Dear Diary: Vikingr
That’s not a misspelling! It’s the Scandinavian for “pirate.” I have always wondered what kind of word “viking” is, and what it means — and now I do, thanks to Chris Wickham!
In addition to providing a more convincing explanation of the “decline and fall” of the Roman Empire than I’d have thought possible (after all the murky ones that I’ve read), Mr Wickham has a way with the scant relicts of Early Medieval Europe that maybe just as deformed by current outlooks as history at any time is likely to be, it is a way that makes sense. Consider his take on the remains of the Northumbrian palace complex at Yeavering:
We are not so far from [Hadrian’s] wall here, and Roman material culture was thus at least physically available to the Bernicians [as the Northumbrians were known]; but for Anglo-Saxons living north of the Roman province of Britannia deliberately to adopt a Roman-influenced construction for something as emblematically Anglo-Saxon as a public assembly point sheds considerable light on royal aspirations, particularly because it seems to predate Christianization, which would make Roman influences more obviously culturally attractive. Indeed, this may go some way to explaining the readiness of Anglo-Saxon rulers to be converted relatively quickly.
In many cases, as here, Mr Wickham simply turns conventional wisdom around, and we see that the history that we were brought up on was the history of the Nineteenth Century, applied to earlier eras.
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I’ve been reading The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000, with the greatest interest. Chris Wickham is a gifted writer who can make almost anything seem interesting; if he’s hard to follow at times, it’s only because one doesn’t have his ready grasp of the difference tetween BCE 500 and BCE 700. To must of us, there’s no difference at all; nor is there much more difference between the dates that bracket Mr Wickham’s period. At the level of simple visualization, most educated people can distinguish the look of the Reformation from that of the Enlightenment (even if they can’t recite any specific dates), because they have some traction on what happened between 1500 and 1750 What’s dark about the Dark Ages is our blanketing ignorance of them.
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When Kathleen travels, I never make promises to gods that I don’t believe in to be a better person in this or that way if she is returned safely to me. I’m not wired for that (which may explain why I don’t believe in gods). Instead, I think of all the things that I won’t do anymore if she doesn’t come home. Kathleen has always returned, so far, without my having become a better person; but I’m quite sure that I should be a worse one without her. Perhaps that’s a false prophecy, but I have no desire to put it to the test.
This time, she returned with her mother’s jewelry. Laid out on a length of white cloth, it looked like something that might have been dug up at Yeavering — not in style, of course, but in its slightness. Except for the most extravagant regalia, women’s jewelry is, for obvious reasons, normally small, and especially small-looking when arrayed on a cloth. The lovely brooches had the vulnerability of tiny birds. The pearls, although entirely correct, had a pagan opulence that seemed vaguely archeological. But the rings — and what is more regal and symbolic than a ring? — were a puzzle.
I remember my mother-in-law as a wearer of power rings. Not the bizarre extravaganzas that my own mother wore on her very long fingers, but quietly serious jewelry that looked exactly as valuable as it was — and no more. (Although an Irish Catholic from Long Island, my mother-in-law was a genuine tai tai.) But the power was evidently in my mother-in-law, not in the stones. Aside from a handsome knob of enamel and gold, none of the rings was at all impressive on Kathleen’s hand.
How can we be surprised, then, that the imperial self-confidence of Hadrian’s time, once shaken off, took fifteen hundred years to retrouver?