Forbidden History - Vikings: The True Story | Part 3

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

In the final instalment of our three-part Vikings special, discoveries and forensic evidence collide to rewrite the Vikings’ story, revealing their everyday lives, vast networks and the surprising legacy they left across Europe. 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  Petra Schneidhofer: Kulturarv, Vestfold & Telemark Fylkeskommune Sverre Naesheim: Metal Detectorist Terje Gansum: Archaeologist, Seksjonsleder, Kulturary Vestfold & Telemark Fylkeskommune Clare Downham: Professor of Medieval History, Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool  Ole Harald Flaten: Oseburg Heritage Foundation Nils Olav Gjone: Nedre Lagen Elvelag Tor Oydvin: Oseburg Heritage Foundation 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, Viking ships crossed the North Sea. Raiders in search of silver. Those are the stories and the narratives that have been told over the years. Over the years, we've been told that their rise was built on plunder

and violence. But in reality, that's not quite the truth. New discoveries are challenging old ideas. Did the Viking Age really begin with raiding? And of course, nobody switched on that button and said, oh, we're Vikings, let's go raiding. This is part three of the true story of Vikings before Vikings. In part two of this three-part special,

We met Ragnar, Teria, and others uncovering the secrets of Vestfold and Telemark in southern Norway. For generations, history books have said the Viking Age began in 793, with attacks on Britain. But experts in Norway and the UK are rethinking that story, especially as they study the great burial mounds of Bura. Bora was already thriving before raiding began. So where did that early wealth come from? Archaeologists are finding clues that point not to looting, but to trade. Goods exchanged, silver-flowing, networks of power taking shape.

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 Hoveland was hiding. And we had this small window of chance. so we could do the geophysics here with Krister and Petra. They were just in time. Petra, Krister and the team got moving with a geophysics survey of the whole area. The way it happened here,

where everything worked out within two days of specialist talks to specialist, talks to specialist, everything is put in place, we're coming, the conditions are completely right. And then, you know, you do your service, you hope for the best. Petra and the others covered the ground and did the survey. They had no idea that they'd made a really special discovery.

It was another building, lost since the Viking Age. Next day I was on a plane and I was processing my data in a plane seat. And when the data were finished, I just found, you know, saw that building in the data. And I was like bursting out with excitement, but I had to be still because I was on a plane. The guy next to me was actually looking at me where I was like, they wouldn't know all the details for some time, but it was a large structure with massive post holes similar to those at Bura, possibly another hall building

or longhouse. A great team effort had paid off. So of course, it's one of the best examples, I think, how, if everything works together as it should, how well the results can be. And it makes me very happy. Through the survey and after, Svara kept searching. New finds kept adding to the picture.

He found scale weights and a silver dirham coin, evidence of trade. Iron slag showed there'd been smelting or blacksmithing. And just in the soil, more than a dozen honestones. Some used, some may be stored for trading that were lost. The hovelin fines brought every everything together. The inner channel, so long just an idea, a theory, now made sense in the landscape, not seen

like this for over 1,000 years. From the coast, near the mouth of the Numidal River, it ran roughly east and north, then from Kaupang, Norway's first trader town, linking it with Gokstad Heimdel. And of course, having this inner channel there ties up for a kind of a major major, a major highway between Kaupang and Heimdahl Gocksta. And the inner channel is bang in the middle. Maybe the channel and others like it link with other trader settlements as yet undiscovered.

Then, along its busy shipping route, at today's Hovelin, there would have been a sheltered mooring. In a sense of like a gas station, that ships come in, the crew needs to sleep, it's a good harbor, Good Harbor, somebody has been on the sailing for a long time, they need some small repairs, stuff like that. There were maybe trader stalls or goods warehouses. Overlooking the site, there was a longhouse or perhaps a religious building. Given the tradition that the whole area was somehow connected with the Norse gods.

They kept the island name. It's still called Thor's Island. It's been seven, eight hundred years since salt water disappeared and making it part of the mainland. But it still kept the name, Taurus Island. Finally, the channel led north, from where the inner channel was perhaps controlled, along with the whole of the trading network. And then, of course, you can't have a channel like this without somebody with political and economical power. For Teria, Ragnar and the team, it brought about a rethink of a rethink of a how a wealthy society built up here,

long before they went across the sea, rating for wealth in the 790s. So a lot of pieces are falling together, and remember that these guards are living here in this long house at the inner channel 200 years before what we call Viking Age kicks in. All this began with a book, stories of a lost island,

and a tiny silver Thor's hammer. I think there is a me more to discover. So I really hope that some of the authorities from the community that they find resources to investigate more. Thor's Island, other places along the inner channel, and the huge structures at Bura itself. Such a large scale of logistics and construction

must have required a huge amount of labor. Terrier and the team are only now grasping the size of all this. There were no machines back then. It's possible to move them, but they're quite big. Where did all that labor come from? When the long ships began venturing from Scandinavia, it seemed the raids weren't just for treasure. There were other things the Vikings were looking for.

What sort of commodities are the Vikings taking advantage of? Of course, one of the biggest probably is the slave trade. So the trade in human lives was a vast part of the Viking trade network. Slaves, known to the Vikings as thralls, were at the very least a source of cheap labor for farming and production, and perhaps for building structures like those at Borough. But most of all, their greatest value was probably as tradable commodities. So people are being traded at really quite far afield,

but also back into the Scandinavian homelands. But the scale of this is actually really difficult to grasp. There have been finds made of iron shackles and chains at some Viking sites. But they can't be accurately dated, nor positively identified as slave restraints. Even if we find graves and skeletons, we don't actually have any way of telling

whether those were forcibly moved if they were people who'd been enslaved. Of course, slavery is really hard to find in the archaeological material. We don't know what they did with the general public, little less what they did to the trels. They were probably discarded as waste. But we can't trace it in the archaeological material. Lack of archaeology and written records hamperes the study of slavery in Scandinavia in Viking times. But that's not the same for everywhere. We are lucky for early medieval Ireland

in that there is an abundance of written materials. Claire Downham has studied the existing sources for Viking Age Ireland. Many of them are only now fully coming to light. Quite a lot of these materials were translated between the 19th century and the 1970s, so some of that material isn't really fully in the public domain. About the time Vikings started rating

Britain. They also attacked Ireland. By around 841 AD, they'd settled and founded a base at a sheltered basin that made a deep natural harbour. So early Dublin was founded around a dark pool, which is from which the settlement gets his name, so the Linduvve of Dublin. And this was an area where ships could be moored. So if ships arrived from Dublin Bay, there's a place where they could shelter. The base was located on the boundary between two Irish provinces, Lensster and Meath. A trading base between the two kingdoms meant they could quite shrewdly exploit both. As with elsewhere in the Viking world, slave trading was undoubtedly a part of this.

Pretty soon, within a few decades, a ruthless pattern emerges. We then in the 830s and 840s get individual captives being taken, but there are some instances in the late 9th century when we get larger numbers of people being taken, perhaps one of the most striking is in the year 895, the Vikings attack Armar, which is probably like the most important religious centre in Ireland at that time, and they take 710 people away. In the archives Claire has studied, one account that has recently come to light paints a picture of the realities of this Viking kidnap and ransom trade. There's one particularly fascinating source, and this is a narrative that was written

in the 870s about a man called Findon who grew up on the coast of Leinster. Finton was brought up in a noble family, which probably explains why his sister was kidnapped. By this time, Vikings knew it was more profitable to sell people back to their own community rather than transport them to some distant slave market. When Fenton goes to negotiate the release of his sister, he's captured as well. And then the Vikings have an ethical debate. as to whether it's a good idea to capture somebody who's come to ransom another prisoner. So ethical to make that.

I know, it's fascinating. It's hardly the image we have from history of rampaging Vikings. And so the Vikings are said to have this discussion as to whether Fendon should be released, and then they release him. And that's probably a good business sense, because if you're going to capture people who come to pay ransoms, then people aren't going to come to pay ransom. The account has the family.

The account has the feel of authenticity, especially with the chaotic chain of events that comes next. As reference to the kind of complex times that Fendon is living with, he doesn't have just one encounter with Vikings. He's captured by them again. He and a neighbouring family of chieftains have been involved in a blood feud together. So Findon's enemies decide to do a deal with the Vikings. And this shows Vikings basically being used as hitmen. If you want somebody to disappear in late 9th century Ireland, you can go to the United States. the Vikings and you can negotiate for this to happen.

Eventually, Fenton makes his way to the Orkney Islands, where after more adventures he finally escapes. This one source tells us so much about the early Viking times in Ireland and to us now, the unsettling thought of life back then. It is just very hard to think back to a world where slavery was just an accepted part of society. it was normal if you were a free family that there would be one or two slaves that worked for you. Even free people risked becoming slaves. You could fall into debt or simply run out of food in a famine. Remote islands where Vikings controlled the seas surrounding them were used to hold slaves before they were taken to markets elsewhere and sold. The Isle of Man in the Irish Sea was likely one such place,

as was Gotland off Sweden in the Baltic Sea. Gotland has yielded more buried Viking Age silver than anywhere else, and both islands shared similarities during the Viking period. Well, analogies have been drawn between Gotland and the Isle of Man, because a huge number of Viking Age Silverhorts have been discovered in the Isle of Man, and so that sense it seems to have been a really important

stopping off point, located in the middle of the Irish Sea, and a place for trade in the same way that Gotland is an island with access to excellent trading routes and is a location of many finds of Viking Age silver. The sheer amount of silver found in Gotland has caused a lot of debate among Viking Age experts. Gotland is an extremely interesting case study for all of this because it's a seemingly tiny island in the Baltic and for some reason it's got some of the rich the most extreme amounts of silver. A remarkable thing about the hordes found on Gotland

is the huge number of dirham coins known to have come from the Islamic caliphates. The Vikings value this extremely pure silver, which was mined near Baghdad in the 8th and 9th centuries. But how did so much of it reach Gotland in the Baltic Sea? There's something about that location, and it's its position in between East and West, that's clearly really crucial. The question is why, why have they got all this wealth? And if all of that is coming into somewhere like Gotland, what's going out?

What's going the other way? What are they getting in return? One of the most likely reasons is the involvement in the slave trade. Some experts now think the main trade between the Vikings and the East, possibly Arabia or beyond, was human slavery. If that's true, the huge amount of silver found on Gotland begs the question how many people from Ireland, Britain or Europe were taken from their homes and lives, perhaps passing through Viking Gotland built on the prophets of slavers.

Whether these are people who are directly involved or if they're sort of middlemen, this is a sort of way station. We don't really know, but clearly this is a really key place. If Bora was built partly on the prophets of slavery, we may never know for sure. There are no written records and archaeology rarely reveals the whole story. Still, the Kulterov team has uncovered a lot of information about how the Viking Age developed here. Their findings suggest it began not just decades, but centuries earlier than our current history's

claim. The kings or queens of Bora were already prosperous by then. Harnessing the natural resources of their land, they used the riverways as the ideal logistical network to transit raw materials and goods to and from the trader settlements, and then out onto the fjords and seas to wider Scandinavia and beyond. We continue the story after the break. Now Ragnar is ready to put everything to the test. After all the research he and his team have done,

he wants to recreate what Viking traders once did, carrying goods from the high plateau of Telemark down to the Vestfold Coast. To do this, he's enlisted the expert boat builders of the Saga Usoberg Yard in Tonsburg. Be careful not to go overboard. They're dedicated to recreating Viking-Aid ships, and each year they're the stars of...

of Tonsberg's Viking Festival. The Saga Ingling, which means Youngster, is an exact replica of one of the boats found buried alongside the main ship in the Gokstad mound. It's exactly the sort of boat that the Viking Age traders probably used, and it's heading to waters that its ancestor might very well have known. It's part of the Numadol River, from Holmphos six miles down

to Hedrum. It's still just as wild as it probably was in Viking times. So now we're up at Holmfoss, and what we're gonna do today is we replicate kind of the trade route from here down to the next farm, which have the same archaeology, which is Hedrum, which is a large farm with lots of burials, rich finds. So they go in a row for 10 kilometers down the river,

so we can kind of test how long time we'll take, how does the boat, in the river. Ragnar's plan is for the boat crew to carry a cargo similar to what Viking traders once transported down the river. Some of the typical goods that you would put on your boat, of course the big volume would be reindeer. So it's just different kind of antlers, so you can make all kinds of needles, cobes, gaming pieces and stuff like that. And of course you have the honestones. And these honestones are from the quarry we were at in at Edsburg.

at Eidsborg. So these are exactly the same ones that's exported all over the Viking world. Another heavy good is your iron. Your iron comes from the iron production sites in the forested areas. And of course to do this, you want to be paid in silver. So you kind of weigh your goods and check if the trade is good.

It's the silver weight, not the coin value. That's the thing here. We have the boat. We have the crew and we have the cargo. And of course a trading run like this from Neas to Heatherham hasn't been done in a thousand years. It's time to load up the cargo. So let's see how this go.

It's intriguing for Ragnar to put his theories to the test. And this is so fun. So it's really nice to see how it operates. Ragnar gets ready to time them. So then we set the timer from going from Holbefos and they start at 1103.03. They head off down river. On the first stage, they're off at a good rate.

There's a strong current. They're still not far from the home false waterfall. This part of the river is carefully protected by the authorities here. Ragnar's crew have been given special permission. Local resident Niels Olaf Guion grew up here, and he knows these waters better than anyone. So he's the ideal person to keep a watchful eye

on Ragnar's crew. This is one of the longest river that you find in Norway and definitely the most significant river for transporting valid goods like iron and so on. And it's still really significant for us. And we wouldn't have business at this part of Norway if it wasn't for the river. Normally this is a place where you can easily flow over with the boats. To be sure that they won't scratch the bottom at all, they will cross the bottom. over the river and follow on the rocky side. In the boat, Steiner is now in the bow as lookout.

They've realized that there are hazards all around them, submerged tree trunks and other debris. Bumping into one of them could crack the thin planks of the boat's hull. Even in mid-river, there are sandbanks and they're very hard to spot. At one point, some of the crew have to get out to nudge the boat back into the stream. The crew, the locals and Ragnar alike, this is epic. It's a site not seen here for a thousand years or more. Finally they make it to their destination at Hedrum and Ragnar's there to meet them.

Two hours, 15 minutes and 22 seconds. So how did you think the boat operated on the river? Beautiful, really good. But it was easy to row all. also upwards the currents. Yeah. Yeah. That's easy, quite easy.

Yeah. This construction with a relatively narrow boat and very light build. I can see that immediately there's a direct line between these boats and the boats that were used in thousands along the coast of Norway until the beginning of the 1900. At the strong currents when you have high-rower, water level, then it's good to have a flexible boat. And we were extremely maneuverable up there, both with the rudder and with yours. And when you know the river, and it's pretty well loaded at the bottom of the boat, I agree with you, I think you could make this in less than an hour.

Yeah, I'm absolutely curious about that. The scale of this kind of logistics network, back in Viking times, begins to take focus. All over Norway, Sweden, you would have this river system with literally thousands of of boats going on like this and that that makes us much much easier to understand the massive production of iron, massive production of honestones in Ayedsborg and those places because you can move those heavy goods so easily on these navigable rivers. It's a culmination of the work the whole dedicated team at Vestfold and Telemark have been engaged with for several years now. The Trader

settlements on the coast to the the high mountain plain at Hardangavida in Telemark. Raw materials from the natural wilderness bound for distant shores. Everything had to be transported down this river, and others like it, including the previously unknown inner channel. This whole society had evolved and become prosperous, a long time, possibly even centuries, before we're told the Viking Age began in 793. So then you start seeing the scale of this and then you start understanding the logistics behind the trading market with these goods and you start seeing the industry behind this.

And it's quite extraordinary. The story of Bora and its great wealth and monuments to long dead ancestors wasn't born of thievery from Christian holy places across the northern seas. It was born of a highly developed, commercially structured society, a trade economy, with, at its heart, networks forged by relationships, honor and obligation. New knowledge through dedicated research is all adding to what we now know about the Viking Age. Trying to understand the Vikings is like trying to unravel a mystery. And I think that for me is the hook. We're always gaining new insights into how we can evaluate that material. And I think that's incredibly important.

The rise of the Viking Age was presided over by kings and queens. But these weren't the real driving forces. I think actually it's going sort of closer to the ground, thinking of all the people, all the hundreds and thousands of lives that actually made up the biggest story. All of those enslaved people, all of those traders. Those lives, I think, are really what can tell us. the tree story of the Vikings.

Back at Hedrum, the people buried here weren't kings or chiefs, but modest traders and riverfolk. Some of those people who really built the Viking Age. So basically now we're standing at Hedrum. At this side, three to five boat burials from the Viking Age are known. And they've probably done the same trip

as we've done today many, many, many times during their lives. And it's just nice to see that, at least at this site, they are still here. Their burials are kept and it's still here. 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.