The Vikings (11 page)

 

Simple dead-reckoning would have sufficed to cross the sea to northern Britain from the west coast of Norway, and there was a second raid in Northumbria in the year after Lindisfarne, when Vikings ‘ravaged in Northumbria, and plundered Ecgfrith’s monastery at
Donemuthan
’.
¹³
Alcuin, with his local knowledge, had warned the religious communities at nearby Wearmouth and Jarrow to be on their guard - ‘You live by the sea from whence this plague first came.’ Simeon of Durham identified the site of the monastery at the mouth of the Don as Jarrow, and reported with satisfaction that its great protector St Cuthbert had not allowed the Heathens to go away unpunished,

for their chief was killed by the English with a cruel death, and after a short space of time the violence of a storm battered, destroyed and broke to pieces their ships, and the sea overwhelmed many of them. Some were cast on the shore, and soon killed without mercy. And these things befell them rightly, for they had gravely injured those who had not injured them.
¹⁴

The thirteenth-century historian Roger of Wendover referred to a raid on Northumbria a few years later in 800, by ‘the most impious armies of the pagans [who] cruelly despoiled the churches of Hartness and Tynemouth, and returned with its plunder to the ships’, after which the focus of the raiding turned to religious sites in Ireland and in the Western Isles of Scotland, a region which the Irish Christian scribes of the
Annals of Ulster
regarded as falling within their sphere of interest and of whose sufferings at the hands of the Vikings they duly opened an account.
¹⁵
The annals for 794 note the ‘devastation of all the islands of Britain by the Heathens’, the following year that the Isle of Skye was ‘overwhelmed and laid waste’. Iona, a religious site that was, if anything, more sacred to Christians even than Lindisfarne, was attacked for the first time in 795, and again in 802. In 806 the monastery was burned down and the community of sixty-eight people killed. The monastery was attacked again the following year.

There are no records of raids on Orkney or Shetland, sixty miles to the north of it, but with a fair wind Shetland lay only twenty-four hours’ sailing west of Bergen and we may be sure they took place. Finds of combs made from the antler of reindeer, an animal not indigenous to the islands, have been taken as likely evidence of contact between Norwegians and the aboriginal Pictish inhabitants of the island from the time before things turned violent.
¹⁶
A degree of activity that the annalists saw fit to describe as the ‘devastation of all the islands of Britain’
¹⁷
probably implies the existence as early as the 790s of a base in the north from which the raiders could easily reach targets further west round the coast of Scotland, and to which they could return without risking a North Sea crossing each time. The Northern Isles would have been the most obvious location of such a base. The date given by the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
for the Lindisfarne raid is 8 January (the ides of January). Following Simeon of Durham in the
History of the Church of Durham
, written some 300 years later, historians have conventionally altered this to 7 June (the ides of June), on the grounds that a crossing of the North Sea in an open boat in the dead of winter would have been unthinkable.
¹⁸
The objection would be less compelling had the raiders started their journey not from Norway but from some such local base to the north. There is increasing acceptance of the likelihood that part of this first manifestation of Viking violence involved the colonization of the Orkneys, and shortly afterwards of the Western Isles of Scotland, and that before the middle of the ninth century a de facto Viking kingdom, referred to by the Irish annalists as Lothlend, Laithlinn or Lochlainn, had come into being and ruled over both, as well as over the Caithness and Sutherland regions of north-east mainland Scotland, and was independent of the power structure in Norway.
¹⁹

The
Orkneyinga Saga
, a narrative history of the Norwegian presence on the islands written down in Iceland in about 1200, does not begin its tale until much later, with the establishment of the islands as a Norwegian earldom in the last two or three decades of the ninth century. The Norwegian King Harald Finehair crosses the North Sea as part of his campaign to unify the inhabited territories of Norway under his kingship. His immediate purpose was

to teach a lesson to certain vikings whose plunderings he could no longer tolerate. These vikings used to raid in Norway over summer and had Shetland and Orkney as their winter base. Harald conquered Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides, then sailed all the way to the Isle of Man where he laid its settlement in ruins. During his campaign he fought a number of battles, winning himself territories further west than any King of Norway has done since. In one of these battles Earl Rognvald’s son Ivar was killed. On his way back to Norway, King Harald gave Earl Rognvald Shetland and Orkney in compensation for his son, but Rognvald gave all the islands to his brother Sigurd, the fo’c’sle-man on King Harald’s ship. When the King sailed back east he gave Sigurd the title of earl and Sigurd stayed on in the islands.
²⁰

Details involving their own ancestors are what seemed important to the storyteller and his audience in the early thirteenth century; who or what preceded them on the islands was of lesser interest. At the time the Viking Age began in the west, a community of Picts had been living on the islands since the fourth century, as part of a larger kingdom comprising the Northern Picts in what is now the Caithness area, and the Southern Picts in the area known as ‘The Mounth’.
²¹
Little is known of their society, but it seems to have been Christian. According to Adomnán, an abbot of Iona in the late seventh century and the biographer of Columba, the community’s founder, the saint visited the Picts in the course of his missionary work and made some converts at the court of their king, Bridei. A Bishop Cuiritán is reported to have preached the gospel to them from a base at the head of the Moray Firth, and a congregation of Pictish memorial stones in the area seems to confirm the existence of a Christian centre there.
²²
Adomnán also writes that monks from Iona were living in a hermitage on the Orkneys during the sixth century, and there may have been a church on St Ninian’s Isle by the eighth century.
²³

The size and ferocity of the Viking warbands that began to appear towards the end of the eighth century severed the links of these Orcadian Picts to their fellows on the mainland and left them to their fate. The toponymists tell us that names of all the towns, settlements, farms, rivers and natural features of the landscape of the Shetland and Orkney Islands are, with the obvious exception of modern names, of Norse origin. Only the name Orkney itself, which means ‘seal-island’, is pre-Scandinavian. This is a very unusual state of affairs and the interpretation of it is controversial. It may mean only that, within a fairly short space of time around the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries, practically all native Picts were wiped out. Such a campaign would have been in the spirit of the Vikings’ well-documented slaughter of whole communities of Christian ecclesiastics in the surrounding regions at about the same time. A parallel has been drawn with the situation in nineteenth-century Tasmania, where the combination of disease and a colonial campaign of slaughter by the British resulted in the disappearance of not only the aboriginal peoples but also of all the aboriginal place-names.
²⁴
The oldest farm-names in the Orkneys show that the Vikings brought their Heathendom west with them. Mill Bay on the eastern side of Stronsay has the Norwegian coast as its nearest landfall in the east, and among the names of Norse origin found there are Odness, also known as Odin Ness, and an Iron Age dry-stone wall structure of the type known as a ‘broch’, which acquired the name God-Odina. Below the broch is a beach named Dritness. In the
Book of the Settlements
Ari tells us that ‘Dritsker’ was the name of the skerry appointed for use as a public toilet by those attending the Assembly site at Thorolf Mostrarskegg’s temple-farm at Hofstadir in Iceland. The geographical proximity of two so resonantly named sites on an Orkney island may well have been typical of Heathen Viking settlements, identifying this particular site as a place at which assemblies were held. Another farm-name that reinforces the association with south-west Norway is Avaldsay on Rousay, just north of Orkney’s Mainland island, was probably named from Avaldsnes in Karmøy, in Rogaland, the place from which, in the later years of the ninth century, Harald Finehair began his campaign to unify Norway.
²⁵

A second explanation for the missing Pictish names may be that the arrival of a Viking warrior aristocracy occasioned only a transfer of power from the ousted Pictish leaders of the native community. For these the consequences might be very dramatic, for those lower down the social scale less so. The latter would simply orientate themselves towards a new set of leaders to whom to pay their taxes and from whom to request protection. Finds in 1970 and 1971 at a Norse farm built on top of a Pictish house on the Point of Buckquoy, at Birsay in Orkney, have been used to support this theory, interpreting the presence of Pictish bone pins and bone combs at the Norse cultural level as a sign that the Vikings had obtained these and other items of domestic equipment from a surviving but subjugated native population. A third possibility is that the Picts who survived a first wave of conquest simply fled the islands in fear and left the Vikings with no local naming culture to relate to at all.

A lean linguistic survival from pre-Norse times in the Orkneys and Shetland sheds little light on these matters. Effectively this consists of a single inscription, that on the Bressay stone found at Cullbinsgarth in Shetland in the early 1850s. A number of theories concerning the script and its meaning have been adopted and discarded since its discovery. Some linguists interpret the writing as a mixture of Old Norse runes and a linear form of script called
ogham
, which was developed in the south-east of Ireland during the fourth century and is known to have been used by the Picts. They interpret the mixture as evidence of contact, communication and cultural continuity between Picts and Vikings, and even as evidence that some Vikings had adopted Christianity by the time the stone was cut.
²⁶
Commemorative inscriptions in mixed languages of a later period, from the Isle of Man, provide a theoretical justification for this type of interpretation. The problem is that there is no general agreement about what the inscription on the Bressay stone means, and interpretation is hindered by its decayed and damaged state.
²⁷

The archaeological record is similarly a case of sparse material remains that give rise to conflicting interpretations. The discovery of Pictish artefacts, usually pottery, in Norse-style houses, and of Viking artefacts in Pictish houses, might indicate peaceful continuity between the two cultures, or it could indicate that the Vikings killed the Picts and took over their houses and buildings. Geneticists, precise in their measurements, can give no unequivocal answer to these riddles. In a survey carried out in 2000 for the BBC television series
Blood of the Vikings
by Professor Daniel Goldstein and a team from University College, London, 60 per cent of the male population of Shetland and Orkney were found to have DNA of Norwegian origin. One condition of the testing was that the island volunteers were able to trace back their male lineage in the same area for at least three generations.
²⁸
A study that limited testing to men with surnames going back to the end of the earldom in the Orkneys in 1469 found an even higher percentage correlation with Norwegian DNA, indicating a genetic deposit from Vikings of somewhere between 60 and 100 per cent.
²⁹
This could equally be the result of a gradual process over time, or of the summary extinction of the indigenous local population over a very short period of time.

The unknown author of the
Historia Norwegie
, a synoptic twelfth-century history of Norway, includes in his account a brief and half-mythological history of the Orkneys at about the turn of the eighth century. At that time, he tells us, the islands were occupied by Irish priests and Picts. A fleet of Norwegians arrived and ‘totally destroyed these people of their long-established dwellings and made the islands subject to themselves’.
³⁰
He describes the Picts as an industrious people whose strength would mysteriously desert them in the middle of the day, so that they would run away and hide themselves ‘for fear in underground chambers’.
³¹
Such timidity, and the fact that he described them as a half-mythical race of goblins, ‘only a little taller than pygmies’, might be the vestiges of a Viking Age dehumaniz ation of the Picts that was a psychologically necessary precondition for killing them easily, rather as Charlemagne’s capitularies of about the same time ruled that no compensation was payable for the killing of a Heathen, on the grounds that the unbaptized were not fully human.

Where the evidence is so flimsy and ambiguous, its interpretation will tend to reflect the view of human nature of the interpreter. The optimist finds evidence of a saturation degree of Scandinavian immigration that led to a new social synthesis. The pessimist, with a glance over his or her shoulder at recent events in Nazi Germany, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and aware of the record of Viking atrocities carried out in the region at the same period, will conclude that the only realistic explanation for the riddle of the missing Orcadian place-names and the DNA of the islands’ current inhabitants is a genocide. In his early eleventh-century
Chronicle
, Adémar of Chabannes, the French Benedictine, imputed a genocidal ‘thought’ to Viking encroachments upon Ireland: