Feature
The exhibition Sword, late 8th–early 9th century. Kalundborg or Holbæk, Zealand, Denmark. Photo: John Lee. © The National Museum of Denmark
the winter storms where they would have had to cope with sea ice.”
From Norse to English
The first Danelaw was established in 886 and by 1014 the King Cnut (the Canute of legend) who became the first Viking king of all England. Cnut, a second generation Christian, made great efforts to ingratiate himself with the people by donating funds to establish cathedrals. For a short period of time Christ was simply taken in as one of the pantheon of Norse gods; but over time and as a result of the Norse pragmatism the Norse gods were sidelined (except in times of peril, when people would still pray to Thor and the old gods). A die for minting pennies found in York shows a Christian inscription and Thor’s hammer, summing up the combination of two different seemingly contradictory beliefs. Other things worked in favour of integration too. Very importantly, the languages of Anglo Saxon and Old Norse were similar enough for speakers to understand each other. And in addition, it seems, that Viking personal grooming was also an advantage too. Early chroniclers reported that Anglo Saxon women found Vikings attractive because they bathed once a week, changed their clothes regularly and combed their hair and beards daily…a bit of a change from the usual Anglo Saxon man, it appears.
Fly agaric The Viking warrior prepared for battle with a little magic mushroom, the fly agaric, which may have been an early source of entheogens, hallucinogenic substances used for religious or shamanic purposes. It contains two toxins, ibotenic acid and muscimol, which are responsible for its psychoactive and hallucinogenic effects. To minimise its toxic side effects, the Vikings would drink it
16
SPRING 2014 www.csrf.org.uk
So today, what have the Vikings done for us? Norse words and references still pepper our language: Tuesday comes from Tiw, the Norse god known for his sense of justice; Wednesday from Woden; Thursday comes from Thor; and Friday from Frigg, a god equal in power to Odin. Words like ‘byelaw’, ‘freckle’ and ‘dirt’ all come originally from Scandinavia too. Farmers still refer to a castrated ram as a wether, while in Yorkshire alone 155 places end in ‘thorpe’, the Old Norse word for village or farmstead and 210 end in ‘by’. (Grimsby was originally ‘Grimr’s town.) Although not invented until hundreds of years later the word gun comes from the Old Norse Gunnhildr: a female name, in which both elements, gunn and hildr, mean ‘war’ and ‘battle’. Norse references may be less acknowledged than Latin ones, but they fill everything from Tolkien to films, TV and comic books. It’s their sense of adventure, says Vohra. “They capture the imagination. They spread themselves across most of Europe and the British Isles and while the communities they established contained certain similarities they were also all very different from place to place.” What did they do for us? A lot more than we usually acknowledge.
ready processed in the form of reindeer urine (yes, really!) dry it, smoke it or make it into ointments. Modern research has also shown that the two active ingredients’ effect on the brain can inhibit fear and the startle reflex, backing up the theory that it helped bring on the uncontrolled rage and fearlessness for which the ferocious Viking Berserkers were renowned. More info at www.treesforlife. org.uk/forest/mythfolk/flyagaric.html
The British Museum exhibition features many new discoveries and objects never seen in the UK alongside important Viking artefacts from its own collection and elsewhere. The centrepiece will be the surviving timbers of a 37m long Viking warship, the Roskilde 6: the longest ever found and never seen before in the UK. The construction of the ship has been dated to around AD 1025, the high point of the Viking Age when England, Denmark, Norway and possibly parts of Sweden were united under the rule of Cnut the Great. The size of the ship and the amount of resources required to build it suggest that it was almost certainly a royal warship, possibly connected with the wars fought by Cnut to assert his authority over this short lived North Sea Empire. For more on the exhibition, see page 39.
The Longship (Roskilde 6). The largest Viking ship ever discovered. The thirtyseven metre long warship was built in southern Norway around 1025, and was deliberately sunk in Denmark in the mid-11th century. © National Museum of Denmark.