THE VIKINGS OF WESTERN CHRISTENDOM.* THE writer of this book
seems inclined to take a too modest view of its historical value. He admits obligations to Pro- fessor Steenstrup's Normannerne, and yet if there ever was a truly and honestly original work, this is one. Then, simply because he had at first chosen The Viking Age as the designa- tion of his volume, and saw Mr. Du Chailla's work announced with the same title, he must needs delay the publication of his own, although it was ready, until he discovered that "the subject-matter of the two books lay wholly apart." One is not at all reminded of Du Chaffin, after one has read a few pages of Mr. Keary's book and mastered his object. One is reminded, however, of some of the most fascinating pages in Gibbon. If only Mr. Keary had been gifted with such a style as Gibbon's, what a book might he not have written on the Rise, Decline, and Fall—or at least Diffusion and Absorption—of the Western Vikings, in the period which is covered by the century between A.D. 789 and 888! But, truth to tell, Mr. Keary, although obviously a scholar as well as a painstaking historical investigator, is not a master of style,—at all events, in the nineteenth-century sense. Occasionally he indulges in a" smart" but hackneyed modern phrase, as when he tells us (p.197) :—" Harold turned • The Minos of Western Christendom, A.D. 789 to A.D. 888, By C. F. Hoary, M.A. London T. Fisher Unwin. 1681.
this time towards the Franks, and sent to pray for the assistance of the Frank Emperor; and Lewis, who had just mounted the throne, embraced this occasion for a spirited foreign policy,'—rather, we may believe, with an eye to religious than to political interests." But aberrations of this kind on Mr. Keary's part are remarkably few. He is at his best when he writes simply, directly, and almost school- boyishly, as when he says of Lewis the Pions :—
"Lewis was in these days a great reader of the Latin classics : he gave up profane studies when he became more serious in later life. He had, in truth, had the best education that 'money could buy,' or rather, such as no money could have bought; for his tutor was William, Count of Toulouse or of Orange, a hero and saint, whom priests and people conspired to honour. To the one he was St. William of Toulouse ; to the other he was Guillaume an Courtn-nez, Guillaume Firebras, about whom and whose kin they sang in after-years their five-and-twenty Chansons de Geste. Lewis's familiarity with literature, Latin literature, must have pleased his Latin subjects. Charles, his father, had reverence enough for anything, but he was an opsimathes, a 'late learner ; ' and, hard as he worked in his hours of leisure, had never time to make any great progress—never quite learnt to write, for example."
It would be difficult to pack into a short paragraph more information put more lucidly—or less epigrammatically.
The first chapters of this volume, treating of heathen Germany, of its creed, and of Christendom at the time when the " barbarians " made their first attack upon the Roman world, are interesting, informing, and even necessary, although they are a trifle too long. Mr. Keary dwells almost lovingly on his own picture of the Irish monk, or Colu.mban, "in his narrow hut, looking out upon the eternal seas," and of his art work :—
"The Irish art work is peculiar; its marked characteristics are the elaborate interlaced patterns which seem almost to defy human ingenuity to carry out their twists and windings. When you scrutinise them closely, you find, moreover, that these patterns are made up of fantastic animals. It is a peculiarity which runs through Irish metal work and illumination alike, and is even imitated in a very inappropriate fashion on Irish stone carvings These interlaced patterns are probably derived in the first instance from the wattling of twigs or reeds — and so with one hand they reach back to prehistoric art in which wattling or platting was one of the earliest and most important industries. But, on the other hand, this twisted scroll-work is the parent of the art, which is characteristically Scandinavian. It was imported by the Vikings into the North, and has remained implanted in the Scandinavian countries up to the present day, though it has been abandoned elsewhere."
But although Mr. Keary is in his element when he is making a point of this kind, it is not till we reach the period of
Charlemagne and his struggle with the Saxons, that he settles down to his proper work, and that we come across the Vikings, at least in force. The great Viking move- ment may, indeed, be said to date from the great disaster to the Frankish arms at the Battle of Roncesvalles in 778. The Saxons were not in alliance with the Saracens, against whom the expedition was led, the rear-guard of which, under Roland, met with such a tragic fate in the passes of the Pyrenees. They may not even have heard of the disaster, although this is by no means certain. But it is beyond doubt that it was the sudden return of Charles from Spain to France to meet a Saxon raid that led to the defeat of Charles, and that after Roncesvalles, the barbarians became bolder than ever. The Saxon War lasted in all from A.D.
772 to 804, and has truly been described as Charlemagne's life-work. In a sense, he accomplished that work. , He slaughtered the Saxons by thousands ; he induced several
of their chiefs, notably Widukind and Abbio, to become Christians; and, after a fashion, he " settled " their country. But did he not practically compel the worst of his enemies—
and the enemies of Christendom—who were behind rather than intermingled with the Saxons, to take to the sea, and
seek lands beyond it ? At all events, it was on a summer day in 789,- fifteen years before the close of the Saxon War, that three Danish " keels " put into a Dorsetshire harbour, and that their piratical crews killed the poor Port-
Reeve who civilly asked them for the usual port-dues. Charle- magne knew where the real danger to Europe was to be found. Had he conquered Jutland, he might have destroyed the pirates in their lairs, and there might have been no furor Normannorum. But he died in 814, and after him came the deluge, in the shape of nearly a century of Viking raids.
The story of the Danish-Norse attacks during this century on the Continent and the British islands, beginning in the Latter case with wild descents on monasteries of the type of Lindisfarne and Iona, is a tolerably familiar one. Mr. 1Ceary has but little that is positively fresh to say about the chain of events which placed Canute on the throne of England, or of the pusillanimity and jealousies of the successors of Charlemagne, which very nearly placed Paris in the hands of the Vikings. Mr. Keary has, however, pointed out, as no previous writer has done, that if there were not two distinct Viking septs or races, there were two Viking spirits, the commercial and the political. The commercial spirit was perhaps best exhibited in the establishment of that Norse kingdom over one-half of Ireland, by which Thorgisl anticipated by half-a-century the course of Viking conquest in other countries. The Norse Vikings who followed Thorgial and gave a beginning to Dublin—the Blackpool of Ireland—were traders quite as much as conquerors. A year or two ago, the grave of a Viking was discovered in the West Hebrides. He had been interred in his boat, and, in the usual way, with his sword, spear, battle-axe, and horse, but along with his military accoutrements was found a pair of scales. He was, therefore, a merchant as well as a warrior. Mr. Keary also emphasises the fact that it was the Norse Kings of Dublin who about 1000 introduced the first native coinage into Ireland. On the other hand, the Danish Vikings who played such an important part on the Continent, and who are identified with the latest and greatest invasions of England, aimed at political aggrandisement, and were colonisers rather than traders. Mr. Keary is probably correct in thinking that the Dane 3 who invaded Germany in 881-82 under Godfrey, and who made the attack on Paris in 885-87 under Siegfried, from which they were not driven but bought off, "were either the same men, or were in close relations with the same men who had for years been engaged in a great effort to conquer England." The comprehensive ambitions of the Danish Vikings were not realised any more than was the dream of the Odin-worshipper, who looked forward to the suppression of Christianity and the establishment of a great confederation of heathen nations in the North of Europe. It was a Norse adventurer with comparatively limited designs like Rolf, that succeeded in carving a kingdom for himself out of the ancient Carlovingian Empire. The Vikings did not conquer Christianity; they were conquered by it. They became an clement—bat not the dominant political element—in Europe. But have they not contributed to the Anglo-Saxon blood that strain of daring, restlessness, heroism, which means patriotism and independence at home, and "expansion" abroad P The Vikings did not conquer Europe. -Yet who but they—through their descendants—colonised America and Australia, and conquered India P
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