The Ruthless, The Silver and the Game
Scandinavian – Muslim Interactions in the Middle Ages
Jim O’Donnell
In 1030 Harald Hardradi, (the Ruthless), watched as his half-brother Olaf Haraldsson was stuck down and killed in another of the ubiquitous struggles for power in the Norway of one-thousand years ago. Disguised and travelling in secrecy, the fifteen year old claimant to the throne made his way to safety in the court of the Rus. From there he sought his fortune in Constantinople as a leader in the Varangian Guard. His achievements in battling Muslims and other threats to the Byzantium throughout the Mediterranean from Sicily to Bulgaria and Syria earned him a fabulous fortune – enough to return to Norway and claim his throne.
King Harald’s Saga, part of the Heimskringla or “The Orb of the World,” tells us that he went on to lay terror to the Viking world until his death at Stamford Bridge in 1066; a defeat that would change the world.
To the Arabs of Syria and Baghdad, the presence of these Norsemen probably didn’t come as much of a surprise. Arabs were quite familiar with people from different cultures and civilizations. They were also detailed observers, literate and curious. The Abbasid historians and caliphal envoys recorded eyewitness accounts of the Scandinavians. Arab chroniclers bore no prejudice against the Norsemen as did the Irish and English, and thus the Arab reports are more objective and, in the eyes of many scholars today, more credible. In fact, was it not for the records of the Muslim chroniclers we would know far less about the Vikings than we do.
Ibn Khurradadhbih, a Khurasani in charge of Caliph al-Mu’tamid’s postal and intelligence gathering service made the first known record of Vikings in the Muslim work in 844. Their boats, he wrote, were loaded with beaver and fox skins as well as finely crafted swords. By camel the Norsemen came south from the Caspian Sea region to Baghdad where they apparently had established their own neighborhood.
The 10th-Century Risala by Ibn Fadman, is a very detailed journal of his encounters with the Vikings, or Rus, in the Volga basin. Thirty years later, al-Tartushi, a Cordoban merchant out down a valuable description of the Danish market town of Hedeby – a extraordinary look at the lives of the Norse in their homeland. Other descriptions of Vikings in the Arab world can be found in the work of al Mas’udi (943), and al Mukaddasi (985).
Clearly the Scandinavians were as interested in the Muslim world as were the Muslims interested in the blond giants from the North. Thousands of of Viking Age graves and buried hoards, are loaded with silver Arab dirhams. Thomas Noonan of the University of Minnesota calls the dirham “the coin that helped fuel the Viking Age.” More than 100,000 dirham coins have been unearthed to date in Sweden alone – minted as far afield as Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Isfahan and Tashkent. And then there are the gorgeous Kufic silver coins found in Norway.
Silver wasn’t the only thing the Vikings were after in the Muslim world however. Beads of rock crystal, Persian glass, silks, vessels and ornaments from Africa and the Middle East have been found throughout Scandinavia, as has the board game daldøsa, a ‘tâb’ type of game known to have originated in the Arab-Muslim world. The similarities between ‘tâb’ and daldøsa are so striking one cannot help but link the two. But where did it come from and how did it get to Scandinavia. Even in Norway, daldøsa is unique. Limited to the area of Jæren in the county of Rogaland, the game is only found among a tiny portion of the population – the farmers and beach-workers along the North Sea coast near the Skagerak, across which the Danish villages of Thy and Mors also held a tradition of the game. Much further north on the Helgeland county and upwards to Tromsø the game is also known – again, only among the most coastal people. The Sami call it Sáhkku and played it all along the Arctic Coast from the North Sea to the Kola.
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The colorful life of Harald the Ruthless, the economic story of the Viking use of Muslim silver coins and the cultural mystery of the game daldøsa will form the intertwining center threads for an exploration of the cultural, economic, environmental and continuing impacts of the relatively unknown interactions between these two very different worlds of a thousand years ago. This project will take me from the homeland of Harald in Norway to the hoards of Muslim coins of Sweden, through Finland and Russia and the Volga river valley to Istanbul, Syria and the Muslim Mediterranean of one-thousand years ago. Along the way I will work with historians, archaeological experts, cultural researchers, ancient texts and the everyday people of these regions who may yet be able to shed light on the little known encounters of ancient cultures.
I expect this to be a three year long project that will result in several publications, videos and podcasts along the way. I’ll tie it all together in the end into an interactive book available in both traditional and electronic version.
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