Paying the Danegeld: Anglo-Saxon peacemaking with vikings

Abstract

It is always a temptation for an armed and agile nation To call upon a neighbour and to say:- ‘We invaded you last night – we are quite prepared to fight, Unless you pay us cash to go away’. It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say:- ‘Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away’. And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane. Rudyard Kipling, ‘Dane-geld ( a.d. 980–1016)’ When Rudyard Kipling penned these lines in 1911, he was drawing what he thought to be enduring moral and political lessons learned from the failed attempt of Æthelred II ‘the Unready’ to purchase peace from the vikings. Though clearly writing for his contemporaries, Kipling could claim that his poem was true in spirit to the main narrative source for Æthelred's reign, the C-recension of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

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