The Auldest Tung

Introduction

But enough musing, at least for now. Let us, in order to begin to create a framework, make an attempt at some analysis of history or at least quasi-history. If the Scandinavian sagas are to be believed or are deemed to have some semblance of truth it took about twenty generations for the people we now call the Danes, perhaps a tribe, perhaps an assorted war-band in what is said to have been the then Germanic tradition, to move from their earlier territory near the shores of Lake Malaren in Sweden, between today’s Stockholm and Uppsala, near where, I simply note, even today there is a small town called Danmark, the “Dane Border”, to more or less their present southernmost limit, the frontier with Germany. That is in time something between four hundred and five hundred years, and in distance still all in modern Sweden six hundred kilometres, four hundred miles, from Uppsala to Helsingborg, then, sticking with kilometres for the moment and for a reason, in Denmark some two hundred and fifty more, from Helsingor on the opposite shore of the Northern Oresund to Helsingborg and across the islands of Zealand and Fyn to Kolding on Continental Europe’s Jutland peninsula and one hundred and thirty more from Kolding to German Schleswig. Check the figures yourselves. It is a total of nine hundred and eighty kilometres or rounded down for the crossing of three stretches of water an average of a little over two kilometres, a mile and a bit, a year.

Put like that it might not seem much but was perhaps the then pace of advance, Danish-, even Germanic-style in general, in what is called on Continental Europe the Early Middle Ages and by us in Britain, for good, if for the Irish inaccurate reasons, the Dark Ages. Let it remembered that, whilst Britain, or more specifically England, was in chaotic, post-Roman tumult and Scotland an also climatically-challenged appendage and by then on-looker, Ireland was at this time about to enter a golden era of intellectual activity. For some two centuries it would be almost the last redoubt of Western European learning, a whole-Europe depository of its Classic knowledge per se, and, for almost two centuries more, the source of redistribution back onto the Continent. If you have your reservations I invite, indeed urge you to read and understand the lives and contributions, philosophical and other, of, amongst others, first Comgall of Bangor and second John Scotus Eriugena. The former lived from around 516 AD to 602 AD, the latter from 815 AD to 877AD.

But back to Denmark. The man to have first united it as such, including Jutland and the islands, of course, but then also Skane in South Sweden and Viken in Southern Norway, was Knut I, who reigned from circa 916 to circa 936 AD with dates in this book always to be taken as rough. They do not for its purposes have to be anything else. Here we are talking not about events but words and ideas so absolute precision at to date is an unnecessary restriction. And Kunt's florit puts on count-back the Danish departure from Malaren at somewhere between about 400 and no later than 500 AD. Both resultant dates, and indeed the spread between, are good i.e. compatible, since what is called the Great Migration Period, of which Danish movement was just a part, is said to have started around 375 AD with the arrival to the East from Asia of the Huns, or perhaps even a little earlier, to have lasted two centuries and may well have had its ultimate root in weather change. Our part of the Northern Hemisphere was cooling, by no more than a degree or two but noticeably enough. From a peak in about 150 AD Europe was about half-down an eleven hundred year climate cycle. And whilst it meant a cooler and therefore wetter North Africa is said to have become became the bread-basket of the Roman Empire life in general beyond its cold northern borders would have been becoming more difficult, given the constraints of, amongst others, simple, open wood-burning fires and no glass, in contrast with today’s de rigeur thermostats, heat-pumps, Scandi triple-glazing and the like. Northern land too would have become increasingly marginal agriculturally, with, resultant, basic economic problems of food shortages and thus social disquiet requiring at the geographical extremes first political action and then other survival responses not just individually but notably movement on a tribal basis, i.e. emigration.

Indeed the story of Danish movement could even have begun with a just such a political act, again if the sagas are to have some element of veracity. Case-in-point it was a multiple assassination. Legend has it that seven “sub-kings”, tribal chiefs, from around Malaren were invited to feast and discuss matters, i.e. problems, of common interest. Six turned up. One did not. The “High King”, the most powerful tribal chief, who had invited them, then burned the six to death, at which point one element amongst the local population, let us call it for argument’s sake Danish, recognised, especially if the matter cum problem up at the top of the agenda for discussion had been as basic as how to feed an expanded, regional population in said cooling and therefore less productive times, that there were no solution, only an outcome or an action. The outcome would be redistribution of what usable land there remained to the dominant group, i.e. a land grab, with resultant clearance even cleansing of the dominated. The action was those whose position was weak pre-empting the situation and moving on with initially south, whilst already taken by other equally Germanic peoples, geographically the only way to go.

Yet these are just stories and theories built thereon. Facts are required and there seem be at least hints of some. What now seems to have been shown incontrovertibly by excavation is that from after 550 AD a political entity, a tribal base, of some note was centred at Lejre in the north centre of Zealand, the easternmost of what are now Denmark’s islands. It was Iron Age, late Iron Age, quite probably Germanic but not necessarily Danish, certainly not at its inception and nor for some time, having therefore been founded by the people to have lived on the Danish islands previously and who, therefore, to some unknown degree, absorption being the other possibility, would be pushed off them by Danish encroachment.

And Lejre, is also about 70 kilometres, still on Zealand, from said Helsingor on the island's north-east corner so six hundred and seventy from Malaren, which again on countback at our rate of two kilometres a year would give a Danish arrival thereabouts, with a single water-crossing included, of perhaps 750 AD. Moreover it would also point to those self-same Danes having crossed from Sweden to Zealand in the early 700s AD and to the next island to the west, Fyn, around 800 AD. Furthermore it indicates a final crossing to mainland Jutland another sixty years or three generations after that, so around 860 AD, a date that matches well those of Knut I. It might even fit, given the possibility of water being more of a barrier and island-hopping being slower than overland, also with earlier Danish, Lejre-n involvement by, as per the sagas, some three generations, sixty years more or less, so about 700 AD, with the caveat that it is nevertheless some one hundred and fifty years after its foundation by people unknown, said by some to be the Heruli, but clearly resident and not just passing through. And it also seems, just, to accommodate the founding in 808 AD under the earlier, Danish King Gudred of the Baltic, coastal trading outpost of Hedeby in south-east Jutland but opposite south-west Fyn.

However, whatever way these calculations are done the prolonged migration of Denmark’s current people cannot at any stage chronologically directly be the reason for the arrival in Britain from that same Jutland of Germanic speakers at the time, i.e. to around 570 AD, of that same Migration Period. It does not rule out the later Danish arrivals, notably the invasion by the Great Heathen Army from 865 AD, but, since the first such immigrants are known to have landed, probably in Kent, at some point in the hundred years after 350 AD, there is no overlap, leaving probably only one reason for the arrival, if not of the first of them, who might have been simple mercenaries, then the bulk that followed. It was economic necessity due to or at least generated by the same climate change that was to drive the Danes to the south of Sweden and over the next quarter millennium would take them further still.

Yet there was a difference. The Danish migration was literally epic. The sagas say so. And the sagas tell us too that too that they did and therefore presumably could take their time, moving with the weather. That appears to be in stark contrast to the peoples, whose land they would as climatic conditions improved first control, then settle and on and with which they would finally remain. These earlier inhabitants, or a large proportion of them, the people who are the real subject of this book after Danes and even Vikings and Norse have been put in their true places, seem to have had no such temporal luxury. For them there was urgency and the reason seems to have been, albeit in some instances indirectly, not politics but inundation; the drowning of all or parts of their tribal lands through rising sea-levels all along the North Sea coast from what is now Northern France to Northern Jutland. Indeed Frisia, or more accurately Old Frisia, the major part of previously Magnum Frisia, the area actually at the heart of this story and then between roughly Ostend in Belgium and the Weser in Germany, is said to have largely disappeared. Furthermore modern mapping confirms that with a rise in seas-levels of only a meter or so precisely that would have been the case with abandonment as an unavoidable consequence.

Which leaves three final matters to be clarified. The first is the “Vikings” bugbear, the second language and the third numbers.

The commonly-held view of the history of the Early Middle Ages has been allowed to be appropriated by Vikings, which is in itself an English misnomer, and pillaged by Viking-ness. Too often it is labelled the Viking era. Yet the non-Danish, Germanic peoples here under consideration were not from Norwegian Viken. Nor were they West Norwegian Norse. Both groups, a basic distinction between which does not exist in Gaelic, where they are both “Fingall”, came between two hundred and fifty and four hundred and fifty years later, the former from about 650 AD, with modern excavations on Shetland showing settlement of some sort from about 700 AD, the latter from about 800 AD. Lindisfarne was first raided and probably by Norse in 794 AD. Ireland shortly after. In fact the basic distinction in Gaelic is between “Fingall” and “Dubhgall”, the Danes and they came later still, around 850 AD, the year Fingall and Dubhgall war-parties are from Irish records and in Ireland known to have first fought each other. Indeed, in itself that encounter is an event that might suggest that, although the Danish were by then well-established in Denmark itself, if not quite yet in full control, they were only just in a position to push beyond, for the moment simply mimicking what had gone before from their northern neighbours before developing their own, distinct approach; concentration on England and invasion “en masse” in the shape of The Great Heathen Army. Moreover, it also ties up well with the consolidation of the Danish state just two generations later, by which time that full control of the Danish islands but particularly Jutland had probably been achieved.

And with control we move to language. With it would have come linguistic over-write. In Scotland we have our own examples, Gaelic over Pictish, English over everything. In Denmark it was Scandinavian Germanic over what had come before, a non-Scandinavian Germanic of an earlier variety, from which there would have been some absorption, perhaps, since I am no Danish-expert, marking it out from Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic and Faeroese. However, it is a variety, which to an extent would have been preserved in Anglian and in Saxon, so in Anglo-Saxon, and has been preserved certainly in English, to an extent in Dutch and more so in Frisian, albeit New Frisian and, I would argue, elsewhere.

So thirdly to numbers. Even in using with regard to the Great Heathen Army the term “en masse” I am aware that it is also a misnomer, one which casts an unhelpful fog over events throughout the North-West Europe of the time. Such “masse”, and here we mean reality-based counting, simply did, indeed, could not exist. Populations in the era were minute. The island of Ireland is estimated in 500-600 AD to have had some 300,000 inhabitants, present-day Denmark plus Skane 390,000, so perhaps a third more, and what is now England about double that of Denmark, so 750,000. It means the Danes incoming just a little later from Sweden to present-day Denmark would be numbered in a few thousand at most. And it also puts in context the numbers of Vikings and Norse, when they came from Norway and the Danes that followed them. They were not a horde or even hordes as so often depicted in the industrial-scale battles so beloved by TV and films but at most little more in total than a lower division football crowd, furthermore one operating in even smaller groups, like Ultras, tens rather than hundreds. A “Viking” longboat would have a complement of maximum thirty men. From 400 AD for the foreseeable an “engagement” would be numbered in tens, whether it was Germanic on Germanic or Germanic on native British, a “battle” in hundreds, only involving thousands as populations doubled to 1000 AD.

In fact it was not manpower that was crucial to the successes “Viking” had but two other factors. The first was paganism, which meant, again like Ultras, they could be seriously unpleasant. The second was mobility. By the 9^th Century they were equipped with nautical technology that was in the final years of the 5^th, the 6^th, the 7^th and even the 8^th Centuries beyond the then imaginations of all other Europeans, Germanic or otherwise. All of which makes still more remarkable the migration to Britain of the pre-Danish, Germanic peoples of Jutland, north and south, with boats before the “Viking” period that were capable only of short, coastal hops from one side to the other of wide river estuaries, darts via the islands across the Baltic or a crossing the Straits of Dover and little else and capable of carrying much the same, if not fewer in terms of numbers.

But then that, as are many more, is another story and for another time and needs must back to the tale at hand. It remains of language and people and it is it and them, to which I intend fully to turn on the basis that I recognise and maintain in looking at the period covered that firm facts are few but assumption and supposition, whilst not fact, do not have to be foolishness or falsehood. However, my turning is not quite yet because first comes The Preamble, a setting of the scenes.