When the great northern invasions began at the close of the eighth century, Charles the Great ruled all the Christian lands of the western Continent. By fire and sword he converted the heathen Saxons of the north to Christianity and civilization and advanced his frontier to the Danish border, so that the pious monk of St. Gall laments that he did not conquer the Danes also—“be it that Divine Providence was not then on our side, or that our sins rose up against us.” And this same gossiping chronicler—not the best of authorities it is true—has left us a striking picture of Charlemagne’s first experience with the Scandinavian invaders:—
Once Charles arrived by chance at a certain maritime town of Gallia Narbonensis. While he was sitting at dinner, and had not been recognized by the townspeople, some northern pirates came to carry on their depredations in that very port. When the ships were perceived some thought they were Jewish merchants, some that they were Africans, some Bretons. But the wise king, knowing from the shape and swiftness of the vessels what sort of crews they carried, said to those about him, “These ships bear no merchandize, but cruel foes.” At these words all the Franks rivalled each other in the speed with which they rushed to attack the boats. But it was useless. The Northmen hearing that there stood the man whom they were wont to call Charles the Hammer, were afraid lest all their fleet should be taken in the port, and should be broken in pieces; and their flight was so rapid, that they withdrew themselves not only from the swords, but even from the eyes of those who wished to catch them. The religious Charles, however, seized by a holy fear, rose from the table, and looked out of the window towards the East, remaining long in that position, his face bathed in tears. No one ventured to question him: but turning to his followers he said, “Know ye why I weep? Truly I fear not that these will injure me. But I am deeply grieved that in my lifetime they should have been so near landing on these shores, and I am overwhelmed with sorrow as I look forward and see what evils they will bring upon my offspring and their people.”[11]
From the actuality of such an invasion the great Charles was spared, but in the British Isles it had already begun. In 787 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us there “first came three ships of Northmen out of Haeretha-land” [Denmark?], whereupon the reeve of the Dorset port “rode down to the place and would have driven them to the king’s town, because he knew not who they were; and they there slew him. These were the first ships of Danishmen which sought the land of the English nation.” Six years later they fell upon the holy isle of Lindisfarne, pillaged the church sacred with the memories of Northumbrian Christianity, and slew the monks or drove them into the sea. In 807 they first landed in Ireland, and “after this there came great sea-cast floods of foreigners into Erin, so that there was not a point thereof without a fleet.” Then came the turn of the Continent, first along the coast of Frisia and Flanders, and then in what is now France. In 841, when the grandsons of Charlemagne were quarrelling over the fragments of his empire at Fontenay, the first fleet of Northmen entered the Seine; in 843 when they were making their treaty of partition at Verdun, the Vikings entered Nantes on St. John’s Day and slew the bishop before the high altar as he intoned the Sursum corda of the mass. Within two years they sacked Hamburg and Paris. Wherever possible they established themselves at the mouths of the great rivers, often on an island like Walcheren, Noirmoutier, or the Ile de Rhé, whence the rivers opened the whole country to them—Elbe and Weser, Rhine and Meuse, Scheldt, Seine, Loire, and Garonne, even to the Guadalquivir, by which the Arabic chronicler tells us the “dark red sea-birds” penetrated to Seville. One band more venturesome than the rest, entered the Mediterranean and reached Marseilles, whence under their leader Hastings they sacked the Italian town of Luna, apparently in the belief that it was Rome.
About the middle of the ninth century the number of the Norse pirates greatly increased and their ravages became more regular and constant, leading in many cases to permanent settlements. In 855 the Old English Chronicle tells us “the heathen men, for the first time, remained over winter in Sheppey,” at the mouth of the Thames, and thereafter, year by year, it recounts the deeds of the Viking band which wintered in England and is called simply here, the army. It is no longer a matter of summer raids but of unbroken occupation. In 878 during midwinter “the army stole away to Chippenham and overran the land of the West-Saxons and sat down there; and many of the people they drove beyond sea, and of the remainder the greater part they subdued and forced to obey them except King Alfred, and he, with a small band, with difficulty retreated to the woods and to the fastnesses of the moors.” The following year a similar band, now swollen into “the great army” made its appearance on the Continent and for fourteen years ravaged the territory between the Rhine and the Loire. Year after year “the steel of the heathen glistened”; in 886 they laid siege to Paris, which was relieved not by the king’s valor but by his offering them Burgundy to plunder instead. A century later the English began to buy them off with Danegeld. “All men,” laments a chronicler, “give themselves to flight. No one cries out, Stand and fight for your country, your church, your countrymen. What they ought to defend with arms, they shamefully redeem by payments.” There was nothing to do but add a new petition to the litany, “From the fury of the Northmen, good Lord, deliver us.”
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To the writers of the time, who could not see the permanent results of Viking settlement, the Northmen were barbarian pirates, without piety or pity, “who wept neither for their sins nor for their dead,” and their expeditions were mere wanton pillage and destruction. Moreover, these writers were regularly monks or priests, and it was the church that suffered most severely. A walled town or castle might often successfully resist, but the monasteries, protected from Christian freebooters by their sacred character, were simply so many opportunities for plunder to the heathen of the north. Sometimes the monks perished with their monastery, often they escaped only with their lives and a few precious title-deeds, to find on their return merely a heap of blackened ruins and a desolate countryside. Many religious establishments utterly disappeared in the course of the invasions. In Normandy scarcely a church survives anterior to the tenth century. As the monasteries were at this time the chief centres of learning and culture throughout western Europe, their losses were the losses of civilization, and in this respect the verdict of the monastic chroniclers is justified. There is, however, another side to the story, which Scandinavian scholars have not been slow to emphasize. Heathen still and from one point of view barbarian, the Northmen had yet a culture of their own, well advanced on its material side, notable in its artistic skill, and rich in its treasures of poetry and story. Its material treasures have been in part recovered by the labors of northern archæologists, while its literary wealth is now in large measure accessible in English in the numerous translations of sagas and Eddic poems.
After all barbarism, like culture, is a relative thing, and judged by contemporary standards, the Vikings were not barbarians. They rather show a strange combination of the primitive and the civilized—elemental passions expressing themselves with a high degree of literary art, barbaric adornment wrought with skilled craftsmanship, Berserker rage supplemented by clever strategy, pitiless savagery combined with a strong sense of public order, constant feuds and murders coexistent with a most elaborate system of law and legal procedure. Young from our point of view, the civilization of the Vikings had behind it a history of perhaps fifteen centuries.
On its material side Viking civilization is characterized by a considerable degree of wealth and luxury. Much of this, naturally, was gained by pillage, but much also came by trade. The northern warriors do not seem to have had that contempt for traffic which has characterized many military societies, and they turned readily enough from war to commerce. In a Viking tomb recently discovered in the Hebrides there were found beside the sword and spear and battle-axe of all warriors, a pair of scales, fit emblem of the double life the chief had led on earth and may have hoped to continue hereafter! Of trade, and especially trade with the Orient, there is abundant evidence in the great treasures of gold and silver coin found in many regions of the north. The finely wrought objects of gold and silver and encrusted metal, which were once supposed to have been imported from the south and east, are now known to have been in large part of native workmanship, influenced, of course, by the imitation of foreign models, but also carrying out traditions of ornamentation, such as the use of animal forms, which can be traced back continuously to the earliest ages of Scandinavian history. Shields and damascened swords, arm-rings and neck-rings, pins and brooches—especially brooches, if you find an unknown object, says Montelius, call it a brooch and you will generally be right—all testify, both in their abundance and their beauty of workmanship, to an advanced stage of art and handicraft.
This love of the north for luxury of adornment is amply seen in chronicle and saga. When the Irish drove the Vikings out of Limerick in 968 they took from them “their jewels and their best property, and their saddles beautiful and foreign, their gold and their silver, their beautifully woven cloth of all kinds and colors—satin and silk, pleasing and variegated, both scarlet and green, and all sorts of cloth in like manner.” “How,” asks the Valkyrie in the Lay of the Raven, “does the generous Prince Harold deal with the men of feats of renown that guard his land?” The Raven answers:—
They are well cared for, the warriors that cast dice in Harold’s court. They are endowed with wealth and with fair swords, with the ore of the Huns, and with maids from the East. They are glad when they have hopes of a battle, they will leap up in hot haste and ply the oars, snapping the oar-thongs and cracking the tholes. Fiercely, I ween, do they churn the water with their oars at the king’s bidding.