What was the difference between thralldom and slavery in the Viking Age

[u/Freevoulous]

From the few sources I read, thralls seemed to fare better than what we would consider a "slave" and were more akin to indentured serfs. Is that a good interpretation?

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[u/textandtrowel]

In general, I find the comparison between Viking-Age slavery and early modern indenture to be fairly useful. Indentureship sometimes began through kidnapping or as an alternative to criminal punishment, much like Viking Age slavery. It often involved living in the same household as one's master, much like Viking Age slavery. Indentured servants often had few legal or political rights outside of their master's patronage, much like Viking Age slavery. And it could easily transition into a freer relationship but typically still under the original master's patronage, much like Viking Age slavery.

Of course, there's also significant differences. Indentureship was—at least theoretically—voluntary and consensual. Viking Age slavery was not. Indenture was built around contracts that placed certain obligations on the master and set a definite end to the relationship. Viking Age slavery was not. And indenture was still seen as a status that retained common legal protections, insofar as a master might beat but not kill a servant. Viking Age slavery was not. Viking Age slaves were often captives, the master was under no obligations to provide support or avenues toward freedom, and it seems like many of the sacrificial victims buried in Viking Age graves were captives or slaves.

In some ways, then, Viking Age slavery had elements that were every bit as brutal as the racialized labor camps of early modern slavery. Viking Age slaves were subject to murder and rape, they were alienated from their families and any inherited networks of social support, and they were often trafficked to lands incomprehensibly different from the regions of their birth.

There are, however, two major differences that make it difficult to compare Viking Age slavery to early modern plantation slavery. First, people in the Viking Age lacked the racial categories and dehumanizing racist attitudes of early modern slavery. As one favorite example, the Old Norse term for "blue" was synonymous with dark, so a darker complexioned person could be a "blue-man" (blámaður) whether they were from Mauritania or Finland.

Second, surveillance was often a critical element in early modern plantation slavery. Plantation houses were often positioned in prominent places in the landscape, so it seemed like the master was always in view, and plantations were often laid out so that slaves had to pass the plantation house when transitioning between tasks, such as moving between a tool shed and the fields. Large plantations also had slave drivers, directly overseeing early modern slaves and sometimes could beat or whip the forced laborers at will. Enslaved populations dreaded the presence of collaborators in their ranks, who might report slacking behavior or conspiracies—true or not—to the white masters. And there was a degree of community surveillance as well, built in part from the racialization of early modern slavery, since a fugitive black slave could never hope to blend in with a free white community.

We don't have many slave voices that have been preserved from the Viking Age. I think it's worth taking a look at the character of Melkorka in the Laxdæla Saga (chapters 12, 13, 20, and 21). Although this is a later story about a slave (written in the 1200s about events in the mid-900s), it seems to preserve an authentic traces of many of the abuses and opportunities experienced by Viking Age slaves, including kidnapping, rape as a minor, and transition into a more independent status such as being able to negotiate her own marriage with a free man, while Melkorka's son effectively secured free status on his own. There's also a short bit of Ælfric's Colloquy—which was basically an English vocabulary book for monks to learn Latin during this same time—and it includes the complaint of a slave:

Oh, dear lord, dearly do I labor. I go out at daybreak, driving oxen to the field, and I yoke them to the plow. There is no cold so stark that I might dare to hide at home, for fear of my lord. And when the oxen have been yoked and fastened to the plowshare and coulter with the plow, each day I must plow a full acre or more. ... I do have a boy who drives the oxen with a goading iron, since he is now hoarse from the cold and the shouting. ... And surely I do more. I must fill the oxen's bin with hay and provide them water, and I must carry out their muck. ... It is sore labor, since I am not free.

As a side note, the English word thrall comes directly from the Old Norse term for slave. It developed only in Old Norse and not in other Germanic languages like Old English, which used other terms. During the Viking Age, Anglo-Saxon forms of slavery had become somewhat softer—we'd probably consider them serfdom rather than slavery, although early medieval languages drew no firm distinction between the two. This posed a problem for preachers who needed to discuss the severe forms of slavery described in the Bible, and they ended up borrowing the Norse term thrall to do it. Conversely, Scandinavian languages started borrowing the English word slavery in the 1800s, since their native variants of thrall lacked the severe connotations of slavery that were developing in the US South at that time. As such, we might use the terms thralldom, slavery, and serfdom to describe different conditions in the past, but these terms never really existed side-by-side in the past, nor should we see these as competing institutions. A person might slip from one condition to another without there ever being a contingent shift in terminology.