Vikings

‘What’s he saying now?’ asked my husband in a provoking manner when an actor read out a bit of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on one of those excellent television programmes by Michael Wood about King Alfred. Very good the Old English sounded — a little like the Danish in The Killing. There were subtitles for those whose focus went further than their whisky glass.

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James Tidmarsh

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Despite a good deal of Viking smiting, the word Viking was not heard. It is a historian’s word, not used in English until as late as 1840. In Alfred’s day they might be called Danish and in The Battle of Maldon (about an encounter we lost in 991), they are referred to as æschere, an ‘ash-army’, from the ash-wood of their boats. Oddly, there is a man called Æschere in Beowulf, hundreds of years earlier, though perhaps his name, ‘Ash-army’ too, refers to the ash-wood shaft of a spear.