In writing a book comparing ethnic identities in tenth-century Normandy and England, Katherine Cross has taken on a very weighty task. In Normandy, in England, and in wider scholarship of the early middle ages, questions of ethnicity are extremely fraught. The study of ethnicity and its relationship to political culture is one with a long and storied historiographical past in both places, yet it is rare that direct and explicit comparison is made, and certainly not so sustained a treatment as is offered here. Yet the significance of the Viking past to both tenth-century England and tenth-century Normandy is evident, and a comparison of this sort is surely overdue. Indeed, Cross does a very respectable job of navigating her boat through the historiographical storms before berthing at some solid conclusions.
The main body of the book is divided into five chapters, each covering a different flavour of source material. Hence, the first chapter deals with genealogical material, the second with ethnic origin myths, the third and fourth with different kinds of hagiography, and the fifth with charter material. These divisions are treated more as useful categories for analysis than as hard-and-fast divisions between texts--thus, for instance, the Historia Normannorum of Dudo of Saint-Quentin is considered from different angles in multiple chapters, appropriately enough for such a rich work. This structure is well-suited to the author's purposes and allows her to engage in detailed textual analysis while keeping one eye on the wider themes which are being compared. It is also nice to see both analysis of relatively-neglected texts such as Fulbert of Rouen's Vita Romani as well as in-depth analysis of an entire charter corpus, a thing common enough in studies of Anglo-Saxon England but still relatively rare in studies of Normandy. From a more theoretical perspective, the book is fully engaged with modern understandings of the construction and operation of ethnicity within society, and the author's impressive and subtle grasp of the literature here is one of the book's strongest features.
The book does not attempt to reconcile the presentation of Scandinavians across the different genres of text it analyses. Rather, it takes their diversity as a key support for its main arguments. Cross notes that the same individuals--the West Saxon and later English kings on one side of the Channel and the Norman dukes on the other--patronised a variety of texts, which presented ethnicity in a number of different ways. These texts promote their patrons' interests, but do so in ways which depend on context. Hence, the presentation of Scandinavians in Æthelred II's charter of 1004 for St Fridewide's church in Oxford, which Cross characterises as having a tone of "unbridled ethnic hostility" (178); and the genealogical claims of Æthelweard's chronicle, from a couple of decades earlier in Æthelred's reign, which gives the West Saxon kings an ultimately-Danish origin, are quite distinct from one another. In a more extreme version of the same phenomenon, disparate views of the Scandinavian past are presented within the most important Norman text under consideration, the Historia Normannorum, depending on what Dudo needs them to do.
Thus, the author argues forcefully that ethnicity within these texts is heavily context-dependent, "appropriate to different audiences and historical moments" (202). The argument that texts are tools, whilst familiar to historians, is here clearly-argued and difficult to dispute. On this basis, the author makes the particularly-interesting argument that Scandinavian ethnicity as presented in Old English and Norman texts had nothing in particular to do with the Old Norse world. That is to say that how Norman or Anglo-Saxon authors constructed their pictures of "Danes" or "Northmen" was influenced weakly if at all by memories of actual Scandinavian customs, histories, behaviours, and so on, but very strongly by pre-existing Anglo-Saxon and Frankish understandings of Scandinavians. Thus Archbishop Wulfstan II of York's Danes are very English Vikings, and Dudo's Dacians are very Frankish ones. Particularly strikingly, this is true even in regions where those patronising the text were themselves of recent Scandinavian heritage, such as the dukes of Normandy (Richard I of Normandy, for instance, was the first duke to be born in Gaul and spoke Old Norse); or the rulers of the Anglo-Scandinavian polities whose meagre textual remnants (such as the sections of the Historia de Sancto Cuthberto which may have been written under Danish rule) Cross does a worthy job of considering. This is an important point for scholars of the political impact of the Vikings in England and France, and a very valuable contribution to the overall debate.
Finally, the author argues that not the least of the reasons the evidence for the Anglo-Scandinavian polities' presentations of ethnicity is so exiguous--or, to put it another way, why the Norman and West Saxon dynasties are so prominent within these texts--is because these rulers combined an interest in textual production with the resources needed to patronise and distribute it. Hence, "official" narratives were able to overwrite all others. This point will be familiar at least to scholars of Dudo of Saint-Quentin--where it was first elucidated by Emily Albu--but it has not previously explored with such thoroughness as here.
There are, of course, criticisms to be made. Leaving aside some more specialist critiques, several opportunities for a deeper analysis of the texts under consideration are missed. The chapter on genealogical texts, for instance, suffers from a misunderstanding of the Frankish context. The author assumes a general interest of tenth- and eleventh-century Frankish aristocrats in genealogy and specifically linking their bloodline to the Carolingians. However, the genealogies cited in support of this are patchy in geographical coverage (confined entirely to Flanders and the upper Loire) and very late, mostly being from the late eleventh and twelfth centuries in a book whose coverage nominally stops in c.1015. The one tenth-century example, Witger's genealogy of the counts of Flanders, is profoundly exceptional and from a very specific political moment. Consequently, the author's analysis of Dudo's Historia Normannorum as a genealogical text is somewhat misplaced: as scholars have long recognised, the work is more usefully analysed in the context of episcopal and monastic gesta, a genre of text which here passes unmentioned.
As implied above, the author's approach to texts produced in the British Isles is admirably nuanced--her attempts to look at texts from the Anglo-Scandinavian polities and from different regions of the Cerdicing kingdom is well done and useful. However, this approach is not really applied to the Norman texts. Herrick's work on local vitae show how this can be a productive approach, for Normandy had its regions just as England did. This gap is particularly palpable in the chapter on charter narratives. Cross makes the quite correct point that Richard II of Normandy produced several charters "in house," rather than relying on beneficiary production all the time, but subsequently takes ducal charters as unproblematically reflecting ducal self-presentation. Thus, charters which are unquestionably from ducal circles are given the same treatment as documents from institutions such as Saint-Père de Chartres, which were very much not under Norman ducal control. As such, the author misses a valuable opportunity to examine regional responses to ducal self-presentation --even if we accept the reasonable supposition that the dukes had a consistent set of priorities as to how they should be presented, these were filtered through local prisms in a way the book does not pick up on.
Finally, despite the worthy emphasis on the roles texts played in their particular contexts, the contexts in which they are analysed is often very broad. For instance, the Translationes of St Audoënus are analysed in the very general context of the patronage of monasteries within Normandy by the ducal family from the mid-tenth to the mid-eleventh century, rather than in the specific context of the years around c.1000, as the Norman dukes moved towards a much more explicitly Christianised self-presentation (as can be seen in Richard I's endowment charter for Fécamp as analysed for instance by Douglas). This is by no means a vitiating flaw in the book, as many, even most, of the author's arguments do not require such specificity--the very stimulating section on what one might with tongue rather in cheek call "the beginning of Norman legal memory" (190), is admirably established without such detail. Nonetheless, analysis of some texts is weaker because the specifics are not considered.
Such critiques are more minor than their length might indicate. Fundamentally, Heirs of the Vikings is a very solid scholarly production, clearly structured and well-argued, which analyses an impressive variety of different sources and comes to some valuable conclusions about them, contributing to modern understandings of the construction, deployment and maintenance of ethnic identities. It will worthily attract the interest of scholars of Normandy, England, and medieval ethnicity.