The word Easter as used in the Roman (as opposed to Greek Orthodox) tradition, for example, derives from the Old English Eostre, the month dedicated to the Germanic goddess of that name – herself an ancient Indo-European goddess of dawn who, given the spring date associated with her, may well have been a fertility goddess. The date chosen for Christmas (25 December) conveniently coincided with the date of the winter solstice and the rather drunken Roman festivities of Saturnalia that celebrated the god Saturn at this point in the year. It seems that the early Christian Church adopted a number of existing pagan festivals for their major celebrations, perhaps to distract their new converts from their previous religious adherences. The point is – and this is something I shall come back to later – new forms of religion don’t usually sweep away older forms, but rather are grafted onto them precisely because the older forms are so deeply engrained into people’s psyche that they are difficult to erase.
Rex Anglorum et Saxonum
Alfred would spend the remainder of his reign crafting that nation into something new – an inclusive national identity, expressed most obviously in the formulation of an unprecedented royal style. No longer would Alfred be described, like his predecessors, only as rex Westsaxonum or rex Occidentalium Saxonum (‘king of the West Saxons’); instead, from the 880s onward, he would increasingly be known instead as rex Anglorum et Saxonum, or, as Asser has it, Ælfred Angul-Saxonum rex: ‘Alfred, king of the Anglo-Saxons’.
Alfred’in Belgelerde Siyasi Propagandası
The subtle disparagement of their Mercian neighbours that we can perceive in the West Saxon sources served Alfred’s political ends. By the latter part of his reign, when these documents were compiled, Alfred was increasingly concerned with claiming a hegemony than extended far beyond Wessex. His own military reputation (which was patchy at best before the late 870s) was bolstered by having his contemporary monarchs painted as battle-shirking weaklings. More importantly, by painting the last independent kings of Mercia as weak, ineffective and lacking credibility, the claims of Alfred and those of his offspring to rule in Mercia appeared more legitimate than they otherwise might have done.
St Edmund Kültünün Doğuşu
The Passio was, transparently, a carefully crafted piece of promotional literature – a puff piece for an ineffective king, elevated to sainthood on account of his death at the hands of an ungodly horde. The cult of St Edmund developed in East Anglia remarkably quickly after his death, but it was Abbo’s writings that really got it off the ground. Shortly after it was written it was translated into Old English (in a mercifully abridged – and far more elegant – form) by the prolific writer and abbot of Cerne, Ælfric of Eynsham. With new-found interest beyond East Anglia, and a compelling myth with which to sell it, the cult grew during the latter half of the tenth century and into the eleventh. By the reign of Cnut, the shrine of the saint-king was receiving significant investment and royal patronage. Enthusiasm for the saintly Edmund continued beyond the Norman Conquest and grew throughout the Middle Ages: Edward I’s younger brother (1245–96) was named after him, and St Edmund also appears on the Wilton diptych as a patron and guardian of the angel-faced Richard II (r. 1377–99), alongside John the Baptist and Edward the Confessor. Although his prominence declined after the adoption of St George as the patron of Edward III’s Order of the Garter in 1348, Edmund’s tomb-shrine ceased to be a major place of pilgrimage only when it was destroyed in 1539 during the reign of Henry VIII. Nevertheless, the town and the abbey which housed it still bear his name – Bury St Edmunds: the burh (‘stronghold’) of St Edmund.
Kent’in Wessex’e Enjekte Edilmesi
It had been customary since the reign of Ecgberht for kings of Kent to be members of the West Saxon royal house, sometimes unifying the crowns of Wessex and Kent in the person of a single individual, and sometimes delegating authority to a younger son or brother. By Alfred’s reign, this practice was beginning to fizzle out, royal power in Kent becoming part of the standard portfolio of the West Saxon king.
Vikinglerin Krallığa Geçişiyle Ticaretin Güvenleşmesi
with the formation of real kingdoms in Scandinavia, the new kings had enough power to begin to control the currency in their territories. Because this is also the time when slow, bulk-carrying cargo ships appear, suggesting that the seas were safe enough that it no longer was as necessary to transport trade goods in warships full of warriors, we might guess that they were also able to control violence, at least to some degree.
İskandinavya’nın Kendi Archbishoplığına Kavuşması
The Scandinavian Church was subordained to the German archbishop in Hamburg-Bremen, which was a thorn in the side of Scandinavian rulers, since they might thus be thought of as subjects of the German emperor. They preferred a church independent of foreign powers and worked with the pope to accomplish this. The many schisms between the pope and the German emperor (often supported by the archbishop in Bremen) in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries helped their cause, and Pope Paschal II promoted the bishop of Lund in Denmark to archbishop in 1103. The Scandinavian Church had thus come of age and become independent of Hamburg-Bremen.
Viking Sagalarında Hristiyan Etkisi
A Christian himself, Snorri lived in a country that had been Christian for a couple of centuries. He would never have met any pagans, and his portrayal of paganism is the product of a scholar’s efforts to interpret books in his study. His writings are valuable because he had access to many books and stories that are now lost to us, but he purveys distorted images of pagan beliefs. We should, for example, not be surprised that we can trace Christian influences in the stories he tells. This Christian coloring might come from Snorri himself, who may have more or less consciously introduced Christian themes and ideas into his book, or it might have come into paganism while it was still a living tradition. Before Scandinavians definitively became Christian around the year 1000, their paganism did not live in isolation from the Christian parts of Europe. Merchants, mercenaries, and raiding Vikings traveled in Christian Europe and would have picked up ideas and ideals there, with or without becoming outright Christians. The story of Thor’s fishing expedition is, for example, clearly influenced by Christian myths and ideas. A god fighting a serpent living in the ocean is paralleled in stories about Christ catching the great sea monster Leviathan. A plethora of legends arose around the question posed in Job 40:20: “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?”
Vikinglerde Boy Ortalaması
A reason to think that the Viking Age was not a period of relative health with low child mortality is that those who lived to an adult age were not as tall as people in previous and later periods. A person’s adult height depends partially on the quality of the nutrition she received as a child. In the Fjälkinge grave field, adult males were 160–185 centimeters tall while women measured 151–171 centimeters. Estrid, 165–170 centimeters, was thus a little taller than average. The average height of Viking Age skeletons found in Denmark is 171 for men and 158 centimeters for women. That is shorter than for the previous period (175 and 162, respectively) and for the following high and late Middle Ages (173 and 160).
Vikinglerde Gift Geleneğinin Evrimi
Chieftains gave gifts and persuaded warriors to follow them. Together with their warriors, they sailed and rowed to the European continent and to the British Isles to raid and plunder, so as to be able to give more gifts. Some of them were better at their jobs or had more luck than others, who were knocked out of competition, so over time there were fewer and fewer chieftains with larger and larger followings. We discern a hint of this process when the European writers who chronicled the Viking raids on Europe tell us that the raiding parties became ever larger and larger. The disappearance of chieftains’ halls in Scandinavia, which we can study through archeological surveys, tells the same story from a different perspective.21 The chieftains became fewer and fewer, meaning that the remaining ones each had more power. The distinctions among chieftains, petty kings, and kings are not very well defined, but at some point during the Viking Age, it becomes appropriate to talk about kings rather than chieftains. These kings met new and different challenges from those faced by their chieftain forebears. Their power over people extended so far that they could no longer maintain the kind of personal friendships that the gift economy of previous centuries promoted. Instead, they needed military and administrative structures to run what increasingly looked like older European kingdoms. The Church was the best organized institution in Europe at the time, and kings received help from clerics to build up their royal administration. Chieftaincy based on charisma and friendships yielded to organized and administrative kingship, although for a long time both “systems” existed in parallel.