Historical Setting: The Great Skellig, 924 C.E.
The abbot and I are considering the changing nature of Viking attacks.
“So,” I ask, “They chose to raid this place, as hard to approach as it is, simply to take the abbot, prisoner? No offense, but an abbot would hardly make a marketable slave.”
“The Danes aren’t here just to steal the bounty and scurry back to the Northlands to survive a winter with a hoard of riches, Laz. This is the flexing of the political power. It is not like the old times,” Abbot Mactyre says, reminding me of my lost century. “Now the Danish attacks have changed from plundering trade items, to terrorizing just for the sake of power.”
“So, you think the Norsemen have their ambitions set on ruling these lands?”
“I know it. See what they’re doing? They’ve taken power everywhere while you were awash in the sea. On my own homeland of Éire there is a great trading center for the Danes now, Dublin. I’ve been there myself. Everyone around that trading center has changed from raising cattle to raising sheep. Irish farmers trade in wool and fleece with all the great kingdoms of the world. The Danes come with their whole families, to build their houses.” [Footnote]
“You are saying that Vikings have become neighbors now?”
“Neighbors? They are Pagans taking young Christian women for wives, and giving us in return all their carved images of snakes and monsters, trimmings for everything — ships, tools, monuments — even crosses. Everything Viking is filled with snakes and sea monsters.”
“Oh, come now. They aren’t to blame for the snakes. Before the attack at Lindisfarne that Gospel, which I know well, was already filled with edges and even whole pages of snakes and sea monsters. Snakes and monsters are the cusp between Christian and Pagan we share with the Norsemen and the Irish all the same before any were Christian.”
“I know, I know, even the great book of Kells, from the scribes of Iona has snakes. Of course, I know the Danes didn’t really bring snakes to Éire. The snakes were already here with the Pagens, and t’was St. Patrick drove off the Pagan ways when he gave us Christianity. And now the Vikings brought it back.”
“I would think if the Norsemen were making their settlements in these places they would have chosen England to make their homes, closer to their old homeland and already leaning more Pagan.”
“And so, they have.”
[Footnote]https://www.museum.ie/en-ie/collections-research/irish-antiquities-division-collections/collections-list-(1)/viking/the-viking-age-in-Éire
(Continues tomorrow)
