Empire: World History - 387. The Vikings Invade Britain (Ep 5)

Episode Date: August 16, 2026

Why did the Vikings invade Britain, and how did they mix into society? What did they do with the gold they stole from churches? Which Viking stereotypes are true - and which ones are total myths? In Episode 5 of this series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple are joined by Dr Eleanor Barraclough, author of Embers of the Hand, to discuss the dramatic arrival of the Vikings in Britain. They dismantle Viking stereotypes, and explore how the raiders reshaped British society. Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over.   For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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OnStar, better never stops. Hordes of tall, bearded men in horned helmets arriving on the British shores and pillaging the coast. This is the Viking stereotype. Many of us were fed as children, and we loved it. And we know that the helmets actually had. no horns, but what else did we got wrong? In this episode of Empire, we are joined by our wonderful friend, Eleanor Baraklough, to discuss the arrival of the dragon ships. Who were the Vikings? What gold bling did they steal from the monasteries like Iona? And how did they not only invade, but settle

the British House? Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durimple. I think this has become so much of our cultural consciousness. It's basically, it's, It's a cartoon stereotype, isn't it? Raiders coming from across the North Sea, hitting up the monasteries around the coastlines of the British Isles and Ireland. And we've got it in our head. It's blokes with beards and boats and battle axes. You know, it's very much.

Every child at primary school can paint that image. You have two splendid boys who are at primary school at the moment with Viking haircuts, I seem to remember. Yeah, there is a whole long plat thing going on right now because of the heat. Yeah, exactly. But even they know, and this is important to say, you do not draw your Viking stereotype cartoons with horned helmets. Although having said that, my signature actually has exactly that in it. I get into trouble sometimes to all children come up to me and say, no, no helmets. I mean, what's interesting is that Norway, though, you know, some of Scandinavia embraces that stereotype themselves.

I mean, we are recording this just after England's fabulous victory over Norway, by the way, and the number of Norwegian fans with horned helmets on sitting in the stands was extraordinary. I am absolutely living for these Norwegian fans, even though Norway is technically out of the World Cup, as far as I'm concerned, they've won. And we've got these images of, you know, even down to little toddlers,

up to all the fans in the stands doing their roo, and they're rowing their boats. But there's one fan in one of the games who was refusing to row. He was just sitting there with his arms folded, and someone asked him why. And he explained, because they didn't row, they had square sails. They were sailing.

But you know they did have oars. They had both, didn't they? I'm sure he had a lovely time with his hands folded, arguing with everyone around him. Can we talk, though, I mean, you know, if not the horns, but this idea that they did sort of hit monasteries and hit them hard, and, you know, the monks had no means of defending themselves. Is that true?

You know, they didn't have any way of keeping these guys out, and therefore they could just come and white, you know, sort of rush through them like a storm. Yeah, exactly, exactly that. They are absolute sitting ducks. And I think that's the problem that behind the stereotype, sometimes we forget that there are real victims and real deaths here. And that's what we see in the annals.

You know, so there's the sentence describing 68 monks killed on Iona in 806. They've already potentially been attacked twice in 802 and 7995. And of course, two years before then, we're familiar with that iconic attack. on Lindisfarne 793 off the coast of north-east England as it is now. Which you did wonderfully in Anglo-Saxon for us last year. We were all in the pub and I did a rendition because you accused me of reading off a screen. I was like, sir. Can I just say that in the pub by the river, Eleanor owned you, my friend.

Go on, show our readers. Here were a rae that coming off in Northumberland on the folk emmlich breakdown. There were in Likresas and Furren the Draken were in sewing on them. flew of the fluega now. Sorry, the translation of that, can I just translate it? Shut up, Willie. Shut up. So just with these raids, if you said that, you know, they raided twice before, were they

always bloody and were they, because there's 68 monks killed sort of hangs in the air, as if it was something quite new, novel and grotesque. But each time they came, I don't suppose they bought flowers. I mean, what was it like? No, I think, yes, they did not bring flowers. I think 68 is probably bad. It's hard to tell numbers. Other than the annals, the way we can look for evidence of what happens is, for example, on visual art. There's that very famous raiderstone from Lindisfarne itself, a grave marker from a few decades later. These guys with the hands of the arm. Exactly. There's these seven figures and they're holding weapons and the weapons are raised and they're there to attack. We've also got from the other side, another island, but this time off the southwest coast of... Scotland, we've got this tiny little island of Inch Monarch and there they found, and there was a

monastery there, we don't know of any attacks there, tiny, tiny island. And there they found a piece of slate and on it someone had basically doodled what seems to be the image of this punk-haired Viking in chain mail carrying off, like literally leading like he's on the end of a fishing rod, a novice monk who's got a reliquary, this little box full of relics attached to him with a chain and this punk-haired raiding figure is leading him off to a Viking longship. Now, what's interesting there is he's not on the floor dead, he's not surrounded by corpses, he's being taken off either to be sold into slavery or if he's important enough to be ransomed back. And again, we know from the annals that if they were particularly high status, people would pay for their return.

So it's not always bloody. It can be that they, basically they're after cash, portable cash and wealth and money and stuff they can take back to their girlfriend sometimes. I've got a question. We always have these two in opposition, particularly the Anglo-Saxons in Lindisfan and the Vikings. But they are sort of vaguely cousins, aren't they?

Their languages are related. The Anglo-Saxons think of Sutton Hu arriving in ships, not completely different to the Viking ships. These are related with, could they understand each other with the words? If they were captured, could the monk have talked a bit of Anglo-Saxon and been understood.

So there's a fabulous scholar in York called Matt Townend, and he wrote a book about this, and I once asked him for his intellectual scholarly summary of how they would have communicated, and he basically said, well, you know, I reckon with a few grunts and points and hand gestures and a few words, they'd have been all right. So you can hear it, for example, fish in Old English is F-I-S-C,

fish-pronounce. In Old Norse, it's F-S-K-E-S-K-E-S-E. So it just becomes a hard K. And you can hear that in later on when they settle a place named like Skippton, for example, that ship skip word again. So there's plenty that's similar enough, but it's not the same language. What's interesting is that genetically it's very hard to tell them about because Anglo-Saxon settlers, as we think of it, come from parts of southern Scandinavia as well as what's now the Netherlands

and so on when they come over the North Sea and settle Britain. I think when we were in the pub, we were talking about my old. professor, a lovely man called John Porter, who did the translation of Beowulf. And I remember him reading Old English and then Old Norse poetry. And the cadences are the same. So they may, you know, genetically very similar, some words different, but they, you know, they really were very, very much alike. Exactly. They're both Germanic languages. I think technically, or golly, Old Norse is sort of North Germanic and I think Old English is West Germanic. So they've come out a bit. So Frisian is probably the closest to Old English. But yeah,

Absolutely, particularly when I read them, because I basically read them both with an old Norse accents. Oh, wonderful. Oh, I love that. I love that. Now, so, I mean, what we're talking about then is, you know, the Raiders arriving on the horizon with no warning and absolutely very little capability for people to repel them. And that really tells us what, so people often say, who are the Vikings? What does Viking mean? And it's basically exactly what you describe. Viking just means a raider or a pirate. There's an old Norse word. vikinger, and again, if we're talking about similar languages, the old English version of that is just weching. It's the same word, once again. It just means a pirate or raider. And so when we

think of the Viking Age, technically speaking, we are talking about the period in which these raids take place. But of course, it's not an ethnic descriptor and not everyone in the Viking Age is raiding, and that's not the only thing that happens in the Nordic world. And not even people who do raid are always doing it. It's something they tend to do over the summer when they're young, when they're trying to sort of increase their wealth and status. But how much does this destroy that golden age of Northumberland that's producing the Lindisfan Gospang Gospang, because every one of these sites that gets excavated, whether it's Lindisfan or Pothamak, which we had in Gordon's picked episode, with these wonderful

vellum being produced and maybe the home of the real home of the Book of Kells, which I'm very god of this idea. These are all burnt, I own a four or five times. I mean, this is, you know, I'm all for giving the Vikings a decent hearing and saying they haven't got horned helmets on, but they're not doing much for ecumenical relations here. They are most definitely not doing much for recumical relations. No, exactly. So, yeah, the evidence from Port Mahanuk is exactly that. It's burning. It's metal work smashed. It's this idea that the monastery's productive life is being violently ended. Sometimes it takes time. So in the case of Iona, we have at least three raids. And there's nowhere to hide. I went there recently. And I'm just thinking, because I hadn't taken it, it was three different raids. And there's one little hillock at the top, but you'd be very obviously visible if you tried to hide anywhere in that island.

The Vikings could have got you in 20 minutes. Exactly. And it's the same on Nindisfan. You know, on Nindisfan, it's incredibly flat. And the really scary thing about Viking ships, again, you know, exciting. And as we say, we just had the World Cup. It's all very sort of in our minds as this exciting cultural moment. But the whole reason that Viking ships were very flat-bottomed with these very subtle, flexible clink. built style hulls is so they could get into these very shallow bays. And sure, you might want to

get into these shallow bays, like on Iona, like on Indusvan, if you're trading, but also if you're raiding, you're there and they can't get away. There's nowhere to hide. And that's a really terrifying thought. In the case of Iona, that third raid, as you say, it's potentially the third raid in 11 years. And eventually we see these communities packing up. It's not necessarily just because of these raids, but there's something fundamental. They're striking at the heart of those monastic communities. Do we have an account from the people who lived through it? I mean, what did they describe? Because it's an attack on their God. It's an attack on, you know, the person that they kneel before and a defeat in many ways in their eyes, I suppose, of their gods and their

emissaries on Earth. So what do they think about it? What do they say? Yeah, the language is biblical. It's apocalyptic. So Alcuin, he's writing from the court of Charlemagne, but he's from around York somewhere and he knows those monastic communities around the northeast of England as it is now very well. So he writes to them, he says things like, this is after Lindisfan, he says never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we've now suffered from the pagan race. So it's this idea, and then other accounts talk of this terror from the north. And it's this idea that from the north evil breaks forth. And so they're absolutely setting it up in these apocalyptic terms of Christians versus pagans and, you know, good versus evil. That's how they're understanding it. And it absolutely

makes sense that that's the case. And that's from, you know, the last decade of the 8th century, at least, that's when we see these raids being recorded for the first time, but they then carry on. And a lot of the stuff that we have from the Golden Age before it, whether it's in Pictland or in Northumberland or in Mercia, is moved to safety at this point, isn't it? We have the, or it's hidden. So the St. Ninian's Isle treasure is probably buried to hide from the Vikings, while the Book of Kells, this famous Pictish manuscript, is carried from Scotland to its colonial home in Ireland.

You're going to get to so much up. Do you know what he's doing? He's starting some kind of British Isles warfare because he's so thrilled that the Scots might have originated the Book of Kels. Just in case you were wondering, Eleanor, what you've walked in on. That's what this is. It was a gleam. I have a festival.

in Trinity College Dublin and Jaipur has it seen and I've at war with the with the display there which makes it this Irish manuscript exclusively Irish and it's clearly you know anyway. And it's also true of the Lindisfan Gospels. They're made, they're very similar in some ways artistically speaking. They're made around 700 so you know nearly a century before that famous raid on Lindisfan and what's really interesting is if you think of what the raiders are after these Viking raiders They are not after the theological text. They don't care about the parchment, the vellum inside. They care about the bling.

They're wrapped in, yeah. And it's a bit like the reliquaries. They are well up for the reliquaries. They take the reliquary boxes, and you find them sometimes in the graves of Norwegian females from the period. You have one. She's even put her name in ruins at the bottom. It says, Rannweig owns this casket.

It's basically taking a nice present home, you know, turning them into brooches. In the case of the Lindisfan Gospel cover, It looks like there was once one, and it was beautiful, it was made by a metal worker called Bill Fleith. But then it's probably ripped off by the Raiders. That doesn't survive. And eventually, the community of Lindisfan leaves quite a few decades later, I should say, and sets off... With the body of St. Kaufman.

Exactly. Exactly. And then they do this little road trip, as it were, all around the northeast. Chesterler Street and up in Durham. I mean, I'm a big fan of that because I used to work up in Durham. That's where I was a lecturer for many years. And I was even a member of St Cuthbert Society, which is one of the colleges. And so very close connection.

And the fact that we've still got his body, we've got his relics. We've got the pectoral cross with the equal arms. Yeah. Or just in Durham Cathedral now in the Treasury. I love in the Lidivand Gospels the fact that the interlace in that is made from the gannets that you can still see fishing in the sea off Lindisfarne and off the May Isle. Yeah, it's the most, it's one of those things where you can really feel that, the embeddedness of these cultural artefact in the landscapes that created them.

But we also have to remember that was true of the communities as well, for them. These were religious landscapes, you know, the islands off the coast of Lindersfarmes, where Cuthbert was as this hermit figure for many years. And so the destruction that the Vikings brought, to these holy places. It's not just the monastery itself. It's not just the killings of monks. It's not just the stealing of the beautiful treasures. It's that desecration of the sacred landscape. Well, that, I mean, that sacrilege that you describe of a woman putting her necklaces and, you know, sort of bobbins in what used to house a holy relic. I like the fact that they don't even try and

hide it. I mean, are there some where you've got an example of somebody basically fessing up to the cop saying, I stole this, I got it from the heathens, and I brought it back. You'll tell me what it says more accurately, but there's no, there are confessions carved in to some of the stolen booty. So this is a wonderful, but the confessions carved into the stolen booty, I think very much applies to Ranweig somewhere who owns this casket. And it's like, yeah, but you didn't make it. I suspect there because it's a bit later. This is actually an heirloom that's been passed down the women in her household for generations from that first raider. But this, I think, yeah, this wonderful one, it's the Codex Orius, the Golden Book.

And that tells us everything. This is a Bling book. This is the book of Bling, and that's why the Vikings wanted it. We know, and by this time, we're in Great Heathen Army territory. So we are in the, it was sort of 865, the Great Heathen Army. We're coming to the Heathen Army soon, yeah. We're not quite there yet. This isn't the first wave of raids. But the Codex Orius is clearly stolen from its religious context. And an Anglo-Saxon, a older man, called Alfred, and his wife, Werberg, ransom this book back. Basically, they hand over the gold that the Vikings want in order to give the book back to its religious community. And there's this wonderful little note that the elder man writes on top.

He says, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I, a elder man, Alfred and Werberg, my wife, obtain these books from the heathen army with our pure money that was with pure gold. And because we did not wish these holy books would remain longer among the heathens, and now we want to give it to Christ's church for God's praise. So twice there, it's heathens, it's pagans, versus the holy books. And then we've got the reference to pure gold. That sums up the whole matrix that's going on within that one book of gold. See, I completely misunderstood.

I thought those who took it off said, yeah, I nick this. And I'm not so clever. But actually, it is the people who get it back who say, this was stolen. back from the awful heathens. We're going to take a break here. Join us after the break when we travel from the idea of raiding to the idea of settlement. Welcome back. Now, we come to a crucial twist in the story because we often think of the Vikings raiding. We don't often so much perhaps think of them settling, but that's exactly what happens in 865. And I've got a personal story here because as an A-level student, I went down and worked at the dig at Repton. And we found

in the Vickers Garden in Repton, the Viking charnel house where the kind of S-A-S, these big strapping lads, all sort of like Norwegian strikers, sort of six-foot-five, were laid to rest in the first camp of the great army after they settled in England. This is the beginning of a move from raids to full-scale colonisation of the north. So take us here, dear Eleanor, take us to the Great Army. What are they up to? Why are they deciding to move? What's wrong with Norway? So this is the Mitchell-Herre, the Great Army, sometimes called the Mitchell-Herner-Hara, so the Great Heathen Army, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes it. As you say, arrives in 865, not a raid, it's a conquest now. So they land in East Anglia, they sweep through North

They capture York, I think 866, and then they sort of split off and move south and east. And that's a really important part. This isn't one mass. They're really flexible. It's been described somewhere as bands of brothers, which I think is a really clever description, because they're basically, they're coming in these boats. And within each of these boats, they already have the units. They have the leader. They have the people who are second in command. And so they, in a way, can transfer that quite nicely onto land. And so that means that various parties can join up for the big battles, but then they have that flexibility to go off in different directions. And yeah, by 8-7-3, they've established a winter camp at Repton, as you say, on the banks of the Trent.

Which they've sailed up in their longships. I'm so jealous that you've got to excavate that. I can't even tell you. If you look at the DNA of some of these bodies, you can see actually a story being told of, you know, this invasion settlement and then, you know, generation. melding. So this is the really interesting thing because I think, yes, exactly, there is some evidence in the DNA that we've got sort of various different levels of populations that sort of have more in common with those over the other side of the North Sea. But I was actually talking really recently to a geneticist at the Crick Institute who said, actually, it's much

harder to tell them we think because of the Anglo-Saxon population, because the Anglo-Saxons have also come, for the most part, from the various parts sort of slightly south, but also from across the North Sea, you've got something that is genetically already very different to, you know, way back in the midst of time when we're talking about the Britons and the Romans, we've got a very different setup already, which is culturally fascinating, because that also explains, for example, why they're able to basically point and grunt and use a few words and communicate. There's a lot in common here. Having said that, when we look at the bodies of the dead themselves, you know, at Repton, at mass burials of sort of young

warriors in kind of the context of this time. And then you do find really, really interesting parallels. One, now this is a little bit later. This is from a second wave of kind of Viking invasions and tension that comes in the wake of the settlement. You've got a mass burial from Oxford, and that's from around 1,000. And they found a young man there who'd been killed violently in this mass burial. And they found a second-degree relative of his over in Denmark, I think on Ornese.

And so they were able to bring these two together. So he was either uncle and nephew or half-brothers or grandfather and grandchild, something like that. Andrancy.com for the 10th century. Yeah, exactly that. So they brought them together for an exhibition in Copenhagen a couple of years ago. where we see that sense of settlement in England, let's talk about, but it's true all over

the British Isles, is in the language, in the place names. That's where we see that that's not raiding. You don't bring over your language, you don't bring over your place names if you're just in and out and grabbing a reliquary in a gospel book and a couple of monks. It's when you're settling, when you become part of that cultural landscape that we start to see it embedded in the landscape, in the place names, in the words themselves. A lot of people will have heard of Dane Law, you know, the Dane Law, which was this area of North settlement. But, you know, what you found actually is that that wasn't the outline. It's a much more dotted outline.

And, you know, that North settlement extends far beyond Dane Law. The interesting thing about the Dane Law, for a start, that word doesn't get used until a little bit later. I think, oh, just, I mean, not crazily later, but sort of, I think it first starts appearing in maybe even the 11th century, something like that. But what we see is this partition. Now, there is, so the era of the Great Heathen Army ends famously with the battles in the West between Gudhrum, who's one of the leaders, and Alfred of King Alfred the Great Fame. And after their final battle, they come to a peace agreement where Gudram is going to be baptized, he's going to be given a Christian name, and he's going to be sent off to rule East Danglia, but very crucially, Alfred stood in as his sponsor, his godfather, when he was

baptized, and so Alfred is very much, should we say, he's got the upper hand, which helps. Now, they draw up a bit later a very famous peace agreement where they talk about the line that's going to separate their legal territories. And it's sort of this line that goes up, through the Thames, up what's basically Watling Street, it's kind of going from southeast to northwest across the country. And north of that line, or up from that line, that's what we think of as the Dane Law. So it's the East Midlands, it's East Anglia, it's Yorkshire, it's Lincolnshire, and that's where we get this concentration of place names. Are we thinking of it a bit like partition of India and Pakistan? Are the populations moving in different directions?

I think there is definitely movement between. We have even in that agreement, they say things like we won't harbor each other's slaves, for example, or we will make sure that the amount of money, the wear-geld, for killing someone, is the same on both sides. And so it's not this sense of, here is a line, you will not cross it. I think it's very, and that's why that Christian element, that conversion of Gurdrum, now Athlstan, is so important, because we need that sense of parity, that sense of movement. But on the other hand, in terms of settlement, yes, there are Norse place names away from that line, but there's not many. So, Eleanor, what I want to know is what place names here in Britain do we get directly from

the Vikings? So obviously, Twat. We're starting with Twat. What obviously? Always a good start. But it's a version of Thwait, which we might be more familiar with from further south, sort of Yorkshire area. It means basically a meadow, a cleared area, something like that. And then you've got anything with a B-Y at the end.

Bew, that just means farms. So Grimsby, Whitby, Selby, Naysby, Derby. crossby, rugby. Thorpe. Thorpe. Yeah, so sort of skunthorpe, that sort of thing. Again, it's the, it's the, those kind of farming areas, and which is important. We think of Vikings reasonably as raiders, but here we are, have them as settlers and therefore farmers, and that's more important.

We've all got the personal names as well. Grimsby, Grimersby. Grimmer is a name, and it's his farm. Grimsby is a really good example of it. So, yeah, but, I mean, we, we, we. We can't not start with Twat. And then we also have, just to move on from Twat without pausing, we are moving on to Dingwall in Scotland, which is the place from the Parliament, the thing.

Dingwool is Thingwetler, the Parliament or Assembly Plains. And if anyone's been to Iceland, or if anyone is a geologist, they'll know Thing Vettler, which is the place in Iceland. They had the original Parliament. I think it's 934. They establish it, making it the oldest continuous parliament anywhere in the world. And it's the place where the two tectonic plates are moving apart, hence the Vettler of the Plains word. But yeah, we've got one in Scotland as well.

A Ness, that's another, another, Loch Nessie, is actually a Norse name, isn't it? Yeah, so Ness is another one. And there are a few like this where there's a sort of, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there's a, there are other equivalents that do the rounds, because these have really ancient. origins. But yeah, it's very interesting that we have lots of our oldest water names and mountain names in the British Isles in particular are actually Britonic. They're from even before the Romans come. Because people don't change the names of rivers. They found a farm, but the river's always there. Exactly, exactly. But then you get this new. And the interesting thing with some of these is that they are in parts of the British Isles that look more, more.

Nordic, maybe we might say sort of more Norwegian in particular, you know, have the long fjords and the fells and the mountains. So where it gets more dramatic, we start to see some of these new layers coming into those place names. Can we, we, we haven't talked about Ireland though, have we? I mean, you know, Waterford, Limerick, Wexford, Cork. I mean, how have the Vikings left their fingerprints all over these places? That's a really interesting one because, yeah, Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, yeah, as you say, Wexford, Cork, all those. They are established, sort of properly, it's not that there's no one living there before, but they're established as these sort of lungfurt, these ship camps in the 9th century. So that same era as the Great

Heathen Army. And then they become permanent trading settlements quite quickly, sort of within a generation or so. Some of these place names are very sort of Irish, kind of Celtic language elements. But sometimes you end up with Norse versions of those. So Dublin, Duflin, it's like the dark pool. And then you have a Norse version of that Duflin. And then you have a Norse version of that dufflin and then we have modern Dublin. But there are a few that are north. So I think Waterford, it's not quite clear. It might be something like Vether, so it's a sort of ram fjord, something like that, a weather. We get the same thing, Weatherby, you know, sheep farm, basically, same thing. My favourite, and so I really hope this is true, but this is my understanding,

is Carlingford. So Kirling afyodor, and a karling, a kirling, is an old hag. nothing to do with the lager no weirdly i kind of always assumed it was but i think it's something to do with those three peaks it's like the three nuns peaks but you often have um they don't bother with nuns they they have they often have like the old woman the old man the hag yeah the troll that's that's the sort of nordic version of that i also i should say i have a very personal connection to one of them which is hooth which is that peninsula on the north side of dublin which is from old north her theatre, such like head, basically. Apparently my grandfather was conceived on that very

peninsula on a wild night out once back in, I don't know, back in the 1920s or 30s. So that was his middle name. Did your granny tell you that lovely story? How do you know? They gave to it as a middle name. It was like, you know, like, Brooklyn's sort of thing. It was obviously a good night. Your family gatherings have very different conversations to mine. Like, just that's what I'm thinking. Orkney is somewhere which I always grew up thinking of as being the most sort of Nordic of all the places in Scotland where until what the 17th 13th century they spoke Norn which was a kind of version of Norwegian. Yep, exactly that, exactly that. So Orkney is and Shetland, so the Northern Isles, absolutely. Those are Nors. And they continue being Nors. So when we think of, you know, when is the end of the Viking Age? Well, we've got these like important Norse settlements off the northern coast of mainland Scotland. Scotland, going into the 15th century, and exactly as you say, there's a form of Old Norse that's still the main language there until I think it's about 1800 or something like that. You see it in the place names. I mean, the most obvious example would be something like Kirkwall, which is on the mainland, and it's sort of where you have St. Magnus Cathedral, very much a kind of Viking or at least Norse Cathedral because of the... St. Magnus, yeah.

And Kirkwall is just Kirky-Vaugur. It's the church bay, basically, after that. So, yeah, that's a very, very strong connection that keeps on going. And it's still part of there. You go to the airports at Kirkwall. You've still got runes that they've put over the top, so Kirkwall is pulled out in ruins. Brilliant.

Eleanor, so, you know, with all of this settlement going on and displacement, if you like, of what was there before, what happens to the monasteries? I mean, are they, wherever the Vikings go, the monasteries don't exist anymore? I mean, just give us an idea of what happens. You have the ones that suffer repeatedly early on. You know, we've mentioned, you know, Iona and Linda Svarn, and then Clon McNois and Quark and all the other armour.

But the interesting thing is that as North settlement becomes permanent, that relationship between the settlers and the surrounding community also changes. And, of course, that surrounding community also includes the local religious communities. We're going to be doing a lot more on the next episode where we're still holding out for zombies, but certainly going into mythology and all this amazing syncretism, which I did not grow up with at all, the idea that you get people preaching parallels between Christianity and the North Smith, but that's for the next episode. But just give us an idea of how it pans out by the 10th century, when these guys are settled,

they've got the Dane law. what is left of the old Anglo-Saxon world and the old Pictish world? Yeah, so this is a really, so, I mean, I'll leave the Picts to Gordon, definitely, but it's not that this, so the problem is that we have this other layer that is much fainter, to mix my metaphors, a much fainter echo than the Norse stuff in terms of, so that pre-Christian religious belief and practice, because of course the Anglo-Saxons also came in as pagans and then they become Christianised. And so you're sort of seeing this rebooting of the same thing under the Norse. I already mentioned how Gudram, one of these leaders of the great heathen army,

is converted to Christianity and then is allowed to become king, very much an Anglo-Saxon king of East Anglia. If we look at his coins, we can see, you know, it's got his name on the coins, but they're absolutely Christian Anglo-Saxon style coins. He's got a cross in the centre. But having said that, You've got some really interesting, slightly later examples where there are still hints of this syncretism. So there's a really good example of this from York. And this is, it's called the St. Peter's Pence. And it's a coin, and I think it's, I want to say, like the early 10th century, something like that. And you have a Christian cross on it.

It's very obviously Christian. But you've also got a little Thor's hammer. Just there, just put on there, just like worked into the lettering. And so it's a sense there that maybe this is about religious belief, but it's also saying something about cultural identity that's very important. We were talking about how Bath is one of those places that transfixes reluctant small people. And York is another one, Yorvik, because it is absolutely fascinating and in your face synergy between cultures. Can you tell us a little more about Yorvik, York? Yeah, there is nothing like York.

So Irfowicz, which is the old English name, becomes, as you say, Jorvik, the Old Norse equivalent. There were these incredible excavations, the Coppergate excavations in the 70s and 80s. And what's really unusual about that is that they revealed this thriving urban settlement, which isn't typical. We think of typical or representative. It really isn't. It's so unusual in terms of its density, the complexity. You know, we've got workshops producing amber and jets and antler. We've got metal objects. We've got evidence of long distance trading with Byzantium and the Islamic world and Scandinavia, of course.

And we've got my absolute favourite, and I'm sorry, it's not horny zombies, but I am going to bring down the tone, because we can't not talk about the Lloyd's Bank coprolite, which is the biggest fossilized human poo, I think anywhere in the world. And it is a chunky monkey. It's over 20 centimetres long. I think it's about five centimetres wide, something like that. And it's fascinating because it's one person's turd from Viking Age York. It tells us that, you know, they were eating bread and meats.

They had a hell of a lot of intestinal worms. My favourite fact about it is that about 20 years ago there was a school party visiting it, the teacher was allowed to hold it, dropped it and broke it into three pieces. And so this, you see it, it's being glued back together. I have seen it. I didn't see the glue marks. So, I mean, the thing is, York has done this so beautifully. I don't know whether we talked about this before, but when I took the kids, we went on

that, you know, they excavated down to the Scandinavian sort of layer, you know, the Norse layer. And you go on this little train journey past these mannequins who are reliving. And it's meant to have sort of smell of vision. And you go through quite a wiffy little bit. I mean, it's brilliantly done and considering it's really old. I mean, I don't know when they did this, when they built this, but you go down, you are part of that world, you hear the noises, and then you learn about the poop. And I mean, it's all fabulous.

I think it's one of the best places. It's fantastic. And it lasts. So, you know, from the time of the Great Heathen Army, so I don't know, about 866. And it comes and goes, you know, there's lots going on there. But we get to the middle of the 10th century, and that's when it's likely. Now, the problem is he is swathed in the midst of historical mystery, but we don't quite know what's going on.

But Eric Bloodax. We haven't had Eric Bloodax. We've got to have Eric Bloodax. Who was he? Tell us who is Eric Bloodax? Eric Bloodax is said to be the last Norse ruler. He's really shadowy. I think much more shadowy as a figure than people realize.

He also appears in some of the Icelandic sagas. So Eil's saga in particular, where Eil ends up, they're terrible enemies. And there he's given this incredible wife, I think she's called Gunnhilder, and she's a magical practitioner. She transforms herself into a bird and sings at a window all night to stop Eir from composing the poetry that will save his life. So he's a figure that all sorts of amazing myths and legends spring up about. But it looks like he was a real person.

and then he's killed at Stainmore out in the wilds, possibly fleeing from York, possibly fleeing to, not sure, but he's killed there. And so we then have it, I think, reverting from Norse hands. But what's interesting is that the city that emerges from that good century of Norse rule is still absolutely there. We walk around, you know, there's Gudrum Gate, Guzrum's Gathe, Gathe, Gathe means street, there's Micklegate, big street, streets. Coppergate. Coprigata, I think it's the woodworkers. Woodworkers, yes. All the Norse names. So it's this sense that it is permanently transformed. It's not just those layers of archaeology that are in themselves so fascinating. You know, at the beginning, we were talking about what happened in Lindisfarne and the fact that the people fled, you know, the monks fled,

their worshippers fled, and they carried with them the body of St. Cuthbert. We kind of left them I mean, how long have they been wandering around with this coffin and what happens to it eventually? Okay, so the community of St. Cuthbert is, really, it's a remarkable story within this remarkable period. They don't immediately abandon Linda Svon at all after that famous sack of 793. They stay for a, it's a good century after that nearly. But then I think it's 875, there's more Norse pressure. And so they leave. We've got Cuthbert.

We've got the Linda Svon Gospon Gospels. I think we've got the relics, you know, various, various saints relics as well, you know. So they're wandering around for several years. They're moving through Northumbria, Cumbria. They're looking for somewhere safe to settle. They, you know, they're at Chester-Lis Street for a while in County Durham. And then about a century later, there's more threat. This time I think it's Danish.

They move again and they finally settle in Durham in 995. And you think of Durham, it's basically, it's the Bailey. It's this, it's almost completely surrounded by water. this huge, very defensible, like, hill, basically. And so that's where they settle. And so the Lindisfan Gospang Gospels survived this, and the relics survive, the community survive. It only just, this is a remarkable survival.

It was much more likely that that wouldn't happen, but it did. It's all still there, isn't it? You get a Durham Cathedral, the pectoral cross, the fragments of the coffin. You can still see little incised images. It's wonderful. Ella, you described this catastrophe, and it turns out to be much more complicated. What does the Viking impact on the sacred world of Britain and Ireland look now to you from the vantage point of a historian, leaving aside now all the zombies and everything else,

when you think of it in your scholarly hat, what does it look like to you? I think it's not just one thing. I think it's about, yes, destruction, but also transformation. and it's really important that we're able to carry those two ideas together. So, you know, the destruction is real and we can't, as we said up top, we can't minimize what was lost at Iona and Linda's Fund, the lives, the culture. You know, it was traumatic and that's really important to say in terms of how the communities experience them.

But then that later transformation is equally real. And so the world that emerged from the Viking Age, and we've got Norse Irish cities, we've got the Danish cities, we've got the Danish place names, we've got the Dainlaw place names, we've got the earldom, that Yaldom on Orkney. We've got, you know, it's richer and it's stranger and it's more various than I think we sometimes give it credit for, because they are interacting with different people in so many different ways. And it's this idea that the islands, in some ways, sort of absorbed the Vikings, but in all these different flavors of what that looks like and what those interactions look like. Thank you so, so much. Now, we're going to stay with Eleanor, our wonderful guest in the next episode. And we're going to look specifically at the Norse effect on the religion of the sun. This series is all about the gods and the transformations

that take place with these different waves of migration. And this extraordinary world where you've now got the Vikings in York all over Cumbria, all over Scott, what's now Scotland and much of Ireland, how does it affect the religious faith and the beliefs and the mythologies of the people in these islands? And we'll be back for that in the next episode. And if you can't wait, you know what to do. Empowerpoduk.com, Empirepodukuk.com. Join our club.

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