The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (13 page)

This is a man who lived in a poor place on
the very edge of the world, close to the great ocean which was supposed to encircle the
world. He could travel only between April and September, when the winds were not too
violent, the cold was bearable in open ships and there was light;
¹⁷
and when he
travelled, he kept moving through the short nights because the winds were famously
unreliable and might change at any moment. On his journey south he noted Ireland, the
Orkneys and the Shetlands, but he also knew his contemporaries were on Iceland (and
looking west from there). He knew ‘the land extends a very long way north
from’ his northerly home, although he had heard that it was ‘all waste,
except that in a few places here and there Finnas camp, engaged in hunting in winter and
in summer in fishing by the sea’. He told Alfred he decided to go north in part
because he reckoned he might find a supply of walrus for their tusks and for the hides.
But he also wanted to ‘investigate how far the land extended in a northerly
direction, or whether anyone lived north of the wilderness’.

He was exploring.

He sailed north, which to him meant a
particular quadrant of the sky rather than an exact compass point, keeping open sea to
his port side. Going south, he always had seamarks to show where he was and knowledge of
where best to beach and rest overnight; the further north he went, the less he knew and
the more he was watching and chancing.

He watched a wilderness gliding past him,
rocky and frigid; but he kept sailing. ‘Then he was as far north as the furthest
the whale hunters go,’ the limits of the usual world for men like him; he had been
there before, once killed sixty whales (or it may have been walrus) in two days, or so
he said. ‘Then he travelled further north, as far as he could sail in the next
three days.’

When he found that the land turned east, he
waited for a wind to take him eastwards; and when he came to the mouth of the White
Sea he waited for a northerly wind to take
him south. He was beyond the help of maps, which showed only a maze of islands in the
north and behind them a world of legends he must have heard: the land where griffins
lived and the land of the Amazons and the savage peoples locked away behind a great wall
by Alexander the Great.
¹⁸
He met only a few fishermen and
hunters camping out on the barrens, heard their more fantastic stories and was properly
sceptical; he trusted only what he could see and test for himself.

There were no settlements on the land until
he came to a wide river mouth on the coast of the White Sea. He did not cross, because
he could see the land was settled on the other side and he already knew the settlers
were not friendly. He was ready to go out in the unknown ocean, but not to risk ship and
crew against this more usual human kind of obstacle. At last he decided to turn
back.

All this is something new. Ohthere in the
White Sea, far beyond the point where his countrymen sailed after whales, is a man aware
of a world waiting to be found, not confined to the usual, regular routes like some
sailor on the easier straits between, let’s say, Dunkirk and Dover. His voyage is
extraordinary in itself, but you can see why a man might think this way. If his
contemporaries had riches, they were mostly bits of animal that only Southerners valued
very high; so Northmen were obliged to travel to turn their goods into money. Slaves
were worth nothing where they were captured; they had to be shipped to the market.
Travelling was honourable in itself but finding something new, perhaps a ship carrying
valuables, perhaps a monastery full of gold and money, perhaps somewhere to settle: that
was a much better prospect. Sons of a fine title went away with their followers to make
both a living and a life.

Others had the same mindset: Christian
missionaries, for example. When the self-aggrandizing bishop Adam of Bremen wrote the
story of missions in the Northlands, he included a book of geography that shows his own
passion to know ‘how far the land extended’. His story isn’t
first-hand, it is pockmarked with legends and forgeries, and he does mention dog-headed
and one-eyed cannibals blocking the way to the lands that Ohthere had managed to
visit,
¹⁹
but he is still read for his other information. He thought the
Northerners were
excellent fighters because
they did not eat fruit, that they ‘more often attack others than others trouble
them’ but, even so, that ‘poverty has forced them thus to go all over the
world’.
²⁰
Perhaps there were too many of them at home and they had to travel
to live.

That is much too simple. Vikings
weren’t just forced onto the seas. They chose to move, for profit, for occupation,
to get away from the authority of kings (in the case of lords) and sometimes to escape
the power of lords (if they were commoners). And yet the growing population, small as
the rise seems to modern eyes, did matter very much: human beings were merchandise. They
could be caught and then held for fat ransoms if anyone was available to pay. They could
be kept as necessities as the Norsemen travelled, farmhands and wives and cooks. When
the Norsemen began to settle the empty, ashy spaces of Iceland around 870 they took
slaves from all around the Irish Sea and more than half the women on the island were
Gaelic. When they reached out to the Americas and their small, fragile colony in
Vinland, they took along a German slave called Tyrkir for special chores.
²¹

Better still, slaves could be sold on a huge
scale. Paul the Deacon, writing in the eighth century, says the North is such a healthy
place that the people breed and breed; Germania got its name from all that
‘germination’. He says: ‘That is why countless troops of slaves are so
often driven away from this populous Germania and sold to the southern people.’
All that Arab silver in Northern hands, lost on the Isle of Skye, buried in hoards, had
to be earned; all the silk that came north and the various dried spices that were needed
to practise the new Arab medicine had to be paid for.

Human beings paid.

The Arab world was suddenly desperate for
people to work. Plague had wasted the population, and labour was in short supply. A time
of peace didn’t help; war had been the usual way to bring in prisoners. Their
slave labourers from Africa were alarmingly restive and then rebellious. They were
forced to go to the slave markets – as far north and west as Utrecht as well as busy
Venice – and they were ready to pay very well; so a slave was worth two or three times
the Northern price when she or he had crossed the Mediterranean going
east.
²²
The numbers were enough for the
church council at Meaux in 845 to take notice of the merchants of Charlemagne’s
empire moving columns of human property through so many cities of the faithful
‘into the hands of the faithless and our most brutal enemies’. The issue was
not just the miserable life the slaves faced; ‘they are swelling the vast numbers
of enemies of the kingdom’ the council complained, and ‘increasing the enemy
strength’. The council wanted to make sure men were sold inside Christendom, which
they said was for the sake of their immortal souls.
²³

The trade was lucrative, wide and growing;
the trader Vikings wanted their share. They were opening their own reliable trade route
to the east, through the Baltic, by way of Novgorod in western Russia and then south to
the Caspian, the Black Sea and beyond. They had fur, ivory, amber, honey, beeswax and
good swords to sell to the Arabs and to the middlemen along the way, Bulghars, Khazars,
Russians. Slaves were one more line of business, and a good one.
²⁴
They were quite
breathtakingly ambitious. Amlaíb, chief and king of the Norsemen at Dublin, went to war
across the Irish Sea and came back in 871 with two hundred shiploads of captive
‘Angles and Britons and Picts’. He brought them back for sale in Ireland, at
least six thousand of them, because there was simply no market for that many slaves in
Scotland or Wales.
²⁵

So when trouble starts, expect the Vikings
to loot, to pillage, but more than anything else: to kidnap. For as long as the Eastern
markets needed labour, the Norsemen were shipping out human cargo. In doing so, they
helped break up all the frontiers, genetic and cultural and political, of the North.

Hardly anybody had yet seen the Norsemen up
close by 800
CE
, but they could be beautiful, they could be terrifying
and quite often they were simply repellent. They had the habits of men cramped together
on long voyages with little water, little shelter and absolutely no idea of privacy;
they knew what it was to be bored through long idle winters so they drank; they had the
perpetual traveller’s passion for the rituals away from home that make him feel he
might still have a home. They carried absolutely all of their culture with them. And
curiously, at least in Hedeby on Danish soil,
they all wore some kind of indelible cosmetic, which may have been a tattoo, to draw
attention to their eyes: men and women alike.
²⁶
They wanted people to be afraid of
their gaze.

The Arab merchant Ibn Fadlān said he met
them in a Bulghar encampment on the Volga, far east of Kiev. He was there on a mission:
to make proper, settled Muslims of a people with shamans, horses and a tendency to
wander about the place. He was startled and impressed when the Rūs, the Vikings living
in the East, arrived to do business. ‘I have never seen bodies more perfect than
theirs. They were like palm trees,’ he wrote. They were tattooed all over with
intricate designs in dark green. They were dirty, they hardly washed except in filthy
communal bowls, they were ‘like wandering asses’; they had companionable sex
with their slave girls in full view of all their companions, and if a buyer arrived at
such an inconvenient moment, ‘the man does not get up off her until he has
satisfied himself’. Naturally, they drank; and what they drank was probably mead,
although it may have been fermented mare’s milk. They knew very well ‘the
heron of forgetfulness that hovers over ale-gatherings and steals the wits of
men’.
²⁷
In time they developed a taste for good wine. When the Danish
king, Godfrid, was asked by the Emperor to take control of Frisia in 882 and keep it
safe against raiders, including his own Danes, he accepted; but he was back inside three
years with a new demand. He couldn’t stay in any land where the wine did not flow
freely – ‘this wine which is in such mean supply in Frisia’.
²⁸

If one of the Vikings fell sick, he was put
out in a tent far away from the others and left alone; he was welcome back, if he
happened to survive. If he died, and he was poor, the Rūs built him a boat and burned
him in it; if he was rich, they made sure he was known to be rich and a Viking in their
own way, which meant a ceremony of fire, sex and murder.

They found a volunteer among the dead
man’s slave girls (or slave boys) to die with him. The slave drank and sang, drank
and sang, in a perfect show of joy. The man’s boat was dragged onshore, and onto a
wooden frame. His body was dug up and uncovered when everything was ready, smelling good
but turned quite black,
²⁹
and put into
the boat along with a dog cut in two and horses which had
been run to exhaustion and butchered. The slave girl had sex with the master of each of
the pavilions built around the boat, and the men all said: ‘Tell your master I
only did this for your love of him.’ Since the girl, according to Ibn Fadlān,
could just as well have been a boy, it seems the Vikings followed the rules of the sea:
the best sex is available sex. They certainly had the half-joshing insults to go with
the habit: the great god Thor was dressed up in women’s clothes to steal back a
magic hammer, of all things, and terribly afraid he’d be thought a
‘cock-craver’; a rude ogress in the song of Helgi Hjörvardson tells the
princeling Atli that ‘though you have a stallion’s voice’ his heart is
in his arse.
³⁰

Evening came. There was a frame like a
doorway, and the girl was hoisted up to look over it as though it was the door to
Paradise: to see first her parents waiting for her, then all her relatives waiting for
her, and then the third time her master calling to her. She drank until she did not know
what she was doing. On the boat, six men raped her, and then two men caught her with
ropes tight around her neck. An old crone came forward, the Angel of Death, and stabbed
her until she died. The men kept banging furiously on their shields so nobody could hear
the girl’s cries, especially not any girls (or boys) who might one day think of
dying with their masters.

The man’s closest male relative now
stripped naked and walked backwards towards the boat, covering his arse with one hand,
holding a piece of flaming wood in the other. He threw the wood onto the boat and he was
followed by the crowd, each with a piece of burning wood. The boat caught, the tents
caught, the bodies burned in a violent wind.
³¹

Ibn Fadlān got some things right; we know
from the uncovered remains of a Viking grave at Ballateare on the Isle of Man. There is
the body of a middle-aged man wrapped in a cloak. Higher up in the same grave, a woman,
quite young with her arms over her head and her skull broken.
³²
She had to die so
he could be buried.

Such things startled a devout Muslim.
Christians were not just startled; they were contradicted. The Church was busy preaching
the unfamiliar doctrine of the family unit, not a tribe or a pack but
parents with their own children, and here were loyalties that
went in all directions, loyalty shown by slaves as well as daughters, crew as well as
sons; it was a quite different way to organize life. The Church was also busy trying to
cram sexuality back into the frame of monogamous marriage, and here was a kind of open,
public, sacramental sex. As the Danes moved into more polite or at least more Southern
society, they even changed the official meaning of marriage. Frankish law in Christian
territory allowed first- and second-class wives, not to mention ‘wives of your
youth’, an expedient until a man settled on a serious contractual and
property-owning marriage, and even concubines; the ninth-century list of penances
prepared by Halitgaire of Cambrai condemns a married man who keeps a mistress but
accepts a man who has a mistress instead of a wife. This kind of living was called
marriage ‘
more danico
’ – in the Danish, meaning in the Viking,
way.
³³