The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are

by Michael Pye

  Consider Charlemagne’s habits and you see the Vikings not as an assault but as another set of players in the same very violent game. Norsemen demanded tribute; Charlemagne demanded not just tribute but also tithes for the Church that was so closely allied with his power. Charlemagne raided across borders just as Vikings did, plundered if he couldn’t stay long enough to demand the regular payment of tribute, accepted tribute if he didn’t want to settle and occupy the land. The difference lay in the way the Vikings ruled and used the sea.

  Their raids began just as Charlemagne had broken his most irritating neighbours, the Saxons: who made a habit (so his courtiers said) of murder, robbery and arson; who were obstinately pagan and didn’t think like Christians and were therefore unpredictable. They were a constant threat to the Frankish need to control the Rhine and the trade which went up and down it. They seemed to be on excessively good terms with various other peoples that the Franks were determined to subdue, especially the Frisians. They also managed to organize their lives without kings, and were rather proud of the fact; earlier Bede reported that they cast lots when war was imminent to choose one lord whom everybody would obey for the duration, but when war ended ‘the lords revert to equality of status’. That was an affront to a man like Charlemagne who was very willing to be obeyed, and a practical problem for a king who wanted to rule them.

  By 800, Charlemagne had won so well he could even be a little magnanimous about recognizing Saxon laws, but he also knew that he had to be more than a king to keep them in line.54 On Christmas Day in Rome he went into pray before the tomb of St Peter and the Pope put a crown on his head and the crowd wished him ‘life and victory’ in his new rank with his new name: Augustus, Emperor of the Romans. Charlemagne said (or at least his biographer Einhard said he said) he would never have gone to church if he had known what was going to happen.

  The new emperor didn’t preach; he attacked. He didn’t try to persuade the Saxons to become Christians, he made new law. A man was killed if he persisted in pagan ceremonies, killed if he hid away and refused to be baptized, and punished harshly if he did not take on all the obligations of the observant. The fines for failing to have a child baptized were the equivalent of thirty head of cattle, even for a man who wasn’t free or noble, and much more for the more visible classes. Even the dead were required to conform. There were to be no more mound graves, only cemeteries, and no more cremation; the penalty for being accessory to a cremation was death. The missionaries waited decorously on the side until the laws were in force, and then they came in preaching to intimidated people who did not dare say they were not already converted.

  Legends of conversion are shining things, full of brave martyrs, furiously convincing preachers, truth triumphing. The actual business of conversion was exceedingly muddy: sometimes brutal, sometimes shallow, sometimes expensive and it never had much to do with hearts and minds. The missionary Anskar went north to save the souls of Scandinavia in the 820s and even his biographer Rimbert acknowledges he ‘distributed much money in the northern districts in order that he might win the souls of the people’. His first monks were bought in a slave market as boys: ‘he began also to buy Danish and Slav boys so that he might train them for God’s service.’ To Anskar’s fury, the boys ended up as servants to a grandee who got control of their monastery; they were never free. And when Rimbert himself went north to the Swedes Anskar gave him and his colleagues ‘whatever they needed to give away in order to secure friends’.55

  Laypersons did much the same. Louis the German paid all kinds of pagans for their help against his father. In return his rival Charles the Bald paid bribes to the Bulghars to encourage them to attack Louis the German. Conversion looks very much like politics by the usual means.56

  Not every soul had to be bought, though. Sometimes calming a terrible storm at sea or inexplicably staying dry in the rain was useful. It showed what the Christian god could do spontaneously without all the magical apparatus that a god like Thor would need. Mind you, Christian crosses quite often still had Thor’s great hammer on the back, just to be sure. Sometimes converting a king or a court was enough, and the Emperor was happy to help with the conversion by impressing any monarch with the scale of his imperial power, his usefulness and resources; Louis the Pious did that when King Harald of Denmark was driven out of his kingdom, not so much for the sake of spreading the true faith but because in future ‘a Christian people would more readily come to his aid’.57

  Some time in the early ninth century, an anonymous poet was even more ambitious; he retold the stories of the four Gospels to convince at least the Saxons, and perhaps the Frisians, too, about the history of Christ. He wrote, on a grand scale, verses to be sung out loud at banquets, just as poets did for the history of human kings. Since he was writing for a listening audience, a mead-hall mob, and since monks and priests should not have needed such convincing, it’s likely he was addressing nobles and grandees. His language is Saxon but with bits of vocabulary from all along the North Sea coast. Finding his name sounds a hopeless quest, but we do know of one bard who sang at banquets, with a repertoire of songs like the great epic of Beowulf; who sang about Frisian kings with relatives from Denmark and Jutland; who had reason for Christian enthusiasm because he had been cured of blindness by the missionary Liudger himself. His name was Bernlef, and it is possible that Heliand is his work.58

  The Gospel according to Heliand,59 which means ‘Saviour’, is all four Gospels moved away from the Mediterranean to a Northern, colder world, where years are measured in winters, where there are deep forests and concealing woods rather than open deserts, where the disciples of Jesus are like the band of men a chieftain might assemble in the expectation of their personal loyalty. ‘That is what a thane chooses,’ Thomas tells the other disciples in a crisis: ‘to stand fast together with his lord to die with him at the moment of doom.’60 Old man Zacharias, astonished at the angel’s notion that he might still have a child at his advanced age, is not at all surprised by what later Christians might find astonishing: that the angel tells Zacharias to bring up the future John the Baptist in the virtue of absolute loyalty, treuwa, so he can be a ‘warrior-companion’ for Christ.61

  The poem is clearly not made for ordinary persons, and ordinary persons hardly feature. Mary becomes a ‘woman of the nobility’, Joseph is a nobleman and the herald angels ignore the shepherds and talk to his grooms and sentries at the stables. The baby Jesus wears not swaddling clothes but jewels. When he grows up and begins to bring together the disciples, they reckon him a generous man, free with the gold and gifts, and also with the drink, or at least the mead; he does as Saxon nobles do, as Anskar learned to do among the pagans he wanted to convert. For Jesus, the disciples become in turn ‘a powerful force of men from many peoples, a holy army’.62

  The Gospel story and the Saxon world begin to merge. Jesus is baptized, and the dove that represents the Holy Ghost comes down; but the dove doesn’t stay above his halo’d head, it settles on his shoulder, just as Wotan’s sacred bird, the raven, settles on his shoulder. The disciples wait for him on the shores of a lake that is really a sea, with sands and dunes, and they sail out in ‘well-nailed’ boats made from overlapping planks ostentatiously nailed in place, ‘high-horned’ ships with prows like Viking vessels. They sail like veterans of such North Sea ships, turning into the wind to stop the waves catching the flanks of their ship.63

  Lazarus is raised from the dead, but not from a cave as he is in the Gospel; he rises from a grave mound with a stone on top in the old Saxon tradition. When Christ rises, he also bursts out of such a grave. High priest and Pharisees meet much like some Saxon assembly, the kind that Charlemagne had carefully forbidden. Where the New Testament goes back to books of law ‘as it is written’, the Heliand has law-speakers, the men who had memorized the oral traditions of Saxon law. Salt is not for flavouring the world but for medicine, as it was for the Saxons. The disciples ask to be taught the sacred runes, and they are given the Lord’s Pray
er: a magic access to God. And when the wife of Pontius Pilate has nightmares about the consequences of Jesus’ death, the Heliand says the dreams were the work of the serpent devil, invisible under that staple of Germanic legend, the magic helmet.64

  Sometimes the poet has to take a very deep breath and discuss Scripture thoroughly. Nobles were used to proving their innocence in court by swearing oaths, so it was hard to tell them that Jesus forbade swearing any oaths at all. They should answer only ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. After all, the poet argues, if everyone swears and not everyone is telling the truth, what would be the value of an oath? Who could believe it? At other times he keeps an action but changes its meaning. When the biblical Christ in the garden accepts that the cup will not pass from him, that his fate is sealed, he drinks it down to show his acceptance. The poet has him drinking the wine to the honour of God. Acceptance would be too mild; instead he salutes his chieftain. Christ clears the moneychangers out of the Temple, but in Heliand the moneychangers are usurers and they are all of course Jews. Jews in Heliand are ‘a different kind of people’, and Christ tells them: ‘You Jewish people never show any respect for the house of God.’ The constant sense of Northern virtue, of the slinking, untrustworthy nature of Southerners, and Jews as people of the South, flickers into life all through the poem: the Jews who oppose Christ become ‘arrogant men’ and an ‘evil clan’. Christ is no longer a Jew, nor are his disciples; they are Northerners. Some abominable thoughts are being born.65

  Cultures muddle, even if they fail to fuse, and the Gospel changes subtly to accommodate the newcomers. It’s not just that no chieftain could ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, so Jesus doesn’t, and no chieftain would ever wash his followers’ feet so a whole new explanation is required. Even the stories left out – no prodigal son, no good Samaritan so no family conflict or social difference – are not as striking as what happens to the lessons that are left. The Saxon disciples are told to be humble, to be gentle, which is almost biblical language from the familiar Beatitudes, but then the blessed who mourn become the blessed who cry over their own evil deeds; the ones who ‘hunger and thirst after justice’ become ‘fighting men who wanted to judge fairly’ because an audience of nobles would expect to be the ones who judged; the merciful are told to be kind but inside ‘a hero’s chest’; and the ‘peacemakers’, whose blessing must have seemed odd to a warrior caste, are limited to men who ‘do not want to start any fights or court cases by their own actions’. As for the men who are ‘persecuted for justice’s sake’, they are present in the poem; they are perhaps the rebellious Saxons now suffering from the attentions of Charlemagne and his lords.66 It would be hard for Charlemagne’s missioners to preach against the defeated being patient in the circumstances; Heliand thinks it tactful to leave out Christ’s promise to ‘bring not peace but a sword’.

  This is political alchemy. Kings and emperors already knew that a literate clergy could make very useful bureaucrats, writing, checking and disputing documents, and the structure of a church, parish by parish, brought a kind of tax-gathering and administration into every part of a kingdom. Churches and monasteries often looked like forts, carefully guarded, and sometimes violent in their own defence; their interest in trading routes, in connections for vats of wine as well as pictures, books and relics, gave them secular importance. What remained was to bring the warrior class into the system, to anchor them with ideals and Christian messages, to allow for the regular business of war in what was supposed to be a religion that taught peace. When warrior lords decided to follow Christ, they needed what Heliand provided: a sense that their warlike occupations could be Godly, that war made sense to a carpenter and his fisherman followers.

  Once that was established, a new and virtuous and considered kind of military style could blossom. There would be bloody battle, of course, but there could also in time be chivalry: war in the form of jousts, war with rules, war as a matter of honour as well as necessity, with the prospect of Heaven (as well as more money, more land or a better class of wife here on Earth). And since Northerners were so obviously Christ’s people, they had every right to go after Southerners of any kind, the infidel in particular: they had every right to go crusading. The show and colours of chivalry, the brutal enterprise of the Crusades: both depend on this early marriage of God and warriors’ manners.

  The Vikings were not interested in all this. They struck where they wanted and took what they wanted.

  They had already ruined some islands off Aquitaine in 799, although they did not find it easy; they lost some ships and more than a hundred men. They could not be countered with land armies, so Charlemagne ordered the building and manning of a fleet, and ordered more new ships in 802, 808 and 810; by which time he had fleets on all navigable rivers.67 It was still not enough. The Danish king, Godfrid, was supposed to meet Charlemagne in 804, close to their frontiers at the port of Schleswig, but he never turned up; he was advised by his own court to keep his distance. He decided, four years later, to reinforce the border from the Baltic to ‘the Western Sea’, which we call the North Sea, and physically to move the merchants who were doing business out of a lost port called Reric into Schleswig; he must have known that Charlemagne had a habit of raiding. And then, just as the new emperor was considering a serious expedition against Godfrid, there was shocking news: a fleet of Norse ships, two hundred strong, had come down the shallow seas to the islands off the coast of Frisia and wrecked them, after which they had come ashore and fought the Frisians in three fixed battles and taken back home to King Godfrid one hundred pounds of silver as tribute.68 A minor king was ruining the weak frontiers of Charlemagne’s empire.

  That was when war went to sea: when battles were fought on the water between fleets that had equal ambitions if not equal hulls. A year after the ruin of Frisia, Charlemagne was inspecting his fleets at Ghent and at Boulogne, restoring the old Roman lighthouse at Boulogne so the fleet could come home safely, starting a chain of warning beacons for when the Vikings came again and ordering his lords to get ready for fighting at sea.69 A new enemy had changed the boundaries of power, made a coastline seem like a weakness.

  Yet that same year Charlemagne was also making peace with another Danish king, Godfrid’s successor, called Hemming; twelve nobles from each side met to swear oaths ‘according to the custom of their people’.70 You could be savagely attacked and yet respect the laws and customs of the enemy, it seemed, and even trust him a little in some circumstances. The Vikings and the Emperor could see that they were in the same game.

  It was the Christians who wailed about this in unison, and carried on wailing. It was as the Prophets had predicted, they said: ‘A scourge from the North will extend over all who dwell in the land.’ The shrine and abbey at Iona had been raided in 795, and again in 802 and again in 806 when sixty-eight of the monks were murdered; in 807 a fourth raid made the monastery move its men to the comparative safety of Kells in inland Ireland. Jerusalem had fallen once again; Rome had been sacked by the heathen; their shrine, their place, their culture had been made to run away, and the worst was yet to come.

  ‘The innumerable multitude of the Northmen grows incessantly,’ wrote Ermentar, the chronicler of Saint-Philibert de Noirmoutier, around 855. ‘On every side Christians succumb to massacres, acts of pillage, devastations, burnings whose manifest traces will remain as long as the world endures.’71 Three centuries later the Liber Eliensis (Book of Ely) was still overexcited by the thought of how in 870 a ‘mob of evil ones’ reached ‘the monastery of virgins’ – the convent and shrine at Ely on the edge of the English fens; ‘The sword of rabid men is held out over milkwhite, consecrated necks.’ These things may not actually have happened, but the rhetoric is real and once again the Vikings were very useful; their inconvenient ravaging distracted the holy and was the reason monks and monasteries were imperfect, or so later monks would claim.72

  From across Europe, from an island in Lake Constance, the monk Walahfrid Strabo (‘the squinter’) denounced the m
urder of Blathmac, a monk with very serious connections (‘of a kingly line’).73 Blathmac had chosen to go to Iona, knowing very well that the ‘heathen mob of Danes used to call there, armed with all the fury of their evil’; he was a man who wanted the stigmata, and even martyrdom, so the danger was the whole point, and the Danes were his best chance of finding armed and murderous men to oblige. Strabo’s poem about the ‘martyr of Iona’ has him standing with God on his side, as you would expect, and saying Mass in a golden dawn when the furious gang of the damned burst in. Blathmac, unarmed, defies them; he says he has no idea where the bones of Cuthbert are buried in their shrine of precious metals. ‘If Christ told me, I would never let it reach your ears.’ He tells the Danes to take their swords, and they do exactly as he says. They hack off his limbs and tear wounds in his cold body so he has stigmata and martyrdom, both.74

  His triumph, his sainthood, depended on a victimhood he arranged for himself; without his terrible death, he was just one more socially presentable holy man. He needed enemies in his binary world: us and them, the right and the wrong, Godly and devilish. The Roman world was very aware of barbarians at its limits, but it did not depend on being opposed to be sure of itself; Christians insisted on a sense that they were being opposed and displaced, even as Christianity moved into more and more territories, changed people’s minds, changed the organization of their lives in alliance with kings and lords.