The Vikings by Robert Ferguson

Author:Robert Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

Though the English repossession of York has the neatness and drama of concluding a ‘campaign’ to re-take lands lost to the invaders, the battle at Brunanburh in 937 seemed to contemporaries and near-contemporaries of greater significance. Another presence at Brunanburh on the English side was that of Oda, bishop of Ramsbury in Wiltshire. The poet does not mention him, but later stories place him there and credit him with miraculously restoring Athelstan’s sword.25 The legend adds interest to the otherwise bald account of the battle in the ‘F’ annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which note only that Athelstan and Edmund triumphed ‘with the help of Christ’. That Christian legend should place this particular man on this particular field of battle has a cultural significance that probably equals the military significance of Athelstan’s victory, for Oda’s father was, in the whispered tones of one source, ‘said by certain people to have come to England with Ubba and Ivar’. He was, in other words, the son of a Heathen Viking.

Visiting the newly reopened monastery at Athelney, Alfred’s biographer, Asser, had been surprised to find so many foreign monks there and attributed it to the fact that Viking violence had frightened the native English away from the monastic life. Among the foreign novices he was surprised to note ‘someone of Viking parentage who had been brought up there’; how much more would the elevation, within a half-century, of a first-generation Danish immigrant to the highest church office in the land have surprised him. Oda was the kind of immigrant the royal house of Wessex must have dreamt of, and it is hardly a slur on his character and on the many talents he showed as bureaucrat, diplomat and Christian leader to wonder if his appointment, four years after Brunanburh, to the archbishopric of Canterbury might reflect an early grasp, among the English intelligentsia, of the benefits of ‘positive discrimination’ towards the right kinds of Danish settlers. As the proud boast sounded in the last few lines of the poem on Brunanburh shows, tribal and cultural self-awareness were an essential part of social identity in early medieval times. Oda’s antecedents as the child of a Viking father were no secret, and the authorities will have hoped that his success might encourage other settlers to follow him.

Most of what we know of Oda’s life and career comes from Byrhtferth of Ramsey’s late tenth-century Life of his nephew, St Oswald. As a young man, Oda left his parents’ home and attached himself to a Christian, Athelhelm, probably identical to a man of that name who was successively bishop of Wells and archbishop of Canterbury, where his religious education began.26 Oda became Athelhelm’s protégé. After travelling to Rome with him in 923 he was appointed by Athelstan to the bishopric of Ramsbury, a position he held for the next fifteen years.

Oda became a close and trusted royal adviser. When, in 936, Hugh the Great of the Franks summoned Athelstan’s nephew Louis d’Outremer (‘from beyond the seas’), to

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