Section 9 of 9
The days of the week, English village names, the year 1066, and a horned helmet that came from an opera.
The age ended in 1066 but did not disappear. It stayed in the names of the days of the week, in the names of English villages, in the Norman dynasty on the English throne — and in the Bluetooth mark, built from two runes of a tenth-century Danish king. It also stayed in the inventions of the nineteenth century, which many people today take for history.
Field note
06
Religious transition
written source
Around 965 Harald Bluetooth’s stone declared that the king had “made the Danes Christian”. Yet Christian influence had arrived earlier, and old and new beliefs coexisted for a long time: one casting mould could produce both crosses and Thor’s hammers.
11 entries
Not one horned helmet has been found in a Viking Age context. The image comes from the costumes Carl Emil Doepler (1824–1905) designed for Wagner’s Ring at Bayreuth: the horns were needed so the character could be read from the back rows.
The helmet from Gjermundbu in Norway is the only one preserved entire. It has a half-mask and no horns of any kind.
Tuesday is Týr, Wednesday is Odin (Woden), Thursday is Thor, Friday is Frigg. The calendar turned out to be more durable than the religion.
The endings -by and -thorpe are the mark of the Danelaw. Whitby, Grimsby, Scunthorpe are not English names but Danish ones that simply stuck.
William of Normandy was the great-great-grandson of Rollo, granted the land in 911. It happened three weeks after Harald Hardrada fell at Stamford Bridge.
Romanticism and national movements turned scattered sea companies into a heroic people with a single character. The horned helmet, the pathos and the “northern blood” come from there too.
About a thousand people in northern Europe make all or part of their living building, repairing and using such boats. The tradition is a working one, not a museum piece.
Harald Bluetooth united lands; Bluetooth was meant to unite devices from different makers. The mark is built from two of his runes.
Island isolation and a written tradition preserved the language so well that modern Icelandic remains close to Old Norse. For new concepts Icelanders still prefer to build words from their own roots rather than borrow.
The borrowings sit at the very core of the language: they, them, their, and also sky, skin, knife, egg, window, husband, law. The two languages were close enough that words crossed over without translation.
Tynwald on the Isle of Man traces itself to a Norse popular assembly and is reckoned the oldest continuously functioning parliament in the world. Its name comes from the same þing as the Icelandic Althing.