23. This, essentially, was the thrust of the 2014 British Museum exhibition and its accompanying publication, G. Williams et al. (eds), Vikings: Life and Legend
Chapter 6: The Gathering Storm
1. Finnsburg, lines 5–12
2. We should, however, bear in mind that the record we have of these years is far from being complete – there are, for example, no surviving chronicles produced in Mercia or East Anglia that provide an independent insight into what was going on in these regions, and the West Saxon chronicle only records what its compilers in the late ninth century wanted their readers to remember. There are, in fact, hints that unrecorded coastal raids did occur in Kent (at least), and possibly before the killings in Portland took place. A synod attended by Offa of Mercia in 782 includes provision for an expedition against pagans arriving in ships in Kent and Essex. Susan Kelly (ed.), The Charters of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, and Minster-in-Thanet, Anglo-Saxon Charters 4 (1995, Oxford University Press), no. 15
3. It is worth considering that twenty-nine years prior to the publication of this book the Soviet Union was still an apparently permanent feature of the geopolitical scene
4. ASC F s.a. 798
5. ASC s.a. 813 (F s.a. 815)
6. ASC s.a. 823
7. HA, iv.29
8. ASC s.a. 832; Ships dated to the ninth century and excavated in Norway can be reliably estimated to have had crews of between 40 (the Oseberg ship) and 66 (the Gokstad ship); see T. Sjøvold, The Viking Ships in Oslo (1985, Universitetets Oldsaksamling); G. Williams, The Viking Ship (2014, British Museum Press). For an introduction to debates regarding the size of ninth-century armies see G. Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West, 450–900 (2003, Routledge)
9. Elene, lines 99–123; prose translation of Old English verse by S. A. J. Bradley, Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1982, Everyman), p. 168
10. See Halsall, Warfare and Society, for the messy reality of early medieval combat; sixty-four shields were excavated with the Gokstad ship, and may have been made specifically for display during the burial rites; they were hung outwards along the gunnels of the ship, thirty-two per side: Sjøvold, The Viking Ships in Oslo, p. 58
11. There is a degree of mystery surrounding this object – despite its obvious quality, it seems to have been discarded or hidden, deposited in a pit on a domestic workshop plot in Viking York. The circumstances under which it was disposed of remain obscure; D. Tweddle, The Anglian Helmet from 16–22 Coppergate (1992, Council for British Archaeology)
12. J. W. Binns, E. C. Norton, D. M. Palliser, ‘The Latin Inscription on the Coppergate Helmet’, Antiquity 64.242 (1990), pp. 134–9
13. G. Williams, ‘Warfare & Military Expansion’ in G. Williams et al. (eds), Vikings: Life and Legend, pp. 76–115; S. Norr, ‘Old Gold – The Helmet in Hákonarmál as a Sign of Its Time’, in S. Norr (ed.), Valsgärde Studies: The Place and Its People, Past and Present (2008, Uppsala), pp. 83–114
14. ASC s.a. 833. The literature concerning the nature of military obligation in Anglo-Saxon England is vast. For an introduction to the key themes and literature see R. Lavelle, Alfred’s Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the Viking Age (2010, Boydell & Brewer), and for an influential overview R. P. Abels, Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England (1988, University of California Press)
15. T. J. T. Williams, Landscape and Warfare in Early Medieval Britain
16. ASC s.a. 835
17. P. C. Herring, The Archaeology of Kit Hill: Kit Hill Archaeological Survey Project Final Report (1990, 2nd edition, Cornwall Archaeological Unit)
18. Herring, The Archaeology of Kit Hill, p. 141; D. L. Prior, ‘Call, Sir John, first baronet (1732–1801)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004, Oxford University Press)
19. M. Peake, Titus Groan (1946, Eyre & Spottiswood), p. 1
20. Herring, The Archaeology of Kit Hill. It is easy to imagine the voice of David Jason: ‘Deep inside this picturesque hill, somewhere in the sleepy countryside of Cornwall, Baron Silas Greenback, the world’s most villainous toad, is plotting to detonate a massive nuclear warhead …’
21. This sort of tautology is a remarkably common occurrence in British place-names. Multiple linguistic layers – Celtic, Latin, Old English, Old Norse, Norman French – have resulted in older word elements (having lost their original sense) being combined with newer words with similar meanings: for example, Eas Fors waterfall on the Isle of Mull (‘waterfall’ [eas, Gaelic] + ‘waterfall’ [fors, foss, ON] + waterfall [ModE]) or Breedon on the Hill, Leicestershire (‘hill’ [bre, Brittonic] + ‘hill’ [dun, OE] + ‘on the hill’ [ModE]).
22. T. J. T. Williams, ‘“For the Sake of Bravado in the Wilderness”: Confronting the Bestial in Anglo-Saxon Warfare’, in Bintley and Williams (eds), Representing Beasts, pp. 176–204
23. T. J. T. Williams, ‘The Place of Slaughter: The West Saxon Battlescape’ in R. Lavelle and S. Roffey (eds), The Danes in Wessex (2016, Oxbow), pp. 35–55; T. J. T. Williams, Landscape and Warfare in Early Medieval Britain
Chapter 7: Dragon-Slayers
1. A. Lang, The Red Fairy Book (1906, Longmans, Green and Co.)
2. ASC BCDE s.a. 851; CA adds ‘on Thanet’, VA and CC suggest Sheppey
3. FH s.a. 844
4. ASC s.a. 839; 851 (C s.a. 853)
5. All s.a. 837; 838; 839; ADEF s.a. 840 (C s.a. 841); s.a. 851 (C s.a. 853)
6. ASC s.a. 848
7. ASC s.a. 850 (C s.a. 853); Either the burial mound of a man called Wicga, or a mound infested with ‘wiggling things’ (Baker, ‘Entomological Etymologies’)
8. ASC s.a. 851 (C s.a. 853). The location of Aclea is unknown, although Ockley in Surrey is a plausible candidate
9. For a sceptical and comprehensive analysis of feuding in Anglo-Saxon England, see J. D. Niles, ‘The Myth of the Feud in Anglo-Saxon England’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 114 (2015), pp. 163–200
10. G. Williams, ‘Viking Camps in England and Ireland’ in G. Williams et al. (eds), Vikings: Life and Legend (pp. 120–1) is a useful introduction to the subject of Viking camps
11. B. Orme, Anthropology for Archaeologists (1981, Cornell University Press), p. 196
12. G. Halsall, ‘Anthropology and the Study of Pre-Conquest Warfare and Society’, in S. C. Hawkes (ed.), Weapons and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England (1989, Oxford University Committee for Archaeology), pp. 155–78; T. J. T. Williams, ‘The Place of Slaughter’
13. Halsall, ‘Playing by Whose Rules?’
14. It should be noted, however, that – as I have argued elsewhere – the impression of novelty may be a product of the increased detail present in the source material from the ninth century onward: T. J. T. Williams, ‘The Place of Slaughter’ and Landscape and Warfare in Early Medieval Britain
15. This was normally a reference to Slavic people, but may have referred to any European transported eastward as a slave: Lunde and Stone, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, p. 222, n. 2
16. Ibn Rusta, c. 913, translated in Lunde and Stone, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, p. 126
17. EHD (13.1); R. Abels, ‘The Micel Hæðen Here and the Viking Threat’, in T. Reuters (ed.), Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences (2003, Ashgate), pp. 269–71; T. J. T. Williams, ‘The Place of Slaughter’
18. See Chapter 13
19. G. Williams, ‘Raiding and Warfare’, in Brink with Price (eds), The Viking World, pp. 193–203
20. L. Abrams, ‘The Conversion of the Danelaw’ in J. Graham-Campbell, R. Hall, J. Jesch and D. N. Parsons (eds), Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress (2001, Oxbow), pp. 31–44; cf. D. M. Hadley, ‘Conquest, Colonization and the Church: Ecclesiastical Organization in the Danelaw’, Historical Research 69, pp. 109–28
21. ‘Dore, Whitwell Gap and the River Humber’ (ASC ABCD s.a. 942); G. Rollason, Northumbria, 500–1100: Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (2003, Cambridge Univ
ersity Press), p. 26
22. ASC s.a. 827; S. Keynes, ‘Bretwalda or Brytenwalda’, in M. Lapidge, J. Blair. and S. Keynes (eds), The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England (2008, 8th edition, Wiley-Blackwell), p. 74
23. ASC s.a. 867
24. Rollason, Northumbria, pp. 192–8
25. All these behaviours are attested to in one way or another in Anglo-Saxon England. Farting in the general direction of the enemy could be one part of the defiant warrior’s arsenal; when in 1068 William the Conqueror turned up at Exeter expecting the town’s surrender, he was roused to particular wrath towards the ‘irreverent’ defenders because ‘one of them’ – according to the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury – ‘standing upon the wall, had bared his posteriors, and had broken wind, in contempt of the Normans [GRA, b.III]’; in 1006, a Viking army had jeered at the cowering townsfolk of Winchester (ASC CDE s.a. 1006), and the display of severed heads seems to have been commonplace in Anglo-Saxon judicial culture: A. Reynolds, Anglo-Saxon Deviant Burial Customs (2009, Oxford University Press)
26. ASC s.a. 867 (C s.a. 868); VA, 27
27. Ragnarssona þáttr (‘The Tale of Ragnar’s Sons’); Ragnars saga Loðbrókar (‘The Saga of Ragnar Loðbrók’); Krákumál (‘The Song of Kraka’); Gesta Danorum (‘Deeds of the Danes’) by Saxo Grammaticus (GD)
28. Jarl is an Old Norse word designating a nobleman – roughly analogous to the OE ealdorman
29. Saxo Grammaticus, in perhaps the earliest version of this tale, recounts that there were several serpents given to Þóra, and that they roamed wild over the land, burning and poisoning with their foul breath; GD, book IX
30. Krákumál, verse 1
31. Beowulf, lines 2312–20; trans. Heaney, p. 73
32. Beowulf, lines 2275–7; trans. Heaney, p. 72
33. Maxims II, lines 26–7
34. Maxims II, lines 28–9
35. Völuspá, verse 66
36. J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘The Monsters and the Critics’ [1936], in C. Tolkien (ed.), The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (1997, HarperCollins), p. 12; Beowulf’s dragon is undeniably a model for the depiction of Smaug the Golden in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, originally published by George Allen & Unwin in 1937
37. The most complete version of the story is told in the late thirteenth-century Old Norse Völsunga saga, but it is also told in poetic form in a number of related – so-called ‘eddic’ – poems compiled together in the Icelandic Codex Regius: J. L. Byock (trans.), The Saga of the Volsungs: The Norse Epic of Sigurd the Dragon Slayer (1999, 2nd edition, Penguin); A. Orchard, The Elder Edda: A Book of Viking Lore (2011, Penguin)
38. C. E. Doepler, Der Ring des Nibelungen: Carl Emil Doeplers Kostümbilder für die Erstaufführung des Ring in Bayreuth (2012 [1889], Reprint-Verlag Leipzig); see also R. Wagner [trans. M. Armour], The Rhinegold & The Valkyrie (1910, William Heinemann) and Siegfried & The Twilight of the Gods (1911, William Heinemann) with illustrations by A. Rackham
39. J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’ [1947], in C. Tolkien (ed.), The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, p. 135
40. E. Magnússon and W. Morris (trans.),Völsunga Saga: The Story of the Volsungs and Niblungs, with certain Songs from the Elder Edda (1870, F. S. Ellis)
41. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009, HarperCollins)
42. G. B. Shaw, ‘William Morris as I Knew Him’, Introduction to May Morris, William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, vol. 2 (1936, Blackwell), p. xxxvii
43. ‘Letter 216’ in N. Kelvin (ed.), The Collected Letters of William Morris, volume 1 (1984, Princeton University Press), p. 205
44. Beowulf, in what is clearly intended as a foreshadowing of events to come, refers to the Sigurd legend directly, although the poem substitutes Sigurd’s father Sigemund in the role of dragon-slayer; lines 873–99
45. G. Williams et al. (eds), Vikings: Life and Legend (pp. 120–1), p. 88; Tatarstan is a Russian republic with its capital at Kazan
46. Rundata (Sö 101; Sö 327); see V. Symons, ‘Wreoþenhilt ond wyrmfah: Confronting Serpents in Beowulf and Beyond’ in Bintley and Williams (eds), Representing Beasts, pp. 73–93
47. The Manx stones are as follows: Maughold 122; Andreas 121; Jurby 119; Malew 120; they are identified by the name of the parish in which they were found and the catalogue number assigned in P. M. C. Kermode, Manx Crosses or The Inscribed and Sculptured Monuments of the Isle of Man From About the End of the Fifth to the Beginning of the Thirteenth Century (2005 [1907], Elibron Classics). See also S. Margeson, ‘On the Iconography of the Manx Crosses’ in C. Fell, P. Foote, J. Graham-Campbell and R. Thomson (eds), The Viking Age in the Isle of Man (1983, Viking Society for Northern Research). The English stone cross-shaft is designated in CASSS as Halton St Wilfrid 1, 2, 9 and 10
48. Ragnars saga Loðbrókar
49. R. McTurk, Studies in Ragnars saga loðbrókar and Its Major Scandinavian Analogues (1991, Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature)
Chapter 8: Eagles of Blood
1. Hávamál, 144
2. One of Ragnar’s sons is named as Hvitserk (‘Whiteshirt’) in Ragnarssona þáttr; this may have been an alternative name for the individual named Halfdan and identified as a brother of Ivar and Ubbe in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: ASC All MSS s.a. 878 (C s.a. 879)
3. Ragnarssona þáttr
4. GD, book IX; a similar version appears in Ragnars saga Loðbrókar
5. M. Townend, ‘Knútsdrápa’, in D. Whaley (ed.), Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 1: From Mythical Times to c. 1035 (2012, Brepols), p. 649
6. R. Frank, ‘Viking Atrocity and Skaldic Verse: The Rite of the Blood-Eagle’, English Historical Review XCIX.CCCXCI (1984), pp. 332–43
7. Ibid., p. 337
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 337
10. GH IV.26; The translated passage is taken from A. Orchard, Dictionary of Norse Myth and Legend (1997, Cassell), p. 169
11. O. Sundqvist, An Arena for Higher Powers: Ceremonial Buildings and Religious Strategies in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (2015, Brill), pp. 110–15
12. Archaeological interventions have discovered evidence for buildings underlying the cathedral church at Gamla Uppsala; these are no longer believed to belong to the temple described by Adam of Bremen; see A. M. Alkarp and N. Price, ‘Tempel av guld eller kyrka av trä? : markradarundersökningar vid Gamla Uppsala kyrka’, Fornvännen 100:4 (2005), pp. 261–72
13. Analysis of the excavated material has cast doubt on whether the human remains should be considered part of the evidence for sacrificial ritual – they seem to have been grouped together and show fewer signs of weathering than the animal bones, implying that they were buried earlier. This research also emphasized the presence of butchery marks on many of the animal bones – including the bones of several brown bears – implying that the animals were killed and cut up before being deposited at the tree (although none of this rules out the possibility that they were suspended from the tree in pieces, or butchered after having been taken down). O. Magnell and E. Iregren, ‘Veitstu Hvé Blóta Skal? The Old Norse blót in the light of osteological remains from Frösö Church, Jämtland, Sweden’, Current Swedish Archaeology 18 (2010), pp. 223–50; see also Price, ‘Belief and Ritual’ for a wider discussion of the evidence of cult sites
14. Lunde and Stone, Ibn Fadlān and the Land of Darkness, p. 48
15. Ibid., p. 162
16. A. E. Christensen and M. Nockert, Osebergfunnet IV: Tekstilene (2016, Kulturhistorisk Museum, Universitetet i Oslo)
17. Orkneyinga saga, 8; the story is repeated by Snorri in Heimskringla, probably drawing on the saga: ‘Haralds saga ins Hárfagra’, chapter 30 (Heimskringla I)
18. N. Price, The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia (2002, Uppsala University), pp. 100–7
19. Völuspa, 28
20. Hávamál, 138–9
21. ASC s.a. 867
22. ‘Ynglinga saga’, chapter 8 (Heimskringla I)
24. CC s.a. 868, pp. 282–5; also ASC All MSS s.a. 868 (C s.a. 869)
25. Halsall, Warfare and Society, p. 223
26. It once adorned the walls of the king’s palace at Nineveh (in modern Iraq), but can now be seen at the British Museum in London (a fact for which the whole world should be grateful since the remains of Nineveh were systematically obliterated by Islamic extremists in 2015)
27. The Vikings, according to the poem De bellis Parisiacæ urbis [or Bella Parisiacæ urbis] by the Parisian monk Abbo, may have used some sort of rock-lobber during the siege of Paris in 886, though his account is exaggerated in a number of details (N. Dass (ed. and trans.), Viking Attacks on Paris: The Bella Parisiacae Urbis of Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés (2007, Peeters Publishers); Halsall, Warfare and Society, p. 225)
28. ASC C s.a. 917
29. CC s.a. 868, pp. 282–5; ASC s.a. 868 (C s.a. 869)
30. We should, however, be slightly cautious about accepting the ASC at face value here; Mercia produced no independent chronicle for this period, and the only guide to events is provided by the Wessex-produced ASC compiled in the following decades. The reality of West Saxon involvement may have been far more complex and ambiguous than the ASC’s version allows
31. ASC s.a. 870 (C s.a. 871)
32. Beornwulf (ASC s.a. 823; CC s.a. 823) and Ludeca (ASC s.a. 825; CC s.a. 825)
Viking Britain- an Exploration Page 39
