Viking Britain- an Exploration

by Thomas Williams

  Scandinavian Britain was a book years ahead of its time, a fact acknowledged by some16 but certainly forgotten by most. Its seamless combination of philology, history and archaeology was a pioneering foray into what we would now call inter-disciplinary study, the attempt to liberate evidence from narrow silos and force them to communicate in conjuring an image of the past. There is deep irony in this: what came naturally to Collingwood, the very quality that makes his writing so easy and unforced and his scholarship so lightly worn, has become a subject of protracted theoretical debate and (sometimes heated) argument; I am sure he would have read much modern historical and archaeological theory with bewilderment.17 For Collingwood, as for many scholars before the creeping professionalization and specialization of the later twentieth century, it would have been entirely natural to muster all of the evidence for the Viking Age that he could access, deploying it on its own merits, without prejudice.

  As a result, many of Collingwood’s specific conclusions, as well as the overall tenor of his treatment, remain startlingly modern, not least his recognition that Viking identities were surprisingly adaptable to the cultural climates into which they plunged. More obviously dated, though in no way to its detriment, is the physical quality of the first edition – a fine example of early twentieth-century publishing, with its beautiful gilt lettering and a finely drawn fold-out map. This sort of attention to detail was to be a hallmark of the work with which Collingwood was associated, and more often than not it was his own hand that supplied the maps and illustrations: he was a highly skilled draughtsman, and brought his pen to bear on the sculpture of the north, producing some of the earliest accurate surveys of what we might now call Anglo-Scandinavian sculptural style. But he was also more than equal to the task of illuminating fictional and mythological work with lively borders and marginalia, maps and frontispieces – enlivening his scholarly output with artistry, and grounding his imaginative work with observational rigour.

  My great-great-great-great-uncle, G. W. Kitchin (1827–1912), had also, like Ruskin, once lived at Brantwood – indeed he was the occupant who vacated the premises immediately ahead of Ruskin’s tenure. The two men had a relationship of sorts, Kitchin having once written a long essay entitled ‘Ruskin at Oxford’ (one of an improbable number of accomplishments and distinctions).18 Kitchin spent his time at Brantwood in the early 1870s in the employ of the Clarendon Press, proofing the pages of the mighty Cleasby–Vigfusson English–Icelandic dictionary, a monumental work of scholarship which remains a definitive foundation of the study of Icelandic and Old Norse in English. Indeed, Kitchin had been instrumental in supporting Vigfusson’s labours during his time at Oxford in the late 1860s.19 His interest was active and engaged – while working on the proofs he consulted the local antiquarian Thomas Ellwood about the Old Norse antecedents of Cumbrian dialect words – and later he wrote to Ellwood from Denmark (Kitchin’s wife Alice was a friend of Queen Alexandra) with the rather outlandish claim that ‘a countryman from here [Denmark] and a countryman from that neighbourhood [the Lake District] would, if speaking their respective dialects, be almost able to mutually understand one another’.20 (One wonders whether, given the rarefied circles in which he moved, Kitchin had all that many conversations with ‘countrymen’ of either persuasion.)

  Some of this interest doubtless originated in his ancestry. His father, Isaac, came from a family of Cumberland ‘Statesmen’, a class of yeoman-farmers that he praised for ‘their independence, their sturdy battle with nature, their simplicity and traditional loyalty’.21 Kitchin regarded these ‘Statesmen’ – independent peasant farmers – as parallels to a Norse (or Swiss) ‘type’, fiercely protective of their freedoms and their rights.22 They were, in other words, the models for Collingwood’s conception of the free Norse farmers who populated fictional works like Thorstein of the Mere and, indeed, Collingwood drew direct parallels between these ‘Statesmen’ and the free farmers (bóndi) of Old Norse saga literature. It was a simplistic idea – though a common enough sort of notion in those days – and an appealing one, particularly for antiquarians working in a predominantly local milieu. In its crudest iterations it was articulated in clumsy racial stereotypes offered up as evidence for the longevity of Viking influence. For example, the cleric, writer and conservationist Hardwicke Rawnsley (1851–1920) felt that to ‘look at the blue eyes and the fine cut profile and heavy jaws, and large limbs and long arms of the shepherds and farm folk of the dales’ is to ‘feel that just such were the Norse sea-rangers’.23

  This sort of thing would be laughable if such ideas had not been manipulated to maleficent ends throughout the twentieth century. Nevertheless, biological descent as an indicator of population movements has, indeed, come to be a viable tool of modern research. South of Cumbria, along the Irish Sea coastline of the Wirral and West Lancashire, maybe half of the male population whose ancestors can be shown to have been present in the region before 1600 have Scandinavian markers in their DNA.24 What such research cannot show, however, is when or how this genetic material entered a population or the number of individuals from which it ultimately derives. It is also selective, ignoring the very many other biological markers that are prevalent in particular communities. More importantly, such research is possible only when it is carried out with relatively large sample sizes, ensuring that results are statistically significant and can be compared meaningfully with other populations. When used in this way, it has the potential to reveal something about the scale of past migrations, even if it remains something of a blunt instrument. Without care, however, it can easily be manipulated to resemble racial bluster – a means to prove (or disprove) a biological connection to a past invested with moral quality or desirable antique glamour: a superiority of the blood.

  It was turning dark when we arrived in Coniston, and it had just started to rain. We missed the turning. We stopped. I consulted the directions to the cottage provided by the letting company. Turning around we drove back along the darkening street – unfamiliar shop-fronts and strangers in cagoules, wet dogs, impatient local drivers; the rain came down harder. Finally we found it; headlamps catching on the words ‘private road’, we crossed the cattle grid, feeling the first sickening lurches as the car slumped into the ruts and divots of the unmade road. I started to feel nervous. Safely tucked behind my desk I hadn’t thought much about the words ‘dirt track’. It had conjured images of a hundred yards of farm track, muddy and bumpy but with a picturesque stripe of greensward rippling down the centre, a touch of bucolic wilderness to signal that the modern world was at our backs – nothing that could threaten defeat.

  As we drove on, the gradient increased, until it was clear that the road was taking us into the fells. It soon became apparent that the road was not a road at all. For substantial stretches, the granite bedrock was laid bare beneath us, the bones of the mountain rubbed raw, defleshed by wheels and walkers; and then there were the pools of scree, the carpet of broken slates that poured down from the mountain like a petrified river, the blood of a giant loosed to cover its wounded flanks. I don’t really know why we stopped; I think the will just ebbed away. It was the sudden knowledge of having been beaten, the sudden clarity of failure after the adrenaline of panic dies away. But now the car wouldn’t move, its sad wheels spinning feebly in the wet sandy gravel. There we were, for a moment, clinging like an iridescent beetle to the foothills of the Coniston Old Man, both of us silent, minds blank, despair seeping in.

  If three returning walkers hadn’t suddenly appeared in the road behind us, all willing to help push the car and endure a muddy splattering and the funk of a tortured clutch, I don’t know what would have happened. But they did, and they were, and after a few miserable minutes of grunting and shoving, we were on our way. Finally, tired and dejected, we made it to our lodgings, overlooking the copper mines and the ribbon of silver water that tumbled from the peaks. But up above, glowering down at us, the Old Man was watching. There was no mistaking it. We had been warned.

>   Almost as soon as we arrived, my wife was struck down with flu. Shuttered in the upstairs room of the cottage, she was not to move beyond the front door until the grim day arrived when she was compelled to drive us both home again. For the rest of the week I watched, increasingly irritated, as a succession of inappropriate hatchbacks bounded up the valley with abandon. On foot I visited the Ruskin Museum, founded by Collingwood in 1901, and the Ruskin Cross, designed by Collingwood in 1900. And every afternoon I sat in the window to write. But always the Old Man was out there watching me, glaring down unmoving, ever changing. I had to climb him. It was inevitable.

  ‘Our first walk is naturally to climb the Coniston Old Man,’ declares Collingwood in The Book of Coniston: ‘It is quite worth while making the ascent on a cloudy day. The loss of the panorama is amply compensated by the increased grandeur of the effects of gloom and mystery on the higher crags.’25 Everywhere there are delvings and workings, spoil heaps and tunnels, culverts and rushing water. Even as I climb, it feels as though the summit recedes, the distances stretching and distorting; the landscape giving up its form grudgingly, revealing its folds and contours one at a time – painfully, slowly. I move up under the black-slate crag, the silver-mercury water marbling the grey with an endless roar, tumbling down from Low Water above; then up and over the springing turf, past boulders that stud the hillsides, scattered like seeds from the hands of giants, down from Raven’s Tor. Suddenly I am up to the rim of Levers Water, the wide cool tarn spreading beneath hunched knots of rock. I skirt the water round to the left and start to climb again. He’s always ahead of me, Collingwood, wiry legs poking out from his shorts, a ghost at the bend in the path, always out of reach. A phantom. I picture him like a mountain goat, like the shaggy upland sheep that bound, with terrifying sureness of foot, up and down the mountain paths – a spry old fellow with a bright gleam in his eye, too quick to catch.

  ‘It is here, on a cloudy day when the tops are covered, that the finest impressions of mountain gloom may be found; under the cloud and the precipices a dark green tarn, savage rocks, and tumbling streams; and out, beyond, the tossing sea of mountain forms.’26

  On the summit ridge, everything changes. Shifting clouds smother the contours, bleaching the landscape, masking the drop. Surrounding peaks loom out of the vapours, hulking leviathans wreathed in mist, no longer chained to the world below but free to crash like icebergs through the fog. The path ahead is bleak and otherworldly, heaped cairns along the path speak of the dead, the horizontal trails of cloud like angry shades, screaming over the mountaintop, voices joined with the howling wind that screams across the peak. Black carrion shapes hover in this twilight kingdom, their wings thrum like propellers overhead.

  ‘The view on a clear day commands Ingleborough to the east, Snowdon to the south, the Isle of Man to the west, and to the north, Scafell and Bowfell, Glaramara and Skiddaw, Blencathra and Helvellyn: and beneath these all the country spread out like a raised model, with toy hills and lakes and villages.’27

  And then suddenly it clears, and the ghosts are gone. I can see Coniston Water laid out below me, and the fells rising in ranks behind me. And away on the far banks of Coniston Water I can see the house, mere flotsam below the tree line, where Ruskin and Collingwood worked and Kitchin once sat, leafing through proofs from the Clarendon Press; and I know that all of them, every day they were there, raised their eyes from their work to look, up through the great study window, to gaze at the Old Man, unmoving, ever changing, and found me gazing back at them across the water.

  16

  A New Way

  Then, it is well known, good men of the old sort, who could not abide to see new laws made and old laws undone, took to their ships and sailed away west. Some of them landed in Iceland; some went to Orkney, and others wandered about the coasts of the Irish Sea to find a home; and wherever they could find shelter and safety, there they settled.

  W. G. COLLINGWOOD, Thorstein of the Mere (1895)1

  In Thorstein of the Mere, Collingwood gives the account just quoted in the epigraph of this chapter describing how the eponymous hero’s grandfather arrived in Britain – one among the many Norwegian émigrés supposedly fleeing the autocratic tendencies of King Haraldr Hárfagri – Harald Finehair (r. c. 872–c. 932). In contemporary sources, the extent of Harald’s rule and the details of his life are murky and contradictory in the extreme.2 In the saga tradition of the twelfth century and later, by contrast, Harald plays a pivotal role. He is credited as being the first king to unify the Norwegian kingdom and thus providing the catalyst for an expansion of Norwegian emigration across the north Atlantic and into the Irish Sea. The result of this, so the founding mythology runs, was the establishment of independent colonies on Orkney, Shetland, Faroe and Iceland, and down the west coast of Scotland towards the Irish Sea – Viking statelets ruled by (depending on one’s view of the situation) freedom-loving pioneers or belligerent fugitives and outlaws, petty pirate kingdoms of the northern oceans.3 Indeed, Orkneyinga saga describes Harald mounting expeditions to the Northern and Western Isles and the Isle of Man ‘to teach a lesson to certain vikings he could no longer tolerate’, winning territory for the Norwegian crown in the process.

  This version of events is most likely reflective (and supportive) of Norwegian territorial claims of c. 1200 when Orkneyinga saga was written, rather than an accurate account of what happened some 300 years earlier. The myth of Harald Finehair presents us with a classic example of how complex processes of emigration, cultural compromise and political consolidation could crystallize in legend around particular resonant figures at a much later date.4 Nevertheless, the extent of Scandinavian influence around the seaways of Britain cannot be disputed. Place-name evidence makes this plain, even if the apparently straightforward patterns we observe mask gaping holes in our understanding of the processes that gave rise to them. Consider, for example, the presence of Irish personal names, Gaelic place-name elements and characteristically Celtic word morphology mixed up with Old Norse in the place-names of north-west England.5 This could signify the presence of Gaelic- or Brittonic-speaking populations that were later overlaid by, or became subject to, or became influenced by Norse-speaking migrants – a possibility apparently strengthened by Old Norse place-names that seem to single out the presence of Gaelic-speakers in the landscape (for example, Ireby, ‘farm of the Irish’, in Cumbria). On the other hand it might indicate that some of the migrants themselves were of mixed Norse–Gaelic heritage. Such identities were indeed developing across this zone of cultural interchange.

  Nor can the interconnectedness of this maritime world be denied – a world where the sea was a highway that led between strands and inlets, headlands and islets, storms and tides; a world where political authority could often only be provisional and where local chieftains and disparate peoples forged and broke alliances and moulded new identities that shifted and mutated with the ocean currents, or tore like clouds in the wide western sky. We can see this in the violence and insecurity implied by the Viking Age promontory forts of the Isle of Man or the defended settlement at Llanbedrgoch (Anglesey), where the skeletons of four men of Scandinavian origin and one woman were found buried in a ditch, a reminder of the brittleness of life lived on the margins of a world seething with violent profiteering, slave-trafficking and silver. Hoards of coins, arm-rings and bullion, stowed in the earth on Man and Anglesey, speak of the trade that flowed back and forth across the Irish Sea and up and down Britain’s western coasts, controlled by the people who built long-houses in the Hebrides at Udal on North Uist and Drimore Machair and Bornais on South Uist, at Braaid and Doarlish Cashen on Man. The same people, possessed of a buccaneering spirit of enterprise, bloody-handed entrepreneurs, ploughed the coastal waters naming the landmarks they passed in their own tongue, the essential vocabulary of a seafaring people; headlands and promontories, islands and bays: Aignish (ON egg-nes, ‘ridge headland’, Wester Ross); Skipnes (ON skip-nes, ‘ship headland’, Coll); Sandaig (sand-vík,
‘sandy bay’, Tiree); Gateholm, Grassholm, Priestholm (all Welsh coast), Steep Holm, Flat Holm (both Bristol Channel), all compounds with ON holmr (‘islet’); Anglesey, Bardsey, Ramsey – all with ON-ey (‘island’).

  At the end of the eighth century, when the first Viking raids fell on the islands of the north, the territories that comprised northern Britain and the Irish Sea made up a diverse and heterogeneous world. There were the ethnically and linguistically British kingdoms of Wales, and the mysterious kingdom of Alt Clud in the region around the Clyde; there was the Gaelic kingdom of Dál Riata, centred on Argyll and the southern Hebrides, and the Pictish kingdom that dominated the highlands and Northern Isles. Of the Isles of Man and Anglesey very little is known, but both seem to have played an important role in trade and travel around the Irish Sea, with mixed Irish, British and perhaps even English populations, some of which were probably transient.6 Finally, there was the Northumbrian realm, extending to the Forth in the north and west across the Pennines to contest in power with the British-speaking peoples of Wales and Alt Clud.