SEVEN
The Sons of Death
AT THE END OF THE EIGHTH CENTURY what medieval historians called ‘a shower of hell’ burst on the Sea Kingdoms. Blown westwards across the North Sea by greed and a need for adventure, the dragon-ships were first seen by the terrified monks of Aidan’s monastery at Lindisfarne off the Northumbrian coast in 793. Roared on by their sea lords, the Vikings rowed hard for the beaches and ran their ships up above the tide-line. Jumping from the dreki, they made straight for the defenceless monastery and stole as much portable loot as they could cram onto the open decks of their ships.
A year later the Vikings rounded Cape Wrath, the turning point, and raided the northern Hebrides, where they may have attacked the coastal monasteries founded by St Donan and St Maelrubai. The converted Picts saw these places as sacred, in need of no special protection, and they must have appeared as open invitations to the pagan Vikings. In 795 they descended on lona and carried off all they could find of two centuries of gifts and enrichments. lona must have housed a large store of treasures, both as the focus for the cult of St Columba and as a focus for pilgrimage, and the Vikings knew it. They called the monks the ‘followers of White Christ’, and in turn the raiders were known as ‘the Sons of Death’.
Iona was attacked again in 798 and 802, and in 806 the Vikings slaughtered sixty-eight members of the community of brothers and lay workers. The abbot, Cellach, had no option but to make plans to abandon the island, the place made sacred by Columba and his successors. It must have been a heartbreaking decision, but the following year work began on a new inland foundation at Kells in Ireland, far from the sea. Some of Cellach’s brothers found the loss of lona impossible to bear and small groups went back, despite the danger. Some time before 825 a monk from an aristocratic background called Blathmac left Ireland to go and live at the old monastery, never to leave it. Blathmac knew the terror that would come from the sea, and he embraced it. A near contemporary account written in Reichenau in southern Germany makes it clear that the monk went to lona precisely because he realized that the Vikings would almost certainly return. Blathmac actively sought martyrdom and he was not to be disappointed. It may be that he felt a blood sacrifice in defence of the sanctity of lona and the memory of Columba, in defiance of the savagery of the raiders, might assure him of a place in glory with the saints. Nothing could have prepared Blathmac for what was to happen to him.
When the Vikings came, it was at dawn. But it was no surprise. Watchers in the night had sent the abbot advance warning and he sent away those monks whose courage failed them ‘by a footpath through regions known to them’. Screaming their war cries, the Vikings broke into the abbey precinct and slaughtered everyone they could find, except Blathmac. In search of the treasures of Columbas shrine, they questioned the monk. When he refused to tell them where it was hidden, the Vikings did a strange thing. They rounded up four of the island ponies and brought them to the monastery. Ripping off Blathmac’s habit, the Vikings threw him to the ground and tied ropes to his ankles and wrists. And then each rope was harnessed to one of the ponies. Before the animals moved the Vikings no doubt asked the terrified monk one last time where Columba’s treasure was buried. When he shook his head, they smacked the ponies hard on the backside and they tore off Blathmac’s limbs. The force probably severed his spinal cord. If it did not, then Blathmac will have died a slower and even more hideous death.
The Vikings showed an unrelenting thirst for blood. In November 869 they captured King Edmund of East Anglia and killed him with the agonies of blood-eagling. Intended as a human sacrifice to the war-god Odin, a victim was tied face-first to a stake or a pillar and the clothes torn from his back. While the pagan Vikings invoked their grisly god, a sea lord stepped forward with his sword drawn. With it he hacked Edmund’s ribs away from his spine, and while the King was still living he pulled them outwards like the wings of an eagle and then ripped out his lungs.
This was not an isolated incident. These terrible rituals were carried out in Orkney and there are records of blood-eagling in the twelfth century. The Vikings lived by such savagery, and when monkish records express repeated horror at their deeds and trembling fear of their return, they are not merely creating propaganda and exaggerating events as a result of the raiders’ fondness for attacking churches. They really were terrified. Perhaps because the dragon-ships were so fast and adaptable, consistently giving the Vikings the power of surprise, their onslaughts were truly frightening. During the summer sailing season lookouts were posted at vulnerable points, but in the grey hours before dawn it was difficult to make out shapes against the horizon, or tell the splash of oars from the play of seals or the wash of the waves on the shore. The only tell-tale sound was the rhythmic thud of wooden oars against the rowlocks, and by the time a lookout had heard that, the dragon-ship was only minutes away from rasping up the beach.
The first phase of Viking contact with the Sea Kingdoms seems to have been entirely piratical, and the raiders returned to Norway and Denmark with their portable loot. Although it is dated much later, in the thirteenth century, and tells of a man based not in Norway but in Orkney, this passage gives a good account of how these men thought of their work:
This is how Svein used to live. Winter he would spend at home on Gairsay, where he entertained some eighty men at his own expense. His drinking hall was so big, there was nothing in Orkney to compare with it. In the spring he had more than enough to occupy him, with a great deal of seed to sow which he saw to carefully himself. Then when that job was done, he would go off plundering in the Hebrides and in Ireland on what he called his ‘spring trip’, then back home just after mid-summer, where he stayed until the cornfields had been reaped and the grain was safely in. After that he would go off raiding again, and never came back till the first month of winter was ended. This he used to call his ‘autumn trip’.
When men embarked on these trips the younger and less wealthy might take only an axe or a spear, hoping to acquire more weapons or the means to acquire them. A sea lord might also carry a sword, bow and arrows and a shield. When Vikings put to sea they arranged their shields in a characteristic way on the gunwales of the ship in an attempt to keep dry in choppy weather. Usually round, each had a metal boss in the middle with a bar behind it for holding and protecting the hand. Swords were one-handed and double-edged for slashing. Very little Viking body armour has yet been found and no helmets with horns sticking out of either side. These were nineteenth-century Wagnerian products of the fertile imaginations of theatrical costume designers. Such helmets as have been turned up are rounded, and some are made of leather rather than iron.
The first waves of raiders were eventually followed by settlers who brought ploughshares as well as swords and who dealt in trade as well as blood. Shetland and Orkney were first landfall for those sailing ‘west-over-sea’ from Scandinavia; they became the mostly intensively colonized of all the islands, and were the heartland of the Viking sea kingdom. Neither remote nor isolated, they were the hub for voyages to the north, west and south out of Norway and Sweden. Both archipelagos stayed in Norwegian hands until 1468 when it was arranged that James III of Scotland should marry Margaret, daughter of Christian I, King of Denmark and Norway. As part of her dowry the Danes pledged Orkney and Shetland to the Scottish crown, but actual sovereignty was never transferred. Technically the islands still belong to Denmark because their king has never renounced his right to redeem that pledge.
Culturally they retained a Scandinavian atmosphere for much longer, and in some important senses, still do. Norse was spoken in a Shetlandic dialect called Norn until the eighteenth century and it still survives, just, in the language of fishermen. Because the sea is so capricious and dangerous the habitual superstition and conservatism of sailors often persuaded them to persist in the use of old languages, particularly when they were at sea: the Cornish and Manx languages were last heard as a spoken vernacular on the decks of fishing boats. In Shetland, the survival of Norn took an unusual turn – it is used as a cover tongue. Certain words in English are believed to be deeply unlucky by the Shetlandic fishermen, and, in order not to test fate too far, they use Norn equivalents instead. So that their use did not chase them away from the nets, the English words for fish are translated: cod is drolti, mussels are knoklins and halibut is da glyed, and in a twist of Viking memory, ministers and churches are thought to be taboo words and the deckhands called them upstaar and munger-hoose respectively. When they hear the cadences of Shetlandic English, some philologists believe that they can hear the way the Vikings spoke.
The harsh ethos of the Vikings was remembered in another custom which faded in the nineteenth century, and for good reason. Every three or four years Shetlandic crofters would ‘ride the Hagri’, On their tough little ponies, the crofters went around the boundaries of their common grazing land that lay beyond the dykes of their in-bye (home) fields. At each boundary stone a young boy ‘got a sair treshin sae as he soud mind weel whaur do hagmets stude’, or he ‘got a sore thrashing so as he should remember well where the boundary stones were’. Different boys were beaten at each stone and these indelible memories were printed on their memories in what was called ‘the whipping custom’.
Shetlandic boats also reveal a clear line back to the raiders from across the North Sea. The sixern is a sea-going rowing boat whose shape and sea-handling are like a small dragon-ship and which, as its name shows, took six men to row. The islands and the voes they rowed between all have Norse names, and a significant echo of the Scandinavian past can be heard when local people climb aboard the ferries at Lerwick and Kirkwall. They talk of ‘going to Scotland’.
The Vikings called Orkney and Shetland the Nordreys, or Northern Isles, which explains why such a northern county as Sutherland was thought to be south. It depends on where you stand or where you sail, and to the Vikings it was certainly to the south. Having colonized Caithness as well, settlers carved out farms in the Outer and Inner Hebrides, which they called the Sudreys. In the formal episcopal title of Sodor and Man, the name is still current, as are thousands of Norse place names which show a pattern of Viking occupation down the western edge of Scotland, in Galloway, Man and down the Irish coastline from Dublin to Wicklow, Wexford and Waterford. Sometimes these new colonies acted independently and at other times they were under the direct control of the King of Norway. Magnus Bareleg, the king who dragged his boat overland at Tarbert to prove Kintyre an island, mounted an expedition in 1098 to reassert his authority over the Viking sea kingdom. His court bard, Bjorn Cripplehand, describes a ferocity undimmed over the three centuries since the first raid on lona, and conveys a powerful sense of how the Vikings understood where and what was theirs:
In Lewis Isle with fearful blaze
The house destroying fire plays;
To hills and rocks the people fly
Fearing all shelter but the sky.
In Uist the king deep crimson made
the lightning of his glancing blade;
The peasant lost his land and life
Who dared to bide the Norseman’s strife.The hungry battle-birds were filled
In Skye with blood of foemen killed,
And wolves on Three’s lonely shore
Dyed red their hairy jaws in gore.
The men of Mull were tired of flight;
The Scottish foemen would not fight
And many an island-girl’s wail
Was heard as through the Isles we sail.On Sanda’s plain our shields they spy:
From Islay smoke rose heaven-high,
Whirling up from the flashing blaze
The king’s men o’er the island raise
South of Kintyre the people fled
Scared by our swords in blood dyed red,
And our brave champion onward goes
To meet in Man the Norseman’s foes.
The story of Viking settlement in the places listed (and omitted) in Cripplehand’s blood-soaked poem is often difficult to disentangle. Not only did the raiders fight with the indigenous Celts they found in the west, they also fought with each other. Norwegian and Danish Vikings vied for control of the Sea Kingdoms and their riches, while sometimes Scandinavian-based royal fleets sailed to engage in battle the ships of the colonists. After a generation or two, Viking and Celtic lines mingled to produce men with Celto-Norse names and mixed loyalties, blurring the picture even more, and amongst the scatter of dates, raids and battles a very interesting pattern emerges.
Over the winter of 840-41 a Viking called Turgesius attacked places deep in the green heart of Ireland. Sailing his dragon-ships into the mouth of the River Shannon and north through the network of lochs he came to the wealthy monastery of Clonmacnoise. He added insult to slaughter and pillage by placing his woman on the altar of the church and having her recite pagan oracles. Less shocking but more important was the establishment of what the Vikings called a ship-camp, a longphort, at the mouth of the Liffey at a place they called Blackpool. Better known as Dublin, the name comes from Dubh-linne which means dark pool. Forty years after the raids began, the choice of Dublin as the first place to over winter was instructive. As much an economic as a strategic choice, the Vikings knew that their palisaded ship-camp straddled the western route from Norway to Biscay, Spain and Europe, and it was close to being the best position for an entrepot for all of the Sea Kingdoms. If a conventional understanding of Dublin’s hinterland is reversed from landward to seaward, then the Vikings’ choice is better understood. North Wales, Man, Cumbria and Galloway were its immediate maritime hinterland, and beyond that lay Cornwall and the Hebrides.
In 851 Danish Vikings sailed into the Irish Sea to attack the Norse-Irish Vikings of Dublin. They wanted a share, if not control, of the profits of the trade that was beginning to be transacted through the colony, particularly the lucrative business of slavery. Perhaps as many as 300 dragon-ships joined battle in Strangford Lough, south of what is now Belfast. It seems that the Danes gained a victory which allowed Ivar to become King of Dublin and begin to plan an even greater coup, the conquest of England, but a short time later he was supplanted by Olaf, a Norwegian king, who ruled in Dublin between 853 and 871. He campaigned a great deal in Scotland and laid an unprecedented four-month siege to the Rock at Dumbarton on the Clyde, the capital of the Old Welsh-speaking kingdom of Strathclyde. The Rock was captured and the Vikings took Very many captives’ to feed their slave traffic.
One of Olaf’s sea-lords was Ketil Flatnose (the Vikings loved nicknames), and his family took the story of the Sea Kingdoms on a fascinating journey. After the victory at Dumbarton, it seems that Ketil and Olaf quarrelled and that Olaf’s wife, Aud the Deep-Minded, became involved. She left her husband and sailed north with her father, Ketil, to sulk in the Hebrides. At some point after 871 Aud had a boat built, and in it she took her people and sailed further north to Shetland, on to Faroe and finally to Iceland to establish what is regarded as the first colony on the island. For cultural reasons the Icelanders have always emphasized an overriding Scandinavian influence but it is probable that Aud the Deep-Minded reached the island before anyone from Norway or Denmark because her ships were guided by men who knew the way and had been there before – men she took on board when she left the Hebrides. The fact that Iceland was originally colonized by Vikings from the west of Scotland has been insufficiently understood. There is clear evidence of Celtic and Christian influence in Iceland which was overlaid after the tenth century by later settlers, most of whom came from Scandinavia.
Many of the earliest settlers had Celto-Norse names, and while Iceland remained pagan until the eleventh century, because it was colonized slightly later from pagan Norway, an underlying Christian influence from the Hebrides was unquestionably present. Aud the Deep-Minded set up crosses at Holar, and since she could find no properly consecrated ground for her grave, she chose to be buried in the sands of the Icelandic beaches. Her son-in-law Helgi Bjolan had a Norse-looking Gaelic nickname which comes from beolan, meaning ‘little mouth’, and he was also an occasional Christian. Happy to worship Christ at home and even name it after him, Kristnes or Christ’s Headland, ‘he was very mixed in his faith. He put his trust in Christ and named his homestead after him, but yet he would pray to Thor on sea voyages, and in hard stresses and in all those things that he thought were of most account to him’, according to the twelfth-century Icelandic Book of Settlement, the Landnamabok. In the late ninth century Helgi acquired a Christian neighbour, a Viking from the Hebrides called Orlygur Hrappson. He had a church built in Iceland that seems to have been dedicated to Kolumkilli, or more recognizably, Calum Cille, St Columba of lona.
Other, more distant, sources support a discovery of Iceland made in a Hebridean Christian atmosphere. Dicuil, an Irish monk at the Carolingian court in France, compiled his World Geography in 825, fifty years before Aud the Deep-Minded sailed. Probably a monk who had fled from her ancestors and their attacks on lona, he wrote about Faroe and a place he called Thule, which is clearly Iceland. Dicuil knew about the pack ice which lay to the north of Thule and a great deal more about the North Atlantic because he had talked to people who had been there. Before the Vikings rediscovered Iceland, there were people at lona who had sailed far to the north, and come back to tell the tale. As Tim Severin showed in his curragh, the skin boat, the alleged fantasies of St Brendan the Navigator were rooted in fact. It seems that hermit-monks, in search of diseartan in the vast wastes of the North Atlantic, had rowed and sailed their fragile boats to these uninhabited and bleakly beautiful islands. From lona to Iceland there is a clear trail of place names based on the Irish Gaelic word for the monks, papar or papa, which means father. The word also appears in Pabbay and Bayble in the Hebrides, Papa Westray in the Orkneys and Papa Stour in Shetland. They all point north to Papey, an island off the south coast of Iceland. Later Icelandic chroniclers confirm that Viking settlers on Faroe and in Iceland came across Irish monks in what might have been a summer colony. The weather was kinder in the second half of the first millennium and there are further hints that Celtic monks developed a store of nautical lore which the Vikings used in their voyages further west. When Erik the Red sailed to found a colony on Greenland between 982 and 985, he took with him a Celtic Christian from the Hebrides, perhaps as a pilot who knew the waters. When Erik’s son, Leif, took ship for Vinland, around 1000, to establish the short-lived settlement at L’Anse les Meadows in Newfoundland, he may have acted on information provided by people who could point him in the right direction. Erik’s Saga tells of conversations with American natives at L’Anse les Meadows during which casual mention was made of ‘foreigners’ who had arrived long before the Vikings landed. They were men who wore long white robes, and marched in procession bearing long poles to which cloths were attached, yelling loudly as they did this. The Icelandic Landnamabok tells of reports of a country ‘which some called Ireland the Great. It lies west in the sea near Vinland the Good.’ The Vikings called their American colony Vinland for the everyday reason that they found vines growing there. There are two further mentions of encounters with Irish monks in the Landnamabok, and since at the time these were probably thought less than remarkable, they are given only passing attention.
A substantial body of documentary, place-name and practical evidence points to a discovery of the islands of the North Atlantic and the mainland of North America by Gaelic-speaking hermit-monks in the early eighth century, and the subsequent use of their maritime knowledge by the Vikings in the ninth century. When the first raiders plundered lona they slaughtered those who stood in their way and stole whatever they could carry, but they were careful not to destroy something which, as seamen, they found immediately useful – knowledge of the oceans and of navigation. Across the arc of the North Atlantic there flickers the faintest shadow of Celtic Christianity.
Much easier to find than Greenland or Newfoundland is the Isle of Man. Sitting at the centre of the Irish Sea it was an obvious target for Viking colonists and soon after Turgesius overwintered at Dublin in 840-41, the dragon-ships appeared in the waters around Man. By the end of the ninth century these warrior-farmers had appropriated the most productive parts of the island, particularly in the north. Still stubbornly pagan, their great men were sent to meet their fierce gods in the impressive and economically very wasteful ritual of the ship burial. There is an elaborate example at Knock y Doonee in the north of Man. A ship burial or cremation aboard a burning ship was a signal of great honour and only accorded to lords or kings. A foreign merchant saw the preparations being made for a ship burning and he left a record which both fascinates and repels. The dead man was laid out in his finery and many of his most prized possessions arranged around him inside the ship. Sometimes horses and pets were killed and set in death as they had been in life, at their master’s side. Under the mound at Knock y Doonee excavators found a sword, shield, spear, battleaxe, fishing gear and a hammer and tongs but also the skeletons of a horse and a dog. The belief that all were aboard a ship bound for a final voyage to Valhalla was very strong. So strong that the foreign merchant recounted how one of the dead Viking lord’s slave girls volunteered to be killed so that she could travel with him. Apparently she was given powerful potions to drink and then allowed each of the lord’s leading warriors to have sex with her. Then she cut off the head of a live chicken and went into the tent where she was to be killed. An old hag stabbed her to death while others around them roared and shrieked so that no-one could distinguish the screams of the slave girl as she died.
Ship burials on the Isle of Man became rarer as the gradual conversion of the Vikings diverted them away from such barbarities to more peaceful Christian practice. In their way, the surviving results of this cultural switch are as dramatic as the ships under their earth mounds – the Viking adaptation of an aboriginal habit of carving gravestones is an astonishing thing. Up until 850 simple funerary slabs had been made on Man, many with only an incised cross. Later a little decoration crept in, but when the Vikings began to commission these, a remarkable series of stunningly beautiful sculptures was created, known as the Manx Crosses.
The first Western European artist from the post-classical era to achieve a clear historical personality was not Giotto, Cimabue or any of the early Italian masters. Between 930 and 950 – a very early date, given the development of the fine arts in Continental Europe – a series of sixteen stone crosses was carved in the Isle of Man by Gaut Bjornson. This is not a matter of conjecture, attribution or confirmation from a separate documentary source. There is no doubt that Bjornson carved the sculptures – he signed some of them.
All of the crosses which are certainly by him, even at a distance of a thousand years, show a complete integrity of style and technique. Gaut was not master of a school which turned out hackwork blocked out by apprentices and finished by him – he did all the work, possibly even the initial excavation. He invented the instantly recognizable ring chain pattern of interleaving which he used to decorate both cross and background. Later pieces show him developing new styles of relief work, using natural forms like tendrils, and also growing in confidence. On the cross-slab of Kirk Michael there is even arrogance: ‘Gaut made this and all in Man’. This is clearly not true since 160 crosses have been found, with the earliest dating from the fifth and sixth centuries. The sculptor was probably claiming that, as a lone artistic pioneer, he had created a new style of carving.
Crosses at Muncaster and Gosforth in Cumbria show less assured examples of his work and their location suggests that he began his career there, before moving to Man. On another, later, cross the signature is expanded to ‘Gaut Bjornson of Kuli’, which not only shows an increasing self-confidence but also confirms that he was the son of a Viking who probably lived at the village now called Ballacooley.
Gaut preferred to work on large rectangular cross-slabs rather than the more characteristic, free-standing sort. They varied in height from 2 feet 6 inches to 11 feet and were generally 15 to 24 inches wide and 2 to 4 inches thick. Some of Gaut’s and many of the other contemporary crosses are round-headed or have a cross cut in the middle of a circle. Looking back at the tradition of Celtic carving which preceded them, it is possible to detect an interesting and surprising process at work. It shows that, contrary to popular assumption, these early crosses had nothing to do with the crucifixion. In the first half of the first millennium this was not a popular symbol amongst Christians, since it recalled a particularly Roman form of execution suffered by common criminals. In the first Manx examples and a handful found near Whithorn in Galloway, there are signs of a very different origin for the crosses which Gaut later carved so beautifully and which found their most monumental expression in the great Celtic high crosses of Ireland.
Christianity was fond of cryptic codes, because it was often a persecuted religion in the Roman Empire. Even now one of the earliest symbols, a stylized fish, is still in currency, and car-stickers for self-advertising believers often incorporate it. The key to this is in the Greek word for fish. Using the Roman alphabet, it reads ‘Ichthus’, which is an acronym for the name of the Redeemer: lasos Christos Thiou Huios Sowtare. Or, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, our Saviour. Even more cryptic was the Chi Rho monogram. Written like a capital P with a cross cut through the stem, it is a device made from the first two Greek alphabet letters of the name of Christ, and from this the early Celtic crosses developed. The vestigial loop of the Rho, written like a long-stemmed version of the Roman capital P, is clearly apparent in early Manx and Galloway crosses. It had faded out by the time Gaut Bjornson took up his chisels but it may be the main reason why the characteristic Celtic cross has a circle around it. The usual provenance argued for the presence of the circle – that it represents the sun as a homage to Druidical beliefs – is unconvincing. Christian missionaries may have adopted holy wells and other places of pagan sanctity to set up the first churches, but their iconography was not a matter for compromise or an eclectic decorative exercise. It was central to their faith and not something which could happily accommodate the pagan beliefs the early missionaries fought so hard to defeat.
The free-standing Celtic high crosses of Ireland developed from around 800 onwards, and later examples insert a figurative representation of the crucified Christ in the circle of the Chi Rho. By that time the memory of the Roman Empire was far distant. Irish historians argue that part of the reason for the appearance of these huge and beautiful objects (the largest, at Monasterboice, is 21 feet tall) is that they were too heavy for Vikings to carry off. It may indeed have been a lesson handed down by Turgesius, the man who desecrated an altar with his wife and her pagan utterances, because a school of cross carving was based at Clonmacnoise, the monastery he attacked. Unlike Gaut Bjornson, who limited himself to abstract pattern, the unknown sculptors of the Irish high crosses chiselled out figurative scenes almost exclusively from the Bible. Many were set near the foot of the upright so that those kneeling in front could see them clearly, and they were brightly painted. All of the Irish crosses were free-standing and to be found in monastic enclosures or near churches.
The slab crosses of Man, used as markers for burials, allowed Gaut to carve decorative backgrounds, and, probably as important for him, to sign his name and carve a dedication on the edge of the slab. Gaut wrote in runes. Like the Ogham script found all over Celtic Britain, the runic alphabet consisted only of straight lines. It was designed to be cut rather than written in the kind of cursive styles we now understand by the term ‘writing’. This supposedly primitive language of limited use allowed his identification as an artist. Yet, outside the Isle of Man, Gaut’s achievement is virtually unknown and the beauty of what he made goes unrecognized.
The names of Gauf’s patrons are also inscribed, as they are on crosses made by other artists. Typical dedications are on the Braddon Cross: ‘Thorleif Hnakki erected this cross to the memory of Fiacc, his son’, or on the Mal-Lumkin Cross: ‘Mael-Lumchon erected this cross to the memory of Mal-Mura, his foster-mother, daughter of Dugald, the wife whom Athisl had’. Many carry the names of patrons with Celtic names like these, and in general they show a society with an astonishing degree of sophistication – and duality. The men who paid for, encouraged and appreciated the innovative creativity of Gaut Bjornson also continued to perform the barbarity of blood-eagling.
When the Vikings took control of the western seaways between 800 and 1100, they effectively ended the Irish intellectual hegemony of Europe. Had they been more numerous, more fortunate and acted in a better organized and concerted manner, Britain and Ireland may have become part of the Norse-speaking orbit of Scandinavia. Battles rarely settle more than short-term issues, but when King Brian Boru defeated a coalition of Vikings at Clontarf, now buried under the streets of Dublin, in 1014, he showed that Celtic Ireland was vigorous and determined not to surrender its identity. And when King Harold Godwineson defeated and killed King Harold Hardrada of Norway at Stamford Bridge near York in 1066, he effectively ended the possibility of the Danish dynasty of Cnut reasserting its claim to the throne of England.
By contrast, the Vikings remained a distinct political phenomenon in western Britain for a long time. Not until the Treaty of Perth in 1266 when Haakon IV of Norway sold his title to the Hebrides and Man did their involvement in the Sea Kingdoms really begin to decline, even though they held on to Orkney and Shetland for another 200 years. Although Norse was still spoken in Lewis until the fifteenth century, the re-emergence of Celtic culture and political power in the Hebrides and Man began much earlier. The Sons of Death were ultimately defeated not by the force of arms but by something much more effective. They integrated. The Gaelic culture of the Sea Kingdoms was strong and it absorbed the ferocious fighters who sailed ‘west-over-sea’, but it never forgot them and the Viking was never far from the Celtic surface. On the edge of the din of battle at Bannockburn, Culloden and many a foreign field, the war cries of the sea lords could still be heard.