Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ Scandinavia, other helmets have been found in graves that may, on the strength of their form or contents, have been the burial places of Vikings – or, at least, of people with a cultural affinity to Scandinavia. But none of these – most of which have been found in what is now Russia and Ukraine – is distinct from the material culture of the (non-Viking) local populations. Are these Viking helmets? If the only qualification is that a person of Scandinavian extraction might once have put one of these things on his head then the answer must be yes. But these helmets are radically different to the Gjermundbu helmet: open faced, conical, distinctly eastern – and worn by all sorts of other people who were definitely not Vikings. So perhaps these were just helmets that some Vikings happened to wear – not ‘Viking’ helmets at all. Perhaps these were no more ‘Viking’ helmets than the Volga salmon they ate for dinner was ‘Viking’ fish. But, of course, that is equally true of the Gjermundbu helmet as well – simply putting it on didn’t make the wearer a Viking, and we can’t even be certain (no matter how probable it may be) that it was made by, or even worn by, someone born and bred in Scandinavia. As we shall see, material culture can be a most treacherous guide to ethnicity.

      The problems lie both in the semantics (the word ‘Viking’) and in the underlying premise that ‘the Vikings’ were a ‘people’ whose characteristics can be listed like a Top Trump card or tabulated like a character-class in a role-playing game. It is fair to say that Vikings, in this sense at least, never existed.

      Most modern academics have an uneasy relationship with the term ‘Viking’, and reject the idea that it can be used as an ethnic label. Its original meaning is disputed. It could mean people who hung around in bays getting up to no good (from ON vik, meaning ‘bay or inlet’) or perhaps people who frequently showed up at trading settlements (from OE wic); there are, also, other possibilities. However, its original derivation is largely irrelevant – what is important is what people thought they meant by it when (and if) they used the word. As a common noun (in its Old Norse and Old English forms Vikingr and Wicing respectively), the word was used rarely during the Viking Age and was applied only to a minority, not all of whom were Scandinavians. In Old Norse poetry composed in praise of Viking kings (known as skaldic verse), much of which dates to the Viking period, the word was as likely to be applied to the enemies of Scandinavian kings as to home-grown marauders. Indeed, one of the rare English uses of the term is found in Archbishop Wulfstan’s lament, c. 1014, that slaves were running away from their English lords to become ‘Vikings’.3 Who the Vikings were, therefore, could be a relative concept. It was never an ethnic category, and in most cases it seems to have been used disapprovingly, suggesting that ‘Vikings’ could prove as much a menace to Scandinavians as to their victims elsewhere.4

      Runestones – memorials to the dead erected during the Viking Age and inscribed in the runic alphabet that was used to render the Old Norse language in written form – also record a number of instances of the word. In most of these cases the word appears as a personal name, and this phenomenon is known from Viking Age Britain as well: a man called ‘Wicing’ was minting coins in Lydford (Devon) on behalf of King Cnut in the eleventh century.5 The implication is that the term ‘Viking’ wasn’t necessarily negative, and although we can’t know for certain if these were names given at birth, it accords well with a society in which individuals revelled in tough-guy epithets.6 Indeed, the abstract form of the noun (ON viking), particularly as encountered in later Icelandic literature, meant a seaborne mission involving adventure, violence, plunder and risk, and was a normal and honourable means by which a man might make his name.

      The poetry of the tenth-century Icelander Egil Skallagrimsson – contained in the thirteenth-century saga of his life – sums up, in words which just might originate with Egil himself, a view of the indulgent nature of Viking parenting:

      My mother said to me

      That they would buy for me

      A ship and lovely oars

      To go away with Vikings,

      Standing in the stern,

      Steering the glorious ship,

      Then putting into ports,

      Killing a man or two.7

      In this sense, ‘Viking’ was fundamentally something that one did or was a part of, and there is very limited evidence that the word was used in this way during the Viking Age. A runestone erected by a mother in Vastergotland (Sweden) implies that to engage in ‘Viking’ activity (in this case in the west – that is, in Britain and Ireland) could be considered praiseworthy: ‘Tóla placed this stone in memory of Geirr, her son, a very good valiant man. He died on a Viking raid on the western route.’8

      However, there seems to have been an expectation that a man (it was almost certainly an overwhelmingly – if perhaps not exclusively – male occupation) would, at some point, settle down. Supported by the wealth accrued during his Viking days, he might set himself up as a farmer and landowner, the head of a family, with a good reputation among his peers. He might take on some public duties at legal gatherings, and he would use his wealth to patronize poets and craftsmen and perhaps even organize trading expeditions. He would become, in other words, respectable. Inevitably, however, there were always individuals who were sufficiently bloodthirsty, marginalized, restless, irresponsible, fame-hungry, greedy or outcast to make the Viking lifestyle a permanent occupation – these outsiders would have been among those who self-identified as Vikings, and it is for these people that the disapproval of Scandinavian skalds seems to have been reserved. This distinction between being and doing was perhaps a little like the different attitudes that a young person might encounter if he or she were to state an ambition to become ‘a traveller’ rather than merely to ‘go travelling’.

      All of which is rendered somewhat irrelevant by the unavoidable observation that hardly anybody was ever called a Viking during the Viking Age itself: they were referred to across Europe and beyond as Danes, Dark Heathens, Dark Foreigners, Fair Foreigners, Foreign Irish, Gentiles, Northmen, Pirates, Pagans, Rūs, Scythians and Varangians, but hardly ever – in Old English – as Vikings (wicings). As we have seen, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tends most frequently to speak of ‘Danes’, despite considerable evidence to indicate that many of the Vikings who found themselves in Britain came from all over the northern world: various Viking leaders can be shown to have had Norwegian origins, runestones commemorate the death of Swedish Vikings in Britain, and even the Viking dead themselves, through analysis of the oxygen isotopes in their teeth, can be shown to have grown up as far afield as Estonia, Belarus and high latitudes beyond the Arctic circle.

      The early English had form when it came to conflating complex cultural phenomena into a homogeneous ‘them’ – the diverse inhabitants of much of Celtic-speaking Britain had been labelled wealas (‘foreigners’, whence the modern ‘Welsh’) and treated as a largely undifferentiated rabble since at least Bede’s day. Likewise, ‘Danish’ seems to have become a convenient catch-all term for people who predominantly spoke Old Norse, wherever they actually came from.9

      One might expect that modern historians would have long ago developed more subtle approaches to complex issues of identity and cultural affiliation. And yet, until relatively recently, it was widely assumed that past ‘peoples’ could be identified as essentially unchanging racial blocs with cultural traits that were stable, heritable and identifiable through language, behaviour, skull-size and material culture. This ‘culture-historical СКАЧАТЬ