Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

Ethelred to return; ‘for they said that no sovereign was dearer to them than their natural lord – if only he would govern them better than he had previously done’. Evidently, the line of Cerdic still retained something of its mystique; but it was too late now for Ethelred to burnish it. Prostrated by illness, his only consistent policy upon his return was to haunt his sickbed; in 1016, at last, he slipped into the grave. His subjects barely noticed. Already, the battle for the rule of England had moved on to a younger generation. Even before Ethelred’s death, his eldest surviving son, Edmund, a warrior of such charismatic fortitude that he would come to be hailed as ‘Ironside’, had laid claim to the throne. But he was not alone in his ambition: for Forkbeard too had left a son.

‘Only a boy, you ship-batterer, when you launched your boat, no king was younger than you,’ wrote one praise-singer of the precociously terrifying Canute. Already, even before landing in England to press his right to the kingdom, the young prince had shown himself practised in the grimmer arts of Viking lordship, mutilating the hostages left in his care by Forkbeard and then sending them back to their relatives, the great lords in their high-beamed halls, to serve as a gruesome warning of the folly of resistance. Sure enough, in the stumps where once the hostages’ hands had been, and in their noseless faces, and in the cropped remains of their ears, the English had indeed been granted fair warning of the horrors soon to come. Ironsided Edmund may have been – but Canute was forged of ice. All the summer of 1016, the two men fought each other; until ultimately, with the pair of them brought to a bloody standstill, there seemed no possible resolution to the conflict, save to divide the kingdom in two. A month after the treaty had been signed, however, Edmund died: the last king of purely English stock ever to sit on the country’s throne. Naturally, men suspected murder — as well they might have done.

Canute had gambled much on his attempt to win his prize — and now it was payback time. Many warriors had followed him across the northern seas, ‘men of metal, menacing with golden face’ – and their captain, just like any other, needed to be a scatterer of treasure, or nothing at all. In Canute, the larcenous instincts that had long propelled generations of Northmen across the seas were set to attain their apotheosis – for he had his sword at the throat of an entire kingdom. Already, over the course of the unfortunate Ethelred’s reign, ton upon ton of silver had been delivered into the hands of the Danes. Now, with all the honed apparatus of English governance directly in his own hands, there was nothing to stop Canute from imposing a truly swingeing tax. Which was what he duly did: at a rate, in effect, of 100 per cent. It took his agents months to screw out; but by the end of 1018, the kingdom’s entire income for that year had vanished into his treasure chests.

Perhaps, then, many among the English must have wondered, this was how the world was to end: with a tax demand. Even the man who was now Archbishop of York, the brilliant and devoutly orthodox Wulfstan, openly warned that the Danes might prove the shock troops of Antichrist. Already, summoning the English to prepare themselves for the Day of Judgement, he had advocated barefoot displays of penance, the singing of psalms and public prayer; and in 10H, during the dark days that followed Forkbeard’s conquest of the kingdom, he had flatly declared the end time imminent. ‘For nothing has prospered now for a long while either at home or abroad, but there has been military devastation and hunger, burning and bloodshed.’ F.ven pagans, however, as they observed the state of the world, might on occasion fall to pondering what its fracturing portended. One did not have to be a Christian to be conscious of Christian dates. Was it merely coincidence, for instance, that Thorgeir, summoning the Icelanders to decide whether they should abandon their ancient gods, had chosen to do so in the year 1000? What prospect, if the end were indeed approaching, that any of the heathen gods, even Odin himself, could hope to keep it at bay? Despite the triumph of the Danes in the killing fields of England, many Northmen, suspended between their new faith and their ancient beliefs, were not immune to the anxieties of Wulfstan. ‘Kin’, wrote one of them, in dread of the end days, ‘will break the bonds of kin’:

A harsh world it will be, whoredom rampant,

An axe-age, a sword-age, shields shattered,

A wind-age, a wolf-age before man’s age tumbles down.[]

The very sentiments of the archbishop—and composed, it may well be, by a man who had heard him utter them. Yet the end of the world sung by the poet was one illumined not by the light of Christ, but by the fiery extinction of the ancient gods, ‘fire flaring up against fire’. No immortality, according to such a vision, awaited those who followed Odin: for he, like the sun itself, was fated to be devoured by a monstrous wolf, while all around him ‘the brilliant stars are dashed down from the skies’. His death, like the death of all those whom the pagans had foolishly worshipped as deathless, was a certainty. Such was ‘Ragnarok’ – the Doom of the Gods.

And Canute, certainly, wanted no part of it: for it was hardly his ambition to play the part of either Odin or Antichrist. Though he might be avaricious and brutal, he was not unthinkingly so. For all the ruthlessness with which he had extorted treasure from the English to pay off his followers, he had no wish for his reign to continue as a wolf-age. So it was that in 1018, even as his tax collectors were