Vikings

by Neil Oliver

  It is one thing to read about Vikings abroad in the wider world — in Russia, the Middle East, perhaps China. The image of dragon ships sailing through the Straits of Gibraltar is enthralling too, at least in part because it happened not just long ago but far away. Strangely enough, though, as a Scot I have struggled hardest to accept the lasting impact they had on my own homeland. Scotland has been united with England since 1707, arguably even since 1603 when the crowns of the two kingdoms came together as one. After such a long marriage it is easy to forget the relationships that went before, when as nations we were much younger than we are today. But the fact is, Scotland’s destiny was shaped and affected for centuries by the Viking culture that became embedded in the Western Isles and on parts of the western mainland as well.

  In addition to establishing themselves in the Northern Isles, the Norwegian Vikings soon gained footholds on mainland Scotland. The Irish annals make it clear the foreigners were over-wintering in Ireland by the middle of the ninth century and it makes sense to imagine other groups of warriors doing likewise in Scotland by at least the same time. The absence of proof in any contemporary Scottish records is not enough to disallow the possibility.

  Caithness is the territory at the north-east tip of Scotland. The first part of the name — Cait — is Gaelic or even Pictish and means ‘cat’. The animal may have been the symbol or totem of the local tribe, in the same way that the people of Orkney identified themselves with the wild boar. But the second element of Caithness — the ness part — is pure Old Norse and means ‘headland’ or perhaps even ‘nose’. Caithness is therefore the head or the nose of the cat, depending upon your preference, and clear evidence not just of contact with Vikings during raids, but settlement as well.

  The Viking boat burial found on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in 2011 is a demonstration too of how much Scotland came to matter to the Vikings. The archaeologists who excavated the find discovered 200 iron rivets around the bones, all that remained of the boat intended to carry the chieftain into the next life, and have suggested it may date from the tenth century. That his people chose to bury a revered elder so far from home surely makes clear that, by then, they meant to stay close by him in the years to come.

  Orkney was home to a Viking earldom by around AD 900. Always richer and more productive than Shetland, it was on Orkney that the Norwegian elites preferred to make their home — and to which people of ambition flocked as a result. The Orkneyinga saga tells how Harald Fairhair made a gift of both archipelagos to one Rognvald, a chieftain who hailed from the west of Norway. In time the holdings apparently passed to Rognvald’s brother Sigurd, and then to Rognvald’s son Einar who is regarded, by tradition at least, as the forefather of the Orkney earls.

  According to one of the sagas it would be Viking warriors led by one of those earls, Harald, who would be driven ashore on Mainland Orkney by a hellish storm and so take shelter inside Maes Howe, until two of them were driven mad by the howling of the wind and the shadows of the dead.

  Both Orkney and Shetland would remain Norwegian territories until 1472. By then Denmark ruled its northern neighbour and it was therefore Christian I of Denmark and Norway who gave them up. His daughter Margrethe had married James III of Scotland in 1469 and, in lieu of a dowry, Christian mortgaged the islands. Perhaps he fully intended to keep up the repayments but, when he failed to do so, James duly claimed the territories for the Scottish crown.

  At least as deep as the Viking roots on the Northern Isles were those put down into the soil of the west coast and the islands there — the Hebrides, both Inner and Outer. Nowadays Prince Charles has, among other titles, that of Lord of the Isles. It is a landless, meaningless honour today, bestowed upon the eldest male child of the ruling monarch, but it recalls the days when the kings of Scots themselves were rivalled by a mighty sea kingdom based in the Western Isles.

  Settled by Irish Gaels in the fourth or fifth centuries, or perhaps earlier, by the end of the seventh century the islands had attracted the attentions of Norwegian Vikings. Soon the foreigners chose to make the islands their home and the culture that evolved there was a hybrid, a mix of the Gaelic and Norse traditions. Gaels elsewhere began to refer to the Islands as Innse-Gall, the Islands of the Foreigners — with Gall as a reference to Gaul and the Gauls, perhaps the only other true foreigners the Gaels had so far encountered.

  It followed that the people living there — and in parts of the southwest Scottish mainland as well — became known in time as Gallgaedil, the foreign Gaels. It was a name and a culture that would last for centuries. ‘Gallowglass’ was a name given to mercenaries in the thirteenth century and Galloway, the modern name for part of south-west Scotland, has the same root.

  Control of the western territory was disputed down through the years by Norwegians and Scots. The Orkneyinga saga has it that Earl Magnus of Orkney accepted a challenge from Malcolm III of Scotland: that he might claim title to all the islands off the west coast that were ‘navigable with the rudder set’. Magnus duly employed the technique of portage and had his men haul a skiff across the narrow neck of land at Tarbert, on Loch Fyne. With himself at the helm of the little boat, Magnus was thereby able to add the Kintyre peninsula of mainland Scotland to his domain.

  It was the legendary Somerled who established the dynasty that would eventually claim the title Lord of the Isles for themselves. Born to a Gaelic father and a Norse mother, Somerled was a nickname meaning ‘led by the summer’. In the Skaldic poetry tradition of Scandinavia, such word forms and allusions are known as ‘kennings’ and one who was led by the summer — off on adventures overseas — was therefore a Viking. Somerled secured the territory for his descendants and in years to come the MacDonalds, the clan synonymous with the Lordship of the Isles, would claim him as their ultimate ancestor.

  Traditionally based on an island in a little loch at Finlaggan, on Islay, the Lords of the Isles held sway over nothing less than a sea kingdom. The warships they used to patrol their demesne and upon which they based their power were called birlinns, but they were clinker-built Viking dragon ships in all but name.

  By the last decades of the fifteenth century the Lords of the Isles had fallen from grace and from real power. Vilified and alienated by the English-speaking kings of Scots, the Gaelic-speakers of the west finally tore themselves apart. John of Islay, chief of Clan Donald, had entered into a treaty with King Edward IV of England; and when King James III of Scotland learnt of the betrayal, he stripped him of his titles. Stung by his father’s humiliation — and worse, by his refusal to fight back — John’s illegitimate son Angus Og rose up against him in a bid to take control. The resultant internecine Battle of Bloody Bay, fought in the Sound of Mull, saw the cohesion of the Lordship fatally wounded. By the end of the century it was finished, the title surrendered to the crown.

  In the late fifteenth century no one called the Lordship ‘Viking’ of course. By then the mixing of Gael and Norse had long since created something quite unique. But what matters is that the culture of the Isles, and of so much of the west of Scotland besides, was itself an artefact of the Viking Age.

  As a young boy I spent numerous family holidays in the seaside town of Largs, on the Firth of Clyde west of Glasgow. One of the most popular landmarks there is a 70-foot-high stone tower built in 1912 to commemorate the Battle of Largs. It is known to locals as the Pencil and it marks the day in October 1263 when King Haakon IV of Norway brought an army to Scotland to settle the matter of outright control of the western seaboard. Although the battle was indecisive, it used to be remembered by all Scots as an event of national importance.

  At a time in history when Scots are being invited to consider divorcing England, it seems fitting to remember the days when marriage to Norway, and to Vikings, was on the agenda instead.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A RISING TIDE

  ‘We are the pilgrims, master; we shall go

  Always a little further: it may be

  Beyond that last blue moun
tain barred with snow

  Across that angry or that glimmering sea.’

  James Elroy Flecker, ‘The Golden Journey to Samarkand’

  When the Norwegian Vikings made landfall in places like Shetland, Orkney, Caithness and the Western Isles there was no such place as Scotland.

  During the latter part of the eighth century — and for generations to come — the land was available to whoever was strong enough to seize and hold it. There were kings and kingdoms right enough, but too many, and none truly secure upon any throne. There are grounds for arguing that all the islands of Britain, great and small, were at that time covered by no more than a patchwork of rival claims. Some fairly large swatches of uniform colour had emerged here and there, but all of them were unfinished at the edges or clashing with their neighbours.

  In what would become Scotland, power swung back and forth between Gaels and Picts. By then the bloodlines of both were surely mixed, brought together by marriage alliances forged over the years in the hope of making peace or securing dominance. For a while a Gaelic king named Cenel mac Gabhrain appears to have ruled both kingdoms, but by the late 830s it was the Pictish star that was briefly in the ascendant once more.

  According to the Annals of Ulster, however, the year AD 839 witnessed a catastrophe great enough to shake the foundations of both houses. The relevant entry reads: ‘The heathens won a battle over the men of Fortriu [Pictland] and Wen son of Onuist and Bran son of Onuist and Aed son of Boanta and others almost innumerable fell there.’

  The names of the fallen are strange to us (who now is called Wen, or Onuist, or Boanta) but the identity of the agents of destruction is clear enough. Within half a century of their first recorded attack anywhere in Scotland — visited upon the monastery of Iona in 795 — pagan Vikings had found the wherewithal to strike at the very heart of the native aristocracy.

  Neither historians nor archaeologists have been able to pinpoint the location of the battlefield, but according to Alex Woolf, ‘This battle may be one of the most decisive and important battles in British history …’ Wherever it took place the fighting apparently wiped out the leader of the ruling family and his heirs as well. In the aftermath of such a blow, the Vikings may well have thought they had done enough to destabilise the land, ready for the accession of one of their own. As things turned out, however, the kingship was taken not by a heathen but by a Christian — indeed a legend of Scottish history.

  The man who stepped into the breach was Kenneth MacAlpin, remembered by generations of Scottish schoolchildren as King Kenneth I of Scotland. History reveals he was in fact no such thing. Little about the man is known for certain and whether he was Gael or Pict, or a son of both, awaits confirmation. Where the contemporary sources give him a kingdom it is listed not as Scotland, but as Pictland. While it was not in his gift to unify all of the peoples of the nation, it is still fair to name Kenneth MacAlpin as progenitor — grandfather in fact — of the first kings of the Scots.

  It was also Kenneth who did what had to be done in the aftermath of that nameless battle of 839. With the wolf (or rather the Vikings) at the door, he galvanised whatever remained of the fighting men — Gaels and Picts alike — and drove off the invaders. They did not leave the land entirely — that was too much to hope for — but at least they retired to their island fastnesses to think again.

  In 841 Kenneth MacAlpin took the step of crushing those Picts still opposed to his rule. According to Pictish folklore, sometime after the battle he invited all the surviving claimants to the throne to join him for a feast, and there make a lasting peace.

  They brought together as to a banquet all the nobles of the Picts, and taking advantage of their perhaps excessive potation and the gluttony of both drink and food, and noted their opportunity and drew out bolts which held up the boards; and the Picts fell into the hollows of the benches on which they were sitting, caught in a strange trap up to their knees, so that they could never get up; and the Scots immediately slaughtered them all.…

  The Vikings were therefore not the only ruthless men scheming for control of a fledgling nation.

  One of Kenneth’s grandsons was named Constantine and in AD 906 he was made King of the Scots in a ceremony at Scone. Situated close to the city of Perth, Scone is famous nowadays as the ancient crowning place of Scottish kings. In fact Constantine was the first to have his coronation there, seated upon the block of Old Red Sandstone known as the Stone of Scone, or of Destiny, and still used for the coronation of British monarchs.

  But while Constantine was King of the Scots, and of the territory known as Alba, a powerful and resourceful warrior named Aethelstan had emerged in the south who would later become King of the Angles, even King of England. If Constantine’s grandfather had hated the Vikings, then King Aethelstan was their foe as well.

  Alfred the Great had died in 899 and was succeeded by Edward, the elder of his two sons by his queen, Ealhswith of Mercia. Everywhere, at the turn of the tenth century, the Vikings were on the prowl — in Ireland, Scotland and the European mainland, as well as in England — but Edward willingly took them on wherever he could reach them. Alfred had largely pioneered a policy of building and maintaining fortified towns, called burhs, and it was exploitation of the same technique that brought success for his son. By 917 he had wrested from the Danes control of much of the Danelaw. East Anglia, Essex and Mercia were certainly under his rule, and in the north and west the Scots, Welsh and even the Norse in Northumbria were said to have submitted, to some extent, to his overlordship.

  When he died in July AD 924, Edward was succeeded by his son, Aethelstan, a man cut very much from the same bolt as both the father and the grandfather. Modern historians are increasingly willing to accept him as the first King of England. While Alfred was the rock around which the hitherto unstoppable Viking wave was first broken, and while Edward was recognised as King of the Anglo-Saxons, truly it was Aethelstan who rose to outright dominance in the south.

  When Edward died there was still a Viking King of York, in the form of Sihtric. A diplomat as well as a warrior, Aethelstan first gave Sihtric his own sister in marriage. But when the Viking died, in 927, the man who would be King of England saw his chance. According to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘In this year fiery lights appeared in the northern quarter of the sky, and Sihtric died, and King Aethelstan succeeded to the kingdom of the Northumbrians.’

  The chronicle goes on to record that, like his father, Aethelstan sought the submission of all other men, kings included: ‘and he brought under his rule all the kings who were in this island; first Hywel, king of the West Welsh, and Constantin [sic] king of the Scottas and Owain king of the people of Gwent, and Ealdred, son of Eadwulf, from Bamburgh’.

  More so than any man before him, Anglo-Saxon or Viking, he had risen above the aspirations of his fellows and at Eamont Bridge in Cumbria, on 12 July 927, he had them bow down before him: ‘And they established peace with pledges and oaths … and renounced all idolatry, and afterwards departed in peace.’ Coins minted from then onwards styled him not ‘King of the Saxons’ or even ‘King of the Anglo-Saxons’ but rex totius Britanniae, ‘King of all Britain’.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reveals that in 934 ‘King Aethelstan went into Scotland with both a land force and a naval force and ravaged much of it.’ Constantine and his forces retreated in the face of the onslaught and the English king pressed him all the way to the stronghold of Dunottar, perched at the end of a narrow promontory near Aberdeen. The most treacherous of approaches to the stronghold, with sheer drops into the sea either side, meant the King of the Scots was safe — at least while he remained penned behind his castle gates. In the end he chose to make terms, and once again accepted Aethelstan as his overlord. It was practical, but also humiliating, and by 937 he had set his heart on freeing himself from all obligations to the King of England. To do so, he first of all made peace with the Vikings.

  If Aethelstan was a student of history as well as a warrior king, he would have kno
wn what happened in AD 84, in the shadow of a hill described by Tacitus as Mons Graupius. Faced with seemingly invincible invaders, the tribes of the north had set aside their differences and united in the face of a foe that posed a threat to their independence, even to their identities. So it was in AD 937, when an ambitious and avaricious King of England made unlikely allies not just of Scots and Vikings but of Britons and Welsh as well.

  The leader of the Viking element of the force was Olaf Guthfrisson — latest Scandinavian king of Dublin — and he and his shiploads of warriors landed somewhere on the east coast of England. Having met up with Constantine’s Scots, as well as with the Welsh and the Britons of Strathclyde, the unlikely alliance then collided with Aethelstan’s army at a place referred to in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as Brunanburh.

  The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba called it Dun Brunde, while the Annales Cambriae made it the bellum Brune. The fact is that the actual site of the battle remains unknown. Bromborough, on the Wirral, in Cheshire, is the location favoured by many historians today but there is no consensus. Wherever it took place, the resultant bloodbath was remembered for centuries afterwards simply as ‘the Great Battle’.

  Scores of sources have recorded the clash and a now-famous Anglo-Saxon poem offers perhaps the best account of the bloody slaughter that ensued. It seemed the battle swept up just about every warrior with a stake in the future of Britain. ‘They clove the shield wall, hewed the war lindens with hammered blades; the foe gave way; the folk of the Scots and the ship fleet [Vikings] fell death doomed. The field was slippery with the blood of warriors … The West-Saxons in companies hewed the fugitives from behind cruelly, with swords mill-sharpened.’ The Anglo-Saxon historian Aethelweard lamented that ‘In this land no greater war was ever waged, nor did such a slaughter ever surpass that one.’