The End of the Viking Age

Viking raids were, as we have seen, often but far from always successful; the Scandinavians were often able to outflank the armies of Europe by being faster than they. As European armies became better at meeting the threat, the Vikings attacked with ever greater groups of warriors made possible by several chieftains banding together for a campaign.

The raids, however, recede in the eleventh century, for two reasons in particular. On the one hand, European rulers had learned how to meet the threat from the seas, with fortifications, their own navies, and army con­tingents strategically stationed. It simply became harder and more risky to raid. On the other hand, the political situation had developed in Scandinavia. The always competing chieftains knocked each other out of the political game with the result that around the year 1000 only the three kings of Denmark, Norway and Sweden remained. These rulers worked on control­ling violence within their kingdoms, and they were not keen on bands of armed warriors that they did not control and who might question their authority. They suppressed any such tendencies, often redirecting them in other directions, such as towards the pagan peoples of the eastern Baltic Sea.

The Reputation of the Vikings

The Vikings had already earned a reputation for violence in the contempor­ary sources, the most accessible of which were produced by their European victims. They were surely happy to acquire such a reputation, since it made their job of either raiding or negotiating for tribute easier. Some sources, such as those mentioned above penned with rhetorical bravura by Ermentarius and the anonymous monk of Saint-Vaast, depict scenes of absolute destruc­tion and devastation.

Exaggeration in the sources is occasionally obvious as when the chronicler Prudentius noted in 834 that the Vikings ‘destroyed everything' in the Carolingian trading town Dorestad in Frisia. Yet the town was still there in

835 for the Vikings to attack and ‘lay waste', as the same chronicler notes. In

836 he says that the Vikings ‘devastated' Dorestad, and they returned in 837. Clearly, the devastation was not so bad that the town could not quickly be reconstructed or that merchants chose not to return, despite what Prudentius' words might make us think.

Scholars and others who later in the Middle Ages read the chronicles of the Viking Age were impressed by the devastation brought by the Vikings, and they typically exaggerated the violence further. For example, in the 1150s the Englishman Henry of Huntingdon wrote a history of his country. Here the Vikings come out even more violent and terrible than in the most rhetorical of contemporary accounts. The invasions of Cnut and other Vikings were ‘much more monstrous and much more cruel' than any other invasions that England had suffered. Vikings wanted only ‘to plunder, not to own, to destroy everything, not to rule'. He makes these statements even though he was certainly aware that Cnut desired to rule, as he did in England for almost twenty years, and that Halfdan's warriors were interested in owning and cultivating land. Henry presented the Vikings as a people interested in violence and destruction for their own sake, and later writers have often followed his lead.^[167]

Scandinavian writers also took the theme of Viking violence and ran with it, notably in the rich storytelling tradition of medieval Icelandic sagas, where increasingly fantastic and exaggerated accounts entertained.

Berserks and the Blood-Eagle

A brief poetic stanza from the early eleventh century celebrated the victory of the Viking chieftain Ivar over the Northumbrian king Ella using a stark circumlocution common in Scandinavian court poetry of the time: ‘Ivar caused the eagle to cut the back of Ella.' The image is of the king's dead body left behind on the battlefield to be desecrated by carrion eaters like the eagle. This kind of imagery is commonplace in the court poetry of the time, but as the centuries passed, new narrators looking to fascinate and horrify their audiences came up with increasingly strained interpretations of this verse. The culmination was reached in the late medieval Tale ofRagnar's Sons, which describes how Ivar and his brothers, in revenge for the torture death of their father Ragnar Lodbrok, ‘had the eagle cut in [the still living] Ella's back, then all his ribs severed from the backbone with a sword, in such a way that his lungs were pulled out there'. This horrific torture, known as the ‘blood­eagle', continues to fascinate modern audiences, for whom it often serves as the ultimate example of how Vikings hungered for cruel violence, even though scholarship has long since shown that the story is an invention of the fourteenth century.^[168]

The ‘berserk' (often spelled ‘berserker') occupies a similarly strong and apparently permanent position in the modern fascination with Viking vio­lence. A ninth-century Scandinavian poem describes warriors ready to fight in a sea battle, again using poetic circumlocutions: the ships are loaded with men, white shields, western spears and foreign swords; the ‘bear-shirts (berserkir) bellow' and the ‘wolf-skins howl'. The poet thus aptly described the sound of chain mail worn by warriors eager for battle using circumlocu­tions that make the hearer imagine those warriors as suitably ferocious and wild, in accordance with Viking Age warrior ethos. Yet medieval narrators took the idea and ran with it, creating a special kind of warrior called ‘berserk' (‘bear-shirt' in Old Norse), who ‘chewed on their shields in frenzy, fought wildly like wolves or dogs, and could not be injured by steel or fire'. Eventually, the berserk became in the Icelandic sagas a stock comic character with great strength but little intelligence whom clever farmers could manip­ulate for their purposes.^[169]