Introduction
1. ‘The Battle of Maldon Poem’, translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland in The Battle of Maldon and Other Old English Poems (London 1965)
2. The exact words of the prayer are almost certainly apocryphal, as no medieval manuscript contains this precise formula.
3. The very first use of the word comes in the Widsith, a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon poem, which pre-dates the beginning of the Viking Age by more than a century. For a discussion of the various theories on the origin of the word Viking, see ‘Who Were the Vikings?’ in Stefan Brink (ed.), The Viking World (London 2008), pp. 4–7.
4. The main manuscript containing the Elder (or Poetic) Edda is the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript dating from 1270. For an account of the theories on the provenance of the Eddic poems, see ‘Eddic Poetry’ by Terry Gunnell in A Companion to Old Norse–Icelandic Literature and Culture (edited by Rory McTurk, Oxford 2005), pp. 82–100.
5. We have the names of around 250 skalds, including picturesquely named characters such as Eyvind skáldaspillir (‘the plagiarist’) and Þorodd dráputstúfr (‘Poem-stump’), so named for his fondness for very short verses.
6. Hávamál, verse 77
Chapter 1: The Origins of the Vikings
1. What is commonly referred to as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in fact exists in seven manuscripts, all of them somewhat different in the dates that they cover. The ‘Parker MS’, held in Corpus Christi, Cambridge, was written by a single scribe up to 891 and then by a series of successors who seem to have been based in Winchester, providing a good general account up to 920, but after that date covering largely local events. The ‘B’ manuscript goes up to 977 and appears to share the same original source as the C version which carries the story up to 1056, with single additions for 1065 and 1066. Versions D and E seem to share material from a set of northern annals (which were also used by Symeon of Durham in his History of the Kings), and the addition of other material of interest to the north of England has been interpreted as meaning that they were compiled in York (although the E manuscript seems to have made its way to Canterbury in the mid-eleventh century and was added to there and at Peterborough until 1155). The F manuscript was compiled by a scribe who used E as his main model, but also seems to have possessed a copy of A and to have used other sources, probably those available in the scriptorium at Christ Church, Canterbury. G was made in the early eleventh century and is a version of A, while H is a fragment that covers only the years 1113–14. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Revised Translation, edited by Dorothy Whitelock, David C. Douglas & Susie I. Tucker, (London 1965), pp. xi–xxiv.
2. The development (and authorship) of Symeon’s chronicle is almost as complex as that of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. See Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius, hoc est Dunhelmensis, Ecclesie / Tract on the origins and progress of this the Church of Durham (ed. David Rollason, Oxford 2000), pp. xvii–l for a detailed discussion.
3. Rollason, Symeon of Durham, pp. xxii, 89
4. Donald A. Bullough, Alcuin: Achievement and Reputation (Leiden 2004), p. 300. The monastic community of Lindisfarne was refounded by St Cuthbert, thirty years after the initial foundation by St Aidan in 635.
5. English Historical Documents, Volume 1: c.500–1042, no. 193, edited by Dorothy Whitelock (London 1979), p. 842
6. The Chronicle inserts the story under the year 789, but this is the year that Beorhtric married King Offa of Wessex’s daughter, and the story of the murdered reeve is said to have happened ‘in his days’, without any further specification of the year.
7. Stefan Brink (ed.), The Viking World (London 2008), p. 342
8. Barbara Crawford, Scandinavian Scotland (Leicester 1987), p. 44
9. Annals of Ulster, 795. See The Annals of Ulster (to AD 1131), (edited by Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill, Dublin 1983). The most probable location for Rechru is the island of Raithlin off the north-east coast of Ireland.
10. The term Francia is used for the Germanic kingdom that emerged in what had been Roman Gaul, to differentiate it from the medieval kingdom of France that emerged from the eleventh century onwards.
11. It was at this time that Godfred attacked the Abodrite trading centre of Reric and forced its merchants to move to his own foundation at Hedeby. See p. 105 below.
12. Frankish Royal Annals, p. 810
13. See p. 47 below
14. The tree cover was so dense that in 1177 a group of Norwegians took seventy-seven days to travel from Malang in Dalarna to Storsjön in Jutland, a distance of just 170 miles. Birgit and Peter Sawyer, Medieval Scandinavia: From Conversion to Reformation, c .800–1500 (Minneapolis 1993) p. 37
15. This was roughly the region that would be covered by the Gulathing Assembly and Law of c.900.
16. None of Pytheas’s works have survived directly. What we have is excerpts quoted in later authors and digests, such as Strabo’s Geography of the first century BC. For a detailed account of his voyage, see Barry Cunliffe, The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (London 2001).
17. Knut Heller (ed.), Cambridge History of Scandinavia, Volume 1: Prehistory to 1520 (Cambridge 2003), introduction by Knut Heller, p. 1
18. The sixth-century Byzantine historian Procopius had also actually visited the northern fringe of Europe (and found ‘Thule’ to be barren). He describes thirteen nations dwelling in Scandinavia, among them the Serithifnoi (possibly the Saami), who had the curious habit of abandoning their babies shortly after birth, leaving them with a morsel of food in their mouths on which to suck.
19. ‘The chronology of the Vendel Graves’ by Brigit Arrhenius in Vendel Period Studies – Transactions of the Boat Grave Symposium in Stockholm, February 2–3 1981 (edited by J.P. Lamm & H.-Å. Nordström, Stockholm 1983), pp. 39–65
20. For an account of Norse religions, see p. 113 below.
21. For the misadventures of the Yngling kings, see Ynglinga Saga in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (edited by Erling Momsen, translated by A.H. Smith, Cambridge 1932), pp. 1–35.
22. Although Nicolaysen recorded this, no nails were preserved in the collection of artefacts that he found, and it was only later excavation in 1989–91 that found remains of them. See ‘The Royal Cemetery at Borre, Vestfold: A Norwegian centre in a European periphery’ by Bjørn Myrhe in The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe (edited by M.O.H. Carver, Woodbridge 1992), pp. 301–13.
23. See p. 135 below.
24. See p. 95 below.
25. See Helen Clarke and Björn Ambrosiani, Towns in the Viking Age (Leicester 1991), pp. 69–72.
26. Although the explanation also provided, that Dan had a brother called Angul, from whom the Angles took their name, suggests a suspicious neatness in the etymologies. Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings (revised edition, Oxford 1984), p. 44.
27. Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, book III, chapter 3 (see translation by Lewis Thorpe, London 1974)
28. Knut Heller (ed.), The Cambridge History of Scandinavia (Cambridge 2003), p. 147
29. See p. 104 below.
30. Forming part of the Elder (or Verse) Edda. See p. 114 below.
31. There are dangers in looking to legal measures to assess when slavery ended in the Viking world. In Iceland, for example, there was never any formal abolition of the practice, but the last slave we know of (mentioned in literary sources) was Gilli, who was the slave of Thorsteinn Siðu-Hallsson shortly after 1050. Yet there are measures in the Grágás law-code which imply that there were still slaves in around 1117. In Norway there is also evidence that slavery was still practised into the twelfth century, while it did not end in Denmark until a century later and there may still have been slaves in Sweden into the early fourteenth century.
32. Konungsbók 112 in Peter Foote, Andrew Dennis & Richard Perkins, Laws of Early Iceland: Grágas, the Codex Regius of Grágás with Material from Other Manuscripts (Winnipeg 1980–2000 in two volumes), pp. 172–3
33. For an account of Ohthere’s journeys, see p. 96 below.
34. See ‘The Perception of the Saami and their religion in Old Norse Sources’ by Else Mundahl in Shamanism and Northern Ecology (edited by Juha Pentikäinen, New York 1996), pp. 97–117.
35. In the Gull-Ásu-Porðar-Páttr. See Mundahl, ‘The Perception of the Saami and their religion in Old Norse Sources’, p. 105.
36. ‘The Sami and their interaction with Nordic peoples’ by Inger Zachrisson in The Viking World (edited by Stefan Brink), pp. 32–9
37. ‘Co-existence of Saami and Norse culture – reflected in and interpreted by Old Norse Myths’ by Else Mundahl, pp. 346–55
38. Egil’s Saga, chapter 40
39. See J. Kim Siddorn, Viking Weapons and Warfare (Stroud 2005), for a detailed account of the techniques of Viking weapon production.
40. See p. 292 below.
41. See Paddy Griffith, The Viking Art of War (London 1995), p. 174.
42. See p. 307 below.
43. These were in fact present on helmets found in Scandinavia in the pre-Viking period, and also on Celtic helmets from the Iron Age, which may have influenced them. The horns became popularised during the nineteenth century when the rise of interest in native Scandinavian history as part of the nationalist movements in Norway and Sweden led to a general revival of things Viking and, for some reason, the horned helmet became part of the universally approved ‘Viking costume’. It is also possible that horned helmets may have derived from Roman models. The helmet found in Valsgärde 7 grave in Sweden had horns with animal-headed terminals, while a late Roman regiment, the Cornuti (‘horned ones’), is recorded in the Notitia Dignitatum, a fifth-century catalogue of Roman army units. Vendel Period Studies – Transactions of the Boat-grave symposium in Stockholm, February 2–3 1981 (edited by J.P. Lamm & H.-Å. Nordström) – Museum of National Antiquities, Stockholm Studies 2 (Stockholm 1983), p. 15.
44. Paddy Griffith, The Viking Art of War, p. 137
45. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 896 in English Historical Documents, vol. 1: c.500–1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock (London 1965)
46. Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement, p. 285
47. This massacre, at Verdun, had the opposite effect to that intended and initially stiffened Saxon resistance, before their final conquest in 797. Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms Under the Carolingians 751–987 (London 1983), pp. 61–3.
48. On the Knútsdrápa, see ‘King Cnut in the verse of his skalds’ by Roberta Frank in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway (edited by Alexander R. Rumble), pp. 106–24. There has been a lively debate about whether the blood-eagle should be taken as a literal description, or more figuratively in the sense of an eagle hovering. See Roberta Frank ‘Viking atrocity and Skaldic verse: the rite of the blood eagle’ in English Historical Review (1984), pp. 332–43; ‘The blood eagle again’ in Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research, vol. 22, pp. 287–9; and ‘The blood eagle once more’ by Bjarni Einarsson in Saga-Book, vol. 23, pp. 80–81.
49. See p. 10 below.
50. The Chronicle’s chronology is slightly wrong here, and the battle seems actually to have taken place in 896.
51. See p. 58 below.
52. The exact size of the Great Army in particular has been a source of some debate, since Peter Sawyer first put it at just several hundred in 1958, and then revised his figure up to 1,000 in The Age of the Vikings (London 1960), p. 125. While Sawyer has received support from others, including David Sturdy in Alfred the Great (London 1995), p. 111, a counter-current argues that this figure is too low. See Simon Keynes, ‘The Vikings in England, c. 790–1016’ in P. Sawyer (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings (Oxford 1999), pp. 48–82. Richard Abels in Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England (London 1998), p. 113, suggests that at its arrival (and before its various divisions) the Great Army may have consisted of more than 5,000 men. For an interesting discussion of how the Great Army managed to feed itself, see ‘Feeding the micel here in England c. 865–878’ by Shane McCleod in Journal of the Australian Early Medieval Association, vol. 2 (2006), pp. 141–56.
53. ‘The Viking Expansion’ by Peter Sawyer in The Cambridge History of Scandinavia, vol. 1, pp. 106–7
54. Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen (translated by Francis J. Tschan, New York 1959), book four, p. i
55. Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, book four, p. vii
56. Else Roesdahl (translated by Susan Margeson & Kirsten Williams), Viking Age Denmark (London 1982), p. 17
57. Dudo of Saint-Quentin, Historia Normannorum, book 1, chapter 2
58. One of the coins in the Sutton Hoo burial in East Anglia, c. 625, carries the name Quantia as its place of minting, which presumably refers to Quentovic, while in 664 Theodore of Tarsus is said to have set sail from the port on his way to take up his position as Archbishop of Canterbury.
59. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300–900 (Cambridge 2001), p. 607
60. McCormick, Origins of the European Economy, p. 609, note 115
61. P. H. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings: Scandinavia and Europe AD 700–1100 (London 1982), p. 75
62. Egil’s Saga, chapter 69
63. The Nydam Boat was the first of the important early Scandinavian vessels to be excavated, by Conrad Engelhardt in 1859–63. Originally two boats were found, but unfortunately one of them was cut up for firewood by troops during the Danish-German War in 1864.
64. The Vikings did not, however, themselves invent the sail, nor were they the first pirates to raid the coastlines of north-western Europe. As early as AD 69–70 the Romans were fighting against a fleet controlled by the Chauci, a North Sea coastal tribe whose raids had plagued the Frisian coast for thirty years. The Bruges Boat (found in Belgium in 1899) dates to AD 180–250 and has a mast step, so it was clearly adapted for sail, while the Anglo-Saxons were definitely using sailing ships by the mid-seventh century, as the missionary St Wilfred returned from Gaul to England in one.
65. The carving’s exact age is unknown, but it is dateable to sometime in the seventh century.
66. See p. 222.
67. See p. 232 below.
68. In fact, Harald’s conquests may have taken place even later. The dating depends on the statement by the Icelandic historian Ari the Wise that his rule over all Norway began in 870, which is otherwise unsupported. Sverre Bagge, From Viking Stronghold to Christian Kingdom: State Formation in Norway, c. 900–1350, p. 24.
69. Such as that of Svein Forkbeard and Cnut to England in 1013. See p. 000 below.
Chapter 2: From Raids to Settlement
1. See Judith Nelson, Charles the Bald (London 1992), pp. 132–7, for a detailed discussion of the Verdun division.
2. St Philibert’s relics were first moved in 836 after the initial Viking attack, when they were transferred to Déas, and then in 845 moved once more to Cunault on the banks of the Loire. In 865 they finally reached Messais in Poitou. There is, however, some evidence from charters that the monks had been preparing the site at Déas to receive St Philibert’s relics since 819, so they had clearly been aware of the dangers posed by the Vikings even before their own monastery was raided for the first time. Ermentarius, De Translationibus et Miraculis Sancti Filiberti (edited by R. Poupardin, Monuments de l’histoire des abbayes de Saint-Philibert, Paris 1905).
3. Although sometimes the fleets based on these rivers operated outside their region; Nantes was sacked by the Seine Vikings in 853. See Rosamond McKitterick, The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians 751–987, p. 237.
4. Pippin was Charles the Bald’s nephew and was in revolt against the settlement that gave Aquitaine to Charles, rather than to him (his father, Pippin I, had been King of Aquitaine). See Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald (London 1992), pp. 101–4, 139–44.
5. Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald, p. 170
6. Fortunately the threat was short-lived, as just three years later Salomon allied himself with Charles the Bald to attack the Loire Vikings. Unfortunately for him, the promised Frankish army never materialised, and he was left fighting Hasteinn’s Vikings alone. Neil Price, The Vikings in Brittany, Viking Society for Northern Research (London 1989), pp. 32–4.
7. Who may or may not be the father of the leaders of the Great Heathen Army that attacked England in 865. See p. 51 below.
8. The Translatio is a peculiarly Viking-Age genre of religious writing prompted by the need to remove the relics of saints from monasteries that were exposed to Viking attack (or had actually been destroyed by them). The Translatio of a saint recounts the happenings as the remains are removed to their new sanctuary, often involving miracles at each new resting place. One of the more prolonged of the Translations was that of St Cuthbert in England, which began when his remains were removed from Lindisfarne in 895, finally ending up in Chester-le-Street for ninety-one years before their final interment in Durham Cathedral in 995. The monks of the monastery of St Philibert on Noirmoutier removed the bones of the saint every year from 839 to 876, before abandoning the monastery altogether and then moving further and further inland in search of sanctuary, until they finally came to rest at Tournus in Burgundy in 875 – an odyssey recounted in detail by Ermentarius, a member of the St Philibert community.
9. For the subsequent epic voyage of a section of this Viking group into the Mediterranean, see p. 82 below.
10. Annals of St Bertin, 869. See translation by Janet Nelson (Manchester 1991), p. 152.
11. Price, The Vikings in Brittany, p. 26
12. For more on this agreement, the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte, see p. 276 below.
13. The leading Frankish magnate, two of whose sons, Odo and Robert, would become Kings of France; he was the ancestor of the Capetian kings who ruled the country from 987 to 1328.
14. Recent work, however, has suggested that these may in fact represent a Frankish element and are not Viking at all. Price, The Vikings in Brittany, p. 64.
15. See p. 124 below.
16. Price, The Vikings in Brittany, p. 71
17. See p. 57 below.
18. Annals of St Vaast (edited by B. von Simson, Hanover 1909)
19. Janet Nelson, Charles the Bald, pp. 255–6
20. Although Odo was elected king of the western part of the Frankish empire, the Carolingian empire fractured as another assembly elected Arnulf, the son of Carloman, to be king in the east. In Italy, Berengar of Friuli took the throne; Louis of Provence took much of the south; Rudolf, son of Conrad the Welf, held sway over Burgundy; while another petty king, Guy (or Wido), occupied part of Neustria (between the Seine and the Loire).
21. See p. 59 below.
22. Charles was crowned king in 893, but was unable to exert his authority effectively until Odo’s death in 898.
23. For more on the development of the Duchy of Normandy, see p. 276 below.
24. See Jean Renaud, Les Vikings en France (Rennes 2000), p. 100, for artefacts found at Péran.
25. For a detailed account of the various Viking rulers of Frisia (including arguments for and against the two Haralds being the same person), see ‘From poachers to gamekeepers: Scandinavian warlords and Carolingian kings’ by Simon Coupland in Early Medieval Europe, vol. 7, no. 1 (1998), pp. 85–114.
26. ‘Two Viking Hoards from the Former Island of Wieringen (The Netherlands): Viking Relations with Frisia in an Archaeological Perspective’ by Jan Bestemanin in Land, Sea and Home – Proceedings of a Conference on Viking-period settlement at Cardiff, July 2001 (edited by John Hines, Alan Lane & Mark Redknap, Leeds 2004), pp. 93–108
27. ‘Frisia in Carolingian Times’ by Egge Knol in Viking Trade and Settlement in Continental Europe (edited by Iben Skibsted Klaesøe, Copenhagen 2010), pp. 43–60
28. For a discussion of possible Frisian participation in the Viking Great Army of 865 (and the attack on York), see Shane McCleod, The Beginning of Scandinavian Settlement in England: The Viking Great Army and Early Settlers, c. 865–900 (Turnhout 2013).
29. An unknown location, most likely somewhere in Surrey
30. The fact that the army was able to split up into several separate groups, one of which was still able to engage in a major invasion of Wessex, argues for the initial micel here’s numbers being in excess of the high hundreds.
31. ‘Kings and kingship in Viking Northumbria’ by Rory McTurk, Thirteenth International Saga Conference (Durham & York 2006)
32. The identification of Ivar and his brothers as sons of Ragnar Loðbrok is a late one, coming principally from Icelandic sagas composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, notably Ragnar’s Saga. It has been argued that the real Ragnar died of dysentery in 845 and that Loðbrok was a figure more legendary than real. ‘Ragnar Loðbrok in the Irish Annals?’ by Rory McTurk in Proceedings of the Seventh Viking Congress (Dublin 15–21 August 1973), (edited by Bo Almqvist and David Greene, Dublin 1976), pp. 93–124.
33. See David Rollason, Northumbria 500–1100, Creation and Destruction of a Kingdom (Cambridge 2003), pp. 212–13.
34. A ritual dedication to Odin, by pulling the victim’s lungs from his ribcage to create bloody ‘wings’. For the authenticity of this rite, see p. 29 above.
35. The exact political situation in York is unclear for some time after 866. In 872 the Vikings expelled Egbert from York, but it is probable that they had installed him as a dependent king in the first place.
36. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in English Historical Documents, vol. 1: c.500–1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock (London 1979), p. 192
37. Written by Abbo of Fleury in the mid-980s
38. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in English Historical Documents, vol. 1 (London 1979), p. 193.
39. Possibly Marten, 20 miles north of Wilton. Timothy Reuter (ed.), Alfred the Great (London 2003), p. 127
40. See Asser’s Life of Alfred, translated by J.A. Giles in Six Old English Chronicles (London 1848), p. 56.
41. Burgred, who had previously been castigated by Pope John VIII for allowing nuns to marry, seems to have been well received at Rome, and lived in obscure retirement for the rest of his life. He was buried in the church of St Mary’s in Saxia (Rome), which formed the focal point for the small Anglo-Saxon community, while his wife, Aethelswith, died in Pavia in 888, possibly while trying to return to England.
42. See ‘Repton and the “great heathen army”, 873–74’ by Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbe-Biddle in Vikings and the Danelaw – Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21–30 August 1997 (edited by James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch & David N. Parsons, Oxford 2001), pp. 45–96; and Richard Hall, Exploring the World of the Vikings (London 2007), pp. 83–5.
43. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 876 in English Historical Documents, vol. 1 (London 1979)
44. See Reuter, Alfred the Great, p. 155; Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, p. 71.
45. See p. 60 below.
46. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in English Historical Documents, vol. 1 (London 1979), p. 195. There are also some suggestions that he was actually deposed, at the behest of Archbishop Aethelred of Canterbury, in a deal that would have seen a Viking puppet king installed in Wessex, along the lines of Ceolwulf in Mercia or Egbert in Northumbria. See Reuter, Alfred the Great, pp. 156–67.
47. Asser’s Life of Alfred in Six Old English Chronicles (translated by J.A. Giles, London 1848), p. 61
48. For a discussion on various versions of the legend of the burning of the cakes and its transmission into Renaissance, Victorian and modern histories, see David Horspool, Why Alfred Burned the Cakes, A King and his Eleven-Hundred Year Afterlife (London 2006), pp. 77–96.
49. Justin Pollard, Alfred the Great (London 2005), p. 183
50. Asser’s Life of Alfred, translated by J.A. Giles, p. 62
51. For the Treaty, see ‘The Treaty between Alfred and Guthrum’ in Dorothy Whitelock (ed.), English Historical Documents, vol. 1, pp. 416–17. The future capital was ‘occupied’ by Alfred around 886, and so it is possible to argue that the treaty with Guthrum post-dates this, but there was probably some form of West Saxon control over London even before it.
52. A King Guthfrith is recorded by the chronicler Aethelweard as being buried at York Minster in 895, and as we have no record of any intervening ruler, it is presumed that this Guthfrith was Halfdan’s immediate successor.
53. This document, which probably dates to about 911–14, in the reign of Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, lists thirty-three burhs, together with the number of hides (which amounted to 27,000 throughout the system) that are needed for the upkeep of their defences, with every four hides yielding four men, enough to man a ‘pole’ length of wall (around 5 yards). D. Hill and A.R. Rumble (eds), The Defence of Wessex: The Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon fortifications (Manchester 1996), pp. 189–231.
54. Guthrum died in 890; although he was notionally a Christian after his baptism in 878, the chronicler Aethelweard unkindly remarks in his note on the Danish king’s passing that ‘he breathed his soul out to Orcus’, the Roman god of the underworld.
55. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 892 in English Historical Documents, vol. 1 (London 1979). Once again, the number is suspiciously exact, but must indicate at the very least an unusually large fleet.
56. The site of this is not certainly identified, but may be Castle Toll, near Newenden (see Pollard, Alfred the Great, p. 274).
57. See p. 78 below.
58. A legal compilation made by Archbishop Wulfstan around 1002–8 refers to compensation payments to be made on Deone lage (‘according to the Danish law’). An earlier law-code (IV Edgar issued in 962–3) mentions ‘secular rights in force among the Danes’, but not the Danelaw itself. The fifteen counties where the Danelaw was in force were Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Middlesex and Buckinghamshire. See ‘Defining the Danelaw’ by Katherine Holmes in Vikings and the Danelaw – Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress, Nottingham and York, 21–30 August 1997 (edited by James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch & David N. Parsons, Oxford 2001), pp. 1–12.
59. See Julian D. Richards, Viking Age England (Stroud 2000), pp. 43–7, and Gillian Fellowes-Jensen’s work, including ‘The Vikings and their Victims: The Verdict of the Names’, Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture in Northern Studies, delivered at University College, London, 21 February 1994, Viking Society for Northern Research (London 1995).
60. There are various other Norse endings such as ‘–toft’, meaning house-site, while studies of field names, which tend to be more conservative, have yielded more information about Danish settlements in areas where an examination of the place-names of larger units or settlements might not have indicated a significant Scandinavian population.
61. Richards, Viking Age England, p. 46
62. See p. 250 below.
63. It also, interestingly, recorded the names of those who owned the land at the time the survey was carried out, and those of the owner at the time of Edward the Confessor. Among the more obvious pattern of Anglo-Saxon ownership being replaced by Norman incomers, half of the names listed in the Confessor’s reign in Nottinghamshire and Cheshire are Scandinavian, as are 40 per cent of the names listed in Derbyshire.
64. Excluding the brief reoccupations by Harald Hardrada in 1066 and during the Northern Revolt in 1069–70.
65. Analysis of the 8-inch-long stool, which was found beneath Lloyds Bank in York, revealed that the intestines of the unfortunate ‘owner’ were riddled with worms.
66. Both of these kings are really only known from the appearance of their names on coins (including those found in the Cuerdale Hoard). It is possible that Sigfroth was the same as the Northumbrian Viking of the same name who attacked Wessex with a fleet in 893, and the jarl, also called Sigfroth, who was involved in fighting around Dublin in 893. Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, pp. 78–9.
67. ‘Some Archaeological Reflections on the Cuerdale Hoard’ in Coinage in Ninth-Century Northumbria: The Tenth Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History (edited by Howard B. Clarke et al., Oxford 1987), pp. 329–54
68. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in English Historical Documents, vol. 1 (London 1979), p. 209
69. The names are suspiciously close to a group of Viking leaders active in the 860s and 870s, and so could possibly simply have been transferred from accounts of earlier actions. Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, p. 87.
70. The northern part of the old Northumbrian kingdom, around Bamburgh, had established a semi-autonomous position, free of direct control from the York Vikings.
71. See Sir Frank Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford 1943), p. 329
72. Sihtric’s coinage is found south of the Humber and it is possible that he reconquered the area between 921 and 924. Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, pp. 97–8.
73. See Higham, The Kingdom of Northumbria, p. 193. See also Alistair Campbell, The Battle of Brunanburh (London 1938). Bromborough was historically in the county of Cheshire, although it now forms part of Merseyside.
74. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 937 in English Historical Documents, vol. 1 (London 1979), pp. 200–201
75. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 357
76. For Eirik’s period as King of Norway, see p. 98 below. The English sources do not, surprisingly, make any mention of his former career in Norway. Even according to Scandinavian sources, such as the Ágrip, written about 1200, Eirik of Norway was granted the earldom of Northumbria, but was soon thrown out and died as a pirate in Spain. Downham argues that Eirik, King of York, was in fact a descendant of Ivar, whose deeds became assimilated with those of Eirik Bloodaxe of Norway through a confusion over the names. Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, pp. 118–20.
77. There is some doubt over this, as it is based on a disputed reference in the Life of St Cuthbert. Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, p. 113.
78. See p. 80 below.
79. It is not clear who this person was; it is possible that Olaf, his father, was either Olaf Gothrithsson or Olaf Sihtricsson, which would argue for Eirik being killed by one of the York Viking community, with a possible eye to replacing him. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, p. 362.
80. Svein Forkbeard and Cnut would later become kings of all England, but they did not re-establish the old Danelaw or rule from York.
81. Richard Hall, Exploring the World of the Vikings (London 2007), pp. 118–19
82. A further hoard from Kell may be from the late ninth or early tenth century, but the date is not confirmed. David Wilson, The Vikings in the Isle of Man (Aarhus 2008), p. 105.
83. For an account of the Battle of Clontarf and its background, see p. 323 below.
84. See p. 304 below.
85. There is some evidence suggesting that one of the skeletons buried in the Viking overwintering site at Repton in Derby may have been sacrificed. See M. Biddle & B. Kjølbe-Biddle, ‘Repton and the “great heathen army”, 873–4’ in Select Papers from the Proceeding of the 13th Viking Congress (Oxford 2001), pp. 45–96.
86. Wilson, The Vikings in Man, p. 41
87. Andreas, 128
88. For more on Fenrir and Viking religious beliefs, see p. 113 below.
89. A claim that depends in part on the break in sessions of the Icelandic Althing between 1800 and 1844, see p. 157 below.
90. It first appears in a panegyric written in 297 in honour of the Roman emperor Constantius I for his recovery of Britain from a long-standing rebellion. It was long considered that this was penned by the rhetorician Eumenius, but this is probably not the case, and the author remains anonymous. See C. E. V. Dixon and Barbara Saylor Rodgers, In Praise of Later Roman Emperors (Berkeley 1994), p. 104.
91. This is actually derived from the Old Norse form Péttlandsfjörður.
92. See James Graham-Campbell and Colleen E. Batey, The Vikings in Scotland: An Archaeological Survey (Edinburgh 1998), pp. 8–9.
93. See K. Jackson, ‘The Pictish Language’ in F.T. Wainwright, The Problem of the Picts (Edinburgh 1955), pp. 129–66.
94. By which is meant Christian hermits. Historia Norwegiae, VI, 1–5 (translated Peter Fisher, Copenhagen 2003).
95. A halfpenny of the English king Edmund (939–46) provides the date after which the burial must have taken place.
96. W. P. L. Thomson, A New History of Orkney, pp. 26–7.
97. Agreements of this nature in the sagas seem to have been more honoured in the breach than in the observance, and Magnus Erlendsson, a later Earl of Orkney (and saint), would similarly fall foul of his cousin Håkon’s flagrant violation of the number of ships they were supposed to bring to a parlay on the Isle of Egilsay. See p. 272 below.
98. Orkneyinga Saga, chapter 6
99. A type of dwelling that is round, with a central hearth, with internal partitions which have the appearance of the spokes of a wheel, dividing the living space.
100. For more detail on the Jarlshof settlement, see James Graham-Campbell and Colleen E. Batey, Vikings in Scotland: An Archaeological Survey (Edinburgh 1996), pp. 155–60.
101. There are a number of others that survived. Hugh Marwick found around thirty toponyms with Celtic roots in Orkney; and Jakob Jakobsen, the Faroese philologist, concluded that between 5 and 10 per cent of Orkney place-names could be deemed of Celtic origin. But this still leaves more than 90 per cent of names with Norse roots. See Thomson, New History of Orkney, pp. 14–20.
102. This is a combination of the ‘Myhre’ hypothesis and the ‘earldom’ hypothesis, which are amongst the major interpretations of the early Viking period in the Northern Isles (along with the ‘genocide’ hypothesis). See Brink (ed.), The Viking World, pp. 419–21.
103. Callum G. Brown, Up-helly-aa: Custom, culture and community in Shetland (Manchester 1998), pp. 126–9
104. Annals of St Bertin (translated by Janet Nelson), p. 65
105. ‘The Archaeology of Ireland’s Viking-age towns’ by Patrick F. Wallace in A New History of Ireland, volume 1: Prehistoric and Early Ireland (Oxford 2005), pp. 814–16. On the exacavations at South Great George’s Street that finally found the site of the longphort, see ‘The first phase of Viking activity in Ireland: The archaeological evidence from Dublin’ in The Viking Age: Ireland and the West: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Viking Congress (edited by John Sheehan & Donnchadh Ó’Corráin, Dublin 2010), pp. 418–29.
106. Wallace, ‘The Archaeology of Ireland’s Viking-age towns’, in D. Ó Cróinín (ed.), A New History of Ireland, volume 1: Prehistoric and Early Ireland (Oxford 2005), pp. 820–21
107. The mound’s appearance can only be recovered from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century descriptions of it, as it was later destroyed. There may also have been a thing near Wexford, commemorated in the name of Ting in Rathmacknee Parish; see Howard B. Clarke, Máire Ni Mahonaigh & Ragnhall Ó Floinn (eds), Ireland and Scandinavia in the Early Viking Age (Dublin 1998), p. 302.
108. The traditional view that the ‘dark’ or ‘black’ foreigners were Danes, probably from York, and that the ‘fair’ foreigners were instead Vikings from the Western Isles has been revised by David Dumville, ‘Old Dubliners and New Dubliners in Ireland and Britain, a Viking-Age story’ in Duffy S. (ed.), Medieval Dublin VI, pp. 78–93.
109. An unidentified kingdom, which may represent a Viking colony in western Scotland that was the source of the raids on Ireland in the 840s. Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, p. 13. By the twelfth century the term, modified to Lochlainn, was used to refer to Norway; and so the term could instead refer to southern Norway as the source of the first raids.
110. See p. 53 above.
111. Sigfrith, confusingly, had the same name as Sihtric’s brother, who had preceded him on the Dublin throne, ruling the city from 881 to 888.
112. The Annals of Ulster, 902 (edited by Seán Mac Airt and Gearóid Mac Niocaill, Dublin 1983), p. 353
113. Downham, Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland, p. 31
114. See p. 65 above.
115. See p. 67.
116. It seems to have been a fairly well-established trade. Merchants from Verdun are reported as providing a constant flow of slaves from eastern Europe for sale in the slave markets of al-Andalus. See Richard Fletcher, Moorish Spain (London 1992), p. 42.
117. The word majus is also related to ‘Magi’, and this is probably related to the fire-veneration practices of the Zoroastrians, the leading main religion of pre-Islamic Persia (which the Muslims conquered between 642 and 644).
118. The account of the embassy is given by Ibn Dihya, a thirteenth-century writer from Valencia. See ‘Whom did al-Ghazal meet?’ in Saga Book of the Viking Society, 28 (2004), pp. 5–28. For more on Horik of Denmark, see p. 14.
119. One such is a tenth-century deer-antler box from León.
120. See Sara María Pons-Sanz, ‘The Basque Country and the Vikings during the ninth century’ in Journal of the Society of Basque Studies in America 21 (2001), pp. 48–58.
121. It was called Greek Fire from its use by the Byzantine armies, and the Arabs may have learnt the formula after facing it in the eastern Mediterranean. Those Vikings who operated in Russia and the Black Sea would have known the substance better (see p. 230 below.)
122. See Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal (London 1996), p. 47.
123. Not in fact that Rome in the mid-ninth century could boast a fraction of the wealth it had contained when Alaric the Goth sacked it in 410. Although in its imperial heyday in the first century the population exceeded one million, by the ninth century it had declined to around 30,000.
124. See F. Donald Logan, The Vikings in History, p. 110.
125. This could be what is now Luna in Liguria, although already in the time of the Lombard king Liutprand (712–44) it was hardly more than a village and could scarcely have been mistaken for Rome, even by the most backwoods Vikings.
126. The Irish chronicler Duald Mac-Fuirbis later recorded that ‘after that the Norsemen brought a great host of Moors in captivity with them to Ireland . . . long were these blue men in Ireland’. See Neil Price, ‘The Vikings in Spain, North Africa and the Mediterranean’ in The Viking World (edited by Stefan Brink), pp. 462–9.
Chapter 3: Chieftains, Myths and Ships
1. The method of wireless communication between handheld computerised devices that bears the Bluetooth name does indeed derive from the greatest of the Jelling dynasty, and the ubiquitous symbol for it is composed of the runic letters for ‘H’ and ‘B’, apparently chosen as a codename for the project for the way in which Harald united the Danes, just as Bluetooth is said to unite communication between computers. One of the early posters advertising Bluetooth even had a stylised image of Harald taken from the Jelling Stone, carrying a laptop in one hand and a mobile phone in the other.
2. Employing the younger futhark script then in use in Scandinavia. See p. 108 above.
3. Their names were Horied, Liafadag and Reginbrand. G. Turville-Petre, The Heroic Age of Scandinavia (London 1951), p. 92.
4. For a discussion of traditional Viking beliefs, see p. 000 above.
5. The church itself was built around 1125 and the bronzes added at the beginning of the thirteenth century.
6. Vita Willibrordi by Alcuin of York, chapter 10, translated by the Reverend Alexander Grieve in Willibrord, Missionary in the Netherlands, 691–739 (London 1923)
7. See p. 101.
8. These pre-scientific excavations were not in fact undertaken through any desire to find what lay in the mound, but because the well that the Jelling villagers had dug at the top of it had run dry, and they were trying to excavate a deeper one to find a fresh source of water.
9. See p. 136 below.
10. Saga of Grettir the Strong, chapter XVIII (see translation by Denton Fox & Hermann Pálsson, Toronto 1974)
11. An additional piece of evidence is that the largest fort of all, Aggersborg, was built not at the western end of the Limsfjord, as easy access to the North Sea and raids against England would demand, but instead in a better position to control the land towards the Norwegian coast. Else Roesdahl, Viking Age Denmark, pp. 153–5.
12. Roesdahl, Viking Age Denmark, p. 47
13. From the Hákonarmál, a skaldic poem quoted in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, book iv, chapter 32 (translated by Erling Monsen, Cambridge 1932).
14. A runestone found in Sønder Vissing church in Jutland reads: ‘Tovi, Mstivoj’s daughter, wife of Harald the Good, Gorm’s son, had this memorial made for her mother.’ Her father, Mstivoj, the ruler of the Obodrites, turned out to be a less-than-reliable friend, as in 974 he allied himself with Emperor Otto II when the Germans invaded Denmark. See Jakub Morawiec, Vikings Among the Slavs – Jomsborg and the Jomsvikings (Vienna 2009), p. 13.
15. Interestingly, although two of the main historical sources, Saxo Grammaticus and the Fagrskinna, concur in this foundation story, the Saga of the Jomsvikings itself gives an alternative version in which it was established by Palnatoki, the jarl of Fyn island, and Burizleif, the King of the Slavs.
16. Who is one of the candidates for the noblewoman interred in the Oseberg ship. See p. 125 below.
17. Gwyn Jones, History of the Vikings, p. 89
18. See p. 71 above.
19. The total distance is about 1,100 miles, so he seems to have travelled just 35 miles in an average sailing day. See Niels Lund (ed.), translated by Christine E. Fell, Two Voyagers at the Court of King Alfred, p. 30.
20. See Gwyn Jones, A History of the Vikings, p. 110.
21. Lund (ed.), Two Voyagers at the Court of King Alfred, p. 22
22. See p. 68 above.
23. The inscription is, however, undated and could equally well date to 1036, or twelve years after the assembly at Moster, when Olaf Tryggvason declared that Norway was a Christian nation. Ferguson, Hammer and the Cross, pp. 264–5.
24. See Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, book IV, chapter 16–17.
25. See p. 93 above.
26. See p. 262 below.
27. See Brink (ed.), The Viking World, p. 668.
28. See p. 105 below.
29. Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, book 1, chapter xxiii
30. Adam of Bremen, book 2, chapter xxxviii
31. The origin of this nickname is rather obscure. Skött means ‘treasure’ or ‘tax’, and so skötkonung may either refer to the tribute that the Swedes paid to Denmark or possibly to Olof’s position as the first Swedish monarch to mint his own currency.
32. See p. 259 below.
33. Cambridge History of Scandinavia, vol. 1 (Cambridge 2003), pp. 223–224
34. Adam of Bremen, book 4, chapters xxvi–xxvii
35. A date yielded by dendrochronology on the site. Helen Clarke and Björn Ambrosiani, Towns in the Viking Age (Leicester 1991), p. 52.
36. Brink (ed.), The Viking World, p. 129
37. In the form of thirty-three sunken buildings in the southern part of the settlement, in some of which raw materials and semi-finished objects were found, indicating the occurrence of some kind of manufacturing. Else Roesdahl (translated by Susan Margeson & Kirsten Williams), Viking Age Denmark (London 1982), pp. 73–5.
38. See p. 300 below.
39. The earliest extant version of the Bjarkøyrett is from the mid-thirteenth century, but it clearly derives from older antecedents. Brink (ed.), The Viking World, p. 88.
40. Clarke and Ambrosiani, Towns in the Viking Age, p. 76
41. One estimate has as many as two million coins being minted at Sigtuna during Olof’s reign. Brink (ed.), The Viking World, p. 143.
42. See p. 96 above.
43. By the archaeologist Charlotte Blindheim. There were earlier attempts at excavation, including one beginning in 1867, by the antiquarian Nicolay Nicolaysen, who concentrated on the burial mounds at Kaupang, of which he dug into seventy-nine. Over half of them contained nothing and the rest, which were cremation burials, a set of grave-goods considerably poorer than the royal graves that Nicolaysen had hoped to find.
44. See p. 124 below.
45. See p. 118 below.
46. From the Hávámal (‘Lay of the High One’), (London 1866), verse 141
47. Terje Spurkland (translated by Betsy van der Hoek), Norwegian Runes and Runic Inscriptions (Woodbridge 2005), pp. 3–4
48. See R. I. Page, Reading the Past: Runes (London 1987), p. 25
49. Including, for example, the loss of the initial ‘j’ in many words, so that the Scandinavian ‘år’ is represented in other Germanic languages by ‘year’ or ‘Jahr’.
50. See p. 299 below.
51. See Birgit Sawyer, The Viking-Age Rune-Stones: Custom and Commemoration in Early Medieval Scandinavia (Oxford 2000), pp. 123–45.
52. Birgit Sawyer, The Viking-Age Rune-Stones, p. 26
53. See p. 238 below.
54. See p. 263 below.
55. See Michael P. Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe (Uppsala 1994), pp. 39–41.
56. Njal’s Saga, chapter 26, and Michael Barnes, The Runic Inscriptions of Maeshowe, p. 39
57. Spurkland, Norwegian Runes and Runic Inscriptions, pp. 172–3
58. See p. 208 below.
59. Wahlgren, The Kensington Runestone, p. 129
60. The most important manual to preserve the Poetic Edda is the Codex Regius, composed around 1270, though almost certainly copied from still earlier manuscripts. The Codex spent several centuries in Denmark before being repatriated to Iceland in 1971; see p. 149 below.
61. Voluspá, stanza 17. ‘Ask’ derives from the Old Norse word for an ash-tree, but the etymology of ‘Embla’ is more obscure.
62. There were also further subdivisions, with the Vanar having their own domain called Vanaheim, the giants dwelling in Jotunheim, the dwarves in Svartalfheim (‘home of the dark elves’) and, at the base of all, Hel, the land of the dead.
63. In one sense the Norns are superficially similar to the Moirae, the Greek Fates. Yet although there are three of them (Urth, Verthandi and Skuld), they do not appear individually to have a specific role in determining the past, present or future of a particular person (or of measuring and cutting the cloth of his life). There are, indeed, references to a multiplicity of Norns who visit a person at the time of his or her birth, and not just the three who made their homes in the shadow of Yggdrasil.
64. See p. 108 above.
65. H. R. Ellis-Davison, Pagan Scandinavia (London 1967), pp. 132–5
66. Christopher Abram, Myths of the Pagan North: The Gods of the Norsemen (London 2011), pp. 61–3
67. Abram, Myths of the Pagan North, p. 70, and Anne-Sofie Gräslund, ‘The Material culture of the Old Norse religion’ in The Viking World (edited by Stefan Brink), pp. 291–3
68. Where the goði combined the role of priest and chieftain (see p. 159 below)
69. The saga of the people of Eyri, which tells of the feud between Snorri goði and Arnkel goði, two members of the Icelandic priestly-aristocratic class.
70. Stephen A. Mitchell, Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages (Philadelphia 2011), p. 21
71. The Borgarthing Law of the Codex Tunsbergensis . . . Diplomatic edition, with an introduction on the paleography and the orthography (edited by George T. Flom, Urbana 1925).
72. Grettir’s Saga, chapters 18–19 (Kar the Old), 32–5 (Glam) (translated by George Ainslie Hight, London 1914)
73. Richard Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia: A Tenth-Century Traveler from Baghdad to the Volga River (Princeton 2005), pp. 66–7.
74. Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia, pp. 67–70.
75. P. Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings (London 1971), pp. 75–7
76. Thorleif Sjøvold, The Viking Ships in Oslo (Oslo 1985), p. 54
77. See p. 122 above.
78. ‘The Oseberg Ship Burial, Norway: New Thoughts On the Skeletons From the Grave Mound’ by Per Holck, in European Journal of Archaeology, vol. 9, nos 2–3 (August 2006), pp. 285–310
79. ‘The “Buddha Bucket” from the Oseberg Find’ by Margaret MacNamidhe in The Irish Arts Review (1989), pp. 77–82
80. Encomium Emmae Reginae, edited by Alistair Campbell, with a supplementary introduction by Simon Keynes (Cambridge 1998), book 2, chapter 5, p. 21
81. See Peder Lamm, Stones, Ships and Symbols: The Picture Stones of Gotland from the Viking Age and Before (Visby 1978), pp. 13–16.
82. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla (translated by Erling Monsen, Cambridge 1932), pp. 181–2
83. See p. 258 below.
84. Confusingly the numeration of the Skuldelev vessels goes up to six, despite there being only five ships. This is because at an early stage of the reconstruction Skuldelev 2 and 4 were believed to be two separate ships, although it is now known that those fragments both formed part of the same original boat (which is numbered as Skuldelev 2/4, or simply Skuldelev 2). The final ship at Skuldelev, numbered 6, is a smaller fishing vessel.
85. But which, unfortunately for the Greenlandic economy, often failed to do so. See p. 186 below.
86. See p. 63 above.
87. See p. 145 below.
88. See ‘The Discovery of an Early Bearing Dial’ by Carl B. Sölver in Journal of the Institute of Navigation, VI, no. 3 (July 1953), pp. 294–6, and ‘The Course for Greenland’ by G. J. Marcus in Saga-Book of the Viking Society, vol. XIV (1953–7), pp. 12–35.
89. See p. 199 below.
90. The general classification of European styles of the Germanic Migration Age is into three broad styles: I, II and III (Salin, Die altgermanische Thieroramentik, Stockholm 1904). The last was further divided into three styles: C, which was in use in the seventh and early eighth centuries; D, which lasted for much of the eighth century; and E, which appeared around the start of the Viking raids at the end of the eighth century and endured into the ninth century.
91. For more details of the significance of the Borre mounds, see p. 19 above.
92. See p. 90 above.
93. The legend of Sigurd has proved one of the most enduringly popular of the Norse myths, from its appearance in the Völsunga Saga in the thirteenth century to its later adaptations in the German epic poem the Nibelungenlied, which formed the core of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and, later, was remodelled by J. R. R. Tolkien into The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. In the original, the smith Regin forges Sigurd an enchanted sword, with which he avenges the death of his father and brother. In return Sigurd slays the dragon Fafnir (who is Regin’s brother and has stolen a treasure given by the gods as payment for Loki’s killing of their father). Regin asks Sigurd to roast Fafnir’s heart and give it to him to eat, but as Sigurd is doing so, some of the blood drips onto his finger and he licks it off. He finds he can now understand the language of the birds, which are discussing how Regin intends to betray and kill Sigurd. Hearing this, Sigurd rides off, confronts Regin and strikes his head from his body. Sigurd then takes possession of the treasure (which will in turn lead to his own death in the end). Popular scenes portrayed on runestones and other carvings are the slaying of the dragon Fafnir, the forging of the sword by Regin and the cooking of Fafnir’s heart.
94. Around 700 or 800 were originally built between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, although only around twenty have survived the intervening centuries. Some of them contain runic carvings, including one at Stedje (in Sogn), which reads: ‘I rode past this place on St Olav’s Day. The Norns did me much harm as I rode by’, indicating that awareness of (if not adherence to) traditional beliefs was still very much alive sometime after the official conversion to Christianity. For more on stave churches, see Dan Lindholm, Stave Churches in Norway (translated by Stella and Adam Bittleston, London 1969) and Anders Bugge, Norwegian Stave Churches (translated by Ragnar Christophersen, Oslo 1953).
Chapter 4: Across the Atlantic
1. See Símun V. Arge, ‘Vikings in the Faroe Islands’ in Fitzhugh and Ward (ed.), Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, p. 154.
2. Dicuili, Liber de Mensura Orbis Terrae (edited by J. J. Tierney, London 1967), chapters 14–15
3. As argued by Jóhannes Jóhannesson in ‘Studies in the vegetational history of the Faroe and Shetland Islands’ in Annales Societatis Scientiarum Faroensis, supplementum 11 (Tórshavn 1985). See also ‘Peaceful Wars and Scientific Invaders: Irishmen, Vikings and palynological evidence for the earliest settlement of the Faroe Islands’ by Kevin J. Edwards & Douglas B. Borthwick in The Viking Age: Ireland and the West: Proceedings of the 15th Viking Congress (edited by John Sheehan & Donnchadh Ó’Corráin, Dublin 2010), pp. 66–79. The evidence for two possible pre-Viking phases of settlement (the earliest in the fourth to sixth centuries) has come from carbon dating of carbonised barley grains at the site of Á Sandum on Sandoy. See ‘The Vikings were not the first colonisers of the Faroe Islands’ by Mike J. Church, Símon V. Arge et al in Quaternary Science Reviews, July 2013.
4. See p. 71 above.
5. See p. 68 above.
6. Olúva was the daughter of Aud’s son, Thorstein the Red, by her husband, King Olaf the White of Dublin.
7. P.G. Foote, On the Saga of the Faroe Islanders, (London 1965), p. 10
8. There have been some suggestions that the Romans visited Thule/Iceland, largely on the basis of three Roman copper antoniniani dating from around AD 270–305 (one each from the reigns of Aurelian (270–74), Probus (276–82) and Diocletian (284–305) respectively), which were found in eastern Iceland (on two separate, though nearby, sites). They could have been brought there by Viking settlers (as antique curios rather than valuables, as they are made of copper, rather than silver or gold), who later lost them, by the elusive papar or even, according to some theories, by Romans either driven accidentally onto the shores of Iceland or on a deliberate voyage of exploration. The use of the word ‘Thule’ by such authors as the fifth-century Roman poet Claudian, who refers in his Against Rufinus to ‘Thule which lies ice-bound the Pole Star’, has been taken as support for this theory. However, since the time of Virgil, Roman writers had used ‘Thule’ as a poetic synonym for the furthest part of the world (Virgil actually used the term Ultima Thule) and so references to it by Claudian and others cannot be taken literally. Whatever the means by which the coins reached Iceland – and it was most probably on a Viking ship – their presence cannot be taken to mean any substantial Roman exploration (let alone colonisation) of the island.
9. Dicuil’s is not in fact the first mention in literature of an island that might be Iceland. The Greek geographer Pytheas, who lived in Marseilles in the fourth century BC, undertook a voyage through north-western Europe, which certainly took in the British Isles. We only know his work through its quotation by later authors, in particular from the compendious Geography of the Roman geographer Strabo in the first century BC. Pytheas describes a country that lay six days to the north of Britain, close to the point where the sea becomes frozen. His description of the sun staying above the horizon all night during the midsummer is sufficiently close to Dicuil’s to raise questions as to whether the later Irish writer was simply repeating Pytheas’s account.
10. See Jón Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga, A History of the Old Icelandic Commonwealth (Winnipeg 1974), p. 6.
11. See Geoffrey Ashe, Land to the West – St Brendan’s Voyage to America (London 1962)
12. This and the other very early voyages to Iceland are recounted in the Landnámabók (translated by H. Pálsson & P. Edwards, Manitoba 1972)
13. See p. 141 above.
14. Landnámabók, chapter 6 (The Book of Settlements, translated by Hermann Pálsson & Paul Edwards, Winnipeg 1972)
15. The Sturlubók, an adaptation by Sturla Thórðarson (who died in 1284), which is relatively complete; the Hauksbók, named for Haukr Erlendsson (d. 1334), which is again mostly intact; and the fragmentary Melabók, which is believed to be the work of the fourteenth-century lawman Snorri Markússon (d. 1313). See Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga, p. 11.
16. For more on the tephrochronology of Iceland, see ‘The tephrochronology of Iceland and the North Atlantic region during the Middle and Late Quaternary: a review’ by Haflidi Haflidison et al. in Journal of Quaternary Science 15 (1) (2000), pp. 3–22.
17. There is also some evidence from radiocarbon dates at Herjólfsdalur on the Westmann Islands (off the west coast), which give a date in the seventh century. The site has not yielded artefacts that would confirm this very early settlement, so uncertainty still remains about whether pre-872 settlement took place (and, if so, by whom). See Kevin P. Smith, Landnám: The Settlement of Iceland in Archaeological and Historical Perspective (1995).
18. See p. 166 below.
19. The Flateyjarbók contains the text of the Saga of the Greenlanders, as well as that of the Orkneyinga Saga and Faereyinga Saga (in both cases being the only surviving original copy of these in Icelandic), as well as sagas dealing with a number of Norwegian kings, including Olaf Tryggvason, Olaf Haraldsson (St Olaf), Magnus the Good and Harald Hardrada. The Codex Regius (or Konungsbók) contains the text of the Poetic Edda, which, without the survival of this manuscript, would be almost completely unknown. A leaf in the Flateyjarbók states that it was written in 1387, making it one of the few major Icelandic manuscripts that can be precisely dated. See Guðvarður Már Gunnlaugsson, ‘Manuscripts and Palaeography’ in A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (edited by Rory McTurk, Oxford 2005). The Codex Regius is believed to have been written around 1270.
20. Which was needed in response to a terrible famine that had struck the country and reduced the population in 1703 to just 50,358.
21. Including some 300 in the Royal Library in Stockholm, 250 in the British Museum, 150 in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library and 100 in the National Library of Scotland. See Jeanette Greenfield, The Return of Cultural Treasures (Cambridge 1996), p. 17.
22. Nordal was Iceland’s ambassador to Denmark from 1951 to 1957. See his The Historical Element in the Icelandic Family Sagas (W. P. Kerr Memorial Lecture 15, Glasgow 1957).
23. The decree stipulated that the first fire was to be lit at sunrise and that the men should walk to each successive fire, which should be at a distance from the previous one that the smoke from it could still be seen. They could then continue until the sun was setting. Whether anyone actually carried out this procedure is unknown. See Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga, p. 30.
24. This has been disputed by some historians, such as Barði Guðmunsson, who pointed to strong differences in customs (such as cremation of the dead, which west Norwegians practised but Icelanders never did, and the higher status of women in Iceland) to theorise that the Icelandic settlers came instead from an eastern Scandinavian group that had settled in western Norway. Barði Guðmunsson, The Origins of the Icelanders (Lincoln, Nebraska 1967).
25. See ‘mtDNA and the Islands of the North Atlantic: Estimating the Proportions of Norse and Gaelic Ancestry’ by Agnar Helgason et al. in The American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 68, issue 3 (March 2001, pp. 727–31). This study showed that the Scandinavian component of mtDNA in the modern Icelandic population was only 37.5 per cent (as opposed to 35.5 per cent in the Orkneys).
26. Large quantities of driftwood still come ashore in western Iceland, often from logging in Siberia, where the cut trunks have made their way into the ocean and then been carried by the currents westwards into the Atlantic.
27. Njál’s Saga, chapter 63 (translated by Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson, London 1964)
28. This literally means ‘forest-going’ and so harks back either to a time when there really were forests of a sort on Iceland, shortly after the first settlement, or is a name carried over from Scandinavia.
29. Gisli’s Saga, chapter 12 (translated by George Webbe Dasent, London 1866)
30. See p. 118 above. The cave forms part of the Hallmundarhraun lava field and is basically one very long lava tube.
31. See ‘Surtshellir: a fortified outlaw cave in West Iceland’ by Kevin P. Smith, Guðmundr Olafsson & Thomas H. McGovern in The Viking Age: Ireland and the West, Proceedings of the Fifteenth Viking Congress, Cork, 2005 (Dublin 2010).
32. See ‘Outlaws of Surtshellir Cave: The Underground Economy of Viking Age Iceland’ by Kevin P. Smith, Guðmundr Olafsson & Thomas H. McGovern in Dynamics of Northern Societies (edited by Jette Arneborg & Bjarni Grønnow, Copenhagen 2006).
33. See p. 167 above for more on Sighvatsson’s role in the Icelandic civil wars.
34. See ‘Laws’ by Gudmund Sandvik & Jón Viðar Sigurðsson in Rory McTurk (ed.), Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture (Oxford 2005), pp. 221–44.
35. The honour of being the oldest extant continuous parliament may then go to another Viking foundation, the Tynwald, the Isle of Man’s parliament, which has been dated to 979. See p. 69 above.
36. Njál’s Saga, chapters 117–24
37. One in every nine tax-paying farmers was legally obliged to attend. The census of these in 1095 revealed that there were 4,560, so at least 500 farmers must have come, meaning in all probability that there would have to have been at least 1,000 people at each annual gathering.
38. Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland (London 2001), p. 176. The office became hereditary in the family of the descendants of Ingólf Arnarson.
39. The laws were written down during the Lawspeakership of Bergthórr Hransson and were compiled at the farm belonging to Hafliði Másson, from which the document on which they were written came to be referred to as Hafliði’s scroll. It was available for consultation by the Lawspeaker and legislators, but unfortunately updates to it were not properly policed and so by the late twelfth century there were a number of competing law scrolls in circulation. Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga, p. 91.
40. A lawsuit arose over the burning to death of Thorkell Blund-Ketilsson – disposing of enemies by burning down their farms seems to have been a frequent means of exacting revenge – and the two chieftains found themselves on opposing sides, leading to an armed confrontation at the Thingnes Assembly. The case was then referred to the Althing. Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga, p. 49.
41. A side-effect of the reforms was that the number of goðar was set at thirty-nine, with three each being sent from the thirteen regional várthing. As this would have given an unfair advantage to the Northern Quarter, which had four várthing and so sent twelve goðar rather than nine, the other three were allowed to send an additional three goðar, making forty-eight in total.
42. Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland, p. 182
43. Landnámabók, chapter 218
44. Note that there must always have remained some Christians in Iceland, including the one who wrote the Hafgerðingadrápa poem on the voyage from Iceland to Greenland c. 985. See p. 260 below.
45. The law-code set out that a verse was to be taken ‘as it is spoken’ and not interpreted ‘according to the language of poetry’, thus preventing obscure interpretations of verses from being the excuse for lawsuits or violence. Konungsbók 237 in Foote et al., Laws of Early Iceland, vol. 2, p. 195.
46. This was known as the fraendaskömm (‘kin-shame law’).
47. Although even then Olaf kept hold of four hostages, one from each Quarter, in case the Christian chieftains reneged on their deal or the pagans refused to be convinced.
48. See Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga, p. 135.
49. For a detailed discussion of the ‘under the cloak’ incident, see Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinnson, Under the Cloak: The Acceptance of Christianity in Iceland, with Particular Reference to the Religious Attitudes Prevailing at the Time (Studia Ethnologica Upsaliensia 4, Uppsala 1978), which concludes that parallels with incidents in Heligoland and Sweden suggest that Thorgeir was consulting the gods rather than merely thinking matters over (and that the muted reaction to the decision was because pagans were accustomed to entrusting important decisions to oracles).
50. See Charles Odhal, Constantine and the Christian Roman Empire (London 2005).
51. Baptism at the time was generally carried out by immersion, and so reluctance to be plunged into streams that were icy-cold, even at the height of summer, is understandable.
52. See p. 258 below for an account of the battle.
53. See Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga, p. 146.
54. Clerical marriage, although generally disapproved of by the Church, was not unheard of in the Middle Ages and only came to an end after a decree of the Second Lateran Council in 1123, which declared any marriage undertaken by clerics of the higher order to be invalid. Also, Gizur was born in 1042, fourteen years before his father became bishop.
55. Lund had become the archiepiscopal see for all of Scandinavia in 1104.
56. This reform largely stuck and although the first two days in modern Icelandic are Sunnudagur (‘Sun-day’) and Mánudagur (‘Moon-Day’), the rest of the days bear satisfyingly non-pagan names: Þriðjudagur (‘Third Day’), Miðvikudagur (‘Midweek Day’), Fimmtudagu (‘Fifth Day’), Föstudagur (‘Care Day’) and Laugardagur (‘Washing’ or ‘Pool Day’), the last presumably an indication that laundry and personal ablutions were confined to one day a week.
57. Both bishops did, however, receive posthumous rewards as they were recognised as saints by the Althing, Thorlák in 1199 and Jón Ögmundarson the following year. As the ‘canonisation’ had not been sanctioned by the papacy, it was not regarded as valid, and Thorlák was only officially recognised as a saint by the Catholic Church in 1984, when Pope John Paul II canonised him (and declared him the patron saint of Iceland).
58. See Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga, pp. 251–3.
59. See Jóhannesson, Íslendinga Saga, p. 267.
60. There are in fact a number of reasons to believe that Harald Finehair’s dynasty did not rule Norway in an unbroken line to 1387. The claims of descent from Harald to Olaf Tryggvason and Harald Hardrada (amongst others) may have been simply attempts to attribute dynastic legitimacy to what would otherwise have been considered a usurpation.
Chapter 5: The Colony that Vanished
1. Excluding Australia, which is usually counted as a continental landmass.
2. Landnámabók, chapter 2 (Time and Place). A more direct route from the coast of Norway took five to seven days’ sail, according to Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg, xxxvii, 36 (translated by Francis Tschan, New York 1959).
3. Gwynn Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 45; Finn Gad, History of Greenland (London 1970), vol. 1, p. 27
4. See Waldemar H. Lehn, ‘Skerrylike mirages and the Discovery of Greenland’ in Applied Optics 39, no. 21 (2000), pp. 3612–29.
5. Landnámabók, chapter 122 (translated by Pálsson & Edwards, 2007)
6. Erik the Red’s Saga, chapter 2
7. For further details of types of Icelandic outlawry, see p. 154 above.
8. Finn Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1 (London 1970), p. 29
9. See p. 179 below.
10. Eirik the Red’s Saga, chapter 2
11. There were alternative theories about the name, such as that given by Adam of Bremen, who theorised that ‘The people there are greenish from the salt water, whence too, that region gets its name’. Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg, xxxvii, 36 (translated by Francis Tschan), p. 218.
12. Saga of the Greenlanders, chapter 1
13. Possibly written sometime around 1250, this is in the form of a dialogue between father and son, with the father possibly being intended to be Håkon IV and the son his successor, Magnus VI. The King’s Mirror (Speculum Regale), (translated by Laurence Marcellus Larson, New York 1917), p. 135.
14. ‘Hafgerdingar: A mystery from the King’s Mirror explained’ by Waldemar H. Lehn & Irmgard I. Schroeder in Polar Record 39 (210), (2003), pp. 211–17
15. The whole story is related in the Story of Einar Sokkason, contained in the Flateyjarbók.
16. There is some evidence that Eirik set up the first thing in Greenland at Brattahlid (there are remains of some structures, which may be thing booths), which became the principal assembly of the colony. At some point in the twelfth century, however, a thing was established at Garðar, which seems to have replaced that at Brattahlid as Greenland’s supreme assembly.
17. One theory has it that Eirik cast his high-seat posts into the sea to determine where he should settle (just as Ingólf had done in Iceland). As the Norse for these posts is set-stokkar, Stokkanes may indicate where they landed, although if this is true, then Eirik did not regard himself bound by the tradition, as he chose the superior land at Brattahlið for his farmstead. Paul Nørlund, Viking Settlers in Greenland (Cambridge 1936), p. 22.
18. J. Kristian Tornøe, Columbus in the Arctic? (Oslo 1965)
19. N. Lynnerup, The Greenland Norse: a biological-anthropological study (Copenhagen 1998), p. 118.
20. ‘The Early Medieval Warm Epoch and its Sequel’ by H. H. Lamb in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, vol. 1 (1965), pp. 13–37
21. One estimate (for Iceland) calculated that each cow needed 12.5 kilos of hay per day, which might amount to 2,500 kilos of hay for a winter lasting 200 days. Nørlund, Viking Settlers in Greenland p. 69.
22. Or GUS, from the Danish Gården under Sander. A detailed discussion of the site is to be found in Jette Arneborg & Hans Christian Gulløv, Man, Culture and Environment in Ancient Greenland (Copenhagen 1998).
23. The action of the river was, indeed, threatening the integrity of the site, as it had undermined the layer of permafrost that protected the buildings and was causing the sand to collapse into the river. During the course of the actual excavations, a river flood caused the water level to surge almost 3 feet; the site miraculously survived the inundation. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (edited by William W. Fitzhugh & Elisabeth I. Ward, Washington 2000), pp 296–7.
24. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 138; Gwynn Jones, North Atlantic Saga, p. 48
25. While Rogation Day is fixed at 25 April, the Little Rogation Days are dependent on Easter Day, falling on the three days before Ascension Thursday (itself forty days after Easter). The earliest possible date for Easter is 22 March, giving Little Rogation Days of 28–30 April, and the latest is 25 April, which would mean Little Rogation at 1–3 June, but such early and late Easters are rare, and so the vast bulk of possible dates are in May.
26. Gad, History of Greenland, p. 138
27. See p. 202 below.
28. The Dorset did survive somewhat longer on the North American mainland, and it would have been possible for the Norsemen to encounter them there as late as 1300. See Robert McGhee, Ancient People of the Arctic (2001), and Hans Christian Gulløv, ‘Natives and Norse in Greenland’ in Fitzhugh & Ward (eds), Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, pp. 318–26.
29. McGhee, The Last Imaginary Place, pp. 116–24
30. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (edited by Fitzhugh & Ward), pp. 324–5. For the end of Viking Greenland, see p. 190 below.
31. Hans Rink, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimos (London 1875)
32. Which could just possibly be a corruption of the Norse Yngvar.
33. Landnámábók, chapter 93
34. See p. 200 below.
35. Knud Krogh, Viking Greenland (Copenhagen 1967), p. 42
36. His nickname may also have meant ‘drip-nose’.
37. Bishop Eirik does appear on an inscription on the Vinland Map (see p. 211 below), where he is said to have gone on his journey in 1117, but the veracity of this text is very much in doubt.
38. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (edited by Fitzhugh & Ward), p. 313. By comparison the Archbishop of Nidaros’s hall back in Norway was larger, at over 2,000 square feet, but this served as the centre of a major Scandinavian archdiocese.
39. See p. 174 above.
40. Smyrill is recorded as being in Iceland in 1202 and 1203 and also travelled to Norway and Rome, so at this stage the connections between Greenland (or at least the Church there) and Europe were functioning well.
41. A radiocarbon dating carried out in 1999 yielded a date of 1272, which would be too late for the deceased to have been Jon Smyrill, but would be consistent with one of the other bishops. Jette Arneborg et al., ‘Change of diet of the Greenland Vikings determined from stable carbon isotope analysis and 14C dating of their bones’, Radiocarbon 41 (2) (1999) pp. 157–68.
42. See p. 168 above.
43. These were 1326, 1350, 1355 and 1374. Gwynn Jones, The North Atlantic Saga, p. 67.
44. The account of this voyage has some significance for the history of the Vikings in North America, see p. 220 below.
45. Farm W54, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (edited by Fitzhugh & Ward), p. 337
46. Graeme Davis, Vikings in America, p. 55
47. He was Sigurd Kolbeinsson, who was umboðsmaðr for King Håkon VI of Norway. A letter from the king in July 1374 refers to Kolbeinsson’s confiscation of some land that had become alienated from the crown. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 149.
48. Historia Norwegiae I.12 (edited by Inger Ekrem & Lars Boje Mortensen, translated by Peter Fisher, Copenhagen 2003)
49. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 150, and Kirsten Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North America ca. A.D. 1000–1500 (Stanford 1996), pp. 148–50
50. T. H. McGovern, ‘Cows, Harp Seals and Churchbells: Adaptation and Extinction in Norse Greenland’ in Human Ecology, 89 (1980), pp. 245–75
51. Joel Berglund, ‘The Decline of the Norse Settlements in Greenland’ in Arctic Anthropology, vol. 23, nos 1/2 (1986), pp. 109–35
52. Berglund, ‘The Decline of the Norse Settlements in Greenland’, pp. 109–35
53. McGovern, ‘Cows, Harp Seals and Churchbells’, pp. 245–75
54. Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (edited by Fitzhugh & Ward), p. 336
55. Paul Nørlund, Viking Settlers in Greenland, p. 132. The Norwegian alen or cubit was around 25 inches.
56. See Seaver, The Frozen Echo, pp. 230–1.
57. G. Scott et al., ‘Dental conditions of medieval Norsemen in the North Atlantic’, Acta Archaeologica, 62 (1992), pp. 183–207
58. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 156
59. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 158
60. See p. 200 below. Kirsten Seaver in The Last Vikings puts forward the idea that English traders persuaded the Norsemen of the Eastern Settlement to collaborate in a venture to set up a colony in North America and that they migrated en masse to this. The colony failed for some reason and the survivors disappeared, either dying or through migration to another (unknown) point. James Robert Enterline in Viking America (New York 1972) favours the theory that the remaining Norsemen penetrated the Canadian Arctic and North American interior further south and merged with the Inuit and Native American populations (although many of the finds cited, such as the Vérendrye Stone discovered in 1738, in an area of North Dakota inhabited by Mandan Native Americans and identified as having a Norse runic inscription, are unverified, discredited or – in the case of the Vérendrye Stone itself – lost).
61. Fridtjof Nansen, In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (translated by Arthur G. C. Chater), vol. 2 (London 1911), pp. 101–3
62. ‘mtDNA variation in Inuit populations of Greenland and Canada: Migration history and population structure’ by Agnar Helgason & Gisli Pálsson et al., American Journal of Physical Anthropologists, vol. 130, issue 1 (May 2006) pp. 123–34. The study also revealed that the Thule may have interbred with existing Dorset populations in Greenland and Canada rather than displacing them completely.
63. Seaver, Maps, Myths and Men, p. 84
64. Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 1, p. 180
65. Frobisher took the man’s wife and infant back to Bristol. The luckless Inuit, named Calichough or Collichang, was exhibited in England as a native of ‘Cathay’ and demonstrated the art of kayaking and hunting birds with a spear. He died within a month from pneumonia, complicated by a broken rib that he had received during his capture. His wife died soon afterwards, and the infant was taken to London, but did not survive long and was buried at St Olave’s Church.
66. Finn Gad, History of Greenland, vol. 11 (London 1973), pp. 45–51
67. For an account of these voyages, see Kirsten Seaver, The Last Vikings, pp. 199–201.
Chapter 6: The Search for Vinland the Good
1. See edition in The Vinland Sagas (translated by Keneva Kunz, London 1997).
2. See ‘The Date of the Composition of the Saga of the Greenlanders’ by Jón Jóhannesson (translated by Tryggvi J. Oleson) in the Saga-Book of the Viking Society XVI (1962–5), pp. 54–66. Using the dates of the Bishops of Hólar mentioned, the Saga of the Greenlanders must date from 1263 or earlier and the Saga of Eirik the Red from 1264 or later.
3. Bjarni’s voyage must have taken place after the discovery of Greenland by Eirik the Red in 986, so can most likely be dated to 988 or 989.
4. It was in fact aboard the ship of Bjarni’s father, Herjolf Bárðarson, that the Christian poet who wrote the Hafgerðingadrápa poem sailed. See p. 174 above.
5. See p. 157 above for details of the booths at the Althing.
6. Or from eyktarstaðr to dagmálastaðr
7. An alternative derivation, put forward by Helge Ingstad, the excavator of the site at L’Anse aux Meadows, has the name coming from Vín, an Old Norse word for ‘meadow’. Generally, however, this interpretation has not been accepted. ‘The Discovery of Vinland’ by Birgitta Wallace in Brink (ed.), The Viking World, p. 604.
8. Leif is said to have gone to Norway sixteen years after the colonisation of Greenland, which would date his meeting with Olaf Tryggvason to 1002. Unfortunately Olaf had perished in 1000 at the Battle of Stiklestad and so either the chronology given by the saga is wrong or the meeting (and the order to evangelise Norway) cannot have taken place.
9. The monopods, a tribe who shade themselves from the sun with their single large foot, are first mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus in the sixth century BC, and then by the Roman naturalist Pliny in the first century AD (Natural History, book 7, 2), who described them as being able to leap with surprising agility. The tradition was carried on by the encyclopaedist Isidore of Seville in his Etmyologiae in the seventh century (book XI, Iii, 21) and was still current in the fourteenth century, when it occurs in the Travels of John Mandeville. Doubtless the composer of the saga had some such reference in mind, rather than any direct observation of a genuine one-footed tribe.
10. The range of estimates is from 1005 to about 1013, but 1005 is surely too soon after the initial discovery of Vinland by Leif Eiriksson.
11. Saga of the Greenlanders, chapter 6
12. The word used in the saga is búnyt, which could refer to milk, although in this case the image of them devouring it makes less sense, so it must be something more solid, like butter or cheese.
13. After the collapse of the Vinland venture, Snorri Thorfinsson is said to have been taken back to Iceland, where he inherited the family farm at Glaumbaer in Greenland after the deaths of Karlsefni and Guðrið, and had two children, a son named Thorgeir and a daughter named Hallfrid. His descendants were said to have included several of the early bishops of Iceland. The next recorded European child to be born in the Americas was Martín de Arguëlles in the Spanish colony at San Agustín, Florida, in 1566/7.
14. Saga of the Greenlanders, chapter 7
15. The Blessed Isles are said to be on the ‘left side of Mauretania’ close to where the sun sets, and the hill ridges are covered with grape vines, while, instead of weeds, the island spontaneously sprouts harvest crops and herbs. See The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, book XIV, chapter vi.8 (translated by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, Oliver Berghof, Cambridge 2006).
16. Anne-Stine Ingstad, The Norse Discovery of America, vol. 2, p. 220
17. The children’s names are not given, although their mother’s name is said to be Vaetilldi and their father Uvaegi. Some attempts have been made to identify the skraeling language on the basis of this tenuous evidence. Gwyn Jones, The Norse Atlantic Saga, p. 212.
18. Birthe L. Clausen (ed.), Viking Voyages to North America (Roskilde 1993), p. 5. C.C. Rafn, Antiquitates Americanæ, sive Scriptores septentrionales rerum ante-Columbianarum in America (Copenhagen 1837).
19. See p. 178 above.
20. He was taking time out between his resignation from Bowdoin College, Brunswick, and his assumption of the post as Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard.
21. Letter to Stephen Longfellow, 20 September 1835 (in The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, edited by Andrew Hilen, Cambridge, Mass., 1966, p. 515)
22. See F. W. Putnam, Notes & News, American Anthropologist, new series, vol. 3, no. 2 (April–June 1901), pp. 387–96
23. ‘Supplement to the Antiquitates Americanae’ by C. C. Rafn in Mémoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord (Copenhagen 1838–9), pp. 369–83
24. Benedict Arnold, who was governor of Rhode Island three times between 1663 and 1678, was the great-grandfather of the similarly named American Revolutionary general. A great storm destroyed Newport’s wooden windmill in 1675, and it is supposed that Arnold built the Newport Tower in stone as a sturdier replacement. For a discussion of the origins of the Tower, see Philip Means, The Newport Tower (New York 1942). There is also a marginally earlier reference in a deed by Nathaniel Dickens (in which he transfers land for the building of a Jewish cemetery) mentioning ‘the old stone mill’, which could conceivably also refer to the Newport Tower. The date of this, February 1677 – as opposed to that of Arnold’s will (December 1677) – does not, however, materially push back the known dates for the Tower’s existence. Horace F. Silliman, The Newport Tower: The English Solution, New England Antiquities Research Association (November 1979). William S. Godfrey Jr in ‘The Archaeology of the Old Stone Mill in Newport, Rhode Island’, American Antiquity, vol. XVII (1951–2), pp. 120–9, concludes from artefacts found in the construction trenches of the tower that it must have been built no later than the mid-seventeenth century and was probably originally a watch-tower that was adapted by Arnold in 1675–7 as a mill.
25. The Chesterton structure was built in 1632, some three years before Benedict Arnold came to America, but it may only have been adapted for use as a mill after 1700. See Means, The Newport Tower, pp. 188–92.
26. ‘True or False – fake traces of the Vikings in America’ by Keld Hansen in Clausen, Viking Voyages to North America, pp. 83–9
27. There are, of course, stone buildings in Greenland (wood, except for driftwood, was almost unavailable as a building material), but the stone churches at Hvalsey and elsewhere, the stone feasting halls and barns are not paralleled by any large stone towers of the Newport type.
28. Although the full range is 1410–1930, the C-14 dating can be somewhat imprecise and the 1410 date cannot be taken as a firm one. Johannes Hertz, ‘The History and Mystery of the Old Stone Mill’ in Journal of the Newport Historical Society, vol. 68, part 2 (1997).
29. Two Venetian brothers, Nicoló and Antonio Zeno, are said to have set off on a voyage across the Atlantic around 1380. They are said to have been shipwrecked on an island named Frislanda, and Nicoló became a pilot for ‘Zichmni’, the ruler of the nearby kingdom of Porlanda. In a series of subsequent voyages with Zichmni, the brothers sailed west to Icaria, where the inhabitants would not let them land, and to Engrouelanda, where they did make landfall. The whole account is probably a conflation of other travellers’ tales combined with real accounts of Iceland and the Northern Isles of Scotland. Unfortunately for the brothers’ credibility, in 1394, at the selfsame time they were supposed to be exploring the western Atlantic, Nicoló was on trial for embezzlement in Venice. See Andrea di Robilant, Venetian navigators: The voyages of the Zen brothers to the Far North (London 2011).
30. Gavin Menzies, 1421 (London 2002)
31. In the 1880s more than 186,000 Norwegians and 475,000 Swedes came to the United States, so that by 1900 first-generation migrants from those countries represented 8.8 per cent of the population (as against 0.7 per cent fifty years earlier). A Century of Population Growth: From the First Census of the United States to the Twelfth 1790–1900 (Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Washington 1909) and Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (Harvard 1981).
32. See p. 133 above for Viking ship replicas in general.
33. After a rather forlorn voyage to New Orleans following the end of the Fair, the Viking was returned to Illinois, where it was generally forgotten until its transfer to the Lincoln Memorial Park in 1920. There it languished, with periodic renovations funded by the local Scandinavian-American community, but generally falling into a state of parlous disrepair, until in 1993 the authority responsible for Chicago’s parks announced that a planned redevelopment of the Lincoln Park meant the ship’s eviction. A rescue council was established and the Viking was transferred to Good Templar Park in Geneva, Illinois. However, attempts to have a proper museum set up for this unique ship foundered and there the vessel has remained.
34. Who held the chair of Comparative Linguistics and Old Norse at Christiania.
35. In fact the original says ‘Goths’, presumably referring to Gotland, culturally a part of Sweden. But to translate it as Goths invites additional confusion with the fourth- and fifth-century Germanic barbarian Goths (such as Alaric, the sacker of Rome).
36. Wahlgren, The Kensington Stone: A Mystery Solved (Madison, Wisconsin 1958). p. 3.
37. See p. 188 above.
38. See p. 111 above.
39. See Wahlgren, The Kensington Stone, p. 115.
40. The Sveriges Historia by Oskar Montelius. See Wahlgren, The Kensington Stone, p. 129.
41. At one point there were some twenty-four runic inscriptions from New England, West Virginia, Nova Scotia and Ontario, which were all said to be evidence of Viking activity in those areas. See ‘True or False – fake traces of the Vikings in America’ by Keld Hansen in Clausen, Viking Voyages to North America.
42. See Richard Nielsen & Scott F. Wolter, The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence (2005), which amongst other things also suggests a connection between the Kensington Runestone and the Templar crusading order.
43. See Seaver, Maps, Myths and Men, pp. 75–6.
44. R. A. Skelton, Thomas E. Marston & George D. Painter (eds), The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation (New Haven, Conn. 1965), pp. 139–40
45. See p. 184 above.
46. Kirsten Seaver in Maps, Myths and Men, pp. 91–3, suggests this may have been the collection of Luís Fortuny Bieto, a Madrid bookseller.
47. Skelton, Master & Painter (eds), The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation
48. For the type of script, see ‘The Manuscript: History and Description’ by Thomas E. Marston in The Vinland Map and the Tartar Relation. For the anomalies in the script, see Seaver, Maps, Myths and Men, p. 172.
49. See ‘Analysis of Pigmentary Materials on the Vinland Map and Tartar Relation by Raman Microprobe Spectroscopy’ by Katherine L. Brown & Robin J. H. Clark in Analytical Chemistry (August 2002).
50. The circumnavigation was not achieved until 1997–2001 by an expedition led by Lonnie Dupré, which covered just over half the distance in dog-sledges and the rest using kayaks.
51. See Fitzhugh & Ward, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, p. 265.
52. Seaver, The Frozen Echo, p. 28
53. Possibly Elymus virginicus; Fitzhugh & Ward, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, p. 234
54. Historia Norwegiae, book I, chapter 12
55. See p. 179 above.
56. Steven L. Cox, ‘Palaeo-Eskimo Occupations of the North Labrador Coast’ in Arctic Anthropology, vol. 15, no. 2 (1978), and Anne Stine Ingstad, The Norse Discovery of America, vol. 2, p. 289
57. R. McGhee, ‘Contact between Native North Americans and the Medieval Norse: A Review of the Evidence’ in American Antiquity 49.1 (1984), pp. 4–26
58. ‘The 1976 Excavations at L’Anse aux Meadows’ in Research Bulletin of Parks Canada, no. 67 (1977)
59. See ‘L’Anse aux Meadows, the Western Outpost’ by Birgitta Linderoth Wallace in Viking Voyages to North America, pp. 30–42
60. See Fitzhugh & Ward, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, p. 214
61. Fitzhugh & Ward, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, p. 215, and ‘The Discovery of Vinland’ by Birgitta Wallace in The Viking World (edited by Stefan Brink), p. 610
62. See Niels Lynnerup, ‘The Greenland Norse: A biological-anthropological study’ in Meddelelser om Grønland: Man & Society 24, pp. 1–149
63. For a discussion of saga scholars’ attempts to locate the Vinland settlements, see ‘The Quest for Vinland in Saga Scholarship’ by Gísli Sigurdsson in Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (Washington 2000), pp. 232–7. See also Niels Vinding, The Viking Discovery of America 950–1008 (translated by Birgitte Moye-Vinding, New York 2005), and Farley Mowat, Westviking, for St Paul’s Bay, and Páll Bergthórsson, Vinlándsgátan (Reykjavik 1997).
64. See Erik Andersen & Claus Malmros, ‘Ship’s Parts Found in the Viking Settlements in Greenland’ in Clausen, Viking Voyages to North America, pp. 118–22.
65. See p. 178 above.
Chapter 7: Furthest East
1. See Heiki Balk, ‘The Vikings and the Eastern Baltic’ in The Viking World (edited by Stefan Brink, London 2008), pp. 485–95.
2. As recounted by Snorri Sturluson in the Heimskringla.
3. For a discussion of the various Normanist and anti-Normanist arguments and camps, see H. Paskiewicz, The Origins of Russia (London 1954), pp. 109–32, and ‘The Varangian Problem: a brief history of the controversy’ in Varangian Problems (Copenhagen 1970), pp. 7–20.
4. Signs of Scandinavian influence in Grobin include the finding of picture stones, similar to those produced on Gotland, which appear in graves, together with male belt-buckles and female brooches of Scandinavian type. The presence of the last in particular indicates that this was a fully fledged colony, as opposed to an ephemeral trading stop or fortified point inhabited exclusively by merchants or warriors.
5. See The Annals of St-Bertin (translated and edited by Janet Nelson, Manchester 1991), p. 44.
6. See H. R. Ellis Davidson, The Viking Road to Byzantium (London 1976), p. 59, and Simon Franklin & Jonathan Shepard, The Emergence of Rus (London 1996), p. 28.
7. Liutprand went on an embassy to the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus in 949, when he would have had ample time to observe Vikings serving in the imperial army. He later wrote up his experiences in the Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana. The theory that the Rus were originally an Alan sub-group was put forward by George Vernadsky (see The Origins of Russia (Westport, Conn., 1975), p. 180). This group, according to Vernadsky, established the first Rus khaganate at Tmutorakan on the mouth of the Kuban River, and eventually moved northwards towards Kiev and merged with Vikings coming from Sweden, who took on the Rus name.
8. For the history of the Varangian Guard in Constantinople, see p. 291 below.
9. Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium, p. 7. The word has also been connected by Russian scholars to the Turkish word varmak, meaning walk (and hence ‘wanderers’).
10. Although probably not by Nestor, a monk from the Pechersk monastery at Kiev, to whom it was traditionally ascribed. The chronicle exists in various redactions, most notably the Laurentian and Hypatian. See Russian Primary Chronicle, Laurentian Text (translated and edited by Samuel Hazzard Cross & Olgerd P. Sherbowitz-Wetzor, Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 5–15.
11. Russian Primary Chronicle, pp. 58–9.
12. See ‘Ninth-century Dirham Hoards from European Russia, a preliminary analysis’ by Thomas S. Noonan in M. A. S. Blackburn & D. M. Metcalf (eds), Viking Age Coinage in the Northern Lands, BAR International Series 122 (Oxford 1981), pp. 47–118.
13. Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 101–3
14. Of around 1,000 graves, only sixty yielded artefacts that were certainly identified as Scandinavian, although in many, being cremation graves, organic material would have perished when burnt. A detailed examination of the evidence in Viking Rus – Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe, Wladyslaw Duczko (Brill 2004), pp. 160–80, suggests that items such as an equal-armed brooch of undoubted Norse provenance, pennanular brooches and a number of swords of Scandinavian type and bridle pieces attest to a very strong Scandinavian presence.
15. Although he may have based this on earlier sources. See Ellis Davison, The Viking Road to Byzantium, pp. 63–4.
16. Ibn Rusteh, see Les Atours Précieux (translated into French by Gaston Wiet, Cairo 1955), p. 163
17. The name of this king is given in Ibn Fadlan’s account as Almish ibn Shilki Elteber. His kingdom was largely pagan, although there were some converts, and he may have sought to free himself from dependency on the Khazars by converting to Islam and so gaining a useful ally in the Baghdad caliphate. Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia, pp. 8–9.
18. Frye, Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia, p. 64
19. The Russian Primary Chronicle says this took place in 862, but as the attack on Constantinople (which is known from other sources to have occurred in 860) post-dates the brothers’ death by four years, the date in the chronicle must be wrong.
20. It is quite likely the raid was actually launched from Gorodishche, as the archaeological record suggests that Kiev was not yet a significant centre for the Rus. Franklin & Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, p. 54.
21. The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, Ar II 6 (translated by Cyril Mango, Cambridge, Mass., 1958)
22. The Homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, Ar II 36
23. The Samanids were the first native Persian dynasty to come to power after the Arab invasion of Persia. Their initial power base was around Samarkand in the 860s, and they gradually expanded east of the Caspian until they occupied Bukhara and all of Khurasan by around 900. Their empire began to fragment in the mid-tenth century under pressure from the Karakhanids and Ghaznavids, until in 992 the Karakhanid ruler Bughra Khan captured Bukhara. See ‘The Samanids’ by R. N. Frye in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4 (edited by R. N. Frye, Cambridge 1975), pp. 136–61.
24. See Ellis Davison, Viking Road to Byzantium, p. 123.
25. This was a common Byzantine stratagem for preventing ship-borne invaders from penetrating the city’s defences. It was also in use at the time of Harald Hardrada’s service in the Varangian Guard (see p. 296 below).
26. Ellis Davison, Viking Road to Byzantium, p. 126
27. The story of Oleg’s death is suspiciously close to the demise of Arrow-Odd from Halogoland, whose death was predicted by a Lapp seeress. Odd had the horse referred to in the prophecy killed and buried. Many years later, Odd returned to his old farm and saw the skull of the horse on the ground. He poked at it with a spear, and a snake slithered out and bit him on the leg, causing it to swell up from the effects of the poison. Some days later, Odd died. His story is told in Örvar-Odds Saga (available in Seven Viking Romances, translated by Herman Pálsson & Paul Edwards, London 1985).
28. The Lombard historian Liutprand of Cremona gives a figure of 1,000, but even this is probably an exaggeration.
29. For a detailed account of its use and development by the Byzantines (and theories of its composition), see J. R. Partington, A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder (Cambridge 1960).
30. Leo the Deacon, see Ellis Davison, The Viking Road to Byzantium, p. 131.
31. The bezant was a catch-all term for gold coins, and this probably equates to fifty Byzantine solidi (the gold solidus being the largest-value coin, almost 95 per cent pure gold in the mid-tenth century). Fifty solidi equated to roughly the sum needed to purchase eight Russian slaves in 944 (each one costing twenty nomismata, or around six and a half solidi). Angeliki Laiou (ed.), The Economic History of Byzantium, vol. 2 (Dumbarton Oaks 2002), p. 847.
32. This was probably about 35–40 miles downstream from Kiev. The town is not mentioned in Russian sources, but could be the same as the Uvetichi referred to in the Russian Primary Chronicle. See Constantine Porphyrogenitus: De Administrando Imperio, vol. 11 (Commentary), edited by R. J. H. Jenkins (London 1962), pp. 37–8.
33. The island is a few miles from Zaporizhia, and was probably named for the Armenian saint, Gregory the Illuminator.
34. There were possibly earlier raids, including one between 864 and 884, referred to by a thirteenth-century writer from Merv, Ibn Isfandiya, and another in 910, described by the same author when a force of sixteen Viking ships reached the Caspian.
35. See N. K. Chadwick, The Beginnings of Russian History: An Enquiry into Sources (Cambridge 1946), pp. 50–1.
36. Leo the Deacon, History, book IX, 11 (translated by Alice-Mary Talbot & Denis F. Sullivan in The History of Leo the Deacon: Byzantine Military Expansion in the Tenth Century, Dumbarton Oaks 2005)
37. There were indications in fragments of a manuscript entitled ‘Report of a Greek Toparch’, which would give a date of 962–3, but these are now regarded as a forgery. Ellis Davison, Viking Road to Byzantium, p. 138.
38. See p. 230 above.
39. See above for the description of Svyatoslav that Leo the Deacon gave on this occasion. The apparition was believed by Byzantine writers to have been St Theodore.
40. See Ellis Davison, Varangians in Russia, pp. 148–9; Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, pp. 152–5.
41. Russian Primary Chronicle (edited by Hazzard Cross & Sherbowitz-Wetzor), p. 111
42. See p. 235 above.
43. For an account of the later history of the Varangian Guard, see p. 296 below.
44. In 1015 (twice), in 1018 and again shortly thereafter, in 1019, 1024 and 1036. The only concrete number given is 1,000 for the second group recruited in 1015. See Franklin and Shepard, The Emergence of Rus, p. 203.
45. See Yngvar’s Saga, chapters 5–7 (translated by Herman Pálsson & Paul Edwards in Vikings in Russia: Yngvar’s Saga and Eymund’s Saga, Edinburgh 1989).
Chapter 8: New Empires in Britain and Scandinavia
1. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 978 in English Historical Documents, vol. 1 (London 1979)
2. Though not everyone went as far as the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, who claimed that the queen had herself delivered the fatal blow to her stepson. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, book V.27 (see translation by Diana Greenway, Oxford 1996, p. 325).
3. It is also a pun on his name, Aethelred meaning ‘of noble counsel’, and did not in fact come into common use until the twelfth century, well after the king’s death.
4. See p. 280 below for the evolving Norman policy towards Scandinavia.
5. As the The Saga of Olaf Tryggvason does, although this is unlikely in fact to have been the case, and the ancestry was ‘manufactured’ to give Olaf’s claim to the Norwegian throne greater credibility.
6. See Donald Scragg, The Return of the Vikings: The Battle of Maldon 991 (Stroud 2006), pp. 80–1. Colchester was inland up the River Colne and had strong defences, which might explain Olaf’s decision to attack Maldon rather than the ostensibly richer prize.
7. There are a number of other islands in the Blackwater, some of which have causeways, such as Osea, which could conceivably be the site of the battle, but the balance of evidence suggests the traditional attribution, to Northey Island, is the correct one. See Scragg, The Return of the Vikings, pp. 131–2.
8. See Scragg, Return of the Vikings, p. 91.
9. As well as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and ‘The Battle of Maldon’ poem, there is the ‘Winchester obit’, written in a calendar by a monk at Winchester; a chronicle by John of Worcester, which gives the name of the Viking leader as Guthmund; the Vita Oswaldi, a life of St Oswald; and two twelfth-century monastic chronicles, the Liber Eliensis, written in Ely, and the Chronicon Abbatiae Rameseinsis, composed in Ramsay.
10. ‘Battle of Maldon’ poem, line 83
11. ‘Battle of Maldon’ poem, line 89
12. This was apparently still in place when the body was moved to the north wall of the abbey’s choir in 1154. Scragg, The Return of the Vikings, p. 155.
13. See ‘The Battle of Maldon: Fact or Fiction’ by D. G. Scragg in The Battle of Maldon, Fiction or Fact (edited by Janet Cooper, London 1993), pp. 19–31.
14. Ann Williams, Aethelred the Unready, the Ill-Counselled King (London 2003), p. 45. In revenge, Aethelred is said to have had Aelfric’s son blinded the following year.
15. Ian Howard, Svein Forkbeard’s Invasions and the Danish Conquest of England 991–1017 (Woodbridge 2003), p. 9
16. See p. 258 for an account of the Battle of Svold.
17. See p. 280 below for how this marriage alliance ultimately led to William the Conqueror’s claim to the English throne.
18. The skin (and another from Copford Church), when examined in 1973, showed some signs of having the same structure as human skin. The church, however, was founded by King Cnut of Denmark after his accession to the English throne in 1016, and it does not seem likely that he would countenance the skin of one of his dead compatriots being used as a door covering for his own ecclesiastical foundation. Another ‘Dane-skin’ at Westminster Abbey proved to be cowhide. See “Dane-Skins”: Excoriation in Early England’ by M. J. Swanton in Folklore, vol. 87, no. 1 (1976), pp. 21–28.
19. ‘Sprouting Like Cockle Amongst the Wheat’: The St Brice’s Day Massacre and the Isotopic Analysis of Human Bones from St John’s College, Oxford’ by A. Pollard, P. Ditchfield, E. Piva, S. Wallis, C. Falys & S. Ford in Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 31 (1), (2012), pp. 83–102.
20. William of Malmesbury adds the detail that Svein’s sister Gunnhild, who had married Pallig, an English count, was among the victims, but this probably relates to a later killing, around 1013. Anne Williams, Aethelred the Unready, p. 4.
21. The ‘A’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is somewhat kinder, with its account showing the English putting up a stouter (if equally fruitless) resistance, and the portrayal of Ealdorman Ulfcytel of East Anglia’s payment of tribute to the Vikings as a perfectly reasonable solution to the situation, rather than the base cowardice of which Aelfric is accused. Ann Williams, Aethelred the Unready, pp. 50–1.
22. Aelfhelm came from a Mercian family who rose to prominence in the 990s (his brother Wulfric founded Burton Abbey). He became Ealdorman of Northumbria in 993.
23. A hide was the unit of measurement denoting the amount of land that could be ploughed by a single ploughman. It varied between 60 and 240 acres, until it was standardised in the Domesday Book as 120 acres.
24. He later served under Cnut, and also drafted law-codes for his new master. See ‘Archbishop Wulfstan: State-Builder’ by Patrick Wormald in Wulfstan of York, Proceedings of the Second Alcuin Conference (edited by Matthew Townend, Turnhout 2004), pp. 9–28.
25. See Anne Hill, Aethelred the Unready, p. 91. Thorkill is also said, in saga tradition, to have been one of the leaders of the Jomsvikings. See p. 93 above.
26. The exact date of the Sermo is unknown, and it may also date to the period after Svein Forkbeard’s death and the recall of Aethelred to England, acting as a kind of manifesto for the way in which the restored king should rule.
27. The Saga of Olaf Haraldsson contains a skaldic verse by Ottar Svarte, which contains the lines ‘London Bridge is broken down. Gold is won, and bright renown.’
28. Alistair Campbell (ed.), Encomium Emmae Reginae, book I.4 (Cambridge 1998)
29. Aethelred’s three eldest sons were Aethelstan, Edmund and Eadred, whom he had with his first wife Aelgifu. By 1013 they were all in their mid-twenties and plausible candidates for the throne. By this time, however, Aethelred had two more sons by Emma, Alfred and Edward (who later became king as ‘the Confessor’), who might in time pose a threat to their elder brothers in terms of the royal succession. By 1013 Aethelstan appears to have been sick with an unspecified illness and died sometime before 1015. His sickness probably explains the weakness of those who might have opposed Aethelred, but nonetheless wanted an English candidate on the throne.
30. Higham, The Death of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 60. Williams, Aethelred the Unready, p. 122, gives 3 February.
31. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1014
32. The witangemot was an ad hoc group of royal advisers, containing notables such as the two archbishops, other leading bishops, the ealdormen and other important thegns. It met as and when required by the king (in Aethelred’s time it gathered some twenty-three times between the first meeting at Kingston in 979 and the final one at Oxford in 1015). It also had an important role in potentially disrupted successions (such as that of Edmund or of Harald Godwinson in 1066) when its recognition of a candidate for the throne could be decisive.
33. The chronicler Thietmar of Merseburg records the date of Cnut’s arrival as July; the May date is that given in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
34. The precise location of the battle site is disputed, with the two main candidates being Ashingdon in south-east Essex and Ashdon to the north-west. See Warwick Rodwell, ‘The Battle of Assandun and its Memorial Church’ in The Battle of Maldon (edited by Janet Cooper), pp 127–158.
35. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Winchester version, and also Higham, Death of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 78
36. He may have married Aelfgifu without Christian rites, and so the ‘second’ marriage was canonically acceptable. Harold Godwinson had a similar relationship with Edith Swan-neck – more Danico ‘according to the Danish custom’.
37. This levy was referred to as heregeld (‘army tax’), a tax first imposed in 1012 as an annual due to pay for defences against (and tribute payments to) the Danes. Previous sums raised to bribe the Viking armies were referred to as gafol. Only later did these two taxes become conflated and referred to as Danegeld. See ‘The Collection of Danegeld and Heregeld in the Reigns of Aethelred II and Cnut’ by M. K. Lawson in The English Historical Review, vol. 99, no. 393 (October, 1984), pp. 721–38.
38. Eadwig was buried at Tavistock in Devon, and although it is not certain that Cnut had him killed, it is most likely. See Higham, The End of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 89.
39. For an account of this battle, see p. 262 below.
40. For more on Godwine, see p. 283 below.
41. Although there was a campaign against the Welsh in 1039, in which Leofric’s brother, Edwin, died in battle against Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the ruler of Gwynedd.
42. Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1042
43. See p. 301 below.
44. Timothy Bolton, The Empire of Cnut the Great, Conquest and the Consolidation of Power in Northern Europe in the Early Eleventh Century (Brill 2009), pp. 136–50
45. He was the son of Cnut’s sister, Estrid, and Ulf (who had rebelled against Cnut in 1027).
46. See p. 93 above.
47. See Torgrim Titlestad, Viking Norway, Personalities, Power and Politics (translated by Stephen R. Parsons, Hafsfjord 2008), pp 133–34.
48. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives a figure of 16,000 pounds of silver, while the actual treaty with Aethelred specifies 22,000, which may include various regional gelds paid in addition to the initial sum.
49. See Titlestad, Viking Norway, p. 110.
50. Gwynn Jones, History of the Vikings, p. 133
51. See the account in Titlestad, Viking Norway, pp. 162–6. There are some indications that there was already a significant Christian presence in Vestland in the decades before 996.
52. Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg Bremen, book 2, chapter xl (translated by Francis J. Tschan)
53. Historia Norwegiae, book XVII, pp. 33–42
54. See p. 129 above for details of this vessel.
55. See Titlestad, Viking Norway, p. 245.
56. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, History of St Olav, chapter 1
57. See Heimskringla, History of St Olav, chapters 3–4
58. According to a skaldic poem by Ottar the Black, Olaf ensured the ‘return of tracts of land’.
59. According to Saxo Grammaticus, however, Olaf actually cooperated with Cnut initially, and the cause of the split between them was that the Danish king seduced Olaf’s mistress Alfiva (see Titlestad, Viking Norway, p. 251), while yet another account (The Saga of Olav the Holy) related that Cnut asked for Olaf’s help in taking London, and in return promised to support any attempt Olaf might make on the Norwegian throne.
60. English Historical Documents, vol. 1 (c.500–1042), edited by Dorothy Whitelock (London 1979), p. 338.
61. His wife, Astrid, was Yaroslav’s sister-in-law. She was the daughter of Olof Skötkonung of Sweden, and her sister Ingegerd had married Yaroslav.
62. Whilst the saga tradition gives 29 July as the date, Snorri Sturluson also says that the battle coincided with a solar eclipse, and this can only have taken place on 31 August.
63. Phillip Line, Kingship and State Formation in Sweden 1130–1290 (Brill 2007), pp. 370–1
64. Line, Kingship and State Formation in Sweden, pp. 103–4
65. See p. 72 above.
66. Tom Muir, Orkney in the Sagas, The Story of the Earldom of Orkney as told in the Icelandic Sagas (Kirkwall 2005), p. 17
67. See p. 29 above for more on the ritual of the blood-eagle.
68. See William P. L. Thomson, A New History of Orkney (Edinburgh 2008), pp. 64–67, for a discussion.
69. See p. 823 below for an account of Clontarf.
70. See Muir, Orkney in the Sagas, pp. 23–4.
71. For an account of the battle, see p. 304 below.
72. See p. 325 for more details of Magnus’s expedition.
73. The story of the exile at Henry’s court appears only in the Longer Magnus Saga, a thirteenth-century expansion of the Orkneyinga Saga’s account of Magnus’s life. New History of Orkney, pp. 92–3.
74. Orkneyinga Saga, chapter 50 (translated by Alexander Burt Taylor, London 1938).
75. Many of these are recorded in the Shetlands, where there was no such strong official opposition to Magnus’s sainthood. Muir, Orkney in the Sagas, p. 72.
76. Rögnvald had only secured the earldom the year before, see p. 328.
77. For an account of the discovery of the relics and their analysis, see John Mooney, ‘Discovery of Relics in St Magnus Cathedral’ in Proceedings of the Orkney Antiquarian Society 3 (1924–5), p. 73.
Chapter 9: The Last Vikings
1. For a discussion of the theories about his origin (including an outlandish suggestion by Dudo of Saint-Quentin that he was the son of the ‘King of Dacia’), see ‘Rollo of Normandy’ by D. C. Douglas in The English Historical Review, vol. 57, no. 228 (October, 1942), pp. 417–36.
2. David Bates, Normandy before 1066 (London 1982), p. 8
3. Harper-Bill, A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, p. 21
4. Dudo of Saint-Quentin, Historia Normannorum, book 2, chapter 6
5. Bates, Normandy before 1066, p. 9
6. See p. 15 above.
7. The first ruler of Normandy known to have used the title Duke was Richard III. Its earliest appearance is in a charter of the abbey of Fécamp, from 1006. However, the title of Duke (or dux) was still used alongside that of Count (or comes) until the reign of Henry I (1106–35), when duke became the exclusive title of the lords of Normandy. See Bates, Normandy before 1066, pp. 148–9.
8. Harper-Bill, A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, p. 25
9. The leader of the family that would eventually displace the Carolingians in 988 and establish the Capetian dynasty, which, in one form or another, ruled France until the nineteenth century.
10. Bates, Normandy before 1066, pp. 18–19
11. ‘Les relations entre la Normandie et les colonies scandinaves des îles britanniques à la lumière des noms de lieux’ by Gillian Fellows-Jensen in Les fondations scadinaves en Occident et les débuts du duché Normandie: Colloque de Cerisy-la-Salle (25–29 septembre 2002), edited by Pierre Baudin (Caen 2005), pp. 215–39
12. Harper-Bill, A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, p. 28
13. Bates, Normandy before 1066, p. 22
14. See p. 251 above.
15. William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi, i.41
16. Higham, The Death of Anglo-Saxon England, pp. 156–8
17. There is an alternative theory, since the account by William of Poitiers is late, and not supported by any of the contemporary chroniclers. According to this theory, there may have been no envoy sent to Rome and no papal sanction for the invasion of England, but the visit of papal legates in 1070 marked an ex post facto recognition of William’s right to the English throne (and enabled him to depose Archbishop Stigand, an unwelcome reminder of the pre-Conquest church hierarchy). Harriet Harvey Wood, The Battle of Hastings (London 2008), pp. 140–1.
18. See p. 286 below for the deposition of Tostig.
19. David C. Douglas, William the Conqueror (London 1964), pp. 194–5
20. See p. 304 below.
21. Emma Mason, The House of Godwine: History of a Dynasty (London 2004), p. 32
22. Higham, The Death of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 121
23. Svein was further in royal disfavour, having been exiled for kidnapping the Abbess of Leominster. He had slipped back to England in an effort to restore his position, and a failed attempt to get Beorn to intercede with Edward on his behalf led to the fatal kidnapping.
24. Higham, The Death of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 134
25. Aelfgar was exiled by the royal council in 1055. It is not exactly clear why, but most probably he was simply removed on trumped-up charges of treason to eliminate a potential rival to Harold. Higham, The Death of Anglo-Saxon England, p. 139, and Peter Rex, Harold II: The Doomed Saxon King (Stroud 2005), pp. 92–3.
26. Stigand’s predecessor, Robert of Jumièges, was still alive and had not been removed by the Pope, so technically Stigand could not succeed him as archbishop. In addition, Stigand conjointly held the see of Winchester, which he did not relinquish – another infringement of canon law that led to his excommunication by successive popes, including Leo IX, Victor II and Stephen IX. As a result, Stigand did not receive the pallium (the broad band worn around the archbishop’s neck) that was the symbol of archiepiscopal authority and only got this from Benedict X, who was briefly Pope in 1058, before being deposed the next year (again casting doubt on Stigand’s legitimacy).
27. Vita Edwardi Regis, book 1, chapter 7 (edited and translated by Frank Barlow in The Life of King Edward who rests at Westminster, Oxford 1992)
28. See p. 301 below.
29. Vita Edwardi Regis, book II, chapter 11 (translated by F. Barlow, Oxford 1992). The woman in question was Harold’s mother Gytha, the daughter of Earl Godwine.
30. This appointment took place sometime between October 1065 and spring 1067, so might possibly have occurred during the reign of Edward the Confessor or even that of William the Conqueror.
31. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, History of St Olav, chapter 76
32. See p. 262 above.
33. Olaf had mediated between Thorfinn and Brusi, two sons of Earl Sigurd of Orkney, and had given each of them one-third of the Orkneys to rule, retaining the final third for himself, which he then entrusted to Earl Brusi to govern as his regent. Olaf kept Brusi’s young son, Rögnvald Brusason, as a hostage against his father’s good behaviour. So it was that Rögnvald (to Harald Sigurdsson’s great fortune) came to be at Olaf’s court. See Barbara Crawford, Scandinavian Scotland, pp. 76–77, and p. 270 above, for the history of Orkney in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
34. There are indications that they may not have. John Marsden, Harald Hardrada, pp. 66–8, argues that Rögnvald’s previous stay as part of Olaf Haraldsson’s retinue in Novgorod made him a more familiar figure to the court and he may have fought as part of Yaroslav’s druzhina, his personal retinue. Harald, instead, may have been attached to the forces commanded by Eilif Rögnvaldson, the son of Rögnvald Ulfsson, who had come to Russia as part of the escort bringing the Swedish princess Ingigerd to Yaroslav in 1019.
35. Sigfús Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium: An Aspect of Byzantine military history (translated, revised and rewritten by Benedikt S. Benedikz, Cambridge 1978), pp. 54–5
36. Marsden, Harald Hardrada, p. 70
37. They were finally dealt with by Yaroslav in 1036, when he raised a huge army (which was said to include Scandinavians) and crushed a Pecheneg host that was attempting to besiege Kiev. The Pecheneg confederacy crumbled, but it was all to no avail, as before long they were replaced in their role as scourge of the steppelands by a new Turkic nomadic group, the Kipchaks (or Cumans).
38. See p. 231 above. The suggestion in the Morkinskinna version of Harald’s Saga that he reached the Byzantine empire by making a wide arc in entirely the wrong direction, travelling via northern Germany and Lombardy in northern Italy, is probably a misreading of Harald’s later role in putting down a Norman revolt in 1040 in southern Italy (which was also referred to as Longobardia or Lombardy, from the Lombard duchies that had been established there in the eighth century).
39. Quoted by Snorri Sturluson in the Heimskringla, King Harald’s Saga, chapter 2.
40. Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium, p. 36
41. Or 1153 nomismata. In exchange for this fee, the guardsman received a roga, or fee, of 44 nomismata a year, meaning that it would take nearly twenty-seven years to recoup the initial investment. The roga, however, would have been supplemented by imperial gifts and the plunder from any expeditions in which the unit took part. Ellis Davidson, Viking Road to Byzantium, p. 181.
42. Vladimir also had to promise to convert to Christianity, a stipulation that he duly fulfilled. When Anna travelled to Kiev, she probably brought in her entourage Thorvald Far-Traveller, the former missionary bishop of Iceland, whose violent temper had got him expelled by the Icelanders in 981. See p. 160 above.
43. The rebellion was finally put down in 1018. Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium, p. 51
44. Ellis Davidson, Viking Road to Byzantium, p. 182
45. This work is incorporated in the larger Strategicon of Cecaumenos, which includes a great deal of advice to emperors and was probably written when Michael VII was emperor (1071–7).
46. Although this has sometimes been interpreted to mean a campaign in North Africa, it is more likely to mean the expedition to Asia Minor.
47. Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium, p. 66
48. See p. 318 below.
49. The story is later, however, and first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae around 1140. For a detailed discussion of the genesis of this legend, see ‘The Legend of the Incendiary Birds’ by Helen Cam in English Historical Review, vol. 31, no. 121 (January 1916), pp. 98–101.
50. See p. 83 above. For the various appearances of the bird and funeral story, see Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium, pp. 71–3.
51. Although the Flateyjarbók manuscript containing Harald’s Saga says they were held in a tower, which later became a tourist attraction for visiting Scandinavians. Ellis Davidson, Viking Road to Byzantium, p. 222.
52. Heimskringla, History of Harald Hardrada, chapters 14–15
53. See Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium, p. 100, and Ellis Davidson, Viking Road to Byzantium, p. 228. There are also indications in Icelandic sources of priests who came to Iceland whose doctrines were enticingly more lax than those of the official missionaries sponsored by Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg. The Icelandic law-code, the Grágás, also makes reference to bishops who did not know the Latin tongue, and who were probably either Armenian or Greek.
54. Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium, p. 110.
55. Geoffrey of Maleterre specifically states that there were English warriors on the Byzantine side, while a little later Anna Comnena refers to Varangians as having come from ‘Thule’, a place she says had formerly belonged to the Roman empire and which could mean Britain. Blöndel, The Varangians of Byzantium, p. 141.
56. Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium, p. 156
57. Blöndal, The Varangians of Byzantium, pp. 231–3
58. See John Marsden, Harald Hardrada, The Warrior’s Way (Stroud 2004), p. 140
59. See p. 238 above.
60. For the Roskilde ships, see p. 132 above.
61. Harald had sailed with a larger fleet initially, but when Svein failed to turn up at the appointed battle site on the Gaut Elf River, the Norwegian presumed that his Danish adversary had reneged on their agreement and sent part of his own force home.
62. Marsden, Harald Hardrada, pp. 188–9
63. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, King Harald’s Saga, chapter 79
64. Vegetius, Epitoma Re Militaris 1.9. See Vegetius, Epitome of Military Science (translated by N. P. Milner, 2nd edition, Liverpool 1996).
65. Heimskringla, King Harald’s Saga (translated by Magnus Magnusson & Hermann Pálsson, London 1976)
66. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, King Harald’s Saga, chapter 87
67. This banner, Landeyðuna, was Hardrada’s most cherished possession, possibly acquired during his service in the Varangian Guard. After Harald fell on the battlefield of Stamford Bridge, the standard was taken up by Eystein Orri, who led a hopeless last stand. It is possible that the Am Bratach Sidhe (‘Fairy Flag’) held at Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye by the Clan Macleod could be none other than ‘Landwaster’, though the stories that swirl around it tell of a gift from the fairy folk or, more prosaically, of it being brought back from a crusade. Yet the Clan Macleod traces its ancestry back to Helga, the sister of Godred Crovan, King of Man, who fought at Stamford Bridge and was one of those who survived. See John Marsden, Harald Hardrada, pp. 231–3.
68. Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, King Harald’s Saga, chapter 91
69. For berserks, see p. 29 above. Snorri’s King Harald’s Saga says that the English retreat was a feint, whereas the versions of the saga in Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna and Flateyjarbók suggest that it was a counter-attack.
70. Fagrskinna, pp. 140–1
71. Recorded in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, The Saga of Harald Hardrada
72. Ordericus Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, book III, ii.144 (translated by Thomas Forrester, London 1854)
73. See William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi, ii.10.
74. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle E text says that Harold fought the Battle of Hastings before his army had been fully assembled, while William of Malmesbury claims that his refusal to share the booty won at Stamford Bridge led to many deserting the ranks.
75. Ordericus Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, book III, chapter 14
76. On his mother’s side. Odo was the son of William’s mother Herleva and Herluin de Conteville, to whom she had been married once her position as Duke Robert’s concubine was no longer convenient. He became Bishop of Bayeux at the tender (and distinctly uncanonical) age of eighteen, and in 1067 received the earldom of Kent, making him both an ecclesiastical and secular baron of great power.
77. Michael J. Lewis, The Real World of the Bayeux Tapestry (Stroud 2008), pp. 7–9
78. William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi, ii.10
79. As William of Poitiers claims, in Gesta Guillelmi, ii.14.
80. See Lawson, The Battle of Hastings, p. 71. The event is referred to by Henry of Huntingdon, but also by William of Poitiers and the Chanson.
81. The scene in the Bayeux Tapestry which depicts the deaths of Gyrth and Leofwine is shown at about this point in the battle.
82. See Lawson, The Battle of Hastings, pp. 226–32.
83. See Lawson, The Battle of Hastings, p. 228. There is a yet further possibility, from stitch-holes on the back of the Tapestry, that the second figure also had an arrow in his skull. See Brooks & Walker in The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry (edited by Gameson), pp. 63–92.
84. The other three are said to have been Count Eustace of Boulogne, Hugh of Ponthieu and a certain Gilfard. Lawson, The Battle of Hastings, p. 225.
85. William of Poitiers, Gesta Gullielmi, ii.23
86. Ordericus Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of England and Normandy, book III, chapter 14. Ordericus says that ‘almost 15,000’ died, but he may be referring to the whole battle and not just this one incident.
87. William of Malmesbury disagreed and stated that William had in fact returned the corpse to Gytha (and had refused any payment) and that it was later buried at Holy Cross Church at Waltham.
88. Lawson, The Battle of Hastings, p. 244
89. That in the west was led by two of Harold Godwinson’s sons, Godwine and Edmund, who had been lent ships by Diarmait mac Mail, King of Leinster. They were fairly easily seen off by Brian of Brittany and retreated to Ireland, where they died sometime in the 1080s. Another son, Ulf, was imprisoned by William and was only released on the king’s death in 1087. He is said to have supported Robert Curthose’s attempt to unseat William II Rufus in 1088, but thereafter his fate is unknown. One of Harold’s daughters, Gytha, escaped to the court of Svein Estrithsson in Denmark and was subsequently married to Vladimir II Monomakh of Kiev. One of their descendants, Isabella of France, married King Edward II of England in 1308. Given that all subsequent monarchs of England have descended from them, the blood of both Harold Godwinson and William the Conqueror flows in the veins of the current British monarch, Elizabeth II.
Edgar the Atheling led a chequered career after the failure of the 1069 rising. He escaped to Scotland, where he was for a time sheltered by Malcolm III. But William’s successful invasion of 1072 forced Malcolm to recognise his overlordship and one of the prices of peace was the expulsion of Edgar, who then took refuge at the court of Robert of Flanders, another long-term opponent of William. In 1074, he returned to Scotland, but while on a return trip to France (where Philip I had offered him some land) he was shipwrecked in England and surrendered to William’s men. He lived for ten years as a pensioner of the man who had seized his throne, and then in 1086 he received William’s permission to move to the new Norman principalities in southern Italy. After William’s death in 1087, Edgar threw in his lot with Robert Curthose and, as a result of the defeat of the 1088 uprising, was deprived of most of his lands. Edgar went back to Normandy with Robert, but was restored by William to favour and in 1097 led an invading army into Scotland on William’s behalf. He is said to have gone on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1102, and by 1106 was back in Europe and was taken prisoner at the Battle of Tinchebrai, when Henry I of England finally defeated Robert Curthose. Henry pardoned him and he died around 1125.
Chapter 10: The End of the Viking Age and the Legacy of the Vikings
1. Although isolated outposts such as Rometta (near Messina) held out as late as 965. Denis Mack Smith, Medieval Sicily 800–1713, p. 5.
2. Harald Hardrada of Norway probably also took part in this expedition during his service in the Varangian Guard. See p. 293 above.
3. Nick Webber, The Evolution of Norman Identity, p. 64, implies that this took place in 1042/3 before William’s death.
4. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter LVI (edited by J. B. Bury, London 1912)
5. Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, book I, chapter X (translated by Elizabeth A. S. Dawes, London 1928)
6. We do not actually possess the original of Amatus’s work, which was lost, but his history has been transmitted to us through a Norman-French version, the Ystoire de li Normant of the fourteenth century.
7. James William Barlow, The Normans in Southern Europe (London 1886), p. 129
8. The last to fall were Castrogiovanni in 1088 and Noto in 1091.
9. The Annals of Ulster, 980.1
10. He did not in fact last long, dying the following year (981).
11. The regalia were known as the Sword of Carlus and the Ring of Thor.
12. Njal’s Saga portrays Brodir of Man as an apostate pagan, who used sorcery to defeat his enemies. The Irish Annals, on the other hand, refer to a Brodor of York, who died in the battle, and so Brodir may not have been from Man at all. Benjamin Hudson, Viking Pirates and Christian Princes: Dynasty, Religion and Empire in the North Atlantic (Oxford 2005), pp. 98–9.
13. ‘High-kings with opposition’ by Marie Therese Flanagan in A New History of Ireland, Volume 1: Prehistoric and Early Ireland (Oxford 2005), pp. 898–900
14. Although there are many other names of Viking origin, such as Waterford, Wexford, Wicklow, Carlingford and Limerick (not to mention Dublin itself).
15. Explanations for Magnus’s curious nickname varied. Snorri Sturluson thought it was because the king had adopted a style of Gaelic dress that left the lower part of the legs bare, while Saxo Grammaticus believed it was because Magnus had once been forced to flee barefoot from an attack on him. See ‘Magnus Barelegs’ Expeditions to the West’ by Rosemary Power in Scottish Historical Review, vol. 65, no. 180, part 2 (October 1986), pp. 107–32
16. For the subsequent bloody history of Håkon and Magnus, see p. 271 above.
17. It was during this battle that Magnus Erlendsson acquired his reputation for sanctity by refusing to fight, preferring instead to recite psalms. See p. 272 above.
18. Orkneyinga Saga, chapter 108 (translated by Alexander Burt Taylor, London 1938)
19. Orkneyinga Saga, chapter 66
20. See p. 272 above.
21. Orkneyinga Saga, chapter 75
22. Orkneyinga Saga, chapter 106
23. See Muir, Orkney in the Sagas, p. 126
24. Christian had become King of Norway as well in 1450 and so inherited the Norwegian claim to Orkney and Shetland.
25. See p. 279 above.
26. See Raymond I. Page, ‘How Long did the Scandinavian Language Survive in England: The Epigraphical Evidence’ in Runes and Runic Inscriptions, pp. 181–97.
27. See Michael P. Barnes, ‘Scandinavian Languages in the Viking Age’ in Stefan Brink (ed.), The Viking World, pp. 274–81
28. Michael P. Barnes, The Norn Language of Orkney and Shetland (Lerwick 1998), p. 3
29. See p. 111 above.
30. Barnes, The Norn Language of Orkney and Shetland (Lerwick 1998), p. 11
31. Which was only actually published in 1879.
32. Barnes, The Norn Language of Orkney and Shetland (Lerwick 1998), p. 17
33. J. J. Campbell, ‘The Norse Language in Orkney in 1725’ in Scottish Historical Review 33, p. 175
34. See Barnes, The Norn Language of Orkney and Shetland, p. 26
35. The Historia de omnibus gothorum sveonumque regibus (1554) by Johannes (1488–1544) and Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (History of the Northern Peoples, 1555) by Olavus (1490–1557)
36. See p. 148 above.
37. Macpherson was best known for his ‘discovery’ in 1761 of a series of poems about the ancient Irish hero Fingal, allegedly penned by the poet Ossian. Macpherson provided ‘translations’ of these, but it soon became apparent (despite his many defenders) that the whole poetry cycle was his own forgery.
38. The journal was named after Iduna, the Norse goddess whose golden apples gave immortality to the gods.
39. Viking Tales of the North: The Sagas of Thornstein, Viking’s Son, and Fridthof the Bold (translated by Rasmus Bjorn Anderson & Jon Bjarnason, Chicago 1876), canto XV, p. 291
40. Ian Bradley, William Morris and His World (New York 1978), p. 57