The Vikings (36 page)

Visiting the newly reopened monastery at Athelney, Alfred’s biographer, Asser, had been surprised to find so many foreign monks there and attributed it to the fact that Viking violence had frightened the native English away from the monastic life. Among the foreign novices he was surprised to note ‘someone of Viking parentage who had been brought up there’; how much more would the elevation, within a half-century, of a first-generation Danish immigrant to the highest church office in the land have surprised him. Oda was the kind of immigrant the royal house of Wessex must have dreamt of, and it is hardly a slur on his character and on the many talents he showed as bureaucrat, diplomat and Christian leader to wonder if his appointment, four years after Brunanburh, to the archbishopric of Canterbury might reflect an early grasp, among the English intelligentsia, of the benefits of ‘positive discrimination’ towards the right kinds of Danish settlers. As the proud boast sounded in the last few lines of the poem on Brunanburh shows, tribal and cultural self-awareness were an essential part of social identity in early medieval times. Oda’s antecedents as the child of a Viking father were no secret, and the authorities will have hoped that his success might encourage other settlers to follow him.

Most of what we know of Oda’s life and career comes from Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s late tenth-century
Life
of his nephew, St Oswald. As a young man, Oda left his parents’ home and attached himself to a Christian, Athelhelm, probably identical to a man of that name who was successively bishop of Wells and archbishop of Canterbury, where his religious education began.
²⁶
Oda became Athelhelm’s protégé. After travelling to Rome with him in 923 he was appointed by Athelstan to the bishopric of Ramsbury, a position he held for the next fifteen years.

Oda became a close and trusted royal adviser. When, in 936, Hugh the Great of the Franks summoned Athelstan’s nephew Louis d’Outremer (‘from beyond the seas’), to cross the Channel and claim the Frankish throne, Athelstan sent Oda over first to conduct the negotiations and obtain the proper safeguards for Louis.
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It was apparently on this trip that Oda, impressed by the devotion and discipline practised at the famous monastery of Fleury, adopted monastic habit as an expression of personal piety.

As archbishop of Canterbury under Athelstan’s successor, Edmund, Oda continued to enjoy royal favour. In 940 he negotiated on behalf of Edmund with the kingdom of York, still then in Danish hands and represented on the Danish or northern side by Wulfstan, archbishop of York. With Wulfstan and a number of other bishops, Oda was responsible for the series of injunctions that made up Edmund’s first law code and covered issues such as the celibacy of the clergy, the penance for killing, sexual offences, the payment of tithes and other church dues, the maintenance of churches and the excommunication of perjurers.
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As a scholar he took it upon himself to make a compilation of early English canonical materials, for the enlightenment ‘of King Edmund and of the whole people subjected to his excellent rule’. Tentatively dated to the first years of his pontificate, this document has been interpreted as a clear indication of Oda’s intention to reaffirm the Church’s most basic principles, values and moral obligations, as well as to restate the moral and political obligations of the king and his court to the Church.

Perhaps the most pregnant of his reforms concerned East Anglia, which was probably Oda’s birthplace and his earliest childhood home. The bishopric there had been a casualty of the Vikings in the 860s, since which time it had been supervised from London. Some time in the mid-950s Oda re-established it at Elmham. He also made improvements to the cathedral church at Canterbury, and added to Canterbury’s collection of relics, importing the bones of St Ouen from Rouen in Normandy, another part of the world in which the descendants of Vikings were trying hard to make the transition to Christian values. We know too little of Oda’s life to compare his influence on Athelstan, and on Edmund later, with the sort of influence Alcuin had on Charlemagne; but Edmund’s appointment of Dunstan as abbot of Glastonbury, which heralded the monastic revival of the second half of the tenth century, may well have owed something to Oda’s influence and to his enthusiasm for the cause of reform, as might the appointment of Ethelwold to the abbey at Abingdon, by Edmund’s successor, Edred. In 957 Oda was given the estate of Ely. Once, before the arrival of the Danish armies, Ely had been the most important of the East Anglian religious houses, and it may well have been his intention to restore it to its former glory. If this were so, it was thwarted by his death in 958. In the years following, the programme of rebuilding and revitalizing a monastic life that had been so thoroughly demoralized by Viking hostility is known, after its leading light, as the Age of Dunstan. Archbishop Dunstan and his supporters enjoyed the great benefit of building on work that had been started before their time by others, including, perhaps pre-eminently, Oda - acting from Christian conviction, certainly, but perhaps fired as much by a personal desire to make some reparation for the role played in its demoralization in the first place by his own people.

 

If literary legend only enhanced Oda’s role on the English side at Brunanburh in 937, it was probably entirely responsible for the presence there of Egil Skallagrimsson, the poet, warrior, drunkard, killer and eponymous hero of the saga. Along with Oda and the seafaring trader Ottar from Hålogoland, he completes a fascinating trio of non-royal Scandinavians whose fates brought them into contact with the kings of Wessex as they struggled to come to terms with the Viking menace. Strict chronology was not a concern of the author of
Egil’s Saga
, but the internal evidence of the story is that his life and adventures spanned the period from 910 to about 990.
²⁹
Like the skilled storyteller that he was, the author was careful to involve his main character in a crucial role in some of the most important historical events of his time, and in Egil’s case this included the battle at Brunanburh.
³⁰
Certain details in
Egil’s Saga
indicate that the author knew a great deal of the history relating to the engagement. When he calls the field of battle ‘Vinheith’ he sounds a close echo of the name ‘Wendune’ given as the site by Simeon of Durham; he also offers a plausible explanation for the long delay between the announcement of the battle, and Athelstan’s eventual arrival at the site, telling us that Athelstan was so shocked at the size of the force ranged against him that at first he gave way before it and made his way south, in order to build up an army as he travelled northwards through the country, ‘for people thought it would be a slow mustering, in view of the numbers needed’.
³¹

The descriptions of the tactical manoeuvring which precede the battle extend over several chapters of the saga and give a vivid idea of the conventions and logistics of a full-scale man-to-man encounter in Viking Age England. Playing for time as he raises an army, Athelstan

sent a man with a message to King Olaf saying this, that King Athelstan wished to appoint a battle-field and meet him in fight at Vinheid by Vinuskog wood. He asked that they should not raid in his land, but whichever of them had victory in battle was to rule the kingdom of England. He appointed their encounter for a week ahead, but the one who arrived first should wait for a second week. It was the custom then that when a king had been challenged to battle he could not raid without dishonour before the battle was ended. King Olaf complied, and halted his army, did not raid, and waited for the fixed day. Then he moved his army to Vinheid. ...

[Olaf] sent men of his up on the moor to the place appointed for battle. They were to find tent sites, and make ready before the army came. When the men reached the place agreed on, hazel stakes were put up indicating the site where the battle was to be. The place needed to be chosen carefully so that it should be on level ground where a great host was to be drawn up. As it was, the moor where the battle would be was level, but on one side a river flowed down, and on the other there was a big wood. King Athelstan’s men had pitched their tents where there was the shortest distance between the wood and the river, and even so that was a long stretch. Their tents went the whole length between wood and river. They had organized their tents so that there was no one in every third tent, and few people in any. When King Olaf’s men came up it was crowded in front of all the tents and they could not go into them. King Athelstan’s men said that all the tents were full of men, so that there was barely room for their army.
³²

The day appointed for the battle passes, and still Athelstan himself has not arrived from the south. His men send a message to King Olaf, offering him a silver shilling for every plough in the kingdom if he will forgo the hostilities and lead his forces back over the border into Scotland. Olaf’s men advise him to reject the offer, certain that the English will improve upon it, and this is done. Athelstan’s messengers request a truce lasting three days, one in which to ride back with the offer, a second for them to discuss it with their king, and a third for the return journey. The request is granted. Three days later they are back with the improved offer. Once again the invaders’ greed gets the better of them. Olaf says he will accept, on condition that Athelstan throw in the whole of Northumbria, along with all its tributes and dues. The messengers negotiate another three-day truce in which to deal with this new demand. But by this time Athelstan has arrived with his army. His men explain their delaying tactics to him, and now at last he gives his true response:

‘Take these words of mine to King Olaf. I will grant him permission to go home to Scotland with his army, and he may pay back all that money which he has unlawfully seized in the realm. Then we will establish peace between our countries, and neither shall make raids on the other. In addition King Olaf shall become my vassal, and hold Scotland from me, and be king under me. Go back now, and tell him how things are.’

The counter-offer is duly refused, and battle is joined. Egil’s involvement is explained as the result of an incident described earlier in the saga, after a character called Eyvind the
Braggart
has been employed by Harald Bluetooth to take charge of Danish defences ‘against the Vikings’.
³³
One of Eyvind’s first actions in this capacity is an attempted ambush of Egil and his crew that goes badly wrong for him and in which Egil kills most of his men. It is in flight from the repercussions of these killings that Egil makes his way to England, where he learns that King Athelstan is advertising for mercenaries and that the rewards are likely to be high. During the battle he acquits himself with great distinction. Afterwards he terrifies friend and foe alike with his demeanour as he sits at Athelstan’s celebratory table, still fully armed, glowering, his shaggy eyebrows riding up and down his forehead, alternately tightening and relaxing his grip on the hilt of his sword, neither drinking nor socializing until the wise Athelstan, discerning a need for appreciation, takes his own sword from its scabbard, removes a ring from his own arm and slipping it over the point of the sword offers it to Egil, who duly raises his own sword in acknowledgement and takes the king’s gift on its point.

Egil was not a settler. Excepting only his willingness to submit to
prima signatio
(or ‘prime-signing’) so that he could fight alongside Athelstan’s Christian forces at Brunanburh, he remains, throughout his saga, an aggressively unreconstructed Viking. One of the motifs of the tale is his enduring conflict with Erik Bloodaxe and Erik’s queen Gunnhild. He kills one of their sons in Norway and is forced to flee to Iceland. Just before he leaves, an idea occurs to him:

Egil went ashore on to the island, picked up a branch of hazel and went to a certain cliff that faced the mainland. Then he took a horse’s head, set it up on a pole and spoke these formal words: ‘Here I set up a pole of insult against King Erik and Queen Gunnhild’ - then, turning the horse’s head towards the mainland - ‘and I direct this insult against the guardian spirits of this land, so that every one of them shall go astray, neither to figure nor find their dwelling places until they have driven King Erik and Queen Gunnhild from this country.’ Next he jammed the pole into a cleft in the rock and left it standing there with the horse’s head facing towards the mainland, and cut runes on the pole declaiming the words of his formal speech.
³⁴

Gaunt monuments like this one, known as
ni
ð
stöng
or shame-poles, are found scattered across saga literature. Egil’s variant is grotesque enough in its own right, but it has been slightly censored by the author and in the context of the saga the force of it remains obscure. In its unadulterated form it contained an accusation of homosexuality that emerges more clearly in a passage in the
Vatnsdaela Saga
, in which the brothers Thorstein and Jokul challenge two other men, Finnbogi the Mighty and Berg the Bold, to a duel. Bad weather prevents Finnbogi and Berg from reaching the duelling site, though not the brothers. When it becomes clear that their opponents are not going to show, Thorstein and Jokul take a pole from a sheep-fold and carve a man’s head at one end of it. An insult is then carved in runes along the pole, a mare is killed, its breast opened and the pole stuck inside the opening. The gruesome apparition is then turned to face in the direction of Finnbogi’s farm.
³⁵
Jokul has already warned Berg that ‘you must now turn up to the duel if you have a man’s heart rather than a mare’s’, and the symbolic force of his construction when his opponents fail to show lies in the open identification of Finnbogi as a female of the species.

A still more complex version of the insult is found in the
Saga of Bjorn, Champion of the Hitardal People
. The friendship between two men who both love the same woman ends when one of them tricks her into marrying him by falsely reporting the death of the other. The bad feeling between the former friends simmers for years. It reaches its bizarre climax one day when a carved wooden statue appears on the boundary of the liar’s property. The carving shows two men standing close together, one behind the other, one with a black hat on his head. Both are bent forward. ‘People thought ill of the encounter, ’ the author tells us, ‘and said that it was not good for either of them who stood there; but it was worse for the one who stood in front.’ Specific prohibitions in the laws of the Norwegian Gulathing and in the Icelandic
Grágás
reflect the seriousness of the homosexual insult: