Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  To illuminate all of the extraordinary contortions, elisions, exaggerations, falsifications, misunderstandings, credulity, hyperbole, political expediency and mischief that collided in the creation of this absurdly hypertrophic idea of kingship would take us on a long detour from our intended destination.37 However, even though Alfred’s greatest achievement may have been the skill with which he publicized his achievements, like most myths his greatness is rooted in a certain amount of truth: for none of it – neither deserved fame nor inflated hero-cult – would have accrued to Alfred had he not found the wherewithal to fight himself out of the corner into which he had been painted in the spring of 878. Even with the knowledge that our view of Alfred derives from the ‘authorized’ version of his life, the mythic quality of its resurrection narrative lends something truly epic, cinematic in its emotional charge, to the return of the king.

  In Alfred’s victory over Guthrum at Edington there is something of what Tolkien called ‘eucatastrophe’, the cathartic joy of a victory attained, against expectation, in the face of horror and despair. In his view, the archetypal eucatastrophe was found in the death and resurrection of Christ, a story that obtained its extraordinary power from its status as what Tolkien called ‘true myth’ – the entwining, as he saw it, of the strands of history and fairy-tale into the defining cable of truth running through the centre of human experience.38 It was this that caused him to insist – most famously to C. S. Lewis in discussions which ultimately caused the latter to reject the atheism of his youth – that myths, of all kinds (but ‘northern’ myths in particular), were not lies: they were echoes of mankind’s understanding of the one true myth that shaped all of humanity’s creative endeavour. To some degree this was a self-justificatory argument: Tolkien was ever anxious to reconcile his love of myth and fairy-tale – and his own lifelong creation of them – with a profoundly held Catholic faith.39

  Alfred the hero, as envisioned by Morris Meredith Williams, 1913 (Photo © Historical Picture Archive/Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

  In essence, however, these were not original thoughts, even if Professor Tolkien expressed them in ways which have retained a rare power. G. K. Chesterton himself had made very similar arguments in a public spat with the atheist and political activist Robert Blatchford in 1904.40 Chesterton had also recognized the mythic potency of Alfred, composing the weird but remarkable Ballad of the White Horse in 1911, one year after his disquisition on the floating shade of ‘Ethandune’. The Ballad comprises 2,684 lines of epic verse that tell the story of the king’s return from Athelney to triumph at Edington.41 It has been described as the high water mark of Victorian Alfredianism, as well as its effective epitaph,42 and it is hard not to see, in the power it draws from landscape and mythic archetype, a prefiguring of Tolkien’s oeuvre – even though the professor, while admiring the ‘brilliant smash and glitter’ of its language, was characteristically scathing about its merits overall (another demonstration of his tendency to attack more harshly those things which disappointed him than those that simply didn’t interest him: ‘not as good as I thought […] the ending is absurd […] G.K.C. knew nothing whatever about the “North”, heathen or Christian’).43

  In the Ballad, the action of the battle is transposed to the landscape around the Uffington White Horse – a location which, as we have seen, is much more likely to have been the location of Alfred’s battle at Ashdown. But the Ballad is not about historical reality; the poem is filled with fictional details and improbable symbolism, designed to emphasize Alfred’s Christlike journey from ‘death’ in exile, to resurrection and apotheosis. It recognizes – or, rather, seeks to revive and recast – the story of these few weeks in 878 as the creation not only of Alfred’s personal myth, but of the nation itself, of ‘Englishness’ and, by extension, of ‘Britishness’ in its Anglocentric imperial iteration, born in a single moment of transcendent bloodshed that washed away the regional differences and ethnic animus of centuries. Chesterton’s three central protagonists, Alfred aside, were an Anglo-Saxon, a Briton and, most anachronistically of all, a Roman – three heroic avatars of what he evidently regarded as the progenitive peoples of (southern) Britain. In his view the Vikings were not part of this heritage:

  The Northmen came about our land

  A Christless chivalry:

  Who knew not of the arch or pen,

  Great, beautiful half-witted men

  From the sunrise and the sea.

  Misshapen ships stood on the deep

  Full of strange gold and fire,

  And hairy men, as huge as sin

  With horned heads, came wading in

  Through the long, low sea-mire.

  Our towns were shaken of tall kings

  With scarlet beards like blood:

  The world turned empty where they trod,

  They took the kindly cross of God

  And cut it up for wood.

  Chesterton’s ‘Northmen’ are dead-eyed, dim-witted barbarians – vital and potent, but a force of nature unfeeling as the storm-wind. They are the primal and impersonal tide against which the quality of Alfred’s humanity could be measured, a mute anvil upon which the gilt mantle of his greatness could be hammered out and the shape of the English nation forged. Of such stuff is national mythology built, and Alfred and his descendants themselves ensured that the events of 878 would be remembered in this light.

  But, of course, nothing is ever so simple.

  12

  The Godfather

  And there came to his chrism-loosing

  Lords of all lands afar,

  And a line was drawn north-westerly

  That set King Egbert’s empire free,

  Giving all lands by the northern sea

  To the sons of the northern star.

  G. K. CHESTERTON, The Ballad of the White Horse (1911)1

  The priest is too close – the kneeling warrior can see the pores of the man’s skin, the wiry hairs that project from his nostrils. The breath comes suddenly, short and sharp amid the low rhythmic babble of unfamiliar words, like the wheeze of a thrall who has spent too long tending the hearth-fire; it is hot and musty, the smell of old wine skins. The kneeling man flinches, a scarred hand flickering to the sword hilt that he knows – all too uncomfortably – is not at his hip. He turns sharply to the side, eyebrows raised. The young man to his right whispers back in the Norse tongue: ‘He is driving away evil, so that Christ can enter.’ The warrior tenses and narrows his eyes. ‘Bolverkr,’ he mutters under his breath, but the priest ignores him and carries on regardless. Salt is placed in the kneeler’s hand, and then, suddenly, the priest grasps his nostrils (to remind him, the translator whispers, to stay steadfast while he is still breathing).

  The Latin is incessant, hypnotic. Occasionally the warrior nods, or grunts an assent when the translator prompts him, but for the most part he fixes his eyes on the serpent that sprouts from the top of the bishop’s staff, imagines it moving, coiling into life, the forked tongue lashing out, hissing … Perhaps, he thinks to himself, this priest is a seiðmaðr – a sorcerer. A brief shudder animates the bare flesh of his torso. ‘Argr,’ he mouths the word silently, glaring at the bishop with new hostility. But suddenly there is oil being painted on his skin – a cross joining his nipples and running down his breastbone, daubs on his shoulders – and then, before he has a chance to understand what is happening, he is on his feet and King Alfred is beside him, leading him towards a great stone basin, carved all around with spirals and rolling scrolls of foliage, brightly painted.2 Guthrum gazes into the water that fills it, uncomprehending. The bishop’s hand is on his head, pushing him towards the surface – a black mirror in which shards of candlelight dart. He can see his own features looking back, shadowy, his eyes hollowed into pits. Fear begins to twist his guts. He resists, looking to the king, who nods reassuringly.

  And then his head is in the water, and all the sound of the chanting and the Latin babble is gone – just a hollow swirl in his ears, and darkness
. He rises quickly, water running into his eyes, and he shakes his head like a dog springing from a pool, spray flying from his beard. But as he tries to regain his balance, he is pushed immediately back into the water. For a moment he wonders if he will drown. And then, once again, he is back, choking in the candle-smoke and the fug of incense. Guthrum barely registers the white robe that is hung upon him, or the oil that is tipped over his head; a white cloth is bound around his brow. A conversation is taking place in English between Alfred and the bishop. He doesn’t understand it all, but he picks out a name, a name repeated several times as they stare at him: Æthelstan.

  After Edington, the Viking army was driven in flight to its encampment (probably at Chippenham). The Vikings were forced to make peace with Alfred, agreeing to vacate West Saxon territory – a promise cemented with hostages and ‘great oaths’. It may have been the totality of Alfred’s victory that meant that the negotiated peace was less conditional than similar agreements had been in the past. Asser specifically noted that while ‘the king should take as many chosen hostages as he wanted’ from the Viking army, he would ‘give none to them’ – the emphasis on Alfred’s ability to choose his hostages suggesting that the West Saxons were free to select high-ranking or otherwise valuable individuals from among the Viking ranks. This, apparently, was unprecedented: ‘never before, indeed, had they made peace with anyone on such terms’.3

  Most dramatic of all the gestures made, however, was an agreement that Guthrum, the erstwhile invader of Wessex, would renounce his heathen beliefs and become a Christian. This was a radical proposition – the religious affiliation of a Viking leader in Britain had never before been on the negotiating table – and there must have been many at the time who doubted the intentions of the Viking leadership. Solemn oaths had been made before and broken, hostages sacrificed. So it may have occasioned some surprise when, three weeks later, Guthrum and twenty-nine other senior members of his army presented themselves to Alfred at Aller (3 miles east of Athelney) for baptism.

  How deeply Guthrum understood the ritual and symbolism of the baptismal liturgy can never be known – the evocation above is imaginative, based on explanations of the rite written by Alcuin in a letter of the late eighth century – and it is possible that he was a far better-prepared catechumen than I have made him out to be.4 He had certainly been in contact with Christians – indeed, he probably had several in his army already. But it seems unlikely that the deeper religious symbolism would have meant much to him, and it is an open question how much English – let alone Latin – he would have understood.

  The politics, however, would have been crystal clear. Asser and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle explain that Alfred stood as Guthrum’s godfather and ‘raised him’ in Asser’s words ‘from the holy font of baptism’. In the process, a new name was bestowed upon him, one of unimpeachable Anglo-Saxon probity: Æthelstan. This was an interesting choice for a number of reasons. There had been a King Æthelstan of East Anglia, in the first half of the ninth century, and this may be significant given the territory over which Guthrum would come to rule. But Æthelstan was also the name of Alfred’s own eldest brother – the first-born son of King Æthelwulf of Wessex. Æthelwulf had been dynastically fortunate in that his first wife, Osburh, had been exceptionally prone to producing sons. It is an extraordinary fact that every single one of them – five in total – ruled as kings (and their only daughter, Æthelswith, had been queen to the luckless Burhred of Mercia): Æthelbald, king of Wessex (858–60); Æthelberht, king of Wessex (860–5) and Kent (855–66); Æthelred, king of Wessex and Kent (865–71); and, of course, Alfred himself (871–99). Æthelstan, the eldest, had been king of Kent, a junior role while his father reigned as king of Wessex, from 839 until some point in the early 850s when he died.

  It had been customary since the reign of Ecgberht for kings of Kent to be members of the West Saxon royal house, sometimes unifying the crowns of Wessex and Kent in the person of a single individual, and sometimes delegating authority to a younger son or brother. By Alfred’s reign, this practice was beginning to fizzle out, royal power in Kent becoming part of the standard portfolio of the West Saxon king.5 In any case, Alfred had no sons (of an appropriate age) or little brothers to placate or promote by offering them inferior kingships (his nephew was altogether another matter, as we shall see). He would, however, have remained well aware of how useful it could be to have a grateful junior kinsman on the throne of a subordinate neighbouring kingdom.

  Guthrum, clearly, was no blood relative to Alfred, but kinship could be established in other ways. By standing as Guthrum’s godfather, and bestowing on him his new, Christian, name, Alfred was establishing a claim to symbolic paternity. When Guthrum became Æthelstan he had also become Alfred’s ‘son’. A relationship had been created between the two men that mingled the loyalties of close kinship with the power dynamics of family hierarchy. Assuming, as seems most likely, that it was Alfred who chose the name ‘Æthelstan’, the choice may have been deliberately intended to cast the relationship between Alfred and Guthrum in the same light as that which had existed between Alfred’s father Æthelwulf and his eldest brother Æthelstan: the latter the nominal ruler of a subservient client kingdom, the former the hegemonic West Saxon king, in whose gift lay the thrones of lesser realms.

  If the political theatre of Guthrum’s baptism were not enough to underscore Alfred’s intentions for the post-Edington power dynamic, Guthrum acknowledged Alfred’s superior lordship in other ways as well. Alfred had sealed the baptism celebrations by showering Guthrum and his men ‘with many excellent treasures’.6 According to well-established social etiquette, the receiver of gifts – particularly if he had little to offer of commensurate value – was placed in a subservient role. Guthrum, from a West Saxon perspective at any rate, became Alfred’s man the moment he took Alfred’s gifts.

  What, we might ask, were Alfred and Guthrum hoping to achieve by all of this? Perhaps Alfred imagined that – at some stage – he would hold, as Guthrum–Æthelstan’s ‘father’ and overlord, a controlling interest in whatever territory the newly Christian Viking came to rule. If Alfred was thinking along these lines, it suggests that he had reason to expect this outcome. What had the West Saxon king promised to Guthrum? What was it that had brought him to baptism, had convinced him to accept such a one-sided peace deal, to honour the terms of it so faithfully?

  In 879, the Viking army moved from Chippenham to Cirencester, where it remained for a year. During this time, a new army of Vikings arrived from overseas, sailing up the Thames with – according to Asser – the intention of linking up with Guthrum’s forces upstream. The newcomers made camp at Fulham and dug themselves in. It must have been a tense few months for Alfred and the West Saxons, poised between two Viking armies hovering on the Thames. But winter came, and winter went, and nobody moved. Guthrum, it seems, was mindful of his accord with Alfred and the benefits that his patronage might confer. Whatever the reasoning, it was enough to overcome any temptation to make common cause with these newcomers. In 880 the new Viking army left Fulham and crossed the Channel, wreaking a trail of havoc across France and the Low Countries. Guthrum’s forces, meanwhile, decamped from Cirencester and made their way to East Anglia.

  When they arrived there, just as Halfdan and his people had earlier done in Northumbria, they ‘settled that land, and divided it up’.7 The next we hear of Guthrum–Æthelstan, he is introduced as a king. Perhaps it was this that Alfred had offered in 878, the prize that had lured the heathen Viking to the baptismal waters; perhaps Alfred, the most powerful Anglo-Saxon king left in Britain, had offered his backing and blessing for Guthrum to claim the East Anglian throne for himself.

  We know very little about Guthrum’s East Anglian regime, the kingdom over which he ruled for a decade until his death in 890. But what does stand out is how swiftly he seems to have come to terms with the new realities and adapted to them. In the early 880s, new coins were being produced in East Anglia. Like most English co
ins of the period, they bore the name of the king on one side (the obverse) and, usually, the name of the mint and the moneyer on the other (the reverse). A great many of these coins bore the name of King Alfred, despite the evidence indicating that they had been struck outside Wessex.8 Wholesale imitation of the coins of other rulers is fairly commonplace among new regimes seeking to establish their own legitimacy, and so it is altogether unsurprising that Guthrum should have taken this approach in getting his own coinage up and running (his moneyers also copied some continental coin types). The coins do, however, give us an indication of how the world looked from the perspective of Guthrum’s subjects, and how the new king began to adapt to their expectations: it was Alfred’s name that was likely to reassure his subjects that the coinage was legitimate, and Alfred’s coinage that was recognized and respected as a means of economic exchange. Equally revealing is the fact that, when Guthrum’s name did appear on the East Anglian coinage, it appeared as (still copying the design of West Saxon coinage) ‘EÐELSTAN REX’ – ‘King Æthelstan’.

  Money is power. Although it is (almost) always an abstracted and symbolic proxy for value, whether it is piles of banknotes or figures moving up and down on digital indices, we understand intuitively that money is bound up tightly with the expression of authority and status. Physical currency embodies and promotes its relationship to state power through the images with which it is encoded, and these convey a host of ideas about the stability of the state, the core symbols of national pride and identity, the strength of the economy, the values of the authority that produces it. Periodic controversy over the personnel selected to decorate modern banknotes demonstrates how important we still feel this to be.