A Description of the Northern Peoples

"In 1539, Olaus Magnus produced an incredible map. It’s called the ‘Carta Marina’, the sea map, and it’s of the far north, the Scandinavian countries and over to Iceland. It’s got monsters in the sea, and some very strange land creatures, but it is not mythical. It is the first time you see a genuine attempt to map and depict the Scandinavian north as if it were a real place. The map is just beautiful, the details—you can spend hours looking at it. There are herds of reindeer pulling men on sledges across the ice and thunderbolts coming down and famous buildings from legendary times. “These were long, dangerous and often really quite unpleasant voyages” A Description of the Northern Peoples is the accompanying book, which he always promised he was going to do and finally published in 1555. Olaus Magnus was the last Catholic bishop of Uppsala and he got kicked out of the country because Lutheranism arrives in Sweden. So it took a bit of time to get the book printed. It’s an encyclopaedic text. There’s a chapter “On the different shapes of snow,” with all these tiny cookie-cutter shapes of snow and frost. Then a chapter called “On snow castles built by young lads”—and they’re all up in an amazing wedding-style snow castle, with these bums going in and out and throwing snowballs at each other. Here we have: “On men racing over the ice for a prize”—and there they are on horses. I also like “On lodgings upon the ice for travellers.” A lot of these images are of the sort that are on his map. Most of the book isn’t about the Viking age. It’s written in the early modern period, but because there’s a lot about history, it also looks back into the Scandinavian past. Some of it is about Lapland. He did actually travel there a lot, so it is the first realistic description of the region. He talks about how the Lapps—or the Sami as we call them now—cement marriages with fire and the parents of the married couple strike flints for sparks for fertility. He really does know his stuff. But there are 22 books and there is all sorts of stuff in them. He’s quite interested in the art of warfare, for example, but because it’s the north, it’s the art of warfare on all sorts of different terrain: land, sea and ice. How do you fight a battle on ice? There’s the different tribes, different traditions, the different religions. “Every ninth year, nine males of every kind—animals and humans—were said to be sacrificed there and then hanged upside down in the grove so their blood drained away” Book 3 is “On the superstitious worship of demons by the people of the North.” Most of what he is talking about is the Norse gods, the pagan gods that we know: Odin, Thor, Freya. He’s the bishop of Uppsala so he’s not going to like this sort of thing. He says, “I’m going to disclose the gross errors of the northern people and their worthless veneration of idols which were brought in by the guile of demons.” He sometimes draws on older sources written by people like, say, Saxo Grammaticus who was a Danish historian writing around 1200, and Adam of Bremen, who was writing in Northern Germany around the year 1070. Both of them are describing what we would call Viking Age culture. So drawing on their work, Olaus Magnus has a chapter called, “On the three greater gods of the Goths.” Usually we think of Odin, here depicted as the god of war, being the high god, the ‘All-Father.’ That’s because of how he is depicted in the Snorra Edda , the 13th century source that is most famous and useful for describing paganism in the Nordic world. But Olaus Magus puts Thor, the god of crops, in the centre and Odin’s wife Frigg, the goddess of plenty, and Odin on either side of him. Olaus Magnus describes pagan rituals of the Viking Age, that we also know about from other sources, particularly at Uppsala, where he’s meant to have had his bishopric. He has a picture of a pagan temple there—which, in his illustration, looks suspiciously like a Christian church—where they were said to conduct pagan sacrifices. Every ninth year, nine males of every kind—animals and humans—were said to be sacrificed there and then hanged upside down in the grove so their blood drained away. This particular ritual is something that we read about from written sources which are fairly late because, obviously, the pagan Norse weren’t writing things down apart from in runes, which is different. Later writers discuss these pagan rituals in overblown, hyperbolic terms, and this is one of the finest descriptions of it. But of course he’s never seen anything of the sort himself. There is archaeological evidence of cultic activity at Uppsala, and of a big temple that may have stood there. There’s some evidence of cultic ritual, but there certainly aren’t, as they talk about in later texts, 72 conveniently weathered skeletons that have been hanged. But there was clearly something going on. What’s interesting about Olaus Magnus’s work is that it’s the first attempt to try to make sense of a Viking Age historical past, but he’s having to do it within the context of his own knowledge, which is limited, and his own Christian beliefs, which colour his interpretations. Yes, and part of the reason we like the Norse or Viking culture nowadays is because it’s a bit bloodthirsty. So Vikings, the TV series, has this amazing scene from Uppsala where they do this pagan sacrifice. It is so overblown, it’s so dramatic. They’re getting all that information from people like Adam of Bremen, but then, later on, people like Olaus Magnus as well. Some people say temper, some people say hair, some people say bloodthirsty. It doesn’t actually say in the sagas. Olaus Magnus is also brilliant because he is just really funny, so he’ll say things like, ‘There’s nothing more delightful than watching squirrels frolicking across the snow.’ Then he says things like, ‘I should’ve learned the Latin name for this fish, but I was really hungry and I just wanted to eat it.’ This is the sort of encyclopaedic history that we’ve lost, in a way. You don’t have that extent of a personal voice anymore. He’s brilliant. He’s just really fun and the pictures are amazing. There’s this big smorgasbord of stuff: later on he talks about giants, and particularly one giant called Starkader, who appears in some of the sagas. So we’ve got, again, this link back to the Viking past, but in a very different form, which we wouldn’t recognise—and probably the people who originally were telling these stories wouldn’t recognise either. But it shows that people are interested in the Viking Age, even in the early modern period, and that interest just grows and grows and grows."