The White Horse King: The Life of Alfred the Great

by Benjamin R. Merkle

  As the two shieldwalls closed on one another, men from the rear ranks began to lob their spears over the heads of the forward shield-wall and into the approaching lines of Viking soldiers. In a moment, the sky was black with Viking and Saxon javelins, each spear (or “gar” according to the Anglo-Saxon tongue) traced a slow and gentle path through the early summer sky. The paths of the spears seemed at first almost comically slow and clumsy. Each spear weighed less than two pounds and moved so slowly that a man could easily sidestep the missile’s fall or catch the spear with his bare hand before it hit the ground.

  But the synchronized launch of thousands of spears so clouded the sky with the plummeting darts that a man’s upward-turned eyes were overwhelmed instantly and could not even begin to pick out the individual spear that was marked for his forehead. But even if a man was able to identify the spear that was aimed at him, if he was in a forward position in the shieldwall, then his body was so tightly pinned between the bodies of his comrades that he had no possibility of sidestepping the falling spear point.

  Down the spears rained on the two bands of warriors. Despite the light weight of these missiles, by the time they reached impact they had gathered enough momentum that they would drive straight through the torso of a grown man and emerge on the other side. If the doomed soldier was wearing a mail byrnie, the head of the spear could still split the armor and sink four to five inches into his flesh. When the soaring flock of spears landed on the shieldwall below, a cacophony of bellows and screams erupted as the mortally wounded fell to the ground thrashing, spitted by the slender shafts of ash. Of course, many of the men managed to block the incoming spears with their raised shields. But the falling shaft still carried enough momentum that it would drive though the wooden shield and stick up to a foot out the other side, frequently splitting the arm that held the shield as well.

  The spear head was designed with a barb that made it impossible to pull the spear back out once the spear had driven through the linden planks of a shield. This meant that a man who had successfully blocked an oncoming spear with his shield (without severely damaging his own arm in the process) now had an immovable six-foot shaft projecting from his shield, rendering his shield so awkward to wield that it became useless and had to be discarded. As the two armies spent their throwing spears, the front ranks of the two shieldwalls were weakened. The dead and wounded dropped to the ground and were swiftly replaced from behind. Those who had lost their shields moved to the back of the shieldwall and readied their axes for the next stage of combat.

  Still the two shieldwalls drew ever closer to one another. Even as the dead fell all around them, Alfred worked hard to urge his men forward with unflagging determination and courage. The Vikings, for their part, continued working on intimidating and demoralizing the Saxon line. If a hole could be created in the Wessex shieldwall before the lines had even met, then the Vikings could easily rip through the Wessex ranks at the moment the two shieldwalls collided, and the battle would be a rout. But as long as the Saxons resolutely held their formation tightly together, as long as men swiftly and willingly stepped in to fill every gap created by a fallen soldier, then the Wessex shieldwall would be impenetrable, and the Saxons would stand a good chance of dominating the place of slaughter.

  But the Vikings still had one more deadly weapon to launch at the Saxons before the opposing shieldwalls collided. When the two forces were still twenty paces apart from one another, small bands of maniacally crazed Viking warriors burst forward from behind the Danish shieldwall and sprinted straight at the Saxon ranks. These lunatic bands were the Viking berserkers, the shock force of the Danish army. They were Odin’s special devotees, men who prepared for battle with a hypnotic ritual dance that drove them into a mindless, bloodthirsty frenzy.

  Before a battle, these men danced in small circles and, through great concentration and an occasional hallucinogenic mushroom, worked their minds into a murderous craze, a mental state they referred to as berserkergang. They painted their faces to appear like hideously grotesque wild beasts and went either nude or wore only the skins of bears or wolves. They believed that as their minds were overcome with the bloodlust frenzy and they entered the berserkergang, the spirits of wild beasts possessed them and gave them the strength of wolves and bears.1

  For Guthrum, the real advantage of deploying the berserker bands was not in their ability to inflict significant casualties on the opposing force but rather in their ability to instill terror in the front ranks of the opposing army as the two forces approached. The spectacle of a few dozen maniacal nude warriors slashing bloodthirstily through the Saxon shieldwall created a powerful sensation of despair in the Wessex troop. And a shield-wall filled with desperation was easy to break. Thus, the attack of the berserkers, sprinting straight into the Saxon ranks in a shrieking murderous delirium, hacking and slashing, was calculated to weaken the Saxon resolve just moments before the two shieldwalls clashed, like an artillery salvo softening up the resistance just before the landing of troops on an enemy beachhead.

  The shrieking bands of berserkers crashed into the Wessex shieldwall in a maniacal frenzy. But, contrary to Guthrum’s hopes, the Saxon warriors were less than terrified by the streaking Danes. The naked Northmen, convinced that the animal spirits that possessed them had rendered them invincible, were sorely disappointed when the front rank of the Wessex force stood resolute and unflinching. Within seconds, the wave of berserkers lay impaled on ashen spears or dismembered by Saxon axes, and the Saxon wall stood unbroken and more confident than before.

  With one last shout, Alfred, the ring-giver of Wessex, urged his men to be true to their vows and fired their hearts with courage as the Saxon line braced for the coming impact. Across the shrinking gap between the two armies, the last of the Viking taunts and the various pagan invocations of Odin swirled in the air and soon turned into one indiscernible gore-hungry red-faced maniacal shriek. In that deafening roar of bloodcurdling shouting and horrific howling the two shieldwalls crashed into one another.

  Spears cracked, shields split, axes crashed down, cleaving helm and skull. The front ranks did their best to hold the protective wall of shields tightly together while attempting to drive hard against the opposing wall. The next few ranks raised their spears overhead and looked for opportunities to drive their shafts down between the overlapped shields of the opposite wall. Spears searched and probed, looking between the linden shields for an inch of unguarded flesh to stab or slice. The keen eyes of the spearmen hunted vigorously for an uncovered shoulder, an exposed thigh, or an unwary skull.

  Wherever a faltering or inattentive defense could be found, there the spearmen drove their deadly shafts. First they gashed open exposed limbs. Then as the wounds began to add up and the pain and blood loss weakened the fey warrior, his shield dropped lower and lower and his vital organs became vulnerable to attack. With deadly cunning the spearmen worked on the defenses of one another’s shieldwalls, like wolves singling out the easiest kills. Then, as the men from the front ranks were cut down by the constantly stabbing spear tips, the shieldwall would weaken momentarily. At that moment, the opposing shieldwall could drive hard in the hopes that an opening had been cut in the enemy wall, but if the fallen warrior’s place was filled quickly and the drive repulsed, then the game would begin again.

  Throughout the course of the morning, the two bloodied armies contested for possession of the place of slaughter. The Viking host was grimly determined to hew a sacrifice for the beaks and talons of the circling ravens, a gory gift to their ravenous war god Odin. But the Christian army fought no less determinedly, having now come to understand what the consequences would be if they were to lose this last opportunity to drive the pagan invaders from their nation. For the better part of that day, the combat raged on. Often the two shieldwalls would separate for a moment or two, giving the men a brief respite. Then, once vaguely refreshed, the two walls would clash once more, probing and searching for the weak link— a softness in the shieldwall
—where the opposing ranks could be driven apart and the enemy forces routed. But victory at the battle of Edington would not be seized easily.

  The battle raged on well into the afternoon, after both sides had already paid dearly. As both shieldwalls became severely depleted by the casualties of the combat and as an intense exhaustion began to weigh the fatigued warriors down, it was clear that the determining factor of the battle would be a simple matter of discovering who had more endurance. The sprint had become a marathon. The two forces were evenly matched in numbers and strength, so the victor would be decided by whichever side was willing to continue putting everything into the shieldwall for the longest time.

  At some point late in the afternoon, the ferocity of the Viking assault began to flag and lose its bite. They did not care for the land of Wessex nearly as much as the men of Wessex, and so, in the end, they were not able to outlast the determination and passion of the shieldwall Alfred commanded. Soon the decline in intensity of the Danes could be felt by the shieldwall of Wessex as it began to require less effort to hold its ground against the raiding army. The sudden realization that the Viking force was weakening galvanized the Saxon troop, which renewed its determination and sent them pushing harder and more resolutely against the Viking defenses. With spirits fired for victory, the men of Wessex strained against the stretching and faltering Danish lines.

  Finally, the Viking shieldwall broke, and the full fury of the Anglo-Saxon warriors poured through the Viking ranks with such a wild ferocity that Odin himself would have cringed. With readied axes and swords, the men of Wessex cut a swath of carnage through the pagan ranks that made the Viking berserkers look like gentle lambs in comparison. Having lost the ability to hold together the shieldwall formation, the Viking ranks became governed by chaos and bedlam. Some of the Danes, knowing their doom was upon them, turned and fled from the battlefield, but most continued to fight on in smaller bands.

  No longer was the fighting a coordinated affair of long rows of overlapping shields and well-aimed spear thrusts. Now the combat turned to the mad havoc of sword and axe fighting. Each man stood or fell by the quickness and power of his blows and the agility of his feet. But as it gradually became clearer to the Danes that the battle had been lost to them, they no longer fought with the goal of holding the place of slaughter but rather for a chance to find room to bolt from the battlefield, happy to escape with their lives.

  At this point it was clear that the fyrds of Wessex had put the Danish army to rout, and they began to feel again the old temptation to relax their attack, to turn away from the bloody battle to nurse their own wounds and begin enjoying their victory. But Alfred had learned the hard way how failing to press on even after a clear victory could easily turn the tide of the battle against him. The king, who once earned for himself the title “the wild boar” for his rampaging combat at the battle of Ashdown, was unrelenting in his attack. He fought on fiercely and unrelentingly. Those Danes who still stood on the battlefield trying to save their own lives, if not the battle, were soon surrounded and overpowered by Wessex soldiers, who cut them down mercilessly. On they fought, until the fields of Edington were drenched with Danish blood, and not one Viking remained standing on the place of slaughter.

  Once the enemy had been driven entirely from the battlefield, Alfred ordered the Saxon forces to chase the Danes who had escaped. All through the late afternoon and into the night, the Wessex soldiers pursued the fleeing Vikings, savagely slaying all whom they found. In the gloaming of the early summer evening, the Saxons searched through fen and forest for their prey, following the reckless footprints, the bloody tracks, and the tortured moanings of the panicked Danes. Once more the roles had reversed, and Alfred was again the hunter, tracking his prey in the wilds of Wessex. Guthrum was the prey, slinking silently through the night back to the safety of his stronghold in Chippenham.

  Guthrum managed to find his way back to his fortress that night, eluding the hunters of Wessex and slipping back into Chippenham before dawn the next morning. By sunrise, a handful of the surviving Danes had joined Guthrum and, along with the forces the Viking king had left behind to protect his temporary capital, they began to fortify the walls of Chippenham in a desperate attempt to prepare for the coming Saxon siege.

  Their preparations were none too soon. Within hours of daybreak, Alfred had positioned his army all about Guthrum’s feebly defended walls, cutting off all chance of escape. Once he had ensured that his siege of the walls of Chippenham was sufficiently orchestrated, Alfred turned his remaining troops to the land surrounding Chippenham, laying to waste what had become over the past few months a Viking settlement. Any captured Danes were slaughtered immediately, and the horses and cattle the Vikings had pastured outside the city walls were all seized.

  Within the walls of Chippenham, the scene began to look desperate. The Viking strength had been cut to ribbons at the battle of Edington. The few surviving warriors who had managed to return from the slaughter were wounded and exhausted. The reserve troops that Guthrum had kept behind at Chippenham were too few to resist the Saxon throng outside the gate. And if the predicament of the Danes was not already dire, the Chippenham fortress had just begun to reach the end of its winter stores, as the harvest was still many months away and the fortress had not yet been sufficiently supplied to hold out for any length of time. It is not surprising that the historical account of Guthrum’s plight from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described the Danes at this point as “terrified by hunger, cold, and fear.”

  Alfred and his men waited hungrily at the gates of Chippenham for an entire fortnight, looking for their opportunity to strike and definitively end the Viking excursion into Wessex. As the impossibility of his situation became clear, Guthrum finally resigned himself to pleading for Alfred’s mercy and seeking out terms of surrender. After fourteen days of siege, Guthrum sent a message to Alfred begging for an opportunity to abandon Chippenham and remove his men from Wessex entirely. In his desperation, the Viking king offered to give to Alfred as many hostages as the Saxon king requested and promised to let Alfred choose the hostages. Additionally, Guthrum offered to leave without taking any Wessex hostages with him.

  All the Danish ruler requested was that he and his men might be allowed to leave Wessex alive. An invading Viking king had never before offered this type of one-sided peace treaty, one-sided in the favor of the Saxons. But the battle of Edington had suddenly reduced Guthrum to groveling for his life.

  Alfred was prepared to grant Guthrum the mercy for which he begged. Up to this point, the Wessex king had been cruel and harsh in pressing home his victory. This brutality had been necessary to ensure that he not allow the Saxon victory to slip from his grasp. Now that his victory was sure and his throne was securely established once again, it was time to make room for mercy. Alfred sent the Danish emissary back to Guthrum with the good news that the king of Wessex was prepared to allow the Danes to quit the town of Chippenham peacefully, though Alfred made one significant addition to the terms of Guthrum’s surrender.

  In granting Guthrum’s desperate request, Alfred was being much more gracious to Guthrum than the Danish conquerors had ever been to the various Saxon kings who had surrendered to the Viking raiding armies. In East Anglia, Ubbe Ragnarsson and Ivar the Boneless had mockingly filled King Edmund with arrows until he bristled like a hedgehog, and then beheaded the Christian king. In Northumbria, Ivar and Halfdan had ritually sacrificed King Ælle to the Norse god Odin in the gruesome spectacle of the blood eagle. If this Guthrum were to be treated as the Viking kings had previously treated their conquered foes, if this humbled Danish king were to receive measure for measure, he would be cruelly executed before the Saxon troops for their evening’s entertainment, and all the captured Viking soldiers would be quickly beheaded. Alfred was determined to make his victory clear to the vanquished Dane in terms that the Vikings would understand, but he also wanted to set a new example with this victory.

  And so, just as Ivar and Halfdan ha
d once sacrificed the conquered King Ælle to their god in the barbaric blood eagle ceremony, Alfred insisted that Guthrum must likewise be given over to the God of his conquerors. If Guthrum refused, the doom of the Viking soldiers was certain, and they would never leave Chippenham alive. Rather than the sadistic human sacrifice that Odin required, however, Alfred insisted that Guthrum be handed over to the Christian God by the bloodless ceremony of baptism. The Vikings could go free from Chippenham if Guthrum was given to the triune God of Christianity through Christian baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

  Throughout the ninth century, baptism had often played an important role in the negotiations between pagan and Christian rulers. Numerous Viking rulers leading campaigns in northern Europe had already received Christian baptism in the hopes that the adoption of the Christian faith would improve their ability to bargain with the Carolingian rulers. Of course the effectiveness of this practice remains a debatable matter. Many of the pagans receiving baptism proved to have undertaken the ceremony with less-than-noble intentions. The seed sown in the hearts of the Viking rulers often fell on stony places or amidst choking thorns.

  Certainly, Alfred had good reason to be suspicious of oaths taken by Danes. He had already seen the Vikings break countless vows, vows made before the Christian God, vows made to their own gods, even vows made with Viking hostages given as guarantees. None of these had proved sure. How could Alfred think that Guthrum would suddenly begin to respect the vow of Christian baptism? Nevertheless, after a siege of one fortnight, this is what Alfred demanded of Guthrum: not only was Guthrum required to take Alfred’s God as his own, but King Alfred was to stand as Guthrum’s new godfather at this christening. Guthrum accepted Alfred’s terms immediately and swore to Alfred that he would honor the terms of this treaty, offering to Alfred his pick of the surviving Danish noblemen for hostages to guarantee this vow.