As I attempt to finish up this little series of posts on American themes in my Viking novels, it would make sense to try to trace some direct lines between Erling Skjalgsson’s career and the birth of the American republic. This might seem far-fetched, but the Norse are not aliens to us. The Vikings aren’t just the ancestors of Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes. They established permanent enclaves in a number of European countries, notably (for the purposes of this discussion) Scotland and England.

I’m rather surprised, in looking through my personal library, to find very little written about the permanent cultural influence of the Vikings in these places. But I do find hints.

Arthur Herman’s book How the Scots Invented the Modern World* highlights how the Scottish Enlightenment informed the thinking of the men who made the American Revolution. Is it pure coincidence that much of Scotland—especially the Northern Isles and the Highlands—was heavily settled by freedom-loving Norse, with a tradition of representative democracy?

The American Founding Fathers, of course, thought of themselves as Englishmen. They had no utopian dream of re-making the world on idealistic lines. They were simply demanding the traditional rights of Englishmen which (they believed) they had been unlawfully denied. To demand one’s rights was not an act of insubordination, but the tribute they owed to their English heritage.

The northern third of what is now England was called the “Danelaw” for many centuries, because Danes had settled it, and Danish law was in effect there (the English called all Scandinavians Danes). This law was an extension of the republican law the “Danes” had known in their homelands. It did have lasting effects on English Common Law, and the rights Englishmen enjoyed.

According to George Macaulay Trevelyan in A Shortened History of England, during the Viking occupation: “The Scandinavians, when not on the Viking warpath, were a litigious people and loved to get together in the ‘thing’ to hear legal argument. They had no professional lawyers, but many of their farmer-warriors, like Njal, the truth-teller, were learned in folk custom and in its intricate judicial procedure. A Danish town in England often had, as its principal officers, twelve hereditary “law men.” The Danes introduced the habit of making committees among the free men in court, which perhaps made England favorable ground for the future growth of the jury system out of a Frankish custom later introduced by the Normans.” (From this Wikinfo page on Jury Trial.)

Most of the barons who faced down King John and forced him to sign the Magna Carta came from the north of England (ref. this article). These were men of the old Danelaw, only a few generations separated from living memory of an independent Kingdom of York up there, under Norse law. Was this accidental?

My friend Torgrim Titlestad, author of Viking Norway (sadly not available for regular sale in the U.S. at this time) writes (p. 212):

The Viking ship allowed this part of the northern hemisphere to withstand the imposition of Carolingian feudalism and its church with its accompanying Latin language. It can be argued that in a longer historical perspective this allowed for the consolidation of the rule of law based upon a strong conception of the rights of the individual in Scandinavia which has fed into and influenced the ideals of 19th Century Western classical liberalism.

When I first read Heimskringla and “fell in love” with Erling Skjalgsson, it was partly because he reminded me of my childhood hero Davy Crockett, who like Erling died in a massacre perpetrated by a tyrant. And the more I studied his life and times, the more American Erling seemed to me. The prototypical American is a free man who stands on his rights and bows to no king. Erling was forced to bow to kings once or twice, but in his heart he was always free, and in the end he died for holding his head high.

It might seem as if he lost his struggle, but it can be argued (and is, by Titlestad and some others) that his rear-guard action had long-term effects in a nation that, for all its poverty, would never know the institution of serfdom.

I like to think of him as a spiritual ancestor to the Englishmen who faced the forces of tyranny at Lexington and Concord, Trenton, and Saratoga.

*Full disclosure, I haven’t actually read this book.