The Vikings in the Isle of Man

Welcome to Dirk Steinforth's Website on the Vikings in the Isle of Man and the Irish Sea.

In these pages I plan to present aspects of the early Vikings in the Isle of Man, such as their chronology in the Island, their burial custom, settlement sites or the iconography of the Manx Crosses as well as the many other questions still existing about them – I begin with the enigmatic boat-burial at Balladoole, one of the most controversial Viking sites in the Island, and intend to add further papers in future.

I hope to discuss these questions with interested readers and invite comments on my papers as well as suggestions regarding other Viking-related issues worthy of attention: Please feel free to leave a message in the commentary box below or send me an email (for contact details please see my Academia site).

For a long time the beginning of the Viking Age in the Isle of Man seemed quite clear: An entry in the Annals of Ulster under the year 798, reporting a Viking raid against an island called 'Inis Patraicc', was interpreted as referring to St Patrick's Isle off the Manx town of Peel. This indicated a very early date and a clearly violent manner for the first encounter between Vikings and Manx. Later, however, some scholars preferred a considerably later date, towards the very end of the ninth century or even after the year 900 – and a comparatively peaceful settlement, as the Manx Crosses indicate a state of social as well as religious harmonisation between the Norse and the natives by the 930s. Both positions face serious objections, and I have presented a third view, proposing a violent conquest of the Island in the third quarter of the ninth century.

Unfortunately, there are no historical records telling us about that period and archaeological evidence is often ambiguous and patchy: little is known about the Manx islanders on the eve of the Vikings' arrival as well as about the organisation of the Norse conquerors, so it is difficult to assess how the relationship between both groups developed in the following years and decades. What is certain is that the Vikings settled and introduced Scandinavian-style house-building (as opposed to the round-houses built before the Viking Age), as for example attested by the two long-houses at the Braaid, Marown parish (see picture gallery). There are at the moment 25 furnished graves in the Isle of Man, some of them magnificent boat- and mound-graves with lots of grave-goods (e.g. in Balladoole), and as the Christian Manx appear to have buried their dead in flat-graves with no objects at all, these must be considered as Vikings' burials – with a pagan religious as well as a social function to them. The objects in the Viking graves are predominantly of Insular manufacture rather than Scandinavian, indicating the conquerors were not raiders straight from 'Norway', but possibly second-generation Vikings from a Norse 'colony' in the British Isles, very probably Dublin. Other finds were of Anglo-Saxon, Carolingian or even Mediterranean origin and demonstrate Viking Age traffic in wares – by raid or trade.

Gradually, it seems, furnished burial went out of fashion, and after about the 950s/960s there are no more pagan graves in the Island. It is reasonable to suppose that the Norse accepted Christianity and eventually were buried according to the new religion – and that instead of impressive grave-mounds they now adopted the Christian custom of carving conspicuous grave-stones. In doing so, they created one of the most impressive bodies of stone monuments, the famous Scandinavian Manx Crosses, ornamented in Scandinavian Borre, Jelling and Mammen styles and runic inscriptions featuring Norse as well as Celtic names. They stongly suggest a high degree of harmonisation between Manx and Norse by the middle of the tenth century.

Click on the Triquetra-Knot to go on to the papers.