connected with a mist and with a great sickness which invaded the army, the place they have come to (in reality Paris) is in Scandinavian tradition identified with the mythic Bjarmaland; and later, in the history of Saxo Grammaticus, it is identified with the geographical Bjarmaland or Perm. (Saxo Grammat., Hist. Dan. p. 452, Gylfaginning (Edda Snorra); Acta SS. 18th May and 11th Oct.; Steenstrup, Normannerne, i. p. 97 seq.; Keary, The Vikings in Western Christendom, pp. 162, 260.)
No example could better than this bring home to us the strangeness of the Christian world to the first adventurers from the north, nor better explain the process of familiarity which gradually extended the sphere of their ambition. The expedition which we have made mention of took place almost in the middle of the 9th century, and exactly fifty years after the effective opening of the Viking Age. But after this date events developed rapidly. It was fourteen years later (in A.D. 859) that Ragnar's son Björn Ironside and Hasting made their great expedition round Spain to the Mediterranean. In 865 or 866 came to England what we know as the Army, or the Great Army, whose first attacks were in the north of England. Five kings are mentioned in connexion with this veritable invasion of England, and many earls. Their course was not unchequered; but it was only in Wessex that they met with any effective resistance, and the victory of Ashdown (871) put no end to their advance; for, as we know, Alfred himself had at last to wander a fugitive in the fastnesses of Selwood Forest. Much was retrieved by the victory of Aethandune; yet even after the peace of Wedmore as large a part of the land lay under the power of the Danes as of the English.
It is from this time that we discern two distinct tendencies in the viking people. While one section is ready to settle down and receive territory at the hands of the Christian rulers, with or without homage, another section still adheres to a life of mere adventure and of plunder. A large portion of the Great Army refused to be bound by the peace of Wedmore, made some further attempts on England which were frustrated by Alfred's powerful new-built fleet, and then sailed to the continent and spread devastation far and wide. We see them under command of two Danish “kings,” Godfred and Siegfried, first in the country of the Rhine-mouth or the Lower Scheldt; afterwards dividing their forces and, while some devastate far into Germany, others extend their ravages on every side in northern France down to the Loire. The whole of these vast countries, Northern Francia, with part of Burgundy, and the Rhineland, seem to lie as much at their mercy as England had done before Aethandune, or Ireland before the death of Turgesius. But in every country alike the wave of viking conquest now begins to recede. The settlement of Normandy was the only permanent outcome of the Viking Age in France. In England under Edward the Elder and Aethelflaed, Mercia recovered a great portion of what had been ceded to the Danes. In Ireland a great expulsion of the invaders took place in the beginning of the 10th century. Eventually the Norsemen in Ireland contented themselves with a small number of colonies, strictly confined in territory around certain seaports which they themselves had created: Dublin, Waterford and Wexford; though as the whole of Ireland was divided into petty kingdoms, it might easily happen that the Norse king in Ireland rose to the position—not much more than nominal—of over-king (Ard-Ri) for the whole land.
Character of the Vikings.—Severe, therefore, as were the viking raids in Europe, and great as was the suffering they inflicted—on account of which a special prayer, A furore Normannorum libera nos, was inserted in some of the litanies of the West—if they had been pirates and nothing more their place in history would be an insignificant one. If they had been no more than what the Illyrian pirates had been in the early history of Rome, or than the Arabic corsairs were at this time in southern Europe, the disappearance of the evil would have been quickly followed by its oblivion. But even at the outset the vikings were more than isolated bands of freebooters. As we have seen, the viking outbreak was probably part of a national movement. We know that at the same time that some Scandinavian folk were harrying all the western lands, others were founding Garðaríki (Russia) in the east; others were pressing still farther south till they came in contact with the eastern empire in Constantinople, which the northern folk knew as Mikillgarðr (Mikklegard); so that when Hasting and Björn had sailed to Luna in the gulf of Genoa the northern folk had almost put a girdle round the Christian world. There is every evidence that the vikings were not a mere lawless folk—that is, in their internal relations—but that a system of laws existed among them which was generally respected. The nearest approach to it now preserved is probably the code of laws attributed to the mythic king Froði (the Wise) and preserved in the pages of Saxo Grammaticus. It contains provisions for the partition of booty, punishments for theft, desertion and treachery. But some of the clauses securing a comparative liberty for women appear less characteristic of the Viking Age (cf. Alexander Bugge, Vikingerne, vol. i. p. 49). Women, indeed, did not take part in their first expeditions. In the constitution of the Jómborg state and again in that of the eastern Vaerings (a Scandinavian body in the service of the East Roman Empire) we see a constitution which looks like the foretaste of that of the Templars or the Teutonic Knights. Steenstrup thinks the code cited by Saxo may be identical with the laws which Rollo promulgated for his Norman subjects. In any case, they fall more near the viking period than any other northern table of laws. A certain republicanism was professed by these adventurers. “We have no king,” one body answered to some Frankish delegates. We do read frequently of kings in the accounts of their hosts; but their power may not have extended beyond the leadership of the expedition; they may have been kings ad hoc. On the other hand, the whole character of northern tradition (Teutonic and Scandinavian tradition alike) forbids us to suppose that any would be elected to that office who was not of noble or princely blood. They were not entirely unlettered; for the use of runes dates back considerably earlier than the Viking Age. But these were used almost exclusively for lapidary inscriptions. What we can alone, describe as a literature, first the early Eddic verse, next the habit of narrating sagas: these things the Norsemen learned probably from their Celtic subjects, partly in Ireland, partly in the western islands of Scotland; and they first developed the new literature on the soil of Iceland. Nevertheless, some of the Eddic songs do seem to give the very form and pressure of the viking period.[1]
In certain material possessions—those, in fact, belonging to their trade, which was war and naval adventure—these viking folk were ahead of the Christian nations: in shipbuilding, for example. There is certainly a historical connexion between the ships which the tribes on the Baltic possessed in the days of Tacitus and the viking ships (Keary, The Vikings in Western Europe, pp. 108-9): a fact which would lead us to believe that the art of shipbuilding had been better preserved there than elsewhere in northern Europe. Merchant vessels must of course have plied between England and France or Frisia. But it is certain that even Charlemagne possessed no adequate navy, though a late chronicler tells us how he thought of building one. His descendants never carried out his designs. Nor was any English king before Alfred stirred up to undertake the same task. And yet the Romans, when threatened by the Carthaginian power, built in one year a fleet capable of holding its own against the, till then, greatest maritime nation in the world. The viking ships had a character apart. They may have owed their origin to the Roman galleys: they did without doubt owe their sails to them.[2] Equally certain it is that this special type of shipbuilding was developed in the Baltic, if not before
- ↑ More especially the beautiful series contained in book iii. of
the Corpus Poeticum Boreale, and ascribed by the editors of that
collection to one poet—“the Helgi Poet.” Here vikings are
mentioned by name—e.g.:—
“ Varð ara ymr, ok iarna glymr; Brast rönd við rönd; rero víkingar.” - ↑ “Sail” in every Teutonic language is practically the same word, and derived from the Latin sagulum.
