Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 Read Online Free PDF Page A

indicative of an increasing importance of sky gods, which were, of course, the dominant gods of the Norse pantheon in Viking times. Another religious change that affected much of Europe in this period was the adoption of cremation as the normal way to dispose of the dead. This was accompanied by a decline in the practice of placing grave goods in burials. Clearly these developments must reflect a major change in attitudes to afterlife. The valuable metalwork that would have gone into graves was now buried as votive hoards in bogs. As places where the separate realms of earth, water and air mingled, bogs were seen as particularly numinous places. However, votive hoards were not merely a way of appeasing the gods; they helped maintain the status of the elite by creating an artificial shortage of metals.
    Because of environmental changes most Bronze Age petroglyphs cannot now be appreciated in their original context. A good example is the UNESCO World Heritage site of Tanumshede in Bohuslän on Sweden’s west coast, where there are around 600 petroglyphs spread over a 126 acre (51 hectare) site. When originally carved the Tanumshede petroglyphs were on the shore of a shallow fjord, but they are now well inland and surrounded by pine forest. During the Ice Age, the enormous weight of the Scandinavian ice sheet depressed the land surface by over 2,000 feet (610 m). When the ice sheets melted, sea levels rose and this vast depression flooded, forming the Baltic Sea. Relieved of its burden, the land, more slowly, began to rebound and will continue to do so for thousands of years to come. This process, which is known to geologists as isostatic uplift, means that Scandinavia’s coastline has been constantly changing throughout human history. Fishing and trading communities that depended on access to the sea have often been forced to relocate themselves as the uplift has left them high and dry. The Baltic Sea is steadily shrinking and in about 2,000 years time its northern arm, the Gulf of Bothnia, will be mostly dry land.
    During the Iron Age (500 BC – AD 800), Scandinavian society gradually acquired the characteristics that directly caused the Viking expansion. The Scandinavian Iron Age is conventionally divided into three periods, the early or pre-Roman Iron Age (500 BC – AD 1), the Roman Iron Age ( AD 1 – 400), and the Germanic Iron Age (400 – 800). The introduction of iron had an immediate and dramatic impact in Scandinavia. Scandinavians had been totally reliant on imported bronze to make tools and other artefacts but bog iron, a low grade, easily worked, iron ore that accumulates in bogs and marshes, is abundant throughout Scandinavia. This new-found self-sufficiency caused the decline of the long-distance trade systems that had sustained the Bronze Age elites. With their control over the distribution of metals broken, their status and power collapsed, and it is five centuries before there is evidence for the re-emergence of a social elite.
    The wider availability of metal tools contributed to agricultural expansion and a rising population, and an increase in conflict. In the late second century BC population pressure led directly to the first of what would be many migrations out of Scandinavia. Faced with a critical shortage of farmland, around 120 BC two tribes from northern Jutland, the Cimbri and the Teutones, set out on a migration in search of new homelands. Their search took them on a destructive rampage across much of central and western Europe before they invaded Italy in 102 BC and were finally annihilated by the Romans. Although it ended in disaster, this migration was just a foretaste of what was to come. Many of the Germanic tribes who invaded the Roman Empire in the fifth century traced their legendary origins to Scandinavia. The Goths believed they had originated in Götaland in southern Sweden; the Burgundians from the island of Borgundarholm, now Bornholm in Denmark; and the Vandals from Jutland. The