Why settled Vikings deserve our attention

The Sea-King and the Sorceress, Neil Price, Allen Lane, £30

Around the year 1080, an elderly woman was buried in Täby, a few kilometres northeast of Stockholm. Now a sleepy suburb of the Swedish capital, the settlement was then the base of a powerful local family, of which Ástríðr Sigfastardóttir was the matriarch. Her well-preserved bones – used to reconstruct her facial appearance – reveal a tall woman with severe back problems, bad teeth and a well-healed arm injury, while a series of runestones erected by her relatives provide key details of her life. Twice married, and the mother of at least seven sons, she was a formidable figure who managed the family’s households and extensive estates.

As a Christian woman who lived a largely settled life (though she may have undertaken a pilgrimage to Reichenau Abbey, more than 1,000 km away), Sigfastardóttir does not conform to modern expectations of what a Viking should be. But, according to the archaeologist Neil Price, that is because our expectations are chiefly shaped by our own fantasies and preoccupations. Indeed, he suggests, the name is itself problematic: the Old Norse word ‘víkingr’ (which means something like ‘pirate’) is more of a job description than an ethnic identity. It is therefore neither a label the people to whom we apply it would recognise, nor an accurate description of a population comprised mostly of settled farmers.

Rather than take a narrative approach (as in his 2020 bestseller, The Children of Ash and Elm), Price introduces us to 21 individuals from across the Viking world, ranging from the 700s to the early 12th century, and covering the entire diaspora, from North America to the Byzantine Empire and beyond. By combining archaeological expertise with textual evidence, Price is able to make the most of his knack for bringing the dead to life.

Some of the characters we meet on this journey do fit the stereotypes: Price opens his book with a mid-8th-century boat burial, containing the remains of more than 30 horribly wounded men who died while raiding in what is now Estonia. Later on, he discusses the Viking burials excavated at Repton in Derbyshire – including that of a man in his late thirties, clearly a member of the Great Heathen Army that terrorised England in the late 9th century, who was buried with significant weaponry, a Thor’s hammer pendant and serious wounds to his skull and hip. Around a year later, his son was buried next to him, under a shared memorial cairn. 

The Vikings were famous for their love of travel, and though this pair died a long way from their Scandinavian home, others went even further afield. Ástriðr Sigfastardóttir’s first husband, Øysteinn, died in Greece, where he was probably employed as a Varangian – one of the many Norse mercenaries who served as bodyguards to the Byzantine emperor, and in his army. A century earlier, Erik the Red (hero of several sagas) arrived in Greenland with his lesser-known wife, Þjóðhildr. A Christian convert who supposedly refused to sleep with her pagan husband, she built, and was buried next to, a tiny turf church in their new village. Their sons, including the famous Leif Erikson, travelled on to a place they called Vinland.

Many others lived more settled lives, and Price makes a compelling case that we should be equally interested in their stories. At the same time as the Vikings were terrorising their European neighbours, they were also establishing important trading centres, including Birka, where over 1,000 graves have been excavated in the large cemeteries which ringed the town. In the 840s, the town’s residents included a woman buried in a red wool dress, with what Price describes as ‘an astonishing array of Viking-Age bling’. Much of it was clearly plundered; perhaps, he suggests, she had provided financial support to the raiders, and the jewellery was her reward?

Further evidence of the domestic impact of raiding is found in the Danish farming community of Randlev, where 80 per cent of the excavated graves belong to women – a population imbalance which (along with the presence of people and goods of surprisingly diverse origins for a rural backwater) suggests that many local men went off raiding and/or trading, and died elsewhere. The women left behind lived hard lives, with many skeletons showing evidence of childhood malnutrition. Throughout the Viking world, this was far more common in females, almost certainly because, if there was not enough food, sons were prioritised.

Such sexism is what we expect of the Vikings, and yet, like most societies, they seem to have had somewhat contradictory attitudes to the vulnerable. Several sagas and law codes mention the practice of exposure; one Muslim traveller claimed that unwanted infants were routinely thrown in the sea. And yet, in the late 11th century, a middle-aged brother and sister were buried in Skömsta (a tiny village in the agricultural lowlands of Sweden). This would be unremarkable had the pair not lived with a rare form of dwarfism, despite which they were clearly well looked after, and well integrated into their community.

Though we may be surprised to find it in medieval Scandinavia, such care for the disabled makes sense to the modern mind – whereas other elements of Viking life and funerary culture seem strange, or even repugnant, to us. Price’s vivid account of the Oseberg ship burial (which contains the remains of two women, carefully laid out on a luxurious bed and surrounded by lavish grave goods) makes clear that Viking funerals were drawn-out, bloody, boozy affairs. Numerous horses and dogs were slaughtered and buried with the women, and many of the objects found with them seem to have been carelessly thrown onto the ship’s deck. If we believe Ibn Fadlan’s claim that Viking mourners quite frequently drank themselves to death (as Price is inclined to), then they probably were.

The identity of the Oseberg women has been much debated, and it is possible that one of the pair was enslaved to the other. One scholar, seemingly unable to believe that two women would have been given such a burial, even argued that they were both enslaved to an important man, whose bones were subsequently removed by grave robbers. Though Price gives that theory short shrift, it is true that slavery was common in the Viking world, and thralls were quite often killed during funeral rituals. One particularly disturbing example comes from the Isle of Man, where a young woman, killed by a single blow to the back of the head while kneeling, was found in the grave of a high-status man. A similar burial in Birka includes the remains of a naked man, beheaded and missing a foot.

Elsewhere, graves reveal a worldview which is completely alien to our own. A woman buried in late-10th-century Fyrkat (Denmark) with a bizarre selection of grave goods (including a pig’s jaw, a pair of ox horns and a pouch full of hallucinogenic henbane seeds) was almost certainly a sorceress. Dozens of other women from across the diaspora, buried with decorated iron staffs, which previous generations of archaeologists assumed to be meat spits, are now thought to have shared her profession.     

Other burials reflect a world in which bodies could take various shapes and in which the boundary between human and animal was surprisingly porous. In central Sweden, a cluster of women buried with lynx pelts may have been female shapeshifters associated with the goddess Freyja, who travelled in a wagon pulled by cats. And, in the book’s most surprising chapter, Price discusses the grave of a bear, which was hunted and eaten before its bones were carefully laid to rest under a stone cairn. This unfortunate creature was clearly not a typical Viking, and nor, perhaps, were the people who buried him. But then, as this original and compelling book shows, there really was no such thing.