Vikings (5 page)

Denmark, Norway and Sweden are, anyway, hardly uniform in terms of the habitats and environments they provide. Those pioneers spreading ever northwards were confronted both with opportunities and with obstacles as they penetrated further and further into the peninsula. All three territories were quite different, one from another, and each prompted distinct responses from her human inhabitants. Those who would in time become Danes, Norwegians and Swedes were separate peoples, with their own ways of doing things.

Denmark is by far the smallest of the three countries, the land mostly low-lying. When first encountered by hunters 10,000 years ago the interior there would have been a patchwork of
deciduous woodlands dominated by birch, bogs and marshlands, lakes, rivers and streams. Relatively modern farming techniques – principally effective drainage – are responsible for the modern expanses of arable fields, and until three or four hundred years ago much of the country’s interior would have been dishearteningly soft and wet underfoot. Strongly on the plus side, however, compared to its neighbours further north, Denmark has the gentlest climate – much more akin to that of the rest of northern mainland Europe.

Sweden is the largest of the three, with an interior dominated by gentle, fairly low-lying contours cloaked in the main by coniferous forest. While it is true her eastern border is on territory as mountainous as anything in Norway, the landscape of most of central and southern Sweden has much in common with that of Denmark, in that it is low-lying and flat. By the time the technology of farming penetrated the country it was there, around the lakes of Mälaren, Hjälmaren and Vättern, in the valley of the Göta River and on the flatlands of Halland, Skåne and Östergötland, that it took permanent root.

To my mind it is Norway that presents the landscape most people visualise when they hear the word ‘Scandinavia’. Here is the vast curl of near-impenetrable mountains and glaciers that people living further east in the peninsula would in time call the
Norovegr
– literally the ‘north way’ leading down to the softer lands of Denmark and the rest of the south, with its wildly and deeply indented 15,000 miles of coastline. The most northerly third of Norway is within the Arctic Circle, and while the coastline itself is comparatively hospitable and ice-free for much of the year, bathed as it is in waters warmed by the Gulf Stream, the interior is mainly mountainous. The jagged outbreak of peaks reaches, for the most part, well above the tree line – creating a barrier of naked rock and ice that presumably made land travel as near-impossible 10,000 years ago as it still does today. There is
good upland pasture to be exploited; but while it is capable of supporting livestock in the summer months, it is unsuitable for crops. Settlements would eventually take hold in the small patches of low-lying land clinging to the sides of the fjords or forming at their necks, but the country was never going to be capable of supporting many people, and never did. Norway certainly offered the toughest upbringing of the three lands, and her children would learn early on that what their mother could not give them they would have to get for themselves.

Scandinavia is also a land of many islands – and some of their populations developed their own ways of doing things, setting them apart from whichever place actually claimed them as satellites. While Swedish Öland is close by the coast of its motherland and shaped by the mores of the mainland, Gotland is far enough out into the Baltic to be almost a place apart. When the shipping lanes mattered more than now, Gotland’s position at the heart of the sea gave it a primacy and strategic advantage that would gift the island power and wealth disproportionate to its size. Likewise the largest of the Danish islands – Bornholm, Fyn and Sjælland – developed characteristics that were sometimes at variance with or in contrast to those of Denmark itself. Islanders are a breed apart, and never more so than in the case of the inhabitants of the islands of the Baltic. One site on the island of Fyn and attributed to the Ertebølle culture offers a hint of the behaviour that eventually carried the Scandinavians into legend.

Thanks to sea level rises since the end of the last glacial, the human occupation site known as Tybrind Vig lies submerged beneath approximately 10 feet of seawater, 250 yards or so off the western coast. During the latter part of the Mesolithic, perhaps 5500–4000
BC
, it was a base for people skilled in the business of fishing. Any traces of the settlement itself have been completely eroded away by the millennia of inundation by the sea
but, fortunately for archaeologists, those fishermen had been in the habit of throwing their rubbish into a waterlogged area on the edge of a lagoon that sheltered their homes from the sea. By the time the people abandoned their settlement in the face of rising waters, their soggy midden was already preserving much of the fishing gear they had thrown away.

Tybrind Vig was first spotted by recreational divers in 1975, and excavated between 1978 and 1988. By any standards it has been a rich find: fish hooks made from the rib bones of red deer; wooden points from specialised fish spears called leisters; evidence for the technology of net-making, in the form of traces of textiles woven from plant fibres; hazel stakes used in the building of fish weirs as well as wooden points for barbing fish traps – all have been recovered in varying states of preservation. Better yet was the discovery of three seagoing dug-out canoes, at least one of which was more than 30 feet long, each carved from the trunk of a lime tree. As well as the canoes, the archaeologists found parts of no fewer than 10 paddles, made of ash and with elegant, heart-shaped blades, four of which had been carefully decorated. A large stone, possibly used as ballast, was found inside one of the canoes. Best of all, hearths shaped from clay and pebbles had been set into two of the hulls.

The excavations at Tybrind Vig were led by Søren Andersen and his possible explanations for the undoubtedly perilous practice of lighting fires inside wooden craft at sea conjure up emotive images. At the very least they suggest the fishermen were accustomed to being at sea for long journeys, during which they needed more than furs to keep them warm; perhaps they even went so far as to cook some of their catch while still on the water. But Andersen has also suggested the fishermen may have needed fire when travelling from place to place so they could keep alive the warmth from one home while en route to the next.

The canoes are surely too slight and too vulnerable ever to have been used for voyages into the open sea, far from land. But is there a glimpse in those journeys from hearth to hearth – with flames carried over water, symbolic of life itself – of the spark of an idea for far greater seagoing adventures?

Since my days as an archaeology student my imagination has been haunted by a site discovered on the Danish island of Sjælland in 1975, in advance of building work. While the intention had been no more than the digging of a few foundations, what was eventually unearthed there, at a place called Vedbæk, was a Mesolithic cemetery containing the remains of more than 20 men, women and even babies. Artefacts found in the graves enabled archaeologists to categorise those hunters, in the way archaeologists do, as part of that now-familiar Ertebølle culture. In any case radiocarbon dates returned by tests on some of the bones revealed the people buried there had died sometime around 4000
BC
.

The occupants of the Vedbæk cemetery are humbling and breathtaking. Stone Age hunters seem as distant as dinosaurs. It can be hard to make them real, more substantial than ghosts. Ironically their mourned dead are easiest to reinvest with life, because they have so obviously been loved. Some of the adults were laid down with their heads or feet resting in cradles formed by the carefully placed antlers of deer. What were the intentions of those burial parties? What was the honour bestowed? Was it thought those dead had been blessed in life with speed and strength and grace, like stags . . . or did such grave goods imply the hope of good hunting in another life?

(Vedbæk is by no means the only Late Mesolithic cemetery in Scandinavia. At Skateholm, in the Skåne district of southern Sweden, archaeologists found not only graves of men, women and children, but also of dogs – suggesting that by the fourth or fifth millennium
BC
, those animals had been domesticated
and were being viewed as members of the family, even worthy of an afterlife.)

But one story suggested by Vedbæk bothers me more than all the rest. Whenever I wonder how we got to where we are now I find myself, in my imagination at least, standing by one graveside in particular. I have thought about its occupants, off and on, for a quarter of a century and when I began thinking about where the Vikings came from I ended up back there yet again.

That grave contained the skeleton of a young woman. I like to imagine she was lovely. Around her neck was a string of red deer teeth – collected from as many as 40 different animals. Such a keepsake, made of trophies from 40 separate kills, speaks of a great and skilful hunter. It is not much of a leap to see it as a gift given only to the most important person in his world, his daughter or his wife. Buried beside her was a newborn baby laid upon the wing of an adult swan, the bones as light as a bundle of straws. By the baby’s hip was a little knife knapped from a piece of flint.

We cannot ever know but it seems at least likely the woman died in childbirth and her baby with her. The passing of 6,000 years does not lessen the tragedy, or its impact. Someone grieving for them saw to it that they went to their grave together, she wearing the necklace he had made for her, and their baby nestled on the wing of a white bird. For hunters – of all people the most sensitive to the ways of animals – the comings and goings of the great flocks of migratory birds might have captured their imaginations like nothing else. They represent the journey, the voyage without end.

The classic image of the Viking long ships, which came thousands of years later, has those vessels shaped and styled to suggest dragons, or sea serpents. Powered by oars or by sail, they could fairly fly across the waves. Maybe some of the inspiration for those elegant craft had come from another memory
and long ago, from hunters watching long-necked birds beating their way from horizon to horizon. Travellers who demonstrated, year after year, it was possible to leave and also to return.

Any sense of separation from the people of the Stone Age – by anything more than time – is brushed away by witnessing their approach to death. Just as we try to accept and understand that transformation today, so the ancestors struggled with the same challenge tens of thousands of years ago. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote: ‘For life in the present there is no death. Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact in the world.’ It seems that as a species we have understood this for the longest time, perhaps always – so that the dead had to be put away somewhere safe, somewhere else.

Out of the shadows then come all the most distant ancestors of the Vikings, their names as mysterious and unfamiliar as the cast of a Bergman film. Before the people of the Ertebølle culture were an earlier marque of hunter classified, by the few belongings collected from another site on Sjælland, as members of a group called
Kongemose.
What little is known about them includes their apparent skill at making all manner of tools from long blades of carefully worked flint. By snapping those blades into angular fragments the knappers could make awls, arrowheads, drills and scrapers, or assemble them as rows of barbs and serrations mounted in wood to make barbed points, or saws. From other stones they shaped axes, and they found use too for objects they made from horn and bone.

If it was people of the Kongemose culture in parts of Denmark and Sweden around 6000
BC
, then in Norway at about the same time it was the
Nøstvet
, where geological circumstances coaxed men and women into shaping their tools from quartz as well as flint. Like everyone else they hunted and fished, trapped seabirds and collected their eggs, made shelters
of saplings and skins. Earlier than the Nøstvet (and a kindred culture nearby called the
Lihult
) were people whose traces go into museum cases labelled
Fosna
or
Hensbacka
(if only to differentiate their leavings from the bits and pieces left behind by everyone else). Whoever they were, they eked existences, of a sort, along the western and southern coasts of Norway. In Denmark and southern Sweden the earliest of the hunters are called
Maglemosian
, after finds in the
magle mose
– the ‘big bog’ – at a place called Mullerup, in western Sjælland. Those last were among the first arrivals after the retreat of the ice, and seem to have lived their lives towards the end of the ninth millennium
BC
.

The traces of human occupation, found in scores of locations scattered all across the peninsula, are slight in the extreme and the many dates difficult to interpret. Perhaps it is most helpful just to imagine generations of people living off the land, exploiting natural resources and hunting and foraging whatever the habitat and the seasons provided. It was a period lasting thousands of years during which little changed for the tiny human populations making lives for themselves in the forests, around the lakes and along the coastlines of Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Hunting provided a good living in the varied environments of much of Scandinavia – so appropriate in fact it apparently kept at bay the world-changing technology of farming for a millennium and a half. The Neolithic – the New Stone Age – is characterised by the appearance either of animal husbandry, crop cultivation or a combination of the two. The technology had developed first in the so-called ‘Near East’ of Mesopotamia, the fertile lands sandwiched between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, by around 11,000–12,000 years ago.

Its push westwards was as slow as that of any glacier but by around 5500
BC
there were farmers at work right across the
European mainland. In the lands to the south of Scandinavia, on the southern side of the Baltic Sea, were settlements comprising great longhouses with wattle and daub walls erected around frameworks of upright timber posts. The farmers grew crops like wheat, barley and flax and kept cattle, sheep, goats and some pigs. They also made pottery and decorated it with patterns of lines cut into the clay while it was still damp. It was this decoration, and this alone, that encouraged German archaeologists to label all this as proof of yet another culture – of a people spread across thousands of miles yet apparently united by thought, language and behaviour. The label applied to all of it was
Linearbandkeramik
, or LBK for short.