Did Vikings kill the native
population of
Orkney and Shetland
What happened?
So what happened in
the Northern Isles?
I don’t think that the
Picts were ‘absorbed’ in Viking Shetland, or Viking Orkney, unless
we stop being mealy-mouthed about such terms.
‘That comforting and
blessed word “absorption”!’ remarked a Shetland antiquary, during
a controversy in the Shetland News in 1896. ‘Disputants
who use this term in this connexion stand in need of being frequently
reminded that when one people absorbs another it is usually the
native and indigenous folk that do most of the absorbing.’ [58]
I don’t think the Picts
were just ‘overwhelmed’, or ‘submerged’, as Wainwright put it, while
continuing to practise their religion and speak an unintelligible
language at home. I certainly don’t think that they achieved ‘social
integration’, or that they ‘blended’. And I am especially sceptical
that they entered into legal contracts with their new neighbours,
as Raymond Lamb would have us believe.
Some scholars who can’t
face the idea of extinction go for enslavement instead. [59] I reject that option, for
two reasons. Here we come back to that central question of language.
If the Norse immigrants in Orkney and Shetland had enslaved the
native inhabitants, or enslaved the males and married the women,
some of their words and lots of their names would have survived.
That’s what happens when conquerors arrive in a country. Colonisers
are lazy, and they are only prepared to coin a certain number of
new names. [60] Even in cases of genocide native place-names survive to a
small extent. [61] The corollary of these well-known facts
is that something unusual, something ‘ominous’, [62] happened in the Northern Isles.
There is only a handful
of pre-Norse names on record in Shetland and Orkney: names of a
few large islands like Unst. As Bill Nicolaisen has said, [63]
[t]o all intents and purposes the Norse
incomers were from their point of view confronted
with a virtually nameless cultural landscape which, in order
to make it possible to perform the speech act of identifying
reference, had to be provided with place names from scratch,
and instantly.
My other reason for
rejecting the argument about enslavement is an anthropological one.
In his recent acclaimed
work Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond presents a typology
of reactions by colonisers to the people whom they colonise. [64] He describes three scenarios:
- conquest in regions inhabited by hunter-gatherer
bands, which are thinly populated;
- in areas where food-producing tribes are established,
which are moderately populated
- in intensive food-producing regions occupied
by states or chiefdoms, which are densely populated.
In the first type of situation the native inhabitants
simply move away to a new location. In the third type the conquerors
enslave the natives, or force them to pay tribute.
But in the moderately
populated food-producing societies—the type of society that we know
existed in Orkney and Shetland in the ninth century—there is usually
a more drastic outcome. ‘Where population densities are moderate’,
says Diamond:
as in regions occupied by food-producing tribes,
no large vacant areas remain to which survivors of a defeated
band can flee. But tribal societies without intensive food
production have no employment for slaves and do not produce
large enough food surpluses to be able to yield much tribute.
Hence the victors have no use for survivors of a defeated tribe
…. The defeated men are killed, and their territory may be
occupied by the victors.
Nearly forty years ago
the Shetland toponymist John Stewart made a striking comparison
between what might have happened in our islands in the ninth century,
and what happened in Tasmania in the nineteenth. [65]
The incompatibility of language [he said], cannot
have been greater than that between the Australian aboriginal
tongues and English, but only in Tasmania are aboriginal place-names
absent, and it is a historical fact that the Tasmanians, by
disease and deliberate slaughter, in spite of efforts to save
them, were wiped out to the last man. It seems a fair judgement
that something similar happened to the Shetlanders who did not
make their escape before the Norse.
I propose that what
happened to the Tasmanians is exactly what happened to the Pictish
Shetlanders and Orcadians. [66] Shetland and even Orkney
are small—extremely small—‘crofting counties’, and they always have
been. When conquering Vikings came to the Northern Isles, 1200
years ago, they had no wish or intention to share the land with
their predecessors. There was no space for sharing, and
there was nowhere to hide. [67] As Alfred Smyth has put it,
‘all the evidence suggests that the Scottish Isles bore the full
brunt of the fury of these invaders who were instantly conspicuous
to Scots, English and Irish alike, for their brutality and heathenism’. [68]
The
best source of information about what happened is a document.
It
isn’t a contemporary record; but it was written a few centuries
after the event, by someone who seems to have had first-hand knowledge
of Orkney. The author of the so-called Historia Norwegiae
describes vividly how pre-Norse Orkney and Shetland were inhabited
by Picts and priests. The Picts, he says, [69] ‘did marvels in the morning and in the evening, in building
towns, but at mid-day they entirely lost all their strength, and
lurked, through fear, in underground houses’. Perhaps he had visited
Scatness in Shetland, which probably still looked like that in the
twelfth century. ‘But in due course’, he continues, ‘certain
pirates … set out with a great fleet … and stripped these races
of their ancient settlements, destroyed them wholly, and subdued
the islands to themselves.’ (My italics.)
That limpid anonymous
statement is the most likely explanation for the disappearance without
trace of Pictish Shetland and Orkney. We may even have a clue to
the date when the process started: the Annals of Ulster announce
in the year 794 ‘the devastation of all the islands of Britain by
the heathen’. [70]
I don’t understand
why modern scholars can’t envisage such a situation. After all,
our own era is the most bloody since the world began. During the
twentieth century, when we were all born, 600,000 Armenians were
slaughtered by Turks; Pol Pot exterminated two million Cambodians;
a million Tibetans died and are still dying under the Chinese occupation.
The Orkney historian
Storer Clouston gave a brutal but accurate response to our problem
seventy years ago. [71] Confronted by A.W.
Brøgger’s work of 1929, which, as I have said, painted a picture
of peaceful Norse immigrants, Clouston shook his head.
‘Surely the common-sense
of the matter ... is evident’, he said.
The first Norsemen ... proposed to settle in
these islands, whether the existing inhabitants liked it or
not. They brought their swords, and if the inhabitants were
numerous and offered resistance, they fought them. If they
were few and fled, they took their land without fighting. They
did, in fact, exactly what we ourselves have done in later centuries,
in India, America, Africa, Australia. ... That is the only way
in which we can settle a new land—chance your luck, but always
bring your gun.
Some archaeologists
have asked me: where is the archaeological evidence for annihilation?
We have no mass graves of Picts, no shattered Pictish sculpture.
But every archaeologist should recall Gordon Childe’s ominous words:
‘negative evidence is worthless’. [72] The fact that we haven’t
found traces of genocide, among the few sites that have been investigated,
is beside the point. Remember: it isn’t long since a historian
was arguing in a British libel court that there’s no archaeological
evidence that genocide took place in the Third Reich.
It is hardly necessary
to go over the argument again.
- If the Picts had survived, as part of
a social integration programme, as Anna Ritchie would have us
believe, some of their place-names would have survived.
- If their leaders had come to an accommodation
with the Norwegians, as Raymond Lamb imagines, the islands would
be full of Celtic names.
- If the Pictish religion and priests lingered,
as Frederick Wainwright seems to have thought, their place-names
would have lingered too.
But there are no such names. All we find are
the sites where Picts used to live and worship, and fragments of
their pottery and pins in the conquerors’ houses. There is no reason
to suppose that Viking behaviour in the Northern Isles was more
amiable than Viking behaviour in Iona or Lindisfarne.
We should
expect the worst.
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