The Úlfhéðnar: The Untold Story Of Forgotten Viking Wolf Warriors

The Vikings are known for their ferocity in battle, but among their ranks were a group of elite warriors known as the Úlfhéðnar or wolf warriors. The Úlfhéðnar were a special breed of Viking warrior who were feared and revered by their enemies. They were known for their savagery in battle, their use of wolf skins and their ability to channel the power of the Norse god Odin.

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The term Úlfhéðnar translates to “wolf coat” in Old Norse, and it is said that these warriors wore the hides of wolves into battle. The Úlfhéðnar were renowned for their berserker rage, a state of mind that allowed them to fight with incredible ferocity and disregard for their own safety. It was said that in this state, they were immune to pain and were driven by an intense desire to kill their enemies.

The origins of the Úlfhéðnar are shrouded in mystery, but it is believed that they were a select group of warriors who were chosen for their strength and bravery. They were often associated with the god Odin, who was known as the god of war and death. It was said that Odin himself would select the warriors who would become Úlfhéðnar and that he would visit them in their dreams, offering them his protection and guidance.

The Úlfhéðnar were not just skilled warriors, but also practiced shamanism and were believed to have the ability to shape-shift into wolves. This belief was strengthened by their use of wolf skins, which they wore into battle as a symbol of their connection to the spirit of the wolf. Some accounts even suggest that the Úlfhéðnar would go into battle without weapons, relying solely on their wolf-like strength and ferocity to overpower their enemies.

Despite their fearsome reputation, the Úlfhéðnar were not invincible. In fact, it is believed that their berserker rage could sometimes lead to their downfall. In this state, they would often lose all sense of reason and would attack anyone in their path, including their own comrades. This could lead to confusion and disarray on the battlefield, and many Úlfhéðnar were killed as a result.

The stories of the Úlfhéðnar have been largely forgotten over time, but their legend lives on in Norse mythology and in the annals of Viking history. It is believed that the Úlfhéðnar were present at many of the most important battles of the Viking age, including the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, where they fought against the English army.

It is interesting to note that the practice of wearing wolf skins in battle was not unique to the Úlfhéðnar. In fact, it was a common practice among many Viking warriors, who believed that it would give them strength and protection in battle. This belief was based on the idea that the spirit of the animal would inhabit the warrior and imbue them with its strength and ferocity.

The use of berserker rage was also not unique to the Úlfhéðnar. It was a practice that was common among many Viking warriors, who believed that it would give them an advantage in battle. The berserker rage was often induced through the use of drugs or alcohol, which would alter the warrior’s state of mind and make them more susceptible to the influence of the Norse gods.

Today, the Úlfhéðnar have become a symbol of Viking strength and bravery, and their legacy can be seen in modern depictions of Vikings in popular culture. The use of wolf skins and the portrayal of berserker rage can be seen in movies, television shows, and video games that depict Vikings and their way of life.

In conclusion, the Úlfhéðnar were a unique and fearsome group of Viking warriors who were respected and feared by their enemies. Their use of wolf skins and their ability to channel the power of Odin made them a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield. While their stories may be shrouded in mystery, their legend lives on as a testament to the strength and bravery of the Viking people.

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OUR ANCESTORS, The Viking Age, Uncategorized

WHEN ENGLAND WAS PART OF A VIKING EMPIRE – CLAN CARRUTHERS CCIS

November 16, 2022 ClanCarruthers

WHEN ENGLAND WAS PART OF A VIKING EMPIRE

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The Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok refers to London as “the finest city in Scandinavia.” This seems like quite a mistake, considering London is the capital of England and sits on the east coast of Britain. However for the skalds who composed the old saga, London was indeed in Scandinavia, for England was once part of a Viking empire.

This part of English history is almost always glossed over or simply not mentioned at all. The tidier narrative is that Vikings invaded Britain in the 9th century, quickly knocked down most of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, but were eventually halted by the founder of England, Alfred the Great. Most history books are silent on what happens after that, before picking up the national story with the Norman Conquest in 1066.

But the whole story is a great deal more complicated. England was indeed a part of a large North Sea Empire founded by Vikings long after Alfred’s death. This does not diminish the accomplishments of Alfred and the English. Instead, the whole story helps us to appreciate how complex the reality of England is. Read on, and it will soon all make more sense.

Back Story: The Great Army, Alfred, and their Legacy

A massive host of Vikings descended upon the kingdoms of Britain around the year 865. According to the sagas, this army was led by the sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, seeking revenge for their father, who had been executed in a pit of vipers. The historical and archaeological records do not commit to the saga narrative. Still, they state the Great Army was made up of Vikings from all over the north, who were suddenly united under tremendously effective leadership, and were remarkably successful.

To make a very long story short, the young ruler of the last Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Alfred of Wessex, stopped the Vikings and forced them into a lasting truce. A border or “DMZ” was marked at the old Roman road, then known as Wattling Street. The Vikings got the northeast of Britain, and the Anglo-Saxons got the southwest.

More waves of Vikings would try their luck at taking the whole of Britain, and Alfred would spend the rest of his days trying to make his enlarged kingdom Viking-proof. His efforts to unify and defend his people earned him the title Alfred the Great.

After Alfred’s death, his son, Edward, and his daughter, Aethelflaed, worked to retake much of the land lost to the Vikings. It would not be until the time of Alfred’s grandson, Aethelstan I, that the Vikings would be decisively defeated. The borders of England were set to more-or-less their current form at the Battle of Brunanburh (937). This is often thought of as the birth of a bona fide English nation.

This is not to say that all the Vikings in England just got up and left. The northeast of Britain had become (and in some ways continues to be) distinctly Danish in character. Though these descendants of Vikings were more prone to farming than raiding, they still retained much of their culture and identity. Viking Sea Kings like Erik Bloodaxe, Sihtric One-eyed, and Olaf the Shoe (Amlaíb Cuarán) often ruled their domains from York. Essentially, the north was still Viking … and English at the same time.

Aethelred the Unready

Aethelstan, the grandson of Alfred and the hero of Brunanburh, only knew two years of peace after that great battle. He died young around 939 and left his newly unified kingdom to his brother. A few successful rulers followed, but a few decades later (978), a young king named Aethelred II came to the throne. Aethelred (or Ethelred) was nowhere near the ruler his predecessors had been and was known even in his own time as Aethelred the Unready (also known as Ethelred II or Aethelred the Un-counseled).

Smelling weakness, the Vikings, Scotts, and Irish again began raiding England. But while King Alfred had been ready to use arms, diplomacy, and Danegeld (bribes) to manage the Vikings, Aethelred only threw money at the problem. Under Aethelred, the English paid vast quantities of silver to the Vikings, but so ineffective was Aethelred’s leadership that he sometimes broke the treaties this silver bought.

In a final act of weakness, Aethelred the Unready ordered a massacre of all the Danes that could be caught, whether they be Viking marauders, traders, or even settlers. This atrocity took place on Saint Brice’s Day, 1002.

Recently, archaeologists have found mass graves in Weymouth and Oxford dated to 975-1025. Each contains the skeletal remains of up to 50 decapitated Vikings. DNA analysis of these remains reveals that the victims were from Scandinavia, Iceland, Russia, and the Baltic. The term “Danes” in English sources, as always, is a catch-all term for Vikings. It is possible that these mass graves date to the Saint Brice’s Day massacre of 1002. If so, it is likely but one of many others that lay undiscovered.

Aethelred’s bad decisions were compounding, though. One of the massacre victims was a woman named Gunnhild, the wife of a Danish chief and the sister of none other than Svein Forkbeard. Of course, Vikings would never ignore such a brazen and cowardly act. The murder of Svein’s own sister made retaliation inevitable.

Svein (Sweyn) Forkbeard

In the mid-tenth century, much of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, were united by the great king, Harald Bluetooth. Yes, this is the same Harald Bluetooth that Bluetooth technology is named for. However, Harald’s estranged son, Svein Forkbeard, led an open rebellion against his heavy-handed father starting in the late 970s. Harald died or was killed sometime during that civil war. After that, Svein became King of Denmark, though Norway and Sweden had already taken advantage of the instability and went their own way.

Svein Forkbeard was a powerful and charismatic leader who had already proved himself highly skilled in war. Whether to take advantage of England’s disarray, avenge his people’s slaying, or both, Svein launched a series of attacks on England starting in 1004. These culminated in a full-scale invasion of England in 1013.

The Vikings landed in the center and swept north, using the support of the entrenched Danish population there to quickly secure the area. They then turned their attention to the wealthy southwest and the seat of Anglo-Saxon power.

The dramatic conclusion of Svein’s invasion took place in London in the winter of 1013-1014. Svein Forkbeard’s forces assailed an English army supported by Viking mercenaries under Svein’s former ally, Thorkell the Tall. This battle was the likely origin of the children’s nursery rhyme, “London Bridges Falling Down,” for the fortified bridges of London (like Paris before it) were crucial for resisting the Viking longships. And yes, some elements of our collective culture really are that old (and older).

Svein Forkbeard won the day. Aethelred the Unready fled to his wife’s family in Normandy. Svein was crowned king, and for that brief moment, held England and Denmark along with parts of Norway and Sweden. Svein Forkbeard was the most powerful man west of Byzantium. He was no longer just a king … he was an emperor.

But life is uncertain, and this was especially true for the 11th century. Svein only reigned in England for about five weeks before he suddenly died. The English immediately recalled Aethelred the Unready (supporting his revered dynasty more so than the man who had so often failed them). The reinvigorated English drove Svein’s son, Knut (or Canute), back to Denmark.

The Vikings were not so easily scared off from what had been one of their most significant accomplishments, and Knut re-invaded England in 1015. Aethelred also soon died and was replaced by his dynamic son, Edmund Ironside.

Knut the Great

Edmund Ironside was a great warrior, charismatic leader, and heroic king. But fate was not on his side, and he was up against one of the most successful Vikings of all time. Knut scored a decisive victory over Edmund’s English in 1016, and the scion of Alfred died of wounds he sustained in that battle.

For the second time in two years, the crown of a united England was in the hands of a Viking. To underscore his legitimacy and emphasize that he was there to stay, Knut married Aethelred’s widow, Emma of Normandy. This move (bizarre and grim to the modern eye) was a 10th-11th century convention, with examples from Ireland to Russia. The marriage of Knut to Emma was also to prove fateful. It was partially on the grounds of this union that William the Conqueror would base his claim to the English throne half a century later.

Circumstances continued to favor Knut. Norway and other lands his father Svein had once controlled soon fell under his dominion, mainly through peaceful means. His reign was long (almost 20 years), relatively tranquil, and prosperous. The effectiveness of Knut’s rule was even more evident by the disarray of the rest of western Europe at that time. The death of Brian Boru in Ireland (1014) and the feebleness of the Capetian dynasty in France meant that Knut was almost peerless. As his boundaries extended and his peace continued, he became known as Knut the Great. Knut ruled his North Sea Empire primarily from England through it all, continuously presenting himself as “a true Christian monarch in the European style” (Price, 2020, p. 472). His English and Norwegian subjects probably never loved him. Still, they eagerly accepted the stability he brought and the goodwill he was always eager to display.

The Legacy of Knut the Great

Knut died in 1035. He left several sons, including his successor by Emma, Harthacanute. Unfortunately, Knut’s heirs could not match their father’s political or military ability. As a result, the North Sea Empire quickly fell apart. Nevertheless, the urgency to rebuild it would serve as an impetus for many ambitious men over the following decades. In 1066, both William the Conqueror and Harald Hardrada probably saw themselves as the heir to this tradition of a unified northwestern Europe.

As for Knut’s memory, sources differ dramatically. Almost everything from Knut’s lifetime is favorable (though much of it is deliberate propaganda, perhaps). In England, he was considered a good king, a patron of the Church, a generous and wise man, a lawgiver, and a law follower. We are told Knut even disbanded his Viking bodyguard, entrusting himself to his English subjects.

In Norse sources, such as the Heimskringla, a fuller picture emerges, with Knut displaying cunning, violence, and vindictiveness characteristic of the most ruthless rulers. Later English folk tradition – perhaps embarrassed that their proud nation was dominated by a foreigner – turned on the man altogether. They portray him in ridiculous tales recycled from old stories of Rome’s hated emperor, Caligula. One of these paints Knut as a mad king, standing on the beach and commanding the waves not to roll up on shore.

More often, though, Knut the Great is forgotten entirely – a footnote on the wrong side of history. The legacy of a Viking England exists more in the fine print: for example, in Shakespeare’s Hamlet when the Danish prince is sent to England to “collect our long-neglected tribute.”

As Knut is connected to the foundations for 1066, he is a part of all of England’s remarkable history since that time. Moreover, the legacy of the Vikings in England would prove to be inseparable from the nation itself. Winston Churchill would later remark on the many contributions to England’s laws, legislature, industry, warfare, and its very personality that the Viking settlers would perpetually contribute. He wrote, “the tribulations of [the years] had not reduced the strength of their original character, nor their attachment to the conquered soil. All through English history, this strain plays a gleaming part” (1956, p. 111).

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References

Sir Winston Churchill. A History of the English Speaking Peoples: Book 1, the Birth of Britain. Reprint by Barnes and Noble. USA. 1993.
Rodgers, D. & Noer, K. Sons of Vikings. KDP. The United States. 2018.
Price, N. Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. Basic Books, New York, 2020.

Gutland / Gotland, The History of Gutland

Unusual Iron Age Burial With Warrior And Sword Discovered In Gotland – Clan Carruthers CCIS

September 9, 2021 ClanCarruthers

Unusual Iron Age Burial With Warrior And Sword Discovered In Gotland

Archaeology students from the Uppsala University have uncovered the remains of an Iron Age warrior in Sweden.

The find made during excavations in Buttle Änge on the Swedish island Gotland has been described as “rather unusual” and the deceased may not have been from Scandinavia.

The man who scientists think may have served in the Roman army was discovered in the midst of a limestone burial.

“I was present when the femur and a piece of the hip bone were excavated. You have to be very careful when digging this type of material so we had to carefully remove the soil with brushes. Eventually, we found spurs down at the feet. And when we brushed at the belly of this individual, it appeared as a piece of bronze that we carefully continued to brush forward”, student Gustav Randér told the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, describing the situation as “absolutely fantastic”.

The man who scientists think may have served in the Roman army was discovered in the midst of a limestone burial.

At the site there was also an 80-centimeter-long bronze sword with bronze fittings. In addition, part of the sword sheath was also preserved in the form of wood remains on both the top and bottom of the bronze sword. At the bottom is a decoration on the ski that has the shape of an acorn.

According to Alexander Andreeff Högfeldt, a doctor of archeology at Uppsala University the sword seems to be inspired by those used on the continent, and the object reveals interesting details about the life of the sword bearer.

“We know from written sources from the Mediterranean world that Germans, that is Scandinavians, served in the Roman army. So it is very possible that this person learned weapons technology from the Romans”, Alexander Andreeff Högfeldt mused.

Andreeff Högfeldt described the find as “rather unusual” and said that warrior skeletons like this may be found once every 30 years

he details about the owner of the sword, however, remain scarce. He appears to be a man with a strong jaw and solid bone structure, who lived sometime during the 300s-500s.

Scientists have announced further investigations and research will be carried out in the future.

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Uncategorized

CLAN CARRUTHERS – NORWEGIAN MOUNTAIN LOAF

September 11, 2020September 11, 2020 ClanCarruthers

NORWEGIAN MOUTAIN LOAF

NO KNEAD, VEGAN

I really can’t express how minimal the effort is here – some half-hearted commitment to the ingredients list, a little apathetic stirring, the most unceremonious hiffing of the dough into a loaf tin, and then the oven does the rest of the work for you.

This bread is fine on its own – if a little strenuously chewy – but really comes alive once toasted, and that is my strongest recommendation for it. In turn, the more seeds you add to it, the more wonderfully nutty and crunchy it will be when put through the toaster. The combination of flaxseeds, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds means you can practically feel your hair getting shinier with every mouthful – however walnuts, sesame seeds, chia and hemp seeds would be great too. I favour this toast spread with refined coconut oil and Marmite, a combination which, chaotic though it may sound, tastes deliciously, butterishly logical to me.

Norwegian Mountain Loaf

No rise, no knead, grainy seedy bread.

350g strong bread flour (usually labelled “high grade”)
50g wholemeal flour
50g rolled oats (not instant)
10g instant/active dried yeast
1 heaped tablespoon sugar, any kind
1 cup/250ml soy milk, diluted slightly with water
1 cup/250ml cold water
1 tablespoon sea salt flakes or 1 and 1/2 teaspoons regular table salt
3 tablespoons pumpkin seeds
3 tablespoons flaxseeds
3 tablespoons sunflower seeds

1: Mix all the ingredients together to form a thick, sticky batter.

2: Tip the mixture into a loaf tin lined with baking paper. Place in a cold oven, immediately turn the temperature to 110C/230F and leave it for half an hour.

3: Once the thirty minutes is up, turn the temperature to 180C/350F and cook it for another hour. Because this is quite dense it might need a little longer – I recommends sticking a skewer in it to see if it comes out clean which is a pretty good way of checking.

Note: I genuinely don’t know why I increased the yeast to ten grams from seven other than being the victim of my own rakish whimsy but! Now that I’ve started doing it I find it hard to stop, so ten grams it is. If you want to use the original seven there is no reason why that won’t work.

Original ingredients, for your comparison/consideration:

250ml water
250ml semi-skimmed milk
350g wholemeal bread flour
50g rye flour
7g easy-blend yeast or 15g fresh yeast
50g porridge oats (not instant)
25g wheatgerm
3 tablespoons each flaxseeds and sunflower seeds
1 tablespoon salt

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OUR ANCESTORS, The Viking Age, Uncategorized

CLAN CARRUTHERS : KING ROLLO THE VIKING

April 30, 2020January 7, 2022 ClanCarruthers

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KING ROLLO THE VIKING

Robert I Rollo “The Viking” Prince of Norway & Duke of Normandy “Count of Rouen” Ragnvaldsson

BIRTH 14 OCT 846 • Maer, Jutland, Nord-Trondelag, Norway

DEATH 17 DEC 932 • Rouen, Seine, Maritime, Haute-Normandy, France

Married:

Poppa Lady Duchess of Normany De Senlis De Valois De Rennes De Bayeux

BIRTH 872 • Bayeux, Calvados, Basse-Normandie, France

DEATH 930 • Rouen, Seine-Maritime, Haute-Normandie, France

Rollo as a Warrior

History has many cunning passages”. – T. S. Eliot

“History . . . the portrayal of crimes and misfortunes.” – Voltaire.

Image result for Rollo as a warrior picture The Normans have evoked great interest from the Middle Ages to the present. Vikings who settled in Normandy, were later called Normans. A phrase, A furore normannorum, libera nos, domine (From the violence of the men from the north, O Lord, deliver us), sums up how historians of the early middle ages looked on the Vikings, for they threatened the progress of western civilization for quite some time (Logan 2003, 15).

The founder of Normandy, Rollo, was the chief of a small band of ravaging Vikings. He once had a dream where he seemed to behold himself placed on a mountain far higher than the highest, in a Frankish dwelling. And on the summit of this mountain he saw a spring of sweet-smelling water flowing, and himself washing in it, and by it made whole from the contagion of leprosy . . . and finally, while he was still staying on top of that mountain, he saw about the base of it many thousands of birds of different kinds and various colours, but with red wings extending in such numbers and so far and so wide that he could not catch sight of where they ended, however hard he looked. And they went one after the other in harmonious incoming flights and sought the spring on the mountain, and washed themselves, swimming together as they do when rain is coming; and when they had all been anointed by this miraculous dipping, they all ate together in a suitable place, without being separated into genera or species, and without any disagreement or dispute, as if they were friends sharing food. And they carried off twigs and worked rapidly to build nests; and willing[ly] yielded to his command in the vision. (From Hicks, 2016, Introduction).

In Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s History of the Normans, Rollo took heed of the omens in the dream and founded a territory that became the duchy of Normandy, uniting various groups under his lead. Later chroniclers recounted how Rollo’s descendants and those of his followers conquered and ruled kingdoms in England and Sicily and Antioch and further, and led armies on crusade. (Ibid.)

Norwegian-Icelandic sources too tell of a large Viking called Rolv Ganger (Rolv Walker), aka Rollo (English) or Rollon (French). Outlawed in Viking Norway for raiding where he was not allowed to by King Harld Fairhair, Rollo was banished from Norway. He was too big for small horses to carry him, a saga tells. Viking horses may have been quite small.

Rolv and his soldiers secured a permanent foothold on Frankish soil in the valley of the lower Seine, and Rolv became the first ruler of Normandy, France, after King Charles the Simple ceded lands to Rollo and his folks in a charter of 918. In exchange, Rollo agreed to end his brigandage and protect the Franks against future Viking raids along the Seine and around it. He also converted to Christianity in 912, and probably died between 928 and 932. Rollo’s descendants were dukes of Normandy until 1202, and his granson’s grandson’s son Guillaume (dead 1087) conquered England in 1066 (William the Conqueror). (Claus Krag, SNL/Norsk biografisk leksikon, “Rollo Gange-Rolv Ragnvaldsson”.

Two more grants followed; one in 924 and one in 933 – land between the Epte and the sea and parts of Brittany. Relatives of Rollo and his men as well as other Northmen followed, for the pastures were green and lush, there was fish in the sea and rivers, and the climate better than in the North. The formerly raided Normandy became protected and became the best part of France for centuries. Normans also took over England and Wales after a descendant of Rollo, known as William the Conqueror, took over England in 1066 fra 1066 and became king of England. Normans also conquered the southern, richest half of Italy, including Sicily, and several other areas bordering on the Mediterranean Sea. (WP, “Rollo”)

Rollo reigned over the duchy of Normandy until at least 928. He was succeeded by his son, William Longsword. The offspring of Rollo and his followers became known as Normans, “North-men”, men from the North.

After the Norman conquest of England in 1066 and their conquest of southern Italy and Sicily over the following two centuries, their descendants came to rule Norman England (the House of Normandy), the Kingdom of Sicily (the Kings of Sicily) as well as the Principality of Antioch from the 10th to 12th century. To enlarge on that: Bohemond I (ca. 1054–1111) of the Norman Hauteville family was the Prince of Taranto from 1089 to 1111 and the Prince of Antioch from 1098 to 1111. He was a leader of the First Crusade. The Norman monarchy he founded in Antioch outlasted those of England and of Sicily. (WP, “Bohemond I of Antioch”)

Two spouses are reported for Rollo:

(1) Poppa, said by chronicler Dudo of Saint-Quentin to have been a daughter of Count Berenger, captured during a raid at Bayeux. She was his concubine or wife. They had children: (a) William Longsword, born “overseas” (b) Gerloc, wife of William III, Duke of Aquitaine; Dudo fails to identify her mother, but the later chronicler William of Jumieges makes this explicit. (c) (perhaps) Kadlin, said by Ari the Historian to have been daughter of Ganger Hrolf, traditionally identified with Rollo. She married a Scottish King called Bjolan, and had at least a daughter called Midbjorg. She was taken captive by and married Helgi Ottarson.

(2) (traditionally) Gisela of France (d. 919), the daughter of Charles III of France – according to the Norman chronicler Dudo of St. Quentin. However, this marriage and Gisela herself are unknown to Frankish sources. Some details can be hard to verify.

ROLLO RULED WITH A VIKING CODE OF LAW BASED UPON THE CONCEPT OF PERSONAL HONOR & INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY.

Was Rollo Other than Norwegian?

The Rollo story is largely historical – and that he and his men were Northmen is taken to men they were of Scandinavian origin. Norwegian-Icelandic sources have it that Rollo was Hrolf from Norway, one of the Viking raiders.

The oldest evidence is in the Latin Historia Norvegiae (ca. 1180). It was written in Norway. A quotation from it follows right below the array of Norse sources.
Fagrskinna‘s chapter 74 tells of William and his ancestor Rolf Ganger (Rollo). This work was written around 1220, estimatedly, and was an immediate source for the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla. Fagrskinna contains a vernacular history of Norway from the ninth to the twelfth centuries, and includes skaldic verses that in part have been preserved nowhere else. It has a heavy emphasis on battles. The book may have been written in Norway, either by an Icelander or a Norwegian. (Cf. Finlay 2004)
In the early 1200s, the Icelander Snorri Sturluson writes about this Hrolf, in Heimskringla, Book 3, section 24; Book 7, section 19, There are stories about the arsonist father and the brothers of Rolf Ganger, at one time rulers of the Orkneys and Moere in Norway. Their tales start somewhere during the reign of King Harald Fairhair (Chaps. 27, 30-32) and say it was he who settled in Normandy. Snorri also tells that Rolv Ganger – also known as Rollo – became one ancestor of the British royal house.
Other Icelandic sagas from medieval times tell of Hrolf too, as the Orkneyingers’ Saga, section 4.
From the Icelandic ◦Landnama Book (Ellwood 1898): “Rögnvald, Earl of Mæri, son of Eystein Glumra, the son of Ivar, an Earl of the Upplendings, the son of Halfdan the Old, had for wife Ragnhild, the daughter of Hrolf the Beaked; their son was Ivar, who fell in the Hebrides, fighting with King Harald Fairhair. Another son was Gaungu-Hrolf who conquered Normandy; from him are descended the Earls of Rouen and the Kings of England.” (Part 4, ch. 7)

From Historia Norvegiae, the oldest of the Norse works where Rollo is mentioned:

When Haraldr hárfagri ruled in Norway some vikings of the kin of a very mighty prince, Rognvaldr, crossed the Sólund Sea with a large fleet, drove the Papar [monks and the picts, called Peti here] from their long-established homes [the Orkney Islands], destroyed them utterly and subdued the islands under their own rule. With winter bases thus provided, they sallied forth all the more securely in summer and imposed their harsh sway now on the English, now on the Scots, and sometimes on the Irish, so that Northumbria in England, Caithness in Scotland, Dublin and other coastal towns in Ireland were brought under their rule. In this company was a certain Hrólfr, called Gongu-Hrólfr by his comrades because he always travelled on foot, his immense size making it impossible for him to ride. With a few men and by means of a marvellous stratagem he took Rouen, a city in Normandy. He came into a river with fifteen ships, where each crew member dug his part of a trench which was then covered by thin turves, simulating the appearance of firm ground. They then arrayed themselves on the landward side of the trenched ground and advanced prepared for battle. When the townsmen saw this, they met the enemy in head-on attack, but these feigned flight as if racing back to their ships. The mounted men, pursuing them faster than the rest, all fell in heaps into the hidden trenches, their armoured horses with them, where the Norwegians slaughtered them with deadly hand. So, with the flight of the townsmen, they freely entered the city and along with it gained the whole region, which has taken its name of Normandy from them. Having obtained rule over the realm, this same Hrólfr married the widow of the dead count, by whom he had William, called Longspear, the father of Richard, who also had a son with the same name as himself. The younger Richard was the father of William the Bastard, who conquered the English. He was the father of William Rufus and his brother Henry . . . When established as count of Normandy Hrólfr invaded the Frisians with a hostile force and won the victory, but soon afterwards he was treacherously killed in Holland by his stepson. (Phelpstead 2008, 8-9)

Dr Claus Krag (born 1943) is a Norwegian specialist in medieval Norwegian history, and at present (2018) professor emeritus at Telemark University College. Krag maintains that what Dudo writes of Rollo – Dudo tells he was a Viking from an alpine Dacia – is “totally unreliable”, and that Dudo’s historic and geographic information “is by no means right”. Dr Krag also notes that in French works younger than Dudo’s book, Rollo is presented as a Norwegian.

Based on the much unclear Dudo about an alps-surrounded “Dacia”, some Danes say Rollo was Danish. However, Denmark is flat. Attempts to settle the question by analysis of DNA profiles of likely Rollo descendants have failed so far. [◦”Skeletal shock for Norwegian researchers at Viking hunting”]

Folk Stories Around Rollo

Several Scandinavian folktales front similar basic “success recipes” as those of battling tribes in search of new areas – Saxons, Angles, Danes and other Vikings. It suggests that many folktale heroes walk in shoes quite like those of Rollo by degrees and through much similar stages where success often depends on combat and getting valuables. Those were the times.

In the course of centuries, stories and myths may grow for such as glorifying ends. Norman bards developed romances that venerated kings. However, having a king is not a great good, according to 1 Samuel 8; 10 in the Old Testament: the king is portrayed as a stealing enemy on top. Taxes continue a tradition . . . Also, immodest royalty may breed dependence and un-normal subservience with or without near-symbiotic and half-neurotic servility.

In 1 Samuel 8:11-18 we read how bad a Jewish king will be:

This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.

But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us.” [Highlighting added]

Rollo In Normandie

The historian Reginald Allen Brown (1924–89) has written extensively about Normans and the Norman conquest. He is rendered in the following:

“Normandy was created by the three consecutive grants of 911, 924 and 933″. (Brown 1985, 15) Normandy was massively colonised by Scandinavians. Rollo and his successors, as rulers of Normandy, obtained the title of count and valuable rights from before, along with widespread domains. (Cf. Brown 1985, 17-18)

Their buildings seem to document remarkable strength or solidity. The churches were much like bastions. But the duke of Rouen controlled the whole church and his bishops owed him military service for their lands – (Brown 1985, 26)

“From (their) Scandinavian inheritance the Normans derived their sea-faring, much of their trade and commercial prosperity which they shared with the Nordic world, their love of adventure, their wanderlust which led to the great period of Norman emigration in the eleventh century, their dynamic energy, and above all perhaps, their powers of assimilation, of adoption and adaptation.” (Brown 1985,18-19.)

(In AD 911) Charles the Simple, king of the west Franks, granted to a band of Vikings, operating in the Seine valley under Rollo their leader, territory corresponding to Upper or Easter Normandy. To this was subsequently added by two further grants, first the district of Bayeux, and the districts of Exmes and Seez in 924, and second the districts of Coutances and Avranches in 933 in the time of William Longsword, son and successor of Rollo. (Brown 1985, 15) (2)

And from the French Histoire de la Normandie (1862) we find, in the fourth chapter, how Rollo, son of the Norwegian Rognevald, was made an outlaw by the Norwegian king Harald Harfager. He arrived at Rouen with his companions. The inhabitants spontaneously submitted to the him and his men. King Charles at first wanted to fight the Viking, but dropped it. Instead they bargained – Rollo won, he got land and permanent welcome. (Barthelemy 1862, 80 ff)

Rollo of Normandy Statue

Brown puts the matter into relief: “Normans were pagans when they came (and they continued to come long after 911).” (Brown 1985, 24). But their leader, the Viking Rollo, agreed to getting ◦baptised, and many others followed. “The Seine Vikings became Christian Normans, the poachers turned gamekeepers. Revival, characteristically in this monastic age, came first to the monasteries. Jumieges was restored by William Longsword (927–43), son of Rollo, who is said to have wanted to become a monk there himself.” (Brown 1985, 21)

In short time the Normans got the back-up of their astute castles and strongholds, helped themselves to most of it – often they were served by ditches and stockades too. (Brown 1985, 37, 37n)

[It is thought that Rollo showed exceptional skills in navigation, warfare, leadership, and administration. He abdicated to his son Guillame (William) and died in a monastery in 933. Among his people he was for hundreds of years the personification of justice and good government under law. Others, who thought differently, found him cruel and arrogant.]

His son Guillame Longue-Epee (William Longsword) succeeded him. The third duke was Richard sans Peur (the Fearless), and there were many intrigues and hard fights. This Richard died and was succeeded by Richard 2 who massacred Saxons in England at war. The French king Robert became the ally of Richard 2. After his death, Richard 3 succeeded him and died prematurely. Robert le Diable succeeded him and, before he died in Terre-Sainte, became the father of Guillame le Conquerant: William the Conqueror. (Barthelemy 1862, 80 ff)

We find the family tree of William the Conqueror in the book of the historian R. Allen Brown. It looks like this:

Richard 1 (ruled: 942–96)
Richard 2 the Good (ruled: 996-1026)
Richard 3 (ruled: 1026–27)
Robert 1 the Magnificent /le Diable (ruled: 1027–35)
William the Bastard / the Conqueror (ruled: 1035–87).

Rollo’s great-granddaughter, Emma married two kings of England, Æhelred the Unready and Knut who was also king of Norway and Denmark. Her son, Edward the Confessor, from the first marriage, was King of England from 1042 to 1066.

A few more dukes of Normandy may be added for the sake of survey of that dynasty line that ruled over Normandy and its English (British) domain:

Robert 2 (ruled from 1087)
Henry 1 (ruled from 1106, King of the English (1100-35)
Henry II, 1135, King of the English (1135-)

“The origins of Normandy in the first decades of the tenth century also reveal the double inheritance of the Normans, from the Scandinavian world from whence they came and from the ancient province of Roman, Frankish and Carolingian Gaul which now they colonised.” (Brown 1985, 17)

“[I]n Normandy by the mid-eleventh century . . . they had adopted Frankish religion and law, Frankish social customs, political organisation and warfare, the new monasticism.” (Brown 1985, 19)

“The Norman monasteries were, by and large, distinguished . . . new . . . vibrant with . . . careless rapture of spiritual endeavour”. The (Normans) became great spirituals – intensely aristocratic. (Brown 1985, 23)

Normans restored and built on monasticism and left robust architectural monuments. Some are still there, more or less intact. The Tower of London was started by Normans, for example. King William had much of it built. “The tower at Rouen was built by Richard 1 (943Rw11;96) and is glimpsed from time to time in the reign of his successor and thereafter . . .. It may have been the prototype for the great Norman towers at Colchester and London. (Brown 1969, 37, 37n) (4)

Normans went on and built monastic churches at such places as Jumieges and many other places. “They added their cathedrals at Rouen, Bayeux [etc.] Many of these major works of Norman Romanesque architecture survive in whole or part”. (Brown 1985, 26)

“Some Normans (including Norman clergy) were patrons of the arts and scholarship . . . and almost all of them were mighty builders.” (Brown 1985, 25)

The French Version

Statue of Rollo of Normandy, Falaise

In 820 peasants . . .along the Seine saw in the distance ten or so curious war ships called—Drakkar because of the animal sculpted into the prow or the stern, which was actually a dragon—the men from the North didn’t travel with their women as they could easily find them on the spot!

Swearing by the names of Thor and Odin—Vikings plundered, pillaged, raped and slaughtered up until 911 when the famous treaty of Saint Clair sur Epte was signed between the Frank king Charles the Simple and Rollon or Rolf, chief of the men from the North.

On the whole our invaders calmed down, adopting a somewhat bourgeois attitude to life in this beautiful region which was to become Normandy.

Soon it was the time for William the Conqueror who, on October 14th, 1066 won the battle of Hastings along with a kingdom—William’s heirs were known as the Plantagenets, and they reigned over Normandy and England. In 1189, Richard the Lionheart divided the double crown.

Rollo and Dudo

Rollo was the son of Earl Ragnvald of More, Norse sagas tell. Two of his brothers were Ivar and Tore. Three more were Hallad, Einar and Rollaug. Hallad and Einar in due time became earls of the Orkneys, each in his turn. [eg, Harald Fairhair’s Saga]

After being made an outcast by the tyrant king Harald Harfager, Rolf voyaged to the western isles. Obviously he could count on support from relatives. The earl of the Orkneys was his paternal uncle, succeeded by that uncle’s son, that is, Rollo’s cousin, and later again by his own brothers Hallad and Einar.

The old sources hold that Rolv took his residence in certain tracts of what today is the domain of Scotland. The Landnamaboka mentions Rolv got a daughter, Kathleen:

Helgi . . . harried Scotland, and took thence captives, Midbjorg, the daughter of Bjolan the King, and Kadlin, the daughter of Gaungu Hrolf or Rolf the Ganger; he married her. (Part 2, ch. 11).

Before Helgi had harried and married, Rolv of the Sagas had travelled from Scotland and the isles near it, to Valland, near the English Channel. The Vikings’ Valland consisted of the southern Netherlands, Belgium and parts of Normandy, roughly said. He took over Normandy in three steps. The Sagas identify him with the Rollo that the Frank king Charles the Simple bestowed it on.

Rollo in Alesund, Norway

Rolv Ganger converted and settled in Rouen. Next he granted many of his Viking companions ample landed property. It was feasible to go north and fetch one’s women and children and kin to the new land, for the soil was fit, there was much fish, and as members of the ruling class they were much safer or freer than those who submitted to the tyranny of Harald Fairhair and his family in Norway and its colonies in several western islands (cf. Simonnaes 1994, 43).

Normans built fortresses on strategic places, and many rustic castles were to come along with them in a short time. All able men had to serve in the Norman military forces. The formerly ruined, marauded region was turned into one of the foremost in France, and Rouen became the second largest city in France, while Hrolf became the originator of the Norman duchy. [Simonnaes 1994 39, 45-46]

Dudos’ Work

Dudo was a visiting French scholar who wrote in verse and prose about the first three rulers of Normandy and their origins. His poetry is different from that of skalds, the Norse bards. It is not complex, as theirs, and he does not glorify war so much either. He is moralistic like earlier Christian eulogists and writers of biographies of saints (Christiansen 1998, xviii). “It was hagiography that moulded his work,” Eric Christiansen aptly sums up (ibid, xxi), and, “there is no sign that Old Norse poetry was ever composed or appreciated in Normandy (1998, xvii; cf. Ross 2005).”

Dudo’s eulogising chronicle (ibid. xxv) is about one family’s rise from defeat and exile in the world of Vikings to an honoured place among the great territorial rulers of France. Dudo recounts two campaigns in England by the founder, Rollo, and a series of stirring events otherwise, including the murder of Rollo’s son William, and the kidnapping, escape and precarious early career of Dudo’s first patron, Count Richard I.

Historians on the whole have doubted much in Dudo’s book, for its historical details are inaccurate. Yet it it is virtually the only source for very early Norman history. Recently, some scholars maintain that Dudo had better be seen as a propagandist.

Dudo’s work has the nature of a romance, and has been regarded as untrustworthy on this ground by such critics as Ernst Dümmler and Georg Waitz. Further, Leah Shopkow has more recently argued that Carolingian writing, particularly two saints’ lives, the ninth-century Vita S. Germani by Heiric of Auxerre and the early tenth-century Vita S. Lamberti by Stephen of Liége, provided models for Dudo’s work. (WP, “Dudo of Saint-Quentin”)

Rollo Grave at the Cathederal of Rouen

New editions of central Norman chronicles have surfaced over the last thirty years. The History of the Normans in Eric Christiansen’s English translation (1998) is said to be “fairly true to Dudo’s often pompous, bloated style” while at the same time being readable, and accompanied by copious, explanatory notes. Christiansen recognises that Dudo is unreliable as a historical source, and he acknowledges the Scandinavian side of the early Normans. Histories of Normans have a potentially broad appeal. On the Internet there has been a version edited by Felice Lifshitz (1996).

Dudo’s content: A few observations

O thou the magnanimous, pious, and moderate!
O thou the extraordinary God-fearing man!
O thou the mangificent, upright and kindly!
O thou miraculous, goodly just man!
O thou peace-maker and offspring of God!
O thou the munificent, holy and moderate!
O thou the incarnadine merciful Richard!
O thou the the long-suffering, Richard the prudent!
O thou most famous one, Richard the comely!
O thou justiciar, Richard the mild!
– All manner of nations duly declare.
Mild one, remember what you see in the book,
Nourish your heart and your soul on these things
That you may be joined to the matter you read.

– Verses to Richard, son of the great Richard (in Christiansen 1998, 8)

A clergy view shines through.

The commisioned chronicler of the Norman dukes, Dudo, tells in Latin (ca. 1015–20) that Rollo was the son of an uncertain king in “Dacia”. ◦Gesta Normannorum:

Spread over the plentiful space from the Danube to the neighborhood of the Scythian Black Sea, do there inhabit fierce and barbarous nations, which are said to have burst forth in manifold variety like a swarm of bees from a honeycomb or a sword from a sheath, as is the barbarian custom, from the island of Scania, surrounded in different directions by the ocean. For indeed there is there a tract for the very many people of Alania, and the extremely well-supplied region of Dacia, and the very extensive passage of Greece. Dacia is the middle-most of these. Protected by very high alps in the manner of a crown and after the fashion of a city. – [From chapter 2, second paragraph in Gesta Normannorum by the chronicler Dudo ca. 1015]

Extracts from Dudo of St. Quintin’s

One thing that stand out from Dudo’s obscure and glorifying marvel is this: If what is called Dacia is surrounded by very high alps, it isn’t Denmark. His Dacia stands out as some very fertile, southern Alp tract (Balcanlike). (Steenstrup 1876, 30, 31)

Against a claim by the Danish Johannes Steenstrup in 1876, there is not one mention of Rollo in classical Danish sources. DNA analyses of Norman descendants of Rollo could have helped in finding out about his origin, but so far no fit DNA has been detected.

The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus from about 1200, has no mention of any Danish Rollo in ◦The Danish History.

In Normandy, Rollo is celebrated as a real Viking from More on the west coast of Norway [Cf. Simonnaes 1994 35]

Rollo in Fargo, North Dakota

In 1911, during the Norman Millennium celebrations, the city of Rouen in Normandy decided to create two copies of its Rollo statue. One replica was sent as a gift to Ålesund, Norway. The earls of Moere were headquartered somewhere nearby Ålesund, it is suggested.

The other replica went to Fargo in North Dakota. The two bronze statues were copied from an original stone statue sculpted in 1863 by Arsene Letellier, erected in Rouen in 1865.

In Fargo, the dedication ceremony in 1912 included a speaker from the French embassy in Washington. A proclamation by the mayor of Rouen, bound in leather with gold seal of the city, gold leaf and other ornamentation, read in part,

“Since these ancient times, these fierce warriors have populated and have become a hard-working people whose importance is shown by the powerful association of the Sons of Norway which has preserved the cult of memory, and which participated last year in the celebrations in the ancient Duchy of Normandy.”

The celebrations were concluded with a parade down Broadway. The Rollo statue was relocated in the 1980s and now stands in a little park. [Simonnaes 1994 39, 48, 40]

Preserving Our Past, Recording Our Present, Informing Our Future

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Gutland / Gotland, The Viking Age, Uncategorized

CLAN CARRUTHERS- TJELVARS

April 27, 2020April 27, 2020 ClanCarruthers

CLAN CARRUTHERS INT SOCIETY CCIS PROMPTUS ET FIDELIS

A Bronze Age Burial Steeped in Legend: What Makes the Ship-Shaped Tjelvar’s Grave Unique?

Gotland, Sweden’s largest island, is home to medieval churches, cathedral ruins, as well as numerous pre-historic sites. The archaeological and historical sites that pepper this land make up a timeline of Gotland’s past.

One such site is known as Tjelvar’s grave. It is a ship-shaped stone setting found on the eastern coast of the island. Sites of this type can be found all over Scandinavia, they are typically dated to the early Viking Age, circa the late 8th century AD.

The “ship” has the length of 18 metres and a width of 5 metres. Nearby are also the remains of two Iron Age forts. From Slite drive south on the road 146 towards Gothem and look for the signs on the right hand side of the road.

However, Tjelvar’s grave can be dated all the way back to pre- Bronze Age, predating the other sites by nearly 2000 years. From the Bronze Age to the Viking Age, to our present age, this style has been resurrected and replicas continue to be built around Gotland and Scandinavia.

When excavated in the 1930’s the robbed cist revealed some cremated bones and pot sherds. The earliest skeleton found on Gotland so far has been dated to 8000 years ago.

The legend of Tjelvar being the first to discover Gotland has been interwoven with the existance of this Bronze Age ship burial site over the millenia. Just north of Aminne you pass through Tjälder and a few hundred metres further north take the gravel lane west towards Bäl and Bjärs. The site is approximately 2 kilometres down this lane. References: Riksantikvarieämbetet Fornsök: Boge 28:1; Site 66 Tjelvar’s Grave.

Since ancient times, Gotland has been the obvious link between the present and the past. Everywhere on the island you can still find traces from hundreds of years back in time. Gotland is a modern destination with a fascinating living history in a world heritage site.

Preserving Our Past, Recording Our Present, Informing Our Future

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The Viking Age, Uncategorized

CLAN CARRUTHERS – VIKINGS IN IRELAND- PART III

April 15, 2020April 15, 2020 ClanCarruthers

CLAN CARRUTHERS INT SOCIETY CCIS PROMPTUS ET FIDELIS

VIKINGS IN IRELAND

795 – 1014

PART III

The Vikings in Wales

One side effect of the strength of Irish resistance was to increase Viking interest in Wales. At its closest points, Wales was only a day’s sail away from Dublin, Waterford and Wexford, and from the Viking colony in the Isle of Man, but despite this had so far suffered relatively little from Viking raids. A combination of strong military rulers such as Rhodri Mawr (r. 844 – 78) of Gwynedd, difficult mountainous terrain, and Wales’ poverty compared to England, Ireland and Francia, seem to have deterred any major Viking invasions in the ninth century. Only a dozen Viking raids are recorded in the period 793 – 920, compared to over 130 in Ireland in the same period. This was fewer than the number of English invasions of Wales in the same period. Place-name evidence points to areas of Viking settlement in the south-west, in Pembrokeshire and Gower, but, as they are undocumented, it is not known when they were made. There was also a small area of Viking settlement in the far north-east, modern Flintshire, most probably by refugees from Dublin following its capture by the Irish in 902. This was probably overspill from the successful Viking colony a few miles away across the estuary of the River Dee in Wirral.

In the first half of the tenth century, Wales was dominated by Hywel Dda (r. 915-50), the king of Deheubarth in the south-west. During his long reign Hywel came close to uniting all of Wales under his rule but his death in 950 was followed by a civil war and the break-up of his dominion. This was a signal to Vikings based in Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Hebrides to launch a wave of attacks on Wales. The area most exposed to Viking raiding was the large and fertile island of Anglesey off the coast of North Wales, which lay only 70 miles due east of Dublin and just 45 miles south of the Isle of Man: raids are recorded in 961, 971, 972, 979, 980, 987 and 993. Another place hit hard was St David’s monastery on the Pembrokeshire coast, Wales’ most important ecclesiastical centre. Founded c. 500 by St David, the monastery became the seat of the archbishops of Wales in 519. Only 60 miles from Wexford, St David’s was first sacked by Vikings in 967, then again in 982, 988 and 998, when they killed archbishop Morgeneu. St David’s would be sacked at least another six times before the end of the eleventh century. In 989 the raids had become so bad that King Maredudd of Deheubarth paid tribute to the Vikings at the rate of one silver penny for each of his subjects. Viking raids declined quickly after 1000, perhaps because the Viking towns in Ireland had come under the control of Irish rulers, but raids from the Hebrides and Orkney continued into the twelfth century. Vikings from Ireland also continued to come to Wales, but they did so mainly as mercenaries signing on with Welsh kings to fight in their wars with one another and with the English.

The Rock of Cashel

The end of Ireland’s Viking Age is traditionally associated with the rise of the O’Brien (Ua Briain) dynasty of Munster, and of its greatest king Brian Boru (r. 976 – 1014) in particular. Brian’s career certainly had an epic quality about it. Brian was a younger son of Cennétig mac Lorcáin (d. 951), king of the Dál Cais, whose kingdom, which was roughly equivalent to modern County Clare, was subject to the kings of Munster. As a younger son Brian probably never expected to rule and his early life was spent in the shadow of his elder brother Mathgamain. Even Brian’s date of birth is uncertain. Some Irish sources claim that he was eighty-eight when he died in 1014, which would mean he was born in 926 or 927, but other sources give dates as early as 923 and as late as 942. Brian’s first experience of war came in 967 when he fought alongside his brother at the Battle of Sulcoit against Ivar, king of the Limerick Vikings. The following year the brothers captured and sacked Limerick, executing all male prisoners of fighting age. The rest were sold as slaves. Ivar, however, escaped to Britain and in 969 he returned with a new fleet and regained control of Limerick only to be expelled again by the Dal Cais in 972.

Probably in 970, Mathgamain expelled his nominal overlord, Máel Muad the king of Munster, from his stronghold on the Rock of Cashel. The rock is a natural fortress, a craggy limestone hill rising abruptly and offering a magnificent view over the fertile plains of County Tipperary. The rock is now crowned by the ruins of a medieval cathedral and one of Ireland’s tallest surviving round towers, so little evidence of earlier structures survives. In legend, Máel Muad’s ancestor Conall Corc made Cashel the capital of Munster after two swineherds told him of a vision in which an angel prophesised that whoever was the first to light a bonfire on the rock would win the kingship of Munster. Conall needed no more encouragement and had hurried to Cashel and lit a fire. This was supposed to have happened around sixty years before St Patrick visited around 453 and converted Munster’s then king Óengus to Christianity. During the baptismal ceremony the saint accidentally pierced Óengus’ foot with the sharp end of his crozier. The king, thinking it was part of the ritual, suffered in silence.

Mathgamain’s success in capturing Cashel promised to make the Dál Cais a major power as Munster was one of the most important of Ireland’s over-kingdoms, covering the whole of the south-west of the island. However, before Mathgamain could win effective control of Munster, Máel Muad murdered him and recaptured Cashel. Brian now unexpectedly found himself king of the Dál Cais and quickly proved himself to be a fine soldier. After his expulsion from Limerick in 972, Ivar established a new base on Scattery Island, close to the mouth of the Shannon, from where he could still easily threaten Dál Cais. This sort of tactic had served Vikings well since the 840s, but no more. Brian had learned the importance of naval power from the Vikings and in 977 he led a fleet to Scattery Island, surprising and killing Ivar. A year later Brian defeated and killed his brother’s murderer to regain control of Cashel. Very shortly afterwards he defeated his last serious rival for control of Munster, Donnubán of the Uí Fidgente, and the remnants of the Limerick Vikings under Ivar’s son Harald. Both Donnubán and Harald were killed. This spelled the end of Viking Limerick. The town now effectively became the capital of Dál Cais, but Brian allowed its Norse inhabitants to remain in return for their valuable military and naval support. In the years that followed, Brian also became overlord of the Viking towns of Cork, Wexford and Waterford.

Now secure in his control of Munster, Brian began to impose his authority on the neighbouring provinces of Connacht and Leinster. Brian’s ambitions inevitably brought him into conflict with Dublin’s overlord, Máel Sechnaill. Almost every year, Brian campaigned in either Leinster, Meath or Connacht. Limerick and other Viking towns provided Brian with fleets, which he sent up the River Shannon to ravage the lands of Connacht and Meath on either side. When Donchad mac Domnaill, the king of Leinster, submitted to Brian in 996 Máel Sechnaill recognised him as overlord of all of the southern half of Ireland, including Dublin. Brian almost immediately faced a rebellion by Donchad’s successor in Leinster, Máel Morda, and the king of Dublin, Sihtric Silkbeard (r. 989 – 1036). Sihtric was another son of Olaf Cuarán, by his second wife Gormflaith, who was Máel Morda’s sister. Brian’s crushing victory over the allies at the battle of Glen Mama in 999 left him unchallenged in the south. Brian dealt generously with Sihtric, allowing him to remain king, and marrying Gormflaith, so making him his son-in-law. There was a brief peace before Brian, his sights now set on the high kingship itself, went back onto the offensive against Máel Sechnaill. Sihtric played a full part in these campaigns, providing troops and warships. Finally defeated in 1002, Máel Sechnaill resigned his title in favour of Brian and accepted him as his overlord: it was the first time that anyone other than an Uí Néill had been high king. Two more years of campaigning and every kingdom in Ireland had become tributary to Brian, hence his nickname bóraime, ‘of the tributes’.

The Battle of Clontarf

Brian’s achievement was a considerable one but he did not in any meaningful sense unite Ireland: outside his own kingdom of Dál Cais, Brian exercised authority indirectly, through his tributary kings, and he created no national institutions of government. Nor was the obedience of Brian’s tributaries assured: he faced, and put down, several rebellions. The most serious of these rebellions began in 1013 when Máel Mórda of Leinster renewed his alliance with Sihtric Silkbeard, who, despite Brian’s conciliatory approach, still hoped to recover Dublin’s independence. To strengthen Dublin’s forces, Sihtric called in an army of Vikings under Sigurd the Stout, the jarl of Orkney, and Brodir, a Dane from the Isle of Man, which arrived at Dublin just before Easter 1014. Brian quickly raised an army that included several of his tributary kings, including Maél Sechnaill, and a contingent of Vikings under Brodir’s brother Óspak. The two armies met in battle at Clontarf, a few miles north of Dublin on Good Friday (23 April) 1014. Neither Brian nor Sihtric fought in the battle. Sihtric watched the battle from the walls of Dublin, where he had remained with a small garrison to defend the city if the battle was lost. Now in his seventies or eighties, Brian was too frail to take any part in the fighting and spent the battle in his tent. The exact size of the rival armies is unknown but Brian’s was probably the larger of the two.

The battle opened around daybreak in heroic style with a single combat between two champion warriors, both of whom died in a deadly embrace, their swords piercing one another’s hearts. The fighting was exceptionally fierce but Brian’s army eventually gained the upper hand and began to inflict severe casualties on the Vikings and the Leinstermen. Brian’s son and designated successor, Murchad, led the attack and was said personally to have killed 100 of the enemy, fifty holding his sword in his right hand and fifty holding his sword in his left hand, before he was himself cut down and killed. Among Murchad’s victims was jarl Sigurd. Of the Dublin Vikings fighting in the army, only twenty are said to have survived the battle and the Leinster-Dublin army as a whole suffered as many as 6,000 casualties. By evening, the Leinster-Dublin army was disintegrating in flight and many Vikings drowned as they tried desperately to reach their ships anchored in Dublin Bay. At this moment of victory, Brodir and a handful of Viking warriors broke through the enemy lines and killed Brian as he prayed in his tent. Brodir’s men were quickly killed by Brian’s bodyguards and, according to Icelandic saga traditions, Brodir was captured and put to a terrible death. His stomach was cut open and he was walked round and round a tree until all his entrails had been wound out. Máel Mórda and one of his tributary kings were also killed in the fighting, as too were two tributary kings on Brian’s side.

For the anonymous author of the Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, Clontarf was the decisive battle of Ireland’s Viking wars, but this exaggerates its importance. The author of the Coghad was essentially a propagandist for Brian Boru’s Ua Briain dynasty and he intended, by glorifying his achievements, to bolster his descendents’ claim to the high kingship of Ireland, which they contested with the Uí Néills. The true impact of the battle was rather different. The deaths of Brian and Murchad caused a succession crisis in Dál Cais that brought the rise of the Ua Briain dynasty to a crashing halt. Brian’s hard-won hegemony immediately disintegrated, Cashel reverted to its traditional rulers, and Máel Sechnaill reclaimed the high kingship. Sihtric found himself back where he had started his reign, a sub-king to Máel Sechnaill. There could have been no clearer way to demonstrate how far gone in decline Viking power in Ireland already was. Sihtric continued to take part in Ireland’s internecine conflicts but his defeats outnumbered his successes, and Dublin’s decline into political and military irrelevance continued. Dublin continued to prosper as Ireland’s most important port, however, making Sihtric a wealthy ruler. In 1029 he ransomed his son Olaf, who had been captured by the king of Brega, for 1,200 cows, 120 Welsh ponies, 60 ounces (1.7 kg) of gold, 60 ounces of silver, hostages, and another eighty cattle for the man who had conducted the negotiations. Though he was quite willing to sack monasteries when it suited him, Sihtric was a devout Christian and in 1028 he made a pilgrimage to Rome. Such journeys were primarily penitential and, as an active Viking, Sihtric no doubt had much to be penitential about. On his return to Dublin he founded Christ Church cathedral but pointedly placed it under the authority of the Archbishopric of Canterbury in England, then ruled by the Danish King Cnut. It was not until 1152 that the diocese of Dublin became part of the Irish church. His alliance with Cnut briefly resurrected Dublin as a power in the Irish Sea, but Cnut’s death in 1035 left Sihtric in a weak position. In 1036 Echmarcach mac Ragnaill, a Norse-Gaelic king of the Hebrides, captured Dublin and forced Sihtric into exile: he died in 1042, possibly murdered during another pilgrimage to Rome.

Echmarcach never succeeded in securing his hold on Dublin and in 1052 he was expelled by Diarmait mac Máel, the king of Leinster, who ruled the city directly as an integral part of his kingdom. For the next century Dublin became a prize to be fought over by rival Irish dynasties interspersed with periods of rule by Norse kings from the Isle of Man, the Hebrides, and even Norway.

Ostman Dublin

By the eleventh century the Viking towns had become fully integrated into Irish political life, accepted for the trade they brought and the taxes they paid on it, and their fleets of warships, which made them valuable allies in the wars of the Irish kings. Pagan burial customs had died out during the second half of the tenth century so it is likely that by now the Irish Vikings were mostly converted to Christianity. It was not only kings like Sihtric Silkbeard who had taken Irish wives, and in many cases the children of these mixed marriages were Gaelic speaking. It is even possible that people of Norse descent were minorities in the Viking towns among a population of slaves, servants, labourers and craftsmen that was mostly Irish. The Irish Vikings had become sufficiently different from ‘real’ Scandinavians to have acquired a new name, the Ostmen, meaning ‘men of the east’ (of Ireland). The name seems to have been coined by the English, who by this time had had ample opportunities to learn how to distinguish between different types of Scandinavian.

In its general appearance, Ostman Dublin was probably much like other Viking towns of the period, such as York or Hedeby in Denmark. In the tenth century the site was divided up by post-and-wattle fences into long narrow plots along streets. Sub-rectangular houses built of wood, wattles, clay and thatch were built end-on to the streets, with doors at both ends. Though the houses were often rebuilt, the boundaries of the plots themselves remained unchanged for centuries. Irish kings used these plots as the basic unit for levying tribute on Dublin, as Máel Sechnaill did in 989 when he levied an ounce (28 g) of gold for every plot. Paths around the houses were covered with split logs, or gravel and paving slabs. The streets of Ostman Dublin lie under the modern streets, so it is not known what they were surfaced with, but split logs were used in other Viking towns like York. Different quarters of the town were assigned to different activities. Comb-makers and cobblers were concentrated in the area of High Street, while wood-carvers and merchants occupied Fishamble Street, for example. Other crafts, like blacksmithing and shipbuilding, were probably carried out outside the town. The wreck of a Viking longship discovered at Skuldelev near Roskilde in Denmark proved to have been built of oak felled near Glendalough, 22 miles south of Dublin, in 1042.

The town was surrounded by an earth rampart, which was probably surmounted by a wooden palisade. By 1000, Dublin had begun to spread outside its walls and a new rampart was built to protect the new suburbs. By 1100 it had proved necessary to extend the defences again, this time with a stone wall that was up to 12 feet high. This was such a novelty that a poem of 1120 considered Dublin to be one of the wonders of Ireland. Dublin probably lacked any impressive public buildings – even the cathedral founded by Sihtric Silkbeard was built of wood and it would not be rebuilt in stone until the end of the twelfth century. Dublin’s four other known churches were probably also wooden structures. The basic institution of Dublin’s government, as in all Viking Age Scandinavian communities, was the thing, the meeting of all freemen. The thing met at the 40-foot (12 m) high thingmote (‘thing mound’), which was sited near the medieval castle. This survived until 1685, when it was levelled to make way for new buildings. Of the other Ostman towns, only Waterford has seen extensive archaeological investigations. Like Dublin it was a town of wooden buildings laid out in orderly plots within stout defences.

The end of Viking Dublin

Viking Dublin was finally brought to an end not by the Irish but by the Anglo-Normans. In 1167, Diarmait MacMurchada, exiled to England from his kingdom of Leinster, recruited a band of Anglo-Norman mercenaries to help him win back his kingdom. Reinforcements arrived in Leinster in 1169 and, with their help, Diarmait captured the Ostman town of Wexford. In 1170, Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare, popularly known as Strongbow, the earl of Pembroke, brought an army of 200 knights and 1,000 archers to support Diarmait, and within days he had captured another Ostman town, Waterford. On 21 September in the same year, Diarmait and Strongbow captured Dublin. The city’s last Norse king Asculf Ragnaldsson (r. 1160 – 71) fled to Orkney where he raised an army to help him win it back. In June 1171, Asculf returned with a fleet of sixty ships and attempted to storm Dublin’s east gate. The Norman garrison sallied out on horseback and scattered Asculf’s men. Asculf was captured as he fled back to his ships. The Normans generously offered to release Asculf if he paid a ransom, but when he foolishly boasted that he would return next time with a much larger army, they thought better of it and chopped his head off instead. Cork was the last Ostman town to fall to the Anglo-Normans, following the defeat of its fleet in 1173.

The Anglo-Norman conquest was a far more decisive event in Irish history than the advent of the Vikings. Despite their long presence in the country, the Viking impact on Ireland was surprisingly slight. Viking art styles influenced Irish art styles, and the Irish adopted Viking weapons and shipbuilding methods, and borrowed many Norse words relating to ships and seafaring into the Gaelic language, but that was about it. The Vikings certainly drew Ireland more closely into European trade networks and by the tenth century this had stimulated the development of regular trade fairs at the monastic towns. However, on the eve of the Anglo-Norman conquest, the Viking towns were still Ireland’s only fully developed urban communities. In contrast over fifty new towns were founded in the century after the Anglo-Norman conquest. Sihtric Silkbeard was the first ruler in Ireland to issue coinage in c. 997, but no native Irish ruler imitated his example: coinage only came into common use in Ireland after the Anglo-Norman conquest. The impact of Viking raiding did accelerate the slow process of political centralisation in Ireland, but even in 1169 the country still lacked any national government institutions. The high kings still exercised authority outside their personal domains indirectly through their tributary kings (though there were many fewer of them than when the Vikings had first arrived). A true national kingship would likely have emerged eventually, but the Anglo-Norman conquest brought this internal process to a sudden end. English governmental institutions were imposed in those areas controlled by the Anglo-Normans, while in those areas still controlled by the Irish, kingship degenerated into warlordism. There were no more high kings.

Dublin prospered after the Anglo-Norman conquest, becoming the centre of English rule in Ireland. England’s King Henry II (r. 1154 – 89) granted Dublin a charter of liberties based on those of the important English West Country port of Bristol. This gave Dublin privileged access to Henry’s vast British and French lands, spurring a period of rapid growth. One of Henry’s edicts took the Ostmen of Dublin and the other Norse towns under royal protection: their skills as merchants and seafarers made them far too useful to expel (though some chose to leave voluntarily). An influx of English settlers gradually made the Ostmen a minority in the city, however. The Ostmen also found that they did not always receive the privileges they had been granted because of the difficulty in distinguishing so many of them from the native Irish. In 1263, the dissatisfied Ostmen appealed to the Norwegian king Håkon IV to help them expel the English, but the collapse of Norse power that followed his death later that year ended any possibility that Dublin would recover its independence. Norse names soon fell out of use and by c. 1300, the Ostmen had been completely assimilated with either the native Irish or the immigrant English communities. A last vestige of the Viking domination of the city survives in the suburb of Oxmantown, a corruption of Ostmantown.

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The Viking Age, Uncategorized

CLAN CARRUTHERS – THE VIKINGS IN IRELAND – PART II

April 15, 2020April 15, 2020 ClanCarruthers

CLAN CARRUTHERS INT SOCIETY CCIS PROMPTUS ET FIDELIS

THE VIKINGS IN IRELAND

795 – 1014

PART II

The Viking slave trade

Archaeological evidence indicates that by 902 Dublin had begun to outgrow the longphort and become a true town rather than an armed camp. Significantly, following the Irish conquest in that year, Dublin was not abandoned: there is clear evidence of continuity of settlement through to its recapture by the Norse in 917. That there was an exodus of Scandinavians from Ireland at that time is not in doubt, so this is probably evidence that Dublin had a significant Irish population living alongside the Norse and that they were allowed to remain: they may even have been the majority because genetic studies have found scant evidence of Scandinavian DNA in the modern Irish population.

Dublin owed its transformation to a town to trade. Pre-Viking Ireland did not play a large part in international trade so it had no trading towns to compare with the likes of Dorestad or York. Coinage was not used either. Ireland was not poor, however. The hoards of magnificent gold and silver liturgical vessels from Ardagh and Derrynaflan stand testimony to the wealth of Ireland’s monasteries in the early Middle Ages. Major Irish monasteries like Armagh or Clonmacnoise were much more than communities of monks, they were also centres of political power and economic activity. Secular communities of craftsmen and merchants grew up around the more important monasteries and by the eighth century a few were becoming small towns. Kings, seeking the authority and safety that close association with the saints was believed to confer, often had residences, treasuries and garrisons in these monastic towns. All of this was more than enough to justify the Vikings’ attentions, but their main interest was in Ireland’s people.

Crude estimates based on a count of known settlements suggest that Ireland’s population was about half a million when the Viking Age began. Thanks to the country’s mild winters, cool summers and reliable rainfall, grass grew all year round so cattle and sheep did not have to be kept inside during the winter. The Irish did not bother to gather hay in the summer as it was so rarely necessary. Despite occasional famines caused by cattle epidemics and severe weather, the Irish population was generally well nourished and very few people were desperately poor. The Vikings rounded up these people in their thousands to be ransomed or sold as slaves according to their wealth and status. Slavery was rare in pre-Viking Ireland – it was used mainly as a form of debt bondage – so there was no slave trade. Plundering in wars between the Irish was usually confined to cattle rustling, so Viking slaving added a new form of suffering to the experience of warfare. Perhaps inevitably, Irish kings soon began to take captives during their wars and sell them to the Vikings. Irish captives who were not lucky enough to be ransomed by their relatives could expect to be sold abroad. Anglo-Saxon England and the Frankish kingdoms both had active slave trades but most Irish captives probably finished up in Scandinavia or the Moorish kingdoms in Spain and North Africa. Through developing the slave trade, the Vikings drew Ireland into fuller participation in the international trade networks. This is usually presented as one of the positive impacts that the Vikings had on Ireland, but it is unlikely that their victims were quite so sanguine about it.

*** OUR THEORY ON FEMALE SLAVES THAT WERE TAKEN AS WIVES IS, OUR GOTLANDER ANCESTORS ONLY TOOK THE MOST BEAUTIFUL WOMEN FOR THEIR WIVES. THAT IS WHY TODAY, THE CARRUTHERS WOMEN ARE BEAUTIFUL. IF NOT, THEY MAY NOT BE A CARRUTHERS***

We know enough about the horrors of the trans-Atlantic slave trade of the eighteenth century to guess at the human misery Viking slaving must have caused. Its economic impact is harder to estimate but it is likely that Vikings targeted the young and healthy rather than infants and the elderly. The kidnapping and breaking-up of communities of learned monks must have had a far more serious impact on Ireland’s flourishing monastic culture than ever the destruction of books, sacred vessels and buildings did. As mere commodities, the voices of slaves are rarely heard in the historical record, but two remarkable accounts have survived about the experiences of Irishmen who were captured by Viking slavers. One relates to a Leinsterman called Findan whose sister was captured by Viking raiders some time around the middle of the ninth century. Findan’s father sent him to the Vikings to arrange his sister’s ransom, but they immediately clapped him in irons and carried him off to their ship too. After keeping him without food and water for two days, the Vikings discussed what to do with him. Luckily, his captors decided that it was wrong to capture people who had come to pay ransom, no doubt because it would discourage others from doing so, and they let him, and presumably his sister, go. A short time afterwards Findan got caught up in another Viking raid but evaded capture by hiding behind the door of a hut. For Findan it was third time unlucky, because in his next encounter with the Vikings he was taken prisoner and sold into slavery. After changing hands several times, Findan finished up on a ship bound for Scandinavia. Findan gained his owner’s confidence by helping the crew fight off some pirates and he was released from his leg irons. When his owner made a stop-over in Orkney, Findan seized the opportunity to jump ship and escape. Findan eventually made his way to Rome as a pilgrim and ended his life as a monk at the monastery of Rheinau in Switzerland: one of his fellow monks recorded his life story shortly after he died.

The second story concerns an Irishman called Murchad, a married man with a daughter, who was captured by Vikings and taken to Northumbria, where he was sold as a slave to a nunnery, with comical consequences. After he had seduced several of the nuns and turned the nunnery into a brothel, Murchad was expelled and cast adrift on the sea in a boat without oars or a sail as a punishment for his impiety. Murchad was rescued by Vikings, who took him to Germany and sold him to a roguish widow, who paid for him with counterfeit money. Murchad seduced her too, of course. After many more adventures, Murchad eventually returned to Ireland, was reunited with his family, and took up a career teaching Latin grammar. How much real history there is in this tale is hard to tell; perhaps it is really about making the best of hard times. It is unlikely that many captives were as lucky as Findan and Murchad but neither is it likely that all came to bad ends: most of the thousands of Irish slaves who were taken to Iceland later in the ninth century were eventually freed and became tenant farmers, for example.

Division is strength

By the early tenth century, Vikings had conquered and colonised substantial parts of England, Scotland and Francia, as well as the uninhabited Faeroe Islands and Iceland. Yet for all the fury of their onslaught, in Ireland the Vikings had not even been able to retain a toehold. Appearances can be deceptive. Ireland’s divisions might have been a handicap in combating plundering raids but they also made it all but impossible for the Vikings to conquer and hold territory. On the face of it, it would have seemed that Ireland’s disunity should have made it more vulnerable to conquest by the Vikings than England, which was divided into only four powerful centralised kingdoms. In fact the opposite was true. In early medieval Europe it was always the centralised kingdoms that got conquered most easily. After the ‘Great Army’ of Danish Vikings invaded England in 865, the kingdoms of Northumbria and East Anglia both collapsed as soon as their kings had been killed in battle. Mercia too collapsed when its king decided he would prefer not to get killed and fled the country. Only Wessex survived to prevent England becoming Daneland. The centralised nature of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms meant that it was relatively easy for the Vikings to destroy the small ruling class and take over; just one battle might do the trick, as it did, more or less, in 1066. Little trouble would then be expected from the leaderless peasantry. Ireland, however, had dozens of kings and even more lineages from which new kings could be chosen. No victory, therefore, could ever have the decisive knockout effect it could in a country like England. Nor was there much chance of a lasting peace agreement with so many kings to negotiate with because what one agreed was not binding on the others.

The military resources of the Irish should not be underestimated either. Most Irish local kingdoms could raise armies of around 300 men. This was inadequate to deal with anything but a small Viking raiding party, but there were a great many local kingdoms. Local kings owed military service to their over-kings, so an over-king who could enforce the obedience of his vassals could raise a very large army indeed. However, in a clash of shield walls an Irish warrior was no match for a well-equipped Viking. The Irish fought almost naked without armour or iron helmets, armed with spears and using only bucklers (small round shields) for protection. The Irish recognised the superiority of the Viking warrior and they usually avoided formal battle in favour of irregular tactics, harassing raiding parties and wearing them down with sudden ambushes before melting away into the woods and bogs. In this kind of fighting, their lack of armour was an advantage to the Irish, making them more agile than a mail-clad Viking. A weary Viking raiding party returning home burdened with loot, captives and stolen cattle would have been particularly vulnerable to these tactics.

The Irish countryside was scattered with as many as 50,000 ringforts, but these were probably less of a hindrance to Viking raiders than Ireland’s warriors. Ringforts varied in size according to the status of their inhabitants. An over-king might have a substantial stone structure like the Grianán of Aileach in Donegal, a stronghold of the Northern Uí Néill dynasty. Built in the eighth century, the Grianán’s 15 foot (4.5 m) thick stone walls enclose an area 75 feet (23 m) in diameter. But although it is an impressive structure, modern experiments have shown that it would not have been at all easy to defend so it may have been built mainly as a ceremonial centre rather than to withstand a siege. Local kings and aristocrats had more modest forts, sometimes as little as 30 feet (9 m) in diameter, with earth ramparts and a palisade, containing its owner’s house and ancillary buildings. The ramparts of these small forts were primarily markers of status, for they were barely adequate for keeping livestock in, never mind keeping raiders out. More secure were crannogs, high status dwellings built on artificial islands in the middle of lakes. Communal fortifications like the English burhs, intended to provide refuges for the general population, were unknown.

During the course of the Viking Age, monks began to provide their monasteries with tall, slender, stone round towers. These were primarily used as bell towers and treasuries but they were also refuges against Viking raids. Over eighty round towers are known to have been built: the tallest surviving round tower, at Kilmacduagh in Galway, is 113 feet (34.5 m) tall. The towers’ entrances were set well above ground level so that they could only be entered with a ladder. The entrances of some towers show signs of fire damage, which is likely a result of Viking attacks. Having no source of water, or battlements from which to fight off attackers, round towers could not withstand a long siege but a small Viking raiding party could not really afford any delay.

The Vikings return

During Ireland’s ‘Forty Years’ Rest’, the bulk of Viking forces were busying themselves plundering England and Francia. By the first decade of the tenth century, the English and Franks were finally getting the measure of the Vikings so Ireland once more began to look attractive to them. In 914 Ragnald, a grandson of Ivar I, appeared in the Irish Sea and defeated a rival Viking leader in a sea battle off the coast of the Isle of Man before going to set up a longphort at Waterford in south-east Ireland. The Vikings were back and with a vengeance. In 917, Ragnald’s brother Sihtric Cáech (‘squinty’) recaptured Dublin and in 919 smashed an Irish counter-attack at Islandbridge, killing the Úi Néill High King Niall Glúndubh and five other kings. In 922, Tomar mac Ailche (Thormódr Helgason) re-established Viking occupation at Limerick and around the same time other Viking leaders established themselves at Cork and Wexford. As was the case in the ninth century, the Vikings made no extensive territorial conquests or settlements outside their heavily fortified towns. Dublin came to control the most extensive territory: known as Dyflinnarskíri or ‘Dublinshire’, it extended along the coast from Wicklow (Vikinglo) in the south to Skerries (from Old Norse sker meaning a ‘reef’) in the north, and as far inland as Leixlip (Old Norse lax hlaup meaning ‘salmon leap’) on the River Liffey. A dearth of Norse place-names in the countryside of Dublinshire supports the conclusion that there was little or no Viking settlement outside Dublin and its immediate environs.

The history of the revived Viking kingdom of Dublin is frequently entangled with that of the Viking kingdom of York across the Irish Sea. While the Norse had been exiled from Ireland, Ragnald had briefly held power in York and now he wanted it back. Using Dublin as a base to campaign in northern England, Ragnald recaptured York in 919. York must have seemed a greater prize than Dublin because when Ragnald died in 921, Sihtric gave up the kingship of Dublin to another brother, Guthfrith, and took up the kingship of York. An aggressive ruler, Guthfrith immediately launched a furious campaign of plundering and slaving raids against the Irish, culminating in a curiously respectful sack of Armagh in November. Guthfrith spared the monks, the sick and the monastic buildings, ‘save for a few dwellings which were burned through carelessness.’ It may be that Guthfrith was a Christian. If so, Guthfrith’s show of respect for St Patrick did him no good because he was intercepted on his way home by Muirchertach of the Leather Cloaks (r. 919 – 43), the king of the Northern Uí Néill, and heavily defeated. This set the tone for Ireland’s second Viking Age: the days when Vikings might criss-cross Ireland without meeting serious opposition were gone. Muirchertach won another victory over the Dublin Vikings at Carlingford Lough in 925, when 200 of them were captured and beheaded, and the following year he killed Guthfrith’s son Alpthann (Halfdan) in another battle at Linn Duchaill. Muirchertach besieged the survivors in the longphort there until Guthfrith brought an army north from Dublin to rescue them. The longphort was afterwards permanently abandoned.

What had changed since Ireland’s first Viking Age? The shock of Viking raiding had forced change upon the Irish. Irish society became increasingly militarised and those kings who offered the most effective military leadership against the Vikings enhanced their status and power and, as they tightened their grip over their sub-kings, they could raise larger armies and enhance their power even more. It was the same virtuous circle of success that was driving political centralisation and state formation in contemporary Scandinavia. Irish kingship was gradually becoming more territorial and many local kings found themselves reduced to the status of local chieftains. At the same time, the Irish had learned from the Vikings, making greater use of swords and axes in battle. Though they still lacked armour, this went some way to evening the odds on the battlefield. War was also waged with a new ruthlessness, against both the Vikings and other Irish kingdoms. Ravaging and burning had been rare before the Viking Age, but now Irish kings used it routinely as a weapon against their foes irrespective of whether they were Irish or Norse.

After Sihtric’s death in 927, Guthfrith went to York, whether to claim the throne for himself or to support his brother’s son Olaf Cuarán is not known. Both were quickly expelled by Æthelstan of Wessex. Guthfrith returned to lay siege to York, but was forced to surrender to Æthelstan, who allowed him to return to Dublin, which he ruled until his death in 934. Guthfrith’s son and successor, Olaf Guthfrithsson, established dominance over all the Norse in Ireland when he defeated the Limerick Vikings in a naval battle on Lough Ree in 937. It was in the same year that he allied with the Scots and the Welsh of Strathclyde in another attempt to win the kingdom of York only to be defeated by Æthelstan at the Battle of Brunanburh (see p. 124). Muirchertach sacked Dublin the following year, taking advantage of its weakness after Olaf’s defeat in England. However, Æthelstan’s death in 939 finally gave Olaf the chance to seize York and unite it with Dublin in a single kingdom. Olaf did not enjoy his success for long: he died shortly after raiding the Northumbrian monasteries at Tyninghame and Auldhame in 941, a victim, it was said, of divine displeasure. A tenth-century Viking burial discovered in the monastic cemetery at Auldhame almost certainly belongs to a high-status Viking who was involved in these raids. It has been speculated that the burial was even that of Olaf himself. As Olaf was married to the daughter of King Constantine II of Scotland he must have been at least a nominal Christian. The king might therefore have been buried on consecrated ground as a posthumous act of penance. Following Olaf’s death his cousin Olaf Cuarán became king of York, while his brother Blácaire succeeded him at Dublin.

Blácaire was an active raider. On 26 February 943 he defeated and killed Muirchertach at the Battle of Glas Liatháin and five days later sacked Armagh. Muirchertach’s death was mourned by the Irish, the Annals of Ulster described him as ‘the Hector of the western world’ and lamented that his death had left the ‘land of the Irish orphaned’. Irish retaliation was swift. The following year, the newly acknowledged High King Congalach Cnogba captured and burned Dublin, carrying away a vast amount of booty. Four hundred Vikings were said to have been killed in the fighting and Blácaire fled into exile. In his absence, Congalach installed Olaf Cuarán, recently expelled from York by the English, as king of Dublin. Olaf’s dependence on Congalach was such that when the pair were defeated by a rival for the high kingship in 947, Blácaire was able to depose him and reclaim his throne. After his death in battle against Congalach in 948, Blácaire was succeeded by his cousin Godfred, another son of Sihtric Cáech. In 951 Godfred led an enormously successful expedition in the Irish midlands, plundering half a dozen monasteries including Kells. According to the Annals of Ulster, ‘three thousand men or more were taken captive and a great spoil of cattle and horses and gold and silver was taken away’. Divine vengeance followed swiftly, of course. A severe epidemic, described in the annals as dysentery and leprosy, broke out in Dublin on Godfred’s return and the king was one of its victims.

While Godfred had been plundering in Ireland his brother Olaf had briefly regained control of York before being expelled by the Norwegian Erik Bloodaxe in 952. Olaf now succeeded as king of Dublin but the dream of uniting Dublin and York was dead. The Dublin Vikings would never be a power in England again. It is doubtful that a Dublin-York axis was ever really viable in the long term. York is much more remote from Dublin than a casual glance at a map would suggest. As York could only be reached by ship from the North Sea, sailing there from Dublin involved a long, dangerous and time-consuming voyage around the north of Britain. The only alternative would have been to sail from Dublin to north-west England and then trek across the Pennine Hills to York. However, it is far from clear how much, if any, control the kings of York actually exercised west of the Pennines. And, fighting off the English and the Irish at the same time must have been way beyond the resources of the Dublin Vikings.

Olaf was not a peaceable king but neither was he a traditional freebooting Viking, as he rarely raided unless he was acting in alliance with an Irish king. Olaf was also closely linked to Irish dynasties by marriage – made possible by his baptism in England as part of a peace deal with king Edmund in 943. Olaf’s first wife was Dúnlaith, the sister of the high king Domnall ua Néill (r. 956 – 80) and, after her death, he married Gormflaith, daughter of Murchad mac Finn, king of Leinster.

** GENEALOGICALLY THE CARRUTHES ARE LINKED TO KING DONMALL UA NEILL. **

Olaf seems to have gained little, if any, political advantage from his marriages because his reign was dominated by conflicts with Domnall and with successive kings of Leinster (some of whom Olaf held hostage in Dublin). On Domnall’s death in 980, Dúnlaith’s son by an earlier marriage, Máel Sechnaill mac Domnall, the king of Meath, succeeded his uncle as high king. Máel Sechnaill clearly had no love lost for his stepfather as he had begun his reign as king of Meath in 975 with an attack on Dublin, in which he burned ‘Thor’s Wood’ (a pagan sacred grove) outside the city. Shortly after becoming high king, Máel Sechnaill heavily defeated a force of Vikings from Dublin, Man and the Hebrides in battle at the Hill of Tara, the traditional inauguration place of the high kings. Máel Sechnaill followed up his victory by laying siege to Dublin, which surrendered after three days. Máel Sechnaill imposed a heavy tribute on the citizens and deposed Olaf, who went into retirement as a monk on Iona, where he died soon afterwards. In his place, Máel Sechnaill appointed his half-brother Jarnkné (‘iron knee’) (r. 980 – 9), Olaf’s son by Dúnlaith, as tributary king. There was no disguising Dublin’s loss of independence.

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The History of Gutland, The Viking Age, Uncategorized

CLAN CARRUTHERS-MESSAGES FROM PICTURE STONES

April 5, 2020April 8, 2020 ClanCarruthers

CLAN CARRUTHERS INT SOCIETY CCIS PROMPTUS ET FIDELIS

Messages from Ancient Stones

Gotland Picture Stones from the Viking Era

Ancient stories that belong to a world far removed from technology have horses and great ships as modes of transport on this ancient Picture Stone. A round disc with six points on a shield held by a warrior on horseback represents the Sun. The carved stones were limestone and there were three notable periods with different styles.

This Gotland Picture Stone was created over a thousand years ago, about 700 – 800 CE and like many other stones on the island still holds secrets that are yet to be uncovered or confirmed. The story on this stone is in pictures and decoding the meaning is a complex task for history and iconography. Picture motifs were inscribed on gravestones, road markers, weapons and amulets. Norse myths and legends were not written down in words and so the pictures on stone are very precious records.

My painted drawing was sketched from one ornate carved Picture Stone, one of about four hundred known today, mostly from the island of Gotland, Sweden. I have tried to be accurate with the detail. The Stones belonged to the Viking Age in Scandinavia and often reference Norse myths and legends. Ancient Stones and sometimes Rune Stones with Runic letters were erected and inscribed to commemorate fallen warriors, rituals, myths and legends.

In this keyhole shaped Picture Stone there are several panels above each other. At the top the rider could be the God Odin astride the horse Sleipnir from Norse mythology. Sleipnir was the fastest of all horses and with Odin could travel between realms. The triple triangle or Valknut behind the horseman is the magical symbol in Nordic paganism for Odin. The horseman is welcomed by a female Valkyrie offering a drinking horn, possibly as a welcome to the Otherworld paradise or afterlife known as Valhalla. Some believe it could be the Goddess Freya holding a cornucopia or cup of abundance.

In the middle band there are Runic letters from the ancient Runic Alphabet below what looks like a figure walking. The Runic alphabet originated among the Nordic peoples of Europe about two or three centuries before the Christian Era. Carved runic inscriptions sometimes issued warnings about the future or issued messages but mostly the letters on these Gotland Picture Stones simply named the memorialized person.

In the panel below this we see a common theme on Picture Stones: a Viking long ship with a crisscross sail. This time there are two figures on board, possibly representing the soul being transported to the afterlife. Below that are big abstracted shapes with an extending interlace pattern that could represent the waves carrying the ship to another realm. All the picture story panels are enclosed by a plait knotwork border.

Messages in these Picture Stones tell us about a different Age, an Age when horses were thought to carry the Sun across the sky and ships were the key to adventure and trade for an island people. The messages inspire the imagination and leave us with a sense of wonder about a pagan life before Christianity, a world of beliefs in gods and goddesses connected to the natural world.

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Gutland / Gotland, The Viking Age, Uncategorized

CLAN CARRUTHERS-WARRIORS OATHS TO THE CHIEF / KING

April 4, 2020April 8, 2020 ClanCarruthers

CLAN CARRUTHERS INT SOCIETY CCIS PROMPTUS ET FIDELIS

Warriors’ Oaths To The Chief / King

Like rulers elsewhere, the Viking age king or jarl had warriors in his service, serving in a similar role to the High Medieval knight. Modern scholars have noted that Germanic kings from antiquity through the Viking Age collected about them a group of such warriors, often referred to using the Latin term comitatus, which might be translated as “war-band.”

In Old Norse, the term for the leader of such a war-band was dróttin, while the term for the war-band itself was drótt. The members of the comitatus were called húskarlar, “house-carls”, especially those found in King Knut’s Danelaw forces as described in Þingliði (Foote and Wilson, p. 100; Barfod, p. 717). Other terms used to describe members of a comitatus included O.N. drengr (“warrior member of a ship’s crew”) and O.N. þegn (“mature man, seasoned warrior”). The conduct of the comitatus was termed drenskapr in Old Norse, meaning “the ideal of conduct for warriors, roughly equivalent to the ideal of chivalry” (Foote and WIlson, pp. 425-426).

If the leader of the comitatus was a powerful noble, such as a king or a jarl, the war-band might then be called a hirð in Old Norse (Foote and Wilson, p. 101; Bagge). The hirð had a special ceremony of reception for new members and held regular meetings, which functioned as a court of law for its members and as a council advising the king (Bagge). By the 12th and 13th centuries, there were three groups within the Norwegian hirð: the hirðmenn (“men of the hirð“); the gestir (“guests”), who served as a royal police force; and the kirtisveinar, young men who served as pages (Bagge). From the hirðmenn came the officers of the hirð. The highest officer of the hirð was the stallari (literally “marshall”) who served as the king’s champion and also as a sort of general of the comitatus forces. The second ranking officer in the hirð was the merkismaðr (standard-bearer) (Bagge; Foote and Wilson, p. 103). Ranking after these officers were the lendir menn, the “landed men”, equivalent to barons, and then finally the body of warriors who made up the bulk of the hirð (Bagge). The relationship between the king and his hirðmenn was based on a contract or reciprocal oath, and the king’s hirð was usually dissolved upon his death (Bagge).

It should be noted that the comitatus, dróttin or hirð was a fairly small, elite band. The Vikings did not maintain standing armies: when it was needful, a levy was called up of free men and farmers. The kings and jarls instead maintained only their small group of core troops between wars. Confusion on this topic is rampant, in large part due to chroniclers’ tendency to wildly exaggerate the numbers of enemy armies and the tally of the dead (Evans, p. 27). The size of the comitatus is put into sharp perspective when one examines the law code of Ine of Wessex at 13.1, which states:

Ðeofas we hatað oð VII men;
from VII hloð oð XXXV;
siððan bið here.

A party of armed men numbering less than seven are thieves;
between seven and thirty-five are a band;
more than that is an army.
(Attenborough, p. 41; Evans, p. 27)

Within the comitatus, the Germanic ruler’s primary duty was to lead his warriors in battle. The literature records that the ideal ruler was the foremost warrior and best of the men in the war-band (Cherniss p. 39). This idea gave rise to descriptions such as Old English cyning-bald which means “very brave” but literally reads “royally brave, brave as a king” (Klaeber, glossary s.v. cyning-bald, p. 314). As Stephen Evans notes:

The major duty of a Germanic or Celtic lord was the conduct of warfare, in which he was expected to take an active part. The lord of a comitatus was expected not only to fight, but to fight with a great deal of martial prowess. At least during his younger years, a lord was expected to be one of the most formidable and valiant warriors of his warband.
(Evans, p. 50)

This appears to have been true for Germanic kings and lords back into antiquity, since Tacitus reports in his Germania:

Cum ventum in aciem, turpe principi virtute vinci, turpe comitatui virtutem principis non adaequare. Iam vero infame in omnem vitam ac probrosum superstitem principi suo ex acie recessisse. Illum defendere, tueri, sua quoque fortia facta gloriae eius adsignare praecipuum sacramentum est. Principes pro victoria pugnant, comites pro principe.

When they go into battle, it is a disgrace for the chief to be surpassed in valour, a disgrace for his followers not to equal the valour of the chief. And it is an infamy and a reproach for life to have survived the chief, and returned from the field. To defend, to protect him, to ascribe one’s own brave deeds to his renown, is the height of loyalty. The chief fights for victory; his vassals fight for their chief.

Aside from the bonds that form between comrades-in-arms, there were specific bonds in the form of oaths and reciprocal rights and responsibilities from ruler to warrior and from warrior to his lord, much like the formal Oath of Fealty used between the king and a knight during the medieval period. “The bond between a Germanic lord and his retainer, in a hierarchical society, places specific, clearly differentiated, though nevertheless similar, responsibilities and privileges upon social superior and inferior, leader and follower” (Cherniss, pp. 30-31). In Skáldskarpamál 53 Snorri Sturluson says:

Konungar ok jarlar hafa til fylgðar með sér þá menn, er hirðmenn heita ok húskarlar, en lendir menn hafa ok sér handgengna menn, þá er í Danmörku ok í Svíðjóð eru hirðmenn kallaðir, en í Nóregi húskarlar, ok sverja þeir þó eiða svá sem hirðmenn konungum.

Kings and jarls have in their train men called hirðmenn and húskarlar, but lendir menn also have men in their service who in Denmark and Sweden are known as hirðmenn, but in Norway húskarlar, and yet they take oaths just as hirðmenn do to kings.
(Prose Edda, p. 129)

The first bond is that of the oath between king and his warriors. “All oaths are important in heroic society, but most important and most binding is the oath of loyalty to one’s lord. This oath takes precedence over any oath which may conflict with it” (Cherniss, p. 63).

The importance of this relationship between warrior and lord cannot be overstated:

The most important relationship within a warband, and the one that was most instrumental in protecting and strengthening its social and cultural integrity, was the lord-retainer relationship. It is the internal social relationship that best explains the structure of the comitatus, and provides us with the social and cultural context in which Dark-Age warbands functioned. At least for the warrior aristocracy, by the period of Germanic migrations to Britain, the bonds established between a lord and his men had become more important than traditional kinship ties and in fact had usurped some of the duties associated with the older social system. The lord-retainer relationship was one that bound the warriors of a warband to their lord, a relationship whose fundamental and underlying roots lay in a bedrock of personal loyalty, and one whose operational framework is reflected in the series of obligations and duties which the lord and his men owed to one another
(Evans, p. 52).

The Teutonic peoples used an oath sworn on a sword hilt since antiquity, as the custom is attested to in the writings of Ammianus Marcellinus (Ellis-Davidson, Sword in A-S England, p. 185). Many early Germanic swords are known to have had special rings set into their pommels, and it is believed that these rings were used as oath-rings (Ellis-Davidson, Sword in A-S England, p. 75), similar to the sacred arm rings made of silver or gold which were kept in the temples of Thórr. These oath-rings were used to swear oaths upon, by having the oath-giver place his hand upon the ring while swearing (Ellis-Davidson, Gods and Myths, pp. 76-77). Later, as ring-swords went out of fashion, the oath was sworn directly upon the sword itself rather than upon a ring associated with the sword.

Early Norwegian law codes, including Hirðskrá (ca. 1270) describe the oath sworn by a warrior to his ruler. These sources state that the hilt of a king’s sword had to be presented to the man who entered his service, and that as the follower swore the oath of allegiance to his new lord he had to touch the hilt of the royal sword as it lay across the king’s knee: this is reminiscent of the kings of the Lewis chess-men, which all bear their swords across their laps as symbols of their temporal authority, and in a position where it may quickly be used for oath-swearing. A 13th century law, which is itself known to be a revision of an earlier 12th century law code, states:

At the time when the king appoints hirðmenn, no table shall stand before the king. The king shall have his sword upon his knee, the sword which he had for his crowning, and he shall turn it so the chape goes under his right arm, and the hilt is placed forward on his right knee. Then he shall move the buckle of the belt over the hilt, and grasp the hilt. so that his right arm is over everything. Then he who is to become a hirðsmaðr shall fall on both knees before the king on the floor … and shall put his right hand under the hilt, while he keeps his left arm down in front of him in the most comfortable position, and then he shall kiss the king’s hand.
(Ellis-Davidson, Sword in A-S England, pp. 76-77).

It is believed that the ritual used in this account was substantially the same during the Viking Age, two to three hundred years earlier, for there are similar accounts in Viking Age literature as well:

Oblato Wiggone perinde ac munere gratulatus, an sibi militare vellet, perquirit. Annuenti destrictum gladium offert. Ille cuspidem refutans capulum petit, hunc morem Rolvoni in porrigendo militibus ense exstitisse praefatus. Olim namque se regum clientelae daturi tacto gladii capulo obsequium polliceri solebant. Quo pacto Wiggo capulum complexus cuspidem per Hiarwarthum agit, ultionis compos, cuius Rolvoni ministerium pollicitus fuerat.
(Gesta Danorum 2.8.4)

Then Wigg came forth, and Hiartuar, as though he were congratulating him on the gift, asked him if he were willing to fight for him. Wigg assenting, he drew and proferred him a sword. But Wigg refused the point, and asked for the hilt, saying first that this had been Rolf’s custom when he handed forth a sword to his soldiers. For in old time those who were about to put themselves in dependence on the king used to promise fealty by touching the hilt of the sword. And in this wise Wigg clasped the hilt, and then drove the point through Hiartuar; thus gaining the vengeance which he had promised Hrólfr to accomplish for him.
(Danish History, Book II)

Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla tells how the Anglo-Saxon king Æthelstan played a trick on Harald Fairhair of Norway. Æthelstan sent a messenger to Harald:

Hann selur konungi sverð gullbúið með hjöltum og meðalkafla og öll umgerð var búin með gulli og silfri og sett dýrlegum gimsteinum. Hélt sendimaðurinn sverðshjöltunum til konungsins og mælti: “Hér er sverð er Aðalsteinn konungur mælti að þú skyldir við taka.” Tók konungur meðalkaflann og þegar mælti sendimaðurinn: “Nú tókstu svo sem vor konungur vildi og nú skaltu vera þegn hans er þú tókst við sverði hans.”
(Haraldar saga hárfagra, ch. 40)

The emissary went up to the king, handing him a sword adorned with gold and silver and set with precious stones. The emissary offered the king the sword hilt and spoke these words, “Here is the sword which King Aethelstan asks you to receive from him.” Then the king took hold of the hilt, whereupon the messenger said, “Now you seized the sword in the fashion our king desired you would, and now you shall be his leigeman since you seized hold of his sword.”
(Heimskringla, “Haralds saga Harfagra” ch. 38, p. 92).

Sveno in his Lex Castrensis records that the custom of Viking kings presenting swords to the men in his fealty persisted up until the time of King Knut (Ellis-Davidson, Sword in A-S England, p. 186).

A young man might also receive a sword from the lord whom he pledged himself to serve as a poet or warrior, thus Hallfred [Troublesome-skald] took a sword from King Olaf Tryggvason and Sigvat a sword from King Olaf the Holy. We know from one of Sigvat’s own poems what this gift meant to him: “I received thy sword with pleasure, O Njord of battle, nor have I reviled it since, for it is my joy. This is a glorious way of life, O Tree of Gold, we have both done well. Thou didst get a loyal housecarle, and I a good leige lord.”
(Ellis-Davidson, Sword in A-S England, pp. 212- 213).

The actual oath that was sworn probably varied from person to person and from place to place. The oath binding a warrior to his lord was of supreme importance within the warrior’s life: “All oaths are important in heroic society, but most important and most binding is the oath of loyalty to one’s lord. This oath takes precedence over any oath which may conflict with it (Cherniss, p. 63).

The typical vow or oath began with a declaration of the lineage of the warrior.

“I will make known my ancestry to one and all: I came from a mighty family of Mercian stock; my grandfather was Ealhelm, a wise ealdorman…” (The Battle of Maldon)
“I am Hygelac’s kinsman and thane…” (E. Talbot Donaldson, trans. Beowulf. New York: Norton. 1966. p. 8).

This condensed genealogy was then followed by a listing of the warrior’s past heroic deeds, especially those which had some bearing upon the deeds he hoped to perform in the immediate future.

“I came from the fight where I had bound five, destroyed a family of giants, and at night in the waves slain water-monsters, suffered great pain, avenged an affliction of the Weather-Geats on those who had asked for trouble – ground enemies to bits.” (Beowulf)

This collection of past feats recalled the warrior’s heroic exploits in order to project the heroic actions so described upon the future acts of the speaker: “the past is made present as it is brought to bear upon some future situation… the spirit of past deeds must be revived and renewed in future struggle” (Conquergood, pp. 27-29). This listing of deeds emphasized the speaker’s heroic virtues (I fought… I avenged… I endured… I ventured…) — never events that did not conform to the ideals of a warrior society (I hesitated… I weighed the alternatives… I surrendered…).

Heroic poetry gives a good idea of the actual promises made in the oaths that a warrior made to his lord or king. For instance, in the Old English poem, The Battle of Maldon, Earl Bryhtnoth’s men have sworn:

not to forget the goods and wealth received from their lord (ll. 185-197)
to always fight before their lord (i.e., in the van, ll. 15-16)
to wrest glory from the foemen they face (l. 129)
that they will not flee one foot-step from the battle (ll. 246-247, 275-276)
to avenge their lord if he is slain or die trying (ll. 207-208, 216-224)
to avenge their lord and fight themselves until slain (ll. 249-253, 288-294, 317-319)

Saxo Grammaticus records the theme of vengeance owed by the warrior to his lord’s slayer as well. After a young man named Wigg bestows King Hrólfr with his famous nickname, kraki, the king gifts the youth with a pair of arm-rings, and Wigg in turn makes an oath:

Nec Wiggoni rependendi beneficii cura defuit. Siquidem artissima voti nuncupatione pollicitus est, si Rolvonem ferro perire contingeret, ultionem se ab eius interfectoribus exacturum. (Gesta Danorum 2.6.12)

Nor was Wigg heedless to repay the kindness; for be promised, uttering a strict vow, that, if it befell Hrolfr to perish by the sword, he would himself take vengeance on his slayers (Danish History, Book II).

The warrior entering a lord’s service made an oath to fight for his lord, to support the lord in battle and protect him, and to avenge the lord if needed, dying if necessary while trying to exact vengeance. Some warriors may have vowed to die in battle if their lord died, taking as many of the foemen with them into death as possible to exact veneance for the ruler’s death (Cherniss, pp. 50, 62).

Another duty of the members of the Germanic lord’s war-band was serving as advisors and counsellors to their lord. While this duty may have fallen primarily to the veteran members of the comitatus based on their age and experience, still it was an important role:

Regardless of the precise constitutional underpinnings and authority of these advisors, it is clear that the chieftains and kings of this period did consult them, at least on matters in which they all had a vested interest; the initiation of hostilities, the course of a campaign, and other important matters pertaining to the kingdom
(Evans, p. 66).

This advice also extended to the selection of new members of the war-band, as is seen in Beowulf, where King Hrothgar’s warrior Wulfgar offers his lord advice on the newly-arrived war-band led by the redoubtable Beowulf, first suggesting that the king should hold audience with the Geatish warrior:

….. no ðu him wearne geteoh
ðinra gegncwida, glædman Hroðgar!

….. give no refusal to him
in your answer, gracious Hrothgar!
(Beowulf ll. 366-367; Evans, p. 66).

Then the Danish warrior assesses the worth of Beowulf and his men, advising his lord as to this assessment:

Hy on wiggetawum wyrðe þinceað
eorla geæhtlan; huru se aldor deah,
se þæm heaðorincum hider wisade.

In battle-gear, they seem worthy
of nobles’ esteem; surely that chief is strong,
who led these battle-warriors here.
(Beowulf ll. 366-367; Evans, p. 66).

In addition to the portion of the oath which specified what the warrior would do in his service to his lord, the sword-oath also was likely to contain a section defining penalties should the warrior fail to perform as he has sworn to do. Sigrun’s curse from Helgakviða Hundingsbana II v. 32 suggests the type of language that may have been used in this portion of the oath:

Bíti-a þér þat sverð
er þú bregðir
nema sjalfum þér
syngvi of höfði.

May that sword pierce thee
which thou dost draw!
May it sing only
round thy own head.

The effect of this type of penalty was that if the warrior should fail to uphold his oath sworn upon the king’s sword then the the sword itself will turn against him in battle, and wrath of the gods will be brought upon him Davidson, Sword in A-S England, p. 210).

The warrior’s oath would then be closed as formally as it was begun, acknowledging the audience as witnesses to the oath by mentioning that the warrior would have no need to fear the scorn or censure of his fellows:

“No thanes shall ever reproach me amongst the people with any desire to desert this troop and hurry home…” (Battle of Maldon).
“No loyal warrior living at Sturmere need reproach me for returning home lordless in unworthy retreat…” (Battle of Maldon).
“My liege lord Hygelac may be glad of me in his heart…” (Beowulf).

An interesting parellel oath structure is preserved in the Russian Primary Chronicle, where the activities of concluding peace treaties between the 10^th century pagan Scandinavian Rus and the Christian Byzantine Emperor are recorded:

The first treaty was negotiated in 907 between Oleg, Prince of Rus, with five delegates on one side, and the Emperors Leo VI and Alexander on the other. Probably it was concluded after an attack by the northerners on Constantinople, which was bought off by payment of a tribute:

Thus the Emperors Leo and Alexander made peace with Oleg, and after agreeing upon the tribute and mutually binding themselves by oath, they kissed the cross, and invited Oleg and his men to swear an oath likewise. According to the religion of the Russes, the latter swore by their weapons and by their god Perun, as well as by Volos, the god of cattle, and thus confirmed the treaty.

The next treaty was made in 911 between Oleg, Prince of Rus, with 15 delegates, among them the five men of the previous treaty, and the Emperors Leo, Alexander and Constantine:

Our serenity, (…) deemed it proper to publish and confirm this amity not merely in words but also in writing and under a firm oath sworn upon our weapons according to our religion and our law. (…) to maintain as irrevocable and immutable henceforth and forever the amity thus proclaimed by our agreement with you Greeks and ratified by signature and oath.

In 941, a kinsman of Oleg, Igor, Prince of Rus, attacked Constantinople. The Rus assault was halted by Greek fire, which terrified the pagan Rus, who supposed the Greeks had the lightnings at their command. The resulting treaty was concludied with fifty Rus emissaries and confirmed on oath:

The unbaptised Russes shall lay down their shields, their naked swords, their armlets, and their other weapons, and shall swear to all that is inscribed upon this parchment, to be faithfully observed forever by Igor and his boyars, and all the people from the land of Rus. If any of the princes or any Russian subject, whether Christian or non-Christian, violates the terms of this instrument, he shall merit death by his own weapons, and be accursed of God and of Perun because he violated this oath. So be it good that the Great Prince Igor shall rightly maintain these friendly relations that they may never be interrupted, as long as the sun shines and the world endures henceforth and forevermore.

The last treaty reported by the Primary Chronicle was concluded by Sviatoslav, son of Igor, a definite pagan who had firmly rejected his mother’s Christian faith. In 960, Sviatoslav attacked the Bulgars on the river Danube in an attempt to create a more convenient shipping-route to the Black Sea, since the river Dnieper with its falls and predatory Pechenegs was a difficult route for Rus trade. As with the earlier Rus assaults against Byzantine territories, Sviatoslav was forced to bow to the greater might of the Greek armies and conclude a treaty:

I, Svyatoslav (…) confirm by oath upon this covenant that I desire to preserve peace and perfect amity with each of the great emperors, (…) until the end of the world.(…) But if we fail in the observance of any of the aforesaid stipulations, (…) may we be accursed of the god in whom we believe, namely, of Perun and Volos, the god of flocks, and we become yellow as gold, and be slain with our own weapons. Regard as truth what we have now covenanted (…), as it is inscribed upon this parchment and sealed with our seals

All four of the Rus oaths recorded in the Primary Chronicle follow familiar patterns seen in other Scandinavian oaths. Perun, god of weather, lightning and power, was worshipped by Slavs and Balts, but adopted by Rus as the local equivalent of the Scandinavian god Þórr. “Volos, the god of flocks” was surely considered as the local equivalent of the Scandinavian’s own god Freyr. These invocations are also seen in the Old Icelandic Úlfljót’s Law:

A ring of two ounces or more [the stallahringr] should lie on the altar of every main temple. (…). Every man who needed to perform legal acts before the court must first swear an oath on this ring and mention two or more witnesses. ‘I name witnesses’ he must say, ‘that I swear the oath on the ring, a lawful oath. So help me Freyr and Njörðr and the Almighty áss [god, often identified as Þórr, Óðinn, or Ullr]…’

The “laying down” of shields, weapons, and arm-rings by the Rus in the Primary Chronicle accounts may indicate the presence of a truce-area, since such areas were hallowed by the names of the gods Freyr and Njörðr elsewhere in Scandinavia, or it may reflect that, as in Úlfljót’s Law, the oath-swearers were actually swearing their own oaths upon these items, their weapons, which would turn against them should they fail the oath, and the sacred ring in the old pagan ritual of oath-giving.

One last common and interesting feature of the Rus oaths is the duration the oaths are sworn to run, “as long as the sun shines and the world endures henceforth and forevermore,” which echoes the Trygðamál, or “Peace Guarantee Speech” found in the Old Icelandic lawbook Grágás as formula for settling disputes:

But the one of you who tramples on treaties made or smites at sureties given, he shall be a wolf and be driven off as far and wide as ever men drive wolves off, Christians come to church, heathens hallow temples, fire flames, ground grows, son calls mother, mother bears son, men make fires, ship glides, shields flash, sun shines, snow drifts, Finn skis, fir tree grows, falcon flies a spring-long day with a fair wind beneath both wings’, and so on…

Once the warrior had sworn his oath to the king, the king in turn had to swear to his new retainer. As has already been mentioned, the most important role of the king in the war-band was as the foremost warrior, so it is possible that the king’s side of the oath would include a promise to lead in battle.

After battle-prowess and leadership, the next most important virtue of the Germanic king or lord was generosity. The spoils of war which are captured in battle by the war-band belong entirely to the ruler. In turn, it is the duty of the lord to be open handed in the extreme with these riches. As the Old Norse proverb has it: Gjöf sér æ til gjalda, “A gift always looks for a return” — in return for service, the lord granted gifts, in return for gifts, the warrior granted service (Foote and Wilson, p. 424).

All of the treasures and favors which the retainers receive come directly from their lord, even though they have originally won these treasures in battle themselves. … Generosity towards his retainers is, along with prowess in battle, the most important virtue which a lord can possess, and is the quality most often praised in Germanic heroic poetry” (Cherniss, p. 41).

Therefore a second component in the oath sworn by the Viking king to his new warrior might be that the lord would reward his new liegeman generously, earning the epithets such as the Old English terms beag-gyfa or beaga brytta (“ring-giver”), gold-wine (“gold-friend, prince, king”), or hord-weard (“treasure-hoard warder”) to the point that these terms became synonyms for “king, lord, prince, ruler.” This motif occurs in Old Norse poetry as well, for example Þjóðólfr Arnórsson calling King Haraldr, Lét vingjafa veitir, varghollr (“The dispenser of gifts to friends, benificent to the wolf”), showing both the king’s generosity to his followers and using generosity as well in a kenning showing him as a warrior, leaving corpses upon which the wolves will dine (Poole, p. 62) or calling him snjóllum hrings, “giver of rings” (Poole, p. 63). Snorri Sturluson, in Skáldskarpamál 53, states that:

…þeir menn, er hersar heita. Kenna má þá sem konung eða jarl, svá at kalla þá gullbrjóta ok auðmildinga…

“…those men, who are called hersar (lords) can be referred to like a king or a jarl, by calling them gold-breakers and wealth-bountiful ones…”
(Prose Edda, p. 129).

By being open-handed with gifts and riches given to the warrior the king fulfilled his side of the contract enacted by the fealty oath:

He beot ne aleh,
beagas dælde,
sinc æt symle.

[King Hrothgar] did not leave unfulfilled his oath:
rings he dealt out,
and treasure at the ale-feast.
(Beowulf ll. 80-81)

The Germanic lord was also known as protector of his people. Many of the kennings for “lord” or “king” reflect this: for instance the Old English terms eþel-weard (“guardian of the native land”), eorla hleo (“protector of earls”), rices weard (“guardian of the kingdom”), folces hyrde (“folk-herd, guardian of the people”), rices hyrde (“kingdom-herd, guardian of the kingdom”). The lord protects his people directly, by his personal battle-prowess, and indirectly by forming advantageous alliances with other tribes, either by mutual exchange of gifts or intermarriage or by adopting a warrior of another tribe as a son:

The devotion of the lord to his followers, and the love of the followers for their lord, are at least partially the result of the role which the lord plays as protector of the people. The lord’s first duty towards the comitatus is to protect his followers from whatever harm might befall them were he not present.
(Cherniss, p. 44-46)

Finally, the ruler might cement the swearing by giving a gift to the new warrior, beginning the reciprocal relationship by his generosity. This gift might be a valuable arm-ring, embodying the oath within the circle of the ring, which has no beginning nor ending and which brought with it connotations of the sacred oath-ring of Thórr. Many times a king or lord would gift his new warrior with a sword, perhaps one captured in battle, or maybe even a famous sword with a lineage:

We know, however, that the gift of a sword from the king or leader to a warrior entering his service was considered to form a bond of mutual obligation and loyalty between them.”
(Ellis-Davidson, Sword in A-S England, pp. 75-76)

Warriors entering the war-band might also be given lands or a home: the Old Danish word for a member of the comitatus was hemþægi, literally “one who receives a home” (Foote and Wilson, p. 100).

Whatever gift was given by the lord to his new warrior, the gift served as a symbol of the warrior’s obligation – the treasure which was gifted to the retainer by the lord demands eventual repayment by the retainer via martial service.

SAMPLE FEALTY

Warrior: “(Lineage) I am Ragnar, son of Ulfgar, grandson of the mighty Snorri of whom many are the songs and stories! (History) I have come from the fight where I alone slew five, furious in the fell play of wound wands! From Skaggerak to Skye my sword is known, and in Skane and among the Skrit-Finns they sing dirge-songs where I’ve slain their sons! (Future deeds) Greater deeds than these shall I gain, garnering fame like grains of gold! In this war-band shall my wound-wand strike hard against the steel of byrnies, so all hear them sing their sad, dire song, if the guardian of the folk grants me the gift I ask, accepting my oath ay!”

Lord: A mighty man in byrnie are you, of proven bravery, bold in battle. Into my war-band will you come, to serve as warrior and counsel wise words?

Warrior: Aye!

Lord: (Calls for sword, which is kept in the sheath, hilt on the knee pointed toward the arrior with the length of the blade running along his leg, and the point passing between the right arm and the body. The buckle of the sword belt should rest upon the hilt, and the lord should grasp the hilt so that his arm lays on top of the sword along its length.) Speak then your oath!

Warrior: (The warrior shall kneel before the king and shall put his right hand under the hilt) I, Ragnar, make this oath: that I shall be in the forefront of fierce battle, forging ahead with my lord and friend, coming to the war-call carrying my weapons; and when no battle causes the war-horn to blow, I shall not forget the ring-giver’s generosity, but will offer wise counsel as I may. And though I had liefer lay down my life than see harm come to my lord, still should the poisoned point or aged edge strike him down, then I shall not flee a single footlength from the field, but rather shall advance into the enemy army, slaying as I might, to avenge the protector of the people. And by Freyr, and by Njordr, and the Almighty Ase, may this sword smite me upon which my hand rests, may my own edge twist and turn against me should I fail to keep this oath. (Leans forward and kisses the lord’s hand or the sword hilt).

Lord: I have heard your oath, as have the holy Aesir. Hear you then my vow to you: with red gold shall I gift you, granting good gifts as you merit, round rings rolling from my hand to yours; among my earls shall you sit in the sumbel, with sweet mead strong filling your stoup; if to the lawcourt you are called, in legal tangles twisted and tied, then I and all of my earls and kin shall stand as oath-helpers if you should need this; and finally, my sword shall stand between you and your enemies, my strength and my war-band beside you boldly, for bare is brotherless back. May Óðinn Allfather, God of Oaths listen, may Freyr and Njörðr witness my words, let Frigga hold me faithful, may Saga keep this oath in memory, and may Thórr, Almighty God hallow this vow! (Lord stands and hands sword to assistant, who in its place gives him an arm-ring or necklace of heavy gold chain, or a sword or other worthy gift, which the Lord gives to his new warrior.)

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The Úlfhéðnar: The Untold Story Of Forgotten Viking Wolf Warriors

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Unusual Iron Age Burial With Warrior And Sword Discovered In Gotland

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NORWEGIAN MOUTAIN LOAF

NO KNEAD, VEGAN

Norwegian Mountain Loaf

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KING ROLLO THE VIKING

Robert I Rollo “The Viking” Prince of Norway & Duke of Normandy “Count of Rouen” Ragnvaldsson

BIRTH 14 OCT 846 • Maer, Jutland, Nord-Trondelag, Norway

DEATH 17 DEC 932 • Rouen, Seine, Maritime, Haute-Normandy, France

Poppa Lady Duchess of Normany De Senlis De Valois De Rennes De Bayeux

872–930

BIRTH 872 • Bayeux, Calvados, Basse-Normandie, France

DEATH 930 • Rouen, Seine-Maritime, Haute-Normandie, France

Rollo as a Warrior

Was Rollo Other than Norwegian?

Folk Stories Around Rollo

Rollo In Normandie

Rollo of Normandy Statue

The French Version

Statue of Rollo of Normandy, Falaise

Rollo and Dudo

Dudos’ Work

Rollo Grave at the Cathederal of Rouen

Dudo’s content: A few observations

Rollo in Fargo, North Dakota

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VIKINGS IN IRELAND

795 – 1014

PART III

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THE VIKINGS IN IRELAND

795 – 1014

PART II

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Messages from Ancient Stones

Gotland Picture Stones from the Viking Era

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Warriors’ Oaths To The Chief / King

SAMPLE FEALTY

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