Life

Just over a thousand years ago, a Viking chieftain named Ohthere paid a visit to England and the court of King Alfred. An intrepid mariner, Ohthere told the king about his homeland in Arctic Norway, and described long sea voyages around what are now Norway and Denmark. The learned king evidently listened intently, and instructed his scribe to note down the intelligence gathered from this visitor from the north. Today, the resulting late 9th-century manuscript, conserved in the British Library, is acknowledged to be the single most important contemporary account of a Scandinavian Viking-age traveller. But what inspired this rich chieftain to undertake risky voyages, and endure months at sea? If rape and pillage wasn't on this Viking's agenda, what was Ohthere up to?

WHEN Ohthere the Viking arrived at King Alfred's court sometime around 880 he presented the king with a gift of walrus ivory. The gift was carefully chosen. Walrus ivory was then a rare commodity obtained only from northern Scandinavia and Russia, and was highly prized by the English. Having established his credentials as a prosperous and high-ranking man from the far north, Ohthere told Alfred that although he owned reindeer as well as cattle, sheep, pigs and horses, his greatest wealth came from the tax paid by the Finnas, or Sami people. This came in the form of seal skins and birds' feathers, the pelts of bears, pine martens and reindeer, tunics made of otter skin and strong ships' ropes fashioned from walrus hide.

Such a catalogue of luxuries must have impressed the English, but what evidently fascinated Alfred most was the geography and people of little-known regions of Scandinavia. The king's scribe strove to capture every detail as Ohthere described a five-week voyage down the Norwegian coast to a place called Sciringes heal - now a farm called Kaupang in southern Norway - and from there on to Hedeby in the western Baltic.

Until recently, quite why this information so intrigued Alfred remained something of a mystery. But as scholars gain insights into the Viking age, the king's interest begins to make sense. Evidence is growing that Ohthere was a shipping magnate, a commodity trader who regularly travelled the route he described to Alfred. During the sailing season from April to September, in daylight hours and with favourable winds, adventurous Vikings travelled south in ships laden with riches from the north.

The furs and hides acquired from the Sami were like money in the bank to Vikings equipped to exploit distant markets. Yet it is now becoming clear that something else also prompted them to load up their boats and head south. Each winter, huge shoals of cod migrated south from the Barents Sea to spawn in the sheltered waters around the Lofoten Islands, near Tromsø in what is now Norway. By hanging up the catches to dry in the cold wind, Ohthere and his compatriots from these far northern parts created a highly marketable global commodity with a long shelf life. The freeze-dried cod was known as stockfish and with good reason: rock-hard, it keeps for up to a decade. Although it resembles dried leather, strips can be chewed like beef jerky or made palatable by soaking, boiling and hammering.

Ohthere and his contemporaries were probably part of a long-distance trading network, shipping stockfish from the Arctic to the British Isles and the Baltic. Until now this trade was invisible to scholars dependent on historical records, but archaeologists have recently uncovered evidence of its origins early in England's Viking age, which began in 793 with a brutal raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne on the north-east coast.

Evidence that trading and not just raiding preoccupied the early Vikings has emerged from excavations of a Viking-age settlement at Ohthere's first port of call, Kaupang. A team of archaeologists at the University of York led by James Barrett has painstakingly analysed the bones and remains of plants and insects from the site.

In several places, insect specialist Harry Kenward found prodigious quantities of the beetle Omosita colon, a species with a penchant for dried animal skins. This suggests the beetles had made themselves at home in a store of skins and furs imported from the north and awaiting shipment. The biological material from Kaupang dates from the early 9th century, which means the trade in skins was established well before Ohthere's voyage.

Now there is evidence from Hedeby, Ohthere's final destination, that cod as well as furs were traded in the Viking age. Barrett, now at the University of Cambridge, in collaboration with 17 archaeologists from across Europe, has shown that an established analytical technique, which relies on measuring the ratios of two stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen, can be used to pinpoint the origins of cod whose bones have lain in the soil for 1000 years or more (Journal of Archaeological Science, vol 35, p 850).

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