Wolf Age

The Wolf Age tells the story of the final phase of large-scale Viking attacks on Anglo-Saxon England, leading to the short-lived North Sea empire of King Cnut, who ruled Denmark, England, and Norway in the 11th century. Through heavy use of contemporary chronicles, skaldic poetry, and later sagas, Tore Skeie paints a vivid picture of a violent and turbulent era, when kingdoms could be won or lost by a few energetic and ruthless men.

Introducing the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons

Around the year 1000, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom was in a very dangerous position. It was both rich and efficiently taxed, but also weak and governed by an incompetent king. When the Viking raids resumed after decades of relative peace, King Aethelred proved incapable of defending his kingdom. Skeie, a Norwegian historian, and his English translator Alison McCullough write a smooth narrative about the hapless king’s failed attempts to protect his realm. Year after year, after yet another failed attempt to fight back, he was forced to pay off his attackers, which only invited further attacks. Part of his problem was the almost comically duplicitous Eadric Streona, who made himself the most powerful man in the kingdom, saved the king through murder, and went on to switch sides in the coming wars multiple times.

Olaf Haraldson

The real central figure of this book however is Olaf Haraldson, son of a petty king and later a canonized Saint. His extraordinarily violent and eventful life led him at a very early age to lead Viking raids on the Baltic coast. He then by turns both attacked and defended Aethelred’s England, went slaving down the coast of Spain to Muslim Andalusia, made himself King of Norway while many of its leading fighting men were helping Cnut conquer England, and finally was driven out by Cnut’s forces. Skeie argues his fame as a saintly figure was a later invention of the saga writers, and reflective of the fact that he did build churches and forcibly promote Christianity as a centralizing force in this mostly fragmented proto-kingdom, with many pockets of traditional Norse religion. However, the skalds employed by him in his own time to sing his praises mostly focused on his warlike prowess and generosity to his supporters.

Olaf, as well as other colorful figures like his sometime ally Thorkell the Tall and Cnut himself, represented the culmination of 200 years of Scandinavian attacks on Anglo-Saxon England. The violent raids and larger invasions in the 9th and 10th centuries had led to the rise of the Wessex dynasty to rule a centralized and united England, while the riches and prestige won by Olaf in England were used to dominate the fiercely independent petty kings and chieftains of Norway to make himself its undisputed king.

Cnut

Cnut remains an enigmatic figure in this story. After his father, Sweyn Forkbeard, had successfully conquered England he immediately died and Cnut was chased out of the country by a suddenly resurgent Aethelred, who returned from exile and enjoyed success for perhaps the first time in his long reign. This of course didn’t last and Cnut returned to conquer the country once and for all. After chasing Olaf out of Norway, he accompanied the newly elected German king to Rome to be crowned emperor by the pope, whom he also met. No previous Scandinavian, or even English, king had been given this much honor and respect in high European society. Still, Skeie doesn’t paint nearly as vivid a picture of Cnut as he does Olaf. This might be the fault of the sources. Both were the subjects of skaldic poems and sagas, but perhaps Olaf’s were just more interesting.

The Viking Lifestyle and Emotion

Skeie isn’t just a good storyteller about the acts of famous men, he also takes time to convey what it would have felt like to be a Viking in this time. It was a life that revolved around the sea, with strict rules of behavior that bound shipmates together for journeys of months or even years. He often evokes the thrilling feeling of gliding across the water in fast ships, the ocean spray and open air, the pride the sailors took in their ship’s decorative animal heads, the brutality they used against their enemies, and often clever tactics they employed in all types of environments.

But this was also to be the end of an era in many ways. As Cnut himself, and later the Normans ruled England, it became a much harder target for plunder. Similarly, as Norway under Olaf and his successors centralized, its kings put more and more pressure on local chieftains to forbid their large-scale raids on the continent. After all, as Skeie says, Olaf did not want anyone else to accomplish what he had done: using the huge treasure he accumulated in his years of raiding to fund his conquest of the kingdom.

Final Thoughts

Though Cnut rose to much greater fame and power than Olaf in his own time, his empire collapsed soon after his death. Today, he’s mostly remembered in England for a tale about him setting up his throne on the beach and commanding the waves to cease. When they didn’t he proclaimed this as proof that only God is a true king. Olaf, His reign was relatively short, but he was remembered as a pivotal figure in the formation of the Norwegian kingdom, being declared after his death both a saint and Rex Perpetuus Norwegiae, the eternal king Of Norway.