Gone Medieval - How To Live Like a Viking

Episode Date: September 20, 2024

The stories often told and retold of the early medieval period are those of great kings, battles and daring deeds. But ordinary people can often be harder to get at.Matt Lewis is joined by Dr. Eleanor Barraclough to discuss how the once-lost little bits and pieces that survive - love letters carved into wood, combs and pots mainly from medieval rubbish dumps - provide windows into everyday Viking lives as they were lived.Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Max Carrey. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK 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, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, billions, plots and murders to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here.

Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. We often tell tales of great kings, battles and daring deeds from the early medieval period, because those are the stories we have. That is the world that can be reconstructed from sagas or elite burial sites. Ordinary people can often be. harder to get at. Eleanor Barclough's new book, though, aims to do just that. Eleanor is a cultural historian, a broadcaster and writer based at Bath Spa University.

I'm delighted that Ellen has come along to talk to us all about her new book, Embers of the Hands, Hidden Treasures of the Viking Age. The book explains that the Embers of the Hands is a Viking Age term for the things produced by people, and these things are the focus of the book. It's a great read with some incredibly human stories, so I'm really looking forward to finding out more. Welcome to God Medieval, Eleanor. It's fantastic to have you here. Thank you. It's such a pleasure to be here. It's all quite wild and windy outside, so I don't know if people can hear the storm that's brewing my end, but that feels quite appropriate for the dramatic subject we're going to be talking about.

It feels quite fitting for taking a little wonder back into the everyday life. in the Viking world, a little bit of wind and a little bit of rain and a storm on the horizon. We need a, what do you call it, a long house and a fire in the centre and we can get down to some Viking storytelling, can we? Yeah, well, next time you're on, we'll get a Viking long house and we'll start a fire. There you go. And we'll see what we can arrange. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I wanted to start off by asking. So the book deals with lots of archaeological items, so it's kind of things from the Viking world. why are those things so important to telling the stories of the Viking age? Well, at least the way I learned Viking history, it was very much the dates and the kings and the queen. You know, the sort of the big important people at the top

that make it into the textual records, occasionally and particularly when it comes to the Vikings, for the things they get up to that the people writing the text aren't so pleased about. So obviously the early raids on the British Isles and Ireland, for example. But the lovely thing about these little bits and pieces that survive is that they give us windows into just ordinary everyday lives as they were lived. And there's a beautiful randomness to the survival of these items, which means that you can't in a way curate your own history. It's not like, I don't know, thinking of someone like Harold Hardrada, who is the King of Norway, dies at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in England, 1066. He has sagas written about him, but he also writes his own poetry and he very much has a hand in his own mythmaking.

Well, if it's just a little comb or a little nubbin of something that survives from you, then you can't really control that in the same way. And I love that unpredictability. I was quite interested in reading the book that it seems like in a lot of instances, advances in science are beginning to mean that we can make increasing use of things that we've known on. that have been around for a while, but we've not really known about them for years. You seem to be able to add stories to those things now. Yes, I love that. It almost feels like the further away we get from the Viking Age or from any period of history, in some ways,

the more we can tell about it, thanks to science. And there's some wonderful stuff, for example, that's going on with DNA evidence. About four years ago now, they did this big DNA study, hundreds of bodies, Viking Age bodies, from across the Viking diaspora, and they looked at the connections between them, and they found, for example,

a young man buried in a grave in Oxford, sort of 10th, 11th century, in a mass grave, was actually a second-degree relative, which means maybe it was an uncle and a nephew, or half-brothers, or, you know, that sort of distance of relation. But he was a second-degree relative of another body they'd found

on the Danish island of Foon from sort of around the same time, but of a man in his 50s. And so what I love about that is there was a big Viking history exhibition in Denmark called Talkta, which means like the raid. And they brought these two bodies back together and they were there reunited after a thousand years. There's other things. So there's solar flares. That's an amazing one. They were able to tell that I'm going to get the dates slightly wrong because I don't have the numbers on the top of my head,

but maybe 991, something like that, there was this big solar flare. And in trees, you know, that creates a bigger tree ring. And so they found these random bits of wood from the Norse sites at Lancer Meadows on Newfoundland's sort of tip. It wasn't a permanent settlement for the Norse, but around the year 1,000, they were there overwintering, mending their ships. And so for the first time, they were able to date a precise year when the North had to be on that site because they could count from that solar flare on the tree rings and see what year those pieces of wood had been chopped down. So it's these wonderful little details once again, very random. And that's part of the joy of it. It's quite unpredictable in a way.

Yeah, fascinating. So the book focuses on ordinary people. So you said you learn the kings and the queens and the big dates and the massive battles and everything else. Why were you keen to tell the stories through these items of ordinary people. What are we missing out of the story when we don't get to know the ordinary folk? Well, I mean, most of the women, for a start, because that's a big thing. The less power you have,

the less sort of, to sort of be slightly flippant, rich, powerful white male you are, the less likely you are to survive or your records, your experiences of being in the world are likely to survive. And so I wanted to think about the experience of women or the experience of people who lived less elite lives who were enslaved, if possible,

but that's a very hard thing to access the lives of enslaved people, people who had disabilities, people who had queer sexualities and identities. It's just you can't find very much of that in the official records. And so, okay, let's try and find out what humanity was really like at that time. One that really spoke to me was women and their experiences of childbirth and child rearing. Because quite honestly, without childbirth, no one exists, right? No one was alive. And yet it's such a hidden part of history for something that was so major and so dangerous and so mind-bogglingly painful.

It's just not there. And so I think this was my attempt to try and, I don't know, on the one hand, give voices back to these people of the past, but maybe that's a bit grand to say. I certainly try and acknowledge their presence, acknowledge their experiences, acknowledge their existence, which is something that really gets lost so, so quickly afterwards. Yeah, I'm definitely going to come back to the women that appear in the book because some of those stories are absolutely incredible. But I wonder if you could just give us an idea before we get into that of kind of where do these things come from? How were they found? Oh, so all sorts of ways. It's this absolute randomness of the historical record to some degree, which is really wonderful. So you'll often find that it's when building works being done, for example, that, you know, you have to have to have the ecologists come in, you have to have the archaeologists come in. And then often that's how things are found, particularly if we're talking about, I don't know, mass graves, the mass grave that I mentioned at, from Oxford, where the body of this man with his relative in Denmark was found. I think that was during building work. So that's certainly one way. Or the famous Lloyd's Bank coprolite. So it's from York. And it's the largest fossilized piece of human poo ever found. And it's called the Lloyd's Bank coprolite. So it's from York. And it's the largest fossilized piece of human poo ever found. And it's called the Lloyd's Bank Coprolite.

like because Lloyd's bank were building on this site. What a piece of advertising? What a thing to have your name attached to? I know. I feel they really should have made more use of that. There's got to be something, you know, turning shit into gold or something. No, no, they just haven't wanted to acknowledge the beauty of their association. So there's things like that. A replacement advert for the black horse coming on. Yeah, I know, right? They should get me on that. I very briefly worked in advertising. I think I'm wasted in history. I should pitch my services to Lloyd. But there's also very random ways. So one of my favourites is a site or a farmstead that I

mention I talk a lot about in the chapter on Home. And now I'm looking at Norse Greenland, which is one of my absolute favourite parts of the Norse world. I find it endlessly fascinating. I spent a lot of term researching out there and they don't really have roads. So I'd be on back of Icelandic horses. Days going from farm. Stead to Farmstead or one year I was with a caribou hunter or two caribou hunters up up in the fjords by Nook. And there's a really wonderful site called Gordon under sand, which is like the farm under the sand. And it's literally, it's a Norse farm, big farmstead, that was there from the very early part of the Norse Greenlandic settlement in the Western settlement, which is that one further up the coast near Nook from the first decades of the 11th century.

And it was there, you know, for several hundred years, up to the end of the Norse Greenlandic settlement, so in the 1400s. But something happened, which was very slowly, the waters that were coming down from the glacier, sort of changed course. And the whole site, the river started to be silted up. And then the whole site ended up covered in thick, thick layer of sand, I think is something like one and a half meters. So the whole thing disappeared. The Norse wouldn't have recognized those landscapes. But then one day there were two Greenlandic, I think caribou hunters actually, I think that's right. They were just hunting in the area and they saw these bits of wood sticking up.

And they thought, well, that's unusual. You don't tend to get these big sort of worked pieces of wood and what had they found. But the loom, the big wooden loom from that Norse Greenlandic, but it was absolutely extraordinary. So there's big finds like that. but often it's these tiny little ephemera that then come out when you look, or just literally, there's a runic inscription, just a little sort of post-it notity type one, carved onto a piece of wood and in a stave church in Norway.

And it's a marriage proposal. And someone, presumably the woman, because of where it was found, who the proposal is meant for, has scribbled out the names on it and has dropped it through, the cracks in the floorboards to hide it. And so once again, that was something that then came to light many years later. So it's all these little ways. And part of what I like about the fact that these things are found often so randomly is you have to think, well, how many more of them are still to be discovered? There's so much more out there. This is, you know, just like

the science, as you say, it's very cutting edge. But there's always something that might be waiting that might completely change our picture of the Viking age and our understanding of the people who lived there. Yeah, yeah. I'm trying to find a way to phrase this next question that you won't find insulting and immediately hang up on me and stop talking to me. Great, okay, it was a challenge.

I want to say something like you seem quite fond of a midden heap, but that doesn't sound very good, does it? Oh, I mean, I have had many, many, many worse things said to me. I am very fond of a midden heap. Some of the best things actually come from middenheaves. One of my absolute favourites actually going to North Greenland once again is a little polar bear. It features as an image on the front of the book. But when you first look at it, even as that image, it almost looks like a hippo.

It's completely misshapen. Its head is a beautiful piece of carving, but its head is just too long on its neck. And that was found in a midden heap. and other things that are found in midden heaps are things like there's a dye also in a midden so rubbish heap you know domestic rubbish heap also from a north greenlandic farm and what I love about those is that it's essentially people's mistakes it's things they didn't want I can just imagine with a polar bear someone realizes oh I got so close and they just totally looks wrong and they just chuck it on the rubbish pile and so you get this flash of

emotion, you know, can't tell for sure, but I like to think that they were very frustrated at this point. And it's just this little human moment of, oh, that doesn't look right at all. And suddenly there it is on a mid-ed-ish. Which sounds very much like me. I'm looking at the cover of the book and I can see the image that you're talking about. Yes, yes. You see what I mean? Hippo. I would never have even got that far. If I tried to carve a polar bear, no one would have a clue what it was even ever meant to be. I'm utterly with you there. But the idea that someone has just got so frustrated and thrown it out, feels so relatable. Yes.

I do a very little bit of pottery very badly on the wheel. And every time, what started off in my head is a masterpiece and ended up a sad little bluff on the wheel. I just think of whoever carved that polar bear, I just think, yeah, I've got you. I know how that feels. And I guess, you know, as you say, mid and heaps are just a treasure trove, a kind of accidental frozen collection of anything from everyday life that could throw up something really significant or interesting or that tells us something about the people who threw it away.

Yes. Yes, exactly. And it tells us all sorts of everyday things as well, like what they ate. That's always an interesting one because that varies across the North world or you'll have very elite sites where clearly they prefer, I don't know, say reindeer and then sites that aren't quite so socially or economically elevated where again you look at the midden heaps you're like oh yeah seal again for dinner you just end up just seeing a lot about that everyday life but in a really exciting way another really interesting one i mentioned lancel meadows newfoundland it's a lack of midden heaps the fact that that that's one big indication that they never settled there that there's not really a lot of rubbish around these aren't people who are making

lives there. These are relatively temporary houses that they've built, almost as sort of overwintering sites as setting off points to go further afield. But yeah, where are the middens? No middens. That's important too. Yeah. I quite like the idea of them bagging up their rubbish and taking it with them. Very good. Yes. Yes. The one example of that, so I talk about religion and I talk about belief and I open that chapter with this amazing, again, very recent site. So there are these incredible archaeologists who've been looking at a cave in the lava fields, deep, deep under, in the lava fields of Hatelmendorraine in Iceland. And initially, they thought that, you know, there's signs of human activity deep, deep under the lava fields in a particular cave, now known as

Sutshetler. And they thought maybe this was somewhere that Outlaws would have. hang out. And I was talking to one of the lead archaeologists there, and he's absolutely fascinating. And they now think it wasn't. They now think it was almost like people were there to leave offerings for, you know, some sort of fire being trying to placate them, stop the volcanoes going off, maybe something like that. I said, well, what made you think that it wasn't outlaws after all? And he said, no poo. Where's the poo? Were they just bagging it and taking it off with them? If there are outlaws living there, you'd expect to see those sorts of, yeah, the everyday detritus. And that's what's missing from those sorts of sites.

Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating how you can piece the stories together from what's there and sometimes what's not there. And putting all of those bits of the jigsaw together. Yeah. You talk a fair bit in the book about love, love stories from the Viking world. And I thought that was a really interesting window into everyday life. So could you tell us a little bit about the, a coded love poem that you talk about that's at Bo in Telmark. Oh, I love this one.

So there's a church, yeah, at Bo in Telemark, which is about, I don't know, 100 kilometres or something, southwest of Oslo. And there's, when I say a poem was scratched into the wood near where the choir sat on a wooden panel. It's late. So it's around the year 1,200 or so, so very much, I say the sunset of the Viking Age, I think, by traditional standards, sort of like slightly beyond the Viking age, although I do kind of go into why we really need to think about what came before and after to understand it.

And I describe it as a kind of ultimate cryptic crossword clue, because the runes translate as they say, I can't sleep because of the sickness of the children, the workers torment, the mountain dweller, the horses toil, the wrecker of the hay, the thralls misfortune, interpret that. Now, you've got to be able to go through the lens, of this poem because you've got to be able to understand runes for a start, but you then have to go deeper into the meaning because every single run had a name

that kind of correlated with the sound. And so actually each one of those reasons I cannot sleep spells out the name of a run. So the run cain for k or g, it can also be a kind of jah sound, it means a sore or an ulcer. So that's, the sickness of children. And then the run for Ur is kind of like you, although it looks like an upside-down-you when you see it, and that means drizzling rain, which is the work as torment. And then the run for Thur, like kind of T-H, that means giant, Thurs, which is the mountain dweller. And then the run name for Rhe is Rhe, which means riding. So again, going back to the poem, that's the horse's toil and then we have that same

urr-y-r-rune again the wrecker of the hay, drizzling rain and then the run name for N is Nairithr which can mean need or distress or bondage which are all ways that you might describe the lot of an enslaved person so you put those runes together

so Gourgurna actually that's the name of a woman Goudren so the reason you actually can't sleep has been hidden in those runes It's I cannot sleep because of Guthrin. I don't know whether actually there was a woman called Guthrin who is specifically being referred to here,

the person who carved it. I suspect it's a clever poem, essentially. But then there are other examples that do seem to be much more personal and do give us insights into love, yes, but also lust and unrequited lust, all sorts of past love affairs gone wrong, all sorts of little windows into the human experience. Yeah, yeah, they're also human. I really loved all those bits. Another one I wanted to just talk about is the one at Lomchurch near Bergen. So there's like a love triangle story that seems to be going on there?

Oh, yes. So this is this proposal, it looks like. And it's quite an interesting one. So again, it's pretty late. And it seems to be a message from someone called Haouvar. to a person who we only know she's G.U. So that could be Guthren. Again, that could be Gudny, Gnhilder, all sorts. And it says it's my full desire to ask you for marriage, but only if you don't want to be with, and then we have the name of another man, Colvain. And this is the one which, yes, they've attempted to scribble out the names and then they've dropped it between the floorboards. And what I love about that, you just can't tell the emotion. I mean, what leads to that person? scribbling at the names. Is she embarrassed? Is she not wanting people to find out about, about this love that's going on? Is she actually far more interested in Colbane? And so she doesn't really want him to get wind of the fact that someone else's is proposing marriage. So there's all

sorts of possibilities. There's others that are far simpler. It's just like Ausa loves and Stairn, could be a man's name, could be Steyn, could be Stefan. And there's ones that are just kiss me or I love you love me and you know very kind of packet of love hearts sort of messages so and then there's others that yeah I love the ones it's like in gibiug loved me when I was in stavanger things like that it's it feels very much like something that on some level at least we can we can all still relate to you what I wanted to end on just to bring relationships kind of slightly full circle is what looks like a note from a wife telling her drunken husband to go home? Yes, this is great. This is, this is from Bergen. The really interesting thing,

so Bergen in Norway, if anyone's been or seen pictures, the really famous image of Bergen is Brighen, which is this sort of, it's a, it's a harbour front with these beautiful, pointy, very colourful houses, wooden houses. They're actually sort of Hanseatic League houses, so, you know, very much pushing us towards the end of this period in beyond. But in the 1950s, but in the 1950s, there was a fire. And in that fire, or after that fire at least, there was a big archaeological investigation. And they found, I think it must be over 700 of what were essentially little roon sticks. Occasionally other material was used like bone or stone or whatever, but mostly little pieces of wood. And they all have runes on them. And this tells us that really by the end of this

period, there is, I was going to say, a form of literacy, but certainly lots and lots of people are using runes in this slightly shorthand, post-it note, text message-y type way. And one of these was found, and it says something like Gia Sayir atu khakim, which means Giva says that you should go home. And then on the other side of this piece of wood, there's another attempt at writing runes except they don't make any sense. And it's found very much Brighen was an area where there would have been lots of taverns

essentially. And so I like to think that Gida writes it herself and that's quite possible. There's plenty of other ones where people are essentially talking about themselves in the third person like that. And I just like to think that she's incredibly fed up, you know,

say it's her husband and he's down the pub and she's just sent someone to give him a message. Who knows that the ones that you can't actually read on the back, possibly that's even the recipients trying to write a message. There are other messages also that seem to be in a sort of context of inebriation, should we say, where all the rooms aren't exactly clear. So maybe that's what's going on there.

Maybe we've totally got the wrong end of the stick. And again, that's the beauty that we have to sit in those places of uncertainty. We can't ever quite get to these people. But I don't see that as a negative thing. I see that as part of the beauty of it, that there is still this uncertainty, because that's actually much more realistic. That's much more what history is about. It's not necessarily having all the facts.

It's having what we have and then trying to work out how to interpret it. I just love the idea that there is all of this romantic seduction and chasing the ladies going on. But there is also the, you know, we've been married for 20 years. He's down the pub again. Get home. dinners in the oven. I mean, it's so, today, it's so human. Yes, it is. And the thing is, plenty of these are written by women as well, two men, or there's at least one. And it's not a particularly nice inscription.

They are, how would I put it nicely? They are most definitely taking the piss. But there's an inscription from Oslo, which is between two hands. It seems to be two, presumably men, but, you know, we don't know that for sure, having a conversation. and they are essentially putting about rumours regarding a man called Oli and they're saying essentially, well, he's engaged in sort of same-sex relationships. And that is really interesting too, because obviously that's not something we're going to get in most runic inscriptions in any form. You know, the whole gamut of human sexuality is there just as it is now.

But then to have these very, very small insights into those worlds, sometimes the only way you can get to those kind of less socially normative practices is to look at prohibitions, particularly to ones from the Christian period, where it's saying men and women who perform same-sex acts, these are the penances that they should undertake or, you know, bestiality is sort of very much in that category. But then, you know, we look at sort of old Norse mythological stories and plenty of the Norse gods there are, you know, extremely gender fluid or transgressive in all sorts of interesting ways. And so again, we sort of have to look behind those official records to see a little more

evidence of a more nuanced idea of what's going on because humans are humans. Absolutely. There's another chapter in the book that deals with games. So games and gaming from the Viking world. Again, gaming is a massive thing today. What kind of evidence do we have for the sorts of games? that Norse people were playing. Oh, no, this is a really nice one.

Again, so I'm going to start with the posh stuff and then move swiftly to the less posh stuff. So there are the most beautiful gaming pieces, like whole sets of gaming pieces that are found in graves. And my absolute, well, I have two favourites. I have pictures of them both in the book. There's one set from Birka, which is this sort of very important international trading island in Sweden.

and there are these glass beads with beautiful greeny blue colours and the kind of the main piece, the sort of king piece, has this blobby, like kind of snow friend type face. It's absolutely glorious. And there's another one, I think, from 10th century Iceland, from Baldersheimer. And it's this craggy piece made out of, I think, it's whalebone and these little dumpling pieces next to it, more of them that look like, I think I say in the book, they look like little round breasts.

They're very, they're very satisfying. I would very much like to play a game with them. I feel they, you know, have a lovely hand feel, as it were. But together with these high status gaming sets that are found in graves, you have every day, particularly the boards. And I think that's significant because if you're just kind of like playing, games with whatever you've got at hand, it's not necessarily going to be obvious what the gaming pieces were. It could just be bits of bone, bits of stone, bits of wood, but you do need a gaming board. And the most sort of popular of these kind of board games in the North World is called Hneffatafel. And if anyone's a Terry Pratchett fan, I think some of his later books like Thud,

he's got his version of Hneffertafel, which again has a sort of equally unpronounceable name. that the dwarves and the trolls play. And the lovely thing about Hnefah Tafel is so, yes, you have a kind of king piece. And later riddles give us a sense of how this might be played. So we know from the board there's a place where you put the king piece in the middle and then the smaller defending and attacking pieces seem to go round the outside. And later riddles preserved in textual sources, sort of Icelandic sagas, for example, suggest that actually the idea is to get the king, your king board piece to the edge of the board without being captured.

And what I love is that in one of these riddles, it turns out that the defender pieces, these are female, which is just wonderful because it's not something that I would expect at all. Not necessarily the case that everyone thought that, but I very much like that, that basically are all these badass female pieces surrounding this large and ornate, but slightly hapless kingpiece in the middle. But there are all sorts of board games. I mean, this one, Keneffatafel seems to be sort of, any sort of fist table. They seem like many board games from this time to be descended from gaming, board games, sort of, you know, games of little soldiers, that sort of stuff. And so again, the interesting thing about that is that it gives us a sense of those cultural connections that, you know, spread from, you know, the Roman Empire, the Western Roman Empire all the way up into Scandinavia

over the centuries, particularly following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. My very favourite ones come from, there's a couple of sites on Orkney, where the gaming pieces that were found were just like scratched onto pieces of stone. And in fact, they were so unremarkable, but in at least two cases, the archaeologist didn't realize they were gaming pieces. They just shoved them on the spoil heap. And it was only when the rains came. that these little scratched boards were revealed.

And so I rather love that, that you have these incredibly high-status elite pieces. You have poetry by one of the Earls of Orkney, Regenwald, who's actually boasting about his skills and things like playing board games. And yet you have completely ordinary everyday people whiling away the long winter nights or possibly long summer days,

playing their versions of these board games. That idea that gaming was, seems fairly widespread is interesting because we think about the medieval period often and we think it's dull, it's boring, it's all about working in the fields trying to survive. If you're a Viking, it's all about going to bash in some Christian monasteries and all that sort of thing. But it shows us what they're doing with their downtime, how they relax. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And my favourite is always, how do you get a sense of,

poetry and storytelling and, you know, song, those sorts of things. And again, you really have to look quite carefully to find evidence of those sorts of things, partly because for the most part, we're talking about a non-literate, oral-based society. So Christianity really brings the tools of literacy as we think about them now. But again, so for example, there's a little piece of poetry. It was found carved in runes on a piece of wood on a North Greenlandic farm. Same North Greenlandic Farm had a tiny little sort of wooden bridge, you know, for stringed instruments to keep the sort of the strings off the board. And again, so music is a wonderful one where, you know, you find you find bits of musical instruments, sometimes high status, but very often probably

not that high status. And then, of course, again, think about downtime, singing, you don't need anything to sing. Everyone, if they have a voice, you know, I was going to say they can sing. Oh, yeah. I would cast out on. that in my case in particular. Yes. Well, there's this wonderful, this Arabic source, this Arabic traveller visits Hedavu on the sort of the Danish German border as it is now,

sort of, I don't know, kind of second half of the 10th century. And he says, of the people living in Herew, they sound like howling dogs. You know, their singing is like howling dogs. I just did a program for BBC radio about Viking music, and I interviewed, if anyone's into Viking music, Aynoselvik, who's, you know, the lead of the amazing musical outfit, Ward Runa. And I asked him about this, he said, yeah, some people are terrible singers.

And, you know, you've ever been in the pub or you've been, you know, after a football match, yep, you will hear what sounds like howling dogs. So I rather like that, that possibly there's a cultural difference that means that, you know, what he heard didn't sound to him like music. But maybe they were just really terrible singers. us. I quite like the idea of that, that he was absolutely right. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. When we get our Viking longhouse next time and our fire going, we'll bring a karaoke machine and I'll show you how about it. There you go. There you go.

We'll get the howling dogs out. Yeah. As you mentioned earlier, written Viking sources, as much as we have of them and sagas and things like that, tend not to say too much about women. Yes. How do you find that this approach of using things that have been found helps us get closer to women, and particularly you mentioned earlier, childbirth. Can it give us any insight into what's happening in Viking childbirth, which normally we would know nothing about? Yeah, yeah, that is, I mean, childbirth specifically, and there's other ways we can get into these kind of very important female spheres. But thinking about childbirth specifically, that's hard. And partly that's the nature, that's sort of the nature of the nature of why. it is. I mean, if we're looking at the material record, unfortunately, you are most likely to see evidence of childbirth when it has gone wrong. And there is an example of that from the island of Rousey, again, going back to Orkney, and it's very, very high status burial, Viking Age burial.

And it's of a woman and a newborn child or possibly not quite born. And it looks like they both possibly died in childbirth. And again, we can't really get a lot further than that. We can look at the incredible grave goods that they were buried with. This was a very high-status person with international connections, but there is a very human and very tragic story at the heart of that that we can't really get any further into. There are thinking of runes. There are these things called piagrunar, so like helping runes essentially. And they're mentioned in later textual sources as, you know, essentially if you want to help a woman get through childbirth, carve these biagrinar, these helping runes, that's possible mention, at least, of the word

biagrinar in a different context in almost like an amulet, like a protective amulet. So that does happen occasionally, but that's not specifically linked, I think, to childbirth as far as we can tell. But then there's one, and again, it's quite a late source. It's Christian, you know, framework. It starts with, you know, Mary Boar, Christ. And then it just says in runes, come out, hairless one, the Lord calls you into the light. And so it is this, again, we have to interpret it to some extent, but it does seem to be maybe, you know, difficult childbirth or some overdue childbirth. So there's, you know, those sorts of little hints. There's also a tradition that, again, this is sort of a post-conversion tradition.

tradition in Iceland, that St. Margaret was one of the patron saints of childbirth. And in fact, there were all these very, very small, tiny manuscripts, sort of smartphone-sized manuscript of the story of St. Margaret's life. And the idea seems to be that they would have been strapped onto a woman, a labouring woman. It feels quite strange that St. Margaret is sort of very famously virginal is the patron saint of childbirth until you read into her story and she was swallowed by dragon. and then the dragon sort of, you know, starts to feel a little bit unwell. And then St Margaret miraculously bursts out of the dragon's stomach, very kind of alien chestbuster style.

So that seems to be why she's associated with childbirth. It always surprises me that St Margaret gets that job as well, when you think she, like you said, alien style burst out of a woman. Surely that's not what you want. No. Is that what you're hoping birth is going to look on? No, exactly. Yes.

I mean, I had what is sort of slightly scarily called a precipitous labour where basically, you know, I had a child shooting out of me. I think in about an hour. Once I had sort of got over the shock, I did think of St. Margaret and the dragon that, yeah, my sympathies are most definitely with a dragon. So, but I mean, you know, I quite like, I quite like the fact that, you know, there's a dragon involved. again, that feels very, very appropriate for childbirth. There are other ways we can find out. So the thing that I think is really important, I always found textile production, not very interesting,

but that is a very, very important insights into the female world of the Viking Age. And actually, it's an incredibly important one, because you remove textile production, and I've got statistics in there that people have put forward about how long, you know, it would have taken for sort of essentially the equivalent of one person to make a sail for a Viking ship. And it's insanely time-consuming. And so, you know, for everything we know, you take away women and you take away children for start, but you take away women and you end up with essentially some naked blokes in a rowing boat because there are no sails, there are no clothes for sea voyages, there are no clothes at all. But then again, if you look at the little bits and pieces that survive from textile production, you get a sense of what those lives were actually like. So you have these textile rooms on the farms. And you have these wonderful little insights. So you have spindle wall weights, you know, so you can spin the wool into thread and these are hanging down. And they've often got runic carvings on them. They've got people's names and they'll say things like Sigrethr owns this. So suddenly you have a whole list of people's names associated with it.

You have pictures. You have, there's one case where they've taken a, well, it looks like what's happened is like children have basically nicked a weaving sword, which is used to pack down the threads. And they've carved little faces onto it. And these faces have got little swords and shields, and they're squaring off against each other. And so suddenly you start to have textile rooms populated by women, women telling stories, women singing songs, having arguments. children getting under the feet. There's one example from Norway where there seems to be a little bit of,

I can't remember what it is, like sort of birch tar, resin or something with the imprints of children's teeth. Children seem to have been in that room using it kind of like as a form of early chewing gum. One of the absolutely incredible finds that was found in a women's weaving room was a little sort of recess on a shelf,

tucked away, essentially sort of a long necklace made out of a few. human hair, blonde human hair that someone has woven. And again, it's like, why did you do this? Was this your hair? Was this a child's hair? Was this a loved one's hair? And yet there's this just little glimpse of physicality of sort of tangible humanity just tucked into a weaving room recess and just left there undiscovered for a thousand years. And so, I mean, I love all the drama of the kind of stereotypical Viking Age. I, you know, there's a reason I started to

studying this stuff in the first place. It's dramatic. It's larger than life. It's colourful. It's often brutal. But there are real humans under these stories. And it's just getting to that humanity as best we can. Oh, well, that's a perfect place to end because I've got to go and pitch a bunch of naked men in a rowing boat as the next big reality TV show. I would watch that. I would watch the hell out of it. So thank you so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. The book, I would recommend to anyone. It's fantastic. It's so interesting. It's so human. And you write so well as well. It's just so engaging. It's a wonderful book. Thoroughly recommend it to everybody to find out a little bit more about the real people behind the Viking Age. Thank you so much for joining us, Eleanor. It's been great to chat to you. Thank you. It has been such a pleasure. Eleanor's new book, Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age, is out now wherever you get your books. If you've enjoyed this, you might like more Viking episodes from our back catalogue, including one on the legendary Ragnar Lothbrook.

Or you can find out about Viking sex from when Kat Jarman teamed up with Kate Lister of Betwixt the Sheets. There's an adult content warning required for that episode, though. Obviously, it's Kate. There are plenty of other Viking-related episodes about their travels, sagas and gods too. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts

add free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. And as a special gift, you can get 50% off your first three months when you use the code medieval at checkout. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.