Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams

expat cleric used the opportunity to castigate the monks, this time for wishing to ‘resemble the pagans’ in their ‘trimming of beard and hair’. With this stern intervention into the hairdressing habits of his former colleagues, however, Alcuin inadvertently alerts us to something potentially more significant than Northumbrian fashion trends, something which challenges and complicates the image of the North as a hellish realm and its peoples as the devil’s imps.

      While learned attitudes to the North seem certainly to have emphasized the diabolic qualities of its inhabitants, comments such as Alcuin’s imply a measure of contact and even, in some cases, admiration or nostalgia for the Scandinavian world and its denizens: a contradiction at the heart of Anglo-Saxon ideas about the wider northern world. On a simplistic level, in order to copy heathen haircuts, the monks must have been exposed to and favourably impressed by them – and presumably not when ducking a swinging axe. It seems highly probable, if not yet provable, that Scandinavian traders had become a feature at some of the new trading settlements of eighth-century England (as well as, perhaps, in the Northern Isles and Pictish Scotland as well).29

      It is certainly the case that the Viking Age emerged against a background of increasingly sophisticated European trade. A new type of specialized trading settlement had grown up around the North Sea during the eighth century, exploiting and facilitating long-distance trade. These settlements – known to historians and archaeologists as ‘emporia’ – included Southampton (Hamwic), London (Lundenwic), Ipswich (Gipeswic) and York (Eoforwic) in England, as well as trading settlements at Quentovic (France), Dorestad (Netherlands), Hedeby and Ribe (Denmark), Birka (Sweden) and Kaupang (Norway) among others. It seems inconceivable that every exchange of goods between Britain and Scandinavia in the eighth century was conducted through continental middlemen.

      Whatever the realities of direct trading relationships in the decades leading up to the earliest Viking raids, archaeology suggests that contacts across the North Sea in the preceding centuries had been close. A famous example (referred to in the preceding chapter) serves to illustrate the point. The great masked helmet (the Old English word, rather wonderfully, is grimhelm) that was excavated from the boat grave found beneath Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk finds its closest parallels in the highly elaborate boat graves from the cemeteries at Vendel and, later, Valsgärde in Sweden; the parallels, in both the style of artefacts and the manner of their burial, demonstrate elements of a cultural identity that spanned the North Sea. This, and a great deal of other evidence (not least the transformation of lowland Britain from a Romano-British-speaking population to one which used the western Germanic ‘Old English’ language), broadly supports the stories which the Anglo-Saxons told about their own origins.30 On this point, the Northumbrian monk and scholar Bede – writing at Jarrow in the early eighth century – was quite explicit:

      In the year of our Lord 449 […] the Angles or Saxons came to Britain at the invitation of King Vortigern in three long-ships […] They […] sent back news of their success to their homeland, adding that the country was fertile and the Britons cowardly […] These new-comers were from the three most formidable races of Germany, the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes.31

      The first group, the Saxons, came from a region identified by Bede as ‘Old Saxony’ – now north-west Germany. The Angles and the Jutes originated in the Jutland peninsula, occupying land which, by the time Bede was writing, lay within the kingdom of the Danes. Quite how true this story is remains unknowable (though it is certain that significant migration from the continent did occur). But what is critical is that the Anglo-Saxons themselves believed it to be true.32

      By Bede’s day, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had been in Britain for the best part of 300 years (by his reckoning), and had been Christian, in most cases, for several generations. By the late eighth century, they had formed a number of independent kingdoms, each with its own cultural and geographical peculiarities. Nevertheless, the tribes from whom they claimed descent were (and, in the late eighth century, remained) pagan peoples, part of a wider northern European heritage that had stood beyond the limits of Rome’s continental frontiers. As receivers of that heritage, the Anglo-Saxons were torch-carriers for traditions, tales, words and images from a legendary world. That world, though its shapes and contours grew ever more indistinct, yet blazed brightly in the imaginations of poets and storytellers. The earliest genealogical lists of Anglo-Saxon royal houses typically extend via Woden, the pagan deity equivalent to Odin (ON Oðinn) in Old Norse mythology, through Finn (a legendary Frisian king) to Geat, the eponymous ancestor of Beowulf’s own Scandinavian tribe.

      Even a century of Viking attacks failed to dampen enthusiasm amongst the Anglo-Saxons for their northern heritage. By the end of the ninth century, royal genealogies had expanded to include Bældæg (the Old Norse god Balder), Scyld (the legendary progenitor of the Danes) and possibly Beowulf the Geat himself.33 Negotiating the evidence for the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons identified with this heritage is complex and sometimes bewildering. Much of what remains is reduced to the blank names of kings and heroes – names which must once have conjured great arcs of narrative, laced with the myths of the pre-Christian past, but whose owners now stand mute guard at the entrance to pathways which can never now be trod.

      The perpetuation of this fascination with the ancestral North did not, however, go unchallenged. Writing in around the year 800, our friend Alcuin was so incensed by this sort of thing that, in a letter to another Anglo-Saxon bishop, he demanded to know ‘what has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ We know only a single anecdote about Ingeld, king of the Heathobards – a gloomy story about how he burned Hrothgar’s hall, Heorot, and was thereafter a target of the Danish king’s vengeance. The story is alluded to in Beowulf and mentioned in passing in another Old English poem, Widsith. Alcuin’s reference to Ingeld pops up in a passage in which he lambasts his fellow ecclesiasts for listening to music and ‘inappropriate’ stories at dinner-time and for laughing in the courtyards (he presumably didn’t get invited to many parties). It is of particular interest, however, because it suggests that even in what should have been a thoroughly Christian environment, the old stories were still popular – and this at a time when, in Alcuin’s own words, the ‘bodies of the saints were being trampled like dung’ by the living descendants of Hrothgar and his kin.34

      Rather less is known about attitudes to the ancestral North in other parts of Britain. One tradition, reported by Bede, held that the Picts – the people inhabiting the highland and island regions of what is now Scotland – had originated in ‘Scythia’. This land had been believed by classical authorities to have existed in an ill-defined region somewhere, seemingly, in northern Eurasia. Whether the Picts themselves believed this to be true – and if they did, what they thought of it – is less than clear. The Welsh, on the other hand, had their own distinct boreal traditions: to them, Hen Ogledd (‘the Old North’) referred to those parts of Britain from which their ancestors had been ejected by Anglo-Saxon incomers in the sixth and seventh centuries. It was an altogether more insular sense of northernness, and can only have compounded the sense that northern lands beyond the sea were a place whence nothing much good ever came.35

      Among the English-speaking peoples, however, we are left with an apparent paradox – a set of attitudes to the North that painted it as both shining ancestral homeland and infernal monster-infested wasteland, its inhabitants as both cousins and aliens. As a result, the Viking has emerged as a Janus-faced figure, constantly at war with himself in our imaginations: poet or plunderer, merchant or marauder, berserker or boat-builder, kinsman or kin-of-Cain. The reconciliation of these themes and the resolution of these identities is in large measure the story of Viking Britain. It is a process of negotiation that continues to this day, and begins with the fundamental question of who we understand the Vikings to be.

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