The Function and Purpose of Viking Violence

A careful reading of the sources makes it abundantly clear that the immediate purpose of Viking violence was to acquire wealth, either directly in the form of gems, precious metals and other valuable materials, or in the form of plunder that could easily be sold, notably slaves.

The Need for Provisions

European narrative sources often tell of Vikings plundering for food and provi­sions. While vainly besieging the Anglo-Saxon stronghold of ‘Wigingamere' in 920 they ‘seized the cattle round about'.^[150] When the Vikings negotiated for tribute, they demanded not only ‘a great sum of silver', but also ‘quantities of corn, wine, and livestock' (the example is from France in 869).^[151]

What happened to any cattle the Vikings got their hands on is vividly illustrated by archaeological testimony about the 882 raids in Frisia. The chroni­cle kept up at the German monastery of Fulda records in a single, brief sentence an 882 Viking raid on Deventer in the Netherlands: ‘The Northmen killed very many and burnt the port town which in the Frisian tongue is called Taventeri, where St. Liafwan rests.'^[152] Archaeological excavations in Deventer have shown unmistakable traces of the Vikings in the form of a layer 10-25 centimetres thick of charcoal, debris and burnt building structures.

Zutphen was clearly an administrative centre within the Carolingian empire, centred on a large single-aisled hall of 24 X 8 m, constructed of posts and planks (rather than the cheaper wattle-and-daub). The archaeolo­gical remains do not allow us to date exactly the destruction of Zutphen, but it is reasonable to assume the town, like its neighbour Deventer, was devastated in 882. The Vikings put the entire town, including the great hall, to the torch, and everything seems to have burned down. Archaeologists have found a thin layer of charcoal, including remnants of wattle-and-daub walls, lost metal household implements, broken ceramics and animal bones, but also a few human skeletons (including the woman whose fate was recounted at the beginning of this chapter).

The Vikings killed at least ten head of cattle in Zutphen. When they departed, they left behind the heads and the lower limbs of these animals, which must mean that they hauled off the bodies with most of the edible meat. As a centre in the royal administration, the town would have housed much livestock, and perhaps this is why the Vikings, always in need of provisions, targeted it.

At some point after the Vikings had left, but not necessarily very soon, Zutphen was cleaned up. The debris, including the remains of people and animals, was put into the pits of the sunken huts and covered up. The woman victim, who may have fallen inside the hut, was never given a proper burial. Afterwards, the town was rebuilt with an even larger hall building, and now with ramparts, ditches and other defensive measures. As everywhere in Europe, rulers built fortifications to meet the Viking threat. The coastline of the Low Countries, for example, is full of fortresses with circular surrounding walls similar to the one built in Zutphen.

The Viking Desire for Wealth

The immediate purpose of the Viking raids was to acquire money and other forms of wealth. This is why the Vikings were always willing to negotiate for

Rhinelands and Scandinavia (Vienna: Fassbaender, 2004); Erica Rompelman, Dierlijk en menselijk botmateriaal uit de opgravingen ’s-Gravenhof '99 en Zutphen Stadhuis: Vondsten uit het laatste kwart van de roerige 9de eeuw: Stadsafval of vikingaanval?, Zutphense Archeologische Publicaties 34 (2007); Michiel H. Bartels and Michel Groothedde, ‘Central Places and Fortifications: The Case Study of Deventer and Zutphen - a Medieval Burgenordnung in the Eastern Netherlands', in Babette Ludowici (ed.), Trade and Communication Networks of the First Millennium AD in the Northern Part of Central Europe: Central Places, Beach Markets, Landing Places and Training Centres (Hanover: Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, 2010), pp. 238-54. tribute in return for peace, as is reported in The Battle of Maldon, when a messenger from the Vikings before the battle announces to the English:

[the Vikings] will be so good as to let you give gold rings

In return for peace. It is better for you

To buy off our raid with gold

Than that we, renowned for cruelty, should cut you down in battle.^[154]

The annals and chronicles of the Viking Age are full of fearful Europeans paying off Vikings with wealth, which the latter gratefully received, rather than fighting. For Viking chieftains, tribute payments had the advantage that the payment went directly to them, who could then redistribute the spoils among their followers, making the latter obliged to their generous leaders. A Swedish participant in three ventures (in 1006, 1012 and 1018) to pressure England's King Ethelred to pay Danegeld thought of the resulting bonanza as generated by the generosity of his chieftains when he boasted about his gains in a runic inscription: ‘Ulf has taken three Danegelds in England. That was the first that Tosti paid.

If no tribute or Danegeld materialised, the Vikings instead got as much wealth as possible through raiding and plunder. Both European sources and those from Scandinavia contain plenty of examples of Vikings simply grabbing the valuables they desired. When in 865 they managed to gain entry into the rich monastery of Saint-Denis close to Paris, they carried out booty to their ships for twenty days, according to a contemporary witness.^[156] A silver necklace found in northern Norway contains a runic inscription that reveals the Viking point of view: ‘We travelled to meet the men of Frisia; we divided the spoils of the fight.'^[157] It is tempting to assume that the silver of the necklace as well as the other silver artefacts found together with it made up some of that booty. The Vikings were in the business of accumulating wealth, and we occasionally hear of the hoards they brought together, as when a group of Frisians in 885 defeated a group of Vikings and in their encampment found a great mass of ‘treasure in gold and silver and other movables'.²¹

Slaving and the Slave Trade

To gain wealth, the Vikings often engaged in trade. They traded products of their Scandinavian homelands, such as furs, reindeer antlers and soapstone, but also objects that they had taken on their raids. For example, a group of Vikings stole an outstandingly decorated Gospel Book (Codex aureus, ‘The Golden Book') from an ecclesiastical library in England. According to a note in Old English in the book, they then sold it for ‘pure gold' to ealderman Alfred of Surrey, who gave it back to Christ Church, Canterbury. Chronicles and other contemporary sources occasionally mention Vikings trading or even setting up markets, as when King Charles the Bald in 873 gave permis­sion to a band of Vikings ‘to stay until February on an island in the Loire, and to hold a market there'.^[158]

In addition to stolen objects and perhaps trade goods legitimately acquired in Scandinavia and elsewhere, such markets would surely have traded in slaves. Written sources often mention that the Vikings captured people on their raids, as when in 888 they betrayed their promise to allow the citizens of the city of Meaux safely to evacuate their besieged city.

A visitor to the trading town of Bulghar witnessed a remarkable display of violence against women when he observed the cremation funeral of a Rus chieftain placed in his wooden ship, which had been pulled ashore. A large array of grave goods was placed in a pavilion on the ship, and then animals were killed and also placed there: two horses, two cows, a cock and a hen, and a dog. One of the chieftain's slave-girls volunteered, Ibn Fadlan claims, to accompany her dead master in death. First, she had intercourse with the most important men who had come for the funeral, before she was drugged and brought into the pavilion where her master lay. ‘Six men entered the pavilion and all had intercourse with the slave-girl.' Afterward, she lay down next to the dead chieftain. The men held her arms and legs and an old ‘crone' called ‘The Angel of Death' put a rope against the slave's neck, giving the ends to two of the men. She then repeatedly stabbed the slave ‘between her ribs, now here, now there, while the two men throttled her with the rope until she died'. Later, the ship was set ablaze, and the ashes were buried under a mound.^[160]

Whether the burial Ibn Fadlan observed exemplifies Scandinavian customs is much debated, since one cannot automatically equal the label Rus with Scandinavians, or Vikings, as is often done. Viking chieftains were certainly often buried or cremated in ships that were later covered by mounds. They may be accompanied by the same kinds of animals as Ibn Fadlan saw, and very occasionally more than one person is buried in the same burial and it is clear that one of them has been killed, for example through decapitation.

Gift-Giving and the Use of Wealth

The wealth that Vikings in one way or another acquired was fed into the political economy of the time, which may be analysed as a gift-exchange system. Chieftains distributed their wealth as gifts among their followers, who in return owed their loyalty or at the very least realised the material advantages of staying with a successful chieftain. Scandinavian chieftains competed with each other in constantly fluid constellations of power. They competed over resources and people, notably warriors, rather than territory. In a time before states existed in the north, they could not simply command people to follow them; they had to persuade them to become loyal followers. In addition to violence, their methods of persuasion included giving gifts and appearing as wealthy and successful.

Such chieftains are described, or alluded to, in northern poetry of the Viking Age, particularly in the Norse court verse known as skaldic poetry, but also for example in the Old English poem Beowulf. The poetry conjures the image of the chieftain hosting great parties in his hall, where he surrounded himself with warriors, who came to partake of his generosity and hospitality. In the eleventh century, the skald Arnorr extolled his patron, Earl Thorfinn of the Orkney Islands, with characteristic skaldic circumlocutions and opaque language: ‘Through all the serpent's slayer [= winter] he, surpassing [all other chieftains], drank the swamp of malt [= beer] - the ruler practiced splendid hospitality then.'^[161] Thorfinn was so generous that he let his warriors party throughout the winter, and not just at Yule, as contented more parsimonious leaders. Being a court poet, Arnorr advertised his chieftain's generosity with aplomb and exaggeration, while the Swedish chieftain Holmbjorn at about the same time was not averse to boasting about himself. He put up a runestone through which he let any rune-literate warrior looking for a patron know that he, Holmbjorn, ‘was generous with food'.^[162]

The halls were also the sites of gift distribution. In early northern literature, chieftains and kings are usually known by some variant of the designation ‘ring giver' or ‘ring breaker'. In still unmonetised Scandinavia, wealth was stored in the form of rings, particularly arm-rings, made of precious metals, and chieftains gave rings to their warriors, sometimes breaking them up to share them. The receivers were suitably grateful, as we can see in another poem by the same Arnorr. This time, he praises another ruler, perhaps King Cnut the Great of England and Denmark, about his gifts of arm-rings and how the recipients were grateful (the ‘men of Scania' are probably the same as the ‘Danes' on the previous line):

Fire of the stream [= gold] was set between the wrist and shoulders of the Danes I saw the men of Scania thank him for an arm-ring.^[163]

The men who benefited from the ruler's generosity were suitably grateful. Their thanks should extend beyond words to action, as Wiglaf reminded Beowulf s other warriors, when their chieftain single-handedly was fighting a fire-spewing dragon:

I remember the time that we took mead together, when we made promises to our prince in the beer-hall - he gave us these rings - that we would pay him back for this battle-gear, these helmets and hard swords, if such a need as this ever befell him.^[164]

Vikings seldom encountered such fearsome enemies, but Wiglaf s argument still holds; when the chieftain called for the armed action of his warriors, those who had received his gifts owed him nothing less than their fighting prowess. Otherwise, they lost their honour as men and warriors. In this way a chieftain was able to maintain the loyalty and obedience of people whom he scarcely could have forced to follow him (in the manner one encounters in the developed state).

In competing over warriors - a finite resource - Scandinavian chieftains needed to acquire things that were suitable as gifts, and they needed as much as they possibly could get. This explains many of the developments in Viking Age Scandinavia as well as the Viking raids themselves. By engaging in trade, chieftains not only won the profits of that trade, readily made into precious metals, they also gained access to particularly attractive gifts in the form of exotic, foreign and rare objects. By supporting artisans (some of whom had surely been enslaved in Viking raids) who manufactured beautiful and attractive things, they were able to increase the perceived value of their gifts beyond the intrinsic worth of the raw materials. By importing presti­gious ideology, such as Christianity, making it accessible to their warriors, chieftains provided yet another gift. In all these respects, Viking Age chief­tains strove to get more value for the wealth they already possessed, but they also strove to increase their wealth, simply by plundering more or being paid more in tribute. This explains the Viking raids on Europe. They were fund­raising events pursued by chieftains starved of wealth.