The Long Hunt (The Strongbow Saga) (44 page)

While computing sailing times using the ship speeds determined by the Viking Ship Museum and comparing them to the sailing times reported by the ninth century merchants Wulfstan and Ottar, I realized that it seemed probable that on their voyages, the latter took few, if any, breaks for the night between destinations. A possible reason could have been a fear of pirates. Most merchants would have sailed a knarr, or similar vessel, rather than a longship, for knarrs had deeper, broader hulls in proportion to their length than longships, and would have been able to more securely transport large amounts of cargo. However, compared to a longship a knarr would have a relatively small crew, making it much more susceptible to attack and capture.

Pirates were a common risk in the Baltic Sea. A vivid example is found in Rimbert's
Life of Anskar
, which relates how, in the year 839, the Christian monk and missionary Anskar undertook a journey from Hedeby to Birka. However, the merchants with whom he had taken passage were attacked by pirates, who took the ship and all the goods it contained—including forty books Anskar and his companions had been carrying to use in their mission. The crew and passengers were put ashore, and Anskar was forced to continue his journey to Birka over land. To lessen the possibility of such attacks, some merchants probably chose to pursue a more tiring and strenuous, but safer, course by sailing far out to sea, day and night, between destinations.

The Viking-era Scandinavians, incidentally, would not have considered their raiding to be piracy, although the victims of their raids—the Franks, English, and Irish—often referred to the Vikings as pirates. In the Vikings' warrior culture—as in many warrior cultures throughout history—raiding another tribe, people, or land in order to steal their possessions was considered an honorable and legitimate means of acquiring wealth. However, the Scandinavians would have considered sea-going bandits who indiscriminately robbed any passing ship to have been pirates.

The Island of Oland

In the above-mentioned account by the ninth century merchant Wulfstan of his voyages across the Baltic Sea, among the lands he mentions passing is Eowland, the land of the Eowans. He is referring to the long island off the coast of Sweden known today as Oland, and which is called Oeland in the story. Although later in the Viking era, Oland was absorbed into the Kingdom of the Sveas, during the mid-ninth century it was still considered an independent land and its population a separate people from the nearby Sveas, as were a number of other islands in the Baltic, including Bornholm—known in the Viking era as Burgundaholmr, the island of the Burgundians, which today is part of Denmark—and Gotland, which is now a part of Sweden.

While researching my way east across the Baltic, in order to be able to write about the company's sea voyage, I discovered that Oland has a fascinating, although enigmatic, history, which I chose to draw on for the purposes of this story. Approximately eighty-five miles long and ten miles wide, Oland contains the ruins of nineteen large stone forts, built between 300 and 600 A.D.  The forts were all abandoned between 600 and 700 A.D.  and fell into disrepair, but during the eleventh century some were rebuilt and were used during the rest of the Viking era and into the Middle Ages. A number of Viking-era buried treasure hoards have also been found on Oland, and there are several stone ship settings, marking the sites of Viking age burials.

Archaeologists and historians do not know who built the forts, other than the obvious—persons who lived on Oland during the time of their construction. But the answers to questions such as what was the nature of the culture and community existing there at the time, was it a militarily powerful kingdom, and why the forts were ultimately all abandoned around the same time remain unknown.

One fort—Eketorp—has been the subject of extensive archaeological excavation, and has since been reconstructed. The rebuilt fort, which today operates as a living history museum, provides graphic visual evidence of the imposing military might that must have characterized the culture of the Oland fort builders at the height of their power.

The feast on Oeland during the story takes place in the ruined fort now known as Barby, or Barby Borg. Although all of the other forts on the island are circular ring forts, and many contain the ruins of interior buildings, Barby consists of a semicircular wall enclosing an open space overlooking a steep cliff-side.  The sacrifice of horses by the Oelanders in the story is based on a theory developed after a large number of horse bones were discovered in a nearby pit during excavations at Eketorp.

My characterization of the population of Oland as having become, by the mid-ninth century, a somewhat meek folk with little ability to defend themselves against armed intruders such as Sigvald's pirate band is my fictional creation for the purpose of the story, although it was inspired by the mystery of the abandoned network of forts on the island.

The Sea Battle

The old sagas contain numerous accounts of sea battles fought between naval forces during the Viking era, and I have long intended to work such a battle—an iconic aspect of the Viking period—into Halfdan's story in
The Strongbow Saga
. As preparation for writing the battle scene in
The Long Hunt
, I reviewed numerous saga accounts of such battles, including those in the
Heimskringla
,
Egil's Saga
, and
The Saga of the Jomsvikings
.

Common elements found in many Viking era sea battles included the practice by the weaker defending side—and on occasion both sides—where they would lash their ships together to create a single large floating platform from which to fight. As a passage in the
Heimskringla
, describing the battle of Solskel won by King Harald Fairhair of Norway, states: "[I]t was then the custom when they fought on ships to lash the ships together and fight on the stems"—i.e., in the bow and stern of the ships.

Early phases of such battles generally consisted of heavy missile fire back and forth: shooting arrows, throwing spears, and, in many descriptions, also throwing stones. The latter would almost certainly have been ballast stones pulled out of the bottoms of the ships' hulls for use as improvised missile weapons.

Eventually, attempts to board the enemy's ships would occur, for Viking sea battles were ultimately decided by brutal, close-quarters hand-to-hand combat. Based on the various saga accounts, it was not uncommon for boarding attempts to be beaten back, often repeatedly, but in the end, battles were decided when a ship was "cleared"—i.e., all of its defenders were either slain or so badly wounded they could no longer fight.

The
Heimskringla
contains a very vivid account of the famous battle of Svold, in which King Olav Trygvason of Norway, while sailing separate from his main fleet with only three warships, was ambushed by a much larger fleet composed of a mix of Danish ships led by King Svein Forkbeard of Denmark, Swedish ships led by King Olav of the Sveas, and followers of Eric the Jarl, a Norwegian nobleman who was a sworn enemy of Trygvason. During that battle, an archery duel between two skilled bowmen occurred, which inspired the duel during the sea battle in
The Long Hunt
between Halfdan and the Finn archer on Sigvald's ship. One of the two dueling archers in the battle of Svold, who fought from the ship of Eric the Jarl and who bested a famed archer aboard Trygvason's ship, was described as "an outstanding bowman…who was called Finn and who was said by some to be a Finn." That description planted the seed in my mind which led to the characters of Rauna and her father becoming part of the story.

The tactic Halfdan uses to defeat the Finn archer—having Asbjorn, Gudfred, and Einar shoot at the Finn's shield bearer, to cause him to flinch and expose the Finn to Halfdan's shot—was inspired by an account of a battle in the
Heimskringla
that occurred when a large force of Wends, raiding up the western coast of Sweden, attacked a town in Vastergotarland. During the battle, a skilled Wendish archer was killing a man with every arrow he shot. The Wend was protected from enemy fire by two shield bearers, but a father and son pair of archers, among the defenders of the town, killed him. The father shot at one of the shield bearers, causing him to pull his shield away to protect himself just long enough for the son to be able to shoot an arrow into the Wendish archer's head.

Sigvald's unusual armor and weapon are inspired by several different saga sources. Mail shirts, or brynies, were quite expensive and fairly rare during the early centuries of the Viking era. The typical mail armor worn during that period would have been a shirt with short sleeves, coming down at most to the elbow, and a relatively short skirt which covered only part of the thighs. More comprehensive mail armor did exist, however. King Harald Hardrada of Norway had a special mail shirt which was so long that his men nicknamed it "Emma," perhaps because its length was the same as a woman's dress. I envisioned Sigvald's long brynie as being a somewhat similar garment.

Sigvald's axe-spear does not match any actual weapon found from the period. However, there are descriptions in several sagas of heavy "hewing spears" of unknown design, and in
Egil's Saga
, at one point the title character and his brother both fight in a battle armed with unusual, heavy spear-like weapons called, in the English translations of the saga, "halberds."   The translator must have been unable to discern an exact meaning for the original Old Norse description of the weapon, for a halberd is a long-handled pole axe that was developed centuries later during the Middle Ages. However, I chose to arm Sigvald with a somewhat similar, though far shorter, weapon—a spear with an axe-like blade on its shaft, which could be used for both stabbing and hewing.

The Sami

The ancestors of the Sami people—also called Lapps, although not by the Sami themselves—were a people of Finno-Ugrian ethnic origin, who reached Scandinavia as early as 10,000 B.C., long before the Germanic tribes who became the Viking peoples reached the same lands.  By around 800 B.C., possibly earlier, they had split into two distinct cultures: the Finns and the Sami.

The Finns were concentrated mostly in the lands which today comprise southern Finland, plus Estonia and western Russia, particularly the area around Lake Ladoga. By the Viking Age, the Sami populated a broad swath of land across Scandinavia, including parts of modern day Norway, central Sweden, and Finland.

During the Viking era, the Sami lived a simple hunter-gatherer existence and engaged in seasonal migrations, moving to coastal and lake regions in the summer, when fishing played a major role in their food production, and deeper into the forests in winter, when hunting—particularly the hunting of reindeer—became their primary source of food, as well as a means of acquiring furs to be used as trade goods. By the Viking period, it had apparently become common for the Sami to gather in relatively large winter villages, although in summer months they may have more often lived in smaller, family-based groups. While migrating and during summer months, the Sami often lived in tents made from animal skins that looked remarkably like the tipis of North American Plains Indian tribes. Although known today as herders of reindeer, the Sami of the Viking period merely hunted the deer—they did not domesticate and begin herding them until the late 1500s.

The Sami were, rather confusingly, called "Finns" by the Viking era Scandinavians, or sometimes "Skridfinns," which translates roughly into "Ski" and "Finn"—during the winter months, the Sami traveled and hunted on a primitive form of ski. Both archaeological and saga evidence reflect that the Sami engaged in trade with the Viking era Scandinavians, exchanging furs for goods they did not produce. However, saga sources, as well as the account told by Norwegian merchant Ottar to King Alfred of Wessex, also reflect that some Scandinavian chieftains regularly extracted "tribute," paid in furs, from the more peaceful Sami, and both Viking sagas and Sami legends tell of occasional raiding expeditions against the Sami.

Knowledge of the old Sami religion is spotty at best, for the Scandinavian peoples of the Middle Ages and later forced the Sami to convert to Christianity and did their best to stamp out all vestiges of their former beliefs. Apparently their gods were closely connected with different aspects of nature, and they believed in two parallel realms of reality: the physical world and the spirit world. The Sami's shamans, called noaidi, were men and women who possessed the power to enter into trance states and travel back and forth between the two worlds.

Sweden and Birka

During the Viking Age, the lands which constitute modern-day Sweden were not a single country or kingdom. Both Skane, the region comprising the southwestern coast, and Halland, just above Skane, were considered Danish lands. The ancient homelands of the Goth tribes—Vastergotarland and Ostergotarland, collectively known as Gotarland—stretched from the western coast above Halland across central Sweden. To the northeast was Svealand, the Kingdom of the Sveas.

Between 1,000 and 300 B.C., waves of Germanic peoples migrated out of Scandinavia and into eastern Europe, establishing new homelands there. The Goth tribes—the Goths, Ostrogoths, and Visigoths, as they were known to the Romans—conquered and settled vast regions, at their peak controlling lands ranging from the Baltic to the Black Sea. But in the late fourth century, the Huns invaded the Goths' lands from the east, and drove them and other Germanic tribes westward into the Roman Empire, precipitating its collapse.

By the beginning of the Viking Age, the original Scandinavian homelands from which the various Goth tribes had migrated hundreds of years earlier were still identified by name. Although they were collectively considered a single people, the Gotars—or Geats, as they were known to the Anglo-Saxon English—in the early Viking era, two distinct Gotar kingdoms at least nominally still existed: Ostergotarland and Vastergotarland.  But as independent kingdoms, they figure almost not at all into the history of the Viking era, and well before the end of the period, the lands and peoples of the Ostergotars, and parts of Vastergotarland, had fallen under the rule of the Sveas.