Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  30. Alex Woolf, ‘Sutton Hoo and Sweden Revisited’, in A. Gnasso, E. E. Intagliata, T. J. MacMaster and B. N. Morris (eds), The Long Seventh Century: Continuity and Discontinuity in an Age of Transition (2015, Peter Lang), pp. 5–18; M. Carver, ‘Pre-Viking Traffic in the North Sea’, in S. McGrail (ed.), Maritime Celts, Frisians and Saxons (1990, CBA Research Report 71), pp. 117–25

  31. HE I.15 (Sherley-Price; Farmer)

  32. Valtonen, The North in the Old English Orosius, Chapter 3

  33. For foundational work on the genealogies, see K. Sisam, ‘Anglo-Saxon Royal Genealogies’, Proceedings of the British Academy 39 (1953), pp. 287–348 and D. Dumville, ‘Kingship, Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, in P. W. Sawyer and I. N. Wood (eds), Early Medieval Kingship (1977, Leeds University), pp. 72–104

  34. Alcuin’s letter to Higbald, EHD (194)

  35. J. T. Koch, ‘Yr Hen Ogledd’ in J. T. Koch (ed.), Celtic Culture: An Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. III (2006, ABC-CLIO); J. E. Fraser, ‘From Ancient Scythia to the Problem of the Picts: Thoughts on the Quest for Pictish Origins’ in S. T. Driscoll, J. Geddes and M. A. Hall (eds), Pictish Progress: New Studies on Northern Britain in the Early Middle Ages (2011, Brill)

  Chapter 3: Mother North

  1. R. E. Howard, ‘The Dark Man’, Weird Tales (December 1931)

  2. The Gjermundbu helmet is now in the Norwegian Historical Museum in Oslo (http://www.khm.uio.no/english/visit-us/historical-museum/index.html)

  3. ‘Sermon of the Wolf to the English’, EHD (240)

  4. The best work on this subject has been published by Judith Jesch: for a clear overview of the meaning of the word ‘Viking’, see The Viking Diaspora (2015, Routledge); detailed analysis can be found in Ships and Men in the Late Viking Age: The Vocabulary of Runic Inscriptions and Skaldic Verse (2001, Boydell & Brewer)

  5. J. J. North, English Hammered Coinage, Vol. 1 (1994, Spink), p. 175

  6. There are quite a few names of moneyers (individuals responsible for the production of coinage and whose names are frequently recorded on their coins) that fall into this category. Brandr can mean both ‘fire’ and ‘sword’ in Old Norse, for instance. (A particularly intriguing example – though not a Norse name – is that of Matathan Balluc. His first name is Gaelic, and he may have been part of the Norse–Irish community that linked York and Dublin in the tenth and eleventh centuries. His second name, however, is the Old English word ‘Bollock’. We will never know whether he possessed impressive testicular attributes in the figurative or the literal sense or, indeed, whether the use of the singular was deliberately significant.) However, many of the most famous ‘Viking’ epithets – ‘Skull-splitter’, ‘Bloodaxe’, ‘Hard-ruler’ and so on – were first recorded in Icelandic literature written down long after the end of the Viking Age

  7. Preserved in Egil’s Saga, and attributed to Egil Skallagrimsson (c. 950); translation by J. Jesch in Viking Poetry of Love and War (2013, British Museum Press), p. 53

  8. Rundata (Vg 61)

  9. There is some evidence to suggest that Old Norse speakers also recognized this commonality among themselves – several medieval sources refer to the Dansk tongu in terms that indicate that this was a language spoken by Icelanders, Norwegians and Swedes as well as by Danes (Jesch, Diaspora)

  10. These connections – particularly the link between Jacob Grimm’s linguistic revelations and the ethno-archaeological approaches of the early twentieth century are delineated in I. Wood, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (2013, Oxford University Press)

  11. The German archaeologist, Gustaf Kossina, is perhaps the central figure of culture-historical theory. His influence on Nazi archaeology and racial theory tainted his legacy in post-war Europe, and more nuanced – and less obviously racist – approaches were pioneered by a new generation of British post-war archaeologists following the lead of pioneers such as Vere Gordon Childe. In many parts of the world, however, these habits of thought have been dying hard and in some cases have sprung back into life, generally where they are underpinned by resurgent nationalist sentiment and/or supported by the state. The former communist republics of Eurasia are notable examples. For an example of the chilling influence of the Russian state in Viking studies, see Leo S. Klejn’s paper, ‘Normanisn and Anti-Normanism in Russia: An Eyewitness Account’, in P. Bauduin and A. Musin (eds), Vers l’Orient et Vers l’Occident: Regards croisés sur les dynamiques et les transferts culturels des Vikings à la Rous ancienne (2014, Presses Universitaires de Caen), pp. 407–17

  12. P. Geary, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (2001, Princeton University Press) is a classic debunking of this sort of thing

  13. R. M. Ballantyne, Erling the Bold: A Tale of the Norse Sea-Kings (1869)

  14. J. Parker, England’s Darling: The Victorian Cult of Alfred the Great (2007, Manchester University Press)

  15. C. G. Allen, The Song of Frithiof, Retold in Modern Verse (1912, Hodder & Stoughton), with illustrations by T. H. Robinson; R. Wagner [trans. M. Armour], The Rhinegold & The Valkyrie (1910, William Heinemann) and Siegfried & The Twilight of the Gods (1911, William Heinemann) with illustrations by A. Rackham

  16. Adapted from the text of the 2 June 1941 meeting of Nasjonal Samling at Borre, as given by Lise Nordenborg Myhre in ‘Fortida som propaganda Arkeologi og nazisme – en faglig okkupasjon’, Frá haug ok heiðni 1 (1995)

  17. Ibid.; see also B. Myhre, The Significance of Borre in J. M. Fladmark (ed.), Heritage and Identity: Shaping the Nations of the North (2002, Routledge)

  18. J. Graham-Campbell, Viking Art (2013, Thames & Hudson), pp. 48–81

  19. B. Myhre, ‘The Significance of Borre’ in J. M. Fladmark (ed.), Heritage and Identity: Shaping the Nations of the North (2002, Routledge)

  20. On the novelty of nationalism see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (2006, 2nd revised edition, Wiley-Blackwell)

  21. In Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters (1938, Herbert Jenkins), Bertie Wooster famously unleashes the following put-down: ‘The trouble with you, Spode, is that because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of halfwits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone […] You hear them shouting “Heil Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode, swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher!”’

  22. J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to his son Michael (45). H. Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (2006, 8th edition, HarperCollins), No. 45, pp. 55–6

  23. R. Paulas, ‘How a Thor-Worshipping Religion Turned Racist’, Vice (1 May 2015) [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/how-a-thor-worshipping-religion-turned-racist-456]

  24. P. Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings (1975, 2nd revised edition, Hodder & Stoughton)

  25. Neil Price points the way to this darker, weirder Viking in his introduction (‘From Ginnungagap to the Ragnarök: Archaeologies of the Viking Worlds’) to M. H. Eriksen, U. Pedersen, B. Rundtberger, I. Axelsen and H. L. Berg (eds), Viking Worlds: Things, Spaces and Movement, as well as more generally in his wider oeuvre

  26. J. Trigg, Hitler’s Vikings: The History of the Scandinavian Waffen-SS: The Legions, the SS-Wiking and the SS-Nordland (2012, 2nd edition, The History Press)

  Chapter 4: Shores in Flames

  1. This Old Irish poem was written into the margins of a manuscript copy of a grammatical treatise (Institutiones Grammaticae) by the sixth-century author Priscian of Caesarea (http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/csg/0904). The manuscript, and the marginalia, date to the middle of the ninth century. Translation from R. Thurneysen, Old Irish Reader (1949, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies), translated from the original German by D. A. Binchy and O. Bergin

  2. AI; s.a. 795; ASC DE s.a. 794; AU s.a. 802, 806; FH s.a. 800; HR s.a. 794

  3. AU s.a. 795, 798, 807; AI s.a. 798

  4. BM 1870,0609.1

>   5. M. Redknapp, Vikings in Wales: An Archaeological Quest (2000, National Museum of Wales Books); M. Redknapp, ‘Defining Identities in Viking Age North Wales: New Data from Llanbedrgoch’ in V. E. Turner, O. A. Owen and D. J. Waugh (eds), Shetland in the Viking World (2016, Papers from the Proceedings of the Seventeenth Viking Congress Lerwick), pp. 159–66

  6. M. Carver, Portmahomack: Monastery of the Picts (2008, Edinburgh University Press), p. 3

  7. Ibid.

  8. NMS X.IB 189 (http://www.nms.ac.uk/explore/stories/scottish-history-and-archaeology/hilton-of-cadboll-stone/). Where exactly the stone originally stood is unknown but, by the 1660s, it lay somewhere in the immediate vicinity of its replica. See Sian Jones’ paper ‘“That Stone Was Born Here and That’s Where It Belongs”: Hilton of Cadboll and the Negotiation of Identity, Ownership and Belonging’, in S. M. Foster and M. Cross (eds), Able Minds and Practised Hands: Scotland’s Early Medieval Sculpture in the 21st Century (2005, Society for Medieval Archaeology), pp. 37–54. Martin Carver’s paper in the same volume (‘Sculpture in Action: Contexts for Stone Carving on the Tarbat Peninsula, Easter Ross’, pp.13–36) draws out the wider context

  9. The earliest symbol stones may date to the late fourth century. Iain Fraser (ed.), The Pictish Symbol Stones of Scotland (2008, RCAHMS) provides a good introduction. Adrian Maldonado’s review of the aforementioned volume in the Scottish Archaeological Journal, 30.1–2, pp. 215–17 is a handy guide to the main literature on the subject. The papers in Foster and Cross (eds), Able Minds and Practised Hands, provide multiple perspectives

  10. A surviving example is the slab that still stands in the churchyard at Eassie near Glamis (Canmore ID 32092). Cf. the fate of the Woodwray cross-slab (Iain Fraser, ‘“Just an Ald Steen”: Reverence, Reuse, Revulsion and Rediscovery’ in Foster and Cross (eds), Able Minds and Practised Hands, pp. 55–68)

  11. Fraser, ‘“Just an Ald Steen”’, p. 62; Carver (Portmahomack) gives alternative possibilities, and the true motivations of whoever broke the stones are irrecoverable

  12. Carver, Portmahomack; the individuals were respectively carbon-dated to 680–900 and 810–1020

  13. In fact, there is good evidence that activity at Portmahomack continued for centuries after this incident, a traumatic moment in the life of a settlement, but not its death-knell. What does seem to have changed is the focus of activity on the site (Carver, Portmahomack, pp. 136–48)

  14. Lord Smith was appointed by the then Prime Minister David Cameron in 2014 to oversee the devolution commitments made by the government during and after the Scottish Referendum of the same year

  15. What seems to have been a gaming board was found among the slates (Carver, Portmahomack, p. 47)

  16. The slate is now housed at Bute Museum (http://www.butemuseum.org.uk/1061-2/). Technically it is two objects: the image is split between two fragments of what was originally one slate

  17. C. Lowe, ‘Image and Imagination: The Inchmarnock “Hostage Stone”’, in B. B. Smith, S. Taylor and G. Williams (eds), West over Sea: Studies in Scandinavian Sea-Borne Expansion and Settlement Before 1300 (2007, Brill), pp. 53–6

  18. M. Blindheim, ‘The Ranuaik Reliquary in Copenhagen: A Short Study’ in J. B. Knirk (ed.), Proceedings of the Tenth Viking Congress, Larkollen (1985, Universitetets Oldsaksamlings Skrifter), pp. 203–18. Egon Wamers gives a sense of the quantity of Irish and British metalwork that made its way to Scandinavia in this period: E. Wamers, ‘Insular Finds in Viking Age Scandinavia and the State Formation of Norway’ in H. B. Clarke, M. Ní Mhaonaigh and R. Ó Floinn (eds), Ireland and Scandinavia in the Early Viking Age (1998, Four Courts Press); also A. M. Heen-Pettersen, ‘Insular Artefacts from Viking-Age Burials from Mid-Norway. A Review of Contact between Trøndelag and Britain and Ireland’, Internet Archaeology 38 (2014) [https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.38.2]

  19. As Snorri tells it, at the end of the world ‘the ship Naglfar loosens from its moorings. It is made from the nails of dead men, and for this reason it is worth considering the warning that if a person dies with untrimmed nails he contributes crucial material to Naglfar, a ship that both gods and men would prefer not to see built’: Gylfaginning, 51

  20. The word most often used to describe Vikings in Irish chronicles is gennti (‘gentiles’). Charles-Thomas gives the original word in his translation – I have substituted ‘heathen’ here and throughout; AU s.a. 824

  21. J. Jesch, Women in the Viking Age (1991, Boydell & Brewer), pp. 45–6

  22. Other possibilities include the translation of relics guarded by a warrior retinue, although the composition doesn’t seem to support this (one would expect the relics and their bearer to have been the absolute focal point of any such scene); another possibility is that the stone depicts a scene from the life of St Patrick – his abduction by Scottish raiders in the sixth century given an anachronistic treatment c. 800. If this is the case, it is probably inspired by or modelled after contemporary events and still therefore reflective of the dangers facing monastic communities at that time. There is no certainty that the warriors depicted are necessarily Vikings, but the broadly known circumstances of its creation and certain details of the ship (the combination of sail and oars) imply that this is the case (see Lowe, ‘Image and Imagination’)

  23. Ibn Rusta, c. 913, translated in P. Lunde and C. Stone, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North (2012, Penguin), p. 126

  24. Ibn Fadlan, describing events of 921–2; Lunde and Stone, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, p. 53

  25. Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (2015, Bloomsbury)

  26. AU s.a. 821; 831; 836

  27. Research is under way, and will form part of the research outputs of the Viking Phenomenon project at Uppsala University (http://www.arkeologi.uu.se/Research/Projects/vikingafenomenet/). See also A. Lawler, ‘Vikings May Have First Taken to Seas to Find Women, Slaves’, Science (15 April 2016)

  28. S. Brink, ‘Slavery in the Viking Age’; S. Brink with N. Price (eds), The Viking World (2008, Routledge), pp. 49–56

  29. Rígsthula, verses 12–13

  30. D. A. E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England: From the Reign of Alfred Until the Twelfth Century (2001, Boydell & Brewer)

  31. AU s.a. 836

  Chapter 5: Beyond the North Waves

  1. R. Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906, Macmillan)

  2. See Chapter 21

  3. Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae (‘Ordinances concerning Saxony’). See D. C. Munro, Selections from the Laws of Charles the Great (2004 [original printing 1900], Kessinger Publishing)

  4. Similar fears had been shared by at least some English-speaking peoples, although by the end of the eighth century these had been eroded, forgotten, replaced and transformed by two centuries of Christian mission. See papers in M. Carver (ed.), The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300 (2003, Boydell Press)

  5. One of the Saxon tribal leaders – Widukind – had sought sanctuary among the Danes after Charlemagne’s early victories, returning in 782 to foment rebellion. The Royal Frankish Annals claim that the Danevirke was built new in 808; archaeological investigation has shown, however, that its first stages date to the sixth century and that it was reinforced from the mid-eighth century onward: A. Pedersen, ‘Monumental Expression and Fortification in Denmark in the Time of King Harald Bluetooth’, in N. Christie and H. Herold (eds), Fortified Settlements in Early Medieval Europe: Defended Communities of the 8th–10th Centuries (2016, Oxbow), Chapter 6

  6. RFA s.a. 804

  7. RFA s.a. 808

  8. C. B. McClendon, The Origins of Medieval Architecture: Building in Europe, A.D. 600–900 (2005, Yale University Press), pp. 105–28

  9. Codex Carolinus 81 (Ibid., p. 112); VKM, 26

  10. RFA s.a. 810

  11. For an overview of the Carolingian context see R. Hodges, Towns and Trade in the Age of Charlemagne (2000, Bloomsbury Publishing)

  12. G
. S. Munch, O. S. Johansen and E. Roesdahl (eds), Borg in Lofoten. A Chieftain’s Farm in North Norway (2003, Tapir Academic Press)

  13. S. Ratke and R. Simek, ‘Guldgubber: Relics of Pre-Christian Law Rituals?’ in A. Andrén, K. Jennbert and C. Raudvere (eds), Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives: Origins, Changes, and Interactions (2006, Nordic Academic Press), pp. 259–64

  14. N. Price, ‘Belief and Ritual’ in G. Williams, P. Pentz and M. Wemhoff (eds), Vikings: Life and Legend (2014, British Museum Press), pp.162–95

  15. J. Story, Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c. 750–870 (2003, Ashgate)

  16. B. Myhre, ‘The Beginning of the Viking Age – Some Current Archaeological Problems’, in A. Faulkes and R. Perkins, Viking Revaluations (1993, Viking Society for Northern Research), pp. 192–203; Myrhe’s arguments are rather more subtle and plausible than they are often presented in the work of others

  17. With the exception of the kingdom of Bhutan (which, to the country’s inexplicably unique credit, uses a measure of ‘gross national happiness’ (GNH) to judge the success of its domestic policies)

  18. Gododdin

  19. Maxims II, lines 21–8, p. 514

  20. ‘Kennings’ are poetic allusions, used in both ON and OE verse, that provided poets with an endless number of ways to describe things and concepts, often using mythological references or deeply symbolic language. These examples, and their provenances, can be found amongst the eighteen kennings for ‘generous ruler’ listed in the database of The Skaldic Project (http://skaldic.abdn.ac.uk)

  21. J. Jesch, ‘Eagles, Ravens and Wolves: Beasts of Battle, Symbols of Victory and Death’, in J. Jesch (ed.), The Scandinavians from the Vendel Period to the Tenth Century (2002, Boydell & Brewer), pp. 251–71

  22. T. Earle, How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory (1997, Stanford University Press); in some tribal societies – including, possibly, the small kingdoms of early medieval Britain – the potentially apocalyptic outcomes of spiralling violence and rapacity were forestalled by the evolution of ritualized warfare, confined to certain seasons and locations and hedged around with mutually understood norms and rules of engagement. This, of course, only really works if everyone is playing the same game. One of the reasons why Viking attacks in Britain and elsewhere were reported with such horror and alarm was perhaps in part because they didn’t know the rules (or, if they did, chose not to play by them); G. R. W. Halsall, ‘Playing by Whose Rules? A Further Look at Viking Atrocity in the Ninth Century’, Medieval History, 2.2 (1992), pp. 3–12; T. J. T. Williams, Landscape and Warfare in Early Medieval Britain (2016, unpublished PhD thesis)