Chapter 3
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independent folks was an acute sense of their altered government. (1)
The state of Norway at the time of its beginnings under Harald was in most respects very like any other early Germanic kingdom, such as that of Charles the Great or that of Alfred in England. Like them, it was to suffer from all the weaknesses inherent in a constitution founded upon the personal authority of the king, and though Harald certainly did create a kingdom that was to endure, its subsequent history is the long inevitable tale of dissensions and interior strife, interrupted not only by more than one collapse into separate states but also by both wholesale and partial foreign dominion. Even in Harald's old age the trouble was beginning, and it was not long after his death that the unity of his realm was seriously threatened.
It has not been the intention of this chapter, however, to follow the history of the formation of the nations of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, beyond the point at which their peoples first possessed real sense of national unity. Its purpose, rather, was to show at what period it is first permissible to use the nation-names and to handle their history in its national aspect. That purpose is now achieved. First in the dark period after the battle of Bravalla, between the end of the eighth century and the end of the ninth, Sweden emerges as a single kingdom; then Harald Fairhair at the turn of the ninth and tenth centuries makes of Norway one state; finally, Harald Gormsson, late in the tenth century, won all Denmark for himself. The three great viking countries are born; another chapter must see the continuation of their story.
Yet one matter remains for short mention here, and that is a statement of the connexion between these three separate births of the viking kingdoms and the appearance in history of the three northern peoples as vikings harassing, conquering, and possessing lands abroad. The outstanding difficulty is, of course, one that has already been discussed, namely the impossibility
1. The sagas make much of the heavy taxation imposed by Harald and of his confiscation of odel property; but it is doubtful if he really did collect taxes on a large scale or everywhere turn the freeholders into his tenants by taking absolute possession of the land. On this subject see the study by Eggert Briem, Um harald hárfagra, Reykjavik, 1915, who summarizes the saga-evidence and most of the discussions thereon. There is also an important paper by E. Bull, Historisk Tidskrift (Norsk), 5 R. IV ( 1917-20), p. 481, and this should be compared with J. Schreiner paper, ib. 5 R VII ( 1928), p. 208. In English there are some admirable pages on this subject in Mr. G. Gathorne Hardy book Norway ( London, 1925, p. 37 ff.).
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of determining an absolute beginning for the period of piracy and colonial enterprise abroad; but although throughout all the stormy centuries of national development the folk of the three nations had found delight in buccaneering expeditions, the immediate task must be to review the story of the kingdoms in relation with the historically accepted and plainly observable outburst of viking activity that suddenly opens in the decades just before and after the year A.D. 800.
With this limit set to the enquiry it is at once obvious that the first expansion of the viking Swedes, their conquest of certain East Baltic states and the early establishment of Swedish outposts in Russia, must be divorced by at least half a century in point of time from the political upheavals that led to the formation of the Swedish state, and in what degree the struggles of Svitjod for complete ascendancy in eastern Scandinavia was the indirect result of this outpouring of Swedish adventurers is a subject upon which history is silent. Yet it will be shown that the early conquests abroad coincide with a period of dual rule (p. 191) under a king in Birka and another in Uppsala, so that it is not improbable that the conflict of the princes of these two houses was in part responsible for considerable unrest and the resultant foundation of settlements in other lands.
In the instance of Norway there is likewise no room for doubt that a considerable tide of emigration and viking enterprise had taken place before the days of Harald Fairhair. At the beginning of the ninth century the peasants of the Möre and Agder districts had begun to people the Orkneys and Shetlands (p. 303), and it is hard to believe that this can have been occasioned by such factors as the wars of their princes or the beginnings of the struggle for supremacy between the young Vestfold state and its rivals. Yet it is also a fact that in the first half of this century (800-850), during the long period of political disturbances in Vestfold before and during the reign of Olof Geirstada-alf, a more audacious and aristocratic people than these poor farmers had seized the Hebrides and had possessed themselves of harbour-strongholds in Ireland, where they had won much wealth; indeed, as both of the two most illustrious chieftains of the early vikings in Ireland, Turgeis (Thorgest) and Olaf of Dublin, were sprung of the Vestfold royal house, it seems that among these more spirited adventurers of the west there were many whom dissensions at home, and not only the mere lust of conquest, had urged abroad.
Similarly, historians have attested that a second wave of emigrants departed west-over-sea, or went further on to the
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Faroes and to Iceland, at the time of Harald Fairhair's achievement of the high-kingship of Norway. It is possible, notwithstanding, to exaggerate the effects of his sudden and severe rule, and it is certainly an overstatement to declare that such notable events as the colonization of Iceland and the Faroes were the result of no other cause than Harald's harsh and hated supremacy in his new-won realm (p. 340). But that a Norwegian aristocracy, discontented and resentful, materially swelled during Harald's reign the flood of adventurers and exiles who sought homes in foreign lands and formed the bulk of the emigrants from Norway in the late ninth century is an axiom of every history book.
In Denmark, on the other hand, the beginnings of the viking attacks upon Frisia and Francia long antedate the foundation of the Danish kingdom by Harald Gormsson and belong to the period of strife in the early ninth century when the contest for supremacy among the Danish princes was first becoming acute. Over a century and a half was to pass before the line of Gorm and Harald was rid of all rivals and ruled alone, yet it was during the first throes of Denmark's birth that the outcast royalties in their rage and anger fell upon the Western Empire to win for themselves, if they could, the territories and power that were denied to them in their own country.
It is abundantly clear, then, that not only the potent factors of over-population and an innate spirit of adventure, but the domestic political situation must be taken into account in estimating the cause of the viking movement. For though history fails, except in the instance of Norway, to show that the contest for a single and undisputed throne sent the spirited malcontents abroad as vikings, yet both in Sweden and Denmark too, it is likely enough that political disturbances consequent upon, or a prelude to, the creation of a single kingdom also played their part in urging the wrathful and ambitious sons of the north to their conquests overseas.
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