CHAP. II. of the Wikings. 829858. It was this hard struggle for life that left its stamp The Coming to the last on the temper of the Scandinavian peoples. The very might of the forces with which they battled gave a grandeur to their resistance. Their temper. It was to the sense of human power that woke as the fisher-boat rode out the storm, as the hunter ploughed his lonely way through the blinding snowdrift, as the husbandman waged his dogged warfare with unkindly seasons and barren fields, that these men owed their indomitable energy, their daring self-reliance, their readiness to face overwhelming odds, their slowness to believe themselves beaten. He who would win good fame, said an old law, must hold his own against two foes and even against three; it is only from four that he may fly without shame. Courage indeed was a heritage of the whole German race, but none felt like the man of the north the glamour and enchantment of war. Fighting was the romance that alone broke the stern monotony of his life; the excitement and emotion which find a hundred spheres among men of our day found but this one sphere with him. As his boat swept out between the dark headlands at the fiord's mouth, the muscles that had been hardened by long strife with thankless toil quivered with the joy of the coming onset. A passion of delight rings through war-saga and song; there are times when the northern poetry is drunk with blood, when it reels with excitement at the crash of swordedge through helmet and bone, at the shout, at the gathering heaps of dead. fight drove all ruth and pity before it. warrior's war The fever of CHAP. II. of the Wikings. 829. 858. circle of his own home indeed the sternness of the life he lived did gentle work in the Wiking's heart.1 The Coming Long winter and early nightfall gathered the household closely together round the common hearth, and nowhere did stronger ties bind husband to wife or child to father; nowhere was there a deeper reverence for womanhood and the sanctities of womanhood. But when fight had once begun, the farmer and fisher who loved his own wife and child with so tender a love became a warrior who hewed down the priest at his altar, drove mothers to slavery, tossed babes in grim sport from pike to pike. The nations on whom these men were soon to swoop cowered panic-stricken before a pitilessness that seemed to them the work of madmen. "Deliver us," ran the prayer of a litany of the time, "deliver us, O Lord, from the frenzy of the Northmen !" What gave their warfare its special character was that its field was the sea. The very nature indeed of 1 For their love of home see a touching scene in the Njal's Saga (trans. by Dasent, i. 236). Gunnar, doomed by the Thing to exile, goes down to the ship, then "he turned with his face up towards the Lithe and the homestead at Lithend, and said, "Fair is the Lithe, so fair that it has never seemed to me so fair; the corn-fields are white to harvest, and the home-mead is mown; and now I will ride back home, and not fare over sea at all." 2 "Domos vestras combusserunt, res vestras asportarunt, pueros sursum jactatos lancearum acumine susceperunt, conjuges vestras quasdam vi oppresserunt, quasdam secum abduxerunt." Hen. Hunt. lib. v. proœm. (ed. Arnold, p. 138). A. Wiking named Oelver in the ninth century is said to have been nicknamed "Barnakarl" (or child's cnecht), because he would not join in the tossing children on pikes. Munch, "Det Norske Folks Hist." (Germ. tr.), pt. iv. p. 232. The Northmen and the sea.: CHAP. II. of the Wikings. 829858. their home-land drove these men to the sea, for in The Coming all the northern lands society was as yet but a thin fringe of life edging closely the sea-brim. In Sweden or the Danish isles rough forest-edge or dark moor-slope pressed the village fields closely to the water's edge. In Norway the bulk of the country was a vast and desolate upland of barren moor, broken only by narrow dales that widened as they neared the coasts into inlets of sea; and it was in these inlets or fiords, in the dale at the fiord's head, or by the fiord's side, where the cliff-wall now softened into slopes to which his cattle clung, now drew back to make room for thin slips of meadow-land and corn-land, that the Norwegian found his home. Inland, where the bare mountain flats then rose like islands out of a sea of wood, the country was strange and dread to them; for the boldest shrank from the dark holts and pools that broke the desolate moorland, from the huge stones that turned into giants in the mists of nightfall, giants that stalked over the fell till the grey dawn smote them into stone again, from the wolves that stole along the fearsome fen-paths, and from the fell shapes into which their excited fancy framed the mists at eventide, shapes of giant moor-steppers," of elves and trolls, of Odin with his wind-cloak wrapped round him as he hurried over the waste. But terror and strangeness vanished with a sight of the sea. To the man of the north the sea was road and hunting-ground. It was a "waterstreet" between the scattered settlements; for few cared to push overland across the dark belts of moor that parted one fiord from another. Even more than the land about his home it was the dalesmen's harvest CHAP. II. of the Wikings. field, for fisher's net had often to make up for scanty The Coming corn-growth and rotting crops, and quest of whale and seal carried them far along their stormy coasts.1 829 858. The life of these northern folk was in its main Their usages. features one with the life of the earlier Englishmen.2 Their home and home customs were the same. The ranks of society differed only in name. Our ætheling, ceorl, and slave are found in the oldest tradition of the north as Jarl, Carl, and Thrall; 3 in later times Carl begat the Bonder and Jarl the King. There was as little difference in their political or judicial institutions. The bonders gathered to the Thing as the ceorls to the Moot; we see the little "folks" who in our own history so soon fuse into larger peoples in the "fylki," each with its Jarl or King, eight of which found room for themselves in the district of Trondhjem alone. In religion too there was the same kinship. The gods that were common to the Teutonic race were worshipped in the northern lands as elsewhere, though nowhere among the German peoples did their story become clothed with so noble a poetry. The contrast of the warmth and 1 See Othere's story in Ælfred's "Orosius," at the close of Pauli's "Life of Alfred," p. 249. 2 See Munch, "Det Norske Folks Historie," Germ. trans. by Claussen, pt. ii. pp. 140-257, for the details of their life. * See the curious" Rigsmaal" in Edda Samundar, iii. 170—190. Copenhagen, 1828. 4 Saga of Harald Fairhair; Laing's "Sea-Kings of Norway" (translation of the "Heimskringla "), vol. i. p. 275. For the Fylki see Munch, "Det Norske Folks Hist." Germ. trans. pt. i. p. 126, &c. CHAP. II. of the Wikings. 829. 858. peace within the home of the Scandinavian with the The Coming sternness and uproar of the winter world without it woke a wild fancy in the groups that clustered through the long eventide round the glowing woodashes of the hearth. Thor's mighty hammer was heard smiting in the thunder peal that rolled away over the trackless moors. Odin's mighty war-cry was heard in the wind-blast that rushed howling out to sea. The faint and brief daylight of mid-winter pointed forward to that "twilight of the gods," when even they should yield to the weird that awaited them, and the All-father himself should die. Their warfare. There was the same likeness in their usages of war. In both peoples the war-band lay at the root of all. The young warriors of the folk gathered round a war-leader for fight and foray; sometimes the king of this dale or that summoned his fighting-men for more serious warfare; sometimes a farmer when seed-time was over mustered his bondmen for a harvest of pillage ere the time came for harvesting his fields. To reap the one harvest was counted through the north as honest and man-worthy a deed as to reap the other.1 But while the English war-band made its foray over land, the northern war-band made its foray over sea. From the "wik," or creek where their long-ship lurked, the "Wikings," or "creek-men," as the adventurers were called, pounced upon their prey, or 1 See the story of Swein, Asleif's son, in the Orkneyinga Saga (tr. by Anderson), c. 72, &c., pp. 117, sq. 2 For derivation and history of this word, see Munch, "Det Norske Folks Hist." pt. iv. p. 237 (German translation). It is used solely by voyagers to the western, never by those to the eastern seas. |