Vikings (7 page)

By her head was a birch-bark box containing a length of woollen cord and an awl, and at her feet a birch-bark pail filled with a fermented drink, perhaps beer. Most intriguing of all, the cremated bones of a child aged five or six years old had been wrapped in a bundle of rags and placed in the coffin with her. Perhaps the infant had been sacrificed so as to accompany her elder; maybe death claimed a second member of the family around the same time – we cannot know for certain.

Satisfied that all was as it should be, the mourners covered the remains with a woollen blanket, placed a sprig of flowering yarrow on top of it, and closed the lid. The coffin was lowered into a carefully cut grave, and then a huge circular barrow of soil and turf, measuring almost 70 feet across and over 12 feet high, was raised over it.

Ever since her discovery in 1921, the so-called ‘Egtved Girl’ has been something of a Bronze Age celebrity. By burying her in acidic soil that remained waterlogged throughout the millennia of her interment, her people ensured an unintended fate for the remains of someone they so obviously held dear. As well as her clothing, jewellery and other grave goods, her hair, nails, teeth, some of her skin and even brain tissue were preserved for all of that time in the ground. It was examination of her teeth that enabled archaeologists to determine she was probably around 18–20 years old when she died; the survival of the yarrow suggested a burial in summertime. Examination of the growth rings in the timber of her coffin allowed archaeologists to pinpoint her burial to the year 1370
BC
.

Every tree’s tally of rings is a record of years. Each ring within a tree trunk represents one year’s growth and in the temperate regions of the planet, where differences between the seasons are most clearly defined, each year leaves its own unique band. Plenty of rain in early spring, followed by a good summer, results in a thick growth ring; a drought or similar hardship makes
for a thin one. It follows therefore that all the trees of the same species, growing in the same region and experiencing the same conditions, will each lay down the same sequence of growth rings during any given length of time. In other words any given year – say 1000
BC
– will have left its own telltale, instantly identifiable ring in every oak tree growing in Denmark at that time. In what is a boon for archaeologists, samples from different specimens can be compared, and patterns built up covering whole geographical zones where climatic conditions have been consistent. This forms the basis for the dating technique known as dendrochronology. Starting from a newly felled tree, it is possible to follow sequences of matching rings backwards through time – carefully identifying overlapping, matching patterns occurring within samples from older and older specimens. In this way, entire chronologies spanning thousands of years have been built up, so that timber from ancient objects like Egtved Girl’s coffin can be dated with astonishing accuracy.

The people who knew Egtved Girl in life – and treated her with such consideration in death – were farmers. Traces of Bronze Age settlements in Scandinavia are scarce but what we have suggests small communities inhabiting long, rectangular houses clustered together in villages surrounded by the fields that provided them with a living. It seems likely the women would have made the clothing for all, perhaps the pottery vessels too. The time of the hunter was ancient history by now and people depended primarily upon the fertility of their fields – and of their animals – and also upon the reassuring cycle of the seasons.

During the first centuries of the period, the majority of day-to-day tools would have been made from, or at least edged with, ground or flaked stone; the metal that gave the age its name was reserved only for high-status weapons and symbols of power that mostly made their way into the graves of important men
and women, or into votive hoards intended to placate or influence deities. Only by the middle years of the first millennium
BC
or so was bronze being put to work by the common folk of Scandinavia as well, for tools and weapons of everyday use.

Apart from anything else, it was about availability of raw materials. For while Denmark and much of southern Sweden were blessed with enough arable land to provide sufficient food for hungry mouths, there were no deposits whatsoever of gold, for real glamour, or either tin or copper for creating the golden-yellow alloy that is bronze.

Natural sources of copper were, anyway, few and far between in prehistoric Europe. In time, the island of Cyprus would become a prime source for the Romans (in fact the name Cyprus is derived from the Latin word
Cyprium
, or
Cuprum
, meaning ‘the metal of Cyprus’). There were also outcrops of the precious ore in the Iberian peninsula and in parts of central Europe including the Bosnian Mountains, Hungary, Slovenia and Transylvania. Southern Ireland was comparatively rich in copper, as was some of the limestone of Wales. (In time the Vikings would find the most important Welsh site for themselves and the name they gave to it, the Great Orme, would last for ever.)

Tin was even harder to come by, occurring only in some of the territory between modern Germany and the Czech Republic, a few parts of the Iberian peninsula and Brittany. Tin was also identified in ancient times at the tip of the south-west of mainland Britain. By the time the Greek historian Herodotus was writing in the fifth century
BC
, Cornish tin was so valued, and so plentiful, he called the archipelago off Europe’s northwest coast the
Cassiterides
– ‘the Tin Isles’.

There was therefore no option for the proto-chiefs of the Scandinavian tribes but to trade for what they required, using the purchasing power provided by control of surplus food and
also of furs, skins, seal oil, resin and the rest of the portfolio of exotica available at home. By at least as early as the Bronze Age, a tiny elite of high-status families with muscle and clout wielded power in western Europe’s most northerly territories.

Once established, powerful people develop a gravitational pull, attracting followers and also those things they desire. Prestige objects were especially attractive and could be drawn from far away. A hoard found near Hassle, in the Närke province of Sweden, consisted of two bronze brooches made in Italy, two bronze swords made somewhere in central Europe and 12 decorated bronze discs. The whole lot of it was unearthed stuffed inside a huge bronze cauldron that had itself been made in Greece. No doubt the items passed through many hands before ending up in the ownership of the big man from Hassle – but that they made it there at all, during the last millennium
BC
, shows the reach of the trade in precious metals at that time. Having travelled all that way, the collection of treasured things was ultimately offered up as a gift to the gods. It was by such displays – the ability to surrender objects of great material value – that Bronze Age leaders and chiefs demonstrated their status and power to their retinues.

Egtved Girl is on display now in the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen – and she is not alone. Nearby are the similarly preserved remains of Skrydstrup Woman, found in southern Jutland in 1935. Apparently of a similar age as Egtved Girl at the time of her death, she too was laid down in a coffin hewn from the trunk of an oak tree. Her tunic had embroidered sleeves and her skirt covered her legs to the ankles. She had an earring in each ear and, again like Egtved Girl, a comb of horn on a belt around her waist. Her hairstyle was elaborate, held in place by a plaited woollen cord worn around her head and all covered by a net woven from horsehair. A cap of wool had been placed in her coffin too.

Trindhoj Man was found in nearby Vambrup in southern Jutland in 1861. His oak coffin was lined with a cowhide and for his burial he had been dressed in a belted woollen coat and cloak. On his head was a cap of wool and his feet were bound in woollen cloths. Alongside him for an intended eternity were a bronze sword and wooden scabbard, a bronze razor, a comb of horn and even a spare hat, safe inside its own specially made box. For fear of the cold, he had been provided with a blanket of white wool. Dendrochronology identifies his burial as having taken place in 1347
BC
.

From beneath a barrow called Guldhoj – ‘Gold Hill’ – excavated in yet another part of southern Jutland in 1891, came an oak coffin containing the remains of another man. He had been buried with a bronze dagger, axe and pin, a box of birch bark, two wooden bowls and a spoon of horn. There were also the remains of a woollen cloak, two woollen hats and a leather shoe. Uniquely among his fellows, he had been provided with a folding stool made of ash wood and inlaid with pitch.

The Copenhagen National Museum is home to an array of these strangely desiccated human beings. The museum is contained, in part, within a building that was once the palace of Danish crown princes. That a sometime royal residence is now home to such ancient, venerable Danes – a handful of representatives of a people who would otherwise have entirely disappeared – seems fitting. They rest now in carefully maintained gloom, in specially built glass cases that hold at bay the natural processes of decay. The low light creates a respectful air that only adds to a strange sensation, the illusion that the occupants of the cases are peacefully asleep. Almost more remarkable than the preservation of bone, teeth, skin, sinew, hair and brain tissue is the survival, intact, of the clothes and other textiles. Woven patterns, like tartan, are as clear to see as on the day long ago when they went into the ground. A person could pick
up one of the blankets and wrap it around the shoulders for warmth. Within those oak coffins, underneath those carefully raised mounds, some part of time has stood still.

At least as affecting as Egtved Girl and the rest is the trio of bodies unearthed from beneath a burial mound excavated at Borum Eshøj, near the town of Aarhus in eastern Denmark, in 1871. They lie now, split between two cases in the National Museum, and it is thought at least possible they are mother, father and son. The mother was found first, but appeared to have been buried last – at some point after her husband and son were already interred beneath the mound. The skeletons of all three testify to a combination of good diet and plenty of hard physical labour. They were farmers – like everyone else in Bronze Age Denmark, and used to working for a living – but also part of a wealthy elite whose status entitled them to an eternity beneath huge burial mounds. Again it is the preservation of the clothes that makes the Borum Eshøj family seem especially human, especially real. Looking at them I could not resist allowing for the possibility that their fellows would still recognise them, even after the passage of centuries and millennia. The faces are gone, along with the rest of their flesh, but the carefully arranged clothes and personal effects are as they were on the days of those long-ago funerals. Some relative or friend, brought back from the Bronze Age, would surely spot a treasured knife, or an item of jewellery – even the set of a powerful jaw – and know who they were looking at. In the case of the son there is a particularly fine head of hair, somehow incongruous now like the wig on a shop-window mannequin. The style of it is, surprisingly, touchingly modern – artfully tousled and in a shape that would not look out of place in the line-up of a twenty-first-century boy band.

Lots of people baulk at the idea of putting the dead on display, citing such behaviour as evidence of a lack of respect. I think
the Bronze Age citizens in Copenhagen’s National Museum, survivors of an otherwise vanished world, are nothing less than wonderful. There are surely worse post-mortem fates. I even like the thought that my own mortal remains might attract fascinated observation in 4,000 years’ time.

The dates acquired from the coffins of those long-dead Danes are so close together it is hard to resist the notion that some of them – at least a few of those thoughtfully and carefully buried individuals – may even have been known to one another in life. In any event they were part – clearly a privileged and high-status part – of an already complicated and sophisticated hierarchical society.

Like the rest of Europe at the same time, it was a society held together, as though by a magical glue, by bronze. Those intent on making names for themselves, during the last two millennia before the birth of Christ, had first to gain control over supplies of the honey-gold metal. Eventually the dominant personalities in Denmark, Norway and Sweden – the new chieftains – succeeded in achieving the necessary stranglehold on the material. Under their protection and patronage their smiths created some of the finest, most inspired and technically impressive bronze objects fashioned anywhere in northern Europe at that time.

Almost exclusive to the Scandinavian Bronze Age are the enigmatic musical instruments known as
lurs
– S-shaped tubes of cast bronze with mouthpieces and decorated ‘bells’ that projected and amplified their sound. Something of the order of 60 lurs have been found so far, usually by peat-cutters working in areas that were shallow lakes or bogs during the Bronze Age. Deposited in such places as yet more offerings to the gods, many of those recovered are in such good condition they can still be used today. They are played like any modern brass instrument – by buzzing the lips into or against the mouthpiece
– and produce a sound I find indistinguishable from that of a modern trumpet, or trombone. (Lur is a word with more recent Norse roots and usually refers to anything funnel-shaped that makes a noise. Some modern Scandinavians use the word as a nickname for their mobile phones and it is even there in the name of
Lurpak
butter, the packaging of which features a pair of lurs.)

Nearly 40 of the ancient lurs were recovered in Denmark, the rest coming to light in Norway, Sweden, northern Germany and Latvia. Most famous of all are the three pairs of lurs found during peat-cutting on farmland to the north-east of Lynge in northern Sjælland, in Denmark, in 1797. Elegantly curved like artistic representations of a pair of mammoth tusks, the so-called Brudevælte Lurs are well over seven feet long and in almost as good condition now as the day they were cast, 3,000 and more years ago.