Dragon Lords
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Eleanor Parker is Lecturer in Medieval English Literature at Brasenose College, Oxford. Dr Parker writes an acclaimed blog in her guise as ‘A Clerk of Oxford’, which was likened by Christopher Howse in the Daily Telegraph to ‘orchards of golden apples’. In 2015 her blog won the Longman–History Today Award for Digital History, and she now writes a regular column for History Today.
‘Dragon Lords offers an absorbing and authoritative account of the survival of Scandinavian legends and history in post-Conquest England. Fromdragon-shipstobears’ sons, andsinners to saints, Eleanor Parker’s nuanced readings of English, French, Old Norse and Latin sources unpack a wealth of unfamiliar and exciting stories. This beautifully written book succeeds in casting Viking invaders and settlers in an unexpected new light.’
– Carolyne Larrington, Professor of Medieval European Literature, University of Oxford, author of The Land of the Green Man: A Journey Through the Supernatural Landscapes of the British Isles (I.B.Tauris, 2015)
‘Dragon Lords tells the fascinating and hitherto unknown story of how the Viking invasions of England were turned into myth and legend by those whom the Scandinavians raided and later ruled. Eleanor Parker vividly retells and contextualises this material (with its dragons, raven banners and unturning tides) while demonstrating at the same time a truly impressive command of Anglo-Scandinavian history and literature.’
– Heather O’Donoghue, Professor of Old Norse, University of
Oxford, author of From Asgard to Valhalla:
The Remarkable History of the Norse Myths (I.B.Tauris, 2007)
‘In this welcome new book, Eleanor Parker sketches the fascinating and varied ways in which the people of medieval England reflected upon their Viking past – both real and imagined. Part literary study, part historical investigation and part folkloric inquiry, it makes a riveting and rewarding read.’
– Levi Roach, Lecturer in Medieval History,
University of Exeter, author of Æthelred: The Unready
Published in 2018 by
I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd
London • New York
www.ibtauris.com
Copyright © 2018 Eleanor Parker
The right of Eleanor Parker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.
References to websites were correct at the time of writing.
ISBN: 978 1 78453 786 9
eISBN: 978 1 78672 360 4
ePDF: 978 1 78673 360 3
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
Typeset by Riverside Publishing Solutions, Salisbury, UK Printed and bound in Sweden by ScandBook AB
contents
List of Illustrations
Timeline of Key Texts and Events
Acknowledgements
A Note on Names
Map of Anglo-Saxon England
introduction
Chapter 1: ‘From the north comes all that is evil’: Vikings, kings and saints, c.985–1100
Chapter 2: The sons of Ragnar Lothbrok
Chapter 3: The story of Siward
Chapter 4: Danish sovereignty and the right to rule
Chapter 5: ‘Over the salt sea to England’: Havelok and the Danes
epilogue: the danes in english folklore
Notes
Bibliography
list of illustrations
Images are the author’s own, unless stated otherwise.
1. A group of warriors on a carved stone from Lindisfarne, the island monastery attacked by the Vikings in 793
2. The Oseberg ship (Larry Lamsa)
3. A carving from Viking York: Sigurðr the Völsung fights the dragon Fafnir
4. The Cuerdale hoard, one of the largest hoards of Viking silver ever found (©Jorge Royan, CC BY-SA 3.0)
5. A modern statue of Byrhtnoth, killed fighting against the Vikings in 991, at Maldon in Essex
6. The gatehouse of Ramsey Abbey, all that remains of the medieval abbey where the first works on St Edmund were written in the tenth century
7. Images of St Edmund, medieval and modern:
a. St Edmund’s death depicted in a fourteenth-century Psalter (British Library, Royal MS. 2 B VII, f. 277)
b. St Edmund’s death, from a fourteenth-century Book of Hours (British Library, Yates Thompson MS. 13, f. 192)
c. A fifteenth-century carving of Edmund, above the door of St Edmund’s church, Kessingland, Suffolk
d. St Edmund’s death, from a window in St Mary’s church, Bury St Edmunds
e. A statue of St Edmund by Elisabeth Frink, dragon lords near the site of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds
8. A silver penny of King Cnut (York Museums Trust)
9. Cnut (British Library, Royal MS. 14 B VI)
10. Edmund Ironside (British Library, Royal MS. 14 B VI)
11. Cnut and Emma in the New Minster Liber Vitae (British Library, Stowe MS. 944, f. 6)
12. Cnut’s two sons, Harold Harefoot and Harthacnut (British Library, Royal MS. 14 B VI)
13. A carving from Winchester, perhaps originally part of a frieze at the Old Minster, where Cnut was buried. It may represent a scene from the Völsung legend
14. The possible current location of Cnut’s remains, in a chest in Winchester Cathedral (Ealdgyth, via Wikimedia Commons)
15. Svein Forkbeard invades England (British Library, Harley MS. 2278, f. 98v)
16. St Edmund kills Svein Forkbeard (British Library, Harley MS. 2278, f. 103v)
17. Osgod the Dane is punished at St Edmund’s tomb (British Library, Harley MS. 2278, f. 110v)
18. The ruins of the abbey church at Bury St Edmunds, where St Edmund’s shrine stood behind the high altar
19. A twelfth-century window from Canterbury Cathedral, showing the Viking siege of Canterbury and St Ælfheah being captured and killed by the Danes
20. A modern image of St Ælfheah on a tomb in Canterbury Cathedral
21. The story of Lothbrok and Edmund, illustrated in a fifteenth-century manuscript of John Lydgate’s Life of St Edmund (British Library, Harley MS. 2278):
a. Lothbrok and his dog set sail from Denmark to England
b. Lothbrok is received at Edmund’s court
c. The murder of Lothbrok by Bern the huntsman
d. Bern tells Lothbrok’s sons that Edmund has killed their father
e. The Danes invade England
22. The remains of Cwichelmshlæw (now called Cuckhamsley Barrow or Scutchamer Knob), once a prominent mound on the Berkshire Downs, where the Vikings defied Anglo-Saxon threats in 1006
23. Harold Godwineson on the Bayeux Tapestry (Wikimedia Commons)
24. St Olave’s, York, the church founded by Siward, earl of Northumbria, where he was buried in 1055
25. The ruined west front of Crowland Abbey, Lincolnshire
26. A medieval statue of Earl Waltheof, with hunting-dog, on the west front of Crowland Abbey
27. The death of Earl Siward, by James Smetham, 1861 (©Wellcome Library, London, CC BY-SA 4.0)
28. Guy of Warwick fights a dragon (British Library, Yates Thompson MS. 13, f. 14)
29. The Ro
llright Stones (Jason Ballard)
30. St Botolph’s, Hadstock, in Essex, a possible site of the church built by Cnut in commemoration of the 1016 Battle of Assandun
31. The eleventh-century door of St Botolph’s, Hadstock, said to have once been covered by a ‘Dane’s skin’
32. A modern memorial to Cnut at Shaftesbury Abbey, showing the king demonstrating that he could not command the waves
timeline of key texts and events
793 Viking attack on Lindisfarne
866–7 A Viking army captures York; Osberht and Ælla, kings of Northumbria, are both killed
869 Edmund, king of East Anglia, is killed by a Viking army
937 Æthelstan, king of Wessex, defeats an alliance of Norse and Scottish armies at the Battle of Brunanburh
941 Oda, son of a Danish settler, becomes Archbishop of Canterbury
c.985–7 Abbo of Fleury, Passio Sancti Eadmundi
1013 Svein Forkbeard, king of Denmark, invades England, but dies the following year
1016 Cnut becomes king of England
c.1040–2 Encomium Emmae Reginae
1055 Death of Siward, earl of Northumbria, Huntingdon and Northampton
1066 Harold Godwineson becomes king of England and is killed in battle at Hastings. Beginning of Norman rule over England
1076 Execution of Waltheof
1080s Osbern of Canterbury, Vita and Translatio of St Ælfheah
1090s Completion of Herman’s Miracula Sancti Eadmundi
1107–31 Gesta Herwardi composed between these dates
1130s Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum
c.1136–7 Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis
1148–56 Geoffrey of Wells, De Infantia S. Eadmundi
c.1188–c.1208 Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum composed between these dates
c.1200–20 The Anglo-Norman Lai d’Haveloc, Gui de Warewic, and Roman de Waldef all probably composed in these years
c.1219 Gesta antecessorum comitis Waldevi
c.1230s Roger of Wendover, Flores Historiarum
c.1250 Oldest surviving version of Ragnars saga composed around this time
c.1290 Middle English Havelok
c.1300 First of several Middle English versions of Gui de Warewic composed
c.1433 John Lydgate, Life of St Edmund
acknowledgements
At the beginning of a book full of origin-myths and ancestry legends, it is a pleasure to thank those who have helped to make this book what it is. The research on which it is based was carried out at the University of Oxford, made possible by support from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Mellon Foundation. At every stage it has benefited immeasurably from the wisdom and generosity of Heather O’Donoghue; I owe the first idea for this project to her, among countless other things. Special thanks are due to Carolyne Larrington, Matthew Townend, Levi Roach, Laura Ashe, Alex Wright, and my colleagues, students and friends at Brasenose College, Oxford. This book is dedicated to my family, because I could not have written it without them. From Winchester to Wallingford, Crowland to Cuckhamsley, they have been with me every step of the way.
a note on names
The Old Norse names of the people discussed in this book appear in various forms in the medieval texts, so to avoid confusion I have adopted standard anglicisations as far as possible: Cnut, Ivar, Olaf, in place of Knútr, Ívarr, Óláfr, and so on, except in some quotations. Medieval English writers were very far from being consistent in their treatment of Norse names; I have attempted to be so, but some inconsistencies will doubtless remain. Readers unfamiliar with Anglo-Saxon and Norse names may find it helpful to know that the letters ð and þ both represent ‘th’.
Introduction
Why did the Vikings come to England? The causes which lay behind what we now call the Viking Age – the movement of peoples from Scandinavia to other parts of Europe between the eighth and the eleventh centuries – are still a subject of debate for modern historians, and medieval writers found the question no less challenging to answer. Today we look to economic, political or sociological explanations for this phenomenon, but medieval historians interpreted it very differently. The Anglo-Norman chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, looking back at the Viking Age from the perspective of the early twelfth century, believed that the defining characteristic of the Scandinavian invaders – the key difference between the Vikings and other conquerors of England, including the Romans, the Saxons and the Normans – was that they came to destroy, not to rule: ‘the Danes swooped and rushed upon the land from all directions very frequently over a long period,’ he says, ‘not aiming to possess it but rather to plunder it, and desiring not to govern but rather to destroy everything.’1 Like many medieval historians, Henry argued that the Vikings were permitted to do this as a divine punishment for the sins of the English, sent by God to chastise and purify a nation which had gone astray.
However, even medieval writers proposing such a view knew that Scandinavians in the Anglo-Saxon period did not only come to raid and destroy. Many settled in England, too, founding towns, holding lands, and ruling kingdoms in the north. Legends and stories recorded in a range of medieval sources from the eleventh and twelfth centuries onwards explore different interpretations of the Vikings (or ‘the Danes’, as they were usually called in medieval England). These narratives imagine why the Vikings came to settle in England, what they did there, and what effect they might have had on English society. Although many writers followed the common view of Viking invasion expressed by Henry of Huntingdon – that the Vikings were indiscriminate raiders, motivated by love of violence and greedy desire for plunder – there were also strong and enduring popular traditions running alongside this which told more complex stories about why Scandinavian invaders and settlers decided to come to England. In these narratives the Vikings come not just to raid but to resolve personal feuds, to intervene in English politics, to search for adventure, or to find a safe and peaceful home. Rather than simply plundering England and returning to Scandinavia with their spoils, the Vikings in these stories leave a lasting impact on the areas where they settle down, and the legends describe how their legacy can be traced in the landscape, in place-names, and in local history.
These stories seem to reflect a diversity of regional traditions about the Vikings existing in medieval England, especially in the north, the East Midlands and East Anglia. These parts of England had all been areas of Scandinavian settlement in the Anglo-Saxon period, and some narratives attempt to explore the role of Viking invasion in the history of these regions, to understand its causes and describe its effects. Although they generally have little historical basis, they can tell us fascinating things about how the Vikings were viewed in medieval England, especially by those who may have believed themselves to be in some sense their descendants. In this book we will trace the paths of these narratives, exploring how they imagine and interpret England’s Viking history and the contribution of the Vikings to the culture and identity of different regions of England.
1. A group of warriors on a carved stone from Lindisfarne, the island monastery attacked by the Vikings in 793
Raiders and settlers: the First Viking Age
It will be helpful to begin with a brief account of the historical events – as far as we know them – which in time gave rise to such a large and varied body of narrative, legend and myth. In its entry for the year 787, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records an event which it interprets as the beginning of a new phase in English history: three ships from Scandinavia arrived at Portland, on the coast of Dorset, and when the king’s reeve came out to meet them, they killed him. ‘These were the first ships of Danes which sought out the land of the English’, the chronicler observes, writing some time later and interpreting this apparently isolated incident, with the benefit of hindsight, as the start of something new and dangerous.2 In 793 came an attack on the island monastery of Lindisfarne, an event marked, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, by the appearance of ominous
fiery dragons in the sky – a grave portent of disaster to come.3 These may not in fact have been the first Viking raids in England, but in retrospect they seemed to the chroniclers to mark the first signs of a new kind of threat. Intermittent waves of Viking attacks followed over the next few decades.4
To begin with, these bands of raiders may have been fairly small, but in time they grew larger and more threatening. The situation began to escalate around the middle of the ninth century, and in 865 what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls a ‘great heathen raiding-army’ descended on the country and swept through the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England one by one.5 They conquered the region north of the Humber, captured the city of York amid much slaughter, and killed the Northumbrian kings Osberht and Ælla. In 869 they moved south to East Anglia, where they put King Edmund to a grisly death which led to him being venerated as a saint and martyr. The leaders of this fearsome army included several men who would later be grouped together as the sons of the semilegendary Viking warrior Ragnar Lothbrok, and these men and their triumphs over Osberht, Ælla and Edmund feature very prominently in later medieval narratives about the Danes in England. Although there were many battles and many other notable leaders on both sides, the later English sources return again and again to the capture of York and the death of Edmund of East Anglia.
The ninth-century invasions were a sustained and almost overwhelming wave of attacks, and they had long-lasting consequences. These Viking kings never succeeded in ruling the whole of England; Alfred the Great managed to retain command of Wessex and defended it from the repeated attacks of a number of Viking armies. However, in the following decades large parts of the north and east of England remained under Scandinavian control, and members of these armies settled in England – they ‘began to plough and support themselves’, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it.6 They settled in what later became known as the Danelaw, a region stretching at its height from Essex in the south to the northern borders of Northumbria, and for a period in the early tenth century the north formed part of a Viking kingdom extending across the Irish Sea, with strongholds in Dublin and York.7