Some Vikings who would rather have been in Deeping. Probably were in Deeping in the ninth century already!

Read on….

We all know, I guess, about the Viking raiders who landed on our shores a millennium or so ago with a reputation for being warlike and brutal. They raided, took livestock, valuables and people (to be slaves) and then they departed, we learn. But that is not in fact the whole story, and modern research has revealed that many of the raiding Vikings did not depart; they stayed and settled and eventually intermarried with the native inhabitants. And how could it have been otherwise since evidence of their presence here is all around us, not least in our language and, particularly in our part of eastern England, in many place-names. Any village, for example, the name of which ends in -by has to have had a Viking connection: Thurlby, Haconby, Carlby; the list is endless, and the reason is that in several Scandinavian languages ‘by’ is the word for ‘village’.

We tend to think, too, that ‘the Vikings’ were one ‘tribe’ who came from Scandinavia; but Scandinavia is a big area, comprising Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The peoples there did have a lot in common, ethnically, culturally and linguistically, but their explorations, in their formidable longboats, by and large took them in different directions. Norwegian and Danish Vikings travelled west and south, reaching, as well as the British Isles, France and even Greenland and North America, while Swedish Vikings, most often, struck out east across the Baltic to Russia and all the way down to the Black Sea.

Apart from words in our language the other ‘remains’ that speak of our partViking past are archaeological and all to be found in the ground – or above the ground in the form, often, of mysterious circles of stones or mounds of earth. This evidence of our common ancestry was brought home to me when on a visit to Sweden. Even in central and eastern Sweden, the parts facing the Baltic and Russia, the ‘remains’ of their Viking past closely resemble those that are to be found in our islands, and rune stones in central Sweden pay homage to Swedish Viking chiefs who had been in England.

Anyone who chooses to fly to Sweden from our area (and with Ryanair!) is likely to land at one of the most agreeable airports in Europe which, apart from being just an hour’s bus ride from Stockholm, is also less than a stone’s throw from one of the biggest Viking burial mounds and ship-shaped standing stones monuments in Scandinavia: this is Anundshög just outside Västerås. These remains are from around 300 A.D., an earlier era than the Viking incursions into England, which took place over time between 780 and 980 A.D.

We very often refer to people, tribes and ways of life that existed many hundreds of years ago as ‘primitive’, and of course in many ways they were. There was no means of travel on land faster than the horse or by sea faster than a sailing boat with or without oarsmen. But when we look at some of the artifacts, metal work, pottery or jewellery, that have risen to the surface, both in Britain and Scandinavia, we surely have to reassess what we mean by ‘primitive’. These items, both practical and decorative, are – or were when first made – as beautiful and delicate as anything created since. And there must have been quite sophisticated social and political organisations in those primitive tribal lands too, or else how could those earth mounds and stone monuments have been built or a written language developed to be etched into stone (rune stones)? No, an element of humility is surely in order when we look back a very long way and consider what our ‘primitive’ ancestors managed to achieve with the few means and little science that they had at their disposal.

Maggie McKay

Afterword: for more information, recently discovered, about a Viking army winter camp by the River Trent at Torksey, Lincolnshire, go to Google!