Through the centuries, countless throngs have visited Hagia Sophia, the magnificent basilica that Emperor Justinian built in the 530s in his capital, Constantinople (now Istanbul), and dedicated to Holy Wisdom. When new, the building was an architectural wonder of which Justinian was rightly proud; after inspecting the finished building, he is said to have exclaimed, “Solomon, I have outdone you!” (referring to the builder of the Temple in Jerusalem). What continues to amaze visitors to the building is its remarkably large dome, which has withstood the ravages of time for nearly fifteen centuries, a wonder of mathematical calculations and structural engineering in the sixth century.
The building itself, which is no longer a church, has acquired many scars over the centuries. Its walls have graffiti from different periods in different languages, which have only recently been the subject of scholarly study. Among the many words scratched into the marble of Hagia Sophia, one in particular stands out. At some point during the Viking Age a Scandinavian inscribed his name, Halvdan, in runes, in addition to a few more runes that have not yet been persuasively interpreted. It is tempting to speculate about Halvdan, who shared his name not only with the first Norse king of Northumbria and with the first known Danish envoy to the court of Charlemagne, but also with more than two dozen Scandinavians known from runic inscriptions.[1] Why was Halvdan in Hagia Sophia? Was he a Scandinavian pilgrim on his way to the Holy Land? Or was he one of the mercenaries in the emperor’s elite [214]Varangian guard who was commanded to attend mass and, in his boredom, showed off his knowledge of runes? Was he a Christian merchant who celebrated in church the lucky outcome of a business deal? We cannot know the answers to these questions, and until the rest of the runes he inscribed are interpreted, we have no context for his name.
Halvdan was able to read and write the distinctive early medieval script system of northern Europe that we call Scandinavian runes. This was a development of Mediterranean alphabetic scripts that had been adapted to be inscribed, especially in wood but also in stone. Thousands of runic inscriptions have been preserved all around Scandinavia, most famously on the thousands of inscribed stones that dot the Nordic countryside. Most runic inscriptions were, however, made in wood and therefore have perished. We get a hint of what must have once existed through the thousands of pieces of wood with runic inscriptions that were found during archeological excavations in Bergen, Norway, where special circumstances helped the wood survive for centuries underground. The inscriptions here, most of which are from just after the end of the Viking Age, range from simple ownership notes to love poetry, from urgent merchant letters to coarse obscenities. One small piece of wood, for example, contains a small love poem in runes from about 1200: “You love me / I love you / Gunnhild. / Kiss me / I know you.”[2]
Inscriptions in Scandinavian granite, rather than in wood, have a much greater chance of surviving to be read today. Thousands have been discovered, and they provide insight into Viking Age society. Most runestones are memorials to the dead, sometimes expressed in very few words—it was, after all, hard work to inscribe stones. For example, the beautiful runestone that is preserved in central Stockholm, inserted into the wall of an early modern building, simply reads: “Thorsten and Frögunn, they [erected] the stone in memory of . . . , their son.”[3] The stone is damaged, with the result that the name of the couple’s dead son has unfortunately been lost. As is typical of many runic inscriptions, this memorial does not give us any contextual information about either the parents or the son. We do not know what kind of people they were, how the son died, or why the parents chose to memorialize him in this way. [215]
Other runic inscriptions are more informative and thus are a boon to historians. An example is a runestone in Rörbro, outside Ljungby in southern Sweden. Its decoration is much simpler than that of the stone in Stockholm, with the runes applied in a curved band snaking around a cross. The inscription reads:
Özzur made these monuments in memory of Eyndr, his father.
He was the most unvillainous of men,
was liberal with food
and oblivious to hate.
A good thane,
had good faith in God.[4]
Eyndr is portrayed, in neatly crafted verse with good alliteration, as a very good man—what we would expect in this genre. But his goodness is not just generalized; it is of a distinctive kind. Eyndr was a good chieftain; he was generous with food in the way a good chieftain should be (like Hrothgar in Beowulf or the leaders praised in skaldic poetry), and he was not one to hold grudges (“oblivious to hate”), again like a good chieftain. His goodness is emphasized in three ways: he was not at all villainous (using understatement in a way that is typical of Nordic literature), he was a good thane (the exact meaning of this term on runestones has attracted a great deal of controversy), and he was a good Christian. These characteristics made him a good chieftain in an age when Christianity was understood as exotic and therefore prestigious. The stone was inscribed after Eyndr had died, and it is likely that his son Özzur commissioned it in an effort to let everyone know that he was the primary heir who should take over his father’s position in society; some of his father’s good reputation should reflect on him. Another runestone a few hundred meters away memorializes another generation of the same family, but more briefly: “Eyndr and [Sve]in placed these monuments in memory of Özzur.”[5] The editor of the inscription believes that Eyndr is the same man as the good chieftain of the other inscription. This Özzur would, then, be the grandfather of the other Özzur.
The Viking Age was the high point of runic inscriptions on stones, but runes were used for two millennia. The oldest examples [216]of Scandinavian runes are from soon after the beginning of the Common Era. They continued to be in use long after the end of the Viking Age. When runes became the object of antiquarian interest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one of the foremost scholars was Johannes Bureus, reportedly taught by a rune-literate farmer from the Swedish province of Dalarna. Bureus published Swedish primers that also taught runic writing, with the result that some Swedish officers serving on the European continent during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) were able to use runes as a readymade code language in their letters to one another. Runes continued to be used even longer in peasant milieus, especially in the province of Dalarna. The last time runes were authentically used was as late as 1900, when the young woman Anna Andersdotter carved into the wall of a shieling (mountain hut) her initials and three runic characters forming the Swedish dialect word meaning that she cared for livestock there: “AAD gät 1900.”[6]
Knowledge of runes survived in Sweden, and popular books directed at a broad reading public spread this knowledge. This is the background of the hoax runestone that the Swedish immigrant farmer Olof Ohman, in Kensington, Minnesota, fabricated in the late nineteenth century. He pretended that the inscription had been made in 1362. It contains an account of a bloody battle between Scandinavian settlers and American Indians. The “discovery” was a sensation, and to this day many believe in the authenticity of the inscription, despite plentiful evidence that it was made long after the Middle Ages.[7]
Even a quick glance at the futhark (the runic alphabet) suggests that it derives from Mediterranean scripts, most likely the Latin script that Westerners still use today. The first rune in the futhark stands for the sound “f.” It clearly derives from a capital F; the two cross strokes have simply been turned diagonally, suggesting that the runes were originally designed to be inscribed in wood, where it is hard to cut straight lines across the grain. Other runes remove a stroke or two while still retaining enough for the letter to be recognizable—for example, the k-rune, which rationalizes away [217]one of the two diagonal strokes in a Latin K. Similarly, the two vertical strokes in the Latin letter N are combined into one to form the n-rune.
Each of the runes has a name, typically a common noun beginning with the relevant sound. The f-rune, for example, is called *fehu in Proto-Germanic (fé in Old Norse), which means “cattle,” and by extension “wealth.” Like any system of writing in older times, runes were sometimes thought to have magical properties, and then their names played a role in whatever potency was ascribed to each rune. For example, the inscription on the Lindholm amulet, a piece of bone that was inscribed at some point in or around the fifth century, is generally agreed to contain invocations of pagan deities. The text begins with a few words that are recognizable, although difficult to interpret exactly: “I, erilaz, am here called wily.” Then follows a nonsensical sequence of runes: “AAAAAAAAZZZNN[N]BMUTTT:ALU:” The rune here transcribed as “A” was called *ansuz in Proto-Germanic (ás in Old Norse), which means “god,” and the rune transcribed as “T” was called by the name of a god, *Tiwaz. The sequence of runes, thus, seems to begin and end (before “ALU,” which may be the word from which English “ale” derives) with divine invocations—in other words, a kind of magic—but there is no agreement on exactly what the runes in the middle mean.
When runes first appeared, the futhark had twenty-four different runes. Inscriptions in this so-called older futhark are typically short and difficult to interpret, especially because the language in which they were written, Proto-Germanic, is incompletely known today. Around the eighth century, Scandinavia went through significant linguistic changes, which resulted in a new, simplified runic alphabet. The younger futhark, which includes only sixteen different runes, was the only alphabet used during the Viking Age. Modern scholars find it much easier to interpret these inscriptions, mostly because the Old Norse language is better known than its Proto-Germanic ancestor. What now sometimes provides a challenge to understanding is that only sixteen different characters are used to represent many more different sounds, meaning that some runes may carry many different phonetic values. [218]
Runic inscriptions often provide insights into the history of Scandinavian society during the Viking Age. Occasionally a runestone even tells us about historical events. A stone found at the site of the early medieval trading town Hedeby, now in northwestern Germany, gives much information: “Thorulf, Svein’s retainer, raised this stone in memory of Erik, his fellow, who died when men attacked Hedeby. And he was a steersman, a very good man.” Erik would have died when the Danish king Svein Forkbeard took back Hedeby from the occupation of the German emperor Otto II in 983. Erik was the “fellow” (felaga in the inscription, the Norse word from which the modern English word is derived) of Thorulf, who was a member of King Svein’s retinue. Thus, one suspects that Erik also was Svein’s retainer. Erik was a drengr, like those who “sought” (that is, attacked) Hedeby. A drengr is not just any man but a valiant and warlike one. Erik was also the steersman of a ship, implying that he held the rudder when sailing or rowing, and he probably also commanded the people of the ship when they were fighting.[8]
The longest preserved runic inscription on stone is the strikingly elegant runestone in Rök, Sweden, which contains about 750 runes.[9] Parts of the inscription are written in cipher, and some use the older futhark, which was already out of use when the inscription was made. The purpose, clearly, is to make the text difficult to interpret and thus mysterious. Most of the inscription appears in the younger futhark, but even its interpretation is much debated. The meaning of the first few words, however, is clear: “In memory of Vemod stand these runes. And Varin wrote them, the father, in memory of his dead son.” Like almost every runestone, the Rök stone is a memorial.
The problems begin with the immediately following rune sequence, made more difficult by the fact that the rune artist who inscribed this stone did not mark where one word ends and the next begins. The following runes literally read: “sakumukminiþat,” and this is a formula that returns several times in the inscription. It seems clear that the last three runes represent the conjunction or the pronoun þat, “that,” but how should one interpret the previous eleven runes? Scholars have understood these words in different [219]ways. Here are a few examples of suggested normalizations into standard Old Norse and translations of the runes:
| sakumukminiþat | |
| ságum yggmænni þat | “we saw that terrifying figure” |
| sagum ungmænni þat | “we say to the young men that” or |
| | “we say that to the young men” |
| sagum ungminni þat | “we say that recent memory” |
| sagum mogminni þat' | “we say that folktale” or |
| | “say to the people that tale”! |
Each of these transcriptions (and several others) are possible interpretations of the runes, illustrating how the same rune may reflect several different sounds (the u-rune in this sequence has, for example, been variously read as y, u, and o). The nasal sound before g represented in modern print by n does not have to be spelled out in runes. Also, according to runic orthography, a sound that appears twice in a row needs to be spelled only once, even when the sounds belong to different words (which explains how scholars have been able, in the last example, to derive two m-sounds from one m-rune). The differing translations also illustrate how ambiguous syntax may be in laconic statements such as these. The interpretations are very different, and our understanding of the rest of the inscription will differ widely depending on how we understand this line.
The basic sense of the sentence that follows the introductory words we just examined is quite clear, and most agree that it should be translated something like this: “which the two war booties were, which twelve times were taken as war booty, both together from different men.” When it comes to explaining what this actually means, however, scholars will be influenced by how they interpreted the words at the beginning of the sentence. Scholars who take the beginning to mean “we say that folktale” take what follows as an allusion to a heroic legend, story, or “folktale” about some famous and attractive war booty that changed hands many times. War booty was important to Viking society in Scandinavia, as we have seen in several different contexts, so this interpretation is attractive. [220]
Scholars who, instead, read the first words as “we saw that terrifying figure” have associated the Rök text with a riddle in Old English that begins “I saw a creature,” especially since that creature carries booty home from war. In the riddle, another figure shows up and “recapture[s] the booty,” driving away the previous possessor. Most agree that the riddle is about the moon stealing light (the “booty”) from the sun, but having to return it, as happens every month when the moon goes through its phases. There are twelve months in the year, so the Rök stone’s words about war booty taken twelve times could be about the moon stealing light from the sun twelve times in a year. This radically different interpretation has as much claim to being what Varin intended when he commissioned this magnificent and mysterious monument in memory of his son.
Whichever interpretation one follows, the Rök stone is about the imaginative world of the society where it was inscribed. Varin and his stonecutter were thinking either of a body of legendary stories about heroes and adventures, or about a mysterious cosmological world of celestial bodies and light coming and going. In a way, the Rök stone is, if not quite a tabula rasa, then at least capable of so many interpretations that we may project our own ideas of what Viking society was like on its malleable sequence of 750 runes. It is a pity that the inscription is so hard to interpret, since it would provide the most detailed insight into the worldview of Scandinavians before their conversion to Christianity if we could be certain how to understand its mystery.
Regardless of which interpretation of the Rök stone one adopts, its contents are literary. The inscription even contains a poetic stanza in the Old Norse meter known as fornyrðislag, meaning approximately “the meter of ancient words.” It is not unusual to find poetry on runestones. Only one inscription, however, contains a complete stanza in dróttkvætt, “the meter suitable for a lord’s band of retainers,” which is the queen of Old Norse meters, the most elegant, difficult, and interesting of them all.
A beautifully shaped piece of granite, partially covered with runes, stands at Karlevi on the long and narrow island of Öland in the Baltic Sea close to the Swedish mainland. Granite is unusual on [221]
fig. 23. The Karlevi runestone contains a complete stanza in the artful Viking Age meter known as dróttkvætt. The poem praises the martial virtues of the dead chieftain Sibbi; the inscription was made by his retinue. Photo: Bengt A. Lundberg, courtesy of Riksantikvarieämbetet, Stockholm. [222]this island, which consists almost entirely of limestone. The inscription begins normally enough with a memorial formula: “This stone is set up in memory of Sibbi goða [= chieftain], son of Foldar, and his retinue set.” The dead man had been a chieftain and the memorial was erected by his loyal retainers.
The standard memorial formula is followed by a complete poetic stanza, which in modern translation reads thus:
The tree [= a man] of the enemies of Þrúðr [a valkyrie; a man of
battle = warrior] whom
the noblest deeds followed—all men know that—lies
hidden in this mound; a more righteous wagon-Viðurr
[= seafarer]
upon Endil’s broad expanses, one strong in battle,
will not rule land in Denmark.[10]
The translation demonstrates some of the peculiarities of Old Norse poetry. Key words are replaced by complicated circumlocutions, so-called kennings. Thus, the prosaic word “warrior” is replaced by “the tree [trees are typically men in kennings] of the enemies of [the valkyrie = battle goddess] Þrúðr.” Similarly, the word “sea” is replaced by “Endil’s [= a sea god] broad expanses.” In fact, the word translated by “broad expanses,” jǫrmungrundar, also appears (in Old English, eormengrund) in a similar context in the poem Beowulf. The hero Beowulf has just injured the monster Grendel, and the warriors celebrate his prowess: “across the wide world, there was none better under the sky’s expanse among shield warriors.”[11] The similarity of diction and of tone suggests that the poetry and societies of Viking Age England and Scandinavia were closely linked.
But these circumlocutions are not the only features that makes this sequence of words into unusually complex poetry. To explore other characteristics of this kind of verse, we need to quote the stanza in the original Old Norse, and to look a little more closely at some of the words:
Folginn liggr, hinn’s fylgðu
(flestr vissi þat) mestar
dæðir, dolga Þrúðar
draugr i þeimsi haugi:
mun’t reið-Viðurr ráða
rógstarkr i Danmǫrku
Endils jǫrmungrundar
ørgrandari landi.
The dróttkvætt stanza is typically very regular, consisting of eight lines, each with three stresses, as in the Karlevi poem. Each line has six syllables. There are several patterns of rhyme to explore. Taking the lines two by two, each pair contains three words that alliterate, beginning with the same sound—always two in the first line and the first word of the second line. In the first pair of lines, the words folginn, fylgðu, and flestr alliterate on f. In the second pair, the alliterating words are dæðir, dolga, and draugr. All vowels (as well as j) alliterate, as in the last pair: Endils, jǫrmungrundar, ørgrandari.
Alliteration is a kind of rhyme, known as head rhyme or initial rhyme, but the alliterations just outlined do not exhaust the rhymes of this verse. There is also internal rhyme within each line: the next to last syllable rhymes with another syllable in the same line. In even lines, there is full rhyme: flest(r) and mest(ar), draug(r) and haug(i), and so on. Odd lines instead sport half-rhyme, where different vowels are followed by the same consonant or consonant cluster, for example folg(inn) and fylg(ðu), dæð(ir) and Þrúð(ar).
There is even more to the artfulness of this stanza, which is typical of the dróttkvætt meter. The syntax is willfully complicated, with terms belonging together placed as far as possible from each other. The opening words, “he lies hidden” (folginn ligger), are left in suspension until the clause is completed in line four: “in this mound” (i þeimsi haugi). Similarly, in the second half-stanza: the beginning, “a man will not rule” (munat reið-Viðurr ráða), does not get its object (what does he rule?) until the very last word of the verse, “the land” (landi).
When Viking Age graves are excavated, they often reveal ingenious stratagems to prevent the dead person from coming back to haunt the living. Sometimes boulders have been placed on top of the corpse; often the dead person’s weapons have been made impossible to use. Clearly, Viking Age Scandinavians believed that dead people might come back as ghosts to haunt them unless they [224]took the necessary precautions.[12] In fact, the Karlevi stone, placed on top of a burial mound, screams, “Danger! Ghosts!” Taken by itself, and read as prose rather than poetry, the middle line (which is prominently inscribed at the center of the stone) draugr i þeimsi haugi simply and straightforwardly means “ghost in this mound.” A casual but rune-literate observer would easily notice and understand this apparent prose line, “ghost in this mound”; it would take more of a concerted effort at deciphering poetry to understand that draugr actually does not mean “ghost,”[13] and perhaps the surface message about ghosts would have been sufficient to scare the reader away before he had time to appreciate the subtleties of the poetry.
Once a reader notices a ghost theme, it is easy to find more scary and ghastly details in the inscription. Almost immediately before the words just quoted stands the word dolga, which is plural genitive of dolgr, “enemy, opponent,” although it can also mean “ghost.” In the poetry the word is a part of the kenning meaning “warrior”: dolga Þrúðar draugr, “the tree of Þrúðr’s [a battle-goddess] enemies.” In the inscription, the word dolga is immediately preceded by the word dæðir, “deeds”; in the syntax of the skaldic stanza, the two words are far separated from each other. A casual reader easily interprets the runes differently, especially since the same rune may stand for similar but different sounds. We have taken the sequence of runes taiþir tulka to be transcribed dæðir dolga, but a reader may easily interpret them, instead, as dauðir dólga(r), which means “dead ghosts.”[14] If our casual reader has not yet run away screaming from this ghastly place infested with ghosts, he might look around the text a bit more and be struck by the runic sequence urkrontari. Most experts read this word as ørgrandari, which is a hapax legomenon, a word that appears nowhere else in Norse literature. Because we cannot study the word in any other context, it is far from clear exactly what it means, and it can in fact be interpreted in two radically different ways.
We shall try to reconstruct how a Viking Age reader would try to make sense of the unfamiliar word ørgrandari, which she would never have encountered before. She would easily recognize the middle syllable grand as a common noun meaning “harm, injury” or some form of the verb granda, “to do harm, to injure.” The meaning [225]of what comes before and what follows is not so obvious. The prefix, ur, here transcribed as ør, carries two separate meanings in Old Norse; it may be taken as either negating the following word (“un-harm”), or intensifying it (“great harm”). The ending -ari can similarly be understood in two different ways. It may be taken as the ending of an adjective in comparative (corresponding to “-er” in modern English “greater”). Or -ari may be understood as the Norse ending making a verb into a noun indicating someone who does something (corresponding to “-er” in modern English “doer” or “destroyer”). Ever since the Swedish runologists Sven Söderberg and Erik Brate interpreted the inscription in 1900, every scholar has taken the prefix as a negation and the ending as the comparative: Sibbi is “more unharmful,” which is a typically northern way of saying, with understatement, “more harmless,” that is, “more righteous, guileless.” But our imagined Viking Age reader, looking at this word out of context, could just as easily interpret it in a different way, understanding the prefix as intensifying and the ending as creating an agent noun, a person who brings great harm, “the utterly-injurer,” or “the desolator.”[15]
In this way, one may read the inscription on several levels. Even for experts in the field, the skaldic stanza is difficult to interpret. Its meaning would never have been obvious to any Old Norse reader standing there at the stone, perhaps in rain or fog, in snow or midwinter darkness, straining to bend her neck to read the runes, which are set in vertical bands that must be alternately read from the left and from the right. Even experts generally not afraid of ghosts and working in the comfort of their studies with photographs and dictionaries close at hand are still not entirely certain that they have interpreted correctly every word in this mysterious inscription. The stanza has clearly been constructed to contain two messages: its real, deep meaning is lavish praise for the dead chieftain Sibbi, less harmful than whom no one is. The first impression, however, is of ghosts, revenants, and conveyors of death and destruction. Composers of skaldic poetry liked to confuse their readers and listeners, using words that were meant to lead astray until the complete sense of the poem was understood. In the case of the Karlevi stone, the poet wanted to scare passersby [226]who might not have had the time, skill, and nerves required to penetrate the complete meaning of his artfully construed stanza. With the inscription seemingly invoking utterly harmful, desolator ghosts, any intended grave robber might have thought twice before digging into the mound.
With its kennings, misleading word choice, tortured syntax, celebration of warrior prowess, and mystic euphony, the stanza on the Karlevi runestone is typical of its genre, Old Norse court poetry, except for the fact that it is the only piece of dróttkvætt poetry that has survived in a contemporary record. Hundreds of other verses survive because they were quoted in sagas composed, mainly, in Iceland from the twelfth century on. But many more have been lost forever. A medieval list of court poets known as Skáldatal lists more than a hundred Icelandic skalds who composed for the halls of Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian kings and chieftains. Many of them are now no more than names, and their poetry is unknown. For example, Skáldatal claims that eleven skalds composed for King Sverre of Norway (r. 1177–1202), but not a single poem by any of them has survived.
Skalds composed for kings and chieftains. Their poetry belongs, in the first place, to the great halls of northern Europe, where kings and chieftains inspired their warriors by means of great feasts, with food and mead and recitals of poetry:
The scop sang
brightly in Heorot—there was the joy of heroes[16]
The scop (pronounced like “shop”) was the Anglo-Saxon counterpart of the skald, and this one sang in Heorot, the hall of King Hrothgar of the Danes, when Beowulf and his warriors visited. The quotation is from the Old English poem Beowulf. The king had his thane serve “the clear sweet drink” from an “ale-cup,” and the warriors (“heroes”) were satisfied. The function of parties in the halls was to make the warriors happy and impressed with their chieftains. The richness of the fare impressed, and so did the praise that the poet recited or, possibly, sang. This was poetry for warriors, and the skalds in particular celebrated the martial prowess of the chieftain and his victories in battle. [227]
A skaldic poem consisted of several stanzas that recounted, for example, a victorious battle or a successful raiding career, usually as a series of vignettes, employing the kind of allusive and circumlocutory language that we found on the Karlevi runestone. An example is the poem Hrynhenda, recited by the skald Arnorr in the 1040s in front of King Magnus Olavsson (d. 1047) of Norway and Denmark.[17] Twenty stanzas are preserved, partially or entirely, which tell the story of Magnus’s career. Since the verses are preserved one by one, we are not certain exactly the order in which they should be read, or even that they all are from the same poem, but the best modern reconstruction at least gives us an impression of what this kind of poetry must have been like.
“Magnus, hear a mighty poem!” Arnorr exclaims emphatically at the beginning of his poem, and for once the skald puts his word in normal prose order, not in the strained syntax typical of skaldic poetry. Everyone was meant immediately to understand this line, and to be silent and pay attention. He demands the undivided attention of the king and his warriors. Then Arnorr continues, now in less obvious syntax, with extravagant praise: “I know no other [prince] more outstanding” and “every prince is far below you.” Arnorr declares his intention: “I mean to extol your prowess, prince . . . , in a swift poem.” Arnorr goes on to summarize Magnus’s life. After the death of his father, Olav Haraldsson, in 1030, Magnus had fled to Russia, and the poem describes how he sailed back on surging warships “with Russian metal [= weapons]” on the Baltic Sea to recruit troops in Sweden. “You did not gain a poor pick of troops,” Arnorr says with typical Norse understatement. Magnus then claimed Norway. Later, he attacked and conquered Denmark and fought the Wends. Magnus is always the perfect king and warrior. Arnorr calls him the avenger of his father, a crusher of thieves, a subduer of princes, a generous man. At the helm of his warship Visundr (Bison) at the head of his fleet, he is an impressive sight: “Foul surf surged in against the after-deck and the helm of the warship; the red gold shuddered; the powerful hound of the fir-tree [= wind] pitched the rushing ship of fir. You steered sturdy prows from the north; . . . currents shuddered in front.” In battle, Magnus is a veritable warrior god—Yggr [= Odin] of battle—who [228]carries red shields, reddens the tongues of wolves, quells the greed of wolves, and reddens the feathers of the gull of Odin [= raven]; in other words, he kills many enemy warriors. His enemy knows he has lost the battle and bolts. Magnus is the perfect warrior king, providing not only dead enemies for carrion eaters, but also plenty of material for Arnorr’s poetry:
Avenger of Olav [Haraldsson = Magnus’s father], you furnished matter for the verse; I fashion such [deeds] into words; you allow hawks of [the valkyrie] Hlǫkk [= ravens or eagles] to drink the corpse-sea [= blood]; now the poem will swell. Diminisher of the home of the reed of shields, you have, daring, performed four blizzards of arrows [= battles] in one season; mighty ruler, you are called invincible.
The one season in which Magnus fought four battles was the year 1043, when he defeated both the Wends and the Danes in his successful quest to subdue Denmark to his rule. Such feats were grist for Arnorr’s poem, which expanded in length and grew in exalted eloquence until the extravagant and timeless praise of the finish: “King, another lord loftier than you will never be born under the sun.”
Arnorr had done his job. He had composed a poem that praised his lord to the skies, thus inspiring those who heard it to follow the gallant king Magnus. We must imagine Arnorr performing the poem at a feast in Magnus’s great mead hall, like the scop in Beowulf. It is hard to understand how much of the poem, with its broken syntax and enigmatic kennings, was immediately comprehensible to drunken warriors, but surely they would have been able to pick out familiar-sounding kennings and other bits and pieces. They would have been in no doubt that the stanzas were in celebration of their great hero, King Magnus, for they surely understood the purpose of the genre and of this particular poem. Such was the social role of Viking poetry: to build communities of warriors around kings and chieftains. In return, Arnorr would have received generous gifts, for which his poetry was the countergift. He pointed out in typically convoluted formulations that Magnus was a generous king—lines that in themselves were intended to [229]inspire generosity: Magnus was a “terror of seized gold” (in other words, he gives away to his warriors and poets the gold that he conquers) and a “diminisher of surf-fire” (fire in any kind of water is a kenning for gold, so the king, again, diminishes his stores of gold by giving it away).[18]
Skaldic poetry was memorable and some of it was preserved through centuries. Verses from the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries are recorded in manuscripts from the thirteenth century and later. Exactly how this poetry survived until then is a much debated issue, with suggestions ranging from the verses being passed on orally from generation to generation, to their being not only written down early on but also at once accompanied by explanatory prose, making it possible for later generations to understand sometimes very far-fetched allusions.
Most of the poetry that survives does not come down to us as the multistanza poems they originally were; rather, they were included piecemeal in prose works, often functioning as evidence to prove the truth of the prose. Most preserved stanzas of Arnorr’s Hrynhenda have been found in historical sagas telling the story of King Magnus. Typically, the prose narrative is a latter-day retelling and elaboration of what the poetry says, suggesting that the authors of the prose sagas had little or no information about the events they described except for the contemporary poetry that they quoted. For this reason, most historians avoid using the so-called historical sagas as sources for the Viking Age; they prefer to base their reconstructions of events directly on the contemporary poetry—working in parallel with the history writers of the High Middle Ages, not following them. This is why I often use poetry as a source in this book, but sagas almost never. The sagas are, nevertheless, wonderful literary texts in their own right, well worth reading for their creative richness and exciting plots.
With its graphic scenes of battle and battlefields reddened by blood and covered with enemy corpses eaten by wolves and carrion birds, skaldic court poetry was meant for the masculine locale of the mead hall, where women at best had a secondary position, like Hrothgar’s queen, Wealhtheow, serving the mead in Beowulf. When skalds mention women, they are typically at home [230]in Norway or Iceland, admiring the martial virility of their warrior lovers. Or the soft embrace of a warrior’s wife or girlfriend is contrasted with the harsh realities of war: “In battle it was not like kissing a young widow on the high seat,” or “in battle it was not at all like when a beautiful [woman] made a bed for the jarl with the curving branches of the shoulders [= arms].”[19] It is typical of the grim humor of skaldic poetry and of Norse understatement to describe the horrors of war and battle by denying that it is at all like a very pleasant situation with erotic overtones. The verses emphasize that women have nothing to do on the battlefield, and that real men are out there fighting and not lolling around at home with the women. Weak men who allow themselves to be seduced—dare one say emasculated?—by their women will lose the battle, as King Harald Hardruler himself is said to have humorously pointed out. “We shall let the anchor hold us in Randersfjord [in Denmark], while the linen-oak [= woman], the Gerðr of incantation [= woman] lulls her husband to sleep.” The men of the region are not alert to Harald and his men arriving; instead they stay in bed and they will surely awaken too late, if at all.[20]
The verses about the contrast between the din of battle and the pleasures of a woman’s embrace also serve to remind the warriors of victory’s rewards. When the victorious warriors finally returned home, women’s role was to admire them and their warlike virility. As the skald Thjodolf commented, again with typical understatement, about a victory won by Magnus: “women from Sogn [= Norwegian women, not just those in the Sognefjord region] will not receive such news with sorrow.”[21]
Women subdued by virile seducers are common literary and artistic images of conquered lands. Such images show up also in skaldic poetry, as when the poet Eyvind Finnsson imagined Håkon Sigurdsson’s seizure of Norway in the late tenth century as “the bride of the battle-god” [= bride of Odin = Norway’s land] lying “under the arm” of the conqueror.[22] Women and the pleasures they offered were clearly part of what Norse warriors expected they would get after success in war. It is remarkable, against that background, that no western European narrative source says anything about Vikings raping women during their raids, contrary to [231]popular expectations.[23] The most reasonable conclusion to draw from this silence in the sources is not that rape did not happen but rather that it was so common in war that the chroniclers of the time saw no reason to dwell on it, or even mention it at all. The skalds admitted, at least, that women would attempt to flee from a victorious army, as when Thjodolf Arnorsson praised King Magnus’s victories in Zealand in Denmark, which forced women to run: “The maiden in Zealand learned in a single word who carried the standard. . . . For the wealth-pole [= woman] her lot was to dash through the forest.”[24]
Beyond fleeing, women had no role on the real-life battlefield, according to the warrior poets of Scandinavia. Still, warlike women appeared in the imagination of Norsemen. Their literature brims with references to valkyries, those “war demons” whose job it was to choose which warriors would die on the battlefield and be taken to Valhalla to become the main god Odin’s warriors.[25] One ninth-century poem is framed as a dialogue between a valkyrie and a raven, the archetypical carrion bird of skaldic poetry. The poet Thorbiörn hornklofi begins by calling for the attention of King Harald Fairhair’s warriors, whom he addresses by referring to the gifts they received from the king:
Let the ring-bearers listen! . . . I shall recount the words that I heard a white, bright-haired girl [utter], when she spoke with a raven:
—
“How are you doing, ravens? From where have you come with gory beak at break of day? Flesh hangs from your claws; the stench of carrion comes from your mouth. I think you lodged last night near where you knew corpses were lying.”[26]
The poem then focuses on King Harald Fairhair, who reputedly unified Norway in the ninth century. The raven claims to have followed Harald since he came out of the egg, and the king was similarly precocious: “[When] young he grew tired of cooking by the fire and sitting indoors, of a warm women’s chamber”; he longed to get out on the battlefield and show his mettle as a warrior. The poet here spells out the distinction between “normal” women’s indoor [232]existence (as distinct from valkyries), where children also lived, and the glories of the (masculine) battlefield.
When they are not conversing with ravens, valkyries often show up in kennings. The hawks of the valkyrie Hlǫkk [= ravens or eagles] drank the sea of corpses [= blood] after King Magnus killed many in battle; Sibbi was a tree of the enemies of the valkyrie Þrúðr [= a warlike man]. These valkyries are undifferentiated—at least, modern scholars cannot distinguish any individual features that made Þrúðr different from Hlǫkk. The poets chose one valkyrie rather than the other depending on how well her name fit the rhyme patterns of the verse and what her name meant. Þrúðr means “strength,” and Hlǫkk means “noise, din [of battle].” In this way, unearthly female beings show up in skaldic poetry, but really mostly to decorate the verse and its kennings, and generally to allude to battle; normally, they do not actually do anything in the narrative.
Skaldic verse is notably silent about romantic love. The proper subject of such poetry was war and battle, not romance. But a few romantic verses do exist, notably inserted into high-medieval sagas about skalds, which typically focus on a love story. Many critics think that these verses were written when the sagas were composed in the High Middle Ages, centuries after the end of the Viking Age.
Romantic ideas do begin to show up in skaldic poetry in the twelfth century, when they probably were influenced by the then new European ideas of courtly love. When the Scandinavian earl of the Orkneys Ragnvald visited Narbonne on his way to participate in a crusade, he was invited to a meal by the viscountess Ermengard, otherwise famous as a patron of troubadours. According to the saga retelling the adventures of the Orkney earls, Ermengard entered the hall with her women, carrying a golden cup to serve Ragnvald, who took the cup as well as her hand and put her in his lap before uttering this verse:
[233]Wise woman, it is certain that your [hair-] growth surpasses in beauty [that of] pretty much most women with locks [like] the meal of Fróði [= gold]. The prop of the hawk-field [= prop of the arm = woman] lets her hair, yellow like silk, fall onto her shoulders; I reddened the claws of the food-hungry eagle.[27]
However romantic, skaldic poetry apparently cannot help itself: the eagle with bloody claws has to be there, even when Ragnvald is addressing in courtly and flattering ways one of Europe’s most desirable unattached women. Ermengard was a widow, but she wore her hair down as if she were a young, unmarried women. The romantic praise of a woman is atypical for skaldic verse, so it is tempting to suggest that this stanza was inspired by the courtly troubadour poetry flourishing at Ermengard’s court, which Ragnvald may have heard during his travels.
A few poems supposedly written by women skalds survive, but the attribution is in most cases problematic.[28] A two-stanza poem that at least has a fair chance of being authentic was composed by Steinunn Refsdóttir at the end of the tenth century. A die-hard pagan, she wrote a poem to ridicule the Christian god after the Christian missionary Thangbrand had suffered a shipwreck:
The killer of ogresses’ kin [= Thor]
pulverized fully the mew-perch
bison [= ship] of the bell’s guardian [= priest]
(the gods chased the steed of the strand [= ship]);
Christ cared not for a sea-shingle
stepper [= ship] when cargo-boat crumbled;
I think that God hardly guarded
the reindeer of Gylfe [= ship] at all.[29]
This stanza is a typical dróttkvætt stanza, with alliteration and rhyme in the appropriate places, and with the expected kennings, including three different ones meaning “ship.” The only thing unusual about it, except for its authorship, is that it is not used for praise.
Although female skalds were unusual, we would expect more visual artists to be women. Almost all Viking Age art is anonymous, however, so it is impossible to prove or disprove this hypothesis. As we saw in chapter 7, women typically worked with textiles—for example, with weaving and embroidery—so it has often been suggested that female artists are behind the examples of textile art that survive. An embroidered tapestry was discovered in the early ninth-century Oseberg burial in Norway, the magnificent ship in [234]which two women were buried with all kinds of luxuries (discussed in detail in chapter 4). The tapestry is poorly preserved, but it is clear that it was a long, narrow (20–23 centimeters wide) strip that probably was meant to hang on a wall. It is made from wool dyed different colors, mainly red, yellow, and black.
The Oseberg tapestry portrays a procession of two rows of horses with knotted tails. Three of the horses pull carts, one of which contains two people, apparently women. Scholars have speculated whether they represent the two women buried in the Oseberg burial (with a cart among their grave goods), and whether the tapestry was specially made to portray the burial procession. The procession in the tapestry also features a large number of men and women walking. The women wear long dresses with trains and cloaks, and some of them carry spears, as do many of the men. Their hair appears to be stuffed into bulging headdresses.[30]
In their attire, the women on the Oseberg tapestry are reminiscent of the valkyries welcoming slain warriors to Valhalla as portrayed on the Gotland picture stones. On these stones, many women do not have their hair hidden by headdresses, but have let it down, as Ermengard is reported to have done when Earl Ragnvald visited her in Narbonne. The valkyries of the picture stones serve food and drink to the dead warriors, and their having let their hair down may suggest sexual availability. Some women portrayed on picture stones hold drinking horns in their hands, as does a small silver figure of a woman found in Birka; they have been interpreted as valkyries serving drink to dead warriors arriving at Valhalla. The warriors typically arrive by horse. Sometimes they ride a horse with eight legs, suggesting that they are so important that the ruler of Valhalla, Odin, has sent his own eight-legged horse, Sleipner, to pick them up. Such picture stones often depict ships. It is at least possible that people of the Viking Age imagined that one had to take a ship to get to Valhalla. Gotland is an island surrounded by water, so one would have needed a ship to go anywhere else. The belief that the way to Valhalla went over the sea would explain why so many Viking Age people were buried in ships, including the two women in Oseberg, the chieftain in Gokstad slain in battle, and many of the warriors in Vendel and Valsgärde. [235]
The picture stones, which are found only in Gotland, contain great series of narrative images. Sometimes, we recognize the stories that are told. Two fragmentarily preserved stones depict, for example, a great snake or dragon, in one case accompanied by a man, suggesting the story of Sigurd “the dragon-slayer,” who, according to Eddic poetry and high-medieval texts such as the Saga of the Volsungs, fought and killed the dragon Fafnir. Richard Wagner retold this story in his opera Siegfried. Other depictions of scenes from the same story appear in connection with two runic inscriptions in Sweden and on a portal in a Norwegian stave church. The inscription on a rock face at Ramsundsberget is famous for its elegantly stylized series of images. The main scene is framed by three snakes, one of which contains the runic text (a rather humdrum memorial formula) of the inscription. Sigurd appears outside the frame, straining as he sticks his sword into the soft underbelly of one of the snakes, Fafnir. Various other figures from the story appear inside the frame. Sigurd roasts the heart of the dragon over a fire and has stuck his thumb into his mouth; according to the story, he burned himself when checking if the heart was done, and when he cooled his finger in his mouth, he accidentally drank dragon blood, thus gaining the ability to understand the language of the birds that are depicted in the inscription sitting in a tree. They promptly inform him that his foster father, the smith Regin, is planning to kill him in order to steal the dragon’s treasure. Sigurd therefore kills Regin, who lies headless to the left, surrounded by his smith’s tools: hammer, thongs, bellows, and anvil. The picture also shows Sigurd’s horse, Grani, loaded with the dragon’s treasure.[31]
While Sigurd and his dragon are easily recognizable, other motifs on the picture stones from Gotland are harder to interpret. They are clearly narrative images or series of images, but the stories they tell are otherwise unknown. Who are the three men who appear on a stone from Sanda? They hold different things in their hands: the first clearly carries a spear, another an object that has been interpreted as a sickle or a torch. Are they the three gods Odin, Thor, and Frey? Or are they three men marking out the boundaries of a newly purchased lot of land? And what is the circle just behind them, and what looks like fire below that circle?[32] If we knew more [236]
fig. 24. A lively inscription on a rock face in Ramsundsberget, Sweden, depicts scenes from the myth of the hero Sigurd. The dragon Fafnir makes up the band in which the runic text was inscribed, and Sigurd can be seen stabbing the animal’s soft underbelly. Afterward, he roasted Fafnir’s heart, and when he tasted the dragon’s blood, he suddenly could understand what the birds said. They warned him of the designs of his foster-father, the smith Regin, whom Sigurd therefore killed while his horse, Grani, was standing by. A masterful artist depicted all this and more with great skill. Photo: Bengt A. Lundberg, courtesy of Riksantikvarieämbetet, Stockholm.
about the stories that were told in Viking Age Scandinavia, we might better understand what this and other picture stones depict.
What the stones prove beyond any doubt is that, like people of every culture and time, Viking Age Scandinavians told stories; we are privileged that we are able to enjoy at least some of those stories because they were written down on parchment in the High Middle Ages. By then, they almost certainly had changed, perhaps especially as they were written down, but pictorial evidence such as the various depictions of Sigurd demonstrates that the main elements of that story at least remained the same.
The images that we have just discussed are narrative and representational. Most art surviving from the Scandinavian Viking Age, however, is decorative and symbolic. The brooches that fastened women’s dresses, magnificent bridles and harness-mounts for chieftains’ horses, and various other utilitarian objects such as cups, [237]weathervanes, and even ships sport intricate decoration executed in all kinds of techniques by skillful artists and artisans. The keel of the Oseberg ship is entirely covered by carvings; the iron blade of an ax discovered in Mammen, Jutland, is filled with images created by silver-wire inlay; buckles and brooches in cast bronze with rich decoration are common. The Viking Age relished the contrast between different kinds of materials, between different colors, and between empty and decorated fields. The same piece of jewelry, or any other object, may combine materials and techniques to produce many disparate visual effects. Niello, glass, paint, gold, silver, bronze, iron, glass, and much else combined in different constellations to produce the desired play of light and surfaces.
A recurring motif—an animal of some sort—dominates Scandinavian and other northern European decorative art from long before the Viking Age to after its end. What appears to be the same animal appears and reappears everywhere in varying executions and forms. It may originally have been inspired by Roman art; lions or horses come to mind, but for the Viking Age, it might be useful to think of it as a dragon, since it is hard to imagine that the images would have conveyed the idea of any particular real animal to contemporary observers. The image developed over decades and centuries, taking on different characteristics that allow art historians to talk of a succession of styles, each usually given its name from the place where some famous object in that style was discovered: Oseberg, Borre, Jelling, Mammen, Ringerike, Urnes. Distinguishing among styles makes it possible to date objects that carry that style: “the heads and tails of [the snakes on the Ramsundsberget inscription depicting the myth of Sigurd] produce typical Ringerike tendrils,” which means that the inscription was probably made during the first half of the eleventh century.[33]
In the development of styles, the animal waxes and wanes; it first becomes stronger, more robust and compact, starting to look like a lion; then it becomes thin, elongated, and sinuous, like a caricatured greyhound; it briefly is filled with speed and movement, only to later return to stasis; the pigtail in its neck grows and shrinks, its lip-lappet likewise; its limbs sprout tendrils that eventually detach and take on a life of their own. Some animals fight [238]one another, while others appear calm and elegant. Thus the typical animal motif of northern decorative art metamorphoses and transforms over the centuries, until it disappears, replaced by new European styles and motifs in and after the twelfth century.[34]
One of the most famous instances of the great animal is on the bow and stern of the Oseberg ship, which are elaborately decorated above the waterline with elegant rows of animals that are shown in sharp relief. The ship was built and the decoration made in around 815–820, and it was buried in 834 in a great burial mound that has preserved it remarkably well. Carved into the oak of the ship, the animals are very similar, even if they differ slightly in the details. They have small heads with large eyes appearing in profile and long, narrow, curved bodies. Their torsos sport two heart-shaped holes, so the entire animal has the form of the number 8, with head (including pigtail), tail, and legs jutting out and interlacing with each other, partially inside the closest heart-shaped hole. The bodies are articulated with lines and other geometrical patterns.
In the tenth century, at some point after 957, a great treasure of about 1.8 kilograms of gold and 2.9 kilograms of silver was buried in the ground in Erikstorp in eastern Sweden. The treasure included 330 coins, mostly Arabic silver dirhams from the period 895–957, allowing the hoard to be dated. Interestingly, the treasure includes a complete set of dress jewelry for a woman. Six of seven golden arm rings consist of two thick threads of gold twisted around each other, the ends narrowing into an elegant knot. The knots are echoed in two dimensions on two rectangular brooches in this treasure, which contain so-called ring chains as well as two depictions each of the usual animal, “with a ribbon-like body, spiral hips, legs which interlace with the body, and a pigtail.”[35] Since they are a pair, one assumes that they were intended to fasten a woman’s apron dress, although such brooches are usually oval, not rectangular. Art historians have determined the decoration of these brooches to belong to the Jelling style.
The treasure also includes silver chains, some of which may have hung between the two brooches. Many of the Arabic coins have small holes and one even sports a small attached loop; they may have hung from the chains. Alongside them may have hung [239]the hammer pendant found in this treasure. It is made of silver, but it has filigree work in gold forming loops of various kinds. The interplay between the yellow gold and the white silver is typical of Viking Age decoration.
The Erikstorp treasure also contains a round brooch entirely of gold, perhaps intended to fasten an outer cloak. The filigree on this brooch depicts three animals, all biting the ring at the brooch’s center, with their limbs intertwined. To make such jewelry, a goldsmith would first mold the basic piece itself, to which he or she would solder the filigree grains (or strings) that he had manufactured. Remarkably, the exact mold used to make this brooch has been discovered in Hedeby, many hundreds of miles to the southwest of Erikstorp. This piece of jewelry was, thus, made in that great town, the home of so many artisans, including goldsmiths. Since the decoration of the other jewelry in this treasure trove is reminiscent of that of the round brooch, it was probably all made in the same place, perhaps in the same workshop. Hedeby was clearly a center for skillful goldsmiths producing exquisite jewelry (and much else) that was exported all over Scandinavia.[36]
On the Erikstorp jewelry, the usual decorative animal is elongated and ribbonlike, although it is robust and appears strong. A hundred years later it had developed an extremely narrow body that looks almost flamboyant surrounded as it is by intertwined limbs and separate tendrils. An example may be found on the runestone that has been moved to the Skansen open-air museum in Stockholm, where it is seen by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year.[37] It originally stood at Ölsta along the ancient main road leading from Uppsala toward the west, the so-called Eriksgata, on which, at least later in the Middle Ages, the Swedish king rode from province to province to be accepted in each. The torso of the animal is draped around the edge of the pleasantly curved stone and contains the runic text. In the middle, its neck loops around its hind parts, and the animal bites its own neck. The head is seen in profile with its elongated eye, small pigtail, and small lip-lappet. The entire animal is intertwined with what looks like many small snakes with tiny heads and small eyes. The whole makes an elegant impression of busyness and movement. This runestone is in the [240]Urnes style, so called after a carved wooden church portal from Norway that contains several similar animals, even more exuberantly portrayed.
The Ölsta runestone, which has been colored in modern times with what someone guessed were its original colors, is a signed (“Ásmundr hjó”) product of the great runemaster Åsmund Kåresson, who is known to have inscribed more than twenty runestones in the Uppland region north of present-day Stockholm. He was a skilled stone-carver, famous for his elegant decorations and well-formulated texts. This stone was commissioned by four siblings, Holmdis and her three brothers, Björn, Gunnar, and Audulf, in memory of their father, Ulf, who was “Ginnlög’s husband.” We can only speculate about why they chose to commemorate their mother’s name in this indirect way, but we must be grateful that they did, since this made it possible for us to know the names of the entire family.
Arts and letters played an important role in Viking Age Scandinavia. The poetry and art that survive were created, in the main, for the upper levels of society, but the same ideas appear in simpler execution for the less well-to- do. What is preserved is certainly only the tip of the iceberg, and much has been lost. We know almost nothing, for example, about Scandinavian music in the Viking Age, although Scandinavians must have enjoyed music a thousand years ago in chieftains’ halls and elsewhere. Nonetheless, what survives of poetry, representational and decorative art, and stories teaches us that the Viking Age was not only about raiding, plunder, and warfare. Scandinavians had a sense of beauty and an ear for poetry, and they developed idiosyncratic styles of both art and literature without any close counterparts in the rest of Europe. These were yet other fields of human endeavor in which Scandinavia went its own way during the Viking Age. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the old native styles were slowly crowded out by the Romanesque in art and by romance in literature. In these fields as well, Scandinavia opted in to joining Europe.
