Empathy and the Etiology of the Viking Age

Robert Ferguson
Historically Speaking, Volume 11, Number 5, November 2010, pp.
12-13 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/hsp.2010.0025
For additional information about this article
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hsp/summary/v011/11.5.ferguson.html
mpathy is an unpredictable tool. Until the
end of World War II George Bernard Shaw
remained willing to regard Adolf Hitler as
a misguided but basically well-meaning leader, deter-
mined to help his people recover from what Shaw
regarded as the overly severe terms imposed by the
Allies after the 1914-18 war. Shaws
empathy with the sufferings of the
German people, his ability and
willingness to place himself imagi-
natively in their predicament and to
feel what they felt, even led him to
express the hope that the Dublin
government would offer Hitler po-
litical asylum in 1945 should the
news of Hitlers suicide prove false.
Empathy can be perceived as
worse than naive, as both immoral
and politically dangerous. Some of
the hostility toward David Irvings
biographies of Hitler and
Goebbels derived from the inclu-
sion of anecdotes revealing that
Hitler felt foolish wearing shorts;
and that Goebbels, short, dark and
club-footed, so greatly dreaded the
prospect of inspecting ranks of
tall, blond soldiers that he had dif-
ficulty sleeping the night before
such parades. Such anecdotes of
insecurity and frailty run the risk of encouraging an
empathy that is inappropriate, even wrong. Behind
the hostility lies the fear that too much free play of
empathy across the intellect will lead to the rational-
ization of unacceptable behavior, and end by mak-
ing it acceptable.
This question of how to handle empathy is of
particular relevance for the historian who wishes to
tell the story of the nonliterate Vikings, for in the
main it was their Christian contemporaries and vic-
tims who wrote their history for them. The situation
seems to call for an entire deconstruction of the
written sources if any semblance of objective truth
about the Viking phenomenon is to be reached. The
Vikings were the Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes of
the Scandinavian Peninsula and Danish archipelago
who, between about 800 and 1100 raided across
mainland Europe from the Mediterranean to the
Baltic. Initially these raids had the character of pri-
vateering ventures, undertaken by small fleets for the
purpose of material gain. Before the end of the 9th
century, however, huge armies transported in enor-
mous fleets had established a series of Viking king-
doms down the eastern seaboard of England. The
Viking enterprise reached its climax in the early 11th
century with the conquest of all of England by the
Danish King Svein and his son Knut, and Knuts
subsequent establishment of a North Sea empire
that comprised England, Denmark, and parts of
southern Sweden and Norway. Yet for all its bewil-
dering complexities, one fact about the Viking Age
is clear: at the start of it the Scandinavians were
mainly heathen, and by the time it ended they were
mainly Christian. In essence the story is one of a
clash of cultures, ending with the defeat and formal
disappearance of northern heathendom, which was
replaced by Christianity.
Why did the Vikings embark on their campaign
of violence? For most of the 20th century one the-
ory in particular dominated. Articulated by the in-
fluential Norwegian historian Andreas Holmsen, it
cites as the causes of Viking violence poverty, over-
crowding, and anomalies caused by the practice of
primogeniture, whereby the oldest son alone inher-
ited all of his fathers land and authority. This, ac-
cording to the theory, left numerous landless and
ambitious younger brothers with no better option
than to band together to embark on a career of pri-
vateering as a way of achieving wealth and status. In
the case of a fortunate few, like Rollo of Normandy,
there might be the ultimate reward of a colony of
their very own in which to exercise aristocratic priv-
ileges.
The popularity of Holmsens theory is under-
standable. Overcrowding, poverty, hunger, and the
need for self-assertion rank high among the peren-
nially recognizable causes of violent emigrations. It
has support, moreover, in the writings of contempo-
rary and near-contemporary Christian historians
such as Rimbert, who wrote the biography of An-
skar, the Apostle of the North; Adam of Bremen,
who wrote the early history of the archbishopric of
Hamburg-Bremen; and Dudo of
St. Quentin, historian of the
Viking colony of Normandy, all of
whom offer similar explanations
involving poverty and land-short-
age. There is a smattering of ar-
chaeological evidence for the
theory, too, although inevitably the
interpretation of this is a matter of
debate.
But this theory tells us nothing
about why the Viking Age began
when it did. Poverty, overcrowding,
and primogeniture had existed for
centuries in Scandinavia, certainly
long before Vikings began launch-
ing raids on the rest of Europe. I
believe that the Viking Age had its
own Sarajevo incident, which
brought simmering regional ten-
sions in northern Europe to a dra-
matic focus toward the end of the
9th century, igniting violence.
By the time Charlemagne be-
came sole ruler of the Holy Roman Empire in 871
his territory in Western Europe exceeded that of
even the Romans. He took seriously the obligations
imposed on him by his position as the most power-
ful ruler in Western Christendom. He halted the
Muslim expansion into Europe, drove the Arabs
back across the Pyrenees, and established Frankish
dominance in Spain and Gaul. But his chief preoc-
cupation was the conversion to Christianity of the
Saxons on his northeastern border. The emperors
determination to achieve his purpose is evident from
an entry in the Royal Frankish Annals for 775: While
the king spent the winter at the villa of Quierzy, he
decided to attack the treacherous and treaty-breaking
tribe of the Saxons and to persist in this war until
they were either defeated and forced to accept the
Christian religion or entirely exterminated.
1
In 779
the Saxon leader Widukind was defeated in battle at
Bochult. Saxony was taken over and divided into
missionary districts. Charlemagne himself carried
out a number of mass baptisms, demonstrating to
the Saxons the close relationship between Christian
missionary churches and the emperors military
power.
In 782 the Saxons rebelled again and defeated
Historically Speaking November 2010 12
EMPATHY AND THE ETIOLOGY OF
THE VIKING AGE
Robert Ferguson
E
An illustration of a Viking ship from Samuel Rawson Gardiner, A Student's History of England-
From the Earliest Times to 1885 (London, 1892).
the Franks in the Sntel Hills. Charlemagnes re-
sponse was the infamous Massacre of Verden on the
banks of the River Aller, just south of the neck of
the Jutland Peninsula. Four thousand five hundred
unarmed Saxon captives were forcibly baptized and
then executed.
2
This was followed up by a program
of transportations in 794 in which about 7,000 were
forcibly resettled. Two further campaigns of forcible
resettlement followed in 797 and in 798. A final in-
surrection was put down in 804, and Charlemagnes
biographer Einhard was able to articulate the fate of
the defeated tribe. The Saxons were to give up their
devil worship and the malpractices inherited from
their forefathers; and then, once they had adopted
the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion,
they were to be united with the Franks and become
one people with them.
3
Charlemagnes capitulary for
the Saxons, De Partibus Saxoni, operative by the mid-
780s, listed the punishments for those who rejected
the imposition of Christian religious culture: death
for eating meat during Lent; death for
the cremating of the dead in accor-
dance with heathen rites; death for any
of the race of the Saxons hereafter,
concealed among them, [who] shall
have wished to hide himself unbap-
tised, and shall have scorned to come
to baptism, and shall have wished to
remain a heathen.
Several times in the course of his
doomed campaign of resistance
Widukind had sought refuge across
the border with his brother-in-law
Sigfrid, a Danish king. His tales must have left Sigrid
in no doubt as to the passion with which his power-
ful Christian neighbor to the south carried out the
missionary imperative of Christianity. News of the
Verden massacre must have traveled like a shock-
wave through Sigrids territory, crossing the waters
of the Kattegatt and the Vik and up the Scandina-
vian Peninsula, arousing fear, fury, and hostility to-
ward both Charlemagne and Christianity. The Danes
were on the churchs list of peoples to be converted.
Bede mentions them, along with the Frisians, the
Rugini, the Huns, the Old Saxons, and the Boruct-
vari, among a number of Germanic peoples still ob-
serving pagan rites in the early 8th century.
4
In about
710, during the time of King Ongendus (a fearsome
heathen more savage than any beast and harder
than stone), Bedes contemporary, St. Willibrord,
carried out his mission among the Danes and re-
turned to Utrecht with thirty boys who he intended
to instruct in Christianity. Following one of the ear-
liest Viking raids, the Anglo-Saxon cleric Alcuin,
Charlemagnes spiritual mentor, wrote to a mission-
ary friend, Tell me, is there any hope of our con-
verting the Danes?
5
For the great 18th-century English historian Ed-
ward Gibbon, the political significance of Charle-
magnes treatment of the Saxons was clear:
The subjugation of Germany withdrew the
veil which had so long concealed the conti-
nent or islands of Scandinavia from the
knowledge of Europe, and awakened the
torpid courage of their barbarous natives.
The fiercest of the Saxon idolaters escaped
from the Christian tyrant to their brethren
of the North; the Ocean and the Mediter-
ranean were covered with their piratical
fleets; and Charlemagne beheld with a sigh
the destructive progress of the Normans,
who, in less than seventy years, precipitated
the fall of his race and monarchy.
6
As the tension caused by Charlemagnes activities in-
creased, so, too, in accordance with a familiar anthro-
pological response to outside threat, did the intensity
with which the Scandinavians began to mark their
artifacts as a way of asserting their cultural identity.
Burial practices, personal ornaments such as
brooches, building and clothing stylesall show a
heightened degree of ethnic self-identification.
7
Yet
these people were neither compact enough nor cen-
tralized enough to organize themselves into anything
like a force that could have mounted a coherent de-
fense against Frankish Christendom. There remained
the option of what we might term asymmetrical war-
fare, in the form of a series of terrifying strikes
against soft targets like the monasteries of northern
Britain, chief among them Lindisfarne, in Alcuins
phrase, a place more sacred than any in Britain.
Charlemagne and his missionaries had set the terms
of the encounters between Christians and heathens,
destroying the religious sanctuaries and cultural insti-
tutions of any who refused to embrace Christianity,
and the heathens saw no reason not to respond in
kind. With an indifference to the humanity of their
Christian victims as complete as that of Charle-
magnes toward the Saxons, a psychopathic rage di-
rected at the Christian other was unleashed,
expressing itself in orgies of transgressive behavior
that offered the same satisfactions whether the
taboos transgressed be their own or those of their
victims.
8
Simeon of Durham tells us that monks
were deliberately drowned in the sea by the raiders.
Perhaps some travesty of baptism was intended.
Viking raiders dug up Christian altars, presumably
because someone had revealed to them, under tor-
ture, that some of the monasterys greatest treasures
lay buried there, but aware, too, of a blasphemous
offense to their victims that was every bit as great as
that suffered by the Saxon heathens at the hands of
Charlemagnes warriors.
History is not an exact science, and our histori-
cal theories are more swayed than we might like to
think by subjective considerations and prejudices. In
Norway, where in its modern incarnation this idea
of the Vikings as cultural warriors was first ex-
pressed by the archaeologist Bjrn Myhre and the
historian Torgrim Titlestad, the theory has been wel-
comed as attractive and plausible; innately so, per-
haps, but also because it provides Norwegians with
an alternative to a national self-image that struggles
between pride in the achievements associated with
the Viking Agethe founding of colonies in Ice-
land and Greenland, the discovery of North Amer-
ica, the creation of a North Sea empire under Knut
the Great by 1028 that incorporated England, Den-
mark, southern Sweden, and Norwayand shame
over the fact that the whole thing began with a series
of murderous attacks on unarmed monks.
There is no written proof of this etiology. Only
empathy can convey to us the inchoate fear that 9th-
century heathen inhabitants of the Scandinavian
lands might have felt when faced with the encircling
tide of Christian beliefs and Christian culture. By
imaginatively putting ourselves in
their place, we can understand how
they might have seen Charlemagne as
a religiously inspired chieftain waging
war against all who refused to convert
to his religion. We need to be able to
conjure an understanding of how fear
at the prospect of the imminent ex-
tinction of their own culture could
manifest itself as psychopathic rage
that justifiedto take but one exam-
ple from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
the slaughter of the entire community
of sixty-eight monks in the raid on Iona in 808. If
we are able to do so, it might lead us to the realiza-
tion that the attacks that marked the start of the
Viking Age were not incidentally carried out by hea-
thens on Christians, but essentially so.
Robert Ferguson is a prolific historian, biographer, and
dramatist. His most recent book is The Vikings: A
History (Viking Adult, 2009).
1
Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithards Histo-
ries, trans. by Bernhard Walter Scholz with Barbara Rogers (Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1972), 51.
2
Ibid., p.61.
3
Two Lives of Charlemagne, by Einhard and Notker the Stam-
merer, trans. by Lewis Thorpe (Penguin Books, 1969), 63.
4
Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People trans. by Leo Sher-
ley-Price, revised by R.E. Latham (Penguin, 1990), 278.
5
Fredrik Paasche, Mtet mellom Hedendom og Kristendom i Norden
(W. Nygaard, 1958), 75.
6
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap-
ter XLIX. Internet resource at www.ccel.org/g/gib
bon/decline/index.htm (accessed 2.11.2007)
7
Bjrn Myhre, The Beginning of the Viking Age: Some Cur-
rent Archaeological Problems, in Anthony Faulkes and Richard
Perkins, eds., Viking Revaluations (Viking Society for Northern
Research, 1993), 182-199.
8
John Hines, P tvers av NordsjenBritiske perspektiv p
Skandinavernes senere jernalder, in Universitets oldsaksamling
rbok 1991-1992 (Oslo, 1993): 103-124.
November 2010 Historically Speaking 13
Only empathy can convey to us the in-
choate fear that 9th-century heathen inhab-
itants of the Scandinavian lands might have
felt when faced with the encircling tide of
Christian beliefs and Christian culture.