Vikings Where You Least Expect

The ‘Vikings’ are a pop-culture phenomenon forever associated with frigid, windswept fjords and bleak, boggy shorelines. They are of the North, perhaps even the extreme North, beyond the periphery of Roman authors and their world knowledge and so tarnished with the brush of being ‘beyond’ civilisation as it was understood between the first and fourth centuries. They were confined to cold, dark environs. Scandza – Scandinavia – was, even by the eighth century, still viewed as peripheral, and so these old perceptions retained their grip on people’s worldviews. So, moving into the ninth century, when Scandinavians and Balts started to make in-roads beyond their northern climes, they were associated forevermore with the ‘North’ as an idea; a domain home to devils and demons, cast from a different cloth to the rest of the world.

Remnants of the ‘Talaiot culture’ of the Balearic Islands: the Necrópolis de Son Real, Santa Margarita, Majorca. Ancient megaliths and tombs like this may have looked familiar to roaming vikingar, considering their broad similarities with prehistoric sites across Orkney and Atlantic Scotland. (Author’s collection, Forgotten Vikings, Amberley Publishing)

As we now know, however, the people we call the ‘Vikings’ certainly moved beyond cold, wet, and boggy environments. We might not always picture sun-kissed beaches and scorching deserts when we think of the Viking Age, but Scandinavian raiders and traders did very much make in-roads to such locations, where we least expect. Take North Africa, for example. In the late ninth century, fragmentary Irish chronicles record the appearance of ‘blue men’ in slave markets around the burgeoning port-town of Dublin, who had been ransomed following a military engagement in Nekor. These ‘blue men’ were people from North Africa who, like many unfortunate souls across the Early Medieval world, were kidnapped and sold into slavery along the trade routes that connected the Irish and Black Seas. ‘Vikings’ spent an awful lot of time in both of these waters; in the former, ruling over Dublin, Man, and the Hebrides as sea-kings, and in the latter, serving as mercenaries for the great city of Constantinople. Here in the city of cities, where imported olives, posh cheeseboards, and luxurious wine was consumed by opulent Mediterranean magnates, it would not be a rare sight to see Scandinavians in the tenth or eleventh centuries. One might even see them in another sea, still further east. Between 1040-1042 the Caspian Sea’s waves were ridden by longship steeds, as the Swedish warlord Yngvar the Far-Travelled mustered his men along a monumental expedition to Georgia to act as profiteers and pirates. Here, Yngvar’s forces aided in a civil war, besieged castles, and maybe sunbathed if they had the time. Sadly, it was not a tan but the plague these warriors picked up from warmer climes, with most succumbing to illness on the return journey, their legacies remembered in a few Swedish runestone inscriptions.

In England, as elsewhere across the Viking Age world, territorial borders were redefined. Sometimes these are recorded in land charters, or indicated by notable landmarks. It is thought that the name of The Bridestones, in Dalby Forest, Yorkshire, derives from Old West Norse for ‘the brink stones’ or ‘the edge stones’. These prominent sandstone outcrops dominate the Staindale skyline; it would be no surprise if they acted as the border between farmland in the fledgling Danelaw. (Author’s collection, Forgotten Vikings, Amberley Publishing)

Also remembered in fireside songs and sagas were raiders operating in Spain, which was during the Viking Age segmented between warring Christian and Muslim contingents. In the mid-ninth century, the Arabic city of Seville was ransacked, and the raiders were met with a vicious reprisal; twenty years later, another fleet may have met their ends off Gibraltar if a pseudo-legendary story about Bjorn Ironside is anything to go by. This larger-than-life character allegedly made it to Italy and even Alexandria in Egypt according to the Arabic source known as the Tarikh. Picturing him or his ilk (legendary archetypes like Ragnar Lodbrok, Erik Bloodaxe, and Harald Fairhair) in sunny, sub-tropical climates is entertaining, but it wouldn’t have been an impossible sight. Like us, maybe the ‘Vikings’ also enjoyed a classic two-week summer shindig. The Balearic Islands, popular tourist destinations today, were visited by raiders in the ninth century; when north Europeans descend on Ibiza for a summer’s worth of binge-drinking and revelling, perhaps there is an echo of viking activity whispered on the warm winds.

Born six years before the Battle of Hastings, King Eric ‘the Good’ of Denmark fell ill and died in Paphos, Cyprus, on pilgrimage to the Holy Land in Pilgrim’s islands like Geronisos would have been home to small animal shelters and artificial reservoirs in his day, several decades after the Viking Age proper, but still a time of intrepid exploration. (Author’s collection, Forgotten Vikings, Amberley Publishing)

Finally, there is even the suggestion that ‘Vikings’ visited the Azores and Madeira, based on the dubious presence of mice bones and pollen kernels dated between the ninth and eleventh centuries. When I wrote Forgotten Vikings, this evidence had yet to be challenged, but thanks to a recent publication it now has; refreshing questions are being raised about claims regarding a Scandinavian presence on these distant archipelagos. Even if disproved, and even if that fanciful dream of ‘Vikings’ on far-away volcanic islands is to die, the whole point of research is to discuss these things, to be sceptical and draw more eyes on ‘forgotten’ subtopics. We might not expect Scandinavian raiders and traders in warm, southerly environments, but they were here, and they deserve to be mentioned as frequently as the usual places they patrolled (England, France, the Baltic Sea, etc) as part of that wider Viking Age diaspora.

Forgotten Vikings by Alex Harvey is available for purchase now.