Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams

pigeon breasts, scabby thighs, knotty knees, crooked legs, swollen ankles, splay feet, spreading mouths, raucous cries […] they grew so terrible to hear with their mighty shriekings that they filled almost the whole intervening space between earth and heaven with their discordant bellowings.24

      The effect is cumulative. What starts out as absurd – comical even (shaggy ears? wild foreheads?) – becomes ever more grotesque and horrible, one perversion heaped on top of another, until the vision devolves into a squamous mass of deformed, unnatural depravity. If this is what early medieval people saw when they dreamt of wild places, then their dreams must have been dark indeed.

      Whatever Cuthbert saw or did not see on Inner Farne, he conquered his little wilderness, living out the brief remainder of his life in self-imposed exile: eating, sleeping, fasting, praying. It is easy to picture him, like the figure in Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting, gazing sadly at the cold grey ocean that embraces him: a last outpost of human life, wearily defiant before the uncaring gulf and his own mortality.

      When he died, Cuthbert’s body was taken by boat to Lindisfarne. A great crowd received it, psalms were sung, and it was carried to the Church of St Peter and buried in a stone coffin beside the altar. Miracles were reported and he was canonized, his tomb becoming a place of pilgrimage. When, eleven years later, his resting place was deemed inadequate, he was exhumed for translation to a more exalted shrine. His body was apparently found uncorrupted, as pristine as the day he had passed away. The story only confirmed his sanctity and his legend spread, the monastery growing in size and wealth, its scriptoria producing illuminated gospels which – like the Lindisfarne Gospels (commissioned to ornament Cuthbert’s shrine-tomb) – are some of the greatest treasures of their age.

      We might be justified in imagining that, for later generations of monks, the monastic life became rather more comfortable than Cuthbert and his forebears would have approved of. By the time of the raid on Lindisfarne, contemporaries – as we shall see – had already begun to voice their opinion on these matters, and it is likely that there really was a drop in standards in the century after Cuthbert’s death; or, rather, that the monks gained access to temptations that their forebears had not enjoyed. Even so, the same cold sea would have lapped at their heels and the stories of the devils of Inner Farne would have been told again and again. For the monks living out their lives on the edge of the world, the sea would have been omnipresent – a wide and brooding, raging wilderness stretching out to eternity. Empty, but alive.

      When the Vikings came it must have seemed to the monks as though something dreadful had finally stirred from its century-long slumber. What horrors did their bleary eyes see rushing up the moonlit shore, what gargoyles leered from the prows of the great black leviathans looming at the edge of the shadowed water? Did they see devils in the shadows – lit red in the glare of blazing torches? Were they ‘ferocious in appearance’ and ‘terrible to hear with their mighty shriekings’? Did they possess ‘filthy beards’ and ‘fierce eyes’, ‘foul mouths’ and ‘strident voices’?

      Against the blood-red glare cast by fire, the dragon-headed prows of the ships stand in silhouette, grim spectators of the unfolding chaos. Like oars striking water, the axes rise and fall, biting into timber, bone and flesh; blood splatters across blankets and altar-cloths, burgundy smears in firelight. Brightly coloured shards of ruined gospels flutter among glowing embers, like butterflies and fireflies dancing together in the thermal draughts. A sea-cold breeze whips off the water, lifting the iron tang of blood and metal with the brine, the stink of death and burning carried deep into the land.

      The attack on Lindisfarne in 793 has become the iconic moment that defines the engagement of Britain’s inhabitants with their neighbours across the North Sea. A sudden seaborne assault on a renowned centre of Christian learning, it was an event that sent shockwaves through Europe. From the court of Charlemagne across the Channel, the English cleric Alcuin wrote a series of letters to his brethren in England in response to this unprecedented tragedy. To him, a terror from the North should have been foreseen, particularly in the light of ‘the bloody rain, which […] we saw fall menacingly on the north side’ of St Peter’s Church in York ‘though the sky was serene’. Therefore one should not be surprised, he adds, ‘that from the north there will come upon our nation retribution in blood, which can be seen to have started with this attack’.25

      A sense of the psychological impact these raids had in the communities they visited can be found in one of the more unsettling objects to have survived them. A carved stone – cracked at its base, rounded at its top – was discovered on Lindisfarne and first mentioned in the 1920s. It numbers among more than fifty tombstones – many of them decorated with Anglo-Saxon carvings and inscribed with names – that have been unearthed on the island. This one, however, is unique. On one side, figures are depicted gesturing towards the sun and moon which ride the sky together on either side of an empty cross. It is an image evoking the passage of time, the transition of day into night, mediated by the risen Christ – a reminder of the judgement to come when night finally falls over the earth.

      On the other side of the stone are depicted seven men, all facing forward, their arms raised. Weapons are held aloft by five of them – three swords and two axes – and their clothing is distinctive. If the stone is taken as a whole, it seems to be a representation of the apocalypse, the armed men perhaps a representation of the wrath of God in corporeal form – a form that English monks would recognize. As we shall see, ecclesiastical commentators found it easy enough to imagine the Vikings as an instrument of divine justice. The stone was probably carved in the late ninth century, and there is no way of knowing whether these armed men are intended to depict Vikings rather than any other armed group, but it is hard to dispel the feeling that the trauma inflicted in Lindisfarne left psychological scars that would trouble the imaginations of generations of monks, colouring their apocalyptic visions.26

      Lindisfarne was the first raid of this type to be recorded, but it was by no means the last. The years around the turn of the ninth century saw waterborne raiders attacking and pillaging poorly defended monasteries and settlements all around northern Britain and Ireland, as well as elsewhere in continental Europe, and for those on the receiving end it must have been a dreadful experience – made all the more terrifying by the primal horror that a heathen assault inspired.

      Alcuin’s words, very often ripped from their context, are found at the beginning of many treatments of the Viking Age: ‘the pagans have desecrated God’s sanctuary,’ he lamented in his letter to Bishop Higbald of Lindisfarne, ‘shed the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope and trampled the bodies of the saints like dung in the street’. One has to wonder whether Higbald and the monks needed reminding. Indeed, one could easily forgive the torrent of Anglo-Saxon invective that we might imagine issuing from the good bishop’s lips upon reading the rest of Alcuin’s letter, for it is not – as one might think appropriate – a warm-hearted missive expressing sorrow, solidarity and offers of practical assistance. It is, instead, a lecture on the assumed defects of Higbald’s authority and the sub-par behaviour of his monks: they are accused of having asked for it through their drunkenness, vanity, lewdness, degeneracy and – most unfairly of all – lack of manliness (‘you who survive, stand like men’).27

      In a similar letter to King Ethelred of Northumbria, Alcuin wrote the words which have led many to imagine the heathen storm breaking on the shores of Britain like lightning from a clear sky:

      Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments …