Norse Ireland - a nation once again
by Seamus Sweeney
[ opinion - may 08 ]
There was a traditional view of Irish history, taught in schools and for some reason most closely associated with the Christian Brothers, that emphasises the suffering of the noble Celtic (and its often implied, fundamentally Catholic) Irish over years of oppression and disaster. Most of this oppression and disaster was - surprise, surprise! - the fault of the evil English, who inflicted 800 years of oppression on Ireland. Of course, for about half those 800 years, English influence was confined to a small area around Dublin, and the forces of Strongbow had been invited by the Irish chieftain Dermot McMurrough in the first place, but the pain-and-suffering view of Irish history generally didn’t concern itself with such trivia.
Nearly as bad as the English were the Vikings. Barbarous marauders of holy monastic Ireland, the average Irish schoolchild perhaps came to believe that the English for all their faults delivered us from the threat of Viking rule. Coming to Ireland only to rape and pillage, the Vikings disordered the monasteries, which of course were seats of learning and piety. Then, Brian Boru won the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, the Vikings went home, and the pious Irish continued along their primose path until the Evil Brits muscled in, with consequences that we all know.
Such a simple picture is of course almost by definition inaccurate. The Vikings have, like most villains of history, been re-evaluated as seafaring and social innovators, committed to a form of democracy. And the Vikings never really left Ireland alone and unsullied. Norse influences on the Irish language are strong, with commercial words such as "airgead" (money) and "margadh" (market) being originally Norse imports. "Norseman Lane", "Sitric Lane", "Sigurd Lane" are just some of the street names in Dublin which reflect its Viking origins. Bryan Sykes’ 2007 book Saxons, Vikings and Celts revealed the results of a decade-long DNA study showing the mingling of Viking blood in Ireland went deep.
The celebration of Dublin’s millennium in 1988 - in reality the millennium of King Sitric’s proclamation of the cities - marked a new appreciation of the Norse nature of Dublin. I recall as a child of nine being taken to the 'Dublin Viking Experience', which involved hours of queuing, such was its popularity. This was a then-novel living history experience, with actors portraying residents of Norse Dublin in an underground recreation (one had to get a lift which had been fitted as a time machine). Much of the fun was trying to catch these actors out by peppering them with questions that implied contemporary knowledge, and yet they remained sturdily in character.
Any visitor to Dublin’s National History Museum can’t fail but be impressed by the range of artefacts of Viking Dublin, and the reconstruction of the Sea Stallion - a Viking longship originally constructed in Dublin which the Danes have reconstructed. In advance of the "return" of the reconstructed Sea Stallion, radio ads informed the nation that the original boat had been "built by Dubliners"
Urban Ireland, it could be argued, was created by the Norsemen. And Ireland is now overwhelmingly urban. Not only Dublin and its surrounding suburbs, but Limerick and Waterford - among Ireland’s other major urban centres - are Viking foundations.
Dublin City football club (in this context, "football" meaning "soccer" - whether one identifies soccer, Gaelic football or even rugby as "football" is a highly revealing choice in Irish society) - a somewhat artificial construct themselves - adopted "Vikings" as a nickname during their brief existence. No longer perhaps are the Norse seen as marauding outsiders.
Identity is fluid. In Africa, the anthropologist Lee Cronk’s work on how, in Kenya, the Mukogodo people became Maasai is instructive. In the early 20th Century, the British assigned the most fertile land of highland Kenya to white settlers. The Mukogodo were deemed original inhabitants of some of the land and were assigned their own reserve. The British, in another example of colonial insensitivity to local subtleties, had mistaken the derogatory term the neighbouring people, the cattle-rearing Maasai, gave to the foraging life - il-Torrobo - to be a tribal name, "the Dorobo", and gave this name to the Mukogodo. The Mukogodo, however, began to keep cattle on their new lands, and embracing this lifestyle began to define themselves as the self-proclaimed superior group, Maasai.
Deep shifts in group self-identify are obviously possible. Think of the shift that Unionist Irish in the North East have had to make - from identifying themselves as Irish and British, to identifying themselves as "Ulster" (and a truncated version of the historic province of Ulster, with many loyal brethren in the remaining Ulster counties of Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan).
Of course, there needs to be some coherence to identity. It would be absurd for the Irish to sudden claim a deep identification with the culture of Burkina Faso. To return to African studies as a source for thought-provoking topics in considering identity and tradition, the historian Thomas Spear has written compellingly on "the invention of tradition," the notion prevalent among historians of Africa and of colonialism that African "traditions" were invention of colonial authorities in collusion with African elders, all for the sake of establishing hegemony. As Spears writes [1], "the case for colonial invention has often overstated colonial power and ability to manipulate African institutions to establish hegemony. Rather, tradition was a complex discourse in which people continually reinterpreted the lessons of the past in the context of the present. Colonial power was limited by chiefs' obligation to ensure community well-being to maintain the legitimacy on which colonial authorities depended. And ethnicity reflected longstanding local political, cultural and historical conditions in the changing contexts of colonial rule. None of these institutions were easily fabricated or manipulated, and colonial dependence on them often limited colonial power as much as facilitating it."
Tradition is not a fabrication, or a pure invention, but a work in progress. Spears also writes "to mobilize African ambitions, colonial rulers had to appeal to both the past and the future, to what Africans had been as well as what many wished to be, and to provide a means of deploying tradition to attain modernity and vice versa. The history of tradition was as important as its future, and any attempt to focus exclusively on the retrospective future of colonized custom or ethnicity is bound to fail. One therefore needs to see colonialism as leading out of earlier eras as well as into later ones in an endless process of becoming, deploying both old and new means to do so."
It is of course both very suggestive and very misleading to use thinking about colonialism in Africa to inform thinking about identity in Ireland. Nevertheless, the "endless process of becoming" gets to the heart of national identity everywhere, but especially in a place so damnably obsessed with the notion as Ireland (if you don’t believe me, go into any bookshop in Ireland and see the stacks and stacks of dreary books on what it means to be Irish) Anthony Powell once wearily told Duncan Fallowell how tiresome he found the Irish, with their endless wrangling about what it means to be Irish. Who else really cared? Who else really cares?
Hardy, sailing forth from the North Atlantic into the wider world, forerunners of some of the more enlightened and progressive societies on earth - perhaps the Vikings would not perhaps be such a bad identity to adopt. Certainly the endless shell game of Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist, seems played out, guaranteed even in these days of a peace process embodied with the Reverend Ian Paisley as First Minister and Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister (with all the dark undertones such a pairing evoke) to lead to nothing but sterility and, always in the background, the possibility of further discord.
The Vikings became the modern Scandanavians - not perhaps a bad society to emulate either. A friend of mine who once worked with Ireland’s Economics and Social Research Institute (ESRI) a research group on economic and social change in Ireland, once told me that ESRI meetings could be summarised with monotonous regularity as "why can’t we be more like Scandinavia?" The Scandinavian social model is often held up as something exceptional and idiosyncratic by its critics. Perhaps this is because Scandinavia is conceptualised as remote, distant, the "frozen north", while in reality historical links between Ireland and Scandinavia are as strong as I have indicated above.
A deep change from Celtic to Norse self-concept in Ireland might not quite have the positive effects I’ve hinted at above - the magical melting away of the supposedly eternal divide that dominates Ireland (especially in the North), the sudden adoption of the social models of the modern Scandinavian states. It might not totally shake the central dogma of a certain narrow, exclusionary Irishness that True Irish = Gaelic = Celtic = Catholic = Nationalist, a central dogma with its own mirror image in the "other community", a double act which has blighted and robbed countless lives over the generations - but it might lighten the high seriousness with which the Irish take identity. It would reflect the multi-ethnic genetic heritage of the supposedly "Celtic" Irish, and literally transcend insularity. Norse Ireland is nation waiting to be reborn.
Notes
1 Spears, Thomas, 'Neo Traditionalism and the Limits of Invention in British Colonial Africa", Journal of African History 44 (2003), pp 3-27. [Back]
