Empire: World History - 51. Vikings: Slavs to Slaves

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

Indian beads found on a Viking in Britain, how did this come to be? The story includes the origin of the word slave, a surprising trade, and a horrific funeral ritual. Listen this week as Anita and William are joined by Cat Jarman to discuss the Viking slave trade. ***Tickets for the live show can be bought at the following link from 9am on Wednesday 10th May: https://robomagiclive.com/empire-podcast-live/. Sign up to The Knowledge here: www.theknowledge.com/empire/ LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/empire This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/empirepod. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunpool. You're very excited about today, aren't you? I'm very excited. This takes me back to my teens. Yes, now tell us.

Why? Because in my head, I have another nickname for you because of this story that you're going to tell. You are, in my mind, the venerable bead, because this is a bead story. Well, I was very not venerable, age 17, when I first arrived in the Vickers Garden at Repton by the extremely unstable chariot of Mark Horton's Reliance Robin, which was like a sort of piece of Tupperware on wheels, which Mark, who was the archaeologist in charge of the site, used to drive. me to each day. And this was me, I suppose, just beginning A-levels. And I was a mad, keen archaeologist in those days. And I'd read in a magazine about this site. And for once in my life, arrived at the

right time. On time? In advance, even, which is... I'm already disbelieving this story right from the outset. Okay, carry on. You arrived on time. Yes, yes. Arrides. No, in advance. In advance. And we stripped back the Vickers garden and found what turned out. out to be an enormous charnel full of Vikings who had attacked what had then been a very important mercy and royal centre, which had both, I think, a sort of political centre and was a religious centre around the shrine of St. Weston buried in the church. And some terrific fighting took place. And what we were digging up in the Vickers garden was a burial. site for the kind of Viking S-A-S. All the guys we were digging up turned out to be sort of six-foot-five

Scandinavians with enormous musculature and sort of straight out of some sort of Viking Chipperdale show. You could see all of this. You could see all of this from the remains. That's extraordinary. The people that were working on the bones came up with the details about our chaps. The Chippendale factor, yeah. But anyway, in the course of the season, one of us on the site, and no one remember who it is because I don't think any of us took much notice of it, came across a tiny cornelian red bead that none of us thought much about it, put straight into a plastic bag and forgot about, because it seemed to be much less exciting than all the other things we were digging up like shields and swords and bones and Vikings and this sort of stuff. And it was only when an extremely

brilliant and intelligent PhD student came across this bag many years later and put the dots together that it became the subject of her book. Kat Jarman, take the story forward. Can I just say before you pick up the bead and run with it, it is lovely to have you on. I know how busy you are, so we're very, very grateful that you've taken the time out. Kat has not one but two wonderful podcasts.

And has a book due. Any minute. Any minute. And is one of the most friendly archaeologists in the world. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for that introduction. And yes, I do like to podcast and dig at the same time. Ideally, and some writing.

That's all. It's good muscle tasking, isn't it, to try and do. But no, this bead, strangely just became a huge part of my life for several years and has this tremendous link, not just to you, but to so many other people as well. Because what he turns out was this big that was literally hidden in boxes and boxes of all the stuff that wasn't in the museum, it wasn't the saw and it wasn't the thoughts. That man, nothing exciting about it. But turned out to have the most remarkable story because it ended up in deepest, darkest Derbyshire and had come all the way

from India. So it'd come all the way from Gujarat in India. And I think the moment I realized that and what that meant, the implications of that was when I just couldn't, I couldn't put it down. And I had to sort of unpick that whole story. And it's a story that involves not just the Vikings, but all the other people they interacted with in England, in Scandinavia, through Eastern Europe, and all the way to the east, to the Silk Roads. And also the topic of today, so slavery, which was a huge part of the reason why that bead, which William neglected and ignored back in the 80s. None of us noticed it. I don't think any of us noticed it. Which is why William went into writing rather than archaeology, I'd venture.

You know, just maybe you went down the right avenue career path after that. She wasn't for you, mate. Okay. So it is a rather beautiful way of teeing up what we're talking about, because as you know, those of you who listen to us regularly, we are talking about slavery. Kat is the author of The Fabulous River Kings, the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads, sort of winds around the bead and so much more besides. If I could just jump in there, the book is astonishing because it does all sorts of really difficult things. I mean, it's not difficult to make the Vikings interesting. The Vikings obviously are one of the most sort of colourful and astonishing bits.

of history. But Kat is coming to it from the point of view of the sort of scientific archaeology, the biological and the complicated bits of archaeology, looking at people's bones and their, what you can tell of what they've eaten and where they've been and how you can use the bits of human detritus left in the ground to reconstruct whole histories. And this is more technical stuff. I mean, you know, when you start with the raw material of Kat's sort of archaeology, you have printouts of details of sort of carbon dating and all sorts of really technical stuff. And it's not easy to make it comprehensible and to turn it into a rip-roaring story. Cat has done that.

And River Kings, I reviewed it in the Financial Times when it came out. And it gave me such pleasure. I actually read it on a plane flying out to India. And normally I sleep on a night plane and go straight. sleep and wake up at the far end. I stayed awake the whole night reading this book solidly for six hours or seven hours because it is literally, rarely is this true of nonfiction, completely unput-downable. So before we say anything else, Kat Jarman, congratulations on one of the great history books that became the The Times History Book of the Year, beat all the others published

that year. Oh, thank you so much. That's so kind of you to say. I was quite terrified when my publisher was going to send it to you. I thought, oh, God, no, this is going to get wrong. I was very relieved to hear that you like it. But yeah, that's been part of my interest and passion is trying to get these really hugely exciting methods. Yes, they can be complicated and complex, but actually what they tell us is so important for understanding people of the past, who we are, what we've done. And we've got this new sort of revolution, really, in the methodology and what we can say now is stuff we couldn't, even when I started studying archaeology, we couldn't do their stuff. It's all new and it's all exciting and it's adding a new perspective.

Kat, tell us just very briefly, because we're talking about this, what you can do now with human bones that you couldn't do 10, 15 years ago. Yeah, so some of it is the radiocarbon dating, which we've refined really how we understand it. So we can look at some of the problems before was that there were lots of issues, lots of errors. We didn't take into account what people were eating. Yeah, so what we can do is we can go over and look at some of the complexities in how carbon gets into our systems. We didn't get that. That relates to what people ate. So we can now look at a bone and we can work out what sort of diet they had,

if they have a vegetarian, fish eaters or meat eaters. And that's traces in our bodies. We literally are walking diaries of our lives. And so if you change your diet, that will come up in your hair and your skin and your bones. And we can now tell that with really good detail, even changes over time. So if you change your diet now, that some of your bones will be different from others. And we can get that record. So when Anita Anand, you move from London to India and you start eating Indian food,

Cat or her descendants in generations to come, we'll see that in your bones. Oh, she'll see so much more besides stuff which I'd probably rather, nobody ever knew about. But it's okay, Kat. Absolutely. We hopefully have a while to wait for that. Look, I mean, you've ticked all of our boxes and you've tickled all of our bansies. You've just said in one sentence, Vikings, India, Silk Roads. What I really want to know is, you know, in Britain we are obsessed with this image of the Viking who storms over to Britain, sees it's a woman, flings her over his shoulder, goes back to a long boat, goes a pillogen, and then at the end of his mortal coil is on a long ship and is set fire to.

I mean, you've brought the whole aspect of the east into us. I mean, just tell us why we have it so wrong. I think that is just such a compelling image, is the one that's been used in literature. It's been in film, and TV, and it's quite, it's kind of exciting. People like that. It's sort of fun and it's sexy. Some of it is based on real sources. A lot of this did happen, but absolutely not to that extent. So I think popular culture has a lot to answer for in that.

And also some of these sort of nuances in there, which are really difficult to get out. But the other problem is that some of the sort of flip side to that is a lot of those people, we don't necessarily hear the stories, but we haven't got the written records. So we don't actually have the sources that tell us about the women. We don't really have sources. And I'll get into more detail about that later, I'm sure, about the slaves. We don't really have their stories. And so that very loud voice, which is of this sort of powerful male warrior, has become sort of the main narrative that we get.

That's not to say that it's not entirely untrue, but it's certainly the one that we hear most of. Well, Kat, I mean, what was so fascinating about digging at Repton in the mid-80s was that this is in the middle of that time, when historians were first challenging the notion of the Vikings as just sort of rapists and looters. And yet the site that we dug repped very much played to stereotype because it was indeed one of the sites of the Viking Great Army of, is it, 865? 873, yeah. 873, with a view to conquering Britain.

And it has all the hallmarks that you'd expect from your stereotypical Viking setup. up. It has lots of dead bodies. It has swords. It has shields. It has ramparts. They've pillaged and desecrated a royal monastery. And crucially for our story today, they've buried slaves there in what looked like ritual murders. We should say, we have listeners all around the world, cat. So we're sort of throwing the word Repton around with gay abandon. For those who don't know where it is and what it is, first of all, give us an idea of what is Repton and where is Repton. Yeah. So Repton today is a small village in Derbyshire, which is, inland in central England. So it's pretty much smack bang in the middle of England, really.

It's located on a river, the river Trent, which is one of the larger rivers that comes all the way up from, so if you trace it back, you get to the Humber and then you get to the North Sea. So you can actually, even though it's inland, you can actually get there by river, and that's actually really key when we understand the Vikings. But back in the 9th century, when the Vikings arrived from Scandinavia, this was one of the key senties of one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the Kingdom of Mercia, This was, as William said earlier in the introduction, this was one of the key royal sites. It was a key religious site.

There was a monastery there. And the king would have been associated with it. I didn't necessarily live there, but it was certainly associated. So it was kind of when this army, this great army that we just heard about, entered England and moved around, taking essentially one kingdom at a time. This Repton was kind of the jewel in the crown of Mercia. So by taking Repton, they essentially managed to take all of Mercia, which was a huge central kingdom at the time. And William sort of teasingly said, you know, that when he was looking and when you continue to look, there was evidence of slaves. When we're talking about Viking slaves, are we talking about local people they seized or people that they brought with them from elsewhere?

Who are the slaves of the Vikings? That's one of the big questions. That's one of those that we're really trying to answer. What they seem to be doing is that they are enslaving people pretty much. much everywhere they go. So there are certainly slaves in Scandinavian society back home. And some of them would have been Scandinavian people as well. But certainly we hear a lot about slave raids in Irish sources and in Scotland as well. So they are clearly taking people wherever they go. And when we get to the eastern part of the story, that's where this really becomes essentially a really big business

is something that's extremely lucrative and actually fueling a lot of the Viking Age as we know it. I mean, we're talking about people like Olaf and IFA. Olaf these days only means a friendly snowman in Frozen, but not so friendly when he was raiding Northern Ireland in 869. How many, I mean, tell me numbers. How many people were they, were they gathering up and enslaving? Again, we have absolutely no idea. There are some records that talk about them talking, you know, people in their hundreds or possibly even in thousands, but they leave no trace.

Nobody's written down exactly how many they are taking. And I think that's one of the reasons why we haven't really studied this in so much detail. It's because the sources just are not there. So the only thing we can really do is to try and look at things like, what are they getting in return? What wealth is coming back in return? Because actually the sale of the slaves is one of the key aspects. Not really so much for own use, but actually for the trade, yeah.

Kat, before we discuss the wider Viking slave trade and the whole story of the Rus and so on, just home in still to that Repton Vickers Garden, to the site there. And you found in the garden these bodies that seemed to be captives that had been richly sacrificed. Talk about them as just a very specific example. Yeah. So there is this one large mass grave of this charnel that you talked about earlier on. And that was, there was a huge mound on top of it, which was a very ritual thing that we see a lot in the Viking age. Just outside it, there was another grave.

And that grave contained four adolescents and children. So the youngest is probably only about seven or eight. The oldest, maybe 17 to 18. They were placed in a very specific position. And at their feet was a sheep's jaw, which is, again, animal sacrifice is something that we see a lot of in the Viking world in funerary contexts. So who these four young people were was quite a sort of big question for a long time. Part of the analysis I did on them was partially to date them, so I could show that they dated to exactly when the Great Army was there and when this grave, this massacre was made.

But I also managed to look at their origins. So another thing in those methods I didn't mention earlier is we can look at where people have grown up from their teeth. So we save chemical signatures in our teeth of where we've had our food and our drinking water sources. So if you lived in India, it's very different from Norway, where I grew up. for example. And these four individuals, these four children came from completely different places and they were not local and they also had very different diets. So how does that happen? How do you

get these four young individuals? At least two of them had violent injuries to their bodies as well. So putting all of that together and knowing what we know about Viking funerals and the fact that a lot of the sources actually suggest that slaves or enslaved people are sacrificed as part of some of those rituals, come to the conclusion that really the only explanation for this grave is that these would have been some of the children that were taking as slave as part of this group. Can you pinpoint where those slave children came from? We're looking at the bones. You said, you know, the diets may be different, but where in the world did they come from,

do you think? Unfortunately, we can't quite pin it down exactly. They could have come from England. One of them possibly from some most slightly warmer. Now, we do know that this particular army group has actually travelled in France as well and parts of Spain. So we have other parts of Europe that they could have come from. But at the moment, with our current methods, we can't tell you. But, you know, so much has happened that maybe in 10, 20 years we can. So on my 17th summer holiday, when I'm just about to go up to university, I've

ended up digging, without realizing it, a human sacrifice site in a vicar's garden in a Derbyshire village. It's the most bizarre coincidence and strange coming together of different worlds. But take a cat to the centre of things. If you were a Viking in the ninth century, we've always been brought up to think that Britain and the raids on Lindisfar, this was the main meat and drink of the Vikings. But according to your book, it's peripheral. The real money, the real trade is heading in a completely different direction and using a completely different world system. Talk to us about the whole idea of the River Kings. Yeah.

So the focus, as you say, has always very much been on the West. And that's to do with, really, who's been studying it and where the sources are coming from. But if we look, especially at the archaeology, we see something quite different. And we see a huge big emphasis on the East. So connections going across the Baltic Sea. And in fact, a lot of researchers now are suggesting that that's really where it all begins. We have this narrative that the Viking Age kicks. off on a day in June with an attack on Lindersfan in 793.

But actually before that, from the 750s, certainly possibly even before, you have a hell of a lot of activity happening in the Baltic Sea. So going eastwards from Scandinavia and across to what is now Russia, around the Baltic Sea, you start to have all these trading sites turning up. And then these move down the rivers of the east. They're all located along the eastern rivers. And eventually this connects Scandinavia and the north, down to Byzantium.

So it goes all the way down to the Red Sea, there's network, and also the Islamic world. And so what seems to happen quite quickly is that these people in the north tap into some really lucrative trading routes down to the east. And much of this is not actually just raiding and attacks, but it's trade. It's the trade that's really bringing in the money here rather than the rates on the West. Just to give some comparative ideas of wealth, I mean, Anglo-Saxon, England, may have had some nice things sitting in a few monasteries, and Repton would have been one of them, where there would have been some gorgeous gold and silver reliquaries and so on.

But that was nothing compared to the riches of Byzantium, or even more so, of Abbasid, Baghdad, beyond. Absolutely. There's actually really not that much that you're getting wealthwise from England, which I think is also a reason why England really comes into it mainly when they're looking at conquest and settlement. So from that 9th century onwards, where you're looking at land, that's much more lucrative in the West. But when you go down those eastern routes, one of the main things that they bring up with them, which I think is one of the ways we can trace the traded goods and the enslaved people, is looking at silver. Silver becomes really the thing that the Vikings and the whole of Viking society,

it becomes completely preoccupied with. And that's what they can get, especially from the Islamic East, terms of coins or Durham coins. And these turn up in literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands in Scandinavia around about this time. But I mean, so you partly answered my next question is because trade is only lucrative if someone's buying. So who were the Vikings trading with? I mean, can you just follow the money to use the term follow the money? I mean, what exactly is the bill of sale that's going on here? And what is what is the quid pro quo that goes on here. Yeah, so after, there's a really good questions. And we know there are certain goods

that go east, certainly from Scandinavia. So they take things like FERS, some from Scandinavia itself, from the forested areas, places like Finland and other parts of Eastern Europe. We've got amber, we've got honey, we've got swords and iron and that sort of thing. But it does really seem like that's not quite enough to justify all that money that comes back to the north. So it seems like, the trading people and the trading slaves is an enormous big part of it. And one thing we do need to clarify, and you mentioned the name of Rousse Sallio, William, when you talked about this a little bit, because once we get to this Eastern Territory, it gets a bit complicated about who these people are. We have people who come straight from Scandinavia, straight going down east. But from about

the 8th century, late 8th century onwards, we have this new sort of identity of the Russe. And there's a huge big debate, which leads into even the current day conflicts in Ukraine. and Russia's invasion, but it's a whole other story there. But these ruse, some of them are people who come directly from Scandinavia, so people who would call Vikings. Some of them are people from places like, now it's Ukraine and Slavic people, who intermingle with the Vikings.

These become the ruse, and we sort of treat them a little bit, one and the same. But essentially, the slave trade there, and especially in those areas, seems to be the most lucrative. and in fact the very word slave comes from the Slavs and the Slavic people because this was happening on such a vast scale. And Kat, just to give us the picture, these guys are leaving the Baltic and they've got boats and sometimes they can actually take a direct river down in the direction of the Black Sea. But you have this extraordinary description of people having to actually sort of put their boats

onto the backs of slaves to carry them between various rivers, So it's not a simple thing of just getting in your boat in Stockholm and ending up in Byzantium. There's a lot of pulling boats over mountains and this sort of stuff on the way. Talk about that. Yeah, so we have some great sources for that, actually. I mean, if you look at the map now, you can kind of trace your finger down and you can see how that river subsystem works. But there are areas where you have to move from river to river. And in some places, they're not really navigable.

So you can't take the same huge big long ships that you would take across the sea. Some of them will take you away, but you would need smaller boats in other places. So we have these fantastic records. Some of them are from Byzantium, so they are some written in Greek, and they talk about these routes that the routes take down the river system. So we have places where you will have to take the boat up and drag it across land, which is great. I mean, Viking ships can actually do that?

They're very shallow. They have a sort of very shallow keel, so that works, which is great. But they also do explain that the slaves are being used for them. that purpose and they're being used for carrying the goods. So you can obviously use them for your trading activities, but also for manpower. They also use local boats, sort of local expanded canoes and that sort of thing to help them on these journeys. One word we haven't used yet are the Khazars. Who are the Khazars? What's their story then? So yeah, so these are some of the other groups that the Roots and the Vikings interact with in this area already. And actually,

they seem to be almost taking over a little bit as they come in, because these have already been interacting with and ruling over some of these Slavonic tribes for quite a long time. So really, what the Vikings and the Roos seem to do is that they seem to sort of be the stronger part in that whole dynamic. So we're looking at a group of people, the Slavs, who've already been subjected to control by the Qataris and by these other people in the same region for quite some time. Cap, just before we take a break, and we must take a break in a second, just talk about you've also dug in this region, haven't you? As well as the work you've done on Viking sites in Scandinavia and in Britain, you've dug a Russian or Ukrainian site on the river systems.

That's right, yeah. I was very lucky to be able to lead a small British expedition to a place near Tenehiv in northeastern Ukraine, actually, working with a team of local Ukrainian archaeologists have been working there for some time. And it was very much one of these smaller sites that we're looking at by the river. So one of those that form this huge big network from the north to the south. It's by the river Desnaar, which is one of the smaller tributaries to the Nipa, so you can go down to the Nipa and all the way down to the Black Sea. And there we were looking at one of these trading sites. It was a fortified site.

It was where goods and people are being funneled through. And you have an elite ruse population there and then a local sort of community. springing up around it, giving him everything they need. In the classic slave trade picture, we're used to the idea of these big forts on the West African coast where the kings of Benin or Nigeria are acting as funnels for people who are already enslaved and selling them into slaver's hands to take them overseas. Is there something similar happening in your site? Are you imagining that locals are bringing slaves to this Rus' settlement or are the Rus'

going out and doing slaving raids themselves? Is there any way of telling that from the archaeology? Not really from the archaeology. I think the belief is that they are going out and proactively taking people, very much so. But I think it's human nature almost isn't it, to try and benefit for whatever will benefit you and actually take part of this. So I imagine there must have been a lot of local people as well who are taking advantage of this situation because obviously they will be getting paid.

they'll be, you know, so helping out. So there seems to be a real mix of what's happening. People are clearly understanding they can benefit from this situation, from the trade. So I think you do have a little bit of everything here, really. Well, look, join us after the break when we find out what happens to these slaves in this trade in the most unlikely of places. Welcome back. Kat, one of the reasons this is such an interesting part of history is that we know so little about it. And I was pretty shocked.

I think I'm pretty sure I read it in your book that the reason we know. know so little about slaves is because slaves generally were not buried. Their bodies were not taken care of. They were, and I think it's you, isn't it, who says they're just sort of chucked out like garbage for the animals to consume. So there aren't that many bones for somebody like you to look over. No, it seems that way. So in a lot of the records of here, which again, you know, people don't deal with, they don't write about that. They don't really describe to us what they are doing with these slaves. And that is part of the problem. And in Scandinavia, we don't really have written sources at all. They have a written language, Rune it.

language, but it's not being used for anything like that. So much of the sources come from the 13th century, so way after the period has ended. So we don't have the written records. We have some observations, things like actually very relevant to the east of Arabic travelers who come and talk about it. But what happens to the dead? We rarely know. It's difficult to tell from the archaeological record as well what sort of status somebody has. So if somebody was enslaved, we don't necessarily know that. So there's nothing with the body. And they're typical buried without any grave goods or any care. A lot of people were cremated, but people were simply also cast aside, unfortunately,

because if there's nobody there to actually bury them and to look after them, if you don't have land, even now you have to, in England you'd have to buy a plot. And if there's nobody there to buy a plot, you know, what will you do? We had Mary Bearden earlier in the series, and she was talking about these slave manacles that they found in Anglesey. And I've seen them at that narrow exhibition in the British Museum. And they're very chilling objects. Did you find anything like that?

Have you found an apparatus of slavery pens or halters or anything like that on your digging? There are some chains, some possible neck change that have been interpreted as slave chains. Again, we have no way of really proving if that's genuinely what they were. we do have some of those written records. One of the Greek records does talk about these slaves who are being transported up and down the rivers, being in chains. That is quite likely. But again, there are so little. I mean, we're literally talking about two or three examples across the entire Viking world. So how do you prove that? If you find something like that, how do you prove that? That's definitely what they are. They can use for animals as well. So they're exactly the same sort of thing that you'd use for animals. And again, things like, you know, if they're keeping people in pens or anything like that, it doesn't necessarily reserve or keeping the record. So I think this is why we just don't know. We just don't have the evidence there. So we can't really tell. There is one thing, though, that you cannot get rid of, and that's DNA. And your work is startling and just the DNA. We talked about, you know, the lazy stereotype of a Viking flinging a woman over his shoulder and rushing off. But actually,

when you look at the DNA of women in certain areas, they tell a story, don't they of origin? Talk us through that. Yeah. So this is really interesting. And that's where we've just come on leaps and mounds in the last few years, absolutely. One of the stories is really what is happening to the women in this period and are they just staying at home in Scandinavia? Are the ones abroad being plucked up and just carried back, as you say, to the homelands or being taken a slave? One early study looked at modern DNA, so looking at the people who are alive today and trying to trace back where they were. So looking at places like Iceland, for example, where we know that there was a lot of settlers from Scandinavia. And the records are

actually saying that a lot of them come from Scandinavia, especially the men, and that a lot of the women and slaves come from areas like Scotland and Ireland. And some of that DNA evidence is actually seemed to suggest that as well, that there's a difference between men and women, that you have more men from Scandinavia and more women from those British and Irish areas. So that is quite compelling. Other parts, so ancient DNA, so if you look at extracting DNA actually from skeletons, and again, some places that does seem to, to, to show. show a similar thing in that they're coming from different places, but others are showing more similarity. And obviously, there's some really difficult questions here as well, because DNA isn't

necessarily passed down equally among everyone in society, because not everyone can produce offspring in the same way. If you're enslaved, you can't just have children willy-nilly as much as you like necessarily, necessarily, be the same sort of way of that genetic material being passed on. So it's a tricky one, but we do certainly see that women also are a huge part of the movements. They're not all staying home. They're not these sort of passive parts in this whole period. Okay. I mean, so fine, they're moving around. They have presence across a great spread, which tells a story. Do we know how they were treated? I mean, for example, what is the lot of a slave girl? Do we know what that might have been like? So we have some of the sources from the sagas that tell us about them. If we look at

back home in Scandinavia, how they're treating an everyday life. We know things from law codes as well as the saga is that they don't really have a great life. They absolutely have to work very, very hard. They haven't got the right to own anything. They have no legal protection, really. Any legal protection belongs to your owner. So it's really your owner whose property really is being protected by those laws, not the lives of the actual people involved. So that's all very, very harsh. But the ones in the East are probably the most fascinating ones. I know William and I have talked about this particular story before, which is from one of the Arabic sources.

We have these quite incredible, especially dating to the 10th century, Arabic travelers who go up these eastern river routes. Some actually also make it all the way to Scandinavia. And they talk about these people they see and their customs. And they are almost like ethnographic descriptions from the 10th century. And in one of those, we hear about a funeral of a Viking chieftain. somewhere along the Volga River. So it's just the same sort of camp like the one I excavated in Ukraine, really,

and a chieftain dies. And this is where we hear about the slaves that are part of that, and especially their slave girls. There's a call going out when he's dead, when the funeral's taking place, that somebody needs to be sacrificed to accompany the chieftain into the afterlife. And a slave girl volunteers for this, and there's this incredible 10-day period where she's being prepared.

So when you say volunteers, can we do the air quote thing? Volunteers? I mean, because I just can't imagine someone who says, yes, yes, pick me, pick me. Well, you say that. You say that, but we've discussed this quite a lot and you look at the source. I actually think there's quite a lot of evidence to suggest that she does volunteer. And partly because of what happens next, one of them is that she's being treated like a complete start for the next 10 days. and she's also being elevated to status of this chieftain's wife in the next life.

So if you can imagine somebody who's probably living a pretty horrible life, she gets an opportunity in the afterlife, which I think at the time you need to understand that the difference between the current life and the afterlife isn't necessarily that's great. They're all presumably a bit of a continuum. So sort of the here and now and the afterlife, they're all part of the same thing, really. and if your life at the moment is pretty miserable and there's no way out and you're given this opportunity

and you really believe in what happens next, then you can see that maybe she is volunteering. She's making a decision. Okay, so what happens next? So she gets chosen, then what happens? So for 10 days, they basically feast and get ready. So they get the chieftain ready for the funeral. And as a part of that, she's been given jewelry, she's been given servants, and she's giving a lot of food, a hell of a lot of drink. and drugs as well.

There's also a very sexual part of this. Sorry, what drugs? Wait a minute. I mean, when you say drugs, it's such a modern concept. We don't know what they are. We don't know what they are. Okay, but some intoxicant. Okay, and you say clearly because it's in the record. Is it that there's somebody, is there a description of one of these slave girls that

indicates this? There's a fabulous description by this Arab traveller who ends up next to this party and his eyes are on stalks at what's going on in the next door camp. and he's watching everything and he can't believe what he's seeing. Okay, tell us what he sees. Go on. Tell us what he sees, Kat. So this all culminates really in the actual funeral at the end.

So they've pulled a ship up from the river. He's going to be buried in this great big ship, which is filled with everything. They're sacrificing animals and all sorts of things. It's a huge big party. But the slave girl, she goes through a ceremony where she's being lifted up above a doorway. She says, I see my parents.

I see my husband. And she essentially gets married to this man. And there's a witch involved, the angel of death. I mean, they haven't just got a slave girl. We've got a witch. I mean, every element of the Hollywood story is here. Yeah, so she's the one who leads the whole ceremony. So she's in charge of it all, really.

But, yeah, so she's then being made to have sex with some of the leading men of the group as well. There's about five or six of them. And then eventually... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, again, wait. So I can't throw the... Wait a minute. And you say, what's the details? Well, no, I just want to.

I just feel, I mean, it's so awful. But I just, I think, you know, so this is a public ceremony. I mean, to me it just sounds like a public gang rape, if that's lots of people having sex. Whereas is that what it would have been? Yeah, I pretty much. And I mean, obviously, what her role was in life, if she was a sexual slave, I don't know. We know, lots of, there's lots of mentions of concubine and concubines in Scandinavian society as well and in all of the different sources.

So that could have been one of her roles previously. We don't really know. But clearly this was an important scene as an important part of the ceremony. And there's all these slightly old statements from these men saying they are doing this to honor. So they're sleeping with her to honor their chieftain. They're only doing it for him, for his sake. We don't know if something's lost in translation. Yeah, right.

That's just a bit of a sort of way of excusing themselves from misties when they're out. brought it up. But it's a really interesting, there's the things going on with this ceremony that we absolutely cannot understand. We have to remember this is written by an Arabic Muslim observer as well through an interpreter. So what there's a reasoning behind it, we really don't know. And the angel of death is brought in at the end and she makes the sacrifice. Yeah. So the girl is then being brought onto the ship where the chieftain is now lying down in a sort of tent structure. and eventually she is murdered by the angel of death as a part of this. And the angel of death is part of the whole, she's in the encampment, she's on the trip, who is she? Yeah, that's a really interesting question. We don't know. I mean, we think there might be sort of an itinerant religious people in a way. Itinerant angels of death that you can just sort of call in for these occasions.

I think they seem to do lots of things. It's so appalling. But I mean, it really is appalling. It's making me feel a bit sick. in a film representation, I can imagine something sort of out of, you know, a fairy tale with an angel of death or a woman raising up a dagger and plunging it into the heart and it's over very quickly. Is that what happens? Do we have any record of how this poor girl, this poor, poor girl dies? Yeah, no, unfortunately, it is very, very gruesome. And we have that description in this record

by Ebenford-Lahn, who writes it down. And he explains that she is both strangled and stabbed and that there's loud noise being made to stop, stop the noise and stop the screaming. So it's absolutely harrowing, but it seems to be so accepted by the entire group that there must be a religious belief in this having to happen that way. I mean, clearly they know about poisons and other ways of doing it. So I think this act, and if you think about Vikings, a lot of other Viking beliefs in society is actually having an honourable death. If you want to go to Valhalla, Odin's Hall, you have to die in battle. So you have to go through. that quite violent death to actually get there. So clearly there is some sort of belief here,

but we do tend to get quite excited about the sort of drama of it all and expect that they forget that sort of very human, horrific element, as you very rightly point out. And Kat, tell me, I mean, the wider picture, these guys are coming from Scandinavia. They're taking their goods and their human goods to sell to the Arab world. Is that the ultimate destination for all these poor enslaved people? So a lot of them is either Constantinople. So a lot of these journeys go down to Constantinople and Byzantium. And is there a big slave trade there?

Yeah. When we think of Byzantium, again, we don't have this image so much of that being a slave society, but it is, is it? Absolutely, yes. So that's one of the big areas. And then the Islamic world is the other. And part of the reason also, I think, is certainly within Islamic world and the trade in slaves is that.

I believe you cannot enslave another Muslim at that time. So they need to have other groups, other religions. So in fact, to be someone external and say, well, we can bring in slaves from the Slavonic world. And then they're sort of essentially legitimate people for them to take advantage of, which is an absolutely, you know, a group of way of thinking about it. But it seems that this is a really key thing that they managed to tap into.

And has there been work in Baghdad or in the, in Babylon, in the, in, in the, in, in the, in, in the, in, in the, in the, in, in the, in the, in, in the, in, in the, in the, in, in the, in in in the, of the Arab world, on the same sort of DNA evidence. Have we found large numbers of Slavic people's bones that end of the, of the trade? As far as I know, not at all. So, we've never seen it from that side, which I think is really, really interesting. I don't know if it's just because none of it has been done or is if it, if it because the bodies just aren't there. So certainly, if you, if you're not burying the bodies of enslaved people, or they're being cremated, perhaps, then of course, there's going to be very, very little left. So we have absolutely none of that evidence again. So we have to rely on those few written sources and the sort of invisible evidence of just, yeah, trying to see what comes back the other way. You know, in this country, and when I say this country, I mean Britain, which is where I'm

sitting, there is a whole lot of soul searching and pushback against recognising the slave trade and the relationship of this country to the slave trade. Are similar conversations going on in Scandinavia, Norway and Iceland about a trade, albeit a lot, lot longer ago. But is there acknowledgement of just how brutal and how awful this all was? Nothing that sort of really changed on that. But I think we are really focusing much more on identifying that slave trade, actually. It hasn't really become, and it is a very, very long time ago. We don't have the specific evidence. Obviously, we don't know who was involved. We can't really say, you know, how that happened. We know it happened in all across Europe.

or across the world, really, but across Europe. So even though the Vikings certainly were very successful, very well known for their role in the slave trade, they absolutely weren't the only ones. So it's a sort of, it's difficult. But I think we are focusing so much more on it now. So I think that's almost like a first step. It's just saying, okay, what happened?

How much did happen? Why? You know, where and all of that? And we're still at that stage at the moment. And in the British context, we have obviously this image of the Vikings as slavers, grabbing people, as Anita said. But is that going on in Anglo-Saxon society too?

And is there a distinction? Can you say that the Vikings have a bigger slave population than the Anglo-Saxons did pre-Viking? No, absolutely not. I mean, it seems clearly that slaves were a hugely important part of Anglo-Saxon society as well. And we see that in some of the earlier law codes, for example, where slaves are mentioned, you know, things that have nothing to do with the Vikings at all. One interesting one where there's one of the law courts after the Battle of Eddington's, So where you get this division between Alfred the Great and Guthrim, one of the Viking kings,

when they talk about dividing England into two halves and different laws being applied to these different areas. We also, some of those lawgoes, we talk about, they talk about in both parts, you know, what happens to escape slaves and that they aren't really allowed to sort of steal other people's slaves on the other side. So clearly both sides then have got slaves. If we look at Doomsday Book Record from the 11th century, for example, that lists sort of, essentially, huge big tax record of the whole of England, that lists slaves being part of English society all over the country, which has nothing to do with the Vikings. And on an earlier period, during the period of the Anglo-Saxons conquest, the British population,

the preceding native population is enslaved. And you can see that, can't you, in place names, and places that have the place named Carr, C-A-W-R. Give us some examples? Like what? In Scotland, where I come from, there's a place called Car. Halfrey Mill, and that is up on the highlands of the Lammermures. And the idea is that the Anglo-Saxons come up the coast, take the best lands, and the British are driven up into the less fertile land of the hills.

And so you get the pre-existing native population living in the hills, and the Anglo-Saxons taking the best land in the coast. So this is not a new thing. No, absolutely. I think also one of the words for Britons, one of the early English words for Britons, is also used in that same way for meaning slaves. So clearly this is something that's happening. And I absolutely don't think that the Vikings were much worse.

And certainly in Scandinavian society, we don't see. I mean, yes, they are part of it. They have slaves, but not on a massive scale. So I think it's partially that just, I don't want to use the word romanticizing because it's not romantic, but it is a sort of very compelling narrative that these are horrific slave traders. Yes, they clearly did get involved on a high scale, but especially in the East. but I don't think that they necessarily were much worse than others at the time.

Going back to the Britons, the Romano-British who preceded the Anglo-Saxes, what's extraordinary is that there is almost no British words in English. And apparently there are two in common use, and neither of those are common. Brock, as in what a badger lives in. mattock, as in what you dig if you haven't got a spade, and Banach, which is what I grew up eating at tea time, a Selkart Banach was a lowland Scots cake. And that's the British, but apparently those are the only three, implying that the British were so marginalised that none of their language made it into English. And that implies either, again, slavery and complete sort of

cultural wipeout or actual genocide? Can we have a pallet cleanser story just after I'm just sort of still reading? I do hate stories of abusive women. Have you heard of Ud the Deep Minded? You must have. Oud the Deep Minded. The sort of 800 AD born. And she was fleeing from Scotland because she and her daughters were going to be either murdered or enslaved.

So she leaves in a longboat with slaves and goes across to Iceland. So her full name, Uno Kales Dottier, that's a that's a that's a lot. I might take a run at it and I might get it right. Yes, so her father was Chietil Flapnose, so she was Chetil's daughter. That's it. Flat nose. That's right. Daughter of Flatnose.

So she goes off and she goes off to Iceland. She just refuses to give in or give up. And it's, you know, they've secretly in the forests build their own longboat and they make their escape. No one thinks it's possible that this woman, this bloody woman, will not submit. And she goes off to Iceland and found Iceland pretty much. I mean, that's one of the arguments, isn't it? Oud the deep-minded is the mother of Iceland.

Is that a great story? She's tremendous. When does she start off? Dublin. So she was married to one of the Norse kings of Dublin actually and lost both her husband and her son to fight. So she was a widow and just went, you know, stuff this. I'm going to somewhere else. Stuff this.

I'm not hanging about to be sacrificed. My daughter's not going to be sacrificed. I'm not having this. And she builds the secret longboat and goes and says, right. I think I'll just go and found Iceland instead. I love her. Interesting. She also has all these people.

She has all these men. She convinces everyone to come with her. So she's clearly a big. And actually, you like this. So she does have parallel because one of the greatest ships in ever discovered in archaeology Osberg ship, my absolute favourite in the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo, was the grave of two women, two very wealthy women who had this tremendous grave. So someone like her, presumably.

But I also love that Oud, the deep-minded, she frees the slaves. She actually makes, you know, when that didn't happen in the culture. And she says, right, you've made this trip with me. You risked your life for me. Now go and be free. And I like her. Chicks rule. That's all I'm saying.

Anyway, I think as far as Chicks rule, Kat Jarman rules, you've been in absolutely delight. Thank you so much. Honestly, certainly, my pleasure. So much fun. Kat, you must first of all, before we let you go, talk up your new podcast because you are racing ahead of the charts, he says, slightly enviously. Yeah, I know we're fighting a bit, aren't we? Up and down?

Yeah, thank you. So my new podcast. It's called The Rabbit Hole Detectives. It's also a history podcast where actually I just get to, with my co-host, fall down random rabbit holes of history. So it's me, Richard Coles and Charles Spencer, and we go into topics and it takes us in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. And it's great fun.

This is all that we've got time for for now. Join us again next week for another empire. Till then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye for me, William Durhampool. Thank you.