Just over a thousand years ago, a Viking chieftain named Ohthere paid a visit to England and the court of King Alfred. An intrepid mariner, Ohthere told the king about his homeland in Arctic Norway, and described long sea voyages around what are now Norway and Denmark. The learned king evidently listened intently, and instructed his scribe to note down the intelligence gathered from this visitor from the north. Today, the resulting late 9th-century manuscript, conserved in the British Library, is acknowledged to be the single most important contemporary account of a Scandinavian Viking-age traveller. But what inspired this rich chieftain to undertake risky voyages, and endure months at sea? If rape and pillage wasn鈥檛 on this Viking鈥檚 agenda, what was Ohthere up to?
WHEN Ohthere the Viking arrived at King Alfred鈥檚 court sometime around 880 he presented the king with a gift of walrus ivory. The gift was carefully chosen. Walrus ivory was then a rare commodity obtained only from northern Scandinavia and Russia, and was highly prized by the English. Having established his credentials as a prosperous and high-ranking man from the far north, Ohthere told Alfred that although he owned reindeer as well as cattle, sheep, pigs and horses, his greatest wealth came from the tax paid by the Finnas, or Sami people. This came in the form of seal skins and birds鈥� feathers, the pelts of bears, pine martens and reindeer, tunics made of otter skin and strong ships鈥� ropes fashioned from walrus hide.
Such a catalogue of luxuries must have impressed the English, but what evidently fascinated Alfred most was the geography and people of little-known regions of Scandinavia. The king鈥檚 scribe strove to capture every detail as Ohthere described a five-week voyage down the Norwegian coast to 鈥� now a farm called Kaupang in southern Norway 鈥� and from there on to Hedeby in the western Baltic.
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Until recently, quite why this information so intrigued Alfred remained something of a mystery. But as scholars gain insights into the Viking age, the king鈥檚 interest begins to make sense. Evidence is growing that Ohthere was a shipping magnate, a commodity trader who regularly travelled the route he described to Alfred. During the sailing season from April to September, in daylight hours and with favourable winds, adventurous Vikings travelled south in ships laden with riches from the north.
The furs and hides acquired from the Sami were like money in the bank to Vikings equipped to exploit distant markets. Yet it is now becoming clear that something else also prompted them to load up their boats and head south. Each winter, huge shoals of cod migrated south from the Barents Sea to spawn in the sheltered waters around the Lofoten Islands, near Troms酶 in what is now Norway. By hanging up the catches to dry in the cold wind, Ohthere and his compatriots from these far northern parts created a highly marketable global commodity with a long shelf life. The freeze-dried cod was known as stockfish and with good reason: rock-hard, it keeps for up to a decade. Although it resembles dried leather, strips can be chewed like beef jerky or made palatable by soaking, boiling and hammering.
Ohthere and his contemporaries were probably part of a long-distance trading network, shipping stockfish from the Arctic to the British Isles and the Baltic. Until now this trade was invisible to scholars dependent on historical records, but archaeologists have recently uncovered evidence of its origins early in England鈥檚 Viking age, which began in 793 with a brutal raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne on the north-east coast.
Evidence that trading and not just raiding preoccupied the early Vikings has emerged from excavations of a Viking-age settlement at Ohthere鈥檚 first port of call, Kaupang. A team of archaeologists at the University of York led by James Barrett has painstakingly analysed the bones and remains of plants and insects from the site.
In several places, insect specialist Harry Kenward found prodigious quantities of the beetle Omosita colon, a species with a penchant for dried animal skins. This suggests the beetles had made themselves at home in a store of skins and furs imported from the north and awaiting shipment. The biological material from Kaupang dates from the early 9th century, which means the trade in skins was established well before Ohthere鈥檚 voyage.
Now there is evidence from , that cod as well as furs were traded in the Viking age. Barrett, now at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with 17 archaeologists from across Europe, has shown that an established analytical technique, which relies on measuring the ratios of two stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen, can be used to pinpoint the origins of cod whose bones have lain in the soil for 1000 years or more (Journal of Archaeological Science, vol 35, p 850).
Every cod carries in its bones a distinctive isotopic signature that reflects both its diet and the temperature and salinity of the water it inhabited. The trouble is, modern values bear little relation to conditions in older seas. To pinpoint the source of the cod at Hedeby, Barrett and his colleagues first had to create a rough map of the signatures expected in the 8th and 9th centuries. That meant analysing cod bones of the right age and of known origin. Drawing on material from sites across northern Europe, they built their reference collection exclusively from cod skulls and jawbones. These bones were likely to be those of locally caught fish because the heads of cod destined for distant markets were chopped off before they were turned into stockfish.
Once they had a reference set of signatures, the archaeologists analysed the bones from Hedeby. The results showed clear signs of a northern origin, consistent with their having been transported south from Ohthere鈥檚 homeland in the Lofoten Islands.
For a Viking who had something to trade, Hedeby was the ideal destination. Established by the Danish King Godfred in the early 9th century, Hedeby became one of the major towns of the Viking age. For two centuries, it served as an important trading centre, linking the north Atlantic region to the west and the Baltic region to the east, with connections, via Russia鈥檚 rivers, to the Far East.
And if Hedeby was the perfect hub of an international network, the timing couldn鈥檛 have been better. By the late 9th century, stockfish would have found an expanding market in the Christian world. Benedictine reforms encouraged stricter adhererence to rules of abstinence that banned meat on Fridays, fast days and during Lent. This fuelled demand for fish among burgeoning urban populations just as stocks of freshwater fish were falling, thanks to the effluent pouring out of the towns into the rivers. This explosion of demand coincided with a warm climatic period, when cod populations were declining in the North Sea but thriving in more northern waters. The Viking redistribution of fish from the Arctic helped to fuel urbanisation as towns sprang up all over north-western Europe. Today鈥檚 intensive sea fisheries 鈥� and the overfishing crisis 鈥� have their origins in the long-distance trade in Viking stockfish.
Historians have long recognised that the expansion of cod fishing from the 15th century, first in Iceland, then in Newfoundland, played a key role in the European colonisation of the north-west Atlantic. Yet archaeologists are now discovering that the consumer shift to marine fish happened far earlier than anyone imagined. In the English trading settlements of York, Ipswich, London and Hamwic (Southampton), for instance, cod bones suddenly appear in rubbish heaps around 975. But it is not until centuries later that extensive written records of the cod trade begin.
鈥淐od bones suddenly appear in rubbish heaps around 975鈥�
And what did the enterprising Norsemen take home in exchange for all their stockfish? Chieftains like Ohthere lived in longhouses 鈥� one recently excavated in Borg in the Lofoten Islands was 83 metres long, with much of the floor space devoted to that essential facility, the banqueting hall. When Ohthere went shopping abroad he would have chosen tableware for feasts, trinkets in precious metal, textiles and weapons, but also grain, malt and honey 鈥� vital ingredients for making mead and beer, without which no Viking chieftain could hope to keep his retinue happy.
