Vikings

 

Viking Legacy


Some parts of Scotland conquered by the Vikings, in the 9th century, belonged to Norway for hundreds of years.

 The Western Isles were Norwegian until 1266.

 Orkney and Shetland only returned to Scotland in 1469, and retain a strong connection to their Viking past.


We can read the epic story of the Earls of Orkney, the Orkneyinga Saga, written down in Iceland around 1200.


 Many of the Viking settlers in Iceland were from Scotland, and took the stories with them. The carving below is based on an Icelandic epic called the Saga of the Volsungs. It tells the story of Sigurd, Dragon Slayer, and shows the making of a sword.




Many Scottish islands like Colonsay, Oronsay, Ulva and Uist have Norse names. The island of Cumbrae in the Clyde is half Norse, half Welsh. From cumbr, Welsh for Britons, and ae, Norse for island. So Cumbrae means island of the Britons. All the Scottish firths, like the Firth of Forth or Clyde, are Scots derivations of the Norse fjord. Sutherland, despite being in the far north of Scotland, means the southern land. Vikings called it that because it lay south of Orkney.


Towns, too, bear the imprint, of the Vikings. Helmsdale, Stornoway, Armadale have Norse names. Thurso is Norse for the river of the ox. Kirkwall means the church field. And Ullapool means the  pool of Ull, who was a Norse pagan god.


In the mid-12th century, Vikings looking for treasure broke into Maes Howe, an Orcadian Stone Age burial cairn. They found nothing, but they carved messages on the walls in runes ( the Viking alphabet).

One of them, perhaps the Icelander Thorhall Asgrimsson, left this poetic message:


' The man who is most skilled in runes west of the ocean cut

 these runes with the axe once owned by Gauk son

 of Trandil in the south country '


This whalebone plaque found at the Scar boat burial site at Sanday, Orkney, is the finest object of its kind to have been discovered anywhere in the Viking world.




 It was probably made in Northern Norway and might have been used for pressing pleats or small linen items, such as a cap. It lay with the body of a woman alongside a gilded bronze brooch and objects used for spinning, sewing, and weaving. 

Who was he, this wealthy Viking warrior buried with his sword on the island of Eigg more than 11 centuries ago? Svein? Hakon? Thorbjorn? We shall never know, but the exquisitely-made hilt of his precious word tells us volumes about this Norwegian raider-turned-settler. 



His mounded grave had lain untouched until around 1830, when crofter Allan Mackay levelled it for cultivation. Mackay found the remains of the sword in its scabbard, together with a decorative bronze fitting from a stave-built wooden bucket and a whetstone.He kept the sword blade fragments and the whetstone, and they are now lost, but luckily the bucket mount and sword hilt were presented to the National collections in Edinburgh. Today they are proudly displayed in the Early People galleries of the Museum of Scotland.


The sword was a masterpiece of the metalworker's craft. The iron blade would have been made by an expert smith and may have been imported into Norway. The hilt, probably made in Norway, is of cast brass. Riveted to it are panels of silver and a black substance called niello, and thin silver wires run around the edges. The panels are decorated with fanciful beasts, their heads turned back.




X-rays showed it started life as four hollow interconnecting pieces, held together by the upper end of the sword blade. Sand was used to fill the gaps and give it weight. Whether it would have worked well as a practical weapon, we're not sure. But it certainly fulfilled its purpose of showing off the wealth, power and good taste of its owner.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Broch Towers

Image
Towering Enigmas     For most of us, our home is a part refuge, part status symbol. That was just as true during the later Bronze and Iron Age, between 1,000 BC and 100 AD when Scotland was covered with the farms of settled and prosperous tribes. The centrepiece of these farms was a large roundhouse. In the south and east of the country, where timber was plentiful, these were usually massive wooden buildings with conical roofs rising up to 40ft above the ground. Unfortunately, centuries of intensive farming have wiped out all traces of them from the Lowlands. Further north, wood was less easily available, and so prehistoric farmers built their roundhouses from stone. These Atlantic roundhouses, so-called because they are most common around Scotland's Atlantic coasts, include the most imposing of all Iron Age buildings - the broch towers. Among the finest architectural achievements of prehistoric Europe, they are found only in Scotland. Some of the best examples are located in Orkne
Read more

Pictish Chains

Image
  The massive Pictish chains are our most striking examples of post-Roman jewellery. These precious and weighty symbols of power were made using recycled Roman silver. Just 10 of these chains have been found, mostly in Southern Scotland . They belonged to the tribal rulers, worn around their necks on important occasions. The heaviest, found in 1809 Caledonian Canal near Inverness, d uring the construction. It originally weighed just over 3 kg (6% lb). These marvellous objects, Scotland's earliest Crown Jewels, can be admired in the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Both Photos : The Whitecleuch chain,  was found in Whitecleuch, Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1869.
Read more

Declaration of Arbroath

Image
 Who was where,  as the seals were set? Who were the 40 people who put their seals to the Declaration of Arbroath to convince Pope John XXII that Robert Bruce was their rightful king? Some were Bruce supporters who had benefited from their loyalty to his cause in lands and titles. Nobles like Thomas Randolph, earl of Moray; Walter Stewart, the Steward of Scotland; Robert Keith, marischal of Scotland; James, lord of Douglas, the famous 'Good Sir James'; and Gilbert Hay, of Errol in Perthshire. Gaeldom, too, lent its support. Bruce in his hour of darkness had fled to the Celtic west where the MacDonalds sheltered him - and it is interesting to note, in the light of later history, that the Campbells were Bruce's kin.  Donald Campbell is listed, and his brother Neil, who had fought for Bruce since 1306, had married the king's sister, Mary. Others were more reluctant converts to Bruce—particularly those on the front line between Scotland and England in East Lothian where dip
Read more

The Blue Men

Image
  The Blue Men The three Shiant Islands, where the amazing find of the priceless gold tore was made, lie in the waters of the Minch, east of Harris, and are known in Gaelic as the enchanted isles. Strong tidal currents are not the only hazard facing those who venture into these waters. Legend has it that the Blue Men of the Minch live in the Sound of Shiant, and that they are either fallen angels who landed in the sea after being ejected from Heaven, or storm kelpies, Sailors are advised to treat the Blue Men with great respect. They should speak to the Blue Ones in rhyming Gaelic couplets, or else be dragged to the bottom of the Minch. A minister in the late 19th century recorded his meeting with one of them. He said "a blue-covered man, with a long, grey face, and floating from the waist out of the water came, so close, I could almost touch him.'' The strikingly attractive Shiants are a cluster of three islands and several islets made of basalt, formed by the eruption of
Read more

King MacBeth

Image
 MacBeth The real story of the man is far from Shakespeare's celebrated version. Indeed, MacBeth's 17-year reign was a prosperous and generous one, and he was to be fondly remembered as the last great Celtic king of Scots. The single most important fact we know about MacBeth is enshrined in a line borrowed from a Latin poem composed within a generation of his death. It says: "In his time there were productive seasons" - fertile tempus erat. Or, as Andrew Wyntoun, the 15th Century Scottish chronicler put it: "All his tyme was gret plenté/Aboundand baith in land and sé." Scots in MacBeth's time still believed in vestiges of sacral kingship, which meant that if calamity came upon the land in such disasters as war, famine, pestilence or atrocious weather, the solution was to sacrifice the king. MacBeth could thus have earned no higher praise. According to an Irish poem, he actually radiated the prosperity for which he was so famous - he was 'ruddy-faced,
Read more

Ystrat Clud

Image
 Ystrat Clud Britons are the ancestors no one seems to have heard about. They were Christians, spoke Welsh, worshipped at Govan, and ruled from Carlisle to Glasgow for 600 years. They are the nearest thing we have to a 'native' people! They called it Ystrat Clud - Strathclyde. Their church was at Govan, their hunting estate at Partick, their stronghold was Cadzow near Hamilton. They were the Welsh forefathers of today's Glaswegians. They were the Britons. Of all the peoples who made up Scotland in the early historic period, the group who are probably least well. Known to the average Scot was the Britons. This is odd, as these are the people who were here when written history began, the nearest thing Scotland has to a “native” people. When the Romans arrived in Britain, first in the 1st century BC, and then during their forays into Scotland in the 1st century AD, Britain was inhabited by Britons from south to north. The Romans called them Brittones. The languages spoken thro
Read more

Inchcolm Antiphoner

Image
SONGS ACROSS TIME Inchcolm Abbey, where the Antiphoner (a musical manuscript) originated. Scotland's Inchcolm Antiphoner is one of the most important yet neglected manuscripts in the history of early European music. It contains the only definitive remnants of the music of the Celtic Church, which was responsible for Christianising large areas of Europe. And it includes music probably composed in the 7th century, whose melodies are as unique as the organisation and practices of this ancient Church. The manuscript also shows that from an early date, Scotland's music has had a distinctive identity. It was written down, probably in the 13th century, on the island of Inchcolm, which lies in the Firth of Forth and can be clearly seen from Edinburgh. The music, known as plainchant, is the unaccompanied vocal music of the early Church, and it formed part of the soundtrack of the arrival of Christianity in Scotland. Plainchant was sung tirelessly by monks as a means of providing their d
Read more

Somerled

Image
 King of the Isles Somerled, King of the Isles, was feared and revered in equal measure in the 12th century, during which time he stood like a giant over Scotland's entire north-western seaboard. For many, his name has retained an almost mythical quality, while others have sought to portray him as an unruly rogue. In fact, he campaigned to defend the Scots kingship and government from what many saw as destructive foreign influences acting on kings David I and Malcolm IV. Somerled's kingship was in the heart of the ancient and distinctively Scottish Viking-Gael land, and he had Gaelic and Norse origins. His name in Gaelic, Somhairlidh, comes from the Norse sumarlidi meaning 'summer raider' or Viking, and his family was firmly among the ruling Celto-Norse chieftains of the Western Isles in the 11th and 12th centuries. Little is known about his early life, but by the 1130s Somerled had emerged as an important political figure. His royal titles were Ri Innse Gall, 'King
Read more

The Lost Battle

Image
The Lost Battle   Many theories exist over the venue for the Battle of Mons Graupius, but none is conclusive. More than a dozen places are rumoured to be the correct site—the more imaginative include the Gleneagles golf courses and the vicinity of Culloden. The name of the battle implies an isolated or at least distinctive hill, in other words, not the whole range of the Mounth. In the first printed edition of Tacitus's work, in 1480, a printer's error caused Graupius to appear as Grampius, which means the region Grampian took its name from a 15th-century spelling mistake.  Grampian Mountains link The very detailed description by Tacitus of the battle gives some clues regarding the lie of the land. The hill itself must have had a concave and rather steep slope. There was an open place for the Roman camp and a plain beside it, with wooded hills nearby and a Caledonian settlement within view.  Serious contenders for the site include: ● Duncrub near Dunning in Perthshire—may conta
Read more

Forgotten Folk

Image
 Forgotten folk Close to the centre of Glasgow is a collection of early Scottish works of art, which attracts experts from around the world. It is a national treasure, as important as lona, yet its historical importance has been neglected by the city fathers and the tourist industry. So much so, that 16 priceless stone carvings were scooped up and dumped as rubble. It seems incredible, but these symbols of our Christian heritage from more than a thousand years ago are virtually hidden, looked after by the minister and elders of Govan Parish Church. Few people knew about them. And the reason appears to be simply that no one knows about the people who created them, the Britonic people, who were the first Glaswegians. The belief is widely held that The when the Romans left Scotland, they turned off the lights, plunging us into centuries of barbarism known as the Dark Ages. Wrong. This was the time when the Kingdom of the Scots started to take shape with the blending of differing nations a
Read more