Northmen: The Viking Saga AD 793-1241 (20 page)

The nature of the Scandinavian settlement in the Hebrides was strikingly different in nature. Genetic profiling shows that around 25 per cent of the modern male population of the islands can trace their origins back to Norway, but only 10 per cent of the female population can. Even allowing for modern immigration, Scandinavian settlers must always have been a minority among the native Gaelic-speaking population. It is also clear that the majority of the Scandinavians were single men who found wives locally. Settlement here was, therefore, probably seen as a riskier proposition than going to the Northern Isles, not a place that a man would feel comfortable bringing his wife and children. Icelandic saga traditions seem to bear this out as many of the earliest settlers of Iceland, like Aud the Deep-Minded and Helgi Magri, were Hebridean Norse who were finding it hard to maintain their positions. Place-names in the Hebrides point to the eventual fate of the settlers: Scandinavian place-names are common but often difficult to recognise for what they are because they survive in Gaelicised forms, such as Roineabhal (‘rough-ground fell’), or as hybrids incorporating Norse and Gaelic elements, such as Skerryvore (‘the great skerry’) from the Old Norse
sker
and Gaelic
mhor
(‘big’). The settlers were eventually assimilated by the native Gaels but it took centuries, not the two or three generations that it took for the Danish settlers in England and Normandy to become assimilated to their host populations. Partial assimilation of the Norse settlers began early. Because so many of the settlers had taken local wives, their children grew up bilingual, speaking both Old Norse and Gaelic. This hybrid Gaelic-Norse population became known to the Irish as the Gall-Gaedhil, the ‘foreign Gaels’, and the Hebrides became the Innse Gall, the ‘islands of the foreigners’. The same process of partial assimilation took place in Galloway, which gets its name from the Gall-Gaedhil. True Gaels probably saw the Gall-Gaedhil as being more Norse than Gaelic as the Irish bard Urard mac Coise (d. 990) described their stumbling attempts to speak the Gaelic language as
gioc-goc,
meaning gibberish
.
This assimilation is also visible in material culture, especially jewellery styles, which blend Celtic forms with Norse ornament. The popular Celtic penannular brooch, a type of fastening for cloaks and dresses, was adapted to the Norse taste by becoming plainer in style but much larger.

Perhaps because so many of them had taken Christian wives, the Scandinavians who settled in the Hebrides were among the earliest to accept Christianity. However, several Viking pagan burials have been discovered in the area too, including a tenth-century boat burial at Port an Eilean Mhóir, in Ardnamurchan on the west coast of the mainland. According to Irish sources, some of the native Gaels even renounced Christianity and adopted the paganism of their new rulers. After the violence of the initial Norse conquest, pagans and Christians probably lived peacefully side by side as they did in other areas settled by Scandinavians. One Hebridean Viking, Helgi the Lean, managed to believe in both Christ and Thor at the same time, and this kind of syncretism may have been very common. This could explain why, after 825, Iona was not raided again for 160 years. When Vikings eventually returned, in 986, the attackers were outsiders, Danes making a rare foray into the western seas. The abbot and fifteen monks were killed in this attack: a hoard of tenth-century silver coins found on Iona may have been buried by one of the victims. The survival of so many papar place-names may be evidence that Iona was not the only monastic community to survive the Viking raids: some must have survived long enough at least for the papar place-names to ‘stick’ in common usage.

The process of assimilation and co-existence between Scandinavian and native Gael is also clearly seen in the Isle of Man. The evidence of pagan burials, containing weapons and sometimes human sacrifices and boats, indicates substantial pagan Scandinavian settlement in the mid-ninth century. This is borne out by genetic studies, which indicate that around 40 per cent of the modern population have Norse ancestry. The native Christian Gaelic-speaking population was not exterminated but the distribution of typical Scandinavian place-names shows that the settlers appropriated the better, lower-lying land for themselves and left the rougher hill areas to the Gaels. Possibly they were relegated to servile tasks, such as tending the conquerors’ sheep and cattle on the upland pastures. The settlers used Christian cemeteries for pagan burials as a symbolic way of demonstrating their power over the natives. After they adopted Christianity in the mid-tenth century, the settlers erected a series of fine carved stone memorial crosses that incorporated Irish, English and Scandinavian decorative styles, and both pagan and Christian imagery. Inscriptions on these crosses are always in runes but several commemorate people with Gaelic names, a sign of intermarriage between the two populations. One bilingual inscription, in Old Norse and Gaelic (written in the ancient Irish ogham alphabet), is also known.

The Gall-Gaedhil retained their distinctive identity until the thirteenth century. The reason for this is partly political – the Hebrides were remote from any major centres of centralised political power that could impose authority on either the Norse settlers or indigenous Gaelic leaders. Norse dominance of the sea lanes also meant that the settlers were in constant contact with other Norse colonies in the Northern Isles and Ireland and also with Norway, so they could constantly reinforce the Norse element in their cultural identity. Only when these links with Norway were broken after the Scots won control of the Hebrides and Man in 1266, were the Gall-Gaedhil thoroughly and finally Gaelicised.

Scots and Picts

The arrival of the Vikings in Scotland had the effect of destabilising the established power structures. Northumbria lost almost half its territory to the Danish kingdom of York and ceased to be a major influence in northern Britain. Strathclyde too entered a permanent decline after the sack of its capital in 871. The Viking intervention impacted most seriously on the Picts, indirectly leading them into complete extinction. The Scots of Dál Riata also lost considerable territories to the Vikings, yet they ultimately became the great winners of Viking Age Scotland, turning the situation to their advantage, conquering the Picts, the Welsh of Strathclyde, and the northern Northumbrian district of Lothian to create the kingdom of Scotland.

Dál Riata began as a colony of the minor Dál Riata dynasty, which ruled Antrim in Northern Ireland. Traditionally, King Fergus Mór mac Eirc (d. 501) was considered to be the conqueror of Argyll, but as its coast lies barely a dozen miles east of Antrim, the area may have been under Irish influence long before his time. Scottish Dál Riata was ruled as part of Irish Dál Riata until the reign of Domnall Brecc (r.
c.
629 – 42), when the kingdom split after suffering a succession of military disasters. From then until the beginning of the Viking Age, Dál Riata led a precarious existence, first as a dependency of Northumbria and then, from
c.
736, as a dependency of the kingdom of the Picts. The Scots regained their independence in 768 after the Picts had been weakened by a disastrous attempt to conquer Strathclyde, but the arrival of the Vikings in the 790s brought further setbacks. The Scots lost control not only of the Hebrides but of the mainland district of Kintyre and, probably, of Morvern and Ardnamurchan too. The Scots’ capital and inauguration place of the Dál Riata kings at Dunadd, only 2 miles inland from the west coast, was dangerously exposed despite its strong fortifications and it seems to have been abandoned around this time. It is not even clear who was king of Dál Riata in the decade after the first attack on Iona, so great was the turmoil. The Scots had a long tradition of naval warfare and a well-organised fleet levy system for which each district had to raise a specified number of men and ships. This system was really only suited to launching raids, however, and it would have been little use in combating the Vikings. By the time the fleet had been gathered from the kingdom’s scattered territories, Viking raiders would be long gone. Under pressure by the Vikings from the west, the Scots turned east to the rich Pictish lands of Fortriu in southern Pictland. Although some earlier kings of Dál Riata may have won temporary control of Fortriu, it was King Kenneth mac Alpin (d. 858) who completed the conquest of the region in 842/3, taking the title king of the Picts. The rest of Pictland fell to Kenneth soon after. In 848 or 849, Kenneth transferred half of St Columba’s relics from Iona to the Pictish royal monastery at Dunkeld in Perthshire. It was a gesture of thanks by the king to the saint for the support of his church and it also served notice to the Picts that their conquest by the Scots was spiritual as well as political. St Columba came to Dunkeld not as a refugee from the Vikings, as is often assumed, but as a conqueror.

The birth of Scotland

Quite how Kenneth achieved his coup is unclear, but he was certainly a direct beneficiary of a Viking victory over the Picts in 839. This was a very severe defeat for the Picts, involving heavy casualties. The death of their king Eóganán and his brother Bran in the battle left them leaderless. As there was no obvious successor, a three-sided succession dispute broke out, leaving the weakened kingdom even more vulnerable. However, it was not only the Picts who were left leaderless by the battle. One of those killed fighting alongside the Pictish kings was Aed mac Boanta, the king of Dál Riata. The sources do not explain why Aed was fighting with the Picts but it would seem that on this occasion the Scots had allied with them against a common enemy. Following Aed’s death, Kenneth became king of Dál Riata. Kenneth’s origins are obscure and it is not even absolutely certain that he was a member of the Dál Riata royal family: he was certainly not close kin to Aed. Had the Vikings not killed Aed, Kenneth might never have had the opportunity to claim the throne. Once he had secured his position as king of Dál Riata, Kenneth seized the second opportunity the Vikings had created for him and invaded Pictland. The divided kingdom was in no state to resist and it fell quickly to the Scots. Kenneth and his immediate successors continued to use the titles ‘king of the Picts’ and ‘king of Dál Riata’, but his grandson Donald II (r. 889 – 900) abandoned this practice and adopted the single title ‘king of Scotland’ (
rex
Scotia
in Latin, or
rí
Alban
in Gaelic).

The Picts did not long survive their subjugation. Though the Scots adopted many of the trappings of Pictish kingship, including its inauguration place at Scone in Perthshire, there was no merging of Gaelic and Pictish culture. The Picts had probably long been exposed to Gaelic culture through the activities of the Columban church, but the Scottish conquest resulted in the complete and rapid annihilation of their identity: the last contemporary reference to the Picts dates to 904. The Picts’ culture died out completely, their distinctive art styles became extinct and whatever Pictish literature that survived Viking attacks on their monasteries was not preserved: the Pictish view of their own history is unknown. The Pictish language also died out, replaced by Gaelic, and only a few words survive as place names. The sparse contemporary records make it clear that there was great violence involved during the Scottish conquest and later Scottish folk traditions held that the Picts had been exterminated. The Scots remembered the Picts as a race of blue pygmies who lived underground rather than as real people. It is unlikely that the Picts were literally wiped out, but it is likely that during the conquest and its aftermath their aristocracy were killed or exiled leaving the rest of the population without political or cultural leadership and so vulnerable to rapid assimilation by the Scots. The destruction of the Pictish aristocracy may be the subject of Sueno’s Stone, a 23-foot (7 m) high sculpted monolith that stands on the outskirts of Forres in Moray. Carved in the later ninth century by a Pictish sculptor, the stone shows scenes of battle and mass executions. The stone is the latest known work of Pictish sculpture, so it may have been commissioned by Kenneth or one of his immediate successors to celebrate the Scottish victory and send a bleak message to the Picts who survived. This is speculation, of course, as the stone lacks any inscriptions to make its true purpose clear.

Saint Columba’s residence at Dunkeld turned out to be a brief one. Fortriu’s wealth made it attractive to the Vikings and it was repeatedly raided. King Constantine I killed Olaf, king of the Dublin Vikings, in 874 – 5, but was himself killed fighting Vikings in Fife in 877. In 878, Dunkeld suffered Iona’s fate and was sacked by Viking raiders. Columba’s relics survived, presumably hidden by the monks, but afterwards they took the decision to reunite them with rest of the saint’s remains at Kells. This time he really was a refugee from the Vikings: as an Irish annalist put it, his relics ‘were taken in flight to escape the foreigners’. It was a wise decision, as Dunkeld was sacked again in 903 and 904. Without Columba’s relics, Dunkeld’s importance quickly declined and it was superseded in 906 as Scotland’s prime religious centre by St Andrews in Fife, which possessed its own potent relics.

Scottish expansion

Kenneth’s successors were quick to exploit other opportunities for territorial expansion created by the Vikings. In 870 the Dublin Vikings under their King Olaf laid siege to Strathclyde’s strongly fortified capital on Dumbarton Rock, which towers over the mouth of the River Clyde. Recognising that their mobility was their main strength, Vikings were normally reluctant to get bogged down with sieges, but in this case they persevered for four months until the Welsh were forced to surrender when their well ran dry. Olaf’s men took a vast number of captives and a great amount of treasure back to Dublin with them. One of the captives was Strathclyde’s King Artgal. Artgal might have expected to be ransomed – ransoming high-status prisoners was a profitable sideline for Viking raiders – but Constantine I (Kenneth’s son and successor) saw an opportunity to weaken Strathclyde still further and persuaded Olaf to kill him instead. Presumably, Constantine paid Olaf the equivalent of the king’s ransom so that he did not lose out by killing such a valuable captive. With Artgal out of the way, Constantine installed the king’s brother Run as client king of Strathclyde. Constantine married Run to his sister, so establishing a Scottish claim to the throne of Strathclyde. The kingship of Strathclyde remained in the gift of the kings of the Scots as they slowly tightened their control over the kingdom. It is thought that in the tenth century, Strathclyde became a sub-kingdom that was ruled by the
tanist
(the heir-apparent to the Scottish throne) until he succeeded to the kingship of Scotland. The last known king of Strathclyde was Owen the Bald, who died
c.
1015, and soon after that Strathclyde was annexed to Scotland.