Free A Brief History of the Vikings by Jonathan Clements Page A

waited beyond, was even moved to quote Biblical prophecy: ‘Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth on all the inhabitants of the land’ (Jeremiah 1:14).
    Viking life revolved around the war-band, called a
comitatus
by Latin chroniclers, who used the term in their own language for a general’s personal retinue. A war-band comprised a leader, often a self-styled ‘king’, and his cronies. Sometimes barely enough men to fill a single longship, sometimes a veritable army, it was the defining unit of Viking life. A Scandinavian community without a war-band was simply a cluster of huts – it would eventually find itself facing aggressors, and be obliged to submit to someone else’s war-band or to form one of its own. The war-band was an organism that lived to acquire possessions – it would roam in search of a territory of its own. It could be destroyed by a more powerful adversary, or it could seize the territory of another, acquiring land, women and wealth for itself. At that point, it would have fulfilled its basic function, and could be expected to fizzle out, losing its vitality. A war-band was not so much a parasite upon a community as an outlet for a community’s bad seeds. A generation after the original raiders gave up on the raiding life, their many wives and concubines would have raised another horde of hungry mouths. Eventually, a new war-band would form, and go off in search of plunder, repeating the cycle once more.
    To travel, they required the infamous Viking ship. As a community developed, and its wayward sons first turned to trade, a ship would permit them to travel further afield. In lean times, when traders had less to sell, and buyers had less tobarter, ships became the vehicles of aggression, permitting the Viking group to remove itself from its own homeland to ruin somebody else’s. The raiders of the eighth century were rulers of nothing but their own ships and men, either because they had never had anything else, or, as increasingly occurred, because they had been ousted from their homeland by another group of rivals.
    One of the most famous Viking ships is the vessel found in 1880 in a burial mound in Gokstad, south Norway. Sometime around AD 900 a great Viking chieftain had been buried inside his vessel, intact in every detail but for the mast, which was hacked off to fit under the roof of the burial chamber. Whoever he may have been, the middle-aged man was laid to rest with a significant number of sacrificial animals: 12 horses, 6 dogs, and even a peacock. 9 The Gokstad ship was an improvement on earlier vessels from the Dark Ages. It had 16 pairs of oars – enough for a small crew of traders or, doubled-up, sufficient transport for a good-sized war-band. Along the gunwales were 32 shields, implying it was used for the latter purpose. There were, however, no seats for the oarsmen, leading archaeologists to presume that Vikings brought their own sea chests, somehow strapped them down, and used them in lieu of benches.
    The Gokstad ship was remarkably preserved, despite the damage done by a party of grave robbers that had hacked through its side. Its state made it possible to seriously contemplate a replica, leading several modern entrepreneurs to build their own versions. The first and most famous was the
Viking
, constructed in 1893 as part of Norway’s entry in the Chicago World Fair. The project was led by Magnus Andersen, the editor of a shipping magazine, who was determined to prove that the Vikings were not only superb seamen, but had sufficient technology to allow them to reach America. Somecritics accused Andersen of taking a few too many liberties with his ‘replica’, including adding extra topsails, and giving it a deeper keel than the original Gokstad ship. Nevertheless, the
Viking
would eventually make the crossing to America in less than a month, with relatively little alteration to its ninth-century design. 10
    Actually building and sailing a