After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Dark Side of the Vikings

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

How dark really were the Vikings? How much of a part did human sacrifice play in their world? And what was their relationship with magic?Joining Anthony and Maddy in today's episode is historian, author and all-round Viking expert Dr Eleanor Barraclough, to take us back to darkest corners of the Viking era.This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Beneath the darkening sky, a crowd gathers around a wooden post slick with blood. Drums pound slowly echoing off the fjord. A priest raises his arms to the gods. Odin, Thor, Freya. And the chosen victim trembles, garlanded with branches, eyes fixed on the dark water beyond. A blade glimps in the firelight. The drums beat louder as life and death hanged together in the freezing night air. To their gods, this is an offering. To their enemies, a barbaric horror. Were the Vikings truly the monsters their victims described,

or believers in a brutal, sacred code the rest of the world could never possibly understand. We're told they arrived on longboats, merciless and brutal pagans foaming at the mouth, interested only in pillaging, killing, and human sacrifice. What is certain is that after a lot of people, the Vikings arrived on your shore, nothing would ever be the same again. But who were these people? And are we getting the full story? Were the Vikings really bloodthirsty heathens? Or

are we seeing them only through the lens of the Christians who feared them? From the dark heart of the Viking Age, this is after dark. Hello and welcome to After Dark. My name's Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And when you hear the word Viking, what comes to mind? Well, it comes with a lot of cultural weight, largely thanks to the way TV and film have portrayed Vikings. And even that's controversial. We'll get into it all. But in the past, this has been people who are horn-helmeted. They've been wild and merciless men, mostly. In recent years, however, it's been wild and merciless men in a sexy outfit, which, you know, that's fine for TV, I'll allow it. But with today's guest,

Dr. Elmer Barclough, historian and author of books including Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, we're going to peel all of that. material away and try and find out who these people really were and explore the darker side of their history. Eleanor, welcome to After Dark. Thank you very much. I should say I'm actually sort of part of the problem because when I sign books, my signature is so bad, I put a little cartoon of a Viking there with horned helmet. Of course it's a hornet. You put a Viking cartoon in every book you sign. Well, they're a really shitty one. I'll show you off. But they do have hauntelments. I once got told off, a child came back and was like, you put horns on this

There was no horns. This is not better if I didn't put the horns, who would know it was a Viking? See, I'm amazed that you have that much commitment. So when I sign books, it becomes increasingly dreadful. On the end, it's a lie. And I'm so sorry to people who get that. That's the problem. I look like a slug who sort of died, cruelling cross the plate.

So hence the Viking with the Worned helmets. Amazing. Let's start with an obvious, and I'm sure very simple and easy to answer a question, Eleanor. When we're talking about the Vikings, Yeah. Who, when, where are we discussing? Oh, kids, the easy ones. Yeah, start with this really simple.

Okay, so if we're talking, let's start with when, which is sort of easy in that. So I've heard you have a connection to Linda's fun. I do. I got married there and I haven't tattooed on my wrist. Is that the title courseway bit on there as well? Well, so do you know what? I got this so long ago and it was in a really bad tattoo parlour and it's bled quite a lot. But I like to think that it's like, you know, the changing sands, and it's all the...

Erosion. Yeah, it's a little bit of seawares. Right. So, that is a good place to start. 793C.E. really famous raid on Lindisfan, which is this tidal island off the north-east coast of England. Everyone must go there. Everyone must. And also, that amazing.

I don't know if it's still there. They've got a really good coffee place and they grind their own beans. I know exactly where you meet. On the island. It's so good. Do people live there? Yes. Yeah, yeah.

I'm never being, obviously, but yeah. You should definitely go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I die, I want to have a Viking burial pushed off to see from Lomas. Yes. Like, I'm just putting that out here in case anyone can arrange that for me, thank you. There you go. First date I ever went on with my now husband was also to Linsfantz. There we go. So, leaving that aside, I was going to say, not so much for the monk because. You never know. They could have fancied the Vikings. I mean, they did not have the opportunity to do that. Right. So, yeah, 793. It's a famous day. and it's the year, so according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, so here we're a reid for beck and a commoner over Northumberland and the folk amelich Bregdon. Sorry, I interrupted you. Can you do it again, just so we can hear a proper?

Here we're in a rea-the-for-beckona-coma over Northumberland on that folk amelage bregdon. That's Old English. As my old English colleagues, or at least the ones, that teach Old English, always say I do Old English with an Old Norse accent. It's not a compliment. I'm like, did you know? So, as long as none of them are listening,

Okay, so that's the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for that year. Here there were dreadful portents over the land of the Northumbrians and the people were terrified most pitifully and there were sheets of lightning, fiery dragons were seen flying through the air. Never a good sign. Right? Little after that, what happens? The heathen men annihilated God's Church and Lindisfund, right? So, nice, easy date to start with. But of course, that's not even the first time. Even if we're talking about the British Isles and Ireland, we know there's at least blood spilled on the south coast, on the Isle of Portland. a few years before then. And so it's always a little bit tricky, but that's a good date. And the reason I think it's still an important date is because people get really freaked out about this. So Alquin, for example, is this cleric. He's from near York, but he's then at that point living at Charlemagne's court, and he's writing letters after this attack, and he's basically writing them to communities

and the king up in Northumbria. And he's saying, what did you do? What has gone on? this is not good, must have been your fault. You're quoting directly there, right? Yeah. What's OMG in Angosan? I don't. It will exist. Right, so that's a good date, but of course it's a really Anglo-centric date, important to say, because the other big date, if we go to the other end, 1066, Battle of Stanford Bridge, Harold of it. Never heard of it. Never, yeah, but Harold Hard Rider, king of Norway is killed, right? And so people say, well, there endeth the Viking Age. And certainly,

yeah, for Harold Hard Rider, it does. But part of the problem, A, there's no such thing as the Viking age at the time. So it's not like people wake up the next day and say, oh, I guess that's over there. But it's also really Anglo-centric. And so it's just like two useful dates, but we have to kind of pull that apart a little bit. Then we've got to talk about what the word Viking means, right? So Viking, there's an old Norse version of the word, Wikinger, which is basically a raider or pirate. There's also a form of it, which is a verb.

So you go on a Viking on a raid in the summer. Old English form of the word as well, weching again means sort of pirate raider. So it's important to think that the Viking age is characterised in terms of sort of when people are doing those sorts of activities. That's important. But of course, that's just an activity. It's something you do.

And that's not a whole culture. And certainly the Norse Diaspora, that whole cultural sphere, is so much more interesting and so much more widespread than that and grows over time, even when they're not really raiding. So that kind of gives a few starting points. And in terms of where, you talk about a diaspora, and they do go pretty far. They go so far. Yeah, exactly.

So we're talking sort of Scandinavia, so Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Those are the Scandinavian homelands and where the Viking Age, you might say, begins. But then, of course, whether it's because of raiding, trading, settling, colonising, whatever it is, but then spreading out. So certainly the British Isles and Ireland. And then, you know, the pharaohs, Iceland, just before 1,000, they reach Greenland and they settle there. And then around 1,000 itself, they get to the edge of the North American continent, which is crazy. I think it would have blown their minds more if they'd realize the significance.

It's like, oh, it's a continent. If they could look on a map. Right. Oh, we just assumed it was a few highlands. Right. But, of course, they meet people there. And that means for the first time in recorded human history, that circle of the world has joined up. So that's huge.

Then we've also got to think they're going in the other direction, particularly sort of from Sweden. They're going across the Baltic. They're going down the Eurasian waterways and all the way to Byzantium, to Baghdad. And so it's a really, like that, we call it a Norse diaspora because they're still culturally connected and they're still talking back to those homelands. What you also find, though, is that they start to almost bleed into the cultures that they are settling amongst. And so you see that move.

for example, from Norse to Slavic in the east. You see it really famously in Normandy, Norman, obviously Northman, but very quickly they're no longer speaking a Nordic language. See it to some extent in the British Isles and Ireland, but it kind of depends on which part of the world we're talking about. So they are quite fluid, really, aren't it? They're very adaptable and very open to changing, depending on where they find themselves. And exactly, as you say, depending on where they find themselves.

And so there are some bits. So you get, for example, when they're meeting people in Greenland, the ancestors of today's sort of Greenlandic Inuit, who are sort of further north up that west coast, that doesn't seem to go well when they meet. Certainly, edge of the North American continent, that's quite violent. They start off trying to trade. They obviously want to settle, but it gets quite violent and it goes wrong and they say in the end, we can't settle here, partly because they've killed a load of people, right? But, you know, it's not. It's always inconvenient. I know, right? But, yeah, so you find, it sort of depends on which

part of the world and what sort of activities they're doing there. And then there are some places where they don't really have to engage with an existing population. So Iceland is a possible example of that. So again, they say in the case of Iceland, they call them Papar. They were papar here and people think they might have been sort of itinerant Irish monks who are basically going across the North Atlantic looking for a place to reenect the lives of the desert fathers. But because you're in the North Atlantic, it's finding a sort of shitty, like, like rock you can go and pray on, basically. And so that is what they say, you know, writing in the 12th century, they say the Papar were here when the first settlers arrived, the north settlers,

but they didn't want to stay among pagans or heathens. And so they then leave their bells and their croziers and their books and they flee. But we don't really have any archaeological evidence to back that up, so we don't know what happened there. Oh, that's so tantalizing. I have two things to say, and both are very important. Number one. I'm in quiet while you say. Number one, and you can put some sad music under this YouTube, is that until relatively recently, my ancestry DNA results said that I was 2% Scandinavian. That has been updated recently, and I am no longer 2% Scandinavian, and I was claiming Viking heritage,

and now that's been taken away. So that's number one. That's all take a bit of sad time over that. Number two, thank you for saying the British Isles in Ireland. Yes. This is actually huge on TikTok at the moment. where people are discussing what the British Isles are

and where actually let me rephrase that where British people are discussing what the British Isles are and it is such an easy if you only take one thing away from this podcast or this YouTube episode I really would well take more than one thing away but I would encourage you to take away

either the Atlantic Archipelago or the British Isles in Ireland just it helps us all an awful lot now now that I've got my personal beef out of the way let's talk a little bit about Eleanor, this idea of belief systems. Because I don't know about you, but like when I think about Vikings and I think about what they're bringing and what the kind of cultural weight that they bring with them, you're thinking about gods. You're thinking about this kind of mythical aspect. These are

almost like quasi-deity people, sometimes savages in terms of betrayal, coming across these seas. What belief systems are they bringing with them? And how is that shaping their culture? This is really, I also want to, can I kind of pin that and give you a bit of genetic hope in terms of your DNA? Oh, go on, yeah. Yeah. So, if you look somewhere like Iceland, which you think of as being sort of vikinger than Vat thou in terms of the genetics, when you actually look at the DNA of modern Icelanders, particularly the females, have a really high proportion of ancestry that comes from the British Isles and Ireland. And that's because that diaspora, that Viking world, isn't just Scandinavian genetic heritage. And so you have more like, I can't remember if it's been updated, but it used to be sort of 80% of the males, their genetic ancestors came from, say, Norway for the most part.

But certainly there's a huge element of Viking culture, particularly when you get to that North Atlantic expansion that comes from the British Isles and Ireland, tons of Irish names, personal names, among the first settlers, like Niao, Niao saga, Niel, obviously. So you may well still be a little bit of Viking. I'm just saying. It's a good news day today, guys. I'm holding on to it. I'm holding on to it. You hold on to that. Right.

There's going to be the office rolling in for the Viking drama. I auditioned for that show more times than I'd like to admit and did not get cast. So more sad music, please. Thank you. Anyway, sorry, yes. Belief systems, yes. So, yeah, exactly as you say, this is a thing that people tend to know most about for good reason because it's like Marvel comics and the Marvel films.

And basically all the good stuff, you know, it's why I was really drawn to it. I did this really weird degree called Anglo-Saxon-Norsin Celtic. And the Norse was like, oh, these gods, these are badly behaving, gender-bending, absolutely fantastic gods. And so that was like my inn into it. And so we're talking about, you know, obvious ones like Odin, Thor, Freya, Loki, sort of godish, Frey. And you see, it's really tricky to explain. is with the source material, if we can take a real nerd moment from in it, because most of the textual sources from within that Norse world come later, because when they're pagan,

the only form of writing they have, really, is runic inscriptions. And you do actually have some references to the gods in really early runic inscriptions. But it's only later, particularly the 13th century, particularly in Iceland, that you get that sort of textual framework for what we think of as that Norse god pantheon and all the stories about the gods, you know, Thor with his hammer and loki sort of transforming himself into a mare and sort of having a sexy time with a giant's horse and giving birth to sleep near the eight-legged horse. All those things predominantly come from 13th century textual sources. So to look at what's actually going on in the ground during the Viking Age proper,

we have to look at the material evidence. Yes. Right? As a material culture, I'm very excited about this. And there is really good stuff. And often this stuff does match up, or at least you can say, all right, we wouldn't understand what we're seeing, say, in terms of the art history record if we didn't have that later textual source material.

So really good example, there is a story of Thor who goes fishing with a giant and he accidentally, his bait is so huge, it's an ox's head, I think. So he throws that into the water and then he's pulling and pulling what's at the end. And it turns out it's the Midgard serpent. It's the world serpent. And so as he's pulling, it's so hard to try and get that serpent out because he's not going to do it, that his foot goes through the bottom of the boat. And what you find, you have several runic, sort of run stones, sometimes with inscriptions where you see this little figure fishing with a foot that's gone through the bottom of the boat. And sometimes there's a sort of snakey thing writhing underneath. We wouldn't know what that was, except we have, the later textual sources. So like, oh, there we go. There's a brilliant one. It's like fire stone. So there's a hole in it. You shove the bellows through so you can sort of pump up the fire without spurning yourself and everything else. But that stone seems to be Loki. It's got a face on it. But the reason people think it's Loki is because its mouth

has little, almost like stitching marks on it. And there's a story of Loki having his mouth sewn up because he loses a bet with the dwarves. And they think they're going to get his head. And he says, yeah, but you've got to wait a minute here because I did not promise my neck. And so you can't take my head without taking my neck. And they say, no problem, we'll sew your mouth out. So it looks like, so again, that material record is really interesting. And we've got to think about belief. And of course, that's a really, you know, what is belief? How can you evidence belief historically? I think in Embers, I say sort of a sorcerer of milk that's left out for an elf looks identical to a saucer of milk that's left out for cat,

you know, and that's the problem. So there are ways. And one of the ways we can look for sort of big rituals, like community rituals, that's one way of doing it. Individual beliefs, you've got to look around the edges and start to see place names, for example, are quite good. So if you see place names that are associated with a particular gods, you might think, yep, okay, that, you know, maybe this is an area where Odin or Frey or Frey or whoever, were particularly worshipped or admired. But then there are other sorts of beings that we only know about because of the later textual records in sagas, for example,

things like landvaitier or the sort of land spirits. And you might leave out offerings to them around your farmstead in the local area, but how are we going to know what belief actually looked like? So it's a tricky one. Eleanor, tell me this, because the impression that I have, and I don't know how much this is colored by Hollywood, actually, is that especially when you compare the Vikings to a group like the Anglo-Saxons, which, you know, we could do a whole podcast on hard to define the Anglo-Saxons and when, where and, you know, whatever they are. But with the Anglo-Saxons, especially with Christian Anglo-Saxons, there's a sense, I suppose, that whilst their material culture is incredibly important to them and they have beautiful weaponry and metal work and all of that, but I also think about the religious texts they're depicting that they're creating and there's so much kind of literature that's being produced, is it fair to say that the Vikings are more materialistic, not in terms of consumption, but in terms of the store that they put by their objects and the way that they record and chronicle and perpetuate their culture. Is it more material-based than other cultures?

That's a really good question. I don't know is the sort of boring short answer, but that's partly because we've got such different preservation contexts. So in the case, well, it's partly just you look at, I don't know, compare Iceland to London, you know, Recovic to London. It's not a brilliant, but you know, the scale of the built-upness is different. So the scale of what survives is going to be different. It's partly going to be due to that.

There's also the problem that say in terms of, when you say preservation, there is a really strong sense, and I mentioned 13th century Iceland is a really good example of this. There's a really strong sense of, yeah, preserving the past, preserving culture, preserving stories, history, heritage. But we have to think of the context in which that's happening, which is that there's a big civil war going on in Iceland. It's really bloody. It's really horrible.

and the Norwegian king is busy trying to take over control of Iceland. And so within that context, what you often find is that cultures are most concerned with preserving themselves when they come up against a force that means that they might not exist, or at least they might not exist in that form anymore. So there's that. There's also the fact that Christianity comes to the Norse world so much later. And that's a big part of it. So by the – it's almost like any bits of that culture and those ideas and those beliefs, whatever it is, that do survive in the region that is often Anglo-Saxon England, you know, broadly defined, because Christianity has come so much earlier, it's almost more remarkable that anything survives. We compare that, for example, to sort of the Carolingian Empire. Same thing. There was probably sort of saga storytelling culture similar there.

to the one that we see in the Norse world. But it's so early that Christianity comes in that it doesn't really survive. So in the case of Anglo-Saxon in England, you get little hints. You get poems where suddenly you realize, oh, that's Odin. That's, okay, there's some,

where you get sort of weird hints of belief systems and sort of these old elements kind of rumbling away underneath. But it's just that happens centuries before. I mean, Christianity doesn't officially reach the Nordic world. until we're getting into the 10th century, sort of 1,000 AD is the sort of classical date for the official conversion. That seems really late, actually. I don't know that. Super late. And that's in Iceland. And even then, it's an act of pragmatism. So the sagas say, and other textual sources. So basically, there's factions of Christians and pagans.

And they come to the Alfinger, the big national parliament. And they're all spoiling for a fight. And they were all arguing about sort of who's the right person to believe in and all the rest of it. And in the end, one of the chieftains says, you're just going to have to chill. This is ridiculous. He goes into a tent. He hides under an animal skin for hours. He comes out the next day. He says, right, okay, we're going to become Christian, but only because we need one law to go over all of us. Otherwise, we're not a nation. We're not a culture, whatever. And so he says, if you're pregnant, just, you know, carry on. It's fine. Just don't, you know, you want to eat horse. You'll eat horse. Just do it quietly. And it's fine. And if you want to go and sacrifice it, just, you know, we didn't. see anything. So it's this idea of pragmatism. It's very much part of that conversion narrative. But of course, then underneath, you know, you don't really know what's going on. So to go back to your original question, it's not necessarily that they are more concerned with preservation. It's just at the time, that snapshot, you know what history is like? It's like what survives

is so random, and the survival context means that it might be, it just looks more like that, because more survives at that moment when it matters. Okay, I think we have established this idea of belief system now, and that's one of the things we associate with Viking culture quite prominently. But I want to move on to something else that potentially is that, well, there's quite a lot of darkness in that too, but there's something a bit more like surface dark about this, and that's this association between Vikings and violence. Yes.

How pertinent is that? How true is that? How much of a way of life is violence for Vikings? Yeah, it's a really important question. And the thing not to do is to say, oh, well, they were all peaceful farmers. I don't know anyone's talking about. Viking, that word, vikinger, it's a raider, it's a pirate.

And as I said before, that idea of the Viking age is defined by these violent raids. And certainly there's other things like, so... You know, you can't divorce that age from the violence that characterizes elements of it. At the same time, you've got to think this was a violent age more generally. And that's the difference, isn't it? It's like the reason that we have so many sources about these raids is partly because of the sorts of people who are preserving this evidence.

So, for example, in the case of the British Isles and Ireland, is mostly monks. And they're going to be absolutely horrified by the idea of pagans. attacking Christian shrines. You know, it's literally, they're saying, you know, they kidnapped and enslaved sort of abbots. And they, they, they, that you see sometimes in the Irish Chronicles, this idea of them shaking the saints relics from those reliquaries and then taking the beautiful, shiny reliquary box itself, you know, away.

And this, of course, is absolutely shocking. You know, and what happens on Lindisfarne is awful. And so it's not that that is not an awful set of things that's happening. It's just that if you take away elements of the difference, for example, the pagan Christian element, or just the fact that they are conducting these raids in ways that aren't necessarily familiar to other cultural groups. So this idea of they come in from the coast, they come in on rivers. You know, they're doing this all across continental Europe as well. They're doing it down to the Byzantine Empire.

it's shocking because it's unexpected and the people who are then having to defend themselves are having to find new ways often of doing that because they've not come across this before so the mobility of that violence I think is something that is seen as unusual but the fact that it is violence full stop I think we have to be very careful of characterising that

as something specific to the North diaspora that's so interesting that actually it's just their methods that are so shocking an unorthodox to the contemporaries at the time rather than the violence itself necessarily. That's really interesting. In terms of violence in what we would probably characterize as violence, in terms of that belief system

and in terms of their own society when they're not attacking other people and integrating with other cultures, thinking about sacrifice and ritual, where does that come in? Because we have a very, again, a very Hollywood-ized version of the, I can think of the Blood Eagle. You know, there's a lot of things like that

that have come down to us that are kind of Viking tropes of just how terrible and terrifying these people were. How accurate is that? How big a part did that play on their culture? Yeah. No, I think that's a really important thing to hone in on because, again, what sort of source material have we got? Okay. So we've got written accounts. We've got visual depictions and we've got material evidence from archaeology. Okay. And all of those things coming together, tell us that something is going on. It's not, again, it's not a completely Hollywood version. So for one, if we look at the archaeological evidence, we see some evidence of people who, we can't say for certain, but there is a very good chance from the context that they are

enslaved people who have been sacrificed to join their master or mistress in the next world. You absolutely see. There's a, I don't know, there's all sorts of examples. There's one on the aisle of man where there's a man buried with great ceremony at the bottom of this mound. The mound is mostly filled in. And then a woman was found on top and it looks like it's really horrible. It's like it looks like she might have been sort of, was it executed from behind, killed from behind and there's part of her skull that's missing. And she's been shoved in there and the mound has been covered over. There's quite a few examples like that. Not crazy numbers, but enough that you can say, all right, this is not a one-off.

This is a pattern. Yeah, exactly. This clearly happened at times. This is a cultural phenomenon rather than just a weird crime. Exactly. No, and occasionally you can't really tell. It's like, is this a crime? But yeah, this is something that sometimes happens.

We then have some textual sources that do back this up. There's a very famous one by an Arabic diplomat called Ibn Afadlan. And he is traveling from Baghdad with this diplomatic corps. They're going up the voice. vulgar, and they're going to see if they can convert the king of the Bulgavulgas, the Volga Bulgars. Yeah. Those, yeah, the vulgar Bulga. Yeah, that way around feels correct, right? Anyway, him to Islam, right? On the way, they meet sort of in one of the waterways on the shores, a group of the people that are sometimes called Rus, and the Rus are the people coming over, particularly from Sweden,

who are trading and settling and sort of taking control of the river-sist. Now, it's important to say that they are not only going to be of sort of genetically speak, going back to your disappointing genetic results, but they're not just Scandinavian in that sense because they are very much mixing with the local Slavic populations as they sort of gain a foothold in this part of the world. And yet they are culturally, the ruse you would say they definitely have Scandinavian cultural features. The reason this is important is because, as Ibn Afadlan, then describes a funeral of one of their chieftains. And this is actually where a lot of the Hollywood ideas of, you know, your Viking funeral

up on Lindisfarne, you're drawing on Ibn Fadlan for this, because what he says is they sacrifice a huge number of sort of animals to join him in the next world. And, you know, but the really horrible bit is this description of the sacrifice of a young woman, an enslaved woman. And the way it's presented is, you've got to remember. that it's coming through different layers of interpretation. He isn't speaking the same language as them. He's got an interpreter there, or at least there is some sort of interpretive communication going on. He says, they ask for a volunteer to join the master in the next world. It goes into all sorts

they lift her above this door frame and she says, I can see my master waiting for me in the next world. There's this really horrible figure called the Angel of Death, this old woman who basically conducts the sacrifice there's sort of what we would say you know it's not how he puts it but essentially mass rape you know she she's then taken around to all the prominent men who have sex with her in the tents and they say sort of tell your master I did this for him it's hot it's really I've read it so many times I've sort of lectured on it at university and I can't it's a horrible horrible text and then finally she's strangled and the angel of death stabs her and then they put her on the ship and they burn the ship.

And so this is the most dramatic, extreme, but it's absolutely horrible. I think you need to rethink your few more than others. Yeah. I think some parts of that will not be included. No, thank you. Just everyone can have a nice coffee in the nice place and in this fight. Yeah. Spread of lashes.

Yes. Just do that. There you go. Something a little bit more serene, maybe. Yeah, so it's the only text you have like that. And so there's lots of things we have to interrogate there. fact is, something is clearly going on. And then there are other bits where it's not quite so clear cut. So there's a very, very famous ship burial. I have to be really careful how I say

that. Ship burial. Yeah. Ship burial. Yeah. The Osterberg ship burial, which is from eight, I think it's eight three, four. So early ninth century in Norway. We will believe you if you tell us. Right. My brain's going, is it eight, two, four is one of the, it's got four. I can tell you the exact time of year this funeral takes place because they have crab apples in it. So we know it's sort of like autumn, which I rather love. That's the kind of archaeology I love when you can literally pinpoint something, and it just takes you to that moment. That's gorgeous.

Yes, and this is exactly one of those burials because it's this beautiful ship, and it's the one that's known very famously for it's got these wagons with cats all over them and sort of sledges, and it's just glorious. And so you think, oh yeah, classic Viking Age ship burial. Except what it contains is two women. And one of them is very elderly. She's like late 70s, 80s, whatever. She's clearly got some disabilities.

The other one, possibly in her 50s, genetically it is possible that she has connections back to the Black Sea in her ancestry, but that it was found in one attempt to genetically profile her and then it couldn't be repeated. So we can't say for sure. But the thing is with, it seems that they are magical practitioners. And, you know, we can talk about magic. I'm sure later because it is... Oh, we will. Oh, yes. It's there. But for now, all I'd say is that the younger of the two women, very little of her body survives.

You can tell that maybe two weeks or so before her death, she had a broken, what's that one, the collarbone. But it started to heal, so that's not responsible for her death. But the question is whether she was also a magical practitioner of equal status or whether possibly she was sacrificed to join the other woman. So there are examples where it's not quite so clear cut. Can I remember your original question? No, I can not. But hopefully I've got there. You've answered it. You're talking about a sacrifice.

That is so fascinating, though, that in burials like that, you can't necessarily read the relationship between the individuals. Yeah, not always. Yeah, not always. And that's so fascinating because that must be maybe not unique to Viking culture, but certainly there are things within Viking culture that make that very ambiguous and hard to read in a way that maybe they're not, certainly not in Christian, burial. Yeah, exactly. Although, I mean, you do, some of, my goodness, some of the Christian burials you get,

particularly from England in the same time, they call deviant burials, which I think is like the best thing ever. But again, it's often linked to this fear of, are you going to come back? Do I want you to haunt me? Probably not. It's fascinating because you have these whole stories. You have these, like the drama surrounding each one, not only of the burials themselves, but the whole backstory to these people's lives.

You know, this isn't just. It's not just the moment. of their death. No, exactly, exactly. And you have to think about, okay, the people who then are responsible for the rituals around sort of what happens after their death as well. It's this sort of embodied, literally embodied storytelling, which I just, I almost find the bits of that where there are the grey areas, as you say, the most fascinating. Because it's like, we don't know. And what's even more amazing is with changes in or sort of development, scientifically speaking, the further away we get from this period, in a way, the more,

we know, like the genetic stuff that's coming up now, where people are connecting, you know, the bodies of people who are found in completely different countries and be like, oh, they're relatives, they're, what? So there's all these, this, this churning mass of stories underneath. It's so interesting to say that it's storytelling, but it's storytelling for the people who are living in that moment, dying in that moment. It's not like a Roman burial where you have a big tomb where it says a nice Latin inscription that still survives. Here is buried. John Smith, insert Roman name here, you know, who was an emperor or, you know, senator or whatever, and he died on this day of this thing and this was his wife

and this what he did, this what he thought and everything, and his whole life story. This is an embodied way of storytelling that's for that moment. It's not necessarily for posterity beyond the bounds of that culture. Yeah, exactly. Those ones very much not. You do get a version of that, but it's often weirdly sort of disconnected from the bodies.

So, but you get those sort of public runic inscriptions, the run stones that stand by bridges and roads where it is very much saying X erected this in memory of Y. There was a really lovely one I was in Norway last week and the Historical Museum in Oslo. There's an incredible way, it's quite late, and it's so tall. And it's beautiful pictures all over it, but also runes. And the runes tell us it was a mother who erected it to her daughter.

And she calls the daughter the handiest maid in the region, which is just, yeah, so you get all sorts of. Again, it's a different, maybe you'd say that's a different sort of life storytelling. But of course, well, we talked about enslaved people. And so for the most part, those people you're not going to find in those sorts of records. There is one exception. And he's someone called Toki. And we know about him because he was freed.

And he then puts up a runic memorial stone to the man who freed him and gave him gold. And so we know that he was a smith, which again would have been someone of sort of elevated status in society. And so again, you have different sorts of stories just coming in from the edges. but on this idea of magic. And let's get into it a little bit deeper because it seems to me that actually a lot of what we've spoken about

already is moving around the fringes of magic and magical belief and that's there anyway. But how present is this? How present is this for the people we understand as the Vikings themselves? Or is this something that we've layered on top of them later to give us this, you know, the Marvel world of the Vikings? Yeah.

And I think that layering is a really lovely way of putting it because it's a bit like we saw with the burials and the sacral. You know, there's always layering. And it's just sort of layers of paint, isn't it? We're kind of scraping back, seeing what there is. In the case of magic, there is a particular form of magic that we know, again, later textual sources, particularly from the sagas, again, sort of 13th century Iceland.

We have them from 13th century Iceland texts, poetry and prose about, the gods. There's a form of magic called Sather, which we really have to think about, because Sather is a very traditionally female form of magic, but it's also practiced by Odin. And the idea, there's this wonderful little figurine that was found only maybe just over 10 years ago in Laira, in this sort of big, if I don't know as Beowulf, it's this big series of halls for hundreds of years, a central place, you might say, in Denmark, that. is associated with the events of the old English poem Beowulf, right? But they found there this wonderful little silver figure.

It's really tiny. And it's a human figure wearing what appears to be a dress with beads. And so you think, okay, female. But then it has two birds on its shoulder. And you think, are those Odin's ravens? And then it has two sort of wolfish-looking things behind. And you think, hmm, Odin's wolves, because he's meant to have two wolves as well. And the defining feature of it, characteristic of it, is that it's had one of its eyes sort of scored through.

And of course, the one-eyed god, Odin. And so that is a suggestion that this form of kind of, you might even say like gender bending, if we're kind of going to be anachronistic, but magic where you're operating in the fringes of social norms and acceptability, that is where this form of magic takes place, which makes me love it. It's like, yes, we wouldn't love that. But then, if you look at the archaeological material, there are instances, and we mentioned the Orsberg ship with these two women buried in it, they very clearly appear to be magical practitioners.

You have, well, for a start, you have the wagons and covered with cats' heads, and you think, well, who's that associated with Freya, the goddess, and who was the deity who was most associated with Saither as a magical practitioner? Well, again, it's Freya, and she's said to have taught magic to Odin. But then you have as well, you have a tapestry from the Osberg ship burial where it looks really nice. There's some trees. You think, how delightful. You look more closely, there are figures hanging from the trees.

This is like human, of course. It's Viking, come on. And every time you're trying to spell the myths and you're like, ah, yeah, but there is that thing. Yeah. So, and they've also got things. They don't help themselves. No, really not. But that's the reason Hollywood loves them, I suppose.

Yeah, there's like, there's a drama there. You can't deny, right? They also have sort of hallucinogenic seeds. I think they have hen bane seeds in that one. But then you have other... On the tapestry? No, just in the grave. And you have other suggestions.

You're like, okay, something's going on. They used to think it was royalty that they were... And they might have been. But when you actually look at what's buried with them, it's like, oh, something witchy this way. Something, yeah, something I'd say more interesting. I find it's so interesting thinking, again, about the Anglo-Saxons and not to make it this Anglo-centric thing.

But I think, you know, thinking about Christianity in that period, I suppose it does have those elements of like heightened sensory awareness in church with sort of incense and that kind of thing. You know, there is some of that going on. It's not that magic is absent in that culture by any means. But Viking magic seems to me to be, as you say, so much more fluid in terms of who's practicing it and what people's roles are, how they transform their bodies and present their bodies in different ways

and their gender and their identities completely shift in that that is part of the magic actually, being that fluid. And of course, we see that in the stories of the gods as well. They're kind of fluid and shape-shifting and all of that stuff. And it just, it seems both so intangible and so therefore completely fascinating because it's so other from the Christianity that we have inherited in this history and this country. And that's, of course, not the whole story. There's a great rich history of all kinds of magic in these islands. But I just think there's something there about the Vikings and their, you know, their fluidity.

it's just, it just feels so different from everything else. And so there's endless possibility and because the archaeological record only gives you a tiny snapshot or a hint of something that we will never be able to recover. But you say, you know, things like having the hallucinogenic seeds and things like that, you get a sense of what magical experience and ritual might be like. Yeah, exactly. And again, we've got to think, because Christianity comes so much earlier to say England in particular, there's always that question of what was going on earlier because if we take sort of the Scandinavian record

back to that similar period, sort of fifth, sixth century, again, there's not very much that survives. And so that's part of it that there's this time lag that allows for more evidence, essentially, to make its way back down to the present day. There's also this really funny thing with Viking cultural Norse culture that it's often at odds with itself.

And so exactly as you say, this sort of fluidity that we see within that, what we know about magical practice and ideas and beliefs. On the other hand, you have this idea of Neith, which is basically if you are performing the passive homosexual role in the case of men, and in the case of women, if you are sort of sleeping together or you are dressing up in sort of male clothes or character, weapons, it's this idea that you are something that they call Rager or Argar, which basically means, well, unmanly is often translated to, but unwomanly. And in fact, you've got this

thing where if someone composes a scurrilous verse about you about the fact that you are Rager or Argar, then you're allowed to kill them. You know, it's like it's a death insult, basically. The sagas, again, written down later, lots of, again, this paint idea, lots of historical layers intermingling with storytelling layers that we might not think of as historical fact. But certainly you see this idea of ungender seemly behaviour playing out in the sagas. You know, a woman, for example, is accused of, she's called Bridges Eidhar, like. So well. Yeah.

And so. Love that for her. Yeah. I know. Well, I love this figure because there's a very famous saga character called Goudrin. And she wants to marry Eidr's husband. And so she needs them to devour. And so she just puts this rumor around that Ovid is called Bridges Ovid because she goes

around in trousers carrying weapons, right? And so they divorce and Guthron marries this man. And Britches Oezer says, right, you're going to call me that. I will show you. So she puts on Bridges and she gets a weapon and she goes. And she stabs her former husband across the nipples, which is, again, a kind of... Very specific. They have a thing about nipples. Good aim as well. Yeah, yes. So actually, Goodwin's first husband, she's allowed to divorce because, because if your husband wears a top that is too low and he shows his nipples, that's Rager.

I mean, in my opinion, that is grounds for divorce, so fair enough. Yeah, I'm just thinking of these horrible string vest. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it wouldn't it for me. She got the ick. Well, she had made the top for him. That was the problem. She's like, I mean, he's not nice, but still it's like, wow, you really engineered them.

Yeah. So it's that sense of these prescribed gender roles being really important. And yet, then exactly as you say, we've got the gods and we've got Loki, who's busy sort of transforming from male to female and giving birth as a mother. And there are female warriors, right, as well. Well, this is a really interesting one. People get very, should we say, exercised about this. And I think that the most honest answer is we don't know what was going on and let's be okay with that space, right? So there are, there are a couple, certainly in the textual records and particularly in the mythological and legendary sources, we have these idea of shield maidens.

and, you know, obviously, Valkyries. And I am very into that. I love me a shield maiden, right? Lagertha, let's... Absolutely. You're going to say, but. Well, no. And.

And. I don't want to hear the but all the end. I'm good with this. But it might not be one. There might, this is the thing, right? So what you have is a couple of examples, and there's two I can think of, and there might be more, but where you have bodies that have been genetically,

like they're female, they have been buried with, weapons. Doesn't mean they used them in life though, yeah. And this is the problem. This is the problem. And what you, in... Is that all we have? Well, source lies? Yes and no. In terms of sort of the human population, yes. So there's a really famous one from Birka. And they found it back in the, I think the 19th century, they assumed it was met. Birka is an island in Sweden. And it's very international. It's very high status in lots of ways. And they found this figure that they said, oh, that is a male warrior because it's a skeleton buried with a lot of armour weapons.

Classic 19th century archaeologists. Right, there we go. Yeah, it's like in the same way. If it's beads, it's a woman and then you find Odin, possibly Odin, this little silver figurine, right? And if people are buried together and they're the same gender, they're just good friends. They're just good friends. Mind you, they probably were in this. Well, yeah.

Well, if you're going to be. Yeah. Although, I can give you one example. I say that as a historian of gender and sexuality. I'm all on the, you know. No, there's actually, there's a couple of interesting things there, but again, they're not being very nice. But I'll come to that. We'll finish with the Warriors first.

Because exactly today, the case of the female warrior, female warrior in Birka, she may have been. And it's really important. Now, there was an example I saw of this that I got really annoyed by recently. I'm trying to say it in a way that doesn't make it clear where I read. Oh, my God, please, make it really clear. Name names. Is it in an academic journal?

Nobody ever heard. No, no, it was in a nice book. But it was basically saying there's no such, I've got to be so. Actually, it's easy to be careful because I can't remember the details. Yeah, exactly. But it was like women cannot have been resistance fighters when the Romans were coming into Britain, yeah, because they were women. And so any discussions of Budaqa or anything, that's just the Romans making that up because they couldn't have been. Do you know what I mean? So it's that circular argument. And so it's really important not to do that with, say, the idea of female warriors. Say the grave in Birka. It's like she's genetically female. We don't know how she presented. And I don't mean that anachronistically. I mean, you know, that there are other things we can't. tell just from... Absolutely. Yeah. But she's also quite slight and often what you find with the skeletons of seasoned warriors, and there's plenty of examples of these from the Viking Age,

you will find, for example, one of their arms is more built up, the bone, because they've been using weapons. Well, they get like the ridges, don't they on the boat? Exactly. Or you'll find if they've had injuries that have healed during life, you'll see evidence of that, you know. So, and there is, to my knowledge, none of that in the beer, to my knowledge. If you get messages, don't tell me. Just deal with those messages. You'll never hear from us again. No, thank you very. This is the end of this.

But so, you know, so it's like there might have been other reasons socially why a woman might have been buried with weapons, you know, to do, like really, and you can come up with so many possibilities if she's the only surviving child of a prominent elite warrior on Birka. It's like, okay, that's my legacy. That's my heritage in that great. You know, we just don't know. But it's not, I think it's really important not to be entrenched on one side or the other. You know, and it also removes that beautiful area of doubt and uncertainty that might be filled later on. You know, you don't know. And the nuance of Viking culture, right?

That we want this Hollywood version. We want these strong, you know, we often talk about the sort of bossification of women in the past. And we want that. We want these to be like glamorous, sexy, strong women, like doing it for themselves in the battlefield. You kill those anglo-s, like, some monk's girl, you know, and it's, that's not necessarily the reality or the nuance or, you know, there are plenty of ways, clearly, for women to. to be powerful in this culture. Exactly. And that's something that actually in the book,

I really struggle with because I was like, I want to meet these women on their own terms, not just as sort of this idea, exactly as you say, that women can only be exciting historically if they are aping, sexy male roles. You know, it's like, oh, for goodness sake, you know. So it's, yeah.

Remember this. Remember what Eleanor is saying. Yes. Say it again, actually. Women are interesting for more things than just pretending to be sexy warrior men. This is, you know, having said that, you do have some evidence for this idea of, culturally speaking, the shield maiden.

You know, there's a really lovely, I can't remember where it's from, off the top of my head, but there's a really lovely figure, sort of little metal figure that they found. Off the top of my head, I can't remember what it was, but... We want a specific field location, please? No, I don't. I'm not awake for being in the one of what's the field. What are these quarters? But she's whole, it's a woman, which appears very strongly for a woman with sort of hairstyle that you would associate.

and she's got a sword and a shield, you know? But again, that to me, again, you've got to preserve that grey space for what is this, you know, who is she? And also you've got to remember that the Vikings or sort of people living in the Viking Age, they liked a good story too. They like their shield maidens. They like their valkyries. It doesn't necessarily mean that reflects social roles on the ground. You know, there's still really bloody good stories, you know. So it's just that complexity surrounding them. The Vikings would love Hollywood is what you say. Yes. And especially the Hollywood version of themselves, they'd be like, yes, yes to this. Right. So I think that that recent film, is it Robert Eggers, you know, the Northmen. Oh, the Northmen,

yes. Oh my God. Vikings would be like, yes, thank you. I don't recognize any of this, but there's a light of it. No, there is a really good bit in that. And this is how you can tell, they have really good consultants on, you know, working on this. Love a Robert Eggers film. I say this all the time on this podcast. It doesn't have, actually, right? So with this one, my favourite series. is when the sort of hero, anti-hero, is fighting with the drogue of the undead, the zombie. In the burial mouth. One of the best cinematic scenes of all time.

And I was watching that. And I said, right, okay, if he cuts off that zombie's head and sticks it up its bottom, we will know that they have their source material right. And he does that. I love that that's the mark. Because that's what happens in the sagas. You want to kill a zombie? That's how you do it.

And I think the idea actually comes back to this idea of Neath. It's you want to embarrass a zombie. badly that it's not going to come back and haunt you stick its nose up its bottom it's too mortified it's like oh that has been done no this so i think and there is the suggestion that actually to kind of bring things weirdly back to that that it is a neath act to do that you are subverting you're yeah you're making this i can't believe i mean this sentence this coming in my mind you are you are forcing the zombie to penetrate itself and so therefore it's like that you know so again but I do think, therefore, that those sorts of films, yeah, they'd be like, this is good.

I just want to point out before we go that the Vikings really need to familiarize themselves as the concept of a power bottom because this idea of passiveness and all the rest of it is, but look, again, a historian of gender and sexuality, it's absolutely different. Now, listen, I want to ask you one thing, Eleanor, before you go, and that is, you've talked about, and this is when my imagination starts to spark. You've talked about being in Norway, you've talked about Iceland, which is just one of the most magical landscapes you can find yourself in. If you had to anywhere in the world, say to any of our listeners or to Maddie and I, you need to go to this one place that will get you as close to Viking culture

as possible. That's so hard. Well, listen, we are known for our probing questions. We will not let you go until you've answered. Where would that be in mind? Oh, no. Okay, well, so I'm going to give you my thought process here, right? So, I might say, go to the west coast of Greenland because there, there has been And the farmsteads are still there. There's like a whole church in one case still standing. Oh, it's fabulous. But you can't, it's so hard to get there

because there's no road system outside the sort of settlements. And so when I was there, there was one year, I was like, I was on the back of an Icelandic horse and his name translates as. That's one does. I know. We really picked the wrong century to study. No, I tell you, you can end up with boils in unexpected places

from being on the back of an Icelandic horse for weeks on end. Right? It's like, yeah, my elbow. Yeah, he's what I knew. That's what I know what I was going to say. But his name translated as he whose eyes pop out of his head when he sees a beautiful woman walking past. Because he had these huge blue eyes. He's like, you're so cute. It's not catchy, though. No, I think it's shorter in Greenland Lake. Sure. Yeah. But there, because all this stuff, because it hasn't been built on, it still survives.

What? No, like 12th century? Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's incredible. And the next year, because there's two settlements, I had to team up with some cariboo hunters. we were going up and down the fjords again trying to find and you see you see sort of like this sprig of green and then you're like oh that's a midden heap from a norse greenlandic farm because all the organic material is making it there's one guy who was growing vegetables on a norse midden heap and selling them to all the posh restaurants in luke because that's where you get all the good organic material yeah so i would say that would be that's a really amazing place to go to

feel like you are almost going back in time in that sort of the landscape you are what you are looking at is what they would have seen. That's amazing. But I don't know. I love Norway. I love sort of Scandinavia. I love I can't. I can't. You've already done it. It's that coasting Greenland. That's what it is. And who is your favorite child? So listen, that is the end of this episode. I'm off to book my tickets to Greenland. Thank you for listening to and watching this episode of After Dark, either wherever you get your

podcast or on YouTube. If you've enjoyed this, please leave as a five-star review. Wherever you get your podcast or if we're on YouTube, do one of those thumbs-up thing that all the young people are doing. We will see you again next time for more other historical darkness and until then, sleep tight.