Aztecs, Vikings, Graves and Mammoths by Mary Hoffman

March can't seem to decide if it's coming in like a lion or a lamb. While it makes up its mind, I want to fill you in a bit on what's happening on The History Girls in the next 31 days.

Unusually we have not one but TWO competitions, to make up for the fact that February had its usual 28 days and no scope for a guest.

On March 4th, Sophia Bennett will be talking about her YA novel featuring the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Following Ophelia and asking a competition question. Then, on 29th we will be having a guest post and competition from Georgia Hunter.

On 18th March, I am swapping my usual first of the month post with Celia Rees and she will post on 1st April. The reason for this is a meeting at the Society of Authors on 16th March, Past Imperfect, called by Histeria, a group to which I also belong. The meeting is specifically to talk about historical fiction for children and Young Adults and will be Chaired by Kevin Crossley-Holland, who was our first ever History Boy (our first male guest).

So lots for you to look out for.

In the meantime, I'm giving you a round up of history-related stories I've read about this month.

First up, the search for the grave of James the First of Scotland:

National Gallery of Scotland

Ever since the skeleton of Richard the Third was excavated from a Leicestershire car park, the quest to find the resting place of other dead monarchs has become the new metal-detecting. You can read the full story here. A hostage, a victim of assassination and father of eight, he was married to Joan Beaufort (granddaughter of John of Gaunt), whose grave is also being sought.

The last resting-place of Margaret Tudor, Henry the Eighth's sister and another Queen of Scots, might also be discovered.

Next, two great English 16th century names together: Thomas Tallis and Katherine Parr. This fascinating story begins in 1976 when some papers were discovered in a wall at Corpus Christi College Oxford and identified as music by the Tudor composer.

Only recently were the words confirmed to be by Henry the Eighth's last queen, who had translated the Psalms into English in 1544 and published them anonymously.

The shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction will be announced this month. Here is the longlist:

Jo Baker A Country Road, A Tree (Doubleday)
Julian Barnes The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape)
Sebastian Barry Days Without End (Faber)
Richard Francis Crane Pond (Europa)
Linda Grant The Dark Circle (Virago)
Charlotte Hobson The Vanishing Futurist (Faber)
Hannah Kent The Good People (Picador Australia)
Ed O’Loughlin Minds of Winter (riverrun)
Sarah Perry The Essex Serpent (Profile)
Dominic Smith The Last Painting of Sara de Vos (Allen & Unwin Australia)
Francis Spufford Golden Hill (Faber)
Graham Swift Mothering Sunday (Scribner)
Rose Tremain The Gustav Sonata (Chatto & Windus)

A Harvard team of scientists has claimed to be able to make woolly mammoths "de-extinct" within two years. The boast created some scepticism.

Mammoth at Ecomuseum in Rousse, Bulgaria. Photo by Tiia Monto

Could the Aztecs have died out because of Salmonella? We are all familiar with the idea that colonists bring weapons with them that are more deadly than guns and swords but this is a new theory. It's not yet confirmed but interesting.

In 2011 a Viking Boat Burial was unearthed in the appropriately named Swordle Bay in Scotland. A first report has just been issued describing the process of such a burial, the status of the corpse and the type of grave goods that were burial with him (they were rarely female).

Photograph of the Ardnamurchan Viking boat grave site, near Ockle in Scotland, taken by Jon Haylett.

(I acknowledge History's Headlines in History as the source for some of the above)

"My Era's Better Than Your Era": reported by Penny Dolan

I’ve been writing my Christmas List, as requested by some nearest and dearest, and as ever, the list is mostly books, However, as I scan down the titles, I can see I’m not being very loyal to the Victorian setting of my work-in-progress. I am very easily lured away by the excitement and interest of a different period.

So I was intrigued when I heard four historians defending a chosen era recently.

Which era did they claim was "the best"?

Ben Kane chose the Romans for their amazing influence on the world, and for their empire which lasted two and a half thousand years. The Roman legions were bold fighters, defeating the German tribes who wouldn’t pay taxes. Their language, Latin, underpins the English, French, Spanish and Italian languages, wherever they have spread across the world. They had a good legal system, even if it was largely borrowed from the Greeks. They built aquaducts and miles of roads and impressive buildings which can still be seen today. Not only that, he said, but there are a host of great tales about the Romans from the well-known legends and histories through to interesting small stories, such as the Roman cow that ran up to the third storey of a block of flats and jumped off into the street below, or the fact that famous gladiators would sell small bottles of their sweat to rich ladies. Not only that, but the Roman era can also boast of that political & military genius, Julius Caesar.

Janina Ramirez was roused to defend the era of the Vikings. They were, she said, the roots of the British identity. She agreed that the Vikings - especially with the destruction of Lindisfarne - had had a bad press but the Viking invaders only took gold and treasures at the start. Over thirty years, they became cosmopolitan and cultured, she said, settling and trading and establishing the area known as the Danelaw, Although the Romans classifying the Vikings as Barbarians, that was because the Romans simply viewed any other culture as un-civilised. Janina felt that the Vikings were different and fascinating. They were the first to reach America, Russia and North Africa; their skills included the fine boat-building, metalwork and jewellery while their sagas and literature  show a modernity about their language and are evidence of the Vikings great love of learning. Janina spoke about the role and respect of women within the Viking culture, demonstrated in Queen Emma of Norway, whose marriage to Cnut, the King of Denmark and England created an ultimate power couple. That long and successful reign so transformed the country that in many ways, Janina claimed, the Vikings have never left but exist deep within the culture and landscape of the British Isles.

S.J.Parris said she hardly needed to suggest the importance of the Tudor era. The sexual and religious politics of that era explain why England is not now a small colony of Spain, and why we enjoy the religious freedoms of today.

It is hard now, she suggested, to understand the feeling among people back in 1580, when the Protestant faith was still seen as just a passing fad. Many went along with the new religion because of the need to keep their head on their shoulders. It was an insecure time. Many of the Catholic families believed that the whole of Protestant England hung on the “person” of the King. If only Queen Elizabeth could be removed, they felt, all would be well, especially with Mary Queen of Scots waiting in the wings.  .

Moreover, the Pope had issued a Papal Bull, declaring Elizabeth’s reign illegal and implying that killing her would not be a sin. With religious schools on continent eagerly sending their students to convert Protestants and drumming up support for the Catholics once Elizabeth had been assassinated, there was no shortage of young men glad to do the deed.

So, said S,J, Parris, the Tudor age saw the beginning of modern espionage, in the person of Sir Francis Walsingham. He was, she said, quoting the Bond franchise, “the first M”. Although his grandfather was a common vintner and tradesman, Walsingham himself became central to the safety of England.  Using a system of spies and ciphers and dead letter boxes, he set up a centralised intelligence system that led to the uncovering of treason such as the Babbington plot. This network helped the Tudor age become an era rich in exploration, science and intellectual growth.

Edwin Thomas, coming last on the list, spoke of the Ancient Greeks. Their culture, he pointed out, lay behind the grandeur of Rome. The Greeks were cosmopolitan globetrotters, valuing intellectual freedom and if we were to judge the best era as the one whose influence lasted longest, it was possible to see examples of Greek architecture, such as perfect Grecian pilasters, on many buildings around town. The Greeks, being great ship builders, invented the tri-reme. They fought many military wars of defence, including those against the Turks, a conflict that still has echoes in that area to this day. Without the Greeks, Thomas suggested, we could have been a colony of Iran. The Greek culture fed deep into the cultures of the Mediterranean and Britain, and their ferment of the Greek intellectual ideas still speaks to us today: witness the series of Greek plays running at The Almeida theatre on London. Democracy existed in Ancient Greece, he said, but did not reach England until the nineteenth century, and we have only just caught up, he claimed, with their relaxed attitude to sexuality. Besides, he added, think of the weather in Greece, a climate that allowed the establishment of open air symposiums, and to the teachings of Socrates and Plato.

I must admit that novelist Antonia Hodgson was so busy keeping the peace between these four passionate arguments that she had no time to defend “her” era - the eighteenth century - during this "contest" at Harrogate’s History Festival.Janina won the vote, mainly because she stressed the role of women in the Viking era which rather won this particular audience.

I wonder what era would be your personal favourite - or maybe it is really is impossible to choose?

Norse-Style Ploughing

by Marie-Louise Jensen


I always get excited when I learn something new about one of the eras I write about. Of course there's masses I don't know, but some things reshape your view of the past more than others.
I've written three books about Vikings and am beginning a fourth for younger readers at present. I haven't researched agriculture in huge detail. I know which animals were domesticated and taken to Iceland during the era of settlement and I know which crops were grown across Scandinavia. But a chance reference of mine to a plough threw up a query from my editors and I discovered I knew very little about the agricultural methods of the Viking age.  
I discovered a wealth of rather contradictory information. Firstly, that the Vikings were known for using horses for ploughing rather than strong but slow oxen. It got the job done faster and left more time for raiding during the summer. However, the modern-style collar which enables horses to pull the plough safely had not yet been invented. So horses used for ploughing often became injured. Oxen were less prone to injury.
It appears to possibly be the case that while the Vikings used horses (and ploughs) for ploughing in the European countries they settled, they continued to use oxen in Scandinavia.
I was also fascinated to read that throughout the Norse era, the archaeological evidence points to the fact that ploughs weren't used in the Viking home countries - there they were still using a forerunner of the plough known as an ard (arðr) which scratched furrows into the soil rather than turning it as a plough does. A field near the Viking settlement of Lindholm Høje in Denmark was uncovered from a 900-year-old sand drift recently and found preserved as it had been when the sand blew over it - recently furrowed by an ard for planting.
The evidence points to the same tools and methods being used throughout Scandinavia in the Norse era, certainly in Icelamd. And an ox was used with an ard - the field worker walking beside the ox as he drew it.
So, given that my story is set in Iceland, I probably need to mention an ox, not a horse and almost certainly an ard not a plough.
I also learned two other fascinating facts. Viking-age sheep were tiny and horses were the only animals the Vikings selectively bred on Iceland.
Research really is an education.

Werewolves

by Marie-Louise Jensen


I had a new book out in late July. Which was weird because I didn't see it until mid August because I was in Europe when it appeared.
I arrived at a friend's house in Germany and she (being a wonderful friend) had ordered a copy. That was my first glimpse of the print edition. Cue squeaks of excitement.

The book is a short novel for younger readers and was originally written as an interactive e-book for 10-11 year olds in schools.
Educational publishing - that strange animal, where not offending religious schools takes precedence over what people believed in the past.

Because let's not beat about the bush; the Norse believed in shape-shifting. In the saga of Egil Skallagrimson (not a tale for the faint hearted and certainly not for children) we are told in quite a matter of fact way that Egil's grandfather was known to be a shape-shifter. He was even called Kveld-Ulf (Evening Wolf.) Egil himself has beserker tendencies and behaves a lot more like a werewolf than a man a lot of the time, splitting enemies heads open with axes and other charming incidents.

The Christanisation of Iceland happened peacefully shortly after his death and his son had his body exhumed and reburied near the chapel that was built on his land. I can't believe he'd have been happy with that. He was a true pagan. Forgiveness and meekness were totally alien to him.

By all accounts, the official acceptance of Christianity in Iceland was a formality. The country was threatened with conversion by force from Norway if the population didn't accept the new god. Sensibly, they accepted him and privately continued with their worship of the Norse gods for many years. To this day, the majority of Icelanders confess to believing in 'The Hidden Folk,' - elves.

But my 'werewolf' wasn't allowed to be real. Which was fine. It made for a perfectly good mystery story anyway. But the people of Viking-age Iceland would have had no trouble believing in werewolves. I should think they'd have been more astonished if you said such things didn't exist. Even after the arrival of Christianity. Werewolves, trolls, elves, ghosts and other supernatural beings were an indisputable part of the rich and brutal fabric of their world.

The Viking Faeroes

by Marie-Louise Jensen

For a number of years, I had a bit of an obsession with the Faeroe Islands, dating from receiving a postcard from there aged 20. The islands looked so weird and wonderful, distinctive green mountains rising steeply out of the sea, and I instantly wanted to visit.

It was 20 years before I got there, but in the intervening time, I read a fair bit of Faeroese literature (in Danish) and was generally fascinated by the remoteness of the islands and the isolated life there. A life that was isolated not just from other countries but by being a series of islands with treacherous seas running between them.

In the Viking era, the islands must have seemed less of a remote outpost than they do now, despite all that cheap flights and bridge-building between islands by the Danish government can do. The Fareoes were very central in the North Atlantic trade and exploration routes - a handy stop over on a voyage to Iceland, Greenland or even Scotland from the rest of Scandinavia.

The Vikings settled them early - duly driving out the Irish monks, as they did in Iceland. They even had their own saga - Faereyinga Saga - though the manuscript has sadly been lost.
In the sagas where they are mentioned, ships stop over on their way to Iceland, and I was inspired by that for my travellers in Daughter of Fire and Ice to stop there for fresh water; a life-changing stopover for my characters as it turned out.

Most of the literature I read about set in the islands was about mu
ch later periods - priests who were deeply mortified about being posted to such a backwater, or who tried desperately to stop their incorrigible flock spending their days in drunkenness.  And - an eye-opener for me - about the leper colony on one of the islands. The over-riding theme of the later literature (19th century and prudish) was the issue of sexual licence. A small colony was in need of new blood to avert in-breeding, so the women reputedly tumbled into bed with every sailor who visited. Myself, I suspect this was either much exaggerated by the male authors (who also told tales of stoning brothers and sisters to death for incest) or down to the Faeroese men being jealous or perhaps they just didn't know how to treat their women properly?

There's no doubt it was a hard life and a poor one for much of the islands' history.

I'm still fascinated by the islands' history and geography and am currently drooling with jealousy over photos my mother has been emailing to me (she's just been there). I've now shared these! Trip, anyone?

Vik and The Night Raider

by Marie-Louise Jensen

One of the first questions I tend to ask myself, once a story has formed in my mind, is where is it set? I need to be able to see it. I've mentioned this in connection with Runaway in my last post, but it's true of everything I write. Sometimes it's a wonderful excuse to revisit a place I love.
When I wrote The Night Raider for the Fiction Express website last year, I wanted to choose a different location in Iceland to my two teen novels. There, I fictionalised the settlement of Husavik on the north coast. For this story for younger readers, I chose another place in Iceland that made a big impression on me.
I don't know whether it was the incredible weather we had the first time I visited Vik on the south coast, the sky cloudless and the deepest blue I've ever seen, or whether it was the incredible black volcanic-shingle beach:

"Reynisfjara, Suðurland, Islandia, 2014-08-17, DD 163" by Diego Delso. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reynisfjara,_Su%C3%B0urland,_Islandia,_2014-08-
17,_DD_163.JPG#/media/File:Reynisfjara,_Su%C3%B0urland,_Islandia,_2014-08-17,_DD_163.JPG

This is a beautiful picture, but it doesn't fully depict how black the shingle is to stand on, and no picture can communicate the sound of the beach - the roar and rattle of the stones as the wild North Atlantic ocean surges against it. 

Another thing I loved about Vik, was that it was the first place I saw puffins flying from the cliffs. I saw plenty later, but this was my first sighting of the funny, charming, awkward fliers:

"Puffin002" by T.Müller - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puffin002.jpg#/media/File:Puffin002.jpg

A third thing I loved about Vik was the campsite was right below bird cliffs, so the second time I visited, and camped, we had kitiwakes and other gulls nesting right around us. Of course Vik also lies close to one of Iceland's big volcanoes, Katla. It is due an eruption soon  and the town is on permanent alert. 
The Vikings settlers in my story don't know about the volcano; it's lurking beneath the glaciers. They are more concerned with a mysterious thief who is stealing livestock in the night...


The Night Raider is print-publishing at the end of June and is suitable for ages 9-11. 
Follow me on twitter: @jensen_ml

The Hávamál

by Marie-Louise Jensen



I have a copy of the Hávamál, which is a collection of 1,000 year-old poems translated as 'Sayings of the Vikings'. I found useful when I was writing my Norse stories Daughter of Fire and Ice and Sigrun's Secret as well as more recent younger stories.

It wasn't that I used anything from it directly in my writing. It was more that it gave me a sense of how the lives of the ancient Norse people were different to ours and also in which ways they were similar.
One of the ways their lives were very different was danger; especially danger of violent death. Thinking of Iceland, for example, as that is the Norse culture I'm most familiar with, there were clear laws and those who broke them could be sentenced to outlawry or fines. But there was no law enforcement, so if the guilty party failed to comply, his enemies would take matters into their own hands. Moreover, Viking tempers were quick and their sense of honour was strong, so feuds frequently arose.
Thus the Hávamál has a few warnings for observing personal safety:

Advice to a Vistor:

When passing
a door-post,
watch as you walk on,
inspect as you enter.
It is uncertain
where enemies lurk,
or crouch in a dark corner.

Famously, assassins would climb up in the roof space of doorways and drop down on unwary victims, killing them before they knew what had happened.

This gives such a flavour of the era. It is impossible to imagine in our lives today (in Europe anyway) having to inspect a doorway before walking in.

There are also warnings on quarrelling at feasts as feuds can follow and on guarding your tongue and carrying weapons when you leave home.
Then there are the sayings that are as useful today as they were in the days of longhouses and battle axes:

When to keep silent

Often it's best
for the unwise man
to sit in silence.
His ignorance
goes unnoticed
unless he tells too much.
It's the ill-fortune of unwise men
that they cannot keep silent.


There are plenty of warnings, too, about alcohol: "drink is a dangerous friend," and "ale unveils [the] mind." There is no doubt that foolish behaviour after drinking is a thousand-year-old issue at least.

Highly recommended for some insight into manners and etiquette of the times!

A Witch Queen in The Gods' Mound? - by Susan Price

The Oseberg Ship

A guest post today from one of our valued History Girls Reserves, Susan Price. It will fascinate anyone who has seen the reconstruction of the longship at the Vikings exhibition in the British Museum.

This, the Oseberg ship, has been called the most beautiful ship ever built.

          Today, of course, it’s priceless. When it was built, it was, to say the least, ‘a high-status artefact.’ But it’s hard to form an idea of just how valuable it was when first made.

          In the Viking Age, cold and hunger, even starvation, were always near: just one bad season away.

          To keep hunger at bay, the time and labour of many people was needed. Fields had to be planted, weeded, harvested. Animals had to be tended, fish and game caught. Fuel was constantly needed, for cooking and brewing, and had to be found or cut, and stored for winter. Food had to be carefully stored, to preserve it: smoked, dried, salted. Milk had to be turned into cheese and butter. Wool and flax had to be spun into thread and woven into cloth. Barns had to be kept in repair, walls and tools mended.

          This ship represents months, perhaps years, of labour that produced neither food nor fuel. Indeed, it consumed food and fuel, as the shipwrights had to be fed and housed by the labour of others. A ship of this quality wasn't built by farmers in their spare time.

The prow

          The Vikings were expert shipwrights, but the Oseberg isn't merely utilitarian. It's exquisite, almost an art object. Look at the lines of her. Look at that beautiful prow, like a piece of sculpture. Look at the carving, probably once painted and gilded.

The carving

          This ship was an expression of staggering wealth, status and power. They built her, at all this expense, and then they threw her away: – they buried her.

          Oslo's other great ship, the Gokstad, was a working warship before she was used in a ship-burial, but the beautiful Oseberg doesn't seem to have been much used. (Though, as ever, interpretation changes. It used to be said that the Oseberg wasn't sea-worthy, because a 1980s replica sank when taken into open sea. It was argued that the ship was merely 'a pleasure yacht,' intended only to cruise up and down a sheltered fjord. However, the replica was based on the original reconstruction, done soon after the ship’s discovery in 1904. As with the first reconstructions from dinosaur bones, mistakes were made, and pieces discarded because they ‘didn’t fit.’ A modern replica is now being built, based on far greater knowledge of Viking ships learned from Roskilde. This new Oseberg is confidently expected to be as sea-worthy as any other Viking ship.)

          When excavated, the Oseberg was found to hold everything needed by a noble household: wooden brewing tubs, for instance, bound with iron, and the kind of small wooden bucket from which drink would be ladled into horns at table. Ladles. Cauldrons. Tapestries. A loom. A large bed. Carts and sledges. Horse equipage.

In a further expression of power and wealth, fifteen horses, four dogs, two small cows and some pigs were buried in and around it. All had been beheaded.

One of the wagons

          What great king lay at the centre of this wealth? None. The ship sailed for the Other World carrying two women.

          One woman was originally thought to have been aged between 25 and 30 at her death. Her skeleton had been damaged and some parts were missing. She had been clothed in a fine red wool dress with a lozenge pattern, and a fine white linen headdress.

          The other, complete, skeleton had been a woman between 70 and 80, about five feet tall, with a crooked spine. Her bones showed signs of arthritis. She was dressed in plain blue wool, with a headdress of wool. These differences in dress arguably show a difference in status.

          The original excavators reasonably concluded that at least one of these women had been extremely wealthy, possibly a queen. Since the ship dated to about 834 AD, it was suggested that she was Queen Asa. The name of the mound, Oseberg, was, it was suggested, possibly derived from 'Asa's Mound'.

          The younger woman was supposed to be the queen's handmaid, possibly a slave who volunteered to join her queen in the grave, or was killed to accompany her. (Several Viking graves have been found where one occupant had been murdered – or sacrificed, depending on your point of view.)

          In support of this theory was the fact that the younger woman's skeleton was damaged and her collar-bone broken - injuries possibly caused by a violent death.

          This explanation never satisfied everyone. 'Oseberg' means, some maintained, 'The Gods' Mound.'

          The bones from the ship were re-examined in 2007, and the new report said that the younger woman had not been 25-30, but nearer 50. Nor had she been violently killed. Her broken collar-bone had been healing for several weeks before she died. The other damage to her skeleton had been post-mortem.

          Both women's diets had included a high proportion of meat, rather than the more normal diet for their time and area, with the protein supplied mostly from fish. The younger's teeth showed signs of wear consistent with her having used a metal toothpick - a luxury item. This suggested that both were of high status.

          Were they mother and daughter? Not enough DNA could be collected from their bones to settle this question, but the older woman's bones showed that, besides arthritis, she had suffered from cancer, which had probably killed her. They also showed that she'd had a hormonal disorder, Morgagni’s Syndrome, which would have given her a masculine appearance, perhaps even a beard.

          The theory that the older woman had been a queen, and the younger her slave was further weakened by the fact that the grave had been robbed during the Medieval period, and all metal items stolen. It was during this robbery that the younger woman's skeleton was damaged. Surely her skeleton had been broken by the robbers because it had been decked in jewellery of precious metal? Which would indicate that she, rather than her older companion, was of the higher status during life.

          Other details: the two women lay on a great bed, itself a high status item. It had been carved with horses’ heads. One woman had a leather pouch containing cannabis seeds. Among their equipment was a long distaff – a tool strongly associated with women, it’s true, but also, for that very reason, with the Goddess Freya and the volvur, the pagan priestesses.

Carving on the wagon

          The carts and sleighs on the ship had been assumed to be practical, working equipment, something needed by a great household. Researchers taking a new look at the grave goods pointed out what had always been plain: they were too small and shallow, and too highly decorated, to have ever been practical.

          Such carts, however, have a long association with pagan gods. The Romans recorded that the Germanic Goddess Nerthus was driven in procession in a sacred cart. The sagas mention a priestess of Frey accompanying an image of the god, which is carried in a cart. Think of the many religious ceremonies today, where a figure of a deity is drawn in procession on some highly decorated vehicle.

          So were the women in the ship priestesses? And if so, who did they worship?

Replica tapestry from Oseberg

          A grave chamber was originally built over the women, and the walls were hung with tapestries – another declaration of status and wealth. The tapestries show women driving carts. Another image showed nine men hanging from trees, with three female figures standing nearby.

          It's recorded that, in the sacred grove at Uppsala, a festival was held to celebrate the Disir, the divine female powers. Every nine years, we are told by a Christian source, for nine days, nine males of every available species - including human - were sacrificed by hanging from the groves' trees.

          Does the tapestry depict this scene? And if so, does it give us a hint about the women in the ship? It's hard to believe so much effort went into making a tapestry of men being hung simply because it was thought to be something pretty to hang on a wall.

          The hung men immediately suggest Odin, the god who sacrificed Himself to Himself by hanging from the World Tree. Sacrifices were offered to Odin by hanging.

          But those three female figures standing by… Priestesses? Goddesses? The Norns, or Norse Fates?

          The Uppsala sacrifices were held in honour of the female powers, the Disir, and the Goddess Freya was the first of them. She is usually represented as a gentle, loving woman, but She had Her fiercer side: She is said to have 'shared the slain with Odin.' Were the women in the ship worshippers of Freya rather than Odin?

          There are suggestions of it. One of the carts from the ship is carved with cats, which were associated with Freya - her cart was drawn by them. (A means of transport only available to a Goddess: imagine trying to drive a team of cats.)

          The great bed is adorned by horses' heads, and horses were sacred to Frey. Horse fights were held in his honour. Are the horses' heads a reference to Frey and His powers of fertility?

          Other historians have pointed to the number of things in the grave carved with serpents, which associate them with the Midgarth Serpent who coils around the earth, and with the giants. The Midgarth Serpent was one of the children of the god Loki and a giantess. Giants were worshipped in the Viking Age. Jord, or Mother Earth, was a giantess, and the mother of the God Thor.

Such Earth goddesses were linked with death and the Underworld, as well as with life and birth.

          And what of those cannabis seeds? Nothing in the ship was made of hemp. It's been suggested that the seeds were in the pouch simply because they were rare in the North, and therefore precious. In view of the age-old use of cannabis to produce altered states of mind, I find this hard to believe.

          It's known from the sagas that the Nordic witches, or priestesses, practiced a kind of shamanism called seidr, (pronounced something like 'say-th,') which involved trance states. It's known that they travelled from place to place, as a modern preacher might travel around his or her parish. And the practice of seidr seems to have involved a certain sexual fluidity. The gods most associated with it, Odin and Loki, both spend time as women. Loki goes so far as to give birth.

          The ship-burial in itself may be significant. The easiest way to travel about Norway, even now, is up the coast by ship, so a travelling priestess might well need a ship.

          Ship burials are themselves rare; and it’s even more unusual to find a woman buried in a ship. Grave goods are usually indicative of the gender of the person buried with them: weapons with a man; jewellery and a woman’s tools with a woman. In the Oseberg, the goods are much less specific: as if the grave’s inhabitants had somehow, in life, escaped such clear-cut definitions of gender.

And the older woman, if we believe the theory, had a masculine appearance and a beard.

          Anne Stine Ingstad, the respected archeologist who excavated Viking settlements in Newfoundland, suggested that the younger woman may have been honoured, during life, as an incarnation of the Goddess Freya, while the other was a priestess who chose to follow her Goddess into death.

          It's possible that, once the great mound was raised over the ship, the mound itself served as a place of worship: Oseberg, the Gods' Mound. And it’s possible that the mound was raised in honour of a woman who was both queen and priestess. The sagas mention royal women who were priestesses.

          I’ve always been interested in the Oseberg, but researching this blog has set an insistent vision playing in my head: the ship sailing on dark currents into the earth, into the Underworld. Have its passengers, lying side by side on their great bed, reached their destination yet?

The Oseberg when first excavated

           Susan Price is the Carnegie-winning author of The Ghost Drum.

          Her book, Overheard In A Graveyard includes a short story, 'Overheard In A Museum' inspired by a visit to Oslo's Viking Ship Museum. The ship in the story, however, is the Gokstad, not the Oseberg.

Swords of Lineage

by Marie-Louise Jensen

Tolkien's named swords in Lord of the Rings have brought the concept of swords with lineage and personality into common consciousness. Swords such as Bilbo's Sting and Elendir's Narsil which is reforged for Aragorn as Anduril (Flame of the West) are known to Lord of the Rings fans everywhere.
Tolkien took his inspiration for this - like so much else - from the Norse sagas. His people of Rohan, in particular, were based on Viking peoples and society.
There are a number of named swords recorded in the Viking sagas and elsewhere. All the names are intended to glorify the wielder or the gods and to intimidate the enemy. The sword of Laxdaela Saga is Leg Biter, another recorded name is Foot Biter. Others are Fierce, Head Biter, Hole Maker, and Sword Breaker.

Viking swords (courtesy of Wikipedia)

There was also a sword known as Odin's Flame.

All these swords were almost certainly the valuable Ulfberht swords which were forged with sharp steel edges in Germany or Russia, using hotter forges and more advanced techniques than the Vikings had themselves. They were highly prized and often worth more than everything else a man owned. It was centuries before such quality could be reproduced again.

When one considers these swords were pitted against Viking-forged iron swords which had a habit of bending in combat and needing to be straightened underfoot, it becomes clear why they were so prized.

There were also Viking battle axes with murderous names: Skull Splitter and Head Crusher are two I've come across and I wouldn't feel inclined to face either in battle. And of course the most famous Norse named weapon is the hammer of Thor himself - Mjolnir.

Viking named swords were passed down through families or were occasionally buried with their owner. Rarely, they were stolen from the burial mounds by men who were brave enough to face the grave ghost. 

Both these traditions (if they can be called that) are also used by Tolkien. Sting is found in a troll hoard by Bilbo and later passed to his nephew Frodo. And in the Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo and his hobbit companions are trapped in a barrow by a barrow-wight, sent by Angmar the Witch King to haunt the downs. They manage to defeat the wight and escape, taking the valuable swords with them from the barrow, thus echoing the ancient Norse tales in many ways.

Tolkien borrowed freely and I love discovering the links.

Democracy, Law Enforcement and Honour

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm currently writing a new Viking e-book for Fiction Express and it has set me thinking again about just how unusual a country Iceland was and is.
When Iceland was claimed and settled by the Scandinavians in 800-900, it became Europe's first republic (or commonwealth) and first democracy. Without a feudal system of Kings, lords and land ownership, this new land forged its own way. All the settlers came from monarchies, but this model wasn't how they chose to shape or build their new country.
Land was claimed by the settlers as they arrived (apparently according to how many bonfires you could light within view of each other in a day if you were a man or how much land you could lead a goat around in a day if you were a woman, but I'm sure it was also a matter of what you could grab!) As the land became settled, a number of regional councils were set up which met in spring to agree laws and settle disputes. And ultimately a national council was set up at Thingvellir, (council valley) in the rift valley outside Reykyavik. These type of councils had already existed elsewhere in Scandinavia but there they were ultimately subject to the king. Men (yes, I'm afraid it was almost all men, though women in Scandinavia were far from powerless) met inside a circle into which they could bring no weapons and there they talked.

 

This annual meeting - the largest in the Icelandic calendar - was held with all the side shows such a gathering would naturally attract: booths, food, trade, horseracing and so on. A lawmaker was appointed to serve for a number of years and he would recite the laws of the land as agreed by the council. Disputes were settled, and important decisions taken, such as the occasion on which Iceland faced the ultimatum from Norway: convert to Christianity or be invaded from Norway. The Icelanders democratically appointed a man to take the decision, and he opted for a peaceful conversion.

This sounds idyllic and in many ways it was. It worked. The problem was that there was no independent law enforcement to ensure the sentences passed at the Thing were carried out. If a sentence such as outlawry was passed on an individual (typical for the crime of killing a man), it was up to the guilty party to abide by it. If he did not, he could lawfully be killed by anyone.
Some people openly flouted the law and stayed on their farms or didn't pay their fines. Then a posse of vigilantes (often the families

who had been injured in the first place) would get together and kill him.
The real problem here came with the Icelandic notions of honour. If someone in your family has been killed, your honour is in question until you have avenged him. This didn't theoretically apply to lawful killings, but in practice often did. And then his family would be honour bound to take revenge in their turn.
From this stemmed many blood feuds that over generations wiped out whole familes. Many of the Icelandic sagas centre around feuds and their resolutions. Gradually, a few powerful familes gathered most of the country's wealth and influence into their hands; never a healthy situation.
Tragically, violence and killing reached such a pitch by the  thirteenth century, that the Icelanders decided to call the Norwegian crown to restore peace. This was their undoing and led to a long period of colonial oppression, poverty and starvation, even worse than the initial problem. The darkest period of Iceland history was when Norway and Iceland came under the Danish crown and were treated with heartlessness and cruelty.
Iceland didn't become a democratic, monarch-free state again until Denmark was occupied by Germany during World War Two. They then seized their opportunity and who can blame them?
Thus from its earliest history, Iceland led the way for democracy. I find it fascinating to note that recently they have led the way again, by refusing to be crushed for several generations by the unscrupulous business practices of a few Icelandic bankers. Instead of agreeing to accept their debt as a nation, they rejected the notion of national guilt and (as I understand it) democratically rewrote their constitution online. As a result, after a brief but severe recession, the country is thriving while the rest of Europe is groaning under the yoke of austerity.
This view of Iceland's history is of course open to debate and not everyone agrees they made a right or fair decision. But as far as I'm concerned the message is: Long live democracy! (but you do need law enforcement...)

TO BATTLE! CONFLICT IN FICTION. Notes from Harrogate History Festival by Penny Dolan.

When writers mention conflict they are often talking about a tension between two or more of their characters.  However, when Harrogate History Festival hosted a panel on this theme, conflict meant “battle and action and weapons”. 

The panel was chaired by John Henry Clay, whose interest is late Roman history and the three speakers were A.L.Berridge, who has written here on the History Girls about the Crimean war, Robyn Young, who created a weighty trilogy on the Crusades, and the Viking author Rob Low. The following post is based on my notes of the session.

JHC: Conflict scenes can be the most difficult scenes to write, and to get right. Of all the “living in the past” historical experiences the writer might identify with, being in the middle of a battle is the possible hardest to understand. 

Not only does the writer have to meet their reader’s expectations, the battle scenes have to fit into the full story and be read as part of the characters life or lives but battles are, by their very nature, incredibly complex events.

So, what makes a good battle scene? 

ALB: Jeopardy! The character has to have something at stake. There must be turning points. Even when the historical outcome is known, the scenes can’t be predictable. You need variety, but there’s more variety in some conflicts than in others. For example, the Battle of Inkerman took place in thick fog, which doesn’t offer a great range of opportunities, but the Battle of Balaclava contains many different elements.

ROB: You need variety to for yourself as a writer, too. Battle scenes can be hard and exhausting to write, especially if you are working on a long book. It helps if the battle setting offers a variety of terrain, or landscape. Variety of action too: you have to find new ways to kill people and make use of when and where the fight takes place and the range of weaponry. Is it arm-to-arm fighting in mediaeval alleyways, a campaign across deserts and plains, or a battle set in the Scottish highlands? It can be hard to maintain suspense if the reader knows what happens to certain characters.

ALB: But the reader doesn’t know what’s going to happen to your characters!

LOW: There’s also the change that happens within a battle. For example, Robert the Bruce began the battle with a full range of armour and accoutrements, riding a fine horse, with pennants flying around him. By the end, he was on the ground, fighting with barely the shirt on his back. I’d say that terrain is everything in a battle. Are you fighting from high to low ground? Is there a water or marsh behind you? Is there a bridge? Are you on horse or foot? At Bannockburn, the English cavalry were falling on the infantry, who were trying to escape across a bridge of trampled flesh.

ROB. In a funny way, sex scenes and battle scenes are both hard to write. Everyone “knows” what’s done, but it is everything that the individuals bring to the scene that make it interesting.

LOW: Another thing I’ve learned, even through battle re-enactments, is that time within battle works in an odd way. It is mostly hours of faffing around followed by a few minutes of sheer, absolute terror and one-on-one experiences. There’s also the variety of people involved. Remember, for centuries it was always the “wee guys” who did all the fighting for the “big guys. The wee men did not have the big plan. They just fought as best they could, hoping that everyone else around them was doing their job.

JHC: Is it necessary to keep the reader informed of the wider view of battle and if so, how?

ROB. It depends on what you want to achieve. For example, when I was writing about the Crusades, I wanted to show the panorama of the landscape and the larger scale action.

ALB. One advantage in writing about the Charge of the Light Brigade is that information could be held back: from the point of view of those first in the Charge, they did not know they were heading for defeat. They did not know Lord Lucan had turned back. 

Historical writers have to take care with fairly recent history. Readers can be very knowledgeable and sensitive about the regiments and reputations involved in a battle so get the facts of the action correct. One way of dealing with this complexity is to show the battle from several different character’s points of view, including enemy action. This does mean that you have to plan out the writing of your battle scenes in advance.

 

LOW: The climate and seasons and weather will affect your battle setting too, not just the location on the map. If you visit Bannockburn at Midsummer, the ground can be rock hard, crossed by little streams here and there, not a bog or marsh.

JHC: Is the documentation of battles a blessing or a curse? Before the Crimea, “documentation” usually meant the general’s formal reports. Since the Crimean war, there have been newspaper articles as well as many accounts by ordinary people.

 ALB: There are so many wonderful accounts, but the downside is that many or so very, very literate, bringing you the sounds and the smells. As a write you can’t improve on that, so the only way is to go for another man’s experience.

LOW: Accounts get changed and re-written. Back in time, there were the Viking sagas. Originally they were the fragments of tales for telling around the fire. Then a collector nailed them together in an often-incoherent way. Even so, such accounts are invaluable as a way of understanding the ethos of the period and discovering how people thought and lived and died.   

For example, Vikings didn’t think of wanting battles. They just thought of killing people. Besides, the details are important. You have to remember that you’re writing for people who may not know the historical details. (People who believe “Braveheart” to be history, for example! Much laughter.) If you look at the accounts of the numbers who died, often the wee man aren’t recorded, only the aristocrats.  You have to be careful of tradition too, and think of the audiences that “historical” writers and novelists were writing for, and why they were writing.

JHC: Thinking about the writing of your characters, do you think fighters in the past suffered the same traumas that we hear soldiers suffering today?

ROB: I’d heard my granddad’s war stories about all the ordinary difficulties and illnesses. Then, for the Brethren novels, I talked to a lot of people, both military and medical. Besides, the mind-set in the past was probably very different. Ordinary people did not matter. They fought when the call from their lord came and, if they survived, went home back to their farms. The valuable people were those with riches and property, because they could be offered for ransom. The first time that we hear of nobles fighting in battle was in the Second Barons War in the Vale of Evesham when Prince Edward wept because the battlefield was “covered in bloody red ribbons” of all the gentry he knew.

ALB: The attitudes of the past and present don’t always match. Religion was very important to people’s lives and culture in the past, in the17^th Century. Peasant’s lives were always difficult and harsh. They faced death in so many ways already: disease, injury, starvation, lawlessness and, for women, childbirth. If daily life has such a high death rate, dying in battle might not seem so terrible.

LOW: In some societies and times, the acceptance of death was almost a cult. A Viking would be ashamed to die in his own bed. His greatest fear would not be death, but the fear of not being brave, of letting his brother warriors down, an attitude that still exists as part of today’s squaddie culture.

JHC: What do you feel about the amount of gore needed to write battle scenes?

ALB: In some ways, “gore” is voyeurish: blood and injuries seen by the onlooker not the participant. When you are in action in the middle of a battle, you don’t register such things the same way. You are too busy worrying about what’s happening next. However, the soldiers involved in the Charge of the Light Brigade were also spectators, because they were charging at cannons. They did see heads blown off, horses running with dreadful injuries, their friends blown apart. The carnage was visible.  The survivors, retreating, saw the vultures already gathering on the bodies of their dead comrades. 

ROB: You do a disservice to your readers if you don’t give them a realistic idea of what the battle was like.

Finally, a couple of the questions from the audience:

How do you approach trying to convey sounds in battle?

ROB: Re-enactment helps. You need to hear the difference between the sounds. How does a pistol sound? Or a musket? There’s also all the other sound, such as bugle calls or drums. 

ALB: First hand accounts help. Two genuine writers were at the Crimea, and they recorded the details a sthey . One Captain wrote about the terrible “slosh” of the cannonball when it hits a human body.

ROB: It’s useful to take part in or attend re-enactments. For example, chain-mail does not rattle, it “shushes”. (LOW demonstrates with a handy tunic)

 

LOW: But in the middle of a battle or fight, your ears may be covered by a metal helmet so you hear your own breath and not much else. (LOW demonstrates with three handy helmets, one with no ear-gap, one with, and one with hinged ear flaps.) ou might pick up bugle calls but you can’t hear commands. You see the standards and rally towards them.

How do you draw the line between creating a hero and the horror of war?

ALB: You have to remember that the antihero and the villain are aspects of the hero.

ROB:  Also, you can’t judge a “hero” by modern sensibilities. You need to find the areas where the hero and the reader connect.

LOW: Heroes are accretions of other people’s dreams and hopes. For example, the hero Robert the Bruce was a ruthless, cunning and mean s-o-b, but he was better at it than most of the others at that time.  A hero is a symbol, a figurehead. He is a human being whose side you can be on. Their task is to do other things and survive.

ALB. When you write, you try to show both the good and bad aspects of ordinary human people. In my opinion, Cardigan and Lucan are the villains of the piece.

Conflict in Fiction was a totally fascinating session, so thank you to all the speakers quoted here, and apologies for any errors in my note-taking or attribution.

The first Harrogate History Festival was supported by several history publishers and planned with the help of the Historical Writers Association. I’m fortunate in living quite close to The Old Swan Hotel so, while I couldn’t attend the whole weekend, I was able to drop in and out of sessions and talks. I’m already watching out for next year and may be offering my notes on a couple of other talks here on History Girls over the next month or so.

Penny Dolan