The Vikings (37 page)

If a man composes
ýki
about another man, the penalty is lesser outlawry.
³⁶
It is
ýki
if a man says about another man or any one of his possessions that which cannot be, and does so to dishonour him. If a man makes
ní
ð about another, the penalty is lesser outlawry and is to be prosecuted with a jury of twelve. It is
ní
ð if one man cuts a wooden
ní
ð against another, or carves or raises a
ní
ð pole against another.
³⁷

According to
Grágás
, the use of any one of the words
ragr
,
strodinn
or
sordinn
, all three of which carried the connotation of homosexuality, justified the killing of the man who used them, by the wounded party. A revealing curiosity in the sexual sociology of the time is that only statements implying that a man took the passive part in the homosexual act were classified as criminal; the law did not concern itself with accusations involving the active partner.
³⁸

This homosexual insult seems to have had a particular currency during the difficult period of transition from Heathendom to Christianity, reflecting the moral and psychological tensions that arose from the inversion of established values promoted by Christianity. The late eddic poem known as the ‘First Lay of Helgi Hundingsbani’ includes an episode of
flyting
, or ritual exchange of insults, between two heroes, Sinfjötli and Gudmund, in which Sinfjötli ‘reminds’ Gudmund of the number of times he has had him:

A variation on this couplet played a central part in events surrounding the conversion of the Icelanders to Christianity in the year 999, which we shall look at in detail later. One of several missions preceding the conversion failed after Thorvald, an Icelandic Christian working with a Saxon bishop, had been made the subject of a verse which improvised on the concept of the godfather in the Christian baptismal ceremony to accuse the pair of homosexuality:

Though Thorvald was allocated the less shameful ‘active’ role in the poem, the offence remained great enough for him to slough off his Christianity and kill his tormentor. In sorrow at his companion’s failure to observe the Christian injunction against killing, the bishop is said to have abandoned the mission.
Njal’s Saga
also offers examples of how the sexual insult was used by Heathens intent on resisting what were perceived as the feminine values of Christianity. In a dramatic scene at an
althing
meeting, the Christian Njal leads his party in assembling a pile of goods as compensation to Flosi’s party for the murder of Flosi’s kinsman, Hoskuld. Njal tops off the pile with a silk scarf and a pair of boots. Flosi does not want reconciliation, and no one will answer him when he picks up the scarf and mockingly demands to know whose contribution this might be. Njal’s son, Skarphedin, then asks who he thinks it might be and Flosi replies, as offensively as possible, that he suspects it might be Njal, ‘that beardless man, because a lot of people, when they look at him, are unsure whether he’s a man or a woman’. The reference is to the practice, introduced by Christian missionaries and followed by the convert Njal, of going clean-shaven. Skarphedin counters the offence to his father by reclaiming the silk scarf and tossing a pair of dark blue breeches to Flosi, assuring him that he will have more use of those. Flosi asks why, and Skarphedin tells him: ‘People say that every ninth night you’re the bride of the Swine Mountain troll, and that he turns you into a woman.’ Njal’s brave attempt to solve the conflict in the spirit of Christianity drowns as the primitive emotions aroused by these exchanges flare up into full-scale violence.

The
Saga of Gudmund Dyri
provides another example of the enduring association in the Viking homelands of the Christian with the unmanly. For having backed the wrong side in a local conflict, an Icelandic chieftain, Gudmund, tells a local priest, Bjørn, that his wife will be made available to any tramp who wants her, and that ‘some thing’ will be done to him, Bjørn, that will not be less of a humiliation. What the ‘something’ is, beyond the humiliation of not being able to protect his woman, is not specified. Bjørn seems to assume that he is being threatened with homosexual rape.
⁴⁰
Unable to sleep, he gets up in the night and visits Gudmund. He offers him everything he owns, if only Gudmund will withdraw the threat. As things turn out, the threat is not prosecuted.

Responses such as Gudmund’s were not, to the Viking mind, a subject for disapproval. If Heathendom involved an uncompromising acceptance of human nature as found, then the Christianity into which Christian kings persistently tried to draw Viking leaders represented, even if only in its most exalted manifestations, the best model of a civilized future available to contemporary thinkers. With dramatic cultural tensions between Scandinavians and Christians present at the start of the insular Viking Age in 793 and still active in 954, the appearance of men such as Oda, in whom an attachment to the new religion overrode any former cultural and tribal loyalties, was vital if the new and fragile unity of England were to survive.

 

Oda might serve as the extreme and accelerated personification of a general process of assimilation and integration that followed the Viking occupation of territories in the Danelaw and in other parts of England and the British Isles. This process of assimilation is difficult to trace or characterize, not least because the size of the Scandinavian settlement remains uncertain. Between the setting-up of the Danish kingdoms which was complete by about 880 and the Norman conquest of England in 1066, there must have been a continuous flow of Danish and Norwegian immigrants into the occupied areas, though there is no documentary evidence of it. Documentary evidence does not become available until the creation of Domesday Book in the eleventh century. With the help of various charters of the twelfth century, attempts have been made to estimate the size of the settlements based on the evidence of personal names. About 60 per cent of Lincolnshire farmers, 40 per cent of East Anglian farmers, and roughly 50 per cent of the northern Danelaw had names of Scandinavian origin.
⁴¹
Even here we are on uncertain ground, for the vagaries of fashion might be leading us into the false assumption that everyone with a Scandinavian name was, in fact, of Scandinavian descent.

Place-names might seem to offer a reliable guide to the extent of the settlements, but this is another complex matter with many variables and imponderables, and without the work of specialists such as Eilert Ekwall, Margaret Gelling, W. H. F. Nicolaisen and Gillian Fellows-Jensen to guide us we should be able to make very little sense of it as evidence. There are major concentrations of Scandinavian places-names in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and relatively few in East Anglia, which survived as a fully independent Danish kingdom only until 902 and after that as some kind of compromised unit until the death of a last and unnamed Scandinavian king in battle in 917. They are almost entirely absent from the southern parts of the Danelaw that included Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Middlesex. Though never formally part of the Danelaw, the areas of north-west England, from Cheshire through Lancashire and Cumbria up to the lower fringes of Galloway, are also rich in Scandinavian place-names.

Assessments of the quality of the land settled have been attempted on the basis of place-names. It seems that the first settlers from the disbanded Great Heathen Army did not change the names of the places in which they chose to settle. Not until the increased levels of settlement and cultivation after 900 did the Danes give new names to the parcelled-out areas of the old English estates and to the new settlements created by draining or clearing tougher terrain. Settlement names that used a number of Old Norse words for ‘marsh’ probably reflect new reclamations of marshy land in the area in this early period of Scandinavian settlement in the Danelaw. Redcar in North Yorkshire and Broadcarr in Norfolk both contain the element
kjarr
, meaning ‘brushwood’ and indicating an area of marsh overgrown with brush-wood.
⁴²
Mosi
meaning ‘moss’ is found in the Lancashire Chat Moss and Rathmoss, and in Cumberland in the names Mosser and Mosedale. River names are the most resilient of all classes of toponyms,
⁴³
and here the Scandinavians followed in the footsteps of the Anglo-Saxons who had, in their time as colonists and settlers, adopted a high percentage of native British names for rivers. Though there are few rivers with entirely Old Norse names, a number in the northern Danelaw like the Beela, the Greta and the Liza use the Old Norse suffix
á
, meaning ‘river’.
⁴⁴
Water was a major factor in the choice of settlement site, as names of fords, bridges and connecting causeways indicate. Both Ferrybridge in the West Riding of Yorkshire and Ferriby in Lincolnshire, meaning ‘ferry settlement’, are built on the Old Norse
ferja
, meaning ‘ferry’.

Gil
, denoting a ‘ravine or a deep narrow valley with a stream’, as compounded in Lowgill and Long Gill in the Forest of Bowland, is found across those areas of north-west England such as Cumbria and the Lake District, which bear such a striking resemblance to the homeland of the Norwegians who settled there. The establishment of settlements after the land had been cleared of trees is suggested by the presence in their names of such Old Norse elements as
lundr, skógr, vithr
, with -
thveit
, meaning a ‘clearing’, the most common among these. Like the names reflecting farms and settlements established after the draining and clearing of marshy land, they suggest many of the later settlers created new farms rather than simply taking over existing ones. These terms seem generally to be used for the secondary development of places with less good potential, very often on higher ground, which may indicate that not all the new settlers had the pick of the land.
⁴⁵
The numerous town and topographical names with -
thveit
in and around the Lake District, such as Bassenthwaite, are often found on valley slopes which would have required a considerable amount of clearing before they could be used for farming.
⁴⁶
Place-names with -
thorp
, of which almost 600 examples have been recorded,
⁴⁷
seem likewise to have been used for land that was at least initially not promising, not the pick of the settlements and required a lot of clearing. The most common Scandinavian place-name element found in the Danelaw is -
by
, which occurs in nearly 900 place-names in England (and Scotland). In Scandinavia, names ending in -
by
would most often be compounded with a topographical feature; in England almost two-thirds of the recorded instances involve a personal name, probably that of the first Scandinavian settler:
⁴⁸
Rollesby in Norfolk was probably settled by Rolf, Ormesby in South Lincolnshire by Ormar, and Scratby in Norfolk by Skrauti.
⁴⁹
Occasionally, where an older English name caused problems of pronunciation for the settlers, it would survive in an adapted form. Thus Shipton became Skipton, Cheswick became Keswick and Charlton became Carlton.
⁵⁰
A rare example of an English place-name being replaced was Anglo-Saxon
Nor
ð
wor
ð
ig
, meaning ‘northern enclosure’, which the invader-settlers renamed ‘Derby’, denoting ‘a place with deer’.
⁵¹

A wealth of words passed into the English language as a result of the Scandinavian settlements. Among the most striking adoptions were the Old Norse personal pronouns ‘they’, ‘them’ and ‘their’, replacing Old English ‘hie’, ‘him’ and ‘hiera’. Many words with an initial
sk
sound, such as sky, skill and skin, derive from Old Norse, as do everyday words like anger, husband, wing, thrive, egg, bread and die. The history of the word ‘egg’ highlights some of the difficulties in interpreting the evidence of common borrowings. In competition with Old Norse
egg
, Anglo-Saxon
æg
survived into the sixteenth century as
eye
(pl.
eyren
), and as late as the end of the fifteenth century was still causing confusion. William Caxton complained of the difficulties in the
Eneydos
in 1490: ‘What sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges or eyren, certaynly it is harde to playse every man.’

Opinions differ over the implications of borrowings at such a fundamental level; it may indicate that a minority of Scandinavian settlers enjoyed, from the start, a high social status which encouraged a local desire to copy their language; or the fact that borrowing took place at this mundane level, rather than at the higher levels at which Norman French later influenced the vocabulary of government and culture, might suggest that Danish influence on Anglo-Saxon English came about through the sheer numbers of those speaking it, rather than from their elevated social status.
⁵²
Again, fashion is notoriously hard to plot into such analyses, since it moves as readily up as down the social scale. Despite the apparent brevity of the period of Scandinavian dominance in East Anglia, Scandinavian names remained common there into the twelfth century, and while the persistence for centuries of feminine names such as Thora and Gunnhild might indicate that settlers imported their wives from home rather than marrying local women, it might equally reflect an enduring fashion for these names. Alcuin, we recall, rebuked the king of Northumbria and his courtiers for copying the hair-styles of the Heathens, and the monks in the monasteries for preferring to listen to
Beowulf
while they dined rather than Christian texts. One of the most common male names used in the Danelaw was ‘Halfdan’, meaning ‘half-Dane’. ‘Thor’ was another.