Ardnamurchan Vikings

Lighthouse at the Point of
Ardnamurchan

As I have previously pointed out, many of the poetic-sounding names of the shipping forecast have Viking associations, as does the Point of Ardnamurchan, in the inshore waters section. Plus it sounds wonderful, too. So who could resist a little trip up there, especially when someone else was paying and there was a work reason to go? (More information on why exactly I was there will follow in its own good time). So last month I went and it turned out to be easier than I thought - fly to Glasgow, then it's a four-hour drive. Well, easy or easy. The drive is quite something, along Loch Lomond (the bonnie banks don't have room for more than a narrow road with lots of traffic), through Glencoe (stunning), a fun ferry crossing to Ardgour, and then the last thirty-five miles of single-track road, dodging confident locals, hesitant tourists, and a variety of fauna. You can see why the Vikings preferred to arrive by boat.

The Viking grave at Swordle Bay

The main reason for being there was in connection with the Viking grave found at Swordle Bay in the northern side of the Ardnamurchan peninsula a few years ago, which had me pretty excited. It's touted as being the first Viking boat burial found on the mainland of Britain, but that is somehow to see it with our contemporary landlubber eyes. Certainly modern technology makes it easy enough to get there overland, but even a few decades ago that would not have been the case, let alone a millennium ago. Even getting to Swordle by car from the south side of the peninsula involved quite a steep climb over the central ridge. The bay has excellent views of Eigg and Rum and other Hebridean islands - and for all practical purposes it might as well have been an island too. Certainly it was on a main Viking Age transport route.

Swordle Bay, Ardnamurchan

The burial is in a stunning location - a great place to spend all eternity. There are many interesting aspects of the grave (it was in all likelihood a man, buried with both weapons and practical items, in a boat) and you can read all about it in this academic publication from a couple of years ago. Or read a shorter presentation on the website of the Ardnamurchan Transitions project of which it is part. Now of course, there is not much to see, only the shape of the burial marked out in stones, and a sense of the site, which looks like an ideal spot for a Viking to settle in. Further archaeological investigations might reveal whether the person buried there also lived there or was just passing through when he decided to take a detour to Valhalla. I have my reasons for thinking the former is more likely. Or at least that there were Vikings living there at the time.

Sanna, a small settlement on the western

end of the peninsula

One of the reasons for thinking this is the small but significant number of place-names on the peninsula that have an Old Norse origin. Swordle Bay itself contains the element svörðr, cognate with English 'sward' (as in 'greensward'), plus dalr 'valley', and it is indeed very lush and green round about. Sanna, now a small settlement on the western end of the peninsula is indeed next to a sandy beach, and if it does come from Sandey 'Sand Island' as it seems to, then there are some small islands in the bay which this could I suppose refer to. The place-names have not been studied in any detail since Angus Henderson in 1915, so there's a job for someone!

Ockle

Many might think there's not much to do on Ardnamurchan, and certainly what we think of as civilisation is thin on the ground at its western end. But for me the landscape and seascape, the lighthouse, the place-names, the burial, were all of great interest. I was also taken by the tiny settlement of Ockle, where the sun came out, enhancing the faded colours of this derelict cottage. I also like old tractors, sheep, cast iron mileposts and many of the other things to be seen there and I know I could amuse myself there for more than the two days I had on this visit.

Strontian

One last little tidbit of information which I had not known until I travelled all the way there was the significance of the village of Strontian. It turns out that this place gave its name to the element strontium, which is key in so much Viking Age research these days, as the bioarchaeologists use isotopes to work out where people came from. If you want to know more about the element, then I recommend the Strontium video from the very fun series of videos about the periodic table made by my amazing colleague Professor Sir Martyn Poliakoff.

Just goes to show how educational following the Vikings can be!

Westfjord Stories I

Although the Westfjords (Vestfirðir) of Iceland are sparsely populated nowadays, they do figure quite largely in a variety of Old Icelandic texts. Several sagas are set, wholly or in part, in the region, including some very well-known ones like Gísla saga, which has its own trail mainly around the Dýrafjörður area. Here however I will just look at a few anecdotes from my favourite text Landnámabók which both interested me and are linked to places I visited on my recent tour of the region.

Flying to Ísafjörður, our Air Iceland Connect plane was named after Þuríðr sundafyllir 'sound-filler'. The lady was a settler from Hálogaland, in Norway, where she had the particular talent of filling every sound with fish at a time of famine. She continued her fishing leadership role in Iceland. Having settled Bolungarvík (where we stayed at the splendid Einarshúsið guesthouse), she established a fishing ground at Kvíarmið out in the mouth of the Ísafjörður and took as payment one ewe from each of the farmers in the region. She could be seen as the founder of the fishing industry which is still such an important part of the economy of the Westfjords. The name Ísafjörður nowadays refers to the fjord in which the town of the same name is situated, but then seems to have referred to the whole of what is now known as Ísafjarðardjúp, as discussed by Svavar Sigmundsson. Ísafjörður is particularly associated with the little-known saga of Hávarðr. This saga is several times referred to in Landnámabók which appears to have used an earlier version of it as a source.

A memorable experience on our trip was the extremely hairy drive down to Rauðasandur, near Patreksfjörður. The eponymous beach is extremely beautiful and, as the name suggests, the sand is indeed fairly reddish. The explanation seems to be that this colour derives from some scallops with reddish shells which form the sand. However, the sand did not strike me as particularly red on our visit, but I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'red'. This colour term was a bit wider in Old Norse than in modern English, also being applied for instance to gold. Although I don't have a convincing picture to demonstrate, I could just about see the sand as reddish gold (as indeed in the picture here). Landnámabók provides an alternative explanation, namely that the place was named after a certain Ármóðr inn rauði 'the red'. The area is still being farmed and one can see why it would be an attractive proposition for a settler, particularly one who would arrive by boat rather than the vertiginous road over the mountain that we took. Since Landnámabók does not have much to say about Ármóðr, we can perhaps assume that his nickname was derived from the place-name, rather than the other way around, and that the colour and size of the beach were sufficiently distinctive for it to be an important navigational marker. Uncertainty about the origin of the name could explain the alternative forms, Rauðisandur 'Red Sand' and Rauðasandur 'Sand of Red'.

My third anecdote relates to what is now called Hrafnseyri, but is in the old texts mostly known as Eyrr or Eyri (along with Flateyri and Þingeyri - spits of land sticking out into the fjord were the ideal settlement sites in this region it seems). As mentioned in my previous blog post, the place was eventually named after Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson, a topic to which I will return in another post. But the first settler there was a certain Ánn rauðfeldr 'red-cloak' who received the land from the eponymous settler of Arnarfjörður, Örn, when the latter moved over to the more clement Eyjafjörður. Ánn had married a certain Grélöðr while harrying in Ireland, and she had thought there were bad smells emanating from the ground at their first residence in Dufansdalur. But when they moved to Eyri, she thought the grass had the fragrance of honey. While we were there, someone was cutting the grass around the church and the whole place was indeed very sweet-smelling!.

The Poetry of the Shipping Forecast

Britannia Designs, Dartmouth

Despite being the world's greatest landlubber, I have always loved the Met Office shipping forecast, especially when broadcast late at night on Radio 4, and I know I am not alone. Undoubtedly my own reason for this lifelong devotion is partly its splendid litany of place-names, beginning with that most evocative word of all, Viking, followed by North and South Utsire, named after Norway's smallest municipality Utsira. The forecast then ends its ramblings round the rocks and waters of the northwest European archipelago (and some nautically nearby places) in suitably Norse and Viking fashion with Fair Isle, Faeroes and South-East Iceland.

But it's not just this abundance of Norse and Viking references that I love. I would go so far as to argue that the shipping forecast follows some rules that make it into a kind of poetry, the kind of poetry I like.

(1) It is formulaic. The basic structure of the shipping forecast is the same every time, and it makes use of a pre-determined and traditional vocabulary and phrases with which both author and listeners are familiar. Occasionally moderate. Showers. Good. Cyclonic. 6 or 7 at first in west.

(2) But like all good formulaic poetry it rings the changes through variation. Moderate or rough. Rain or showers. Poor. Variable 4 becoming northwesterly for a time.

(3) It has a fixed structure, each part introduced by a formula to keep the listener orientated: 'The shipping forecast is issued...', 'The general synopsis at midday', 'The area forecasts for the next 24 hours'. Within each part the content is formulaic and always in the same order, though making use of variation as described above.

(4) Its formulaic nature gives it a regular, fairly predictable, if somewhat staccato, rhythm.

(5) It is primarily oral, though you can also read it on the page.

(6) It has a function (even if not for me). I like poetry that has a function other than that of being poetry. Because of its important function the shipping forecast has to be read in clear and unemotional tones, which thereby emphasise the drama of 'rough or very rough', or 'severe gale 9'.

As you snuggle in your warm bed tonight, just spare a thought for those in peril on the sea.

P.S. I'm not the only lover of the shipping forecast who owns the charming little dish pictured above. Thanks to my ever-vigilant other half who found it for me.

Horses of the Sea

Norse and Viking ramblings took me to Denmark earlier this week, specifically to north-east Fyn and the small but picturesque town of Kerteminde. Highlight of the trip for me was my first-ever visit to Vikingemuseet Ladby, home of Denmark's only known ship-burial. This was discovered in the 1930s and excavated, as one sometimes did in those days, by the local amateur enthusiast, one Poul Helweg Mikkelsen, a chemist in Odense. But he did a splendid job and also had unusual foresight for those times to insist that the partially-excavated grave be left in situ in its mound. So there it is today (pictured left), you can still see the impression of the planks of wood and the many nails in their original position. You can also see the skeletal remains of eleven horses (their teeth are massive!) and probably four dogs. This custom of including horses and dogs in the burial is well-known and widely attested. We can speculate endlessly about the mindset that went in for this kind of mass slaughter to accompany one who was undoubtedly a wealthy and powerful local or regional chieftain. It's also rather graphically illustrated in the reconstruction of the burial (pictured below) in the small museum on the site.

Both the horses and the ship were of course the expected accoutrements of a great chieftain like the one buried at Ladby. The burial mound is on the coast and, while he may not have lived at Ladby itself (the name means 'loading settlement'), he certainly lived nearby and would have used both means of transport to get around. But there is more to this connection between ships and horses and we can get some insight into that by considering the poetry.

Much surviving Old Norse poetry, particularly in the skaldic genre, deals with ships, sailing and sea-battles, and the poets deploy a rich and surprisingly realistic vocabulary when dealing with such matters. But when it comes to the ships themselves, they also allowed themselves all kinds of flights of fancy, particularly in their use of kennings. As I touched on in a post last year, one of the most common kenning types is that which figures a ship as the 'horse of the sea'. Oddly enough, the kenning does not work the other way  round - in the whole of the skaldic corpus there is, I believe, only one example in which a horse is said to be the 'ship of the land' (parallel to the classic kenning-example of the camel as a 'ship of the desert'), and that is a bit obscure. Nor is there that much realistic description of riding in the poetry. But the number and range of kennings which vary the 'horse of the sea' concept is quite astonishing and the examples below are just a selection.

The 'horse' can be a drasill, a fákr, a faxi, a hestr, a marr or a viggr, all of which are just different words for 'horse'. Or it could be called by a typical horse-name, such as Blakkr 'Dusky', Hrafn 'Raven', Sóti 'Sooty' or Valr 'Falcon' (notice how the idea of substitution, so common to kennings, creeps into these horse-names, two of which are actually other animals, in fact birds). The 'sea', on the other hand, could be expressed through words that mean 'wave', such as bára, hrönn, unnr or vágr, or other words such as sundr 'channel', sær 'sea', or haf or lög 'ocean'. Again, the idea of substitution can make things more complex, with the 'sea' being replaced by a sea-kenning such as eybaugr 'island-ring' or hvaljörð 'whale-land'. You have to be pretty well-schooled in this way of thinking immediately to conjure up a picture of a ship when you hear of a 'steed of the island-ring' and kennings can often get even more complicated than that.

Not all ship-kennings involve horses, there are examples in which the base-words are bears, boars, elks, rams, reindeer and even swine. And just as horses sometimes had bird-names, so these kennings are reminiscent of the way in which ships were sometimes named after animals. Examples of such names from both the Viking Age and the medieval period include Ormr 'Snake', Trani 'Crane', Vísundr 'Bison', Hreinn 'Reindeer', Gammr 'Vulture', Elptr 'Swan' and Uxi 'Ox'. There's even a nice parallelism in the way that both horses and ships can be named after birds, though why anyone would have thought a vulture was a fine thing to name your ship after, we will never know.

Despite this maritime menagerie, the strongest association of the ship is still with the horse. Mastering a ship is rather a different skill from riding a horse, but the successful Viking Age chieftain, particularly in a landscape like that around Ladby, needed to be good at both. A ship was undoubtedly more expensive, and more difficult to replace, than a horse, so he would have had more of the latter. But both enabled him to cover more ground than the pedestrians he ruled over and, with one ship and several horses, he could also take a group of followers to support him in his endeavours. While almost anyone could have one horse, the chieftain had a lot of horses and at least one ship, perhaps precisely in the ratio of 11:1, as in the Ladby burial. This superiority in prestige of the ship over the horse may explain the kenning pattern mentioned above: while a ship could be figured as a horse, no horse could ever aspire to be a ship.

These associations are deep and complex, and fundamental to Viking Age concepts of leadership and masculinity. Much more could be said about them, perhaps drawing in those dogs that were also buried with the Ladby chieftain, and indeed his sword, another essential accoutrement of the well-accessorised Viking leader. And we mustn't forget that women were also buried in ships, accompanied by horses, though these associations are more difficult to untangle - was it only certain kinds of women and if so which kinds? The symbolism of both burials and poetry is endlessly fascinating and a real key to the Viking mind, if only we knew what it all really meant.

That Fishy Place

A recent ramble took me further north than I had ever been before, to the Lofoten Islands. We were staying at the splendid Nyvågar Rorbuhotell on Austvågøy, at more than 68° N (even Iceland only just scrapes 66° N by virtue of the offshore island of Grímsey). Obviously the seminar included the obligatory excursion to the fabulous site of Borg on Vestvågøy, where we enjoyed the exhibition and indulged our inner Vikings with mead and a nice thick lamb soup inside the reconstructed chieftain's hall.

 
Many other beautiful sights were seen, the weather was kind (except for the day we were supposed to have a boat trip into Trollfjorden, which caused some real disappointment) and interesting discussions were had. But what particularly piqued my curiosity was all the stockfish drying (see picture above), and my realisation that the very district of Vågan where we were staying is quite widely mentioned in Old Norse texts, where it is known as Vágar ('Bays').
 
Accounts of the renowned battle of Hjǫrungavágr (c. 985) mention that one of the supporters of Hákon jarl was a chieftain called Þórir hjǫrtr (‘Hart’) from Vágar. Hákon was a noted pagan, and his followers were too, and when Hákon had been killed and Norway was ruled by the Christian missionary king Óláfr Tryggvason, Þórir reappeared as one of the northern chieftains who attempted to resist Óláfr’s Christian mission and political ambitions, though they were ultimately unsuccessful and Þórir was killed by Óláfr.

 The religious history of the region is then obscure until over a century later when the Norwegian king Eysteinn Magnússon (d. 1122) is said to have built many churches in different parts of Norway, including one at Vágar. The fact that he bothered suggests the importance of the place already then, if not before. The same king was also responsible for revising the laws  regulating the economic activities, including fishing and the fur trade, of the people of Hálogaland. The enactment mentions that ‘every man who catches fish in Vágar’ must give five fishes to the king. A  royal order of 1384 names Vágar as one of the three most important trading centres of western and northern Norway, alongside Bergen and Trondheim.

 

The importance of this district as fishing station and trading centre resonates through several sagas of Icelanders, where it is presented as having had that status already in the ninth and tenth centuries, including Egils saga, Hallfreðar saga and Grettis saga. The question is whether this represents what Icelanders thought of Vágar in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, or whether the stockfish trade could have been older. I will discuss this question at greater length in something I am working on at the moment, so watch this space!

There is also a glimpse of Vágar in Konungs skuggsjá (‘The King’s Mirror’), an instructional text for ambitious young men by a thirteenth-century Norwegian, for whom Vágar is characterised not by paganism or by fishing but by its latitude. To this up-to-date and scientifically-minded observer, instructing the future seafarer, Vágar is the land of midday stars in winter and the midnight sun in summer. In early May, when I was there, it was a bit too early for the midnight sun, but it certainly did not get completely dark at night and sleep was difficult. But who could sleep in such a beautiful place?

Gather Ye Groaties

The work of the Kirkwall draper, conchologist and poet Robert Rendall (1898-1967) may not be to everyone's taste - the poetry is traditional in style and often about God. But he really has a way with words, in my view, and it's nice to see that there is now an edition of his Collected Poems (ed. John Flett Brown and Brian Murray, 2012). In addition to his four published collections, this includes poetry never published or published only in newspapers or other ephemera. As with most Orkney poets, there is always an undercurrent of fascination with the islands' Norse heritage in Rendall's poetry. Here is a snippet from the rather fine and stately 'King Hakon's Dirge', published in Orkney Variants (1951, pictured):

Death comes, alas,
On raven wings,
And even kings
Like shadows pass
From mortal things.

But some of his most delightful writing comes in the autobiographical prose pieces collected in Orkney Shore (1973), mainly about his development as a naturalist, but with some nice poetical snippets, too, here musing on the vernacular names of the sea-shells that were his life's work, in particular the 'shell names from farm animals [which] have a northern provenance':

The common mussel with its outline of folded wings and up-turned neb was soon transformed into a 'kraa' with blue-black plumage. The finely corrugated ribs of a cockle, which in Norway became a sheep's fleece, was with us replaced by similar ribs on a scallop shell, and so recognized as the mark of a gimmer-shell. A cat's face could be seen in the obtuse 'cattibuckie' and that of a dog in the neb of a spired winkle ...' (Orkney Shore, pp. 19-20).

A 'gimmer' is a year-old ewe, according to the Dictionary of the Scots Language and comes from Old Norse, though the word is not just Orcadian but is quite widespread in both Scottish and northern English dialects. The picture shows some scallop shells I found on the beach between Grit Ness and the Sands of Evie last week.

As a conchologist, Rendall of course picked up (Orkney Shore, p. 18) on the fact that the three-year old Egill Skallagrímsson (in ch. 31 of his saga), refers to the 'three silent dogs of the surf swell' that the juvenile poet got from his grandfather as payment for his first poem. The saga prose interprets this kenning as referring to kúfungar, or sea-snails, a term used for a large and diverse group of animals - it's a pity the Orcadian poet-conchologist didn't speculate a little more on just what shells these were, though he was fascinated by spiral shells:

The mind rests on its sheer loveliness, content, it may be, with the harmony of aesthetic values; or if so disposed, wanders in the dangerous but delightful labyrinth of speculative thought. This wonderfully contrived object, so specialised as to differ from all others in its class, yet not excelling in any intricacy of design, each in its own way being unique, what is it? (Orkney Shore, p. 122).

Icelandic Cats Etcetera

I'm just back from a lightning visit to Iceland. The educational business that took me there and the shortness of the trip didn't allow for too much sightseeing, and my biggest disappointment was missing the Northern Lights which apparently put on a good show on the first night I was there, while I was too ensconced in the hotel bar to notice. It's embarrassing in my profession never to have seen the Northern Lights, but there was at least a certain Northern Cats theme to my visit. The picture shows a sachet of the Icelandic cat food I brought back for my own little friend - notice that even this is marketed using a Viking ship! Iceland has to import quite a lot of things, but I guess all their livestock farming gives them the wherewithal to make their own ekta íslenska framleiðsla fyrir köttinn þinn 'genuine Icelandic product for your cat' from the more unspeakable bits of sheep and cows. I think my own furry friend prefers Sheba, but she didn't entirely turn her nose up at Murr kattamatur.

I, too, was well-fed in Iceland, about which the less said the better. More importantly, I photographed, but did not eat at, the splendidly-named restaurant Fjalakötturinn. This word seems to be a variant on the mousetrap-kenning I discussed in an earlier post, where the medieval version was a tréköttr 'wooden cat', whereas this one is better translated as 'plank-cat'. I'm not entirely sure it's the best name for a restaurant, but it's good as ever to see kennings still in use. Apparently, the building is modern, but built on the site of an earlier one with the same name (I haven't been able to discover why), and even earlier there was a Viking longhouse on the site, not surprisingly, as the restaurant is right next to the Reykjavík 871±² settlement exhibition.

 On my last evening I photographed this rather beautiful pussycat (right) on the seashore near my hotel. It is standing in front of a monument celebrating the fact that the football club Þróttur was founded on that very spot. The club's name means 'strength', and some think it is one of Odin's names. The word also appears mysteriously on some rune stones in Sweden, about which I have written recently, but I digress. The spot in the photograph is actually rather interesting, since there are some old (or not even so old) fishermen's huts, known as Grímsstaðavör, still standing (see below, in the romantic gloaming), the last remnants of the fishing heritage of the area before the complete suburbanisation of Reykjavík. What with cats, Norse mythology, ruins and much more, there was plenty to catch my interest in that short evening walk along Ægissíða. Even better than the Northern Lights, though I still hope to see those one day.

 

 

Lights of the Isles

Like all good teachers (I hope), I don't have any real favourites among my Norse and Viking rambling locations - from Newfoundland to Estonia, I have loved them all. But careful readers of this blog may nevertheless have noticed I have a bit of a soft spot for Orkney. So I am delighted to report that I am here again! The kind folk of the Thing project have invited me to give lectures in both Orkney and Shetland this week. And I wouldn't be me if I didn't tack on a few days extra to make it a proper busman's holiday...

This time I decided the extra in Orkney was to be North Ronaldsay, the northernmost of their isles, a place I visited once before in 2003, and home to some seaweed-eating sheep and the really rather colourful Ragna, about whom Earl Rögnvaldr composed a very strange poem (see ch. 81 of Orkneyinga saga, or my edition in Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages vol. 2).

Having arrived in glorious sunshine on Monday evening, my one whole day on North Ron was wiped out by the really rather atrocious weather that pummelled the whole of Orkney pretty much all of Tuesday, necessitating a day spent indoors with some academic work. I cannot complain, since I consider the weather to be an essential part of the authentic Viking experience, but I was disappointed.

Today, I was to leave on the 11 am flight and the weather was of course heart-wrenchingly better. But thanks to two of my fellow-guests at the North Ronaldsay Bird Observatory (an excellent place to stay, by the way), my last few hours were saved and I got a little adventure to boot.

It transpired that my two fellow guests were the engineers who maintain the lighthouses of Orkney and Caithness for the Northern Lighthouse Board. They, too, were leaving on the 11 am flight, but had a few things to clear up at the lighthouse before going, and graciously allowed me to accompany them. So I had a special tour of the highest land-based lighthouse in Britain, managing to climb all 176 steps to the top, where there was a splendid view of the whole island, glinting in the sunshine. There is a webcam, if you want to get an idea, and the two keepers' cottages have now been turned into very nice self-catering accommodation.

So what's all this to do with the Vikings, you ask? They who sailed without benefit of lighthouses (and therefore probably got shipwrecked a lot)? Well, it transpired that one of the lighthouse engineers was none other than Hrolf Douglasson, a Viking re-enactor I had met once before, now leader of the Norðreyjar branch of Regia Anglorum, author of several books about Vikings, and now with this really rather cool job of looking after the lighthouses of Orkney and Caithness. So thanks Hrolf, and your colleague Rob, for the tour!

A Modern Swelkie

Among all the devices being tried out in the waters around Orkney to harness the energy of tides and waves, one caught my eye in particular. It's an undersea turbine, described as a 6m wide 'fan', and it is being tried out in the 'Fall of Warness' off the coast of Eday. I caught sight of it in a news item on the BBC the other day. Because the BBC report implied it was being tried out in the Pentland Firth, it reminded me of an Old Norse legend, a version of the widespread aetiological tale in which an undersea salt mill is said to be the reason why the sea is salt. One version of this tale attaches this legend to the Swelkie (sometimes written Swilkie or Swelchie), a fearsome tidal whirlpool in the Pentland Firth (I've discussed this a bit in this paper from the Durham Saga-Conference and also in one from the Uppsala Saga-Conference, which can be downloaded here). This picture of the turbine looks just like how I imagined the salt-mill...