Forbidden History - Vikings: The True Story | Part 2

Episode Date: October 15, 2025

In part two of our three-part special, the investigation deepens as our team follows the trail of newly uncovered Viking artefacts, revealing surprising connections and challenging what we thought we knew about this infamous historical era. 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 Steinar Mandt: Vest-Telemark Museum Eidsborg  Sverre Naesheim: Metal Detectorist Dag Rorgemoen: Director, Vest-Telemark Museum Eidsborg 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. More than 1,200 years ago, from across the North Sea, longboats, raiders, Vikings. Attacking without warning in search of silver. Those are the stories and the narratives that have been told over the years. History tells us this was built on unlawful gains,

that the Vikings rose to power by plundering all around them. But in reality, that's not quite the truth. From old ideas to new discoveries, new knowledge, challenging what we thought we knew. Did the Viking Age really just begin when Scandinavians first went raiding? And of course nobody switched on that button that said, Oh, we're Vikings. Let's go rating. This is part two of the true story of Vikings.

Before Vikings. Vestfold and Telemark in the south of Norway. In part one of this three-part special, we met Ragnar, Teria, and others as they tried to understand their region's intriguing Viking past. Still today, children around the world are told that the Viking Age began in the year 793 AD with the Scandinavian attacks on Britain. Because of this view, we think of the Vikings becoming wealthy and prosperous by pillaging

and stealing. Yet experts in Norway and the UK are challenging that view, and they're trying to understand a mysterious and monumental burial ground from the Viking Age, Bura. It was already long established before Scandinavian's took to the sea to go Viking or raiding. So where did the power and wealth to build such a site come from? To grow the Viking society before it burst its borders and flooded out into Western Europe. That's what Ragnar Orton Lee and the team are trying to find out. They're finding that for once it's a story of Vikings, not about raiding and loot, but of trading, goods for sale, Silver changing hands, commerce, wealth.

Iron is hard to trace, but there's one commodity that has proved a better tracker for this kind of research. It's found in the high uplands, and the LIDAR gives the team the best overview of it. 25 miles southwest of Skinnerboo is Eidsborg, another important source of natural raw materials during the Viking Age, and likely before. The mountains here are made from metamorphic rock. More than 270 million years old. It's a hard type of quartz mica schist, and its stratamine that it fractures in oblong lengths, from a few centimeters to one or two meters.

That makes it ideal for a particular kind of everyday item that was required across the whole of Viking Scandinavia and beyond. Hone stones or wet stones were needed by anybody who had metal items that needed sharpening. For the Viking Age, it's easy to think that this just meant warriors' axes, swords, spears, and arrowheads. Not everyone was a warrior though. Knives, wood axes, spades, chisels, needles, fish hooks, all needed to be sharpened. In this area, a honestone is worthless. there's you can get millions of them just in the nearby region so instead of just having rocks that you

sail with you can sail with uh sellable ballast once you get to Denmark honestones aren't laying around in the landscape so then you can have a higher price on them once you get to England you probably don't have the same amount of honestones so you then get a product that's easily sellable and you're actually having to sail with the weight anyway. You can see the Eidsborg-Honstones in massive impact on the markets in Denmark, Germany, around the North Sea area. Hone stones may not be treasure, but Kat Jarman has worked as an archaeologist for 20 years. And for her, everyday items like these can be some of the most rewarding finds to make.

One of the most magical things about being an archaeologist is that you're you get to be the person who sort of scrapes the ground and you find something, pick it up and you realise that you're the first person to touch that for a thousand years. The last person to have lost it lived in the Viking Age. So it's like it's a direct link between you and that person. It's something you never quite get used to. And it's the closest you get to time travel, I suppose. Kat tells us about a honestone she excavated from a site in England.

But they pop up everywhere in the archaeological record, especially from the Viking Age. This one doesn't seem to have come from a grave, so it's probably just a casual loss, something that somebody dropped and never picked up again. The quarries are protected and looked after today by the Vest Telemark Museum at Eidsborg. It's an important piece of Norway's heritage. The museum also preserves historic buildings from around the region, some of which are the oldest wooden houses anywhere. anywhere. They also promote traditional rural industries, preserving the skills and tools that

have been used here for centuries. And of course, they use the honestones in exactly the same way now as people did back in Viking times. Steinar's family have lived and worked in the area for generations. The honestones he uses today were used by those generations. I got this sharpening stone from my father and he got it from his father. I've been used for many years on daily work mostly in the summertime when it was moving the grass and small one they used for a shovel. When they are digging ditches or things like that to cut the roots on the top so they have a needle near the sharp shovel. Over the centuries, many thousands of people have lived out their working lives here. There are several quarries,

and they were used for hundreds of years after the Viking age. In fact, there was still one old honestone maker, still working here as late as the 1970s. The scale of the quarry and the setting in the mountains makes Idesborg a unique and otherworldly place. Daug-Rogmourn, curator of Idsborg's museum, is trying to find out which parts of the quarry are the oldest, the ones the Vikings worked.

Analysis of the rock surface luminescence can reveal when it was first quarried, when it was first exposed to daylight. We can actually date the quarries. It could have been back in the Viking ages that they tested out this point here, and they found out that no, the stone isn't good enough, we try another place. Then we send this to the lab and see what they can get out of it. One day, they might be able to reveal the actual Viking workings. Viking workings.

This is like something out of a science fiction movie, but thinking about the kind of reputation for looting churches and plundering and all that stuff, this industry in a small place in Westfold and Telemark goes into a total network of trade. Archaeologists in Bergen, Norway, working with the Vestfold and Telemark team, have matched the stone's geological signature with honestones found elsewhere in Norway, Denmark, and other parts of Scandinavia, along with Britain, France, and parts of Europe. The stones are the ideal trackers to help show how far the Vikings traveled, what regions they reached, and the quantities of goods they traded.

But that's after they'd been quarried, processed, and then been delivered to the seaports. And this was something else that bothered Ragnar and the team. One thing they're quite certain Norway didn't have in the Viking Age was Rhodes, at least not many of them, and certainly nothing like Roman roads in Europe. It's more than 62 miles from Hardungavita down the Vestfold coast. So how did they move all these raw materials and trade goods? With Vikings, we think of long ships, the seafaring raiding dragons. We tend to think of the Vikings as the sort of great maritime.

people just going across the seas from the coast to coast to do whatever it is that it needs to do but of course a lot of things and people and objects especially have to actually go from really quite far inland and that's really quite a challenging logistical task if you look at a map of Norway for example you have a really challenging geography you got some really extreme mountain environments so going over land is quite tricky but there One method of travel that you have at your disposal is to go along the rivers. And these rivers really can take you right to the interior and down to the coast.

So people would have used the rivers. In fact, many of them may just live in land and not really go to the coast at all, but they would have had access to rivers, they would have access to those ways of transporting things and to going on boats down the rivers and to the coast. So that really was a crucial part of how anybody or anything would move in the Viking age. Boat traffic would have been the main way to get any heavy or bulky goods around.

But there were still problems. In high mountain areas, goods had to be carried by dog or horse, where the rivers were too rough or inaccessible. Along the Vestfold coast are many rocky coves and bays, also known as Viks, from where we get the name Veking, Viking. Yet there aren't many ways to navigate laterally between the big rivers up into the interior. Burra is at one end of a peninsula. Kaupang and Gokstadt Heimdahl are at the other end. Did they sail all the way around this to get to and from the trader settlements? It turned out

the landscape was ready to reveal another of its secrets. Hovland, in southern Westphal and Telemark. Petra and Krister from the Kultarov team are getting ready to bring to a close and important fieldwork project. It's part of the Kultarov team's ongoing mission to build the geophysical and geor radar picture of the country's historic site. In the 1970s, a farmer plowing a field turned up large sections of an old wooden boat. People speculated it might be Viking, maybe a burial, but there were no bones or bones or treasure and in any case why would it be in the middle of a field so the remains were thrown away through climate research in recent decades it's been shown that the

sea level in Norway has changed a lot since Viking times it's estimated to be by almost 10 feet we knew that the Viking Age shoreline was about 3.8 meters higher than it is today so everybody knew that was a possible for you having to, could be sailing an inner channel. An inner channel. But at this stage, it was still a kind of theoretical myth. Like the search for the Northwest Passage at sea in the 1800s. Once again, LIDAR changed everything.

The team used the LIDAR data to create highly detailed present-day shoreline maps. Then the LIDAR portal gave them the ability to manipulate changes in the sea level very accurately. Low-lying areas of the modern coast gave way to water, and the lay of the Viking Age shoreline of Vestfold was restored. No one had seen it like this for more than 1,000 years. The detail was so clear that valleys and contours became broad floodplains and bays. Small streams became navigable rivers. And amazingly, in the Vestfold Peninsula, it revealed numerous long lost waterways. One was the long suspected inner channel

that would have helped link the trader bases all the way south of Bura to Kaupang and North via main rivers right into the uplands. And of course, having this inner channel there ties up for a kind of a main highway between Kaupang and the smaller but still urban site and the small, urban site at Heimdahl Goksta. And these are just situated less than 30 kilometers away from each other.

And the inner channel is bang in the middle. Ragnar and the team were making progress. It was all starting to make sense, beginning to throw light on the mysteries of Bura and Vestfold and Telemark's Viking past. We continue the story after the break. Archaeologist Teria Gansom, Ragnar and the Vestval Telemar Kulterov or Cultural Heritage Team know that somehow Bura is the key to understanding how the Viking Age began here, but it's a real enigma.

Where does Bora fit in with all that? Bora is kind of the... What is Boda? That's kind of the big puzzle in this. Bura is famous. for its monumental burial mounds. But even by the 1980s, almost nothing else had been found there.

Before, we were puzzled that we just had mounds here. And of course, was this a place just to bury important persons, kings, queens? Every so often, Bora gives up another of its secrets. This was the case around 30 years ago. Bora Park is highly protected by Norwich. region law. So to have done any archaeology there is quite something. But Teria has dug there several times. Now he's the head of the Koltarov team. But back then, he was just starting

out. I was a very young archaeologist and that was some of my first experience excavating here at Boire in the early 90s. They were only allowed to dig small trenches. And while While they found the remains of structures, possibly evidence of settlements, they couldn't really get an overview of what they were looking at. I knew that we didn't get the whole grip in the early 90s. That puzzling would go on for years until they got permission to explore some more.

In 2007, we were able to test out with a GPR, GEO radar to survey some areas here. ground penetrating radar was a fantastic new tool for archaeology and the team hoped it would help them understand the site without more digging the GPR team planned a routine-wide survey area but Teria had a different idea I told the guys who run the Geo Radar don't do that take 25 meters wide and a hundred meters long test along the fence Teria's instincts were proved right. The radar slice made sense of what they'd actually excavated

back in 1991. And suddenly we realized we have been inside a whole building doing excavations. No one had expected this. We were inside without knowing. They'd discovered a whole building, a long house. It was a big structure, a classic Viking hall. The structures they discovered in 1991,

were actually its internal chambers. From the georadar results, they could investigate the post holes that would have supported the hall's great structure. They were over five feet deep, meaning it was likely a tall, impressive building. And it's huge, it's massive. Obviously we're talking about a huge building, a high building, not an ordinary long house.

In fact, when they properly unpack the data, there were actually two buildings. It's opened up a new dimension to Bura. It could no longer be seen as just a burial place, even for kings and queens. Now it seemed Bora had been some kind of royal manor sight. It led to more interest and more surveying. And then, if anyone was in doubt about its status in Viking times,

in the winter snows of 2013, Bura relinquished another of its treasures. In March 2013, we put the georadar behind the Skido and prospected the hole area, and we found even a much huge hole, 63 meters long, and that's one of the biggest hall buildings ever found in Scandinavia.

It was found on a slope above the other hall buildings, buildings and burial mounds. It would likely have been visible from far out in the fjord, a display of power, wealth and tradition to maintain your trade network. I think this is part of what it takes to be a royal manner. You need to show off. You need an old history. The mounds is showing that you have your ancestors here.

You need to show you. show, power, and you have to be generous. And the whole buildings are the place where these negotiations and these actions takes place. It's known that the sea level in Viking times was almost 10 feet higher than now. Climate change is an issue for us today, and it's clearly been a factor in Norway's past.

But the change with the sea level took place over centuries. What if change happened much more rapidly. In wider archaeology, it's now accepted something bad happened. The archaeology does seem to suggest that sometime in the early to mid 6th century, something changes in Scandinavia. Quite a lot of sites in the archaeological record and it seems to be that society is being challenged in some way. We don't exactly know what that is. Around the 530s AD, graves become less ornate, and there are fewer of them. It seems that people were spending less time on elaborate funeral rituals.

There are signs of crop failures with no full growing season for two, possibly three years. People turned back to hunting and fishing. The finds for this time become more Spartan. It's quite possible that there was something that was affecting the population on really quite a vast, scale and that seems to have impacts on the society and how that developed too. So we see social changes, we see different types of objects and artefacts appearing and it's really intriguing to try and link those two together to try and understand what the trigger was, what the sort of catalyst was for that change.

In recent decades, various theories have been put forward. One suggests that a comet might have impacted with the Earth's upper atmosphere and exploded. Something similar happened over the Siberian region of Tunguska in 1908, killing thousands of reindeer and flattening the trees for hundreds of miles. Current research is leaning towards a volcanic eruption, or maybe more than one, creating an ash cloud similar but far larger than the one in Iceland in 2010. These possible eruptions around 535 or 536 AD may have blocked out the sun in parts of Europe in Scandinavia, creating an effect similar to a nuclear winter.

Tens of thousands may have died, possibly more. As if this wasn't bad enough, soon after, from the early 540s, parts of Europe were badly affected by the first major outbreak of the Black Death, known at the time as the Justinian Plague. We certainly know that these things are happening. We have other parts of Europe, well, we certainly know it has a huge impact on. on people. Some have drawn a link between the crisis in the 500s and one of the compelling myths from

the Nordic sagas. Fimblewinter is the harsh winter that precedes the end of the world and puts an end to all life in Midgard, also known as Earth. It's described in the poetic Edda, a collection of Old Norse narrative poems written around the 10 or 1100s. Wimblewinter saw three successive winters with no summer. Hardship, strife, and war followed, causing a kind of reset in society. It's tempting to see the 6th century crisis as perhaps being the fire from which Viking society rose.

For Ragnar and the archaeological team, the effect of the 6th century crisis is real, and they can see it in the archaeology. Society got going very slowly again. It was likely driven by the trading activity along the inner channel to and from the interior of the country. For most ordinary folk in Vestfold and Telemark, it must have taken a long time. We see all this starting in the 700s. We rebuild after the climate change. Sixth hundreds are mainly gone.

In the 700s we see the builder to what we call Viking Age. It seems Bura had the resources to survive. Borre is still functioning. Through the Finbul winter and so on, seems to just go on. So everything is not collapsing during after the eruption and possibly a plague and a comet. In fact, Teria believes the crisis may have worked in favor of its rulers. I think part of the aristocracy, which is Bore is an example of, takes advantage of the disaster and move even higher up on rank and conquer a lot of the

competing powers. So in a way after mid-550 AD you see that the aristocracy they take a step up and take on a lot of power during that following decade. To do this and to keep the silver flowing the trading network and its logistics were vital. In Part 1, we followed archaeologist Petra Schneidhofer as she and the team worked at Hoveland, just inland from the Vestfold Coast. There was a feeling that this area hid a Viking past. But when the team first heard about the site, no one suspected just how significant it would turn out to be.

In 2019, a metal detectorist got in touch to say he'd found what he thought were Viking Age artifacts. Norway has strict laws on this and all fines have to be handed over. The finder was new to detecting and also to the area. My name is Sweri Nesheim. My wife and I were looking for a small farm and we bought this place and there was six months before we moved in and I had some time to look into the history and I found this old book. The book Svara found was from 1915, and it told of the local tradition that in Viking times this had been an important region. Maybe one connected with some kind of local power and the worship of the Norse gods, but there was something more.

I read here that they thought that this area was an island and there was a waterway passing the farms here. By coincidence, this was totally separate to the work the Koltarov team had been doing to recreate the Vestfold coastline as it was in Viking times, before the sea level changed. I think about this is my Indiana Jones story, where I find this old book with a treasure map, and then I went out and looking for the treasure. So this is actually the start of my interest for this place. was the start of me as a metal detector guy. Armed with his treasure map and a brand new detector, Sferra tried detecting for the first time. He made some finds, but they were much later, not Viking.

But then he remembered what he'd read in the book. I thought that I should search more on the side where the old waterway passing these farms. At the end of his second day searching, Svara's hunch paid off. It was getting dark and I was heading home and I got a good signal. The signal was for silver,

but he couldn't yet tell what it was. It was a little bit dark and so I brought it home and I watched it and I saw clearly this was a force of hammer. Thor's Hammer, symbol of the thunder god of the Viking Age. Not bad for your very first Viking find.

I was so surprised and happy because finding a Thor's Hammer at Thor's Island, that's a great thing and the first evidence of these stories and theories about this area. Svara also found a silver knot ring, similar to Anglo-Saxon examples. in the British Museum. These were the finds he first reported to Teria and Ragnar and the Koltar who were very interested. The area fitted in with the idea

of the inner channel, just as Svara's antique book claimed. The days after, I was out searching all the time, I think my wife, she will confirm that I was gone mentally and physically for some days there. His next find was really special, and he could easily have missed it.

And then I found this piece gold foil. So it's so small, it's like a small post stamp, something like that. And it could easily go into the trash bin, because it's similar to chocolate paper or something you just throw away. But it felt a little bit different in my house. Sferra hadn't seen anything like this. Few people have since the Viking Age, even in Scandinavia. It was folded, so I had to fold it out, and then I saw its motif. Sferra saw that there were tiny figures in relief on the very thin gold foil.

It was a Guguba, or little old man of gold. These are rare, only found in Scandinavian. found in Scandinavia and they're thought to be connected with high status or religious sites in the very early Viking age or before roughly the five or six hundreds this really got the team interested so we understood that there's something going on here and it's by the inner channel they decided to try and find out what else Hovland was hiding in part three we'll discover how this sea level change helped reveal the truth about Hovland and the name by which it was known in

Viking times. They kept the island name. It's still called Thor's Island. We'll journey to the islands of Ireland and Gotland to unearth one of the most disturbing aspects of Viking history. It is just very hard to think back to a world where slavery was just an accepted part of society. It was normal. And in the high upland country of Telemark, will join Ragnar and the team as they pit themselves and their theories against the Norwegian River Wild. So please join us next time for the final part of this story. 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.

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