Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams
places. But the desire to demystify the Viking Age also brought in train a new myth: that the Vikings – with their storytelling and home-making, their pragmatism, their games and their shoe-menders – were essentially the same as we are, but fitter, stronger, clearer of purpose, uncorrupted by modernity. Peering into the Viking world, some have found a mirror reflecting back all that they would wish themselves and the modern world to be: simple, undiluted, purified …
But, as we shall see, the Vikings were strange. They were strange to their contemporaries and they should be strange to us too. Theirs was a world in which slaves were raped, murdered and burned alongside the decomposing corpses of their dead owners, a world where men with filed teeth bartered captive monks for Islamic coins, where white-faced women smeared their bodies in fat and human ash and traversed the spirit world in animal form: it is not the template for a brave new world that I, for one, would choose. Thus ‘the Vikings’, to us now and to their contemporaries in their own time, could represent something both familiar and alien: they could be weird and remote, monstrous even, but also bound tightly into narratives of who the English-speaking peoples have felt themselves – wanted themselves – to be. It is a complex and enduring problem, and shifting emphases in the presentation of the Vikings and their homelands, from the eighth century to the present day, illuminate the preoccupations of the modern psyche just as much as they do the realities of the Viking Age itself.25
All of which is to say that the whole idea of the ‘Viking’ needs to be handled with care. As it is used in a modern sense (and in this book), the word is largely employed as a term of convenience. It is used to define a period, the seaborne warriors whose activities characterized that period, and the shared cultural connections, ideas and art-styles (mostly, but not exclusively, of Scandinavian origin) that both bound people together and spawned new identities. It is important to recognize that – like the reality of all human life – what we mean by the term is chaotic, contestable and imprecise, resisting easy definition. How that chaos is, and has been, negotiated is in part what this book is about. And thinking about it is important, because the stereotypes can be deadly.
Norwegian propaganda for the SS by Harald Damsleth, 1940–5
In the 1940s, hundreds of young Norwegian men, stirred by images of their ‘Viking’ heritage and convinced by nationalist propaganda of the threat from Russian Bolshevism, signed up for the ‘Norwegian Legion’. They were promised that they would be fighting in the interests of a free and independent Norway. Instead they found themselves, barely out of training, ordered by German officers into the meat-grinder of Hitler’s Eastern Front. A hundred and eighty of them (around 20 per cent) were killed before the legion was acrimoniously disbanded. Those few who remained committed to the Nazi cause were integrated into the SS Nordland Division, a force of mainly Scandinavian volunteers which had formerly constituted a part of the SS Wiking Division. These were the men who were inspired by the Viking-themed propaganda images churned out by the Reich and who had listened misty-eyed to Quisling’s fantasies in the supposed burial ground of Halfdan the Black. The men of SS Nordland, convinced of the superiority of their Viking blood, would go on to commit atrocities in eastern Europe which were equal to the crimes of any of their Nazi peers.26
4
Bitter is the wind tonight,
it stirs up the white-waved sea.
I do not fear the coursing of the Irish sea
by the fierce warriors of Lothlind [Vikings].
Irish monk (ninth century)1
If the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 remains the apocalyptic touchstone for the Viking Age in Britain, it was only the first of many similar attacks that were to rage up and down the coastlines of Britain and Ireland in the years around 800. Viking raiders struck at Iona in the Western Isles in 795, at Jarrow (former home to the monastic scholar Bede) in 796, at Hartness and Tynemouth in 800, at Iona again in 802 and 806.2 The earliest raids in Ireland fell in 795 on Rathlin Island, Co. Antrim (almost certainly the same group that had already hit Iona in that year), at St Patrick’s Isle (Co. Dublin) in 798 and at Inishmurray (Co. Sligo) in 798 and 807.3 The record is patchy and incomplete; but what is certain is that people died and people suffered. There is not much direct evidence of the impact of these early Viking raids, no clear indication of the human cost exacted – of the people, possessions and lives that were snatched away. But there are traces – objects and remains that give terror and plunder a weight and substance that even the purplest of ecclesiastical prose fails to convey. It is here, in the material traces of the Viking Age – in stone and bone and metal – that something of the original purpose and the impact of the Vikings in Britain can be seen.
A grim and bearded head lies within the collection of the British Museum.4 It is small, made of bronze and dated to the eighth century – a piece of Scottish, Irish or Northumbrian workmanship. It was probably intended to depict the face of a saint (it is strikingly similar to the depiction of St Mark in the Lichfield Gospels). Discovered near Furness Abbey in Cumbria (a region, as we shall see, of later Scandinavian settlement), the head has been adapted as a weight in a manner typical of Viking traders. Stuffed with lead, it has been turned to a new use in the hands of owners more concerned with personalizing their belongings than with piety. The little head, severed from its body, hacked from whatever piece of ecclesiastical treasure it had once been intended to decorate, is a reminder of the material consequences of Viking raids – of the treasured possessions that were broken and stolen, the human heads that were detached from their bodies, of the people taken away from their homes and disposed of far away.
Direct evidence for the sort of violence recorded by monastic writers is rare and often equivocal; a number of skeletons excavated from the ditch of an enclosed settlement at Llanbedrgoch on Anglesey, for example, were long believed to be local victims of Viking raiding until chemical analysis of the remains revealed several of them to have grown up in Scandinavia: not, in itself, any reason to believe that they were not the victims of raiding, but enough to complicate the narrative considerably.5 In only one place in Britain – at the former monastery at Portmahomack in Scotland – has good evidence for the violence of Viking raiding been uncovered; it is a place, moreover, that is not mentioned in any written source that has survived from the Viking Age.
‘The further north you go in the island of Britain, the more beautiful the scenery becomes, the hills wilder, the skies wider, the air clearer, the seas closer. Even for those not born in Scotland, you feel as if you are driving towards your beginnings.’6 This is how Professor Martin Carver described his journey to Portmahomack. The small fishing settlement lies at the north-eastern tip of the Tarbat peninsula: a finger of land that points emphatically north-east, separating the Moray and Dornoch Firths. It is the shard of crust marking the end of the Great Glen, the weirdly rectilinear fracture that shears a diagonal fissure through Scotland, scoring a damp line that puddles along its length into Loch Ness and Loch Linnhe before dispersing into the Firth of Lorne. There is a sense up here, as elsewhere in the far north of Britain, of land dissolving at the margins, like the edge of pack ice giving way to the ocean, splintering and drifting into ragged and provisional forms. To travel there is to a find a place of transitions and embarkations, not journeys ending.
The monastery that Carver discovered at Portmahomack was revealed in a series of archaeological investigations between 1994 and 2007.