Wednesday
Feb012012
ENGLAND AND THE VIKINGS (Part 2 of 2)
Christina von Nolcken
Even here, however, things had become so bad that in the winter of 878 Alfred was driven deep into the Somerset marshes where he took refuge in a herdsman’s hut. There he was so overwhelmed by his troubles that (as a later chronicle tells it) he let the ash-baked bread burn:
“What sort of careless man are you, who neglects to attend to burning bread?
Never have I seen so negligent a man—one who doesn’t even know how to
turn ash-baked bread--and yet when it’s put in front of you’ll no doubt rush to
consume it.” The king, patiently taking in the words of reproach, replied, “It is
as you say, good hostess, for I would be exceedingly slow even if I knew how
to deal with ash-baked bread.”
Alas, this best-known "fact” about King Alfred seems a fabrication. Nonetheless –and miraculously, it would seem—it was from this refuge that Alfred gathered an army and, in the seventh week after Easter, routed “that pestilential mob.” He wasn’t able to drive “the foul plague” entirely from the country, for many of “the filthy crew”--I quote Aethelweard’s Chronicle, c. 975 here-- were there to stay. Even so,
Three weeks later the [Viking] king Guthrum came to him, and Alfred stood
sponsor to him at baptism. And Guthrum was twelve days with the king, who
greatly honored him and his companions with riches. (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)
So now, from the end of the ninth century, we have Scandinavians enjoying their own kingdoms in the north and east of England, and a recognizably English culture maintaining itself in the south. We don’t have much information about the goings-on in Scandinavian England (the Danelaw) in this period because the English mainly controlled the written record. But relations between the English and the Scandinavians do seem to have been good, especially as the Scandinavian communities themselves became increasingly Christianized. Partly as a result, perhaps, Alfred’s son and daughter, and then his grandson, were able to regain control over large parts of the country; indeed, to some extent it seems that the Scandinavian communities welcomed the stability they associated with the English. In 954
even York was recaptured. This happened after our old friend Eirik Bloodaxe, who had maneuvered himself into being king there, was killed in a minor skirmish.
Eirik’s entry into Valhalla (commemorated in a poem commissioned by his widow of Bragi, the Norse god of poetry) did not, however, mean the end of the Scandinavian invasions of England. Far from it. A fresh wave of attacks began in 981: "In this year,” says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle), “for the first time seven ships came and ravaged Southampton.” This time things would climax with Danish kings ruling the whole of England.
What motivated these fresh attacks? One factor seems to have been that, with the silver mines of the Arab Caliphate just about exhausted, the Vikings had to look for their revenues elsewhere. But the attacks seem also to have been differently organized from before, coming in part from highly disciplined forces trained in rigorous military camps in Denmark. The English were, by all accounts, unable to resist. We have a moving poem about an incident at Maldon in 991 in which they tried and failed: “And the smitten corselet sang/A doleful dirge.” This defeat marked the beginning of a new system of simply buying the marauders off: “It was decided for the first time to pay tribute to the Danes on account of the atrocities they wrought along the sea coast. On this first occasion it amounted to ten thousand pounds” (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The sums would later rise as high as forty-eight thousand.
The English were, in all likelihood, up against two formidable figures: Sweyn Forkbeard, King of Denmark since c.988, and Olaf Tryggvason, about to become king of Norway. Sweyn was the greater threat to England; but Olaf could juggle three daggers, run across the oars outside the vessel while his men were rowing, and cast two spears at once. So let’s look first at this grandly paradigmatic Viking (described in the Icelander Snorre Sturlason’s 13th-century Heimskringla).
When Olaf was a child, his father, King Tryggvi, a grandson of Harold Finehair, was killed by a son of Eirik Bloodaxe --killed, that is, by his cousin. Eirik would gladly have disposed of Olaf too, had Olaf’s mother not fled with him towards the Baltic Sea. En route, however, Olaf was snatched by pirates and
sold as a slave in Estonia. Fortunately for him, he was bought by decent folks. Even more fortunately, he was eventually spotted by his mother’s brother who happened to be passing through. What attracted his uncle’s eye was that the boy was so good looking. His uncle bought him out of slavery, but not before Olaf had managed to kill the pirate who kidnapped him—who also happened to be passing through.
Olaf was next adopted by the king of Russia. But he so utterly charmed the queen, that people gossiped: “What can he have to talk about so often with the queen?” So, extracting himself from another sticky situation, Olaf decamped for Poland, where he married the king’s daughter. The lady promptly—and considerately--died, leaving Olaf the wherewithal to raid in more westerly lands—not least England. There Olaf became ferociously Christian. He then returned to Norway, where he made sure he became king.
But Olaf’s luck ran out as he tried to ram Christianity down unwilling Scandinavian throats. One of his failures involved his sending a “powerful but murderous priest,” Thangbrand, to convert Iceland. But Thangbrand, defending himself with a crucifix instead of a shield, proved the death of at least three persons, and Iceland postponed her conversion. Olaf was similarly unsuccessful when he tried to convert Sigrid, Queen of Sweden, so as to marry her. She politely declared she wouldn’t become Christian herself, but said he could be Christian if he wanted. Olaf over-reacted:
King Olav was very wroth,” Why should I wed thee, thou heathen bitch? And
he struck her in the face with the glove he was holding in his hand. And Sigrid
said, “This may well be thy death!” (Heimskringla)
So much, then, for Olaf Tryggvason. More important to England was Swein Forkbeard who in 1013 managed, not without provocation, to drive out the English king Aethelred (the Unready) and finally establish himself as king. But he died shortly after, and it took a while for his son, Cnut, to regain England. Once he did, he ruled judiciously and well, it seems, from 1016-35. Then, more fighting involving Cnut’s sons Harald I and Harthacnut, until the English house reestablished itself in the person of Edward the Confessor. Edward reigned until 1066 but died without an heir. Whereupon that other grandly paradigmatic Viking, Harald Hardrada, made his unsuccessful bid for the English throne (which is where our story began in Part 1). Harald’s back story is even more splendid than Olaf Tryggvason’s: among other things (according to Heimskringla, and partly confirmed by Byzantine sources) he went to Byzantium, where he headed the emperor’s elite guard, caught the fancy of the empress Zoe, and blinded the emperor. In the words of the Norwegian praise-poet, Thjodolf:
The warrior who fed the wolves
Ripped out both the eyes
Of the emperor of Byzantium;
Strife was unleashed again.
The warrior-king of Norway
Marked his cruel revenge
On the brave emperor of the East;
(King Harald's Saga)
But Harald failed in his bid for England. After considerable success in the north of the country, he and his army were taken by surprise by the English forces. As he himself put it:
We go forward
Into battle
Without armour
Against blue blades.
Helmets glitter.
My coat of mail
And all our armour
Are at our ships.
Mindful of his future reputation, he observed, “That was a poor verse. I shall have to make a better one:
We never kneel in battle
Before the storm of weapons
And crouch behind our shields;
So the noble lady told me.
She told me once to carry
My head always high in battle
Where swords seek to shatter
The skulls of doomed warriors.”
Harald fought with customary valor—and was killed by an arrow in the throat.
Even though England did not finally become part of Scandinavia (which it might well have), there can be no doubt of the very great impact the Vikings had on the English-speaking world. More than 1400 place names in England today have Scandinavian endings (such as -by, -thorp, -toft, -thwaite). Some
400 words of Scandinavian origin have survived into modern standard English, and 600 or more in the dialects. Predictably, the first words that made it into English tended to be technical terms --for boats, weapons and the like. But later words seem more ordinary, and many stuck, words like anger, band, bank, birth, both, call, cast, clip, crave, crook, dirt, dregs, egg, fellow, happy, husband, law, low, loose, odd, rotten, same, scant, seemly, sister, sky, sly, tattered, ugly, window, wrong, they/them/their. Reflecting the languages’ shared antecedents, we also have doublets like shirt/skirt, church/kirk, ditch/dike, and shrub/scrub where the palatal sh sound is Anglo-Saxon and the velar k sound is Scandinavian. Such words and the culture they represent must have seemed reassuringly familiar for 19th- and early 20th-century Scandinavian immigrants to North America.
In our own day, in August 2007 Denmark apologized for her part in the ninth-century Viking invasions of Ireland. Given the frequency with which countries have been apologizing for earlier depredations, she may also soon be apologizing to England. But an apology would not be entirely in order, for she has also had a lasting, and often beneficial influence on the culture of the whole English-speaking world.
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CHRISTINA von NOLCKEN is Associate Professor of English Language and Literature, and Chair of the Program in Medieval Studies, at the University of Chicago. See also: http://english.uchicago.edu/faculty. Parts 1 and 2 of this article have been drawn from Prof. von Nolcken's lecture at the University’s Humanities Open House, October 2011.