An Alternative History of England

Cnut fights Edmund Ironside in a 13th-century manuscript CCCC MS. 26, f.80v

October is the season of conquest anniversaries. Four days after the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings falls a less well-known date: on 18 October 1016, a Danish army led by Cnut defeated the English king Edmund Ironside in battle at a place called Assandun in Essex, the last battle in Cnut's conquest of England. I wrote about that battle in detail, and the sources for our information about it, in this post from 2016, and about a visit to the area here. Like Hastings, Assandun was a battle which won a kingdom; but unlike at Hastings, the leader of the losing army was not killed, and so the aftermath was more complicated. It resulted in a treaty which divided England into two parts: Wessex for Edmund, and what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls the norðdæle, 'the northern part', for Cnut.

This division of the kingdom between north and south reflected a regional split in England which by that time already went back more than a hundred years. Parts of northern England had been settled by Scandinavians and under Scandinavian rule at various times since the ninth century, and their culture, language and perhaps political affiliations were still significantly influenced by this settlement. When Cnut's father Svein Forkbead launched a serious invasion in 1013, he seems to have felt able to count on political support from at least some among the leaders of the north for Danish rule, and he and Cnut treated the north differently from Wessex during their invasions. The division of the kingdom proposed in 1016 thus reflected a pre-existing cultural divide, of which the legacy can still be seen with extraordinary clarity today in the place-names and dialect of northern and eastern England.

The exact regions which are meant to be encompassed by the term norðdæle in the 1016 division are not entirely clear, but it probably means Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia - a huge area, stretching from the south Midlands to north Northumberland, and geographically speaking, much more than half of England. (norðdæle is the term used in ASC D; other versions of the Chronicle just mention Wessex for Edmund and Mercia for Cnut, leaving unsaid what happened to the rest of the country, but perhaps implying Cnut's control of those areas further north was already established.) Although over the course of the tenth century the kings of Wessex, Edmund Ironside's ancestors, had extended their power over the rest of the formerly independent kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, some of these areas had also been ruled by Cnut's predecessors among the kings of the Danes. By 1016 both Cnut and Edmund could claim that not only had both their fathers, Svein and Æthelred, ruled the whole kingdom of England (though in Svein's case only very briefly) but that both had ancestors who had ruled regions of the country. It would be wrong to imply that everyone in this vast norðdæle thought of themselves as culturally Scandinavian or 'Danish', or that even if they did it would necessarily have translated into political support for a Danish king; but they may not all have thought of themselves as 'English', either. Regional identities, such as 'Northumbrian', may have mattered as much or more. The point is that we are dealing with a large area and a mixed population, whose perspectives and identities would have varied considerably, and whom it is difficult to label. The chronicler's use of norðdæle seems to imply a division between Wessex vs. 'everything else', but that 'everything' included a great variety.

As it turned out, the division between Wessex and the rest of England lasted only a few weeks. Edmund died on 30 November that same year, and left Cnut as king of the whole country, which he then ruled (with Denmark, and eventually Norway too) until his death in 1035. But let's pause a little in that brief period when England was split between the two kings. It's an opportunity to think about how the movements of history which can, with hindsight, appear irresistible are actually far from being so. If Edmund had lived, and the division of the country had lasted, perhaps there would never again have been a single kingdom of England. It's a reminder that political unions which may seem to us inevitable and eternal can, in fact, fracture very rapidly.

The distribution of Scandinavian-influenced place-names in England, from this site

Since I've already written quite a bit here about Assandun, I want today to share another edited extract from my book which offers an unusual perspective on the roots of Cnut's conquest and its place in English history. What I wanted to explore in the book was how medieval writers and audiences in England, between the end of the Viking Age and the fifteenth century, understood and interpreted the history of Viking activity in this country - activity which includes not just raiding, but also this history of substantial Scandinavian settlement and periods of rule by Scandinavian kings. To understand this question, it's important to realise that our modern academic knowledge of the Viking Age, as well as the idea of 'the Vikings' which is so prevalent in popular culture, both first emerged centuries after the end of the medieval period. Almost everything you think of when you think 'Viking' comes from the 19th- and 20th-century rediscovery of medieval sources of information which were not available in medieval England, whether that's the huge amount of written sources from Scandinavia and Iceland - not accessible to English-speakers in any real quantity before the 19th century - or other sources of information unavailable to medieval historians, such as archaeology, the scientific study of place-names, linguistics, and much more. The very word 'Viking', while frequently found in Old Norse sources, was not a word used in medieval England; it was introduced into English in the 19th century, as a result of English-speakers beginning to have access to - and fall in love with! - Old Norse sagas. (There was an Old English cognate, wicing, but it doesn't have exactly the same meaning, did not survive into Middle English, and is not the origin of the Modern English word.) Instead of 'Vikings', medieval English writers tend to talk of 'the Danes' instead, which is of course a massive oversimplification given what we know about the complex and fluid make-up of the Vikings, and yet reveals something about how English writers saw them. It makes a difference that 'Danes' relates to a specific country, and one geographically close to England.

So how did England's early medieval history look if you didn't have the vast majority of the sources of information which have fed our modern understanding of 'the Vikings' - if you had never read a saga, or seen a reconstructed Viking ship or a map of the Danelaw? There are quite a lot of answers to that question, depending on the perspective, time and (especially) place from which medieval writers look back on the Viking past.

A map of Scandinavian-influenced place-names in Lincoln Museum.

One reason local history museums are so important...

In the British Library's superb 'Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms' exhibition last year, which gathered together such a glorious wealth of material from early medieval England, the one thing I came away reflecting on with some regret was the absence of discussion of what happened to the north and east of England under Viking rule. The course of Anglo-Saxon history wended its way from Kent up to Bede's Northumbria down to Mercia and Wessex, but once we reached Alfred the Great and his successors, the centre of attention was firmly in the south, and stayed there. The Vikings were seen doing their 'Viking' thing, burning monasteries and looting the Codex Aureus, but they were certainly marginal to the main story; as soon as they appeared, the focus moved south. There was, as far as I spotted, only one brief reference to the Viking kingdom of York, and only in the context of Athelstan claiming control of it; none of its kings were named, and there was nothing to suggest the importance of this kingdom which extended across the Irish Sea to Dublin. It inherently reflects a particular perspective on 'English' history to treat Athelstan as a major figure and not even give Sitric a name. There was also no mention of the many forms of evidence for the lasting impact of Scandinavian settlement in the north, and no reference to Old Norse as a spoken language in England or its significant influence on the present-day English language. Of course I wanted to see those things in part because they're my special interest, but I'm also conscious that treating that aspect of Anglo-Saxon history as marginal means overlooking an important part of the story of northern England and its particular relationships with neighbouring peoples in Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia (and again, we're talking about what is geographically at least half of England - not just Northumbria, but the East Midlands and East Anglia too.) This is more an observation than a criticism of the exhibition; it was so very good, and no exhibition can include everything. You might well object that the Viking rulers of Northumbria or East Anglia weren't technically 'Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms', which I suppose is true. But perhaps it's also part of the problem. Both 'Anglo-Saxon' and 'English' are terms which in this period have political force, and reflect a certain perspective on what 'England' is and what it should be. 'Anglo-Saxon England' is more an idea than a place, an idea formulated in the first instance by elites in particular times and places who wanted to bring it into being, and as historians have long been aware, it's an idea which (like 'the Vikings') doesn't always map onto how these peoples saw their own identity. So does it include the Scandinavian settlers and their descendants and those who lived alongside them? Well, that's the question. It does and it doesn't; depends who you ask. The 'Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms' way of telling the story of early medieval English history is certainly a well-established and familiar one; it already was by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, because it's the story as seen from the perspective of the people who by that time were doing most of the history-writing. But it was not inevitable that it should be so; it was not inevitable that 'the history of the kings of Wessex' should merge seamlessly into 'the history of England'. If we look closely at the sources we can find alternative histories, different ways of telling the story, where other people and other places are not marginal but central to the imagined narrative of English history.

A coin from Viking York

Here's one alternative history of early medieval England which comes from 12th-century Lincolnshire. It's predicated on the idea that the Danes, far from being late-comers to England - invaders and raiders and enemies of the English - were actually there first, and had a presence in at least parts of the country long before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. (Though modern historians now question the traditional idea of the adventus Anglorum, 'the coming of the English/Angles', most medieval historians accepted it as established fact, so just go with it...)

This story is recorded by a writer named Geffrei Gaimar in his Estoire des Engleis, written in c.1136-7. The Estoire tells the story of the 'history of the English', in sprightly Anglo-Norman verse, all the way from the coming of the Saxons to the death of William Rufus in 1100. Gaimar wrote for a female patron, a woman named Constance Fitz Gilbert, a member of a well-connected aristocratic family in Lincolnshire. The Estoire is, therefore, intended primarily for a secular, aristocratic, French-speaking audience, which makes its version of Anglo-Danish history all the more interesting. Gaimar presents a narrative of English and British history freely drawn not only from his two main sources, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but also from romance and oral tradition which he probably encountered in Lincolnshire. It's a potent blend of history and legend, with just enough of each to keep things lively.

Gaimar tells stories about a number of semi-legendary Danish kings who supposedly ruled in England as long ago as the days of King Arthur, which here means some time in the fifth century - kings whose historical basis is not clear, though some of them do appear in other sources. The powerbase of these Danish kings is in Lincolnshire and East Anglia, but they also rule lands in Denmark itself. They're at war with Arthur and his descendants, and then when the Saxons come they're at war with them too. First there's King Adelbriht, who starts off as king of Norfolk, but then extends his rule down as far as Colchester in Essex. (Adelbriht would generally be an English name, but he's explicitly said to be Danish). His royal capital seems to be Thetford, since that's where he is when he dies, and he's buried in Colchester. His daughter Argentille marries Haveloc, the son of another Danish king named Gunter; Haveloc has been orphaned as a child and brought up in Grimsby, but there's a long story about how he rediscovers his true identity and becomes a successful king. (It's an alternative version of the Havelok legend which I've written about elsewhere and discuss at length in the book; and see also this post by Caitlin Green on Gaimar's Haveloc and Lincolnshire history) The story of Haveloc and Argentille ends with them ruling a Danish kingdom which stretches from Colchester up to the Humber, and apparently includes at least part of Denmark too.

And by this point in the story it's still only 495! It's only now that the Saxons begin to turn up in (what was to become) England. Later we meet Wasing - whose name might have something to do with Walsingham - a Danish king of Norfolk who goes to war with the Saxons of Wessex. And so when some Danish ships arrive on the coast of Dorset in 789, an incident recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which later historians often took to be the 'beginning of the Viking Age', it's not really the beginning at all:

E en cel tens vindrent Daneis
pur guereier sur les Engleis:
un senesçal al rei oscistrent,
la terre saisirent e pristrent,
mult firent mal par les contrees,
si nen u[re]nt ke treis navees.
Puis realerent en lur païs
si asemblerent lur amis;
en Bretaigne voldrent venir,
as Engleis la voldrent tolir
car entr’els eurent esgardé
e dit ke ço est lur herité,
e mulz homes de lur linage,
urent le regne en heritage
ainceis kë Engleis i entrast
ne home de Sessoigne i habitast:
li reis Danes tint le regnez,
ki de Denemarch[e] fu nez:
si fist Ailbrith e Haveloc,
e plus en nomerent ovoc,
purquai il distrent pur verité,
Bretaigne ert lur dreit herité.
(2065–86)

It was during this time that the Danes arrived to wage war on the English. They killed a certain royal steward, seized and secured the land and, despite their only having three ships, caused a great deal of damage throughout the region. They then returned home and enlisted their allies with the intention of coming to Britain to seize the island from the English, for they had reached the decision between them, and claimed that this country was part of their heritage, and that many of their ancestors had established an inheritance claim before any English had even arrived or before anyone from Saxony came to live there. King Dan, who was born in Denmark, had ruled over the kingdom, as had Adelbriht and Haveloc, and they named others in addition who had done so. It was on this basis that they claimed it to be true that Britain was their rightful inheritance.

Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis: History of the English, ed. Ian Short (Oxford, 2009), pp. 114-15.

According to this story, Viking attacks on England aren't opportunistic raids of plunder but a coordinated attempt at national expansion. The Danes are would-be conquerors who target England - and actually the whole of Britain - specifically because their ancestors had once ruled there, not only Adelbriht and Havelok, as described above, but also this mysterious 'King Dan'. King Dan does not appear in any other sources from England, but there are several references in Scandinavian historical writing to a king named Dan, progenitor of the Danes. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus begins the first book of the Gesta Danorum by naming the brothers Dan and Angul as the originators of the Danish and English nations, respectively. According to Saxo, this Dan was the grandfather of Sciold/Scyld, from whom the Scyldings were descended (the Scyldings are the Danes in Beowulf, Hrothgar et al, and Cnut seems to have considered himself a Scylding too). Dan is also found in some other Scandinavian sources: a King Dan is mentioned in the twelfth-century Chronicon Lethrense as a king who ruled Denmark in the time of the Emperor Augustus and gave his name to the Danes, and Snorri Sturluson, in the prologue to Heimskringla and in Ynglinga saga, says that Dan was the first person to be called king by the Danes.

King Dan is probably a purely legendary figure, a back-formation from the name of the Danes, as Angul is from the English. It's possible that Gaimar and these Scandinavian sources arrived at the same name independently (it would be a natural etymological deduction!) but it's also possible that the ultimate source of Gaimar’s information was connected to these beliefs about Danish history - an Anglo-Danish tradition in Lincolnshire, perhaps. This East Midlands perspective, with its specific focus on ties to Denmark (rather than, for instance, Norway) is itself likely to be very different from ideas which might have been current elsewhere in northern England.

Cnut and Edmund in CUL MS. Ee 3 59, f. 5

And that brings us to Cnut. When Gaimar tells the story of Cnut and Edmund Ironside meeting to divide England between them in 1016, he has Cnut inform Edmund that they are both the sons of kings who have ruled the country, but that his ancestors held England many years before the coming of the Saxons:

e bien sachez, loi[n]gtenement
l’urent Daneis nostre parent:
prés de mil anz l’out Dane aince[i]s
ke unc i entrast Certiz li reis.
Certiz, ço fu vostre ancïen;
e li reis Danes fu le mien.
Daneis le tint en chef de Deu,
Modret donat Certiz son feu:
il ne tint unkes chevalment,
de lui vindrent vostre parent.
Pur ço vus di, si nel savez,
si vus od mai [vus] combataz,
l[i] un de nus ad greignur tort,
ne savom liequels en ert mort.
Pur ço vus vol un offre fere
e ne m’en voil de rien retrere:
partum la terre dreit en dous,
l’une partie en aiez vus,
l’altre partie me remaigne!
(4315–33)

Our Danish ancestors, I’ll have you know, have been ruling here for a very long time. Almost a thousand years before king Cerdic came to the throne, Dan was king. Cerdic was your ancestor, and king Dan was mine. A Dane held the land in chief from God. It was Mordred who granted Cerdic his fief; he never held it in chief, and your family is descended from him. In case you don’t already know, I’ll tell you that if you fight me, one of us is going to be in the wrong more than the other, though we don’t know which one of us will die as a result. This is why I’m willing to make you an offer – one that I will not seek to back down from: let us divide the kingdom exactly in two, with one part going to you and the other remaining with me.

Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis: History of the English, ed. Ian Short, pp. 234-7.

Cnut is claiming that the Danes have a prior claim to England dating back to centuries before the foundation of the kingdom of Wessex, long before Cerdic and Edmund Ironside's other ancestors had ever come to the country. Numerous other medieval chroniclers have versions of a story about this meeting between Cnut and Edmund (I wrote about some of them in a previous version of this post), but no one else includes this bold claim to ancient Danish sovereignty. From a historical point of view this clearly can't be accurate, but what's interesting is that Gaimar treats it as basically a sound and legitimate argument: it's only repeating what has already been shown several times in the Estoire, and Edmund Ironside is said to admire ‘how humbly and how justly the good king spoke to him’. Edmund agrees to the division of the country along the lines proposed by the Danish king, and his response to Cnut’s argument implicitly accepts it as a valid interpretation of the history. Cnut’s offer to divide the kingdom, in this light, is a magnanimous one: he has a prior claim to rule the country, and is generously conceding part of it to Edmund to put an end to the fighting. (Most medieval and indeed many modern retellings of this story would put it the other way around - that Edmund is the one conceding something rightfully 'his'). Morally and historically, Cnut is on the strongest side.

So what's going on here? Gaimar's narrative is a fascinating mash-up, combining Anglo-Saxon historical sources with the newly popular world of Arthurian romance beloved by the Norman aristocracy; but the firm belief in Danish right to rule and the general sympathy with Danes over Saxons suggests that at least some of this material has its roots in the Anglo-Scandinavian society of 12th-century Lincolnshire, where Gaimar was writing. It's worth pointing out that in the 1130s Danish claims to rule England were not only the stuff of distant history, but also of the fairly recent past: there were serious threats (or promises, I suppose, depending on your view) that the Danes would invade England on and off well in the 1080s. Yet, as the title of the Estoire suggests, the Danes and Saxons all form part of the 'History of the English' - and so, implicitly, do the French-speaking audience of the Estoire. Gaimar retells the story of pre-Conquest England for a Norman aristocratic audience who may have seen themselves as the latest in a long line of conquerors, relatively new to England but nonetheless heirs to its land and its history. Danes, Saxons, Normans - 'English' is a capacious term which expands to include these new arrivals.

A coin from Viking East Anglia

Of course, the Estoire is not actually wrong to suggest that the Danes had a long-established history in England, or that they had ruled in the East Midlands: Adelbriht and Haveloc and King Dan are (probably) fictional, though there may be a grain of truth in their stories, but certainly there had been Danish kings of East Anglia of whose existence we can be confident. The Estoire just locates this history about five centuries too early, perhaps as a way of claiming primacy over an alternative version of pre-Conquest history: that centred on Wessex. It's the Wessex version we get almost everywhere else in late Anglo-Saxon sources, and in most of the Anglo-Norman chroniclers who follow them - the version which sees the creation of a kingdom of England, ruled from the south, as the teleological end-point of Anglo-Saxon history. So in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's account of Assandun, for instance, the chronicler can insist by fervent repetition that Edmund is fighting on behalf of 'all the English people', while Cnut is an outsider whom only traitors support:

Se here gewende eft up on Eastseaxan, 7 ferde into Myrcan, 7 fordyde eall þæt he oferferde. Ða se cyning geahsade þæt se here upp wæs, þa gesamnade he fiftan siðe ealle Engla þeode 7 ferde him æthindan, 7 offerde hi innon Eastseaxan æt þære dune þe man hæt Assandun, 7 þær togædere heardlice fengon. Þa dyde Eadric ealdorman swa swa he ær ofter dyde, astealde þæne fleam ærast mid Magesætan, 7 swa aswac his kynehlaforde 7 ealle þeodæ Angelcynnes. Ðær ahte Cnut sige, 7 gefeaht him wið ealle Engla þeode. Þa wearð þær ofslægen Eadnoð biscop, 7 Wulfsie abbod, 7 ælfric ealdorman, 7 Godwine ealdorman, 7 Ulfkytel of Eastenglan, 7 Æþelward Ælfwines sunu ealdormannes, 7 eall seo duguð of Angelcynnes þeode.

[The [Danish] raiding-army turned back up into Essex, and went towards Mercia, and destroyed all that they overtook. Then when the king [Edmund] heard that the army was inland, he gathered all the English people for the fifth time and travelled behind them, and overtook them in Essex at the hill which is called Assandun, and there they fought a hard battle together. Then Eadric the ealdorman did as he had so often done before, and first began the flight with the Magonsæte, and so betrayed his king and lord and all the English people. There Cnut had the victory, and won for himself the whole people of the English. There Bishop Eadnoth was killed, and Abbot Wulfsige, and Ealdorman Ælfric, and Ealdorman Godwine, and Ulfcytel of East Anglia, and Æthelweard, the son of Ealdorman Æ[thel]wine, and all the best of the English people.]

The chronicler here uses 'Engla þeode' and 'Angelcynnes þeode' interchangeably, and both should probably be translated as 'English people' (þeod might equally be translated, with caveats, as 'nation'). But it's important to be alert to the extent to which this use of 'English' is propagandistic, deliberately exclusionary, defining 'the English people' to mean 'Edmund Ironside and his supporters'. It is a much more restricted definition than that put forward by the French-speaking Gaimar 120 years later, for whom Engleis potentially includes anyone living in England. Here, 'English' is made to exclude not only people of Danish birth, like Cnut, but even those among the English who were supporting him; by going over to the Danes, they have somehow forfeited their 'Englishness'.

But would people have recognised this restricted definition in Lincolnshire, or other parts of the former Danish-ruled areas of England? Might some of them have thought there was another version of history in which a concept and term like 'all the English nation' could readily encompass Danes and Danish kings, since it had done so in the past? That was certainly the approach Cnut himself took as king: ready to rule like the kings of Wessex from Winchester, but happy to be compared to long-ago Viking kings who had ruled from York. One of his poets lauded him by reminding the king and his followers that:

Ok Ellu bak,
at, lét, hinns sat,
Ívarr ara,
Jórvík, skorit.
Ok senn sonu
sló, hvern ok þó,
Aðalráðs eða
út flæmði Knútr.

Ívarr, who ruled at York, had Ælla’s back cut with an eagle. And Cnut soon defeated or drove out the sons of Æthelred, every one.

Ivar is the famous Ivar the Boneless, Ælla a Northumbrian king who was one of his victims, and it was 150 years or so from their time to Cnut's. Whether Cnut or his supporters really did trace the precedent of a Danish England all the way back to King Dan, this poem too finds a precedent for Danish rule in an alternative reading of English history which places its Danish kings front and centre. Here it's the West Saxons who are a footnote, the sons of Æthelred (like Edmund Ironside) who are the ones driven away, marginalised, swept out of the mainstream by history's apparently inevitable onward tide. It could easily have been that way. It very nearly was.

A pendant of Thor's hammer found in Lincolnshire,

one of many found across the areas of Scandinavian settlement in England

Beowulf - and more

Just a short post to say that I've written a piece on Beowulf for this month's issue of the BBC History Magazine (not online at the moment, but I'll add a link if it turns up on their website.) It's very much a basic introduction to the poem, but I tried also to suggest some of the complexities of the poem's worldview and its approach to legend and history.

Shocking as this might be to confess, Beowulf is not a poem I'm naturally drawn to; I had to teach myself to find it interesting, and though I do appreciate its fine qualities I somewhat regret that it so much dominates public perception of early medieval English literature. It's the only Anglo-Saxon text most people have ever heard of - in the UK, Beowulf is often the very first thing people think of when they hear the term 'Anglo-Saxon'. (Second is primary school lessons about the Battle of Hastings!) Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that even one Anglo-Saxon poem has that kind of name-recognition, and it's important to have a reference point which can help people steer their way through this largely unfamiliar landscape. Yet in many ways Beowulf is not particularly representative of the rich and varied body of literature which survives from early medieval England (for one thing, it doesn't take place in early medieval England!). There are many other fascinating texts, poetry and prose, which will never make their way into any popular history magazine, nor ever be turned into a blockbuster film, but which are nonetheless very much worth exploring - remarkable for their poetic dexterity, their sensitivity of thought, their glimpses into an unfamiliar cultural world.

So if you're new to Anglo-Saxon literature other than Beowulf , and would like to explore some less well-known texts from the period in translation, here a few freely accessible online resources which you may not have come across before:

The Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry Project is an extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging collection of open-access translations of Old English poems - from short lyrics on all kinds of subjects to long and complex narratives telling stories from the Bible and the lives of saints.

The Riddle Ages blog translates and discusses the Old English riddles of the Exeter Book, a fabulous set of little poems by turns witty, beautiful, and mystifying (and often all at the same time).

A diversity of many types of short Old English texts, with valuable discussion, can be found at the wonderful blog 'For the Wynn' - there you will encounter Anglo-Saxon prayers, prognostics, medical and scientific texts, charms, and much more...

If you like Beowulf, you'll really like this post on the poem Widsith, and other material at the same fine blog.

I've written here often about some of my own favourite Old English poems: this tag will take you back through the archive, and if you'd rather go through it seasonally, here's a page with links to many posts on The Anglo-Saxon Year. A couple of times I've written for History Today about Anglo-Saxon texts: this on a beautiful poem about the seasons and the natural world, and this on a collection of 11th-century proverbs.

In terms of prose, you can read many of the sermons of the great Anglo-Saxon teacher, preacher and writer Ælfric in parallel-text translation here - the translation is old-fashioned, but solid. There are some of his saints' lives available here and here, and I've posted a few translations and discussions of Ælfric's sermons under this tag. (His works for teaching are fun too...) You can also read a translation of Ælfric's short work which he intended to introduce a few key principles of early medieval science, from equinoxes to leap years and the causes of different kinds of weather.

You can also read the entirety of Bede's Ecclesiastical History online in translation from the Latin. Translations (older, but still useful) of the longer prose Old English works are available through archive.org, such as the English version of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy associated with Alfred the Great. You could even read the West Saxon translation of the Gospel of John, and follow along in a modern English translation...

And because English and Latin were not the only literary languages to be found in Anglo-Saxon England, let's have a word for the Old Norse poems I sometimes talk about which were (probably) performed in this country, such as those composed for Cnut when he was king of England and Denmark. Translations of some of these can also be found online, if you know where to look: this is a poem in praise of Cnut's conquest of England which glories in his victories over the English, enumerating his battles across the country, north and south, by the Ouse, the Tees and the Thames. (Just in case you ever wondered what the Vikings called Norwich or the Forest of Dean.) If you prefer your triumphal poetry to be at the expense of the the Normans, here's a short poem about the Anglo-Danish earl Waltheof and his victory over Norman forces at York in 1069.

Should you read those and then decide 'forget the Anglo-Saxons, I want to read Old Norse!', the Viking Society have got you covered with their wonderfully generous archive of open-access publications. It's a long way from Beowulf, but not entirely so - because Beowulf is about Scandinavians, after all... ;)

On the coast of Yorkshire on a September day

It's the time of year for a favourite story of mine, which seems like a good opportunity to break a long blogging drought. Here's a short summary of an episode which I discuss in further detail in my book, as a taster to induce you to notice that it's currently on sale...

Harold Hardrada's army landing in England, in a 13th-century English manuscript

(CUL MS Ee.3.59, f.31)

On or around 18 September in the autumn of 1066, the king of Norway, Harald Hardrada, arrived on the coast of Yorkshire with a large army. In his company was Tostig, the brother of Harold Godwineson, king of England, who had joined forces with the Norwegians against his brother. Harold Godwineson himself was occupied elsewhere, on the south coast, having spent the summer awaiting a Norman invasion which had not - yet - come. Soon after their arrival the Norwegian forces won a battle at Fulford, near York, but were defeated a few days later by the English king at Stamford Bridge. In this battle, Harald Hardrada was killed. Accounts of the Norwegian invasion of 1066 in medieval English sources tend to be fairly brief, since it came to be overshadowed by the Battle of Hastings a few weeks later; but in Scandinavian history Harald Hardrada was a major figure, and so many Old Norse sources tell detailed and powerful narratives about the last days of his life. Written centuries after the events they describe, they are not really intended to be reliable sources for what actually happened in 1066; instead, they show us how later Norse writers thought about this period of history, which was (among other things) a turning-point in England's relationship with the Scandinavian world.

One such is a text called Hemings þáttr, a narrative written in Iceland in the thirteenth century, which deals at length with the attempted Norwegian invasion of England, the Norman Conquest, and its aftermath. Following other Norse sources, it tells how Harald's last days were marked by a cluster of omens which seemed to show the king that his death was approaching; Harald is shown embarking on the invasion with a sense of foreboding, increasingly confident that this will be his last expedition, the end of a magnificent career. He has been talked into it by Tostig, egged on to ambition by a bitter and vengeful man - Tostig is jealous of his brother, wants power for himself, and is trying to use the Norwegian king to get it. Harald knows Tostig is using him, knows he can't be trusted, and yet agrees to support him. Almost before he has done so, the bad omens start: Harald's men have threatening dreams, sailors report mysterious fires at sea and blood pouring out of the sky, a ghost rises up from a graveyard to prophesy that the king will fall. Worst of all, before setting sail, Harald has a vision of St Olaf, his martyred half-brother, who angrily chastises him for what he is about to do. Harald is shaken and Tostig, a wily 'man of many words', has to talk him round, telling him it's just some 'English witchcraft' trying to frighten him. But the signs could not be clearer that this invasion will not end well.

By the time they reach the English coast, the relationship between the king and his English egger-on is strained. One thing that's interesting about this part of the story is how precise the geographical references are, compared to the English sources; the Old Norse sources are much more specific about locating Harold and Tostig in particular places as they travel along the coast of Yorkshire, and Cleveland, Scarborough, and Ravenser are all mentioned by name. (Sometimes medieval Icelandic writers knew more about northern England than historians in the south of England did.)

It's at Cleveland that Harald and Tostig have a terse, tense conversation:

Þeir taka land ok ganga þar upp sem Kliflond heita. Konungr spyr Tosta, 'Hvat heitir hæð su er þar er norðr a landit?' Tosti segir, 'Eigi er her hverri hæð nafn gefit.' Konungr segir, 'Nafn man þo þersi eiga, ok skalltu segia mer.' Tosti segir, 'Þat er haugr Ivars beinlausa.' Konungr svarar, 'Fair hafa þeir sigrað England er at hans haugi hafa fyrst komit.' Tosti segir, 'Forneskia er nu at trua sliku.'

They reached land and came ashore at a place called Cleveland. The king asked Tostig, ‘What is the name of the hill which is along the land to the north?’

Tostig said, ‘Not every hill here has a name given to it.’

The king said, ‘But this one has a name, and you shall tell it to me.’

Tostig said, ‘That is the howe of Ivar the boneless.’

The king replied, ‘Few who have landed in England near this howe have been victorious.’

Tostig said, ‘It’s just superstition to believe such things now.’

Ivar the Boneless was one of the most famous Vikings to invade England, and stories about him abound in both medieval English and Scandinavian literature. The context for this superstition about his burial-mound is explained in another Old Norse saga, Ragnars saga:

Ok þa er hann la i banasott, męllti hann, at hann skylldi þangat fera, er herskat veri, ok þess kvazt hann vęnta, at þeir mundi eigi sigr fa, er þar kęmi at landinu. Ok er hann andaz, var sva giort, sem hann męllti fyrir, ok var þa i haug lagidr. Ok þat segia margir menn, þa er Haralldr konungr Sigurdarson kom til Englandz, at hann kęmi þar at, er Ivar var fyrir, ok fellr hann i þeirre faur. Ok er Vilhialmr bastardr kom i land, for hann til ok braut haug Ivars ok sa Ivar ofuinn. Þa let hann giora bal mikit ok lętr Ivar brenna á balinu. Ok eptir þat berzt hann til landsins ok fęrr gagn.

When Ivar lay in his last illness, he said that he should be carried to the place where armies came to harry, and he said he thought they would not have the victory when they came to the land. And when he died, it was done as he had said, and he was laid in the howe. And many people say that when King Harald Sigurðarson [i.e. Harald Hardrada] came to England, he landed at the place where Ivar was, and he died on that expedition. And when William the Bastard came to the land, he went to the place and opened Ivar’s mound and saw Ivar, undecayed. Then he had a great fire made and had Ivar burned in the flames. After that he fought battles across the country and won the victory.

The difference between the two invaders of 1066 is shown by how they react to Ivar's burial-mound: William is prepared to risk the wrath of the great Viking by burning his bones, but Harald, already convinced he is doomed to die on this expedition, accepts the bad omen as his fate.

I'm interested in the burial-mound story, but I've written about that before, so here I'll instead explain why I also very much like how Hemings þáttr imagines the little dialogue between Harald and Tostig. Picture them, on the coast of Cleveland on a warm September day, steeling themselves for coming battle and passing the time with this ill-tempered conversation. This is the kind of naturalistic moment at which Icelandic sagas excel - more like something from a modernist novel than a medieval history. It's sparse and tense, and what matters most is what's not being said. (It will now take me three paragraphs to explain what the saga leaves unsaid...) As battle approaches, the two allies are getting on each other's nerves: Tostig thinks the king is losing his grip, and Harald is increasingly frustrated with Tostig's evasions. Harald already fears the answer to his question about the hill - he intuits that they have landed in an ill-omened place - and he wants to make Tostig confirm it. Tostig's irritable attempts at deflection suggest he knows it too, but doesn't want to say so.

Sagas of this genre are often interested in the relationship between kings and their advisors - what it is and isn't safe to say to a powerful man, and how best to say it - and there's some of that going on here, all tact and tactics as Tostig tries to distract the king from fears which might become self-fulfilling prophecies. There are also some undercurrents to do with Tostig's status as an outsider Englishman (as this saga presents him) and a Norse writer's view on whether the English in general can be trusted to speak the truth. In his ambition for power Tostig has set himself apart from his countrymen and keeps telling Harald 'you can't trust the English', speaking as if he's not one of them - but in the eyes of the Norwegians he absolutely is, in part because he's the most untrustworthy of all. Harald knows that the English hate Tostig, and Tostig knows it too - so perhaps it needles him to be called on to act as guide to the English landscape. 'You're from around here, you're supposed to know this place - tell me what that hill's called'.

And there's something memorable and almost proverbial about Tostig's brittle riposte, 'Not every hill has a name'. Not everything is an omen, he's trying to say, not everything is about something else - just focus on the job in hand! I think of that sometimes as a useful little self-rebuke against the tendency to take things too seriously. (But in this case he's wrong, of course: this is an omen.) Altogether it's a brilliant evocation of eve-of-battle nerves, and the sense of anticipation, of something momentous drawing near, is very strong. What comes next you can read about here. (And in my book - did I mention it's currently on sale?)

'If in day of Doom one deathless stands'

Readers of this blog may be interested in watching this series of talks given recently in Oxford (in connection with the Bodleian Library's exhibition Tolkien: Maker of Middle-Earth) on the subject of the medieval languages which interested and influenced Tolkien. There were lectures on Old and Middle English, Medieval Welsh, Gothic and Old Norse (my contribution). If you're interested in Tolkien, the whole archive is worth exploring - the Bodleian have made available talks dating back to 2008, on a range of topics relating to Tolkien and his works.



In my lecture I talked about Tolkien's interest in Old Norse and especially in the legend of the Völsungs, which he explored in his long poem The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. This text interests me because it's such an individual take on the story; though it arises from a deep engagement with the medieval sources, it's far from a straightforward retelling of the legend. There are several ways in which this is true, but in the lecture I focused on the element of Tolkien's retelling which interests me the most: his Christian-inflected retelling of the story of Ragnarök. This too is highly individual, and while some lovers of Norse mythology might feel it detracts from the powerful bleakness of the Ragnarök myth, Tolkien's version has a poignant beauty of its own. His Sigurd, dragon-slayer, is not just a great hero but a Christ-like figure, the Chosen One (that's Tolkien's proposed interpretation of Völsung): the promised Saviour, the fulfilment of prophecies, whose return at the end of time will be the salvation of the world.

A seer long silent
her song upraised –
the halls hearkened –
on high she stood.
Of doom and death
dark words she spake,
of the last battle
of the leaguered Gods.

'The horn of Heimdal
I hear ringing;
the Blazing Bridge
bends neath horsemen;
the Ash is groaning,
his arms trembling,
the Wolf waking,
warriors riding.

The sword of Surt
smoketh redly;
the slumbering Serpent
in the sea moveth;
a shadowy ship
from shores of Hell
legions bringeth
to the last battle.

The wolf Fenrir
waits for Ódin,
for Frey the fair
the flames of Surt;
the deep Dragon
shall be doom of Thór –
shall all be ended,
shall Earth perish?

If in day of Doom
one deathless stands,
who death hath tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Ódin,
then all shall not end,
nor Earth perish.

On his head shall be helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendour.
The Serpent shall shiver
and Surt waver,
the Wolf be vanquished
and the world rescued.'

(Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, ed. Christopher Tolkien (2009), pp. 62-3)

Some of this is drawing on (in places directly translating) the description of Ragnarök in Völuspá, the first poem in the Poetic Edda, but its context and function are very different in Tolkien's poem. The fulfilment of this prophecy, as Odin ensures, is to be Sigurd: he who shall come, 'who death hath tasted / and dies no more.' Tolkien's reworking of Sigurd as a Christ-like figure is done with a light touch - a bit of subtle source-reshaping here, a resonant turn of phrase there - and it takes away nothing from the original story, but invites us to read it in a new light, with new eyes.

All this seems particularly appropriate to think about here at the beginning of Advent, the season which by ancient tradition is not just a preparation for Christmas but an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between prophecies and their fulfilment, between the Old Testament and the New, between the first Advent and the Second Coming at 'the day of Doom'. Tolkien's interpretation of the story of Sigurd is a kind of typological reading of the myth, somewhat like the way medieval readers interpreted the different 'types' for Christ they found in the figures of the Old Testament: Isaac, Moses, Jonah, and more. Those figures and their stories were understood simultaneously to be real historical episodes and to be signs foreshadowing the story of Christ's birth, death and resurrection; neither reading takes anything away from the other, but offers an additional layer of meaning in the divinely-composed narrative of human history.

The idea of a parallel between Sigurd and Christ is something I wrote about a few years ago in this Advent post; there I was discussing the history of the word arkenstone (Old English earcnanstan, Old Norse jarknasteinn), which - as Tolkien must have known - one Old English poem applies to Christ, and one Old Norse poem to Sigurd. The Old English instance occurs in a prophecy, embedded within an account of Christ's second coming at Doomsday:

...æt ærestan
foreþoncle men from fruman worulde
þurh wis gewit, witgan dryhtnes,
halge higegleawe, hæleþum sægdon,
oft, nales æne, ymb þæt æþele bearn,
ðæt se earcnanstan eallum sceolde
to hleo ond to hroþer hæleþa cynne
weorðan in worulde, wuldres agend,
eades ordfruma, þurh þa æþelan cwenn.

...from the beginning,
from the origin of the world, foreknowing men
with their wise wits, prophets of the Lord,
holy ones sage in spirit, spoke to men
often, not once only, of that noble child:
how the precious stone should
come into the world as refuge and comfort
to all the race of men, the ruler of glory,
beginner of bliss, through the noble woman.

This poem is known today as Christ III and as it comes down to us in the Exeter Book (though probably not as originally composed), it stands last in a sequence of three poems which moves from Advent to Apocalypse, from creation to destruction and rebirth - as Völuspá does too, in its different way.

As I've said before, the medieval understanding of Advent was as a season which encourages new and exciting kinds of reading - a season rich in imaginative possibility for those who are prepared to read with the right eyes. Advent is the time when the church reflects on the many different kinds of meaning which Scripture, and the world around us, can reveal: the season for interpreting 'the signs of the times' written in the book of the world, and for reading a Christian interpretation into the prophecies and poetry of the Old Testament (the same kind of light-touch typological reading Tolkien offers in his version of the Sigurd story). The ancient liturgy of Advent is crafted to appeal to all the faculties of the mind and heart which we call upon when we read poetry, or take in stories in any form: it offers metaphor, allegory, foreshadowing, wordplay, expressions of urgent desire, and (especially in the link between Advent and Apocalypse) creative thought experiments with narrative time. Medieval liturgists were some of the greatest literary critics who ever lived - sensitive and imaginative readers of Scripture, who wove together connections between texts, between characters and words and ideas, and between moments in time, and hallowed the very act of reading as a way of trying to understand the mind of God.

There's an imaginative fertility and a reaching ambition about the medieval view of Advent which offers something much richer than just a cheery countdown to Christmas. For many people the basic details of the Christmas story are so familiar that its strangeness and power and meaning have been sucked dry, and it doesn't have the imaginative appeal that other kinds of less well-known mythic story do - the story of Ragnarök, for instance, or the fierce beauty of the Poetic Edda. But Advent can be a yearly exercise in 'making strange' - reading old stories with new eyes.

The Danish Conquest, Part 13: The Battle of Assandun

Cnut (British Library, Stowe 944, f.6)

On this day 1000 years ago, Cnut defeated Edmund Ironside at the Battle of Assandun, the final battle in his conquest of England. This blog has been following the course of the Danish Conquest for the past three years, beginning with Svein Forkbeard's invasion of England in the summer of 1013; it's been a lengthy and complicated story of shifting allegiances, invasions, resistance, multiple battles, and extended periods of doubt and uncertainty. It must have felt like a very long three years had passed by the time the two armies met in Essex on 18 October 1016.

(Rather than going back and reading all previous posts in this series, you can get caught up on the whole story with my new ebook, A Short History of the Danish Conquest, just published by Rounded Globe!)

Last Friday saw the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, which attracted a great deal of attention here in the UK - much more than any other anniversary from Anglo-Saxon history would ever receive. That reflects, of course, the important part played by the Norman Conquest (and just as importantly, the myths associated with it) in English and British history, as well as the fact that it's one of the few historical dates 'everybody knows', or used to. This anniversary also comes at a time when the relationship of Britain to the rest of Europe is under particular scrutiny, so the historical analogies have been flying around, from Bayeux Tapestry-inspired political cartoons to official prayers offering thinly-disguised parallels between 1066 and the current political situation (something about an 'island nation poised between Europe and Scandinavia' - don't ask). Future historians will be able to look back on the 2016 commemorations of 1066 and explore what they reveal about our present moment, just as we look back on those of 1966.

It's not surprising that the 1000th anniversary of Cnut's conquest has received so much less attention, given the general lack of information, and widespread misinformation, about Anglo-Saxon England, even among people who are otherwise quite educated about history. The inaccurate but still popular belief that 1066 marks 'the beginning of English history' (and the end of the Dark Ages) consigns everything before that date to misty obscurity, and it can be difficult to convince people that an event like Cnut's conquest might actually be an interesting or important part of this country's history. Particularly unfortunate is a persistent refusal to acknowledge that pre-Conquest England was as complex as any other period of history: the myth of rugged, plain-spoken, 'simple Saxons' persists, both among those who romance about the brave-but-doomed heroes of Hastings and among those who prefer to celebrate the Normans for bringing sophistication and European civilisation to a nation of half-savage peasants. It's sadly difficult to persuade people on either side that Anglo-Saxon England might not actually be simple at all, but worthy of considered thought and attention in its own right - not just as a kind of prologue to 'real history' or a quarry for facile Brexit parallels.

(As for 'plain-spoken' - a few minutes with any piece of Old English poetry ought to dispel that myth!)

Few things illustrate that complexity better than the long story of Cnut's conquest. There are no heroes and villains here, no easy tales of winners and losers. This is a period of Anglo-Saxon history for which we have rich and sophisticated written sources; for the Battle of Assandun, those sources include a long chronicle in English, a Latin history whose author parades his classical learning and his familiarity with Roman historians - oh, and one of the most intricate forms of poetry ever devised by the human imagination (skaldic verse). So let's have a look at what these sources have to say about Assandun, the battle fought on 18 October 1016.

Cnut and Edmund Ironside (CUL MS. Ee 3 59, f. 5)

We can pick up the story where we left off in the last installment. Edmund Ironside, having fought with the Danes in Kent and accepted his treacherous former ally Eadric Streona back into his counsel ('never was there a more unwise decision than that was', the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle comments), now pursued the Danish army into Essex. And then:

Se here gewende eft up on Eastseaxan, 7 ferde into Myrcan, 7 fordyde eall þæt he oferferde. Ða se cyning geahsade þæt se here upp wæs, þa gesamnade he fiftan siðe ealle Engla þeode 7 ferde him æthindan, 7 offerde hi innon Eastseaxan æt þære dune þe man hæt Assandun, 7 þær togædere heardlice fengon. Þa dyde Eadric ealdorman swa swa he ær ofter dyde, astealde þæne fleam ærast mid Magesætan, 7 swa aswac his kynehlaforde 7 ealle þeodæ Angelcynnes. Ðær ahte Cnut sige, 7 gefeaht him wið ealle Engla þeode. Þa wearð þær ofslægen Eadnoð biscop, 7 Wulfsie abbod, 7 ælfric ealdorman, 7 Godwine ealdorman, 7 Ulfkytel of Eastenglan, 7 Æþelward Ælfwines sunu ealdormannes, 7 eall seo duguð of Angelcynnes þeode.

[The [Danish] raiding-army turned back up into Essex, and went towards Mercia, and destroyed all that they overtook. Then when the king [Edmund] heard that the army was inland, he gathered all the English people for the fifth time and travelled behind them, and overtook them in Essex at the hill which is called Assandun, and there they fought a hard battle together. Then Eadric the ealdorman did as he had so often done before, and first began the flight with the Magonsæte, and so betrayed his king and lord and all the English people. There Cnut had the victory, and won for himself the whole people of the English. There Bishop Eadnoth was killed, and Abbot Wulfsige, and Ealdorman Ælfric, and Ealdorman Godwine, and Ulfcytel of East Anglia, and Æthelweard, the son of Ealdorman Æ[thel]wine, and all the best of the English people.]

We don't know exactly where the battle took place: 'Assandun' is the Old English form of the place-name, which today is most likely to be either Ashdon, in north-west Essex, or Ashingdon, in the south-east of the county. (This uncertainty makes the fevered debate about moving the supposed site of the Battle of Hastings a mile this way or that seem quite trivial!). Ashingdon was the favoured candidate for a long time, but I personally incline towards Ashdon, so I'll use the Old English form Assandun for convenience's sake.

The chronicler, whose sympathy is with Edmund Ironside and what he considers to be the 'English' side, here insistently uses variations on the phrase 'all the English people' (ealle Engla þeode); but we have to remember that not all among the English were fighting for Edmund in 1016. There must also have been Englishmen fighting for the Danes by this point in the war - and not only the treacherous Eadric Streona. There's a strong chance, for instance, that by a remarkable historical irony the father of the king who would lead the English at Hastings, fifty years later, was fighting for the invaders in this battle. Godwine (not the one named in the extract), father of Harold Godwineson, had perhaps already gone over to the Danes; he would soon marry a Danish noblewoman and be richly rewarded for his service to Cnut. Godwine gave his eldest sons the distinctly Danish names Svein and Harold (the names of Cnut's father and grandfather, and of Cnut's own two oldest sons) - and fifty years after Assandun, almost to the day, that Harold was killed at Hastings.

We don't know the names of any on the Danish side killed at the battle of Assandun, but the Chronicle lists some prominent men killed among the English. Ulfcytel was Ealdorman of East Anglia, and for a decade or more he had been more successful in his battles against the Danes than most English leaders. He had made a big impression on his Danish opponents: he appears in Scandinavian sources under the name Ulfkell Snillingr, 'Ulfkell the Bold', and in 1004, after he led his men into battle at Thetford against a Danish army, it was apparently said that 'the Danes admitted they had never met with harder battle in England than Ulfcytel had given them'. He died in battle on his own ground, in Essex; the ealdormen of Hampshire and Lindsey were likewise killed, along with the son of a noble East Anglian family (Ealdorman Æthelwine).

The dead also included two leading churchmen, Wulfsige, Abbot of Ramsey, and Eadnoth, Bishop of Dorchester. They may have been fighting, or they may have been with the group of monks from Ely and elsewhere who took relics to the battle to pray for the army. The Liber Eliensis says that Bishop Eadnoth was killed while he was singing mass at the battlefield; 'first his right hand was cut off for the sake of a ring, then his whole body was cut to pieces'. His body was buried at Ely, where he was considered to be a martyr. Four years earlier, Eadnoth had been responsible for retrieving the body of St Ælfheah, Archbishop of Canterbury, after he was killed by the Danes, which makes Eadnoth's own fate particularly poignant.

Eadnoth's remains still lie at Ely, alongside those of another famous casualty of the Danes: Byrhtnoth, the ealdorman of Essex killed in battle at Maldon in 991, and hero of the Old English poem of that name. Byrhtnoth died in what is sometimes considered the first battle of the Danish Conquest, Eadnoth in the last, and at Ely they are together (alongside Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, but we'll get to him in a moment).

Memorial to Eadnoth, Byrhtnoth, Wulfstan and others (Ely Cathedral)

At Assandun eall seo duguð of Angelcynnes þeode, 'all the best of the English' were slain, according to the chronicler. This is rather poetic language: duguð has an interesting range of meaning, and might be best translated with a poetic phrase like the 'flower of English manhood'. The word is powerfully associated with loss and grief in two famous Old English poems, The Wanderer and The Seafarer (lines 80-90):

Dagas sind gewitene,
ealle onmedlan eorþan rices;
næron nu cyningas ne caseras
ne goldgiefan swylce iu wæron,
þonne hi mæst mid him mærþa gefremedon
ond on dryhtlicestum dome lifdon.
Gedroren is þeos duguð eal, dreamas sind gewitene,
wuniað þa wacran ond þas woruld healdaþ,
brucað þurh bisgo. Blæd is gehnæged,
eorþan indryhto ealdað ond searað,
swa nu monna gehwylc geond middangeard.

The days are departed,
all the glories of the kingdom of the earth;
there are now no kings nor caesars
nor gold-givers such as there once were,
when they performed among themselves so many magnificent deeds,
and lived in most lordly majesty.
Fallen is all that duguð, joys are departed,
weaker ones now live and possess the world,
gain use of it by their labour. The blossom is bowed down,
the nobility of earth ages and grows sere,
as now does every man across the world.

The language of these last few lines is autumnal: blæd (which I've translated here as 'blossom') means glory or fame but also blossom, flower and fruit, and all things which grow and flourish. In this world the flowers of spring and of youth inevitably fall, and the earth grows sere (searað), like autumn leaves 'in the sere and yellow' of the year. In the October of 1016, such language might have seemed very apt.

A possible site of Assandun (near Ashdon, Essex)

If the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is tinged with the language of loss, Cnut's Scandinavian poets commemorated the Battle of Assandun in very different terms. His victory is extolled in an Old Norse poem composed by the Icelandic poet Óttarr svarti, probably late in the 1020s. This poem praises Cnut's greatest triumphs, including the victory at Assandun:

Skjöldungr, vannt und skildi
skœru verk, inn sterki,
(fekk blóðtrani bráðir
brúnar) Assatúnum.

Strong Skjöldungr, you performed a feat of battle under the shield; the blood-crane [raven/eagle] received dark morsels at [Assandun].

Óttarr svarti, Knútsdrápa, ed. and trans. Matthew Townend, in Diana Whaley, ed., Poetry from the Kings' Sagas 1, Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages I (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), Part 2, p.779.

Cnut is called 'Skjöldungr' in reference to his supposed ancestors, the legendary Skjöldung dynasty of kings, who appear in Old English literature as the Scyldings of Beowulf. It's an epithet which reaches back into the mists of history and legend, to endow Cnut with the greatness of his royal Danish lineage to make a political point. (Compare, perhaps, the modern fondness for calling the English army at Hastings 'Saxons', despite the fact that - as you can see in the extract from the Chronicle above - by this date they were more likely to call themselves 'English'.)

Source

The power of historical parallels, and especially of recognisable images, was just as evident in 1016 as it is to today's cartoonists. The Encomium Emmae Reginae, a history of Cnut's conquest commissioned by his wife Emma, claims that the Danish army carried an especially meaningful banner into battle at Assandun:

Now they had a banner of wonderfully strange nature, which though I believe that it may be incredible to the reader, yet since it is true, I will introduce the matter into my true history. For while it was woven of the plainest and whitest silk, and the representation of no figure was inserted into it, in time of war a raven was always seen as if embroidered on it, in the hour of its owners' victory opening its beak, flapping its wings, and restive on its feet, but very subdued and drooping with its whole body when they were defeated. Looking out for this, Thorkell, who had fought the first battle, said: "Let us fight manfully, comrades, for no danger threatens us: for to this the restive raven of the prophetic banner bears witness." When the Danes heard this, they were rendered bolder, and clad with suits of mail, encountered the enemy in the place called Aesceneduno, a word which we Latinists can explain as 'mons fraxinorum'.

This magical raven banner, which prophetically displays whether the bearer will be victorious, is very like one said by legend to be have been carried into battle by Ivar and Ubbe, sons of Ragnar Lothbrok, Danish conquerors who had ruled in the north of England in the ninth century. Their raven banner was, one medieval English source claims, 'woven by the three daughters of Lothbrok in the space of one noon-tide'. Ivar and Ubbe were not direct ancestors of Cnut, but they were the most successful Danish invaders of England before his time. In Norse sources, there's a suggestion that after death Ivar's mighty spirit guarded the coast of England from later invaders, who could only win the land by conquering the dead king as well as the living ones.

In the eleventh century, 150 years after their heyday, it was still a powerful thing for Cnut's poets to compare him to 'Ivar, who ruled in York' - a reminder that the Danes had ruled in England before, and were now ready to do so again. We can't know whether Cnut's army really did carry a raven banner at Assandun, or only said they did, but the link this story suggests between Cnut and the sons of Ragnar might indeed have 'rendered the Danes bolder' and daunted the English.

The raven banner in the Encomium (BL Add. MS 33241, f.37v)

The Encomium goes on:

And there, before battle was joined, Eadric, whom we have mentioned as Eadmund's chief supporter, addressed these remarks to his comrades: "Let us flee, oh comrades, and snatch our lives from imminent death, or else we will fall forthwith, for I know the hardihood of the Danes." And concealing the banner which he bore in his right hand, he turned his back on the enemy, and caused the withdrawal of a large part of the soldiers from the battle. And according to some, it was afterwards evident that he did this not out of fear but in guile; and what many assert is that he had promised this secretly to the Danes in return for some favour.

Then Eadmund, observing what had occurred, and hard pressed on every side, said: "Oh Englishmen, today you will fight or surrender yourselves all together. Therefore, fight for your liberty and your country, men of understanding; truly, those who are in flight, inasmuch as they are afraid, if they were not withdrawing, would be a hindrance to the army." And as he said these things, he advanced into the midst of the enemy, cutting down the Danes on all sides, and by this example rendering his noble followers more inclined to fight. Therefore a very severe infantry battle was joined, since the Danes, although the less numerous side, did not contemplate withdrawal, and chose death rather than the danger attending flight. And so they resisted manfully, and protracted the battle, which had been begun in the ninth hour of the day, until the evening, submitting themselves, though ill-content to do so, to the strokes of swords, and pressing upon the foe with a better will with the points of their own swords.

Armed men fell on both sides, but more on the side which had superiority in numbers. But when evening was falling and night-time was at hand, longing for victory overcame the inconveniences of darkness, for since a graver consideration was pressing, they did not shrink from the darkness, and disdained to give way before the night, only burning to overcome the foe. And if the shining moon had not shown which was the enemy, every man would have cut down his comrade, thinking he was an adversary resisting him, and no man would have survived on either side, unless he had been saved by flight. Meanwhile the English began to be weary, and gradually to contemplate flight, as they observed the Danes to be of one mind either to conquer, or to perish all together to a man. For then they seemed to them more numerous, and to be the stronger in so protracted a struggle. For they deemed them stronger by a well-founded suspicion, because, being made mindful of their position by the goading of weapons, and distressed by the fall of their comrades, they seemed to rage rather than fight. Accordingly the English, turning their backs, fled without delay on all sides, ever falling before their foes, and added glory to the honour of Knutr and to his victory, while Eadmund, the fugitive prince, was disgraced.

Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. and trans. Alistair Campbell (London: Royal Historical Society, 1949), pp.25, 27 (paragraph breaks added).

It's interesting that the author, though obviously on the Danish side, gives Edmund Ironside a heroic speech, pro libertate et patria: 'O Englishmen, fight for your liberty and your country!' For the Danes, it's Thorkell the Tall, Cnut's chief supporter/rival, who is the most prominent figure here: to Thorkell falls the key role of encouraging the troops and interpreting the omens of victory. Considering this is supposed to be Cnut's triumph, he's strangely absent from every detail of the battle. But triumph it was, and the Danes won the day.

Initial from the Encomium (BL Add. MS 33241, f. 8r)

Like William the Conqueror at Battle, Cnut later founded a church on the site of his victory. In 1020, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us:

on þisan geare for se cyng 7 Þurkyl eorl to Assandune, 7 Wulfstan arcebiscop, 7 oðre biscopas, 7 eac abbodas 7 manege munecas, 7 gehalgodan þæt mynster æt Assandune.

[In this year the king and Earl Thorkell went to Assandun, with Archbishop Wulfstan and other bishops, and also abbots and many monks, and consecrated the church at Assandun.]

If we believe the Encomium, Thorkell had been the hero at Assandun in 1016; by 1020 Cnut had made him Earl of East Anglia, so the site of the battle, wherever it was, lay in his earldom. In 1016, Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, was the leading churchman in England (since it took some time to appoint a successor to the martyred St Ælfheah as archbishop of Canterbury). Wulfstan had been outspoken in his preaching against the Danes, and in 1016 he must have been wondering whether if Cnut and Thorkell triumphed he would share Ælfheah's terrible fate. But by 1020 he had become the king's chief English adviser, writer of Cnut's laws and public pronouncements, and now preaching reconciliation and peace. It's been suggested that one of his surviving sermons, 'On the Dedication of a Church', may have been preached at the dedication of the church at Assandun. Wulfstan died in 1023 and now lies at Ely, in the same monument as Bishop Eadnoth.

Other people likely to have been present at the dedication of the church, among the crowd mentioned in the Chronicle, include Cnut's queen Emma (patron of the Encomium), Earl Godwine (perhaps with his new Danish wife, Gytha), Æthelnoth (soon to be made Archbishop of Canterbury), the Norwegian earl Eiríkr (newly appointed earl of Northumbria) and more. The church was entrusted to Stigand, a priest probably of Anglo-Danish heritage - the first appointment of the man who would rise to be Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the Norman Conquest. With hindsight, there are many tantalising connections and ironies to be drawn out from this disparate collection of people - English, Danish, Norwegian and Norman - who between them would shape England's fate throughout the eleventh century. No one could have foreseen on that day in 1020 that fifty years later the young priest Stigand would be Archbishop of Canterbury, crowning Godwine's son King of England.

Stigand and Harold Godwineson

The date of Assandun was also commemorated when Cnut endowed a new church at Bury St Edmunds, which was consecrated on 18 October 1032. Cnut's commemoration of Assandun through church patronage is often described as an 'act of penance', but it's rather more complicated than that. A great public ceremony like the one described in the Chronicle, attended by the leading figures of the kingdom, preserves the memory of a victory; even if the king expresses regret for the lives lost, he is asserting the importance of his conquest and ensuring that posterity will remember it, and there's nothing humble or penitent about that. Several people have commented in the last few days on the difficult question of whether we have been 'commemorating' or 'celebrating' the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and you might ask the same question of Cnut and his followers at Assandun. It's hard to believe that the court which preserved the triumphal stories about Assandun recorded in the Encomium did not think the battle more a matter for celebration than penance - and the church a memorial to a great victory.

One possible candidate for Cnut's minster (Hadstock, Essex)

'There Cnut had the victory, and won for himself the whole nation of the English', says the Chronicle. But Assandun is not quite the end. Edmund Ironside did not die on the battlefield, and in fact there's one really excellent part of the story still to come (it involves a duel - which never actually happened - between Cnut and Edmund). Even the last stages of this fascinating story are not straightforward or simple...

'The words linger': Christ the Arkenstone and 'The Hobbit'

Shooting a dragon (BL Arundel 91, f. 28v)

Today I want to share with you a very short extract from an Old English poem, which I hope will be of interest this week for two reasons: firstly because it's about Advent and the birth of Christ, and secondly because it contains a single word which features prominently in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. This is a pleasing confluence of events, and entirely a coincidence (somehow I don't think Advent had much to do with the timing of The Hobbit movie, except that we've replaced Advent with the commercial potential of the run-up to Christmas...)

I wrote about The Hobbit and its relation to some medieval stories about werebears and dragon-slayers last year, but today's poem offers a particularly nice coincidence because it brings us close to the Old English version of the O Antiphons, appropriate reading for the last week before Christmas. Scholars, somewhat lacking in imagination, have traditionally given the name Christ I to the untitled poem based on the O Antiphons, because it's the first poem in the manuscript and it's about Christ. The third poem in the same manuscript is known as Christ III (I bet you can't guess why...). While Christ I is about the first coming of Christ into the world, Christ III is about the second coming: it describes the end of the world in fire, Judgement Day, the joy of the saved and the misery of the damned, the terrible beauty of Christ as he returns in glory. (The whole poem can be read online in translation here.) It's in this poem that we meet our word from The Hobbit, and the title of this post has given away the clue: the word is Arkenstone, the name Tolkien gave to the great jewel of the dwarves, which he took from the Old English earcnanstan, 'precious stone'. This word appears a handful of times in Old English, sometimes in reference to a particular gemstone - a pearl or a topaz - and sometimes for jewels generally. But in Christ III (ll. 1190-8) it's used for something a bit more special:

...æt ærestan
foreþoncle men from fruman worulde
þurh wis gewit, witgan dryhtnes,
halge higegleawe, hæleþum sægdon,
oft, nales æne, ymb þæt æþele bearn,
ðæt se earcnanstan eallum sceolde
to hleo ond to hroþer hæleþa cynne
weorðan in worulde, wuldres agend,
eades ordfruma, þurh þa æþelan cwenn.

...from the beginning,
from the origin of the world, foreknowing men
with their wise wits, prophets of the Lord,
holy ones sage in spirit, spoke to men
often, not once only, of that noble child:
how the precious stone should
come into the world as refuge and comfort
to all the race of men, the ruler of glory,
beginner of bliss, through the noble woman.

The context of these lines is rather difficult to explain, because this is, quite apart from anything else, a beautifully intricate manipulation of narrative time: this description of the incarnation comes after the destruction of the world, when Christ appears in glory with the radiant Cross at his side. At the sight of the wounds he bears, sinful mankind is forced to confront the evidence of their cruelty towards him, which the poem describes; then it says they should have known who he was, because 'from the origin of the world' it had been prophesied that the earcnanstan would come. In the middle of a poem which is about the future, the end of the world and the second coming, this loops back to a moment when the first coming itself was still in the future, the subject of prophecies and hope but not yet of reality. Such a link between Advent and Apocalypse is an ancient part of the church's observance of the season before Christmas (an idea explored in an Anglo-Saxon context by Ælfric in an Advent sermon I posted recently), and this description of the incarnation, embedded within an account of the end of the world, follows that conventional association of ideas.

But why is Christ called the earcnanstan? One reason might be that this poem, like the Biblical descriptions of the Apocalypse, is studded with literal and metaphorical precious gems: Revelations describes God as appearing like jasper and ruby, enthroned upon a rainbow like an emerald, and in Christ III the stars are called tungolgimmas 'starry gems', the eyes heafodgimmas 'the head's gems'. Among all these jewels, Christ is the most precious: the gem, the earcnanstan. In the passage quoted above there's a notable emphasis on the language of nobility, drawn from secular lordship; God is called wuldres agend, literally 'the owner of glory', and both Christ and Mary are called æþele 'noble'. The word used for Mary, cwenn, can just mean 'woman', but frequently also 'queen' (it's the origin of the Modern English word, of course). The earcnanstan seems to fit with this royal context. Not only are precious stones naturally associated with kings and queens, but the first element, earcnan, seems to mean something like 'noble'; it's found in some early Anglo-Saxon royal names, such as Eorcenberht, seventh-century king of Kent, and St Erkenwald. Perhaps 'noble stone' would be a better translation - fitting for The Hobbit's royal heirloom.

Even so, it strikes me as an unusual name for Christ in this particular situation (the incarnation is Christ becoming flesh, and what's less like flesh than a precious stone?) but that very strangeness makes it a richer image, something which rewards extended thought. The Old English translations of the O Antiphons meditate on some of the mysterious titles given to Christ: key, cornerstone, craftsman, king, daystar, 'God mid us'. This creative poetic naming comes, in that instance, from the liturgy and ultimately from scripture, but it's just the kind of variation and allusive titling and re-titling which harmonised with Anglo-Saxon poetic tradition, and in which Old English poetry abounds. Just look at the different titles by which Christ is called in the few lines quoted above: noble child, precious stone, ruler of glory, beginner (in the sense 'author, source') of bliss. The Old English version of 'O Emmanuel', a poem especially concerned with Christ's name and titles, offers even more examples. 

In medieval tradition precious stones were not only beautiful but powerful, that is, they were considered to have the ability to heal; so to call Christ a precious stone is fitting in more ways than one. Somewhere behind this is an echo of the 'pearl of great price', for which earcnanstan is used in an Old English translation of Matthew 13:45-6: Gelic is rice heofunas menn ceape sohte gode ercnanstanas... The Virgin Mary, too, is addressed by God as min meregrot... min eorclanstan 'my pearl, my precious stone' in one of the Blicking Homilies. The pearl is the central image of a later medieval poem with which Tolkien was deeply engaged, a text of dazzling complexity in which the pearl stands for a multiplicity of things. (It's worth noting that the Middle English poem Pearl is often linked to a poem in a similar style about St Erkenwald, and they're sometimes ascribed to the same author; the pearl and this earcnan- name thus have an additional tie for anyone who has worked on both texts.)

All this is a resonant context for Tolkien's Arkenstone. This stone, which has its own alternative title ('heart of the mountain'), shines 'of its own inner light', like Earendel/Christ who tida gehwane of sylfum þe symle inlihtes 'of thine own self ever enlightenest every age'. Remembering the apocalyptic context in which the word appears in Christ III, the title of the short chapter in The Hobbit which deals with Bilbo's bartering over the Arkenstone is particularly striking: 'A Thief in the Night' refers to the little burglar himself, of course, but it is a reference to St Paul's description of the second coming in 1 Thessalonians 5: 'the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; for when they shall say, peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.' All this is the subject of Christ III; in fact the poem opens with this very image, saying that 'the great day of the Lord' will come like

...sceaða fæcne,
þeof þristlice, þe on þystre fareð,
on sweartre niht...

...a crafty burglar,
a bold thief who moves in the darkness,
in the black night...

(sceaða means 'robber, criminal' so I don't think burglar is too inapposite a translation...) Bilbo's nighttime deed of daring with the Arkenstone brings about a day of judgement of sorts - and certainly sudden destruction.

The Second Coming, from the Benedictional of St Æthelwold (BL Add. 49598, f. 9v)

If you look for the Arkenstone in some of the many guides to Tolkien's use of Anglo-Saxon literature, you'll be informed that the word appears in Beowulf, in the form eorclanstan. There the stones in question are not just any gems, but the most famous jewels of Germanic mythology: the necklace of the Brísingamen, treasure of the goddess Freyja, forged for her by dwarves. It is mentioned in Beowulf because after killing Grendel, Beowulf is presented with many rich rewards for his labours, among them a precious neck ring. The narrator says that he has never heard tell of any greater treasure – except, that is, for the 'necklace of the Brosings', which he calls þa frætwe wæg, eorclanstanas 'the ornamented thing, the precious stones' (1207-8). Unlike the earcnanstan of Christ III, these jewels are a dangerous treasure: in Norse tradition they are the product of sexual bartering by Freyja, constantly coveted and stolen, and the object of immoderate desire and dragonish lust. Thorin never had a chance against this kind of arkenstone.

Virgin and Child (BL Additional 34890, f. 115)

But Beowulf aside, the connotations of the word are generally positive. The cognate Old Norse word is jarknasteinn, and this too is applied to a human being in one memorable instance - in the Poetic Edda, as a comparison for the great hero Sigurðr the Völsung. After Sigurðr's death, his wife Guðrún mourns him with a moving lament:

Svá var minn Sigurðr hjá sonum Gjúka
sem væri geirlaukr ór grasi vaxinn
ða væri bjartr steinn á band dreginn,
jarknasteinn yfir öðlingum.

So was my Sigurðr, compared to the sons of Giuki [her brothers],
like a green leek growing up out of the grass;
like a bright stone threaded on a string,
a precious stone among the princes.

Sigurðr was by far the most famous dragon-slayer of Germanic legend (it wouldn't have taken him three movies to kill Smaug), and there's not as big a gap as you might think between Sigurðr and Christ; the scene of Sigurðr killing the dragon appears on early carvings in a Christian context, which are difficult to interpret but may show Sigurðr's triumph being cast as a battle between good and evil. Tolkien, of course, produced his own version of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, though he did not include this poem, so we don't know how he would have rendered Guðrún's word jarknasteinn. (The Edda contains several different variants of Guðrún's story; this lament comes from Guðrúnarkviða I, and Tolkien instead based his telling on Guðrúnarkviða II.) Tolkien's Sigurðr is a very noble figure indeed: 'sun-bright Sigurd', he is called, 'golden Sigurd / glorious shining'. After he is killed he goes to Valhalla, to await the war with which, in Norse mythology, the world will come to an end:

There feasts he long
at his father's side,
for War waiting,
the World's chosen.

Perhaps there is an echo of this in Thorin's words as he lies dying: 'I go now to the halls of waiting, to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed'. (This is omitted from the film, for reasons which pass understanding.) Thorin is buried, within the mountain, with the Arkenstone on his breast. But Sigurðr, the jarknasteinn, will have a second coming:

In the day of Doom
he shall deathless stand
who death tasted
and dies no more,
the serpent-slayer,
seed of Óðin:
not all shall end,
nor Earth perish.

On his head the Helm,
in his hand lightning,
afire his spirit,
in his face splendour.
When war passeth
in world rebuilt,
bliss shall they drink
who the bitter tasted.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: Harper Collins, 2009), pp. 179-180.

Tolkien was working on this poem, according to Christopher Tolkien's recent edition, in the early 1930s, during which time he was also teaching and lecturing on the Poetic Edda at Oxford (as well as on Beowulf and his other medieval interests, of course). This is also the period when The Hobbit was written, so the Sigurðr story must have been at least in the back of his mind. The Hobbit's most obvious debt to the Poetic Edda is in the names of the company of dwarves, which come straight from a list in Völuspá, the first poem in the Edda, but there are some other elements of the story strongly reminiscent of the Sigurðr legend. Sigurðr (in the Norse poems and in Tolkien's translation) seeks his dragon through misty mountains, Mirkwood, and withered heaths; he famously learns to understand the language of birds, like the helpful speaking thrushes and ravens which swoop through the last pages of The Hobbit. The final section of the book leans heavily on an equivalency between dragon-fire and literal and figurative 'rivers of gold', which is a key part of the story of Sigurðr's treasure-hoard. And Thorin's rapturous list of similes for the Arkenstone - 'it shone like silver in the firelight, like water in the sun, like snow under the stars, like rain upon the Moon' - is structurally not unlike Guðrún's lament for Sigurðr: 'like a green leek growing up out of the grass, like a bright stone threaded on a string, a precious stone among the princes...'

In his edition of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, Christopher Tolkien quotes his father saying in a lecture on Guðrúnarkviða II that he (unlike many readers of the Edda) was more interested in Guðrún, 'usually slighted, and considered as of secondary interest', than in her rival, Brynhildr, contrasting the long agony of Guðrún's grief to Brynhildr's 'brief and terrible storm' of passion. Guðrún lives for many years after the death of Sigurðr, forced to marry again to a man who develops an all-consuming lust for Sigurðr's dragon-won treasure. This terrible greed brings about destruction in which Guðrún loses her brothers, is a second time widowed, and kills her own children. Tolkien's version of The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun ends with Guðrún's grief:

While the world lasteth
shall the words linger,
while men are mindful
of the mighty days.
The woe of Gudrún
while world lasteth
till the end of days
all shall hearken.

Tolkien, The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, ed. C. Tolkien, p. 305.

'The words linger'. No one did more than Tolkien himself to make this come to pass; every time you hear the word 'Arkenstone', even amid the sound and fury of the Hobbit movies, you're hearing a word of Guðrún's lament.

Dragon-fight (BL Additional 34890, f. 158)

You can make up your own mind on how much all this tells us about the Arkenstone of The Hobbit, but it's a reminder of how complex a history any single word 'borrowed' from Old English or Old Norse really has – what a deep well of legend and poetry Tolkien was drawing from as he created his mythology. A word which can be used as a name for Christ and for the pre-eminent dragon-slayer of Germanic legend, for the kingdom of heaven and for one of the most perilous objects of Norse mythology, for the Virgin Mary and for the necklace of the goddess Freyja, is a word located at the centre of an intricate web of literary traditions. Perhaps you might think that to investigate these contexts is excessively pedantic, but it follows a good example: Gandalf's very first words in The Hobbit are a philological quibble, insisting to know what, out of a four possible meanings, Bilbo means by his polite 'good morning'. If we imitate him and ask what 'arkenstone' means, we have to take all these many medieval contexts into account.