This year I’m using the power of the twenty-sided die to
force myself to read more widely. My first role showed a 12 for ‘History, Myth
and Legend’, and so I headed into Waterstone's with my Christmas gift card and
had a rummage. With everything that has ever happened (and a significant quantity
of things that didn’t) to choose from, it was a difficult decision. In the end
I let my current obsessions choose for me, and selected Philip Parker’s history
of the Viking world ‘The Northmen’s Fury’.
For a while, when I was in primary school, Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories took up the most
space on my bookshelf. Those books first introduced me to the joys of reading
and of history, but while I still find the past fascinating, I’m a little
ashamed to admit that until I embarked on this project, I had never read a
history book aimed at adults. For somebody who has not fostered the skill of
reading history, The Northmen’s Fury
is perhaps a difficult place to start. This is no fault of Parker’s – he writes
clearly and engagingly, but he does so about a contradictory people, and across
a field which is both temporally and geographically huge.
One thing that history has in common with the novel is that
both concern themselves with cause and effect, but when the primary sources are
as sparse and biased as they are for the Vikings, motivations can be hard to
follow. While the Vikings had a writing system in the form of runes, they left
little record of themselves other than a few monumental inscriptions often
following a simple ‘X raised this rock in memory of Y,’ formula. One or two of
these appear to corroborate information from the much later sagas, but they do
little to help Parker tell the ‘story’ of Norse culture. This largely
non-literary, largely pagan culture spent a significant amount of time
attacking Christian neighbours who did keep fairly detailed historical records.
Add to this the fact that many of their victims were monks – the very people
writing those records – and it is little surprise that contemporary sources
created the, barbaric picture of the Vikings that remains in many people’s
minds to this day. They were, of course, sometimes capable of brutal violence,
but no more so than many of their neighbours. Parker tells us of the massacre
of the Danes who had settled in England, as ordered by King Aethelred, during
which even the children of ‘those women who had consented to intermix with the
Danes’ were ‘dashed to pieces against posts and stones’.
When the Vikings’ descendants did develop their own rich
literary heritage in the form of the Icelandic sagas, Parker is careful to
remind us that they were written down many years after the events described
(presumably as the culmination of an oral tradition), and that many of them
serve to legitimise the claims of this or that Norwegian royal house. While he
acknowledges the potential unreliability of his sources, Parker does not shy
away from presenting much information from them as fact – a decision which can
be justified by imagining the difficulty and tedium involved in reading a book
which presents every single action as something that may or may not have
happened.
The difficulty in following the chain of causality is not
always helped by the fact that the Vikings tended to travel widely, and
Parker’s decision to divide up many of his chapters geographically (although
some areas get different chapters for different periods), means that we
sometimes have the same historical figure appear in different chapters without
necessarily following their careers in chronological order. It should be noted
however that Parkers systematic approach is useful in giving a sense of
organisation to this history’s vast scope. Those readers who would like an
approach which more closely examines the biographies of the period’s key
players will find themselves well served by the book’s penultimate chapter: a
set piece centred on the dual invasions of England in 1066 which follows lives
of each of the three key players up to that point. Parker is seemingly helped
here by the more detailed sources available for this period, and manages to
shed new light on a period I thought I knew well. The life of Harald Hardrada
is particularly interesting: he spent a number of years fighting in the Byzantine
empire’s Varangian guard before taking his throne in Norway, and seemed to be
the most experienced of the three generals vying for the crown of England.
I do not wish to suggest that Parker himself is responsible
for the sometimes confusing nature of the book. He does a very good job of providing
readers with a structured history of a people whose motivations are lost to
time, and who sometimes do things which seem bizarre to the modern reader. For
example, several of the kings of Viking Dublin seem to have abandoned their
thrones to take up kingship of York, or vice versa, and at least one later
changed his mind, returning to Dublin to oust the relative who had ruled in his
place. Adding to the confusion is the fact that it sometimes seems as though
almost all of the era’s major figures are called Harald or Olaf, and thus they
almost all bear the patronym Olafson or Haraldson.
When I studied A-level Archaeology, the parts I found most
interesting were the small glimpses we occasionally get into the lives of
people from long ago. It is in these moments that this book is also at its
best. For example, the small group of Norse Christians returning from the
crusades who took shelter in the Neolithic tomb at Maeshowe on the Orkney
islands, and occupied their time in carving coded runes into the walls with
messages varying from boasts about the skill of the carver, to praise for
Ingigerd, ‘the most beautiful of women’, and even a claim that a large pile of
treasure that was removed from the tomb and buried somewhere nearby (probably
an example of Viking humour – as Parker points out, the sparse, primitive grave
goods we find in stone-age tombs are unlikely to have been of much interest to
Norse warriors). While the style here is still very much that of a fiction book,
we as readers are in the tomb with the band of crusaders while the storm rages
outside.
As might be expected from a history of the Vikings (and
probably of any early medieval group) the story we are told predominantly
concerns the military elite, with the lives of the everyday folk fading into
the background. This is understandable, as the farmers who likely made up the
majority of the population had little opportunity to do much that would be
worthy of record in sagas or in monks’ records. We do get more of an idea of
the lives of ordinary people when Parker turns his gaze across the Atlantic to
focus on the settlements of Iceland and Greenland, and the probable forays into
parts of North America (interestingly, the Greenland colony, which almost certainly
collected resources from the American mainland, made its last written records
in 1408, and archaeological evidence suggests that the colony may have survived
until the latter half of that century – only decades before Columbus’s
discovery of America). In these chapters we are presented with a people who resisted
any form of leadership which is too autocratic – both Iceland and the Isle of
Mann have claims to the oldest running parliaments in the world – but whose
isolation and infighting eventually caused them to submit to Scandinavian
monarchies which would later neglect them in times of need.
As well as valuing independence, the Viking people are
presented as being great technological innovators whose long-boats allowed them
to strike deep inland along river courses, and whose navigational skills
allowed them to build up a trading network which stretched as far as
Constantinople and the Middle East. Their cultural sphere of influence
stretched from Kiev and Novgorod in the east, to the shores of America in the
west, but their lack of one unifying government – and their sometimes Game-of-Thrones-esque
political infighting – prevents them from being considered as an empire on the
scale of the Romans or the Macedonians.
In the final chapters, Parker deals with the descendants of
a small group of Vikings who settled in the France, and went on to found dynasties across western
Europe. He also discusses the 19th Century cultural interest in the
Viking myth and acknowledges how parts of it were appropriated by the Third
Reich (although he does not mention the ongoing rift between Neo-nazi and
non-racist factions in contemporary Germanic Neopaganism), a system of
government which would almost certainly have appalled those Vikings who braved
the unforgiving North Atlantic in order to avoid what they saw as increasing
tyranny in Scandinavia and set up communities which we would now recognise as being
run along democratic lines. In this respect it’s also worth noting that the
Viking societies seemed happy to trade and intermarry with people of many
different cultures and religions, and in areas like Normandy and Russia they
eventually became fully integrated with the surrounding people.
This is connected to one of the core things I was reminded
of by this book. History is always more complex than we imagine it. In popular
culture, Vikings are very much the pagan outsiders ransacking Christian Europe,
and while there is an element of truth in this, it is worth remembering that
they were also shrewd traders, whose politics were deeply interwoven with their
neighbours, particularly in the British Isles. I was also surprised to learn
that, while it took a long time for Christianity to become established in the
Nordic countries (and Norway had a pagan rebellion as late as the 12th
Century), there is evidence that there were Christians in Scandinavia at the
very start of the Viking period, and Christians were involved in the
settlements of both Iceland and Greenland. This should not be a shock, given
the Viking age starts five centuries after the Roman Empire had made Christianity
a dominant faction in Europe. One thing about the pop-culture Viking which does
seem to be true is their preoccupation with being remembered in stories, and I’m
sure the many Haralds and Olafs mentioned here would be pleased to see their
names recorded a millennia after they passed into the afterlives of their
chosing.
