The Hammer and the Cross: A New History of the Vikings by Robert Ferguson

Author:Robert Ferguson [Ferguson, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780141923871
Publisher: [DerHammer]
Published: 2014-09-14T16:00:00+00:00

A man steps forward and twines the long fair hair around his hands. As the executioner Thorkel brings down the sword the youth jerks away and the sword slices off the assistant’s arms below the elbow. The young man coolly inquires whose hands these are in his hair. Youth, sharpness of wit, bravery and vanity are the essential qualities of the heroic Viking and the young man has shown all four in abundance. He is reprieved and invited to become a member of Earl Erik’s hird. And yet the realities of Viking Age war are hardly glamorized by scenes in the saga of men interrupting battle to remove items of clothing because the heat of the day has made them uncomfortable; nor of ships that return to shore to pick up fresh supplies of stones, the stone for throwing being the weapon of choice for the average foot-soldier or sailor throughout most of the Viking Age.

Such details remind us of how differently things were done in the past. The distinction is emphasized by a naming culture that has handed down to us Ragnar Hairy-Breeches, Erik Bloodaxe, Halfdan the Black and Ivar the Boneless, and scores of other personal names that dramatize the cultural gap between the Viking Age and our own times. For reasons best known to marketing people, ‘Bluetooth’ has recently been resurrected as the name of a form of wireless communication (never blåtann, always English ‘Bluetooth’, even in Scandinavia). If King Harald did indeed have a prominent blue or black tooth at the front of his mouth this may have been a simple case of dental decay. There is, however, a slight possibility the name might be related to the recent discoveries of twenty-four skeletons of young Viking Age males, in locations spread across Denmark and Sweden, whose teeth have horizontally filed furrows on the frontal upper part of the tooth crown. The work appears to have been done by people skilled in the practice. The furrows are usually several, though single furrows occur, and the modified teeth are at the front of the mouth. Their significance is obscure, but a suggestion put forward by the researchers is that the furrows may have been coloured to make them visible from a distance, perhaps in an erotic or a warlike signalling, in which case Harald’s would have been blue.48

Harald Bluetooth’s son, successor and probable usurper, Sven, bore the less enigmatic after-name Tveskegg or Forked-Beard. Within thirty years of Harald’s death Sven would become the most powerful Scandinavian king we have so far met, and we might cautiously suppose that his dream of empire derived in part at least from close observation of his own father’s manifest ability to build on the grandest scale.

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