EHR, cxxi. 490 (Feb. 2006)

English Historical Review Vol. CXXI No. 490
© Oxford University Press 2006, all rights reserved

BOOK REVIEWS

Viking Empires , by Angelo Forte, Richard Oram, and Frederik Pedersen

(Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2005; pp. 447 . £25).

H ere is yet another diffuse Viking book, by three authors who prefer not to
reveal who wrote what, although their voices are not as concordant as those of
the Andrews Sisters used to be. Nevertheless, they have a theme, which is almost
a thesis: that the Nordic peoples have been closely connected with Continental
cultures from Roman times and even earlier, and that their reactions have taken
forms of which the viking raids and overlordships ( ‘ empires ’ ) were intermediate
or transitional between the relatively peaceful situation of c .500 to c .750, and
the Christian or crusading activity of c .1050 to c .1250. Before 750 , these peoples
developed nautical skills and an upper class of rulers and retainers; the damage
these infl icted on Christian countries thereafter led to the counter-offensive of
the German and Anglo-Saxon churches which diverted the raiding impulse
into crusades against the heathen of the Baltic coastlands. The dynamic in each
case came not from within, as a result of over-population, silver-shortage, or
wanderlust, but from tonic interactions with what the authors lazily describe as
Europe. So it was either a case of outsiders doing it to them or their doing it to
outsiders, but either way it was in some sense much the same sort of thing — the
image of the self-propulsion of the ingesting jelly-fi sh springs to mind.

This intellectual blur extends to the concept of viking empire. Sometimes it

means dominion of places outside Scandinavia by Nordic rulers like Canute,
sometimes by emigrant Scandinavians, sometimes of the wildernesses of Iceland,
Greenland and Newfoundland by colonists: a confusion lessened by the decision
to drop the Rus entirely, because ‘ the time is not yet ripe to embark on assessment
of eastern activity ’ , and the book is quite long enough as it stands. That means
that there is not much about Swedes or Gauts either; the emphasis is on the deeds
of Danes and Norwegians inhabiting what are treated as fully defi ned, even
centralised, countries called Denmark and Norway almost from Roman times.
Centralised seems to mean areas within which power is wielded from several
centres rather than one, although this usage is not actually explained as it should
be in a book for non-specialists. It is not presented as original scholarship and
research, despite the high qualifi cations of the contributors, and the references
are often to national and general histories of similar type, which gives a rather
prefabricated air to some of the chapters. Where the references are to sources they
are too often carelessly handled. Using the Heimskringla legend of Harold Fairhair
to shed light on ninth-century Norway is an old habit, but inadvisable; here, it
leads to his being credited with a fi fty-year reign beginning c .880, although his
supposed expulsion of Rollo of Normandy is put at 876 on the unreliable evidence
of Dudo. We are assured that Harold ‘ is generally described by later sagas as the
cause of the Scandinavian exodus to the West because of his militant Christianity ’ ,
an assurance evidently unconnected with a reading of those sagas; and the Anglo-
Saxon Chroniclers also seem to have laboured in vain, as the authors ascribe to the
chronicle reports of ‘ an orgy of looting and burning ’ by the Danes in 869 , a battle
at Marlborough in 870 – 71 , the mortal wounding of king Ethelred I on that fi eld,

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191

and the ‘ stiff Welsh resistance ’ to the raiders from Chester in 894 , none of which
appear in any published text. Similar inaccuracies appear in later chapters on the
post-conversion history of the Danes, which is less familiar to most readers. These
are mere details, but credibility in small things is needed to reinforce such large
ones as the claim that Scandinavian settlers in the West ‘ established one of the fi rst
multi-cultural societies in Europe, and the relative ease of their integration
provided an important strand of tolerance in the European psyche ’ .

By contrast, the chapters on seafaring ( 4 , 11 , 12 ) and on Ireland and Scotland

( 4 , 8 , 9 , 10 ) offer more reliable résumés of current scholarship and theories,
ranging from the impact of ‘ rogue waves ’ on timber ships and the improbability
of navigation by wooden sun-compasses, to the nature of Irish Sea politics from
the tenth to the twelfth centuries. Oram’s Lordship of Galloway (Edinburgh, 2000 )
and David I (Stroud, 2004 ) evidently lie behind the unravelling of Orkney and
Scots affairs, whoever the unraveller is in this case. The narrative is in places
dense, but there is reason to be grateful for a clear account of the interplay of
forces between the 1130 s and the 1270 s which resulted in the Scots supremacy over
northern Britain at the expense of the rulers of Orkney, the Isles and Norway. It
is well said that ‘ the “ Viking ” character of (earl) Thorfi nn (of Orkney)’s rule that
Orkneyinga Saga presents gives a misleading picture of the cultural development
of the earldom in the eleventh century ’ , since his authority rested less and less on
raiding and more on taxation within the homeland and co-operation with his
bishop; but the overlordship and government he left behind him was simply not
strong enough to compete on equal terms with Norway or the king of Scots, or
manipulate rivalries of the greater powers to its own long-term advantage. Shorn
of Shetland by the Norwegians, of Caithness and Sutherland by the Scots, the
thirteenth-century earls also lost their grip on their own churches and the chance
to pursue an independent foreign policy. It is refreshing to learn that changes like
that were ‘ not simply a result of Scandinavian Orkney’s fuller integration into the
political and cultural mainstream of Europe ’ , but can be attributed to the fact that
in 1200 , by a process of elimination, ‘ only two viable kingdoms remained ’ within
the British Isles. Yet the work ends with a chapter which attempts to wind the
threads of this ‘ defi nitive new account of the Viking world ’ into a nebulous unity
of integration, assimilation and Euro-osmosis, as if the good stuff in previous
chapters had struck a false note. This is a pity, because the prospective purchaser
may well ask in what ways is this three-man job superior to the Oxford Illustrated
History of the Vikings , a collection of articles edited by Peter Sawyer for OUP in
1997? The intermittent concentration on two themes, ‘ empire ’ and colonisation,
rather than many, is a potential advantage, but on the whole this book has no
right to say to the Oxford one, with Lamb’s poor relation: ‘ Madam, you are
superannuated ’ . †

Summertown, Oxford

E. CHRISTIANSEN

EHR, cxxi. 490 (Feb. 2006)

† doi:10.1093/ehr/cej008