Gone Medieval - Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Vikings

Episode Date: September 6, 2022

September is Vikings month on Gone Medieval, as Dr. Cat Jarman presents a mini-series about her favourite, specialist subject. Over her next four episodes, Cat will be taking a deep dive into the Viking age, looking at how it all started, how it all ended, and the stories we tell about those people from the north in between.In this first episode, Cat addresses all of the burning questions about the Vikings that you sent in via Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the Medieval Monday newsletter. Asking the questions are Gone Medieval’s producers Elena and Rob.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Today is a special episode because we now kick off our Viking mini-series. This month, every Tuesday, I will be taking a deep dive into the Viking Age, looking at how it all started, how it all ended, and the stories we tell about those people from the north in between.

But to start it all off in this episode, I'm going to be answering all of your burning questions on everything you always wanted to know about the Vikings. Now to do that, I've enlisted the help of two people who are absolutely key to making this whole podcast happen, namely my producers, Elena and Rob. And they've been collating your questions on Instagram, Twitter and through the Medieval Monday's newsletter.

There's a huge interest in the Vikings out there so I'm really excited to be able to hear from all you brilliant listeners because obviously without you this podcast wouldn't really happen. So thank you to everyone who's gotten involved with this and a very warm welcome to Elena and Rob. Thanks, Katz. Yay! I'm so happy to be making a debut on the podcast. It's brilliant.

Normally we're just having meetings and emails but actually having you in the studio is fantastic. I think really, I should just hand this over to you two now, shouldn't I? Because you're going to be the ones asking me questions this time around. Well, I think there's nothing more appropriate for the Vikings than burning questions. But I have a burning question for you to start with. And that is, when I was growing up, there was a TV children's cartoon series,

which I watched avidly called Nog in the Nog. And that was my very first experience of knowing about the Vikings, although they were very cute. But was it Nog in the Nog that got you into the Vig? Viking. So it wasn't actually, mainly because I grew up in Norway, we didn't have Norfolk, they're not on Tully, I'm afraid. So we didn't have much Tilly at all, I have to say. It sounds a bit backwards, doesn't it? But what it really was, actually, was something similar. So I read a fiction novel about the Viking Age, about these Viking children who are actually

taken as slaves from Ireland and taken to Norway, but I was about nine. I then went to the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo and saw these incredible Viking ships. And that just completely did it for me because the stories were amazing but actually it was real. So that's sort of where it started, went on to study archaeology, was lucky enough to go on to do a master's in a PhD, studying the Viking Age, realizing that actually there was so much we really didn't know, still don't know about the Vikings and that we had some really exciting new methods, scientific methods to answer those questions. So yeah, it kind of all took up from there really.

So this is incredibly exciting. I'm really excited that we're able to get the listeners involved with this. And so I think let's take it back to basics for the first few questions. So who were the Vikings and when did they exist? So the people we call the Vikings are people from Scandinavia, the people who went out from Scandinavia at raiding and trading, starting at the end of the 8th century and going on until the late 11th century. And we call them Vikings, even though they didn't really. really call themselves that. So I'm going to go a little bit deeper into that in the next episode,

actually. But for now, let's use the short-hand Vikings, Scandinavians, going out, some staying home between the 8th and the 11th centuries. As a one of the stereotypes that I think of when I think about the Vikings is that they were a particularly violent group of people. Is there any truth to that? That's a question that comes up quite a lot, because that is the image that the Vikings have all these very, very sort of violent people. And there's definitely a lot of truth for that. We can't go the other way. And so actually, no, they were really just cuddly and sweet. A lot of Vikings certainly weren't violent. There were lots of farmers. There were lots of traders. There were lots of people who were absolutely not involved in raiding at all. But also, the people we know

who went out from Scandinavia, two places like Britain and raided were absolutely violent. And we do hear about this in the written record. So we also have to remember that. It's a lot of of that comes from the people who were being targeted. So they obviously have every reason to emphasize that strength and violence of the Vikings. But interestingly, if you try and actually look for evidence for it from other sources. So, for example, you could look at skeletons, so human remains and see, have these people got more injuries? If they're really violence, then you should also find lots of bodies with lots of violent injuries from swords and access and things. And if you look at Scandinavia in that time period, there actually isn't that

much evidence of violence. And comparing the bones from the Viking Age to those before and after, it seems like there's almost more violence in the medieval periods of sort of later after the Viking age. We don't know if that's just at home, if it's different away. But we do also know that early medieval Europe was a very violent place. So I think they probably gave as good as they got, to put it that way. Certainly we have mass graves of people we now think are Scandinavian raiders in Oxford and in Weymouth. One of them contains more than 50 men

who have all been decapitated by their enemies, so presumably by people living in England at the time. So although yes, violence was a big part of Viking society, I'm not sure that as sort of completely violent society is what we're looking at. So we do need to sort of consider it a bit more widely than that. We've been talking a lot about the Vikings being this very sort of macho culture. In fact, when I think about the Vikings, I just think about hairy men in helmets, raiding. But so we've had a couple of questions on Instagram from Vicky and Steve.

And it's the same question, actually. What did female Vikings do? And, or as Steve says, Vy queens? So, again, this is something that is a really interesting question that I've been researching actually for the last 10 years. We used to think that all the women in the Viking age stayed at home. tender to the farm, their menfolk went away. They went out raiding and trading and doing all these things and coming back. So women were at home tending to the farm. To a degree, that was probably quite correct. We know that a lot of women did stay home. But also, we now know that an awful

loss of the women from Scandinavia were part of the movement outwards. One of the reasons why we can now tell is that we can use modern more forensic methods. So we can look at things like isotope analysis, which is a way of looking at skeletons, looking at teeth and tooth enamel, to find out where somebody grew up. And by doing that, we can trace migration around the world. So looking at skeletons from the Viking Age, we see that actually an awful lot of women are also moving out of Scandinavia. And others are coming back in, interestingly, as well. So women are not just staying put at home. And as to the question of whether they're fighting, that's become a really popular question at the moment. Again, that's something we used to think that absolutely not.

There is one very famous grave in Birka in Sweden, a grave BJ 581, also known as the Birka Warrior Woman. And this caused a sort of huge worldwide sensation a few years ago when ancient DNA analysis show you that this skeleton, somebody who was buried in a very rich grave full of weapons, pretty much every type of weapon you could imagine, was always thought to be a but DNA showed that this body was genetically female. So what was thought to be one of the most powerful warriors in the Viking Age turned out to be presumably a woman. So that sort of changed that question completely.

And we have other records of this as well, so of women fighting abroad being found on battlefields, for example. But I think this was quite rare. I think it was possible as a woman you could take up weapons. you almost certainly had to know how to defend yourself, either back home or if you're one of those women traveling out, you had to know how to defend yourself. So I think it was a possibility. I don't think we have what some modern drama shows like to have these huge big armies, Lagather and her crew, for example, in Vikings. I don't think it was anywhere near that common, but it was definitely possible. But we also know that some women took part in things like trading.

So there's a lot of burials of women with trading weights, especially into Eastern Europe and places like Russia. So I think we have to move away from that very sort of simple women at home, which interestingly was created in kind of Victorian times when that was when the view of women in current society was that they were quite passive, staying at home. And now I think we have quite varied roles. We have some female rulers as well. so we have some very powerful, presumably vik queens, as Steve suggested. I love that. Can we pick up on the question of DNA, which you just mentioned? We've had a number of questions through the Medieval Monday's newsletter

concerning the genetic legacy of the Vikings in Britain and Ireland. If one was to have a DNA test, would we find bits of Viking in our blood still? So this is a question I get asked quite a lot, actually, because these modern DNA tests are really popular. And some of them actually advertise that you could look for Viking ancestry. You can find out how many percent Viking you are. It's not quite that simple. First of all, there's no Viking DNA.

This Viking, as I'll get into in a later episode, is just a term that we've given people from Scandinavia. And there's also problems with how that sort of ancestry is passed on. Because actually, if you trace your history back, you've got hundreds of thousands, millions of ancestors. It multiplies every generation. but there's not really been that many people in the world. So if you go back a thousand years,

there are actually fewer people alive a thousand years ago than you have ancestors, which is a really difficult thing to get your head around. But what that means is that these sort of ancestors cross over. And actually it also means that if you go back to about a thousand years ago, everyone who lived a thousand years ago and had offspring had children and passed on their DNA is essentially the ancestor of everyone living.

today, which is a really weird concept that I still don't quite get. But what that means is that if you've grown up in northwestern Europe, if you've got ancestry in northwestern Europe, you probably have some ancestors who are what we would call Scandinavians. So that's a really sort of random way of answering the question. We also need to think about the fact that if you take a DNA test and your genes are then compared to where people are living today, so they'll be comparing your to people living in England, living in Scandinavia. So it doesn't necessarily tell you about where people lived in, say, 8.50 AD, but where people are living today.

So that's why it's not quite so simple, unfortunately, and people get a little bit disappointed. But we do know that a lot of people moved out of Scandinavia. A lot of people didn't just raid in places like Britain and Ireland, but in fact they did settle. We haven't quite figured out just how many yet. We're still arguing amongst ourselves, as academics, how many people actually settled somewhere like England.

We think probably quite large numbers. But some of the DNA studies are suggesting that the actual genetic legity is quite small, as little as maybe 6% I think one study suggested. But again, I think that's partially because of the way that the methods work. There's also an issue with the similarities between, Scandinavians from the Viking Age and the people who migrated to England in the centuries before that, the people we tend to call the Anglo-Saxons. So this was going to be my next question.

So this is from Sam, Peter, Lucy, Enahedha, or from the Medieval Monday newsletter. And they're keen to understand the difference between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons and whether they have a common ancestor. Because I think sometimes Vikings and Anglo-Saxons can be confused, maybe used interchangeably. So what do you think about that? Yeah, so this is such a good question. And again, it's one that doesn't unfortunately have a very simple answer,

but that's what makes it so interesting, I think. So the people we tend to refer to as to Anglo-Saxons, and I know that term itself is a little bit controversial. But what we mean by that is the people who seem to migrate into England in the post-Roman period. So they come from Northwestern Europe as well. So really what's southern Denmark, northern Germany, across the coast to sort of Netherlands.

These are people who are named as Angles, Saxons, and also Jutes. Well, Jutes tend to get forgotten about in all of this. And they seem to come across to England, where they settle, possibly invade, we don't really know. There are stories, there are historical narratives dating back to that period. So, Bede, for example, writes that these people and invade Britain, and they sort of push away the native Britons, and they settle instead. We have some archaeological evidence. we've got evidence that things like pottery decoration artifacts match in parts of England and these parts of Denmark and Germany. So there's clearly things happening there. But what's difficult when you then

get into the genetics of it is that these come from very similar places. So some of them are southern Denmark. Vikings come from Denmark too. And it's very close in time. These migrations, these earlier migrations happen all the way up to the Vikingage really. So, there's not really a genetic difference, and we can't tell them apart. And that's where the problem comes in. So when you have these studies, these huge big genetic studies all over England or over Britain, trying to tease apart people who migrated before the Viking Age and during, it's almost impossible. But having said that, there's also some other places.

So some of the Norwegian DNA, for example, is quite different. Scandinavia is quite big. There's not sort of one big lump of genetic answer to those all. same, there's a lot of variety there. So there are some patterns and we can see more people from Norway, for example, going across to the northwest, things like that. So there are patterns there, but it is tricky and it's very tricky to tell them apart or to work out when the migration's happened. How much of a tyrant really was Julius Caesar? And it's very interesting to think about why it's Caesar in particular when there have been many political assassinations in the past

millennia, why Caesars has been the one that is brought up again and again. Would we have ever stood a chance against the first dinosaurs? In the Jurassic, you see dinosaurs get bigger, and you see meat-eating dinosaurs grow into things like the size of buses. And did Helen of Troy really have the power to launch a thousand ships? She is always derided as this sort of terrible adulterish, but at least as old as Homer, at least the 8th century BC, is a counter-tradition. which Helen doesn't go to Troy. She's never Helen of Troy. She's Helen of Egypt.

Well, you can expect all of this and more from the ancients on history hit. Join us twice a week, every week, as we explore some of the greatest moments of our ancient past. Subscribe to the ancients wherever you get your podcasts. So we had this question about were all Vikings Scandinavians or, alternatively, were all Scandinavians automatically Vikings. Haley has also written through the Medieval Monday newsletter. says if Vikings traveled and traded so widely, would they have come across people of colour? And would this have led to Vikings of different races? If so, where did they come from? What roles might they have played? How were they treated? Or were all Vikings actually blonde and white?

What characterises the Viking Age is really this movement out? It's the fact that they are going out of Scandinavia. They're going so far. They reach all the way to North America. They go down to the Mediterranean and into Eastern Europe. So, in all those travels, of course, they do come across an awful lot of people. We know that for a fact. So we do know that there are raids recorded in Morocco, for example. So they will be certainly meeting North Africans there. We also know that there's a huge movement to the east. Part of the stuff that I've been looking at and researching in my work is the contact with Eastern Europe, especially going all the way down to Constantinople or Istanbul as we know it, but also across to

Baghdad. So we know that those people who went east along the rivers of Eastern Europe had a lot of contact with eastern parts of the world. So they would have come across a lot of Arabs. We know there's records and accounts of Arabic travellers who interact with these Eastern Vikings. We also hear about them travelling all the way to Baghdad themselves. So in places like Constantinople and Baghdad, they're going to come across an awful lot of different people. Where there, many of those came back to places like Scandinavia, we actually don't really know. Although we do see evidence of contact with Islam, certainly. There's a lot of huge numbers, like we're talking hundreds of thousands of Islamic coins coming into Scandinavia. Now that's actually because of the silver

more than anything else, but they have contact with that. We also actually have some people buried, especially in Birka in Sweden, which seem to be a sort of cultural melting pot. You have people buried with all sorts of grave goods, including Arabic items. There's a woman with a ring that's got an Arabic inscription on it. Whether these are actual people from the Islamic world who've come up and migrated, we don't really know. There are some possibilities of that. They don't seem, though, to have made much of an impact genetically. There was a recent big ancient DNA study, and largely in Scandinavia, so I

sort of coming back home, the types of DNA and genetics there were more commonly what you would expect in Scandinavia. But there was also some southern European DNA, so certainly some people were coming back in. But you then also have some interaction with various native population, both in Scandinavia itself, you've got the Sami people, or a sort of semi-nomadic people. And then if you go across to the North Atlantic and somewhere like Greenland, you do have an indigenous population there too that they definitely interacted with. Nobody's found any genetic interaction between them, but we know from things like the sagas, for example, they actually have a name for the Inuit people called Skralir. It's not always a peaceful relationship, but we also see

now from archaeology that they were clearly trading, so they were interacting. We have people interacting really a lot, and there's no evidence to suggest that they were particularly negative to people of other cultures or racist or skin colour or anything like that, which I think is quite interesting. It doesn't really ever come across in the sagas or anything. And I think actually part of the key to the Vikings' success was the fact that they were really adaptable. They could go all these places. They could interact with all these people.

So clearly there's nothing in their society or religion that's really saying, don't talk to people with dark skin or anything like that. So there's no sort of sign of anything like that, which I think is quite interesting. And I think just the final question was on whether they were all blonde and white. Well, we have actually seen now from that ancient DNA study that I just mentioned, which looked at things like skin and hair colour, they definitely weren't all blonde, so we do have a lot of brown hair. As the skin colour, I think they are largely light skin,

which is to be expected really, but definitely not all blonde. So I'm going to segue from Haley's really highbrow question into one from some of the boys in the history hit office, Jake McGorry and Luke Holmes. So they asked, was Gout big in the Viking Age? Which I think is actually quite an interesting question around diet, right? And Luke has specifically asked, is this why they were all massive and ripped?

So, yeah, let's talk about Viking diet. Okay, right, so a few things to unpack there. I like this. So Goward, so that is a condition that is quite often thought to go up. we know comes from things like quite rich diets, also a lot of alcohol. So I can see his idea here. Neil on Instagram, how quickly could they neck a pint? Yeah, another one. That also links to it. I can see a nice theme here. I think that's, I've got scientific answer, 7.5 seconds, actually. That's a lie. That's a lie. I don't know. I think we need to ask about

a horn, so we don't have a pint, but you'd have a horn, you'd drink from a horn. So the question should really be, how quickly could they neck a horn? They did drink beer. be meed. So yeah, it's a valid question. Maybe we need to do some experimental archaeology and some testing in the history hit office to find out. But anyway, let's go back to the gout. Do we know anything about gats ago? It's a sort of condition where the body creates too much uric acid and that builds up as little horrible crystals in joints, especially the big toe and because it's very, very painful. Now, we don't actually have any evidence for it in the Viking Age. We would have to find it in skeletons. So we'd have to look at that toe joint.

you can find traces of things like arthritis. As far as I know, nobody's ever picked up something that they can definitely link to gout in the Viking Age. So, do we know if they drank a lot and ate a lot? Certainly, if you look at the stories of Valhalla, so this sort of afterlife where the warriors could go to, I think those who go to Valhalla would definitely be likely to get gout because there they basically fight all day

and then they eat and drink every evening. They have a pig that they slaughter. every night and then they eat it and then it magically comes to life again the next day and they can do the same thing and there's a lot of beer and a lot of mead real life however so they do drink beer beer was quite important actually it was really important but it was normally kept for feasts and feasting activities because actually it was quite expensive it's quite difficult to produce you need a lot of grain a lot of corn for making it and that is something that was actually quite hard to come by especially in places like Norway where you don't have a lot of very good farmland.

So I don't think on our daily basis they would be lacking a lot of pints, but for feasting activities definitely. And in terms of diets of the food they ate, so again, we're a little bit limited in the sources we have. We can look at skeletons, we can look at some of these forensic methods to see. I don't think they're eating a lot of sort of very protein-rich diets just because there's not so much of it going around so much of it available. some of them are eating a lot of fish

we tend to sort of think well Vikings must eat a lot of fish because they're scalylavia they're by the sea for some of them definitely that is true and things like isotope analysis where we look at bones and we look at diet from that is showing high marine diets but actually it was really quite varied so there's no sort of general

this is what a Viking ate actually a bit like us some of this is definitely also going to be linked to how wealthy you were if you were wealthier you'd have access to more higher protein diets but yeah I think we don't have those sort of super rich diets is that linked to things like size and height it can be so good diets a lot of protein can make you sort of taller and obviously stronger but some of that is genetic as well so obviously if you've got tall bearings you're

going to be probably quite tall and pass that on to your children so some of that is a sort of more Scandinavian genetic ancestry that we have got some quite tall people and actually some of the raiding parties we think we've found in places like England, they're not all that sort of big and strong. Some of them are, but not all of them. So again, I think we've got some of those stereotypes we talk about at the beginning coming in here. So they didn't all necessarily look like Alexander Scarsgaard in The Northman.

No, I don't think they did. Some of them probably, but no, I think some of them were sort of slightly more scrawny. But then again, they would have been used to physics. work, right? So they'd be rowing and there would be farming, which is all really hard work, but not quite the six-pack apps, I don't think. Well, thanks for that, Jake and Luke. I hope that's maybe I laid some beers or some comparisons for them. Just thinking about diets, I suppose, also what Vikings ate depended where they went. So if they came to Britain or they went to the eastern Mediterranean, they're going to be trying out different cuisines of different places where they went.

But I wonder what influence they had on the cultures they left behind. So Lucy and Hand, through our newsletter and also through Instagram, have asked us about this question, what was the influence of Vikings on our culture now? And Cole has also written through the medieval Monday newsletter. What was the impact of the Vikings on place names in the UK? and also, for example, accents. Are there traces of Viking in Geordy or Yorkshire accents? This is a really interesting question, so I like these ones, because actually the Vikings on the Viking Age had a massive influence.

In fact, on the way we are talking right now. So the English language, for example, is hugely impacted by Scandinavians, especially. So I think England really is one of those big places where they made such a big impact. So English language has a lot of Old Norse words in it, So Old Norse is essentially the language that the people were called the Vikings spoke. Lots of words we use things like egg and sky and knife, even cake. These are all basically Viking words.

So we've got the Vikings to thanks for all of those. So this happened when these Scandinavians are settling in England and start to have some of their words being taken up by the local population because it's not a sort of complete colony where they're just sort of set up and don't interact very quickly. they mix in with the local populations, which is probably also the reason why we can't quite work out how many of them, because they're not separate, they're sort of completely assimilate into the cultures. So we see a lot of it in the language, definitely.

In art that appears at the time, lots of things like stone carvings have all these sort of really wonderful Scandinavian influences. And that's especially in the north and east of England, where we see it quite a lot. They had an impact on the economic system of England at the time, So they were essentially triggering a generation of coinage again. So the English economic systems that sort of turning to what we have today are really starting at this time as well.

And partially because of the impact of that. Lots of towns are being created. Burr, so it's the places with the Burr and the place name. These are essentially towns that had new defences made, starting with Alfred the Great and a few generations afterwards as well. So certainly England, there's that huge impact. And with those things like place names is one of those things where we can really see that. It's really interesting.

So look around places like anything ending in B-Y, so Derby, Rugby, the B-Y-B still in Scandinavian languages means town. So that would mean village or town. So Darby is Deer Village, basically. So that's a really interesting one. And you can trace them around the country as well and there's a lot more of them in the north. You've got lots of other versions, things like Thorpe. Thorpe means outlying settlement. that's again a Scandinavian word.

Kirk, so things like Kirby, as Kirk comes from church. So Kirby means village with a church in it, for example. So you could go and see that quite a lot, and you see much more of them in the places that had a really heavy Scandinavian presence. And in terms of things like accents, it's a bit harder because we also have to remember that an awful lot has happened in the last thousand years. A lot of people have come across,

and there's certainly into the Middle Ages. There's a big ongoing connection, like Scotland and the sort of northern islands and Norway, for example. You have a lot of people coming into places like Liverpool to work in the docks, lots of sailors coming in 17th, 18th century. So Scouse, for example, the sort of name for Scouts is for people from Liverpool, comes from the dish Lapskas, which is actually a very common traditional dish in Norway of sort of meat and vegetables.

And that is thought not to be a Viking origin, but actually from those 18th century sailors and people who worked in the harbour. So when you have that later in fact it's difficult to tell. So are some of those later words? There's a lot of words used in the north and in Scotland that are like Scandinavian words. But do they really date back a thousand years? Most cases probably not. We can look at all the documents, all the place names, some really interesting ones where you see we can go back. You look at Doomsday Book, for example, and you can look at names there, place names and pick up so you're much closer to the period itself. So there definitely is a legacy, but we have to be a little bit careful

with looking just today what people say today and try and work out what's happened since. So still kind of on the topic of culture, I'm fairly certain that the Vikings were no stranger to parties. I know back in December, we put out an episode about Viking Midwinter Solstice

and Christmas and talking about the various feasts and parties and things that they were doing. And so one question that I particularly enjoy from Guy on Instagram is, what kind of tunes did they like? You know, what would have been on the orcs cable at a Viking party. I love that question so much. That sort of makes me a bit sad because we will never, I don't think, be able to know exactly what sort of music they

listened to and exactly what they sang because nothing's been preserved unless you can record something. We wouldn't know. But having said that, we do know quite a bit about instruments that they play. So maybe we can sort of start to recreate it a little bit. We also know that they were really into poetry and lots of the poetry has been preserved. So at some of these feasts, people will be reciting poems presumably to music. Maybe some of them did actually have tunes so they would be sung. So that's a really nice thing. But also, we've got quite a lot of evidence of musical instruments that have come from the archaeological record, which I think is really nice. One of them is the lyre. So lyre's like a stringed instrument that you would either pluck. Later, we know it's used

with a bow as well, but we didn't quite know what the Vikings did. But we found those out of Viking Age sites, places like Birka in Sweden, if you listen to sort of Lyre music, it's got a really lovely sort of foxy kind of tune to it, so you can really imagine that, I think. And we also assume that they had drums or some sort of percussion instruments, possibly even in battle situation,

we have all these processions we know about from funerals and things. So I think drums, almost certainly, of some kind they would have had. But what we've also found, a lot of horn-type instruments, so sort of horns that you can play. And again, I'd sort of recommend

people Google this, just to sort of hear these sounds, even though if we don't know the exact tunes, you can hear the sounds they're making. So we find a lot of those. One type is known by the name of Lude, which is almost like a trumpet type thing. We've got examples of those known

from before the Viking Age as well. Cow horns with holes in them. You can actually make a lot of sounds, a lot of tunes from the horn. Some of them can be used for sort of warning signals, some battle situation, for example, but also to make real nice music. And finally, we've also got flutes.

So we have examples of flutes being made, especially of bone with holes in them. A bit like a recorder really, but hopefully slightly nicer sounding. So even though we haven't got the actual tunes, we have got the sounds. So I think from that, we can probably try to recreate something quite similar to a Viking party. I've got to just ask one final question. It's a quick one, just a one-word answer from Annie on Instagram. Who would win in a fight, a Viking or a bear? A bear.

Well, unless you grow a weapon, I think the bear, sadly, would win. There we go. Definitive answer from the Viking expert, a god medieval. A Viking could not take on a bear. You heard it here first, people. I think we should finish with a quick fire round of the kind of common questions that everybody wants to know about the Vikings. So the first thing, while you're fighting a bear, are you going to be wearing a horned helmet? Not unless you're in a 21st century movie, no. Okay, let's do... The raid on Lindisfarne was the first time Vikings came to England.

Actually, that's false. That's not quite true. We have an account of an earlier rain on Portland on the south coast of England in 789, but that's only the first recorded. So I think they're likely to have come earlier than that, but that's the first we know of. Okay, true or false, the Vikings journeyed to North America before Christopher Columbus. True. So we know that because we've got the sagas to tell us about it. And we also have archaeological evidence from Lancer Meadows dating to precisely the year 1021, possibly even earlier. So certainly there was a presence in North America at that time. True or false, Vikings always travelled on

boat? False. A lot of travel would have been overland, on horseback, even on sledges. And I think, skates. So what sorts of modes of transport? That's interesting. I didn't know about ice skates. So did they do dancing on ice as well? I think they must have done. I think they'd be really good at that, actually. Okay, so my final quickfire question, which has actually come from me, were all Norsemen Vikings? Was it compulsory to take to the seas like a kind of conscription or did they get a choice in the matter? Oh, that's a good one. So I think that a lot of people did have a choice. You didn't necessarily have to go on a raid, although they would have probably been quite a lot of pressure. We have no evidence of any sort of conscription type rules, but if your chieftain or your family told you to, you probably would. But certainly a lot of people were not raiders.

A lot of people had quite peaceful lives. And this all comes back to our definition of what a Viking was or what a Viking did, which is something I'm going to be getting into in the next episode, we're going to be talking about the rise of the Vikings, who they were, where they came from, and how the whole thing started. So, yeah, I think you have to stay tuned on that one for the full answer. Well, that was actually quite hard work answering all of those questions. But Elena and Rob, thank you so much for collecting them and for, yeah, grilling me. It's been a great pleasure.

I'm going to go and watch my box set of Nog in the Nog now just to revise. Yeah, and I'm going to go see if I can find some mead and recreate a Viking party. Brilliant. Thanks so much. and a huge thank you to all the listeners for sending in those brilliant questions. It was fantastic to hear from you. So that leaves me at the end of this episode. Don't forget to listen to the next three if you want more Viking content where we're going to go deep diving into the start, the middle and the end of the Viking age.

This has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already. or leave us a review which really helps other people find the podcast. And you can, of course, also subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in the episode notes for how to do that. Don't forget that my co-host Matt Lewis will be back again on Saturday for his next episode and I will be back with you next Tuesday.

Thank you all for listening and have a great week.