This
illustration shows the stereotype of Viking marauders wreaking mayhem,
even on clergy. The scene depicts the monastery at Clonmacnoise,
Ireland.
The Vikings gave no quarter when they stormed the city of Nantes, in
what is now western France, in June 843—not even to the monks barricaded
in the city's cathedral. "The heathens mowed down the entire multitude
of priest, clerics, and laity," according to one witness account. Among
the slain, allegedly killed while celebrating the Mass, was a bishop who
later was granted sainthood.
To modern readers the attack seems monstrous, even by the
standards of medieval warfare. But the witness account contains more
than a touch of hyperbole, writes
Anders Winroth, a Yale history professor and author of the book
The Age of the Vikings, a sweeping new survey. What's more, he says, such exaggeration was often a feature of European writings about the Vikings.
When the account of the Nantes attack is scrutinized, "a
more reasonable image emerges," he writes. After stating that the
Vikings had killed the "entire multitude," for instance, the witness
contradicts himself by noting that some of the clerics were taken into
captivity. And there were enough people left—among the "many who
survived the massacre"—to pay ransom to get prisoners back.
In short, aside from ignoring the taboo against treating
monks and priests specially, the Vikings acted not much differently from
other European warriors of the period, Winroth argues.
In 782, for instance, Charlemagne, now heralded as the
original unifier of Europe, beheaded 4,500 Saxon captives on a single
day. "The Vikings never got close to that level of efficiency," Winroth
says, drily.
Erik the Red, a famous Viking explorer and the
discoverer of Greenland, built a wooden church (replica above) for his
wife in Qassiarsuk, Greenland.
Viking History Told by Their Victims
Just how bad were the Vikings?
Winroth is among the scholars who believe the Vikings were
no more bloodthirsty than other warriors of the period. But they
suffered from bad public relations—in part because they attacked a
society more literate than their own, and therefore most accounts of
them come from their victims. Moreover, because the Vikings were pagan,
they played into a Christian story line that cast them as a devilish,
malign, outside force.
"There is this general idea of the Vikings as being
exciting and other, as something that we can't understand from our point
of view—which is simply continuing the story line of the victims in
their own time," Winroth says. "One starts to think of them in storybook
terms, which is deeply unfair."
In reality, he proposes, "the Vikings were sort of free-market entrepreneurs."
Archaeological evidence suggests that Vikings built a base camp for hunting and trading on the shore of Canada's Baffin Island.
To be sure, scholars have for decades been stressing
aspects of Viking life beyond the warlike, pointing to the craftsmanship
of the Norse (to use the term that refers more generally to
Scandinavians), their trade with the Arab world, their settlements in
Greenland and Nova Scotia, the ingenuity of their ships, and the fact
that the majority of them stayed behind during raids.
But Winroth wants to put the final nail in the coffin of the notion that the Vikings were the "Nazis of the North," as an
article
by British journalist Patrick Cockburn argued last April. Viking
atrocities were "the equivalent of those carried out by SS divisions
invading Poland 75 years ago," Cockburn wrote.
Few scholars today hold Cockburn's view. In fact, some
believe the trend Winroth represents—de-emphasizing Vikings' violence
and stressing their similarities with other Europeans—goes too far.
"Other Europeans were perfectly horrible as well," agrees
Tom Shippey,
an emeritus professor of English at Saint Louis University, who writes
often about the Vikings. But why, Shippey asks, slightly exaggerating,
did the Vikings always win?
Much of the explanation, he says, is an "ethos that is
unlike anything else in Europe," one that included reverence for the
warrior ideal and a gallows-humor, "who cares?" attitude toward death.
In addition, points out
Martin Arnold,
a reader in Old Norse studies at the University of Hull, the pope
placed limits on Christian warfare and threatened excommunication for
leaders who became unduly aggressive. The Vikings had no such inhibiting
force.
An alternate explanation for the Viking win-loss record,
which Winroth embraces, is that Viking ships were so speedy and stealthy
that the Norse almost always surprised their enemies. "I don't buy it,"
says Shippey.
Viking seafarers used ships like this modern replica to reach the New World.
Blood Eagles and Berserkers
It used to be routine for scholars to claim that Vikings
killed some of their victims by means of the so-called blood eagle. The
form of an eagle reportedly was carved onto a victim's back, his rib
cage severed, and his lungs pulled out the back.
But Winroth holds strongly to the view, first advanced by his Yale colleague
Roberta Frank,
that the anecdote derives from a misreading of the allusive,
grammatically ambiguous, and metaphorically rich Viking verse written by
the so-called skalds.
Skaldic poetry is full of birds, including eagles, that
feast on the bodies of one's enemies. Through dubious grammatical
readings, the authors of the Scandinavian sagas, written centuries after
the Viking raids, turned an eagle cutting into a man's back into an eagle being carved on the back. Further embellishments and creative license took flight from that first error.
Winroth also wants us to rethink the berserkers, the
supposedly near-psychopathic warriors in the front line of Viking
attacks said to be immune to pain and possibly high on psychotropic
mushrooms. The more colorful accounts add that they chewed on their
shields and ate burning coals. But Winroth argues that references to
berserkers first appear in the poetry of 13th- and 14th-century Iceland,
and they are plainly described as people who lived "once upon a time."
But that doesn't necessarily rule out the existence of half-crazed warriors, says
Robert Ferguson, an independent scholar and author of
The Vikings.
"I don't have any particular trouble in imagining that the
Vikings in the forefront of their attacks were men of violence, the kind
of people you have in the Hell's Angels now. They would drink. They
were almost psychopathic. I think we have berserkers [in modern armies]
now. They just aren't called that anymore. "
This geometrical Viking camp on the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark extends some 130 yards in diameter.
The True Reason for Viking Raids
Rather than being primed for battle by an irrational love
of mayhem, Vikings went raiding mainly for pragmatic reasons, Winroth
contends—namely, to build personal fortunes and enhance the power of
their chieftains. As evidence Winroth enumerates cases in which Viking
leaders negotiated for payment, or tried to.
For example, before the
Battle of Maldon
in England, a Viking messenger landed and cried out to 3,000 or more
assembled Saxon soldiers: "It is better for you that you pay off this
spear-fight with tribute ... Nor have we any need to kill each other."
The English chose to fight, and were defeated. Like anyone else, the
Vikings would rather win by negotiation than risk a loss, Winroth says.
Nor was every place the Vikings attacked decimated, despite
repeated claims by scribes that "everything was destroyed." Winroth
notes that the trading post of Dorestad, in what is now the Netherlands,
was sacked four times in four years, starting in 834, yet it continued
to flourish. Viking raids were seen as an "overhead cost," Winroth
writes, and a fair number of traders doing business in Dorestad would
have been Norse.
Along those lines, Winroth stresses just how entwined the
Norse were with other Europeans. In the 840s a Viking named Rurik, whose
uncle had been king in Denmark, plundered the coastal regions of the
kingdom of Emperor Lothair, in what's now Belgium and the Netherlands.
Lothair then essentially hired Rurik to defend his land against other
Viking raids, a common practice. Rurik became the equivalent of a
European prince.
This sixth-century helmet plaque shows two berserkers, one wearing a horned helmet and one in a wolf or bear mask.
The Norse were prodigious traders, selling furs, walrus
tusks, and slaves to Arabs in the East. Winroth goes so far as to argue
that Vikings provided much needed monetary stimulus to western Europe at
a crucial time. Norse trade led to an influx of Arabic dirhams, or
coins, which helped smooth the transition to an economy of exchange
instead of barter.
Yet even among scholars who attempt to see things from the
Vikings' perspective, disagreements persist about the nature of Viking
violence. Robert Ferguson, for example, doesn't downplay its ferocity,
but he characterizes it as symbolic and defensive, a form of "asymmetric
warfare."
In the year 810, for example, the slaughter of 68 monks on
the Isle of Iona, off the coast of Scotland, sowed terror in Europe.
Ferguson suggests that the move was designed to convince Charlemagne and
others that it would be very costly to expand Christianity into
Scandinavia by force. The Vikings "were fighting to defend their way of
life," Ferguson says.
Stefan Nordgren lives in a trailer during the annual reenactment of a Viking battle in Sweden.
Winroth took an indirect route to becoming a scholar of the
Vikings. As an undergraduate in his native Sweden, he was frustrated by
how little he learned about the Norse. And misunderstandings about
Vikings "are just as prevalent in Scandinavia" as in the United States,
he says. "Maybe more."
When his dissertation on medieval church law won a
MacArthur Fellow prize, the so-called genius grant, he used the funds to retrain himself as a scholar of the Norse.
Asked whether he thinks there's a danger of going too far
in domesticating the Vikings, Winroth replies: "To domesticate them
means to see them in context."
For a historian, he says, putting people in the context of their
times humanizes them. And that's an unadulterated good, even when we're
talking about people best known for rapine, plunder, and slaughtering
monks.
Rambold's attorney had argued for a
two-year sentence, pointing out that the defendant had no prior criminal
record, underwent sex offender treatment and was considered by the
state as a low risk to re-offend.
Lansing
requested for his client a two-year sentence in the custody of the
Department of Corrections, with another 13 years suspended. That would
have allowed Rambold to serve his time in a community setting rather
than prison.
Rambold,
however, violated that agreement by having unauthorized visits with
relatives' children and entering into a relationship with an adult woman
without telling his counselor. As a result, the case was revived and
Rambold pleaded guilty.
