Читать книгу The Oathsworn Series Books 1 to 5 - Robert Low - Страница 25

The Whale Road is set in and around the year 965AD, an era when the line of kings in Norway and Denmark is confidently set out by historians and, for the same era, the nation that would end up as Sweden is generally marked as ‘chaos and confusion’, with not even the names of the protagonists known for certain.

More confidently, the history of several hundred years earlier does record that Attila died on the night of his wedding to Ildico, who was found beside the bloody corpse the next day. No one knows where he is actually interred, though the Hungarians make the loudest claim for it, at the same time as repudiating that the Hun part of their name has anything to do with that barbarous tribe. I prefer the idea of his being interred out on the open steppe, but that is pure invention on my part.

He did have a famous battle-winning sword and both he and it seemed to have been interchangeably called The Scourge of God – but who made it, its twin and what they were made from is also my own invention.

The Volsungs are real – well, more real. They figure in the classic Saga of the Volsungs – no one has yet confidently identified who they actually were – composed anonymously between 1200 and 1270, almost certainly in Iceland and probably using all the stories, in prose and poetry, which had been handed down about the Volsungs and Gjukungs.

In it, the whole relationship with Attila the Hun, tributes of treasure and more is an integral part of the story. Elements of that and other Icelandic eddas went on to become the basis for Wagner’s epic Ring Cycle and, later, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Birka and the other trading ports along the Baltic all suffered from the lack of eastern silver around this time, but Birka suffered most of all and, by 972AD was all but gone from history. Gotland, until then a seasonal fair, picked up the trade and now some of the richest archaeological finds of Dark Age silver come from that island.

The rise of the Rus into a nation at this time is fascinating. The Norse, the Slavs, the strange Khazars and all the steppe tribes swirled in the huge cauldron of central Russia, slowly being moulded into an empire, first by Sviatoslav, then Vladimir and finally, Yaroslav, the Wise, who re-fashioned Kiev in the image of Byzantium, laid the foundations for a new Kremlin and built the famous Golden Gates, as well as the Saint Sophia cathedral.

Finally, there are the varjazi, the Rus name for those bands of Norse warriors hiring themselves out for pay. They had carved out the kingdoms of the Norse, but now those kingdoms had no use for them – they were busy making themselves into nations and the sea raiders of the past were now interlopers to be fought off.

Even their gods were under threat from the rise of Christianity and only the growing rift between the Greek church of Byzantium and the western worship of Rome seemed to slow the process. The final schism between those two churches came in the 11th century, but arrived too late to prevent the demise of the Aesir gods of the north. Stubbornly, the varjazi fought on until only their name was left – the Greek rendering of it was Varangii and the famed Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperors was composed of 6000 originals sent by Vladimir to Byzantium only some 20 years after the events of this story.

Less than a hundred years later the ranks of this elite Viking guard were almost all filled by Saxons from England, fleeing after Hastings, having been defeated, ironically, by the Normans – the Vikings who had settled in France.

The so-called Dark Age was coming to an end. Those who imagine this meant civilisation coming out of a long, dark tunnel of barbarism, where beleaguered souls huddled round fires in skins, bemoaning the loss of a good Roman bath and waiting desperately for someone to reinvent underfloor heating, should consider that the Norse, at this time, traded, raided and settled from Iceland to Russia, from Orkney to Jerusalem. Byzantium, at this time, was a city of more than a million people when Paris was a collection of huts with a few thousand – and the Norse attacked both with equal arrogant confidence.

Finally, this is a saga, to be read round a fire against the lurking dark. Any errors or omissions I claim as my own – but don’t let it spoil the tale.