One of the indelible film memories of my childhood was the 1959 epic, “The Vikings,” starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh (Jamie Lee’s dad and mom). Accompanied by blasts of French horn and Valkyrie choruses throughout, the most terrifying moment comes in the film’s opening.
My own introduction to Anglo-Saxon/Viking began with the 1959 epic, “The Vikings,” starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Ernest Borgnine as Ragnar.
Following a historical narration by Orson Welles that concludes with “Protect us, Oh Lord, from the wrath of the Northmen,” the grinning, gap-toothed Viking, Ragnar, played by Ernest Borgnine, bursts through a tent flap. In a matter of seconds, he murders Northumbria’s king, then rapes and impregnates his queen, off-camera in the convention of the times.
This sets the stage for another “East of Eden”—only now with braids and battle axes.
Sixty-plus years after I first saw “The Vikings,” I trod the ground of that first notable Viking raid on England’s shores, although the site had nothing to do with raping a queen, but did involve sacking, burning and murder on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. This is the story told in the recent television series, “The Vikings,” starring Travis Fimmel as a more thoughtful, though equally bloody-minded Ragnar. The raid is protracted and monks slaughtered in grisly detail, as per historical accounts, in the TV version, but for shear rollicking drama and cinematic spectacle—especially to the mind of a 12-year-old—the film (and Ernie) cannot be beat.
The Holy Island was the first stop on a private tour of Northumberland’s historic northeast coast, led by Alexander (“Alex”) Iles, who owns the company (Iles Tours) and is steeped to the marrow in all things Roman and Anglo-Saxon. He made me painfully aware of this when, soon after we motored away from my Newcastle hotel, I dropped (proudly) that a few days before I had completed the last outstanding segment (for me) of the Hadrian’s Wall path.
“I hiked the entire path in Roman armor,” he replied, without taking his eyes off the road.
The author’s guide for the outing to Lindisfarne and Bamburgh, Alexander Iles, hiked all 84 miles of the Hadrian’s Wall path in Roman armor.
The next stop, five miles south, was Bamburgh, where the red sandstone bulk of the castle looms over the village of the same name from a 150-foot-high escarpment on the North Sea. These days, both sites are notable for the key roles they play in binge-rich series, such as the one mentioned above, and “The Last Kingdom,” a saga of Anglo-Saxon England in the time of King Alfred the Great (849-899) and his son, Edward the Elder (c.870-924). Both are available to stream in full on Netflix. To take advantage of this, a few Newcastle and Tyne Valley tour companies structure tours based on these epics—as they also do for the mystery series, “Vera”—though Alex, who has a master’s degree in history, holds to a more studious, though no less entertaining path.
This I learned soon after clearing Newcastle’s outskirts when he launched into an hour-long lecture (without taking a breath it seemed) that included every king, warrior (Viking and Anglo-Saxon) and monk who ever trod the wind-swept moors and ragged coast of Northern England. My elderly brain turned to liquid fat trying to keep track of everyone, but it also recalled with pleasure my Roman history professor, Carl Schuler, who read his lectures, word-for-word, out of blue books while we feverishly scribbled. We would, without fail, stop him for clarification, whereupon he would re-read the entire passage, including the clever history jokes.
Before leaving home, I had absorbed most of Alex’s main points by reading several British historians, among them, Marc Morris, whose “The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 400-1066” is as entertaining as it is comprehensive. (I have cited him in these pages before.) But I also binged every single episode of “The Vikings” and “The Last Kingdom,” wherein history is warped to drive the plot and bring those big-eyed figures in the stain-glass windows to life. (More on that later.) On confessing that I had indulged in historical pollution, Alex revealed that he was guilty as well and took great pains to separate fact from fiction as the day unfolded.
High Tides and Green Grass
The Pilgrim’s Way, walking path, to the island is a bit longer than the vehicular causeway and not an exercise for lollygaggers. The open-air platform is for those who don’t make it.
Those traveling to Lindisfarne from the mainland by vehicle (car, truck, bus, scooter, or bicycle), must do so at low tide via a mile-long paved causeway. The same goes for hikers and pilgrims, who negotiate the longer and muddier Pilgrims Way delineated by 20-foot stakes set 100 feet apart farther out on the tide flat. (You can watch the actor Brenda Blethyn do the latter in the final episode of “Vera.”) Ignore the tide tables posted on either end, or miscalculate your visit and miss your window, and you will end up spending an unplanned seven to eight hours on the island.
Vehicular traffic must wait for low tide in order to cross from the mainland to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.
There is also the potential of a glitch: A traffic accident, a broken barrier, a disrupted train crossing, and vehicles will literally part the waters as tides from four- to six-feet deep sweep over the roadway. Contingency plans do exist to move vehicles to higher places; and there is a single refuge hut set high on stilts above the causeway, and two similar (though open air) huts on the Pilgrims Way for the stranded. No one has perished in recent years, but as you would expect, the causeway is also the source of dare-devil stories. Alex related one in which a young-blood eager to impress his girlfriend (who may have egged him on) raced the tide not twice, but three times. He did not make it. The waters closed in, bringing the Coast Guard, a £1,500 fine, and a lost automobile.
Speaking of “Vera”: In the series, the detective Vera Stanhope (Blethyn) lives in her father’s old croft on Lindisfarne, to which we are to presume she commutes daily. I hate to be fussy, but I have only heard her mention beating the tides home once in all the episodes. Moreover, the turn-off to Lindisfarne is more than an hour’s drive north, sans commute traffic, from her office in Newcastle. It seems unlikely a detective chief inspector on call would be subject to such restrictions.
But then she’s Vera, isn’t she? As iconic in our era as…well…King Oswald.
The Abbey and Saint Cuthbert
A year after he won the great battle at The Heavenfield near Hadrian’s Wall, Oswald of Northumbria, in 634 CE, brought the Irish monk Aidan (d. 651) from Iona, an island in the Inner Hebrides, to establish a small church at Bamburgh and the monastery on Lindisfarne. In those days, the faithful in northern England, including Aidan and the Lindisfarne monks, stood for the Celtic church of Ireland (viz. St. Patrick), as opposed to the Canterbury or Roman branch that was gradually taking hold with the Anglo-Saxon conversion in southern England.
St. Cuthbert
Lindisfarne and the north finally embraced Rome in 663, whereupon the bishop at the time, Colman, left in a huff. The future saint, Cuthbert (634-687), arrived in 684 to finish the job of swaying the faithful to Rome. But office politics and fractious monks compelled him to flee periodically to a skerry (islet) off a rocky beach, leaving him blessedly isolated at high tide. The skerry is still known as Cuthbert’s Island and is an essential stop for those pilgrims with muddy boots, lost these days among the tour buses.
Saint Cuthbert served as bishop of Northumbria and abbot at Lindisfarne before spending the remainder of his life as hermit. Before his retreat, he found a few hours peace each day by retreating to this skerry (islet) off a shingle beach just before flood tide.
But even the skerry was not enough for Cuthbert. He resigned as bishop two years later and moved to a larger, but more exposed island farther offshore, where he lived as a true monk 1., or hermit, until his death. After that, Cuthbert truly made history: Uncovered from earth and vault at least four times over the next 900 years, his body remained “uncorrupted,” meaning it did not decompose. Expounding on the legend, Alex took special delight in relaying the story of William the Conqueror’s visit to Durham Cathedral in the 1070s. Evidently, the Norman king ordered the saint’s final resting place opened, with a warning that if he found the body decomposed, he would murder everyone in sight for perpetrating an Anglo-Saxon fraud. (It had not, and he did not.)
Another favorite concerns the monk who dug up The Venerable Bede’s bones in Jarrow, stuffed them in a sack and hid them under his bed in Durham’s cloisters. Only on his deathbed did he confess to the sacrilege. Whereupon the churchmen moved Bede (672-735) to a vault, appointed in granite and oak, in the cathedral’s Galilee Chapel, where today devotees can pray resting on an embroidered padded kneeler. Alex has a sack full of such tales, which is why I highly recommend his tour, if you have the time.
The lone surviving rainbow arch in the abbey ruins at Lindisfarne suggests that the church was built, on a smaller scale, to emulate the cathedral in Durham.
But back to Lindisfarne. We started off with Ragnar ripping open the tent flap, so let us return there. A profusion of Viking raids swept the region leading to the late 700s; enough so to justify that anticipatory shift of Cuthbert’s corpse to Durham. (You can watch a reenactment of this in “The Last Kingdom,” though they have scrambled the dates, and the abbot tasked with moving the saint is so toxic it is cause for exultation when he at last has his throat cut.) But in June 793 the big one hit. In a reprisal for depredations committed by Charlemagne’s warriors in Scandinavia, or Frisia (depending on whom you read) the Vikings landed at Lindisfarne, murdered the monks, and made off with the holy treasures and relics. The monastery was left a smoking ruin.
A panorama of the 12th century abbey ruins and village of Lindisfarne.
The impact of the raid was profound, not only in Britain, but also on the continent. Here is an account from Alcuin, a Northumbrian scholar in the employ of Charlemagne:
“Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race … The heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets.”
And in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
“In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen men destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.”
January or June? All the same.
Lindisfarne on the Tourist Circuit
Anyway, when you visit Lindisfarne today, there is little left of the carnage, save for the ghosted outline of an original church on a bluff overlooking the Norman-era abbey, or the archaeological work going on between the abbey and the shoreline, which Alex cites as the Viking landing place. There is also the Viking Domesday Stone housed in the small, but excellent, English Heritage Museum on the site. A national treasure, the burial stone, which dates to the 11th century, depicts the catastrophic raid of 793, according to some scholars. On one side is the sun and moon, parted by heavenly hands; on the other are seven mail-clad warriors armed with swords and axes, thought to be Vikings.
The 11th century Viking Domesday Stone, housed the English Heritage Museum at Lindisfarne, depicts the catastrophic raid of 793, according to some scholars.
But there is much more to Lindisfarne. The abbey ruins are the remains of a church modeled on the great cathedral of Durham, which includes a “rainbow arch,” the last of that architectural element still in evidence. The ruins are also painful reminders of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536, which you can find throughout England: stone scatter where a soaring nave once stood, and garden wall ruins that trace rooms that once housed the monks and those seeking refuge.
The only refuge found on Lindisfarne these days is at high tide, when the 150 islanders and those who stay in the limited lodgings have the Holy Island to themselves, which is something to which my fellow San Juan Islanders can relate. Post-pandemic “Over Tourism” has hit hard here as it has everywhere else. Summer and sunny weekends bring a phalanx of tour buses, and the overflow parking areas are crammed with automobiles and motorhomes—each sober occupant aware of the tide tables, which amplifies the compulsion to see it all before Moses sweeps the flats with his staff.
Visitors stream from the car park to the abbey ruins on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.
They swamp the ruins and the souvenir shops. They quaff beverages and hamburgers in the Manor House Inn and Lounge, where “Based on a True Story” is emblazoned on the side of the building and is the first thing you see on entering the site. But I was one of them, part of the throngs taking the long walk from the parking area to the ruins—a paying guest, intrigued by all I saw. But these days, unless you look closely from a quiet corner, it is hard to feel “holy” on the Holy Island. You need to plumb the human heart for that.
Lindisfarne after all is an island. If you don’t bring it with you, you won’t find it there.
Soon it was time to leave, well ahead of flood tide, for Bamburgh where St. Aidan found his rest, a genuine Viking leader Ragnar was hurled into a pit of snakes (wolves in the movie) and Uhtred the Bold, an 11th century Anglo-Saxon chieftain (or king), found immortality in 21st century streaming.
Stay tuned in a couple of weeks for Part II.
For further reading: Marc Morris’s The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 400-1066, and Alexander Iles blog, https://ilestours.co.uk/blogs/. The menu at the top of Alex’s blog page links to his tour website. If you’re up for a deep dive, the internet will take you to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, begun during the reign of Alfred the Great, the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Gildas’s De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, William of Malmesbury’s Deeds of the Kings of the English and Henry of Huntington’s History of the English.
- The crux of the dispute between the Celtic and Roman churches had to do with the proper day and date to celebrate Easter. They also squabbled over the proper tonsure, i.e. how a monk should shave his head. The winner was the classic bald crown wrapped by a fringe of hair, representing Christ’s crown of thorns. (Elderly guys with bald pates, like me, don’t count.)
- “Monk” from the Greek monachos, meaning single or solitary. They started out as itinerant hermits striving for a closer connection to God. Eventually they found security and comradeship gathering in monasteries headed by an abbot, from the Aramaic word abba, or father.