The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (18 page)

There was also a point on the riverbank at
York called Divelinestaynes, or ‘Dublin stones’, which suggests a landing
place for ships from Dublin, still the closest thing the Vikings had to a capital city.
It remained so. Even when the Norsemen were beaten out of England after the battle of
Brunanburh, the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
breaks into verse to show them
‘disgraced in spirit’ leaving ‘to seek out Dublin and their own land
again’.
³¹
The trouble with ‘their own land’, which is to say
Ireland, was that it had belonged to others in living memory, and those others wanted it
back; the Norsemen had to fight. After the battle at Limerick in 968 it was the Irish
who ‘carried away their soft, youthful, bright matchless girls; their blossoming
silk-clad young women; and their active, large and well-formed boys’.
³²
Such
an appetizing list suggests a very settled and civilized place, the kind that Vikings
used to raid. Dublin now became subject to fire setting, to raids and slaughter, but
this time from the Irish. Finally its Norse king, Amlaíb Cuarán, went out against all
the Irish kings; and he lost. The ‘red slaughter’ at the battle of Tara in
980 ended the military power of the Vikings in Ireland.

In every other way, though, they remained.
They had come as raiders, half-hearted settlers, merchants and slavers and fighters, and
in setting up their business they also created towns: Dublin, Wexford, Limerick,
Waterford and Cork. Those towns had a life that any Irish king would want to encourage,
and of course tax; they were not going to be dismantled just because they were connected
to the failing Vikings. In fact, Irish poets came to quite approve of the old
enemy’s ways, ‘sailing ships skilfully over the sea, the greed and business
of the Vikings’. Ireland went on buying English Christian slaves until well after
the Normans took England, not least because William the Conqueror was in no hurry to
change things; ‘he enjoyed a share of the profits from this trade,’ William
of Malmesbury reports.
³³

The Vikings had adjusted reality all round
the North Sea. They ran up the Canche River and took out Quentovic, the port for British
pilgrims on their way to Rome, the
emporium for trade back and forth to England. They stormed the new fort on the island of
Walcheren off Zeeland; they are a part of the hidden history of Domburg that the sea
once briefly revealed. Their ships forced their way up the Rhine and the IJssel, reached
inland ports like Dorestad and Deventer and left traces everywhere: a whalebone batten
for a weaving loom left in Frisia, a whalebone T-staff engraved with Anglo-Frisian runes
left in one of the raised living mounds along the coast, Arabic coins and coins with
Scandinavian images.
³⁴
Charlemagne’s empire lost so
much silver to the Vikings, in raids and tributes, that tight control of coinage had to
be loosened and nobody bothered any more with standardizing weights and types of coin. A
fair amount of silver also went underground, buried to protect it from civil unrest, or
maybe as a kind of tax avoidance when the Vikings came to demand tribute.
³⁵

They also left behind their genes. Vikings
were not famous for being continent. Dudo in his
History of the Normans,
which
was written at the end of the tenth century, wrote that ‘by mingling in illicit
couplings they generate innumerable children’. Saxo Grammaticus complained:
‘they seem to have outlawed chastity and driven it to the brothel’.
³⁶

More, they broke the limits of the usual
world. They went on pirate raids, sometimes as far as the frontiers of the Chinese
empire on the Caspian Sea; in the ninth and tenth centuries the Chinese outriders were
surprised to meet men who were tall, red-haired and blue-eyed. They connected the
Norwegian coast with the Russian badlands all the way south to Constantinople. In
Constantinople itself, Vikings became Varangians, the guards who did odd jobs for the
Emperor, jobs as odd as collecting his taxes and castrating his enemies. They were the
muscle round the throne, big men because the emperors had grave doubts about the
usefulness of small men; they were paid off with plunder and trusted, up to a point,
because they stood outside the politics of the court. Their privileges could be curious,
like the right to steal the palace decorations on Palm Sunday, not just the expensive
hangings but also the palm fronds which carried a blessing worth money. They were
riotous drinkers, a fact so
famous there
were satires written about it, where Varangians are the jury in the trial of the Grape,
who naturally is convicted, sentenced to be cut down, trampled and have his blood drunk
by men until they lose their senses. They also had a stern sense of justice, perhaps
surprising for men famous for their violence. If a man tried to kill another, he died.
When a Varangian tried to rape a woman he fancied, she grabbed at his sword and stuck
him through the heart; and his Varangian colleagues applauded her. They awarded her all
the man’s property, and threw their friend’s body away without burial. He
was, they said, a suicide.

Many men went south to Byzantium, so many
that the old Swedish law codes had to write special rules on inheritance for those who
were living ‘in Greece’.
³⁷
Some of them had exceptional
stories, both before and after their mercenary careers: Harold Hardrada, for
example.

Harold Hardrada ruled Norway for a time, and
he led an army into the north of England in 1066 in high hopes of being king there, too.
He had also been, for a time, a Varangian. When his half-brother Olaf was forced off the
Norwegian throne, Harold waited for his wounds to heal and then prudently went into
exile. He became a commander for the prince of Kiev, a mercenary who didn’t expect
his master to interfere with his wars or his profits. After a while, according to the
text called
Advice to the Emperor
, he took five hundred men in armoured ships
and made his way to Byzantium; the sagas say he was blown to port by a cool wind,
watching the shine of the metal roofs of the city. Onshore, he didn’t boast about
his rank, because the Byzantine court had every reason to fret about royal and noble
plotting, and he didn’t claim a great title; instead he again signed up with the
mercenaries. He went out with the patrols tackling pirates in the Aegean, because Viking
seamanship was a valuable commodity. He went to fight in Sicily and later in Bulgaria.
He is said to have fought in Africa, which must mean North Africa. He was a specialist,
sent off to take small forts, small cities with a small force of skilled men; eighty
towns in Arabia alone. In one of his own poems he says: ‘I reddened swords far
from my fosterland. The sword sang in the town of the Arabs but that was long
ago.’

His world went at least as far east as
Jerusalem. The sagas say he
‘made the
whole way to Jerusalem peaceable, slaying robbers and other wicked folk’, that
‘all cities and castles were opened for him’, that in Jerusalem he made
offerings at the shrines of ‘so much money in gold and jewels that it is hard to
compute the amount’. Most likely he went with the masons who were to rebuild the
Church of the Holy Sepulchre, commanding the guards who protected them; and since he was
a Varangian, an imperial bodyguard, it’s likely he was also guarding members of
the imperial family, maybe the exceedingly pious sisters of the Empress. There were
robbers on the way – there always were – and he dealt with them. There was really no
reason for castles or cities to stay closed to him: he was not crusading; he went in a
time of peace, when the Caliph himself was the son of a Byzantine mother and quite happy
to have Christians on his territory.

He knew when it was time for him to go home,
though, as Vikings so often did. He wanted to be king in Norway alongside the new King
Magnus; he wanted to be recognized in the place which had sent him away. His problem was
that the Byzantine Emperor was fighting off a general who was set on a coup, and also
preparing to fight off the threatening Russians. Harold was much too useful to be
allowed to leave.

There were iron chains strung across the
harbour at Byzantium to stop anyone moving along the Bosphorus, but he had to go through
the Bosphorus to get to the Black Sea and then to the rivers that would take him home.
His solution was simple. He took two ships and sailed them right up to the chains in the
water. He ordered men to take the oars, and anyone who was not needed to row was to take
all his goods and bedding and cram everything together at the stern of the ships. The
prows rose and caught on the chains; the ships stopped dead. Then Harold ordered the men
to run suddenly forward into the bows and the ships tilted down. One of them stuck fast
and broke open; many men died. The other tilted and slid down into the water.

Harold Hardrada was free to go home.

He turned out to be a generous king,
remembered for helping out the Icelanders in time of famine and for his princely gifts.
He was
‘famous and excellent for [his]
long and successful travels’. He was also ambitious; Norway was not enough. In
1066 there was no obvious heir to the throne of England and Harold went after the crown.
His invading army ran into the defending Anglo-Saxons at a village called Stamford
Bridge. Carnage followed, and Harold was among the dead.

‘He went out as a Viking to gain fame
and wealth,’ the saga says, ‘and then took rule over all people he could
conquer. Therefore he fell on another king’s soil.’

All this was happening in the warm years
when the seas were open and the Northern lands looked green, before the returning cold
began to jam the Northern seas with ice. The Norsemen made the most of the opportunity.
They were used to brutal, lightless winters, and they did not have high expectations of
summer, but they did know about the seasons for travelling. They knew when to move.

They did what almost no other people has
done in the Common Era: they settled truly empty lands. They came to the Faroe Islands
around 825 and panicked a few hermits into leaving, which accounts for the grievance of
the monk Dicuil. They noticed the birds going north each year, and they guessed at land
even further out. Around 860 they began cautiously exploring the coasts of Iceland. They
found traces that Irish hermits had left behind after they, too, had been frightened
away by the Norsemen’s reputation for being bloody and persistent. The fact that
hermits had survived at all in such a remote place may have encouraged the newcomers.
They saw the fish, birds and seals, the scrubwood everywhere and the driftwood, and
above all open spaces in a climate that was still mild. They were herdsmen looking at
empty pastures.
³⁸

The result was a small empire without
enemies for a while, an almost innocent kind of pioneering. After all, there was no law
at all in either Iceland or the Faroes before the Norse, no customs and rules, no
assemblies to make decisions and judge the guilty; no farms to divide up land and
produce food, no trade and no burial places to keep a common memory alive. The new
Iceland maintained for centuries a curious kind of democracy, rather more democratic in
our
modern sense than anything in ancient
Greece. There was no king. Many women and men had independent farms with no landlord,
and no feudal overlord. When they met in assemblies, the
Alþingi
, each could
vote to choose which of the local chieftains he would follow.

They had no towns, and none of the pecking
order that goes with a settled town; their social order was too new for that. Authority
rested not on title or name, but on what people knew or thought they knew about each
other. Farmers took to writing in their own Icelandic version of Old Norse, or at least
to having the priests write for them in Icelandic, because they needed a solid form of
memory to tell them what laws they had made, who owned what, where boundaries ran, how
they had come to Iceland in the first place and from what family. They constructed a
past for themselves, which was a practical thing to do because it set the rules and
decided who owned what, and then they recorded it. They also wrote down a past that was
heroic and even glorious if you have a good stomach for gore: the past of the sagas. The
process was costly, so it must have been very important: to write down one saga you
first had to kill between fifty and a hundred calves to get the skins for vellum.
³⁹

In time, the farms merged into great
estates. The Church took over half the land. Norway’s king and then
Denmark’s ruled over Iceland and introduced the very alien notion of tax. But
around 1000
CE
, the island itself told a story: how you could live out
beyond the waters that had once been taken for the very edge of the world, how you could
satisfy the hunger for land and space, and how a whole society could invent itself.

The temptation was always to go further. The
world had not yet turned colder and the waters were as open as they ever would be. Land
that would in time be snowed under and iced in was still alive and fertile. And there
were always people with good reason to move on. Erik the Red left Norway for frontier
Iceland ‘on account of some killings’ and after a while he had to leave
Iceland on account of some more killings; he needed a fresh start after his first fresh
start. He had to find a new frontier.

He heard stories about islands lying off a
great land mass to the west, the skerries off the coast of Greenland: Gunnbjarnarsker,
notorious for
their brutishness to visitors
and settled by a man who himself was running away from the consequences of doing murder.
Erik sensibly went beyond the skerries. He came into land under the white ice of a
glacier, and he tacked south along the coast looking for somewhere to settle; for three
winters he went up and down the coast, claiming site after site by giving them names,
choosing between the possibilities. He saw pasture for sheep and maybe some cattle, rich
fishing, walrus to hunt for their tusks and the hide that made such good ropes. He also
saw the emptiness of the land, just like Iceland, just like the Faroes. It would be two
more centuries before the Inuit moved south into Greenland as the seas began to freeze,
and began their challenge to the Europeans: a Norse sheep turned out to be much easier
to hunt than a wild walrus, even with the Inuits’ special skills.