The Vikings (13 page)

Another change that evolved out of the confusion and violence of the first decades of raiding was the appearance from about the middle of the century of a new group of warriors whom the annals call the
Gall-Gædhil
or ‘Foreigner-Celts’. They were a mixed group, some being Irish renegades who had opportunistically adopted the lifestyle of the invaders, others the products of the union of Norwegian and Irish, still others Irish raised by Viking foster-fathers. Between 830 and 880 the annals record eighty-three incidents of Norse burnings and plunderings in Ireland. The record of similar assaults by Irish forces during the same period is modest by contrast, a mere ten. Three more were attributed to these
Gall-Gædhil
.
⁴⁷
Their loyalties were to themselves and they fought now on the Viking side against the Irish, now for the Irish against the Vikings. In this they were, in truth, no different from either the Irish or the Vikings themselves. Cinaed, king of North Brega, rebelled in 850 against the high-king Mael Sechnaill and, joining forces with a Viking band, ravaged the lands of the southern Úi Néill. Inevitably the frail ethical code that had protected Irish clerics and church buildings from the worst of the secular violence gave way and it was the raw brutality of the Vikings that prevailed. During the attack on the church at Trevet 260 people who sought refuge in the oratory were burnt alive. Cinaed was finally captured and executed by drowning, ‘in a dirty stream’, according to a source, though the quality of the water can scarcely have mattered to him.

 

The available archaeological evidence reinforces the commonsense notion that the raiders during the first fifty years of the Irish Viking Age came, in the main, from the south-west coast of Norway. Viking Age graves excavated in the region at Gausel, near Stavanger in northern Jæren, contain the highest concentration of artefacts of Irish origin found outside Ireland.
⁴⁸
These include the grave of a female discovered in 1883 by a local farmer, which was lost and subsequently rediscovered in 1997. Among over forty items buried with her were an Irish hanging bowl and two Irish bronze mounts from a reliquary shrine. An analysis of the 500 or so items of insular metalwork found in Scandinavia led to a similar conclusion: most of the graves identified as being from the decades around 800 were in the Sogn og Fjordane and Møre og Romsdal areas of western Norway, and in most of them the grave-goods were of Irish ecclesiastical origin.
⁴⁹
Linguists are also able to tell us that the forty or so loan-words absorbed by Irish during the Viking Age point to the south-west of Norway as their place of origin.

A significant development occurred in 848 with the arrival in Ireland of a fleet bearing another large number of Scandinavian warriors, these so distinct from their original tormentors that the annalists called them ‘the dark Heathens’ or ‘the black foreigners’. They were Danes. They attacked and overwhelmed their rivals, the
Finngall
or ‘fair foreigners’ of Norway at their base in what would later be Dublin, killing a great many of them and robbing them of their possessions. The Norwegians re-grouped and in 852 a fleet of 160 ships engaged the Danes in a ferocious sea-battle at Snám Aignech that lasted three days and nights before the Danes emerged triumphant. Even for violent times these were exceptionally violent years. In four separate battles fought in 848 a total of precisely 2,600 men are said to have been killed. Among the dead at the battle at Sciath Nechtain was the Earl Tomrair, described as a ‘tanist of the king of Lochliann’. This mysterious king seems to have decided that now was the time to impose his authority on an increasingly chaotic situation. He sent his son Amlaíb, or Olaf, to Ireland at the head of a fleet of 140 ships for the purpose of exacting obedience from the various Norse bands operating there. ‘The foreigners of Ireland submitted to him,’ the annalist tells us, ‘and he took tribute from the Irish.’
⁵⁰
This marked the start of the Norse kingdom of Dublin, one of several enclosed Viking colonies that developed out of the creation of permanent bases known as
longphorts
to service their ships. The most notable other
longphort
sites were at Hlymrekr (Limerick), Vethrafjörth (Waterford), Veigsfjörth (Wexford) and at Vikingalo (Wicklow). In time these evolved into Ireland’s first proper towns, superseding the rudimentary trading centres associated with the monasteries. Dublin may have remained a very insular kingship. The University College, London, genetic survey mentioned above also carried out tests in search of Viking DNA among the Irish, and while the complete absence of any in the samples taken from Castlerea, in the rural heart of the country, came as no surprise, since there has never been any suggestion that the Vikings established inland settlements of any size, the researchers were surprised at the similarly complete absence of any Scandinavian DNA in material taken within a 20-mile radius of Rush in north County Dublin that just swept the northern outskirts of the city. One of a number of possible explanations is that they did not settle much beyond the confines of the original site on the Liffey.
⁵¹

The Viking takeover included the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea. Over thirty grave-finds from about 850 to 950 indicate Viking settlements on some of the best agricultural land on the island, in the north-west and south-east.
⁵²
As on the Orkneys, the names of a large number of features of the natural landscape, like the Snæfell peak and the Laxey river, are of Scandinavian origin. The Point of Ayre was formerly Eyranes, the Calf of Man, Manarkalfrinn. Saving Douglas and Rushen, no Celtic settlement names seem to have survived the arrival of the Vikings. Were it not for the fact that the Norwegian DNA signature from the UCL survey was about 15 per cent, declining in reciprocal proportion to the distance from Norway, the assumption might be that the island’s population suffered a fate similar to that of the Orcadian Picts. Evidence of a more harmonious encounter may be the mingled inscriptions on one of the crosses at Old Kirk Braddan, a late tenth-century tapering pillar with a small pierced ring at the cross head and a characteristically Scandinavian design of tiny dragon-like creatures with intricately twined limbs, tails and top-knots cut down one side. Along the other side a runic inscription announces that the cross was raised by a father with the Norwegian name of Thorleif, in memory of a son with the Celtic name of Fiac.
⁵³
The island benefited from its proximity to Dublin and coin hoards from about 960 to about 990 show connections with England and Ireland, later hoards from about 1020 to 1080 indicating that the connections with Ireland had grown stronger. Because it is not confirmed in any of the Irish sources, historians are inclined to doubt the statement in the
Orkneyinga Saga
that King Harald Finehair got as far as the Isle of Man during his campaign to discipline unruly Vikings in the Orkneys; but, as part of the expansion of the earldom of Orkney in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries under Sigurd the Stout that brought the Western Isles of Scotland under his control, it is likely that Man entered the earldom’s sphere of influence. Later still, under Godfred Crovan in the eleventh century, it had its own kings who also ruled the Western Isles. A relic of this island kingdom survives today in the name of the bishopric, Sodor and Man - sodor being
Súthreyjar
or ‘the southern islands’, which the Hebrides were to these northern Vikings.

The Kingdom of Man and the Isles at its greatest extent in about 1095.

In Dublin, the intervention of the king of Lochlainn had brought a degree of stability to the region for the next few decades, a period referred to in the Irish annals as the ‘Forty Years Rest’. In 902 the Vikings were driven out of the city, but in 914 a huge fleet appeared off Waterford under the leadership of Ragnald and Sihtric Cáech. Already its Viking identity is compromised, for Sihtric was a member of the powerful Celtic-Norse Uí Ímhair dynasty and whose personal name was a gaelic rendering of the Scandinavian ‘Sigtrygg’. The nickname Cáech was a Celtic word meaning ‘squint’ - put together they show further evidence of the continuing process of acculturation. He defeated the O’Neill king of Tara, captured Dublin in 917 and took control of the other
longphort
settlements at Waterford, Wexford and Limerick. With Man in the middle of the Irish Sea as a bridgehead, this was one of several opportunities that fell to Viking leaders in the ninth and tenth centuries to unite the kingdom of Dublin with York in the north-east of England, which, as we shall shortly see, had been a Viking kingdom since 866. In the hands of an ambitious and capable ruler a kingdom bridging the whole of northern Britain like this would have been very difficult for the English to resist and might have led to their conquest a full century before this was achieved by Sven Forkbeard and his son Cnut. But these Viking kingdoms were not monarchies, their kings not military visionaries, and the attractions of assimilation proved greater. Sihtric’s grandson Olaf married an O’Neill princess, was baptized in 943 and died in monkish old age on the island of Iona, which his forefathers had so often tried to destroy. The twelfth-century history known as the ‘War of the Irish with the Foreigners’ dramatized the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 and immortalized Brian Boru as a national, Christian and Irish ‘king of kings’, who finally triumphed over the barbaric and Heathen Vikings; but Brian’s principal opponent in the battle was the king of Leinster, Brian himself is said to have been too old to fight in the battle and, in truth, the Vikings had ceased to pose a threat to Irish society and its Christian culture some fifty years earlier.

The Orkney earl, Sigurd the Stout, was among those who died fighting at Clontarf for the Leinster king. His son Thorfinn, later called the Mighty, was five years old at the time of his father’s death and became the first Orkney earl to be raised a Christian. He continued the expansion of the earldom begun by his father and, after a successful career as a raider in the prime of his life, devoted himself in his later years to the conversion of a population still largely Heathen. After a pilgrimage to Rome where, the
Orkneyinga Saga
tells us, he received absolution from the pope for all his sins, he returned to his capital at Birsay and established a bishopric there.
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Too remote to have formed part of Orkney, or any other kingdom or earldom, the Faroes are nevertheless linked to the islands south of them in reflecting the cultural assimilation going on there. According to the collection of texts gathered as the
Færeyinga Saga
, the first settler bore another Celtic-Norse combination of names, Grímur Kamban, and probably came from Man, Ireland or the Hebrides.
⁵⁵
The saga, anxious to glorify his name, credits the Norwegian King Olaf Tryggvason with bringing Christianity to the islands at the end of the tenth century, though it seems tolerably certain he did not.
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Someone certainly did: finds from excavations carried out during the late 1980s near the town of Leirvík on Eysturoy included, besides bronze pins in a recognizably Irish-Scandinavian style used for fastening a man’s cloak, two quite large wooden crosses made of larch that had probably arrived as driftwood from Siberia before being carved in a characteristically Irish ring-cross style.
⁵⁷

5

The Vikings in the Carolingian Empire

Notker the Stammerer, one of Charlemagne’s biographers, has left us in his ‘Life’ with a remarkable image of distressed greatness. Charlemagne arrives in an unnamed seaside town in Southern Gaul. As he sits eating his supper a fleet of pirates makes an attack on the harbour. At first there is confusion about their identity. Some take them to be Jewish merchants, others believe them to be traders from Africa or Britain. Charlemagne, however, from the build of the ships and their speed through the water, at once recognizes them as Northmen. ‘Those ships are not loaded with goods’ he tells his men, ‘they are filled with savage enemies.’ As the Vikings make their getaway after the lightning attack, the emperor’s men take up the chase but are soon outsailed. Afterwards, writes Notker,

Charlemagne, who was a God-fearing, just and devout ruler, rose from the table and stood at a window facing east. For a long time the precious tears poured down his face. No one dared to ask him why. In the end he explained his lachrymose behaviour to his warlike leaders. ‘My faithful servants,’ said he, ‘do you know why I wept so bitterly? I am not afraid that these ruffians will be able to do me any harm; but I am sick at heart to think that even in my lifetime they have dared to attack this coast, and I am horror-stricken when I foresee what evil they will do to my descendants and their subjects.
¹

The story is perhaps too good to be true and may only have been Notker’s way of announcing the emperor’s early perception of the dreadful havoc the Northmen would wreak on his legacy. Charlemagne will have been abetted in his pessimism by his close associate Alcuin, for whom the assault on Lindisfarne remained a catastrophic watershed in the history of civilization. Well before his death in 814 Charlemagne had plentiful experience of the new and troubling neighbour on his northern border following the subjugation of the Saxons and occupation of their territory in the 780s. The Danes were, in the judgement of the contemporary eastern Frankish
Annals of Fulda
, ‘the most powerful people among the Northmen’.
²
Of the three Viking peoples it is they who, at all times, most resemble a coherent military power. As the references in the Irish annals to conflicts arising in the middle of the ninth century between the ‘fair’ and the ‘dark’ foreigners make clear, beyond the fact of a shared Heathendom (or more pertinently a shared non-Christianity) and a common language, Vikings from the various regions of Scandinavia were often rivals for territory and property. We know very little about the governmental and social structures of Norwegian society at the time, but of Danish society the comparative thoroughness of the Frankish annalists conveys the impression that towards the close of the eighth century it was ruled by a strong monarchy and extended over a stable region not unlike that of present-day Denmark, with the addition of that part of southern Sweden known as Skåne and the shore of the Vik in the vicinity of the Oslo fjord. Prior to the Carolingian expansion the Danes seem also to have claimed tributary rights over a number of other peoples in their region, including the Saxons and a tribe of Polabian Slavs or Wends known as the Obodrites. This in itself was an indication of local cultural superiority, for like most other Slav peoples the Obodrites were an egalitarian and clan-based society without tribal leaders which, in times of crisis, elected leaders at assemblies known as
veche
for the duration of the crisis only.
³
The comparatively late arrival of the Danes in Ireland may in part have been due to the fact that they were engaged elsewhere, in the first instance watchful and anxious of Charlemagne and his expansionist Christianity.