What Was Life Really Like For Viking Men And Women?

The sun rises over the sea straits that gave Norway its name. This narrow passage was the cradle of the Vikings, masters of the sea and the wind, the last barbarians. Today, modern archaeology and science shed new light on where they came from and how they succeeded in dominating the seas and waterways of Europe. From the ice fields of the north to the Russian steppe, these fearsome Scandinavian warriors sailed the globe for three centuries, spreading their net of trade and pillage. They built kingdoms and empires, but their origins still puzzle archaeologists and historians the world over. The Vikings were great explorers and sailors. I, and many people along with me, understand the concept of Viking as activity, as a characteristic. It is something that you do, you are out a Viking. Today, the Viking legend attracts men and women from all over the world who reenact their epic voyages and battles. But many sources tell us that Vikings were feared as ruthless pirates. Gunnar Andersson is an archaeologist and curator of the Stockholm National Historical Museum's Viking exhibit. There are actually some on the rune stones as well. There is also confirmation on a few rune stones that Vikings were not only feared outside of Scandinavia, on the continent, but there are occasional rune stones that tell stories about him or her being a guard against Vikings here in Scandinavia as well. Today, modern science and stunning new discoveries reveal who these Scandinavian adventurers really were. The Swedes, Norwegians and Danes spoke the same language and worshipped the same pagan gods, but we shall see that it was their life and death relationship with the sea that defined Viking culture. For centuries before the Viking era, the Scandinavian populations buried their dead in ship-shaped stone graves called ship-settings, such as these two on the windswept island of Öland that stand side by side with menhirs as entrances to the world of the dead. So, it is a motif, a ship motif that recurs above ground and it is supposed to be visible in that way. Then the burials in the big ones are in most cases only common cremations, so to speak, the cremation lair, as it is called. But then we have, first and foremost, from the middle of the Viking era and in the late Viking era, great quantities of ship burials where they actually burned the boats. Far across the Baltic Sea, on the island of Saaremaa in Estonia, no less than 40 Viking warriors were excavated in 2011. They were buried in two boat graves. When the carbon-dating results came back, director of the history faculty at Tallinn University, Jiri Peets, was shocked to find out that the ships dated back to 650 AD. These were pre-Viking Age Vikings. That makes them pre-Vikings of the pre-Viking Age, according to the Estonian calendar. The Vendel Age, according to Swedish chronology, and the Merovingian Age, according to the European chronology. The bodies found in the Saaremaa ships had been hacked to death. Battle they died in must have been major if 40 men were killed and enough survivors were left to bury them. We can say for sure that it was a battle burial ceremony. But there was a serious battle with more than 40 victims in two ships, I mean, says it all. The battle had to be hard. We can see vicious wounds on the skeletons, for example, hacked hands and broken heads. So it was hard, and they had to bury those victims fast. The men who died on Saaremaa Island were buried with full military honours. Raili Alme is an anthropologist and was amazed at the care with which they were laid to rest. I think that this burial was done with great respect, because it was a great honour to be buried here. Because we can see separated body parts, heads, hands or legs. But they were buried in an anatomically correct order. I think that this is a very important sign that they were buried with high respect. The strontium isotope readings from the enamel of the teeth of the Saaremaa warriors suggest they originated from Sweden, around Lake Malaren, North of Lake Malaren lies Valserde, the heart of a thriving pre-Viking Age Scandinavian community where noble men and women were buried with rich grave goods for centuries before the first recorded Viking raid. As we shall see, the massive Lake Malaren was the gateway to the Baltic for communities like these. Here, Ingmar Jansson found the best-preserved pre-Viking Age burial site in this part of Scandinavia. The first grave of this kind dates from about 600, thus the beginning of what we call the Vendel era. But anyway, it's just one man that's laid out like that, intact. All the other families, they lie in simple graves. You don't see them over there in a pile, cremated. These Vendel era boat graves were rich in artefacts buried with the dead. Objects they believed would serve in the afterlife, including magnificent helmets. They give us an insight into the lives of these pre-Viking adventurers. And the man lies in the middle of the boat surrounded by his weapons. The Vendel era was a prosperous period, so they would bury three shields. And there would be other things too, such as drinking vessels, horns, and glass from France, and so on. The Walsjärde Cemetery shows how cremation and boat burial went together in the pre-Viking era. Noble women were buried with their typical oval brooches. There was a woman buried over there in a 2-meter-high mound. She was buried with glass pearls and bronze jewelry, and so on. But the one thing that was so special was a little dragon head that must have been made out of some kind of ivory. A woman was the owner of the finest ship grave ever found. It was uncovered in a burial mound at Åseberg, south of Oslo, and dates to the earliest part of the Viking age. The ship now stands in the Oslo Viking Ship Museum, directed by Jan Bill. During the excavation, it became clear that even though there weren't two complete skeletons in the grave, it did contain the remains of two distinct individuals. It was also evident that they were probably female. This was confirmed by the osteological examinations, and they also confirmed that the remains were from an older and a younger woman. Archaeology confirms how ships were central to Scandinavian society and how rich men and women would literally take them to the grave. The powerful lady who owned the ship was in her 80s and was buried with a cart, a sledge, and a slave woman aged about 50 whose DNA can be traced to populations living around the Caspian Sea, the furthest east the Vikings ever went. Dendrochronology, or study of tree rings, revealed the ship's place of origin. It was only later, when other dendrochronological examinations of two ship findings from Karmøy in west Norway were carried out, that it was suddenly possible to find an exact match with the tree ring characteristics from the Oseberg ship. When it was possible to demonstrate that the tree ring pattern seen in the wood from the Oseberg ship was the same that was seen in the ships and the grave on Karmøy, then it was possible to state that the Oseberg ship must have been built in that same area of west Norway. The ship sailed for decades in the early 9th century before it was buried with the old lady of Oseberg. It was built here, on Karmøy Island, western Norway. Marit Vea leads the excavations at Arvaldsnes, the seat of the first kings of the Norsemen. Norway is named after a sea lane, and this north way started here. When people in the olden days came sailing past the open Jæger coast, just when they turned north, Kamsund, outside here, is like a road of water. So this is where the north way started. This is where the story of the first Viking raiders of the west started, the homeland of the terrifying predators of the sea. The story of the Vikings starts many centuries before the first recorded attack. The sea was the lifeblood of the Nordic communities that lived along these rocky shores of Karmøy Island in modern day Norway. The Vikings here lived and died by their ships. The ship grave on its own is a manifestation, a communication with the gods in a way. It's almost like a theatrical play, where you are connecting with the gods. And it wasn't like they made these graves in a couple of days. There were a lot of rituals, and they stood open several months. We can see that on the logs that we found in the graves. The sagas, written in Iceland two centuries after the end of the Viking era, record stories passed on orally by Norse poets from one generation to the next, and they tell of the first kings of Ørvaldsnes. The last saga from Ørvalds ancestry was the king at Arvaldnes, Gjur. He travelled all the way to Siberia, which the Norse people called Bjarmaland. There he met a Mongolian princess of Siberian ancestry, and to ensure the whale hunt trade, he married her and brought her back to Arvaldnes. And so there was a dark-skinned queen here on Arvaldnes. Although for hundreds of kilometers northwards, Norwegian geography offers nothing but mountains and deep fjords, perfect for sheltering ships from the Atlantic gales, but hopeless for farming. Here, local chieftains found a profitable way of exploiting the rocky coastline, by extorting a toll from rich merchants passing through. They sent their ships out to control the sea traffic, and it is this channel outside Arvaldnes that created Arvaldnes and turned Arvaldnes into a center of power for 3,000 years. One has to be clear about the fact that voyages down to the continent from Sweden and Scandinavia were something that had been going on many years before the period that we call the Viking era. In that way, the Vikings only followed an already well-worn path. We know that the contacts between the continent and Sweden and Scandinavia were comprehensive and extensive already during the early Iron Age. Evidence of ancient trade links with the east along Russia's rivers were found here on the shores of Lake Malaren in Sweden, where archaeologists found this bronze Buddha dating back to 750 AD. Yes, the little Buddha statue was found in the 1950s in a settlement on an island outside of Stockholm named Helio. It was found in a house there, and we know that it was made in today's Pakistan, in the Swat Valley, and that it dates to about 400 years after Christ. Helio and Birke were trading Emporia on Lake Malaren near Stockholm. Here on Adelsøa Island on the other side of the lake from Birke, the local chiefs taxed and extorted protection money from traders and industrialists, creating easily disposable wealth that they could spread among their followers. There was a longhouse, a port, and reception halls. As the seat of political power, it was built at a healthy distance from the industrial town, where traders and craftsmen labored in grimy and filthy conditions. The layers of waste are so thick, and there is so much garbage that lies inside these places. You must also remember that many of these places, first and foremost Birke, had no natural surrounding areas. Out on the farms, they removed the waste they used as manure for the fields and things like that, but in these places, that space was missing. Other trading towns grew and faded away. In Norway, all that is left of Kaupang on the shore of Oslofjord are a few mounds dating back to the earliest years of the Viking Age. As at Birke, here a powerful military elite taxed trade in exchange for protection. What we can see in the whole of Europe is that when these early cities rise, they have connections to kings and the powerful. The connection can be indirect. Cities need protection. They need military protection, because trade is not a barbaric thing. It's a peaceful thing, and tradesmen are mostly engaged in other things than war. They want protection. Kaupang, on the edge of Norway's Oslofjord, actually revealed surprising cultural influences from the south and the first self-proclaimed king of Denmark. And in Kaupang, we look south, because if we look at the Scandinavian jewellery in the graves, in Kaupang, culturally, it's a connection to the south. And what was there of powerful kings in the south of Scandinavia around the 800s? King Godfred. King Godfred was little more than a warlord based in northern Denmark, competing with others to control farmland and trade. He founded the trading towns of Hedeby and Ryby on the very edges of the lands he controlled, taxing all those who traded in his realm. It was a violent way of life, where workers toiled in miserable conditions, and traders risked their lives on the high seas, suffering attacks, but also pillaging themselves where they could, armed to the teeth and ready for anything. So, we don't have clear traces of plunder there, but at the same time they did plunder other places, that's obvious. And we have some indirect traces. We've got pieces of ecclesiastic inventory from the British Isles, where they had been broken off and robbed, and made into the jewellery that we found lying in the graves. The most ancient power centre found in Denmark was a chieftain's camp at Leire, close to the modern city of Roskilde on the island of Zealand. The ancient burial grounds and the royal halls here date back to the late Iron Age and Viking Age. Scholars believe this is the place that inspired the Old English epic poem about Beowulf, proving an ancient tie between the two lands. Tom Christensen has excavated here for decades and explains the ancient ties with England. What happens in England is that the Romans leave the island and then the German immigration begins, together with Danish tribes. We know that people from Jutland settled in Kent, for example, so there must have been cultural and perhaps also personal contact between the head of clans, between Denmark and England. The legendary era kings here in Denmark were known as the Skuldings, descendants of Odin. The ancestral pagan gods legitimised the rule of the kings here, committing them to defending the old religion as long as they could. In Leire, the kings were called Skuldunger. Skuld was the son of Odin, so he was the son of God. It was quite common that the royal families created connections to the gods. As a baby, Skuld was sent on a ship to the country of the Danes, so a ship arrived from nowhere with this baby on board. Relations with the gods were necessary to be able to call yourself king. You had to have a godly descendant. And afterwards, we have got these stories. The Purana sagas, about the genealogy of the kings that were here. If the origins of Viking culture have been lost in the mists of time, today archaeologists and scholars are shedding new light on the Dark Ages in Scandinavia. Today we know very little about early Scandinavian culture, but the extraordinary Viking sagas, written down 200 years after the end of the Viking Age, did record the legendary feats of Vikings, as repeated in poems handed down orally, generation after generation, by court poets. The old Norse sagas, the ancient Nordic sources, are from a later date. They are written down several years after the Viking era, and they are also written down by chroniclers in Scandinavia who were Christians, and who lived in a Christian context, and who wrote from their own Christian conception of the world, so to speak. Runic inscriptions show a common language between the inhabitants of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. This non-standardized 16-letter Runor alphabet used sound values inscribed on stone or wood by Scandinavians. Then there are the Runic inscriptions, first and foremost in this part of Scandinavia, and they are contemporary, but they have their own special problems, because the messages are often very short and concise. Really, they tell us nothing about society at that time. The runestones used a standard layout of Scandinavian iconography, mainly to commemorate the dead, and sometimes for magic. Carl Dahlberg is a modern-day runestone carver who lives on Adelsor Island. This ornament shows a flying dragon, and is maybe the most beautiful I've seen on a runestone. Unfortunately, the stone once fell, so half the dragon's nose has broken. But we see the eye, and the neck goes down here, and a beautiful wing here. Then the paw is here with two claws, and the tail goes down in a circle here, and another circle here. With some artistic license, the tail is turned into a foot, with two claws, and a small thumb. The runestones were usually red, starting with the head of the dragon. But this one was different. And here he writes Jorger, and Fastger, and Erlich, had this stone painted after their father, Vorger. Then there is an addition, F-R-E-H-N, their father, something very special. Even after the Vikings had become Christians, the dragon remained a key feature of their culture, and figured on runestones for centuries. The dragon painted on these runestones is generally tied in some way. Either there is a leash between the neck and the tail that binds the two together, or the leash is interwoven. Here it is interwoven, and therefore it is a sort of rule that if you follow this tail, for example, it goes over, next time under the leash. Over, under, over, under, over, under. And it has to be like that all the way. So if the dragon tries to flee, it just gets tangled up. Unlike parchment or paper, carving a runestone left no margin for error. Then he cuts the runic inscription that is ordered. He cuts runes after runes, and at the end he writes his father. He forgot the R. He must of course have an R, so the solution is that either he must cut an R, here below, or he must place it inside the sentence. He then chooses to place it inside. And I know, being a rune carver myself, that when he discovered that he forgot the R, then he got so angry, it really bugs him. He pulled his hair. How could I do that? Outside the Scandinavian world, churchmen wrote about the pagan Vikings as a scourge of God, threatening centuries of work building new Christian kingdoms to protect and propagate the faith. The pan-Scandinavian culture that was so threatening to the Christian world was cruel, but effective. Only warriors who died in battle made it to the mythical paradise of Valhalla to fight during the day and feast by night. Here the one-eyed god Odin ruled this warrior paradise with the aid of a raven and the Valkyries. Dead Vikings played board games that simulated battle. The fine game pieces found in the Saaremaa ships were carved with dragons. There were about 325 gaming pieces. Some were fragmented, but still it's a huge number. And there were a few dice made from tusk. And in general there are two types of gaming pieces. The game was called Nefertafl and was very popular in pre-Viking and Viking times. So this is a Swedish king who is the main character. Nefertafl means the king's table. So it is the king who is being attacked by the Muscovites, the enemies. The gods were not necessarily good. The Viking chief buried on Saaremaa Island possessed a luxurious jewel-encrusted sword. The representation of the canine god Fendrir tells us a lot about the early Viking beliefs. The dog's father, Loki, was a famous trickster revered by pirates. Now here we have a very nice sword handle detail. And it's a bit different from the others. We can see a very nice symbol in the form of a two-faced animal. It is possible that it was the mythical hunter, the son of Loki, called Fendrir, with a human face and animal hands. Odin and his brother Thor, whose hammer amulets are present in every Viking excavation, had killed the previous god Ymir and made the world out of his body. Odin's family was vast. And if Loki was destined to betray his brothers, cousin Freyja had quite a different role. It was Freyja who was both the goddess of war and of love. And when there had been a battle, Freyja was the first to come to the battlefield with her wagon drawn by big cats. And it was Freyja who first got to pick out her half of the men who had fallen. Those that she didn't want went to Odin in Valhalla. Women played a vital role in religion. Here at the Lyra Land of Legends Experimental Center in Denmark, a priestess shows how the gods and spirits would be summoned. There were female priests. They had the same status. There were Volvas, for example. Volvas that could see the future and the past. And it is said in the Voluspar saga that Odin himself goes to a Volva and asks her to tell him about the past and the future. Most of pre-Christian Viking religious worship took place outdoors, in open spaces and sacred groves. No temples remain, though the German cleric Adam of Bremen described one at Old Uppsala in modern-day Sweden as a large feasting hall. Ahmad al-Fatlan was a 10th century Arab traveler along the Volga River in modern-day Russia. Al-Fatlan tells us the Russian Vikings worshipped in open places, often in woodland or by springs. He describes an elaborate Viking funeral rite with the sacrifice of a slave girl and a ship burning. There were two forms of sacrifice, known as blot, one in which animals, objects and at times humans were sacrificed to a god and the remains would be thrown into peat bogs or springs, such as this one, recreated here at the experimental settlement at Lyra in Denmark. In another form of sacrifice, the participants ate the meat of the sacrificed animal in company, in a common building. All you see here is based on archaeological findings. For example, the horses have been recreated after we found a horse skull, the hooves and the bones of the lower leg in a Danish bog. The rest was not found, so this is our interpretation. What may have happened is a feast to the gods, where the horse meat was eaten and then they hung up the skin on a support with the hooves dangling. At some point, the horse pelt and the support decomposed and the remains fell down into the bog. The idea that a man or woman might be sacrificed to the gods to propitiate some divine intervention went back to the earliest times of Scandinavian history. We have the Tollund man, with a rope around his neck and a belt around his waist. The Høldremosa woman, with all her clothes and equipment like combs, that have been carefully laid down in the bog. The Tollund man was hanged to death in sacrifice and found in the peat bog of Silkeborg in southern Denmark. The remains date back to the 4th century BC. Vikings too threw valuable objects and the bodies of sacrificial victims into bogs and springs, like these two four-year-old boys found in a well at Trelleborg. It was an ancient pagan tradition. Three Christian clerics described human sacrifices. Among them, Tietmar of Maesburg wrote that every nine years, humans and animals were sacrificed by the dozen at Lyra. When Tietmar describes the terrible and cruel things taking place in Lyra, blood sacrifices and the like, then you have to remember that this is a Christian's point of view of pagan traditions. Besides, this Tietmar was of noble family, and some of his relatives had been taken hostage by the Danish king, so he was personally involved and may not have been completely neutral in his presentation. Adam from Bremen relates what the Danish king Sven Estridsson has told him. And here we are already in about the year 1000, so there is a big difference in time here. But there is also the fact that we know that different parts of Scandinavia performed different ceremonies, first and foremost regarding funerals and events like that. How extensive human sacrifice was is incredibly difficult to say, because then we must be able to define how these people came to lie in the grave, so to speak. The Norsemen spread westwards to the British Isles and Iceland, taking with them their ancient pagan culture, which clashed with the Christian empires. Politics, power and religion went hand in hand in the merciless struggle that lasted 300 years. In Europe, the pagan Viking culture clashed violently with the expanding Christian world. But in Iceland, the settlers kept their traditions for centuries to come. Sacrifices were held in a room at the end of the larger longhouses that served as a shrine, and the banqueting hall was the place where the members of the community came to eat the flesh of the sacrificed animal. The Icelandic law books tell us that the richest farmer, the most powerful man in any one area, would also be the priest. The priests were also the speakers at the Assembly of All Free Men, here at the Þingvila, where Icelanders exercised their right to debate public issues, making Iceland the earliest modern democracy in the world. The typical Scandinavian home was called a longhouse. The northernmost of the Shetland Isles, Unst, has the highest concentration of longhouses in all of Britain, and was a hub of Scandinavian expansion into the Atlantic. Shetland, and Unst in particular, is right in the middle of the Viking seaways, so it's the obvious place if you're going from Norway across to Faroe, Iceland, Greenland, or even America, or even up and around, going sort of north about, and then down to Ireland and Mann, and that direction. Shetland's right in the middle. Here at Jarlshof in the Shetland Isles, there is evidence that the early Scandinavian settlers reused the houses built by the original Pictish people who inhabited the islands before they arrived. Initially, people came here trading, and that would have been the first contact, and the first contact would certainly have been on that level, and they would have been finding out what it was like in Shetland as a result of that. We do know that, in the end, the Pictish people, completely, their way of life was subsumed completely by the Vikings. Viking society was based on family allegiances and laws. There was a three-tier class system split into a small ruling elite, or jarls, free farmers, known as bondi, and slaves. As prosperity increased, the Scandinavian birth rate grew, and family leaders had to find more land and ever-greater opportunities for their offspring and dependents, while the rise of the warlords left little space for the more independent-minded petty chieftains. It seems that prosperity, rather than starvation, drove the first raids. Ships were expensive to build and required social cohesion. Armor and weapons, too, took organization, and taking men away from farming during the summer months meant that someone else was looking after the crops. The role of women, therefore, was key to keeping the community functioning. It was the women who ruled the farm, and as a symbol of that, they had keys. And they kept those keys with the rest of their valuables. And since the men traveled out a lot, they were counting on the women to keep order back home. Women enjoyed greater political and economic rights than in the Christian world, too, as the Lady of Åseberg demonstrates with her rich funeral goods and fine trading ship. When they held a meeting, the people went to those meetings. When they gathered in the small villages, the women also had the right to join. That means they had the right to vote. In 793, calamity struck the English kingdom of Northumbria. Raiders of unknown origin attacked the undefended monastery of Lindisfarne and took away everything of value. These men would soon be known as the Vikings, considered by Christians to be a scourge of God. But the Vikings had been raiding and dominating key points on trade routes as far away as Russia long before they officially entered the history books. We found seven male skeletons in the first ship in Salme, and they were not buried systematically. They were located in different places. And in the second ship we found 33 or 34 human skeletons and fragments. And now we know that ten of these have blade wounds, and six have multiple injuries. The ship graves puzzled the archaeologists. The battle wounds of the 40 men buried here show that the relationship with the local inhabitants was probably violent. Yet the rich grave goods show that there was a lot more to this expedition than pure pillage. These people were killed in battle because we have evidence of that on their remains, especially on hands and legs. For example, we have an upper arm that was hacked in four different places. Also, we have injuries from swords on other arms, like someone was defending himself with the upper arm. Also, we have skulls with obvious injuries. I don't know what those people were doing there. They might even have been a wedding delegation, peaceful visitors, but we really don't know for sure what was the main reason for their being here. And it is very strange that there are so many luxury items, swords, gaming pieces, dogs, birds and so on. Not typical battle ammunition. The Vikings penetrated the Baltic coastline and traded and raided deep into the East European plain. The routes passed through Staria Ladoga, North Russia, where finds of Scandinavian amulets and runic inscriptions on wood show that the Vikings were trading with, if not ruling, this strategic place on the Volkoth River by the mid-8th century. The Finns, Slavs and eventually the militarily dominant Scandinavians traded here for centuries before the Vikings are mentioned in written chronicles. They founded the trading town of Novgorod, just as, on the other side of Europe, other Vikings were plundering Paris. The question is, why does it escalate? Why this sudden rush? The factors that have contributed to it, first and foremost, are the fact that people then, as well as now, are opportunistic, in the sense that some areas where the situation was unstable, we must remember that, for example, the Frankish Empire was in dissolution, and not to mention the British Isles, there were lots of conflicts in that area as well. The great Frankish Empire to the south was ruled by Charlemagne, who aggressively expanded his realm. In the late 8th century, he began a 30-year campaign to forcibly convert the Saxons, the southern neighbors of the Danes, to Christianity, pressing north toward the fiercely pagan Scandinavian world. Charlemagne spilled just as much blood as the Vikings. So maybe the Viking raids started out as a military operation, but after a while, people discovered that there is money to be earned here, and then it developed into ordinary plunder. Here at Orvaldsnes, Harald Fairhair gathered around him a military force that was able to hold together most of Norway. A great battle at Harjadsfjord brought him final victory over the petty kings and pirates of Vestfold, and caused an exodus to Iceland. Indeed, it was during the upheavals of the war to unify Norway under Harald Fairhair, that we see the greatest Viking emigration. Between 846 and 865, the Vikings attacked both England and France often, taking advantage of the chaos that afflicted the great empire of Charlemagne. The Norwegian Vikings went the furthest of all people in their time, and they went as explorers, not as bandits to rob, but as explorers and tradesmen. All of that comes down to the ship technology they developed. It was a case of life or death. The Baltic and North Seas facilitated the sense of pan-Scandinavian community. Ships travelled swiftly along the coast or across the sea, while land travel was slow and dangerous. It is no surprise, therefore, that expansion into the rich plains of Russia, or raiding up the rivers of prosperous England and France, was an easier option than cutting the forests and farming the land of inland Sweden and Norway. While early Scandinavian society became more organized, and benefited from trade between the far north and the far south, its appetite for wealth, earned or stolen, grew. Its ability to organize a predatory economy grew with it. Although they instilled terror in their victims, the Vikings were just the more aggressive face of a fast-evolving Scandinavian society whose influence spread from modern-day Canada to the Caspian Sea. The secret of their success lay in their nautical technology and unique social cohesion, which together were a formidable weapon for these empire builders.