Celts to Vikings 2014

Met my students for the first time tonight. It went pretty well, although I talked too much. Combination of nerves and inadequate preparation, I guess; plus I was thrown off by missing my first class and starting a week behind.

We set some of our themes for the class: barbarians and Romans, especially, and my notion that medieval Europe results from the fusion of their worlds;  and we began our exploration of Europe's two different models of male-female relations and the status of women by reading some Roman texts on famously virtuous women.

Next time I will slow down and push my students to talk more.

Celts to Vikings: the End

Last night was the last meeting of my Celts to Vikings class. Teaching this class was the most fun I have ever had teaching, and I am sad it is over. My students were great, and about half of them really got into this material. It was a great experience.

I am also a little relieved, because I have been wearing myself out getting ready for class and driving back and forth to Frederick, and I need a rest. I haven't posted much in the past two weeks because I have been racing through 8th and 9th century Europe, without time to dwell on cool topics on the way I did for earlier parts of the course. I am not satisfied with the way this section went, and I would do it differently next time. I hope there is a next time. I have loved this material for thirty years, but in teaching it I have learned much, much more about it. I have read or reread fifty books and dozens of articles, looked at hundreds of pictures. I have thought over things in new ways, sought new ways to explain them.

I love teaching medieval history, Hood College is a great place to teach, and I very much hope I will back there soon.

The Viking Style

The swirling, interlacing style of Viking art, expressed in wood and metal.

The Ingvar Stones

One of my favorite things that I have learned about teaching Celts to Vikings this year is the Ingvar Stones.

In 1036, a Swedish Viking named Ingvar the Far-Traveled raised a large mercenary force, several hundred strong at least, and took them to the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. There they took part in a civil war raging in the kingdom of Georgia. Most, it seems, died of disease -- including Ingvar -- others in battle. Only one ship out of 26 returned to Sweden.

Ingvar's expedition was remembered in songs and eventually written into a saga. His men were memorialized by their families with rune stones set up all over Sweden, 26 of which survive. The one above is typical; the inscription reads:

Andvéttr and Kárr and Kiti and Blesi and Djarfr raised this stone in memory of Gunnleifr, their father, who was killed in the east with Ingvarr. May God help their spirits. Alríkr(?), I carved the runes. He could steer a cargo-ship well.

This one says:

Þjalfi and Holmlaug had all of these stones raised in memory of Baggi, their son, who alone owned a ship and steered to the east in Ingvarr's retinue. May God help Baggi's spirit. Áskell carved.

These stones sum up the spirit of the Viking age for me. Ingvar's expedition was a mad adventure with a high risk of death for everyone involved, even had they been successful. Yet he had no trouble recruiting 26 shiploads of men to sail a thousand miles down treacherous rivers, much of the way through hostile territory, to take part in a war in which none of them had any personal stake. Whatever else they Vikings were -- killers, pirates, slavers -- they were certainly brave. They were brave when they had to be, but more notably they were brave for no very good reason. The Icelanders recorded that their ancestors crossed the Atlantic to an unknown island because they wanted to be more free. Ingvar's men went because going seemed better than staying home. The men who settled Greenland, or fought for the emperor in Constantinople, or sailed their longships into the Mediterranean to raid Spain and Italy, also had no pressing reason to go. They just did.

The Ingvar Stones give a clue as to why the Vikings were like that. The people who stayed home in Sweden must have followed Ingvar's adventure as best they could, and they made the news they heard into songs. Their relatives who went seemed heroic to them, and when they did not come home they set up stones to honor their memory. (Not many runestones were set up for ordinary Swedish farmers.) Viking boys grew up hearing such stories, seeing that the people who were talked about and admired were the ones who crossed the sea in search of adventure and gold. The ones who came home with chests full of English or Saracen silver became chieftains, lording it over their more timid neighbors. The biggest hazard faced by Scandinavian kings was that some exiled relation would come home with a ship full of money and an outsized reputation and toss them off their thrones. In this world, adventure was a way of life, the more dangerous the better.

Alboin and Rosemund

The most famous king of the Lombards was Alboin, who led their invasion of Italy in AD 569. His story was rendered by historian Paul the Deacon as a little saga in the mode of the Nibelungenlied. Before the invasion, when the Lombards lived in modern Hungary, they fought a great battle against the Gepids and their king Cunimund:

In this battle Alboin killed Cunimund, and made out of his head, which he carried off, a drinking goblet. This kind of a goblet is called among them “scala,” but in the Latin language “patera.” And he led away as a captive Cunimund’s daughter, Rosemund by name, together with a great multitude of both sexes and every age, and because Chlotsuinda [her husband] had died he married her, to his own injury, as afterwards appeared.

Alboin and Rosemund got along well enough for the next decade, the period of the invasion of Italy and other extraordinary events, and they had at least two children.

After this king had ruled in Italy three years and six months, he was slain by the treachery of his wife, and the cause of his murder was this: While he sat in merriment at a banquet at Verona longer than was proper, with the cup which he had made of the head of his father-in-law, king Cunimund, he ordered it to be given to the queen to drink wine, and he invited her to drink merrily with her father. Lest this should seem impossible to any one, I speak the truth in Christ. I saw king Ratchis holding this cup in his hand on a certain festal day to show it to his guests. Then Rosemund, when she heard the thing, conceived in her heart deep anguish she could not restrain, and straightway she burned to revenge the death of her father by the murder of her husband.

No doubt Alboin was drunk at the time, but still, not a very smart move. Rosemund seduced the king's armor bearer, Helmechis, to get him to perform the assassination -- her part was to secure the king's sword and then let the assassins into the bed chamber -- and then she and her lover fled to the territory of the Byzantine Empire at Ravenna. There the Imperial Prefect suggested to Rosemund that she do away with Helmechis and marry him, and she agreed, so she carried a cup of poisoned wine to Helmechis in his bath. He drank the wine but realized he was poisoned, grabbed Roseumnd and drowned her in the bath before he expired.

Celts to Vikings XIX: Thinking About a Familiar Map

If you have ever studied European history, you have surely seen some version of the map above. It shows the movements of the barbarian groups who entered the Roman Empire in the fifth century. I find that my students are numb to what it implies, so I like to spend some time going over the human reality of those neat colored lines. Think about the blue line that shows the Vandals moving from central Germany toward the southeast, then west into the Empire, across Gaul to Spain, and then to North Africa, from which lines shoot out across the Mediterranean Sea. Imagine a man born along that line in about AD 390, along the frontiers of the Roman Empire in modern Hungary. He would have spent his boyhood in unsettled times, perhaps moving several times, always threatened by hunger and violence. As he became a teenager his people began a great migration, tens of thousands of them loading all their belongings into wagons, or onto their backs, and moving toward the west. For the next few years they skirted the Roman frontier, skirmishing, searching for food, begging admittance to the promised land beyond the frontier. In the winter of 406 the crossed the frozen Rhine River and began their invasion of the empire. Imagine the emotions that accompanied that fateful day -- the hope of safety and wealth, the fear of battle and annihilation, the cold and the hunger and the dread of cracking ice. The Vandal leaders tried to negotiate a grant of land along the Rhine frontier, but the local Roman authorities persuaded them to keep moving. For three years they traveled ever onward across Gaul, stopping at various places for a few months. They were able to extort enough food and fodder to keep going, but city gates were closed against them and they never knew when some general or governor would raise an army to destroy them. Surely suspicion and fear dogged those years.

In 409 they reached Hispania, where whole provinces were handed over to the Vandal leaders. Here they tried to settle down, ruling over people who probably hated and despised them, claiming some land as their own. Some of the migrants merged with the population and became farmers. But in 420 the Visigoths came to Spain to claim the land for their own, and they defeated the Vandals and their allies in a major battle. Those people who still identified with the Vandal kingdom packed up and moved on again -- 80,000 of them, according to the Byzantine historian Procopius. They crossed to North Africa and marched along the coast, shut out of cities until they took some by siege. By 422 they had founded a new Vandal kingdom centered on ancient Carthage. Imagine how strange this land seemed to people born in the German forests. And then, seeing an opportunity, they became pirates and raided by ship around the Mediterranean Sea. Perhaps our young Vandal, by this point grown to manhood, finished his military career as captain of a pirate ship, or perhaps he was killed in an attack on Sicily or Corsica. His children, born in Spain or Africa, knew the land where their father was raised only in stories. They grew up Vandals amidst Roman Africans, sojourners among people who hated them and longed for a Roman emperor to come and drive them out. They kept their Vandal identity for a century -- their language, their Arian church, their sense of themselves as vigorous outsiders destined to rule over corrupt Romans.

Those lines are the trajectories of people's lives, and they trace out the extraordinary destinies lived out by many thousands of people in that disordered age.

The Sevso Treasure

We are about to start the Time of Wandering in my Celts to Vikings class, the era in the fifth and sixth centuries when barbarian tribes entered the Roman empire and ended up turning the western half into a bunch of independents kingdoms. The Franks took over Gaul, the Visigoths ruled Spain, the Ostrogoths and then the Lombards dominated Italy. One sign that this was a period of great chaos is the number of extravagant buried treasures that have been found from this time. Wealthy families, unsure what to make of the warlords who had taken over their districts, buried hoards of gold and silver. Some of those families were then wiped out by the warlords, or fled to distant cities and never returned.

One of the most spectacular late Roman hoards is the Sevso Treasure. This was deposited within a few decades of the year 400, but nobody knows where. The name comes from the largest dish, which is inscribed:

Hec Sevso tibi durent per saecula multa

Posteris ut prosint vascula digna tuis

May these, O Sevso, yours for many ages be

Small vessels fit to serve your offspring worthily.

When it first surfaced it was accompanied by documents that said it had been in Lebanon for many years, but these documents turned out to be fake. At that point the Getty Museum backed out of a deal to buy the treasure for $10 million. Claims were then made for the treasure by the governments of Lebanon, Hungary, and Croatia, but the courts in New York held that there was not enough evidence to take the treasure from its owner, a consortium headed by the Marquess of Northampton. The most intriguing theory holds that the treasure was found near Lake Balaton in Hungary by a laborer named Jozsef Sumegh, who was murdered in 1980. His killing was never solved, and a connection to this spectacular treasure would certainly supply a motive.

Whoever turns out to own the treasure, it is certainly a spectacular sign of the wealth of the late Roman elite, and their devotion to the classical artistic tradition.

Celts to Vikings 17: Sigurd/Siegfried

The great epic of the ancient German world was the tale of Siegfried or Sigurd the dragon slayer. The story survives in two independent versions, the medieval German poem known as the Nibelungenlied and a prose telling from Iceland called The Saga of the Volsungs. The popularity of the story is attested by its many appearances in German art, including the numerous carved “Sigurd Stones” set up in Sweden illustrated with scenes from the hero’s career. I find it strange that both of these versions tell the same story, because that story is a mishmash of two separate, tenuously related tales. The first describes how the hero slew the dragon Fafnir and acquired a horde of cursed gold – the Norse version also includes the story of Sigurd’s family, the Volsungs, going back several generations – and the second is the story of a band of heroic warriors besieged and eventually killed by the army of Attila the Hun. The connection is that Sigurd or Siegfried marries into the family that ends up getting slaughtered by the Huns, but is betrayed and murdered by his brothers in law. They are incited by Brunhild, a woman he promised to marry but then abandoned. Sigurd/Siegfried’s widow then marries Attila the Hun, bringing him and his boundless greed into the story.

The story is dark and bloody. Everyone ends up dead, and not for any clear reason. The tale is sometimes taken to be the expression of a gloomy German consciousness, in which fate appears as a doomsday machine crushing all human hopes. It has also been one of the main channels by which ancient Germanic lore was passed down into modern times, and in the form of Wagner’s operas it is the most common way for modern people to encounter the ancient German world. So I assigned the Norse version, The Saga of the Volsungs, in my Celts to Vikings class. This version is shorter than the Nibelungenlied, easier to read, and less Christianized. I had doubts as to how this would work, but it has been great. My students liked the story and enjoyed analyzing what it says about fate and the human condition. They admired the courage of the characters, who are caught up in a tragedy from which they cannot escape but go down fighting instead of whining about their fates or blaming anybody for their troubles. They had interesting things to say about how it compared with the Irish stories we had read, and enjoyed speculating about how Celtic and Germanic culture were different.

It was an interesting exercise and fun, and I would do it again.

Wotan Id Est Furor

The chief god of the ancient Germans and the pagan Norse was Wotan or Odin. Odin was a strange sort of god. He was not the god of the sky or thunder or the sun or the wind; he was not invoked for better crops, better health, or success in business. He decided the outcome of battles but he was not a war god; he was much involved in death but was not the god of the underworld. He was the god of kings and gave them their power, and his closest comparisons among other Indo-European gods are those associated with sovereignty. Yet he is not much like Mitra or Varuna, either.

One thing we know about Odin is that he received human sacrifices. His victims were often hanged from trees, about which more later. This carving on a Viking age stone from Gotland seems to show two sacrifices, one that may be a child, laid out on a stone for slaughter, and a warrior with shield who has been hung from a bent tree; when the tree is released it will lift him into the air and strangle him. Over them hovers the interlaced triple triangle of the Valknut, or dead man's knot, which is a symbol of Odin and probably indicates that the sacrifices are for him.

Odin made sacrifices of his own. For one drink from the spring that flows forth at the foot of Yggdrasil he gave up one of his eyes, but the water from that sacred spring gave him great wisdom. He was called the Far-Seeing, and the All-Knowing. His companions were ravens, which are emblems of both wisdom and slaughter, another connection between Odin's sovereignty and the land of the dead.

Adam of Bremen, writing around 1070 AD, gives us an important clue to Odin’s identity. Wotan, he wrote, id est furor. “Wotan, that is, madness.” Among Odin’s followers were the berserks of the Viking era, men who fought in a state of frothing rage beyond pain or fear. Odin was the god of poets and gave them their inspiration. He was the master of the runes, which were used in foretelling the future. An obscure Norse poem tells us the story of how he acquired his rune mastery:

Wounded I hung on a wind-swept tree
For nine long nights,
Pierced by a spear, pledged to Odin,
Offered, myself to myself
The wisest know not from whence spring
The roots of that ancient rood.

They gave me no bread,
They gave me no mead,
I looked down;
with a loud cry
I took up runes;
from that tree I fell.

What kind of god acquires his wisdom by hanging for nine nights on a tree?

A shaman god. Odin, in the stories that come down to us, acts much like a shaman, specifically a Siberian or Lapp shaman. Shamans, the most ancient human religious practitioners, enter into a trance state in which their spirits leave their bodies to journey through other planes or realms; often the place they visit is imagined as the realm of the dead. From their journeys they bring back knowledge, especially knowledge of the future or of how to cure diseases. Shamanic lore is woven all through Norse myth, from Freya’s cloak of feathers to Odin’s eight-legged steed -- both were conveyances used by shamans in their spirit journeys. The Norse cosmos was centered on a great ash tree, Yggdrasil, whose roots and branches connected the nine worlds where humans, gods, giants and others lived. This is the cosmos of the Siberian shamans, and they imagined themselves climbing up the world tree as they entered the spirit realm. Sometimes they climbed trees or wooden poles as part of their rituals. They called these trees their spirit horses. Yggdrasil means “the steed of Odin,” so the axis of the world as the Norse saw it was the pole their shaman god climbed to reach knowledge.

Here is the connection between Odin and all-knowing and Odin the god of death, for like a shaman he must travel the spirit road to acquire his wisdom.

Shamanic ecstacy was widely seen as a sort of temporary madness, and the overall sanity of its practitioners was suspect. This notion carried over into other forms of ecstasy, for example in the tradition that makes poetic inspiration a kind of madness. This is why Odin, the shaman, is the patron of poets and berserks – all forms of ecstasy fall under his purview.

The worldview of the Siberian shamans was not optimistic. They believed that most or all of life was governed by impersonal forces beyond the control even of gods, and the that the shaman’s main role was to discover what fate those forces had decreed. Sometimes, by heroic effort, a shaman could avert an illness or discover that some catastrophe had been sent by an angry god who might be placated. Mainly, though, they were discoverers, not shapers. Death meant passage to a shadowy realm where spirits had even less freedom than living humans. The gods themselves would in the end be defeated and destroyed, their doom already decreed.

So far as we can tell, the ancient Germans had a similarly gloomy cosmology. Into Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain, Odin gathered dead heroes and feasted them so that they would fight for him in the last battle. This was the best sort of afterlife the Norse could imagine, and we hear little in their legends about the fate of dead farmers or housewives. But the afterlife of the heroes was shadowed by the end they knew was coming: Ragnarök, when Fenris the Great Wolf would snap his chains and swallow the sun, the gods would be overwhelmed by monsters and demons, and the dead heroes would meet their final end. Perhaps, though, some of the tales hint, the world would then be remade, and perhaps that future world would be better than the violent, cruel world of the Viking age.

Celts to Vikings 15: Germania

On Monday we started our unit on the ancient Germans with the traditional text, Tacitus’ Germania. Even though this must be one of the most widely assigned of ancient texts, it raises some problems. In writing it, Tacitus was not much interested in the Germanic tribesmen themselves. His main purpose was to comment on the mores of his fellow Romans by contrasting them with the barbarians; for example, he devotes a long paragraph to how greatly the Germans detested adultery, by way of complaining about sexual license among the Romans. Since we have a hard time figuring out how much adultery there is in our own society, I find it unlikely that Tacitus really knew how much there was among the German tribes. He also says the Germans did not value gold and silver, which has been disproved by numerous finds of gold and silver objects in German graves. Surely Tacitus only included this passage to attack the greed of the Romans.

Nonetheless, Tacitus gives us much information about the Germans that appears to be correct. He gives an accurate account of German weaponry – no surprise there, since by his time many Germans fought in the Roman army and Tacitus may well have commanded German troops. Other things Tacitus recounts have at times been met with skepticism but have in recent decades been confirmed by historical and archaeological research. He gives us our only account of horse sacrifice among the Germans, making their practice seem much like that of ancient Iranians and other early Indo-Europeans, about which Tacitus cannot possibly have known. He tells us that the bravest and fiercest German warriors did no work at all, which might seem unlikely if we did not have several accounts from the Norse sagas of characters who infuriated their families by refusing to do anything productive. “Coal biters,” they were called, because they sat around the fire all day chewing on coals and complaining about how bored they were. He says that the Germans did not value land but instead counted their wealth in cattle, which fits perfectly with an economy devoted to stock-raising and slash-and-burn or swidden agriculture. He says that the Germans practiced human sacrifice, sometimes by drowning the victims in bogs and using nets staked into the peat to hold down their bodies, which matches the condition of some “bog bodies.”

I think the most important thing Tacitus says concerns German marriage practice:

The young men are slow to mate, and their virility is not thus exhausted. Nor are maidens rushed into marriage. As fully grown as the men, they match their mates in age and strength, and their children reflect the strength of their parents.

Pseudo-biology aside, this is an accurate picture of the ancient marriage pattern in northern Europe. As far back as we can find any evidence, northern Europeans typically married in their 20s, and the men and women were roughly the same age. Their marriages were much more equal, both legally and in practice, than those of the Mediterranean world, where girls just past puberty were commonly wedded to men ten or even twenty years older. Tacitus seems not to have grasped the difference this made for relations between the sexes, but he got the basic facts right.

So the Germania remains the best available primary source for introducing the Germans, and its complexity can even be a plus for an advanced class like the one I am teaching now, challenging the students to tease out the threads of genuine ethnography and social criticism.

Taranis

Bronze image of the Celtic thunder god from the first century AD; note the wheel, which was a common thunder symbol in old Europe, and the rattle, which might have been imagined as the way he makes the noise of thunder but looks very much like the rattles used by Siberian shamans to scare away evil spirits.

Celts to Vikings 13a: Brochs

One of the cool things about the Picts is that their kings and nobles lived in stark stone towers that we call brochs. About twenty of these survive to a reasonable height. They vary considerably in size, and some, like the Broch of Gurness (below), include impressive outer walls and many other structures.

The interiors of the brochs were divided into rooms, and some of the partitions survive:

There are two different ways of reconstructing what these brochs looks like. Some archaeologists think they looked like this, with a roof covering the whole interior well:

While others think the tower was open to the sky in the center:

Either way, they look like dismally uncomfortable places to live, especially through a Scottish winter. But I suppose freezing in the damp was better than being clubbed to death in your sleep by one of your howling, blue-painted neighbors.

Celts to Vikings 13: Picts and Scots

On Monday, the day before my exam, I gave my students in Celts to Vikings a little lecture about the origins of Scotland. I find this instructive because Scotland is now full of nationalistic people who think there is something important and profound about being Scottish. Yet Scotland originated from a disparate group of peoples. The natives were people the Romans called the Picts, which just seems to be another version of the same word that gave us Britons. They spoke a Celtic language. Before the Romans they were already different from the wealthier and more commercial societies of the south, which is one reason the Romans decided to wall them off from the part of the island worth ruling rather than try to conquer them. By the time the Romans left they were even more different.

After the empire fell, the southern part of modern Scotland, up to Edinburgh, was ruled by Welsh kings and was culturally part of Britain. The north remained Pictish. The western isles were overrun by invaders from Ireland, who at the time were called Scots. They brought their language, Gaelic, with them, as well as their bards, stories, and music. The Highlanders of the western isles, considered by many people today to be the heart of Scotland, are Irish immigrants. Then the Anglo-Saxons came and overran much of southern Scotland, where their language became dominant. Then the Vikings, who conquered the northeast and settled heavily in the Shetland and Orkney islands and some coastal areas. And then the Normans, who were invited in by the Stuart kings after 1066 and supplied much of the Scottish leadership in the 12th and 13th centuries.

Nor is this division all ancient history. Scotland was divided by intense and bitter conflicts in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, many of them pitting conservative highlanders against the modernizing commercial elite of Glasgow and Edinburgh. And yet somehow, through some political alchemy, these elements fused enough to form a Scottish identity. The Scottish people have already partially seceded from Britain and may yet take themselves all the way out. I find this all bizarre, but then as I have said many times nationalism is something I simply don't understand.

Juellinge

A grave of a Danish noblewoman from the 1st century AD. Note the Roman glass and the hair pins.

Merlin

Merlin actually has a better claim to have been a real person than Arthur, and he may have been less thoroughly transformed by the bards who passed down his legend. If he did live, though, it was two generations after the most plausible dates for Arthur, and the stories do not put them together until the 12th century. The Welsh annals include this notice from the Year 573: The Battle of Arfderydd, between the sons of Elifer, and Guendoleu son of Keidau; in which battle Guendoleu fell; and Merlin went mad. The Battle of Arfderydd is a well-attested event by the standards of the period, so there is no reason to doubt it. All the combatants were Welsh, living in what is now the border country between England and Scotland. The tradition that associates Merlin with this event is old, going back to the 9th century. So we have a character who may have lived in the sixth century and fought in a famous battle between Welsh kings. If there was a Merlin, he seems to have been a bard. The Welsh manuscripts include several poems attributed to Merlin or Myrddin. Some of them can be dated to the high middle ages and can therefore be ruled out as the actual products of a sixth-century bard, but others are older. These older poems are all difficult and obscure, in the druidical manner. One of them, The Appletrees, seems to be a lament by a man who was once a favored nobleman but now hides in an appletree from pursuers who want to kill him. "At the Battle of Arfderydd, my torc was of gold," he says. Once he was loved by a beautiful woman, but now he is alone. He must forage for food, living in caves or huts, with wolves and bears for friends. Merlin was best known in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as a prophet, on whom new prophecies were foisted at regular intervals. Prophecy, especially in the Celtic tradition, is strongly associated with both madness and poetry. Prophets were strange men who ranted obscurely, and only time would tell which of the ranters had the true gift of foresight. There is no more agreement on what the name Merlin means than about that of Arthur, but one interpretation derives it from Celtic roots meaning "madman." It has to be said, though, that this story of a man who goes crazy after a battle and thereafter lives in the wilderness, making prophecies, had other protagonists besides Merlin. A character named Lailoken who appears in the Life of St. Kentigern has exactly these characteristics, and some of the people who believe in a historical Merlin think they were one in the same person. Perhaps Lailoken was his name and Merlin his title, so he was Lailoken the Madman. There are other, less exact parallels in Ireland and Brittany. After the druids disappeared, with the coming of Christianity, their role as the custodians of traditional Celtic culture was taken over by the bards. As a bard who composed verse in the ancient manner, full of esoteric allusions, Merlin would have been an expert in that older culture. He thus would have been in some sense the thing that some contemporary pagans want him to be, a defender of the ancient pagan ways against assaults by Christianity and simple forgetting. That is a lot of would haves and ifs, but the history of the sixth century is full of such phrases no matter what the subject. Someone wrote the poems attributed to Merlin, and that person was steeped in ancient lore. Prophecy is certainly part of the Welsh poetic tradition, strongly associated with madness. I can think of no reason why some pagan prophets might not have lived for a time in the wilderness, or at least in rough huts at the edge of civilization -- after all, plenty of Christian hermits did. Such a rejection of the settled world is recognized in many cultures, everywhere including elements of both divinity and madness. I suspect there was a Merlin, who fought at Arfderydd and later acquired or intentionally cultivated a reputation as a mad prophet, who glimpsed the future in ways the church did not know. As with Arthur, his story was changed in the telling, taking up more and more attributes of myth. He became a mighty wizard, a tamer of dragons, an arranger of the fates of nations. But perhaps he had once seen himself as something not so different from his own legend.

Celts to Vikings 11: King Arthur

Monday night, when my students’ first papers were due, I lectured on King Arthur. The Arthurian legends area a great case study of the very issue we have spent much of the class discussing, what we can learn about the past from literary sources like the Irish legends. In their full-blown, 12th-century form, the Arthurian legends give us an Arthur who is the king of all Britain and also conquers a large swathe of Continental Europe. He has an ancient fertility goddess for his wife, a magical sword from the realm of the pagan gods, a mighty castle for his home, and a war band made up of the greatest knights in Christendom. With the help of his wizard Merlin he administers the law justly and oversees a golden age of British peace and prosperity. Alas, he is ultimately betrayed by his cousin Mordred and treacherously slain, or else wounded and then carried off the Isles of the Blessed by more goddesses in a magical ship. It’s quite a career, even leaving aside his involvement with the quest for the Holy Grail, a separate legend somehow that gets attached to the heroes of Arthur’s court.

Was Arthur a real person? Everything about this question is hotly debated. Even Arthur’s name is the subject of contention, some holding that it is the obscure but real Roman name Artorius, others that it is a Celtic name meaning “bear king,” or something else entirely. If Arthur did live, it was some time around 500 AD, which happens to be the worst documented period of British history since before Caesar’s invasion. (“Of course,” say the cynics.) The early sources about Arthur make him a leader of Romanized Britons in their struggle against Saxon invaders. The Saxons first appeared in Britain around AD 428, and a letter of AD 446 survives in which embattled Britons, besieged by Saxon, Pictish, and Irish invaders, plead for help from the surviving Roman authorities in Gaul. By about AD 500, though, the situation in Britain has stabilized, with the Saxons holding only a small part of the island, and they do not really begin to sweep across the lands that would become England until after AD 550. The resistance put up by the Roman Britains requires some explanation. After all, larger, richer territories like Gaul, Spain, and Italy were entirely overrun by barbarian invaders. Somebody, therefore, was leading British resistance against the invaders, and the Welsh remembered two names from this time: Ambrosius Aurelianus, and Arthur. Our oldest account of the resistance was penned by the British priest Gildas around AD 540, and Gildas singles out Ambrosius Aurelianus as his hero. Gildas also tells us that the British won a great victory over the Saxons fifty years before his time at a place called Mons Badonicus, or Mount Badon.

The first mention of Arthur in any surviving text is in a Welsh poem of around AD 600 saying simply that some warrior should be praised for valor “even though he was no Arthur.” Several similar mentions survive from Welsh poetry, enough to tell us that by AD 700 Arthur was famous among the Welsh as a great warrior and commander. The first historian to mention Arthur was Nennius, an obscure monk who transcribed, around AD 800, a list of 12 battles in which Arthur was the commander. This list includes Mount Badon but only one place, Carlyle, that can be identified with any confidence, and that is on England’s northern border, on the west coast, a very strange place for anyone to be fighting Saxons. If this location is authentic is presumably means that Arthur fought Picts as well. Nennius does not say that Arthur was a king; in fact, he says explicitly that Arthur was chosen for command even though he was not the most noble of the Britons. Around AD 900 an anonymous writer compiled a document we call the Welsh Annals that lists a few dozen events in British history over the previous 500 years, including two mentions of Arthur:

Year 72 (c. AD 516) The Battle of Badon, in which Arthur bore the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shield for three days and three nights and the Britons were victors.

Year 93 (c. AD 537) The Strife of Camlann in which Arthur and Medraut fell and there was death in Britain and in Ireland.

Across the period from AD 600 to 900, then, Arthur was known to the Welsh as a commander who led British armies against invaders, especially Saxons. The slow spread of the Saxons across Britain shows that there was such resistance, and presumably somebody was leading it. I think it is quite likely that one of the leaders was Arthur, and that the tradition of him as a war leader is authentic.

Of course, Arthur did not stay a mere war leader. Around the year 1000 he began appearing in saints’ lives and as the king of all Britain. In the Welsh story Culhwch and Olwen, which Welsh scholars think dates to around 1050, Arthur is much the figure we all know, a mighty king in a marvelous castle surrounded by a stable of heroes. He has, in short, become a figure from Celtic myth.

The bards were not interested in preserving accurate details about the heroes whose deeds they sang. Instead, they honored heroes of the past by assimilating them into their myths. The more they admired a man, the less truth they told about him and the more they loaded him with the attributes of a demigod. The highest honor they could pay to a hero was to destroy his individuality and completely remake him into an archetype, the way they did with Arthur.

What we learn from the myths, then, is not so much what really happened -- although some of that is, I believe, preserved in the myths -- but what people think ought to have happened. We see their categories of thought, their hopes, their fears, their ideals. Certain social facts are reflected accurately, such as the dominance of aristocrats, and the armament of warriors, but what fascinates me is the cultural and psychological dimension of the myths. They show us the wildest dreams of people who lived long ago.

Merlin's Parents

The wizard Merlin first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain as a fatherless boy, a stock character from Celtic folklore who crops up in many stories. Later in the Middle Ages this was interpreted to mean that Merlin was the offspring of a demon. This illustration from a 13th-century manuscript of Geoffrey's Historia shows Merlin's father as an incubus, visiting his mother in her dreams to conceive their famous son.

Celts to Vikings 10: St. Columba Battles the Druids

Among the many stories recorded in the Life of St. Columba are two battles between the saint and a Pictish druid named Broichan.

One day Broichan addressed St. Columba, saying, "Tell me, Columba, when do you intend to sail?"

"God willing and life lasting," replied St. Columba, "we plan to start our voyage in threes days' time."

"You will not be able to," said Broichan combatively, "for I will produce wind and mist to stop you."

"The almighty power of God rules all things," said the saint, "and he directs all our comings and goings."

Why say more? On the day he had planned in his heart, Columba came to the long loch at the head of the River Ness. The druids began to congratulate themselves, seeing a great mist covered the loch and a stormy wind was blowing against Columba's people. . . .

Columba, seeing that the elements were roused to fury against him, called upon Christ the Lord. Though the sailors were hesitant, he was steadfast. He boarded the boat and ordered them to hoist the sail into the wind. This was done,and all the crowd of people saw his boat move off directly into the wind at marvelous speed.

In this and several other stories Columba seems to battle the druids on common magical ground, testing his power over the weather or disease against theirs. In other stories Columba acts just as druids once had, making prophecies about the future fortunes of kings and their houses. Columba's druidic qualities provide a way to understand the Christianization of northern Europe. In some ways, things changed a great deal. Christianity brought its admiration for humility, asceticism, and willful poverty into these societies, and they would thenceforth have two competing value systems rather than just the worldly aristocratic values they had had before. Christianity brought with it Latin and a huge chunk of classical, Mediterranean civilization. Christian institutions, especially monasteries, became vital social organs. As a religion of the book Christianity brought an obsession with writing everything down, and it is mostly because of the efforts of monks that we have any record of the pagan past.

In other ways, though, Irish or Germanic society went on after Christianity just as it had before. Fundamental things like the way land was distributed, the legal status of women, the organization of agriculture, the power of kings, and so on were not altered. Many things about the religious attitudes of people did not change: the Irish, for example, continued to believe in the prophetic power of visions and dreams, the possibility of divine beings appearing in our world, and even in the existence of the old gods, although they were gradually changed into heroes, demons, or minor spirits like leprechauns and banshees.

The Art of Irish Gospels

When the Irish converted to Christianity, they brought their fabulous artistic sensibility with them. The result was astonishing works of religious art, like the famous Book of Kells, which dates to around 800 AD. These gospel books are just one sign of a vibrant intellectual culture that also included the writing of histories, saints lives, theology, devotional works, and mystical visions, as well as recording the masterpieces of pagan Irish culture.