The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (4 page)

Audun found himself penniless, in the
middle of a warzone, with a starving bear who could be forgiven for considering his
minder as lunch; his journey south took so long that even if the bear was a cub in
Greenland it must have been big and hungry now. The King of Norway offered to buy
the beast, but Audun refused and kept moving. He made it across to Denmark, but now
he had quite literally nothing except a bear that was starving to death; a courtier
offered both of them food, on condition he could own half the bear. Audun had no
choice.

This is a story, so naturally the Danish
king saves Audun and his bear. He pays for Audun to go to Rome and back again, and
even the King of Norway acknowledges that Audun probably did the right thing when he
refused to sell him the bear. Norwegian kings gave ships, food and time like Danish
kings, but not silver; by holding on to the bear until he reached Denmark, Audun
made a solid fortune in money which he could use for anything. A man no longer
skirts the abyss in the far north and lives in fear of monsters; instead, he does
business with them for cash.

The story is the folktale of a man and a
bear, but it also signals a moment when the world becomes recognizable, if not
downright modern: money, travel, trade, ambition. But of course we choose what we
want to recognize.

That is why the reality of this hidden
past matters so much. It involves whole peoples’ ideas about who they are, how
they think, where they come from and why they rule: all the things they choose to
recognize.

‘Forgetting history or even
getting it wrong is one of the major elements in building a nation,’ Ernest
Renan wrote, and he said history was a danger to nationalism; Eric Hobsbawm added:
‘I regard it as the primary duty of modern historians to be such a
danger.’
32

For national history has a way of being radically
incomplete. The Irish were and are deeply attached to the notion of an island of
saints and scholars, which is not wrong at all, except that it leaves out the
raiders, slavers and traders. Some Dutchmen used to have a deep mistrust of anything
medieval on the grounds that it was bound to be Catholic and therefore unpatriotic
and wrong, but it’s tough to get right a history that has to be a perfect
blank before the Protestant sixteenth century; and it can be silly. When the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam first opened in its pseudo-medieval glory, all Gothick
spikes and towers, King William III in 1885 announced: ‘I shall never set foot
in that monastery.’ Norwegian attitudes are even more complicated, since the
Middle Ages were the time when Norway was independent and powerful, before Danes and
Swedes took over and started to write the national story; so instead of leaving out
the medieval, Norwegians chose to leave out the next four centuries, the
‘four-hundred-year night’. When the first Norwegian national assembly, a
thoroughly democratic body, opened in 1814 the President perversely declared:
‘Now is re-erected the Norwegian royal throne.’
33

There is worse. The peoples around the
North Sea have a remarkable story, the one I mean to tell, but it all too easily
degenerates into a claim on Northern superiority: one in which the Southern lands
where the lemon trees blossom, and the people have time to sit under them, are meant
to learn from their betters, and long, thin blond people are meant to rule short,
stocky, dark people. As a short, stocky dark person from the North, I am unhappy
with this; the fact that Nordic saga-writers made all their thralls and slaves look
like me is infuriating.

And particular evils rest on the
Northern legend: the story of connections is twisted to justify separations of the
bloodiest kind. German nationalism was always fascinated by its Scandinavian
connections; think of Wagner tweaking dragon-slaying superhero stories from the
Nibelungenlied
and the gods of old Iceland into the
Ring
cycle, think of Fritz Lang tweaking Wagner in the movie version of
Die
Nibelungen
, setting out to make a perfectly medieval epic about
‘Germany searching for an ideal in her past’ and having to put up
with praise from Goebbels for ‘an
epic film that is not of our time, yet is so modern, so contemporary and so
topical’.
34

The rediscovery of the great Saxon poem
Heliand
, the Gospels retold in the ninth century in the manner of some
North Sea epic, produced a number of fits of fantasy: in the nineteenth century
August Vilmar took it to show ‘all that is great and beautiful, with all that
the German nation, its heart and life, were able to provide’. It celebrated
all sorts of things he reckoned to be especially German, like ‘the lively joy
of the Germans in moveable wealth’. He somehow deduced that the Christian
conversion of all German lands was proof that Germany was a single nation,
‘clean and resolute, its inner unity and its unity to itself transferred by
the poet … onto the persons with his holy story’.
35
The Saxon
detail and thinking of
Heliand
became a pan-German myth: Jesus lining up
with Bismarck. Vilmar was delighted by the rude remarks throughout the text about
the ‘sluggish’ people of the South, who were mostly Jews, and the
obvious superiority of the ‘Germanic’ disciples. His ideas persisted. At
the time of the First World War the Gospels, told in Saxon verse, had somehow become
‘a pithy story of German manhood’.
36

In the 1930s, the history of the
Hanseatic League – trading towns working together so they could effectively subvert
national powers – somehow turned into a claim for German national dominance. It was
as though the fact that the Hansa had happened once could wipe away all those
hundreds of years when it didn’t happen at all; and there are papers in the
essential French journal
Annales
from the 1930s which are now unreadable
because they claim all kinds of ‘powerful spiritual and intellectual
forces’ behind a merchants’ union, make metaphysics out of the account
books.
37
That is not the worst. In pursuit of a criminal idea of race,
the SS was to become a perfect, almost mystical bunch of Nordic thugs, not only
identified by type and shape of head but also bound into a carefully chosen past.
With absolutely no irony at all there were posters in wartime Norway which showed a
Viking standing most approvingly behind an SS man, freelance freebooters and a
foreign state police oddly united against Nazism’s mirror, Bolshevism.
38

History helps kill, if you’re not
careful, so let me make one thing
clear. I
am celebrating the North’s contribution to the culture of Europe, but that
does not mean forgetting the glories of the South; this is a story of connections. I
want to isolate one part of the whole story only in order to get it clear, because
it is the part that is so often missed.

German nationalism went wrong, that is
obvious, and in a particularly ugly way. By contrast an Englishman can read some of
the English and British nineteenth-century versions of the past – just as determined
to sing anthems and wave flags – and try to find them simply absurd.

That would be a mistake. They still have
extraordinary power.

The English have a story every
schoolchild knows, how Anglo-Saxons stormed the coast of Britain some time in the
fifth century and pushed out or even exterminated the British and Celtic natives and
changed the island for ever; we became Germanic, and we started to speak a kind of
English. We became Christians in a world still pagan. We qualified to be a separate
nation, six centuries before that meant much, and we had what every nation needs: a
story about its origins.

We’ve good authority for this.
Bede’s
Church History of the English People
39
is the work of a
great scholar who had access to a very decent library in his monastery at Jarrow. It
was finished around 731
CE
, which is as close as we can get to the
invasion he describes, but not very close. Bede does say how he did his research,
which was impressive: he had a Canterbury abbot to tell him what happened at
Canterbury, who in turn drew on the memory of older men as well as what was written
down. Meanwhile, a future Archbishop of Canterbury went to Rome to work through the
Vatican book chests with the Pope’s permission and bring back letters of Pope
Gregory for Bede. When he writes in his history about St Cuthbert and his island
life on Lindisfarne, he says he wrote or talked to any credible witness he could
find.

But is Bede himself credible? He wrote
about the times that mattered most to him: the times of Christian missions and their
success. When he writes about earlier times, he says he followed older
writers, which is natural enough since he
believed in such authorities.
40
His book was not scientific, and
not historical in a modern sense. He didn’t question his sources so much as
paste them together on the page, a brilliantly considered scrapbook. His book is
naturally a Saxon account of Saxon triumphs, a Christian treatise. A Saxon monk was
never likely to write anything else.

This is where the trouble starts. Bede
says that long before the Saxon missionaries landed, a king in Britain called
Vortigern had invited Saxon mercenaries to come across the North Sea and help beat
back the enemies of the Britons. He and his allies had asked for Roman help before,
but the Romans were otherwise occupied, and the Picts and the Irish were still
marauding. Three longships came in 449
CE
, Bede says, carrying men
who were expected to defend the country as friends but really meant to conquer it
like enemies; Gildas, his sixth-century source, writes more colourfully that
‘a pack of cubs burst forth from the lair of the barbarian lioness, coming in
three keels’.
41
They found the country rich,
they thought the Britons cowardly and they summoned from home a much larger navy
with many more fighting men. Jutes, Saxons and Angles arrived, with Hengist and
Horsa as commanders, and they were followed by mobs of settlers, so many that the
native Britons became nervous. They were right: the Saxons were about to turn their
weapons on their allies. They ravaged almost all the island – the
‘dying’ island, Bede calls it. Houses fell, Christian priests were
slaughtered at the altar, there was nobody prepared to bury the dead bishops and
when the Britons took to the hills they were murdered in heaps. Some were starved
into surrender, some quit the country altogether, some were exiled to the forests
and mountains to scrape together what living they could. The Britons went away and
England was Saxon.
42

This is loaded stuff, and a little
confusing. For a start, Bede was not just on the Saxon side; he seems to be on the
pagan side against Christians. He had to believe that Christianity had somehow gone
wrong in Britain, that the Britons deserved everything they got for being sinful,
drunk and arrogant, including the plague he says was so sudden and violent there was
nobody alive to bury the dead. The Saxons were God’s next means of punishment
‘that evil might fall on the
reprobates’. He was particularly angry that the
Britons, clergy and lay alike, threw off ‘the light yoke of Christ’; he
says later that the Britons were rotten with heresy, corrupted by the comforting
notion that man is not stained with original sin at all but is free to choose good
or evil for himself. Bede gives a brief account of a British victory at Mount Badon
which seems to contradict his notion that all the surviving Britons had died or run
away, and then he gets to his real story: the coming of Saxon missionaries and their
very rapid success. These are Saxons preaching to Saxons: what could go wrong? After
all, the British – still around, it seems – collapsed into civil strife when they
found they had no foreign wars to fight.
43

Bede’s version is very powerful.
It gives England a clean start and Christian faith. It turns history into a Saxon
story. It has been used to explain how English was formed, why the English are
somehow a racial group. But what if there never was an invasion? What if the real
story was one of connections, of Saxons invited in over the years to help out in
battles, of ‘Belgic’ peoples on the east side of England who spoke a
Germanic language, as Tacitus said, even before the Romans arrived in 43
CE
? The Romans certainly had Germanic mercenaries, then small
mobile field armies with Germanic soldiers who were billeted on civilians with
plenty of opportunity to fraternize and put about their genes. Saxon mercenaries did
indeed come to Britain to help the Britons, but it would take a prodigious number of
ships to bring enough people to repopulate a whole island; did the Saxons also
improvise, with the help of the British women? The best estimate is that there were
two million natives at the time, and at the most a very few hundred thousand
newcomers, and more likely tens of thousands.
44

If the Britons were driven out, why is
it that archaeologists look at the human remains through this period and find so
little change?
45
Of course, the survival of bodies to check is an arbitrary
business, and it is almost always easier to study the remains of someone rich and
powerful, the kind of person who can afford a visible tomb full of famous riches.
But even so: check the enamel on teeth, and the isotopes will tell where the
deceased grew up, and it doesn’t seem to have been in Saxon territory; measure
skulls and they start to get
bigger only
after the Norman Conquest; the DNA is such a muddle that the main movements of human
beings must have taken place long before.

If bodies didn’t change, did
language? Such a rush of new people, all speaking Germanic languages, might explain
why Anglo-Saxon became the base and root of English; but it seems there were
Germanic-speaking peoples in England already, the Belgae. During Roman rule, there
was a ‘Count of the Saxon Shore’ in Britain, as there probably was
across the Channel in Gaul, with nine shore forts to defend the coastline,
46
but
was it the ‘Saxon’ shore because it had to be defended against Saxons or
because the Saxons were already there? The
Gallic Chronicles
mention a
Saxon territory in England in 423, two decades before Bede says Kent had its first
Saxon king. If you choose to trust Bede’s careful collection of other
people’s stories, these questions don’t matter; but if you start to have
doubts, they begin to seem important enough to change history.

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