The first half of the Germanic Iron Age is known as the Migration Period (400 – 500), after the series of Germanic migrations that resulted in the complete collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476. The ultimate cause of the Germanic migrations was the arrival c. 370 in eastern Europe of the Huns, a ferocious Turkic nomad people from Central Asia. Those tribes who could took flight in a desperate search for safer homelands, displacing other tribes and setting almost the whole Germanic world in motion. Some tribes were broken up and absorbed by others, and new ethnic identities were forged from ad hoc coalitions. Many tribes, including the Goths, Vandals, Burgundians and Suevi, sought refuge in the Roman Empire, overwhelming its border defences and founding new kingdoms on its territory. The Huns never reached Scandinavia but the political chaos of the age created opportunities for the enterprising. Britain slipped out of Roman control in 410 and was left exposed to the Saxons, who seized land and began to settle the rich lands of the south-east and the Midlands. Saxons also took advantage of the chaos the invasions caused in Roman Gaul, settling in the Pas de Calais, Normandy, and on the River Loire. At the same time they raided as far north as the Orkney Islands, as far west as Ireland, and as far south as Aquitaine. The Angles soon joined the Saxons in Britain, settling along the east coast from East Anglia north to the Firth of Forth. So too did the Jutes, whose main settlements were probably in Kent. Another tribe from southern Scandinavia, the Heruls, launched pirate raids as far afield as Aquitaine and northern Spain but they made no known settlements. A branch of this well-travelled people had already migrated to Ukraine in the third century, and from there launched pirate raids around the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean. Those Heruls who remained in Scandinavia were conquered by the Danes in the sixth century. This is most likely the period that sailing ships began to be used in Scandinavia as it is scarcely credible that the Angles, Jutes and Heruls should have undertaken such long voyages of settlement and piracy in rowing ships, taking weeks or months, when their Saxon neighbours were crossing the same seas, for the same purposes, in much swifter sailing ships.
Scandinavian raiders were also busy much closer to home, raiding Frisia, a region on the North Sea coast now divided between Germany and the Netherlands. In c. 528, Frisia was raided by the Scandinavian king Hygelac, who went on to sail down the Rhine as far as Nijmegen before he was defeated and killed by the Franks. It is a sign that Scandinavia was now truly beginning to emerge from prehistory that Hygelac’s raid was recorded in four independent literary sources, including Gregory of Tours’ near contemporary History of the Franks and the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon epic poem ‘Beowulf’. Unfortunately, the sources don’t agree whose king Hygelac was. Gregory of Tours, and two other Frankish sources, describe Hygelac as a king of the Danes – their earliest appearance in history – but in ‘Beowulf’ he is called king of the Geats, that is the Götar, from southern Sweden, or even the Jutes of Jutland. In the poem the hero Beowulf is said to have taken part in the raid, swimming home after his king’s defeat, in full armour, underwater. Beowulf goes on to save the Danish king Hrothgar from the man-eating troll-like monster Grendel and his equally awful mother, become king of the Geats, and finally die slaying a dragon that was ravaging his lands. ‘Beowulf’ also describes another Danish raid on Frisia as does another early Anglo-Saxon poem, the fragmentary ‘Finnsburg’. A Frankish poem, composed c. 570, records another major raid by Danes but this was also driven off by the Franks. No further Danish raids on Frisia are recorded until the Viking Age, so this defeat appears to have deterred them from interfering in what the Franks regarded as their sphere of influence for 200 years.
The Migration Period was a quite literal golden age for Scandinavia. In the course of their migrations, the Germans and Huns relieved the Romans of enormous amounts of gold and silver, either as plunder or payments of tribute. Much of this gold eventually found its way to Scandinavia, whether by trade or plundering raids across the Baltic, or in the pockets of homeward-bound mercenaries. One of the routes by which much of this gold reached Scandinavia was through Eastern Europe and across the Baltic to the islands of Bornholm, Öland and Gotland, where several treasure hoards dating to this period have been found. The richest hoard of the period, however, was found in the eighteenth century at Tureholm in Södermanland in central Sweden and contained 26.5 pounds (12 kg) of gold. Treasures may be buried for two reasons: ritual offerings to the gods or, in the days before banks, for security. However, in the second case, the owner’s intention was eventually to recover the treasure, not leave it in the ground as an expensive time capsule for modern archaeologists or metal-detectorists to discover. There is no evidence that most of these treasures were buried for ritual reasons so the failure of the owners to recover so many hoards is best seen as yet another sign of the pervasive insecurity of the period. These islands would have been particularly exposed to piracy and the owners of the unrecovered hoards may well have been killed in raids or captured and carried off for the slave markets.
Most of the imported Roman gold was melted down and turned into spectacular jewellery and other prestige objects for the aristocracy. It was in the early part of the period that goldsmiths and silversmiths in southern Scandinavia developed the Scandinavian-Germanic animal art style, which used the stylised and enormously elongated bodies of real and imaginary animals to create interlaced patterns of astonishing complexity. The new art was probably a response to the turbulent times, creating a new language of symbols that were full of meaning to those who had the knowledge to read them. Unfortunately, that knowledge is now lost. Taken to Britain by the Anglo-Saxons, the animal style merged with indigenous Celtic art styles to create the hybrid Hiberno-Saxon style, whose finest expressions are found in illuminated manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells. In Scandinavia, animal art developed through a succession of styles until it was replaced by the imported Christian Romanesque style at the end of the Viking Age.
One of the characteristic items of Migration Period jewellery are bracteates, gold medallions modelled loosely on Roman medallions, which were worn as pendants. Bracteates frequently have the motif of a man’s head and a horse – thought to represent Odin and his steed Sleipnir – and sometimes also runic inscriptions, most of which have defied interpretation. Few artefacts, however, could have displayed the wealth of their owner more impressively than the two ornate gold drinking horns found at Gallehus in Jutland, the larger of which was 30 inches (75.8 cm) long and weighed over 7.7 pounds (3.5 kg). Horns like this, together with other precious tableware, fine jewellery and weapons, would have been displayed at the lavish warrior feasts that were, after wars, a chief’s or king’s most important opportunities to enhance their reputations by feeding their followers heroic portions of meat, filling them with ale or mead, and showering them with valuable gifts. Another example of Roman influence in this period are guldgubber (‘old men of gold’). These are tiny gold foil votive plaques impressed with figures of men or, more rarely, women or couples, which are thought to be inspired by Roman temple money. Around 75 per cent of the 3,000 guldgubber found so far come from Sorte Muld, a trade and cult centre on Bornholm. Guldgubber were mass produced as many were clearly stamped with the same moulds.