Denmark and Norway, and Norwegians certainly identifiable thus, only enter
English chronicling in the Second Viking Age. Denmark (Old English Denemearce) is
found from 1005 in ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’. Norway (Norwege) makes its first
appearance in 1028 , Normen means Norwegians in 1049 D and 1066 CD, and in 1066 DE
Haraldr is se Norrena cyng (E) and Óláfr Haraldsson is þæs Norna cynges suna (D). We may
suspect, on the back of all this, that the use of denisc (from the 990 s) and of Dene (from
1018 DE) became more geographically and politically (and perhaps ethnically) precise
in the context of the creation of the historical Scandinavian kingdoms. The Swedes have
a single walk-on part in ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’ for their resistance to Knútr
(Cnut; 1025 E). To that era and its historiography in Insular chronicling we shall return.
I have written at length elsewhere about the historiographical problems created by
national compartmentalisation of the history of the Viking Age (Dumville 2002 c). In
spite of various scholars’ determined efforts, this remains a problem in the Insular world,
in continental Europe and in Scandinavia. It cannot be said too often that vikings were
not respecters of boundaries, whether mental or geographical or political, and certainly
not of modern categories. Vikings must be followed and studied wherever they went.
The historian’s principal difficulty in dealing with vikings has been that the sources
from one genre or area or language may give a very different impression of their
activities from those derived from another. In spite of the unceasing flow of generalising
(and usually undocumented) books about vikings as a whole, scholars have emerged who
have cautioned against any kind of generalising approach. And yet it is arguable that to
avoid generalising hypothesis on principle is unnecessarily to become the prisoner of the
patchy distribution of partial sources. To take a simple contrast, we learn from English
chronicles about vikings’ roles in high politics; but from more abundant, if more
laconic, Gaelic chronicling we learn (above all) of numerous attacks on Irish churches.
Yet if we were to deduce that vikings in England were interested only in conquest and
settlement and left the Church alone, while vikings in Ireland were more interested in
plunder, we should undoubtedly have gained a severely distorted view of Insular history
in the Viking Age. In other words, where historians, in a mood of cheerful positivism,
have deduced themes from their national chronicle-record they have often seen only a
fragment of the picture even of their own territory. It is arguable therefore that an
infusion of themes by the historian into the chronicle-record will provide valuable tests
of that evidence.
We can, of course, see common themes in different categories or groupings of sources.
If we ask the extant chronicles what it was like to have vikings as visitors or neighbours,
some shared experiences emerge across the boundaries between the several ethnic groups
of the Insular world. But there are restraints: we learn nothing about northernmost
Britain or the extreme west and south of Ireland, for example. That vikings had nothing
to do with these areas is a manifestly nonsensical hypothesis (on Ireland, see Sheehan
et al. 2001 ). For approximately a half-century after the first-recorded raids vikings
remain anonymous: in effect, the encounters took place at the point of a weapon, with
exchanges of name unlikely; the pre-existing conventions in all divisions of Insular
chronicling were to name the leaders and groups participating in recorded armed
activities, and long-standing opponents would be aware of each other’s identities.
Nameable leaders of vikings emerge in Irish, English and Welsh chronicles over a period
of half a century from the middle of the ninth: at 837 in ‘The Annals of Ulster’
(Mac Airt and Mac Niocaill 1983 : 294 – 5 ; cf. Downham 2006 : 54 ); at 871 in ‘The
–– chapter 26: Vikings in Insular chronicling––