Decapitated Vikings

Yeah, saw this on the BBC news site yesterday, quite fascinating.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/8563377.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/8563719.stm

-Derek

It was in the headline internet news here in the US yesterday. Very interesting. Puma

angeliz2k said:

The bodies of 51 young Vikings were found while digging was being done for a future Olympic site in Weymouth, England. I saw this reported first in the Metro.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/science/03/12/viking.olympics/index.html?hpt=P1

Apparently, these Vikings were executed by the resident Anglo-Saxons using swords, then thrown into a mass grave. It must have been a pretty grizzly scene. But frankly, I don't think you can blame the Saxons...

This could be the basis of a VERY interesting story!

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I think I can.

Sadly, Vikings suffer from centuries of bad PR. Britain was a screwed up place at that time, with the Saxons and Danes and Norse each trying to gain a foothold. The common misconception about Vikings is that they lived for rape and pillage. The fact of the matter is, almost all of their raids were on Abbeys and Monastic institutions. They were just as 'civilized' as any other society at that time, with poetry, art, etc.

It is a fascinating story and horrific. It must've been a terrible way to die.

So are they going to abandon building that road now or are they going to continue desecrating that site?

They damaged religious institutions.

The Saxons weren't exactly invited into Britain either.

The Saxons weren't exactly invited into Britain either.

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Unless you believe in Vortigern's Invitation... Actually, I love framing my English history classes by invasions. Start with the Romans, end with the Normans. Start with the Normans, end with the Dutch. Etc, etc.

If I'm not misremembering, there've been a couple of new Anglo-Saxon and Viking discoveries in the past 3-4 years. It's one of the cool things about England - it has layers of history that are constantly being rediscovered.

The down-side of that is life has to go on... if they made every historical site (or even just those with bodies) off-limits to future development there would hardly be any island left. E.g. Guildhall (itself a historical monument) sitting on top of the Roman amphitheatre. Or, on the other side of the Pond, a house near to where I used to live was being renovated and they discovered the skeleton of a Revolutionary war soldier. Does that mean no one can ever live in that house again?

Kitti said:

Unless you believe in Vortigern's Invitation... Actually, I love framing my English history classes by invasions. Start with the Romans, end with the Normans. Start with the Normans, end with the Dutch. Etc, etc.

If I'm not misremembering, there've been a couple of new Anglo-Saxon and Viking discoveries in the past 3-4 years. It's one of the cool things about England - it has layers of history that are constantly being rediscovered.

The down-side of that is life has to go on... if they made every historical site (or even just those with bodies) off-limits to future development there would hardly be any island left. E.g. Guildhall (itself a historical monument) sitting on top of the Roman amphitheatre. Or, on the other side of the Pond, a house near to where I used to live was being renovated and they discovered the skeleton of a Revolutionary war soldier. Does that mean no one can ever live in that house again?

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Yes, the discoveries never stop and, now that archaeological science has improved so much, we're finding out more all the time.

We used to live in Cumbria, the village was built on the site of a Roman fort, not just a bog-standard stockade but a full blown administrative centre with a vicus, which has yet to be found. When development was approved for the field behind our house, they sent the archaeologists in and I was lucky enough to have a nose around when they were working. The one archaeologist showed me a bag full of finds, including a very fine fragment of pottery, which she said would've been from a vessel from the Head Guy's dinner table. She also pointed out that the red blocks set into the stone walls all around the village had been scavenged from the fort.

The village had a Norse name. The Vikings actually settled peaceably in Cumbria. There are viking place names all over the shop up there. About ten years ago there was a story on the local news about a family who'd raised sheep up on the fells for a thousand years. They were shipping up and moving out to Canada, their surname was Akrigg, a good old Norse name. I find the local history fascinating especially the all-pervading legacy of the vikings. No bloodshed in that neck of the woods.

Plenty of Viking place names in that part of the country.
But before they settled they raided, let's not forget about the slaves they took.

Viking means "expeditioner," or "raider." It was a spring and summer pastime. They sailed up the rivers on known routes, and circulated information about farms and homesteads--and no, it wasn't just monastic settlements, at all--those are just the ones we have the most written records of.

Battle of Maldon? That's about viking raiders; so is Brunanburgh. The red hair we think of as "Irish" is a Germanic marker associated with vikings. The Irish cities of Dublin, Cork and Limerick were ceded to Germanic viking groups as a "trade city."

Why do we have to remember the slaves the Vikings took any more than we have to remember the slaves the Anglo-Saxons took, the genocidal oppression of the Normans and the extremely dodgy behaviour of the Irish especially to the peoples of the Welsh and Western English coasts? We've just have St Patrick's Day, but I notice as ever the glossing over how he came to be in Ireland in the first place. As firedrake says, the Danelaw had a long tradition of peaceable settlement and once a people has been established in an area for many generations, appears to me a bit hypocritical to criticise them for having taken possession of the land by force when more recent waves of immigrants also took the land by force and are not being criticised for it.

Sirius said:

Why do we have to remember the slaves the Vikings took any more than we have to remember the slaves the Anglo-Saxons took, the genocidal oppression of the Normans and the extremely dodgy behaviour of the Irish especially to the peoples of the Welsh and Western English coasts? We've just have St Patrick's Day, but I notice as ever the glossing over how he came to be in Ireland in the first place. As firedrake says, the Danelaw had a long tradition of peaceable settlement and once a people has been established in an area for many generations, appears to me a bit hypocritical to criticise them for having taken possession of the land by force when more recent waves of immigrants also took the land by force and are not being criticised for it.

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Bad PR over the centuries.

It does my head in.

The 2006 film Tristan+Isolde was dodgy in some ways (to begin with, given Marke was being played by Rufus Sewell, the only possible explanation for Isolde preferring Tristan had to be the mis-applied love potion version, and I think they missed this aspect out) but at least it (accurately) had the evil Irish slave-raiders as the contemporary villains.

Puma said:

It was in the headline internet news here in the US yesterday. Very interesting. Puma

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"headline" har har

Reviving this thread again.

There's an piece on the BBC web site today about another massacre of Vikings

Nice people, dem saxons. Not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_eagle

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Ah, the blood eagle. A supposed Norse practice for which evidence is based mostly on the translations of Norse mythology written by a Christian scholar centuries after the fall of Norse culture, and whose writings are much debated today amongst scholars and modern Asatruar as possibly being very heavily influenced by the writer himself.

As an ex-archaeologist, I can confirm that skeletons are often found on archaeological sites - they are photographed, recorded and lifted for further study, and may eventually be re-buried.
I assisted with the excavation of around 80 burials from a medieval churchyard that had later been built over, and was about to be built over again as part of a new shopping centre, and that is what was done there. In total, we dug 6 acres of Norwich town centre in advance of the development of a new shopping centre, the Castle Mall.
We found a graveyard (and church) that were previously unknown in addition to the 80 bodies we knew about, and an 8 metre deep ditch which was part of the defences of the castle, and lots of other goodies, including a Saxon house (demolished to make way for the castle).
All of these things were recorded and destroyed to make way for the shopping centre, and this is the normal way that archaeological sites work.
In order to study the site, it has to be destroyed, layer by layer, until you get down to the 'natural', which is the soil that has never been touched by human hand. Each layer is recorded as you go, with the associated finds and so on.