Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  It is quite extraordinary, the physicality of the atmosphere in this small and dingy subterranean cube. John Betjeman described the space as ‘holy air encased in stone’, a turn of phrase which perfectly encapsulates the curious sense of substance that one encounters on descending into the gloom, the shadowed vault supported on four candy-twist columns, like rustic Tudor chimney pots. It is a place rank with religion, the air thickened by the ineffable weight of antiquity and prayer, as though something has been trapped down here, entombed for centuries. This aura is compounded, perhaps conjured, by the knowledge that this crypt served as – may indeed have been built for – the bones of Mercian kings. The first of these (and the one for whom it may have been constructed) was King Æthelbald, who was interred in the crypt in 757. His bones were later joined by those of King Wiglaf (died c. 839) and Wiglaf’s grandson Wystan who, though he declined to take the crown in favour of a religious life, was nevertheless done in by his relations in 849.

  As John of Worcester reported it, Wystan – or St Wystan as he became in death – ‘was carried to a monastery which was famous in that age called Repton, and buried in the tomb of his grandfather king Wiglaf. Miracles from heaven were not wanting in testimony of his martyrdom; for a column of light shot up to heaven from the spot where the innocent saint was murdered, and remained visible to the inhabitants of that place for thirty days.’1

  Twenty-four years later, the men and women living in the precincts of the church that still bears his name may well have wished that Wystan’s left-over parts could have produced some new and impressive miracle – preferably, this time, something with a more practical application. For the river had finally proved a risk to the religious community and the relics of the saints and kings it curated; in the winter of 873/4, however, it was not the water that threatened to sweep Repton away, but the deadly flotsam that it bore.

  When the Vikings left Wessex in 872 after making terms with Alfred, they first found their way to London where, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts, the Mercians ‘made peace with them’.2 The Viking army spent another winter there before moving on, travelling to Lindsey (a region within what is now Lincolnshire) in 873 and establishing a new camp at Torksey, 10 miles north-west of Lincoln. The Mercians, once again, ‘made peace’.3 If the Viking bayonet was probing for steel, it was finding little of it. When spring came, the micel here was on the move again. From Torksey the River Trent offered an inviting artery that led straight to the heart of the Mercian kingdom. The sources tell us very little – even by their own stingy standards – but the impression given is of a swift and surgical intervention that brought the once glorious kingdom to its knees at a single stroke: ‘the horde went from Lindsey to Repton and took winter-quarters there, and drove King Burhred across the sea […] and occupied that land’.4

  In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Burhred comes across as a hapless king: thrice he had come to terms with the Viking great army (in 868, 871 and 872), only to find himself ejected from his kingdom, and his people subjugated with humiliating ease (he died in Rome, and was buried at St Mary’s Church in the city’s English Quarter).5 The contrast with the way that Viking progress in Wessex was described should be obvious: there the Viking army is depicted as encountering resistance at every step, suffering defeats at Englefield and Ashdown and grinding out hard-won victories elsewhere (although we should remember that Alfred had also, in 871, paid the Vikings to go away).

  It is tempting to read the sources at face value, and to see the West Saxons as the defiant epitome of the bulldog mentality, a striking contrast to the flaccid appeasement practised by the Mercians: Alfred playing Churchill to Burhred’s Chamberlain. To do so, however, is to be corralled by channels of thought dug by Alfred’s own propagandists. There is simply no way of knowing how hard the Mercians fought to preserve their kingdom and eject the Viking menace. As we shall see, at least one Viking warrior came to grief on Mercian soil.

  The subtle disparagement of their Mercian neighbours that we can perceive in the West Saxon sources served Alfred’s political ends. By the latter part of his reign, when these documents were compiled, Alfred was increasingly concerned with claiming a hegemony than extended far beyond Wessex. His own military reputation (which was patchy at best before the late 870s) was bolstered by having his contemporary monarchs painted as battle-shirking weaklings. More importantly, by painting the last independent kings of Mercia as weak, ineffective and lacking credibility, the claims of Alfred and those of his offspring to rule in Mercia appeared more legitimate than they otherwise might have done.

  At some point, not long after Repton was taken under new management, a ditch and rampart were dug, closing off an area to the north of the church and forming a D-shape against the river bank – a space providing unimpeded access for ships to moor but offering landward protection, the direction from which danger was most likely to arrive. The church building itself was incorporated into the defensive circuit, a masonry gate-house through which access could be controlled. Instead of Mercian royalty, monks and devout pilgrims, Viking warriors now breathed the holy air of St Wystan’s crypt. At around the same time, the first of a number of graves were dug around the church, many of them decidedly unconventional for ninth-century Mercia.6 One man was buried with a gold ring on his finger and five silver pennies, all of which can be dated to the mid-870s; his grave, which lay adjacent to the church wall, was cut through a layer of burnt stone and charcoal – an indication that the church had been severely damaged, broken rubble and burnt timber strewn where they had fallen after the upper parts of the building had burned. As at Portmahomack, a monolithic stone cross was shattered and discarded, its fragments buried in a pit to the east of the chancel.

  The most famous of these burials is Grave 511. Like several others, the man in this grave was buried with weapons – in this case a sword and knife. He had died, it would appear, unpleasantly. Following a blow to the head, he had suffered a deep cut to the left femur where it connected to the pelvis – probably from a sword or axe. The blow was administered when the victim was already on the ground, and it would have severed the femoral artery resulting in massive blood loss; it would also have deprived him of the soft parts that had once dangled between his legs. In an apparent attempt to compensate for this loss, those who buried him placed the tusk of a boar in the appropriate position. And, if any doubt were to remain about the cultural affiliations of the deceased, this man had been laid in the grave with, among other objects and pieces of metalwork, the hammer of Thor about his neck.

  Odin and Thor were the most popular and powerful gods of the Norse pantheon, but in many ways they were diametrically opposed to each other in character. Where Odin was subtle and sinister, the patron of poets, sorcerers and kings, Thor presented a less complicated personality. He was a proponent of what we might call the direct approach – more action, fewer words; less brain, more fist. He is often (as we see him in the stories that survive of him) a bit of an oaf. Most of these tales features the god smashing things up, shouting, getting drunk, breaking things and hitting people. He is a ‘mannish’ god – a god of farmers, fishermen and fighters (as the runologist R. I. Page put it, ‘the everyday Viking […] the man-in-the-fiord’).7 He is precisely the sort of god we would expect to feel particularly embarrassed about a misplaced member, and whose devotees might have felt the need to make showy compensation for their comrade’s missing man-parts.

  In the Prose Edda, a medieval primer on Norse mythology and one of the most valuable sources for pre-Christian belief in Scandinavia, Snorri provides a potted outline of the god’s key attributes:

  Thor […] is the strongest of all gods and men […] [He] has two male goats called Tannigost [Tooth Gnasher] and Tannigrisnir [Snarl Tooth]. He also owns the chariot that they draw, and for this reason he is called Thor the Charioteer. He […] has three choice possessions. One is the hammer Mjollnir. Frost giants and mountain giants recognize it when it is raised in the air, which is not surprising as it has
cracked many a skull among their fathers and kinsmen. His second great treasure is his Megingjard [Belt of Strength]. When he buckles it on, his divine strength doubles. His third possession, the gloves of iron, are also a great treasure. He cannot be without these when he grips the hammer’s shaft.8

  The story that best sums up Thor’s character is recounted in the eddic poem Þrymskviða (‘the Song of Thrym’). Unlike the dark and difficult texts with which it was compiled in the Codex Regius (poems, for example, like Völuspá and Grímnismál), Þrymskviða is a fairly light-hearted romp. Nevertheless, like all good satire, it gets to the heart of the matter (in this case Thor’s character) with pointed efficiency. It runs thus: Thor woke up one morning to find his magical hammer, Mjölnir, missing. Loki, the trickster god, was deputed to find out where it was and flew to the hall of the giant, Thrym. Thrym admitted to having stolen it and claimed to have hidden it ‘eight leagues under the earth’, adding that ‘No one shall have it back again unless he brings me Freyja as bride.’9 On receiving this news, Thor was keen to take the giant up on the bargain (‘these were the first words he found to say: “Freyja, put on your bridal veil”’). Freyja, unsurprisingly, was less enthusiastic (‘Freyja was enraged, and gave a snort, so that the gods’ hall trembled, and the great Brísings’ neck-ring tumbled: “You’d think I’d become the maddest for men if I drove with you to Giants’ Domain [Jötunheimr]”’).

  Eventually, the god Heimdall came up with a cunning plan:

  ‘Let us put Thor in the bridal veil,

  let him wear the great Brísings’ neck-ring!

  Let us have keys jangling beneath him,

  And women’s clothes falling round his knees,

  and broad gem-stones sitting on his chest,

  let us top out his head with style.’

  Then Thor spoke, the strapping god:

  ‘The gods will call me a cock-craver,

  if I let myself be put in a bridal veil.’10

  Thor’s protests notwithstanding, Heimdall’s scheme was put into action. Thrym, evidently not the brightest of characters, was easily bamboozled by the cunning disguise; nevertheless, his suspicions were eventually aroused by his bride-to-be’s table habits: ‘Freyja’ (Thor) packed away a whole ox, eight salmon, all the food laid out for the women and three casks of mead. Loki (in the guise of a maidservant) was forced to claim that the false bride had not eaten for eight days because of her excitement at the approaching nuptials (Loki, unlike Thor, apparently had no qualms about cross-dressing). Finally the moment of the wedding ceremony arrived, and Thrym called for the hammer Mjölnir to be brought forth to hallow the union. Thor needed no more encouragement than this: his heart ‘laughed in his chest’ as he grasped the hammer and set about venting his anger and humiliation:

  Thrym, lord of ogres, was the first one he felled,

  before battering all of the giant-race.11

  Þrymskviða is a tale that, at least in its received form, postdates the Viking Age – possibly by some margin (the manuscript in which it is found – the Codex Regius – was compiled in the latter part of the thirteenth century). The poem may have been intended to parody the absurdities of past beliefs; perhaps transforming the mighty Thor into a berserk Widow Twanky was one way to tame the unsettling residue of a none-too-distant pagan heritage.12 Nevertheless, several themes in the poem resonate with much of what else we know or is implied about Viking attitudes to sexuality and Thor’s place in the pantheon.

  The term which Andy Orchard, regius Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, provocatively translated as ‘cock-craver’ is the Old Norse word argr, which is normally (and euphemistically) rendered as ‘unmanly’.13 In reality, argr (and its cognate form ragr) was an insult which, when directed at both men and women, implied some sort of unusual enthusiasm for being penetrated. When directed at a woman, therefore, it suggested promiscuity; when directed at a man it ascribed a passive homosexuality. It was a particularly rude charge to level at one’s (male) counterparts, and to insult someone in these terms could constitute a potentially lethal slight. The earliest Icelandic law codes are clear that no intervention or recompense could be expected if those bandying unsubstantiated slanders came to violent grief as a result of their impertinences.

  The Norwegian Gulathing law was specific about what constituted the worst sorts of insult:

  Concerning terms of abuse or insult. There are words which are considered terms of abuse. Item one: if a man say of another man that he has borne a child. Item two: if a man say of another man that he has been homosexually used [sannsorðenn]. Item three: if a man compare another man to a mare, or call him a bitch or a harlot, or compare him to any animal which bears young.14

  This, however, wasn’t a moral abhorrence of homosexuality in the sense that the Christian Church would later seek to formulate it, and the law codes and sagas – all of which date to the post-conversion epoch – have to be read carefully in this light. What, instead, the Vikings seemed to find upsetting was the feminized role of the ragr-mann (gently translated: ‘unmanly-man’). Indeed, using men for sex – particularly in a punitive way – seems to have incurred no moral judgement. To bugger one’s enemies was a manly way to humiliate a vanquished foe: the latter, by contrast, would then be considered argr/ragr, rassragr (‘arse-argr’), stroðinn or sorðinn (‘sodomized’) or sansorðinn (‘demonstrably sodomized’).15

  The problem, it seems, was not so much being gay as being thought to be ‘unmanly’ in some way. Indeed, other typically female behaviour could also attract accusations of ergi (unmanliness), suggesting that it was the adoption of inappropriate gender roles that Vikings objected to, rather than homosexual liaisons per se.16 Even the gods could be susceptible to these imputations – Loki, in the most extreme example, gave birth to Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir after an intimate moment with the frost-giant’s stallion Svaðilfari (‘Unlucky Traveller’); Loki was in the guise of a mare at the time. Odin too, though more indirectly, was labelled argr because he practised a form of sorcery – seiðr – that was explicitly considered the preserve of women. As Loki pointed out:

  ‘It’s said you played the witch on Sámsey,

  beat the drum like a lady-prophet;

  in the guise of a wizard you wandered the world:

  that signals to me a cock-craver.’17

  This, however, is a very specific image of effeminacy, and one to which we shall return. The picture it conjures (Loki’s crude insult aside) is an indefinably eerie one – another thread in the weft of Odin’s surpassing weirdness.

  It is this fear of effeminacy (or, rather, the fear of being seen as effeminate) that Thor expresses in Þrymskviða. In the end, he is forced to erase the threat to his manhood in the only way a deity with limited subtlety of mind could manage: by beating all and sundry to a pulp. This image of Thor fits easily into our conception of this god of warriors and working men, an unreconstructed he-man who responded to danger, irritation and humiliation with brute force – problem-solving with a hammer. Certainly, the cult of Thor seems to have become extremely popular in the late Viking Age. By the time Adam of Bremen was describing the temple at Uppsala, Thor was regarded – from a Christian perspective anyway – as the major deity. Hundreds of Thor’s-hammer pendants and rings (from which small hammers and other amulets were suspended) have been found throughout the Viking world, from Iceland and Ireland to Poland and Russia – many, though by no means all, in graves.18

  And yet, despite all this, when we start to probe the details of the cult of Thor a surprisingly complex picture begins to emerge. For one thing, the vast majority of individual Thor’s-hammer pendants found in graves (as opposed to the rings and the disassociated finds) are found in the graves of women.19 This fact alone is enough to suggest that there was more to the invocation of the god than the doom-brained muscle-cult we may have been led to expect by sources like Þrymskviða. Moreover, runic inscriptions invoking Thor’s blessing of monuments implies that his role could be ima
gined as a broader responsibility to preserve and protect those things that people held valuable.20 His hammer could even (if Þrymskviða can be trusted) be used symbolically to seal a marriage ceremony.21

  Grave 511 at Repton, with its Thor’s-hammer pendant, is therefore a reminder of the heathenism of the Vikings who comprised the micel here, and allows us to begin to imagine the social mores and attitudes of the people who found themselves here in the winter of 873/4. But the presence of the boar’s tusk and the humerus of a jackdaw among the grave goods suggests that, woven into the machismo of the Viking way of life, were ideas and attitudes that remain alien to us, and whose significance is irrevocably lost. The part of the Repton excavations that makes this latter point most dramatically, however, is another grave – this time a mass grave – that remains as strange, unique and compelling as it was when it was first broken open in 1686. In an account given to the antiquarian researcher Dr Simon Degge in 1727, a man called Thomas Walker described how he had dug into a large mound that stood west of St Wystan’s Church:

  About Forty Years since cutting Hillocks, near the Surface he met with an old Stone Wall, when clearing farther he found it to be a square Enclosure of Fifteen Foot: It had been covered, but the Top was decayed and fallen in, being only supported by wooden Joyces. In this he found a Stone Coffin, and with Difficulty removing the Cover, saw a Skeleton of a Humane Body Nine Foot long, and round it lay One Hundred Humane Skeletons, with their feet pointing to the Stone Coffin. They seem’d to be of the ordinary Size.22