Viking Britain: A History

Viking Britain: A History Thomas Williams A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields.To many, the word ‘Viking’ brings to mind red scenes of rape and pillage, of marauders from beyond the sea rampaging around the British coastline in the last gloomy centuries before the Norman Conquest. It is true that Britain in the Viking Age was a turbulent, violent place. The kings and warlords who have impressed their memories on the period revel in names that fire the blood and stir the imagination: Svein Forkbeard and Edmund Ironside, Ivar the Boneless and Alfred the Great, Erik Bloodaxe and Edgar the Pacifier amongst many others. Evidence for their brutality, their dominance, their avarice and their pride is still unearthed from British soil with stunning regularity.But this is not the whole story.In Viking Britain, Thomas Williams has drawn on his experience as project curator of the British Museum exhibition of Vikings: Life and Legend to show how the people we call Vikings came not just to raid and plunder, but to settle, to colonize and to rule. The impact on these islands was profound and enduring, shaping British social, cultural and political development for hundreds of years. Indeed, in language, literature, place-names and folklore, the presence of Scandinavian settlers can still be felt, and their memory – filtered and refashioned through the writings of people like J.R.R. Tolkien, William Morris and G.K.Chesterton – has transformed the western imagination.This remarkable book makes use of new academic research and first-hand experience, drawing deeply from the relics and landscapes that the Vikings and their contemporaries fashioned and walked: their runestones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields, poems and chronicles. The book offers a vital evocation of a forgotten world, its echoes in later history and its implications for the present. (#uaab9a6a7-0300-5895-89dd-6ec3e820de8d) Copyright (#uaab9a6a7-0300-5895-89dd-6ec3e820de8d) William Collins An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.williamcollinsbooks.com) This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017 Copyright © Thomas Williams 2017 Thomas Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover illustration by Joe McLaren Maps by Martin Brown All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008171933 Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780008171940 Version: 2018-06-25 Dedication (#uaab9a6a7-0300-5895-89dd-6ec3e820de8d) FOR Z Epigraph (#uaab9a6a7-0300-5895-89dd-6ec3e820de8d) Storms break on stone-strewn slopes, Snows falling, the ground enfettered, the howling of winter. Then darkness awakens, deepens the night-shadow, sends from the north a harsh hail-harrying bringing terror to men. The Wanderer (tenth century)1 (#litres_trial_promo) Contents Cover (#u3e393fb7-ee40-5319-a6de-84b01a5e80ee) Title Page (#u87988c2c-7055-5319-9f86-1a407a94c824) Copyright (#u1706e83c-175a-5fe1-b139-5a8a22299ae5) Dedication (#ued612693-7a2d-5116-8b73-80286294bdc1) Epigraph (#u599e8639-a04d-56d6-a9db-85308b375835) Maps (#uea6bc385-c832-59ba-a1f3-d4032904d003) Preface (#ua6a6b615-80c8-5788-b07b-dc7d971c9f17) 1 Outsiders from Across the Water (#u836f9a6b-2d31-5f92-a84e-0e96833d8cf7) 2 Heart of Darkness (#udfdf72ba-8275-537d-8a9a-197f3ff5f507) 3 Mother North (#u81cccc80-11f1-57f7-8a7c-f4c866006b59) 4 Shores in Flames (#uc3059a31-ce84-503c-b4b3-fea05de4466f) 5 Beyond the North Waves (#uae507ac4-9b63-5b85-9b38-908cf37990e6) 6 The Gathering Storm (#uc69ca137-c11d-5a8a-9188-665c2ee670d8) 7 Dragon-Slayers (#u9b26fb07-be0e-53e4-af99-18e247b0d9ab) 8 Eagles of Blood (#litres_trial_promo) 9 Wayland’s Bones (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Real Men (#litres_trial_promo) 11 The Return of the King (#litres_trial_promo) 12 The Godfather (#litres_trial_promo) 13 Rogue Traders (#litres_trial_promo) 14 Danelaw (#litres_trial_promo) 15 Lakeland Sagas (#litres_trial_promo) 16 A New Way (#litres_trial_promo) 17 The Pagan Winter (#litres_trial_promo) 18 The Great War (#litres_trial_promo) 19 Bloodaxe (#litres_trial_promo) 20 Wolves (#litres_trial_promo) 21 Mortal Remains (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) Timeline (#litres_trial_promo) Abbreviations and Primary Sources (#litres_trial_promo) Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Further Reading (#litres_trial_promo) Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) (#uaab9a6a7-0300-5895-89dd-6ec3e820de8d) Preface (#uaab9a6a7-0300-5895-89dd-6ec3e820de8d) In 2013–14 I was the project curator for the exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend at the British Museum. One of the first reviews, published in a major national newspaper, offered the following critique: There’s no stage-setting. No gory recreation of the Lindisfarne raid, say, to get us in the mood […] I felt like crying. Where were the swords? And if I was ready to bawl, what does this exhibition offer its younger visitors? It can’t claim not to be for them. You can’t put on an exhibition called Vikings without expecting some kids. The only way this exhibition could sound more child-friendly would be if it was called Vikings and Dinosaurs. But the austerely beautiful cases of brooches and golden rings and amber offer very little to fans of Horrible Histories.1 (#litres_trial_promo) Leaving aside the issue of whether sensationalizing historical violence for the entertainment of children is ever appropriate (how about a ‘gory recreation’ of the Srebrenica massacre?), what these comments really reveal is an uncritical assumption that the Vikings have their proper place as players in a hilarious historical Grand Guignol, alongside head-chopping at the Tower of London. The Vikings, it seems to say, are a cheerful, bloody diversion for the kids on a wet bank-holiday afternoon, not a proper historical phenomenon. The indignation that springs from not having had these prejudices confirmed is palpable. Brooches? Women? Trade? BORING! Vikings are big men with swords, crushing skulls left, right and centre: the barbarian archetype writ large and red. It occurred to me at the time that nobody would treat Roman history in this way. It is unthinkable, for example, that any art critic would yearn for lurid re-enactments of Roman soldiers cheerfully raping and murdering British women and children – least of all within the austere neo-classical precincts of the British Museum. The Romans, it is instinctively felt, are refined, have gravitas. They benefit from a cultural snobbery with extraordinarily deep roots (ultimately fastened in the smug imperial propaganda of the Romans themselves). Roman Britain, in particular, is widely presented in a solidly respectable way – epitomized in tiresome tropes of roof tiles and under-floor heating, good roads and urban planning, fine wine and fancy tableware. It is a period that can serve as an acceptable backstory to who we are and where we come from, a people ‘just like us’, who went to parties and wrote letters and had jobs. Romanitas – Romanness – means ‘civilization’. Few think of the age of the Vikings in those terms. Like other romantic curios they have been fetishized and infantilized, set apart from wider history alongside pirates, gladiators, knights-in-armour and, I suppose, dinosaurs. The Vikings are presented as cartoon savages who had a short-lived cameo rampaging around in the gloomy interlude between the end of Roman Britain and the Norman Conquest. It does them a grave disservice. Between the conventional beginning of the Viking Age in the late eighth century and its close in the eleventh, Scandinavian people and culture were involved with Britain to a degree that left a permanent impression on these islands. They came to trade and plunder and, ultimately, to settle, to colonize and to rule. It is a story of often epic proportions, thronged with characters whose names and deeds still fire the blood and stir the imagination – Svein Forkbeard and Edmund Ironside, Ivar the Boneless and Alfred the Great, Erik Bloodaxe and Edgar the Pacifier – a story of war and upheaval. It is also, however, the story of how the people of the British Isles came to reorient themselves in a new and interconnected world, where new technologies for travel and communication brought ideas and customs into sometimes explosive contact, but which also fostered the development of towns and trade, forged new identities and gave birth to England and Scotland as unified nations for the first time. By the time of the Norman Conquest, most of Britain might justifiably be described as ‘Viking’ to varying degrees, and in language, literature, place-names and folklore the presence of Scandinavian settlers can still be felt throughout the British Isles, with repercussions for all those places that British culture and colonization have subsequently touched. The Vikings have also retained their influence as a powerful cultural force in the modern world, and representations of the Viking Age in art, music and literature have had a profound impact on the western imagination. Indeed, much of what we imagine when we think of this period in British history – even the word ‘Viking’ itself – grew from political, literary and artistic currents that swelled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, too, a ‘Viking Britain’ came alive and, to the likes of William Morris and J. R. R. Tolkien, this was a place that seemed to lurk unseen just at the borders of their rapidly modernizing world. It was there not only in the writings and monuments that time had preserved, but also (and perhaps especially) in the elements themselves – the grey sea, the north wind and the very bones of the earth. In travel, art and literature, landscape became a way to commune with the people of the Viking Age – people who had seen the same red sun rising, felt the same cold wind on their necks, touched the same fissures in the smooth grey rock. This has in turn become a way to explore the mentality and world-view of a people with an intimate and profoundly imaginative relationship with the environment. For people living in the latter centuries of the first millennium, the landscape was teeming with unseen inhabitants and riddled with gateways to other worlds. Pits and ditches, barrows and ruins, mountains, rivers and forests: all could be home to the dead, the divine and the diabolical, haunted by monsters and gods. Telling the story of the Vikings in Britain is therefore not a straightforward undertaking – it is the tale of a people who were not a people, who came to lands that were not yet nations. The historical record is patchy, the archaeology equivocal. Even the very words we use – ‘Viking’ most of all – slither away from easy definition. It is, moreover, the story not only of the three centuries leading up to (and overlapping) the Norman Conquest, but also of how that time has been remembered, recycled and reimagined by successive generations. It is, as earlier generations seem better to have appreciated, a world that is still tangible. The sense that the past is present in the landscape – that there is another world hovering just out of sight – has receded in step with modernity’s alienation from the land. Against the advance of technology, urbanization and globalization, our imaginative connection to landscape continues to fight the long defeat. The land, water and sky have largely been disenchanted of the past, just as they were disenchanted of their elves and spirits during the enlightenment and industrial revolution. But the past can never be wholly erased, and the rivers, hills, woods and stones of Britain remain deeply imprinted with memories of the Vikings and their world. It is a legacy that runs far beyond the confines of Britain itself. From the seventeenth century to the present, the English-speaking diaspora – of people, ideas, systems, values, laws and language – has had a transformative impact on the world, firstly through the expansion of Britain’s Empire, and latterly through the ongoing dominance and global reach of North American culture and economic power. The memory of the Vikings may only be one small cell in the vast genome of Anglophone identity, but it is a tenacious and enduring one. Sometimes it appears overtly, in the simplified and bowdlerized versions of Norse myths and Viking stereotypes that penetrate popular culture, whether through the pages of comic books, the iconography of football teams or the covers of heavy-metal albums. But it also runs in deeper channels of thought and language, the serpentine ships that travel the dark rivers of the subconscious mind, a half-seen shadow of grim gods and thudding oars and dark pine forests wreathed in mist. The chapters that follow tell the tale of the Vikings in Britain as a broadly chronological narrative. At times the story diverges as events begin to unfold simultaneously across Britain, but I have largely endeavoured to keep the overall momentum moving forward as much as possible. At the same time, however, this is also a book about ideas, objects and places. Through the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked – their runestones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields – it is possible to reach beyond the bare rehearsal of names and dates to explore the way that people in Viking Age Britain thought about their world and their place within it, and the way they have been remembered in the centuries since their passing: the stories they told and the tales they inspired, their fears, their fantasies, and the dooms they aspired to. Several themes recur throughout this book – in particular what being a ‘Viking’ really meant, how attitudes and identities changed over time, and what that meant for the ethnic evolution of the people of Britain – but in a general sense this book is about illuminating an influence on British history that has been profound and enduring, one that has shaped languages, culture and the historical trajectory of the British Isles and beyond for hundreds of years. In a small way, I hope, this book may help to restore to the Vikings some of the dignity that they have too often been denied. There are, it must be acknowledged, some difficulties that attend the writing of a chronological history of this period; some parts of Britain – England especially – receive more detailed treatment than others, and not all of the evidence is discussed at equal length. In many cases this reflects the availability of source material: both the lack of it and – less often – its abundance. A complete inventory of all Viking-period archaeology found on the Isle of Man would run to many hundreds of pages; a compendium of all the contemporary written references to Viking activity in the same place would fit on the back of a small envelope. Frequently, however, the question of what to cover and what to leave out has been decided by me, and I make no apology for this: it reflects the fact that this book is a personal, at times perhaps idiosyncratic, exploration of the subject. It is intended to be neither definitive nor comprehensive – it cannot hope to be either, not within the covers of a book as slim as this. For all of the detailed regional surveys and the surfeit of books (of wildly varying quality) on the Vikings as a whole, a truly definitive compendium of evidence for the Vikings in Britain remains to be written: it would be a mammoth undertaking, probably running to multiple volumes. It would also, more than likely, be made less than definitive within days of its publication, as new data – much of it gathered by metal-detectorists – continues to roll in, week after week, and spectacular finds are made with some regularity.2 (#litres_trial_promo) At the same time, major research projects continue to transform our perception of Viking Age societies, their interactions and their evolutions; this too is unlikely to stop any time soon.3 (#litres_trial_promo) This book has not been written with an academic audience in mind, but I am nevertheless deeply conscious of the need to provide signposts for the reader to the sources of the material from which this narrative has been constructed. Although it would be unnecessarily distracting to provide full scholarly citations, some textual references are necessary for the reader’s orientation and to acknowledge sources that I have cited directly. I have chosen, in the main, to restrict these citations to primary written sources and archaeological reports – that is, to evidence rather than interpretation. However, where the work of individual scholars is referred to directly, or where a particular argument or line of reasoning is consciously derived from the work of others, I have also provided the appropriate citations. For brevity, a full citation is only provided the first time a work is referred to in the notes; thereafter, works are referred to by their author (or editor) and abbreviated title only. Primary sources that are referred to frequently have been abbreviated, and a full list of the abbreviations used and a full citation to the edition(s) relied upon in each case are provided in the endmatter. Where primary sources have been quoted in the text and the translation is my own, the citation in the Notes refers to an original language edition of the source in question. Where a translated edition of a source has been quoted, the citation in the Notes directs the reader to the translated edition relied upon. Exceptions are indicated in the Notes. A short summary of relevant further reading can be found at the end of this book. This is intended to direct the reader to the most accessible and up-to-date treatments and is intended only as a starting point to the vast literature that touches on the Vikings – in Britain and in wider perspective. In addition, a full bibliography of all literature cited can be accessed at tjtwilliams.com (http://www.tjtwilliams.com) Acknowledgements The ideas and opinions expressed in this book are – even where I believe them to be my own – indebted to a huge number of historians, archaeologists, linguists, numismatists, scientists and others, whose work I have read or with whom I have had the privilege of working, whether as a student, a colleague or a friend. Those people will know who they are, and may well recognize their own fingerprints on my thought-processes. Particular thanks are due to Gareth Williams (no relation), my colleague at the British Museum, and a man to whom I owe a great personal and intellectual debt. Neil Price at the University of Uppsala did me the honour of reading the entire book in draft. His comments have been both hugely encouraging and unerringly pertinent. My editors, Arabella Pike and Peter James, deserve many thanks indeed. Their ministrations – and, in the case of the former, great forbearance – have helped to ensure that the best possible version of this book was ultimately realized. My agents, Julian Alexander and Ben Clarke at LAW, also deserve fulsome thanks for their support and tireless efforts on my behalf. Tom Holland requires a special mention: if it had not been for a good-natured intervention on his part, my introduction to the aforementioned gentlemen would never have been effected, and this book may not have come into being at all. My father, Geoffrey Williams, read every word of the manuscript as the chapters were produced and watched its slow gestation over many months. My discussions with him, and the innumerable errors identified and improvements suggested, have undoubtedly made this a better book. My mother, Gilli, produced (at exceptionally short notice and with remarkable facility) several of the fabulous line drawings in this book. For all of the help that both my parents have provided, as well as their unwavering love and support, my gratitude is profound. And finally my wife, Zeena, has had to contend with an intrusive Viking presence in her life for longer now than she probably ever imagined. But she has weathered the storm and borne me up whenever I felt that I might sink. Nothing would have been possible without her. She is the best. I cannot stress enough, however, that none of the people I have mentioned above can in any way be held responsible for my wilder flights of imagination, or for any errors that have made it into print: these are all my own. A Note on Names There is a bewildering amount of variation in the rendering of personal names across this period, with the same name frequently appearing in wildly different spellings depending on the language of the written source in which it appears. As a rule of thumb, I have preferred to use the most contemporary and ethno-linguistically appropriate versions wherever possible. I have, however, made frequent exception wherever normalized modern spellings of names are likely to be more familiar to the reader: hence ‘Olaf’, rather than Ol?fr; ‘Eric’, rather than Eir?kr; ‘Odin’, rather than O?inn. Where variant forms are used (especially in quotations), I have provided the more familiar form in square brackets. Given the complexities and ambiguities of Viking Age onomastics, it is entirely likely that some inconsistencies remain: my apologies in advance if this is so. In the text and Notes, ‘ON’ denotes Old Norse, ‘OE’ Old English and ‘ModE’ Modern English. 1 Outsiders from Across the Water (#uaab9a6a7-0300-5895-89dd-6ec3e820de8d) When the watchman on the wall, the Shieldings’ lookout whose job it was to guard the sea-cliffs, saw shields glittering on the gangplank and battle-equipment being unloaded he had to find out who and what they were. So he rode to the shore, this horseman of Hrothgar’s, and challenged them in formal terms, flourishing his spear. Beowulf1 (#litres_trial_promo) In the days of King Beorhtric of Wessex (r. 786–802), ‘there came for the first time three ships of Northmen from Hordaland’,2 (#litres_trial_promo) and ‘they landed in the island which is called Portland’.3 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘[T]he king’s reeve, who was then in the town called Dorchester, leapt on his horse, sped to the harbour with a few men (for he thought they were merchants rather than marauders), and admonishing them [the Northmen] in an authoritative manner, gave orders that they should be driven to the royal town. And he and his companions were killed by them on the spot. The name of the reeve was Beaduheard.’4 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Those were the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English.’5 (#litres_trial_promo) Looking south from the summit of the barrow, the land feels like it is slipping away, yielding itself to the ineffable splendour of the ocean. Away in the distance the dark bulk of Portland languishes, a last defiant redoubt set in the glittering sea. The world is wide here, the coast of England laid out in broad wings to east and west; on a bright clear day – the ozone hollowing out the sinuses – you feel weightless, as if you could step from the top of that mound and be lifted into the firmament, soar into that white light obliterating the edges of land, sea and sky, tumbling in the breeze. The mound is known, for reasons now lost, as Culliford Tree. It is a tumulus, a Bronze Age burial mound – one of five running east to west – that had stood on the Dorset chalk for more than 2,000 years before it received a name in the English tongue. Like breakwaters in the surf, the mounds and their ancient dead have endured the battering tides of time, forcing history to shape itself around them. At some point after it was named, the barrow became the meeting place of Culliford Tree Hundred, the administrative district of which Portland formed part at the time of the Domesday Survey in 1086. It had probably served this purpose for hundreds of years prior to William the Conqueror’s great national audit and by the end of the eighth century it was almost certainly a significant regional meeting place. It was in this place and in others like it that royal officials enacted the king’s will and delivered his justice, adjudicating disputes and pronouncing verdicts which could include fines, mutilation and death. From the summit of the barrow, the landscape reveals itself to the watcher – a place from which the land could be claimed, authority enacted in the act of seeing. On that day at the end of the eighth century when three ships came unasked to Portland, the man riding down to Portland strand might well have paused and looked back over his shoulder, looked for Culliford Tree. He might have sought comfort from the distant mound on the horizon – a dark beacon of antiquity and earth-fast custom, a symbol of territory and authority, of land and legitimacy. This man, Beaduheard, would have known that the barrow watched over him, lending him the power in the land, confirming the prerogatives of his office. He was reeve to the king of Wessex, Beorhtric, and as such he exercised the king’s delegated authority. Reeves represented the king in towns, ports and sometimes across whole shires; the modern and medieval word ‘sheriff’ has its origin in these ‘shire-reeves’. Beaduheard, therefore, was an important man – responsible, perhaps, for local government in Dorchester and the surrounding countryside, a man used to getting his own way. Beaduheard arrives on Portland to find a group of travellers arrayed on the beach, their ships drawn up behind them, their backs to the sea. They are wary – frightened even. They are strangers in a strange land, conditioned perhaps to expect a frosty welcome. Beaduheard dismounts from his horse to receive them, others following his lead, shingle crunching beneath leather-shod feet. Words are exchanged but their meaning is lost – whatever mutual words they understood failing in the tension of the moment, drowned by the crashing of the waves. But Beaduheard is no diplomat, and the tenor of his words is clear enough. He ‘admonishes’ the newcomers in an ‘authoritative manner’, he attempts to ‘drive them’ to the king’s residence (‘against their will’ as the chronicle of John of Worcester adds).6 (#litres_trial_promo) He knows his duty, and he knows the law. The West Saxon edicts that are closest in date to these events are the laws of King Ine (r. 688–726). Clause 20 gives a sense of the sort of welcome that the unfortunate wanderer could expect in eighth-century Wessex: ‘If a man from afar, or a stranger, goes through the woods off the highway and neither calls out nor blows a horn, he may be considered a thief, to be slain or to be redeemed [by paying his wergild (“man-price”)].’7 (#litres_trial_promo) Britain’s most southerly realm offered cold comfort to the lost. In the Old English poem Beowulf – composed at some point between the early eighth and the early eleventh century – there can be found, expressed in the Reeve’s own West Saxon tongue, a form of words that we might imagine Beaduheard speaking in his final hours: an echo of a lived experience.8 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘What kind of men are you who arrive rigged out for combat in coats of mail, sailing here over the sea-lanes in your steep-hulled boat? […] Never before has a force under arms disembarked so openly – not bothering to ask if the sentries allowed them safe passage or the clan had consented […] So now, before you fare inland as interlopers, I have to be informed about who you are and where you hail from. Outsiders from across the water, I say it again: the sooner you tell where you come from and why, the better.’9 (#litres_trial_promo) In the poem, these words are spoken by the Danish coastguard to the eponymous hero and his men as they arrive from the realm of the Geats (southern Sweden) to lend their aid to Hrothgar, the Danish king. They are formalities, to be understood both by questioner and visitor: the back-and-forth ritual of arrival. In the real-life counterpart to this scene, however, the newcomers on the Portland beach chose not to participate, not to play the game. Perhaps they did not know the rules. The travellers, berated in a foreign tongue by an aggressive stranger, are frightened and frustrated – the instinct to fight or flee like a high-pitched whine, raised to intolerable pitch. In the heavy moments that follow, the confrontation develops the hypertension of a shoot-out: a bead of sweat running down the back of a sun-burnt neck, eyes darting left and right as time slows to dream-pace, measured out by the metronomic crashing of the surf. Perhaps a hand flickers towards a sword hilt; perhaps a horse stamps, a cloak billows, a gull shrieks … When the spell finally breaks the violence seems inevitable – preordained – as if only death can bring the world back into balance. In the end, all that is left, in place of Beowulf’s polite and formal replies, are huddled corpses on the strand, their blood swallowed between stones. The arrival of these Northmen in Portland – the carbuncle that sprouts from Dorset into the English Channel – established the leitmotifs for Britain’s early interactions with its northern neighbours: unanswered questions and sudden brutality, the fluid identity of the merchant-marauder, the collision of cultures at the margins of the land. For almost three centuries, seaborne marauders would return again and again – sometimes like the inevitable attrition of the tides, dissolving the most vulnerable shores one wave at a time, at others like a mighty storm that smashes sea-walls and wreaks devastation before expending itself exhausted. Sometimes it would seem more like the inexorable flood of a climate apocalypse, the waters rising and rising without respite, washing deep inland and bursting river banks deep in the interior of the land. Everywhere the crimson tide flowed and pounded, the history of these islands would be changed for ever, new channels and shapes scoured and moulded in the clay of British history. The island that the crew of those three ships blundered into in the reign of King Beorhtric was still far from settling into its familiar modern grooves. Scotland, Wales and England did not exist, and the shifting patchwork of petty kingdoms that made up the political geography of Britain was fractured along cultural, linguistic, religious, geographical and historical lines. Major fault-lines divided those parts of Britain that had once been exposed to intensive Roman colonization from those which had not, those which adhered to Roman and which to Irish forms of Christian liturgy, those who believed their ancestors were British from those who looked to a homeland in Ireland or across the North Sea. Landscape sundered highland zones from lowland zones; language divided speakers of Celtic languages from those who used a Germanic tongue; the sea brought an influx of foreign goods and ideas to some, while shutting others out. The map of Britain at the end of the eighth century had developed slowly from conditions arising from the decline of the Roman Empire during the fourth century. In Britain, the removal of direct Roman administration and military defence around the year 400 coincided with changes to the cultural orientation of communities along Britain’s eastern seaboard. Increasingly, their centre of gravity shifted from the Mediterranean world to the North Sea. Part of the reason for this was political and economic, but migration also played a major role. People from what is now northern Germany, southern Scandinavia and the Low Countries had been moving into eastern areas of Britain – particularly Kent, East Anglia and England north of the Humber – from at least the early fifth century. The numbers involved, and the nature of the migration, remains fiercely contested, but the impact was undeniable and dramatic. By the early eighth century, the northern monk Bede was able to write with confidence about an ‘English-speaking people’ who were distinct from the native British. The key distinguishing characteristic of this group – as implied by Bede’s phrase – was their tongue. These were people who spoke a different language from both Romano-British elites (for whom Latin was the ubiquitous written language) and the ‘indigenous’ Britons, who spoke varying forms of a Celtic language known as Common or Old Brittonic (or Brythonic). The newcomers, however, spoke a Germanic language known to modern scholars as ‘Old English’ (or, more rarely these days, as ‘Anglo-Saxon’) which was closely related to the languages spoken in the regions from which migrants across the North Sea had come. While doubts hover over a great deal of Bede’s narrative, and particularly his migration and conquest narratives (much of which is an elaboration of a vague, tendentious and ideologically motivated sermon written by the British monk Gildas in the sixth century),10 (#litres_trial_promo) the impact of the English language is not in doubt. Place-names and early vernacular written records attest that English became dominant and widespread at a remarkably early date. Moreover, these English-speakers (whatever their genetic ancestry) had, by Bede’s day, become culturally and linguistically dominant in most of lowland Britain, forming a tapestry of greater and lesser kingdoms which had grown out of an inconsistent pattern of tribal groupings and late Roman administrative districts. The most northerly of these English-speaking realms was Northumbria – literally the land north of the River Humber. By the late eighth century this kingdom covered a huge swathe of northern Britain, from the Humber to the Forth, cobbled together from a number of former British territories: Deira, Bernicia, Gododdin, Rheged and Elmet. For over a century, Northumbria had represented a high point of post-Roman achievement in scholarship and artistic culture, driven from major centres of learning such as Wearmouth-Jarrow (where Bede wrote, among much else, his Ecclesiastical History of the English People) and the island monastery of Lindisfarne. This extraordinary cultural flowering was also remarkable for its fusion of British, Irish, Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean influences. The Lindisfarne Gospels – an illuminated manuscript of breathtaking beauty and craftsmanship – exemplifies the splendour, ingenuity and spontaneity of this northern renaissance, its famous ‘carpet pages’ weaving Celtic, Germanic and Coptic Christian themes into mind-bending symphonies of colour and cultural synthesis. However, despite the cultural refinement and territorial muscle, Northumbria had been growing weaker throughout the eighth century, undermined by the incessant feuding of its aristocracy and the instability of its royal house. In 790, for example, around the time that the Northmen had arrived in Portland, King Osred II was deposed after only a year on the throne, forcibly tonsured and exiled from his kingdom. His replacement, ?thelred I, seems to have had powerful friends. It is likely that the coup was carried out with the support of Northumbria’s large and belligerent southern neighbour: the kingdom of Mercia. Covering most of the English midlands from approximately the modern Welsh border in the west to the borders of East Anglia in the east, and from the Thames valley in the south to the Humber and the Wirral in the north, Mercia dominated southern Britain and reached the apogee of its political dominance under King Offa (r. 757–96). In the last decade of the eighth century, Offa was at the height of his powers. From his power-base in the Staffordshire heartlands around Tamworth, Lichfield and Repton, the king exercised not only direct rule over Mercia, but political and military control over the neighbouring kingdoms of East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. The greatest surviving monument of his reign is the massive defensive earthwork marking the western boundary of Mercia: Offa’s Dyke. The scale of this engineering project is testament to the extent of the king’s power and ambition, not to mention his ability to coerce his subjects into undertaking state-wide projects.11 (#litres_trial_promo) Offan statecraft was of the Corleone school of governance. When, for example, King ?thelberht of East Anglia attempted to assert a measure of independence (briefly minting his own coins), ‘Offa ordered King ?thelberht’s head to be struck off.’ This sort of gangland authority was closely tied to the personal charisma of the king and, as it turned out, the Mercian supremacy unravelled shortly after Offa’s death in 796.12 (#litres_trial_promo) The decapitation of King ?thelberht wasn’t enough to bring the kingdom of East Anglia to an end. Comprising at its core the ancient counties of Norfolk and Suffolk (the ‘north folk’ and the ‘south folk’ in Old English), the kingdom had, at the beginning of the seventh century, been an important power-broker. East Anglia had once boasted links to Scandinavia, the rest of continental Europe and beyond, and nothing better exemplifies the kingdom’s cosmopolitan splendour than the great ship burial at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in Suffolk. The famous mustachioed helmet found at Sutton Hoo is the ubiquitous icon of the Anglo-Saxon age, an object which in its style, iconography and manufacture has its closest parallels among the grave goods buried with the military elite of southern Sweden. But the burial also contained – among other objects – silverware from the Byzantine Empire (the surviving eastern part of the Roman Empire, centred on Constantinople – modern Istanbul), coins from Merovingian Gaul (which comprised parts of France, Germany and the Low Countries) and weapons and jewellery embellished with garnets imported from India. Although East Anglia would never again achieve the influence it commanded in this glittering seventh-century heyday, it nevertheless maintained its independence long into the ninth century.13 (#litres_trial_promo) The smaller kingdoms which had lain under Mercian domination during Offa’s reign were, however, destined ultimately to becoming defunct as independent concerns. The royal dynasty of the East Saxons (with its core in Essex) and those of the South Saxons (Sussex) and Kent either disappeared or had been demoted to junior aristocratic rank by the early ninth century. The killer blow in each case was delivered not by Mercia but by another resurgent player in the English-speaking community: Wessex – the kingdom of the West Saxons. Wessex had experienced a torrid eighth century. With its heartlands in Hampshire and Dorset, Wessex was an assertive force in southern Britain, extending north across Somerset, Wiltshire and Berkshire, and eating steadily westwards into Devon. During its heyday in the reign of King Ine (r. 688–726), West Saxon authority had also extended across Surrey and Sussex in the east. But more than sixty years of attritional warfare with the Mercians to the north had eroded its territories south of the Thames, created a militarized zone across the chalk uplands of Wiltshire and Berkshire and seen control of Sussex lost to Offa’s Mercia. In 786, the pugnacious West Saxon ruler Cynewulf was killed in a power-struggle and the man who emerged as king, Beorhtric, was, it seems, Offa’s man. The impression of Wessex in these years is of a beaten-down kingdom, exhausted by war and resigned to its subordinate status in Offa’s new order. The man who would pick up the banner of West Saxon kingship from Beorhtric, however, was of a markedly different stamp. King Ecgberht (r. 802–39) would take the West Saxon kingdom to the peak of its power and prestige, overwhelming its smaller neighbours, restoring the pride and reputation of its royal house, and ultimately providing the self-confidence that future kings would need in the dark days that lay ahead. But all this was in the future. When the Northmen arrived on Portland, Wessex yet remained a weakened client state of the Mercian supremacy. Although English kingdoms had been, and continued to be, dominant in lowland Britain, they were never the whole story, and in parts of Britain – notably the highlands and islands of what is now Scotland, Cumbria and the valley of the Clyde, the lands west of Offa’s Dyke and the Cornish peninsula – a number of kingdoms of mixed provenance maintained distinct identities, languages, religious practices and cultural norms. Cornwall, beyond the south-western marches of Wessex, had been only lightly touched by direct Roman rule. At the western end of the kingdom of Dumnonia (Devon and Cornwall), the region had developed a distinctive culture that blended British and Irish influences and maintained maritime links with both Brittany and the Byzantine Empire. While Devon, the eastern part of Dumnonia, became subsumed by Wessex over the course of the eighth century – becoming thoroughly Anglicized in the process – Cornwall, for the time being, retained its independence. Further north, the kingdoms of what is now Wales present an altogether more complex picture, and posed a greater challenge for their Mercian neighbours to the east. The scale of the threat is represented by the magnitude of the effort made by Offa, and perhaps his predecessors, to contain it (through the construction of the dyke), and a range of sources make clear that border raids into Mercian territory (and vice versa) were endemic.14 (#litres_trial_promo) The Celtic-speaking people of what is now Wales were no more unified, however, than their Anglophone rivals. The four main kingdoms, as established by at least 850, were Gwynedd (in the north and north-west), Dyfed (in the south-west), Gwent (in the south-east) and Powys (in the eastern and central regions). All of these, in one way or another, were based on the former Roman civitates of western Britain, themselves based on old Iron Age tribal groupings.15 (#litres_trial_promo) This, it must be admitted, is to simplify a complex and volatile pattern of tribal confederations, but it is evident that ruling Welsh elites clung to an idea of Romanitas even as it drifted ever further into the past. Latin and bilingual inscriptions on standing stones (stones deliberately erected as upright monuments) throughout Wales (and elsewhere in former Roman Britain) reveal a self-consciously Latinate identity that lasted into the ninth century and beyond. The bitter irony was that it was the heathen interlopers – the Anglo-Saxons – who, having adopted an explicitly Roman model of Christianity, would ultimately align themselves with the new mainstream culture of ‘Latin’ Europe; the British, despite having kept alive a vibrant, if idiosyncratic, Christian faith alongside the memory of their imperial heritage, were increasingly cast as the barbarians in this changing European landscape.16 (#litres_trial_promo) The British kingdoms of Wales and Cornwall were by no means the only representatives of Brittonic-speaking culture to survive the Anglo-Saxon cultural takeover. Though some (such as Rheged, Gododdin and Elmet) had perished in the expansion of Northumbria, the British kingdom of Alt Clud (‘the rock of the Clyde’) still held out in the region bordering the Clyde. A shadowy kingdom of obscure origin, Alt Clud had its fortress capital at Dumbarton Rock. The kingdom had spent most of the eighth century fending off the unwelcome advances of its neighbours, and in 780 was burned (by whom, or why, is not known). One of the possible culprits was Alt Clud’s neighbour to the north-east, the substantial and periodically powerful kingdom of the Picts (sometimes referred to as ‘Pictavia’), a realm that had its heartland in northern and eastern Scotland, and which seems to have held sway (at least culturally) over the Orkney and Shetland islands. The most visible and dramatic monuments to Pictish culture are the symbol stones – slabs carved with images of beasts and enigmatic symbols that are most often interpreted as representations of the names of kings and aristocrats. By the eighth century, many of these objects displayed ostentatiously Christian iconography, and it is clear that Christianity had by that time become associated with expressions of power and status: a monastery at Portmahomack, on the Tarbat peninsula in Easter Ross, had been established as early as the sixth century, possibly with royal patronage.17 (#litres_trial_promo) Pictish power was by no means unchallenged in northern Britain. The kingdom’s main rivals were Northumbria, whose borders extended to the Forth, and whose armies it had repeatedly beaten back during the earlier part of the century, and the kingdom of D?l Riata, a Gaelic-speaking polity spanning the Irish Sea to include Argyll, Lochaber and the north-eastern part of Ulster. D?l Riata had its power-base at Dunadd near Kilmartin, an imposing hill-fort where its kings were believed to have been inaugurated – the impression of a foot, worn into the living rock, may have played a key role in the rituals that were enacted there. By the end of the eighth century, however, D?l Riata was coming under Pictish domination. In 736 Dunadd had been captured by the Pictish king Oengus (he underscored his dominance by dragging the sons of the D?l Riatan king back to Pictavia in chains), and by 811 D?l Riata was being ruled directly by the Pictish king Constantine (r. 789–820). By then, however, a new power was rising, and the Viking impact in northern Britain would have profound consequences for all of its regional players. There is more that might be said. Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Irish monastic colonies of the Western Isles – Iona chief among them – are all stitched tightly into the events that followed the advent of the Northmen. Nor can the story of the Vikings in Britain be told without some reference to events in continental Europe. Nevertheless, the foregoing paragraphs sketch – in broad outline – the most important contours of British political geography at the time that three strange ships pitched up on the beach at Portland. Though nobody could have known it then, the death of Beaduheard marked the beginning of a series of cataclysmic upheavals that changed Britain for ever. Many of the places mentioned above will be revisited in the chapters that follow; many of the kingdoms will fall. But before that story can be told, we must return to that beach in Portland, the dark sails receding into the distance. We watch them go, and the coastguard’s questions replay in our minds, too late now for any hope of an answer: ‘Outsiders from across the water […] the sooner you tell where you come from and why, the better.’18 (#litres_trial_promo) There is no written source that tells these events in the words of the Vikings themselves. For the most part, the people of Scandinavia did not record their history in written form until long after the Viking Age is usually considered to have closed. The sagas and histories, produced in Norway and especially in Iceland, are products of the late twelfth century and later – sometimes much later. To say that the Vikings were illiterate is strictly false, however. As will be seen, they made use of their own runic script for inscriptions marking ownership or memorializing the dead. Moreover, poems composed during the Viking Age survived orally to be written down in later centuries. Nevertheless, very little of the Viking voice survives, and certainly nothing that will explain the identities, motivations and origins of those first violent pioneers. In the face of this Scandinavian silence we must turn and consider who the people of early medieval Britain thought these strangers were, where they had come from and what had driven them on to British shores. The written sources for the Viking Age in Britain are not a straightforward guide to contemporary events. These were documents written for specific purposes, in different times and in different places, each one reflecting the views of the people who compiled or commissioned them. As such, they are partial and biased, limited by the range of knowledge which their authors possessed, though not by their imaginations. By far the most important sources for this period are the various manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The first, and oldest, of these manuscripts is normally referred to as the A text or, sometimes, as the ‘Winchester Chronicle’. It was put together in the late ninth century – probably in the 890s – as part of the intellectual scene that surrounded the court of King Alfred in Wessex. All later historians and chroniclers of the Middle Ages, including the other texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, rely on the A text to some degree. The earliest record of the Viking arrival on Portland is found in the A text, and was therefore written down a century later than the events it describes. Although this Chronicle almost certainly contains real traditions and material from older sources, none of these survive for us to make a comparison. The suspicion therefore remains that the view of history which the Chronicle presents is coloured by a bleak century of Scandinavian plunder, conquest and colonization. In particular, one might justly raise an eyebrow at the chronicler’s assertion that these ‘were the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English [Angelcynnes lond]’: quite apart from the vexed question of what exactly the chronicler meant by ‘Angelcynnes lond’, one might well question how, 100 years later and from the perspective of Britain’s most southerly realm, such knowledge could possibly have been possessed.19 (#litres_trial_promo) The A text tells us, in no uncertain terms, that the newcomers were ‘Danish’ (denisc). While this might seem, on the face of things, to be a useful statement of origins, it is not at all certain whether that which seemed ‘danish’ to Anglo-Saxon eyes would necessarily appear ‘Danish’ to our own. As will be seen, the term denisc (along with other generic terms used throughout Britain) in fact came to be applied indiscriminately to people and things held to have emanated from the North. Far more promising is the statement that the newcomers were ‘Northmen’ (Nor?manna) from Hordaland (Here?alande), now a county of western Norway centred on Bergen. Alas, this is surprisingly (and suspiciously) specific. The earliest record of this notice is found, not in the A text, but in the so-called ‘northern recension’ of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and can be dated no earlier than the mid-eleventh century – at least 250 years after the incident at Portland. This reference may shed more light on the origin of eleventh-century Scandinavian settlers in Northumbria than it does on events in late eighth-century Wessex.20 (#litres_trial_promo) In other words, the sources – so promising at first reading – really only tell us that the newcomers were foreigners, probably from somewhere across the North Sea. It is certain, however, that the people of Britain thought something when they encountered strangers on their beaches and imagined the worlds from which they had come. Understanding what that something might have been – what it meant – is bound up with how the people of early medieval Britain understood their own world, and their place within it. 2 Heart of Darkness (#uaab9a6a7-0300-5895-89dd-6ec3e820de8d) Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land. JEREMIAH 1:151 (#litres_trial_promo) northwards lies the road to hell SNORRI STURLUSON, Gylfaginning (early thirteenth century)2 (#litres_trial_promo) ?rest of swin forda upp andlang broces to ceolnes wyllan … (‘Go first up from the swine ford and along the brook to ceolnes [Ceolwine’s?] well’)3 (#litres_trial_promo) At the river’s edge you pass a churl driving his pigs across the muddy ford, hairy oinkers on their way to the wood pasture, eager to rootle among wyrttruma (‘woody roots’) for acorns and beech mast; the animal scent of sweat and pig shit, crumbly clods of dried mud dropping from bristly bottoms. It is damp down here, soggy. Water seeps into your shoes (stitched leather – hardly watertight) as you turn to the north, away from the ford. Perhaps you slip a little on the muddy path that runs beside the brook and stub a toe on a stone – the dull throbbing adding injury to numbness in your cold feet; at least there are no midges (mycgas) at this time of year. You pause and place a bright glass bead on the flat mossy stone beside the spring where the brook wells up – you have heard from the monks how, long ago, a pilgrim called Ceolwine struck his ash staff on the stone and a rush of cold water sprang up to slake his thirst: a miracle they said. But an old man in the village told you this was rubbish: his grandfather had been a boy when the old gods still lived here and the folk made sacrifice, mounting the heads on ash poles and throwing the bones into the water; now their corpses haunt the marshy edgelands: ‘you can hear them coming when the light fails boy: drip … drip … drip …’ Probably best to leave a gift either way. andlang hege r?we to luttes crundele · ?anon to grafes owisce · Andlang owisce to wege … (‘along the hedgerow to luttes [Lutt’s?] pit and then on to the eaves of the grove; along the eaves to the road’) Reaching the hedgerow is a welcome relief: the land slopes slightly away from the brook here, the earth becomes firmer. As you walk alongside the broad band of bramble and blackthorn, you can hear the rustling of foraging birds: a blackbird (?sle) probably, or a finch (finc). A streak of brown – a mouse (m?s), or a shrew (scre?wa) perhaps – shoots across the path ahead and disappears rustling into the undergrowth: all are hunting for the last berries of autumn.4 (#litres_trial_promo) It is November (Bl?t-m?na?: ‘the month of sacrifice’), and the scent of damp earth mingles with the vinegar notes of rotten apples. You hurry past Lutt’s pit – part stone quarry, part sepulchre (the word, crundel, is ambiguous): you have heard stories about this place too, but you would rather not dwell on them now, not until you are clear of the dark overhanging woods. You know you’re being a baby – this is managed woodland after all – but you’re glad when you reach the road all the same. … Andlang weges to ?les beorge · ny?er on aler cumb · Andlang aler cumbes ut on afene · Andlang afene eft on swin ford. (‘along the road to ?les [?lle’s?] barrow and down to alder-tree valley; along alder-tree valley and out to the Avon; along the Avon to the swine ford.’) From here it is an easier stroll on the compacted earth, compressed by the tread of generations of men and beasts. You need to watch where you’re going, mind – sometimes dips in the path have allowed the rain water to gather. Here the plunge of heavy hoofs, and the ruts riven by the ox-wains, have churned the path into patches of slimy mud – you dance your way with giant steps, and try to keep to the green stripe that marks the middle of the track. When you eventually look up, you give an involuntary start: massing against the westering sky, the dark bulk of ?lle’s barrow looms. The atmosphere thickens. This is a place of power; everyone knows it … even the monks, though they pretend it’s all just superstition: heathen folly, you’ve heard them call it, although not in front of the reeve – he’ll tell anyone who listens that his ancestor is buried under that mound, sleeping until the day his people call upon his aid in battle. It’s not so different, now you think of it, to the stories the monks tell: of long-dead saints who return to help the living … Lost in thought you stroll through the alder trees and back down the valley, arriving at the river as the light begins to fail. Standing on the banks you watch the ghost-white spectre of a swan glide past, the curve of its neck rising from its breast as the prow of a ship rises from its keel, carving the placid water, silent in its grace. The fragments of Old English, translated above, are from what is known as a boundary clause, a description of the edges of a parcel of land. This one describes an area at North Stoke in Somerset. It was written down and added to a charter documenting a grant of land made by the West Saxon king Cynewulf (r. 757–86), Beorhtric’s predecessor. Like many such clauses, it is written in English – the common tongue – but it is inserted into a document otherwise drafted in Latin, the officialese of ecclesiastical administrators. The implication is clear enough: while Latin was appropriate for the legal formulae of witness lists and the stern religious injunctions against violating the terms of the charter, the description of the land came straight from lived experience – from the mnemonic commitment of landscape to oral narrative. A boundary clause circumscribes a place known at an intimately local level, swaddling a parcel of land with animals, plants and the bumps and wrinkles of the soil. In some cases these bounds can still be followed in the perimeters of modern parishes, and the ‘beating of the bounds’ – a communal ritual of remembering in which the bounds are not only walked, but the landmarks physically struck by the participants – has in some places endured to the present day. These texts provide more than a simple insight into local administrative geography, however. They show us a way of understanding the world, not with the false objectivity of the map-reader looking down from above, but as an actor and participant within it. Names and monuments emerge by the wayside: no one knows any more who this Ceolwine was or what he meant to the stream that bore his name; none can say what crawling things or shadow walkers (sceadugangan) might have emerged from Lutt’s pit or ?lle’s barrow in dark Anglo-Saxon dreams. What is beyond doubt is that places like these, all over England, were the punctuation points in the stories that rural communities told about their world: more than how to get from A to B (or, in the case of boundary clauses, how to get from A back to A), these were the tapestries of lived existence that were woven both in words and in the physical actions of human beings moving and interacting with the world around them.5 (#litres_trial_promo) In a modern context, geographical knowledge tends to be represented in forms which are relatively static. We think of masses of land and water viewed from space, the contours of mountains, the reflective spatter of lakes, the ragged torn coastline of Norway – remembered by Slartibartfast in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for its ‘lovely crinkly edges’.6 (#litres_trial_promo) We also think of neatly inked political boundaries, the nation states limned in pink and powder blue, or of roads and railways scored decisively across the page. These types of knowledge are essentially cartographical, known to us through abstracted, two-dimensional images. Whether carried in the imagination, drawn by hand or photographed from space, the map is the dominant means by which we understand our relationship to the physical world. And yet, in myriad ways, it is fundamentally flawed – made all the more misleading by the sense of omniscience it instils: maps, we feel, make gods of us. It takes only a little scratching to find the bloodstains under the cartographer’s pastel palette. Enduring fault-lines of religion, language and politics are obscured; ancient pathways fade from view. Distances are rendered down to straight lines through empty space, continents grotesquely contorted through the amputation of their third dimension. The senses are cauterized: map-world is a place for the eyes alone. That we instinctively feel this sensory loss can be judged by the compulsive desire to run frustrated fingertips over the smooth surfaces of maps and globes, subconsciously seeking the missing textures of the earth.7 (#litres_trial_promo) How inadequate – how anaemic – this would have seemed to Beaduheard’s contemporaries, steeped in a geography that was personal, local, storied. For early medieval Britons, geographical knowledge was more than just a series of routes and landmarks; it was a series of signs and symbols that plumbed time, mythology and identity – moving through ancient landscapes could mean travelling backwards in time, while ancestral mythologies transported people to far-off realms. Maps were not unknown, but their circulation was restricted to a handful of learned men and fulfilled very different purposes from their modern counterparts. A common form was the T-O map – a schematic diagram, or ‘ideogram’, that divided the world into three unequal segments: Asia (the top half of the circle), Africa (the bottom right quarter) and Europe (the bottom left). Jerusalem lay at the centre. The image was in part a means of concentrating the mind on the totality of God’s creation, its symmetry and its unity. By superimposing the letters T and O on to its form, it also incorporated the initials of the words terra orbis (orb of the world; the globe) into the design. Needless to say, it was of limited utility to the disorientated traveller. Like boundary clauses, early maps and the base of knowledge from which they were derived were essentially concerned with circumscription – the gathering of what was known into (usually circular) plans, forming an ‘inside’ and an ‘out there’. In the Greek and Roman worlds this had symbolized the distinction between civilization and barbaricum; in the Christian epoch ‘inside’ indicated, if not exactly Christendom, then the totality of that portion of the earth which lay within the orbit of potential salvation. Later medieval maps – such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi – depict Christ standing behind the world, literally embracing creation.8 (#litres_trial_promo) That which lay beyond these borders was, in this conception, more dreadful than mere terra incognita. It was the abyss – the world beyond God. A sense of how fearsome this outer world could seem is evident in Old English poetry and the cosmology it reflects: the Old English poetic retelling of Genesis, for example, paints the earth as a golden hall surrounded by a sea of darkness – the void a place of mist and sorrow beyond the light of God.9 (#litres_trial_promo) Other poems refine this image: the cold seas of The Wanderer and The Seafarer reflect both physical and spiritual desolation. It is Beowulf, however, that really drives this fear home: Grendel was the grim ghoul named, Famous edge-marcher, who held the moors The fen and fastness …10 (#litres_trial_promo) The first part of Beowulf tells the story of how the eponymous hero came to Denmark from his home in the land of the Geats, drawn by tales of a monster – named Grendel – who for many years had menaced the hall – Heorot – of the Danish king Hrothgar. Beowulf defeats the monster, tearing off his arm and sending him fleeing back to die in his fenland home. But the real power and tension in this part of the poem follows the monster. Grendel is the border-walker, the dweller in shadow, the descendant of Cain and an avatar of jealous alienation. He is of the world ‘outside’ – fifelcynnes eard, literally ‘monster-world’ – and it is with horrible fascination that the poet follows him ‘down over mist-slopes’, creeping through the darkness, coming with the fog, greedy hands pushing at the hall door.11 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Heorot’ literally means ‘hart’ (a male deer), but the word is derived from the same root as the Old English heorte, a word which means ‘heart’ in all its literal and figurative senses; and in Beowulf the hall is, indeed, the beating heart of human culture – a symbol of warmth and light, safety and security, community and the affirmation of bonds: it is fortress, pub and family home wrapped into one. The violation of that safety and sanctity is what gives the poem a psychological edge that cuts easily across the centuries – Grendel is the home-invader, the wolf in the fold, striking deep at the vitals of society. In fact, Grendel and his kin are described in explicitly lupine terms by the Beowulf poet, a distinction they share with other malefactors of the Anglo-Saxon world. The term wearg (the origin of Tolkien’s ‘warg’) meant both ‘wolf’ and ‘criminal’, and the label wulvesheofod (‘wolf’s head’) was, by the eleventh century, used to define outlaw status. The Vikings who appear in the poetic account of the battle of Maldon in 991 are ‘slaughter-wolves’ (waelwulfas). These groups – monsters, criminals, outlaws, Vikings – posed threats to the ordered world represented by the hall: they were the wolves beyond the border, the slaughterers, raveners, stealers of property, of livestock, of children. In a world where terrors could be made horribly and suddenly real, it is small wonder that Ine’s laws should have been so unforgiving to the outlander.12 (#litres_trial_promo) Of all the compass points from which terror might emanate, there was one which held the greatest dread. This was not just because the sea had repeatedly disgorged boatloads of child-snatchers and hall-burners from precisely this direction, nor indeed because empirical observation demonstrated that this was the horizon over which the most wretched weather tended to hurtle, but because the Anglo-Saxons already knew full well that it was here that Satan had set his throne. This was the medieval world’s heart of darkness: the North. Behind are the familiar paths and places of home, the songs in the hall, the fire, the harp. Out here there is only the dark, only the cold, only the biting north wind that screams over the barren hillsides. Rocky paths lie ahead, thin winding ways where death leers blackly from the fells below. A mist closes in, a wolf howls … Down through the mist-bands, a glimmer of light flickers – ghostly, ethereal, unnatural: a sheen of dark water, witch-fires burning on its surface. Beyond the water a bleak forest looms, glowering from gloomy cliffs. Branches encrusted with rime and hoarfrost drag skeletal fingers through the frigid air; roots like serpents quest over slimy banks towards the rotting stagnant tarn. In the reeking water nameless things writhe and wriggle. Monsters dwell here – among the ‘wolf-slopes, windy headlands, dangerous fen-tracts’.13 (#litres_trial_promo) To go further would be to risk soul and sanity: here the laws of nature are perverted and upended – the burning black water rushes upwards towards the heavens and gouts of ice and flame entwine. From the sky comes a deadly hail, lashing from the roiling clouds, and amid the black mist comes the beating of wings in the darkness, like clouds of leathery moths searching for prey to pluck into the storm-wracked heavens. Further northwards, and deeper down, lies the abyss itself: sometimes a foul cavern beneath the waves, infested with serpents and other filthy wriggling things, sometimes a grim bastion wreathed in smoke and fume, ‘evil spirits running about amid the black caverns and gloomy abysses’.14 (#litres_trial_promo) Other than the T-O ideograms, very few maps date to the eighth century or earlier, and the northern world is all but absent from them. It seems that, at the beginning of the Viking Age, what learned British monks knew of classical scholarship implied that Britain was, itself, at the ends of the earth: about lands further north, classical and Christian learning was vague, and it is uncertain how much of this knowledge was even accessible to British monks. The image they would have had was one of vaguely drawn islands floating in sluggish seas: of the isle of Thule and the land of the Hyperboreans (the dwellers ‘beyond the north wind’), of men with bestial bodies and others with the heads of dogs – a dwelling place of monsters.15 (#litres_trial_promo) In this, it was not unlike any of the unknown regions of the earth, but the theme of the North as a specifically satanic realm also manifested itself in the literature of medieval Britain. Often this can be found in ways clearly derived from biblical narratives, but at others it appeared in vivid and idiosyncratic form. In the tale of St Guthlac, written at the monastery of Crowland in Lincolnshire in the 730s by a monk called Felix, the treatment meted out by a demonic horde to the unfortunate anchorite is described in vivid terms. After a relentless campaign of physical and psychological punishment, they began to drag him through the cloudy stretches of the freezing skies to the sound of the horrid beating of their wings. Now when he had reached the lofty summit of the sky, then, horrible to relate, lo! the region of the northern heavens seemed to grow dark with gloomy mists and black clouds. For there could be seen coming thence to meet them, innumerable squadrons of foul spirits. Thus with all their forces joined in one, they turned their way with immense uproar into thin air, and carried the afore-named servant of Christ, Guthlac, to the accursed jaws of hell.16 (#litres_trial_promo) Nor is this the only northern tradition to riff on the biblical theme of the diabolical North. The vision of St Paul, as told in late Anglo-Saxon England, recounts that ‘St Paul was looking at the northern part of this world, where all the waters go down, and he saw there above the water a certain grey rock, and there had grown north of that rock very frosty woods, and there were dark mists, and under that rock was a dwelling place of water-monsters and wolves; and he saw that on that cliff there hung in those icy woods many black souls, tied by their hands, and their foes, in the guise of water-monsters, were gripping them like greedy wolves, and the water was black …’17 (#litres_trial_promo) That these ideas had deep roots in the northern psyche is implied by striking similarities between this description of the monster-haunted North and the Beowulf poet’s description of the home of Grendel and his mother. The two descriptions are almost certainly related. Though no comparable tales survive from the Celtic-speaking areas of Britain, the Irish life of St Brendan – written in the seventh century – describes boiling northern seas and an island of flame and tormented howling: ‘the confines of Hell’ as the saint puts it.18 (#litres_trial_promo) Even the people of Scandinavia themselves knew that ni?r ok nor?r liggr Helvegr (‘netherwards and northwards lies the road to hell’).19 (#litres_trial_promo) The word ‘hell’ itself has no Latin-Christian origin. It is older than that, reflecting fragments of a shared vision that haunted the darker dreams of the Anglo-Saxons and their contemporaries: a nightmare North of the early medieval imagination. The human inhabitants of this world, if known at all, would have been distinguished for their heathenism – their rejection of Christian norms and values, their bloodletting and their weird rites. It would have been natural to imagine them, to use the historian Eric Christiansen’s memorable phrase, as ‘robot agents of Satan’s foreign policy’, flesh and blood avatars of the monster-world beyond the pale.20 (#litres_trial_promo) When the men of the North next appeared in the written record, in all their dreadful pomp and fury, they more than lived up to the fevered imaginings of their victims. In 793, the North disgorged its innards in lurid tones, and chroniclers responded with imagery that came easily: In this year dire fore-bodings came over Northumbria and miserably terrified the people: there were immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying aloft. Those signs were soon followed by a great hunger, and a little after that in the same year, on 8 June, the harrying of heathen men wretchedly destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.21 (#litres_trial_promo) Of all the religious centres of northern Europe, there were few that could rival the cultural muscle of the island priory of Lindisfarne. Its peripheral location, tied to the Northumbrian coast by the narrow umbilical cord of its tidal causeway, belied the wealth and status that it had accrued since its foundation in the early seventh century. Much of this flowed from the stories told of its most famous bishop, Cuthbert (c. 634–87). Cuthbert – a monk originally from Melrose who had later been appointed prior of the community at Lindisfarne – was elevated to bishop in March 685. For perhaps as long as nine years, Cuthbert lived in self-imposed exile from Lindisfarne as a hermit on Inner Farne, a wildly bleak outcrop of grey granite stacks, jutting gloomily from the sea.22 (#litres_trial_promo) It was a life of hardship, solitude and self-denial modelled on the penitential attitudes of the desert fathers – St Anthony in particular. His elevation to bishop did little to change his temperament – by 687 he had returned to his hermitage, determined to live out his last in solitude. On Inner Farne, Cuthbert – like St Anthony – encountered devils in the wilderness. The accounts of his struggles are brief – he fought them with ‘the helmet of salvation, the shield of faith and the sword of spirit which is the word of God’ – and the vanquished demons are left to the imagination.23 (#litres_trial_promo) But it is perhaps justifiable to imagine them in the same way that Felix depicted the diabolical horde that appeared in his life of St Guthlac: they were ferocious in appearance, terrible in shape with great heads, long necks, thin faces, yellow complexions, filthy beards, shaggy ears, wild foreheads, fierce eyes, foul mouths, horses’ teeth, throats vomiting flames, twisted jaws, thick lips, strident voices, singed hair, fat cheeks, pigeon breasts, scabby thighs, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, splay feet, spreading mouths, raucous cries […] they grew so terrible to hear with their mighty shriekings that they filled almost the whole intervening space between earth and heaven with their discordant bellowings.24 (#litres_trial_promo) The effect is cumulative. What starts out as absurd – comical even (shaggy ears? wild foreheads?) – becomes ever more grotesque and horrible, one perversion heaped on top of another, until the vision devolves into a squamous mass of deformed, unnatural depravity. If this is what early medieval people saw when they dreamt of wild places, then their dreams must have been dark indeed. Whatever Cuthbert saw or did not see on Inner Farne, he conquered his little wilderness, living out the brief remainder of his life in self-imposed exile: eating, sleeping, fasting, praying. It is easy to picture him, like the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting, gazing sadly at the cold grey ocean that embraces him: a last outpost of human life, wearily defiant before the uncaring gulf and his own mortality. When he died, Cuthbert’s body was taken by boat to Lindisfarne. A great crowd received it, psalms were sung, and it was carried to the Church of St Peter and buried in a stone coffin beside the altar. Miracles were reported and he was canonized, his tomb becoming a place of pilgrimage. When, eleven years later, his resting place was deemed inadequate, he was exhumed for translation to a more exalted shrine. His body was apparently found uncorrupted, as pristine as the day he had passed away. The story only confirmed his sanctity and his legend spread, the monastery growing in size and wealth, its scriptoria producing illuminated gospels which – like the Lindisfarne Gospels (commissioned to ornament Cuthbert’s shrine-tomb) – are some of the greatest treasures of their age. We might be justified in imagining that, for later generations of monks, the monastic life became rather more comfortable than Cuthbert and his forebears would have approved of. By the time of the raid on Lindisfarne, contemporaries – as we shall see – had already begun to voice their opinion on these matters, and it is likely that there really was a drop in standards in the century after Cuthbert’s death; or, rather, that the monks gained access to temptations that their forebears had not enjoyed. Even so, the same cold sea would have lapped at their heels and the stories of the devils of Inner Farne would have been told again and again. For the monks living out their lives on the edge of the world, the sea would have been omnipresent – a wide and brooding, raging wilderness stretching out to eternity. Empty, but alive. When the Vikings came it must have seemed to the monks as though something dreadful had finally stirred from its century-long slumber. What horrors did their bleary eyes see rushing up the moonlit shore, what gargoyles leered from the prows of the great black leviathans looming at the edge of the shadowed water? Did they see devils in the shadows – lit red in the glare of blazing torches? Were they ‘ferocious in appearance’ and ‘terrible to hear with their mighty shriekings’? Did they possess ‘filthy beards’ and ‘fierce eyes’, ‘foul mouths’ and ‘strident voices’? Against the blood-red glare cast by fire, the dragon-headed prows of the ships stand in silhouette, grim spectators of the unfolding chaos. Like oars striking water, the axes rise and fall, biting into timber, bone and flesh; blood splatters across blankets and altar-cloths, burgundy smears in firelight. Brightly coloured shards of ruined gospels flutter among glowing embers, like butterflies and fireflies dancing together in the thermal draughts. A sea-cold breeze whips off the water, lifting the iron tang of blood and metal with the brine, the stink of death and burning carried deep into the land. The attack on Lindisfarne in 793 has become the iconic moment that defines the engagement of Britain’s inhabitants with their neighbours across the North Sea. A sudden seaborne assault on a renowned centre of Christian learning, it was an event that sent shockwaves through Europe. From the court of Charlemagne across the Channel, the English cleric Alcuin wrote a series of letters to his brethren in England in response to this unprecedented tragedy. To him, a terror from the North should have been foreseen, particularly in the light of ‘the bloody rain, which […] we saw fall menacingly on the north side’ of St Peter’s Church in York ‘though the sky was serene’. Therefore one should not be surprised, he adds, ‘that from the north there will come upon our nation retribution in blood, which can be seen to have started with this attack’.25 (#litres_trial_promo) A sense of the psychological impact these raids had in the communities they visited can be found in one of the more unsettling objects to have survived them. A carved stone – cracked at its base, rounded at its top – was discovered on Lindisfarne and first mentioned in the 1920s. It numbers among more than fifty tombstones – many of them decorated with Anglo-Saxon carvings and inscribed with names – that have been unearthed on the island. This one, however, is unique. On one side, figures are depicted gesturing towards the sun and moon which ride the sky together on either side of an empty cross. It is an image evoking the passage of time, the transition of day into night, mediated by the risen Christ – a reminder of the judgement to come when night finally falls over the earth. On the other side of the stone are depicted seven men, all facing forward, their arms raised. Weapons are held aloft by five of them – three swords and two axes – and their clothing is distinctive. If the stone is taken as a whole, it seems to be a representation of the apocalypse, the armed men perhaps a representation of the wrath of God in corporeal form – a form that English monks would recognize. As we shall see, ecclesiastical commentators found it easy enough to imagine the Vikings as an instrument of divine justice. The stone was probably carved in the late ninth century, and there is no way of knowing whether these armed men are intended to depict Vikings rather than any other armed group, but it is hard to dispel the feeling that the trauma inflicted in Lindisfarne left psychological scars that would trouble the imaginations of generations of monks, colouring their apocalyptic visions.26 (#litres_trial_promo) Lindisfarne was the first raid of this type to be recorded, but it was by no means the last. The years around the turn of the ninth century saw waterborne raiders attacking and pillaging poorly defended monasteries and settlements all around northern Britain and Ireland, as well as elsewhere in continental Europe, and for those on the receiving end it must have been a dreadful experience – made all the more terrifying by the primal horror that a heathen assault inspired. Alcuin’s words, very often ripped from their context, are found at the beginning of many treatments of the Viking Age: ‘the pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary,’ he lamented in his letter to Bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne, ‘shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street’. One has to wonder whether Higbald and the monks needed reminding. Indeed, one could easily forgive the torrent of Anglo-Saxon invective that we might imagine issuing from the good bishop’s lips upon reading the rest of Alcuin’s letter, for it is not – as one might think appropriate – a warm-hearted missive expressing sorrow, solidarity and offers of practical assistance. It is, instead, a lecture on the assumed defects of Higbald’s authority and the sub-par behaviour of his monks: they are accused of having asked for it through their drunkenness, vanity, lewdness, degeneracy and – most unfairly of all – lack of manliness (‘you who survive, stand like men’).27 (#litres_trial_promo) In a similar letter to King Ethelred of Northumbria, Alcuin wrote the words which have led many to imagine the heathen storm breaking on the shores of Britain like lightning from a clear sky: Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments …28 (#litres_trial_promo) Once again the expat cleric used the opportunity to castigate the monks, this time for wishing to ‘resemble the pagans’ in their ‘trimming of beard and hair’. With this stern intervention into the hairdressing habits of his former colleagues, however, Alcuin inadvertently alerts us to something potentially more significant than Northumbrian fashion trends, something which challenges and complicates the image of the North as a hellish realm and its peoples as the devil’s imps. While learned attitudes to the North seem certainly to have emphasized the diabolic qualities of its inhabitants, comments such as Alcuin’s imply a measure of contact and even, in some cases, admiration or nostalgia for the Scandinavian world and its denizens: a contradiction at the heart of Anglo-Saxon ideas about the wider northern world. On a simplistic level, in order to copy heathen haircuts, the monks must have been exposed to and favourably impressed by them – and presumably not when ducking a swinging axe. It seems highly probable, if not yet provable, that Scandinavian traders had become a feature at some of the new trading settlements of eighth-century England (as well as, perhaps, in the Northern Isles and Pictish Scotland as well).29 (#litres_trial_promo) It is certainly the case that the Viking Age emerged against a background of increasingly sophisticated European trade. A new type of specialized trading settlement had grown up around the North Sea during the eighth century, exploiting and facilitating long-distance trade. These settlements – known to historians and archaeologists as ‘emporia’ – included Southampton (Hamwic), London (Lundenwic), Ipswich (Gipeswic) and York (Eoforwic) in England, as well as trading settlements at Quentovic (France), Dorestad (Netherlands), Hedeby and Ribe (Denmark), Birka (Sweden) and Kaupang (Norway) among others. It seems inconceivable that every exchange of goods between Britain and Scandinavia in the eighth century was conducted through continental middlemen. Whatever the realities of direct trading relationships in the decades leading up to the earliest Viking raids, archaeology suggests that contacts across the North Sea in the preceding centuries had been close. A famous example (referred to in the preceding chapter) serves to illustrate the point. The great masked helmet (the Old English word, rather wonderfully, is grimhelm) that was excavated from the boat grave found beneath Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk finds its closest parallels in the highly elaborate boat graves from the cemeteries at Vendel and, later, Valsg?rde in Sweden; the parallels, in both the style of artefacts and the manner of their burial, demonstrate elements of a cultural identity that spanned the North Sea. This, and a great deal of other evidence (not least the transformation of lowland Britain from a Romano-British-speaking population to one which used the western Germanic ‘Old English’ language), broadly supports the stories which the Anglo-Saxons told about their own origins.30 (#litres_trial_promo) On this point, the Northumbrian monk and scholar Bede – writing at Jarrow in the early eighth century – was quite explicit: In the year of our Lord 449 […] the Angles or Saxons came to Britain at the invitation of King Vortigern in three long-ships […] They […] sent back news of their success to their homeland, adding that the country was fertile and the Britons cowardly […] These new-comers were from the three most formidable races of Germany, the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes.31 (#litres_trial_promo) The first group, the Saxons, came from a region identified by Bede as ‘Old Saxony’ – now north-west Germany. The Angles and the Jutes originated in the Jutland peninsula, occupying land which, by the time Bede was writing, lay within the kingdom of the Danes. Quite how true this story is remains unknowable (though it is certain that significant migration from the continent did occur). But what is critical is that the Anglo-Saxons themselves believed it to be true.32 (#litres_trial_promo) By Bede’s day, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had been in Britain for the best part of 300 years (by his reckoning), and had been Christian, in most cases, for several generations. By the late eighth century, they had formed a number of independent kingdoms, each with its own cultural and geographical peculiarities. Nevertheless, the tribes from whom they claimed descent were (and, in the late eighth century, remained) pagan peoples, part of a wider northern European heritage that had stood beyond the limits of Rome’s continental frontiers. As receivers of that heritage, the Anglo-Saxons were torch-carriers for traditions, tales, words and images from a legendary world. That world, though its shapes and contours grew ever more indistinct, yet blazed brightly in the imaginations of poets and storytellers. The earliest genealogical lists of Anglo-Saxon royal houses typically extend via Woden, the pagan deity equivalent to Odin (ON O?inn) in Old Norse mythology, through Finn (a legendary Frisian king) to Geat, the eponymous ancestor of Beowulf’s own Scandinavian tribe. Even a century of Viking attacks failed to dampen enthusiasm amongst the Anglo-Saxons for their northern heritage. By the end of the ninth century, royal genealogies had expanded to include B?ld?g (the Old Norse god Balder), Scyld (the legendary progenitor of the Danes) and possibly Beowulf the Geat himself.33 (#litres_trial_promo) Negotiating the evidence for the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons identified with this heritage is complex and sometimes bewildering. Much of what remains is reduced to the blank names of kings and heroes – names which must once have conjured great arcs of narrative, laced with the myths of the pre-Christian past, but whose owners now stand mute guard at the entrance to pathways which can never now be trod. The perpetuation of this fascination with the ancestral North did not, however, go unchallenged. Writing in around the year 800, our friend Alcuin was so incensed by this sort of thing that, in a letter to another Anglo-Saxon bishop, he demanded to know ‘what has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ We know only a single anecdote about Ingeld, king of the Heathobards – a gloomy story about how he burned Hrothgar’s hall, Heorot, and was thereafter a target of the Danish king’s vengeance. The story is alluded to in Beowulf and mentioned in passing in another Old English poem, Widsith. Alcuin’s reference to Ingeld pops up in a passage in which he lambasts his fellow ecclesiasts for listening to music and ‘inappropriate’ stories at dinner-time and for laughing in the courtyards (he presumably didn’t get invited to many parties). It is of particular interest, however, because it suggests that even in what should have been a thoroughly Christian environment, the old stories were still popular – and this at a time when, in Alcuin’s own words, the ‘bodies of the saints were being trampled like dung’ by the living descendants of Hrothgar and his kin.34 (#litres_trial_promo) Rather less is known about attitudes to the ancestral North in other parts of Britain. One tradition, reported by Bede, held that the Picts – the people inhabiting the highland and island regions of what is now Scotland – had originated in ‘Scythia’. This land had been believed by classical authorities to have existed in an ill-defined region somewhere, seemingly, in northern Eurasia. Whether the Picts themselves believed this to be true – and if they did, what they thought of it – is less than clear. The Welsh, on the other hand, had their own distinct boreal traditions: to them, Hen Ogledd (‘the Old North’) referred to those parts of Britain from which their ancestors had been ejected by Anglo-Saxon incomers in the sixth and seventh centuries. It was an altogether more insular sense of northernness, and can only have compounded the sense that northern lands beyond the sea were a place whence nothing much good ever came.35 (#litres_trial_promo) Among the English-speaking peoples, however, we are left with an apparent paradox – a set of attitudes to the North that painted it as both shining ancestral homeland and infernal monster-infested wasteland, its inhabitants as both cousins and aliens. As a result, the Viking has emerged as a Janus-faced figure, constantly at war with himself in our imaginations: poet or plunderer, merchant or marauder, berserker or boat-builder, kinsman or kin-of-Cain. The reconciliation of these themes and the resolution of these identities is in large measure the story of Viking Britain. It is a process of negotiation that continues to this day, and begins with the fundamental question of who we understand the Vikings to be. 3 Mother North (#ulink_841bc18d-7cef-5bd7-8c7f-874028e0d217) Huge warriors with golden beards and savage eyes sat or lounged on the rude benches, strode about the hall, or sprawled full length on the floor. They drank mightily from foaming horns and leathern jacks, and gorged themselves on great pieces of rye bread, and huge chunks of meat they cut with their daggers from whole roasted joints […] All the world was their prey to pick and choose, to take and spare as it pleased their barbaric fancies. ROBERT E. HOWARD, ‘The Dark Man’ (1931)1 (#litres_trial_promo) When I was growing up, my idea of what a ‘Viking’ should be was not, I presume, very different from that imagined by anyone else of my generation. My grandmother – who lived in Glastonbury, Somerset – was a full-time carer and companion to a (to my young eyes) elderly disabled gentleman whom I knew only, and affectionately, as ‘Venge’. An Italian by birth, who in truth luxuriated in the name Bonaventura Mandara, Venge was an exceptionally kind and gentle man, with a love of brandy, cigars, cards and horse-racing: he was, in other words, a jolly fine fellow. He would often encourage me, sprog that I was, to clamber on to his bad leg (always propped up horizontally in front of him, encased in a steel and leather contraption that both frightened and fascinated) and read me the cartoon strips from the back of his newspaper. Only one of these left any kind of impression. H?gar the Horrible – a comic strip drawn by the American cartoonist Dik Browne – was probably my first encounter with a Viking. The eponymous H?gar fulfilled all the stereotypes: an unruly faceful of red beard, an unashamedly horned helmet, a flagon of foaming ale, an aversion to bathing. In essence he remains the classic ‘Viking as barbarian’, essentially indistinguishable from the cartoon caveman. That was fine with me. H?gar and his frequent anachronistic assaults on large medieval stone castles were a happy complement to early childhood visits to Glastonbury spent rampaging around the ruins of the medieval abbey and staring through the windows of King Arthur themed crystal shops. When I was a little older, I remember being taught about the Vikings – the only time I ever encountered the subject in compulsory education. I must have been about eight, and although perhaps not best equipped to appreciate the significance of what I was learning, I remembered that lesson when all else had faded away. The thing that stuck, the one key message that lodged most firmly in my brain, was that no Viking ever wore, possessed – or perhaps even imagined – a horned helmet. The absence of horns on Viking helmets invariably comes as a blow to those who aren’t prepared for it. Many is the occasion on which I have been obliged to plunge in this particular knife; it is remarkable to witness, in fully grown adults (in fact, especially in adults), the visible shrinking of the spirit that accompanies the unexpected death of an image formed in childhood. There may well be, and I apologize for it, readers of this book who are right now experiencing the bewildering combination of anger and disbelief that accompanies the detonation of this fact-bomb. To a small boy weaned on H?gar the Horrible the news was, well, horrible. I still remember the frustration of it all – if the Vikings didn’t have horned helmets, why had I been lied to? Thankfully my young mind was still fertile enough to bounce back from this mental napalm. The blow was also softened slightly by the discovery that the helmets they did wear were almost as cool (or so I tried to convince myself) as their cornigerous surrogates. The evidence for helmets of any kind, however, is slim. Aside from scattered fragments, only one complete Scandinavian helmet of the Viking Age has ever been found. This is the famous Gjermundbu helmet (named after the place in Norway where it was buried, along with its owner), an arresting object defined by the sinister half-facemask that was intended to protect the eyes and nose. Its owl-like visage – cold, impassive and predatory – was the face presented by at least one Norwegian warrior in his battle-cladding.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Outside Scandinavia, other helmets have been found in graves that may, on the strength of their form or contents, have been the burial places of Vikings – or, at least, of people with a cultural affinity to Scandinavia. But none of these – most of which have been found in what is now Russia and Ukraine – is distinct from the material culture of the (non-Viking) local populations. Are these Viking helmets? If the only qualification is that a person of Scandinavian extraction might once have put one of these things on his head then the answer must be yes. But these helmets are radically different to the Gjermundbu helmet: open faced, conical, distinctly eastern – and worn by all sorts of other people who were definitely not Vikings. So perhaps these were just helmets that some Vikings happened to wear – not ‘Viking’ helmets at all. Perhaps these were no more ‘Viking’ helmets than the Volga salmon they ate for dinner was ‘Viking’ fish. But, of course, that is equally true of the Gjermundbu helmet as well – simply putting it on didn’t make the wearer a Viking, and we can’t even be certain (no matter how probable it may be) that it was made by, or even worn by, someone born and bred in Scandinavia. As we shall see, material culture can be a most treacherous guide to ethnicity. The problems lie both in the semantics (the word ‘Viking’) and in the underlying premise that ‘the Vikings’ were a ‘people’ whose characteristics can be listed like a Top Trump card or tabulated like a character-class in a role-playing game. It is fair to say that Vikings, in this sense at least, never existed. Most modern academics have an uneasy relationship with the term ‘Viking’, and reject the idea that it can be used as an ethnic label. Its original meaning is disputed. It could mean people who hung around in bays getting up to no good (from ON vik, meaning ‘bay or inlet’) or perhaps people who frequently showed up at trading settlements (from OE wic); there are, also, other possibilities. However, its original derivation is largely irrelevant – what is important is what people thought they meant by it when (and if) they used the word. As a common noun (in its Old Norse and Old English forms Vikingr and Wicing respectively), the word was used rarely during the Viking Age and was applied only to a minority, not all of whom were Scandinavians. In Old Norse poetry composed in praise of Viking kings (known as skaldic verse), much of which dates to the Viking period, the word was as likely to be applied to the enemies of Scandinavian kings as to home-grown marauders. Indeed, one of the rare English uses of the term is found in Archbishop Wulfstan’s lament, c. 1014, that slaves were running away from their English lords to become ‘Vikings’.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Who the Vikings were, therefore, could be a relative concept. It was never an ethnic category, and in most cases it seems to have been used disapprovingly, suggesting that ‘Vikings’ could prove as much a menace to Scandinavians as to their victims elsewhere.4 (#litres_trial_promo) Runestones – memorials to the dead erected during the Viking Age and inscribed in the runic alphabet that was used to render the Old Norse language in written form – also record a number of instances of the word. In most of these cases the word appears as a personal name, and this phenomenon is known from Viking Age Britain as well: a man called ‘Wicing’ was minting coins in Lydford (Devon) on behalf of King Cnut in the eleventh century.5 (#litres_trial_promo) The implication is that the term ‘Viking’ wasn’t necessarily negative, and although we can’t know for certain if these were names given at birth, it accords well with a society in which individuals revelled in tough-guy epithets.6 (#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, the abstract form of the noun (ON viking), particularly as encountered in later Icelandic literature, meant a seaborne mission involving adventure, violence, plunder and risk, and was a normal and honourable means by which a man might make his name. The poetry of the tenth-century Icelander Egil Skallagrimsson – contained in the thirteenth-century saga of his life – sums up, in words which just might originate with Egil himself, a view of the indulgent nature of Viking parenting: My mother said to me That they would buy for me A ship and lovely oars To go away with Vikings, Standing in the stern, Steering the glorious ship, Then putting into ports, Killing a man or two.7 (#litres_trial_promo) In this sense, ‘Viking’ was fundamentally something that one did or was a part of, and there is very limited evidence that the word was used in this way during the Viking Age. A runestone erected by a mother in Vastergotland (Sweden) implies that to engage in ‘Viking’ activity (in this case in the west – that is, in Britain and Ireland) could be considered praiseworthy: ‘T?la placed this stone in memory of Geirr, her son, a very good valiant man. He died on a Viking raid on the western route.’8 (#litres_trial_promo) However, there seems to have been an expectation that a man (it was almost certainly an overwhelmingly – if perhaps not exclusively – male occupation) would, at some point, settle down. Supported by the wealth accrued during his Viking days, he might set himself up as a farmer and landowner, the head of a family, with a good reputation among his peers. He might take on some public duties at legal gatherings, and he would use his wealth to patronize poets and craftsmen and perhaps even organize trading expeditions. He would become, in other words, respectable. Inevitably, however, there were always individuals who were sufficiently bloodthirsty, marginalized, restless, irresponsible, fame-hungry, greedy or outcast to make the Viking lifestyle a permanent occupation – these outsiders would have been among those who self-identified as Vikings, and it is for these people that the disapproval of Scandinavian skalds seems to have been reserved. This distinction between being and doing was perhaps a little like the different attitudes that a young person might encounter if he or she were to state an ambition to become ‘a traveller’ rather than merely to ‘go travelling’. All of which is rendered somewhat irrelevant by the unavoidable observation that hardly anybody was ever called a Viking during the Viking Age itself: they were referred to across Europe and beyond as Danes, Dark Heathens, Dark Foreigners, Fair Foreigners, Foreign Irish, Gentiles, Northmen, Pirates, Pagans, R?s, Scythians and Varangians, but hardly ever – in Old English – as Vikings (wicings). As we have seen, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tends most frequently to speak of ‘Danes’, despite considerable evidence to indicate that many of the Vikings who found themselves in Britain came from all over the northern world: various Viking leaders can be shown to have had Norwegian origins, runestones commemorate the death of Swedish Vikings in Britain, and even the Viking dead themselves, through analysis of the oxygen isotopes in their teeth, can be shown to have grown up as far afield as Estonia, Belarus and high latitudes beyond the Arctic circle. The early English had form when it came to conflating complex cultural phenomena into a homogeneous ‘them’ – the diverse inhabitants of much of Celtic-speaking Britain had been labelled wealas (‘foreigners’, whence the modern ‘Welsh’) and treated as a largely undifferentiated rabble since at least Bede’s day. Likewise, ‘Danish’ seems to have become a convenient catch-all term for people who predominantly spoke Old Norse, wherever they actually came from.9 (#litres_trial_promo) One might expect that modern historians would have long ago developed more subtle approaches to complex issues of identity and cultural affiliation. And yet, until relatively recently, it was widely assumed that past ‘peoples’ could be identified as essentially unchanging racial blocs with cultural traits that were stable, heritable and identifiable through language, behaviour, skull-size and material culture. This ‘culture-historical paradigm’, accompanied by racist bricolage of varying offensive shades, was driven by the twin engines of misapplied Darwinist logic and the German revolution in philology (which had demonstrated the interconnections between Indo-European languages and the mechanics of linguistic development). Social, cultural and racial development was soon seen to be as predictable as vowel mutation and as inexorable as evolution.10 (#litres_trial_promo) It was only during the second half of the twentieth century that these views began to change and mainstream academia started thinking more critically about past ethnicity.11 (#litres_trial_promo) It is no coincidence that in Anglophone scholarship this shift coincided with the loss of Britain’s Empire and the country’s diminution as a global power. The culture-historical model shared many features with the system of racial classification that had been used by academics and administrators to reinforce the discriminatory structures of the British Empire – and in particular the position of white English men at the pinnacle of the world order they had invented. It was a classic circular argument – the fact of Empire proved the superiority of the British, the innate genius of whom had made British global supremacy inevitable. At the time, the obvious implication was that the greatness of Britain had been present in the genes; for, if cultural traits were – like DNA – handed down the generations, then surely the seeds of that greatness lay in the blood of mighty ancestors. And, of course, they found greatness in abundance: in the Romans whose civilization prefigured their own Empire, in the Anglo-Saxons whose Germanic origins had (in their minds) brought law, democracy, freedom and a distinctively ‘English’ Christianity to Britain, and, increasingly, in the Vikings.12 (#litres_trial_promo) As the nineteenth-century children’s author R. M. Ballantyne wrote in 1869, ‘much of what is good and true in our laws and social customs, much of what is manly and vigorous in the British Constitution, and much of our intense love of freedom and fair play, is due to the pith, pluck and enterprise, and sense of justice that dwelt in the breasts of the rugged old sea-kings of Norway!’ A stirring message for the Empire’s future administrators.13 (#litres_trial_promo) The British Empire was in essence a maritime concern. From Francis Drake to Horatio Nelson its greatest heroes and progenitors had been seamen. Even Alfred, the ninth-century king of Wessex, was f?ted (on the strength of very little evidence indeed) as the founder of the English navy.14 (#litres_trial_promo) The Vikings, as a seafaring people, seemed to embody and prefigure all the greatest traits and achievements of the British: the spirit of commerce and adventure, the cutting-edge maritime technology, the suicidal bravery on land and sea, the discovery and settlement of new and exotic lands, the rattling of sabres in the faces of savage natives – even the cheerful pillaging of Catholic Europe with a gusto of which Drake would have been proud. The thought that these qualities had been reproduced in the British – not only by the example but in the very blood of the Vikings – was a tremendously exciting one in the intellectual climate of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here was a myth of origins that did not rely on the Mediterranean parallels and exempla that had been the staples of classical education since the Renaissance; the Old North was real and palpable in the cold salt spray of home waters, and the roar of Boreas carried the family ghosts with it. So, out of half-digested Icelandic sagas, Wagnerian wardrobe cast-offs, classical ideas of barbarian virtue and a good dose of romantic nationalism, the classic image of the Viking was born: blond and bare-chested, lusty and bold, a noble savage for the north European soul. This, incidentally, was also the crucible in which the horned helmet was forged, a fantasy propagated and popularized through book illustrations. Thomas Heath Robinson’s illustrations for the English retelling of Frithiof’s Saga, published in 1912, have a lot to answer for in this respect, and Arthur Rackham’s drawings accompanying the translated libretto of Wagner’s Ring cycle didn’t help either; even though the Ring wasn’t ‘about’ Vikings, the valkyries, gods, dwarves and other paraphernalia of Norse myth placed it in the same milieu. Most importantly of all, it was in the latter part of the nineteenth century that the word ‘Viking’ came popularly to be applied to these people, their culture and their age.15 (#litres_trial_promo) In the light of modern attitudes towards Britain’s imperial project, it is now hard to view the enthusiasm of men like Ballantyne without cynicism. The approving comparisons made by men of the nineteenth century between themselves and their Viking forebears now carry a grim irony. Shackles and collars have been excavated from major Viking commercial centres at Dublin and elsewhere along the trade routes to the slave-markets of central Asia; they are functionally and technologically identical to those used in the African slave-trade that underpinned much of Britain’s vast imperial wealth. The greed, brutality and callous disregard for the art and culture of others that the British were periodically to display across the globe were aptly prefigured in the rapacious Viking lust for silver, slaves and tribute. The qualities that some in the past saw as ‘manly vigour’ might very well strike us today as psychopathic tendencies – whether manifested in the eleventh-century Norwegian king Harald Hard-ruler or the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British general Horatio Herbert Kitchener. And, as Britain’s Empire unravelled in the decades following the Second World War, misty-eyed nationalist eulogies to the North became ever more absurd, and comparisons with the recently humiliated Nordic countries increasingly unwelcome. The marchers move with a practised military discipline, boots polished to a high shine, brass buttons gleaming. At the front march the Rikshird (the State Troopers) in navy blue, followed by the Kvinnehird (the women’s brigades) and the various youth groups gathered together under the banner of the Nasjonal Samling Ungdomsfylking (‘National Unity Youth Front’). Everywhere there are shining eyes and waving banners, gold crosses on red fields, eagles and swords. They move like an army, down from the plain little whitewashed church towards the barrow cemetery. The hump-backed mounds rise and plunge in the grass, like leviathans playing in the shallows of Oslo fjord, the glittering waters spreading out to the east. A pouchy-looking fellow, with limp sand-coloured hair and slightly bulgy eyes, is standing at a podium. As he begins to speak, the faces of the young men and women assembled before him look up in rapture, glowing with the promise of a golden dawn. ‘Norwegian women, Norwegian men. Today, we are gathered in a historic place, at a historic time in the lives of our people … It was from here, where the Yngling dynasty has its graveyard, that – with thought and deed acting in concert – Norway became united […] Was it not the Viking kings, the Ynglings resting here, the strong Nordic men, who one thousand years ago drove forward the will of the Norwegian people […]?’16 (#litres_trial_promo) The speaker was Vidkun Quisling, leader of the puppet regime that governed Norway under close supervision from Nazi Germany between 1942 and 1945, and chairman of the Norwegian fascist movement Nasjonal Samling (‘National Unity’). Between 1935 and 1944, Nasjonal Samling held meetings during the Pentecost holiday at the Borre national park in Vestfold, near Oslo.17 (#litres_trial_promo) The park is the setting for a cemetery of forty surviving grave-mounds, the largest of which are 23 feet tall and up to 150 feet in diameter. In 1852, one of the mounds was demolished by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration for the purpose of gravel extraction. In the process, the remains of an elaborate Viking Age ship burial were discovered. Although the excavations were botched and most of the evidence of the ship itself was lost, the treasures that were found accompanying the burial were spectacular. Gilt-bronze bridle fittings, with their knot-work and zoomorphic decorations, gave rise to the definition of a new Viking art-form: the ‘Borre’ style.18 (#litres_trial_promo) These were some of the first artefacts that allowed Norwegians to imagine the splendour of Viking Age power, and historians eagerly took up the Borre site as emblematic of national origins – a powerful symbol in the period around 1905 when the independent kingdom of Norway formally came into being after more than 500 years of political and dynastic union with Denmark and (latterly) Sweden. In 1915, Professor Anton Wilhelm Br?gger sensationally claimed that the ship burial was the grave of Halfdan the Black, father of Harald Finehair (c. 850–c. 932) – the man credited as the first king of a unified Norway. This built on medieval traditions that considered the Borre mounds to be the cemetery of the legendary Yngling dynasty, from which Halfdan and Harald ultimately sprang. These elaborate confections of folklore and invented tradition have disintegrated under scrutiny in recent decades. But, in the political climate of post-independence Norway at the beginning of the twentieth century, a national myth of such potency went unchallenged. In 1932, with Br?gger as its indefatigable cheerleader, Borre became Norway’s first national park – a sacred site, as he saw it, in the birth of Norwegian nationhood.19 (#litres_trial_promo) These were the myths that Quisling, and men like him, eagerly embraced. Borre was not the only Viking Age site that Nasjonal Samling commandeered for their propaganda – they also met at the iconic battle-sites of Stiklestad and Hafrsfjord where Quisling told his audience (wrongly), ‘Norwegian kings sat on Scotland’s throne and for almost four hundred years Norwegian kings ruled Ireland,’ pointing out too (and stretching the truth almost as much) that ‘Ganger Rolf [Rollo], who was a king of Norwegian birth [he wasn’t], founded a kingdom in Normandy [he didn’t] which was so powerful that it conquered England [150 years later].’ The promotion of the archetypal Viking image – the aggression, the expansionism, the machismo – became a powerful recruiting tool for the Nazis and their fascist allies. Numerous propaganda images (the majority produced by the Norwegian artist Harald Damsleth) featured lantern-jawed Nordic types riding the decks of dragon-prowed long-ships, alongside more sophisticated and esoteric uses of runic scripts and mythological allusions. These fostered a spurious sense of continuity between the Viking Age and the National Socialist project. The deep roots and time-hallowed legitimacy that these symbols implied lent the ultra-modern ideology of racist nationalism a gravitas that helped it to transcend its inherent novelty and absurdity.20 (#litres_trial_promo) It was the latter quality that fascist movements in Britain never quite managed to escape: P. G. Wodehouse’s brilliant lampoon of the British politician Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists, or ‘Blackshirts’ (with Roderick Spode’s ‘Blackshorts’), proved that the British capacity to laugh at anything was a useful barricade against the pompous po-facedness of fascist demagoguery.21 (#litres_trial_promo) But the ultimate failure of British fascism is perhaps also testament to the fact that, by the mid-twentieth century, the medieval (including the Viking) past – so relentlessly plundered by nationalist movements across Europe – had already been integrated into British national culture in forms which were harder to bend into totalitarian shape. Nevertheless, the degree to which the Nazis successfully co-opted the image of the Vikings into National Socialist propaganda can be measured in the long-term and widespread contamination of northern European heritage. J. R. R. Tolkien’s deeply held loathing for ‘that ruddy little ignoramus’ Adolf Hitler rested in no small part on his recognition of the damage done by ‘Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making forever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light’.22 (#litres_trial_promo) It remains the case today that too warm an enthusiasm for the ‘Germanic’ past can raise suspicions (often justified) of unsavoury politics: the subject remains a fecund repository for the imagery of racist propaganda. This taint is one of the quietest, most tenacious and most ironic legacies of the Third Reich.23 (#litres_trial_promo) This squeamishness about the Vikings and their world would lead ultimately to a thorough reappraisal of the Viking Age in the decades following the Second World War. Pioneered by the British archaeologist Peter Sawyer, revisionist histories sought to downplay the lurid violence and warrior ethics of the Vikings, emphasizing instead their artistic, technological and mercantile achievements.24 (#litres_trial_promo) There is no doubt that it was a necessary corrective, rebalancing the Viking image and dispelling a plethora of myths and falsehoods that had stood unchallenged since the Middle Ages. However, far from liberating the Vikings from nationalist captivity, the new narratives provided a fresh palette with which revivalists and nationalists could embellish what had previously been a relatively two-dimensional image. Viking ancestors became pioneers without equal, craftsmen and poets, engineers and statesmen – as well as remaining the warriors and conquerors they had always been. All of which was true of course, at least of some individuals at certain times and in different places. But the desire to demystify the Viking Age also brought in train a new myth: that the Vikings – with their storytelling and home-making, their pragmatism, their games and their shoe-menders – were essentially the same as we are, but fitter, stronger, clearer of purpose, uncorrupted by modernity. Peering into the Viking world, some have found a mirror reflecting back all that they would wish themselves and the modern world to be: simple, undiluted, purified … But, as we shall see, the Vikings were strange. They were strange to their contemporaries and they should be strange to us too. Theirs was a world in which slaves were raped, murdered and burned alongside the decomposing corpses of their dead owners, a world where men with filed teeth bartered captive monks for Islamic coins, where white-faced women smeared their bodies in fat and human ash and traversed the spirit world in animal form: it is not the template for a brave new world that I, for one, would choose. Thus ‘the Vikings’, to us now and to their contemporaries in their own time, could represent something both familiar and alien: they could be weird and remote, monstrous even, but also bound tightly into narratives of who the English-speaking peoples have felt themselves – wanted themselves – to be. It is a complex and enduring problem, and shifting emphases in the presentation of the Vikings and their homelands, from the eighth century to the present day, illuminate the preoccupations of the modern psyche just as much as they do the realities of the Viking Age itself.25 (#litres_trial_promo) All of which is to say that the whole idea of the ‘Viking’ needs to be handled with care. As it is used in a modern sense (and in this book), the word is largely employed as a term of convenience. It is used to define a period, the seaborne warriors whose activities characterized that period, and the shared cultural connections, ideas and art-styles (mostly, but not exclusively, of Scandinavian origin) that both bound people together and spawned new identities. It is important to recognize that – like the reality of all human life – what we mean by the term is chaotic, contestable and imprecise, resisting easy definition. How that chaos is, and has been, negotiated is in part what this book is about. And thinking about it is important, because the stereotypes can be deadly. Norwegian propaganda for the SS by Harald Damsleth, 1940–5 In the 1940s, hundreds of young Norwegian men, stirred by images of their ‘Viking’ heritage and convinced by nationalist propaganda of the threat from Russian Bolshevism, signed up for the ‘Norwegian Legion’. They were promised that they would be fighting in the interests of a free and independent Norway. Instead they found themselves, barely out of training, ordered by German officers into the meat-grinder of Hitler’s Eastern Front. A hundred and eighty of them (around 20 per cent) were killed before the legion was acrimoniously disbanded. Those few who remained committed to the Nazi cause were integrated into the SS Nordland Division, a force of mainly Scandinavian volunteers which had formerly constituted a part of the SS Wiking Division. These were the men who were inspired by the Viking-themed propaganda images churned out by the Reich and who had listened misty-eyed to Quisling’s fantasies in the supposed burial ground of Halfdan the Black. The men of SS Nordland, convinced of the superiority of their Viking blood, would go on to commit atrocities in eastern Europe which were equal to the crimes of any of their Nazi peers.26 (#litres_trial_promo) 4 Shores in Flames (#ulink_8fc42ab3-335d-51e0-a269-fb4f458b07ba) Bitter is the wind tonight, it stirs up the white-waved sea. I do not fear the coursing of the Irish sea by the fierce warriors of Lothlind [Vikings]. Irish monk (ninth century)1 (#litres_trial_promo) If the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 remains the apocalyptic touchstone for the Viking Age in Britain, it was only the first of many similar attacks that were to rage up and down the coastlines of Britain and Ireland in the years around 800. Viking raiders struck at Iona in the Western Isles in 795, at Jarrow (former home to the monastic scholar Bede) in 796, at Hartness and Tynemouth in 800, at Iona again in 802 and 806.2 (#litres_trial_promo) The earliest raids in Ireland fell in 795 on Rathlin Island, Co. Antrim (almost certainly the same group that had already hit Iona in that year), at St Patrick’s Isle (Co. Dublin) in 798 and at Inishmurray (Co. Sligo) in 798 and 807.3 (#litres_trial_promo) The record is patchy and incomplete; but what is certain is that people died and people suffered. There is not much direct evidence of the impact of these early Viking raids, no clear indication of the human cost exacted – of the people, possessions and lives that were snatched away. But there are traces – objects and remains that give terror and plunder a weight and substance that even the purplest of ecclesiastical prose fails to convey. It is here, in the material traces of the Viking Age – in stone and bone and metal – that something of the original purpose and the impact of the Vikings in Britain can be seen. A grim and bearded head lies within the collection of the British Museum.4 (#litres_trial_promo) It is small, made of bronze and dated to the eighth century – a piece of Scottish, Irish or Northumbrian workmanship. It was probably intended to depict the face of a saint (it is strikingly similar to the depiction of St Mark in the Lichfield Gospels). Discovered near Furness Abbey in Cumbria (a region, as we shall see, of later Scandinavian settlement), the head has been adapted as a weight in a manner typical of Viking traders. Stuffed with lead, it has been turned to a new use in the hands of owners more concerned with personalizing their belongings than with piety. The little head, severed from its body, hacked from whatever piece of ecclesiastical treasure it had once been intended to decorate, is a reminder of the material consequences of Viking raids – of the treasured possessions that were broken and stolen, the human heads that were detached from their bodies, of the people taken away from their homes and disposed of far away. Direct evidence for the sort of violence recorded by monastic writers is rare and often equivocal; a number of skeletons excavated from the ditch of an enclosed settlement at Llanbedrgoch on Anglesey, for example, were long believed to be local victims of Viking raiding until chemical analysis of the remains revealed several of them to have grown up in Scandinavia: not, in itself, any reason to believe that they were not the victims of raiding, but enough to complicate the narrative considerably.5 (#litres_trial_promo) In only one place in Britain – at the former monastery at Portmahomack in Scotland – has good evidence for the violence of Viking raiding been uncovered; it is a place, moreover, that is not mentioned in any written source that has survived from the Viking Age. ‘The further north you go in the island of Britain, the more beautiful the scenery becomes, the hills wilder, the skies wider, the air clearer, the seas closer. Even for those not born in Scotland, you feel as if you are driving towards your beginnings.’6 (#litres_trial_promo) This is how Professor Martin Carver described his journey to Portmahomack. The small fishing settlement lies at the north-eastern tip of the Tarbat peninsula: a finger of land that points emphatically north-east, separating the Moray and Dornoch Firths. It is the shard of crust marking the end of the Great Glen, the weirdly rectilinear fracture that shears a diagonal fissure through Scotland, scoring a damp line that puddles along its length into Loch Ness and Loch Linnhe before dispersing into the Firth of Lorne. There is a sense up here, as elsewhere in the far north of Britain, of land dissolving at the margins, like the edge of pack ice giving way to the ocean, splintering and drifting into ragged and provisional forms. To travel there is to a find a place of transitions and embarkations, not journeys ending. The monastery that Carver discovered at Portmahomack was revealed in a series of archaeological investigations between 1994 and 2007. It is, just for the fact of its existence, a supremely significant addition to our knowledge of the early medieval north. No record of it exists in any written source, and it is – so far – the only monastery discovered within the notional bounds of the Pictish kingdom; indeed, it lies close to its heart. At the height of its wealth and productivity in the eighth century, the monastery was producing prodigious quantities of vellum for the production of manuscripts as well as high-quality liturgical metalwork such as chalices and pyxes (containers for holding the consecrated bread used in the Eucharist). There was obviously a limit to the number of such objects (particularly of the latter sort) that a single church required, and so the workshops probably served newer, start-up monasteries elsewhere in Pictland and perhaps beyond. It is precisely this sort of wealth and activity that drew attention to Portmahomack and probably sealed its fate. For at that time, and in that place, the attention of outsiders was something that no one would have wanted to attract; at some point around the year 800, the monastery burned. The parts nearest the sea went first, the blaze ripping through the workshops of the vellum-makers, immolating timber, straw and heather. The severity of the fire can be judged by the condition of stone fragments, cracked and reddened in the heat of the burning. Carver’s team discovered that most of these stones, strewn on top of the fire, had been part of a great cross-slab (a flat rectangle with a cross carved upon it in relief). The stone, which had originally stood at the edge of the monastic graveyard, had been toppled and obliterated – pulverized with a calculated malice more reminiscent of the violence done by Islamic fundamentalists to ancient artefacts than of any casual vandalism. This was destruction with a purpose – the work of people with motive and intent, who had an understanding (whatever that was) of what such a monument stood for. It was not the only one: other stone cross-slabs (at least one, probably three) were broken down and shattered on this site.7 (#litres_trial_promo) A famous example of the sort of thing that was broken at Portmahomack can be seen just 5 miles away at Hilton of Cadboll. The stone that stands near the chapel there is an imposing monument, nearly 8 feet tall and 4? feet wide, heavy and overbearing. The images that decorate its surface – like those discernible among the fragments from Portmahomack – are stunning in their quality and execution, renderings in stone of the types of imagery more familiar from illuminated manuscripts like the Book of Kells. It is a replica, the original stone having been moved from here in the mid-1800s and ultimately finding its way to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.8 (#litres_trial_promo) The imagery that survives on the original monument is almost all on one side. Scenes of aristocratic life – hunting dogs and a deer run to ground, mounted men with spears and others blowing horns, a woman riding side-saddle – are surrounded by a frame of twisting vines and interlacing animals. Surmounting it all are the idiosyncratic hieroglyphs known as ‘Pictish symbols’ – in this case the ‘crescent and V rod’ and the ‘double-disc and Z rod’, as well as the ‘comb and mirror’, tucked into the corner of the figurative hunting scene. Nobody really knows what these symbols represent, but they certainly had their origins in a distant past. The best guess at present is that they signify the names, and perhaps ranks or affiliations, of Pictish aristocrats.9 (#litres_trial_promo) Engraving of the Hilton of Cadboll stone by Charles Carter Petley, 1812 (Wikimedia Commons) Missing from the original Hilton of Cadboll stone is the feature that, at the time of its making, would have been its definitive attribute: the huge and elaborate cross that once decorated its eastern side (a reconstruction of this cross can now be seen on the replica, sculpted by Barry Grove). This cross was deliberately defaced, methodically, carefully and totally; but not by Vikings. In 1667, or a little later, the redressed stone was inscribed with a memorial to one Alexander Duff and his three wives (one assumes that these were consecutive, rather than concurrent, relationships). In the febrile religious climate of seventeenth-century Scotland, it seems possible that the ostentation of this cross was enough to make it a target for iconoclasts. No one knows whether it originally carried an image of the crucified Christ; if it did it would have been even more offensive to Protestant sensibilities – nothing says ‘Popish’ quite like an enormous ornamental crucifix embellished with vine scrolls and animal interlace. At the very least it was clearly not considered worth preserving such an object, pregnant as it was with associations that ran counter to prevailing cultural, political and religious norms.10 (#litres_trial_promo) In 1640, the Aberdeen Assembly (the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland) determined that ‘in divers places of the Kingdome, and especially in the North parts of the Same, many Idolatrous Monuments, erected and made for Religious worship are yet extant’ and should be ‘taken down, demolished and destroyed, and that with all convenient diligence’. Such stones, in other words, in the seventeenth century, were inescapable reminders of a regional, native identity that was partly defined and sustained by its religious affiliations. For the men of the Aberdeen Assembly, such reminders were intolerable – on religious grounds, certainly, but perhaps also as memorials to an aristocratic, kin-centric and local way of life, deep-rooted and old-fangled things that lay far beyond the systems and controls of civic assemblies, national government and kirk. At the time of their making, however, these stones were billboards proclaiming the political and cultural dominance of the prevailing local dynasties, and clearly could be no less provocative. Around the year 800, not long after the monuments at Portmahomack and Hilton of Cadboll were erected, a new power was plying the coastal waters of Pictland. This power, founded in raw military strength and impressive maritime technology, was unimpressed by the strictures, injunctions and symbols of the British Christianity it encountered. Moreover, it had a vested interest in challenging the strident Pictish identity that those stones gave voice to. It was a power determined to frame the landscape in its own terms, without reference to local landmarks and the bigwigs who had built them. For Viking warlords – seeking, perhaps, to consolidate their spheres of influence – the Pictish monuments of Portmahomack may have represented an intolerable challenge to their mastery of the northern oceans. This perhaps was the reason why they suffered so badly.11 (#litres_trial_promo) It was not, of course, only the stones that suffered. Although it is the damage done to buildings and to things that endures in the archaeological record, and although it is the irretrievable loss of cultural heritage that grieves the historian most acutely, for the monks who were present at the monastery on the day it burned there were corporal and existential issues at stake. Excavation of the monastic cemetery revealed the skeletons of three men who had suffered extreme personal violence. One of them (number 158 in the excavations report) was struck in the face with a sword, a wound which cleaved through his flesh and into the bones of his skull. Somehow he survived to die another day. Another monk, number 152, received three blows to the head with a heavy bladed weapon. He was less fortunate than his brother. ‘As two of the cuts were on the back of the head,’ Carver explains, ‘it is likely that the assailant attacked from behind. Given that one of the fractures was on the crown of the head, the individual may have been below the assailant at one point (e.g. kneeling). As injuries with larger weapons are more likely to produce terminal fractures, it is possible that a weapon such as a large sword may have been used to produce these fractures.’12 (#litres_trial_promo) Here are the Vikings we think we know – hacking apart the head of a fleeing monk, shearing open his skull from behind as he drops to his knees. Did he stumble in his flight – driven by the burning terror that had spewed up out of the ocean? Or did he drop to his knees in prayer, facing death as a martyr with the Pater Noster on his lips? This we cannot know. What we can say with certainty, however, is that someone cared enough about him in death to remove his bloody corpse from the smoking ruins and inter it with dignity within the confines of the monastic cemetery. These were hardly likely to be the actions of his killers. They, presumably, were long gone, in ships laden with silver chalices and the gilded covers of holy manuscripts, their precious painted vellum leaves left to burn in the smouldering wreckage or used to stoke the camp-fires at their next stop along the coast. Not that the Vikings would leave this corner of Britain alone. There were other islands, and other sources of wealth, to be won.13 (#litres_trial_promo) The island of Inchmarnock, lying off the Scottish coast among the other islands of the Clyde, is not much of anything really, not now at any rate: a smear of wooded hillside between the coast of Bute and the Kintyre peninsula, a few fields caught napping when the tide came in too fast. These days it is privately owned by Lord Smith of Kelvin, who breeds highland cattle on the island; there are no other human residents.14 (#litres_trial_promo) Twelve hundred years ago, however, Inchmarnock was thriving. Excavation in and around the medieval ruins of St Marnock’s church has revealed evidence of early medieval metalworking, and – most significantly – of what has been interpreted as a monastic schoolhouse. Dozens of fragments of slate, scratched with graffiti, patterns and text, seem to be the work of students, copying or practising writing and carving: a longer Latin text in a neat insular minuscule is perhaps an exemplum – passed around for copying – and fragments of cross-slab monuments imply the ultimate intended expression of the artistic skills being taught here. One can imagine a clutch of young boys, seated cross-legged on a hard earth floor, stifling their yawns as an older monk tries patiently to explain the importance of making sure their half-uncials are all the same height. A little way from the main group, one boy sits apart. He doesn’t join in with the covert attempts of the others to turn their practice slates into gaming boards,15 (#litres_trial_promo) or to flick pebbles at the brother’s back when he gets up to go for a piss. Instead he silently persists in his own project, scratching at the lump of grey schist he keeps tight in his left hand, pressing down hard, his muscles taut. He hasn’t been long on the island – he came with some older monks from Iona; something had happened there, apparently, but the other boys weren’t told what. The new boy won’t speak, and the monks won’t tell them. ‘Just keep on eye on the sea,’ they say, ‘just watch the sea.’ Among the slates found on Inchmarnock, one stands out as utterly unlike anything else found there.16 (#litres_trial_promo) It depicts four figures, all in profile, facing to the right as if moving together resolutely in the same direction. Three of them – only one of which is complete (the upper-right portion of the image has broken away and is presumably lost, or perhaps still somewhere under the surface of Inchmarnock or in the foundations of its ruinous buildings) – appear to be armed men dressed in mail shirts, the cross-hatching on their legs perhaps indicating the tight wrappings that were worn to gather the loose material of fabric trousers. They surround the image of a ship, its multitude of oars giving it the appearance of an unpleasant, scuttling invertebrate. The central figure in particular dominates the composition – large and commanding, a shock of long hair streaming from his bristly, oversized head. He leans forward slightly, propulsive and determined, in total contrast to the pathetic figure behind him. Stunted and unfinished, his head is barely outlined – just a jumble of lines; he is indeterminate, without identity: a nobody, a blank. What gives him purpose is the object attached to him, shackled to him in fact, hanging from an arm that pushes forward, reaching out. There is something terribly poignant about the gesture – drawn so clearly, where the face is absent, the fingers delineated and the hand open. It is on the object, however, that interpretation of the image turns. It could be a lock or a manacle; several such objects have been discovered in Ireland and around the Baltic. The object seems to be chained to the body of the figure in some way, and perhaps to the waist of the warlike central figure as well. Lines extending from the shoulder of the latter figure also seem to imply a captive being dragged into bondage – dragged, perhaps, to the waiting ship and a long journey east.17 (#litres_trial_promo) If the object is not a manacle, it is most probably a depiction of a portable reliquary shrine. These little house-shaped objects are a familiar component of ecclesiastical culture around the Irish Sea; containing the relics of a saint, they would have functioned both as containers for holy objects and as portable focal points for devotion. As such, they were often highly decorative and valuable. Surviving examples, like the Scottish Monymusk reliquary, give an indication of the craft and precious materials with which such treasures were invested. As such, they made tempting targets for robbers – especially robbers with scant regard for Christian sensibilities. Substantial quantities of ecclesiastical metalwork, including house shrines, from northern Britain and Ireland in particular, have been found in Scandinavian graves and settlements – often adapted for use in new ways. A casket of exactly this type, manufactured in the eighth century in Ireland or western Scotland, was discovered in Norway, eventually entering the royal collections of the Danish–Norwegian royal family and from there into the collections of the National Museum of Denmark. It is empty, long having lost the relics it was built to house, but on its base is scratched an inscription in Old Norse, the letters formed in the distinctive runic alphabet used in south-west Norway and in the later Norse colony of Isle of Man: ‘Rannveig owns this casket.’18 (#litres_trial_promo) The noise is deafening. The sail cloth beats and rumbles like barrels tumbling over cliffs, and the ship’s timbers scream in the rending hands of wind and water; above it all comes the shrieking gale, the thousand voices that howl together, raging and vengeful as they pour unending out of the blackening sky, riding on the salty arrows of the storm. He fights to bring the sail in, to stop the oar holes, to secure the provisions. He thinks he can hear the howling – the wolf that will swallow the sun; he thinks he can feel the thrashing of coils – the serpent that encircles the earth; he thinks he can see the shadow of the ship, Naglfar, built from the fingernails and toenails of the dead.19 (#litres_trial_promo) His right hand reaches up and grips the hammer that hangs around his neck. He forces his thoughts homeward, to the bright hearth and the cows in the byre. He thinks of his boys playing on the hillside, and the carvings around the hall door; he thinks of his wife, sitting by the fireside, her head bowed, weeping. Suddenly the storm is dying, the rain reducing to great globs of water that strike hard but sparingly, the rage of the wind expended, quietened now to a whispered lament. A ray of sunlight breaks through the fortress of black clouds in the east, a golden glimmer spreading on dark water. An arch begins to form, building itself from the ether into a bridge of colour linking the heavens with the earth. He smiles: it is a good omen. Bending down to open the chest that serves as a rowing bench, he begins to rummage among the clinking metal objects within. Eventually he produces a house-shaped box. It is small but exquisite, gleaming with gilt bronze. He wipes a ruddy-brown stain from the lid with a corner of his cloak and opens it up, peering inside and grunting. Standing, he upends it over the edge of the boat and towards the disgruntled water, shaking its contents into the breeze. Scraps of fabric, little brown bones, a fragment of wood, tumble into the slate-grey sea and are swallowed in darkness. He closes the box again, turning it in his big, scarred hands, the fugitive light glinting from its golden edges; he thinks of his wife, sitting by the fireside, the casket in her lap; she looks up, and she smiles. Rannveig is a woman’s name, and there is every possibility that the casket that bears it was brought back from a successful campaign of raiding in the west, its holy contents dumped without ceremony, repurposed as a lavish gift from a father, husband or suitor. An Irish annal of 824 describes the fate that befell the bits and pieces that had once been or belonged to St Comgall: ‘Bangor at Airte was sacked by heathens; its oratory was destroyed and the relics of Comgall were shaken from their shrine.’20 (#litres_trial_promo) Of course, Rannveig might well have acquired such an object by other means before marking her ownership in writing; Viking women were not dependent on men for their status and possessions.21 (#litres_trial_promo) But it is hard to imagine how such an object could have been liberated from its keepers and divested of its holy cargo without the application or threat of violence, and this – in the overwhelming majority of cases – was the preserve of men. It may well be, therefore, that the Inchmarnock stone depicts the abduction of valuables both human and material, shackled together, shrine and guardian hauled off into bondage as one. The drawing was made – on the basis of its context and the style of the lettering found on its reverse side – around the year 800, the same time that the monastery of Portmahomack burned. It seems highly likely, given what else we know of events in that region in those years, that Viking raids on Iona and the coast of Ireland, as well as further away to the west, furnished the imagery and impetus for someone to scratch this odd graffito on to stone. With its menacing ship and exaggerated, trollish warriors, it calls to mind those heartbreaking drawings produced by the child survivors of wars and atrocities – crude images in which men, their weapons and their vehicles loom huge and all powerful, the visual manifestation of unhealable mental scars. As always, of course, there are competing interpretations (as with the apocalyptic gravestone at Lindisfarne, we can never know for sure what this scene was intended to convey), but it is easy to see how the arrival of murderous waterborne marauders could have jolted those on the receiving end into novel spasms of creativity.22 (#litres_trial_promo) Thus we come to perhaps the most lucrative and plentiful source of wealth that the Viking raiders targeted – plunder that leaves little trace in the archaeological record, but which defined the activities of people from the north in the eye of those they encountered. In the early tenth century, the Arab traveller Ahmad ibn Rusta described the activities of Vikings in eastern Europe (the R?s). He explained how they raided their neighbours, ‘sailing in their ships until they come upon them. They take them captive and sell them in Kharaz?n and Bulk?r (Bulgh?r) […] They treat their slaves well and dress them suitably, because for them they are an article of trade.’23 (#litres_trial_promo) Being treated well, however, was – for a slave – a relative concept. For women and girls, the experience was as horrific as could be expected, and frequently far worse. Another Arab writer, Ahmad ibn Fadlan, describes his encounters with a group of R?s travellers, making their way from the north along the Volga towards the markets of central Asia and the Middle East. In an extended description of the funeral of the R?s chief, ibn Fadlan describes how a slave girl – owned in life by the dead man – ‘volunteered’ to die and accompany him to the grave. After a lengthy ritual, the girl was stupefied with alcohol, repeatedly raped, stabbed with a dagger and strangled with a cord. Once dead, she was burned upon the funeral pyre with the dead man, his horses and his hounds.24 (#litres_trial_promo) These accounts are from the east, where the Viking trade routes came into contact with the Abbasid Caliphate, the Byzantine Empire and the flowing riches of the Silk Road.25 (#litres_trial_promo) But the goods they brought to trade were harvested far away; all and any of the people who could be preyed upon by sea might find themselves shackled and transported. Descriptions of the seizure of people are commonplace – particularly in the Irish chronicles. The year 821, for example, saw the ‘plundering of Etar [Howth in Dublin] by heathens; from there they carried off a great number of women’. Ten years later, in 831, ‘heathens won a battle in Aignecha against the community of Armagh, so that very many were taken prisoner by them’. In 836 came ‘the first plunder taken from Southern Brega by the heathens […] and they slew many and took off very many captive’.26 (#litres_trial_promo) Monks may have been of less value as sex-slaves, and men were probably valued primarily as manual labour, often carried back to Scandinavia to work the farms of landowners where they, as well as female slaves, would have been expected to undertake the hardest and foulest work. Recent research has even suggested the institution of slave ‘plantations’ in parts of Scandinavia, where imported workers were housed in cramped conditions and forced to mass-produce textiles for the export market.27 (#litres_trial_promo) There they were known in Old Norse as ?r?lar (‘thralls’), a word which survives in modern English with something close to its original meaning (to be in ‘thrall’ to something is to be captivated by it). The low regard in which these unfortunate folk were held can be gauged by a poem, written down – in the only surviving version – in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, but probably preserving a much older text and ideas.28 (#litres_trial_promo) It describes the mythologized origins of social castes in Scandinavia and lists the sort of pejorative names and menial tasks thought suitable for the children of a thrall (‘slave’; ON ?r?ll) or thrall-woman (ON ??r): I think their names were Big-mouth and Byreboy, Stomp and Stick-boy, Shagger and Stink, Stumpy and Fatso, Backward and Grizzled, Bent-back and Brawny; they set up farms, shovelled shit on the fields, worked with pigs, guarded goats and dug the turf. Their daughters were Dumpy and Frumpy, Swollen-calves and Crooked-nose, Screamer and Serving-girl, Chatterbox, Tatty-coat and Cranelegs; from them have come the generations of slaves.29 (#litres_trial_promo) Slavery was an institution across Europe, as it had been in the days of the Roman Empire, and persisted into the Norman period. In 1086, some 10 per cent of the English population was recognized as being unfree, and Anglo-Saxon slave-owners had the power of life and death over their slaves until the late ninth century.30 (#litres_trial_promo) The capture of defeated enemies was also a feature of inter-kingdom warfare in both Britain and Ireland before and during the Viking Age. In 836 (the same year that Vikings took captives from Brega), Fedelmid mac Crimthainn, king of Munster, attacked the oratory at Kildare ‘with battle and weapons’, taking the abbot Forindan and his congregation captive: they were shown, according to the chronicler, ‘no consideration’.31 (#litres_trial_promo) What was different about the Viking slave-trade was its integration into long-distance commercial networks that connected the Irish and North Seas with the Baltic, Black, Caspian and Mediterranean Seas. No longer could slaves taken in Britain and Ireland expect to remain within a reasonable radius of their erstwhile homes, surrounded by people who differed from them little in speech or custom, and who respected social and cultural norms that were mutually understood. Instead they faced the possibility – if they weren’t shipped directly to Scandinavia or to more local Viking colonies – of being transported like livestock over vast distances, to be sold in the markets of Samarkand or Baghdad, or – perhaps – to meet a horrific death on the banks of the River Volga. If they survived that journey and made it to market, they may well have found themselves, prodded and manhandled, forced to watch as their price in silver was carefully measured out – the scales tipping with the heft of weights, gleaming with ornaments ripped from the books and treasures that had once adorned their homes and churches. 5 Beyond the North Waves (#ulink_940de6d3-be80-54db-8243-00702e8107d6) What is a woman that you forsake her, And the hearth-fire and the home-acre, To go with the old grey Widow-maker? RUDYARD KIPLING, ‘Harp Song of the Dane Woman’ (1906)1 (#litres_trial_promo) Explaining the beginnings of the Viking Age is to enter into difficult and contentious territory. We can observe the Vikings’ arrival in the written sources, and glimpse what they wanted and how they went about getting it. But to question why people from northern Europe suddenly began to risk their lives on the wide ocean and brave the unknown dangers of foreign lands is another matter. To make progress on this front requires consideration of where the Vikings came from – not just geographically, though this is important for understanding the economic and political pressures that affected them, but also culturally. The structure of society in the pagan north, the shared values and beliefs – these were critical factors in pushing people towards the ‘Viking’ way. Ultimately, these are questions to which there can be no firm answers, only suggestions and reconstructions and ideas placed in the minds of people we cannot hope to know, but by doing so we can perhaps inch a little closer to understanding what made the Vikings tick. Despite the very limited information provided by the written sources, it is clear that the people who were raiding Britain at the turn of the eighth century came from somewhere in the ‘Danish’-speaking (that is, Old Norse-speaking) north-east and – most importantly from the perspective of Christian writers – were heathens. In the year 800, the Baltic was a pagan lake. The people who had turned their attention to Britain came from the west of this region – from what is now Denmark, Norway and Sweden – but all of the neighbouring lands to the east were also inhabited by pagan peoples, by Baltic and Slavic tribes in (moving clockwise around the Baltic coast) modern Finland, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia (again), Poland and Germany. It would be wrong to draw very firm distinctions or borders between these groups – as in Britain, it is better to try to forget everything we know about the way that the storms of history have left their tide lines on the map. The formation of modern north-eastern Europe – its political geography and its religious and ethno-linguistic fault-lines – has been the result of more than a millennium of often catastrophic upheaval that lasted well into the second half of the twentieth century. The people who formed Viking raiding parties could have been (and in later centuries demonstrably were) drawn from all over this wider region.2 (#litres_trial_promo) To the south and west was the Carolingian Empire, a great swathe of Europe – corresponding to most of modern France, northern Italy, western Germany and the Low Countries – united under a Frankish king (the Franks were a Germanic tribe who had begun to settle the Roman province of Gaul in the fifth century and who give their name to the modern nation of France). That king, in the same year, had been crowned emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, a title that confirmed him as the sanctioned champion of an aggressive Christianity and the successor to the authority of the long-defunct Roman Empire in the west (the eastern, or Byzantine, Empire, centred on Constantinople – modern Istanbul – remained a going concern). That king would come to be known as ‘Karolus Magnus’: ‘Charles the Great’, or Charlemagne. By the time he received the imperial crown, Charlemagne had already redrawn the boundaries of Christendom in western Europe. In particular, a series of bloody campaigns against the pagan Saxons of northern Germany – effectively completed in 797, though revolts continued until 804 – had brought the boundaries of Frankish Christian Europe into contact with the pagan Scandinavian and Slavic tribes of the Jutland peninsula and western Baltic littoral. These wars had been exceptional for their combination of extreme brutality with religious zeal. In 772 Charlemagne ordered the destruction of the Irminsul, a holy tree or pillar central to Saxon worship. Ten years later, in a particularly notorious incident, he had 4,500 Saxon prisoners beheaded on the banks of the River Weser near the town of Verden, apparently in retribution for their involvement in a revolt against Frankish domination. This was followed by laws that made death the penalty for refusing baptism.3 (#litres_trial_promo) The violence of Charlemagne’s Christian mission prefigured the Crusades by three centuries. Whatever the precise nature of the religious beliefs of the Saxons, it is likely – as we shall see – that they were shared, at least in part or in outline, by their neighbours to the north in what is now Denmark. Indeed, an inconsistent but interconnected network of beliefs, stories and rituals extended from the borders of the Frankish world throughout the Baltic world, linking together people of markedly different linguistic and cultural backgrounds through broadly compatible world-views and systems of social hierarchy. It is certain that Charlemagne’s bellicose Christian foreign policy would have sent ripples of alarm shuddering out across the Baltic. Kings, chieftains, priests and priestesses would have wondered how long it would be before their traditional way of life and their political independence would be snuffed out beneath the hooves of Frankish horsemen, how soon they would see their timber halls burning and their sacred groves falling beneath the axes of Christian missionaries.4 (#litres_trial_promo) This fear and uncertainty prompted a range of reactions. Some, like the Slavic Obodrites, did a deal with the superpower to their west, accepting Charlemagne as nominal overlord, providing the Empire with military aid and, in return, maintaining a level of political and religious freedom. They did this, admittedly, under duress: Charlemagne had invaded their territory and taken hostages. The Danes, for their part, provided shelter to Charlemagne’s enemies and took steps to defend their landward border with Saxony by reinforcing the ditch and rampart structure – the Danevirke (literally the ‘Dane-work’) – that divided Germania from the Jutland peninsula.5 (#litres_trial_promo) As Charlemagne’s conquests in Saxony became established geopolitical facts, Danish kings increasingly found themselves having to deal directly with Frankish power. In 804, the Danish king Godfred arrived with his fleet and ‘the entire cavalry of his kingdom’ at Hedeby (Schleswig) on the Danish border.6 (#litres_trial_promo) It was a show of strength and, after a diplomatic exchange with the emperor, he departed – feeling, presumably, that he had roared loudly enough to convince his Frankish neighbours that the Danes were not to be trifled with. In 808, however, he apparently changed his mind, this time crossing with his army into Obodrite territory to the south-east, sacking a number of Slav settlements and burning the coastal trading settlement at Reric. The Obodrite inhabitants of the town, on the Baltic coast east of Jutland (close to the modern German town of Wismar), may have been accustomed to paying tribute to the Danish king. If so, the alliance with Charlemagne put an end to that, and also gave the Frankish Empire a friendly port on the Baltic. It was probably for both these reasons that Godfred, after destroying the town, deported its traders to Hedeby, placing them – and their tax revenues – firmly within his own sphere of control.7 (#litres_trial_promo) Charlemagne hardly leapt to the defence of his allies. The Frankish Royal Annals describe how he sent his son Charles to wait at the banks of the Elbe to make sure that no one entered Saxon territory; the Obodrites were left to their fate. Once the Danish army had withdrawn, the Franko-Saxon army crossed the river and burned the fields of those Slavic tribes who had allied themselves with the Danes (and who had probably done so in order to avoid similar treatment from the Danish king; this has ever been the fate of small tribal communities – the weakest always suffer the most). Some fairly empty diplomacy followed in 809 – conducted, so it would seem, to give both sides an excuse to shore up the loyalty of their various Slavic allies. Godfred, however, had not finished baiting the Empire. In the summer of 810, Charlemagne was at the great palace complex he had commissioned at Aachen (now in Germany), the new capital of his hard-won realm. The cathedral at Aachen still incorporates a building – the Palatine Chapel – built as part of the original palace in the 790s by the architect Odo of Metz. The extraordinary scale and lavish attention to detail of the building, with its many-coloured marble floors and tiers of rounded portals – the eight sides of the central vestibule surrounded by the sixteen-sided outer perimeter – are the monumental vestiges of the staggering wealth and imperial grandeur of Carolingian power at its apogee. Gleaming white stone, green porphyry and blood-red Egyptian granite, frescos and mosaics, marble and bronze – the remains of great civilizations of the past were being gathered together, literally building a new empire.8 (#litres_trial_promo) In 787, Pope Hadrian I wrote to Charlemagne agreeing to let him take from Ravenna ‘mosaic and marble and other materials both from the floors and the walls’, and the emperor’s biographer – Einhard – describes him having marbles and sculptures brought from Rome and Ravenna to adorn the palace at Aachen.9 (#litres_trial_promo) The most startling of all the surviving fixtures of the Palatine Chapel, however, is the throne. Raised on a dais of six steps, the simple and unadorned seat exudes a living presence from the vaulted shadows. Though it has been sat upon by thirty-one German kings since Charlemagne’s day, it is indissoluble from the memory of its first master, the first Holy Roman Emperor. It is easy to indulge the imagination by picturing the great ruler brooding here amid the magnificence of his rule, chin resting on one hand as he gazed on the holy altar to the east, considering the price of power and the promise of salvation. In June 810 Charlemagne’s eldest daughter, Hruodtrude, died and the emperor may well have found himself in sombre and reflective mood; whether he ever burst from his throne in rage or retreated to it in search of holy guidance can never be known, but the events that followed can have done little to improve his mood: he received the news that a fleet of two hundred ships from Denmark had landed in Frisia, that all the islands off the coast of Frisia had been ravaged, that the army had already landed and fought three battles against the Frisians, that the victorious Danes had imposed a tribute on the vanquished, that already one hundred pounds of silver had been paid as tribute by the Frisians, and that King Godofrid [Godfred] was at home.10 (#litres_trial_promo) The chronicler, evidently concerned that his Frankish readership would find this all rather hard to swallow, felt compelled to affirm that ‘that, in fact, is how things stood’. As if this were not bad enough, the elephant which Charlemagne had been given by Harun al-Rashid, caliph of Baghdad, died suddenly soon afterwards: a bad summer indeed. Charlemagne, of course, was not prepared to let Godfred’s belligerence stand. He began to raise an army and would no doubt have pursued his opponent with all of his customary zeal, had not the Danish king died as suddenly as the elephant, apparently murdered by his own people (who would, understandably, have been worried that their king’s pathological warmongering was leading them into the teeth of Charlemagne’s war machine; before his death, Godfred had reportedly boasted that he was looking forward to fighting the emperor in open battle). What the Annals fail to conceal, however, is the extent to which the Frankish Empire had been rattled; Godfred, one might say, had given even Karolus Magnus the willies. This may all seem like something of a digression: what, one might ask, do the border wars of Frankish kings have to do with the story of Viking Britain? But the story of Godfred and his dealings with the emperor brings a number of issues into perspective. Firstly, it highlights the critical point that, at precisely the same time as the first Viking raids in Britain were taking place, continental Europe was dominated by a mighty superpower at the height of its strength. Charlemagne’s Empire was economically and militarily superior to any other regional power, and its presence fundamentally affected the way in which rulers dwelling in its shadow (including Anglo-Saxon kings) could operate. Faced with the prospect of poking the monster on the doorstep, some Scandinavian warlords may have been prompted to exploit new avenues of adventure away to the west. Secondly, it highlights the political and economic importance of towns and trade and the maritime technology by which these could be exploited, defended and harassed. Places like Reric, Hedeby and the coastal settlements of Frisia formed part of a much larger network. Such networks, and the opportunities for long-distance trade they presented, opened new frontiers for the most ruthless and entrepreneurial individuals – particularly those with access to effective maritime technology.11 (#litres_trial_promo) Finally, the belligerent career of Godfred indicates that by the late eighth and early ninth century there were individuals in parts of Scandinavia who were able to wield resources and military power that had the potential, at the very least, to disrupt and dismay even their most powerful neighbours. They were, moreover, human beings (not merely the demonic hordes of clerical imagination) – people who dealt in the pragmatic realities of early medieval politics and trade. They were people with aspirations towards lordship and power on an increasingly grand scale; and, to achieve and maintain it, they would need the trappings, the wealth, the loyalty and the prestige that society demanded of them. At over 260 feet in length, the house at Borg on Vestv?g?y is – by any standard – a massive structure. Dark, squat and muscular, the great hall holds fast to the Norwegian soil, its eaves reaching almost to the ground. It is a dwelling of the earth, rooted in the soil, rising from it like the gently arching back of some giant slumbering beast. In winter, if the snows come – despite the latitude, the Gulf Stream keeps the Lofoten Islands relatively warm – it is given back to the landscape: one more gentle mound among undulating drifts of white – betrayed, perhaps, only by the thin drift of wood smoke that rises from the roof-spine. And though massive, it represents an utterly different expression of power from that expressed by Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen. Where the Palatine Chapel soars, tiers of columns and arches reaching upward to heaven, the long-house at Borg spreads in the horizontal, hugging the skyline, long, low and narrow (only around 30 feet wide). Aachen is an expression of a cosmopolitan outlook, its stylistic cues taken from the architecture of Rome and Byzantium, its fixtures literally transplanted from elsewhere – signifiers of a pan-continental imperialism, rendered in imported stone. Borg, on the other hand, is a creature of the vernacular. Its form – the long, bow-sided plan and gently curving roof-line – is peculiar to early Scandinavian architecture, an evocation perhaps of the curving keels of the ships which defined northern life. More fundamentally, the hall itself is built from the very tissue of the land: the trees that were felled to raise its skeleton, the turf blocks that were cut and stacked to flesh it and to bind it to the earth. The hall is fashioned from its environment, moulded into a new form, clinging to the shores of a sheltered tidal estuary (Inner Pollen), the glittering peaks of Himmeltinden and Ristinden looming to the west. The traveller rides from his ship on the lakeside, up, past outbuildings and over fields, to the great house hunkered in the snow, atop the low hill before the mountains. There are four doors along its eastern side, but the southernmost entrance is grander than the others, with its pillars and lintel carved with the images of writhing creatures, biting and twisting and gripping each other in a tangle of sinuous limbs and gaping mouths. The traveller dismounts and a thrall-boy appears from another door; he runs to take the reins of the horse, leading it away towards the north-easterly end of the building. The traveller follows for a few steps, catching the soft shuffle of heavy feet inside, a low whinny, the hot stench of dung and warm animal bodies. Cattle and horses, pungent and comforting: a homely smell. He smiles and turns back to the carved portal, ducks his head and passes through. Inside the cold violet of the Lofoten dusk gives way to a deep orange glow of firelight, bouncing from tapestries and the rich umber of the timber walls. The flames cast shadows that set the carved beasts wriggling on the pillars that run in two aisles down the length of the building. Between them the long hearth lies sunken in the floor, flames licking up to light the rafters, heat filling the hall that extends to the right of the door. There are older men seated at benches along the sides of the hall, and they rise as he enters, bringing the wide world indoors, shaking the smell of winter from his cloak. The long-house, as experienced today, is a reconstruction of the building as it may have looked between the early eighth century when it was constructed (on the site of an earlier, sixth-century building), and the mid-tenth century when it was demolished. The original hall lay a few hundred yards to the east; the position of its timber pillars, long since rotted away, are marked now with modern posts, its outline clearly visible from the air. At nearly 270 feet, the building was 30 feet longer than Westminster Hall. Unlike that great sepulchral eleventh-century chamber, however, the hall at Borg was the social hub of a whole farming community, and saw all of life swirling through its portals. Archaeological investigation of the site suggests that the building was divided into five rooms. The largest of these – at the north-east end of the building – was a cattle byre and stable-block, a home to precious animals over the cold, dark winter months and a source of living warmth to the human inhabitants of the building. Perhaps for obvious reasons, the slope on which the building stands drops away to the north-east, meaning that the north-east end of the building lies around 5 feet lower than the part of the building that contained the domestic and human-centred areas – nobody wants a river of shit pouring through their living room all winter.12 (#litres_trial_promo) Objects found in the rest of the building give clues to the various uses to which the apparently communal spaces were put: whetstones and spindle whorls, sword fragments, iron tools and arrow heads indicate the sorts of activities that men and women would have undertaken from and in the building – weaving, hunting, farming and preparations for the possibility of violence. There were also a number of what are known in archaeological circles as gullgubber – thin gold foils struck with images that are most commonly believed to depict mythological scenes – leading to the suggestion that the communal activities that took place here included religious or ritual functions as well as social and practical ones.13 (#litres_trial_promo) The evidence seems to suggest that, unlike the hierarchical and authoritarian structures of the Christian Church, with its professional priesthood and purpose-built temples, Viking religion – at least at the beginning of the Viking Age – was personal and domestic. It is probable that, at places like Borg and elsewhere (such as Lejre in Denmark or Gamla Uppsala in Sweden), the principal heads of individual estates would have adopted the role of cult leader alongside their more prosaic responsibilities, perhaps taking the lead in making sacrifices of animals (bl?t) and in depositing the valuables that have been discovered in earth and water in these places. Gullgubber, precious objects already invested with mythic symbolism, would have made appropriate offerings.14 (#litres_trial_promo) It has been suggested, with varying degrees of emphasis, that religion played a role in the violence doled out to churches, monasteries and Christian communities – that the Vikings, aware of the impending threat posed by aggressive Christian nations, turned on the most visible and accessible symbols of this religion in a sort of pre-emptive strike (or not so pre-emptive if, as one might argue, Charlemagne’s Saxon wars were regarded as the first demonstration of what awaited all their pagan neighbours). In such a war of cultural self-preservation, it would have mattered little whether the churches and monasteries were situated in Frankia or in Britain. The symbols were the same, and thus – it is argued – the political identity of their creators would have been regarded as part of a homogeneous bloc, a united threat to tribal culture and independence. Indeed, such was Charlemagne’s power that the whole of Christian Europe, Britain included, can in some respects be seen as lying within a Frankish sphere of influence.15 (#litres_trial_promo) It is hard to imagine how the events of the late eighth and early ninth century could have failed to leave a deep and negative impression on communities around the Baltic, particularly about the nature of Christian faith and the character of its practitioners – violence, terror and subjugation would have seemed the inescapable outriders of the cross. The destruction of the cross-slabs at Portmahomack can, from this perspective, be seen as evidence for an ideological component to Viking raiding. Just as a raiding army might harass the lands and dependants of an enemy king in order to force a confrontation, the Vikings – it could be argued – were directly and deliberately targeting the houses of God and his personnel. It is, it must be said, easy to get carried away with the idea that the Viking Age began as a pagan religious war. But as even the most frequently cited exponent of this thesis – Bj?rn Myhre – has pointed out, Christianity should be seen in the light not just of its spiritual content but of the political affiliations it affirmed.16 (#litres_trial_promo) For Charlemagne, as for many other European monarchs, Christianity represented a powerful toolkit of symbols, hierarchies and rituals through which he could emulate the political and military achievements of the Emperor Constantine and, by extension, Roman imperial power as a whole; simple soul-food it was not. Cultural vandalism directed by pagans towards those same symbols (if that is what Carver uncovered at Portmahomack) might therefore be better interpreted as a statement of defiance against rampant Frankish imperialism – not anything ‘anti-Christian’ in the strictly religious sense. However, what seems to have been much more important than any of this was the acquisition of wealth. This term is a little abstract – in modern culture ‘wealth’ tends to be measured by fairly crude standards: the amount of money in a bank account, the relative value of share prices, projected tax receipts, quantity and quality of property, land, assets.17 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘Wealth’ in the early Viking Age, however, can be seen as a rather more expansive concept. Luxury goods – such as the English and Frankish glassware also discovered at Borg – were highly prized for their intrinsic quality and usefulness, and ownership of them was, as now, one index of achievement. But such assets also performed key social functions, and their ownership hinted at broader networks or the potential to forge them. In the early Middle Ages, gift-giving between lords and their retainers (as well as between rulers) was the basic agent of social cohesion and a measure of relative political substance; in return for weapons, jewellery and luxury items (and the expectation of more), men would pledge loyalty to their lords as warriors. This relationship was the fundamental basis of the war-band, and bonds thus forged were subsequently invested with and cemented by solemn oaths and a code of heroic ethics. The system was very similar in Britain and had endured for centuries: the Old Welsh poem Y Gododdin (describing events of the fifth century, but written any time between the sixth and thirteenth centuries), for example, describes the operation of a war-band of this nature – its constituents paid in advance for their loyalty and support in battle with mountains of food and rivers of booze.18 (#litres_trial_promo) In Old English and Old Norse poetry, however, this relationship had developed into a material exchange, driven in part by the desirability of the goods being produced in Frankish and, to a lesser extent, Anglo-Saxon workshops. By the Viking Age this had crystallized into a general expectation of the role of a monarch, expressed most succinctly in Old English maxims (‘the king belongs in his hall, sharing out rings’),19 (#litres_trial_promo) but also repeated through a mind-boggling number of ‘kennings’ in skaldic verse – an economical means by which to emphasize the virtue of any given ruler: ‘lofty ring-strewer’; ‘thrower of gold’; ‘eager, wolf-gracious bestower of friendly gifts’ …20 (#litres_trial_promo) The ownership of precious objects was thus a symbol of the quality of one’s social connections – not merely personal riches, but a visible symbol of the patronage of a powerful lord; perhaps even, ultimately, signifying the potential to dole out gifts to one’s own dependants. The ability of important individuals to acquire prestigious objects was, therefore, an absolute prerequisite to the exercise of power, and generosity was seen as one of the two fundamental pillars of exemplary lordship. The other pillar, however, perhaps less immediately appealing to modern sensibilities, was the ability to provide an unending diet of human corpses to satisfy the sanguine cravings of wolves, ravens and eagles.21 (#litres_trial_promo) The king or warlord who could demonstrate himself to be both open- and bloody-handed was likely to cement his reputation – ideally in verse – and the ownership of portable wealth spoke to both of these qualities. Happily, these two traits dovetailed neatly. It is quite obvious how a Viking warlord, seeking to improve both his reputation and the size of his war-band, could kill two birds with one stone by violently extracting wealth from foreign shores and doling it out among his followers. Such a socio-economic system, however, has its drawbacks. Though its mechanisms are straightforward, its demands necessarily mushroom: increasing war-bands require increased resources, increased resources require larger and more frequent raids, larger and more frequent raids require larger war-bands, and so on.22 (#litres_trial_promo) Of course, there are other ways of acquiring portable wealth, and it seems that Scandinavian traders were pioneers in exploiting the trade networks that had developed around the North Sea during the eighth century. We have seen already the keen interest that Godfred took in securing access to Baltic and North Sea trade, but there is no reason to separate the acquisition of goods through trade from the violence enacted elsewhere. Books, exhibitions and school textbooks often make a great deal of the characterization of Vikings as either ‘raiders’ or ‘traders’, with the public encouraged to view the Vikings through one or other of these lenses. This irritating meme is, in essence, a product of the academic debates of the 1970s and 1980s – debates which, while important at the time, have tended to perpetuate the wrong sorts of questions. It is obvious, of course, that raiding and trading were never mutually exclusive phenomena; the Viking slave-trade is the most obvious manifestation of this false dichotomy. The burning, killing and plundering that accompanied Viking activity around the coasts of Britain and Ireland were carried out by the same individuals who might have been found weeks later hawking their captives in the Hedeby slave-market or peddling bits of plundered church furniture in the bazaars of central Asia. Nevertheless, the evidence for peaceful trading is plentiful, and Scandinavian traders must have been a familiar sight at major emporia like Ipswich, York and Southampton. Indeed, it is probably as a result of such trading expeditions that Scandinavians came to be aware of the wealth of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the geography of the British coastland and the location of monasteries and the wealth they housed. It also, presumably, allowed for an insight into local political fault-lines that ambitious men might hope to exploit.23 (#litres_trial_promo) None of this can really diminish the possibility that the earliest raids were the outcome of individual initiative, with their subsequent popularity among Scandinavian seafarers a reflection of the ease and profitability with which monasteries could be divested of their valuables. This comes close to a Victorian view of Viking derring-do, a tendency to explain the Viking Age by the hot-blooded ‘pith and pluck’ of Nordic men that drove them to adventure. But it cannot be denied that human agency would have had a disproportionate impact in an age when populations were small, and when stories of young men returning from overseas, their boats sitting low in the water with treasure and slaves, would have spread fast and far. To the farming communities of Norway, stretched out along the narrow strip of cultivable land, eager for the social and economic capital to resist political pressure from the south, such apparently easy wealth would have seemed to present opportunities on a scale previously undreamt of. There is unlikely to have been a shortage of volunteers for future expeditions, or a dearth of ambitious chieftains planning new adventures. Perhaps the lord of Borg was one of them. 6 The Gathering Storm (#ulink_3ba310c3-bbbc-5152-aaa7-2659914d45a4) … The bird cries, grey-coat screams, battle-wood resounds, shield to spear-shaft replies. Now shines the moon drifting into dimness. Now deeds of woe arise that will propel this peoples’ malice. But awake now, warriors of mine, Seize thy linden-shields, dwell on courage, Fight at the front, be fierce and bold! The Fight at Finnsburg1 (#litres_trial_promo) Although Viking raids would continue to afflict Ireland with almost absurd frequency throughout the 820s and 830s, there is a gap of twenty-nine years after the third raid on Iona in 806 before a Viking raid is again recorded in Britain.2 (#litres_trial_promo) For historians, knowing what was to come, this can seem like a trivial span of time, a brief hiatus before the hammer would fall with all its force. But for people living at the time it would have seemed very different; they did not know that they were living in the ‘Viking Age’.3 (#litres_trial_promo) Many of those who were aware of the attacks on Lindisfarne, Jarrow and Iona, including some of the survivors, would have lived out the rest of their lives with the impression that this diabolical onslaught had burned itself out – passing, perhaps, like the fiery whirlwinds and bloody rain that had presaged its arrival. Indeed, for more than a generation after the appearance of the first Vikings in the written record, the overwhelming fear – in southern Britain at least – would have been that, if violence were to come, it would come from people who spoke familiar (if not shared) languages, who lived similar lives in recognizable landscapes and who worshipped the same god in broadly compatible ways. In 798, for example, King Ceolwulf (newly king of Mercia after Offa’s death in 796) ravaged Kent and captured its king, Eadberht. Eadberht was dragged to Mercia in chains where he had his eyes gouged out and his hands cut off.4 (#litres_trial_promo) In 815, King Ecgberht of Wessex raided the ‘west welsh’ (that is, the Cornish) from ‘east to west’.5 (#litres_trial_promo) Ten years later, the same king defeated the Mercians at a place called Ellendun (now somewhere underneath the western suburbs of Swindon), ‘and a great slaughter was made there’.6 (#litres_trial_promo) A fragment of poetry recalls that ‘Ellendun’s stream ran red with blood, was stuffed up with corpses, filled with stink.’7 (#litres_trial_promo) In the same year King Beornwulf of Mercia was killed by the East Angles (it was a bad year for the Mercians). These violent convulsions all took place during a period that saw a steady shift in the centre of political gravity in southern Britain, focusing power around the kingdom of Wessex at the expense of Mercia and some of the smaller southern realms. In this reorientation – which would have huge repercussions later on – the Vikings were of little consequence. In the early ninth-century brutality league they would have struggled to make the play-offs. Ultimately, however, this state of affairs did not hold. The first black clouds reappeared in 835, when ‘heathen men’ raided across the Isle of Sheppey, but even darker days lay ahead. In 836, a fleet of thirty-five ships (one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says twenty-five) arrived at Carhampton on the Somerset coast, and the formidable King Ecgberht – bane of Mercians and Cornishmen – was there to face them. The fighting that ensued was the first setpiece battle (that we know of) that pitched a Viking army against British foes. Once again, and not for the last time, the Chronicle provides the gloomy observation that ‘a great slaughter was made there’, and from what little else is known about it, it seems indeed to have been a grim day’s work. If the number of ships is taken at face value, a Viking army numbering 1,500 men would be a conservative estimate, and it is probably fair to assume a similar number assembled to fight them. Three thousand men engaged in brutal hand-to-hand fighting with axe and sword would have made for a terrifying spectacle.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Although Anglo-Saxon chroniclers reveal little about the realities of early medieval battle, their poets were less reticent: The horror of battle materialized. There was cracking of shields, attacking of warriors, cruel sword-chopping and troops dropping when first they faced a volley of arrows. Into that doomed crowd, over the yellow targe and into their enemies’ midst, the fierce and bloody antagonists launched showers of darts, spears, the serpents of battle, by the strength of their fingers. Relentless of purpose onwards they trod; eagerly they advanced. They broke down the shield barrier, drove in their swords and thrust onwards, hardened to battle.9 (#litres_trial_promo) The opposing armies would have faced up to one another in close formation, huddling together so that each man might benefit from the protection afforded by the large, round timber shield held by the man to his right. The defensive barrier thus created – a sort of clinker-built fence of human-held timbers – is known by poetic convention in Old English and Old Norse poetry as the ‘shield-wall’. Its importance as a military concept has probably been over-stressed by modern historians – it was a product of fear and necessity as much as it was ever a formalized battlefield tactic, its description in poetry a function of conventional semantics (like other evocative constructs such as w?hagen, ‘war-hedge’) – but there is no doubt that an army arranged this way presented a formidable face to the enemy. The shields would have been brightly painted, probably carrying religious symbols or depictions of beasts designed to intimidate enemies and provide courage to those who sheltered behind them. Ninth-century examples, excavated in Norway with their timber still surviving, are around 3 feet in diameter and painted black or yellow. Rimmed with iron, these shields were augmented with a large semi-circular metal boss riveted to the centre. This protected the hand (which gripped the handle attached behind it), but could also blunt the edges of misplaced weapon-strikes or smash the face of an enemy once the shield-wall had broken down into the series of individual duels and knots of vicious combat that the battle would inevitably devolve into.10 (#litres_trial_promo) The smashing of one’s own face was, obviously, something to be avoided wherever possible. Helmets, like the one discovered at Gjermundbu, were probably more common than their rarity in the archaeological record might imply; the simple psychology of self-preservation would suggest that some sort of head and face protection would be desirable. An Anglo-Saxon helmet, found during the Coppergate excavations in York in the late 1970s, suggests the sort of thing that might have been available to the wealthiest warriors. Although it would have been old fashioned by the 830s (it was probably made in the third quarter of the eighth century), it seems to have remained in use until the first half of the ninth century. Old fashioned it may have been, but it was of exceptional craftsmanship and quality – not least the creatures that are woven into an intricate lattice in the decoration of the brazen nose-guard, and the eyebrows terminating in the heads of fanged serpentine creatures. The equipment of warriors in this period would have been far from homogeneous, and military gifts and heirlooms could be prized symbols of lineage, affiliation and religious persuasion. The Coppergate helmet carries an inscription on the brass crest that runs over the top of the helmet, an invocation to commend protection of its wearer – a man named Oshere – to the care of the saints.11 (#litres_trial_promo) The inscription enhanced the helmet’s protective capabilities, transforming it into a magical item that conferred mystical as well as physical protection: a reminder that, to the warriors of the Viking Age, supernatural forces could play a critical role on the battlefield: ‘IN NOMINE DNI NOSTRI IHV SCS SPS DI ET OMNIBUS DECEMUS AMEN OSHERE XPI’ (‘In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Spirit of God, let us offer up Oshere to All Saints. Amen’).12 (#litres_trial_promo) Other helmet fragments, like an eyepiece discovered at Gevninge on Zealand (Denmark) and dated to the cusp of the Viking Age, imply that the finest helmets might still have resembled those recovered from the Vendel, Valsg?rde and Sutton Hoo cemeteries. These objects, with their full-face coverings of mask or mail, their swooping dragons and coiling serpents, their images of riders and spear-shakers, are objects to inspire awe and terror in equal measure. They rise up darkly from an age of legend, conjuring images of heroes and kings – dripping with antiquity and the glamour of mighty forebears. If helmets like these did indeed appear on the battlefields of the Viking Age, it would have seemed to contemporaries as though the ghosts of the mighty dead strode among them still, time collapsing amid the blood and chaos of battle, the eternal raven wheeling overhead.13 (#litres_trial_promo) Several high-ranking West Saxons fell in the fighting at Carhampton: the ealdormen Duda and Osmod (ealdormen were senior nobles, subordinate to the king and often in charge of a shire or, later, groups of shires) and the bishops Herefrith and Wigthegn. They were surely the tip of a bloody iceberg, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was never much concerned with the deaths (or the lives) of the average warrior. Of their enemies we know even less. All we are told, in a phrase that would roll out with grim regularity on the parchment leaves of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, is that ?a Deniscan ahton w?lstowe geweald: ‘the Danes had possession of the place of slaughter’. In other words, they were victorious.14 (#litres_trial_promo) The attack at Carhampton was a major incident, and it represented a sea-change in how Viking raiders related to the people of Britain. No longer content with the small-scale smash-and-grab raids which had defined Viking activity in the early ninth century (and which had picked up again in Ireland and Frankia from the 820s), the Vikings who attacked Carhampton seem to have done so with a heightened sense of what might be achieved through violence. A settlement of some importance, with archaeological traces dating from the fifth to the eighth centuries, Carhampton seems also to have been the site of an early monastic church – associated with the Celtic saint Carantoc. It may, therefore, have been a place of pilgrimage and a major centre of wealth, and in this it would fit the pattern of the targets of earlier Viking attacks, both in Britain and abroad.15 (#litres_trial_promo) However, Carhampton was also the site of a royal estate (it is included in the will of Ecgberht’s grandson, Alfred, drawn up sixty years later) and was later the administrative centre for the hundred in which it sits – all of which suggests that it was an important political centre. This might, in part, explain why King Ecgberht himself was there to deal with the Viking threat – for if a king couldn’t hold his own, how could he be expected to defend an entire kingdom? His failure to do so in this case may well have emboldened the people who had sailed against him. Victory against the fearsome king of Wessex can only have awakened Viking warlords to their ability not only to wrest wealth from hapless coastal communities, but also, through sheer force of arms, to win glory, fame and – perhaps – power and dominion of their own. In 838, King Ecgberht brought his army to Hengestdun, now known as Kit Hill in Cornwall. He had come to head off a new threat to his growing hegemony – an army of Cornishmen and their ‘Danish’ allies who had marched east to contest with the West Saxon king for control of their borders and to make a stand against his increasingly domineering approach to the south-west. The battle that ensued was significant, not so much because of its outcome, but because – for the first time that we know of – a Viking army had chosen to involve itself in the internal politics of Britain, making common cause with the Cornish to fight against the West Saxon king. It is not known why the Vikings chose such involvement. Perhaps they fought as mercenaries, seeking a share in the spoils, or perhaps they had been promised land or trading rights in whatever new arrangement could be wrested from the English king. Whatever the reason, it was a sign of things to come: over the course of the ninth century, Viking war-bands would increasingly use their military muscle to redraw the map of Britain. On this occasion it came to naught. Ecgberht, as we have seen, was not a king to be trifled with (his heavy-handed treatment of the Cornish in the 820s had perhaps gone some way to inspiring the events of 838). When the king ‘heard of that [the alliance between the Vikings and the Cornish], he then went there with his army and fought against them at Hengestdun, and put both the Britons and the Danes to flight’.16 (#litres_trial_promo) Rising to the impressive height of 1,096 feet, Kit Hill dominates the valley of the Tamar from which it rises, standing aloof from its comrades that huddle together in the uplands of Bodmin Moor. Up here you can see for miles. From Bodmin to Dartmoor to Plymouth Sound, a vast swathe of Britain’s south-western peninsula opens itself to the eye: rime-scoured boulders and ancient field boundaries, rough delvings and crook-backed pollards, the scars of a tussle between the tough, wilful landscape and its human wranglers that has been fought over millennia. To the south the sea glints in a cleft cut into the horizon by the broad silver band that snakes through green pastures on its way from the hills. It is no doubt the combination of its commanding position and its accessibility by sea and river that gave this place the strategic importance that it seems to have had in the ninth century; whoever held this place could, with good reason, consider himself master of the Cornish borders. The significance of the formative battle that was fought here was not lost on early English antiquarians. Of the many earthworks and monuments that litter the sides and summit of Kit Hill, one of the most prominent is a five-sided enclosure of low walls, with bastions at four of the five intersections. It looks like the shaggy remains of a fortress. This curious structure was long interpreted as a Civil War-era fortress (1642–51) on the strength of compelling similarities with the plans of other, better-documented forts around England. However, appearances were deceptive. On 27 June 1800, Sir John Call, who owned the adjacent estate and manor at Whiteford, wrote in his will that he desired a ‘tomb of Cornish granate [sic] alias Moorstone’ to be made on top of Hingsdon Down or Kit Hill ‘within or adjoining to the Inclosure of the Castle I have built there’.17 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘[T]he late Sir John’, William Betham explained in the fourth volume of his Baronetage of England (1801–5), ‘erected something like an old Saxon castle on the summit, with large stones of granite found there in great plenty.’ It seems likely that this peculiar endeavour (though not untypical of the folly-building extravagances of his peers) was intended to evoke the battle that was fought there in 838 – a battle of which he seems to have been dimly aware: ‘a Battle was undoubtedly fought at the bottom of that hill some time between the 7th and 8th century [fought in 838, it was in neither of these centuries]’. It is perhaps surprising that Sir John should have been so sketchy about the details – he was, from 1785, a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, the learned society set up in 1707 to cater for the growing interest of certain well-heeled gentlemen in the physical evidence of the past. In its early days, the Society seems to have been largely a drinking club for like-minded men of a particular sort, and there were no formal entry requirements. Sir John, for example, seems to have been admitted on the strength of some interesting lithographs he had picked up in India. He had worked there as a military engineer, planning the fortifications at Madras – this, of course, being the reason for his ‘Saxon fort’ looking more like a typical post-medieval redoubt than the Anglo-Saxon stronghold he intended.18 (#litres_trial_promo) When I visited Kit Hill with my wife and parents, it was a disconcerting experience. Thick banks of dreary mist swamped the landscape and shut down visibility to 20 feet in every direction. I felt as though, rather than standing at the summit of a massive Precambrian abscess on the sedimentary bedrock, we had been washed up on the shores of some weird fog-bound island, its coarse cliff-top vegetation concealing innumerable pits and fissures from which some Cornish Caliban could spring at any moment. The atmosphere was distinctly alien – a landscape stripped of all familiarity; even the cagoule-clad ramblers seemed vaguely sinister. At the highest point a great masonry tower rises through the white shrouds of clinging ether like a star-gazer’s tower, the haunt of some Prospero, rising – to use Mervyn Peake’s immortal words – ‘like a mutilated finger […] pointed blasphemously at heaven’.19 (#litres_trial_promo) Or, perhaps, like the funnel of some fantastical steamship, ploughing onwards through fog-bound oceans, on its way to a lost world. This tower is, indeed, a chimney, unusually ornamental for its purpose. An obsolete monument to the industrial mining operations of the second half of the nineteenth century, it once exhaled the by-products of the steam engine which pumped water from the deep delvings below. Mining took place on Kit Hill from the Middle Ages until the early twentieth century, and the seemingly random gouges in the upper slopes are memorials to the earliest, open-mining phases of this activity. In subsequent centuries, workings grew deeper and more elaborate, as miners began seeking out the veins of tin and copper that had seeped into fissures in the granite in some unimaginably ancient epoch, and now the hill is riddled with shafts and tunnels, their lethal openings hidden amid gorse and bracken. These borings reached their climax in the 1880s with the Excelsior Tunnel, an 800-yard gallery driven horizontally into the side of the hill, like the passage to some improbably vast tomb. It was, in fact, constructed to mine the deepest lodes, and was extended on a few occasions in the early twentieth century. In 1959–60, however, the tunnel was taken over by the UK Atomic Energy Authority for bomb testing. Despite rumours to the contrary, these tests never involved any nuclear material, although – despite modern radiation tests confirming the Ministry of Defence’s assurances – rumours to the contrary inevitably persist.20 (#litres_trial_promo) In the ninth century, Kit Hill was known for other reasons and, as we have seen, by a different name – Hengestdun, the hill of Hengest – and a wisp of its memory still clings to its lower eastward slopes in the tautological place-name Hingsdon Down (‘don’ and ‘down’ both derive from OE dun, meaning ‘hill’).21 (#litres_trial_promo) The name is important. Hengest would have had a dual meaning in Old English. It means ‘stallion’. But it was also the name of the legendary founding father of the English-speaking people – one half of the alliterative duo who, according to Bede, arrived in three ships from across the North Sea in the mid-fifth century. Landing in Kent, Hengest and his brother Horsa (and later his son ?sc) defeated the unfortunate Vortigern and his sons and began the process of clearing out the degenerate Romano-British order, founding the royal house of Kent in the process. The story raises all sorts of red flags. The idea of a duo named ‘Stallion’ and ‘Horse’ paving the way, through the might of their arms, for a whole new set of nations, has ‘foundation myth’ written all over it (despite its continued acceptance as fact in some quarters). It may well be that Hengest and Horsa were, originally, a pair of pre-Christian deities who were turned from gods into human ancestors by Christian writers and given prominent roles in the authorized version of English origins. Whatever the reality, it is clear that the name had a great deal of potency attached to it by the ninth century.22 (#litres_trial_promo) Early medieval battles were often fought at places associated with the names of gods and heroes, some of them burial mounds, others – like Hengestdun – massive hills that might have been imagined in some way to house the oversized remains of superhuman occupants. These were places where the past dwelt and where the memories of mighty warriors could be imagined to confer an aura of legitimacy, rootedness and martial prowess on those who fought in their shadow. These were also, conversely, places where ancient English claims could be challenged and new (or older) associations of landscape inscribed or resurrected – places where symbolic blows could be struck in the struggle for hegemony.23 (#litres_trial_promo) It must be partly for these reasons (as well as for its strategic significance) that when the Cornish wished to challenge the supremacy of the West Saxon dynasty, it was here that they came to meet King Ecgberht in battle. The defeat of the Cornish cemented West Saxon authority over the south-west, but it did little to deter future Viking war-bands from chancing their arm in Britain. For the rest of the century, a rising tide of violence was directed towards the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Some of them were raids, directed – just as they always had been – towards concentrations of wealth. However, the battles of Ecgberht’s reign, fought at places of symbolic significance like Carhampton and Hengestdun, signalled a shift in the level of engagement that the Vikings displayed towards their adversaries. From this point onwards, Viking armies were to display an increasingly sophisticated understanding of how power was articulated within the kingdoms of Britain, exploiting, undermining and appropriating the political and physical landscape until they themselves became an integral part of it. 7 Dragon-Slayers (#ulink_32a40aaa-4264-5f34-9323-de433d535a8d) This is a very old story: the Danes who used to fight with the English in King Alfred’s time knew this story. They have carved on the rocks pictures of some of the things that happen in the tale, and those carvings may still be seen. Because it is so old and so beautiful the story is told here again, but it has a sad ending – indeed it is all sad, and all about fighting and killing, as might be expected from the Danes. ANDREW LANG, ‘The Story of Sigurd’ (1890)1 (#litres_trial_promo) In 850, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, ‘heathen men stayed over the winter for the first time’. Although this notice passes without commentary in the Chronicle, dropped in almost as though it were an afterthought, the over-wintering of the heathens was the breath of wind that carried off the first leaves of autumn from the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. It was the harbinger of a storm that would not only strip those old oaks bare, but tear many of them up by their roots.2 (#litres_trial_promo) Viking attacks had been increasing in volume and severity since the 830s, particularly in Wessex and the south-east. Between 840 and 853, this part of Britain was attacked at least fifteen times, and an attack is also recorded as taking place in Northumbria in 844 – resulting, disastrously, in the death of the king and his heir.3 (#litres_trial_promo) The first raids on Lundenwic (London) occurred in 842 and 851,4 (#litres_trial_promo) and there were attacks on Southampton and Portland (840), Romney Marshes (841), Rochester (842), Carhampton again (843) and Canterbury (851).5 (#litres_trial_promo) Many of these seem to have started off as raids with, presumably, economic motives, and most seem not to have encountered serious resistance. On occasion, however, Viking raiding armies were intercepted by shire levies raised by local leaders or by the king, resulting in pitched battles in which Viking armies often took a serious mauling. At the mouth of the River Parrett in 848, the men of Dorset and Somerset – led by their respective ealdormen, Osric and Eanwulf, and Ealhstan, bishop of Sherborne – ‘made a great slaughter’ of a Viking war-band.6 (#litres_trial_promo) The Vikings were defeated again in 850 at a place called Wicga’s Barrow by Ealdorman Ceorl and the men of Devon,7 (#litres_trial_promo) and in the following year King ?thelwulf of Wessex and his son ?thelbald routed the Viking army at a place called Aclea where they ‘made the greatest slaughter of a heathen horde that we have ever heard tell of’.8 (#litres_trial_promo) Achieving a crushing victory over his heathen foes would have brought the king great personal satisfaction. In 843 he had gone to Carhampton with the intention of defeating a Viking army at the very place where humiliation had befallen his father, Ecgberht, in 836. But at the second battle of Carhampton, ?thelwulf too had been outfought. The victory at Aclea in 851, therefore, avenged both his own and his father’s shame, ending it the way that Anglo-Saxon feuds had always traditionally been settled: in blood.9 (#litres_trial_promo) After this robust West Saxon response, Viking war-bands seem to have become wary of assaulting Wessex directly, with raids in southern Britain confined to Kent for the rest of the decade. But the Viking winter camps of 850 – or at least the concept of such camps – were never abandoned. It became possible for Viking armies to mount raids throughout the year, as seems to have been the case in the early 850s, and by living off the land they could keep large numbers of warriors permanently in arms. Reinforcements from overseas could join them unimpeded, and the numbers of men and the size of their fleets could therefore grow unchecked. Unlike the Anglo-Saxon warriors they faced, there was no imperative for them to return to their fields for the harvest, or – like their compatriots in Scandinavia – to stay at home when North Sea storms kept their ships moored over the winter.10 (#litres_trial_promo) Conflict between Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had always been, to a certain extent, a ritualized activity. The phrase ‘ritual war’ is an unfortunate one, implying something lacking in severity (what one anthropologist has compared to ‘over-enthusiastic football’),11 (#litres_trial_promo) Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/raznoe-12661756/viking-britain-a-history/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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