VIKINGS IN THE LANDSCAPE
Waves of Vikings brought terror to the British Isles over 1,000 years ago and they left a deep mark on the landscape, as Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough discovers for a new BBC Radio 4 programme
It may be 1,000 years since the Viking Age in Britain but these Norse raiders and settlers left an indelible mark.
Longships on the horizon. The glint of sharpened axes. Blood on the altars. Pagan pillagers. Across the British Isles, the image of the marauding Viking is a stereotype so engrained in our cultural consciousness that it’s hard to shake. In some ways, it’s a fair stereotype. After all, the word ‘viking’ simply means ‘raider’, a job description rather than a cultural label. No one from the medieval Nordic world was a Viking all the time.
When the first attacks from Scandinavia began at the end of the 8th century, they took the form of hit-and-run summer raids. A successful raiding party would be looking to get back home for winter with a boatload of booty, hoping for enhanced social prestige and maybe a shot at finding a wife.
COASTAL RAIDERS
The British Isles were badly hit. In 793 AD, the Norsemen attacked the wealthy monastery of Lindisfarne, a tidal island off the coast of Northumberland. These sea-hardened raiders from across the North Sea chose their targets well – they struck at monasteries located on islands and coastlines: vulnerable, undefended and easily accessible by boat.
As the Anglo-Saxon scholar Alcuin wrote after the Lindisfarne raid, “never was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made”. A short walk down to the shore from the ruined monastery, it’s easy to see why this location was chosen. The wide bay is flat and sandy, perfect for landing shallow-bottomed longships and for loading them with ill-gotten gains. Lindisfarne wasn’t the only place to be hit: the Irish annals record for the year 794 “the devastation of all the islands of Britain by the pagans”. For Scandinavians with their advanced ship technology, seas and rivers were the equivalent of today’s motorways: a convenient transport network to carry them around the coast and deep inland.
Unlike other waves of invaders – the Romans with Hadrian’s Wall and their sophisticated
villas, the Normans with their imposing castles and cathedrals – the Norse didn’t leave many physical structures in the landscape of the British Isles. But in areas where they settled, their presence is embedded in a far more enduring, tangible form: place names.
When I’m hiking or driving through such regions, place names help me to see the terrain as the Norse would have done – a mental map of the farms, resources and settlers who came to call this country home. In England, the East Midlands and Yorkshire are particularly fertile ground, because they were the heart of what we today call the ‘Danelaw’, the area that came under Norse control during the 9th century. If you find a ‘by’ at the end of a place name, you can be pretty sure there was once a Norse farm. So Grimsby began life as a farm owned by a man called Grimr, while Wetherby was a sheep farm.
VIKING CENTRAL
Today you can walk around the city of York – once the viking stronghold of Jorvik – and follow in the footsteps of its earlier Norse inhabitants through its street names. Once you know what the names mean, you can construct a sort of ‘virtual reality’ map of the city as it would have appeared to its Scandinavian residents: Goodramgate (Guthrum’s Street), Micklegate (Big Street), Skeldergate (ShieldMakers’ Street), Coppergate (Cup-Makers’ Street), Coney Street (King’s Highway). Jorvik had close ties with another Viking stronghold across the Irish Sea: Dublin, which also held the dubious distinction of being the biggest slave market in Northern Europe. From Dublin, slaves from the British Isles would be transported to all corners of the known world.
Further north in Orkney and Shetland, the majority of the place names are of Norse origin, because it was part of the Scandinavian cultural sphere until the 15th century. Orkney and Shetland were the Northern Isles (Norðreyjar), just like today. But to the west of the Scottish mainland, the Hebrides were the Southern Isles (Suðreyjar), which gives us a sense of their place in the Norse world view.
The Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides is home to some of the most famous artefacts of the Viking Age: the Lewis Chessmen. Around 78 pieces were found, fashioned from walrus ivory and whalebone. Beautifully crafted and almost cartoonish in style, they were the inspiration for Noggin the Nog, gentle king of the Northmen in the British animated TV series. Portly bishops sit pompously on their thrones, clutching their croziers. Queens stare glumly into space, cupping heads in hands. Warriors bite down toothily onto their shields, working themselves up into berserker rages.
Recently I visited Lewis to make a Radio 4 Open Country programme, and was amazed at how frequently the earth still spits bits of Norse history out of the ground. I interviewed a crofter who had stumbled upon a Norse hair comb made of bone as he was out walking. Appropriately his croft was at Swainbost, a Norse place name meaning ‘Svein’s Steading’. Even better, his surname was Macsween – it’s not certain where this name comes from but it may be of Norse origin, meaning ‘Son of Svein’. A coincidence perhaps, but currents of history run deep in these landscapes.
Combs and chessmen aren’t the only physical remains of Britain’s Viking Age past that have been uncovered. Viking hoards have been discovered across the British Isles; the equivalent of safety deposit boxes where the owners never returned to reclaim them.
As recently as 2014, the Galloway Hoard was found in southwest Scotland, crammed with goodies that reflect an extraordinary range of international connections. These included a silver gilt cup from the Carolingian Empire, gold and silver trading ingots, an Anglo-Saxon cross, a delicate golden pin shaped like a bird, Anglo-Saxon and Irish brooches, and an exotic crystal jewellery box wrapped in silks, possibly from the Byzantine Empire or Middle East. The hoard was bought by National Museums Scotland for £2 million.
SINFUL HABITS
When raiding gave way to settlement, the Norse didn’t keep themselves to themselves. In time, Anglo-Saxon churchmen were complaining that locals were copying hipster Norse hairstyles (shaved at the back, long at the front). Even worse, the immigrants were getting the best women with their sinful habits of combing their hair, changing their clothes and taking regular baths. So not all medieval Scandinavians who came to these lands were raiders. Here they built farms, watched the seasons change, worried about their livestock, their crops and their health, raised families, mourned their dead, lived their lives.
The Viking Age might seem long ago, but the Norse never really left these lands. They are here in our present as well as our past, in our place names and genes. So for those living in parts of the British Isles settled by Norse men and women, remember that the familiar landscapes we call home were once as well loved and well known to them as they are to us today.