Huginn's Yule

Roman artisans began to replace yarn with valuable plain silk cloths from China and the Silla Kingdom in Gyeongju, Korea. Chinese wealth grew as they delivered silk and other luxury goods to the Roman Empire, whose wealthy women admired their beauty. The Roman Senate issued, in vain, several edicts to prohibit the wearing of silk, on economic and moral grounds: the import of Chinese silk caused a huge outflow of gold, and silk clothes were considered decadent and immoral. "I can see clothes of silk, if materials that do not hide the body, nor even one's decency, can be called clothes.... Wretched flocks of maids labor so that the adulteress may be visible through her thin dress, so that her husband has no more acquaintance than any outsider or foreigner with his wife's body..."

The Han army regularly policed the silk road route against nomadic bandit forces, generally identified as Xiongnu. Han general Ban Chao (mentioned briefly in my story) led an army of 70,000 mounted infantry and light cavalry troops in the 1st century AD to secure the trade routes reaching far west to the Tarim basin. Ban Chao expanded his conquests across the Pamirs to the shores of the Caspian Sea and the borders of Parthia. It was from here that the Han general dispatched an envoy, Gan Ying, to Daqin (Rome). The Silk Road essentially came into being from the 1st century BCE, following these efforts by China to consolidate a road to the Western world and India, both through direct settlements in the area of the Tarim Basin and diplomatic relations with the countries of the Dayuan, Parthians and Bactrians further west.

Chinese historians have also recorded more visits by people thought to have been emissaries from the Roman Empire during the Second and Third Centuries AD. The earliest recorded such official contact between China and ancient Rome was in A.D. 166 when, according to a Chinese account, a Roman envoy, possibly sent by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, arrived in China. A record of this meeting survives. There were several other direct contacts with Rome over the centuries, but with the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire, and its demand for sophisticated Asian products, trade with China crumbled in the West around the 5th century, although some later contacts were made by the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium).

And now, trade routes across the Steppe covered, the time at which this story is set, approximately 540AD, was at the tail end of the "Great Migration Period" on the Eurasian Steppe. This was a period that lasted from 375 AD (possibly as early as 300 AD) to 538 AD, during which there were widespread migrations of peoples within or into Europe, during and after the decline of the Western Roman Empire, mostly into Roman territory, notably the Germanic tribes and the Huns. This period has also been termed in English by the German loanword Völkerwanderung.

For obvious reasons, this period, and these tribal migrations, are not a well-documented, and it's probably an understatement to say that these migrations were violent in the extreme.

The migrants were made up of war bands or tribes of 10,000 to 20,000 people, with the first migrations made by Germanic tribes such as the Goths (including the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths), the Vandals, the Angles and the Saxons, the Lombards, the Suebi, the Frisii, the Jutes, the Burgundians, the Alemanni, the Scirii and the Franks. These tribes were later pushed westward by tribes from the Eurasian Steppe; the Huns, the Avars, the Slavs, the Bulgars (originally a nomadic group from Central Asia, but occupying the Pontic steppe north of the Caucasus since the second century), the Magyars, and many others.

The Huns, for example, were non-European, with their origins in central Asia, who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe, between the 4th and 6th century AD. According to European tradition, they were first reported living east of the Volga River, in an area that was part of what was known as Scythia at the time; the Huns' arrival is associated with the migration westward of an Iranian people, the Alans.

By 370 AD, the Huns had arrived on the Volga, and by 430 they had established a vast, if short-lived, dominion in Europe, conquering the Goths and many other Germanic peoples living outside of Roman borders, and they may have stimulated the Great Migration by causing other tribes to flee, a contributing factor in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. They crossed the Volga and Don, absorbed the Alans, drove the Goths into the Roman Empire, raided the Roman Empire and broke up. Fragments of their confederation reappeared under other names.

Some modern historians have associated the Huns who appeared on the borders of Europe in the 4th century AD with the Xiongnu who had invaded China from the territory of present-day Mongolia between the 3rd century BC and the 2nd century AD. The Chinese Han dynasty send huge armies, numbering hundreds of thousands of soldiers, against the Xiongnu.

Starting from the Emperor Wu's reign (r. 141--87 BC), the Han empire changed from a relatively passive foreign policy to an offensive strategy to deal with the increasing Xiongnu incursions on the northern frontier, and also according to general imperial policy to expand the domain. In 133 BC, the conflict escalated to a full-scale war when the Xiongnu realized that the Han were about to ambush Xiongnu raiders at Mayi. The Han court decided to deploy several military expeditions towards the regions situated in the Ordos Loop, Hexi Corridor and the Gobi Desert in what was a successful attempt to conquer these lands and expel the Xiongnu.

The war then progressed further westwards towards the many smaller states of the Western Regions. The nature of the battles varied through time, with many casualties during the changes of territorial possession and political control over the western states. Regional alliances also tended to shift, sometimes forcibly, when one party gained the upper hand in a certain territory over the other. The Han Empire decisively defeated the Xiongnu, and the Han Empire's political influence expanded deeply into Central Asia.

As the situation deteriorated for the Xiongnu, civil war further weakened the confederation, which eventually split into two groups. The Southern Xiongnu submitted to the Han Empire, but the Northern Xiongnu continued to resist and were eventually evicted westwards by further military expeditions from Han Empire and its vassals, and the rise of Donghu states like Xianbei. The Han-Xiongnu War resulted in the total victory of the Han empire over the Xiongnu state in 89 AD. Due to their devastating defeat by the Chinese Han dynasty, the northern branch of the Xiongnu continued to retreat north-westward; their descendants may have migrated through Eurasia towards Europe, sparking of the Great Migration of the tribes into Western Europe.

Okay, that's the Hun's, but what about a couple of the other people's that the Princess Yuan Fan encounters on her journey -- and all I'm going to touch on here are the Rouran (the Avars) and the Magyars (who would go on to become the Hungarians), although there are a lot of others.

First, the Rouran. "Rouran" is a Classical Chinese transcription of the name. However, according to Xianbei sources in orders given by the Emperor Taiwu of Northern Wei, Ruanruan and Ruru means something akin to "wriggling worm" and was used in a derogatory sense. And THAT is very Chinese. LOL. Anyhow, the Rouran Khaganate was the name of a state of uncertain origin (proto-Mongols, Turkic, or non-Altaic), although it's commonly believed that its people were descended from the Xianbei.

The Rouran are noted for being the first people to use the title of "khan" or "khagan" for their rukers. The Rouran Khaganate lasted from the late 4th century until the middle 6th century, when they were defeated by a Göktürk rebellion, which subsequently led to the rise of the Turks in world history. The Rouran may have fled west after this defeat and become the Pannonian Avars. This however, is a contested theory among historians. The Göktürks chased after these "Avars" into the Byzantine Empire and referred to them as "Varconites" who were escaped slaves of the Türks. However they also claimed that these were not "true Avars", who remained in the east as subjects of the Türks, while the ones in the west were only "pseudo-Avars".

These Pannonian Avars were an alliance of several groups of Eurasian nomads "of unknown origins", and are best known in European history for their invasions and destruction in the Avar--Byzantine wars from 568 to 626. They established the Avar Khaganate, which spanned the Pannonian Basin and considerable areas of Central and Eastern Europe, lasting from the late 6th to the early 9th century, so you can more or less see the flow on effects of events along the Chinese frontier on Europe, in all these migrations. The cause and effect wasn't known at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight, archeology, the studying of genetic origins and linguistics, together with access to historical records worldwide, the pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place, and a fascinating picture it makes.

Now, the Magyars. They're a people of very distant Finno-Ugric origin, as were many of the peoples of the northern taiga prior to the Slav invasion of their lands. They originated in an area east of the Ural Mountains, circa 4000 BCE, and around 1500 BCE, in conjunction with other steppe peoples, adopted the horse, becoming nomadic herdsmen. Around 4-500 AD, the Proto-Magyars moved to the west of the Ural Mountains to the area between the southern Ural Mountains and the Volga River, where my heroine encounters them, and it wasn't until 895/896 that they entered Europe, where eventually they would found the core of what is now Hungary.

There were many other steppe peoples, but I'm touching only on the ones in my story, and skipping the rest. And now, as for Dane-folk on the Volga and raiding south along the edges of the Caspian Sea, there I've deviated from history a little, and moved the activities of the Vikings, circa 864-1041 AD up by 400 odd years. Those Viking raids into the Caspian were no minor events -- while the first small-scale raids took place in the late 9th and early 10th century, there was a large-scale expedition in 913 when the Vikings arrived on 500 ships. Raids continued for some time, with the last Scandinavian attempt to reestablish the route to the Caspian Sea taking place in 1041 by Ingvar the Far-Travelled (gotta love those old Viking names). So my story there is based on history, but history from a little later, although with more or less the same peoples.

And now, the funeral scene where Princess Yuan Fan's maid and the two Magyar girls are sacrificed. The details of the Viking funeral are taken from the account of Ibn Fadlan, where he witnessed and recorded the details of a Viking ship burial, and I pretty much followed Ibn Fadlan on that one. Again for those who haven't heard of him, Ibn Fadlan was a Muslim traveler, famous for his account of his travels as a member of an embassy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars, written around 921-922 AD. His account is most notable for providing a detailed description of the Volga Vikings, including an eyewitness account of a ship burial. This practice is evidenced archaeologically, with many male warrior burials (such as the ship burial at Balladoole on the Isle of Man, or that at Oseberg in Norway also containing female remains with signs of trauma.

Ship burials were a common practice for Kings or other notable rulers, where the deceased was laid in a boat, or a stone ship, and given grave offerings in accordance with status and profession, sometimes including sacrificed slaves. Afterwards, piles of stone and soil were usually laid on top of the remains in order to create a tumulus or barrow. Again, it's a little later than the period my story is set in, but ship burials and sacrifices associated with them are recorded through much of the history of the peoples of the north, and Ibn Fadlan is a reliable eye-witness. He's also a major character in Michael Crichton's 1976 novel, "Eaters of the Dead", which draws heavily in its opening passages on Ibn Fadlān's writing. Ibn Fadlān is also a character in the 1999 film adaptation of the novel, "The Thirteenth Warrior", played by Antonio Banderas, and again, this plays fast and loose with timelines, for Beowulf (for The Thirteenth Warrior is a retelling of Beowulf) is, as with my story, set a few centuries before Ibn Fadlan's time.

We do know that the Saxon's and other people from the time my story is set in practiced ship burials, and Sutton Hoo, in Norfolk, is one of the best known in England (derived from the Old English name Englaland, which means "land of the Angles" - the Angles came from the Anglia peninsula in the Bay of Kiel area (present-day German state of Schleswig--Holstein) on the Baltic Sea) -- and guess who Norfolk is named after. The "North Folk", as opposed to Suffolk (the "South Folk") or Essex and Wessex (East Saxons and West Saxons").

Leaving aside ship burials and human sacrifice, Europe, circa 550 AD was in the middle of that period that would later become known as the Dark Ages, that period when the Western Roman Empire had fallen, and all was chaos. The civilization of Rome in the West had vanished, Arthur had fought his last battle (the battle of Mount Badon) in approximately 500AD, keeping the Saxons at bay for another 50 years, but at the time at which I set my story, Roman Britain was going down in final defeat and the Germanic tribes were flooding across the North Sea to found new kingdoms amongst the ruins of old Roman-Britain, whilst on the continent, the Franks were taking Gaul, the Visigoths founding their kingdoms in Spain, and other tribes from the north were establishing their own states.

Sleeps, with a broken sword - and Yseult sleeps

Beside him, where the Westering waters roll

Over drowned Lyonesse to the outer deeps.

Lancelot is fallen . . . The ardent helms that shone

So knightly and the splintered lances rust

In the anonymous mould of Avalon:

Gawain and Gareth and Galahad - all are dust.

Where do the vanes and towers of Camelot

And tall Tintagel crumble? Where do those tragic

Lovers and their bright eyed ladies rot?

We cannot tell, for lost is Merlin's magic.

And Guinevere - Call her not back again

Lest she betray the loveliness time lent

A name that blends the rapture and the pain

Linked in the lonely nightingale's lament.

Nor pry too deeply, lest you should discover

The bower of Astolat a smokey hut

Of mud and wattle - find the knightliest lover

A braggart, and his lilymaid a slut.

And all that coloured tale a tapestry

Woven by poets. As the spider's skeins

Are spun of its own substance, so have they

Embroidered empty legend - What remains?

This: That when Rome fell, like a writhen oak

That age had sapped and cankered at the root,

Resistant, from her topmost bough there broke

The miracle of one unwithering shoot.

Which was the spirit of Britain - that certain men

Uncouth, untutored, of our island brood

Loved freedom better than their lives; and when

The tempest crashed around them, rose and stood

And charged into the storm's black heart, with sword

Lifted, or lance in rest, and rode there, helmed

With a strange majesty that the heathen horde

Remembered when all were overwhelmed;

And made of them a legend, to their chief,

Arthur, Ambrosius - no man knows his name -

Granting a gallantry beyond belief,

And to his knights imperishable fame.

They were so few . . . We know not in what manner

Or where they fell - whether they went

Riding into the dark under Christ's banner

Or died beneath the blood-red dragon of Gwent.

But this we know; that when the Saxon rout

Swept over them, the sun no longer shone

On Britain, and the last lights flickered out;

And men in darkness muttered: Arthur is gone . . .

(Hic Jacet Arthurus Rex Quondam Rexque Futurus, by Francis Brett Young)

But that's another story.

Around this same period, Svealand, the first Swedish state, was founded, and is one of three historical lands of Sweden, bounded to the north by Norrland and to the south by Götaland. The Land of the Goths. When the early sagas talk of Sweden, it is to Svealand that they refer. Now most of what we know about early Sweden is been taken from the epic "Beowulf", written about 700 A.D. Beowulf is a Geat, who lives in Geatland (Götaland). The events in the poem "Beowulf" take place over most of the sixth century, after the Anglo-Saxons had started migrating to England and before the beginning of the seventh century, a time when the Anglo-Saxons were either newly arrived or were still in close contact with their Germanic kinsmen in Northern Germany and southern Scandinavia.

This is the time at which I have set my story, and the proximate location of King Harald Wolf's-Fang's kingdom, which in my mind at least is located to the south of the kingdom of the Geat's and the Wulfing's, towards the southern end of Sweden and across the Baltic from the Dane-mark.

And there I will leave this, before the afterword becomes a book itself, but if you want some further reading, here's some of the books I used, and my story's fiction -- so I used a few history's, but I also used a few novels from and around the period, but my main "go-to's" were Beowulf, Hrolf Kraki's Saga and The Longships. And yes, all the books below are in my or my husband's bookshelves (his are the two more military ones at the end of this little list). Scary, huh LOL.

The Saga of Beowulf (of course)

Hrolf Kraki's Saga, by Poul Anderson

War of the Gods, by Poul Anderson

Mother of Kings, by Poul Anderson

The Longships, by Frans G. Bengtsson (and I'm sure the author is sitting at the right hand of Odin, smiling as he reads my little homage)

Bernard Cornwell's "The Saxon Stories" -- there's twelve of them in the series, some better than others

The King of Athelney, by Alfred Duggan

Conscience of the King, by Alfred Duggan

The Dragon and the Raven, or The Days of King Alfred, by G.A. Henty

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

In Search of the Dark Ages, by Michael Wood

The Mummies of Urumchi, by Elizabeth Barber

In Search of the Indo-Europeans, by J. P. Mallory

Early riders: The beginnings of mounted warfare in Asia and Europe, by Robert Drews

Warriors of the steppe: A military history of Central Asia, 500 B.C. to A.D. 1700, by Erik Hildinger