Introduction
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pottery he had none, though he did keep in the house a huge rectangular clay-lined trough to serve him as a bath.
In arms and equipment the viking aped the Frank and the Saxon, and his skill in metallurgy permitted him to copy in profuse quantity the foreign weapons that he so much admired, even if he could not always imitate their quality. He possessed indeed a rich and varied armoury and was in this respect better equipped than the East Baltic and the Slavs, and better off than the Celts whose chronicles admitted the superiority of the viking gear.
Most beloved of all were the sword and the axe, and these, if they were not bought or stolen abroad, were made according to the prevailing continental types that the German smiths had evolved. A single-edged pointed sword was still in use among the northern peoples in the ninth century, but the favourite blade of the Viking Period is two-edged and heavy, with a deep wide fuller. The details of the pommel-shape and quillons vary with the period, but characteristic shapes that occur commonly are illustrated by four viking swords in a little group of weapons (Pl. V) chosen from the Iron Age Gallery of the British Museum. The magnificent axe shown in this same picture is probably the work of an eleventh-century Anglo-Danish smith and is the end of a long and varied series of viking axeforms which need not be paraded here; the axe was indeed an almost indispensable companion of the Northmen and it won for the Scandinavians in the Varangian Guard at Constantinople the name of the 'Axe-bearing Barbarians' and singled them out from the other foreign troops in their imperial master's service. The three iron spearheads in the group belong in all probability, like the axe, to the end of the Viking Period, but they illustrate a favourite variety, long narrow blades with sharp shoulders and handsome-looking, such as Svein's soldiers may have borne.
Of the viking shield little is known except that there were two varieties, the one long so that it would cover a man when he knelt behind it, and the other, which was by far the commoner type, round. This last was a light wooden disc about 3 feet in diameter, metal-edged and painted, with a central boss of bronze or iron; they were shields of this kind, painted alternately yellow and black, that lined the bulwarks of the Gokstad ship (Fig. 1) and that are borne by the warriors carved on the Stenkyrka stone (Pl. IV), and they were such shields, if English examples are wanted, that were carried by the vikings depicted on the Lowther hogback tombstone in Westmoreland and the
Plate V
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Gosforth hogback in Cumberland. As for armour, chain-mail was not unknown and an attempt to represent this in a little bone carving is shown here (Fig. 7); but probably it was rarely used except by the richest chieftains until the eleventh century, and before that a leather cuirass was the ordinary man's protection for the body; the kings and leaders likewise wore a helmet, a simple pointed casque sometimes provided with a nose-guard and often surmounted by a crest, but never having the funny wings or horns of the picture-book vikings. The profile of these helmets can be seen on the Stenkyrka stone (Pl. IV) and on many other memorials.
The sagas have little to say of bows and arrows, but most of the nobles and bönder of the north were practised archers and there is a quiver full of arrows included in the rich furniture
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of a tenth-century viking boat-grave found at Hedeby in Sleswig that is now to be seen in the Kiel Museum. Yet the bow seems to have been comparatively little used except for the rich man's hunting, and it plays but a small part in the saga-stories of battles. But if the ordinary viking was no great archer he was certainly a good horseman, and although an Arab author said of the Volga-vikings that they rode but little, in the west the northern soldiers were accustomed to ride on horseback during their cross-country expeditions, as the chroniclers of both Francia and England testify. The harness and other horse-gear of the vikings have been found on many occasions, and a drawing is shown here of a stirrup of the type they wore (Fig. 8); it is a handsome iron hoop inlaid with gleaming bronze and was found in the Thames; probably this example, which is in the British Museum, was made in England late in the ninth century and its owner may perhaps have been an Englishman, for it is only in shape that it is typical of viking stirrups.
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It is no easy matter to pass judgement on the viking abroad or to label him according to the manner of man he was. That he could be a grand and noble adventurer, that he could be valorous in battle, wise in council, and law-abiding, all this the saga-reader cannot doubt; in like manner his love of poems and stories, his taste for rich and handsome ornaments, his pride in well-built and beautiful boats, his delight in a good sword or a keen axe, these veil him decorously in the mists of romance so that often he figures in history books only as a mettlesome
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and admirable person who was lavishly caparisoned, a proud, chivalrous son of the sea, who had come that he might revive with his sturdy northern civilization the effete and characterless folk of the west. But a wealthy viking on his best behaviour can scarcely be taken as typical of all his northern brethren, and neither can his most extreme counterpart, the shameless professional robber, nor the poor squalid settler working on some stolen lands in a foreign country or struggling to develop a bleak, inhospitable territory of the far-off north. It is, of course, true that the viking was often a worthless rascal leading a sordid and miserable existence; one contemporary Arab writer describes
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the domestic life of the Volga-vikings in terms that show them to have been objectionable and filthy creatures of a peculiarly repulsive kind, and another Arab agreed that they were veritably the dirtiest of all men. But this glimpse is only of a part of an enormous whole and is insufficient to condemn all the Northmen as entirely despicable barbarians.
For the viking, whatever he may have done abroad, whatever his social behaviour was, despite his heathendom and the polygamy of his chieftains, must be seen against a cultural background that deserves respect. He came of a people who were for the most part sober and industrious agriculturists, a people who were endowed with considerable aesthetic sensibility and who were in some trades, such as shipbuilding and ironwork, craftsmen of more than ordinary skill. Therefore though it is profitless to look for such a thing as a typical viking, since throughout the whole of their history the vikings were exactly what their circumstances made them, robbers, colonists, and traders, yet it is a nearer approach to the truth to believe of them that they were an orderly and sensible civilized folk than that they were bloody and destructive brutes.
It has been said that neither the conquests abroad made by the vikings nor their colonial enterprises command an unreserved respect. It remains, therefore, to ask what was the worth of the viking movement and what permanent good or lasting harm these Northmen did.
So far as eastern Europe is concerned the vikings undoubtedly played an important and beneficial role in the foundation of the Russian state and in the subsequent orientation of this upon Constantinople; herein, beyond all question, was their most significant and remarkable achievement. But in the west there is less to be said for them. Certainly the fact that Iceland and the Faroes are now peopled by a flourishing and happy folk must be regarded as a result of Norse enterprise in the Viking Period; yet the discovery of Greenland brought few men profit, and the amazing discovery of America was so much adventure and courage wasted. On the other hand, the seaport town-system of Ireland was not only established but developed by the Northmen and this contributed materially to the well-being of the country in the early Middle Ages; in Ireland, indeed, the usefulness of the vikings ended only with their extinction after the Norman invasion, and this perhaps is also true of the northern shores of the Bristol Channel where the vikings had developed a lively trade and were settled in no small numbers. In England the establishment of the Danes meant the addition
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