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They had to retain information on bloodlines, land possession, law codes, as well as a vast body of stories, myths and history. To be illiterate was not to be ignorant, but rather to utilise more of the memory actively. It was Christianity that brought literacy and Latin to a people who had depended for three centuries on oral tradition and memory. It could be argued that with writing came complacency, bureaucracy and rigidity.
Æthelburg’s daughter, Eanflæd, was the first person baptised by the Roman mission in Northumbria. Eanflæd would go on to play an important role in the newly emerging northern church, marrying her father’s successor and then becoming the first abbess of the freshly founded double monastery at Whitby. This princess’s baptism set a precedent that other noblewomen of the north would follow.
Hrothgar’s hall, Heorot, described in Beowulf: ‘The building in which that powerful man held court was the foremost of halls under heaven; its radiance shone over many lands.’
Heroic Æthelflæd! Great in martial fame, A man in valour, though a woman in your name: Your warlike hosts by nature you obeyed, Conquered over both, though born by sex a maid.
King Magnus Ólafsson translated the phrase: ‘drekkum bjór af bragði / ór bjúgviðum hausa’ as ‘we shall soon drink beer out of the skulls of those they killed’. However, it should have read ‘we shall soon drink beer from the curved trees of skulls’, alluding to a wooden drinking horn.25
