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Dyflin

Heathen Norse Dublin

Modern-day Dublin, capital of the Republic of Ireland, is a sprawling city spread north and south of the River Liffey on its way to the Irish Sea. The Liffey is met with Georgian-era canals and small named tributaries like the Dodder and Bradogue, which appear in narrow channels and disappear into underground culverts, and the rain and tides vary these river systems from muddy rivulets to brackish water that reaches the bottom of the bridges. Until very recently, few buildings exceeded five stories, and there are only a handful of noticeable hills in the greater Dublin area. It is a flattish, riverine city that is charming, relatively small, and notably wet.

It is also a city of two names, carried today on the linguistic divide between English and Irish, but bearing a long history that may itself predate the Norse. Dublin is also Baile Atha Cliath, the Town at the Ford (i.e., navigable river crossing) of the Reed Hurdles (intentionally sunk earthworks to create or maintain said ford). In modern Irish these syllables are run together, and it sounds like “Balla Cleeah” or even “Blocklee.” Middle Irish still pronounced th, similarly to how it is spoken in English, so medieval residents would have called their town Ath Cliath, “Oth Cleeoth,” although the final “th” is likely to have dropped on familiarity.

The precise site of Áth Cliath is unknown as central Dublin has undergone extensive rebuilding—if such reed hurdles or other settlement markers would have left much of a trace in the archeological record in the first place. But from context, it seems to have been around the modern suburb of Islandbridge, south of Phoenix Park and between the Irish National War Memorial Gardens and Heuston Station. Islandbridge today is packed with new construction apartment blocks, trendy shops, and young professionals and their families; an ever-renewing area of residence in Dublin.

Further downstream to the west, where the Poddle meets the Liffey, and currently the site of Dublin Castle’s garden, was a deep-water “black pool” (dubh linn), which gives its name to Irish Duiblinn. The b (later bh) makes an “f ” sound and was rendered into Old Norse as Dyflin. It is presumed that this deepwater confluence made an attractive port for Viking ships where they could be kept in the water ready for launching, but also close enough to shore to facilitate movement of goods and people on and off of them.

Thus, while the Annals of Ulster report that the Vikings set up

“a ship-camp at Duiblinn (longport oc Duiblinn),” just four years

later they refer to the newcomers as “the foreigners of Áth Cliath

(Gallaibh Atha Cliath)” indicating a confusion over, or indifference

to, placenames even at this early stage . . .1

Just as modern Dublin is also “Blocklee,” Dyflin, or Norsespeaking Dublin, was also Áth Cliath. For ease, in this book I will refer to Dyflin specifically to mean the settlement on the Liffey in the ninth through twelfth centuries. When the Cambro-Normans crossed the Irish Sea and set up a new outpost of their kingdom there, the town was still very aware of its position as a Norse town, in a world where Vikings had become well-paid mercenaries, established traders, church officials, and aristocratic administrators. The Dubliners of Norse descent—sometimes called Hiberno-Norse by modern scholars or, with a clatter of syllables, Hiberno- Scandinavians—called themselves Ostmen, Men (in the sense of “people”) of the East, in reference to their position looking west towards the rest of the Norse-speaking world.

RELIGION IN DYFLIN

When the Norse settled in Ireland from the beginning of the ninth century onwards, they came from a region of Europe that had not previously been part of Roman imperial administration. As such, there was a lack of social institutions that were found in other areas on the Continent that had been maintained, if not by the Roman Church directly, then by local Christians in a desire to emulate and stay connected with the trade, status, wealth, and security that Christianity provided to medieval Europe after the Roman Empire. Far northern Europe, including today’s Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, functioned in a social order described as “pre-Christian.”

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of any attempt to study or understand heathenism: it was an oral culture for which recording theological or even legal material was alien. Unfortunately as it was a preliterate culture—indeed, one that prized memory and oral recitation—we have nothing clearly about heathenism that was written down by a heathen. Apart from a handful of quasi-magical runic carvings, all literature from Germanic northern Europe came firmly after conversion, from the hands of Christian authors.

However, the editorial weight of these writers varied, and we believe that we have fairly substantial hints at pre-Christian beliefs encoded in poetry, literature, and even law texts. We also have archaeology: objects from homes and workspaces, inhumations or burials, and sometimes entire landscapes from before Christianity. Marrying medieval literature with archeological discoveries, and applying anthropological principles to these analyses, yields glimpses at a fairly comprehensive heathen theological system.

Germanic northern Europe was polytheistic; that is, its religion included multiple gods. These gods are household names due to popular films as well as the days of the week—early English Tiw’s Day became Tuesday, Thursday from Thor’s Day, and so on. While these gods mostly came from the same family—Thor was Odin’s son, for instance—polytheism can accommodate different cultures, and medieval literature tells of people who worshipped Christ alongside other Norse deities. Heathenism also involved veneration of ancestors and the dead, as well as landscapes and spirits of nature. It appears that reputation and honor were key motivations in heathen theology.

However, calling this a “religion” is imposing a standardized system onto an ill-defined and highly localized world view. Heathens did not set up a pantheon of “good” and “bad” gods, or compose holy books about what to believe, or insist that there was a single “truth” about the world that only some people held. They performed their local customs in the belief that they were the right way to go about things. And the “right way” varied from valley to fjord, from one farmstead to another, and likely even between generations as families grew or moved around.

Not until institutionalized Christianity appeared, that is, an organized religion that required communal faith and worship, did heathens even start to think of their practices as a philosophy.

An interesting thing about heathenism is that, while tied into nature and the landscape, it travels well. Iceland was essentially unpopulated before Norse settlers arrived in the late ninth century and then functioned as a majority-heathen society for over a century, including the establishment of sacred areas in previously uninhabited land (see chapter 4). The famous Eiríkr “the Red” (raudi) was a heathen, to his Christian wife’s chagrin, and the two lived separately in their preferred ways in Greenland. Centuries earlier, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes brought their heathen practices to Britain and instituted Germanic holy sites and placenames. Where heathens went, their practices followed. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that heathenism came to Dublin along with its Norse inhabitants.

THE LANDSCAPE OF DYFLIN

This is evident in the set-up of the Norse town, elements of which persisted through the early modern period or even to the present day. The precise layout and limits of the pre-Norman town are still under consideration, but we know it was in the general area of central Dublin, where the Wood Quay civic offices of Dublin City Council now stand.

The Long Stone or Langstein, a man-made standing stone or monolith, was twelve to fourteen feet high and stood until removed in the early eighteenth century. Its site is now commemorated with a much smaller sculpture. While this site is now several hundred meters from the quay, it would have been a fixed navigation aide for sailors in Dublin Bay in the ninth and tenth centuries, and likely marked the edge of navigable passage in the tidal Liffey.2

There is not necessarily a religious dimension to this practical guide; however, the amount of effort to erect such a monolith indicates an interest in broadcasting power. It may also have had other functions, such as a marker of the space between the town and the bay.