In this book a MacArthur Award-winning scholar argues for a radically new interpretation of the conversion of Scandinavia from paganism to Christianity in the early Middle Ages. Overturning the received narrative of Europe's military and religious conquest and colonization of the region, Anders Winroth contends that rather than acting as passive recipients, Scandinavians converted to Christianity because it was in individual chieftains' political, economic, and cultural interests to do so.
Through a painstaking analysis and historical reconstruction of both archeological and literary sources, and drawing on scholarly work that has been unavailable in English, Winroth opens up new avenues for studying European ascendency and the expansion of Christianity in the medieval period.
In this book a MacArthur Award-winning scholar argues for a radically new interpretation of the conversion of Scandinavia from paganism to Christianity in the early Middle Ages. Overturning the received narrative of Europe's military and religious conquest and colonization of the region, Anders Winroth contends that rather than acting as passive recipients, Scandinavians converted to Christianity because it was in individual chieftains' political, economic, and cultural interests to do so.
Through a painstaking analysis and historical reconstruction of both archeological and literary sources, and drawing on scholarly work that has been unavailable in English, Winroth opens up new avenues for studying European ascendency and the expansion of Christianity in the medieval period.
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In this book a MacArthur Award-winning scholar argues for a radically new interpretation of the conversion of Scandinavia from paganism to Christianity in the early Middle Ages. Overturning the received narrative of Europe's military and religious conquest and colonization of the region, Anders Winroth contends that rather than acting as passive recipients, Scandinavians converted to Christianity because it was in individual chieftains' political, economic, and cultural interests to do so.
Through a painstaking analysis and historical reconstruction of both archeological and literary sources, and drawing on scholarly work that has been unavailable in English, Winroth opens up new avenues for studying European ascendency and the expansion of Christianity in the medieval period.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300178098 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/24/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The Conversion of Scandinavia
VIKINGS, MERCHANTS, AND MISSIONARIES IN THE REMAKING OF NORTHERN EUROPE
By ANDERS WINROTH
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 Anders WinrothAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-17809-8
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Dynamic Eighth Century: Scandinavia Comes of Age
The pagan men from "the ends of the earth" in the north suddenly appeared on the European stage in around 780. Uncouth, unshaven, and—most importantly—unchristian, they were on the minds of rulers and intellectuals, a subject of wary conversation at the centers of power and culture in Europe, already before the beginning of the Viking raids. The Danes, in particular, were a political problem for the Frankish king Charlemagne, and all sorts of Scandinavians would soon become everyone's security problem, when the Viking Age began in earnest in 793.
The political and intellectual center of western Europe toward the end of the eighth century was Charlemagne's court, where the king "with a happy countenance" ruled his growing kingdom, and where the greatest minds of western Europe educated the king and the children of the Frankish elite. The court moved around with the hypermobile king. The court school, which eventually settled at the newly reconstructed palace in Aachen, was a serious intellectual powerhouse but also a playful and somewhat whimsical environment, where King Charles himself participated in intellectual games. Teachers and students wrote letters to each other, in which they showed off their rhetorical and poetical skills, and in which they competed sharply with each other. Two Italian intellectuals, who were among those Charlemagne had brought to his court, were particularly good at writing Latin verse in classical meters, and they entertained themselves, their king, the court, and the school with impish exchanges. Peter of Pisa was Charlemagne's own teacher of Latin, and he was also the king's ghostwriter of Latin poetry.
"You never answered my question," wrote Charlemagne/Peter in a versified letter to Paul the Deacon, "whether you would prefer to be broken under heavy iron, lie in a wild prison dungeon when you are tired, or if you wish to consider carefully the face of pompous Sigifrit, who now holds his impious scepter over a pestiferous kingdom." Sigifrit was king of the Danes, and he was a newly discovered enemy of Charlemagne when Peter wrote in the 780s. Peter, speaking in the voice of Charlemagne, challenged Paul to go to Denmark and baptize Sigifrit, "who when he spots you will deprive you of life and art."
That an Italian schoolmaster, however distinguished an intellectual he was, would be able to convert and baptize the king of the Danes was so preposterous an idea that it was funny to Peter of Pisa. Paul was quick to pick up on the joke and heaped further abuse on Sigifrit in his very learned response, in which he several times quoted and alluded to Ovid, Virgil, Persius, and other classical Latin poets.
"If I were to be in such trouble as to behold Sigifrit's truculent countenance, I don't think that would be of much use," Paul responded, "for his uneducated heart lacks Latin speech, and his language is utterly unknown to me. I consider him an ape or a bristle-bearing brute.... Even though he is bearded and unshaven and very similar to a he-goat as he sets laws for the young bucks and rules over the goats," he will still be afraid of Charlemagne's weapons. Paul means that Charlemagne will put Sigifrit in his place with weapons, while his own Christian sermonizing would fail due to language problems. After military defeat, Sigifrit will become very gentle indeed and willing to be baptized. "Otherwise, he will come to us with his hands tied behind his back, and then Odin and Thor will be of no help to him." Paul thought that Sigifrit, the archpagan, was so stubborn a pagan that only military conquest would suffice to convert him and, by extension, his people to Christianity. The method he recommended for Christianizing Sigifrit and his people was the same one Charlemagne was employing at the time against the Saxons.
Peter and Paul were not the only ones among Charlemagne's intellectuals to worry about the conversion of the Danes. In 789, their colleague Alcuin, who was also Charlemagne's teacher, asked a friend, an abbot in Saxony, whether there was any hope of converting the Danes. The formulation of the question suggests that Alcuin did not expect an affirmative answer. No response from the abbot (whose identity we do not know) is preserved.
It is not surprising that Peter, Paul, and Alcuin worried and joked about the Danish king Sigifrit and his stubborn paganism in the 780s. The Danes had at the time become a political headache for leaders of the Frankish kingdom as Charlemagne was extending it eastwards across the Rhine. He had decided to conquer the Saxons in 773, and his first campaign there during that summer had been successful. The Saxons, however, unusually unwilling to be conquered, put up stubborn resistance, and it took thirty years and many very bloody summer campaigns to subdue them. Each summer they admitted defeat, were baptized, and gave hostages, promising to be faithful subjects of Charlemagne, only to take up their weapons again at the earliest opportunity.
To the north beyond the Saxons lived the Danes, who were a potential ally of the Franks, but they were in fact mostly hostile. When Charlemagne victoriously invaded Saxony for the third time in 776, the most important Saxon leader, Widukind, escaped the king's clutches by fleeing to Denmark, where the Frankish armies could not follow him. He came back in 778 and spurred on the Saxons to "revolt" once more against Charlemagne. The Franks suppressed the Saxons, again, and Widukind fled, again, but the sources do not tell us whereto. The Danes had at any rate become a player in the political game that Charlemagne was playing on his eastern border, and he was now forced to pay attention to them.
Indeed, Charlemagne soon took up diplomatic relations with King Sigifrit; a delegation led by a man with the Norse name Halvdan ("Halptani" in the Latin sources) showed up at a meeting of the important people in Charlemagne's kingdom in 782. From that point on, the sources mention embassies in both directions now and then. It had become important for Frankish rulers to be in touch with the rulers of Denmark, and we may assume that it was important for the Danes to stay in contact with the most powerful ruler of Europe.
Soon enough, Scandinavians made their existence known in even more emphatic ways than by simply hiding a man whom Charlemagne considered a treacherous rebel. The "Viking Age" began in 793 with an armed attack on the defenseless monastery of Lindisfarne in northeastern England. Alcuin's reaction was twofold. First, he wrote a letter of consolation to the leader of the monastic community, Bishop Higbald. He focused on the possible theological and eschatological implications of the attack (is it the "sign of some great guilt"?), and thus he talked of the attackers simply as "pagans," not "Danes" or "Northmen," although there is no reason to think that he did not know their origins. Indeed, in another letter where Alcuin refers to the unhappy fate of the "Church of St. Cuthbert" (Lindisfarne), he quotes the words of the prophet Jeremiah: "From the north an evil takes fire."
Second, Alcuin wrote another consolatory text to the same addressee—a Latin poem consisting of 120 elegiac couplets—in which he attempted to put into context the "day when, alas, a pagan warband arrived from the ends of the earth, descended suddenly by ship and came to our land, despoiling our fathers' venerable tombs of their finery and befouling the temples dedicated to God." To soften the blow, Alcuin compared the sacking of Lindisfarne to the twofold destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the Romans, the "barbarous ruins" remaining of "golden Rome," and the frailties of old age. Rather than blaming God and despairing, the monks of Lindisfarne ought to "appeal to His kindly mercy, so that He take tribulation away from us."
After 793, as dangerous Scandinavians began to plunder and extort tribute all around northwestern Europe, they and their supposedly obstinate paganism captured the European imagination. It was in that context that Alcuin inserted an anecdote about Danish bullheadedness in the biography of St. Willibrord he wrote in 796 or soon thereafter. Alcuin claimed that Willibrord, whose main importance was as a missionary in Frisia before 714, had traveled the arduous way to Denmark, where he found King Ongendus "more savage than a wild beast and harder than any stone." Needless to say, Willibrord did not accomplish anything with such unpromising material for conversion even though he was well received, or so Alcuin tells us. We recognize in Alcuin's story the same ideas as in the versified epistles of his colleagues and friends Peter and Paul: the Danes are obdurate in their paganism and there is no point in trying to preach to them or to convert them. When Alcuin wrote, the Frankish Empire was in the midst of conquering and converting Saxony. Peter, Paul, and Alcuin were trying to influence their king to go the same way with the Danes. There is, thus, no reason to suspect that Alcuin was reporting historical fact when he spoke of the encounter between Willibrord and Ongendus. He was simply commenting on the current political situation.
King Ongendus is mentioned in the Old English poems Beowulf and Widsith as King Ongentheow of the Swedes. We know from other sources that Alcuin knew "the songs of the heathen" (perhaps from his youth in England) and the names of persons who were mentioned in them. In a letter, he mentioned Ingeld, who also appears in Beowulf. When Alcuin wished to include a story about Willibrord and a Danish king, he needed a name for that king. He found the name in the stuff of stories and poems that he knew, and he Latinized it as Ongendus. The fact that the king is mentioned in more than one source also does not mean that Alcuin was reporting the truth.
Peter, Paul, and Alcuin knew something about the threat of the Danes, but their writings do not exhibit any concrete geographical knowledge of the Scandinavian north. By the 820s, however, when another of Charlemagne's courtiers, Einhard, wrote a celebrated biography of his late master, he was able to describe the north of Europe better than anyone had before. He was the first writer to write of the Baltic Sea in a recognizable way: "A gulf of unknown length, but nowhere more than a hundred miles wide and in many parts narrower, stretches off towards the east from the western Ocean. Many tribes have settlements on its shores: the Danes and Swedes, whom we call Northmen, live along its northern shore and all the adjacent islands, while the southern shore is inhabited by the Slavs, Aisti, and various other tribes."
Einhard was writing at a time when Carolingian intellectuals and kings no longer joked about the awful paganism of the Danes. They had become serious about finding allies and potential Christian converts in Denmark. They also knew more, since the Saxons had been pacified a generation earlier and many of them resettled all over the Frankish Empire. They must have brought geographical knowledge of their northern neighbors. A man who claimed to be a Danish king showed up in 826 at the court of Charlemagne's son and successor, Louis the Pious. Harald was baptized with his family and all his men amid pomp and circumstance at the Church of St. Albans outside Mainz and close to the imperial palace at Ingelheim. This was a great triumph; the king of the Danes had submitted to Christ, and the emperor had been his godfather in baptism. Louis thought that the Danes would henceforth be allies. Unfortunately, Louis had misjudged the situation, and it turned out that Harald was not welcome back in Denmark, and he was unable to fight his way back, even with the reinforcements that his godfather provided. Harald became an imperial pensioner for the rest of his life. When the Carolingian Empire was split up among three brothers after the death of Louis the Pious, Harald even raided in the kingdom of one brother at the behest of another brother.
Nevertheless, the 820s also saw the first organized religious missions to Scandinavia, first to Denmark, and then by the end of the decade also to Sweden. Archbishop Ebo of Rheims went to Denmark for the first time in 823, and his assistant Ansgar went to Sweden a few years later. The paganism of the north no longer seemed so impenetrable.
The extension of Frankish interests toward the northeast and the incursion of Scandinavian pirates into western Europe had made Scandinavia a more distinct presence in the imagination of Europeans. Before 800, Charlemagne's courtiers had only hazy ideas of the geography of the north, while Einhard recognizably described the Baltic Sea. Scandinavia had, however, not been entirely unknown before Widukind fled to the Danes in 776. Learned geographers from the ancient Greeks on had included vague ideas of Scandinavia in their works, and they had supplemented their knowledge with what they could learn from merchants and soldiers. The historian Jordanes, writing in the 550s in Constantinople, knew for example that the Swedes "have splendid horses ... [and] send through innumerable other peoples sappherine fur for trade." He was also able to report the names of several "peoples" living in Scandinavia. Still, Scandinavia definitively entered European history and the consciousness of Europeans only at the end of the eighth century. Why did it happen at that time specifically?
One answer is that the expansion of the Frankish kingdom toward the northeast put, especially, Denmark in closer touch with the "civilized" countries of Europe, but that is not the entire answer, nor even the most important one. The primary reasons for the appearance of Scandinavia on the European stage are to be sought inside Scandinavia, where things were rapidly changing in the eighth century. They would continue to change over the next centuries, leading in the end to the creation of Scandinavian kingdoms that adopted Christianity, notwithstanding the doubts of Paul the Deacon and Alcuin. As such, they took their place alongside other medieval European kingdoms, still perhaps to some degree exotic and strange, but no longer the utterly foreign and fearsome outsiders that Charlemagne's courtiers had imagined.
If the end of the eighth century marks a change in how seriously Europeans began to think about Scandinavia, that century also represents a watershed moment inside Scandinavia itself. It was during this period that the fundamental transformation of Scandinavian society that is the subject of this book began, as part of a long, drawn-out process. The remainder of this chapter will first sketch the power structure in eighth-century Scandinavia, as a kind of baseline for the transformation that will be described in the following chapters. Then I shall highlight some of the changes that heralded the more fundamental transformation that Scandinavia experienced during the Viking Age.
Halls dominated the geography of power in Scandinavia during the eighth century. They, or rather their archeological remains, are thus useful for providing an image of early medieval power. The tradition of building halls began around the fourth century, when they surely imitated, at least remotely, the audience halls, or basilicae, of Roman officials. Large buildings with a spacious interior, they had high ceilings and few inside posts supporting the roof (see figs. 1 and 2). Fireplaces at or close to their centers were not used for cooking or handicraft but provided light and heat. The real center of gravity in the hall was, however, the richly decorated high seat of the chieftain. Here the chieftain sat, looking out over his guests and followers, whom he led in feasting, mead drinking, and sacrifices inside the hall, and in war outside it. It was here that the relationships that kept the group together were manifested and maintained.
In Scandinavian halls, archeologists have found evidence of the greatest luxuries of the time. Most spectacular are the sets of drinking vessels made out of glass, sufficient for at least half a dozen people, that have been found in at least four different Scandinavian halls. Single glass vessels have been found in many other halls. Glass was not manufactured in early medieval Scandinavia but had to be imported at great cost from the Frankish Empire or even farther afield. Drinking was an important part of the ceremonies that went on in the halls, as suggested in the early medieval poem Beowulf, which describes what went on in King Hrothgar's hall, Heorot:
[Hrothgar's queen, Wealhtheow] then went about to young and old, gave each his portion of the precious cup, until the moment came when the ring-adorned queen, of excellent heart, bore the mead-cup to Beowulf.
The cup was precious, not so much because it was made from valuable material or because of the liquid in it, but because of its associations with the prestige and power of the chieftain. That prestige and power focused on the hall and, specifically, on the high seat. No wonder that the loss of hall and high seat, rather than the loss of human life, most grieved Beowulf when a fire-spewing monster harrowed his kingdom, "leav[ing] nothing alive":
To Beowulf the news was quickly brought of that horror—that his own home, best of buildings, had burned in waves of fire, the gift-throne [high seat] of the Geats. To the good man that was painful in spirit, greatest of sorrows.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Conversion of Scandinavia by ANDERS WINROTH. Copyright © 2012 by Anders Winroth. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments.................... ix
Note on Names and Translations.................... xi
Maps.................... xii
Introduction: Europe, Scandinavia, and Hallfred the Skald.................. 1
1 The Dynamic Eighth Century: Scandinavia Comes of Age.................... 12
2 The Raids of the Vikings.................... 24
3 The Power of Gifts.................... 41
4 Carving Out Power.................... 52
5 Weland, Ulfberht, and Other Artisans.................... 61
6 The Lure of the Exotic.................... 76
7 Networks of Trade.................... 85
8 The Story of Conversion.................... 102
9 Writing Conversion.................... 121
10 The Gift of Christianity.................... 138
11 Kings of God's Grace.................... 145
12 Scandinavia in European History.................... 161
List of Abbreviations.................... 169
Notes.................... 171
Bibliography.................... 207
Index.................... 229