Here’s an oddity, and pretty much up my alley. Tip: Grim’s Hall.

I think I’ve mentioned before how I’ve gradually been won over, at least tentatively, to the view that the original Viking raids against England, particularly the one against Lindisfarne (793 AD), may have been intended as a preemptive attack, in order to send a message to the Emperor Charlemagne. This would have been because Charlemagne, at the Battle of Verden (782) forcibly baptized the defeated Saxons, and (probably) massacred them, an action that Denmark (understandably) considered provocative.

Under the rule of the Franks, the Saxons were formally Christianized. In order to teach them the gospel, Frankish missionaries did something both interesting and questionable. They “translated” the Gospel story into Germanic epic form, in a work known as the Heliand. (I actually have a friend who’s been raving about this poem for years, but I’ve never read it myself.)

We’ve wrung our hands recently over a New Testament translation that caters to Muslim sensibilities. But those changes pale compared to the alterations the Franks made, in order to put Christ’s story into a form that would be intelligible to Germanic warriors.

Having been thoroughly ‘Saxonised’, Christ becomes a warrior, the towns of ancient Israel become ‘hill forts’ and the three wise men become warriors and thanes. John the Baptist is called a ‘soothsayer’ and the Lord’s Payer [sic] apparently contains ‘secret runes’. When Christ leaves the wedding at Cana, the Heliand says that

‘Christ, the most powerful of kings decided to go to Capharnaum, the great hill fort, with his followers. His forces of good men, his happy warrior company assembled in front of him’

Read all about it here.

In a Viking reenactment group on Facebook that I belong to, somebody asked an interesting question recently. “I know a guy who’d like to portray a Viking fool,” he said. “What do you people think about that?”

The response was unanimous (very much to my pleasure, since there’s precious little unanimity among Viking reenactors on anything). There’s no evidence for jesters in Viking culture, and the very idea is not one that fits with the Viking ethos.

I thought I’d meditate on the reasons tonight. It has to do with issues I’ve addressed before.

The Viking culture, steeped in its heathen virtues, set personal honor above all things. You could make jokes about your enemy all you wanted—as long as he wasn’t present. If you made a joke about him to his face, it meant you wanted a fight. No insult could be overlooked, if a man was to keep his social standing. “It was just a joke! Lighten up!” wouldn’t buy you any tolerance. A cutting word was no different from a blow.

Gradually, with the coming of Christianity, that changed. Honor culture lingered (the duel was still legal in places well into the 19th Century), but it came gradually to be accepted that a man did not demean himself if he admitted a fault (Canute the Great, only a second generation Christian, did penance for a man’s murder, which must have been hard for a fellow so close to Asa worship. I need to remember to examine that when he comes into the Erling books). Continue reading A foolish post →

“Today I arise, through the baptism of Christ—His cross; and His grave; resurrection; ascension; and final descent, for the judgment of doom.

“Today I arise, while God’s angels serve…” (Read on)

He didn’t know God cared about him as a person; he just seemed to care whether he was a good person or a bad person. Kinda like Santa.