4

‘The devastation of all the islands of Britain by the Heathens’

However we rank the reasons for the Vikings’ sudden and dramatic eruption into the written records of England and Ireland at the turn of the eighth century, there is little debate about the importance of the longship, with its large sail, in making such raiding possible. The story of the introduction of sail into Scandinavia as told by the Gotland picture-stones is of a slow evolution, taking place from the sixth to the eighth centuries, in which a rudimentary piece of cloth fastened high on a pole gradually turned into a sophisticated, full-sized sail, with a tall mast and ropes that gave a high degree of control over its tension and orientation to the wind.¹ Some might argue that the mere possession of a technological wonder like this, and the desire to exploit it fully, must be counted among the reasons for the onset of the Viking Age.

It is thought that boat-builders worked in pairs, perhaps with a master craftsman on one side and an apprentice on the other, who was able to watch and mirror his techniques. Tools used were mainly chisels, hammers, axes and a type of drill that rested against the breastbone as the handle was turned. Most of the work was done using the long-handled cutting axe, heavier than a hand-axe and with a short, almost straight edge. Builders of reconstruction boats report that the most arduous and time-consuming part of the work was the shaving and shaping of the boards, a job that called for the broad-edged ‘bearding-axe’.

Logs for ship-building were split with a club and wedge along the central pith rays that gave further splits into four, eight, sixteen and sometimes thirty-two parts. The advantage of this was that the integrity of the wood-fibre system was preserved, minimizing the penetration of water and providing good resistance to rot. It also made for a boat that was light in weight but flexible and strong, qualities that were perfect for the Viking raiding tactic of beaching in locations thought to be inaccessible to warships. The mild climate of those times produced huge oak forests, and the very large number of trees from which the boat-builder could choose meant that for those parts, such as the keel and hull of the boat, where a curve was needed, he was able to pick out a tree in which such a curve occurred naturally. This ability to ‘see’ the shape of a plank inside a growing tree must have been an essential part of the Viking Age boat-builder’s skill. A builder of reconstruction boats found that the use of naturally curving planks gave up to twenty times more resilience in the timber than planking that had been sawn to shape.² The keel could not be jointed, so the length of the timber dictated the length of the boat. A socket construction called the ‘mast-fish’ held the mast, which could be lowered and removed when not required, and the rectangular sails were made of wool reinforced with leather bands.

A characteristic of the longship was a steering-oar mounted at the rear on a small shaft on the starboard side (from the Old Norse styrbord, meaning ‘steering side’) of the ship. The familiar stern-mounted rudder of the modern boat is a more efficient navigational device, and since the Vikings had the technology to make the iron hinges on which to hang a sternpost rudder it is natural to wonder why they did not do so. The strongest advantage seems related to the shallowness of the draft, in that it enabled navigation in almost any type of water, from the open North Sea to the rivers and streams of Ireland, Francia, England and the lands east of the Baltic. Fully extended at sea, the oar hung vertically below the level of the ship itself in a leather strap and could be easily adjusted up or down to allow for differences in the depths of the water. It could also be loosened from the strap and stored horizontally when navigating in shallow waters, or prior to landing on a beach. It enabled ships to load or unload cargoes from a river bank, or when beached at low tide. The ease of removing it would enable boats to be dragged deep inland up narrow rivers and towed backwards to open water where there was no possibility of turning round, a manoeuvre that would be impossible for a ship with a rudder mounted on the sternpost.³

The longship, high at both ends, with the large keel that was essential to maintain stability when crossing an ocean and its retractable side-oar that functioned as a rudder remains, for most people, the symbol of the Viking Age. The idea of the purpose-built vessel, in particular one designed for use as a merchant ship, does not seem to have arisen until a time somewhere between the building of the Gokstad ship in about 900 and of the five ships discovered at Skuldelev,⁴ built around the middle of the eleventh century, that had been filled with boulders in their old age and scuttled to protect the approaches to the harbour at Roskilde, then the capital of Denmark. These were discovered and raised in the 1960s.⁵ Taken together they offer a fairly representative selection of the range of ships in use in the Viking Age.

Each vessel revealed a different functional design: Skuldelev 1 was an ocean-going trading vessel, possibly a knarr, with decks fore and aft and open holds amidships. She would have been crewed by six to eight men. Regardless of size, ships were not fitted with benches and men would use their sea-chests to sit on when rowing. Skuldelev 2 was a longship that would have had a crew of about seventy men. It has been estimated that with sixty men manning the thirty pairs of oars (by way of comparison, Oseberg had fifteen) Skuldelev 2 would have been able to maintain a speed of about six knots for long periods of time. Under sail and in favourable wind conditions she could probably have reached twenty knots. Dendrochronological analysis shows that Skuldelev 2 was built from trees felled in a forest at Glendalough, north of Dublin, in about 1042. Skuldelev 3 was a small, oak-built trading and transport ship. She had an open hold with space for about four tons of cargo. Skuldelev 5 (Skuldelev 4 turned out to be part of Skuldelev 2) was a small longship of the type known as a snekke with thirteen pairs of oars and room for thirty warriors on board. Tests with a replica showed that, even when fully manned, she drew no more than 50 centimetres of water. Skuldelev 6 was a high-sided fishing vessel that probably also saw service as a ferry boat.

The Skuldelev ships were built mainly of oak, with ash and pine also being used, and in the ‘clinker-built’ style, working from the outside in, with each board overlapping the one below it and fastened to it with iron rivets. By contrast with the Oseberg ship, on which the fibres, up to 3 metres long, used by whales to filter the seawater for their food,⁶ were used to bind her shipboards to the interior struts - something that gave her hull a remarkable flexibility - the Skuldelev ships were jointed with nails.⁷ Caulking was done with moss and tar, and they all showed signs of having been repaired or adapted at some point in their lives, with rotten or damaged planks being replaced. Among the tools employed would have been a two-pronged iron ‘nail-seeker’ used to locate and cut rivet heads of the type found at the excavations of a Viking Age ship-building site at Paviken on Gotland.⁸

No rigging has survived in any of the ship-graves discovered so far, and for our knowledge of the sails and rigging of Viking ships we are dependent on the picture-stones from Gotland, some of which, like the Alaskog stone and the Stora Hammars stone from Lärbro, show remarkable detail. A stone of unknown provenance shows a relatively rare representation of a longship with her sails reefed. Coins from the later Viking Age sometimes display longships, like the coin found in 2000 near Lake Tissø. The coin and a number of picture-stones show shields mounted on a ‘shield-rail’ running round the railing of the ship, like the sixty-four yellow and black shields buried with the Gokstad chieftain on his ship. Ship-building as an industry throughout the Viking Age must have been a major part of the daily life of very large numbers of a great many communities, and the foresters, carpenters, blacksmiths, sail-makers, rope-makers and labourers involved must have been legion; yet the sagas convey nothing of this. Perhaps it was the very ubiquity of its sights and sounds that left the industry unremarked, unless it were that their authors hailed mostly from treeless Iceland where little ship-building was done and old ships patched up and kept afloat for as long as possible.

The wealth of incidental detail concerning navigation scattered across Heimskringla and in the sagas suggests the use of techniques ranging from the simple plumbline to avoid shallows and the countless tiny and rocky skjær that form a natural barrier to so much of the Norwegian coastline, to the sophistications of a sun-compass. When crossing the open sea the Vikings would use ‘dead-reckoning’, a method of navigation that involved observing the latitude and estimating the longitude to give some idea of the total distance travelled. Latitude sailing necessitated the use of a navigational aid called a ‘sun-shadow board’. This was a wooden disc with a pin or gnomon at the centre that could be adjusted up or down according to the time of year. It was floated in a bowl of water and the shadow of the sun at noon noted. If the ship was on course then the shadow would reach a circle marked on the board. If it passed beyond, the ship was north of this latitude. Should it fail to reach the circle she was south of it and the skipper could make the necessary adjustments. A cauldron of the type found in the aft or ‘kitchen’ section of the Oseberg ship, when not in use for on-board cooking, could have been used to float the device. There is archaeological evidence in the form of a partial wooden disc, found in 1948 at Uunartoq fjord, near the Eastern Settlement, one of the two colonies established by the Vikings in Greenland in about 985.⁹ It is marked with hyperbolas and sixteen small cuts crossing a long line that seems to indicate north. Dated to about 1000, in its complete form it would have measured about 7 cm in diameter, with thirty-two carved triangular points cut around its circumference. The shadow cast by the tip of a gnomon in the centre of the disc described different hyperbolas at different times of the year. In the few weeks of the year around the summer solstice, at latitude 62° north of the equator, rotating the disc until the shadow of the tip fell on the curve would give the general directions with sufficient accuracy to sail a bearing. A second and more complete sun-compass, dated to the eleventh century, was found at Wolin in Poland in 2002.¹⁰

A reference in a late and literary source describes the use of a ‘sun-stone’, a mineral that occurs in several forms in Iceland with the property of polarizing light when held up in the direction of the sun. Raudulfs tháttr, a short story preserved in a manuscript from the early fourteenth century, describes the visit of the Norwegian King Olav Haraldson to the home of a rich farmer named Raudulf. Olav asked his host’s son Sigurd if he had any special talents, and the youth replied that indeed he did - he was able to tell the time, day or night, even when no celestial body was visible. The king was interested and on the following day, which was overcast, he challenged the youth to demonstrate his skills. Once Sigurd had done so, Olav ordered a sun-stone to be brought out and held up to the sky in the general direction the sun was thought to be. In the story the light streams through the prism and Sigurd’s remarkable talent is confirmed to the king’s satisfaction.

In general, there is uncertainty about the degree of astronomical knowledge the Vikings had. Oddi Helgason, a twelfth-century Icelander known as Star-Oddi for his knowledge of astronomical phenomena, kept an almanac with precise calculations of the occurrence of the summer and winter solstices and diverse other mathematical observations, but it is not known whether Oddi merely noted down knowledge that had been common in the far north since the ninth century, or was a genius responsible for the calculations himself. ¹¹ Another enigma involves thirty lenses of rock crystal that are part of the collection of the Visby Museum on Gotland. Dating from the very late Viking period, and at first assumed to be ornamental trinkets, tests conducted on the lenses revealed that they had imaging powers as good as those of modern optics.¹² They had obviously been made on a turning lathe and were of such high quality that they could have been used as magnifiers, as fire-starters, to cauterize wounds, or even to make up the light-chain in a telescope. Their rarity has led to the supposition that they were not the work of a Viking Age craftsman but came originally from the more advanced workshops of Constantinople or ancient Persia. To all such speculations we can only add the further presumption that efficient and safe long-distance navigation involved for the Vikings a knowledge of the major landmarks observable on the longer voyages; of the direction and strength of currents at sea; of birds - particularly sea-birds - and of their environments and habits of flight; of cloud formations; of the use of both day and night sky as an almanac; as well as a developed sensitivity to the subtleties of sea, sky and weather well in excess of anything we possess now.

Simple dead-reckoning would have sufficed to cross the sea to northern Britain from the west coast of Norway, and there was a second raid in Northumbria in the year after Lindisfarne, when Vikings ‘ravaged in Northumbria, and plundered Ecgfrith’s monastery atDonemuthan’.¹³ Alcuin, with his local knowledge, had warned the religious communities at nearby Wearmouth and Jarrow to be on their guard - ‘You live by the sea from whence this plague first came.’ Simeon of Durham identified the site of the monastery at the mouth of the Don as Jarrow, and reported with satisfaction that its great protector St Cuthbert had not allowed the Heathens to go away unpunished,

for their chief was killed by the English with a cruel death, and after a short space of time the violence of a storm battered, destroyed and broke to pieces their ships, and the sea overwhelmed many of them. Some were cast on the shore, and soon killed without mercy. And these things befell them rightly, for they had gravely injured those who had not injured them.¹⁴

The thirteenth-century historian Roger of Wendover referred to a raid on Northumbria a few years later in 800, by ‘the most impious armies of the pagans [who] cruelly despoiled the churches of Hartness and Tynemouth, and returned with its plunder to the ships’, after which the focus of the raiding turned to religious sites in Ireland and in the Western Isles of Scotland, a region which the Irish Christian scribes of the Annals of Ulster regarded as falling within their sphere of interest and of whose sufferings at the hands of the Vikings they duly opened an account.¹⁵ The annals for 794 note the ‘devastation of all the islands of Britain by the Heathens’, the following year that the Isle of Skye was ‘overwhelmed and laid waste’. Iona, a religious site that was, if anything, more sacred to Christians even than Lindisfarne, was attacked for the first time in 795, and again in 802. In 806 the monastery was burned down and the community of sixty-eight people killed. The monastery was attacked again the following year.

There are no records of raids on Orkney or Shetland, sixty miles to the north of it, but with a fair wind Shetland lay only twenty-four hours’ sailing west of Bergen and we may be sure they took place. Finds of combs made from the antler of reindeer, an animal not indigenous to the islands, have been taken as likely evidence of contact between Norwegians and the aboriginal Pictish inhabitants of the island from the time before things turned violent.¹⁶ A degree of activity that the annalists saw fit to describe as the ‘devastation of all the islands of Britain’¹⁷ probably implies the existence as early as the 790s of a base in the north from which the raiders could easily reach targets further west round the coast of Scotland, and to which they could return without risking a North Sea crossing each time. The Northern Isles would have been the most obvious location of such a base. The date given by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the Lindisfarne raid is 8 January (the ides of January). Following Simeon of Durham in the History of the Church of Durham, written some 300 years later, historians have conventionally altered this to 7 June (the ides of June), on the grounds that a crossing of the North Sea in an open boat in the dead of winter would have been unthinkable.¹⁸ The objection would be less compelling had the raiders started their journey not from Norway but from some such local base to the north. There is increasing acceptance of the likelihood that part of this first manifestation of Viking violence involved the colonization of the Orkneys, and shortly afterwards of the Western Isles of Scotland, and that before the middle of the ninth century a de facto Viking kingdom, referred to by the Irish annalists as Lothlend, Laithlinn or Lochlainn, had come into being and ruled over both, as well as over the Caithness and Sutherland regions of north-east mainland Scotland, and was independent of the power structure in Norway.¹⁹

The Orkneyinga Saga, a narrative history of the Norwegian presence on the islands written down in Iceland in about 1200, does not begin its tale until much later, with the establishment of the islands as a Norwegian earldom in the last two or three decades of the ninth century. The Norwegian King Harald Finehair crosses the North Sea as part of his campaign to unify the inhabited territories of Norway under his kingship. His immediate purpose was

to teach a lesson to certain vikings whose plunderings he could no longer tolerate. These vikings used to raid in Norway over summer and had Shetland and Orkney as their winter base. Harald conquered Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides, then sailed all the way to the Isle of Man where he laid its settlement in ruins. During his campaign he fought a number of battles, winning himself territories further west than any King of Norway has done since. In one of these battles Earl Rognvald’s son Ivar was killed. On his way back to Norway, King Harald gave Earl Rognvald Shetland and Orkney in compensation for his son, but Rognvald gave all the islands to his brother Sigurd, the fo’c’sle-man on King Harald’s ship. When the King sailed back east he gave Sigurd the title of earl and Sigurd stayed on in the islands.²⁰

Details involving their own ancestors are what seemed important to the storyteller and his audience in the early thirteenth century; who or what preceded them on the islands was of lesser interest. At the time the Viking Age began in the west, a community of Picts had been living on the islands since the fourth century, as part of a larger kingdom comprising the Northern Picts in what is now the Caithness area, and the Southern Picts in the area known as ‘The Mounth’.²¹ Little is known of their society, but it seems to have been Christian. According to Adomnán, an abbot of Iona in the late seventh century and the biographer of Columba, the community’s founder, the saint visited the Picts in the course of his missionary work and made some converts at the court of their king, Bridei. A Bishop Cuiritán is reported to have preached the gospel to them from a base at the head of the Moray Firth, and a congregation of Pictish memorial stones in the area seems to confirm the existence of a Christian centre there.²² Adomnán also writes that monks from Iona were living in a hermitage on the Orkneys during the sixth century, and there may have been a church on St Ninian’s Isle by the eighth century.²³

The size and ferocity of the Viking warbands that began to appear towards the end of the eighth century severed the links of these Orcadian Picts to their fellows on the mainland and left them to their fate. The toponymists tell us that names of all the towns, settlements, farms, rivers and natural features of the landscape of the Shetland and Orkney Islands are, with the obvious exception of modern names, of Norse origin. Only the name Orkney itself, which means ‘seal-island’, is pre-Scandinavian. This is a very unusual state of affairs and the interpretation of it is controversial. It may mean only that, within a fairly short space of time around the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries, practically all native Picts were wiped out. Such a campaign would have been in the spirit of the Vikings’ well-documented slaughter of whole communities of Christian ecclesiastics in the surrounding regions at about the same time. A parallel has been drawn with the situation in nineteenth-century Tasmania, where the combination of disease and a colonial campaign of slaughter by the British resulted in the disappearance of not only the aboriginal peoples but also of all the aboriginal place-names.²⁴ The oldest farm-names in the Orkneys show that the Vikings brought their Heathendom west with them. Mill Bay on the eastern side of Stronsay has the Norwegian coast as its nearest landfall in the east, and among the names of Norse origin found there are Odness, also known as Odin Ness, and an Iron Age dry-stone wall structure of the type known as a ‘broch’, which acquired the name God-Odina. Below the broch is a beach named Dritness. In the Book of the Settlements Ari tells us that ‘Dritsker’ was the name of the skerry appointed for use as a public toilet by those attending the Assembly site at Thorolf Mostrarskegg’s temple-farm at Hofstadir in Iceland. The geographical proximity of two so resonantly named sites on an Orkney island may well have been typical of Heathen Viking settlements, identifying this particular site as a place at which assemblies were held. Another farm-name that reinforces the association with south-west Norway is Avaldsay on Rousay, just north of Orkney’s Mainland island, was probably named from Avaldsnes in Karmøy, in Rogaland, the place from which, in the later years of the ninth century, Harald Finehair began his campaign to unify Norway.²⁵

A second explanation for the missing Pictish names may be that the arrival of a Viking warrior aristocracy occasioned only a transfer of power from the ousted Pictish leaders of the native community. For these the consequences might be very dramatic, for those lower down the social scale less so. The latter would simply orientate themselves towards a new set of leaders to whom to pay their taxes and from whom to request protection. Finds in 1970 and 1971 at a Norse farm built on top of a Pictish house on the Point of Buckquoy, at Birsay in Orkney, have been used to support this theory, interpreting the presence of Pictish bone pins and bone combs at the Norse cultural level as a sign that the Vikings had obtained these and other items of domestic equipment from a surviving but subjugated native population. A third possibility is that the Picts who survived a first wave of conquest simply fled the islands in fear and left the Vikings with no local naming culture to relate to at all.

A lean linguistic survival from pre-Norse times in the Orkneys and Shetland sheds little light on these matters. Effectively this consists of a single inscription, that on the Bressay stone found at Cullbinsgarth in Shetland in the early 1850s. A number of theories concerning the script and its meaning have been adopted and discarded since its discovery. Some linguists interpret the writing as a mixture of Old Norse runes and a linear form of script called ogham, which was developed in the south-east of Ireland during the fourth century and is known to have been used by the Picts. They interpret the mixture as evidence of contact, communication and cultural continuity between Picts and Vikings, and even as evidence that some Vikings had adopted Christianity by the time the stone was cut.²⁶ Commemorative inscriptions in mixed languages of a later period, from the Isle of Man, provide a theoretical justification for this type of interpretation. The problem is that there is no general agreement about what the inscription on the Bressay stone means, and interpretation is hindered by its decayed and damaged state.²⁷

The archaeological record is similarly a case of sparse material remains that give rise to conflicting interpretations. The discovery of Pictish artefacts, usually pottery, in Norse-style houses, and of Viking artefacts in Pictish houses, might indicate peaceful continuity between the two cultures, or it could indicate that the Vikings killed the Picts and took over their houses and buildings. Geneticists, precise in their measurements, can give no unequivocal answer to these riddles. In a survey carried out in 2000 for the BBC television series Blood of the Vikings by Professor Daniel Goldstein and a team from University College, London, 60 per cent of the male population of Shetland and Orkney were found to have DNA of Norwegian origin. One condition of the testing was that the island volunteers were able to trace back their male lineage in the same area for at least three generations.²⁸ A study that limited testing to men with surnames going back to the end of the earldom in the Orkneys in 1469 found an even higher percentage correlation with Norwegian DNA, indicating a genetic deposit from Vikings of somewhere between 60 and 100 per cent.²⁹ This could equally be the result of a gradual process over time, or of the summary extinction of the indigenous local population over a very short period of time.

The unknown author of the Historia Norwegie, a synoptic twelfth-century history of Norway, includes in his account a brief and half-mythological history of the Orkneys at about the turn of the eighth century. At that time, he tells us, the islands were occupied by Irish priests and Picts. A fleet of Norwegians arrived and ‘totally destroyed these people of their long-established dwellings and made the islands subject to themselves’.³⁰ He describes the Picts as an industrious people whose strength would mysteriously desert them in the middle of the day, so that they would run away and hide themselves ‘for fear in underground chambers’.³¹ Such timidity, and the fact that he described them as a half-mythical race of goblins, ‘only a little taller than pygmies’, might be the vestiges of a Viking Age dehumaniz ation of the Picts that was a psychologically necessary precondition for killing them easily, rather as Charlemagne’s capitularies of about the same time ruled that no compensation was payable for the killing of a Heathen, on the grounds that the unbaptized were not fully human.

Where the evidence is so flimsy and ambiguous, its interpretation will tend to reflect the view of human nature of the interpreter. The optimist finds evidence of a saturation degree of Scandinavian immigration that led to a new social synthesis. The pessimist, with a glance over his or her shoulder at recent events in Nazi Germany, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and aware of the record of Viking atrocities carried out in the region at the same period, will conclude that the only realistic explanation for the riddle of the missing Orcadian place-names and the DNA of the islands’ current inhabitants is a genocide. In his early eleventh-century Chronicle, Adémar of Chabannes, the French Benedictine, imputed a genocidal ‘thought’ to Viking encroachments upon Ireland:

At this time the aforesaid Normans invaded the Hibernian island of Ireland with a large fleet, something their fathers had never dared to do, together with their wives and children and the Christian captives, whom they had made their slaves, with the intention that with the Irish wiped out, they themselves could inhabit this very prosperous country.

Anomalies of place-naming in the Outer Hebrides suggest a scenario similar in most respects to that involving Shetland and the Orkneys: the killing or capture and sale as slaves of the original inhabitants, in a process so swift and complete as to leave behind only fragmentary traces of the place-names used by those original inhabitants.³² By the middle of the ninth century the Irish annalists had started to refer to the Hebrides as ‘Na hInnsi Gall’ or ‘the islands of the foreigners’. A second genetic survey of the populations of the Northern and Western Isles, carried out by scientists from the University of East Anglia and published in 2005, looked at both the female mitochondrial DNA as well as the male Y-chromosomal and found that the figure for overall Scandinavian ancestry among inhabitants of the Northern Isles was about 44 per cent for Shetland and 30 per cent for the Orkneys, with roughly equal genetic contributions from Scandinavian males and females.³³ Scandinavian ancestry for inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides was lower, at about 15 per cent, and the findings showed a much higher contribution to the gene pool from Scandinavian males than females. The likely explanation is that the patterns of settlement were different. In the geographically closer Northern Isles, Viking settlers brought their Scandinavian families over with them from Norway, while the typical Hebridean settler was a young Viking who took from among the local girls, whether they were willing or not. Males among the local population were deprived of even this melancholy option. The ‘hostage stone’, a slate found in separate pieces and on separate occasions on the Hebridean island of Inchmarnock in 2001 and 2002, shows a crude drawing that probably symbolizes the fate of those who were not killed: three men wearing chain mail, one wild-haired, another armed with a spear, appear to be conducting a shackled man to a waiting longship. He holds what may be a reliquary and his head is bowed as he contemplates the life of slavery that awaits him over the seas.³⁴

After the raids of 806 and 807 the remains of the community at Iona crossed the North Channel to Ireland to begin work on a safe refuge at Kells in Ireland, a retreat that marked a first tangible effect of Viking terror directed against Christian targets. But as we have seen, Ireland itself had already become a target. In 795 the monastery at Rechru was burnt, and in 798 St Patrick’s Island was attacked and the Vikings ‘took the cattle-tribute of the territories and broke the shrine of Do-Chonna’.³⁵ The country had been Christian since the fifth century, and it was from Ireland, and the monastery centres of the Western Isles founded by Irishmen, that Christianity was exported to northern Britain in the succeeding centuries. The cultivation of monastic life over three centuries led to the establishment of communities in the vicinity of monasteries with many of the features of trading towns. A seventh-century account of the community that had evolved around the monastery at Kildare refers to the ‘multitudes who live there’, in a place where ‘no man need fear any mortal adversary or any gathering of enemies’. ‘And who could number the varieties of people who gather there in countless throngs from all provinces? Some come for the abundance of its feasts; others, in ill-health, come for a cure; others come simply to watch the crowds go by.’ ‘A great metropolitan city’, a contemporary historian called it.³⁶ By the time of the first Viking raids the practice of working precious metal into altar-vessels, book-covers and shrines had become part of the religious culture of these Irish monastic centres. As a result of the legal functions that fell to them, such as the pledging of agreements, each monastery probably disposed of a collection of valuable objects like brooches.³⁷ Beyond their walls the picture that emerges from the law codes of the political organization of early ninth-century Ireland is of a hierarchy of kings. Chieftains with authority over local areas recognized the authority of a group of about five more powerful regional kings, who in their turn acknowledged the superiority of a yet more powerful ‘king of overkings’, an office associated with the kingdom of Tara on the central east coast of the island, who claimed precedence over them all.³⁸

Map of Ireland showing the locations of some of the early raids and the longphort bases established by the Vikings.

The main literary sources for this field of Viking activity are the Annals of Ulster, a fifteenth-century compilation from earlier sources, the Annals of the Four Masters, a seventeenth-century compilation from medieval monastic sources that uses the Annals of Ulster for some of its later entries, and the late Fragmentary Annals of Ireland which, as the name implies, is a collection of the fragmentary survivals of lost annals that ranges from 573 to 914. Preceding and then accompanying the descriptions of Viking activity in Ireland in these sources are references to a close association between the political and religious authorities that fostered rivalries between the neighbouring monasteries and often led to pitched battles in which large numbers of people were killed. In 807 the Annals of Ulster report ‘a battle between the community of Corcach and the community of Cluain Ferta Brénainn, among whom resulted a slaughter of a countless number of ordinary ecclesiastics and of eminent men of the community of Corcach’.³⁹ In 831 the fair at Tailtiu turned into a riot that began in some unspecified dissension over holy relics, ‘and many died as a result’.⁴⁰ By a well-established tradition, family was the crucial factor in succession to church office in Ireland. Feidlimid, son of Crimthann, of the Eoghanacht dynasty of Munster, was both king and cleric who seized power in 820, interfered in the politics of Armagh in 823 and 836 to take the side of a favoured candidate in a succession dispute, feuded endlessly with the Clonmacnoise, carried out the ‘smashing of the southern Uí Briúin’ in 830 and took by force the abbacy of Cork in 836.⁴¹ And yet there is just a hint that the parties in such fighting tried in principle to observe certain behavioural limits. In 833 the chieftain Feidlimid executed members of the community of Clonmacnoise ‘and burned their church-lands to the very door of the church’. The community of Dairmag suffered similar treatment, we are told. They, too, had their lands burnt, ‘to the very door of the church’. The annalist seems to be making a point here, that the burning of churches was a transgression unique to the Vikings, and one that was in defiance of a logic that must have told them it would make better economic sense to leave them standing, for their store of replenishable treasures would have been available to steal again that much more quickly. Sanctuary was respected. Where breaches of sanctuary by fellow-Irishmen occurred, compensation was paid to the monasteries involved.⁴² At the very least there would be formal pronouncement of a curse on the intruders. Nor did the Irish aristocrats who waged war against each other’s monasteries count, among the spoils of victory, the right to sell the defeated into slavery. Viking cruelty was regarded as being in a class of its own. Implying that this was no normal hunting practice, the annal for 828 reports ‘a great slaughter of porpoises on the coast of Ard Cianachta by the foreigners’.⁴³ The Vikings had discovered, either through torture or treachery, the Christian custom of housing the remains of their revered dead in sumptuous containers like the ‘shrine of gold and silver’ which contained the bones of a certain Conlaed; or the ‘gold and silver casket’ in which the remains of Ronan, son of Berach, were placed.⁴⁴ In 824 they plundered the monastery at Bennchor (Bangor), ‘destroyed the oratory and shook the relics of Comgall from their shrine’. Blamac was an Irish chieftain’s son who had chosen life as a monk of Iona. His martyrdom in 825 at the hands of the Vikings became the subject of a lament by Walafrid Strabo, a scholar at the Frankish court of Charlemagne’s son, Louis the Pious. Blamac had gone to Iona knowing well that the Vikings had already attacked the island several times, and when they did so yet again he took it upon himself to warn other monks to flee for their lives, but stayed behind himself to bury the holy relics of St Columba. Strabo relates that he was tortured to death by Vikings trying to discover their whereabouts. In a raid on Étar (Howth) in 821, at which they ‘carried off a great number of women’, the raiders showed that they had discovered the potential of these territories for the slavery which was to fund so much of their activity over the next two centuries. And they had quickly learnt the significance for Christian communities of the Church calendar, and the advantages to be had from raiding on feast days, when the crowds of people who flocked to the monasteries to trade and buy could themselves be stolen away and traded on.

As the relentless nature of the new threat became apparent, some among the approximately 150 kings of Ireland, great and small, began to engage the Vikings in battle. A militarized Church leadership joined in, putting abbots into the field at the head of their own monastery armies. In 811 there was ‘a slaughtering of the pagans at the hands of the Ulaid’ that came to the admiring attention of the Royal Frankish Annals in the following year, and Viking forces were beaten twice more in 812. The annalists continue to note sundry atrocities and encounters: in 821 the Vikings occupied the islands of Wexford Harbour, in the same year as the annalist reported the abduction into slavery of the women of Étar. In 823 and 824 they invaded Bangor, and in 824 raided the remote hermitage of Skellig Michael, off the Kerry coast, carrying off a hermit named Éitgal who shortly afterwards died of hunger and thirst, whether from deliberate maltreatment or in self-denial the annals do not say. Indeed, by contrast with the makers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Irish annalists are almost conventionally reticent, though that very reticence conveys the fate of a harmless individual like Éitgal, and of all those taken away into slavery, perhaps better than outrage would. When he tells us that the captives were ‘led away’, or that they were ‘brought to the ships’ or ‘taken away’ and sometimes ‘taken away to the ships’, we realize that these are stoicisms and not euphemisms. In 831 the Vikings raided Conaille in County Louth, captured the king and his brother and took them back to their ships as prisoners. In 832 they discovered the wealth of the Armagh monastery and attacked it three times in one month. Churches at Mucnám, Lugbad, Uí Mécth and elsewhere were plundered, more monasteries and churches burnt, more people abducted into slavery. Just occasionally one of those ‘led away’ makes a reappearance in the annals. In 845 Forannán, abbot of Armagh, with his collection of relics, was captured by the Heathens ‘and brought to the ships of Luimnech’. The following year, without further explanation from the annalist, the same Forannán returns ‘from the lands of Mumu [Munster] with the halidoms of Patrick’. He resumed his previous post but retired two years later and a final entry records his peaceful death in 852. Probably only a very few of the abducted were as fortunate.

Thus far the Vikings had confined their attacks to coastal targets. From about the 830s onwards they began forcing their way ever deeper inland as a prelude to larger and more organized raiding that was probably also an investigation of the possibilities of settlement and/or colonization. In 837 two fleets of sixty ships each arrived on the Boyne and the Liffey, a likely raiding force of between 3,000 and 4,000 men. They ‘plundered the plain of Life and the plain of Brega, including churches, forts and dwellings’ and brought ‘havoc in all the lands of the Connachta’. The death at the hands of Cianacht of a chieftain named Saxolb (Old Norse Saxulfr) is noted in that year, the first Viking name to appear in the written record after some forty years of incessant raiding. It was progress of a sort, a sign that the two sides were at least in communication with each other. But with no monarch seeking the tangible prize of a coherent kingship to take over, the sides seemed doomed to decades of intermittent and inconclusive warfare.

If the fragmented nature of secular power in Ireland and the ad hoc nature of the chieftains’ military organization made a territorial takeover of Ireland an impractical goal, these conditions did provide an opportunity for Viking leaders to become involved in regional conflicts between the great families that could help them force a legitimate way into the native power structures. In the late 830s a Viking army was defeated at Derry by a force whose leaders included Murchad mac Máele Dúin, a deposed king of Ailech. This Murchad was father to a son named Erulb. Linguists suggest this may be an Irish version of the Norwegian name Herulfr, indicating that the child may have been the result of a marriage alliance. And with intermarriage came bilingualism, religious flexibility and all the subtle yet profound effects that follow when cultures that collide violently wheel, like colliding galaxies, into accommodation with each other.⁴⁵ In due course Olaf, the first king of Dublin, is said to have married a daughter of an Irish high-king, Aed Finlaith. When a later king, Ivar, died in 873 the annalist wrote that he ‘rested with Christ’, though whether this was merely formulaic or not is impossible to tell. Marriage between a Heathen and an Irish princess must have involved the Viking in some kind of conciliatory gesture towards Christianity. At the least he was probably asked to submit to the ceremony of the prima signatio or ‘prime-signing’, the ‘first marking with a cross’ that became, throughout the Christian world, an important tool of correspondence for those on both sides who were determined not to let religious belief stand in the way of business and power politics. Prime-signing was a preliminary to baptism. In one of its fuller forms the priest would lay his hand upon the catechumen’s head, breathe on him to drive out evil spirits, make the sign of the cross on his forehead and place a corn of salt on his tongue to symbolize his purification in Christ. With this provisional ceremony out of the way Christians might trade and interact with Heathens as they wished.⁴⁶

Another change that evolved out of the confusion and violence of the first decades of raiding was the appearance from about the middle of the century of a new group of warriors whom the annals call the Gall-Gædhil or ‘Foreigner-Celts’. They were a mixed group, some being Irish renegades who had opportunistically adopted the lifestyle of the invaders, others the products of the union of Norwegian and Irish, still others Irish raised by Viking foster-fathers. Between 830 and 880 the annals record eighty-three incidents of Norse burnings and plunderings in Ireland. The record of similar assaults by Irish forces during the same period is modest by contrast, a mere ten. Three more were attributed to these Gall-Gædhil.⁴⁷ Their loyalties were to themselves and they fought now on the Viking side against the Irish, now for the Irish against the Vikings. In this they were, in truth, no different from either the Irish or the Vikings themselves. Cinaed, king of North Brega, rebelled in 850 against the high-king Mael Sechnaill and, joining forces with a Viking band, ravaged the lands of the southern Úi Néill. Inevitably the frail ethical code that had protected Irish clerics and church buildings from the worst of the secular violence gave way and it was the raw brutality of the Vikings that prevailed. During the attack on the church at Trevet 260 people who sought refuge in the oratory were burnt alive. Cinaed was finally captured and executed by drowning, ‘in a dirty stream’, according to a source, though the quality of the water can scarcely have mattered to him.

The available archaeological evidence reinforces the commonsense notion that the raiders during the first fifty years of the Irish Viking Age came, in the main, from the south-west coast of Norway. Viking Age graves excavated in the region at Gausel, near Stavanger in northern Jæren, contain the highest concentration of artefacts of Irish origin found outside Ireland.⁴⁸ These include the grave of a female discovered in 1883 by a local farmer, which was lost and subsequently rediscovered in 1997. Among over forty items buried with her were an Irish hanging bowl and two Irish bronze mounts from a reliquary shrine. An analysis of the 500 or so items of insular metalwork found in Scandinavia led to a similar conclusion: most of the graves identified as being from the decades around 800 were in the Sogn og Fjordane and Møre og Romsdal areas of western Norway, and in most of them the grave-goods were of Irish ecclesiastical origin.⁴⁹ Linguists are also able to tell us that the forty or so loan-words absorbed by Irish during the Viking Age point to the south-west of Norway as their place of origin.

A significant development occurred in 848 with the arrival in Ireland of a fleet bearing another large number of Scandinavian warriors, these so distinct from their original tormentors that the annalists called them ‘the dark Heathens’ or ‘the black foreigners’. They were Danes. They attacked and overwhelmed their rivals, the Finngall or ‘fair foreigners’ of Norway at their base in what would later be Dublin, killing a great many of them and robbing them of their possessions. The Norwegians re-grouped and in 852 a fleet of 160 ships engaged the Danes in a ferocious sea-battle at Snám Aignech that lasted three days and nights before the Danes emerged triumphant. Even for violent times these were exceptionally violent years. In four separate battles fought in 848 a total of precisely 2,600 men are said to have been killed. Among the dead at the battle at Sciath Nechtain was the Earl Tomrair, described as a ‘tanist of the king of Lochliann’. This mysterious king seems to have decided that now was the time to impose his authority on an increasingly chaotic situation. He sent his son Amlaíb, or Olaf, to Ireland at the head of a fleet of 140 ships for the purpose of exacting obedience from the various Norse bands operating there. ‘The foreigners of Ireland submitted to him,’ the annalist tells us, ‘and he took tribute from the Irish.’⁵⁰ This marked the start of the Norse kingdom of Dublin, one of several enclosed Viking colonies that developed out of the creation of permanent bases known as longphorts to service their ships. The most notable otherlongphort sites were at Hlymrekr (Limerick), Vethrafjörth (Waterford), Veigsfjörth (Wexford) and at Vikingalo (Wicklow). In time these evolved into Ireland’s first proper towns, superseding the rudimentary trading centres associated with the monasteries. Dublin may have remained a very insular kingship. The University College, London, genetic survey mentioned above also carried out tests in search of Viking DNA among the Irish, and while the complete absence of any in the samples taken from Castlerea, in the rural heart of the country, came as no surprise, since there has never been any suggestion that the Vikings established inland settlements of any size, the researchers were surprised at the similarly complete absence of any Scandinavian DNA in material taken within a 20-mile radius of Rush in north County Dublin that just swept the northern outskirts of the city. One of a number of possible explanations is that they did not settle much beyond the confines of the original site on the Liffey.⁵¹

The Viking takeover included the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea. Over thirty grave-finds from about 850 to 950 indicate Viking settlements on some of the best agricultural land on the island, in the north-west and south-east.⁵² As on the Orkneys, the names of a large number of features of the natural landscape, like the Snæfell peak and the Laxey river, are of Scandinavian origin. The Point of Ayre was formerly Eyranes, the Calf of Man, Manarkalfrinn. Saving Douglas and Rushen, no Celtic settlement names seem to have survived the arrival of the Vikings. Were it not for the fact that the Norwegian DNA signature from the UCL survey was about 15 per cent, declining in reciprocal proportion to the distance from Norway, the assumption might be that the island’s population suffered a fate similar to that of the Orcadian Picts. Evidence of a more harmonious encounter may be the mingled inscriptions on one of the crosses at Old Kirk Braddan, a late tenth-century tapering pillar with a small pierced ring at the cross head and a characteristically Scandinavian design of tiny dragon-like creatures with intricately twined limbs, tails and top-knots cut down one side. Along the other side a runic inscription announces that the cross was raised by a father with the Norwegian name of Thorleif, in memory of a son with the Celtic name of Fiac.⁵³ The island benefited from its proximity to Dublin and coin hoards from about 960 to about 990 show connections with England and Ireland, later hoards from about 1020 to 1080 indicating that the connections with Ireland had grown stronger. Because it is not confirmed in any of the Irish sources, historians are inclined to doubt the statement in the Orkneyinga Saga that King Harald Finehair got as far as the Isle of Man during his campaign to discipline unruly Vikings in the Orkneys; but, as part of the expansion of the earldom of Orkney in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries under Sigurd the Stout that brought the Western Isles of Scotland under his control, it is likely that Man entered the earldom’s sphere of influence. Later still, under Godfred Crovan in the eleventh century, it had its own kings who also ruled the Western Isles. A relic of this island kingdom survives today in the name of the bishopric, Sodor and Man - sodor being Súthreyjar or ‘the southern islands’, which the Hebrides were to these northern Vikings.

The Kingdom of Man and the Isles at its greatest extent in about 1095.

In Dublin, the intervention of the king of Lochlainn had brought a degree of stability to the region for the next few decades, a period referred to in the Irish annals as the ‘Forty Years Rest’. In 902 the Vikings were driven out of the city, but in 914 a huge fleet appeared off Waterford under the leadership of Ragnald and Sihtric Cáech. Already its Viking identity is compromised, for Sihtric was a member of the powerful Celtic-Norse Uí Ímhair dynasty and whose personal name was a gaelic rendering of the Scandinavian ‘Sigtrygg’. The nickname Cáech was a Celtic word meaning ‘squint’ - put together they show further evidence of the continuing process of acculturation. He defeated the O’Neill king of Tara, captured Dublin in 917 and took control of the otherlongphortsettlements at Waterford, Wexford and Limerick. With Man in the middle of the Irish Sea as a bridgehead, this was one of several opportunities that fell to Viking leaders in the ninth and tenth centuries to unite the kingdom of Dublin with York in the north-east of England, which, as we shall shortly see, had been a Viking kingdom since 866. In the hands of an ambitious and capable ruler a kingdom bridging the whole of northern Britain like this would have been very difficult for the English to resist and might have led to their conquest a full century before this was achieved by Sven Forkbeard and his son Cnut. But these Viking kingdoms were not monarchies, their kings not military visionaries, and the attractions of assimilation proved greater. Sihtric’s grandson Olaf married an O’Neill princess, was baptized in 943 and died in monkish old age on the island of Iona, which his forefathers had so often tried to destroy. The twelfth-century history known as the ‘War of the Irish with the Foreigners’ dramatized the Battle of Clontarf in 1014 and immortalized Brian Boru as a national, Christian and Irish ‘king of kings’, who finally triumphed over the barbaric and Heathen Vikings; but Brian’s principal opponent in the battle was the king of Leinster, Brian himself is said to have been too old to fight in the battle and, in truth, the Vikings had ceased to pose a threat to Irish society and its Christian culture some fifty years earlier.

The Orkney earl, Sigurd the Stout, was among those who died fighting at Clontarf for the Leinster king. His son Thorfinn, later called the Mighty, was five years old at the time of his father’s death and became the first Orkney earl to be raised a Christian. He continued the expansion of the earldom begun by his father and, after a successful career as a raider in the prime of his life, devoted himself in his later years to the conversion of a population still largely Heathen. After a pilgrimage to Rome where, theOrkneyinga Saga tells us, he received absolution from the pope for all his sins, he returned to his capital at Birsay and established a bishopric there.⁵⁴

Too remote to have formed part of Orkney, or any other kingdom or earldom, the Faroes are nevertheless linked to the islands south of them in reflecting the cultural assimilation going on there. According to the collection of texts gathered as the Færeyinga Saga, the first settler bore another Celtic-Norse combination of names, Grímur Kamban, and probably came from Man, Ireland or the Hebrides.⁵⁵ The saga, anxious to glorify his name, credits the Norwegian King Olaf Tryggvason with bringing Christianity to the islands at the end of the tenth century, though it seems tolerably certain he did not.⁵⁶ Someone certainly did: finds from excavations carried out during the late 1980s near the town of Leirvík on Eysturoy included, besides bronze pins in a recognizably Irish-Scandinavian style used for fastening a man’s cloak, two quite large wooden crosses made of larch that had probably arrived as driftwood from Siberia before being carved in a characteristically Irish ring-cross style.⁵⁷