THE VIKING AGE (ca 800-1050), generic term for a period when traders, warriors, emigrants and discoverers from southern Scandinavia spread to the coasts of England and France, through Eastern Europe to Constantinople, and westwards to Iceland, Greenland and North America.

This is a book published in the series NORWEGIAN HERITAGE. A series of books about a range of Norway’s best-known national icons. The respective titles deal with significant figures within arts and literature, science, sports and society, as well as the country’s many natural wonders, important historical periods and cultural topics. Each book offers the reader an updated introduction to readers who wish to familiarize themselves with a given subject.

See www.norwegian-heritage.no for more titles and information about the series.

The books are published in Norwegian and English.

ROBERT FERGUSON

THE VIKING AGE

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The shallow draft of the Viking longship made the waterways of the world accessible to the Vikings in a new and unique way. The side-mounted rudder could be raised to allow ships to be towed backwards down rivers.

Contents

What is the Viking Age?

The Causes of the Viking Age

The Vikings in the British Isles

The Carolingian Empire and the Duchy of Normandy

The Vikings in Russia

The Vikings in Iceland

The Vikings in Greenland

The Vikings in North America

The Vikings in the Arab world

The End of the Viking Age

Appendix

What is the Viking Age?

Those nineteenth century Norwegian, Danish and Swedish historians, who, between them, identified what we now call the Viking Age, had very specific reasons for doing so. Each of the three Scandinavian countries was at that time, for differing reasons, in need of a lost golden age of greatness.

The reassurance and comfort the Danes needed, after being overpowered by Prussia in 1864 and forced to give up the duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, was provided by the historian Johannes Steenstrup. He reminded them of the specifically Danish elements in the ‘European’ colonisations carried out by the Vikings in England and Normandy, and claimed that Normandy’s founder Ganger Rolf (‘Rolf the Walker’) was a Dane and not, as the Norwegian sources asserted, a native of Møre og Romsdal on the west coast of Norway. Norwegians needed to emphasize the distinct nature of Norwegian cultural identity as part of the drive towards the independence from Sweden that came in 1905. Serving this end was Gustav Storm’s vigorous promotion of the fact that it was Norwegians who had colonized Iceland, Greenland and were responsible for the establishment of the heroic but short-lived Viking Age settlement in North America in about 1000. The Swedes too looked for the compensations of nationalist nostalgia to make up for the painful loss of Finland to Russia early in the nineteenth century.

Textile fragment from the Oseberg ship, in which two women were buried in the year 834. The ship was discovered at Slagen, in the Norwegian Vestfold, in 1904.

Historians in all three countries were refining the work of the Danish historian Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, the first to organize the past into Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, based on the archaeological finds of tools and weapons made from these materials. The rationale for the creation of a particular ‘Viking’ Age within the later Iron Age was the number of finds in Scandinavia associated with seafaring and returning warriors.

In 1820, at about the same time as Thomsen was working on his rationalization of the study of history, the Swedish novelist Esaias Tegnér’s Fridtjofs Saga became a bestseller throughout Europe, inspiring a wave of interest in the large body of Old Norse saga literature. Artists such as Johannes Flintoe, P. N. Arbo and Anker Lund made careers out of illustrating scenes and characters from the sagas, their efforts giving a strong, but still only tentative, legitimacy to the public idea of a ‘Viking Age’. Something more specific was needed to confirm the existence of a culture or civilization so distinct as to warrant a name of its own. This confirmation came in the form of a series of discoveries of buried ships made in Norway in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first of these Viking Age ships to emerge from more than a thousand years of obscure anchorage inside burial mounds in the rural south-east of Norway was the Tune ship, unearthed at Rolvsøy in Østfold in 1867 and dated to about 900. A rectangular grave-chamber behind the mast housed the remains of a man, along with a horse, sword, spears and the remnants of a saddle. The discovery caused much excitement and provided significant new information about the construction of the Viking longships, already familiar from saga literature and tapestries and quickly becoming the defining symbol of the Viking Age. Thirteen years later another ship discovered inside a mound at Sandar in Vestfold, known as the Gokstad ship, overshadowed the Tune find. The Gokstad ship itself was overshadowed by the discovery of the even more richly furnished and exquisite Oseberg burial ship found at Slagen in Vestfold in 1904, a time-capsule crammed with characteristic artefacts that established beyond all doubt that there really was a ‘Viking Age’.

Various theories have been put forward to explain the origins of the word ‘viking’. Some linguists believe it derives from the Latin vicus, meaning a ‘town’ or ‘camp’ or ‘dwelling-place’, others that it comes from the Old Norse verb vikja, meaning ‘to travel from place to place’. A simple and persuasive theory is that it originally denoted people from the region of the Vik, the bay area of south-eastern Norway around the Oslo fjord and the inland coastal region, and included the coast of Bohuslän in present-day Sweden. The men who sailed on the Tune and Gokstad and Oseberg ships would have been most familiar with these waters, and the frequency with which the Vik is mentioned in saga literature shows that it was the most heavily trafficked maritime area in the region at the time.