The Vikings (9 page)

Raising his voice, he cried: ‘Listen to me, listen. I am the messenger of Almighty God and to you Saxons I bring his command.’ Astonished at his words and at his unusual appearance, a hush fell upon the assembly. The man of God then followed up his announcement with these words: ‘The God of heaven and Ruler of the world and His Son, Jesus Christ, commands me to tell you that if you are willing to be and to do what His servants tell you He will confer benefits upon you such as you have never heard of before.’ Then he added: ‘As you have never had a king over you before this time, so no king will prevail against you and subject you to his domination. But if you are unwilling to accept God’s commands, a king has been prepared nearby who will invade your lands, spoil and lay them waste and sap away your strength in war; he will lead you into exile, deprive you of your inheritance, slay you with the sword, and hand over your possessions to whom he has a mind: and afterwards you will be slaves both to him and his successors.’
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The ‘nearby king’, of course, was Charlemagne. Once they had recovered from their surprise the Saxons seized Lebuin and would have stoned him to death had not an elder intervened to save his life. In 782 the Saxons rebelled again and defeated the Franks in the Süntel hills. Charlemagne’s response was the infamous massacre of Verden on the banks of the river Aller, just south of the neck of the Jutland peninsula. As many as 4,500 unarmed Saxon captives were forcibly baptized into the Church and then executed.
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Even this failed to end Saxon resistance and had to be followed up by a programme of transportations in 794 in which about 7,000 of them were forcibly resettled. Two further campaigns of forcible resettlement followed, in 797 and in 798. A final insurrection was put down in 804 and Einhard the Monk, Charlemagne’s biographer, articulated the fate of the defeated tribe. The Saxons were to ‘give up their devil worship and the malpractices inherited from their forefathers; and then, once they had adopted the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion, they were to be united with the Franks and become one people with them’.
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Charlemagne’s capitulary for Saxons,
De Partibus Saxoniæ
, operative by the mid-780s, listed the punishments for those who tried to reject the imposition of Christian religious culture:
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death for eating meat during Lent; death for the cremating of the dead in accordance with Heathen rites; death for any ‘of the race of the Saxons hereafter, concealed among them, [who] shall have wished to hide himself unbaptized, and shall have scorned to come to baptism, and shall have wished to remain a Heathen’. Heathens were defined as less than fully human so that, under contemporary Frankish canon law, no penance was payable for the killing of one.
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By way of comparison, under the 695 law code of the Kentish King Wihtred, Christians caught ‘sacrificing to devils’ were punishable merely by fines and the confiscation of property.
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Charlemagne and his missionaries set the terms of the encounters between Christians and Heathens, destroying the religious sanctuaries and cultural institutions of those who refused to embrace Christianity exclusively, and the Heathens saw no reason not to respond in kind. When Saxons attacked and burned Christian churches, an element of reciprocated cultural hostility lay behind their attacks. In the
Royal Frankish Annals
account of the attack on a church at Fritzlar in 773 the sole aim of the Heathens was to set fire to the church:

The first Viking raids on north-eastern Britain were launched from the Norwegian west coast. The shaded area shows Denmark and the sphere of influence of Danish Kings in about 800.

The Saxons began to attack this church with great determination, trying one way or another to burn it. While this was going on, there appeared to some Christians in the castle and also to some Heathens in the army two young men on white horses who protected the church from fire. Because of them the pagans could not set the church on fire or damage it, either inside or outside. Terror-stricken by the intervention of divine might they turned to flight, although nobody pursued them. Afterwards one of the Saxons was found dead beside the church. He was squatting on the ground and holding tinder and wood in his hands as if he had meant to blow on his fuel and set the church on fire.
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Charlemagne’s vast empire ran from the Ebro in Spain to the Elbe in northern Germany, and the line between it and the Saxons’ small pocket of territory in the north-east corner of Europe passed through more or less open country. Once Charlemagne had made up his mind to crush his neighbours there could have been, in Einhard’s confident phrase, ‘only one possible outcome’.
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Even so, the great English historian Edward Gibbon expressed surprise at the degree of effort the emperor put into the war, reflecting on ‘three-and-thirty campaigns laboriously consumed in the woods and morasses of Germany’ which would have brought easier and greater glory had they been directed against the Greeks in Italy, and a further reduction in Muslim power in Spain. To Gibbon, the political significance of Charles’s treatment of the Saxons was clear:

The subjugation of Germany withdrew the veil which had so long concealed the continent or islands of Scandinavia from the knowledge of Europe, and awakened the torpid courage of their barbarous natives. The fiercest of the Saxon idolaters escaped from the Christian tyrant to their brethren of the North; the Ocean and the Mediterranean were covered with their piratical fleets; and Charlemagne beheld with a sigh the destructive progress of the Normans, who, in less than seventy years, precipitated the fall of his race and monarchy.
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Gibbon was echoed in 1920 by the English novelist and man-of-letters H. G. Wells in his widely read
The Outline of History
:

Most of our information about these wars and invasions of the Pagan Vikings is derived from Christian sources, and so we have abundant information of the massacres and atrocities of their raids and very little about the cruelties inflicted upon their pagan brethren, the Saxons, at the hands of Charlemagne. Their animus against the cross and against monks and nuns was extreme. They delighted in the burning of monasteries and nunneries and the slaughter of their inmates.
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Lucien Musset, the greatest French scholar of the Viking Age in the twentieth century, is another who insisted that the violence that is its most outstanding characteristic must have had its origins in a cultural and religious conflict of the most dramatic sort.
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Several times in the course of his doomed campaign of resistance, Widukind had sought refuge across the border with his brother-in-law Sigfrid, a Danish king. His tales can have left Sigrid in no doubt as to the passion with which his powerful Christian neighbour in the south lived out the missionary imperative of Christianity. News of the Verden massacre must have travelled like a shock-wave through Sigfrid’s territory, crossing the waters of the Kattegat and the Vik and on into the Scandinavian peninsula, arousing fear, fury and hostility towards both Charlemagne and Christianity. An incident that took place in 789 on the south coast of England at Portland, involving ‘the first ships of Danish men which came to the land of the English’, may well reflect the tensions aroused by this incident.
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The chronicler Æthelweard provides a scene-setting description of the incident, with people ‘spread over their fields and making furrows in the grimy earth in serene tranquillity’ when the ships arrived. The king’s reeve, a man named Beaduheard, rode to the harbour and confronted the sailors, admonishing them ‘in an authoritative manner’ before ordering them to be taken to ‘the royal town’. The men, who had identified themselves as natives of ‘Hörthaland’, the modern Hordaland on the west coast of Norway, must have refused, for a fight broke out and Beaduheard and his men were killed. With no mention of subsequent plundering or attacks on churches or monasteries it looks like a case of fatal mistrust, routine perhaps, were it not for the raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne four years later to which it now seems a prelude. Perhaps the men were afraid they might be forcibly baptized and then executed. The Danes were certainly on the Church’s list of peoples to be converted. Bede mentioned them, along with the Frisians, the Rugini, the Huns, the Old Saxons and the Boructvari, among a number of Germanic peoples still observing pagan rites in the early eighth century.
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In about 710, during the time of King Ongendus, a fearsome Heathen ‘more savage than any beast and harder than stone’, Bede’s contemporary, St Willibrord, carried out his mission among the Danes and returned to Utrecht with thirty boys whom he intended to instruct in Christianity. Clearly nothing had come of this, for in the year of the Portland raid Alcuin had written to a friend, proselytizing among the Saxons, ‘Tell me, is there any hope of our converting the Danes?’
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Our pluralistic twenty-first century tries to encourage respect for the cultures of others and an acceptance of them on their own terms. The position would have baffled men like Bede and Alcuin, effortlessly certain of their right to impose the new and superior values of one culture upon another perceived as inferior and backward. We see Heathen ninth-century Scandinavians not as the horde of savages they were to these early churchmen but as a people who had evolved a social and spiritual culture of their own. Certainly it was very different from that of the Christians, but it was their own and we must assume they were content with it.
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The Norwegian archaeologist Bjørn Myhre has suggested that for a period of perhaps three or four hundred years there had been a relatively stable North Sea community of peoples enjoying normally peaceful contact across the water with each other as traders, in technological and artistic exchange, in marriage and in the fostering of each other’s children.
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Alcuin’s letter to the Northumbrian King Ethelred, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is evidence for this kind of contact. So too are the grave-goods and shield and helmet from the East Anglian Sutton Hoo ship-burial from the middle years of the seventh century, which bear striking stylistic resemblances to Swedish artefacts of the same period found in royal graves at Vendel and Valsgärde. Ironically, this posited stability may in part have been due to the emergence of the Merovingian Franks as the dominant power in mainland Europe during the sixth and seventh centuries, one result of which had been to encourage trade around the North Sea and the development of a string of coastal trading towns like Dorestad at the mouth of the Rhine, Hamwic on the site of present-day Southampton, London by the Thames, Ribe on the west coast of South Jutland from about 700 and Kaupang in the Norwegian Vestfold a few years later.

As the degree of tension caused by Charlemagne’s activities grew more marked, so too, in accordance with a familiar anthropological response to outside threat, did the intensity with which the Scandinavians began to mark their artefacts as a way of asserting their cultural identity. Burial practices, personal ornamentation like brooches, clothing styles and the design of houses all show, on this interpretation, a heightened degree of intensity in ethnic self-identification.
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The threat may even have affected Viking Age poetry. As we noted earlier, many scholars believe that the Viking Age’s greatest spiritual monument, ‘The Seeress’s Prophecy’, was composed comparatively late in the history of northern Heathendom as a direct response to the threat of militant, expansionist Christianity and the dramatic and seductive Judaic creation myths of the Bible.
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The local Scandinavian cultures that felt the first stirrings of this threat were neither compact nor centralized enough to organize themselves into anything like a structure that could have mounted a military campaign against Frankish Christendom. A more feasible goal, closer at hand, easier of reach, undefended and, in the parlance of modern terrorist warfare, ‘a soft target’, was the monastery at Lindisfarne. In Alcuin’s phrase, it was ‘a place more sacred than any in Britain’. With an indifference to the humanity of their Christian victims as complete as that of Charlemagne’s towards the Saxons, a psychopathic rage directed at the Christian ‘other’ was unleashed, expressing itself in infantile orgies of transgressive behaviour that offered the same satis factions whether the taboos transgressed were their own or those of their victims.
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Simeon of Durham tells us that monks were deliberately drowned in the sea by the raiders: perhaps some travesty of baptism was intended. They dug up the altars, presumably because someone had revealed to them, under torture, that some of the monastery’s greatest treasures lay buried there - but aware, too, of a blasphemous offence to their victims that was every bit as great as that suffered by the Saxon Heathens at the destruction of Irmensul. A feature of the raiding and church-burning that ensued was the Vikings’ penchant for cutting up stolen items, like Bible clasps and crosses, and reshaping them into items of personal ornamentation. ‘Ranvaik owns this box’, its new owner had inscribed in runes on a beautiful, house-shaped box found in Norway in the seventeenth century. Graffiti depicting the prows of longships had been carved on its base. Made in Scotland towards the end of the eighth century, its original purpose had been to house the bones of a Christian saint. Useful enough for Ranvaik no doubt, but also an active expression of cultural disrespect.
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