Look North More Often

A sentiment with which all readers of this blog will concur, I hope. It comes from a piece by Kevin Crossley-Holland in 'The Week in Books' column in the Guardian (it's apparently not on their website, so you'll just have to go out and buy the paper!). He is a spokesperson for the Norwegian Christmas tree project in Trafalgar Square ('Look North More Often' being their motto), and writes evocatively of going deep into the forest to select and remove the big tree, and the 'death-in-life, life-in-death' feeling you get at such a moment, when the tree of life is felled but comes to a kind of new life with its lights for the festive season. At such moments, we think of the dreadful year the Norwegians have had, and how bravely they have borne it.

And just to cheer things up, though it is a bit early for the festive season, I append a photo of a delightful tree-bearer I picked up in the Sally Army shop in Majorstua, on my most recent visit to Oslo.

Vatnsdœla Saga

After a lightning trip to Oslo on academic business last week, your intrepid blogstress was off on her rambles again, this time the annual postgraduate field trip to the north-west of England with some enthusiastic students. The cultural high point, as ever, was the Gosforth Cross, though all the familiar old hogbacks, runes and place-names we visited were also wonderful. But for a stunning landscape, the undoubted gem was, as ever, our overnight stay in Wasdale.

Although Wasdale in Cumberland is not so very like Vatnsdalr in Iceland (about which I blogged recently), it is after all the same name, and since my return I have amused myself by seeking out some parallels between the two. It had always struck me that the account in ch. 15 of Vatnsdœla saga of Ingimundr's arrival in Vatnsdalr must represent the reactions of many a Viking settler to their new homeland, wherever that may have been. As Ingimundr said:

'... ek sé nú ok land at víðleika með vexti, ok ef þar fylgja kosti, þá má þat vera, at hér sé vel byggjanda.'

'... I now see a land expansive in its spaciousness, and if the conditions are as good as the size, then it may be that this is a good place to settle.'

After a brief interlude in which Ingimundr's wife gives birth to a daughter by the riverside, they proceed in their explorations:

Síðan sótti liðit upp í dalinn ok sá þar góða landakosti at grösum ok skógum; var fagrt um at litask; lypti þá mjök brúnum manna.

Then the party made their way up into the valley and saw good agricultural conditions with respect to pastures and woods; it was beautiful to look at; people's brows unfurrowed.

Driving from Gosforth to Wasdale Head reveals both woods and pastures, the latter populated by large numbers of sheep (pictured above). Ingimundr, too, had lots of sheep, indeed a valley called Sauðadalr is said to have taken its name from some of his sheep which disappeared but were then found later on in the woods having spent the winter out of doors. The Herdwick sheep of Cumbria, too, are famous for their hardiness and for knowing their way around their patch. Ingimundr also had some problematic swine, and the Lake District is awash with Swin(e)dales and Grisedales. Natural resources are good too. In ch. 22 of the saga, we're told that there was veiðr mikil ... í Vatnsdalsá, bæði laxa ok annarra fiska 'much fishing ... in Vatnsdalsá, of both salmon and other kinds of fish'. Near Wasdale is Waberthwaite, the first element of which seems to come from an ON veiði-búð or 'fishing hut'.

When he died, Ingimundr was given a boat burial, presumably with a mound (ON haugr) over it. The EPNS volume for Cumberland lists some 17 minor names with 'how' in Wasdale alone, though, as Diana Whaley points out in A Dictionary of Lake District Place-Names, the element is prolific and can be used for both natural and artificial features, the latter including burial mounds. Disappointingly, the first element in the evocative Boat How was nothing to do with a burial but is from búð 'booth, hut' again.

Not that any of this proves anything at all, only that Viking settlers sought out similar landscapes, and used their well-established vocabulary to name those landscapes. But it's fun, and it's no wonder that those 19th-century antiquarians found themselves inspired by the links between Iceland and Lakeland.

The Vikings are Coming!

That was the headline in my copy of this morning's Observer which has quite a large feature on the cultural invasion of Britain by a number of forthcoming 'TV sagas, epic novels and a major exhibition' which 'testify to a fascination with all things Norse'. All of that is excellent news. But OK, dear Observer, if only you'd been reading this blog, you'd have known that they never really went away!

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme Dat Ding

Some years ago, on one of my rambles to Orkney, I stopped off in Dingwall, Ross-shire. As all Viking aficionados know, the place-name comes from an Old Norse word for an assembly site, found most notably at Þingvellir in Iceland, but also at several places in these islands, the two Thingwalls on either side of the Mersey, or Tynwald on the Isle of Man, plus a few scattered about the Scottish islands. On that brief visit to Dingwall, I wandered into the museum, and saw a few signs of Viking awareness, but not many. Otherwise, it was a charming place.

Now I read in The North Star that the very town centre car park in which I parked my car on that day is reported to be the site of the Viking Age assembly mound, according to some rather vaguely unspecified archaeological investigations (though not yet excavations) carried out last month. The various worthy persons interviewed in the article all foresee a great future for Dingwall as a Viking tourist hotspot. How things change in a few years...

While searching for a suitable image for this post, I came across the above golden bull on a handsome black plinth. If you look carefully, there is an attempt to render the name Dingwall in both Old Norse and runes, but, oh so sadly, such a dismal attempt, especially the runes. They are really neither one thing nor tother, and I'm not even that sure what exactly they are meant to spell. I predict a rash of dodgy 'runic' inscriptions in Viking tourist spots around the country, each one feebler than the last. Please, please, please guys, if you want to do something like that, get in touch with a real runologist, like those splendid chaps at Hotell Svava and Kirkwall Airport did.

Ships and Men

The exciting recent discovery of an intact Viking Age male weapon burial in a 5m. boat on the Ardnamurchan peninsula has been widely reported in the media today, for instance The Guardian. Apparently, the artefacts are fantastic - the electronic version of the Guardian article has a nice short film of an axehead being dug up. We all await further details. And luckily, a few of the guy's teeth have been preserved, so we will soon know what he ate and where he grew up, once Janet Montgomery has done her work of stable isotope analysis. Ardnamurchan, though isolated today, is of course on the main seaway from Norway, through the Northern and Western Isles, and down to the Irish Sea, so it is not at all surprising to find such a burial there, rather than on the islands, which is where all previous ones have been found.

The excitement is tinged with sadness at the almost simultaneous announcement of the death of Ole Crumlin-Pedersen, the nestor of Viking boat and ship studies. He's the third eminent Viking to die (all of them far too young) within the last six weeks or so, following hard on the heels of Mark Blackburn and Richard Hall. May they all have a splendid feast in Valhalla together, while the surf pounds outside, as Ormr Barreyjarskáld might have said at the Ardnamurchan funeral:

Útan gnýr á eyri
Ymis blóð fara góðra.

Ymir's blood [the sea] crashes out there on to the sand-bank of good vessels.

The Wasdale Web

By a happy coincidence, I have just been (re-)reading Vatnsdœla saga today, on the very same day that fellow blogger Emily, over on Saga-steads, is travelling through Vatnsdalur itself (its northern reaches pictured right). Her blog is its usual readable self, with interesting observations about the afterlife of the sagas in present-day Iceland, and some beautiful photos (she seems to have had better weather than I did!). But the best nugget in her blog is that the inhabitants of the valley are currently working on a tapestry version of the saga, à la Bayeux. So far, all they seem to have is a drawing of chapter 26 of the saga, on which they are embroidering away, but it looks really good - you can recognise the events of the chapter quite easily.

Even my favourite bit of chapter 26 is there, though it is hard to represent visually (see if you can find it...). The hero Thorstein sends his shepherd off to find out what is going on at a neighbouring farm he is in dispute with. He tells him to recite poetry while he waits for them to answer his knock. When the shepherd returns and tells Thorstein that he had recited twelve verses before they admitted him, then Thorstein knows for sure that skulduggery is afoot. Presumably, it can be worked out by timing a standard dróttkvætt stanza and multiplying it by twelve - I make it about six minutes. An interesting thought that poetry can be used as a measure of time...

The title of this post, by the way, refers to Vatnsdalur's English namesake, Wasdale in the Lake District, and its WWW presence. Just thought I'd get that in, since I'm going thither again soon - but it also seemed appropriate. W.G. Collingwood thought Vatnsdalur one of the most beautiful valleys in Iceland, and the same could be said of Wasdale. Now they just lack a tapestry (and a saga).

Runic Tourism

Your intrepid Norse and Viking rambler has just returned from a runic ramble in Sweden, where perfect weather and congenial and learned company enhanced the already delightful process of the close study of runic inscriptions in a variety of media and with a variety of more or less comprehensible texts. Among many other delights, I offer you (left) a photo of what might be the only memorial inscription on a rune stone commemorating the commissioner's aunt. Fathers and sons, yes frequently; mothers and daughters, not so common but still quite a few; sisters and uncles are rare but there. But I think this is the only auntie, or father's sister in this case (if indeed that is what the text says - half the fun of runic inscriptions is that we are not always 100% sure), in the Swedish Viking Age corpus. Hurrah for aunties everywhere!

The runic theme of this short trip was enhanced by the only partially deliberate decision to stay in the Hotel Svava in Uppsala, possibly the world's only runic-themed hotel. As you can see from the photo to the right, every bedstead in the place is enhanced by a runic inscription - the runes are proper, but the message is in modern Swedish (I leave you to spell out the advertising message for yourself). A very distinguished runologist on the ramble admitted to me that she had devised the inscription many years ago when the hotel opened - despite the occasional ribbing she has received, I think it's splendid. It did make me wonder about other runic hotels. I do remember seeing a splendid runic banner at the Kettletoft Hotel in Sanday, Orkney, when I was there in I think 2000. I wonder if it's still there?

But the best bit of runic tourism is surely the airport at Kirkwall. Not only are the runes proper Viking Age ones, the spelling is pretty good (the place was called Grimsetter when the RAF built an airfield there in 1940), written in pretty good runic orthography as krimsitir (though in Old Norse it would ideally be krimsitr, or setr with a dotted i-rune). I haven't found out which runologist, if any, was responsible for this one, though. Now why can't the baggage tags be in runes when you fly to KOI-Kirkwall?