Ryan Lavelle, who is teaching our new HistoryExtra Academy course, shares five surprising facts about the raiders, pirates and traders from medieval Scandinavia
A Viking wedding involved a bed and eight people
The people of medieval Iceland are best known for their sagas – vivid stories written about their Viking ancestors. Yet they also possessed a lawcode, and these laws reveal a curious marriage custom that shines a light on gender relations in Icelandic society.
For a marriage to be legitimate, a groom had to be seen by six witnesses entering the same bed as his new wife, “without concealment”. The idea that marriage was witnessed ensured that children from the union were seen as legitimate – an important matter for the descent of property and for family honour. After all, the keeping of mistresses was far from uncommon and the sexual mistreatment of female slaves so widespread it appears that it was barely worth recording in sagas.
All this is worth bearing in mind when considering the Viking cemetery in Birka, Sweden – in which a skeleton buried with an array of weapons turned out to be biologically female. Many Viking women enjoyed greater freedoms than their counterparts across Europe. But there were still limits to their power. Did the person buried at Birka express their identity like that of a male warrior because of such limits?
The Vikings with Ryan Lavelle
In this four-week short course, you’ll discover everything you need to know about the Viking period, guided by Ryan Lavelle, Professor in Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester.
Vikings converted to Christianity earlier than we thought
In c965 AD, King Harald Bluetooth made a bold – and striking – claim.
On a runestone erected at Jelling on the Jutland peninsula, the Danish monarch declared that he had “made all the Danes Christian”. It was the earliest ‘official’ statement on Christianity made in Viking Scandinavia.
So does that mean that Christianity didn’t gain much traction in the Viking lands until the late 10th century? Perhaps not. For, in 2016, on the Danish island of Funen, a metal detectorist discovered a Scandinavian gold crucifix pendant from the early 10th century.
- Read more | When did Christianity first arrive in Britain?
Two centuries before that, in the early 800s, the Frankish bishop St Anskar led a mission to Scandinavia that, tradition has it, met with little success. The Aunslev crucifix shows that perhaps Anskar’s efforts – or, maybe, the influence of Vikings returning home from Christian lands – bore some fruit after all.
Harald Bluetooth was no friend of the Vikings
Harald Bluetooth is one of the most famous Danish kings of the Viking Age. But it seems that he was anything but a Viking himself. The king – who was named ‘Bluetooth by a 12th-century chronicler, perhaps on account of a bad tooth – never took part in a Viking expedition and ordered no raiding expeditions.
In fact, Harald projected himself as a king of a united Denmark through a series of massive building projects that were designed to repel Viking raiders. These included a network of circular ring fortresses (known as Trelleborg fortresses, after the first such one to be discovered) that could house many hundreds of soldiers.
Designated by Unesco as world heritage sites in 2023, Trelleborg fortresses were constructed across the territories of Denmark, probably with the aim of bringing the Danish kingdom together – something that Harald Bluetooth claimed on the Jelling runestone.
With such fortresses, as with the Anglo-Saxon burhs of Wessex and Mercia a generation or so earlier, any marauding Vikings could be prevented from wreaking havoc within Harald’s realm.
The legend of William Tell may derive from a Viking story
Harald Bluetooth’s massive building projects were costly, straining relations between the king and his nobles. Saxo Grammaticus, a 12th–13th-century Danish writer, tells that on hearing one of his nobles boast that he was a deadshot with a bow, Harald ordered the man, Toki, to prove it in a way that tested his loyalty to the limits. And so Toki displayed that loyalty by shooting an apple from his son’s head. When Harald asked Toki why he had brought more arrows from his quiver, Toki replied that, had he missed the apple, he would not have missed the king.
Whether or not we choose to believe Saxo, his tale reveals to us that saga-like storytelling traditions didn’t only hail from Iceland. And Saxo hadn’t finished with Harald quite yet. The Danish writer tells us that the king was driven out of his kingdom by his rebellious son, Swein Forkbeard. Harald’s attempt to claim back a foothold in Denmark was, Saxo writes, scuppered when, in a quiet moment in a battle, he headed off into a wood to answer the call of nature. Watching him was Toki, again ready with his bow. Naturally, he did not miss.
The Viking Age began before the Lindisfarne raids
“Who could have known that such an inroad from the sea could be made?” lamented the Northumbrian churchman Alcuin on hearing the news of the Viking raid on the island monastery of Lindisfarne. That terrible attack, in 793, is widely believed to have fired the starting gun on the Viking Age. But some historians now argue that this era in medieval history may have been under way earlier than that.
The most compelling evidence for this arrived in the early 2000s with the discover- ies of two war boats with skeletons at Salme on the Estonian island of Saaremaa. These finds date from around 750.
Archaeologists remain puzzled by the finds, which include Scandinavian weapons, dogs and hawks. Many of the skeletons have revealed extensive evidence of injuries. Was this a diplomatic mission gone wrong (with dogs and hawks intended as gifts?), the fate of unsuccessful raiders, or the burial of a group of would-be settlers? Whatever the case, there’s little doubt that, almost a millennium after it drew to a close, the Viking Age continues to throw up surprises.