The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (51 page)

The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
is extensively about genealogies and dates, and draws on earlier texts. The one feature that stands out in this and later documents is that all the half-dozen Germanic royal houses in England (Saxon, Anglian and Jute) claimed descent from one recent non-Saxon legendary ancestor: a person named ‘Woden’. The only partial exception was the line of Essex kings, who did still claim descent from Woden by the marriage in the sixth century of Sledd to Ricula, sister to King Ethelbert of Kent, but whose male line of descent went back, otherwise and uniquely for England, to the legendary Saxon ancestor Seaxnet.

We still honour Woden’s name in variants of the word-stem
Wednes
- in English place-names and one of the days of our week. So, we read in Book 1 of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
: ‘From this Woden arose all our royal kindred’.
⁴
This text, from one of our oldest surviving English histories, was no routine description of an accident of descent but a deliberate statement. The gap between each of the main English founders and Woden was but a few generations. For instance, the Jutish leader Wihtgils, whose name is attached to the Isle of Wight, was claimed to be Woden’s great-grandson through Wecta and then Witta. Wihtgils was also claimed as the father of the fifth-century and earliest semi-legendary invaders Hengist and Horsa, which would make him already resident in the British Isles when they invaded!

England was not the only Germanic-speaking country whose royalty claimed Woden as their ancestor. We read from the prologue of the Icelandic bard Snorri Sturluson’s
Prose Edda
that the royal houses of Denmark, Norway and Sweden all descended from various other sons of Woden. Not only that, but Snorri apparently supplied three additional sons to Woden for his royal offspring in north-west Europe, namely the ‘houses’ of East Saxony, Westphalia and the Volsungs Kingdom of the Franks.

However, two of Snorri’s Continental Woden lines can, with slightly different spellings and details, still be recognized in the pre-invasion royal lines of the English given in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
: Snorri’s ‘House of East Saxony’ confusingly gives rise to both Jutes and Northumbrians, while that of ‘Westphalia’ is very close to King Ælfred’s Wessex line for over ten generations. Even the three male generations preceding Woden are also very similar in the two texts. Thor Heyerdahl, who picked
up on this paradox in his book
The Search for Odin
, argues on textual grounds that this particular parallelism was unlikely to be the simple result of copying.
⁵

So, if the god-king Woden was a common Germanic ancestor figure, does that help us to differentiate Dark Ages Germanic regal ethni cities? Well it might, if we can identify from relevant Medieval Germanic literature where he is supposed to have come from and when and how his ‘sons’ dispersed.

The first thing to notice is that the connection between Anglians and Jutes of the Cimbrian Peninsula (i.e. modern Jutland in Denmark and Angeln in Schleswig-Holstein) on the one hand and Snorri’s House of East Saxony on the other is less likely to be a confusion of homelands and more likely to reflect a rapid geographical extension of elite control. The latter is consistent with territorial changes known to have taken place in the first millennium
AD
. During Emperor Augustus’ reign 2,000 years ago, the tribal land of the ‘Saxones’ lay right next to Angeln at the base of the Cimbrian Peninsula, on the east side of the River Albis (Elbe) (
Figures 9.3
and
8.1d
).
⁶
A little over a hundred years later, Ptolemy again refers to the Saxons as occupying the neck of the Cimbrian Peninsula. This small region was possibly Bede’s Old Saxony. By the fifth century
AD
, however, ‘Saxony’ and Saxon geographical identity had moved a long way from this region, south-west into the hinterland behind Frisia, now known as Niedersachsen (Lower Saxony).
⁷
Whatever the explanation for the move, these references all seem to confirm the suspicion that the word ‘Saxon’ was used rather loosely in Medieval histories.

Westphalia and the Frankish kingdoms, described by Snorri as ruled by the descendants of Woden, were progressively to the south and west of Lower Saxony. In other words, these two Low German royal families, supposedly twinned with the invasion of England, were originally Scandinavian and may well have started out in the Cimbrian Peninsula (i.e. southern Scandinavia) at least 2,000 years ago during early Roman Imperial times. If the genealogies are anything to go by, Woden’s descendants ended up ruling a large part of north-west Europe. How much of this movement and change reflected an extension of elite-family political control and how much was real people movement is not clear. There certainly is historical evidence for south-western migrations on the Continent, but the best of it relates to the effects of flooding of large parts of Frisia and the Netherlands around
AD
500, which does not tell us anything directly about England.

There is another, much larger Late Medieval document which attempts to chart the history of the royal families of southern Scandinavia in great detail and has much to say about Woden or Odin, mostly uncomplimentary. This is the
Gesta Danorum
or ‘Danish History’, written in Latin by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus (‘Saxo the Lettered’) during the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.
⁸
Saxo was well aware of Bede’s earlier work and admired him, but was passionately overinclusive compared with Bede and may not have had quite the same dry concern for accurate recording and cross-checking of sources. He probably got his information from a mixed bag of manuscripts, myths, legends and sagas. His agenda were nationalist
– he was a Dane – and, almost certainly, Christian – his patron was a bishop.

Saxo starts his first of sixteen books by defining the two brothers Dan and Angul as the stock of Danes and immediately identifies the ‘Anglian race’ which took possession of Britain as descendants of Angul. So there is little doubt on which side of the north/south Germanic family divide Saxo places the Angles and the English. As far as he is concerned, the royal ‘Saxon-named’ lines, interact with but are not part of the mainstream of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and English history. (But remember that ‘Saxony’ had a different location by the time of his writing.)

What is perhaps most interesting in terms of
perceived
English ancestry among Saxo’s tangle of genealogical detail is his corroboration of some of Beowulf’s Danish relations (see below) and a mass of description, albeit unfavourable, on the sexual and socio-political antics of Odin, his wife Frigga, and their origins and descendants.

As a Christian, Saxo adopts the same practice used by the Christian compilers of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
in referring to Odin/Woden as a historical person. However, unlike them he makes this designation explicit by such comments as ‘At this time there was one Odin, who was credited over all Europe with the honour, which was false, of godhead, but used more continually to sojourn at Up[p]sala.’
⁹
By this and other references, we gather that Saxo regarded Odin as no paragon or deity but as a particularly successful Swedish chieftain-warlord who had managed to induce a godhead cult in his own name.

This all seems to point to Woden and southern Scandinavia respectively as the preferred ancestor and homeland to which all the Anglo-Saxon kings wanted to be related. Of course, it could
still be that Woden or Odin was just a non-specific Germanic godhead figure with an affiliation and ancestry that varied according to bard or author. There is, for instance, an isolated, dubious eighteenth-century genealogy which dates ‘Wotan’s’ reign to the third century
AD
and makes him descended from a long line of prior Saxon kings, all with non-Scandinavian Low German names.
¹⁰

There is some evidence from around the time of Bede for an early split in Woden’s cult to form a new mainland branch. This is indicated in a curious ‘formal response’ given in an eighth-century
Formel of Pagan Renouncement
intended for those taking up Chris tianity – voluntarily or otherwise! Written in Old Frankish, one line reads: ‘I forsake Thor and Woden and the Saxon Odin.’
¹¹
Presumably, it was felt that if both regional cults of Odin were not covered, the convert might be insincere, in a sense crossing his fingers behind his back.

This evidence of a cultural-linguistic split in royal-sacred genealogy leads us to ask again just where the English pagan affili ations lay: in Scandinavia or in Low Saxony. Since Woden’s genealogies in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
were all consistent with the Scandinavian names and lines given in Snorri’s
Prose Edda
and in Saxo’s ‘Danish History’, we may still infer that the Anglo-Saxon kings had all made an informed choice of
Scandinavian
ethnic ancestor. This amounts to a clear declaration of perceived Norse ancestry, irrespective of Odin or Woden’s actual existence and the veracity of his putative family trees.

Other, more direct evidence for English–Scandinavian affiliation rests in
Beowulf
, the first jewel of Old English literature.
Beowulf
is one of the earliest and most famous of English poems. There is doubt about its date of writing, though probably in the early eighth century, and about where it was composed, probably in Northumbria. (A later date, and in Mercia, has also been suggested on textual grounds.
¹²
) Irrespective of such details,
Beowulf
is written in Anglian and is essentially a Scandinavian saga. The main dramatis personae are southern Scandinavian, and with the exception of excursions to Frisia, the action takes place in Zeeland (part of Denmark) and the land of the Geats in southern Sweden. Why on earth should the English be writing a saga praising Danes around the time of the Viking raids? One answer is that the original was composed before the Viking raids, and the Norsemen might not have been strangers to the place where it was composed.

Written in a grand heroic alliterative split-line couplet style, the poem tells how Beowulf, a Geat hero of royal descent, sails to help Danish King Hrothgar deal with two monsters (Plate 20), Grendel and his mother. Having succeeded, he sails back to his home somewhere in southern Sweden and is acclaimed by Hygelac, King of the Geats, whom he helps in wars with the Swedes, eventually succeeding him as King. Beowulf kills one more dragon in his old age, dying of his wounds afterwards. The dragon had been guarding an ancient treasure buried in a mound. Beowulf himself is buried in a mound with great pomp.

As mentioned, the Scandinavian genealogy described in
Beowulf
, both Swedish and Danish, is extensively corroborated in the Danish History. Hrothgar, King of the Danes, may have lived in the fifth century.
¹³
One key Geat character in
Beowulf
, namely his lord Hygelac, is mentioned in many independent historical sources, and we can even read of the date of his
disastrous raid on the Frisians, in 521.
¹⁴
Beowulf himself has a more shadowy provenance in other sources. However, if we are looking for an answer to the common question of the heroic relevance of Beowulf, from southern Sweden, to the English rulers’ sense of identity, there is a clue in the Winchester MS, the oldest version of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
. Here it states that five generations before Woden, the ultimate ancestor of English Kings, was Geata from eastern Sweden.
¹⁵

Another king-list argument can be made to link England with southern Sweden and possibly with Beowulf. The name of one of the East Anglian kings, Wuffa, appears as a stem in several place-names of the region and in the name of the royal family of East Anglia, known as the Wuffingas. Bede tells us that ‘King Redwald was … son of Tytilus, whose father was Uuffa, from whom the kings of the East Angles are called Uuffings.’
¹⁶
Wuffa ruled from around 570. The Wuffingas may have been an offshoot of the Scylfings, the royal house of Uppsala.
¹⁷

Sam Newton, East Anglian scholar, author and enthusiast, has taken this link much further and argues that:

Wuffa
seems best explained as a diminutive of
Wulf
… The patronymic
Wuffingas
seems to be a variant of
Wulfingas
or
Wylfingas
… meaning children of the wolf … The Wuffings, in other words, may have been descended from the Wulfings … given the possibility that the East Anglian Wuffings may have been descended from the Wulfings,
Beowulf
’s Queen Wealhþeow may have been regarded as a Wuffing ancestor.
¹⁸

I have done Dr Newton a disservice in condensing his convincing and lucid text, which contains numerous parallel lines of textual, place-name and archaeological evidence that link the kings of
East Anglia with southern Sweden. He reveals such a tide of corroborative material in
Beowulf
that it is tempting to search further afield for allusions to the Wulfingas, such as Gildas’ comment on the Saxons sending for reinforcements: ‘Their mother-land, finding her first brood thus successful, sends forth a larger company of her wolfish offspring, which sailing over, join themselves to their bastard-born comrades.’
¹⁹
But then Gildas was talking about Saxons, not Angles, and had already described the first ones as lion cubs in the same chapter, and who knows – if he had heard of crocodiles, he would probably have called them spawn of crocodiles too.