OF the peoples who inhabited the fringes of Europe farthest from the two foci of light and learning, Rome and Constantinople, only a short account can be given here. The Celtic and Scandinavian peoples had in early days no written literature: it is therefore difficult to reconstruct a chronological account of their early history from written sources, generally the chance references of alien peoples, often their enemies. The archaeological evidence about these early peoples, their ornaments, weapons, their burial places, sometimes their peasant huts and occasionally their chieftain’s halls, is relatively plentiful and often shows fine artistic skill. Both these races made their contribution to the history of early medieval Europe.
The Celts, like the Scandinavians, spoke an Indo-European language. Their earliest home was in central Europe, between the North Sea, the Alps and the Carpathians; they had as their neighbours the Latin and Sabellic tribes who soon passed south into Italy. There would seem at an early period to have been a common Italo-Celtic language. From central Europe, however, the Celtic peoples dispersed, not only into Italy, but from the middle Danube south into the Balkans and Asia Minor, westward into Gaul, and northward into Britain and Ireland. These early migrants settled among the iron age people of the Hallstatt culture (named from the famous cemetery near Salzburg), and brought to these metal workers Greek and other Mediterranean influences and techniques.
The early megalithic monuments, such as, for instance, Avebury, or Stonehenge with its outer ring of wooden posts, its inner circle of lintelled stones (and the rest of the stone complex), had been set up by the earlier peoples of the stone, bronze and early iron age: they were already very old at the time of the early Celtic wanderings and settlements, very old in the time of the Hallstatt people. The Celts were metal workers, and their distinctive contribution to civilization lay, not in the raising of monuments, but rather in the smelting and casting of iron, and the social changes that followed the new techniques. In the fifth century B.C. increased Italian influence produced the second great iron age society, the specifically Celtic or La Tène culture, called after the pile-built settlement at La Tène on lake Neuchatel. The Celts now worked in bronze or gold for their chieftains’ ornaments, sometimes using a red enamel. Already the characteristic trumpet ornament appeared upon their brooches, buckles, mirrors and other metal work, together with the Greco-Roman palmette. The distinctively Celtic ornament in, for instance, the Book of Kells or the Lindisfarne gospels, had its ancestry in the iron age art of Gaul, the Danubian territories and Asia Minor.
The Celtic populations of northern Italy, Roman Gaul, central Europe and Britain underwent conquest by the Romans and by the Germanic peoples who migrated in the fifth and sixth century A.D., but the Celts remained a large, and sometimes the largest element in the population. In Gaul, their place-names remained in the countryside, their craftsmen continued to use the spiral decoration and plaitwork, sometimes alone, sometimes in conjunction with the Germanic animal ornament. In Wales, Cornwall, and their colony, Brittany, the Celtic language survived; in Ireland above all a Celtic, tribal society developed, uninfluenced by Roman or Germanic conquest.
Among the Celtic peoples of western Europe, living in tribal settlements and ruled by tribal chieftains, the Druidic priesthood was a common link. It has been suggested indeed that the Druids originated not with the Celts but with the mesolithic or neolithic peoples who made the great stone monuments, but the evidence shows rather that the Druids were a characteristic order of Celtic society. There is no evidence at all that they used the megalithic monuments in their rites and sacrifices. The word Druid, once thought to be connected with an old Irish word for the oak tree, is now held to be derived from another Irish word meaning ‘the wise one’, ‘the soothsayer’. There is, however, evidence that the Druidic rites included a ceremonial cutting and offering by the Druids of the mistletoe that grows upon the oak; the old Irish feast of Samhain, at the beginning of November, was marked by such a ceremony. But of the old stone age gods for whose offerings Stonehenge (and the smaller, wooden ‘henges’ which air photography has discovered in Britain) were built, we have no knowledge.
Since the Celtic peoples were spread over western Europe for some 500 years before Caesar, and continued as the subject population, not completely Romanized or Christianized, for some 400 years after him in Gaul, Britain and Ireland, it is unlikely that their customs remained uniform and undeveloped; evidence (nearly all from alien observers) that the Celts did or did not practise sacrifice and even human sacrifice: that the Druids were ‘philosophers’, and the like, may refer to different periods in their long history. It seems fairly certain, however, that when Greek and Roman writers like Ammianus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen spoke of the Druids as ‘philosophers’, they were speaking of Celts who had had contact with the empire, and possibly even with Greco-Roman thought: relatively late Celts. It is of interest that, of all the pagan cults encountered by the Romans in the west, that of the Celts alone had a teaching priesthood, and one that linked the race groups in Gaul, Britain and Ireland.
There is a good deal of evidence about these Druids, and their secondary order of filid (teachers) and vates (bards or soothsayers), in the writings of Caesar, Strabo, Ammianus and those old Irish writings about the struggles of Patrick and his helpers with the Druids (the filid and their schools they tolerated). The Druids of Roman Gaul used to visit Britain as part of their training, and there was also communication between the Druids of Ireland and Wales. It seems that these priest-diviners, who also acted as judges and as the repositories of the long-stored oral knowledge of the tribes, must have been a cohesive force in Celtic society. There was, in fact, a common Celtic culture, and the Druids, filid and bards helped maintain it. They educated the young and they passed freely among the tribes: in Ireland, even when those tribes were at war. There were Druid colleges, which chose and trained new members: and there were also Druidic families, for certain chieftains, or even fifth-century Christian saints, are said to have sprung from Druidic stock.
Apart from Ireland, no independent Celtic state survived the Germanic migrations and conquests: though Wales and Brittany long continued Celtic in language and culture. But the Celts made, nevertheless, their own contribution to the new Europe. The Celtic tribal province or canton survived both the Roman and Frankish conquests of Gaul, and the Roman town, the old tribal headquarters, became the seat of the Roman magistrate and the Frankish count. Medieval local government in France rested upon a framework ultimately Celtic. Celtic linear pattern combined with Greco-Roman naturalism in the eighth and ninth centuries to give birth to the brilliant illuminations and sculpture of Ireland, Celtic Scotland and Northumbria. The names of Celtic gods and goddesses survived in many of the place-names of Gaul and Britain: Lug, the sun-god, gave his name to Lugdunum (Lyons) and Luguvallum (Carlisle): the goddess Brigantia gave hers to the tribes of Roman Yorkshire; Camulos, a Gallic and British god, to Camelodunum. The large group of Celtic stories of a voyage to the country of the blest, or the dead (like that of Bran, son of Cuchulainn) had their Christian counterparts in the voyage of St Brendan and others which seem to foreshadow the passing of Dante to hell, purgatory and heaven. And again, Celtic life, still half nomadic and tribal, and yet with its curiously strong organization for the preservation of a common learning, developed not unnaturally its peculiar form of Christianity, its peculiar Latin learning, and its peculiar missionary genius.
St Patrick (c. 385–461) planted in Ireland the Latin Christianity in which he had, it would seem, been trained at Auxerre, the see of St Germanus, and the primitive, eastern monasticism he had learned at Lérins, at the mouth of the Rhone. He was able to teach an Irish clergy to recite the Latin office, and, because Latin had never been a spoken language in Ireland, the clergy studied grammar and kept the Latin inflexions pure. It is however possible that the remarkable spread of Latin learning among the Celts was not due solely to the missionaries: a vernacular account of the work of St Patrick speaks of the retorici with whom St Patrick contended: these he may have met in Gaul, or they may possibly have been refugees from fifth-century Gaul.
St Patrick would naturally have sought to reproduce in Ireland the Christian organization with which he was familiar. He therefore established for himself a territorial archbishopric of Armagh; but the tribal and pastoral nature of society, and the lack of ‘towns’, soon led to the service of the Irish church by tribal monasteries of clergy, headed by abbots. Irish clerics could pass among the small villages of the tribe, accompany the chieftain, or go on pilgrimage for the love of God, not knowing where their voyage would end. In the monasteries, to which the ridged and cheap papyrus barely came, a beautiful Celtic script developed, written with quill or reed pen upon the smooth surface of vellum: the beautiful Irish illumination developed from the astonishingly sure Irish penmanship. The creed preserved the one Christian faith, although the Latin services had a character all their own; and the essential function of the bishop in ordination, the dedication of churches and other rites was preserved, without, however, jurisdictional authority. Every Irish monastery had its bishop, or even several bishops, to perform the traditional ceremonies: but authority came to lie, not with these bishops, but with the abbots. It was this lack of a territorial episcopate that roused the later suspicion of Celtic Christianity as unorthodox, and the isolation of Christian Ireland was perpetuated by the paganism of the Anglo-Saxons who invaded Britain in the fifth century. Nevertheless, the Irish monasteries were esteemed for their learning, and frequented by travelling scholars both from Britain and the Continent.
Irish Christianity, learning and art, moreover, extended themselves to Britain and the Continent. Columba (d. 597), a relation of the Irish high-king and pupil of Finnian of Moville and Finnian of Clonard, sailed with twelve disciples and founded a monastery on the little island of Hy (now Iona). Irish daughter houses spread over Scotland, and the monk-bishop Aidan brought Irish Christianity from Iona to Lindisfarne. Meanwhile Columbanus, a monk of the great bangor (monastery) in county Down, went off with twelve companions c. 590 to convert the half-heathen people of the Vosges; he founded Celtic monasteries, keeping his own severely ascetic rule, at Luxeuil and Fontaines. He taught among the Alemanni and left his pupil, Gallus, in a monastery founded in Switzerland; he himself passed on into Lombardy and in 613 founded the monastery of Bobbio in north Italy, dying there in 615. Columbanus, Finnian of Clonard and Gildas (? author of the De Excidio), were all known to each other, all Celtic scholar-abbots, and some of their letters and writings have survived. When Columbanus died, the Celtic form of monasticism was more widely extended than the Benedictine in western Europe: and for some time later, founders of monasteries often laid upon their monks the obligation to follow both monastic rules. The Celtic missionary monks, sprung from a mainly pastoral society whose only large, settled communities were the monasteries themselves, made admirable missionaries to western Europe, and contributed to the passing on to heathen and illiterate peoples of the Greco-Roman heritage.
The Celts, despite the diminishing importance of their small kingdoms or tribal groups to the political history of western Europe, nevertheless made their own contribution to her early literature and art. They helped to pass on the Greco-Roman tradition in the field of literature, while making use of some distinctively Celtic forms of their own; in the art of writing, illumination, metal work and sculpture the Celtic genius remained undominated by Byzantine influence, and became one of the factors of the Carolingian renaissance.
In the field of learning the Irish monasteries commanded respect, especially in the sixth and seventh centuries, when Ireland was untroubled by invasion, Britain settled by a barbarian and only slowly converted people, and northern Francia, from the Seine to the Rhine mouth, had little learning, and no leisured class except the relatively few monks of Columbanus’ houses. (The double minsters of Francia and Gaul, referred to by Bede as places to which Anglo-Saxon princesses were sent for training, seem to have produced no literature.) The Breton, Welsh and Irish monasteries of the sixth century clung to the study of Latin to secure an enlightened saying of the office and study of the scriptures; Armagh, the see of Patrick, and Clonmacnois, founded in 548, were notable schools of Latinity. The Irish monks revered the name of Vergil, and though he was no Christian, named their promising clerics after him: but they would seem to have been more familiar with the great fifth-century glossators and grammarians, like Nonus or Servius or Donatus, than with the Vergilian text. Gildas, for instance, was one of those scholars who belonged to the second period of Irish church history (the first being the Patrician, and the third that of Maelruainn, propagandist of the anchoretic life). This second period was dominated by the figure of the sapiens, exponent of the Latin written learning in a population knowing only the oral, vernacular learning of the Celts. Columbanus, Finnian of Clonard, Gildas and others were sapientes: but Gildas’ classical learning was limited. He quotes Vergil from memory six times, but inaccurately; he knew something of Persius and Martial and Claudian and Porphyry. He also knew Jerome’s letters and his De Scriptoribus Ecclesiae, and, as a good abbot, he was acquainted with the old canons of the church: Columbanus refers to him as an authority in his subject. But in the field of classical literature, his delight in the rarer Latin words indicates that the great glossaries were his favourite, or only accessible, texts: ‘otherwise’, says Mommsen, ‘he could not have written so obscurely’.
The work of the two Columbas contributed also to the passing on of the Greco-Roman heritage by the establishment in peasant societies of a class of literate clerics. Columba’s (Columcille’s) foundation of Iona in 565 was to prove the mother house of Melrose, of a number of houses in Caledonia, of the great minsters of Iona and, eventually, York. Of Columba’s own writings, only a few hymns, chief among them the Altus Prosator, survive; but his work helped to establish a leisured class of literate Scottish monks, and lay behind the outstanding work of Adamnan, abbot of Iona from 679 to 704. Adamnan’s Life of Columba, indeed, was a fine piece of Latin rhetoric, bringing the actions, aspect and qualities of the great abbot clearly before the reader: it was the first piece of fine historical writing in these islands before Bede. Adamnan also wrote a commentary on Vergil, but his finest work in the Latin tongue and tradition was his De locis sanctis, presented to his friend and pupil, king Aldfrid of Northumbria. Adamnan here compared the oral information of his guest, the Frankish pilgrim bishop, Arculf, about the holy places in Palestine and about Constantinople, with the evidence he could get from Jerome, Sulpicius Severus and other Latin writers. His book has all the freshness and detail of a traveller’s tale, and is of interest as showing the knowledge of Byzantium and even Damascus which might be available to a seventh-century Scottish abbot. The Latin learning of Iona and Lindisfarne was available to Bede, and he, like Adamnan, compiled a Life of Columba: but it is likely that his resources, the great library of manuscripts laboriously brought back by Benedict Biscop for his monastery of Jarrow, were greater than those of Iona or Lindisfarne.
Columbanus, like Columba, increased the number of Celtic scholar monks, and of his own writings more is known than of Columba’s. Six of his letters have survived, one of them defending the Irish method of reckoning Easter, and a collection of verses unremarkable in themselves but showing a good knowledge of Vergil. His three dogmatic treatises are lost, but some short addresses to monks have survived, and his monastic rule, a regula coenobialis patrum, notable for the austerities enjoined on the monks. Just as the Irish method of reckoning Easter was the survival of an old method conditioned by Irish isolation, so in the Columban regula the spirit of Pachomius and the desert fathers survived less modified by Latin familial tradition than in that of Benedict.
A curious Celtic jeu d’esprit, unimportant as literature but perhaps indicative of the extent to which the Celtic monk could get access to the great glossaries rather than Latin texts, was the Hisperica Famina, used in a few short Celtic poems, one or two tracts, and a few passages of scholars who, like Aldhelm, could write good Latin prose and verse. The vocabulary of this conceit was collected from the rarest and most obscure Latin words, and some invented ones: famina is such a word for speech, Hisperica from Hesper, the evening star; the expression would mean ‘western (Latin) speech’.
When Irish scholar monks drifted to the Continent as missionaries, each perhaps with a single Latin text in his book satchel, they joined for the most part a Columban house, or the household of some missionary Frankish bishop. They took their Celtic enthusiasm for Latin literature, their Celtic ability to write fine verse, to Frisia and the land of the Saxons, to the middle Danube and to Lombardy. But the very fact that they had now at their disposal all the manuscript riches of Italy and the Adriatic, Latin and even Greek manuscripts, merged their studies in the rising wave of the Carolingian renaissance, and deprived it of distinctive character; Irish classical learning had always been derivative of its source. In the later Carolingian period the greatest scholar at the court of Charles the Bald, John Scotus Erigena (see p. 515) was an Irishman: but he wrote as a Byzantine Neoplatonist.
In the field of art, however, the Celts remained undominated by the Greco-Roman tradition, though their illuminated gospel books, like the Book of Durrow and the Book of Kells, adopted the custom of inserting a picture of the evangelist and his symbol from some Byzantine prototype. In Scandinavia, barbarian art persisted because the country remained long unconverted; in Ireland, however, early converted by the Patrician mission, the barbarian style with its abstract ornament, its trumpet pattern, its double spirals, triumphed in the main over Greco-Roman naturalism. The spiral-and-trumpet pattern, in which the thickened trumpet ends continued to form focal points from which other spirals sprang in radiating directions, was purely Celtic: but other motifs, like the interlaces borrowed originally from Roman pavements in Britain, the key pattern of Latin origin, and the ‘lacertines’ of interlacing ornament, all adapted themselves to the Celtic love of abstract ornament and dynamic design. They are all found in Celtic illumination, the ornament on the side panels of the Celtic crosses, the goldsmith’s work, and the Irish ‘shrines’ or reliquaries so often looted by Norse raiders and carried off to Scandinavia.
Research into the history of Irish illumination has now penetrated beyond the Book of Durrow, the earliest of the Irish illuminated gospel books, and it appears that the earliest Irish missionaries knew nothing of the later, Insular, system of decorating the gospels. There is in Trinity College, Dublin, a gospel of the late antique style of the fifth century (codex Usserianus primus): it was not written in Ireland, but imported there in the finished state. The old Latin psalter known as the Cathach of St Columba was however written in Ireland: it is the earliest extant example of the Irish national script: each psalm has an initial in Roman capitals, the thick strokes decorated: the ornament is ultimately La Tène, translated from stone carving and metal to illumination, and ‘showing the age-long Celtic predilection for curvilinear ornament’. The Irish minuscule and art-forms were carried to Europe by the missionaries, and only gave way to the Carolingian minuscule and Greco-Roman naturalism in the renewed enthusiasm of the ninth-century renaissance.
The Scandinavian peoples (Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, and for cultural purposes, Icelanders) were always outside the Roman empire, although the remains of their civilization show many traces of Roman influence. The early Scandinavian languages were not very different from those of the Teutonic peoples of northern Europe: the primitive Scandinavian language, that is, belonged to the Teutonic branch of the Indo-European speech family. This primitive language, however, the language of the earliest northern runic inscriptions dating from c. A.D. 300, had been transformed before the beginning of the Viking period (c. A.D. 800) into different dialects; in which probably the Danish-Swedish tongue differed from the Norwegian, though these northern peoples still thought of their language as one, the ‘Danish tongue’. Scandinavian civilization also seems to have been, roughly, undifferentiated, though the evidence comes mainly from burial finds and is scanty about the habitations of the living. Inhumation and cremation of the dead were practised, and the personal ornaments buried with the dead were rich; they included square-headed and cruciform brooches, inlaid garnet ornament and those pendants peculiar to the Scandinavians with a coin device rather barbarously copied on one side only, bracteates. Ship burial within a mound was sometimes afforded to chieftains, as in the Vandel graves near Uppsala (and the cenotaph discovered in 1939 at Sutton Hoo). The practice of ship burial points however to the normality of travel by sea along the Scandinavian waterways, and to some belief in another life beyond the troublesome waves of this world. The Scandinavian peoples in their native lands did not officially accept Christianity till c. A.D. 1000.
The landmark in the history of the Scandinavian peoples comes at the end of the eighth century, with the beginning of the ‘Viking’ age, when the Scandinavians broke out of the isolation of their northern world, and sailed across the North Sea and the Baltic to make pirate raids on adjacent countries. They had long been sailing in the Baltic and trading with the Slav races, and were already fine boat-builders, seamen, metal workers and fighters. The word Viking is of Nordic origin, and possibly derived from a word meaning sea-roving: the term would apply to sea traders as well as sea pirates, for the Vikings practised both trade and piracy: but in the ninth and tenth centuries they found piracy the more profitable. The Viking period is one when a northern culture broke in upon one that was southern and more civilized. The Vikings wanted ‘a place in the sun’, and had a warlike technique that enabled some of them to get it, and all of them to enrich themselves by plunder. To some, fighting would seem to have been an end in itself, like dangerous sports throughout the ages, for the battle of the crew of a Viking ship usually resolved itself into a series of hand-to-hand encounters; sagas speak of the kind of rage of battle into which the northern warriors passed as ‘going berserk’. Prayers to be delivered from the fury of the Nortmanni were soon included in Christian litanies.
The northern civilization from which the Vikings came was that of peasant farmers, where the crops that could be grown in the short, northern summer were supplemented by fishing. Each patriarchal farmstead was self-supporting, and every man had some knowledge of farming, stock breeding, fishing and smithy work, though some smiths and metal workers practised a special craft. The iron axe had been used for forest clearing since the Celts brought the iron-working techniques to western Europe; but forest clearing by fire had still been easier, and the potash in the wood ash useful for the growing of a few successive crops. But now, in the Viking period, planks were needed for the clinker (nail) built Viking ships, and the iron axe had become a more useful tool: an impetus was given to wood felling, and the Viking period saw great forest clearance in Scandinavia.
The ‘long houses’ of the Viking homestead were perhaps 100 feet in length, with a series of log fires down the centre; the women spun and wove, cooked, made blankets, cheese, beer and everything needed in domestic life. Pairs of oval, convex, ‘tortoise’ brooches, beads, mosaic ornaments, combs, and shears and scissors for weaving, have often been found in women’s graves. No writing on vellum or papyrus was practised, though runic inscriptions were occasionally cut on stone or metal work; literature was oral, and the long northern nights favoured entertainment by heroic poetry and, in Iceland, the prose ‘saga’. For the northern peoples, contact with civilization came not by land but by sea: the iron axe had made the building of the wooden ships possible. The new skill in iron smelting and forging provided the spears, swords and battleaxes for warfare, as also the coat of mail, the brynja or byrnie, made of linked iron rings.
The beginning of the Viking raids was probably not unconnected with Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons: the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaks also of a raid made on Wessex in the days of king Beorhtric of Wessex (786–802). Great Britain, Ireland, and Charlemagne’s empire were henceforth attacked by Norwegians and Danes, while Swedes mainly found an outlet through the Baltic and down the Russian rivers. The raids were not mass migrations, but expeditions led by individual chieftains or kings; there are some signs, however, of more or less peaceful settlement in the Hebrides and northern Scotland. While the earliest raids were summer campaigns, it was soon found advisable for the ‘host’ to winter at some river mouth as a base for further raiding.
As to the rise of kingdoms in these northern lands (the area covered by the modern Denmark, Norway, south Sweden and the Baltic coast beyond Jutland): a whole world of legendary history about their kings, some of it founded on fact, is represented in Beowulf and other early heroic poetry. The poets and their hearers knew of Eormanric, king of the Goths (indeed, a sixth-century king of Kent was called Eormanric): Heremod, king of the Danes, and the Swedish king Ohthere, both mentioned in Beowulf probably actually existed. But the earliest Scandinavian king to have relations of some importance with Charlemagne’s empire was Godefrid, mentioned as king in 804 by Saxo Grammaticus. Godefrid came into conflict with Charles and brought an army to the Schlei, the Baltic creek which lies to the south of Jutland. Relations with the Franks remained uneasy and Godefrid was preparing to fight them when he was killed by one of his own men in 810; he had been king also of southern Norway. War broke out in 812 between the followers of Godefrid and those of a former king, Harald. Eventually Harald, a descendant of the earlier Harald, won a temporary victory, and agreed to divide the Danish lands with the sons of Godefrid, chief of whom was Horic. Both sides desired the help of Louis the Pious, and in 826 Harald came to Ingelheim, near Mainz, and was baptized with four hundred of his followers: he had just anticipated the arrival of Godefrid’s followers, asking for Frankish support. He then returned to Denmark with Anskar, the scolasticus of Corvey, as his chaplain, but was expelled in 828 from his kingdom; he retreated to the lands in Frisia earlier granted him by the emperor. In the year of the grant, 826, Louis the Pious granted lands in Frisia also to Harald’s brother: it was imperial policy to make the Danes converted allies. Their conversion was, however, slow: the first of the Danish wooden churches was built only about 850. The political relations of the Scandinavian lands, however, remained confused, and with the later Carolingians hostile, through the Danish raids and occupation of northern Frisia.
Meanwhile the Norwegians, besides colonizing (usually after warlike attack) northern Scotland, Ireland, northern England and Normandy, had been increasing the area of cultivable land in their own country with the axe; the fjords and valleys of their deeply indented coast had long been forest covered. Population now increased and also the wealth brought in by traders and sea-rovers; the loose overlordship of the Danes was challenged. King Harald Fairhair of eastern Norway at length conquered all the Norwegian petty kings and nobles by his crowning victory of Haforsfjord (c. 900). The subject of a fine poem, The Lay of Harald, he reigned for about fifty years, and founded a Norwegian dynasty, finding it useful to ally with the English king Æthelstan against the Danes. He is thought to have died c. 931–2 (Turville-Petre). The country was already beginning to be organized for sea-warfare into districts, each bound to produce a ship with a crew of 80–100 warriors for two months in the summer; even as, in the Carolingian empire, the provision of armed fighting men fell upon landed proprietors.
Of the early history of Sweden, little is known: Tacitus mentions the Suiones and their kings. The Goths appear to have migrated, before the middle of the second century, from the region in southern Sweden now known as Gothland. Various north Germanic tribes appear to have made independent tribal settlements in Sweden, the Swedes themselves inhabiting Uppland. Uppsala, with its king and great heathen temple, was the focus of their settlement: the discoveries of Swedish archaeologists have established that three Swedish kings mentioned in Beowulf were laid in the mound in old Uppsala in 575, 510 (?) and 500 respectively. The Geatas of south Sweden were overrun or absorbed by the Swedes, possibly subsequently to the date of Beowulf, and, in their expansion now and later, the Swedes sent out also Viking raids against the Slavs. The conversion of Sweden, however, was begun at about the same time as that of Denmark: king Björn of Denmark sent emissaries to Louis the Pious desiring Christian teachers in 829. Anskar, whose earlier missions to the Danes had failed with the exile of Harald his protector, was now sent to Sweden, and many converts, some noble, received baptism; Anskar was consecrated first archbishop of Hamburg in 831. He also received, with bishop Ebbo of Reims, a papal legateship to the northern peoples.
The early Scandinavian peoples and the Goths in south Russia before Wulfila taught them, had one thing in common: some form of primitive runic script. They used it for inscriptions in stone or whalebone, in metal work, and according to one theory, for the cutting of brief messages on sticks. The forms of the letters, where straight lines replace the curves of Greek (or Latin?) capital or cursive letters, suggest either the cutting of the letters with a small knife on a rounded twig or the carving of an inscription in stone by a craftsman less skilled than those responsible for inscriptions in the Greco-Roman world. Runes are known to have been in use in the Scandinavian north in the third century a.D., and the runic script appears in inscriptions found all over Europe, from Rumania and western Russia to the east of France, Frisia and England. Some of the inscriptions are believed to have magical significance, for they consist of groups of runic symbols not forming words. The runic alphabet consisted of twenty-four symbols, divided up into three groups of eight. The oldest decipherable runic inscriptions were found in south-western Denmark and date from the mid-third century: the area round Schleswig and Fyn appears to have been a cradle of the Scandinavian form of runes, which spread from there to Sweden and Norway, and, with the invading Anglo-Saxons, to England. Other inscriptions sited on a line running through Pomerania, Brandenburg and Rumania, and found in conjunction with archaic objects, show that runes were early used along the northern coast of the Black Sea and along the lower Danube: ‘this line gives an immediate indication, if not of the runes’ earliest home, at least of the first spreading of the runic writing’ (Sketelig and Falk).
When Wulfila began teaching the Goths in Dacia and Moesia, they would have been using a runic script. Wulfila, however, rejected the runic script as a medium for his new translation of the gospels into Gothic, possibly as associated with paganism and magic, possibly as less suitable phonetically than signs resting ultimately on the Greek alphabet. He certainly made his translation from a Greek manuscript and used the Greek capital and cursive letters with which he was familiar as the basis of his new Gothic alphabet, which he wrote with a straight-cut reed or quill pen; he made use of only one or two runic signs. There is no evidence, however, that the Goths at this early stage used runes for writing on papyrus or vellum, any more than the Scandinavians: these early people handed down their heroic poetry, and the genealogies of their kings, in the memories of their bards or scopas. The runes were used for inscriptions: ‘I, Viv, engraved the runes to my master (Vodurid).’ ‘Rolf raised this stone.’ ‘Hlewagast from Holt made this horn.’
The ogham writing, the earliest and most numerous examples of which were found in Ireland, appears to have been a primitive, inscription-writing practised by the Celts. The technique and purpose is similar to that of the runes, though the alphabet itself is different. Its structure implies a knowledge of the Latin alphabet, not of the Greek: its characters consist of groups of straight lines, cut right or left or diagonally along the arris (edge between two planes) of a pillar stone. The inscription runs up the arris, and, if long, down another edge. The place of origin of the script is thought to have been Ireland itself; but the language of the oldest ogham inscriptions is so old a form of Celtic that the Irish had not yet become distinct from the British form of it. The use of the script is generally believed to have developed after Patrick introduced the Latin language to Ireland; the primitive nature of the language, and the analogy to the use of runes, suggest to others that ogham was a script used by the Celts, near neighbours to the Latins, even in their earlier home on the Continent. The reading of ogham was facilitated by two bi-lingual inscriptions, in ogham and Latin, found in Wales; other ogham inscriptions occur in Scotland, Devon and Cornwall, and one at Silchester in Hampshire.
Runic writing and other features of the distinctive northern, Scandinavian culture persisted throughout the Viking period and down, indeed, to the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Viking raids and conquests brought the northmen within the sphere of the old Greco-Roman influence: but, because the Scandinavian countries remained pagan, they were not penetrated in the ninth century by southern traditions and techniques. The northmen were wood users: their ships and their halls were built of wood: their richest ornament was carved woodwork, often deeply undercut or even hollowed out within like the carved posts of the Oseberg ship: and they used a barbaric animal ornament developed by carving in wood; the bodies of the animals, highly stylized, were sometimes covered by a design of raised or embossed texture, produced by the wood-carver’s tool, not the brush of the Hiberno-Saxon illuminator. On the whole, the influence of Greco-Roman art-forms was surprisingly small in Scandinavia or Denmark in the ninth century; there were no carved Greco-Roman figures in pagan Scandinavia: fierce beasts or twining dragons continued to decorate wooden ships and halls in a manner reminiscent rather of the steppes and even China. There are more ninth- and tenth-century carvings showing Viking influence in Britain, Ireland and the land of the Franks than there are carvings in Scandinavia showing Greco-Roman influence.
Wood perishes: but literary evidence shows that in the Carolingian empire and much more in Scandinavia wood was the most widely used building material. While timber was still very plentiful, ‘blockwork’ building was used in eastern Europe with the timber balks or planks lying horizontally one on the other and fitted into each other at the angles of the building by means of cut notches: the ends of the balks protruded externally. Not much ornament was used in such ‘block’ buildings nor were they used in the far north: the technique was used where oak was plentiful. When timber was rather less abundant, and when, as in Scandinavia, there was much pine forest capable of producing long beams, framework or half-timber construction was used: this is apparently referred to by Bede as building more Scottorum. In such a building, timber uprights supporting the roof or cross beams were set some distance apart, and the space between them filled, sometimes with plaster, clay or a different timber, and sometimes with a diagonal framework of the same timber as the uprights, filled in with clay or plaster. In this half-timber work, the timber frame itself had artistic value and displayed a technique developed quite independently of the Greco-Roman tradition.
The third style of timber building, characteristic above all of Norway, was that used in the later mast-churches, which clearly derived from the structure used by ship builders. No pagan, secular building of this type is extant, even in Norway, its home: the fine, early mast-church of St Andrew at Borgund (near Bergen) dates from c. 1150. This church has successive tiers of roofing ascending to a central spire, the roof gables ending in long, curved dragons derived from old pagan tradition: as in all mast-churches, the accent is on height, not length. Such a church implies a long preparatory stage in this style of building: though the mast-churches certainly derive their origin from ship building, and the need for a strongly-stayed central mast to support the great, square sail, yet it would seem that some intermediate stage must have intervened between the ships and the extant mast-churches: some simpler form of mast and sleeper building than those now extant. In pagan, ninth-century Norway, such a technique may have been used for the halls of kings and earls. The essence of the construction was the laying of four great, interlocked beams or sleepers under the floor (as at Borgund); these formed a square or rectangle, and in the intersecting corner beams four masts were set, with two more masts intermediately on each side. Above this tall, two-storeyed structure other frameworks of sleepers and masts were raised, rising to a central wooden spire: and, around the central rectangle of mast-columns, light external screens or walls were built to a height of one or two storeys, supporting light, outlying roofs and increasing the floor space. Thus, externally, the Borgund church looks like a cluster of descending roofs, separated by short spaces of wall. In such mast-churches, the carpenter’s experience in nail-building a ship, and setting the mast in a central sleeper laid across it, lay at the root of the development.
While the mast-built halls of the Vikings in the ninth century are only an inference from the later churches, two of their richly carved ships have survived, because laid up in burial mounds. The Oseberg ship, found in a mound not far from the Oslo fjord, was built c. 800: it was already old when used for the funeral rites of Asa, the wife of Gudröd, in the mid-ninth century. The ship was not built for raiding on the open sea: it had a high prow and stern post, both beautifully carved, but its sides were low. Within it were laid the lady’s ceremonial wagon, and two wooden beds, all beautifully carved, her cloth of gold coverings and household paraphernalia: and with all this furniture to accompany her in death there were also laid the bodies of thirteen horses, six dogs and a woman, slain in sacrifice. While the Oseberg ship appears to have been built as a royal pleasure barge, that found in the mound at Gokstad was an ocean-going vessel, used for piracy or distant trading, built about 900. It was clinker-built and undecked, with an external keel, and a strong block, capable of supporting a mast, fitted into the ship’s frame. It had sixteen oars a side, and, instead of a steering oar, a rudder-board and a tiller. On such ships the Vikings could even cross the Atlantic: and their narrowness in proportion to their length allowed them to be rowed far up-river.
The Oseberg and the Gokstad ships have, as it were, survived by accident, and but for them we should have little knowledge of the richest ornament of the Viking period. The desire to commemorate the dead, before the period of Scandinavian expansion, took the form of barrows erected on the skyline rather than of carved stone monuments. In the ninth century, however, carved tombstones and metal horse furniture and jewellery came into use, decorated by craftsmen less highly skilled than the wood carvers, but showing the same tumultuous vigour in the form of their decorations. The earliest style of this animal design is called after Jellinge, the royal residence of the Danish kings in Jutland. It has two types of animal ornament, both showing foreign influence: connexions between the Danes settled in Ireland and Britain with those still in Scandinavia continued close. The first Jellinge style, shown in the richly decorated Copenhagen horse collars, has a Hiberno-Saxon interlaced pattern, with a ‘loosely knit confusion of violently racing creatures’ (Kendrick). Similar in the rugged and violent confusion of the design is that of the second Jellinge style, so-called from the sculptured boulder or memorial stone of Harald Gormson at Jellinge (set up c. 980). This has a runic inscription, an Anglian ‘great beast’ or lion, struggling with an intertwined serpent, and on another side what may be a crucifixion, with the half-pagan figure of Christ struggling with interlacing bands or serpents. The theme of a central human or animal figure struggling with twining serpents must indeed be old, far older than the tenth-century versions of it that remain. It suggests in Scandinavian-Anglian terms descent from the ancient Daniel-in-the-lions’-den motif, and its violence, profusion and struggle are indeed symbolic of Viking art and life at the period.
There are two later styles of Viking art: the Ringerike style, which copied in stone and metal the illuminated acanthus work of the tenth-century Winchester school and belongs to the period when Svein and Cnut ruled an empire ringing the North Sea: and the Urnes style, in which ingenious and intricate animal-patterns were used to adorn small metal objects used even in Christian worship. Both these styles, however, belong to the mid-tenth and eleventh centuries: they show increasing Greco-Roman influence.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
FOR THE CELTS, see H. Hubert, Les celtes depuis l’époque de la Tène et la civilisation celtique, 1950, with a full bibliography, dealing with the topographical, linguistic, archaeological and literary sides of Celtic history: for trans., see M. R. Dobie, Greatness and Decline of the Celts, 1934: A. Long-non, Noms des lieux anciens de la France, 1890: d. Gougaud, Les chrétientés celtiques, 1911: R. Flower, The Irish Tradition, 1947: F. Henry, Irish Art in the Early Christian Period, 1940. For Gildas, the dating of his life, and his whole or partial authorship of the De excidio Britanniae, the publication of Père Paul Grosjean’s work on the sources of Bede must be awaited: the brief references to Gildas on pp. 469–470 are merely provisional. For Columbanus, see G. S. M. Walker, Sancti Columbani Opera (with translation), 1957; for the Hisperica Famina, P. Grosjean’s ‘Confusa Caligo’, in Celtica, vol. iii (1955).
FOR THE SCANDINAVIANS, see G. Turville-Petre, The Heroic Age in Scandinavia as a necessary preliminary to Scandinavian studies: H. M. Chadwick, The Heroic Age, 1912: A. Mawer, The Vikings, 1913: T. D. Kendrick, A History of the Vikings, 1930: B. S. Phillpotts, Edda and Saga, 1931: H. Sketelig and H. Falk, Scandinavian Archaeology, trans. E. V. Gordon, 1937: C. A. J. Nordenfalk, Before the Book of Durrow, 1947: T. D. Kendrick, Late Saxon and Viking Art, for Scandinavian influence on Anglo-Saxon sculpture and timber constructions.