What was it like to be enslaved by Vikings? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

What was it like to be taken captive and enslaved by Vikings during a raid, or sold into slavery to the Vikings?

Terrifying. Once raiding parties reached a safe spot, they probably culled the very young, the very old, and any dangerous looking captives. Those who survived the selection for slavery might then change hands several times before landing among a group heading toward a major Scandinavian trading site. This was probably disorienting and terrifying in its own right. The Laxdala saga (ch.12) preserves the story of Melkorka, an Irish princess who was seized at the age of 15 and ended up in a market near Gothenburg SE in the 900s. By the time she enters the saga, she appears tattered and traumatized, unwilling or unable to talk. Her seller claims that he's tried everything imaginable to get this 15-year old girl to talk but without results. I'd personally prefer not to think about the options he considered.

Were they particularly cruel?

As Timothy Reuter has noted: "for most of Europe in the eighth and ninth century it was the Franks who were the Vikings." Charlemagne's own biographer, Einhard, proudly noted a Byzantine proverb: "If a Frank is your friend, then he is clearly not your neighbor." The cruelty of the Franks was somewhat mitigated by half-hearted efforts to stymie their own slave trade to the Islamic caliphate, but judging by the repeated legislation urging the Venetians to stop castrating and exporting young boys, these efforts didn't have much backing. If there were some way to measure and compare cruelty, perhaps the vikings would win out solely due to the scale of their slave trade, which fed into Islamic slave markets that only began to boom as the Frankish empire was already starting to fragment and contract.

Would they use you for amusement?

The Laxdala saga relates that an Icelander named Hoskuld bought Melkorka, slept with her that night, dressed her up the next morning, then paraded her before the Norwegian king and his followers. Further north in Norway at Flakstad, archaeologists have identified a group of likely immigrants (based on DNA) who ate differently and were decapitated as part of burial rituals. Ibn Fadlan, an Arab diplomat who wrote about a very different group of people specialized in slave trafficking through Russia, described how slaves might be selected for burial with a chieftain, were drugged and raped, then killed and burnt. I suppose these incidents might in some way qualify as 'amusement'.

Could they use slaves as part of currency?

No—because Scandinavia and Scandinavians abroad didn't really participate in a coin economy. By the mid-Viking Age, they had increasingly adopted a silver economy, where silver was weighed, but aside from one early minting of coins and then the institution of royal mints at the tail end of the Viking Age, there's nothing that we today would have considered currency. As such, slaves could be bartered like any other good. To return to the story of Melkorka, Hoskuld reportedly bought her for 3 marks of silver. I wouldn't read too much into the precise value, since we don't necessarily know how much a 'mark' weighed in this case, and Hoskuld himself apparently had no clue but relied instead on the merchant's scale. But the point is that Melkorka was traded for silver, which was typically imported from Central Asia during the Viking Age, with some inflow from Western Europe as well. Not precisely currency, but it's the closest that the Viking-Age Norse had in common use.

Were there different kind of slaves?

Yes. Old Norse developed a sophisticated vocabulary of slavery and dependency, which didn't always intersect in the ways we might expect. Sometimes a slave would be entrusted with great responsibility while a freeman would be relegated the meanest of tasks. Like almost everything in the early middle ages, there was variety and experimentation. The Norse terms of slavery have been a special subject of interest for Stefan Brink.

Could you earn your freedom?

Yes. Norse societies weren't as text heavy as Western Europe, so there's no bills of manumission like we sometimes find in Francia and elsewhere. Nevertheless, slaves might feasibly purchase their freedom or earn their freedom through service. For example, in Njal's saga (ch.38), a man named Atli who worked on a farmstead agreed to go kill one of his head farmer's enemies, but only on the condition that if he was killed in return, that the head farmer would demand payment as if he had been a free man.

What was it like if you were a woman?

Not good. Sexual slavery was real. As the Laxdala saga reveals, Icelanders celebrated Hoskuld's purchase of a sex slave for roughly 300 years before writing it down. More mundanely, women were probably tasked to do all sorts of domestic labor, mostly involving food processing and textile production. Some Scandinavian researchers have suggested that small unheated pit houses were used by slaves for their daily labor and perhaps for sleeping as well. There's also the possibility that some slaves slept among the animals in long-houses that included stalls. The later poem Rigsthula (6-9) describes slaves who seem to be worn down with work and exposure.

Once a slave, would you travel with your owner?

Melkorka certainly traveled with Hoskuld. Birgitta Linderoth Wallace has identified three slaves who traveled to Vinland. In the Greenlanders' saga (ch.3-4), Tyrkir the German has been identified as a slave who accompanied Lief Eriksson to America. And in Eirik the Red's saga (ch.8), two Scottish (= Irish?) slaves named Haki and Hekja are given on loan by Lief to another explorer.