The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (12 page)

Their ships were on the move from around 700
CE
. The Vikings didn’t burst out of the north like some flight
of arrows; they had been trading, sailing about widely enough to know where there were
riches, and better yet where the riches were portable and close to the coast. They came
south to find a regular connection with anyone in Western Europe who wanted skins and
furs and walrus ivory. They brought luxuries out of the eastern Baltic and the rivers of
Russia,
¹
the goods so expensive they were worth carrying in small quantities in
a small ship: like amber, which was lovely and almost as obscenely valuable as diamonds
now. They were the mercenaries of Byzantium, the traders of Kiev and capable of coming
ashore at will in the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast of Spain and
finally North America. Their connections to the trade routes gave them the local
knowledge they needed to decide where it was worth going out as pirates, and also where
they could dispose of the loot; because a man can’t eat a gilded reliquary or a
few hundred metres of fine cloth.

They were also less predictable than other
pirates and the imperial raiders, because they knew how to tack into the wind, so they
did not have to let the wind decide their course, or wait for it. A startled
cosmographer from Andalucia reported that they had ‘big ships with square sails
and could sail either forwards or backwards’.
²
Owning a great ship that was moved
solely by manpower was a sign of high social standing, but they did not depend on oars
and muscle; their ships had single sails, some of them huge affairs of woven wool
sewn
³
together, as much as a hundred square metres for the grandest. A ship
was an investment of money, time and life. It took thirty
weeks to weave a sail sixteen metres square, and half a kilometre of planks to make the
hull, not to mention timber for mast and spars and the iron that had to be smelted and
formed for nails and rivets to hold the ship together.
⁴
A ship didn’t
just show how rich or powerful or grand a man might be; it was his being.

Their armies leaving port would run up the
sails but then use manpower to row the ships out to sea, into the strongest waves; and
row on even when the sails were set higher. Rowing was good for manoeuvring a warship or
the heavier freighters that came later, but sails gave ships stamina and speed. Saxons
may have used them before the Vikings came, and there may have been others on the North
Sea,
⁵
but it was Viking boats with sails that became such extraordinary machines. They could
cross the widest part of the North Sea, more or less six hundred kilometres, in four or
five days and without any of the usual need to cling to the shore and spend the nights
on dry land.

So the world of the Norsemen was not the
same as other people’s worlds, not even the world that the Frisians knew. The Old
Norse texts make it clear that the centre of their world was in the North, not in
Jerusalem as it was on the usual world maps further south, and their headquarters were
not in Rome as the Church imagined; Vikings did not see themselves on the edge of
things. They could already operate through a world much wider than the world of Romans
or Saxons or Britons. They knew there was land across the ocean to the west, but they
did not know its shape or exactly where it lay. They defied a strain of Christian
orthodoxy just by thinking that people could live south of the Earth’s hot zones,
where it is summer when the north has winter. Most likely, too, their time at sea,
navigating with the help of wide horizons, had taught them that the Earth itself was a
sphere and not a pancake on top of a ball as learnèd men were supposed to think. They
knew how to sail out to sea so the curve of the earth would hide them from the land.
They knew they could trick an enemy, as King Olaf tricked Erling in the sagas, by
lowering their sails gradually so they seemed to be sailing over the horizon.
⁶
They
used every advantage that a round Earth could provide.
⁷

And they knew where they were going. The magnetic compass
arrived in the North some time in the thirteenth century, but the Vikings already had a
brilliantly simple sun compass. It worked as a sundial works, by tracking the tip of the
shadows thrown by a stick at different times of day; where the shadow is shortest and
the sun is highest, the shadow points north and south. It was useless in rain or snow or
fog, but in the sailing season, which was the summer of endless light, it was a huge
advantage. Such a compass belonged among Norsemen because the North had winter; people
who were used to travelling over blank snowscapes, where the landmarks are buried and
the detail is all smoothed away, needed to make such a device.
⁸
Once they had it,
they could also sail a featureless ocean as far as America.

As for who they were, what they were, that
was easy: they were enemy. They were the others, the ones not like the rest, and their
brilliance at sea brought them far too close for comfort. Their sense that voyaging was
something worth recording and praising and honouring
⁹
did not make them
sympathetic, as it would in later years. Their great stories had not yet been written
down, not even told aloud, so their habits and their history were unknown. Since what
they did – raid, plunder, slave – was all too close to what everybody else did, given
the chance, there had to be some other dimension to make them a proper enemy: they had
to be demons. Nobody expects to understand what demons do.

There were clues, though. For a start, the
Danes were unsettled by the steady spread north of the Frankish empire. In 734, Charles
the Hammer took Frisia for the Franks and was all too close to the Danes’ southern
borders. Within three years the Danes were working on their defences, building a strong
oak palisade, two metres high, to cross their southern frontier, and putting a barrage
across the bay at the south of Jutland. They could never have built such a barrier
without the kind of powerful king who makes local nobles anxious enough to obey his
commands. Somebody had to organize and commandeer a quick and large operation, not to
mention the naval support it needed. That somebody had the power to be just oppressive
enough to persuade local Danish lords, used to their own
independent power, that they might as well take their chances
on the sea.
¹⁰

Further north there was less kingship.
Harald Finehair was still struggling to create a Norway he could rule, even if some men
were already calling themselves ‘Norwegian’. There was less of a state, but
the same squabble of nobles. So little of Norway could be ploughed and planted that even
the kindness of the climate in the last centuries of the first millennium could not make
the land truly valuable; it was swamp, lakes, mountain and the kind of conifer forests
that ruin the soil.
¹¹
Riches had to come from somewhere
else, which meant the sea; nobles who felt just marginal were willing to ship out.

The idea of going away, being curious about
the world, began before the Viking age. In a village with a couple of families running
large farms, at Helgö, not far from Stockholm on Lake Mälar, someone buried objects from
the sixth and seventh centuries: a Coptic bronze ladle from Egypt, which might have been
used in baptisms; a whole series of love scenes cut into gold foil; and, quite
astonishingly, a Buddha. His caste mark on his forehead is gold, his eyebrows and lips
are painted, his cloak is finely embroidered and he sits on an intricate lotus blossom
throne; he is a true rarity even in Kashmir, where he was probably made. No Scandinavian
is known to have travelled as far as India, which is a huge distance over land as well
as sea. There was the whole Muslim world in between and it is highly unlikely any Arab
trader would risk the contamination of such a heathen and infidel object, even if he
thought he could find a buyer in the West. The Buddha was known in Byzantium –
he’s a character in a popular epic called
Barlaam and Josaphat
– and
perhaps the Jewish traders working throughout Asia and Europe might have brought the
statue as a curiosity and sold it on. But then why would a farmer on the edge of a
Swedish lake have wanted it?
¹²
It had no religious significance
for him, it had no magic, although it has great beauty. Did it satisfy curiosity about a
wider world, perhaps?

Around the middle of the eighth century,
Scandinavians began to make their way from the Baltic down the great river systems of
what is now Russia. This, too, seems strange. It is one thing to raid rich and easy
targets on the coasts of the North Sea or the Irish Sea, sailing off
with lovely treasure. Helgö lies a good distance from the
North Sea, but the farm with the Buddha also owned a bronze from Ireland: an
eighth-century crook from some priest’s crozier in the shape of a dragon, with
blue and silver eyes and enamelled jaws, circled round a human head with a wolf and a
bird in attendance. Such things could be had quite easily. But the same sort of men were
making an extraordinary effort to work their way overland through swamp and forest into
Russia, daring an unfriendly menagerie of creeping, stinging and biting beasts, having
to push or abandon boats when they came to the cataracts that roared on the rivers and
made them even more vulnerable to bandits. The famous predators had to keep armed guards
onshore so as not to become prey. They did all this in territory that was miserably
poor, where there were few people and no friends; there is evidence of only one town in
all of north-western Russia in the eighth century. The Scandinavians – the ones whose
brothers owned bronze and gold and even a Buddha – were the richest targets around.
¹³

There is one likely reason for their
determination to break through Russia: silver. Neither Russia nor Scandinavia had
sources of silver, but silver coins travelled north from the Arab caliphates in the form
of the famous
dirham
. Opening a trade route for furs, for amber and for slaves
and bringing back silver could be hugely valuable. Besides, if a man had nothing to sell
he could always sell his services, as the ‘friendly’ troops of Swedish and
Russian kingdoms in the East, as the palace guard of Byzantine emperors, as mercenaries
for the Khazars beyond Byzantium between the Black and Caspian seas. By the eighth
century, a voyage down the Volga was commonplace; within a single generation, the first
decades of the ninth century, Vikings worked out how to use the great rivers to travel
regularly as far as Constantinople. They opened up vast territory by daring to go
through the badlands. Everyone around the Baltic would have known of silver coming
north, could have met with the merchants on the routes into Asia, but only the Vikings
chose to go hunting the source of that wealth.

There is a cultural difference here, a
willingness to be unsettled: men trapped by long winters, barely scratching a living out
of narrow
lands, found the sea their obvious
escape. They had no great riches to defend at home, no neighbour enemies. They had every
reason to move on and on.

Ohthere knew that. He was ‘among the
foremost men in that land’, or so he said when he met King Alfred in southern
England some time in the late ninth century. The king was always eager to meet strangers
who knew strange corners of the world. Ohthere brought him walrus ivory, perhaps as a
sample of things to trade, perhaps to pay for protection, or simply as a gift: a formal
courtesy. He was certainly a trader of some kind because on his journeys he called at
trading places like the seasonal settlement Kaupang in the south of Norway.
¹⁴

He answered questions before Alfred, he
explained himself and his country, and his answers were written down and slipped into
the translation Alfred was preparing of the historian and geographer Orosius, his
Histories against the Pagans
. So we know that Ohthere had more wild than
domestic animals: six hundred reindeer ‘unsold’ in his herds, for the meat
and the hides, and six of the beasts who led the moving herd and acted as decoys when
there were wild reindeer to catch. ‘However, he did not have more than twenty head
of cattle and twenty sheep and twenty pigs, and the little that he ploughed he ploughed
with horses.’ Southerners were surprised; they ploughed with oxen.

He said he ‘lived furthest north of
all the Norsemen’ beside the Western Sea, far north on the coast we know as
Hålogaland; and although he does not mention it, perhaps because it seemed so obvious to
him, he was living close to the winter spawning grounds for codfish, which will have fed
him in the bleak months. Those long winter nights were lit with whale oil from blubber
pits along the shore, maybe worked by the hunting and herding Sami peoples on the
coast.
¹⁵
His wealth depended mostly on those same nomads: he was worth what he
owned in skins and bone and feathers (which means eiderdown), tunics of marten and otter
(which sold at three times the price of sable in the South), and ship’s ropes made
from walrus hide. As for farming as Southerners knew it, up north on the
very edge of the zone where cereals can ripen, he said that
the land ‘that may be grazed or ploughed, that lies along the sea … is
nevertheless very rocky in some places, and wild moors lie to the East and above,
running parallel to the inhabited land’.
¹⁶