PAST CRIMESdirectly connected with the sinking. One of the individuals was an adult man,
the other a much younger adolescent originally thought also to be male. More
recent analysis, however, suggests that this was a female. Three different
injuries are visible on the right side of the isolated skull’s frontal bone, made
by stabbing with a sharp object. A knife or similar weapon also punched a hole
in the right side of the jaw. Although not fatal, there are no signs of any
healing of these injuries, so this person must have died very soon after the
attack, possibly from a soft tissue injury elsewhere on the body. How, when or
why this attack occurred is unknown. Was the victim a free person or a slave?
Were they part of a ship’s crew or someone from the town? Was it murder, or
an act of war?
Smuggling was probably a common crime in Hedeby. At the time, it was
one of the most important Viking ports, and ships would have arrived there
from Greenland, Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia, Northern Europe, Britain,
Ireland, and the Mediterranean–even perhaps from the Viking settlement
in Newfoundland. Sited at the base of the Jutland peninsula, it connected
the North and Baltic seas via a river and a sea inlet. It consisted of small
houses laid out in a crowded grid of streets leading down to the jetties and
harbour. Most people only lived to about thirty or forty, and many of them
suffered from a number of serious diseases, including tuberculosis. A
Spanish Arab traveller said it was a large but poor town, whose inhabitants
ate fish and threw their unwanted babies into the sea rather than have to
feed them. He said that both the men and the women wore eye makeup,
and that their form of singing was a rumbling sound worse than the
growling of a dog!
The town was twice sacked in the eleventh century and was eventually
abandoned, leaving its remains to be rediscovered by archaeologists, although
much information was probably lost when Nazi archaeologists dug the site in
the 1930s to find ideological evidence for Aryan supremacy. More modern
excavations have found a vast amount of artefacts and many structures
associated with the town’s Viking heyday.
All sorts of goods would have passed through the town–some legitimately
traded, others the spoils of pillage and looting. Some items were particularly
sensitive, and regarded as contraband. The Franks passed regulations against
the export of arms and weapons to the peoples of the Baltic. A merchant
carrying arms or breastplates was liable to have his whole stock seized.
A number of swords found across the Viking world bear a signature welded
into the blade, carrying the nameULFBERHTin damascened iron wire (Plate 4).
The reverse side of the blade usually has a geometrical pattern worked on it. It