Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  My wife and I came to Ashbury in late afternoon, the sun already beginning to signal its long retreat. We sat for a few minutes in our defiantly out-of-place Nissan Micra, eating cheese rolls and sipping coffee. If you were to ask Google about Ashbury, you would be presented with images of the quintessential English village: the Christmas-card-perfect Norman church, sixteenth-century public house and half-timbered buildings, thatched cottages surrounding the village green. It is the sort of place where it’s all too easy to imagine John Nettles bimbling about, investigating the death of a parson in the vicarage potting shed. English rural settlements aren’t really like that, of course, not entirely – except, perhaps, here and there in the swamp of affluence that pools along the Thames valley corridor, from Richmond in the east to Cirencester in the west. In this attractive stripe of southern Britain, the combination of influential Tory constituencies, a convenient commuter route to Paddington, coachloads of Japanese tourists and a surfeit of substantial pensions combine to provide the conditions and incentives that make places like Witney and Bibury so improbably manicured and photogenic. Most English villages, however, away from their village greens, are not so neat and tidy: plastic bus shelters with their small rusty waste-bins and resolutely brutalist lamp-posts, rusting corrugated-iron lean-tos and discarded tarpaulins, unlovely post-war architecture spilling into the surrounding countryside – most villages and small towns in the UK boast their own tatty hinterlands, miniature frontiers where human habitation gives out untidily into the woods and farmland beyond. It’s always been that way, the lived-in contingency that blurs the boundaries between private, public and wild space.

  The lay-by where we sat with our Thermos was at the edge of the village: a yellow grit silo, a bollard, gardens and concrete houses stuttering out into farmland. We got out of the car and began to walk, up a footpath towards the east, climbing the chalk ridge. I can’t remember what we were arguing about – we were both tired; a misunderstanding about a buzzard I think, or something to do with sheep … maybe both. I know that I broke my umbrella in a fit of pique – the spike was stuck in the earth when I kicked it, and it bent beyond repair. I had to carry the useless thing around with me for the next hour as a badge of shame. It was forgotten though, when we got to the top of the chalk and started along the Ridgeway. The afternoon was beginning to thicken. Darkness was a way off yet, but the atmosphere was changing, deepening; the shadows between the trees were blacker, distances subtly distorted. We arrived at the monument suddenly, and silence fell like a heavy shutter; the dark bulk of the orthostats caught the low oblique sunlight that spilled in ribbons through the beech trees. A mist was rising in the valley behind us.

  The Neolithic chambered tomb, constructed around 5,500 years ago, wouldn’t have looked to Alfred as it appears to us now. Its modern arrangement is a restoration of something approximating its original (or, rather, final) appearance. The four huge sarsen stones that dominate the southern end of the long-barrow were set upright after excavations carried out in the early 1960s by the archaeologists Stuart Piggott and Richard Atkinson; there were originally six of them, silent guardians flanking the dark burrow of an entrance – a portal, unmistakably, to another world.22 Photographs taken in the early twentieth century show the monument as it looked before any restoration had taken place: a tumble of overgrown stones, wilder and weirder – if a little less grandiose – than it appears now. This, or something close to it, would have been how the people of early medieval Britain encountered the monument.23 What the Romano-British called it, we do not know. Speakers of English, however, had called it welandes smiððan – Wayland’s Smithy – from the middle of the tenth century, and probably long before.24

  The association between this tomb and the work of a legendary smith endured for a staggeringly long time. In an eccentric letter of 1738 to one Dr Mead, Francis Wise, keeper of the Oxford University archives, repeated the legend of Wayland’s Smithy that he had heard from ‘the country people’: ‘At this place lived formerly an invisible Smith, and if a traveller’s Horse had lost a Shoe upon the road, he had no more to do than to bring the Horse to this place with a piece of money, and leaving both there for some little time, he might come again and find the money gone, but the Horse new shod.’25 If Wise’s account does genuinely preserve a folk tradition attached to the long-barrow (rather than a flight of Francis’ admittedly over-stimulated imagination), it would suggest that stories of Wayland had continued to circulate in the Berkshire hills for at least eight centuries.26

  Alfred knew who Wayland was. In the Old English translation of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae – usually attributed to Alfred’s court, and perhaps to Alfred himself – the phrase ‘Ubi nunc fidelis ossa Fabricii manent?’ (‘Where now lie the bones of faithful Fabricius?’) is translated as ‘Hwaet synt nu þæs foremeran [‘and’] þæs wisan goldsmiðes ban Welondes?’ (‘Where now are the bones of the wise and famous goldsmith Weland [Wayland]?’).27 They weren’t in Ashbury, that’s for sure, although archaeologists did find plenty of bones in the barrow when they excavated it.28 But the Anglo-Saxons hadn’t called it welandes beorg or welandes hlaæwe (Wayland’s Barrow) – they had called it a smithy, and such – in their imaginations – it presumably was, the workshop of a craftsman both famous and wise: ‘Wise, I said, because the craftsman can never lose his craft nor can it be taken easily from him – no more than the sun may be shifted from its place. Where are the bones of Weland now, or who knows now where they were?’

  It is interesting that the Boethius translator should pause and digress on the value of craft at this point in De consolatione. The passage into which Wayland was inserted is a meditation on the transience of mortal life and the futility of earthly fame in the face of death and the passing of generations – topics which, as we have seen, appear to have weighed heavily on the Anglo-Saxon imagination. But Alfred seems also to have been uncommonly fixated by his own legacy, with crafting a kingdom that would outlive him. Indeed, the word ‘craft’ (OE cræft) has been recognized as one of the most important in Alfredian literature, invested with connotations not merely of skill but also of virtue, and other works attributed to Alfred are replete with the imagery of construction and labour: his version of St Augustine’s soliloquies, for example, frames the gathering of knowledge as a great building project, detailing the collection of timbers and materials to construct a new and better world and the skill involved in their assembly.29 The metaphor was matched in the physical construction of towns and ships that would occupy his later reign and those of his children and grandchildren. Alfred, in other words, seems to have been determined to challenge – through craft, fame and wisdom – the fatalistic pessimism of Boethius.

  Wayland, however – the craftsman whose skill was as everlasting as the sun – was an uncomfortable avatar to invoke. Old English poetry makes a few references to him. Beowulf refers approvingly to a Wayland-forged mail-shirt, and the poem Deor – one of the oldest in the canon – gives voice to the tale of Wayland in a highly abridged and allusive, but relatively complete, form.30 The most complete account of the myth, however, is found in Old Norse verse – a poem called Völundarkvida (‘the song of Völund [Wayland]’) – demonstrating that Wayland was an entity whose tale, like so much else, was shared across the North Sea. It is a thoroughly unpleasant story, which culminates in the eponymous hero – who had been captured and hamstrung by the wicked King Nídud (OE Nithhad) – raping and impregnating the king’s daughter, murdering his sons, fashioning cups from their skulls, jewels from their eyes and brooches from their teeth (which he presents to their oblivious parents), and then escaping on the wing like some vengeful Nordic Daedalus. At least one scene from the legend decorates the Frankish casket: a bearded figure holds out a cup he has forged, a mysterious object gripped in a pair of tongs in his other hand. Below the work-bench a headless body lies. As Völundarkvida has Wayland explain to the horrified Nídud:

  ‘Go to the smithy that you set up:

 
there you’ll find bellows spattered with blood;

  I cut off the heads of those small cubs,

  and in the mud beneath the anvil I laid their limbs.’31

  This is not the workshop of the benevolent, elvish tinker imagined by the folk of eighteenth-century Berkshire. Perhaps it was the sight of Neolithic bones protruding from the earth that suggested to the Anglo-Saxon mind the association of the long-barrow with Wayland. It was a dark place, a bloody place – sown with corpses, seeded with bones.

  The story of Wayland hints at a tension in the Anglo-Saxon psyche. It reminds us that while Asser paints the Viking wars as a binary struggle between godless heathen and the Christian warriors of Wessex, older and darker things yet lurked in the Anglo-Saxon mind – skeletons in the closet. Alfred and his circle wanted to leave the impression that they were building a new world, a world of craft and learning and Christian enlightenment. But somewhere, down in the mud beneath the anvil, down among the roots of Alfred’s new England, the bones of Wayland still lay – a pagan past that the English had never properly come to terms with: a past with its roots in the old North, in stories of rape and mutilation, transmutation and supernatural flight, of vengeance and violence.

  The archaeologist Neil Price has suggested that the Anglo-Saxons reacted in such a visceral way to the heathen Vikings appearing suddenly in their midst not only because of their violence and their paganism, but also because of a dreadful familiarity – a familiarity born of an ancient kinship and a shared web of stories and ways of seeing:

  The Anglo-Saxons […] knew that this Viking world-view was not so far removed from what theirs had been not so long before, and maybe, under the surface, still was […] The Vikings were not only conventionally terrifying, they were a dark mirror held up to the image of what the English needed to believe themselves to be.32

  The Anglo-Saxons, looking into that mirror, saw things that they preferred not to confront – felt as though they stood unsteadily on the brink of the howling abyss of pagan savagery from which they had lately hauled themselves. The Vikings were, therefore, in Freudian terms, unheimlich (‘uncanny’). They were that which ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’, a manifestation of ‘something which is familiar and old established in the mind and which has become alienated from it’.33 Freud’s concept of the unheimlich has been productively employed to explain the potency in supernatural horror of the dislocation of the familiar and the mundane – the chair that moves in the empty room, the child that begins speaking in tongues … It has also been invoked to explain the frisson of archaeology, the uncovering of that which should remain hidden. The frequent recourse to archaeological themes by the writers of weird literature – M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood – stands testament to the thrill and horror of uncovering unspeakable hidden knowledge, places and things. But, for the Anglo-Saxons, the ‘uncanny’ had a horrible and malevolent reality, marauding across the countryside with axe and flame. The lost English homeland – ‘emptied of its people’, as Bede had believed, at the time of the fabled Anglo-Saxon migrations – had shown itself to be far from depleted. This lost world, romanticized in fireside tales where the monsters were remote and the heathen gods glossed with Christian ethics, was spewing forth a revenant nation, reaching out a rotting hand to drag the English screaming back into the mire.

  The Anglo-Saxons may have thought they had escaped their past. But now their sundered kinsmen, their gods and their beliefs were rising up out of the darkness, borne on black tides from a world beyond the pale.

  Ashdown may have been a major victory for the West Saxons, but it was hardly a decisive one – the exception rather than the rule. Probably this is why Asser made such a big deal of it: the years that followed marked a pretty desperate start to Alfred’s reign as king.

  In 871, Æthelred and Alfred fought the Viking army at Basengum (probably Old Basing in Hampshire). They were defeated. Later in the year they fought again at the unidentified Meretun; despite putting up a stiff fight, they were defeated again with serious casualties (including Heahmund, bishop of Sherborne). After Æthelred’s death later that year, Alfred fought the Vikings again at Wilton (Wiltshire). The Vikings, once again, ‘had possession of the place of slaughter’.34 Exhausted by the fighting (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes that there had been nine folcgefeoht – literally, ‘folk-fights’, probably battles involving shire levies from across Wessex, rather than single local militias – as well as innumerable raids and skirmishes), and presumably demoralized by the succession of losses, the West Saxons agreed terms in 871. The Viking army, led by Halfdan, retreated – first to Reading and then to London.35

  Once again, the Vikings had been bought off by their victims.

  10

  Real Men

  A Geat woman too sang out in grief;

  with hair bound up, she unburdened herself

  of her worst fears, a wild litany

  of nightmare and lament: her nation invaded,

  enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,

  slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

  Beowulf

  The sun is low, striking sharply against the earthen furrows, deepening them to chasms of peaty black between golden brown ribs of soil. The oxen have stopped at the edge of the water meadow; they stare listlessly ahead, snorting white clouds of spectral vapour into the frigid air. Steam rises from their great ruddy backs. The man stands by the plough, ready to move the animals and reharness them, ready for the return journey back up the next strip of land, back towards the village and a welcome fire. It is winter, and the river has flooded the water meadow, waterlogging it, leaving no trace of the rampaging cowslip and cranesbill that will saturate the field with colour in the spring. Now the silver water lies pale under skeleton trees, their roots breaking the surface like tentacles. Alder and goat-willow screen the water. Later in the winter the villagers will cut withies for poles and baskets, but for now the willow pollards march beside the river with their misshapen bodies and wild upright hair: a throng of trolls mustering on the river bank. Beyond them the sun is raising the ghost of a fog. There is a sudden plop, perhaps an otter taking to the water, then a sudden rush of wings – a thrush startled into flight, the clumsy crash of a wood pigeon. There is something out there, a presence on the river. The man squints, trying to squeeze his vision between the withies, into the silver twilight between the trees. He sees nothing, just the gathering mist, but a sound comes. A gentle swish of oars and, buried in it, a low pulse like a muffled heartbeat. He can feel sweat beginning to bead at the back of his head, prickling on his top lip, like insects crawling at the roots of his hair. Something is coming – something big – real and tangible, gliding into the November sunlight: sightless eye, immobile jaws gaping, a monster of oak carving through the land. And then it is gone, back into the mist.

  The image of the Viking ship in full sail on the open sea, emerging blackly on the wide horizon, is a reasonably familiar one. Less commonly pictured in the mind’s eye is the glimpse of the carved bestial prow glimpsed through the trees on a quiet river bank. Yet it was the exploitation of England’s river routes – made possible by their light and shallow-draughted ships – that provided Viking armies with a means of swift and efficient movement through Britain’s interior that vastly increased the range of their attacks and the extent to which they were able to destabilize Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the second half of the ninth century.

  There are few places in Britain that are further from the sea than Repton in Derbyshire, a quiet, pretty village of smart Georgian and Victorian houses and shopfronts, running in a ribbon of red brick away from the southern bank of the River Trent. Repton is further now from the river than it was a thousand years ago when it lay at the heart of the kingdom of Mercia, but the Trent is still capable of flexing its muscles in the faces of the villagers. In 2012, flood waters swamped the fields that fill the plain to the
north of the village, between the river’s old bed and its new route skirting the southern edge of neighbouring Willington. A wide band of English countryside, almost three-quarters of a mile across in places, was transformed into a gloomy dystopian landscape, spindly bare trees and bedraggled hedgerows standing proud of the brown and brackish water, watched over by bleak concrete ramparts – the monstrous cooling towers of Willington power station.

  The rising water stopped mercifully short of Repton itself; although the sports fields of Repton School were submerged, the swollen river’s creep was checked at the perimeter of St Wystan’s churchyard by the banks of the stream – the Old Trent Water – that still follows the ninth-century course of the river. When Repton Abbey was founded as a double-monastery (a monastery with a twin community of monks and nuns) in the seventh century, the rising ground to the south had probably ensured that the community was safe from all but the most extreme flooding, despite the river running perilously close. It was here that a young, bellicose nobleman called Guthlac had come to take monastic vows in the late seventh century, before embarking on a new career as a spiritually obstinate, demon-defying fenland hermit. It was evidently a secure and amenable environment, allowing the monastery to become the recipient of considerable investment in subsequent centuries. The Church of St Wystan as it appears today is mostly the product of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but hidden beneath the high medieval gothic spires can be still be found the crypt of the Mercian church, built in the early eighth century.