The Viking Age by Charles Keary

Author:Charles Keary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ozymandias Press

DEFENCES BROKEN DOWN, A.D. 846-58

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THE SCANDINAVIANS ADOPTED A SPECIAL name, Primsigning — first-signing — for the custom of allowing oneself to be marked with a cross, as we saw that Gisli did in his day. Even now this had become not infrequent among the Northmen, especially in those countries which bordered upon the empire — or, in other words, upon the kingdom of Lewis; for he now owned the marches between Germany and Denmark. The custom was useful for trade purposes among others. But it had also a certain religious significance of a highly characteristic kind. It was a halfway house on the road to baptism. It did not commit the recipient too far. But at the same time there was a sort of charm in it — against disease, the darts of enemies, and so forth.

Baptism itself the Northerners, or in fact converted heathens of any sort, generally put off as late as possible, till their death-beds if that might be; following the example, for instance, of Slavomir, the king of the Abodriti in Charlemagne’s day, who remained a heathen till he was upon his death-bed, and then had himself baptized: or much more distinguished examples among the converted Romans in the early days of Christianity, such as that of the great Constantine himself. And why? Not so much, or at any rate not only, that they might defer the evil hour when they must renounce many of their old pleasures; but because baptism, as a sacrament, was to them one of the supreme magic rites of the Christian Church — a church which had so many strange dealings with the supernatural world — a supreme charm against the devil and the dark powers from below. To die in the white garments of baptism was to go straight to the Christian heaven, and to go straight away from the Christian hell in which, at any rate, these heathens were beginning to believe and tremble.

The seed planted by St. Fursey long ago, or, if you will, still longer ago by the Seer of Patmos, had grown and borne fruit. The lives of the saints begin now to be filled with visions of the celestial and infernal kingdoms. Men trembled before the sky’s portents, which were, perhaps, rather exceptionally common in this century — comets, eclipses, meteor showers, northern lights; that curious dispersion in the air of a tiny fungoid growth causing the descending rain or snow to be tinged with red, which hence, in popular superstition, becomes a rain of blood — all these natural phenomena, looked at with the eye of fear, took spectral and portentous shapes.

Add to these motives the more commonplace influence of trade; the material advantages which some places such as Sleswick — which for a short while was a town of the empire — were visibly gaining through peaceful intercourse between Dane and Christian; and you have the explanation of the peace which soon began to reign upon the borders of Lewis’s kingdom, in the very parts where matters had looked most threatening in Charlemagne’s day.

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