Praising his dead patron Olav Haraldsson, the skald Sigvat exclaimed: “The prince subdued every end of Oppland. . . . Earlier eleven princes ruled them.” Olav had arrived in Norway in 1015 after years of itinerant life as a Viking and a mercenary. He had plenty of warriors and much wealth, and he had proceeded to conquer the country, including the landlocked eastern region known as Oppland. “Which more outstanding prince has ever ruled the northern end of the world?” Sigvat asked rhetorically, clearly not expecting his audience to provide a plausible alternative to Olav Haraldsson.[1]
Sigvat portrays Olav as a great conqueror who defeated many competitors to gain sole rule over Norway. We may not want to accept literally his claim that the region Oppland had previously been divided up among exactly eleven chieftains (the word for eleven in Old Norse, ellifu, provided convenient alliteration for Sigvat’s verse), but the idea that Olav defeated several petty rulers is based in reality. The Scandinavian kingdoms came about when would-be kings consolidated in their own hands the fragmented power that had earlier been held by many chieftains.
Similar claims show up elsewhere in the history of the creation of the Scandinavian kingdoms. The skald Einar, for example, praised his patron, Earl Håkon Sigurdsson, for defeating sixteen chieftains in Norway.[2] When the Danish king Harald Bluetooth [132]on his runic monument in Jelling boasted that he had “conquered all of Denmark,” he implied that there were parts of Denmark that had earlier been under the control of others. Historians believe that he, for example, subdued the region Scania, which earlier may have been under the control of the chieftains residing in Uppåkra.[3]
Archeological discoveries further illustrate the idea that political fragmentation preceded the high-medieval kingdoms that appeared in Scandinavia around the year 1000. Forests, mountains, and water separate different regions from one another, and those regions were typically different in their material culture. While, for example, the people of the Värend region of Sweden during the Viking Age buried their dead under oval stone settings, the people of the neighboring Finnveden region put them under small mounds.[4] In the sixth century, the Byzantine historian Jordanes mentioned the Finnveden people as one among twenty-eight named Scandinavian tribes.[5] Such evidence clearly suggests that many small but independent-minded areas, including regions such as Finnveden and Värend, were distinctly different regions in prehistoric times.
We may understand the political history of Scandinavia during the Viking Age and preceding periods by viewing it through this lens: successful warrior chieftains fighting one another for political domination. Some were more successful than others and managed to build up greater power by defeating their rivals. That power might fall apart as rapidly as it came together. The general tendency, however, was for more and more power to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Toward the end of the Viking Age, the three familiar Scandinavian kingdoms, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, appeared, each ruled by a single king, although centuries would pass before they had become truly stable. Something like the old system lived on in the outlying Scandinavian settlements in Iceland and, probably, Greenland until they submitted to the king of Norway in the 1260s.[6]
The preserved sources provide occasional snapshots of this process. When, for example, the great men of the Frankish Empire of Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious in the early ninth century were for the first time paying serious attention to Danish affairs, we get a glimpse of internal Danish politics. A man called Godfrid [133]had managed to accumulate considerable power by the beginning of the century, dominating at least the Jutland peninsula. He was a thorn in the side of the Franks, attacking their allies the Obodrites, who resided on the southwestern coast of the Baltic Sea. In 810, a Frankish history writer reported that Godfrid had been killed by one of his own retainers. Four years later, we hear of four men fighting over Godfrid’s inheritance: Harald, Reginfrid, and two of Godfrid’s sons. “In this conflict, Reginfrid and the oldest son of Godfrid were killed.”[7] It is tempting to understand this struggle as a battle for the “Kingdom of Denmark,” especially since the Frankish chroniclers label the contestants involved “kings,” but this is to apply anachronistic categories. There were no stable kingdoms with defined assets and boundaries to fight about in ninth-century Scandinavia. Godfrid had accumulated power in competition with other chieftains, but that power fragmented when he was killed and at least four people competed for a share of it afterward. The conflicts lasted a long time. As late as 826, one of the chieftains/ kings involved, Harald, sought out the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious to get his assistance in regaining a foothold in Denmark. He had already received help in 814. Despite the assistance he received, Harald was not able to create a kingdom for himself in Denmark, so he lived the rest of his life as the emperor’s pensioner, having been awarded for his upkeep a county in northern Frisia.
We do not know very much about what happened in Denmark during the rest of the ninth century, and much less about Sweden and Norway, for the Frankish recorders of history turn their attention elsewhere and the indigenous material is limited to brief runic inscriptions and archeology. We know the names of some kings, like Björn, whom the Frankish missionary Ansgar encountered in Birka in about 829, and Horik, who was powerful enough in Denmark that the pope sent him a letter in 864 encouraging him to accept Christianity, but we do not know any details about their reigns and we do not know how large their kingdoms were. Archeology tells us about many halls, those focal points of chieftains’ power, existing at the same time. Everything points to a situation in which power was fragmented, fluid, and constantly contested by competing warlords. [134]
Godfrid was killed in 810, Reginfrid was killed four years later, and the chieftain buried in the Gokstad ship was, as we have seen, killed in about 900. Many other men and women, chieftains as well as ordinary people, were killed in the competition for power in Viking Age Scandinavia. Competition among chieftains was violent, and each chieftain was a warlord with his own private army. It was, thus, an essential concern of chieftains to recruit as many warriors as they were able. This need for capable warriors is key to understanding how society worked before more regular kingdoms were created around the year 1000.
We learn about some of the most important mechanisms that early medieval Scandinavian rulers employed to recruit and retain warriors, and thereby power, through a poem composed by the same Sigvat who introduced this chapter. He wrote about his lord Olav Haraldsson: “I was with the lord who gave gold to his loyal men and carrion to the ravens; throughout the lifetime of that king he gained fame.”[8] A chieftain needed to be generous to his men, he needed to be victorious in battles—to “feed carrion to ravens,” in the poetic vocabulary of the time—and he needed fame and a good reputation. If he was not able to achieve all of this, he could not achieve any of it. It was through winning battles that he gained the riches that allowed him to be generous, and his generosity stimulated poets like Sigvat to contribute to his fame by composing and reciting poetry. This, in turn, inspired warriors to seek out the famous king, so that he got more warriors and won battles even more easily, which again gave him a good reputation and more booty to hand out to warriors.
The key feature in this system of political economy was the king’s generosity. Chieftains needed above all to be generous, to freely give gold, silver, and other valuables to their followers. We see this already in the quotation from Sigvat’s poem with which we began this chapter, if we look at it more closely. The translation given there was simplified and flattened: “The prince subdued every end of Oppland. . . . Earlier eleven princes ruled them.” The expression rendered as “princes” toward the end of the quotation is, in the original, a four-word circumlocution of a type that is typical of skaldic poetry, a kenning: “the destroyer of the speech of the cave’s generous man.” The “cave’s man” is a giant, for giants live in [135]caves. The “giant’s speech” is gold, since Norse mythology has a story of the rich giant Ölvaldi, whose three sons took as much gold in inheritance as each was able to carry in his mouth. Someone who “destroys gold” gives it away, which is the proper behavior for a chieftain or prince, who was expected to “destroy” his own wealth by giving it to his warriors.
Similar ideas lie behind the word that Sigvat used for Olav, simply rendered above as “prince”; Sigvat literally said “giver,” which would have been understood as “giver of gold and other gifts.” Chieftains, kings, and others who led warriors were the archetypical givers of the early Middle Ages. They needed to give valuable gifts to their warriors, which inspired those warriors to be loyal followers. This gift-giving system was such a deeply engrained component of early medieval ideology that it was thoroughly embedded in the very language of poetry.
The archetypical gift was an arm ring. Money did not exist as such in early medieval Norse society. Wealth was simply gold and silver bullion, or land or natural products. The normal way of storing wealth was in the form of more or less weighty arm rings of gold and silver. Archeologists have found many such rings in graves and in treasure hordes, some simple loops of metal, others beautifully worked jewelry. Literature and poetry devote a lot of attention to rings, and kings were often referred to as “ring-givers” or “ring-breakers,” for the rings could be broken apart to be shared among several retainers.
At some point in the early eleventh century, the poet Arnorr composed a partially preserved poem, probably about King Cnut of Denmark and England. The poem illustrates the importance of arm rings:
Fire of the stream [= gold] was set
between the wrist and shoulders of the Danes;
I saw men of Scania thank
him for an arm-ring.[9]
The fragment begins, typically, with a kenning for gold, one of very many kennings that existed for that metal. Gold was alluded to as watery fire, since according to Norse mythology the sea god Ægir once invited the gods to a meal in his underwater hall, which [136]they found illuminated solely by radiant gold. Cnut set his gold as arm rings on the Danes. Arnorr pointed out that the men of Scania were grateful to the king. Either the Scanians in the poem are simply representative of the Danes in general or, more likely, Arnorr wanted to emphasize that they were loyal to the king since Cnut could not always take for granted the reliable allegiance of the region, probably subdued with arms by his grandfather Harald Bluetooth. In any case, the poem shows that Scanians and other Danes wore their gold on their arms.
Another ring-breaker was the Scandinavian king Erik Bloodaxe of York (d. ca. 954), whose generosity is a theme in a celebrated poem by the legendary Icelandic Viking poet Egil Skallagrimsson:
The breaker of arm fire [= rings]
offers arm gems [= arm rings].
The ring-breaker will not praise
the tardy handing-out of treasure.
The pebbles [gold] of the hawk-beach [= arm]
are highly alienable to him [the king, giving away golden arm
rings].
The lot of men are happy about the
meal of Froði [= gold].[10]
Line after line of the poem drives home the point that Erik is a very generous king, quick to break (i.e., hand out) rings and offering ornaments for the arms of warriors. His generosity makes his throngs of fighters happy, and that was the purpose of giving away wealth. The warriors of an early medieval Scandinavian ruler were not simple mercenaries fighting for pay; they were independent-minded and proud warriors who would fight alongside those they were bound to in honorable relations of friendship. If they accepted a gift from their chieftain, they knew that this meant that they owed their loyalty and fighting prowess as a countergift.
The warriors who accompanied the Norwegian king Harald Hardruler on his failed attempt to invade England in 1066 understood that they owed him loyalty unto death. They died alongside their prince at Stamford Bridge, at least if we may believe the hyperbolic lines the poet Arnorr wrote about the battle: [137]
Spear-points inlaid with gold
did not protect the slayer of robbers [= just ruler = Harald].
All the retainers of the gracious prince chose
much rather to fall beside the battle-swift commander
[= Harald]
than wishing quarter.[11]
Harald had given his warriors gilded spears, which did not protect him sufficiently, although it did inspire them to fight on, rather being killed next to their leader than suing for peace. The connection between the chieftain’s gifts and the warrior’s loyalty, unto death if necessary, as countergift is spelled out in a famous passage of the Old English poem Beowulf, written at some point during the Viking era. Beowulf ’s loyal follower Wiglaf, “mournful at heart,” upbraids other warriors who were slow to join their leader in fighting a fearsome and fire-spewing dragon:
I remember the time that we took mead together,
when we made promises to our prince
in the beer-hall—he gave us these rings—
that we would pay him back for this battle-gear,
these helmets and hard swords, if such a need
as this ever befell him. . . .
—
It seems wrong to me that we should bear shields
back to our land (= survive), unless we first might
finish off this foe.[12]
Wiglaf here outlines a warrior ethic in which every gift required a countergift. Those cowardly followers of Beowulf who did not give him their loyalty forfeited their honor. Wiglaf scolded them, “those ten weak traitors,” now “shamefaced,” after the end of the battle, when both Beowulf and the dragon lay dead: “Death is better for any earl than a life of dishonor!”[13]
Given the unusually fearsome nature of his fiery enemy in this battle, we should perhaps not be surprised that Beowulf ’s gifts were not successful in inspiring total loyalty among his warriors. [138]The sense of the passage is, however, that loyalty and warrior bravery was the expected countergift, as it indeed was among King Harald’s warriors in 1066. Or as another Norwegian king, Håkon the Good (d. 961), expressed it in a poem that was put in his mouth by a high-medieval Icelandic saga composer recounting the king’s last, fatal battle: “Well do my men repay me . . . for gold and inlaid spears.”[14] The men repaid the king’s gifts by continuing to fight, even in a doomed battle.
Successful chieftains not only gave their followers gilded spears and golden arm rings but also inspired them in other ways—for example, by inviting them to great celebrations in the chieftain’s hall. Those banquets could carry a religious accent if they happened in conjunction with pagan sacrifices or with Christian rituals, which added a sacred tinge to the relationships that were created there. We often hear about chieftains who were generous with food and drink, like King Hrothgar, whose hospitality in his “mead-hall” Heorot in the Beowulf poem is legendary. Many runestones commemorate great men with some variation of the formula “he was generous with food.” With a stone erected during the first half of the eleventh century close to the southern tip of the Scandinavian peninsula, the widowed Tonna memorialized her husband Bramr, who “was the best of householders, and generous with food.”[15] Great chieftains were famous for being great hosts, like Earl Thorfinn of the Orkneys, who, according to his skald Arnorr, was much more hospitable than other chieftains. They feasted with their retainers only over Yule (the midwinter holiday) itself, whereas Thorfinn offered ale (“the swamp of malt,” in Arnorr’s kenning) all through the winter. “The ruler exercised bounty then!” the poet exclaims happily.[16]
The great feasts took place in the halls of the chieftains, which were spaces devoted to establishing and maintaining friendships between chieftains and their followers. Then as now, lively and boisterous parties with food and drink were ideal settings in which to build close-knit communities, and more than eating and drinking went on there. It was in the halls that skalds recited their poetry, praising and celebrating the chieftain who presided at the festivities, and thus making it even more desirable to be his friend. [139]
fig. 18. The great halls of Scandinavia were large, impressive buildings with open interiors intended for feasting and camaraderie. Here chieftains and their warriors planned and celebrated Viking raids. This careful computer reconstruction of the large Viking Age hall at Lejre, Denmark, is based on the archeology of the site. Courtesy of Nicolai Garhøj Larsen, EyeCadcher Media, and Roskilde Museum.
The hall was also the site where the chieftain might hold forth, proving his eloquence and persuasive powers, to encourage his followers to fight alongside him and to persuade other chieftains to ally with him. Chieftains distributed gifts to their followers in many places—for example, on the battlefield—but perhaps most typically inside their halls. The Beowulf poet tells us as much when he imagines King Hrothgar giving Beowulf wine and gifts after his defeat of Grendel: a famous historic sword, a ridged helmet, a golden banner, a mail shirt, and eight horses with ornamented bridles and a “skillfully tooled” saddle “set with gemstones.”[17] The chieftain’s hall was also a sacred space where chieftains used religious rituals to bind his followers even more tightly to himself. A sumptuous banquet was useful to inspire community among those invited, but if it was not just a dinner but also a sacrificial meal, then that community took on an added sacred dimension. This applies to both pre-Christian and Christian religions. A Viking Age ruler celebrated not only for his hospitality but also for his religious zeal [140]
fig. 19. This set of Roman wine utensils, found in Öremölla in the province of Scania, Sweden, contains a large mixing bowl, a ladle, and a sieve of bronze, as well as two glasses. A chieftain who was able to prepare his wine with such equipment would consider himself fortunate. Photo courtesy of Riksantikvarieämbetet, Stockholm. [141]was Earl Sigurd Håkonsson in Lade (d. ca. 962). He was hospitable, so his guests did not need to bring boxed food and drink to his feasts, as the poet Kormakr expressed it. Kormakr characterized the earl as the protector of a sacred place.[18] The poet thus reminds us that religious rituals were closely linked to eating and drinking, perhaps so that the meat of any sacrificed animal was cooked and eaten after the gods had received their share. Later in the Viking Age, some enterprising chieftains replaced the old pagan religion with the “new” religion of Christianity, with which they had come in contact on their travels in Europe. Just as resourceful chieftains impressed their followers the more strongly by inviting them to drink their mead—or, even better, imported wine—from wondrously beautiful glass vessels, they would awe them with the rituals and customs of an exotic religion that was embraced by some of the most powerful people in Europe.
A good chieftain needed not only to be generous and victorious in battle but also to be eloquent, to be able to persuade with honeyed words. Runestones and skaldic poetry often praise men for eloquence. The eleventh-century Swede Holmbjörn, for example, advertised on a runestone at the main road close to his home that he was “generous with food and eloquent,” obviously trying to lure warriors and other followers to join him in his hall.[19]
When Magnus, the son of the Norwegian king Olav Haraldsson, was coming back from exile in Russia to take back his father’s kingdom, he needed troops. Olav’s queen Astrid Olofsdotter had been a Swedish princess, so she had returned to her family in Sweden when her husband had fallen in the battle of Stiklestad (Trondheim) in 1030. Magnus was not her son; his mother was Alfhild, one of King Olav’s mistresses (or that is how she is characterized by the high-medieval sagas, which employed then-current ideas about marriage and concubinage that may not have applied in Viking Age Norway). Astrid nevertheless helped Magnus to recruit troops in Sweden by speaking persuasively to an assembly of people. She impressed those who heard her to the degree that Magnus got a large enough army to conquer Norway. She particularly impressed one of Olav’s old court poets, now composing for Magnus, Sigvat [142]Thordarson, who wrote a poem in her praise, of which three stanzas are preserved.
Astrid was a “good advice-giver,” Sigvat said, who could not have dealt better with “the daring Swedes, had bold Magnus been her own son.” It was thanks to her that Magnus was able to claim his rightful inheritance, for “a substantial army of Swedes assembled . . . when Astrid announced the cause of the son of Olav.” So “generous Magnus owes Astrid a reward for her bold deed.”[20]
Sigvat portrays Astrid as a woman of deep counsel and eloquence, and she must have enjoyed good relations with the Swedish warrior circles from which she originated. This kind of praise of a woman for her political skills is all but unique in the skaldic corpus, the male-oriented poetry that typically praised the battle deeds and the generosity of kings and chieftains. Sigvat was a poet who was not afraid of breaking new ground, as he did when he praised Astrid.
Chieftains gave gifts and persuaded warriors to follow them. Together with their warriors, they sailed and rowed to the European continent and to the British Isles to raid and plunder, so as to be able to give more gifts. Some of them were better at their jobs or had more luck than others, who were knocked out of competition, so over time there were fewer and fewer chieftains with larger and larger followings. We discern a hint of this process when the European writers who chronicled the Viking raids on Europe tell us that the raiding parties became ever larger and larger. The disappearance of chieftains’ halls in Scandinavia, which we can study through archeological surveys, tells the same story from a different perspective.[21] The chieftains became fewer and fewer, meaning that the remaining ones each had more power. The distinctions among chieftains, petty kings, and kings are not very well defined, but at some point during the Viking Age, it becomes appropriate to talk about kings rather than chieftains. These kings met new and different challenges from those faced by their chieftain forebears. Their power over people extended so far that they could no longer maintain the kind of personal friendships that the gift economy of previous centuries promoted. Instead, they needed military and administrative structures to run what increasingly looked like older [143]European kingdoms. The Church was the best organized institution in Europe at the time, and kings received help from clerics to build up their royal administration. Chieftaincy based on charisma and friendships yielded to organized and administrative kingship, although for a long time both “systems” existed in parallel.
As late as in the preamble to the earliest preserved Norwegian law book, Gulatingslov, the text expresses a wish that the ruler of the land “be our friend, and we his,” just as in the old gift economy.[22] The date of this law book is much debated; it survives in manuscripts from the thirteenth century but claims to be based on texts from the early eleventh century. Whatever its age, the book bears witness to the old system, when the king or chieftain was seen more as the first among equals, a friend of his friends, than as a ruler in a hierarchical system. This idyllic state of affairs changed radically with the end of the Viking Age. In about 1277, King Magnus Håkonsson of Norway issued a law book for the aristocracy of his kingdom, the Hirdlov or Law of the Retinue. The title refers to the king’s retainers, the group of warriors that followed the Viking chieftains of old. But these thirteenth-century warriors had a very different relationship with their king, who here lets his men know that they should “serve him personally . . . in unbreakable fidelity and complete loyalty” as the king’s “servants.”[23] The word here translated “servant” (þjónn) used to be applied only to slaves and thralls. In the Viking Age, it would have been an unforgivable insult to libel thus any of the king’s warriors, and a chieftain calling his warriors “servants,” as King Magnus did, would quickly lose their loyalty. New uses of language had, however, come into Scandinavia with Christianity, which characterized all Christians as servants or slaves of God. With the new language came also new ideas about social relationships. The king became a ruler appointed by God and his followers became his servants.
The organization of the Church was strictly hierarchical, and kings learned to organize their kingdoms in a similar way. The retinue that appears in the Hirdlov is no longer a band of drinking buddies and fellow warriors; they are officials serving their king, and it is appropriate that they should fall to their knees in front of their king, as the law book demands. The memory of the great festivities [144]in the mead halls survive in the Hirdlov’s rules for appointing high-born officials called table page, cup-bearer, and steward, although these were distinguished titles that should not lead us into assuming that their bearers were simple waiters. Otherwise, the law book portrays a hierarchical society in which even the greatest aristocrats were, in the last analysis, the king’s servants. The chancellor, often a cleric, attended to issuing and preserving documents, while the marshal spoke on the king’s behalf and organized his travels. Each official had his defined assignment in war, but also in peace, which is very different from Viking Age retainers, whom the king or chieftain gathered for the primary purpose of fighting wars.
If the retinue had metamorphosed from being a proud warrior elite into an aristocracy of service (and that change began long before 1277), the role of the king had changed even more radically. After the end of more than a century of civil war, off and on, the Norwegian king sat securely on his throne after 1240. There were no more wars about succession. Each king was succeeded by his son, as is stipulated by the Hirdlov, until 1319, when King Håkon Magnusson died without sons and his grandson Magnus Eriksson took over the kingdom.
The Norwegian kingdom to which the Hirdlov bears witness encapsulates the most important changes that took place in Scandinavia with the end of the Viking Age and afterward. Hierarchically organized “feudal” kingdoms with defined territories and a more or less bureaucratic administration replaced looser confederations of warriors. Kings strove to organize an ordered succession to the kingdom, be it as an elective monarchy or a hereditary one, in sharp contrast to the free-for- all of the Viking Age, when warlords fought for the unstable loyalties of people not defined territories. The medieval kingdom attempted to control violence within its territory, and to some degree it succeeded. Instead of plunder and raiding in foreign lands, taxes, fines, and other fees claimed from the territorial population provided the stable economic basis for rulership, which was exerted in close collaboration with the Church.[24]
Scandinavia’s transformation into the medieval kingdoms was a long, slow process, and it happened at different speeds in different parts of Scandinavia. It was fastest in Denmark, whereas Sweden [145]was particularly slow in getting organized. The process had two aspects. On the one hand, the kind of bureaucratic and hierarchical kingdoms described in the Norwegian Hirdlov came into being everywhere, although exactly how this happened is mostly hidden in the mists of history. On the other hand, kings succeeded in pulling together the different regions that made up each of the three medieval kingdoms of Scandinavia, and that process is better known.
In Denmark, it seems clear that kings like Godfrid (d. 810) and his more shadowy predecessor Sigifrit (r. ca. 780) were powerful rulers, since they constituted enough of a threat to the Carolingian Empire that Charlemagne’s court paid close attention to their doings. Sigifrit’s supposedly intransigent paganism was a matter for banter among the court’s intellectuals, while Godfrid’s attacks on the Obodrites, allies of Charlemagne, were carefully recorded in official Frankish history writing.[25] Since the latter source tells us that Godfrid forced the merchants of Reric, the main Obodritian trade emporium, to move to Hedeby close to the base of the Jutland peninsula, we may conclude that Godfrid held power at least over Jutland, as did Sigifrit, probably. It remains unclear and unlikely whether we really should think of their power in terms of territory, and whether, if so, it extended also to the Danish islands between Jutland and Scania.[26]
Archeology tell us about even earlier powerful people on Jutland. In 726, someone had a canal built across the small island Samsø, east of Jutland. An observer on this island would be able to spot any ship heading toward or coming from the Great and Little Belts, the two best and most important passages between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea. The Samsø canal made it possible to sail quickly from the protected harbor at the island in any direction toward any passing ship. The chieftain who organized the building of the canal would have been powerful enough to command the work of many, and he would probably have been able to maintain enough ships and warriors on Samsø to be able to stop, rob, or demand a toll from any but the largest fleets that would sail through either of the Belts. This would have been a lucrative business.[27]
A decade or so later, in 737, a chieftain built a great earthen wall with an interior timber structure, the so-called Danevirke, across [146]the center of the base of the Jutland peninsula. Whether this was a defensive military measure (it was used as such in the Danish–Prussian war of 1864) or a way to control and tax (merchant?) traffic, this large construction project demonstrates that a chieftain in southern Jutland in the 730s was able to command a large workforce.[28]
Was the chieftain behind the Danevirke identical to the chieftain behind the Samsø canal? Or, to express it differently, are the two construction projects evidence that a single person ruled over at least the southern half of Jutland in the early eighth century? The answer is often assumed to be yes, and that a single kingdom responsible for both the Samsø canal and the Danevirke extended from the Danevirke to Samsø and that this was the kingdom later ruled by Sigifrit and Godfrid. This is possible, but probably an overinterpretation; the canal and the wall might well have been built by chieftains in competition with one another.
King Godfrid was murdered in 810 by one of his own retainers, whom we should think of as a competitor for power who must have broken the bonds of friendship. A period of intense competition followed the murder, with at least four persons, including two of Godfrid’s sons, competing for the power that he had held. Two of these competitors were killed in the process, and a third, Harald, took refuge with Emperor Louis the Pious. But not even with the emperor’s help was he able to take power in Denmark.
Meanwhile in Denmark around 850, a King Horik gives the missionary Ansgar permission to build a church in Hedeby, so his power extended at least over southern Jutland, and probably farther. Over the following century, Danish history is only spottily known, which did not prevent later medieval historians, such as the influential Saxo Grammaticus (d. ca. 1220), from constructing an unbroken series of Danish kings from grey antiquity through Godfrid and on to their own contemporaries. Saxo and his colleagues did not do so on the basis of information that we now lack, but because they took it as self-evident that something like the Danish kingdom they themselves experienced had “always” existed. They simply made up a list of names for those kings, including a prehistoric King Amleth, whom William Shakespeare later made [147]world-famous as Hamlet. The story told by contemporary sources is rather of constantly contested power during the early Viking Age, but a contest in which a few families tended to return generation after generation, at least for some time, showing a tendency to form dynasties, a characteristic of the mature medieval kingdom. This may well be, but we should remember that family and kinship in the early Middle Ages were not necessarily based in biological fact. People made up familial relationship where none, strictly speaking, existed. A famous example is the rebel leader Sverre, who fought his way to becoming the king of Norway (r. 1184–1202). Ostensibly the son of a Faroese comb-maker, Sverre claimed that he was the love child of an earlier Norwegian king, Sigurd Munn (r. 1136–1155). At this point in history, one could not become king of Norway without royal blood. Sverre won the kingship and his genealogical claims, which most likely are fictional, were widely accepted, although opponents continued to contest them. If we accept that people are likely to have similarly made up kinship in the Viking Age, we must admit that what may look like Viking Age dynasties in the sparse source material are not necessarily that. Genetic examinations of bodies buried in prestigious graves in central Sweden reveal, for example, an open family structure; genetically unrelated persons were able to reach positions of high status and be buried in what are usually seen as dynastic cemeteries.[29] In other words, a new chieftain in central Sweden was not necessarily the biological kin of the old chieftain he replaced; we have no reason to expect that things would have been different in Viking Age Denmark.
Danish political history emerges from the mists of prehistory when a splendid royal compound was constructed during the second half of the tenth century at Jelling, a central location on Jutland, from which the entire peninsula and the Danish islands could be militarily controlled. The great variety of features and their unprecedented size and magnificence make Jelling stand out, far surpassing any similar site elsewhere in northern Europe. Someone with much to prove and resources to match stood behind it all: King Harald, the first man that we know with certainty was king of all of Denmark. Later in the Middle Ages he was nicknamed [148]“Bluetooth” (and this nickname, in turn, inspired the name of a much-used wireless communication technology standard developed by history-savvy Scandinavian computer scientists and symbolized by a combination of the runes H and B).[30] King Harald himself tells us, in runes inscribed on a large boulder inside the Jelling compound, that he “won for himself all of Denmark, and Norway.” Through the runestone, Harald dedicated his “monument” (probably referring to the entire compound and not just the inscribed stone) to his parents, Gorm and Thyre.
The compound in Jelling was surrounded and protected from prying eyes by a wooden palisade, perhaps three meters tall, in the form of a slightly skewed square 360 meters on a side. Several magnificent structures were constructed at different times inside this stockade, including the two greatest Danish grave mounds, standing almost nine meters tall, and the largest ship setting (large rocks placed to outline a ship) anywhere, about 340 meters long. The ship setting was pulled down when the second, southern mound was constructed. Harald’s magnificent runestone rests at the exact midpoint between the two mounds, with a smaller runestone raised by his father Gorm close at hand. The eleventh-century stone church of Jelling stands between the runestones and the northern mound. Various postholes under the present church suggest that at least one wooden church preceded it, but it remains unclear exactly when this church might have been constructed and how large it was. It is attractive to imagine Harald as the builder of the first church in Jelling, for he claims in his runic inscription to have “made the Danes Christian,” and he reinforced this message by having a magnificent image of the crucified Christ sculpted into the stone. Archeologists have found the remnants of several other buildings within the palisade, but not yet the king’s residence.
Among the most fascinating features of Jelling are two Viking Age graves. A disarticulated skeleton rests under the present church together with few grave goods. It appears to have been put in the grave inside precious textiles including gold threads. This grave cannot be dated exactly and may not even have been inside the church when the skeleton was buried. Another grave chamber is found in the northern mound at the exact midpoint of the [149]palisade enclosure. This chamber contains no human remains at all but plenty of grave goods, including a horse. This grave is situated also at the midpoint of the ship setting and was constructed with timber felled during the winter of 958/959. The grave chamber of the northern mound must have contained the body of a very important person, and many scholars agree that this must have been the grave of Harald’s father, Gorm (or possibly his mother, Thyre), as suggested by Harald’s runestone dedicating “this monument” to his parents.
Why have no bodily remains been found in the northern mound? If the body had been cremated, it would have left ashes. It is possible, but not very likely (given how well wood has survived in the grave), that any body once in the grave has completely disintegrated since 959. What complicates the mystery is that someone clearly broke into the grave chamber at an early point, perhaps as early as in the 960s. We may reasonably guess that the body was removed at this point from the grave in the northern mound. An attractive but unprovable theory suggests that the body was removed from the mound to be put into the grave under the church floor, thus Christianizing in retrospect the burial of King Gorm (if it indeed was he who once rested in the northern mound). Harald’s large runestone with its depiction of Christ would have had a similar effect, Christianizing the entire compound with its large “pagan” grave mounds and its ship setting.[31] Other explanations for the graves in Jelling are also possible. The skeleton in the church may be Harald Bluetooth himself; he was deposed and driven into exile by his son Svein Forkbeard, and it is possible that his body was transported back to his own royal compound after first resting in foreign lands.
We will probably never know for certain exactly who rested in each Jelling grave, but this matters little for the big picture. The Jelling compound as a whole was intended to tell a powerful story: Harald Bluetooth was a splendidly mighty and resourceful Danish king. That story becomes even more obvious if we place Jelling into context. In about 978, Harald had a long wooden bridge constructed across the swampy valley surrounding the Vejle River, a little south of Jelling. The Ravning Enge bridge was five meters broad and extended about 760 meters. It allowed the king to move [150]quickly, with his army if necessary, between southern Jutland and the central parts of the peninsula around Jelling. In this way, he avoided a long detour around the river valley.
Harald also constructed fortifications all around Denmark. In 964–968, he extended by 3.5 kilometers the Danevirke, the old wall that marked the southern border of his power on Jutland.[32] In about 980, he had built four or five circular fortifications, so-called trelleborgs. Two of them are on Jutland, one on Fyn, and one on Zealand. A fifth was most likely in Scania. They were all constructed on the same plan, with a circular palisaded wall (having an inner diameter of 120 or 240 meters, which interestingly corresponds with the 360-meter- long sides of the Jelling fence). The walls of the trelleborgs had gates at the four cardinal points of the compass. The interior was divided by two wood-paved streets into four quarters, each with four or twelve buildings, which were about thirty meters long. The buildings had different uses: dwellings, workshops, storage buildings, and stables. At least two of the trelleborgs also contained cemeteries. Harald constructed these fortifications as permanent military strongpoints, and clearly also as demonstrations of his power. With the help of troops stationed in the trelleborgs, Harald was able to dominate Denmark militarily, thus striving to control violence within his kingdom. He clearly was not lying when he claimed on the Jelling runestone to have “won all of Denmark.”
Since Harald claimed that he had won all of Denmark, he must not have started out with all of the country. His home base was clearly Jutland, where Jelling, with its runestones, mounds, and ancient church, is situated. Jutland also appears as a political unit a little earlier, in 948, when the first three bishops with sees in Danish towns were consecrated; they all resided in Jutland. We guess that Harald’s father, Gorm, at this point dominated Jutland, and was not hostile to Christianity (despite his ostentatiously pagan burial, if indeed it was he who rested in the northern mound in Jelling), considering that he welcomed bishops within his kingdom. The fact that no bishops at this time were appointed on the Danish isles or in Scania suggests that Gorm’s kingdom did not include these regions. Harald’s investments in military infrastructure allowed him to suppress the power of chieftains that might have [151]competed with him. They did not help much against his son Svein Forkbeard, who rebelled against his father in the 980s, taking over power. Harald died in exile.
King Svein appears not to have cared for his father’s military fortifications, the trelleborgs and the Ravning Enge bridge, which he allowed to decay. Perhaps he felt strong enough without them. Svein was active as a Viking raiding in England. In the early 990s, he plundered in England together with the Norwegian chieftain Olav Tryggvason. The English king Ethelred paid them a danegeld of sixteen thousand pounds of silver in 994 to make them go away. With a windfall like that, Svein might have been able to keep Danish chieftains and warriors happy with gifts. He came back for more two decades later, when he even drove Ethelred out of the country and succeeded in making himself king of England. He was proclaimed king on Christmas Day, 1013, but died suddenly only a few weeks later. His younger son Cnut managed to repeat his father’s feat in 1016 and conquered England, acquiring power also in Denmark a few years later when his brother Harald died. He would rule England for almost two decades, to be followed by his two sons. When his last son, Harthacnut, died in 1042, the old Anglo-Saxon royal family returned in the person of Edward the Confessor.
Meanwhile in Denmark, Cnut’s nephew Svein Estridsson (d. 1074) became king after an interlude with a Norwegian ruler. Svein was succeeded in turn by no less than five of his sons, most of whom fought one another bitterly. Their fratricidal strife proves that there now was a kingdom of Denmark to fight about. Denmark had definitely become more than a geographical concept, something that the papacy also recognized in 1103, when it awarded Denmark an archbishop residing in Lund. It is also at this time that we first hear of royal servants similar to those mentioned in the Norwegian Hirdlov: a marshal in 1085, a chamberlain in the early twelfth century, and royal notaries by the mid-twelfth century at the latest testify that Denmark had become a hierarchically organized society in which the king’s servants, aristocratic or not, served the needs of the kingdom.
Danish kings had long cultivated their contacts along the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, and they turned later to military [152]conquest. King Valdemar I conquered the island of Rügen, including its famed pagan temple, in 1169, and his son Valdemar II conquered Estonia in 1219.
The “way to the north” that has given its name to Norway was a sea route following the long coast with its many deep indentations and fjords. It took the chieftain Ottar, who claimed to live the farthest north of any Norwegian, about a month to sail the entire way down to the Oslo Fjord in around 900 (if his statement about this trip, preserved in Old English summary, has been correctly recorded and understood). The great span of the country plus the fact that tall mountains separate the fertile valleys, which in most places were narrow, means that Norway was more difficult to unify than Denmark. The unification often came about piecemeal with the areas around the Oslo Fjord and those around the Trondheim Fjord being controlled by different rulers for the longest time. The history of Norway is both enlightened and confused by native history writing, which began at least as early as the twelfth century and attained high literary standards with the sagas of thirteenth-century Iceland, especially the Heimskringla, a splendid narrative in Old Norse of history from hoary antiquity through the twelfth century. Like Saxo in Denmark, these writers projected back in time the unified Norway they themselves experienced.[33]
Heimskringla and other late history works celebrate Harald Fairhair (d. 930) as the first king to unify all of Norway under the rule of a single man, but contemporary sources and other shreds of evidence vaguely suggest that he may have ruled only parts of western and southern Norway. Be that as it may, it is clear that whatever lands he was able to pull together did not stay together after his death. Several of his sons held power in Norway, including Erik Bloodaxe, who became king of York in England, and Håkon the Good, who had been brought up as a Christian at the court of King Ethelstan of England. Håkon is claimed to have attempted to introduce Christianity in Norway, but his history is very poorly known.
Harald’s sons and grandsons had to compete with other Norwegian chieftains, especially the earls of Lade, and the kings of Denmark were in the habit of meddling in Norwegian affairs. Harald [153]Bluetooth claimed in the 970s on his great runestone in Jelling, as we have seen, to have “conquered Norway.” We cannot know exactly what that means, but his influence is not likely to have extended far beyond the Viken region (the area around the Oslo Fjord), and he probably controlled Norway indirectly through Norwegian clients. His son Svein Forkbeard and grandson Cnut the Great treated Norway similarly, Cnut even placing his own son Svein as king there for a few years in the early 1030s. The earls of Lade were traditionally the most important clients of the Danish kings—some of them also served King Cnut in England—although they could also be independent-minded. Two Viking adventurers, both named Olav, inserted themselves into this mix, and each was able to take control of Norway for some time around the year 1000.
Olav Tryggvason used the fortune he had made as a Viking chieftain as well as his Christianity to defeat Earl Håkon of Lade in 995 and become king. A coalition of the Danish king Svein Forkbeard, the Swedish king Olof Eriksson, and Håkon’s son Erik in turn defeated Olav in 1000 in a grand sea battle at Svölðr, an otherwise unknown location that probably was in the sound between Zealand and Scania. Another Christian Viking chieftain, Olav Haraldsson, took power over Norway in 1015 but was eventually defeated and killed in the land battle of Stiklestad (at Trondheim) in 1030. The two Olavs, who may (wrongly) have claimed descent from Harald Fairhair, became famous as missionary kings. Their hostility to the kings of Denmark also earned them posthumous praise and renown in indigenous medieval histories as heroes in the struggle for Norwegian independence. Olav Haraldsson even became a Christian saint—the most famous Scandinavian saint—and his family provided the kings of Norway for more than a century after the demise in 1035 of the Danish client king. Olav’s son Magnus took advantage of a power vacuum in Denmark to become king there as well for five years in the 1040s. Olav’s half-brother Harald Hardruler served successfully in the Byzantine emperor’s elite body guard, the so-called Varangian guard of Constantinople—the only identifiable such Scandinavian recruit to be mentioned by name in Byzantine sources—before coming back to Norway with enormous riches and a large army to share power with his nephew. Harald is [154]famous for his attempt to conquer England in 1066, being defeated and killed at the battle of Stamford Bridge just a few weeks before the arrival of William the Conqueror.
In the High Middle Ages, Norway was a strong kingdom that was able to expand its rule to the North Atlantic islands thanks to its seafaring traditions. The Orkneys, Hebrides, and Isle of Man submitted to the Norwegian king around 1100, with Iceland and Greenland following in the mid-thirteenth century.
We do not know how much of Sweden beyond the town of Birka itself was ruled by the kings whom the missionary Ansgar met there during his two visits in around 830 and 850. A merchant called Wulfstan reported in the late ninth century at the court of the English king Alfred that the svear (Swedes) dominated the western coast of the Baltic Sea through the province of Blekinge. The svear were a seafaring people, perhaps mentioned as such already by Tacitus in the first century CE, and their basis was the region around Lake Mälaren in eastern Sweden. The fertile areas around the two large southern Swedish lakes Vänern and Vättern, known as Västergötland and Östergötland, were mostly landlocked and thus not easy for the svear to dominate. Competition and tension between the svear and the residents of the two Götaland regions remained a central theme of Swedish history for centuries.[34]
The first king known to have ruled both the svear and the Götalands is Olof Eriksson, who was a Christian and fought against Olav Tryggvason at the battle of Svölðr in 1000. His descendants were important rulers in the history of Sweden into the twelfth century, but they also had competition from other chieftains who were able to seize power, at least regionally, now and then. The Danish kings meddled here, too, and at least Cnut the Great claimed to rule over parts of Sweden. The details of all this escape us, since the sources are unhelpful in the extreme. It appears clear that religion, both pagan and Christian, played a great role in the eleventh century to rally the forces on either side. From the middle of the twelfth century, two new families fought for power in a now mostly unified Sweden, which also began to look like a feudal and administrative monarchy. The country was, however, not a stable monarchy with ordered succession to the throne; most kings throughout [155]the twelfth century were murdered or fell in battle. Only with the accession of the Folkunga dynasty in the mid-thirteenth century did Sweden become a more stable kingdom, and the country now also displayed the expected feudal and administrative features that we saw in Norway at the same time. Already in the twelfth century, Swedish kings expanded their power to the other side of the Baltic Sea, especially to Finland. Gotland submitted to the Swedes through an agreement in the late thirteenth century.
The Viking Age not only brought Scandinavia into concrete and direct contact with the rest of Europe, it also took the region into the European mainstream. When Charlemagne’s courtiers jested in the 780s about converting “impious,” “brute,” and “impenetrable” Danish kings to Christianity, Scandinavia was still far outside European civilization and culture, and the Franks could only joke about the region. Their attitude became outright hostile when the Vikings began to attack, when learned clerics learned to contemplate God’s words to the prophet Jeremiah (1:14): “From the north an evil will spread out upon all the inhabitants of the land.” Scandinavia belonged to the realm of barbarians.
After the end of the Viking Age, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Scandinavia was a part of Europe, no longer an alien region beyond civilization but a region that was organized and structured along the same lines as the rest of the continent. For example, the Scandinavian population began to pay taxes and fees to their kings and other feudal overlords, just as in France, Germany, or England. This was part of a bargain through which they received protection from raids and plundering, at least in theory. During the Viking Age, kings and chieftains secured the income they felt they needed by looting and pillaging away from their own lands, which were thus left undefended and vulnerable to similar raiding by other chieftains and their warriors.[35]
To provide protection, medieval kings in Scandinavia as well as in the rest of Europe built up military resources as well as a bureaucracy to administer those resources and to collect and manage taxes and fees. The Church played a pivotal role in the process, providing [156]education as well as administrative know-how, in addition to an ideology that promoted the idea that kings ruled with divine sanction at the top of a hierarchical bureaucracy. All of Europe went through a similar transformation during the centuries after the turn of the millennium, but it was most revolutionizing in Scandinavia, which started at a very different stage of societal development. Western Europe already had kingdoms with some centralized power in the early Middle Ages, when power in Scandinavia still was fragmented and localized.
The processes that brought about the three medieval kingdoms of Scandinavia were long, complex, and violent. Many of the details are lost to history, but the main outline of events is clear. The formless but dynamic society of the Viking Age, when many chieftains competed violently with one another, was followed by the early kingdoms, where power continued to be violently contested and unstable. When such kingdoms matured, as they did in Denmark in the twelfth century and in Norway and Sweden in the thirteenth, kings enjoyed largely stable rules, and the system of taxes, fees, and hierarchy was not seriously questioned. Thus Scandinavia entered the mainstream of European history.
