Viking Britain: A History. Thomas Williams

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ in Britain be told without some reference to events in continental Europe. Nevertheless, the foregoing paragraphs sketch – in broad outline – the most important contours of British political geography at the time that three strange ships pitched up on the beach at Portland. Though nobody could have known it then, the death of Beaduheard marked the beginning of a series of cataclysmic upheavals that changed Britain for ever. Many of the places mentioned above will be revisited in the chapters that follow; many of the kingdoms will fall.

      But before that story can be told, we must return to that beach in Portland, the dark sails receding into the distance. We watch them go, and the coastguard’s questions replay in our minds, too late now for any hope of an answer: ‘Outsiders from across the water […] the sooner you tell where you come from and why, the better.’18

      There is no written source that tells these events in the words of the Vikings themselves. For the most part, the people of Scandinavia did not record their history in written form until long after the Viking Age is usually considered to have closed. The sagas and histories, produced in Norway and especially in Iceland, are products of the late twelfth century and later – sometimes much later. To say that the Vikings were illiterate is strictly false, however. As will be seen, they made use of their own runic script for inscriptions marking ownership or memorializing the dead. Moreover, poems composed during the Viking Age survived orally to be written down in later centuries. Nevertheless, very little of the Viking voice survives, and certainly nothing that will explain the identities, motivations and origins of those first violent pioneers. In the face of this Scandinavian silence we must turn and consider who the people of early medieval Britain thought these strangers were, where they had come from and what had driven them on to British shores.

      The written sources for the Viking Age in Britain are not a straightforward guide to contemporary events. These were documents written for specific purposes, in different times and in different places, each one reflecting the views of the people who compiled or commissioned them. As such, they are partial and biased, limited by the range of knowledge which their authors possessed, though not by their imaginations. By far the most important sources for this period are the various manuscripts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The first, and oldest, of these manuscripts is normally referred to as the A text or, sometimes, as the ‘Winchester Chronicle’. It was put together in the late ninth century – probably in the 890s – as part of the intellectual scene that surrounded the court of King Alfred in Wessex. All later historians and chroniclers of the Middle Ages, including the other texts of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, rely on the A text to some degree.

      The earliest record of the Viking arrival on Portland is found in the A text, and was therefore written down a century later than the events it describes. Although this Chronicle almost certainly contains real traditions and material from older sources, none of these survive for us to make a comparison. The suspicion therefore remains that the view of history which the Chronicle presents is coloured by a bleak century of Scandinavian plunder, conquest and colonization. In particular, one might justly raise an eyebrow at the chronicler’s assertion that these ‘were the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English [Angelcynnes lond]’: quite apart from the vexed question of what exactly the chronicler meant by ‘Angelcynnes lond’, one might well question how, 100 years later and from the perspective of Britain’s most southerly realm, such knowledge could possibly have been possessed.19

      The A text tells us, in no uncertain terms, that the newcomers were ‘Danish’ (denisc). While this might seem, on the face of things, to be a useful statement of origins, it is not at all certain whether that which seemed ‘danish’ to Anglo-Saxon eyes would necessarily appear ‘Danish’ to our own. As will be seen, the term denisc (along with other generic terms used throughout Britain) in fact came to be applied indiscriminately to people and things held to have emanated from the North. Far more promising is the statement that the newcomers were ‘Northmen’ (Norðmanna) from Hordaland (Hereðalande), now a county of western Norway centred on Bergen. Alas, this is surprisingly (and suspiciously) specific. The earliest record of this notice is found, not in the A text, but in the so-called ‘northern recension’ of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and can be dated no earlier than the mid-eleventh century – at least 250 years after the incident at Portland. This reference may shed more light on the origin of eleventh-century Scandinavian settlers in Northumbria than it does on events in late eighth-century Wessex.20

      In other words, the sources – so promising at first reading – really only tell us that the newcomers were foreigners, probably from somewhere across the North Sea. It is certain, however, that the people of Britain thought something when they encountered strangers on their beaches and imagined the worlds from which they had come. Understanding what that something might have been – what it meant – is bound up with how the people of early medieval Britain understood their own world, and their place within it.

      2

       Heart of Darkness

      Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land.

      JEREMIAH 1:151

      northwards lies the road to hell

      SNORRI STURLUSON, Gylfaginning (early thirteenth century)2

      Ærest of swin forda upp andlang broces to ceolnes wyllan …

      (‘Go first up from the swine ford and along the brook to ceolnes [Ceolwine’s?] well’)3

      At the river’s edge you pass a churl driving his pigs across the muddy ford, hairy oinkers on their way to the wood pasture, eager to rootle among wyrttruma (‘woody roots’) for acorns and beech mast; the animal scent of sweat and pig shit, crumbly clods of dried mud dropping from bristly bottoms. It is damp down here, soggy. Water seeps into your shoes (stitched leather – hardly watertight) as you turn to the north, away from the ford. Perhaps you slip a little on the muddy path that runs beside the brook and stub a toe on a stone – the dull throbbing adding injury to numbness in your cold feet; at least there are no midges (mycgas) at this time of year. You pause and place a bright glass bead on the flat mossy stone beside the spring where the brook wells up – you have heard from the monks how, long ago, a pilgrim called Ceolwine struck his ash staff on the stone and a rush of cold water sprang up to slake his thirst: a miracle they said. But an old man in the village told you this was rubbish: his grandfather had been a boy when the old gods still lived here and the folk made sacrifice, mounting the heads on ash poles and throwing the bones into the water; now their corpses haunt the marshy edgelands: ‘you can hear them coming when the light fails boy: drip … drip … drip …’

      Probably best to leave a gift either way.

       andlang hege ræwe to luttes crundele · þanon to grafes owisce · Andlang owisce to wege …

      (‘along the hedgerow to luttes [Lutt’s?] pit and then on to the eaves of the grove; along the eaves to the road’)

      Reaching СКАЧАТЬ