At the end of the Second World War, a thirteen-year-old boy was taking a rather deeper interest than the average teenager in the strange and exotic Viking stone carvings housed in the lych-gate of Kirk Michael churchyard in the Isle of Man. It seems that destiny was at work in transforming this youthful curiosity into one of the world’s leading scholars of the Viking Age, and a future Director of the British Museum.
Sir David Wilson gained his initial inspiration for his career in archaeological scholarship from this early raw exposure to the magic of Viking-Age carvings in the Isle of Man, where they are still related to the traditional landscape from which they were drawn, both geologically and culturally. He has retained these strong links throughout his subsequent career, and when he retired from the British Museum in 1991, he came back to live near the source of his original inspiration. As he says in the preface to his new book, ‘I now wish to repay my debt to the island for delivering me into my life’s academic path’.
However, The Vikings in the Isle of Man is not simply the payment of a local debt of gratitude. It provides a major contribution to the study of the Vikings, through the microcosm of a landscape which has produced some of the most significant evidence for the subject. Having been a leading scholar in the subject of Anglo-Saxon and Viking studies for more than fifty years, we must respect Wilson’s judgement that ‘the Isle of Man is one of the most important sources for the history of the Viking settlement in the West (providing) a unique testimony to the spirit of the Scandinavian expansion at this period’.
Hitherto, the Isle of Man evidence has been summarized in conference and congress proceedings, such as that from the Viking Congress in 1981, and in David Wilson’s own lecture ‘The Viking Age in the Isle of Man’ given in Odense in 1974 when he was Professor of the Department of Scandinavian Studies, University College London. This new book provides an extended and full statement of the Manx evidence. Originally conceived as a chapter for an ongoing project developing a new five-volume history of the Isle of Man, it is fortunate that the author’s characteristic impatience with publication delay has led him so helpfully to extend his review of the evidence and to draw together his conclusions as to its significance in this new form. By enhancing the 130 pages of description and interpretation with the addition of eleven pages of sources, this book should certainly ensure that both scholars and students of the future will have easy access to this important part of the story.
In a methodical, but readable way, which Wilson himself describes as ‘a narrative for a general audience’, he examines the evidence of the Vikings in the Isle of Man from their arrival towards the end of the ninth century through to the beginning of the eleventh century, and provides a very useful final assessment of the Viking legacy which still pervades aspects of the Isle of Man’s political system and place-names.
Having provided the international and regional background, the book presents the topographical and historical setting. The author then examines the period thematically from the earliest Vikings in Man, through the evidence of their culture as new pagan arrivals subjugating the local Celtic community to their relatively quick conversion to Christianity, and the dramatic change of burial practices and material cultural remains that resulted. Once a stable accommodation had been reached between the incomers and the local inhabitants (evidenced by the carved inscription of both Celtic and Viking names on one of the famous stone crosses), a pattern of peaceful settlement is described.
Rather less clear evidence exists for the chapter on ‘Economy, Politics and the Church’, as the Isle of Man has such a paucity of written evidence from the period. This is surprising when, as Wilson notes, in terms of international trade in the Viking world, ‘the Irish Sea was in effect a Viking sea for much of the tenth and eleventh centuries’. Man was at the centre of the Kingdom of Man and the Isles, which included the western Isles of Scotland – the sudreyjar – the southern Isles of navigation and trade, as seen from Norway, extending from the Isles of Man to Lewis.
The pagan Viking burials in Man are spectacular. That at Ballateare, in the north of the island, provided the remarkable evidence of a warrior’s burial, with his weapons ritually broken. He was accompanied into the next world by one of his female entourage, sacrificed by the blow of a weapon across her skull. The neat execution, like the slice from the top of a breakfast egg, is clearly illustrated in the surviving skull which, with the majority of the other archaeological finds mentioned in the book, is safely housed and well displayed by Manx National Heritage in the Manx Museum in Douglas. As Wilson comments: ‘Few Viking burial mounds anywhere have revealed so much about the pagan ceremony surrounding the death of a man’.
The boat burial at Balladoole is no less spectacular, providing clear evidence of how the early Vikings imposed their pagan burial customs on the hallowed sites of the native Celtic Christian inhabitants. The grave revealed exotic riding equipment, such as stirrups, together with intricately worked harness from the man’s horse: dramatic evidence of one of the island’s first ‘Viking land-takers’. A thorough review of all the other pagan and mound burials builds up the picture of these earliest Vikings in Man, who were aggressively placing their burial monuments in the landscape, symbolizing their power and status to the locals.
However, by the mid-tenth century, the Vikings had settled and become Christian, perhaps within a generation, and inter-marriage with the local Celts took place. With this new cultural change came the most dramatic and internationally significant evidence for the Viking Age from the Isle of Man – the Manx Crosses. Although most of the memorials were raised by men, for men, there are inscriptions commemorating seven women – one foster-mother, one daughter and five wives.
The corpus of memorial crosses and fragments, primarily carved in great detail in slabs of the local soft Manx slate-stone, provides some of the earliest physical evidence of the conversion to Christianity in the Scandinavian world. There are around one hundred sculpted stones from the Viking Age, about half of which have inscriptions. They show that the artists in the Isle of Man, some of whom were immodest enough to name themselves in stone, were familiar and skilled in relation to the tenth-century artistic culture of Norway, including the Norse runic alphabet. There are more than thirty runic inscriptions in the Manx corpus, compared with only forty from Norway and just one from Ireland. As Wilson states: ‘the concentration of a large body of memorial sculpture in such a limited geographical area provides a unique insight into the process of conversion to Christianity of a pagan Viking population’. The rich variety of artistic designs and animal figures is described in detail, but the key piece is Thorwald’s Cross, rightly used on the front cover of the book. It depicts on one side Odin, with his raven, battling with the wolf Fenrir at the last battle of Ragnarok, while the other side of the stone shows a belted figure, holding high the Christian cross, and treading on the serpent – a clear reference in one piece to the change from the old pagan world to the new world of Christianity.
The third major source of evidence is that of Viking hoards discovered in Man. Over twenty-six finds have been made so far, mostly consisting of dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of silver coins, armlets and ingots. For interpretation of these, Wilson enlists the opinion of the leading expert, James Graham-Campbell, who has made a particular study of the Manx material. The powerful microcosm of information available in the Isle of Man is highlighted by Graham-Campbell when he observes that ‘the Ballaquayle hoard forms a classic example of a mixed Viking-Age silver hoard containing all four diagnostic elements in combination: coins, ingots, complete ornaments and hack silver’. However, the discovery within another hoard from Kirk Michael of ‘Hiberno-Manx’ coins provides evidence of a specific Manx mint dating from c 1025 to 1065. The more recent finds of three gold rings in the west of the island prove that the Manx soil has not yet finished revealing its insights into this rich period of Viking activity.
Wilson concludes his review of this outstanding Viking legacy with a brief survey of the language evidence, primarily in the place- names, which are still numerous in the island, and the political traditions, which are based on the longest continuous parliamentary assembly in the world, Tynwald. One of the most identifiable remaining ‘thing’ sites established by the Vikings in Europe, Tynwald (meaning ‘assembly field’) is still the name of the Manx national parliament, and also the physical site of its annual open-air assembly, where the new laws of the land are promulgated each midsummer’s day in Manx and English, almost always in the presence of dignitaries from Norway! As the author observes, although there is a strong body of tangible evidence in terms of the visible remains, ‘it is the intangibles – the language, law, church and constitution – that positively confirm the importance of the Norse heritage of the Isle of Man’.
Throughout the book, Wilson succinctly manages to provide a comprehensive narrative survey across the range of evidence, and allows himself the very useful addition of a summary conclusion at the end of each section, which, in accord with his announced intention, is a useful synthesis of each subject area for the general reader. The extensive sources quoted are up to date and include some recent and forthcoming publications, both local and more general. The full bibliography included at the end will be extremely useful for students who might otherwise have missed some of the vital links which Wilson makes between the Manx evidence and the wider body of published work on Viking history. However, as might have been expected from this experienced writer, the extensive inclusion of footnotes on almost every page reveals the book’s further value and attraction to a more academic readership.
Wilson has been generous in acknowledging and referencing the ideas and work of other researchers, amply demonstrating the absorption of new ideas and information during the genesis of the book he describes in his Preface. It is useful to everyone now seeking to understand the Vikings in the Isle of Man that the author’s remit has strayed beyond the strictly archaeological and historical into art history, place-names, epigraphy, systems of land division, political structures and legal frameworks, in order better to explain the Viking legacy that still characterizes the island.
There are a few typographic errors, most irritatingly of Manx place-names, which should have been proofed out by a knowledgeable, perhaps local, editor. Some of the illustrations are unhelpfully placed in relation to the text that describes them. But these are small criticisms of an otherwise excellent quality of production by Aarhus University Press. David Wilson has succeeded admirably in the primary task of describing and justifying the importance of the Manx Viking legacy to the study of the subject as a whole. Despite his long-held affinity with the Isle of Man, on this evidence, we cannot doubt the validity of his assertion that ‘The Isle of Man provides the most diverse assemblage of Viking-Age archaeology in Britain’.
