were finding their power on the downslide in Ireland. It was time for new horizons.

Around 900, Rollo and seven hundred ships left Norway and made it their way to that favorite Viking getaway, the lands of the Franks. They sailed up the Seine, stopping at Rouen on their way to attack Paris. The citizens were horrified to see the river dominated by Viking ships but a shrewd bishop advised them to trust to Rollo’s better nature. So the citizens of Rouen opened the gates of the city; Rollo and his forces entered and took possession. However, the citizens were treated well; they may have lost control of their city but they kept their lives. In those uncharitable days, of conquest, that was as good a bargain as anyone could hope for.

Back on his way to Paris, Rollo sailed up the Seine and met with the Viking chiefs and the thirty thousand men whose presence turned the river into a Viking encampment on water. The Parisians were prepared for the Vikings, having fortified the city on the advice of Eudo, the Count of Paris. Two walls with strong sturdy gates were constructed to encircle the city.

Cities had walls for a reason; to keep the residents safe inside and to keep the enemies outside. Rollo’s men built a tower on wheels which they rolled up to the walls of the city. On the other side of the walls were archers, with arrows which they fired at the Vikings. Citizens hurled rocks at the besieging Vikings, and poured pitch and boiling oil on them. Sieges take time, and the Vikings were patient as they waited for 13 months while inside the city, the Parisians had less and less to eat. Alarmed at the looming prospect of defeat, Count Eudo furtively escaped through one of the gates to let the King of France know that the city of Paris was in grave danger of being lost to the invading Vikings. Charles, the son of Louis the Stammerer and Adelaide of Paris, was born posthumously and had not succeeded to the throne until 893 although he was not a monarch in truth until 898. There was no apprenticeship for kings in those days, and he had to take decisive action.

The king assembled an army and the Vikings, finding discretion to be the better part of valor, abandoned the siege and left Paris. The Franks also decided against battle, leaving Rollo and his forces to escape, where they went to Burgundy.

Whether he went plundering elsewhere, or loitered in Burgundy, or returned home, the annals don’t say. Some histories believe that he was exiled from Norway in 900 for his lawless ways. But in 911, he emerged back in the story to once again, leave Norway to sail up the Seine with hundreds of Viking ships. The plundering and raiding commenced. King Charles II, known as Charles the Simple, sent a message to Rollo to propose terms of peace. Rollo agreed to meet the king. Each side stayed on one side of the river while messengers traveled back and forth. Rollo offered, in exchange for land, to become the vassal of the French king. As a vassal, Rollo would be required to provide men in arms to Charles should the king command military support in case of another Viking invasion. Rollo agreed as long as he could be the leader of the troops.

Charles decided that this was feasible, so in exchange for Norse vassals, he offered the city of Rouen and the land between the Epte River and the sea. Charles was actually making a shrewd bargain. This area along the coast was a frequent target of invasion and putting it in the hands of a Viking meant that it was in his own best interests to repel the Northmen who would seek to conquer it.

Accepting the hand of a royal princess in marriage was acceptable, but the ceremonial tradition which accompanied the rites of vassalage were not. Rollo was required to kiss the boot of the king. Rollo was resistant, but tradition was tradition. So he assigned one of his men to perform the deed, although with less humility than the king expected. Rollo’s substitute raised the king’s booted foot and brought it to his mouth, but without bending down in subordination. The king toppled from his mount, an episode of humiliation which has been retold throughout history.

There was one other stipulation which the king made: Rollo had to become a Christian. The kiss was given, the deal was struck, and Rollo the vassal was Rollo the lord of the land around Rouen, which was named Normandy after the north men who now ruled it. Upon baptism, Rollo took the name of Robert, but a Viking by any other name is still a Viking. By receiving the hand of Charles’ daughter Gisela in marriage, Rollo successfully married up. Baptism, marriage, and a city were a profitable return on Rollo the Viking’s excursion into France.

In any case, the transaction was duly recorded in 921 in one of the chronicles, but the evidence of his acquisition of Frankish land is evinced in 918 in a charter which recorded those properties given for the protection of the kingdom of the Northmen on the Seine. In short, Rollo.

The newly named Count of Rouen found Normandy to his liking and so did his men. They married the local women and to use a modern term, assimilated—with their own unique twists—into the landscape of the French.

Once in power, Rollo turned from outlaw to hanging judge. The rules governing his realm were strict; robbers and raiders were subject to hanging. The duchy of Normandy became renowned for its safety and its prosperity, although it was not noted for its adherence to ecclesiastical authority. It’s unlikely that Rollo’s religious conversion was shaped by any genuine spiritual inspiration. He wanted land and by becoming a Christian, he acquired it, and proved to be an able leader. By 924 Rollo had expanded his boundaries to include Bessin and Maine. In 927, he abdicated in favor of his son, William Longsword, who would also enlarge his territory, this time by adding the lands of the Cotentin and the Avranchin to Normandy. When Rollo died in 932, he was buried in the Cathedral at Rouen. In 1066, Rollo’s descendant, William, would also venture from his homeland, traveling to England which he would conquer and claim.

Rollo’s aversion to the subservience which Charles required of a vassal may have come from the customs of his homeland, which claimed a sort of democracy which, although vastly different from governance as we know it today, nonetheless showed more of an egalitarian spirit than what was evolving in Gaul. In the Viking society, kingdoms were divided into districts. Within the district, meetings of the free man—the kings, nobles, wealthy, warriors, merchants, farmers—were held to discuss political decisions, criminal trials and disputes over land. An official was elected or appointed to act as the judge. A member with more money or influence was going to have more influence than the others, however. The process was not a formal one and if a decision could not settle the dispute, the next stage was the ordeal. A man proved his innocence by walking on water without drowning or gripping hot iron without being burned because the gods were protecting him. The odds were obviously stacked against him unless phenomenal luck intervened.

However, in other aspects of their social order, the Vikings displayed a form of equality which allowed for more mobility and expression than that seen in the social structure of other Europeans.

Chapter Four

The Scandinavia They Left Behind

One remarkable truth about the Viking societies is that most of them were members of what today would be called the middle class. For Vikings, these were the karls who were free and owned land, and had a trade or skill which was valued by their community: they were often smiths and farmers. The farmers made up the biggest social class in Viking society. Viking artisans included blacksmiths, bronze smiths, coopers, leather tanners, saddlers, shoemakers, and makers of leather goods; there were jewelers and men who carved bowls from soapstone and bone and antler into combs, which were standard belongings of Viking men and women. There were also tenants, known as leiding, who leased farmland, paying for it by providing a designated amount of food to the owner. He might not have been at the top of the pecking order, but he was still a free man, with the rights of other free men.

The nobility among the Vikings, or jarls, from which the title of earl came, were at the top of the hierarchy in terms of status. The jarls were the upper class, noted for their wealth, treasure, estates and ships. The jarl was expected to maintain the honor of a man of status and courage, and he needed to be able to command the respect of his supporters. Society for the Vikings had a certain trickle-down effect; as things went for the jarl, so it went for his followers. His success was also key to their prosperity and security, as well as their image. There was some fluidity between the classes so that it was within the realm of possibility for a karl to become a jarl. Viking society had structure. But an interesting social custom among the Vikings was the comparative freedom given to women.

The medieval era was not a time when women could expect to be treated as equals. Like other cultures, the Vikings lived in a male-dominated world, and a woman was forbidden from being a chieftain, a judge, or a witness; instead, she was under the authority or her husband or father. According to Icelandic law, women could not cut their hair short, carry weapons, or dress in men’s attire. However, the role of the shieldmaiden was part of Viking society, which gave her a level of warrior status. Even the ordinary women, however, did have freedom, more, in fact, than women in other societies of the time. Viking daughters were married between the ages of 12 to 15 years of age, and upon her marriage, she received the keys to the household supply chests, which she wore in a belt around her waist. The females oversaw the family’s finances, which meant that, if her husband died, his widow had the potential to become a wealthy property owner.

In Icelandic society, a woman could obtain a divorce, and if she felt that her husband was shirking the traditional testosterone role of seeking vengeance, she could threaten him with divorce, which could have brought him financial hardship. For the Vikings, punishment was often handled as a matter of revenge. The Vikings were a society where honor had primacy; therefore, an insult to honor would be addressed. Unwanted male attention was forbidden; there were penalties not only for rape but also for kissing a woman who did not want to be kissed. The code of the culture disapproved of violence against its females.

If her husband was abusive or mistreated the children or failed to do his part in maintaining the farm, she had grounds for divorce. If she left her husband without grounds, the husband could keep her belongings. Obtaining a divorce was not difficult: she could call several witnesses and announce, first outside the threshold and second next to the marriage bed, that she was divorced from her husband. As a wife, she still belonged to her own family and was allowed to keep the goods (woolen and linen bedclothes, a loom and a bed) that she’d brought into the marriage. Whatever she brought as a dowry became her bequest to her children when she died. If she was a mother of babies or very young children, they remained in her custody if she sought divorce. Older sons and daughters were divided between their parents’ families depending on the family status and wealth. Poor families had less latitude; they did the work themselves, without help from slaves or servants, and shared the responsibilities of the home. But although they were poor, they could console themselves with the fact that they were at least free, which was more than could be said of the thralls.

The thralls or slaves were at the bottom of the social ladder. Slavery was an accepted part of the social structure in the Middle Ages, and the Vikings profited from selling the slaves they’d captured during their raids. The lowest class also included bondsmen or loysing. Bondsmen entered servitude because they had not been able to pay their debts and were required to work for another man until the debt was paid. In Norway, slavery was the family heritage for four generations; after that, a freed slave’s children were free. Slaves could not inherit or bequeath property or goods. When a slave passed the age when he could be useful, he was put to death. However, a slave could buy his freedom if he saved sufficiently. But slaves served a purpose for the agricultural Norse society; Norwegians were said to believe that at least three slaves, along with twelve cows and two horses, were necessary to run a farm. A slave’s only permitted possession was a knife.

Norse society was not so regimented that it lacked outsiders. Magicians, outlaws, witches, beggars and tramps were on the outskirts of society and Danish law treated them accordingly.

Everyday Life in Viking Society

The average Scandinavian did not have a bad life. It was a challenging era and life then was quite different from what we today would regard as endurable. But within the limitations of that society, the Vikings did reasonably well. Archeological findings have unearthed household artifacts from the burial sites that provide a glimpse into the daily routine of the Viking domestic life.

A typical Viking lived on a farm, albeit in houses which might only have one room that was divided into living quarters for the family and a stable for the livestock. They usually were built of wood, but in regions where wood was scarce, the house might be constructed of stone, earth and turf. Vikings lived together as extended families: grandparents, parents and children shared the home, and even servants, workers, and slaves would be under one roof. A typical farm might include cows, pigs, horses, sheep, goats, and perhaps chickens. Vikings also had dogs and from the year 1000, cats as household pets. In the middle of the house was the fireplace, the chief source of heat and light, with a hole in the roof to allow the smoke to escape.

Because the lower classes had household items made of wood, they haven’t lasted through time, so there’s little evidence from archeology to give a good idea of what everyday items were like. If they broke down or were worn, they’d have been used for fuel and thrown into the fire.

In Greenland, where wood was hard to come by, stone was used for the building and turf for the roof. Windows were small because there wasn’t glass for the panes. Shutters that were covered at night kept out the cold. The houses were dark; the only light came from oil lamps carved from soapstone.

Furniture consisted of a table and stools, not chairs, which were a luxury. Cups of the rich might be made from wood, or pottery. Hollow horns, or drinking horns, were often used for drinking. For eating, they had wooden bowls and dishes. There were no forks; they used spoons made of horn or, for the wealthy, metal. Tools, jewels, and clothing were stored in chests. The Vikings who could afford chairs might have been able to afford beds, but most slept on benches with rugs around the side of the hut. In the average home, the beds would have been mounted on the walls. Don’t envy the bedded ones; the mattresses were stuffed with straw or down. Covering was provided by wool blankets or furs. Carpeting wasn’t known; the average person spread rushes on the floor. Tapestries covered the walls of the wealthy to help keep out drafts.

The Viking men worked in the fields, fished, and hunted. As was customary in that time, women tended to the domestic tasks of the household, including spinning, weaving, laundry, caring for the children. Women prepared the food, milled grain into flour, and prepared animals for meals. Wool from sheep would be woven on the loom, crocheted or sewn into clothing and other textile items.

Women were praised for their beauty and wisdom. As the family’s medical authority, she used herbs to take care of her family when illness struck. The woman oversaw the feeding of the family; February was the hunger month, something that a woman would have in mind as she made butter and cheese, dried and smoked fish, and meat to meet her family’s needs. Foods grown by the Vikings included wheat, barley and rye; cabbages, onions, leeks, apples and plums. They enjoyed wild berries and made bread and porridge, adding peas to the porridge to make it stretch. Cod and herring were staples in their diet, and they raised cattle, pigs, sheep and goats, the latter two used for milk, geese and chickens. In the autumn, they slaughtered the animals and salted or smoked the meat to feed them through the winters. Meat was roasted on a spit or boiled in an iron cauldron. Mead, made from honey, yeast, and water, was of course the famous beverage of the Vikings, but they also drank beer and wine if they could afford it.

Vikings at Leisure

Even in a time as demanding as the Middle Ages, there was entertainment for the Vikings. Sports included swimming, wrestling, skiing and ice skating. They were archers; they hunted and enjoyed falconry. It may be hard to imagine, but the Vikings played chess, as well as dice and a board game called Hnefatafi. Kvatrutafl was their version of backgammon and they also had an early version of draughts. Viking entertainment included songs that praised the mighty deeds of their lord; the skald or poet would sing the poems. They told riddles and stories, played the harp, horn, and wooden pipes.

Viking Religious Beliefs

Maintaining the family’s religious observances fell under the women’s role. It may seem surprising that the Norse God Thor was the deity invoked by couples to bless their marriage, and his famous hammer was part of the blessing. In Norse lore, the gods seem to have working class roots that set them apart from the gods and goddesses of other cultures. Thor and his wife Sir were in charge of bringing a fruitful harvest of the crops.

Chief among the gods was Odin, the one-eyed god who sacrificed an eye to obtain wisdom.

Odin exemplified courage and honor to Norse society. Warriors who died in battle would be

carried off the battlefield by the Valkyrie to live in Valhalla; it was a sought honor to die in battle and a disgrace to die safely of old age. It was Odin’s quest for wisdom that brought the mystery of the runes to Viking society. When he first saw the runes, he was unable to translate the carvings on the stones that foretold the destinies of the nine worlds. He obtained the hidden knowledge by hanging himself on Yggdrasil, the world tree, and after piercing his chest with a spear, hanging there for nine days, living in a limbo between life and death.

Mythology reveals more than simply the religious practices of a society. The stories of Odin confirm the bathing habits of the Vikings. When his son Baldur was killed, the poem Voluspa writes. “His hands he washed not or his hair combed Till Baldur’s bane was borne to the pyre.”

Arab chronicler Ibn Fadlan provided a glimpse into the actual religious practices of the Vikings when he recorded the actions of the Rus traders that he met in his travels. After the completion of a voyage to the Volga which was successfully accomplished in 922, the Vikings prayed to their Norse gods, offering sacrifices to wooden representations of the gods and entreating them to provide buyers who would purchase their wares with silver coins. Ibn Fadlan witnessed the burial rites of the Vikings. When a chieftain died, the Vikings set the body on fire with the ship. Jewelry, food and drink and livestock accompanied the honored leader to his death, along with the body of a slave girl who volunteered to be killed so that she could be burned alongside the chieftain.

Viking Style and Sex Appeal

Contemporary readers may be surprised to learn that the unkempt barbarians they expect to see in Viking garb were perhaps not quite so slovenly. English cleric John of Wallingford of the priory of St. Fridwides took exception to the hygiene of the men who lived in the Danelaw because they paid attention to their appearance in a time when hygiene was lackluster. The cleric scolded them for these acts and wrote in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that their purpose for combing their hair daily, bathing every Saturday and changing their garments was so that they could seduce well-born English women and seduce noblemen’s daughters. His words alert us to the fact that in the Middle Ages, the Vikings were the dandies, apparently able to cut a glamorous figure for the ladies, which must give even the most ardent fan of the Anglo-Saxons pause to wonder just what they must have looked like in comparison.

Saturday was the day when Vikings bathed, performing their ablutions in a separate bath house which was common in most Viking farms. Some homes even had running water, obtained by directing the water of a river or pond into a channel running under the house. The channel was covered by rocks and when water was needed, the rocks were lifted and the water procured.

But the evidence confirms that the Vikings were mindful of their appearance. In his accounts, the Arab Ibn Fadlan wrote “Every day they must wash their faces and heads . . . every morning a girl servant brings a great basin of water; she offers this to her master and he washes his hands and face and his hair—he washes it and combs it out with a comb in the water, then he blows his nose and spits into the basin. When he has finished, the servant carries that basin to the next person who does likewise. She carries the basin thus to all the household in turn, and each blows his nose, spits, and washes his face and hair in it.” That would seem to negate the cleanliness of the act, but an observer has noted it’s likely that the basin was emptied between each use. Because devout Muslims washed in running water, Ibn Fadlan was unimpressed by ablutions in a basin. The Vikings were in general cleaner than most of their European counterparts during the Middle Ages, and actually chose to wash, whether in lakes and streams during the summer or in the bathhouses on the farms, which were heated in the winter. For those in Iceland, the natural hot springs would have been brought into the bath house.

While the average Viking would likely have worn his hair shoulder length, thralls had very short hair. A warrior would likely keep his beard and hair trimmed to avoid having his locks turned against him battle. The men wore linen shirts and tunics, and trouser-like garments. Women wore a shift made of linen or wool underneath a dress that was open at the sides and fastened with shoulder straps, help in place by brooches, a great ornamental favorite of the Vikings. In cold weather they wore cloaks or shawls. The women plaited their hair or put it under a headscarf. Men were bearded, and both sexes wore jewelry. According to Ibn Fadlan, the women of the Rus wore one neck ring of silver or gold for every 10,000 dirhams, or silver Arab coins, corresponding to her husband’s wealth. They were also fond of colored beads, oval brooches from which hung combs, keys, and knives.

Combs were used daily, not merely for the sake of vanity and holding off a bad hair day, but also to remove lice and vermin. The Vikings washed their hair and combed it while wet. Combs were made from bone and ivory, either from a whale or imported elephant ivory.

The Vikings had other tools used for their grooming. The earspoon, which was made from bone, ivory, silver or other metals, was used to clean ears in the days. Like many Viking items, the earspoon was decorated, which was why many women wore theirs on a chain dangling from their brooches. Women also carried tweezers in a similar fashion, showing that women were tweezing their eyebrows as far back as the Bronze Age.

Blonde-haired women had the edge in Viking society, influencing brunettes to dye their hair with the use of a strong soap containing lye which would turn hair blonde or red. An unmarried Viking maiden would wear her hair long and loose, or in braids. Once married, the hair was coiled on top of their heads and covered with a cap or veil, or gathered in a knot at the back of the head. Burial grounds from the ninth and tenth century have revealed headgear, indicating that the women of Dublin and Jorvik, who were Christian, may have been more inclined to cover their heads. But the Valkyries were not constrained by fashion: a carving done soon after the end of the Viking Age shows a Valkyrie with her hair either unbound and loose or contained simply in a ponytail.

To our modern eyes, the Vikings, along with most of Europe in the Dark Ages, seem rough and rude in their lifestyles, but strangely enough, the Vikings had a strong sense of esthetics. Their swords were well made and functional but the Vikings made them things of beauty by adorning them with jewelry and in scripting them with runes. Interestingly enough, according to Yale’s Professor Winroth, Christianity may owe an incredible debt to Viking artistry; the pious monks who created the illuminated manuscripts that are one of the Middle Ages’ most prized achievements adopted decorating motifs created by the pagan Vikings.

Viking Government

The Scandinavian rulers in the eighth century were not national figures; chieftains were the high-ranking members of society until the monarchy. However, by the time the Viking Age ended, individual kings had managed to consolidate their control over extended boundaries, giving them a more prominent role in sovereignty but also more responsibility. It’s one thing to protect the borders of one’s own area, but a national leader is called upon to defend borders potentially far from his own center of power. Kings, in one sense, worked for their crown. They were not royal in the sense of a birthright; they had earned their title by their abilities which would often include not only battle skills but also ruthlessness. A king did not necessarily win his title by paternity; the title could be inherited but it could also be bestowed upon him by supporters with influence.

Vikings enjoyed a structured form of government known as the Thing, which was the source of legislative and judicial powers. It was the duty of every freeman to attend the Thing common meetings unless they farmed on their own without help and could not leave their farm unattended. Women were also allowed to attend although they did not have an official responsibility to do so. The Thing was quite an event. During these meetings, which could last several days, there would be a festival, a marketplace; and a king might be elected. Although the Vikings did not have a written code of law, the Thing opened with an oral reading of the laws which had been memorized by the lovsigemann or “law reader man.” Because the laws were memorized, no one could change them and it was the responsibility of free men to uphold and respect the law, no matter their rank. Part of that respect was shown in grooming: the poet Havamal writes, “Well groomed and washed . . . wend to the Thing, though they clothes be not the best; of they shoes and breeks . . . be not ashamed, and still less of they steed.”

Vignettes of the Viking Age: Runes

Runes served as the first systems of writing used by Germanic peoples. The Viking alphabet, the futhark, had 16 letters or runes, made of straight and diagonal lines, carved into wood or stone. In the later Viking Age, people wrote on sheep or calf skin.

The runes had a mystical provenance which makes the humble alphabet seem mundane. Each rune was a symbol of a principle: to write a rune was to direct the force which represented the rune. Known as the futharks after the first six runes, the 16 character younger futhark replaced the elder alphabet around 750. The earliest runic inscription was found circa 50; it was manufactured in the north of what is today Germany. There is some uncertainty about whether this early example of runes actually owes its origins to runic roots or whether its derivation is, in fact, Roman. The earliest known carving of a full futhark dates from 400 and is found on the Kylver stone from Gotland Sweden. The ancient Norse did not regard the runes as having been invented. They pre-existed Odin, and retained the aura of power and mystery which Odin himself conveyed.

Chapter Five

The Vikings Reach New Frontiers

In a time when people did very little traveling, preferring the familiarity of their own land to the unknown territories beyond the horizon, the Vikings embraced the prospect of the brave new world. In 985 or 986, Iceland’s Bjarni Herjulfsson was on an exploration when his ship was blown off course during his trip to Greenland; he saw the coast of North American, probably catching a glimpse of Nova Scotia, but didn’t land on shore. However when he returned home to Iceland, he told his story of a forested land west of Greenland, and those tales would plant a seed in a young man named Leif Ericsson, who would himself venture away from his homeland to seek the New World.

Eric the Red

Not all of the Vikings were content with Paris, York, or Kiev. Eric the Red, born around 950, was from Norway but when his father Thorvald Asvaldsson murdered a man, the family moved to Iceland. The family must have been a hot-tempered bunch because Eric mirrored his father’s actions, killing two men, and was sentenced to banishment from Iceland for three years. Eric took his punishment in a spirit of exploration and decided to sail to the islands west of Iceland that had been discovered by Gunnbjorn Olfsson. In 982, he sailed west, founded the islands which were located off eastern Greenland, and then landed on the coast of Greenland. The land was forbidding, which might explain the name Eric gave it: Midjokull, meaning middle glacier. He kept going, sailing around the southern tip of Greenland, and wintering on the southwestern coast to spend the winter. For the following two winters, he spent his time exploring the southern tip of Greenland.

When his banishment ended, he returned home to Iceland, and with a public relations flair that would have made him a natural for any modern-day advertising agency, he named his discovery Greenland, despite the fact that the newfound land was actually icier than his homeland. There was a reason for his colorful camouflage: Eric was bickering with his neighbors and was eager to settle somewhere else where he wouldn’t have to deal with his foes. He must have been extremely persuasive, because in 986 he left Iceland with 14 ships carrying between 400 and 500 people willing to settle in this “green” land that Eric had praised. Things went well for a time, and perhaps Eric’s choleric temperament was otherwise engaged as he dealt with the challenges of colonizing a harsh land. Eric himself died, fittingly enough in winter, in either 1003 or 1004.

But when a season of particularly and unusually forbidding weather came, some of the settlers returned home. There’s no record of what happened to the settlers who stayed in Greenland. Historians believe they were attacked by the native Inuit or died from starvation and disease. However the settlement survived for a long time, according to the evidence, which shows that the last recorded voyage between Iceland and Greenland was in 1410. By then, the world was a very different place, but the Vikings had left a lasting imprint on the world they had dominated for centuries.

Leif Ericsson

The spirit of adventure and a taste for seeing the world must have been in the family DNA. Eric’s son Leif Ericsson, known as Leif the lucky, born around 980, followed his father’s example, heading even farther from familiar territory. In the year 1000, he headed north from Greenland’s southern tip then traveled south along the coast of Baffin Island to Labrador, landing in what he called Vinland because of an abundance of wild grapes that he saw, but what is today known as Newfoundland. Leif followed the path of Icelandic explorer Bjarni Herjulfsson, sailing for North America in 1000 with a crew of 3 and reaching Vinland in 1001, making Leif the first European to sail to North America. In 1002, Ericsson returned to Greenland, where he succeeded his father Eric as leader of the colony after Eric’s death.

Vikings in Russia and Arab Lands

The Vikings who struck out for new lands were in uncharted territory. The Vikings who headed to England, Scotland, Ireland, and France to trade and plunder found easy pickings upon settled lands. But the Vikings who built trade routes to Russia and Central Asia were masters at commerce who developed a remarkable business network, not through fear but through the timeless business axiom of keeping the customer satisfied.

Baghdad was a far cry from the rustic lands to which the Vikings were accustomed. The Arabs were also expert traders. They were the ones who called the men of the North not Vikings but the Rus. It’s because of the Arab accounts that the Viking influence in the East is known to us. Ibn Fadlan, writing in the ninth century, recorded his dealings with the Rus in his Risala or Letter. Unlike the monks of Western Europe, who regarded the Vikings as rapacious scourges sent by God as divine punishment, the Muslim accounts were not emotional and therefore are regarded as a more reliable account of that historical period. The trade was a profitable and popular one or both sides. The Arab coin known as the dirham was lucrative because, for the Vikings, silver was a choice currency lacking in their home territory. The coinage was available in the Volga region so that Vikings simply “followed the money.”

The rivers of Russia were uncharted but that didn’t impede the Vikings; they continued their travels until they reach the eastern trade centers. By the ninth century, Ibn Khurradadhbih was writing about the fair-haired Europeans who brought swords and furs to the Black Sea. The Arabs prized the furs, which they used to make caps and coats of sable, Siberian squirrel, fox, ermine, marten, weasel, and hare. But the Rus traders also had honey, goat skins, swords, acorns, armor, wax, birch bark, hazelnuts, cattle, and amber to sell. Rus swords, were highly valued, according to one contemporary account, “for their sharpness and excellence.” Another valued trading item were the slaves that the Rus sold in a commercial network that stretched from Spain all the way to Egypt.

Much of what’s known about the Rus comes from the secretary of a delegation that the Caliph al-Muqtadir sent to the king of the Bulgars who sought instruction in Islam and assistance in the building of a fort and a mosque. The secretary, Ibn Fadlan and his delegation traveled 2500 miles in response to the Caliph’s order, and there was much to record. Approximately one-fifth of Risala is devoted to his observations of the Rus. He wrote, “I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy. Each man has an axe, a sword, and a knife and keeps each by him at all times.”

But the world that the Vikings knew, and to a large part, owned, was changing. England’s political destiny was about to undergo a dramatic shift which would forever change the dynastic structure of the monarchy. The Vikings were facing a time when their power and their nature would be transformed as well.

Book #3

The End of the Viking Age

Chapter One

The Legacy of Alfred the Great

The Vikings of Scandinavia had come a long way, both in terms of miles and in perception, since their first forays into England in the waning years of the eighth century. For the next two hundred years, in addition to enduring disease, poverty, and the ongoing wars between neighboring kings, the natives of Europe had to endure the raiding, and the then raiding-and-staying Vikings who attacked at will but instead of leaving, treated the plundered country as their winter home. As the Vikings built outposts in their conquered territory, they began to stay in those settlements rather than return home. By the dawn of the eleventh century, the terrors of the North who had devastated the monastery at Lindisfarne had been contained to the Danelaw, the region that was ceded to them after Anglo-Saxon Alfred the Great and Danish chieftain Guthrum signed a treaty to bring peace to the island.The Viking reign of terror, after generations of dominating a collection of weak states, was over. And yet, they were not really conquered. What did that mean for the Viking invaders who had become Scandinavian immigrants?

Peace for the Dark Ages was a relative term, but even monarchs would settle for what they could get when it came to dealing with the Viking invaders, using whatever means were at hand. In the case of King Alfred the Great, victory meant first defining borders that would contain the Vikings and second, being able to enforce those boundaries to avoid further incursions onto home turf. Following the Anglo-Saxon victory at the Battle of Edington, the Vikings accepted terms that gave them the territory in England that would be known as the Danelaw, which included the region north of England to Bedford and Chester. The Vikings were no stranger to the geography, so the treaty was as interested in pragmatism as it was in peace. The region now called Yorkshire, or as it was known when the Vikings dwelled there, Jorvik, was dominated by the Norse from late in the ninth century through the first half of the tenth century.

York had enjoyed a diverse history, founded by the Romans and then, after the legions left, it was turned into a trading port for the Anglo-Saxons. When the Great Heathen Army invaded England in 866, Viking leader Ivar the Boneless and his forces captured the region. The kingdom of Northumbria was under Viking control and the Norsemen who ruled it would be known as the kings of Jorvik. The Viking coinage was minted at the city of York, demonstrating the economic influence which the trading Scandinavians brought to their new home. The city’s importance was both real and symbolic, and any business between the opposition forces would have to address whether Jorvik would be Danish or English.

Although the Danes had their realm and their center of power, they remained a threat to the Anglo-Saxons, alert for any sign of weakness that would allow them to once again vanquish the English monarchs. Alfred continued to face their raiding, but under Alfred these would be skirmishes rather than battles. When the Vikings attacked Rochester and besieged the city, Alfred’s Anglo-Saxon troops forced the Vikings to flee. The Anglo-Saxons were, however, defeated when their ships met Vikings at the mouth of the River Stour. The tension between the two sides continued for several years, but when Alfred obstructed the River Thames to prevent the Vikings from using it to reach London, the Vikings returned home.

But in 886, Alfred reoccupied London, adding fortifications and redesigning the street layout. It was during this time that the King of Wessex became known as the King of England, ruling over the Saxons, although it was not a title he used. However, his achievements received attention from Pope Marinus in Rome. Alfred was known for his devout Christian faith and his support of education, and his achievements and his faith were rewarded when Pope Marinus gave the Anglo-Saxon king gifts that were said to include a piece of the true cross upon which Jesus Christ had been crucified. The Viking raids had had a severe effect on the advance of education, so much so that Alfred wrote “learning had declined so thoroughly in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could understand their divine services in English.” It’s true that the production of manuscripts had fallen off in the middle of the ninth century; many manuscripts had been burned by the Vikings and the manuscript copying would not resume in earnest until near the century’s end.

As long as the Vikings heeded the treaty, there was time for the educated and talented Alfred to focus on administrative issues instead of constant warfare. For a time there was peace. But the death of Guthrum in 888 changed the political landscape. In 892 or 893, a group of Danes, along with their wives and children and 330 ships, left Denmark for Kent. It was up to Alfred’s son Edward to defeat the Danish force. Northumbria, East Anglia, or even back home to Denmark.

Vignettes from the Viking Age

When the daughter of Alfred the Great married Aethelred, Lord of the Mercians, she was following in the traditional role of royal princesses. But when her husband died in 911, Aethelflaed ruled Mercia. She had inherited some of her father’s abilities, proven when she built a fortress in 910 and established garrisons in Hereford and Gloucester. Her title was not honorary; she is credited with being a skilled tactician and military leader. Historian Frank Stenton makes that claim that her brother’s reign as king of England was all the more successful because he was able to rely upon his sister. In order to avenge the murder of an abbot, she led an expedition to Wales and captured the wife of the Brycheiniog king. Edward failed to show gratitude, however; when his sister died and her daughter Aelfwynn succeeded her, Edward deposed his niece and took control of Mercia.

Alfred died in 899 and was succeeded by his son Edward who also ruled Mercia after his sister, who had ruled there in her own right, died in 918. In 917, he had captured East Anglia and the eastern Midlands from the Vikings. Although records of the time assert his rule over all of England, the city of York continued to mint its own coins, indicating that the island continued to host both Anglo-Saxon and Danish realms.

The Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons might have forged wary alliances throughout their long geographical cohabitation, but they adopted a policy which was common for centuries to come, one which would use marriage as a way of cementing ties. In 926, Alfred’s grandson, Aethelstan, married his sister to Sihtric, the Norse king of York. Sihric died a year later and was succeeded by the son of his first marriage, Olaf, who was an ally of the king of Dublin, and uncle to the heir. Aethelstan saw trouble on the horizon, so he decided to be proactive by seizing York and razing its fortifications. A brief period of peace ensued, but not for long.

The landscape of the British Isles continued to incite conflict. In 934, the English King Aethelstan invaded Scotland. He may have had just cause to do so because it’s possible that a peace treaty had been violated by the Scottish king Constantine II. Aethelstan brought with him a large army and if his efforts were to be repulsed, Constantine realized that he would need help. That help came from the king of Dublin, Olaf Guthfrithson, who according to one source was the father-in-law of the Scottish king, and Owen, the king of Strathclyde. The new allies were former enemies, but the need to defeat Aethelstan was stronger than their enmity. Olaf’s army, which according to the monk Simeon of Durham included 615 ships (a claim doubted by modern-day historians) joined the forces of Constantine in 937 after crossing the Irish sea. Aethelstan, his brother Edmund, and his army out of Wessex and Mercia met their foes in the daylong Battle of Brunanburh. The Anglo-Saxons cut through the shield wall and overran the alliance forces whose efforts to find refuge in trenches fortified with timber were a failure.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle trumpeted the English victory with a poem that included the line “never yet as many people killed before this with sword’s edge . . . since from the east Angles and Saxons came up over the broad sea.” The historian Aethelweard, writing near the end of the 10th century, evaluated the battle victory at Brunanburh in terms of its results, saying that “the fields of Britain were consolidated into one; there was peace everywhere, and abundance of all things.”

Constantine escaped back to Scotland and Olaf returned to Dublin, Aethelstan and Edmund returned in triumph to Wessex, and the fate of Owen is not recorded. The casualties were considerable: in addition to the soldiers who died, Constantine lost family members including his son; Olaf’s army saw the spilling of royal blood; and two of Aethelstan’s cousins, Alfric and Aethelwin, perished. Fighting for land in those days was a family affair with the survival of the family in many cases depending upon military victory. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle lamented the royal deaths: “Five kings lay on the field of battle, in bloom of youth, pierced with swords. Soseven eke of the earls of Anlaf, and of the ship’s-crew unnumber’d crowds.”

Before the battle, England was a nation with a surplus of kings and nobles eager for power. Scotland’s two kingdoms were Alba and Strathclyde. Geography was changed with the changing tide of battle. The English victory maintained the union of England. Historians regard this battle as the greatest single battle in Anglo-Saxon history before 1066 and the Battle of Hastings. Its significance rests in its results rather than its location, because no one knows exactly where the battle took place. A plausible candidate for the site of the battle is Bromborough, a village on the Wirral, but other possibilities suggested by historians include Shropshire, South Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Northamptonshire. Wherever it took place is unimportant. Its significance ranks it with a battle which was soon to come—the Battle of Hastings—because it redefined the nations who called Britain their home. English military forces under and after Alfred were more successful at keeping the Scots to the west and the Danes to the north. A united island nation consisting of Wessex and Mercia had staying power and was able to maintain its borders against the Scots and Welsh.

One historian describes this battle as the “moment when Englishness came of age” but for Aethelstan, the victory did not have the consequences he intended. His power declined and when he died without an heir at the age of 45, his brother Edmund became king and the watchful Olaf in Dublin saw an opportunity. He invaded York, the famed stronghold of the Vikings, and in 939, the year that Aethelstan died, was able to force Edmund to agree to a treaty that surrendered Northumbria as well as parts of Mercia. This attack re-established York and Dublin as a united kingdom under Viking control. His victory was recognized in the minting of a silver penny minted at York; its inscription is in Old Norse and depicts a raven, a bird associated with the Norse god Odin. Even the coinage, in those days, reflected the seesaw of religious loyalties which continued to show itself between Christians and pagans.

In 940, Olaf invaded Mercia and East Anglia. After mediation by the archbishops of York and Canterbury, Edmund was forced to surrender land in Lincolnshire and the southeast Midlands. In some ways, the borders and boundaries of these contested lands were established as much by the Grim Reaper as by military might; when Olaf died in 942, Edmund reclaimed the territory south of the Humber River, driving the Vikings out of York. In 944, he took Northumbria back by driving out Kings Olaf Sihtricson and Raegnald, who were Norse. When he captured Strathclyde in 945, he allowed the Scottish King Malcolm I to rule it in exchange for Malcolm’s military support.

Learning and diplomacy may have been family attributes. Edmund worked to diminish the feuding that made conflict so prevalent, and under his rule, the monasteries enjoyed a revival in England. But in 946, King Edmund I was murdered at the age of 25 in his own palace by a robber, leaving the throne to his brother Eadred because the heirs were too young, England was a united land. But as usual, trouble was on its way.

The trouble would come from Norway, when Norwegian Eric Bloodaxe ventured into Northumbria. As a youth, his courage and strength, those prized Norse traits, were impressive. He had spent years in a seafaring role, traveling along the coasts of Denmark, Germany and Frisia, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, then France. He also sailed up the Dvina River to raid the trading port at Permina.There’s not a lot of historical information available about the Dane with the name that seems designed for Viking conquest, but evidence indicates that he was also the king of Norway in addition to ruling Northumbria. He did not win the throne by inheritance, however. Somewhere along the way, Eric managed to claim the succession to the throne by disposing of his brothers. His serial fratricide is the reason given for the nickname of “Bloodaxe.”

His reign as the Norwegian king ended when his younger, surviving brother Hakon declared himself king. Hakon had been reared in England at King Aethelstan’s court; the king was known for his habit of fostering royal sons and forging alliances. Aethalstan supported Hakon’s claim, the Norwegians did not like Eric, and when Hakon sailed home to the kingship, Eric left and went to England. That seems like an unlikely response from a Viking, but through his life, Eric, more than once, ran away so that he could live to fight another day.

The English had the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Norse had their sagas and according to the bards, Eric was welcomed in England by the king who had supported his brother’s claim to Norway’s throne. Eric, the sagas assert, was made a ruler of Northumbria with Aethelstan’s blessing and authority. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other sources say that Eric became king of Northumbria after Aethelstan’s death.

During his life, Aethalstan sought alliances with his neighbors and he rewarded them for their military support. Eric became the king when the Northumbrians drove out King Olaf Guthfrithsson, but, just as had been the case in Norway, he failed to win the affection of the people. They kicked him out of the kingdom and he was later killed in battle, York and Northumbria were lost to the Norse and the Northumbrians acknowledged Eadred as king. The line of Eric Bloodaxe would not lose its lustre, however; his sons would rise to the throne of Norway. Eric’s exploits would long be a favorite subject of the Norse sagas; what audience could resist learning about a man whose name and job description were so completely aligned?

Chapter Two

The Vikings Return to Power

A period of relative peace ensued during the reigns of the Anglo-Saxon kings from 955-975, but when Edgar the Peaceable died in 975, two branches of the ruling family sought the throne. Trouble in England was historically a siren call to Viking adventurers who knew how to exploit a nation in turmoil. One Anglo-Saxon claimant, Edward the Martyr, won, but was murdered not long after, when the rival Aethelred became king. Aethelred II ruled for 37 years but the reign was far from successful. His name, Aethelred the Unready refers to the lack of wise advisors who could counsel him well at a time when sage guidance could have meant the difference between a stable throne and one at risk. Because the Vikings were poised once again to invade, Aethelred needed better advice than he received.

The Viking armies of this time, led by the king of Denmark, were well trained and supported by raiding bands, also well trained, who operated under independent chieftains. The new Viking invasions presented a powerful new threat to England, which had thought itself free of the fear of the Norsemen. In 980, when the Vikings invaded, Aethelred displayed the expected traits of a warrior king and by 988, the Viking campaign was defeated with a battle at Maldon in Essex. Aethelred signed a treaty with the Duke of Normandy in 991. Vikings had been finding shelter in Normandy for some time, but the Duke agreed that he would no longer support the Vikings who went to his duchy for aid. The Duke’s sister, Emma of Normandy, was given to Aethelred in marriage as the political seal to the deal.

But in the same year a major defeat for the English was in store when Byrthnoth, leading the English, was forced to allow Olaf Tryggvason of the Vikings to leave the island where they were encamped to fight a pitched battle. Byrthnoth had few options because the Vikings had come with their fleet and the English leader, although his acquiescence doomed his forces to defeat, had no way of cutting them off from an easy retreat. Hs options: to fight the Vikings on equal grounds or permit them to sail away and continue their raids before he could pursue them.

Evidence indicates that the English plans were revealed to the Vikings by the ealdorman of Hampshire. Aethelstan retaliated by having the ealdorman’s son blinded. Aethelred paid Danegeld, or 10,000 pounds of silver, to the Vikings as advised by Sigeric, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

All was not smooth among the Vikings. Olaf Tryggvason, who had accompanied Denmark’s King Sweyn on his first English campaign in 994, had become a Christian as part of his treaty with Aethelstan and switched sides, fighting against the Danes and not with them or for them. The 994 campaign, however, was worthwhile, with the Danes accepting tribute rather than conquest. The Vikings were paid Danegeld in 1002, 1007 and 1012.

In 1011, Vikings held St. Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury for ransom but he refused to allow a ransom to be paid by the residents of Kent because they had already paid so much in tribute. His courage was admirable but his death was inevitable, and he was subsequently murdered the next year. But Christianity had made inroads by this time among the Vikings and King Sweyn had been raised as a Christian. Thorkell the Tall, who had been the chief Viking leader after Sweyn, was revolted by the murder of the cleric and switched allegiance, bringing his 40 ships with their warriors to the service of King Aethelred, who was not only a Christian but paid well.

Sweyn was a Christian, but he was a warrior and a king. He attacked in 1013, forcing Aethelred to flee to Normandy with his family. Sweyn seized the opportunity and took the throne. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “all England received him as king.” His reign was brief. When he died in 1014, he left two kingdoms to be ruled by his two sons. Harold became the king of Denmark and Cnut was intended to receive the English throne. But when Sweyn died, the throne was contested: the Vikings and the people of the Danelaw elected Cnut, Sweyn’s son, as king, but the English Witenagemot summoned Aethelred back from Normandy. Accompanying him was his wife, Emma of Normandy.

A regime change was not in Cnut’s plans. He assembled a large fleet of around 200 ships with 10,000 troops, and was joined by his brother-in-law Earl Erik of Lade, a man with experience in both warfare and governing. Thorkell joined Cnut’s forces, as did Eadric Streona and his 40 ships, which gave Cnut control of Wessex.

Although Aethelred returned to England, he fell ill and died. His sons by Emma would not inherit until the sons from Aethelred’s first wife, beginning with Edmund Ironside, took their place in the inheritance. Edmund Ironside sought an alliance with Earl Uhtred of Northumbria. It was a bad move for the Earl; Cnut had him murdered. The Northumbrians maintained loyalty to Cnut and accepted another candidate, Earl Erik, as their earl, just as Cnut suggested. When Edmund Ironside became king, Eadric Streona switched sides. But Edmund was defeated by Cnut at the Battle of Ashingdon in Essex. Each side suffered greatly and the two kings accepted a division of the kingdom: Edmund remained king of Wessex, Cnut was given the territory north of the Thames.

Then mortality, always a member of the cast in the Middle Ages, struck, and Edmund died sooner than he had expected. Although murder, also no stranger to the era, was suspected, there’s no evidence that Edmund Ironside’s death was a homicide. Cnut was crowned king of all of England. One of his first acts was to execute the fair-weather traitor Eadred, whose switching sides at Ashingdon likely affected the battle outcome. Several important Anglo-Saxon nobles were also killed as Cnut cleaned house to strengthen his claim to the throne.

In England, a Viking was king. In Ireland, the Irish were fighting back against the Norse, who had begun raiding late in the eighth century. The Vikings had first built settlements along the coast, but by 838, they had created a fortified area in Dublin. The Annals of Ulster wrote in 841: “Pagans still on lough Neagh.” Although there had been a settlement on the site where Dublin was established one thousand years before the Romans, the year 988 is recognized as the official founding date. In the tenth century, Dublin was a kingdom and a Viking one at that. Dublin was thriving under Viking dominance and the Vikings succumbed, as did their kinsmen in England, to the local customs, creating a Norse-Gaelic society. The Irish were not docile under the dominance of the Vikings and it was at this time that the legendary Brian Boru made his appearance on behalf of the Irish.

Vignettes from the Viking Age: Battle of Clontarf

In Ireland, mythology is quite comfortable when it’s placed side-by-side with history. That’s the case with the Battle of Clontarf, which took place in 1014. High King of Ireland Brian Boru met the combined forces of Dublin’s Norse King Sigtrygg Silkbeard, Leinster’s King Mael Morda mac Murchada, and Vikings Sigurd of Orkney and Brodir of Mann. The battle, which lasted from dawn until sunset, took the lives of between 7,000 and 10,000 men, but in the end, the Irish won and the Vikings were defeated. The casualties were high and highborn; the Viking leaders, the king of Leinster, Brian Boru, his son and grandson all died. However, the battle freed the Irish from the foreign rule of the Vikings.

Chapter Three

The Viking King of England

Cnut was described as being tall and strong and handsome (except for a thin, high-set, hooked nose) with a fair complexion and a thick head of hair, and better-than-average eyesight. But until he accompanied his father on the invasion of England, his history is mainly conjecture and legend. He was crowned king of England on Christmas Day in 1016 and would rule as king over the land that his Viking ancestors had plundered for generations. His domain was a significant one, described as the North Sea Empire, that included not only the England he’d acquired but also Denmark and Norway. He was not a bad king; his laws and leadership brought peace to the country. Under his rule, the country was protected from Viking raids, and with peace came prosperity.

Sentiment had no place in the brutal world of pragmatic medieval politics. Cnut married the widow of King Aethelred. Emma of Normandy, no novice to marriage as a means of diplomatic alliance, was a person of note. She’s the first of the early medieval queens to have been commemorated by a painted portrait and no one can deny that Emma of Normandy deserved this distinction. While she was a typical royal wife during her marriage to England’s Aethelred, she gained more influence as the queen of Cnut. She was also wealthy, with lands in the East Midlands and Wessex.

Emma’s marrying up made the lineage one of dispute but she’s credited with saving her sons’ lives by her marriage to her dead husband’s rival. While her marriage to Cnut was being arranged, she attempted to maintain Anglo-Saxon control of London. What was it like to be the widow of one king, the bride of another, in such a tangled political environment? After her marriage, she did not adopt a prominent role in the initial years, but around 1020, as she became a supporter of the clergy, her links to ecclesiastical people of importance strengthened Cnut’s claim to the throne. The marriage with Cnut, which began for political reasons, turned into one of affection. The couple had two children, a son Harthacnut and a daughter Gunhilda.

In 1036, Emma’s sons by Aethelred, Alfred Aetheling and Edward the Confessor, came to England to visit Emma, under the protection of their half-brother Harthacnut. But Alfred was captured and tortured, blinded with a hot iron held to his eyes and later dying of his wounds. Edward escaped again to Normandy. Emma blamed Harold Harefoot, Cnut’s youngest son by his first wife Aelgifu of Northampton, for her son’s capture, suspecting him of planning to get rid of two rivals to the throne. Some scholars speculate that Godwin, the powerful Earl of Wessex who was traveling with the royal sons as their protector, might have been the guilty party.

Cnut continued to consolidate his kingship by executing English noblemen who had aroused his suspicions. By accounts, Cnut proved to be an effective and successful king. The kingdom was so secure that in 1018, Cnut sent his Danish army home to Denmark, paying off his fleet with 72,000 pounds of silver in Danegeld collected from the English with an additional 10,500 pounds from London. For his own defenses, Cnut retained 40 ships which also provided his bodyguard. The Danes and the English agreed to accept the laws of King Edgar as the foundation of their legal relationship, laws which were drafted into a legal code by Archbishop Wulfstan.

It may say something about Cnut that, as with Alfred, a famous story has arisen that tells us something about the nature of the king. Cnut knew his power. But he also knew his limitations. It’s likely that members of his court were given to flattery and perhaps the king was wise enough to recognize the ploy. According to the story written by Henry of Huntingdon, who lived within 60 years of Cnut’s death, the king gave orders that his chair was to be carried to the shore. When he arrived, he ordered the waves not to break upon the land. The waves, of course, disregarded his command. The king declared that the power of a monarch was empty and worthless, and only God was king, and God’s will was the only one that the heavens, the earth, and the sea would obey.

By the time of Cnut’s death in 1035, his reign was on solid footing internationally; he’d negotiated with the Pope as a Christian and was recognized as an equal by the Holy Roman Emperor. Coin minting achieved a high level of quality, stabilizing the country economically. Under Cnut, education for the English was advanced outside of the monastic structure. England under Cnut was part of an empire that included Denmark, Norway and even part of Sweden. In some ways, he seemed to share many traits with his Anglo-Saxon predecessor, Alfred the Great. And as with Alfred, there was peace for a time.

Peace didn’t last long in those years. Thanks to her fertile marriages to the two successive kings, Emma, by either line, was the mother of the potential heir. Harold I ruled England from 1035 to 1040, when Cnut’s second son Harthacnut ruled for the next two years. Aethelred’s son Edward the Confessor gained the throne in 1042, making England once again an Anglo-Saxon realm.

Vignettes from the Viking Age: Encomium Emmae Reginae

Written in 1041 or 1042, the encomium is a manuscript written in honor of Queen Emma of Normandy. It’s believed to have been written by a monk of St. Omer, inspired by the political situation which had arisen in England. It was commissioned by Queen Emma and is a medieval attempt at public relations, focusing on her second marriage to Cnut, and blaming Harold the son of Cnut and his first wife, Aelgifu, as the murderer of Emma’s son Alfred by Aethelred. The Encomium does not pretend to be an unbiased historical account; nonetheless, it’s a valuable reference for the history of England and Scandinavia in the early 11th century. The work is divided into three books: the first addresses the conquest of England by Sweyn Forkbeard, Cnut’s father. The second concerns his sons’ reconquest of England, his marriage to Aethelred’s widow and his rule. The third book, which takes place after Cnut’s death, concerns the problems Emma faced when Harold Harefoot was king, and then the accession of her sons Harthacnut by Canute, and Edward the Confessor by Aethelred, to the English throne.

The Norman Conquest

In 1066, the history of England changed dramatically. William the Conqueror, a descendant of the famed Rollo who had accepted the duchy of Normandy in exchange for becoming the vassal of the Frankish king, invaded England, defeating Harold Godwinson, the Anglo-Saxon king. The road to the Conqueror’s kingship was a tangled one on the English side.

When Edward the Confessor died without an heir in 1066, there was no shortage of claimants to the throne. Harold defeated two of his rivals at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, but William landed in England on September 28, just eight days after the battle, forcing Godwinson to swiftly head to the south. The English army numbered approximately 7,000; William had 10,000. But William also had archers, those men skilled with the bow whose prowess would prove vital in future wars. The battle began in the morning and ended at dusk. The English fared well at first and the Normans were unable to break their lines. But when the Normans adopted the tactic of feigning flight and then turning on the pursuing English, the tide turned. Harold was killed and the army was defeated. It’s estimated by historians that approximately 2,000 Normans were killed in battle, and around 4,000 Anglo-Saxons. Grateful for his victory, or perhaps just a shrewd leader who knew he faced obstacles ahead, William founded a monastery on the battle site, reputed to be on the site of Harold’s death.

On Christmas Day, 1066, William the Conqueror was crowned the king of England. The era of the Vikings was ended. Or was it?

Chapter Four

The Legacy of the Vikings

In 793, the Vikings were the dreaded invaders. By the time of the Norman Conquest, the Vikings were the neighbors next door. The Vikings had runes, but they didn’t have recorded history, which left them without scribes who could record their incredible feats. They built the first ships that crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and were the first Europeans to land in North America. They also traveled farther inland into Western Europe than their contemporaries, thanks to their extraordinary navigational skills and intrepid exploring courage. Archeologists who are excavating Viking burial grounds are discovering more and more evidence that the Vikings, once considered the barbarians of Europe, were actually empire-builders who, for almost 300 years, dominated the European continent through expert trading and effective raiding.

Archeologist William Fitzhugh reminds us that part of the reason for the Viking reputation comes from the perspective of the people who were reporting the events. The early accounts came from the church or reports to kings. “Only in the past 20 years or so have archeological and other studies begun to provide information that fleshes out and in some cases contradicts or even replaces the historical record. These findings are giving us a totally different view of the Vikings We see them archeologically not as raiders and pillagers but as entrepreneurs, traders, people opening up new avenues of commerce, bringing new materials into Scandinavia, spreading Scandinavian ideas into Europe.”

In some ways, the Vikings benefit from a clearly defined timeline. The raid on Lindisfarne in 793 is accepted as the beginning of the Viking Age. The year 1066 brings the Viking Age to a conclusion. A lot happened in 1066, but don’t fast forward to Norman rule without taking a brief look at genealogy. In 1066, Harald Hardrada, the king of Norway, was intent on conquering England, but he was defeated and killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge by England’s King Harold Godwinson. But another battle loomed for Harold Godwinson at Hastings, where Normandy’s William the Conqueror, the descendant of the famed Rollo the Walker, defeated the Anglo-Saxon army and became king of England. Once again, the Vikings had extended their boundaries and their power.

The Vikings in Britain

Beginning in 900, the Vikings who had found northern Scotland to their liking were ruling the Orkney and Shetland Islands and Hebrides islands and the Isle of Man. Dublin, Ireland, owes its founding to the Vikings. The country of Wales, however, must not have found favor with the Vikings, because few of the Norsemen settled there.

The Vikings who left home settled into their new surrounds and took root. They intermarried with the local girls. Researchers at the Universities of Leicester and Nottingham found that as much as half the DNA from men in Northwest England matches the genetic types of Scandinavian. Although a conquering power may wane, it leaves its mark, and this is true of the Vikings. Intermarriage and adoption of the customs that were absorbed by the natives all contribute to the lasting influence of the Vikings. The Vikings in Ireland married the local girls as well and adopted their traditions and religion, as did the Danes in the Danelaw.

Throughout their domination, the Vikings had not always lived as an occupying force. They had established outposts in England, they held the right to territory under the Danelaw, they had even seen one of their own as king of England. While the era of plunder and pillage may have come to an end, it maybe is more accurate to say that England and the Vikings between them created a hybrid nation which absorbed the strengths of the other entity as part of nation building. It’s fair to say that, when the Age of the Vikings ended, it did so with a bang. The reign of King Cnut in England oversaw a realm that was described as the North Sea Empire.

The conquest of England by the Normans was more an extension of Viking influence than a defeat to the Vikings. Normandy had, since Rollo in the previous century, been an enclave of assimilated Vikings. When Edward, the son of Aethelred and Emma, was in exile in Normandy in the court of his uncle Richard II, his presence encouraged Norman interest in the kingdom across the Channel. The Normans supported him and when he ruled in England, his court had a strong Norman presence in the form of clerics, soldiers, and courtiers who assumed high positions. It’s believed that Edward may have encouraged William, who was his kinsman, to seek power in England after Edward’s death.

The Vikings in Scotland

The Vikings settled in Scotland but an absence of written records means that the details of their assimilation are not defined. However surviving place names reveal that the Norwegians settled in the Orkneys, Shetlands, and the mainland of Caithness and Sutherland.

But a significant result of Viking settling is the disappearance of the Picts, which in the eighth century had been a power to be reckoned with in Britain. But the end of the ninth century, they were gone, replaced by the Scots, who were the descendants of the Irish immigrants from the fifth and sixth centuries. The Scots were energetic in their efforts to make themselves the kings of the northern region of Britain, known as Alba. They linked their identity with the Picts, while at the same time trading on the fame of St. Columba, regarded by the Scots as the apostle to the people of the north.

The Vikings in Europe

It would be a mistake to assume that the main area of Viking influence was in England, Scotland and Wales. Europe knew the Vikings, who through trading and raiding made an indelible impression on the continent. The mighty Charlemagne created an empire that sought to emulate Rome; while that would have been a difficult task for any leader, the Vikings made sure that it didn’t happen. As early as 834, they raided Dorested, which was part of the empire Charlemagne created. Their conquest continued and by 911, the cities which had been part of the Carolingian Empire, including Rouen, Paris, Nantes, Bordeaux, and Hamburg as well as Dorested, were under Viking control.

The middle of the ninth century saw the Vikings in Russia and founding Kiev and Novgorod. In 988, when the Byzantine Emperor Basel II faced the invaders, he asked for help from Vladimir of Kiev, a prince of Norse origins, for help in defending his realm. Vladimir sent 6,000 Vikings to Basel’s aid and those troops became part of an elite military force for the Byzantine Empire.

When the Roman Empire fell in the west, the Eastern Empire, with Constantinople as its center of power, remained. But the city was besieged by the Vikings in 860. There was plundering, burning, and slaughter, the standard Viking technique for success. The raids went on for 200 years.

The Vikings in North America

The masters of the nautical realm were not content to stay close to the shores of Europe. Around the year 1000, a Viking settlement was founded in North America. The settlement didn’t thrive, but it demonstrated that, over four hundred years before the celebrated Christopher Columbus, the Norsemen had planted a Scandinavian footprint on the New World.

In 986, 24 ships set out for Greenland under Eric the Red’s leadership but only 14 arrived because the others were lost at sea or forced to return home. But the 400 settlers who made it to shore created a community with dairy farms, churches, a monastery and a convent, as well as a cathedral. The population of the settlement may have increased to 5,000 at its peak.

Viking exploration in North America has too often been treated as a minor footnote in the saga of the New World. But the fact that they reached sites in North America when they did, well before other explorers with more celebrated legends, says much about their courage and skill. The Greenland experiment did not last, perhaps because it lacked sufficient settlers or perhaps because it was too hard to defend, but its place in history is important. The western colony in Greenland vanished around 1350; the eastern colony lasted for 100 more years; the last record comes from 1408, with a church wedding.

An excavation in 1932 revealed the church’s remains and a great hall with fire pits where the settlers cooked their meals. It was here that the people would have listened to the sagas of the bards. Archeologists digging in 1961 found a chapel that Eric the Red had built for his wife, a Christian. Eric never renounced his belief in the Norse gods of his heritage and his wife was a faithful Christian, but apparently they declared a truce in terms of religion. The church excavation uncovered three skeletons that have led to speculation. The skeletons were located near the church wall near where the eaves would have originally been. They may have been the remains of Eric and his wife and their son Leif. Medieval belief held that bodies buried closest to a church would be the first to rise on Judgment Day.

In the 1990s, archeologists returned to excavate the lost community. They found a house made of stone and turf that dated from the colonization of Greenland. The five rooms were filled with glacial sand, and the archeologists had to dig through permafrost. But when they reached the structure, they found household possessions including whetstones, soapstones, a double-edged comb, an iron knife, fragments of looms and fabric. What the archeologists found fascinating was the weaponry that the settlers left behind, inspiring curiosity: what had driven the Greenlanders to depart so abruptly?

One theory is that the Inuit, in the year 1000, migrated down the coast and overran the community. When members of another settlement located 300 miles away assembled a military force to attack the Inuit, they found the settlement abandoned. “When they came hither, behold they found no man, neither Christian nor heathen, naught but some wild cattle and sheep,” which they brought back with them. But within another century, that community too would end.

Viking artifacts have shown up in the North American Arctic that can be dated 300 years after original voyages to Vinland. In particular, the walrus-ivory trade flourished, but Greenland’s lack of trees also inspired trading trips to what today is Labrador. Archeologist William Fitzhugh not only asserts that the Vikings were much more than their reputation indicates, but he challenges the reputation itself. “One misconception we have is that swarms of Vikings raided constantly all over the place . . . For the most part, the raids were totally independent. They were not the result of national armies or navies moving into Europe . . . generally, they were much more individualistic. They had to find food, and they couldn’t carry their food with them. They had to live off the land, so they drove people out and took whatever money and other valuable people had. And of course, the church centers and monasteries . . . constituted the major sources of wealth at that time.”

The fact that over two million Arab coins have been discovered in Viking burial sites demonstrates the incredible maritime skills of these much-maligned seafarers. Why, then, are the Vikings stereotyped merely as raiders when, in the 300 years of their influence, they controlled parts of England, Scotland, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Russia, as well as Scandinavia? If the Vikings had had a written, as well as an oral tradition, would they have been known as the Napoleon of the Middle Ages?

According to Yale’s Anders Winroth, an expert in Viking lore, the most important legacy which the Vikings left comes not from battle victories or even their trading achievements but their language. “Norse words are so embedded in modern English that we’re unaware of them, while we’re more apt to notice the French and Latin-derived words in our vocabulary. As an example, he refers to a colleague in the Yale English department who composed a sentence which, except for articles and prepositions, is entirely composed of words which originate in the Norse language: “The odd Norse loans seem an awesome window onto a gang of ungainly, rugged, angry fellows, bands of low rotten crooks winging it at the stern’s wake, sly, flawed “guests” who, craving geld, flung off their byrnies, thrusting and clipping calves and scalps with clubs.”

The Vikings who lived in the Danelaw deserve some attention for the role they played in the development of the blending Danish-English culture. Both Anglo-Saxon Old English and Viking Old Norse claim Germanic roots, and although the languages evolved differently, there were enough roots that in time the languages could merge.

Winroth also credits the Vikings with making an odd contribution to Western civilization. “I often say that the Vikings introduced the western world to death and taxes. Their raids obviously killed a lot of people, and when they attacked, Europeans realized they had to shape up to repel them. That meant kings had to raise money, and after they got what they could from the Church, they had to start taxing the people. The Norse invaders were determined to get what they wanted, and they continued to demand more and more both by threatening to strike and by kidnapping and charging enormous ransoms. Churches became impoverished. In 994 they threatened to burn down the Canterbury Cathedral unless the archbishop paid them off with a large sum of money. The archbishop, who a few decades earlier had controlled the most wealth in England at this time, had already paid them so much that he had to borrow money from another bishop.”

Winroth attributes the Vikings, thanks to their extraordinary trading empire, with the creation of money in Europe. “The Vikings, who were as much traders as marauders . . . allowed commerce to take off. Currency was not a novel idea in Western Europe, but there was as desperate lack of it since gold and silver was rare. The Norsemen introduced gold and silver from the rich Arab Caliphate. Bartering no longer needed to be the means of exchange.”

The Vikings Speak from the Ground

Approximately 150 years ago, the burial mounds of the Vikings were first being excavated. The findings were well preserved; one grave in Sweden held fragments of silk from China; in Norway, the wealthy Vikings were buried in ships which were painted in pigments that might have originated in the Middle East and India. When Dublin archeologists in the 1970s found a Viking settlement that was spread out over several acres, they discovered over 3,000 pieces of amber that likely came from Denmark. An excavation in St. Petersburgh Russia unearthed jewelry, weapons, and tools that came from houses more than a millennium old.

A common bond among burial sites so far apart is the dirham, a thin silver coin. Most of the dirham were made in Baghdad, the center of the Arab world from 750-950. The coins were stamped with the year in which they were minted. The Vikings obtained the dirhams by trading amber, ivory, furs and slaves for them. A site in Harrogate England unearthed a treasure from 927 that’s worth millions of dollars; the site included 617 coins including 15 dirhams. A Viking settlement near Gdansk Poland delivered almost 800 Arabic coins dating from 780-840. Other Arab coins have been found in France, Ireland, Iceland and Greenland. “What we’re seeing is the remnants of an extremely intricate network of barter trade,” deduces Jonathan Shephard, a historian at St. Kliment Ohrid University in Bulgaria. “It’s a weird combination of coercion and tribute side by side and intermingled with bartering.”

Although the Age of the Vikings is recorded as beginning in 793, archeology has been serving as the biography of the Norsemen, and excavations continue to enlarge the world’s knowledge of this era. That knowledge is also serving to expand the period of time during which the Vikings were exploring worlds beyond their homes.

Two ships, uncovered on Saaremaa, an Estonian island, containing the remains of warriors, are filling in some of the information gaps. The ships are believed to date from between 700-750. Scholars call this the Vendel period, a time when, so they believed, long-distance voyages were not taking place. The remains were discovered in 2008 when workers who were digging trenches for electrical cables came upon the unexpected discovery. Marge Konsa, a University of Tartu archeologist, informed the workers that the remains did not come from World War II, but from a time far before then. “This is our first taste,” Dr. Konsa said, “of the Viking Age.” Konsa recognized a spearhead and bone gaming pieces that alerted her that the find was from long ago. Most of the timber had rotted, but 275 of the iron rivets that held the boat together were still in place, which made it possible for the research team to reconstruct the boat’s outlines.

Konsa realized, when she noted that the boat would have been both fast and light, that it wasn’t a fishing boat, but a war boat. Until this find, historians had not known that the Vikings had sailed in the Baltic until 820, based on a boat that was unearthed in 1904. The nails which were found were able to date the ship. That discovery reveals that Viking expertise in sailing began even earlier than first believed. As excavations continue, we continue to learn more about the Vikings.

That archeological evidence has shown that the city of York, although established under the Romans, did not become important until the Vikings ruled over it. The findings are in good condition because the moist, peaty layers were able to preserve the organic remains of items such as leather shoes, textiles, and timber buildings, which would have been dust in most archeological sites. Also preserved in York’s Coppergate Dig were seeds, the remains of insects, plants, and bones, as well as pollen and the eggs from human parasites which provide information on the climate and health of the environment and the people who lived at that time.

A ship that was found in 2003 in a Yorkshire field included coins from Mercia’s King Burgred, Alfred the Great of Wessex, and a piece of a silver dirham from Viking trade in Baghdad. The Arab practice of imprinting the year and location in which the coin was minted has provided valuable information for both archeologists and numismatists, tracking the journeys which the coins made from their place of origin. Viking excavations in Dublin have made it possible to view the city from its Norse roots. Two hundred houses from the eleventh and twelfth centuries have been uncovered; along with the houses, fireplaces and bedding materials also were included among the findings. Excavations have shown how the men and women dressed and the jewelry that they adorned themselves with. It’s already known that Vikings paid attention to their appearance, but Dublin was a center for making combs. The combs, both single- and double-sided, were made from deer antlers and cattle horn.

In 1997, a Viking ship dating from either the ninth or tenth century was found near Vyborg, Russia. Because sections of the hull and the keel had been preserved, researchers were able to define the structure of the ship. A repair made with a small piece of cloth placed in one of the hull boards resembles the manner in which another Viking ship, this one found in 1880 in Gokstad, Norway, was repaired, demonstrating the range of exploration of the Vikings.

Vikings grab our attention as the ground in which their bodies and treasures are buried tell us more about them. The Vikings have continued to be a popular subject in universities as well as high school classrooms. The University of the Highlands and Islands’ Centre for Nordic Studies has developed a program of study which explores the manner in which the Vikings are portrayed in various media included film, comics, and music. According to Dr. Donna Heddie, who leads the course, “The Vikings have been incredibly influential in world history and culture.” Students will visit Viking sites on Orkney as part of their studies.

Chapter Five

The Vikings in Popular Culture, Then and Now

While it’s true that the Vikings neglected to provide historical records of their prowess, they were not silent on the subject of their history. But the Vikings chose to be entertained rather than instructed and their sagas supply rich detail about Norse culture and psychology. Historians and admirers of Norse culture are indebted to the sagas which were written during the 13th and 14 centuries. A saga, which is believed to mean “what is told,” is a narrative written in poetry or prose which relates the story of mythological and historical subjects from the Norse and Germanic eras of history.

The headlining name among the sagas is Snorri Sturluson, a writer, historian, and political figure who was born in 1179. It was his theory that the famed gods of Asgard first came to prominence as human military leaders. After they had died, cults developed around the sites where their funerals took place. Subsequent warriors who called upon the deceased leaders before going into battle established a reverence for these heroes until the mortal man became divine in their understanding. Battles between humans mirrored the mightier battles between the conflicting gods.

Who was this scholar and writer who made a name for himself in government as well as literature? Sturluson was the scion of an influential family. His destiny was forever altered by an incident which could have come from one of his own sagas. During a legal exchange, his father was attacked by a woman with a knife who claimed she planned to stab him so that he would emulate the one-eyed Odin. The woman’s husband, a member of Norway’s royal family, offered to raise Snorri and provide him with an education. The family agreed to this advantageous proposal for their son, who never returned to the family home.

Sturluson achieved renown as a lawyer, rising to the position of law speaker of the Althing in 1216, but after six years, he was invited to come to Norway, where he became a friend of the king. His political fortunes rose and fell and he was eventually assassinated in 1241. But Sturluson’s poetic skills contributed to his political success, demonstrating that for the Vikings, art was actually a requisite for the acquisition of power. His works include the Prose Edda, a narrative about the Norse myths; the Heimskringla which explores Norwegian history by telling the story of the kings; the Skaldskaparmal; and the Hattatal.

Thanks to his writing, historians know much more about those valiant and much-maligned Vikings. From the legends comes a portrait of the Vikings, their beliefs and bravery, and their accomplishments. Sturluson and other writers from his era are credited with introducing concepts such as sovereignty, independence, the state and the nation to the Icelandic people. Norwegian monarchs seeking to establish the duration of their dynasties cited his works for validation. Not many societies merge poetry and politics but Iceland managed to do just that, requiring us to evaluate the Vikings in terms of their arts as well as their conquest.

Old Norse sagas may seem to be unfamiliar to modern audiences but Beowulf, the longest epic poem in Old English, is well known as a staple of literature classrooms. Scholars guess that the writing was done during the time that the Viking Cnut was England’s king. Beowulf is the longest epic poem in Old English for a long time, the origins of the medieval poem Beowulf were in dispute until it was determined to be an authentic Anglo-Saxon work. But even though its origins are Anglo-Saxon, it identifies common traits which were shared with the Vikings.

The action takes place in sixth-century Denmark. Prince Beowulf rids the kingdom of the vicious monster Grendel but the danger is not over: Grendel’s mother attacks the hall, the center of Viking domesticity and society, and Beowulf must kill her as well. The hall established the power of the kings and the inclusiveness of Viking society; to threaten the hall was to imperil the entire community. “Then, as I have heard, the work of constructing a building was proclaimed to many a tribe throughout this middle earth. In time—quickly, as such things happen among men—it was all ready, the biggest of halls. He whose word was law far and wide gave it the name ‘Heorot.’ The saga was probably passed down orally from generation to generation until it was finally written down.

Vikings in Prime Time

But Viking fans aren’t required to pursue their interest academically with a reread of the classroom staple Beowulf. The film Avengers Assemble includes Thor as one of the superheroes. A television episode of Doctor Who featured an encounter with Vikings. In modern times, Vikings are fun to have around, at least for the viewers.

The previous image of the Vikings portrayed them in entertainment media as violent pagans who excelled in excess. But according to Jeffrey Richards of Lancaster University, those Hollywood over-the-top Viking films were showing up on screen just as historians were beginning to revise that perception of the Norse, a view, Richards wrote “which sees them not as savage conquerors but as traders, explorers, shipbuilders, craftsmen and mapmakers.”

Modern entertainment owes the Vikings a debt of gratitude. The History Channel’s series The Vikings, features the exploits of a young Viking farmer and family man who finds the policies of his local chieftain not to his liking. So the young Viking heads west to try his luck. The young man’s name? Ragnar Lothbrok. The series, which has become a ratings success averaging 4.3 million viewers, was praised by History Channel’s executive in charge of production. “Vikings has raided the hearts of both audiences and critics, establishing itself as one of the most compelling, visually stunning dramas on television.” The History Channel representative went on to laud the series for what he called “the perfect balance of scope, smarts and bloodshed.”

Perhaps that’s a fitting description of the Vikings themselves; their legacy to Europe included the scope of their travels, the smarts of their trading empire, and certainly the bloodshed which fell on the soil of the lands they raided in a time when blood fell freely.

The Viking Queen

Modern-day England looks very different from what it did in its early history when its island kingdoms struggled to survive in a violent period of time. The British tend to celebrate their medieval past, their Elizabethan legends, swinging London of the 1960s and the stiff-upper-lip demeanor of the royal family. But contemporary traits have their roots in a more primitive, less refined ancestry.

The next time you’re watching a news story about the English monarchy, pay careful attention to that elderly woman wearing the hat and carrying a purse. She may look like the stereotypical image of someone’s aged grandmother, but she’s descended from William the Conqueror through King Edward IV, one of the Plantagenets. William the Conqueror is Queen Elizabeth’s 22nd times great grandfather. Remember that the ruler of England has Viking blood in her veins.

The Meaning of the Viking Legacy

What, ultimately, is the lesson of the Vikings? Is it that, perhaps, we all have a little Viking in our veins? Certainly the Norse reached heights to which any modern entrepreneur in the business world, any military leader, any legislative advocate for the public’s right to a political voice, already aspires. What can we say about people whose bargaining skills in trade equaled their bloody exploits? They made their mark upon the Middle Ages but their legend is forever colored by the written records of the peoples they conquered. Nonetheless, their historical footprint left its mark on commerce, exploration, seafaring, governing, and literature. They braved the unknown without turning away from danger, venturing to new frontiers with the same intrepid spirit that their gods displayed in stories which have lasted through the ages since the longships sailed. William Fitzhugh says, “When we look into the future now, I think we implicitly look back to the Vikings as the origin of this kind of human endeavor to find new horizons.”

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A History from Beginning to End

Table of Contents

Book #1 – The Beginning of the Viking Age

Book #2 – The Peak of the Viking Age

Book #3 – The End of the Viking Age

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Book #1

The Beginning of the Viking Age

Chapter One

The Year of Rapine and Slaughter

After the Romans

The Vikings are Coming!

Lindisfarne

Vignettes of the Viking Age: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Chapter Two

The Vikings Strike Europe

People without Boundaries

Vignettes of the Viking Age: Viking Warriors

Chapter Three

The Raiding Turns to Staying

Chapter Four

Ragnar Lodbrok and the First Viking War

Vignettes from the Viking Age: The Great Heathen Army and Edmund the Martyr

Chapter Five

Who Were the Vikings?

Vignettes of the Viking Age: The Viking Sailors

Book #2

The Peak of the Viking Age

Chapter One

The Raiding Turns into Staying in Dublin

Homes Away from Home

The Vikings in Ireland

Chapter Two

Alfred the Great

Battle of Edington

Danelaw

Chapter Three

Rollo Rognvaldsson

Chapter Four

The Scandinavia They Left Behind

Everyday Life in Viking Society

Vikings at Leisure

Viking Religious Beliefs

Viking Style and Sex Appeal

Viking Government

Vignettes of the Viking Age: Runes

Chapter Five

The Vikings Reach New Frontiers

Eric the Red

Leif Ericsson

Vikings in Russia and Arab Lands

Book #3

The End of the Viking Age

Chapter One

The Legacy of Alfred the Great

Vignettes from the Viking Age

Chapter Two

The Vikings Return to Power

Vignettes from the Viking Age: Battle of Clontarf

Chapter Three

The Viking King of England

Vignettes from the Viking Age: Encomium Emmae Reginae

The Norman Conquest

Chapter Four

The Legacy of the Vikings

The Vikings in Britain

The Vikings in Scotland

The Vikings in Europe

The Vikings in North America

The Vikings Speak from the Ground

Chapter Five

The Vikings in Popular Culture, Then and Now

Vikings in Prime Time

The Viking Queen

The Meaning of the Viking Legacy

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