The raids of Baltic Vikings

The Eastern Baltic Sea tribes were not only attacked by the Scandinavians, but also themselves took part in various raids against the Scandinavians and sometimes conquered some of their towns.

In the 12th century chronicle Gusta Danorum ("Deeds of the Danes") by Saxo Grammaticus one reads that the Curlanders and Estlanders aided the Swedes in the Battle of Bråvalla against the Danes who were joined by the Slavs, Livonians (a Finno-Ugric tribe that lived on the territory of today's eastern Latvia and Estonia) and seven thousand Saxons.

Saxo Grammaticus tells that the home of the best-known berserk of ancient Scandinavia - Starkadr/Starkather - was Estonia. In a later episode he mentions that Starkadr took part in looting raids to Couronia and Estonia.

Probably most known incident of Estonians (Oeselians from the island of Saaremaa) raiding Sweden is the attack of Sigtuna in the late 12th century. Sigtuna was the Swedish trading town on Lake Mälar, near Birka, which replaced Birka in importance in the later Viking Age. Oeselians and Karelians sailed to Sigtuna and occupied the town, which slowly lost its position of a commerce centre in favour to Kalmar, Stockholm, Uppsala and Visby on the island of Gotland.

The events were described in the King Erik's chronicle (Sweden, 14th century):

"Sweden then suffered serious harm

 from the Karelians, causing great alarm. 

They sailed into Lake Mälar from the sea 

whether calm or stormy it might be, 

secretly within the Svealand isles 

in stealthily advancing files. 

Once their minds to the idea did turn 

that they the town of Sigtuna should burn, 

and so thoroughly they put it to the flame 

that it since then has never been the same. 

There Archbishop Jon was killed, 

a deed that many a heathen thrilled." 

(source: Chronicle of Duke Erik: A Verse Epic from Medieval Sweden. Lund, SWE: Nordic Academic Press, 2012)

Slash and burn... a field. Popularity of rye bread explained

Land cultivation was people's main source of sustenance in the Viking age. In the south of Estonia animal husbandry and fishing were also popular. We learn about agriculture mostly from the remains of fields and crops. In northern and westerns parts of Estonia the soil was full of limestone. Archaeologists recognize the shape and size of fields by the heaps of stones that were removed from the fields, and by the baulks that separated one plot of land from another.

People used mainly the "slash and burn technique" to cultivate the land. Plants and forests were first slashed, left for a while and then burnt to create fields. A family exploited the soil to the maximum and then the field would be abandoned for a newly cleared one. Plants would be permitted to grow on the previous one until another family uses it several years later. The slash and burn technique drastically reduced the area of forests in Northern Europe.

Permanent fields ("strip fields") appeared first during the Viking age in Estonia. In contrast to fields which were cultivated with the slash and burn technique, stationary farming meant permanent land ownership and in a long run, development of villages. Moreover, further growth in population required more effective ways of land cultivation, which in practice meant increasing the extent of permanent fields and reducing slash-and-burn shifting cultivation.

The main cultivated plant throughout the Viking Age was barley. Finds of grain in Estonia also include wheat. Rye began to be cultivated in about the 6th century, and this can be considered to be the most important change in agriculture in the period under review. Rye grew as weed on wheat and barley but as it was very frost-resistant, soon it became cultivated as a separate crop.

There is also a parallel explanation to why rye became so widespread in the North. "It is possible that the spread of rye cultivation was accelerated by the climatic catastrophe of AD 536, as the latter may have caused both barley and wheat crops in fields to fail, while rye, as a less demanding cereal, at least produced seed grain. It may have been as a result of this that pure rye seed was first obtained over an extensive area." (Tvauri, 2012).

There is also evidence of the cultivation of oats, peas, broad beans, and the fibre plants flax and hemp (used as raw material for ropes and seeds as food).

Today in Estonia rye bread is considered a part of Estonians' identity and symbol of their national cuisine.

Rye bread in my kitchen.

Saaremaa and Oeselians in chronicles

The biggest island of Estonia is Saaremaa (est. saar - island, maa - land). In Swedish the island was called Ösel and its inhabitants used to be called Oeselians. We know from Scandinavian sagas, for example Heimskringla (aka
King Olaf Trygvason's Saga, best known Icelandic kings' saga written in Old Norse ca. 1230) that the Oeselians and the Curonians (from neighbouring Curland) were called Víkingr frá Esthland - Vikings from Estonia. Another hypothesis suggests that the name Saaremaa was used for the whole archipelago of islands. The main island was called Kurresaar, thus Curonians might have simply been another name for Oeselians.

Source: Wikimedia commons.

The Livonian rhymed chronicle tells that, "The Oeselians, neighbors to the Kurs (Curonians), are surrounded by the sea and never fear strong armies as their strength is in their ships. In summers when they can travel across the sea they oppress the surrounding lands by raiding both Christians and pagans."  

Scandinavian sagas mention several raids of the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish Vikings on Saaremaa.

"In the end of the 10th century there was a battle between the Norwegian jarl Erik, who was ravaging the coasts of Saaremaa, and a four-ship group of Danish Vikings sailing in the same waters. In the Njall saga there is a description of a battle that took place in 972 AD between Icelandic and Estonian Vikings. The battle was fought somewhere near the northern coast of Saaremaa and was won by the Icelanders.

About 1008 AD Olaf the Holy, who later became the king of Norway, landed on Saaremaa. The Osilians, taken by surprise, had at first agreed to pay the tax he demanded but then gathered an army at the time of the negotiations and attacked the Norwegians. Olaf nevertheless won the battle. Around the year 1030 a Swedish Viking chief called Fröger was killed in a battle on Saaremaa.

The most detailed description of Viking Age Estonia can be found in the saga of the young Norwegian prince Olaf Trygvasson written by Snorre Sturlusson. In 967 when Olaf was three years old, he was travelling with his mother Estrid and many companions to Novgorod. On the way, Osilian pirates attacked the ship. Both Olaf and his mother were taken prisoners and sold into slavery. Olaf was resold to different owners many times before he was bought on a market by his uncle and thus regained freedom. Years later, Estrid was also freed." (source: www.saaremaa.ee)

In Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus one can find that "Olimar, that renowned tamer of savage peoples, vanquished Thorias the Tall, king of the Jämts and Hälsings, with two other leaders just as powerful, not to mention also Estland, Kurland, Oland and the islands that fringe the Swedish coast."

People: elite entertainment

Noblemen in the Viking Age engaged primarily in warfare and power struggles with their most imminent competitors. They invested in impressive military retinues and expanded their forts. Apart from fighting, trading or looting the nobles engaged in non-production activities proving that they did not have to work.

Hunting was closely related to military activity, yet, contrary to other parts of Scandinavia, it was not regarded as a distinctive elite kind of activity. In contrast, board games with pieces made of ivory, whale bone or amber were considered luxury items. In 2008 a burial boat was excavated in Salme revealing over 70 gaming pieces. It is reportedly the largest archaeological find of gaming pieces in northern Europe. Some gaming pieces were also found in stone graves in other regions of Estonia, confirming that board games might have been played in Estonia. Surprisingly, there is a connection between board games and warrior ideology - the elites did not waste their time as most likely, what entertained them were strategic games with a military orientation.

An overview of Hnefatafl - the most known strategic board game from the Viking times can be found here, by Sten Helmfrid.

People: social classes

Societies in Scandinavia were divided into three social classes: noblemen, free farmers and dependants. The same classification can be applied to Estonia.

The majority of the society were free farmers who lived in farmsteads which consisted of 6-10 people - pererahvas (all folk who lived and worked on a farm, in modern Estonian pere stands for family). Larger and more populous settlements were forts and adjacent settlements where most probably a nobleman, his kin and military retinue lived. Real villages developed approximately only in the 10th century, in conditions of population growth which encouraged partitions of farmsteads into smaller households.

Noble families can be defined as those who possessed arable land (tied to a lineage rather than an individual), rented it to farmers or taxed landed farmers in exchange for military protection. Arms race, weapons and military retinue expressed power struggles between noble families but also allowed the nobles to tax the farmers. Moreover, younger sons of noblemen who did not inherit land engaged in trading.

Interestingly, there was not a distinctive class of craftsmen, although some of them, especially blacksmiths enjoyed a high esteem in society.

Slaves were managed and owned mostly by noble families. Due to lack of sources, little is know about the origin, number or legal status of slaves.

People: population size

This is the first post in the theme: Estonian society (or better to say - communities living in what is modern Estonia) in the Viking age.

The life of the inhabitants of the eastern coast of the Baltic sea was hugely dependent on agriculture. It was the amount of crops yielded from fields that decided on the standard of life, nutrition, life or starvation of people.

Various archaeologists and scientists tried to estimate how many people lived on the present-day territory of Estonia in the second half of the first millennium.
Some scholars, assuming a slow but constant growth in population size, suggest that the population of Estonia in AD 500 was about 23,000, grew to about 95,000 in AD 900 and reached 150,000 in the beginning of the 13th century.

Settlements in the Viking age in Estonia
Source: A, Tvauri, The Migration Age, Pre-Viking Age and Viking Age in Estonia, 2012, p. 23.

Others argued that we cannot assume constant growth - there is evidence which suggests that several times, for example in the 6th century when a climatic catastrophe resulted in limited hours of sunlight and consequently poor crops and extensive famine, the number of people all over Northern Europe dropped abruptly. Other population losses can be observed around the Baltic Sea and in north-western Rus in the 860s and the 940s–950s, though they were not as extensive as in the mid-6th century. The tendency was visible in vast areas which led scholars to assume it was caused by food shortages (and climate anomaly in the case of the 6th century) rather than any abrupt military aggression or rapid political change.

Archaeological record (burial grounds, settlements, forts etc.) shows that in the vicinity of Tallinn and Harjumaa (north Estonia) the growth in population and its impact on natural environment became evident again in the second half of the Viking age (late 10th through 11th century).