"The Wrath of the Northmen": The Vikings and their Memory

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ou won't be surprised that the Vikings were normally viewed by those they came up against in a markedly negative light. Certainly this was true in England, the area most of our early records come from, and the one I am most familiar with. Indeed, the story of the Vikings is usually taken--and not just by English historians--as starting and ending with events in England. The end is often considered to be the 1066 invasion of England by the Normans (originally Vikings themselves who had settled in northern France and adopted the language they found there), though Viking-type raids continued, especially in the Scottish islands, until about the end of the twelfth century.

The beginning of the Vikings' recorded story--which coincides with the beginning of recorded history for Norway--is usually marked by a Viking raid on a northern English monastery in 793. But 793 wasn't quite the first time the Vikings had caused trouble in England. Here is the entry for 787 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a work only compiled some century later, though it does seem to have used earlier written sources. 787 [789]. In this year [ . . .] came first three ships of Norwegians from Hørthaland [around Hardanger Fjord]: and then the reeve rode thither and tried to compel them to go to the royal manor, for he did not know what they were: and then they slew him. These were the first ships of the Danes to come to England. (Garmonsway, 55) What is so striking is the total unexpectedness of this happening. The reeve had expected to find peaceful traders who would take their goods to the royal residence, as was customary. And what he got was people who lived by totally different rules.

The event provides a fitting overture for the even more shocking raid in 793. Here is the relevant part of the Chronicle entry for that year: In this year terrible portents appeared over Northumbria, and miserably frightened the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine soon followed these signs; and a little after that in the same year on 8 [June] the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter. (Garmonsway, 55, 57) It is an event that terrorized the whole of the Western Christian world. This is what one Englishman (Alcuin of York) had to say about it at the time: 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; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples. [. . .] What should be expected for other places, when the divine judgment has not spared this holy place? (Loyn, 55-6) Well, what could they expect apart from a lot of trouble?

These raiding peoples emerge out of all three Scandinavian homelands--Norway, Sweden, and Denmark--sending off their young men all over the known world in search of wealth and prestige.

The Norwegians kept pushing west, sometimes merely raiding, sometimes also setting up settlements, to the Scottish islands, to Ireland (Dublin was founded as a base particularly for slave trading in 841), to northern England. They occupied the Faeroe Islands (825), Iceland (ca. 870-930), and parts of Greenland (ca. 985), finally setting up outposts also in America (ca. 1000). They pushed south through England, into France, down to the Mediterranean. The Danes expanded westwards along the North Sea coast toward France. They fanned out within France--Paris was sacked in 845 and again in the 860s--and went south to raid in Spain. Pressing through the straits of Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean, they sacked Luna, a small town in northern Italy, apparently thinking it was Rome (860). They almost completely took over England in the ninth century (with a bit of help from the Norwegians) and, in a later wave of invasion, they provided England's kings from 1013-1035: Swein Forkbeard, Harald II and Cnut.

The Swedes traded and colonized around the Baltic. They sailed up Russia's rivers and became the first rulers of the Kievan Russian state. They made their way to Constantinople and the Orient. They served as the bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors.

And they certainly did not do all these things without terrorizing a lot of people. As Priit J. Vesilind put it in his "In Search of Vikings" in the May 2000 issue of National Geographic, "In a casually brutal age Vikings were simply better brutes" (Vesilind, 10-11).

The English might not have agreed with Vesilind's assessment of the age, but they would have agreed with him about the Vikings. Following those traumatizing early raids there was a lull for about a generation. But then there were two further waves of attack. The first involved large groups of Danes coming sometimes for loot but also very often to settle in England's green and pleasant land. By the end of the ninth century it seemed they would take over the whole country. The tide was finally turned by King Alfred and his successors, but then there was a second major wave of attacks, heralded by a terse entry in the Chronicle under 981: "In this year for the first time seven ships came and ravaged Southampton" (Garmonsway, 125). And then the English paid, and paid, and paid to try to keep the invaders from laying waste the country--and still they were often plundered.

Unfortunately, the English made some very serious mistakes in this later period. In 1002 they indulged in what looks like a stupid effort at ethnic cleansing: 1002. In this year the king and his councillors decided to pay tribute to the fleet and to make peace, on condition they ceased from their evil deeds. [. . .] This was accepted and they were paid twenty-four thousand pounds. Then [. . .] in the same year the king gave orders for all the Danish people who were in England to be slain on St. Brice's day [13 November], because the king had been told that they wished to deprive him of his life by treachery, and all his councillors after him, and then seize his kingdom. (Garmonsway, 133-5) Among those slain was the sister of Swein Forkbeard, king of Denmark. The act provoked Swein to an orgy of revenge that reached its climax in 1011--at least according to our monastic chronicler--when the Vikings plundered Canterbury and seized all those in holy orders, including the archbishop Ǽlfhere. The following year they martyred him: 1012. Then on the Saturday the host became greatly incensed against the bishop, because he was not willing to offer them any money, and forbade any ransom to be given for him. Moreover they were very drunk, for wine had been brought to them from the south. Then they took the bishop, and led him to their tribunal, on Saturday evening, within the octave of Easter [19 April], and pelted him to death with bones and the heads of cattle; and one of them smote him on the skull with the iron [head] of an axe, so that with the blow he sank down and his holy blood fell upon the earth, and his holy soul was sent forth to God's kingdom. (Garmonsway, 142) It seemed to the English that the world was coming to an end.

The English weren't the only ones who lived in fear of the Vikings. The French too were traumatized: "From the wrath of the Northmen, O Lord, deliver us," they prayed. And at the other end of the known world the Arabs were simply appalled. Ibn Fadhlan, an Arab emissary who met a group of Vikings in the 920s, described them as "the filthiest of Allah's creatures: they do not wash after shitting or peeing, nor after sexual intercourse, and do not wash after eating. They are like wayward donkeys" (Roesdahl, 34). Elsewhere he provides a detached but terrifying eyewitness account of a Viking ship burial on the Volga (I provide a conveniently abbreviated version of this; I quote at such length because the account is so astonishing): When a chieftain dies, slaves and servants are asked who will die with him. The one who volunteers cannot alter the decision. In this particular case it was a woman who was treated with great courtesy while the burial was being prepared. On the day of the funeral the chieftain's ship was drawn up on land and people walked around it and said words. A bier was placed on it and cloths and cushions laid on it by an old woman called the Angel of Death. She was responsible for the preparations. The dead body which up to now had been laid in a grave was taken up and dressed in splendid garments specially made for the occasion. He was seated among the cushions in the tent on the ship, with alcoholic drink, food, aromatic herbs and all his weapons. Then a dog, two horses, two cows, a cock and a hen were killed and placed in the ship.