Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 by John Haywood Read Free Book Online

closest to the border. Plunder from raids, Roman subsidies to friendly tribes, trade, and wages for mercenary service enriched the border tribes. Tribes further north raided and traded with the border tribes, so becoming enriched in turn. Those who led successful raids or gained control of the distribution of trade goods were soon set apart from the rest of society by their greater wealth and status. Roman writers, such as Tacitus, attest that the comitatus or war band became the central institution of Germanic society in this period. Known in Viking Age Scandinavia as the lið or hirð , the comitatus was made up of young warriors who entered the service of a chief or king. In return for their loyalty and military service the warriors of the comitatus expected to receive food and lodging, gifts of weapons and jewellery, and a share of war booty. The warriors swore loyalty to their chief for life but their loyalty was conditional on the chief fulfilling his side of the bargain. A chief who did not, or could not, reward his warriors would not have a comitatus for long. Chiefs who were poor warriors fell by the wayside, those who were good warriors consolidated their power because their success attracted more warriors, and a stronger comitatus led to more success in war. This dynamic created a violent and predatory society in which war was the surest route to wealth, status and power. Another effect was to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands, increasing competition between ambitious men within a tribe, and to encourage the merging of tribes. In some cases this was because a stronger tribe conquered and absorbed a weaker one, but just as often it was done voluntarily. Many tribes allied, forming coalitions to wage war more effectively. When their unity was cemented by success in war, these coalitions became the basis for new ethnic identities. The Saxons and the Franks, for example, both developed from tribal coalitions in this way.
    The Germanic Iron Age (400 – 800) was Scandinavia’s heroic age, a proto-historical period that was half remembered in legendary traditions of dragon-slaying warriors and great battles. At the beginning of the period the process of centralisation that had transformed the Germanic world had still not progressed far in Scandinavia. Jordanes listed more than twenty tribes living in the ‘island of Scandza’ in his history of the Goths, and this doesn’t include the Angles and Jutes who lived in Jutland, which he didn’t count as part of Scandza. Jordanes’ list is based ultimately on the testimony of Rodulf, the exiled king of a Norwegian tribe called the Rani. According to Jordanes, two tribes had already become pre-eminent, however: the Swedes or, as they called themselves, the Svear, and the Danes, whose territory then included Skåne and Blekinge in the far south of modern Sweden. Also prominent were the Götar, who lived between the Swedes and the Danes in Sweden’s densely forested Southern Uplands. Around eight tribes lived in Norway; their homelands can be identified with some certainty because they are etymologically related to the names of regions of modern Norway. The Raumarici most likely lived in Romerike, the Alogi in Hålogaland north of the Arctic Circle, the Rugi in Rogaland, and so on. Rodulf’s Rani probably lived in Romsdal, the valley of the River Rauma, in the west of the country. Thanks to its rugged geography, Norway remained a land of local tribes even at the beginning of the Viking Age. Elsewhere, most of the tribes named by Jordanes had vanished by this time. The Danes had absorbed the Angles and Jutes and another tribe mentioned by Jordanes called the Heruls, who lived between the Götar and the Danes. The Swedes and Götar had absorbed the rest. This was certainly not a peaceful process. Fortresses proliferated across Scandinavia – over 1,500 are known from this period. On the 80-mile-long island of Öland, nineteen stone ring-forts were built around this