I. THE NORTHERN PEOPTES TO A.D. 7OO ffi 1. From the Beginnings to the Age of Migrations rT InE IHREE ScANDINAVTAN couNTRIES KNowN FoR morc than a thousand years as Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have had a long if not continuously recorded history, and.lrery siag. of it helped mould the lands, peoples, and kingdoms as we behold them in the Viking Age. Twelve thousand years ago) in the earliest poscglacial period in Scandinavia, men were moving over its habitable areas, food-gathering, hunting, fowling, and fishing, leaving their mark on a flint here, an antler there, in Denmark by Bromme north-\rcst of Soro in Z,ealand, in Sweden in Skine and Halland, in Norway in Ostfold on the eastern side of the Oslofiord and, as no* .pp.rir certain, in the south-western coastal ,.giion, and along the west coast from Bergen to Trondheim. These last were the Fosna folk, who had probably enrered Norway from the south. Northwards again, facing the Arctic Ocean, were to be found people of the Komsa culture, their place of origin unknown. It is meaningless to talk ofnationaliry in those distant times, and idle to speak of race; but these hunters, fishermen, and food-gatherers from the south who knew, or over the centuries came to know, the b9w 1nd arrow, kniG, scraper, halpoon, and spear, who developed the skin-boat, would possess the first known tamed animals, ihe big wolflike dogs of Maglemose and Svardborg, and buried their dead in shallow graves in close proximiry to theliving-these were the parent'scanlinavians', and their way of liG, closiy adapted to their surroundings, persisted for many thousands ofyears. Indeed, N-oryegian scholars in particular have found survivals or parallels ofthis ancient hunting culture ofscandinavia not only arnong the L-apps of Finnmark blt among the Norse population of Noiway almost to our own dav. I8 d Hittory of the Vikingr From tbe Beginning to tbe .{ge of Migrations r9 Yet of these halFglimpscd wanderers in the northern wilderness, and fish. For today's student these rock-carvings are the picture- with every allowance for the piety which would have men look galleries of their age. Finally rile see the Age in its funerary ritual, to the rock from which they are hewn, it is their remoteness from the thousands of graceful tumuli covering and enlarging a burial the viking scene which most irnpresses. Nor need we trace even in chamber proper) the wealth of grave goods, including not only broad outline those developments in climate, environment, social w'eapons and adornments-but, uniquely time fpargd by -and practicerand cultural influence which rnade human progress possible corruption, garments and fabrics, boxes and pails, cups, beakers, in Scandinavia, or count the untellable generationi ofhuniers and and stools. KneeJength kirtles, overcloaks of woollen, shoes of fishers, workers in flint and clearers offorest, stock-minders, crop- cloth or leather and caps round and shaggy, blouses andjackets and rai-sers, builders of dolmen and dysse, the artificers, traders, and woven fringed skirts, all are to be found, and most rnoving of all, colonizers who fill ten thousand years of northern prehistory till miraculously preserved by the tannin of the'oak cists' of Denmark, r. .r,ioo B:c. BI then, with the lironze Age under way, there is the very flesh and fell ofthe wearers, the bodies, faces, features, of evidence from physical anthropology that th"e people ofthe far north the men and women themselves. dwelling in the village settlementiof the varangir$ord were of the The Bronze Age came to an end some five hundred years 8.c., same 'nordic' racial type as the inhabitants of the Oslofiord in the not suddenly, but by gradual transition to a period characterized south; while Denmark and the more southerly regi6ns of the by the use ofiron. The lap-over ofthe late Bronze and early Iron Scandinavian peninsula were entering upon a period oflomparative Age provides us with an evocative change in burial practice. Boat- wealth, social change, modes of belie[ and artistic achiCvement shaped graves outlined with stones, and often with taller stones at informative in themselves and prophetic developrnents of to come. either extremity to represent prour and stern Qkibsetninger,'ship- To pay for tin and copper, and also gold from the peoples farther settings', sing. tki.bsetning), and inhumation are found together jn south, Denmark had the high-priced amber ofJutland, and soon Gotland and on Bornholm. The dead were now thought of as having natiye smiths and artists rvere rivalling and at times excelling their to make a voyage) or at least as having need of a boat. The skiket- southern masters in the working of bronze. We see the Bronie Age ninger direct our thoughts back to the formalized rock-carvings of handsome and clear in its weapons and personal ornaments, in suih the early Brorlze Age, with their religious or ritualistic.significance; religious offerings as the sun-image of Trundholm, where the sun's outwards to the contemporary religions of the mediterranean disc stands with a bronze horse within a six-wheeled bronze chariot, civilizations; and a millennium and a half forward to the boat- so that worshippers might see their god in effigy make a progress shaped viking graves oflindholm Hoje, the boat-shaped viking across the northern heavens, and in the long, slender, gracefully houses of Trelleborg, Aggersborg, and Fyrkat in Denmark, the curved lurs or trumpets, masterpieces beyond which the casteri' viking ship-burials of Norway, the pictorial stones of the Swedish art couli hardly hope to progress. We see it, too, in the contempor- mainland and Gotland, and the convex walls of the first Christian ary rock-carvings to be found almost everywhere in Scandinivia church in Greenland, at the Norse settlement of Brattahlid in south of a line Trondheim-swedish Uppland. For the carved rock- Eiriksfjord. faces of Bohusldn and the pictured slalis of the Kivik barrow show The opening centuries of the Iron Age were a depressed period these splendid artefacts in use, along with their users: swords and for most ofScandinavia. The wealth and liveliness of the Bronze Age axes, spears, bows and arrows; ships beaked at both ends, with dulled and contracted; there was little gold and as yet no silver; rowers (never with sails); sun-images ship-borne, man-borne, grave offerings became fewer and poorer, field and bog offerings {raw1 by horses; chariots and wagons; there are men fighting. came almost to an end. And whereas bronze and bronze artefacts dancing, and turning somersaults, sharing in religious cererioniei, had found their way as far north as latitude 68", early iron fails at and almost every man of them with an immense erected phallus. latitude 6o', approximately that of present-day Oslo and Uppsala. Sometimes they depict gods and priests, occasionally a female And everywhere artistic standards were in decline. Why should figure, and a piofusion oihorr.r, co*s, dogs, snakes, ieer, birds, this be so? What impoverished the northern countries and ?.o A Hittorl of tbe Vikings Fron tbe &gimings to tbe Age of Migrations for a time interrupted their lines of communication south? First grain, heavier ploughs, more lethal w'eapons, and longer trousers' there is the compelling fact of European history which has labelled ihat Scandinavia first appears in European historical and geo- these centuries the'Celtic'Iron Age. This was an epoch of Celtic graphical records. In 33o-3oo n.c. Pytheas made a remarkable power and expansion, when the Celtic peoples who occupied the ioyag, west and north as part ofhis survey ofthe coasts ofEurope Upper Rhine and Danube basins and much oieastern France, spilled from Cadiz to the Don. But the work which recorded this, his of the over into Spain, Italy, Hungary, the Balkans, and even Asia Minor, oceanrhas not survived, and all too much is uncertain. Six days' sail and westward pressed on to the Atlantic seacoast and into the north ofBritain, he tells us (or, more accurately, later geographers British Isles. The core of their society was a military, bur not rich in ignorance, confusion, and prejudice tell us), he came to a heedlessly militant, aristocracy with a need for chariots and harness, land which appears to lie close under the Arctic Circle. It was v/eapons and personal adornments, and therefore the pragmatically inhabited by barbarians who lived by agriculture. They were minded patrons of artists and craftsrnen who alone could mak-e poorly offfor domestic animals, but had millet and herbs, roots and these splendid accoutrements lor them. Their empire was military fruit. From grain and honey they made a fermented drink, and this and cultural, based on the warrior with his two-edged iron sword, grain they threshed indoors, because the rain and sunlessness made in turn based on the peasanr with his plough and Jickle, but with outdoor threshing impossible. This dank, uncordial region, wherever no enduring political structure which could make it a permanent it lay, was not Pytheas's only acquaintance with the north. He threat to the urbanized mediterranean world. But the unrest into speaks of the amber island of Abalus (Heligoland?), whose inhabit- which they_ threw so much of Europe worked unhappily upon the ants sold the sea's gift to a people called the Teutones. He speaks, north. Trade routes and cultural channels between Scindinivia and too, of the Ingvaones and almost certainly of the Goths or Gutones. the Etruscan and Greek civilizations were in large measure blocked, The Teutones were possiblv the inhabitants of the Danish district and for a while the northern countries Gll into"that backwardnesi ofThy, bounded east and south by the Lim$ord and north by the and'isolation to which their geographical position and southern Jammerbugt, in north-western Jutland.