Viking Britain- an Exploration Read online

  Sigurd imagery also found its way to Britain during the Viking Age: four Christian runestones erected on the Isle of Man by communities of Viking origin display imagery from the Sigurd legend, and an iconographic scheme that depicts the roasting of Fáfnir’s heart and Sigurd sucking his thumb was carved into a standing cross at Halton in Lancashire.47 One of the Manx stones contains a rare detail, found in only a handful of other depictions of the story. This is the image of Gunnar in the snake-pit; a scene from later in the story – pithily summarized in the thirteenth-century Völsunga saga. Gunnar, who with his brother Högni had murdered Sigurd in order to claim the treasure for themselves, fell foul of their brother-in-law, Attila the Hun, who – having invited them over for dinner – had Högni’s heart cut out and Gunnar thrown into a pit of snakes. The latter brother was able to fend off death for a short while by playing a harp with his feet: all of the snakes fell asleep, except for one, which delivered the fatal bite.

  Ragnar Loðbrók was in many respects a reinvention of his dragon-slaying antecedent Sigurd; it was even said (with cavalier regard for chronology) that Ragnar’s second wife, Aslaug, was the daughter of Sigurd himself (with the valkyrie Brynhildr). Ragnar and Aslaug even had a son they named ‘Sigurd’, a young man who, it was said, had the image of a snake biting its own tail swirling in his iris: for obvious reasons he became known as Sigurd ‘snake-in-the-eye’ (ormr í auga).48

  Ragnar may never have existed, and if he did, almost nothing we are told of his life in the sagas is true. His death, as recorded in the sagas and in Krákumál, is pure fantasy. He was said to have died languishing at the bottom of a snake-pit – consigned to this improbable death by Ælle, one of the two kings of Northumbria killed by the micel here in 867. (The similarity to the treatment of Gunnar in Völsunga saga is obvious and probably deliberate.) What is clear, however, is that when Scandinavians of the later Middle Ages came to write about the deeds of Ragnar and his sons they saw them in the light of the most heroic figure of all: Sigurd the dragon-slayer himself. This alone should tell us something about the high regard and wide-ranging fame that attended the reputations of the men who took York in 867. But what is also clear is that it was felt necessary to provide some sort of explanation for the Viking invasions of Britain in the 860s, a compelling origin tale to explain what happened, to justify all the violence and the bloodshed, to explain the appalling deeds and doings of a cast of individuals who (or some of whom at least) have a far better claim to historicity than their supposed father.49

  8

  Eagles of Blood

  Do you know how to cut? Do you know how to read?

  Do you know how to stain? Do you know how to test?

  Do you know how to invoke? Do you know how to sacrifice?

  Do you know how to dispatch? Do you know how to slaughter?

  Hávamál1

  Björn Ironside, Halfdan Whiteshirt,2 Ubbe, Sigurd Snake-in-the-Eye and Ivar the Boneless.

  The recitation of their names has a poetry about it, like the ritual summoning of Viking ghosts. Most of these individuals – if not all of them – were, unlike their supposed father, real people. Of the five, three of them – Ubbe, Halfdan and Ivar – had a major role to play in Britain during the ninth century. In the stories that were written about them in later centuries, the relationship with their father, Ragnar Loðbrók, was crucial – not least in establishing a motive for their violent intrusion into England.

  The vengeance that they (and Ivar in particular) were believed to have wrought on King Ælle for supposedly dumping their dad into a snake-pit has been held up for centuries as the epitome of Viking savagery and pagan cruelty. ‘Ivar and the brothers’, so the story is told in Ragnarssona þáttr (‘The Tale of Ragnar’s Sons’, written c. 1300), ‘had the eagle cut in Ella’s back, then all his ribs severed from the backbone with a sword, so that his lungs were pulled out’.3

  This grotesque performance has become known as the ‘blood-eagle’. Saxo Grammaticus, writing at least a hundred years earlier than the author of this account (though still 300 years after the event) gives a version of something similar, but his description is ‘milder’ in that the outline of an eagle is simply incised into Ælle’s back; no messing around with ribs and lungs flapping about all over the place (although Saxo does introduce some literal salt into the wound: ‘Not satisfied with imprinting a wound on him, they salted the mangled flesh’).4 More pressing than the disagreement between these sources, however, is the fact that the only contemporary account of Ælle’s death implies that it occurred during the Northumbrian attempt to recapture York in 867. Even if we imagine this unpleasant spectacle taking place in the immediate aftermath of victory, one might expect that something so outlandish would have received a passing mention, even in a document as famously laconic as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

  The earliest Old Norse reference to the killing of King Ælle comes in verse form. In a stanza of one of several skaldic poems composed in praise of King Cnut in the eleventh century (known collectively as Knútsdrápur), the poet Sigvatr Þórðarson wrote:

  Ok Ellu bak,

  At lét hinn’s sat,

  Ívarr, ara,

  Iorví, skorit.5

  Translated literally, this turns out as:

  And Ella’s back,

  at had the one who dwelt,

  Ivarr, with eagle,

  York, cut.6

  To say that skaldic verse is an economical art-form would be something of an understatement, and the particular form that the Knútsdrápur took (a metre known as tøglag) was particularly compressed. Most pertinently, the relationship of the elements within the stanza is as ambiguous in Old Norse as it is in modern English. It can be translated as ‘Ivar, who dwelt at York, had an eagle cut into Ælle’s back’ – the implication being that Ivar cut the image of an eagle into Ælle’s back. This seems to have been how medieval writers understood it, and modern historians have tended to accept the interpretation of Saxo and the saga-writers.

  However, the verse could equally well mean ‘Ivar, who dwelt at York, caused an eagle to cut Ælle’s back’.7 Or, if one is to fill in the subtext: ‘Ivar, having captured York, defeated and killed King Ælle: which meant, to everyone’s general satisfaction, that eagles were able to gouge the flesh of his corpse as it lay face down and naked in the mud: hooray for Ivar, feaster of eagles!’ This, the reader may remember, is very much the sort of thing that Viking aristocrats enjoyed being praised for. Good kings were those who could claim particular success in turning their enemies into fleshy morsels for raptors and carrion creatures (especially the wolf, raven and eagle). In other words, it is utterly conventional, and precisely the sort of thing we should expect a skaldic poet to come out with.8

  The elaborate and inconsistent descriptions of gory rituals contained in Saxo’s history and in the sagas seem, when seen in this light, to have been the product of a medieval misunderstanding, one which has been compounded by a tendency among modern translators to approach the poetry through the prism of those later embroideries.

  The supposed ‘rite of the blood-eagle’ seems, therefore, to be a myth of Viking barbarity conjured up in later centuries by antiquarians enthralled by the exoticism of their forebears and titillated by their gory antics. As the late Roberta Frank, the incomparable scholar of Germanic languages and literature, put it: ‘Medieval men of letters, like their modern counterparts, could sometimes be over-eager to recover the colourful rites and leafy folk beliefs of their pagan ancestors.’9 This should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the pagan people of northern Europe did indeed engage in practices which – from our perspective – appear horrific and bloodthirsty.

  In a famous passage in his Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesie pontificum (‘Deeds of the Bishops of the Church of Hamburg-Bremen’), the eleventh-century German chronicler Adam of Bremen decided to give an account of what he called ‘the superstition of the Swedes’. After an extraordinary (and frankly somewhat unlikely) description of a temple at
Uppsala, he goes on to explain that:

  each of their gods have appointed priests to offer up the sacrifices of the people […] The sacrifice proceeds as follows: nine males of every living creature are offered up, and it is customary to placate the gods with their blood: their corpses are hung in the grove next to the temple. That grove is so sacred to the heathens that every single tree is considered to be divine, thanks to the death or rotting carcass of the sacrificed; they hang dogs and horses there alongside men.10

  There are plenty of details in Adam’s account that provoke sceptical beard-stroking – the grandiose scale of the temple and its associated rituals, as well as the obvious Christian agenda of the author, are paramount among these.11 But even if the details are dubious – indeed, even if there never was a temple at Uppsala12 – evidence from elsewhere in the Viking world suggests that sacrifice, perhaps including human sacrifice, was very much a part of pre-Christian religion in the north. In 1984, remodelling of Frösö Church in Jämtland, Sweden, led to an archaeological investigation of the chancel. Beneath the altar, the excavators discovered the stump of a birch tree, cut down before the church was built. In the dark earth surrounding the tree were found the bones of animals – cattle, goat, sheep, pig, horse, dog, chicken, grouse, squirrel, deer, elk and bear – scattered in profusion, disarticulated, broken and cut. The remains of humans were also found: two adults (possibly more) and two children – one between three and five years old, the other a baby of less than six months. All of the bones, human and animal, can be dated broadly to the Viking Age. The evidence from Frösö strongly suggests that the tree was a focal point for sacrificial offerings, and it is possible that humans and animals (or parts of animals) were hung from branches – in a manner similar to that described by Adam of Bremen – until they were cut down and buried, or rotted and fell to the earth below.13

  Other images and texts from the Viking Age seem to corroborate Adam of Bremen’s tale – at least in part. Ibn Fadlān explained that, in gratitude for supernatural intervention and assistance, animals were slaughtered and their remains offered to the idol. The offerer ‘hangs the heads of sheep or cows on the wooden stakes which have been driven into the ground’.14 Ibrâhîm ibn Ya`qûb al-Ṭurṭûshî, a Jewish merchant from Islamic Spain, reported that in Hedeby, ‘When a man kills a sacrificial animal, whether it be an ox, ram, goat, or pig, he hangs it on a pole outside his house so that people will know that he has made a sacrifice in honour of the god.’15 It must have made for a grisly street scene.

  A fragment of tapestry, woven in the ninth century, was preserved in a ship burial at Oseberg near Oslo in Norway. It seems to depict a strange tree laden with corpse-fruit while a procession of wagons, horses, women and warriors passes beneath it. Finally, the famous Stora Hammars picture stone from Gotland appears to show something more elaborate: a small figure lies face down on a small structure. Behind, to the right, stands a bearded man, leaning forward, wielding a spear. Behind him and above him, two large birds are depicted – ravens, perhaps. To the left of the scene an armed man hangs from a tree, to the right a crowd wave their weapons in the air.16 No one knows what this scene is intended to convey (a mythological scene, a legendary narrative, a depiction of contemporary practices?), but the impression of blood-ritual is unmistakable and a connection to the cult of the god Odin entirely plausible.

  One of the most evocative of medieval embellishments was that which transformed the supposed rite of the blood-eagle from a sadistic and vengeful act into a religious ritual. This notion of cultic sacrifice has its origins in the only other saga account of the practice – a description in the thirteenth-century Orkneyinga saga which insists that Halfdan Long-leg (a son of the ninth-century Norwegian king Harald Finehair) ‘had his ribs cut from the spine with a sword and the lungs pulled out through the slits in his back’ by Einar, Earl of Orkney, who ‘dedicated the victim to Odin as a victory offering’.17 The saga is deeply flawed as a guide to historical events, its grisly details as unreliable as the sources discussed above. In one detail, however, the saga may preserve a real aspect of the relationship between death and ritual during the Viking Age: an association with the lore and cult of Odin, Lord of the Hanged (Hangadrottinn).

  There is no escaping the fact that Odin, as we know him from Old Norse poetry, as well as from later medieval writings, is a troubling and sinister deity. Among the most ominous of the huge number of names by which he was known are Valföðr (‘father of the slain’), Skollvaldr (‘lord of treachery’), Hjarrandi (‘screamer’), Grímnir (‘the hooded one’), Hildolfr (‘battle-wolf’), Bölverkr (‘evil worker’), Draugadróttinn (‘lord of the undead’), Hengikeptr (‘hang-jaw’) …18 His portfolio is a broad one: magic, warfare, rune-craft, fate, poetry, prophecy, dissimulation, power and death seem to have been considered his main areas of interest. Odin’s multifaceted nature makes him a difficult god to characterize. But in all his guises there runs a skein of darkness, an intimacy with death that hangs off him like a cloak of shadow that obscures and obfuscates – a dark and tattered mantle.

  Odin’s association with bloody rituals is bound up with the god’s repeated acts of self-sacrifice in the pursuit of hidden or forbidden wisdom. His one empty eye socket – the god’s most unambiguous distinguishing feature – was the result of his thirst for a draught from the well of Mímir, the fountain of wisdom and intellect presided over by its eponymous guardian. To gain access to the well, Odin plucked out his own eye and gave it to the waters – an exchange of sight for insight.19 When Mímir the guardian died, decapitated during a war between the gods, Odin took possession of the severed head. He carved runes into it, spoke charms over it. Ever after it would speak with him, whispering him secrets, telling of other worlds. Here is Odin the necromancer, conversant with corpses.

  The knowledge of runes and charms came about as the result of an even greater sacrifice – the god’s dedication of himself to himself:

  I know that I hung on that windy tree,

  spear-wounded, nine full nights,

  given to Odin, myself to myself,

  on that tree that rose from roots

  that no man ever knows.

  They gave me neither bread, nor drink from horn,

  I peered down below.

  I clutched the runes, screaming I grabbed them,

  and then sank back.20

  The tree from which Odin was hung is probably to be identified with the world tree, Yggdrasil. The spear with which he was wounded is probably his own dwarf-forged spear, Gungnir. Unlike the loss of his eye, given as surety to a third party, this was a more profound sacrifice – one which acknowledged Odin himself as the highest power to which an offering could be made, himself to himself, an ordeal of transcendental suffering – the primal bargain of power for pain.

  The initial Viking capture of York came towards the end of 866, and the calamitous Northumbrian counter-attack didn’t materialize until March of 867.21 The delay meant that the Vikings were probably able to celebrate their victory in synchronicity with the mid-winter festival, a time of drinking, feasting and sacrifices known, in Old Norse, as jol – or, as we know it, Yule. As is so often the case, we only have much later writers to rely on for any sense of what this festival involved. And, almost as predictably, it is the Icelander Snorri Sturluson in his great historical cycle Heimskringla who provides the detail. This comes, firstly, in Ynglinga saga, where he explains that sacrifices were made at mid-winter for a good harvest (a provision which makes sense if one imagines mid-winter as marking the rebirth of the sun – the start of the solar year – and the beginning of a new cycle of growth),22 and, secondly, in Hakonar saga góða (the saga of Hákon the Good). Hákon (King of Norway between 934 and 961) is principally remembered for his role in promoting Christianity in Norway, and one of the ways he apparently tried to achieve this was by aligning the Yule festival with the dates of Christmas. As Snorri explains, ‘previously observance of Yule began on midwinter night (12th January), and continued
for three nights’. He goes on:

  It was an ancient custom, when a ritual feast was to take place, that all the farmers should attend where the temple was and bring there their own supplies for them to use while the banquet lasted. At this banquet everyone had to take part in the ale-drinking. All kinds of domestic animals were slaughtered there, including horses, and all the blood that came from them was called hlaut (‘lot’), and what the blood was contained in, hlaut-bowls, and hlaut-twigs, these were fashioned like holy water sprinklers; with these the altars were to be reddened all over, and also the walls of the temple outside and inside and the people also were sprinkled, while the meat was to be cooked for a feast. There would be fires down the middle of the floor in the temple with cauldrons over them. The toasts were handed across the fire, and the one who was holding the banquet and who was the chief person there, he had to dedicate the toast and all the ritual food; first would be Odin’s toast – that was drunk to victory and to the power of the king – and then Njǫrð’s toast and Freyr’s toast for prosperity and peace. Then after that it was common for many people to drink the bragafull (‘chieftain’s toast’). People also drank toasts to their kinsmen, those who had been buried in mounds, and these were called minni (‘memorial toasts’).23