The A to Z of the Vikings 17 ppsx

Earl Ulf was probably Cnut’s brother-in-law and the uncle of Harold Godwinsson, future king of England and is described as Cnut’s “protector” of the Danish kingdom; he apparently champi

clutch both ends of the hogback Some hogbacks, such as the

so-called Giant’s Grave from Penrith in Cumbria, appear to have been

part of larger monumental arrangements involving hogbacks and crosses The vast majority of the hogbacks seem, from their

orna-mentation, to date to the period c 925–1000, although the example

from Brechin, Tayside, Scotland has 11th-century features.

The distribution of the hogbacks is largely confined to northern England, with notable centers at Brompton and Lythe in North York-shire and Sockburn-on-Tees in County Durham There is, however, a group of hogbacks from central Scotland, including a group of five

from Govan (Glasgow), and single examples from Wales and Ire-land There are no Scandinavian hogbacks, and it appears that the

monument may represent an adaptation of solid stone shrines known from the British Isles The distribution of the hogbacks in northern England largely coincides with the distribution of Norwegian or Gaelic-Norse place-names, suggesting that Irish influence may be linked to the development of this “colonial” form of monument

HOLMGÁRD– R See NOVGOROD.

HOLY RIVER, BATTLE OF Battle fought in 1026 in the province

of Skåne in the southwest of present-day Sweden Cnut I the Great

was defeated in this battle by a Swedo-Norwegian alliance, led by

King Anund Jakob of Sweden and King Olaf Haraldsson of Nor-way An account of the battle, containing skaldic verse composed for Cnut by Óttar the Black and Sighvatrþþórðarson, is preserved

in Snorri’s Heimskringla The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also

men-tions Cnut’s defeat in an entry for 1025, although it names his

op-ponents as Ulf and Eilaf Earl Ulf was probably Cnut’s

brother-in-law (and the uncle of Harold Godwinsson, future king of England) and is described as Cnut’s “protector” of the Danish kingdom; he

apparently championed the cause of Cnut’s son, Harthacnut, in

Denmark, and was frustrated by Cnut’s long absences from

Den-mark Eilaf may have been Ulf’s brother Saxo Grammaticus’s

ac-count of the battle mentions a triple alliance between the Swedish and Norwegian kings and Earl Ulf Despite Cnut’s defeat, he was able to drive Olaf Haraldsson out of Norway and into exile just two years later

138 • HOLMGÁRD – R

HON HOARD The Hon hoard is the largest Viking-Age gold hoard

known from Scandinavia It was discovered in a bog at Hon in Buskerud, Norway, during the 19th century, where it was probably deposited during the second half of the ninth century The metalwork

is of the highest quality and includes a gold trefoil brooch of Car-olingian workmanship; a number of gold neck, arm, and finger rings

of mixed provenance (including Russian and Anglo-Saxon pieces);

several gold pendants inset with semiprecious stones; over 100 glass beads; and 20 gold or silver coins, all of which have had loops added

to them for suspension Very few of the objects are of Scandinavian workmanship On the basis of the coins and the composition of the hoard, it has been suggested that this was part of the heavy ransom paid to Vikings in France for the return of Abbot Louis of St Denis and his brother in 858

HORIK There were in fact two ninth-century kings of Denmark called

Horik, generally known as Horik I the Older (d 854) and Horik II the Younger (d 864–873) Horik the Older was the son of the Danish

king, Godfred, and according to the Royal Frankish Annals, he and

three of his brothers seized power in 813, driving out Harald Klak.

Frankish support for Harald Klak led to a brief period of shared

power c 819–826, but Horik forced Harald into exile once again in

826/7 By the 830s, all of Horik’s brothers seem to have been dead, and Horik himself had come to some kind of agreement with the

Frankish emperor, Louis the Pious However, following Louis’s

death and the resulting battle for power between his sons, Horik sacked Hamburg and ignored Frankish demands to stop his subjects

from raiding in Frankia Horik apparently allowed the German mis-sionary, Ansgar, to build churches in Hedeby and Ribe during the

850s Around the year 850, he was forced to share the rule of his

kingdom with two nephews A third nephew, Guthorm (Gudurm),

ar-rived in Denmark in 854, triggering a civil war between Horik and his nephews and resulting in Horik’s death

Little is known about Horik II the Younger, although in the

An-nals of Fulda he is described as a “small boy” and the only

mem-ber of the royal family to have survived the civil war He apparently refused to be baptized, but allowed missionary work to continue in his kingdom and sent gifts to Pope Nicholas II in 864 There is no

HORIK • 139

further information about Horik II after this, and very little is known about conditions in Denmark in general for much of the fol-lowing century

HOUSECARL (ON húskarl plural húskarlar) Name given to the

household troops of the kings in England from 1016–1066 and, in

the late 12th-century, it is found in the Danish Vederlov “Law of the

Hird,” which claims to go back to legal provisions made by Cnut I the Great The earliest evidence for the use of the term comes from

an account of the translation of the relics of Ælfheah of Canterbury in

1023 This late 11th-century account, by Osbern of Canterbury, records how the household troops (“called housecarls in the Danish tongue”) of Cnut created disturbances to distract people’s attention, guarded key points on the route the relics were transported, and ac-companied the body itself in case there was any attempt to stop its

movement from London to Canterbury Harthacnut apparently used

his housecarls to collect taxes in 1041, and when two were killed in Worcester, he sent an army and “almost all his housecarls” to punish the town However, while it used to be believed that the housecarls performed a purely military role in the households of Cnut, Harthac-nut, Edward the Confessor (d 1065), and Harold Godwinsson (d 1066), recent work has emphasized the nonmilitary contexts in which many housecarls appear As well as collecting tax for Harthac-nut, a number of housecarls, such as Bovi and Urk, appear in charters

as both witnesses and as recipients of land grants In Domesday Book,

some people are described as both housecarls and thegns in different

parts of the text, and both Bovi and Urk were also described as thegns

(ministri) This evidence suggests that the housecarls were not a

stand-ing army of mercenaries but rather a group of retainers that followed and supported the king at court and in the countryside

HOUSES The houses built and inhabited by the Vikings varied across

the Viking world, according to climate, available building materials, and function The most common kind of house was a rectangular structure (often with curved side walls), which might measure some

5 to 7 meters in width and between 15 and 75 meters in length, de-pending on the status and wealth of the householder This kind of dwelling is known as a longhouse and usually consisted of one main

140 • HOUSECARL

living room where all the inhabitants ate and slept and where house-hold tasks such as cooking and weaving were performed The two long walls of this room were generally lined with wall benches, built

up with earth and lined with wood, upon which people sat, ate, and slept Under the same roof, in rural communities, there was also a separate cattle byre (although toward the end of the Viking Age, ani-mal houses and living quarters were often in separate buildings), and there may also have been a small room for storing foods and other goods The longhouse was heated by a long hearth in the middle of the room, and smoke escaped from a small hole in the roof of the longhouse Lighting was supplied by the fire, oil lamps (using herring

or seal oil), and later on by wax candles There were often no win-dows in the longhouse, although there might be some very small holes left in the walls, covered by a translucent material such as thin, scraped, and stretched animal skin, that let in a little light The two exterior doors (to the byre and the main hall) were placed so as to minimize draughts, depending on the direction of the prevailing winds The main longhouse might be surrounded by several separate buildings with specialized functions, such as a smithy, a dairy, ser-vants’ quarters, shelter for small animals, and a bathhouse

In Sweden and Norway, where timber was in plentiful supply, these longhouses were generally of a solid blockhouse construction (horizontal logs with overlapping corners), using pine, and with a birch-bark and turf roof However, in Denmark, where the climate was milder and where there was less timber, the walls of houses were frequently of wattle construction—clay plaster put on to a framework

of upright wooden (usually oak) posts—with a roof of reeds or

thatch A reconstruction of a wattle-and-daub house from Hedeby

can be found at the Moesgård Museum, near Århus in Denmark In largely treeless Iceland, houses were built from turf, earth and stone, often partially sunken for insulation, and with walls measuring a

me-ter or more in thickness The Stöng farmhouse, preserved in volcanic

debris, is a good illustration of an Icelandic longhouse

HRÓLFR KRAKI, SAGA OF (ON Hrólfs saga kraka) One of the

so-called Sagas of Ancient Times It survives in some 44 manuscripts, the

earliest of which dates to the 17th century However, it is believed that

the saga was probably composed in Iceland around 1400 Certainly,

HRÓLFR KRAKI, SAGA OF • 141

the Icelandic monastic library of Möðruvellir lists this saga among its

collections in 1461 Snorri Sturluson refers to tales about Hrólfr in his

Skáldskaparmál and Saxo Grammaticus also describes the exploits

of Hrólfr in his translation of Bjárkamál, which suggests that stories

about this heroic Danish king were popular well before 1461 Indeed,

another reference to the king comes from the Book of Settlements

where Hrólfr’s sword, Skofnung, with which he was buried, is said to have been stolen by Skeggi of Midfjörd before he settled in Iceland It was apparently passed down in the family until one of Skeggi’s

de-scendants, Gellir (d c 1073), was buried with the sword at Roskilde,

near Lejre, in Denmark.

Hrólfr was king of Denmark in the sixth century, of the legendary Skjolding dynasty, with his seat at Lejre in Jutland His nickname,

kraki “pole-ladder,” was derived from his stature, which was said to

be tall, slim, and like a pole-ladder The saga includes stories about Hrólfr’s 12 champions and their role in Hrólfr’s conflict with the Swedish king, Adils, which eventually brought about their and Hrólfr’s death in battle However, much of the material of the saga is clearly mythical and magical, and the saga narrative is constructed

around sorcerers, trolls, elves, berserkers, and spells.

HRYNHENT (“accentuated verse”) Form of meter used in skaldic

poetry Hrynhent was the most important meter after dróttkvætt,

and was particularly popular in the 14th century Hrynhenda,

com-posed by Arnórr þþórðarson jarlaskáld, is the first surviving praise

poem in hrynhent and is actually named after the meter It was

com-posed in the mid-11th century in honor of Magnus the Good Olafs-son of Norway.

HUGIN (ON Huginn “thought”) One of Odin’s two ravens, the

other being Munin (ON Muninn “the thought”) Hugin appears in

the written sources, such as the Poetic Edda and skaldic verse,

more frequently than Munin In skaldic verse, the names Hugin and Munin are used to refer to ravens in general, usually in the context of battlefields where the fallen warriors are described as food for ravens Odin was the god of warfare and the battlefield, and his ravens were the birds of the battlefield Perhaps the most well-known reference to Hugin (and Munin) is in Snorri’s

142 • HRYNHENT

Gylfaginning, where it is said that the two birds fly around the

world every morning, collecting information, and then fly back and sit on Odin’s shoulders, whispering all that they have heard and seen Ravens also appear to have been a popular motif for war

banners: for example, Orkneyinga Saga (ch 12) refers to a magic

banner made for Earl Sigurd the Stout by his mother, which

brought him victory

HUMBER, RIVER Major estuary in northeast England, which formed

an important dividing line between the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of

Northumbria and Lindsey (northern Lincolnshire) Northumbria is

derived from the OE norð(an)hymbre “the people living to the north

of the Humber;” and the word, suðhymbri “the people living to the

south of the Humber,” is also found in, for example, the Anglo-Saxon

Chronicle, where on two occasions (s a 697, 702) it appears to refer

to Mercia The annal for 827, however, talks of King Ecgberht’s

con-quest of Mercia and “all that was south of the Humber.”

The Humber was an important sea-route for Viking invaders and

traders, connecting as it did with the Rivers Ouse and Trent This al-lowed the Vikings to sail their ships up river to the Northumbrian

capital, York, and down through the East Midlands to Nottingham,

one of the so-called Five Boroughs The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

mentions the Humber on eight occasions between 827 [829] and

1070 In 866, the Great Army is said to have crossed the mouth of the river on their way from East Anglia to York; in 942, the river is

mentioned in a poem commemorating the conquests of King Edmund

of England, where it is said to be one of the northern boundaries of

the kingdom of Wessex; in 993, a Viking army is said to have raided

at the mouth of the Humber; in 1013, Svein Forkbeard sailed north

from Kent, past East Anglia, up the Humber and down the Trent to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire, where he received the submission of the northeast English; in 1066, the river was the scene of a

con-frontation between Earl Edwin of Mercia and Earl Tostig, renegade Earl of Northumbria and ally of Harald Hard-Ruler of Norway; in

1069, a fleet of rebellious northerners sailed from the Humber up to York as part of the uprising against Norman rule; and finally, in 1070,

the invading fleet of King Svein Estrithsson of Denmark sailed

up the Humber before receiving the submission of “local people.”

HUMBER, RIVER • 143

HÚSDRÁPA (“House lay”) Skaldic poem composed in Iceland at the

end of the 10th century by Ulf Uggason The poem commemorates a new hall built by Olaf Peacock at Hjarðarholt and it describes the

mythological scenes that decorated the wall panels of this splendid

hall The setting for Ulf’s recital of the poem, a marriage feast for

Olaf Peacock’s daughter, Thurid, is described in Laxdæla Saga,

al-though this saga does not contain any of the poem However, Snorri Sturluson included 56 lines of the poem, mostly quoted in

half-stanza chunks, in his Prose Edda Three mythological subjects are mentioned in this drápa: Balder’s death and funeral, Thor’s en-counter with the World Serpent (see Midgard serpent), and an

oth-erwise unknown story of how the gods Loki and Heimdall took on the shape of seals and wrestled for the necklace, Brísingamen.

HVERGELMIR (ON Hvergelmir) Name of a spring, which may mean “the bubbling cauldron,” in Norse mythology Gylfaginning

provides two conflicting accounts of exactly where Hvergelmir was

located: in Niflheim and under the roots of Yggdrasil Eddic poetry

does not help to resolve this conflict; Grímnismál is the only poem to

mention it, and this poem simply describes Hvergelmir as being filled from the antlers of a stag, Eikþyrnir, who stands on the roof of Val-halla It also adds that all the rivers of the world had their source in

Hvergelmir

– I – IBN FADLAN. Arabic diplomat—sent by the caliph al-Muqtadir in Baghdad on an embassy to the Bulghars—who lived on the River Volga The king of the Bulghars had requested personal in-struction in Islam from the Caliph and help in the conin-struction of a mosque Ahmad ibn-Fadlan ibn al-Abbas ibn Rashid ibn Hammad was the secretary and religious instructor of the delegation His

diplo-matic log, Risala, famously describes a Rus community he

encoun-tered in an unnamed settlement on the Volga c 922 This vivid

eyewitness account, which forms about one-fifth of his report,

pro-vides considerable detail about the burial rituals and cremation in a ship of one of the Rus chieftains, which involved the ritual sacrifice

144 • HÚSDRÁPA

of one of his slave girls He also comments (positively) on the

ap-pearance and (negatively) on the hygiene of the Rus

Part of Ibn Fadlan’s account was included in a 13th-century

geo-graphical dictionary, Mu’ajam al-Buldan An 11th-century copy of the complete text of the Risala was discovered in Meshed, Iran, in the

early 20th century A 16th-century geographer, Amin Razi, is be-lieved to have had access to an even earlier copy of the diplomatic log

ICELAND The most important of the Scandinavian colonies in the

North Atlantic, Iceland lies about 570 nautical miles west of Norway, touching the Arctic Circle in the north Before the Viking coloniza-tion, the island seems only to have been populated by Irish hermits

who, according to the Book of the Icelanders by Ari Thorgilsson

“went away because they were not prepared to live here in company with heathen men.” Little else is known about the island before the

ninth century: Dicuil (see Book of the Measurement of the Earth)

may have been writing about Iceland when he described “Thule,” where the sun stayed above the horizon all day and night in summer The traditional account of the Scandinavian settlement of Iceland

is contained in a number of later, predominantly Icelandic, sources,

such as the Book of Settlements and the Book of the Icelanders.

While the latter attributes the colonization to “a Norwegian called

In-golf settled south in Reykjavik,” the Book of Settlements mentions

three other Vikings who appear to have reached Iceland before In-golf Arnason: two of these, Naddod and Gardar the Swede, were

driven by storms toward the island, but a third, Floki Vilgerdarson from Rogaland in southwest Norway, apparently set out to settle the island, taking three hallowed ravens as his guides He is said to have settled around Vatnsfjörd in the northwest, but the cold winter and spring destroyed the livestock he had brought with him, and, chris-tening the island, Iceland, he decided to return to Norway

Despite Floki’s unfortunate experience of the Icelandic winter, col-onization began in earnest In fact, the new settlers found a country where the coastal climate was relatively mild because of the Gulf Stream, which warms the sea and the air around the western coast of Iceland There was also fairly good land around the numerous fjörds and inlets, good enough to support livestock, and the sea too was also

ICELAND • 145

a valuable resource, providing fish, seals, walrus, whales, and sea birds Although today Iceland is largely treeless, there were birch forests on the island in the Viking Age, which provided building ma-terial, and this could be supplemented with driftwood washed up on the shores

The first settlement is dated by Ari to around the year 870, and the island is said to have been completely settled around sixty years later,

by about the year 930 Ari and Snorri Sturluson both consider the desire to escape from the tyranny of King Harald Fine-Hair as

the most important reason for this colonization process, but this is fairly certainly a later exaggeration covering more diverse and

complex motives The Book of Settlements lists some 430 separate

settlements that were established by these colonists As well as Nor-wegians, the settlers also included Scandinavians who had lived in

Britain, especially in Scotland and Hebrides, and in Ireland Con-sequently, some of the Norse settlers had Celtic wives or slaves, or

Celtic names, such as the eponymous hero of Njal’s Saga Celtic

names can also be found in some of the place-names of Iceland There is no evidence that any towns were established or developed

on Iceland in the Viking Age Icelanders instead traveled to Norway

to buy and sell goods Icelandic exports included walrus ivory, seal-skin, and other products derived from marine mammals, such as walrus-hide rope Icelandic wool was also an important export, and

the basic unit of measurement, the vaðmal, was based upon a length

of cloth Reykjavik did not become the Icelandic capital until 1918, and for most of the Viking Age it appears to have been a predomi-nantly rural settlement Archaeological excavation has given us some idea of what Icelandic farms were like In southern Iceland, in the Thjórsársalur valley, the eruption of the volcano, Mount Hekla, buried a number of Viking-Age buildings One of the well-preserved

farms was excavated out of the volcanic ash in 1939 at Stöng, and a

reconstruction of what it must have originally looked like has been built

As at home in Norway, the new society organized itself around

lo-cal legal assemblies, lo-called things The country was divided into

four, and each quarter had three or four things, under local chieftains,

called goði As well as providing secular leadership, people also

gathered in the halls of their goði for feasts to mark the seasons and

146 • ICELAND

to worship their gods There was also a national assembly called the

Althing at which the most important legal decisions were made and disputes settled It was at the Althing that Christianity was formally

accepted c 1000 With the advent of Christianity, churches were built

and schools were founded for priests to study the new religion It was these places that became the great literary centers of medieval Ice-land, where large numbers of sagas, poems, and historical and reli-gious writings were produced

In keeping with the colonists’ apparent desire to rule themselves, there were no kings of Iceland Nevertheless, Iceland remained closely tied to Norway by bonds of family and by economics Much

of Iceland’s trade was with the motherland, and the Norwegian royal court was the place for the young, ambitious Icelander to go It was

the Icelanders who wrote the history of the Norwegian kings (see

Kings’ Sagas) and much of the skaldic poetry about these kings.

However, the Middle Ages saw the ideals of the free Icelandic re-public collapse into civil war and politicking, and this lead ultimately

to the republic’s incorporation into the kingdom of Norway in 1262–1264

IDUN (ON Iððunn “the rejuvenating one”) Goddess of the Æsir, who

was married to Bragi, and whose main role it was to guard the apples

of youth that the gods needed in order to stay young Very little is

known about this goddess, and Snorri Sturluson recounts just one

myth involving Idun in his Prose Edda This relates how Idun and

her apples were stolen by Loki and the giant, þjazi Loki was

per-suaded, on pain of death or torture, by the gods to bring her back, and rescued her in the form of a falcon (he borrowed this form from

Freya) Pursued by þjazi, in the shape of an eagle, Loki carried Idun back to Asgard in the form of a nut.

INGLEBY HEATH Site of a group of some 60 burial mounds on the

River Trent in Derbyshire, England, partially excavated in the 1850s, 1940s, 1950s, and which was investigated more recently in the 1980s

The men and women buried in these mounds had been cremated,

making the Ingleby Heath burials the only definite examples of

Viking cremations in England The burials also contained the traces

of burned animal bones and the remains of grave goods, including two

INGLEBY HEATH • 147