Gone Medieval - The Viking Age: What Discoveries Reveal

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

The Vikings continue to fascinate us because their compelling stories connect with universal human desires for exploration and adventure. But recent advances in excavation and archaeological science, coupled with a re-evaluation of oral traditions and written sources, are furthering our understanding of the Viking Age. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis meets Dr. Davide Zori, Associate Professor of History and Archaeology in the Honors College at Baylor University. In his new book Age of Wolf and Wind: Voyages through the Viking World, he integrates history, archaeology, and new scientific techniques to shed new light on the Vikings. This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. 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. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. We remain slightly obsessed with Vikings, particularly here on Gone Medieval. The word alone conjures up for us a world of violence, of mead and most often beards, but it's also an age of intrepid travel. David Zori is Associate Professor of History and Archaeology at Baylor University and his new book, The Wonderfully titled Age of Wolf and Wind

voyages through the Viking world, brings together current techniques across disciplines to try and clarify our image of the Viking Age. Welcome to God Medieval, David. Thank you for having me. Pleasure to have you here. We always love talking about Vikings, so any excuse to talk about Vikings, and your book title is absolutely spot on. It sounds incredible, so hopefully it will already be making people want to go out and buy

the book. In the book, you draw on different disciplines, so archaeology, science, and the text that we have. How important was it for you to work across? all of those disciplines and to weave them together? It was fundamentally important. The Viking Age, like any proto-historic period, in my opinion, requires or calls out for us to use all the available datasets to tell stories about the past. That's why I seek to do.

So the study of the Vikings has been from the beginning, sort of dominated by texts available to us. And now with new archaeological techniques and new scientific analyses available, we can really expand everything that we thought we knew about the Vikings. It seems like a really good time to be a biking historian at the moment. There's so much new stuff and new techniques that are uncovering and unlocking all sorts of other things. It must be a great age to work in this field. I love the field. I find it so exciting, the knowledge that we're gaining every field sees it.

New information comes in, new objects, new relic landscapes that we can analyze and juxtapose with what we thought we knew based on the texts, and also subject those materials, those landscapes to scientific analysis, everything from surveys with LIDAR and different geophysics equipment. That's becoming available to us at reasonable costs. And so in my mind, we have independent data sets now from texts, from archaeology, from science. They each have their own new disciplinary issues and need to be approached critically. But when you juxtapose those different views into the past, you can start to check one against the other. And you can let

them correspond. You can let them build on each other. You can scaffold them to tell really fascinating narratives that are fine-tuned in a way that they weren't possible to draw a decade or two ago. You talk in the book about the three Cs that you try to explore. Can you tell us a little bit about those, please? Yes, the three Cs. These are the new arenas for analysis that emerge when these data sets are juxtaposed. So in a sense, they are the entanglement of the encounters between our data that result when we put them together. It's challenging. But if you think of these potential agreements,

and there are other ways to look at it, but the way that I approach it is, these data sets could affirm each other. That is, we excavate something that confirm as what we thought we knew through the texts. That's always gratifying, and that's probably the oldest of the attempts to let these data sets work together.

In the antiquarian periods across the Viking world, people would take their text, whether their sagas or the angixt, or the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and they'd go dig a hole somewhere, they found something, you know, a burial mound, it must be the burial mound of this particular hero, or if they dug at someone's formstead, when they found a house, it must be the house of that saga hero.

It's not that easy, of course, and many mistakes were made. That said, with more care, we can seek confirmation. So that's the first see, confirmation. The second see is contradiction. When we think we know something, and then we dig or we do some scientific analysis, And we find that that was not true. And then that sends us back to look at the text again.

Maybe we read them wrong. Maybe the author means to tell us something that is propaganda. And then we need to work through the text again. So it sends us back to the scaffold. And then the third C is complementarity. And this is probably the most gratified for me is when each of these windows into the past from the sources, from the archaeology,

and from scientific analysis, tell stories that don't contradict each other. They don't necessarily direct. directly confirm each other, but they allow a new story to develop, allow us to see a broader picture or more nuance at local levels across the Viking world. Yeah, so the complementarity is kind of like opening the curtains a bit wider on the window, gives you a broader view a better insight into what's going on outside. Yeah, it's when the new sciences of the archaeology has those questioned sources in a different way or maybe reveals sights or aspects of the Viking world that were unknown through the

texts. And then we go back to the Texas and why are these absent? So for instance, something very new in the 20th century was the discovery of the Trellaborg fort system in Denmark. These forts, which represent the biggest public works program in the Viking Age, and it ties in with the formation of the state of Denmark. These are very intricately planned, very large forts across the Danish landscape, around that roads oriented with the cardinal directions, and they're very, they're They are all laid out with the same mathematical precision. They're unmentioned in the text. There are no texts, no runestones that discuss these forts.

They're the biggest public works project in all the life. So why are they ignored in the texts? So this sends us back to look at those texts. Then we've now done scientific analysis of the people buried within the forts, for instance. And we see that at least a good number of them might not be native Danish. So this fort system in Denmark, this tied to all power, there are people warriors coming from outside of Denmark living in these forts. We haven't resolved every question about this fort system.

This is exactly what I'm looking for. You know, so just to go back, if you want to reinterpret the texts for this particular fort system, you do have some mentions of really hard work that the king at the time, Harold Blueprint, put the Danes to. And one of those jobs was hauling a large rock to yelling, which was its cap of. And it was always kind of a weird story. Why are they hauling a rock up to yell? and really upset about it. Now, there is a large runestone yelling, which this king sets up,

that claims that he united all the Danes and made the Christian. People have sometimes connected to that. Maybe it's a symbol of the hard work that he made the Danes do, even beyond this new, unprecedented public works system that required all the labor of the people from across the Nashet's state. And we know that Harold Bleat-tooth was open-throfts. in the rebellion from his side. So perhaps part of the loss and history about these forts, for instance, is that the next kings would rather downplay what happened under this ruler. So it's not necessarily the right answer,

but it allows these new questions of the texts that I'm really enjoying being part of. That's what I seek to sort of achieve in each of the chapters of the book, is to look in great detail at case studies that I think are significant for understanding the Viking world. So I intended to work as an introduction to the Vikings, but really also dive into the individual data from these three separate disciplines of history, archaeology, and the heart sciences. Fantastic. And the first element that you address is Viking voyages. So what were you able to glean from using this approach about the Viking voyages?

Do we see kind of any pattern to it or a plan for expansion? Or is it much more random as they go raiding all over the place? We do see patterns, and that's one of the main things that the book looks for. Patterns of information gathering and then reactions. So as you move beyond your homelands, which is what characterizes to me the Viking Age is at an unprecedented scale in Scandinavian history, people are moving beyond their native shores to do various things on those voyages. So first, you need to know what's out there. So there's a phase of discovery where you're gathering information.

We know from the texts, sometimes when the Vikings will return from these voyages, they'll be blamed for not being curious. You know, you get to this new land where you didn't explore. This happens, for instance, in Finland. The first discoverer of a new world and returns to Greenland, and people's going to make fun of them for not exploring it. This is the second phase, I'd say, is an exploration. And then in the third phase, you can then start exploiting it. And that exploitation can take many forms. In my mind, the Vikings quit essential opportunists.

And so they might raid if they encounter, let's say, a lot of wealth, perhaps not protected very well. So monasteries are a great example. They're not occupied by the world's greatest warriors, and they're often living in isolation. And they've got a lot of wealth, because Western Christianity's followed a ton of wealth into these modest things. So raiding there is a good option. In the North Atlantic, there's no one to raid. So they get to Iceland, about 100 years into the Viking Age. And there's a vast open landscape in Iceland that is not settled.

and they take advantage of that. And then there's trade. So when they're going east, they pretty quickly settle on trade being the main lucrative opportunity for them in the east. And they're moving up and down the rivers of Russian, Ukraine, the Nipper and the Volga, down into these large state-level societies

in the Caliphate of Baghdad and Byzantium. When they encounter that kind of power and trade is a better option. So the book does also focus quite heavily on the viability on the Viking presence in Britain. Does this multidisciplinary approach tell us new things about that presence? For example, does it help us determine between where they're raiding,

where they're trading, and where they're settling? Yes. Britain's a good example of a place where we thought we knew pretty well how this went down. And that's because there are some very good texts. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles

the most important has been the most dominant. Then there are also very good letters written between clergy, some good texts from archives. in those churches. The annual section chronicle goes year by year and it reads like this ought to be true. And so large extent has been very useful. It's provided those two dates that people used to bracket the vitamin Hintra is the beginning, 1066 is the end. And it's not that easy. So what archaeology and science has done is complement more than anything else what you thought we knew from the texts

and has stuck to resolve some of these old questions. Well, a quick example is, for instance, It's the size of the Viking great arm, which trumps around in England in the middle of the ninth century. And the Chronicle says they overwinter in different places. And the numbers given have been suspicious. So one debate is, well, how many Vikings are they really at? So that's a pretty big question, because that's in the footprint of 100 guys versus 10,000 is substantial.

It's only with the archaeology that we've been able to test that. So the first of the Viking camp meant to be discovered archaeologically is erected. The fort there wasn't representative, really. The camp was much larger than that. Now a few other camps have been discovered, and we're seeing that these are sort of moving towns almost that are interacting with the local community in ways that we did not guess based on sources. There's a trade going on.

These camps, they're not just maddeny, they have families with them. So we're seeing the interactions that Scandinavians had with a local community come to life. And it humanizes it in a different way. And archaeology is good at that in giving us insights it to the individuals that aren't addressed in the sources which focus on the big met and the leaders. It feels to me as well that the further these studies go, the less our view of the Viking Age is one of pure violence. There does seem to be much more of a focus on trading and settling than we previously allowed. for with just the violent invaders who turn up, steal everything, and run away again. This was one of the first correctives that archaeology offering.

And perhaps we let it overcorrect a little. But when archaeological digs started really focusing on urban centers, the impact of the Vikings was understood in Ireland and England and also in Russia and Ukraine, they look productive, right? They look like they are catalysts for interregional trade and they're doing craft work and they're minting coins in imitation of usually things. area they have settled in. And the peaceful Viking was stressed for a while in the productive one. And that probably swung a little too far towards the peaceful vifus. I think it's worth

remembering that these are very violent folks and their ideological system was also set up to scaffold that violence. I mean, sometimes a question is asked, you know, well, are they really more violent than anybody else in this contemporary period? And maybe not, but they're definitely not less the violence. And so I'm happy that we're now also looking at aspects of the culture, the swing the pendulum back to the violence. You know, it's also worth remembering that this interregional trade was based to a large extent on human traffic. It was slaves that they were selling to especially kind of large polities like in Byzantium and Calipa of Baghdad for silver. And a lot of those early efforts that we talked about, you know, whether they're rating or trading or

settling down and being productive, most of those efforts, are about bringing wealth back to to Scandinavia and propping up, investing it in the political economy, investing in gift giving, throwing lavish feasts, or in purchasing mates back home. The flow of wealth is also an important aspect of the AIDS that flow well back into Scandinavia that fuels the political development of the time. And you mentioned the ideological culture of the Vikings just then. One of the things you addressed in the book is the process of Christianization and the impact that that has, the move from paganism to Christianity.

What do you find that that meant for Viking society and for wider European society? Because their change to Christianity must have impacted their neighbours and the broader European polity too. It's a profound shift. And it's hard to separate sometimes the effects of Christianity from the other major changes that are happening in the Viking Age. And this is a time where everything is changing in Scandinavia. You move from the pre-Christian, pagan ritual system, religion, to Christianity changes the worldview. You're moving from political system where you had chiefs in the anthropological sense. They men inherit status, but don't have a monopoly of force to state-level societies run by kings,

modeled on a Western European standard. And you have a shift in economics and in settlement pattern that results in the first cities, first towns in Scandinavia. All those things are wrapped up together, but Christianity has a huge impact in that, in drawing Scandinavia into Christianitas, the Christian part of Europe. So it changes the way that they're interacting with the landscape. It changes the way that they are engaging in politics. And it changes what they believe. Even in the Viking Age, some of the writers Adam Bremen, as one of them, says that the arrival of Christianity is what made them stop rating. I think that might be going a little far. We know Christians are violent to each other,

let's say it's too. But is it part of the explanation? Perhaps. Yeah, I guess because medieval Christianity always teaches you shouldn't attack other Christians. Yeah, I think it makes them pause, perhaps a little more. Viking attacks definitely dealt cease. This goes back to Britain, just as an example. I mean, you can see a shift in what kind of violence they deal out. But even after conversion, they're still invading Britain so that we might be able to divide into four phases of biking activity in Britain. It starts with these seasonal raids, but they gather a bit of information that show up on the coast, kind of hit and run tactics, and they go back at the end of the raiding season to Scandinavia so they can harvest their crops, but they got added well.

Then phase two might be multi-year campaigns where you start to seed them set up bases, whether that be up in the northern hills, go to Scotland, to the Hebrides, North East, or closer at hand, especially on the side of the English channel. Then phase three, we have multi-year campaigns where people are moving around the landscape and being much more presence than the Viking Great Army would count on that. Then phase four, you could think of as royal invasions

from Scandinavia. King Canute's horses is probably our quintessential example, but also his son, Sven Fortbeard, and also from Norway, teams are doing this, so Harold de Horn Goulda, Harold Haraldi, In 1066, tries to talk about him to two. They were Christians, so Harold Hard ruler,

Newtogne, and Fort Greed, they're all Christians, so it doesn't stop them from it, they date. But the way they act when they do take over, interacts with Christianity, and it's very pious in the sense that they give to the church, and they're allied with the church. Newt de Great goes to Rome on a pilgrimage and helps during the coronation of the Holy Roman Emperor.

So it draws in Scandinavian rulers into Christianity in a way that transforms doctors their relationship that they have with other European polities, peoples, but also the way they deal with their own subjects. And I think it's hard to say exactly how big of an impact Christianity itself had on this. But I think what causes, in a way, the end of the likenage is that wealth extraction for the leaders in Scandinavia ceases to depend on stealing wealth or extracting wealth by tribute or tax of people out. outside of Scandinavia, and it refocuses on the wealth that can generate it from control of your own nation, your own polity. As the Vikings begin to change these smaller, petty kingdoms into much larger solid nation states rule by a king,

do we get a sense from the texts, but also from the archaeology and the science, of how that changes the Viking notion of themselves and the way that they interact with the world around them? If they're shifting from being these almost nomadic raiders, does it change who they consider themselves to be? It does. I think that one of the most fascinating periods in the Viking Age is the period of transition from pre-Christian belief systems that world views to the Christian worldview.

And you read the text, it can feel very immediate. It sounds like an automatic thing. It sounds like this is the moment of Christianization. Every Viking suddenly converted in one day. Yeah, that's just not how it works. So I think this period of conversion, 50, 100 years, right where we see hybridity and synchronization between the ritual systems and in the artwork. And it must also reflect this tension in people's minds as they're coming to terms with this new

ideological system, which a lot of times is top down. Of course, it must be, and we know that there are some bottom-up types of conversion. Bullets and processes where people are exposed to Christianity, Braden come back. There are German missionaries and English missionaries going over and building churches and trying to talk to Scandinavians about Christianity. But top-down conversion is what we see mostly in the texts. So what do you do? Do you instantly then, instead of burying on the outskirts of your land and the mound, do you then go to burying without many grave goods inside of the church or next to a churchyard

that might be located in the town? So burying where you live is also big change. And sometimes it looks like a very rapid ship. Part of it is there was already a little bit of influence of Christian before, so they had toned down some of the great goods, for instance, that they were putting into graves. But the graves I really like, and we're seeing these in archaeology, the ones I find the most fascinating,

the ones that seem to be hedging their bets. So that was part of an excavation for many years. We found these graves in a conversion era, small church on the farmstead. And they're 25 graves, and five of them had objects in them that don't make sense for Christian graves. They're hardware, the rivets or clench bolts that are the type of object that you find in boats or ships. And they're placed on top of the graves of these individuals. And we came to realize that these are parts of boats on top of the bodies. So why do you put parts of boats in there?

I mean, the boat as a symbol transport to the next world, the world of the afterlife in its Canamavia is a well-known idea from the Viking Age that had great importance for them. And I think that these five burials right after Christianization is saying, okay, well, we're Christians, but we're not totally giving up these ideas in paganism. And sometimes you even see backlash, you know, or maybe even resistance. So 30 meters away from this early graveyard in Iceland were found a cremation, which is definitely not a Christian thing. And the date of that cremation is about 30 years after the first Christian.

burial, which means this community is multi-faith. I don't at least represent it as multi-faith. And this is the farmstead in Iceland, the chieftain's farmstead. In Iceland, sub-question Iceland. That's interesting. So then you start asking questions of this, you start thinking, what is this person buried over here? And it looked like it's the adult male. Was this a grumpy old grandpa, you know, who wanted to go out in pagan style? Or was this peaceful multi-faith community? There are many personal stories that you might imagine that are to get at. This is for more And this is not just in the boondocks of the Viking world where there isn't any royal control, let's say, because Iceland's conversion in the year 1,000 looks very different from the conversion

of the places that have the monarchy established like Denmark or Norway. So if we look at those Trellaborg forts, which were a royal building program, the largest public works program in the Viking world, there are graveyards associated with them. And one of those forts called Fierkech has a tremendous pagan grave, very nuanced. wagon cart. It's probably a serious woman who had some ritual role and was buried with an incredible amount of wealth in a pagan fashion. Definitely not a Christian ritual specialist, but a pre-Christian ritual specialist. So what is she doing buried in one of Harold Bluetooth's main construction works? And also the multi-faith community. So even though he says, I made the

Dane's Christian, okay, the people living in the actual force that he's setting up to dominate the landscape and protect his Nashit state or still practice some pagansism. That feels like a really good example of the complementarity, though, where you've got the idea that, yes, the Vikings were Christianized, but Harold Brututh would try and present it as, you know, I clicked my fingers and everyone became Christian, whereas the archaeology is saying,

well, you did all become Christian, but maybe it was more gradual and staggered and people were less immediately certain about it. So they seem to complement each other quite well there. Absolutely. These are exactly the moments, I think, that are still around, and many of them are being nuanced even more as we get better dating methods. Materials excavated, classic archaeological methods, and then now subjected to jury analysis,

we can tighten the cryology. I mean, when the forts were first excavated, people thought they were Sven Forkbeard's forests built to invade England, for instance. So it was only with tidal chronology, dental chronology, who were able to say, wait a minute, these weren't built in the reign of Sven, this was built in the ring of Harold, and then find one of the historical circumstances that would require the building with these forts down that we have adjusted the time frame. And how significant was the colonization of Iceland

to the Viking world? I think you were hugely significant again. We talked about those different opportunities that the Vikings see when they leave their own homes, the raiding, the trading, and the settlement. And the settlement is just as much a part of the Viking ethos. that expansionism moving beyond your shores. I mean, sometimes I think about getting on a wooden boat

and going across the North Atlantic and then imagining putting kids on there and your friends and some cows, some sheep, and then going out for a week across the North Atlantic in a wooden boat. It's extraordinary the decision-making to do that, to make that migration. And so I want to underscore that I think that's a key part

of the Viking Age, that expansion. I mean, Iceland is one of the last really big landforms settled by humans. So it offers us also significantly for our own time and for the discipline. It offers us a case study of human environmental interaction that we desperately need and how, as we're thinking about what impacts humans have on environments. Here, the lightning expansion into the North Atlantic offers all these little laboratories of the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland, which we now know based on archaeology,

it's not just some crazy stories. It's really a historical event. that to say, I think it's significant for our time as well. For the Vikings, a very large number of Scandinavians move into the North Atlantic to settle on this totally wide open lands. Within 60 years, it's complete settled. You might be dealing with 70,000 people. And it comes at just a right moment, too, for a more traditional Vikings, let's say. In England, the Great Army has settled down, so they share out land, dismantle three out of the four Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that are left. They And would leave Wessex standing, as you know, and now and that becomes the kingdom of England later.

So this is one of the effects of the Vikings in Britain. And so opportunity in England might not be as great. Well, you have a guy like Alfred the Great who starts resisting for the Viking incursions. And back in the homelands, kings are taking power and changing politics. And people are looking for other opportunities there. So I think the sort of traditional Viking type that might seek into the North Atlantic and settle down there and become productive. They were surviving there's free land. That was the main draw.

There was some aspect of interregional trade, though, that they may also have pulled them to Iceland. That's the Walrus colonies that were both in Iceland and Greenland, which would offer ivory for trade with Europe at a time when elephant ivory was hard to come by. There's the trade across the Mediterranean had been severed. So that's maybe one of the kind of world systems theory reasons for the Vikings going into the North Atlantic. And they continue, right? So they go from Iceland to Greenland and to the New World. And just thinking about using all of these techniques in the way that you and others are now, bringing all of these disciplines together,

what else do you think we might be able to uncover or answer using this approach? What still mystifies you that you would like to get to the bottom of? I mean, there's so many good questions still out there. Just to continue on the Viking expansion into the North Atlantic. One thing we haven't talked about is the promise of, ancient DNA to solve some of the problems. It's one of the most enticing of the new sciences. When we think about setting them up against each other, these datasets, written texts have been dominant. They have been driving research and the questions we're asking. To the point that

archaeologists have taught for a long time about the tyranny of the text, text is telling us where to get. I think we have more balanced now. Archaeology is its own field and is a respected field itself. can stand up to the historical documents. And then, you know, the bombshell of ancient DNA comes. It's going to solve all our problems. You know, we're going to understand human migration. We're going to understand how people interact with each other, intermarry, into breed.

So there was a fascination with, I think, some of these sciences, but it's also not that easy. Even in the genetics, you have to create your comparison. When you're saying, so for Iceland, this is very interesting. It leads to one of the things I would really like to look into more. when they did genetics of Iceland to figure out who were the people that settled Iceland. We know it's Scandinavians. Well, are there any other populations involved in this?

So about 80% that the DNA of modern Iceland is comparable to, let's say, Norwegians. So that's 80% Scandinavians and a good portion of Celtic, northern British Isles, folks. But what's fascinating is that when you look at the mitochondrial DNA, so the female line, less than 50% Scandinavian. and you have more Celtic DNA in Iceland. And that was, yeah, a bit of a revelation. Then you'd send you back to the text and go, okay, well, they do talk about bringing slaves and wives from the British Isles to Iceland. So it's there, not 50%, but it is there. So then you go back, you have to rethink also the archaeology.

Well, are there any Celtic type remains in Iceland? Can we see that? It's really not much. There are some, but the culture in Iceland. is overwhelming with Schededatig. You know, the language the saga was written, and the language that so speak is Skadig. So the identity that they create for themselves in Iceland,

even though there is this vast genetic input from non-Scanavians is Scandinavian. So the identity formation, I think, is something that we can really explore. So people, as now and also in the past, make choices about what their identity is, what their ethnicity is, how they represent themselves. And the fluidity of that is something that we really need to look into more in the Viking Age. So everything from identity in Iceland, even the northern British Isles,

so the Shetlands and the work, and they started speaking, Scandinavian language that becomes dominant. When they're in Britain, in southern England or in France, they adapt the local culture much quicker. We also now see from archaeology and DNA, clearly that women were warriors as well. The famous grave in Birka, just a few years ago, demonstrated that one of the one, of the highest class when essential Viking warriors that was in every textbook, it's the example of a male Viking warrior, was biologically female. These types of questions, new arenas for analysis are emerging almost every year. The identity formation, I think, is one of the questions I would really like to look into.

Then there's summer all the show, the little thing is worried if you go. I spent one summer looking for a second Viking site in Newfoundland, and I'm based out of America, So that is one of students questions. Oh, is there more Viking stuff to be found and more of America? And I think that there is. It's amazing how much our understanding of the Viking world has moved on as these studies emerge. And so that makes it even more interesting to think about where it might go. It's a really exciting field that is, as you say, changing all of the time.

And I wonder where we'll be in 10 years' time with our understanding of the Viking world. It's really, really exciting. Yes, I hope I'm still around to take part in that new discovery. Absolutely, I hope so too. Well, thank you so much for spending some time with us talking about the Viking world. David, it's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you. Thank you, Matt. It's been a pleasure. David's new book, The Age of Wolf and Wind, Voyages Through the Viking World, is out now if you'd like to expand your horizons, just as the Viking chased theirs.

There's new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and tell all of the your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find the show. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.