Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - What Did The Vikings Really Look Like?

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

Were the Vikings the original trendsetters?Even when they were raiding the poor monks in Lindsfarne in 793, they were passing on hairstyles that annoyed some of the local elders.Why did they file their teeth? How often did they bathe? And what influence did their gods have on all of this?Joining Kate today to explore the beauty standards of the Vikings is Dr. Eleanor Barraclough, author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. How the hell are you doing? Well, I'm thrilled to hear that. And I'm so glad that you've come back for more. But before it can give you any more,

I have to tell you that this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Does that sound fair? Does that sound okay? Do you want to proceed? Well, all right, fair do's. I did warn you.

I get the horned helmets, spoiler alert. They are a myth made up by the Victorians. Hair was actually far more important to the Vikings than horned helmets. Yes, we can all picture the slow motion, rugged Viking macho type, standing astride a craggy rock with the sun catching his bulging biceps

and the wind in his hair. Is that just me? But their hair is something that they took a lot of pride in. The king of Norway himself, was called Harold Fairhair, no less. And before that, we had Harold Tangle Hair because he refused to run a comb through his barnet until the whole country was under his command.

That is a weird request. But it does show you just how seriously the Vikings took their appearance. And I don't know about you. I want to know more about their beauty regimes. What do you look for in a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my voice needs. by just turning enough and pushing the fun. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful, Dan. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Call me crazy, but the Vikings would have made

fantastic beauty influences. They've already got fabulous hair, and their personal hygiene was apparently pretty good as well. I mean, you know, when they weren't spending months at sea and lopping the heads off monks, But they did influence the world in terms of style. I mean, colour me intrigued. Today I'm joined by Dr. Eleanor Baraklough, author of Embers of the Hands,

Hidden History of the Viking Age, and she's going to tell us more about the Viking beauty secrets. And if you're curious to know more about the Viking way of life, why not explore our previous episode on Viking sexuality from March this year? And without further ado, combs and axes at the red. Any betwixters, let's do this. Hello and welcome to betwixta sheets. It's only Eleanor Baraklough.

How are you doing? I am so well. I'm sitting in a potting shed and... I've been admiring the background. You've got little dolls in the background. I've been trying to work out. Are they Viking? They are Viking dolls.

Look, look, look, right, not only that, if anyone is a fan of Vikings, the TV series, the main musician on there is Inisselvic from the band Warderuna. These are signed by Aina himself. She's holding them up. Is that a knitted Viking? No, what is that? Yeah, their little knitted Viking.

That's so cute. They're so soft. They're not mine. They belong to my two small children, but I nick them whenever possible because, quite honestly, these are wasted on children. These are too good. They are super, super cute little Viking knitted dolls with like a mane of hair. Wild hair, punk hair.

Yeah, that's what I like about them best. Well, I like about them is they do. of open up the conversation that we're going to have quite nicely, which was Viking beauty standards and what they look like, because looking at these little dolls, you'd be forgiven for thinking, like, oh, they're really cute, the Vikings. They've just come over for a cuddle. And indeed, as we will talk about, some of them did, special cuddle. Special cuddle. Special cuddle. Yeah. But yeah, and also what I like about these is that you wouldn't be able to say, oh, yeah, they're definitely male, they're definitely female. No. There's a lot. Yeah, like that very much.

They are androgynous little Viking dolls. They are, aren't they? They are badass but cute. They are very cute and they're very beautiful. And cute and beautiful are words that we associate with the Vikings. They don't tend to have that reputation, do they? Yeah, let's not kid us off. You know, when we're thinking about the Viking Age, we're thinking raids.

And that is how it starts. So let's not pretend otherwise. You know, we're not going to suddenly rehabilitate the Vikings in one episode, right? Although that even in itself, if we're talking about that kind of standard 793 raid on Lindisfar on that monastery off the coast of Northumberland, what's really interesting there is that people are increasingly wondering if one of the kind of impetus is one of the reasons for those raids was that basically the raiders were looking for someone to hook up with when they got back to Norway. Yeah, yeah. So you'll find there's like a good chunky number of. of essentially what seemed to be Pilford's Christian things like reliquaries. You know, they used to keep bits of saints in them. But they're in female graves, Norwegian female graves.

And the idea is that basically Raiders bring them home and they're like, all right. As a little gift, I'll bring you something back nice. Exactly. It's both awful and strangely romantic, depending on what side of the North Sea you're talking about, right? That has straddled two very different places. That has, hasn't it? It's kind of, oh, Sven always brings me something back from his raiding activities, but not so good for the monks. No, really not.

No, exactly. So, yeah, and I suppose they'd be like, well, it's okay for you. So they just, like, there's animal descriptions, basically they're just, the raiders tip out, the reliquary, the things inside. They're like, that's a nice piece of shiny metal. Thank you very much. I'll have that. Wow. And the monks, they're like, wow.

Ouch. When you hear things like, and you read about the raiding of the Lunders fan, it's like, it's obviously. It's like apocalyptic stuff. It was terrible. It's very easy to forget the more human aspects of it, which would have just been people going, oh, that's quite nice. And nicking stuff, taking stuff back that they thought was pretty. Exactly. That's what I really like. That's the bit I'm interested in. That's what I'm doing in this book. You know, it's the little bits and pieces of ordinary humans because it doesn't mean that people of the past were like us. That's this kind of misconception. It's like, oh, we're all just humans. And we are like biologically and, you know, physically. humans a thousand years ago, very similar in many ways to humans now. But you've got to think of everything around it. You've got to think how much more violent the society was generally, how much more just everyday death, everyday sickness and suffering. It is different.

It's the same, but it's not the same. You'd love to sit down with the Vikings, wouldn't you? And just say, all right, lads, the raiding thing. How are you justifying this to yourselves? Like, what do they tell themselves that makes it okay to just go in a boat and then attack monks who couldn't possibly fight back and nick all their stuff. No, which is why they're so attractive really. It's like, well, you've not got any weapons.

This makes it easy for us. I mean, I suppose one thing is just not to kind of, again, be flippant about it, but everyone is doing a version of it. This isn't just Nordic society. Yeah, everyone is violent. You look at, I don't know, even Charlemagne attacking the Saxons. It's like thousands of Saxon killed. It's quite normal.

and there's many, many aspects of what's going on within a sort of Norse context that are absolutely going on elsewhere. But again, there is something different as well about what's happening in the Viking Age. And I think that's the problem because we call it the Viking Age. And so you automatically think, you know, exactly as you say, like, all right, lads, what you're doing in your boats going off and raiding. But the Viking Age is something that's full of humans, all sorts of different humans, doing all sorts of different things, and very much not just males and not just young males

and the males who are sort of wealthy enough to be able to get a place on one of these raiding boats. You know, we have to remember how broad this world is, both sort of socially but also chronologically and geographically. And that sort of opens it up and it makes it much more interesting in a way than just the raids. Can we talk about Viking hair? Yes. There's a lot of things that visually will signify to you Viking. Even if you know, bugger all about Viking culture, if you're not a Viking historian, one of them is the horned helmet. and we can get to that, which we all know, is, you know, that that's not true.

Not a thing, yeah. But hair is another one, the kind of the image of the hairy Viking is really entrenched. Yeah, exactly. And that's where it comes back to these little dolls again, because you see. So, I mean, this is very stereotypical that they're blonde for a start. Obviously, not everyone in the Viking ages is blonde. Not everyone is white. These little knitted ones are.

But I love the hair. So what you will find in most Norse graves that have burial goods is a comb that's, like, standard. And that's partly to do with aesthetics because hair mattered. And it's partly because, you know, everyone had lice. So it's also a case of hygiene. Yeah, which you've got to, I mean, many, many people had sort of tummy worms and, you know, just everyday life. Most people ended up with osteo-otheritis if they were lucky enough to live long enough to get it. Do you know?

So it's like, it's hard. So those early raids, that's quite a good place to start because what are the dates of those raids, just in case anyone's wondering? Right. So the classic first raid, 793 CE, it doesn't mean that is definitely when it started. You know, they didn't wake up one morning and go, oh, it's 793, right, here we are in the Viking Age. Absolutely not. If again, we're looking at the other end of it from a very specifically anglo-centric perspective, 1066 is sometimes used as a date because that's when Harold Hardrado, who's king of Norway, comes over and, you know, he's killed by Harold Godwinson, Battle of Stanford Bridge, before Harold Godwinson is then killed. by William, you know, and then the Normans arrive. So nice, easy dates, but of course that's not how cultures work. That's not actually how history works. And, you know, if we're talking, for example, about just the British Isles, if we're talking about raids and attempts to sort of keep territory

in Scotland, we've got to come all the way up to the middle of the 13th century, Battle of Lags, 1263, for example. Yeah. If we're talking about, you know, the Northern Isles, Shetland, Orkney, they belong to the Norwegian crown. until 1472 when they pass over to the Scottish crown because basically the Norwegian king's bankrupt and he needs to pay a dowry for his daughter. But then there's a form of old Norse called Norn that's still spoken in those islands until maybe 1800.

You know, we go over the sea to Greenland. There's Norse settlements there until the 15th century. You know, so we've got to be really careful about those cut and dry dates, but they're also useful. You know, we don't have to throw them out. we just have to use them carefully. What's really interesting, going back to Hare, that famous raid, Linda's Farn, 793, that's when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle talks about dragons over the sky,

through the sky and sheets of lightning and blah, blah, blah. And he's Anglo-Saxon, he's called Alcuin, but he's living at the court of Charlemagne, so on the continent. And he sends some letters up to people that he knows in this part of North East England that's been affected by raids. And there's one letter he writes to the King of North Carolina. And it's basically victim blaming, you know, in a kind of slightly flippant sense, but it is. And he says, consider the dress, consider the way you wear your hair, look at how you trim your beard and your

hair, you want to be like the pagans and aren't you menaced by terror of those whose fashion you wish to follow, right? So that does several things. For start, that kind of dispels the idea that these raids come out of nowhere, that no one's heard of the Norse, no one's heard of the Norse, no one's so it's just not true. There's clearly cultural contact because otherwise they're not going to be talking like that. But also, it's this idea that then develops, and let's not kid ourselves, it's there today as well, right? Scandy equals she. It's true. There is a Scandinavian look and there's a Scandinavian look and there's a Scandinavian. There is an aesthetic. Yeah. And they are very beautiful people. You ever been like when you go to Scandinavian conditions

and you sort of walk around and you're like, I am a troll. Yeah, I feel like a little, yeah, troll hobbit. I'm just like, oh, I was feeling quite good about myself. But I might imitate Scandinavian culture because I've seen like crime noir dramas that I like or things in IKEA. Why the fuck would people be imitated? They've been raiding them. That's mad.

Because they're snappy dresses and they've got good hair. But they do look good. I mean, what's funny as well is when you have occasional descriptions of how the Anglo-Saxons look, sometimes from sort of within the Anglo-Site. They're like, yeah, they don't come across so well. But there's this Alphrich of Ansham, and he's writing to someone he dresses as Brother Edward. But we don't know if this is a monastic brother or an actual brother or whatever.

We don't have Edward's letter, but he's written to Alphrich, essentially saying, well, what do you think of? My latest haircut? And Alphrich writes back, and he is not impressed. He says, you do wrong in abandoning your English customs, that your ancestors, you know, gave to you and loving the customs of the heathen people who didn't give life to you.

And then he says, and basically you insult everyone because you dress in Danish fashion, and this is the really interesting bit, with bared neck and blinded eyes. And so it's this idea. It's a haircut we still see, right? So basically you've got quite a closely shaved head at the back.

And then you've got quite a shaggy long fringe at the front. Wow. And you see it, right? Bayo tapestry, that's how the norm is. have their hair because of course Norman equals Northman and they're only a couple of generations removed from their Nordic ancestors who come over, yeah, sort of started the 10th century. And you see that on the Bay of Tapestry. I just can't quite get my head around the fact that they would be imitating the fashions

of people they know are raising them. And it can't be that they came over, they clobbered the monks, everyone was going, it's awful, it's so bad, but like did you see his hair? That was amazing hair. When Alphrich is telling Edward off, we're talking around 1,000. So that's a completely different context. That's two centuries since those initial raids. There must have been, as you said, cultural contact before and after. And then there's settlement. Yeah. So from kind of the middle of the ninth century, you get the great heathen army coming in.

They start to sort of essentially take over some of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. And then they start to settle. They start to plow the land. Githrom, one of the leaders, he's converted to Christianity after basically reaches this stalemate agreement with King Alfred of. Wessex, Alfred the Great. And he takes an Anglo-Saxon name, he's Christian, he becomes king of East Anglia. And that's sort of that period where we start to see what we think of as the Dane law, you know, that part of East and North England that's sort of very much influenced and controlled by Nordic elements. So by the time you get up to around the year 1000, yeah, that cultural situation has changed. There's still definitely tensions, you know, 1002, that's the year of of what's known as the St. Bright's Day Massacre, where the English king, Ethelred,

basically orders the extermination of all the Danish people living there. And he said, yeah, it's horrible. He says, they were going to attack me. They had designs on my life and the lives of my, my sort of counsellors. And so I ordered the most, a most just extermination of, you know, all the Danes. It's horrible. He talks about them springing up on this island like cockles amongst the, wheat and it's all very negative. And part of the reason we know about this is because he's basically

getting a church in Oxford rebuilt. And this church is rebuilt because, according to this charter, the local Scandinavians living in Oxford fled to it, locked themselves in. And so the locals who were not Scandinavian burned it down. It's really horrible. But what's quite interesting, coming back to this idea of fashion and looks, Once again, so there's a chronicler centuries afterwards, like he's writing around 12, 20 or something called John of Wallingford. And he's describing the St. Bryce's Day massacre. And he says, he's very much not on the side of the Scandinavians. But I mean, it's crazy. He says they brought hardships to the people of the land because as was their custom, they combed their hair every day. They bathed every Saturday. They changed their clothes often. They groomed their bodies. And then as a result, he says, all the local women, even if they're married, they want to sleep with them. Because, I mean, you're like, no shit. They were clean. They smelled nice. They changed their socks. Well, the solution then is not to massacre everyone. It's just to start bathing yourself. That's it. Have a bath. It's not a big deal.

Jesus Christ. So it's tricky, isn't it? Because it's not us and them in that very black and white way that we think about it. But then there are within different areas and in different time periods. There are, going to be tensions. Some of those apparently are coming about if we're going to believe John of Wallingford because basically the women are attracted to these in-comers. I'll be back with Eleanor after the short break. I'm still getting the sense then that in a way that I'd appreciate it before that Vikings were trend settings. Even back then they were considered quite a beautiful race of people for your money just while we're on hair because hair is obviously very important to them and some of their leaders are named after their hair

aren't they? So hair is important to them. Harold Fair Hair, that's a good one. Known as Harold Tangle Hair until he basically says, I'm not going to comb my hair until I've conquered the whole of Norway. And so when he does, he changes the name. See, that's somebody whose hair is very important to him. What a completely bonkers thing to say.

I know. But, you know, it's also coming back to this idea of hygiene as well. So if you see someone who's got good hair, they're probably looking after it and combing it, which means fewer lice, less stinky. It sort of makes sense, right? Was there a Viking haircut? Because now if they're on the big screen,

like a cinematic representation, we like them, it's kind of matted and there's some braids and they might be kind of half shaved off at the top and that kind of visually says Viking, but do we have any idea of what their hair was actually like? Yeah, so the fact that that, you know, short at the back, along at the front, that comes up in multiple sources written and also visual.

That's like, all right, okay, there's something going on there. I think we can, you know, at least in some places in some parts of the world at some time, that is probably what's going on. But then, I don't know, there's also lots of images of women. And they're probably specifically what we think of as valkyries or sometimes as shield maidens. That's sort of like part of the warrior culture, not necessarily doing the fighting, but kind of involved in that. But from a sort of predominantly mythical or legendary level rather than actually there. And when you see them, and sometimes you find little amulets, little metal amulets that, you know, show their hairstyles, or you see them on runic picture stones, particularly from Gotland, the island in the middle of the Baltic, and off the coast of Sweden, you see this kind of beautiful, intricate, knotted, it's like this knot at top, and then the hair kind of like falls down their backs. So you see that, for sure. But hair, obviously, because it's organic and it's delicate, it very rarely survives. Actually, there was one really nice case where it does survive. there's this, this is in Norse Greenland, it's on a farmstead and probably in the textile

room, which is associated with females. And they've plaited it, they've sort of woven it into this beautiful long, nearly 60 centimetres long, knotted, braided thing. And maybe it would have been, you know, they put it on the neck or something like a keepsake. So there are times where hair does survive, but obviously the look of it is harder to ascertain when we're not talking about textual sources or visual depictions. One thing that we are quite certain about, and you've alluded to it already, is that they did wash themselves. A personal hygiene was of some consequences, people.

And when it comes to people in the past, the temptation, it's like when I was a lecturer, one of the things I'd always have to do is reassure the students is that, like, no, not everyone in the past was just running around, smelling of poo and looking awful. Like, everyone was at least slightly concerned about it. But then you get into this stuff and you realise that actually standards are different. Yeah, oh, God, definitely.

Like, people have different standards, don't they? Oh, I suspect the past was a very smelly place. I think you probably, like, by our standards, it would have been horrendous, wouldn't it? Like, if you could time travel back now, you'd just be like, oh, well, exactly. Just, no, absolutely, yeah. But what's interesting, you say standards are different, but that can go both ways. So Anglo-Saxons pretty pissed off because the laws are too clean and too sexy. They're washing once a week.

Oh, my God. Exactly. They've even got a name for it. So Saturday is called loigerdagur, and that's still Lur-Dargan, you know, modern Nordic languages still have that bath day, essentially is what it means in their languages. And it's there in Old Norse as well. One of my favourite things, there's in Iceland, in particular, obviously they have the hot springs. And so that's where they like to bathe. And you have lots of place names that are named for basically the pools. They've got that loig element. Or they've got reik, which means like smokies.

my rake, leig, reik, dahlur, like, smoky valley. And in fact, when they convert to Christianity, rather than being baptized in the cold springs, they all say, yeah, now I'm just hanging off till I get to the warm springs on the way home, thank you. Wow, where you would, wouldn't you? That makes sense.

Yeah. Exactly. So there's, like, bathing culture, particularly in Iceland. Then you go to the other end of the Viking world, because as we say, it's like, it's a big, geographically, it's huge, and they come into contact with all sorts of different cultures. So heading east, there's an amazing description by an Arabic writer called Ahmed Ibn Afadlan. And he's kind of going up the Volga from Baghdad with sort of an entourage. And he's part of this group that's being sent to convert the king of the Volga-Bulgar's best name to Islam.

And they come across a group of what they call Rus traders. And the Rus are of Norse heritage. They're very much interwoven with the Slavic groups. they are initially of Norse heritage, and so we can kind of talk about them within that Nordic context. And he meets them around the year, I think it's 9-21. And he does not think they're clean, and he does not think they bathe enough.

He says, like, they're the filthiest of God's creatures. They're, like, wandering asses. They don't clean themselves after having sex or pooing or weeing. And then there's this horrible, horrible depiction. Is it the bowl? it's the bowl It's the ball! It's the ball! Tell everybody what the Vikings did.

If the raiding hadn't put you off, this might. This is worse as far as long as it. It's just absolutely felt. So if someone comes in and she brings this bowl around, she takes into the person who is sort of most socially elevated and he washes in it and he combs his hair in it and he spits in it. He blows his nose. He like snots in it, yeah.

Like literally put one finger on a nostril and like all snot into the water in the bowl. Oh, I swear. But then they pass. it round. So it's not just the one. Oh, it's so nasty. It's so nasty. So it's like, you imagine by the time you get to the last person what that bowl is like, I swear, if anyone's listening to this while they're eating, I'm so sorry, just turn it off, come back later on it's not worth it. It's a communal ball of water that they're all, like, the washing in, the washing the pits in, the spitting in, the, like, the gargling with it, they're clearing the nose. It is grim. Ibun Valan is not impressed.

He's so not impressed. But the thing is, you've got it from his point of it, of course, he would only culturally be washing very frequently with running water. So the idea of this bowl. But then on the other hand, it's so funny because he talks about that and a lot of very unpleasant things they get up to. But he also says, you know, I've never seen bodies more perfect than theirs. They're like palm trees. They're fair and ruddy. And then he describes what seem to be sort of green, dark green tattoos on the skins of the males. So it's not all bad. And actually, Arabic writers are quite an interesting source because they're often travelling and they're often seeing the Norse in these very different cultural contexts. And so there's another one. He ends up in Hedibu, which is this

trading town on what's now sort of the Danish German border. And there he talks about, he says, the men and the women both where I make up to enhance their beauty and the women are able to divorce the men. And then just when you think, oh, this all sounds great, he then talks about there singing and he says they're like howling dogs. I've never heard anything so awful as they're singing. So it's a mixed bag. But of course it's culturally dependent. Well, I was just about to say it might be that we're talking about different standards because Ibn Fulant, where was he from? Was he from modern days? He's from Baghdad. Baghdad, that's the one. And medieval Arab culture, it was very clean, public bathing, bathing every day for

religious reasons. So I guess comparatively, the Vikings, God knows what it would have made of the Anglo-Saxons. That's what I always think. I'm like, oh, he'd be so horrified. I don't know, I can't remember what description it is, but it's someone, and he's part English. One of his parents is English, one of them's

Norman, something like that, but he's saying, you know, around the conquest, and they wear these horrible little short tunics, and they're all covered in bling, this is the Anglo-Saxons now, and they've got, like, just imagine the, like, greasy hair looking a bit like used car salespeople from the 70s. It's that sort of vibe. I'm like, nah, give me Vikings, I need a day. You get that sense as well during the Crusades a few centuries later

of like the accounts being written of the English people coming over and they're just like, they stink. They are horrible. It's not good. These utter barbarians. It's all relative. But having said that, you know, it's all very well being clean as a Viking, at least all clear, you know, when they are settled, when they're able to access buds.

but I just imagine what everyone would have smelled like after, say, I don't know, a voyage across the North Atlantic, trying to get from Norway or Iceland to Greenland. Ooh, that would have been high ponging by the time they got to the other side. You mentioned there about Viking tattoos, and that's a fascinating one, because they crop up in films about Vikings or TV shows. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm interested that there might be some truth to that.

Well, it isn't, isn't, because we can't tell. Even if Fadlan, he describes them, and it looks like it's tattoos. It's not definitely tattoos, but that feels like a likely explanation. The Anglo-Saxons are also described as having tattoos, and so that might explain why it's not mentioned. So it's possible, yeah, the Norse do have tattoos, but it's just not worthy of comment. So you're right, it's such an important part of the modern visual representation,

and yet that's the one area we don't actually have much evidence for it, Because, you know, you think when tattoos survive on human bodies from history, they're usually preserved in ice. It's those sorts of conditions or, you know, Egyptian mummies where they've been mummified and women often, you know, so you have that, but we haven't found anything like that from the Norse world yet. It's possible it might happen. There's lots of sort of glacial archaeology going on at the moment in Norway, maybe a beautifully tattooed. Oh, wouldn't that be great? You know, like I love mum and a big anchor and all that stuff. Yeah, that would be so special. But yeah, that's it until that happens. What about some like

piercings? I'm assuming they had ear piercings, but like body modifications at all. So body modifications, that's the one thing we can tell, obviously, because skeletons survive a lot more frequently. So if there's been modifications to any part of sort of bone or the enamel, then that can survive. And that's a really interesting one because this is really quite new. They found, I think this is like last count is 130 or so bodies like skeletons from Norse contexts, predominantly Sweden and predominantly Gotland, the island, where they have filed teeth. So the person who's done the most work on this, she says, I'm not sure if it would have been painful. But I just imagine, I can't even use an electric toothbrush. It's too sensitive. I'm like,

what are they filing them into points? Like, what are we talking about here? No, although that would be so cool. No, it's like, it's like, gruesome. across them. So either like straight or like kind of half moon sort of things. But what's really interesting is there's a demographic in the sense that, okay, most of them are associated with Sweden. So maybe something is going on there. We have got one, I think at least one that was found in England in a mass burial at Ridgeway Hill in Dorset. So one of them, but of course they come from further afield. I don't think they've looked to see where they come from. They haven't looked at the isotopic evidence. But they're there.

But what you don't have is a sense, oh yeah, they tend to be making grooves on their teeth if they are, say, warriors or they are enslaved people or they're very high status people. They're all male, but we can't pick out the narrative. There is obviously a narrative because, you know, body modification is a way of communicating something about identity. But we don't quite know what that is yet. We might one day. Wow. Filing their teeth. Filing their teeth.

Yeah. I'll be back with Eleanor. after the short break. We've spoken a lot about men and about male beauty. And so far I've got that they had filed teeth. They had sort of a hibster shaggy hairdo. Did they have beards? Is that true?

Were they clean shaven? No, no, I think they often have beards. So, I mean, again, it's like nicknames. You've got people like Sven Forkbeard, which I rather love. Because that's the, you start to think, okay, that idea of that pointy, forked, platted, fork, yeah, too. So, no, no, I think there's plenty of beards and Norsego. odds, you know, Thor is often called like old red beard.

Oh, yes. So, no, I think plenty of beards. Okay. Yeah. When they can't grow beards, and this is in the saga, this is Niel saga, so the main character who's this like really cool lawyer, they take the piss out of him because he can't grow a beard. And they call his children dunglings.

They say, oh, you know, you must have put dung on his chin to try and grow a beard, and you still can't grow a beard. So, yeah, I mean, birds. Imagine how stigmatized that must be to actually insults someone's kids because they can't grow a beard. Oh, insults are big. There's a lot of insults going around in the back. You can kill people if the insults are particularly bad and if they stick. And if they're poetic insults, that's really bad. Yeah, don't insult someone through poetry. Okay. So they have beards. They do have beards. They're very clean. They might have filed teeth. I'm going to assume they smell reasonably okay. They do revolting things with bowls of water. But do we have evidence about what the women were doing? What is a beautiful, Viking woman. So, on the one hand, I quite like this. So if we go to texts, and again, we're thinking of kind of like texts from within the Norse world that are written later, so, you know, the saga is

written down in 13th century Iceland, but with longer oral tales, for example, or again, 13th century texts Iceland again, that look at sort of tales of the pagan gods of the past and legendary heroes and all the rest of it, when women are described there, yes, sometimes they are, you know, the most beautiful woman in Iceland, or she was the most beautiful of all the gods. Freya is described as beautiful, but Freya in the same sentence is described as mighty. And quite often, I'm not suggesting this is like reflective of what everyday life would have been for women in the Viking age at all. But I rather like the fact that often in the texts, there are other features other than their physical appearance

that are equally prioritized at least. So the sarkas is a really interesting example because often the men, they're almost like glittering husks. So you'll get heroic male characters who sort of go off to Byzantium or whatever. They come back and they're like dripping in beautiful fabrics and metals and armor, beautiful swords. The women don't get that. The women, it's more sort of the internal lives. And it is these rather badass women who end up being at the forefront of a lot of. of the saga narratives, which I absolutely love.

You know, they might be beautiful, but, you know, beauty is not enough. So you get that. But then there is a source problem because there we're talking about texts and they're later. But when we're looking at evidence for the period or texts that are written about the Norse by people outside the culture, you don't get so much about the women. And I think that is more to do with the fact that, well, you're a woman, bad luck. Not as important, not worth quite so much. So, you know, and this is always the problem.

It's like, where do we find the women in the culture? They're there. They are there, aren't they? Was it the song of Rigg, that strange story about how the God Himdal goes to three different houses? And they start really ugly and then they get progressively better looking. And it's the enslaved people who are the ugly, dumpy ones. Yeah, yeah. Which, again, like we can talk about, yeah.

Slavery in the North World, big, big. big, big, you know. That's kind of mad that they just made all of the slave people in that story, hideously ugly, covered in flies and smelling terrible. Yeah, but again, it's sort of, it reflects many things, doesn't it? But one thing it reflects is that when they're within sort of farmstead household environments, they are likely to have been given the most nasty, the horrible, horrible work. You do, again, thinking about the sagas particularly, you do get instances where this does not reflect

well on anyone. But, you know, it's the plus Leuch, like the most beautiful young women who are taken as essentially sex slaves. And there are descriptions of that sort of beauty. There's one where he's just that this guy goes off and he's quite a weak character. He's an Icelander.

And he just sees this beautiful woman for sale on one of the slave markets. And he's just like shoving all his money at her to get her home. Turns out, of course, because it's a saga narrative that she's actually the daughter of an Irish king and she's actually very badass. And the child that she has is extremely badass and becomes a big saga hero.

But it is her beauty that's kind of the factor. The other thing, I mean, we can talk about not bodily modifications, but certainly jewelry. That's something we see particularly from burials. So a lot of beads. There is an archaeological problem there is that men had beads as well. But often archaeologists kind of have assumed, oh, if there's lots of beads. And sometimes this assumption is going to be absolutely true. if there's lots of beads in a grave, if we can't tell from the body whether this male or female, it's probably female.

Probably is a lot of the time, but we can't say for sure. And there's also been some really interesting work looking at in that Dane Law area of settlement in Britain, how the women of Scandinavian heritage were wearing jewelry that reflected that Scandinavian heritage that had either been brought over from Scandinavia, if not by them, but then by their sort of granny or great granny. So there's definitely visual markers and markers that are meant to enhance beauty but we don't get that same attention to physical detail in the descriptions and the text that we get for the men. I personally quite, I'm all right with that. You know, talk about the male gaze. I quite like the idea that it's males being gazed at more for once.

I'm like, yeah, go for it. They are gazed at. There's a lot of boy gays in Viking culture, isn't there? Yeah, love it. Alex, you have been wonderful to talk to, and I understand you have a book coming out, ember of the hands, hidden histories of the Viking Age. Before you go off on your own little raiding expedition, can you tell me what your book is about? Do you know, it actually is about a lot of what we've been talking about today. These embers of the hands are the little tiny bits and pieces of humanity, of everyday life that survive.

You know, it might be, yeah, someone's jewelry, it might be someone's physical hair. it might be like there's a lot of runic inscriptions, really rude ones, some of them in there as well. My dad read chapter three and was like, wow, that was saucy. I don't know. So, you know, it's like humans being humans, everyday humans, not the ones at the top of the pile. It's like humans who were too poor, too female or too, you know, queer or too enslaved, whatever it is, too disabled to make it into those official narratives that are usually about the men at the top of the pile.

So, and it's looking at, yeah, what life would have been like, being a human, you know, human in the world, an ordinary human living in this sort of extraordinary time. There are filed teeth in there as well and some rather nasty, yeah, full descriptions of what Ahmed's Ibn Afadlan witnessed on the Volga with these roost traders. El, it's been amazing. And apart from going out and buying the book, where can people find you? Are you on social media? Oh, so social media is the one place I'm not on.

I'm off on radio, like BBC Radio. It's kind of, you can find me cropping up and podcasts writing if you can. kind of by BBC History magazine, BBC Country Film magazine. You can find me popping up there as well. But yeah, I'll crop up on the radio and you'll hear some sort of growly voice and it will be me talking about something weird and historical, usually Vikingy. Well, thank you so much for talking to me. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. So have I. It's been great. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Eleanor for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like with you and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, then please email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the history of underwear to sexuality in ancient Mesopotamia all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggie

and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound. I don't know.