Vikings (30 page)

The voyage described at the opening of this chapter was made not by some nameless Viking of the ninth century, however, but by a young Norwegian man named Kaare Iversen and three of his friends, towards the end of 1941. Their vessel was the Iversen family fishing boat, the
Villa
, and they were driven by a desire to defy the Nazi occupation of Norway.

Having successfully made landfall on the Shetland Island of Fetlar – and been fed and watered there by a sympathetic and unquestioning farmer’s wife – Iversen soon volunteered for service in the clandestine operation that became known as ‘the Shetland Bus’. The efforts of men like Iversen forged a permanent link that continued after the end of the German occupation of Norway in May 1945. Agents and equipment were ferried across the sea, mostly during the winter months when darkness
and bad weather lowered the risk of detection by enemy planes and vessels, and refugees and wanted men were carried to safety in Britain on the return trips. Much of the work of the Shetland Bus was conducted by fishing boats, and their crews consisted mostly of Norwegian and Shetland men, some barely out of their teens. Definite figures are hard to come by but it is thought at least 160 of them perished in the line of duty, killed by the enemy or lost to the sea while fighting a secret and largely forgotten part of the war.

The ties forged by the Shetland Bus lasted for lifetimes, and even longer. Nowadays the friendships made during the war years are maintained by the children and grandchildren of those who actually took part. It is just another chapter of the long story of connections between the tribes of Britain and of Scandinavia. Having been colonised by Norwegian Vikings in the eighth and ninth centuries, Shetland and Orkney remained part of the Norwegian kingdom until the fifteenth century. If today’s islanders consider themselves anything other than Shetlanders, then most would say they are Norwegian rather than Scots, far less British. The men and women who welcomed Iversen and the rest of the thousands of dispossessed Norwegians to the Shetland Islands during the Second World War were therefore no strangers, they were family – and those family ties were a thousand years and more in the making.

The simple truth revealed by history is that the North Sea has for long been more of a bridge than a barrier for those living either side of it, and the peoples of Scandinavia have always found many different reasons to look westwards.

When I dreamed myself a Viking it was mostly a
Norwegian
Viking that I had in mind. I first encountered their stories in childhood (I preferred to call them
Northmen
, then), but as an adult I learnt some of the complexities of it all: that they were
not one unified people but three, and that each had their own long, unique histories, identities and – most importantly when it came to fathoming all that had happened in the Viking Age – their own motivations and needs for putting to sea in their ships.

I once thought they had appeared out of nowhere in the last decade of the eighth century, with axes in their hands and murder in their hearts; now I know that, by then, they had already preoccupied the imaginations of their European and British neighbours for decades at least.

Charlemagne of the Franks encountered them during his attempts to subdue and conquer the Saxons who lived on the northern and eastern borders of his expanding demesne. Whether he knew it or not, his own experience was in many ways the same as that of the Romans eight centuries before. While the legions toiled to impose their version of peace on the Germanic tribes, they sought the co-operation of those living in the Scandinavian territories beyond, in hopes of trapping their most stubborn foes in a pincer movement. And so it was, at least to some extent, with Charlemagne. He battled the Saxons with the sword in one hand and the Cross of Jesus Christ in the other – and as he did so he was right to keep an eye on the Danes and the rest of the most northerly pagans on Earth.

I learnt, too, that the Swedish Vikings were quite different from their neighbours – if not in their motivations, then in their tactics and behaviour. They travelled east and not west and they were men of the rivers rather than the seas. The Swedes, and to some extent the Danes, were also beneficiaries of geography. They faced the east and so found themselves at one end of an ancient trade route that was thousands of miles long. By venturing back and forth along it, loaded with white furs and golden amber, they could reap a harvest of Arabic silver. Armed with great wealth, their greatest chieftains could win and maintain
the loyalty of many swords back home – and so in time make kings of themselves.

Medieval Europe in the eighth century was a continent invigorated by change and by new ideas. Charlemagne, like other powerful men at that time, was determined to exploit the potential of wealth, politics and Christianity to drive his ambitions and the headlong advance of his kingdoms.

By dint of their location in the world, looking out across the Baltic Sea towards the sources of the energy, the Swedes and Danes were quickest to notice the benefit. There were already chieftains and dynasties in all the Scandinavian countries by then, the product of centuries and millennia of social climbing by the few; but it was in Sweden and Denmark first of all that men of ambition learnt how to follow Europe’s lead in shifting their dreams of dominance up a gear, towards statehood and kingship.

Life for the Norwegian Vikings was always different, and harder. Their place on the edge of the world, facing into the North Atlantic, meant they lay in the shadow of eastern Europe warmed first by the rising sun. The chieftains of the west had their great halls like all the rest, places built to mimic the basilicae of the Romans, where they feasted and made their sacrifices. They had learnt from their ancestors that the loyalty of followers was the product of a complicated relationship that relied, at its heart, on the exchange of gifts. A warlord, a king in the making, adorned his warriors with silver and weapons; he plied them too with drink from wondrous glass vessels. In return they sat before him in his hall and promised him the strength of their arms, while the poets among them recited verses extolling his virtues – his courage and, best of all, his generosity.

The Viking lords of Norway knew all this every bit as well as their neighbours east and south, and were no doubt excited by the thought of the great river of foreign silver flowing through
ports like Birka, Hedeby and Ribe. The men of the west, of the north way – the
Nor Way
– had to find their own ways of growing rich. As Alex Woolf explains: ‘A need among Westland chieftains to provide their followers and clients with the same access to foreign luxuries drove them overseas . . . The attacks on northern Britain and Ireland in the 790s were thus driven by a need to keep up with the Joneses (or perhaps the Johanssons, in this case).’

In understanding all of this I also finally knew what it was that had drawn me to the western Vikings all along: they were the underdogs – and the best underdogs always come out fighting. Let the Swedes have their silk-clad merchants with their market stalls – give me patched-cloak warriors in dragon ships every time.

For all the hand-wringing and self-pity of Alcuin and the rest of the British churchmen, the desecration of Lindisfarne was almost a false start for the age of Vikings to come. For decades afterwards the authors had little to report but raids on isolated monastic communities. The European mainland was quieter still, until around 830 when the Vikings began to appear more often and in greater numbers.

As far as the records seem to show, the British Isles did not experience large-scale Viking attacks until about the middle of the ninth century. The countries we know as England and Scotland did not exist in any meaningful sense then and Wales, dominated by its own little kings, never did attract much in the way of significant attention from the Vikings.

Until the ninth century, England was divided into what is known to historians of the period as the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy – the seven petty kingdoms of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Mercia, Northumbria, Sussex and Wessex. Of these, four mattered more than the rest. Anglo-Saxon Deira and Bernicia
had come together early in the seventh century to form Northumbria, stretching at times from the River Forth in the north to the River Humber in the south. Mercia occupied what would now be described as the Midlands. The territory of East Anglia formed a third entity in the east of the country and in the West Country was the kingdom of Wessex.

The territory of Scotland was even more of a patchwork, but essentially split between a Gaelic kingdom of Irish origin in the west and a Pictish kingdom, descended from the ancient hunter-gatherers of prehistory, in the north and east. Finally, occupying lands west of Northumbria and south of the Gaels, was the kingdom of the Britons, those who had known Roman rule and now controlled a territory occupying an area broadly similar to that of modern Strathclyde.

After all the mentions of raids on monasteries, an attack on Britain recorded in the Annals of St Bertin under the year
AD
844 sounds more significant than anything that had occurred before: ‘After a battle lasting three days, the Northmen emerged the winners – plundering, looting, slaughtering everywhere. They wielded power over the land at will.’

Since The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes the same event as having happened in 840 it is hard to be sure precisely when those Vikings struck, but it is made to sound like rather more than a hit-and-run raid targeting a few tonsured monks. Whatever it was and whenever it happened, it was still only a foretaste of what was headed towards the English kingdoms in the following decade.

In the year 850 there are reports of Vikings over-wintering in England for the first time. By then, of course, the Irish had learnt to accept a relatively permanent Norse presence in the form of the long ports. The Vikings who spent the winter of 850–51 on the island of Thanet, off Kent’s east coast, surely employed the same tactics. Within a few years more of them would pull off
the same trick on the island of Sheppey, on the Thames.

It was for the year
AD
865, however, that The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle first made mention of a force described, almost chillingly, as the
mycel here
– the Great Army. Sometimes, just to make matters crystal clear, the authors write about the
mycel heathen here
– the Great Heathen Army. Here then was the arrival of something quite different. Rather than opportunist, small-time raiders, travelling in two or three ships, the Viking force known as the Great Heathen Army amounted to at least – men and must have arrived in a fleet numbering in the hundreds. Furthermore the Great Heathen Army was effectively here to stay. And while its individual members came and went – dying in battle or heading home rich – it would remain in Britain as a unified entity for the next 30 years, travelling east, west, north and south at will and with devastating consequences for the ruling elite.

It is at this point that it is worth marvelling at the brevity of the annalists and other writers of the period. The annals were books of records, kept year by year, of any notable events. But they are brief in the extreme and usually frustratingly light on detail. The writers of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle too were given to missing out information we would consider essential. In the case of the Vikings’ activity, for instance, individual leaders are often named only if and when they are defeated; victors in battles remain anonymous.

From what we can discern, the men of the Great Heathen Army spent their first winter in East Anglia. They apparently came to peaceful terms with the locals but only on receipt of precious valuables and supplies. By 866/67 they were in Northumbria, exploiting a civil war there to their own ends. In his History of the English Kings, Symeon of Durham recorded how: ‘In those days, the nation of the Northumbrians had violently expelled from the kingdom the rightful king of their
nation, Osberht by name, and had placed at the head of the kingdom a certain tyrant, named Aella.’

Having perhaps stood by while the opposing sides – both Christian – tore each other apart in battle, the heathen Vikings stepped into the aftermath: ‘Nearly all the Northumbrians were routed and destroyed, the two kings being slain – the survivors made peace with the pagans. After these events the pagans appointed Ecgbert king under their own dominion . . .’

It is worth pausing for a moment to consider how much was being achieved, and how rapidly. Apparently within just a couple of years of its arrival the Viking army had got its way in two of the four English kingdoms – ‘pacifying’ one and placing a puppet king on the throne of the other. Since a unit of as few as 30 men was routinely described as an ‘army’, a fighting force of 3,000 might not sound especially ‘great’ by our modern standards but would have had devastating potential in ninth-century Britain.

They might have called themselves kings, but the dominant men in territories like Northumbria and East Anglia hardly exercised total control over their populations. There were no professional standing armies worthy of the name and therefore the Great Heathen Army held many advantages. Each of its warriors was a man far from home and in such circumstances every one of them understood their survival as individuals depended upon their staying together as a group. Petty differences and personal loyalties might be set aside, at least temporarily, until the greater goal was reached. Mutual dependency can be a powerful glue and in the face of piecemeal opposition, thrown hastily together before being thrown in the direction of the foe, the Vikings’ commitment to their common cause may well have been all the advantage they needed.

As well as a common bond the men of the Great Heathen Army were united by the lure of wealth. By the middle of the
ninth century every ambitious Scandinavian would have known the names of the trading towns grown rich from import and export. In addition to Birka, Hedeby, Kaupang and Ribe closer to home, they would also have heard of Canche, near Boulogne, Dorestad, on the Rhine – and of course Southampton, London and York in England. Merchants had grown fat from the proceeds and the whole lot of it might be for the taking by determined men of war.