All at once, the Northmen swarmed out of their boats. They scaled the city walls on ladders and spread throughout the city. They smashed, broke, and cut through doors and shutters; they plundered, looted, and ravaged as they desired; there was no one to defend the city of Nantes in what is now western France. The town was full of people, for it was St. John’s Day, June 24, 843. Masses of people had come to celebrate the holiday from the surrounding countryside and even from distant cities. First to discover the approaching Vikings, the monks from the monastery Indre some nine kilometers away took their treasures and fled upstream along the Loire to Nantes to seek protection inside the city walls. Their flight was in vain; they were no safer in Nantes. Monks, clergy, and layfolk flocked to the sturdiest building in town, the magnificent ancient cathedral, dedicated to the apostles Peter and Paul, where Bishop Gohard, “an upright man filled with piety,” organized them as best he could in the chaos. They barricaded the doors and anxiously waited. Resorting to their only remaining hope, they implored God for delivery and salvation. Bishop Gohard led his flock in prayer and liturgical invocations. It did not help.
The Vikings broke down the doors and knocked out the windows of the cathedral. They ran savagely into the sacred building, striking down everyone they encountered. They attacked the flock, cruelly murdering all the priests and laity except for those taken [16]prisoner and hauled off to the ships. Legend claims that Bishop Gohard was at the altar saying mass when he was struck; he had reached the Sursum corda, “Lift up your hearts [to God],” from the preface of the Eucharistic liturgy. His exemplary behavior in the face of immediate danger earned him sainthood and martyrdom in the Catholic Church.
The Vikings killed some of the monks outside, others inside the building, but most of them were butchered like sacrificial animals on the sacred altar of the cathedral. Or so said a monk from Indre who witnessed the massacre and survived to tell the story. When he wrote down his memories many years later, he could not hold back an eruption of despair at the memory: “Who can disentangle all the pain and loss of that day? Who can hold back his tears when explaining what happened, when children hanging at their mothers’ breasts got blood instead of milk, when the blood of my saintly brothers, shed by hostile swords, drenched the floor of the temple, when the sacred altars were besmeared with the blood of innocents?”
The Vikings plundered immense quantities of gold and silver, including the plate of the cathedral; they brought all the loot to their base on the island of Noirmoutier in the Loire estuary. They also hauled off many captives, some of whom were later released against ransom paid by “those who survived the massacre.” A few days later, on June 29, the Vikings attacked the monastery of Indre, which they devastated and burned so thoroughly that it was never rebuilt.
This story of the massacre in Nantes, a great city close to the border between the independent principality Brittany and the Carolingian Empire, comes from the pen of an eyewitness. His account is unique because of its rich detail. The author was a learned man who wrote splendid Latin, sprinkled self-consciously with unusual words and rhetorical expressions. As we shall see, most other sources are couched in disappointingly vague and general terms. Thanks to this eyewitness, we can answer questions about the Nantes raid that we cannot even begin to address for other raids.[1]
How many Vikings attacked Nantes in June 843? We cannot know exactly. The eyewitness only tells us that the ships were “numerous”—he presumably did not have time to count—but a [17]later chronicle claims that sixty-seven Viking ships sailed and were rowed up the Loire on that fateful midsummer day. Such numbers in medieval sources should normally be understood as more suggestive and symbolic than factual. But we would be safe to assume that it must have been a sizable group of several hundred warriors who descended on Nantes.
The Nantes eyewitness tells us, though not in so many words, that the Vikings were great opportunists. They attacked a month after the local Frankish army led by Count Rainald of Nantes had been crushed in battle with the Bretons under Prince Erispoe, on May 24. The count was the official appointed by the Carolingian king to administer and defend his region. Rainald had been count of Nantes since 841, but he was killed in the battle. The city lacked any military leader to organize its defenses, and the local army had been decimated, the eyewitness emphasizes. The Vikings clearly knew this and acted on their intelligence. How did they know? The eyewitness alleges that the treacherous villain Lambert, son of a previous count of Nantes, against whom the writer harbored some unspecified bitterness, led the Vikings through the dangerous labyrinth of sandbanks, marshes, and islands in the Loire estuary.
The truth is that the Vikings did not need any Frankish aristocrat to tell them that the count of Nantes was dead with most of his army and that the city was undefended. At the same time as some Scandinavians attacked and raided cities like Nantes, other Scandinavians participated in normal commerce and other intercourse in the Frankish Empire as well as elsewhere in Europe. Actually, many of the same people both raided and traded, as the opportunity arose. They would quickly get a whiff of important events.
The Vikings also knew when to strike. They waited a month after Rainald’s defeat to attack. This was not only to collect the large force needed to attack a major center like Nantes; the Vikings of the early ninth century traveled in smaller groups of one or a few ships that, when a good reason emerged, such as the opportunity to attack an undefended city, would join with others to undertake a major enterprise. But the Vikings clearly wanted to attack on a major Christian feast day, in this case St. John’s Day, when they knew that many people in their fineries would congregate in the [18]main churches. The booty would be larger, both in gold and silver and in human captives who could either be held for ransom or sold as slaves. More booty would also be concentrated in a few places.
The Nantes eyewitness gives us the impression that the Vikings attacked suddenly and unexpectedly. Everything was fine, and then, all of a sudden, armed Vikings swarmed everywhere. It is not as if the good burghers of Nantes were not used to warfare; Brittany, still an independent duchy, was not far away, and border skirmishes were common. Even worse, for the previous three years the entire Frankish Empire had been torn apart by a fratricidal and very bloody civil war, in which the three surviving sons of Emperor Louis the Pious (d. 840) had fought about how to share the empire among them. The crucial difference with the Viking raid was speed; they appeared as if from nowhere, although, in fact, they came from the sea on their fast ships. The Carolingian armies of the civil war and the armies of the Bretons lumbered slowly across land, providing plenty of advance warning for civilians to hide themselves and their valuables before the armies’ arrival. The Vikings appeared unheralded. Contemporaries noticed this feature in Viking tactics. The chronicler Prudentius noted, for example, in 837 that “the Northmen at this time fell on Frisia with their usual surprise attack.”[2] The key word here is “usual”; Prudentius knew that the Vikings’ preferred mode was warfare by incursion.
We begin to be able to discern the patterns of Viking tactics, first on the basis of the Nantes eyewitness report, but these patterns are confirmed by other sources: the Vikings preferred to attack suddenly and without warning when they knew that no organized military forces that might provide resistance were close and when they knew rich booty was to be had. To be successful under such circumstances did not require any particular bloodthirstiness or advanced weaponry or martial skills. As we shall see, the Vikings were, at least initially, amateurs at fighting, despite their reputation.
What did the Vikings want from Nantes? When one reads either what Prudentius reported in his chronicle about the raid or, in particular, the eyewitness account, the main impression is that the Vikings were homicidal maniacs who killed for pleasure. The eyewitness pulled out all the rhetorical stops to evoke the image of a [19]cathedral drenched in blood through the impious actions of a devilish people who sacrificed monks as the pagans of olden times sacrificed animals on their altars. Of course, from the perspective of the victims, the loss of life was shocking, traumatic, and devastating. That is why the sources often emphasize that the Vikings killed, and killed in large numbers. If we read the sources a little more closely, however, a more reasonable image emerges. The Nantes eyewitness at one point says that “the heathens mowed down the entire multitude of priest, clerics, and laity,” but he immediately adds “except those” that were hauled off into captivity. A few lines further down, we find out that there also remained people in Nantes who had been neither killed nor captured, for “many who survived the massacre” paid ransom money for those captured. What we see is the writer falling for the rhetorical temptation to say that the Vikings were so bad that in their unquenchable blood lust they killed everyone, but then having to admit that this was not actually what happened. It is perfectly understandable that anyone who had lived through the trauma of a Viking raid would like to portray the raiders as killing machines and that all those people killed would loom large in their memory, but we should not therefore draw the conclusion that the Vikings were primarily interested in killing.
This is a lesson that we do well to bring with us when we are reading other, less elaborate sources that tell of the Vikings’ exploits. Sources from the Viking Age are full of violent Vikings and the appalling destruction they wreaked. The great year-by- year accounts (written in Old Irish, Old English, and medieval Latin) of current events that were kept and updated at many royal courts and in many monasteries and other Church institutions—works known to modern historians as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Annals of St-Bertin, the Annals of Ulster, and other similar labels of convenience—dull readers’ senses with their repeated stories of Viking attacks. They can become leaden reading, not just because of the repetition year by year, but because the accounts of the Vikings are all so similar, so stereotypical, and—most annoyingly—so devoid of detail.
In the annals that the cleric Prudentius semiofficially kept at the palace of Emperor Louis the Pious in Aachen, and which he continued privately after the emperor’s death in 840, a single sentence is [20]devoted to the sack of Nantes: “Northmen pirates attacked Nantes, slew the bishop and many clergy and lay people of both sexes, and sacked the city.”[3] We know much more about this particular raid, thanks to the eyewitness report that has happened to survive. But for most Viking raids, the level of detail in the annals, similar to Prudentius’s line about Nantes, is all we ever get: the Vikings show up, ravage, and kill many if not all, including such-and- such an important person. In 864, for example, another chronicler, Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, tells us, “the Northmen got to Clermont where they slew Stephen, son of Hugh, and a few of his men, and then returned unpunished to their ships.” In 836, Prudentius writes about Viking attacks: “the Northmen again devastated Dorestad and Frisia.” An annalist writing in Old Irish tells us that, in 844, “Dún Masc was plundered by the heathen [Vikings], and there were killed there Aed son of Dub da Crich, abbot of Tír dá Glas, and Cluain Eidnig, Ceithernach son of Cú Dínaisc, prior of Cell Dara, and many others.” In 844, Prudentius writes, “The Northmen sailed up the Garonne as far as Toulouse, wreaking destruction everywhere, without meeting any opposition.“ In 873, we are told, “the Northmen, after ravaging various towns, razing fortresses to the ground, burning churches and monasteries and turning cultivated land into a desert, had for some time now been established in Angers.” An Anglo-Saxon writer recounts that in 943, “Here [the Viking] Olaf broke down Tamworth and a great slaughter fell on either side, and the Danes had the victory and led much war-booty away with them. Wulfrun [a high-born Mercian lady] was seized there in the raid.”[4]
The Vikings “lay waste,” “raid,” “slaughter,” “ravage,” “wreak destruction,” and “devastate.” The writers of annals and chronicles, trained in rhetoric, vary the words, but still do not tell us much about the details. How was the abbot of Tír dá Glas killed, and in what situation? Was he helping to defend his monastery, sword in hand, or was he saying mass in his monastery church when a band of Vikings lacking respect for Christianity cut him down (like Bishop Gohard in Nantes)? Was he hit by an ax, spear, or sword in the heat of battle, or was he captured and later executed when a suitable ransom did not materialize? Nobody tells us. The [21]Anglo-Saxon chronicler recounts that the Vikings in 994 “wreaked indescribable harm,” and the curious modern reader is left to wonder exactly what the Vikings were doing and if they were more destructive in 994 than in their other raids. Or if it just seemed so to the particular chronicler who wrote down this notice because he had little previous experience of Vikings. When the sources talk, for example, about “the slaughter of men,” as they often do, do they mean that the Vikings killed everyone (or every man?) that they saw when they ran from house to house or rather that the Vikings won pitched battles, killing everyone on the opposing side? The sources are unhelpful, leaving plenty of space for our imagination, but little concrete detail with which to reconstruct the violence of the Vikings.
If we are interested in finding out how the Vikings fought, what their tactics looked like, or why they fought, these sources do not provide much assistance. Neither do Frankish liturgical books that contain the kind of prayer said by Christians afraid of becoming the Vikings’ next victims: “Save us, Lord, from the wild Northmen who lay waste our country. They strangle the crowd of old men and of youth and of virgin boys. Repel from us all evil.”[5]
The medieval and modern reputation of the Vikings is also seasoned with the religious outlook and theological training of the people who wrote the preserved sources, almost all of whom were monks, priests, or bishops. We can see this already in the reaction that the first known Viking raid against a monastery stimulated in the theologian Alcuin (d. 804). In 793, a band of Vikings had plundered the island monastery of Lindisfarne in northeastern England, an important center for Christianity in Northumberland, one of the kingdoms in early medieval England. Alcuin, who was living in voluntary exile with King Charlemagne in the Frankish realm, wrote a poem and a series of consolatory letters to English acquaintances; he himself was English and had plenty of connections in England. Deploring “the tragic sufferings” of the monastic community, he chose scriptural language that was usually taken to allude to the Last Days. “Is this the beginning of the great suffering [which according to Christian belief would come before the end of the world] or the outcome of the sins of those who live there [22][in Lindisfarne]?” Alcuin suggested that the Viking raid should be given either an eschatological or a moral interpretation or, better, perhaps both combined. At the very least, “it has not happened by chance.”[6]
We also find this kind of theological spin in the annals and chronicles. The writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, usually refer to the Vikings as “the heathens.” A source that provides more detailed insight into what the Vikings were doing even though it frames the story in religious terms is the Translation of St. Germain of Paris, which narrates events surrounding the Viking attack on Paris in 845. “Translation” refers to the moving of holy relics from one place to another. The author is anonymous but must have been a monk at the monastery of St. Germain-des-Près just outside the city. He wrote simple and straightforward Latin without the sophisticated rhetorical coloring of an intellectual like Alcuin or the Nantes eyewitness. Most of the text is devoted to miracles worked by the patron of his monastery, St. Germain, whose body usually rested in the monastery church, but which was moved farther inland at the news of the approaching Vikings. Considered its most valuable possessions, the relics of a church were also a source of power because they represented a powerful saint. In this case, St. Germain caused several of the Vikings, who “arrogantly were plundering and blaspheming God,” to become violently ill, and he worked several other miracles, which are retold in detail. A pagan Northman inflated by pride, for example, entered the monastery church with a drawn sword and started to hack away at a marble pillar, striking it thirty times. The Northman’s purpose is unclear. Perhaps the writer wished to portray the irrationality of a Viking acting in a manner that would destroy his own weapon. “Through the virtues of the Lord Germain,” the right arm of this unwise Viking withered, so that he had no use of it again for the rest of his life.
The wondrous miracles of St. Germain make up the story that our author wished to tell, but in praising the acts of the saint, the writer also provided details about what the Vikings were up to. Without opposition, the Vikings had brought their ships up the Seine. In Rouen, the first major city on their way, they “did what [23]
fig. 2. The Vikings famously raided the Lindisfarne monastery in 793, and the monastic community fled to greater security inland. Monastic life was reestablished in Lindisfarne in the eleventh century but was suppressed in the sixteenth century, leaving the buildings to decay. Drawing and watercolor by Thomas Girtin, St. Cuthbert’s Holy Island (1797). Photo courtesy of Yale Center for British Art.
they wanted, captured and killed people of both sexes, devastated monasteries, plundered and burned churches.” Farther up the river, the Vikings met King Charles the Bald with the Frankish army, which had been divided into two contingents. The Vikings captured 111 men from one contingent and hanged them in plain sight of the other contingent, apparently on the other side of the river or on an island, “to insult and laugh at the king, his generals, and all the Christian people who were standing there.” This atrocious spectacle had the desired effect on the morale of the Frankish army; the writer states that many Frankish soldiers deserted, taking flight “some through the valleys, others through the plains, yet others through the dense forests . . . , as I cannot write without plentiful tears.” What makes this monk particularly indignant, to [24]the point of crying, is that the Frankish army was well equipped, “provided with helmets, armor, shields and lances,” while the people they fled from were “unequipped and almost unarmed, and very few.”[7] Here, the monk of St. Germain tells us two things of particular interest. First, we learn that the Vikings were not averse to using psychological warfare to demoralize their opponents. Like the Mongols in later European history, they cultivated an image of ferocity, which served them well in achieving their goals.[8] Second, in comparison with the professionally equipped Frankish army, the Vikings were poorly armed and had little in the way of protective armor. This would change as the Viking Age wore on, but at this relatively early stage, the Vikings were fighting more as amateurs than professionals.
How did the Vikings actually fight? The best evidence comes from the graves of Viking warriors who were buried with their weapons. Scandinavian archeologists have found large numbers of weapons—swords, axes, spears, and arrows—in burials from the time.
In the Viking Age, no other weapon was as closely associated with fighting Northmen as the ax. The weapon had been quite unusual in Scandinavia before the Viking Age, when it became common. Many Scandinavians served the Byzantine emperor as mercenaries, and these “Varangians” were known in Constantinople as “the ax-bearing barbarians.” They were the trusted elite soldiers of unquestionable loyalty in the Byzantine army, and the emperors were wont to use them for especially difficult assignments. Some members of the Varangian guard survived their service and returned home to Scandinavia, where some of them raised runestones to boast about their exploits. The Swedish warrior Ragnvald, for example, inscribed a huge boulder in southeastern Uppland in memory of his mother, Fastvi Onämnsdotter, and there he told everyone who could read runes that he “was in Greece, [where] he was the commander of the retinue.”[9] In other words, he had held command in the Varangian guard of the Byzantine Empire, which Viking Age Scandinavians called “Greece.” One man, now anonymous because damage to his runestone renders his name illegible, “fell in Greece” and may have been a less fortunate member of the same elite guard.[10] [25]
fig. 3. Axes and spears were less prestigious weapons than swords, but they were put to efficient use by Vikings and other medieval warriors. Photo courtesy of Riksantikvarieämbetet, Stockholm. [26]
Varangian guards such as Ragnvald would have been trained to use an ax in addition to other weapons in battle. Scandinavian battle-axes were formidable and efficient weapons that could inflict great damage. In his praise poetry, the Norse poet Arnorr describes his patron, King Magnus of Norway and Denmark, wielding his ax in a battle at the southern border of Denmark: “The unsluggish ruler stormed forth with broad axe . . . the prince clenched both hands around the shaft. . . . Hel [the name of his ax] split pallid skulls.”[11] The name of King Magnus’s ax, “Hel,” is also the name of the Norse goddess of death. Arnorr and Magnus, both Christians, would have associated the name with “Hell,” perhaps a suitable label for such a hellishly efficient weapon. King Magnus had, according to later claims, inherited it from his father, the Norwegian patron saint Olav Haraldsson, and Hel is, thus, the very ax still portrayed in the Norwegian national coat of arms.
Fighting Scandinavians used many different types of axes, but warriors preferred the broadax, a formidable weapon with a wide edge and a thin blade. Such an ax weighed about a half kilogram, and the edge could be as long as thirty centimeters. It was kept sharp with a whetstone, always part of a Scandinavian fighter’s equipment. In the hands of a well-trained warrior, a broadax could cut through chain mail and even helmets. Thus, Arnorr was not necessarily using poetic exaggeration when he said that King Magnus cleaved heads with his ax as if he were splitting firewood. The Norse poets talked about ax edges as “yawning iron mouths,” which threateningly “gape against the enemy” or give lethal kisses. King Harald Hardruler (Hardrada; d. 1066) is believed to have composed a stanza in which he said that he could not remain king in Norway unless his main opponent, Einar, “kisses the thin mouth of the axe.”[12] Sometime later, Einar was killed by the king’s men, but no source tells us whether or not he was hewed down by an ax.
Not only the ax’s sharp edge but also its butt could be used to inflict injury or death. In 1012, attempting to persuade the captive Archbishop Alfheah of Canterbury to allow himself to be ransomed with gold and silver from the treasury of his church and other churches, drunk Vikings first pelted him with animal bones and then “one of them struck him on the head with the butt of an [27]axe.” This killed the archbishop, who earned the crown of a martyr and soon became honored as St. Alphege, still the dedicatee of several English churches.[13]
Early medieval Scandinavians fought with other weapons in addition to the battle-ax. When archeologists excavate Viking Age warriors’ graves, the variety of weapons is striking. Spears, arrows, and swords are common, and those are also the weapons that are mentioned in the most detailed contemporary battle narrative, the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle mentions, briefly and soberly, that “Ealdorman Byrhtnoth was killed at Maldon” in Essex on the eastern coast of England in 994. The poem eloquently celebrates Byrhtnoth’s heroism and stiff upper lip in the face of defeat while providing details about how the battle played out (or at least how the poet imagines it). Spears were thrown, arrows shot, and the warriors fought with swords. The poet does not mention any axes, probably because he focuses on more prestigious weapons: swords and spears.
The Vikings attacked first. After their battle cry,
they loosed . . . from their hands the file-hardened spear,
the sharp-ground lances to fly.
The Vikings at Maldon were in effect reenacting what they thought was the very first battle ever, which started when the warrior god par excellence, Odin, “shot a spear, hurled it over the troops; that was the first battle in the world,” according to the old Scandinavian poem Völuspá.[14] Or perhaps it is more correct to say that the narrator of Völuspá describes the legendary first battle as starting in the way battles usually do, the way the battle of Maldon did.
The Battle of Maldon continues:
Bows were busied—shield met point.
That rush of battle was bitter—warriors fell.
—
Even Byrhtnoth’s kinsman, his sister’s son,
he with swords was fiercely hewn down.
To the Vikings was given retribution.
I hear that Edward slew one
fiercely with his sword, not holding back his swing
so that a doomed warrior fell at his feet.
—
Then a sea-warrior [Viking] sent a southern spear
so that the warlord [Byrhtnoth] was wounded;
he then shoved so with his shield that the shaft burst
—
Enraged was that warrior [Byrhtnoth]. He stabbed angrily
the proud Viking who had given him the wound.
Wise was the warrior: he let his spear advance
through the neck of the youth, his hand guiding it
so that he reached the life of the sudden attacker.
Then he quickly shot another
so that the byrnie burst; he was wounded in the breast
through the rin g-lock[ed mail shirt]; at his heart stood
the poisoned point. The earl was the happier.
—
Then one of the warriors let a hand-dart [spear]
fly from his hand so that it, too, went forth
through the noble retainer of Ethelred [Byrhtnoth].
He who stood at his side, an ungrown youth,
a young man on the battlefield, Wulfstan’s child Wulfmer the
young,
who very boldly drew from the man [Byrhtnoth] the bloody
spear,
and afterward let it, the hardened, go back.
The point went in, so that he lay on the ground,
he who had his lord [Byrhtnoth] so severely wounded.[15]
So far, the battle has mainly involved projectiles hurled from a distance, probably between two armies lined up in battle formation. The spears are thrown back and forth, something the poet emphasizes in focusing on the reactions of the English to the [29]
fig. 4. The Old English poem The Battle of Maldon tells of spears with sharpened points being thrown back and forth between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons during a battle in 991. Photo courtesy of Riksantikvarieämbetet, Stockholm.
invaders’ aggression. A Viking throws a “southern” spear at Byrhtnoth. By saying that the spear was “southern,” the poet probably means that it was a spear from the equipment of the English that had already been hurled at the northerners, and one of them now threw it back, a practice common in premodern battles.[16] This enrages the earl, who throws it back. Since he is a wise and experienced warrior, he aims it so well that it hits the neck above the mail shirt of one of the Vikings, killing him. A second spear is hurled with such force that it penetrates the mail shirt of the Viking, hitting the heart. Then another Viking throws a spear again at Byrhtnoth, wounding him severely, but a youth, probably an apprentice, pulls out the spear and throws it back, similarly felling the man who had injured Byrhtnoth. Thus, the poet portrays the fight as a series of reactions and counterreactions to previous actions, with increasingly higher stakes.
Byrhtnoth appears to be put out of commission, and one of the Vikings approaches in order to plunder him, “wishing to fetch wealth, his garment and rings, and the adorned sword.”[17] This marks the beginning of the skirmish, when the battle lines break up and the soldiers engage in hand-to- hand combat. Here [30]individual warriors might be able to gain trophies. As the leader of the English, the earl would have had the most costly equipment and adornments. Indeed, the poet alluded earlier to his sword having a golden hilt. But Byrhtnoth is still not defeated and he pulls his sword, “broad and bright-edged,” striking the mail-shirt of the would-be plunderer. The Viking, however, quickly stops him by injuring his arm. Now Byrhtnoth can no longer stand upright; he falls, praying to God to grant his soul an easy passage and not allow any hellish enemies to injure it. But “then the heathen knaves hewed him.” The verb chosen, used also for cutting wood, makes one think of axes, but the poet does not explicitly mention this weapon. The poet sets up an effective contrast between Byrhtnoth’s pious wish for the preservation of his soul from devils and his inability to save his body from worldly (but heathen and thus devilish) enemies, the Vikings.
In this part of the poem, the poet depicts close combat in which a sword and possibly other suitable weapons were used. The immediate tactical goal of Byrhtnoth’s Viking attacker is to disable his arm, rendering him defenseless. We may compare these battle tactics with what we know about the death of another warrior chieftain, a Norwegian man who was killed close to the year 900. In 1880, archeologists excavating a grave mound in Gokstad, Norway, found a splendid ship along with remnants of three smaller boats, twelve horses, six dogs, and parts of a human skeleton. The grave goods prove that the dead man was rich and powerful. The bones show that he was large, 181 ±3 centimeters tall, with strong muscles and thick bones. It is hard to know how old he was when he died, but the best guess is that he was in his forties. Several years before his death, he had fallen, or jumped, from a great height, injuring his left knee. As a consequence, he would have walked with a limp, perhaps using a cane.
With impressive grave goods, the Gokstad man must have been an important person, probably someone we should think of as a chieftain. He met a violent death. Both of his thigh bones and his left shin bone display several cut marks from at least two weapons. It is obvious that his opponent focused on immobilizing him by first injuring his legs, just as Byrhtnoth’s Viking enemy [31]aimed to deprive the earl of the use of his sword arm. The Gokstad man’s right fibula (calf bone) had been cut straight through with an oblique blow from above, severing his foot. His left shin bone bore a cut, about four centimeters long, which was made with a thin-bladed weapon, more probably a sword than an ax. That blow alone would have caused him to fall to the ground. His right thigh bone carried a mark from a cut made by a knife or an arrow. The Gokstad man did not long survive these cuts; there are no signs of healing. The cut in his right thigh would likely have injured his femoral artery, which would quickly have drained him of blood and thus killed him, but he could also have sustained other fatal injuries that we do not know about, since we lack soft tissue evidence and only eight bones of his skeleton survived the thousand years he was buried.[18]
The Gokstad man was injured by a sword, and Byrhtnoth drew his sword. Swords are constantly celebrated in northern literature as the ultimate prestige weapon. Scandinavian court poets thank their patrons for swords, often swords that, like Byrhtnoth’s, carried gold on the hilt. In the early eleventh century, King Olav Haraldsson of Norway gave his court poet Sigvat Thordarson a “gold-woven” sword with a “hilt-knob of silver.” Thousands of Viking Age swords have been found by Scandinavian archeologists, and some of them have splendid hilts, decorated with gold, silver, and other valuable materials. For example, a tenth-century sword found in Dybäck in Scania, southern Sweden, has a silver hilt with the grip twined with gold thread. The silver hilt also carries engraved decorations depicting animals and geometric designs.
Swords were the weapons of the Viking Age North most associated with high status. This is why they are mentioned in poetry and in other literature much more often than more everyday weapons like axes. The very best swords came from inside the Frankish Empire. Even in faraway Baghdad, Arab writers praised the quality of Frankish swords. And so did Scandinavian poets. Sigvat in his Viking Songs says that the “Welsh [= foreign = probably Frankish] swords bite,” when his hero, Olav Haraldsson, tries to take London. In fact, Frankish swords were so attractive to the Vikings that Frankish rulers prohibited their export on pain of death. Such [32]prohibitions were futile, however, and the Vikings kept attacking the Franks with their own swords.[19]
The best swords of the time were made by Ulfberht. They had trademarks inscribed on their blades: “ulfberh+t” or “ulfberht+,” or a variant thereof. About one hundred such swords are known to have survived, but there may be many more, since hundreds of surviving Viking Age rusty sword blades have not yet been X-rayed to determine whether they have inscriptions. Modern metallurgical examinations have revealed that some of the Ulfberht swords were made of high-quality steel with unusually high carbon content. Such steel could not be produced during the Viking Age in Europe, with its primitive iron-melting technology, but must have been imported from somewhere in India, Persia, or central Asia, where different melting methods produced this kind of high-quality, high-carbon steel. Such steel, forged at the right temperature for the correct time, would produce very hard and tough weapons, just like some of the surviving Ulfberht swords.
Some other swords carrying the trademark, however, were made from inferior steel or even iron and thus were not nearly as strong and hard. Apparently, the authentic Ulfberht swords were so good and attractive that a market of pirated copies appeared. An archeometallurgist has found a correlation between the quality of the steel and how the name on the blade is spelled. Most swords with the spelling “ulfberh+t” are made of top-quality steel.[20] They were very efficient weapons.
Ulfberht produced swords for three centuries, coinciding more or less with the Viking Age, so the name cannot simply refer to an individual smith; it probably refers to a workshop or a family, although, as we have seen, there were also copycats. It is uncertain where “Ulfberht” was active. His swords have been found all around the Baltic Sea, but also in Norway and in Germany. Linguistically, his name belongs, some have argued, to the Rhineland in Germany, but the fact that the metal came from Asia has made other scholars argue that the smithy should be sought somewhere along the Scandinavian trade routes through Eastern Europe. The “Ulfberht” swords were the best swords of the Viking Age, and since early medieval literature talks of the best swords as “Welsh” or [33]
fig. 5. The Ulfberht swords were the best Viking Age swords, manufactured of very strong high-quality steel that must have been imported from Asia. Such distinguished weapons were eminently worthy to sport exquisitely decorated handles. Photo: Monika Runge, courtesy of Germanisches Museum, Nuremberg.
Frankish, it is tempting to put their manufacture inside the Frankish Empire, for example, in the Rhineland. Suitable trade routes certainly existed along which steel from Asia could reach this area.
A Viking who owned a tough and hard “Ulfberht” sword could consider himself lucky. If he met an enemy with an inferior sword made out of softer or more brittle steel, he might well manage to shatter that sword. “Ulfberht” swords were, however, rare and very expensive, and thus very few Vikings would have been able to acquire them. As the St. Germain author expressed it, the Vikings were “almost unarmed” in comparison to the Frankish army. They had to fight with whatever weapons they had at hand, even if it simply meant fighting with wooden clubs or bringing from home your usual ax for chopping wood or throwing back the spears the enemy had hurled at you.
War and fighting are hazardous. No one can be certain ahead of time that he is going to emerge victorious, and most avoid actual fighting as long as possible. This was true of the Vikings, and yet they have a reputation for cherishing fighting and violence as if for their own sake. This is not a surprising image considering the source material available, the annals and chronicles with their seemingly endless litanies of Viking attacks. This bias is not limited to written sources but also applies to archeological material. Weapons made of high-quality steel or even iron stand a very high chance of surviving until now, to be found by archeologists or others. Some of the preserved “Ulfberht” swords have survived for centuries at the [34]bottom of rivers, to be found when the rivers were dredged, like the one that was taken up from the Elbe close to Hamburg in the 1960s.[21] The implements of many peaceful activities were made of wood, which does not survive as well as weapons of steel in the soil, and certainly not at the bottom of rivers.
Modern imaginations have been thrilled by tales about Norse superheroes in the form of the berserks, a supposed elite group of Viking fighters of remarkable abilities, and about horrendous pagan-tinted tortures like the blood eagle (discussed later in this chapter)—so thrilled, in fact, that the normally well-functioning critical faculties of historians and others have frequently been overwhelmed. Even those who should know better continue to retell these stories long after they have been shown by critical research to be based on little more than misunderstandings combined with the appeal of a good yarn.
Contemporary writers portrayed the Vikings as violent and stereotyped them as “others,” and later medieval historians looked back on the Scandinavian raiders as a uniquely destructive phenomenon. The Englishman Henry of Huntingdon, who in the 1150s (almost a century after the last Scandinavian raids on England) wrote a history of his country, considered the Viking raids to have been true catastrophes. They were “much more monstrous and much more cruel” than any other invasions that England had suffered. Vikings wanted only “to plunder, not to own, to destroy everything, not to rule.” Henry presented the Vikings as a people interested in violence and destruction for their own sake, despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary.[22] Vikings from King Guthrum to King Cnut the Great may have been destructive, but they were certainly more interested in ruling than in destroying. In fact, several of them sought royal thrones in England.
In the High Middle Ages, looking back on their ancestors’ accomplishments, Scandinavians themselves adopted the image of the Vikings as primarily interested in destruction. They wrote rousing stories about martial prowess and exhilarating adventures resulting in incredible riches taken as booty. Icelandic saga tellers of the thirteenth and later centuries vividly retold the story of the villain of the St. Germain story of 845, Ragnar—“ the blasphemer [35]of God and his saints,” according to the Frankish monk quoted earlier. In numerous exciting adventure stories, Ragnar Hairy-Breeches (Loðbrók), as he came to be known, is portrayed as a heroic fighter, extremely bloodthirsty, and given to extraordinary feats. Nothing about him is normal, not even his death, which becomes a memorable execution. King Ella of Northumbria captured him and put him to death by throwing him into a pit full of poisonous snakes. The snake pit, a refined method of horrific execution, was a literary topos; it was, for example, how Attila the Hun executed King Gunnarr of Burgundy, according to the Old Norse heroic poems Atlakviða. In the saga that bears his name, Ragnar’s last words in the snake pit were, “How the little pigs would grunt if they knew how the old boar suffers!” This phrase serves to set up the horrendous revenge taken on King Ella by Ragnar’s sons (the “little pigs”), themselves Vikings with widespread reputations. In the sagas, they obtain picturesque nicknames that remain hard to explain persuasively: Ivar Boneless, Björn Ironside, Whiteshirt, and Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye.
In historical fact, the sons of Ragnar defeated Ella in battle at York, England, in 866, and there is nothing in the contemporary sources to suggest anything but that Ella died on the battlefield while fighting to defend his kingdom. That is certainly how the Icelandic poet Sigvat Thordarson presented his death in the celebratory poem, Knútsdrápa, that he wrote in the early eleventh century for his patron King Cnut, who counted Ivar Boneless and Ragnar Hairy-Breeches among his ancestors. “And Ivar, he who resided in York, caused the eagle to cut Ella’s back.”[23] The image is stark and easily misunderstood, but that is in the nature of Viking Age poetry, which typically celebrated martial prowess by circumlocutions referring to how its heroes fed scavenger birds and other animals by killing their enemies. Not only were the enemy humbled and killed, but they also suffered the ultimate humiliation of remaining on the field of battle to become food for carrion-eating beasts rather than enjoying a proper burial.
The eagles and ravens feasting on battle-killed corpses are so much part and parcel of Norse skaldic poetry that they tend to pop up even in the most inappropriate contexts, such as when [36]
fig. 6. The story of the execution of Ragnar Hairy-Breeches in a snake pit is illustrated on a Gotlandic picture stone from the Viking Age. Photo: Raymond Hejdström, courtesy of Gotlands Museum, Visby.
Earl Ragnvald of Orkney, in wooing Europe’s most eligible widow, added carrion-eating eagles to the blandishments of his verses.[24] When the Norse poet Sigvat wrote poetry about his pious pilgrimage to St. Peter’s in Rome in the 1030s, he could not resist using images of wild beasts eating his dead enemies. In order to pick up his pilgrim’s staff, Sigvat says, he “put down my precious sword . . . , which succeeds in lessening the hunger of the husband of the she-wolf.”[25] Sigvat claimed to have sated the he-wolf by providing him a banquet of dead bodies with his sword. Wolfs, ravens, and eagles are most often mentioned in skaldic poetry when poets want to say that someone died on the battlefield, and they do not shy away from graphic images that may seem unpoetic to modern readers. “Ottar fell under the eagle’s claws. . . . The eagle trod on him . . . with bloody feet,” the tenth-century poet Thjodolf of Hvini told his presumably appreciative audience.[26]
There was nothing extraordinary about Ella’s death; hundreds of medieval rulers and chieftains must similarly have fallen on the battlefield, as did Byrhtnoth and the Gokstad chieftain, so that [37]would not be a sufficiently exciting story for later storytellers. Scandinavian high-medieval writers of adventure stories and of histories used skaldic poetry as sources. The art of composing this most intricate of medieval poetry had survived, especially in Iceland, but even Icelanders could have problems understanding the old poems with their strained circumlocutions, allusive style, and free word order. So it was with Sigvat’s poem about the death of Ella, which in the original Old Norse is particularly terse, dense, and easily misunderstood. Thus, readers began to understand the stanza as saying not that “Ivar caused the eagle to cut the back of Ella”—that is, Ivar killed Ella, providing carrion for the eagle to eat—but that “Ivar cut the eagle on the back of Ella.” Both interpretations are grammatically possible, although only the first makes literary and historical sense. To explain this mysterious statement, the storytellers’ imaginations worked overtime. At first, they imagined that Ivar tortured the still-living Ella by carving an image of an eagle on his back. The story reached its full development, however, in the fourteenth century when another storyteller created a truly horrific torture on the basis of his and his predecessors’ misunderstanding of this verse: “King [Ella] was taken captive. Ivar and the brothers now recall how their father had been tortured [in the snake pit]. They now had the eagle cut in Ella’s back, then all his ribs severed from the backbone with a sword, in such a way that his lungs were pulled out there.”[27]
In the imagination of this storyteller, this elaborate execution method, known as “blood eagle,” was suitable revenge for Ragnar’s painful death in the snake pit. Thus the little pigs avenged the suffering of the old boar, in the literary imagination of storytellers. The legend of the blood eagle has become much beloved in modern times, developing new features (such as salt in the wounds to make it even more painful), inspiring much anatomical speculation (for example, on exactly when the victim dies), and acquiring a religious coating suggesting that this surely was a particularly awful pagan rite. Even long after the skaldic scholar Roberta Frank in 1984 explained how the idea of the blood eagle developed out of misunderstood skaldic poetry, many historians (as well as popular culture) have shown themselves unwilling to let go of this most [38]cherished demonstration of Viking cruelty. In this, they continue to be inspired by the medieval spin by Henry of Huntingdon and others, depicting the Vikings as the most terrible catastrophe in medieval history. Violence continues to intrigue modern society, and the Vikings have become emblematic of the most atrocious and mindless violence.
Similar tales of horrendous violence dominate both medieval and modern accounts of the feats of the Vikings, and many of them are similarly hard to take seriously. Prominent in many accounts, old as well as recent, of Viking fighting are the “berserks.” The word literally means “bear-shirt” in Old Norse. In around 1200, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus described one such berserk:
At this time a certain Harthben, who came from Hälsingland, imagined it a glorious achievement to kidnap and rape princesses, and he used to kill anyone who hindered him in his lusts. . . . His towering frame stretched to a height of nine cubits. . . . A demonical frenzy suddenly possessed him, he furiously bit and devoured the rim of his shield; he gulped down fiery coals without a qualm and let them pass down into his belly; he ran the gauntlet of crackling flames; and finally when he had raved through every sort of madness, he turned his sword with raging hand against the hearts of six of his henchmen [who had conspired against him]. It is doubtful whether this madness came from thirst for battle or natural ferocity. Then . . . he attacked [King] Halvdan, who crushed him with a hammer of wondrous size, so that he lost both victory and life, paying the penalty both to Halvdan, whom he had challenged, and to the kings whose offspring he had ravished.[28]
The Icelandic sagas from the thirteenth and later centuries similarly feature many berserks, who fought wildly “like wolfs or dogs” and were as strong as “bears and bulls.”[29] Many modern commentators believe that the berserks existed in fact and speculate about how they gained their strength, guessing without any basis in historical sources that they had put themselves into a trance by eating poisonous mushrooms or grain infected by the fungus Claviceps purpurea, or possibly by getting high on self-induced excess adrenaline.[30] [39]
As in the case of the blood eagle, the main historical problem with the berserks is that they are, with one possible exception, mentioned only in sources that were written centuries after any of them would have been alive. The one early reference to the berserks is in a poem dedicated to the ninth-century Norwegian king Harald Fairhair, which simply states that, as the battle of Hafrsfjord began, “bear-shirts [berserkir] bellowed . . . wolf-skins howled.”[31] Had it not been for the entire later tradition regarding berserks, a modern interpreter expert in the imagery of skaldic poetry would simply translate “bear-shirts” and “wolf-skins” with “[warriors wearing] chain-mail shirts (byrnies).” It is highly probable that this in fact is what the poet intended to convey.
In the Icelandic sagas and in Saxo’s work, the berserks are portrayed as people who existed “once upon a time” and more specifically in pagan times, since there is a strong association between berserks and paganism. When a berserk accepted baptism, his berserk powers disappeared, according to the sagas, which thus betray the saga writers’ attitude toward the berserk as a part of the distant, pagan past. The stories of berserks carry all the hallmarks of being literary and legendary creations of the imagination of Icelandic saga writers who found the old skaldic verses fascinating but not necessarily easy to understand. They had found the mysteriously named berserks and wolf-skins in the old poem about Hafrsfjord, but they did not understand, or did not want to understand the term as a poetic circumlocution for warriors in armor. Instead, they dreamed up a fantastic kind of elite warrior, which remains titillating to this day, as do many of their other literary creations. The word has entered the English language, and we occasionally read in the news about persons, mostly men, “going berserk.”
Just because the blood eagle and the berserks were creations of the vivid imagination of high-medieval writers, combined with their inexact understanding of old poetry, does not mean that the Vikings were not violent. Close attention to the sources, however, reveals that the Vikings’ violence was a means toward a goal that was not very different from the goals of other groups in what was, after all, a very violent time, the early Middle Ages. What the Vikings wanted was wealth, which they used for political purposes. [40]
Before fighting in the battle of Maldon, the Vikings tried to negotiate:
Then a Viking messenger stood on the shore
and cried out firmly [to Byrhtnoth]:
—
“Bold seamen sent me to you,
commanded that I tell you that you must send quickly
rings for protection. And it is better for you
that you pay off this spear-fight with tribute
than that we engage in such a hard fight.
Nor have we any need to kill each other.”[32]
Arm rings made of gold and silver were how wealth was stored and carried in the Viking Age. Byrhtnoth carried rings on his arms, if we can believe the poet.[33] So here the Vikings showed up, rattled their weapons, and asked for tribute in exchange for peace. Clearly, it was the wealth of silver and golden arm rings that interested this particular band of Vikings, not violence for its own sake.
In fact, many similar stories show up in other sources. The Annals of St-Bertin, for example, record that the Vikings in 852 sailed with 252 ships to Frisia, where they demanded a tribute that was paid, so they continued on to elsewhere without inflicting any damage. Similarly, in 868, they appeared outside Orleans demanding a tribute, which was also paid.[34] In other cases, the tribute was paid only after the Vikings had begun to wreak havoc. Byrhtnoth proudly refused to pay tribute to the Vikings he encountered at Maldon in 991. They killed him and defeated his army. Afterward the English agreed to pay a large tribute of 10,000 pounds of silver. “In that year it was first decided that geld be paid to the Danish men because of the great terror which they wrought along the sea coast,” an Anglo-Saxon chronicler commented.[35] It was the first tribute payment in a series of increasingly large danegelds that would be paid out over the next few decades to different bands of Vikings (not all of whom were Danish, despite the name given to the tribute). In 994, 16,000 pounds of silver were handed over. The Swedish Viking Ulf from Orkesta, north of where Stockholm is [41]today, went to England three times to take a share in the danegeld, as he boasted on the runestone that he commissioned: “And Ulf has taken three gelds in England.”[36] He had gone there in 1006, 1012, and 1018, following the Viking chieftains Tosti, Thorketill, and Cnut. In fact, the inscription says that it was those chieftains, not the English, who had “paid” Ulf, and that would have been how one Viking warrior among many would have experienced the events. The chieftains negotiated for danegeld from the English, and when they succeeded, they distributed their shares among their followers. In fact, it was essential that the chieftains distributed the booty in this way, for that made the warriors eager to follow them. From the perspective of the warriors, it was the generous chieftain who gave them their just rewards. Such a chieftain was worthy of their loyalty.
The goals and methods of Viking expeditions are similar to those typical of other early medieval warfare. The people of Frankish lands that the Vikings so often attacked looked back to Emperor Charlemagne—Charles the Great—as a founding figure. He ruled the kingdom for almost a half century, from 768 to 814, and during this period he was seldom at peace. Only toward the end of his life did his official historian, the author of the so-called Royal Frankish Annals, occasionally note as something exceptional that during a single year the royal army had not campaigned. The army, usually under the personal leadership of Charlemagne, was otherwise usually attacking one or another of the neighbors of the Franks. A result was that Charlemagne’s empire at his own death was much larger than the kingdom he had inherited from his father. He had, among other regions, conquered northern and central Italy, large swaths of western and southern Germany, areas in eastern Spain, and even parts of Hungary. Conquest was, however, not the primary goal of these expeditions. They served to acquire booty and tribute payments for the king. In a time when royal taxes were at best marginal, kings needed income to be able to maintain an army and, in general, followers among the important people of his kingdom. The best way to gain wealth was simply to take it as booty in a military campaign, or to force others to pay tribute. Some less powerful neighbors of the Franks, such as the Bretons and the Beneventans [42](in central Italy) paid tribute regularly to the ruler of the Franks. A Frankish chronicler noted, for example, that in 863 Duke Salomon of the Bretons “paid Charles [the Bald, Charlemagne’s grandson] the tribute owed by his land according to ancient custom.”[37] Other neighbors, who did not pay tribute, became the objects of military campaigns to gain booty. The Royal Frankish Annalist tells us that Charlemagne in 774 returned from his campaign in Saxony with “much booty.” In the same year, he also conquered Pavia, the capital of the old Lombard kingdom in northern Italy, where he took the royal treasury.[38] In 796, he was even more fortunate. The Frankish army had, with surprising ease, defeated the Avars, who lived in Pannonia in Hungary. In conquering their main fortification, the so-called Avar ring, Charlemagne’s army discovered undreamed riches, “which had been piled up over many centuries.” The army brought the loot back to his residence in Aachen.[39] Some of those treasures had originally been tribute paid by the Byzantine Empire to the Avars to dissuade them from attacking.
These campaigns of Charlemagne were very bloody. Even as biased a source as the Royal Frankish Annals does not pretend otherwise. In fact, its authors take pride in the devastation wreaked by the Frankish army on the enemy. That enemy could be many different peoples living around the Frankish kingdom, but the Saxons (in Germany) were particularly hard hit during wars waged by Charlemagne, which lasted for thirty years. In 774, for example, Charlemagne divided his army into three forces, which he sent to different places in Saxony, where they “with fires and pillaging devastated everything, and several Saxons were killed who were attempting to resist.”[40] Charlemagne’s army went back to Saxony several times—for example, during the winter 784–785, when armies commanded by the king personally or his generals devastated Saxony.[41] During a single day in 782, Charlemagne ordered no fewer than 4,500 Saxons decapitated, according to the Annals. He believed that he acted lawfully, punishing oath-breakers; those killed might have disagreed, but there are no Saxon histories that preserve the viewpoint of Charlemagne’s victims. The Vikings’ execution of 111 prisoners in 845 pales in comparison. In 795, the Saxons killed Charlemagne’s ally, King Witzin of the Slavic [43]Obodrites, which “made him [Charlemagne] hate the treacherous people even more. . . . Once the Saxons had been soundly beaten, their country laid waste, and their hostages received, the king returned to Gaul and celebrated Christmas and Easter at his palace in Aachen.”[42] With his large kingdom and well-organized army, Charlemagne was able to inflict much more violence, seize more booty, and demand greater tributes than the Vikings could ever dream of.[43] His wars were not always as violent and bloody as in Saxony; like the Vikings, he sometimes found that his putative enemies were eager to collaborate and pay tribute in order to save their skins.
Yet, the Vikings are the ones on whom the reputation for violence and bloodthirstiness has stuck. Charlemagne, in contrast, is today generally extolled as a founding father of Europe. France and Germany compete about who has the greatest right to claim him as their national founder. The European Union celebrates the great Charles as a symbol of the unification of Europe. One of the largest buildings of the administrative offices of the European Union (EU) in Brussels, for example, is the Charlemagne Building. Europeans still remember that Charlemagne unified great swaths of the continent under his rule, but the EU has chosen to forget that he committed genocide in the process. It is perhaps ironic that Germany is one of the founding and still dominant members of the EU, but the Saxon ancestors of modern Germans were among the longest-suffering of Charlemagne’s victims.
Charlemagne’s raids among his neighbors brought him much booty as well as tribute. He used this loot to reward his followers. For example, in 796, his army seized the main Avar fortress and sent its considerable treasures to his palace in Aachen. “After receiving it and thanking God, the Giver of all good things, this most wise and generous man, the Lord’s steward, sent [a large gift to the pope]. The rest he distributed among his magnates, ecclesiastic as well as lay, and his other vassals.” Likewise, after taking the Lombard capital of Pavia in 774, Charlemagne “gave the treasures he found there to his army.”[44]
In other words, Charlemagne was sharing his booty with his followers to inspire their loyalty, very much as Viking chieftains [44]like Tosti, Thorketill, and Cnut shared their booty with their followers, men like Ulf from Orkesta. They all fed booty conquered through violence or tribute gained by threatening violence into the gift economy of their societies, obliging their followers to give their loyalty as a countergift. Clearly, the system worked differently in Charlemagne’s kingdom from how it worked in the more anarchic society of the Northmen, but it was still the same system. For Charlemagne, and not only him but also his predecessors and successors as Frankish kings and emperors, the influx of silver, gold, and other valuables from outside his kingdom was essential for the survival of that kingdom.
Likewise, Viking chieftains absolutely needed to be successful in winning booty or tribute on their raids. Otherwise, no warrior would follow them, and they would lose whatever position they had managed to attain. Those most successful in raising funds enhanced their position, which would eventually lead to the establishment of kingdoms in Scandinavia. The creation of states was firmly based in violence, and the Vikings were not unique in using it. But since they, unlike Charlemagne, attacked those with a monopoly on writing, it is their deeds, not Charlemagne’s, that have gone down in history as infamous, irrational, and bloodthirsty. We will do well to nuance this image.
