Oh those Vikings

One sparkling August morning in 1970, I awoke in the small town of Roskilde Denmark. I was hitchhiking to Copenhagen but had been warned that the youth hostels were full so I stopped short. So that morning I knew I was 30 km from downtown Copenhagen and absolutely nothing else about Denmark. By the end of the day I had become a serious fan of things Viking because of a 1962 find of five ships of various sizes in the mud near the main harbor. The good people of Roskilde had built a museum in 1969 to house these finds that from the looks of things, has grown in size and sophistication since then.

I have a sister who has compiled a thorough genealogy of our family. All eight of my great-grandparents came from the Viking "belt" that extends from Denmark in the south to Uppsala / Birka in the north. Because of geography, the explorations / raids / settlements of the Danes and Norwegians went west. These are the best known Vikings because of their importance to British history—William the Conqueror was a Norman (northman / Norwegian), after all. The Swedish Vikings went east and influenced the history of Russia and the Ukraine. Between a great-grandfather from Bergen Norway and two great-grandparents from Gotland, I have the range of Viking roots well covered.

In 1970, I knew none of this. In fact, the universe of Viking historians was pretty damn tiny. As my interest in the subject grew, I discovered I had latched onto a very obscure topic. For example: I found my way into a relationship with a woman who was half Norwegian. Since I was still a redhead, tall, and pretty good with a hammer, I thought that as a romantic gesture I would make her a Mjolnir (Thor's hammer) as a piece of costume jewelry / good luck charm. I made it of wood and leather and it turned out quite nice. It might have worked as romantic gift except that 1) She had never heard of Mjolnir. 2) She had never heard of the Viking pantheon of gods. 3) She had no idea what this gesture was supposed to mean. This was 1994. Amazingly, pop culture has caught up with my obscure hobby. I was watching an episode of Jeopardy not long ago (a guilty pleasure indeed) when they had a category on Viking mythology—all three contestants could have gotten them all right.

These are my people. I have lived in Scandinavia on two occasions. No one I know acts remotely like a Viking raider. So the question that has fascinated me for the last 48 years has been—how did the Vikings become Scandinavians? My Lutheran preacher father claimed that because the Viking Age mostly ended with the coming of Christianity to the north, this was the defining event. I always had a lot of problems with that explanation because goodness knows, there have been plenty of bloodthirsty Christians in history.

My pet explanation is those Viking boats. No longships, no Viking Age. These were amazing craft. Able to travel long distances over open and often stormy oceans at high speed, shallow enough to navigate narrow rivers, and light enough to be hauled over portages. At the height of the Viking Age, their influence stretched from North America to Constantinople because of those boats. The folks who went out in raiding parties could be violent thugs—the folks who built the boats had to be highly skilled, in love with precision, and supported by other skilled trades like steel making. It requires a sophisticated society to float a navy that can conduct overseas raids. The peaceable producing classes had to stay home and build boats. The young bucks went a-Viking—mostly to get a grubstake so they could buy a boat. None other than Thorstein Veblen thought Viking raiders were mostly young men out having fun with dad's boat.

A recent find in Ribe Denmark gives new evidence for what simply had to be true—that Viking settlements had to be communities of skilled people. Those boats did not emerge from thin air. A boat demands a boatbuilder. Anyone who has ever built or maintained a boat will emphatically explain just how difficult this is to do.

Viking city: excavation reveals urban pioneers not violent raiders

Excavations in Ribe, Denmark show that Viking culture was based on sophisticated production and trade. Is their brutal reputation unfair?

David Crouch in Ribe, 20 Nov 2018

In an extraordinary moment captured on film this summer, the tuning pegs and neck of a lyre, a harplike stringed instrument, were carefully prised out of the soil of Ribe, a picturesque town on Denmark’s south-west coast. Dated to around AD720, the find was the earliest evidence not just of Viking music, but of a culture that supported instrument-makers and musicians.

The same excavation also found the remains of wooden homes; moulds for fashioning ornaments from gold, silver and brass; intricate combs made from reindeer antlers (the Viking equivalent of ivory); and amber jewellery dating to the early 700s.

Even more extraordinary, however, was the discovery that these artefacts were not for home consumption by farmers, let alone itinerant raiders. Instead, the Vikings who made them lived in a settled, urban community of craftsmen, seafarers, tradesmen and, it seems, musicians.

“Ribe confounds history,” says Richard Hodges, a British archaeologist and the president of the American University of Rome. “What we have here defies the opinion that all the Vikings did was to raid and to rape.”

The discoveries at Ribe suggest mass production, high levels of specialization and a division of labor – all characteristics of a settled urban society rather than a nomadic one based on pillaging.

“We can see in Ribe that Viking society was based on sophisticated production and trade,” Hodges says. “It is a paradox: they made these beautiful things, they had gorgeous cloth, wonderful artifacts, but at the same time they are known to history for their brutality.”

European history has been written from the perspective of Christian chroniclers who wanted to tell us that Vikings were barbarians, Hodges notes.

The evidence suggests that, over the decades before launching their infamous raids on Britain with the attack on Lindisfarne in AD793, the Vikings created one of the first post-Roman Scandinavian urban bases for world trade and exploration. The culture was based on craftsmanship and trade and helped create the basis for sweeping changes in economic life over the ensuing millennium.

Speeding through the autumn countryside on one of his frequent journeys to Ribe, Søren Sindbæk, an archaeologist from Aarhus University, keeps up a constant stream of thoughts about the site’s broader historical significance.

“A transformation took place in northern Europe between the end of the Roman period – when this was the dark side of the continent – and the Middle Ages, when it became a bustling region with great cities, cathedrals and commercial shipping,” says Sindbæk.

“That change, leading eventually to the European age of exploration and world trade hegemony, begins here on the North Sea coast, where urban Vikings were a catalyst.”

Another find is a tiny silver coin the size of a fingernail, preserved so well it could have been minted yesterday. Coinage is evidence of a stable trading community, says Morten Søvsø, chief archaeologist.

“Looking at Ribe we can see there was a monopoly coin system already from the eighth century,” Søvsø says. “It’s all about trade and tax, and about keeping the peace – so people could rely on a return from their trade.”

Ribe has long been known as an early trading settlement. The question posed by the latest discoveries is about the relationship between these urban Vikings and the period of raids that followed the attack on Lindisfarne – Britain’s 9/11 moment, as Sindbæk puts it.

“The fact we can see this trading system was already in place before the Viking raids started in the British Isles makes it likely that the two things have something in common,” he says, adjusting the broad-brimmed Indiana Jones hat he keeps in the boot of his car for rainy days.

“It could be that the raids were actually the tip of an iceberg of trade – there is evidence of a trading relationship with Scandinavia, but we haven’t heard about the peaceful side.”

The site in Ribe is unique because it enables precise dating of the finds, thanks to deposits that have lain undisturbed in the sandy, worm-free soil. Lasers have been scanning the site as each layer of history is peeled away, creating a 3D model of the eighth century so samples can be precisely located in the archaeological record.

This method has revealed that the bead-makers of Viking Ribe were early victims of globalisation. Mass-produced beads from towns such as Raqqa in present-day Syria started arriving in bulk around AD780, undercutting the local trade.

The Danish archaeologists have applied another technique for squeezing every last drop of knowledge out of the site at Ribe. Blocks of soil no larger than a cigarette packet are impregnated with resin so they can be sliced into thin sections, which can then be analysed under a microscope.

The dig, funded by the Carlsberg Foundation and carried out by Aarhus University with the Museum of Southwest Jutland, began in 2017 and is now complete; the 100 sq metre site has returned to public use. Many discoveries lie ahead, Sindbæk says, as he and his colleagues study the data and materials they have assembled.

In a corrugated hut outside the warehouse where all the finds are kept, Sara Hee and Jane Sif Hansen are engaged in the less high-tech business of sifting through bags of mud. Hee describes how the discoveries are upending prior theories that the Vikings were marauders rather than traders.

A few days earlier, she says, she plucked a perfect tiny amulet from the muddy soup, marked with a Christian cross – a “huge adrenaline rush” – suggesting Christian currents were present here long before King Harald Bluetooth’s declaration on the Jelling runestone circa AD965 that he had brought the religion to the Danes.

“Some written sources have presented the Vikings as barbarians in order to make themselves look good,” Hee says. “So we cannot completely trust people writing at the time: are they describing what they saw or imposing their own understanding on it?” more