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).