Lindisfarne Minus One

Lindisfarne Minus One

Knarr arrives – little boy sees the ship.
Norseman disembarks, waits on the beach.
Is led to monestary. Converses in the coastal tongue
Looking for iron, charcoal, and coins.
Offering silver jewelry and ???
Priest wants the jewelry as “a gift to God.”
Norseman asks what God is going to use it for and is it a gift for self?
Priest tries to steal the jewelry.
Norseman is insulted by the refusal of payment and gets up to leave.
Priest is angry that he would have to pay and insults the Norseman.
Norseman replies that he would return.


The generally accepted date for the Viking raid on Lindisfarne is 8 June; Michael Swanton writes: "vi id Ianr, presumably [is] an error for vi id Iun (8 June) which is the date given by the Annals of Lindisfarne (p. 505), when better sailing weather would favour coastal raids."[49][c]

Alcuin, a Northumbrian scholar in Charlemagne's court at the time, wrote: "Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race ... The heathens poured out the blood of saints around the altar, and trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the streets."[50] During the attack many of the monks were killed, or captured and enslaved.[51]

Biographer Peter Ackroyd writes: "The monasteries of Lindisfarne and Jarrow were not attacked at random; they were chosen as examples of revenge. The onslaught of the Christian Charlemagne on the ‘pagans’ of the north had led to the extirpation of their shrines and sanctuaries. The great king had cut down Jôrmunr, the holy tree of the Norse people. What better form of retaliation than to lay waste the foundations devoted to the Christian God? The Christian missionaries to Norway had in fact set out from Lindisfarne."[52]