Region, also known as Vinland the Good, explored by Norse Greenlanders that is mentioned in a number of written sources, the most important of which are the Icelandic sagas, the Saga of
Trang 1with the sense of town or market, and that therefore the Vikings might have been distinguished by the fact that they frequented these trading places—for both raiding and trading
Although the people who stayed at home in Scandinavia techni-cally were not Vikings in the true sense of the word, it is often hard
to distinguish the two groups of population clearly, as in the summer, people who had lived peacefully at home all winter may have turned
to Viking activities
The term Viking was in actual fact hardly used by the
contempo-raries of the Vikings They used instead a wide range of other terms:
in the Christian West they were often called “heathen,” and in the
Muslim regions, such as Spain, they were called majus Most
com-mon, however, were the geographical terms “Northmen” and
“Danes” that were usually used irrespective of which part of Scandi-navia from which they came
VINLAND (ON Vinland) Region, also known as Vinland the Good,
explored by Norse Greenlanders that is mentioned in a number of written sources, the most important of which are the Icelandic sagas,
the Saga of the Greenlanders and the Saga of Erik the Red In these
sagas, Vinland is described as having a plentiful supply of salmon; a mild climate so that livestock could graze all year round; days and
nights of a more even length than in Iceland or Greenland; and a
good supply of timber and wild grapes
The geographical descriptions contained in these sagas make it
clear that Vinland was located somewhere in North America, but
there has been considerable scholarly debate about the exact location
of the region One of the earliest suggestions was made by C C Rafn
in 1837, when he equated Vinland with Cape Cod, but New England, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the St Lawrence River valley have since also been put forward as possible locations for Vinland
However, following the archaeological discoveries at L’Anse aux Meadows in the 1960s, most scholars believed that Newfoundland
was the Vinland of the sagas, although the absence of wild grapes in the region has caused a number of problems in identifying the exca-vated site with the descriptions of the sagas More recent accounts have stressed the connection between L’Anse aux Meadows and the specific settlements or camps mentioned in the sagas, Leifsbuðir and
278 • VINLAND
Trang 2Straumfjörd, which were used as bases for exploration south In this view, Vinland itself would be located to the south of Newfoundland, where grapes grew in the wild, perhaps in New Brunswick, the Bay
of Fundy, or the St Lawrence River valley
VINLAND MAP Yale University Press published The Vinland Map and
the Tartar Relation by Raleigh A Skelton, Thomas E Marston,
and George D Painter on 11 October 1965 (the day before Columbus Day) It was found by an American bookseller, Lawrence Witten, of New Haven, and was purchased in 1957 by a man called Mellon However, Witten had sworn not to reveal details of the map’s previ-ous ownership, so nothing else is known of its provenance The map
is a crude depiction of the world, drawn on antique vellum and dated
by its authors to c 1440 because of its discovery with an authentic and unrelated medieval text, the Tartar Relation In the top left-hand
cor-ner of the map (in the northwest) was what appeared to be the first
known depiction of Vinland, labeled Winilanda (or Vinilanda) Insula.
A Latin inscription above this mentions Byarnus (Bjarni Herjólfs-son) and Leiphus (Leif EriksHerjólfs-son) together explored Winilanda, and
that Henricus epsicopus (Bishop Eiríkr Gnúpsson?) went in search
of Vinland in the early 12th century
Norse voyages to Vinland are recorded in the Icelandic sagas, the
Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders, and on
the basis of the geographical descriptions in these sagas, Vinland had
been identified as lying somewhere in North America However,
be-fore the discovery of archaeological evidence for a Scandinavian presence in North America, many historians questioned the reliabil-ity of the sagas’ evidence, as they were first and foremost literary rather than historical texts The Vinland Map therefore seemed to substantiate saga evidence for pre-Columbian Europeans visiting the North American continent
However, doubts concerning the authenticity of the map were raised from the time of its publication Its view of the world was out-side the mainstream of cartographic evolution, where the ocean is normally depicted as encircling the inhabited world on medieval maps, but this is not the case on the Vinland Map; unlike other me-dieval maps, the map is not oriented to the east; the depiction of
Greenland was unparalleled in its accuracy before the 20th century;
VINLAND MAP • 279
Trang 3and, of course, the map shows Greenland and part of North America, which otherwise do not appear on extant maps until the beginning of the 16th century, when they are depicted by Genovese cartographer, Nicolo Canerio (his map is dated to 1503–1505) Following scientific tests by Walter McCrone, the Vinland Map was dismissed as a for-gery in 1974, as the ink with which it was drawn contained commer-cial titanium oxide, anatase, which was apparently unknown before
1917 However, later testing by Thomas A Cahill, published in 1987, suggested that only trace elements of the chemical could be found, and that the map could therefore not be dismissed as a fake on the grounds of its ink However, others contest this, and analysis of the specific ink used to draw the map is ongoing; it appears that it may be a common varnish-based printer’s ink that needs to be heated
to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit in order to remain stable on the page The results of a fresh examination of the ink were published in 2002, and the scientists from University College London concluded that they were modern However, the parchment on which the map is drawn is likely to be from the 15th century Despite careful preserva-tion, the ink pigment on the Vinland Map has been rapidly falling off since its discovery, so that no black lines can be seen today, just the stain of linseed that soaked into the vellum; such a rate of loss further suggests that the map is unlikely to have been medieval in date Fi-nally, the supposedly medieval date of the map partly rested on its
discovery with the 15th-century Tartar Relation, but the binding with
which the two were placed together is 18th-century in date
Ironically, the map provides no real evidence to help scholars
lo-cate Vinland: it does not show Markland and Helluland, which the
sagas say were visited by Scandinavians on their way south to Vin-land, and scholars who argue for Hudson Bay, New EngVin-land, or New-foundland as the location of Vinland can all find some support in the map for their claims Yet, at the time of the map’s publication, clear
archaeological evidence for Scandinavian settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows had just been discovered.
VINLAND SAGAS Name given to the two Icelandic sagas that
re-count Norse voyages to Vinland There are many similarities
be-tween the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders
but a number of differences too The key difference between the two
280 • VINLAND SAGAS
Trang 4sagas is the role of Leif the Lucky Eriksson, son of Erik the Red.
In the Saga of Erik the Red, Leif made the first accidental discovery
of Vinland in 1000, whereas in the Saga of the Greenlanders, it was
sighted by Bjarni Herjólfsson some 15 years earlier The account in
the Saga of Erik the Red also links Leif’s discovery with the
conver-sion of Greenland to Christianity, claiming that Leif was persuaded
in Norway by Olaf Tryggvason to convert his countrymen
How-ever, while sailing from Norway to Greenland, Leif was blown off course and thus discovered Vinland, before heading back to Green-land and then successfully converting the Norse colony to Christian-ity, and rescuing two shipwrecked sailors on the way
Although the more polished Saga of Erik the Red was preferred by
many 19th-century scholars, research published in the 1950s demon-strated that the story about Leif meeting Olaf Tryggvason and con-verting Greeland was the invention of an Icelandic monk, Gunnlaug Leifsson, in the late 12th century, when the traditional number of
countries that Olaf is said to have converted, five (Norway, Iceland, Orkney, Shetland, and Faroe Islands), suddenly became six.
Gunnlaug added Greenland to the list, and this new “tradition” was
subsequently repeated in many 13th-century works The Saga of Erik the Red was therefore seen as a deliberate revision of the older Saga
of the Greenlanders, focusing on the role played by Erik’s family The writer of the Saga of Erik the Red had to try to reconcile all the evidence he had: on the one hand, the Saga of the Greenlanders
recorded that Vinland was first accidentally sighted by Bjarni, but on the other, there was the later tradition that it was Leif who had dis-covered Vinland first The result was that he discarded the Bjarni episode and was therefore also forced to discard the story about Leif’s deliberate voyage to explore Vinland, which is given in the
Saga of the Greenlanders However, the details of this voyage were used but fitted into different places in the narrative in the Saga of Erik the Red More recently, some scholars have argued against a written
link between the two Vinland sagas, concluding instead that they both independently drew upon details of the Vinland voyages that were circulating in oral tradition
VÖLSUNGA SAGA (“The Saga of the Volsungs”) This saga is per-haps the most famous of the Sagas of Ancient Times and was the
VÖLSUNGA SAGA • 281
Trang 5inspiration for German composer Richard Wagner’s opera cycle
Ring des Nibelungen It was written in Iceland c 1260–1270 and is
preserved in just one vellum manuscript dating from c 1400 but
is believed to incorporate relics of a much older oral tradition In-deed, some of the figures in the saga can be identified with known
historical figures from the Migration Age (c 400–550) For exam-ple, Jörmunrekkr in the saga appears to be the fourth-century king of the Goths, Ermanaric; and Atli, the fifth-century king of the Huns,
Attila However, the central figure in the saga is Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer, whose acquisition of a cursed treasure of gold leads
to his death and a bitter and bloody series of feuds Following Sig-urd’s own death, the cursed treasure passed into the possession of his brothers-in-law, Gunnar and Hogni Their sister, Gudrun, remarried,
taking Atli, brother of the valkyrie Brynhild, as her husband Atli
coveted the gold Gudrun’s brothers owned and tricked and killed them both (Gunnar was put to death in a snake pit) Gudrun re-venged the deaths of her brothers by tricking Atli into drinking the blood and eating the hearts of his sons, before killing him with the help of Hogni’s son, Niflung However, the curse of the gold fol-lowed Gudrun, whose daughter (by Sigurd), Svanhild, was trampled
to death by horses at the instigation of her (Svanhild’s) father-in-law
VÖLUSPÁ (“The Prophecy of the Seeress”) The first and most fa-mous of the mythological poems in the collection known as the El-der or Poetic Edda The poem is preserved in two main manuscripts, the Codex Regius and Hauksbók, the texts and ordering of which are
quite different; most modern editions follow the former, adding some
four stanzas (34, 54, 65, and parts of 47 and 60) from Hauksbók, which gives the poem a total of 66 stanzas Although the Codex Regius manuscript is dated to c 1270, the poem itself is believed to
be considerably older and may predate 1065, when the skald (see
skaldic poetry) Arnórr þórðarson jarlaskáld echoes stanza 57 of
Völuspá in his þorfinnsdrápa A date as early as the beginning of the
10th century has been suggested, but it is also argued that the poem may reflect millennial anxieties surrounding the year 1000, when it
was believed that the world would come to an end Völuspá is
pre-sented as a series of visions recounted by a seeress or sybil to Odin
and it provides an account of the beginning and end of the Norse
282 • VÖLUSPÁ
Trang 6mythological world Snorri Sturluson used this poem for his own
account of Norse mythology and cosmology in the Prose Edda The
extent to which the poem reflects Christian influence has been much debated, with particular attention paid to the poem’s account of the end of the world, the reference to the coming of “The Mighty One,” and the idea of punishment or reward after death
– W –
WALES, VIKINGS IN (ON Bretland) It appears that Wales escaped
serious Viking raiding until the mid-ninth century Its coastline, with
treacherous currents and difficult approaches, certainly made it diffi-cult for hostile forces to attack However, following the
establish-ment of permanent Viking settleestablish-ments in Ireland and the Hebrides,
Scandinavian raiders made some attempt to gain a foothold in Wales Particularly attractive was the island of Anglesey off the northwest-ern coast of Wales However, Rhodri Mawr, prince of the northnorthwest-ern Welsh kingdom of Gwynedd, (844–878) managed to resist Scandina-vian attempts to establish settlements on Anglesey and killed the Viking leader, Gorm, in an important campaign in 855 Excavations
at Llanbedrgoch on Anglesey since the 1990s have revealed a huge defended enclosure that may have been constructed during Rhodri’s reign or that of his son’s in response to Viking pressure However, the artifacts found at Llanbedrgoch also suggest that there was trading contact with Scandinavians active in the Irish Sea region, and it may even be possible that the settlement was taken over by Vikings at some point During the last years of Rhodri’s reign, he was forced into exile in Ireland following a series of Danish victories; and in
878, the Vikings first overwintered in Wales, in the southwestern dis-trict of Pembrokeshire
The expulsion of the Dublin Norse in 902 renewed Scandinavian
interest in Wales and, in particular, Anglesey However, In-gimundr’s army was driven from the island and was eventually given land around Chester by Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians The restoration of Scandinavian power in Ireland in 914 was followed
by a further attack on Anglesey, which was repelled by Hywel Dda
(c 915–950), grandson of Rhodri Mawr South Wales suffered
WALES, VIKINGS IN • 283
Trang 7rather more during this period Pembrokeshire offered a relatively easy line of entry into the country through Milford Haven; there were sporadic raids and there may have been some limited
settle-ment along the Haven In 914, two Viking earls from Brittany,
Ohter and Hroald, ravaged the Welsh coast and moved inland along the Wye Valley as far as Archenfield Here they captured the bishop
of Llandaff, Bishop Cyfeiliog, who was ransomed for £40 by Ed-ward the Elder of England
There was a lull in Scandinavian activity in Wales during the sec-ond quarter of the 10th century during Hywel’s reign, and by 942, Hywel was ruler of virtually the whole country However, this inter-lude was followed by a dramatic new development in Welsh relations with the Vikings Until this time, Wales was the only kingdom in the British Isles that had been able to avoid intense raiding and conced-ing tracts of land to the Scandinavians But Hywel Dda’s death in 950 ignited a disastrous period of internal conflict in Wales, and this was taken advantage of by the Vikings Some Welsh princes used Scandi-navian mercenaries in their own campaigns for political dominance within Wales For example, Maredudd ap Owain (986–999), ruler of the south Welsh kingdom of Dyfed, used Viking mercenaries but was later forced by them to pay a penny a head for Welsh prisoners that they had taken Some 14 or 15 raids are recorded in the 50 years that followed the death of Hywel Dda: on Dyfed, Anglesey, and the Lleyn Peninsula, and in the Bristol Channel area Monasteries were obvious and vulnerable targets, for example, St David’s was attacked in 982,
988, and 999; and the kingdom of Gwynedd suffered from its
prox-imity to Viking bases in Ireland and the Isle of Man, with attacks
recorded on Holyhead (961) and Towyn (963) However, again, An-glesey appears to have suffered most In 971, Magnus Haraldsson, leader of the Manx Vikings, attacked Penmon, and further attacks by Magnus’s brother, Godfrey, are recorded in 972, 980, and 987 In
972, Godfrey was apparently the temporary lord of Anglesey The fe-rocious attack in 987 was recorded in Irish and Welsh annals, where some thousand Welshmen are said to have been killed and a further two thousand taken captive
By around the year 1000, Viking activity across the border from Eng-land increased with intensified campaigning there Pressure from the east became the dominant issue in Welsh politics, a trend that was
in-284 • WALES, VIKINGS IN
Trang 8tensified after the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 However, Gruffydd ap Llewelyn (1039–1063) largely resisted these incursions successfully, until defeated by Harald Godwinsson in 1063 Gruffydd
was actually assisted by a Norwegian fleet, under Magnus Haraldsson, son of Harald Hard-Ruler in 1058 By this time, distinctions between
Celt and Norseman were becoming blurred, and it is possible to talk of
an Irish-Sea political circle For example, Gruffydd ap Cynan, ruler of Gwynedd from 1075, was said to have been born in exile in Ireland in
1054 or 1055 and to have been brought up in the Scandinavian settle-ment there
After 1066, the new Norman earls of Hereford, Chester, and Shrewsbury supported Norman expansion into the west Hugh Lupus
of Chester, with Hugh Montgomery of Shrewsbury, made a decisive attempt to win control of north Wales in 1098 The native Welsh princes were forced to withdraw to Anglesey and employed Hiberno-Norse mercenaries to help control the seas The mercenaries betrayed their Welsh lords, and Gruffydd ap Cynan was forced to flee to Ire-land It was at this point that the last real Viking intervention in Welsh
affairs came, with the appearance of King Magnus Bare-Foot and a
Norwegian fleet off the island of Priestholm After a confrontation
in the Menai Straits and a Norwegian victory, both the Norwegians and the Normans withdrew from Wales
The impact of the Vikings on Wales was relatively slight when compared to other parts of the British Isles There was virtually no
Scandinavian influence on the Welsh language: iarll “earl” and gardd
“enclosure” may be examples of Scandinavian loanwords, but it is also possible that they were loaned via English There is no explicit mention of Scandinavian settlement in Wales in any sources, apart
from the very problematic 12th-century legendary Saga of the
Jomsvikings (see Jomsvikings), which mentions a Danish colony
that was established in Bretland before c 930 and which existed
throughout the 10th century There are several examples of Scandi-navian place-names, but these are generally navigation points and the names of small islands around the Welsh coast, such as Bardsey, Holyhead, the Skerries, Priestholm and Orme’s Head in the north, and Ramsey, Grassholm, and Skokholm in the south Anglesey itself,
which is consistently called Mon in Welsh, seems to be a
Scandina-vian name meaning “Ongull’s island,” although no Viking leader
WALES, VIKINGS IN • 285
Trang 9called Ongull can be identified in any of the written sources Names
inland around Milford (itself derived from ON -fjörðr) do, however,
hint at some kind of Scandinavian settlement in the interior of Wales Swansea is undoubtedly Scandinavian “Svein’s island,” but there are also many names, such as Womanby Street in Cardiff (from Hund-manby), that may reflect later Anglo-Scandinavian influence rather than Scandinavian influence
WANTAGE CODE See DANELAW, WAPENTAKE.
WAPENTAKE (ON vápnatak OE wæpentac “weapon-taking”) A
lo-cal administrative and legal division found in parts of Danelaw, which
largely corresponds with the English hundred (a hundred notionally consisted of 100 hides, a hide being the amount of land needed to sup-port one family and the basic unit of taxation in England) In 1086,
Domesday Book records wapentakes in the territory of the Five Bor-oughs, parts of Northamptonshire, and in the West and North Ridings
of Yorkshire (East Yorkshire, however, is divided into hundreds) The word is first found in English sources in 962, in the laws of King Edgar (959–975), concerning the buying and selling of goods “in a borough
or a wapentake.” Wapentake assemblies were held regularly, usually in the open air, and they appear to have been the most important legal and
judicial unit in the administration of the Five Boroughs in Æthelred
II’s Wantage Code In Iceland, the vápnatak was a ceremony
per-formed at the end of the Althing, in which weapons were beaten to
confirm the decisions of the assembly Weapons were outlawed at the Althing in 1154, but it seems that this law was largely ignored There
is no Scandinavian evidence for the use of the term “wapentake” to de-scribe an administrative district
WAR OF THE IRISH WITH THE FOREIGNERS (Irish Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh) Twelfth-century Irish rhetorical account of
Norse-Irish relations, written as a piece of propaganda for the Uí
Bri-ain dynasty descended from Brian Boru Divided into two sections, the work begins with a colorful description of Viking raids and plun-dering that afflicted Ireland during the eighth and ninth centuries,
and then goes on to describe in heroic terms the defeat of the Vikings
at the hands of the Uí Briain kings of Dál Cais, paying particular
at-286 • WANTAGE CODE
Trang 10tention to Brian and his brother, Mathgamain The War of the Irish with the Foreigners culminates with a vivid description of the Battle
of Clontarf, in which the “foreigners” are depicted as, among a long
series of pejorative adjectives, “cunning, warlike, poisonous, mur-derous, hostile,” while the Irish under Brian are “bright, fresh, never-weary, valiant, victorious heroes.” Despite the clearly propagandist nature of the work, it has had considerable influence on perceptions
of the importance of the Battle of Clontarf
WATLING STREET Name of the Roman road that ran from London
in the southeast to Chester in northwest England During the Viking period, Watling Street appears to have functioned as a boundary be-tween the area of Scandinavian settlement and the area that remained
under English control Watling Street was mentioned in Alfred the Great and Guthrum’s treaty at Wedmore, although the treaty itself
does not actually specify that the boundary ran along the whole length of Watling Street to Chester Instead, it merely states that the dividing line between Alfred’s and Guthrum’s territories should first follow the River Thames, then the River Lea to its source, then run in
a direct line to Bedford, and then up the River Ouse to Watling Street
It is not until later on, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1013, that
we have some contemporary evidence that Watling Street had come
to be generally recognized as the dividing line between Anglo-Scandinavian and English England The distribution of Anglo-Scandinavian place-names also largely follows this dividing line
WEAPONS AND ARMOR Viking warriors were generally armed
with a shield, spear, a sword or an ax, and a short knife attached to
their belts The warrior shown on the Middleton cross is equipped
with all of these weapons and is also wearing a helmet Very few hel-mets have survived from the Viking Age, although depictions of
war-riors in Viking art suggest that conical helmets were common The
horned and winged helmets associated with the Vikings in popular mythology were the invention of 19th-century Romanticism It has been suggested that Viking helmets may have been made from leather, as well as from iron The best-preserved Viking helmet is that from Gjermundbu in Norway, which is more elaborate than the sim-ple conical design, with protection around the eyes and for the nose
WEAPONS AND ARMOR • 287