The Hammer and the Cross is a brilliant book. It is a scholarly, systematic and scrupulous investigation of the phenomenon of the Vikings. Roberts carefully weighs the evidence about every aspect of the farflung activities of the amazing men who discovered America, settled Greenland, invaded Britain and France, became the special guard to the Byzantine Emperor and – the biggest surprise to me – founded Russia!
Our ignorance
The message repeated in chapter after chapter is that the evidence from the Dark Ages is so pitifully scanty that most of the subject is shrouded in confusion and uncertainty. Thus:
- nobody knows the origin of the word ‘viking’, which language it comes from or what it means
- nobody can agree the date of the ‘Viking Era’
- there is no agreement on the definition of the Vikings: was it an ethnic group, a racial group, men from particular countries, or was it simply a form of behaviour, that men from certain northern cultures would, as the Old Norse has it, fara i viking, which seems to mean ‘go a-viking’, as if viking is an activity or profession
Or, although Viking trader-warriors from modern Sweden spent decades clearing the river routes south through what is now Russia to the Black Sea and in doing so founded the city of Kiev, although they were widely described as the ‘Rus’ and although this activity was the basis of the modern state of Russia, nobody knows what ‘Rus’ actually means or where it came from.
Nobody knows what pagans did or believed. All their shrines were destroyed by Christians. None of these people could write: they recorded absolutely nothing of their activities. Only one four-line prayer exists anywhere, embedded in a long poem in the Poetic Edda.
There are a pitiful handful of eye-witness accounts of pagan Viking behaviour, none of which are very clear. There’s a number of runestones which barely convey anything. There is a handful of primitive picture stones.
I understand better than before why, against the background of this pitiful lack of evidence, the Poetic Edda, the collection of poems and the Prose Edda – the synopsis of Norse legends – both set down in 12th century Iceland, are so enormously valuable.
Was it a holy war?
However, as the book progresses, an idea emerges which develops into Ferguson’s central thesis: this, like everything in the book, derives from a scrupulous weighing of the evidence, and it is that the Viking phenomenon was a religious war.
The idea is broached in the chapter about the start of the Viking era (different in every country). In Britain the era (notoriously) started with the brutal attack on Lindisfarne monastery in 793. Ferguson links this to the extremely violent and intimidating campaign of Charlemagne to convert northern Europe to Christianity which got underway in the 780s and targeted the Saxons who lived south of Denmark. As Charlemagne’s forces invaded Saxony, burning pagan shrines, forcibly converting pagans and killing resisters. Thousands of refugees fled from this pogrom north into Jutland and, Ferguson argues, this may be what lies behind the sudden eruption of revenge attacks by the pagan men from the sea who we call the Vikings. After all, wherever the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian attackers landed, they went out of their way to loot and destroy churches and monasteries and to torture, rape and kill priests, monks and nuns.
Those within converted Europe, the Christians who wrote what records we have about the Vikings, the victims who were attacked again and again and again from about 800 to about 1050, they disagree about where the Vikings came from, whether they were blonde or dark-haired, what language they spoke etc – but on one thing they all agreed – they were heathen, pagani, unbelievers, infidels, illiterate outsiders, fired by terrifying ferocity and anger against everything connected with Christianity, going out of their way to loot and desecrate.
Which led me to wonder whether this period shouldn’t qualify as the First Wars of Religion in Europe – preceding the 150 years of carnage sparked by the Protestant Reformation (1500 to 1650), a period we should perhaps now rename the Second Wars of Religion.
This is a marvellous book, all the more awe-inspiring and romantic for the scrupulous care with which every scrap of evidence and every conflicting theory or interpretation is weighed and assessed.
Top Viking facts
Holy War
There are numerous theories about what started the ‘Viking Age’. Bad weather. Poor soil. Population explosion. Development of sailing technology. Ferguson goes with the theory that Norse violence was a holy war, a hyperviolent response to Charlemagne’s bloody campaign to convert the heathen Saxons to Christianity in the 770s which climaxed in the massacre at Verden in 782. Saxon survivors fled north into pagan Denmark, taking tales of atrocities and it was only a few years later, in 793, that the first, ferocious assault was made on the coast of Britain, at the monastery of Lindisfarne, an attack which inaugurated 250 years of blood-soaked raiding, killing and enslaving. The other theories may be true as well – there may be multiple causes – but only the Holy War theory explains the excessiveness of the violence which is always associated with the Norsemen.
Slavery
Who they didn’t torture and kill, the Vikings enslaved. Slavery was one of the most widespread and lucrative commodities of the Viking Era (800 to 1050) across Europe. Dublin was a major centre of the slave trade. Rouen became a thriving centre of the trade till past the time of William the Conqueror, who was petitioned by clerics to curtail the trade.
Slav slaves
The English word slave ultimately stems from ‘Slav’ because throughout the Viking period so many Slavs were traded as slaves. Russian nationalists do not like this fact. Online etymological dictionary
The Great Heathen Army
From the British perspective, there is a lull between the famous attack on Lindisfarne in 793, followed it’s true by persistent opportunistic raids – but it’s with the first army wintering on Sheppey in 835 that the threat becomes sustained and builds to the arrival, or invasion, of the Great Heathen Army in 865. They don’t leave and go on to establish a ‘kingdom’ across the east and north of England which endures over 100 years.
Russia was founded by Vikings
Debate rages to this day about the origins of the ‘Rus’ who give Russia its name, basically the West taking the evidence at face value that it was founded by the Rus, meaning men who row, who were Vikings from Sweden. Russian nationalists take the ‘anti-Norman’ view that native Slavs were too culturally superior to be conquered by barbarians. The debate is summarised in this Wikipedia article.
Ferguson goes with the Western view that Viking raiders/traders, predominantly from Sweden, explored the river systems which drain into the Baltic and realised, with a small amount of portage (carrying the boats), they could cross over into the river systems which flow south to the Black Sea and Constantinople. Rhos or Rus traders were reported by Greeks from Byzantium, by Arabs, in western chronicles and in the earliest Russian annals – they were Heathen, raided with savage violence, were strong and blonde like the other Scandinavians, held ship-based funerals like Vikings, and their most profitable commodity was slaves from the shores of the rivers they navigated which they sold to the Greeks. Kiev became the great trading centre half-way along the route, centuries before Moscow was founded, which is why Kiev and the Ukraine still hold such a place in Russian nationalist ideology.
Ireland’s towns were founded by Vikings
The first attack on England was at Lindisfarne in 793. In 795 Vikings attacked and burned Rathlin island monastery. After a generation of opportunist raiding, just as in England, in the 830s and 840s the Vikings stopped disappearing after a raid and began to winter in Ireland and penetrate further inland. They established coastal settlements at Dublin, Waterford, Wicklow, Cork and Limerick. Dublin became a centre of the Viking slave trade.
Vikings had tattoos
‘Ibn Rustah also tells us that the Rus were covered to their fingertips in tattoos depicting trees, figures and other designs. This is of a piece with what Alcuin and that other anonymous Anglo-Saxon commentator noted concerning the personal vanity of the Heathens, especially their fashion for blinded eyes’, which may have been a form of eye shadow. An Arab source leaves no doubt that eye make-up was common among the Rus:
‘once applied it never fades, and the beauty of both men and women is increased.’ Tattooing was banned in Christendom in 787 by Pope Hadrian because of its associations with Heathendom… (page 257)
Which sheds light on the general taboo against or denigration of tattoos until very recently.
Throwing stones
The sagas tell ‘of ships that return to shore to pick up fresh supplies of stones, the stone for throwing being the weapon of choice for the average foot-soldier or sailor throughout most of the Viking Age.’ (Page 214)
Starboard
Comes from the Norse for ‘steer board’, which was on the right-hand side of the longboat allowing it to be folded up to the side when navigating shallow water, unlike a rudder fixed to the stern.
Top Viking words
- the Old Norse personal pronouns they, them, he and she replaced Old English hie, him and hiera
- many words with an initial sk sound like sky, skill and skin are Norse in origin
- everyday words such as anger, husband, wing, thrive, egg, bread and die
- Gil denoting a ravine or steep narrow valley with a stream e.g. Long Gill
- –by placenames indicate places where the Vikings settled first, for example, Selby or Whitby; there are some 600 such places in England; the -by has also passed into English as ‘by-law’ meaning the local law of the town or villages
- -thorpe meaning secondary settlements on the margins or on poor lands; there are 155 place names ending in -thorpe in Yorkshire alone
Top Viking characters
Ragnar Hairy-Breeches
Legendary figure whose campaign of violence comes to an end when he is thrown in a snakepit by Aella of Northumbria, which triggers the arrival of the Great Heathen Army in 865.
Ivar the Boneless (d.873?)
A son of Ragnar Lodbrok/Hairy-Breeches, Swedish Viking leader who ruled part of modern Sweden and Norway – one of the leaders of the Great Heathen Army which invaded East Anglia in 865. Credited with the murder of king Edmund in 869, who quickly became revered as a Christian martyr.
Halfdan the Black (810 to 860)
Of the house of Yngling, king of Vestfold, a portion of Norway.
Harald Finehair (850 to 932)
Son of the above, first king of a unified Norway
Erik Bloodaxe (885 to 954)
The oldest of Harald Finehair’s sons, got his name for killing two of his own brothers, came a refugee to England where he established himself as king of York but was shortly driven out, and assassinated in flight, 954.
Ganger Rolf (846 to 931)
Also known as Rollo, Rollon, Robert, Rodulf, Ruinus, Rosso, Rotlo and Hrolf, Ganger Rolf or Rolf the Walker, conqueror of the area of north-west France which becomes known as Normandy, and so ancestor of the William who conquers England in 1066.
Harald Bluetooth (935 to 985)
King of Denmark and Sweden, converted to Christianity and erected the Jelling stones.
Sweyn Forkbeard (? to 1014)
Son of Harald Bluetooth, he likely deposed his father who died wretchedly on the run. Sweyn or Sven went on to conquer England, becoming first of the Danish kings of England.
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