3 - Viking Destinations

Summary

… afar hence

Seek out a foreign fastness.

POUND

There is a large number of place-names, from Scandinavia and elsewhere, in the runic and the skaldic corpus, which collectively give a useful indication of the geographical range of activity in the late Viking Age, although by no means every place vikings went to is mentioned. Here I aim to survey the material in order to provide at least a partial geographical context for the ‘viking’ activities discussed in this book.

‘East’ and ‘west’

The range of viking activities is summed up in U 504, in which a son commemorates his father who uas uistr uk ustr ‘was west and east’. Similarly, in Sö 173, the commemorated father hafþi ystarla u(m) uaRit lenki ‘had long been in the west’, although he and his son tuu austarla meþ inkuari ‘died in the east with Ingvarr’. In Vg 197, a group of brothers commemorate two of their number, one of whom uarþ tu(þ)r uestr en anar au(s)tr ‘died in the west and the other in the east’. Most trips abroad from Scandinavia were figured as going either ‘west’ or ‘east’, although in strict geographical terms, ‘south-west’, ‘south’ and ‘south-east’ would be more appropriate. It is a commonplace of histories of the Viking Age that geography determined destination, so that Swedes went east, Danes south and Norwegians west, but the evidence, from the late Viking Age at least, shows that things were more complicated than that.

The western route

‘West’

The adverbs vestr ‘in the west’ and vestarla ‘out in the west’ occur in some twenty runic inscriptions, without any further geographical indication. Similarly, Vg 61, discussed above, notes that the deceased uarþ tuþr o uastruakm ‘died on the west-ways [á vestrvegum]’. In three inscriptions, the adverb vestr is followed by á Englandi ‘in England’ (Sö 166, Sm 104, Gs 8). It is likely that vestr means ‘England’ in the other inscriptions as well, since their distribution corresponds fairly closely with those which mention England (without using the adverb), discussed below. A probable exception is G 370. Gotland's location in the Baltic means that, geographically, the whole of Scandinavia is included in the direction ‘west’, as well as the British Isles, while neither the adverb vestr nor the name England appear otherwise in any other Viking Age inscription from Gotland.