Home ›› 31 Oct 2022 ›› Opinion
Cat Jarman led me through a dense tangle of forest called Heath Wood. We were in Derbyshire, close to the very heart of England. There was no path, and the forest floor was overgrown with bracken and bush. It was easy to lose your footing and even easier to lose your way. Jarman, a fit, cheery woman in her late 30s, plunged jauntily on as I tried to keep up. “See all these lumps and bumps?” she asked as we broke into a small clearing. She pointed to an array of 59 small, rounded hillocks, many two or so feet high and four or five feet in diameter. Humans, not nature, had clearly put these things here, and they gave off a spooky, supernatural energy.
“We are literally walking across a Viking cemetery—the only known Scandinavian cremation cemetery in the whole country,” says Jarman, an archaeologist, whose new book, River Kings, takes a fresh look at who the Vikings really were and what exactly they were up to here. She flashes me a broad smile.
Yes, it is good—simple, powerful and mysterious. For a ceremonial burial place, the Vikings picked a surprisingly unceremonial spot. The overgrown forest shrouds these tombs in anonymity. There is no visible sign of a Viking settlement nearby, just an expanse of open fields and beyond that, a hamlet with a church, school and a few houses. The Vikings used rivers to get around, but it’s an awfully long hike from here to where the River Trent flows today. Which raises a big question, says Jarman. “Why have you got these Scandinavian cremation mounds here in the middle of nowhere?”
Jarman thinks she finally found the answer, but only after new research techniques, changing attitudes and some good luck filled in numerous blanks. A thousand years ago, Heath Wood was likely bare of trees and could be seen from all around. The Trent flowed close by back then; lidar satellite imagery now reveals how dramatically the river has shifted its course in the past thousand years. And the empty fields around Foremark have been transformed by scholarship into the likely site of a Viking settlement. The men and women who lived there may have come with the Viking Great Army around A.D. 873, but they didn’t all leave when the army moved on. They stayed and sank roots in England.
In general, apart from stone sculptures and place names, the Vikings have left us little record of their 250-year moment on the stage of English history, roughly from the end of the 8th century to the middle of the 11th. Scholars are left to pick over some old bones, sometimes burnt and sometimes not, and the useful objects that accompanied their owners into the hereafter—what archaeologists call “grave goods.” The Vikings also left silver coins and jewelry, sometimes buried for later retrieval and known as a hoard, or, far more often, scattered haphazardly across the fields, where they await the amateur metal detectorist’s electromagnetic pulse.
That’s pretty much it. The Vikings left no contemporaneous written record, and later Icelandic sagas, while gripping, are uncertain guides. The Vikings likely did construct dwellings in England. “But most of the buildings in that period, other than churches, were built out of wood, like the timber halls with Scandinavian ornament depicted in the movies The Lord of the Rings. We don’t have them,” says Julian Richards, an archaeologist and co-author, with Dawn Hadley, of a 2021 book, The Viking Great Army and the Making of England.
Smithsonian
