This poem, showing Kipling’s verse at its most skilful and eloquent, was a favourite of the Argentinan writer Jorge Luis Borges. Of course, when you think about it the answer to the question the poem poses is obvious and rather practical. I suspect it would be quite wrong to think of the Vikings as having any mystical or sentimental attachment to the sea, or to picture them as mooning about declaiming some Old Norse equivalent of Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’. They had a proper fear of the sea-goddess Rán and her nets that she used to capture and drown mortals who dared to trespass on her kingdom. There is a poignant elegy, the Sonatorrek, attributed to the great 10^th century skald Egill Skallagrimsson, in which he laments the death of his son Böðvar, who drowned at sea during a storm:

Mjök hefr Rán rykst um mik;
emk ofsnauðr at ástvinum.
Sleit marr bönd mínnar áttar,
snaran þátt af sjalfum mér.
 
Mightily Ran has wrought on me
who reft me of friend, of scion.
Bare now is his place at board
Since the sea took my son.                    (my translation)

No, it was simply that the sea offered the speediest route to rich plunder with a bit of rape and monk-bashing on the side, and that the voyaging, though hard and dangerous work, at least offered a break from trying to scratch a living from the Scandinavian soil. Be that as it may, the poem is certainly capable of evoking a shiver. That ‘ten-times-fingering weed’ gets me every time.

Harp Song of the Dane Women

What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She has no house to lay a guest in
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.

She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Yet, when the signs of summer thicken,
And the ice breaks, and the birch-buds quicken,
Yearly you turn from our side, and sicken–

Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters.
You steal away to the lapping waters,
And look at your ship in her winter-quarters.

You forget our mirth, and talk at the tables,
The kine in the shed and the horse in the stables
To pitch her sides and go over her cables.

Then you drive out where the storm-clouds swallow,
And the sound of your oar-blades, falling hollow,
Is all we have left through the months to follow.

Ah, what is Woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

Rudyard Kipling