Viking Warfare (Review)

8/9/2019 Viking Warfare (Review)

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VIKING WARFARE. By I. P. Stephenson. *Amberley. *Stroud, 2012. 144pp. 46 colour and

black-and-white illustrations. ISBN 978-1-84868-690-8.****

Tom Williams (Institute of Archaeology, University College London)

This book presents itself as “groundbreaking…the first comprehensive survey of Viking warfare in all

its forms” (back cover), and it is true enough that there is no comparable work on the subject that

seeks to make a general survey of the practice, history and technology of Viking-Aage Scandinavian

warfare. Judged against this mighty claim, it is perhaps inevitable that this slim book should be found

somewhat wanting1; it runs to only 113 pages of text and provides next to nothing on the subject of

Viking warfare beyond Anglo-Saxon England or on the enormously significant relationships between

religion, ideology and violence in the Iron-Age/early medieval North, the subject of much recent and

ground-breaking study (see especially Price 2002, Jørgensen et al. 2003, Andren 2006). It also skates

remarkably lightly over the crucial subjects of naval technology, organisation and tactics (only seven

pages relate directly to this subject: pp. 94-101). Ryan Lavelle’s recent volume on the subject of late

Anglo-Saxon warfare sets the benchmark for the level of detail and subtlety that an overview of this kind can

achieve (Lavelle 2011; see also T.J.T.Williams 2011), and those hoping for something comparable to Lavelle’s

book would be advised to hold out for Gareth Williams’ long-anticipated volume (G.Williams forthcoming).

However, the absence of critical apparatus implies that this book is intended primarily for the

educated general reader, and it should therefore perhaps be judged not by its failure to plug a serious

gap in the scholarly literature, but rather by what it adds to the corpus of popular publications treating

early medieval warfare-so often written with the re-enactor or war-gaming enthusiast in mind. By

those standards the book is far more successful, and Stephenson should be commended for engaging

robustly with some of the written sources; he writes off sagas as direct evidence for the Viking-Age

early on (Chapter 2, ‘Lies, Damn Lies and Sagas’), explodes the berserker as a myth (‘no reality

beyond the story or the chessboard’, p.23), problematises the term ‘Viking’ (Chapter 1, ‘Vikingr!’),

and so on. All of this is light years ahead of most popular literature on the subject and is important

stuff; the casual misrepresentation of the Scandinavian past-especially in popular culture-has provided

and continues to provide the dominant stock images for nationalist and far-right fantasy.

It is a shame then that these early chapters throw up their own problems, many of them needlessly

caused by the overbearing tone with which the author communicates his views. Subtle and important

discussions about the transmission of cultural knowledge or the impact of shamanic and magico-

religious practices in northern warfare are thus swiftly dispensed with, the reader instead being

vigorously directed to consider the ‘real’ evidence. To his great credit, Stephenson includes

archaeological and art-historical material in this category alongside the major Frankish and Anglo-

Saxon documentary sources (with a nod to Irish annals and Skaldic verse; Arab and Byzantineevidence is not mentioned). Nevertheless, by his own admission, it is with the Anglo-Saxon material

that the author is most concerned and many of the sources he mentions are barely referred to in

subsequent chapters. Thus Chapter 3, ‘The Wrath of God’, exclusively describes the campaigns of

Anglo-Saxon kings against Viking armies as reconstructed primarily from the major Anglo-Saxon

narrative sources for the period 789 to 1016. There is almost nothing in the way of source criticism in

the presentation of this material, a surprise after the author ’s sensitivity to historical texts in the

preceding chapters.

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Chapter 4, ‘Bright Wargear ’, surveys the military equipment of Viking armies. Here the reader is

introduced to the persistent and problematic idea that Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian warriors used

essentially identical tactics and equipment and that, therefore, observations made about the former

must apply equally to the latter. This approach, it must be said, does help to undermine the sort of

cultural-historical assumptions made about archaeological material that still bedevils much popular

literature on the subject; the interconnectedness of northern Europe with the rest of the continent – as

well as with the Islamic east and the Byzantine world – is consistently stressed. However, blunt

statements such as ‘The Vikings were no different in respect of armour provision than their enemies’

(p.51) are not backed up by the author with sufficient evidence. Indeed, suspicion builds that this

argument is employed as a methodological sleight of hand that enables Stephenson to avoid gaps in

his research by basing broad-brush conclusions on the pan-European (and especially Anglo-Saxon)

evidence with which he is more familiar. Thus the effects of a tenth-century ‘military equipment

revolution’ (the fashion for conical helmets) are taken for granted as applying to Viking equipment,

despite the admission in the previous sentence that only a single example of a Viking helmet has ever

been found (the Gjermundbu helmet). Although the same issues recur in Stephenson’s discussion of

weapons, here they are less pronounced, and the author does a good job of contextualising Vikingweaponry in the light of late Iron-Age, Roman, eastern and Anglo-Saxon examples. References to

other works are included here (albeit unsystematically: references are implied (e.g. ‘Christiansen

argues’, p.102) which do not appear subsequently in the bibliography (presumably Eric Christiansen

is meant), and books are included in the bibliography which have singularly failed to make any

discernible impact on the author - Neil Price’s The Viking Way (2002) being one.) and the

representational evidence is also made subject to criticism. More illustrations would have been

helpful-especially in the description of sword lengths and pommel shapes. Some specialist terms are

also left unexplained and un-illustrated (e.g., ‘lenticular’; ‘mid-ribbed and fullered examples’, p.64).

Chapter 5 – ‘Hold Their Shields Aright’ – is where the flaws in this book become most apparent. It

begins with a strange paragraph in which Stephenson lays his ideological cards on the table: ‘why was

the Viking and Anglo-Saxon way of war the same? . . . The short answer is that Viking warfare begins

within Western warfare.’ (p.76). Ultimately, this view is derived from and justified by Stephenson’s

conviction, articulated most forcefully in his previous book (The Late Anglo-Saxon Army), that ‘the

single most defining ideological event in Anglo-Saxon warfare came at Marathon in 490 B.C.’

(Stephenson 2007, p.28). There is not the space here fully to criticise Stephenson’s view of cultural

and technological hyper-diffusion or his assumptions about the inherent superiority of ‘the Western

way of war’. Suffice it to say that these ideas are far less accepted (or acceptable) than his

presentation of them implies. These prejudices subsequently justify a reliance on evidence for Anglo-

Saxon military tactics, alongside assumptions based on technological and historical reconstructions of

archaic and classical Hoplite warfare, to interpret the battlefield behaviour of Viking warriors. Given

Stephenson’s prior wholesale rejection (rightly or wrongly) of later medieval Scandinavian texts, it is

curious to say the least that he chooses instead to rely on comparison with events of the fifth century

B.C. Nor does he have any qualms about using Old English poems (with all their attendant dating and

compositional uncertainties) that present fictional and biblical stories (e.g., Beowulf and Judith) to

elucidate Viking military practice. The final chapter addresses battles (‘The Place of Slaughter’) and

focusses on Maldon and Brunanburh, the former battle also extensively covered in his previous book

(Stephenson 2007).

There are, it must be said, flashes of insightful and original thought throughout this volume. The

notion put forward on page ninety-four that the raid on Lindisfarne functioned (and functions) as aleitmotif for the way in which the Vikings and Viking warfare in general have been remembered and


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characterised is an interesting one. Points made in chapter four about the power and significance of

outward display also make a valuable contribution (p. 71), as do comparative observations made

about the survival of military equipment in the archaeological record (pp. 40-41). The author also

deserves credit for choosing to take a thoroughly inter-disciplinary approach to the subject, as well as

stressing the centrality of warfare to the period and to the way that Vikings were and are perceived

(and, indeed, how the term ‘Viking’ itself should be understood). Unfortunately, however, these

qualities are undermined by substantial problems. Some-such as inconsistent referencing and

undefined terms-can be ascribed to editorial failings on the part of the publishers. However, the most

significant issue for this reviewer is the author’s flawed ideological agenda, an aspect of the work

which results in strident conclusions being made on the back of prejudiced and dubious cross-cultural

and cross-chronological analogy.

References

Andrén, A. 2006. ‘A World of Stone: Warrior Culture. Hybridity, and Old Norse Cosmology’. In A.Andrén, K. Jennbert and C. Raudvere,eds.. Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives, 33 – 38.

Jørgensen, L., B. Storgaard and L. G. Thomsen, eds. 2003. The Spoils of Victory: The North in the

shadow of the Roman Empire, , 90 – 102.

Lavelle, Ryan. Alfred's Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the Viking Age.

2010.

Price, N., 2002. The Viking Way: Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.

Stephenson. I. P., 2007. The Late Anglo-Saxon Army.

Williams, G. (forthcoming). Viking Warfare and Military Organisation.

Williams, T. J. T. 2011. Alfred’s Wars: Sources and Interpretations of Anglo-Saxon Warfare in the

Viking Age. Reviewed by R. Lavelle in Medieval Archaeology 54 (2011), 347 – 48.

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Viking Warfare (Review)