The Vikings and Their Victims: the Verdict of the Names

THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS: THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES By GILLIAN FELLOWS-JENSEN READER IN NAME STUDIES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN The Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture in Northern Studies delivered at University College London 21 February 1994 PUBLISHED FOR THE COLLEGE BY THE VIKING SOCIETY FOR NORTHERN RESEARCH LONDON © UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON 1995 REPRINTED IN THE UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM 1998 ISBN: 0 903521 39 3 THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS: THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES N the Dorothea Coke memorial lecture delivered in 1986, Professor R. I. Page, that silver-haired master of silver- I tongued vituperation, had to admit that he had been at a loss as to how to translate without resort to obscenity one of the many more or less obscene descriptions employed by the late tenth- century English chronicler Æthelweard of the late ninth-century Viking invaders.1 The rather colourless result arrived at: A most vile people, was included in the title of his lecture on the radi- cally differing views about the Vikings that were held by early historians. It is not, of course, surprising that the victims of Viking attacks considered their aggressors to be pagan barbarians, capable of every kind of deed of shame, nor that inscriptions on rune- stones in Scandinavia raised to the memory of Vikings who had died in action in the west praise the dead men as models of valour, liberality and loyalty. Among the many inscriptions commemorating Swedes who died in England discussed by Professor Sven B. F. Jansson in his Dorothea Coke memorial lecture in 1965, for example, is that on the stone at Transjö in Småland, which was raised in the eleventh century by Gaut to his son Ketil, who is said to have been ‘among men the most un-dastard’ (SRSm 5).2 Ketil’s English enemies may not have shared the opinion of his father but there certainly were Englishmen in the eleventh century who 1 R. I. Page, ‘A Most Vile People’: Early English Historians on The Vikings (London, 1987), p. 1. 2 Sven B. F. Jansson, Swedish Vikings in England. The Evidence of the Rune Stones (London, 1966), p. 9. References in the present paper to rune-stones in Sweden are to the series Sveriges Runinskrifter (Stockholm, 1900– ) with the following abbreviations: SRSm = Småland, SRSö = Södermanland, SRU = Uppland. 3 THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS could acknowledge the heroism and fidelity of the Vikings, even while describing the atrocities they had suffered at their hands.3 The English must have been only too conscious of the Scandi- navian element in the population of their country. They knew that new waves of invading Vikings had sometimes received sup- port from their fellow-countrymen already resident in the Danelaw. An English defeat in East Anglia in 1009, for example, is ascribed to the fact that a man called Þurcytel Myran heafod– instigated the flight from the field of battle, leaving this in the possession of the Danes.4 Þurcytel is an anglicised form of a typically Scandinavian personal name, Þorketil, while Myran heafod– ‘mare’s head’ is an English by-name, perhaps a translation of Scandinavian *merarho≈fuð, and almost certainly derogatory. Eleventh-century Englishmen also knew, however, that men bearing Scandinavian personal names could remain true to the English cause even in the face of Danish attack. The East Anglian levies whose defeat was brought about by Þurcytel’s infamous flight were actually under the command of a man with the Scandinavian name Ulfcytel who had a long record of valiant behaviour in command of English forces and actually died fighting the Danes in yet another battle which was lost because of treachery among the English.5 With the passage of the centuries, Englishmen would seem to have forgotten the Viking contribution to the population of the country. The early seventeenth-century English antiquarian Richard Verstegan, whose Dutch descent made him very conscious of the Saxon origin of the English and whose view of the procreative ability of the Danes was hardly flattering, was of the opinion that the Danes ‘had so little time of quiet settling themselves in England, that they could leave but few of their poster- ity there’.6 As access to early accounts of the Viking raids became more general with their publication in the nineteenth century in 3 Page, ‘A Most Vile People’, pp. 26–27. 4 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC) E, s. a. 1009; here and below quoted from C. Plummer and J. Earle (eds), Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel (Oxford, 1892). 5 ASC D, s. a. 1016. 6 R. Verstegan, Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities. Concerning the most noble, and renowned English Nation (Antwerp, 1605, reprinted London, 1653), pp. 237–38 in the printing of 1653. 4 THE VERDICT OF THE NAMES the Rolls Series and elsewhere, English historians began once again to pay more attention to the events of the Viking period and their significance for the composition of the population of England. I am convinced that it is the knowledge that many of the invaders became our ancestors that has caused twentieth- century English historians to temper their language when describing the onslaughts of the Vikings. In Scandinavia, a more wholeheartedly positive, not to say romantic, view of the Vikings has prevailed, based mainly on the Latin chronicle of Saxo Grammaticus and the magnificent vernacular sagas of Iceland. In recent years the three major ex- hibitions that have been devoted to the Vikings and the accom- panying catalogues have served to enhance their image not only in their homelands but also in some of the lands that suffered most grievously at their hands a thousand years ago.7 At the same time, detailed research on the written sources and the employ- ment of scientific methods in archaeology have contrived to bring about a revolution in Viking studies everywhere and to provide a more balanced and rounded picture of the life and times of the Vikings. Systematic studies of place- and personal names have made their own significant contribution to this new evaluation. When King Alfred defeated the Danish king Guthrum at Edington in 878, a peace-agreement was concluded between them requiring that Guthrum, who was to remain king of East Anglia, should recognise Alfred as his overlord and that he and thirty of the most honourable men in his host should receive baptism. Alfred stood sponsor for Guthrum, who received the Christian and English name Athelstan.8 It would not, however, seem to have been normal for humbler Danes who were baptised in England to have assumed new names together with the new faith. If it had been so, then it would have been much more difficult for modern scholars to exploit the evidence of personal names and 7 Cf. J. Graham-Campbell and D. Kidd (eds), The Vikings (London, 1980); E. Roesdahl et al. (eds), The Vikings in England (London, 1981); E. Roesdahl and D. M. Wilson, From Viking to Crusader, Scandinavia and Europe 800–1200 (Copenhagen, 1992). 8 ASC A, s. a. 878. 5 THE VIKINGS AND THEIR VICTIMS place-names as a source of information about patterns of Dan- ish settlement there. There are still two major problems involved, however. The first was noted many years ago by J. R. R. Tolkien in connection with the name of the above-mentioned East Anglian commander Ulfcytel, whose career shows that ‘it could not be assumed that a man who bore a “Danish” name was (in whole or in part) of Scandinavian “blood” or language, or even of Danish sympathies’.9 It is normally difficult and sometimes impossible to know whether a man with a Scandinavian name who held land in England in the eleventh century, for example, was a follower of Cnut or his sons who had been granted the land in return for his services or a descendant of the Danes who had partitioned eastern England between themselves at the end of the ninth century. The second problem is concerned with the dating of the coin- ing of the Scandinavian place-names in England. For the major- ity of the settlement names in the Danelaw, the terminus ante quem, that is the date before which they must have been coined, is 1086—the date of the compilation of Domesday Book, in which they make their first written appearance. In most cases it can be difficult to push this date back any further and there is in fact evidence that some of the place-names recorded in Domesday Book are unlikely to have assumed the forms in which they occur in that source earlier than in the first half of the eleventh century. There survive a few pre-Conquest documents recording grants or confirmations of grants by Cnut to some of his housecarls.10 An original document dated 1024, for example, records the grant of Portisham in Dorset to Orc, Cnut’s minister (S 961),11 and this grant and Orc’s status are confirmed by a surviving declara- tion of Edward the Confessor, that can be dated to between 1053 and 1058, to the effect that Urk, his housecarl, is to have his rights over the shore at this place (S 1063). In a grant of Edward 9 J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘English and Welsh’, in Angles and Britons, ed. H. Lewis (Cardiff, 1963), pp. 1–41, at pp. 9–10. 10 Noted by K. Mack, ‘Changing Thegns: Cnut’s Conquest and the English Aristocracy’, Albion 16:4 (1984), pp. 375–87, at p. 376. 11 All references to Anglo-Saxon Charters are cited according to the S-number accorded to them in P.

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