by Ed West
Something of the reasonable Scandinavian character was already in evidence in the way that Christianity was introduced. In most societies once the monarch became Christian followers of the old religion were soon ruthlessly persecuted but only the Scandinavians had sought to make some sort of compromise. When Iceland voted to change religions it allowed pagans to continue to eat horse flesh and expose their children to the elements, like in the good old days.
Hakon the Good, king of Norway from 934, offended some countrymen because he wanted to chart a middle course over the pagan festival of Yul-tide honoring the old gods. The pagans wanted him to take part but, although as a Christian he couldn’t, he didn’t want to be too fanatical about it, and so instead inhaled the smoke from the boiling horse meat that had been sacrificed to pagan gods without eating it. When pressed he agreed to eat some of the horse’s liver as a halfway measure. Luckily the controversy was eventually resolved when Hakon was killed by Erik the Red’s sons over something else.
Viking leaders certainly didn’t entirely abandon pagan ideas about sex, and Scandinavian rulers continued for some time the traditional practise of having a second sexual partner, called a handfast or ‘Danish wife’, who was not quite a second wife but neither exactly a mistress either. The Rus king St Vladimir, who acquired his halo after converting his people, had an exhausting seven wives and eight hundred concubines. Realising the Rus would have to adopt one of the Abrahamic faiths for political reasons, Vladimir chose Christianity over Islam largely because the latter prohibited alcohol, which was never going to sell well with the Russians.11
Their adventurers in Russia had brought the Vikings into contact with the Middle Eastern world. One Arab trader called Ahmad ibn Fadlan spent much time with the Rus, noting their tattoos, long hair, poor hygiene and general barbarism, including their music, of which he said: ‘I have never heard anything more horrible than their singing. It is more like the barking of dogs only twice as beastly.’12
The Norse world was connected to the Islamic through the slave trade, and the rise and fall of Viking activity in England was linked to far away events. One theory is that the Viking revival of the 980s was affected by an African slave uprising in modern-day Iraq, in which black soldiers sided with the rebels, which resulted in the Muslim world wanting more European slaves instead.13
There were one or two cultural misunderstandings along the way; in one incident the Emir of Cordoba in Spain, Abd ar-Rahman II, sent an embassy to a Viking called Jorik of Denmark, which turned into something of a disaster. The Danes tried to make him bow but the Arab refused to, and eventually it ended with the visitor showing his backside to the king, who had tried to lower the entrance to force him to genuflect. The Viking queen also took a liking to the ambassador, a handsome poet called Yahya ibn Hakam al-Jayyani, which increased tension. Obviously the Viking fondness for eight-day-long drinking binges that ended in comas did not impress the Moors too much, although it was not entirely boorish as a society; the Vikings loved poems, or scalds, but they tended almost entirely to revolve around fighting.
Among the most important Scandinavian raiders was Olaf Tryggvason, nicknamed Crowbone because he was obsessed with reading omens (Viking leaders were often very superstitious, but being seaborne raiders, their lives were directed by chance). His Swedish aristocrat mother Astrid was lucky to survive after Olaf’s father was murdered by a rival, the sinister-named Greycloak, whose lackeys searched the countryside for the pregnant widow in order to kill her and her husband’s heir. One version has them fleeing to Russia and being sold into slavery after they were intercepted by pirates. Then, reaching as low as he could get when he was exchanged for a single goat, Crowbone grew up as a farmhand in Estonia, before being discovered and freed by his uncle Sigurd. Now he became a great seafarer, and went on to own the largest Viking warship we know of, the hundred-foot Long Serpent, and also circumnavigated the British Isles; in 981 he turned up in Padstow in Cornwall.
Although the formation of Norway, Sweden and Denmark would ultimately lead to the pacification of Scandinavia, it also made these new Viking armies much larger and stronger than previous ones. And with a young and weak king on the throne of England, the Viking raids began again in the 980s, met by Ethelred with incompetence and cowardice.
Olaf Tryggavson was one of the leaders of a fleet of ninety-three longboats that attacked the east coast of England in the summer of 991, hoping to go from town to town demanding money. A force this big could devastate a huge area before any help could arrive, and people usually just gave the Vikings silver in the hope they would go away.
However after they turned up in Maldon, Essex, the local lord, Byrhtnoth, insisted on fighting them, despite being well into his sixties. When the Norsemen arrived at the shore and demanded money, the ageing warrior replied: ‘We will pay you with spear points and sword blades.’ This all sounds very heroic, but showing characteristic English fair play, Byrhtnoth refused to attack the Vikings while they were still on the causeway and agreed that they should be allowed to make their way ashore for a fair fight. The unsporting Vikings then slaughtered their English opponents. (Another explanation is that had the Vikings not been allowed over they would have just sailed away and he would rather engage them now when he was ready).
Although the old warrior died, along with some of his followers—many also ran off—he took a lot of Vikings with him, and the poem of The Battle of Maldon became an inspiring tale of English courage. It had an important national message, since Byrhtnoth’s men came from across the country; while in reality England was disintegrating, and as the Chronicle recorded, no county would help the next. In the poem Byrhtnoth tells the Vikings:
‘Listen, messenger! Take back this reply
… that a noble earl and his troop stand here—
guardians of the people, and of the country, the home
of Ethelred, my prince—who will defend this land
to the last ditch.’
Unfortunately the only copy of the poem was burned during a famous 1731 fire at the Ashburnham Museum in Westminster, along with half of all manuscripts from Anglo-Saxon England, and though the deputy keeper of the collection had just made a copy, which otherwise would have been lost, he hadn’t got around to finishing the last fifty lines. So like someone who’s borrowed a library book only to find out that the previous user has ripped out the last page, we’ll never know how it ended. At any rate Byrhnoth died.
As a result of the battle and the subsequent raids, Ethelred paid Olaf £16,000 to leave, on condition that he convert to Christianity. That was a huge amount of money in those days (literally 16,000 pounds in silver), and naturally Olaf spent the rest of his very comfortable years very much loving Jesus. Olaf in fact forcibly converted large numbers of his subjects when he became king of Norway, maiming and torturing people who didn’t embrace Christianity, which is perhaps slightly missing the point. Despite this, like many newly Christian Vikings, he maintained the custom of having two wives. However it didn’t have a happy ending, and eventually he was killed in battle with a Norwegian rival, Earl Erik.
After Maldon Ethelred began the policy of paying off raiders, with at least £250,000 raised during his reign, with the money going up from £10,000 in 991 to £24,000 in 1002, £36,000 in 1007 and an astonishing £45,000 to £48,000 in 1012 alone. But the country could afford it, for at the time sterling was a valued currency accepted and imitated all over northern Europe (the word comes from steor, Latin for stable, at least according to one theory). England had seventy royal mints that produced the ten million coins that were at any one point in circulation, each of which was 92.5 percent silver. In recent years more of Ethelred’s money has turned up in Scandinavia than in England.
And having seen Olaf come home with enormous sums of money, the other Vikings got the impression that England was a rich and cowardly country. Attacks continued in 993 with Bamburgh in Northumbria destroyed and ‘much war-booty taken’. In 994 another Viking fleet arrived w
ith a combined force of ninety-four warships and two thousand fighting men; that year London was successfully defended, and so the Vikings moved on to Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire. In 997 Devon, Cornwall and Wales were assaulted and the following year Dorset and Isle of Wight got hit, while in 999 Norsemen landed in Rochester in Kent and defeated a local army.
The army in Kent fled in the face of superior numbers, because (according to the Peterborough version of the Chronicle) ‘they did not have the help they should have had’. The Canterbury Chronicle recorded ‘the ship-army achieved nothing, except the people’s labor, and wasting money, and the emboldening of their enemies’. These were all none-too-subtle criticisms of the king, who had failed to provide any sort of leadership. On the one occasion, in 992, when Ethelred got all the leading nobles together to organize an army to fight the Vikings, the man he put in charge, Elfric, went and betrayed the secret to the enemy, for whatever reason. Afterwards, the king had Elfric’s sons blinded.
In another one of his depressing sermons Wulfstan the Homilist noted English warriors watching helplessly while the Danes gang-raped their wives and daughters, while on another occasion a large group of townspeople did nothing while just three or four Vikings brought English people onto their boats for a life of slavery.
While England was powerless against the invaders, and with the millennium approaching, it seemed to confirm people’s worst fears about the end of the world. The coming of the year 1000 was met with something approaching dread in some quarters, but Old English culture had a strong sense of doommongering at the best of times, which considering events was understandable.
Much of what we know of the Anglo-Saxons comes from their poetry, which would have been played around the fire of great halls accompanied by the six-stringed harp. Although only a handful of poems survive, they tell us something of their world, among them Deor, about a poet who has lost his position among a tribe called the Heodenings, and which recounts how the poet, or scop, was the living memory of the tribe. On a similar, depressing note, The Wanderer is about a man who loses his lord and is mournful, lamenting:
‘The prudent man should under-
how ghastly it will be,
when all this world’s wealth
shall stand waste,
as now divers.
over this mid-earth,
with wind shaken
walls stand,
with rime bedeck’d:
tottering the chambers,
disturbed are the joyous halls,
the powerful lie
of joy bereft,
the noble all have fall’n,
the proud ones by the wall.’
Probably not something you’d quote when volunteering for the Samaritans. Then there was The Fortunes of Men, dating to the late tenth century, which lists all the way people will die—crippled, falling from a tree, exiled, hanging and ‘one a jabbering drunkard’, which says something about the life quality of most people.
‘Hunger will devour one, storm dismast another’
One will enjoy life without seeing light
One will have no choice but to chance
remote roads, to carry his own food and leave drew tracks among foreign people in a dangerous land.’14
The poem concludes, however, that one will reach old age and a reasonable level of happiness; and everything in life, whether we are talented, good at throwing or clever, is all in God’s hands, so there is no point worrying about it.15 The Fortunes of Men comprises one part of the Exeter Book, a collection of ninety-six riddles still in the city’s cathedral library where in 1072 it was given to the bishop. It is a precious record of early medieval England, although it has since been damaged, having been used down the years as a cheese board, breadboard and beer mat. Of the riddles, a dozen concern war, and some reflect ideas about the Christian faith, but most however describe everyday life with humor that is often quite lewd. One goes:
‘I’m a wonderful thing, a joy to women,
to neighbors useful. I injure no one
who lives in a village save only my slayer.
I stand up high and steep over the bed;
underneath I’m shaggy. Sometimes ventures
a young and handsome peasant’s daughter,
a maiden proud, to lay hold on me.
She seizes me, red, plunders my head,
fixes on me fast, feels straightway
what meeting me means when she thus approaches,
a curly-haired woman. Wet is that eye.’16
The answer is: an onion. The whole thing has a 1970s British sex comedy feel to it. Another poem of the period goes:
‘A youth came along to where he knew
she stood in a corner. Forth he strode,
a vigorous young man, lifted up her own
dress with his hands, thrust under her girdle
something stiff as she stood there’17
Anyway. The year 1000 did not mean the end of the world as expected—in fact they had miscalculated Christ’s birth by six years—although the king’s wife died soon afterwards, at which point someone at the court came up with an ingenious plan of fighting off the Vikings by forming an alliance with a group called the Normans. What could go wrong?
CHAPTER THREE
In Bed with the Normans
While England was being attacked in the ninth century the Danes were also launching raids on Francia, the former Roman province of Gaul which had been overrun by the Franks when the empire collapsed. The Franks were the most powerful of the barbarian German tribes and their king, Charlemagne, had in AD 800 been crowned ‘Emperor of the West’ by the pope; so started the complicated nonsensical entity called the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ which lasted, strangely, until Napoleon’s time, and which no one—even at the time—understood. Charlemagne was behind what is called ‘the Carolignian Renaissance’ which in essence began the Middle Ages, introducing everything we associate with that period from Romanesque cathedral architecture to castles to Carolingian typeface. But his huge empire had no real coherence and only survived so long as there was a ruler as ruthless and strong as he was (which he was—Charlemagne killed something like fourty-five hundred Saxons1 because they refused to convert to Christianity.) Charlemagne’s grandsons, however, fell out and the war-torn country was left open to raids just as the Vikings were getting into their groove. One of the most serious was led by the semi-mythical Ragnar Lothbrook who attacked Paris in 851,2 but they were especially menacing around the region formally known as Neustria, upriver from Paris, which contained lots of inlets and rivers, just the sort of places Vikings loved.
Following Alfred the Great’s rise to power these raids in Francia got worse and in 912 a group of Vikings settled on the river Seine and decided that, whatever the French thought about the matter, they were staying. The Frankish king Charles the Simple, who despite his name was actually quite shrewd (the name might better be translated as ‘honest’) thought that it would make more sense to co-opt the Norsemen and use them to fight off other Vikings. He must have assumed the marauders’ colony would collapse or be quickly absorbed—but as it turned out the Duchy of Normandy would become a monster that caused as much distress to France as it did to England.
It’s common to refer to the Normans as ‘French Vikings’ but they weren’t that Viking. In their culture and their military tactics the Normans by 1066 were rather like any other Franks; they hardly went near the sea, they fought on horses, spoke French, were deeply Christian and, like the Franks, were also moderate in their drinking compared to the English. Norman chroniclers were frequently disgusted by how much alcohol the English consumed, which is a criticism no Scandinavian would make. Say what you like about the Vikings, but they weren’t sanctimonious.
Indeed the Normans aren’t very Viking by ancestry; a 2015 study on people from the part of Normandy colonized by Norsemen showed just 15 percent had the blood group associated with Scandinavia, and none the specific markers linked to Norway.3 Mos
t likely the number of Viking settlers in France was small.
These Norsemen were led by Hrolf or Rolf—Rollo in French—who agreed to Charles’s terms. However according to one slightly unlikely story, Rollo refused to bow to anyone, so when it came time to kiss the Frankish king’s feet during the agreement he got one of his sidekicks to do it, but the big lumbering man upended Charles because he didn’t want to bow either.
Charles made his daughter Gisla marry Rollo, who promised to become a Christian in that vague way Vikings tended to without really meaning it. Apparently Rollo made gifts to churches, but also organized pagan human sacrifices, which is called hedging your bets.4
However Gisla died childless and Rollo then reinstated his mistress Poppa; their son William Longsword succeeded him and helped the colony to survive and thrive. The early settlers had smashed up most of the monasteries in the region, but as their colony became known as Normandy (‘land of the North-men’) these Normans turned into the most faithful, indeed deranged, Christians.
And though a century later the Normans spoke French, they still had some connections to Scandinavia and were allowing their friends from the old country to use Normandy as a base for attacks on England. This was extremely damaging, and at one point Ethelred may have tried invading Normandy, but the mission was aborted in failure, as his plans tended to be. So instead, after Ethelred’s wife Elfgifu died, the thirty-year-old king decided to get the Normans onside by marrying the twelve-year-old Norman princess Emma, daughter of Duke Richard. Confusingly, and weirdly, Ethelred didn’t like the name Emma and preferred to call her Elfgifu—which she must have loved. It wasn’t to be a happy marriage, and the conniving queen showed nothing but contempt for her husband throughout their unhappy union.