Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom by Holland Tom

Author:Holland, Tom [Holland, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, History, Non-Fiction, Religion
ISBN: 9780349119724
Amazon: 0349119724
Goodreads: 43537198
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 2008-09-18T07:00:00+00:00

Perhaps, then, many among the English must have wondered, this was how the world was to end: with a tax demand. Even the man who was now Archbishop of York, the brilliant and devoutly orthodox Wulfstan, openly warned that the Danes might prove the shock troops of Antichrist. Already, summoning the English to prepare themselves for the Day of Judgement, he had advocated barefoot displays of penance, the singing of psalms and public prayer; and in 10H, during the dark days that followed Forkbeard’s conquest of the kingdom, he had flatly declared the end time imminent. ‘For nothing has prospered now for a long while either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed.’ F.ven pagans, however, as they observed the state of the world, might on occasion fall to pondering what its fracturing portended. One did not have to be a Christian to be conscious of Christian dates. Was it merely coincidence, for instance, that Thorgeir, summoning the Icelanders to decide whether they should abandon their ancient gods, had chosen to do so in the year 1000? What prospect, if the end were indeed approaching, that any of the heathen gods, even Odin himself, could hope to keep it at bay? Despite the triumph of the Danes in the killing fields of England, many Northmen, suspended between their new faith and their ancient beliefs, were not immune to the anxieties of Wulfstan. ‘Kin’, wrote one of them, in dread of the end days, ‘will break the bonds of kin’:

A harsh world it will be, whoredom rampant,

An axe-age, a sword-age, shields shattered,

A wind-age, a wolf-age before man’s age tumbles down.[]

The very sentiments of the archbishop—and composed, it may well be, by a man who had heard him utter them. Yet the end of the world sung by the poet was one illumined not by the light of Christ, but by the fiery extinction of the ancient gods, ‘fire flaring up against fire’. No immortality, according to such a vision, awaited those who followed Odin: for he, like the sun itself, was fated to be devoured by a monstrous wolf, while all around him ‘the brilliant stars are dashed down from the skies’. His death, like the death of all those whom the pagans had foolishly worshipped as deathless, was a certainty. Such was ‘Ragnarok’ – the Doom of the Gods.

And Canute, certainly, wanted no part of it: for it was hardly his ambition to play the part of either Odin or Antichrist. Though he might be avaricious and brutal, he was not unthinkingly so. For all the ruthlessness with which he had extorted treasure from the English to pay off his followers, he had no wish for his reign to continue as a wolf-age. So it was that in 1018, even as his tax collectors were bleeding England white, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Wulfstan into swearing that he would uphold all the laws of Edgar and Ethelred: that he would rule, in short, as the heir of the Cerdicingas.

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