Introduction

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       submitted to an English king; Dublin likewise fell to the Irish after half a century of Norse rule and was for some years under the rule of Cearbhall of Ossory; Frisia was lost by the Danes three years after it had been ceded to Godfred by Charles the Fat; Normandy was Frenchified out of recognition within a century of its granting to Rollo. But these isolated instances of failure within the Viking Period itself are only symptoms of the lack of colonial sense, and the real instability of the achievement of the Northmen as colonists is best shown by the dismal continuation of the story in the twelfth century and afterwards; for the Middle Ages witness the collapse and poverty of the Scandinavian powers, the dwindling and extinction of the Ostmen in Ireland, the loss of the Scottish islands, the complete collapse of Danish rule in England, the unspeakable miseries of deserted Iceland, the shameful end of the Greenland Norsemen, and the vanishing into Slavonic civilization of the few remaining Swedish folk of the Kievan state in Russia. All these events, the immediate sequel to the Viking Period, are a necessary complement to the successes of the ninth and tenth centuries; for the fall of the viking peoples most cruelly illuminates their rise, revealing it not as a stately and stable advance, but as a sickly capricious thing, a triumph not for political sense, but merely for audacity, enthusiasm, and lust.
      
       An incomplete and erroneous impression of the Viking Period must inevitably result from any account that is confined to the fortunes of the buccaneers and colonists abroad. The real story of the time is that of the political development of the three northern countries concerned, and as a background to the plunderers and the emigrants faring over the high seas there remain always the kings of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, ruling as best they could a conservative and long-established folk who clung tenaciously to their ancestral estates. For these hard-working folk, jealous of their traditional freedom and privileges, were the real substance of the viking world, and not only as emigrants but as stay-at-homes, as men of peace as well as men of war, they contribute their share to the history of the time.
       In their own countries the Northmen were ruled either by a high-king who was undisputed lord of a nation, or by petty kings or great noblemen who were masters only of the people among whom they dwelt; next in rank to the kings was a rural aristocracy of jarls (earls) and hersir (lesser nobles), and next a vast and respectable middle class of landed farmers known
      
      
      
      
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       as the bönder (yeomen), (1) while below these were two lower orders of freedmen (cottagers) and thralls (slaves). It was the aristocracy that supplied most of the great viking leaders, and some of these, like Turgeis the Norwegian, Rorik the Dane, and Ingvar Vittfarne the Swede, even came of the royal families, so that it is not hard to understand how domestic political disputes and the rivalry of princes may have been responsible for the departure of these and many other malcontent grandees who left their country in order to win dominions abroad. But the great bulk of the viking emigrants, the colonists and the merchants, were men of the bonde class, a hard-working, orderly agricultural folk of decent birth, dwelling on their ancestral lands, proud of their lineage and their rights, and possessing through the things (district courts), of which each was a member, a voice in the economic and political destiny of their folk. The bonde, like the noble, was a free man, owner of the land he lived on, and oppressed by none of the obligations of feudalism, yet though he was a worthy and well-intentioned person, there were two factors that made him not quite such a comfortable and trustworthy member of the social order as his position warranted; the first of these was that his favourite odel system of land tenure on a family basis, intended to prevent the alienation of the estate to strangers, either led to its rapid division among the heirs into too many uneconomic units, or left the superfluous younger sons of the family compensated out of the ancestral exchequer, but without an estate at all; in the second place the bonde was abnormally jealous of his rights and sensitive in a most unusual measure to the real or supposed tyranny of the king.
       In these two weaknesses there lie causes of the unrest that provoked these stalwart farmers into the viking enterprises of land-winning and plundering abroad. For a system of land-tenure ill-adapted to the needs of a vigorous and increasing stock in a country where the supply of arable land and pasturage is far from inexhaustible leads inevitably to over-population, and over-population is a potent incentive to migration. A roving life abroad with the promise of quick-won booty, or the adventure of settlement in the colonies, were alike preferable to a difficult and undistinguished existence on the too-crowded family estate, and therefore those men who were not the principal heirs to their fathers' lands took to viking enterprise not merely as an

1. There is no exact equivalent for the Norse bonde; I prefer yeoman to farmer, but any word implying feudal obligations is, of course, misleading.
      
      
      
      
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       outlet for their valorous and greedy passions, but of necessity, so that they might win wealth and a home. That over-population was indeed the cause of one migration from the north, an outpouring of the Gotlanders about the year A.D. 500, is attested by the Gutasaga itself, and Dudo, the Norman historian of the eleventh century, likewise attributes the migrations of the Danes and other German folk to the same cause; but Dudo believed that the over-population was the result of polygamy, and this was certainly a practice of many viking nobles in the early days that must also be reckoned with as contributing to the peopling of the northern lands with spirited and well-born youths who could not hope to inherit the great estates of their fathers.
       On the second count, since the freedom of the noble and the bonde led them both to resist stubbornly any attempt to interfere with their ancient privileges, it was inevitable that in an age destined to see the birth of the northern nations as monarchies bowed beneath the rule of one paramount and all-powerful lord, these tender-skinned folk should find themselves assailed by royal commands, by new vexations, new restrictions, and evil consequences of the royal displeasure such as neither they nor their ancestors had known before; so they took ship, many of them, vowing to make their homes in other countries where a man might manage his affairs as he would and owe allegiance to none other. Thus in Norwegian history there is a tradition, vouched for by Snorri Sturlason, that the severity of Harald Fairhair's rule, after he had made all Norway his, resulted in the migration of the Norse bönder to the Faroes and to Iceland.
       But even with this much said it is still impossible to explain in final and satisfactory terms the huge outpouring of the northern peoples that is known as the viking expansion. It may well be that over-population, lack of land, and political grievances were the most urgent motives, yet the relative forces with which they operated cannot be measured, and it must be conceded that neither severally nor together do they seem sufficient to explain migrations so considerable and so long-sustained. Perhaps, after all, sheer and ugly greed must be reckoned as the spur that constantly and unfailingly provoked the Northmen to their viking exploits; but there may have been other factors likely to result in emigration that were beyond men's control and that are wholly unknown, a long succession of bad harvests, for example, or the temporary failure of the hunting and the fishing.
      
       Plate II