Dan Snow's History Hit - River Kings: Epic Stories of the Viking Age

Episode Date: February 17, 2022

To mark the US release of our very own Dr Cat Jarman’s incredible book River Kings: A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads, sit back and relax as she takes us a whistle-stop tour of her captivating Sunday Times bestseller. From Sweden to Ukraine and from London to Constantinople, the Vikings certainly got about! But how much of a link was there between the western and eastern Viking worlds? By joining the dots of fascinating new archaeological evidence, pioneering research and reassessments of traditional sources, Dr Cat reveals that many of the stories we are traditionally told about the Viking Age might not quite be as true as they seem. Order Dr Cat's book today.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm in the Antarctic at the moment, not the easiest place in the world to make podcasts,

so here is an episode of our sister podcast, Gone Medieval, with Dr Kat Jarman. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval by History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. Today I want you to go back to a point in time that I'm sure you're all very well familiar with. That sunny day in June in the year 793, when a savage attack on a monastery in Lindisfarne marked the start of the Viking Age. When a brutal strike by heathen raiders from Scandinavia, heralded by terrifying premonitions of blood-red skies and fiery dragons flying above, left monks slaughtered and their sacred saints' remains trampled underfoot. The threat was new, unexpected and the beginning of a whole new phase of history.

Except that's not quite true. That wasn't the start, perhaps not even close, but for a long time it's been a really convenient place to begin the story. And that's not the only part of the traditional Viking narrative that we should reconsider. In fact, recent discoveries and new knowledge about the interconnection between Viking expansion in the West, the Silk Roads and the rise of the Islamic Caliphate in the 8th century, allow for a different view of the Viking Age than the story that's traditionally told. Now, there's no doubt that the attack on Lindisfarne, or one very much like it, happened, but the significance it's been given is emblematic of a very Anglo-centric perspective.

And much of the new evidence shows that as those Scandinavians' eyes started turning towards conquering the Anglicised West, those same eyes had, perhaps, already landed quite hungrily on the prospering and wealthy Islamic worlds in the East. and wealthy Islamic worlds in the East. All of this is the topic of my book, River Kings, a new history of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads. And in this episode, I haven't got a guest, but instead I'm going to take you on something of a whistle-stop tour through the book and some of those new things that we now know about the Vikings. So, do we really have much new to say about the Viking Age? I had to answer this question a few times when I was approaching publishers for this book and I would argue that we really do and that's come from a combination of new research, new evidence, sites that have been

discovered but also a sort of reassessment of what we thought we knew. There's been something of a scientific revolution in archaeology over the last decade or two but those new scientific techniques things like isotope analysis and ancient DNA are not on their own going to give us all the answers but they can start to let us reassess some of those questions and especially about the Vikings. In the book River Kings I'm especially interested in one thing and that is the link between the eastern and the western Viking worlds. How detached were they? Were they completely different stories? And were they related to the start of the Viking Age? Now, this knowledge that

the Vikings travelled to the east is not a new one. We've known that for a very long time. It's in the Icelandic sagas. We've got evidence for it. But when, where and how did it happen? And how much can we talk about an early form of globalisation in the Viking Age? My particular part in the story begins deep in the heart of England in a quaint little village called Repton. Back in the 9th century, however, this really was a place that played centre stage in an ongoing political process. This is where the so-called Great Viking Army, or Great Heathen Army as it's also known, arrived in the winter of 873 to set up their winter camp. It was the site of a very wealthy monastery, one that the Vikings attacked, managing to drive the Mercian king, the local ruler, overseas and placing a puppet king in their place.

The story of the Great Army is really that very traditional Viking tale. that very traditional Viking tale. It's a raiding army that comes not just for pillaging and taking riches back home, but actually for political conquest and eventually settlement. But it's one that's very much focused on the West. However, within the last decade or so, our understanding of that great army has changed quite a lot. And one of the main reasons it's done that is because of metal-detected artefacts, things that people have found in fields. And keen listeners of the podcast will have heard the Portable Antiquities Scheme, or the PAS, mentioned several times.

And one of those things that the PAS has been able to do, this is a big database where you can log metal detective finds over the whole of England. That's really shown us how that great army moved across the landscape. Because as they went along, they dropped little things like gaming pieces and weight. And importantly, also silver Durham coins. And those coins came directly from the Middle East and show a direct connection. So the question then is, how much of that was really happening? In Repton, we up until very recently had no evidence for it. But a few years ago, I found a small little artefact left behind in the archives of excavations that took place in the 1980s.

In those archives, I found a tiny little bead, a little bead made of the material carnelian, which is a semi-precious stone. Those beads, bright orange beads, are quite unusual in the Viking Age in England. There's only a very small handful of them. But if you go over to Scandinavia in the 9th century, they suddenly became extremely popular. And what's so interesting about them is that they are not local at all. In fact, the most likely origin of the bead that was found in Repton is Gujarat in India. And this particular bead was found right in the midst of a charnel or a mass grave containing the bones of nearly 300 people buried under a mound in what we now believe is most likely a burial place,

a communal burial place of that Viking great army. So my big question was really, how did the bead get there? And what could that, along with things like those silver durhams, actually tell us about the great army, the 9th century connections between England and places far to the east that connect to the Silk Roads. I should say here also that if you want to know more about the Great Army in particular, do look up the episode called In Search of the Great Army that I did jointly with Dan Snow on Dan Snow's History Hit. There's also a History Hit documentary on it, so you can actually look at some of those sites that we went to. Now, there's still actually very much we don't know about the Viking presence

in England. One of them is quite simply how many people came to settle. When we talk about the Great Army we think that it numbered in many thousands but in terms of the settlers we really can't quite tell. Even the new DNA studies don't quite agree. If you look at modern populations DNA, different researchers have come to different results. One study concluded that Scandinavian genetics had only a tiny input into the English population. But a big problem is that genetically speaking, it's very difficult to tell apart those who might have migrated from Scandinavia during the Viking Age from those who migrated from similar sort of areas just a few hundred years before. Those migrations we typically talk about as the Anglo-Saxon migrations, which come from really the same sort of regions. So southern Scandinavia, Denmark and the northwestern coast of Germany.

There's really not much genetically speaking of a difference there. So being able to untangle that sort of migration from the Viking Age is almost impossible. So what that means is that by looking at modern DNA, we can't really tell. What we can do if we have access to Viking graves is we can look at the skeletons themselves, try to extract ancient DNA, or even more usefully, look at things like isotope analysis. These are chemical signatures that reflect the sort of food and water you drank as a child when your teeth were forming. Those signals are very specific to certain geographical areas, so we can tell if somebody was a first-generation migrant.

In Repton, for example, we've been able to show that a lot of the graves that we think are associated with that great army are from people who were certainly not local, but could well have arrived there from Scandinavia. It was this method that could show us that the two graves in Repton, two men buried side by side, an older man often dubbed as a Repton warrior because he was buried with a Thor's hammer pendant around his neck and a sword along his side. He had some severe and very gruesome injuries, including most likely having had his penis cut off with a big axe wound.

The man who he was buried next to was slightly younger. It used to be thought he might have been his slave or his weapon bearer. The isotope analysis could show that they both grew up in a very similar place, most likely Denmark or somewhere else in southern Scandinavia. But when we analysed the ancient DNA of these two men, we could show that they were in fact related in a first-degree relationship, meaning that they were most likely father and son. But those individual stories are really quite few and far between. But we're starting to

understand more about how that great army fitted into the bigger picture. And those sites, those new camps, those artefacts that we're finding in fields through metal detecting discoveries, are also showing us connections between England and Scandinavia. Because it seemed that would be the first point of call. So tracing that Carnelian bead, which is what I tried to do in River Kings, all the way from its final resting place in Repton and back to its source in Gujarat,

you have to go across the North Sea and to Scandinavia. If we're going to understand that early part of the Viking Age, one thing we have to think about is trade and trading settlements. Because when we look at those Viking camps in England, like Repton and another site called Torksey, for are exactly the same sort of things that turn up in trading sites in Scandinavia as well. Now, in the Viking Age, early Viking Age, and certainly before the Viking Age, we didn't really have towns at all in Scandinavia. They start right at the beginning in places like Denmark, sites like Reba, around about 700-ish or so. That's the first form of sort of proto-urbanisation. People are really living in villages. But just before the Viking Age, this starts to change. In fact, before the Viking Age even begins,

we've got a lot of these trading settlements around the North Sea region, and especially in the English Channel as well. So 7th, 8th century and so on. We've got these sites that tend to be called Emporia. There are places where people can meet and they can trade and they can exchange goods. And it's quite likely that these places are where information is being gathered as well. There was certainly contact across the North Sea before the first raids started taking place. One place we see that is in a letter from Alcuin of York to Æthelred, the King of Northumbria, where he describes and commiserates him for this

Lindisfarne attack. But as well as doing that, he also launches this tirade not just against the foreign invaders but also against his own countrymen and women for the sins and practices they are guilty of which includes copying the hairstyles and the dress and the habits of the pagans those precise people that are now attacking them this can be interpreted in many different ways but one of them suggests that perhaps there was a little bit more contact than we previously thought. But if we think about these trading towns in Scandinavia then as they start to appear from the 8th century onwards

these really become the places where goods are being exchanged ideas are being exchanged, knowledge is being exchanged. And a lot of things like the dirhams and the carnelian beads travel precisely through these places. Places like Birka in Sweden, one of the most famous and biggest trading settlements, have an awful lot of links to foreign places, and especially those that are considered exotic. At Birka, for example, we have an awful lot of Eastern artefacts turning up in graves. We have things like a Buddha statue. We have a ring inscribed with what might possibly be

Kufic or Islamic script, although there's some uncertainty whether that's actually real or a fake. But it's clear that Eastern links are very desirable. And people wear these things. So while Durham coins, silver coins can be used as currency by melting down that silver, they also use that jewellery. So people are signalling an interest and a connection with the East. Yet this is something that happens as the Viking Age is really kicking off properly. This isn't the first step. But if we go back right to the beginning, so back to the middle of the 8th century, around about 750,

we're starting to see trading towns like that setting up around the Baltic Rim, and especially in places that are later to become Russia, places like Staria Ladiga near modern-day St. Petersburg. This is really around about 750, so very early on. It's also the time when we come across what might be the first evidence of a Viking raid at Salma in Estonia, where we got two ships that were clearly attacked. They were filled with the bodies of men. One of them had 40 men all buried together inside the ship. There were arrows

still in the side of the ship, some lavish and rich grave goods and isotope analysis and DNA have shown that these men most likely came from Sweden and that ship burial may also have been one of the first ever examples we have of really a Viking ship with a sail and a keel. So this eastern part of the Viking world becomes increasingly important from that early stage and we see that through things like these trading settlements popping up along the river systems of Eastern Europe. So especially what later becomes Russia and Ukraine, we've got the Volga and the Dnieper River. And actually, you can go almost all the way directly from the Baltic and right the way down to the Black Sea on those rivers. Ancient history fans, this is our moment. Over on the Ancients podcast, twice every week,

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Those rivers really become crucial to the success of those trading networks. The Viking ships were a key part of that. The fact that they could actually go from just going across somewhere like the Baltic or the North Sea and straight onto the rivers. They're light enough so that you can pull them along if you have to get past a dangerous rapid, for example. But sometimes they would swap to smaller vessels, boats that they could make or purchase locally and being

able to adapt in that way was clearly a key part of this success. Now one of the main ways that we know that people went from Scandinavia down those rivers is through the artefacts, is through spread of objects that are clearly defined as Scandinavian. But then the question is, of course, could those objects not have moved on their own? Could they not just have been traded through local people? And of course they could. And this, in fact, has been one of the key questions, a very thorny issue relating to how much input the Vikings or the Scandinavians had over the development of Eastern Europe. As well as the archaeological evidence, we do also have some written accounts. And these, quite unusually, come from two different sources.

We have the later Icelandic sagas, which tell us a little bit, although they are written down many hundred years later, so not always that reliable. But we also have the account of Arabic travellers. These are contemporary accounts from people who come up from the Middle East and they're on various journeys, sometimes they're missionaries for example, and they talk about the people they meet along the way. And in some of those, like the account of Ibn Fadlan for example, we can very clearly recognise traits that we would immediately describe as Scandinavian or as Viking. But those people are not called Vikings. They're

not called Scandinavians. Instead, the sources call them the Rus. And the Rus, of course, become the founders of the Rusian state, or what later becomes Russia and also has a root in Belarus. The very first time we hear about them is actually from a Frankish source. It's from an account with a date of the 18th of May, 839. And it describes an envoy that visits Louis the Pious, the Emperor of Francia. He had his court in Ingelheim in what's now Germany, and he received this envoy from Byzantium. The envoy was accompanied by a group of men who called themselves the Rus'. Now, this is quite an amusing story, really, because Louis had no idea who these people were. He was highly suspicious. He thought they were most likely

spies come to spy on his kingdom. So he sort of put them into house arrest for a few months while he tried to work out who they were. He interrogated them. They told him that they came from somewhere not too far from Byzantium. But when he interrogated them further, eventually they told him that they came from the tribe of the Swedes. So essentially who we would call the Vikings. That was one of those first links that we have between the Rus of the Swedes, so essentially who we would call the Vikings. That was one of those first links that we have between the Rus and the Scandinavians. But there's a much more contentious source, which is the Russian Primary Chronicle,

also known as the Tale of Bygone Years, which is thought to have been written down in the Middle Ages, probably the 13th century, we're not quite sure. That essentially is the sort of origin myth or origin story of the Rus and of Russia and here the story goes that in the 860s the land of the Slavs or again what we now know as Russia especially was in turmoil there was a civil war the local tribes kept fighting among themselves and couldn't agree and they were being harassed by people from the north as well eventually they decide to put out a plea for someone to come and

help them so they made this request to the group of northerners called the roosts where they said that our land is great and rich but there's no order in it so please come and and rule and reign over us and the call was answered by three brothers who took all their families and all of the Rus to migrate, set up and eventually came to establish the land of the Rus and the Rus state. How much of that story is true we really don't know and it's been argued that it's entirely a medieval fabrication. And the evidence on the ground is really difficult to interpret. Are we talking about Scandinavians migrating down, being in these positions of power?

Are we talking about just traded goods? And this was particularly under the Soviet Union, a very politically charged question. New methods are just about beginning to give us some new answers to this. We are getting more artefacts out of the ground. We are now able to start tracing more of those artefacts. So, for instance, like the isotope analysis that we can use on human remains, on human teeth, to find out about geographical origins,

we can do the same thing to metal artefacts. So lead and silver, for example, we can start to trace. Researchers have done just this, looking at all the silver that arrives in Scandinavia and in places like Britain in the Viking Age. Because really, silver is pretty much what drives the Vikings forwards. This metal becomes hugely desirable, it becomes the usable currency, coins like those from the Middle East are melted down and used as what we call bullion. And now new scientific methods are then pinpointing exactly where that came from. It's showing us that the vast majority of that melted down silver is actually coming directly from the Middle East.

So that really helps. We also now have the first preliminary results from some DNA analysis, and it's shown that at least some burials in Ukraine are of individuals who may well have had Scandinavian ancestry. So hopefully with a bit more of this in the years to come, we'll be able to tell a little bit more. But also then, the archaeological record is showing objects like the Carnelian bead, like the one in England, turning up at settlement and trading sites in Eastern Europe.

These are usually located along the rivers. So those rivers are used to control the trade. They're used to gather taxation. They're used to essentially take advantage of people. Because the question, of course, is if all that silver is coming north and back to Scandinavia, what exactly are they exchanging for it? We know that a lot of it isn't just raiding and pillaging. This is traded silver.

And the Vikings or the Rus, they're trading in things like amber and furs, but on a large scale they're also trading in slaves. It's very difficult to get much real information about the ancient slave trade because those people who are enslaved are usually not given proper burials. There are no records kept giving us numbers and figures but what the sources are telling us is that the slave trade took place on an enormous scale in Eastern Europe. So much in fact that the very name for slave comes from the Slavic tribe, the Slavs. A question is where all of this was heading? Where were all those traders going down those eastern routes? And one of the key answers to that is that they were going to a place known, at least to the Vikings, as Miklagard or the Great

City, better known as Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, or Istanbul to us today. We actually do know quite a lot about these trading visits of the Rus or the Scandinavians down to Byzantium because we have a lot of the sources from Constantinople. Some of them tell us about attacks and others about trade treaties so it's clear that this relationship was a very mixed one. Some of them tell us about the journeys travelled by the Rus, the actual routes they took down those rivers and it was clear that the emperor knew just how lethal some of those journeys were. In fact some of the peace treaties actually list all the different perks and rewards that the Rus would be awarded if they made it all the way to Miklagard.

It could be things like getting free board and lodgings and a monthly allowance including bread, wine, meat, fish and fruit. But also after six months or so so what they needed to travel back home again which could be something like a sail or even an anchor however in order to get these perks you needed to be trading you need to have some valuable goods with you but the emperor clearly kept a watchful eye over the roost because they were only allowed to reside in a certain part of this city, only allowed to enter through a certain gate and in very small numbers. Some of those treaties also give us the names of the people involved and some of them have very distinctly Scandinavian names. So either they were directly from Scandinavia or they were the descendants of people who were, who wanted to

pass on that identity. Now we don't have a lot of archaeological evidence of the Scandinavian presence or the Rus presence in Istanbul but there is some graffiti. So if you go and visit the Argea Sophia you can actually find inscription of the marble balustrade with names written in runes. There's a name Halfdan, another one is Arni, kind of graffiti saying Halfdan was here, really. There's also what may well be a depiction of a Viking ship. But here in Istanbul, the trail kind of goes cold. We do have written records of routes going further east across the Black Sea into the Caspian Sea.

There's this long series of raids Black Sea into the Caspian Sea. There's this long series of raids on towns around the Caspian. We also have records of some of them reaching that final destination of Baghdad, the capital of the Islamic world. We know that people, according to those records, travelled over land on camel caravans to trade in Baghdad. It's possibly here also that objects like that carnelian bead that ended up in Repton would have come to. Because the trade networks that Baghdad were part of had been in existence for thousands of years. These were the Silk Road networks, both Baghdad,

Constantinople, and even some of those steppe areas inland near those rivers were all part of those vast networks. This really then was something that the Rus and the Vikings just tapped into. They essentially created a connection between the Baltic Sea, those new trading settlements up far, far in the north, and the Mediterranean and those regions in the east. They were taking advantage of opportunities that arose. And it's clear that some of that was relatively peaceful trading, but some of it was also quite violent. And what we see in Repton, what we see in England with those dirhams, those silver coins and the carnelian bead is the far side of those big networks. So the carnelian bead would have probably travelled on those networks from Gujarat to Baghdad. I don't know if any Scandinavians actually made it that far in the 9th century. We certainly know that there was a knowledge of that part of the world in early medieval Europe and in England. There's various

records from about the same time showing that there was knowledge. We know Arabic travellers went to the east to places like India, possibly even to China, and all the way up to Scandinavia. So the contact, the information was certainly there. So that really leads us to the final point. We have those objects, we have the metals, we have this big opening of a connection between East and West happening very, very early on. It really seems to happen with those trading settlements

that start around the 750s. So not really with violent attacks on the West, but actually other things, other movements happening. And with all of that, it really opens up what we today would call a sort of globalised society, really, because things flow very, very quickly. And they're not all good. You have that slave trade, but also, and I'm not going

to reveal too much because I don't want to spoil the book if you want to read it, but new genetic research and evidence from bodies, from skeletons, scientific data showing us that contagion also travel to the west and to the north with those brand new networks opening up between east and west. But of course it wasn't all bad. All those influences coming in from the east had a huge impact on society in Scandinavia and in northwestern Europe more generally. Culture, arts, language, even politics is all linked to that global expansion. This has only been a very brief introduction to River Kings. In the book itself, I talk about all this evidence in much more detail, and I talk about other topics, like women.

Was this a purely male venture? Did only men go west, and did only men go east? Actually, I think we're starting to know the answer to that, and some of it is quite exciting, and it comes from the bioarchaeology, so the skeletons themselves. And if you're interested in learning more, do consider picking up a copy of River Kings, a new history of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads. It's out in the UK and in most of Europe in the English language by William Collins Publishers. And right now it's just come out in the US as well

with Pegasus. And that brings me right to the end of this episode. I'm Dr Kat Jarman and this has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. Don't forget to subscribe and maybe leave us a little review if you'd like to to help other people find the podcast as well. You can subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter. Just look in the episode notes wherever you found this podcast. Thanks, everyone. That was an episode of Gone Medieval. It's History Hits New Medieval podcast by the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. They've got a big canvas. They got the Romans leaving till, I don't know, I guess the Tudors when they hand over to Professor Susie Lipscomb, not just the Tudors. We're building total coverage

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