The Vikings (22 page)

In the following year the army divided. Possibly in connection with events following the death or the enforced exile of King Egbert, Halfdan marched north to consolidate his hold on Northumbria, staying the winter at a camp on the Tyne and raiding among the Picts and the Strathclyde Britons.
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His activities in Bernicia, in the north of the kingdom, so disrupted life at Lindisfarne that, like the monks of Noirmoutier before them, the brothers finally abandoned the monastery and set off on the search for a safe haven for the bones of Cuthbert, their patron saint and protector, which lasted for seven years. Following Ricsige’s death in 876, Northumbria beyond the Tyne was nominally given to Egbert II. Halfdan shrewdly reinstated Wulfhere as archbishop of York, agitating a rivalry with the see at Canterbury and dabbling in the same tribal waters that had seen Cornishmen align themselves with Vikings against the Anglo-Saxons some thirty years earlier.
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The final entry for 876 in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
summarizes the events of the year in words of biblical simplicity: ‘And that year Healfdene [Halfdan] shared out the land of the Northumbrians, and they proceeded to plough and support themselves.’
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Meanwhile Guthrum, Oscytel and Anwend, having taken Mercia, made their way from Repton to Cambridge and stayed there for the next year. Guthrum seems to have had his sights set on the prize of Wessex. Evading Alfred’s forces, he and the army slipped out of Cambridge by night and occupied a fortress site at Wareham in Dorset that had, in times of peace, been a nunnery. Alfred was forced to treat with him. Guthrum and his army promised to leave Wessex and handed over hostages as security. It was on this occasion that the
Chronicle
, for the first time close enough to pass on details of the cultural practices of the invaders, noted that Guthrum swore his oath on a holy ring, and that this was ‘a thing which they would not do before for any nation’.
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Guthrum himself must have made the claim. In this he was following the advice of Odin in ‘The Sayings of the High One’:

Instead of leaving the kingdom, he and his men slipped away under cover of night and rode to Exeter. Alfred pursued but was unable to overtake them before they had occupied a fortress. There was another exchange of hostages, more swearing of oaths.

In January 878 the army left Exeter, rode to Chippenham and began driving people from their homes and taking over the land. A brother of Ingvar and Halfdan, whom the Anglo-Norman chronicler Gaimar names as Ubbi, was also in the region at the time, having spent the winter at Dyfed in south Wales with a fleet of twenty-three ships.
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Alfred’s biographer, the Welsh monk Asser, tells us that Ubbi had first ‘slaughtered many Christians’ before departing for Devon. Ubbi was killed in battle with several hundred of his men. The
Chronicle
adds the detail that ‘there was captured the banner which they called “Raven” ’. The
Annals of St Neots
, created in about 1105, relate that the original - for each separate army probably had its own flag - had been woven by the three sisters of Ingvar and Ubbi, and that observations of it were used to predict the outcome of battle. The raven was associated with Odin, on whose whim the fortunes of war depended: a lifelike fluttering of the bird in the wind was a sign of impending victory, just as its lifelessness presaged defeat.

If the raven flag failed to flutter for Ubbi and his men it must have blown gloriously for the remainder of the Viking army, for as Guthrum’s men drove out some of the West Saxons and received the submission of others who stayed, Alfred was now reduced to the humiliation of flight, heading west to Athelney in north Somerset. For some time, says Asser, his life became one of ‘great distress amid the woody and marshy places of Somerset. He had nothing to live on except what he could forage by frequent raids, either secretly or openly, from the Vikings as well as from the Christians who had submitted to the Vikings’ authority.’
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The homely legend of his being scolded by a farmer’s wife, ignorant of his true identity, for letting her cakes burn is laid to this difficult time of his life.
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A more tangible and exalted trace of his presence in the region was the accidental find, in 1693, of the exquisite ‘Alfred Jewel’ at a site four miles from Athelney. This small, gold-framed image in
cloisonné
enamel shows a seated male figure in a green smock holding what may be a flower and is inscribed, in the Wessex form of Anglo-Saxon, ‘Ælfred Mec Heht Gewyran’ (‘Alfred had me made’).
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Its function is uncertain. It may have been a book-mark or pointer for use with Alfred’s own translation of Pope Gregory’s
Pastoral Care
, copies of which were sent to each of the Wessex bishoprics.

From his marshy refuge Alfred turned the tables and embarked on a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the invaders, which soon gathered momentum. In May 878, backed by the men of Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire, he engaged the Danish forces in a decisive battle at Evington in Wiltshire. Guthrum’s men were beaten and driven back to their camp at Chippenham. After a fourteen-day siege they emerged to make peace. Asser describes what happened next:

When he heard their embassy, the king (as is his wont) was moved to compassion and took as many chosen hostages from them as he wanted. When they had been handed over, the Vikings swore in addition that they would leave his kingdom immediately, and Guthrum, their king, promised to accept Christianity and to receive baptism at King Alfred’s hand; all of which he and his men fulfilled as they had promised. For three weeks later Guthrum, the king of the Vikings, with thirty of the best men from his army, came to King Alfred at a place called Aller, near Athelney. King Alfred raised him from the holy font of baptism, receiving him as his adoptive son; the unbinding of the chrisom on the eighth day took place at a royal estate called Wedmore. Guthrum remained with the king for twelve nights after he had been baptized, and the king freely bestowed many excellent treasure on him and all his men.
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Mixing cultural and conversion diplomacy, Athelstan was the Christian and Anglo-Saxon name given to Guthrum when he was raised from the font, showing that Alfred, like the Carolingians across the Channel, put his faith in a policy of complete assimilation. This time Guthrum/Athelstan kept his word to leave Wessex. In 880 he led his army into East Anglia and shared out the land there. With this, the heart of the area that later came to be known as the Danelaw was complete.

But old habits die hard. Asser complains that, in 885, the East Anglian Vikings ‘broke in a most insolent manner the peace they had established with King Alfred’. In the main, however, it seems Guthrum was satisfied to have achieved the respectability of kingship. Alfred could not be as content with his share of the peace. The Viking menace was hydra-headed. In 882 he fought a small naval battle against a Danish fleet, and in 885 engaged with a large force which had crossed from France and besieged Rochester. Alfred’s unexpected arrival threw the aggressors into disarray and they fled back across the Channel, leaving behind their prisoners and their horses. He made his way into East Anglia, ‘in order to plunder that area’ and probably punish Guthrum’s men for having supported the attack on Rochester.
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Initially successful, his ships were finally driven from the mouth of the Stour by a fleet assembled by these same East Anglian Danes. The frequency with which Vikings were making use of the Thames as a port of entry into England clearly demanded Alfred’s urgent attention. It was vital to control London and, in 886, he attacked and re-took the city, an act that entrained the submission to him of ‘all the English people that were not under subjection to the Danes’.
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At some point between this action and Guthrum/Athelstan’s death in 890, he and Alfred came to a formal written agreement that marked a watershed in relations between the two sides. Its prologue recognized the reality of the status quo, invoking a peace between ‘all the English race and all the people which is in East Anglia’.
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The boundary between the neighbours was settled as running ‘up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source, then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street’.
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Legal parity between the two populations was affirmed, with a fine set at eight half-marks of refined gold for the killing of either a Dane or an Englishman. The wording of the treaty confirms that trade links already existed between the parties, with terms agreed for the cross-border buying and selling of slaves and other goods.

Wessex during the time of King Alfred, with a line marking the division of territory, later known as the Danelaw, that was agreed on by Alfred and the Viking chieftain Gurthrum in about 886.

 

The sixteen-year period between the invasion of the ‘Great Heathen Army’ and its subsequent conquest of eastern Britain and the establishment of the Danelaw became a seminal moment in the creation of Scandinavian history, and its events and main characters a radiant for some of the most potent legends and myths that are still associated with the Viking Age. Ragnar Lodbrok’s after-name ‘Hairy-Breeches’ and the equally mysterious after-name of his son, Ivar ‘the Boneless’; the alleged Viking practice of a form of torture and execution known as ‘the Blood-Eagle’; the death and canonization of Edmund, former king of the East Angles; and the origins of the Viking kingdom of York - all are linked in a tangled web of legend with its origins in this long seminal moment. It is worth stepping aside from the narrative to look briefly at the origins and development of this legendary history, to remind ourselves once again of how close much of Viking Age history is to ‘the idiom of legend’.

The earliest reference to a possible historical model for Ragnar Lodbrok is in the ‘Ragnarsdrapa’ by the Norwegian Bragi the Old, dated to the first half of the ninth century and surviving only in fragments in Snorri Sturluson’s
Prose Edda
. It is a ‘shield-poem’, so called because it appears to describe a number of scenes painted on a shield. The ‘Ragnarsdrapa’ is the oldest known example of skaldic art, and Bragi himself the earliest skald whom we know by name. We learn from the poem that the shield was a present to Bragi from his lord, a certain Ragnar. As we noted earlier, this may have been the ‘Reginfred’ who attacked Paris in 845 and who also, according to Saxo Grammaticus, raided in the Baltic in the same decade.

The first references to the name ‘Lodbrok’ occur almost simultaneously in about 1060. Summarizing the earliest history of the Norman dukes, William of Jumièges writes of a certain ‘Lothroc’ that he was a king of the Danes who expelled a very large number of people from his territory. Adam of Bremen makes no mention of a ‘Ragnar’, but in writing of the Viking chieftain Ivar he gives the name of his father as ‘Lodparch’.

Ari the Learned was the first to bring the names together in
The Book of the Icelanders
, in which he identifies Ragnar Lodbrok as the father of the Viking leader Ingvar/Ivar, and includes himself among Ragnar’s descendants, from which it is clear that Ragnar was already a semi-legendary figure.
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The association of the name Ragnar with ‘hairy breeches’ does not occur until the
Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok and his Sons
, a tale that also offered its thirteenth-century audience an explanation for the invasion of England that cast the Danes as the injured party in search of revenge. Ragnar’s heroism is established early on in the saga when he travels to Gotland in response to a challenge to save a princess and win a kingdom by killing an enormous serpent that is threatening both. Protected from its venom by a pair of leather trousers boiled in pitch, he is successful. Saxo tells a similar story but adds the detail that Ragnar used a cushioning of hair beneath his clothes for extra protection, and as a final insurance leapt into the icy seawater so that his breeches would freeze solid before his meeting with the serpent.

Much later on in the saga, during a raid on England, Ragnar is captured and put into a snake-pit by his enemy King Aella, dying only when his tormentors finally realize the secret of his immunity and remove the snake-proof breeches. Ragnar’s last words are carried back home to his sons: ‘The little pigs would grunt if they knew how the father-pig suffered.’
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Determined to avenge Ragnar’s death, the sons then raise a great army and invade Northumberland. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
refers to the Viking attack on York in 867 and the death of the city’s defenders, including its king, Aella; but it does not name any of the Viking leaders, nor does it go into detail concerning the circumstances of Aella’s death. The
Saga
is much more forthcoming, describing how the captured king was executed by having ‘the blood-eagle’ cut on his back. Saxo similarly states that Aella’s back was carved ‘with the figure of an eagle, exultant because at his overthrow they were imprinting the cruellest of birds on their most ferocious enemy’, and gives Ivar as the name of the son responsible for this.
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