The Vikings (28 page)

Vikingsd used the rivers of the north west Furopean mainland to penetrated deep into Frankish territory and capitalize on the rivalry that broke out between the sons of Louis the Pious after his death.

 

Also known to his biographers, chroniclers and poets as Rollo, Rollon, Robert, Rodulf, Ruinus, Rosso, Rotlo and Hrolf, Ganger Rolf or Rolf the Walker, founder in about 911 of what became the duchy of Normandy, is another of those, like Ragnar Hairy-Breeches and Ivar the Boneless, whose prominence among their contemporaries conspired over the years with an almost complete lack of biographical information to transform them from ordinary mortals into dense hybrids of men, myth and legend. As we noted earlier, Dudo of St-Quentin’s claim that Rollo was one of the Viking leaders at the long siege of Paris in 885 seems doubtful. A canon of St-Quentin in Picardy, Dudo was commissioned in 994 to write his history of the duchy of Normandy by Rollo’s grandson, Duke Richard I. Dudo’s account of the creation of the duchy and its subsequent development has suffered more than most from the rigours of source criticism. Much of his information about Rollo’s activities prior to the foundation of the duchy is probably the product of a desire to insert retrospectively into significant events someone whose rise to prominence went almost unnoticed in the contemporary record, and thereafter to portray him in as sympathetic a light as possible.
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Yet Dudo’s is the closest we have to a local and contemporary history of the duchy. His successors as historians of the duchy were William of Jumièges, writing some time after 1066, and Orderic Vitalis, who died in about 1142. Both used Dudo as their source, and though they did so with discretion and were able to provide a few extra items of information they did not substantially alter his account of the early days of the duchy. There are only three references to Rollo in independent contemporary sources, each of them brief, none that tell us anything about who he was or where he came from.

His origins, not unsurprisingly, are uncertain. The tradition Dudo records is that he was from Dacia or Denmark, of aristocratic family, and driven out of the country either as a result of what Dudo implies was a form of population control in Denmark that involved the expulsion of whole generations of young men by the drawing of lots, or because the Danish king considered the popular Rollo too great a threat to his power. Rollo made his way to Skåne and from there embarked on a career as a Viking that included making tributaries of the Frisians in Walcheren. In England he struck up an immediate and close rapport with a king whom Dudo calls ‘Alstem’, and agreed terms of perpetual friendship and support with him. This is regarded as one of Dudo’s wilder fictions and a grotesque misjudgement of Alfred of Wessex’s character. Yet its oddness is diminished if we take the reference to be not to Alfred, king of Wessex, or even a misdated Athelstan, grandson of Alfred, but to Guthrum, the Danish leader whom Alfred baptized and then recognized as king of the East Angles in 880. ‘Alstem’ is an acceptably close approximation to Guthrum’s baptismal name Athelstan, and we know that Athelstan used the name in minting his coins. Identifying Alstem as Guthrum/Athelstan, king of the East Angles, makes credible the warmth and respect that Dudo tells us sprang up between these two men, apparently spontaneously.
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When Rollo’s emissaries reveal to Alstem that they are Danes, the king’s reported reply - ‘No region brings forth extraordinary men, and ones actively instructed in arms, more than does Dacia’ - has the unique ring of one ex-pat fondly greeting another. Guthrum/Athelstan died in 890 and had been king in East Anglia since 880, dates that easily accommodate these associations. Dudo tells us that Rollo lived to an advanced age and died in about 929 or 930, so if we hazard a guess at a birthdate of about 860 this would make him active by 880 at the latest.

The identification also supplies a logic for this Danish Alstem’s recurring problems with a respectless and rebellious native population: ‘The English, puffed up and perverse with their audacious insolence, refuse to obey my commands’, he complained to Rollo.
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Placing Rollo at the siege of Paris that took place in 885, Dudo writes as though this were indeed the state of affairs:

And when the English heard that Rollo had laid siege to the city of Paris, and was occupied with Frankish matters, they reckoned that he would not come to the assistance of his friend king Athelstan, and they renounced their fealty. They began to grow insolent and arrogant and fierce, and opposed the king by vexing him with battles.
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Dudo goes on to refer to the English as ‘perfidious’, illogically for a supporter of the house of Wessex, logically for the supporter of a Danish conqueror struggling to assert his authority over the natives. He even tells us that Alstem offered a half share of his kingdom to Rollo, an incredible gesture for Alfred, but for Guthrum/Athelstan only a sensible attempt to solve problems of order in his new kingdom.

The identification of Alstem with the Guthrum/Athelstan known to us from
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
strengthens Dudo’s claim that Rollo was of Danish origins; but in general Dudo’s account of Rollo’s origins and career has all the vagueness and general applicability of a newspaper horoscope. It suffers by comparison with Snorri Sturluson’s more detailed account. In Snorri’s
Saga of Harald Fairhair
the future conqueror of Normandy is a Norwegian youth named Hrolf, a son of that Ragnvald, earl of Møre, who was Harald’s main ally during the campaign to unify Norway and his ceremonial hairdresser once it was successful. Snorri tells us that Rollo was so big that no horse could bear his weight and he had to walk everywhere, and was for this reason known as Ganger Rolf or Rolf the Walker. It makes him a sort of legendary inversion of Ivar the Boneless who, in one set of stories about him, could walk nowhere at all and had to be carried everywhere. For once it is Dudo who has the more sober explanation for this tale, conceding that in the last year of his life Rollo was ‘unable to ride a horse’ but adding that this was owing to ‘his great age and failing body’. There is no hint of his being an unusually large man.

Like Dudo’s Rollo, Ganger Rolf was a successful Viking. He made the mistake of harrying on the shores of the Vik at a time when King Harald himself was in the region. Harald promptly outlawed the young man. Rolf’s mother Hild, whose family name was Nevja, tried to persuade him to change his mind, but the king was adamant. Hild then composed this sorrowing verse:

The lines enjoy the special credibility generally extended to poems embedded in saga texts as more likely to be creations describing contemporary events; yet they have no direct bearing on the identification of Rolf with Rollo of Normandy. This comes unequivocally with Snorri’s summation of Rolf’s fate after his banishment: ‘Rolf the Ganger afterwards crossed the sea to the Hebrides and from there went south-west to France; he harried there and possessed himself of a great earldom; he settled many Norsemen there, and it was afterward called Normandy. ’
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Among Rollo’s three half-brothers was Rollaug, a name that transmutes more easily into Latin ‘Rollo’ than does Rolf. Snorri quotes, moreover, a verse by Einar, earl of Orkney, which shows that Rolf and Rollaug were at some point together in the Orkneys. But arguing against the faint possibility that Snorri somehow got the brothers confused and that it was Rollaug who was actually ‘Rollo’ of Normandy, is the story mentioned earlier of how Rollaug was told to settle in Iceland by his father, for he had ‘no disposition for war’.

Rollo’s Hebridean connections are further supported, despite some passing confusion, by the anonymous twelfth-century Welsh history
The Life of Gruffyd ap Cynan
, where the genealogy of Gruffyd’s grandfather includes Rollo, here a brother of King Harald Finehair, who subdued ‘a large part of France which is now called Normandy, because the men of Norway inhabit it; they are a people from Llychlyn’.
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‘Llychlyn’ looks like a variant spelling of that independent island kingdom, mentioned earlier, comprising the northern and western isles as well as parts of mainland Scotland.

At the close of the nineteenth century, with the Scandinavian nations jostling for position over the emerging reality of a ‘Viking Age’ and laying claims to its various heroes, the question of Rollo’s nationality became for a short time a matter of urgent debate. The Danish historian Johannes Steenstrup used the surviving fragments of a
Planctus for William Longsword
, a grief-poem written by an unknown author shortly after the murder of Rollo’s son and successor William Longsword, in 942, to advance arguments for accepting the reliability of Dudo’s history that would make Rollo a Dane. The Norwegian Gustav Storm employed the
Planctus
to opposite effect to reinforce Snorri’s case for his Norwegian origins, pointing out that the
Planctus
’s description of William as ‘Born overseas from a father who stuck to the pagan error/and from a mother who was devoted to the sweet religion’ directly contradicts Dudo’s claim that William was born in Rouen. Snorri’s tale of Rolf’s Hebridean interlude, along with the
Planctus
’s reference to his Christian wife, both appear to complement a tradition, recorded in the Icelandic
Book of the Settlements
, and repeated in the so-called
Great Saga of Olaf Tryggvason
,
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that Rolf had a daughter named Kathlín, or Kathleen, who married the Hebridean King Bjólan.
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Dudo makes no reference to this daughter, whose name is both Celtic and Christian.
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Snorri is very sure of himself in the identification of Rolf with Rollo, and the enigma of Dudo’s ignorance of detail concerning his subject’s origins that was available to Snorri over 200 years later remains. It may well be that he was trying to rationalize the fact that Rollo was Norwegian but most of his followers Danes. In his
Saga of St Olav
, king of Norway between 1016 and 1028, Snorri revisits Rolf/Rollo’s great triumph at the conclusion of a typically brisk genealogical round-up: ‘From Rolf the Ganger are the jarls of Ruda (Rouen) descended, and long afterwards they claimed kinship with the chiefs of Norway and set great store by it for many years; they were always the Norsemen’s best friends, and all Norsemen, who would have it, had peace land with them.’
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Though there are other alternatives - William of Jumièges cautiously gives no pedigree for Rollo and says he was chosen by lot to lead his generation of Seine raiders; and the late tenth-century historian Richer of Reims trenchantly refers to Rollo as a ‘pirate’ and names his father as a certain Catillus (Ketill)
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- Snorri’s identification remains the most popular, though it is certainly not definitive. Nor is the anonymous thirteenth-century
Saga of Ganger Rolf
, a sublimely wild account of the doings of a man who shares nothing but his name with the hero of Snorri’s and Dudo’s histories, and the legend of his great size with Snorri’s. Contemplating some of his more obvious outrages against both history and common sense, the author admits with a disarming shrug that ‘maybe this saga doesn’t tally with what other sagas have to say about the same things, not in regard to the various events, or the names of the people, or the brave and bold deeds done by this one or that, or where the various chieftains ruled’. He assures his readers, however, that

those who have assembled these tidings must have based them on something, either ancient verses or else the testimonies of learned men. And in any case, few if any of the stories from the old days are such that people would swear that everything happened just as related therein, since in most cases a word here and there will have been added. And sometimes it’s not possible to know every word and every happening, for most things happen long before they’re told about.
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As we have noted earlier Dudo put the date of Rollo’s arrival on the Seine at 876 and placed him at a siege of Paris which, if there be any truth in the story, is more likely to be that of 886. Thereafter he treats him as the only significant Viking leader on the lower Seine. At some point Rollo captured the city of Rouen. Unlike his predecessors, he managed to keep control of it. The
Historia Norwegie
describes in admiring terms the tactics that won the day. The crew of his fleet of fifteen ships dug pits disguised with turfs between the city walls and the river and then lured their mounted opponents into the traps by pretending to run for their ships once the battle was under way. The trick was so successful that they were able to enter Rouen unopposed.
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Indeed, it seems that Rollo had established himself so firmly there that defeat in a battle against the Neustrian count Robert I in about 911 led not to flight but instead to an invitation from Charles the Simple to join him at the negotiating table, where the king formally recognized Rollo’s right to remain in possession of a large part of north-west Francia, pointedly described as already ‘too often laid waste by Hasting and by you’.
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In return Rollo agreed to be baptized and to assist the king in the defence of the realm. The seal of agreement was to be marriage between Rollo and Charles’s daughter, Gisla.
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