The Golden Rule of Viking Society Gold was the glue of Viking society, and the longships took them to it. The strongest and wealthiest, Viking chieftains and kings, ruled by giving generously to those under their command. Trade and conquest filled the coffers of the kings, and the Viking Age simply would not have existed without the longship. The best boat of the day, taxis of terror and trade. The Vikings lived in a highly structured society, with a chieftain priest at the top. Below the chieftain the class of Freeman included warriors, farmers, artisans, lawyers, and poets. These rules were fluid, and while every warrior was also a farmer, some were also poets and blacksmiths, lawyers and priests. Viking society also included slaves, the bottom of the social ladder. The slaves, often other people captured during Viking raids, could be killed in any season and for any reason. During the Viking Age, 800 to 1066, the kings rose to ultimate power by might and bloody battle, killing or cowing all other chieftains. Harold met a bedazzling princess, who refused to marry him, unless he made something more of himself. The frailty of the male eye, the lure of love, her face, would launch a thousand ships. To meet her challenge and gain her as his wife, he aimed to conquer all of Norway, and he refused to cut, comb, or wash his hair until he achieved this lofty goal. He succeeded by sea, using long ships with burserks growling in the prowl. Only on the way all road or sea, could he reach and defeat the populated regions of mountainous Norway. After ten years, he became that country's first king, and when he finally did wash, cut and comb his hair for the wedding, people commented on how fine his hair was, hence his nickname, Harold Find Hair. The kings or chieftains won their place by military might, by winning battles and killing their own kind, and Vikings were eager to share their violence with others, turning the Christian peace of Europe to pandemonium. The Vikings prized the matrix of four interconnected virtues above all, courage, honor, generosity, and loyalty. A curious blend of fearlessness and fatalism guided them to face inevitable death, with stoic fortitude, an idea captured in the poem Havimal, the sayings of the High One. Cattle die, wealth dies, kinsmen die, you yourself must one day die, but word fame never dies for him who achieves it well. The top god, the High One, Odin, was an unscrupulous philosopher king, worshiped by the Viking nobility, the poets and burserks. As lord of the slain his animals, the wolf and raven ate the dead bodies after battles. The common folks worshiped Thor, whose name lives on in Thursday. The free men, chieftains, and kings were also strongly independent people, and this appears in the very advanced for the times, rights of women. Women were married at a young age to men chosen by their fathers, but the Icelandic sagas record numerous accounts of women playing an active role in this process, because the men rather frequently left home to fish, trade, and raid. The women had to manage the farms in their absence. Viking women could own property, inherit estates, and even divorce their husbands. Here is an illustrative passage from Laxdialasaga. Gudrun, Asvifur's daughter, is introduced as the most beautiful woman ever to have grown up in Iceland, and no less clever than she was, good looking. Gudrun has dreams that cause her concern. A wise kinsman interprets the dreams to mean that Gudrun will have four husbands. She will divorce the first one, but the other three will die. And indeed, Gudrun marries her first husband at the age of 15, and he turns out to be a man she dislikes. She makes him a shirt, with a low cut neck, and then shortly thereafter divorces him on the grounds that he wears woman's clothing. Viking kings and chieftain priests gained the gold for their gifts, by military conquest, and increasingly by trade. The desire to extend the net of trade certainly explains part of the volcanic movements of the Vikings in this period. The Great Wealth in the Christian territories of Europe also attracted Viking swords like a magnet. They got to the gold, by boat. In the firestorm that would be, overpopulation and climate change made the Tinder dry in Scandinavia, but the massacre of 4,500 pagan sacksins at Verdun by Charlemagne in October of 782 provided the spark for the conflagration. The resulting Viking attacks and the rise of the kings provided a repost to the military and ideological threats posed by such Christian nation-states. The swan breasted and swan-necked long-ships would carry merchants and warriors to distant shores in search of the silver, gold, and other goods to fuel their gift-giving economy. Skimming over the rough waves of the North Atlantic by sail, or rode up a river, these versatile and sleek swans took the adventurous and warlike north to lands far west, east and south. The Viking craftsmen, important artists in the society, built a hull first, overlapping the planks in what is termed the clinker-built or lap-strake style, and the internal crossbeams were often tied to the ribs near the keel to provide added elasticity. Archaeology has proven that Norwegians traded at Reeb, the oldest commercial center in Denmark, prior to the start of the Viking Age, so the development of naval skills and technology began under the ages of peaceful trade. History, although sometimes written in stone, is fragile like ice. Each historian and each age has limitations and biases, the imperfections and shortfalls of our shared humanity, and the hard facts that furnish history are often too many today and too few in the past. Modern archaeology has greatly improved our knowledge of the Viking Age, but we owe a debt to the early writings of Iceland, primarily the sagas, the only extent written sources on the Vikings by a Viking people are clearest window on that path. you