Across northern Britain, there are areas, cities, and communities that uphold a particular pride in having Viking heritage. Prominent amongst these are York, the Isle of Man, Orkney, and Shetland. In these places, Vikings are seen as local folk heroes and serve as a basis of a considerable tourist industry. Museum displays, heritage trails, and school history projects emphasise Viking themes. Festivals, perhaps most vividly exemplified by the annual winter ship-burning ceremony of Up Helly Aa in Shetland, give colour and drama, and reinforce the place of Vikings at the heart of contemporary local culture, distinctiveness, and communal self-esteem.
Notwithstanding the role of the Victorians and more recent civic enthusiasts in embellishing the facts underlying the growth of popular appreciation, there is a real historical resonance to these re-awoken traditions that enthuse and delight locals and visitors year upon year. Even in areas that make less of a regular habit of festive Viking commemoration, hints of Scandinavian heritage are widely (if imperfectly) understood and appreciated.
Norse place-names and church dedications such as Chester’s St Olave (Olav or Olaf) inspire adults and school children to spend time reading about and creating art works alluding to the long-ago Viking presence. Since 2008, every July 29th—St. Olav’s Day—or thereabouts, hordes of enthusiasts have trudged the 20 or so miles between West Kirby, Wirral, via Thurstaston and Neston to St. Olave’s Church in Chester. Wirral’s own version of Norway’s St Olav Pilgrimage from Oslo to Trondheim (approximately 400 miles) was captured in Michael Wood’s 2011 BBC series The Great British Story (Figure 1.2).
Popular culture has taken the Vikings to heart. Supporters of Football and Rugby League clubs such as Tranmere Rovers and Widnes Vikings wear plastic horned helmets at games and roar their support in a suitably war-like manner, especially when the match is against a club from an area lacking such an ebullient northern heritage. In 2002, a local brewery in Liverpool distributed commemorative beer mats to mark the 1100 th anniversary of the arrival of the Vikings—with instructions as to what to do if the Vikings return (Figure 1.3).
The popular name for Liverpudlians, Scousers, is widely held to be of Viking origin, although in actuality this belief is probably misplaced. The potato stew called Lapskaus that gave rise to the term is more likely to have been introduced by Scandinavian sailors in more recent centuries (Harding and Vaagan, 2011). Perhaps the most remarkable indication of popular enthusiasm for Vikings has been seen in the responses of over 200 present-day residents of selected areas of north-west England to a call to provide DNA samples (from cheek swabs) as a means of researching the extent to which Scandinavian genetic traits occur in the modern population.
Fifty or more years ago, few places that now identify themselves strongly with a Viking past were noticeably doing so. Scandinavian place-names, archaeological evidence for the Viking presence, and linguistic survivals in speech and dialect, of course, existed as much as they do today (in the latter case even more richly then). It has taken the spread of the mass media, in part responding to the greatly increased profile of archaeological excavation from the 1960s onwards, plus a huge outpouring of academic and popular books and museum exhibitions, to reawaken interest in the Vikings. This has perhaps been assisted by a greater secularisation in modern society which has become less averse to glorying safely in the delights of paganism, epic slaughter, and fantasy heroism, than would more churchgoing-minded former generations with direct experience of devastating conflicts.
FIGURE 1.2 This time they come in peace! Top: St. Olav’s Day walkers enter Chester on 29 July 2011 at the end of a 13-mile walk from Neston, Wirral to commemorate Norway’s patron saint and help preserve the continued existence of a St. Olave Church in the north-west of England. They are greeted by broadcaster and historian Michael Wood. (Photo courtesy of Dan Kemp.) Bottom: St. Olave’s Church, Chester.
FIGURE 1.3 Beer mat produced by a local brewery in Liverpool to commemorate 1100 years after the arrival of the Vikings. The reverse side indicates what to do if they come back again. (Courtesy of Cain’s Brewery, Liverpool.)
Gradually, awareness of a sharing in a Viking past has spread beyond its most visible and well-known centres in Britain and Ireland. This has not always been a smooth or trouble-free process. In Dublin in the late 1970s, considerable controversy and even some violence surrounded the city corporation’s plans to redevelop the run-down Wood Quay area of the urban waterfront. Excavations from the late 1960s onward had shown that this area represented a deeply stratified treasure store of archaeology, with astonishingly well-preserved evidence for streets, houses, and quaysides dating back over 1,000 years to the time when Dublin was a Viking kingdom and the largest international trading port in the western seas (Bradley 1984; Johnson 2004). The plan to impose a modernist concrete municipal office development over this area attracted widespread protests and a sit-in prevented progress for a while. Confrontations between protestors and developers resulted in damage to property and even to some (fortunately not too serious) bloodshed. A less-than satisfactory compromise was eventually reached. It allowed the National Museum’s archaeologists more time to excavate the site, but in some ways the lasting impact of these dramatic events was on popular perceptions of Irish history.
Led by a clergyman, Fr. F. X. Martin, the pro-Viking Dublin campaign (perhaps ironically) undermined the unquestioning historical assumptions behind the notion of ‘The Land of Saints and Scholars.’ A national origin myth of Celtic Christian purity underlying the culturally nationalist and politically republican politics of the previous century in Ireland was challenged seriously on a popular level for the
FIGURE 1.4 Thingwall, Wirral. Following popular support and financed by a local company, four special signposts were erected in May 2012. This one at Cross Hill marks the site of one of the leading candidates to be the site of Wirral’s Thing. (Photo courtesy of Brian MacDonald.)
First time. Vikings (formerly viewed with disdain as barbarian outsiders and forerunners of Ireland’s 750-year foreign occupation and colonisation by Normans, English, and Scots), were reclaimed as prestigious and dynamic forebears by ordinary Dubliners; they became objects of intense interest and have remained so ever since.
In north-west England, the principal geographic subject of this collection of papers, no such dramatic political confrontations have propelled Vikings suddenly into modern consciousness. Nevertheless, from Cheshire to Cumbria, there is a growing appreciation of the value and interest of the distant Viking past and its legacy today. From Thingwall to Ormskirk to Kirkby Lonsdale, people recognise and appreciate that they live in places that owe their names and historic identities to the Viking presence, and this is reflected in posting of heritage signs such as four recently erected on Wirral denoting Thingwall as the ‘Assembly Field’ (Figure 1.4).
Words in regional and local rural spoken dialects still preserve ancient connections and represent living links to the distant past. In 2001, BBC presenter Julian Richards, in filming the Blood of the Vikings programme, encountered in Cumbrian villages phrases probably more understandable to Norwegians than to modern Londoners, such as: ‘Did thee come up here lakin when thee was a barn?’ (Did you come up here playing when you were a child?).
Across the north-west of England there is local pride in the presence of Viking-Age sculptured stones in parish churches (many of which have recently been brought out of dusty obscurity with better lighting and interpretation panels) and a rush of interest every time an archaeologist or metal detectorist finds something that might reveal the Viking presence. Museum archaeologists and the regional finds liaison officers of the Portable Antiquities Scheme receive more enquiries from members of the public claiming to have found Viking objects than enquiries about almost any other period. Sometimes Viking attributions are correct, but very often the objects turn out to be misplaced from another archaeological period or are modern, but the reports continue to come in nevertheless.
The Wirral and West Lancashire Project for sampling Y-chromosomal DNA in the modern male population (Figure 1.5) took place from 2002-2007.* The results were published in 2008 (Bowden et al. 2008) and in popular form two years later (Harding, Jobling and King 2010). Its connection with the local archaeology of the region was also considered in a specially commissioned article for British Archaeology (Griffiths, Harding and Jobling 2008).
Over 200 men from old Wirral or West Lancashire families took part. All had paternal grandfathers from one of these regions. The group included over 80 individuals who possessed surnames that were present in these regions prior to 1600—names such as Totty, Forshaw, Sherlock, Robinson, Raby, Melling, Scarisbrick, Crombleholme, and Altcar. The pre-1600 surname factor was used to help circumvent the large population movements that occurred in north-west England since the Industrial Revolution
Www. nottingham. ac. uk/-sczsteve/survey. htm
(a)
(b)
FIGURE 1.5 DNA testing. (a) West Kirby: Volunteer from Wirral providing a cheek swab for the Wirral survey. (b) Ormskirk: Volunteers from West Lancashire completing appropriate documentation before providing their samples. DNA sampling must follow strict ethical guidelines.
And the tremendous growth of the Liverpool conurbation. By linking genes with modern geography in this way, could characteristic genetic signatures for the Norse settlers from a millennium previously be found? And to what extent? Turi King (Chapter 11) takes another look at the findings and explains the technologies involved.
Ground-breaking advances in population genetics for assessing genetic ancestry and links between populations (Jobling et al. 2013) have attracted considerable interest and debate. Sceptics have also wondered about the time when such traits may have appeared in the population. Researchers have had to be on their guard against attempts to twist their data for racially or culturally divisive ends, although much of the DNA (mitochondrial DNA or from male Y-chromosomes)-tested bears no relation to how people look or behave.
However, the idea that Viking blood and genes are still alive within current generations has a powerful allure to many, and this appeal runs wider than just those whose cheek swab samples revealed signature Scandinavian genetic traits. Others too, including children and adults of biological Viking heritage in other parts of the world, have enthusiastically adopted Vikings as mascots for their communities, sports
FIGURE 1.6 North - west England’s modern Viking Navy rowing the Draken Harald Harfagre, the largest contemporary Scandinavian longship (35 m long, 8 m wide) at the Karm0y Viking Festival, 2013.
Clubs, and schools. North-west England even boasts its own modern 100-strong ‘Viking Navy’ of local enthusiasts expertly trained by the Liverpool Victoria Rowing Club on the River Mersey. In June 2013, this formidable group ‘raided’ Karm0y in western Norway, taking the opportunity to row the largest working Scandinavian longship reconstruction (Figure 1.6).
How, therefore, did such a strong contemporary popular perception of a Viking heritage come about, and to what extent do popular perceptions reflect the reality of a modest, fragmentary, and often frustratingly unclear stock of actual evidence for the Viking presence a millennium ago?
World History
