In 1992, on a school trip to the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, Norway, I lagged behind my class because the stern of the Gokstad ship had completely transfixed me: impossibly big, impossibly old, and impossibly beautiful. At home, I was reading the novel Taken by Vikings about two Irish children taken as slaves and brought back to Norway on a ship just like this one. If I had been less well behaved, I would have reached out to touch it: a darkened plank of wood as an actual, physical link between me and my distant forebears. That visit sparked my love for archaeology but my interest in the Vikings soon waned. Their story was already written, and despite the beauty of the objects, the violent, bearded raiders were of little interest to me. The real-life inspirations for those fictional enslaved children had left little trace and surely, there was nothing new to discover? Turns out, this was completely wrong.
We know the Vikings left an indelible mark on northern Europe and especially England, with history books typically painting a definitive picture of the sequence of events. But when you unravel those narratives and interrogate the evidence, it’s clear how little we actually know about the real people, the real lives, of those who made up the Viking Age. In the west, the story is very much one told from the top down, through the likes of publicists working for Alfred the Great and his ilk, describing battles, raids, and political conquest. Yet at the same time, Scandinavian settlers quietly melded into the landscape, physically and metaphorically. So quietly, in fact, that we can’t even agree on how many of them there were. Throughout the past century, academics have fiercely debated the scale of the Viking migrations. Did they count in just a few shiploads or did the armies and settlers number in the tens of thousands? New DNA evidence now suggests the latter. What most academics were very clear on, however, is that the women stayed at home, tending the farm while their menfolk left for distant shores. Now, it turns out that this was wrong too. Over the past decade, metal detectorists have uncovered female jewellery of types worn by Scandinavian women in the hundreds, dramatically changing our understanding of who those migrants were. The objects most likely to have arrived on the clothes of travelling women.
Similar proof comes from the bones themselves. We are like walking diaries of our lives, and the stories preserved in our bones remain there for millennia to come. Every time we eat and drink, subtle chemical signals from our diets make their way into our skin, hair, and bones. Isotopes from the water I drank in Norway as a child are now locked into the enamel in my teeth, forming a record of where I was when my permanent teeth developed. My children’s reflect their upbringing in south-west England: their status as second-generation migrants can be revealed in the combination of their DNA and the isotopes in their enamel. This form of evidence from Viking Age skeletons shows us not just that the raiders and settlers were of diverse origins - some even from beyond Scandinavia - but also that women were an extensive part of the migrations too. In a more tragic case from Derbyshire, the teeth of four juveniles who met a violent end in the 9th century and were buried together, showed that they came from four entirely different locations. Perhaps this is one of those untold stories of enslaved children?
In 2021, the Vikings are more popular than ever. From Bernard Cornwell’s The Last Kingdom, to the recent computer game AC Valhalla, they are everywhere. Even the medieval Icelandic sagas were fictional narratives: the story of Ragnar Lothbrok made famous by the TV show Vikings was invented, or at least heavily embellished, for the purpose of entertainment back in the 13th century. In the realm of science, you can now get a DNA test to tell you – allegedly and problematically – how many percent Viking you are. But not all interest in the Vikings is benevolent and the Vikings have been used and abused for almost a century. Leading up to the second world war, the blue-eyed, blonde warrior became the perfect poster child for Hitler's Third Reich, while Norway's Viking burial mounds formed the backdrop for Nazi party rallies. Museum curators were sent to prison and internment camps for hiding Viking artefacts in a mine in the mountains and there's even a rumour that Himmler tried to have my beloved ships moved to Berlin. On the Eastern front, Hitler's efforts to expand into Slavic territory had him grasping for a Germanic claim to heritage. Because here, too, the Scandinavians had a significant impact: The Rus', the founders of modern-day Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, may have hailed from Scandinavia: something that was vehemently denied by Stalin and subsequent Soviet historians. And it is here, in the East, that the real untold story lies: The story of the thousands of journeys up and down the eastern rivers, bringing goods, silver, and people (with or without their consent) across the spidery network of rivers stretching to the Silk Roads. What is new now, in a post-Soviet era, is that we finally have the access and methods to begin to tell it. Including the story of a journey that brought a tiny carnelian bead from India and all the way to rural Derbyshire.
Despite what the journalists’ headlines are always trying to tell us, nothing we discover will ever rewrite history, because we are constantly writing it, living it. To appropriate the words of archaeologist Jaquetta Hawkes, who wrote about Stonehenge: Every generation gets the Viking Age it deserves – or desires. River Kings tells the story of ours.