Book Reviews, British History, Charles, European History, Medieval History, Military History, Sex Roles, Social Behavior, War
comments 7

Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings (Tom Shippey)

In these days where man is held to be homo economicus, we are told that all people are basically the same, and what they want, most of all, is ease and comfort. Real Vikings prove this false. Instead, they reflect back to us a strange combination of very bad behavior and until-the-last-dog-dies virtue. Tom Shippey wants to talk about those real Vikings, not the sanitized ones who were supposedly much like us, just colder. If you read this book, therefore, you’ll get the Vikings in all their bloody, malicious glory.

Shippey (a professor of Old and Middle English literature, and one of the world’s leading authorities on J. R. R. Tolkien) tells what we know about the Vikings, primarily from their own stories about themselves, the sagas. He combines this with other sources, including archaeology and the written histories of those with whom the Vikings came into contact, to create a vivid and compelling narrative. It may seem strange to treat the sagas as history, since fantasy elements, from dwarves to dragons to Valkyrie, are ubiquitous, and many were written down centuries after the events in them took place. The author takes the position, apparently not uncontroversial, that the sagas can nonetheless be used as history, though with caution and only in some instances. Either way, the sagas show the Viking mentality, not so much through the plots of the stories, but through the actions of the people in them. Most of all, it is this Viking mindset that Shippey cares about; he calls it “a kind of death cult,” which does not seem an exaggeration.

Shippey is well-versed in the languages in which the sagas were written, including Old Norse; he does his own translations. Given the bowdlerization that is common in pre-modern translations, this is very helpful to the reader. The stories in the sagas are very complex, largely due to the tangled webs of kinship they portray. These are not fairy tales, with a simple story and simple moral, but Shippey does an excellent job of exposition. He emphasizes that sagas aren’t meant to be beautiful or delicate; they aim instead to follow extremely strict rules of rhyme and meter, and are full of complex grammar and obscure allusions. The creation of excellent poetry was regarded as a high virtue and accomplishment for men in their off hours, when they weren’t killing other men.

Vikings are often incorrectly seen as synonymous with Scandinavians. In Old Norse, vikingr meant simply pirate or marauder. “It wasn’t an ethnic label, it was a job description.” Shippey rejects revisionist accounts that try to paint the Vikings as settlers, or traders, or nice people who just occasionally got caught up in fighting. Plenty of Scandinavians were settlers, traders, and nice people—just not the Vikings. For three hundred years, they stole and murdered across much of northern Europe, especially England, and got as far as Constantinople and southern Spain. “To the modern mind, it is amazing, almost incomprehensible, how so many thousands of men, over generations, took appalling risks in small boats and continuous hand-to-hand and face-to-face confrontations with edged weapons, for what do not seem to us to have been very great financial returns. Viking armies were often defeated, even exterminated, but there never seemed to be any difficulty recruiting another one.” What made this possible was the Viking mentality.

Shippey’s book is both analysis and history. The history begins where Viking histories normally begin, with the sack of the monastery of Saint Cuthbert on Lindisfarne, in A.D. 793. It ends with Harold Godwinson’s defeat, in 1066 at Stamford Bridge, of the giant Norwegian king, Harold Hardrada (whose name Shippey translates, roughly, as “Hard-Line Harold”). The actual causes of the eruption of the Vikings are not completely clear, because there are almost no written records from Scandinavia of the time, but they probably have to do with upheaval and a power vacuum in Scandinavia. Intertwined with history, Shippey offers his careful and detailed parsing of sagas, combining that with evidence from archaeology. Much of this seems vaguely familiar to the reader, because Vikings have been staples of popular culture for two hundred years, but the more you read about real Vikings, the less familiar it seems (although a few works of modern fiction, such as Eric Rücker Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, do manage to capture a real Viking feel).

As he moves through history, Shippey itemizes core features of the Viking mindset; then illustrates and expands on them. The single overriding feature was an absolute need to be brave. Cowardice was utterly disgraceful. Part of that was never giving in. Fighting to the last man was a baseline Viking expectation. We can understand that; it’s to some extent part of our own culture (or was, until we were pansified). Another feature, though, is harder for us to grasp—losing isn’t the same as being a loser. Vikings lost all the time; there was no disgrace in that, as long as you kept the right attitude, which was not giving in. If you had to give in physically, not giving in mentally would do. And the best way to show that was to die laughing (hence the title of the book). That laughter wasn’t ironic or self-referential, though. It was malicious.

If you laughed as your enemies killed you, because you knew how they were going to die soon too and you’d get your vengeance, that was admirable. The goal wasn’t stoicism (which was often the goal of other martial societies, particularly the American Indians); it was getting one over on your enemies, and knowing it. Or if you bided your time as a defeated slave, forming a plan to kill and mutilate your enemies, then chuckled over their bodies, that was admirable too. (It is, as Shippey says, no coincidence that our word “gloat” comes from Old Norse.) Waiting to get back at your enemies so as to do it well is high-class behavior; it’s low-class thralls that lose their tempers and strike back hastily. And if you simply can’t get vengeance, you can make a dark joke, like the saga hero who, cut terribly across the face in hand-to-hand combat onboard a ship, grabs his gold, says “The Danish woman in Bornholm won’t think it so pleasant to kiss me now,” and jumps overboard to sink beneath the waves. Being humorously nasty is also admirable, like the man who, as he is about to be decapitated after a battle, asks for one of his enemies to hold his hair back so it doesn’t get bloody—then, as the axe falls, jerks backward so the helper’s hands are cut off, and dances around, laughing and shouting “Whose hands are in my hair?!”

Being comfortable with losing continued even after death. Those warriors chosen for Valhalla were not promised eternal life or eternal happiness; they were promised a good time until Ragnarok, the final battle, whereupon all of them, and all the gods, were to lose and die permanently. In the Viking ethos, this makes sense, because you can only show that you will never give in if you can be defeated. The goal isn’t to avoid defeat, certainly not by switching sides to gain advantage. It’s to show your worth, come what may. Many have pointed out that the gods in the Iliad are, in a sense, lesser than men because their immortality makes everything they do ultimately trivial. Not so for Vikings, or their gods.

Fighting was the number one Viking activity, of course. In all the sagas, there is a definite exaltation of strongly masculine behavior, mostly fighting but wine and women as well. Vikings had a general love of constant violence, including games intended to create violent disputes among friends out of nothing. They also invariably reacted with a hair trigger to insults; and when they lost their lives, as they expected to someday, if not laughing ideally offered dying last words that were not self-pitying but were laconic, such as “bear to Silkisif and our sons my greeting; I won’t be coming.” Self-control was extremely important—showing any weak-seeming emotion or offering any reaction (other than violence or laughter) was looked down on, even if severely injured or having lost a child or wife. Vikings didn’t cry, ever. All this behavior was, collectively, drengskapr, basically a code of honor, the function of which Shippey analogizes to later European dueling, which served important functions tied to the core male need for validation and hierarchy. Its opposite, naturally, was dishonorable behavior, such as killing the defenseless, cowardice, or breaking an oath; such actions meant either a loss of face or expulsion from the community.

Despite the inherently masculine nature of drengskapr, women appear often in this book. Shippey notes that in the sagas women are “not themselves Vikings by trade, but often the most determined instigators and proponents of the heroic mindset.” The “sagas of Icelanders especially are full of dominating and aggressive women.” Numerous sagas turn on the actions of women, seeking revenge for slights or harms to them or their families, or rejecting an ambitious warrior until he achieves more fame. Old Norse even has a special verb just for women taunting men as cowards.

Beyond the sagas, as with all the peoples descended from “Germanic” barbarians, women occupied significant roles in society. This is in sharp contrast to the East, where women were kept hidden and exercised influence purely behind the scenes. Women were out and about in Viking society (and in other Germanic societies, such as the Franks, causing scandal in Outremer among Muslims during the Crusades). They ran businesses, owned property, signed contracts, and generally acted with a great degree of independence. Vikings had no harems—although Vikings made a lot of money supplying young women to Muslim harems (and some high-status Viking men kept concubines). Slaves were the Vikings’ number one cash generator, and Muslims their number one market, since Christian Europe strongly disfavored slaves, even at this point, and Scandinavia itself didn’t have the money to buy a lot of slaves.

In other words, contrary to the modern propagandistic myth, there’s no indication women as women were oppressed in Viking society (which is true for most, if not all, Western societies throughout history). As usual, relations between men and women were a constant negotiation where everyone was trying to muddle through together. In conflicts, women usually gave as good as they got, and exemplified similar courage as men. Voluntarily choosing to die, “[Brynhild] regards Sigurd as her real husband, her frumverr or ‘first man’; she means to go with him. Of course, she also had him murdered, but that does not affect her real feelings or her sense of what’s right.”

Where women appear not a single time in this book, however, is as warriors, because Viking women warriors are a total myth. Last year widespread coverage was given to a claim that the grave of a Viking woman warrior had been uncovered. Fake news, which was quickly disproven, though that was not given any coverage at all in the popular media. Viking women warriors simply didn’t exist. “Viking warrior” is a tautology; “Viking woman” is an oxymoron. Neither history nor saga mentions women as warriors. What about the famous “shieldmaidens,” you ask? A thirteenth-century Danish historian, Saxo Grammaticus, created that legend out of whole cloth in imitation of myths about the Amazons. The sole mention in any actual saga of any woman warrior is in The Saga of Hervor and Heidrek, a thirteenth-century mashup of several earlier sagas, where part of the plot revolves around a woman, Hervor, who takes up arms after her father and brothers are killed (summoning her dead father, Angantyr, from his barrow grave to give her his sword, Tyrfing). (She was the inspiration for Tolkien’s Eowyn of Rohan, depicted, like Hervor, as golden haired in golden helmet.) This is all obviously just fantasy no different than that about dwarves and dragons. Such fantasies aren’t new; people have been projecting their fantasies onto Vikings for more than a thousand years. In the ninth century A.D. the Muslim ruler of Spain, Abd al Rahman II, sent an embassy to the Vikings, led by an ambassador, nicknamed al-Ghazal (“the gazelle,” for his good looks). It’s not clear precisely where he went or whom he met, because in what he wrote he was less interested in writing useful detail, and more in telling us that the custom of the Vikings was “no woman refused any man,” and that the queen of the Vikings was infatuated with him. Al-Ghazal’s writings show, as Shippey says, “we are deep in Male Fantasy Land,” and the same is true of Hervor. (Muslims, and the Byzantines, did interact quite a bit with the Vikings; more accurate than al-Ghazal was the record of the tenth-century Ahmad Ibd Fadlan’s mission to the Rus, which forms a large part of the backstory to the movie The Thirteenth Warrior and which Shippey discusses at length, mostly to show that the Vikings were fine with sex slavery, ritual murder, and gang rape.)

Along similar lines, you often hear that the Valkyries were women warriors, a trope that shows up, for example, in modern movies based on the Marvel comic books. Shippey makes clear that they were nothing of the sort (addressing the question directly never comes up for him, any more than discussing whether the Vikings carried iPhones or used machine guns). The Valkyries were Odin’s servants, acting as harvesters, or rather recruiters, who picked which warriors would die in battle, and thus join Odin in the halls of Valhalla. They often picked the strongest men, who were brought low by seeming chance, but actually by the Valkyries or Odin himself—a way for the Vikings to explain the seeming randomness of death in battle. But the Valkyries weren’t warriors. At all. They were more like the Greek Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos; and overlap with the Norns, the Norse rough equivalent of the Fates. Nor were they aspirational figures for women in Viking society.

Silly claims about female Vikings are part of a larger problem with the corruption of everything by ideology—news, science, history. A claim that a Viking woman has been found is useful. It can be, and is, used to support idiot actions like allowing women into the military, and more generally to aid the ongoing massive propaganda campaign to pretend that not only are there no real differences between men and women, but that women can do anything that men can do, only better. (We have seen this on display in recent weeks in the blanket coverage given to the Women’s World Cup, an unimportant event that very few Americans care about, and the winning of which is equivalent to being the world’s tallest midget.) Thus, such a “discovery” is feted around the world and the “discoverer” briefly becomes an international celebrity, before returning to a promotion and permanent job security. A claim that a male Viking burial has been found is boring and gets the claimant nothing. Along similar lines, Shippey notes several attempts to feminize Viking history, such as when in 2014 the British Museum censored the translation of a runestone inscription to change phrases such as “They fared like bold men far for gold” to “They fared far for gold.” As Shippey says drily, the word men “is not favored academically.”

Fortunately, this book is not marred by any such distortions. It’s an uncut presentation of Viking behavior, straight up, no chaser. After you read it, you’ll probably be glad you weren’t around when and where the Vikings were. Still, as you order some knickknack off Amazon to give you a brief rush of consumer enjoyment, briefly beating back your ennui, you’ll probably feel some tug toward the grandeur and glory of the Viking mindset, and wonder whether modern life, lacking any transcendence, is as hollow at its core as it seems.

PDF (Typeset) Version eBook (ePub) eBook (MOBI/Kindle)

7 Comments

  1. T. Greer says

    The depiction of valkyrie as martial women far precedes Marvel Comics. It was a staple of 19th century painting, and is highly suggested in the sagas themselves. Wikipedia for once is actually useful:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_valkyrie_names

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie#Poetic_Edda

    See especially the quotations from “elgakviða Hundingsbana I.”

    Your ideology gets ahead of you in this piece, which is a shame, as you are usual in more sober form than this.

    • Charles says

      I did not say it originated with Marvel Comics; I gave that as an example. Such legends pre-date today, obviously; they can be seen in Wagner’s Ring Cycle, for example. But they are all modern tropes, since the renewal of interest in the Vikings in the seventeenth century.

      Neither of those Wikipedia articles contradicts me on Valkyries not being warriors. Shippey notes (though I did not repeat it in my review) that Valkyrie names are frequently given for aspects of battle, such as “Paralysis, Mist or Confusion, Din, Sword-Time, Spear-Shower, Shield-gnawer.” He also describes in detail the Valkyries weaving the warp and weft with intestines and heads, and so forth. Again, none of these images suggest Valkyries are warriors.

      The Poetic Edda is thirteenth century, as it happens, and not a saga itself; to what degree it imports outside concepts, as Saxo Grammaticus did, is disputed, but in any case, it does not portray women as Vikings, or women as warriors. That Valkyries are, in the Poetic Edda and the sagas, occasionally portrayed as carrying the tools of battle does not mean they are portrayed as acting as warriors, which they are not, as the Wikipedia article makes clear. Valkyries are associated with the fate of warriors; they are not warriors themselves. So, when Sigrdrífa says she “brought down” Hjalmgunnar in battle, that does not mean she fought, but that she performed the role of the Valkyrie, to decide which Vikings would lose and join Odin. Or when Sváva, King Eylimi’s daughter, “often protected him in battles,” (leaving aside the Valkyrie are not daughters of men), that means protected from untimely death, not fought on his behalf. You have to read references to words like “protect” by reference to what the function of Valkyries was, not by imposing a desired vision on them.

  2. Robert says

    In response to the comment on “homo economicus” – have you read Alchemy by Rory Sutherland? It is a very easy read, mostly delivered fo a popular audience, you might knock in out in an afternoon. But it is also a fairly good anti-systemic manifesto – I feel on an instinctive level that there is a cluster of related thinking emerging, from Taleb to James Scott, Kahneman and Tversky, and a few others, whose work emphasises an anti-systemic approach which valorises the nonrational, non-ideological approach. Of course, Sutherland is in marketing (Ogilvy), so his angle may be inevitable.

    While I’m riffing here, I feel like you might get more traction out of a political program which centres on a single concept, from which other concepts derive associatively. For example, let’s say you come from a “developing nation” which has trashed most of its institutions over the past couple of decades in populist kleptocracy. Crime is rampant, and schools are dangerous and dysfunctional. I would (and plan to some day soon) start a “Law and Order” party. It’s a concept even the most uneducated person understands, it allows one to borrow as many policies from “left” and “right” as one sees fit, and fosters good manners, civilised behaviour, safety and security, high standards and respect for the law.

    This is a signalling approach, that is, you find a concept which denotes a policy program, but carries as many of the desired connotations as possible. Rather than work out a reasoned, thoroughgoing doctrine, which can be manipulated, misunderstood, and (because of its complexity) go wrong or only be partially implemented, the guiding concept approach (so long as you understand how the public associates things) allows participants and public observers to build upon their own understanding. It also allows enormous flexibility, which is necessary in politics. Rigid, doctrinaire approaches come with downsides.

    I have no idea if this is helpful to you, or to what extent your (as yet unpublished) complete thoughts on “foundationalism” are, but I hope that this is a useful idea.

    • Charles says

      I had not heard of Alchemy, but it looks great—I have ordered a copy.

      A single organizing concept has some value, certainly. And the example of “law and order” is plausible, or rather, it’s a plausible place to start. The problem we face is two-fold. First, nearly every important aspect of our society has severe problems, and thus a single policy, if it is an actual policy (“do this”) will not suffice. Second, the source of those problems is singular—liberalism, the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Ross Douthat put it best, when talking about how conservatives lack a unifying vision: “Liberals, on the other hand, dream the same dream and envision the same destination, even if they disagree on exactly how to get there. It’s the dream of Thomas Friedman as well as Karl Marx, as old as Babel and as young as the South Korean cloners. It whispered to us in Eden, and it whispers to us now: ye shall be as gods. And no conservative dream, in the 400 years from Francis Bacon until now, has proven strong enough to stand in its way.”

      It is that dream that must end, for it is destructive and man cannot flourish under it. Thus, the core of Foundationalism is that it opposes liberalism, and wishes its destruction. Only when it is wholly discredited is a new thing possible, for if not, the serpent will whisper in men’s ears forever.

      But Foundationalism is not, beyond that, a “rigid, doctrinaire approach.” It can’t be, for precisely the reasons you state. That would make it an ideology, and self-contained system that offers all the answers, no matter the inputs. Foundationlism’s “pillars” are therefore primarily meant to be reflections of reality, not a new creation, and they are meant to be organic. So, for example, although I have not worked it out fully, another pillar is a wholesale revision of sex roles, to a structure that reflects reality, rather than some set of political goals or political myths. Similarly, the insistence on Space as critical to human flourishing for modern Man reflects an underlying reality about what man needs.

      “Law and order” is therefore too specific in this context. Yes, there will be law and order, but that will result from a combination of the political structures and the reborn virtue of the populace. I’m not opposed to a “Law and Order” party, but it’s just a band-aid without far greater structural change, and unnecessary if that structural change is accomplished.

      Which leaves the question–how is that structural change to be accomplished? Not easily, and not without some external fracture. But there will be more on this topic later.

  3. Pingback: ZeroGov | Quarantine Dryfire and Other COVID19 Ramblings by John Meyers

  4. John C. McGee says

    Viking Stories is an interesting study on YouTube. He proposes that the Viking Age was a response to the “conversion by sword” used by Charlemagne and particularly the massacre of the Saxons. The Vikings attacked Lindisfarne as an affront to Christianity and the immense loot they carried away set off the wholesale subsequent sacking.

    The current Ukraine war is mired in the Viking Rus destroying the Jewish Khazarian empire and the repercussions to this day over ascendency.

    • Charles Haywood says

      Interesting. I would have to look into Viking chronology to have any opinion.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *