Forbidden History - The Real Vikings: What The Treasure Tells Us

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

In this episode of Forbidden History we uncover the hidden wealth of the Viking world. From the remarkable hordes of Gotland to the intricate jewellery of Scandinavia, we explore what these remarkable finds reveal about Viking life and their legacy. PATREON LINK HERE: https://patreon.com/ForbiddenHistory?utm_medium=unknown&utm_source=join_link&utm_campaign=creatorshare_creator&utm_content=copyLink Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator
 Tim Sutherland: Host and Archaeologist
 Max Adams: Archaeologist and Author
 Hanne Lovise Aannestad: Archaeologist and Collection Manager, University of Oslo

 Neil Price: Archaeologist, Uppsala University

 Per Widerström: Archaeologist, Gotlands Museum Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Traces of light seep out from the dark earth, hidden for centuries from the dead. Stone and wood, iron and gold, silver for the gods. In the kind of popular view of the Vikings, they're always associated with loot and plunder and its product treasure. Serpents in spirals. Dragons and wolves, amulets and rings. It's classic Viking material, and it's everywhere the Vikings went. A story of trading and travel, of raiding and theft. It's a road trip for the purpose is to come back richer than you went away.

The beauty of an age now passed, hoarded in the earth, known only to the gods. The treasure of the Vikings. From the late 8th to mid-11th centuries, the Scandinavian peoples burst from their frontiers, almost wherever the seas could take them. In this episode of Forbidden History, we will be exploring the treasure of the Vikings. The story of Viking treasure is the story of the Vikings themselves,

the richness of imagery of the wonders left to us now. For some, it reflects the voyages and adventures, the romance of a period that fascinates us. For archaeologists, Viking treasure is more broadly defined beyond fine things alone. Life was short and often violent, yet it was not without its beauty. The sagas convey to us echoes of a Viking age, tales of heroes, and the battles they fought to win great fame, and most of all, treasure. Yet the sagas were written many years after the sagas were written many years after

after the Vikings lived. One of the problems about understanding the Scandinavian point of view at this time is that, of course, the Scandinavians are not writing things down. They're making runic inscriptions, but these are more or less kind of epitaphs on monuments to the dead and so on. They don't give us a lot of information, especially not in this early period in the 700s and into the early 800. If there ever was any contemporary Scandinavian literature from the Viking era, it's now gone.

many physical clues about their society remain. Archaeologist Tim Sutherland has worked on Viking sites. He's in Nottingham to see a special exhibition of artifacts from around the British Isles, reflecting this extraordinary period. The Viking Age is distinct in its visual record, its art. One of the interesting things about the Viking period is the artwork. It's so distinctive. It's beautiful to look at, and it also seems to appear out of nowhere,

and then becomes very classic Viking in style. The imagery is clearly defined and instantly recognisable. It's related to, yet different to, Anglo-Saxon or other European Christian art. There are several styles of decoration. There are animals and mythic beasts, wolves, ravens, and always serpents and dragons. A lot of it's made out of very basic materials as well. I mean, there's metals and as stone, but there's things like walrus ivory and wood. And so they see it almost looks as though they've been trying to make things out of everything.

It's almost as if they couldn't help themselves and produce artwork. And of course, it seems to get better and better until it's classic Viking material and it's everywhere the Vikings went. kings went. Probably most of the physical manifestations of Viking art have not survived. Artifacts perishable by time and the elements. Apart from aberrations like the Ossiburg grave, they mostly don't survive in the ground. The Western Viking Age lasted barely 300 years, but the archaeology from the time is distinct. The physical artifacts, above all else, define in our minds the Scandinavian peoples who

traded and looted them. They're made of stone, of metal. Iron and steel degrade, precious metals less so, bronze, gold, silver. But what do we mean by treasure? And what did the Vikings do with it, the treasure itself, over the years of the Viking period? How did that change? Scandinavian society had existed relatively peacefully beyond the frontiers of Western Europe for centuries, but But then in 793 AD, with the attack on Lindisfarne, the raiding began. Over the following centuries, incalculable amounts of valuable items and materials were migrated from the British Isles and all over Europe to Scandinavia. But what were the Vikings looking for in those first raids?

I think in the early part of the Viking Age, the kind of literal loot that Scandinavians are taking and bringing home with them. It's mainly, frankly, anything they can carry that appears to be of value, especially anything made of precious metals. From the early decades of raiding, very little has survived. We find some of this material recycled. We find coins made independence, things like that. They're certainly not after money in the way that we understand it. Scandinavia was not a coin economy in the early Viking age. I think the bulk of the stuff that's coming in from the raids, it's probably melted down and then recast into new forms more to Scandinavian

tastes. So how can we understand exactly what treasures the Vikings were after when they attacked Lindisfan? The raids sent shockwaves through history, and we imagine it to have been catastrophic, given the Saxon accounts. Yet it might not have been that devastating. It seems the Vikings didn't get everything they were looking for. Archaeologist and writer Max Adams picks up the trail. Lindisfarn's priory was well known across Christian Europe, and throughout the rest of

Northumberland were other respected priories, and famous Saxon monks. Lindisfarne itself is forever linked with St. Cuthbert. His remains today lie in Durham Cathedral. In 793, they lay enshrined in Lindisfarne Priory, when the Vikings attacked. Despite their plundering, Cuthbert's body survived,

and with it, perhaps the greatest treasure, at least that we know of, that the Vikings never stole. This extraordinary, exquisite little object, no more than two, two and a half inches cross, is Cuthbert's personal possession, his pectoral cross, worn about his neck on a chain. And it's remarkable

survival to this day is due, part coincidence, part just good luck, I suppose, to the fact that it was wrapped beneath several layers of shroud, and it wasn't found until the 1830s when it was finally opened and the shroud was unwrapped. And it is a remarkable unique survival of 7th century craftsmanship and of Cuthbert's own personal physical presence in the world. The shrine of St. Cuthbert was well known, and it's hard to think that the Vythbert's the Vikings didn't seek it out as they ransacked Lindisfarne. We can't be sure now if the monks had time to hide the body. Whatever the first Viking raid did, they didn't steal or defile the Shrine of Cuthbert.

And that's worth contemplating that for all the destruction the Vikings reeked, that they didn't get at Cuthbert's coffin, whether that was because they were scared or because they, it was in a plain wooden casket and didn't look very interesting. and didn't look very interesting or didn't look as if it had any treasure in it. But it did have this treasure in it, and they didn't get it. St. Cuthbert's Cross now serves as a reminder of what lured the Scandinavians to the British Isles. The bait for the beginning of an age of raiding.

Over time, the raids start to accelerate, and at that point, clearly when, well, as they say, nothing succeeds like success. If you happen to know that Olaf in the next valley has suddenly got some nice shot any new brooches, or is melting them down and making silver things, you start to wonder when you're there, you know, shoveling the dung pile or whatever. What can we learn about the treasure that we know the Vikings did capture and take home with them to Scandinavia? The Museum of Cultural History in Oslo houses the greatest collection of Viking treasures in Norway, perhaps all of Scandinavia. Much of it is jewelry for personal

adornment, the power of display. Archaeologist Hannah Lovisa Anastad is here to explain to Tim more about the Viking treasures. From the Viking age, people are drawn to, and researchers are drawn to gold, silver, coins, jewelry. We often think of Vikings as big rough-dif-tofti men, but this is really fine material. It's really artistically fine as well. It's not sort of big and sort of lumpy. It's incredibly delicate.

I mean, that's one thing that sticks out. These are really beautiful, not just because they're made of gold and silver, but because they're actually beautiful works of art as well. Absolutely. They used a lot of energy to make these things to wear them to look good, obviously. Yeah, certainly. And it does as well. It works, obviously.

It works, it works. It's gold and silver and it looks good anyway, because of the artistic workmanship has gone into it. Yeah, absolutely. But Tim's interested to see the fragments that remain from the earliest raids of the Viking Age. Artifacts from this period are rare. It was just a few years or decades when Scandinavian raiding began and quickly escalated. The rewards were there, it seems, for those who dared.

Now we can only guess at exactly why the raids began when they did. Vast amounts of treasure from the British Shiles end up in Scandinavian. end up in Scandinavia, some of it's lost, some of it's hidden and they're never recovered, some of it's buried in graves. What are they actually thinking they're going to do with that money? I think, first thing on their mind is they're going to buy themselves a wife. In other words, now they've got cash, they can afford to proposition a woman who's got pretty good idea which girl they're going to proposition. And with ready cash, which girl's father is going to refuse them.

There's evidence that in this early period, items like gold and gold and crosses pulled off Bibles or attached to walls, were ripped off and were worn as jewelry, even those that had been quite crudely cut up, as if they were shares of plunder. They were almost all excavated from female graves. This raided treasure was just about always found on the upper chest of the body, often between the two traditional Scandinavian turtle brooches worn by many women. These wives' mothers, sisters or daughters went to the afterlife wearing treasure that they knew was from across the seas that had been won for them by their loved ones.

It's about status, it's about prestige, it's probably about gift giving. These objects come from a long way, from a long distance and this is a society extremely focused on prestige and honor and the chieftain had to get that honor from somewhere. It wasn't just the gold. It was also the fact that he had or they had traveled abroad, maybe fought for these objects, won a battle and then come back. It's really materialized prestige and honor. As the 9th century war on,

artifacts like these became more rare in Scandinavian graves. The Viking Age had only just begun. But things were changing. Of course, as the decades go on, the pickings get much thinner. People are a little bit more wary. Monks move inland. The first wave of is too good to be true. Then after that, I think it gets a bit thinner.

Raiding had probably been small scale at first, but now it had expanded to a different level. I have to think about how did the raids actually get organized. Who owned the ships? Who equipped the people on them? Do people bring their own weapons? Do they get provided with them? Are raids sponsored by people who don't actually go on them at all?

Are there raids by commission? Now, what I'd really like is one of those, one of those, not so much of these next time, okay? We don't know, but we certainly see enormous amounts of material filtering back into Scandinavia. As the treasure flowed in, the Viking world itself was transitioning fast. But as the raids go on,

as they escalate. And the proceeds of those actions are more fed into the economy in a formalized way. And this is when we start to find silver bullion, hack silver, where finished objects like arm rings or whatever are cut into pieces and quite clearly used for their weight, their value, rather than their aesthetic qualities. Jewelry and prestige items seem to take second place now to sheer amounts of material, collect in hordes. One of the things we associate with the Viking period is the horde,

and it's not just one or two. There are hundreds of them, and some of them are quite small and quite distinctive, almost certainly personal, but some of them are absolutely massive, and the number of them is astounding. I mean, they're all over the Viking world. Hordes aren't exclusive to the Vikings. They've been found in Roman and Anglo-Saxon sites, but from the 8th century,

they seem to flourish in the archaeological record. Viking hordes have been found across Western Europe and as far away as Iceland. They often contain gold and copper alloy or bronze. But most of all, they reflect the Scandinavian's apparent favorite material. The hordes contain things like coins, but a lot of them also contain very beautiful pieces of art. And you could argue that some of this was left intact because they appreciated its value. appreciated its value. It's not just the silver content, it's the value of the artifact itself, and they wanted to retain it.

In the decades and centuries after the Lindisfarne raid, the Vikings went from raiders and invaders to settlers. As with every other place they journeyed, so too did their treasure hordes. And the British Isles were no exception. Lakeside Arts in Nottingham is the current home of a travelling exhibition, which features some of the greatest hordes found in Britain. This is a fantastic exhibition because what they've done is they've brought together a large collection of hordes from around Britain. Also, some of the most important hordes, some of the big ones,

from various parts of the British Isles. But at first, they don't all look like treasure. It is almost like a collection of material that you see in the hospital that the kids have swallowed. I mean, there's such a variety of bits and pieces. and they're quite small as well. The majority of them are things you could carry around with you in your purse. They do seem to like their well-defined small pieces of silver

or something that could crumple into a small piece of silver. The material itself is often what's being valued rather than the form of the item. So you've got the ingots and then you've got the coins, but you've also got obviously things that have been chopped from bigger pieces and whether that's to make it more portable or whether that's something so you can distribute it between your friends or use it as the equivalent of a coin or a method of payment.

Over the decades, the composition of Viking hordes changed. From what appear like random bits and pieces, increasingly more hacksilver appears, as it seems to become more about commodity. This change is also evidence in the hordes found in the Vikings' homeland. We see it in the economical transformation in the hordes, where you get the bullion, the smaller pieces,

the coins, the use of precious metal, and especially silver as payment. So it's kind of an economical transformation that draws Scandinavia closer to the international trade networks, both in the east and in the west. So what you consider to be. considered to be valuable changes in this period. Precious metal as payment was all that mattered now.

But when it came to this need for bullion, the precious metal which appears most in Viking treasure hordes is silver. We know they had a particular affinity for silver. It occurs again and again in their material culture and their jewelry and so on. They like gold as well, but silver is the metal they can get access to. Silver seems to have been universally used across Scandinavia for trading with regions beyond their frontiers. But how did this trade develop? It seems the foundations had been there a long time.

To the east of Scandinavia, the Baltic region in Viking Times, is relatively unknown. Again, written records are virtually non-existent. But archaeology is now revealing glimpses of very early Scandinavian activity here. There has traditionally been a sense that the Viking Age, the time of the Vikings, begins in the West with the raids. But actually, these connections out into the world have been in existence for centuries before the Viking Age, even the great trade routes down to the Black Sea to Constantinople, what's now Istanbul, and even way into the East, into the Asian steppes, linking up with

the caravan routes, even as far east as China. Tallinn, Estonia's capital. It's one of the best preserved medieval cities in northern Europe. The towers that are there today are from a later period, but the city itself dates back to Viking times. In the Middle Ages, it was an important member of the Hanseatic League, but its importance for trade dated back to at least Viking times and probably before. Tallinn was a gateway to the sea routes east, to Russia, but also north to Finland,

and south towards the distinct region of the Black Sea, and the Golden City of Byzantium. And there's evidence of these far-flung connections in Tallinn today. One of Tallinn's medieval fortifications called Fat Margaret Tower is home to Estonia's Maritime Museum. An exhibition here also brings together many treasure hordes from the Viking period. But there's a difference about what makes up most of these hordes. As the Viking Age goes on, you start to see this enormous treasurer. trade in silver coming in from the Arab world to the east. So you have these coin hordes all over Scandinavian.

Coins of silver and gold in huge quantities and from far beyond the frontiers of Viking society. It's staggering. If you look at the silver, there's all different types from all around the world. And basically you can see the quality of it. It looks like it was made yesterday. Or it almost looks fake. It's so pristine. That's what's amazing about this museum is that there's coins from all over the place from different periods, all throughout the Viking periods.

And it's got all different types of hordes as well, there's private small hordes, or there's group hordes where there's obviously more than one person's wealth. The jewellery kept in Tallinn dates back as far as late Roman times and comes from across Scandinavia and Europe. Most of it, however, originated much farther east. Some of the coins are Deerums from the Middle East, which are very specific coins. I mean, you tell how far they've come and others are from various other parts of the world. And it shows the extent that the Vikings were trading. One of the nice things you can see here are the details on the coins themselves. How they were made, when they were made, they would have had the name of the ruler on them as well.

And so you can quite often easily date them. Some of the dirhams look more like coins from the 19th century, rather than the 9th. Minted over a thousand years ago, and yet they almost look fake. They almost look brand new. It didn't matter that they were foreign coins. The Vikings only cared about the metal itself. Vikings, of course, the Scandinavians, most of them carry little balances. They were very, very careful in weighing treasure by weight.

metal. It's nice to see the scales here because that's what's important about this silver. It's not the denomination of the coins, it's the weight and purity of the silver. So if you know the purity, then of course all you've got to do is chop up your silver into exactly the right amount of weight. And remember that what we see in the archaeology is a tiny, tiny fraction of what was originally there. Most of it has probably been melted down over and over again and has been recycled out of the Viking Age.

Neither silver nor gold occur naturally in Scandinavia. The Vikings raided Britain and Western Europe for it, but when it came to quantity and purity, the eastern supplies were incomparable. But how did this amount of silver travel the vast distances from Arabia? The inland areas of Estonia and North Europe were wildernesses. The Vikings were experts in mobility. Just a short drive south of Tallinn,

Vikina T'Kula is a reconstructed Viking village. There's a highway from Tallinn now, but in the Viking age, the road wouldn't have been the best way to travel here. Rivers like this have hardly changed since the Viking times. There are no real main roads. They're very little in the way of progress through the country, and these are the equivalent of the motorways of their day. You get people coming up and down, using the rivers to get in and out of the country,

bringing in the trade goods, and also taking out goods like the timber or whatever that was valuable from the country that could be taken out of the country as well. As the Vikings travelled further afield, it was second nature for them to use rivers to travel inland, and their boats were well suited to it. The shallow draft boats would have been absolutely ideal because some of these rivers are literally about half a meter deeper something, and the ships were perfect for actually skimming over the surface right up into the

heartland itself. The river networks ran for hundreds of miles through the vast North European forests. To journey them was perhaps as long and was maybe at times as arduous as crossing the Baltic or the North Sea. Viking boatmen would have probably never even have seen the sea. A lot of them were actually born and bred and used the boats inland and it was very rarely that anybody would have got out and gone across the sea. Rivers were the real key to the expansion of Viking trade.

Archaeologists in Estonia are now mapping the silver route, showing this incredible international network, not just in the Baltic, but for hundreds of miles to the north, south and east. We think of the Vikings as people who have stolen wealth and taken it back home. What this evidence shows us here is the extensive trade networks around the world. and these people are bartering, buying, selling, not just stealing it, they're actually using commerce as we see today. And that's the information that we're getting from all this.

And nowhere has there been found more treasure than on a single island in the Baltic Sea. One thing that's absolutely clear from every aspect of the archaeological record is that the island of Gotland is in some senses a separate place, a distinctive culture. Gotland lies almost at the center of the Baltic seaways, and this must have influenced life on the island, virtually since sailing began. The Viking Age in Gotland lasted longer than almost anywhere else in Scandinavia or Europe, and the people of those times certainly left their mark here. One of the things that is most apparent when you start looking at the archaeology of Gotland in the Viking Age is the silver.

There are so many hordes buried deposits of silver on Gotland that if we make a distribution map of the Viking silver hordes of the Baltic, Gottland is kind of black because there's no space between the dots. There's at least one silver horde found in Gotland every single year, more than anywhere else in the Viking world. It's absolutely astonishing. There are some parts of the island where absolutely literally every farm has a silver hoard. So they're not just trading in silver, they're doing different things with it than the rest of Scandinavia.

The big question is why? Archaeologist Peia Wiedostrom has excavated many hordes on Gotland. People in general, I think, think of history on Gotland. And it's an island, it's an isolated place packed with history. There's lots of evidence for trade in Gotland going back to the Stone Age. But with the Vikings it reached a different level. There was a strong culture here, and this shows in the archaeology. During the Viking Age something else happens, and we can see that there are

large amounts of, especially silver coming in here, and we can also see that the jewelry on the Swedish mainland are very similar from north to south, but on Gotland is something completely different, so it's really important for the Gotlanders to stand out from the rest. Peir is part of a small team of archaeologists on the island, whose task it is to investigate every new treasure hoard. In July 1999, when another horde was unearthed, no one was too surprised. At first it was another horde, but then we realized that this is something different and something else.

Even today it stands out in the archaeology of the Viking Age. It had come to light in the northeast of Gottenham. the northeast of Gotland on a farm called Spillings. The discovery of the Spillings Horde, the largest Viking silver horde ever found, not just on Gotland, but anywhere, is one of those amazing moments. Metal detectorists working with Gotland's museum were routinely surveying a field where the landowner had over the years found dozens of silver coins. The landowner at Spillings, he's very interested in the Viking Age and he said that you need

to go over this piece of land. There is something here, I'm sure. At first it seemed that all there was in the field were rocks, and they were on the verge of giving up. It took us a while, and then one of the museum metal detectorists went there and got his bright signal that started all, actually. The detector signal went off the scale. They found not one, but three deposits of metal buried in the shallow soil a few meters apart. It was clearly a big find.

I think we realized quite fast that this was something different, but not how different. The fragile finds had to be carefully recovered and quickly. Many visitors flocked to the site. Each cache was cast in plaster and then lifted as a whole in the hope of preserving valuable clues about how they'd been placed in the ground. When we excavate silver hordes, it's, we'd like to keep them as intact as possible. We'd like to see if they've been like, if people have been taking things from them or if there's been things added and if there are lots of coins in them.

Sometimes we can see that there's a gap for like 20 years and then they start refilling them again. So that's what we want to do. So therefore we put them in plaster and we take them indoors and excavate them in the laboratory. Each individual piece had to be separated, cleaned and conserved. It was to be more than two years before the team would begin to know the full picture. Most hordes are found by chance and are often dug up before the archaeologists even hear about them. But at spillings, Pair had an opportunity to do a proper excavation and investigate the burying of the While we were excavating there one day, this old lady came to us and she was really interested in what we were doing because she told us that her husband used to farm this land.

And she said that on this spot where we were now, he was very annoyed all the time because he got steel wire tangled into the harvester. And he took it out and he put it on a big pile of stone. and that pile of stone was now later taken away. And we excavated this and found all these like almost purple-looking threads. And we realized later that that was silver, that was silver threads, and silver jeweler that's been dragged out. Pair and the team found out why the field was so stony. The horde wasn't just buried in the middle of a field.

Back in Viking times, there was a building here, and unusually, it was partly stone, accounting for the rocks all around the area. It was 10 by 50 meters, huge by the standards of the time, probably with an upper floor. But there was no hearth, leading pair to speculate it was some kind of storage or warehouse. The horde in the three holes close together had been beneath the floor of the building. The steel wire that snagged in the harvester was literally just the beginning. Spillings was clearly a spectacular find. Neck rings, arm rings, finger rings, bars, ingots, and other hacksilver.

One part of the horde was bronze. By itself, just this amount of material was greater than many hordes found on Gotland. But what made the find truly unbelievable were the coins. In all, there were more than 14,000 of them. Altogether, it amounted to the largest horde from the Viking period ever found. Not just in Gotland, but in the world. It was truly unique. Not so much of its size, because even though that's amazing,

I mean it's 67 kilos of silver and other metals, it's really because of the context of it. What does that hoard mean? What could it buy? I mean, what has happened for that amount of wealth, money, if you like, like, to be left in the ground and never recovered. Did whoever did that die and not tell anyone? If you know that granddad buried sort of the tax burden of the island for six years,

somewhere in your property, I mean, would you not tear the walls down, you know? It's very strange. It's also hidden. It's inside buildings. Somebody is literally pried up the floorboards and buried this underneath in sacks. The Horde is now displayed in Gotland's Museum in Visby. After cleaning, the coins could be examined, and this revealed valuable information. Like those from Oslo and many other hordes in the Viking world,

the origin of these coins was very distant from Scandinavia. The majority of these coins are from the Middle East. We have some from Italy, some Denmark, but like 99% are from the Middle East. The coins carry the names of Arab Caliphs, more than a millennium old. Some date back almost to the end of the Roman Empire, and one even carries an inscription to Moses. The geographical origins of many of them are all too familiar to us today. The biggest minting town for this hoard is Baghdad. And they got silver from Afghanistan to make their coins, and we got it from there,

or perhaps even from Russia or elsewhere. but that's where they were minted. The Vikings didn't care whose ruler was on the coins. They just wanted the purest silver. When we see these as bracelets, they were once coins, so the amount of coins that actually got here must have been huge, because they don't weigh much. It's all evidence of the widely ranging trade route from Scandinavia to the east.

Rating in Britain or Europe brought quick rewards for a far few decades, but the basis for this influx of pure silver was trade, for Scandinavian goods, possibly most of all, human slaves. We're unlikely ever to know for sure, only the silver itself now remains. We can only wonder as to why so many hordes came to be, and why so many of the Vikings consigned so much wealth in bronze, gold, and most of all in silver to the earth. I think the traditional explanation for silver hordes or any kinds of deposits of precious objects has been a kind of primitive banking. It's the kind of stuffing your money under the mattress. But at the same time we know that that doesn't really work.

I mean, is everybody on Gottland burying their money and then meeting an untimely end before they tell anybody? It's just absurd. With vast numbers of hordes across the Viking world, more than 800 discovered so far in Gotland alone, there must be other explanations. Perhaps they're marking property. I know that this is my land because my family have claimed it in physical ways over the decades and centuries.

The archaeology, so far at least, tells us hordes seem rarely taken from, just added to. There are some farms that we can see that there are like one horde for each generation within the same farm. So it must have been important for each generation to have its own collection of silver. So they would have known that their father also had one, but they didn't take it up. Either they didn't find it or they didn't want to take it up for some kind of religious reasons. And perhaps this was not necessarily in a way we would understand now. Something I find fascinating is almost a kind of throwaway remark in a later text.

It's the beginning of a saga of the Norwegian Kings written by Snorri Sturluson. Snorri Sturlison was an Icelandic scholar and writer. Saga's like his are almost all we have to try to catch fleeting glimpses into the Viking mind. He talks about a set of laws laid down by the god Odin as to proper behaviour, what you should do about burying the dead and so on. And one of these things says that anything a person buries in the ground in their lifetime will come back to them after death. So it may well be a kind of bank, but it might be a spiritual one.

It means you get the checkbook when you reach the other side. Odin's Law is the only clue we have. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. Thanks for listening.