Diaspora in Action

These sculptures represent the diaspora in action. Both in the Isle of Man and in north-west England, they show communities remembering their cultural traditions from the homeland. But, these communities lived in very different cultural and linguistic circumstances—alongside Celtic-speaking communities in the Isle of Man and alongside English-speaking communities in England—and they used these cultural traditions in different ways. In the Isle of Man they developed a distinct local custom of erecting memorial stones for the dead, often with runic inscriptions. In north-west England they also developed local customs of sculpture, though generally without the use of runic inscriptions. The local custom in England adopted local cultural traditions; although the Scandinavians were familiar with stone monuments, they did not have the custom of figural and decorative carving in stone; that was something they learned in England. Moreover, like the Halton cross, most of the monuments they carved are very clearly

FIGURE 3.4 Detail of the Gosforth cross, Cumbria, showing the Crucifixion. (Copyright Judith Jesch.)

Christian, even when they show images from Norse myth and legend. The most famous example is the great cross at Gosforth in Cumbria (Bailey and Cramp 1988, pp. 100-104); see Figure 3.4.

This is what diaspora is about. The migrants and their descendants are still in touch with their cultural traditions and their language, both brought from the homeland, but they also develop new cultural traditions, borrowing elements from their new neighbours. Such sculptures cannot be described as Viking in any meaningful sense, except insofar as they are the result of the Viking diaspora. As well as borrowing cultural traditions, the migrants and their descendants may also have borrowed the religion of their neighbours. The Vikings were not Christians when they left Norway, but by the time they were commissioning the runestones of Man or the Halton cross they clearly were. The way this happened is still not fully understood, but somewhere along the way they decided to start worshipping Christ. One possibility is that women played a role. If some of the Vikings who settled in the Irish Sea region married and established families with local women, who were of course Christian, it is very likely that those women would have encouraged them very strongly to convert. It is also possible that women of Norse origin who came to the Irish Sea region with their Viking husbands, may have been more receptive to the Christian message and encouraged the conversion of the whole community. There is some evidence that this happened back in Scandinavia and in other Viking colonies such as Greenland. If women were the agents of change in religion, it is also true that they often had the role of maintaining cultural traditions such as telling the old stories of heroes like Sigurd Fafnisbani. By doing so, they also maintained the language and passed it on to the next generation.

Although women are not so visible in either historical records or the archaeological evidence, they are in fact the key to understanding what really happened in the Viking Age. What the genetic evidence reveals is that there was a lot of Viking sperm about. But the evidence of language and culture in the form of place-names, inscriptions, and sculpture provides a much fuller picture of the community. It shows women maintaining the language and cultural traditions of the homeland while also being receptive to new ideas about religion, and new expressions of identity, both borrowed and transformed from their new neighbours. This is what diaspora is about—not merely a transplantation of people from one country to another, but a whole new culture formed by combining the memories of the old country with the best of the new country.