Local legends
SARAH FOOT enjoys an insightful exploration of how medieval myths shaped the way we remember the Vikings
Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England by Eleanor Parker IB Tauris, 288 pages, £20
A fragmentary piece of stone carving found in Winchester, spiritual heart of the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex and burial place of Alfred the Great, connects the city with England’s Viking past. Originally part of a larger frieze, it depicts a scene from the Norse legend of Sigmund, showing his bound figure with honey smeared around his mouth to distract a hungry wolf from killing him. Sigmund and his son Sigurðr, the dragon-slayer, were well-known heroes of Germanic legend who were understood in the Middle Ages as ancestors of later kings of Denmark. If this carving were, as Eleanor Parker suggests, originally designed as part of the tomb of the Danish king Cnut, who conquered England in 1016, it would be an impressive testimony to Cnut’s political influence. It also reminds us of how effectively the Danish elite became integrated within Anglo-Saxon culture.
Dragon Lords does not directly ask why the Vikings came to Britain. Rather, it explores how medieval English writers explained the Vikings’ motives and deeds through stories and legends, and how these myths cast the Viking conquest in a new light. As Parker demonstrates, these narratives became connected with different regions of England, especially those where Scandinavian settlement was most intense: parts of the north, the East Midlands and East Anglia.
East Anglian traditions focused particularly on the legends of King Edmund, who died at Danish hands in 869. In local retellings of a legend that also circulated in Scandinavia, Edmund’s Danish killers (sons of the semilegendary warrior Ragnar Lothbrok) acquired a role in the promotion of Edmund as a national royal saint.
Similarly, although the historical Siward was most closely associated with Northumbria, where he was earl in the time of Cnut, it was in the east Midlands that people took most interest in his legend. There, Siward’s story was told as if Northumbria were a distant and exotic location, where supernatural creatures abounded. Most fascinatingly of all, Parker shows how the legend of the Danish prince Havelok developed in Grimsby. The emphasis of these stories
The Danish elite were well integrated within Anglo- Saxon culture
is much more on the economic aspects of Danish activity, especially the importance of merchants and trade, than on military affairs we might imagine as more typically ‘Viking’.
Parker has crafted an impressively readable and accessible account of these little-known legends, presenting medieval English traditions about Scandinavian warfare and the consequences of Danish settlement. Her interpretations draw on her unparalleled knowledge of these complex sources, but she wears her learning lightly and always writes with a general reader in mind.
Sarah Foot is regius professor of ecclesiastical history at the University of Oxford