Bloody Vikings!

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

Tags

Beowulf, Bromley, Byzantine, Glendalough, Grettir's Saga, Lindisfarne, Monty Python, Onund Treefoot Ufeighson, Risala of Ibn Fadlan, Scandanavian, Skraelings, Spam, Sutton Hoo, The Vikings (1958), Varangians, vikings

Welcome, dear readers, and, if you’re a Commonwealth English-speaker, please excuse the mild blasphemy. (For those without any idea about that last remark, please follow this LINK.)

In fact, it isn’t really our fault, but, rather, it comes from a line in a very famous Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch, the notorious “Spam” skit.

In this sketch, two people are lowered into a café, whose breakfast menu

appears to be entirely based upon a tinned/canned ham product called Spam.

(If you would like to become deeply learned on the subject of this product, please follow this LINK.)

With no explanation, we find that the rest of the customers are Vikings, but, when a professor is suddenly inserted into the scene, we learn that they have mustered at the Green Midget Café in Bromley, a southeastern town within Greater London, (see the LINK here for important information about Bromley, in case you’re considering a holiday), for a surprise attack on England.

In the course of the sketch, the word “spam” is repeated again and again and, as it is, the Vikings begin to sing its praises in chorus, causing the waitress

to shout “Shut up! Shut up!” repeatedly and once, on the original LP, to mutter, “Bloody Vikings!”—hence our title—although, as you’ll see, reading on, she might have said “Not so bloody Vikings!”

Some time ago, we did a posting on a specific Viking custom, burial, but, unlike the depictions, in everything from 19^th-century paintings

to the well-known 1958 film,

we discussed the latest understanding, that prominent Vikings might be cremated (we see this custom as early as the poem Beowulf –7th-8th- century AD?), but then were subsequently buried—if they were especially important, in their own ships, as was the case with the prominent figure who would have been in the famous Sutton Hoo burial, with its wonderful metal work.

This revision has extended far beyond the sensational flaming ship, however. To begin with, 19^th-century illustrations of Vikings

image10viking image11viking

have been replaced with more accurate depictions, based upon the surviving physical evidence.

(This last is a picture of a famous warrior, Onund Treefoot Ufeighson, from Grettir’s Saga—we think that you can guess where that nickname came from!)

As well, Vikings are shown as domestic—after all, their ancestors and relatives had all been farmers and fishermen in Scandinavia.

And their fine craftsmanship was recognized, including their great skill as shipwrights.

They were certainly raiders.

(This is a picture of a Viking attack in Ireland, as can clearly be seen from, in the foreground, the distinct haircut—called a “tonsure”—of the fallen monk—this particular cut being the typical Irish pattern–and, in the background, the distant form of a round tower. Here’s an image of a real one, at Glendalough. And a LINK, if you’d like to know more.)

Raiding, however, was only part of some Vikings’ lives. Numbers were traders, not only of items like furs, but humans.

Others were soldiers in foreign rulers’ bodyguards—these are Varangians, who, for a time, protected Byzantine emperors.

In their handy ships, the Vikings not only raided and traded, but colonized, spreading their culture from western Russia all the way to Iceland and northern North America, settling or resettling places like Dublin and York.

Their settlements were not always successful, as we may see in this scene, where the locals—whom the Vikings called “Skraelings”, were not comfortable with having Norse neighbors.

All of this makes the Vikings, on the one hand, more ordinary—just one more Germanic people with many occupations and a desire to find trade and lebensraum—but, on the other, it leaves us, dear readers, with a small sense of loss, as they seem not quite the flaming force which brought about this prayer:

“Summa pia gratia nostra conservando corpora et cu[s]todita, de gente fera Normannica nos libera, quae nostra vastat, Deus, regna!”

“Our highest, pius, Grace, by preserving our bodies and the things in our charge, free us from the fierce/beastly Northmen who, O God, lay waste our kingdoms!

or inspired this early tombstone from Lindisfarne (devastated by the Vikings in 793AD).

Thanks, as ever, for reading and

MTCIDC

We want to credit the “Viking Answer Lady Webpage” for the Latin quotation (translation and correction in brackets, ours). Here’s a LINK, in case you need Viking answers, too.

pps

If you would like to read a first-hand account of what appears to be the burial of a prominent Viking, please see this LINK: Risala of Ibn Fadlan. It is James E. McKeithen’s translation of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan’s account of his 10^th-century travels, and it includes his visit among the Rus, who are the Norsemen and descendants of Norsemen who traded with and settled in what is now (mostly) the Ukraine. Warning: this is not a description for the faint-hearted.

In Shining Armo(u)r

17 Wednesday Jan 2018

Posted by Ollamh in Artists and Illustrators, Heroes, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods, The Rohirrim, Tolkien

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Agincourt, Anglo-Saxon, armor, Bayeux Tapestry, chain-mail, Crecy, Dark Ages, Embroidery, Howard Pyle, knights of Dol Amroth, Medieval books, medieval manuscript drawings, N.C. Wyeth, Norman knight, Pauline Baynes, Romans, sub-Roman period, Sutton Hoo, The Lord of the Rings, The Rohirrim, The Story of King Arthur and His Knights, Tolkien

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In a letter to Miss [Rhona] Beare, of 14 October, 1958, JRRT wrote to answer what was clearly a question about dress in The Lord of the Rings:

“Question 4. I do not know the detail of clothing. I visualize with great clarity and detail scenery and ‘natural’ objects, but not artefacts. Pauline Baynes drew her inspiration for F. Giles largely from medieval MS drawings—except for the knights (who are a bit ‘King-Arthurish’)* the style seems to fit well enough.” (Letters, 280)

To which he adds this footnote:

“*Sc. [= “Know/understand”] belong to our ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages which blends unhistorically styles and details ranging over 500 years, and most of which did not of course exist in the Dark Ages of c. 500 A.D.”

In the next paragraph he adds:

“The Rohirrim were not ‘mediaeval’, in our sense. The styles of the Bayeux Tapestry (made in England) fit them well enough, if one remembers that the kind of tennis-nets [the] soldiers seem to have on are only a clumsy conventional sign for chain-mail of small rings.” (Letters, 280-281)

The Bayeux Tapestry (which should really be called the “Bayeux Embroidery”, since it’s actually a long piece of cloth with hundreds of figures and details stitched on to it, rather than woven into it) presents us with a detailed history of the invasion of England in 1066AD. The soldiers Tolkien is talking about look like this:

You can see what he means by “tennis-nets”—which should really look like this:

That chain-mail, then, looks like this:

And, at the bottom of this next illustration, you can see how it’s made:

We know, then, how JRRT envisaged the Rohirrim in its eoreds, marching towards Minas Tirith, but how did he imagine other soldiers, we’ve asked ourselves, and, in particular, the knights of Dol Amroth—the only soldiers specifically described as such in The Lord of the Rings?

JRRT writes of them as they enter Minas Tirith:

“And last and proudest, Imrahil, Prince of Dol Amroth, kinsman of the Lord, with gilded banners bearing his token of the Ship and the Silver Swan, and a company of knights in full harness riding grey horses…”(The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 1, “Minas Tirith”)

“Full harness” means “complete armor”. When we think of the term, we think of something later than the Normans, who are, after all, just wearing a kind of very long ringed shirt. Here’s a useful chart to give you of an idea of what we mean.

So, since “full harness” doesn’t look like the Rohirrim, how might it look?

In Jackson’s films, we don’t believe that we ever see those knights singled out, as we see the Rohirrim. The best we could find was this picture of Faramir’s men about to mount a cavalry charge against what appears to be Osgiliath. (We’ve talked about this in a much earlier posting—one of the most unbelievable moments in the whole of Jackson’s work.)

This is a big picture, but the details, unfortunately, aren’t very clear. There are a few things, however, which we found rather odd:

although there appear to be a few lances with penons among them, most seem to be armed only with swords—a close-up weapon—which is why actual knights also carried lances—heavy cavalry came crashing down on infantry or slamming into enemy mounted men—or intended to—spearing right and left and then drawing swords (or using maces or battle axes)
a minor detail, but everyone seems to be wearing his sword on the right-hand side, which would have made it very hard to draw, unless all were left-handed men!
the helmets and armor seem very standardized, and we would believe that budgetary considerations probably influenced this uniformity—50 identical helmets were probably cheaper to make than 50 different ones—but such sameness reminds us more of Roman imperial troops than of any western medieval army we can think of.

We assume, then, that this is the film’s view of soldiers at least like Imrahil’s men, but when Tolkien wrote “a company of knights in full harness”: what might he have had in mind? We think there is a clue in that adjective “King-Arthurish”, which he uses of Pauline Bayne’s illustrations and in his footnote, where he refers to “our ‘mythological Middle-Ages”. What does he mean?

JRRT would have been about ten when Howard Pyle published his The Story of King Arthur and His Knights in 1903.

Here is how Pyle saw Arthur’s knights.

image9aknight image10asknights

Could this have inspired Tolkien’s view of Imrahil’s men? (Judge for yourself by following this LINK.)

Tolkien would have been nearly 30 when The Boy’s King Arthur, illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, was published in 1922,

but, if this were in among his children’s books, perhaps these illustrations might have given him ideas. (And here’s a LINK to your own copy, from the Internet Archive.)

These are two well-known sets of illustrations of Arthurian figures, both available in Tolkien’s early lifetime. If Arthur was real, of course, he would have lived, as JRRT was well aware, in what is called the “sub-Roman period”, c.500AD—at the beginning of the so-called “Dark Ages”– and he and his men would actually have looked like this:

But this is where “our ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages” comes in—little would have been known, when JRRT was writing The Lord of the Rings, of what such warriors would have looked like, although the spectacular Sutton Hoo find of 1939, with its splendid helmet, would have given an inkling, once restored.

Because such knowledge was lacking, however, the historical Arthur (if there was one) had been moved to the Middle-Ages and re-equipped as a military figure of a much later era, and we believe that, when Tolkien wrote “Arthurish” and “knights”, this is what he meant—and how we’ve always seen Arthur, not only from books (and lots of films) but also from the armor galleries in a number of museums, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

to the Higgins Armory in Massachusetts

to the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts

to the Tower of London.

And, as we’ve discussed before, Prince Valiant, has been an influence from childhood (talk about ‘mythological’ Middle-Ages!).

And so, in turn, we imagine—and we think that JRRT did, too–the “company of knights in full harness” to have been individuals, brightly clothed in heraldic colors, their armor that, perhaps, of Crecy, in 1346—

or Agincourt, in 1415.

And you, dear readers, what do you think?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!

MTCIDC

Of Boats and Boromir

18 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods, Poetry, Uncategorized

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Abbotsford, Anduin, Aragorn, boat, Boromir, burial, Camelot, Edoras, Eglinton Tournament, Falls of Rauros, Gimli, Gondor, Gyeongju, Henryk Siemiradski, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, Horace Walpole, Ibn Fadlan, Ibn Fadlan and the Rusiyyah, Idylls of the King, Ivanhoe, Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies, King Arthur, Korea, Legolas, medievalism, neo-medievalist, On Heroes, poetry, pre-Romantics, Prose Edda, Pugin, Rohan, Romanticism, Ship burial, Silla, Sir Frank Dicksee, Sir Lancelot, Sir Walter Scott, Snorri Sturluson, Snorro, St. George's chapel, Story, Strawberry Hill, Sutton Hoo, Tennyson, The Departure of Boromir, The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology, The Lady of Shalott, The Lord of the Rings, The Vikings (1958), Thomas Carlyle, Tolkien, vaults, Victorian, viking burial, vikings, Westminster, Windsor

Dear Reader,

Welcome, as always.

In this posting, we want to take something we mentioned in our last about Tolkien having read Tennyson. This is our guess—but in the late Victorian world into which JRRT was born, he must have been inescapable.

We _could_ say that medievalism was in the air then, brought in by Romanticism—and even before, by pre-Romantics, like Horace Walpole, with his mock-castle at Strawberry Hill (1749-76).

]

There were lots of early neo-medievalist things—some of Sir Walter Scott’s novels, like Ivanhoe (1820)—not to mention his mock-castle, at Abbotsford.

the absolutely wonderful and crazy Eglinton Tournament of 1839 (we may have to have a posting about this)

the medieval-revival architecture of Pugin

before Tennyson began publishing Idylls of the King in 1859, with its poems about King Arthur and his court.

Even before Idylls, Tennyson had been interested in writing about King Arthur’s world, producing the poem “The Lady of Shalott” in his Poems (1833, revised version 1842), in this poem, a lady under a curse sees, from her tower, Sir Lancelot riding by, and falls in love with him without ever meeting him. What happens next was what brought us to write this posting.

Because it reminded us of Boromir.

At the beginning of The Two Towers, Aragorn finds the dying Gondorian sitting, with his back against a tree, and, scattered around him, and “Many Orcs lay slain, piled all about him and at his feet.” (The Two Towers, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”) When Legolas and Gimli join Aragorn, they decide upon a hasty, but they hope, appropriate burial.

“ ‘Then let us lay him in a boat with his weapons, and the weapons of his vanquished foes,’ said Aragorn. ‘We will send him to the Falls of Rauros and give him to the Anduin. The River of Gondor will take care at least that no evil creature dishonours his bones.’” (The Two Towers, Chapter 1, “The Departure of Boromir”)

In other burial scenes of important people in The Lord of the Rings, we see that the Kings and Stewards of Gondor are laid to rest in special vaults, rather like medieval and later English kings buried either in St. George’s chapel at Windsor or in Westminster Abbey.

The Kings of Rohan lie beneath a series of mounds just before Edoras,

like those of the Silla kings of Korea at Gyeongju (57BC-935AD).

Or like the sort of ship burials of which Tolkien must have read in the newspapers of 1939, the famous Sutton Hoo grave.

From which came treasures like this helmet (with its reconstruction).

A number of ship burials of northern European upper class people survive, all more or less in the same pattern: the ship is dragged to a spot where it is filled with the deceased, occasionally accompanied by others and even animals, and grave goods of a high quality, then a mound is built over it. The deceased may have been cremated beforehand, but not necessarily. There is a well-known description of this process by an Arab traveler, Ibn Fadlan. (for a translation of this with copious annotations, see James E. Montgomery, “Ibn Fadlan and the Rusiyyah”, Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies 3, 2000—available on-line by googling “Ibn Fadlan and the Rusiyyah”)

Here’s an 1883 reconstruction of one part of that process by the Polish painter Henryk Siemiradski.

In contrast, the image of the deceased being placed in such a ship, the ship being launched, and then torched, would appear to be a Hollywood popularization, perhaps originating with the 1958 movie, The Vikings, of something rare (or at least difficult to document).

At the conclusion of this film, a major character is given this treatment.

(That the Victorians were aware of this alternative can be seen in this 1893 painting by Sir Frank Dicksee.

Dicksee had based this painting not on a scholarly source, but upon a lecture by Thomas Carlyle, “The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology”, which he would have found in Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. Carlyle very loosely cites “Snorro” for his description of such an event, by which he means Snorri Sturluson, author of the Prose Edda)

But this brings up back to “The Departure of Boromir”—and to Tennyson.

In “The Departure of Boromir”, as we have seen, Boromir is placed into one of the Elven boats.

The three companions tow the boat as close to the Falls of Rauros as they can, then cast it loose to be carried over the Falls.

The companions, of course, are pressed for time: Frodo and Sam have gone one direction, Merry and Pippin have been carried off in another and there isn’t time, they feel, to bury Boromir or to build a cairn over him. As they have boats and there is the river below them, the method chosen seems a natural one, but we wondered if the author didn’t have Tennyson’s model in his mind, as well.

In “The Lady of Shalott”, after seeing Lancelot through her window (or in a reflection in the 1842 version of the poem), the Lady places herself in a small boat, with note in hand, and dies on her way down the river on the way to Camelot, apparently of a broken heart (as the backstory, appearing as early as the 13^th century, tells us).

Not only would the poem (which has a rather catchy rhythm) have been readily available, but there were a number of paintings and engravings illustrating the story, practically from the time of the 1842 version.

This is not so dramatic as going over the falls and her death is pale in comparison to multiple arrow wounds, but there is that rhythm, the image of the body in the boat going downstream, and the popularity of the poet—plus the numerous illustrations. We’ll include a link to the poem so you can judge for yourself: was this a possible influence on JRRT?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

What’s In A Name?

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by Ollamh in Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Narrative Methods

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Anglo-Saxon, artefacts, Balin, Beaumaris, Bladorthin, Gandalf, Girion, Hadrian's Wall, Hoard, Middle-earth, Raedwald, Ship burial, Sigeberht, spears, Staffordshire Hoard, Stonehenge, Suffolk, Sutton Hoo, The Argonath, The Hobbit, Thorin, Thror, Tolkien, weapons

Dear Readers, welcome, as ever.

If you look for the name “Bladorthin” in The Annotated Hobbit (our standard source), you will find it only once, on page 287, where Thorin and Balin discuss what they can remember of the great hoard of the Lonely Mountain.

This includes not only the usual golden items and jewels, but also what appears to have been a military consignment, “the spears that were made for the armies of the great King Bladorthin (long since dead), each had a thrice-forged head and their shafts were inlaid with cunning gold, but they were never delivered or paid for.”

Who this king was and why he was arming his men with what appear to be deluxe weapons is a mystery and probably forever unsolved. This is likewise true for the original Bladorthin, who exchanges his name for that of the head dwarf in the first drafts, Gandalf, just as the head dwarf loses his name, Gandalf, to become Thorin. Why does Tolkien make the shift?

If neither of these can be answered, perhaps we can step back a little to wonder why Bladorthin, the king, is in The Hobbit at all?

A strongly-marked feature of The Lord of the Rings is the sense of age, of great time having passed. Part of this comes from Tolkien’s own sense of history, part from living in a place where things like stone circles

and Roman fortifications

let alone more recent things, like castles

are everywhere to be seen every day.

Part of it, too, comes from Tolkien’s seemingly-unquenchable desire to add to what he had created, providing more and more and more context practically per page.

What might be seen as obsessive, or nearly, however, adds what we might call convincing texture, and in two ways: on the one hand, it makes the story that much more vivid because it’s so much more detailed, and, on the other, it gives it weight: this is not a tale of yesterday, but of a long ago, even if not a long ago from the world of the Neolithic or Romans or Edward I.

This sense of age comes from a number of elements, including not only the idea that the text has been translated from a manuscript, a handwritten text from a pre-Gutenberg age, but also from the landscape which, like Tolkien’s own mid-20^th-century Britain, is full of visible reminders of the past–

In fact, not long after the publication of The Hobbit, in 1937, a major uncovering of the English Anglo-Saxon past took place near the coast, in Suffolk, at a place called Sutton Hoo. Here, a series of mounds

yielded a ship burial

with nothing short of a hoard, including such items as these pieces from a purse

and a helmet.

(And, since then, it turns out that the area is an extensive cemetery, which, though much plundered, has yielded many other finds.)

Although Tolkien doesn’t mention this discovery in his selected letters, it would be difficult to imagine that he hadn’t seen something about it: it was even featured in the US National Geographic, in the year of discovery, 1939. Unfortunately, who the man buried there was appears impossible to say, leaving one aspect unknown, and all of the valuables simply generic Anglo-Saxon. (The theory now is that he is the early 7^th-c AD ruler, Raedwald, or his son/step-son, Sigeberht.)

The Hobbit, written earlier in terms of years and even earlier, perhaps, in terms of literary sophistication, has, in comparison, much less depth. Much of the backdrop is, particularly in comparison, fairy-tale flat, without all of those levelsl of history.

But then there is Bladorthin.

That mound of wealth, extending beyond the sleeping Smaug is initially described as:

“…on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of precious things, gold wrought and unwrought, gems and jewels, and silver red-stained in the ruddy light.” TH 270

This is impressive enough to wake a kind of primal greed in Bilbo:

“His heart was filled and pierced with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves; and he gazed motionless, almost forgetting the frightful guardian, at the gold beyond price and count.” TH 271

Imagine, then, that such a hoard—like Sutton Hoo, or the more recent—and astonishing—Staffordshire Hoard (see the link here)

could have names attached to some of its pieces, if not to the hoard in general. Thorin and Balin, in their reminiscing, combine general description with some specific detail, as well as identifying several one-time object owners:

“…shields made for warriors long dead; the great golden cup of Thror, two-handed, hammered and carven with birds and flowers whose eyes and petals were of jewels; coats of mail gilded and silvered and impenetrable; the necklace of Girion, Lord of Dale, made of five hundred emeralds green as grass, which he gave for the arming of his eldest son in a coat of dwarf-linked rings the like of which had never been made before, for it was wrought of pure silver to the power and strength of triple steel. But fairest of all was the great white gem, which the dwarves had found beneath the roots of the Mountain, the Heart of the Mountain, the Arkenstone of Thrain.” TH 287

Just as places in Middle-earth, by having history, are deepened, the same would be true for artefacts: not just a necklace, but Girion’s necklace, not just a golden cup, but Thror’s cup, and not just spears, but spears commissioned by Bladorthin, a king of long ago.

Thus, although Bladorthin’s history may remain a mystery outside The Hobbit, what history there is gives greater depth, narrative texture, to this early vision of Middle-earth and to the story of Bilbo, in particular.

Thanks, as ever, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Sutton Hoo

Bloody Vikings!

In Shining Armo(u)r

Of Boats and Boromir

What’s In A Name?