Ride of the VALKYRIES

 

... the English called them wælwulfas,  'slaughter-wolves' ...

"Viking raiders were never a bolt from the blue, unknown barbarian sails on a North Sea horizon. Their victims had encountered Scandinavians many times before, but as traders rather than agents of chaos; the surprise was in the violence, not the contact."

The Vikings ominously enter the written record in the pages of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 789 AD:

      'Here [King] Beorhtric [of Wessex] took [Mercian] King Offa's daughter Eadburh. And in his days came first three ships of Northmen from Hordaland: and then the reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king's town because he did not know what they were; and then they killed him. These were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race.'

Some corrective notes are required for the chronicler's account. This occasion was probably not the first 'visit' of the the Northmen's ships to the kingdom of the West Saxons. A charter by the king of Mercia in 792 AD refers to Kent and the need for military service against "seaborne pagans" in migratory fleets. These aggressors had obviously been harassing the southeastern shores of Britain for some time. Neither were the murderous 'strangers' rightly named as "Danish men", an error made despite the internal reference to Hordaland in western Norway. The catch-all label of Dani ('Danes'), like pagani ('pagans'), is often repeated as a generalised  slur in the English sources.

The first securely recorded Viking raid came in 793 AD, with the infamous assault on Lindisfarne, the island monastery dedicated to St Cuthbert. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records it:

     'In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen men destroyed God's church at Lindisfarne.'

The Annals of Lindisfarne amend the date to June 8th, which makes more sense in terms of suitable weather for 'summer raiding'. The other important addition made by the monk Alcuin is the idea of complete surprise. What astonished him and his contemporaries was that their Norwegian 'friends' brought swords, not goods to trade. In a letter written to Aethelred, king of Northumbria, Alcuin writes:

     'Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples.'

... 'inroad from the sea', navigium  ... (later gloss) naufragium, 'disaster' ...

In keeping with the collective note of shock, later accounts describe how the monks of Lindisfarne where slaughtered where they stood, tied and thrown into the sea to drown, seized and carried off to slavery. It was the sudden turn to brutal cruelty that was so utterly unexpected.

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... along the Norwegian North Sea coast in the eighth century 

saw the rise of a new kind of a new kind of ruler

the sækonungr or 'sea-king' ...

According to Snorri's Saga of the Ynglingas,  "At that time ... 

there were many sea-kings who commanded large troops and had no lands".

In the 1930s a list was compiled of all the sea-king personal names found in the written sagas and sources. Only those with origins in the ninth century or earlier were included, and the result was "real-world descriptors of violent war leaders. They almost stride from the page:

Ari, 'Messmate';  Beiti, 'the Cruiser',  Ekill, 'He Who Sails Alone';  Geitir, 'the Goat';  Gestill, 'the Little Guest';  Jalkr, 'Screamer';  Mysingr, 'the Mouse';  Mævill, 'the Seagull';  Rokkvi, 'He Who Sails At Dusk' ― and some seventeen more. These are pirate names ... Viking names in the proper sense of the word, the real thing ... warlords of the sea ..."

These sea-kings were critical to the beginnings of the Viking Age in the West. Their attempts to expand their power along the whole coastal ribbon form the political back-drop to the raids on northwestern continental Europe and the British islands. The Lindisfarne raiders came from this area, for example. The exact derivation of the name 'Viking' is unknown, but the most widely accepted interpretation today builds on the Old Norse vik, a 'bay of the sea'. Vikings may originally have been 'bay-people', their sleek ships waiting in concealment, ready to strike out at passing maritime traffic. This tactic would certainly be consistent with their later strategies of gliding silently along rivers to surprise inland settlements.

"The central concept in the organisation of Viking warrior groups ... seems to have been the lio, a term that cannot be precisely defined but is usually taken to refer to a shipborne host, a team of warriors sworn to a leader whose responsibility it was to feed, equip, and reward them for their service. The size and nature of lio appear to have ranged from a couple of ships' crews up to forces numbering one or two hundred ..."

These groups formed the core of the early raiding parties and, later, the smallest components of the large Viking 'armies'. The subsequent 'invading' massed forces were always coalitions of lio rather than united groups under the immediate command of just one leader. The lio's essentially discrete and autonomous nature is illustrated in the Annals of St Bertin, which in 861 AD described Vikings in a fleet made up of sodalitates; 'brotherhoods' that dispersed from the main force to overwinter in various ports along the river Seine. A lio can be considered an armed fighting group, loyal to a single leader, and operating on a mostly seasonal basis.

Their unity came from shared experience of the hazards of venturing over open seas (shipmates under a trusted mariner or captain) and exposure to the dangers of battle (survivors of and experts in fighting with weapons). This can be seen in the runic inscriptions on memorial stones, [Danish rather than Norwegian] texts for the dead that preserve the warrior ideology, from their own (idealised) point of view.

Hallestad in Skane

He did not flee at Uppsala.

Valiant men placed  in memory of their brother the stone on the hill ...

Sjorup in Skane

Saxi placed this stone in memory of ... his partner .

He did not flee at Uppsala, 

but carried on killing as long as he could hold a weapon.

Aarhus in Denmark

Gunulfr and Ogotr  and Aslakr and Hrolfr set up this stone in memory of

Fulr, their brother in arms.

He found death when ... kings were fighting.

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THE RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES

... armed with spear, sword and shield, armoured in  mail, sometimes helmeted

They ride horses through the sky ...

... terrible war-women, screaming their malice in the din 

The Valkyries ...

handmaidens of Odin ... vicious servants of the god of war

lethally mesmerising ... 'like looking into the flames'

The idea of fate, the preordination of the future, lay at the heart of the Norse mind-set. Fate was seen as the manifestation of pre-existing truth, becoming the person you always, really, had been. This is subtly different to being fatalistic, of simply accepting whatever happens without resistance. There is room within the Viking belief-system for immense outbursts of rage and wrath, with supernatural encouragement for reckless acts of defiance as well as immoral and unpredictable cunning.

"The Norns worked their power in the shadows, invisible, although sometimes appearing in dreams. Their fingernails each bore a rune, the symbols of secrets. The Norns are often depicted weaving fate on a loom ... On an upright loom, the warp of a textile always has a pattern, inherent from the beginning and determined by the threading of the heddles. It is made by the decisions of the weaver, but cannot be fully perceived until the cloth nears its finished state ... [This] is an elegant metaphor for the essential outline of a life, revealed through human experience, ending only when the last thread is cut."

"The Valkyries too, were agents of fate ... as their name ― 'choosers of the slain' ― implies, their province was war ... [They are] usually depicted as voluptuous young women with big swords and minimal clothing [big-busted Wagnerians]. These dreary tableaux bear little resemblance to the demons of carnage in Norse mythology."

"These 'primal' Valkyries did not visit the battlefield, swooping gracefully down to bear away their chosen heroes; instead they were unleashed upon it, personifying its harsh realities ...  Valkyrie names ... embodied the condition of combat itself, often through the metaphor of a violent storm. The sense of swirling chaos ... the overwhelming din and screaming confusion of a Viking-Age battlefield ...

     'Gondul  the 'War-Fetter' ... Hlock  the 'Chain' ... Mist  the 'Cloud' ... Hjalmthrimul  'Helmet-Clatter' ... Hjorthrimul  'Sword-Noise' ... Hjlod  'Howling' ... Randgnithr  the 'Shield-Scraper' ... Skalmjold  the 'Sword-Time' ... Svava  the 'Killer' ... Tanngnithr  'Teeth-Grinder' ... Gierahod  'Spear-Flinger' ... Gierskogul  'Spear-Shaker ... and 'Battle-Weaver',  'Shaker',  'Disorder',  'Scent-of-Battle', 'Victory-Froth',  'Vibration',  'Unstable',  'Treader', 'Swan-White',  'Shield-Destroyer', 'Helper',  'Armour',  'Devastate', 'Silence'  ... '

The list goes on. We know of fifty-two individual Valkyries and there are many, many more anonymously subsumed in collectives."

"In a strange battle poem called The Web of Spears ... a troupe of twelve horse-borne Valkyries are seen dismounting to enter a cottage.  When the observer peers inside, he sees them working an immense loom made of human parts, weaving a cloth of entrails dyed with blood, using weapons for tools. The women sing verses that make it clear that they are, in fact, weaving the outcome of a distant battle, the motions of their implements mimicking (and effecting) the dart and swoop of projectiles on the field ... When the cloth is finished, they tear it to shreds and ride off with the scraps."

The Valkyries are the essence of violence, unsettling and terrifying.  They permit their 'heroes' to be the same.

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FIRST FUNERAL  c. 750 AD

 

Viking raids, in the literal and exact sense of the term, were a phenomenon

not of the West but of the East.

The Austmarr,  the 'Eastern Sea' as it was called in the Old Norse, (now the Baltic)

was the key arena in Swedish (Svear) raiding in the middle of the eighth century.

    Around 750 a Swedish maritime expedition came to violent grief on or near the island of Saarmaa off the coast of Estonia. Two boats full of dead warriors were discovered buried by the seashore in what is now the village of Salme. The grave mounds had been set up parallel to the waterline, forty metres apart on an isthmus at a strategic point where ships would pass, as a visible landmark meant to be seen and remembered.

     The first of the Salme vessels, the smaller of the two, contained the corpses of seven men. It was a rowing craft, 11.5 metres long and 2 metres wide. Its mortuary crew were sitting up on benches, six of them in three pairs at the oars, and the seventh and oldest at one end ― probably the steersman in the stern. The men were buried with a variety of tools and utensils, a few weapons, large quantities of meat, and the headless bodies of two hawks.

The second Salme ship contained thirty-four bodies. It was much larger, a true oceangoing ship seventeen metres long and three metres across the beam. At one end of the boat, probably the prow, the thirty-four men were buried in four layers, laid side by side down in the hull. On and around them were forty-two swords, many with jewelled hilts and gold decoration. The men wore jewellery of simple cloak pins, implying practical hardwearing gear for use at sea. A few wore beads and two had necklaces of bear's teeth. The majority were in their thirties and unusually tall ― men in  their prime.

DNA studies have shown the dead coming from the same extended and localised family background. Isotope studies of their teeth indicated their common place of origin as the Malaar Valley in central Sweden.

The bodies were strewn with gaming pieces (carved figurines from chess-type board-games), some had fish carefully placed over them, others held seabirds in their arms, some had chops of veal, mutton, and pork stacked on their breast; the deck was heaped with cuts of beef and pork. The whole pile of bodies was covered by a wooden 'burial mound' made from shields, placed with overlapping boards to form a timber dome over the dead. Each shield boss had been hammered flat, the boards were slashed, and many of the weapons were deliberately bent. The mound had been covered by a single piece of coarse textile, probably the vessel's sail, and it had been weighted down with a curb of stones. Three birds of prey had been laid over the 'shield mound'. Six dogs had been cut into pieces and draped over the shields draped around the perimeter. Two swords were stuck vertically in the top of the mound in a final dramatic statement.

The Salme boat burials had clearly been preceded by fierce fighting. Many of the bodies, especially in the upper layers of the 'shield mound' and in the smaller boat, exhibited either blade penetration and/or blunt-force trauma, with slashes to the face and arms, arrow wounds to the hips. In the centre of the mound lay a man with some of the worst injuries and also the finest weapons, including a ring-hilt sword ― the mark of a very high-status leader. Unlike the others, his body was not strewn with gaming-pieces. Only one, 'the king', had been placed in his mouth.

The care taken with the dead, the time and effort taken, and the resemblance to the ship rituals on the Swedish mainland, all suggest that these men were buried by their friends. The evidence of massive wounds on their bodies show this was a predatory raid that went horribly wrong. But whatever the physical price paid, the outcome of the battle was such that the Vikings recovered, sufficiently at least to gather up their fallen warriors and bury them with  'honour'.

Snorri's Heimskringla, a semi-mythical history of the Ynglinga dynasty in the central Swedish kingdom of Svear, contains a remarkably similar epic:

King Yngvar made peace with the Danes, and then began to raid around the Baltic [Austrvegr]. One summer he took out an army and went to Estonia [Eistland] and raided during the summer, at the place called Steinn. Then Estonians [Eistr] came down with a large army, and they had a battle. The native army was so numerous that the Swedes [Sviar] could put up no resistance. Then King Yngvar died and his army fled. He is buried in a mound close to the sea ... The Sviar went home after this defeat.

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SECOND  FUNERAL   c. 922 AD

When an Arab soldier-diplomat called Ahmad ibn Fadlan

encountered Vikings on the Volga in 922, he noted how

"each man, from the tip of his toes to his neck,

 is covered in dark-green lines, pictures and such like".

"Ahmad ibn Fadlan was sent from Baghdad by the Abbasid caliph on a long and hazardous journey to the lands of the Bulghars, whose capital was at the bend of the Volga River ... The fame of his report rests on his descriptions of a people he met while at the Bulghar trading post that now lies somewhere near the Russian city of Kazan. He called them al-Rusiyyah, anglicised as Rus', and we know them as the predominantly Scandinavian merchants who plied the Eurasian river trade ― ... the Vikings in their eastern manifestation. In addition to general descriptions of the Rus' appearance, clothing, and personal habits, ibn Fadlan's greatest gift to posterity was his detailed observation of the rituals following the death of a Rus' chieftan, culminating in his cremation in a ship."

     "The first thing he noticed was that the funeral preparations were so elaborate as to require a full ten days following the man's death. During that time his body was interred in a temporary grave ― with temporary grave goods, including food, drink, and a musical instrument; there is a strong suggestion that all this is intended for his entertainment pending the final funeral ... that the dead is somehow aware. The same ten day period sees continuous festivities in the Rus' camp, involving music, sex, and heavy drinking; almost the entire band is perpetually drunk.

      Special burial clothes are also made for the dead chieftain, on which a third of his wealth is spent ... Another third goes to the brewing of appropriate quantities of alcohol ... only the remaining third is inherited by his heirs.

      All these proceedings are presided over by a middle-aged woman, heavy set and angry, whose title ... means the 'Angel of Death' ... the term in the [Arabic] text is Malak al-Mawt, the Quranic angel whose purpose is to choose the dead and take them to their assigned places [like the Valkyrie!] ...

      Early on the dead man's slaves are asked which of them will 'volunteer' to be killed; a girl in her mid-teens steps forward. This female thrall is referred to as the dead man's bride. She is dressed in fine clothes and jewellery, and assigned servants of her own ... the daughters of the Angel. She spends the ten days prior to the burial drinking and feasting, and ... has sex with many of the men in the camp, particularly the relatives of the deceased."

     "On the tenth day the ship is hauled onto the pyre, described as a box-like structure of wood ... A wooden tent or cabin is set up on the deck, with a bed inside made up with Byzantine gold brocade. The dead man is exhumed ― his body has turned black but does not smell ― dressed in his mortuary clothes, and brought to the ship, where he is propped up with cushions in a sitting position on the bed. In several successive visits his possessions are brought on board, and a variety of food, drink, and herbs are laid out around the corpse.

      The rituals then intensify. The enslaved girl goes from tent to tent around the ship, having sex with each man, who shouts loudly that he has thereby done what his duty demands of him. A dog is then led to the ship and cut in two, and the halves of its corpse are slung on board. The man's weapons are then placed in the cabin ...Horses and cattle are then sacrificed ― not cleanly slaughtered but ... hacked to pieces with swords ... Some chickens are killed by tearing their heads off; the pieces are first thrown precisely to either side of the ship, and finally onto the deck.

      Before entering the ship, the enslaved girl is lifted up by men in order to look over ... a specially built free-standing door frame that has been set up in the open air... She describes three ... visions of the next world and its inhabitants ... 'Paradise' ... her dead family ... her dead master ... The daughters of the 'Angel' then remove her jewellery ... The enslaved girl then ascends to the deck of the ship by walking on the raised palms of the men with whom she has earlier had sex.

      She sings a leave-taking of her fellow thralls, and is made to quickly drink two beakers of strong alcohol. She becomes confused ... and is reluctant to enter the cabin ... the 'Angel' grabs her head ... she is forced inside, the girl begins to scream but her cries are drowned out by men ... on the deck beating staves on shields ...

      The girl is then held down on the bed beside the ten-day-old corpse of the chieftain, and raped by six of the dead man's kinsmen. After this ... four of the men hold her arms and legs, the other two strangle her with a twisted veil. At the same time, the 'Angel of Death' stabs her repeatedly between the ribs 'in place after place'."

     "When the living have left the ship, the pyre is then lit by a naked man walking backwards around the vessel; he keeps his face averted and covers his anus with his fingers (all his orifices are thus either pointing away from the ship or protected). As the fire consumes the ship and its occupants, fanned by a rising wind, the Rus' talk with approval about how the smoke is being carried high into the sky and that therefore their 'Lord' is pleased.

      When the ashes cool, a mound is erected over the remains of the pyre and a birch pole set up on top, on which is cut the dead man's name and that of his king. After this, the Rus' leave."

To all this one must add the 'audio-visual effects' ...

the screaming of the animals, their entrails fouling the ship's timbers,

the expensive textiles covered in gore, the panic of the girl, 

the flies in the sticky pools of blood,

the mingled scents of recent sex, old death, and violent killing.

It is hard to believe anyone could remain entirely calm in the midst of such acts.

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"They were as mad as dogs or wolves, 

bit into their shields, and were as strong as bears or bulls.

They killed men, and neither fire nor iron could touch them.

That is called berserkrgangr."

Snorri Sturlusson, c. 1225, Ynglinga saga

(Old Norse beserkerganger  'beserk fury')

 

The berserkr (ON pl. berserkir  'Berserkers') was a frenzied warrior, fearsome and fearless in equal measure. The origin of the word is ambiguous, deriving either from the tendency of fighting without armour (ON berr  'bare' and -serkr  'shirt'), or else from the custom of wearing bear-skins into battle (ON beri 'bear').

Shield-biting and howling are repeatedly cited as activities that preceded and even precipitated berserkrgangr ... the rage was a trance-like state induced by particular ritual behaviours that 'emulated perceived animal characteristics'.

Grettis saga Asmundarsonar : "[The beserk] now began to howl and bit into the rim of his shield and placed the shield up into his mouth and gaped over the top of it and raged furiously."

Vatnsdæla saga : "Shortly after that came another ship, and on it were two berserks, both of whom were called Hauk ... they howled like dogs and bit into their shield rims and waded through burning fires with their bare feet."

In the early pagan Viking Age they were renowned shock-troops, used to spear-head attacks and strike fear into the enemy, as the skaldic poet ᚦorbjorn Hornklofi described King Harald Fairhair's elite warriors in the ninth century battle of Hafrsfjord (Norway).

Haraldskvæthi or Hrafnsmoi : "The prince in his wisdom puts trust in such men, who hack through enemy shields ... wolf-skinned warriors wading out into battle, spears and shields reddened with blood."

Grettis saga Asmundarsonar : "They were called wolf-skins, and no iron bit on them, and where they rushed to attack, there was no holding against them."

However the later sagas, created in the Christian era, make it clear that a moral stigma was attached to the practice of berserkrgangr. 

Vatnsdæla saga : "Now and then berserkrgangr came over Thorir. That seemed a great injury to such a man, for he received no distinction from that."

Thorir's brother Thorstein then prays to "him who created the sun" (a Christian reference) so that the berserk fury no longer afflicts him.

In his Ynglinga saga the thirteenth century author Snorri Sturlusson called the beserkers "Odin's men", suggesting they belonged to an era of the old gods. Tactically they fought with abandon, consumed by a bloodlust that could blur the distinction between friend and foe. In the Nine Books of Saxo Grammaticus, Hardbeen "turned his sword with raging hand against the hearts of his six companions." 

Like the grotesque orgies of ship burials with bloody human and animal sacrifices, the berserker-'possession' tradition of manic violence had to go.

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Apart from some minor supplementary reading of online journal articles, the main source for this post has been the excellent book by Neil Price, The Children of Ash & Elm : A History of the Vikings, (Penguin Books, 2022).