Some oleaginous interviewer once suggested to Winston Churchill that he was the greatest Briton who ever lived. The grand old man considered the matter gravely. ‘No,’ he replied at length. ‘That was Alfred the Great.’
In his hefty, hard-to-pick-up History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Churchill expatiated on King Alfred’s foremost quality: it was his ‘sublime power to rise above the whole force of circumstances, to remain unbiased by the extremes of victory or defeat, to persevere in the teeth of disaster, to greet returning fortune with a cool eye, to have faith in men after repeated betrayals’.
Remind you of anyone? But perhaps it isn’t surprising that Churchill should have singled out for reverence another wartime leader who had saved his island from a savage horde. Alfred’s ultimate victory over the Vikings remains our foundation myth, a ninth-century fore-echo of the clash with Nazism. And this, according to Thomas Williams in his robust new book, is one among many reasons why the Vikings have tended to be demonised by history. The more brutal and bristle-bearded the enemy, the greater is Alfred’s Greatness for subduing them. And the greater, therefore, are we.
Viking Britain — an engrossing account of the skirmishes, wars and final symbiotic absorption that occurred between Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians from the late eighth to the early 11th century — suggests that another motive for exaggerating the differences between the Vikings and ourselves is a queasy awareness of the similarities. The idea is that the Anglo-Saxons glimpsed in the enemy a garish, nightmarish image of their former selves. After all, it hadn’t been so many generations earlier that they too had arrived by sea, calling on a comparable pagan pantheon (they worshipped Woden; the Vikings Odin) for the courage to ride roughshod over the natives, rape their women and ransack their wealth.
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