Of Vikings and Vestments

Brandino the Great Takes a Look at Some Dead People


I study dead people. Long-dead people. These are beings who live exclusively in the letters inked onto the lightly stubbled surface of parchments, their cares and loves and sufferings painted onto the sheepskin with precision and patience. They come from a time that is reserved, in modern parlance, as a synonym for barbarity and squalor.

To “go medieval on that guy’s ass” generally means that you will beat him up, but it would be just as historically accurate to yoke a donkey up to a plow. Clearly it’s a time that has been sorely misinterpreted and exaggerated by the modern culture.My job is to arrange these traces of a poorly understood past and to make the people whole again, instead of just caricatures. The longer these people have been dead, and the more sparse the evidence of their lives, the harder my job becomes.

One such caricature who has puzzled historians for centuries is Alcuin, an English monk and the head Latinist for Charlemagne. He was living in the Carolingian capital of Aachen, when in 793 he received word that Vikings—who in the eighth through the tenth centuries doled out head wounds as liberally as school-yard bullies today give wedgies—had attacked the monastery of Lindisfarne. Alcuin knew this monastery and the monks well, making it a very personal piece of news. And what dire news: The monastery had been desecrated, the grounds strewn with dead monks, and the holy relics had been ground under impious Scandinavian boots.

I would imagine that Alcuin’s first impulse was to recoil in horror. His second impulse, however, was to write a letter to the survivors of the attack. In this letter he offers condolences, solidarity, encouragement, and fashion advice.

Alcuin begins the letter with the usual pleasantries. He sends his best wishes to Bishop Higebaldus and the remainder of his congregation. Then he muses over the monastery as it was and as it is: “The memory of your charity, while I was at Lindisfarne, has cheered me greatly. But now, the calamity of your sufferings after I left, makes me sadder every day.” He relates what he has heard of the disaster, even though this is clearly old news to the monks. He offers Hallmark-card expressions of sympathy.

With an abrupt about-face, he seems to lose all capacity for empathy and advances the theory that God might be merely chastising those whom he loves most, as he is wont to do, and that this brutal attack might just be a divine nudge in the right direction, so that the monks can manfully pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. Following this train of thought, Alcuin embarks upon a very helpful list of ways for the monks to correct their habits: “Do not rejoice in the vanity of clothing,” and “Do not efface the words of your speech with drunkeness.” And seek heavenly treasures, not worldly ones, because Vikings can’t plunder the former.

Alcuin seems glibly unaware that the poor monks are probably, at this very minute, washing mud, ash, blood, or some combination thereof from their torn habits and drinking away their post-traumatic stress. Indeed, even though the opening sentences tell us that this is a personal letter about disaster, the wishes are formulaic and devoid of the humanity the situation merits. There is no sense of hurry or surprise or shock. He only speaks in pious and sententious truism. He doesn’t even ask any of the questions that you would expect, like, “How’s my friend Aethelstan? Is he okay?” or “Charlemagne says that the Vikings are eight feet tall, and I bet him a buck he’s wrong. But you saw them. Write me back.”

When we dig deeper, it turns out that the earliest text of this letter was written over two hundred years after Alcuin died, in a volume containing letters to bishops and kings. We can date it by the handwriting. That means that if Alcuin actually wrote this letter, it was copied at least once before it fell into the hands of scholars. And in that replication, possibly upwards of two hundred times in two hundred years, things could have happened. Passages could have been elaborated. Statements could have been cut. Pages could have been lost. Even more nightmarish, the entire thing could have been composed after Alcuin’s death, and just attributed to him.

Even though the letter is published in a modern edition of “Two Alcuin Letter-Books,” it actually reflects the concerns of whichever bored monk was transcribing in the years after, rather than Alcuin’s response to the Lindisfarne disaster. And while there might be a kernel of truth at the center of this letter, we will never know where that kernel lies.

At the risk of projecting too much upon the past, I’ll offer a completely unprofessional fantasy. I think that Alcuin probably did send a letter. But it was probably briefer, hopefully more familiar. I like to think that it read something like:

Hey guys, I’m sorry to hear the bad news. I’m just waiting for Charlemagne, and then we’re going to come up north with an army and we’re going to get those jerks, teach ’em a lesson. Just you wait.
Your pal, Alchie.

P.S., I sent you some new robes. They’re not pretty, but they’ll be warm at least.