Viking Women: Life and Lore

By Lisa Hannett

Let's travel in time together, a thousand or so years back, and meet Viking women in their hearth-lit world.

How did these medieval viragoes live, love and die? How can we encounter them as flesh-and-blood beings with fears and feelings - not just as names in sagas or runes carved into stone?

In this groundbreaking work, Lisa Hannett lifts the veil on the untold stories of wives and mothers, girls and slaves, widows and witches who sailed, settled, suffered, survived - and thrived - in a society that largely catered to and memorialised men. Hannett presents the everyday experiences of a compelling cast of women, all of whom are resourceful and petty, hopeful and jealous, and as fabulous and flawed as we are today.

Lisa Hannett is an award-winning Canadian-Australian writer and academic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson Australia
• Release date: Jan 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781760763244

Book preview

1

MELKORKA: CONCUBINE AND SLAVE

Melkorka

Daughter of Mýrkjartan, King of Ireland

c. 920–?

THE POOL THAT lends Dublin its name is black even in summer. Easterly winds carve runes across its murky waters, airborne curses that blow in with the fast-flowing river, reeking of sea salt, bad oaths and ten generations of dung. Grey clouds trap the stench with their rain-heavy bellies, forcing it down onto the town’s palisade, onto watchtowers and rooftops and masts swaying in the harbour. Melkorka has lived here her whole life, fifteen years and counting, but each time she descends from her father’s longphort, fleeing the walled sanctuary of his hilltop fortress, the town’s lower-class reek punches her right in the nose.

This is how she remembers it, now.

Before, though, she is drawn down to the narrow streets, the markets, the wharf – constantly, relentlessly – in ways, even now, she can’t quite explain. What possesses her to keep sneaking off like this? What drives her, Mýrkjartan’s prettiest daughter, away from her private chambers, where the floor is daily strewn with fresh water-mint and vervain, the bedstraw laced with lice-killing lavender, the sconces flickering with sweet beeswax candles? What pushes her, the high king’s precious first child, away from her spinning and sewing, away from ale-swilling and coffer-filling future husbands, away from her young, ambitious brothers – not yet men, either of them, but both are bright and sharp as silver brooches, both will succeed their father, each in their own time, but neither will surpass him, Melkorka thinks, no one will ever dub them ‘the Hector of the Western world’. No one will kiss her head as Mýrkjartan does when he’s home, nor pat her fair cheek and, smiling, call her ciarán. Little dark one.

No, she can’t really explain – now or later – what sends her scurrying from all the pomp and privilege of royal life. What makes her slum it with the human sludge down here in Dublin town, while the pond’s rot spills like offal through skinny lanes, the coopers bend oak staves into barrels, cupmakers turn maple into beer vessels, chandlers conjure light from tallow, and skin-sellers writhe warmth into lonely bodies. Breathing through her mouth, she passes a yard overspilling with midden. Pigs scuttle ahead as she ponders, their fat black rumps bouncing, trotters churning the path into curds.

There’s only one reason she can get her head around, really, and it’s nonsense.

It’s just … a gut feeling.

Impulse.

A visceral urge to escape.

How she regrets giving in to this stupid whim.

With a crack, the clouds split their seams and, within seconds, dump their loads. No foreplay for these sky-giants, just a quick spit and then it’s full torrent. Thunder beats a drum across the heavens, the thrum and boom echoing in from the sea, the sound swelling as it pounds inland, soon roaring down the An Ruirthech river.

Shouts from the waterside become screams on the wood quay become terrified shrieks in the town. Soon, and too late, the wharf-bells clang. Soon local warriors are howling for Muirchertach – for her father, Mýrkjartan – to fend off the attackers. Soon foreign swords are slashing sinews and tendons, soon they’re being sheathed in Irish flesh. Soon, absurdly, as cold rain and cold steel shears down on them all, there’s fire.

‘Run!’ Melkorka hollers, the sky streaming into her eyes. ‘Run!’ she yells, practising what she preaches. Run. This way and that, run, feet slipping, heart rabbiting. Where is he? Where’s Mýrkjartan? Where are his men? Run home, her gut implores, but she’s come too far, now, she’s too far from the fort, from hill and hearth, she won’t make it there before the raiding sea-wolves swarm up Winetavern or Cook or Fishamble street, before they snarl and snap and swallow everyone.

Oh, how she regrets tricking her beloved nurse this morning –Father needs you, Melkorka had said, or something along those lines, something vapid but reliable, knowing Valgerd would drop everything (chores, gaze, skirts) to please him. Rumour has it they were lovers once, a king and his concubine, though the old woman refuses to admit it. But there’s some spark there, some tenacious ember burning in Valgerd’s stout chest, and Melkorka was only too happy to fan it.

Now, she’d do anything to be back inside, working the loom with Valgerd beside her, sour-cheese breath whistling through the great gaps in her teeth. Now she’d give anything for her nurse’s company, her protection. But no, no, now more than ever she has to ‘Run!’, she has to ‘Go!’, she has to escape, her soul screams, escape, escape, as she flies past smashed doors and smashed stalls, past a ragged army of booths, twenty or thirty of them pegged in a makeshift market, past linen tarps and tents sheeting with flames – they’ve got oil, she thinks, the heathens somehow have oil – and she sputters through the squall and the smoke, she skids around one corner after another, searching for the small chapel she thinks is nearby, it’s over there, isn’t it? beyond that smithy? or, no, it’s at the end of that lane – but she’s turned around now, the sky’s reeling, the mud’s dipping and bobbing beneath her feet, and she crashes into a shoeless thrall stuck there with a barrow, pushing it deeper and deeper into a rut, its load so wet now he may as well tip it. Skin dark as his expression, he swears at her, her, Mýrkjartan’s first daughter, and in that instant the slave grows a spine, his back is straight and his neck free of iron, he won’t bow for anyone but his gods. But maybe, Melkorka thinks as she yells, ‘Go!’, maybe his gods don’t recognise him now, up to his shins in filth, chained to some richer man’s barrow, pointing and cursing at some wild, storm-drenched woman.

But then some other man’s fingers gouge into Melkorka’s upper arm, thick and solid as whalebone, and she knows who the thrall’s really been cursing.

Behind her, the Northman huffs once.

Not a laugh.

A simple grunt of exertion.

He yanks her back, hard, and her skull cracks against his teeth. Blood-metal in her mouth, tongue throbbing, she flails and screeches, a terrified jumble of words, but he only gnarls his fingers deeper into her hair, pulls her harder as she kicks and screams. He doesn’t even try to stifle her – what’s the point? Who’s going to stop him? Who’s going to hear her? Who’s going to care? She’s nobody special. Just another pig squealing in the din.

Later, after this heathen meets up with his wire-bearded buddy, after the two of them scrape Melkorka along warp-wattle fences and between two tiny houses crammed too close together, after they drag her into this or that gull-spattered yard, after they topple her in the muck, stained leather straddling embroidered linen, cold mud up her back and cold rain in her face, after they ruck up her ruined dress, right there, right out in the open, while smoke greases up from the cook-fire beside them, and dozens and dozens of other bluish trails stink skyward all over town, Melkorka hears that same grunt again and again and again. Right on top of her. Right in her ear.

‘Ransom me,’ she croaks, throat raw from screaming and crying, soaked with slobber and snot. The Northmen switch places. ‘I’m a princess,’ she says with a sob, rancid from head to toe now, her beautiful black hair a sodden mass of horse piss and heathen spit. Grit grinds against her scalp, she cannot believe this, she cannot accept this is happening, ‘Don’t hurt me,’ she says, too late, ‘My father is king,’ Ciarán. ‘He’ll pay you—Please don’t—’Little dark one.

She talks and talks until her voice fails.

Begging gets her nowhere.

These brutes are all brawn, no brains. They aren’t schemers. They aren’t strategic. Once they’re done with her, they’re done. Quick cost-benefit analysis: nope, there will be no negotiating, no ransom. They won’t schlep her through this burning warren all the way back to Mýrkjartan’s fort. Too far for too little: they’ll snatch what they can now and hit the whale-road. Already their sea-rat noses sniff change in the wind: the tide’s about to go out, and all of them with it. That decides it. They make a short, rough haul down to the harbour. To the sharp-keeled ships dragged up on the strand, past the wood quay crawling with their axe-wielding kinsmen, those unlucky few who’d pulled the short straws on the way over. You’re the ship-shields this time, lads, we’re the swords. There, they offload her on the sallow-cheeked Rūs man, let him gauge her worth. He knows a good thrall when he sees one.

And he does – through the bruises and blood – see one.

This one’s expensive, the slave trader thinks, tossing Melkorka into his ship’s whimpering hold. Yes, this one will do.

She is too tired, now, to fight.

She’s wedged between rowing benches with the rest of them, women and girls mostly, poor fishwives, thin red-haired maids. No one Melkorka recognises. No one with status. The ship’s crammed full of nobodies.

And just like that, she’s one of them.

Nameless cargo in the hold.

The raiders return. The trader casts off. Dublin’s smouldering shoreline becomes a smudge, a scratch, a memory. She blinks as a grizzled sea-dog catches her eye. As he sidles closer, she stares down at her lap, her hands clenched in white-knuckled prayer. Quickly, she wrestles the gold band off her forefinger, the one Mýrkjartan gave her as a baby, a teething ring fit for a princess. She squirrels it in her mouth. Clamps down hard as the sea-dog slams his paws on her – and she bites until her teeth crack.

There are few stories about slaves in the sagas, though in reality slaves were ubiquitous as water – and as fundamental to Viking Age life. The slave trade is the silent cog around which the concept of ‘being a Viking’ turns. The cycle of raiding and trading revolves around slaving: raids are exercises in obtaining commodities, which include human captives who are then put to work in Viking homelands. This slave labour enables the Vikings to continue their own work (that is, more raiding and trading), perpetuating the cycle.

Caveat before we go any further: the term ‘Viking’, used as a proper noun like this, a capital ‘V’ label for a person with Scandinavian heritage and a penchant for sailing, storytelling and a greater or lesser amount of pillaging, is a modern construction. In Old Norse, the words víkingr and víking weren’t used as a catch-all for a particular ethnic identity. Instead, the masculine noun víkingr refers, generically, to a ‘pirate’ or ‘raider’ while the feminine víking describes the activities such men performed. In other words, they were people who went ‘a-viking’ but didn’t call themselves Vikings while doing so; hardly anyone in medieval sources did. To the Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Frisians and Irish, they were, unsurprisingly, seen as outsiders and foes; but the 9th- and 10th-century chroniclers call them ‘heathens’, ‘Northmen’, ‘strangers’, ‘foreigners’. In the Íslendingasögur (Sagas of Icelanders), Vikings – that is, people who go a-viking – are almost exclusively the characters’ Norwegian forebears; heroic and often troublesome men from a golden past, who harried widely and without discrimination before they settled in Iceland.

So when it comes to the business of buying and selling people, the line between ‘raider’ and ‘trader’ is so blurred it’s near impossible to see. Slaves were acquired through raiding and sold through trading; there’s little reason to doubt that the people responsible for the supply of such property were also the ones who demanded it. Annual expeditions took these merchant-warriors to Denmark, Sweden, around the Baltic Sea and up the Volga river, back down to Frisia, Saxony and all over the British Isles – this last, especially, is where they did a roaring trade in human chattel.

Without slaves, the Viking Age as we know it would not have existed.

Finding evidence of these slaves, however – particularly if they’re women – is tricky. Written records do mention the capture, treatment, occasional release and laws governing the ownership of human property, but the details are either puzzling or frustratingly scant.

As always, the Sagas of Icelanders offer more – and somehow tantalisingly less – than their early medieval counterparts. There are many slaves in these stories: some old and some young, some mowing hay or driving sheep, some oafish caricatures and butts-of-the-joke, some plot-devices masquerading as people, some little more than nameless pawns in the main characters’ feuds, some clever-tongued schemers (like Melkolf, Hallgerd’s right-hand man, in Njáls saga, who we’ll briefly meet in Chapter 3). Some are treated as lowly animals, while others, like Melkorka, are unfree but still clearly considered high-class. Slaves are everywhere in the sagas, but for the most part, they aren’t given much air time.

Archaeologists have called slavery ‘an invisible practice’ insofar as the material evidence is concerned. At first, this claim seems counterintuitive. After all, aren’t museums filled with Viking Age relics? National museums in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Olso, Dublin and London (to name just a few) have magnificent collections: mountains of hacksilver and coins (including an abundance of Arabic dirhams);blown-glass drinking vessels imported from the Rhineland; combs of antler and ivory; bone game pieces and ice skates and ironing boards; a dragon’s hoard of multicoloured glass beads; leather shoes, wool mittens, precious scraps of silk; twisted iron rods that may have been a seiðr-woman’s staff, a völva’s (seeress’s) magic wand; runestones uprooted from groves or headlands or crossroads, transplanted to marble-tiled halls; enough impressive swords, spears, arrowheads, halberds and axes to arm all the warriors in Valhalla, and then some. There are manacles, even. Heavy iron collars.

It’s all there for us to visit, this incredible wealth of grave goods, these priceless finds dredged from ancient mounds and riverbeds and harbours. But while slaves may have ‘owned’ these last couple of items (worst gift ever), of course they didn’t warrant any of the former. Slaves didn’t get their own graves. Nothing was buried with them for archaeologists to excavate – they themselves were the things. And no solo graves for them means no identifiable goods for us to ogle, over a thousand years later, with our noses and smartphone cameras pressed against museum glass.

And yet ‘Making of a Nation’, a permanent exhibit at the National Museum of Iceland (Þjóðminjasafn Íslands) in Reykjavík, shows the impact of Viking Age slavery in a way that is at once invisible and also overwhelmingly present.

The museum itself hulks on a vibrant green lawn kitty-corner from the University of Iceland’s austere main building and its grand, semi-circular park, within spitting distance of Tjörnin (‘the pond’), a picturesque lagoon in the city centre teeming with birds and birdwatchers, joggers, commuters and perambulators. The National Museum is three concrete storeys, Modernist, its shape reminiscent of so many Icelandic churches: a long, rectangular nave leading to a curved apse, a single boxy tower, blunt transepts jutting here and there. (Its logo, by the way, is a brilliant mashup of the institution’s initials and Viking Age objects: a ‘Þ’-shaped axe with an ‘Í’-shaped sword-cum-handle. Beautiful.) Inside, up a short set of stairs to the second floor – which is embedded with a Viking ship’s glowing outline – there’s a calm, almost reverent hush.

Outside it’s hat and scarf weather – even in August – but in here the layers have to come off. (Give it a few days and the mercury will reach 23 degrees Celsius, much to my taxi driver’s delight: it’s perfect for swimming, he’ll tell me.) Golden light sifts down onto white walls and pillars, giving them a crème brûlée hue. There’s a set of intricately carved doorposts, vines endlessly coiling. There’s a drawer with Viking shoes and a child’s wadmal mittens (a cord strings the mitts together, a clever invention that Canadian mothers, like mine, still use). There’s the Ufsir Christ, its wood worm-riddled with tiny holes. There’s the remarkable 12th-century Valþjófsstaður door. Around and in between these treasures, there are interactive multimedia touchscreens, voice actors re-enacting the past, maps and details that change how we view the present.

Here, on an interface labelled ‘Origin of Icelanders’, you can press a virtual button and find women like Melkorka (though not her per se). Stories of slave women told not in words, but in blood and bones: ‘62 per cent of women settlers in Iceland were from the British Isles; 80 per cent of men were from Nordic countries,’ the screen says. Recent studies have shown there’s a bit of wriggle-room in these figures, perhaps 75 per cent of men, perhaps 60 per cent of women, though the consensus falls well within the exhibit’s stated range. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), the touchscreen explains, is matrilineal; it can be traced up to 100,000 years. Samples can be scraped from teeth.

Therefore, I scribble in my notebook, it seems like early Icelanders were largely made up of Nordic men who took British Isles women for their wives.

Add ‘slaves and concubines’ to my quick note’s enthusiastic but restrictive and excessively optimistic use of ‘wives’ and we might get a clearer picture of the women given short shrift in other written records. After all, the names of women captured in Viking raids aren’t listed among the settlers in Landnámabók (the Icelandic Book of Settlements, compiled in the 12th century), but their presence is still palpable today. Scientists have mapped whole genomes from a series of Viking Age Icelandic skeletons found across the island, most likely from the first three generations of settlers; these genetics reveal that the first migrants were either Norse (from Norway or Sweden) or Gaelic (either Ireland or Scotland), and/or a combination of both. Studies examining mtDNA and Y-chromosome DNA of modern-day Icelanders also show that around three-quarters of patrilineal ancestry is Scandinavian, and around two-thirds of matrilineal heritage comes from the British Isles.

Evidence of the Viking slave trade, then, is everywhere in Iceland’s National Museum. Not just in the stuff that’s been carefully curated, arranged beautifully and pinned behind glass, nor simply in the fascinating information found on touchscreens – but in the people behind these exhibits. The living, breathing people of this country.

The Rūs flesh-peddler is a real pro. He’s always on the go, swooping like a tern into this port and that, skimming the shores for the best bits of fresh meat, flying off with a bellyful of tender morsels. He’s a light hand with the whip, liberal with the waterskin. Got to keep the thralls fit for work, the ambátt supple; customers come to Gilli ‘the Russian’ to buy pliable concubines, not shrivelled leather bags. Gilli’s ship is always full, but there’s a high turnover in stock – he’s got a reputation for top-notch merchandise, and he wants to keep it that way, only trading in fine imports like silk and spices, alongside his other (almost new) second-hand goods. His girls always sell without quite hitting their best-before dates.

Less than a week out of Dublin, Melkorka and the others are just about ready to expire.

So Gilli aims his prow for the Brenn Isles off the coast of Göteborg, Sweden, where King Hakon’s royal assembly is about to kick off. He knows a rich market from a poor one, and this one – held every third year in these parts – is one of the richest. Perfect for selling a prize like her.

Hundreds of booths, tents and pavilions have sprung up like mushrooms all over the islands, some little more than crude shelters, lengths of oiled tarp strung between stunted trees, others huge timber-framed delights with wyrms and wolf-heads snarling above the doorways. The Norse king and his retinue descend on the locals, lodging with one elite family after the next, doing them the great honour of draining their ale casks and decimating their larders before moving on. A clearing in the birch grove serves as the summer thing – think of it as an open-air courthouse, and things as government assemblies – where grievances are aired, criminals are tried, and lawspeakers tell everyone what they can and can’t do, offering legal loopholes when they’re most needed. Everywhere, there is feasting and frivolity, games and gambling, talk and trade; three years’ worth of news to catch up on. Through it all, hearts and bellies swell, or sink, or stay the same. Not every event is life-changing.

Gilli sets up shop on the harbourfront, within sight of the hoi polloi but at an exclusive distance. This here’s the VIP booth, got it? While lesser men hawk their wares out in the open, he trots his own past the wooden stage perched at the water’s edge, avoiding the steps creaking up and down the thing’s ends. Iron rings are nailed into the platform’s floorboards, spoked like cartwheels. Chains rise like rigging from the deck up to iron collars bolted around chafed and blistered necks. Today there are forty, maybe fifty captives bound for sale, men stripped of name, rank, honour, wearing nothing but soiled tunics and expressions of defeat.

Did you say one ounce for this lad, Áskell? Melkorka hears someone in the crowd shout, Only one? ‘Amateurs,’ Gilli scoffs, steering her into his large red and white striped tent, one hand at her elbow, the other forcing her head down and through the flaps. Come now, Brín, comes the reply. You can’t have been sitting on your ears while standing up over there. One ounce is what you heard, one is what I said …

From inside Gilli’s tent, the slave-brokers’ bartering is muffled. Colourful carpets cover the grass, soft as cats’ fur under Melkorka’s cracked feet, and bright fabrics hang from the crossbeam, swooping backdrops for the goods Gilli’s henchmen have laid out. At the back of the shelter, behind the selection of decorative combs and brooches, Eastern silks and Western wool, amber amulets and ivory game pieces, bags of salt more precious than gold, the real money-makers huddle on a long, low bench. A handful of young, wide-hipped girls in rough twill. Dark-eyed women with strong backs but fading looks, their hair just a few shades shy of crone. Three round-bellied sows Gilli’s keen to sell quick: A real bargain, these ambáttir, he’ll say with a wink. Two for the price of one.

A slap and a shove get Melkorka down on the bench with these other hollow-gazed women, then a curtain falls behind Gilli, plunging them into a reddish twilight. Twelve souls in all, sniffling and whimpering and gnawing their fingernails, heads swimming with fear and hunger, trembling despite the heat in here, the lack of air. Wind thrums against the tent’s taut walls, more noise than oxygen; it does little to dispel the fug around them. The musk of old fish and worry. The nervous burps. The damp seats and knee-crooks and armpits. The dried blood.

Beyond the curtain their captor booms, ‘Yes, yes, come in!’

God save us, Melkorka thinks. Sunlight limns the curtain’s edges, and the wharf-side racket follows a deep, mead-soaked voice into the tent. ‘Wasn’t sure if you were open,’ it says. ‘Of course, of course,’ comes Gilli’s well-oiled reply.

Melkorka tongues her gold ring. Presses it into the roof of her mouth, fretting it along the ridges. She stares at the rug under her feet. The tattered fringes. The blue and white zigzags. She blinks slowly. Sees mountains. Blink. Waves. Blink. Pointed dragon fangs.

Slow blink.

‘—the Russian. Maybe you’ve heard of me,’ Gilli says, without shame or irony, a man confident in the precedence of his reputation.

‘Once or twice.’ A smile warms the man’s admission. ‘Word is, you’ve got quite the range—’

‘If I don’t have it,’ Gilli spruiks, ‘you don’t need it.’

‘That so?’ A crack in the smile now, an edge of challenge. ‘What if I was after something special? Something exotic? Or maybe someone?’

‘Please,’ Gilli says with a laugh. ‘Let’s dispense with the riddles. There’s nothing you could want that I haven’t sold at least twice in the past month. Let’s narrow it down a bit, shall we? Tell me: what’s your poison? Blonde? Brunette? Red Irish or Black?’

Melkorka winces as Gilli whisks the curtain aside, the light dazzling. Peering up, she catches a glimpse of him decked out as never before, in blue tunic and baggy trousers all a-glitter with gold thread, a fur hat taming his grey curls. A grin splits his moustache, its long black tails wriggling as he talks.

Slow blink.

Eyes fixed on the carpet.

Mountains, waves, teeth, bare toes.

‘Go on,’ the trader says. ‘Take a look. Let me know if anything tickles your fancy.’

The man’s boots are brown leather, well-worn but well-kept. Despite the mead – or perhaps because of it – his pace is carefully measured. He walks the bench’s length once, twice, before pausing. As one, the women hold their breath. A third pass and he stops. Everyone but Melkorka exhales.

‘How much is this one?’he asks. Prestige jangles around his wrists, bronze rings and gold. Prominent gifts for a prominent man.

‘Three marks of silver,’ Gilli replies without hesitation.

No way. Melkorka tenses – that’s too much. Hope prickles her with sweat. Maybe Gilli’s greed has bought her some time? Enough time for Mýrkjartan to find her? To kill all these heathens and take her back home? Three marks, she thinks. That’s an absolute fortune. That’s a warrior’s wergild, rich compensation for the loss of a great man’s life. That’s enough to stock a wealthy farm, eight milch cows or more, and enough land for grazing them. That’s—

‘A rather high price for a slave-girl,’ says the man. ‘Even a beautiful one.’

‘You’re not wrong,’ Gilli says, ‘she is beautiful. But