GENETIC JOYCE STUDIES – Issue 16 (Spring 2016) How the ‘offsprout of vikings’ went ‘east-viking’ Joyce’s Notes on A. Mawer’s The Vikings Viviana Mirela Braslasu and Robbert-Jan Henkes The Vikings by Allan Mawer was published in 1913 by Cambridge University Press in the Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature, a collection that Joyce would consult more than once in 1925 and later.1 The manual, as Mawer calls his book, addresses the idea promoted by the works of medieval Latin chroniclers, that the Vikings were no better than pirates, and emphasizes the importance of the Scandinavians for the history, culture and civilisation of Europe. The period of Scandinavian history that the author refers to, extends from the middle of the eighth century, when the Vikings began to raid the coasts of England, Western Scotland, Ireland and France, to the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh, when it ends with the consolidation of the Scandinavian kingdoms under such powerful leaders as Olaf Tryggvason, Olaf the Holy, king Knut, Ragnarr Loðbrók, Bjorn Ironside, Sigurd Snake-eye and their successors. As the Viking civilisation played a major part in shaping the history of Europe, so Allan Mawer’s book played an important part in providing some of the background information for Joyce’s novel, that he read alongside another useful work pertaining to the Vikings and Dublin, Haliday’s The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin (see our other article in this issue of the Genetic Joyce Studies.). This article will list the indexes of Joyce’s Mawer-reading. Viviana Braslasu found the source and prepared the Mawer index to VI.B.7, and Robbert-Jan Henkes found and matched Mawer to the ‘East Vikings’ notes in Danis Rose’s James Joyce’s The Index Manuscript, “Finnegans Wake”, Holograph Notebook VI.B.46 published in 1978 by A Wake Newslitter Press. Each will be preceded by a short introduction. Since March 2014, the book can be accessed at www.archive.org: https://archive.org/details/vikings00mawe. 1 More Cambridge Manuals Joyce read include W. A. Craigie’s The Icelandic Sagas in VI.D.2; W. L. Jones, King Arthur in History and Legend in VI.D.1 and VI.B.46; T. G. Bonney’s The Work of Rain and Rivers in VI.B.9 and H. J. Chaytor’s The Troubadours in VI.B.12. 1 2 The Vikings in Notebook VI.B.7 For the revisions of Book I and Book III in February 1925, Joyce began working on a new notebook (VI.B.7). Besides visible proof of Joyce’s struggle with his failing eyesight, the notebook is a repository of notes that suggests the beginning of a new and important stage in the writing of Finnegans Wake: the use of Scandinavian related sources to further shape both Earwicker’s Scandinavian personality and his place of origin. Joyce’s interest in the Vikings and their influence on Irish history had manifested itself before 1925; in some of his earlier notebooks we find notes from Scandinavian Relations with Ireland, The History of Ireland, Ireland: Its Saints and Scholars or Ireland and the Making of Britain, to name but a few. In preparation for this new dimension of the novel, Joyce undertook the task of reading and harvesting from two new books: The Vikings by Allan Mawer and The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin by Charles Haliday. Both sources make up the latter part of the notebook. Joyce started to take notes from page 10 of The Vikings, his first jottings appear on page 76 of the notebook. He then temporarily abandoned the book, because until notebook page 136—with a single exception on page 122, where we find a single entry from page 29 of the source—the notebook is filled with different entries, some belonging to From Luther to Steiner, some untraced. Joyce returned to the book and he continued to jot down notes until page 150 of the notebook where, we might assume by the new entries, his interest in the subject led him to pick up The Scandinavian Kingdom of Dublin; because the next four pages of the notebook contain entries taken from Charles Haliday’s book. Notes from The Vikings fill the next twenty pages of the notebook, and they stop again on page 170. Joyce does not annotate the whole book, he does not seem to have read the last chapter on the Scandinavian influence in the British Empire and Iceland. His notes end on notebook pages 176-7 with the complete bibliographical reference to three other books he harvested from the book’s bibliography: Scandinavian Britain by W. G. Collingwood, The Norse Influence on Celtic Scotland by G. Henderson and Dublin som Norsk By by L. J. Vogt, none of which, for as far as we know, were used by Joyce. The entries taken from The Vikings, are names of Scandinavian heroes, names of places and events in the British history, units of land measure, social classes and their property, the law system, and English words with a Scandinavian origin. VI.B.7.076 (b) Lochlann / Danar The Vikings 9-10: The question as between Dane and Norwegian has been to some extent made more difficult of settlement through the national prejudices of Scandinavian scholars; e.g. Danes for the most part decide in favour of the Danish origin of Rollo of Normandy, while Norwegians decide in favour of his Norwegian birth. Such differences of opinion are unfortunately only too often possible owing to the scantiness of the material upon which we have to base our conclusions. Medieval chroniclers were for the most part unable or unwilling to distinguish between Danes and Norwegians; they were all alike [9] ‘Nordmanni’ to them and the term ‘Dani’ is practically interchangeable with it. The vagueness of their ethnographical knowledge is manifest when we find the Norman Dudo at the beginning of the 11th century tracing back the Dani (or Daci) to an 3 original home in Dacia. The Irish annalists did, however, draw a very definite distinction between Norwegians and Danes—Finn-gaill and Dubh-gaill as they called them, i.e. White and Black Foreigners respectively1. They seem never to confuse them, but exactly on what grounds they gave them their distinguishing epithets it is now impossible to determine. They do not correspond to any known ethnographical differences, and the only other reasonable suggestion which has been offered is that the terms are used to describe some difference of armour or equipment as yet unknown to us. The Irish annals also distinguish between Daunites or Danes and Lochlanns or men from Lochlann, i.e. Norway; but again the origin of the term Lochlann as applied to Norway is obscure. The writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle seem to use the term Norðmenn very definitely of Norwegians, just as Alfred does in his translation of Orosius, but the term Dene came to be used more vaguely and uncertainly. 10n1: The name Finn-gaill survives in Fingall, the name of a district to the north of Dublin, while Dubh-gaill is the second element in the proper names MacDougall and MacDowell. VI.C.5-239(d),(e) (c) bRagnar / Lodhoy VI.A.151 (d) Ota The Vikings 13: Of the leaders of the Vikings at this time there is only one whose figure stands out at all clearly, and that is Turges (O.N. Ðorgestr) who first appeared in 832 at the sack of Armagh. He had come to Ireland with a great and royal fleet and ‘assumed the sovereignty over the foreigners in Erin.’ He had fleets on Lough Neagh, and on Lough Ree, and raided the country as far south as the Meath district. Turges was not the only invader at this time: indeed so numerous were the invading hosts that the chronicles tell us ‘after this there came great sea-cast floods of foreigners into Erin, so that there was not a point thereof without a fleet.’ The power of Turges culminated in 841, when he drove the abbot of Armagh into exile, usurped the abbacy, and exercised the sovereignty of North Ireland. At the same time his wife Ota (O.N. Auðr) profaned the monastery of Clonmacnoise and gave audience, probably as a völva or prophetess, upon the high altar. VI.C.5-239(f) (e) Finn v. Dan / C & V The Vikings 14: The early attacks on England and the first invasion of Ireland were alike due to Norsemen rather than Danes. This is evident from their general course, from the explicit statement of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, and from the fact that the first arrival of Danes in Ireland is definitely recorded in the year 849. The attack on Dorchester (c. 786-802), lying as it does near the centre of the south coast of England, is somewhat strange if it is assigned to the traditional date, viz. 787, but there is no authority for this, and if it is placed at any date nearer to 802 (before which it must have taken place), it is probable that the attack may be explained as an extension of Viking raids down St. George’s Channel and round the S.W. corner of England. VI.C.5-239(g),(h) VI.B.7.122 (e) bDaemelagh The Vikings 29: When once Edward the Elder’s claim to the throne was firmly established in the battle fought at ‘the Holm,’ somewhere in South Cambridgeshire, he commenced, with the active co-operation of his brother-in-law Aethelred, ealdorman of Mercia, the great work of strengthening the hold of the English on the Southern Mercia preparatory to an attempt to reconquer the Danelagh.