Cover images © PA Archive/Press Association (main ship); David Lomax/ Robert Harding (small ships); Dan Barnes/Getty Images (waves); F. Verheist/Getty Images (background).

Frans G. Bengtsson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007560707

Version: 2016-11-29

Praise

From the reviews of The Long Ships:

‘A novel with the potential to please every literate human being in the entire world – something for everyone. Bengtsson recreates the world of 1000 AD with telling detail and persuasive historiography, with a keen grasp of the eternal bits that pebble the record of human vanity, and with the unflagging verve of a born storyteller – but above all, and this is the most remarkable of the book’s many virtues, with an intimate detachment, a neighbourly distance, a sincere irony, that feels at once ancient and postmodern. It is this astringent tone, undeceived, versed in human folly, at once charitable and cruel, that is the source of the novel’s unique flavor, the poker-faced humor that is most beloved by those who love this book’

MICHAEL CHABON

‘[A] wonderful adventure novel’

Observer

‘This extraordinary saga of epic adventure on land and sea … is a masterpiece of historical fiction … Not least of the rewards of reading Mr Bengtsson’s gorgeous romance is the sly humor that is sprinkled through it’

New York Times

‘A boldly illuminated picture of the Northmen … confidently recommended’

The Times

‘A remarkable panorama of a vanished way of life’

TLS

‘Offers lusty Vikings lusting and looting, bedding and battling across Europe from the Ebro to the Dneiper’

Time

‘The author and his excellent translator bring that old, warrior world alive with such vigorous enjoyment and simplicity that the deeds of those men roving about the world in their dragon ships seem as marvellous as those of our atomic age’

Daily Telegraph

‘[Bengtsson] keeps his readers eager for the next chapter. He has a sharp eye for the picturesque and the comic in daily living, and though his style is sophisticated he often writes with a kind of festive abandon’

New York Herald Tribune

‘The literary equivalent of an action- and intrigue-filled adventure movie that won’t insult your intelligence … Orm is a charismatic character, and Bengtsson is an infectiously enthusiastic and surprisingly funny writer – even readers with zero interest in the Europe of a millennium ago will want to keep turning the pages. All novels should be so lucky as to age this well’

NPR

‘A banquet of adventure by sea and land, with man-size helpings of battle and murder, robbery and rape’

New Statesman

‘Still the king of books about Vikings … the Vikings liked to row and sail and fight. That’s what they do in this action-packed epic’

Bookmarks Magazine

HARP SONG OF THE DANE WOMEN

What is a woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,

To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in—

But one chill bed for all to rest in,

That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,

But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you—

Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,

And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,

Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken—

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.

You steal away to the lapping waters,

And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,

The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables—

To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,

And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,

Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,

And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,

To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

RUDYARD KIPLING

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Praise

Maps

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

PROLOGUE: How the shaven men fared in Skania in King Harald Bluetooth’s time

PART ONE: THE LONG VOYAGE

I: Concerning Thane Toste and his household

II: Concerning Krok’s expedition: and how Orm set forth on his first voyage

III: How they sailed southwards, and how they found themselves a good guide

IV: How Krok’s men came to Ramiro’s kingdom, and how they paid a rewarding visit

V: How Krok’s luck changed twice, and how Orm became left-handed

VI: Concerning the Jew Solomon and the Lady Subaida, and how Orm got his sword Blue-Tongue

VII: How Orm served Almansur, and how he sailed with St James’s bell

VIII: Concerning Orm’s sojourn among the monks of St Finnian, and how a great miracle occurred at Jellinge

IX: How King Harald Bluetooth celebrated Yule

X: How Orm lost his necklace

XI: Concerning the wrath of Brother Willibald, and how Orm tried his hand at wooing

XII: How Orm came home from his long voyage

PART TWO: IN KING ETHELRED’S KINGDOM

I: Concerning the battle that was fought at Maldon, and what came after it

II: Concerning spiritual things

III: Concerning marriage and baptism, and King Ethelred’s silver

IV: How Brother Willibald taught King Sven a maxim from the scriptures

PART THREE: IN THE BORDER COUNTRY

I: How Orm built his house and church, and how they named his red-haired daughters

II: How they planned a christening feast for King Harald’s grandson

III: Concerning the strangers that came with salt, and how King Sven lost a head

IV: How Orm preached to the salt-pedlar

V: Concerning the great christening feast, and how the first Smalanders came to be baptized

VI: Concerning four strange beggars, and how the Erin Masters came to Father Willibald’s assistance

VII: Concerning the King of Sweden’s sword-bearer, and the magister from Aachen and his sins

VIII: Concerning the sinful magister’s second sin, and the penance to which he was condemned for it

IX: How the magister searched for heifers and sat in a cherry-tree

X: Concerning the women’s doings at the Kraka Stone, and how Blue-Tongue’s edge became dented

XI: Concerning Toke Grey-Gullsson, and a misfortune that befell him; and of a foul gift Orm received from the Finnvedings

XII: Concerning the Thing at the Kraka Stone

PART FOUR: THE BULGAR GOLD

I: Concerning the end of the world, and how Orm’s children grew up

II: Concerning the man from the East

III: Concerning the story of the Bulgar gold

IV: How they planned to get the gold

V: How they sailed to the Gotland Vi

VI: How they rowed to the Dnieper

VII: Concerning what happened at the weirs

VIII: How Orm met an old friend

IX: Concerning their journey home, and how Olof Summer-Bird vowed to become a Christian

X: How they settled accounts with the crazy magister

XI: Concerning the great hounds’ chase

Footnotes

About the Author

About the Publisher

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

The action of The Long Ships covers, approximately, the years A.D. 980–1010. At that time, the southern provinces of Sweden belonged to Denmark, so that Orm, although born and bred in Skania, regarded himself as a Dane.1

The Vikings harried the countries of northern and western Europe more or less continuously for a period of over 200 years, from the end of the eighth century until the beginning of the eleventh. Most of the raids on western Europe were carried out by Danes and Norwegians; for the Swedes regarded the Baltic as their domain, and founded a kingdom in Russia at the end of the ninth century which endured for 350 years, until the coming of the Mongols. Ireland was, at first, the favourite western hunting-ground of the Vikings; it was not until 838, forty years after the first attack on Ireland, that they began to raid England in large numbers. For the next sixty years, however, they – especially the great Ragnar Hairy-Breeks and his terrible sons – troubled England cruelly, until Alfred withstood them and forced them to come to terms. Then, from 896 until 979, England enjoyed eighty years of almost unbroken respite from their fury. In France, the Northmen were so feared that, in 911, Charles the Simple ceded part of his kingdom to them; this came to be known as Normandy, the Northmen’s land. Vikings peopled Iceland in 860, and Greenland in 986. In the latter year a Viking ship heading for Greenland went off its course and reached America, which, because of the good grapes they found there, the men named ‘Wineland the Good.’ Several other Viking ships sailed to America during the next twenty years.

The Battle of Jörundfjord, or Hjörungavag, so frequently referred to in the following pages, was one of the most famous battles fought in the north during the Viking Age. It was fought between the Norwegians and the Jomsvikings. The Jomsvikings (to quote Professor C. Turville-Petre) were ‘a closed society of Vikings, living according to their own laws and customs. None of them might be younger than eighteen years, and none older than fifty; they must not quarrel among themselves, and each must avenge the other as his brother.’ No woman was allowed within their citadel, Jomsborg, which was sited on the southern shore of the Baltic, probably in the region of where Swinemunde now stands. According to Icelandic sources, Canute’s father, King Sven Forkbeard, invited the Jomsvikings to a feast. As the ale flowed, King Sven swore an oath to invade England and kill Ethelred the Unready, or else drive him into exile. The Jomsviking chieftain, Sigvalde, swore in his turn to sail to Norway and kill the rebel Jarl Haakon, or else drive him into exile. All the other Jomsvikings, including the two Skanian chieftains, Bue Digre and Vagn Akesson, swore to follow him. They sailed to Norway with sixty ships, but Haakon got wind of their approach and, when at last they turned into Jörundfjord, they found him waiting for them with a fleet of no less than 180 ships. At first, despite being thus outnumbered, the Jomsvikings looked likely to prevail; but the weather turned against them and, after a bitter struggle, they were routed and slaughtered almost to a man.

This was in 989. In the following spring, another vital battle was fought in Sweden, on Fyris Plain before Uppsala, when the dreaded Styrbjörn, the exiled nephew of King Erik of Sweden, sought to win his uncle’s kingdom, but was killed by a chance spear in the first moments of the fight. It is to the echoes of these two battles that The Long Ships opens.

M.M.

PROLOGUE

How the shaven men fared in Skania in King Harald Bluetooth’s time

Many restless men rowed north from Skania with Blue and Vagn, and found ill fortune at Jörundfjord; others marched with Styrbjörn to Uppsala and died there with him. When the news reached their homeland that few of them could be expected to return, elegies were declaimed and memorial stones set up; whereupon, all sensible men agreed that what had happened was for the best, since they could now hope to have a more peaceful time than before, and less parcelling out of land by the axe and sword. There followed a time of plenty, with fine rye harvests and great herring catches, so that most people were well contented; but there were some who thought that the crops were tardy, and they went a-viking in Ireland and England, where fortune smiled on their wars; and many of them stayed there.

About this time the shaven men had begun to arrive in Skania both from the Saxons’ land and from England, to preach the Christian faith. They had many strange tales to relate, and at first people were curious and listened to them eagerly, and women found it pleasant to be baptized by these foreigners, and to be presented with a white shift. Before long, however, the foreigners began to run short of shifts, and people wearied of their sermons, finding them tedious and their matter doubtful; besides which, they spoke a rough-sounding dialect that they had learned in Hedeby or in the western islands, which gave their speech a foolish air.

So then there was something of a decline in conversions, and the shaven men, who talked incessantly of peace and were above all very violent in their denunciation of the gods, were one by one seized by devout persons and were hung up on sacred ash-trees and shot at with arrows, and offered to the birds of Odin. Others went northwards to the forests of the Göings, where men were less religiously inclined; there, they were welcomed warmly, and were tied up and led to the markets in Smaland, where they were bartered for oxen and for beaver skins. Some of them, upon finding themselves slaves of the Smalanders, let their hair grow and waxed discontented with their God Jehovah, and gave good service to their masters; but the majority continued to denounce the gods and to spend their time baptizing women and children instead of breaking stones and grinding corn, and made such annoyance of themselves that soon it became impossible for the Göings to obtain, as hitherto, a yoke of three-year-old oxen for a sturdy priest without giving a measure of salt or cloth into the bargain. So feeling increased against the shaven men in the border country.

One summer, the word went round the whole of the Danish kingdom that King Harald Bluetooth had embraced the new religion. In his youth, he had done so tentatively, but had soon regretted his decision and recanted; this time, however, he had adopted it seriously. For King Harald was by now an old man, and had for some years been tormented by terrible pains in his back, so that he had almost lost his pleasure in ale and women; but wise bishops, sent by the Emperor himself, had rubbed him with bear’s-grease, blessed and made potent with the names of apostles, and had wrapped him in sheepskins and given him holy herbal water to drink instead of ale, and had made the sign of the cross between his shoulders and exorcised many devils out of him, until at last his aches and pains had departed; and so the King became a Christian.

Thereupon, the holy men had assured him that still worse torments would come to plague him if he should ever again offer sacrifice, or show himself in any way unzealous in the new religion. So King Harald (as soon as he had become active again, and found himself capable of fulfilling his obligations towards a young Moroccan slave-girl, whom Olof of the Precious Stones, the King of Cork, had sent him as a goodwill present), issued a proclamation that all his subjects should get themselves christened without delay; and, although such an order sounded strangely from the lips of one who was himself descended from Odin, still many obeyed his command, for he had ruled long and prosperously, so that his word counted for much in the land. He meted out especially severe punishments to anyone who had been guilty of violence against any priest; so that the number of priests in Skania now began to multiply greatly, and churches rose upon the plain, and the old gods fell into disuse, except in times of peril at sea or of cattle-plague.

In Göinge, however, the King’s proclamation was the occasion of much merriment. The people of the border forests were blessed with a readier sense of fun than the sober dwellers of the plain, and nothing made them laugh so much as a royal proclamation. For in the border country, few men’s authority extended beyond the limit of their right arm, and from Jellinge to Göinge was a long march even for the mightiest of kings to undertake. In the old days, in the time of Harald Hildetand and Ivar of the Broad Embrace, and even before that, kings had been wont to come to Göinge to hunt the wild ox in the great forests there, but seldom on any other errand. But since those times, the wild ox had died out, and the king’s visits had ceased; so that nowadays, if any king was bold enough to murmur a complaint that the people of those parts were turbulent or that they paid insufficient taxes, and threatened to journey thither himself to remedy matters, the answer would be sent to him that there were, unfortunately, no wild oxen to be seen in the district nowadays, but that as soon as any should appear he would at once be informed, and a royal welcome would be prepared for him. Accordingly, it had for long been a saying among the border people that no king would be seen in their country until the wild oxen returned.

So in Göinge, things remained as they had always been, and Christianity made no headway there. Such priests as did venture into those parts were sold over the border as in the old days; though some of the Göings were of the opinion that it would be better to kill them on the spot, and start a good war against the skinflints of Sunnerbo and Allbo, for the Smalanders gave such poor prices for priests nowadays that it was hardly worth a man’s trouble to lead them to market.

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Concerning Thane Toste and his household

Along the coast the people lived together in villages, partly to be sure of food, that they might not depend entirely on the luck of their own catch, and partly for greater security; for ships rounding the Skanian peninsula often sent marauding parties ashore, both in the spring, to replenish cheaply their stock of fresh meat for the westward voyage, and in the winter, if they were returning empty-handed from unsuccessful wars. Horns would be blown during the night when raiders were thought to have landed, so that the neighbours might come to the assistance of those attacked; and the stay-at-homes of a good village would occasionally even capture a ship or two for themselves, from strangers who had not been sufficiently prudent, and so have fine prizes to show the wanderers of the village when the long ships came home for their winter rest.

But men who were wealthy and proud, and who owned their own ships, often found it irksome to have neighbours on their doorstep, and preferred to live apart; for, even when they were at sea, they could keep their homes defended by good warriors whom they paid to stay in their houses and guard them. In the region of the Mound, there were many such great lords, and the rich thanes of that district had the reputation of being the proudest in all the Danish kingdom. When they were at home, they readily picked quarrels with one another, although their homesteads lay well spaced apart; but often they were abroad, for they had been used from their childhood to look out over the sea and to regard it as their own private pasture, where any whom they found trespassing would have to answer for it.

In these parts there lived a thane called Toste, a worthy man and a great sailor who, although he was advanced in years, still commanded his ship and set out each summer for foreign shores. He had kinsmen in Limerick in Ireland, among the Vikings who had settled there, and he sailed west each year to trade with them and to help their chieftain, a descendant of Ragnar of the Hairy Breeks, to collect tribute from the Irish and from their monasteries and churches. Of late, however, things had begun to go less well for the Vikings in Ireland, ever since Muirkjartach of the Leathern Coats, the King of Connaught, had marched round the island with his shield-arm towards the sea as a sign of defiance. For the natives now defended themselves better than before and followed their kings more willingly, so that it had become a difficult business to extort tribute from them; and even the monasteries and churches, that had previously been easy to plunder, had now built high stone towers to which the priests betook themselves, and from which they could not be driven by fire or by force of arms. In view of all this, many of Toste’s followers were now of the opinion that it might be more profitable to go a-viking in England or France, where times were good and more might be won with less effort; but Toste preferred to do as he had been used to do, thinking himself too old to start journeying to countries where he might not feel so well at home.

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