The Vikings (23 page)

It is possible that these late literary descriptions of ‘the blood-eagle’ derive from a verse that survives only in fragmentary form, composed in about 1030 by the Icelandic poet Sigvat, in which he exults that ‘Ivar, who dwelt at York, carved the eagle on Aella’s back.’ The
Orkneyinga Saga
, from about 1200, offers a fully detailed account of the practice, describing how Torf Einar avenged his father’s murder by applying ‘the blood-eagle’ to the killer’s back, cutting the ribs away at the spine and pulling out the lungs from behind. The victim in this case was dedicated to Odin.
²²
Snorri Sturluson tells the same story in
Heimskringla
. But precisely what Sigvat meant by saying that Ivar ‘carved the eagle on Aella’s back’ has been much discussed.
²³
Snorri and the author of the
Orkneyinga Saga
took it literally and presumed it to have been a form of execution by torture, in which case the loss of blood involved in the initial stages of such a ritual would have killed the victim well before the fancied resemblance to an eagle was finally achieved. Conceivably, however, Sigvat intended to convey only that Ivar had killed Aella, and to do so poetically by conjuring the image of an eagle, perched on the back of the dead king and working into his flesh with talons and beak, no doubt a common sight in the aftermath of any battle.

Of Ivar’s reputation as a cruel man, however, there can be no doubt. Adam of Bremen calls him the most gruesome of all the Danish petty kings who ravaged in Francia.
²⁴
More even than as the torturer of Aella, his notoriety among Christians derived from his role as the murderer of Edmund, king of East Anglia, in 870. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
is again succinct: there was a battle, the Danes ‘had the victory, and killed the king and conquered all the land’.
²⁵
Within twenty years a cult of martyrdom had grown up around Edmund’s death which acquired a dramatic symbolic power across the mission fields of Europe. The first account that links Edmund with Ivar the Boneless is that of Abbo of Fleury in the
Passio Sancti Eadmundi
, a biography of the saint-king written sometime between 985 and 987. According to Abbo, an army under Hinguar and Hubba (Ivar and Ubbi) invaded England and captured Northumbria. Hinguar/Ivar then made his way south into East Anglia and triumphed over Edmund’s army. The king himself was not among those killed or captured, so Ivar mounted a hunt for him and eventually located him in the village of Hellesdon, in Norfolk. He sent a message demanding that Edmund accept Ivar as his lord and share his kingdom with him. Edmund replied that he would do so on condition that Ivar accept baptism from him. The offer was rejected. Ivar had Edmund seized and brought before him, tied to a tree and scourged. Provoked by his insistent calling on Christ, Ivar’s men are said to have used him as target practice for their archery. Finally his head was cut off and thrown away in the undergrowth.

The thirteenth-century English chronicler Roger of Wendover used details from Abbo’s story for an account of the king’s death in which it is, beyond doubt, a martyrdom:

In between the whip lashes, Edmund called out with true belief in the Saviour Christ. Because of his belief, because he called to Christ to aid him, the heathens became furiously angry. They then shot spears at him, as if it was a game, until he was entirely covered with their missiles, like the bristles of a hedgehog (just like St Sebastian was). When Ivar the pirate saw that the noble king would not forsake Christ, but with resolute faith called after Him, he ordered Edmund beheaded, and the heathens did so.
²⁶

The origin and meaning of Ivar’s after-name ‘the Boneless’ (
Ívarr inn beinlausi
) is as impenetrable as any of the Great Heathen Army myths and legends. The explanation in the
Ragnars Saga
is that he was unable to walk and had to be carried everywhere.
²⁷
‘Boneless’ may have been a forbidden or
noa
-name for the wind, reflecting Ivar’s prowess as a seaman. The name has been associated with sexual impotence, and with sexual potency. A modern suggestion is that he suffered from the medical condition known as brittle-bone disease.
²⁸
Another theory suggests that the name arose from a confusion between the Latin adjectives
exosus
meaning ‘detested’, and
exos
meaning ‘boneless’.
²⁹
A further possibility is that his after-name should properly be interpreted as Ivar ‘the Snake’, a metaphorical deduction from the literal meaning of ‘
inn beinlausi
’ as a creature ‘without bones’ or ‘without legs’ or ‘without feet’, and a thoroughly appropriate cognomen for a man of such legendary slyness and cruelty.
³⁰

Excavations on the site of the Repton camp which was the Great Heathen Army’s base in 873 have unearthed finds that, while they hardly confirm any of the theories, have given rise to speculation on the historical person behind the Ivar legends. A number of mounds and burial chambers have been examined within the D-shaped fortress the army built on the Trent. Perhaps the most striking of these, located in what is now the Vicarage Garden, was a chamber containing the carefully stacked remains of some 264 individuals. The majority of these were tall, well-built men.
³¹
The bones had originally been stacked in charnel fashion against the walls, but had been seriously disturbed by digging done in about 1686. In 1726 an elderly labourer named Thomas Walker, who had been involved in the work, was asked about the discovery:

About Forty Years since cutting Hillocks, near the Surface he met with an old Stone Wall, when clearing farther he found it to be a square Enclosure of Fifteen Foot: It had been covered, but the Top was decayed and fallen in, being only supported by wooden Joyces. In this he found a Stone Coffin, and with Difficulty removing the Cover, saw a Skeleton of a Humane Body Nine Foot long, and round it lay One Hundred Humane Skeletons, with their Feet pointing to the Stone Coffin. They seem’d to be of ordinary Size. The Head of the great Skeleton he gave to Mr Bowers, Master of the Free School. I [i.e. Walker’s interlocutor] enquired of his Son, one of the present Masters, concerning it, but it is lost; yet he says that he remembers the Skull in his Father’s Closet, and that he had often heard his Father mention this Gigantick Corps, and thinks this Skull was in Proportion to a Body of the Stature.
³²

It is possible that Repton was a Viking war-grave, and the bones those of warriors who had died elsewhere and been taken there for burial.
³³
The
Annals of Ulster
for 873 report the death of a Viking chieftain named Imar/Invgar/Ivar, and the
Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok and his Sons
preserves a tradition that Ivar the Boneless was buried in England. Putting together these details, Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle, the archaeologists who excavated the site between 1974 and 1993, have cautiously advanced the hypothesis that Ivar the Boneless may indeed have been an exceptionally tall man who, for whatever medical reasons, had to be carried from place to place, and that the remains of the giant at the centre of this grouping might just conceivably be his.
³⁴

The drama of this rich web of legends about Ragnar Lodbrok, his sons, the invasion of the Great Heathen Army, King Aella and ‘the blood-eagle’, and the martyrdom of St Edmund cannot, however, obscure the fact that, from the Scandinavian side, we have almost nothing to go on beyond a handful of names in trying to work out the details of the invasion of England by the Great Army in 865. What is abundantly clear - from the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, from other contemporary annals and from Asser’s biography of King Alfred - is that this was a well-led, organized, tactically sophisticated and highly mobile military force with very efficient lines of communication. It was perhaps only a lack of manpower that prevented it from making a full take over of England at this point.

 

Following Alfred’s victory at Edington in 878 and the Danish occupation of East Anglia, much of the attention of the keepers of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
was diverted to the activities of Viking forces on the continent. When Viking attacks on Alfred’s kingdom resumed in earnest in 892, they encountered resistance of a different order from that of previous raids. Alfred’s bonds with the people of Mercia from his marriage, in 868, to the Mercian princess Ealswith, were much strengthened in 889 by the marriage of his daughter Ethelfled to alderman Aethelred, who was the power in that part of the kingdom that remained in Anglo-Saxon hands. The main routes into Wessex were now protected by a network of fortified sites or
burhs
, so disposed as to make any one of them accessible to men living within a twenty-mile radius. Alfred introduced a rota system of conscription that divided the army into two, ‘so that always half its men were at home, half on service, apart from the men who guarded the boroughs’.
³⁵
By 885 he had also strengthened his navy sufficiently to defeat the Vikings in a battle in the mouth of the Stour and capture sixteen of their ships. His successes in dealing with the army that came over from the continent in 892 in a fleet of 250 ships under the Viking Hastein/Hasting owed much to the efficiency of these reforms. They finally conveyed the home advantage his forces should always have had, despite the assistance Hasting received from his fellow-Scandinavians settled in East Anglia. Alfred’s forces stormed the fortress at Benfleet that Hasting was using as his base and put the garrison to flight, breaking up or burning the ships and capturing all the goods and the women and children sheltering inside and taking them to London. Hasting’s wife and two of his children were among them, a hint that the thought of further colonization was on his mind. Though this engagement is the first reference in the
Chronicle
to Hasting, he and Alfred had obviously encountered one another before, perhaps as part of the peace-and-baptism agreement between Alfred and Guthrum/Athelstan in the handing-over of East Anglia:

And Hæsten’s wife and two sons were brought to the king; and he gave them back to him, because one of them was his godson, and the other godson of Ealdorman Ethelred. They had stood sponsor to them before Hæsten came to Benfleet, and he had given the king oaths and hostages, and the king had also made him generous gifts of money, and so he did also when he gave back the boy and the woman.
³⁶

By the summer of 896 it had become clear to Viking leaders that Wessex was never going to become their prize. The army split up, some disappearing into the Danelaw territories of Northumbria and East Anglia. Others, ‘those that were moneyless’, got themselves ships and crossed the Channel to try their luck on the Seine.
³⁷

Hasting’s story shows that Alfred had evidently not given up on conversion diplomacy and as we noted earlier with certain reservations, it seems the cultural transformation of the Heathen Viking Guthrum into the Christian East Anglian Athelstan had been successful. The restraint in the notice of his death in the
Chronicle
in 890 implies respect: ‘And the northern king, Guthrum, whose baptismal name was Athelstan, died. He was King Alfred’s godson, and he lived in East Anglia and was the first to settle that land’. As proper kings do, he had issued coins, and the fact that he did so under his baptismal name suggests that the respect was mutual.
³⁸
It was an encouraging sign of the willingness of some Vikings to accept that the religion which they rejected with such ferocious contempt represented a higher form of culture than Heathendom, if only in its aspirations towards a better way of living. For many, though, the religious divide remained a factor in sustaining the sense of ‘otherness’ necessary to attack, enslave or kill without provocation the innocent and the unarmed. There are even recorded cases of Heathen Vikings turning the tables and encouraging apostasy among their Christian associates or allies. Sometime in the 860s, Pippin II of Aquitaine, a grandson of Louis the Pious who was also a monk, not only went over to the Vikings and fought with them but renounced his vows and became a worshipper of Odin. The
Annals of St-Bertin
mention another monk who joined the Vikings and practised their form of worship, and was executed for apostasy upon capture.
³⁹

 

Most of the graves excavated at Repton were those of men who had died violent deaths. One had been killed by spear thrusts to the head including one that passed through the eye. A fierce blow across the top of the thigh may have castrated him and explain the presence between his legs of a jackdaw bone and a boar’s tusk, perhaps symbols respectively of Odin and Frey. Marks on the spine suggest that he was disembowelled after death. His sword had been broken and sheathed in a fleece-lined scabbard, and a knife, key and a Thor’s hammer amulet completed his grave-goods.
⁴⁰
Other finds from the same camp indicate that these men also traded as they went, using silver and gold bars for currency as well as coins. There are even signs that metalworking in copper and silver was practised.
⁴¹
Viking warriors were known to be willing to trade on their travels, though as the Frankish soldiers lured by a false signal of surrender into the Viking camp at Asselt in 882 discovered to their cost, it could be a risky business. For a dedicated Viking Age trader, however, we must turn to the redoubtable Ottar, who hailed from Hålogoland, high up on the north-west coast of Norway, in his own words ‘the furthest north of any who lived in the north’. At some point, probably late on in Alfred’s reign, he found himself in Wessex, lecturing King Alfred’s courtiers on his life, his home, his travels and his plans.
⁴²
He gave his audience invaluable information on the little-known lands to the north and east of Britain which Alfred added to his translation of Orosius’
History of the World
as a supplement.