The Northwomen, page 9
Clearly, raiding and sailing across the North Sea were risky propositions. Back home in the great halls of Norway, some poets likened the sea to a giant troll with an insatiable appetite for human beings. It was a fearsome adversary, and to escape its hungry maw, the raiders who voyaged west needed more than just courage, skill, and luck. They needed powerful magic and the help of gods and goddesses to keep them safe from the terrors of the sea and the violence along its shores.
In a poem composed near the end of the Viking Age, Sigrdrífumál, seafarers were advised to carve magical runic inscriptions on the stem and rudder blade of their ships to ward off the dangers of dark waves and foaming breakers. But big problems, like the dangerous, roiling expanse of the North Sea, required big solutions: elaborate ceremonies performed by female ritualists who had mastered the art of speaking to the gods and who could intercede successfully on their behalf.
And that, it seems, was where the lady from Melhus and her reliquary came in.
To learn more about the woman, Heen-Pettersen teamed up with Griffin Murray, an archaeologist at University College Cork in Ireland who had a long-standing interest in medieval ecclesiastical metalwork. Together, they turned to one of the most important clues in the woman’s burial: the Melhus reliquary. Previous research showed that such house-shaped shrines were used in both Scotland and Ireland in the early medieval period. Moreover, the Melhus reliquary looked much like an illustration of a sacred temple in the Book of Kells, a famous manuscript from around A.D. 800 that was probably the work of two medieval monasteries, one in Scotland and the other in Ireland. But the Melhus reliquary dated to an earlier time, judging from its size and the style of its ornamentation. Carved from solid yew wood and decorated with metal sheets and fine glasswork, it was probably made during the seventh century.
Murray’s research suggested that the little shrine was once carried in church processions held on Christian holy days—the feast day of a saint, for example. In all probability, a monk or priest slipped its leather strap over his neck and hung it on his chest, where it could be seen easily by those lining the route of the procession. Moreover, historical records kept by Irish monks revealed that these types of shrines were favorite targets of Viking raiding parties during the late eighth and early ninth centuries. Small and highly portable, the reliquaries were richly decorated and easily carried off. Indeed, the Hostage Stone, a slate inscribed in the eighth or ninth century and found in the buried ruins of an early medieval Scottish monastery, seems to depict long-haired Viking warriors leading off a prisoner carrying a very similar reliquary.
Almost certainly, Viking warriors acquired the Melhus shrine in the same violent manner. Exactly when is difficult to pinpoint, but a detailed analysis of the woman’s burial by Heen-Pettersen and Murray indicated that the shrine was interred with its new owner in the early ninth century—only a matter of years after the Viking attack on Lindisfarne. In other words, the lady of Melhus had likely received the shrine at a time when Viking seafarers were still learning the North Sea route and finding their way along the hazardous northern coasts of the British Isles. And it was then, when the peril was greatest, that someone had presented an extraordinary foreign prize to the lady from Melhus. Was it a payment of sorts for assistance she had given to a local raiding party? And if so, what form did this assistance take?
In search of answers, Heen-Pettersen and Murray closely examined the other objects from the Melhus grave and scrutinized the 1907 report that Theodor Petersen wrote on all the small finds (some of which had been lost in subsequent years). What soon struck them was the cultic nature of some of her possessions. There was, of course, the huge disk-on-bow brooch studded with pieces of fiery red enamel and garnets, as well as the large bead necklace—both of which may have been part of the regalia worn by a cult leader honoring Freyja and the other Dísir.
Other objects from the grave shed yet more light on the lady’s identity. The mysterious platelike object that Johannes Melhus had discovered in 1906, for example, turned out to be part of a whalebone plaque, an object found mainly in the graves of rich Viking women. (The Vikings seem to have obtained this bone primarily by hunting and killing cetaceans with traps or with weapons such as spears—an arduous and sometimes dangerous business. On occasion, they made plaques from the bone and decorated them with geometric designs and even carvings of dragons.)
In the view of one prominent Viking specialist in Scotland, Olwyn Owen, elite Viking women may have used these plaques as small ironing boards to press pleats in fine linen clothing with glass smoothing stones. If so, a leader in the cult that honored Freyja may have found them indispensable. One of Freyja’s many names apparently derives from the Old Norse word for flax, the source of linen, and it’s possible that the mistress of her cult dressed in a pleated linen gown or chemise during important rituals.
Heen-Pettersen, however, favors another theory. In 2012, a Norwegian graduate student named Eva Isaksen published an analysis showing that many of the whalebone plaques excavated by archaeologists from the graves of Viking women were scored with cutmarks from knives. This meant that their owners could have used them as serving platters at elite feasts, rather like expensive charcuterie boards today. The whalebone plaque found with the Melhus reliquary bore such cutmarks, and it’s entirely possible it was employed to serve food during large celebrations. Feasting, after all, often went hand in hand with important religious festivals.
Heen-Pettersen also points to one other tantalizing find from the burial: a corroded, 19-inch-long iron rod, which looks very much like a staff that would have been carried by a sorceress. (Indeed, Price included it in his published corpus of “possible” sorcery staffs.) Like others of its ilk, it was square in cross section, and its tapered end may have been enclosed in a wooden handle. Its presence in the grave suggested that the lady from Melhus could have mastered the art of sorcery.
All in all, the burial pointed to someone of wealth, influence, and special power. “I think that it is very, very likely that this is some sort of ritual specialist, and that she had a central role in pre-Christian cult practice in the area,” Heen-Pettersen says. The mound lay in a particularly prosperous part of the Namdalen valley. The farms there possessed an abundance of good soil, and the river that wound through the valley was a vital transportation artery. It linked several resource-rich inland regions to the sea and was therefore an important water road for traders.
Certainly, the landowners of the region were exceptionally well situated to hear talk of early Viking expeditions to the British Isles, and some had the economic means to act on this information. One can easily imagine a rich landowner—perhaps the man buried in the boat with the lady from Melhus—deciding to mount a small raiding expedition of his own to lands in the West. If so, he would surely have welcomed supernatural assistance to keep his expedition and his valuable ships safe from the perils of the North Sea and its western shores. Who better to approach for help than the lady from Melhus?
As a cult leader, this elite woman would have known how to speak to Freyja and the spirits of the Dísir, who were said to guard humans from hostile forces. (With their assistance, a Viking crew might avoid altogether the trolls who infested the North Sea.) And as a sorceress, the lady from Melhus could also cast her spells to bring good fortune to the raiders.
What kinds of rituals she performed is unknown. But when some of the early raiders returned to farms along the Namsen River, they brought her two memorable gifts. One was a shiny bronze brooch containing a repoussé ornament pried off a stolen church treasure. It was exquisite, and when lit by firelight at night in a Viking longhouse or hall, it would have looked utterly exotic.
And that was likely the point. As the University of York archaeologist Steve Ashby observed in a fascinating paper published in 2015, such exotic jewelry served as visible, tangible proof of strange adventures into the unknown, voyages fraught with peril. They told a story of stormy seas, alien people, exotic gods, enchanted temples, and moments of pure triumph. Possessing something so rare and so fantastical would set the owner apart from others. Certainly it marked the lady from Melhus as someone involved in a lucrative overseas expedition—a member of a very elite club in the early Viking Age.
The other gift that the raiders likely brought her was even rarer and more exotic: the reliquary. According to several contemporary Irish documents, Viking raiders often smashed Christian reliquaries on the spot, taking only the ornamental bits with them. But this wasn’t the fate of the Melhus shrine. Raiders carried it off whole, and when they arrived home safe and sound, someone presented it to the lady from Melhus.
Did this extraordinary woman slip the leather strap over her head and wear the little shrine while conducting blood sacrifices and other old Norse rituals? It’s certainly possible. How better to exhibit her superior talents as a sorceress than to brandish a sacred object purloined from a land far away by an expedition she personally assisted? Seen in this light, the lady from Melhus was probably a key player in launching at least one risky Viking raiding campaign, if not more.
And she probably had company. Heen-Pettersen believes that other female ritualists were likely doing the same thing, performing magical rites and seeking out divine assistance for the warriors venturing to the west. “I don’t think the woman buried at Melhus is the only one,” she says. “I’m sure there would have been many.” Indeed, the role of these female ritualists may have become increasingly important over time, judging from the numbers of such women found in Scandinavian burials during this period of intense overseas travel. “We do see an increase in the number of ritual specialists that were buried during the Viking Age,” Heen-Pettersen observes. “And I do wonder if some of this increase may be [related] to the need for protection on their journeys.”
It’s a fascinating thought, and one that casts the earliest Viking raids in a new and very different light. We tend to think of the warriors on those ships as bold, steely, supremely fearless, and nearly invincible, concerned only with stealing treasure from Christian monasteries and churches abroad. But the research on the Melhus reliquary reveals a more complex and human picture. Some early raiding parties knew enough about the North Sea to fear for their lives on such ventures. So their leaders seem to have enlisted elite female ritualists to peer into the future for them or protect them from the monsters of the deep. In this way, upper-class women could become vital players in the success of the early raids—the foundational events of the Viking Age.
Indeed, such women were money in the bank. But as time passed, they weren’t the only ones playing pivotal roles in the raiding expeditions. Equipping a raiding fleet and arming its crew demanded the skills of many other women too. And for centuries, those women were all but forgotten.
Everyone was asleep. It was pitch-dark outside, and the woman heard wolves howling in the distance. She wanted nothing more than to sleep, but she had no time to spare; it would soon be dawn. She pulled the lamp a little closer to the bench and picked up the thick layers of linen, sewing them together, stitch by stitch, with needle and strong thread.
Her husband was leaving at first light. He had sworn an oath of loyalty to a rich chieftain from Vestfold, Åsgeir, who was assembling a large fleet to go raiding along the rivers of France. Åsgeir wanted to sail up the Seine first, plundering every wealthy monastery and town along the way, and taking wealthy hostages for ransom. The Frankish king, her husband said, was too weak to stop them. If all went well, her husband would soon be a rich man too—rich enough to buy a ship of his own and dress her in jewels and fine clothes.
He had first spotted her in the market at Kaupang. She and her mother were known for their exceptional skills as spinners and weavers, and they had brought lengths of high-quality sailcloth to the market, hoping to find a buyer. It was cloth enough to make a spare sail, and Åsgeir and some of his men had seen it. The chieftain wanted nothing but the best for his ship, and he agreed to pay handsomely for it.
Her future husband loaded the heavy cloth into his lord’s ship, and when her mother’s back was turned, he whispered that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. That winter, he journeyed to her home with his kin and offered a generous bride-price for her. The two were soon married.
But it wasn’t her beauty that the warrior wanted. She soon learned that. He wanted her skills as a weaver. He wanted fine, warm, fashionable clothes that fit him well—the kind of clothing that only an expert weaver and seamstress could produce. The clothes his mother made were drab and rough. He was tired of looking like a poor man. And he told his new wife that she must make him a beautiful sail with long red stripes for the warship he would one day own.
But for now, he had a more urgent demand. He needed a new gambeson—a padded cloth jacket that could deflect an archer’s arrows. His old one was thin and fraying at the seams. It wouldn’t last another battle. He wanted something that would fit well and keep him alive until he could afford chain mail, he told her one night. He didn’t understand what he was asking, the long days of heavy work that went into producing cloth armor. But she didn’t dare refuse him.
Her mother had helped spin and weave all the necessary cloth. And for days now, she had hardly slept as she sewed the thick layers together to make the strongest gambeson she could.
She was nearly done.
By the early ninth century, raiding was becoming a growth industry in Scandinavia. The days of the small fleets—just two or three ships and perhaps a hundred or so warriors—were fading, as ever larger and more ambitious ventures took to the water. In 836, for example, a fleet of 25 to 35 Viking ships sailed to the coast of Somerset and soundly defeated an army led by Egbert, the king of Wessex. Seven years later, 67 Viking ships sailed up the Loire River in France, ravaging the town of Nantes on the feast day of St. John. And two years after that, in 845, 120 Viking ships voyaged up the Seine to the walls of Paris—a fleet so formidable that the Frankish emperor finally offered 7,000 pounds of gold and silver to the Viking commanders in return for sparing the city.
These numbers leap out from the medieval annals, but they are even more striking when one considers the huge amount of labor that went into constructing and equipping just one Viking ship. In recent decades, archaeologists at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, have become experts on this subject, thanks to their experiments constructing historically accurate Viking ships with traditional tools and methods. And the records they kept during these experiments reveal something stunning: Viking women contributed a staggering amount of work to these endeavors. In an age long before factories and mills, they wove all the cloth needed for the huge sails that billowed from the masts of longships. It was a formidable undertaking.
In 2016, archaeologist Morten Ravn, a curator at the Viking Ship Museum in Denmark, published an estimate of the total time required to construct two medium-size Viking ships, from keel to sail. Ravn based this estimate on projects documented by the museum staff. His calculations showed that spinning and weaving enough cloth for just one sail accounted for as much as 36.9 percent of the total number of hours logged by builders of an average-size Viking ship. This meant that just over a third of all the work that went into constructing such a ship was performed by women. And if the crew carried enough spare cloth to mend the sail—a practice recommended by one Old Norse text, King’s Mirror—that statistic climbed to 53 percent, more than half of all the necessary work.
But the women weren’t done there. They also produced a wealth of other high-quality gear for the raiders themselves, from heavy seafaring blankets to water-resistant clothing. And last, but certainly not least, research now suggests that they made a surprisingly effective form of body armor. In other words, the skills and labor of the Northwomen were critical to launching entire fleets of Viking ships and equipping their crews for survival. Indeed, they were as vital to Viking raiding and warfare as the famous Rosie the Riveters were to the production of munitions and some U.S. military aircraft in the Second World War.
Until recently, however, these major contributions received little recognition. A few written sources mention the woolen sails that powered Viking ships, but archaeological evidence of this nautical gear is scarce. Cloth made from natural fibers tends to decay relatively quickly in the ground: It’s preserved only under exceptional circumstances in archaeological sites. Such conditions prevailed, however, in the famous ship burials at Oseberg and near Gokstad, where archaeologists discovered red lumps of densely woven wool cloth with attached pieces of rope. These looked like remnants of large sails or possibly of tents, but textile specialists were unable to analyze them. The layers in the lumps were nearly cemented together.
But in 1990, a major discovery in a medieval church in Trondenes, north of Trondheim, gave researchers the break they needed. During the late Viking Age, coastal communities in Norway were required to provide a warship for a maritime defense system called leidang, and an old Norse law stated that the men responsible for those vessels “shall store the sail in the church.” In Trondenes, someone had weatherproofed an old church roof by tearing up a huge piece of wool cloth and jamming the rags between the planks.
On closer examination, researchers Jon Bojer Godal and Erik Andersen found one rag with an eyelet sewn for a sail rope. It was concrete evidence of an ancient wool sail, and later carbon dating showed that it was produced between 1280 and 1420, during the post-Viking period. But it was the oldest known sail in Scandinavia, and subsequent studies shed new light on the ancient tradition of wool sails in the North.
A sail, after all, represents a sophisticated piece of technology, and sailmakers must find exactly the right balance between many conflicting demands. As Norwegian science writer Nancy Bazilchuk noted in an article for New Scientist, the fabric needs to be lightweight enough for crew members to raise easily, yet heavy enough to withstand a gale at sea without ripping apart. It must billow gracefully, filling with wind, but not swell so much that the helmsman struggles to steer the ship. In other words, a sailmaker lives in a world of trade-offs, and each decision has to be carefully considered.
