As receivers of that heritage, the Anglo-Saxons were torch-carriers for traditions, tales, words and images from a legendary world. That world, though its shapes and contours grew ever more indistinct, yet blazed brightly in the imaginations of poets and storytellers. The earliest genealogical lists of Anglo-Saxon royal houses typically extend via Woden, the pagan deity equivalent to Odin (ON Oðinn) in Old Norse mythology, through Finn (a legendary Frisian king) to Geat, the eponymous ancestor of Beowulf’s own Scandinavian tribe.
Even a century of Viking attacks failed to dampen enthusiasm amongst the Anglo-Saxons for their northern heritage. By the end of the ninth century, royal genealogies had expanded to include Bældæg (the Old Norse god Balder), Scyld (the legendary progenitor of the Danes) and possibly Beowulf the Geat himself.33 Negotiating the evidence for the ways in which the Anglo-Saxons identified with this heritage is complex and sometimes bewildering. Much of what remains is reduced to the blank names of kings and heroes – names which must once have conjured great arcs of narrative, laced with the myths of the pre-Christian past, but whose owners now stand mute guard at the entrance to pathways which can never now be trod.
The perpetuation of this fascination with the ancestral North did not, however, go unchallenged. Writing in around the year 800, our friend Alcuin was so incensed by this sort of thing that, in a letter to another Anglo-Saxon bishop, he demanded to know ‘what has Ingeld to do with Christ?’ We know only a single anecdote about Ingeld, king of the Heathobards – a gloomy story about how he burned Hrothgar’s hall, Heorot, and was thereafter a target of the Danish king’s vengeance. The story is alluded to in Beowulf and mentioned in passing in another Old English poem, Widsith. Alcuin’s reference to Ingeld pops up in a passage in which he lambasts his fellow ecclesiasts for listening to music and ‘inappropriate’ stories at dinner-time and for laughing in the courtyards (he presumably didn’t get invited to many parties). It is of particular interest, however, because it suggests that even in what should have been a thoroughly Christian environment, the old stories were still popular – and this at a time when, in Alcuin’s own words, the ‘bodies of the saints were being trampled like dung’ by the living descendants of Hrothgar and his kin.34
Rather less is known about attitudes to the ancestral North in other parts of Britain. One tradition, reported by Bede, held that the Picts – the people inhabiting the highland and island regions of what is now Scotland – had originated in ‘Scythia’. This land had been believed by classical authorities to have existed in an ill-defined region somewhere, seemingly, in northern Eurasia. Whether the Picts themselves believed this to be true – and if they did, what they thought of it – is less than clear. The Welsh, on the other hand, had their own distinct boreal traditions: to them, Hen Ogledd (‘the Old North’) referred to those parts of Britain from which their ancestors had been ejected by Anglo-Saxon incomers in the sixth and seventh centuries. It was an altogether more insular sense of northernness, and can only have compounded the sense that northern lands beyond the sea were a place whence nothing much good ever came.35
Among the English-speaking peoples, however, we are left with an apparent paradox – a set of attitudes to the North that painted it as both shining ancestral homeland and infernal monster-infested wasteland, its inhabitants as both cousins and aliens. As a result, the Viking has emerged as a Janus-faced figure, constantly at war with himself in our imaginations: poet or plunderer, merchant or marauder, berserker or boat-builder, kinsman or kin-of-Cain. The reconciliation of these themes and the resolution of these identities is in large measure the story of Viking Britain. It is a process of negotiation that continues to this day, and begins with the fundamental question of who we understand the Vikings to be.
3
Huge warriors with golden beards and savage eyes sat or lounged on the rude benches, strode about the hall, or sprawled full length on the floor. They drank mightily from foaming horns and leathern jacks, and gorged themselves on great pieces of rye bread, and huge chunks of meat they cut with their daggers from whole roasted joints […] All the world was their prey to pick and choose, to take and spare as it pleased their barbaric fancies.
ROBERT E. HOWARD, ‘The Dark Man’ (1931)1
When I was growing up, my idea of what a ‘Viking’ should be was not, I presume, very different from that imagined by anyone else of my generation.
My grandmother – who lived in Glastonbury, Somerset – was a full-time carer and companion to a (to my young eyes) elderly disabled gentleman whom I knew only, and affectionately, as ‘Venge’. An Italian by birth, who in truth luxuriated in the name Bonaventura Mandara, Venge was an exceptionally kind and gentle man, with a love of brandy, cigars, cards and horse-racing: he was, in other words, a jolly fine fellow. He would often encourage me, sprog that I was, to clamber on to his bad leg (always propped up horizontally in front of him, encased in a steel and leather contraption that both frightened and fascinated) and read me the cartoon strips from the back of his newspaper. Only one of these left any kind of impression.
Hägar the Horrible – a comic strip drawn by the American cartoonist Dik Browne – was probably my first encounter with a Viking. The eponymous Hägar fulfilled all the stereotypes: an unruly faceful of red beard, an unashamedly horned helmet, a flagon of foaming ale, an aversion to bathing. In essence he remains the classic ‘Viking as barbarian’, essentially indistinguishable from the cartoon caveman. That was fine with me. Hägar and his frequent anachronistic assaults on large medieval stone castles were a happy complement to early childhood visits to Glastonbury spent rampaging around the ruins of the medieval abbey and staring through the windows of King Arthur themed crystal shops.
When I was a little older, I remember being taught about the Vikings – the only time I ever encountered the subject in compulsory education. I must have been about eight, and although perhaps not best equipped to appreciate the significance of what I was learning, I remembered that lesson when all else had faded away. The thing that stuck, the one key message that lodged most firmly in my brain, was that no Viking ever wore, possessed – or perhaps even imagined – a horned helmet.
The absence of horns on Viking helmets invariably comes as a blow to those who aren’t prepared for it. Many is the occasion on which I have been obliged to plunge in this particular knife; it is remarkable to witness, in fully grown adults (in fact, especially in adults), the visible shrinking of the spirit that accompanies the unexpected death of an image formed in childhood. There may well be, and I apologize for it, readers of this book who are right now experiencing the bewildering combination of anger and disbelief that accompanies the detonation of this fact-bomb.
To a small boy weaned on Hägar the Horrible the news was, well, horrible. I still remember the frustration of it all – if the Vikings didn’t have horned helmets, why had I been lied to? Thankfully my young mind was still fertile enough to bounce back from this mental napalm. The blow was also softened slightly by the discovery that the helmets they did wear were almost as cool (or so I tried to convince myself) as their cornigerous surrogates. The evidence for helmets of any kind, however, is slim. Aside from scattered fragments, only one complete Scandinavian helmet of the Viking Age has ever been found. This is the famous Gjermundbu helmet (named after the place in Norway where it was buried, along with its owner), an arresting object defined by the sinister half-facemask that was intended to protect the eyes and nose. Its owl-like visage – cold, impassive and predatory – was the face presented
