Vikings (35 page)

When he died in July
AD
924, Edward was succeeded by his son, Aethelstan, a man cut very much from the same bolt as both the father and the grandfather. Modern historians are increasingly willing to accept him as the first King of England. While Alfred was the rock around which the hitherto unstoppable Viking wave was first broken, and while Edward was recognised as King of the Anglo-Saxons, truly it was Aethelstan who rose to outright dominance in the south.

When Edward died there was still a Viking King of York, in the form of Sihtric. A diplomat as well as a warrior, Aethelstan first gave Sihtric his own sister in marriage. But when the Viking died, in 927, the man who would be King of England saw his chance. According to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘In this year fiery lights appeared in the northern quarter of the sky, and Sihtric died, and King Aethelstan succeeded to the kingdom of the Northumbrians.’

The chronicle goes on to record that, like his father, Aethelstan sought the submission of all other men, kings included: ‘and he brought under his rule all the kings who were in this island; first Hywel, king of the West Welsh, and Constantin [sic] king of the Scottas and Owain king of the people of Gwent, and Ealdred, son of Eadwulf, from Bamburgh.

More so than any man before him, Anglo-Saxon or Viking, he had risen above the aspirations of his fellows and at Eamont Bridge in Cumbria, on 12 July 927, he had them bow down before him: ‘And they established peace with pledges and oaths . . . and renounced all idolatry, and afterwards departed in peace.’ Coins minted from then onwards styled him not ‘King of the Saxons’ or even ‘King of the Anglo-Saxons’ but
rex totius Britanniae
, ‘King of all Britain’.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reveals that in 934 ‘King Aethelstan went into Scotland with both a land force and a naval force and ravaged much of it.’ Constantine and his forces retreated in the face of the onslaught and the English king pressed him all the way to the stronghold of Dunottar, perched at the end of a narrow promontory near Aberdeen. The most treacherous of approaches to the stronghold, with sheer drops into the sea either side, meant the King of the Scots was safe – at least while he remained penned behind his castle gates. In the end he chose to make terms, and once again accepted Aethelstan as his overlord. It was practical, but also humiliating, and by 937 he had set his heart on freeing himself from all obligations to the King of England. To do so, he first of all made peace with the Vikings.

If Aethelstan was a student of history as well as a warrior king, he would have known what happened in
AD
84, in the shadow of a hill described by Tacitus as
Mons Graupius.
Faced with seemingly invincible invaders, the tribes of the north had set aside their differences and united in the face of a foe that
posed a threat to their independence, even to their identities. So it was in
AD
937, when an ambitious and avaricious King of England made unlikely allies not just of Scots and Vikings but of Britons and Welsh as well.

The leader of the Viking element of the force was Olaf Guthfrisson – latest Scandinavian king of Dublin – and he and his shiploads of warriors landed somewhere on the east coast of England. Having met up with Constantine’s Scots, as well as with the Welsh and the Britons of Strathclyde, the unlikely alliance then collided with Aethelstan’s army at a place referred to in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as
Brunanburh.

The Chronicle of the Kings of Alba called it
Dun Brunde
, while the
Annales Cambriae
made it the
bellum Brune.
The fact is that the actual site of the battle remains unknown. Bromborough, on the Wirral, in Cheshire, is the location favoured by many historians today but there is no consensus. Wherever it took place, the resultant bloodbath was remembered for centuries afterwards simply as ‘the Great Battle’.

Scores of sources have recorded the clash and a now-famous Anglo-Saxon poem offers perhaps the best account of the bloody slaughter that ensued. It seemed the battle swept up just about every warrior with a stake in the future of Britain. ‘They clove the shield wall, hewed the war lindens with hammered blades; the foe gave way; the folk of the Scots and the ship fleet [Vikings] fell death doomed. The field was slippery with the blood of warriors . . . The West-Saxons in companies hewed the fugitives from behind cruelly, with swords mill-sharpened.’ The Anglo-Saxon historian Aethelweard lamented that ‘In this land no greater war was ever waged, nor did such a slaughter ever surpass that one.’

Aethelstan died just two years after the battle, at the age of 43. Constantine had lost his own son to that butcher’s yard, but at least he lived long enough to see the death of his greatest
tormentor. In 943, aged in his sixties or maybe even his seventies, he walked away from his throne, preferring to spend the years remaining to him as a holy man, in St Andrews. Aethelstan’s vision of a unified kingdom of England died with him. Like Constantine of the Scots, Olaf, King of the Dublin Vikings had also survived the battle, and when Aethelstan died it was he who seized the kingship of Northumbria. Still unsatisfied, Olaf turned then on the Christian Anglo-Danes of eastern Mercia and, having added their submission to his tally, headed north to sack the monastery of Lindisfarne. It was further north, in East Lothian, that he seemingly met his match. Days after leading his warriors in an attack on the religious community of Tyninghame, he was dead. As far as the local tribespeople were concerned the Viking had been bested by St Baldred, whose shrine he had desecrated.

Olaf was succeeded by his cousin, Olaf Sigtryggsson, who retained control not just of Northumbria and York but also of Dublin. Here was nothing less than a dynasty, a lineage of Vikings – all of them claiming descent from Ivarr the Boneless, the same man who had arrived in Dublin with Olaf the White in
AD
853, and who may have been buried in Repton a century before, surrounded by hundreds of his followers.

While Hastings and 1066 are familiar to most, Brunanburh and 937 are all but forgotten – yet it was there that something fundamental about Britain was written in the blood of all her peoples. Aethelstan might have ordered his coin-makers to style him King of all Britain, but in the end his reach exceeded his grasp. When the fighting was over, his Anglo-Saxon forces held the field. He was triumphant on the day, but his dream of total conquest lay dead among the rest of the carrion. Come what may, Britain would be home to more than one land, ruled by more than one king. What is remarkable too is that Vikings were there among the tribes of Britain to help settle the matter.
In the manner of the times, they were fighting on both sides.

Among the heap of slain picked over by wolves and crows were not just those led by Olaf Guthfrisson, King of Dublin, but also Viking warriors in the service of Egil Skallagrimsson of Iceland. Egil and his men fought for Aethelstan and their adventures at Brunanburh inspired some of the most famous passages in Egil’s saga.

The Icelandic sagas amount to some of the greatest literature of the world and Egil’s saga is regarded by scholars as one of the finest of all. In the aftermath of the fighting, Egil finds his brother Thorolf among the slain. Having buried him, he makes his way to Aethelstan’s victory feast. Egil’s bravery in the battle has ensured him a place of honour, directly opposite the king, but he sits silently, consumed by grief and anger.

Seeing the hero’s misery, Aethelstan takes a gold ring from his own arm, places it on the tip of his sword and holds it over the fire. Egil takes his own sword from his sheath and uses it to accept the offering. His sadness and wrath assuaged, he takes a hearty draught from a drinking horn and recites the following in praise:

It was the warrior’s

work, to hang this gold band

round an arm where hawks ride

ready to do my will.

And see how I make my sword

Summon the ring to its

Arm. There’s skill in this. But

The prince claims greater praise.

That a thirteenth-century Icelandic poet and writer should make a point of referencing a battle fought in England more than two centuries before goes some way towards underlining
the nation-shaping significance of Brunanburh. But why were tenth-century Vikings from Iceland involved?

Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales were just the start of the westward expansion of the Norwegian Vikings. Superlative ships and generations of seafaring put the islands of the North Atlantic within reach of the bravest mariners, that much is agreed. But historians are still arguing about precisely what possessed them to take the risk.

Some blame population pressure; others cite the harsh regime of King Harald Fairhair; yet more suggest ambitious men sought wealth abroad to finance social advancement back home. For my own part I believe some wanderers have always chased the setting sun, even if that means heading out into the sundering sea in open boats.

For all that, however, the first human feet to splash ashore on the Faroe Islands, and on Iceland, were not Norwegian. Whatever the inspirations of the pagans, Christian hermits with a taste for isolation seem to have got there first. Christianity had been on the move much longer than any Viking. From its first home in the eastern Mediterranean, monasticism moved steadily west, and then north. Ireland and the Western Isles provided the sought-for peace and isolation, and sometime in the sixth century one of their number, St Finnian of Clonard, is said to have established a monastery on Skellig Michael, seven miles off the County Kerry coast of Ireland. It was to such rocks that early Christianity clung while Europe was racked by all the storms of the Dark Ages.

This urge to put distance between themselves and others persuaded some holy men there were miles yet to travel, regardless of any physical dangers. While the Vikings would have their clinker-built knarr, as seaworthy as any vessels in the medieval world, the monks put to sea in
currachs.
Tanned
cowhides stretched over frames of slender willow saplings make vessels that sit lightly upon the swell, like resting seabirds, but it is a brave man who would climb aboard such a thing and head off into the North Atlantic in hope of finding land that may or may not even exist. Brave or merely deluded, it was Irish monks who made the first voyages of discovery, and who were therefore first to set foot upon the Faroe Islands.

Around
AD
825 an Irish monk named Dicuil wrote
Liber de Mensura Orbis Terrae
– ‘Measure and Description of the Sphere of the Earth’ – in which he described islands lying far to the north of the British Isles:

A set of small islands, nearly all separated by narrow stretches of water; in these for nearly a hundred years hermits sailing from our country, Ireland, have lived. But just as they were always deserted from the beginning of the world, so now because of the Northman pirates they are emptied of anchorites, and are filled with countless sheep and very many diverse kinds of seabirds.

As yet the archaeological evidence is inconclusive. Some place names make use of
papa
, suggesting the presence, once upon a time, of ‘fathers’. There have been finds of stone slabs engraved or incised with simple crosses, but so far nothing by way of domestic artefacts has come to light. Perhaps the best clue lies in the presence of the sheep. When the Viking settlers finally arrived they named the place
Faereyar
– the sheep islands – suggesting the four-legged inhabitants were already in residence by then. Since the sheep had not swum there, it is plausible they were the descendants of stock animals transported by the monks in their currachs more than a century before.

According to the fourteenth-century
Flateyjarbók
– ‘the Flat
Island Book’ – the first Viking settler on the Faroe Islands was a man called Grimur Kamban. Sometime around
AD
800 he arrived with enough companions, seed crops and animals to establish a settlement. All modern Faroese claim descent from Grimur and tradition has it that he travelled via Dublin, Cape Wrath, Orkney and Shetland. To make the matter of his origins and identity even more interesting, his name is a combination of both Norse and Celtic elements. The ‘Grim’ part is common in northern Europe and Scandinavia, and means something like ‘the masked man’. But the ‘Kam’ in Kamban has its roots in an old Irish word for bent or crooked. The idea of an Irish source for the first man on the Faroe Islands simply will not go away.

Whether or not it was Irish monks who were first to reach the islands, it is important to remember they could not have been ‘colonists’ in any meaningful sense of the word. For a start, they were all men, seeking seclusion and the peace of God rather than families in search of new lives. Whatever impact the hermits might have had on the islands, it would certainly have been superficial. When the Vikings arrived, led by Grimur Kamban, they would quickly have swamped any Irishmen there – brushing away their traces like chalk dust from a blackboard.

Lying approximately halfway between Norway and Iceland, the Faroe Islands have belonged to Denmark since 1814. There are 18 main islands in the group, amounting to some 540 square miles of rugged, often rocky territory that feels as lonely and far-flung as any misanthropic monk might wish. Slaettaratindur is the tallest peak, at nearly 3,000 feet, and when the length of the coastline of all the islands is added together it comes to the best part of 700 miles, much of it in the form of dramatic cliffs and waterfalls. It is a landscape of extremes, one breathtaking view after another. If movie director Peter Jackson had not selected New Zealand to stand in for Middle Earth in his trilogy of
Lord of the Rings
films, then the Faroe Islands would surely have been
every bit as suitable, for Mordor at the very least.

But for all that they might seem isolated they are also in a pivotal position in the North Atlantic. Look at them on a map and suddenly they appear like a central point, a hub. As recently as the Second World War both the British and the German governments understood their geographical significance, so that when Hitler invaded Denmark, Churchill immediately sent troops to occupy the little archipelago. During the Battle of the Atlantic, control of that lonely outpost proved crucial to Allied success.