Children of Ash and Elm Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2020 by Neil Price

  Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai

  Cover images: The Gokstad Longship (photo), Viking (9th century) / Viking Ship Museum, Oslo, Norway / Bridgeman Images; © Alin Brotea / Shutterstock.com

  Cover copyright © 2020 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: May 2020

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Price, Neil S., author.

  Title: Children of ash and elm : a history of the Vikings / Neil Price.

  Other titles: History of the Vikings

  Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020001863 | ISBN 9780465096985 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780465096992 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Vikings. | Northmen. | Civilization, Viking. | Viking antiquities.

  Classification: LCC DL65 .P68 2020 | DDC 948/.022—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001863

  ISBNs: 978-0-465-09698-5 (hardcover), 978-0-465-09699-2 (ebook)

  E3-20200401-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  A Note on Language

  Prologue: Driftwood

  Introduction: Ancestors and Inheritors

  The Making of Midgard

  1. The Home of Their Shapes

  2. Age of Winds, Age of Wolves

  3. The Social Network

  4. The Pursuit of Liberty

  5. Border Crossings

  6. The Performance of Power

  7. Meeting the Others

  8. Dealing with the Dead

  The Viking Phenomenon

  9. Inroads

  10. Maritoria

  11. Warriorhoods

  12. Hydrarchy

  13. Diaspora

  New Worlds, New Nations

  14. The Golden Age of the Sheep Farmer

  15. Silver, Slaves, and Silk

  16. The Experiments of Monarchy

  17. Lands of Fire and Vines

  18. The Many Ends of the Viking Age

  Epilogue: Games

  Photos

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Discover More

  References

  Also by Neil Price

  For the fylgjur, all of them

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  Map 1. Simplified political and ethnic geography of Europe c. 565 CE, showing the changes resulting from the preceding decades of crisis. The borders of the Eastern Roman Empire are depicted as they stood at the death of the Emperor Justinian. Map by Neil Price.

  Map 2. Scandinavian tribal groupings, legal districts, and kingdoms, from sources dating c. 500–1350 CE, including the Getica of Jordanes (c. 551) and the tenth-century English poem Widsith. Map by and © Ingvild T. Bøckman and Frode Iversen, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, used by kind permission.

  Map 3. Places assaulted in the first phase of Viking raiding, 793–833 CE, with the European coastal emporia and the major settlements of Scandinavia. Map by Ben Raffield and Daniel Löwenborg.

  Map 4. The successive Viking assaults on the British isles and Frankia, 834–999, with the bases established in Ireland, in England, and on the Continent. Map by Ben Raffield and Daniel Löwenborg.

  Map 5. The great Mediterranean raid of c. 859–862, allegedly commanded by Björn Ironside and Hástein. The path of the Viking fleet can be traced southward from its base at Noirmoutier in the Loire estuary, around the coasts of Frankia and Iberia, and into the Middle Sea itself; three years later, a third of the ships made it home, having spent time somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean and fought the passage of the Gibraltar Straits (Nörvasund). Map by Neil Price.

  Map 6. The Viking diaspora in the East, to Byzantium, the Steppe, and beyond. The river routes from the Baltic to the Black Sea, dominated by the Rus’, connected seamlessly with the caravans of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Silk Roads, extending far into Asia. Map by Ben Raffield, Daniel Löwenborg, and Neil Price.

  Map 7. The later Viking Age in Scandinavia and the North Sea, from the reign of Harald Bluetooth (c. 960–987) to the ‘empire’ of Knut the Great (c. 1016–1035). The six known ‘Trelleborg’-type circular fortresses are shown: (1) Aggersborg, (2) Fyrkat, (3) Nonnebakken, (4) Trelleborg, (5) Borgring, (6) Borgeby. Map by Ben Raffield and Daniel Löwenborg.

  Map 8. The Norse in the North Atlantic. Iceland was settled c. 870 and quickly attracted a large population. Just over a century later, Icelanders founded the Eastern and Western Settlements in Greenland, and in turn sailed to what is now eastern Canada. The precise location of the regions they named Helluland, Markland, and Vinland can only be estimated, and L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland remains the only confirmed Norse settlement in North America. Map by Neil Price.

  A NOTE ON LANGUAGE

  A GREAT DEAL OF THIS book concerns beings, places, and concepts whose names in use today ultimately derive either from the Old Norse language (actually a shorthand term for a complex array of dialects and linguistic branches from Iceland and Scandinavia, dating to the Middle Ages and earlier) or from the modern tongues of the Nordic countries. This can be a complex soundscape to navigate, and there is no simple way that it can be normalised in an English text while also doing justice to its original variety. I have opted for readability and convention over consistency, and the language has been simplified here in several ways.

  Two Old Norse (and modern Icelandic) letters have been anglicised, except when quoting texts in the original and certain names: Þ/þ or thorn, as ‘th’ and pronounced as the first two letters of ‘thought’; and Ð/ð or eth, spoken more softly as in ‘breathe’ but usually rendered as ‘d’. In the same way, the Old Norse æ diphthong has been separated ‘ae’ and is pronounced approximately ‘eye’.

  Norse acute accents on the vowels have mostly been retained in names: long á is pronounced ‘ow’, and thus há (high) is spoken ‘how’; é is ‘ay’, like the first letter in the alphabet; í is a long ‘ee’; ó is a higher, more defined version of the regular sound, spoken like ‘owe’ and conveying emphasis; ú is long and deep, like the vowel in ‘sure’ said with a rolling Scots accent. In Old Norse, y is also a vowel, pronounced approximately like ‘ew’ as in the colloquial expression of disgust; the accented ý stretches it out.

  In place-names and personal names, the modern Scandinavian letters å, ä/æ, and ö/ø have bee
n used where appropriate, with the slight differences between Swedish and Danish/Norwegian. These are pronounced in English approximately as follows: å like ‘oar’; ä/æ like ‘air’; ö/ø like ‘err’. The Swedish letter ö has been used for ǫ, the Old Norse o with ogonek.

  Some academic works—including many of my own—use the Old Norse nominative for proper names, even when this is rendered grammatically problematic by the present-day English context. The most common example, also including some of the letters and accents mentioned above, is probably the name of the god Óðinn (pronounced ‘Owe-thinn’). With some exceptions, this and other similar cases (such as his son Þórr) are anglicised here, thus ‘Odin’ and ‘Thor’.

  Quotations from Old Norse texts are mostly rendered in English without the original, although occasionally I have retained the medieval words as well, especially in verse. When properly recited in appropriate surroundings, Viking-Age poetry can taste like cold iron on the tongue, its complex rhyme schemes building upon one another like layers of frost—treacherous but beautiful. We gain something old and true in this language, even if only understood in translation, and for that reason I have included a selection here.

  PROLOGUE: DRIFTWOOD

  The gods’ footprints stretch out behind them in a meandering line, clear in the sands by the shore of the encircling ocean. Its waves crash and foam beside them, in their ears its roar. The beach is utterly unmarked by the passage of others because there are as yet no humans in this world.

  It is three brothers we see walking: Odin—the most powerful and terrible of them all—and his siblings, Vili and Vé. They go by many names, which will become a common thing in their divine family of the Aesir.

  Peaceful and still though it seems, everything around them has been built from blood, the earth and the heavens fashioned—literally—from the dismembered body of a murder victim. The universe as crime scene: it is an unsettling story, full of strangeness, violence, and contradictions, a tale whose truths must be felt rather than merely explained and understood. We shall explore it in time, but for now, in its aftermath, all is quiet. They are curious, these gods, always restlessly inquiring into the nature of the things they find in their shiny new creation. What is that? And this? They are also lonely, in this place that as yet lacks spirit, sense, and colour.

  But now the gods are on the strand, and they have seen something by the water’s edge.

  Two great stumps of driftwood have washed up with the tide, the beach otherwise empty under the immensity of the sky. Odin and his brothers approach them, turning over the trunks in the sand with effort. And it is then that they understand what is inside, as a sculptor perceives the carving within the block of raw stone, waiting to be released. The three gods work their hands into the wood, moulding, planing, shaping it along the grain. A cloud of shavings and dust. They grin at each other, swept up by the joy of making. Slowly the things inside become visible, forming under the pressure of divine fingers. Here is an arm, and there a leg, and at last, the faces.

  First, a man—the first man—and then a woman. The gods stare down at them. It is Odin who moves now, exhaling into their mouths, giving them life; they cough, start to breathe, still trapped inside the wood. It is Vé who opens their eyes and ears, sets their tongues in motion, smoothes their features; wild glances, a babble of noise. It is Vili who gifts them intelligence and movement; they shake themselves free of the stumps, flakes of bark falling.

  Last of all, the gods give them names, their substance transformed into sound. The man is Askr, the ash tree. The woman is Embla, the elm.

  The first people in the world look around them, astonished, listening to the silence and then filling it with speech, shouts, laughter. They point at the ocean, the sky, the forest, at more and more, naming them all, laughing again. They begin to run, away from the gods watching them, off along the sand, farther and farther into their new home until they are lost to sight. Perhaps they wave to Odin and the others, perhaps not, but they will see them again.

  From this couple are descended all of humankind, down through the millennia to our own time.

  1. The Vikings and the Victorians, incarnate. An extraordinary drawing from 1895 by Lorenz Frølich, of the gods’ feast as related in the Old Norse poem Lokasenna, ‘Loki’s Quarrel’. The Aesir gods appear as a cross between barbarian banqueters in the Classical mould and rather prim contemporary diners, while Loki plays drunk uncle, all in a Rococo room under what seems to be a chandelier. Image: in the public domain.

  The Vikings enjoy a popular recognition and interest shared by few other ancient cultures. More or less everyone has at least heard of them. Over just three centuries, from approximately 750 to 1050 CE, the peoples of Scandinavia transformed the northern world in ways that are still felt today. They changed the political and cultural map of Europe and shaped new configurations of trade, economy, settlement, and conflict that ultimately stretched from the eastern American seaboard to the Asian steppe. The Vikings are known today for a stereotype of maritime aggression—those famous longships, the plunder and pillage, the fiery drama of a ‘Viking funeral’. Beyond the clichés there is some truth in this, but the Scandinavians also exported new ideas, technologies, beliefs, and practices to the lands they discovered and the peoples they encountered. In the process they were themselves altered, developing new ways of life across a vast diaspora. The many small-scale kingdoms of their homelands would eventually become the nations of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which are still with us, while the traditional beliefs of the North were gradually subordinated by Christianity. That initially alien faith would fundamentally change their view of the world, and the Scandinavian future.

  In a literal sense, the Vikings are of course people of the past, dead and gone—but at the same time they inhabit a curiously haptic kind of prehistory, one that appears to return whatever pressure is applied to it. Many have been tempted to put their fingers on the scales of hindsight and imagined that the impulse to do so came not from themselves but through the revelation of hidden truths buried by time. Medieval monks and scholars reinvented their pagan ancestors either as nobly misguided forebears or as agents of the devil. In the manuscript illuminations of Romance literature, with a kind of Orientalist prejudice, they became Saracens, enemies of Christ depicted with turbans and scimitars. In Shakespeare’s England, the Vikings were taken up as violent catalysts in the early story of the kingdom’s greatness. Rediscovered during the Enlightenment as a sort of ‘noble savage’, the figure of the Viking was enthusiastically adopted by the nationalist Romantics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Searching for their own emerging identities, Victorian imperialists scoured Scandinavian literature looking for suitably assertive northern role models, expressing the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxons through their Nordic cousins. The logical end of that trajectory came a century later, when the Nazis appropriated the Vikings in pursuit of their racist fictions, elevating them as a spurious Aryan archetype; their modern successors still plague us today. Elements of the broad Pagan community now seek a spiritual alternative that draws inspiration from Viking religion, with Tolkienesque flavourings added to a cloudier Old Norse brew. All these and many more, including today’s academics and the audiences for historical drama, have taken the fragmentary material and textual remains of the Vikings and recast them in moulds of their choosing. At times it can seem that the actual people have almost disappeared under the cumulative freight they have been made to bear. One recalls Brideshead Revisited and Anthony Blanche, “Oh, la fatigue du Nord”.

  2. Where it all went wrong. A recruitment poster for the SS, advertising a rally in Nazi-occupied Norway in 1943. The political appropriation of the Vikings could not be more obvious. Image: in the public domain.

  What unites most of these perspectives is that they privilege the observer, looking in on the Vikings from the outside, and ignore how they themselves saw the world. This attitude has a long pedigree, and in fact dates back to the writings of the
Vikings’ victims, who can hardly be expected to be unbiased. Ironically, even the people with whom the Scandinavians came into contact (often at the point of a sword) were not always entirely sure whom they were really dealing with. To take a single example from the late ninth century, after a vicious war with an entire Viking army, King Alfred of Wessex in southern England could still entertain a non-combatant Norwegian merchant at his court, asking question after question: Where did they come from? What did they do? How did they live? The king was not alone in his uncertainty and curiosity.

  Those same puzzles continued to be debated for the next thousand years, accelerating in the last two centuries or so with the growth of academic enquiry and scholarship. Here again, though, the focus has largely tended to be on what the Vikings did rather than on why they did it. There is a sense in which this viewpoint is looking through the wrong end of the historical telescope, defining (and often judging) a people solely by the consequences of their actions rather than the motivations behind them.

  This book takes the opposite approach, working from the inside looking out. The emphasis here is very firmly on who the Vikings really were, what made them tick, how they thought and felt. Their dramatic expansion will not be ignored, of course, but its context, its origins, are at the core of what follows.

  Where better to begin, then, than with the creation itself? The tale of the gods fashioning the first humans from stumps of wood, on the shores of the world ocean, has roots that extend very deeply into Norse mythology. For all the fearful confusion about their identity among those they encountered, in the Vikings’ own minds there was never any doubt at all: they were the children of Ash, the children of Elm.