Dan Snow's History Hit - Viking Voyages and Legends

Episode Date: June 30, 2022

In the dying days of the eighth century, the Vikings erupted onto the international stage with brutal raids and slaughter. The medieval Norsemen may be best remembered as monk murderers and village pillagers, but this is far from the whole story. Throughout the Middle Ages, long-ships transported hairy northern voyagers far and wide, where they not only raided but also traded, explored and settled new lands, encountered unfamiliar races, and embarked on pilgrimages and crusades.In this episode recorded at the 2022 Chalke Valley History Festival, Dr Eleanor Barraclough joins Dan to talk about all things Viking- from the old sagas that tell exotic wonder-tales of Norse life to the recent archaeological discoveries that are now challenging our understanding of these far travelling people.You can learn more in Dr Barraclough's new book 'Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas'. Produced by Mariana Des ForgesMixed and Mastered by Dougal Patmore 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.

Hi, buddy. Welcome to Dan Snow's History. I have just returned from a long weekend, a long weekend at the Chalk Valley History Festival, where, for those of you not lucky enough to have been there in the past, the world's biggest history geeks, people like me and the team at History Hit gather and drink beer and mead in beautiful tents as the sun sets on the Wiltshire downland surrounding it, as Roman legionaries and cavalier pikemen and First World War flamethrower operators drink alongside, exchanging war stories. It was great to see so many history at subscribers there. Thank you very much for camping and talking to us all and bringing your suggestions and ideas how I can make a better

service. And thank you to all the people who subscribed afresh. If you want to join their number, their ever increasingincreasing number, head to the link in the notes of this podcast. Just click on that link. You get two weeks free if you sign up today. And while you're there on History Hit TV, you can watch endless, nearly endless, Viking content, early medieval content about the Norse Vikings

and how they travelled the seas, exploring, trading, raiding and farming. And this episode of the podcast is all about those Vikings. I was lucky enough at the festival to interview Dr. Enla Barraclough. She's a historian and broadcaster. She's an expert on all things Norse, all things Viking. She's got a new book, Beyond the Northlands, Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas. I caught up with her it short value on the

history hit stage. We chatted about Vikings, the word itself, the extent of their voyaging, why we fetishize them, what we do know about them and what the sagas tell us. We know a lot about what their enemies made of the Vikings. We know what the Christians thought of them. But the sagas are a way in which enemies made of the Vikings. We know what the Christians thought of them. But the sagas are a way in which the descendants of the Vikings talked about their forebears. They're fantastical, but they do contain rich seams of evidence that historians like Eleanor have been able to mine. This was such a great chat. I enjoyed it hugely.

A highlight of the festival. You may hear on the audio of this podcast, you may hear drums, you may hear an 18th century cannon blasting, you may hear processions, you may hear Jacobite cavalry, and you may hear a bit of wind. It was all recorded live at the festival just a few days ago. It was one of many great conversations we had, and if you weren't there, I thought I'd bring you this one. So here is Dr Eleanor Barrowclough. Enjoy. Hello everyone, welcome. Thank you for staying behind for this, the highlight of the Chalk Valley History Festival. We're going to be talking to the brilliant Eleanor about Vikings. First question is are we calling them Vikings? Let's call them Vikings because honestly no one's come up with

anything better. Whatever you say, someone's going to complain. So if you try Norse, I was going with Norse for a while, but then it turns out that some people don't like that because it makes them sound too Norwegian rather than anything else. Vikings technically sort of just means raider, so it's not what you'd be all the time,

it's something you do. That is a contemporary word, is it? Yeah, it is. So there's an old English version so the anglo-saxons had one they called it weaching just means sort of pirate yeah then the medieval scandinavians they had one viking good but they also named their children viking sometimes you know so it does a lot of heavy lifting this word but also it's something you go on you go on a raid you go on a viking and then that word falls out of use and then comes back in the 19th century when everyone gets very excited about the vikings again and that's how it ends up with us we might talk about that 19th century viking fetish oh yes at the end so when's the viking age because people have been crossing

the north sea and harassing our brethren on the east coast of England, which is now England, for a long time. They've also been trading with these brethren and sistren. They've been peacefully migrating and fishing and trading as well. Exactly. People have been crossing this ocean, this wonderful ocean that surrounds us, since the beginning. So why do we have a distinct...

What is going on? Is it a kind of civilisation? Is there something different that happens? So the way we tend to traditionally say this is the Viking Age is when the raids start. And the first sort of big raid that we know about is Lindisfarne, the little island monastery off the coast of Northumberland, 793 AD. But the fact is that we've got signs of similar activity going east to the Baltic about 50 years before then.

In Salme. In Salme, exactly. Shall we talk about those burials? Those are the best burials. I would love to, because it's the most exciting Viking thing ever. But just finish your answer first. So 50 years before. Again, does that feel like a distinct thing from what had gone before?

Yes, but also at the moment that's exactly what I'm trying to write about for a new book. And every time I try and write a beginning, I find a beginning that takes us further back in time. That's the problem with history. And then if we're talking about, say, runes, that quintessentially Norse way of writing in all those spiky little letters, if we're going to talk about those, we're going to go back to the second century AD. We're going to talk about how Scandinavia, although it was never conquered by the Romans, actually had a huge amount of engagement. And that sort of like feeds into the centuries later in the Viking Age. So where do you start? Where do you start? I mean, I'm

showing my bias here. Is it a little boat building technology, mini breakthroughs going on? Is that giving us a little something? So you can see, certainly by the time of these Salome ship burials that we'll talk about in Estonia, you can see they've got sails and they've got these clinker belts, you know, when all the planks are sort of like against each other going up the side. It's true that that coming in, in sort of the centuries leading up to what we think of the Viking Age, does make overseas transports and voyages more possible,

that helps, but that's different to saying it's the cause. And that's the difference. And in the 19th century, we sort of thought there was some overpopulation of young, hearty males. Is there anything going on? That's coming back as a theory, right? Not for reasons that you think.

So that idea that basically there's too many people living in Scandinavia and so everyone sort of gets out to try and find new farms and new land. It's not that. It's the fact that there's some suggestion, certainly in the written sources, but we've got to remember those are later, that there might have been not enough women to go around the men who wanted to get married and have farms and children

and like found dynasties as it were sounds like my teenage years well except i hope it's not for the same reason which is people have suggested it's because there are more female babies who are sort of exposed and killed because it's harder to raise them um so what that means is that basically the young men who don't necessarily have positions and. So what that means is that basically the young men who don't necessarily have positions and farms set up at home have to then go and find wealth and prestige so they can come back and say, hey, look at my nice thing, I nicked it off a monk.

Do you fancy? Also, we could talk about that. I went to Iceland once, like you, and talked to a genetic scientist who says, all the men in Iceland are from Norway, all the women are from Ireland and Scotland. Can we go back to Salme? Let's go back to the beginning of this Viking Age.

So we've explored a little bit about are there any kind of areas of discontinuity, any areas of change. Salme is in Estonia. Yep, on an island. An island of Estonia. And what you're about to hear is going to blow your mind. It's the greatest Viking site I've ever been to.

There's nothing left to see there now obviously there's a very nice cycle track very nice cycle illuminated oh also nice interesting second world war battlefield which is overlay on top of it but some builders were digging to build a school uh cycle track and they discovered two ship burials yeah describe what they discovered what they think happened there right so the first ship that they find is really quite small. It's got seven people buried on it and some of these people are still in the positions that they would have rowed in.

What's interesting there is that there's signs of violence, there's arrowheads embedded in the woods. These people have clearly been killed and then buried with some style but then they then found the most extraordinary second bearing in mind the first one seven people that i don't think had ever been found that many people buried on a ship in this kind of viking way the second one what was it, 34 people, something like that? I mean, many, many people, warriors, who had been buried. They had to bury them almost like Jenga pieces, you know, like in

rows, because there were so many to bury. So there's all sorts of grave goods, there's weapons, there's all the rest of it. My favourite is that there are tonnes and tonnes of gaming pieces. And the Norse game that was most popular, there's a bigger piece that's sort of basically a king piece in the middle. And this king piece was found in the mouth of one of the dead men. And so what it seems is that was probably the leader, but it becomes this sort of Agatha Christie murder mystery

where they're trying to work out what happened. Clearly, they've been attacked. And initially, people thought, oh, well, this is an early Viking raid. This is the first Viking raid. And what's incredible is these people were from Sweden. And so when we think of those first Viking raids, we think from Norway, going west to the British Isles. But here we are 50 years earlier, looking east, and these armed warriors have come over from Sweden and met a rather nasty end.

But then people started thinking, wait a minute, I don't think this is a raiding party that's gone wrong and being attacked by locals, because they've got things on board, buried with them, that you wouldn't bother to take. So incredibly high-stated weapons, decapitated falcons. And I think we think that they were proud of the ground weren't they because yes so they were left on the beach with these piles of dead bodies in them the possible king figure

at the steering oar and they were undisturbed by local people so that's the kind of mystery isn't it yeah and the question there is why are they undisturbed are they undisturbed because actually it's not relevant and people don't know about them? But what I love is, okay, someone was able to bury them with such status and such honour. Like you say, not necessarily the big old mound that you might expect, but there was sort of rubble and stones piled into the centre. But the fact is, they were able to do that. And so again, you think, okay, well, if they'd been horribly attacked and outnumbered, then you wouldn't stick around to do this incredibly elaborate burial. So now the latest theory is that actually these people were part of a very high-status diplomatic mission going east,

trying to open up trading routes, trying to sort of get a bit of the money that's flowing all the way from the Islamic caliphate and all that bit further south and maybe that is what happened that they were attacked possibly by people also from Sweden who didn't want the competition who knows but so who respected their burial practices or something well no I think possibly that whoever buried them knew these people they knew who the leader probably was they knew there were four brothers all buried together. So I think they were buried by the survivors.

But it would make sense that if they were attacked, not by locals who might still be in the area and therefore hostile, but people who were sort of also from slightly further west, then those attackers sail off. They're like, right, they're not going to get onto our turf. And so you have time to bury your dead and then go back home a bit like the spanish and english fighting each other in the new world perhaps yeah yeah so it's an amazing amazing amazing site very very special indeed and since we're we will get to lindisfarne and attack on england but since we're heading east

and since we've just watched the film the north man, and since Vladimir Putin has invaded Ukraine, let's keep going east. The word Russian, arguably, is from the Vikings. Is from the Vikings. So Rus is what they were called, or Alvrus, if we're talking about Arabic sources. And this gets complicated. And exactly like you say, it's important to remember Russia and Putin and Ukraine,

because actually this is not ancient history as far as that part of the world is concerned. So it looks like we have Scandinavians, probably again from Sweden, probably maybe even the descendants of this unsuccessful buried party, the Salme from 750. And they start heading east, the Baltic region, down to the area that we now know as sort of the Russian waterways, Ukraine, Belarus. There are rivers that go from modern St. Petersburg all the way down to the Caspian Sea and the Crimea. You can, with virtually no portage, and you can go the whole way on rivers. It's a riverine empire environment. And what's really interesting then is that when you

get to the end of this river system, you end up with basically the golden geese of this period. You've got the Byzantine Empire focused on Constantinople, now Istanbul, and then you've got the Islamic Caliphate further east focused on Baghdad and all that area. And I always think with, I'm going to say Vikings, Norse, whatever we call them, you follow the money, you find out where they can get the money from and how they can trade their way down there and anything else and then you're going to find where they end up. So they come all the way down these river systems but what's interesting is that as they're doing that they are becoming a smaller and smaller drop in the ocean of all the other cultures and tribes that are there which means that yes there does seem to be some Norse foundation of Novgorod

and Kiev but there are also lots and lots of Slavic elements there and that's important and that tells us something about the Norse culture, the Norse diaspora, you know, which stretches all the way from Greenland to then the kind of Russia, Ukraine area we're talking about, that they're really good at adapting culturally and

becoming part of other cultures as far as it's going to suit them. There's a brilliant story just to illustrate this idea that it's like well we'll take a bit of this culture that culture you want us to do that well it suits us so I think it's in the reign of Louis the pious so we're talking further west again we're talking Carolingians and Louis the pious as his name suggests is very keen on converting anyone who isn't Christian and the Norsese, particularly Danish, they're like, yep, we can do

this if this means we can trade. And so they come year after year and they all line up, well at least in my head they do, I don't think it's specified, they all line up waiting to be baptised. And when they get to the front of the queue, they're given a lovely baptismal robe to wear. But there's so many of them coming to be baptised so they can then trade with carolingians that the quality of the robes gets worse and worse until basically louis the pious is like we'll just hand out some rags until a viking gets to the front of the queue and he's like what's this what are you giving me this dirty little piece of rag i've been baptized so many times here and i've never had such a horrible robe than this so again it's not about belief it's

about well if I get baptized and then you'll take my stuff and I can buy stuff off you that sounds good to me so we've sent the vikings east they've plugged into the world's richest civilizations of the near east Byzantium Persia and further east they're getting dirhams they're getting resources and gold and spices and slaves from Central Asia. Let's start to go west now. You mentioned they arrive on the coast of England, France. Let's deal with the violence thing. Were they hyper-violent?

They were hyper-violent, but in a hyper-violent time. Right, exactly. So this is it, that again, when you say, okay, well, what are the theories? History swings one way and then swings the other way. The fact is were violent often and when you look at the raids they were horrible and I think it's really important to remember that because there were victims on the other end so it almost becomes like a cartoon violence isn't it's like it's further enough in the past it's okay you know ha ha ha but that is there but we've got to remember that everyone's at it. And this idea as well that they're the only ones attacking Christian sites and monasteries just isn't true. We look at the Merovingians, the sort of post-Roman Empire, again in this sort of Frankish area.

And one army comes through and they are doing all sorts of horrible things, often to their own people. And they're attacking churches and monasteries as well. And these are Christians doing it. So we've got to be really careful of making these sorts of black and white assumptions. But at the moment, I've been looking quite a lot at evidence for children in Viking material culture. So like in the archaeological record. And the fact is, there's not very much. But there are swords.

and the fact is there's not very much but there are swords and sometimes particularly swords that have been found up near Novgorod which was a strong Norse settlement these swords are like extremely realistic you can actually find the model of Frankish sword that they're based on and these are meant for small children so we have to think that you're surrounded by people yes who are farming who are telling nice sagas around the fire, all sorts of things, but there is also... We've got to recognise this is a violent age, but it's a violent age for everyone. Let's talk about, briefly, the Isles.

We know a lot in England. He's an army, so-called lands, almost conquers England. Somewhere around here, it is reversed by the men of Wessex. Scotland and Ireland, both very important value stories. But overall, if you look at York and Dublin, really interesting becoming networks into this big trading pattern we just talked about, that stretches all the way into Eurasia. Hugely. And to find the evidence of that, one of the things that you find most often, as you mentioned, are these little dirhams, these silver coins, all the way from Persia and Islamic caliphate. And it's amazing to think how far these items are travelling. And then you've got to think, okay, maybe it's not

very often that one person is then travelling that distance. It's very much a sort of leapfrog thing. But this network is extraordinary and so multicultural and so global in the sense that we would talk about global to north america which i'm sure we'll come on to well let's do that so island hopping the vikings do not stop i mean there is some evidence that mediterranean merchants did get as far as the Arctic Circle 500 years before, but tragically it doesn't survive in its original form. Let's assume that the Vikings are the first people to explore these mid-Atlantic islands and places. We've got St Kilda, we've got Shetland, we've got famously Iceland.

They settle Iceland. Yes. And there's no one there when they arrive. Well, there may be an Irish priest. We don't know. Well, I mean, the thing is, it's totally fine if there were a few Irish priests out there. It makes complete sense.

So we've got records of these people that the Icelanders call the papar. They're like Irish hermits, basically, making their way to the islands of the North Atlantic to find peace and solitude. There's a wonderful 8th century Dick Will writing in the Frankish Empire who describes, he says, well some of them came to me and they'd gone so far north that at midsummer they could see by the light of the sun at midnight clear enough to pick the lice off their clothes, which I think just sums it up really.

So it's possible that there was some of those people who made it to Iceland but that's different to settlements and it's certainly different to the sort of settlement we see where if you're going to have a sustainable population you need women and men and the children and the next generations and you need a good cross-section of society and so the papar is something different if that happens that's really interesting in itself but it is different to settlement so settlement occurs in iceland annoyingly they were going to call it snowland i think and then so i've always been very upset about that uh and then it becomes iceland terrible soil plowing all

the soil washes off into the sea cut down the trees root systems blah blah blah so a bit of an ecological disaster but able to support settlement I guess we're trading fishing yeah I mean the trees thing is really interesting because even in the medieval Icelandic sources so the settlement of Iceland it starts around 870 and in about a few decades we've got the outside of Iceland fully settled as it were because the inside isn't very habitable because it's all like glaciers and mountains and rocks and according to the Icelandic sagas trolls and if you've been there I mean you'll know it does feel quite trollish in places doesn't it so we have that settlement and should we talk about the male female thing that you would go fascinating so back in what around 2000 so 20 odd years ago

they looked at the dna of modern icelanders and they found that the type of y chromosome that modern icelandic males have about 80 of the modern icelandic males have a similar type of y chromosome that you would find in sort of the Norwegian population and it doesn't prove but it suggests that something around 80 percent of the male settlers who came to Iceland back in the 9th century and onwards came from Norway but what was really interesting was when they looked at the mitochondrial DNA, so I'm not a geneticist, there will be people here who are going to like cringe as I get this horribly wrong, but basically it's the female part of the DNA that's passed down through the generations. When they looked at

modern Icelandic women, they found that something like what, 67% of that or something seemed to come from the sort of genetic profile you'd get in the British Isles and Ireland so what that suggests is that a far far greater proportion of the female settlers to Iceland came from the British Isles and Ireland and then you have to think okay well why is that certainly again if we look at the latest sagas that describe the settlement of iceland although they're written a couple of hundred years later they sort of preserve oral memory and information at least partly we don't know how much but at least partly you see a strong irish british isles hebridean element in the settlers you see them in the names

so one of the most famous sagas is called Nial's saga. And that's a person's name, Nial. And that's like Nile, Neil. You can see Cormac's saga, Cormacr. You can see that element. But then the question is, okay, well, if there were more women, is it that stereotype of basically big, blonde, bearded Viking males swinging by the British Isles and Ireland,

picking up women, not necessarily in any way, with their permission, and taking them to Iceland. There probably was some of that. But we also have to remember that by this point, the British Isles and Ireland, you mentioned Dublin and York, is being settled by Scandinavians. And it's possible that some of the women who are then going to Iceland, they might genetically

look like they have British Irish DNA, basically. But culturally, it's possible that say they married into Norse families, and they were living within a Norse context. In the same way, if you look at my DNA, you'll see Dutch DNA, because my granny's from Holland, but I can't speak Dutch, and I'm in no way culturally Dutch. You see what I mean? So genes don't tell us everything. And we have to be careful in trying to work out what they do tell us. Because sometimes, I don't know about you but i was like oh it's science it must be true scientists came up with it great solved on we

go next thing and of course it's all interpretive and it's all a little bit tricky to get a handle on listen to dan snow's history we're talking vikings more coming up Listen to Dan Snow's history. We're talking Vikings. More coming up. Have you ever wondered if those pointy medieval shoes gave you bunions? Would you be friends with someone who had leprosy in the Middle Ages? And what on earth does that Bluetooth symbol on your phone have to do with the Vikings? I'm Dr Kat Jarman and on Gone Medieval we find those answers for you, talking everything from saints to sacrifices, runes to relics, sex to science. Join me, Dr Kat Jarman, and my co-host Matt Lewis for everything from berserkers to battles and runes to raids. Subscribe to Gone

Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So we go from Iceland, we go further.

Much further. Unbelievably, Greenland, which has some of the most incredible Norse sites that you can still go and visit. And then, stunningly, Canada, possibly Baffin Island, but Newfoundland is pretty well attested. Yeah, yeah, yeah. On the end of Olso Meadow on the northern tip of Newfoundland

and critically there are some seeds in Newfoundland which are not native to Newfoundland, which come from further south on the east coast of what is now the US and Canada. So hysterical excitement. Yeah. It implies they really did get down possibly to New England. So these are little butternuts and they only grow as far north as the St Lawrence River area.

And so the fact that they were found on this northernmost tip of Newfoundland, Lansamuddin, where there is definite archaeological evidence of some Norse activity, yeah, it suggests they got further. And certainly there are two sagas. Again, sagas written in Iceland, 13th century onwards, based on oral tradition, often about that early Viking Age period

of expansion and settlement. Little bit dodgy. Sometimes we get zombies and dragons. Can't take it as gospel, but there are some very interesting information that gets passed on. In fact, it's those two sagas about Greenland that initially made people think oh right okay I think they might have got to the North American continent and actually decided where they were going to look

so it's not history as we think of history with its footnotes and all the rest of it but they're not just useless fairy tales and these sagas so it's the saga of the greenlanders and it's the saga of eric the red they tell us that around the year 1000 ad the norse went from greenland and they got to this part of the north american continent and they went further south. And you mentioned Baffin Island. I think there has been a very small amount of, yeah, archaeological, yeah,

that suggests that they did at least stop there. What's interesting is in the sagas, it's almost like, you know, if you stop and ask someone in the street, oh, how do I get to the post office? Like, right, go down that. And then when you get to that lamppost, then turn left and then wait till you get to the tree.

And then it's a little bit further on on the right. The sagas are full of that sort of directional information. Baffin Island, the reason you think, oh, yeah, OK, this makes sense, is they call a place that they sail past and stop briefly, Hetlu Land, which means stone slab island. And Baffin Island is very rocky and stony, not suitable for the sort of settlement that the North would have been after. And then the sagas tell us that they go further down the coast, further south, and they come to a place that's very tree-ish and has animals to hunt. And they

call this place Markland, which means forest land. And that looks very much like Labrador. And then they get to this place where the sagas say that they build overwintering houses. And they call this Vinland because they find wild grapes there. But it looks like that's what they're talking about. And indeed, that was what they found archaeologically, wasn't it? It was these little booths overwintering huts. I sometimes think,

can you imagine a person that found the butternut seed? It's like kryptonite. You're the most famous archaeologist in the world, but your next-door neighbour doesn't care anything about it. I found a butternut seed. It's like winning the World Cup. I mean, what a legend that person is. And yet there are people who walk amongst us who wouldn't care. It's unbelievable, isn't it?

But also Meadow, this place in Newfoundland, no burials interested interestingly, right? So longhouses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As you say, overwintering potentially. Exactly. So no sign that they were living here long term. No burials.

And also the middens, the rubbish heaps, are really quite empty. So what it looks like is that they were there for a little while. They came back, maybe. I mean, we're talking more like a place to mend your ships because the journey from Greenland to this part of North America is huge.

It's like 2,000 miles or something. It's big. And they've tried to reconstruct these voyages in authentic Norse ships. And they did an amazing one. I think it was back in 1998 or something. The first time they got into the middle of the ocean and it just failed. And if they had been Norse, that they got into the middle of the ocean and it just failed

and if they had been norse that would have been the end of them as it was they weren't so they could radio for help and then try it again next year so we've got to think this is a huge huge distance and it's a huge open distance and that's part of the issue that when we were talking about the waterways going down to byzantium and going through Russia, going through Ukraine. We're talking about places where you can stop en route and places where there are other, I want to say, civilisations that you would sort of recognise, because there are definitely people living in Greenland and this part of North America who are not Norse, and they're a very important part of the story but how that

interaction occurs is problematic whereas if you're coming down the waterways you've got stopping off points you've got leapfrog ideas if you're crossing 2,000 miles of open water essentially and you're already coming from a place that is already remote. So if you're then going that little bit further, that's an awful long way to stretch. And we've already talked about how in Iceland there's not an awful lot by way of, say, trees and wooden resources that are actually really, really important for cultures like medieval Norse culture. And the same is true in Greenland. There really isn't that much. And that makes it difficult to do really basic things like mend ships and build ships in the first place. And so if you're then stretching yourself that far over, you've really got to think, okay, how sustainable is that if

you're looking to build permanent settlements out there? And particularly if there are already people living there who might not want you there very reasonably again that's what the sagas tell us happen that they meet the people who live there and they trade for a while it kind of goes well they fall out they really fall out and then it all goes horribly wrong and they say well this land is full of resources but we're just not going to be able to settle here and they sail back to Greenland and that's it that sort of then makes sense if something like that happened around the year 1000 it explains why as you say no burials at this site Newfoundland and not a lot of rubbish and it doesn't seem to be occupied very long because maybe they realize all right this is just not going to work however what I love is that this record that we have is incomplete.

And just when we think we've got a handle on the story, it shifts again. So I'm going to get the date wrong, but it's at some point in the middle of the 14th century, 1364, in the Icelandic annals. They say a ship arrived from Markland, Labrador, and it didn't have an anchor. And basically they were shipwrecked. But the idea is this very small ship, as the annals call them, has come all the way from the edge of the North American continent. And of course, we haven't heard anything about Norse in that part of the world for hundreds of years.

And so then suddenly you're like, oh, wait, we don't have the full story. Is this real? Did this actually happen? Is this where they actually were? In which case, what were they doing all the way over there? And, OK, maybe they weren't the only ones. So just when you think you've got a handle on it, it just goes again. It's wonderful. It's a wonderful seafaring culture. I once went to the museum in Roskilde, which is one of of the great museums in the world where they were building a viking museum and as they

were building it found innumerable viking ships and so they had to keep expanding the museum every time they did they found more viking ships so they've got dozens and they made me eat herring smoked with reindeer droppings maybe they just made that the english people do that but that was what they claimed and then we went sailing in a Viking ship and we snapped. The steering oar is held to the side of a ship. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans.

Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

Outside the hull, so there's a piece of wood that goes through the hull grabs onto steering we snapped that we landed on a beach we went into the local tesco's where there's all those young saplings that they plant around supermarkets asked permission chopped the sapling down ripped it up and used the roots of the sapling to bind the steering or and then put their trunk through and tied a big knot in the trunk here and that's how they fixed as you say that resources it was so incredible and they could basically build ships where they went if they had the resources but the problem is iceland greenland

and north america just they don't have those kind of resources or they do in north america marklin but the problem is too far away and you think about it so earlier we were talking about the Salme ship burials ship wood you know easy it's interesting that there are so few ship burials from Iceland and you think well how did you actually function it's not that there were no trees they cut down a lot of trees but then they sort of started to manage the trees and realized we're going to get into a lot of trouble here there was also driftwood and they could also import very high-quality wood from Norway. But of course, you can only do that if you have a lot of resources, capital. And also, that's the interesting thing about the archaeological record, isn't it?

So much of that organic material just disappears. And so what you're left with is this skeleton outline, but not necessarily literally skeleton, but just these little fragments of reality that you can't quite get at. Speaking of fragments of reality, one other myth, or perhaps not myth, let's find out, about the Vikings is this role that women play. They've been slightly fetishised. Are there shield maids on the battlefield?

Why do we associate women fighting with that particular culture? What is going on there this is a really tricky one so i don't know how many people like in the news the last few years it's woman warrior confirmed by genetics in sweden that's really problematic that woman warrior oh good east coast of sweden right yep inka. So it's a big sort of like trading, very international in the Viking Age island. And so this was a burial that was found many, many decades ago and it had a lot of weapons.

And it was assumed that it was male. And then recently, researchers looked at the DNA evidence. They found out that this person had XX chromosomes and so it was like oh it's a woman, oh it's buried with weapons, aha it must be a warrior. Now all that might be true but there are so many layers to unpick there partly about our own assumptions and partly then about what was going on at the time. So part of the problem is why are women historically only exactly as you say fetishized or made exciting if they are doing something that we associate with

masculine like high octane activity. So that's problematic for a start isn't it. It's like oh how exciting a woman doing something fun rather than sort of i don't know weaving at home so there's a problem there about how we view the roles that people carried out in the past and it's partly then why people like woo vikings because it is the sexy violence and all the rest of it and the far travel and i should say far travel we definitely know that there were a significant proportion of women involved there. So that's important to say. The next problem is that just because someone's buried with weapons doesn't make them a warrior. It doesn't make them not a warrior. I'm not suggesting that this person definitely wasn't a warrior, but it's a problem. And the researchers who did this, who are fantastic, they're some of the best people working in this field at the moment, they said, well, when we thought this was a male,

no one questioned that this was a warrior. And now we see they've got XX chromosome, everyone's really crossed that we're saying they're a warrior. And they're absolutely right. But then surely the question there is, well, why do we assume that someone buried with weapons, whether male or female, is a warrior? There are all sorts of other reasons you might be buried with weapons. And so then you might start to think, OK, well, let's look at the body, because in this case there is a skeleton, and see if there's anything that the skeleton can tell us about the sort of lifestyle this person had.

A bit like Roman gladiators. If we see that one of their arms was very much more developed than the other, it's like, okay, possibly weapons. Or if we see evidence of wounds, like nasty cutting wounds that have healed, we might think, all right, this person may have been in battles at some point. And as far as I know, there's nothing to suggest that with this person. It is true, though, that there have been other women found in graves with weapons, not necessarily a huge array of weapons. And there's one,

I'm always surprised it doesn't come up enough. And I have to look into it more where it does seem to be a Norwegian sort of Viking age burial of a woman in Norway, as is now. And they were buried with weapons. and it looks like they had some sort of quite nasty head wound that had started healing so I'm quite interested to know what's going on there definitely did Neil Price share with me a scrap of Irish monastic account about endless Viking fleets and it says but the worst was the fleet of the red girl yes and nothing compared to devastation and that's it that's a by the way how amazing early medieval history we love it because what an unbelievable little scrap of evidence we don't know the red girl was but just

that one sentence can open up a kind of universe of fascination that's quite a fun reference this is it and well neil price we should say is like one of the main researchers who's been looking at this birka burial what neil also brings up is the kind of mythological dimensions of this and this is where i'm going to say blame wagner because you know we've got the valkyries we've got right big breast plates and horns and all the rest of it right and that idea of the norse woman or the viking age woman is like in our sort of collective cultural memory that's there and now we've got this other sort of layer which is like anyone who's a fan of the tv series vikings we've got lagatha and again lagatha is someone who is mentioned in the medieval textual records, but it's how far we can extrapolate those mythological figures and those legends

and those little, as you say, textual hints that something's going on. And I think it's quite possible that there were female warriors, however we're going to define those, in the Viking Age. I doubt very often, but I don't see why that's possible. And I think this is part of our problem of everything has to be binary. And you've got to allow for different humans

having different experiences of life and gender and sex. And that's as true in historical periods as it is now. Yep, and there are plenty of examples of warrior women from other periods as well. Exactly, yeah. So Eleanor, leading historian of the Viking Age, has a Viking period helmet ever been found

which shows evidence of horns on it? No, never, no. Are there any depictions, are there any descriptions of any Viking Age person ever wearing a horn on their helmet? No, blame Wagner and the other 19th century Vikingiking it was literally wagner's

costume person yeah so there was a very popular saga that was translated in the 19th century and in fact amundsen took it on his polar adventures it's called frithjof saga and it's sort of very classic vikingy i think the illustrations for that translation, I think they may be the first depictions of the horn helmet, I think. And they're slightly pre-Wagner. So Wagner's costume designer, he gives them all, basically everything you think of when you think of like a cartoon Viking. And the fact is that, okay, Wagner and his crew may not have been the first,

but in terms of popularization, that's a biggie. Perfect. And just brief at the end, why are we so hot for the Vikings? Other peoples are available. What is it about the Vikings? Do you know, I genuinely still struggle to answer this, which is know partly a cop-out but like bear with me here because the fact is many people they try and say no they weren't all warriors true they were all farmers partly true and adventurers sometimes but they almost use that as sort of like here is the sexy viking which is the kind of bloodthirsty far-traveling viking and now let's break that down and say no they were just like everyone else but it is the violence it bloodthirsty far-travelling viking and now let's break that down and say no they were just like everyone else but it is the violence it's the far travel i don't know anglo-saxons

just aren't as sexy are they oh i'm sorry everyone shots fired you're in the wrong part of the country to say that we're not in norfolk anymore uh no i think that's right i think the early anglo-saxons very sexy very sexy and very like the Vikings all those late Roman descriptions of seafarers but this is the problem so are we just sort of

you know little mice looking at sexy cats basically going and this is part of the problem that you think no at the time the bit that we find I'm going to say sexy again

now was really horrific and as we say they weren't the only ones doing it either. So there's something else. What's interesting is that in America, it's a different sexy. It's much more about those kind of independent, far-travelling, far-flung Vikings.

Homesteaders. Yeah, exactly. And so I think, as is so often the case in history, we're seeing what we want to see. And we're imprinting a lot onto this lovely past. Let's finish it with that. Go and think about that. Thank you very much, everyone. Thank you.

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