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  Four years later, Godfrið’s armies pre-emptively invaded the lands of the Obodrites on the southern shores of the Baltic Sea, rendering them tributary. Charlemagne, ageing, ill and perhaps unwilling to embark on another major military campaign, responded by sending his son Charles with an army to counter further Danish incursions. Fierce fighting depleted Godfrið’s army, but he took a number of Obodrite fortresses. In what seems to have been a long campaigning summer Charles countered by building a bridge across the Elbe and ravaging the lands of those peoples who, according to the official Frankish annals, had ‘defected’ to Godfrið.6

  Before returning to Denmark the Danes destroyed the trading centre at Riric (possibly modern Lübeck, with its vital access to Baltic trade routes). Godfrið ordered the wholesale removal of its merchants, resettling them at a new trading town on the River Schlei at a place called Haithabu, or Hedeby. Anticipating a response from Charlemagne, Godfrið now ordered the extension, perhaps merely the completion, of a network of defensive earthworks across the base of the Jutland peninsula, from his new town at the navigable head of the Schlei as far as the River Treene, which flows into the Eider and thence into the North Sea. The Danevirke, like Offa’s Dyke, was a hugely ambitious military and cultural project of iconic national significance, stretching more than 20 miles (32 km) in its final, complex form. As late as 1864 it could still be defended, albeit unsuccessfully, against Prussian invasion.

  In 809 Danish and Frankish envoys met, hostages were exchanged, and Charlemagne ordered a new fortification to be built north of the Elbe, some 30 miles (48 km) south of the Danevirke. A year later Godfrið sent a second pre-emptive force of 200 ships to invade Frisia, harrying the islands and exacting a tribute of 100 lb (45 kg) of silver. Charlemagne sent his marshals out to raise an army and arranged to rendezvous with his fleet on the Rhine at Lippeham. The death there of his prize elephant coincided with news that the Danish fleet had returned to its home base, and that Godfrið had been murdered by one of his retainers.

  If Charlemagne believed that a peace signed with Godfrið’s nephew Hemming, briefly emerging from a pack of likely regal contenders, would set Frankish–Danish affairs at rest, he was mistaken: Hemming was killed in 812. A bitter war of succession between Godfrið’s sons and nephews broke out, lasting more than fifteen years. Charlemagne’s sole remaining legitimate son,‡ Louis ‘the Pious’, succeeding his father in 814, pursued a policy sponsoring exiled pretenders to the Danish throne, part of a giant plate-spinning exercise by which he maintained ambivalent sets of relations with Spanish caliphs, popes, Byzantine emperors, Slavs, Persians and Anglo-Saxon kings, not to mention disaffected members of his own dynasty. These dynastic exiles mixed with a Carolingian court overflowing with would-be Frankish kings seeking political and material support—refugees from successful and unsuccessful coups d’état; it hosted clerics seeking sponsorship for missions to convert heathens of various persuasions, scholars like Alcuin, traders, poets, musicians, engineers and metalsmiths, all part of an increasingly complex web of patronage, ambition, competition and vested interest. The closer one got to the beating heart of the royal court, the higher the potential rewards, the more deadly the consequences of failure or ill-fortune.

  The destabilization of neighbouring states, a favourite political tool employed by Early Medieval kings, was an equally high-risk strategy. As the history of Western intervention in the Middle East shows, support for incumbent or prospective leaders by military and economic means might win friends, gain valuable influence and open economic doors, but it has a horrid tendency to unleash unforeseen forces: to backfire. The Carolingian policy of intervention in Danish affairs came to haunt the North Sea states for two centuries.

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  Denmark, lying outside the Latinate Christian world, had no literate chroniclers of its own. Its history, transmitted orally through the generations, flickers in and out of focus as it interacts with Francia, Britain and the lands to the east. There are stories of missionaries building churches in the trading ports of the Baltic but if, sometimes, they lived to tell the tale, they did not effect conversion where it mattered: Denmark would not have a Christian king until the middle of the tenth century. We know the names of some of its kings, the distribution of its settlements, something of its agriculture and buildings. Pagan memorials to the dead can still be seen in the countryside and two trading settlements, Ribe on the west Jutland coast and Hedeby on the River Schlei, have yielded some of the secrets of its early trading success. Some of the vessels sailed by its traders, fishermen and pirates have been recovered from its shallow coastal waters and rivers. The fact that Denmark’s armies could challenge the might of Charlemagne and its fleets terrorize all Europe speaks volumes for Danish cultural wealth and sophistication, not to mention military clout.

  If ninth-century Denmark is opaque, Sweden and Norway are even more obscure. We cannot know what social or environmental factors created the circumstances in which Norwegian pirate captains set out to explore the northern seas in the late eighth century with such devastating consequences for the religious communities of coast and island. Their dynastic histories in this period, when they interacted only distantly with the worlds chronicled by Latin clerics, are utterly dark. Even so, the Danish experience, and the annals, offer some clues.

  Historians agree that the Scandinavian world had not yet evolved the sort of institutions that would survive the death of its kings. In the Christian states of north-west Europe the church (its archbishops, bishops, abbots and abbesses, priests, monks, nuns and clerics) enjoyed the support and protection of kings, whose gifts of land, held by ecclesiastical communities in perpetuity and often free from obligations of military service and food renders, ensured their stability and continuity. Monastic estates were able to invest the sweat-equity of labour: they built churches, mills, and the agricultural infrastructure that fostered technical innovation. They encouraged the arts and sciences and the writing of history—above all, the production of books, the accumulation of libraries of ancient works, and inquiring scholarship of the sort exemplified by Bede and Alcuin.

  In return for royal patronage, the church offered living kings and their favoured successors legitimacy and the promise that their short stay on earth would, if they were virtuous, lead to everlasting tenure at God’s side in the kingdom of heaven. With its strong sense of continuity, its skills in recording land transfers, laws and rights and its unifying message and language, the church acted as a self-interested civil service, maintaining the institutions of state whoever held the reins of temporal power.

  The pre-Christian kingdoms of Scandinavia lacked those institutions and their useful by-products. They offered no alternative careers for collateral family members—alternative, that is, to fighting in the king’s war band and competing for regional power. On the kings’ part, side-tracking their family rivals’ secular ambitions by offering them the fruits of large ecclesiastical landholdings without royal interference—in effect, paying them off—was not an available option.

  By the turn of the ninth century a network of élite clientèle, with all its benefits for stabilizing kingship, was deeply embedded in the Christian kingdoms. In the pre-Christian, geographically disparate lands of Scandinavia, the state was the king; with his death it collapsed. Networks of affiliation, loyalty, gift exchange and obligation, built up during his reign, were reset to zero. Each new king had to re-invent his kingdom. Only customary laws, passed down through the generations, provided rules for tribal conduct; and the force of arms might at any time prevail. Long-lasting, stable dynasties that succeeded in controlling succession, without excessive internecine warfare, were rare. In that competitive climate, opportunities abounded for young, unmarried Scandinavian men of noble or royal stock to gain glory, cash and a reputation by fighting for an ambitious warlord. But the acquisition of land on which to settle and of a wife with whom to raise a family was another, altogether more difficult matter. A life spent in exile was common.

/>   In crude terms, the dawn of the Viking Age around the year 800 can be portrayed as the extended consequence of such unstable networks coming into conflict with Christianized states whose stability had, ironically, become a fatal liability. Monasteries, trading settlements, royal estates even, were rarely enclosed by defensive walls, palisades or ramparts: they look, in retrospect, terribly exposed, even if they are eloquent testimony to the king’s peace and the written rule of law.

  That is not to say that Scandinavian societies were in any way primitive, or any more thuggish than their neighbours and rivals. The Christian chroniclers, self-appointed inheritors of Roman values of universal authority, invested much ink and vellum in de-humanizing their heathen attackers, casting them as amoral, mindless barbarians. But the Scandinavian worldview was multi-dimensional. Like ancient Greeks and Romans, Scandinavians were pantheists: their gods were sometimes playful and indulgent, often vengeful, occasionally cunning and always capricious, interfering with the world of humans, Midgard,§ as with playthings in a child’s toy set.

  Oðin the one-eyed, whom the Anglo-Saxons remembered as Woden, was the senior figure of the pantheon: often cited as the progenitor of royal lines, he had received the wisdom of the knowledge of runes by hanging himself, starving, from the world ash tree, Yggdrasil, for nine days. He rode the eight-legged Sleipnir, a flying horse, across the sky. He was a shape-shifting poet whose destiny was to receive into his hall, Valhalla, half of the warriors who died well in battle so that at the end of time, in the last great battle of Ragnarök, he might lead them to their doom. Sacrifice, wisdom, apocalypse, revenge, terrible divine power and magic lie at the heart of the Scandinavian worldview. That those same elements are also fundamental to Christianity, whose repertoire of Old and New Testament heroes was drawn from a blend of ancient Jewish royal histories and Near Eastern mysticism, is one of history’s richer ironies.

  It is quite possible that by the time the stories of the Scandinavian gods and their relations with mortals were written down in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, something of Christ’s story had been grafted onto those of Oðin, Thor, Loki, Freja and the rest. Scandinavians found themselves attracted to much of what Christian priests told them of their faith and its disciplines. They were impressed by the military might and organizational capabilities of the inheritors of Rome and above all, perhaps, by their skilful use of writing. Scandinavia had its literary élite too; but runes were very much an inscriptional, messaging alphabet, found on memorial stones and carved into wood, or as graffiti. Norse laws and literature, which seem to have been plentiful, were transmitted orally.

  What the Scandinavian peoples found hard to comprehend was not so much that Christians should only have one God but that they should insist that believers worship no other (they had heard much the same from the Islamic world). Even so, the fatal gap between the Scandinavian psyche and that of the Romano-Christian world was not so much an incompatibility of moral philosophy as one of institution, technology and geography.

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  The three ship-loads of Norwegians who encountered an unsuspecting king’s reeve on the south coast of Wessex in about 789 may not have been the first of their kind, even if their assault stands as the earliest recorded Viking attack on Britain, enshrined in an entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A Mercian charter of 792, issued by King Offa, confirmed existing exceptions to certain church privileges in Kent (then a Mercian possession) in their obligation to provide levies against ‘marauding heathens’, so the idea of piratical northerners may not have been totally novel.7 The annals that recorded their predations were partisan, their spheres of interest limited, so we must allow for unrecorded attacks of which only scant traces survive: the community of a monastery at Lyminge, a few miles inland of the south Kent coast, was granted refuge at Canterbury in the face of a real or perceived threat of raids; a Northumbrian envoy, returning home from pleading for the support of Charlemagne for the exiled King Eardwulf, was captured by pirates.

  The first wave of recorded attacks has, nevertheless, a geographical shape to it: Lindisfarne, the island monastery off the Northumbrian coast, plundered in 793; Bede’s church at Jarrow, a day’s sail south of Lindisfarne, a year later. Then silence until 800, when Hartness and Tynemouth, also on the Northumbrian coast, seem to have been targets. These North Sea raids might plausibly be ascribed to Danish ships, crossing the southern North Sea from their homelands, exploring, probing.

  The scale of the raiding is difficult to assess: there is no doubting the ability of the Danes to send large fleets to sea, and there may have been a political dimension: Northumbria and Wessex were allies of Charlemagne; the Danes his antagonists. Danish traders must already have known the geography of Britain’s east and south coasts: they conducted business at markets in East Anglia, Yorkshire, Kent and Wessex as well as at Lundenwic on the Thames. What we cannot say is whether the first raiders, targeting the easy pickings of coastal minsters, used intelligence gained from traders or whether they had been traders themselves. Perhaps our desire to distinguish between the two would have baffled them.

  There is another, northern and western dimension to the opening of the Viking Age; and it may have begun some time before the attacks on Wessex and Northumbria. Most scholars agree that the Annals of Ulster, a key Irish chronicle, records attacks by pirates of Norwegian origin: the year 795, for example, saw ‘the burning of Rechru by the heathens, and the shrine was overwhelmed and laid waste’.8 Rechru is either Rathlin Island, off the northern coast of Antrim or, more likely, Lambay near Dublin. In 798 Inish Patrick, off the Dublin coast, was raided and cattle taken. In 802 one of Irish Christianity’s greatest monasteries, Colm Cille’s foundation on Iona, was burned. Four years later it, or one of its dependencies, was attacked again; this time sixty-eight members of the community were martyred.

  Behind the clipped language of the annals lie human stories, narratives of tragedy. A remarkable drawing on slate has, in the last few years, surfaced from excavations at the island monastery of Inchmarnock, just off the west coast of Bute.9 Dubbed the ‘hostage stone’, it appears to depict a ship powered by a sail and oars, and a warrior with wild hair, dressed in chainmail, leading a prisoner who seems to be carrying a box, possibly a reliquary. It reminds one, hauntingly, of the sorts of images children create when faced with the trauma of warfare.

  Historians have to tried to extrapolate a coherent narrative from these events. Some have seen them as part of a more substantial series of campaigns than the sources allow, as evidence of raiding armies capable of supporting themselves and overwintering on foreign soil. There have been several suggestions that Shetland and Orkney had already been partially settled by Scandinavians by the time that the Viking raids made their grand historical stage call. Orkney, after all, lies no more than three days’ sailing west of Norway. Others have read the contemporary sources at face value: these were opportunistic exploratory raids by independent captains seeking cash and glory for themselves and their dependents but limited in numbers, time and space. Whatever the truth, after 806 the Irish Annals refer only fitfully to fresh attacks from across the seas until the 820s, when notices of Viking activity, notably in Ulster, increase dramatically. In this decade Ireland bore the brunt of pirate aggression.

  3. THE ART OF TRAUMA: Viking raiders appear to abduct a monk, in a drawing on slate from Inchmarnock island in the Sound of Bute.

  Those first twenty years of raids affected Insular societies only at a very local level. The disproportionate attention they have received from chroniclers, and from historians since, has magnified their impact. There is little evidence that monasteries were destroyed as functioning settlements in that first wave of raids. Lindisfarne, Iona and others still supported monastic communities in the ninth century and beyond. It is true that there had been a general decline in standards since the seventh-century ‘golden age’ of monasticism, whose intellectual and artistic glories lay in the past even in Bede’s day. Scholarship had given way to ac
quisition; strict rules had lapsed; a more secular world had encroached on the holy sanctuaries. Whether that decline began before, or as a result of, Viking raids is not nearly so certain.

  There is some evidence, too, that monastic communities were not quite as unprotected as the more lurid tales suggest. At Jarrow, if historians are correct in believing that it was the monastery ‘at the mouth of the River Don’ recorded in the ‘E’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the raiders did not even get away scot-free. Their chieftain was killed (by whom—militant monks or local militia?) and a great storm sank several of their ships.10 On the other hand there is no record at all of the fortunes of Jarrow, or its twin foundation at Wearmouth, in the ninth century; and it is true that two of Jarrow’s major buildings, when excavated, proved to have been burned down and not rebuilt. But silence does not mean non-existence, and a building may burn by accident. The jury is still out.

  Alcuin, the Northumbrian scholar who spent much of his career at the court of Charlemagne, wrote a letter of support to the bishop of Lindisfarne in the wake of the raid of 793, lamenting the day when ‘pagans desecrated the sanctuaries of God, and poured out the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope, trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like shit in the street’.11 Alcuin’s perspective was that of the prophet Isaiah, of God punishing the sins of the Jews. In Alcuin’s view these deadly visitations were punishment for sins already committed. Archaeology has not yet been able to confirm the state of the monastery on Lindisfarne immediately after the raid;# but the community was able, in later decades when the threat was even greater and more persistent, to take with them more or less complete the incorrupt body of their holy saint Cuthbert along with the precious head of King Oswald and some of the relics of the founding bishop, Aidan. And Cuthbert’s community maintained a written record of both their possessions and their relations with kings, Vikings and the wider church. That record, the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto, has proved to be of the highest value in illuminating the effects of two centuries of upheaval on the British monasteries.