Kings And Vikings – P. H. Sawyer, 1982 ★

Epic History Made Dull

It takes a class-A killjoy to take a true-life story as violent and bloodthirsty as that of the marauding Norseman of the early Dark Ages and turn it into a treatise on place name derivations and burial mound archeology. But that is what you get here.

P. H. Sawyer was a longtime authority on the history of the Vikings by the time he got around to writing this book. Whatever unique, bold insights he offered in his field had clearly been spun out by then in other books. Here, what’s left is a good deal of chaff, without a central thesis or even an organizing principle behind it.

This is a short book, but don’t let the size fool you. It’s a chore to read.

Sawyer begins promisingly enough by quoting St. Augustine in City Of God, asking “what are kingdoms but fair thievish purchases.” Pushback against the Vikings’s cruel popular image had been going on for some time when this book was published in 1982. Sawyer wastes no time setting up the constructive side of the Viking invasion:

Scandinavians were undoubtedly responsible for many great changes during the Viking Age. By colonizing the Atlantic islands they extended Europe, while elsewhere they played a significant part in reshaping political structures. As raiders they were disruptive, even destructive, but as conquerors and colonists they made a more positive contribution, not least by stimulating commerce and encouraging the growth of towns.

Sawyer pushes back on the popular Viking stereotype of kill-happy warriors: "The significant question is not whether the Vikings were more violent and brutal than others, which seems unlikely, but rather what effect their violence had, directed as it was to somewhat different ends than that of their Christian contemporaries."
Image from https://www.iflscience.com/is-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-vikings-wrong-68022

This is a promising start. It reminded me of Magnus Magnusson, the popular historian, pushing the same idea, that for a people deemed “lawless” by later chroniclers the Vikings actually did some cool things, like introducing the very word “law” to the English language. I didn’t read this book expecting Magnusson’s light touch; nor the energy-draining recitation of minutia Sawyer delivers here.

In his first three chapters, Sawyer expands on elements of Scandinavian culture in 1200 (after the Viking Age), the unreliability of epic Viking sagas, and Scandinavian society as a whole as it existed across some eight centuries, mostly outside the Viking era.

In other words, he writes around the title of the book. The more I read, the more I sensed Sawyer wanted to focus the book around elements of Scandinavian culture outside of the Viking experience. But he needed to justify a title his publisher wanted to sell, so he stuck some perfunctory Viking stuff in the back of his manuscript.

What makes pre-Viking Scandinavia interesting? Sawyer offers little:

The collapse of Roman imperial authority in the West, and the subsequent struggle for power throughout Europe, certainly had great effects, both direct and indirect, in Scandinavia as the demand for northern products declined. Imports from the Roman and Byzantine worlds, and from former Roman provinces, still reached Scandinavia but the quantities were much smaller in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Pre-800 AD contacts between Scandinavian traders and the rest of Europe included the sale of slaves, a profitable activity which Sawyer suggests led to later Viking invasions. "In the eighth century Scandinavians appear to have been active in the lands east of the Baltic, presumably gathering amber, furs and slaves as tribute."
Image from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/little-known-role-slavery-viking-society-180975597/

When he at last delves into the Vikings, it’s in an ancillary way. The peoples of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark were seafarers by geographical orientation, and long sought riches from shipborne trading. In time, this gave way to a more aggressive form of commerce.

None of this gets touched on until Chapter 6, by which point the book is half over. Sure, the Viking origin story could well be interesting, but Sawyer’s focus is never that tight.

He’s more interested in laying out all the things scholarship can’t tell us about the way things were and what was going on. The book is choked with donnish qualifications and demurrals:

Where their sources can be identified, it is sometimes possible to work out how they were used or misused, but when the sources are unknown we cannot check what Saxo or Sven did with them; their works therefore have very little, if any, value as evidence for the history of the Viking Age…

Scandinavians were certainly active in the ninth and tenth centuries in the lands east of the Baltic. Unfortunately, the evidence leaves much room for doubt about their role there…

Hoards can show what wealth was available for hoarding; their absence cannot prove that there was no wealth…

Traces of Viking civilization still exist in the form of runestones like this one in Lingsberg, Sweden. Sawyer notes these rock carvings often display both pagan and Christian influence, as can be seen here in the encircling serpent and the central cross.
Image from https://norse-mythology.org/runes/

Kings And Vikings is very academic as opposed to popular history, but to a point. It’s limited in focus and never very deep in the information being presented. The fact that all this stuff happened long ago and things change shouldn’t prevent Sawyer from advancing theories and so on, but too often he is content to summarize recent archeological finds, which as he so happily points out, are never the final word on anything.

The disappointment I feel with this book runs deeper than it should, probably because I remember reading this book in high school researching a paper and enjoying it. Looking back now, I can’t imagine how. I must have thought myself clever to have gleaned anything from it.

Sawyer presented an anecdote I really enjoyed then, about the Norwegian King Olaf and the Dane Sven Forkbeard clashing over a prosperous marriage, and how the aftermath of their violent fight was depicted differently in their respective countries. I recalled the book going over this at some length, but Sawyer just presents it perfunctorily, as another example of why contemporary sources can’t be trusted.

"One commodity that was essential in Viking Scandinavia was iron," Sawyer writes. "It was needed for tools, weapons, household equipment and even ships–about 80 kilograms were needed for the rivets of the Gokstad ship alone." Above, the 9th-century Gokstad ship on display in Oslo, Norway.
Image from https://www.sciencenorway.no/archaeology-viking-age-vikings/researchers-have-examined-the-burial-mound-where-the-gokstad-viking-ship-was-found-what-they-found-surprised-them/1741928 

He’s more interested in counting notches on antique coins to discern decade-by-decade patterns in commerce. The more a coin was exchanged for goods, the more it was “pecked” to check its authenticity:

The maximum number of pecks on any English coin is nine, while on the German coins there are up to nineteen. It is also significant that about three-fourths of the most recent type of English coin in that hoard have no pecks at all.

Sawyer may have gone on to explain why this was so significant, but my memory is a blur. This kind of data can be useful when it is attached to a theory or concept; not as mere facts by themselves.

Sawyer does quickly summarize Viking expansion in three directions, west to the British Isles, southerly to France, and east to the future Russian Empire. In fact, the name “Rus” was originally connected to Swedish Viking groups which settled in Kiev and other areas. The Norwegians and Danes had similar influence over British and Irish politics. The French were more unified and capable of resistance, but for a time the Vikings became kingmakers there, too.

A depiction of early Vikings coming into contact with Slavs. The origins of modern Russian and Ukrainians alike have been tied by many to Viking or "Rus" conquests, though this theory is not universally held.
Painting by Viktor Vasnetsov from https://discover.hubpages.com/education/VIKING-40-Rurik-And-The-Rus.

Over time, however, their power waned. Why this happened was another tangent Sawyer doesn’t go into, except to say that over time, the Vikings who conquered were absorbed by those they conquered. Talk of Viking domination was overblown, he concludes:

The Viking menace clearly grew with telling and, as in Ireland, by the twelfth century the elaborations had become very fanciful. These exaggerated and colourful accounts have, however, played a large part in forming modern ideas about the Vikings and the threat they posed to Christian civilization.

Christianity may have played a role in the Vikings’s diminution across Europe. Given they had first gained power attacking and looting wealthy shrines off the English and Irish coasts before 800, the fact so many Norse rulers took up the Cross might have neutered them a little. But Sawyer caveats this: “When Viking leaders came to terms with Christian rulers, they normally accepted baptism, but their conversion was not always permanent.”

Ultimately, Sawyer doesn’t come down on any one thing for very long. Kings And Vikings is more about particularizing broad social trends using the relics and ruins available to researchers of the 1980s.

The climax of the Viking dominance of England came at Stamford Bridge in 1066. The Saxon triumph was short-lived, as they would be crushed in turn by the Normans a month later at Hastings, ushering in the modern British era.
Image from https://discover.hubpages.com/education/The-Lone-Viking-Warrior-on-Stamford-Bridge

The best resource for understanding life among the Vikings, Sawyer posits, may begin with the nation founded by Vikings themselves, and most concerned with that specific cultural legacy: Iceland.

There are many echoes of Norway in Iceland: the settlers soon organized assemblies of freemen on Norwegian lines, and, like Norway, Iceland was divided into Quarters. The conservatism of the Icelanders is perhaps best represented by their language, which to this day remains far closer than the languages of continental Scandinavia to the old Norse of the Viking Age.

Iceland was also the principal source of many of the Viking sagas by which we would come to know the people today. Long before the printing press, they were all about printing the legend. Sawyer isn’t, so instead of detailing the sagas, he just alludes to them as being unreliable sources and leaves it there.

There are nuggets of interesting information shared here and there, such as the last Viking holdings along the British coast and the widespread use of Norsemen “Varangians” as mercenaries, but so much is left unsaid or rebuffed in some way that I only felt more ignorant of who the Vikings were and what they did after reading it. Did the Vikings even exist as a thing apart from Scandinavians? Sawyer is vague as always.

Sawyer, in his prelude, expresses “my hope that this book will stimulate discussions that will contribute to its own obsolescence.” That seemed a rather humble thought at the outset; by book’s end I was left wondering how this thin, dry thing could stimulate much of anything.