Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  It was an inauspicious start to a long and disastrous reign in which Ethelred tried to pay off the Vikings, such Danegeld becoming a byword for appeasement, although Alfred had at times had a similar policy. It failed and eventually Ethelred, in 1014, was driven out by Sweyn only for the Viking to unexpectedly die.

  And so Ethelred returned, with the help of allied Norsemen who defended London from other Vikings. The bridge was torn down with the help of an absurdly strong nineteen-year-old Viking, Olaf Haraldsson, said to be so agile he could run along the oars of a longship being rowed at full speed. As was said of Balon Greyjoy: “At thirteen he could run a longship’s oars and dance the finger dance as well as any man in the isles.”25 Ethelred lasted for two more years, after which Sweyn’s son Canute took the crown from Ethelred’s son Edmund Ironside.

  Among Canute’s first acts was to return some hostages his father had taken, minus their lips and ears, a habit continued throughout his brutal and effective reign. Mutilation was a common risk for anyone caught up with medieval kingship; just as Stannis rewards Davos by making him a knight but cuts off the first joints of all fingers on his left hand, so the Viking ruler of England mutilated anyone who displeased him or whose relatives did. But Canute also rewarded a loyal smuggler and pirate who aided his cause, a Sussex man called Godwin.

  Later Canute feuded with his ally Thorkell, who he had arrested in 1021; it was resolved by swapping hostages, with Thorkell’s son marrying Canute’s niece Gunnhild, and Harthacnut, Canute’s son by Ethelred’s widow Emma, raised by Thorkell in Denmark as his ward.

  Canute illustrates one area where the Vikings were very different to the Iron Born, who were “drab in their clothing and adornments.” As one author put it “no Viking would have torn Theon’s gold from him unless he intended to start a fight on the spot.”26 Indeed Canute, like most Vikings, covered himself in gold rings, broaches, and loudly-colored garments, proud of the wealth they had acquired from raiding. They also washed their hair regularly, an unusual habit at the time.

  Canute was the first Viking leader to arrive on the European stage and had his daughter Gunhilda married off to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry; however, she was accused of adultery and to prove her innocence sought a champion who would fight on her behalf. Although the accuser was a giant, a gallant page boy promised to be her champion and killed the much bigger man—Gunhilda was cleared of the charge and refused to ever lie with her husband again. What happened to the brave champion we don’t know; like Bronn of the Blackwater, men could make a name by fighting a renowned warrior in such a contest, but more often than not they would die.

  Upon Canute’s death in 1035 the crown of England was fought over by the sons of his English and Norman wives—Harold Harefoot, son of Elfgifu, and Hardicanute, son of Emma. The two men bitterly hated each other. However, both died within a few years, and the throne passed to Ethelred’s son Edward “the Confessor.”

  Edward spent his reign in conflict with Canute’s former regent, Godwin, Earl of Wessex, and his six sons, a division that would trigger a bigger catastrophe later on. Most likely the cause of the hatred was the fate of Edward’s brother Alfred; during the reign of Canute and his sons, Edward and his brother had been exiled in Normandy, his mother Queen Emma’s homeland, but after Canute’s death Alfred had crossed the sea. There he was seized and blinded by Canute’s son Harold Harefoot, but suspicion had always fallen on Godwin as an accessory.

  Just as King Baelor the Blessed in Westeros put up the Great Sept of Baelor, so King Edward the Confessor built Westminster Abbey. Baelor was known for his piety, and for being frail and thin, just as Edward was unusually pale. Baelor forgave his brother’s killers; Edward had to live with the man he blamed for the murder of Alfred, although whether he forgave is another matter. There was also the unhappy marriage, Baelor having his dissolved; Baelor also quarrelled with his hand, Viserys, while Edward fell out with his most powerful lord, Godwin.

  Baelor is a sort of saint and is described as walking barefoot into a viper’s nest to rescue his cousin Aemon, the snakes refusing to attack him. Scared of his own sexual desires, he locked his sister-wife Daena and his own sisters in the Maidenvault, and spent the days in prayer, leaving his uncle to run the realm as hand. (It is on the steps of the Great Sept that Ned Stark is executed). In real life, Edward’s marriage was probably chaste, or at least did not produce issue, although it may have had something to do with the fact that his wife Edith was the daughter of Godwin. Whether he refused to consummate the marriage, or Edward’s reputation for holiness extended to an aversion to sexual relations, we cannot know for sure. He never had any children out of wedlock, either, which was rare for kings of the era.

  In 1053, Earl Godwin died suddenly at a feast in Westminster, possibly from choking to death on bread, or perhaps a stroke, and with the childless king growing old and sick, Godwin’s eldest surviving son Harold effectively became heir apparent, though without Edward’s public blessing. And yet the Godwins were themselves torn apart by feuds. Godwin’s third son, Tostig, had been made Earl of Northumbria following the death of Earl Seward in 1055, who the previous year had defeated and killed the Scottish usurper Macbeth at the Battle of the Seven Sleepers near the Firth of Forth. Northumbria was an alien place to southern men, there were few passable roads between north and south, and the region was far more heavily Danish, especially the country around its largest city York. Tostig, despite his Danish name and Danish mother, was considered too southern by most of the magnates but the violence he displayed in maintaining the law, to both the guilty and innocent, also provoked hostility.

  In October 1065 this led to an uprising in the north, led by two brothers from the old ruling house of Northumbria, Edwin and Morcar, who marched toward the Thames. Harold acted as mediator, most likely agreeing to exile Tostig, making the brothers Earls of Northumbria and Mercia, and marrying their sister. As she was of the royal blood of Northumbria, this would give him a greater claim to the throne, which the lords of the north would support. Harold already had a handfast, in the Scandinavian manner, who was now put aside.

  The final days of 1065 were marked by terrible storms. The noblemen of England came from all around the country to feast together at Westminster Abbey, which Edward had built, but it was clear that the king was gravely ill. Two monks by his bedside warned that England was cursed by God and would suffer evil spirits for a year and a day; on Twelfth night, January 5, the king died, and the following day Harold assumed the throne.

  THE GREAT CITY

  The Vikings—Danes and Norwegians—had most heavily settled on the rocky islands off the north and west of Britain, especially the Orkneys and Shetlands. According to the sagas it was the semi-legendary Norwegian king Harald Finehair who conquered Orkney with his famous ship, Dragon. The court poet of Haakon I, son of Harald Finehair, and known as Evyind “the plagiarist,” had once composed an epitaph for his king that says much about their attitude to this fleeting life: “Wealth dies, kinsmen die, The land is laid waste, Since Hakon fared to the heathen gods, Many are thralls and slaves.”27 (Why he got the name “the plagiarist” we’ll never know.)

  Today the Shetlands retain a dialect with aspects of Norse, and DNA analysis suggests that the islanders are 30 percent Viking by blood, the highest rate in Britain, followed by their neighboring islanders, the Orcadians.28 In contrast, mainland Scots overwhelmingly descend from the first men of the island, Picts as well as Gaels. The Vikings also inhabited the Hebrides, which in Gaelic is Innse Gall, “Isle of the Foreigner,” and the Isle of Man, which remained Norwegian until 1266. Many of the islands retained their Viking culture for long into the modern age. In Uist in the Outer Hebribes in the 1870s, locals were heard by a visitor talking about how “nine days he hang pa de rutless tree,” a clear reference to the old tradition about Odin, which had passed down in folklore almost a millennium after Christianization. Shetland still celebrates its Viking heritage on the last Tuesday of January with a festival called U
-Helly-Aa, in which locals dress up as their ancestors. It used to involve dragging burning tar barrels through the streets of Lerwick (until this was banned in 1874, for obvious reasons). The Isle of Man, a sort of quasi-part of Britain, today has the oldest continuous parliament in the world, the Tynewald (from the Norse word for assembly—thing).29

  The Vikings terrorized large swathes of western Europe and even reached as far as Islamic Spain, where the Muslims called them the magus, or fire-worshippers. They first hit Moorish Spain in 844 when some turned up the Guadalquivir river in 844 and attacked Seville. When they then attacked Cadiz, the Norsemen lost thirty ships and one thousand men at the hands of a strange flammable liquid they had never seen before. Clearly, al-Andalus was easily capable of driving away the barbarians; Rahman II ordered for ships to be built in Valencia, Lisbon, and Seville, and two fleets were established, and the fire-worshippers were driven out. Those they captured were converted to Islam, and a wall was built around Seville.

  The Vikings covered huge distances, and reached as far as Iceland, a barren, treeless, volcano island which they colonized in the 870s, having discovered Irish monks living there. (Among its many lava caves are Grjótagjá, which is just below 50°C due to the nearby volcanic eruption and was used as a location for romantic scenes between Jon Snow and Ygritte.) The Vikings went further still, to Greenland, where, with pack ice reduced by global warming, a settlement of four thousand was eventually able to build a cathedral and two monasteries. The Vikings even reached mainland North America, going as far south as Newfoundland. But they also sailed east, beyond Finland and down the rivers of the east where they were called “the rowers,” or Rus.

  After travelling up the rivers that fed the Baltic Sea, these Rus would carry their boats across dry land until they found the south-flowing rivers that would bring them toward the warmer Black Sea. Sailing south, they established a statelet that would one day become the Grand Duchy of Kiev, from which the empire of Russia emerged. Finally, these tough wildenerness men arrived, astonished, to find themselves in Miklagard—the Great City. To others it was called the Basileuousa (Queen of Cities) or New Rome, but most of the world knew it as Constantinople.

  *Tweet that and it says below “translate from Swedish.”

  17

  THE BRETHREN OF THE CROSS

  Hypocrisy is a boil. Lancing a boil is never pleasant.

  —THE HIGH SPARROW

  Martin’s world is different from ours, and not just because of the dragons. For all the comparisons between the Seven and Catholic Christianity, religion is mostly absent from public life. The High Septon does not attend the Small Council, there are no formal prayers at public events, and none of the characters regularly attend any religious service.1

  Perhaps most significantly, the Faith is not especially associated with learning, reading, and writing, when in real life the Catholic Church was the education system in western Europe. It was almost entirely responsible for raising literacy from almost total non-existence during the post-Roman period to a considerable minority of the population in the fourteenth century, as many as 20 percent in the cities and 5 percent in the countryside.2

  It was the monasteries that spearheaded these changes, where books were copied and written. Much of Ancient Greek learning had been preserved in the Arab world, but Latin survived largely through the monastic network, which began in Egypt in the fourth century and arrived in western Europe later. In monasteries brothers copied information for the next generation, laboriously, often painfully, with frozen quills in bleak northern cells. Without them what little of Roman writing survives—estimated at only 1 percent of what was put on paper—would have disappeared too.

  Monks were the real-life maestars. As novelist Umberto Eco once put it, “A monastery without books is like a garden without herbs, a meadow without flowers, a tree without leaves.” Yet none of the religious libraries could compete with the ancients—the Library of Alexandra had 500,000 scrolls in the third century BC, and one estimate has 700,000 volumes there two hundred years later. Even major libraries of the twelfth century had no more 500 or so manuscripts; this had improved somewhat over time, so that in 1338 the Sorbonne in Paris had 1,728 works for loan, although 300 of these were lost.

  Many medieval libraries consisted of rows of chained books, which can still be seen in places such as Hereford Cathedral. However, books were often lent out—and never returned. Some feature curses threatening divine justice to anyone who fails to return them, while other lenders initiated contracts, a sensible precaution when books were hugely expensive.

  However, monastic chronicles were in decline by the time of the War of the Roses, with increasing numbers of men choosing to go into secular professions instead; long before the Reformation, the Church was losing its monopoly over education and government.

  In England among the most important of these real-life maestars was the Venerable Bede, a Northumbria monk born in 672 who, at the age of twelve, was sent to a monastery in Jarrow. Bede wrote The Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, in 731, and was the first to refer to the people of the seven kingdoms as the Anyclyn, or English, although his most influential act was to popularize the idea of the dating system using BC and AD. If we imagine there is anyone who resembles Measter Aemon it would be Bede (Aemon also speaks with the north-east English accent of Bede’s native land). There is also an echo of Beowulf when Sam says of Aemon: “No man was wiser, gentler or kinder. He was the blood of the dragon, but now his fire has gone out.”3

  Monasteries were tough places, and hungry mouths were often sent there at a young age by desperate parents. Orderic Vitalis was packed off to a monastery at the age of ten and was still bitter and angry when he wrote about it more than four decades later: “I did not see my father from the time he drove me into exile, like a hated stepson, for the love of the Creator.” Anselm in the eleventh century described boys in the monastery “trembling under the master’s rod.” These young ones had to be silent and still at all times, and monks were even forbidden from smiling at novices. However, from the twelfth century monasteries began to refuse young children, just as the Church would not allow children to be betrothed, since they lacked the reason to make such choices.

  Although Catholic priests were not fully celibate until the twelfth century, monks had been forbidden the sins of the flesh since the first monasteries and punishment for vow-breaking could be savage, in the Theon Greyjoy sense. A nun at Wilton Abbey in the south of England had become pregnant by a monk, and after he fled, her veil was torn off and she was whipped and imprisoned and put in prison on a diet of bread and water. However, they soon tricked her into revealing the whereabouts of the man responsible and once he was captured her fellow nuns, “eager to revenge the insult to virginity,” asked the canons “if the young man might be sent to them for a little while.”4 There they forced the pregnant woman to castrate her lover and then the testicles were placed in her mouth. Ailred of Rievaulx commented approvingly on this somewhat excessive punishment: “See what zeal was burning in these champions of chastity, these persecutors of uncleanliness, who loved Christ above all things.”5

  Monasteries copied large amounts of information, and not just about religion. Bede wrote dozens of books, including works on science and history, and recorded what he had learned from travelers and stories from around the kingdom and beyond, to be recorded, copied, and used by later generations. He even speculated on such matters as how the moon affects the tides and the movement of the earth the seasons.

  The number of monasteries grew especially in the twellfth century, by which stage European society was reaching take-off. Around this time some monasteries were gathering such a community of scholars that they attracted students and started teaching classes, informally and then formally. So the first universities were born in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, founded in 1088, 1150, and 1167 respectively. Theologian and chaplain Robert de Sorbon had started off the library at the Paris university that bore his nam
e, donating sixty-seven books; thirty years later it consisted of 1017 titles.

  Life for students was grim and violent, and closer to the Night’s Watch than Brideshead Revisited. At Paris, the most influential university of the medieval period, huge, fatal brawls between students and locals were common. In 1200, there was a fight after a group of German students smashed up a tavern and beat up the owner. The city’s prevot (magistrate) raised a militia and attacked the Germans’ hostel, but some Parisian students were killed too. Afterwards the scholars threatened to leave the city and as a result King Philippe Auguste issued the university’s first charter and made the prevot endure a trial by ordeal. He survived but went into exile. In 1229, there were battles between students and locals in which as many as 320 were killed, their bodies thrown into the Seine.

  Things were no better in Oxford, which experienced numerous disturbances leading to hundreds of deaths, sometimes between students and locals and sometimes among students, usually between northerners and southerners. A riot in 1209 resulted in several fatalities and caused some academics to leave town and found a university at Cambridge instead. The most notorious incident occurred in 1355 when ninety-three died in a brawl between students and locals during the St. Scholastica Day riots. Each year afterwards on February 10 the city mayor and councillors had to walk bareheaded through the streets and pay the university a fine of one penny for each scholar killed—sixty-three in total. This procession lasted until 1825 when the mayor refused to take part, and a formal act of reconciliation was only made in 1955 when the mayor was given an honorary degree and the university vice-chancellor made a freeman of the city.