VIKINGS OR NORTHMEN.
CIRCA 787-1066.
The discoveries and conquests and colonies of the Norse Vikings, from
the White Sea to North America, are the first glimpses of light on the
sea of darkness round the little island of the known world that made up
Christendom. And from the needs of the time these were the natural, the
only natural beginnings of European expansion. From the rise of Islam,
Saracens controlled the great trade-routes of the South and East. It was
only on the West and North that the coast was clear--of all but natural
dangers.
In the Moslem Caliphate men were now busy in following up the old lines
of trade, the immemorial traditions of the East, or as in southern
Africa, extending the sphere of commercial activity and so of
civilisation; men of science were commenting on the ancient texts of
Greeks and Latins, or adapting them to enlarged knowledge.
But in Christendom, in the atrophy both of mental and physical
activity, broken for short periods and in certain lands by the revivals
of Charles the Great, of the Isaurian Emperors, of Otto I., of Alfred
and his House, the practical energy of Heathen enemies,--for the
Northmen were not seriously touched by Christianity till about the end
of the first millennium,--was the first sign of lasting resurrection.
After the material came the spiritual revival; the whole life of the
Middle Ages awoke on the conversion of the Northern nations and of
Hungary; but in the abundant and brilliant energy of the eleventh, the
twelfth, the thirteenth centuries, we must recognise the offspring of
the irrepressible Norsemen as well as of the Irish and Frank and English
missionaries, who in the Dark Ages of Christendom were working out the
empire of Innocent III.
In exploration, especially, it was true that theory followed
achievement. Flavio Gioja, of Amalphi, did not apply the magnet to
navigation--did not "give sailors the use of the magnet"--till
navigation itself had begun to venture into the unknown Atlantic. The
history of geographical advance in the earlier Middle Ages is thus
rather a chronicle of adventure than of science.
But the Norse discoveries are not only the first, they are the leading
achievements of Western travel and enterprise in the true Unknown,
between the time of Constantine and the Crusades. The central fact of
European expansion in the Dark Ages (from the seventh to the eleventh
century) is the advance of the Vikings to the Arctic Continent and to
America about the year 1000. All that precedes this on the same line is
doubtful and unimportant. For, of the other voyages to the West in the
sixth, the eighth, the tenth centuries, which, on Columbus' success,
turned into prior claims to the finding of the New World, there is not
one that deserves notice.
St. Brandon in 565, the Seven Spanish Bishops in 734, the Basques in 990
may or may not have sighted their islands of "Antillia," of "Atlantis,"
of the "Seven Cities." They cannot be verified or valued, any more than
the journeys of the Enchanted Horse or the Third Calendar. We only know
for certain a few unimportant, half-accidental facts, such as the visits
of Irish hermits to Iceland and the Färoes during the eighth century,
and the traces of their cells and chapels--in bells and ruins and
crosses--found by the Northmen in the ninth.
It was in 787 that the Vikings first landed in England; by the opening
of the next century they were threatening the whole coast line of
Christendom, from Gallicia to the Elbe; in 874 they began to colonise
Iceland; in 877 they sighted Greenland; in 922 Rolf the Ganger won his
"Normandy" from Charles the Simple, by the Treaty of Clair-sur-Epte; as
early as 840 was founded the first Norse or Ostman kingdom in Ireland,
and in 878 the Norse earldom of the Orkneys, while about the same time
the first Vikings seem to have reached the White Sea and the extreme
North of Europe.
This advance is almost as rapid as that of the early Saracens; within a
hundred years from the first disturbance of Danes and Northmen by the
growing, all-including power of the new national kingdoms,--within three
generations from Halfdan the Black,--first the flying rebels, and then
the royalists in pursuit of them, had reached the farthest western and
northern limits of the known world, from Finisterre in "Spanland" to
Cape Farewell in Greenland, from the North Cape in Finland to the
Northwest Capes of "Irland," from Novgorod or "Holmgard" in Russia to
"Valland," between the Garonne and the Loire.
The chief lines of Northern advance were three--by the north-west,
south-west, and north-east, but each of these divided, after a time,
with important results.
The first sea-path, running by Caithness, Orkneys, Shetlands, and
Färoes, reached Iceland, Greenland, and at last Vinland on the North
American Continent; but from the settlements on the coasts and islands
of northern Scotland, a fresh wave of pirate colonists swept down
south-west into the narrow seas of St. George's Channel and beat upon
the east and north and south of Ireland and the western coasts of
England and of "Bretland."
The second invasion ran along the North German coast, and on reaching
the Straits of Dover, fell upon both sides of the English Channel,
according as the resistance was stronger or weaker in Wessex or in
Frankland. The advanced guard reunited with Ostmen and Orkneyers in the
Scilly Isles, and in Cornwall, and pressed on to the plunder of the Bay
of Biscay and its coasts. The most restless of all were not long in
finding out the wealth of the Moslem Caliphate of Cordova, and trying to
force their way up the Douro and the Tagus.
The expansion on this side was not to stop till it had founded, from the
Norman colony on the Seine, a Norman kingdom of England, and a dominion
in the Two Sicilies, but this was the work of the eleventh century, the
time of organisation and settled empire.
On the third side of northern expansion, to east and north-east, there
were two separate roads from the first; one taking the Baltic for its
track, and dividing northwards to Finland, up the Gulf of Bothnia,
eastwards to Russia and Novgorod ("Gardariki" and "Holmgard"), the other
coasting along "Halogaland" to Biarmaland, along Lapland to Perm and the
Archangel of later time.
Of these three lines of movement by far the most vital to our subject is
the first, which is also the earliest; the second, to south and
south-west, hardly gives any direct results for our story; and the
third, to east and north, is mainly concerned with Russian history.
While King Alfred was yet unborn, Norse settlements had been permanently
founded in the outlying points, coasts, and islands of Scotland and
Ireland, and in the years of his boyhood, about 860, Nadodd the Fäeroe
Jarl sighted Iceland, which had been touched at by the Irish monks in
795 but was now to be first added as a lasting gain to Europe, as a new
country, "Snowland"--something more than a hermitage for religious
exiles from the world. Four years later (in 864) Gardar the Swede
reached this new Ultima Thule, and re-named it from himself "Gardar's
Holm." Yet another Viking, Raven Floke, followed the track of the first
explorer in 867, before Iceland got its final name and earliest
colonisation from the Norsemen Ingolf and Leif and the sheep-farmers of
the Färoes in 874, the third year of Alfred's reign in Wessex.
[Illustration: THE ANGLO-SAXON MAP. (SEE LIST OF MAPS)]
Three years later, 877-8, at the very time of the farthest Danish
advance in England, when Guthrum had driven the English King into the
Isle of Athelney, the Norsemen reached their farthest point of northern
advance in Europe; Gunnbiorn sighted a new land to the north-west, which
he called "White Shirt," from its snow-fields, and which Red Eric a
century later re-named Greenland--"for there is nothing like a good name
to attract settlers." By this the Old World had come nearer than ever
before to the discovery of a new one.
Geographically, this side of the Arctic Continent falls to the share of
North America, and once its fiords had been made in their turn centres
of colonisation and of further progress, the actual reaching of
Newfoundland and Cape Cod was natural enough. The real voyage lay
between Cape Farewell and the European mainland; it was a stormy and
dangerous passage from the Greenland Bays to Labrador, but not a long
one, and, as far as can be judged from scanty records, neither so cold
nor so icebound as at present.
But exploration had outrun settlement. It was not till 986, more than
one hundred years after Gunnbiorn's discovery, that Eric the Red, one of
the chiefs of the Iceland colonists, led a band of followers and
friends into a permanent exile in the unknown land. The beginnings of
several villages were made in the next few years, and the first American
discoveries followed at once. About 989 one Bjarni Herjulfson, following
his father from Iceland to Eric's Fiord in Greenland, was driven west by
storms first to a flat, well-wooded country, then to a mountainous
island, covered with glaciers. He bore away with a fresh breeze and
reached his home in Eric's Fiord in four days.
But his report aroused great interest; the time had come, and the men,
and Norse rovers, who after so much in the past were ready to dare
anything in the future, eagerly volunteered to follow up the new route;
Bjarni himself visiting Norway and telling his story, was blamed for his
slackness, and when he went back to Greenland there was "much talk of
finding unknown lands." In the year 1000 Leif, a son of Red Eric,
started with a definite purpose of discovery. He bought Bjarni's ship,
manned it with five and twenty men and put out. First they came to the
land Bjarni had sighted last, and went on shore. There was no grass to
be seen, but great snowy ridges far inland, "and all the way from the
coast to these mountains was one field of snow, and it seemed to them a
land of no profit,"--so they left, calling it Helluland, or Slate-land,
perhaps the Labrador of the sixteenth century.
They put to sea again and found another land, flat and wooded, with a
white sand shore, low-lying towards the sea. This, said Leif, we will
call after its nature, Markland (Woodland). Thence driving for two days
before a north-east wind, they came to an island, where they landed to
wait for good weather. They tasted the dew on the grass and thought they
had never known anything so sweet. Sailing on again into a sound between
the island and a ness, they reached a place where a river came out of a
lake; into this they towed the ship and anchored, carrying their beds
out on the shore and setting up their tents, with a large hut in the
middle, and made all ready for wintering there.
There was no want of fish food--"the largest salmon in the lake they had
ever seen"--and the country seemed to them so good that they would need
no fodder for cattle in the winter. There was no frost; the grass seemed
fresh enough all the year round, and day and night were more equal than
in Iceland or in Greenland. The crew were divided in two parts: one
worked at the huts and the other explored the country, returning every
night to the camp. From the wild vines found by the foragers, the whole
district was called Vinland, and samples of these, enough to fill the
stern boat, and of the trees and "self-sown wheat" found in the fields
were taken back to Eric's Fiord. Thereafter Leif was called the Lucky,
and got much wealth and fame, but Thorwald Ericson, his brother, thought
he had not explored enough, and "determined to be talked about" even
more than the first settler of Vinland.
He put to sea with thirty men and came straight to Leif's Booths in
Vinland, where he stayed the winter. On the first signs of spring
Thorwald ordered his vessel to be rigged, and sent his longboat on
ahead to explore.
All alike thought the land beautiful and well-wooded; they noticed that
the distance was small between the forest and the sea, that the beach
was all of white sand, and that there were many islands off the shore
and very shallow water; but they saw no trace of man or beast, except a
wooden corn-barn on an island far to the west. After coasting all the
summer they came back in the autumn to the booths.
The next spring Thorwald went eastwards, and "towards the north along
the land they drove upon a cape and broke their keel and stayed long to
repair, and called the place Keel-Ness (Kjalarness) from this." Then
they sailed away eastwards along the country, everywhere thickly wooded,
till at one place Thorwald drew up his ships to the land and laid out
gangways to the shore, saying, "I would gladly set up my farm here."
But now they came upon the first traces of other men; far off upon the
white sandy beach three specks were sighted--three skin boats of the
Skrælings or Esquimaux, with three men hiding under each. Thorwald's men
captured and killed eight of them, but one escaped "to where within the
fiord were several dwellings like little lumps on the ground." A heavy
drowsiness now fell upon the Norsemen, in the Saga, till a "sudden
scream came to them, and a countless host from up the fiord came in skin
boats and laid themselves alongside."
The Vikings put up their shield-wall along the gunwale and kept off the
arrows of the Esquimaux till they had shot them all away, and "fled off
as fast as they could," leaving Thorwald with a mortal wound under the
arm. He had time just to bid his men "carry him to the point he had
wished to dwell at, for it was true that he would stay there awhile, but
with a cross at head and feet; and so died and was buried as he had
said." The place was called Crossness from the dead chief, but the crew
stayed all the winter and loaded the ship with vines and grapes, and in
the spring came back to Eric in Greenland.
And now, after the first mishap, discovery became more serious--not to
be undertaken but by strong and well-armed fleets. It was this that
checked the expansion of these Arctic colonies; at their best they were
too small to do more than hold their own against nature and the Skræling
savages in their tiny settlements along the coast, where the ice-fields
have long since pushed man slowly but surely into the sea, with his
painfully won patches of hay and corn and pasturage.
But the colonists would never say die till they were utterly worn out;
now they only roused themselves to conquer the new lands they had found,
and found disputed.
First a third son of Red Eric, Thorstein, bethought him to go to Vinland
for his brother Thorwald's body. He put to sea and lost all sight of
land, beating about in the ocean the whole summer, till he came back to
Greenland in the first week of winter. (1004-6.)
He was followed by the greatest of the Vinland sailors, Thorfinn
Karlsefne, who really took in hand the founding of a new settlement over
the Western Sea. He came from Norway to Iceland soon after Thorwald's
death in 1004, passed on to Greenland about 1005, "when, as before, much
was talked about a Vinland voyage," and in 1006 made ready to start with
one hundred and sixty men and five women, in three ships. They had with
them all kinds of cattle, meaning to settle in the land if they could,
and they made an agreement, Karlsefne and his people, that each should
have an equal share in the gain. Leif lent them his houses in Vinland,
"for he would not give them outright," and they sailed first to
Helluland (Labrador), where they found a quantity of foxes, then to
Markland, well-stocked with forest animals, then to an island at the
mouth of a fiord, unknown before, covered with eyder ducks. They called
the new discoveries Stream Island and Stream Fiord, from the current
that here ran out into the sea, and sent off a party of eight men, in
search of Vinland, in a stern boat. This was driven by westerly gales
back to Iceland, but Thorfinn, with the rest, sailed south till he came
to Leif Ericson's "river that fell into the sea from a lake, with
islands lying off the mouth of the stream, low grounds covered with
wheat growing wild, and rising grounds clad with vines."
Here they settled, re-named the country "Hope, from the good hope they
had of it," and began to fell the wood, to pasture their cattle in the
upland, and to gather the grapes.
After the first winter the Skrælings came upon them, at first to traffic
with furs and sables against milk and dairy produce, and then to fight;
for as neither understood the other, and the natives tried to force
their way into Thorfinn's houses, and to get hold of his men's weapons,
a quarrel was bound to come.
Fearing this, Karlsefne put a fence round the settlement and made all
ready for battle, "and at this very time was a child born to him in the
village, called Snorre, of Gudrid his wife, the widow of Thorstein
Eric-son, whom he had brought with him." Then the Esquimaux came down
upon them, "many more than before, and there was a battle, and
Thorfinn's men won the day and saved the cattle," and their enemies fled
into the forest.
Thorfinn stayed all the winter, but towards spring he grew tired of his
enterprise, and returned to Greenland, "taking much goods," vines, wood
for timber, and skin-wares, and so came back to Eric's Fiord in the
summer of 1008.
Thus ends the story of the last serious effort to colonise Vinland, and
the Saga, while giving no definite cause for this failure upon failure,
seems to show that even the trifling annoyance of the Skrælings was
enough to turn the scale. Natural difficulties were so immense, men were
so few, that a pigmy enemy had all the power of the last straw in a
load, the odd man in a council. The actual resistance of American
natives to European colonists was never very serious in any part of the
continent, but the distance from the starting-point and the
difficulties of life in the new country were able, even in the time of
Raleigh and De Soto, to keep in check men who far more readily founded
and kept up European empires in the Indian seas.
So now, though on Thorfinn's return the "talk began to turn again upon a
Vinland voyage, as both gainful and honourable," and a daughter of Red
Eric, named Freydis, talked men over--especially two brothers, Helge and
Finnboge--to a fresh attempt in the country where all the House of Eric
had tried and failed; though Leif lent his booths as before, and sixty
able-bodied men, besides women, were found willing to go, the colony
could never be firmly planted. Freydis and her allies sailed in 1011,
reached the settlement, which was now for the third time recolonised,
and wintered there;--but jealousies soon broke up the camp, Helge and
Finnboge were murdered with all their followers, and the rest came back
in 1013 to Greenland, "where Thorfinn Karlsefne was just ready for
sailing back to Norway, and it was common talk that never did a richer
ship leave Eric's Fiord than that which he steered." It was that same
Karlsefne who gave the fullest account of all his travels, concludes the
Saga, but whether Thorfinn ever returned to Vinland, whether there were
any more attempts to settle at Leif's Booths or elsewhere, whether the
account we have of these voyages is really an Eric Saga, only telling
the deeds of Red Eric and his House--for after Bjarni, almost every
Vinland leader is of this family--we cannot tell. We can only fancy that
all these suggestions are probable, by the side of the few additional
facts known to the Norse Skalds or Bards. The first of these is, that in
983-4, Are Marson of Reykianes in Iceland was driven by storms far West
to White Man's Land, where he was followed by Bjarni Asbrandson in 999,
and by Gudleif Gudlangson in 1029. This was the tale of his friend Rafn,
"the Limerick trader," and of Are Frode, his great-great-grandson, who
called the unknown land Great Ireland.[17] True or untrue, in whatever
way, this would be a later discovery than those of Eric and his sons, if
the news of it did not come into Iceland or Norway till after Thorfinn
Karlsefne's voyage, as is generally supposed. Again, the length of the
voyage is a difficulty, and the whole matter has a doubtful look--an
attempt to start a rival to the Eric Saga, by a far more brilliant
success a few years earlier.
[Footnote 17: By some supposed to be S. Carolina, by others the
Canaries.]
We seem to be on more certain ground in our next and last chapter of
Viking exploration in the north-west, in the fragmentary notices of
Greenland and Vinland voyages to the middle of the fourteenth century,
and in the fairly clear and continuous account of the two Greenland
settlements of the western and the eastern Bays.
We hear, for instance, of Bishop Eric going over from Eric's Fiord to
Vinland in 1121; of clergy from the Eastern Bay diocese of Gardar
sailing to lands in the West, far north of Vinland, in 1266; of the two
Helgasons discovering a country west of Iceland in 1285; of a voyage
from Greenland to Markland in 1347 by a crew of seventeen men, recorded
in 1354.
Unless these are pure fabrications, they would seem to prove something
of constant intercourse between the mother and daughter colonies of
north-west Europe and north-east America, and something of a permanent
Christian settlement of Northmen in the New Continent is made probable
by assuming such intercourse. Between 981-1000, both Iceland and
Greenland had become "Catholic in name and Christian in surname"; in
1126 the line of Bishops of Gardar begins with Arnold, and the clergy
would hardly have ventured on the Vinland voyage to convert Skrælings in
an almost deserted country.
The later story of the Greenland colonies, interesting as it is, and
traceable to the year 1418, is not part of the expansion but of the
contraction of Europe and Christendom. And the voyages of the Zeni in
1380-95 to Greenland and the Western islands Estotiland and Drogeo,
belong to another part; they are the last achievements of mediæval
discovery before Henry of Portugal begins his work, and form the natural
end of an introduction to that work.
But it is curious to notice that just as the ice and the Esquimaux
between them were bringing to an end the last traces of Norse settlement
in the Arctic Continent, and just as all intercourse between Vinland,
Greenland, Iceland, and Norway entirely ceases--at any rate to record
itself--the Portuguese sailors, taking up the work of Eric and Leif and
Thorfinn, on another side, were rounding Cape Verde and nearing the
southern point of Africa, and so providing for the mind of Columbus
suggestions which resulted in the lasting discovery of the world that
the Vikings had sighted and colonised, but were not able to hold.
The Venetian, Welsh, and Arabic claims to have followed the Norsemen in
visits to America earlier than the voyage of 1492, belong rather to the
minute history of geographical controversy. It is a fairly certain fact
that the north-west line of Scandinavian migration reached about A.D.
1000 to Cape Cod and the coasts of Labrador. It is equally certain that
on this side the Norsemen never made any further advance, lasting or
recorded. Against all other mediæval discoveries of a Western Continent,
one only verdict can stand:--Not Proven.
The other lines of Northern advance, though marked by equal daring and
far greater military exploits, have less of original discovery. There
was fighting in plenty, the giving and taking of hard knocks with every
nation from Archangel to Cordova and from Limerick to Constantinople;
and the Vikings, as they reached fresh ground, re-named most of the
capes and coasts, the rivers and islands and countries of Europe, of
North Africa, of Western Asia. Iberia became "Spanland"; Gallicia,
"Jacobsland"[18]; Gallia, "Frankland"; Britannia, "England," "Scotland,"
"Bretland"; Hibernia, "Irland"; Islam, outside "Spanland," passed into
"Serkland" or Saracenland. Greece was "Grikland"; Russia, "Gardariki";
the Pillars of Hercules, the Straits of Gibraltar, were "Norva's Sound,"
which later days derived from the first Northman who passed through
them. The city of Constantine was the Great Town--"Miklagard"; Novgorod
was "Holmgard," the town of all others that most touched and influenced
the earlier, the Viking age, of Northern expansion. For was it not their
own proudest and strongest city-state, and "Who can stand before God, or
the Great Novgorod?" except the men who had built it, and would rush to
sack it if it turned against them?
[Footnote 18: From St. James of Compostella.]
But all this was only the passing of a more active race over ground
which had once been well known to Rome and to Christendom, even if much
of this was now being forgotten. It was only in upland Russia and in the
farthest North that the Norsemen sensibly enlarged the Western world to
east or north-east, as they did through their Iceland settlements on the
north-west.
On the south and south-west no Vikings or Royalist followers of Vikings,
like Sigurd the Crusader, sailed the seas beyond Norva's Sound and
Serkland,[19] and as pilgrims, traders, travellers, and conquerors in
the Mediterranean, their work was of course not one of exploration. They
bore a foremost share in breaking down the Moslem incubus on southern
Europe; they visited the Holy sites
"When sacred Hierosolyma they'd relievèd
And fed their eyes on Jordan's holy flood
Which the dear body of Lord God had lavèd";[20]
they fought as Varangian body-guards in the armies of the great
Byzantines, Nikephoros Phokas, John Tzimiskes, Basil II. or Maniakes;
but in all this they discovered for themselves rather than for Europe.
[Footnote 19: Unless White Man's Land and Great Ireland are the
Canaries. See above, p. 63.]
[Footnote 20: Camoëns, _Lusiads_, (Barton's trans.).]
But Russia, that is, Old Russia round Novgorod and Kiev, the White Sea,
the North Cape and Finland coasts, as well as the more outlying parts of
Scotland and Ireland, were first clearly known to Europe through the
Northmen. The same race did much to open up the modern Lithuania and
Prussia, and the conversion of the whole of Scandinavia, mother country
and colonies alike, in the tenth and eleventh centuries added our
Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, with all the Viking settlements, to the
civilised world and church of Rome.
First, on the eastern side, it was in 862 that the Russians invited help
from their less dreaded neighbours around Upsala against their more
vexatious neighbours around Kiev, and in September of the same year
Ruric arrived at Novgorod and founded the Mediæval Kingdom of Russia,
which in the tenth century under Oleg, Igor, and Vladimir was first the
plunderer, then the open enemy, and finally the ally in faith and in
arms of the Byzantine Empire.
All through this time and afterwards, till the time of the Tartar
deluge, the intercourse of Swedes, Danes, and Northmen with Gardariki
was constant and close, and not least in the time of the Vinland
voyages, when Vladimir and Jaroslav reigned at Novgorod, and the two
Olafs, the son of Trygve and the Saint, found refuge at their court
before and after their hard rule in Norway.
Olaf Trygveson's uncle had grown old in exile at Novgorod when young
Olaf and his mother fled from Norway to join him there and were captured
by Vikings in the Baltic and kept six years in the Gulf of Riga before
they got to Holmgard (972).
In 1019 Ingigerd of Sweden was married to Jaroslav; ten years later St.
Olaf was driven from Norway by revolt, and flying into Russia, was
offered a Kingdom called Volgaria--the modern Casan, whose old
metropolis of Vulghar was known to the Arab travellers of the ninth
century, and whose ruins can still be seen. Olaf hesitated between this
and a pilgrim's death in Jerusalem and at last preferred to fight his
way back to Norway.
The next King of the Norsemen, Magnus the Good, came from Novgorod by
Ladoga to Trondhjem, when Olaf's son Harold Hardrada fled back to his
father's refuge, to the court of Jaroslav; while Magnus had been in
exile, men had asked news of him from all the merchants that traded to
Novgorod.
Last of these earlier kings, Harold Hardrada, during all the time of his
wild romance in East and South, before he went to Miklagard, and after
his flight, and all the time of his service in the Varangian Guard of
the Empress Zoe, made Novgorod his home. His pilgrim relics from Holy
Land and his war spoils from Serkland--Africa and Sicily--were all sent
back to Jaroslav's care till their master could come and claim them, and
when he came at last, flying from Byzantine vengeance across the Black
Sea into the Sea of Azov and "all round the Eastern Realm" of Kiev, he
found his wealth untouched and Princess Elizabeth ready to be his wife
and to help him with Russian men and money to win back Norway and to die
at Stamford Bridge for the Crown of England (1066).
Harold is the type of all Vikings, of the Norse race in its greatest,
most restless energy. William the Conqueror, or Cnut the Great, or
Robert Guiscard, or Roger of Sicily, are all greater and stronger men,
but there is no "ganger," no rover, like the man who in fifty years,
after fighting in well-nigh every land of Christians or of the
neighbours and enemies of Christendom, yet hoped for time to sail off to
the new-found countries and so fulfil his oath and promise to perfect a
life of unmatched adventure by unmatched discovery. He had fought with
wild beasts in the Arena of Constantinople; he had bathed in the Jordan
and cleared the Syrian roads of robbers; he had stormed eighty castles
in Africa; he had succoured the Icelanders in famine and lived as a
prince in Russia and Northumberland; by his own songs he boasts that he
had sailed all round Europe; but he fell, the prototype of sea-kings
like Drake or Magellan, without one discovery. Men of his own nation and
time had been before him everywhere, but he united in himself the work
and adventures, the conquests and discoveries of many. He was the
incarnation of Northern spirit, and it was through the lives and records
of such as he that Europe became filled with that new energy of thought
and action, that new life and knowledge, which was the ground and
impulse of the movement led by Henry the Navigator, by Columbus, and the
Cabots.
Harold's wars kept him from becoming a great explorer, but Norse
captains who took service under peaceful kings did something of what he
aimed at doing.
We must retrace our steps to the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan under
King Alfred about the year 890, about the time when a Norse King, Harold
Fair-hair, was first seen in the Scotch and Irish seas. Their discovery
of the White Sea, the North Cape, and the gulfs of Bothnia and Finland
was followed up by many Norsemen, such as Thorer Hund under St. Olaf, in
the next one hundred and fifty years,[21] but Ohthere's voyage was the
first and chief of these adventures both in motive and result.
[Footnote 21: And a certain number of Viking sailors seem to have
preceded Ohthere on his voyage to the Dwina.]
"He told his lord King Alfred that he dwelt northmost of all Northmen on
the land by the Western Sea and he wished to find how far the land lay
right north, or whether any man dwelt north of the waste. So he went
right north near the land;--for three days he left the waste land on the
right and the wide sea on the left, as far as the whale hunters ever
go"; and still he kept north three days more (to the North Cape of
Europe).
"Then the land bent right east, and with a west wind he sailed four days
till the land bent south, and he sailed by it five days more to a great
river--the Dwina--that lay up into the land, and where beyond the river
it was all inhabited"--the modern country of Perm and Archangel.
Here he trafficked with the people, the first he had met, except the
Finn hunters, since leaving his fiord. Besides his wish to see the
country, he was looking for walrus-ivory and hides.
The Finns and Biarma-men (men of Archangel), it seemed to him, spoke
nearly the same language, but between his home and this Biarmaland no
human being lived in any fixed dwelling, and all the Northman's land was
long and narrow and thinly peopled, decreasing in breadth as it
stretched northward, from sixty to three days' journey.
Again Alfred told how Ohthere, sailing south for a month from his house,
having _Ireland_ on his right and coasting Norway all the time on his
left, came to Jutland, "where a great sea runs up into the land, so vast
that no man can see across it," whence in five days more he reached the
coast, "from which the English came to Britain."
Wulfstan, in the service of the same king, told him how he sailed in
seven days from Sleswick to Truso and the Vistula, having Wendland (or
Pomerania and Prussia) on his right all the way. He described "Witland
near the Vistula and Estland and Wendland and Estmere and the Ilfing
running from the Truso lake into Eastmere," but neither the king nor his
captains knew enough to contradict the old idea, found in Ptolemy and
Strabo, of Scandinavia as one vast island.
Thus it was for the satisfaction of their Saxon Lord that Wulfstan and
Ohthere, by their voyages along the coasts of Norway and Lapland, of
Pomerania and Prussia, round the White Sea and the Gulf of Riga and
southern Finland, added a more coherent view of north-east Europe, and
specially of the Baltic Gulf, to Western geography; but these Norse
discoveries, though in the service of an English king, were scarcely
used save by Norsemen, and they must partly go to the credit of Vikings,
as well as of Alfred the Great. Thus in 965 King Harold Grayskin of
Norway "went and fought with the folk on the banks of the Dwina," and
plundered them, and in 1026 Thorer Hund joined himself to a fleet sent
by St. Olaf to the White Sea, pillaged the temple of the idol Jomala,
and destroyed his countrymen by treachery on their way home. Where two
expeditions are recorded they may well stand for twenty unknown and
uneventful ones, and the same must be equally granted as to the gradual
advance of knowledge through the unceasing attacks of the Norse kings
and pirates on the lands to the south of the Baltic, where lived the
Wends.
Thus on the west and east, north-west and north-east, the Northmen could
and did make a definite advance into the unknown; even the south-west
lines of Northern invasion and settlement, though they hardly yield any
general results to discovery, certainly led to a more thorough inclusion
of every part of the British isles in the civilised West, through the
Viking earldoms in Caithness, in the Orkneys and the Shetlands, in Man
and the Hebrides, and on the coast of Ireland, where the Ostman colonies
grew into kingdoms. From about 840, when the first of these settlements
was fairly and permanently started, to the eleventh century, when a
series of great defeats,--by Brian Boru at Clontarf in 1014, by Godwine
and Harold in England from 1042 to 1066, and by the Norman and Scottish
kings in the next generation,--practically destroyed the Norse dominion
outside the Orkneys,--for those two hundred years, Danes and Northmen
not only pillaged and colonised, but ruled and reorganised a good half
of the British isles.
By the time of Alfred the Viking principalities were scattered up and
down the northern and western coasts of the greater of our two islands,
and were fringing three sides of the lesser. About A.D. 900 the pioneer
of the Norse kings, Harold Fair-hair, pursued his traitors, first to
Shetlands and Orkneys, then to Caithness, the Hebrides, and Man. His son
Eric, who followed him, ranged the Northern seas from Archangel to
Bordeaux, and so Hakon the Good in 936 and other Norse princes in 946,
961, 965, above all, the two great Kings Olaf in 985-9 and 1009-14,
fought and triumphed through most of the world as known to the Northmen.
Thus, Frankland, England, Ireland, Scotland were brought into a closer
unity through the common danger, while as the sea-kings founded settled
states, and these grew by alliance, first with one another and then with
their older Christian victims, as the Norse kingdoms themselves became
parts of Latin Christendom, after Latin Christendom had itself been
revived and re-awakened by their attacks, the full value of the time of
trial came out on both sides, to conquered and to conquerors.
For the effects--formative, invigorative, provocative,--of the Northern
invasions had a most direct bearing on the expansion that was to come in
the next age even for those staid and sober Western countries, England
and France and Italy, which had long passed through their time of
migration, and where the Vikings could not, as in the far north-east and
north-west, extend the area of civilisation or geographical knowledge.
Lastly, the new start made by England in exploration, and trade, and
even in pilgrimage, is plainly the result--in action and reaction--of
the Norse and Danish attacks, waking up the old spirit of a kindred
race, of elder cousins that had sunk into lethargy and forgotten their
seamanship.
But from the Peace of Wedmore (878) Alfred first of all began to build
an English navy able to meet and chase and run down the Viking keels;
then established a yearly pilgrimage and alms-giving at the Threshold of
the Apostles in Rome; then sent out various captains in his service to
explore as much of the world as was practicable for his new description
of Europe. His crowning effort in religious extension was in 883, when
Sigehelm and Athelstan bore Alfred's gifts and letters to Jerusalem and
to India, to the Christians of San Thomé; the corresponding triumph of
the King's scientific exploration, the discoveries in the White Sea and
the Baltic, seem to have happened nearer the end of the reign, somewhere
before 895.