Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

the spirits of Iceland, adopting various forms, whether of dragons, or of bulls, or of venomous toads, had stood sentry over the fjords, until at last a huge cliff-giant armed with an iron flail had chased away the whale. ‘And the king, brought the news, had turned his fleet around, and sailed back for home.’ Evidently, the dread of overambitious warlords might serve to chill even the realm of the supernatural.

And who might have been the tyrant capable of inspiring such fantastical tales? Not OlafTrygvasson, but rather an earlier Christian king, one who had become, among the Northmen, an even blacker and more flame-lit legend, a rumour of wrath and terror. Beyond the southern reaches of the North Way, across the icy and reef-strewn waters known as the Jotlandshaf, lay the heath-clad flatlands of Jutland, seat of the kings of Denmark. The realm was an ancient one: indeed, back in the time of Charlemagne, the Danes had treated with the Franks as their equals, and although, over the following century, the ruling dynasty had torn itself quite spectacularly to shreds, their erstwhile subjects had never wholly lost a sense of shared identity. By the middle of the tenth century, a new line of kings had risen to power in Denmark: one with sufficient ruthlessness and resolve not to let slip its hold upon the kingdom. Show-place of the dynasty’s power was Jelling, a stronghold in the heart of Jutland, a place of ancient graves, and rows of monoliths, and gold-ringed warriors set on guard outside mighty-gabled halls. Two huge mounds of earth dominated the scene: the work of Gorm, the dynasty’s first great ruler, and of Thyri, his queen, pagans both. Yet between the two barrows, the traveller to Jelling would have found, not a temple, not a shrine to Odin or Thor, but a church; and beside the church, a great block of granite carved with a crucified, serpent-entangled Christ. ‘King Harald had this memorial made,’ it was inscribed on the stone, ‘for Gorm his father and Thyri his mother: that same Harald who won for himself all Denmark and Norway, and made the Danes to be Christian.’

This was a boast that veiled as much as it revealed. The truth was that ‘Bluetooth’, as Harald was known, had only ever exercised the most threadbare hegemony over the North Way; that his conversion to Christianity had been prompted, in part at least, by a panicky desire to forestall invasion by Otto the Great; and that for many years he had cringed before the Saxon emperor, paying him both homage and tribute. Nevertheless, within the limits of his own kingdom, his sway had been fierce and iron-fisted, a potent demonstration to later warlords, Olaf Trygvasson notable among them, that the Christian faith might comfortably be squared with the traditional enthusiasms of a Viking: indeed, that it might help to make the practice of robbery and intimidation even more effective. Whether it was by building massive fortresses all over Denmark, or by extorting tribute from his weaker neighbours, just as Otto had extorted tribute from him, Bluetooth had aimed to throw his weight around in the authentic manner of a Christian king. If the sponsorship of talking whales was not in truth a noted feature of his preparations, then the ability to outfit menacing amphibious expeditions, and to unleash them upon his enemies, most certainly was. The assaults launched to such devastating effect against England in the final decade of the millennium were a demonstration of just how potent a role model Bluetooth had been.

And not only to Trygvasson. Cruising alongside him in the raids of 991 and 994, and standing next to him amid the dust of Maldon, had been a Viking lord no less feared and widely sung: Sweyn, known as ‘Forkbeard’, Harald Bluetooth’s son. Chill and calculating where Trygvasson was headstrong, Forkbeard had learned much from his father – so much so that in the previous decade he had paid the example set by Bluetooth its ultimate compliment by knifing the old wolf in the back. In 982, the year of Otto II’s defeat by the Saracens at Cotrone, and the Wendish invasion of Saxony, the Danish king too, dispatching his own war bands across the frontier, had sought to scavenge pickings for himself; but it was Forkbeard who had secured all the glory of the venture, and then exploited it to topple his father. Various tales were told of Bluetooth’s end: the grisliest had him wandering off after a parley with his son, and then, ‘as he squatted down behind a bush for the purpose of emptying his bowels’, being hit square between the buttocks by an arrow. A spectacular death, if true – and one that had certainly left Forkbeard secure in his inheritance.

‘Not a ruler, but a destroyer’: such was the judgement of his near neighbour, Thietmar, the ever-sniffy Bishop of Merseburg. This, however, was to mistake Forkbeard’s talent for wreaking destruction – which was indeed prodigious—as having no goals other than itself. In truth, it was precisely by destroying that he ruled: a coldly calculating approach to the demands of lordship that would ultimately enable him to put even Trygvasson in the shade. The two kings might once have been brothers-in-arms, but a man responsible for having his father shot in the rectum was hardly likely to feel inhibited by any sense of fraternal loyalty. Sure enough, in the years that followed the parting of their ways, and Trygvasson’s arrival right on Forkbeard’s doorstep, beyond the Jotlandshaf, the rivalry between the two had grown increasingly deadly. Coolly, patiently, and in the end to lethal effect, the Danish king had prepared his trap. In the year 1000, a great host of ships manned by allies recruited from across Scandinavia, the North Way included, joined with Forkbeard’s fleet, looking to deprive Trygvasson of what every Viking warlord needed in order to survive: command of the sea lanes. Trygvasson himself, flamboyant as ever, responded by sailing into