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tradition. Various traditions attributed great magical feats of power to Merlin, from overcoming dragons to the construction of Stonehenge. But his role in the Arthurian story—the magical bringing together of Arthur’s parents, the raising of Arthur, the placement of Excalibur in the stone—was first recorded in the twelfth century. Nor does the Mabinogion relate anything of the half-sister of Arthur, Morgan le Fay (or Morgaine, Morgana), who was presented as a healer and shape-shifter by Geoffrey of Monmouth. By the time of Thomas Malory, she is the cause of Arthur’s downfall. To round out the circle of Celtic connections, many scholars believe that Morgan is a version of the earlier Morrigan, the Celtic war goddess, who brought about the fall of Ireland’s great hero, Cuchulainn.

MYTHIC VOICES

Valhalla stands nearby, vast and gold-bright. Odin presides there, and day by day he chooses slain men to join him. Every morning they arm themselves and fight in the great courtyard and kill one another; every evening they rise again, ride back to the hall, and feast. That hall is easily recognized: its roof is made of shields and its rafters are spears. Breast-plates litter the benches. A wolf lurks at the western door, and an eagle hovers over it.

—from The Norse Myths, KEVIN CROSSLEY-HOLLAND

It is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made.

—English scholar ALCUIN (793 CE)

What mythology besides Celtic came storming out of northern Europe?

Maybe your first taste came from Looney Tunes, when Elmer Fudd put on a horned helmet and sang “Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit” to music from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Or maybe it was the scene in Apocalypse Now, when American helicopters attacked a Vietnamese village as loudspeakers blared “The Ride of the Valkyries.” Perhaps the Marvel Comics character Thor was your introduction. Or the video loop of the burning “Yule log” shown on television every Christmas. Or the Minnesota football team called the Vikings. Or the magical world of giants, dwarves, runes, magical swords, and powerful rings created by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) in Lord of the Rings.*

Powerful and popular, all of these images are based on the Norse and German myths of the Vikings.

Think “Viking,” and perhaps you envision burly, bearded men with broadswords, horned helmets, and dragon boats, accompanied by out-sized women with names like Brunhilde. If so, you would be right. Each of these rich images represents the fierce Vikings, or Norsemen, who terrorized, raped, and pillaged their way across Europe for some three hundred years, from about 800 until 1100 CE, when they were Christianized and started to cut back on their hell-raising.

As we see from the English scholar Alcuin (above), who got his first taste of Viking handiwork when raiders sailed out of the fjords of Norway in June 793, the Norsemen were a force to be reckoned with. After looting a monastery off the northeastern coast of England, where monks had been serenely copying religious manuscripts on the island of Lindisfarne, the Viking raiders spent the next few centuries scorching other parts of England, Ireland, and Scotland. In 841, they established Dublin as a winter base and began to strike farther from home, looting and burning towns in France, Italy, and Spain, and spreading fear wherever they went.†

If the Celts were frat-house boys gone bad, the Vikings were a gang of lawless bikers—“bad to the bone”—until they finally settled down and became the respectable, civilized Scandinavians they are today.

But was it all about pillage, rape, and destruction? Or was there a kinder, gentler Viking?

The answer is—not really. For most of their history, the Vikings were fierce pirates and warriors who descended from the Germanic peoples who had settled in northwestern Europe. Going as far back as 2000 BCE, some of these Germanic tribes