fascinated people for centuries. But as a major exhibition opens at the
British Museum, have people got them all wrong?
The longships arrived on 8 June. The monks at Lindisfarne
didn’t know it then – the year was 793 – but it was the beginning of 300
years of bloody Viking raids on England.
“Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have
now suffered from a pagan race,” Alcuin of York wrote at the time. “The
heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar, and trampled
on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets.”
Over 12 centuries later and the Vikings are the subject of a
major exhibition at the British Museum – and they still loom large in
the imagination. Blond, powerfully built men with horned helmets,
nostrils flaring with naked aggression, descending on settlements to
rape and pillage.
That at least is the perception. But long-held views are being challenged.
Let’s start with the helmets, so beloved of Scandinavian
football fans. The Vikings never wore them. They have only been included
in depictions since the 19th Century. Wagner celebrated Norse legend in
his opera Die Walkure (The Valkyrie) and horned helmets were created as
props for the performance of his Ring Cycle at the first Bayreuth
Festival in 1876.
The horned helmet is based on historical fact, says Emma
Boast from the Jorvik Centre, but it just wasn’t a Viking thing. The
British Museum has a ceremonial horned helmet from the Iron Age that was found in the River Thames. It is dated 150-50 BC.
The Vikings used horns in feasting for drinking and blew into
them for communicating. They were depicted in Viking broaches and
pendants. They weren’t worn. And for battle it would have been a major
encumbrance, adding weight to the helmet.
But today a child asked to draw a Viking will start with the
horned helmet, Boast says. “I can understand that kids are drawn to
that. It’s so embedded with our society that I don’t think we’ll ever
get rid of that. But actually there’s a richer explanation.”
With the new exhibition there has been soul-searching in the media. A recent New Statesman headline asked: “The Vikings invented soap operas and pioneered globalisation – so why do we depict them as brutes?”
A Daily Telegraph reviewer – brought up on the idea of them as “all hirsute jowls and beady eyes bent on rape and pillage” – suspects that the new British Museum will be an exercise in academic debunking.
“I will learn that these rapacious raiders were in fact vegetarians,
that they maintained some of the leading universities of the day and,
worst of all, that they did not wear horned helmets.”
His tongue-in-cheek fears show that the British Museum has a
difficult job on its hands. “The debate about whether the Vikings were
cuddly or not has been going for a long time,” says Matthew Townend, who
teaches Old Norse at the University of York.
The classic view is that articulated in Hollywood’s 1958
movie The Vikings. Starring Kirk Douglas, Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis,
it opened with what one critic today describes as a “full-blooded depiction of rape, fire and pillage”. At least there were no horns in evidence.
In the 1960s and 70s their portrayal as marauding barbarians
was questioned. Academics pointed out that most of the written records
for the Viking invasion of England were written by monks who, as the
“victims”, would not have been objective. Archaeology began to replace
the Norse sagas – written several centuries later – as the most reliable
evidence.
A crucial turning point came in the late 1970s. During the
construction of a shopping centre in the Coppergate area of York, Viking
homes, clothes, jewellery, and a helmet were found well preserved in
the moist earth. It led to the creation of the city’s Jorvik Centre. The
Vikings became seen as domestic, family-oriented people.
“Until Coppergate our view of the Vikings was skewed,” says
Chris Tuckley, head of interpretation at the Jorvik Centre. The Viking
makeover saw them transformed from bloodcurdling raiders into
resourceful traders. A British Museum exhibition in 1980 – the last
before this week’s opening – reflected this view. They were poets. They
wore leather shoes and combed their hair.
On a trip to Dublin in 2007, Danish culture minister Brian
Mikkelsen was reported to have apologised to the Irish people for what
the Vikings had done. He later denied having said sorry, telling a Danish newspaper:
“What I mentioned in my speech was ‘it did a lot of damages to the
Irish people’, but we don’t apologise for what the Vikings did 1,000
years ago. That was the way you acted back then.”
An apology 1,000 years on would have been absurd. But others
question Mikkelsen’s second point – that their behaviour was the norm.
The correction to “cuddly” Vikings had gone too far, says
Prof Simon Keynes, an Anglo-Saxon historian at Cambridge University.
“There’s no question how nasty, unpleasant and brutish they were. They
did all that the Vikings were reputed to have done.”
They stole anything they could. Churches were repositories of
treasure to loot. They took cattle, money and food. It’s likely they
carried off women, too, he says. “They’d burn down settlements and leave
a trail of destruction.” It was unprovoked aggression. And unlike most
armies, they came by sea, their narrow-bottomed longships allowing them
to travel up rivers and take settlements by surprise. It was maritime
blitzkrieg at first.
Worse was the repeat nature of the raids. The Vikings, like
burglars returning over and over again to the same houses, refused to
leave places alone.
Images courtesy of the Trustees of the
British Museum, The National Museum of Denmark (gold neck ring) and
National Museums Scotland (brooch)
Ivar the Boneless is said to have been particularly cruel.
According to the sagas, he put Edmund, king of East Anglia, up against a
tree and had his men shoot arrows at him until his head exploded. And
Viking rival King Ella was put to death in York by having his ribs cut
at the spine, his ribs broken so that they looked like wings and his
lungs pulled out through the wounds in his back. It was known as the
Blood Eagle. But the accuracy of these stories is disputed.
And others point out that the Anglo-Saxons were hardly upholders of a prototype Geneva Convention. In 2010 it was reported that 50 decapitated bodies had been found in Weymouth, thought to be executed Viking captives.
Viking culture
Newfoundland, to northern France and Germany, and east into what is now
Russia and Ukraine. Perhaps less known is the Viking influence in
central Asia and the Middle East. “It’s very difficult to find a single
way of assessing them all because they did so many things,” Keynes says.
The largest body of written sources on the Vikings in the 9th
and 10th Century is in Arabic, points out James Montgomery, professor
of Arabic at Cambridge University. The Vikings reached the Caspian Sea
and came into contact with the Khazar empire. They may even have got as
far as Baghdad if one mid-9th Century source is to be believed. Vikings
known as the “Rus” are thought to have contributed to the formation of
the princedom of Kiev, which turned into Russia, Montgomery says.
It has led some to paint the Vikings as global traders more
than warriors. And even – with their Icelandic sagas – as inventors of
the soap opera.
Revisionism is natural. Academics are always looking for a fresh angle. And people change their mind as social mores evolve.
“Stendhal said that the biography of Napoleon would have to
be rewritten every six years,” says historian Antony Beevor, author of
The Second World War.
But revisionism and counter-revisionism happens more in some
fields of history – World War One for example – than others. For Beevor
it tends to occur “over periods and questions which have contemporary
political resonances – civil wars, slavery and colonialism, labour, the
treatment of women and so forth”.
Townend says the Vikings were both invaders and migrants. They
didn’t just raid, pillage and leave. Over the 300-year Viking period,
many stayed. Their attitude to the local populace was more complicated
than just that of thuggish raiding parties. “They don’t wipe them out.
So how do these two groups live together?”
It becomes a story about not just conquest but immigration
and assimilation. Many of the Vikings embraced Christianity. There was
intermarriage. King Cnut, who became King of England and ruled for 25
years, replaced those at the top but allowed society to go on as before.
At the same time they held on to Norse names and traditions. “My view
is that there was a good deal of give and take,” Townend says.
Haakon the Good converted to Christianity while in England.
On his return to rule Norway, “he was given a hard time”, Townend says.
“His religious beliefs were rather different to the majority of his
subjects.”
What came after the Vikings was arguably worse, argues
Tuckley. The Normans went about things in a more systematic way, he
says. “They oppressed the local populace rather than integrating as the
Vikings did.”
No doubt the revisionism and counter argument will be
fine-tuned. But the Viking story – replete with violence, colonialism
and trade – has it all. With or without horns.
