Viking Britain: A History

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © Thomas Williams 2017

Thomas Williams asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Cover illustration by Joe McLaren

Maps by Martin Brown

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Source ISBN: 9780008171933

Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780008171940

Version: 2018-06-25

Dedication

FOR Z

Epigraph

Storms break on stone-strewn slopes,

Snows falling, the ground enfettered,

the howling of winter. Then darkness awakens,

deepens the night-shadow, sends from the north

a harsh hail-harrying bringing terror to men.

The Wanderer (tenth century)1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Preface

1 Outsiders from Across the Water

2 Heart of Darkness

3 Mother North

4 Shores in Flames

5 Beyond the North Waves

6 The Gathering Storm

7 Dragon-Slayers

8 Eagles of Blood

9 Wayland’s Bones

10 Real Men

11 The Return of the King

12 The Godfather

13 Rogue Traders

14 Danelaw

15 Lakeland Sagas

16 A New Way

17 The Pagan Winter

18 The Great War

19 Bloodaxe

20 Wolves

21 Mortal Remains

Epilogue

Timeline

Abbreviations and Primary Sources

Notes

Further Reading

Picture Section

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Preface

In 2013–14 I was the project curator for the exhibition Vikings: Life and Legend at the British Museum. One of the first reviews, published in a major national newspaper, offered the following critique:

There’s no stage-setting. No gory recreation of the Lindisfarne raid, say, to get us in the mood […] I felt like crying. Where were the swords? And if I was ready to bawl, what does this exhibition offer its younger visitors? It can’t claim not to be for them. You can’t put on an exhibition called Vikings without expecting some kids. The only way this exhibition could sound more child-friendly would be if it was called Vikings and Dinosaurs. But the austerely beautiful cases of brooches and golden rings and amber offer very little to fans of Horrible Histories.1

Leaving aside the issue of whether sensationalizing historical violence for the entertainment of children is ever appropriate (how about a ‘gory recreation’ of the Srebrenica massacre?), what these comments really reveal is an uncritical assumption that the Vikings have their proper place as players in a hilarious historical Grand Guignol, alongside head-chopping at the Tower of London. The Vikings, it seems to say, are a cheerful, bloody diversion for the kids on a wet bank-holiday afternoon, not a proper historical phenomenon. The indignation that springs from not having had these prejudices confirmed is palpable. Brooches? Women? Trade? BORING! Vikings are big men with swords, crushing skulls left, right and centre: the barbarian archetype writ large and red.

It occurred to me at the time that nobody would treat Roman history in this way. It is unthinkable, for example, that any art critic would yearn for lurid re-enactments of Roman soldiers cheerfully raping and murdering British women and children – least of all within the austere neo-classical precincts of the British Museum. The Romans, it is instinctively felt, are refined, have gravitas. They benefit from a cultural snobbery with extraordinarily deep roots (ultimately fastened in the smug imperial propaganda of the Romans themselves). Roman Britain, in particular, is widely presented in a solidly respectable way – epitomized in tiresome tropes of roof tiles and under-floor heating, good roads and urban planning, fine wine and fancy tableware. It is a period that can serve as an acceptable backstory to who we are and where we come from, a people ‘just like us’, who went to parties and wrote letters and had jobs. Romanitas – Romanness – means ‘civilization’.

Few think of the age of the Vikings in those terms. Like other romantic curios they have been fetishized and infantilized, set apart from wider history alongside pirates, gladiators, knights-in-armour and, I suppose, dinosaurs. The Vikings are presented as cartoon savages who had a short-lived cameo rampaging around in the gloomy interlude between the end of Roman Britain and the Norman Conquest. It does them a grave disservice.

Between the conventional beginning of the Viking Age in the late eighth century and its close in the eleventh, Scandinavian people and culture were involved with Britain to a degree that left a permanent impression on these islands. They came to trade and plunder and, ultimately, to settle, to colonize and to rule. It is a story of often epic proportions, thronged with characters whose names and deeds still fire the blood and stir the imagination – Svein Forkbeard and Edmund Ironside, Ivar the Boneless and Alfred the Great, Erik Bloodaxe and Edgar the Pacifier – a story of war and upheaval. It is also, however, the story of how the people of the British Isles came to reorient themselves in a new and interconnected world, where new technologies for travel and communication brought ideas and customs into sometimes explosive contact, but which also fostered the development of towns and trade, forged new identities and gave birth to England and Scotland as unified nations for the first time. By the time of the Norman Conquest, most of Britain might justifiably be described as ‘Viking’ to varying degrees, and in language, literature, place-names and folklore the presence of Scandinavian settlers can still be felt throughout the British Isles, with repercussions for all those places that British culture and colonization have subsequently touched.

The Vikings have also retained their influence as a powerful cultural force in the modern world, and representations of the Viking Age in art, music and literature have had a profound impact on the western imagination. Indeed, much of what we imagine when we think of this period in British history – even the word ‘Viking’ itself – grew from political, literary and artistic currents that swelled in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Here, too, a ‘Viking Britain’ came alive and, to the likes of William Morris and J. R. R. Tolkien, this was a place that seemed to lurk unseen just at the borders of their rapidly modernizing world. It was there not only in the writings and monuments that time had preserved, but also (and perhaps especially) in the elements themselves – the grey sea, the north wind and the very bones of the earth. In travel, art and literature, landscape became a way to commune with the people of the Viking Age – people who had seen the same red sun rising, felt the same cold wind on their necks, touched the same fissures in the smooth grey rock. This has in turn become a way to explore the mentality and world-view of a people with an intimate and profoundly imaginative relationship with the environment. For people living in the latter centuries of the first millennium, the landscape was teeming with unseen inhabitants and riddled with gateways to other worlds. Pits and ditches, barrows and ruins, mountains, rivers and forests: all could be home to the dead, the divine and the diabolical, haunted by monsters and gods.

Telling the story of the Vikings in Britain is therefore not a straightforward undertaking – it is the tale of a people who were not a people, who came to lands that were not yet nations. The historical record is patchy, the archaeology equivocal. Even the very words we use – ‘Viking’ most of all – slither away from easy definition. It is, moreover, the story not only of the three centuries leading up to (and overlapping) the Norman Conquest, but also of how that time has been remembered, recycled and reimagined by successive generations. It is, as earlier generations seem better to have appreciated, a world that is still tangible. The sense that the past is present in the landscape – that there is another world hovering just out of sight – has receded in step with modernity’s alienation from the land. Against the advance of technology, urbanization and globalization, our imaginative connection to landscape continues to fight the long defeat. The land, water and sky have largely been disenchanted of the past, just as they were disenchanted of their elves and spirits during the enlightenment and industrial revolution. But the past can never be wholly erased, and the rivers, hills, woods and stones of Britain remain deeply imprinted with memories of the Vikings and their world.

It is a legacy that runs far beyond the confines of Britain itself. From the seventeenth century to the present, the English-speaking diaspora – of people, ideas, systems, values, laws and language – has had a transformative impact on the world, firstly through the expansion of Britain’s Empire, and latterly through the ongoing dominance and global reach of North American culture and economic power. The memory of the Vikings may only be one small cell in the vast genome of Anglophone identity, but it is a tenacious and enduring one. Sometimes it appears overtly, in the simplified and bowdlerized versions of Norse myths and Viking stereotypes that penetrate popular culture, whether through the pages of comic books, the iconography of football teams or the covers of heavy-metal albums. But it also runs in deeper channels of thought and language, the serpentine ships that travel the dark rivers of the subconscious mind, a half-seen shadow of grim gods and thudding oars and dark pine forests wreathed in mist.

The chapters that follow tell the tale of the Vikings in Britain as a broadly chronological narrative. At times the story diverges as events begin to unfold simultaneously across Britain, but I have largely endeavoured to keep the overall momentum moving forward as much as possible. At the same time, however, this is also a book about ideas, objects and places. Through the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked – their runestones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields – it is possible to reach beyond the bare rehearsal of names and dates to explore the way that people in Viking Age Britain thought about their world and their place within it, and the way they have been remembered in the centuries since their passing: the stories they told and the tales they inspired, their fears, their fantasies, and the dooms they aspired to. Several themes recur throughout this book – in particular what being a ‘Viking’ really meant, how attitudes and identities changed over time, and what that meant for the ethnic evolution of the people of Britain – but in a general sense this book is about illuminating an influence on British history that has been profound and enduring, one that has shaped languages, culture and the historical trajectory of the British Isles and beyond for hundreds of years. In a small way, I hope, this book may help to restore to the Vikings some of the dignity that they have too often been denied.

There are, it must be acknowledged, some difficulties that attend the writing of a chronological history of this period; some parts of Britain – England especially – receive more detailed treatment than others, and not all of the evidence is discussed at equal length. In many cases this reflects the availability of source material: both the lack of it and – less often – its abundance. A complete inventory of all Viking-period archaeology found on the Isle of Man would run to many hundreds of pages; a compendium of all the contemporary written references to Viking activity in the same place would fit on the back of a small envelope. Frequently, however, the question of what to cover and what to leave out has been decided by me, and I make no apology for this: it reflects the fact that this book is a personal, at times perhaps idiosyncratic, exploration of the subject. It is intended to be neither definitive nor comprehensive – it cannot hope to be either, not within the covers of a book as slim as this. For all of the detailed regional surveys and the surfeit of books (of wildly varying quality) on the Vikings as a whole, a truly definitive compendium of evidence for the Vikings in Britain remains to be written: it would be a mammoth undertaking, probably running to multiple volumes. It would also, more than likely, be made less than definitive within days of its publication, as new data – much of it gathered by metal-detectorists – continues to roll in, week after week, and spectacular finds are made with some regularity.2 At the same time, major research projects continue to transform our perception of Viking Age societies, their interactions and their evolutions; this too is unlikely to stop any time soon.3

This book has not been written with an academic audience in mind, but I am nevertheless deeply conscious of the need to provide signposts for the reader to the sources of the material from which this narrative has been constructed. Although it would be unnecessarily distracting to provide full scholarly citations, some textual references are necessary for the reader’s orientation and to acknowledge sources that I have cited directly. I have chosen, in the main, to restrict these citations to primary written sources and archaeological reports – that is, to evidence rather than interpretation. However, where the work of individual scholars is referred to directly, or where a particular argument or line of reasoning is consciously derived from the work of others, I have also provided the appropriate citations. For brevity, a full citation is only provided the first time a work is referred to in the notes; thereafter, works are referred to by their author (or editor) and abbreviated title only. Primary sources that are referred to frequently have been abbreviated, and a full list of the abbreviations used and a full citation to the edition(s) relied upon in each case are provided in the endmatter. Where primary sources have been quoted in the text and the translation is my own, the citation in the Notes refers to an original language edition of the source in question. Where a translated edition of a source has been quoted, the citation in the Notes directs the reader to the translated edition relied upon. Exceptions are indicated in the Notes. A short summary of relevant further reading can be found at the end of this book. This is intended to direct the reader to the most accessible and up-to-date treatments and is intended only as a starting point to the vast literature that touches on the Vikings – in Britain and in wider perspective. In addition, a full bibliography of all literature cited can be accessed at tjtwilliams.com

Acknowledgements

The ideas and opinions expressed in this book are – even where I believe them to be my own – indebted to a huge number of historians, archaeologists, linguists, numismatists, scientists and others, whose work I have read or with whom I have had the privilege of working, whether as a student, a colleague or a friend. Those people will know who they are, and may well recognize their own fingerprints on my thought-processes. Particular thanks are due to Gareth Williams (no relation), my colleague at the British Museum, and a man to whom I owe a great personal and intellectual debt. Neil Price at the University of Uppsala did me the honour of reading the entire book in draft. His comments have been both hugely encouraging and unerringly pertinent. My editors, Arabella Pike and Peter James, deserve many thanks indeed. Their ministrations – and, in the case of the former, great forbearance – have helped to ensure that the best possible version of this book was ultimately realized. My agents, Julian Alexander and Ben Clarke at LAW, also deserve fulsome thanks for their support and tireless efforts on my behalf. Tom Holland requires a special mention: if it had not been for a good-natured intervention on his part, my introduction to the aforementioned gentlemen would never have been effected, and this book may not have come into being at all.

My father, Geoffrey Williams, read every word of the manuscript as the chapters were produced and watched its slow gestation over many months. My discussions with him, and the innumerable errors identified and improvements suggested, have undoubtedly made this a better book. My mother, Gilli, produced (at exceptionally short notice and with remarkable facility) several of the fabulous line drawings in this book. For all of the help that both my parents have provided, as well as their unwavering love and support, my gratitude is profound.

And finally my wife, Zeena, has had to contend with an intrusive Viking presence in her life for longer now than she probably ever imagined. But she has weathered the storm and borne me up whenever I felt that I might sink. Nothing would have been possible without her. She is the best.

I cannot stress enough, however, that none of the people I have mentioned above can in any way be held responsible for my wilder flights of imagination, or for any errors that have made it into print: these are all my own.

A Note on Names

There is a bewildering amount of variation in the rendering of personal names across this period, with the same name frequently appearing in wildly different spellings depending on the language of the written source in which it appears. As a rule of thumb, I have preferred to use the most contemporary and ethno-linguistically appropriate versions wherever possible. I have, however, made frequent exception wherever normalized modern spellings of names are likely to be more familiar to the reader: hence ‘Olaf’, rather than Oláfr; ‘Eric’, rather than Eiríkr; ‘Odin’, rather than Oðinn. Where variant forms are used (especially in quotations), I have provided the more familiar form in square brackets. Given the complexities and ambiguities of Viking Age onomastics, it is entirely likely that some inconsistencies remain: my apologies in advance if this is so.

In the text and Notes, ‘ON’ denotes Old Norse, ‘OE’ Old English and ‘ModE’ Modern English.