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The North Way
in search of Norway’s Viking heritage
by Rebecca Priestley
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I’m looking up at the smooth, dark, wooden prow of a 1,200-year-old Viking ship. Cameras flash all around me — the Viking Ship Museum, built to house three excavated ships, is one of Olso’s top tourist attractions. The ship I’m admiring is 70 feet long, sleek and imposing, with smooth curves and a coiled stem-post carved with elaborate dragon and serpent motifs. Powered by burly Norwegian oarsmen and a woolen sail, axe-hewn ships like this one carried boatloads of Vikings on raiding parties to the British Isles and on colonization journeys across the Atlantic.
This vessel, known as the Oseberg Ship, was excavated in 1904 from the richest Viking burial mound ever found. In a chamber behind the ship’s mast were the remains of two women — probably a Viking queen and her servant — dressed in fine clothing and laid out on feather beds. Also found on the ship were richly ornamented sleds, a loom, cooking utensils and food — two oxen, bread dough and some apples — to equip the women for their journey to the underworld.
The term Viking refers to Norse people living in the Viking Age, which began with the plundering of England’s Lindisfarne monastery in 793 and continued through the 1066 defeat of the Norwegian King Harald Sigurdsson at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England. Viking Age people were travelers, acquiring language, wealth and customs from other European cultures, and leaving an indelible cultural mark on the lands they first plundered and eventually colonized . . .
“Terrible ’angover this morning” we hear from one bearded, chainmailed fellow. They’re Englishmen — members of The Vikings, which is “the largest Dark Ages and Medieval Society in Europe,” one fellow tells us.
“Doing the battle of ’astings next week,” his mate chips in. This is these Vikings’ first visit to Norway, but they have plenty of home practice re-enacting Viking battles at York’s annual Viking festival.
The Norse-British connection is many hundreds of years old. In Viking Age Norway, overpopulation among the elite and the country’s limited resources meant the only way of gaining wealth and power was to take it from someone else or to emigrate. The Vikings who left Norway were aristocrats who could afford to fund and provision a ship. In the 9th and 10th centuries, whole families traveled with livestock, food and possessions to colonize new homes in the British Isles, the Faroe Islands and Iceland.
The notorious Eric the Red pushed even farther west. Exiled from Iceland for murder, he led a party to colonize Greenland. In the green southern fjords of this great island, he established two colonies that mysteriously died out after 300 years. His son Leif Eriksson was another adventurer, credited with being the first European to set foot in North America, in 999 A.D.
We’re not following any Viking migrations today — instead we’re traveling even farther back in time, to the home ground of many of these émigrés . . .
