The people of the real Middle-earth lived in small communities – extended families belonging to tribes and clans – over north-west Europe and Scandinavia. Their culture lasted for a span of about a thousand years (AD 0–1000), until social, political and religious forces began to change its character. At the beginning of the first millennium, their population may have totalled only two or three million. Their tribes were led by chieftains (in Anglo-Saxon the term translates as ‘head-kinsman’) who were later called kings or queens. They were more than elected leaders – they were often regarded as sacred. In early European and Norse tribal culture people identified with their ancestors, and leaders in particular would name a long personal heritage, going back many generations. Ultimately, the chieftains claimed their earliest ancestor as the god Woden (called Odin in the Norse culture). This sacred heritage filled them with ‘mana’ or life-force. They carried the fortunes of their tribe in their personal presence.
The early communities were bonded together by shared rituals and customs particular to each, such as calendar festivals, hunting practices, techniques of magic and by totems or icons which symbolized the spirit of the tribe. Dialects, details of costume and shared stories about heroic figures, were as important to their identity as they still are today in badging and branding subcultures in our less homogeneous contemporary social worlds.
The terms we use today to denote these people of first millennium Europe, such as Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Norse, are really ‘umbrella’ titles which subsume a myriad of tribal groups. For example, among the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ or Germanic stream of peoples, inhabiting the lowland areas of the north-west coast of Germany and southern Denmark, were the Frisians, with the Saxons competing with them from the north, and squeezed by the Sugamri and Batavi in the marshes to the south. The Cherusci were settled in heavily forested land on the Weser River, near the Chatti. In the eastern reaches of Germany lay the Burgundiones, with a chief named by the Romans as Gunther uth Clotar. They were under pressure from the Lugians to their east, themselves pressed by the Vandals for agricultural land, and also by the Langobardi to the north. Northern Germany was the home of the Cimbri. They were a successful and powerful tribe until they were decimated by the Roman legions whom they challenged in protecting the southern borders of their tribal territory.
The Goths were an eastern German confederation of tribes which ranged as far as southern Scandinavia. In central Germany the Hermundris’ lands were a mixture of forest and open flat land. Their neighbours were the Langobardi. In southern Germany were the Marcomanni and Quadi, and in the south-west, the Suebi. Many tribes stretched across the lands now in Holland and Belgium, including the Batavi, the Frisians and the Bructeri, who, around the third and fourth centuries, became part of the tribal merging that became known as the Franks, who gave their name, grammar and laws to modern France. Among the many other tribes were the Saxons and their cousins the Jutes and Angles who, along with the Frisians, populated England after the fall of Rome.
These Middle-earth cultures thrived, grew and battled all around north-west Europe and Scandinavia. In England, particularly, they came together like ingredients in an alchemical cauldron. The smallness of Britain as an island meant that when new ethnic groups settled, they mixed with, or dominated, earlier settlers. This mixture of traditions conjured a rich blend of magic, and eventually inspired Tolkien to write The Lord of the Rings as an attempt to invent a legendary story which captured this essence of ancient England. In historical and cultural terms, the coming together of these peoples in England is a microcosm of what happened at various levels of intensity elsewhere. In this book I refer to sources dealing with peoples on the European mainland and in Scandinavia, but use England as a touchstone for examining the ways in which the magic was expressed.
There were four main cultural influences during this thousand years. First were the early Celts, who were living as a settled society in Britain, when the Romans invaded the island in AD 43, and stayed for four centuries. The Romans contributed a lot to the culture of England, but in terms of the magic of Middle-earth, they were more like a contrasting intermission, as we shall see. When they left around AD 410, the Saxons invaded and settled, pushing many of the Celts into Wales and Cornwall. They were followed by the Norse, or Vikings, in the eighth century, which saw them colonize the eastern part of the country. These three peoples – the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Norse, make up the people of the Real Middle-earth.
I begin the book, then, with a brief overview of the conventional history of these tribal incomers to England – the kings, warriors, battles, religious rivalries, social structures and economies – the ‘noisy history’ with which we are already somewhat familiar. It comprises our more usual sense of the history of ancient times. This will help to establish the context in which the culture of Middle-earth emerged.
England proved to be a volatile meeting ground for the tribal peoples of ancient Europe. Academics used to distinguish between them on linguistic grounds as falling under the ‘umbrella’ terms of the Germanic Peoples (including Scandinavia), and the Celtic peoples. However, in a shifting kaleidoscope of migrating tribal groups, it seems likely that the importance of this variation in their language may have been overstated. Distinctions between the two groups are small compared with their commonality of experience consequent upon living as tribal peoples. Many scholars now regard all of these tribal peoples as sharing some beliefs and practices.
Certainly warfare took place between tribes of the two peoples, but the process of migration, invasion and settlement of the later Germanic groups on an island formerly occupied by mainly Celtic peoples is now understood as a much more complex array of relationships, from cooperation all the way to open antagonism.
The history of this period, while increasingly documented by archaeologists and historians, has been generally ignored in favour of the earlier cultures of Greece and Rome, although schoolchildren in north-west Europe are now beginning to be introduced to the history of their ancestors. Denigrated as the ‘Dark Ages’, it was considered, until recently, a regrettably primitive period which dominated Europe between the fall of the enlightened age of Roman occupation, at about AD 400 years, until the full advent of Christianity across Europe, and into Scandinavia, around AD 1000.
But research in a wide range of disciplines is revolutionizing our view of these people, and enables me in this book to develop a very different perspective. While I do not claim that the indigenous peoples of ancient Europe represent some sort of utopian society, they are far from being peoples of the ‘dark ages’ in a negative sense. Indeed, seen from the viewpoint of what they offer us today, the best of their ancient culture represents a millennium of knowledge and insight in areas of life in which we might even be relative paupers today.
Celts
While humans of some kind have lived in England since at least 500,000 BC – the date of rhinocerous bones with flint marks of human butchering, found in the south of England in the 1990s – we know too little about them to assess the subtleties and heritage of their culture. But we do know that from at least 600 BC, immigrants from the European continent continued to cross the choppy waters of the narrow English Channel in small boats. The flotillas of extended families beaching their boats on England’s (then called Albion) shores were from many small tribes, and their numbers built up gradually over several hundred years. They were known collectively by the Greeks as Keltoi, or Celts, and they spoke languages that have survived into modern times as Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Manx, Scots Gaelic and Irish. They were the first people to contribute to the magical culture I have identified as the Real Middle-earth.
To meet a Celtic person today who lived two thousand years ago, at the beginning of the Middle-earth period, would be like meeting ourselves in a long-forgotten dream. They would be instantly familiar to us. Looking into their eyes, we would see not an alien being from another world, but an intelligent person. Their culture was highly developed. Their ‘scientific’ knowledge was of course much less than ours today, but they knew a lot about things that we have forgotten over the centuries. And skull measurements show that the brain capacity of people living in the first millennium was exactly the same as our own.
The writers of ancient Rome described the Celts as tall, well built people, strong and healthy. They had fair or reddish hair. Their skin would be ruddier or more tanned than most modern north-west Europeans, through living an outdoors life. They enjoyed a wide range of fresh foods, although they could suffer in times of famine, for crops sometimes failed. They also had fewer cures for infectious illnesses than we do now. But those who survived to maturity seemed to live a healthy life, albeit shorter than now – a person in their fifties was considered venerable.
The Celtic women were impressive too – they were ‘nearly as tall as the men’. Cassius Dio, a Roman writer of the fourth century AD, reported the appearance of Boudicca, a Celtic warrior queen of the Iceni tribe, a wealthy and powerful society who lived in what is now Norfolk and northern Suffolk. ‘In stature she was very tall’, says Cassius, writing from her reputation and from documents that we no longer have: ‘A great mass of the tawniest hair fell to her hips; around her neck was a large golden necklace; and she wore a tunic of divers colours over which a thick mantle was fastened with a brooch. This was her invariable attire.’ It is unlikely that a Celtic queen would leave her hair ‘wild’ while at court, for they were known to be well-groomed people. But this vivid account is of a warrior woman preparing for combat. Celtic women were renowned for their strength and bravery, fighting in battle alongside the men.
The Roman’s descriptions of the Celts was of a dynamic and fiery culture. Physical fitness, sports, and war skills were popular, especially among the elite warrior class. So were lavish feasts. Strabo, who died in about AD 21, was one of the world’s first travel writers. He described the Celts in his Geographica as heavy drinkers, with wine for those who could afford it and beer of wheat for the commoners, spiced with cumin. At feasts they passed around vast and ornate cups and imbibed from them. According to Strabo, ‘they do it rather frequently’. Perhaps if we met them, the aroma of feasting, wine and beer could be smelled on their breath.
An encounter with an early Celt would probably be a colourful experience, too, so much so that the Roman writer Strabo thought their love of personal ornamentation to be rather naive and boastful. They decorated themselves with heavy twisted gold necklaces, ending in clasps with animal motifs. Gold bracelets gleamed on the arms of high-born men and women. Brooches were enamelled and cloaks were fastened with imposing buckles. Examples of their beautiful gold torques dating from the first century BC have been found in Norfolk, Suffolk and Staffordshire. The torque at Snettisham, Norfolk was part of one of the largest hoard of Celtic gold and siver treasure discovered in Britain. More than 11 kilograms of gold and 16 kilograms of silver jewellery were unearthed. The hoard lay in the East Anglian territory of Queen Boudicca. Perhaps she even wore some of it.
Fabric clothing was dyed and stained from natural vegetable colourings, in a variety of hues and stripes from bright reds, to greens and yellows – in contrast to the former, dreary stereotype of the ‘Dark Ages’ during which people were imagined to be poverty-stricken savages, trudging about in grime. This view is now outmoded.
The Celts lived in roundhouses made of turf or wattle and daub, with thatched roofs. Usually they were constructed in small hamlets of between about fifty and a hundred people. These must have been essentially extended family settlements. Each community grew barley and wheat, and raised pigs, sheep and cattle. They were ruled by chieftains or elite families. For protection they often formed alliances with other small groups, and sealed the arrangement by gift-giving and entertaining each other to sumptuous feasts.
So why did the early settlers come to Britain? There are theories of land shortages and over-population on the continent, but the ‘bottom line’ answer is they migrated to Britain for wealth. ‘Albion’ was an island rich in natural resources, a temperate climate for farming and plenty of land – although the island is small, it was not yet crowded. We can gain a sense of how the island would have continued to attract incomers from Bede’s account written some several hundred years later.
Bede
Bede was born around 673, and died in 735. He is a very important figure in the scholarship of Middle-earth, for his texts are reckoned to be well researched by the standards of his time. And, while seeking to put Christianity in a positive light, his work is considered to be more objective in intention than many early monastic volumes which were, for example, hagiographies praising uncritically the virtues of certain Church figures. He was also the most voluminous writer of his time, as far as we can tell, and was highly influential in his day.
Bede was born in the region of the modern Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and lived there all his life except for occasional, short periods spent away at the monastery of Jarrow where he was a monk. He lived the life of an academic priest, attached to the monastery, and wrote his texts in Latin, as was standard practice for monastic scholars. Those of his sources we can document showed that he had read widely, probably in the library at Jarrow which contained numerous books brought back from the continent. Bede read widely from Christian Latin literature, and also knew some pre-Christian Greek writings. As Bede lay dying, he wrote a short poem. The existence of this poem was noted by a man called Wilberct, who happened to be in the room with him, transcribing Bede’s oral translation into Anglo-Saxon of St John’s Gospel. The poem is written, unusually, in Anglo-Saxon rather than Latin, and in words which reflect a Northumbrian dialect, which is probably how he spoke. The actual sound of his speech cannot be recreated, but the words used, spellings and so on, show he is writing in the vernacular of his region.
The Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of Britain, his language, even allowing for poetic licence, gives a sense of what the incomers found here. He says that Britain ‘extends 800 miles in length towards the north, and is 200 miles in breadth … where it opens upon the boundless ocean.’ He goes on to detail some of the natural qualities of this small island: ‘Britain excels for grain and trees, and is well adapted for feeding cattle and beasts of burden. It also produces vines in some places, and has plenty of land and water-fowls of several sorts; it is remarkable also for rivers, abounding in fish, and plentiful springs.’ He describes great quantities of river fish like salmon and eels, even whales hunted off the coasts, and many sorts of shellfish, such as mussels, in which are often found excellent pearls of all colours, red, purple, violet and green, but mostly white.
Bede also describes a great abundance of cockles, ‘of which the scarlet dye is made; a most beautiful colour, which never fades with the heat of the sun or the washing of the rain; but the older it is, the more beautiful it comes’. Bede mentions that Britain has both salt and hot springs, and from them flow ‘rivers which furnish hot baths, proper for all ages and sexes and arranged accordingly’. There were treasures, too: ‘… Britain also has many veins of metals, as copper, iron, lead and silver; it has much and excellent jet’.
So a wealth of natural resources supported a successful economy, which through trade made the elite class gold-rich. It also made the people of the island not only subject to waves of fresh immigrants throughout the thousand years – but also the victim of vicious raids, piracy, inter-tribal warfare, competing warlords and extortion by the Romans and Vikings (both of whom referred to enormous enforced payments as ‘tribute’).
These perennial curses of plunder, pillage and bloody conflict have been well documented in other, more conventional history books. These are the material facts. However, there is another dimension. A subtle culture lay hidden beneath the noise and harshness of battle. This is the magic of Middle-earth – more intimate and democratic than religion, more substantial than superstition, more manifested than fantasy. The people who lived out their lives during this long period of history, in this place, imbued their lives with an imagination so rich that it entertains us still.
Romans
After the Celts came the Romans, who stamped their military overlordship on ever-increasing amounts of territory, and milked those tribes for wealth to support the glory of Rome. Julius Caesar invaded Britain twice, first in 55 BC then again in early 54 BC. The indigenous Celtic tribes were regarded by the Romans as ‘barbarians’ – a term derived from the Greek and mimicking the ‘bar bar’ sounds of ‘savage’ language. The Celts had either to submit to the Romans as overlords, or risk being wiped out by a huge military invasion. On his second attack, six powerful tribes in the east of England submitted to them. Among them were Boudicca’s Iceni. Their story was eventually to become a tragic example of what happened to the Celtic tribespeople of Britain under Roman rule, as we shall see. But then Caesar had to leave to deal with troubles on the continent among the great territories he was controlling. He never came back. For a century life went on without the Romans.
In AD 43 a new emperor called Claudius had been hustled into power during a crisis caused by the murder of the notoriously corrupt Caligula. Looking for adventures which would promote his prestige, he studied Caesar’s journals about Britannia, and decided that the island was rich enough to warrant launching a new invasion. He sent an enormous detachment of 40,000 troops to take and colonize the island. Faced by this military might, many of the Celtic tribes swallowed their pride and succumbed to being ‘client kingdoms’, among them the Iceni. Their tribal ruler Prasutagus, and all the other client-rulers, received military ‘protection’ – an early and large-scale example of a protection racket. They were also required to take enormous ‘loans’ from the Romans, thus leaving them in debt to the sovereign government. They had to take the loans, for much of their wealth was being plundered by the Roman government. These payments, or ‘tributes’, were sent back to Rome.
Prasutagus married Boudicca in about AD 48 or 49. As Queen of the Iceni, she bore two daughters (names unknown), who are believed to have been in their early teens when their father died in AD 60 or 61. Boudicca then became Regent of the Iceni, and the guardian of her daughters’ inheritance. When Prasutagus died he left in his will half of his wealth, in lands, personal possessions and monies, to the Emperor Nero. This was required of him, as a client-ruler ‘indebted to Rome’. He left his remaining wealth to his wife, for their daughters, assuring a dowry to their future husbands, and income to pay their Roman tributes.
The Roman governors, assuming themselves to be unassailable, felt this was not enough. So they publicly stripped and flogged Queen Boudicca, and raped her two daughters, before confiscating much of their wealth. This action was far more than a mere public humiliation. Early tribal cultures regarded their chieftains as descended from gods. The Iceni held Boudicca to be sacred. The Roman’s had knowingly destroyed the soul of her culture, and the Iceni now had nothing left to lose. Boudicca raised an army of farmworkers, women, even children numbering up to 100,000. In righteous revenge, they burned the Roman city of London (Londinium), leaving a thick layer of red ash which exists still below the streets of the city. They sacked two other Roman towns, but were finally defeated in a battle with elite Roman troops. Mass slaughter followed, and the remaining Iceni were forced into slavery. It was genocide on a massive scale. Calgacus, leader of the Caledonians in the far north of Britain, led another rebellion against the Romans some twenty years after Boudicca’s, and said of them, ‘They create a desolation and call it peace.’
On the island of Mona (Anglesey) in AD 60, the Romans sought to break the status and influence of the Druids over the indigenous Celts. Here, in an ancient Druidic sanctuary, some of the leaders of rebellions against Roman rule had sought protection. The Roman leader Suetonius decided to hunt down not only the rebels, but destroy the Druids at the same time. The scene at Mona is vividly described by Tacitus. Facing down the well-drilled Roman troops was a native force including ‘black-robed women with dishevelled hair like Furies, brandishing torches’. Close by stood the Druids, ‘raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses’. Transfixed by this spectacle, the Roman legions had to be urged forward by Suetonius to put these strange people to the sword. After the successful assault, Suetonius had the sacred groves of Mona cut down so that, as Tacitus put it, Mona’s ‘barbarous superstitions’ could no longer be practised.
The Romans seemed less concerned about introducing their gods and beliefs on the Celts than simply gaining political and military dominance. Britannia became the wild outer fringe of the extensive Roman Empire. The Romans built roads, villas and even garrison-towns. The ruling aristocracy, numbering thousands, but dominating an island of perhaps a million people, was modelled on Roman lines, although many of the Celtic peoples continued to live in the ways of old, in small groups with local chieftains.
Of course, the Romans brought benefits. They recorded much about the people they encountered – England enters the history books with the writings of the Romans. And certainly the Romans were well connected throughout Europe, providing trade and other links with an empire that extended to the Holy Land, North Africa and central Europe as far north as the Rhine and the Danube.
But then eventually the empire started to fall apart, with Rome stretched in AD 406 by attacks on its northern border, which was effectively the river Rhine in Germany. In 407/8 the Rhine froze over, and the Vandals, Alans and Suebi unleased a massive invasion cross the ice and swarmed into Gaul (France) to attack the Roman encampments. Two years later, Roman rule was collapsing back to defend Rome itself. In 410 the Emperor Honorius issued an edict to the cities in Britain instructing them to take responsibility for their own defences. Troops of centurions were pulled out of Britain to help to deal with this threat.
Historical re-enactment groups who have recreated replica Roman armour of this period and worn it, have remarked on how noisy it is. Metal knocks against metal. The martial clanking of an approaching Roman garrison must have frightened many an enemy. But it must have sounded like music of the gods as they finally left the country, never to return.
Saxons
England had been subject to the military dictatorship of Rome for four centuries, so when the Romans summarily withdrew, they left a power vacuum. Chiefs of ancient tribal fiefdoms all over England embarked on a frantic round, forming alliances as they competed for territory over shifting borders and boundaries. Such intense inward-looking activity and lack of central organization meant that the country as a whole was ill-prepared for dealing with any outside threats. Some of the evidence for this state of affairs is clear in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. This was a compilation of the annual diaries of events of the previous year kept in monasteries in various parts of England. The original compilation was probably put together in the early 890s at the court of King Alfred. Several versions of it have survived until modern times. And in their pages, the chroniclers have recorded a post-Roman story of continuous rolling battles and alliances, fuelled by treachery and triumph.
The first chieftain to gain wide prominence is named in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as Vortigern. We have little information about him, and we do not know what evidence was available to the writers of the Chronicle, or indeed to what extent they may have been relying on folklore and legend. It is possible that Vortigern is a title for ‘overlord’. He is reckoned to be a warlord ruler of the south-eastern kingdom of Kent, and the first Celtic leader to emerge as leader of post-Roman Britain.
There is uncertainty about exactly when he achieved this position. Some sources say that he came to the overlordship of Britain in AD 425, although dating gets pretty awry here. The Chronicle reckons a later date of 449. But what is not at issue is what he did about the marauding Picts – the tribal people raiding and robbing down the northern coasts of England. ‘Picts’ was the name applied to them from the third century AD by the Romans, possibly translating from the Latin as the ‘painted ones’, referring either to the use of warpaint, or possibly a native custom of tattooing.
In exchange for their keeping the Picts at bay, and guarding the south coast to prevent the Romans from re-invading, Vortigern offered land on the Isle of Thanet, off the coast of Kent, to a substantial contingent of Saxon mercenaries. According to the Chronicle, warriors from Jutland, under their leaders Hengist and Horsa, landed at Vortigern’s invitation at Pegwell Bay, just south of modern Ramsgate. Hengist’s name means ‘horse’, and his companion Horsa means stallion. These may be given names, or status titles within their tribe. Possibly these tribespeople had horses as a totem animal, perhaps sailing with horse-headed ships. By tradition, they came with a banner of a white horse, preserved to this day as the emblem of Kent.
According to the Volsunga Saga, a thirteenth-century Icelandic story of Sigmund the Volsung, an early and legendary family, Horsa was a high-born leader of Saxons. And Bede, in his eighth-century history of England, records that Horsa was a king descended directly from the pagan god Woden, as Saxons invariably claimed of their chieftains, suggesting that the incomers were indeed high-born tribal leaders. Bede says they were Jutes, although some historians think it more likely that they were Franks, and sailed therefore not from Denmark but from the mouth of the Rhine.
All of these tribal groups were closely related, probably having, in the opinion of linguistic experts, only slightly divergent dialects. Their versions of ancient Germanic language formed the basis for modern German, Dutch and English wording, the southern English accents (Jutes and Saxons), and the midland and northern accents (Angles). From the latter comes ‘Angle-ish’, or English.
The first sight of the Saxon peoples who contributed so much to Middle-earth magic was far from enchanting. They must have looked terrifying. Plunging from their low, lean boats onto the beaches of England, beards and moustaches stiff with saltwater spray, these were elite warriors armed to the teeth. Bristling with swords, spears, shields, axes, bows, metal helmets, knives and chains, they beached in their dozens, scores, even hundreds in search of a new homeland for their clans.
Certainly these warriors came dressed to kill – literally. They were a sort of Saxon samurai. Even their hairstyles reflected their elite status, and tribal affiliations. Roman writer Sidonius, writing at the time of these first invasions, describes fifth-century Frankish warriors – whose exclusive right to speak their mind freely in Dark Age Gaul gave us our ‘speaking frankly’ phrase. They pulled their hair from the back of the head and fixed it on top, leaving their necks bare and bright. He describes their ‘red pates’, and they may have vividly painted their faces and necks. Coolly staring from these colourful heads were eyes ‘faint and pale, with a glimmer of greyish blue’, according to Sidonius. They were clean shaven, except that ‘instead of beards they have thin moustaches which they run through with a comb’. They must have resembled Captain Hook from Peter Pan, but without the whimsy.
A Roman official called Cornelius Tacitus reported that the young warriors of the Chatti tribe, in western Germany, allowed their flowing hair and beards to grow unchecked until they had killed an enemy. The wild, unkempt locks of these men hungry for the status of a haircut would not have been an encouraging sight. And Sidonius reveals that in Bordeaux the north German Saxon fighters shaved their hairlines and ‘… with the growth thus clipped to the skin, his head is reduced and his face enlarged’. The big-faced Saxons charging up the beaches must have been an alarming sight. Sometimes they embellished their appearance with luxuriant moustaches which, judging by the combs, tweezers, shears and clippers found in archaeological digs, would have made them impeccably groomed assassins.
The most dramatic hairstyles among this array was that of the Suebians, a tribe from the south-west of Germany. They can be seen in Roman sculptures of Germanic tribesmen with their hair tied up in a knot at the side of their head. This was a sign of status as a freeman, according to Tacitus, and several hundred years later, Sidonius confirms that this hairstyle was still in vogue and copied by other tribes. Young warriors were obviously the role models of popular culture in those days, a more brutal version of our sportsmen and rock stars.
Even the Romans had employed Saxons on a small scale to repel invaders along the east coast. But the Romans had the military muscle to contain the mercenaries. With England in a now much weakened state, the Saxon warriors coming in saw opportunities for the taking. They kept arriving in scores and hundreds. Entries in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, say ‘Aelle and his three sons, Cymen, Wlencing and Cissa, came into Britain with three ships.’ Another, for 514, records that ‘In this year the West Saxons came into Britain with three ships.’
The new Anglo-Saxon invaders were not centrally organized, and their spread across the landscape was slow and uneven. Historians have long debated just how this transition could have happened. It used to be thought that the Saxons wiped out the Celts, or forced them to the west, Wales and Cornwall. Certainly, this was the case for some of them. A letter sent by the Celts to the Romans said of the Saxons, despairingly, ‘The barbarians drive us into the sea, and the sea drives us back to the barbarians. Between these, two deadly alternatives confront us, drowning or slaughter.’ Then the evidence accumulated to show that it was a more complex and varied pattern. In some areas there was cooperation, in others the Saxons were the rulers and the Celts a kind of underclass. At West Heslerton, in Yorkshire, an Anglican settlement excavated in the 1980s, revealed 201 burials. The skeletons were of two distinct physical types. Most of them were short and of stockier build, while a minority – about one-fifth of the total – were taller and probably of a higher status, because they were buried with their weapons. Archaeologists think it likely that the shorter people were indigenous Celts, while the taller were Angles, who had invaded and become the dominant upper class. Nevertheless, there is little Celtic influence in place-names and root words in England, which one would expect if cooperation had been the norm. And certainly there were pitched battles between some Celtic tribes and the Saxon incomers, some perhaps featuring that part-legendary Celtic hero, Arthur. So while there probably were examples of cooperation, in sum, the Saxons did take over, and the Celts were subjugated again, as they had been when the Romans came to the island.
By the end of the sixth century, the liaisons and confederations of tribal groups coalesced into larger kingdoms. By the end of the sixth century, some of their names can still be traced in today’s counties and old shires. Kent was named from the Cantiabi, the Celtic tribe who occupied the territory before the Saxons took it over. Sussex and Essex were the lands of the the South Saxons and East Saxons respectively. The region on the east coast of England known as East Anglia today was the homeland of the East Angles. The other two Angle kingdoms were those of Northumbria (land north of the Humber) and Mercia (middle Angles – now the Midlands). Wessex, home to the West Saxons, eventually extended over most of England south of the Thames, when Alfred the Great became the first regional leader to successfully unify much of the country – a military necessity in the face of Norse invasions in the ninth century.
By this time, competition and intermarriage had led to amalgamation of kingdoms, so that at the beginning of the ninth century only four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms remained: East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex. Also by now, Christianity had been officially adopted by all the Anglo-Saxon royal houses, although the populace did not necessarily follow them until some time later. Baptism was an attractive move for kings like Alfred, for it connected them with the powerful political alliances connected with the Church on the continent. The kings added to their Woden ancestry a Christian blessing on their ruling as His representatives on Earth. Christianity spread downwards from the kings and their court to the people, although the process took some time.
The Anglo-Saxons themselves remained well aware of their origins, even centuries after they first settled in England. In 738 the English missionary, St Boniface, reports the continental Saxons saying of the English, ‘We are of one blood and one bone.’
Vikings
The final phase of the noisy history was as bloody as the earlier ones. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and other sources report bluntly what happened in AD 789: three fast ships appeared suddenly on the south coast of Devon. This was in the territory of Beorhtric, then king of the West Saxons (who later died in 802, the victim of an allegedly ‘accidental’ poisoning by his wife). His local administrator, one of the officials then called ‘reeves’, was named Beaduheard. He was notified about the ships. Immediately he leapt on his horse, and rode over to the ships from Dorchester with a few men. He assumed that the foreigners were merchants who needed supervising, rather than the armed marauders they turned out to be. Reeves were usually men of high status, in charge of great royal estates and receiving large gifts of land from the king for their services. They were used to being obeyed. The sources tell us that when Beaduheard reached the ships and encountered the Norsemen, he ‘admonished them in an authoritative manner’, and gave orders that they should be driven to the royal town. And at that point he and his companions were summarily executed by the Norsemen.
This event set the tone for many years to come. More ‘fast ships’ began to arrive, and brought raids intermittently from around 780 until the Normans took over the island in 1066. They were oared by people who came to be called, in The Chronicle, ‘northmen’, ‘Danes’, or ‘Vikings’. Some scholars reckon the name Vikings to have originated as a description of people who came from the shores of the Oslo Fjord, know as the Viken. Among the English, it was soon taken into the general vocabulary as a term for the feared pirates with whom they became painfully familiar. Their language became today’s Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese.
Raiders along the east coast of England helped themselves to the easy pickings of Christian wealth in unguarded monasteries. Silver and gold chalices, book-mounts, personal ornaments and coinage were melted down by the still-heathen Norsemen. The monastery of Whitby in Yorkshire was raided in 867, and a stone mould for casting ingots found at Whitby Abbey may have been used by Vikings for melting down and sharing out the looted treasures.
Contemporary Christian commentators such as Wulfstan regarded the Vikings as the agents or instruments of divine punishment for the sins of the English people.
Gradually, from the end of the eighth century until the middle of the eleventh, England was transformed by a large influx of Norse invaders. The raids increased in frequency, the Norsemen started staying in England over winter, and then settling, particularly in eastern England. In 866 they captured York, and by the early 870s the Vikings controlled the greater part of eastern England from York to London. In 865 the first payment of a Danegeld is recorded – tribute payments. For the promise of peace the people of Kent paid the Vikings money and were rewarded with treachery, says The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle accusingly, and that ‘under cover of the promise of money, the (Viking) army went secretly inland by night and ravaged all the eastern part of Kent’.
The political battle for territory split the country until finally, King Alfred came to the throne of Wessex in 871 until his death in 899. In the year of his accession, nine major battles took place against the Vikings. At the beginning of 878 Alfred narrowly escaped capture in a surprise attack on his residence at Chippenham. He fled to the Somerset marshes and hid until he could reorganize his forces. He rallied the West Saxons and won a decisive victory at Edington in Wiltshire. In 886 Alfred ‘occupied’ London, and in the words of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘all the English people that were not under subjection to the Danes submitted to him’. Alfred ended his reign as ‘king of the Anglo-Saxons’ the dominant ruler in England.
His successors established a united English kingdom by the middle of the tenth century. The last Viking king of York was Eirik Bloodaxe, who was expelled by the Anglo-Saxons in 954 during the reign of Alfred’s grandson, Eadred. The struggle for power continued, and Edgar (Eadred’s son) had a second coronation at Bath in 973 to confirm his status as the most powerful of the rulers of the British Isles.
The Death and Rebirth of Middle-earth
The Norse invaders were originally from the same ethnic stock as the Anglo-Saxons, and much of their culture was the same. But they had not been subject to the same influences of Christianity, and now they brought a resurgence of the magical beliefs of Middle-earth.
With this late refuelling, the culture of the Real Middle-earth had lasted for about a thousand years, from the times of the early Celts. When King Edward the Confessor died in 1066 without a male heir, Harold, a powerful and very wealthy member of the Wessex aristocracy, claimed that Edward had promised him the succession to the throne – and had himself crowned king in Westminster Abbey on 6 January, the day after Edward had died. However, it transpires that he had already promised the succession to the throne to William of Normandy, who came to England to fight Harold for the kingship. Harold lost the throne to William on 14 October 1066 at the Battle of Hastings. His earlier oath of allegiance to William had proved his undoing. After his death, it was said that Harold had been ‘too free with his oaths’.
While history is a seamless, interwoven flowing river of human experience, there are points in the stream to which we can point and say the current changed. This was one of those times. With Harold’s death and the takeover of the royal house by the Normans, a new aristocracy arrived. And by this time, political and religious upheavals in Europe had brought in a more strictly Christian religious epoch, in which the old ways became marginalized or even outlawed. The Norman invasion of 1066 was the beginning of the end for Anglo-Saxon England as the invaders brought in a new layer of elite rulers. The magical culture of Middle-earth gave way to what we think of as the beginning of the Middle Ages, and a new era.
Through the centuries, an incipient denigration of pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon culture followed and has persisted. The magic was dismissed by historians as ‘superstition’, ‘primitive’, ‘dark ages’ – an embarrassing interlude of history between the Romans and the Normans. Only now have these attitudes to the Anglo-Saxons begun to be reversed as archaeology and history reassess the past. And today, there is a renewed hunger for magic and mystery in a modern world in which technology has failed to deliver peace, and science has proven to be an inappropriate language for finding answers to the deeper questions about our existence. The realm of human imagination is once again considered as important as our rational mind. We need both. Middle-earth has returned.