The matriarch of the family was dead. She had died at the farm of her long-dead first husband, at Såsta, about seventeen kilometers north of where, a century or so later, Stockholm would be built. She died in the late eleventh century at a great age for the time, older than sixty, and she had outlived two husbands, three sons, and her stepson. None of them had been Vikings plundering around the shores of Europe, as far as we know, but they lived in the Viking Age and were no strangers to traveling far. Estrid Sigfastsdotter had always taken care of feeding and clothing her family, of bringing up the children; she carried the keys of the farm (one key followed her into the grave) and she managed the storehouses. But as the men around her died, Estrid took on an even more central role in the family, managing farms and thralls, running the family business, making the important decisions. Her influence and wealth are still discernible in the Swedish landscape through the many runic inscriptions that she decided to create to memorialize the dead of her family. But when we read the inscriptions, we are perhaps less fascinated by the men of the family than by Estrid herself, the matriarch, who stands out in unusually vivid colors.[1]
Estrid died and was buried on the farm in Såsta that she had been running for decades. Her skeleton was found in the 1990s, helping us form a basic idea of what she looked like so we may imagine her in life and death. She was 165–170 centimeters tall, lithe, and had [158]
fig. 20. When a road was widened close to two runestones in Såsta, Sweden, archeologists found a well-preserved female skeleton from the Viking Age. She has persuasively been identified as the matriarch Estrid Sigfastsdotter, who sponsored the runic inscriptions. Photo: Lars Andersson, courtesy of Stockholms läns museum.
gracious features. She had been married twice, but now she was buried next to the monument to her first husband, Östen, and the grave of their first son, Gag. Perhaps it was her decision to rest here rather than at the farm of her second husband, Ingvar; perhaps she liked Östen better. Or it could be that her surviving sons decided her final resting place. One does, however, get the impression that Estrid was used to making decisions, so I suspect she had determined her own final resting place.
Estrid did not have the satisfaction of resting next to Östen’s body, for his burial mound was empty, as she explained on the runestone that she had had erected on the site decades earlier: “Estrid had these stones raised in memory of her husband Östen. He traveled to Jerusalem and died in Greece.” Östen had made a pilgrimage to the most holy place in Christendom, the place where the Church of the Holy Sepulcher enclosed not only the tomb of Christ, but also the hill on which his cross had stood. Östen had died in transit somewhere in the Byzantine Empire—whether on [159]the way there or on his way home we cannot know—and his widow had created a cenotaph (an empty, symbolic grave mound) for him close to his farm at home. Did they bring any part of his body home with them? That would at least be possible, although we cannot check, for the mound was removed when a road was broadened in the nineteenth century. When Archbishop Unni of Bremen died in Birka in 921, his companions brought his head home to Bremen, where the priests in the twelfth century were still able to point out the small, squarish grave in the cathedral where it had been buried.[2] Perhaps Estrid (if she had accompanied Östen) similarly brought home Östen’s head, heart, or some other part of his body.
Estrid, Östen, and their family were Christians, and they put crosses on their runestones to let everyone know it. Christianity was still so much in its infancy in Sweden that consecrated cemeteries were rare, so Estrid was buried close to home, as had been the custom for centuries before the conversion. A generation or two later, the inhabitants of Såsta would be buried at the local church in Täby, but that tradition had not yet established itself in the eleventh century. Estrid and Östen were wealthy and could afford the expensive pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It makes sense that she would have accompanied him, for when she was buried, a small shrine, probably made of lindenwood and covered with painted linen, was placed in her grave. The shrine contained two coins, one of which came from Basel in Switzerland. Perhaps this was a souvenir from the trip.
On an island in Lake Constance, now on the border between Germany and Switzerland, the old monastery of Reichenau maintained lists of its benefactors. This “Book of Life” contains thousands of names and the monks would have prayed for the persons listed. The list includes the names “Östen, Estrid,” written consecutively in the eleventh century. Are these the names of our Swedish pilgrims who would have rested in the monastery before their arduous crossing of the Alps on their way south? The name immediately before theirs was “Sven,” a name carried by one of their sons. Other Scandinavian names follow immediately afterward: Esbjörn, Åskatla, Tor, Torun. One gets the distinct impression of a group of Scandinavian pilgrims stopping at Reichenau and making [160]the appropriate donations to have their names remembered. One of the best ways to get from Scandinavia to Reichenau was to travel upstream on the Rhine. If this was the way Estrid and Östen went, they would have passed Basel on the way, where Estrid might have picked up her souvenir.[3]
Also in Estrid’s shrine were three weights of the kind used by those who needed to weigh silver and other precious metals. They symbolize Estrid’s responsibility for managing family affairs; she paid and received money and silver, which she may have stored in the small lindenwood shrine, which could be locked with a key. The Scandinavian economy was only partially monetized in Estrid’s time, meaning that coins typically were weighed, not counted, when used as a means of exchange. Together with the evidence of the runic inscriptions, the contents of her grave portray Estrid as an independent and active woman. She sponsored, alone or together with her close relatives, five runic inscriptions to commemorate her dead relatives—her husbands Östen and Ingvar, and her sons Gag, Ingefast, and Ingvar.[4]
Estrid must have been born a decade or two after the turn of the millennium, and she was given a name that was unusual in Scandinavia at that time. The king of the Swedes, Olof Eriksson, was married to a woman from the Mecklenburg area of northern Germany. Her name was Estrid, and it is possible that our Estrid got her name from the queen. Scandinavian chieftains and kings used Christianity and especially the relationship-creating ceremony of baptism to create and confirm alliances with the great men and women of their kingdoms. Perhaps Queen Estrid was the godmother of little Estrid, giving her an unusual name associated with royalty. That would mean that Estrid’s father, Sigfast, a local chieftain residing on the farm Snåttsta, fifteen kilometers to the north of where his daughter was buried, was one of King Olof ’s loyal men. That relationship would have been so important to the king that he tied Sigfast closer to himself by having his queen sponsor the baptism of Sigfast’s daughter. We know of a similar event from about the same period in Norway, where King Olav Haraldsson was the godfather of the daughter of his warrior and poet Sigvat Thordarson.[5] [161]
Whether or not Estrid’s name was given her by the queen, she belonged to the richest and most important class in Swedish society, and it is hard to argue that her life in general was typical for Viking Age women. But aspects of her life certainly were. For example, it is typical that we know the names of seven of her sons but not of a single daughter. It is hard to believe that she would not have had any daughters. The fact that we do not know of any must be because nobody, not even Estrid, saw any reason to memorialize the names of daughters with a runic inscription. Or perhaps the woman Åskatla mentioned in the Book of Life at Reichenau shortly after Estrid may have been a daughter who accompanied her parents on the pilgrimage.
The names of women were less important than the names of men in early medieval society. We discern this phenomenon in the Old Norse poem The List of Rig, in which a god taking on the name Rig visited representative homes of the three social classes of early medieval Scandinavia: slaves, farmers, and magnates. The poem gives the names of the twelve sons of the representative magnates, Jarl and his wife Erna, but it does not mention any daughters, an omission that a recent editor understands as deliberate.[6] This was a patriarchal society, in which, essentially, only men were important enough to be commemorated by having their names chiseled into stone. Women were subordinate to men.
This uncompromising image of male domination is, however, considerably tempered when one looks more closely at the evidence—for example, the three thousand or so runestones we know of from Scandinavia. Estrid was, to be sure, an exceptional woman to be so very active in erecting runestones, but many other women also appear in the runic record. We actually know the names of Estrid’s sister Gudrid and her sister-in-law Inga, the latter also appearing in more than one inscription. Estrid was able to create runic monuments because, as the person in charge of a large farm, she had the economic resources to do so. Many women in fact had such resources. Almost 12 percent of the runestones known from Scandinavia were, according to their inscriptions, erected by women acting alone. An additional 15 percent were commissioned by women together with men. These statistics warn us [162]against drawing glib conclusions about the relationship between women and men in Viking Age Scandinavia.[7]
Another way in which Estrid’s experience is typical of women of her time is that some of her children died before she did. Her son Ingefast was an adult, a married man with at least two sons, when he died, but her first-born son (as far as we know), Gag, was only about ten when he died, if archeologists are correct in identifying him with a boy’s skeleton found in a grave close to Estrid’s. Gag had suffered from diseases such as a severe ear infection. The uneven growth of the enamel on his teeth suggests that he was malnourished during at least three periods when he was between one and five years old. We should remember that even rich people, as Estrid’s family clearly were, could suffer from malnutrition during years of extreme famine. But it is also possible that Gag suffered from some disease that made it impossible for him to eat properly or to absorb the nutrition in the food he ate.
It is a cliché that children died in devastatingly large numbers before the invention of modern medicine. In Sweden’s oldest reliable population statistics, from the period 1751–1800, for example, about 40 percent of children died before they were four years old. The Viking Age appears to be different, though. Archeologists have examined many Scandinavian grave fields from the period, including fields used by the agricultural population, and thus not just by elite groups such as warriors and merchants, where one would not expect many graves of children. Only about 10 percent of the graves in the grave fields of Swedish Viking Age farms were occupied by children. This number should be compared to the corresponding figure from the early Iron Age (roughly 500 BCE–500 CE), when 30 percent of the graves were dug for children. Similarly, a large inventory of 320 Viking Age graves in Denmark showed that only 9 percent contained the remnants of children.
Such evidence may suggest that during the Viking Age Scandinavia experienced low child mortality, but it does not seem very likely that the graves are telling the whole story. Other explanations for the relative and unexpected lack of children’s graves have been sought, but there is no agreement among specialists.[8] Perhaps the bodies of dead children were disposed of in some way other than [163]burial in the usual grave field. A Viking Age cemetery in Fjälkinge, Scania, which has been carefully examined, provides a more representative image of child mortality. Of 128 burials, 79 were of children, most of whom died in their first year. If a child survived to five years old, she had a great chance of reaching forty. Few reached sixty, as Estrid did.[9]
A reason to think that the Viking Age was not a period of relative health with low child mortality is that those who lived to an adult age were not as tall as people in previous and later periods. A person’s adult height depends partially on the quality of the nutrition she received as a child. In the Fjälkinge grave field, adult males were 160–185 centimeters tall while women measured 151–171 centimeters. Estrid, 165–170 centimeters, was thus a little taller than average. The average height of Viking Age skeletons found in Denmark is 171 for men and 158 centimeters for women. That is shorter than for the previous period (175 and 162, respectively) and for the following high and late Middle Ages (173 and 160). The man, more than sixty years old, buried close to Estrid at Såsta (nobody has come up with a plausible identification for him, but it is likely that he was one of her relatives, perhaps even her second husband, Ingvar) was a stately 180–185 centimeters tall. This is in accordance with another finding of the Danish height study: there is a correlation between wealth and being tall. The man buried at Såsta clearly belonged to the upper stratum of the agricultural population.
Archeological investigations of the graves tell us a great deal about the life and death of ordinary families. Husband and wife appear buried next to each other, just as Estrid was buried next to Östen’s symbolic grave. There are few differences between the graves in which men were buried and those of women. Men’s graves are typically a little larger and more prominent, while women were attired for burial with more jewelry and dress details of metal. Men’s graves from before the conversion to Christianity (which outlawed grave goods) contain bones from more animal species than women’s graves. Bones from dog, sheep, and roosters appear often in graves for both sexes, whereas horse and pig bones typically are found only in men’s graves. A few women’s graves contain these kinds of animal bones and are also prominently situated. A [164]reasonable interpretation of such graves is that they contain the bodies of women who, like Estrid, had a prominent position in society (for example, as owners and managers of important farms).
What men and women had in common, irrespective of social class, was that they were much affected by disease. Both Estrid and, to an even higher degree, the tall man who was buried close to her had severe problems with their teeth, as did everyone who survived to mature age in the Viking Age. Their teeth were infected to such a degree that it is visible in their skeletons, although caries was seldom the cause. The molars (grinders) in their mouths were worn down almost to the gum, because they ate bread, porridge, and other products made from grain that had been threshed on the ground. Dust and sand thus were mixed in with the grain, which wears down the teeth. In the cemetery from Fjälkinge with 128 carefully examined Viking Age skeletons, people over age sixty had lost, on average, two-thirds of their teeth. A fifth of the adults and almost all children buried in the Fjälkinge cemetery suffered from iron deficiency, probably because of parasites or bacteria that gave their hosts persistent diarrhea. Almost half of the adult individuals from this cemetery had suffered from some health problem that is still visible on their skeletons or teeth. Broken bones are legion; Estrid had once broken her arm, but it had healed nicely. Older women have many knee injuries, and a few persons who were buried at the edge of the Fjälkinge cemetery suffered from leprosy. The usual image of the Vikings as able-bodied, strong, and healthily virile men has an important corrective in the skeletons surviving from actual Viking Age Scandinavians.
Some historians have suggested that women played an important role in Scandinavia during the Viking Age, for they would have stayed at home managing the farms while their husbands sailed out to raid as Vikings. This conclusion is based on the idea that, during the Viking Age, all or most able-bodied men in Scandinavia were Vikings and left home for months or years on end. This is a gross exaggeration. The Viking raiding parties were small and, as far as we know, to a large part made up of young men who did not own much, if any, landed property, and who were typically not married. The reason they went out raiding was that they had [165]no farms to manage at home. They were men like the Norwegian Bjor, who “died in the retinue when Cnut attacked England,” according to the runestone that his father, Arnsteinn, erected in his memory.[10] It is possible that Bjor could have expected to inherit something from his father, who must have been a wealthy man since he could afford a runestone, but if there were many sons in the family and Bjor was one of the younger ones, he could not have expected to get much landed property. He may have opted to try his luck with the Danish king Cnut, who in 1018 conquered England. Bjor appears to have been a typical Viking: a younger son with few prospects in life except those he could create for himself. He may have hoped for a piece of land in England to cultivate, or a sufficient share in Cnut’s booty that he could live comfortably for the rest of his life. A few generations earlier, the Viking chieftain Halvdan provided such opportunities to his followers when he “divided up the land of Northumbria.” His Vikings then “plowed and provided for themselves.”[11] They were not men who had much to return to in Scandinavia.
Women in any case played important roles that had nothing to do with their husbands being away on Viking raids.[12] In premodern agricultural societies, the daily work of farms required the constant participation of both men and women. A farm could not really function if it was not headed by a couple, which is the reason why widowed family heads typically remarried very quickly, as Estrid did after the death of her first husband, Östen. The loss of a wife or a husband was a catastrophe, as the Swedish farmer Holmgaut felt acutely after his wife Odindisa died in the late eleventh century: “No better housewife ruling the farm will come to Hassmyra,” he inscribed sorrowfully in the Old Norse poetic meter of fornyrðislag on her memorial runestone.[13]
In Viking Age Scandinavia, women and men had relatively clearly defined domains in which they worked, domains later specified in law, and that we hear about in literature and see in grave goods. The medieval Icelandic law book Grágás specified that the wife was responsible for affairs “within the threshold” (that is, inside the house) while the husband was in charge of everything outside.[14] [166]
Notable in women’s graves are the many tools for textile work, such as spindles for spinning and warp weights from looms. The work of producing clothes was women’s work in the Viking Age, as in many other periods of history. Textiles were made both from animal fibers, especially wool, and from vegetable fibers such as flax and hemp. The processes that made clothing from sheep’s wool and growing flax plants was long and time-consuming. The sheep had to be sheared of their wool. Scissors had been introduced to Scandinavia in the first century CE, but the old method of tearing the wool from the sheep with one’s hands was still in use in the Viking Age. The wool then had to be cleaned, sorted, and combed to produce the long fibers that could be spun into worsted yarn. By the Viking Age, the sheep of Scandinavia had been bred to produce white wool (before the Common Era, they had been black, gray, or brown).
The harvesting and preparation of flax to make linen was similarly labor-intensive. The combed wool or flax was put on a distaff and was spun by hand with a spindle. When the god Rig wandered around the world (according to the Old Norse poem The List of Rig), he met the ancestress of all the stout farmers of the world:
On it sat a woman, spinning with a distaff,
stretching out the thread, preparing for weaving.[15]
The thread was then woven, typically on a vertical loom with weights keeping the warp straight, producing twill fabric. We can count on this being done in every homestead of Scandinavia, requiring a great deal of work from the women of the family. It was laborious indeed to weave the cloth needed to produce the huge sails of the ships used by Vikings, merchants, and others, and it was women’s work, as Ottar the Black, a court poet of King Cnut of England and Denmark, admitted when praising the ship the king commanded:
You cut the high, engulfing waves
with a smoothed rudder;
the sail, which women had spun,
played against the mast-top
on the reindeer of the roller (= ship).[16]
The cloth was colored with dye from a variety of vegetable sources: for example, woad (blue), madder (red), and perhaps walnut shells (brown).
By the Viking Age, well-to-do families no longer needed to produce their own cloth; high-quality wool and linen fabrics were produced commercially in several Scandinavian centers, in western Norway, on Gotland, on Zealand, and in Finland. For anyone who could afford to purchase such ready-made textiles (and they appear only in the graves of the well-to- do), it would be an enormous saving of work. Women cut the fabric and made it into clothes. Early medieval clothes in Scandinavia were mainly made of wool and linen. No complete article of clothing survives for either men or women, and wool survives better than linen, but many fragments help give an idea of the typical dress.[17]
Both men and women used brooches to hold their clothing in place. Their clothes were layered—perhaps to be expected in a highly variable climate like Scandinavia, with warm summers and bitterly cold winters. Women wore a long shift under a long, tight-fitting dress that reached from the armpits to midcalf. Straps that were fastened at the front by two large oval bronze brooches held the dress up. These brooches are typical of women’s dress and are found all over Scandinavia as well as in areas that have been culturally influenced by Scandinavia, such as Russia. They must have been mass-produced and their decoration is rather stereotypical. Most women also wore a scarf or a cloak, fastened with another brooch, on top of the dress. An almost obligatory part of female attire during the Viking Age were strands of beads of glass, metal, amber, and other materials, which a woman wore as a necklace or hanging from her dress.[18]
Men typically wore trousers, which could be of different lengths and cuts, and a shirt, which could be loose-or tight-fitting (the man Rig encountered in the peasant farmhouse wore a “close-fitting shirt”).[19] Over the shirt, men wore a cloak of heavier material, fastened over the right shoulder with a brooch or with ties. This kept the right arm free for handling a sword, a knife, or another tool. Men and women wore shoes or boots, which could have long or short shafts. Clogs with soles made of wood were also used. [168]Shoemaking was a very common craft in the trade towns of Scandinavia, and archeologists have found a lot of Viking Age shoes in excavations.
The dress I have described is the “Sunday best” worn by wealthy, or at least well-to-do, women and men. The wealthier they were, the more luxuriously their dresses might be adorned. The man buried toward the end of the tenth century in Mammen, Jutland, was clearly a very wealthy man, and his dress included bands of silk, marmot fur, sequins, and embroidery depicting leopards.[20] The decoration of the dress of wealthy people could include silver and gold threads. Of course, less wealthy people would wear less luxurious variants of the standard dress. Common to all, however, was that every one of the many steps in the process of making clothes, from shearing the sheep and reaping the flax to cutting and sewing, was a female task (with the possible exception of making shoes).
Another especially female task was preparing food for the family. In the Viking Age as in many other time periods, it was women who managed the dairy products, baked the bread, cooked the meals, and prepared the drinks. They cooked food over the fire hearth in the farmhouses, in cauldrons of iron or soapstone that hung on chains, or they fried it on spits or in frying pans. In graves, both men and women were often accompanied by utensils for food preparation. The production of milk, butter, cheese, and other dairy products belonged entirely to the women’s domain, even if they sometimes milked cows and sheep “outside the threshold.” In the winter, they cared for the animals inside the longhouses of the homesteads, but in the summer, the animals would be grazing farther away from the farms, being watched over by male and female shepherds, who would also milk them. After milking, it was the women’s task to sieve the milk, probably in the perforated ceramic vessels that archeologists have found at many Viking Age farms. Similar vessels were used when separating the curds from the whey in the cheese-making process.
Bread was often given as grave gifts, and when they were included in cremations, they carbonized, which meant that they have a greater chance of surviving until today, when scholars can analyze them. Viking Age bread was, leavened or not, made [169]in different sizes, from smallish round buns, five centimeters in diameter, to larger loaves reaching eighteen centimeters. They were mostly thin, from 0.5 to 1.5 centimeters thick, and typically round (though occasionally oval and rectangular loaves are found). The main ingredient in the breads was hulled six-row barley, which during the Viking Age was the most commonly cultivated grain in Scandinavia. Other grains such as rye, spelt, oats, and flax, or even peas, could be mixed into the bread. Sometimes the ground inner bark of pine has been mixed into the bread, which contributed vitamin C to the diet, preventing scurvy. Another additive to bread could be blood, producing various kinds of black pudding. The bread was baked in ovens, which existed in Scandinavia for centuries before the Viking Age. Grain was also an ingredient in beer and other brewed drinks. Brewing took place in the kitchen and was a female task.
The grain obviously grew outside the threshold, so it was a male task of managing the fields—to fertilize, plow, sow, harvest, and thresh—although all able members of the household would help during the particularly labor-intensive stages of the process of producing grain, especially during the harvest. The cycle of grain production began with plowing. In the Viking Age, Scandinavian farmers mostly used the ard (also known as the scratch plow), which was a nearly vertical spike. It produces a deep scratch in the soil, breaking it up, but not turning it over (as with later medieval and modern plows provided with a moldboard). For this reason, farmers typically cross-plowed their fields, meaning that they went over the same ground once or twice again, plowing across the scratches they had previously made. The ard was typically pulled by oxen, but in the absence of such animals slaves would do.[21] The ard was originally made entirely of wood. Its cutting edge would quickly become dull with use and would have to be replaced every other day or so, as scholars have discovered in modern experiments. Beginning in the early Middle Ages, the ard’s edge would be made of less destructible iron, saving much time and effort.
More advanced plows, including moldboards, show up already in the Scandinavian Viking Age, at least in Denmark, where some fields thus plowed have been examined by archeologists. Fields [170]plowed with moldboard plows are recognizable because they produce broader furrows than the simple ard, plus these plows move soil a little to one side. Since one tended to plow long and narrow fields (presumably because it was difficult to turn the moldboard plow, which typically was drawn by oxen), going back and forth on different sides of the field, those fields tended over the years to become convex: higher in the middle than on the sides. They are, thus, easily recognizable—for example, when archeologists remove layers of wind-blown sand lying on top of them, as often must be done in western Denmark.
Viking Age farmers saved dung from both animals and humans to be spread as fertilizer on the fields. In addition, they, or at least some of them, practiced crop rotation, alternating different crops and letting the soil sometimes rest by leaving it fallow, practices that replenish nutrition in the soil. When the grain was ready to be harvested, the farmer cut it with a scythe and typically the women of the farm raked. Threshing was men’s work and was probably done with clubs and pokes, not with flails, since archeologists have not found any flail datable to the Scandinavian Viking Age. What was then done to the grain was the task of the women, who might grind it on hand mills and bake bread, as we saw. Or they might make porridge or gruel (probably more often than they made bread), or they might brew beer and ale from it.
Hand mills could be found at most Viking Age Scandinavian farms, but water-powered mills were beginning to appear also in the North at this time. They were already common in England and the Frankish Empire, where they were investments made by lords, who used them as a means to get greater income from the farmers who wanted to grind their grain. It is likely that the few Scandinavian water mills that archeologists have examined (mainly in Denmark) were constructed for powerful people.
Grain had long been cultivated in Scandinavia, but it had not been the main source of nourishment. The acreage devoted to grain was comparatively small. This changed during the Viking Age, when the typical medieval diet was introduced into Scandinavia, as in the rest of Europe, with a much greater focus on cultivation and consumption of grain than previously. Pastures and meadows [171]were put to the (improved and thus more productive) plow and made into grain fields. The shift began in southern Scandinavia and moved slowly north.
In most of Viking Age Scandinavia, much farmwork focused on animal husbandry. Animals were used primarily to produce milk and wool and as a source of power as draft animals and riding horses, rather than as livestock for meat. In fact, it was during famines when all other food had been consumed and farmers were facing starvation that they would actually kill and eat their animals. The traditions of keeping cattle, sheep, and horses go back a long time in Scandinavia. Pigs had always been raised, as in the rest of Europe. In the eighth century, however, pigs became much more common in Europe, and this happened to some extent in Scandinavia, although not on nearly as large a scale. The reason for this shift appears to be the intensifying focus on grain production, which removed much of the pasture land where sheep and cattle might graze. The diet of pigs is different from those animals, since they thrive on household waste as well as acorns and other forest products. The osteological evidence of animal bones as household waste reveals that during the Viking Age pork appeared on the table of the wealthy; pig bones have been found predominantly at magnate farms and in the towns. People who could afford it ate beef, chicken, and venison. Fish was on everyone’s table and was an important part of the diet.[22]
Also changing, and first among the wealthy, was the layout of the farms themselves. The center of the farm was the longhouse, a type of house that by the beginning of the Viking Age had dominated in northern Europe for hundreds of years. Two Viking era farmhouses in Vorbasse on Jutland, Denmark, measured thirty-three meters in length. Longhouses had three naves. A double row of interior wooden posts, connected in pairs by beams, carried the weight of the roof. Other posts were placed along the walls, and they were connected by beams with the double post rows in the middle of the building. The roof was covered with whatever suitable material was available in the region, such as straw, water reed, heather, or wood shingles. The walls were at first constructed by weaving thin wooden reeds between upright wooden stakes and [172]then daubing the resulting lattice with clay or other sticky materials (wattle and daub). Later on in the Viking Age, planks were used instead for the walls. The floor was probably simple stamped earth, although there could be raised areas covered with planks. A hearth somewhere in the middle of the living quarters provided heat, light, and plenty of smoke, since there were no chimneys. The smoke would seek its way out through small openings in the walls and perhaps the roof, which must have been provided with shutters. There was not a lot of furniture in the houses of ordinary farmers, although the wealthy would have had beautifully carved chairs and beds with soft bedding stuffed with feathers and down, as demonstrated by the items buried in Oseberg in 834. Benches along the walls as well as chests provided places to sit. The walls sported rugs and tapestries that not only were decorative but also protected against drafts. The farmer’s longhouse must in addition have contained a lot of equipment, especially for the women’s work “within the threshold”: cooking utensils, storage jars, a hand mill, and looms.[23]
When archeologists excavate longhouses, the only thing remaining typically is traces of the postholes, which gives a basic idea of the architecture of the house but little information about its height. Only once have almost intact wall posts been discovered. They had been reused to line the walls of a well in Vorbasse in Jutland, which served to preserve them. Those posts are 180 centimeters long, suggesting that the walls of longhouses, at least of those belonging to the well-to- do, may have been about that tall. Since Viking Age people seldom were taller than that, most would have been able to walk straight through the door opening. Chieftains’ halls could certainly stand taller than the one in Vorbasse. Judging from the angle of the raking timbers on the great hall at Lejre, Zealand, the side walls would have been three to four meters tall, which would allow for the ridge of the roof to be some ten meters above ground. That was a stately house built to impress, much like Hrothgar’s hall Heorot described in the Beowulf poem: “The hall towered high.”[24] The chieftain’s hall had better be an impressive building; it was the center of his world. It was here that he feasted with his followers and that he sacrificed to his gods. People came to see him in the hall, [173]and he gathered his warriors here before going out to plunder as a Viking in Europe or before attacking the chieftain in the next valley.
Unlike the chieftain’s hall, the farmer’s longhouse was divided by interior walls into several rooms, which each would have had its own designated use. Originally, people lived in one end of the house, typically in the western end, and the animals in the other, at least during the winter (so the women’s work of milking the animals really was “within the threshold”). The longhouses could be up to forty meters long and thus truly deserved their name.
Building traditions changed fundamentally during the Viking Age. The longhouses no doubt survived in some places much as they had for centuries, including the space for animals at the eastern end. Two significant developments took place, however: the great halls of chieftains developed from the ordinary farmer’s longhouse at the same time as most ordinary farmers built smaller dwelling houses and began to house the animals in separate buildings. Farms began to consist of several houses, each with its own designated use—for example, for different kinds of crafts, such as weaving, baking, and carpentry. Outbuildings used for such purposes were typically pithouses, partially dug into the soil. The excavated farm Lillinggården, close to Herning in western Jutland, Denmark, consisted of five buildings. The dwelling house was a longhouse of almost twenty-five meters, including at least one inner wall and a fireplace. A smaller building stood close by and may have been a workshop, a storage house, or an extra dwelling house. A little farther away were the barn and the stable. Unusually, at Lillinggården archeologists have been able to identify a pole barn, that is, a shedlike structure, mainly used for storage, that consists of four poles carrying a roof. This shed may have had simple walls, but no traces of them survive.
Viking Age farms were surrounded by fences, which kept animals away from grazing in the farmer’s cultivations, just as in more recent times. Doors on residences may have been decorated with woodcarvings or iron fittings, and they may have contained locks made of wood or iron. The mistress of the house would normally have carried the keys to the houses. Many women were buried with their keys, made out of iron or bronze. The museums of Scandinavia contain many Viking Age keys. [174]
fig. 21. Medieval women carried the keys to the important buildings at their farms, and many of them, including Estrid Sigfastsdotter, were buried with at least one of their keys. These examples come from several women’s graves in Sweden. Photo courtesy of Riksantikvarieämbetet, Stockholm. [175]
The architecture of the dwelling houses of ordinary farmers changed in ways similar to those of the chieftains’ halls. More and more of the interior posts were removed, creating large interior spaces, but it also meant that more of the weight of the roof rested on the walls, which became buttressed by raking timbers. New types of constructions also appeared, such as timber houses standing on stone sills, which would become typical in the Middle Ages and beyond.
Farms were either found alone in isolated locations or clustered in villages, especially on the plains of southern Scandinavia. While the farm buildings during the Iron Age often were rebuilt at new locations close by when the old buildings needed to be replaced, they became stationary during the Viking Age. Not uncommonly, farms are still to be found in the same spots as a thousand years ago, or at least they remained in those spots until they were moved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when many villages were reapportioned. Farmers who lived in villages performed some of the agricultural work, such as sowing, harvesting, and fencing, in collaboration with one another, and they would also share some more expensive equipment.
When thinking about Scandinavian farms during the Viking Age, it is easy to imagine each farm as self-sufficient and isolated, simply sustaining the people living on the farm by producing just enough food, so there would be no reason to be in contact with the greater world around each individual homestead. But this is not how Viking Age agricultural society worked in Scandinavia. Many would have had brothers and sons, and perhaps also daughters, who participated in Viking raids, served as mercenaries in Constantinople and elsewhere, went on pilgrimages to the holy places of their religion (like Östen in Såsta going to Jerusalem), or traded furs, slaves, and silver in foreign countries. Farmers did many things that connected them to the outside world, even when they stayed at home on the farm. They had not personally manufactured every tool they used. The soapstone pots many used for cooking had been transported from Norway. The iron of the plow bill had been transported from the iron-producing regions of Sweden and sold on a market. Of course, some farmers supplemented their agricultural [176]work by mining soapstone and making pots, while others shoveled lake ore out of lakes, streams, and marshes, and then smelted the ore to make iron. All of them would have been tied into a commercial network that appears to have functioned well, even though for most of the Viking Age Scandinavia had no money economy. That is why household managers like Estrid needed scales to be able to carefully weigh the silver (or other precious objects) used for payment. Scales and weights are often found in Viking Age graves, and not only in merchant graves.
We should remember that there were substantial groups in the population of Viking Age Scandinavia who did not produce food but still needed to consume it. The great men and women of the halls surely owned large farms where they had slaves and employees who produced food for them, but they may still have needed to buy more than they produced, since a great chieftain needed to entertain many, many followers with food. Likewise, trade towns such as Hedeby and Birka had large populations that needed to be fed. Many more people lived there than could be fed with the produce of the immediately surrounding area, so food must have been brought in from the outside, even from far away. Archeologists have found some hints about how food might have been provided for these towns.
The farm at Sanda lay in Sweden not far north of the current site of Stockholm. The settlement expanded strongly just before and during the Viking Age. A large three-aisled hall remained on the same spot for five hundred years, although it was rebuilt at least twice. When it was reconstructed at some point between 850 and 950, it was twenty-five meters long and six meters wide. This was clearly the residence of rich people. Three other archeological finds make Sanda stand out among other farms. Unexpectedly, much burned grain, mainly the unusual high-status variety of wheat (triticum aestivum), was found. Several of the outbuildings contained ovens. A lot of worn-out millstones had been used to build hearths in some of the houses, starting in the tenth century. Taken together, these findings suggest that Sanda was a center for the production of wheat flour and also for baking bread. What the millers and bakers produced was high-status stuff, far more than would [177]have been consumed on-site. These products were probably transported to and consumed at some high-status location where much food was needed. The most likely candidate is the trade town Birka, some thirty kilometers to the southwest. It seems that at least the wealthier people in Birka got their bread or their flour from Sanda.
Further exchange of goods is implied at Sanda, for the surroundings are marshy and unsuitable for growing much wheat, so it must have been grown elsewhere and transported there. The millstones also come from elsewhere, farther north in Sweden. This single site reveals itself as a node in a network of goods exchange that brought in millstones and wheat and sent on flour and bread. The owner of Sanda must have been able to make a good profit on providing food to Birka: he or she constructed a hall with a surrounding stone terrace as a visible manifestation of wealth and power.[25]
When considering life at home on the farm in the Viking Age, we must be careful not to idealize and make peasant life in former times seem idyllic. Farmwork was (and is) unpleasant, laborious, and back-breakingly hard. In the early Middle Ages, almost all work had to be done manually with what even hobbyist gardeners today would consider inadequate tools, mostly made of wood. In the absence of moldboard plows, for example, farmers would need occasionally to turn the soil with a spade. If they, as was common, had to use a wooden spade, they would quickly wear it down and have to manufacture a new one. To make a dress from growing flax or sheep wool was a process in many steps, each of which required both skill and hard work. It is difficult for modern people living in the West to imagine how hard life was for medieval peasants, although we might get some idea if we study farmers in the developing world.
During the Middle Ages, the upper classes knew how hard farmers worked. The old Scandinavian poem The List of Rig imagines how hard work deformed the physical features of an agricultural thrall:
On his hands there was wrinkled skin,
crooked knuckles,
thick fingers, he had an ugly face
a crooked back, long heels.
They put dung on the fields, worked with swine,
looked after goats, dug the turf.[26]
More details are filled in by a school text written in England in about 1000, which is framed as a conversation between a master and his student. The text is in Latin with an Old English translation between the lines. The student takes on the role of people at different stations in society. When he plays the role of the plowman, he says: “Oh, my lord, I work too hard. I go out at dawn, driving the cattle to the field, and I yoke them to the plow. The winter weather is never so bad that I dare to hide out at home . . . but when the oxen are yoked, and the plowshare and coulter attached to the plow, I must plow one whole field a day, or more.” When asked what more the plowman does, the student answered: “I must fill the manger of the oxen with hay, and water them and carry out the dung.” “Oh, oh, that is really hard work,” responded the master.[27]
Not only was agricultural work hard, the farmer was also always threatened by natural disasters as well as willful destruction by hostile bands of warriors. If the harvest failed, perhaps several years in a row, poor people might simply starve to death, or die of any of the many diseases that often accompany famines. Medieval chronicles and other records of contemporary events often describe famines in Europe. No such sources are preserved describing famines in Viking Age Scandinavia, but there is no reason to believe that Scandinavia escaped the disasters that afflicted Europe. After all, the climate is colder to start with in Scandinavia than in the more southerly latitudes of Europe for which we have sources. Since it has been established that periods of bad weather (often implying crop failure and famine) could occur globally as a result of, for example, volcanic eruptions spewing ash into the atmosphere, such episodes would certainly affect Scandinavia as well; indeed, they are discernible in the ice cores taken from the glaciers of Greenland.[28]
One of the most eloquent descriptions of a European famine was written by the loquacious French monk Rodulfus Glaber, whose [179]description of the great famine of the years surrounding year 1000 is probably exaggerated but still suggestive:
A famine raged in the whole Roman [= Catholic] world for five years. It was so terrible that there was no region which was not destitute and without bread. Many people died for lack of food. In many parts of the world the dire famine forced people to eat not just the flesh of unclean animals and reptiles, but also that of men, women, and children; not even family relationship could prevent it. The famine had become so savage that grown sons ate their mothers while mothers did the same to their babies, lost to all maternal love.[29]
Of course, farmers of every time period develop strategies for managing failed crops and bad weather, to avoid starving. When the grain harvest was small, they would mix grain with other edible products of nature, such as roots and the inner bark of certain trees. Those who lived close to the sea or other bodies of water would fish more if land crops failed. For most farmers, the animals themselves, mostly kept for their milk, fur, or as sources of power, were a food of last resort. People would also eat the fodder set aside for the animals to eat during the winter when they were kept in barns. Even as late as the nineteenth century, cattle were often so starved by the end of the winter that they were unable to walk out of their barns when spring finally came.
Not only nature visited farmers with disasters. War and violence were manmade tragedies for the population. The Vikings are, of course, infamous for inflicting such suffering on the population of Europe, but we should not imagine that the warlike chieftains and their warrior bands remained peaceful within Scandinavia itself. Before being united into the three kingdoms Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in around 1000, many chieftains in Scandinavia would inflict violence on their major competitors. There were no states to check them; only the threat of other chieftains and their warrior bands could stop them.
We have every right to expect that Scandinavian chieftains fought one another at least as often as they attacked Europeans, and we should not think that any farmer who happened to be in the [180]way would have been spared, or that his crops and animals would not have been destroyed. Farmers would probably look to local chieftains for protection, but they had little recourse if those chieftains lost the competition with other chieftains. Written sources seldom or never tell us about such “collateral” damage, although they make abundantly clear that Scandinavia was not a peaceful place during the Viking Age.
The Beowulf poet had an acute sense of people’s suffering in war. King Beowulf had been able to protect his Geatish people (who were Scandinavians) from raids by hostile forces, but he died at the end of the poem. On the poem’s last page, a Geatish woman (her hair was bound up, which means that she was old) lamented the death of her people’s protector and foretold a terrible future:
And a sorrowful song sang the Geatish woman,
with hair bound up, for Beowulf the king,
with sad cares, earnestly said,
that she dreaded the hard days ahead,
the times of slaughter, the host’s terror,
harm and captivity.[30]
It was dangerous to be a Viking, to sail out to Europe to raid and pillage, since the intended victims might at any point fight back, injuring or killing attackers. But to stay at home on the farm was not necessarily a much safer alternative. All your diligent work to grow grain, care for your animals, fish, and harvest might be for naught if nature sent bad weather, or if your chieftain’s enemies from the next valley showed up with an armed band of warriors.
