Forbidden History - Vikings: The True Story | Part 1

Episode Date: October 14, 2025

In part one of this three part special, we begin our journey into the world of the Vikings, uncovering groundbreaking discoveries that challenge long-held myths about the so-called Nordic “warrior race.” With exclusive access to a team of Norwegian experts, we explore how cutting-edge research is rewriting Viking history. Go to https://surfshark.com/forbiddenhistory or use code FORBIDDENHISTORY at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Cast List: Cat Jarman: Archaeologist & Author, River Kings  Ragnar Orten Lie: Archaeologist, Kulturarv Vestfold & Telemark Fylkeskommune  Terje Gansum: Archaeologist, Seksjonsleder, Kulturary Vestfold & Telemark Fylkeskommune Christer Tonning: Archaeologist, Kulturarv Vestfold & Telemark Fylkeskommune  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Over a thousand years ago, from out of nowhere, on the sea winds, longboats, raiders, Vikings. Across the Northern Sea they came, seeking silver and gold. Those are the stories and the narratives that have been told over the years. Great reputations were made.

Great kingdoms founded, all built, so were told on the riches they stole. But in reality, that's not quite the truth. From old ideas to new discoveries, new knowledge, challenging what we thought we knew about Norway's fiercest exports. And of course nobody switched on that button that said, oh, we're Vikings, let's go raiding. This is part one of the true story of Vikings before Vikings.

History tells us that the Viking Age began at the end of the 8th century, that Scandinavian longboats suddenly appeared on the shores of Britain, Ireland and Europe. So we have this idea that the Viking Age begins with a bang in 793 with the attack on Lindisfarne. At Lindisfarne and elsewhere, they sack churches. and monasteries. They violently assaulted and murdered captives. But most of all, they stole. Food, cattle, anything they could carry. What they wanted most was treasure. Silver. This history tells us is how the Vikings became prosperous. For almost 300 years until the mid-11th century, Their success, power, and above all, their great wealth, came from raiding.

But was this really the case? We are understanding that the picture is a lot more complex than what we used to think. What if the people known to us now as Vikings didn't just appear like that, off the coast of Britain in 793? What if they didn't get rich just through what they stole when they began taking to the seas? What if they were already prosperous and wealthy? What if before they were raiders and invaders? They were traitors.

We hear so much about the raids and the violence and the kings, but actually it's more the everyday people. That's really where you can find the true story about the Vikings. In this three-part special of Forbidden History, we'll join a team of experts from Norway and the UK, archaeologists, specialists, and researchers, as they uncover new knowledge about this period in Scandinavia and Europe's past. We'll share in the journeys as the team searched down clues in the landscape, the secrets that

are bound in the earth, and will be there as they try to piece together new ideas and new interpretations of the Viking past. Experts believe the Vikings, who according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, first attacked Britain, we're probably from Norway. Today, when we think of Vikings, it's hard not to think of this same country. Echoes of its Viking heritage are still very evident in modern Norwegian society. Some are still national symbols of identity there, although the emphasis these days is rather less on their pension for plundering. Yeah, so growing up in Norway, we do learn about the Vikings, and these are sort of

are a big pride, really. This is the glorious part of our history where we went out and we discovered and we explored. You get less of the violent side as a child in school. Archaeologist Kat Jarman is Norwegian and she's lived and worked in Britain for many years. So she's well placed to see how both cultures are taught about the Vikings from an early age. The Viking edge is really when Norway really begins as a country so that the modern country that we then go on to learn about it at school. So it is a really interesting point to see that key moment, that key period, that that essentially

creates the Norway that you grow up in the 21st century. The Vikings brought about great change for many countries and cultures, with wide-ranging effects beyond their own age. Yet, when they're supposed to have suddenly appeared at the end of the eighth century, Norway wasn't even one nation. There is something called Norway, but it's certainly not a country in that sense at all. So we have these smaller regions, we have probably chiefdoms, we have these sort of smaller units that are being ruled by somebody. We haven't got written records of it, so we actually don't know.

This is one of the key things about our knowledge of the Vikings today. They didn't write their own chronicles and histories, and if they did, they're lost to us now. So archaeology is vitally important in leading the truth, and that archaeology shows how powerful the people from this region became. Norway is a big country, with thousands of square miles, some of which are too mountainous or remote for human habitation, especially in the long wintertime. That's as true today as it was in Viking times. The team will follow are unlocking the secrets of the Vestfold and telemark

region. It's home to some of the most famous archaeological treasures of the Viking Age, not just in Norway, but the whole Viking world. One of the most unique parts really of Viking Age Norway is the South Norwegian areas, places like Vestfall, where we have these incredibly rich size. The famous burial ships, Gakhstadt and Usoberg, were discovered in the late 1800s and early 1900s, their Norway's most famous Viking treasures. I mean, these are spectacular, not just on a Norwegian scale, but on a world scale. These are world heritage treasures, really.

The great burial ships are the best known, but there are many more ancient sites and places in the region, especially along the Vestfold coast. Thirteen hundred years ago, it seems to have been a heartland of forces that were driving Viking expansion. There's something really unique there at the time. It was a hugely important place, also on a world scale, I would say. So it's not just the sort of popular modern interest, but actually going back into the time itself, there was something very crucial happening at that place and at that point in time. Why was this area so important?

Merlin, on the southern extent of Vestfold and Telemark's coast, is home to hundreds of piles of rocks along its shorelines. These great mounds aren't natural. They're made from huge shingle boulder. They're so strong that they've resisted weather erosion since at least the Viking Age, and probably since way back in the Iron Age, so archaeologists like Ragnar Orton Lee believe. All these are designed to be visible on the shoreline for all those who sail by.

The mounds are placed just on where you could get the best profile from the sea looking inland. Even after standing for a millennium, they were so big that they were still on sea charts in the 19th century and used as landmarks for ships, maybe to warn them as they came close to the shore. It's as if they were built to be seen like they're displaying something. Their location is strategic. They're at the entrance to the Oslo Fjord, to the Vestfold and Telemark coast. To get to these locations from the open sea, you came past these mounds. You were meant to see them here. You were approaching an important region, and you had to mind what you were about. Merlin is impressive, but it's nothing compared to what lies further up the fjord.

Just an hour or so north along the coast, you'd see the burial mounds of Bura, around 8 miles north of present-day Tonsburg. The old name was Bura Horgon, which means the Bura mounds. There are seven large and more than 20 smaller burial mounds. Some are over 150 feet in diameter and up to 20 feet high. They're all together in an area of around 20,000 square feet. There is no other concentration of burial mounds like this, anywhere else in Scandinavia.

It's been likened to a Viking valley of the kings. Only the kings, queens or chiefs are all nameless. But certainly, the people buried here were important. Boré has been known as a really important place in the Scandinavian Viking Age. There are a lot of other structures here that continue to impress us. There are fewer mounds now because in early 1852, workers building a road used one of them as a gravel pit. When the mound collapsed, someone realized what it was.

An archaeologist Nikolai Nikolayasen was called in. But what he was about to find was a world first. So it was all trashed up and he found what was left of a Viking ship. We could follow the rivets from the boat for over 12 meters, but it was a complete mess. But this is the first time in world history that an archaeologist is documenting a Viking ship. So he saved what was left of the very rich burial. Was able to establish that this is a very significant early fire from Viking Age. On this very first investigation, one thing was clear.

The people buried here were wealthy, beyond the wildest dreams of most ordinary people back in Viking times. There was everything you'd expect Royal Vikings would need on their journey to the next place, perhaps to Valhul, also known as Valhalla. Armor, weapons, horses, saddlery, hunting dogs and treasure, silver and also gold. The intricate designs on jewelry were so unique that they were classified as a new category in Viking Age art, Burah style. The National Park was created around the whole site, and for more than a century, no further

digging was allowed. So how did archaeologists find out how old the burials were? Teria Gansum has devoted much of his career to investigating Burra. He's the leader of Vestfold and Telemark's Filchus Commune Archaeology team, the Kulterov, and he spent decades broadening our understanding of Bura. He's researched all the archaeology previously done here. It was Teria's university mentor, Beyond Murrah, who came up with an idea of how to try and date some of the mounds without serious invasive new excavation.

They needed organic material from deep inside the mounds in order to get the mountain. a C-14 carbon date. While many of the mounds had been dug into a long time ago, Bionn Mure saw an opportunity. Every mound here has been re-opened again, probably sometime after it was sealed for the first time. We can anticipate that part of the center of the mound is deliberately put outside here.

So if you took charcoal from these contexts, you might be dating something that has been in the center of the mount. So that was the thought of Bjorn Mire, that it must have come from the center of the mound. Let's date what we can find easily instead of doing a lot of excavations. The plan worked. And what's more, the organic buildup over the spoil heaps meant that they could be dated with striking results. And it's possible to date. So the reopening of the mound here, we can date it to the end of Viking Age.

The Viking Age is only supposed to have begun in 793 AD. The material from inside showed that the mounds were already centuries old by then. The monumental power culture here was already long established. This shows us that this way of expressing themselves, with monuments starts much earlier than what we tend to call the Viking Age. But there's no reason that we can't call this seven, sixth century bound a Viking Age mount. They did the same kind of rituals, this is the same culture. Before the Viking Age, yet the same Viking culture.

The implications for Viking history are huge, yet this is almost all the hard archaeology, that's been done on the burials. Even top experts like Terria can't excavate here without real justification. So he and the Koltarov team have to find other ways. People actually tend to believe that archaeologists have worked and dug out a lot of these. But the fact is that we have very, very few archaeological trenches within the park because this is a very, very strict protected area. And that's why we have invested so much in non-invasive methods to use on this site,

because then we don't need permission, then we can detect a lot of what's hidden underneath the ground without doing archaeology. We tend to discover new things each year. He has backed a big move into non-invasive sensing, like geophysics and, and Geo-Radar. Some of the work they've done is the most extensive in archaeology anywhere in Scandinavia, and every now and then, Bura gives up another of its secrets. We continue the story after the break. Petra Schneidhofer and Krista Turning are two members of the geophysics team. They've surveyed thousands of square feet of the region's Viking Age places, much of it at Bura. One of the newest found graves,

which had no visible mound was by chance found in 2019. It's also a boat grave, not as big as the one excavated in 1852, but still rare nonetheless. It's also personal to Krista because it was his own daughter who discovered it. My daughter, who was in school back then, she needed to learn how to be in a workplace,

and she came along with me. So he did the entire 50 by 50, 50 by 50 meter area here. And when I came home, processing the data, I literally fell up my chair because there was a ship in the data. And they don't come often. So that was a good day.

How old was she at the time? She was 14. Made the first boat grave find it. They have to start somewhere after it. The team are using a geo-radar to survey the site. As the data accumulates, the ghostly outline of a 1,000-year-old graveship takes form. From the team's research, it's clear that Bura was an important place in this part of Norway during pre-Viking times. The center of a kind of small state, like the city-states of the classical world, a kind of Vikingopolis.

It took someone, a family, dynasties, whoever they were, power to create and then sustain it over centuries. Power, but above all, wealth. And this is before they went over the sea in longboats, simply to steal it. So where did they get it? The Koltarov team have been trying to find out. Ragnar Orton Lee wonders how Bura fitted in with what was going on in Vestfold at the very beginning of the Viking Age and before.

Along the coast, there are several known Viking places. They are not big enough to be towns, but through archaeological finds, we know some of the activity that took place there. Trade. Small scale weights and even scales themselves have been found. Bits of silver that were lost. Plus the remains of small, regularly spaced plots of land, almost like allotments. In these were workshops and traces of goods that were actually made there.

These were trader settlements. One of them, Kaupang, has been known about for some time. And its name even means marketplace. But now Ragnar is looking at other less well-known sites, and he's beginning to see a pattern. The Gakhstad Mound is known for its famous burial ship. Not a lot is known about this site compared to Kaupang, but Ragnar knows where to look. In 1995, there was a new intersection on the road. The archaeologist started to find a lot of production waste and structures for buildings.

So we started figuring out that between 4 and 500 meters away from the Goxta mound, there is a Viking Age site of production and transaction. There's been no hard archaeology. hard archaeology done here. The limited facts that Ragnar knows are from an exploratory geophysics survey the team did a few years ago. They had a hunch that maybe there was something here, and they were right. At the surveying in 1995, we could see about 10 centimeters left of a cultural layer, riddled with slags, tools, glass beads, stuff like that.

We could see post holes from houses. We could see part of the ditches. The geophysics were really promising. It looked very much like the team had discovered a new trader settlement. But then fate and farming intervened. The excavation starts in 2012. Unfortunately, there's been plowing of this field. Once and 10 centimeters of cultural layers, most of the post holes vanished.

So just the remains of the parcel ditches were left. The crop and harvest wiped out the only known physical remains of Gakstadt Heimdahl's Viking Age trade settlement. But at least Ragnar knew he and the team were onto something. They began putting it all together, looking for places where there was archaeological evidence of production or manufacturing anything to do with trade. With each year that goes by, more and more fines add to the picture. Along with the other nearby sites, was this some kind of trade network?

And was it controlled by Bura? They had to be getting something to trade with, something to sell, but what? The clues lay in the archaeology. There was evidence of iron production, the smelting of iron ore. There were materials like soapstone for carving bowls and other domestic items. Combs, often finely made and decorated from bone or reindeer antler. There was a whole range of commodities, from everyday items to luxurious status symbols. And all the raw materials needed to make these trade goods were right there in this part of Norway. The Koltarov team surveys all

the archaeological sites within the region, and Norway, still now, but especially back in Viking times, is rich in natural resources. Vestfold and Telemark are currently two counties combined together, from the Vestfold coast, right up to the Telemark Uplands in the north. The largest national park in Norway, Ha Dungavida, is an upland plateau that covers more than 2,000 miles, just mountains, lakes, and rivers. At Skinnerbo, there's still one of the largest wild reindeer herds in the world. The animals have been hunted here since prehistoric times, for food, as well as for their pelts and their antlers. These were important resources in Viking times, and the hunting of reindeer and other animals reached a huge scale. Precious Gia falcons and other

birds of prey were also hunted here, captured alive for export to rich nobles to use in falconry. They would even be exported overseas due to being so sought after. There are also archaeological sites that reveal another kind of activity here, and one that was on a surprising scale. Coal pits aren't something you think of as from the Viking Age, yet iron production was hugely important for trade, and so the availability of coal made this region ideal. The earth surrounding it as a bank and the actual pit for coal production. They would fill this with timber, cover it with earth and turf, and then just burn the coal.

An industrial landscape involving coal pits and iron ore smelting. Smoke and flame and deforestation. It's more like our impression of 18th century Britain than idyllic untouched Norway. So about 1,200 years before the Industrial Revolution, there's a massive production here. The problem for Ragnar and the team is that these sites are scattered over such a vast area. To keep on top of trying to assess them all, they needed a game changer. And thanks to the Norwegian government, they got one. Laser imaging detection and radar.

LIDAR or LIDAR. LIDAR is kind of a scanning of a landscape that removes all the vegetation. So like a burial mound or a coal pit or anything that either elevates from the ground or is dug down in the ground will give a clear feature. The Norwegian Mapping Authority has embarked on a LIDAR survey of the whole of Norway. The Kultarov team combined this data with aerial photos, including reconnaissance from the Second World War. With it all put together, it's a powerful display of the past and the scars it sometimes leaves. leaves in the landscape. We have these national database of cultural heritage sites.

And of course with driving distances and stuff, it helps us a lot. What's the potential in this area? Should I go in the car and drive three hours to see? Or should I just take a look on my computer and say, ah, there is something here. We actually do need to look at this area. These red dot are heritage sites. It lies at about 880 meters, about

sea level and once I want to take a look at it I can go to just aerial photo and I can see that it's covered with some forests it's peaty so it will give good iron ore you have a river close by so it's suitable for iron production the LIDAR gives Ragnar what the maps and photos alone can't an extra dimension then I can switch on the lighter data. That gives you a lunar landscape. It's now cut away all the vegetation, so the birch forest is gone. And then of course all these craters are coal pits. So these are for producing coal for an iron production site. There's about 11 of them in this area alone. There are tens of thousands of these coal pits, Viking Age, and how many do you need for one iron

production site? So if you have like 2,000, coal pits in an area, you probably have several hundred iron production sites. So then you start seeing the scale of this, and then you start understanding the logistics behind it. It's just so extensive that you kind of start to see the, to get a glimpse of the highly organized production that's been going on. Iron is just one of the things the Viking Age traders harvested from the interior. But Ragnar and the team want to be able to track these and other commodities from here down to the market settlements on the coast.

In part two, we'll learn about some of the amazing discoveries the team were able to bring to light. I was like bursting out with excitement, but I had to be still because I wasn't in a plane. The guy next to me was actually looking at me where I was like... I saw clearly this was a force hammer. Including a certain commodity, a certain commodity that has proven to be a very convenient tracker for the team's research. I sort of just came across another one of these honestone, but they pop up everywhere in the archaeological record, especially from the Viking Age.

And we'll discover how examining the sea level change started to provide clues about Hovlin's past. So join us next time for part two of this Viking special, wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. 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. And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out Where Did Everyone Go, Histories of the Abandoned, A Deep Dive into the Incredible Stories Behind Forgotten Places. Available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.