Vikings (32 page)

What is undisputed is that the Great Heathen Army split into two at Repton. After nearly a decade together, tensions of one sort or another finally caused a rift. A Viking chieftain called Halfdan – who may have been kin to Ivarr, even his brother – took half of the force and headed north to Northumbria. From
his base there Halfdan began making trouble for, among others, the Picts and the Britons in the north. It was hardly the first time Vikings had raided there. The 200 ships full of slaves that had arrived in Dublin in 871 had contained not just hapless Anglo-Saxons but also Britons and Picts.

As well as continuing the tradition of raiding, it seems Halfdan’s men also sought to put down roots – both literally and metaphorically. According to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 876 he ‘shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and they proceeded to plough and to support themselves’. If this was so then it would mark yet another turning point, and the chronicle even identifies Halfdan as not just a king leading the army, but a king
of
at least a part of Northumbria itself.

The rest of the army, under the leadership of three Viking chieftains named Guthrum, Oscetel and Anwend, departed Repton for the area around modern-day Cambridge. After over-wintering there, the Vikings once more focused their sights on the last surviving independent English kingdom, that of Wessex.

Alfred the Great was the only English king who managed to defeat the Vikings. He came to his throne in 871 following the death of his elder brother, King Aethelred. Those were dark days for the people of Wessex and the shadow over the land was cast by Vikings. With no other options available to him, the newly crowned Alfred had to ‘make peace’ with the invaders. No doubt that peace was bought with a large quantity of gold and silver from Wessex coffers – and in any event it was short-lived.

Time and again during the next seven years Viking forces invaded Alfred’s kingdom, and always Alfred was forced to buy them off. Guthrum, one of the triumvirate that led half of the Great Army away from Repton, masterminded the surprise attack that all but claimed the life of the king himself. Alfred was
staying at a royal stronghold in Chippenham in the winter of 877/8, when the Vikings struck. With most of his fighting men slaughtered, Alfred led a ragtag band of survivors to Athelney, in the Somerset Levels, where they threw up hasty defences. It was there, at his lowest ebb, that he was apparently given shelter by a peasant woman. Unaware she was entertaining her king, she left him to keep watch over some cakes she was cooking on her fire and, distracted by his plight, he let them burn.

Much like Robert the Bruce, King of Scots, Alfred seems to have found new resolve while on the run. It was in the May of 878 that he returned to the fray and achieved a decisive victory at the Battle of Edington. Properly cowed by the scale of the defeat, Guthrum promised to lead his army out of Wessex for good, and as part of the deal he even accepted baptism into Alfred’s Christian faith. With a new name, Aethelstan, and with Alfred as his godfather, the Viking accepted a peace deal that saw a new boundary appear on the map of England. While Alfred’s Wessex now extended into the western half of Mercia, the Vikings could lay claim to much of the territory north of the Thames and the River Lea, and into East Anglia. This Viking domain would become known as the Danelaw; and rather than being a geographical concept, it was that part of England where the legal systems of the Norse held sway.

From the Viking point of view it was an astonishing achievement. Having arrived as an army of 3,000 men 15 years before, now they had conquered three of the four English kingdoms and claimed much of the north and east of the land for their own colony. There, Norse kings would rule and even today the place names and the very blood of the people are silent witnesses to the scale of the Viking success.

It was never likely that Alfred’s peace with Guthrum would bring matters to a final close and in 892 there was an attempted influx by two armies of Vikings hoping to settle in England.
Alfred was ready for them, however, and his pre-prepared defences, with armies on standby, meant the would-be settlers were thwarted. A poor shadow of the Great Heathen Army of nearly 30 years before, they roamed hopelessly until 896 when, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the soldiers went their separate ways, ‘some to East Anglia, some to Northumbria and those who were without money or property got themselves ships there, and went south across the sea to the Seine’.

The principal centres within the territory of the Danelaw were Lincoln and the capital of the Norse in England, York. The confluence of the Ouse and the Foss rivers has recommended itself for settlement for millennia. It certainly attracted the Romans, who arrived in
AD
71 and called it Eboracum – the place of the yew trees. After they left it was known to the Anglo-Saxons as Eoforwic and as Jorvik by the Vikings. Archaeological excavations in York, particularly in Coppergate, have painted a detailed picture of busy, productive lives. Craftspeople lived and worked in timber houses built on long narrow plots separated one from another by wattle fences. Over time the style of buildings changed but always the inhabitants were engaged in the business of making tools and household items as well as jewellery of amber, bronze, silver and gold.

There were English puppet kings in York at first, but by the early 900s they were Scandinavians, often basing their legitimacy on descent from Ivarr. York grew into a veritable city of between 10,000 and 15,000 souls and such a centre attracted merchants and visitors from all over the known world. As well as finds of Irish and Scottish origin, excavations in Coppergate have turned up evidence of French wine and Byzantine silk. Sure of themselves and determined to ape Anglo-Saxon ways, the Scandinavian kings of York even began minting coins.

Years of Danelaw turned to decades and soon even the language of England began to show Norse influence. Anglo-Saxon
and Norse are, anyway, from the same branch of the tree of languages. The Anglo-Saxons came to Britain from north and western Europe in the wake of the Romans, and by the time Vikings began arriving, four or five centuries later, both peoples could still understand one another relatively well. As more and more Norse settlers appeared in the Danelaw in the second half of the ninth century, so the two languages became increasingly intertwined. Place names are particularly revealing. The thousands of town and village names ending in
-by
,
-thorp
and
-thwaite
indicate that those places were either established, or taken over, by Vikings. A quick look at a map of the north and east of England makes clear just how much of the land was therefore settled by Scandinavians. Perhaps more surprising is just how many so-called ‘loan-words’ are used in modern English as a result of the ninth- and tenth-century mixing of the two languages. Everyday words like ‘cast’, ‘die’, ‘egg’, ‘knife’ and ‘window’ are all derived from Old Norse and we would not have ‘their’, ‘them’ and ‘they’ either without the Scandinavian influence. Something like 600 Old Norse loan-words are still part of modern English and it is only the loss of local dialects – regional variations of speech that survived for millennia but that are now all but drowned out by the uniformity imposed by modern media – that has recently done away with thousands more.

The dialects of northern Britain were generally affected more noticeably than those in the south, and many words used today in Cumbria and Yorkshire – like ‘tyke’ for an unruly youngster, ‘nay’ meaning no, as well as good old honest ‘muck’ – are all understood to be loan-words from the Vikings. The Scots word ‘kirk’ for church has the same origin. Best and surely most unexpected of all, it turns out ‘akimbo’ is Old Norse too, and comes from a word meaning something like ‘bent into a crooked shape’.

In Shetland, the memorial to the men of the Shetland Bus is on the seafront at Scalloway, capital of the islands until the eighteenth century. As you might expect, it takes the form of a little boat riding high upon a wave on a storm-tossed sea. It seems clear the westward expansion of the Norwegian Vikings reached those islands first of all and, having been established as the beachhead, Shetland was for ever after a fixed point in their understanding of the world.

Archaeology has proved there were Swedish Vikings in Staraya Ladoga, in modern Russia, by the middle of the eighth century. Nothing has been found so far to place the Norwegians in Shetland quite so early – but common sense alone makes such an idea tenable at the very least. The most northerly part of the British archipelago has been a hub around which exploration and expansion have revolved for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

Despite the obvious logic of placing Vikings on the Northern Isles from the eighth century onwards – and at least earlier than the attacks on the Northumbrian monasteries – there is no physical or even documentary evidence that it was so. No one wrote anything down about the settlement of the islands until 300 years later; and by then the testimony, by Icelanders and others of Scandinavian origin, is in the form of sagas written to entertain rather than to keep track of dates.

What we do know is that by the seventh century
AD
Shetland and Orkney, as well as the north and east of the Scottish mainland, were home to people descended directly from the hunters and gatherers who had colonised Britain at the end of the Ice Age 10,000–12,000 years ago. Their ancestors had walked dry-shod onto what was then a peninsula of north-western Europe and those who made it as far as Orkney and Shetland had reached the end of the line: Ultima Thule. The way of life
there had been evolving for millennia and during the early centuries of the second millennium
BC
, the height of the pre-Roman Iron Age, had given rise to the mighty circular stone towers known as brochs.

By the onset of the Viking Age proper, the people of those islands were farmers and fishermen, using iron tools and living in settlements of roundhouses. Their culture might be described, for want of a better word, as Celtic. Sometime before the coming of the Vikings – perhaps a hundred years or more – Christian missionaries, remembered by the locals as
papar
, had brought their faith to the islands, but in all practical respects they remained remote, as they still are today. Shetland’s modern capital Lerwick is more than 130 miles north-east of Dunnet Head, the most northerly point on the Scottish mainland, and the islands beyond have always been worlds apart.

If, as seems likely, they had been reached by the culture of the mainland Picts, then the pre-Viking islanders on both Orkney and Shetland would have spoken a language that is completely lost to us now. ‘Eeny, meeny, miny, moe’ is said by some to be one, two, three, four – all that remains of a pre-Roman counting system. If it is Celtic – and therefore Pictish – it has survived by being fossilised within a children’s rhyme.

While much of our history is in the ground, waiting to be recovered by archaeologists, a huge amount of it lies buried in the language we speak every day. Unexplained and largely redundant, like the vast majority of our DNA, the remains of who we used to be are all around. Some of what resides in the languages and dialects of Britain may have drifted from the mainstream, but is retained by the memories of a few. In the hills and valleys of the north of England there were, at least until recently, shepherds who counted their flocks using words unrecognisable and downright alien to all but a handful of people living today. ‘Yan, tan, tether, mether, pip, azer, sezar, akker, conter, dick’ are
the numbers one to ten in a single example of a score of dialect variations spread from Cumbria in the west to Northumbria in the east, and through Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire and County Durham besides. The origins of these words are as uncertain as eeny, meeny, miny and moe but linguists suggest they might be Anglo-Saxon.

On the Scottish mainland the Celtic, Pictish culture merged in time with that of the Irish Gaels. Together, the two ways of being became one – the identity that became
Scottish.
The coming together of Picts and Gaels was complete by perhaps
AD
900, but in the Shetland and Orkney Islands the old Celtic, Pictish way of life may have been subverted and replaced at least 100 years before.

Some of the sagas, written much later, claim it was the rule of Harald Fairhair, first King of Norway, that gave many men cause to flee their homeland. Ruler of the country between around
AD
872 and 930, Harald’s determination to consolidate and extend his power brought him into open conflict with other ambitious Norwegian men. Some traditions make Harald the grandson of the Ynglinga Queen Aase – said by some to be the younger of the two women buried amid all that finery in the Oseberg Ship – and the dynasty’s children seemingly perpetuated the family tradition of claiming total authority. Harald’s aspirations were such that his own reign was said to have driven many men to head west in search of new lands to settle. It was in this atmosphere, according to the sagas at least, that Norwegian Vikings first set foot upon Orkney and Shetland as well as the Western Isles of Scotland and Caithness, on the mainland.

Another document, the
Historia Norwegie
– the History of Norway – written sometime in the second half of the twelfth century, has it that:

. . . the Pents, only a little taller than pygmies, accomplished
miraculous achievements by building towns, morning and evening, but at midday every ounce of strength deserted them and they hid for fear in underground chambers . . . In the days of Harald Fairhair, king of Norway, certain Vikings, descended from the stock of that sturdiest of men, Ragnvaldr jarl, crossing the Solund Sea with a large fleet, totally destroyed these people after stripping them of their long-established dwellings and made the islands subject to themselves.

Right away we see the yawning gap between history as we understand it, and the stuff of myth and legend as enjoyed by readers in the High Middle Ages. Four hundred years after the Vikings arrived in the islands, the indigenous people encountered there – the Picts – have become little more than pixies.