In this big Hollywood epic, Norsemen seeking treasure in "Moorish Barbary" are captured by the local king and dragged before him. The whole population of the town turn out to see them.VIKING: Well, where are we?
VIKING LEADER (ROLF, i.e. Richard Widmark): Civilization.
VIKING: Huh?
VIKING LEADER: You wouldn't understand that..,
A couple or three weeks ago I had a look at the Last Kingdom, a TV series depicting the period of Alfred the Great and his wars with the Danes. I was referred by friends to a critique of the authenticity of this film put on YouTube by a man named Lindy Beige. Mr. Beige is repeatedly offended by the fact that ninth century warriors wore soft leather armo and all sorts of inexplicable fur and leather accessories. And even the kings are dirty. One of them wears the same clothes for 10 years!
Fair enough – but I have to say that I found the series inexplicably good. When was the last time you saw a commercial video depiction of the Vikings that has nobody wearing horned helmets? In my case I think I can say "never!"
It's also surprising to me that the treatment of Alfred the Great, a man who was very eccentric in terms of his own time, is reasonably believable.
Mr. Beige says sense somewhere in his critique that he has no trouble with the plot or the acting of the last kingdom. Indeed? And you want more?
Buko, Andrzej, ed. Bodzia. A Late Viking-Age Elite Cemetery in Central Poland. East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Pp. xxxi, 624. $293.00. ISBN: 978-90-04-27829-5.
However, given such an impressive catalogue of achievement, there sadly remains one truly glaring problem, which is not the fault of editor or contributors: as ever with Brill's otherwise excellent early medieval volumes, this book is priced far beyond the pockets of students, academics or even libraries [SM]. If it really does cost nearly three hundred dollars to viably produce a volume like this, then one wonders if a pdf on Open Access might honestly be a better solution, or at least breaking it up into two or three more affordable paperbacks.
Top: Priestesses at Olympia light the torch.
Some of the coins shed new light on the period – parts of Britain such as Staffordshire and Yorkshire were already believed lost by the Vikings and under Anglo-Saxon dominion, yet there are coins which show the Vikings were still creating their own currency in these regions. One such coin, with the word "Rorivacastr" on it, is believed to have originated from Roceter, in 10th-century Staffordshire, on the border of Viking and Anglo Saxon control.Image: a small part of the hoard.Gareth Williams, curator of early medieval coins and Viking expert at the British Museum, said this particular coin revealed that the region may still have been under Viking control, despite Anglo Saxon spin that it was under their rule. He added that it was a truly remarkable find, with a vast array of coins from as far afield as Scandinavia, continental Europe, Tashkent and Afghanistan.
"There's been nothing like it for over 150 years. The size and range of material gives us an insight into the political history, the cultural diversity of the Viking world and the range of cultural and economic contact at that time," he said. Priceless lessons in history would further be revealed in four years time after careful study, he added.
Ever wonder how historical images and reputations get propagated, reworked, and repropagated?I want instead to ask another question: why is it so necessary to modern Britain that the Vikings were violent? This can’t simply just be put down to right-wing prejudices about immigration (although this crops up in the Daily Mail): Simon Schama had pretty much the same attitude to Vikings in his History of Britain (BTW, the best takedown of Schama’s TV history style I’ve yet seen is here).So there you have it, cherry-picking of useful images once again...
There is a very interesting contrast here with an earlier British attitude. If you look at some of the classic popular histories from the first half of the twentieth century, such as Our Island Story or 1066 and All That, then the Danes (not yet the Vikings) are simply one among many violent attackers of early Britain. There is nothing that particularly distinguishes their violence from that of Romans, Saxons or Normans. The same attitude is still shown by Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories. But generally in Britain, it is now the Vikings alone whose violent reputation must be defended or revised: no-one outside history facilities really cares how violent the Saxons were or whether Hengist was coarser than Horsa. Why does Viking violence now spark the imagination in a way it didn’t 100 years ago? There’s been the discovery and display of much more material culture (as in Jorvik), but we’ve got more Saxon stuff as well.It’s also not a reflection of modern politics in the normal sense: there are no significant anti-Scandinavian prejudices here. If you’re going to demonise the EU via the past, then Normans as proto-French and Saxons as proto-Germans are a better bet. But if you look at which aspects of the Vikings are remembered, you get the clue. It’s not Canute/Cnut or even the Danelaw which strike the modern imagination, and King Alfred is surprisingly absent. It’s the raids, from Lindisfarne in 793 onwards. What this country remembers about the Vikings is the sudden alarm of longboats appearing at a ‘peaceful settlement’ (this was the main trope in Simon Schama). It’s not the threat of invasion and conquest (Britain being ‘overrun with fire and the sword’) that sends a thrill of terror up British spines now. It’s the small-scale, unprovoked, seemingly random and meaningless violence that does that: the Vikings as the first terrorists.
Picture by Randy Asplund, whose site features his medievally-inspired art.
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Darrell Markewitz, ironmonger and Iron Age re-enactor extraordinaire, made a research trip to Denmark in Spring 2008. Now he has packaged hundreds of pictures of sites, museums, and artifacts on a jewelcased DVD, which also includes his extensive commentaries. It is available here now!
But this is actually the 2008 Up Helly Aa celebration in Shetland, an annual celebration vikingized in 1878.
Not so long ago, the bodies of two women were found buried at the famous Oseberg ship burial site. Here's the most recent news out of Norway.
