Dan Snow's History Hit - Vikings: River Kings

Episode Date: February 19, 2021

Today, I am joined by Cat Jarman bio-archaeologist and author of a new book all about how the Vikings spread east, often utilising the rivers of central and Eastern Europe, all the way into central Asia. These travels enabled them through trade, violence and settlement to plug themselves into that superhighway of the time, the Silk Road.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Data Science History. We're talking Vikings again on this podcast and Vikings podcasts always do well. It's endlessly fascinating. And they're particularly fascinating when we're being

told all about Vikings by Kat Jarman. You've heard her here before. She's a bioarchaeologist. She uses cutting edge forensic techniques to uncover more about this group of people that we call Vikings. Who were they? What do they want? What were they doing? And where were they going? She's just written a wonderful new book called River Kings, and it's giving us a new history of the Vikings and how they emerged from Scandinavia and tapped not into just life in Britain and Ireland, but all the way into Central Asia and connected themselves, plugged themselves in to that superhighway at the time, the Silk Roads. It's great talking to Kat. Kat has been on the podcast many times before talking about the Vikings, but also Easter Island, weirdly.

She and I are going to go on a road trip as soon as this lockdown ends, and we're going to look for some Viking sites in England, hopefully Scotland as well. So that will be something to look forward to. You can listen to all Kat's episodes of the podcast. You can see me interviewing her in Repton about the possible burial site of Ivor the Boneless. I love saying that. And she's taken part in many other History Hit projects. You can see all of those, listen to all of those over at historyhit.tv. It is a digital history channel. It's like Netflix, but just for history. It's awesome. Check it out, historyhit.tv. Go and sign up. You're going to absolutely love it absolutely love it in the meantime everybody here is the wonderful Kat Jarman enjoy hey Kat thanks for coming back on the podcast oh my pleasure you've now been on quite a lot so

thanks for putting up with me well thanks for letting me come back even more times well you need to be on this time because you've written a huge new book about the viking age but i think the main thing i took away from your book is that we in britain are obsessed with norse and danish influence in the isles or really a lot of english people when you think about it in england the viking age started with linda's fun go really wide like first of all what should we call them are we going to call them vikings i think we haven't really got anything better to call them unfortunately so that word is a bit problematic but nobody's really come up with a good alternative but part of the problem is that it depends where you go so if you go to the east which is what a lot of my book talks about then we don't really

talk about the vikings we talk about the rus and so i talk about this connection in the book how do we know if somebody moves out of Scandinavia, how long do they stay as Scandinavian? How many generations? How do you detect that several hundred years later on? So it's tricky, but I think for now, the best we can do is to keep calling them the Vikings. Yeah, the Normans, the Russians.

I mean, when did they stop being Vikings? So we're talking about Scandinavian seafaring, migrating traders, settlers, explorers, slavers. When should we date the Viking Age from, if not the Assault on Lindisfarne? When do these people from the Baltic start to exercise this remarkable influence over a huge swathe of Eurasia and beyond?

So I think we need to push it back a few decades at least. So that 793 Lindisfarne attack has become kind of crystallized as a start. But the more we look at it, the more we see that things are happening a few decades before that. So at least from about 750, but perhaps it isn't really so clear. I think some of the changes around about that time. And so we have something that started around 700 with a lot of trading networks, these huge trading settlements around the Baltic and also stretching across the North Sea and the English Channel. But then somewhere around about 750, I think

there's definitely a change. So perhaps that's for now where it should start, but we keep changing our minds on it. And change, like is that a bit of boat building technology? The Victorians had this idea that there was a sort of demographic explosion, all these young people were kind of seeking fortune and partners elsewhere. What is your sort of theory on why we suddenly start hearing about these peoples? So this point is really when the expansion starts out from Scandinavia. This is where so much of that travel really starts to happen. But it has been happening before as well. This isn't the first time that Scandinavians work out how to get across the North Sea, for example. You just look at something like Sutton Hoo, which

obviously has had a lot of attention now recently, that has very strong connections to especially Sweden and graves in Sweden. So we know there's contact. But the raids and the attacks really do start in the late 8th century. And nobody has quite yet worked out why that happens. There's lots of theories, lots of hypotheses on that. And one of quite yet worked out why that happens. There's lots of theories, lots of hypotheses on that. And one of those is that there's demographic pressure, that there's even perhaps too many young and slightly violent men who need to go out raiding in search of wealth so they can get themselves a wife back home. We know there's political pressure as well. But it seems to be a really quite complex scenario. The boat technology definitely

plays a big part. It's not the reason for the attacks, but it kind of facilitates it. So it makes it possible, the fact that we now have these really wonderful ships with the keel and with the sail, but even that is being pushed back a little bit. So we now know that the earliest Viking ships that we would recognise as such probably date to about 750 as well. Well Kat, 750, isn't that around about the date of Salmo? Because you have written about this and I've been lucky enough to visit this wonderful island in the Baltic off Estonia? Yeah that's right yes very dangerous. Discovered during the building of a school I believe, an amazing ship burial which we cannot go into all the detail

now, but it's one of the most brilliant bits of archaeology, I think, of my lifetime. All sorts of weird and wonderful details. For example, it was actually not a burial, was it? We believe the ship was actually left as a kind of a monument above the ground. So we don't quite know because so much of it eroded away afterwards. It's possible that it was covered with a mound, but that's vanished, so we don't quite know. But yeah, it's actually two ships next to each other. But the largest one was really quite spectacular. In total, they contained, I believe, 41 men buried, all died of very violent injuries. And it's quite spectacular. The grave goods are really spectacular as well. There's lots of weapons, animals, sacrifices, gaming pieces. It's a really quite incredible grave.

And the bent swords, the symbolic bent swords, which are beautiful. Please go and look that up after this podcast, everyone. It's one of the great sites. So that's 750, that's before Linzwan. And they seem to be from Sweden, don't they? Yeah, so there's now some really exciting scientific evidence on that, looking at those bodies. So both DNA and strontium isotope analysis very strongly support that they were not local at all, but that they came from southeastern Sweden, which is exactly what the artefact suggests as well. So that's really backed up. So that's an important reminder that features a lot in your book, that this so-called Viking Age, it occurred in the Northwest Atlantic, so the northwest of Europe, the Isles, Normandy,

of course, Paris famously. But it's just as important there was a push to the East as well. Yeah, I think that's what we're seeing more and more. And that's what I wanted to really point out in my book, that actually those two parts of the Viking world were very, very closely connected. And we've kind of treated them as separate for so long. So you have people studying the Vikings in the West and then other people studying the Vikings in the east and there have been sources and artefacts so we've known that you know it's not new that Scandinavians went to the east as well but it's that connection it's that link between the two that's something that we're really now starting to see just how

closely connected it was and that's through archaeological evidence it's through objects and things turning up in England as well that are quite surprising in many ways. And so let's talk about the geography then, I guess. I love boats. As a long-time listener to this podcast, we'll attest to, it's an awful lamented fact. But what really excites me about the Vikings, they're oceanic seafarers in the West,

but to the East, it's about rivers. It's kind of a riverine empire. If you go in through the eastern Baltic in a shallow draft longship, where can you get to? You can get reasonably far. You can start going down the rivers, but quite soon you get to some larger lakes as well. But at some point you do need to deal with things like rapids. You need to go over land. There's lots of portages. I think it's extremely unlikely that you can sail a ship, even though some of the saga suggested that you could sail a ship from Sweden and all the way down to the Black Sea. You probably would have to stop. You would have to drag your

boats across. And we have some brilliant records that actually tell us about some of those portages and some of the ways that they dealt with that. Some of the local boats as well. So quite often, not talking about the big Viking ships that we might find in Scandinavia, but you're talking about smaller vessels that are really suitable for the rivers. So those sort of logistics of travel is something that we're also really starting to open our eyes to now. And why were they traveling? What were they up to? Is it fire and sword or is it trade, exploration, curiosity, settling? Is it fire and sword or is it trade, exploration, curiosity, settling?

It definitely seems to start with a trade. So we start seeing these trading settlements. The first one, I think, most likely seems to be Staria Ladoga, which is just to the east of St. Petersburg, so not too far from the Salma ship. And that really is a kind of entry point into these rivers. And that begins probably somewhere again around 750. And we start to see Scandinavian artefavian artifacts a clear Scandinavian presence there but there's a lot of objects there's craft objects there's things being traded and it seems peaceful so there's no fortifications there's no weapons

it's not somewhere just to sort of defend that really happens a bit later on so I think it seems to very much start with that trade and the spread and expansion in and we have objects like furs especially going south and also slaves so there's a lot of slave trading going on and the vikings obviously were brilliant at this they were very prolific slave traders taking people from all over the place and trading them and in return they get a lot of luxury goods, things like silver and silks, even things like spices and beads, which is one of the things I talk about in the book as well. So there's this clear good exchange. The Vikings seem really, really good at taking advantage of various natural resources that they know are really desirable in other parts of the

world. And you mentioned silk, you mentioned spices. I mean, do we need to start thinking about this in terms of that avalanche of scholarship we've been hearing about over the last 30 years now about the importance of that Eurasian trading route, the kind of centrality of it? Is this the Vikings plugging into that, but coming in from the Northwest? Absolutely. I think that's just what it is. And they find a way to tap into those networks. Those networks are already existing. So Silk Road networks, and they find a way of essentially just extending their own trade, building on some of those earlier connections, taking over some of the local people, some of the local groups. They sort of take advantage,

find a little niche, and essentially are able to very rapidly bring all those goods right back to the north. That's something we haven't really seen before the Viking Age. We see goods going to the west, we see them going to places like Britain, but it's usually through the Mediterranean and this sort of eastern back route, which is so effective, that really starts sometime then in the 8th century. In your book, it's almost unbelievable how far east they get. Looking at the archaeology, what are some of the more recent finds and scholarship? And just explain to everyone just how far into Asia Viking traders and Viking goods were penetrating. The furthest east, unfortunately, we don't have that many definite really far east connections. A lot of them are from the written sources. And written sources tell us that the Vikings certainly raid around the Black Sea, they go to the Caspian Sea,

they're quite a menace around the Caspian Sea in the 10th century and onwards. And we also know that they travel then overland to Baghdad, so they go from the southern shores of the Caspian and overland to Baghdad. And from there it seems that they are getting a lot of these goods that we see back home in Scandinavia that come from places perhaps like in the Indian Ocean region as well. So we have things like beads especially going all the way back up north. What we haven't really found yet is the definite evidence of the pupils. We haven't got any burials, we haven't got any Scandinavian artefacts in the Caspian Sea region for example, but we are starting to find some more in Turkey for example. There's a lot of work going on in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine,

with objects with definite Scandinavian origins. So hopefully it's just a matter of time before we find something further east as well. I mean, that's east enough for me, dude. This little sunburnt Brit, the Caspian Sea feels like a pretty exotic destination to go raiding and trading, as far as a Viking. Initially, it's trading. Does the sword follow the merchant? I think for a while they definitely go hand in hand and i think it's a matter of you can be peaceful if that works

and if it doesn't you bring the sword out and you raid and you attack so they seem very adaptable i think they seem very able to just see what they can take advantage of so especially the relationship with constantinople and by santium and that trading that goes on between the Rus and the Scandinavians and Constantinople. There are lots of written sources that show us that the trading relationships are actually functioning quite well for a lot of the time. But at the same time, there are attacks as well. So it just seems to be whatever works, whatever opportunity they can take advantage of. But the trade is always there in the background. And it's clear that the goods coming into those other parts of the world,

so anywhere from Constantinople eastwards, is so beneficial that it's worthwhile for other people to trade with the Vikings as well. You're listening to Downstone's History. We've got Kat Jarman on again. She's talking about the Vikings. More after this. the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. What about settling? In England, after the original raids, they come to settle what became

known as the Danelaw, but in fact, all over England, they eventually commute in the 11th century, what Swain thought bid, conquers England successfully. What about in the East? Talk me through kind of Rus and what Rus means and whether it's the ancestor of Russia and why all that's quite contested. Yes, this is a really big multi-million pound question, actually, that everybody wants to answer. How many of the Scandinavians really did settle there? And are they one and the same as the Rus? This word Rus, this name is a really interesting one. And it's actually one that we first hear about in one of the Frankish annals.

So from what is now France is an entry from the year 839. And it's in an account of a visit made to Louis the Pious, who was the emperor at the time. So he has this group, a delegation coming from Byzantium, and they bring with them some people calling themselves the Rus. And he had never heard of the Rus before. And he was very suspicious. He thought they were probably spies. And he interrogated them for quite some time. And eventually they explained a bit further and they said that they were Swedes, basically, so who we would call the Vikings. And this is in the early 9th century.

And then later on, that same name appears again in documents like the Russian Primary Chronicle, which is a sort of origin story for the Russian state, which we don't quite know whether it's true or not. And in this one, we hear that in the 860s, there's complete turmoil in the land of the Slavs, so what's now Russia and Ukraine especially. And they ask for help, essentially, from this group coming from the north, asking them to help them rule over their country because they can't do it themselves.

And the call was answered by somebody called Rurik and his brothers, and they essentially come and set up the state of the Rus, which then becomes the Rusians or the Russians. So that is the sort of second origin story, the second time. So from the records, it seems like these Rus are Swedes, that they are Vikings, essentially. But then obviously, that's quite contentious, because we don't know if that's really true. And it's suggesting that the Slavic peoples were unable to rule for themselves, which is obviously not a very popular history,

at least not in recent times. So that's the kind of historical basis. And then we have all these Scandinavian artefacts, but it's really difficult to tell if the objects are being traded or if people are bringing them themselves. So the question is still open, I think, but we now know that there's a lot of contact,

there's a lot of people, but the question of ethnicity and cultural origins is probably quite a complicated one. So from the East, let's track back to Central Europe and then Western Europe, and maybe even North America as well. Am I being thick? Do I not hear about Viking penetration

of the Oda, the Vistula, the Rhine, and those great Europeans quite as much as I hear about them on the western seaboard of Europe? Does Central Europe get away without too much in the way of Viking raids? It seems to be that most of the raids certainly are in the sort of fringes, really, of Europe. So you have far more on the coast of France and even Spain going down into the Mediterranean. And then there's not quite so much happening in the centre

of Europe as it were. So I think that is in part because of the internal politics and the fact that it's much more difficult to launch large raids going south or going on those rivers than it would be along the coast for example so it's on this eastern side of europe that the vikings make themselves particularly felt presumably again that sub-geography point i mean it's not beyond the wit of man to ride an easterly wind over from denmark or norway to hit the east coast of scotland the northeastern east coasts England. Yeah, no, absolutely. It's actually a really quite short distance from western Norway as well, along to the Orkneys and the Isles, the Northern Isles.

It's actually quite a straightforward trip. Let's talk about the west now. Geography makes England, Scotland, Ireland, western France very vulnerable to seaborne raiders. What brings the Vikings west? That's a good question as well. At the start of the Viking Age, it seems like the richest, there's a wealth that they can find in these undefended monasteries is a clear attraction. So I think in an early phase, that probably is one of the main

reasons why they start spreading to the west. But then quite soon, we have people definitely in search of settlements so one of these theories for why the viking age kicked off in the first place was demographic pressure that people did not have quite enough land not on a farmland that there was political competition back home especially in places like norway so that would have been a factor too but it's from about the 820s 830s onwards we start to see a bit of a step up so you have more sort of larger scale attacks and then from at least the 860s we're beginning to get clear signs that they're looking for political conquest they're not just looking for hit and

run raids they're not just looking for trinkets to take home and sell but they are trying to take over and then the Vikings very much become involved in politics in places like England and Scotland and Ireland as well. And it sort of starts a new phase. You then have the Great Army, especially. And that's when from the 870s that the written records tell us that these are people who are settling. They are actually taking land and they're sharing it out among themselves and they're starting to farm, which is interesting because we have that in the records. We don't know if the same thing happens in the East, but it's really quite possible. Perhaps that's also

another place where you're looking for farmland or looking for somewhere to live, but certainly in the West. And when they developed the settlement at Jorvik, York today, obviously built on the ruins of a significant Roman city, that becomes, according to your book, almost a terminus of this great route that leads right the way back into Central Asia. So often people can think of the Vikings in the UK as almost sort of quite barbaric, but if anything, they were introducing trade goods, quite a cosmopolitan worldview into York at that time. Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. I think they're very heavily involved in trade. And some of these settlements really served as a bit of a catalyst, I think, for a lot of economic development and cultural development, things like art. And obviously, the Vikings had a huge impact on the English language.

So I think we tend to kind of give the violent sides a bit too much emphasis. It's not to say that a lot of them weren't carrying out some really atrocious things, but actually the overall effect was one that had a huge impact on the country in terms of things like the development of towns, like York, like lots of other places, especially in the east and north of England. And then of course, we can't talk about anything on the podcast these days without discovering the importance of pandemics in the past and you've got a really important idea about a Viking Age pandemic and we talk about the 20th century pandemics caused by this remarkable mixing of populations, globalisation, whether it's the armies gathering for the First World War that led to the Great Influenza, or whether it's the huge migrations

that occur today. But actually, you would argue that the Vikings tripped off something quite similar. Yeah, so this is something that came out, actually, I was just getting towards the end, I'd written my first draft of the book, and then a new study was published, and I had to add another little section to it. Because some scientists working on ancient DNA of a huge range of sample from across the world actually were looking for the smallpox virus or the earliest evidence of the smallpox virus and they identify 13 samples of people who died with this virus turns out that all of these were associated with Viking sites all dating to the Viking age and none of them any earlier than that. And that

was really quite remarkable, because when you then start digging into it, who those 13 individuals were, there seems to be a really interesting pattern. Turns out two of them were from Viking or Rus sites in Russia. A lot of them were from sites in Scandinavia that have a lot of mobility, so island sites like Erland, for example, where we already know that there's a huge amount of mobility. And then there was one in England, which I think is the earliest evidence of smallpox in England, from St. John's College in Oxford, which is a mass grave thought to relate to St. Brice's Day massacre of 1002. So there was one man in that grave who died with the virus although not of it because he was like brutally murdered unfortunately but it turns out that somebody else from the same group was actually related to

another burial in Denmark of another man who also had the smallpox virus so we have family members across the North Sea where you have the virus in one place and in the other and then you have all these other sort of Scandinavian connections as well. And I don't think it's a coincidence that this happens in the Viking Age. They were studying skeletons from a huge long period. I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened in the Viking Age because this is when we start to see this huge globalised travel and travelling really rapidly as well.

So you can go from Englandland to scandinavia and all the down the rivers really really quite fast and taking with them things like smallpox so i think there's something really interesting in looking at the spread of disease and the new mobility that we have at that time it was a strange thing to discover and to write about during the first pandemic in our lifetime just before you go actually i do want to write about during the first pandemic in our lifetime. Just before you go, I do want to ask about one thing. People have heard me discuss on the podcast the role of women in the Viking world. And I get kind of criticised for it rightly because we kind of buy into this myth about warrior women. And for some reason, we get much more excited about it in the Viking world than other cultures.

But is there something about the place of women in Viking culture and certainly mythology and perhaps politics as much as we can work out that you think is different from other early medieval contemporary cultures? It's an interesting one. It's a tricky one to tease apart what we mean by these terms of what is an actual warrior and what is a female warrior. And I think that's where it gets a bit contentious. But it seems to me what's really important to understand is that women in this time period could be in quite serious positions of power. And I think the best evidence of that probably is in the Oseberg ship burial, which is one of our most wonderful ships ever discovered in the Viking Age. This gorgeous, huge big ship dating to about 834 with extremely elaborate grave goods, something like 15 horses and all sorts of equipments. And this happens to be the grave of two women. And we

believe this would have been at least one of them, somebody who might have been a queen or a local ruler of some sort. But the important thing is that at that point, you could be in that position of power, you could be buried with so much wealth, which must mean that you had this really high social standing. And she wasn't the only one, there's historical records of others as well. So whether or not they were fighting, I think, to me, that doesn't really matter. It's the fact that we have these women who are playing a huge part in politics and in society, which I think is quite unusual from other times. And we don't necessarily know about them from the written sources, but they are there.

Well, thank you very much for that, Kat. Thanks for coming back on the podcast. Tell everyone what the book is called. My book is called River Kings, A New History of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads, and it's out on the 18th of February. And that book's out now, so everyone hurry up and buy it. And then Kat, you and I discussed whether we do a major British road trip in the footsteps of the great heathen army, which I cannot wait.

Yeah, definitely. We need to do that. We need to track them down and find them. As soon as this lockdown is lifted, we're going on the war path. Kat, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me.

I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free.

Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, explores the ideas of the man

who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.