There is still a trend, especially evident in the culture popular, of presenting Viking societies as pseudo-primitive constellations that gradually became civilized through contact with the Christian world. Traditional discourse holds that the Vikings began to discover different parts of Europe as they raided the West or began to follow the Russian rivers to the borders of Asia and the Byzantine Empire. However, even among pre-Viking societies there were regular contacts with other regions throughout the North Sea, the Baltic and beyond. Objects from as far away as Asia or Africa were highly prized and the existence of the main kingdoms of Europe was well known.
The Vendel period:Scandinavia before the Vikings
The period preceding the Viking Age in Scandinavia has different names. The Swedes call it the Vendel period , starting from a well-known necropolis; the Danes, for their part, knew him as the Late Germanic; while the Norwegians called it the Merovingian period . In Sweden, this stage is especially known for the magnificent ship burials that characterize it, especially those from Vendel, which give the period its name. In them, rich warriors were buried together with complete panoplies, household objects and a large number and variety of animals such as horses, dogs, hawks and owls for hunting or livestock; symbols of wealth and well-being. The graves are magnificent evidence of the material culture of the period and were the forerunner of later Viking ship burials, and may even have served as the inspiration for the even more famous ship graves in Norway.
But boat graves are not very numerous in the Vendel period, and most of them have been found along the Fyris river basin in Sweden. central. In contrast, more than 99% of those buried in Scandinavia were cremated , which means that their remains are very fragmentary or appear melted as a result of the heat of the pyre. This was the vast majority of burials from the Vendel period found until recently and, for a long time, archaeologists hardly found remains of settlements corresponding to this stage but, fortunately, this situation has changed recently.
The Vendel period traditionally places its beginning around the year 550 and ends a few decades before 800. Its start, therefore, occurs at a time when many European regions are experiencing dynamic and turbulent events that have an effect on the populations of the north. However, the changes in the European scene probably had a different effect on the different regions of Scandinavia depending on their connections with the outside world. For natural reasons, and as is the case today, Denmark and Norway had more contact with people from the North Sea, while the Swedes interacted more with people from the Baltic or Eastern regions. In the case at hand, it was Swedish society that underwent the greatest transformation.
In the turbulent stage of the Era of Migration [N. of the E.:in Norway and Sweden it includes grosso modo between 400 and 550 AD. C. and takes its name from the barbarian invasions of the disjointed Roman empire, with subsequent population movements as a result of these] Eastern Norsemen already had contacts with Eastern Europe. There are numerous finds of imported glass vessels and other objects from places as remote as the Black Sea that certify this. Many Roman gold coins found, particularly on the islands of Gotland and Öland, suggest that Scandinavian warriors also participated in the raids that took place in the late Roman Empire. But the arrival of oriental materials quickly stopped around the year 550, coinciding with the last great event that occurred during the Age of Migrations. The Avars eventually came to threaten Constantinople itself (see “Barbarii ad portas . The Avar-Sasanian site of 626” in Desperta Ferro Antigua y Medieval No. 4) and prompted other peoples to emigrate. Thus, for example, the Lombard confederation moved to northern Italy, where it established a new kingdom. These events also encouraged a great migration of Slavic-speaking peoples who settled on the southern coast of the Baltic, in the territories now occupied by Poland and East Germany; All this probably meant that the trade networks in the Baltic were altered, causing the Scandinavians some problems in continuing their eastern trade. In such conditions, it seems that they began to look more and more insistently towards the North Sea region and other territories of Western Europe that seemed more stable, since the Merovingian, Visigothic and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were expanding and well established. . Culturally, we are experiencing a very interesting stage that involves the westernization of art, imports and social expression throughout Scandinavia. It is also a kind of prequel to the strong influence that Carolingian culture will have on Scandinavia in the Viking Age , about 200 years later.
A stage of changes
From an external perspective, Scandinavia has often been considered as a homogeneous region but, in reality, it is a very diverse territory surrounded by the Atlantic in the West and the Baltic in the East. The climate and vegetation of the southern part are similar to those of the Central European regions, while in the north the climate is arctic. Most people spoke dialects of a Germanic language, but geographically Finno-Ugric dialects were dominant in an equally large region in the less populated north. It is the language used by the ancestors of the Sami people [N. of the E.:sometimes, despite being less successful, also known as Lapps].
The basic economy of these societies has been farming, fishing and hunting for millennia, although important signs of change are observed in society after 550 , ranging from great technical innovations to radical changes in settlement patterns, the rise of a new elite, and a profound increase in the importation of luxury goods and raw materials.
This process is much more evident in central Sweden, where numerous investigations in necropolises and settlements make it easy to observe these changes. This particular area is particularly young, since it was submerged by ice in the last ice age. When the land resurfaced, some strips of fertile land exposed to the sea were gradually colonized. The valleys were already densely populated from the First Iron Age and were completely reorganized in the 6th century AD. C., when the old scattered farms were abandoned. However, they did so to concentrate on elevated positions with respect to the landscape, and their remains remain there to this day. It is, therefore, a large-scale territorial reform that even today does not have a completely satisfactory explanation. Some researchers relate it to a period of intense cold that occurred around 536, while others believe that it is a longer and more complex process.
In any case, this major reorganization of the farms seems to coincide with a desire on the part of the people who occupied the territory to express their status in a much more visible way. It is a period in which the elite builds great burial mounds after burning tons of human and animal flesh in immense funeral pyres that were consumed in the fire. Some, on the other hand, preferred not to be cremated and were buried in large ships. Thus, these people expressed not only their individual status through the weapons and jewelry that accompanied them, but also by adding animals, horses, and kitchen equipment or tools in a burial chamber or on a huge pyre. It is very possible that the middle class also followed them in this type of practice. In most of the finds in the necropolis, buried people are documented –both men and women– accompanied by a horse, dogs and some sheep, goats or pigs.
The place where this new era is most evident is in Gamla Uppsala , where its leaders built, for nearly a hundred years, huge burial mounds to house their remains. This early royal dynasty became legendary and its men were called in the Viking Age the Ynglingar, mythical kings who traced their lineage back to the god Frey himself. The aristocrats of this place not only built great tombs, but also invested in their stately palaces. As with the burial mounds, they wanted to make their houses more visible on the ground, so they built large artificial terraces on which to place them. The largest mansions, which have been documented, in Gamla Uppsala (Sweden) and Lejre (Denmark), cover large areas of land and include different buildings that house the residences of the leaders, workshops for blacksmiths, jewelers and other craftsmen and special buildings for the cult, in addition to the necessary infrastructure for the logistical maintenance of these protopalaces. Its most prominent buildings were the spacious halls used for official ceremonies and great feasts. They were much larger than many later medieval stone buildings and, in this case, were built of wood. The only remains that are clearly visible today correspond to its terraces built with piled earth.
The emergence of this new settlement pattern for elites came hand in hand with some important technological changes . The most obvious of these is the increase in the use of iron, whose production in forested regions is experiencing an important boom that is clearly reflected in the settlements and necropolises. In the early stages of the Iron Age it was common for practically all the iron to be recycled, but in the Vendel period we see a different pattern, in which people began to discard some of the now cheaper remains or amortized them over time. their graves. It seems that this iron surplus generated a certain desire for experimentation. Carpenter's axes would be larger, large iron cauldrons were built, and elaborate ornaments were added to shields. It is probably not a coincidence that the first ship burials built using the clinker technique – which assumes that the hull is made up of planks overlapped and riveted together – correspond to the Vendel period. In fact, this is a technique perceived as c characteristic of Viking naval architecture and known since the Low Roman Empire, but it is in the Vendel period when its use became widespread.
Some time ago this period was conceived as poor, partly due to the scarcity of gold objects that circulated more frequently in the Roman period and the Age of Migrations. However, it seems that the gold trade decreased throughout the European territory, while other imports multiplied. This is the case, for example, with glass, necklace beads, metals and fabrics from places as distant as India or the Red Sea. Most imports of luxury goods, like glass for bead production, probably came to Scandinavia from the North Sea region, while some Mediterranean products came via the trade routes of the current French, Italian or even Spanish and Portuguese coasts. In contrast, Scandinavian products are quite rare in Western Europe, probably because in many cases they were raw materials such as fur, iron, or high-value live animals such as falcons, but not manufactured objects. There is a major exception to this rule in the form of a luxurious Scandinavian helmet and shield found on the Sutton Hoo burial ship in England. These objects suggest that this lord either had a Scandinavian ancestor, or received the weapons as a diplomatic gift. In any case, both imports and exports show that the Vikings plundered in the West those regions with which their ancestors had traded.
A characteristic detail of the Viking world are the piles of silver and oriental beads that flowed into Scandinavia, especially from the Middle East. A good part of them arrived through the Russian rivers as a result of the Viking trade with the Abbasid caliphs , a new superpower based in Baghdad whose traders reached places like Mozambique or the arctic regions of Scandinavia. However, it is not easy to find oriental imports from Russia, Poland or beyond in the Scandinavia of the Vendel period. There are some materials from the Byzantine area or Egypt, but these objects could also have come from the west. Instead, we do detect strong evidence of a Scandinavian presence and interaction with regions such as Finland or the Baltic states. Thus, some tombs found in present-day Estonia and Latvia even indicate the existence of settlements with a population from central Sweden or the island of Gotland.
The evidence of the war in the Vendel period For a long time they have been quite modest compared to those of the Viking Age, but we know that martial practice was something highly valued by the societies of this time and we see it reflected in the rites, the art and, of course, in the funerary trousseau A few years ago, however, an important discovery related to this aspect took place. Estonian archaeologists discovered two burial ships on the island of Saaremaa, both built in the style of eastern Swedish burial ships, but in this case, instead of containing a single individual, each of them housed the bodies of several warriors. buried around 750, some fifty years before the first Viking raids on Britain. Materials and anthropological analysis indicated that the warriors came from the same region in which these ship burials were characteristic:central Sweden around Uppsala. Therefore, the warriors of Salme were undoubtedly part of a military expedition to Saaremaa. Some of them even preserved evidence of war injuries that probably caused their death. Contrary to other recent finds of Viking mass graves in England, these burials show no signs of a defeated military party or that their graves were hastily constructed. One of the ships was unfortunately partially damaged, but in the other thirty-four occupant warriors were found covered by shields and with their weapons laid aside, in the manner of normal funeral ships. We don't know if this army or military party stayed in Saaremaa for a long time, but it is clear that they were in no hurry to leave and took their time to properly bury their dead.
Recap
The Vendel period is fairly unknown outside of Scandinavia, except for commonly depicted helmets (often mistakenly called “Viking helmets”) and weapons found on burial ships. In this article we have tried to show how some of the features considered characteristic of the Viking period are actually much earlier. The Scandinavia of Vendel's period had well-organized and technologically well-prepared societies to carry out enterprises beyond the borders of Scandinavia.
Perhaps what most separates the Vendel and Viking periods is that the early Vikings believed they could raid regions they knew through trade and previous sojourns. But the Viking expansion coincided with a sharp increase in trade throughout the ancient world and created a huge demand for Scandinavian trade goods, including slaves. Probably one of the reasons that encouraged the expansion and the war between the Vikings was the need to expand their trade. Higher demand requires some expansion, exploitation, and often conflict resolution. Thus the supply of fur in Scandinavia was perhaps insufficient compared with that of the great eastern regions, and the obtaining of slaves, gold, and silver was evidently easier by force than by trade. But there was also, of course, the prospect of obtaining land, the most precious commodity in a world where agriculture was the main way of life.
Bibliography
- Brink, S.; Price, N. (eds) (2008):The Viking World. London-New York:Routledge.
- Lamm, J.P.; Nordström, H. Å. (eds) (1981):Vendel period studies:transactions of the Boat-grave symposium in Stockholm. Stockholm.
- Ljungkvist, J. (2008):“Continental imports to Scandinavia. Patterns and changes between 400-800 AD”, in Quast, D. (ed.):Thirteen International Studies on Early Medieval Mobility, Monographien des Römisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums, Band 78. Mainz, pp. 263-282.
- Ljungkvist, J.; Frölund, P. (2016):“Gamla Uppsala – the emergence of a center and a magnate complex”, Journal of Archeology and Ancient History, 16, pp. 2-29.
- Price, D.; Peets, J.; Allmae, R.; Maldre, L. (2016):“Isotopic provenancing of the Salme ship burials in Pre-Viking Age Estonia”, Antiquity , Vol. 90, Issue 352, pgs. 1022-1037.