Viking Britain- an Exploration Page 29
Odin will ride into the jaws of Fenrir and do battle with the wolf; he will face it alone, and that will be the end of him, the All-Father swallowed into the maw of death. Thor will ride beside him, but no help will come from that quarter. Thor will be locked in deadly conflict with Jormungandr and, though he will slay the wyrm, he will be poisoned by its venom – staggering nine steps before he too will fall. Frey will die also, cut down by Surt’s flaming sword. Tyr, the one-handed god, will go down to Garm – the hound who howls before hell’s mouth – and Heimdall and Loki will slay each other.
The ideas contained in Völuspá, and rationalized and repeated by Snorri, cannot be attributed with any confidence to the Viking Age itself, but allusions to, and scenes from, the story of Ragnarök are found in other poems and fragments.18 Of these, two of the most dramatic are found carved in Britain, shards of the pagan Viking end of days, frozen in immortal rock.
Thirty-one runestones stand on the Isle of Man, the largest number in any place outside Scandinavia. Like their cousins, they are memorials to the dead (although at least one was erected to salve the soul of a living man) and are defined by the runic carvings – inscribed in the Norse language – that record the names of those lost and those remaining, and the people who raised the stones. (Some also carry inscriptions in Ogham, the vertical Celtic alphabet of hatch-marks used in Ireland and western Britain – a sure sign of a culturally and linguistically mixed population.)19 They make up roughly a third of all the carved stones of Man, an impressive corpus of sculpture bearing the combined influence of Irish stoneworking traditions and Scandinavian art-styles. They are, stylistically, quite dissimilar to the runestone tradition of the Viking ‘homelands’ and are primarily cruciform objects – either high standing crosses, or cross-incised slabs akin to the Christian symbol stones of Pictavia.20 The inscriptions they carry are, for the most part, fairly mundane, although they do provide a thrilling glimpse of the individuals who peopled Viking Age Man, even if the light that the inscriptions cast on these people is but a fleeting glimmer in the dark.
‘Þorleifr the Neck raised this cross in memory of Fiak, his son, Hafr›s brother’s son,’ runs the inscription on the tenth-century standing cross at Braddan Church;21 ‘Sandulfr the Black erected this cross in memory of Arinbjǫrg his wife …’ runs another at Andreas Church.22 Some, like Þorleifr’s, hint at premature tragedy (‘Áleifr […] raised this cross in memory of Ulfr, his son’),23 another acknowledges a guilty conscience (‘Melbrigði [incidentally, the same Celtic name (albeit spelled differently) as that scratched into the back of the Hunterston Brooch], the son of Aðakán the Smith, raised this cross for his sin …’) but concludes with the prideful boast of the rune-carver (‘but Gautr made this and all in Man’).24 Sometimes they hint at familial drama and community tensions. A person who identified himself as ‘Mallymkun’ raised a cross in memory of ‘Malmury’, his foster-mother. He ends with the sour observation that ‘[it] is better to leave a good foster-son than a wretched son’. A thousand years later, the rancour still festers in the stone. Other thoughts are snapped off by time and left hanging: ‘Oddr raised this cross in memory of Frakki, his father, but …’25 But what? It is most likely that the missing runes revealed the name of the carver (‘but [so-and-so] cut/made this’ is a typical formula), but it is impossible to rule out a more personal aside: ‘… but Hrosketill betrayed the faith of his sworn confederate’,26 runs the truncated inscription on another stone at Braddan Church. Alas, what Hrosketill did – or to whom, or even for what purpose the stone was raised – is lost for ever.
The most famous of the Manx runestones is the fragment of a monument known as ‘Thorwald’s Cross’, found at Andreas Church. It is a slab-type runestone, with its surviving inscription ‘Þorvaldr raised [this] cross’ running down one edge, and a decorative cross on each face, embellished with characteristically Scandinavian ring-chain carvings. In the case of this particular runestone, however, the simple Christian message is complicated by the subject matter to which the carver chose to turn his chisel. On one side of what remains of the stone, cut in relief on the bottom right-hand quadrant left vacant by the cross, is the image of a male, bearded figure with a large bird perched upon his shoulder. A spear is in his hand, its point downwards, thrusting towards the open jaws of a wolf – a wolf that is in the process of devouring him, his right leg disappearing down the lupine gullet. There can be little doubt that this is a depiction of Odin, Gungnir in hand and raven on his shoulder,27 swallowed by the wolf.
Across the sea from Man, at Gosforth in Cumbria, a tall cross stands in the churchyard of St Mary’s, 15 feet of slender masonry with pea-green lichen clinging like sea-scum to the ruddy Cumbrian stone. It seems odd and incongruous, standing there amid the dour eighteenth-century tombstones – like some strange Atlantean pillar recovered from the ocean floor and hauled upright, flotsam from another world. Its carvings are in surprisingly good condition, given the millennium during which it has stood against the elements. The lichen is less ancient than the carvings it obscures. In 1881, Dr Charles Arundel Parker – the obstetrician and part-time antiquarian – and his friend the Rev. W. S. Calverley came to Gosforth ‘one dull wet day in the late autumn’, when, the two gentlemen had determined, ‘the continuous damp and rain of the previous weeks would have softened the lichens which had filled every sculptured hollow’. Happily for them and the condition of their frockcoats, these were days when menial labour was easily to be had. These two learned fellows stood in the churchyard while Dr Parker’s coachman, ‘up aloft, with a dash of a wet brush to the right and to the left hand scattered the softened mosses’.28 What he revealed were the triquetrae (interlacing triple-arches) that decorated the cross-head, the final details to be revealed and recorded of a monument that boasts the most comprehensive iconographic depiction of Norse mythology dating to the Viking Age anywhere in Europe.
Many of the scenes that cover the four faces of the shaft of the Gosforth Cross remain open to interpretation, but two in particular stand out. One is the torment of Loki, the punishment inflicted for his part in the death of Baldr and the pivotal event of the mythic cycle that ends with Ragnarök. We see him bound in an ovoid cell, a pathetic trussed creature, while his wife Sigyn bends over him to catch the venom that drips from the serpent pressing its diamond head into his face. The other is the depiction of a figure, striding purposefully into the gaping mouth of a beast, one foot upon the lower jaw, one hand reaching to grip the upper, a spear held in the other. Snorri provides the key that enables us to identify this figure as Vidar, son of Odin: ‘Vidar will stride forward and thrust one of his feet into the lower jaw of the wolf […] With one hand he takes hold of the wolf’s upper jaw and rips apart its mouth, and this will be the wolf’s death.’29 This is the end of the wolf, Fenrir, but it is not the end of the world. That comes with the final blackening of the heavens and the burning of Yggdrasil, the sinking of the earth into the sea – a return to the primeval void.
In all tellings of the Ragnarök story, however, there is a final act, a light to guide us through the darkness. In Völuspá it is told with heartbreaking simplicity, the heathen völva’s vision of a far green country – a promised land to come:
She sees rising up a second time
the earth from the ocean, ever-green;
the cataracts tumble, an eagle flies above,
hunting fish along the fell.30
There are aspects of this unfolding vision that feel familiar – the ‘hall standing, more beautiful than the sun, better than gold’, where ‘virtuous folk shall live’ and ‘enjoy pleasure the live-long day’ and, in one version of Völuspá, the sudden appearance of ‘the mighty one down from above, the strong one, who governs everything’,31 the arrival – as one scholar describes it – ‘of Christ in majesty, descending to the earth after the rule of the pagan gods has come to an end’.32 This Christian coda to the pagan end of days is there at Gosforth as well, more explicitly perhaps than anywhere else. Immediat
ely below the depiction of Vidar’s grisly dispatch of Fenrir is a depiction of the crucifixion, the redemptive fulcrum of human history – the event which, in Christian cosmology, ensured safe harbour for the souls of those who embraced its message. It is the symbol of the promise of eternal life, the seal that guarantees that a new world shall rise from the ocean.
Vidar and Fenrir on the Gosforth Cross; Julius Magnus Petersen, 1913 (Wikimedia Commons)
It is a supreme irony that the very monuments at Andreas Church and Gosforth which seem to confirm the pagan beliefs written down in a later age also bear witness to their dwindling, their co-option into a new world-view. The old stories were not yet dead at the time these monuments were made, and many of them would never die, living on through the versions written down 300 years after being alluded to in stone. But by this time the stories were no longer (if they ever were) an oppositional belief system, a Viking ‘religion’ to rival the teachings of the gospel. They were, instead, passing into folklore, becoming tales that could be told without threatening the Christian world-view, complementing it perhaps, explanatory metaphors for the new narratives that were percolating through mixed and immigrant communities. We might imagine that it would, initially, have been easy for a people accustomed to many gods to add another to the throng (or many others – the trinity and the multitudes of saints and angels would doubtless have appeared indistinguishable at first from the gods, ghosts and elves of native belief). Over time, the exclusive nature of the Christian god would have gradually asserted itself, but it cannot have been clear at the beginning. The crosses at Gosforth and Andreas Church can therefore be interpreted in different ways as the products of an incomplete conversion – made for or by people for whom, at the time, Christianity was just an additional set of images and stories to add to the mythological cauldron.
On the other hand, perhaps, these were erudite attempts to juxtapose Christian and pagan images – a means of instructing new converts on the essentials of the Christian faith. For example, although the scene on the reverse of Thorwald’s Cross has not been securely interpreted, there is little doubt of its Christian intent: a man wielding a huge cross and a book tramples on a serpent while another Christian symbol, a fish, hovers near by: a triple whammy of Christian symbology. There is room for a little ambiguity here – crosses can easily be mistaken for hammers (indeed, some Thor’s-hammer pendants may actually have been intended as crosses, and some deliberately combine cross and hammer on the same object),33 and Thor was famous as both a fisherman and a fighter of serpents. One thing he was not, however, was bookish, and it is this more than anything else that gives the Christian game away. Although we cannot know for sure, it may be that the missing ‘panels’ of the complete cross depicted complementary images from pagan and Christian mythology – a sort of pictorial instruction manual to Christianity, the build-it-yourself guide to getting religion with the old myths deployed as the key.
I prefer, however, to see all of this in a different light, to see the Ragnarök story as an expression of a melancholy self-awareness, the creative and emotionally profound product of people who could feel the old world slipping away, a poetic response in words and stone to the twilight of an ancient way of life, a twilight of their gods. The Ragnarök story brims with sadness and nostalgia, a pagan vision of the future that was alive to the impending extinction of its own world-view in an increasingly homogenized Europe. It is a complex and intellectually involved interplay of hope and defeat, defiance and resignation, an acknowledgement – a recapitulation – of what was already slipping away and a yearning for a new and better world around the corner. For the Viking communities of Britain, that hope lay in the new identities and new ways of being that were being adopted and adapted in different ways across the islands. As the tenth century progressed, old affinities and beliefs began to break down as new political and cultural realities asserted themselves. What it meant to be a ‘Viking’ in Britain was changing rapidly.34
18
The Great War
Long was prophesied the time when they will come,
rulers by right of descent taking their possession,
men of the North in a place of honour around them;
in the centre of their van they will advance. […]
There will be spear-thrusts, a fierce flood.
No friend will spare the body of his enemy.
There will be heads split open, without brains.
There will be women widowed and horses riderless.
There will be terrible wailing before the rush of warriors,
and a multitude wounded by hand before the hosts part.
Armes Prydein Vawr (tenth century)1
When, in 920, Edward the Elder finally received the submission of the north, Northumbria had been subject to Viking conquest, settlement and rule for half a century. In the years that followed the capture of York by the micel here in 866, power in Northumbria appears to have been shared in an untidy fashion among a number of groups, competing or cooperating as circumstances dictated. There were native Northumbrian rulers (Ecgbert I, Ricsige, Ecgbert II), as well as a separate dynasty that retained a power-base at Bamburgh in the north of the kingdom. Then there were the bishops of Northumbria – at Lindisfarne and York – and also, probably, those leaders of the micel here who had not gone south with the army to Mercia, East Anglia or Wessex. In 874, however, a new ‘big beast’ reappeared on the scene: Halfdan, supposed son of Ragnar Loðbrók, and one of the leaders of the army that had captured York in 866, came north from the capture of Repton with an army.2 He camped on the Tyne, overrunning northern Northumbria before raiding and briefly occupying Pictavia (during the reign of Cinaed’s son, Constantín I) and attacking the new kingdom of Strathclyde.3
From this point onwards, and particularly from 876 when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that Halfdan began to ‘share out the land’ of Northumbria, men with Scandinavian names began to be recognized as the prime movers in the kingdom, particularly in those territories centred on York.4 The years that followed saw Halfdan succeeded by a line of Viking kings – Guthfrith, Siefred and Cnut – about whom very little is known. What can be seen, however, is that, like Guthrum–Æthelstan in East Anglia, these were men who outwardly embraced the Christian Church and what is more, the Church – so it would seem – had begun to embrace them back.
A sense of ecclesiastical investment in the way this new royal power was framed can be seen in a remarkable description in the Historia Sancti Cuthberti (a history of the see of St Cuthbert, dating from the mid-tenth to mid-eleventh century) describing the circumstances of Guthfrith’s elevation to the throne in 877. It is not a very reliable source – neither in general nor within the bounds of the specific anecdote that follows – but it does tell us something about how power was being brokered in the north in those days, about the unlikely accommodations that were being reached. Once again, the discorporate form of our old friend St Cuthbert is on hand, still apparently taking an active interest in British politics, this time appearing:
by night to the holy abbot of Carlisle, whose name was Eadred, [and] firmly enjoining him as follows: ‘Go,’ he said, ‘across the Tyne to the army of the Danes, and say to them that, if they will obey me, they are to point out to you a certain boy, Guthfrith, Hardacnut’s son […] and at the sixth hour lead him before the whole multitude, that they may elect him king. And at the ninth hour lead him with the whole army on to the hill which is called “Oswiu’s down” [Oswigesdune], and there place on his right arm a gold armlet, and thus they all may appoint him as king.’5
This, the Historia relates, is exactly what Eadred did and, naturally, the Viking army was perfectly happy with this arrangement. Guthfrith was duly made king with ‘the great goodwill of the whole multitude’.6 There are glimpses here, perhaps, of rituals of power being enacted – a glimpse of the royal theatre through which rulership was expressed and validated in the febrile climate of Viking-dominated late ninth-century Northumbria.
Guthfrith takes the golden ring from the priest. He holds it aloft and a brief shaft of sunlight catches it, burning it for a moment with amber fire. Suddenly a rumble begins, swords on steel rims, ash on linden, a forest thunder. It builds until the hills echo with it, rolling from the fells and dales, crows startled, wheeling from the woods. Guðfrið smiles; he places the ring upon his arm and draws his sword, a silver fish in rapids, dancing in the daylight. A cry of exultation breaks forth, a roar like the falling of trees, rising skyward from a thousand wolfish throats, announcing the birth of a king.