The Courtroom of History: The Viking Legacy Subject to Textual ‘Othering’

December 13, 2018

As Somerville and McDonald write in The Vikings and Their Age, Scandinavians in the Middle Ages were viewed as “militant pagans, hostile to Christianity” (62), and have since assumed a role in the popular imagination as “nothing more than axe-wielding barbarians who raped, pillaged and plundered … with dire consequences for Western civilization” (35). This conception of Vikings positions them as inherently opposed to the European world despite being a vital part of it; it suggests a conceptualization of Vikings as separate, alien, and most importantly – pagan. They are ‘othered,’ made out to be different. The vital question at the heart of this issue is not why (there is ample evidence for Viking cruelty and raiding), but rather how. How were the Vikings first made out to be savage heathens, and how did this conception persist? While it is extremely difficult to draw a direct connection between the reputation of Vikings and their representation in any given text, one can nevertheless see in 9^th Century accounts of Viking movements the origin of these sentiments which would characterize them for centuries. This essay will demonstrate how these Christian writers engage in a process of ‘othering,’ characterizing Vikings as fundamentally alien (i.e. Non-Christian), therefore reaffirming their own collective identity; how these same texts provide ample evidence that the two groups are more alike than they are different, revealing the biases of Christian writers; and how the persistence of these biased perspectives may lie in the fact that the Icelandic sagas, despite their more sympathetic presentation of Viking peoples, were written in an entirely different time and context, and for very different reasons. The conception of Vikings as savage heathens thus exists and persists largely because the contemporaneous texts historians have come to understand them through saw them from the outside looking in.

Vikings are first known in the historical record through Christian texts – annals, records, hagiographies – that record their raiding activities; as a result of this perspective, the victims of Viking raids make them out through language to be ‘others’ of differing values. In the hagiography of Saint Findan, his Viking captors are consistently described not in ethnic or racial terms, but as “pagans” (The Viking Age: A Reader 196) and “heathens” which Findan cowers in fear of after being sold into slavery (198). What is significant about this labelling is that Findan, at the time, was not yet a pious man, having not yet pledged himself to God. This is thus a retroactive labelling in which the scribe posthumously recording Findan’s life story characterizes the Vikings by the title which best defines what separates them. They are not labelled ‘slave-traders’ or ‘murderers’ presumably because these acts were not exclusively committed by Vikings. The writer, in an attempt to construct these foreign people as strange, latches onto the only marker of difference available to him. In this one observes a process of textual ‘othering’ which buttresses the Christian identity in opposition to another group. The impact of this labelling is seen in that ‘heathen’ becomes not just a label, but a title. In an account of Viking raids on Ireland from the Annals of Ulster, the writer refers to them only as “heathens,” recounting towns “burned by the heathens,” and people “killed by the heathens” (The Viking Age: A Reader 189). Names have power, and by tying their ‘otherness’ in their lack of faith directly to their identity, the author minimizes the common humanity between the two groups; the Vikings become not people from a different place, but some malicious inhuman force. Their attacks thus unsurprisingly become characterized as some sort of divine punishment. In the Annals of St-Bertin, which recounts the escapades of the Northman in the Carolingian world, they are said to “plunder and burn” at the will of “God … so much offended by our sins” (The Viking Age: A Reader 209); in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounting raids on England, the “miserable raiding of the heathens” is placed alongside such “terrifying omens” as “lightning … fiery dragons … great famine” (184). As a result of being placed alongside natural calamities, these heathens become not people in themselves, but a force of nature – inhuman instruments of God’s will, little different than a plague of locusts or a great flood. By tying the Viking’s lack of faith – their defining attribute of difference as pagans – directly to their identity, Christian writers are able to dehumanize them. As a result of being inhuman, they are often characterized as animals. The Findan writer portrays Vikings that reason, plan, bargain, and engage in commerce, yet nevertheless writes that their “savagery outstrip[s] that of monstrous beasts” (196); in an Islamic account, Ibn Fadlan describes the Scandinavian Rus as “the filthiest of Allah’s creatures … like asses that roam in the fields” (275). These writers, encountering a people they perceive as different and dangerous, attempt to place themselves apart from them, and above them. Vikings are thus subject to the same processes which would come to define the colonial era; they are characterized as savage heathens just as Native Americans and Africans would likewise come to characterized by their barbarity, their connection with nature, and their ignorance of Abrahamic religions. While Vikings were a source of power in the Middle Ages – the slavers, not the enslaved – this negative image persists because they existed outside of the white, Christian framework and were thus subject to its discourses of self/other.

The influence of language and labelling in constructing a negative image of the Vikings is clear in that these same historical documents contain evidence that the Vikings were little different from the other Christian groups insisting on this difference. This is seen primarily in their willingness to include Vikings in their own regional conflicts. For example, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle notes that “the Welsh and the Danes joined forces and began fighting against Ecgbriht, king of the West Saxons” (The Viking Age: A Reader 185). This suggests that the Vikings, in their war-like nature, are not fundamentally different or any more brutal than their Christian counterparts, but merely new players in a long-standing game, and they work together to wage the same manner of warfare. It also implies that the dehumanization of the Vikings in these same texts is not a reflection of their true nature, but instead comes from a place of victimhood: the ones writing history merely happen to be on the receiving end of the same violence which characterized the era. As Somerville and McDonald say, the Vikings “must be viewed against the backdrop of an early medieval Europe in which violence was commonplace and few people lived in anything approaching security” (The Vikings and Their Age 135-136). The realms of England, Ireland, France – they were all characterized by constant instability and warfare. This can be seen in a similar instance of cooperation between Christians and Scandinavians whereby the Frankish King Charles once levied a tax upon his people to enlist the support of Weland, a Danish commander who besieged his fellow Vikings on behalf of the Frankish kingdoms (The Viking Age: A Reader 213). The Vikings are, in this instance, not outside attackers striking blindly at the innocent for their own gain, but hired help in a pre-existing arena of war. It is questionable for the Frankish writers to assert moral superiority over a group of supposed savages when those same savages are taking their place in an existing conflict, fighting as they would, on their behalf. As Somerville and McDonald say, “Many aspects of Viking warfare seem to have differed little from those of the Franks or Anglo-Saxons … scarcely a year went by in the Frankish kingdoms without some kind of military activity” (The Vikings and Their Age 37). Viewed in this context, the supposedly violent and savage actions of the Vikings are revealed to be more a reflection of those doing the writing: their own biases, their unwillingness to acknowledge the ways in which they are similar. These similarities extend not only to matters of strict warfare, but culture and society as well. In Saint Findan’s hagiography, the author paints a picture of Ireland that appears very much like the honor-bound world depicted in The Sagas of the Icelanders. He writes of an incident of murder that quickly devolves into “inexorable feuding between the tribes,” after which Findan receives payment for the revenge-killings of his father and brother (The Viking Age: A Reader 197). In every way, this conflict resembles the dispute process of family feuds as depicted in sagas such as “The Saga of Hrafnkel Frey’s Godi” and “The Saga of the People of Laxardal”: it is a local conflict in which parties pursuing justice commit violence against one another as a means of negotiation, and in the end come to a resolution of monetary exchange; it is a conflict which reignites years later out of fear that the offended party is merely “biding [his] time … waiting for the right moment to strike back” (9.1: The Saga of the People of Laxardal Part 2). Christians and Vikings in the medieval world did not merely wage war in the same manner – they also thought similarly, acted similarly, valued the same things, and worried about the same things. The two groups are no better or worse than the era in which they all lived. If anything, the Christian attempt to demonize pagans as savages could be considered a deep-seated denial of the ways in which they fail to live up to their own pious ideals. As previously stated, the critical characterization of Vikings is thus merely a matter of perspective.

The negative reputation of Vikings in history may be due to the fact that the Vikings did not express their own perspective in the same manner as Christians did – through written records – and thus one can only see them from the outside in. As Somerville and McDonald write, “There are few contemporary Scandinavian sources, and those that do exist come from Christian writers such as Rimbert or Adam of Bremen” (The Vikings and Their Age 66). The only way to see the Vikings in their time with any amount of historical accuracy are through the eyes of biased observers. The Vikings do not have a voice through which to construct themselves. They may very well have seen Christians in much the same way as Christians saw them – as foreign ‘others’ with differing religious values – but only the Christian perspective survives. This is largely due to the fact that both groups used writing differently. Christians annals were “list-like, recording events deemed notable or noteworthy,” and this is reflected in the annals previously discussed, which all record the actions of the state in relation to other groups (5.1: Ninth-Century Christians Encounter the Vikings); they are texts deeply concerned with preserving confrontations with the ‘other.’ The Vikings, however, did not bother to relate themselves to other groups. They were not interested in recording their confrontations on the world stage. This is seen in the fact that the only body of Viking prose that records the actions of real-life people are The Sagas of the Icelanders: “fictively developed narratives of the intimate lives of men and women” written long after the Viking Age had ended (The Vikings and Their Age 108). As discussed in course content, these stories were a kind of “family history,” a “memorialization,” a way for Christianized Icelanders to understand their own ancestry (8.1: The Saga of the People of Laxardal Part 1). They are highly insular works written for personal purposes, depicting the complex psychologies of characters who exist largely outside the context of the larger European world (partly due to Iceland’s geographic isolation, making confrontations with the ‘other’ few and far between). In contrast to the annals, which were factual and written for the purposes of preservation, the sagas were likely related orally, subject to change over time, and retold only among a small group of people. As Vikings were in many ways culturally absorbed by Christianity, their seeming unwillingness to produce texts in the context of the wider world – to write back against the Christians – leaves the image of them as savage heathens largely uncontested.

Ultimately, the ways in which Vikings used and consumed writing, as well as the things they chose to write down (or refrained from writing down) effects the way history perceives them. Their negative reputation as animalistic Medieval terrorists derives largely from the biases of Christian writers who, failing to see the numerous ways in which they were similarly violent, construct Vikings as alien in order to preserve their own self-image as Christians. The persistence of these biased perspectives possibly lies in the fact that the only sympathetic portrayals of Vikings were written to meet the individual needs of a very small audience; the Vikings and their ancestors were seemingly not interested in anyone but themselves, and did not feel a need to assuage their own self-image by admonishing others, and thus no process of ‘othering’ occurs.

Works Cited

Rasmussen, Ann Marie. “5.1: Ninth-Century Christians Encounter the Vikings.” Waterloo

LEARN GER 230 Online, Winter 2018,

https://learn.uwaterloo.ca/d2l/le/content/399311/viewContent/2220152/View

Rasmussen, Ann Marie. “8.1: The Saga of the People of Laxardal (Part 1).” Waterloo LEARN

GER 230 Online, Winter 2018, https://learn.uwaterloo.ca/d2l/le/content/399311/viewContent/2220164/View

Rasmussen, Ann Marie. “9.1: The Saga of the People of Laxardal (Part 2).” Waterloo LEARN

GER 230 Online, Winter 2018,

https://learn.uwaterloo.ca/d2l/le/content/399311/viewContent/2220169/View

Somerville, Angus A. and R. Andrew McDonald. The Viking Age: A Reader. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 2014. Print.

Somerville, Angus A. and Andrew McDonald. The Vikings and Their Age. University of Toronto

Press, 2013.

The Sagas of Icelanders. New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Print