The Unbearable Hipness of the Vikings

"Anglo-Saxon writers of the period occasionally wax poetic when talking about viking mayhem, revealing a grudging admiration for the raiders’ sense of self, their restlessness and rootlessness. For the Norseman had a style...

Alcuin voices his horror at the sack of Lindisfarne in 793 in letters and verse that bewail not only its appalling aftermath but also the excessive levity of the raiders. Alcuin’s distaste for such laughter, a symptom for him of disorder and loss of control, is apparent in his much-quoted letter of 797 to the head of an English community, an exhortation that famously demands: “Let God’s words be read at the episcopal dinner-table. There it is proper that a reader should be heard, not a harpist; patristic discourse, not pagan song. What has Ingeld to do with Christ?”... His reprimand ends as primly as it began: “The voices of readers should be heard in your dwellings, not the laughing rabble in the court-yards.” Rhythm (even Sievers’s five metrical types) seems to him, as to later preachers, to pose a threat to civilization. Here is the voice of authority railing against the cacophony of street entertainers, brothel blues, enclaves of low culture, bootstrap hustle, ethnically impure music; it is the black church castigating bebop and hip hop as the work of the devil and the harp as his instrument; it is the industrialist Henry Ford denouncing “monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps”—he was speaking of jazz.

If listening to songs about Danes were not bad enough, some Anglo-Saxons apparently copied the look of these road-warriors. In a letter of 793to King Æthelred of Northumbria, shortly after the raid on Lindisfarne, Alcuin berates his countrymen for imitating the appearance of the pagan Northmen, their oppressors: “Consider the dress, the way of wearing the hair, the luxurious habits of the princes and people. Look at your hairstyle,how you have wished to resemble the pagans in your beards and hair. Are you not terrified of those whose hairstyle you wanted to have?”...

Alcuin never describes what the retro-pagan hairstyle he so deplored looked like. But Ælfric, writing two centuries later from Wessex in the reign of another Æthelred, makes a stab at it. He rebukes his countrymen for abandoning ancestral English customs for heathen ways, and, in particular, for“dressing in Danish manner, with bared neck and blinded eyes”15—suggesting long bangs in front and hair shaved at the neck. Ælfric, who almost certainly knew the Alcuin letter just quoted, continues prissily: “I will say no more about this shameful dress except that books tell us that he will be cursed who practices the custom of heathen people in his life and dishonors his own kindred in the process.” Complaints about the rawness of Danish table manners come later, as in E. A. Freeman’s laconic mid-nineteenth-century put-down: “Pelting people with bones at dinner seems to have been an established viking custom.” A few tenth-century Anglo-Saxons, representing the forces of rectitude, lined up against this non-U looseness, this mongrel chic, as against a disease.

But others, including Ælfric’s own lay patron, sometimes express a more admiring attitude toward the Dane; they do so indirectly, by the careful placement of a Norse-sounding compound or resonant poeticism or archaism...

Some Norse loans hint at an even more intimate kind of swapping. Although composed in a landscape presumed to be crawling with Norsemen, Aldred’s glosses (950–970) to the Lindisfarne Gospels on the whole avoid Scandinavianisms. But not completely. The closest Old English gets to a certain four-letter obscenity is a Norse loanword found among his glosses to Matthew: Old English sero from Old Norse seroa(with the same meaning as the English word that turned the flower named after Leonhard Fuchs into afuschia). This borrowing from Old Norse renders “do not commit adultery” as “do not sin with or sero another man’s wife.” Perhaps what is referred to was so rare among the northern English that Aldred had to adopt a dirtyword from his Danish contemporaries to describe it. Something like our own borrowing of ménage à trois. Another Norse word found only in the Lindisfarne glosses, twice, is song, “bed, couch.” One thirteenth-century chronicle attributed a slaughter of Danes by Anglo-Saxons in 1002 to the former’s irresistibility to the latter’s spouses: “The Danes made themselves too acceptable to English women by their elegant manners and their care of their person.They combed their hair daily, according to the custom of their country, and took a bath every Saturday, and even changed their clothes frequently, and improved the beauty of their bodies with many such trifles, by which means they undermined the chastity of wives.”"

--- Terminally Hip and Incredibly Cool: Carol, Vikings, and Anglo-Scandinavian England / Roberta Frank