Víkingr in Oslo

Here in dismal, grey, snowless Oslo it was a delight to visit the Historical Museum and especially its exhibition called Víkingr. The museum is currently being renovated, so this exhibition is a pared-down version of its old Viking Age exhibition, but also a long-term stop-gap while we wait for the new Viking museum on Bygdøy in 2025. It's quite minimalist, in terms of both the way it is presented and what it presents. I suppose that is partly because of limited space during the renovations and partly from a recognition that the Viking Age is such an extensive and complex phenomenon that it is hard to encompass it all in one exhibition. So on entering the room the visitor is told to expect 'a selection of exceptional objects that reflect the world of the Vikings and what they valued'. This seems to me like a good idea - it admits it's only a partial view of the subject and gives the exhibition focus, even if it does lead to a slightly clichéd emphasis on war and bling. There is no 'daily life in the Viking Age' as we were also promised there wouldn't be in the big exhibition of 2013-14 - which was a shame in the much bigger exhibition, but fine for this one.

Entering the room is a delight. It's a beautiful room in its own right, but is also very beautifully lit and laid out. The cases are all the same size and it is easy to follow them through the room in a logical order, with each row of three given an introduction on the wall to the right. The labels on the cases are very low down (for smaller people, or those in wheelchairs?) but there is a booklet you can borrow which gives general information and full details of all the exhibits. (You can also download the booklet in either Norwegian or English.) The massive Dynna rune-stone at the end and the logo behind it break up the monotony and draw the eye through the room, and you get to appreciate the art nouveau details of this very fine building from 1902.

The exhibits themselves move logically from international contact and the riches acquired from there to war and its accoutrements, ending with religion and new ways. This does mean that the vast majority of the items displayed are of metal, with just a few beads and the rune-stone breaking up this heavy metal emphasis. But I'm not complaining, for some of the absolutely top metal objects from the museum's collections are on display: the gold hoard from Hoen, the Gjermundbu helmet, and plenty of coins, jewellery (including some made from bits of metalwork acquired in the west), Thor's hammers and weaponry. The other non-metal exhibit is the skull of the young lady from Nordre Kjølen that featured in a recent National Geographic documentary on women warriors which I discussed in a previous post. The curators of the exhibition are suitably cautious as to whether or not this burial represents a female warrior, I was glad to see, and present alternative explanations.

In addition to the burial from Nordre Kjølen, women are well represented, in part by their jewellery (there are plenty of both oval and trefoil brooches) and by the magnificent Dynna stone. This has always been a striking element of the museum's exhibitions. It is a roughly 3-metre high pillar of sandstone on which a mother commemorates her deceased daughter Ástríðr, the 'handiest maiden in Hadeland' (her name is in the picture to the right) with a runic inscription and Christian images, particularly of the Epiphany (so very seasonally appropriate, even if a few days late).

On the whole, I would say the exhibition is small but perfectly-formed, like the little gold serpent from the Hoen hoard pictured left, and well worth a visit. Also, if you buy a ticket to the Historical Museum, you also get in free at the current Viking Ship Museum on Bygdøy, also a beautiful building containing some fabulous objects. I only wonder why they called this exhibition Víkingr (just one Viking?). I myself would have gone for Víkingar (Vikings) or even Víking (a Viking expedition). Oh well, you can't have everything.

Polar Bear Steak

In a blog post last year, I questioned whether the meat of the polar bear was especially edible. Well, travel is educational and I got some kind of an answer on my recent visit to the Westfjords of Iceland. The very splendid Westfjords Heritage Museum in Ísafjörður had a small display about the shooting of a polar bear up at Hornvík in the far northwest of the region in June 1963 by some egg-hunters from Ísafjörður. It made the front page of the national newspaper and what struck me was the description of how the bear was eaten. According to the article, they cooked the meat and found it delicious, not unlike beef. They also ate the heart and gave the liver to guests. They managed to bring back 250 kg of meat which they sold at 30 kr./kg., along with the 3000 guillemot eggs they had collected during their week-long trip. So there you have it. Not sure I'd fancy polar bear myself, but apparently it is perfectly edible.

Westfjord Stories II

My recent visit to the Westfjords, and to Hrafnseyri in particular, sent me back to re-read Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar. A relatively little-discussed saga, it is set in the Sturlung era, and recounts the life history of Hrafn up to his execution by his rival Þorvaldr in 1213. Much of the saga is taken up with feuds of various kinds, over sheep or whales, or the more serious political rivalries which characterised the Sturlung period. But there is much of general interest in the saga, not least the fact that Hrafn was a famous medical practitioner. He inherited this skill from his great-grandfather Atli who acquired it at the battle of Hlýrskógsheiðr when St Óláfr appeared in a vision to his son Magnús the Good and told him to select twelve of the best men to bind the wounds of the warriors. That slight touch of sanctity accompanied Hrafn throughout his life and in his martyr-like death. In general the saga has a vast cast of characters, including quite a few women, lots of poetry, and the hero has some interesting adventures abroad. But most of all it has a lot of detail about life in the Westfjords at the time. Here I just look at a few anecdotes which particularly caught my eye after being in the place.

The saga-author was particularly partisan as regards his hero, and spends considerable time outlining his virtues. Hrafn lived at Eyrr (now Hrafnseyri) for most of his life and was apparently a very benevolent local leader. He was a generous host who fed everyone who visited, he ferried people across the Arnarfjörður for free, and also kept a ship on Barðaströnd for the use of people who needed to cross the Breiðafjörður. Certainly, a ferry across Arnarfjörður would have been a lot quicker than the long road around every fjord that is so typical of the Westfjords today. Hrafn also took no fees for his medical interventions. As the pious author remarks, 'For that reason, we expect that Christ will have provided Hrafn with spiritual healing with him for free on his death-day'.

Early on in his career, Hrafn was able to help out when a walrus beached in the Dýrafjörður during the spring assembly. The animal proved difficult to capture, so Hrafn called on St Thomas of Canterbury for help and promised to give him the tusks, still attached to the skull, in return. The walrus was duly caught and the following year Hrafn went to England where he donated the tusks, as well as some money, to the minster in Canterbury. The walrus skull and tusk (of unknown antiquity) pictured here was in the splendid local museum at Hnjótur. There is archaeological evidence for walrus hunting in the first century of Norse settlement in Iceland, but this seems to have died out and the export of walrus ivory became a mainstay of the economy in Greenland. More recent captures of walrus in Iceland will be of stray walruses (who do however seem to be arriving in greater numbers in recent years).

The course of true love did not run smoothly in the Westfjords, according to the saga's account of the tribulations of a woman called Jórunn. Her father was Snorri, a great chieftain in Ísafjörður, who had many children, none of whom were legitimate. A half-brother of Jórunn's was Hrafn's great rival Þorvaldr, and her love life undoubtedly contributed to the start of their feud. Jórunn's first admirer was a certain Sveinn, who just happened to be her brother-in-law. Sveinn was a follower of her brother Þorvaldr, but it was her other brother Þórðr who organised an attack on Sveinn, in which he was severely wounded, eventually being healed by Hrafn. Sveinn then left the country and Jórunn's next suitor was a priest called Magnús, who took her away from Ísafjörður to Dýrafjörður. This displeased a man called Bergþórr, who had previously fancied her and came looking for her. Magnús concealed Jórunn elsewhere and sent Bergþórr off with a dog as a parting gift, along with a couple of satirical verses. Bergþórr and Þorvaldr then chase Magnús who hides in a cave. Eventually Magnús and Jórunn make their escape to Norway, with her disguised as a man. In Norway they have many children and presumably live happily ever after. The saga's editor, Guðrún P. Helgadóttir, draws attention to a similar episode on Sturlu saga (in the Sturlunga compilation) in which a widow, Yngvildr, cut her hair and dressed as a man to escape to Norway with her lover. That episode took place in 1158 and may have been a model for this one, though no doubt such things also took place in real life. The Sturlu saga episode also had the complication of a possible love-child, though there is no mention of such a thing in Hrafns saga.

For some more stories from the Westfjords, I can recommend Emily Lethbridge's Saga-steads blog.

Writing the Ice-Bear III

Photo by Brocken Inaglory

Wikimedia Commons

Just a little footnote to previous posts on this topic... Here in Britain we have suffered some unseasonal weather at a time when we might expect winter to be turning its thoughts to spring. In March there was quite a lot of snow across the country (something generally unusual in lowland England, even in the winter months) causing a period of chaos. Some places even had snow as recently as today. This weather was popularly known as the 'Beast from the East'.

I don't think the nature of this beast was specified anywhere, but I can now reveal that the answer is to be found in the Eddic poem Atlamál. This is the wordier, more prosaic, and later, version of the much-told story of how the heroes Gunnar and Högni are deceived and killed by Atli, the husband of their sister Guðrún, who then takes a particularly violent revenge. Before Gunnar and Högni depart on their fateful visit, the latter's wife Kostbera has a prophetic dream of a bear breaking into their home, smashing it up and even apparently eating a few people. Her husband, like all Old Norse heroes, cannot allow such a clear warning to put him off, so he claims the dream just has a meteorological meaning (st. 18 in Eddukvæði 2014, ed. Vésteinn Ólason and Jónas Kristjánsson):

Veðr mun þar vaxa, / verða ótt snemma, / hvítabjörn hugðir, / þar mun hregg austan.

It means that a storm will grow, it will soon be daybreak, if you think of a polar bear, it means a blizzard from the east.

Interestingly, this reference to a polar bear is what scholars have used to justify the manuscript title of the poem Atlamál in grœnlenzku 'The Greenlandic Poem about Atli'. There is however little real evidence for a Greenlandic origin for the poem, which the latest editors think is quite likely to be Icelandic and no earlier than the twelfth century. The story is ostensibly set in Denmark, but whether the author was Greenlandic or Icelandic, we don't need, I think, to take either their dream interpretations or their ideas of Danish weather too seriously. And we can enjoy the author's little joke in making Kostbera (the second element of whose name means 'she-bear'), dream of a bear.

Writing the Ice-Bear II

Polar bear in the Svalbard Museum,
Longyearbyen

I promised to return to the topic of polar bears and my memory was jogged by the news, a few days ago, that a polar bear was shot in Newfoundland after being deemed 'a public safety risk'. In times of ecological crisis these magnificent animals are driven towards human habitation in search of food and it usually does not end well for them, as a hungry bear is a real danger to humans and it is not always easy or even possible to tranquilise and remove them. These latter options were not really available to people in former times and when polar bears drifted over to Iceland, it could go either way. The Icelandic annals record that, in 1321 a hvítabjörn came on the ice to Strandir in the north-west of Iceland, killing eight people and causing much destruction before he was finally killed on Straumnes. Another annal records that, in 1275, no less than 27 polar bears were killed in Iceland. Presumably, this was not all on one occasion (the bears tend to be quite solitary), but a result of the fact that, in that winter, kringdi hafíss nær um allt Ísland 'sea-ice encircled almost all of Iceland'. That this was an unusual event is suggested by the law in the Christian Laws Section of Grágás which stipulates that, while people are not supposed to hunt and fish on holy days, they can go out to catch a polar pear if one turns up. Another exception to usual practice in this law is that the bear belongs to 'whoever gives it a death wound', rather than whoever owns the land on which it is killed, which is otherwise when, for example, whales are stranded. The owner was then left with a nice pelt, for it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to eat a polar bear (though see below).

Mural in Thon Hotel Polar, Tromsø

Curiously it seems that people did have tame polar bears, most likely caught as cubs (either in Greenland, or having sailed to Iceland on an ice floe) since taming an adult bear is surely an impossibility. Grágás stipulates that a tame polar bear is to be treated like a dog, namely that its owner needs to pay for any damage it does. While such a bear has no immunity if it harms people, if it is itself harmed, then the person who harmed it pays a fine and compensation for the damage to the owner.

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Humans' curious love-hate relationship with bears of all kinds is suggested by the popularity of the name Bjorn, or names with -björn as the second element, then as now, and many stories turn on the human-like qualities of bears. There is a curious reciprocity in a story recorded in Landnámabók (the Icelandic Book of Settlements) about a certain Arngeirr, a settler in the north-east of Iceland and his son Þorgils. When they didn't return from looking for their livestock in a snow-storm, the younger son Oddr goes to search for them and finds them 'lying as food' for a polar bear, as Sturlubók puts it (Hauksbók at this point has a vivid image of the bear sucking the blood out of them). Oddr kills the bear and is said to have eaten it all. In fact, the saying was that he avenged his father in killing the bear, and his brother in eating it. But as a result he becomes evil and unruly, and shape-shifts at night so that the neighbours wanted to stone him to death for being a sorcerer. It's hard to imagine that eating a whole polar bear was very tasty so, while doing this was quite heroic, it does seem to have been in general quite a bad idea.

Another interesting aspect of polar bears in Old Norse texts is how frequently they turn up in dreams. But that is a matter I will leave to another blog.

Writing the Ice-Bear I

My excellent friend the Snow Queen (I call her that for reasons you may or may not be able to work out) has written about our arctic adventures, so I don't have to. Thanks! But since the polar bear was such a leitmotif of our travels, particularly in Svalbard, I thought I'd follow up with a little footnote rounding up some of the polar bears in Old Norse-Icelandic literature. But just before that, if you think there is something funny about the franked stamp to the left (a genuine one on a postcard that I sent), you're right. There aren't 52 days in January. I'm assuming that's a typo for 25 (the day after we left), but I'm wondering how it came about... Do they still use hand stamps with those rotating numbers for setting up the date?

Anyway, back to ice bears. Of course everyone's favourite and the best known example is from that staple of beginners' Old Norse courses, the Tale of Audun from the West Fjords, as it has most recently been translated. I don't want to spoil the story for those who have not read it yet - it's a short tale that will give you great pleasure and also food for thought! But basically it concerns a young Icelander who makes his way in the world by working for a travelling merchant in Norway and Greenland. In Greenland he gives all he has for a bear. Then, through a really risky series of voyages, involving treacherous stewards, encounters and delicate negotiations with the kings of Norway and Denmark, and a tough pilgrimage to Rome, he returns to Iceland a wealthy and respected person. The bear disappears partway through the story and we never really find out what happened to the creature. I guess its real role in the story is to illustrate both Audun's risk-taking and his cleverness. Having given all he had for a bear, a bear from Greenland, and therefore a rarity and a 'treasure' (as the story calls it), it takes real guts and wits to transform that bear into a fortunate outcome for himself, indeed an outcome that is not at all certain until the end. I haven't spoiled the story for you because it's how he does it that is the real interest of the tale. Indeed, the American professor of law William Ian Miller has written a whole book about the intricacies of this jewel of Old Icelandic narrative (though beware, students, there are two versions of the tale, with some interesting differences).

Tethered polar bear cub in Svalbard

Museum, Longyearbyen

Given the long sea-voyages involved, and the nature of polar bears, one has to assume that when Audun first acquired it in Greenland, the bear was a cub (compare the stuffed version we saw in the museum, right). Audun was not himself a hunter, the story makes clear that he paid for it. The story also makes clear that things got a bit tricky when he couldn't afford to feed it any more, as it must have grown faster than he anticipated and a hungry polar bear is a fearsome sight to behold.

Audun's tale is set in the middle of the eleventh century. Giving polar bears to important people seems to have been quite the fashion back in those days, though we're never really told what these VIPs did with them. Presumably, they died an early death, but their skins would still have made a nice decoration for the royal hall. Iceland's first bishop, Ísleifr Gizurarson, took a hvítabjörn 'white bear' with him to the emperor Heinrich III in Saxony on his inaugural voyage in around 1056, which did the trick as Heinrich gave him his protection for the rest of his journey throughout the empire, according to Hungrvaka (ch. 2). But Ísleifr did not go to Greenland for the bear, rather the text explicitly says the bear was kominn...af Grœnlandi 'come from Greenland'. Perhaps someone else brought it, or the bear might have come floating to Iceland on an ice floe, something which still happens nowadays, most recently last summer. Nowadays it does not generally end well for the bear because they are a real danger to both humans and livestock. And I wonder if Ísleifr's bear may not rather have ended up as a rug than as a real, living animal in Saxony....

Map from Nordic Adventure

Travel, nat.is

Similarly, the hero of Vatnsdœla saga, Ingimundr inn gamli, having only recently arrived in Iceland, sails back to Norway to get some timber to build himself a splendid dwelling, and takes with him no less than three bears (a she-bear and her two cubs) as a gift for his patron King Haraldr Finehair, which he graciously accepts (chs 15-16). No doubt the bears played their part in the king's extremely generous return gift of a ship loaded with timber, but then Ingimundr was one of the few settlers of Iceland who was in good odour with that king. The other interest of the anecdote is that Ingimundr and his men found the bears on the ice during the winter, when there was a lot of ice around. In the north of Iceland, a bay (Húnaflói), a fjord (Húnafjörðr) and a lake (Húnavatn) are all supposedly named after the bear cubs they found (húnn being the word for a bear-cub), as can be seen from the map above. Well, it's a nice story, though probably apocryphal.

In Grœnlendinga þáttr, a short tale set rather later, in the twelfth century, the inhabitants of Greenland twice try to use bears to ingratiate themselves with important people, only once successfully. In the very first chapter, we meet the important and well-respected Sokki, who feels the community is not complete without a bishop, and sends his son Einarr to Norway to arrange this, with gifts of walrus ivory and hides. Once the bishop thing is sorted (bishops didn't really like the Greenland gig), Einarr gives King Sigurðr Jórsalafari a bear which he happened to have brought with him from Greenland, in return for which he gets praise and honour from the king. Later in the tale, things didn't go so well with the Norwegian troublemaker Kolbeinn, who had killed Einarr and pleads his cause with King Haraldr gilli in Norway with the aid of the gift of a polar bear. But the king gathers that Kolbeinn is not telling the truth and kómu eigi laun fyrir dýrit 'no reward was forthcoming for the animal'. Soon afterwards, Kolbeinn gets his comeuppance and drowns.

These are just some of the most well-known instances of polar bears in Icelandic texts. Having started to look into it, I've realised there are many, many more, far too many to squeeze into one blog post. So I'll save some of them for another occasion.

The Towering Goddess

The Viqueen, I can report, is beyond excited at her upcoming trip to extremely northern latitudes in Norway in a couple of days' time. Heading north in January means that there are two desiderata above all, snow and the northern lights. It is true that the Viqueen has seen quite a lot of snow in her lifetime, and she even finally achieved one of her all-time goals when she saw the aurora borealis on a trip to Iceland last November (as proven by the rather murky photo, right). But global warming means snow is not as reliable as it once was, while one glimpse of some rather faint northern lights can only whet a Viqueen's appetite for even more, and perhaps even more spectacular, displays.

So what does a Viqueen do? Well she knows to pray to Skaði for snow, for the skiing goddess/giantess just cannot do her thing without it. But what about the northern lights? The Viqueen duly consulted her friend the Snowqueen on this important matter, and the oracle suggested that an appropriate deity to propitiate would be the otherwise not very well known goddess Gná. This sent the Viqueen back to her books to remind herself about this rather obscure figure, and what she found there is rather interesting.

Like many other obscure goddesses, Gná occurs a few times in kennings, where she is mostly just a synonym for 'goddess', in those woman-kennings where a goddess, any goddess, depending on the requirements of rhyme or alliteration, forms the base-word. Still, it is interesting that Gná appears in kennings in both very early poetry (Ölvir hnúfa, one of the poets of Haraldr Finehair in the 9th century) and quite late poetry (in the Jómsvíkingadrápa by the Orcadian bishop Bjarni Kolbeinsson, in the late 12th or early 13th century), suggesting a longevity in the minds of those who cared about these things.

Another bit of evidence that she was better-known in those days than she is now is the way in which she is mentioned in Snorri's Edda. There, she appears as no. 14 in the list of goddesses and her main characteristic seems to be as a kind of errand-girl for the top goddess Frigg (aka Mrs Óðinn). But then Snorri tells us a bit more, that she has a horse, called Hófvarfnir, that can run on both the sky and the sea. Snorri also goes on to quote a couple of stanzas from a poem occasioned by her riding through the air. On being seen by 'certain Vanir' doing this, one of them asked:

'Hvat þar flýgr? / Hvar þar ferr / eða at lopti líðr?'

What flies there? What goes there, or travels in the air?

to which the goddess herself answers:

'Né ek flýg / þó ek fer / ok at lopti líðk / á Hófvarfni / þeim er Hamskerpir / gat við Garðrofu.'

' I do not fly, though I go and travel in the air on Hófvarfnir, whom Hamskerpir conceived on Garðrofa.'

  (quoted from Snorri Sturluson. Edda. Prologue and Gylfaginning, ed. Anthony Faulkes, 1982, p. 30, my translation)

Just a little snippet of mythological knowledge there, not unlike the many names, of mythological horses as well as many other things, that we find in Grímnismál. But what is perhaps more interesting than that is the fact that these two stanzas are among the very few Eddic, mythological stanzas in Snorri that must derive from longer poems that do not otherwise survive, again suggesting that this goddess was once better known than she is now.

Snorri then goes on to add, in some guesswork etymology, that 'From the name of Gná, a thing which goes up high is said to tower (gnæfa)'. So, indeed, an appropriate deity for the northern lights up there in the sky. The Viqueen can only hope that she recognises this humble approach and arranges things accordingly next week.

P.S. If you want to read a much more learned disquisition on the possible significance of Gná and other flying females in Norse myth and superstition, then do have a look at Stephen Mitchell, 'Gudinnan Gná', Saga och Sed (2014), 23-41.

Horses of the Sea

Norse and Viking ramblings took me to Denmark earlier this week, specifically to north-east Fyn and the small but picturesque town of Kerteminde. Highlight of the trip for me was my first-ever visit to Vikingemuseet Ladby, home of Denmark's only known ship-burial. This was discovered in the 1930s and excavated, as one sometimes did in those days, by the local amateur enthusiast, one Poul Helweg Mikkelsen, a chemist in Odense. But he did a splendid job and also had unusual foresight for those times to insist that the partially-excavated grave be left in situ in its mound. So there it is today (pictured left), you can still see the impression of the planks of wood and the many nails in their original position. You can also see the skeletal remains of eleven horses (their teeth are massive!) and probably four dogs. This custom of including horses and dogs in the burial is well-known and widely attested. We can speculate endlessly about the mindset that went in for this kind of mass slaughter to accompany one who was undoubtedly a wealthy and powerful local or regional chieftain. It's also rather graphically illustrated in the reconstruction of the burial (pictured below) in the small museum on the site.

Both the horses and the ship were of course the expected accoutrements of a great chieftain like the one buried at Ladby. The burial mound is on the coast and, while he may not have lived at Ladby itself (the name means 'loading settlement'), he certainly lived nearby and would have used both means of transport to get around. But there is more to this connection between ships and horses and we can get some insight into that by considering the poetry.

Much surviving Old Norse poetry, particularly in the skaldic genre, deals with ships, sailing and sea-battles, and the poets deploy a rich and surprisingly realistic vocabulary when dealing with such matters. But when it comes to the ships themselves, they also allowed themselves all kinds of flights of fancy, particularly in their use of kennings. As I touched on in a post last year, one of the most common kenning types is that which figures a ship as the 'horse of the sea'. Oddly enough, the kenning does not work the other way  round - in the whole of the skaldic corpus there is, I believe, only one example in which a horse is said to be the 'ship of the land' (parallel to the classic kenning-example of the camel as a 'ship of the desert'), and that is a bit obscure. Nor is there that much realistic description of riding in the poetry. But the number and range of kennings which vary the 'horse of the sea' concept is quite astonishing and the examples below are just a selection.

The 'horse' can be a drasill, a fákr, a faxi, a hestr, a marr or a viggr, all of which are just different words for 'horse'. Or it could be called by a typical horse-name, such as Blakkr 'Dusky', Hrafn 'Raven', Sóti 'Sooty' or Valr 'Falcon' (notice how the idea of substitution, so common to kennings, creeps into these horse-names, two of which are actually other animals, in fact birds). The 'sea', on the other hand, could be expressed through words that mean 'wave', such as bára, hrönn, unnr or vágr, or other words such as sundr 'channel', sær 'sea', or haf or lög 'ocean'. Again, the idea of substitution can make things more complex, with the 'sea' being replaced by a sea-kenning such as eybaugr 'island-ring' or hvaljörð 'whale-land'. You have to be pretty well-schooled in this way of thinking immediately to conjure up a picture of a ship when you hear of a 'steed of the island-ring' and kennings can often get even more complicated than that.

Not all ship-kennings involve horses, there are examples in which the base-words are bears, boars, elks, rams, reindeer and even swine. And just as horses sometimes had bird-names, so these kennings are reminiscent of the way in which ships were sometimes named after animals. Examples of such names from both the Viking Age and the medieval period include Ormr 'Snake', Trani 'Crane', Vísundr 'Bison', Hreinn 'Reindeer', Gammr 'Vulture', Elptr 'Swan' and Uxi 'Ox'. There's even a nice parallelism in the way that both horses and ships can be named after birds, though why anyone would have thought a vulture was a fine thing to name your ship after, we will never know.

Despite this maritime menagerie, the strongest association of the ship is still with the horse. Mastering a ship is rather a different skill from riding a horse, but the successful Viking Age chieftain, particularly in a landscape like that around Ladby, needed to be good at both. A ship was undoubtedly more expensive, and more difficult to replace, than a horse, so he would have had more of the latter. But both enabled him to cover more ground than the pedestrians he ruled over and, with one ship and several horses, he could also take a group of followers to support him in his endeavours. While almost anyone could have one horse, the chieftain had a lot of horses and at least one ship, perhaps precisely in the ratio of 11:1, as in the Ladby burial. This superiority in prestige of the ship over the horse may explain the kenning pattern mentioned above: while a ship could be figured as a horse, no horse could ever aspire to be a ship.

These associations are deep and complex, and fundamental to Viking Age concepts of leadership and masculinity. Much more could be said about them, perhaps drawing in those dogs that were also buried with the Ladby chieftain, and indeed his sword, another essential accoutrement of the well-accessorised Viking leader. And we mustn't forget that women were also buried in ships, accompanied by horses, though these associations are more difficult to untangle - was it only certain kinds of women and if so which kinds? The symbolism of both burials and poetry is endlessly fascinating and a real key to the Viking mind, if only we knew what it all really meant.

Skaldic Yule

Christmas is traditionally a time for overindulging in food and drink, and things were no different a thousand years ago. The Old Norse word jól can refer either to the midwinter feast of pre-Christian times, or to the Christian celebration of the Nativity, as depicted on the 11th-century rune-stone from Dynna, in Norway (left). Both festivals involved extensive feasting. In the mid-12th century, the crusader and poet Earl Rögnvaldr of Orkney remembered the Christmas feasts he and his best friend used to organise together in their youth (all texts and translations below are taken from vol. 1, ed. Diana Whaley 2013, and vol. 2, ed. Kari Ellen Gade 2009, of Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages):

Muna munk jól, þaus ólum austr gjaldkera hraustum, Ullr, at Egða fjǫllum, undleygs, með Sǫlmundi. Nú gerik enn of ǫnnur jafnglaðr, sem vask þaðra, sverðs at sunnanverðum svarm kastala barmi.

{Ullr {of the wound-flame}} [SWORD > WARRIOR], I will remember the Christmases when we entertained in the east beside Agder’s mountains with Sǫlmundr, the valorous steward. Now, just as glad as I was there, I make, once again, throughout another [Christmas], {a swarm of the sword} [BATTLE] at the southern perimeter of the castle.

Here the poet draws an explicit comparison between the peaceful joyous feasting of Christmas back home in Norway, and the Christmas he is spending equally joyously attacking a castle in Galicia, on his way to the Holy Land. In the next stanza, he refers to making 'the eagle replete again'. Being largely a military genre, skaldic poetry often figures Christmas as a feast for the beasts of battle (carrion-eaters the raven, the eagle and the wolf), with the underlying image a comparison with the more peaceful feasting the warriors themselves indulged in at Christmastime. In this rather baroque imagining by a poet called Grani the beasts of battle's Christmas feast also includes their family and children, as indeed do Christmas feasts for humans:

Dǫglingr fekk at drekka danskt blóð ara jóði; hirð hykk hilmi gerðu Hugins jól við nes Þjólar. Ætt spornaði arnar allvítt við valfalli; hold át vargr, sem vildi, — vel njóti þess — Jóta.

The lord gave the brood of eagles Danish blood to drink; I believe the ruler prepared a yule-feast {for the retinue of Huginn } [RAVENS] by Þjólarnes. Far and wide the kin of the eagle trod on the fallen carrion; the wolf ate the flesh of the Jótar as it pleased; may it truly enjoy that.

That was King Haraldr harðráði 'Hard-Ruler' bashing the Danes in the mid-11th century. But skaldic Christmas is also a time for reflection and remembering those we have lost during the year, as the newspapers do today. In this stanza by Sigvatr, even as he is drinking he remembers, and is saddened by, how his lord and patron, King (later Saint) Óláfr was treacherously responsible for the death of his friend, the powerful Norwegian chieftain Erlingr Skjalgsson:

Drakk eigi ek drykkju dag þann, es mér sǫgðu Erlings tál, at jólum allglaðr, þess’s réð Jaðri. Hans mun dráp of drúpa dýrmennis mér kenna; hǫfuð bôrum vér hæra — hart morð vas þat — forðum. I did not drink my drink very happily [lit. happy] at Christmas on the day when they told me of the betrayal of Erlingr, the one who ruled Jæren. The killing of him, the splendid person, will cause me to droop; we [I] carried our head higher before; that was a harsh murder. Skaldic poetry had the function of recording history as well as of celebrating and remembering military prowess, and in this function Christmas becomes a useful chronological marker along with other Christian festivals. In this stanza Oddr rehearses the battles of King Magnús góði 'The Good' in both the Baltic and Denmark in the early 11th century: Vas fyr Míkjálsmessu malmgrimm háið rimma; fellu Vinðr, en vǫnðusk vápnhljóði mjǫk þjóðir. Enn fyr jól vas ǫnnur óhlítulig lítlu — upp hófsk grimm með gumnum gunnr — fyr Árós sunnan.  A sword-grim battle was waged before Michaelmas; Wends fell, and people became much accustomed to weapon-sound. And shortly before Christmas there was another [battle], by no means trivial, south of Århus; grim fighting erupted among men. This poet was not interested in comparing battle to the culinary pleasures of  Christmas, he prefers instead to emphasise the grim significance of it - the festivals are just points on the calendar. That is not to say that Vikings were either pacifists or vegetarians...but as this survey of Yuletide references has shown, skaldic poetry could still be used to express a range of attitudes. And so we can reflect that Christmas in our time is also a marker of time passing, and both still a time of war and of feasting, and of remembering those who have gone. And also the celebration of a birth which can be taken as a symbol of hope for better things in the coming year. All the best for 2016, everyone.

Kennings Continued

Desert Camel by Sherbaz Jamaldini
from Wikimedia Commons

When I tell students about Old Norse poetry and try to explain how kennings work, I turn to that old chestnut, the 'ship of the desert', though recently I have noticed that students respond with a slightly puzzled look to what I thought was a well-known expression. But I plough on, explaining that it's rather a good kenning because we all know that what characterises the desert is that it is drier than anywhere else on the planet, and so the last place you would expect to find a ship. But if you start thinking about it, the sand dunes are not unlike waves and the camel is after all a mode of transport. So, we start by imagining a ship (the base word), but then the addition of the word 'desert' (the determinant) turns our thoughts to sand dunes, rocking motions and transport, and we eventually arrive at the correct solution, which is 'camel'.

The other reason this is a useful example is that it is in many ways the exact opposite of that very common Old Norse kenning, the 'horse of the sea'. Horses can't travel  on water, but they are a sturdy and trusty mode of transport on land, over the hills and heaths, just like your Viking ship is on the ocean. Thus, both the camel-kenning and the ship-kenning conform to the definition offered by Margaret Clunies Ross in A History of Old Norse Poetry and Poetics (2005, pp. 107-8):

... a noun phrase comprising two nouns in a genitival relationship (or a compound noun with an implicit genitival relationship between two distinct elements) ... used ... as a substitute for a noun referent. ... the three essential elements of the kenning [are] the base word, the determinant, which is usually in the genitive case or implicitly so, and the referent, which is unnamed.

I shall leave aside the complexities of how kennings really work in Old Norse poetry, and how they might have been understood by the Old Norse poets, and the medieval scholars who wrote about them, as much has been written on this and it is all a bit heavy for this light-hearted blog. Rather, I wanted to speculate a bit on modern kennings.

Now modern poetry inspired by or imitative of Old Norse poetry often makes use of kennings and kenning-like constructions, as you can see for example on the excellent Kennings in the Community website. But these are all made by people with at least some acquaintance with the Old Norse tradition and, in their quest to write good modern poetry, they do not always conform to the relatively strict definition cited above.

I'm more interested in kennings that are used less knowingly, in the poetry of the everyday, as in the Icelandic mousetrap I once blogged about. So when I come across something that seems suitable I make a note, and now have a small collection, which I am always eager to expand. My students sometimes come up with kennings, some of which are unprintable in a family blog. One clever student reminded me that both 'sea-lion' and 'hippopotamus' are kennings. Indeed the latter appears as a 'water-horse' or words to that effect in some languages (cf. Hungarian 'viziló'), though I am not very clear where the 'horse' idea comes into it, and it's a very different animal from the 'horse of the sea' I mentioned above.

The Old Norse 'horse of the sea' is popular in modern times, as I pointed out when this blog was still in its infancy, as 'steed of the waves' on Robert Calvert's 1975 album Lucky Leif and the Longships. But perhaps that is all a bit obvious - so what else is out there? My trusty notebook offers the following:

Observing tree surgeons working round about the place, I notice that they often use a machine called the Timberwolf to mash up the wood after they have properly pruned the branches.

On a natural history programme on the radio I heard about a North American salamander that is known as a 'snot-otter' (which has a bit of skaldic internal rhyme, too). This is apparently because it excretes mucus when you pick it up and it lives in rivers. Charming.

In the Observer magazine, I saw a photographic feature on a well-known fashion model that eschewed the word 'bra' and spoke instead of her 'tit-pants'.

Better known kennings include phrases like 'couch potato' and the similar 'porch monkey' I found on www.urbandictionary.com. Doubtless there are more to be found there if I could be bothered to search, but I prefer the surprise of serendipity.

All of these thoughts were sparked off by a letter in today's Guardian. In a series of recent letters about seagulls, one Glyn Reed wrote in to inform us that:

In the Royal Navy in the late 70s, any and all seagull-type birds were collectively known as “shitehawks”.

I guess this only really works if hawks don't normally defecate, or at least do so less than seagulls...who knows?

Of course these are all simple two-element kennings, such as you also find in Old English with its swan-roads and whatnot. To really understand the glory of kennings, you do have to study Old Norse poetry, firstly to find how many ways simple phrases like 'horse of the sea' can be varied, and secondly to discover the baroque delights of three-(or more)element kennings and kennings within kennings.

Viking Women

In my self-appointed role as Viqueen, I not unnaturally take a great interest in the doings of all my Viking sisters in this most apparently masculine or even masculinist of historical periods. But when I indulge this interest, I do sometimes feel like a still, small voice amidst all the popular (and even academic) fascination with the war and the violence, the boyish obsession with transport (horses and ships), and all the shiny, shouty stuff like bling and skaldic poetry. At a conference just over a year ago in connection with the Copenhagen leg of the great Viking exhibition (currently in its final days in Berlin), I was amused to hear from one of the curators that one topic that was firmly excluded from their exhibition concept was that of 'daily life on the farm'. (Another was Viking art, but that's perhaps another blog topic, one day). Which is a pity, because I find 'daily life on the farm' just as fascinating as all the violent and blingy stuff, and perhaps just as foreign to the modern world, if not more so. After all, we still live in a violent and blingy world but how many in the western world at least still have to produce their own food, build their own houses and make their own clothing from sheep or linseed through to garment?

If there are any budding scholars out there, there is certainly still plenty of scope to research the role of women in the Viking Age, along with children, men, animals and all the accoutrements of daily life. And there are signs of renewed interest in the roles of women, as evidenced in a book just out, Kvinner i vikingtid (Women in the Viking Age), edited by Nancy Coleman and Nanna Løkka. The book has seventeen articles, in Danish, English, Norwegian (both nynorsk and bokmål) and Swedish, on a wide range of aspects of women's experiences in the Viking Age and after. I particularly liked Pernille Pantmann's chapter on women and keys, deconstructing the hoary old chestnut that keys in female graves represent the mistress of the house (an old idea that I have been guilty of myself in the past...). I'm less convinced by Pernille's alternative explanation, but she is properly cautious about putting it forward, and her piece certainly opens up the whole question for renewed discussion. We need more work like this.

Another recent publication, In Search of Vikings: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Scandinavian Heritage of North-West England, edited by Steve Harding, David Griffiths and Elizabeth Royles, also has a couple of papers relevant to the understanding of female roles and experiences. In particular, Christina Lee's chapter shows the range of information that can be gleaned from textiles and textile working implements. The production of clothing, and other textiles (such as sails for Viking ships) was probably the one job that took up most of most women's time in the Viking Age, and studying this evidence again opens up all kinds of interesting questions about craft production, agriculture, family life, and artistic expression, not to mention the symbolic roles of weaving and spinning in Old Norse mythology.

Which reminds me that, nowadays, the most obvious profile of Viking Age women in both the popular media and much academic research is that of the possibly more glamorous but certainly minority (and in some cases fictional) roles of sorceresses, valkyries and warrior women. Or queens. All of these have their interest, of course, and I have expressed my views about both valkyries and warrior women before. I blame Game of Thrones, myself. I have to confess I haven't read the books, but I have watched a few of the TV episodes and, from my limited watching, it is clear to me that the female characters are mostly a pretty clever, capable and attractive bunch, usually more so than the male characters. This is how we like to see women from the dark and distant past in the twenty-first century, and it is certainly an improvement on the embarrassingly almost female-free twentieth-century equivalent, the fantasy works of Professor J.R.R. Tolkien.

But fantasy is just that, it's fantasy. When it comes to studying the past, I always struggle, both for my own part and in my teaching, to understand and to explain the paradox that, while human beings are human beings and always have been and always will be, the past really is another country. That's what's so fascinating about studying it - in what ways were people then just like people now, and in what ways were they different? Pinning that down in detail is the fun part.

On the whole, I think it's a shame that those interested in the Viking Age find it less interesting nowadays to explore the lives of real women, both those who stayed at home to cook, clean and bring up the children, and those who went out on great adventures, as settlers in the Hebrides or Iceland, or traders in Russia, with or without their menfolk or children. Maybe these new books will bring some redress. And at least some of these questions will be addressed in The Viking Diaspora, to be published next summer. But there is still plenty to do!

Vikings: Life and Legend

Tjørnehøj brooch
©Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen

The Mega Viking Show has finally come to town, and your faithful blogstress was honoured and privileged to be present when Margrethe, Queen of Denmark, and various other dignitaries opened it last Thursday, as well as to get an early viewing of the whole thing. I don't propose to review the exhibition - there are plenty of reactions of all types to be read in the media. The exhibition is designed for the general public, rather than the expert, and I firmly believe that the outsider's view is the one to seek out. Interestingly, the reactions vary enormously - do read more than one review to get a sense of it all. Another reason I would find it hard to review is that so many of the objects are almost too familiar. This is not only because I saw a version of the same exhibition in Copenhagen last September, but also because some of them I saw last time the British Museum did a Viking exhibition, in 1980, and in other exhibitions in various places since. Yet others are familiar from the many illustrated coffee-table books about the Vikings that flood the market on a regular basis.

But some of the exhibits are relatively new and I thought I'd pick out a few of my favourites at random, for my and your delectation. My top favourite is probably the valkyrie figure discovered in 2012, but I have blogged about that before. Several other 'valkyrie' images can be seen in the exhibition, and they are a fascinating group, mostly relatively recent metal detectorist discoveries. Another recent (2007) metal detectorist find from Denmark of which I am inordinately fond is the ship-brooch pictured above and extensively used by the British Museum in its publicity for the exhibition. It is sometimes said to represent a dragon-ship, but it is quite clear to me that the two figureheads are those of horses, as indicated by their ears and manes. Although similar brooches are known, this is the only one I have come across on which the animals seem very definitely to be horses' heads, and is thus a unique representation of that figure so commonly found in skaldic poetry, by which ships are called 'horses of the sea'. I also like the little face between the horses' heads, though quite what he represents I do not know.

Oval brooches have always fascinated me because they are typical of Scandinavian women's dress, and when we find them around the world, they raise interesting questions about the role of women in Viking migrations. Many thousands of them are known, from a broad geographical and chronological range, and in a variety of styles. For me, the one that tops them all is definitely that found in 2004 in an archaeological investigation at Finglas, in Dublin. There's an interesting photo of how it looked when it first came out of the ground on the website of Icon Archaeology, but it can only truly be appreciated in its cleaned-up form, which shows very clearly its 'protruding animal ornament', as the archaeologists say. These include both whole animal figures, and animal heads, all of which strongly resemble bears. Although similar brooches with small animal figures are known, I think these are the only ones which are clearly bears. They look quite cute to us today, though the bear was of course a feared and fearsome animal, and widely significant in Viking language and culture. I haven't found a good photo of the brooch to show you, but it adorns the cover of The Viking Age: Ireland and the West (2010), edited by John Sheehan and Donnchadh Ó Corráin, shown above, and is discussed at length by Maeve Sikora in that volume.

Finally, although the exhibition is not strong on runic inscriptions, it was a real pleasure to see the Kirk Andreas III stone from the Isle of Man, with its simple (and incomplete) inscription 'Þorvaldr raised this cross'. While not the most exciting inscription, it is of interest because, along with most of its fellow Manx inscriptions, it records the earliest uses of the word kross in Old Norse, a word with a fascinating history which appears to be borrowed from Latin crux into Gaelic, from there into Old Norse (as suggested by the Manx inscriptions) and from there into English, as suggested by some place-names in the north-west of England. Oh, and the stone, which is clearly a Christian cross-slab, also has those well-known images of what appear to be Odin at Ragnarok on one side, and a Christian figure on the other (above, left). It was particularly nice to see it in London last Thursday, because on Friday I went off on another runological field trip to the Isle of Man, where we had to make do with a replica in St Andrew's church, Andreas, instead. But the display in the church did have a nice picture of the last time the stone went to the British Museum, for the 1980 exhibition (above, right).

Little Bear

Despite my temerity in calling myself 'Viqueen', I do not take a great interest in the doings of royals, of either the monarchical or the Hollywood variety. However, it did not escape my notice that megastar Kate Winslet has recently had a little boy whom she has graced with the name 'Bear'. In the media, this is presented as 'the latest in a long line of celebrities to give their child an unusual name'. I agree that celebrity baby names are often quite hair-raising (and not only baby names, for mercifully young Bear will be spared his father's surname of RocknRoll). But on this occasion, the journos have not done their homework. As all readers of this blog will know, Björn was one of the most popular boy's names in the Viking Age. Lena Peterson's invaluable study of Scandinavian personal names in runic inscriptions (Nordiskt runnamnslexikon) is our best source for actual Viking Age naming practices. Her frequency tables show that Björn is the second-most popular male name in this material, topped only by Sveinn. The latter is probably due to the fact that there are many more inscriptions from the east Scandinavian area where this name was popular, whereas Björn was more widely used across the whole Scandinavian world. The popularity of Björn is also indicated by its second place in the frequency table of deuterothemes, that is the second element in compound names like Þorbjörn. In this frequency table, it is pipped to the post by -ulfr 'wolf', the monothematic version of which is no. 4 in the frequency table of most popular names.

One can only speculate as to why Vikings like to call their boy-children 'Bear' and 'Wolf', though it isn't too difficult to imagine. There don't appear to be any (certainly not any common) female names which are animal-words, and we may note that neither bears nor wolves are particularly nice animals. (Vikings did not call their children 'Sheep'). But they had lots of cool names, and let us hope that more Hollywood stars and other celebrities will study Lena's name-lists for some nice Viking names, rather than choosing to name their children after boroughs of New York, or fruit. And one day, they might even have a nice rune-stone, like the one pictured, for a certain Ulfr.

Gather Ye Groaties

The work of the Kirkwall draper, conchologist and poet Robert Rendall (1898-1967) may not be to everyone's taste - the poetry is traditional in style and often about God. But he really has a way with words, in my view, and it's nice to see that there is now an edition of his Collected Poems (ed. John Flett Brown and Brian Murray, 2012). In addition to his four published collections, this includes poetry never published or published only in newspapers or other ephemera. As with most Orkney poets, there is always an undercurrent of fascination with the islands' Norse heritage in Rendall's poetry. Here is a snippet from the rather fine and stately 'King Hakon's Dirge', published in Orkney Variants (1951, pictured):

Death comes, alas,
On raven wings,
And even kings
Like shadows pass
From mortal things.

But some of his most delightful writing comes in the autobiographical prose pieces collected in Orkney Shore (1973), mainly about his development as a naturalist, but with some nice poetical snippets, too, here musing on the vernacular names of the sea-shells that were his life's work, in particular the 'shell names from farm animals [which] have a northern provenance':

The common mussel with its outline of folded wings and up-turned neb was soon transformed into a 'kraa' with blue-black plumage. The finely corrugated ribs of a cockle, which in Norway became a sheep's fleece, was with us replaced by similar ribs on a scallop shell, and so recognized as the mark of a gimmer-shell. A cat's face could be seen in the obtuse 'cattibuckie' and that of a dog in the neb of a spired winkle ...' (Orkney Shore, pp. 19-20).

A 'gimmer' is a year-old ewe, according to the Dictionary of the Scots Language and comes from Old Norse, though the word is not just Orcadian but is quite widespread in both Scottish and northern English dialects. The picture shows some scallop shells I found on the beach between Grit Ness and the Sands of Evie last week.

As a conchologist, Rendall of course picked up (Orkney Shore, p. 18) on the fact that the three-year old Egill Skallagrímsson (in ch. 31 of his saga), refers to the 'three silent dogs of the surf swell' that the juvenile poet got from his grandfather as payment for his first poem. The saga prose interprets this kenning as referring to kúfungar, or sea-snails, a term used for a large and diverse group of animals - it's a pity the Orcadian poet-conchologist didn't speculate a little more on just what shells these were, though he was fascinated by spiral shells:

The mind rests on its sheer loveliness, content, it may be, with the harmony of aesthetic values; or if so disposed, wanders in the dangerous but delightful labyrinth of speculative thought. This wonderfully contrived object, so specialised as to differ from all others in its class, yet not excelling in any intricacy of design, each in its own way being unique, what is it? (Orkney Shore, p. 122).