The Vikings

by A. Mawer

Strange forms and mixtures of belief arose in the passage from one faith to the other. Helgi the Lean was a Christian, but called on Thor in the hour of need. The Christian saints with their wonder-working powers were readily adopted into the Norse Pantheon, and Vikings by their prayers and offerings secured the help of St Patrick in Ireland and of St Germanus in France in times of defeat and pestilence, while we hear of a family of settlers in Iceland who gave up all faith except a belief in the power of St Columba. On sculptured stones in the west may be found pictures of Ragnarök, of Balder and of Loki together with the sign of the cross. Some of the heathen myths themselves show Christian influence; the Balder story with its echoes of the lamentations for the suffering Christ belongs to the last stage of Norse heathendom, while a heathen skald makes Christ sit by the Fountain of Fate as the mighty destroyer of the giants. When the virtue had gone out of their old beliefs many fell a prey to the grossest superstition, worshipping the rocks and groves and rivers once thought to be the dwelling place of the gods. Others renounced faith in Christian and heathen gods alike, and the nickname 'godless' is by no means rare among the settlers in Iceland. Of such it is often said that they believed in themselves, or had no faith in aught except their own strength and power, while in the saga of Friþjof we hear how the hero paid little heed to the sanctity of the temple of Balder and that the love of Ingibjorg meant more to him than the wrath of the gods. For a parallel to such audacious scepticism as that of Friþjof we must turn to southern lands and later times with Aucassin's 'In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only to have my Nicolete, my sweet lady that I love so well.' For some the way of escape came not by superstition or by scepticism, but in mystic speculation, in pure worship of the powers of nature. Thus we hear of the Icelander Thorkell Mani, whom all praised for the excellence of his way of life, that in his last illness he was carried out into the sunshine, so that he might commend himself into the hands of the god who made the sun, or of the goði Askell who, even in the hour of famine, deemed it was more fitting to honour the creator by caring for the aged and the children, than to relieve distress by putting these helpless ones to death.

One other illustration of the declining force of heathenism must be mentioned. It is to the Viking age that we owe the poems of the older Edda, that storehouse of Norse mythology and cosmogony. They are almost purely heathen in sentiment, and yet one feels that it could only be in an age when belief in the old gods was passing away that the authors of these poems could have struck those notes of detachment, irony, and even of burlesque, which characterise so many of them.

The condition of faith and belief in the Viking age was, then, chaotic, but, fortunately for purposes of clear statement, there was, to the Norse mind at least, no necessary connexion between beliefs and morality, between faith and conduct, and the ideas on which they based their philosophy and practice of life are fairly distinct.

The central ideas which dominate the Norse view of life are an ever-present sense of the passingness of all things and a deep consciousness of the over-ruling power of Fate. All earthly things are transitory and the one thing which lasts is good fame. 'Wealth dies, kinsmen die, man himself must die, but the fame which a man wins rightly for himself never dies; one thing I know that never dies, the judgment passed on every man that dies,' says the poet of the Hávamál, the great storehouse of the gnomic wisdom of the Norsemen. 'All things are unstable and transitory, let no man therefore be arrogant or over-confident. The wise man will never praise the day before it is evening.' Prudence and foresight are ever necessary. All things are determined by a fate which is irrevocable and cannot be avoided. Every man must die the death that is appointed for him, and the man whose final day has not yet come may face unmoved the greatest danger. This sense of an inevitable fate must lead to no weakening of character or weariness of life. Death must be faced with cheerful stoicism and our judgment of the worth of any man must depend on the way in which he awaits the decree of fate. Place no great trust in others whether friend or foe, least of all place trust in women. 'Wommennes conseils been ful ofte colde,' says Chaucer in the Nun's Priest's Tale, using an old Scandinavian proverb. 'Be friendly to your friends and a foeman to your foes. Practice hospitality and hate lying and untruthfulness.' With their enemies the Vikings had an evil reputation for cunning and deceit, but when we study the incidents on which this charge was based—as for example the story of the capture of Luna (v. supra, p. [47]) or the oft-repeated trick of feigning flight, only to lure the enemy away from safe ground—one must confess that they show an enemy outwitted rather than deceived. This aspect of Viking character perhaps finds its best illustration in the figure of Odin. His common epithets are 'the wise,' 'the prudent,' 'the sagacious'; he is a god of witchcraft and knows all the secret powers of nature and stands in contrast to the simple-minded Thor, endowed with mighty strength, but less polished and refined. The development of the worship of Odin in Norway belongs specially to the later Iron Age, and it is worthy of note that his worship seems to have prevailed chiefly in military circles, among princes and their retainers.

The Vikings were guilty of two besetting sins—immoderate love of wine and of women. Of their relations to women enough has been said already. Their drunken revelry is best illustrated by the story of the orgie which led up to the death of St Alphege in London in 1012, when, after drinking their fill of the wine they had brought from abroad, they pelted the bishop with bones from the feast, and finally pierced his skull with the spike on the back of an axe. Of sin in the Christian sense the Vikings had no conception. An Irish chronicler tells us indeed that the Danes have a certain piety in that they can refrain from flesh and from women for a time, but a truer description is probably that given by Adam of Bremen when he says that the Danes can weep neither for their sins nor for their dead.

The chief occupations of the Vikings were trade and war, but we must beware of drawing a too rigid distinction between adventurers and peaceful stay-at-homes. The Vikings when they settled in England and elsewhere showed that their previous roving life did not hinder them in the least from settling down as peaceful traders, farmers, or peasant-labourers, while the figure of Ohthere or Óttarr, to give him his Norse name, who entered the service of king Alfred, may serve to remind us that many a landed gentleman was not above carrying on a good trade with the Finns or undertaking voyages of exploration in the White Sea.

Trading in those days was a matter of great difficulty and many risks. The line of division between merchant and Viking was a very thin one, and more than once we read how, when merchants went on a trading expedition, they arranged a truce until their business was concluded and then treated each other as enemies. Trade in Scandinavia was carried on either in fixed centres or in periodical markets held in convenient places. The chief trading centres were the twin towns of Slesvík-Hedeby in Denmark, Skiringssalr in S.W. Norway, and Björkö, Sigtuna and the island of Gothland in Sweden, while an important market was held periodically at Bohuslän on the Götaelv, at a place were the boundaries of the three northern kingdoms met. A characteristic incident which happened at this market illustrates the international character of the trade done there. On a certain occasion a wealthy merchant named Gille (the name is Celtic), surnamed the Russian because of his many journeys to that country, set up his booth in the market and received a visit from the Icelander Höskuldr who was anxious to buy a female slave. Gille drew back a curtain dividing off the inner part of the tent and showed Höskuldr twelve female slaves. Höskuldr bought one and she proved to be an Irish king's daughter who had been made captive by Viking raiders.

The chief exports were furs, horses, wool, and fish while the imports consisted chiefly in articles of luxury, whether for clothing or ornament. There was an extensive trade with the Orient in all such luxuries and the Vikings seem eagerly to have accumulated wealth of this kind. When Limerick was re-captured by the Irish in 968, they carried off from the Vikings 'their jewels and their best property, and their saddles beautiful and foreign (probably of Spanish workmanship), their gold and their silver: their beautifully woven cloth of all colours and all kinds: their satins and silken cloths, pleasing and variegated, both scarlet and green, and all sorts of cloth in like manner.' They captured too 'their soft, youthful, bright, matchless girls: their blooming silk-clad young women: and their active, large, and well formed boys.' Such captives whether made by Irish from Norsemen or Norsemen from Irish would certainly be sold as slaves, for one of the chief branches of trade in those days was the sale as slaves of those made prisoner in war.

The expansion of Scandinavian trade took place side by side with, rather than as a result of, Viking activity in war. There is evidence of the presence of traders in the Low Country early in the 9th century, and already in the days of St Anskar we hear of a Swedish widow of Björkö who left money for her daughter to distribute among the poor of Duurstede. Jómsborg was established to protect and increase Scandinavian trade at Julin, and there were other similar trading centres on the southern and eastern shores of the Baltic.