The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  What interests him now is not the terror of the sea, but what you find when you get across it. Adam of Bremen filled the north with men who never walked, only hopped on one foot, and those who ate human flesh (‘as they are shunned, so may they also rightfully be passed over in silence’). There were Goths and blue men, worshippers of dragons and Prussians who seemed ‘a most humane people’. There were dogheaded men and men with one eye in the middle of their foreheads; and when the Amazons gave birth, which they did after seducing passing merchants, or forcing their male captives, or perhaps just by sipping water, the boys that resulted had their heads on their chests and the girls became beautiful women who drove away any man who even came close. The edge of the world was also the edge of reason.26

  Between the time the story of Brendan was first composed and the writing of the History of Norway many ships had been sailing out north and out west, carrying people and cargoes and using the sea that once had been a source of pure, holy terror. The change is profound, but not at all complete: there was still a great unknown beyond the ice in the north, a place to be filled up with stories. Yet the mystics of Germany and the Netherlands, who once used the sea as a symbol of hostile, purifying space, now start to use the desert as their metaphor instead. The sea is too busy, too practical; the desert is still pure and utterly strange. The sea was beginning to be known. When the mystic Hadewijch writes about water in the thirteenth century, she does not see it as the terrifying prospect it once was; the abyss is no longer a threat to life or the end of the world, for her it is a way to think about the tempestuous nature of God himself and the way you can be lost in love. Leviathan has, for the moment, gone away.27

  There were other monsters still present and they travelled. Polar bears and their pelts hardly ever turn up in customs records, but the ferocious live beasts were brought to Norway as bribes, and successful ones: they even turn up, but not often, at the French and English courts.28 The edgy North had become like Africa and Asia: a distant place, a strange place, but a source of wonders that could be known, traded and used.

  Take the medieval tale of Audun: a man with almost nothing, who had to work and live with relatives in the Westfjords of Iceland and had a mother dependent on him. He did have luck, though, and it got him a bear. In Iceland almost everything was sold on credit, because people had to be able to eat in spring even if the wool and the cloth that they traded for food would not be ready until summer. They depended for supplies on sea captains from Norway, who had a pressing interest in knowing who was truly creditworthy. Audun helped one captain so well that he was offered passage to Greenland. He sold off his sheep to support his mother, because by law he had to provide her with enough to take her through six seasons – three winters, three summers – and he sailed out.29

  On Greenland he met a hunter with a polar bear that was ‘exceptionally beautiful with red cheeks’. He offered the man all the money he had to buy the bear; the man told him that wasn’t wise, and Audun said he didn’t care. He wanted to make his mark on the world by giving the bear away to a king: a gift as exotic, as rare, as any rhinoceros given to a Pope in later centuries.

  Shipping a polar bear for days out at sea in a small boat is wild, but not implausible. A bishop on his way from Iceland to the mainland to be consecrated took with him ‘a white bear from Greenland and the animal was the greatest of treasures’; the beast ended up in the Emperor’s menagerie. When Greenlanders wanted a bishop of their own in 1125 they sent a bear to the King of Norway to encourage him, and the ploy worked.30 Bears went much further, in fact. King Håkon of Norway sealed his deal with King Henry III of England with gifts of falcons, furs, whale tusks, a live elk and a live polar bear.31 The monsters of the North start to seem almost domestic; the law in Iceland, where any polar bear at all was a rare sight on the floating ice, laid down that ‘if a man has a tame white bear then he is to handle it in the same way as a dog’.

  Audun found himself penniless, in the middle of a warzone, with a starving bear who could be forgiven for considering his minder as lunch; his journey south took so long that even if the bear was a cub in Greenland it must have been big and hungry now. The King of Norway offered to buy the beast, but Audun refused and kept moving. He made it across to Denmark, but now he had quite literally nothing except a bear that was starving to death; a courtier offered both of them food, on condition he could own half the bear. Audun had no choice.

  This is a story, so naturally the Danish king saves Audun and his bear. He pays for Audun to go to Rome and back again, and even the King of Norway acknowledges that Audun probably did the right thing when he refused to sell him the bear. Norwegian kings gave ships, food and time like Danish kings, but not silver; by holding on to the bear until he reached Denmark, Audun made a solid fortune in money which he could use for anything. A man no longer skirts the abyss in the far north and lives in fear of monsters; instead, he does business with them for cash.

  The story is the folktale of a man and a bear, but it also signals a moment when the world becomes recognizable, if not downright modern: money, travel, trade, ambition. But of course we choose what we want to recognize.

  That is why the reality of this hidden past matters so much. It involves whole peoples’ ideas about who they are, how they think, where they come from and why they rule: all the things they choose to recognize.

  ‘Forgetting history or even getting it wrong is one of the major elements in building a nation,’ Ernest Renan wrote, and he said history was a danger to nationalism; Eric Hobsbawm added: ‘I regard it as the primary duty of modern historians to be such a danger.’32

  For national history has a way of being radically incomplete. The Irish were and are deeply attached to the notion of an island of saints and scholars, which is not wrong at all, except that it leaves out the raiders, slavers and traders. Some Dutchmen used to have a deep mistrust of anything medieval on the grounds that it was bound to be Catholic and therefore unpatriotic and wrong, but it’s tough to get right a history that has to be a perfect blank before the Protestant sixteenth century; and it can be silly. When the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam first opened in its pseudo-medieval glory, all Gothick spikes and towers, King William III in 1885 announced: ‘I shall never set foot in that monastery.’ Norwegian attitudes are even more complicated, since the Middle Ages were the time when Norway was independent and powerful, before Danes and Swedes took over and started to write the national story; so instead of leaving out the medieval, Norwegians chose to leave out the next four centuries, the ‘four-hundred-year night’. When the first Norwegian national assembly, a thoroughly democratic body, opened in 1814 the President perversely declared: ‘Now is re-erected the Norwegian royal throne.’33

  There is worse. The peoples around the North Sea have a remarkable story, the one I mean to tell, but it all too easily degenerates into a claim on Northern superiority: one in which the Southern lands where the lemon trees blossom, and the people have time to sit under them, are meant to learn from their betters, and long, thin blond people are meant to rule short, stocky, dark people. As a short, stocky dark person from the North, I am unhappy with this; the fact that Nordic saga-writers made all their thralls and slaves look like me is infuriating.

  And particular evils rest on the Northern legend: the story of connections is twisted to justify separations of the bloodiest kind. German nationalism was always fascinated by its Scandinavian connections; think of Wagner tweaking dragon-slaying superhero stories from the Nibelungenlied and the gods of old Iceland into the Ring cycle, think of Fritz Lang tweaking Wagner in the movie version of Die Nibelungen, setting out to make a perfectly medieval epic about ‘Germany searching for an ideal in her past’ and having to put up with praise from Goebbels for ‘an epic film that is not of our time, yet is so modern, so contemporary and so topical’.34

  The rediscovery of the great Saxon poem Heliand, the Gospels retold in the ninth century in the manner of some North Sea epic, produced a number of fits of fanta
sy: in the nineteenth century August Vilmar took it to show ‘all that is great and beautiful, with all that the German nation, its heart and life, were able to provide’. It celebrated all sorts of things he reckoned to be especially German, like ‘the lively joy of the Germans in moveable wealth’. He somehow deduced that the Christian conversion of all German lands was proof that Germany was a single nation, ‘clean and resolute, its inner unity and its unity to itself transferred by the poet … onto the persons with his holy story’.35 The Saxon detail and thinking of Heliand became a pan-German myth: Jesus lining up with Bismarck. Vilmar was delighted by the rude remarks throughout the text about the ‘sluggish’ people of the South, who were mostly Jews, and the obvious superiority of the ‘Germanic’ disciples. His ideas persisted. At the time of the First World War the Gospels, told in Saxon verse, had somehow become ‘a pithy story of German manhood’.36

  In the 1930s, the history of the Hanseatic League – trading towns working together so they could effectively subvert national powers – somehow turned into a claim for German national dominance. It was as though the fact that the Hansa had happened once could wipe away all those hundreds of years when it didn’t happen at all; and there are papers in the essential French journal Annales from the 1930s which are now unreadable because they claim all kinds of ‘powerful spiritual and intellectual forces’ behind a merchants’ union, make metaphysics out of the account books.37 That is not the worst. In pursuit of a criminal idea of race, the SS was to become a perfect, almost mystical bunch of Nordic thugs, not only identified by type and shape of head but also bound into a carefully chosen past. With absolutely no irony at all there were posters in wartime Norway which showed a Viking standing most approvingly behind an SS man, freelance freebooters and a foreign state police oddly united against Nazism’s mirror, Bolshevism.38

  History helps kill, if you’re not careful, so let me make one thing clear. I am celebrating the North’s contribution to the culture of Europe, but that does not mean forgetting the glories of the South; this is a story of connections. I want to isolate one part of the whole story only in order to get it clear, because it is the part that is so often missed.

  German nationalism went wrong, that is obvious, and in a particularly ugly way. By contrast an Englishman can read some of the English and British nineteenth-century versions of the past – just as determined to sing anthems and wave flags – and try to find them simply absurd.

  That would be a mistake. They still have extraordinary power.

  The English have a story every schoolchild knows, how Anglo-Saxons stormed the coast of Britain some time in the fifth century and pushed out or even exterminated the British and Celtic natives and changed the island for ever; we became Germanic, and we started to speak a kind of English. We became Christians in a world still pagan. We qualified to be a separate nation, six centuries before that meant much, and we had what every nation needs: a story about its origins.

  We’ve good authority for this. Bede’s Church History of the English People39 is the work of a great scholar who had access to a very decent library in his monastery at Jarrow. It was finished around 731 CE, which is as close as we can get to the invasion he describes, but not very close. Bede does say how he did his research, which was impressive: he had a Canterbury abbot to tell him what happened at Canterbury, who in turn drew on the memory of older men as well as what was written down. Meanwhile, a future Archbishop of Canterbury went to Rome to work through the Vatican book chests with the Pope’s permission and bring back letters of Pope Gregory for Bede. When he writes in his history about St Cuthbert and his island life on Lindisfarne, he says he wrote or talked to any credible witness he could find.

  But is Bede himself credible? He wrote about the times that mattered most to him: the times of Christian missions and their success. When he writes about earlier times, he says he followed older writers, which is natural enough since he believed in such authorities.40 His book was not scientific, and not historical in a modern sense. He didn’t question his sources so much as paste them together on the page, a brilliantly considered scrapbook. His book is naturally a Saxon account of Saxon triumphs, a Christian treatise. A Saxon monk was never likely to write anything else.

  This is where the trouble starts. Bede says that long before the Saxon missionaries landed, a king in Britain called Vortigern had invited Saxon mercenaries to come across the North Sea and help beat back the enemies of the Britons. He and his allies had asked for Roman help before, but the Romans were otherwise occupied, and the Picts and the Irish were still marauding. Three longships came in 449 CE, Bede says, carrying men who were expected to defend the country as friends but really meant to conquer it like enemies; Gildas, his sixth-century source, writes more colourfully that ‘a pack of cubs burst forth from the lair of the barbarian lioness, coming in three keels’.41 They found the country rich, they thought the Britons cowardly and they summoned from home a much larger navy with many more fighting men. Jutes, Saxons and Angles arrived, with Hengist and Horsa as commanders, and they were followed by mobs of settlers, so many that the native Britons became nervous. They were right: the Saxons were about to turn their weapons on their allies. They ravaged almost all the island – the ‘dying’ island, Bede calls it. Houses fell, Christian priests were slaughtered at the altar, there was nobody prepared to bury the dead bishops and when the Britons took to the hills they were murdered in heaps. Some were starved into surrender, some quit the country altogether, some were exiled to the forests and mountains to scrape together what living they could. The Britons went away and England was Saxon.42

  This is loaded stuff, and a little confusing. For a start, Bede was not just on the Saxon side; he seems to be on the pagan side against Christians. He had to believe that Christianity had somehow gone wrong in Britain, that the Britons deserved everything they got for being sinful, drunk and arrogant, including the plague he says was so sudden and violent there was nobody alive to bury the dead. The Saxons were God’s next means of punishment ‘that evil might fall on the reprobates’. He was particularly angry that the Britons, clergy and lay alike, threw off ‘the light yoke of Christ’; he says later that the Britons were rotten with heresy, corrupted by the comforting notion that man is not stained with original sin at all but is free to choose good or evil for himself. Bede gives a brief account of a British victory at Mount Badon which seems to contradict his notion that all the surviving Britons had died or run away, and then he gets to his real story: the coming of Saxon missionaries and their very rapid success. These are Saxons preaching to Saxons: what could go wrong? After all, the British – still around, it seems – collapsed into civil strife when they found they had no foreign wars to fight.43

  Bede’s version is very powerful. It gives England a clean start and Christian faith. It turns history into a Saxon story. It has been used to explain how English was formed, why the English are somehow a racial group. But what if there never was an invasion? What if the real story was one of connections, of Saxons invited in over the years to help out in battles, of ‘Belgic’ peoples on the east side of England who spoke a Germanic language, as Tacitus said, even before the Romans arrived in 43 CE? The Romans certainly had Germanic mercenaries, then small mobile field armies with Germanic soldiers who were billeted on civilians with plenty of opportunity to fraternize and put about their genes. Saxon mercenaries did indeed come to Britain to help the Britons, but it would take a prodigious number of ships to bring enough people to repopulate a whole island; did the Saxons also improvise, with the help of the British women? The best estimate is that there were two million natives at the time, and at the most a very few hundred thousand newcomers, and more likely tens of thousands.44

  If the Britons were driven out, why is it that archaeologists look at the human remains through this period and find so little change?45 Of course, the survival of bodies to check is an arbitrary business, and it is almost always easier to study the remains of someone rich and powerful, t
he kind of person who can afford a visible tomb full of famous riches. But even so: check the enamel on teeth, and the isotopes will tell where the deceased grew up, and it doesn’t seem to have been in Saxon territory; measure skulls and they start to get bigger only after the Norman Conquest; the DNA is such a muddle that the main movements of human beings must have taken place long before.

  If bodies didn’t change, did language? Such a rush of new people, all speaking Germanic languages, might explain why Anglo-Saxon became the base and root of English; but it seems there were Germanic-speaking peoples in England already, the Belgae. During Roman rule, there was a ‘Count of the Saxon Shore’ in Britain, as there probably was across the Channel in Gaul, with nine shore forts to defend the coastline,46 but was it the ‘Saxon’ shore because it had to be defended against Saxons or because the Saxons were already there? The Gallic Chronicles mention a Saxon territory in England in 423, two decades before Bede says Kent had its first Saxon king. If you choose to trust Bede’s careful collection of other people’s stories, these questions don’t matter; but if you start to have doubts, they begin to seem important enough to change history.

  Bede insists on a new world in England – Saxon, Christian, with the old pagan Britons swept aside. The trouble is, the record of physical remains shows that not even the place, let alone the people, was reinvented. Roman sites were used again, new buildings sometimes raised over baths and basilicas. Sometimes the buildings themselves remained in use, which we know from the late Anglo-Saxon coin found on the steps of a Roman basilica in Caerwent. The Romans left resources, after all. Stone buildings do seem to have come down, replaced by wooden structures or nothing at all, but that may have been the aftermath of sixth-century plague and war, and their dire economic consequences. Old Roman towns – Dorchester, for example – were used as churches and monasteries. The sunken buildings that look like novelties in the landscape, and were still being used in medieval times, can sometimes be dated all the way back to the second century AD. The evidence for sudden change is very hard to find. And yet Bede gave the English a story we seem to have needed: the English as the new Israelites, crossing the North Sea instead of the Red Sea into freedom of a kind.