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The Vikings
Anyone who has watched on
television (or perhaps seen in the old Plaza cinema) the 1958 film “The
Vikings”, which starred and was produced by Kirk Douglas, father–in-law of
Swansea’s Catherine Zeta Jones, will envisage Vikings as Norse seafarers intent
on plunder and pillage.
The word
“Viking” comes from an Old English word meaning pirate, though there is no
evidence that they wore horned helmets.
A
ccording to legend, Vikings
destroyed St Cenydd’s hermitage in Llangennith in the year 986. Yet prior to the Norman conquest
Norsemen were often engaged in more peaceful activities, setting up trading
settlements from their Irish bases at Wexford and Dublin across the Irish Sea
to South Wales.
That could have been how
Swansea originated, although, as Gerald Gabb
points out in the first volume of his authoritative “
Swansea and its History”, actual evidence is
hard to come by, and what there is can often be disputed.
The Welsh name Abertawe meaning
“mouth of the river Tawe” is an accurate description of the town, for that was
the attraction for a settlement.
The
English name
Swansea
may have derived from “Sweyn’s Eye”, composed of an old Norse proper name
“Sveinn”, along with the old Norse word “ey”, meaning an island or inlet.
Svein might have been Svein Forkbeard, who
was king of
Denmark
from 986 to 1014, and the father of Cnut the Great.
This was Canute of the apocryphal anecdote
about king Canute and the waves, which demonstrated the limitations of secular
power compared with God’s supreme power, though it often
misrepresents Canute as if he believed he had
supernatural powers.
Was
Swansea founded in the eleventh century by a
person named Sweyn?
In spite of the
paucity of evidence, when the new Guildhall was being built in the 1930s,
architect Ernest Morgan advised the Corporation to include features suggesting
Viking connections.
So the bronze
handrails of the grand staircase represent the bows and sterns of Scandinavian
ships, the imagined visage of a bearded Sweyn presides over approaches to the
Council Chamber, and the prow of a Viking long boat projects from each side of
the clock tower.
Some Viking artefacts have been
uncovered – in 1949 Minchin Hole below Pennard car park provided the earliest
find of any post-Roman currency in
Wales,
before any coins minted by the
Normans.
It yielded a penny of Egbert of Wessex (802
to 839), as well as two other coins.
When a road was being constructed from
Penrice Castle
to Millwood a hoard (rather like the large 3
rd century Pennard
hoard) of 30 coins was discovered dating from 1003 to 1009, from the time of
Ethelred the Unready (meaning “uncounselled”).
A complete bronze brooch, described as of Irish-Norse type and probably
used to affix a cloak, was found in Whitford in the parish of Llanmadoc.
At Culver Hole near Burry Holmes (not the
Port Eynon Culver Hole), a 10
th century bronze ring-and-pin brooch
was discovered.
Of course the name of
the tidal island Burry Holmes may itself indicate Viking connections, since
“holm” is the Old Scandinavian word for island.
In 1993 artist Mark Mumford
envisaged an immense statue of Sweyn, about 150 feet high, rivalling
New York’s Statue of
Liberty, and proposed it be erected on top of Kilvey Hill, but his suggestion
was not taken further.
If we move away from
images of a warlike Viking (Kirk Douglas wearing a horned helmet), perhaps we
can imagine Norse seafarers seeking a trading post at the mouth of a navigable
river. In the absence of conclusive
proof, former City Archivist Dr John Alban, County Archivist of Norfolk,
stated, “I am still of the opinion that there was a Viking settlement at
Swansea”.
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