The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are (15 page)

The new emperor didn’t preach; he
attacked. He didn’t try to persuade the Saxons to become Christians, he made new
law. A man was killed if he persisted in pagan ceremonies, killed if he hid away and
refused to be baptized, and punished harshly if he did not take on all the obligations
of the observant. The fines for failing to have a child baptized were the equivalent of
thirty head of cattle, even for a man who wasn’t free or noble, and much more for
the more visible classes. Even the dead were required to conform. There were to be no
more mound graves, only cemeteries, and no more cremation; the penalty for being
accessory to a cremation was death. The missionaries waited decorously on the side until
the laws were in force, and then they came in preaching to intimidated people who did
not dare say they were not already converted.

Legends of conversion are shining things,
full of brave martyrs, furiously convincing preachers, truth triumphing. The actual
business of conversion was exceedingly muddy: sometimes brutal, sometimes shallow,
sometimes expensive and it never had much to do with hearts and minds. The missionary
Anskar went north to save the souls of Scandinavia in the 820s and even his biographer
Rimbert acknowledges he ‘distributed much money in the northern districts in order
that he might win the souls of the people’. His first monks were bought in a slave
market as boys: ‘he began also to buy Danish and Slav boys so that he might train
them for God’s service.’ To Anskar’s fury, the boys ended up as
servants to a grandee who got control of their monastery; they were never free. And when
Rimbert himself went north to the Swedes Anskar gave him and his
colleagues ‘whatever they needed to give away in order
to secure friends’.
⁵⁵

Laypersons did much the same. Louis the
German paid all kinds of pagans for their help against his father. In return his rival
Charles the Bald paid bribes to the Bulghars to encourage them to attack Louis the
German. Conversion looks very much like politics by the usual means.
⁵⁶

Not every soul had to be bought, though.
Sometimes calming a terrible storm at sea or inexplicably staying dry in the rain was
useful. It showed what the Christian god could do spontaneously without all the magical
apparatus that a god like Thor would need. Mind you, Christian crosses quite often still
had Thor’s great hammer on the back, just to be sure. Sometimes converting a king
or a court was enough, and the Emperor was happy to help with the conversion by
impressing any monarch with the scale of his imperial power, his usefulness and
resources; Louis the Pious did that when King Harald of Denmark was driven out of his
kingdom, not so much for the sake of spreading the true faith but because in future
‘a Christian people would more readily come to his aid’.
⁵⁷

Some time in the early ninth century, an
anonymous poet was even more ambitious; he retold the stories of the four Gospels to
convince at least the Saxons, and perhaps the Frisians, too, about the history of
Christ. He wrote, on a grand scale, verses to be sung out loud at banquets, just as
poets did for the history of human kings. Since he was writing for a listening audience,
a mead-hall mob, and since monks and priests should not have needed such convincing,
it’s likely he was addressing nobles and grandees. His language is Saxon but with
bits of vocabulary from all along the North Sea coast. Finding his name sounds a
hopeless quest, but we do know of one bard who sang at banquets, with a repertoire of
songs like the great epic of
Beowulf
; who sang about Frisian kings with
relatives from Denmark and Jutland; who had reason for Christian enthusiasm because he
had been cured of blindness by the missionary Liudger himself. His name was Bernlef, and
it is possible that
Heliand
is his work.
⁵⁸

The Gospel according to
Heliand
,
⁵⁹
which means ‘Saviour’,
is all four Gospels moved away from the Mediterranean to a Northern,
colder world, where years are measured in winters, where
there are deep forests and concealing woods rather than open deserts, where the
disciples of Jesus are like the band of men a chieftain might assemble in the
expectation of their personal loyalty. ‘That is what a thane chooses,’
Thomas tells the other disciples in a crisis: ‘to stand fast together with his
lord to die with him at the moment of doom.’
⁶⁰
Old man Zacharias, astonished at
the angel’s notion that he might still have a child at his advanced age, is not at
all surprised by what later Christians might find astonishing: that the angel tells
Zacharias to bring up the future John the Baptist in the virtue of absolute loyalty,
treuwa
, so he can be a ‘warrior-companion’ for Christ.
⁶¹

The poem is clearly not made for ordinary
persons, and ordinary persons hardly feature. Mary becomes a ‘woman of the
nobility’, Joseph is a nobleman and the herald angels ignore the shepherds and
talk to his grooms and sentries at the stables. The baby Jesus wears not swaddling
clothes but jewels. When he grows up and begins to bring together the disciples, they
reckon him a generous man, free with the gold and gifts, and also with the drink, or at
least the mead; he does as Saxon nobles do, as Anskar learned to do among the pagans he
wanted to convert. For Jesus, the disciples become in turn ‘a powerful force of
men from many peoples, a holy army’.
⁶²

The Gospel story and the Saxon world begin
to merge. Jesus is baptized, and the dove that represents the Holy Ghost comes down; but
the dove doesn’t stay above his halo’d head, it settles on his shoulder,
just as Wotan’s sacred bird, the raven, settles on his shoulder. The disciples
wait for him on the shores of a lake that is really a sea, with sands and dunes, and
they sail out in ‘well-nailed’ boats made from overlapping planks
ostentatiously nailed in place, ‘high-horned’ ships with prows like Viking
vessels. They sail like veterans of such North Sea ships, turning into the wind to stop
the waves catching the flanks of their ship.
⁶³

Lazarus is raised from the dead, but not
from a cave as he is in the Gospel; he rises from a grave mound with a stone on top in
the old Saxon tradition. When Christ rises, he also bursts out of such a grave. High
priest and Pharisees meet much like some Saxon assembly, the kind that Charlemagne had
carefully forbidden. Where the New
Testament
goes back to books of law ‘as it is written’, the
Heliand
has
law-speakers, the men who had memorized the oral traditions of Saxon law. Salt is not
for flavouring the world but for medicine, as it was for the Saxons. The disciples ask
to be taught the sacred runes, and they are given the Lord’s Prayer: a magic
access to God. And when the wife of Pontius Pilate has nightmares about the consequences
of Jesus’ death, the
Heliand
says the dreams were the work of the serpent
devil, invisible under that staple of Germanic legend, the magic helmet.
⁶⁴

Sometimes the poet has to take a very deep
breath and discuss Scripture thoroughly. Nobles were used to proving their innocence in
court by swearing oaths, so it was hard to tell them that Jesus forbade swearing any
oaths at all. They should answer only ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. After all,
the poet argues, if everyone swears and not everyone is telling the truth, what would be
the value of an oath? Who could believe it? At other times he keeps an action but
changes its meaning. When the biblical Christ in the garden accepts that the cup will
not pass from him, that his fate is sealed, he drinks it down to show his acceptance.
The poet has him drinking the wine to the honour of God. Acceptance would be too mild;
instead he salutes his chieftain. Christ clears the moneychangers out of the Temple, but
in
Heliand
the moneychangers are usurers and they are all of course Jews. Jews
in
Heliand
are ‘a different kind of people’, and Christ tells them:
‘You Jewish people never show any respect for the house of God.’ The
constant sense of Northern virtue, of the slinking, untrustworthy nature of Southerners,
and Jews as people of the South, flickers into life all through the poem: the Jews who
oppose Christ become ‘arrogant men’ and an ‘evil clan’. Christ
is no longer a Jew, nor are his disciples; they are Northerners. Some abominable
thoughts are being born.
⁶⁵

Cultures muddle, even if they fail to fuse,
and the Gospel changes subtly to accommodate the newcomers. It’s not just that no
chieftain could ride into Jerusalem on a donkey, so Jesus doesn’t, and no
chieftain would ever wash his followers’ feet so a whole new explanation is
required. Even the stories left out – no prodigal son, no good Samaritan so no family
conflict or social difference – are not as
striking as what happens to the lessons that are left. The
Saxon disciples are told to be humble, to be gentle, which is almost biblical language
from the familiar Beatitudes, but then the blessed who mourn become the blessed who cry
over their own evil deeds; the ones who ‘hunger and thirst after justice’
become ‘fighting men who wanted to judge fairly’ because an audience of
nobles would expect to be the ones who judged; the merciful are told to be kind but
inside ‘a hero’s chest’; and the ‘peacemakers’, whose
blessing must have seemed odd to a warrior caste, are limited to men who ‘do not
want to start any fights or court cases by their own actions’. As for the men who
are ‘persecuted for justice’s sake’, they are present in the poem;
they are perhaps the rebellious Saxons now suffering from the attentions of Charlemagne
and his lords.
⁶⁶
It would be hard for Charlemagne’s missioners to preach
against the defeated being patient in the circumstances;
Heliand
thinks it
tactful to leave out Christ’s promise to ‘bring not peace but a
sword’.

This is political alchemy. Kings and
emperors already knew that a literate clergy could make very useful bureaucrats,
writing, checking and disputing documents, and the structure of a church, parish by
parish, brought a kind of tax-gathering and administration into every part of a kingdom.
Churches and monasteries often looked like forts, carefully guarded, and sometimes
violent in their own defence; their interest in trading routes, in connections for vats
of wine as well as pictures, books and relics, gave them secular importance. What
remained was to bring the warrior class into the system, to anchor them with ideals and
Christian messages, to allow for the regular business of war in what was supposed to be
a religion that taught peace. When warrior lords decided to follow Christ, they needed
what
Heliand
provided: a sense that their warlike occupations could be Godly,
that war made sense to a carpenter and his fisherman followers.

Once that was established, a new and
virtuous and considered kind of military style could blossom. There would be bloody
battle, of course, but there could also in time be chivalry: war in the form of jousts,
war with rules, war as a matter of honour as well as necessity, with the prospect of
Heaven (as well as more money, more land or a
better class of wife here on Earth). And since Northerners
were so obviously Christ’s people, they had every right to go after Southerners of
any kind, the infidel in particular: they had every right to go crusading. The show and
colours of chivalry, the brutal enterprise of the Crusades: both depend on this early
marriage of God and warriors’ manners.

The Vikings were not interested in all
this. They struck where they wanted and took what they wanted.

They had already ruined some islands off
Aquitaine in 799, although they did not find it easy; they lost some ships and more than
a hundred men. They could not be countered with land armies, so Charlemagne ordered the
building and manning of a fleet, and ordered more new ships in 802, 808 and 810; by
which time he had fleets on all navigable rivers.
⁶⁷
It was still not enough. The Danish
king, Godfrid, was supposed to meet Charlemagne in 804, close to their frontiers at the
port of Schleswig, but he never turned up; he was advised by his own court to keep his
distance. He decided, four years later, to reinforce the border from the Baltic to
‘the Western Sea’, which we call the North Sea, and physically to move the
merchants who were doing business out of a lost port called Reric into Schleswig; he
must have known that Charlemagne had a habit of raiding. And then, just as the new
emperor was considering a serious expedition against Godfrid, there was shocking news: a
fleet of Norse ships, two hundred strong, had come down the shallow seas to the islands
off the coast of Frisia and wrecked them, after which they had come ashore and fought
the Frisians in three fixed battles and taken back home to King Godfrid one hundred
pounds of silver as tribute.
⁶⁸
A minor king was ruining the weak
frontiers of Charlemagne’s empire.

That was when war went to sea: when battles
were fought on the water between fleets that had equal ambitions if not equal hulls. A
year after the ruin of Frisia, Charlemagne was inspecting his fleets at Ghent and at
Boulogne, restoring the old Roman lighthouse at Boulogne so the fleet could come home
safely, starting a chain of warning beacons for when the Vikings came again and ordering
his
lords to get ready for fighting at
sea.
⁶⁹
A new enemy had changed the boundaries of power, made a coastline seem
like a weakness.

Yet that same year Charlemagne was also
making peace with another Danish king, Godfrid’s successor, called Hemming; twelve
nobles from each side met to swear oaths ‘according to the custom of their
people’.
⁷⁰
You could be savagely attacked and yet respect the laws and
customs of the enemy, it seemed, and even trust him a little in some circumstances. The
Vikings and the Emperor could see that they were in the same game.