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A History of the Vikings

Chapter 4

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mark and England, came sailing into the Baltic and there conquered Samland (the Königsberg peninsula on the east side of the Gulf of Danzig), whereat the sudden menace of his almost overwhelming power became so serious both to Norway and Sweden that Anund and Olaf the Stout hastily combined together and in 1025 or 1026 made preparations for an attack upon Denmark. Cnut knew of their plans and forestalled them; there was an indecisive engagement off the coast of Scania opposite Holy River and then speedily retribution followed their overboldness. For afterwards Cnut went on to the conquest of a great part of southern Sweden and obtained the submission of Anund, even styling himself on his coins as 'King of the Swedes' (1) ; Olaf he drove from Norway and himself became lord regent of that country.
       With the fall of Denmark after the death of Hardecnut, Anund recovered some of his former power and, except for the Bohuslän and Scania, he regained most of the Swedish territory that Cnut had won; yet the new period of prosperity was short-lived and a prelude to two disastrous centuries of civil war. Anund was followed on the throne by a half-brother, Emund, who died after only a brief reign, and at his death, which took place about A.D. 1060, the ancient Yngling line of Uppsala kings was ended, for Emund was succeeded by Stenkil, a man of Västergötland, who had married a daughter of the last of the Ynglings. It was when Stenkil died in 1066 that the long and devastating struggle for the throne began.
       The story of the early Middle Ages in Sweden, of the long-continued strife between the house of Stenkil and princes of the old royal family, there is no need to relate. For the only king in the first hundred years of the civil wars whose reign, though it lasted but a few years, is worthy of record in this context is Eric Jedvardsson, better known as Eric the Saint, who was the husband of a great-granddaughter of Stenkil. As a warrior and as an evangelist he was beloved of his people, ever famous as the man who led a crusade against the heathen Finns whom he converted to Christianity at the point of the sword; but in 1160 he was murdered in Uppsala on his way from mass and subsequently he was admitted into the calendar of saints, there to join the company of those two other royal vikings, St. Olaf of Norway and St. Cnut of Denmark. Eventually he became the patron saint of Sweden, the legendary and knightly symbol of a golden age.
       The last king of the direct line of St. Eric died in the middle

1. But see n. 1, p. 118 above.

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of the thirteenth century and his successor was Valdemar Birgersson, whose mother, a princess of Eric's family, had married Jarl Birger Magnusson, the great nobleman and soldier who was regent of the country on his son's behalf until 1266 and whose firm rule at length gave peace to the long-troubled and weary land. In his day Sweden prospered; a trade-agreement with the Hansa made possible a new development of Swedish commerce; relations with Norway and Denmark became more friendly; a new and successful Swedish settlement in Finland was established; and this prosperity lasted through the reign of Birger's second son, Magnus Ladulås (1275-1290), and afterwards throughout the regency of that noble Swede Thorgils Cnutsson. But troubles began again with the accession of the three-year-old Magnus Ericsson Smek in 1319. This young prince, a month after he came to the throne of Sweden, also became king of Norway on the death of his grandfather, Haakon V, and in 1333, by redeeming Scania which had been mortgaged to the Count of Holstein, Magnus found himself ruler of the whole Scandinavian peninsula; the result of these enormous acquisitions of new territory was the complete financial breakdown of the Swedish government and Magnus was soon forced to realize the impossibility of maintaining order throughout his huge realm. In 1343 he surrendered Norway to his son Haakon and henceforth devoted himself to the difficult task of ruling Sweden and Scania; he governed courageously, giving the land a common law and doing much to strengthen the crown's authority at the expense of that of the nobles and clergy, but his reign ended in civil war and the loss of Scania to Denmark. The Folkung dynasty was overthrown and the crown of Sweden conferred by the selfish and discontented nobles upon Albert of Mecklenberg, the son of Magnus's sister, in 1363; thereupon Haakon VI of Norway, Magnus's son, at once took up arms against the German usurper and the struggle between them was the immediate prelude to the sudden and astonishing union of the three kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, by Queen Margaret.
       Such in their simplest outlines are the stories of the ruling dynasties of the three viking countries, but to a summary of the chieftains' deeds and politics there must be added a brief statement concerning two other matters of northern history that will be seen to have some bearing upon the course of viking affairs. The first of these new topics is the conversion of the peoples of the north to the Christian faith and the second is the

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decline of their shipping and commerce in the face of the competition of the redoubtable Hanseatic League of German merchants.

THE INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY

      Eight hundred years after the birth of Christ these northern folk, except perhaps for a few adventurous travellers, were still heathens. Their religion was polytheistic, yet not wholly rid of an older and baser animism that found expression in various forms of nature-worship; also the cult of ancestors and of the spirits of the noble dead had its ardent devotees. But most of all they loved the gods. Of these Thor, the Thunderer and Hammer-Wielder, was dearest to them, for he was the friend and protector of mankind, a patron of farmers, a peacemaker at the things, and a mighty comforter in battle and the guardian of bold warriors. Then there was Odin, too, in later days a deity especially beloved in Sweden and Denmark, whose cult had found its way to the north in the time of the folk-wanderings; he was the fount of valour and wisdom, the supreme and almighty father of gods, the lord of the warrior-dead in Valhalla. Also there was Frey, god of fruitfulness and prosperity, and Njord, an ancient god of plenty, but now the patron of fishermen and merchants; there were, in addition, many minor and local gods included in this changeable and uncertain pantheon. To these deities, above all to the three first named, temples were built and to them sacrifices were made, these being conducted at the major festivals by the kings themselves in their capacity as the religious heads or chief priests of the people. Not animals only, but human beings too, were the victims of these rites.
       Like other barbarous religions of its kind, it was in certain respects a comfortable one, for it enjoined no stringent moral code upon its adherents. Every bloodthirsty and abominable act of slaughter and pillage, except those that involved the death of relatives, could be committed at the sole risk of human vengeance, and sweet to Thor and Odin were the clash and clamour of any fight, the smoke of all burning dwellings, and the vainglory of each victor. An eye for an eye, these gods demanded, a tooth for a tooth. But it was precisely this freedom to battle and to ravage without incurring the wrath of heaven that Christian teaching sought to end; therefore, though a viking might without serious misgivings allow himself to be persuaded to acknowledge Christ as his heavenly master instead of the dear gods of his fathers, it was a vastly more difficult thing to complete his conversion by making him pay a proper

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respect to Christian teaching. To fight for Christ he was often willing enough, but to hold back from fighting, to forbid himself the bloodshed that had pleased Thor, to offer the other cheek to him that smiteth, this was asking of him an almost insupportable restraint.
       The conversion of the northern lands, then, falls into two periods, the first of mere acknowledegment of Christ, of lip-service to Him, and the second of real spiritual reconciliation to the Christian doctrine. It is in this second phase that the results of the conversion are most of all likely to lead to observable alterations in the habits and behaviour of the viking peoples.
       When the Viking Period opens, that is to say at the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries, the northerners, or at any rate their chiefs and nobles, were already aware that the Christian faith was not the special religion of one particular foreign nation but was rather some tremendous and all-pervading belief that bound together the diverse peoples of two huge empires. Everywhere that travellers from the north went, whether they journeyed south or west, when they entered the civilized world they found themselves among Christians. Their brother Germans, they knew, were already forsaking the old gods; the Franks and the Frisians had long been Christians; the Saxons were now Christians; the English were Christians; only in the darkest and furthermost shadows of the barbarian domains did heathendom still linger. Christianity was a passport into a world of wealth and splendour, a permit to tread safely upon the golden roads that led to the markets of Byzantium and the court of the western Emperor.
       The kings of the north were not slow to perceive the advantages of adopting the new faith, and in Louis the Pious (814840) they discovered an emperor who prized a convert dearly. Harald of Denmark (p. 92), whose kingdom had already been visited by the missionary Archbishop Ebbo of Rheims, was the first to become a Christian and he was baptized at the imperial palace of Ingelheim, close to Mainz, in 826 with several hundreds of his followers amid scenes of pomp and enthusiasm over which Louis himself presided. Then in 829 came a Swedish delegation to the emperor asking for missionaries to be sent to Sweden, for King Björn, like King Harald none too sure of his throne, needed the friendship of the Frankish empire; so the missionary Anskar, who for two years had been preaching the gospel in Hedeby, was bidden to move on to Birka, and there he built a church. But neither these kings, nor the missionaries whom they introduced, made any substantial progress in overthrowing

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the heathendom of the north. Certain kings changed their faith, and no doubt their courts did likewise; the missionaries, established and protected by these kings, preached; yet the people remained pagan and indifferent. Moreover, succeeding kings themselves turned from Christianity, preferring their fathers' ancient faith. Indeed, heathendom must have seemed established in unassailable strength when, at the end of twenty years of Christian endeavour, a huge Danish fleet under Horik seized Hamburg (p. 203) and drove Anskar, now an archbishop, from this his archiepiscopal seat.
       During the viking raids, the trading enterprises, and the colonial expeditions of the ninth century, the adventurers who stayed to bargain or take land abroad found themselves dwelling in close contact with Christians, and this not only on the shores of the Western Empire or on the borderlands of the Byzantine world, but also in the fervently Christian provinces of Ireland and Scotland, and in north England, where the Northumbrian Danes had their own Christian king at York, one Guthred, as early as 883. Some of these Northmen in foreign countries took Christian women to wife; by the '50s many prominent viking aristocrats had themselves become converts, and one result of this was that when Iceland was colonized in the last quarter of the century there were Christian families among the new settlers. Also a number of Swedish and Danish merchants who were accustomed to trade with such Christian ports as Dorstad in Frisia received baptism and on their return became members of the tiny Christian colonies in Birka and Hedeby, the chief trade-towns of the north; indeed, on the island of Gotland, as the Gutasaga attests, it was the missionary work of the returning merchants of Gotland that first introduced Christianity into the island. Yet these small Christian communities had little real influence; for the early Christianity of Iceland was engulfed and lost in the heathendom of the majority, and in Scandinavia the worship of that new and potent deity Christ made no significant progress, lessening in no wise the common respect for friendly Thor and Odin. Nearly two hundred years were to pass since the day when Ebbo had first preached in Denmark before the heathen Northmen were suddenly bidden by their rulers to abandon, one and all, their old faith and to receive baptism in the new.
       It was, in fact, wellnigh at the end of the Viking Period that the peoples of the north awoke to find themselves assailed not merely by the entreaties of a few venturesome missionaries as of old but by the thunder and majesty of the king's own

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