At the time of writing, which at current rates is something like three weeks behind appearance here, when at work I am mainly doing copy-editing of a certain book that it would be tactless of me to identify, given what I’m about to say and what I think of its chances of actually emerging. However, it has set me on a hunt, because it mentions as an unreferenced throwaway that the city of Lugo, in Galicia, north-west Spain, was sacked by Vikings in the early eleventh century. Now, I will confess, it was news to me that the Vikings were anywhere near Spain then, but it transpires that actually Norse sea-raiding was The Genuine Problem at that time and there was certainly enough of it to become a cliché in relic translation narratives and so on. However, sacking a whole city? There are books that ought to mention this and they don’t. However, Richard Fletcher’s St James’s Catapult, so much more than an incomprehensible title, does find a quote from Sampiro’s Chronicle suggesting that Lugo was threatened and also says that Tuy was sacked, which we apparently deduce from episcopal vacancy and which is associated with a serious raid of 1015-1016; this asssociation appears to go back to Ramón Menéndez Pidal’s La España del Cid but Fletcher was suitably cautious so I guess no-one actually says straight out that the vacancy was the fault of Vikings.1 I will check Sampiro, but I think this bit has to come out, or at least be heavily modified. That wasn’t actually what I was going to talk about.
The ruins of a tower at Catoira, Galicia
While searching the web for something that included Lugo in the relevant destructions, I found this, a write-up of a visit to a place in Galicia called Catoira. Here stand the Torres de Oeste, ‘Towers of the West’, which are alas two opposite ends of a ruined castle through which a road has been driven. Before that mishap this place Catoira apparently did pretty well using this fortress to hold off Viking attacks, and indeed English ones hundreds of years later, and every year the town has a festival celebrating this.
Longboats in Catoira harbour for the annual festival
As for the post title, the site whose pictures I’m cheerfully linking to here reckons that either Tolkien or Tolkien’s illustrators had seen the pair of towers divided, so iconic are they. I have no idea if Tolkien ever went to Galicia, though certainly some of the Lord of the Rings names are familiar from my work (Frodo, as far as I’m concerned, was a Bishop of Barcelona, 862-90, pro-Carolingian, property reclaimer and first bishop of the see to strike coin, height and hairiness unrecorded), but it is certainly a nice idea. You can picture this as a suitable illustration quite easily:
The Two Torres de Oeste at Catoira, Galicia
1. Referencing Richard A. Fletcher, St James’s Catapult: the life and times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela (Oxford 1984), online at LIBRO, last modified 16 August 2000 as of 17 October 2009, p. 23 & nn. 52 & 53, and Ramón Menéndez Pidal, La España del Cid (Madrid 1934), 2 vols, transl. H. Sutherland as The Cid and his Spain (London 1934).
31 October 2009 at 2:17
Nitpickery here:
Tolkien mentions somewhere that the Two Towers are actually meant to be Minas Tirith and Minas Ithil/Morgul: the opposing fortresses that guarded the Anduin.
31 October 2009 at 13:26
Oh, I know it’s a silly suggestion, but there aren’t many chances I get to legitimately to put Tolkien, Vikings and Spain all in the same post :-)
31 October 2009 at 13:41
For a contemporary Scandinavian allusion to ‘viking’ raids this far south in the early C11th, you might be interested in taking a look at the skaldic poem Víkingarvísur (the title is editorial), attributed to the Icelandic court poet Sigvatr Thórdarson. The poem is only transmitted in written sources that originated in the C13th, but it is apparently an early C11th panegyric on the young Óláfr Haraldsson’s expeditionary career as a warrior in the Baltic, Frisia, England, Normandy, Aquitaine and Spain in the years up to 1015. Óláfr, like others of his compatriots, raided extensively: Scandinavian predation at this time was not fixed solely on England. The poem (edited by Christine Fell in the festschrift for Gabriel Turville-Petre published in 1981) documents various place-names from Óláfr’s itinerary, many of which have not been securely identified. Included are 3 stanzas apparently referring to Óláfr’s activities in NW Spain, which name destinations such as Gríslupollar (?Castropol, in Asturia), a place called Fetlafjördr, and Seljupollar (?Sil [Lat. Cilenorum aqua], now Guardia). Some of the Spanish evidence for Norse plundering in this region was gathered by the Norwegian scholar Oscar Albert Johnsen in his 1916 account of Óláfr’s early career. Liesbeth van Houts and Judith Jesch have had something to say on the Norse poem and some of the more southerly raids to which it alludes, but, to my knowledge, the nature and extent of late Viking-age Scandinavian activities in Iberia has not been adequately examined (it sounds like the sources may not allow us to reach a better understanding of what was going on). In fact, as Judith Jesch has pointed out on several occasions, the range of Scandinavian raiding in the early C11th in general has still not been fully documented and examined. Her new edition of Víkingarvísur is expected in 2010/11, as part of the ongoing Skaldic Editing Project (http://skaldic.arts.usyd.edu.au/db.php).
31 October 2009 at 18:34
That’s very informative, thankyou!
15 November 2009 at 15:38
As Jonny Grove says, there’s still a topic out there for someone to delve into. In the meantime, and while you are still waiting for my edition of the poem (which probably won’t solve these problems…), there are a few additional comments in my paper ‘Vikings on the European Continent in the late Viking Age’ in Jonathan Adams and Katherine Holman (eds), Scandinavia and Europe 800-1350 (2004).
15 November 2009 at 16:03
Oh! Thankyou. I shall get hold of that when I go and hunt down the Sampiro reference. Also, welcome! I’m afraid we rarely stray onto your territory here but it’s nice to think that you may notice when we do…
19 November 2009 at 21:47
Well, it’s nice to see what other people are up to. I’m a great fan of the 11th century myself, but the 10th is good, too…
6 November 2009 at 15:52
Muy interesante, creo que anteriormente ya habia dejado este enlace, no lo recuerdo bien.
http://tematico.asturias.es/cultura/ridea/ConsultaBoletines/PDFs/026-02.PDF
Espero sea de su interés, un saludo cordial.
6 November 2009 at 16:07
Quizás estos enlaces puedan ser de interés.
http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/libro?codigo=72503
http://www.cvc.cervantes.es/obref/aih/pdf/03/aih_03_1_053.pdf
http://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=272173
6 November 2009 at 16:56
Muy util! y muy gracias!
9 November 2009 at 0:04
Those last references are particularly helpful to dolts like me who need plenty of help to find their way around the nooks of Iberian history — only the first item appears in Mariano González Campo’s ‘Bibliographia Normanno-Hispanica’, published in Saga-Book 26 (2002), which is my main navigational aid for this particular nook. I’d be /really/ interested indeed if you or any of your readers know of any more recent bits and pieces that help illuminate Scandinavian activities in this area in the C11th and early C12th (apart from Romero’s Historia de los Vikingos en España).
11 November 2009 at 16:37
I have no news as yet–I’ve been ill, I’m afraid, but the Sampiro reference at least is now on my next week’s to-do list…