Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains descriptions of enslavement, sexual abuse, and ritual sacrifice.



Between the Lines

Barraclough describes a scene where a warrior leads a captive by a rope about the neck. It is the image on the hostage stone, a visual story of enslavement by Viking raiders. Stories like this appear throughout accounts of the period, including an attack on Seville in 844: “They spent seven days there, killing the men and enslaving the women and children” (253). Elsewhere, accounts describe women taken in 821, abbots and reliquaries in 832. Some were ransomed, but many were sold.

One estimate suggests 20 to 30% of the population of Scandinavia was enslaved in the year 1000, yet evidence of their daily lives is hard to find. Legal rights were vitally important to free people, but enslaved people appear in law codes only as chattel. Enslaved men were called “thralls,” and enslaved women were “ambatt,” a term that sometimes indicated sexual enslavement. The enslaved could be foreign captives or individuals of Scandinavian origin who surrendered their freedom temporarily to pay a debt. Variations in their conditions meant “freedom” was a relative term.

Bindings

Written records often describe enslaved people held by locks and chains, but because captives were plentiful and chains were expensive, most captives were likely bound with rope. The hostage stone seems to represent this. Shackles, when they are found at all, appear mostly at trading centers, where the volume of people coming and going was higher.

Written records describe the existence of enslaved people in the context of other stories. Vita Rimberti from 888 was written with the intent of building Rimbert up as a saint whose prayers broke chains from the necks of captives intended for enslavement, so Barraclough reminds readers to be skeptical. However, she says the description of a busy port where Christians are being led away in chains is likely based on reality.

Human Cargo

The author returns to the Rus-Byzantine peace treaty of 907 and introduces another Byzantine source, On the Governance of the Empire, from the same period. While the treaty makes no mention of enslavement, the latter source describes humans among the goods the Rus traded: They “conduct the slaves in their chains past by land, six miles” (258). Writing from a trading post at the Volga River, Arab geographer Al-Muqaddasi listed “slaves” among the items brought to market. This is supported by Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s notes from 921, in which he also wrote that they had sex with enslaved women in public, left the dead to be eaten by animals, and sacrificed enslaved people so they might serve them in the next world.

Settlers and Pioneers

Ingolf, whom Barraclough described in “Belief,” was accompanied by his friend Hjorleif when settling Iceland. The Landnamabok lists 10 enslaved individuals they brought with them; only five are named. One of the enslaved men led the others in the murder of Hjorleif and his companions, then escaped to a nearby island, until Ingolf and two enslaved men found and killed them. The islands where this happened are called the Westmanna Islands, after an old term referring to the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland, where the enslaved men were from. The author calls the islands’ name a reminder that enslavement is part of Iceland’s earliest settlement.

The saga of Erik the Red also includes enslaved people. In Iceland, Erik’s enslaved persons cause a landslide on a neighboring farm, for which the neighbor’s relative kills them, and for which Erik kills the relative, resulting in his exile and eventual exploration of Greenland. Records show enslaved people were among the first Greenlandic settlers. In the saga, Lief Eriksson brings two enslaved Scots, Haki and Hekja, on his voyage west from Greenland. They go ashore and return with handfuls of grapes; this leads to the land being called Vinland. Another saga credits an enslaved man named Tyrkir, whose father treated Leif “very affectionately as a child” (262). Barraclough suggests the description of Tyrkir shows he would have experienced a different form of enslavement than Haki and Hekja.

Archaeological evidence from L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland proves Norse settlers landed there, confirming many details in the Vinland sagas. Though there is no evidence to show whether Haki, Hekja, and Tyrkir were real people or fictionalized characters, enslaved people played crucial roles in exploration and settlement.

Workers

Runic clues confirm the work of enslaved people was difficult and degrading. The N-rune was called naud, and a poem explains: “Naud is the suffering of the slave and heaviness of being and toil of work” (263). A law recorded in medieval Norway described a typical farm as containing 12 cows, two horses, and three thralls. Bigger farmsteads required more labor and thus more thralls. Divisions of work are harder to parse, since the archaeological record cannot show who held farm equipment or worked a loom, and whether they were free or unfree.

Companions

Barraclough revisits Egil’s saga to describe a competition in which Egil and his friend are pitted against Egil’s father Skallagrim. Skallagrim kills Egil’s friend and is about to kill Egil when an enslaved woman intervenes to save him; Skallagrim kills her instead. The author says her selfless act suggests an emotional bond, akin to that between Leif Eriksson and Tyrkir.

The woman in the saga is called Skallagrim’s ambatt, suggesting he used her for sex. In Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s account of Rus traders, enslaved women are treated as property to be used for sex without regard for consent, a term the author points out is essentially meaningless within the power dynamic of enslavement. Some law codes address pregnancy in enslaved women: There were penalties for impregnating someone else’s property, which existed to protect the person who benefitted from their labor. The person who impregnated an enslaved woman was responsible for her until she was able to go back to work, but there is no mention of the woman’s welfare.

Sacrifice

Written and archaeological records show sacrifice of enslaved people. A poem about the Valkyrie Brynhild describes her instructions for her own burial, and includes the list of individuals to accompany herself and Sigurd to the afterlife: “[M]any foreign slaves,” “maids adorned with jewellery,” “five serving-girls,” “eight servants of good family,” and “the slaves who grew up with me” (267). The account by Ahmad ibn Fadlan is famous for the description of an enslaved woman who “volunteers” to be sacrificed for her dead master; he describes a ritual in which six men enter a pavilion to have sex with the woman, after which a figure called the Angel of Death kills her by stabbing and strangulation.

Barraclough says some burials with multiple individuals in one grave indicate ritual sacrifice. The younger of the two women in the Oseberg ship burial may have been one such; genetic tests indicate she may have been from the Black Sea region, connecting her to Brynhild’s “many foreign slaves.” A burial from the 10th century on the Isle of Man includes a large mound with a young male sealed inside; near the top was a young woman with a severed skull, face-down with burned animal bones. 

In Birka, the grave of an older man contained the body of a younger man, decapitated with his head placed carefully near his chest. Other burials include decapitated bodies that indicate sacrifice. The author points out that these decapitated men had horizontal grooves in their teeth and wonders whether such markings were intended to label them as “property.”

Freedom

A runestone in Denmark, dated around 1000, says it was commissioned by Toki the Smith to honor Thorgisl, who freed him from enslavement. The fact that Toki had enough resources to commission this runestone and another nearby shows he became an individual of some means. 

Saga narratives include stories of individuals being freed, including Ingolf freeing one of the men who helped him avenge Hjorlief’s murder. However, another saga story—where a father scoffs at a formerly enslaved man who asks to marry his daughter—shows that having once been enslaved was enough to keep a person from equal footing in society. Norwegian law codes show that a freed person owed fealty to their former master even generations after enslavement, and anything they owned was also tied to the family that once owned them.

Endings

The author notes that though Christian clerics at the time began to make objections to the slave trade, these were mostly cases where Christians were being sold to non-Christians. Other records show enslavement continued. Peace treaties between Danes and Anglo-Saxons include agreements not to harbor runaways, and law codes describe punishment for those trying to “steal themselves.” 

In the Colloquy, Abbot Ælfric of Eynsham wrote a description of a day’s work from an enslaved man’s point of view, which the author explains is notable as an effort by someone from the upper reaches of society to imagine the lived experiences of the enslaved. Enslavement began to diminish under William the Conqueror in 11th-century England. Scandinavia followed, though mentions of “thralls” exist in legal documents into the 13th century.