Gone Medieval - The Rise of the Vikings

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

September is Vikings month on Gone Medieval, as Dr. Cat Jarman presents a mini-series about her favourite, specialist subject. Over four episodes, Cat is 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 second episode, Cat tells how raiders, traders and settlers from Scandinavia succeeded over 300 years to make an indelible mark on Western Europe, with insights from some previous contributors to Gone Medieval.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Matthew Peaty 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. For about 300 years, raiders, traders and settlers from Scandinavia made an indelible mark on northwestern Europe and beyond. And as we usually told, it all started more or less out of the blue with an unprecedented attack on the monastery of Lindisfarne on the 6th of June 793. Is that really how it started? Who were the Vikings anyway? And what reasons do they have to turn outwards from Scandinavia

to raid and pillage, but also to trade, explore and peacefully settle? Can we really understand how these people went from a few early violent raids to forming not just their own kingdoms and countries, but also at the very peak of their story, for someone like King Knut to rule over not just Denmark and Norway, but also England. In this episode, as part of our Viking month, I'm going to try to answer some of those questions, which I've been working on for quite some time as well.

And we're also going to be going back to some colleagues we have heard from previously on the podcast. To start with some definitions, what do we mean by the Vikings? This is something that always seems to come up every time I write an article or post something on social media. The most common definition is as a description of the people who originated in Scandinavia from the beginning of the Viking Age, usually defined us 7-9-3, but we'll get back to that, and up until about 1066.

And by Scandinavia, here we mean the modern countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, which, of course, did not exist as those nations until the end of the period. In fact, it was the Viking Age that really created the Scandinavian countries in the first place. We do certainly have something called Norway and Denmark at the time, but they're not countries in the way that we define them now, and certainly not with the same territories. At the beginning of the period, we have a series of smaller kingdoms, with several petty kings or local rulers, often competing for territory.

We're going to get back to that as well. Now, many use the word Viking only to refer to those who travel out of Scandinavia and especially on violent raids as pirates and pirates. pillages. In fact, some like to refer to the word Viking as a job description rather than an ethnic identifier. And the latter is very true. There's no such thing as an ethnic Viking. And if you travelled back to say 8.50 and ask someone who they were, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't answer a Viking. They'd be more likely to identify themselves with a certain family or regional group. In fact, if you look at the Icelandic Lannamabuk, the Book, the Book of Settlement, which is

sort of who's who or telephone directory that describes the earliest settlers of Iceland, people are very much described and identify by who they are related to and where they're from. The way we use the word Viking now in English is a pretty recent invention, having been revived in the 19th century. If we go back to the Viking age and the very limited contemporary Scandinavian sources we have, we find two related words in Old Norse. noun vikingo, which is a person, and viking, which is an activity. We found them on runestones and in poetry, and a vikinger was someone who went on expeditions, usually abroad. We don't have a fuller explanation of the word viking, and it's not, as many people

think, a verb. The meaning of it could include raiding, but it certainly wasn't only that. It was only in the medieval sagas that the word became one with a negative connotation, referring to pirates and predators. Other names we use for the same people include the Norse, so speakers of the Old Norse language. Part of the problem with that is we don't exactly know what they spoke or where that language was spoken. What happened to those who settled somewhere like England, for example? How quickly did the language change? Ultimately, the word Viking is not perfect and it's certainly not accurate. But it's kind of the best.

we've got. Now, I want to come back a little bit to this question of who these people really were, because there's no such thing as an ethnic Viking linguistically speaking. What about biology and genetics? This is another question that comes up an awful lot. Now, with modern DNA tests, there are some services out there offering you the opportunity to test to see if you are, in fact, a Viking. Now, I have to warn you straight away that despite what they promise, we can't can't do such a thing, not least because of those problems with definitions that I just talked about, but also because there's no such thing as a genetic Viking that you can compare yourself to. Those services will give you information about your own genetic makeup and compare that with a database of other people.

But crucially, to other people alive in the world today. So if you get a match to, say, Norway, then really that's only telling you that your genetic makeup is quite It's similar to the people living there right now. You can't actually know what that says about your link to the Viking Age. Now having said that, there was also a recent large-scale study on ancient DNA, looking at DNA from Viking Age skeletons, which attempted to draw out some patterns of larger-scale populations and population movements. Now within this study, they did find some differences between the different areas of Scandinavia,

areas that were more what they called Norwegian-like or Swedish-like, for example. But what was also really interesting is that those differences didn't actually map properly onto what borders we have today, but rather were more defined by geography. Another interesting point from the study was that there were plenty of people coming into Scandinavia, including from some unexpected locations like southern Europe. And often, ways that we typically identify ethnicity or cultural affinity, like grave goods, for example, didn't match the genetic markers. So you can have people, for instance, who you have a genetic makeup that match the Sami, the indigenous populations, buried with grave goods that we would usually identify as Viking. So the genetics and the definitions that we have don't exactly quite match.

and we've still got quite a long way to go to tease the part what this all means. But let's get back to the start of the Viking Age and those early raids. Technically, that raid on Lindisfarne isn't the first recorded raid because in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, another raid is mentioned on Portland in southern England. In this attack, a royal official murdered by the crew of three ships of raiders who apparently came from Holdalan in Norway, and it's reported for the year 7, 8, 9. The entry says,

they came for the first time three ships and then the Reeve rode there and wanted to compel them to go to the king's town because he did not know what they were and they killed him. Those were the first ships of the Danish men which sought out the land of the English race. But Lindisfarne, of course,

is the raid that was much better known. And regardless of whether or not that was really the first raid, Pretty soon the Viking raiders became a serious threat to Britain and Ireland. A while back, I talked to Dr David Petz about the raid and the evidence we have about it. One of the things I really wanted to know was if this really was as unexpected as we think, and if the site was totally undefended.

It's pretty clear from all the sources that it was entirely unexpected. Obviously, once the impact of Viking raiding becomes more established, I think people become more aware of potential. But you've really got to remember this really is. Apart from one other example down on the south coast of England, this was really out of the blue. There's never really been anything like it before. So that first attack,

I think it's just that shocker that anybody would dream of particularly attacking a monastic site. Early medieval Northumbria, it wasn't a peaceful place. I mean, there's plenty of conflict going on. But the idea of attacking and sacking a monastery was something qualitatively different to the other kinds of battles and warfare that was endemic in this period. The Lindisfarne attack sent shockways throughout Europe, not least because it was reported by a Northumbrian scholar Alquin of York,

who ended up working at the Court of Charlemagne. I asked David about the significance of this report. The fact that what's happened in Northumbria is being transmitted to the Holy Roman Emperor and his court is really, really important. This isn't just something which happens on the edge of a known world. It's something which has profound impact

on the continental mainland. It's very easy to forget when we talk about the Vikings in Britain, we always tend to think of it as the kind of the Viking impact on Britain and Ireland and the North Atlantic. The Viking impact on continental Europe

and France and the low countries was incredibly profound. So I think there's that sense that something nasty is coming our way because this part of Europe, the Karengian Empire, they are part of that North Sea trading world as well. So they are interested and worried about anything that might impact on it. And the Viking threat, of course, was not just limited to England.

They were also raised taking play towards the end of the 8th century across the English Channel in the Kingdom of Francia. I spoke to Dr Chris Coyman's about what we know about those earliest attacks. We get a sense from various different texts that Vikings were already active in a limited capacity along the Frankish coast around the turn of the 9th century, so roughly coinciding with their first recorded appearances around the coast of Britain and Ireland. But for Francia, the early evidence is sometimes difficult to interpret, and it's a bit vague on the detail, so we often can't really pinpoint early attacks with any

great amount of certainty. But the first specific attack around the Frankish... coast that is traditionally thought to have been carried out by Vikings, is dated to the year 799. Now, we don't actually know all that much about this attack. The annals are completely silent about it. We have no archaeological evidence to work with, but what we do have is a letter written by Alquin of York, no less, who mentions that pagan ships had made their way to the islands of Aquitaine and that they'd cost a lot of damage there, and that over a hundred of these

attackers had been killed on a beach. So this attack is traditionally thought to have taken place on the island of Noamu Kyi, which is off the Atlantic coast of present-day France. It's just south of Brittany. And it's often held up as the one event that kicked off the Viking Age in Franke, much like Lindisfarne was for England. But when we examine Alquin's letter a bit closer, we actually discover that it's nowhere near as specific. Aquin doesn't actually say who the attackers were, for example. He doesn't use the word Northman or Dane, which we find in a lot of these later sources, which would confirm them to be Vikings.

He just uses the word pagan and pirates, but those terms were used for other peoples as well. They could refer to mariners coming in from Iberia and the Mediterranean Sea, for example, who are also known to be active in those same waters. He also doesn't specify what the target would have been. He just mentions islands, plural. and because there are many islands off the coast of what would have then been Aquitaine, we really can't say with any certainty whether Noamu Che would have been among them. So could this have been a Viking attack?

Yes, I think so, absolutely. We can't rule it out in any way. But if it was, would it have been this sort of game-changing bolt from the blue event? Probably not. As I mentioned, we do have other suggestions of this activity taking. place during this early time, suggesting that it was already far more commonplace to run into Vikings along the Frankish coasts. So there were clearly plenty of raiders active across the English Channel and possibly for longer than we have records of. Another thing we know is that not

all the intention was focused on Western Europe, but things were happening in the East around the same time, possibly even a little bit earlier. Researchers are now learning more and more about activity in the Baltic Sea. One major discovery was a ship burial at Zalma in Estonia that was discovered in 2008. There were actually two ships there that contained a remarkable burial of 41 individuals in total, with the larger of the two ships extremely well equipped with weapons and elaborate artefacts. This was clearly an important and high status. burial. The men had died in some kind of battle or attack, an isotope and DNA analysis

showed they most likely came from Sweden. But one thing that's important about this burial is the date, because the ships seem to date to around 7.50, so several decades before the attack on Lindisfarne. And what's also important is that around the same time, we start to see trading settlements with a distinctly Scandinavian nature, appears along the eastern river routes, the first one being Staria-Ladagar near what is now St. Petersburg. It seems like people were moving eastwards, perhaps even before they moved to the west. We also start to see goods coming back into Scandinavia from the late 8th century, things like Islamic silver, silver that would be a hugely important part of the whole Viking story.

Now there are also tantalizing clues that there might have been more contact between Scandinavia and places like Britain before the first raids took place. And if you think about it, that's quite logical, not only because the distances are quite short, but also because those first raiders clearly knew where to go and what they would find. When we have that first attack on Portland, for example, the Reeve came down to see them, trying to direct them to the market town. He saw no threat in those Viking ships coming along. Perhaps he bestook them for traders.

Now, even if we don't quite know where it started or how much contact there had been before, the question remains why? In the last quarter of the 8th century, something changed that drove people out of the homeless in Scandinavia in such a richest by violent means. And what was that? Hi there, I'm Don Wildman,

the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week. as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park. From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights,

the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to del, into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Over the years, a number of courses of the Viking Age have been put forward. A major suggestion is that there might have been population pressure in the Viking homelands, seeing groups forced to move elsewhere because of an increased population

that may have led to there being a lack of land for settlements back home. Unfortunately, we don't actually have. any real evidence to tell us if this was the case or not. Another possible reason is the environment, so impact of climate change leading to better opportunities for settlement in places like Iceland and Greenland. Now we do know that is the case, but it doesn't actually happen right at the start, it happens a little while later. So that can't really be a course as such.

The next plausible candidate relates to politics and power struggles back home in Scandinavia. And if you remember the talk right at the start about the Scandinavian countries, there were a number of smaller kingdoms and chieftoms in Scandinavia, and this inevitably led to competition. And to be able to compete in a situation like that, you need capital, something that you could easily obtain on a raid overseas. There are what's been described as ideological reasons as well, relating to the mentality and a worldview focused on and geared for war,

fair where overseas raids give you status and training. It might even have given you social capital that you could use when you came back home. But none of this really explains that quite sudden change in the late 8th century. We also have technological factors playing and especially the development of the Viking ship. And this is actually really important because the ship was so crucial to the success of the raids with the new development of a keel, and the use of sails for the first time in Scandinavia, the Viking ships not only allowed quite large crews to cross the oceans, but also to navigate rivers and to pull up quickly and silently onto beaches

and disappear again as quickly as they arrived. Finally, there's a more recent suggestion that a shortage of women may have been a reason for the Western raids. This would then provide an incentive for young men to raid and obtain wealth so that they can compete in a very tricky marriage market and importantly have the money to pay the necessary bride wealth that was due to the bride's family. It's been suggested that this shortage of women was caused by selective infanticide

where female babies were killed by their families, while at the same time those at the higher end of the social ladder may also have had several wives. The problem with the scenario is that we don't actually have any evidence that there were fewer women at all, and much of it relates to a bit of a misunderstanding. Because we do have a much smaller number of female graves than male graves in Scandinavia from the Viking Age.

This has been taken directly to suggest that there were also fewer women. But that's not actually the case. The difference is caused by the ways we identify these Viking graves and identify gender in the archaeological record. We usually do this by graves, goods and because places like Norway has really poor preservation conditions for

skeletons you didn't really have another way so unless we have some really obvious artifacts we have no way of identifying the sex as a disease and in any case that method of identifying gender based on grave goods and objects is a very problematic anyway so what we are now that really is is that there probably wasn't one specific reason. Instead, all of these factors played in like a perfect storm where tricky conditions at home created an incentive to go out. And the new technologies like the ships suddenly made it very possible.

And at the same time, there seems to have been widespread contact between the far reaches of Scandinavia and the outside world. People were mobile, and they were very much aware of what was out there, and what they could possibly get hold of. Now importantly, this began to happen long before the first attacks, initially around Scandinavia. And this was something I talked to Dr Stephen Ashby about in the context of trade in antler and combs,

and new methods he has used to identify reindeer antler, something that was traded very early on, and that may have told us something about those contacts and all that mobility. Ranger Antler started to appear in the small numbers in finished combs in the early 8th century. So well before the start of the Viking Age, somebody who had a comb that was probably made in somewhere like Upland, Norway, or used materials that came from Upland Norway, found themselves in this place in Denmark, which was later to become something like a town.

So fairly early on, they're aware of this place. There's a kind of emerging kind of understanding of travel, of the need to go to towns, of what has become to be known as an urban network. It's starting to form already about. And if nothing else, what it shows is there's travel between these places. So there's shipping going on well before the Vicarage has become. But then what we found is that that kind of slow trickle just persists. But really takes off in a decade when we haven't any surprise to anybody,

the sort of 790s. Round about that point, you start to see reindeer antler appearing, not just in finished combs, but in manufacturing waste. Someone's importing reindeer antler to make combs out of in southern Scandinavian. So it looks like there's a extended period of maritime connection and travel and transport and trade, but then it spikes just when everything else spikes. When we hear about the raiding in the Anglo-Sat and Chronicle, when we start to see changes in the movement of silver around the Viking Age, where we start to see references in the Frankish animals. And we start to see the movements of beads changing, all those things you know a lot about as well. It's looking more and more like this is a kind of key moment.

What's interesting is that the contact with Upland Norway or the Arctic is keyed into that just as much as those more exotic connections to the east are keyed in. So it does seem to be a kind of key moment of change. But it also suggests that there is this trickle of contact before them. So while we couldn't find this contact with Scandinavia and Scotland back into the early 8th century, they are certainly travelling around Scandinavia by boat at that point. So it does look like there was movement, there was contact, there was trade, that expanded and changed at some point during the late 8th century,

rather than beginning at that point from nothing, really. That's such a brilliant conclusion to be able to get to from something like Combs. One other question that I have, which is a, I'm not sure you can really answer, but it's a bit of a sort of chicken or egg sort of question, really, in terms of seeing all this new, the new reindeer and the material, especially, and the use of that in Combs, is that to do with a cultural thing? And do you think, is it more sort of whatever roles they have in society? Is that becoming more important?

or is it the fact that suddenly it's possible for these materials to move around and so people can access, because you have much more transport and networks and all of that, is it sort of because they need the materials? Or is it because they are accessible, do you think? Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. Certainly, it must have been about the network opening up. So somebody who's getting hold of reindeer antler is aware that they can ship this to somewhere, that somebody else wants it somewhere else. That has to be important.

It's not that it's necessarily a kind of culturally ascribed material, that it kind of means something. Now, that might well be there, but there are particular things about reindeer which make it desirable. If anyone knows what a reindeer antler looks like, it's got big flat plates on it, much as elk has. You don't see that in red deer antlers as much. So red deer antler tends to be, it's kind of cylindrical. And that's probably one of the reasons why the combs you see in places like England are not quite so pretty. It's a harder material to work in a kind of symmetrical sort of way. But I think the key thing is that reindeer grouped together in large herds, huge herds, a thousand, and thousands of deer, completely nothing like you see for red deer or for elk.

So if you want large numbers of antlers, then reindeer is the place to go. Lots of this material seems to be what we call cast or shed. It's not butchered. It's not been taken from animals that have been hunted. It's been collected from the ground. And the easiest way to do that is if you've got a large number of animals together. So I think that's the reason that it becomes kind of desirable outside of the immediate area of where the animals live.

It's because it allows you to bring in large numbers. I think it probably suggests expanding scale of production. and the need to supplement what you've got locally with mature from outside. So this was the earliest stage of the Viking age then. Pretty soon the Viking presence in Western Europe started to change. Clearly, raiding in the West and East was profitable. Leaders with ambitions and those they recruited along the way realised the raids were good business.

And before too long, those early hit-and-run raids turn into something else. ambitions of political conquest. Now typically we date this to almost a century after the first raids with the coming of the Great Army. Our loyal listeners would have heard me and others talk about this army many times before and we have several episodes that you can go back to listen to. Here's how Dr Jane Kirschor, for example,

describe the Great Army. They are first recorded as arriving in England in 865. So this is after a period of 70 years or so of Viking raiding. But in this year a great army arrives, they're a motley collection of career warriors, mostly from Scandinavia, maybe some people coming from the continent, possibly from Ireland as well,

and they travel round England, subduing the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. They take East Anglia, they go and they capture York, they're capturing parts of Mercia as well, and this activity is taking place in the late 8060s and 70s, and we have historical documents that tell us where they overwinter. And it's these winter campsites that archaeologists have been investigating

and that we're learning a lot more about. Crucially, not only did armies like this raid and conquer kingdoms, but they were also involved in trade, setting up key connections between Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. And this is a really important part of the Viking success story. The trade was not just a bit of exchange on the side, but a very sophisticated network stretching vast distances. I spoke to Dr Tom Horn about this.

What you are getting after that point is you're finding ways of being more efficient at this. You set up these market sites. And what you then want to do is continue to bring all the silver out. which is probably being exchanged for furs and slaves and the like. And you're setting up these markets and you're trying to link them up as well. So we think Kaupang and Neurosavoslo and Neoslav Fjord connecting to Hedbby, which is basically in southern Denmark, northern Germany. And that we think of that actually is a kingdom.

Niels Blancis would call it a network kingdom. And you also get network kingdoms connecting Scandinavian territories in the Eastern Baltic with Scandinavia proper. So Beerca, which is to the major trading site to the west of Stockholm, is connecting across the Baltic into places like probably Estonia and then into the river systems of Eastern Europe, then heading down to where the silver's coming in. So what you've got is silver coming out one way, and then you've got these markets which attract things like bringing slaves and bring in things like amber and furs, and then you get that exchange. So what I think is then happening is when the Southern

Scandinavians establish themselves in Dublin and then York, what they're doing is, oh, okay, this works. It's an efficient way of getting the local wealth and however you define that and getting it to a market point where by ship in the main, we can transport it long distances quickly and efficiently and we can bring in tolls from that, we can bring in taxes from that and then obviously the sale as well. They knew from southern Scandinavia that you could bring in lots of silver coming in via the Baltic, which would pay for your slaves from Ireland or from southern Scotland or northern England as well. So what I think is happening is the Southern Scandinavians that have been raiding and trading in the low countries in northern France.

When they go over to Dublin and Ireland in the 850s particularly and England from the 865 on what they're doing is basically just this thing of best practice that are going. The best way to make money quickly and efficiently is to have connected markets, or in sending back we'll call them no-dull markets, some major market points that are efficiently placed to get all the resources that are near to them and then be able to exchange them from all this amazing silver that's coming in to the Baltic. So they've got basically the game plan there. So what you need to do is set up what Niels Blancis calls these network kingdoms.

You connect as many major markets as you can and that bring in all the resources. And then you just try and attract traders to them and you try to attract people that are bringing in their slaves. And then you just skim the profit off that. So I think that is the connection. You've really got to look at Southern Scandinavia and maybe even also Sweden. And you see what's been done there. And then they've transposed that. They've just taken that idea and they've brought it to Britain and Ireland.

And then they just follow what they've been doing for maybe even a century by that stage. So a century after the first recorded raids in the West, the Vikings are a firm and definite presence in northwestern Europe. There are Scandinavian settlements, kingdoms and trading networks in places like Britain and Ireland, Normandy, Iceland, and along the rivers of Eastern Europe. But this is just the beginning. in the coming two weeks we'll be hearing about the stories and sagas that have been told about these people from the north as well as the culmination of their power in the west make sure you don't miss the rest of our Viking month here on gone medieval i'm dr cat jaman and thank you so much for listening to the podcast i'm excited to tell you that we have a very special offer over on history hit you can get there by following the link in the episode notes below this podcast we're building the world's best

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