Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  33. PSE, V

  34. PSE, X

  35. It is likely, however, that Viking chiefs did indeed play central roles in cult practice. For an introduction to the issues see O. Sundqvist, ‘Cult Leaders, Rulers and Religion’ in Brink with Price, The Viking World, pp. 223–6

  36. PSE, XIII

  37. PSE, XIV

  38. R. Pinner, The Cult of St Edmund in Medieval East Anglia (2015, Boydell & Brewer)

  39. The mystery of the Holy Trinity is among the most baffling and incomprehensible aspects of Christian theology. Vatican attempts at clarification cannot always be judged wholly satisfactory (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s2c1p2.htm)

  Chapter 9: Wayland’s Bones

  1. W. Camden, Britannia, ‘Barkshire’, 12: P. Holland (trans.), D. F. Sutton (ed.) (2004 [1607], The University of California): http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/cambrit/

  2. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days (1857, Macmillan), pp. 11–13

  3. The quote is attributed to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), but he never seems to have used these precise words. He is, however, recorded saying: ‘we […] must probe with bayonets whether the social revolution of the proletariat in Poland had ripened’: R. Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996, Yale University Press). In 1975, the American columnist Joseph Alsop wrote: ‘The Soviets […] merely follow Lenin’s advice to probe with bayonets any situation that looks mushy, withdrawing only when the bayonets meet steel’ (J. Alsop, ‘Post-Vietnam Assessment is Intense and Painful’, Sunday Advocate (18 May 1975), p. 2-B, col. 2)

  4. VA, 35–6

  5. VA, 35–6. No evidence for any major earthworks of this period have yet been discovered at Reading (J. Graham-Campbell, ‘The Archaeology of the “Great Army” (865–79)’, in E. Roesdahl and J. P. Schjødt (eds), Beretning fra treogtyvende tværfaglige vikingesymposium (2004, Aarhus Universitet), pp. 30–46). It is possible that the defences were hastily built, perhaps utilizing buildings and timbers that were already present. If so, this might explain the reluctance of the Viking army to place much faith in the defences

  6. ASC s.a. 871 (C s.a. 872)

  7. VA, 35–6, p. 78

  8. EE, 2953–71; Geoffrey is a little difficult to evaluate as a historian of this period; although his Estoire des Engleis (1135–7) contains details that are not preserved anywhere else (and he would have had few reasons to invent them), he also had a habit of including obviously fantastical material and was writing many centuries after the event

  9. ASC s.a. 871 (C s.a. 872); VA, 37–9

  10. VA, 37–9; Asser is probably mistaken about the death of Sidroc the Old – according to the ASC he had been killed at Englefield

  11. A number of suggestions have been made. See, for example, P. Marren, Battles of the Dark Ages (2006, Pen & Sword Books), pp. 118–21

  12. F. Wise, A Letter to Dr Mead Concerning Some Antiquities in Berkshire: Particularly Shewing that the White Horse, which Gives Name to the Vale, is a Monument of the West-Saxons, Made in Memory of a Great Victory Obtained Over the Danes A.D. 871 (1738, Oxford)

  13. Ibid., p. 23

  14. Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days, p. 13

  15. Ibid., p. 7

  16. M. Gelling, The Place-Names of Berkshire, volumes I and II (1973; 1974, English Place-Name Society, volumes 49/50)

  17. It is also possible that battles were not fought at these places at all, that these might simply have been the royal manors closest to where the fighting took place, and therefore useful geographical markers that everyone – especially the king – would have recognized

  18. S288

  19. S524

  20. O. S. Anderson, The English Hundred Names: The South-Western Counties (1939, University of Lund), pp. 14–15

  21. G. B. Grundy, ‘The Ancient Highways and Tracks of Wiltshire, Berkshire, and Hampshire, and the Saxon Battlefields of Wiltshire’, Archaeological Journal 75 (1918), pp. 69–194

  22. NMR: SU 28 NE 4

  23. It is also, incidentally, nearer to how it would have appeared to J. R. R. Tolkien when he visited the place with his family in the 1930s – one of a number of sights near Oxford to which the professor drove in his Morris Cowley (named ‘Jo’), charging around the countryside in a manner which his biographer Humphrey Carpenter described as ‘daring rather than skilful’. H. Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography (2002 [1977], HarperCollins), p. 39

  24. The phrase appears in a boundary clause, in a charter of King Eadred (r. 946–55) dated to 955 (S564); the phrases ‘Wayland’s Smithy’ and ‘Wayland Smith’ may or may not have something to do with the choice of the name ‘Waylon Smithers’ for the subservient assistant to Springfield power-plant owner Monty Burns. If this is a deliberate joke, the relevance is not altogether clear. It has been suggested that the choice of name may be an ironic inversion of macho stereotypes, the violent, rapey manual labourer becomes, in Mr Smithers, an effete, homosexual personal assistant. I think it’s a push, but who knows? The creators of The Simpsons have never – so far as I am aware – made any comment on the matter. M. S. Cecire, ‘Wayland Smith in Popular Culture’ in D. Clarke and N. Perkins, Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination (2010, Boydell & Brewer), pp. 201–18

  25. Wise, Letter to Dr Mead, p. 37

  26. Wise also asserted that the tomb was the burial place of the Viking king Bacsecg, a claim for which he offers no supporting evidence whatsoever and which is, needless to say, total bunk. This is not to say, however, that important Vikings were never interred beneath impressive monuments, as the following chapter elaborates

  27. Boethius II.7; OE Boethius XIX. The works traditionally believed to have emanated from Alfred’s circle are summarized in S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Alfred the Great: Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ and Other Contemporary Sources (1983, Penguin), p. 29. Alfred’s personal input has, however, been questioned in recent years, especially by Malcolm Godden (M. Godden, ‘Did King Alfred Write Anything?’, Medium Ævum 76 (2007), pp. 1–23). The noun faber in Latin means ‘smith’; it is uncertain whether Alfred is being playful or erroneously literalistic in his translation of the Latin proper name Fabricius

  28. C. R. Peers and R. A. Smith, ‘Wayland’s Smithy, Berkshire’, The Antiquaries Journal : Journal of the Society of Antiquaries of London 1 (1921), pp. 183–98

  29. N. G. Discenaza, ‘Power, Skill and Virtue in the Old English Boethius’, Anglo-Saxon England 26 (1997), pp. 81–108

  30. Beowulf, line 907; Deor, lines 1–13

  31. Völundarkvida, verse 34

  32. Price, ‘From Ginnungagap to the Ragnarök: Archaeologies of the Viking Worlds’, p. 7

  33. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (trans. Alix Strachey), in S. L. Gilman (ed.), Sigmund Freud: Psychological Writings and Letters (1995, Continuum), pp. 126, 142; see also G. Moshenska, ‘The Archaeological Uncanny’, Public Archaeology 5 (2006), pp. 91–9 and ‘M. R. James and the Archaeological Uncanny’, Antiquity 86.334 (2012), pp. 1192–1201

  34. ASC s.a. 871 (C s.a. 872)

  35. Ibid.

  Chapter 10: Real Men

  1. CC s.a. 850

  2. ASC s.a. 872 (C s.a. 873)

  3. ASC s.a. 873 (C s.a. 874)

  4. ASC s.a. 874 (C s.a. 875)

  5. W. J. Moore, The Saxon Pilgrims to Rome and the Schola Saxonum (1937, University of Fribourg)

  6. St Wystan’s churchyard is also notable as the resting place of the extraordinarily multi-talented C. B. Fry (1872–1956). His career took in football, rugby, athletics, acrobatics, politics, writing, publishing, broadcasting, teaching and, above all, cricket. One can’t help but think that had Fry been around in 874, the Vikings would have found themselves batting on a very sticky wicket

  7. R. I. Page, Norse Myths (1990, British Museum Press), p. 35

  8. Gylfaginning, 21

  9. Thrymskvida, verse 8; Freya was the goddess of love, sex and fertility: she was frequently an object of desire among gods, giants, elves and dwarves:
Orchard, Dictionary, p. 48

  10. Thrymskvida, verses 15–17

  11. Ibid., verse 31

  12. Page, Norse Myths, p. 14

  13. P. M. Sørensen, The Unmanly Man: Concepts of Sexual Defamation in Early Northern Society (1983, Odense University Press)

  14. In general, D. Wyatt, Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800–1200 (2009, Brill), pp. 206–14; Sørensen, The Unmanly Man, pp. 76, 83

  15. Ibid., pp. 17–18, 80, 82, 111; see also, for example, the planned rape of a man and his wife by the hero of Guðmundar saga dýra (Wyatt, Slaves and Warriors, pp. 211–12)

  16. Helgakviða Hundingsbana fyrri, verses 37–43

  17. Lokasenna, verse 24

  18. S. W. Nordeide, ‘Thor’s Hammer in Norway: A Symbol of Reaction against the Christian Cross?’, in Andrén et al., Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives. A. S. Gräslund, ‘Thor’s Hammers, Pendant Crosses and Other Amulets’ in E. Roesdahl and D. Wilson (eds), From Viking to Crusader: The Scandinavians and Europe 800–1200 (1992, Nordic Council of Ministers)

  19. J. Staecker, ‘The Cross Goes North: Christian Symbols and Scandinavian Women’ in M. Carver (ed.), The Cross Goes North, pp. 463–82

  20. DR 110, DR 209, DR 220, Vg 150; Tentative: Sö 140

  21. Thrymskvida, verse 30

  22. S. Degge, ‘An Account of an Humane Skeleton of an Extraordinary Size, Found in a Repository at Repton in Derbyshire …’, Philosophical Transactions 35 (1727–8), pp. 363–5; M. Biddle and B. Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Repton and the “Great Heathen Army”, 873–4’, in Graham-Campbell et al. (eds), Vikings and the Danelaw, pp. 45–96

  23. Degge, ‘An Account of an Humane Skeleton’

  24. R. Bigsby, Historical and Topographical Description of Repton (1854)

  25. J. Richards et al., ‘Excavations at the Viking Barrow Cemetery at Heath Wood, Ingleby, Derbyshire’, The Antiquaries Journal 84 (2004), pp. 23–116; cf. Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, who suggested – largely on account of the apparent stature of a number of the male skeletons – that many of the later bones were of Scandinavian origin, and were the recovered bones of earlier deceased members of the Viking army

  26. According to the thirteenth-century Chronicon Abbatiae de Evesham, King Cnut had the relics of Wystan moved to Evesham in the early eleventh century (J. Sayers and L. Watkiss (eds and trans.), Thomas of Marlborough: History of the Abbey of Evesham (2003, Clarendon Press)); this is suspicious, however, on a number of levels (How did Wystan’s relics survive the Viking takeover? What was the nature of the relics moved by Cnut, and how can we be sure they ever belonged to Wystan? Did Cnut ever move anything to Evesham, or did the monks of Evesham simply need a credible provenance for whatever mouldy old bones they had decided could usefully be attributed to an obscure saint? And so on)

  27. If he can be equated with the Imair of the Irish chronicles, Ivar the Boneless had been active in the Irish Sea, on and off, during the 850s, 860s and 870s: C. Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland (2007, Dunedin). The Annals of Ulster record his death as 873, the year the micel here came to Repton. The tenth-century English chronicler Æthelweard states that he died in 870, but implies that his death came in England. Ragnars saga Loðbrókar claims that he was buried in Northumbria under a barrow (see Biddle and Kjølbye-Biddle, ‘Repton’, pp. 81–4)

  28. ‘Ynglinga saga’, chapter 8 (Heimskringla I)

  29. Ibn Fadlan; Lunde and Stone, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, p. 51

  30. Ibid., p. 53

  31. Although ibn Fadlan recounts that a poor man was also burned in a small boat, and modest boat burials are known from Britain and Scandinavia; ibid., p.4

  32. Ibid., p. 54

  33. Although it is the diversity of Viking burial practice – as we have already begun to see – that is perhaps its most defining characteristic. N. Price, Odin’s Whisper: Death and the Vikings (2016, Reaktion Books); also Price, ‘Belief and Ritual’

  34. ASC s.a. 876

  Chapter 11: The Return of the King

  1. G. K. Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse (2010 [1911], Dover Publications), Book I

  2. VA, 53

  3. Beowulf, lines 102–4

  4. VA, 92; see also the explanatory notes to the text in Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great

  5. Ibid.

  6. VA, 55

  7. ASC s.a. 874; VA, verse 48

  8. ASC A s.a. 877; the events are also mentioned in all other versions of the ASC s.a. 877 (C s.a. 878) and VA, 49

  9. Ibid.

  10. CA, p. 42

  11. VA, 52; see also ASC s.a. 878 (C s.a. 879)

  12. HSC, 16

  13. L. Simpson, ‘The Alfred/St Cuthbert Episode in the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto: Its Significance for mid-Tenth Century English History’ in G. Bonner, D. W. Rollason and C. Stancliffe (eds), St Cuthbert, His Cult and His Community to AD 1200 (2002, Boydell & Brewer), pp. 397–412

  14. HSC, 12–13

  15. ASC s.a. 878 (C s.a. 879); ASN s.a. 878, p. 78; VA, 54, pp. 83–4 ; CA, p. 43; EE, 3144–56

  16. Geoffrey Gaimar later claimed that his body was interred at a place called ‘Ubbelawe’ (‘Ubbe’s barrow’) in Devon (EE, 3144–56)

  17. ASC s.a. 878 (C s.a. 879)

  18. ASN, s.a. 878

  19. Lavelle, Alfred’s Wars, pp. 55–106; J. Baker and S. Brookes, Beyond the Burghal Hidage: Anglo-Saxon Civil Defence in the Viking Age (2013, Brill), pp. 199–208; Halsall, Warfare and Society, pp. 40–133

  20. Anglo-Saxon riddles could be surprisingly suggestive. For example, Riddle 44 in the Exeter Book is translated into prose by S. A. J. Bradley (Anglo-Saxon Poetry, p. 379) as follows: ‘A curiosity hangs by the thigh of a man, under its master’s cloak. It is pierced through in the front; it is stiff and hard and it has a good standing-place. When the man pulls up his own robe above his knee, he means to poke with the head of his hanging thing that familiar hole of matching length which he has often filled before.’ Riddles 25 and 45 are also notoriously rude: all are translated by Bradley; see also K. Crossley-Holland, The Exeter Book Riddles (1993, Penguin) [the solution to Riddle 44 is ‘Key’]

  21. The story of Finn and Hengest is told in two Old English poems, Beowulf and a fragment known as ‘the Fight [or Battle] at Finnsburgh’ (ASPR 6); it is a tale of divided loyalties, betrayal and revenge. The episode was discussed by Tolkien in a series of lectures, published after his death as ‘Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode’ (2006 [1982], HarperCollins)

  22. For Anglo-Saxon beacon systems see D. Hill and S. Sharpe, ‘An Anglo-Saxon Beacon System’, in A. Rumble and D. Mills (eds), Names, Places & People (1997, Paul Wathius), pp. 97–108, and extensive discussion in Baker and Brookes, Beyond the Burghal Hidage

  23. VA, 55–6

  24. Baker and Brookes, Beyond the Burghal Hidage, pp. 186–7; J. Baker, ‘Warrior and Watchmen: Place Names and Anglo-Saxon Civil Defence’, Medieval Archaeology 55 (2011), pp. 258–9

  25. Anderson, The English Hundred Names: The South-Western Counties, p. 152

  26. P. H. Robinson, ‘The Excavations of Jeffery Whitaker at Bratton Camp’, Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Magazine Bulletin 25 (1979), pp. 11–13

  27. A. L. Meaney, A Gazetteer of Early Anglo-Saxon Burial Sites (1964, Allen & Unwin), p. 266

  28. Beowulf, lines 3137–49

  29. T. J. T. Williams, ‘The Place of Slaughter’; the place-name Edington (Eðandun) may have been used by the chronicler to suggest a reference to Alfred’s grandfather Egbert and his achievements at Ellendun in 825, a victory that prefigured Alfred’s own in establishing a greater West Saxon sphere of control (the alliteration, rhyme and equal syllabic count of the two place-names may also have helped to foster the comparison)

  30. S290

  31. Alfred’s Will is translated in Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great (pp.173–8); S1508; S765

  32. NMR ST 95 SW 38

  33. G. K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions (1910, Methuen)


  34. Parker, England’s Darling

  35. Ibid., p. 195, n. 16

  36. E. A. Freeman, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, 5 vols (1867–79, Clarendon Press), p. 51

  37. See especially Parker, England’s Darling, but also S. Keynes, ‘The Cult of King Alfred the Great’ in Anglo-Saxon England 28 (1999), pp. 225–356 and B. Yorke, The King Alfred Millenary in Winchester, 1901 (1999, Hampshire County Council)

  38. T. Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth: How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology (2005, 2nd edition, HarperCollins)

  39. Shippey, Road to Middle-Earth, pp. 222–31; Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories; H. Carpenter, The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their Friends (2006, 4th edition, Harper Collins], pp. 42–5

  40. G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Blatchford Controversies’ [1904], in D. Dooley (ed.), The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, vol. 1(1986, Ignatius Press)

  41. Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse

  42. Parker, England’s Darling

  43. Carpenter (ed.), The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien, No. 80, p. 92

  Chapter 12: The Godfather

  1. G. K. Chesterton, Ballad of the White Horse (2011 [1911], Dover Publications), Book VIII

  2. An example of a mid-ninth-century Anglo-Saxon font survives at Deerhurst (Gloucestershire). R. Bryant, Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture: Vol. X, The Western Midlands (2012, Oxford University Press), pp. 161–90

  3. VA, 46, p. 85

  4. E. Dümmler (ed.), Epistolae Karolini Aevi, vol. 2 (1895, Berlin), nos 134 and 137; J. H. Lynch, Christianizing Kinship: Ritual Sponsorship in Anglo-Saxon England (1998, Cornell University Press)

  5. It is possible, however, that Alfred’s son Edward was promoted to a ‘kingship’ – perhaps of Kent – later on; a charter which includes both Edward and Alfred lists him as rex on a Kentish charter’s witness list (Alfred is designated rex Saxonum); Keynes, ‘The Control of Kent’, Early Medieval Europe 2.2 (1993), pp. 111–31

  6. VA, 56; ASC s.a. 878 (C s.a. 879)

  7. ASC s.a. 880 (C s.a. 881)

  8. The evidence is fairly complex, but relates to the naming of moneyers unknown at established southern mints, die links between ‘Alfred’ coins and others, and the maintenance of a different weight standard. See M. A. S. Blackburn, ‘Presidential Address 2004. Currency under the Vikings. Part 1: Guthrum and the Earliest Danelaw Coinages’, British Numismatic Journal 75 (2005), pp. 18–43