Dragon Lords

by Eleanor Parker

  19. A twelfth-century window from Canterbury Cathedral, showing the Viking siege of Canterbury and St Ælfheah being captured and killed by the Danes

  After this Ælfheah is taken prisoner by the Danish fleet, and throughout the months of his captivity he is shown gaining converts among the Danes, preaching and baptising, until only the leaders of the army resist his influence. Osbern consistently distinguishes between the Danish army and its leaders – who go unnamed after the first reference to Svein and Thorkell – and indicates that some of the Danes followed and protected Ælfheah. It is Ælfheah’s insistence on making converts, as well as his refusal (or inability) to pay ransom, which causes the leaders of the army to decide to kill him, because they fear he is turning their own men against them. His success in converting the army brings about his death, but it also sows the seeds for his final triumph: as sentence of death is pronounced upon him, Ælfheah speaks a prophecy, telling the Danes that if they do not convert to Christianity they will not ‘take root’ in England.83 Unlike St Dunstan’s prophetic speech to Æthelred, this prophecy is less a threat than a promise – it suggests that if they do convert, they can take root, and so it proves.

  As soon as Ælfheah is dead, his prophecy begins to come true. It is Ælfheah’s Danish converts who are the first to proclaim him a saint and martyr, and his dying prophetic metaphor is brought to life with his first posthumous miracle. The few Danes who remain sceptical propose a trial of his sanctity: if a wooden oar sprouts new life after it is dipped in Ælfheah’s blood, they will agree that Ælfheah was a holy man and allow his followers to bury his body. The oar miraculously blooms; the Danish oar has literally taken root in English land, and the very force which kept Ælfheah captive, Viking sea-power, becomes the means of demonstrating his sanctity. It is a living metaphor for the converted Danes who will now, as the narrative goes on to show, conquer and rule England under Cnut by the guidance of St Ælfheah. Ælfheah’s body is taken for burial in London, accompanied by crowds of Danes and English.

  Osbern shows the archbishop as a figure around whom conquerors and conquered can unite, and this theme is even more prominent in the fuller account of Ælfheah’s translation written after the Vita, in which Osbern develops the central figure of Cnut as the supreme example of Ælfheah’s power at conversion. The translation of Ælfheah from his first place of burial at St Paul’s back to Canterbury seems to have been one of the acts Cnut undertook in atonement for the injuries of his conquest, and it involved an elaborate public ceremony, witnessed by Cnut, Emma and their young son Harthacnut.84 This was a politically charged action for a number of reasons: it was not only a form of reparation for the most high-profile killing of the Danish conquest, but also an opportunity to remove a potential focus of anti-Danish feeling in London and to win the support of Canterbury.85 The translation took place in 1023 on 8 June – the same date as the first Viking raids on Lindisfarne in 793, which is probably a coincidence, although it is a strikingly fitting date for an act of atonement for Danish sins against the English.86 While the Vita is anguished and tense, the Translatio is cheerful and raucous in tone, emphasising at length the king’s personal involvement in the removal of the relics. Osbern presents the translation as an act of propitiation, which is undertaken by Cnut after he witnesses the punishments visited on Thorkell and the other Danish killers of Ælfheah: by the power of God and St Ælfheah the Danes’ ships are wrecked at sea and many are drowned, and Thorkell is murdered by his own countrymen when he returns to Denmark. Cnut’s decision to translate and honour Ælfheah is motivated by a desire to avoid divine punishment himself, but is also said to be activated by knowledge of Ælfheah’s final prophecy. It is his veneration for Ælfheah which wins him control of England: after he has been told about Ælfheah’s warning that the Danes will never take root in England unless they convert, he agrees to return the saint’s body to Canterbury, ‘and a sign of divine propitiation followed the council. For a few days later Cnut made peace and gained, after the peace, half the realm, and later the whole.’87

  Osbern knew, of course, that the Danes under Cnut did ‘take root’ in England, so this prophecy helps to explain how it was permitted, and how these events could be interpreted not as punishment for the English (as in Dunstan’s prophecy to Æthelred) but more positively, as an example of St Ælfheah’s powers of reconciliation and conversion. The translation is presented as Cnut’s own decision and arrangement, undertaken with the cooperation of Archbishop Æthelnoth and two Canterbury monks, whom Osbern names as his informants for these events. When Cnut, Æthelnoth and the monks break open Ælfheah’s tomb in St Paul’s, Cnut addresses the saint’s body, asking forgiveness for the injuries inflicted on Ælfheah, and imploring the saint not to blame him for the sins of his ‘kinsmen’ (parentes).88 Whether this is intended to be a reference to Svein only, or to align Cnut with his more distant Viking forefathers, it is a reminder of Cnut’s Danish ancestry as well as his new condition as a penitent Christian king.

  The king and archbishop remove the body from its resting-place to Cnut’s ship, which is described as ‘a royal longship with golden dragon prows’.89 The king takes the helm himself and steers the ship across the Thames to Southwark, from where he sends Æthelnoth to Canterbury with the body. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Ælfheah’s body was taken away from London by boat, but the dragon-ship is Osbern’s addition, and this too seems to draw inspiration from Cnut’s Danish identity: as in the miracle of the oar, Viking naval power has been converted to serve the glory of the English martyr. The removal is aided by Cnut’s own soldiers, ‘who are called “housecarls” in the language of the Danes’, Osbern notes.90 The use of this Old Norse word highlights the housecarls’ Scandinavian identity, their linguistic and cultural difference – but here they are allies in the service of Ælfheah, joining with the monks of Canterbury against the people of London.

  20. A modern image of St Ælfheah on a tomb in Canterbury Cathedral

  Osbern paints a picture of Cnut as an eager convert, a Danish king who develops a strong personal devotion to Ælfheah. In exchange for his service, Ælfheah grants him rule of a newly united kingdom of England, where Danes and English cooperate in honouring the martyred archbishop. Osbern’s two works on Ælfheah offer a narrative in which the violence of the conquest is quickly replaced by unity between conquerors and conquered, achieved through the mutual veneration of English saints. Even more so than in Herman’s Miracula, Cnut emerges here as an exemplary figure, ready to be guided by English churchmen and to atone for the actions of his Danish ancestors. This is a narrative which imagines a process of conciliation following a disruptive conquest, proposing that even a violent invasion can result in a reign of justice, and that rulers newly rooted in a foreign land may grow and flourish if they align themselves with the people they have conquered. Writing about the Danish conquest provided an opportunity to explore questions of cultural interaction and assimilation in a way that must have been particularly useful in Canterbury after the Norman Conquest, and it is in this context that we should interpret Osbern’s narrative of Danish rule as a period in which English identity and continuity with the past had been seriously challenged, almost overcome, but had proved resilient, and able to successfully absorb and work with a new ruling class.

  These narratives about saints and Vikings are part of a much larger body of narrative material about the Danish invasions developing and circulating at the end of the eleventh century. Herman’s story about Svein’s death may already have been in circulation, since Osbern also knew that Svein had been ‘killed in a terrible manner by almighty God’, although he does not mention Edmund’s role;91 similarly, the revised version of Herman’s Miracula, which was produced at Bury St Edmunds c.1100, adds a number of details which read like the growing elaborations of legend, including the detail of Thorkell’s revenge for his sisters and a speech from St Edmund to Svein which sounds remarkably like Byrhtnoth’s threat to the Vikings at Maldon, defiantly proffer
ing him weapons in place of the money the Danes have demanded.92 Osbern has St Ælfheah respond to the Danes’ demands for tribute with a similar kind of riddling substitution: instead of money, he says, he will set before them ‘the gold of divine wisdom.’93

  The Danish conquest of 1013–16 had provided new saints and martyrs of Viking invasion, but other kinds of stories were still being told. Not long after Osbern completed his works on Ælfheah, his younger contemporary at Canterbury, Eadmer, wrote the first stand-alone account of St Oda, the Viking’s son who became Archbishop of Canterbury. Probably written shortly before 1100, this was one of Eadmer’s earliest historical works, and it draws on Byrhtferth’s Vita S. Oswaldi as well as Osbern’s writings on Dunstan.94 In an attempt to reclaim Oda’s cult for Canterbury (where he was buried), Eadmer returned to the saint whose Danish ancestry had, a century before, provided a story of integration and conversion in the aftermath of foreign invasion. Like Byrhtferth, he draws attention to Oda’s Danish ancestry as evidence of the pagan origins from which he sprang:

  Venerabilis Christi confessor Odo, nobilibus sed paganis parentibus oriundus, sicut rosa e spinis floruit, uel quasi pretiosum de uilibus uasculis aroma processit. Nam ex impia illa senatorum multitudine fertur genus habuisse quae olim sceleratissimum praedonem Inguarem comitata nauali manu in regnum Anglorum est aduecta.

  (The venerable confessor of Christ, Oda, who was descended from noble though pagan parents, flourished like a rose among thorns, or, to put it another way, issued forth like a priceless perfume from a worthless vessel. For he is said to have taken his lineage from that horde of godless nobility who were transported long ago in the company of Ivar, a most wicked plunderer, to the kingdom of the English by a naval force.)95

  The Vikings here are certainly wicked, but Oda’s story goes on to show how they were absorbed into England. Later on, Eadmer adds to his source the account of a particularly appropriate and dramatic miracle, performed by Oda for King Æthelstan. He tells how Oda accompanies Æthelstan to the battle of Brunanburh, a fight against ‘a vast army of heathens’. Æthelstan’s sword breaks at a crucial moment in the battle, and the king is at a loss, left weaponless in the face of his enemies. But Oda is at his side and saves him, miraculously mending his broken sword.96 This is not the last time we will see a medieval writer reimagining the circumstances of the battle of Brunanburh, or attaching a story to this famous victory. It is not clear what Eadmer’s source for this story may have been, but it must have seemed fitting that Oda, the converted son of a pagan Dane, should intervene to help Æthelstan win this great battle over the Vikings.97 In Chapter 2 we will look at the English legends which developed around what Eadmer calls the ‘horde of godless nobility’, Ivar and his army, but there is one final point to make about what Oda’s story may have suggested to English readers at the close of the eleventh century. At an early stage in the manuscript tradition, including in two (now lost) manuscripts probably written in the 1090s, Eadmer’s Vita Sancti Odonis is found in a unit of three with Osbern’s two works on Ælfheah.98 These works all deal with saintly archbishops of Canterbury, so they have many overlapping interests and concerns, but these three texts would also incidentally have provided a reader with a narrative of English history bounded by two Danish invasions: the Viking army with which Oda’s father came to England, and the conquest of Cnut, who was converted into Ælfheah’s most influential supporter. For a reader at the end of the eleventh century, this must have been a powerful story of cultural and religious conversion, giving two saints of Canterbury – Viking’s son and Vikings’ victim – a central role to play in shaping an England which had survived and absorbed the Viking threat.

  CHAPTER 2

  The sons of Ragnar

  Lothbrok

  The leaders of the Viking armies who invaded England in the second half of the ninth century became the subject of a wide array of later legends, especially the men we have already encountered as the supposed killers of St Edmund of East Anglia: Ivar, Ubbe and their brothers. In time, these men came to be identified as the sons of the semi-legendary warrior Ragnar Lothbrok, one of the most famous Vikings in Scandinavian history. Ragnar and his sons feature in sagas, chronicles and poems from Denmark, Norway, Iceland and elsewhere, with the most extended and colourful stories about them dating from the twelfth century and later. The modern popular image of the Vikings – fearless, ruthless, death-defying – evolved in large part from these Old Norse sagas and poems about Ragnar and his sons, after they were rediscovered by antiquarian scholars in the seventeenth century.1 It is difficult to separate the sparse facts about Ragnar and his sons from the many legends which grew up around them, but the historical origins of these figures have been the subject of a considerable amount of investigation from scholars, who have worked to untangle history from legend and to trace the development of these stories as they spread around the Scandinavian world and beyond.2

  The fullest versions of these legends are the vivid and detailed Scandinavian texts, but a few sources – preserved mostly in short summary form, in Latin chronicles and saints’ lives – suggest there were also various stories about Ragnar Lothbrok and his offspring circulating in medieval England. It has been argued that these narratives may have had their ultimate origin in the Anglo-Scandinavian society of the Danelaw, as settlers and their descendants attempted to explain or justify the Viking invasions of northern and eastern England in the ninth century.3 Whether we think of this as taking place in the early days after the settlement, as was the traditional view, or in the twelfth century, as has more recently been suggested,4 these short English narratives are often discussed primarily in relationship to the Scandinavian tradition, rather than in their own right. In this chapter we will attempt to do something different: we will trace the development of these stories within their English context, to explore what they could have meant for English audiences at a time when the Viking Age was an increasingly distant memory.

  The Lothbrok legend

  The Ragnar Lothbrok of the Norse legends is a Viking warrior and king, a serpent-slayer and the father of many warlike sons. One of his adventures explains how he got his nickname: to defend himself in a fight against two poisonous serpents, he coated his legs in woolly breeches covered with tar, and so earned himself the name loðbrók, ‘shaggy breeches’. Various sources give him at least three wives, one of whom he wins by this serpent-slaying exploit; another wife is a dauntless female warrior who fights alongside him in battle, and the third is the daughter of the great hero Sigurðr the Völsung. By these wives Ragnar has at least eight sons, who all embark on adventures of their own, raiding and ruling across northern Europe. In the end, the legend goes, Ragnar meets his death in England after raiding in Northumbria. He is captured by the Northumbrian king Ælla and put to a cruel death in a snake-pit. With his last words as he lies dying he laughs in the face of death, declaring that his sons will come to avenge him. They do, and Ælla is made to pay dearly for Ragnar’s death.5

  This is the story as told by a range of Scandinavian sources, including the thirteenth-century Old Norse Ragnars saga loðbrókar, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, writing between c.1188 and c.1208, and numerous others.6 These narratives are a synthesis of what may originally have been a variety of disparate legends, attached to the names of a number of Viking leaders who were probably the ultimate historical antecedents of Ragnar and his sons: Reginheri, who sacked Paris in 845, a man named Björn who was raiding around the Seine in 857–9, and the Ivar, Ubbe and Halfdan who were active in France, Ireland and England in the second half of the ninth century.7 However, it is evident even from this brief summary that the legends about these men developed very far from any likely historical origins. Although the English traditions about Ragnar and his sons are related to these legends, they in fact share very few of the details of the story summarised above, and have their own interpretation of the details they do share. The name Ragnar does not even appear in the English sources (with one possible
exception, which will be discussed below). The equivalent figure in England is named only Lothbrok, with no explanation for how he got that name. In place of the large number of sons attributed to Ragnar in the Scandinavian traditions, the Lothbrok of the English sources is usually credited with just two or three: Ivar (whose name usually appears in medieval English texts as Inguar or Hinguar), Ubbe and Beorn. Another brother, Halfdan, who features among the sons of Ragnar in the Scandinavian legends, is identified in Anglo-Saxon sources as a brother of Ivar, but is never made the son of Lothbrok in an English source.

  In their earliest appearances in the historical record, the Viking leaders who may have been the origins of these legendary figures are not linked to any named father, nor are they always identified as brothers. In the second half of the eleventh century, however, they began to be named as the sons of a man called ‘Lothbrok’. The first to make this identification was the Norman historian William of Jumièges, writing around 1070. In his Gesta Normannorum Ducum, writing about Viking raids on northern France in the middle of the ninth century, William mentions a warrior named Bier (Björn), son of King Lothbrok. This Bier, he says, was known as ‘Ironside’, because his mother had protected him with magic spells of invulnerability which meant he could fight unarmed on a battlefield and yet not be injured by any weapons.8 William says it was the law among the Danes that a father would exile all his sons from his land except one, who would be his heir, and so Lothbrok exiled Bier, who left home to conquer lands for himself. Accompanied by his tutor Hasting, he gathered an army of other young men and raided across France and Italy. Bier was subsequently shipwrecked on the coast of England as he was sailing back to Denmark, and finally met his death in Frisia. Nothing else is said of his father Lothbrok. It has been argued that William’s identification of Bier as the son of Lothbrok came from English or Anglo-Scandinavian tradition, rather than from Normandy, especially in light of the fact that the nickname ‘Ironside’ may have been borrowed from the name of Cnut’s opponent, Æthelred’s son Edmund Ironside.9