Other records exist, left by Arab travellers who encountered
the Vikings under less fraught circumstances than these and who were able to
indulge their anthropological curiosity to leave us an elliptical view of
Viking culture that is largely missing from the wounded accounts of Christian
scribes in the British Isles and in mainland Europe. We have already met Ibn
Fadlan, who closely observed, among other things, the funerary rituals of the
travelling band of Rus traders he met on the Volga in 921, and the geographer
Ibn Rustah, who travelled to Novgorod with the Rus at a slightly later date than
his fellow Muslim and noted down his impressions of the people and their home.
Ibn Fadlan’s descriptions veer dramatically from admiration at the physique of
the Rus – ‘I have seen the Rus as they came on their merchant journeys and
encamped by the Volga. I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall
as date-palms and ruddy-complexioned’ – to disgust at their failure to wash
themselves after defecating, urinating and having sexual intercourse. The day
began with a slave-girl who passed among the members of the group carrying a
pitcher of water in which each washed his hands, face and hair and then cleared
his nose and spat. The process was repeated until all had used the same water
in the same fashion. With the Volga flowing by outside, the economy would seem
unnecessary. Perhaps some bonding ritual was involved that reinforced the group
identity and strengthened its internal loyalty. Constantine Porphyrogenitos, in
his description of Rus traders making their way down the Dneiper to trade in Constantinople,
drew particular attention to the ‘one for all and all for one mentality’ that
guided their behaviour. Ibn Rustah observed the same thing: ‘If one group of
them is challenged to war, they all join forces. They stand firm as one man
against their enemies until they have won the victory over them.’ His account
is generally more sympathetic than Ibn Fadlan’s and is free from the latter’s
occasional flourishes of disgust:
They keep their clothes clean and the men adorn
themselves with armbands of gold. They treat their servants well and dress
exquisitely because they are such keen traders. ( … ) They are generous to each
other, honour their guests and treat well those who seek refuge with them, and
all who come to visit them. They do not allow anyone to annoy or harm these.
And whenever anyone dares to treat them unfairly they help and defend them.
Walrus tusks and furs were no doubt valuable and rare
commodities to take to market in the Arab world, but Ibn Fadlan and Ibn Rustah
both noted the importance of slave-trading:
They terrorize the Slavs, whom they reach by ship. They
take prisoners there and transport them to Hazaran and Bulgar and sell them
there. They do not own fields, but live entirely off what they bring from the
land of the Slavs.
Ibn Fadlan observed that each Rus woman wore pinned to her
breast a band of silver, copper or gold, its size determined by the wealth of
her man, from which a knife hung. Around their necks the women wore gold and
silver rings, each ring representing 10,000 dirham or Arabic coins. For much of
the early Viking Age the status of the dirham was such that it was a
universally accepted currency, in much the same way as the American dollar is
today, and was widely copied or counterfeited. Some of the dirham from the
Vårby hoard found near Stockholm have small Christian crosses added above the
Islamic inscription, suggesting they may have been struck in a Christian area.
Dirham make up a regular feature of the coin hoards unearthed across the Viking
world, from Cuerdale in the north-west of England to Spilling’s Farm in the
north-east of Gotland. The sheer volume of them is testimony to the extent of
the trade relations that existed between Arabs and Vikings in the east, with
Gotland and Birka as the main channels for conveying the coins westward; but as
we noted earlier, for a Viking the value of the dirham remained its silver
content, not its monetary value. Dirham were for daily use, and the fact that
so many of them were buried underground by Vikings in their own territories
suggests that they were so plentiful as to have attained the status of a
surplus material.
It was inevitable that misunderstandings should arise as
these Arab travellers tried to make sense of the ritual and mores of this alien
culture. Ibn Rustah wrote that the friends of a dead warrior dig him a grave
resembling a large house and place him in it, along with his clothes, his gold
arm-bands, food, drink and coins, and that his favourite wife is buried alive
with him before the grave is closed. There are no indications from any native
Scandinavian source that the Vikings practised suttee. What is likely is that
such travelling bands, be they Vikings, Rus or al-madjus, developed, as
self-contained groups far from home do, their own set of rules and rituals that
were unique to them. The degree to which the group observed by Ibn Fadlan was a
self-sufficient unit is suggested by the presence among them of their very own
priestess, the ‘Angel of Death’, whose functions included the ritual stabbing of
the slave-girl who had ‘volunteered’ to accompany her dead master into the next
world. Ibn Rustah likewise noted the terrifying power of the Rus priests:
They have their wizards, who decide on what they own as
though they were their masters, and tell them to sacrifice to their creator
whatever they decide of women, men and cattle. And once the wizards have made
the decision, they are compelled to carry out their instructions. The wizard
then takes the person or the animal from them, puts a rope around the neck and
hangs them from a gallows until dead.
Ibn Fadlan’s group was rich enough to sacrifice an entire
ship as a crematorium for its dead chieftain and his slave, but his informant
told him that only the greatest chieftains warranted such ceremony. Rank-and-file
members of the band were buried alone in small boats, while dead slaves were
simply left to rot where they died. The cultural similarities between the Volga
and Oseberg funerals include the use of ships as coffins and the provision of
food, or perhaps companionship, for the dead in the form of freshly killed
horses and dogs. The Volga funeral involved the sacrifice of a slave, and, as
we noted earlier, one of the women in the Oseberg ship may have been sacrificed
to accompany her mistress. But in terms of the imagined afterlife the
differences are striking: the climax of the funeral on the Volga came with the
burning of the ship, in which it resembles the ceremony carried out on the Île
de Groix off the north-west coast of France, but is distinct from both the
Oseberg and the Gokstad ship-funerals, where neither ships nor bodies were
cremated.
Ibn Fadlan is the more sensationally inclined of these two
great Arab observers and rounds off the Risala, or ‘little book’, as his
account of his meetings with the Rus is known, by asserting that their king
spent most of his time on an enormous throne studded with precious stones.
Forty sexual slaves sat beside him, and whenever it pleased him to, he would
take one in full view of his men. When he wished to mount his horse the animal
was led to his throne, when he dismounted he did so directly on to his throne.
Most striking of all, Ibn Fadlan claims that he did not even leave the throne
to answer the call of nature but used a salver. This has the ring of a traveller’s
tale to it, and lacks the obvious credibility of the account of the funeral and
the events leading up to it. The main purpose of the embassy of which Ibn
Fadlan was a part was to instruct the Bulgar kagan in the Islamic faith.
Bearing in mind this religious goal, there is perhaps a point of contact
between his reactions to the Rus and those of Alcuin, who was so clearly uneasy
at the lack of physical modesty on the part of Heathens he had come across
before Lindisfarne. There is an almost homoerotic quality to Ibn Fadlan’s
description of the magnificence of the Rus as physical specimens, which he
struggles to quell with disgusted descriptions of their lack of hygiene. Like
the Christian Alcuin, Ibn was effortlessly convinced that, as a Muslim, he represented
the higher culture. One exchange makes it clear that the Rus did not agree. Ibn
Fadlan noticed his interpreter in conversation with one of the Rus and asked
him what they had been talking about. The interpreter told him:
‘He said, “You Arabs are stupid!” So I said, “Why?” and
he replied, “Because you take those who are dearest to you and whom you hold in
highest esteem and you bury them under the earth, where they are eaten by the
earth, by vermin and by worms. We burn them in the fire, straightaway, and they
enter paradise immediately.” Then he laughed loud and long. I asked him why and
he said, “Because of the love which my god feels for him. He has sent the wind
to take him away within an hour.” ’ Actually, it took scarcely an hour for the
ship, the firewood, the slave-girl and her master to be burnt to a fine ash.
Among the Vikings, uniformity of procedure on socially
significant occasions like births, marriages and deaths waited on the
introduction of Christianity and the spread of the written word for its
imposition. But in his cheerful arrogance, this particular Rus seems to have
known that, in one respect at least, they had the future on their side.
Ibn Rustah also tells us that the Rus were covered to their
fingertips in tattoos depicting trees, figures and other designs. This is of a
piece with what Alcuin and that other, anonymous, Anglo-Saxon commentator noted
concerning the personal vanity of the Heathens, especially their fashion for
‘blinded eyes’, which may have been a form of eye-shadow. An Arab source leaves
no doubt that eye make-up was common among the Rus: ‘once applied it never
fades, and the beauty of both men and women is increased’. Tattooing was banned
in 787 by Pope Hadrian because of its association with Heathendom and superstition,
and Christian disapproval may account for the absence of any reference to
tattoos in the descriptions of men and women in the sagas written down in the
Christian era. Only a clutch of stray references, literary and archaeological,
have survived to confirm that it was indeed practised. In the ‘Sigrdrífumál’, a
gnomic poem on the deeds of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer collected in the Codex
Regius, the hero wakes a Valkyrie named Sigrdrífa whom Odin has condemned to
perpetual sleep for her disobedience, and compels her to reveal secrets to him.
One verse ascribes a magical power to tattooing:
Ale-runes you will want if another
man’s wife
tries to betray your trust;
scratch them on your drinking horn,
the back of your hand
and the need-rune on your nail.
Another indicates that tattoos could have a medicinal
function:
I’ll teach you lore for helping
women in labour,
runes to release the child;
write them on your palms and clasp
her wrists
invoking the disir’s aid.
Özti, the 5,000-year-old hunter whose body emerged from the
melting permafrost in the Öztal Alps in 1991, had at least fifty-seven tattoos
on various parts of his body. Many were concentrated in areas where the joints
bore signs of being worn and painful, and researchers have speculated that they
might have combined magic with a form of acupuncture. Tattooing may also have
had a ritual significance. An unusual comb, with runic inscriptions dated to
about 550–600, was found at Bømlo, in South Hordaland, in Norway, along with a
number of bone pins, including one with an iron tip and a small, iron-dressed,
hammer-like head. It is possible that in its entirety the find might have been
equipment associated with a rite of passage initiating young girls into
womanhood that involved tattooing and ritual decoration of the hair.
These encounters between Allah and Odin on the Iberian
peninsula and along the coast of the Mediterranean left few lasting traces.
Slavers routinely took the precaution of transporting their captives overseas
to discourage escape attempts and slaves taken by al-madjus in the region were
not offered for sale locally and did not lead to the development of local trade
relations. The only known diplomatic contact to have arisen out of the raids is
a mission, said to have taken place in about 845, to the court of the al-madjus
king who had led the attack on Seville the year before, with the aim of
establishing friendly ties with him. The Arab emissary was a renowned poet and
ladies’ man known as al-Ghazal, or the Gazelle, a name given to him in his
youth in tribute to his good looks. The wealth of detail in the account by the
twelfth-century Spanish scholar Ibn Dihya includes a description of the land of
this king of the al-madjus:
They came next to the royal residence. It was a large island
in the ocean, with running water and gardens. Between it and the mainland is a
journey of three days. Innumerable of the al-Magus live on this island. Close
to it are many other islands, large and small. All the inhabitants are Magus.
And the closest mainland also belongs to them, several days’ journey away. They
were formerly Magus, but now follow the Christian religion, since they have
abandoned the worship of fire and the religion they followed previously, and
converted to Christianity, excepting the inhabitants of some of the islands
belonging to them which are further out at sea. These continue to observe the
old religion with the worship of fire, marriage with mother and sister and
other abominations.
This sounds like Denmark, with the king’s hegemony over ‘the
closest mainland’ a reference to Vik in south-eastern Norway and Skåne in
southern Sweden, in which case al-Ghazal’s host would have been King Horik, who
was baptized by Anskar and encouraged Christianity in Denmark, though without
making it compulsory. Most of Ibn Dihya’s account is a literary entertainment
describing the king’s wife’s infatuation for her Arabic visitor. Al-Ghazal
visited her frequently and she showered him with gifts. He became her lover,
and satisfied her curiosity about his people and their customs. He made verse
in praise of her: ‘I am enchanted by a Magus woman, who will not let the
sunlight of beauty dim, who lives in the most remote of Allah’s lands, where
the traveller finds no tracks.’ His companions warned him to stop seeing her
and accepting the gifts and al-Ghazal cut his visits down to one every second
day. When the queen, who in al-Ghazal’s verse bears the non-Scandinavian name
‘Nud’, was told the reason for the change in his routine she laughingly
reassured him that
Our ways are not like that, and there is no jealousy among
us. Our women stay with their men of their own free will; a woman stays with her
man as long as it pleases her, and leaves him when she wearies of their life
together.
The independence of women from the Heathen north generally
was a source of great surprise to Arab travellers. One noted that ‘among them
women have the right to divorce. A woman can herself initiate divorce whenever
she pleases.’ Ibn Dihya adds that, until the coming of Christianity, no woman
was forbidden to any man, the exception being when a high-born woman chose a
man of lower standing. This was held to shame her, and her family kept the
lover away from her. Al-Ghazal, reassured by Queen Nud’s words, resumed his
daily visits until his departure. The impression of a Danish society free from
sexual jealousy is countered by Adam of Bremen, who states plainly that women
who were unfaithful to their men were immediately sold.
No authoritative Arab historian of the time mentions this
mission, nor do any of the biographers of al-Ghazal, and the great French
arabist, Évariste Lévi-Provencal, judged the whole story to be a fictional
improvisation based on a journey to Constantinople known to have been made by
al-Ghazal in the winter of 839/840. This was the year in which the Rus turned
up at the court of Louis the Pious in Ingelheim on their way back from
Constantinople. Lévi-Provencal speculates that al-Ghazal may have met these Rus
or heard talk of their land and their customs, with his report from this
encounter forming the basis of Ibn Dihya’s later improvisation.
The sole Viking Age artefact to have emerged in Spain is a
small cylindrical vessel made of deer horn, with a pattern of holes around it
and a handle at one end. It is a rarity among such artefacts in that it was not
found accidentally by the digging of archaeologists but had been in use in the
Church of San Isidoro, in León, for several centuries until it was finally
identified and installed as an exhibit in the town museum. All three of the
dominant Borre, Jelling and Mammen styles of the second half of the tenth
century have left identifiable traces on the design on the vessel, a gripping
beast motif made up of as many as eight smaller beasts. The mingling of styles
suggests a transitional phase between the Jelling and Mammen eras, and a
tentative dating to the end of the tenth or beginnning of the eleventh century.
The provenance of the vessel is obscure, but it may have been part of a large
donation made to the church in León by King Fernando I (1037–1065) and his
Queen Doña Sancha in 1063. How it came to be in their possession and what its
original function may have been are unknown. Other traces of the Viking
presence are slight. Generally speaking, it was too sporadic to leave a
significant impact on the local language and place-names. In the province of
León there is a village called Lordemanos, which may indicate a local
settlement of Vikings, and near Coimbra, in Portugal, a village named Lordemão
invites similar speculation, as do villages named Nordoman and Nortman. In
Vascony, Vikings who settled in Bayonne may have taught the Basques how to hunt
the whales that arrived in the Bay of Biscay every autumn. Predictably, the
handful of loan-words from Old Norse into Basque, Spanish and French are
connected with maritime and fishing activity. The fishermen of Bermeo, the most
important fishing-port in the Basque country, use ‘estribor’, compounded of
‘styr’ and ‘bord’, to designate ‘starboard’, and ‘babor’, from ‘bak’ and
‘bord’, to mean ‘port’. Among place-names in the region with otherwise unknown
origins, Mundaka, on the mouth of the river Oka, may derive from Old Norse
‘munnr’, meaning ‘mouth’.
The wave of raids between 966 and 971 marked the climax of
the Viking Age in Galicia. Briefly, there was a danger that the province might
turn into a Spanish Normandy. But it did not, and the raids on the Iberian
peninsula and beyond had no lasting political or cultural significance. They
were episodic and piratical, long and daring journeys undertaken in search of
riches and adventure, and as such perhaps more authentically ‘Viking’ in spirit
than the colonizations. There are no conversion stories here, no discourse with
local aristocrats, no attempts on the part of the adventurers to establish
large-scale settlements and farm the land. Yet we know enough by now to realize
that there is no such thing as a typical Viking, and an enigmatic and unusually
charming recollection of their presence is a tale told by one Arab chronicler
of a certain group of al-madjus who got lost or separated from their companions
in al-Andalus, somehow evaded execution, converted to Islam, and married local
girls. They started a farm at Isla Menor, on the Mediterranean coast between
Alicante and Cartagena, where they presently established a reputation as
producers of what was reputed to be the best cheese in the region.
