The Vikings

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A monastery on a tidal island off the coast of Northumbria, cut off from the mainland twice a day by the sea, was about as far from the world’s violence as an eighth-century Christian could place himself. On the eighth of June, 793, ships came out of the north, and the men in them killed the monks at the altar, carried others off in chains, and stripped the church of its silver. Word reached Alcuin of York, a Northumbrian scholar then at the court of Charlemagne, and he wrote home in something close to disbelief: never, he said, had such a terror appeared in Britain, and the heathens had poured out the blood of the saints around the altar. The raid on Lindisfarne was not the first time Scandinavian ships had touched the islands of Britain. But it fell on the holiest place in the kingdom, and the shock of it has fixed the year ever since as the opening of an age.

A word before a people

There were no Vikings, exactly, in the way there were Franks or Saxons. The word is an activity before it is a nation. In Old Norse a víkingr is a man who goes raiding overseas, and víking is the raid itself — a season’s venture, a voyage out and back, not a bloodline and not a creed. To go í víking was to do a thing, the way one might go to sea or go to war. Most of the Norse-speaking inhabitants of early-medieval Scandinavia never did it. They were farmers working a short northern growing season, herders, fishermen, smiths, traders, and poets, tied to the land and to the law-assemblies of their districts. The raider was the exception who gave his name to the whole.

So “the Vikings” properly names not a separate people but the Norse in a particular phase of their history: the roughly three centuries in which they burst out of Scandinavia to raid, trade, explore, and settle across a quarter of the world. By long convention the period runs from the attack on Lindisfarne in 793 to the year 1066 — when, at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada fell with most of his army in a failed bid to seize England, three weeks before the same English king who beat him was himself beaten at Hastings by another descendant of Northmen. The dates are tidy in the way that all such period-markers are tidy: conveniences imposed on a thing with no edges. Raiding had happened before 793 and continued after 1066. But between those two points the Norse reached farther, and weighed more heavily on the rest of the world, than at any time before or since.

What made the reach possible was a ship.

The longship

The longship is the technology that defines the age, and almost everything the Vikings did follows from what it could do. It was clinker-built — its hull laid up from overlapping planks, each riveted with iron to the one below and the whole skin made watertight and flexible at once, so that the ship flexed and gave with the sea rather than fighting it. It was long and narrow and shallow, drawing so little water that it could float in a meter or run straight up onto an open beach, and it was double-ended, with raised prow and stern alike, so that it could reverse out of a fjord or a river-mouth without turning. It carried a single square sail on a mast that could be lowered, and beneath the sail a full bank of oars, so that wind and muscle could be used together or by turns. Under good conditions it could make ten knots and more.

The Gokstad ship (built c. 890), excavated from a Norwegian burial mound, Viking Ship Museum, Oslo. Photo Karamell, CC BY-SA 2.5.

Two of these ships survive nearly whole, both pulled from burial mounds in southern Norway and both used as the graves of the very rich: the Oseberg ship, built around 820 and about twenty-one and a half meters long, and the Gokstad ship, built around 890, nearly twenty-four meters, with positions for sixteen oars a side and thirty-two rowers. To stand before one is to understand the strategic problem it posed for everyone else. A vessel that could cross the open North Atlantic and then, at journey’s end, ascend a shallow English or Frankish river to fall on a town fifty miles inland gave the Norse a reach that the kingdoms of Christendom, with their deep-hulled trading ships and their defenses oriented to land, simply could not match. The raiders chose where to strike and were gone before a response could be raised. For two generations there was no good answer to it.

The Oseberg ship (built c. 800), Viking Ship Museum, Oslo. Photo Petter Ulleland, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The fury of the Northmen

The raids that follow Lindisfarne are the part of the story everyone knows, and they were real enough. Through the ninth century the longships came in growing numbers against the monasteries and trading-towns of Britain, Ireland, and the Frankish empire — places that held portable wealth and lacked walls, of which the undefended Christian monastery, with its silver and its slaves, was the ideal kind. The island monasteries of the Irish Sea were sacked repeatedly. The Frankish rivers carried fleets up to Rouen, to Paris, to the heart of the kingdom; Charlemagne’s heirs paid silver to be left alone, and were not left alone. Later medieval lore distilled the terror of all this into a single line of prayer — a furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine, “from the fury of the Northmen, deliver us.” The line is famous and it is apt, but the record is exact and the record corrects it: no ninth-century litany has ever been found containing those words. The nearest genuine survival is an antiphon that begs God to de gente fera Normannica nos libera — “free us from the fierce Norman people.” The famous version is a later condensation, true to the fear if not to any document.

It is worth holding the violence at its real scale. The Vikings were raiders in an age of raiders, no crueler by the standards of the time than the Christian kings they preyed upon, who burned each other’s lands as a matter of course. What set the Norse apart was not ferocity but reach — the ship that let a small band strike anywhere along thousands of miles of coast and river, and vanish. The horror in Alcuin’s letter is the horror of the undefended struck without warning, not of a uniquely savage enemy.

The settlement

And the raiding was only the opening movement. Behind the war-bands came the settlers, and within a couple of generations the same fleets that had plundered Britain were carving out a new map of the North.

In England, the army that landed in 865 — the Great Heathen Army, no mere raiding party but a force out to conquer — overran kingdom after kingdom until only Wessex under Alfred held out. The peace that followed split the country in two. The north and east, by the treaty of Alfred and Guthrum drawn up in the 880s, became the Danelaw: the broad swath of England where Danish law and custom held, anchored on the Five Boroughs of Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford, and Lincoln. Its mark is still on the map and on the tongue. The villages ending in -by and -thorp are Norse foundations, and English took from the settlers’ speech a freight of common words — sky, law, egg, knife — and, more remarkably, the everyday pronouns they, them, and their. In Ireland the Norse built the country’s first true towns, founding the trading-port that became Dublin and ringing the coast with Wexford, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick. In northern France a war-band leader the Franks called Rollo was granted the lower Seine valley in 911 in exchange for his fealty and his baptism; his Northmen gave the duchy its name, Normandy, the land of the Northmen, and a century and a half later their descendants would conquer England, Sicily, and a slice of the Levant.

Out across the open ocean, the Norse went where no one was. They settled the empty Faroes, and from about 870 they filled Iceland, an uninhabited island in the North Atlantic, with farmers from Norway and the Norse colonies of the British Isles — a settlement whose memory the Icelanders would keep with extraordinary care. From Iceland, Erik the Red, outlawed for killing, sailed west around 985 to a still emptier land he named Greenland, where the Norse farmed the southern fjords for some four centuries before the colony failed in the cooling climate of the later Middle Ages. And from Greenland, around the year 1000, Erik’s son Leif Erikson sailed farther west still and made landfall on the coast of North America, in a country the sagas call Vinland.

For a long time Vinland was a tale in a thirteenth-century saga and nothing more. Then in 1960 a Norwegian couple, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, were led by a local farmer to a cluster of grassy mounds at L’Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Excavation turned up the unmistakable footprints of a Norse settlement — eight sod-walled buildings, iron rivets, a bronze pin, the slag of a smithy. It is the only confirmed Norse site in the Americas outside Greenland, and recent analysis of wood cut with metal tools has fixed a year of occupation precisely at 1021. The Norse stood on the American shore very nearly five centuries before Columbus. They did not stay; the distances were too great and the inhabitants too many, and the foothold was abandoned. But it was there.

Map of Viking and Norman expansion, 8th–11th centuries. Max Naylor, public domain.

The road east

The Vikings of the schoolbook sail west, against England and Ireland and France. But a second expansion, less remembered, ran the other way — and it was a trade-route before it was anything else. From eastern Sweden, Norse traders pushed across the Baltic and up the rivers of what is now Russia, hauling their boats between the river-heads and riding the currents down the Volga toward the Caspian and the Dnieper toward the Black Sea. These eastern Norse were called the Rus, a name that the Finns had already given the Swedes — from an Old Norse word bound up with rowing and the rowing-levy — and which passed through Slavic mouths to become, it is widely held though still debated, the name of Russia itself. The thirteenth-century Primary Chronicle tells that the Slavic and Finnic tribes, weary of their own disorder, invited a Norse prince named Rurik to come and rule them, and from that beginning grew the state of Kievan Rus. How much of that story is fact and how much is foundation-legend is argued still; the older “Normanist” reading, that Scandinavians founded the first Russian state, has been fought over for political reasons for two and a half centuries. But the Norse presence on the river-roads is past dispute.

Down those roads went furs, walrus ivory, amber, honey, wax, and human beings — for the eastern trade ran heavily on slaves, captives funneled south to the markets of the Islamic world. Back up the rivers came silver, and the silver is the proof. Hundreds of thousands of Arabic dirhams, struck in the mints of the Caliphate, have been dug out of the soil of Sweden and the Baltic, the buried profit of a fur-and-slave traffic that linked the Caspian to the Baltic. At the river’s end stood Constantinople, which the Norse called Miklagard, the great city; some Rus traded there, some raided it, and some took service in the emperor’s elite Varangian Guard. The same people, in the same lifetime, could be raider, merchant, settler, and mercenary. The categories were never separate.

The closing of the age

What ended the Viking Age was not defeat but conversion and the state. Through the tenth and eleventh centuries the loose, locally various world of the old Norse cult gave way to Christianity, and the patchwork of petty chieftains hardened into the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. In Denmark a king raised a great stone at Jelling declaring that he had made the Danes Christian; Iceland adopted the new faith by a decision of its assembly at Thingvellir around the year 1000; Norway’s conversion was sealed in blood at the battle of Stiklestad in 1030, where the king who had pressed it died and was promptly made a saint. A Christian king with a settled realm and a church did not send his young men off raiding; he taxed them and conscripted them and answered to the Pope. The longship did not vanish, but the world that had built it for plunder was gone. When Harald Hardrada — himself a former captain of the Varangian Guard, a man whose career spans the whole arc of the age — fell at Stamford Bridge in 1066, the thing was effectively over.

Horns that were never there

The afterlife of the Vikings has been at least as eventful as their history. For most of the centuries since, they were remembered chiefly as the prayer remembered them — the heathen terror, the despoilers of the monasteries — and then, in the nineteenth century, they were reinvented as something nearly opposite: noble, blond, free, the Romantic ancestors of the northern nations. It is to this Romantic reinvention, and not to anything the Norse ever wore, that the single most famous Viking image belongs. The Vikings did not wear horned helmets. No horned helmet has ever been found in a Viking grave; the contemporary sources, which mention helmets often enough, never mention horns; the one near-complete Viking helmet recovered, from a Norwegian grave, is a plain rounded iron cap with a face-guard and nothing on top. The horns are a stage prop. They were fixed in the popular eye by the costume designs Carl Emil Doepler made for the first complete production of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at Bayreuth in 1876, and they have proved unkillable ever since, surviving every debunking because they make so good a picture.

The horned helmet is the visible tip of a deeper problem, which is that the Vikings have always been more useful as a symbol than as a subject. The same Romantic-national enthusiasm that gave them horns also gave nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial nationalists a usable myth of a pure northern warrior-race, and that appropriation runs, by an ugly and well-documented line, through völkisch fantasy into the symbols of the Third Reich and on into present-day white-supremacist iconography, which has plundered Norse runes and god-names for its own ends. Modern Heathen and Ásatrú communities, who reconstruct the old Norse religion as a living practice, have for the most part repudiated this appropriation explicitly and insistently, drawing a hard line between an inclusive reverence for the northern past and its racist counterfeit.

Against all of this the scholarship of the last hundred years has worked steadily to recover the Vikings as they were — which turns out to be more interesting than either the demon of the prayer or the noble savage of the opera. The men who sacked Lindisfarne were the same men who founded Dublin, farmed Greenland, carried Arab silver up the Volga, and stood on a Newfoundland beach a thousand years before the word “globalization” existed. They were raiders, and they were also the most far-ranging traders, settlers, and explorers of their world. The longship did both, and the age took its name from the half that drew blood.

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