Review : Viking Britain

Hot on the heels of Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm comes Thomas William's Viking Britain. Given how much I enjoyed his Lost Realms, I was expecting good things from this.

The Review Bit

I was by no means disappointed. But I was, sometimes, a tad frustrated.

While Viking Britain is vaguely chronological, it forms little if anything in the way of a linear narrative. That's not so bad in itself, but the whole thing is unstructured all the way down. Each chapter tends to be an eloquent, beautifully written but all-encompassing rant about the Vikings. Even chapter titles give no real clue as to what they're about, the themes are sometimes hard to discern (occasionally replete with irrelevant information), and some of them are clearly out of sequence. Williams is apt to wander off on innumerable tangents and nobody has tried to rein him in. The word that keeps coming to mind is unfocused. 

Just as in Lost Realms, Williams fails to give any sort of satisfying ending or conclusion*, with the book essentially just coming to a halt because he ran out of things to say. This is a shame, because there's tonnes of good stuff here, and the rhetoric really is quite formidable. It's also obvious that Neil Price read this one very carefully (the two authors cite each other), with many passages feeling strikingly similar in the two books. There are also plenty of differences too, as we'll see.

* One smaller example : he goes on at some length about how the "Danelaw" was a later conception (the original treaty being between Alfred and Guthrum personally and specifically, rather than between English and Norse more widely), but never explains why exactly this matters.

Ironically, this is much more of a conventional history than COAAE, concerned mainly with what happened more than why. And this is perhaps the biggest defect : that there's previous little about what life was actually like in, well, Viking Britain. He gives some extremely readable passages which are almost micro-stories about very particular incidents, but it's dominated by high politics from the Anglo-Saxon perspective. It's not that there's nothing about everyday life in the Danelaw, just that there's not nearly as much as there should be. 

All the marvellous prose leaves me with the impression that Williams has a not-so-secret, irrepressible urge to write a novel, that he loves writing true history* but it isn't his real calling. And he bloody well should write fiction ! His descriptions are beautifully evocative and put flesh on the bones of a lost age. But sometimes it felt here like being at the literary equivalent of a swimwear pageant, showing off the author's ample talents for no particular reason. I'm not complaining – the author's literary assets are certainly eye-catching – I just think they could be put to better use.

* WHY, for the love of all things holy, do people call it "true crime" and not just "crime" ? IT MAKES NO SENSE ! Nobody does this about anything else ! STOP IT !

Despite all this I give it a very solid 7/10. It may be unfocused, but it's not a true mess, and there's plenty of interesting content wrapped in almost verse-like description. It's just a bit... muddled.

This is a much shorter book than COAAE, so I'll attempt to keep this to a single post. I'm gonna go for three major themes : why the Vikings did what they did, what exactly it was that they did, and the experience of what life was actually like in Viking Britain.

1) A life on the ocean wave : why bother ?

Price did a good job of examining what made tens of thousands of Scandinavians up shop and invade Britain, but there's a whopping difference of omission from COAAE : Williams never mentions polygyny. It's hard to know what to make of this since Williams literally never refers to it at all, nor does Price ever comment on the lack of attention previously paid to this possibility. Williams favours the much more straightforward explanation of a desire for wealth as the main motivational drive, and doesn't comment on why the Northmen should have been especially avaricious compared to the other realms of the time (polygyny would at least be something peculiar to the region). Both authors do agree, though, that a combination of factors were at work, and no single factor can ever explain the Viking phenomenon. 

They also similarly agree on the ethnic diversity of Vikings, with Williams pointing out that even in Britain there were some Englishmen among their numbers (just as Price noted that raiding began internally in the Scandinavian regions before its tumultuous outgrowth). Racism, then, was a marginal factor at best : the Vikings didn't see their opponents as sub-human or inferior, just unlucky enough to find themselves on the receiving end of a very sharp axe.

Williams makes a useful contribution here, noting that the Anglo-Saxons may not have shared this ethnically-tolerant viewpoint. He says that they viewed themselves living on the edge of world, with the North a paradox : on the one hand, they viewed it as their cherished ancestral homeland*, but on the other, it was also a realm of Satanic terror. He points to Grendel as a potent symbol of this, a demon of the dark invading the warmth of the hall in a way that retains a deep emotional resonance today. But for the original audience the symbolism would have been far stronger, with Vikings being described as "slaughter wolves" because they were thought to be almost literally monstrous, demons from beyond the pale, foes risen from out of the mouth of Hell.

* Like Price, Williams says that the two peoples knew about each other for centuries before the raiding began, pointing to Sutton Hoo as a prime example.

For all their racial liberalism, the Vikings themselves would have shared some of the religious-driven xenophobia, seeing the new religious symbolism as a threat to their way of life. Williams argues that this may result more from a political response to the aggression of Charlemagne, who posed a very direct and blunt threat to pagan lifestyles. The Vikings, then, may have attacked religious symbols more out of a perceived association with Frankish imperialism, rather than because they especially hated Jesus and his stupid goody-two-shoes beard or whatnot.

2) From beginning to end

Williams does a perfectly decent job of charting the course of the Viking invasions, beginning roughly with Lindisfarne and ending roughly with Cnut. He does this latter part especially well, making a good, easy-to-follow summary of what could easily have become a tremendously complex sequence of back-and-forth political turmoil. But whether one even considers the Christian Cnut*, as a centralised ruler of conventional military forces, a genuine Viking, is open to debate. The interesting stuff is all in the earlier period.

* Can we go back to the anglicisation of Canute, please ? "Cnut" just makes embarrassing typos and misreads far too easy...

A notable point of difference from COAAE, which I can't resolve, is whether the early raiding caused positive or negative feedback. Price has it very much as being positive, with the resources from the raids being used to fund more and larger expeditions. Williams views the situation as being more negative, saying that raids diminished because they became unsustainable. But since the raids did grow in the early period, which lasted many decades, this seems a bit strange; Price's argument that raids => money => more raids => cultural exchange => end of raids makes a good deal more sense to me.

On a more specific point, there's one thing that nobody has ever made clear : what was it about the battle of Eddington that marked it out to have such singular significance ? This was the pivotal battle of Alfred's career. Pushed into the fens and marshes, he famously rallied his forces, defeated the Vikings, and drove them out of Wessex. Okay, but as Williams makes clear, he'd suffered a series of defeats to get to this point. The Vikings had by no means had things all their own way, but they'd won more battles than they'd lost. Presumably, the scale of the defeat must have been unprecedented, but it would have been nice if he'd commented more on it*. I know, I know, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself gives precious little to go on. But a little speculation to fill in this important gap would have been helpful. 

* I mean, how did it compare with the previous battles ? Were those likely of smaller forces or were their causality rates much lower, or both ? How could the Vikings have won so often but then been rendered so impotent by this single encounter ? Williams comments that the one-sided hostage taking after the battle was unprecedented, but clearly Alfred didn't have things all his own way. He pushed the Vikings out of Wessex, rather than driving them back across the sea.

More interesting is William's observation that the Vikings relied heavily on fortifications whereas the Anglo-Saxons preferred open battle. It was the English that favoured an honour-based society, used to more formalised and ritualistic combat, whereas for the Vikings what mattered more was success. Time and again the Vikings won because they had safe fortifications to retreat to, which hardly fits with the bloodthirsty lunatics of popular culture. Yes, most of the stereotypes were true, or at least had a very solid basis to them. But the Vikings also deserve credit for intelligent military operations. The Anglo-Saxons, as depicted by Williams, won out by eventually beating the Vikings at their own game and adopting a similar strategy : Eddington gave them the breathing room, but it was the fortified burghs that won the war (of course, many authors agree with this latter part, but few mention that the Vikings themselves made extensive use of fortifications before the Anglo-Saxons did).

Williams is more openly skeptical about the significance of Alfred than other writers. Most seem to agree that Alfred was far from perfect but nevertheless a jolly good chap, extremely intelligent and a far-sighted visionary. Williams has him more skilled at propaganda than anything else – certainly not a stupid man by any means, but not especially heroic and concerned with his own image mainly as an act of vanity. For example, on Bishop Asser's chastisement of the locals for not properly following orders to build and maintain defences :

Alfred was indeed making practical and long-term changes to the way in which the defence of his kingdom was organised and was also trying hard to overcome resistance to his innovations; it is equally clear, however, that on both counts the king's efforts sometimes failed. (The temptation to blame everyone else for the bungling of executive orders can often be an appealing strategy for a regime and its apologists)

Ye-es... but sometimes also the common people can simply be thick as shit. This is a problem that affects many a well-meaning commentator, a sort of noble-savage fallacy in a refusal to believe that the great unwashed are, in fact, fully capable of being as corrupt and stupid as their idiotic rulers.

Alfred, though, has suffered because some Victorian imperialist twat decided to use the ludicrous hyperbole that he was "the most perfect character in history". You can't really help but have revisionism tend to roll things back from that because there's literally no other direction you can go. Williams does a better job of describing his immediate successors Edward and Athelstan, who have claims to be the first kings of England and Britain respectively. But the magnitude of their achievements isn't really stressed. To me Athelstan in particular still seems massively under-rated, a Dark Age king who exceeded Alfred's wildest expectations surely deserves to be more widely known.

The most interesting point William's makes is largely implicit. I mentioned in the COAAE post that the failure of the Viking network to defeat monarchical hierarchies is at odds with claims about which organisational setup is the stronger. But in Viking Britain there are hints as to what may have happened. Williams speaks of "narrower loyalties" in the settled communities within the Danelaw. In the "absence of clear royal authority", people looked to their immediate surroundings for economic and cultural guidance. In essence, then, the network fragmented to the point it was no longer really a network at all : the people were there, but the links were cut. Without a wider purpose, driven by common motivating factors, each town and village became a separate entity that could be dealt with piecemeal. This is somewhat at odds with William's own claim about how the Vikings in Britain remained economically connected to a vast economic network stretching to Constantinople and beyond, so clearly there's still work to do on this.

3) How the Viking half lived

Williams offers some interesting comments about why the Vikings inspired such peculiar terror among the Saxons : they were a ghastly embarrassment. Despite being largely or entirely Christian when the raids began, the Anglo-Saxon culture still had recognisable ties to its northern, pagan roots (witness Beowulf, and many other poems of similar style that Williams quotes*). And as he rightly points out, lulls in raiding of 30 years or so are historically short, but to those living through it, it would have given every appearance of being a permanent cultural shift. So they really would have felt, quite literally, as ghosts of the past, a disturbance in the natural order, a thing of the pagan dead risen to challenge the living Christ**. Much like the resurgence of fascism today, I suppose.

* And it must be said that he gives translations which are millions of times better than others I've read. I will even provisionally withdraw my claim that the sagas are largely agonisingly tedious if there are more translations in this style.
** This makes it all the stranger that Williams doesn't appreciate how, conversely, sustained increases in raiding of several decades point to their self-financing nature from positive feedback effects.

In Marc Morris' The Anglo Saxons there was a clear sense of cultural change among the English throughout the Dark Ages. From proud, mead-drinking warriors in timber halls, they transformed to feudally-organised societies in the span of a couple of centuries. But Williams makes it apparent that even in the later part of the period, they shared plenty of cultural similarities with the northern peoples. The Vikings believed in the sacred nature of blood, in a supreme god who hung himself from a tree in self-sacrifice... well, so did the Christians, more or less. They each went about things in very different ways, but it may be the similarities more than the differences that the English found so fearful. Even today, it's hard to read the mythologies and not see something more than a little sinister in Odin; to the Anglo-Saxons, this older belief must have felt like a gross perversion – and one that happened to carry a very big axe.

Williams also points out that the early Christians had radically different attitudes to disasters than today : the response was blame, not charity. The Vikings could be seen literally as a punishment from God for the sins of the people, in which case fighting back would have felt all the more hopeless. The longer-term cultural attitude to charity, to respond to disasters first and foremost by helping the afflicted rather than admonishing them, is surely worthy of a study in its own right (though Keith Thomas alludes to this).

What of the titular subject ? Williams fully agrees with Price that Vikings were indeed both those who changed and were themselves changed by their exploits. Guthrum, after Eddington, actively sought to assimilate himself with his subjects. He didn't do so because he was a vanquished and humbled ruler so much as because he found the mystique of kingship both appealing and useful. Here was a means to power far greater than was possible in comparatively egalitarian Nordic society : he'd be acknowledged as an equal (if grudgingly) with, or at least a peer amongst, the great leaders throughout Europe, anointed by the Pope himself, and his visage shown everywhere on the coins throughout his realm. "Heady stuff", says Williams. Indeed. And I suppose the spiritual price of adopting Christianity would have seemed a little thing, a minor change of gods really, compared to the all too tangible prize of political power that it bestowed.

Culturally life in the Danelaw was indeed distinct, with a fair claim to being its own entity just as the preceding Romano-British had been. Williams notes that the word "Danish" was adopted to refer to far more than people from the region of modern Denmark, sometimes with horrific consequences of ethnic cleansing on behalf of the Anglo-Saxons. They had a shared mythology, expressed their identity in unique ways (Eric Bloodaxe, for example, was a Christian remembered in pagan poetry), and it's abundantly clear that Tolkien was wrong : there was plenty of religious "muddled thinking" as Christianity and paganism mingled. 

The trap for Guthrum and the others came as monotheism appears to to act as a (generally) effective one-way valve. Pagans are happy enough to incorporate Christ as just another deity (especially when so similar in some ways to their own), but Christians are apt to use this as a wedge or lever to gain entry. Once it gets a foothold, monotheism corrupts and destroys the earlier beliefs, reducing once-proud gods to spirits and saints, if it allows them to survive at all.

Summary

Williams begins with a lament about how Viking museum exhibitions are sometimes assumed to be for children : bloodthirsty monsters whose murderous exploits are culturally acceptable to depict in a light-hearted way as would never be possible for anything else*. He's got a good point. Even if many of the stereotypes were broadly accurate, the Vikings were culturally sophisticated. They were not mindless brutes and shouldn't be seen as such, even if they were more then capable of committing acts of incredible violence**.

* Well, except pirates, I guess. And Romans. And Mongols. And the Huns, and the Visigoths... hmmm...
** Not the famous "blood eagle" though, at least according to Williams, who says it's probably a mistranslation and exaggeration. Booo !

Take dragons, for instance, a point of shared mythology across Viking Britain. Tolkien notes that their other-worldly, supernatural nature is a key part of how they inspire such terror, and thus render the hero's deeds as of paramount importance. Brian Bates went further, postulating that they're more than just a foil for heroes, but represent a defence of the underworld : the buried gold given to the ancestors, with the dragon protecting the cosmic order. Here Williams notes that they're anti-kings, monstrous because of their insatiable greed – a lesson in how a king should be generous by showing the terrible opposite. 

These ideas are not mutually exclusive, and reinforce how complex any serious analysis must be. Similarly, yes, Vikings could be barbarous, but they were, as a culture, neither simple nor stupid.

Quite how much we can really know about Viking beliefs is open to debate. COAAE, and the various other books I've read, take it that the Eddas and sagas at least record moments of real belief : not the full story by any means, but nevertheless representing things that some people, for some period, sincerely believed were true. Williams is more skeptical, although why he takes this position isn't clear. Nevertheless, even he acknowledges that the belief in Ragnarok (though never entertaining any notion that it had a real-life counterpart as Price does) was something truly fundamental to the Vikings, and he deserves to be quoted here at some length :

Of all the deaths and endings it is the death of Odin that is the most poignant, the one that speaks most clearly to the contradiction at the heart of the human condition. Odin may be the darkest of the gods, but he is also the most like us. He has watched the ebb of time across the ages, the rise and fall of kings and nations, the petty hurts and feeble triumphs of humanity. And despite knowing it to be futile, that ultimately he must fight the wolf and fail, he has prepared carefully for that day, selecting and curating the champions who will fight beside him when the last sun rises over the battle-plain... It is this bloody-mindedness – the obsessive quest for wisdom though it brings no peace, the desire to gain knowledge of a future that cannot be circumvented, the relentless preparation for a doom that cannot be avoided – that reminds us of our own self-defeating consciousness, the knowledge of mortality that defines our humanity.

The capacity to think, to remember, to dream, to prepare against whatever the future holds – all of it leads inevitably to the only certainty that the universe can provide: that all things fade and all things fail. And yet, like Odin, we struggle on heedless of the long defeat, wading against the tide that one day will overwhelm everything. It was acceptance of this harsh reality that permeated Viking warrior culture, shaping its mentality and appetite for adventure – the willingness to stare death and defeat in the eye knowing that to carry on is futile and that failure is assured, yet determined to fight on regardless, to struggle until the last breath is spent. It is in that struggle – internal, ethical – that true bravery lies and there, precisely there, eyeball to eyeball with death unflinching, was the place where legends could be born that might outlast the living.

Heady stuff indeed. All the same, I have to wonder if there isn't a different certainty that we struggle with. Not that all things fail, but the opposite : that all things have consequences, that every action, however minor, ripples through time unbroken, that a billion years hence the universe will, in some small way, be different because of our trivial triumphs and failings. Every act we take has infinite effects; nothing is truly irrelevant, but to look at full eternal magnitude of our myriad daily actions is to court insanity. We make choices in spite of ourselves. It's not that all our decisions are futile but their limitless ramifications that ought to stupefy us into inaction, yet, like the doom-laden Vikings, we make our choices just the same.

Finally, both Price and Williams do an excellent job of seeing the Vikings on their own terms. They don't try to moralise the past, don't try and hold the Vikings up either as icons of virtue or symbols of barbarism, but as real, complex people. Both authors acknowledge that there are aspects of the Vikings that, to a modern Western audience, can be at once inspiring and horrifying. The notion that they were perhaps traders rather than raiders, says Williams, is a particularly appalling one, given that they only thing they ever had to sell to the locals was what they'd stolen from them in the first place. By not brushing this under the carpet, by dealing with the Vikings as their own unique phenomenon, allows a far richer, more interesting, and far more mysterious portrait to emerge.

They were not 'just like us' : there is more to being human than using coins or wearing shoes, and mundane things do not readily reveal how people felt, thought and dreamt. But we can still stand where they stood, and feel the grass under our feet and know that they felt it, and taste the sea-breeze on our tongues and know that they tasted it. And when we wait by the shoreline, with the sun dipping like blood into the west and the breakers crashing on the strand, we can still hear their voices singing with the tide, the grinding of keels on the shingle.

Review : The Children of Ash and Elm (II)

Welcome back to yet another two-part review, this time Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm. Hey, it's not my fault I keep picking interesting books to read, so don't blame me for going overboard. Actually I'd really prefer not to go overboard, given Viking beliefs about what happened to those who drowned...

In part one I covered how Price defines the Vikings and why insisting it should only mean "sea pirate" is a bit silly, as well the factors that led to a distinct Viking Age. In this concluding post I'll look more into lifestyles of the rich and Viking : the scale of the raids and invasions, how women were (mis)treated, and the often bizarre spiritual beliefs that drove the Northmen across the world... and, very briefly, at what happened next.

4) Quantity and Quality

Many years ago I remember reading a book (though I forget which one) in which it was clear that the scale of the raids was controversial. The author favoured the view that the historical records were in the right ballpark, with some of the larger Viking armies numbering in the thousands or even tens of thousands. This was opposed by earlier claims that this was all exaggeration, with the "actual" numbers  being more like hundreds. The answer here appears to now be decisively settled in favour of thousands. Estimates of the number of arrivals following the initial raids in English are now, conservatively, 30-50,000 in 30 years. 

Which is not to say that it started like this. The Viking Age wasn't a long period, perhaps 300 years, but long enough for plenty of developments within it. The earliest raids were no more than a few boats here and there; the final ones numbered in the low hundreds. Incidentally, Price answers a question I had from reading the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle : why is Lindisfarne typically cited as the beginning of the era ? Two answers. Firstly, that's only true in the west, whereas raids to the east were happening a good fifty years earlier. Secondly, it's the one for which the date is secure from multiple sources, with the date of the earlier incident mentioned in the Chronicle being disputed by other records.

While the first raids were just that, within a generation they'd escalated to a true invasion. Early longships contained nothing but warriors, but thirty years later they were transplanting entire communities with the intention to settle. By the end of the era there were still huge Scandinavian fleets roaming the North Sea, but by now they were under much more centralised control, much more like conventional military forces with specific objectives determined by a distinct leader. Price describes this as being in some ways a second Viking Age, although by the time they'd all converted to Christianity and adopted kingship, it's difficult to distinguish them from any other European powers of the time. Their piratical tendencies may have persisted, but by licensing them as legal military duties set forth by a king, they were hardly the same as the spontaneous let's-go-kill-some-monks jollies across the North Sea as in earlier times.

The reason the Viking Age can be said to persist, says Price, is Iceland, which remained free of monarchy. And of course even changing religion does not change a culture completely. Some of their supernatural beliefs persisted well beyond the medieval era and indeed still persist to this day. 

5) Angry Young Women

But before I tackle that final topic, I have to say something about Viking attitudes to women. Here Price is at his most ambiguous. I get the very distinct sense that he wants to present them as misunderstood, the hyper-masculinity at least exaggerated due to later attitudes (this certainly seemed to be the case in Larrington's mythology book). And to an extent this is clearly true. But there are other aspects of Viking attitudes to gender which were much, much worse than any stereotypes. Ultimately, pinning them down directly to to modern ideals is a bit like trying to nail fog to a wall : they were a culture all of their own, and trying to understand their beliefs on our terms is a mistake.

Which is not to say we can't compare them to our standards on a case-by-case basis. In that sense the situation can be helpfully simplified to positive and negative aspects, if only by revealing just how strange the Vikings were. The mistake would only be in thinking that there's some predetermined objective standard to which human cultures should naturally adhere to.

On the positive side, women were, unlike slaves, legally people and not property. They could initiate divorce just because they felt like it. They could own property and were masters of their own domain (the household) as a perfectly respectable social sphere. They weren't exclusively confined there either, with the notorious shield maidens being almost certainly a real thing (one of the most famous ship burials turns out to be that of a woman) even if their numbers are not yet known. Open marriages seem to have been common, and mixed or gender neutral (even gender fluid !) grave goods suggest that being female or male was never central to one's entire identity. There were also strong legal protections for women against the direct effects of violent feuds, though not its indirect consequences.

Like the Greeks, they had many powerful female gods, but unlike them they seem to have had real female warriors. They also believed that everyone had their own personal guardian spirit who was invariably female, which puts a rather different spin on people who gave themselves nicknames like Bloodaxe*. Even seemingly passive goddesses like Idunn, who gave the gods the apples they needed to remain immortal, wielded incredible power in their own way. In real life, magic was largely the domain of women, though often with an explicitly sexual component to it.

* Though on a related point : the Valkyries, Price is keen to point out, started off as being dangerous, primal, and extremely violent forces, only becoming the busty maidens of Wagnerian opera much later.

Wait, wait, back up a second... unlike slaves ? Let's not just brush that one under the carpet. Make no mistake, this was not a nice society. People were discriminated against on the grounds of wealth and class, though apparently not, interestingly, race. This didn't stop Viking society from being one heavily reliant on slaves, with their very myths describing how the gods gave rise to the thralls, clearly implying that some people were simply good for nothing else. Social mobility... not so much of a thing*. 

* Things were a thing, but though people got together to discuss their problems, Price is clear that the great and the good carried much more influence than others. There wasn't much democratic about Viking society even in the pre-monarchy era.

And the downsides of being a woman may not have been as great as being a slave, but they were nonetheless manifold. Compared to men, the archaeological evidence indicates drastically different rates of malnourishment : 7% for men but 37% for women. Sex trafficking was common and men openly raping other women in front of their wives was normal (notoriously, gang rape was sometimes part of the funeral rites). While women could divorce on grounds of violence, the socially acceptable standards of violence were absurdly high. Though they could do male roles, what they could not do was actually pretend to be men (and vice-versa : they may have had myths involving cross-dressing and even gender-swapping, but this wasn't shown in a positive light – at best it was intended to poke fun). There were prescribed dress codes and haircut styles. For a woman to seem too manly, by, say, wearing trousers, would certainly be grounds for her husband to divorce her.

Price makes an excellent point that it's very hard to say how all this actually played out in real life. The majority of romantic liaisons, he said, would have been between freely consenting adults. Though some gender role deviations could carry a capital sentence (especially men practising female magic), in fact plenty of men managed to do this without any actual penalty. Much as how the Christian Church would later pronounce harsh invective against astrology and other magic, in everyday like people tended to ignore even the most serious-sounding legal diktats. Even Odin was clearly a powerful user of what was supposed to be female-specific magic. As always, people didn't always enforce their professed ideologies all that rigorously; rhetoric and hyperbole are sometimes just that. The hyper-macho stereotype is by no means at all without foundation, but it isn't the whole story either.

6) A World of Doom and Darkness

What sort of spiritual beliefs could give rise to a society like this ? As with other pagan religions, says Price, their mythologies were fundamentally amoral. They were concerned more with providing a world view rather than ethical instruction. There are hints of moral guidance here and there, most notably with the fallen heroes going to Valhalla, but they're only hints. Whether Hel (both the person and the place) is supposed to be a place of suffering and woe is very unclear; in some interpretations it's more neutral. There's nothing about anyone being tortured in Hel but it also just doesn't seem very nice. Nor is it at all obvious where most of the ordinary people actually go after they die.

One exception proves the rule : those who drowned were damned to crew the great nail-ship Nglafr, made of the nails of all those who had died. They were punished in the afterlife not for any choices they made but simply because of how they happened to die through no fault of their own. Price is careful to stress that beliefs varied, and as with other pagan cultures, it's unlikely there was any set doctrine, but there seems very little evidence of the afterlife being much of a reward or punishment for any moral reasons. In the main, in paganism the supernatural is much more of an idea about how the world works rather than why.

This comes through very clearly in the funerary rites, which varied hugely. Yes, the classic boat burial was very much a thing (though Price doesn't mention if they were ever set adrift and burned at sea), but these could even be small dugout canoes as well as the full-sized longships. Chambered burials were also common*, with burial mounds sometimes in the middle of settlements. Like prehistoric graves, both could be actively used for years afterwards, with some boat burials being half-completed with accessible chambers open on the incomplete half of the mound, then filled in later – apparently in a great hurry, as if in fear. The sense of fear is also apparent at recorded descriptions of the funerals, and not just for the unfortunate sacrifices**. There are reports of naked men walking around the ship just before it was burned, keeping all their orifices either covered or pointed away from the boat, as though protecting themselves from some spiritual force that might somehow enter them. And there are descriptions of the interred sitting upright because of the heat of the fire, an image that must have caused absolute terror. Which makes it all the more mysterious that they didn't just bury the deceased immediately. Nor is it obvious why some of the dead were thought to become dragur and others didn't, or why some people were to be feared in death while others weren't.

* Burial practises varied enormously and I'm simplifying to an absurd degree here. Some examples include pits of murdered children and animals ripped apart; more tame practises involved lining up the corpses and putting a pebble in each hand.

** Of which animals were included in vast numbers. Nor was each boat burial necessarily just for one person – in extreme cases they contain several dozen people. The boat itself might not symbolise a journey but simply be the ultimate in grave goods, as evidenced by some cases where they are actually moored up : hardly could they have been expected to go anywhere.

While the stories of the gods form the backbone of the mythology, Price says that these weren't that important in everyday life. They mattered, but more frequently the supernatural was encountered as draugr, ghosts, monsters, elves, dwarfs, and most frequently of all as the fourfold nature of the human spirit : the physical body (which some could alter as shapeshifters), something roughly equivalent to the soul (which Odin can destroy), the person's luck (which could walk around on its own and even be visible to people with certain abilities), and the always-female guardian spirit. This was an extremely rich and sophisticated set of beliefs, no matter how brutish and barbaric it could sometimes be.

As to the gods themselves, I need not repeat myself (you're far better off reading a book for those anyway – it shouldn't be reduced to a blog post). But the refined nature of Norse religion comes through here too, and these tales also reinforce just how little we understand about their ideas. Almost uniquely, says Price, the Vikings believed in temples in the afterlife. There were graves in Hel, and Odin even visits one to resurrect a seeress, thus giving death after life after death (she retreats of her own accord after her temporary restoration). Perhaps this fits with a cyclic view of time...

And so on to my final point, Ragnarok. My current read reminds me that the Apocalypse is also part of Christian mythology, but in large parts of Christendom it isn't seen as all that important. In Britain we're never taught about it in school assemblies and the like – it's something you pick up on in popular culture. But every author I've read agrees that this was front and centre of Viking religion, this permanent sense of overhanging doom. 

Price thinks this may have been inspired by a real event, a real-life "fimbulwinter" caused by volcanic eruptions in the sixth century. The archaeology, he says, supports a truly cataclysmic population decline by perhaps 50% of the population, with probable eruptions having been robustly identified. With flame-red sunsets, bitterly harsh winters and people routinely starving and freezing to death, it becomes easy to see how this could have been mythologised. And with so many direct parallels in Viking and Greco-Roman beliefs, maybe this is what happens when you mix pagan religion with catastrophe : nothing like this happened to the Romans themselves until they had converted to Christianity. Maybe also the fact that the Scandinavian people did survive and rejuvenate is why Ragnarok is followed by a new and better world, though Price wonders if this might only be the influence of Christianity recasting the earlier stories to make them more palatable.

The End Of All Things

Of course, the Vikings also ultimately converted to Christianity. Price notes that missionaries explicitly targeted kings to make mass conversion of the populace easier. But this is seemingly at odds with the earlier claim that Viking society was reasonably egalitarian, a network more than a hierarchy in which no individual had the power to much alter anyone else's ideas. So how would that work ?

Several reasons. By this point kings were much more powerful, with the tendency of networks to evolve into hierarchies surely being an important lesson in its own right – those who want to do away with the corrupt politicians/billionaires/tyrants etc. would do well to remember this. More importantly, as Price says, it was more like a magical effect exactly as Keith Thomas describes : the important thing was that people were baptised. Actually altering their beliefs was both very much harder and not really the point at all, with the act of baptism itself believed to be the cause of salvation, not altering anyone's moral outlook. And of course it wasn't always successful, with plenty of conversions in both directions to begin with, with some aspects of pagan belief never really going away entirely.

And so the Viking era came to an end, or many ends in different places, but end it did. No more raids, no more human sacrifices, no more egalitarian networks. For better or worse, the Scandinavian countries became more and more like the rest of Christian Europe. From conquering kingdoms across a continent, the invaders were themselves assimilated and absorbed. There was no final battle, no pivotal moment. They simply changed, as all things must do. Some of their beliefs have become incomprehensible, all the symbolism lost, and all we have left are the weird vestiges of a "very old, and very odd" way of looking at the world. Other aspects survived and endured and still resonate today. So on the legacy of the Vikings, in this modern age of right-wing resurgence, I give the last words to Price :

We should never ignore or suppress the brutal realities behind the clichés – the carnage of the raids, the slaving, the misogyny – but there was much, much more to the Vikings. They changed their world, but they also allowed themselves to be altered, in turn; indeed, they embraced those connections with other peoples, places and cultures. Their most respected values were not only those forged in war but also – stated outright in poetry – a depth of wisdom, generosity, and reflection. Above all, a subtlety, a certain play of mind, combined with a resilient refusal to give up. There are worse ways to be remembered.

Review : The Children of Ash and Elm (I)

Continuing with the recent history/mythology theme, Professor Neil Price's history of the Vikings is an essentially perfect combination of both. In this first of two parts, I'll look at why it's such a bloody good book and what made the Vikings who they were. Next time I'll look a bit more at Viking life.

The Review Bit

Skip ahead to the next section if you just want to know what the book says and don't care much what I think about it.

This isn't a conventional history and it isn't meant to be. Price sets out with the underlying aim of examining why the Vikings did what they did, how their world view shaped their actions, how they lived their everyday lives. In this he succeeds brilliantly. What he doesn't do, couldn't possibly do in the 500 pages available, is also give much in the way of a history in the classical sense : who did what to who and when they did it. This is a social and religious account of the Viking era, and by design only contains the bare minimum of anything so base as to describe actual events that happened. The result is a seriously good read but not necessarily the best introduction to the topic.

Price presents his arguments with extreme clarity, following a broadly chronological track yet with distinct themes to each chapter. He is at turns vividly descriptive, emotive, detailed, humorous, empathetic, serious, rhetorical, all as the occasion demands. He manages to blend of all this into a rich mixture rather than a chaotic mess, and the result is something hugely readable, informative, well-argued and critical. It's a first rate work which I give a rock solid 8/10.

Okay, so it's mainly excellent. Hooray ! But it's far from flawless. I hasten to add that none of the issues should be enough to put anyone off from reading it, but I can't ignore them either.

First off, it must be said it does sometimes get a bit plodding and humdrum, with some chapters concerned with minutia and trying a bit too hard to making Viking fashion sense somehow interesting. Price's enthusiasm is always set to high, which helps keep the drier chapters readable, but even this can't always succeed, and it can be a bit distracting. He perhaps needed an editor to ask awkward questions like, "well, yes Neil, I understand that it's important to note that the Vikings didn't spend all their time hacking off heads and drinking themselves to death, but do readers really need to know about how they liked to do their hair ?". Some much more interesting questions he raises, like what it's like to live in a world where you sincerely believe your neighbour could be a werewolf, go unanswered in favour of the utterly mundane and unsurprising.

Another niggle is that while he rightly attempts to dispel the stereotypes, he largely ends up doing the opposite. Okay sure, they weren't the outright foaming-at-the-mouth rabid madmen the chronicles of the monks would have us believe, but they absolutely could be and were – not infrequently – savagely violent in the extreme; dark, brutal instruments of terror, and yes, they could also literally drink themselves to death. There is every indication that they practised human sacrifice with deliberately pronounced bloodletting. 

On this score I'd have to say that pretty much all the stereotypes were true, except that they were very well-dressed savage maniacs (and their attitudes to women being more a good deal more subtle than the hyper-macho alpha males of legend). I came away almost thinking of them as the Aztecs of the north : civilised, sophisticated and intelligent, no doubt about that, but also deeply alien with a value system that is at times incomprehensibly strange. In short, the History Channel's Vikings is about as good an adaptation of Viking history as you're ever likely to find. 

Actually, if you're looking for more expert commentary, I stumbled on this blog review by another history professor, who picks Neil to pieces over what appear to me as a gormless layman to be rather petty details (I mean, complaining the author is too fond of Beowulf...well, how very dare you !). She's probably right that Price could and should have corrected his various errors, few of which sound like they'd change anything, but I very much like Price's attitude :

One can speculate with varying degrees of confidence, but it is not always possible to be sure. An essential prerequisite for a good researcher is a willingness to be wrong, the invitation of constructive critique. Nevertheless, while conclusions must be framed carefully, it is pointless to caveat everything to oblivion, to believe that it is impossible to really know anything about the past.

This could have been written as a direct response to Ronald Hutton's strap-caveats-onto-everything approach. To advance an idea knowing it might be incorrect, but inviting others to discuss it, is infinitely more productive than giving up and saying we haven't got a clue, which is not only pointless but also extremely boring. 

Similarly, while every reputable book about the Vikings feels the need to condemn the far right in no uncertain terms, Price manages this in a sensible way. He moralises, but never to an excessive degree or in accusative terms except where this is undeniably necessary. Most of the time the balance is firmly on understanding his subject, not judging it. He allows himself to be more explicit here and there, but it's generally a light touch. Nothing ever gets rammed down anyone's throat or other orifice.

A final minor issue where I have to vehemently disagree is Price's love of the sagas. "Go and read them !" he says, repeatedly. Their poetry can "taste like cold iron on the tongue", he claims. Mmm, nope. In my experience reading the sagas is more like having that cold iron bash your teeth in, and Price's own phrase is better rhetoric by far than anything I ever read in any of them*.

* That said, in Thomas William's Viking Britain (stay tuned !), there are some much better examples, so maybe it's just a matter of translation. Also to be fair, in some sagas people jump spontaneously into verse as though they were in a musical or something. Okay, it's often dismal, boring verse, but it's still at odds with the popular view of axe-wielding savages.

Right, let's get on with things. What interesting stuff does Price have to say ?

1) To Be A Viking

"Viking" is often said by People On The Internet to be a job description rather than a people. Price is both more tolerant and nuanced :

In the modern Nordic languages, vikingar or vikinger is still used only in the exact sense of seaborne raiders, while in English and other tongues it has come to serve for anyone who had, as one Cambridge scholar resignedly put it, "a nodding acquaintance with Scandinavia in those days"... Some scholars now use 'vikings' to mean the general populace, while reserving title case for their piratical acquaintances.

That is, restricting the word to only the sharp end of the people who decided to go out in longboats and whatnot is to deny a perfectly serviceable term for which no other quite fits the bill. Trying to bring it back in English to the original meaning of its mother tongue (which is anyway uncertain), and even debating what we mean by "Viking" in terms of the people, is to miss the point. Instead, Price believes that a clear Viking Age took place with a distinct beginning and end, even if it's not quite as straightforward as saying it started with Lindisfarne and ended with Stamford Bridge. 

The impression I get is that there are three main criteria for defining a Viking either as an individual or part of a wider society :

• Belief in the Norse gods, deities, and associated religious practises.
• A capacity for raiding and waging war, without any moral beliefs against violence.
• Being part of distinctive culture and society, often including a decentralised organisation with no single ruler.

Have all three and you've clearly got yourself a Viking. Have only one and you definitely don't : later Norwegian armies organised under powerful Christian kings to wage war on other nation-states don't feel Viking at all. Any random two ? That's a very grey area.

One obvious question here is why the Vikings went raiding. The Anglo-Saxons and other European peoples never did this (at least not to anything like the same degree), so what set the Vikings apart ? Price explicitly denies there was any one cause, but definitely favours some over others. Which leads on to the next section.

2) The Anti-Social Network

Implicit in this is the (initially at least) decentralised structure, there seldom being any single leader with whom their adversaries could negotiate with. The Vikings were an emergent network phenomenon : they went into piracy because they all independently decided it would be a good idea, not because anyone commanded them to do anything. This made them all but impossible to stop through diplomacy, because diplomacy can't remove the underlying conditions. You might as well try negotiating for the rain to stop. Price likens them to much later pirates :

The mythical hydra was a challenge to defeat because every time one of its heads was severed, two more grew to take its place. Likewise, sinking individual pirate ships or killing notorious captains did little to dent the nature of the enemy – and yet through it all, "the pirates" as a collective source of grave political peril remained entirely valid and operative, just like the supposedly unkillable hydra.

The term he uses is hydrarchy. The Viking "armies" were, he says, polities in themselves, groups of armed migrants the like of which aren't supposed to exist outside of the pages of the right-wing tabloids. They weren't "armies" in the modern sense, not on their way to anywhere in particular, but were instead "an end unto themselves". They had no single overall goal, though they were intelligent and their raiding was carefully planned (but often badly coordinated), and, as time went on, their piratical operations built up to an industrial scale.

While Niall Ferguson has it that "it takes a network to beat a network", this doesn't ring true here. Early Viking attacks on the Frankish Empire were successful only because the Franks were in a period of political turmoil; when the Empire got its act together and was able to marshal its resources properly, the Vikings were swiftly repulsed. Hence they began to attack England in much larger numbers, but once again, when Wessex united itself under a strong, capable leader it was famously able to fight back very effectively. 

The network of Viking society could be resilient but it could also be vulnerable to fragmentation. Without any deliberate large-scale coordination, without a clear underlying reason to maintain momentum, they could be eliminated piecemeal. The Vikings on the warpath, when they were all individually motivated towards aggression, were indeed formidable opponents, but once they began to settle down, they were vulnerable to the trappings of centralised societies. The parallel is not exact, but there are definitely similar overtones to the nomadic steppe tribes invading China here.

3) Angry Young Men In Their Filter Bubbles

It takes more than a decentralised social structure to cause idle young men to undertake enormously dangerous ocean voyages to hack the heads off a bunch of defenceless monks. What gives ?

Part of the cause, says Price, was religion, even a "holy war" of sorts in which the pagans were the deliberate aggressors against the Christians just because they didn't like them very much (i.e. they hated and feared the new religion). This, though, was a relatively minor factor. A more significant but indirect contribution is that Norse religion was amoral and didn't condemn violence, but more on that in part two.

Considerably more important than this is the sheer and simple desire for wealth. Price is keen to stress that the Vikings actions abroad were the outgrowth of what were original internal Scandinavian practises. Raiding began internally before expanding outward to more distant, more profitable shores, which had the helpful side-effect of unifying the populace somewhat. There was also positive feedback, with raids bringing back resources to finance more raids.

But the biggest factor in all this, or at least the one Price devotes most effort to, is polygyny, in which men routinely married multiple women. In the TV show Vikings this is supposed to be reserved for a select few elite men*, whereas according to Price it was the norm rather than the exception. This rapidly led to a severe depletion in the number of available ladies for otherwise eligible bachelors, meaning that to have any chance of social success, would-be husbands had to outdo each other. Foreign wealth, often poorly defended, made an awfully tempting target. They could also, of course, simply take a wife abroad, with "take" here often meant in its most literal and brutal sense. 

* Whether they were lucky or unlucky depends, I suppose, both on one's perspective and who they happened to marry... in Vikings they're all supermodels (woohoo !) but also manipulative, angry, and murderous (less woo).

Price is very keen on this explanation but doesn't develop it very much. If we had evidence for exactly when it started, if we could say that there was a coincidence in uptake of the practise and an upscaling in raiding, that would make it much more convincing as an explanation. Especially since he makes it clear that it was the conflict with the other countries that was novel, not the contact : Vikings has Ragnar essentially discovering England, which Price dismisses as nonsense. It was abundantly clear that they're traded with the British for centuries beforehand (cough, cough, SUTTON HOO ! forts of the Saxon shore !). There's scope for more investigations here, I think. He does also acknowledge technological developments in ship building and navigation as also being essential factors, though clearly not the main motivation. 

In sum : Nobody wants to turn pirate just because they're horny and have a new boat. But if you're horny, have a new boat, don't particularly want to attack your neighbours, haven't got much money, have heard of some rich defenceless monks across the ways and there's no spiritual penalty for bashing their heads in... well, what's a man to do ?

---

The answer is... well, quite a lot really. Next time I'll look into the scale and nature of the invasions, how Viking women were really treated, and the complex and sophisticated religious beliefs that underpinned everyday Viking life.

Review : Norse Myths and Tales (II)

As per usual, a single-part post just isn't going to cut it. Having ranted at considerable length against the Norse sagas (of Flame Tree's Norse Myths and Tales) in part one, in this much more interesting conclusion it's time to enter the weird world of Nose mythology. As before, I'll use VT to refer to the "Viking Tales" book and TNM to refer to Larrington's The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think. I'll try not to repeat things I covered already in the latter, except for a few interesting points of difference.

2) The Mythologies

One other thing about this particular collection I need to mention is that the stories are arranged by theme rather than chronology. This can make things more than a little confusing, jumping between Loki being tortured by and then best pals with Thor. It also repeats the story of Baldur's death twice, but, fortunately, this is actually really interesting because the two versions have significant differences from each other, with the second version being far more bloodthirsty.

In some ways the mixed-up ordering is perversely fitting. Underpinning the whole mythology is, of course, the sense of doom. This is completely unlike the Celtic or Greek stories, which are entirely about what the gods did in the past by way of illustration as to what might happen in the future. With the Norse, both past and future are known, including that the gods will eventually die. So at what point in the timeline did the Norse believe they were at ? In the second version of the apocalypse stories, it's said that Loki was unleashed on Earth and corrupted men to evil. But it's also said elsewhere that he remains imprisoned underground, under the dripping of a serpent's venom as torture for his murder of Baldr, resulting in volcanoes and earthquakes. 

When are we, then ? Is Loki still galivanting around with the other gods*, trapped underground, lose in the world causing mischief... ? And, perhaps more importantly, how come men know of the fate of the gods but the gods apparently don't ? Or if they do, why do they bother fighting a hopeless cause and are so woefully unprepared when the forces of chaos break free ? How did the Norse people themselves view the effect of the rise of Christianity on the prophecies of the end of days, or did it not matter ? Answers are to be found here none. Like the Greek myths, presumably there were a multitude of different versions of the stories, with nobody seeing any need for (or having the authority to) impose any sort of consistency.

* Even who Loki is is actually ambiguous. According to some he's Odin's brother, while other's say Odin did have a bother but it wasn't Loki. Other interpretations have it he's another class of deity altogether, the remnant of an earlier age.

What also becomes immediately apparent is that the stories have very different styles to each other. They're every bit as complex as the Greek myths, with a pantheon of gods that if anything is considerably more complex (and with habitations that are a veritable multiverse, with the structure of reality playing a much larger role than in the Greek stories). But whereas the Greek myths tend to veer towards serious tragedy, the Norse, by and large, lean if anything more towards comedy. There's a lot of good-natured aspects to the myths, the danger sometimes clearly not serious; it's hard to escape the impression of a Marvel-like, unserious-but-important tone to the whole thing. They're almost self-subversive in mocking their own underlying doom by putting a big beardy man in a dress to marry a giant.

Yet at other times the sense of destiny and drama eclipses almost anything in the Greek world. Odin hanging himself in tortured sacrifice to himself, "myself to myself", in screaming agony felt throughout the worlds for nine days, or Loki imprisoned with the entrails of his torn-apart sons, the emergence of Ymir in the Yawning Gap, and the apocalypse stories alike... all of these are epic melodrama of the highest order.

Again, it's clear there wasn't a single set version, no definitive dogma. For example, the goddess Hel is in one version cruel and stern, reluctant to relinquish Baldr, allowing one possibility of release only because duty demands it. In another it's the exact opposite : she would dearly live to release poor beloved Baldr, but duty permits her only one possibility !

Baldr himself can sometimes seem like he exists only to die, having no other function – an empty shell of a character. But in other descriptions he's literally goodness itself. His death is significant because it directly precipitates Ragnarok as the gods begin to age, with his loss giving strength to the forces of evil and chaos. He doesn't actually do very much except die, but he acts as a sort of moral lynchpin to the universe, without which it all falls apart.

Death also permeates the stories far more than in the Celtic tales. In Grettir's saga there's a draugr, a zombie living in a barrow, but even in Hel's own domain (where Baldr resides after his death) there are graves where Odin resurrects a seer : there is, it seems, both life and death after death. The gods can die in what seems to be a very final sense indeed, but undead mortals – as physical, roaming corpses rather than mere ghosts – are common. 

The moral character of almost all of the gods is grey in the extreme (if "extreme greyness" isn't an oxymoron). Odin is supposed to be beneficent but appears here very much neutral, a powerful figure who's obsessed with knowledge, not morality : on the side of humans to be sure, but meaning the human species rather than any individual person – and even then only to recruit them as warriors for the final battle. His actions often have distinctly sinister overtones to them, rarely evil, but often horrific. Conversely Loki, though often cruel and ultimately evil, is capable of being entirely altruistic, in at least one case demonstrating greater intelligence than all the other gods, and taking considerable risk to himself, all for the sake of saving a peasant's child. Even Thor, who is largely compassionate towards both humans and humanity, isn't adverse to murder, and unlike Hercules he isn't wracked with regret should this prove necessary. 

For the god's main adversaries, the giants, ambiguity is again the rule. It's totally unclear why Odin and his brothers (which may not may not include Loki) killed Ymir, the first giant who emerged from the blending of the primeval fire and ice. Plenty of gods, including Odin, have sexual and romantic relationships with giants, some of whom are described explicitly as good* – so why Odin thought Ymir in particular should die is never answered. The giants are in no way demonic forces of pure evil, and only seem to challenge the gods because frankly the gods provoked them out of their own sense of insecurity (just as the Fenris wolf only became bent on destruction to revenge himself against his godly captors, being hitherto an innocent pup). 

* The giants, that is, not the sex.

Nor are the giants even lesser than the gods, often being considerably stronger; Odin himself has to be rescued from them on several occasions. Sometimes Thor alone is able to defend the other Aesir, and then only thanks to his mighty hammer. Likewise the gods aren't especially knowledgeable or wise compared to the giants, with Odin having to steal Mimir's knowledge through deception. It isn't even especially clear what attributes he has that make Odin deserve to be leader : save that he was there from the very early days, he's not really anything special in terms of strength, wisdom or powers. Ambiguity, then, permeates all aspects of the mythological figures, not just their morality.

So while there might be a few extreme cases of the embodiment of good and evil, by and large, almost everyone is much more complex than that. It's also surely significant that one of those extremes (Baldr) is killed, whereas the morally flexible but intelligent like Odin and Loki survive considerably longer. And it's the ambiguous ones who create the world we know, including humans.

Perhaps all this is a result of the nature of the gods. Christianity (at least the modern form) is pretty clear that God is, when you get right down to things, It. Mind came first, matter later. Not so in the Norse or Greek myths, in which the act of creation itself is quite unexplained. The gods and giants emerge from primordial forces but they're not the same as them. They create humans, but they never reach anything even approaching omniscience, let alone omnipotence. The Greek gods don't share the sense of struggle against doom, but they too are in many ways closer to humans than they are to the Christian God. Certainly both Norse and Greek gods alike have aspects of embodying or personifying natural forces, but they're ultimately far more complex than that. It is, maybe, more that Thor took on the mantle of thunder rather than being thunder itself.

I suggest that it might be this that really distinguishes the supposedly monotheistic Christianity from the so-called pagan religions. Christianity has its own multitude of supernatural entities, but they're not the same at all. In the pagan traditions such beings are, ultimately, a physical part of the natural world. In Christianity they are of a different order altogether, truly incomprehensible to mortals, with what we see being a mere raiment of their true form. More important than replacing the myriad of deities with a single supernatural being (which Christianity never really managed) might be that it had this much more radically different concept, the idea that the world was basically of the mind of god, not one of matter with God acting as a glorified overseer.

It then becomes easier to understand how pagan deities, being essentially of the same stuff of reality as the rest of us, could get away with having such imperfect and fascinatingly complex characters, rather than the goody-two-shoes attitude of Jesus et al. The Christian deities are all about morals and instruction because they exist outside of our reality; morality is their whole being and function. The pagan deities, though of a totally different order to humans, more differ in their quantity than quality. They are much more similar to us than to the angels.

Not that there wasn't a radical difference in the pagan gods and ordinary mortals. One thing that seems relatively underappreciated is the sheer size of Valhalla, which is itself just one of several halls in one of many worlds. This single hall alone has 540 (or sometimes 500) doors, through each of which 800 warriors can march abreast. Hang on, that means each door is going to be at least a kilometre wide ! So we have of order 500 km of doors alone, plus we'll need some walls in between them or they can't count as doors – that would make Valhalla a sort of cosmic gazebo, which just isn't going to work. The upshot is that we're talking about a hall several hundred kilometres wide, able to receive 432,000 warriors in a single step (say about a million warriors a second), with an ultimate capacity in the tens of billions. It'd take days or weeks just to walk to the centre.

And that, remember, is just for the selected male warriors. Women and others go to other halls. So just how many people the Vikings thought were dying each day is hard to guess, but a quick Google reveals that the total global death rate today is about 150,000 : far short of Valhalla's capacity alone ! They were certainly thinking in cosmic scales*, if not in concepts. Though what the significance of their cosmic myths meant to them, how literally we should take the structure of Yggdrasil and the nine realms, the dismemberment of Ymir and all that, is hard to say. Perhaps it was meant to be symbolic of something deeper that is now lost. Certainly, despite the sheer bizarreness of the creation myth, it feels like there is something more profound and meaningful behind it all.

* Not always though. At one point Loki is carried away by an eagle with an entirely unimpressive 8 ft wingspan, while in another story the wall surrounding Hel is described as being "20 ft high at least !". There's a sometimes comic and sometimes just thoughtless mismatch between the physical scale and tone of the events being described.

I should probably bring this to end with (what else ?) Ragnarok. Or rather, post-Ragnarok. The apocalypse itself is dramatic, and beautifully deadly, but the aftermath doesn't seem nearly as much talked about. Not only does the Earth eventually re-emerge from the sea, verdant and renewed, but several of the gods survive. This includes Baldr, presumably freed now that Hel is dead, but a couple of others also need be mentioned. Vidar, the son of Odin and giantess, has a single giant shoe, possibly formed of all the bits of leather that cobblers have discarded. With this he holds down and breaks the jaw of Fenris. Another is Vali, the son by rape (sorry, "compelled to become his wife", as the text puts it) of Odin and a Russian princess. Also of note is that while the introductory text describes (as in TNM) the dragon Nidhug flying overhead with corpses in his wings, in the actual story given this is not seen : everything is a picture of harmony.

That everything at least basically works out in the end puts a very different slant on the whole thing, especially that not all of the gods are doomed. Regeneration is another common theme throughout the stories, especially regenerating animals for food. Here the change is more substantial. Odin, Thor and most of the rest appear to be truly gone : the old order will not return, replaced with one which is simpler, less interesting, but more benevolent. Ragnarok is truly an ending, but it is not the end. Nothing ends completely Even the worse calamities bring renewal and hope.

---

In these posts I've mentioned a few times that I don't really see Christianity as monotheistic. It should also be clear that I don't find Bible stories particularly interesting, which might seem unfair since they feature many of the same elements as the pagan ones : divine beings with magical powers doing strange things to people. So what gives ?

I think it's mainly because they're so morally fixated and certain. The mechanics of miracles is rendered bland and dull because it's always just down to the unimaginable powers of God. The morality is always framed as having one certain answer, with any deficiencies brushed under the carpet as missing the point. The structure of the cosmos, the nature of reality – these play no part at all in anything (at least, all this is how it was taught to me at school). Plenty of interesting events happen but the stories are all tediously moralising sermons, perpetually serious and loaded with endless judgement. 

While the pagan and Christian stories share some elements, the resemblance is superficial. Pagan stories do have moral judgements in them, but far more often they simply raise moral questions without clear answers. The gods themselves frequently behave like arseholes, often comically. The myths practically invite us to ask questions both moral and physical without ever judging our own answers : was it right that the gods did that ? How does magic work ? Paganism also allows the believer access to magical powers of their own, rather than reducing everything to God.

Now as a scientist the appeal should be clear. A world view which is inherently amoral rather than immoral, with uncertainty as one of its core principles, and allowing the user scope to both investigate and change reality... in more than a few ways, paganism may have more in common with science than Christianity. The attempt of Christianity to unite moral and physical beliefs is to me ultimately unsatisfying, or at least uninteresting since the answer is so often deemed to be beyond investigation. For Christianity any moral failings of the stories are a problem; for paganism they're an active feature. It feels far easier to view paganism metaphorically, whereas in Christianity things are often supposed to be meant rather more literally. 

It's the very lack of answers in paganism that I find appealing. I would much prefer to have to ask interesting questions than deal with answers I can't accept, to paraphrase Feynman. 

I shouldn't go too far with this, mind you. I stand by a previous review of Tom Holland's Dominion as one of the best books I've read in recent years, doing a commendable job of advocating for the benefits of Christianity from an atheistic perspective (especially its truly revolutionary concern for the poor). And I'm acutely aware that many Christian thinkers do ask deeply philosophical questions, that theology at a beyond-school level can be altogether different from being taught right from wrong "because the book said so" as a child. Nevertheless, the Christian stories themselves feel loaded with judgements in a way the pagan stories simply don't. So while Dominion did change my views of ancient peoples in a way no other book has done, ultimately... I still find paganism to have a stronger appeal.

Not that I'll ever be signing up to anything. The subversive elements of pagan stories are certainly much more rewarding than the holier-than-thou Bible stories as literature, but as a guide to anything (moral or physical) they seem all but useless. Perhaps most importantly of all, I just don't see the need for invoking deities as either physical explanations (except perhaps a prime mover) or for daily moral instruction. Science, philosophy, and discussions with others provide all of that in abundance. To me there's just nothing to be gained, and quite a lot to lose, by signing up to any particular belief structure. Better by far to just muddle through.

Review : Norse Myths and Tales (I)

And now back to the mythology.

Last year I covered a few of Flame Tree Publishing's Epic Tales series, most recently their Viking Folk and Fairy Tales (VT). Though plenty of the fairy tales are indeed fascinating, I'm more interested in mythology proper. The folk stories certainly draw on elements of genuine belief, but the stories themselves feel for the most part like works that were meant to be understood as fundamentally fictitious. I want the things that people actually believed in, to get at the world view of the Vikings themselves*.

* Yes, Vikings. According to distinguished professor Neil Price this is a perfectly fine term to use, so that's what I'll do.

Step forth Flame Tree's Norse Myths and Tales, unavailable in my local bookshops but easily obtained by having someone else buy it for me putting it on my Christmas list. This is altogether a much better collection as far as mythology goes. Oh, I enjoyed Thames & Hudson's The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think (TNM) very much indeed, but sometimes there's just no substitute for reading the original material.

This being Flame Tree, the content is a mixture of the pre-Christian myths and a few later sagas. As usual, to my continuing displeasure, they don't really state the origin of the texts with anywhere near enough clarity. Sometimes things are oddly corrupted, with sentences just ending unfinished for

Yes, you can see how annoying that can be. Don't worry, I wo

It's also problematic because again it's not entirely clear what's a direct translation and what's a retelling; Sigurd feels like a blend of both, which might explain why some parts make absolutely no sense. And the translations are highly unequal. Thankfully, in this case all the mythology stuff is perfect – everything I could ask for, indeed adding a lot of details that TNM missed completely, sometimes radically changing the understanding of the tales. 

But the sagas... not so much. Frithiof the Bold is rather better than the translation in VT, the Laxdaela is okay, but Grettir the Strong is borderline unintelligible. Vocabulary is more often than not unconventional for no good reason whatsoever, doing nothing but making it more difficult to read. Sentence construction is even worse, often being just plain bad. I persisted as long as I could, but I seriously considered skipping it. The opening prologue is totally and utterly uninteresting, and only reading the Wikipedia summary – which assured me there were monsters and such – gave me any desire to persevere. In the end I found an online translation which was at least readable, and I got through it eventually*, but this part alone took me several weeks.

* Sheer bloody-mindedness saw me through, mostly for the humblebragging rights so I can tell y'all from a qualified position about how bad it is.

On, then, to my usual analysis-cum-summary.

1) The Sagas

They're boring.

Yes, they are. Not as bad as the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, but still bad.

To clarify, they're not all boring all the time and they're certainly not all equally boring, but the overall quality is one of extreme, finely-honed dullness. They're written as long, rambling, pseudo-histories, in which every single time – without fail – a new character is introduced, the reader is subject to a genealogical deluge like a bizarre precursor to Who Do You Think You Are ? Worse, so many of the characters have names which are so ridiculously similar to each other, and often make such fleeting appearances, that following along with the story becomes all but impossible. Even with the Sigurd saga - the only one I did actually enjoy, and don't really count it as a saga – I had to rename half the characters in my notes to make any sense of what the hell was going on.

With the others here (Frithiof, Gunnlaug, Gettir, and Laxdaela) I made no such effort. They're just weird and weirdly uninteresting, a sort of strange proto-literature. Every once in a while, they rise to the standards of something decently readable, with the dialogue sounding quite a lot like it was written for TV's Vikings, with many a thing left powerfully unsaid. But most of the time they're terse in the extreme, lacking any sort of emotive description whatever, with dialogue so laconic it borders on the farcical. Not a real example, but it easily could be :

"I suppose I had better fight you now, then."

"Yes, that seems the way of it".

Absolutely everything is delivered in the same extremely matter-of-fact way, even on the sporadic occasions of magic and monsters. One character is nicknamed "the chatterbox" because she has the audacity to utter two sentences in succession ! Many characters (especially in Frithiof) slip into verse at random, although I assume it just doesn't translate well because every single entry is without exception utterly crap.

Not to say that reading the sagas is totally without value. It's interesting to compare with Tolkien's thoughts on Beowulf, that he could see the point of asking for no monsters in the story but not in asking for less. These particular stories are an excellent demonstration of why that approach doesn't work. When the characters have to deal with a mixture of the mostly mundane but occasionally magical, the significance of the magic is utterly lost. It'd be like if Harry Potter was mostly a story about a boy who had to fill in his tax reports* or something, but was just occasionally but inconsequentially assisted by a magical owl. True, it does help to reinforce that people really believed in these magical elements, treating ghosts and draugr as being every bit as plausible as run-of-the-mill warriors, but narratively, they're nothing special. The magic is robbed of all its force.

* No, I don't know why a minor would have to fill in taxes, but meh.

In short, if you make the mundane become magical, stories can become far more interesting. Doing it the other way around, stripping the magical of its mystique, simply doesn't work.

A couple of examples will suffice. Grettir descends into a barrow and finds "horse bones, and then he stumbled against the arm of a high chair, and in that chair he found a man sitting, great treasures of gold and silver were heaped together there... as he went out through the barrow he was gripped at right strongly." So is the barrow-wight the man in the chair ? It isn't said, so the opportunity to build up any real horror is squandered. 

Likewise the only good bit in Frithiof is when the eponymous hero and his crew encounter a storm  raised by witches sitting in a magical tower. But they also see two witches at sea riding a whale, which they fight by hitting them with oars. The witches in the tower "tumbled down and brake both their backs". Presumably there's a connection (which is definitely interesting), but if you can fight magic using a wooden plank, it hardly seems like anything especially fearful. Cool imagery, but wasted through dire narrative.

What's particularly strange is the contrast with the mythologies. In the sagas, everyone is concerned with petty vengeance and lawsuits the whole god damn time; they're essentially soap operas with swords, but nowhere near the level of writing talent of, say, Coronation Street (yes, really, they're that bad*). In the mythologies the storytelling is worlds apart : they're fun, entertaining, clear and straightforward. What went wrong ? How did they go from stories about Thor fighting a giant snake and Loki bound in the entrails of his children to... stories about boring people having endless petty squabbles and legal disputes about matters of no importance ? Certainly there's enough similarity between the myths and the folk tales to see the evolution from one to the other, but the sagas leave me coldly baffled. On the other hand, people today enjoy boring stories of no importance, so I suppose there's that.

* Especially Njal's Saga, which I read some years ago and outright hated. The ones in this volume I'm merely, shall we say, actively uninterested in. I don't hate them. There's not really enough there to hate.

One final general observation : these stories are definitely a lot more feminist than the later folk tales. There are, to be fair, strong female characters aplenty, seldom warriors but definitely in control of the situation, and sometimes violent. They're not always very nice too, though the standards of the day differ wildly. This is true of the male characters as well. Grettir is to modern eyes surely at the very least an antihero, a precursor to the unbearable "cinderlads" of the folk tales : the lazy and forgotten who are insufferably arrogant because they turn out to have hidden talents that put everyone else to shame. At worse he's a murderous villain. Yet in the saga he's clearly depicted in a favourable light, but as to why we're supposed to ally ourselves with the stupid and unbearable git is anyone's guess. Thus with Gudrun, a woman whose love interests are prolonged and confused, it's hardly clear what we're supposed to make of her actions. And quite unlike in VT, there are plenty of women who justifiably snap at their husbands here.

Not that this means any real sort of equality. In one case, Gudrun persuades a man to divorce his wife for the irredeemable act of wearing trousers.

Okay, rant over. As you'll have guessed, there's only one saga I think I need to cover in any detail.

Sigurd

I have to give the Sigurd saga at least a little airtime because it's very, very different to the others. It feels somehow more Germanic and less Norse, though I've no right to that opinion whatever. It's a lot more grounded in the human world with the gods having important but ultimately walk-on parts – it's much more a story than a myth. The powers of the gods are far diminished compared to the truly mythological tales, with the gods being capricious to the point of incoherency (though this might be a result of the translation/summary). At various times they act like fundamental, all-controlling powers in the world yet at others they're helplessly impotent against, say, rope. And there's an awful lot of relationship-based melodrama and little or no humour.

Unlike the versions given in both VT and TNM, this one does at least describe the whole saga, rather than focusing solely on Sigurd himself. And the backstory is fascinating. Of course, there are more than a few elements that compare directly with the tale of Túrin Turambar in The Silmarilion, especially the fight with the dragon. But one key difference that exemplifies the differences emerges early on. The central tragedy of Túrin is his accidental incest with his sister, but for one of Sigurd's ancestors it's another matter entirely. Sigmund's sister Signy sends him her sons so he can raise them to wreak vengeance on her husband, who murdered their family. Finding them wanting, Sigmund either sends them away... or kills them. Signy figures that only a child of pure blood will do, so she willingly swaps forms with a sexy witch, shags her brother, and their offspring is sufficiently to Sigmund's liking that he raises him in the arts of vengeance.

Not that Sinfiotli has it easy, mind you. Oh my no. His hardships start at age 10, with Singy sewing his clothes to his skin and ripping them off to see if he flinches. He doesn't. Later, he and Sigmund turn into werewolves and Sigmund goes berserk and kills him – but not to worry, he's restored with the help of a magical immortal weasel.

Go on, look me in the eye and tell me that's not ten thousand times more interesting than all those petty legal disputes and stupid blood feuds of the other sagas. I dare you.

Interesting, undoubtedly... but pretty soon it began to remind me of those "Am I The Asshole ?" threads on reddit. The answers to those tend to be either a) yes, obviously, b) no of course not, or, more common by far, c) WTAF how are you like this you can't possibly be like this or know people like this you seriously, outrageously WEIRD person. The latter describes pretty much everyone in the Sigurd saga, with their motivations basically comprehensible yet also absolute and total bullshit. And they're racist to the nth degree, or perhaps more accurately tribalistic : everyone in the wrong tribe "clearly" deserves death, not because of anything they've done but just because of who they are, and it seems the reader is meant to support this.

Signy, for instance, confesses her incest for no apparent reason and then burns herself alive. Her son Sigurd falls in with Regin, bother of the dragon Fafnir, who initially helps him to kill Fafnir* to steal his treasure, but then immediately blames Sigurd for killing his brother. "Not to worry", he says, "it'll be okay if you roast his heart". Errr, mind explaining HOW THE ACTUALY LIVING FUCK does that help anyone, Regin ?**

* Tolkien described Fafnir as one of only two dragons of any real significance. I'm not sure – Fafnir is hardly a primal, elemental force like Nidhug who gnaws at the roots of Yggdrasil, the world tree. Fafnir is ultimately just a corrupt man. Certainly he's interesting, but he's not a matter of of cosmic importance.

** Much as Celtic heroes gain knowledge from salmon so too does Sigurd gain knowledge from the heart. But this isn't made clear in advance, which makes Regin sound more than slightly mad, and Sigurd more than slightly stupid for believing him.

So it's tough to like anyone at all in the Saga of the Völsungs. When Sigurd meets Brunhild in her castle surrounded by fire, he fucks her brains out and then gives her... a cursed ring. SIGURD NO DUDE WTF DID YOU DO THAT FOR  ? It gets worse : he buggers off and for some reason Brunhild decides, no, I've been waiting here my whole life, I love you but I'm staying here for a few days FOR NO DAMN REASON. Which of course results in Sigmund having his memory wiped and marrying some other random babe somewhere else. 

Basically, it's a great but utterly stupid story. In the end everyone dies pointlessly and tragically. Odin and the other gods flit in and out, capriciously favouring this and that mortal and rescinding their favours for no fucking reason whatever. There's monsters, cannibalism, incest, child murder, genocide, sex aplenty. It is, in short, a veritable hot mess of a saga, bizarre in the extreme – and, of course, eminently suited for opera.

---

That's quite enough for part one. Next time I'll look at the considerably more interesting world of the mythology itself, with not a legal dispute in sight. The northern peoples of Europe may have had the literary talents of a basket of dead hamsters but they redeemed themselves tremendously when it came to explaining the world around them.

Review : Religion And The Decline Of Magic (IV)

If you're just joining, I've been summarising Keith Thomas' incredible 1971 thesis Religion And The Decline of Magic. In part one I looked at the differences between religion and magic and the beneficial effects of magical thinking. Part two examined how magical beliefs sustain themselves, but also how they relate to and evolved into scientific methodologies. Part three looked at what happened when things went wrong : how witch trials got out of control, but also what brought them to an end, as well as how magical, paganistic ideas were, and are, extremely enduring.

The early modern period saw the development of a rationalist ideology (if that's not an oxymoron) that has persisted for centuries. Some aspects of this were extremely rapid cultural shifts. The witch-hunting mania of the 1650s gave way, in less than a single lifetime, to an era when magical beliefs in general became socially embarrassing, confined much more to something approaching a lunatic fringe than being the social norm. But fortune's wheel is ever turning, and there are no guarantees that this state of affairs will persist. Indeed in some ways the western world seems bent on regression to an earlier and nastier way of thinking. 

This does not mean, by any stretch, that we are abandoning science and rationality; by no means is there necessarily a slippery slope here. But it does seem pertinent to try and make sense of how the opposite occurred, how we came to reject ideas that had been seen as normal for most of human history and adopt a rational, evidence-based scientific approach in spite of all our natural tendencies.

7) Why did this happen ?

Let me begin by emphasising the magnitude of the change that happened here. The world view that emerged from the wreck of the old bore little resemblance to its predecessor, with a radically different cosmology and, as we'll see, a vastly different moral outlook. Even the conception of time had been totally reshaped. Why, for instance, do all those medieval manuscripts with illustrations of Greco-Roman stories have everyone in medieval garb ? Why do they have the walls of Troy as those of a 13th-century castle ? There's an enormously profound bit of reasoning behind this apparent bit of artistic foolishness : the notion of time itself had changed. 

Technological development was hardly at a standstill in the medieval period, but its visible effects were, Thomas says, somewhat limited. People lived and died much as they had done for centuries. Their houses were constructed in much the same way, they planted the same crops, caught the same diseases, died just as easily, suffered just as much. There was little reason for them to suppose the past had been significantly different to the present, because in many ways it wasn't : the glory that was Rome didn't affect the world of rural agriculture very much at all. But when you start getting inventions like gunpowder and the printing press, which have visible and powerful changes on everyday life... then any pretence that the world was unchanging has to give way. Astrology played a role in this by dividing time into periods, making the idea of change more palatable. But actual technological developments, more than abstract theory, drove the changing view inexorably forwards.

This view on time matters, and not just because of its significance in itself. In the both the medieval past and classical antiquity, there was a sort of "progressive conservatism" behind all proposed changes. "Make Rome Great Again" would have been something Cicero would wholeheartedly approved of; medieval equivalents would have worked just as well. The idea is quite simple : this change will make us better not because it's new, but because it's reverting us back to the ways of our glorious past. It's almost totally without foundation, obviously, but that didn't stop people believing it. Some still do, of course.

As scientific and technological progress, err, progressed, this way of thinking was no longer tenable for the majority of people. New inventions were unlike anything ever seen, so the idea that you had to hark back to the past to justify yourself fell by the wayside. What did the world of Caesar and Alexander know of Gutenberg and Newton ? Sod all. Now you could openly propose that new ideas were better in and of themselves, not because they'd restore any lost ideals. The appeal of ancient prophecies was fatally undermined by the present being so demonstrably different to the past. The two could no longer be held to relate so directly to each other.

One issue on which I think I will provisionally disagree with Thomas is that religion was self-confirming, that it couldn't have changed by its own volition and had to have been changed by external influences. For all the circular reasoning at work in the supernatural beliefs, the opening chapter does seem to make it clear that it was a change of religious belief that underlined the wider shift in philosophical world views*. True, it hardly went from a state of "everything is God" to "everything is atoms" – it was nothing at all like that. But there was that aspect to it : magical thinking gave way to something much more materialistic than had prevailed before, however messy and imperfect that change was in reality. 

*And indeed, the Protestant movement was branded very much as a reversion to a lost and more virtuous past, a way to overcome the contemporary corruption. Like later, political ideologies of the English Civil War, this had unintended consequences. Even if early Protestants were not actively trying to rethink the nature of reality, that was the end result.

Which is not to say that the circular nature of the old beliefs wasn't extremely important. It is, as the old saying goes, impossible to people reason people out of positions they hadn't been reasoned into. People often believe things simply because other people they know and trust also believe them; understanding of the issues isn't required. Thomas himself points this out.

Advancement in scientific thinking and technological progress, however, undermined the need for magical thinking at a base and emotional level. People believed in magic in part because they needed to : it fulfilled an essential social role that could not be met in any other way. It allowed people to make decisions about issues they could not decide rationally. But when thinking advanced to the point those issues could be understood rationally, magical thinking faded away. When complex issues can be predicted quantitatively and reliably, when you can demonstrate irrefutably that things happen simply due to the physical nature of reality, then the need to moralise everything vanishes.

That moral dimension is crucial to understanding the change that occurred. The unifying factor between religion, astrology and magic was that they all had morality as one of their key features. They all held that bad things happened to people who deserved it. They denied the very possibility of random chance : there was, in effect, always someone to blame, and if that someone was God, then you must surely have deserved whatever befell you. Medieval society was not a meritocracy, but in some ways it believed it was one – or perhaps more a sort of "moralocracy" : the king's on top because he's an innately better person, the serfs are at the bottom because they're a bunch of shitheads.

The change in thinking was to be able to demonstrate that this wasn't the case. Not perfectly and not evenly (there are still monarchists today, still those who idolise celebrities, and of course still those who believe in astrology and other bunk), but still... something changed. Profoundly, and in some cases rapidly, as per the rapid decline in witchcraft trials; in living memory, normal magical rituals became the stuff of open ridicule and mockery. When you can show that things happen for entirely natural causes, you simply don't need to give them any kind of moral aspect. When you can better protect people from fire and flood, you don't need to pretend that they had it coming when their village was burned down or washed away. When the state can provide for the poor and destitute, communal solidarity is no longer needed, and the mad old cat lady need not be feared for being a social deviant.

The decline in magic is not quite mirrored by the rise of science. The former occurred well before the latter, in some cases centuries before, says Thomas. He suggests that the age became experimental before it became really successful : enough answers were being found to have faith that eventually other answers would be found as well. Instead of needing to plug the gaps with magic, the mindset became one of sufficient confidence to accept the unknowns. What is a mystery today, the thinking goes, might be understood tomorrow so long as we keep investigating. Just as the medieval mindset had cause to doubt individual wizards but not magic itself, so did their descendants come to doubt individual scientific claims but not the fundamental method of inquiry. 

In a way, says Thomas, it was more the loss of magic that led to the ascendency of science rather than the other way around. Science didn't overturn magic so much as a loss of faith in magic allowed science to flourish. The Protestant diminishment of everyday magic wasn't out of some inherently more rational world view, what with ascribing absolutely everything to God. But it did facilitate the development of such a view, because again, people needed tangible answers, and if magic was out, then science had to step up. Again, not evenly – there were even violent movements against mathematics because of its arcane symbols – but it did happen.

Today, we still place faith in the scientific method even when its results are manifestly wrong, says Thomas. In that sense, magical thinking is likely to always be with us, a deep-seated aspect of the human psyche. Just as paganistic reasoning survived the arrival of the (so-called) monotheism of Christianity, so too do many of us persist in our little rituals. It's just human nature to believe in things. Which is why I get very cross with people who insist that we should simply stop doing this, as though it were something we have any control over. We don't, not really.

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I have to end with a brief attempt to learn some of the lessons of all this. Why are we backsliding ? Thomas' analysis would suggest it's because our emotional needs aren't being met. "God is dead, and we have killed him", perhaps, but we still have gaps where we can't make a rational judgement yet the gap needs to be crossed for us to make a decision. If we have no clear moral preference and no rational judgement then something comes forth to get us across. And if it helps us, then we believe in it.

I doubt there's a single global root cause here; as per the witch trials proceeding quite differently in Britain and Europe, the same outcome might result from a multitude of reasons. Still, I think I should try to at least sketch out some possible contributing factors. Whether these are enough to explain my exasperation with the current state of affairs I don't know; I think a least some of these will be significant, but I won't attempt to guess which are the most important. I'm also acutely aware that an attempt to rationally understand a loss of rationality may be a fatally stupid thing to do, but I'm going to try anyway.

Broadly there are two categories to this. The first is how we process information :

• The obvious one in a simple information deficit. Anecdotally, there are certainly plenty of quite extraordinarily stupid people out there, and a poor education system must surely have some role in all this. Some people have been left behind, not so much materially but informatically : they have never subscribed to the wider modern world view but persist in much older, largely religious, delusions*. The Overton window has shifted how these people express themselves and what's socially acceptable, but hasn't actually altered their system of thinking very much.
• A bigger factor, I suspect, is the opposite : information overload. It's now all too easy to sink into the first emotionally-rewarding explanation one comes across. I don't necessarily mean "thing that I already agree with" here, that's a different issue. Nor do I blame people for being lazy and not seeking out better sources, which are often far more complex – even with the best outreach content available. No, the pressures of modern life, though incomparably different to the medieval era (and in some important ways vastly less) are nonetheless real. For people to reach to an immediately emotionally-satisfying answer, rather than one that's more powerful but less intuitive, isn't something I can raise issue with.
• Outright misinformation should not be underestimated. I doubt it has much of a role in in convincing people. Instead its main role is secondary, to cause confusion rather than conviction, to sow fear, doubt and mistrust of the other side. Bribery and corruption among the wealthy oligarchs is a major cause of this.
• If we don't experience a change directly for ourselves, we have to believe it's a good thing to support it happening to others. If we perceive a positive development as negative, then we're convinced the system is failing by apparently making things worse, in spite of the truth. We then start to look for alternatives, however irrational those may be. You can't feel something if you don't experience it, so you rely heavily on how people report it.
• If we do experience things directly, then a force may be perceived as good only if it causes improvements rather than merely maintaining the status quo – even if the status quo is actually quite nice. In Thomas' period things were visibly changing and improving as a result of scientific progress. In the modern era this is still (make no mistake !) happening, still a good thing... but it isn't causing such direct improvements any more, at least not ones that so inescapably change and improve our daily lives. Better cancer treatments matter a great deal to those benefiting from them but they don't directly affect the vast majority of people, at least not regularly. In short, we've come to take things for granted, and therefore don't see scientific gains for what they are, or even appreciate that it maintains our lifestyles or recognise just how much worse things could be.
• A happier factor may be a "regression to the mean" effect. Swathes of people, having become already very rational indeed, can't very well become even more rational, but can easily become at least a little bit more unhinged.
• We may have stopped seeing spiritual gains from rationality. Things have sometimes hardened into a nastier, more binary, less tolerant sort of logical thinking, "if you don't agree with my PERFECLTY REASONABLE conclusions then you're obviously a twat". This is the essence of New Atheism. By forcing people to conform, like the medieval communities, it may have exactly the opposite effect. By permitting no tolerance whatever for minor and harmless beliefs, it may drive the much worse ideas it seeks to suppress. As with misinformation I suspect the main impact of this is secondary, in that it becomes easier to tar all scientists with the same brush.
• It's probably also worth remembering that a lot of people do participate in the irrational stuff purely for its ceremonial value. They like being with their friends and singing songs; they don't actually believe much of what they're saying at all (this is how you get Christians who don't like Jesus). This doesn't make it any the less damaging if they vote in accordance with their community, however. They really do believe it's going to Church, not practising Christian teachings, that matters. For the MAGA types it's all very cult-like, if not towards particular figures (though this often happens, believing in Trump himself rather than in anything he says) then in effect making a cult out of their community : whatever their community does must be correct.

* Regular readers will know of course that I don't mean all religion is delusional. I'm thinking here larger of the American Bible-thumpers, who are quite, quite different from the parish priests of rural Britain.

The second category may be more important than all of these combined : materialistic concerns. The need for tangible gains was evident throughout the whole work, and as Thomas points out, it sometimes wasn't the arguments that changed, only their circumstances. Just as with information, it may not be enough to maintain the status quo for us to see it as a good thing : things have to improve. Now in many ways there have been huge material improvements in recent decades, but in others, there haven't. We haven't seen a substantial change in working hours in decades. Housing prices have skyrocketed. Wages have increased, but not so much in real terms. It feels like we're being asked to do more and more for less and less, especially given the poor state of public infrastructure – and with less and less guarantees for the future.

As for the solution, I leave that for another time. There's a quote going around that you can't get a fascist out of office peacefully, but I draw some hope from studies which show that this just isn't true.

I'm going to end on a more long-term note though. The magnitude of the change in world view from the medieval to modern periods was truly staggering. Let's suppose that shift was, as seems likely, broadly positive, getting us a little closer to understanding the world as it truly is, or at least in ways more useful to us. I think that's basically the case, that the scientific approach is a better way of reasoning with the world. Now extend that forward. Might we eventually change up or replace the modern scientific method completely ? Maybe our own current views, not just the details but the fundamental basis of it, our conception of reality, our cosmology, our very methodology, will all look similarly backward to our descendants as medieval magic does to us. Personally I rather hope so. And perhaps our descendants will be charitable enough to remember that while our views may have changed, we can still appreciate the old ways, still enjoy the old stories, and most importantly of all, remember that we're not as different as it may first appear.