The Auldest Tung
Topographical Topicality
So, with Angeln, Sachsen (Saxony) and Alt Friesland, Anglia, Saxonia and Old Frisia positioned geographically now is perhaps a moment for a little, light introspection. It is, I hope you agree, interesting the way we are used to the shape of the World as it is and not as it was. It can blind us to realities and this seems, until modern technology has allowed us to look pictorially at our coasts, to have been the case with regard to both Britain and Continental Europe. In the former over the couple of hundred years from the 16th to 18th Centuries the outline particularly of England changed considerably. In fact England increased in land-surface by about an eighth as the areas of permanent and seasonal marshland already described were first diked and then drained. Indeed as I write it is some of those self-same areas, the Wash, South Yorkshire, the Somerset Levels, the Severn and its estuary, that over the last years have seemed to be trying to return to what they were, inland seas dotted with islands, on which human life, if somewhat precariously, could at times be maintained and sometimes not. Nor, as also previously outlined, was North Britain immune with the Carses, the marshlands, particularly that of the River Forth neatly almost splitting in two just below the Highland Line the north and the south of today’s Scotland and again further north the Cromarty, Beauly and Dornoch Firths plus our high hills doing much the same for my beloved Wester Ross, Sutherland and Caithness.
However, Scotland and even England were frankly nothing in comparison with the lands across the North Sea on the western rim of mainland Europe. Indeed, if global warming is making the reality of the English predicament more, forgiving the painful pun, of a “hot topic”, then that potentially of our continental neighbours looks like a disaster waiting to happen that even a million French, Belgian, Dutch, German and Danish fingers in dikes would struggle to avoid. Facts are that at even the current sea-level without man’s intervention western Netherlands behind a narrow coastal strip containing The Hague and Harlem would be a mire only re-emerging as dry at Utrecht, Amersfoort, Zwolle and Leewarden. Thus Amsterdam, without the myriad measures to hold out the sea, would for large parts of the year be surrounded by water and Hilversum, the town "between the hills” twenty miles to its south-east, would have marsh-views. Moreover Flanders to the south, with a still less substantial strip of land on its seaward side and and an inland bog behind would more often than not have its shoreline at Antwerp and Bruges. And further south still on what is now just across Belgium’s border with France in Picardie behind sea-ward islands once more there would be marais reaching twenty-five miles deep inland to St. Omer, with Calais perhaps on a peninsula accessed from the south and therefore, unlike today, not the jumping-off point from all directions for the Channel. That would probably be by Zeebrugge with not Dover but Sandwich and/or Thanet literally first westward port of call.
And if that water level is raised by a single metre in Holland the coastal strip become a long, thin bar, Hilversum is on a peninsular now with sea-views and Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden and Delft are islands. The effective coastline moves fifty to sixty kilometres eastward. And further south too, although not quite as drastic with the coastal strip still largely in place what is now an inland sea in Belgium stretches back twenty kilometres as far as Merkem, in France to the aptly named Watten with Calais teetering now on island status with from the changes an emergent and crucially dry province of Brabant, bridging today's border into the southern Netherlands to sea-side Breda with Brussels as it capital.
Furthermore, with those same rising waters the story in the north is, if anything, worse still. In what little remained of today’s South Frisia Groningen would have existed but be surrounded by water on three sides and perched at the end of a long peninsula. Emden have been Germany’s Amsterdam, whilst Hamburg and Bremen, not as they are, respectively fifty and thirty-five miles up the Rivers Elbe and Weser, would lie at the top of estuaries that today on either side are drained and diked as in the Netherlands. Similarly in modern East Frisia Cuxhaven too would have been at the end of yet another peninsula sticking out and around an island-dotted shallow sea itself reaching twenty miles inland to Saxonia’s shore. And further north still it was much the same. Between Hamburg and the middle of Danish Jutland the western shoreline would be twelve to twenty-five miles further east then currently with dry land at its narrowest point just twelve miles wide, a quarter of what it is today. And that point is between the city of Schleswig, on its inlet from the Baltic, south-east almost to a wee place called Hollingstedt.
Now we have this insight because modern technology permits us to model and compare today’s sea- and land-levels. But with that same technology we can do and view more. It allows us also, metre by metre, to see what happens as we imagine the water both encroaching and retreating. Raise the water level by just a single metre more, so now in total two meters, and in most places, specifically in the south and centre of the length of North Sea coastline under examination little difference results. The damage is largely already done. But in the north it creeps another five kilometres, three miles eastwards. Specifically wee Hollingstedt, already an island, is all but overwhelmed and mainland Jutland’s narrowest point becomes just nine miles wide. Schleswig, or at least the hills to its immediate west, are still more or less at its eastern extremity but in the west it ends at an inlet just a couple of kilometres south of a village called Ellingstedt. And the northern shore of that Ellingstedt inlet also marks precisely the westernmost point of the Dannewerke.
It is an earthen wall, erected, since seemingly it faces south, apparently to stem northward movement and once thought to have been begun in the 8th Century by the Danes arriving from the north. However, supported by recent archaeology, the current thinking is that in fact it had been begun some two centuries earlier and therefore could not have been originally Danish at all but more local. Indeed, if greater indication were needed, then would it not be the suggestion that the wall fits with almost unerring accuracy, given a storm surge of up to two metres, another topography, not that of now or a time when Danes might have stood on its ramparts but one when they were still on their journey from Sweden, had possibly just reached the islands of Eastern Denmark but were not yet in Jutland yet England was beginning to be settled in part by people, seemingly from just to the wall’s north, definitely from its north-east, viz. Angles, but also perhaps from its immediate south. In fact, would not a better scenario be that when the Danes did arrive and by then the sea might have begun to retreat once more, they topped up the wall in parts but had or needed little further ambition. There is no obvious sign of much extension to a new shoreline. It seems they just took over what they found, repaired it, perhaps strengthened a section, which is higher and broader, claimed it as their own work and to match their own mythology simply renamed it accordingly. Dannewerke is so much more punchy than “Other Peoples’ Werke”.
However, that, interesting as it is in terms of Danish state mythology, is a side issue. In about 500 AD there was a far greater one, one which, if climate is the root cause of all this book is about, then runs, I suggest, the Dannewerke at least a close second and, moreover, is also topographical. Just eighteen miles to its south the Jutland peninsula, having broadened to forty, once more narrows. Today from Kiel on the Baltic south-west to the North Sea it is fifty miles and it is much the same across from Eckenfoerde via Rendsburg but then once more with a two metre sea-level rise it was fifteen and twelve respectively. It would have created not just one but now three squeeze-points and between them effectively two sumps, people-sumps, what might be called Jutland Traps with, for those already passed through the Dannewerke and also those eventually squeezed northwards towards it by the broadening Elbe, only one way out, more of which later.