The Vikings (54 page)

But if political thinking did lie behind Cnut’s choice of Cantabrian rather than Hamburgian bishops, the situation changed after what was probably his most dramatic display of Christian piety. This was the pilgrimage made to Rome in 1027, to attend the coronation of the Emperor Conrad II of Germany. The invitation confirmed a wider degree of acceptance than any Scandinavian ruler had experienced before. With evident pride he related in his report of the pilgrimage that ‘they all both received me with honour and honoured me with precious gifts’, and that the emperor had paid him particular honour in the form of ‘vessels of gold and silver as well as silk robes and very costly garments’.
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The rhetoric is a clear statement of how fiercely this northerner now longed to enter the European political and cultural mainstream. Once he had returned from Rome he made no further attempts to promote the missionary claims of Canterbury above those of the German see.

On the practical side, he had obtained assurances that English and Danish merchants would be allowed to travel freely to and from Rome without being subjected to all manner of local tolls and taxes, and he obtained satisfaction over complaints from his archbishops at the large sums of money demanded of them when they journeyed to Rome to receive the pallium. The spiritual purpose of his journey had been ‘to pray for the remission of my sins and for the safety of the kingdoms and of the peoples which are subjected to my rule’, and in the letter of report he vowed to God ‘to amend my life from now on in all things’. His reeves and sheriffs were enjoined to stamp out injustice and to ensure an adherence to the law so strict that it did not deviate, not even ‘to amass money for me; for I have no need that money should be amassed for me by unjust exaction’.

A number of the Scandinavian rune-stones that commemorate men who took Cnut’s geld ask God to have mercy on the souls of those who lost their lives attacking a Christian country in pursuit of nothing more elevated than power and money. It seems ironic, bearing in mind the effort made from the time of Charlemagne onwards by emperors, kings, bishops and missionaries to convert the Norsemen to Christianity. But if we turn the prism slightly we can see the bargain being struck here, with the English spiritual leadership eliciting these public expressions of piety from Cnut as the price of accepting his leadership. For him to have rejected the role of a good Christian king would have turned his reign into an enervating series of Christian-led insurrections. Acceptance of it paid off: at his death in 1035 Cnut was master, either directly or through his family and tributary relationships, of a compact maritime empire consisting of Denmark, Norway and England. The curious tale of how Cnut sat in his throne on the seashore and commanded the waves to go back is attested only 100 years after his death by Henry of Huntington, whose account makes it clear that the performance was designed solely to instruct his followers in the severe limitations God had placed on his powers. Homiletic tales concerning historical figures do not usually wander too far from their known characteristics. The lesson of this one must be that Cnut was a most talented, intelligent and pragmatic king.

Cnut’s North Sea empire at its greatest extent in 1028.

If this was all a credible and indeed creditable act of self-reinvention, at least one group of people were not seduced. Cnut’s own idea of himself as king was expressed in the letter following his visit to Rome, which was addressed to ‘the whole race of the English, whether nobles or
ceorls
’, the lowest class of freemen in Anglo-Saxon England. To the eight Scandinavian court poets listed in the later Icelandic
Skáldatal
or ‘List of Poets’ who flocked to his court and for the duration of his reign made it a centre of patronage and composition, however, Cnut was and remained their great and triumphant Viking leader.
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Roberta Frank’s analysis of the verse made in honour of his achievements suggests that these skalds were singing not for Cnut alone but for a wider audience of people of Danish extraction living in England, using a syntax, words and idioms that together made up a language at times so distinct as to invite the term Anglo-Danish.
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The incidental content of the poems reinforces the sense of separate cultural identities in England, with an assumption on the part of the Scandinavian poets that their listeners were Danes first and Englishmen second. Cnut’s poets praised him for the benefits his expeditions and activities brought to Danes in Denmark and Danes in England. Their possible benefits to native Englishmen were of no interest to them.

We have noted on several occasions the innate conservatism of the skalds, well illustrated by the opposition of Hallfred the Troublesome Poet to the coming of Christianity. Religious conscience was a factor in this, but there was also the devastating effect on the skaldic art of being compelled to abandon the entire structural underpinning of Heathen myths and lore that lay behind it. In threatening Heathendom, Christianity threatened the cultural history of which the skalds were the oral custodians.
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One poet who found solutions to these problems was the Icelander Sigvat Thordarson, regarded by Snorri Sturluson and by many later connoisseurs as the greatest skald of them all. ‘Sigvat did not talk quickly in ordinary language,’ Snorri writes, ‘but skaldship came so naturally to him that he talked in rhymes as easily as if he were talking in the ordinary way.’
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Without lessening it, he managed to reinvent skaldic poetry by reducing its reliance on a frame of reference that would have embarrassed the Christian sensibilities of kings such as Olaf Tryggvason and Cnut, and by rationalizing the complexity of its sentence structure.
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Just as Archbishop Wulfstan had shown an awareness of his own Anglo-Saxon roots in harking back to the start of the insular Viking Age in the ‘Sermon to the English’, so did Sigvat show what a high degree of historical awareness of themselves as Vikings these eleventh-century Scandinavians had. In the course of the ‘Víkingarvísur’, a praise-poem that enumerates the battles of Olav Haraldson, he invoked the name of the ninth-century Northumbrian king, Aella, to characterize the English as ‘all the race of Aella’ to whom Olaf had caused such suffering.

We saw earlier how, in another context, he again invoked the memory of King Aella in a line from his praise-poem for Cnut called the ‘Knútsdrápa’: ‘And Ivar, who dwelt in York, carved the eagle on Aella’s back.’
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The significance of these two references lies in the parallel Sigvat was drawing between the two Danish heroes, Ivar the Boneless, whose achievement as one of the leaders of the Great Heathen Army lay in his capturing York in 867 and giving the Vikings their first firm foothold in England, and Cnut, now undisputed king over all England. His long narrative line is clear: Cnut had finished the job started by Ivar. Cnut had brought to a successful conclusion a long-term military campaign pursued, with exemplary and unwavering patience, towards just this end. His was a poetic and not a political or historical analysis, but Sigvat’s choice of image gives us a piercing insight into the historical self-awareness of the Vikings. Remarkably, Cnut’s crowning as king of England in 1016 was figured in the poet’s literary imagination as the heroic realization of a plan that had been fashioned by his Viking ancestors over 150 years earlier.

After so long a gestation, the only Viking empire that warrants the term turned out to be short-lived. As the Frankish empire had been after the death of Louis, Cnut’s North Sea empire was plagued by succession problems. When he died at Shaftesbury, on 12 November 1035, he intended his son Harthacnut to inherit England and Denmark, the two most prestigious and wealthy components of the empire. But problems with the Norwegians detained Harthacnut in Scandinavia, and his half-brother Harold, known as Harefoot, Cnut’s son by Ælfgifu, seized his opportunity, ruling first as regent, then as king from 1037. By 1040 Harthacnut had settled his business with the Norwegians and was preparing a fleet to sail to England and depose the usurper, when Harold died suddenly at Oxford.

As their new king, Harthacnut at once alienated his subjects with the imposition of a large tax to pay for the fleet. Coming at a time when a scarcity had caused the price of corn to soar, it provoked widespread hardship and unrest. Tax-collectors named Feader and Thurstan, in flight from an angry mob in Worcester, were cornered and killed in one of the monastery towers. Harthacnut’s response was to raise an army, ravage in Worcester, and burn the city. Such an opening did not augur well for his reign, and there was general relief when, on 8 June, after less than two years on the throne, he collapsed and died while drinking at a wedding-feast, falling to the ground ‘with fearful convulsions’.
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So ended the short rule of the Jelling dynasty in England.

17

The Viking saint

Writing some two centuries after the conversion of Iceland and the reign in Norway of Olaf Tryggvason, Snorri includes in his biography a vignette from the latter days of that king’s short life:

Once when King Olaf was at a feast at Avaldsnes he was visited by an old man who wore a broad-brimmed hat on his head. He was one-eyed, and very eloquent and had something to tell of every land. He entered into conversation with the king; and as the king found much pleasure in the guest’s speech, he asked him concerning many things, to which the guest gave good answers: and the king sat up late in the evening. Among other things, the king asked him if he knew who the Avaldi had been who had given his name both to the ness and to the house. The guest replied, that this Avaldi was a king, and a very valiant man, and that he made great sacrifices to a cow which he had with him wherever he went, and considered it good for his health to drink her milk. This same king Avaldi had a battle with a king called Varin, in which battle Avaldi fell. He was buried under a mound close to the house; ‘and there stands his stone over him, and close to it his cow also is laid’. Such and many other things, and ancient events, the king inquired after. Now, when the king had sat late into the night, the bishop reminded him that it was time to go to bed, and the king did so. But after the king was undressed, and had laid himself in bed, the guest sat upon the foot-stool before the bed, and still spoke long with the king; for after one tale was ended, he still wanted a new one. Then the bishop observed to the king, it was time to go to sleep, and the king did so; and the guest went out. Soon after the king awoke, asked for the guest, and ordered him to be called, but the guest was not to be found. The morning after, the king ordered his cook and cellar-master to be called, and asked if any strange person had been with them. They said, that as they were making ready the meat a man came to them, and observed that they were cooking very poor meat for the king’s table; whereupon he gave them two thick and fat pieces of beef, which they boiled with the rest of the meat. Then the king ordered that all the meat should be thrown away, and said this man can be no other than the Odin whom the heathens have so long worshipped; and added, ‘but Odin shall not deceive us’.
¹

The picture of Odin as a solitary old tramp wandering through the forest alone is very different from the one Snorri gave us at the beginning of
Heimskringla
, in the
Ynglingasaga
, where Odin was in the infancy of his godhood, the human at the centre of an adoring tribe: ‘when he sat with his friends he was so fair and noble in looks’. It is part of Snorri’s literary genius to present the persistence and the enduring power of the old faith in this way, showing us how even the passionately Christian king was loath to stop listening to the old man’s stories. Of all the early post-Christian historians in Scandinavia, Snorri was the one most palpably nostalgic for the vanishing indigenous culture of the north. But this was not a noble appearance, and this Odin was clearly on the run.

Olaf contented himself in throwing away the horse-meat steaks that the wily old god had tried to slip him. He might have been better advised to hunt him down and kill him, for in the aftermath of his own death at the battle of Svold both the
Ágrip
and Theodoricus Monachus describe a Heathen revival in Norway. Politically, the results of the battle were that King Sven reasserted the direct rule of Danish kings over the Vik that they had exercised at least since the end of the eighth century. Olaf Sköttkonung of Sweden was allowed to control the eastern shores of the Vik. The long tradition of alliance between Lade earls and the Danish kings which had been disrupted during the reigns of Håkon the Bad and Olaf Tryggvason was revived. One of Håkon’s sons, Sven Håkonarson, became effective ruler of the four eastern provinces of the Trondheim region. His brother Erik ruled in the west of the province.
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The
Ágrip
claims that ‘as much pain and effort as Olaf Tryggvason had put into forwarding Christianity - and he spared nothing which was to the honour of God and the strengthening of the Christian faith - so Eric and his son put all their strength into quelling it’.
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All four rulers were, as far as we know, baptized Christians and a respectful deconstruction of this might lead us to suggest that Sven and Erik, aware how many enemies Olaf Tryggvason’s coercion had made him, practised a tolerance that turned a blind eye to sacrificing, necromancy and the eating of horse flesh. Theodoricus Monachus notes merely that under Erik’s rule ‘many Christians had turned aside from the true faith’.
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