Sigurd the dragonslayer. A wood carving from Norsk Folkemuseum, Oslo, Norway.
(Source: paganroots, via bearcultist)
from: A Brief History of the Normans by: Francois Neveux
“In the years following the battle of Varaville, the political situation changed completely. William’s enemies, King Henry I and Count Geoffrey Martel, both died in the same year, 1060 [ce]. Their successors were not in a position to pursue the same anti-Norman policies. The new king, Philip I, was only eight and his guardian was William’s father-in-law, Baldwin V of Flanders. Geoffrey Martel had no children and the inheritance was disputed between his two nephews, Geoffrey the Bearded and Fulk Rechin, the latter finally gaining the upper hand in 1068 [ce].
In the meantime, William was free to act as he wished in Maine, of which he undertook the conquest in 1063. The last Count of Maine, Herbert II, had died without children in 1062 [ce], bequeathing the county to the Duke of Normandy. He did, however, leave a potential heir, his sister Margaret. William quickly married her to his eldest son, Robert Curthose, who was then about twelve. His principal adversary in the county was Geoffrey, Lord of Mayenne. To seize his castle, the duke is said to have employed unorthodox methods: he asked two children to slip into the castle and set fire to it from inside.
Now master of Maine, he turned his attention to Brittany, where Duke Conan II was trying to shake off the Norman yoke and directly challenging William. William launched an expedition in 1064 [ce]. His aims were limited, being to support one of Conan’s rebellious vassals, Ruallon, Lord of Dol. This episode in recounted by William of Poitiers, but is best known for being depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. William Took with him Harold, Earl of Weesex, who at the time was an envoy at the duke’s court. The principal result of the expedition was the lifting of the siege of Dol. The powerful Norman army forced Conan to flee, and then continued its advance as far as Dinan, perhaps even as far as Rennes. Conan was not defeated for good, but was sufficiently weakened not to worry William. The Duke of Normandy had his own allies in Brittany- especially Conan’s uncle, Odo of Penthievre- who were to supply him with large contingents for the conquest of England. As for Conan, he met his death, opportunely for William, on 11 December 1066, while laying siege to Chateau-Gontier.
These two expeditions, to Maine and Brittany, had allowed the duke of Normandy to ensure the tranquility of his southern and south- western borders at a time when he was planning the invasion of England. He believed himself King Edward the Confessor’s designated heir. Edward was over sixty and in poor health, and a successor would soon need to be found. William considered every eventuality. He had certainly not ruled out the possibility of a military expedition to conquer the kingdom. This was to be the greatest adventure of his life.”
“…the date of Olav’s birth is traditionally set at 995[ce], though it may have been unknown and set by later historians as a way of establishing a narrative connection with Olaf Tryggvason (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaf_I_of_Norway), who came to power in Norway that year. Accepting the dating means that he was no more than twelve years old at the time of the Viking adventures in the Baltic that are referred to in the praise poems concerning him, and only fourteen when he came to England as a soldier in the army of Thorkel the Tall in 1009[ce]. Sigvat’s ‘Vikingarvisur’, or ‘Viking Verses’ (the title is modern), celebrate nine battles from Olav’s Viking days, of which the sixth was that attack on London Bridge which gave rise to one of the more surprising legacies of the Viking Age, the English nursery rhyme ‘London Bridge is falling down’. The Enormous gelds this army took from the English, including the 48,000 pounds in 1012 [ce], must have laid the foundations of Olav’s fortune. The point is expressly made by Ottar the Black in ‘Head- Ransom’, a poem of reparation composed after Ottar had angered his master by making a verse about Olav’s wife:
“Lord wide- renowned, the people of the English race
might not stand against you,
undaunted one, when you took tribute,
not seldom
did man pay gold to the gracious prince.
I learn that great treasures went ever and again
Down to the shore.”
The same poet in the same poem refers to Olav’s participation in the taking of Canterbury, where “fire and smoke played fiercely upon the dwellings,’ and hails Olav as the destroyer of the lives of men. In the light of Olav’s later beatification there is irony in the fact that, in his Viking youth, this saint- king was a member of the army responsible for the murder of St Alphege in 1012.
Upon the break up of his army, Olav’s skalds praise him for the part he took in the raids in France, al- Andalus,
along what is now Portugal…it seems that on his return, Olav made his way to the Norman court of Richard II, where Ethelred and other members of the English royak family had sought refuge after Sven Forkbeard’s conquest in 1013. According to Theodoricus, Olav was baptized at the age of about three by Olaf Tryggvasin himself, during a missionary visit to Ringerike, the home of Olav’s stepfather. It seems that, during this visti to Normandy, he entered into some kind of Alliance with Ethelred.
Olav’s baptism in Rouen [France] must have taken place at about the same time as Sven Forkbeard’s death, and from this sudden change in the political scene he emerged as a pretender with serious designs on the crown of his native Norway. Two contrasting scenarios exist to describe what happened next…”
c.12, The Viking Saint from “The Vikings” by Robert Ferguson
“Among the thousands of papyrus documents that have been found in Egpyt, there is one tattered piece whose battered lines of writing are the remains of a contract that was drawn up in Alexandria [Egypt] some time around 150 b.c.[e]. One party to the contract was a group of five merchants who were planning a trip down the Red Sea to the “incense lands,” as Egyptian traders had been doing for millennia. Like most ancient shippers they were working with borrowed capital: the party of the second part was a Greek who was putting up some of the money. The five partners too were Greek; one, as it happened was from Sparta and a second from far-off Marseilles. Five other men endorsed to guarantee repayment. One of these was a travelling merchant from Carthage, the other four were soldiers stationed in Alexandria; quite possibly they had some of their spare cash invested in the venture. Of the soldiers, one came from Marseilles, another from Elia in Southern Italy, a third from Salonika [Greece]. The funds were handled through a banker. He was a Roman.
The document is almost unique; hardly any others like it have survived. It offers a picture in miniature of the key characteristics of trade in the Hellenistic world… the wide-flung world, run by Greeks, that Alexander opened and that lasted until the first century b.c.[e.] when Rome finally swallowed it. Its commerce was international in scope and, as a consequence, its business methods highly developed; to the age-old exchange of commodities that the Mediterranean had always known it added a lucrative trade in exotic luxuries; and, during it all, Egypt managed to play a major role”
from East meets West ”The Ancient Mariners”- Casson.
