Vikings: British Museum unveils the treasures of our most ferocious invaders

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Human sacrifice, a female angel of death and why the Vikings were even more savage than you thought: British Museum unveils the treasures of our most ferocious invaders
In some ways, history has got it wrong about the Vikings. Those supposedly horned helmets of theirs are a complete fabrication
And their leaders didn’t revel in names such as Eirik Bloodaxe, Thorfinn Skullsplitter and Harald Hardruler for nothing
There was also a peaceful, domesticated side to them and a rich cultural heritage to draw on
A splendid array of archaeological artefacts will show this in major exhibition, opening in a couple of weeks’ time at the British Museum
By TONY RENNELL
PUBLISHED: 02:07 GMT, 22 February 2014 | UPDATED: 02:08 GMT, 22 February 2014

The Viking warlord did not go quietly to his death — they never did. Ragnar ‘Hairy Britches’ was legendary for leading a fleet of longships up the Seine and pillaging Paris, but when he turned his band of marauders to England, he met his match.

Defeated by the Anglo-Saxon King Aelle in Northumbria, he was not executed cleanly, but thrown alive into a pit of poisonous snakes.

As vipers crawled over him and he died a lingering death in terrible agony, he sang a song of defiance and revenge.


Members of the Viking Jarl Squad surround a burning viking galley ship during the annual Up Helly Aa Festival, Lerwick, Shetland Islands in 2010

It fell to his sons, Ivar and Halfdan, to carry out that threat. In 876, having crossed the North Sea, they took York, captured King Aelle and demonstrated that no one could out-do the Vikings for sheer violence and horror.

In a macabre ritual killing known as the ‘blood-eagle’, Aelle’s chest was cut open, his ribs split and his lungs pulled out from inside the ribcage and then pinned back to his chest like the wings of an eagle. The message was clear: you mess with the Norseman at your peril.

In some ways, history has got it wrong about the Vikings. Those supposedly horned helmets of theirs — so beloved by cartoonists, costumiers for Wagnerian operas and Scandinavian winter sports spectators at Sochi — are a complete fabrication.

There is no evidence they wore anything other than unadorned conical headgear, straight up-and-down, and distinguished by nothing more than a vertical metal guard for the nose.

But, as for everything else we tend to assume about those rampaging warriors — the blood-letting, massacre, rape and plunder — that’s totally accurate, as King Aelle discovered.

Their leaders didn’t revel in names such as Eirik Bloodaxe, Thorfinn Skullsplitter and Harald Hardruler for nothing.

Emerging out of the sea-mists in their dragon-prowed long boats, crash-landing on beaches, or rowing up river estuaries into towns and cities, they terrorised much of Europe and beyond for three centuries and more, battalions of Hells Angels and Mad Maxes intent on drinking and sex, slaughter and pillage.



There was also a peaceful, domesticated side to them and a rich cultural heritage to draw on, as a splendid array of archaeological artefacts in a much-heralded major exhibition, opening in a couple of weeks’ time at the British Museum, shows — the biggest here for 35 years.

But, as the museum points out, the intricate jewellery, coins and other fine objects it has amassed shouldn’t lull us into too peaceful an interpretation of the Vikings.

Yes, some were merchants and others settled as farmers, but the very word ‘viking’ means ‘pirate’ or ‘raider’ in Old Norse, and that was their true trade.

Witness the exhibition’s array of warships, shields, swords and spearheads, the lethal tools of the trade for an inherently violent people, whose favourite saga was the story of a seven-year-old boy who buried an axe in the head of his best friend in an argument over a ball game.

In the Early Middle Ages, the so-called Dark Ages, from what is now Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the adventurous, ambitious, dispossessed, and just plain greedy adapted shallow-keeled rowing boats to operate under wind-power, hoisted sails, and went faster and farther than others to look for spoils.

Their first arrival in Britain can be traced to the year 789, when three ships arrived off the coast of Dorset. An inquiring official of the local Anglo-Saxon king approached, there was an argument, and he was killed. A pattern was set.

Four years later, another gang swooped on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in Northumberland, whose monks were put to the sword as Vikings erupted out of the sea and, in the words of a chronicler, ‘devastated everything with pitiless looting, trampled the holy things under their sacrilegious feet, dug up the altars and pillaged all the treasures of the church.

‘Some of the brothers they killed, several they threw out naked, and others they drowned in the sea. Never before has there been such terror in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race.

The Vikings were here with a savagery that could be grotesquely inventive. In the next century, the captured King Edmund of East Anglia was used for archery practice and riddled with arrows, while the Archbishop of Canterbury was pelted with ox bones until dead.

No wonder that local rulers wherever the vicious invaders landed tended to try to buy them off with vast amounts of money and treasure — a process that merely encouraged the raiders to come back for more.

‘Danegeld’ was always just another word for extortion, demanding money with menaces a Viking way of life.

Reputation was often enough to strike terror even into brave hearts, particularly when it came to the legendary ‘berserkers’, crazed warriors who fought naked except for a helmet, an animal-skin, belt, tattoos and war-paint, and worked themselves up into such a battle frenzy that they supposedly felt no pain.

Whether they actually existed is unclear, but that mattered less than the unsettling thought in an enemy’s mind that they were out there, waiting to ambush and butcher him. Similar tales of Vikings shape-shifting into wolves, bears and even trolls had the same effect.

Surprisingly, a few Viking women were allowed to go to war, emulating the dreaded death-dealing Valkyries of Norse mythology, though their role was probably as witches to provide magic charms for the men. Clearly, these were not fail-safe.

The remains of a Viking warrior found in Derbyshire had a boar’s tusk and a jackdaw’s leg round his neck for luck, but they had not saved him from being speared in the face, castrated and disembowelled — proof, too, that Vikings didn’t always get their way, and that battles were lost as well as won.

The actual sight of a Viking was chilling, even off the battlefield. ‘He was solid in the neck and broad in the chest, with an angry and savage appearance,’ wrote a chronicler after one such meeting on the Danube.

‘His eyebrows were thick, hair grew abundantly on his upper lip but his head was completely shaved except for a lock of hair that hung down on one side. On one ear was fastened a gold earring.’ Some filed their teeth.

Another chronicler, an Arab traveller named Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, came across Vikings in what is now Russia, and was scandalised by their lack of hygiene.

They were tall and their bodies ‘perfect’ in shape, he recorded, but they were ‘the filthiest of God’s creatures’, as dirty as ‘wild asses’ and had shocking sexual habits.

These were displayed at an extraordinarily lavish but dreadful ritual he witnessed for a chieftain who had just died — in reality, an orgy, a pagan gang-bang, no less.

A third of the man’s possessions went to his family, a third on the clothes for his funeral, and the remaining third on booze for his wake, ensuring everyone was drunk enough to perform what came next.

At the centre of the ten-day proceedings was a slave girl from his household, apparently a volunteer, who would be cremated with her master.

A boat was hauled on land and a couch placed on deck, covered by a tent. The chief’s body was dressed to the nines in stockings, trousers, boots, and a tunic of brocade with gold buttons, and propped up on the couch. Mead, fruits, and flowers were laid beside him for his journey into the afterlife, along with his weapons.

‘Then they brought a dog, cleft it in two halves and laid it in the boat. Then they took two horses, cleft both of them in twain with a sword and laid their flesh in the boat.
‘Then they brought two cows, cut them in two likewise and laid them in the boat.’


This photograph shows the Jarl Squad marching around a Viking longship before torching it at a traditional festival in the Shetland Islands, Scotland, last month

Meanwhile, the ‘maiden’ who was to die had death duties to perform — ‘she went here and there, and entered each of a series of tents where the head of the household quartered within had intercourse with her, saying “Say to thy lord, I have done this out of love of thee”.’

The climax of the ceremony approached with the poor girl being lifted onto a platform. ‘Behold, I see my father and mother,’ she called out, before being let down. Then she was lifted up again and declared that she could now see all her dead relatives.

Lifted a third time, she cut off the head of a live chicken, and announced: ‘There I behold my lord sitting in paradise, and paradise is fair and green, and around him are men and servants. He calls me. Bring me to him.’

‘Then,’ wrote the chronicler, ‘they led her to the boat. She took off the two armlets that she wore and gave them to the old woman whom they call the Angel of Death, who was to kill her.

‘The slave girl then took off two anklets and gave them to the two maidens who had waited on her, the daughters of the old woman known as the Angel of Death.

‘Then the people lifted her onto the boat, and men with shields and staves gave her a bowl of mead, whereupon she sang a song bidding farewell to her friends and drank it.

‘She was given another beaker, took it and sang for a long time, while the old woman was urging her to finish the goblet, and to go into the tent where her lord lay. I saw then how disturbed she was.’
The now frightened girl hesitated — ‘until the old woman took her by the head, made her go into the tent and also entered with her. Whereupon the men began to beat their shields so her shrieks would not be heard.

‘Six men went into the tent, and all had intercourse with the girl. Then they placed her beside her dead lord. Two men seized her by the feet and two by her hands.

‘The old woman took out a rope into which a loop had been made, and gave it to two of the men. The old woman jabbed her with a broad-bladed dagger, while the two men strangled her until she was dead. The relatives of the dead man then took torches and set fire to the ship.’

It was over in a great blaze — master cremated, slave girl sacrificed, a brutal and violent end, but a death seemingly in keeping with the way Vikings chose to live and die.

This vividly-told story from the 10th century is remarkable, not just for its content, but for where it took place — on the banks of the River Volga, which runs through what is now modern Russia. It indicates how far and wide the daring of the Vikings took them, in what was almost an obsession to find new lands and wealth to plunder — economic migrants prepared to risk all. From Denmark and Norway, they went wherever sea and rivers would take them.

Their long ships carried them westwards to Britain, Greenland and North America, south as far as France, Spain and North Africa, and east into Russia, the Ukraine and even Constantinople (Istanbul), the stepping stone to Asia.

In many places, they stayed, colonised, settled and integrated. Bloodlines mixed and Vikings morphed into the Normans of northern France who, in turn, under William the Conqueror, gained mastery over Britain.
In Constantinople, the last of the Vikings formed the elite Varangian Guard, who protected the Byzantine emperor.


A much-heralded major exhibition on the Vikings is to open in a couple of weeks' time at the British Museum

Over 250 years, various Viking armies made attempts to conquer and rule Britain and, at one stage, a Dane, Cnut (Canute), sat on the throne. But heroic figures such as King Alfred emerged to rally Englishmen against the invaders.

It was in 1066 that the last great Viking attack from Scandinavia was driven off, when Harald Hardruler and his men were thrashed at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire — only for the Normans, themselves descendants of Vikings, to cross the Channel and seize England at the Battle of Hastings.

The Viking Age itself petered out. The countries they plundered became more united and resolute, less willing to yield to yob armies threatening mayhem. In Russia and elsewhere, the invaders went native, turned into locals, merged with Slavs, Franks and so on, and lost their unique identity. Scandinavia was pushed to the fringes.

But the result of centuries of Viking exploration, adventure and conquest is that, a thousand years later, their blood flows in veins all over the world.

According to historian Philip Parker, the footprint of their DNA shows millions share Viking ancestry.

Their influence remains, too, in our language, with words such as ‘egg’ and ‘bread’ Norse in origin.

The legacy resurfaced when a group of historically minded Swedish academics in the 19th century got together to recite ancient poems and quaff mead from drinking horns. Sagas became all the rage.

The Viking was now a romantic hero figure. Viking balls became fashionable in Stockholm, with costumes prominently, but mistakenly, featuring horned helmets. Wagner borrowed freely from the mythology to produce his epic Ring Of The Nibelung in 1876, while British writers such as Sir Walter Scott helped popularise a literary craze for the Vikings.

The negative side of this was an unhealthy interest shown by Germany’s Nazis, who promoted the Vikings as a prototype of the Herrenvolk, the master race.

Vikings continue to fascinate and appal us in equal measure. Theirs was an age of savagery and yet advancement, of sadism and civilisation of a sort, of barbarism and beauty.
There was some light in the Dark Ages, and it has left its mark on us, even now.

Vikings: Life and Legend is at the British Museum, March 6 to June 22. The Northmen’s Fury, by Philip Parker, is published by Jonathan Cape on March 6 at £25. To order a copy for £20 (p&p free), call 0844 472 4157.

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[The King, I am]

Fuck yeah! We fucked the British