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

time so no one would have been more than two or three miles from a refuge. At the same time there was a general movement of settlement away from the coast, a sure sign that piracy was endemic. The Viking Age may not have started in western Europe until 793 but something like it was already well under way in the Baltic Sea.
    The first half of the Germanic Iron Age is known as the Migration Period (400 – 500), after the series of Germanic migrations that resulted in the complete collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The ultimate cause of the Germanic migrations was the arrival c. 370 in eastern Europe of the Huns, a ferocious Turkic nomad people from Central Asia. Those tribes who could took flight in a desperate search for safer homelands, displacing other tribes and setting almost the whole Germanic world in motion. Some tribes were broken up and absorbed by others, and new ethnic identities were forged from ad hoc coalitions. Many tribes, including the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and Suevi, sought refuge in the Roman Empire, overwhelming its border defences and founding new kingdoms on its territory. The Huns never reached Scandinavia but the political chaos of the age created opportunities for the enterprising. Britain slipped out of Roman control in 410 and was left exposed to the Saxons, who seized land and began to settle the rich lands of the south-east and the Midlands. Saxons also took advantage of the chaos the invasions caused in Roman Gaul, settling in the Pas de Calais, Normandy, and on the River Loire. At the same time they raided as far north as the Orkney Islands, as far west as Ireland, and as far south as Aquitaine. The Angles soon joined the Saxons in Britain, settling along the east coast from East Anglia north to the Firth of Forth. So too did the Jutes, whose main settlements were probably in Kent. Another tribe from southern Scandinavia, the Heruls, launched pirate raids as far afield as Aquitaine and northern Spain but they made no known settlements. A branch of this well-travelled people had already migrated to Ukraine in the third century, and from there launched pirate raids around the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. Those Heruls who remained in Scandinavia were conquered by the Danes in the sixth century. This is most likely the period that sailing ships began to be used in Scandinavia as it is scarcely credible that the Angles, Jutes and Heruls should have undertaken such long voyages of settlement and piracy in rowing ships, taking weeks or months, when their Saxon neighbours were crossing the same seas, for the same purposes, in much swifter sailing ships.
    The age of Beowulf
    Scandinavian raiders were also busy much closer to home, raiding Frisia, a region on the North Sea coast now divided between Germany and the Netherlands. In c. 528, Frisia was raided by the Scandinavian king Hygelac, who went on to sail down the Rhine as far as Nijmegen before he was defeated and killed by the Franks. It is a sign that Scandinavia was now truly beginning to emerge from prehistory that Hygelac’s raid was recorded in four independent literary sources, including Gregory of Tours’ near contemporary History of the Franks and the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon epic poem ‘Beowulf’. Unfortunately, the sources don’t agree whose king Hygelac was. Gregory of Tours, and two other Frankish sources, describe Hygelac as a king of the Danes – their earliest appearance in history – but in ‘Beowulf’ he is called king of the Geats, that is the Götar, from southern Sweden, or even the Jutes of Jutland. In the poem the hero Beowulf is said to have taken part in the raid, swimming home after his king’s defeat, in full armour, underwater. Beowulf goes on to save the Danish king Hrothgar from the man-eating troll-like monster Grendel and his equally awful mother, become king of the Geats, and finally die slaying a dragon that was ravaging his lands. ‘Beowulf’ also describes another Danish raid