2. The Oseberg ship (Larry Lamsa)
The impact of this Scandinavian settlement in the north and east of England has long been recognised as an important factor in the early history of those regions, and there are many forms of evidence which reveal its lasting effects. The written sources provide few details, so historians have frequently disagreed about the size, dating and character of the settlement, but there is no question that it left a deep and permanent impression.8 The distinctive place-names of northern England are perhaps the most obvious lasting legacy of these Scandinavian settlers: the classic examples include names ending in the Old Norse elements -by and -thorpe (Whitby, Derby, Scunthorpe) or incorporating Norse words, personal names or pronunciation (Skegness, Ormskirk, Skipton, etc.).9 They left an impact too on the English language throughout the country, not only in northern dialects but in some of the most commonly used English words.10 Material evidence casts light on the culture of the Scandinavian settlers and their descendants, revealing a complex picture of assimilation, cultural interaction, and religious and social change in the years after the settlement.11 The pagan settlers rapidly adopted Christianity, but they seem to have brought with them beliefs, stories and traditions which correspond to those found in later collections of Norse myth and heroic legend. In this period, poetry in Old Norse was being composed and performed in England, including skaldic verse, the intricate court poetry of Scandinavian kings, and possibly also some of the poems about Norse gods and heroes preserved in the Poetic Edda.12 Perhaps the most vivid evidence for the culture of Anglo-Scandinavian England is the depiction of scenes from Norse myth on sculpture from the north of England, mostly dating to the ninth and tenth centuries: on these stones, Thor can be seen fishing for the World-Serpent; Loki, bound, awaits Ragnarök; Sigurðr, the greatest dragon-slayer of Norse legend, fights the serpent Fafnir.13
3. A carving from Viking York: Sigurðr the Völsung fights the dragon Fafnir
It is possible – though ultimately unprovable – that oral legends introduced from Scandinavia to England at this date were the origins of some of the much later narratives about Viking history that we will be looking at in this book.14 The real story is, however, likely to be richer and more varied than this. The Scandinavian settlers who came to live in England brought with them a culture and a language closely related to those of the people among whom they settled, and interactions between the two groups must have been influenced by a range of factors, more complex than the available evidence allows us to reconstruct. Recent studies of Scandinavian settlement in England have increasingly emphasised the importance of avoiding overly simplistic assumptions about the construction of ethnic and cultural identity in this period, attempting to move away from the two opposing models which were previously the focus of critical debate: that the Scandinavian settlers either retained a distinctive ethnic identity for some time after settling in England, or quickly assimilated into the native population.15 The evidence suggests that it is instead more accurate to speak of the development of an Anglo-Scandinavian society, a fusion and intermingling of the two cultures which is reflected in the linguistic, artistic and archaeological record. As Katherine Holman puts it:
Just as the law of the Danelaw was neither Scandinavian or English, so the stone sculptures produced there in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the artefacts found in archaeological excavations and the personal names used by the settlers all testify to something that was different from what had gone before but also, crucially, from what was found back in Scandinavia […] The ethnicity in question is not Scandinavian, it is Anglo-Scandinavian.16
This is an important reminder of the complex issues of identity involved, not only in the first generations after the settlement but for later centuries too. Some medieval writers who talk about ‘the Danes’ in England view identity in binary and deterministic ways: a person is either Danish or English, and that origin influences how he or she behaves. However, many of the narratives we will be examining in this book have a more nuanced understanding of the factors which might influence how individuals identify their own or their family’s origins: shifting political allegiances, intermarriage, and linguistic and cultural fashion all affect what it meant to be Danish, or to call someone Danish, in medieval England.
1016 and 1066
In the first half of the tenth century, successive kings of Wessex fought to extend their power over areas of England under Scandinavian rule, and in the process paved the way for a united kingdom of England, subsuming the formerly independent kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia. The political landscape, however, remained complex: the command of northern England was contested by Norwegian, Scottish and Anglo-Saxon kings, as well as the Norse kings of Dublin and York.17 When the West Saxon king Æthelstan won a famous victory at Brunanburh in 937 – a battle which, as we shall see, became the subject of many later legends – his opponents were an alliance of Norse and Scottish armies led by Constantine of Scotland and Olaf Guthfrithson, Viking king of Dublin.18 While these leaders fought over Northumbria and York, the Danish settlers of the Midlands seem to have increasingly become an accepted part of the English kingdom, culturally and legally distinct, yet under the rule of the kings of Wessex: in 942, a poem in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle could praise Æthelstan’s brother Edmund for recovering the ‘Five Boroughs’ of the Danelaw – Derby, Nottingham, Lincoln, Leicester and Stamford – and rescuing the Danes of those regions from the ‘captive fetters’ of the heathen Norsemen.19
4. The Cuerdale hoard, one of the largest hoards of Viking silver ever found (©Jorge Royan, CC BY-SA 3.0)
At the end of the tenth century, Viking invasion once again became a pressing threat in the south of England. During the reign of Æthelred II (‘the Unready’), England began once more to be raided by Scandinavian armies, under the control of leaders including the kings of Denmark and Norway and the Viking warlord Thorkell the Tall.20 It is in this period that we begin to see a growing interest in exploring the earlier history of Danish invasion and settlement in England, with attempts to trace its patterns and understand cause and effect. Some examples of this interest, from both the Danish and English sides, will be discussed in Chapter 1; the triumphs of earlier Viking invaders, and the fates of the English kings they fought, had suddenly become intensely topical. In 1013, after two decades of raids, the Danish king Svein Forkbeard, accompanied by his son Cnut, finally embarked on a full-scale invasion of England. Within a few months they had driven Æthelred into exile, and Svein became the first Viking king to rule the whole of England. The 1013 conquest was the final stage of a long campaign of attrition, and it exposed something very interesting about the political situation of late Anglo-Saxon – or rather, Anglo-Scandinavian – England. At this date England had only been a unified country for a few generations, and when the Danes returned under Svein the kingdom fractured along old borders. Immediately on arrival in 1013, Svein came to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire and met with the leaders of Northumbria and the Midlands, who submitted to his rule without a fight, and he accepted the submission of all the people north of Watling Street – the ancient road which formed the traditional boundary between northern and southern England, and in this case, it would seem, between ‘Danish’ and ‘English’ England. Svein seems to have recognised and exploited this political faultline: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says his army did not raid in the north, but only began to cause damage once they had crossed the border of Watling Street into Wessex and the south of England.21 This seems to give us a glimpse into the Danes’ perception of English territory, and perhaps also into the allegiances of the men who came to meet Svein and accepted him as king. No doubt opposition to Æthelred, as well as sheer expediency, played some role in their decision to submit to the Danes; but many of them might well have had Scandinavian ancestry, some generations back, and they probably knew that the Danes had ruled in northern England before. For various reasons, Anglo-Saxon written sources tend to privilege the perspective of Wessex an
d the south, and we can only catch occasional glimpses of how the situation may have been viewed from other parts of England, but in 1013 it seems possible that there may have been many people in the north who did not object to the return of the Danes.
After Svein’s death early in 1014, his son Cnut had to fight for two years to recover his father’s kingdom, which was defended by Æthelred and his son, Edmund Ironside. By the end of 1016, however, with Æthelred and Edmund both dead, Cnut had established himself as king of England. He went on to rule, apparently without much opposition, for nearly 20 years, and England became part of a Scandinavian empire ruled by a Danish king. This was a situation rich in potential for mutual cultural exchange, when England and the Scandinavian world were more closely entwined than ever before or since. Many of Cnut’s Danish and Norwegian followers made their homes in England, marrying into English families and holding lands all over the country, and in these years a Scandinavian presence can be traced not only in the former Danelaw, but throughout England, from Wessex to Northumbria.22
Cnut’s two sons both died young, and his dynasty in England died with them. Æthelred’s son Edward (‘the Confessor’) returned from exile in Normandy to restore the line of the West Saxon kings, and the period of Danish rule in England proved to be short-lived. It was not quickly forgotten: men and women from Anglo-Danish families continued to hold positions of influence during Edward’s reign, and even for a short time after the Norman Conquest. However, the events of 1066, the year which saw one of the last serious attempts at a Viking invasion of England, led by the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada, also brought about a fundamental and irreversible change in England’s relationship with Scandinavia. England’s focus shifted towards the continent, and by the twelfth century the time of significant Anglo-Scandinavian interaction was increasingly a thing of the past. There are some exceptions: for a few years after the Conquest, Scandinavian involvement in English affairs remained a politically sensitive issue, as the Danes came to the aid of anti-Norman rebels, and Scandinavia became a place of refuge for English aristocrats displaced by the Conquest.23 Some parts of England continued to have ongoing ties with Scandinavia through commerce and trade, and it is important to remember that in the later medieval period, especially in the north, contact with Scandinavia was not only the stuff of distant history and legend – we cannot understand the texts which deal with England’s Viking past without taking into account the continuing links between the lands around the North Sea, and Iceland too.24 As well as trade, there were also enduring connections between the English and Scandinavian churches; in the Anglo-Saxon period the English church had played an important role in establishing Christianity in Scandinavia, and those ecclesiastical networks continued throughout the Middle Ages.25
History becomes legend:
remembering the Vikings
The centuries following the Norman Conquest saw an explosion in interest in narratives about England’s pre-Conquest history, in romance, historical writing and hagiography.26 In many cases, writing about the history of Anglo-Saxon England necessarily involved attempts to interpret England’s Viking Age past, and to understand the role that Scandinavian conquest and settlement played in national and regional history. It is these narratives about the Vikings in England – interpreting and reimagining the past from the perspective of decades and centuries later – which are the subject of this book. Although the history of Viking contact with England, briefly sketched in this introduction, spans more than three centuries at the most conservative dating – between the first Viking raids on northern England, conventionally dated to the end of the eighth century, and the end of the eleventh century – two periods in that lengthy history take on special prominence in post-Conquest English narratives: the invasions led by the (supposed) sons of Ragnar Lothbrok in the ninth century and by Svein Forkbeard and Cnut in the eleventh. As a result, there are huge swathes of Viking history which are hardly touched upon in this body of material. The narratives we will be considering deal primarily with England, only rarely mentioning the activities of the Vikings in Ireland, Scotland and other parts of Europe; they also tend to refer to all Scandinavians as ‘Danes’, whether or not they originated in Denmark. As ‘Danes’ is the term most commonly used in the English medieval sources, it will frequently be used in this book, and in many cases it will be best understood as not referring strictly to people from Denmark (or their descendants), but reflecting a later, Anglo-centric perception of Viking Age raiders and settlers from Scandinavia.27
It is important to note, too, that this retrospective interest in England’s Viking Age history was by no means one-way. There are many medieval histories and sagas from Norway, Iceland, Denmark and other parts of Scandinavia, mostly dating from the twelfth century and afterwards, which explore the activities of the Vikings in England, as well as in the rest of northern Europe and further afield.28f Just as in England, medieval historians in Scandinavia and Iceland were well aware that the Viking Age had been a period of very close ties between England and the Scandinavian world, when invasion, trade and settlement provided many contexts for cultural interaction – particularly during the eleventh century, when England was part of Cnut’s great North Sea empire. In discussing this period, Old Norse sagas sometimes include England as part of the region they call Norðrlönd, ‘the northern lands’, more commonly a term for Scandinavia.29 Later writers also knew that this close political and cultural relationship had been fundamentally altered in the second half of the eleventh century, chiefly as a result of the Norman Conquest and the events of 1066 – a year which had momentous consequences for Scandinavia too, because of the death of the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada on an English battlefield. A famous passage from Gunnlaugs saga, written in Iceland in the thirteenth century but set several centuries earlier, describes this closeness in the time of Æthelred II, around the year 1000:
Ein var þá tunga á Englandi sem í Nóregi ok í Danmǫrku. En þá skiptusk tungur í Englandi, er Vilhjálmr bastarðr vann England; gekk þaðan af í Englandi valska, er hann var þaðan ættaðr.30
(At that time there was the same language in England as in Norway and Denmark. But the language in England was changed when William the Bastard conquered the country; French prevailed in England from that time forth, since he himself was French by birth.)
It is fascinating to see the author of this saga so conscious of the changes in the English language which had taken place between the late Anglo-Saxon period and his own day. In the saga, this detail of linguistic history is introduced in order to set the scene for a literary interaction – a story of an Icelandic poet composing a poem, in Old Norse, for an English king. It is one of numerous Norse sagas which imagine contact between Iceland, Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England, describing Scandinavian characters participating in English politics and fighting battles in England (often on behalf of Anglo-Saxon kings, as well as against them). These stories have varying amounts of historical plausibility, but they reflect a continuing interest in the relationship between England and Scandinavia; at times they also seem to be drawing on English oral or written sources about this period of history, providing details or perspectives which no longer survive from England, and so from time to time we will have cause to refer to these Norse sources as a comparison for the English material.
Almost as soon as the Vikings began to make an impact on England, legends and stories about them began to spread. The narratives we will look at may in some cases have originated as early as the ninth century, even if they were not written down until long after the Norman Conquest. We will begin, however, at the end of the tenth century, on the eve of Svein Forkbeard’s conquest of England. This starting point has been chosen for two reasons. Firstly, this was a moment when past examples of Viking invasion and settlement were of the utmost contemporary relevance – when to write about the history of the Danes in England was a politically sensitive act, an intervention in a fraught and contentious debate about how to respond to
Viking invasion. Secondly, it is intended to underline the significance of the Danish conquest, so often overshadowed by the events of 50 years later; the purpose is to emphasise the potential for continuity as well as change across the traditional boundary of the Norman Conquest, the complex processes of assimilation and accommodation which were atwork in both Anglo-Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman England, and the extent to which literature in the second half of the eleventh century and afterwards drew on texts and traditions from before the Norman Conquest.31
For many of the medieval writers we will be looking at in this book, England’s pre-Conquest history – including the history of the Scandinavian invasions – was a formative period in national and regional identity, which had shaped and influenced the country they knew. Beginning in the late Anglo-Saxon period, then, when Viking attacks were still a potent threat, we will see how the earliest waves of Viking invasion first became the subject of legend, and then how the questions of integration and cultural exchange which these stories dramatise again became pressing in the aftermath of another conquest by a foreign power in 1066. After this we will turn to the most capacious and widely circulated body of legend about the Danes in England: stories about the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, which give various interpretations for their invasion of England, exploring their motives, their characters, and their different fates. We will then look at some narratives about the adventures of the Danish warrior Siward, earl of Northumbria, and the heroes Waldef and Hereward the Wake, and we will see how a long-standing belief among some medieval writers that the Danes had a legitimate claim to rule England became linked to one of the most popular heroes of medieval romance, the dragon-slayer, pilgrim and pious Norman knight Guy of Warwick. Then we will turn to stories about Havelok, the Danish king beloved in medieval Lincolnshire, and his foster-father Grim, the founder of Grimsby. Finally, we will explore how the Danes were remembered in English folklore, long after the end of the medieval period.
Dragon Lords Page 2