Gone Medieval - Harald Bluetooth

Episode Date: August 31, 2021

Many of us use Bluetooth technology every day, but know nothing or little of its namesake. And there is little to be known of the King of Denmark Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson, except that he is credited with introducing Christianity to Denmark. In this episode, Søren Sindbæk explains what we do know of Bluetooth, and about his remarkable archaeological discovery of Danish Ring Forts. Søren is a Professor at the University of Aarhus. 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 this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Now if you have a smartphone, you probably use Bluetooth technology for connecting wireless devices. And you may or may not know that this technology was named after the Danish king Harold Bluetooth. And in fact, the little symbol on your phone is actually a combination of the rooms H and B. And the reason why this name was chosen was that the technology is meant to gather and unite devices

in the same way that Harold the King is credited with uniting the kingdom of Denmark. But that's not all that that particular Bluetooth is known for. He was also credited with building an incredibly extensive and unique series of fortifications across Denmark. And only a few years ago, a brand-new fortification of Ringford was discovered, which may well have formed part of that same defensive system. So to take us back to 10th century Denmark, to Bluetooth and this exciting new discovery, I've invited one of those involved in finding and researching it,

and that's Professor Sir Nesinbeck from Oahu's University. So we're welcome, sir. Thank you very much, Kat. So we're going to move on to this new discovery in a moment, but I thought it might be helpful just for the audience to get a bit more context behind it first and to understand why it's actually important and why we're all very excited about it when it appeared.

Can you start with telling me a little bit about Harold Bluetooth and his background and the sort of dynasty that he was a part of? I can try. In fact, we don't know as much about those things as we would like to. I guess that's a case with many aspects of the Viking Age. But Harold Bluetooth is an enigma in some ways. If you read about the Viking Age in general, you see that there's one set of kings that turns up on big expeditions in Britain or Western Europe.

And then there are other kings who tend to. remain back in Scandinavia. So it's two different aspects of power in this period. And certainly in Denmark, we have sort of a royal of kings who never turn out of the expedition because they're busy at home. And Harold is one of those. So he doesn't have any big known battles or conquest to his name. But all the more so he's got exploits in Denmark that are very famous, especially if you're Dane, because he's probably the Viking king that you know best from your school teaching. What's special about him is that he sort of left us with his own thoughts on himself in the great Yelling runestone. He built a magnificent set of burial monuments in a small village called Yelling in the middle of

Jutland that was probably intended to be sort of a dynastic gathering place. And in the middle of that, there is an enormous runstone beautifully carved with ornaments and also with a quite longish text where he states most of what we actually know definitely about him. He states that he was the son of another king, King Gorm. And he mentions his mother as well, so she must have been an important part of the story, although we're not quite sure how. But she's mentioned in several run stones, so she was a powerful lady in her own right. And then he mentions three things that he wants to be remembered for.

He said that he was the herald who conquered all Denmark and Norway and made the Danish Christians. And that's about later. That's more or less what we know as definite facts. Later historians have elaborated on that in very different ways because they had very different names. So we've got a set of German authors who are very keen to stress that this king was acting in accordance with, in obedience of the German emperors.

And we've got other sources that suggests that he did no such thing that he was a very independent ruler. So we have to make up our minds. There's been endless discussions about every one of those aspects. What does it mean that he conquered Norway? What does it mean how he conquered old Denmark? And many believe that the bit about conquering all Denmark has to do with uniting the kingdom in the first place. That's why we get the Bluetooth device named after him. But it's actually more likely than what he means is that he won an existing kingdom in competition with others. So he mentions there's some kind of power straddle and he came out successful. That's probably what the inscription is meant to say. And that would be the same story that a number of

other Viking kings could have told us. Just remember the Viking kings of England, Knoot and Swain. They won a kingdom. They didn't unite England. They won a kingdom for themselves. And that's probably what he's telling us. So he didn't come to his kingdom just by hereditary right. But he does mention his father, so there was also hereditary right there. And then the interesting bit about making the Danes Christians. Now, that's quite a big thing to change the religion of a country and its people. And at least that's one point that different sources agree on. And we can see that although it's probably a bit of a protracted process, there is a definite change of religion. We can see it most clearly in the burials, of course, where elaborate furnished burials that you need for going to Valhauer,

or anyway to the realm of death in pre-Christian beliefs they stopped in Denmark. And instead, we get over the next couple of generations, the first churches and the first Christian burial grounds, except for the small burial grounds that existed around in the Viking towns, where, of course, there was a mixed population already. So he did something. And we think today that we know some of what that was about, because we have contemporary mentions in continental sources that tells us both, about an act of conviction that the king experienced a miracle enacted by a priest and decided that

Christ had to be a bigger god than the Nordic gods. And there's also a hint of a political situation for this because another source tells us that about this time, there was an alliance forming between the Saxons in the north of Germany and the Danes and the representative of the German emperor had to act quickly. And there's a suggestion that Harold actually got his conversion on very favourable terms. There was no demand that he adhered to the church hierarchy, that he had his bishops appointed by an important arch bishops see in Germany or elsewhere. So he was pretty free to choose the terms of his conversion. All of this is what we know from the written sources, including the Yelling Roonstone. But what has made Herald particularly famous then

in modern times are the monuments that we're going to speak about today, the ring fortresses. and they're really just an archaeological discovery. That whole story has been unraveled over the past 80, 90 years through archaeological discoveries and has painted a new picture of Harold and also put some of his other deeds in a new perspective. How precisely do we know what time he lived? Do we have any good dates for his rule? Some historians have given dates because we like to have dates. So normally we say that he must have rained from probably 959.

And that date is actually an archaeological date because it's the date when the burial champ who was closed in the yelling monuments in the grave that we believe is the grave for Gorme, Harold's father and predecessor. And the normal date given for the end of his reign is 987. But both of those states, of course, like so many things in early history, are contested. If you had asked a generation ago, some people, or many people would have said that Harold ruled since the 930s, because one source has that, and others would have argued that he died early. But roughly, the dates that are provided now are the most likely ones.

We hear about him in a contemporary source for the first time around 961, 62, and he was on the scene definitely until the beginning of the 980s. But the exact year might still not be known. I think that highlights quite a good point that there is a lot of new research happening all the time, so actually even just 10 years ago, we had quite a different picture and we'll get more to that when we hear about the new discovery.

But let's move on to these fortifications that is known for then. So can you start by just telling us about the ring forts more generally, the ones we've known about for a long time? Sure. So in the 1930s, Danish archaeologists came upon a very odd site

in Western Sealand, the big island in Denmark. Nobody knew at the time what it was, it was visible in the landscape as a big ring structure and the best guess was that it was a medieval castle. or remains of the fortifications from it. But as the first excavations were conducted, it became quickly clear that this was actually a Viking Age foundation.

And it became a big enigma because nobody had imagined that anywhere in the Scandinavian Viking Age could have organized a work of this magnitude. This was a Earth and Timber Fortress with circular ramparts that had a diameter of more than 150 meters. It had had great big wooden halls in a grid pattern in the inside, 16 often, 30 meters long each of them. The rampant would have stood to a height of at least four or five meters, perhaps more. It had a ditch that was 18 meters wide. So this was a huge and very organized piece of military architecture, something like what you would expect from the Roman army, but not from a bunch of Vikings. So there was,

Big discussions about what all this was about. And originally, there were many suggestions that it had to be something foreign. Perhaps, after all, the German emperor did come to Denmark and built something like it. That was what historians could imagine in the 1930s. This site, Treleburg in Cheleland, became famous in the 1930s, but also a big nickname. But the real breakthrough happened over the next 20 years, when three more sites of the same scale and the same organization appeared, elsewhere in Denmark, two of them in Jop and then one on the island of Foonim.

And they were so similar that they had to belong to a common system. It was not just a ring fortress and the size of that. It was that everything was laid out very meticulously to a geometrical pattern. The ring fortress was not just a ring. It was a perfect circle. There were four gates that were laid out exactly at right angles. And there were the buildings in the inside, these great big wooden halls that were laid out in courtyards of four, all with very minimal deviation from a strict grid pattern.

So all of this organization underlined the first discovery from Treleburg that this was something that was undertaken with a great deal of control. But even more, that this was a control that extended to every major province of the Danish kingdom. So it was something that was not just an individual power base. This was a network of power. And that's what still today is distinctive and intriguing about these fortresses. There are lots of earthworks from the early Middle Ages across all parts of Northern Europe. But what was distinctive about this set is that they were clearly planned and executed according to a master plan.

Subsequently, two more sites were discovered in Skona, in South and Sweden, that are probably part of the same group. They've never been investigated quite to the same extent. but it's likely that one or both belong to the same group of fortifications. But after that, nothing really happened for a long time in Denmark. The existing sites were investigated and published over several decades, and new facts emerged. One very important discovery came around 1980 when it became possible to apply tree ring dating, dendroclological dating, to some timbers found at Treleborg and one of the Jutland sites. called Furcat. And they were a big surprise because initially these constructions have been

connected to the conquest of England. We had on one side of some very unusual military structures, and then we knew from written sources that there was a very unusual event. So it was tempting for historians and archaeologists to combine the two and said that these had to be the training camps that had been used for the army that went and conquered England. But what came out of the The dental chronological dates was that the fortresses were much older than the campaigns to England. They were built around 980 and not around the year 1000 and after that when the big expeditions came to England. So they had to fit entirely different place in history.

And they also had to belong to a different king. It was not Swain Falkbeard who ruled around the year thousand. It was his predecessor, Harold Bluthiers. And that really became the basis of the story that we know today. that these were monuments that were not built there to contain Viking armies, but for some different purpose. And what that purpose was, was really the discussion for many years among archaeologists and historians. Could it be either that these were monuments that were trying to control the regions in perhaps a newly United Kingdom, as many thought the

Ealingstone to say, or was it rather a defense, did they express a situation of crisis where it was necessary to protect our population. What bothered me and other researchers that were investigating the sites was that if you were to imagine that there was a plan behind their location, it always seemed that there were too few sites to protect anything seriously. There were many important regions that were left without any coverage, so to speak. So if it was a Bluetooth network, then it was very patchy. And this is where the discovery that we're going to talk more about,

today took off. So, okay, so you actually, it wasn't just a sort of lucky accident. It was actually looking at the distribution and thinking where, if you were to have any more of them, where would you look? So it's a kind of way it makes sense in the landscape. Was that how it started? That's exactly how it started. About 10 years ago, we were in the process of finalising the grand final publication of

the biggest of the previously known fortresses, which is called Agasbork. and it's located in the north of Chutland. There have been big excavations there in the 1940s and 50s, but they've never been published because the excavator died shortly after the excavations. So we were bringing all this together and got to understand a lot about not just the site at Argus' book, but also about the Ring Fortress as more generally.

And what we kept coming back to in the team that were on those investigations, including Elsa Rostow was a Viking scholar that many people will know from her great book about the Vikings. But what we kept coming back to was this inmate that if they were to be a meaningful defense system, there were too few. And at one point, I started systematically to try and gather what would be the options if we were to look for more? And in some sense, I did that with some reluctance because in the years after the four classical Danish ring fortress were discovered, there were so many attempts to find more. And it almost became a joke in Danish archology. It

that somebody had believed to have found a new ring fortress. Many museums will get contacted by amateur archaeologists and historians who think that they know where a new one was. So it's not exactly a thing you do lightly. And I remember after having set up my list, the place that intrigued me the most was the eastern coast of Sealand, the large island where Copenhagen is located, which was a rich province. We knew that it had been densely populated in late prehistoric and early medieval medieval. evil times. And there was at least one very obvious location that was the same kind of spot in the landscape where the other fortresses were located close to a fjord or inlet where you

could land on the coast and also strategically located at crossings of major old land routes. And I remember coming to a conference where a colleague from the regional museum of that region was present. Her name is Nana Holm. And with a bit of reluctance, I quote, Nana over coffee and said, you know, I know this sounds crazy, but could we have a talk? Because I think that there might be an undiscovered trellible green fortress in your area. And I was sort of prepared for a great laugh. But instead, she just looked at me and said, yes, it's at Koo. And I couldn't believe that.

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Was this the same place that you were thinking, it might be as well, so you'd have the same thought? I think we were at different scales in the landscape. I knew that the former fjord, it's now a river valley due to tectonic processes, it's dry land, but it was a form of fjord. It was certainly the old, central landing place on the eastern coast of Sherland, next to a medieval town called

Kui. So I thought it had to be somewhere around there. But Nana, knowing the landscape in closer detail, was aware that about a year previously, the first national LIDAR data, that's a new remote sensing technique that became available about that time, where you measure the height of the landscape in very great detail using an airborne laser. And that data had become available, and showing very minute differences in height in the landscape. And Nana had noticed that at the end of the fossil fjord that occurred, there was a peculiar ring. And when I asked her, that sprang to her mind.

So we went looking at the site. And where you were in the landscape, there was nothing really that you would notice. If you knew what to look for, you could see this very slight rise. We're talking about perhaps height differences of no more than 25, 30 centimeters. because obviously after thousand years of agriculture, this site was entirely plied out. It's some of the best agricultural soil in Chile. So it's been leveled at some point and plough that since.

But we could see that there were something. And that's where the next important step came in, because at that time, I had been for several years a lecturer in the department in York University in the UK. and one thing that I had learned a lot about while I was there was the use of geophysical surveys, which has not been very popular until recently in Scandinavia, in part because it can give ambiguous results in some of the Danish soils are not very good for the techniques that we have available. But we had done some experiments at Agassburg using what's called a gradiometer,

which measures really, really minute differences in the, the magnetic signal that you get from the soil. And they are conditioned by things like whether there were one spirit, wood that has drawn out the iron particles in the soil, or whether there has been major earthworks with materials dug up or deposited. So I knew that there was a potential for this technique. And after some discussion, I managed to persuade both Nana and the museum that we had to try this. So we brought a colleague from York, Helen Goetschild, who was an expert in this

method. And really, in one day, we survey the whole site. And it's one of the most incredible days in my career, because we could see literally hour by hour how this beautiful circle image formed in our mapping. And when we set out on that morning, we had discussed the arts, and we agreed that perhaps it was a 10% chance that it was what we were looking for. And if it was something else, that was fine. We'd be interested in that as well. But we'd be interested in when at the end of that day, we felt absolutely certain that that was the only thing this could be. There was nothing that was so meticulously circular from any other period of prehistoric. That's so really, I mean, I should emphasise that this isn't something that happens very often in archaeology.

Most of the time we go out and we spend an awful long time and we really don't find what we're looking for. So that is in itself a really fantastic discovery. But more fieldwork took place after that as well. Can you talk us through some of the discoveries that you made and whether you were able to actually date any of it? Yeah, that was the next question because it was one thing that we were convinced. I remember showing our results to colleagues

and they just couldn't believe it. They agreed with us that they could think of nothing else that this could be, but couldn't really believe that this was true. And this was in 2013, and we decided to keep our heads calm and wait until 2014 when we were allowed. to conduct a small-scale investigation at the site. And if we had jumped to excavation in the first place,

I think there's a great chance that we would not have realized, or at least we would not have been able to prove anything serious, because how on earth are you going to understand a site, which is perhaps 150 by 150 meters, by digging small holes, or even by stripping the whole field and ruining a lot of the archaeology. But because we had the geophysical map, we could target very exactly some areas that we wanted to investigate.

So the first small trench we caught, we could establish that the ramper did in fact have timber constructions as it was supposed to. The second small cut we made, we were able to hit right on one of the fortress gates. That was what we were trying to, but it was just amazing to hit and get confirmed just what you had hoped for. And then came the big test because we all agreed that if this was a Trellible Fortress, it should respect that strict geometry. So it should be possible to point on the map and say a 90 degrees to the east of our fortress gate here. There should be another on exactly this spot. And using our GPS, we could set up ranging rods in the landscape

saying this is where we believe exactly here is the fortress gate. And we got the mechanics. digger to the spot and it cut, I think, just two by two meters and there it was. That was when we actually announced the discovery and it got headlines in the Danish press, but it also got headlines worldwide. And we had three very nerve-wrecking months waiting for the dating results because they had not been obtained yet. We had obtained charcoal that we could use for radiocarbon dating, but for some reason it just took ages to get the results.

And I remember the day when the email dropped in in my inbox, here are your results from the radiocarbon dating. I said, okay, now I'm going to click on this mail and either this will make or it will break my career. And I clicked on it and there was bang on it. It was a 10th century date. Fantastic. It's kind of spine tingling stuff, isn't it?

Because I think this is just such a great combination of both. It's the knowledge, isn't it? It's the knowledge of those fortresses. So both the location, what they looked like, but then also marrying that with the new technology that actually allowed you to spot it in the first place and then applying that all together. An absolutely fantastic resolve, really.

And then have you, did you do any more excavations after that? Or was that it? So this was 2014 and now, of course, followed a few months with big discussions. And they were big discussions. This got up in a lot of public attention. And there were many people who still, just couldn't believe it and thought that there had to be some other explanation. So we were told in newspapers and on the internet discussion forums that we got it wrong,

it couldn't be a Viking fortress. And then funnily enough, we were told at the same time that it was a Viking fortress and people had known about it all the while because the earthwork had been recorded in a national database, which had just not been dated or understood. So when that calmed down, luckily people had accepted that it was. was a new important monument. I remember the time that it really sang into me was when I was in my kid's school and the math teacher came to me and said, do you know what you've done? And I said, no, I don't know what I've done. And he said, you know, we have these math books

and they're teaching multiplication by this example that we've got four fortresses and they've got four courtyards with four houses. And now you've read that. So I sometimes joke that Lots of people have rewritten the history books, but I've rewritten the math books. But it also meant that we could apply and we got money from a big foundation that was ready to support further research. And we had three seasons of fieldwork there, 2016 to 18, which brought us a lot of new discoveries there. And it was quite an interesting way to do fieldwork because the excavations were open

to the public as we went along. They had a small visitor center there and people could just come and see what we were doing. There were two guided tours a day. so we had tens of thousands of people looking over our shoulders. But while we were doing that, we actually found out lots of great new stuff about the site. And that's what's just been published in four papers that came out a few weeks ago in a journal called Journal of Danish psychology. We thought we'd put them together so that the knowledge is assembled in one place and people can find it. Because there's really many different kinds of new information there.

We excavated in the fortress. We found artifacts and we found more about the earth. works and what was there. But there was also very important investigations in the surroundings that taught us more about the location of this site. And I think that's just as important as anything we found on the fortress. So let's just finish off, I think, with going back to some of what we talked about at the beginning. So you were talking about the context of this and the fact that these are very unique, but they're also that they are very clearly centrally organized. So they're sort of by presumably Bluetooth, if we think that that's a very specific.

is correct, putting in all this effort, which is very unusual for the Viking Age. It's not something that we see. Do we have any idea of both where he got this inspiration from, but also how we got the funds for that sort of thing? Because surely there's a lot of effort or money really in producing them. Well, I think what the new excavations have contributed is, well, in the first place, more details about what that effort really was. So on one hand, we can see that Bork Ring was very lavishly projected in some way.

The site that was chosen in the landscape was not quite perfect for the monument that was intended. So they just levelled a lot of ground and extended the building lot. That's something you do if you've got a lot of manpower on your hand. And it had to be just specifically so it couldn't be slightly small or a different shape. It had to be just like that. So we're really dealing with a very set plan and very confident use of resources. On the other hand, we're a bit surprised to see

from environmental archaeology what was the impact of this because we speculated in the past that they had to cut down the forests in a huge area to build such a site. And what we learned by detailed modelling was that it was actually not such a big area that needed to be involved. Much of the soil for the ramparts could be collected within perhaps as little as 800 meters from the structure.

And it would have taken only a few hectares of forest, which is, of course, quite a bit of work. But it's not something that changes a landscape massive. So we got a much better idea about the scale of this work. And in the end, what's concerned when you want to build a ring fortress like that is likely, we think, though, to be something like, like what perhaps a thousand people could do in three or four weeks. So it now looks as if what's happening here is a king commandeering people to a site for a relatively short period. In some cases it might have been done at two or three occasions.

It's possible that, for instance, the Trellibor Fortress was built in two goals. But it's likely to be something that special purpose. It's not, let's say, a standing force who works for years. It's what happens either in a crisis situation or in a conquest situation. So that's what we're dealing with. And that leads two scenarios still that we're working with. One is the conquest scenario, which works for the people who still believe that there was a sort of conquest of the Danish provinces. If that's the case, then we would picture a situation where the king arrives with an army and commandeers,

presumably all the farms to bring up their thrals, their slaves, to do earthwork and digging and build this new stronghold. Alternatively, we could also think of this as a more defensive act where these resources are being rushed out because there is an imminent danger. And I'll say at present, both these options are still possible. But there's one point which makes me think that the Hawking Fortress was more likely to have been a defensive measure. And that's the the fact that for what we can see from the new excavations, it was not finished in the way that Treleborg and Furikov was. If it was intended to have these big buildings, it never got them. That could, of course, be because the building project was disrupted and was never completed.

But if you're talking about something that happens within a couple of weeks, I don't think that's so likely. Either you can start this and substantially complete it to your plan or you wouldn't start at all. So I think the most likely scenario here is that somebody is putting this up because there is an imminent danger. And if we look at a few sources that we have, there's actually a good case for that, I think, because we can see that in the 1970s, after at least a decade where Harold could have reigned in great confidence, and we can see he does, he builds the great yelling monuments in that period. He builds a huge defensive rampart at the Southland border of Denmark, where he actually incorporates the big trading town, Heatherby, into his realm previously,

was sort of in a no-man's land. Then we know that suddenly the German emperor got very interested in his northern boundary and actually brought an army that was apparently successful in at least one battle. We don't know much about the details. But that, of course, would have brought the Danish king into a completely different situation in relation to his provinces. and in relation to all the other powerhouses and rulers in the region. So I think that the most likely scenario we can suggest today

for Borgring and these ring fortresses, which were built at exactly this time, in the second half of the 1970s, is that they were meant to show to his population that he was in charge and he was ready to defend them against anyone who could arrive with a fleet at just the spots where such a fleet would land, because that's where the ring fortresses are generally located. I think that sounds like a very convincing argument there. So we'll see what any future work might bring up.

Do you think there's a chance of finding more of these ring fortresses now that you've got quite a good methodology for searching for them? I think there is a chance. In fact, I would have thought that we had found new ring fortress by now, if you asked me five years ago, and there's certainly been lots of places suggested. We haven't had the next confirmed site. but there are one or two places where it would be quite likely that they would have been built.

Some of those locations are in the middle of later medieval towns and maybe very difficult to investigate, but I think that there is still something for archaeologists to the future to discover. So we are all just desperately waiting for you to find some more. We're sort of half really jealous and wishing it were us looking and finding these things, but also really happy that there's so much optimism for finding new sites and making new understandings of it. So thank you so much for joining me here today, Sir. That was a pleasure. And if you want to find out more, you can just Google Serens research and look for Borgring,

and all of this research is available as open access. You can get to the academic research articles if you'd like to. And can you go and visit many of these sites? Most of them, Borguegring is closed at the moment, but there are great museums at Trelibeau and at Furek. Fantastic. So when people can travel again, they can go to Denmark and check them out. Now, thank you all for listening to this episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, and I hope you'll tune in to the next episode. My co-host, Matt Lewis, will be here with new content on Saturday,

and I'll be back again next Tuesday. If you haven't already, subscribe to Gone Medieval from History Hit, so you don't miss any of our crucial medieval information.