Tuesday, November 19, 2019

The Vikings: A History, Robert Ferguson, c. 2009.

The Vikings: A History, Robert Ferguson, c. 2009.

Chapter 1: The Oseberg Ship.
The story of the three long-ships. When reading about the "prophecy" of the headless hen, it reminds me of the crowing of the cock story in the New Testament when Christ was betrayed.

Chapter 2: The Culture of Northern Heathendom.
The task -- to try to reconstruct a general outline of the Scandinavian/Viking culture of northern Heathendom, which was in so many essentials distinct from the Christianity that had become, by the end of the eighth century, the dominant culture across mainland Europe.

Skaldic: Icelandic; a term used for poets who composed at the courts of Scandinavian leaders during the Viking Age and into the Middle Ages. Skaldi poetry forms one of two main groupings of Old Norse poetry, the other being the anonymous Eddic poetry.
Poetic Edda: creators were unknown
Skaldic: the names of the poets were known

Page 21: Heathendom's creation story. The story of Odin and the first man / woman: Ask and Embla. Ask means "ash"; the meaning of Embla is unknown.


Chapter 3: The Causes of the Viking Age

starts with the raid on Lindisfarne, 793
Roman Empire to the East which had survived the break-up of the Roman empire and its disappearance in the west
the Muslims, whose expansion during the years 660 to 830 under the Umayyad and Abbasid cliphates had taken them eastward as far as Turkistan and Asia Minor to create an Islamic barrier between the northern and southern hemispheres;
and the Franks, who had established themselves as the dominant tribe among the successor states after the fall of the Roman empire in the west



Chapter 4:


Chapter 5:


Chapter 6: Russia, Constantinople

Swedish Vikings, from the Baltic Sea down to Constantinople, establishing bases in Russia along the way. Incredibly interesting.


Chapter 7: The Danelaw I, Occupation
A really good chapter on the beginnings of an organized England.
chaos followed the withdrawal of the Romans in the 5th century; and,
the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the 6th century
Northumbria -- Mercia -- East Anglia -- Wessex
Essex -- Sussex -- Kent
Wessex: the Saxons
Sussex and Essex: absorbed by Wessex
a long-standing rivalry between Mercia and Wessex
waves of Viking raids
the first wave in the 790s (Lindisfarne, 793)
the second wave in the 830s
from the 830s, from the beginning of the second wave, hardly a year went by when a Viking raid was not described;
up until now, raiding was a seasonal activity
raiders on the west coast of England; longphort bases on the east coast of Ireland:
Dublin, Wexford, Waterford, and Cork
for those Vikings concentrating on the Thames, their home base was probably Denmark
in the second wave, things changed; some Vikings now wintered over in England
865: largest Viking group ever; landed ashore at East Anglia
"the great Heathan Army"
Viking kingdom of York established; puppet king, Egbert
English kings: Ethelred, Albert, Edmund: all mentioned, page 136
one takeaway: all the English kings during this period -- 800 - 1200 -- many of them were Viking puppets
page 140: with this, the heart of the area that later came to be known as the Danelaw complete
page 142: the sixteen-year period between the invasion of the "Great Heathen Army" (865 A.D.) and its subsequent conquest of eastern Britain and the establishment of the Danelaw became a seminal moment in the creation of Scandinavian history, and its events and main characters a radiant for some of the most potent legens and myths that are still associated with the Viking Age.
Remember: the Vikings that took London/Thames were probably based out of Denmark, and thus "Danelaw"

Chapter 8: The Settlement of Iceland
first landings in the 860s, probably
Snorri: the Saga of Harald Finehair, three strands of the story wove together:
how Harald acquired his after-name;
an account of the first unification of Norway; and,
an explanation of when and why the first settlers emigrated to Iceland
page 158: "among the scholars who created the idea of the Viking Age towards the end of the 19th century..."

page 161: Relating the story of how Harald Thickhair became Harald Finehair (somewhere between 890 and 910), it was noted that Harald had taken a number of wives and concubines and Gyda turned out to be the only one of at least ten women who bore him sons, sixteen of them in some sources, twenty in others. She did not even have the honour of finally cutting and combing his hair. That honour went to Ragnvald, earl of Møre, whom Snorri also credits with coining the king's new after-name, turning Harald Thickhair into Harald Finehair. "The gesture of combing is peculiarly appropriate, for across the geographical and temporal spread of Viking Age culture the single item most commonly found in graves remains, as we have sometimes seen earlier, the humble comb."

 
page 173: the rapidity of the colonization of Iceland owed much to the fact that there were no natives to subdue. Apart from the Arctic fox there were no indigenous wild animals for the settlers to compete with either. Everywhere else the Scandinavians of the Viking Age gained a foothold -- in Ireland, in England, in the Scottish islands, in Normandy, and later in Greenland and Vinland -- they had to fight for it. Their own courage and willingness to adapt played a large part in the success of the venture. So did the elevation of law among them to an almost spiritual prominence, which kept the temptations of indiscipline at bay. The Icelanders were proud of their law. Iceland was as much vár log-- 'the domain of our law' -- as it was a location in the remote North Atlantic. An enduring peculiarity of this pride was that they did not complement the legislative and judiciary powers they had awarded themselves with administrative or executive authority. A verdict handed down in a court of law left the implementation of it to the successful litigant. The practical result was that might rather than right remained the deciding factor..... this omission, if such it was .. laid the seeds for the eventual collapse of the Iceandic free state over 300 years later."

Chapter 9: Rollo and the Norman Colony  






Chapter 8: The Settlement Of Iceland

Chapter 9: Rollo and the Norman Colony

Chapter 10: The Master-Builder -- Harold Bluetooth and the Jelling Stone
runes
early 10th century (900's)
effective independence of Brittany, Flanders, and Aquitaine and the gift of Normandy to Rollohad further fragmented what remained of the legacy of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious
Horik the Young, 870: central authority among the Danes went into eclipse for some sixty years
911: the death of German King Louis the Child, eastern Franks, brought the Carolingian dynasty there to an end
small dukedoms gathered around Harold the Fowler, Saxon duke, and he became King Harold the Fowler
Fowler won back Lotharingia from western Franks and established new marches along the Elbe after a series of victorious campaigns against the Wends
Otto the Great
the Jelling stone, p. 200
discussion of the first known runic alphabet, p. 202
page 212: "The pious inscriptions on a number of rune-stones in Sweden make it clear that in a post-conversion Scandinavia the building of a bridge was considered a peculiarly Christian sort of good deed."
Wow. 





Chapter 11: The Danelaw II, Assimilation
treaty between Alfred and Guthrum
referenced an agreement among "all the English race and all the people which is East Anglia,"
boundary: running up the Thames, and then up the Lea, and along the Lea to its source,and then in a straight line to Bedford, then up the Ouse to the Watling Street.

The first use of the term 'Danelaw' to define the regions where Scandinavian influence was most intense does not occur until 130 years after the share-out of land, in two legal compilations made by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, which use the Anglo-Saxon terms 'on Deone lage' and 'on Dena lage.'

No surviving documents relate to the separate acts of settlement of the eastern part of Mercia and of Northubira, but a document dated to the second half o the eleventh century lists the shires comprising the Danelaw as Buckinghamshire, Middlesex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.

The seven kingdoms, which had been reduced to four by the time of the Lindisfarne raid and to two by the time of Alfred the Great, underwent a final rationalization under Alfred's successors into one kingdom under the rule of one king. The creation of the English monarchy laid the foundations for a model of kingship so efficient that later Scandinavian kings and conquerors were able to take over England run it in their own interests with a minimum of administrative adaptation. The sixty or seventy years that the process took culminated in the expulsion from York, in 954, of the city's last Scandinavian ruler, the Norwegian Erik Bloodaxe. His eviction and subsequent death signalled the end of independent Scandinavian power in England. -- pp. 216 - 217.

This would be a good chapter to cross-reference with my book on the history of England.

... the medieval annalists and historians who coined the term "Danelaw" it was the insistence of the invader-settlers on importing their own law and administration into the areas in which they settle that beame the defining haracteristic of the new model of England that arose as a result of the Viking invasions. -- p. 241


Chapter 12: When Allah Met Odin
at about the same time as Harald Bluetooth / monument to Viking Christianity at Jelling; and Wessex dynast was completing the first unification of England wihtthe expulsion of Harald's brother-in-law Erik Bloodaxe from York, seafaring Vikings of the old-fashioned sort were making, after an interval of almost a century, a second series of violent investigations of the territory and peoples of al-Andalus (Muslim Spain and Portugal), and the northern and western shores of Africa.

Brief history of expansion of Islam since 610 / 622:

Umayyads and then the Abbasids

844: first serious Viking attack on the Iberian peninsula;
tiny kingdoms of Asturia, Cantabria, and Galicia divided Christian Europe from Muslim Spain -- p. 247

attacks: commonly with 60 to 80 Viking longships

Guadalquivir, p. 249; from wiki:
The Guadalquivir is the fifth longest river in the Iberian Peninsula and the second longest river with its entire length in Spain. The Guadalquivir river is the only great navigable river in Spain. Currently it is navigable from the Gulf of Cádiz to Seville, but in Roman times it was navigable to Córdoba.
Aunites (that is, the Danes) -- p. 250 at the bottom

Third series of raids, 966 -- p. 252

A fourth and final wave of Viking attacks lasted from 1008 to 1038 -- p. 253


Chapter 13: A Piece of Horse's Liver -- The Pragmatic Christianity of Håkon the Good
reminder: Harald Bluetooth's boast on the Jelling stone, that he had won for  himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian -- p. 263
Christian missionary: Håkon the Good
p. 265: Friday fasts (coincide with Jewish Sabbath eve)
see last paragraph, p. 279: Thangbrand, missionary bishop; dispatched to Iceland; first step in what is probably the most striking and well-documented account of the conversion to Christianity of any of the Viking Age peoples. 


Chapter 14: Greenland and North America
buildings and life on Greenland
fourteenth century: Medieval Warm Period was coming to an end; replaced by the "Little Ice Age."





Chapter 15: Ragnarök in Iceland

Chapter 16: St Brice, St Alphege and The Wolf -- The Fall of Anglo-Saxon England

Chapter 17: The Viking Saint

Chapter 18: Heathendom's last bastion

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