by Iain Gately
Alcohol also appears in the rules produced by Irishmen, in the style of St. Benedict, for use in their native monasteries. St. Gildas (AD 504- 570) was responsible for the earliest example of these, in which he acknowledged that monks must be allowed to drink, and that even if they did so to excess then this was no great sin: “If anyone because of drunkenness is unable to sing the psalms, being stupefied and without speech,” they were to be “deprived of dinner,” which was a modest penalty in an age when fasting was thought to be a laudatory activity. This policy of toleration was extended to the lay population. St. Gildas is on record as stating that his mission included drunkards. As he pointed out in a letter to a fellow cleric, “Our Lord Jesus Christ did not avoid the feasts of publicans, so that he might save all sinners and harlots.”
Irish Christians were responsible for the reconversion of much of Europe, and their native tolerance of drinking contributed to their successes abroad. Their missionaries left for France and Germany armed with inspirational tales of not one but three Irish saints who had had the power to convert water into ale, for Mochuda and Cronanus had developed the same miraculous skill as Brigit. Their examples were followed on the continent by saints Arnuld and Goericus, to the amazement of their audiences, and numerous pagan souls were saved for Christ by the spontaneous creation of alcohol. Irish missionaries were prepared to work miracles against, as well as with, their favorite beverage. St. Columban (521-579) won many converts by casting Satan out of an ale cask that a band of heathen Austrians were about to offer to their native deity: “They had placed in their midst a large [cask] . . . filled with ale. When the man of God approached and asked what they intended to do with it, they said that they intended to make an offering to their god, Wotan. . . . Hearing of this abominable deed, at a distance he breathed upon the vessel, and through a miracle the vessel was shattered into pieces . . . and the [force of the blast expelled] the ale. . . . It was clear that the devil had been hidden in this vessel, and he would have captured the souls of the participants through the heathen offering. The barbarians, seeing this, were stunned, and said that the great man had the breath of God, since he was thus safely able to shatter the vessel into pieces.” Interestingly, the supernatural ability to explode casks predates St. Columban in Irish myth. Athairne the Fierce, a legendary hero, was said to have developed an urgent thirst for ale while still in his mother’s womb and, after taking control of her faculties, prompted her to ask a brewer to draw some from his barrel. She was refused, whereupon the unborn hero caused the barrel to explode and enjoyed secondhand the spilled brew his mother licked off her fingers.
The pious endeavors of Irish and other missionaries led to the creation of a Christian empire of souls, whose European dominions closely matched those of imperial Rome, and which shared the same capital. Christian channels of communication were the conduits through which news of Britain, the abandoned province, reached Rome, more than a century and a half after silence had fallen. It seems that Rome had forgotten as much about its former possession as the inhabitants of Britain had of their past ruler. The persistence of Ultima Thule was revealed by the appearance of some of its youth in the papal slave market, where they were spotted by Pope Gregory I. Struck by their beauty, he inquired as to their place of origin and, when told they were Angles, from England, resolved to convert such appealing pagans. In AD 597 he sent a Benedictine monk, St. Augustine of Canterbury, on this important mission. It was successful, after numerous martyrdoms, and within a century most of England had become Christian. Bishoprics and monasteries were founded and endowed with land, bishops and abbots grew in temporal as well as spiritual power, and their refectory tables were laden with as much food and alcohol as any pre-Christian mead hall. Not only did the plenty of the halls infiltrate the monasteries, but also their drinking culture. The Anglo-Saxon abbot Alcuin, writing circa AD 800 to a Mercian bishop, admonished him for overindulging, as if he were a hall lord: “It is surely better that Christ’s bishop is more praised for his performance in church than for the pomp of his banquets. . . . The continual pursuit of drunkenness . . . [is] insanity: In the words of the prophet, ‘Shame on you, you mighty wine drinkers and bold men in mixing your drinks.’ Whoever takes pleasure in such things will, as Solomon says, ‘never be wise.’”
Monasteries were islands of literacy in an analphabetic country. Their monks made exquisite copies of the gospels and the other sacred texts of the Christian canon. They wrote, by and large, in Latin and preserved some of the most famous of the imperial authors for the sake of their instructive writing styles. Exposure to Ovid and Virgil made them familiar with the Roman pantheon, and they incorporated classical metaphors and imagery within their own works. Bacchus was resurrected as a synonym for wine; they referred to vineyards as Nysa after the mountain where he had spent his adolescence. The clerics also revived the dormant classical hierarchy of drinks with wine at the top. Their prejudice is evident in the Colloquy of Aelfric, written by an English bishop in the late 900s and intended to serve as a phrase book for Anglo-Saxon novices learning Latin. It takes the form of a Q & A between teacher and pupil and illustrates the drinking habits of the monastery:
ABBOT: “What does the novice drink?”
NOVICE: “Ale if I have it, water if I have no ale.”
ABBOT: “Does he not drink wine?”
NOVICE: “I am not so wealthy that I may buy myself wine; and wine is not the drink of children or fools but of the old and wise.”
Note that the novice, probably a teenager, welcomed ale when he could get it, suggesting that Clement’s advice on adolescent drinking carried as little weight in England as his strictures against bingeing. The irrepressible thirst of the Anglo-Saxons was confirmed elsewhere in Aelfric’s work. His sermon De Populo Israhel was written as a model to show his fellow clerics how to explain to the bibulous English why an omnipotent deity had supplied Moses with water in the wilderness instead of something alcoholic. God, according to Aelfric, had he been so minded, could just as easily have caused a flow of wine “or, what is more, of ale” to spring forth from the rock, but that he chose not to do so was simply proof of the inscrutability of his ways.
In addition to reviving Bacchus, and formulating appropriate policies toward drinking for Anglo-Saxon Christians, the religious orders were instrumental in collecting and preserving English medical lore in documents known as leechdoms. These used alcoholic beverages in almost every cure; indeed, the only condition for which they were not recommended as medicine was pregnancy. According to one such tract, “pregnant women should not drink to excess nor drink beor at all.”
Just as civilization was enjoying a second spring in England, a fresh batch of barbarians appeared from the north. The Vikings arrived by sea, and since most of the fighting in the country over the past two centuries had been land-based, the English were entirely unprepared for them. The most unready were the monasteries, many of which were situated on little islands just off the coast, so as to be at a safe distance from the conflicts that rolled up and down the land and the temptations it contained in times of peace. Lindisfarne, an islet off the coast of Northumbria, which had been selected by St. Aiden in AD 635 as the ideal site for a religious colony and had flourished to the extent that it had a church the size of a cathedral, more than a hundred monks, an alumni roll that included several saints, a brewery, and a treasure of gold and silver, was the first to be attacked. The Vikings hit Lindisfarne in AD 793, and in the words of Simeon of Durham, they “laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted feet, dug up the altars, and seized all the treasures of the holy Church. They killed some of the brothers; some they took away with them in fetters; many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults; and some they drowned in the sea.”
The Vikings were a rude reminder to the Christian Anglo-Saxons of just how civilized they had become since their conversion. Ethnically, Vikings were very similar to the warrior bands who had settled Britain after the e
nd of Roman rule—they had matching tribal gods, an identical veneration for mead halls, and an equal obsession with battle and excess. They launched their snaken—snake boats, long ships—not only against the coasts of Britain but also those of Germany, France, Portugal, and Spain. Wherever they visited they left the same reputation as a race of psychopaths who respected neither property nor person. Their swords, spears, battle-axes, and war hammers were responsible for the creation of a host of new martyrs. They put down roots in some of the places they attacked. In England they took Northumbria and Mercia, and fought legendary wars against King Alfred of Wessex; in France, the Norsemen founded the kingdom of Normandy; and they were probably the first humans ever to reach and settle Iceland. In between raiding and colonization, the Vikings traded their plunder for luxuries via river through the Baltic states and Russia to the Black Sea, where they established contact with Constantinople, the last outpost of the old Roman Empire. Their trade goods in the main consisted of furs, slaves, amber, and walrus ivory, which they exchanged for gold, silver, and wine.
Alcohol was central to Viking culture. Their gods drank heavily; their paradise consisted of a battlefield, where dead heroes might fight all day every day for eternity, and a celestial hall, Valhalla, where the deceased repaired each dusk to enjoy a perpetual menu of roast pork and mead served by awesome blonde Valkyries. The Vikings had the same categories of alcoholic drink as the Anglo-Saxons—mead, ale, wine, and beor. Like the Anglo-Saxons, they venerated mead but drank mostly ale. Modern attempts to reproduce a Viking brew have resulted in a strong (9 percent ABV), dark, and malty beverage, sweet in taste— which would have seemed even sweeter in an age when sugar was rare. In polite Viking society ale was strained before being served—ale strainers have been found amid the grave goods of well-bred ladies, who performed the role of cupbearers in the Viking halls.
The Norse sagas, which contain their creation myths, their genealogies, and record the deeds of their greatest warriors, provide a sense of the pervasiveness of drink in Viking society. A striking number of their heroes and kings died from alcohol-related accidents—King Fjolne, for instance, fell into a vat of mead below his hall and was drowned; the prince Swegde and his train of warriors were lured by a dwarf into the pit of hell after a drinking binge; kings Alf and Yngve, brothers, murdered each other in Yngve’s mead hall when drunk, and so on. Rather as the Romans had made a tactic of intoxicating barbarians before attacking them, Vikings often settled their feuds by killing each other in mead halls, or burning them to the ground when their occupants were drunk. An example of both metasolutions appears in the Yngling saga, in the story of King Ingjald, who marked the beginning of his reign with an heirship feast: “It was the custom at that time that he who gave an heirship feast . . . should sit upon the footstool in front of the high seat, until the full bowl, which was called the Brage-beaker, was brought in. Then he should stand up, take the Brage-beaker, make solemn vows to be afterward fulfilled, and thereupon empty the beaker. Then he should ascend the high seat which his father had occupied; and thus he came to the full heritage after his father. Now it was done so on this occasion. When the full Brage-beaker came in, King Ingjald stood up . . . and made a solemn vow to enlarge his dominions by one half, toward all the four corners of the world, or die.” King Ingjald realized his pledge by intoxicating his guests, burning down his own hall with them all inside, then confiscating their kingdoms.
In their prime, between about AD 850 and 1100, the Vikings had a significant influence over the fortunes of Europe and beyond. Their voyages of trade and exploration took them farther north and west than any prior Europeans. They were the first to reach the coast of North America, and Vinland (“land of wine”) was the first European name for that portion of the continent. The Vikings got to America by using their colonies in Iceland and Greenland as stepping-stones over the Atlantic Ocean. They established a summer trading camp in Newfoundland, then coasted south until they came to a land of plenty. These voyages, pioneered by Leif Eriksson, are described in the Graenlendinga saga, which records the discovery of grapes in the new land by Tyrkir, a German Viking, who was familiar with wine from his native country. Eriksson accordingly named the place after its most promising feature, and loaded up his snaken with a cargo of grapes to take home to Greenland, where the vine did not grow and wine, if it ever reached there, was a fabulously rare import. He also took back timber, which Greenland likewise lacked. There were subsequent voyages in quest of grapes and lumber, but hostile Native Americans drove them away and they gave up on the American continent.
Meanwhile, in the parts of Europe that they had settled, they, too, succumbed to Christianity. They adjusted their drinking habits to accommodate the new religion, which, in its turn, incorporated some Viking customs, especially those pertaining to the year-end feast of Yule, which King Hakon of Norway shifted so as to coincide with Christmas. Whereas the Christian celebration had focused on quiet prayer, the Viking festival emphasized gift giving and self-indulgence. King Hakon decreed that for the new, combined festival “everyone was to have ale for the celebration, or else pay fines, and had to keep the holidays while the ale lasted.”
6 ISLAM
How I wish today that
My share of life’s provisions
Was a wine on which to squander
My earnings and inheritance.
—Abu “Ali al-Hasan Ibn Hani” al-Hakami (c. AD 757-814)
In the course of their river voyages through Europe toward the Black Sea, the Vikings established contact with the followers of a new religion whose conquests during the same period that the Vikings had terrorized the West made the Norsemen’s own achievements seem trivial. One such encounter was recorded for posterity by Ibn Fadlan, a native of Baghdad, and a disciple of Islam. Ibn Fadlan was a pious and literate man who traveled in the entourage of a Muslim ambassador, and his account of his meeting with a band of Vikings in AD 922, by the banks of the river Volga, is a mixture of admiration and horror. They were “perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy.” They were also “the filthiest of all Allah’s creatures,” who did not wash after eating, excreting, or sexual intercourse, all of which acts they performed before the astonished Muslim’s eyes. Their drinking habits were equally repugnant: “They are addicted to alcohol, which they drink night and day. Sometimes one of them dies with the cup still in his hand.” While this was scarcely news to the peoples whom the Vikings raided, Ibn Fadlan expected it to disturb his readers in Baghdad, whose faith had placed an absolute ban on the consumption of alcohol.
Islam, the revelation of Allah, the one true God, via his prophet Muhammad, was born in the harsh climate of Arabia, in the middle of the first millennium AD. Muhammad (c. AD 570-632), a native of the town of Mecca, received a visit in his fortieth year from the archangel Gabriel, who informed him that he was the last of a line of Judeo-Christian prophets whose pedigree stretched from Noah to Jesus, and instructed him to spread the word of Allah and to convert, exterminate, or tax unbelievers. Initially, he was poorly received in Mecca, which contained the most sacred object in Arabia—the Kaaba, a black cubic rock adorned with the images of 360 different gods, most of them petty immortals, possessed of no very great powers and worshipped, individually, by very few people. They did, however, draw the Arab nation together once a year for their veneration, so that polytheism was an important business in the city, and the monotheism preached by Muhammad unwelcome. After retreat to the town of Medina, where he continued to communicate with Allah and raised an army, Muhammad subdued Mecca, converted his fellow tribesmen, and by the time of his death, the principal places in Arabia, and its foremost clans, recognized the rule of Islam.
The basic precepts of new religion were simple—to acknowledge the supremacy of Allah, to pray five times a day, to fast during a specified period each year, to give alms, and, if possible, to make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Further instructions as to how Muslims were expected to behave were contained in the Koran, r
evered as the word of God, as spoken to his prophet. This sacred text was set down some years after the death of Muhammad, in the first instance inscribed on palm leaves and the shoulder blades of dead sheep. It contains 114 suras, or chapters, each composed of an uneven number of verses. It is not chronological, in that it does not record the utterances of Allah in the sequence that they were made. The Koran provides the faithful not only with general guidance on how to live, but also gives particular directions regarding dress, personal hygiene, and diet. Among these is a total ban on the consumption of alcoholic drinks.
Subsequent commentators have unraveled the correct order in which advice was given by Allah to mankind, and it can be deduced that his attitude toward alcohol changed from approbation into censure over time. Islam was born in a region of drinkers: The Greek historian Herodotus had claimed that the Arabs worshippedonly two gods—“Bacchus and Urania.” Strabo, writing four centuries later, noted that they drank wine when they could, and palm liquor in those parts of their territory unsuited to the cultivation of the grape. Arabian poetry had a minor genre dedicated to the celebration of wine, and perhaps as a concession to this heritage, alcohol is first mentioned in the Koran as a good thing, alongside water, milk, and honey. However, by its next appearance its status had become equivocal: It was labeled as sinful but also pronounced as having some useful qualities, albeit unspecified: “They ask concerning wine and gambling. Say, ‘In them is great sin and some profit, for men; but the sin is greater than the profit.’” The news that drinking was a sin was not enough to deter the faithful, some of whom refused even to sober up for prayers. The prophet consulted his god again and was advised that no Muslim could attend prayers if drunk. Given the frequency of prayer sessions, this could be read as a de facto ban. However, it seems the Arabs persisted in their old ways and continued to drink heavily at their frequent feasts. An affair of blood at one such led to a third consultation and complete and unequivocal prohibition. At the event in question, Hazrat Saad Ibn Abi Waqquas was busy reciting poetry that eulogized the excellence of his own tribe while belittling the merits of the Ansars of Medina, when an enraged and drunken Ansari youth threw a lamb bone at him, wounding his head. From such trifling incidents flow momentous consequences. Muhammad conferred with God once more and was told, “Strong drink, games of chance, idols, and divining arrows are an abomination of Satan; avoid them, that you might prosper,” for “Satan’s plan is to excite enmity and hatred between you, with intoxicants and gambling, and hinder you from the remembrance of Allah and from prayer: Will ye not then abstain?”