by Neil Oliver
The Venerable Bede recorded that Aidan was a man of simple, modest spirituality:
He never sought or cared for any worldly possessions, and loved to give away to the poor who chanced to meet him whatever he received from kings or wealthy folk. Whether in town or country, he always travelled on foot unless compelled by necessity to ride; and whatever people he met on his walks, whether high or low, he stopped and spoke to them.
But for all that Bede was prepared to say in praise of Aidan’s commitment to asceticism and to learning, he was a bitter critic of the ways in which the Celtic Church had evolved separately from his own beloved Roman version of the faith. The Celtic idiosyncrasies included such apparent affronts as a different hairstyle for the monks, but the crucial (and unforgivable) stumbling block as Bede saw it was the way the Irishmen had calculated the date of Easter each year — so that from time to time the two Churches might celebrate the principal festival of the Christian year as much as a month apart. The Synod of Whitby in 664 decided in favour of Roman ways, and many of the disgruntled Celts took their leave of Lindisfarne for good then and there, returning instead to Iona, where they felt able to continue doing things their own way, and the right way as they understood it.
It was Bishop Cuthbert who became Lindisfarne’s most famous spiritual leader and by the time of his death in 687 he had brought the community and the wider Church of Northumbria into line with Roman Christianity. Cuthbert’s grave within the priory on the island was a place of pilgrimage and soon miracles were being reported there. By the eighth century the Holy Island of Lindisfarne was a prestigious centre of both spirituality and of learning and it was during the first decades of the eighth century that the famous Lindisfarne Gospels were created.
A copy of the four gospels of the New Testament, it is, by any standards and in any time, a luminous masterpiece. Each of the Evangelists is depicted in a full-page portrait of startling originality and imagination. Matthew appears as an angel; Mark as a lion; Luke as a bull and John as an eagle. The pages given over entirely to intensely detailed and almost hypnotic decoration have been described as examples of the richest and most complicated abstract art ever produced. The illumination of the script is lavish throughout and the wonder of it all is intensified by the thought that the whole piece is the work, the opus Dei, of just one man — the artist and scribe Bishop Eadfrith. The Lindisfarne Gospels were created during the period when the cult of St Cuthbert was being actively promoted in hopes of securing the community’s place at the heart of English Christianity.
By the start of the eighth century, life in the monastery was lived according to the Rule of St Benedict of Nursia, in Italy. It was a carefully regulated system of work and prayer designed to ensure the monks were focused and disciplined, body and soul, at all times. It was undoubtedly a life of hardship.
I would defy anyone to visit Lindisfarne (or indeed Iona) and not feel a sense of peace. Religion need not come into it — the calm of the place is older than that, and deeper. Apart from anything else, there is simply something special about the landscape there. Joined to the mainland for part of each day, separated by the high tide for the rest, it seems good for a person. I have visited many times and for some reason I cannot describe, I always feel the benefit.
The focus nowadays is on the ruin of the priory built during the twelfth century by monks from Durham, long after the time of the Vikings. Local folklore has it that boys from the surrounding area used to prove their manhood by walking across the so-called ‘rainbow arch’, a fragile, elegant span of sandstone blocks — all that remains of a vaulted roof and still tens of dizzying yards above the floor. But those stone buildings, ruined as they are since the priory fell into neglect and disrepair in the seventeenth century, must not distract us from the realities of the lives led by monks there a thousand years before.
For long the only accommodation was provided by simple timber buildings with wattle and daub walls and thatched roofs — little comfort in the teeth of a North Sea storm in winter. The weather, good or bad, could never have felt very far away. For food they would have relied on fish harvested from the surrounding sea, as well as whatever domesticated animals might be kept and crops grown. These were men concerned after all not with earthly trials and pains but with the spreading of the Word of their God. According to the gospels it was their duty to take that Word to the ends of the Earth and so perhaps the privations of their little island, ethereal and hardly there at all, floating between sea and sky, seemed in keeping with the hardship of their calling. Just as their shelters offered brief respite from the elements, so a man’s life was a moment of warmth in the whole of eternity.
Writing in AD 731, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede recounted the words of one of King Edwin’s men:
The present life of man upon Earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.
Those were the thoughts of at least one warrior, and so the monks might have inherited some of the same philosophy, while at the same time consoling themselves with the belief that their faith in everlasting life promised longer-lasting warmth than any hearth.
This then was the little world that had been built from nothing on Lindisfarne — a world where men prayed and read and worked the land, a bright beacon of light in the darkness. It was a place where men spent long days and weeks copying manuscripts by hand. They had the time to fret about how best to shave their heads and style their hair, and precisely when in spring they ought to celebrate the triumph of life over death. But despite what might have been intended by the community’s founding fathers, the place had steadily acquired political significance as well. Close by the royal palaces of Bamburgh, Milfield and Yeavering, it was right at the heart of the Bernician dynasty of the Northumbrian kingdom. By the eighth century at least it also mattered to men with earthly rather than spiritual concerns.
Towards the end of April AD 793 the community agreed to bury a high-ranking local nobleman called Sicga. But Sicga had taken his own life after apparently murdering his king. For the monks to accept such a man — a regicide and suicide — was controversial to say the least. It was in such an atmosphere of scandal and controversy that a flotilla of ships appeared on the horizon just six weeks or so later, on 8 June.
Such an arrival would hardly have been troubling at first. It was an island community after all and likely well used to greeting seaborne visitors from north, south and east. Perhaps some of the brothers, together with their novices, sauntered down onto the beach at dawn — when the tide was at its highest that day — to greet the new arrivals. Maybe they noticed carved dragon heads on the ships’ prows, shields mounted on the gunwales. For these were no traders bringing goods for exchange or sale. These were Vikings and their cargo was Hell on Earth. The precise details of all that unfolded are not recorded. Lindisfarne was home by then to perhaps 30 monks, attended by novices who had not yet taken holy orders and also a lay community of helpers, some of them women. Many were murdered, there on the beach or in and around the church buildings themselves. The rest were rounded up for sale elsewhere as slaves. Whatever portable wealth had been gathered during the century and a half of the community’s existence would certainly have been carried off as well.
That all this horror had been unleashed just weeks after the scandal of Sicga was interpreted, in the wider world, as more than just a coincidence. Alcuin of York, writing in Charlemagne’s academy in Aache
n, was in no doubt it was the manifest wrath of God. ‘Is this the beginning of greater suffering, or the outcome of the sins of those who live there?’ he asked. ‘It has not happened by chance, but is the sign of some great guilt.’
Even the presence of a saint as beloved as Cuthbert had been insufficient to protect the community — clear proof, as far as Alcuin was concerned, that the monks there had strayed so far from the path of righteousness God himself had had to intervene, with pagans as his tools. It is also worth remembering that Alcuin of York, like many Christian churchmen of the eighth century, was convinced the end of the world was nigh. His understanding of the scriptures made it clear to him and to many others like him that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ was imminent — and the disaster that had befallen Lindisfarne was clearly a portent of doom.
A legendary entrance, then — made immortal and unforgettable not by its brutality (since those were brutal days) but by its target. In 794 it was the turn of another Northumbrian monastery — almost certainly Bede’s beloved Jarrow. Religious communities on the islands of Skye and Rathlin, as well as the mother island of Iona, suffered the same fate the following year. Britain was hardly alone in enduring such offences: the monastery of St Philibert in the Frankish Loire estuary was attacked in 799 and within a year the chroniclers were recording Charlemagne’s efforts to beef up the defences along his northern coastline in the face of raids by savage seaborne pirates from the north.
The men taking part in those first raids around the British coast and elsewhere were unlikely even to have called themselves Vikings, at least not in the beginning. On account of their presumed source, the Franks of the time called them Northmen. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to Danes or Pagans. Not until the ninth century was the label Viking being applied to the seaborne pirates with any kind of regularity. A great deal of time and effort has been spent trying to track down the origin of the word itself. Vikingr is Old Scandinavian for ‘sea warrior’ — clearly a desirable epithet rather than a badge of dishonour. There is also a sense, in the Viking homelands at least, in which the word can be understood to refer to fighting overseas. The territory on the banks of the Oslo Fjord has been called Viken, so that ‘Viking’ may once have been a term used to describe people who had their homes there. The syllable vik refers to a ‘bay’ or ‘inlet’, while the German word wic means ‘harbour’ or ‘trading place’ — as in Hamwic (the old name for Southampton), Ipswich and Norwich. It might follow therefore that ‘Vikings’ were seaborne traders who would seek out a ‘vik’ with a view to conducting peaceable trade — although such thinking reeks of attempts to portray notoriously violent men as misunderstood merchants. Suffice to say, there is no consensus.
It is vital, however, to look beyond the myth-making and claims of divine retribution, and to go in search of the reality of those few shiploads of warriors who so traumatised the British Isles and elsewhere in northern and western Europe in the last years of the eighth century.
At the time of the Lindisfarne raid, the reigns of Queen Aase and King Harald of the Ynglinga dynasty — those commemorated in boat burials like that in Osberg — were still in the future. But if the English chroniclers are to be believed, those raiders of 793 hailed from precisely the same part of Norway that would later be part of that legendary kingdom. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes mention of a raid in Dorset during the reign of Beorhtric, King of Wessex between 786 and 802: ‘there came for the first time three ships of the Northmen (from Horoaland) and then the reeve rode to them and wished to force them to the king’s residence, for he did not know who they were; and they slew him. These were the first ships of Denisc men which came to the land of the English.’
The relevant part of the chronicle is dated AD 789 — four years before the attack on Lindisfarne — and the culprits are described as Denisc, or Danish. But according to Dark Age historian Alex Woolf, it is reasonable to interpret both the apparently earlier date and the supposed country of origin of those Northmen as clerical errors. ‘Despite the claim in the chronicle that these were the first Denisc men to come to the land of the English,’ he wrote, ‘this attack probably followed that of 793—4 in Northumbria.’
Woolf outlines a scenario in which men from Horoaland, the central portion of Norwegian Vestland, crossed first of all to the Shetland Islands before making their way south to the mainland of the British Isles and on to Lindisfarne itself. Since Jarrow suffered the same fate the following year — and then the Scottish islands the year after that — Woolf argues that all this villainy might have been the work of the same group of men. Perhaps they based themselves in Shetland or somewhere in the Hebrides before ranging far and wide in their dragon ships. The Irish east coast was the next target and a raid visited upon the Dublin area in 798, culminating in demands for tribute paid in cattle, may have been yet more activity by Vikings operating from several semi-permanent bases in Scotland and Ireland.
Wrote Woolf: ‘The attack on Dorset was probably one of the secondary raids from the Irish base. The use of the term Denisc, “Danish”, for the Horoar in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, should not worry us too much. As late as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Icelanders, for the most part themselves descendants of migrants from the Norwegian Westland, referred to their language as the “Danish” tongue and on one level “Dane” seems to have been synonymous with “Scandinavian.”’
Most important is the likelihood that the warriors who struck at Lindisfarne hailed from the west coast of Norway. For it was into the west, to Shetland, the British Isles, the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and North America, that the Norwegian Vikings — arguably the most intrepid of all the Scandinavian pioneers — would eventually penetrate. The land from which they had set sail was by no means a unified nation. Instead it was a collection of territories, home to separate, often warring tribes: Horoaland, as mentioned by Woolf, and others like Agder, More, Rogaland, Trøndelag. Even the name ‘Norway’ was first of all a geographical rather than a political concept, meaning ‘the north way’ or, more precisely, ‘the way to the north’. Rather than a term understood by the people living there — between Skagerrak and Tromsø — it was used by those occupying southern Scandinavia to refer to the long coastline stretching away from their own territories towards the very limits of human occupation.
The crossing from the west coast of Norway to the Shetland Islands would have taken little more than 24 hours in good weather. From there it was a short hop south to the Orkney Islands and then onwards, across the Pentland Firth, to Caithness. Once ensconced either in the Northern Isles or on the Scottish mainland, the Vikings were ideally placed for journeys west and south towards the Western Isles, Ireland, the Isle of Man and the west coast of England, or south along Scotland’s east coast and on to Northumbria and the rest of northern England. For much of the time the landscapes — especially in the west — must surely have reminded the raiders of home. By keeping in the lee of the many islands they could move easily from bay to bay, harbour to harbour, putting ashore either when they needed provisions and fresh water or to take advantage of whatever vulnerable communities might catch their eyes. For men well used to sea travel, the opportunities presented by bases in Shetland, Orkney and Scotland must have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Having left home in spring, when the crops had been planted and the weather turned fair, they could spend an entire summer raiding at will before making the return journey in the late summer or autumn.
In the short term, however, we do well to try and imagine the depth of the shock felt by those first Northumbrian victims. While it is true to say the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had been established in the aftermath of the Roman occupation — by invited guests who turned violently upon their erstwhile hosts, becoming conquerors of the Celtic Britons — by the eighth century they ruled over a relatively peaceful and prosperous demesne. They were also Christian, their populations no doubt persuaded by their priests that faith in God was the only protection they needed. That the priests and monks themselve
s had been helplessly cut down by heathens — and in the holiest of holy places in their kingdom — would have been shattering.
Given all that shock and awe in the west, it is surely fascinating to learn that by the end of the eighth century other Vikings had been abroad in lands to the east for the best part of half a century. It is impossible to say with certainty when the first pioneers made landfall on the Baltic coastline of northern Europe. No doubt for as long as people had been making and using boats there would have been opportunities for contact in both directions — by Scandinavians travelling south and east across the Baltic Sea and by northern Europeans heading north and west. Graves containing Scandinavian material have been found at Grobin, in Latvia, some of them with dates as early as the middle of the seventh century. Jewellery from the island of Gotland was found there, and also in graves excavated in Elbing, beside the mouth of the River Vistula in Poland. This after all was the natural direction of exploration and expansion for people living along the eastern seaboard of Sweden. Having crossed the Baltic they would soon have found the mouths of several rivers, like the Oder and the Vistula and others, providing access to the interior of the eastern European mainland.
It hardly matters who among them was first to set out into the wider world, whether it was Danes heading south, Norwegians heading west or Swedes heading east. We know they did it — put to sea in their ships, crossed the beckoning water heading in all directions — but less clear is why. They had the seagoing craft and the know-how to undertake considerable journeys. Long exposure to contact with their neighbours meant they were familiar with a range of peoples and cultures. Those in Norway were aware of lands to the west; those in Denmark and Sweden already had long histories of contact with Frisians, Franks, Saami, Finns, Balts, Slavs and others. Some of their neighbours had already colonised parts of the British Isles and so they were well acquainted with the idea of a world of opportunities — but none of all that was in any way new. What exactly was it, then, that fired the starting pistol and sent them all — Danes, Norwegians and Swedes — so forcefully on their various ways?
