Griffiths Vikings of the Irish Sea

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-0-7524-9854-6
Verlag: The History Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Vikings began raiding islands and monasteries on the Atlantic fringes of Europe in the 790s. The Irish Sea rapidly became one of their most productive hunting grounds. Attacks, battles and destruction were accompanied by trade - in slaves, silver and fine objects. Vikings crossed and re-crossed the Irish Sea in search of land, wealth and power. Raids were followed by settlement, first in fortified camps, and later in towns, market enclaves and rural estates. Vikings came into contact with existing populations in Ireland, Britain and the Isle of Man. Viking paganism, demonstrated by spectacular burials, was gradually eclipsed by Christianity. By 1050, the process of assimilation was well under way, yet Viking influence and distinctiveness did not altogether disappear. This updated edition of Vikings of the Irish Sea takes the sea as its starting point and looks afresh at the story of a supremely opportunistic people who left their mark in ways that still resonate today.

DAVID GRIFFITHS is Reader in Archaeology and a Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford University.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Griffiths, David

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is to bring together a disparate archaeological and historical subject in a region defined by common access to a relatively small and semi-enclosed sea (), rather than in the more familiar terrestrial context of a country or national landmass. It is universally acknowledged that the sea was the principal highway of the Viking world. The Viking phenomenon in Britain and Ireland was primarily a maritime one. Vikings were pirates, adventurers and colonists. They also depended on the sea for trading, fishing and hunting. Early raids came from the sea. Fleets, enmities and alliances transferred easily from one landmass to another, especially when these were separated by only a day’s sailing time. Trade and settlement were conditioned by maritime access and held together by seaborne contacts. The geography of the Viking world was linked by sea crossings and river passages. Islands and headlands, isthmuses, sounds, bays, inlets, portages, anchorages, eddying currents, maelstroms, sands and rocks loom large in Norse literature and place-names. Ships were amongst the most prized and animated possessions. They formed the theatre of the grandest pagan graves at Oseberg and Gokstad, and of many lesser ones such as Balladoole on the Isle of Man, and are commemorated throughout Scandinavia by the earthwork remains of the large boat-houses or on the strands of the most powerful farms.

It is ironic, therefore, that in most of Europe the activities of Vikings have mostly been viewed in the context of territorially-bounded national historical narratives. In Ireland and Britain, as in many other European countries outside Scandinavia, Vikings have until recently been viewed as outsiders in the story of ‘national races’ such as Celts or Anglo-Saxons. Political concepts of nationhood, race and ethnicity, from the eighteenth century to the present, but most particularly in the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, have tended to distort and manipulate the archaeological and historical past. Vikings have been used, abused or ignored within patriotic historical traditions that have been mostly concerned with explaining or excusing the rise of modern nation states. This book does not attempt to iron out differences in a search for false conformity around the Irish Sea, because many variations and differences certainly existed, but to redress the balance somewhat by placing the neighbouring areas around this small maritime zone within the context of each other.

Vikings

Vikings have become predominant in our historical perceptions of early Medieval Britain and Ireland, linking the disparate pasts of places such as Waterford, Dublin, Wirral, the Isle of Man, Cumbria and Galloway, into a common international historical theme that stretches from Greenland to Russia and beyond. Vikings are, however, far from being a unified or easily categorised historical or archaeological phenomenon. The term ‘Viking’ is in part derived from Old Norse (bay or inlet), which came to mean something like ‘adventurer’, ‘marauder’ or ‘pirate’.1 It figures far more prominently as a convenient and universally understood shorthand in modern literature than as a description in contemporary historical sources where is it barely known. Rather than being restricted to its specific and historical meaning of pirate or adventurer, the term ‘Viking’ has now spread itself to encompass most expatriate Scandinavians in the period 790-1050, including traders and settlers, and is used in this manner here.

Early raiders and settlers from Scandinavia would not have thought of themselves as something as anonymously generic as ‘Vikings’. Their identity was constituted in terms of family or wider kindred (and by implication their rank within them), their religion and home territory, and their relationship with other families in their homelands. There were linking tenets to be found in convergences of mutually intelligible language, religion and warrior ideology. Late Iron Age Scandinavia, the homelands of these raiders and settlers, was a patchwork of semi-independent territorial chiefdoms, many of which paid scant loyalty to any upstart centralising dynasty. In the comparatively kinder and more pliable landscapes of Denmark, south-eastern Norway and southern and eastern Sweden, kings had begun in the eighth and ninth centuries to assert a dynastic pressure on their compatriots, fighting and buying off rival families to elevate their own, and beginning to call on resources throughout their nascent kingdoms. The western and northern chieftains maintained a particular sense of their own independent worth. One of them, Ottar (or Ohthere), from the northernmost farm in the northernmost Norwegian province (very probably Bjarkøy, Troms county, which is part of the ancient province of Hålogaland), gave King Alfred of Wessex a memorable account of fishing and whaling, of relations with the Lapps (better known today as Saami) of the inland areas, and his trading links to southern Norway and beyond. Separated from each other by majestic but harsh topography (), local centres of power in Norway are marked by clusters of monumental grave mounds, and the remains of formerly impressive buildings. These graves and settlements, particularly in the western Norwegian coastal provinces of Rogaland, Hordaland, Sogn, Møre and Trøndelag, and Vestfold in south-east Norway, have been found to include impressive quantities of Irish and British metalwork alongside iron weapons and other indigenous products.2

Rather than ‘Vikings’, contemporary historical sources in Britain and Ireland (almost all compiled by hostile ecclesiastics) preferred ‘heathen’, ‘gentiles’ (religious distinctions which largely went out of use in the 940s), or ‘Northmen’. Irish annalists often used ‘foreigners’ () as a general description, although their occasional willingness to distinguish between types of ‘foreigner’ – black or white foreigners, and the foreign-native hybrid (below, Chapter 2), is somewhat more informative. Even so, contemporary references to Scandinavians are mostly implicit, rather than explicit. Were Scandinavians regarded in the west with more of a sense of familiarity than we perhaps assume? Given the contacts between an earlier, pagan, Anglo-Saxon England and Scandinavia, as exemplified in the Anglo-Saxon poem and the great seventh-century ship-burial at Sutton Hoo (Suffolk), it is highly unlikely that Vikings were the first Scandinavians ever to venture towards the west of Britain or beyond. They were certainly far from the last to exert their presence, as shown by the presence of nineteenth-century Norwegian and Swedish sailors’ hostels and churches in west-coast ports such as Liverpool and Cardiff.

Although ‘Northmen’ or ‘Danes’ have been of interest to antiquarians since at least the seventeenth century, scientifically grounded ‘Viking Archaeology’ could be said to have started with the visit to Britain and Ireland in 1846–7 of the eminent Danish prehistorian Jens J. A. Worsaae. His visit included a lengthy stay in Dublin, during which time he gave a series of lectures to the Royal Irish Academy and conferred with antiquarians such as Sir William Wilde (below, Chapter 5). Worsaae’s book of 1852, , was the first of a long series of publications by Scandinavian scholars on the Viking period in Britain and Ireland. It launched a research tradition, based on typological studies of artefacts conducted with reference to museum collections in Scandinavia, which was to remain dominant for more than a century.3 Following the writings of Sir Walter Scott, the nineteenth century also saw a rapid rise in popular interest in Viking mythology and the Icelandic sagas, some of which was little-troubled by historical and archaeological reality.4 Nevertheless, despite the fictionalising vogue for Vikings, genuine scholars did emerge during the Victorian period. These included romanticists such as W.G. Collingwood, a follower of John Ruskin and a luminary of the arts and crafts movement, whose studies of the early Medieval sculptured stones of northern England remain a major contribution to research.5 Viking Archaeology was, however, little more than an obscure minority interest until the mid-twentieth century. During Ireland’s struggle for independence, Vikings were mostly viewed unsympathetically as villains in a national story which stressed Celtic purity, and their artistic and economic contributions were generally devalued as a result. As in many other areas of cultural expression, however, such historical conservatism began to feel the effects of change in the 1960s. The later twentieth-century booms in urban development and higher education, on both sides of the Irish Sea, saw public and academic interest in Vikings rise to an unprecedented level. Major excavations in Dublin and York in the 1970s and early 1980s provided a centrepiece for renewed academic research, and in the case of Dublin, significant political controversy (below, Chapter 7). Numerous television programmes, museum exhibitions, conferences and university courses followed in their wake. Vikings have now become virtually synonymous in the popular mind with the history of northern Europe in the period 800–1100, a situation which is now producing a revisionist...