Vikings in America (4 page)

Russia was by no means the limit of their eastward spread. From the Caspian Sea the Vikings moved south to the great trading city of Babylon, today Baghdad, as well as to Astrakhan. The Black Sea gave access to Constantinople, the city previously known as Byzantium and now as Istanbul. The Norse called it simply
Mikligathr
, the Great City. With a population of around half a million people, Constantinople was by far the largest city in Europe, and far removed in grandeur from the isolated farmsteads and tiny villages from which the North-men had come.

In the
Mikligathr
of Constantinople and further to the south, the Vikings encountered the citizens of the Eastern Roman Empire: Greeks,
Romans, Jews, Arabs and many other groups. All these the Norsemen called by one name: South-men. Beyond Constantinople through the straits of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles the Norse reached the Eastern Mediterranean basin, where they took a prominent part in the Crusades to recapture the Holy Land for Christianity, reaching the Holy Land and Jerusalem. The South-men lived in an area of fabulous wealth – yet they employed the North-men as mercenaries to fight their wars for them, and in these wars the North-men were victorious and became wealthy. Northern peoples came to rule much of today's Italy: Lombardy, Naples and Sicily; while the establishment of the Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem was under a mixed Norse and French dynasty.

Finally there were the West-men. These are the speakers of Celtic languages whom the Vikings encountered in Scotland, Ireland, Wales and the Isle of Man, and whom by marriage and conquest they made part of their world. Scotland was for long a battlefield between Vikings and Celts, with the north of Scotland firmly in Viking hands, and the northern isles of Orkney and Shetland for centuries acknowledging a Norwegian king as overlord. In the Isle of Man the Vikings established a long-lived kingdom with its own parliament and institutions, creating a sense of identity for the Isle of Man such that even today it remains outside the United Kingdom and the European Union, though it is a British territory. In the west, in Ireland, the Vikings established the greatest truly Viking city: Dublin.

This was the world of the North-men. Those North-men who visited other lands took part in the great adventure of the age. Certainly they went for trade and plunder, or the chance to serve as mercenaries to a Greek emperor in Constantinople, or to rule a territory in Russia. But most of all they went for adventure, and the chance to make their name and reputation. A band of 20 or so men, usually from one village and of about the same age, left for the journey of their lives east to Russia, and south to the Mediterranean or the Middle East. Before leaving they swore an oath of unquestioning loyalty to their group – a
varang
in their language. The oath was absolute, to last through the years of the journey until they came home. In years of travel the Norse were continually threatened by hostile peoples, or tolerated on the basis of uneasy alliances. For survival they were utterly dependent on their comrades and on the integrity of their
varang
. They became the people who had sworn an oath – Varangians. Thus the Norse who formed the personal guard of the Greek emperor in Constantinople were called Varangians, and the shock-troops who fought in the Holy Land were likewise Varangians.

While the movement to the east and south was an adventure for men only, the voyages to the west were more often a family matter. The defining factor for a group of North-men setting off on a voyage to the west was that they were all from one location, one
Vik
.
Vik
means both a dwelling place and also a bay or creek – a term which reflects the fact that in Norway human settlement is usually on a bay or creek. From a
Vik
came a group of
Vikings
, people of the
Vik
. The Vikings were the Norse explorers and settlers of the lands of the North Atlantic.

The westward expansion started a little later than that to the east and the south. The key development which made it possible was advances in the area of ship building.
²

The Vikings had had ships for many centuries, but they were flat-bottomed, really suitable only for rivers or sheltered, coastal waters. While the occasional Viking boat had doubtless made the journey over the North Sea to the British Isles, such voyages were very much the exception.

It is the ship that is the key to understanding the success of the Vikings. Before the Viking Age the hulls of all European ships had been constructed around a wooden frame, with timbers fastened to the frame. This produced a heavy ship that was also structurally weak. Mounting a mast produced more strains on the frame, and prevented large masts and sails. Pre-Viking ships could be rowed – with great effort – or could sail in the direction of the wind. The system of building a ship in this way was the style of all European ships both in the classical age and the early Middle Ages, and at the dawn of the Viking Age it had a pedigree of around 2,000 years, with little evolution. The ships so produced could not develop as there were intrinsic limitations in the design.

In the late eighth century an unknown Norse craftsman made a spectacular technological breakthrough that transformed ship design, creating the style of vessel that enabled the Vikings to visit four continents. In a nutshell, Viking ships dispensed with the frame. Instead of fastening timbers to the frame they were all fastened directly to the keel and to one another. Planks overlapped one another in the clinker technique, and this became the basis of all shipbuilding until iron hulls were developed. The mast, the flooring and the rowing benches were likewise all fastened directly to the keel rather than to the hull, allowing the hull far greater flexibility.

Viking ships were built usually from oak, on occasion from other hard wood. The keel was a single timber, stressed so that it bent upwards fore and aft, and cut from an oak tree using axes alone. An axe cuts with the grain and ensures that the resulting timber has maximum strength and flexibility, and this tool is therefore preferable to a saw. In building a Viking ship everything depended on the strength and integrity of the keel. While the keel remained intact the ship could scarcely founder, but if the keel broke the ship was certainly lost. The need for the keel to be of just one timber imposed a maximum size on Viking ships, in that they could not be bigger than an oak tree can grow. The timbers of the hull were likewise of oak, and likewise created by use of an axe alone, with no sawing whatsoever. Both keel and timbers were produced by eye rather than measured, and the process was such that the ships could be built very quickly. Seasoned wood was preferred, but green wood was used when a ship was required at short notice. Bonding of the timber was achieved through thousands of iron rivets which nailed the timbers into place – the rivets were produced in such great numbers that today they are one of the most frequent metal-detector finds from the Viking period. The result was a lightweight but strong vessel of shallow draft which flexed with the sea. The contrast between Viking ships and the heavy, structurally weak and deep draft vessels previously known is enormous. The Norse had made a technological breakthrough that set the standard in shipbuilding for the next millennium. Steering was by means of a single steering board on the right (steer-board, or starboard) side of the ship, and which did not pierce the hull, which would have created a weakness. The single square sail enabled the ships to sail before the wind, and gave some ability to cross or even tack against the wind. The strength and stability of the Norse ships was such that masts and sails much larger than those of earlier ships could be used, giving a great increase in speed.

The ships that the world today most closely associates with the Vikings are the Dragon Ships, also called Long Ships. These were the war ships which terrorised the British Isles and the Baltic, fast troop-carriers that could cross from Norway to Britain in around 36 hours at speeds of up to 14 knots per hour. The combination of sail and oars for speed in all conditions, and a flat bottom for coastal waters and beaching, made these the perfect troop landing ships. They were brightly painted in order to strike terror into the enemy, often with stripes on their sail, and usually with a prow that was shaped as a dragon head. These were large vessels, typically around 90 feet in length, with the largest discovered measuring 119 feet. Able to carry up
to 100 armed men, just one of these ships could destroy any small coastal settlement, be it a monastery or a village. Their drawback was that they had little space for a cargo, no provision whatsoever for shelter from the elements for the crew, and very little space for food and water. The most frequent use for these ships was in the endless quarrels of the Norse in Norway and Denmark, and for raids across the North Sea. It is unlikely that a ship of this construction ever made a voyage as far as Iceland, and certainly not to America. We can be sure that no dragon ship ever sailed into the bay at L'Anse aux Meadows.

Dragon ships must have been an impressive sight. A contemporary account of the Danish Royal Fleet is given by a monk at St Omer, France:
³

When at length they were all gathered, they went on board the towered ships . . . On one side lions moulded in gold were to be seen on the ships, on the other birds on the tops of the masts indicated by their movements the winds as they blew, or dragons of various kinds poured fire from their nostrils . . . But why should I now dwell upon the sides of the ships, which were not only painted with ornate colours but were covered with gold and silver figures? . . . The blue water, smitten by many oars, might be seen foaming far and wide, and the sunlight, cast back in the gleam of metal, spread a double radiance in the air.

No wonder these magnificent ships have been remembered as the symbol of the Viking Age.

Alongside the dragon ship, and using the same fundamental construction technique, was the
knarr
, or merchant ship. This was first of all a cargo ship, broader than the dragon ship, with higher sides, and with cargo space fore and aft. The
knarr
lacked the very high prow of the dragon ship, and was without most of the decoration. Inevitably these broader ships were slower than the dragon ships, and they were less manoeuvrable in coastal waters, but they were much better suited to open seas, and may be regarded as the first wooden ships with the ability to withstand the storms of the North Atlantic. The
knarr
came in many different sizes. A small
knarr
might be 40 to 50 feet long and could be crewed for short voyages by as few as four to six men. Such a ship was almost exclusively a sailing vessel, as the ship would be too heavy for so few men to row, though oars would have been used for
short distances within harbours. A larger version of a
knarr
might be 60 to 70 feet long and carry a larger crew, typically around 20 men, which was an adequate number to row such a ship, though not at any great speed. These should be regarded as sailing vessels which could at need be rowed for short distances. The
knarr
rather than the dragon ship was the vessel that enabled the Vikings to expand out of Scandinavia, and these were the ships that took the Vikings to America. Used as migrant ships, they are known to have carried about 40 people, a combination of crew and passengers, as well as livestock and belongings.

The triumph of the design of the
knarr
is demonstrated by its long usage. Even in the mid twentieth century, ships which the Vikings would have recognised were in use in many places as a lightweight and functional cargo row-boat that was seaworthy in the North Atlantic. In Scotland's Isle of Lewis until the 1960s a boat based on the design of the
knarr
was used every year to cover 50 miles of open North Atlantic from Stornoway to North Rona to harvest gannets there. Its design reflected an unbroken pedigree of well over 1,000 years. Many of the grand nineteenth-century ships built from wood reflect directly the achievement of Viking design. For example, the Viking square sail principle was utilised even by the nineteenth-century tea-clippers, the last and greatest of the line of Viking-inspired sailing ships.

The first stage in the Viking westward expansion was across the sea to Britain. Historians point to the year 793 as a convenient starting date for the Viking Age, for in this year a group of Viking looters in their new dragon ships landed at the monastery of Lindisfarne, and sacked it. And the target could not have been more shocking!

Lindisfarne is the ‘Landward-Farne', the nearest to land of a group of small islands off the North Sea coast of England's Northumberland, and closely linked with the Christian culture and art which had arrived in England. In the eighth century the English kingdom of Northumbria had flourished as the very font of the English nation. The kings of Northumbria had created peace and prosperity, with a growing population supported by the fertile land of the Northumbrian coast, and by trade with Celtic kingdoms to the north and east. At Yeavering they built a royal palace from which Northumbria was ruled, along with a tiered hall for discussion, which may be regarded as a form of parliament and the earliest example of English democracy.
Alongside these regal and democratic institutions, now excavated, Yeavering has the distinction of being a key location in the spread of Christianity, for this is where in AD 627 Paulinus, Bishop of York spent 36 days baptising converts in the River Glen. It is at Yeavering that many English people – rather than just their rulers – accepted Christianity. Yeavering epitomises the achievement of Northumbria – a strong kingdom, a nascent democracy and a Christian country. Northumbria is where England started, and where eighth-century England saw its great flourishing. Just ten miles away, off the coast of Northumberland, was the great Christian monastery of Lindisfarne.

Lindisfarne is an island at high tide, but at low tide a causeway three miles in length links the island to the coast. The site was perfect for the first Christian missionaries. They came by sea – from the Apostolic Celtic Church of St Patrick in Ireland, to St Columba's Iona on the west coast of Scotland, through the Forth–Clyde Valley of central Scotland to Inchcolm – Columba's Island – in the Firth of Forth, and from there under St Aidan to the new Christian site of Lindisfarne, known to many people since simply as the Holy Island. Lindisfarne Christianity was Celtic, claiming an Apostolic mandate which pre-dated the Catholicism of Rome. It is this Church to which the scholars of the English Reformation looked for authority in creating the Anglican Church. This is the Church of the Venerable Bede, greatest worthy of the early Middle Ages, and the Church which produced the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels, the single greatest artistic achievement of the English early Middle Ages. This is the environment that produced the poet Cynewulf, author of some of the greatest poetry in English. This is the Church that produced its own saint, St Cuthbert. Yet probably what is best remembered today of this beacon of civilisation and culture is its sack, when fewer than 100 Viking adventurers in a dragon ship destroyed it in one brutal raid.