The Far Traveler - Nancy Marie Brown (10 page)
Still, the Norse legacy in the British Isles is mainly linguistic. Thousands of towns have Norse names like Derby, Kirby, Wadbister, Isbister, Winskill, Skaill, Laimiseadar, Lacsabhat, Heylipoll, and Kirkapoll, while from Norse the English language gained such words as egg, ugly, ill, smile, knife, fellow, husband, birth, death, cast, take, kettle, steak, leg, skin, lost, mistake, law, and brag. Not to mention ransack.
Why did Viking hordes suddenly descend on the Western world (and some of the Eastern) between 793 and 1066? The smart answer is because they could: They owned the best ships on the seas. But what was driving them? What inspired their technology?
Modern historians have not come up with any better explanations than did the medieval monks trying to see God’s purpose in the burning of their churches. According to Adam of Bremen:
On account of the roughness of its mountains and the immoderate cold, Norway is the most unproductive of all countries.... Poverty has forced them thus to go all over the world and from piratical raids they bring home in great abundance the riches of the lands. In this way they bear up under the unfruitfulness of their own country.
He adds, charmingly, that “since accepting Christianity”—which came to Norway in the late 900s—“they have already learned to love the truth and peace and to be content with their poverty.” Dudo of Normandy, writing about fifty years before Adam, in 1020, thought the problem was population pressure caused by lack of morals (as well as land). The Vikings, he says:
...insolently abandon themselves to excessive indulgence, live in outrageous union with many women and there in shameless and unlawful intercourse breed innumerable progeny. Once they have grown up, the young quarrel violently with their fathers and grandfathers, or with each other, about property...
Those that are driven away fight in other lands for a place “where they can live in continual peace,” he concludes. The Icelandic sagas also explain the Norse exodus as a response to violent quarrels “about property,” not within families, but between political factions. When Queen Asa’s grandson, Harald Fine-Hair, determined to become king of all Norway, he dispossessed a number of other kings and chieftains and noblemen. Some went to Denmark, some to Sweden and farther east. Others became sea-kings, hoping to outlast Harald and retake their old estates (without luck: Harald reigned a long time, from about 870 to 930). Others went to the British Isles or took a chance on the empty new island in the west: Iceland.
Ketil Flat-Nose, the father of Unn the Deep-Minded, was one of those who sailed “west over sea,” taking the sea route through the Southern Islands toward Ireland. “He knew the country well,” one saga says, “for he had raided there extensively.” It isn’t clear when or why he quarreled with Olaf the White, king of Dublin, but Unn the Deep-Minded might have been the “peace cow” that brought these two Viking sea-kings to terms; her marriage to Olaf was certainly not a love match. A few years later, Olaf put her aside to marry the daughter of Kenneth mac Alpin, king of the Scots.
So it was not to Olaf that Unn turned when their son Thorstein the Red died in about the year 900, leaving her in charge of his six daughters and one son. According to the Icelandic
Book of Settlements,
which was written at the same time as the sagas but is considered to be more “historical”:
Thorstein became a warrior-king. He joined forces with Sigurd the Rich, son of Eystein the Chatterer, and they conquered Caithness and Sutherland, Ross and Moray—altogether more than half of Scotland. Thorstein became king of the Scots. But they betrayed him, and he died in battle. Unn was in Caithness when she learned of Thorstein’s death. She had a ship built in secret, and when it was ready... Unn went in search of Iceland. She had in her ship twenty free-born men.
By this manly act, an elderly grandmother set in motion the events that make up many of the Icelandic sagas.
Thorfinn Karlsefni, Gudrid’s husband, traces his lineage to Unn the Deep-Minded, as do Hallgerd Long-Legs, Olaf the Peacock, Chieftain Snorri of Helgafell, and three of Gudrun the Fair’s lovers (Bolli, Kjartan, and Thorkel Eyjolfsson), along with many, many more saga characters.
The Book of the Icelanders,
the first history of Iceland, written in the early 1100s, calls Unn the Deep-Minded one of the four chief founders of Iceland.
Visiting the Hebrides, I could see at once why Unn had fled. The bleak, open landscape so close to enemy territory left nowhere to hide, nowhere for a cast-off Viking queen and her royal grandchildren to live in freedom from fear—the reason Karlsefni would give, a hundred years later, for leaving Vinland. Walking that landscape, I understood, too, why Iceland would have felt so homey to Unn and her shipmates once they reached it. In both places, the sky is the element in which people live. The views are immense—or shut off by fog. The wind is constant. Life and death hang on the balance of frost and sun. But what I most wanted to know about Unn the Deep-Minded could not be found here, nor in the histories written by monks and so painstakingly dissected by modern historians. What I wanted to know was this: What did she take in her ship when she sailed to Iceland about the year 900? What did she wear? I had a possible answer only because someone had eyed an oddly shaped hill and imagined that something was buried in it. Like Grettir the Strong, he got a shovel and started digging.
The hill was in Norway, on the farm of Oseberg in the Oslo Fjord. Eighteen feet high and over 70 feet long, it was known as the “Foxes’ Mound.” In 1903 the owner of the property took a shovel to it. Unlike Grettir, he paused when he hit wood. The piece he pulled out was elaborately carved in a twisted, fluid, snakelike style. It occurred to the farmer that he might have something more significant here than a fox’s den. Twenty years earlier, a mound on the farm of Gokstad along the same fjord had produced the grave of a Viking chieftain, complete with a splendid ship. The farmer at Oseberg took the bit of wood to the director of the museum at the University of Oslo, who agreed: They had a ship burial on their hands.
Oseberg, says historian Judith Jesch, is “undoubtedly the richest and most sumptuous burial known from the Viking Age.” The two skeletons found in the ship were both women. Because the name Oseberg could mean Asa’s Fortress, the burial has been linked with Queen Asa, who revenged so completely her rape by the Hunting King. Tree-ring analysis of the wooden burial chamber, along with pollen found inside, tell us that the women died in the autumn of 834. (The ship was built in 820.) But we have no firm dates for Asa—the story was written down hundreds of years after she died—so no one can say for sure whether this was her grave.
Nor can we tell if the queen was the young skeleton or the old one, whose feet were swollen with arthritis. One or the other, scholars believe, was a servant who chose (or was chosen) to accompany her queen to the Otherworld. Neither skeleton was found in the burial chamber amidships. The large, carved bed, made comfy with blankets and feather pillows and eiderdown, and surrounded by wooden chests and a chair, lay empty. Someone like Grettir—someone who knew exactly what he was looking for—had dug into the mound long before the farmer. A hole had been cut into the chamber’s roof. One of the three ironbound oak chests had been smashed open and emptied. The bodies had been hauled down the length of the ship to the entrance shaft that the robber had dug. There, where perhaps the light was better, they were stripped of their jewels and the old woman’s right hand cut off, presumably for its rings. No royal treasure remained when archaeologists uncovered the Oseberg ship. But just as Grettir had no interest in the horse bones or the chair the barrow-wight sat in, the Oseberg robber left behind the very things that give us the greatest insight into the lifestyle of a Viking queen.
The Vikings believed that a queen would be a queen in the next world, and a slave would remain a slave. (That Christianity declared all souls equal was one reason common people were attracted to the new faith.) So that the queen’s rank would be recognized, however, she needed to arrive in the realm of the dead in style. Thus the great dragonship in which she was buried, with its high coiled prow and the glorious carving all down its sides. Despite its beauty, it was a working ship, with thirty oars, a bailer, a sail (small bits of it remained, the ropes still attached), and a gangplank. Arne Emil Christensen, who directs the museum that was built around the Oseberg and Gokstad ships, calls it the oldest true Viking ship, the prototype of the rowing boat with a sail, the typical longship for raiders in the early 800s. Such a vessel could have made it to Ireland, in the summer, if the sailors were lucky with the weather.
But what if the queen’s last journey was not on water? Buried with the queen were a spoke-wheeled cart and four sleighs, all richly carved, and teams of horses and oxen enough to pull them all. The queen also had her saddle horse, with its tack, and two dogs on a leash.
Unn the Deep-Minded, fleeing to Iceland with her family seventy-some years later, would presumably have taken fewer animals (and those alive and probably pregnant), and she would not necessarily have had the sleighs on hand (they were not as useful in Scotland, where the snow cover was much less, as in Norway). But the rest of the gear packed for the queen’s death journey would just as likely have been on Unn’s ship and, in another hundred years, on the ship that took Gudrid to Vinland.
Many of the queen’s belongings were made of wood, exuberantly carved with beasts and faces and interlaced lines—and all crushed into muddy splinters when found. That this treasure can be seen, now, in the cathedral-like museum at Bygdoy, Norway, is a credit to the patience of the archaeologists in the last century who puzzled it back together. Besides the furniture in the burial chamber, they recovered two beds that could be taken apart and stacked for travel; two tents to set up for overnight stops; three large wooden barrels and several smaller ones, some sheathed with brass (probably used for serving ale); a bucket of wild apples and another, with a lockable lid, full of weaving tools; a kitchen stool; two iron cauldrons, one with a tripod; a kettle carved out of soapstone; an iron frying pan; a carved wooden trough more than six feet long and three smaller ones, one of which held bread dough; five dippers, four dishes, and some wooden spoons; more spoons made of horn; a carving knife and two choppers with wooden handles; and a bundle of spices, including cumin, horseradish, and mustard seed. Another leather bundle held cannabis—hemp seed, grown for rope—while a small box held seeds of woad, a plant that makes a blue dye. Some of these things were found in the oak chests. One chest was four feet long and 16 inches high, and decorated with iron plates and tin-headed tacks. It had an iron padlock, whose key the queen would have worn on a chain.
In addition to kitchenware, the queen’s heirs had sent her and her servant off with four looms on which to weave their otherworldly clothes, plus a set of square tablets made of antler, for braiding the elaborately patterned ribbons the Vikings favored as borders and hems. The queen’s tablet loom still held the threads of her last pattern, as if she might pick it up in a moment and finish her work. She also had scissors and spindles and flax beaters (for making linen), a yarn winder, and two yarn reels. Two carved wooden whistles and a bone comb are all that remained in a set of small caskets and boxes. Before the robbers came, the queen had most likely been well provisioned with trinkets and jewelry to buy her way out of difficulty.
This attitude toward death—that it was a mirror world in which a woman would need horn spoons and a frying pan, and enjoy weaving ribbons or playing the whistle—changed as Christianity entered the Viking world. The Church did not forbid grave goods (though it did ban the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and servants), but household furnishings were not necessary in the Christian heaven. The Christian dead were washed, wrapped naked in a linen shroud, and buried in a coffin, facing east—leaving us with much less information about who they were and how they lived. Happily, though, Christians also were never cremated. If this was why the Oseberg ship wasn’t burned, we’ll never know; similar ships were set on fire before being covered with earth. On the lie de Groix off the coast of Brittany is a ship burial every bit as rich as Oseberg, with two male skeletons, one old, one young. It was torched. All we have to look at are bits of burned bone (including a six-sided die made of walrus ivory and a set of twelve gaming pieces), scraps of blackened metal, and one gold ring.
From Oseberg, we have not only wooden whistles and brass-covered buckets, but
cloth.
What did a Viking queen wear? Wool and silk and linen. Light, supple fabrics that clung to her form and draped elegantly, woven of several different textures in thread counts as high as 150 threads per inch. Norwegian archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad writes in a book on the Oseberg queen that some of the Oseberg wool fragments were “so fresh and bright it is hard to understand that they’ve spent over a thousand years in the ground.” Most, however, were caked together into stiff clumps and flakes made of many layers of different fabrics. Having teased these scraps apart, Ingstad found a “lovely red fabric” woven alternately of two different threads, one thick, one thin. “This must have been done on purpose, as it has given this fabric a beautiful muslin-like effect.” It was once appliqued onto another fine red tabby-woven wool; the gown had accents of silk, and all the seams were adorned with fine chains of embroidery. The other woman’s gown was bright blue.
Based on the evidence of other burials, under their wool gowns the women would have worn an ankle-length shift or chemise of finely pleated linen, pinned at the throat with a small bronze or silver brooch. Linen, being made of plant fibers, decays more readily than wool, and little of it remains. But traces of linen are often preserved pressed into the backs of brooches, where contact with the metal has protected them. Archaeologists have also deduced that the Oseberg queen wore a linen headdress—impressed into a clump of feathers on the bed was the shadow of a lacy, open weave. The linen could have been white and glossy; linen smoothers have been found in many other Norse women’s graves. Made by flattening a single fist-sized droplet of dark green glass, these smoothers were still used in Norway and Scotland in the nineteenth century instead of irons.