• DOI:10.1179/0078172X14Z.00000000075
• Corpus ID: 161252048

ÆLLA AND THE DESCENDANTS OF IVAR: POLITICS AND LEGEND IN THE VIKING AGE*

@article{McGuigan2015LLAAT,
  title={{\aE}LLA AND THE DESCENDANTS OF IVAR: POLITICS AND LEGEND IN THE VIKING AGE*},
  author={Neil McGuigan},
  journal={Northern History},
  year={2015},
  volume={52},
  pages={20 - 34}
}

• Neil McGuigan
• Published 1 March 2015
• History
• Northern History

IN MARCH 867 the Northumbrian king AElla died at York during a battle against the Scandinavian ‘Great Army’.1 Two years later, further south, the same force dealt a similar end to the ruler of East Anglia.2 King Edmund subsequently became the object of significant religious devotion. His death produced one of the most important roya l martyr cults of medieval Europe, giving rise to an eponymous city and territorial honour as well as the dedicated shrine at their centre. The new cult had received significant patronage within a generation. The successors of his killers, the conquering Scandinavians who had settled in East Anglia and adjacent regions of Mercia, oversaw its rise. Like Henry II after the Becket affair, the East Anglian Norse came to honour their victim. A series of coins dedicated to Edmund as saint and king were in circulation in the region within thirty years, seemingly coming to an end only when Edward the Elder established West Saxon overlordship of Norse East Anglia in 918.3 Yet the West Saxon monarchs were to embrace the cult, too, and at the other end of the tenth century it became one of the formally patronised cults of the ‘unified’ kingdom of England, with Abbo of Fleury’s Passio Sancti Eadmundi standardising early legends in the form expected for such a martyr.4