Yggdrasil · Humankind

Wulfstan: Seven Days Across the Baltic

A traveller’s report of a seven-day sea voyage from Hedeby to Truso, kept in an Old English history.

Myth and literature

The story

Near-contemporary travel account: a report of a sea voyage was written down in the late ninth century, close in time to the journey as the sources date it, and it is one traveller’s account, not a description of Norse life in general.

Wulfstan says he sailed from Hedeby to Truso, a trading place near the mouth of the Vistula, and that the voyage took seven days and nights with the ship under sail the whole way. He names the lands he passed. To one side lay the land of the Wends, as far as the Vistula. To the other lay Langeland, Lolland, Falster and Scania, which he says belonged to the Danes, then Bornholm, which had its own king, and after that Blekinge, Möre, Öland and Gotland, which he says belonged to the Swedes. He also describes customs of the people near Truso. Seven days is what he reports for one voyage, not a standard timetable.

Myth and literature · Context

What we know, and what we do not

What is recorded: a voyage from Hedeby to Truso of seven days and nights under sail, the lands and peoples named on either side, and notes on the customs of the people near Truso. The text names the Danes and Swedes as holding the islands and provinces he lists.

What is not recorded: why he went. One suggestion is that King Alfred of Wessex wanted allies against Viking raiders, but this is a hypothesis. It is also unclear whether Wulfstan was English or from Hedeby. What he saw near Truso are one man’s observations of one region, and they should not be taken as customs of all Norse people. The seven days are the length of this trip, with this ship and these winds, and not a rule for the route.

Historical evidence

The evidence

Wulfstan’s report survives in the Old English version of Orosius’s history, made in the late ninth century, where it stands beside the account of Ohthere of Hålogaland. It is a short insertion about the Baltic and the only record of Wulfstan himself. The Wikipedia article dates the voyage to around 880, and other writers give a slightly later date. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde published a whole volume of studies on the voyage in 2009 (Anton Englert and Athena Trakadas, eds., Wulfstan’s Voyage), after a seminar in 2004. The museum’s boat guild also sailed a replica of the ship Skuldelev 1 from Hedeby to Gdansk as an experiment linked to that seminar.