Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams

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      Rannveig is a woman’s name, and there is every possibility that the casket that bears it was brought back from a successful campaign of raiding in the west, its holy contents dumped without ceremony, repurposed as a lavish gift from a father, husband or suitor. An Irish annal of 824 describes the fate that befell the bits and pieces that had once been or belonged to St Comgall: ‘Bangor at Airte was sacked by heathens; its oratory was destroyed and the relics of Comgall were shaken from their shrine.’20

      Of course, Rannveig might well have acquired such an object by other means before marking her ownership in writing; Viking women were not dependent on men for their status and possessions.21 But it is hard to imagine how such an object could have been liberated from its keepers and divested of its holy cargo without the application or threat of violence, and this – in the overwhelming majority of cases – was the preserve of men.

      It may well be, therefore, that the Inchmarnock stone depicts the abduction of valuables both human and material, shackled together, shrine and guardian hauled off into bondage as one. The drawing was made – on the basis of its context and the style of the lettering found on its reverse side – around the year 800, the same time that the monastery of Portmahomack burned. It seems highly likely, given what else we know of events in that region in those years, that Viking raids on Iona and the coast of Ireland, as well as further away to the west, furnished the imagery and impetus for someone to scratch this odd graffito on to stone. With its menacing ship and exaggerated, trollish warriors, it calls to mind those heartbreaking drawings produced by the child survivors of wars and atrocities – crude images in which men, their weapons and their vehicles loom huge and all powerful, the visual manifestation of unhealable mental scars. As always, of course, there are competing interpretations (as with the apocalyptic gravestone at Lindisfarne, we can never know for sure what this scene was intended to convey), but it is easy to see how the arrival of murderous waterborne marauders could have jolted those on the receiving end into novel spasms of creativity.22

      Thus we come to perhaps the most lucrative and plentiful source of wealth that the Viking raiders targeted – plunder that leaves little trace in the archaeological record, but which defined the activities of people from the north in the eye of those they encountered. In the early tenth century, the Arab traveller Ahmad ibn Rusta described the activities of Vikings in eastern Europe (the Rūs). He explained how they raided their neighbours, ‘sailing in their ships until they come upon them. They take them captive and sell them in Kharazān and Bulkār (Bulghār) […] They treat their slaves well and dress them suitably, because for them they are an article of trade.’23 Being treated well, however, was – for a slave – a relative concept. For women and girls, the experience was as horrific as could be expected, and frequently far worse. Another Arab writer, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, describes his encounters with a group of Rūs travellers, making their way from the north along the Volga towards the markets of central Asia and the Middle East. In an extended description of the funeral of the Rūs chief, ibn Fadlan describes how a slave girl – owned in life by the dead man – ‘volunteered’ to die and accompany him to the grave. After a lengthy ritual, the girl was stupefied with alcohol, repeatedly raped, stabbed with a dagger and strangled with a cord. Once dead, she was burned upon the funeral pyre with the dead man, his horses and his hounds.24

      These accounts are from the east, where the Viking trade routes came into contact with the Abbasid Caliphate, the Byzantine Empire and the flowing riches of the Silk Road.25 But the goods they СКАЧАТЬ