The Vikings: A Very Short Introduction (17 page)

Several reasons have been suggested for the failure of the colonies.

One suggestion is that climatic deterioration changed the migratory routes of the caribou, while the settlers were tied to one place by their domestic animals. Grazing deteriorated and the west coast was sealed off from Europe. However, the evidence is inconclusive and for modern scholars such environmental determinism is seen as too simplistic. The Little Ice Age is unlikely to have destroyed the Norse colonists – the intensive chill did not take place before 1600 –

by which time they had already disappeared. On the other hand, the observed decline in vegetation may have been caused by the Norse by over-grazing.

Second, it has been argued that the Greenlanders suffered from
s

disease and malnutrition, and may even have been wiped out by the
g

kin

Black Death. However, apart from revealing an increased reliance
e Vi

on marine species, all the skeletons that have been analysed are
Th

healthy.

The breakdown of trade with Europe certainly was important. By the 14th century elephant ivory from India and furs from Russia were readily available and the economic basis of the colony was thus undermined.

Fourth, the failure has been blamed on increased competition with the Inuit. The late 13th-/early 14th-century
Historia Norvegiae
recorded violent contact between Norse hunters and
skraelings
who ‘used walrus teeth for missiles and sharpened stones for knives’, although few now believe that Inuit attacks can have been the sole reason for Norse depopulation, and their arrival in the Western Settlement may well have been after it was already deserted. It is, however, significant that Inuit artefacts and technology are conspicuously absent from Norse sites. The Norse did not adopt Inuit skin-covered umiaks and kayaks, or their 114

clothing styles; nor did they acquire harpoon-hunting technology to widen their subsistence base.

Lack of adaptation certainly seems to have been an important factor in the Norse decline. Norse farmers were tied to isolated pockets of pasture capable of supporting domestic animals. They took little advantage of the sea; even seals were only clubbed when they came on land, whereas the Inuit hunted them by boat. Farmers lived in a stratified society controlled by powerful chieftains and church officials. The social and economic structure rested upon payment of tithes to landowners, the church, and the Norwegian crown.

Th

e edge of th

The church was an important influence: over 20 local churches were constructed, replete with stained glass, bells, and vestments.

Its main power centre was at Garðar where a bishopric was
e w

established on the rim of the known world and a small stone
orl

cathedral was dedicated to St Nicholas. The bishop’s palace
d: G

complex included a tithe barn where the skulls of 25 walrus and five
reenlan
narwhal skulls indicate the level of tithes. Two huge cow byres with
d an

space for 150 cattle show the concentration of economic power.

d Nor

Analysis of the bishop’s skeleton (identified by his crosier) revealed that he – unlike his parishioners – was able to live off a diet of land
th Am

animals, rather than seal meat. In 2000 Thomas McGovern
eric

attributed the failure of the Greenland colony to a single-minded
a

concentration on European-style stock-raising strategies: When faced with multiple challenges to the basic environmental and social framework of their economy and society, the Norse Greenlanders chose to avoid innovation, to emphasize and elaborate their own traditions, and ultimately to die rather than abandon what they must have seen as core values.

Several sites provide evocative archaeological evidence for the end of the Norse colonies. At the bishop’s palace at Garðar nine partial skeletons of hunting dogs lay on floors of stables and dwelling houses, buried beneath collapsing roof timbers in the 115

mid-14th century. At GUS, the farm was abandoned at around the same time. A solitary goat later returned, and with no one left to care for him, starved to death outside. Later still, after the roof had partially collapsed, a group of Inuit came and camped in the abandoned farmstead, but their fire set the ruins alight and they fled, leaving behind some of their belongings. At Site W54, adjacent to GUS, bio-archaeology has revealed the death of the farmstead, as warmth-loving insects in the lower farm levels were replaced by carrion-loving insects in the upper layers. All that was left in the larder were cattle hooves, mixed with the feet of ptarmigan and arctic hare. In the hallway outside the larder was the partial skeleton of one of the great hunting dogs. Cut marks to the bones revealed that this faithful hound had provided the last supper of the occupants.

This poignant tale of starving 14th-century settlers, clinging to a
s

maladaptive lifestyle, is a far cry from warrior-kings of the 9th-g

kin

century, and emphasizes the wide range of cultural behaviour to
e Vi

which the term Viking has been applied. In the last chapter it is
Th

time to return to the issue of how these different roles have been taken up by subsequent commentators and been used to create their own Vikings.

116

Chapter 12

Reinventing the Vikings

At the outset of this book I observed that ‘Viking’ was not a common term in the 9th and 10th centuries, and that our modern image probably owes more to recent appropriation of the term than to any historically-based reality. In subsequent chapters we have looked at what archaeology can tell us about the cultural identities of those peoples who lived in Scandinavia and its colonies during what we now call the Viking Age. But every age has reinvented the Vikings and in this chapter we will examine some of these more recent reinventions.

Nineteenth-century Vikings – the Romantic revival By the 16th century there was scant appreciation of Scandinavia’s early history, and knowledge of the Viking Age was virtually non-existent. Despite Ole Worm’s catalogue of Danish monuments,
Danicorum Monumentorum
(1643), scholarly interest was limited.

Europeans were more concerned with their classical past and the great civilizations of Greece and Rome. From the late 18th century, however, Vikings began to become fashionable again, not as cultural heroes, but exactly because they were considered barbarians. Vikings and other early medieval cultures provided indigenous European examples of Rousseau’s ‘Noble Savage’.

This new enthusiasm for Vikings became particularly intense in 117

Denmark and Sweden after both countries suffered humiliating military defeats. In 1807 Nelson bombarded Copenhagen; in 1809

Sweden lost Finland to Russia. With the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars patriotic romanticism grew in many countries. In Scandinavia, the educated classes felt the need to recover the power and vitality of the Viking Age. Vikings became core to their maintenance of a sense of national identity. In 1808 Nikolai Grundtvig’s
Northern Mythology
was published in Denmark.

Grundtvig (1783–1872) campaigned to infuse the Danish education system with the Viking spirit. Today he is widely regarded as the founder of lifelong learning. Grundtvig retold the Viking myths in the form of a chronology of the sagas, the aim of which was to develop the prestige of Scandinavia in Europe. In 1811 the Gothic Society was founded in Sweden. Its purpose was to encourage the patriotic spirit and encourage archaeological research. An all-male group, its anthem was ‘In ancient times Goths drank from horns’. Drinking
s

horns were given pride of place in middle-class dining rooms
g

kin

throughout Scandinavia. Its members included Erik Gustaf Geijer,
e Vi

whose poem
The Viking
portrayed an ideal society where harmony
Th

depended on the balance between free farmers and high kings, and Esaias Tegnér, author of the poetic romance
Frithiofs Saga.

While poets and students met to read Old Norse songs and poems, they looked to archaeology for a Viking Age that could be displayed.

Burial mounds were obvious man-made features and were targeted for investigation. One of the royal mounds at Jelling was dug in 1820; the second in 1861. The three great mounds at Old Uppsala were dug in 1846–7 and 1874; in 1852 the Borre ship burial was excavated.

From 1873–95 Stolpe excavated over 1,000 graves at Birka. At about this time the term ‘Viking Age’ was used for the first time in Scandinavia by Oscar Montelius, to refer to the period 800–1050.

At the same time as agricultural improvements and deep ploughing were leading to a rapid increase in the pace of archaeological discoveries in Scandinavia, industrialization and urban growth were creating an urban proletariat who saw themselves as Swedish 118

or Danish rather than as the inhabitants of local farming districts.

Norway was part of Denmark up to 1814; then it became part of Sweden until achieving independence in 1905. Nationalism was particularly intense and regional dialect studies were taken as proof of a greater Norwegian affinity with their Viking heritage and Old Norse than with either Denmark or Sweden.

In summary, the image of the Vikings in 19th-century Scandinavia was characterized by a number of features, several of which have had lasting impact. First, a homogeneous Viking Age culture was identified in Scandinavia, lasting from 800 to 1050. This Viking Age was seen as a step on the evolutionary ladder, equivalent to those of Stone, Bronze, and Iron in a grand Darwinian perspective.

The Viking past was owned solely by the Scandinavian nations and the key historical actors were the early Viking kings, particularly
R

those involved in unification. Where possible, their history should
ein

v

be written from documentary sources, and illustrated by
entin

archaeological finds. Its main themes were political unification,
g th

Viking voyages, and the process of conversion to Christianity. By
e Vi

the 20th century the Vikings had become one of a small number
kin

g

of ‘great civilizations’, and interest focused on the rise of the
s

Scandinavian states. However, differences between regions were secondary to a shared common culture and language, visible in the archaeological evidence.

Outside Scandinavia, Vikings were also taken initially to represent pre-classical barbarian culture, but the romantic appeal of the sagas soon became combined with the revival of interest in the northern world and the search for northern ‘primitive’ ancestors.

In Britain the Vikings were reinvented in accordance with Victorian notions of race, valour, and enterprise. Comparisons were drawn between the Viking spirit and the enterprising spirit of Victorian entrepreneurs and explorers. Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon were revived as university subjects equal to the classical languages, and chairs were endowed particularly in northern industrial towns, 119

Richard Wagner (1813–83) . . . and horned

helmets

Richard Wagner used a series of sagas and other sources
when he composed
The Ring of the Nibelung
, first performed
1869–76. Reworking his Norse sources, Wagner combined
two stories: the tale of Sigurd and the account of
Ragnarök
,
the downfall of the Norse gods, to create a pastiche of Germanic and Scandinavian mythology. He is often credited
with popularizing the idea of horned helmets, giving one to
the character Hunding in the Ring cycle. In later productions
horned helmets were most closely associated with the
Valkyries, but as originally staged the Valkyries wore helmets with wings. Wagner and his costume and set designer
sg

Carl Emil Doepler probably borrowed the idea from the cos-kin

tumes in stage plays about ancient pre-Viking Germans, and
e Vi

used it in the original production of
Tristan und Isolde
in 1865.

Th

In fact Vikings first acquired horned and winged helmets
during the 19th century. Romantic artists began to explore
mythology, depicting a hodgepodge of Germanic, Celtic, and
classical motifs. The Swede Gustav Malmström gave horns
to Vikings in illustrations for an edition of
Frithiof’s Saga

(1820–5), but may have borrowed the idea from prehistoric
Scandinavian rock art. There are depictions of horned figures in the Viking Age, on a tapestry from the Oseberg ship
burial, but they are shamanistic figures in a ceremonial procession. The only surviving horned helmet is Iron Age,
dredged from the Thames at Waterloo Bridge in the 1860s,
and now in the British Museum. Some Viking warriors did
wear helmets in battle, but they were simple conical affairs,
such as that found at Gjermundbu, in Sweden, or that
depicted on the Middleton cross.

such as Manchester and Leeds. Victorian writers also fuelled the popular interest, and the Pre-Raphaelites turned away from classical to Norse and Germanic heroes. Even the landscape was appropriated and for them the Lake District was a Viking landscape, frozen in time. In 1892 the Viking Society for Northern Research was founded, and began the publication of
Sagabook
, the first periodical devoted to the study of Vikings. There was particular interest in the links between Germanic myth and Christian teaching, which encouraged the study of Viking sculpture as it depicted events in heathen mythology alongside Christian scenes in ways which emphasized the parallels.

William Morris (1834–96)

Rein