Stories of Vikings ...... today on the wireless*

The Vikings have never done much for me.

Silly Viking helmet

In my league table of all time favourite bits of history they sit somewhere around the bottom of the list.

Now I know much work has been done to rehabilitate them over the last 50 years and today we have a much more rounded view of them.

It starts with a critical reinterpretation of the early English accounts which presented the Vikings as just vicious marauding pirates and  encompasses the on going archaeological discoveries which offer up a fascinating glimpse into their social life, and their trading activities.

All of which are there to see at the Jorvick Museum in York which holds many of the finds from the digs undertaken in the old Viking quarter of the city.***  

So I will put my prejudice in  my pocket and listen to The Orkneyinga Saga, today on Radio 4.

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Saga of the Earls of Orkney, as told in the 13th Century by an unknown Icelander. 

Marauders

This was the story of arguably the most important, strategically, of all the islands in the British Viking world, when the Earls controlled Shetland, Orkney and Caithness from which they could raid the Irish and British coasts, from Dublin round to Lindisfarne. 

The Saga combines myth with history, bringing to life the places on those islands where Vikings met, drank, made treaties, told stories, became saints, plotted and fought.

With, Judith Jesch, Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, Jane Harrison, Archaeologist and Research Associate at Oxford and Newcastle Universities, and Alex Woolf, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of St Andrews

Producer: Simon Tillotson

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production"*

And while I am listening to the story of the saga, I shall get down my own little bit of Viking history in the form of an oyster shell which was uncovered during the Jorvik dig in the 1970s.  

The archaeologists uncovered so many that they were offering them up for sale at 10p a shell, which was an offer I couldn't refuse.  

Leaving me just to say that the conventional image of a Viking warrior with helmet festooned with horns or wings is pure invention, a travesty of historical accuracy I visited years ago I visited years ago.***

Picture; drawings  from People in History, Volume one, From Caractacus to Alfred 1955 and Looking at History, 1956, R.J. Unstead, and that oyster shell, date unknown, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Orkneyinga Saga, In Our Time Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001zvvp

**Jorvik Viking Centre, https://www.jorvikvikingcentre.co.uk/ https://www.jorvikvikingcentre.co.uk/

***Viking helmets, a Zapata moustache, and some fierce looking chariots …… the silly story,  https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/10/viking-helmets-zapata-moustache-and.html 

Viking helmets, a Zapata moustache, and some fierce looking chariots …… the silly story

Now I grew up with horrible Vikings wearing wings on their helmets, Celtic war chariots driving into massed ranks of Roman soldiers, and more recently artistic reconstructions of Iceni warriors and marauding Danes with impressive Zapata moustaches.

None of which are historically accurate, although to be fair when some of them were drawn and reproduced in the history books I read in the 1950s they may have been based on accepted historical knowledge.

Others of course were pure tosh, arising from a vivid imagination and in the case of the chariot sequence in the film Ben Hur, old fashioned nail biting drama.

But then, when did historical accuracy count more than spectacle?

Of course, in the case of chariots and swords on wheels, Hollywood chose to believe that all ancient armies wouldn’t look the part without such vicious accompaniments.

And at the same time packaged up and distributed an image of the American West, which had been set in stone in the early twentieth century with the first cowboy films with Tom Mix and others.

As the editor in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance said,  "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."*

Leaving me just to reflect on that other way of reproducing scenes from the past where the artist is influenced by the present.

And here I am thinking of a collection of pictures drawn to illustrate The Making of the British which was a series published in the Observer Magazine.**

There were ten parts, and as you do I kept them all, but sadly I can no long remember when they were published, but I am thinking the late 1960s.

One shows Queen Boudicca, surrounded by an army of Iceni warriors and another of a Viking posing with sword in hand, and what they have in common is that pretty much all of them were sporting fine Zapata moustaches which were fashionable at the time.

And it reminds me of one of my favourite observations of the future, written by Thomas Hobbs in 1650, who wrote “No man can have in his mind a conception of the future for the future is not yet.  But of conceptions of the past, we make a future.”***

Which of course is equally applicable to those who attempt to depict the past, by drawing on the present.

I would love to have included the pictures, but fear I might fall foul of copyright.

So I won’t, but instead just comment that the rest of the Vikings were wearing helmets with wings or horns, while in another picture of a cross section of Saxon men, and all nine were indeed men, a fair few of them had very fashionable sixties haircuts.

The Observer followed up the series, with The New British, the British and the Sea, and The British and America, all three of which were published between 1973 and 1975.

But despite their historical sweep, there appeared no reference to those who came to live in Britain from the Commonwealth or the Common Market.

To be fair I am missing a few parts of the later series, but I suspect the Windrush generation, those from the Indian subcontinent, along with those from Africa and the European six were not included.

It may be that the Observer returned to the concept in the succeeding decades and addressed the omission, but by then we no longer took the paper..

So, not for the first time the story started on a silly note and closed in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

Leaving me just to point out to all those who crave historical accuracy, that the picture showing units of the 7th and 10th Legions engaging Celtic forces during Julius Caesar's first invasion of Britain is equally wrong.

The armour and helmets worn by the Roman legionaries date from roughly a century later.

Location; the past

Picture; drawings  by J.C.B. Knight, from People in History, Volume one, From Caractacus to Alfred 1955 and Looking at History, 1956, R.J. Unstead, Riders of the Range, Eagle, Vol 10 No. 22, May 30th 1959

* The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962 directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and James Stewart.

**Hobbs, Thomas, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politics, 1650

*** The Making of the British, Observer Magazine, “A history – 10 parts – of the restless people whose coming together made Britain, and forged our national character”. The Observer followed it up with The New British, 1973, the British and the Sea, 1974 and The British and America, 1975

The Danelaw ..... on the wireless ..... one to listen to

Now I have never been that keen on the Vikings, but this programme on Radio on 4 in the series In Our Time is well worth listening to.*

It starts with a Viking Raid, and ends with D.H. Lawrence, .......... now that has to be intrguing.

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the effective partition of England in the 880s after a century of Viking raids, invasions and settlements.

Alfred of Wessex, the surviving Anglo-Saxon king and Guthrum, a Danish ruler, had fought each other to a stalemate and came to terms, with Guthrum controlling the land to the east (once he had agreed to convert to Christianity).

The key strategic advantage the invaders had was the Viking ships which were far superior and enabled them to raid from the sea and up rivers very rapidly. Their Great Army had arrived in the 870s, conquering the kingdom of Northumbria and occupying York.

They defeated the king of Mercia and seized part of his land. They killed the Anglo-Saxon king of East Anglia and gained control of his territory.

It was only when a smaller force failed to defeat Wessex that the Danelaw came into being, leaving a lasting impact on the people and customs of that area.

With; Judith Jesch, Professor of Viking Studies at the University of Nottingham, John Hines, Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University, and, Jane Kershaw, ERC Principal Investigator in Archaeology at the University of Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson"

*The Dane Law, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0003jp7

And there is even a reading list.

Richard N. Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture in Northern England (Collins, 1980)

Jayne Carroll, Stephen Harrison and Gareth Williams, The Vikings in Britain and Ireland (British Museum Press, 2014)

James Graham-Campbell, Richard Hall, Judith Jesch and David N. Parsons (eds), Vikings and the Danelaw: Select Papers from the Proceedings of the Thirteenth Viking Congress (Oxbow Books, 2001)

D. M. Hadley, The Vikings in England: Settlement, Society and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2006)

Richard A. Hall et al., Aspects of Anglo-Scandinavian York (York Archaeological Trust, 2005)

Judith Jesch, The Viking Diaspora (Routledge, 2015)

Jane Kershaw, Viking Identities: Scandinavian Jewellery in England (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Julian D. Richards, Viking-Age England (The History Press, 2004)

Matthew Townend, Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations Between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Brepols, 2005)

Matthew Townend, Viking Age Yorkshire (Blackthorn Press, 2014)

Thomas Williams, Viking Britain: A History (William Collins, 2017)

Next; The Irish Famine