In this episode, Richard and Ellen discuss who and what vikings were historically, and how they were depicted in the Middle Ages and modern times. The episode focuses upon the first century of the Viking Age, roughly from the late eighth to the early tenth century.
(This episode marks the first anniversary of 'Tis But A Scratch: Fact and Fiction About the Middle Ages. Ellen and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, our listeners. If you are enjoying the podcast, please let friends, family, and (if you are a teacher) students know about it. And if you are listening on one of the platforms that rates and reviews podcasts, like Apple, please take the time to rate us. It is a great way of spreading the word. I should also add my sincere apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein and to all French speakers for butchering the pronunciation of the names of French towns.)
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
In this episode, Richard and Ellen discuss who and what vikings were historically, and how they were depicted in the Middle Ages and modern times. The episode focuses upon the first century of the Viking Age, roughly from the late eighth to the early tenth century.
(This episode marks the first anniversary of 'Tis But A Scratch: Fact and Fiction About the Middle Ages. Ellen and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, our listeners. If you are enjoying the podcast, please let friends, family, and (if you are a teacher) students know about it. And if you are listening on one of the platforms that rates and reviews podcasts, like Apple, please take the time to rate us. It is a great way of spreading the word. I should also add my sincere apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein and to all French speakers for butchering the pronunciation of the names of French towns.)
Listen on Podurama https://podurama.com
Intro and exit music are by Alexander Nakarada
If you have questions, feel free to contact me at richard.abels54@gmail.com
‘Tis But A Scratch: Fact and Fiction About the Middle Ages
Episode 22: Vikings!
Play opening two minutes from “The Vikings” (1958)
Ellen: Reaction
Richard: That was the opening scene from the 1958 box-office hit movie, “The Vikings,” based very, very loosely on the saga of Ragnar Lodbrok. I thought it would be a good intro for today’s episode, because it captures most of the popular stereotypes about vikings but also makes an important point. You didn’t have to be a Scandinavian to become a viking. Even two New York Jewish kids like Kirk Douglas, birthname Issur Danielovitch, and Tony Curtis, the former Bernie Schwartz, could grow up to be viking chieftains. Of course, it helps to be the legitimate and illegitimate sons of the fierce viking King Ragnar Lodbrok, or as he was known off-screen, Ernest Borgnine. The film also starred Janet Leigh as a captive Welsh princess and love interest of both male leads. Curtis won out, as was only proper given that he was then married to Leigh, though, according to Hollywood gossip, the marriage was in trouble. Jamie Lee Curtis, who was born in 1958, called herself a “save the marriage baby.”
Ellen: Reaction. It does sound truly terrible.
Richard: Actually the movie is fun if you ignore the history. It opened to good reviews, and overall holds a 76% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Most importantly, it made a ton of money and spawned both a television series, Tales of the Vikings, produced by Kirk Douglas, and several other viking films. But you will be happy to know that I won’t be talking about any of them in this episode.
Ellen: Explains she saw a couple of episodes of “The Last Kingdom.”
Richard: And what did you think?
Ellen: Not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.
Richard: We’ll talk about that mini-series and the novels by Bernard Cornwell upon which it’s based in a later episode about King Alfred the Great. I would also like to do an episode on the recent movie “The Northman” and maybe the television series, “The Vikings” and “Vikings: Valhalla.”
Ellen: Okay…..
Richard: Don’t worry. I’ll do that episode with someone who like movies because I am too good a husband to force you to watch them—though I think you might like “The Northman.” The director Robert Eggers really made an effort to capture the tone and ethical sensibilities of the sagas. As he did with his movie “The Witch” about seventeenth-century New England, he went to lengths to make the settings, costumes, and language of “The Northman” as historically faithful as possible. The over the top violence of the movie might be too much for you, and it does get intense.
Ellen: Which is the reason that I don’t like watching movies. I tend to find them too emotionally intense for me.
Richard: So no movies today, just some history and historical speculation.
Ellen: Thank you. I guess we should begin with basics, who and what the Vikings were.
Richard: There is nothing more basic than Wikipedia, so let’s start with its entry on Vikings.
Ellen: According to Wikipedia QUOTE Vikingsis the modern name given to seafaring people originally from Scandinavia (present-day Denmark, Norway and Sweden), who from the late 8th to the late 11th centuries raided, pirated, traded and settled throughout parts of Europe. They also voyaged as far as the Mediterranean, North Africa, Volga Bulgaria, the Middle East, and North America. In some of the countries they raided and settled in, this period is popularly known as the Viking Age
Richard: Usually said to be between the mid eighth and mid eleventh century
Ellen: Wikipedia continues: “the term "Viking" also commonly includes the inhabitants of the Scandinavian homelands as a collective whole.” END QUOTE
Richard: I have to confess that I like Wikipedia a lot more than many of my colleagues in academia. I even donate money to it every year.
Ellen: I approve!
Richard: I’ve found that the more obscure the topic, the more reliable Wikipedia is. This is true for medieval subjects, partly because those entries were created by people interested in those subjects and then edited by experts.
Ellen: Like you did a few years ago with the Alfred the Great entry.
Richard: Yes, and the entry was subsequently reedited because I made the mistake of not citing my own published work
Ellen: My overly modest husband
Richard: You could have said that a bit more sincerity. I hadn’t realized that one needs to cite published sources to authenticate facts and interpretations, so some of what I wrote got tagged as “original research,” which is not a Wikipedia compliment.
I love the characterization of Wikipedia as something that can only work in practice, but never in theory. And the Wikipedia entry on Vikings is not at all bad. But I do have a problem with its characterization of vikings as a seafaring “people originally from Scandinavia,” and its observation that “the term Viking also commonly includes the inhabitants of the Scandinavian homelands as a collective whole.” It’s certainly true that it is used that way today, but that is not what it meant during the Viking Age. As used in the early and high middle ages, the term viking was not a synonym for “early medieval Scandinavians,” although, as the Wikipedia entry states, viking is often used that way today. Nor did it mean a “fierce warrior,” as movie-makers, wargamers, and Minnesota football fans like to believe.
Ellen: And let’s not forget neo-Nazi white supremacists.
Richard: As a historian of what used to be called Anglo-Saxon England and is now early medieval Britain, I hate that ultra-right wing groups have appropriated so much of the terminology of my field. And they have done so without a clue about the history and meaning of these terms.
Ellen: So what did “viking” actually mean in the Viking Age?
Richard: The etymology of the word 'viking' is obscure and is a continuing subject of academic debate.
Ellen: Surprise, surprise.
Richard: Some writers have derived it from the Norse word for fjords, others think that it refers to the men of the Viken region of Norway around Oslo. Another possibility is it derives from the Old Norse verb vikja [VEEKYA] to travel, often used for sea voyages. Whatever its etymology, what is more certain is that in both Old Norse and Old English the term “viking” referred to raiding or piracy. Old Norse had two words related to modern viking: ‘viking’ [VEEKING], which meant an overseas raiding expedition, and ‘vikingr [VEEKINGER],’ one who goes on a raiding expedition.
n The earliest appearance of the word is in an 8th-century English biblical epic, Exodus, where wicing refers to a band of raiders.
n It glosses the Latin word piractici in a Latin-Old English glossary: Piratici wicingsceaþan
Despite its ubiquity in modern history books, movies, novels, etc., the word ‘viking’ is not commonly found in contemporary sources. The most common terms for these raiders found in Frankish and English sources were: Northmen, & Danes. Irish sources call them foreigners (gall), and Byzantium sources call them rus. Even in Old Norse being called a vikingr was not a compliment. The appropriate compliment for a man who proved himself in combat was drengr, roughly meaning “a good lad.”
Ellen: So what did Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons mean when they called someone a viking?
Richard: An Anglo-Saxon would say that you were a pirate. A Dane, Norse, Swede, or Icelander would say, more neutrally, you were a seafaring raider. In either case, viking was an occupation or activity NOT an ethnic designation. [That is why I don’t capitalize it in my publications (despite the heroic efforts of spellcheck and editors to correct me). Vikings are best thought of as pirate bands, not unlike the buccaneers of the Spanish Main in the seventeenth century. The occupation of ‘viking’ required a man to be a capable fighter, but vikings were not necessarily warriors. Battles were not profitable and to be avoided if possible. The main reason for a viking band to engage in battle was to defend its loot against a defender that had intercepted it before that band could makes its way back to its fortified camp or ships. ]
Ellen: You say that being a viking was a profession, but I’ve read a number of sagas where it seems to have been a seasonal activity or maybe even an interlude for landowners and farmers.
Richard: Some viking raiders undoubtedly were men like the Orkneyinga Saga's Svein Asleifarson, who went a-viking in the Hebrides every spring after he had overseen the sowing of his fields, and every fall after the harvest. I think that this was pretty typical of vikings in the first half of the ninth century. For these men, going a-viking was a seasonal activity. But this changed in the second half of the ninth century. The crews of these viking fleets were filled with men who practiced piracy as a profession. By the 860s, the ambitions of the leaders of larger viking fleets had turned to conquest, at least in Britain and Ireland, while the aspirations of their crews were no longer to return to their homeland enriched with plunder but to settle abroad as wealthy farmers.
Viking, as I said before, was not a synonym for Scandinavian. Most Scandinavian farmers never went a-viking, and many vikings were not in terms of genomes Scandinavian.
Ellen: Recent scientific studies raise questions about how “Scandinavian” the Danish, Norse, and Swedish vikings actually were. Two genetic studies of skeletons from Viking-Age Scandinavian burial sites, one in 2020 and the other in 2022, found a lot more genetic diversity in early medieval than modern Scandinavia. Evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev, a professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Copenhagen and director of its Center of Excellence in Genetics, who led the 2020 Viking genome project, explained, “It’s pretty clear from the genetic analysis that Vikings are not a homogenous group of people. A lot of the Vikings are mixed individuals” with ancestry from Southern Europe, Turkey, and Scandinavia. As science writer Kiona Smith put it, “vikings swapped DNA pretty freely with the other people they encountered — sometimes with all parties’ consent and sometimes not. The result was that Viking society was far from homogeneous and surprisingly cosmopolitan.”
Richard: The 'nationality' of a viking warband was defined by its leaders, and, as much as ultra-white supremacists might like to think otherwise, tribal identity in the Viking Age was cultural rather than genetic. A “Danish viking fleet” meant that the captains of the ships identified themselves as Danes. The members of a viking boat, however, could well be an ethnically heterogeneous lot. Medieval Irish sources, for instance, tell of 'Irish foreigners,’ natives who decided to join viking armies, preferring the role of predator to prey. English sources tell of slaves who ran off to join viking crews. Mostly, though, crews were drawn from the class of free farmers called bóndi, and their tenants.
Ellen: Bóndi, do we get the word husband from that? And what about slaves? Ninth-century Scandinavia was a slave owning society, right? Did slaves serve in viking crews?
Richard: Yes, our word husband derives from Old Norse husbóndi, master of the house. And Viking Age Scandinavia was a slave-owning society. The basic social division was between the free and the unfree. Norse society was hierarchical. At the top were kings and those of royal blood. Next came a hereditary aristocracy, the jarls. The majority of the male population, as well as the crews of viking vessels, were farmer landowners, the bóndi. Status among them was based on wealth. Iceland had no kings or jarls. But the wealthiest freemen were called goðar, chieftains, which referred to their lordship over men rather than rule over territory. Kings and nobles had warrior household retainers. Wealthy landowners had tenant farmers. And even they probably owned some slaves. Freedom meant to be arms-worthy and law-worthy, that is they had the right to speak at the local assemblies known as things. The close relationship between the status of being arms-worthy and law-worthy is captured in the term for local district courts in the tenth and eleventh-century English Danelaw, vapnatak in Old Norse which became wapentake in Old English—literally, weapons-touching. The lives of freemen were protected by the threat of their kinsmen’s vengeance, that is, blood-feud, and were valued according to a sliding scale of compensation, the wergild, reflecting the status of the dead man. The killing of a slave, a thrall, in contrast, was regarded as a property crime. It was not all that different, except in cost, from the killing of a cow. The sign of thralldom was a slave-collar and cropped hair. In Scandinavia, slaves were forbidden from bearing arms, and I haven’t seen any evidence of Scandinavian slaves being recruited as vikings. Foreign slaves were a different matter. Able-bodied male slaves sometimes ran away to join viking bands. If a run-away slave was received into a viking band, he not only achieved the status of a free man but could claim the wergild of a thegn. Archbishop Wulfstan II of York saw this as a perversion of the divine social order. In his famous jeremiad against the sinfulness of the English people, the “Sermon of the Wolf,” he inveighed against it as one of the “loathsome laws and shameful exactions common among the English people because of the wrath of God.”
Ellen: I assume that the status of the runaway slave depended upon whether a viking captain saw them as more valuable as a crew member than a commodity.
Richard: Undoubtedly. It was all about profit. Viking boats were privately owned and their captains and owners were wealthy farmers, while the leaders of fleets came from the hereditary aristocracy. What they all shared was a common purpose: to extract as much wealth as they could from their overseas ventures.
Ellen: What when we look at Erik Bloodaxe…… What do the primary sources tell us about vikings?
Richard: Historians of early medieval Europe have to deal with the scarcity of sources. I’ve sometimes compared what I do is trying to make sense out of a jigsaw puzzle in which 70 or even 90% of the pieces are missing and I have only a vague idea what it is supposed to look like. This problem is especially true when it comes to vikings. vikings are mainly known through the writings of their victims. There are few contemporary Scandinavian written sources for the vikings, and these are either terse inscriptions on runestones or cryptic skaldic verses. And, then, there are the Old Norse sagas.
Ellen: Which has shaped the way I think about vikings.
Richard: The Old Norse sagas are wonderful reads, but they are problematic as historical sources. Most were written in the late twelfth through fourteenth centuries by Icelandic authors such as Snorri Sturluson—
Ellen: In other words, centuries after the end of the Viking Age
Richard: Yes, centuries after, which is too often ignored by the script writers and producers of television shows and movies about vikings. Literary scholars divide the Old Norse sagas into several genre. The Sagas of the Kings, of which Snorri’s Heimskringla is the prime example, relates stories about the kings of Norway beginning with a mythical past and continuing into the twelfth century. Although the word ‘saga’ means “history”, these Kings’ sagas are not histories, even by the standards of twelfth-century Anglo-Norman historians such as William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis. They are episodic, filled with anecdotes about the adventures of Icelanders in the courts of the kings of Norway, and focus mainly on dynastic conflicts. The Sagas of the Icelanders or as they are also known, Family Sagas, tell stories about the early settlement of Iceland. The plots revolve around family relations and conflicts. One theme that predominates is the conflict between the establishment of law and the persistence of traditional responses to injuries and wrongs, the blood feud. Some of these sagas follow their protagonists abroad as they take up a viking life. They are written in a straightforward and highly realistic style that provides verisimilitude to the stories they relate, and they may well contain valuable information about the settlement of Iceland and Old Norse culture, though it takes a really good historian like Prof. Jesse Byock of UCLA to distinguish between what is historically authentic and what is not. The Icelanders sagas also contain an abundance of genealogical information about each character
INSERT MONTY PYTHON NJORL’S SAGA
Ellen: I was wondering how you would get in a Monty Python reference. My bet was on “Erik the Viking”
Richard: That movie fits in better with an episode about viking movies. The point about the sagas is that they are not primary sources. Sagas are best thought of as historical novels. They are entertainments written by Christian authors about their savage pagan ancestors to provide thrills to their readers. Their protagonists are as much anti-heroes as heroes.
Ellen: Like the hero or anti-hero of one of my favorites, Egils saga. I know that Egil Skallagrimsson is supposed to be a heroic viking and a talented poet, but he seems to me to verge on being a psychopath.
Richard: You are thinking about the story of how the six-year old Egil responded to losing a ball-game. Why don’t you tell it.
Ellen: Egil’s father Skallagrim loved competitive games, in particular a ball-game that was the rage at the time. One of Skallagrim’s tenants was a young man named Thord, who captained Skallagrim’s ball-game team. Egil was large for 6 and had already shown himself to be quick tempered and headstrong, so that all of Skallagrim’s men took care that their sons knew when to give in to him.
One day Skallagrim took his son to a ball-game. A lot of the other players also brought their sons, so the youngsters were divided up into teams so that they could also play. Egil was matched against Grim, son of Hegg of Heggstead, who was four or five years older than Egil and strong for his age. When Egil was outplayed by Grim, he lifted his bat and struck Grim. Grin took hold of Egil and threw him to ground and began to hit him. As Egil lay there, Grim told him that if he wouldn’t behave himself, he would do him some real damage. Egil got up and left the field to the jeers of the other youngsters.
When Egil told Thord what had happened, Thord gave him the axe he was carrying so that he could repay Grim. They came to the field just in time to see Grim racing with the ball to the goal, pursued by the other boys. Egil intercepted him and struck him on the head with the axe, killing him.
Richard: Of course, the upshot of this was a battle among the adults in which seven men, including Grim’s father Hegg, were killed.
Ellen: But when Egil’s mother was told about what her son had done, she said approvingly that Egil had the makings of a real viking and it was obvious that as soon as he was old enough he ought to be given a long-ship.
Richard: A few years later, Skallagrim, playing against Thord and Egil, grew so angry at being outplayed that he threw Thord to the ground so hard that he shattered all his bones and killed him, and would have done the same to his son if a slave-woman hadn’t intervened. He killed the slave-woman instead. An angry 12 year old Egil took vengeance by killing his father’s estate manager, because he knew his father really liked the guy. According to the saga, Skallagrim said nothing and that was the end of the matter, though for the rest of the winter neither father nor son spoke a word to each other.
Ellen: And soon after that Egil began his career as a viking
Richard: Under the command of another landowner who reluctantly accepted Egil into his crew, commenting that if his father couldn’t control him at home, there wasn’t much chance he could do so abroad. And he was right. He begins by earning a death sentence from King Erik Bloodaxe, then king of Norway, by killing one of his men in a drunken state at the king’s court—but escapes unharmed.
Ellen: Egils saga provides a vivid portrait of a viking adventurer, but how much of this is historically true?
Richard: Like I said, Egils saga should be read as a historical novel, but like all good historical novels, its setting includes historical figures such as Erik Bloodaxe and Egil’s patron the English King AEthelstan. What is authentically tenth-century, however, are the verses quoted by the author. Egil was a wealthy farmer in Iceland, a viking, a warrior retainer, and skaldic poet. It was the last that made him famous. I have little doubt that he himself is a historical figure. But the narratives of the sagas, once again, are not primary sources. And although writers like Stori Snurluson quoted skaldic poetry, it doesn’t mean that they fully understood it.
Ellen: I’ve read some of the poems in the sagas and I can understand why they might have had difficulties. Skaldic poetry is not easy.
Richard: Which is the point. Skaldic poetry is meant to be a verbal puzzle, filled with poetic metaphors. Scandinavians of the Viking Age may be portrayed as barbarians, but they enjoyed verbal and visual riddles, games of strategy, and poetry that reads like cross-word puzzle clues.
Ellen: On blood metaphors. Valkyries. Looms.
Richard: The blood-eagle is a great example of the problem of interpreting skaldic poetry. The blood eagle is supposed to be a method of ritual sacrifice of captured royalty to the god Odin. The victim was laid upon a table on his stomach. His ribs were separated from his spine by a sharp knife, and then his lungs were drawn out and spread out upon the ribs, giving the impression of an eagle’s wings.
Ellen: Ughh. And how does this relate to skaldic poetry?
Richard: Prof. Roberta Franks argues that the “blood-eagle” ritual was based on a misunderstanding of complex and obscure skaldic verses meant to convey the idea of an eagle scoring the back of a man who fell in battle.
The blood eagle appears only in a few medieval sources. It is described most fully in the Orkneyinga saga(c.1240):
Einarr made them carve an eagle on his back with a sword, and cut the ribs all from the backbone, and draw the lungs there out, and gave him to Odin for the victory he had won.
Snorri Sturluson, writing about the same time, describes Earl Einarr cutting the blood eagle on the back of his enemy Halfdan Halegg. QUOTE “He thrust his sword into his chest by the backbone and severed all the ribs down to the loins, and then pulled out the lungs.”
The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, writing around the year 1200, claims that Ivar and Bjorn, sons of Ragnar Loðbrok, avenged their father by ordering Ella’s: “back to be carved with the figure of an eagle, because at his overthrow they were imprinting the cruelest of birds on their most ferocious enemy. Not content with impressing a wound upon him, they then salted his mangled flesh.”
Ellen: Okay, I see a problem since, as I understand it, most historians regard Ragnar Loðbrok as a fictional character.
Richard: They do—which didn’t prevent The History Channel from having a series, Vikings, that was centered on him. Saxo Grammaticus’ description of the blood eagle as carving the figure of an eagle on the back of a captured enemy seems to be the source for an allusion to it in the early 14th century Nornagests þáttr.
Ellen: From what you already said, I suspect that there is at least some skaldic verse that mentions the blood-eagle
Richard: Yep. The earliest possible reference is a poem by the skald Sikvat Thortharson who died in 1045. The verse literally reads as follows:
And Ella's back,
at had the one who dwelt
Ívarr, with OR by eagle,
York, cut.
Roberta Franks made sense of this as:
And Ívarr, the one
who dwelt at York,
had Ella's back
cut by [an] eagle
According to Franks, all that Sikvat meant was that Ivarr klled Ella and left his corpse face down on the battlefield to be preyed upon by an eagle.
Ellen: On the other hand, pagan Scandinavians did make animal and sometimes human sacrifices to the gods.
Richard: Yes, which is a point made by Alfred Smyth, who argued for the authenticity of the ritual. Adam of Bremen in his “Deeds of the Bishops of Church of Hamburg” reports that the bodies of sacrificed animals and men were hung from trees in the grove of the great pagan temple in Uppsala.
Ellen: The tenth-century Muslim traveler Ibn Fadlan, who wrote a detailed account of his visit to a Rus settlement on the Volga, described the sacrifice of a slave girl to accompany her dead master to the afterlife.
Richard: Yes, although according to Ibn Fadlan the slave girl was a willing volunteer. If the “blood eagle” was a real ritual, those who underwent it were not volunteers.
Ellen: Do you think it was real?
Richard: I don’t, but I wouldn’t discount it out of hand. In a recent issue of Speculum, the flagship journal of the Medieval Academy of America, Prof. Luke John Murphy of the University of Iceland and a team of anatomical specialists argued that the ritual was physically possible, though the full ritual would have required a great deal of strength on the part of the executioner and the victim would have probably died with the severing of the ribs, and that it was culturally plausible. One shouldn’t forget that from the time of King Henry III, the penalty for traitors to the English Crown was to be “hanged, drawn, and quartered,” which involved hanging the culprit until nearly dead, followed by emasculation, disembowelment, beheading, and quartering, that is chopping the corpse into four parts. Hanging, drawing, and quartering was practiced into the late eighteenth century and wasn’t abolished until 1870.
Ellen: Probably what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they prohibited “cruel and unusual punishments” in the eighth amendment.
Richard: But, to answer your question. I’m not persuaded by the article—and I’m not even sure why Speculum even published it. Just because it the ritual sacrifice was theoretically possible doesn’t really add much to the question whether it was actually practiced. My problem with the “blood eagle” is that it appears in no Frankish or English source from the Viking age. Monks loved to portray vikings as savage beasts and the blood eagle would have fit in nicely with that, and yet no one mentions it. My sense is that Roberta Franks got it right. But I’m not surprised that the blood eagle made it into the sagas. Sagas were stories written by Christian authors who took delight in depicting the savagery of their pagan ancestors. They were also entertainments. To use them as historical sources for vikings is like using “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” “Braveheart” or “Kingdom of Heaven” as sources for medieval history!
Ellen: Okay, I’ll bite. Where do we get the idea that they had helmets with horns or wings on them?
Richard NO!!! “Credit” for the myth of the viking horned helmet goes to Carl Emil Doepler, the costume designer for the first performance of Wagner’s “Ring of the Nibelungen” cycle at Bayreuth in 1876. Doepler may have inspired by late Bronze Age Nordic ritual helmets (800-500 B..), such as those found at Grevensvaenge, Zealand, Denmark, in 1779. Horned and winged helmets were part of 19th-century German nationalist myth-making. That horned helmets are bogus seems to have made it into the popular consciousness. Horned helmets don’t appear in recent movies or television shows about vikings, Nowadays, they are pretty much restricted to the comic strip “Hagar the Horrible” and Halloween Viking costumes.
Ellen: So where do we get the modern image of vikings in popular culture---and how close is it to what historians think about vikings?
Richard: The medieval sources for our image of vikings are contemporary Frankish and Anglo-Saxon chronicles and the saga literature.
Ellen: In other words, it is fashioned from the accounts of victimized churchmen and from lurid historical novels written centuries later.
Richard: Exactly. Both portrayed vikings as barbaric pagans. But arguably, the “Vikings” as we know them were an invention of 19th century romantic and nationalist Scandinavian and British historians. Danish and Norwegian historians found in them a history of ancestral greatness. English historians, particularly in the Victorian period, saw them both as the Other in the story of Alfred and as part of their Germanic past. Modern media—movies, television, graphic novels, fantasy novels—perpetuate this conception of Vikings, although without either nationalist nostalgia or Christian condemnation.
Ellen: How accurate is the modern image of vikings as savage raiders who killed indiscriminately, and lusted not only for loot but for glory?
Richard: We shouldn’t discount the brutality of vikings. But they probably did not kill as wantonly as they seem to do in movies and television. They were after moveable wealth, which included able bodied men, women, and children whom they could sell as slaves. They weren’t pagan Crusaders who sacked monasteries and sacrificed monks to Odin and Thor. They sacked churches because churches were filled with liturgical silver and gold.
Ellen: Not all that surprising. In the local warfare among Christian Irish kings in the eighth and ninth centuries, the enemy’s monasteries were often targeted. And one reason that Christian bishops promoted the Peace of God movement in the eleventh century was to protect churches and clergy, which suggests that there was a need to protect churches and clergy.
Richard: Vikings also weren’t really warriors. They would defend their loot in battle if necessary, and they admired good fighters, drengrs, but they preferred to avoid general engagements if possible. There was no profit in it. The purpose of going a-viking had less to do with winning glory and a place in the great hall of Valhalla than to acquire wealth. The easiest and preferred way was to persuade a king, bishop, or magnate to purchase peace with silver. Not terribly heroic but safe and profitable.
Ellen: “And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.”
Richard: Thank you, Mr. Kipling. And Kipling was absolutely right. The payment of silver to a viking band purchased a truce, not a lasting peace. Arguably, the payment of tribute encouraged vikings to return for more. As the word spread about the vulnerability of their wealthy neighbors to the south, the viking fleets that raided Francia and England grew in size throughout the ninth century. Throughout the second half of the ninth century, they continued to crisscross the English Channel in search of easy game. But the vulnerability of the English kingdoms encouraged a grander ambition among the leaders of the composite force called the Great Heathen Army. Why be satisfied with taking some wealth when one could take it all. By the 860s, it seems that many men in these viking fleets had reconciled themselves to leaving their homelands permanently and settling in England and Francia.
Ellen: The activity of vikings really wasn’t all that unusual for the time. Raiding and slaving were normal early medieval activities for Christian as well as pagan warrior societies. The prosperity of Charlemagne's kingdom was based on his constant and usually successful wars, which produced enormous numbers of slaves and portable booty, as well as large territorial additions to his Frankish empire. That the Vikings raided Europe needs no explanation. When and how they did, does. So how do historians explain this?
Richard: The when is the late eighth century. The very first reference to vikings appears in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s entry for the year 787: And in days of King Beorhtric of Wessex there came for the first three ships: and then the king’s reeve at Portland rode thither and tried to compel them to go to the royal manor, for he did not know what they were, and they slew him. These were the first ships of the Danes to come to England.”
This was followed in 793 by a truly traumatic event, the pillaging of the great island monastery of Lindisfarne. To quote again the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle s.a. 793: "In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria, and miserably frightened the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these signs; and a little after that in the same year on 8 June the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter."
In the 830s the size and frequency of viking raids on France and England increased. In 834 vikings attacked Frisia, laid waste the important trading town of Dorestad (on mouth of Rhine), and returned for the next three years in a row to pillage this port city. From 841-892 West Francia was subject to wave upon wave of viking raids.
Ellen: Okay, the when is the late eighth century. What about the why?
Richard: The beginning of the Viking Age doesn’t have a single cause.
Ellen: What a surprise.
Richard: Historians have suggested several factors:
First, overpopulation in Scandinavia (there is some archaeological evidence for new farmsteads established in sparsely populated areas of Sweden and Norway in the late eighth and ninth centuries)
Ellen: Well something has to explain why anyone would have landed in Iceland and thought, hey this would be a great place to settle—not to mention Greenland.
Richard: A second factor was the endemic warfare between the many petty kingdoms in Scandinavia, which resulted in the losers becoming a exiles and adventurers. Young landless freemen, the sons of farmers, joined them to acquire the wealth needed to pay the bride-price needed to marry
Ellen: And how do we know that?
Richard: From archaeology. Plunder from viking raids has surprisingly been often found in graves of women. Perhaps most critically was the increase of trade in the north sea in the late eighth and ninth century that resulted in the creation of emporia along the shores of Francia and southern England, and which attracted the attention of enterprising pirates. The British historian Peter Sawyer argued that the growth of trade between western Europe and Scandinavia was the factor most responsible for creating the viking age. "It was the western European demand for northern products such as amber, ivory, furs,” he wrote, “and the parallel Scandinavian demand for western goods, that caused close contacts between the two areas, and encouraged Scandinavians to search for new supplies in the far north or east of the Baltic. This trade enhanced the power of some Scandinavian rulers, by increasing their wealth. Others who were less successful or even exiled could resort to piracy, first in the Baltic and later in the west, an extension that was facilitated by the adoption of the sail. ...This trade also tempted pirates, and the competition between traders and merchants must have speeded up the development of the remarkable sailing ships that are indeed the key to the Viking Age.” END QUOTE
Sawyer was a minimalist when it came to vikings. He argued that chronicle reports of viking fleets numbering several hundred ships were exaggerated, and that viking armies rarely numbered more than several hundred, or, at the most, a couple of thousand men. He also downplayed the destruction wrought by vikings.
Ellen: I remember that someone characterized Sawyer’s vikings as groups of long-haired tourists who occasionally roughed up the locals.
Richard: Yeah, that was the historian J.M. Wallace-Hadrill who was skeptical, to say the least. The recent trend in historiography is to downplay the destructiveness of the vikings, noting that the raids were small in size and the devastation was only local, and, as you pointed out, these activities were not restricted to vikings. Viking apologists prefer to emphasize their roles as merchants and settlers. And they have a point. The vikings were interested in trade, and did establish important permanent trading centers. By the early ninth century Scandinavian trading ports such as Hedeby, Birka, and Truso were flourishing along the coast of the Baltic Sea. The Rus vikings established a long network of trade routes along the Russian river systems, trading with the Constantinople and with the Moslems, selling their furs and slaves for silver coins. They also had a complex, hierarchical social system at home, with a well-developed legal institutions. And, as the historians of the vikings were "good guys" school emphasize, they were also excellent workers in metal, skillful in the use of stone and timber for building, and boasted a distinctive and elaborate artistic style that emphasized animal motifs (gripping beasts, stylized animals, intricate interlacing designs, etc.) They also settled Iceland, explored Greenland, and perhaps the coast of North America, and left an impact on the political and social development of Ireland and Britain.
The Irish city of Dublin was a viking settlement. First settled in the 840s, viking Dublin had become a center of commerce and industry as well as a stronghold by the mid tenth century. Probably the most important commodity exported from Dublin, though, was slaves (as noted by contemporary Irish annals).
Ellen: But were these merchants and settlers really vikings? You began by saying that the best translation of viking is pirate.
Richard: One ought not draw too distinct a line between these vikings as traders and vikings as pirates. If a town was strongly held, or if the viking party was laden with booty it wished to trade, the vikings would sell their goods. If a town was easy prey, they would sack it. All that having been said, the vikings were, nevertheless, brutal marauding pirates who created devastation wherever it suited their purposes. As one monk writing in the 860s lamented (Ermentarius of Noirmoutier):
The number of ships increases, the endless flood of vikings never ceases to grow bigger. Everywhere Christ's people are the victims of massacre, burning, and plunder. The vikings over-run all that lies before them, and none can withstand them. They seize Bordeaux, Perigueux, Limoges, Angouleme, Toulouse; they make deserts of Angers, Tours and Orleans. Ships past counting voyage up the Seine, and throughout the entire region evil grows strong. Rouen is laid waste, looted and burnt: Paris, Beauvais, Meaux are taken, Melun's stronghold is razed to the ground, Chartres occupied, Evreux and Bayeux looted, and every town invested.
Even though this account is exaggerated, and even though a monastic chronicler would be more sensitive to the rampage of the vikings who loved to prey on monasteries and churches, one cannot ignore the reality behind Ermentarius's lament. The vikings did attack and devastate West Francia and Britain. Viking chieftains such as Ragnar Lothbrok and his son Bjorn Ironside terrorized the lands of the Seine, Loire, and Trent basins. If their devastation was not greater than it was, it was less because of restraint on their part than the lack of a sophisticated technology of destruction.
From 841 to 892 hardly a year went by in which a Frankish chronicler did not record a viking attack. The long list of murdered Frankish bishops and enslaved clergy--Frobald of Chartres, Ermenfrid of Beauvais, bishop of Nantes with all his clergy--testifies to the havoc wreaked by the raiders. As the British historian Rosamond McKitterick put it, "the vikings were masters at attacking the defenseless--monks, people going to markets, merchants".
Ellen: The main visual for vikings—other than horned helmets—is probably the viking longship. Want to say a few words about it?
Richard: Most explanations of why vikings suddenly appeared in the late eighth and early ninth century emphasize the development of a special type of vessel that was capable of sailing up rivers and crossing oceans. The vikings were known for their seafaring, and in order to understand their military expeditions as well as their explorations, one must know something about their ships.. Scandinavian boats of the sixth and seventh centuries lacked a true keel and thus could not support a mast. These were rowing vessels, ships that were not suitable for long voyages. By the late eighth century and the ninth century Scandinavian ship design had evolved considerably. The ninth-century Gokstad ship, buried in Norway as part of a ship burial ritual, provides us with the dimensions of one Norse “longship.” The Gokstad ship was 23.3 m. in length and 5.25 m. amidships. The height from keel to gunwale is 1.95 m. Her dead weight, unloaded, is about 9 tons; fully loaded with crew and equipment, probably closer to 18 tons. The draught of the fully loaded ship would probably have been only about a meter. The hull is built of overlapping strakes that were first nailed together and then lashed to the frames by means of pliable spruce roots through holes in cleats left free standing when the plank was smoothed. In other words, the boat was almost sewed together. The keel is T-shaped, and the two lowest strakes of the ship were attached to the keel by nails. The planking, keel, and mast were all made of pine. The mast was about 10 m. high. The ship was steered by a large oar attached to the starboard side.
The great characteristic of this vessel is her elasticity and lightness of weight. Because the frames were attached to the strakes by spruce roots the vessel was less rigid than a nailed ship; fewer ribs were needed and she was therefore lighter. (The British living history website, Regia Anglorum, has a nice webpage devoted to the construction of viking ships.) The replica of the Gokstad ship that sailed from Norway to America in 1893 was recorded to have undulated with the waves; the bottom and keel rose and fell by as much an inch and the gunwales twist as much as six inches out of true. The Gokstad ship, however, was not a war vessel but a chieftain's ceremonial ship. A warship would have been had a higher length to beam ratio, and, in fact, would have been almost canoe like. Riverine vessels such as the Ladby ship or the Skuldelev Wreck 5 were about 18-20 meters long and about three meters wide; it could accommodate a crew of fewer than 30 warriors. Such ships were not ocean-going vessels, but would have been used in coastal waters and for raiding up estuaries. In the late ninth through eleventh centuries, sea-going viking warships ranged in size, though the most common seems to have been a twenty-bencher with forty oars.
Ellen: I would be more impressed with all of this if you and I hadn’t almost died while trying to row a replica viking warship in the Roskild fjord.
Richard: Almost died is a bit overly dramatic—but it was hairy. Why don’t you tell the story.
Ellen: It was in 1991. Richard had given a paper about vikings in an academic conference in Copenhagen. I had joined him at the end of the conference, just in time for Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, the director of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, to offer participants at the conference the opportunity to row a replica viking warship. So a bunch of academics and their spouses loaded into a bus and happily drove off to Roskilde. It was a windy and rainy day. The water in the fjord was rough. We dressed in yellow fishermen slickers.
Richard: I remember the captain of the Skuldelev 5 looked really nervous. One of our group joked that he was afraid that he would lose one of us overboard and have to fill out the paperwork. Without even the hint of a smile, the captain said, yes. It didn’t help that Dr. Ole Pedersen brightly called out that it was a good thing that this wasn’t an official outing because he could never have gotten permission to sail out given the weather.
Ellen: But row out we did. Most of us, including Richard and me, had never rowed before and were making a mess of it.
Richard: You kept fouling my oar.
Ellen: I remember it differently. You kept fouling mine—and blamed me for it! Anyway, when we got far enough out into the fjord, the captain ordered the sail lowered—and the boat took off so quickly that it broke the till. We were now stranded in the fjord. The captain ordered the sail taken down and everyone who didn’t know how to row off of the oars. Richard and I became ballast as the captain kept on telling us to shift from side to side to balance the boat, while the experienced rowers slowly and painfully rowed us back to shore.
Richard: My conclusion is that vikings never really made it out of the fjords, let alone crossed the Atlantic!
Ellen: Can you say a little about viking armies of the ninth century?
Richard: Viking fleets varied in size according to the number of viking chieftains who decided to join together. Ordinary viking captains led small forces of a few dozen ships These forces, however, might join together under the command of one or several "sea kings" for larger raiding expeditions. As I’ve already noted, British historian Peter Sawyer was a minimalist when it came to vikings. Sawyer. distinguishing between the exact small numbers and round large numbers of ships reported in the contemporary chronicles, contended that the largest viking armies consisted of, at most, one to two thousand warriors. He bolstered this argument by citing the logistical difficulties that larger fleets would have encountered. Nicholas Brooks and others, while admitting that the round chronicle figures are approximations, note the consistency with which Frankish, English, and Irish chronicles report the size of fleets. This suggests to them that viking fleets of 200-350 ships are credible. My own sense is that the largest fleets may well have been that large. The "Great Armies" that operated in England in the 860s and in Francia in the 880s and early 890s might well have consisted of a few thousand men.
Ellen: And women?
Richard: Yes, and women. There is good evidence that women and even children accompanied the viking fleet that came to England in 865. The numbers also included craftsmen and merchants. Archaeologists Dawn Hadley and Julian Richards characterized the 65 acre viking winter camp at Torksey in 872-873 as a moveable town with a population in the low thousands. Other than the wives and children of some of the leaders of the Great Army who are mentioned in chronicles, who these women were, whether Scandinavians or locals, is unknown.
Ellen: I remember reading about genetic studies of the Icelandic population. I wasn’t surprised that the ancestry of 80% of the men is Norwegian. What did surprise me is that 60% of the women, and 20% of the men are of Gaelic ancestry. It seems that the Norse males who settled Iceland brought with them or purchased a lot of female Irish slaves.
Richard: What I found really intriguing was a genetic analysis in 2018 of 25 skulls excavated from Icelandic Viking Age burials. Sequencing using samples from teeth revealed that only 57% of the settlers were Norse. The rest were Gaelic. Males were mainly of Norse ancestry; women were all Gaelic. Over time, the population of Iceland has become more Norse, rather than less, reflecting perhaps the advantage that Norse males had in reproduction. But what was most interesting is that while most of the skeletons of individuals with Gaelic DNA were found in unadorned burials, a few of the men were buried as vikings with swords.
Ellen: We are running out of time. Do you want to conclude by telling our listeners a little bit about who these vikings were who raided Francia and England in the ninth century were?
Richard: Sure. The best way of doing this is through a case study. The viking chieftain I’d chose doesn’t have a saga written about him. We only know of him through contemporary English and Frankish chronicles. His name was Weland. Weland was the leader of a viking fleet that ravaged Frisia in the late 850s. In the year 860 this viking fleet landed in Hampshire and sacked the town of Winchester. The raiders ravaged further north, pushing perhaps as far as the Berkshire Downs. As they slowly made their way back to their ships laden with booty, a West Saxon fyrd led by the ealdormen of Berkshire and Hampshire intercepted them. The Welsh monk Asser in his Life of King Alfred relates what happened next: QUOTE ‘the battle having been joined in earnest, the heathens were cut to pieces everywhere. When they could not resist any longer, they took to flight like women, and the Christians had mastery over the field of death'. END QUOTE
Ellen: Not a very auspicious start of the story for Weland.
Richard: But it isn’t really the start of the story. Contemporary Frankish chronicles, in particular the Annals of St Bertin, permit us to track in unique detail the movements of these vikings before and after they undertook their ill-fated expedition to Wessex and to glimpse the complex political reality underlying contemporary sermons. The tale that emerges from the pens of the chroniclers Bishop Prudentius and Archbishop Hincmar is far more complicated than a simple story of heathen predators and Christian prey. It tells, rather, of Frankish princes, predators themselves, who were not above hiring vikings to fight other vikings or even Christian rivals.
According to the Annals of St Bertin, these same vikings had established themselves the previous year near the Somme River. There they had come to an agreement with the West Frankish King Charles the Bald to drive off or kill a different band of vikings who had built fortified bases on islands in the Seine River, first at Jeufosse and subsequently at Oissel [Waah sel]. From these bases they conducted raids deep into the countryside, pillaging towns and churches. Charles the Bald, to the consternation of clerical chroniclers, was far more interested in securing his throne against the threats of his brothers, nephews, and counts than in dealing with viking depredations. Charles regarded vikings as a nuisance. His rival royal kinsmen, on the other hand, were an existential threat. But the viking camp on the island of Oissel [Waah sel] was too near Paris and the heartland of his domain to be ignored. Charles agreed to pay the Somme vikings three thousand pounds of silver to rid his domain of the Seine vikings. While Charles raised the cash by taxing the treasures of churches and the houses and moveable wealth of landholders and merchants, the Somme vikings took hostages from the Franks and struck out across the Channel. Their rough reception at the hands of the West Saxons persuaded them to return to Francia, not quite soon enough for Charles’ liking as the Seine vikings had sacked Paris in their absence. When Charles the Bald paid Weland the full 3,000 pounds of silver-- weighed out under watchful vikings eyes—these viking mercenaries no more trusted Charles than he them, the Somme vikings fulfilled their side of the bargain by besieging the Oissel [Wah sel] stronghold of the Seine vikings.
As news of the siege spread, other vikings decided to get in on the action. Weland’s force swelled with the addition of forces from a newly arrived fleet of sixty ships. Meanwhile, Charles gathered livestock, corn, and wine for his viking allies so that the realm would not be looted. Finally, the besieged Seine vikings, ‘forced by starvation, filth and general misery', surrendered. They agreed to pay Weland 6,000 lb of gold and silver, and then joined up with him. With winter coming on, Weland's forces chose not to brave the hazards of the North Sea and wintered over in Francia. Splitting up into smaller bands, they scattered among the ports and abbeys of the Seine basin. Eventually they left Charles' kingdom, but only after Weland's son led the former Oissel vikings from their base in the deserted monastery of Fossés [FOS] in an attack upon the town of Meaux [MeOO]. For Bishop Hildegar of Meaux, Charles's forbearance in allowing the vikings to ravage the Seine basin was a disgrace and his permission for them to winter upstream from Paris nothing short of treachery.
Ellen: Incompetence, yes, but treason?
Richard: The bishop had a reason to suspect that. The raid upon Meaux may, in fact, have had Charles's tacit approval. Hildegard was a supporter of Charles’ rebellious son Louis the Stammerer. As one historian commented, ‘if Charles did not actually let the Fossés vikings loose on Meaux, their activities there would not wholly have displeased him. In the ashes of Meaux's buildings, late in 862, Louis the Stammerer and Hildegar would have seen daily reminders of the wages of sin'.
Whether or not Charles winked at the Danish attack on Meaux, it gave him an opportunity to enhance his prestige through decisive action. It had already provoked a near rebellion among the peasantry of the Seine-Loire region, who in 859 had attempted to take matters into their own hands by forming a sworn association to resist the Danes by force of arms. Though the local magnates had quickly and forcefully put an end to such presumption, by 862 they must have come to share their dependents' frustration. Charles responded by raising an army and stationing troops along both banks of the Rivers Oise, Marne and Seine, threatening to cut off viking escape to the open sea. By spring 862 Weland, who had sworn fealty to Charles, and the leaders of the other viking bands agreed to return the captives they had seized and to depart the kingdom. The great fleet broke up into smaller bands, many of which sailed to Brittany to take service with the Breton chieftain Salomon. Others signed on with Salomon's rival, Robert the Strong of Anjou.
Ellen: And do we know what happened to Weland?
Richard: Weland himself returned to Charles' court within the year, having apparently lost command of his fleet. He, his wife, and their entourage accepted baptism, presumably in order to secure the Frankish king's favor. But in an odd turn of events, the viking chieftain was accused by one of his own men of ‘bad faith' and of having sought baptism ‘as a trick'. He proved his accusation by killing Weland in single combat in the presence of Charles and his court.
Ellen: That sounds fishy to me.
Richard: And to me too. It was a truism of the time that one had to be a fool to trust the oath of a pagan viking. But Carolingian rulers could be just as treacherous, if a bit more subtle and clever about it.
The story of the viking Weland sheds a great deal of light upon the viking menace that English and Frankish kings faced in the ninth century. These vikings were not a ‘people' and their war bands were not well regulated ‘armies'. Though the chronicle sources often label viking fleets as ‘Danish' or ‘Norse', these terms better describe the leaders rthan their crews, who probably were a heterogeneous and variable lot. The viking ‘army' of the Somme quite clearly was a composite force made up of various warbands. Like flocks of migrating geese that join together under one leader, only to break up and reform under another, the viking ‘armies', or heres as they were termed in the English sources, represented fluid and shifting combinations of small fleets. The story of Weland also shows the limitations of our sources. We know nothing about who or what he was before he went a-viking. The authors of the annals of St. Bertin believed him to be a Dane and presumably he was a man of some substance to have been chosen to lead this fleet by the other captains. But even that is speculation.
Ellen: We have run out of time, but we certainly haven’t exhausted the subject of vikings.
Richard: We’ll return to them in future episodes. I’d like to talk about vikings in movies and television shows, and I would like to have an episode dedicated to King Alfred the Great, who defeated the vikings.
Ellen: And about whom you wrote a biography that you are presently supposed to be revising for a new edition.
Richard: I know, I know. Thank you for reminding me! And let’s thank our listeners for joining us. If you are enjoying this podcast, please spread the word. Good ratings and reviews on podcast platforms really do help do that. Bye for now. I thing I w’ll sing us out with a little tune I wrote for one of my classes.
Ellen: Dear God, no
Richard sings “There is nothing like a Dane”
Ellen [breaks in at end of the first verse,
“there ain’t anything like a Dane…..” Please stop!
Richard: Sorry, just cone more verse.
Continues to sing, fade out.
Ellen: Good bye everyone.