The British Museum's Viking exhibition offers us a welcome compass corrective
|
Version 0 of 1. No one seems to have noticed, but the British Museum's Viking exhibition is very quietly subversive. It became clear at some point between the exhibition packed with people (mid-week) politely jostling each other to examine the tiny fragments of a culture that disappeared over a thousand years ago and the gift shop mugs and tea cloths depicting charts of the seas – North, Baltic, Atlantic – across which the Vikings sailed. Here is Britain looking afresh at its northern boundaries and at the inspiration, influence and threat which have emerged there. A timely intervention, you could say, in the heated arguments of the Scottish referendum. Not because it has anything useful to say about the pound or border controls, it's much too subtle for that. But it is a reminder of how powerfully our north has shaped all the national identities of the United Kingdom – English, Scottish and Welsh. That is always a helpful corrective in England, where the default cultural tendency has always been to look south to Italy, Greece and France – or west to the US. That is paralleled by the UK's internal geography which, over the last century, seems to have shrunk to a dangerous concentration on the south-east – its landscapes, its coast and its city So three cheers for an exhibition dominated by maps and photos of northern seas and lands. But the intervention is not just about compass correctives. The Vikings were "sea-borne businessmen whose principle interest was slave trading", as one reviewer summed it up. The similarities with the British empire are striking. Both used the sea to travel huge distances, testimony to the thirst for adventure and expansion. The Vikings' travels took them to Afghanistan, Constantinople and Newfoundland. They were not ones to build monuments; instead, they took weighing scales with them and ingot moulds to melt down spare ecclesiastical treasures. Much like their British descendants, they traded and pillaged but didn't leave much behind. Scotland traces much to the Vikings – they ruled the Orkneys and Western Isles until well into the Middle Ages – and that imperial adventuring barely paused before its next chapter of tobacco and slave trading was launched in North America, the West Indies and beyond. Scotland made a disproportionate contribution to the British empire, that joint project which has done more than anything else to bind England and Scotland together. Auden always maintained, "One must have a proper moral sense about the points of the compass; North must seem the 'good' direction, the way towards the heroic adventures." Without the north, what happens to England? Does it sink into stagnant complacency? And even more pressing and pertinent, what does nation mean in these multi-ethnic global networks of trade and war? Alongside the questions and the reminders of shared histories, the exhibition goes further – and the reviewers have been outraged. It resolutely refuses to endorse the mythologising of the Vikings which has been a staple of the British imagination. For generations of children, the Vikings have been both wild savages (thanks to Anglo Saxon monastic chroniclers, and Horrible Histories) and emblematic of mythical forces, thanks to Tolkien and Pullman. There is probably a fascinating thesis somewhere on the role of Vikings in forging British middle-class masculine identity (the outraged reviewers were male). Instead, the British Museum offers something far more prosaic. There is even a photo of a mass grave after a defeat of these famed warriors; they were no more aggressive or successful than their contemporaries. The delicacy of the jewellery, combs, and even a tiny gold scoop for ear wax, suggest a role for women which was more than just warm bed mates. So how is this subversion? For starters, it's revising and re-examining the old myths which underlie and sustain national identities. But more importantly, the museum's exhibitions keep surfacing the "incorrigible plurality" – as the poet Louis MacNeice put it – of human beings and how that manifests in the communities, nation states and empires they build. This is neither a vote yes or no on 18 September, but it is a refreshing widening of the mind to re-imagine our identities and relationships well beyond the UK. Linda Colley concluded her BBC Radio 4 Acts of Union and Disunion series by calling for "new constitutive ideas for a new kind of union". The British Museum is offering just that. It was, after all, one of the first institutions to be named British, and has a director who as a Scottish unionist has a keen personal stake. Later this year its focus moves to Germany. Next year it is the Celts. All three speak of intimate relations, uncertain boundaries and ambiguous legacies, and all feed the much-needed new ideas for a new kind of union. |