Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  How inadequate – how anaemic – this would have seemed to Beaduheard’s contemporaries, steeped in a geography that was personal, local, storied. For early medieval Britons, geographical knowledge was more than just a series of routes and landmarks; it was a series of signs and symbols that plumbed time, mythology and identity – moving through ancient landscapes could mean travelling backwards in time, while ancestral mythologies transported people to far-off realms.

  Maps were not unknown, but their circulation was restricted to a handful of learned men and fulfilled very different purposes from their modern counterparts. A common form was the T-O map – a schematic diagram, or ‘ideogram’, that divided the world into three unequal segments: Asia (the top half of the circle), Africa (the bottom right quarter) and Europe (the bottom left). Jerusalem lay at the centre. The image was in part a means of concentrating the mind on the totality of God’s creation, its symmetry and its unity. By superimposing the letters T and O on to its form, it also incorporated the initials of the words terra orbis (orb of the world; the globe) into the design. Needless to say, it was of limited utility to the disorientated traveller. Like boundary clauses, early maps and the base of knowledge from which they were derived were essentially concerned with circumscription – the gathering of what was known into (usually circular) plans, forming an ‘inside’ and an ‘out there’. In the Greek and Roman worlds this had symbolized the distinction between civilization and barbaricum; in the Christian epoch ‘inside’ indicated, if not exactly Christendom, then the totality of that portion of the earth which lay within the orbit of potential salvation. Later medieval maps – such as the Hereford Mappa Mundi – depict Christ standing behind the world, literally embracing creation.8

  That which lay beyond these borders was, in this conception, more dreadful than mere terra incognita. It was the abyss – the world beyond God.

  A sense of how fearsome this outer world could seem is evident in Old English poetry and the cosmology it reflects: the Old English poetic retelling of Genesis, for example, paints the earth as a golden hall surrounded by a sea of darkness – the void a place of mist and sorrow beyond the light of God.9 Other poems refine this image: the cold seas of The Wanderer and The Seafarer reflect both physical and spiritual desolation. It is Beowulf, however, that really drives this fear home:

  Grendel was the grim ghoul named,

  Famous edge-marcher, who held the moors

  The fen and fastness …10

  The first part of Beowulf tells the story of how the eponymous hero came to Denmark from his home in the land of the Geats, drawn by tales of a monster – named Grendel – who for many years had menaced the hall – Heorot – of the Danish king Hrothgar. Beowulf defeats the monster, tearing off his arm and sending him fleeing back to die in his fenland home. But the real power and tension in this part of the poem follows the monster. Grendel is the border-walker, the dweller in shadow, the descendant of Cain and an avatar of jealous alienation. He is of the world ‘outside’ – fifelcynnes eard, literally ‘monster-world’ – and it is with horrible fascination that the poet follows him ‘down over mist-slopes’, creeping through the darkness, coming with the fog, greedy hands pushing at the hall door.11

  ‘Heorot’ literally means ‘hart’ (a male deer), but the word is derived from the same root as the Old English heorte, a word which means ‘heart’ in all its literal and figurative senses; and in Beowulf the hall is, indeed, the beating heart of human culture – a symbol of warmth and light, safety and security, community and the affirmation of bonds: it is fortress, pub and family home wrapped into one. The violation of that safety and sanctity is what gives the poem a psychological edge that cuts easily across the centuries – Grendel is the home-invader, the wolf in the fold, striking deep at the vitals of society.

  In fact, Grendel and his kin are described in explicitly lupine terms by the Beowulf poet, a distinction they share with other malefactors of the Anglo-Saxon world. The term wearg (the origin of Tolkien’s ‘warg’) meant both ‘wolf’ and ‘criminal’, and the label wulvesheofod (‘wolf’s head’) was, by the eleventh century, used to define outlaw status. The Vikings who appear in the poetic account of the battle of Maldon in 991 are ‘slaughter-wolves’ (waelwulfas). These groups – monsters, criminals, outlaws, Vikings – posed threats to the ordered world represented by the hall: they were the wolves beyond the border, the slaughterers, raveners, stealers of property, of livestock, of children. In a world where terrors could be made horribly and suddenly real, it is small wonder that Ine’s laws should have been so unforgiving to the outlander.12

  Of all the compass points from which terror might emanate, there was one which held the greatest dread. This was not just because the sea had repeatedly disgorged boatloads of child-snatchers and hall-burners from precisely this direction, nor indeed because empirical observation demonstrated that this was the horizon over which the most wretched weather tended to hurtle, but because the Anglo-Saxons already knew full well that it was here that Satan had set his throne.

  This was the medieval world’s heart of darkness: the North.

  Behind are the familiar paths and places of home, the songs in the hall, the fire, the harp. Out here there is only the dark, only the cold, only the biting north wind that screams over the barren hillsides. Rocky paths lie ahead, thin winding ways where death leers blackly from the fells below. A mist closes in, a wolf howls … Down through the mist-bands, a glimmer of light flickers – ghostly, ethereal, unnatural: a sheen of dark water, witch-fires burning on its surface. Beyond the water a bleak forest looms, glowering from gloomy cliffs. Branches encrusted with rime and hoarfrost drag skeletal fingers through the frigid air; roots like serpents quest over slimy banks towards the rotting stagnant tarn. In the reeking water nameless things writhe and wriggle. Monsters dwell here – among the ‘wolf-slopes, windy headlands, dangerous fen-tracts’.13 To go further would be to risk soul and sanity: here the laws of nature are perverted and upended – the burning black water rushes upwards towards the heavens and gouts of ice and flame entwine. From the sky comes a deadly hail, lashing from the roiling clouds, and amid the black mist comes the beating of wings in the darkness, like clouds of leathery moths searching for prey to pluck into the storm-wracked heavens. Further northwards, and deeper down, lies the abyss itself: sometimes a foul cavern beneath the waves, infested with serpents and other filthy wriggling things, sometimes a grim bastion wreathed in smoke and fume, ‘evil spirits running about amid the black caverns and gloomy abysses’.14

  Other than the T-O ideograms, very few maps date to the eighth century or earlier, and the northern world is all but absent from them. It seems that, at the beginning of the Viking Age, what learned British monks knew of classical scholarship implied that Britain was, itself, at the ends of the earth: about lands further north, classical and Christian learning was vague, and it is uncertain how much of this knowledge was even accessible to British monks. The image they would have had was one of vaguely drawn islands floating in sluggish seas: of the isle of Thule and the land of the Hyperboreans (the dwellers ‘beyond the north wind’), of men with bestial bodies and others with the heads of dogs – a dwelling place of monsters.15 In this, it was not unlike any of the unknown regions of the earth, but the theme of the North as a specifically satanic realm also manifested itself in the literature of medieval Britain. Often this can be found in ways clearly derived from biblical narratives, but at others it appeared in vivid and idiosyncratic form.

  In the tale of St Guthlac, written at the monastery of Crowland in Lincolnshire in the 730s by a monk called Felix, the treatment meted out by a demonic horde to the unfortunate anchorite is described in vivid terms. After a relentless campaign of physical and psychological punishment,

  they began to drag him through the cloudy stretches of the freezing skies to the sound of the horrid beating of their wings. Now when he had reached the lofty summit of the sky, then, horrible to relate, lo! the region of the northern h
eavens seemed to grow dark with gloomy mists and black clouds. For there could be seen coming thence to meet them, innumerable squadrons of foul spirits. Thus with all their forces joined in one, they turned their way with immense uproar into thin air, and carried the afore-named servant of Christ, Guthlac, to the accursed jaws of hell.16

  Nor is this the only northern tradition to riff on the biblical theme of the diabolical North. The vision of St Paul, as told in late Anglo-Saxon England, recounts that ‘St Paul was looking at the northern part of this world, where all the waters go down, and he saw there above the water a certain grey rock, and there had grown north of that rock very frosty woods, and there were dark mists, and under that rock was a dwelling place of water-monsters and wolves; and he saw that on that cliff there hung in those icy woods many black souls, tied by their hands, and their foes, in the guise of water-monsters, were gripping them like greedy wolves, and the water was black …’17

  That these ideas had deep roots in the northern psyche is implied by striking similarities between this description of the monster-haunted North and the Beowulf poet’s description of the home of Grendel and his mother. The two descriptions are almost certainly related.

  Though no comparable tales survive from the Celtic-speaking areas of Britain, the Irish life of St Brendan – written in the seventh century – describes boiling northern seas and an island of flame and tormented howling: ‘the confines of Hell’ as the saint puts it.18 Even the people of Scandinavia themselves knew that niðr ok norðr liggr Helvegr (‘netherwards and northwards lies the road to hell’).19 The word ‘hell’ itself has no Latin-Christian origin. It is older than that, reflecting fragments of a shared vision that haunted the darker dreams of the Anglo-Saxons and their contemporaries: a nightmare North of the early medieval imagination.

  The human inhabitants of this world, if known at all, would have been distinguished for their heathenism – their rejection of Christian norms and values, their bloodletting and their weird rites. It would have been natural to imagine them, to use the historian Eric Christiansen’s memorable phrase, as ‘robot agents of Satan’s foreign policy’, flesh and blood avatars of the monster-world beyond the pale.20

  When the men of the North next appeared in the written record, in all their dreadful pomp and fury, they more than lived up to the fevered imaginings of their victims. In 793, the North disgorged its innards in lurid tones, and chroniclers responded with imagery that came easily:

  In this year dire fore-bodings came over Northumbria and miserably terrified the people: there were immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying aloft. Those signs were soon followed by a great hunger, and a little after that in the same year, on 8 June, the harrying of heathen men wretchedly destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter.21

  Of all the religious centres of northern Europe, there were few that could rival the cultural muscle of the island priory of Lindisfarne. Its peripheral location, tied to the Northumbrian coast by the narrow umbilical cord of its tidal causeway, belied the wealth and status that it had accrued since its foundation in the early seventh century. Much of this flowed from the stories told of its most famous bishop, Cuthbert (c. 634–87). Cuthbert – a monk originally from Melrose who had later been appointed prior of the community at Lindisfarne – was elevated to bishop in March 685. For perhaps as long as nine years, Cuthbert lived in self-imposed exile from Lindisfarne as a hermit on Inner Farne, a wildly bleak outcrop of grey granite stacks, jutting gloomily from the sea.22 It was a life of hardship, solitude and self-denial modelled on the penitential attitudes of the desert fathers – St Anthony in particular. His elevation to bishop did little to change his temperament – by 687 he had returned to his hermitage, determined to live out his last in solitude.

  On Inner Farne, Cuthbert – like St Anthony – encountered devils in the wilderness. The accounts of his struggles are brief – he fought them with ‘the helmet of salvation, the shield of faith and the sword of spirit which is the word of God’ – and the vanquished demons are left to the imagination.23 But it is perhaps justifiable to imagine them in the same way that Felix depicted the diabolical horde that appeared in his life of St Guthlac:

  they were ferocious in appearance, terrible in shape with great heads, long necks, thin faces, yellow complexions, filthy beards, shaggy ears, wild foreheads, fierce eyes, foul mouths, horses’ teeth, throats vomiting flames, twisted jaws, thick lips, strident voices, singed hair, fat cheeks, 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 wh
ips 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.