Needing money to pay off Danish raiders and build ships to repel them, Aethelstan and his family were among the first in Europe to collect an efficient tax on agriculture. But now that the Danes were back in force, King Aethelred the Unready* was forced to pay Danegeld to new raiders: the Bluetooth family, founded a century earlier by a warlord, Old Gorm, who ruled Jelling in Denmark, a realm expanded by his son Harold Bluetooth (probably named after the pagan fashion for colouring teeth).* Bluetooth announced his conversion to Christianity in runic inscriptions on the Jelling Stones, but struggled over thirty years to control Jutland and southern Norway. In 986, his son Sweyn Forkbeard deposed Bluetooth, seized Denmark and Norway and started raiding Britain.
On St Brice’s Day 1002 after four years of Forkbeardish raids, Aethelred ordered that ‘All the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amid the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination,’ as he put it a royal charter. In a day of the long knives, Anglo-Saxons murdered Danes, burning many in an Oxford church where thirty-four skeletons, charred and butchered, have been unearthed. Among them was Forkbeard’s own sister Gunhilde, married to a Danish lord at Aethelred’s court. Forkbeard planned revenge, though he had rivals for the English prize: a Danish warlord Thorkel raided on his own account and after a massive tribute payment joined Aethelred.
In 1013 Forkbeard invaded in force and defeated Aethelred, who accompanied by his son Edward fled to Normandy. There he was given asylum by Rollo’s descendant Duke Robert. But it all depended on Forkbeard. When he suddenly died, it all fell apart.
His younger son, the twenty-year-old Canute, ‘exceptionally tall and strong, handsomest of men, all except for his nose, thin and rather hooked’, took control of Norway, then raised a coalition of Scandinavians and Poles, lent by his cousin Bolesław, duke of Poland, which landed at Sandwich in Kent. He devastated England. Canute was joined by an English warlord, Godwin, who became his hatchet man, rewarded with the earldom of Wessex. Canute agreed to divide England with Aethelred’s son Edmund Ironside of Wessex until his death, an occurrence that the Dane surely accelerated: Ironside was murdered defecating in his privy – always a vulnerable moment.
In 1017, Canute was crowned king of England, marrying Aethelred’s widow Emma, daughter of a duke of Normandy. Playing both sides, Emma’s brother protected her sons by Aethelred. Canute killed the one that fell into his hands, while he and Emma had their own son, Harthacnut. Confident of himself as ‘king of all England and Denmark and the Norwegians and of some of the Swedes’, Canute travelled to Rome for the imperial coronation and European summit, where he boasted that ‘I spoke with the Emperor himself and the Lord Pope.’* But, as with Forkbeard, Canute’s sudden death in 1035 unleashed chaos: Harthacnut was in Scandinavia, so his son by his concubine Aelfgifu, Harold Harefoot, seized England. When Aethelred’s son, Aethling (heir) Alfred, returned, Godwin of Wessex blinded him, then scalped his troops. On Harefoot’s death by elf-shot (a lovely euphemism for natural causes), Harthacnut claimed England* but was forced to recognize his half-brother Edward as Aethling. A fatal mistake.
The return of House Alfred was backed by Richard III, duke of Normandy, where Rollo’s Vikings were now thoroughly Christian and Frankified. But the Vikings were still raiding and venturing. Now they reached a continent that had been separated from Afro-Eurasia for many millennia: America.
THE AMERICANS: FREYDIS AND FEATHERED SERPENT
Around 960, Thorvald Asvaldsson was exiled from Norway for murder and sent to settle in a new Viking colony far to the north: Iceland. The island, which had only been settled in the 870s by Naddod, a Viking from the Faroes, became a refuge for killers and dissidents. DNA reveals that many of the settlers hailed from Ireland or the Isles, victims of slaving raids. The 10,000 Icelanders founded a ‘domain of our law’ controlled by an
