Toynbee extrapolates a Viking conquest of Midgard.

After a deep hunt for the Arnold J. Toynbee appendice The Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Scandinavian Civilization (mentioned as an inspirational piece for Vikingverse author Ian Stuart Sharpe in our interview), NorsePlay has decided to present it in its entirety here.

First published in A Study of History, Volume II, from Oxford University 1934 CE, this appendice gives one much food for thought about how historical outcomes sometimes turn on a tíuaurar, and quite possibly how the seemingly tenuous & malleable society of today could also be directed in the now.

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THE FORFEITED BIRTHRIGHT OF THE ABORTIVE SCANDINAVIAN CIVILIZATION

Having observed the narrowness of the margin by which the abortive Scandinavian Civilization failed to achieve its manifest destiny, let us now imagine to ourselves that the historic encounter between the Vikings and the Civilizations of the South had ended, not as it actually did, but in the other of the two possible alternative outcomes. Let us imagine, that is to say, that the Teutonic rear-guard, instead of being eventually discomfited like the Teutonic vanguard, had eventually triumphed over Roman and Orthodox Christendom, as the Achaean barbarians had once actually triumphed over the Minoan Civilization and the Hittite Civilization. Owing to the accident that, in the Scandinavian case, history has happened to take the other of the two equally possible alternative courses, the unfulfilled consequences of the unachieved victory of the Scandinavian barbarians are as difficult to apprehend in our latter-day imaginations as the unfulfilled consequences of the unachieved victory of the Far Western Christians of Ireland. Yet, if we glance again at the critical events in the history of the Viking Age, we shall recognize that the Scandinavian Vikings, like the Irish missionaries, came within an ace of succeeding in their gigantic enterprise.

Let us suppose that they had just succeeded, instead of just failing, to capture Constantinople in 860 CE and Paris in 885-6 CE and London in 895 CE; let us suppose that Rollo had not been converted by Charles the Simple in 911 CE nor Svyatoslav defeated by John Zimisces in 972 CE; let us suppose that, at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries of the Christian Era, the Scandinavian settlers in Greenland had just managed, instead of just failing, to gain a footing on the North American Continent; and let us suppose that the Scandinavian settlers in Russia, having actually made themselves masters of the Dniepr and the Volga waterways, had proceeded to make use of these key-positions not merely for occasional raids upon the Caspian provinces of the Abbasid Caliphate¹ but for the exploration and mastery of the whole network of waterways that gives access to the Far East across the face of Eurasia. None of these seven suppositions are at all far-fetched or fantastic; and if we allow ourselves to postulate all of them, or even a majority of them, in imagination, we shall obtain a reconstruction of the course of history which will perhaps surprise us.

We shall see the Vikings trampling the nascent civilizations of Roman and Orthodox Christendom out of existence as thoroughly as the Achaeans actually crushed the decadent Minoan and the rising Hittite Society: so thoroughly, in fact, that the two annihilated civilizations do not leave any spiritual children, affiliated to them through a universal church, behind, but vanish, bag and baggage, from the face of the Earth to leave the field free for a new Scandinavian structure on barbarian foundations. We shall then see this new Scandinavian Civilization reigning supreme in Europe in Christendom’s stead and marching with the Arabic Civilization across the Mediterranean, and with the Iranic Civilization across the Caspian, as the Hellenic Civilization, once created on new barbarian foundations by the Achaeans, actually marched with the Egyptiac and Babylonic civilizations in the place of the Minoan and Hittite civilizations, when these had been so utterly overthrown that their place did not know them any more. And, after this, we shall watch the Scandinavians turning their energies to the extension of their domain into the barbarian hinterlands on either flank.

The Scandinavians, in their day, were assuredly as efficient in the art of exploration and commerce and conquest and colonization along the channel of inland waterways as the latter-day Cossack pioneers of the Old World or the latter-day French and English pioneers of the New World. The Cossack, who made themselves masters of the waterway of the Lower Dniepr some five or six hundred years later than the Vikings, conducted their north-eastward operations from this base with such effect that, within two or three centuries, they had threaded their way across the vast expanse of river-shot continent that stretches away from the left bank of the Dniepr to the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk. Is it credible that the Dniepr-Vikings and the Volga-Vikings would have failed to anticipate the achievement of the Cossacks if they had applied their thoughts and energies seriously to this task?² Again, the French and English mariners who eventually made themselves masters of the St. Lawrence and the Hudson, some six centuries after the Greenland Vikings had just failed to master these two North American waterways, pushed westward, inland, up-stream, and on into the Basin of the Mississippi with such effect that, within two centuries, the victorious Western pioneers had reached the coast of the Pacific. Is it credible that the Vinland-Vikings (if Vinland had actually become, as it so nearly became, a Scandinavian colony) would have failed to anticipate the achievement of the French coureurs and the English backwoodsmen? The estuary of the St. Lawrence, which offers itself invitingly to any seafarer approaching North America from the direction of Greenland, inducts the explorer, through the chain of the Great Lakes, into the heart of the Continent; and here, at the head of the Lakes, lie vast tracts of country with a soil and a climate in which the Viking pioneer would have found a larger and more genial reproduction of his native Scandinavia.

The peculiar suitability of this region for Scandinavian agricultural settlement is demonstrated by the strength of the modern Scandinavian contribution to the population of the present States of Wisconsin and Iowa and Minnesota; but the Swedish and Norwegian farmers who have been attracted to the American Northwest and have ‘made good' in these new surroundings within the last half-century have not been pioneers themselves. They have waited for French and English pioneers to lead the way into an American land of promise which these modern Scandinavian settlers' Viking forefathers were on the verge of discovering for themselves at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries of the Christian Era. If a few more Viking ships had made the passage from Greenland to Vinland in that age, or if the ship's companies that did make the passage had not shown something less than the usual Viking determination and enterprise in failing to push on beyond the fringe of the great new world upon which they had stumbled, we must surely suppose that, by Hauk Erlendsson's time, some three centuries later, the Scandinavian World would have extended to the Pacific coast of North America as well as to the Pacific coast of Northern Asia. Perhaps the fourteenth century of the Christian Era, which actually saw the completion of the partition of the ci-devant Scandinavian domain between Western and Orthodox Christendom, would have seen, instead, a Scandinavian encirclement of the globe, when Viking pioneers who had made their way across the breadth of the North Atlantic Ocean and the breadth of the North American Continent to Alaska joined hands at last, across the Behring Straits, with other Vikings who, in starting out from Scandinavia, had turned their faces in the opposite direction and had crossed the Baltic in order to make their way across the breadth of Eurasia to Kamchatka.

What would have been Iceland’s rank and role in Hauk Erlendsson’s day in a world in which Western Christendom and Orthodox Christendom were both extinct, and in which a triumphant Scandinavian Civilization, that had overrun Europe and encircled the globe, now found itself marching with the Arabic Civilization across the Mediterranean and with the Iranic across the Caspian and with the Ear Eastern along the Amur and perhaps even with the Mexic Civilization along the Rio Grande? In this unrealized and therefore unfamiliar but by no means impossible world, it is evident that Iceland would long since have ceased to be a Scandinavian Ultima Thule and would have become, instead, the centre-point of the Scandinavian World: the inevitable stepping-stone, in mid-ocean, between the European and the American half of the gigantically expanded domain of a living and growing Scandinavian Society. And what would then have been the state of Icelandic culture? Would this brilliant culture, which actually wilted away under the transforming touch of Christianity before it had attained its prime, have been able to fulfil its early promise by going on steadily from strength to strength if a successful Viking conquest of Europe had extirpated Roman Christianity on its native soil before ever the alien religion had acquired an opportunity of exerting its corrosive influence upon Icelandic life? And if the Icelandic culture really had continued to develop, what special colour would it have taken and what special lines would it have followed?

From its actual development, before its life was cut short, we can surmise with some confidence that its aesthetic sensibility and intellectual penetration would have been of a rare quality and that its religious temperature would have been sub-normal.⁴ The two tendencies are interdependent, for both spring equally from the specific ethos of the Scandinavian Civilization which we have attempted to appraise above. This ethos, as we have observed, bears an unmistakable resemblance to the Hellenic; and if we wish to conjecture what the Scandinavian genius might have achieved by the fourteenth century of the Christian Era — supposing that it had enjoyed the Hellenic immunity from a sterilizing contamination — we cannot do better than to remind ourselves of what had actually been achieved by the more fortunate Hellenic genius in its most brilliant early focus at a corresponding date.

What is the corresponding century in Hellenic history to Hauk Erlendsson’s in Scandinavian? Hauk Erlendsson actually lived, and was no doubt highly conscious of living, in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era; but if Scandinavian history had taken the alternative course that we have allowed ourselves to imagine, Christianity would have been virtually extinct and the Christian Era therefore presumably obsolete by Hauk’s time. In that case Hauk might have been conscious rather of living in the tenth century since the moment when his Scandinavian forefathers had struck out that independent course of their own which had eventually led their descendants to unforeseen heights of achievement. He might have reckoned his chronology from the beginning of the post-Hellenic Volkerwanderung (circa 375 CE), when the Teutonic vanguard went off to the wars and the Teutonic rear-guard made its momentous choice of staying four centuries longer at home. And if we take the corresponding starting-point for Hellenic history, and measure off the centuries from the beginning of the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung, when the Achaeans made a Vandal choice and won Scandinavian laurels, what is the tenth century of the Hellenic Era on this computation? Simple arithmetic informs us that the Hellenic century which corresponds to Hauk Erlendsson’s century in Scandinavian chronology is the fifth century BCE (circa 525-425 BCE). And if we contemplate the historic cultural achievement, in that famous century, of Ionia, the Hellenic Iceland, we may begin to imagine what might have been achieved, at an equivalent date, by Iceland, the Scandinavian Ionia, if Fortune had permitted the Icelanders, as she graciously permitted the Ionians, to work out their own high destinies undisturbed. In that contingency the Icelandic culture in Hauk Erlendsson’s day might have reached and even passed its zenith, and Iceland might then have been in the act of handing the torch of Scandinavian Civilization to Norway and to Vinland, as Ionia, in the fifth century BCE, did hand the torch of Hellenic Civilization to Athens and to Magna Graecia.

So near did the Scandinavians come, when they responded to the challenge of Roman Christendom, to achieving the same success as the Achaeans achieved when they responded to the challenge of the Minoan Civilization.

¹ For these occasional Viking raids in the Caspian, see Kendrick, op. cit., pp. 158-63.

² The Vikings were actually better placed than the Cossacks for penetrating and mastering the Great North-East, since they were already masters of the Volga — a waterway oi unique importance over which the Cossacks never obtained control (the Cossacks were anticipated by the Muscovites on the Lower Volga and therefore had to make the leap from the Don to the Yaik [Ural]. The Vikings reached the Volga partly direct from the Baltic (the portage to the Volga Basin from the Volkhov Basin is shorter, though less level, than the portage to the Dniepr Basin from the Volkhov Basin) and partly by a roundabout route down the Dniepr into the Black Sea and out of the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov and up the River Don and across the portage between the Don and the Volga at the point where the courses of the two rivers approach nearest to one another. (See Kendrick, op. cit., pp. 158-63.)

³ There is one alleged piece of material evidence — a runic inscription, hearing the date 1362 CE, which came to light at Kensington, Minnesota in 1898 CE, which opens up the possibility that, in Hauk Erlendsson’s age, one band of Nordic explorers from Greenland may have penetrated thus deep, at any rate, into the interior of the North American Continent (See Holand, H R: The Kensington Stone [privately printed Wisconsin 1932 CE, Ephraim])

⁴ For an imaginary reconstruction of the religious history of medieval and modern Europe on the supposition that Christendom had succumbed to Viking assaults instead of beating them back, see I C (1) (b), vol 1, p99

[Note that NorsePlay has removed page breaks from pp438-43, editing for newer time era BCE/CE formats, scanning/printing lacunae, and re-numbered footnotes to exclude reference-only citations. See original here.]

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There's a forceful wistfulness between the semi-judgmental & accusatory lines of Toynbee's might-have-been evaluation.

"History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life."

~ Arnold J. Toynbee

And looking with & beyond Toynbee's words toward the future, there are perhaps applicable unspoken implications for Heathen reconstruction, reconstitution, and recovery on some scale, and if not establishing a city-state to eventually win Midgard itself, at least for ourselves as self-determining free individuals linked by a shared interest in a cultural network that transcends previous geographic or military models of civilization.

[Either way, you're all welcome under that glowing NorseTopian NorsePlay banner, just hit that shiny blue follow button near top left, thanks.]

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Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires' Norse Gods and Giants at age seven. Since then he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the Map of Midgard project, and spearheaded the neologism/brand NorsePlay. If you have employment/opportunities in investigative mythology,  field research, or product development to offer, do contact him.