Gone Medieval - Viking Sagas

Episode Date: September 20, 2022

Few people in European history have had as many stories told about them as the Vikings. We know about them from novels, films, TV series and games. But telling stories about the Vikings is nothing new. In fact the richest stories come from the Middle Ages in the form of sagas that were mainly written down in Iceland.As part of her special month of episodes exploring the Vikings on Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman meets Medievalist Dr. Eleanor Barraclough to explore the sagas and sort out the facts from the fiction about the Vikings.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited by Thomas Ntinas 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.You've been listening to a History Hit podcast. Please take a couple of minutes to fill out this survey with your feedback, we'd really appreciate it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. A few people in European history have had us many stories told about the massive Vikings. We see them on screen, on film, TV and in games. But telling stories about the Viking Age is nothing recent. In fact, the richest storytelling comes from the Middle Ages in the form of the sagas, which were mainly written down on Iceland. and those sagas sit somewhere between fact and fictions,

but they have become one of our key sources to learn about the Viking Age, and not least the people who lived through it. Now, in today's episode, we're going to be digging a little bit deeper into those saga sources and find out what they can really tell us about the Vikings. So we're made to do that today, I am delighted to have medievalist Dr. Eleanor Baraklov, who is the author of the book Beyond the Northlands, Viking Voyages and the Old North Sagas. So welcome to Gone Medieval, Helena. Thank you. It's so nice to chat. This is going to be fun.

Let's talk sagas. Yes. Let's talk a little bit about those sagas and some of those stories. And I absolutely loved reading your book because you talk very much about, especially the travel aspect of it, which is a huge part. I mean, so many of the sagas focus on that, don't they? Well, that's it. And I suppose it's partly because if we think of the Viking Age and the Viking world, so much of that is about travel and expand. whether that's for trading or raiding, those sort of traditional Viking-y stereotypes, but also for, yes,

exploring and settling and going on pilgrimage and crusades and all sorts of things. All those sorts of events are what end up in the sagas. And of course, as you said, in your introduction, because it's Iceland that's predominantly responsible for these sagas being transmitted down the centuries and then written down. Of course, the Icelanders themselves are very much part of that Norse diaspora, that movement out from the Scandinavian homelands. Yeah, and I guess so many of these stories are also for the people who are left behind. People are sort of sitting at home and hearing about the adventures.

And I suppose also to encourage people and to sort of understand what's happening out there and bringing that information back home, I suppose, as well. Yeah, I like to think of them as the equivalent of, I don't know, sitting down and watching a good film, or now it would be sort of a Netflix miniseries or something. I mean, the sagas survived because they're written down in manuscripts in sort of 13th century Iceland, but of course they have these longer oral traditions, these stories that were told down the generations and changes they were told. But that often took place around the winter fires. I mean, particularly that part of the world, there's plenty of winter and there's plenty of darkness,

and there's lots of time where you are just going to be sitting around. And so you're not necessarily going to want more stories about other people who were just sitting around. You're going to want stories about people who are going off and having adventures. Or of course, there's plenty of stories where they don't necessarily travel, but they're part of this kind of Icelandic, epic, family tradition that can span whole generations. Yeah. And can you say a little bit more? I suppose a lot of our listeners will be quite familiar with these sagas that we're talking

about. But for those who maybe are not, could you say a little bit more about? them and, you know, who actually wrote them down? What are they really? Well, this is what's so interesting. I mean, for me, one of the easiest ways of thinking about what sagas are, because of course, we do use the word today. It was, oh, my journey to work, oh, it was such a saga or Twilight saga or, like, Forsyte Saga is this idea of this big extended narrative, basically. And I suppose when you put it like big extended narrative, that's not actually too far off the mark. But saga comes from the Old Norse.

word say to say, to tell. And as I said, it's very much there we have to look for what the sagas are and where they started, because they are the stories that are told predominantly, or at least the sagas that we know most about and that are most famous, they're told about the first generations of settlers to Iceland. So we're talking late 9th century up to, say, maybe the 11th century. And if people do know sagas, they probably know sagas like Nyael saga, the saga of this peace-loving, beardless lawyer and his rather battle-hungry friend, Gunaar, and all the scrapes and killings that happen.

I think the body count for Nielsaga is like 100 or something by the end. And then there's... It's impressive, isn't it? It really is. And then, you know, we were talking about travel, and there's the Vinland sagas, the saga of Eric the Red, and the saga of the Greenlanders. Both of them are about, well, all sorts of things, the settlement in Greenland,

but then also around 1,000 AD, the explorations and sort of tentative steps onto the edge of the North American continent by Norse explorers from Iceland and Greenland. So there's a lot going on in terms of the sagas that we might think of as history, in the sense that as far as we know, there are plenty of. of characters in these stories who were historical, or we think might have been historical. But of course, because these sagas are told down the generations, they change as they're being told.

And someone's idea of history, if you're living in Iceland, in kind of the Viking Age and in the Middle Ages, isn't necessarily the same as our sense of history today. So that's why also in the sagas, we're going to meet dragons and trolls and monsters and all sorts of strange. creatures and zombies and hauntings. And so it's not history as we know it. It's not fiction as we know it. It's on that hazy borderline between the two. And I mean, what we've been talking mostly there

are sagas that we would call sagas of Icelanders, Icelanding Asur as they call them. But there are other sorts of sagas as well. And those aren't quite as well known today. But there are other there's chivalric sagas, which are basically romance sagas based on sort of Arthurian legends and so on. And then there are for Naldo Surgur, which are sort of ancient sagas of olden days, of olden times. And those can be even we're wider and more divorced from sort of what we might think of as historical reality. And the popularity of these sagas at the time that they were being told, at the time they were being written down, and is sort of much more expansive than our understanding of them today and the sense of what we might have come across

if we're interested in history and storytelling and the Viking Age and medieval Iceland. That's such a good explanation of it. And I think that also explains a bit why it's quite difficult to use them and why it's sort of difficult to try and untangle all of this from what's real history. And so you gave some examples there, things that are very much based on real events and real things like the Vineland Sargis. We know we have this evidence that people ran about the same time.

We've got radio carbon dates telling us that people came across to North America in exactly the same sort of times that the sagas tell us. But does that make them real or not? That's part of the problem, isn't it, with using them as sources of information? It really is. And I think in a way it's, I don't know, kind of cop-out would be to say it's more useful or more straightforward to use them as a source for how people in a different time and a different place thought about the world, imagined the world, you know, made sense of the world around them,

because that then encompasses those different layers of meaning. But of course, we do want to know, was that true? Did that happen? Did that character exist? Did she actually end up in that place? And for me, if you're happy to sort of sit with the uncertainty and the fact that it's never going to be a perfect, picture that emerges. I find that so interesting. So yeah, you mentioned the Vinland sagas. And of course, the sagas, the storytelling versions of these explorations to the edge

of North America around the year 1000 AD, they existed before any archaeological evidence was found. And in fact, it was partly the sagas that directed those first archaeologists, Helgeny and Anna to the site. But then if we kind of go... from that far west, all the way east into Sweden. One of my favourite examples of this is a saga that we have from 13th, 14th century Iceland, called the saga of Ingvar the Far Traveller. And it's a crazy saga. You know, it's full of dragons and monsters and demons and all sorts of creatures with beaks,

but man bodies that lob apples. It's mad, isn't it? You know, it's... It really is. And in the saga, they're going down the waterways. You can't remember which river it is, but they're heading down through this sort of like semi-real geography down their sort of Russian, Ukrainian, as they are now, waterways. You read the saga, it is kind of like at the fantastical end of saga narratives. But then, of course, in Sweden, there's what, 20 or so runestones.

Some of them are just little stubby fragments that commemorate people who, according to the runestones, went east with Ingvar, died out. in the east with Ingvar. And the more you put them, these threads together, you can see, okay, there is a connection between these tangible archaeological records and these crazy saga stories, you know, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds miles away, you know, somewhere between Sweden and Iceland.

Somehow, through the centuries, this story has made its way up there. But by the time it gets there, it's barking mad, you know? So, I don't know. From an archaeological point of view, do you find this saga's frustrating in that? Or is it quite fun to have a different sort of evidence to use? Yeah, it is quite frustrating in a way because, of course, sometimes you can confirm exactly things like you're saying now with these runstones.

You can confirm those things. And we see that in sometimes slightly subtle ways. Even things like now with new DNA evidence for families, you know, we've got all these evidence for families traveling together, brothers traveling together from ancient DNA. And that's what we see in the stories. well. And so we hear about these brothers travelling. So you get that confirmation, which is sometimes quite reassuring. And you can go, yes, okay, I think my evidence says this, and here's a source

to suggest it. The problem is when people then try to do it the other way and they go, ah, okay, so for example, if you look about the Great Army, which we've got lots of sources for, and we've got some good historical sources for it as well. But then you get the sort of Ragnarothbrook saga, for example, which obviously has a lot of elements that are really clearly not factual. But you're trying to tie them two together and people sort of go, yeah, but it says in the saga. And you sort of have to say, yeah, but the evidence doesn't say that. It doesn't, we don't. So it gets difficult when you get into that sort of situation.

Yeah, you have to be the party pooper who's telling everyone, well, it's not quite, yeah. It's hard as it. Of course, because the saga versions, I mean, you'll often see, yeah, something like the Great Army, isn't it, where people will say, oh, well, of course, they'll give a narrative. and that's totally cool because not everything can and should be footnoted, but you'll find that they're conflating the narratives, you know, these wild saga narratives with the archaeological evidence and other textual sources, until you can't really tell what's what in this soup, isn't it? And that's when it becomes problematic.

Yeah. Yeah. And also, I mean, I don't know if it's something you've used very much because it's sort of a very different beast as it were, but there's another type of saga called the contemporary sagas, the Samtidim Sogir. And they're set in 13th century Iceland, of course, when there's this big civil war going on between the leading families. And they're written by a prominent member of one of these families.

And they read almost more like war reports, if that's not too strange a word. Do you know what I mean? It's like they don't have the monsters and the demons and everything. And they are something where without those, we really wouldn't have. have very much of any other type of evidence to know what was going on. But of course, maybe they're not so popular because they don't have all the weird, fantastical stuff in them so much. Yeah, exactly. They're less engaging. They're less sort of stories and dramas and Netflix series, aren't they? So that's probably part of the problem. But so I wanted to ask you a little

bit more about some of these other things, because what does, I think, what I do find really helpful and interesting in the series is when they tell us about things, we can't really quite get to, from other sources, so from the archaeology, for example. And one of the things I really like when you wrote about in your book was, so you go geographically, you talk about lots of different parts of the world in it, and one of them is looking at the homeland, so going to the north, so go, you know, what are they saying about Scandinavia, about those places that a lot of them came from?

And, of course, we do have a lot of stories that talk about the kings and the rulers and all of this. But you also bring in things that they talk about people who we might not hear about so often, And one of those is the Sami, so the indigenous people of Scandinavia. So can you say a little bit about what sort of things that they tell us about the Sami? Yeah, so this is really interesting because I think, again, yeah, if we look on sort of the material level, we do see, as you know far better than me, I'm sure, evidence of cross-cultural encounters and cross-cultural, you know, Norse people marrying Sami people. and when everyone goes out to Iceland, the first settlers,

at least some of these first settlers are descended, we're at least told in other textual sources from Sama. So it's not that we only know about these links because of the sagas, but often these links get forgotten. It's very much, you know, that stereotype of the blonde, blue-eyed Aryan Viking, basically. And of course, that's not what's going on, even in the Scandinavian homelands themselves. What's interesting is in the sagas that when the Sami feature,

they do have stereotypes that make them sort of outsiders inside the North World, as it were. So they're particularly known for their magical skills and their abilities to shape shift and tell the future, all that sort of stuff. What's interesting, of course, is that those stereotypes still exist to some extent. I have friends who are partly Sami. They said, well, you know, I did know that. I am Sami after all. Yes, the continuous in contemporary society. That's it, isn't it?

And of course, you think part of it, there's this really interesting account of when it's called the History of Norway, historian Norregiae, where they talk about Norse traders going and staying with Saomi, who they're trading with. And there's basically a no idea of shamanistic ritual

where they're trying to summon someone back from the dead and everything. So you do wonder whether maybe some of these stereotypes that the Norse are picking up on and are sort of turning into stories in their sagas come partly from witnessing those sorts of rather, from their point of view, exotic cultural traditions. So again, it's that mixture of facts and fiction. But in the sagas, there are some really interesting Sami characters. There's one called Snaifri, her name means basically Snow Beautiful. And she marries a Norwegian king. But even in the story,

when they're describing how they meet and he falls in love with her. It's very much that sense that there is magic at work here and they have some children and then she dies. But again, there's magic at work in that she stays in suspended animation, basically a sleeping death like Snow White for a number of years. And the king just sits by her and the kingdom is abandoned

and everything's going to rack and ruin. And then finally the saga tells us that when she's moved, all these creatures, these bugs, and things start pouring out of the bedding and everything turns black and she starts to decompose. But the spell is then broken and the kingdom is then restored. So it's this fairy tale reality or unreality, really, on the one hand, that we see in the saga. But then on the other hand, we do have evidence, as I say, of these particularly high status marriages, like intercultural marriages. So again, the sagas do something that we can't always quite get a handle on. And then there are other sagas where the Norse heroes go even further into the north

and meet people or creatures or beings. We're not quite sure always if they're meant to be Sami or their trolls or their giants. And so there's this sense of that that border between, human and non-human starting to bleed a little bit. It's a, I don't know, because sometimes you think, well, this isn't always a very flattering portrayal. It's not necessarily a nice portrayal. But on the other hand, like I say,

they're not othered in the same way that some other cultural groups are. It's very much this sense of coexistence in a way and mutual help. I don't know if that's your opinion of it. Yeah. I think that does make a lot of sense. Because one of the things that strikes me about the Viking age in general and the Vikings is actually all these places they go to. We read so much and you both have written books about this and how far they actually go.

And on those journeys, they interact with so many people. And sometimes that's in a very negative way. So they'll go and they'll attack and they'll kill and they'll murder and they're pillage. But actually an awful lot of the time, they don't do that. They interact with them and they settle or they trade or whatever. So they do coexist with so many different people. and they come across so many different languages, so many different religions. And I think in a way, looking at the Sami especially, because this is the homeless.

The Sami people live sort of in the north, really, of Norway and Sweden and then across sort of Finland, which isn't really quite so much in their sort of Viking sphere in the same way. But these are people, have very constant presence there. And so you have to find a way of coexist quite peacefully. And they clearly do. It is a good relationship. So to me, it sort of represents that. way of coexisting and maybe we sort of almost should take that a bit of a model for what they then

do when they go to the east or to other parts of the world really. That's it, isn't it, I don't want to overstate it, but there's a sort of pragmatism, not always, but often that comes up in how they, or at least there's certainly a lot of violence, as you say, but when we think about the Vikings, we think of the violence over the pragmatism and we have to sort of be able to hold those two ideas together, even if that's sometimes quite hard. And, yeah, and again, you can see that in the sagas. Now, of course, we just have to keep reminding ourselves that the sagas are written down in the forms that we have them in the centuries after the events they describe, when they're talking about what we think of as the historical events of the Viking Age.

But, I mean, one of my favourites is Ailes saga, you know, the saga of Ailes, Gatler-Grimson, who's this brilliant poet and complete violent Laos, you know, and loving family man. You know, he's a very complex character. But a lot of his saga is, well, actually a lot of the opening of the saga in the generation before him is actually about Norse-Sa-mi interactions in the Far North, good and bad, you know, and that sense that if you're a rich trader who has links to the riches of the Far North, and in a way you're a danger to the Norwegian king because you have an alternative source of power and wealth and allies.

But then, later on in the saga, there's a lot of it that's set in the British Isles. And again, it's very fantastical, isn't it? I mean, it's as Ailes ends up having a feud with King Eric Bloodaxe of York and his wife Gunnhilde, who's clearly sort of a witch and at one point transforms herself, I think, into a bird, stop him composing the poetry that's going to save him the next day. You know, so it's all very dramatic, you know.

But still, it's really interesting, isn't it? Because we are dealing with historical characters and historical events. And yet the saga's sort of layer on top of that, this glitz of narrative and characterisation and drama. And again, we... just keep coming back to us and it's like you're not quite sure what to do with it, but that makes it quite interesting, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess it reminds us quite a lot about the humanity of it as well,

which I think sometimes in archaeology, especially we can get a bit too much into the facts and the sort of, you know, this is the artefact, these are the objects, these are the buildings we've got, but it just reminds you that these are people, they're real lives, they're people with emotions and, you know, some very good and some very bad. Yes. So it just adds that layer of humanity, which, I think we can miss otherwise, I suppose. I totally agree.

And I think in the sagas, what's interesting is how many strong female characters there are in particular. In a time where often the females are very much sidelined in the historical sources and the material sources. But, you know, when you're thinking about the great psychologically complex dramas of the sagas, there's almost always a woman at the heart of them somewhere. I mean, the most famous is Lackstiler saga, the people of the saga of the saga of the people of Laksidal or Salmon Valley. And at the heart of that is Guthrin, who's this amazing character. And I mean, literary character.

When you get a character as sort of complex as her, you have to wonder how much history there really is underlying it anymore. But just as a piece of literature, as a psychological study of her, as she goes through these four husbands and one lover, and it's very dark, there's a love triangle, there's a lot of murder, there's a lot of feuding and vengeance killing. but you really get a sense of the sort of humanity that might not be the humanity of necessarily, in this case, a real human who once lived that life, but the sort of humanity that you get from literature,

that sense of emotions lived and lives that you can connect with. Absolutely. No, I think that's such a really, really brilliant and very important point, actually. Airplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own. We uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects. We manage to put two men on the moon before we put wheels on suitcases. Unpack invention myths.

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to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. Okay, so I do have to just ask you to go a little bit back to the West again, actually. So you've mentioned previously Greenland Sargars and Vineland Supplements and all of that. And of course, one of the stories, now that you've also got us onto the topic of women and strong women, has got to do with one particular woman who travels west, and that's Fradis. And we also have some interaction there with a native population, which is slightly different from what we talked about with Asami. Would you mind going through that story for our listeners, please?

Oh, yeah. The two Vinland sagas, the saga of the Greenlanders and the saga of Eric the Red, they have some really cool women at the heart. In fact, the saga of Eric the Red hardly has Eric the Red at all. People say it should be called the saga of Guthryder, who is another character, and she travels, as does Freidus, to the edge of North America.

And according to the sagas, she actually gives birth out there. So she's the first sort of quasi-European to do so. she tends to be the character that people focus on, but I'm really glad you brought Freides up because I think she's very interesting, complex character and gives us a sense of why we both have to be careful with the sagas, but also really shouldn't ignore them. So Freidus is the, well, at least according to the saga,

the daughter of Eric the Red. Eric the Red is the person who first, I say discovers, you know, but from a Norse point if he discovers Greenland, He's outlawed there for killings. He's not a very nice person for three years. He goes back to Iceland, picks up his family and friends, sets off for Greenland. They settle there. And that's around the year 985. And then the explorations to Vinland, the edge of the North American continent, we're talking sort of around the year 1,000. And those are the ones that Fradis is involved in. So she's the half-sister of Leif the Lucky, another one of Eric's children. So we, we're

We've got lots of characters around her who we may well know just because sort of in our culture they're the big names. But Fredis is really interesting, partly because in one of the sagas, she is a goodie and in the other saga she is a very murderous baddie. And what's interesting is these two sagas, it's really important to say this, they don't seem to be directly connected to each other as texts. So the suggestion is, at least at the moment, that these These two sagas come from the same pool of oral traditions and storytelling, but they've made their way into a kind of manuscript, textual form, separately. And so the fact that you have the same characters turning up in both of them is very

interesting to start with. But then with Freidus, the fact that you have two very diverging characterizations is, I think, even more interesting. So you mentioned the Screiling, or the Screilingard. and they are, that's the Norse sort of catch-all term for the indigenous inhabitants of that part of the North American continent and indeed Greenland. So we're talking sort of Inuit in Greenland and then the various tribes of lower part of eastern seaboard of Canada and what is now North America. And in the sagas, they start off that, you know, they meet these, I'm going to say, indigenous peoples, these natives, because Skalinga is not a positive term. It means

scrawny ones or puny ones. And it starts okay and they're doing trading and all the rest of it and then everything gets violent and then there's killings and murder. And there's, in one of these sagas, there's the point where Fredis and the people that she's with, the Norse people, they are basically fallen foul of or possibly done foul things too and probably both, the natives and they're trying to escape. And she's very heavily pregnant. And everyone else runs off and leaves her. And at that point, and it's a really strange bit, and no one really knows what's going on, she picks up a sword of one of the fallen Norse people.

And she bears her breasts and she slaps the sword against them. And the natives are so frightened that they run off. But why they're running off? It's just one of them. Very bizarre. It's completely bizarre. It's complete. And I always wonder, it's like, okay, at the time did people go, oh, yeah, the old bare-breasted pregnant woman's.

sword-slapping thing that is very terrifying or would they have been like hmm don't know what's going on there but what's interesting is then yeah so in this saga she's pretty good in the other saga she's horrible and she goes out with her husband and they're on a ship but she goes out and with another ship that's owned by two brothers and when they get out to vinland she wants what they have She doesn't like the setup. She falls out with them. And she then incites her husband and the other people on her ship to kill the people on the other ship. And there are, I think, five women on the other ship and no one will kill them.

And so this is a very chilling bit where Fredis just says, hand me an axe or put an axe in my hand. And she kills these women herself. And then she swears everyone to secrecy. And they go back to Greenland. And of course, the saga then says, well, when they got back, to Greenland, this all came out. And it's really strange, isn't it? Because it's, you know, we know so many of the things in these sagas do have some basis in some sort of historical reality as we would think of it. And yet there's a character like Fredis, who's become so monstrous and yet so

brave. I don't know. What would you put your money on? What do you think is going on there? It's really funny. I mean, it's a bit like there is. just this historical character that people, so maybe this was somebody who did, she was a real person originally, but actually nobody really quite knew what happened. And so people are making these, almost like Shakespeare, taking other historical characters and making a new play about and making a new story. And then you write a new piece of historical fiction about something which is sort of real, but you have to create your own spin on it because you want your sort of story to be popular. I sort of feel like maybe that's what it is, that there is something at the

core of it, but there's different versions of that story, which is, I guess, you know, brings us right back to where we were earlier talking about how it's problematic to then use them, because what is it that is real, is anything real? I think that to me is sort of probably where it is. We're getting into deep existential angst mode, that is anything. Yeah, that's quite quickly. But one thing I think is really interesting, especially talking about these women, and there's been, of course, a lot of debate recently about women in the Viking Age, which isn't really the topic of what we're going to be talking about today at all. That's a lot of a whole different kettle of fish. But I think one thing that you mentioned quite a lot now is that

a lot of these women are travelling and they're part of it. They're going to Iceland. They're going to Greenland. You know, whatever they did, if they were good or bad, we didn't know that. But they were there and they were moving about. And that's one of those places where I find that this really backs up now. There's data we get from archaeology and especially from bio-archologies. We're seeing with things like isotope analysis that women weren't just staying at home in Scandinavia, which is kind of what we used to think at a world back. But they are going out and about. And then you have all these characters doing that in the sagas as well. And that, to me, is one of those places where these saga sources and the archaeology are working really nicely together, I think.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think what is it in the Lansomeda, the site, you know, the Vinland site that they found in Newfoundland. There are, what is it, part of a spindle? There's other sort of, there's spindle world, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So things that would be associated with a female presence, you know, not definitely, but very, very, likely, and exactly as you say, then you look at the sagas. There's lots of women there and you think, well, of course, why not? And certainly with settlement, if there are no women there,

you're not going to survive very long as a new settlement, are you? You're really just going to have that one generation and that's it. If you want to move on. No, absolutely. And I think that it's really nice. And so to me, that's one of the key parts, really. It's just sort of taking them and sort of stripping off some of that, the fun bits, but actually looking at what are the essentials and how can we compare that. So that's absolutely one of the things I think. Definitely. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, I think that's really nice. I've really enjoyed talking to you about this, exactly what these are, because that's the thing it always comes back to. What are these sagas? How much can we use

them? I think we can never quite get the answer to that. But I wanted to ask you sort of as a final question. I mean, what to you do you think is the thing that these sagas can really tell us about the Vikings and the Viking Age? What's the most valuable part of the sagas to you? So many answers to that. So many things. But I think for me, it's the importance of storytelling to not just humanity, but that sense of who we are as humans and who we are when we look at the past and our presence in relation to that past.

Because that's partly what we're doing here, you know, but that's also, of course, what they were doing when they were telling the saga stories and then when they were writing them down. and they were writing them down in this very sort of turbulent civil war era where they're really having to think, well, who are we? And what's our place in the world? And I think that so often that's what history comes back to. It's that idea of, you know, looking in a glass darkly

and basically you're seeing yourself reflected back as well as whatever's through the glass. But how important storytelling and those ambiguities of storytelling. So, you know, that because when we think about the world, when we think about ourselves, our place within it, there are so many layers. And that sense of what those layers are, it's not all fact-based sort of history and, you know, those intricacies of details.

It is about imagination. It is about how we think of ourselves, how we think of the people around us, how we think of where we came from and where we're going. And, you know, those narratives are so important to, yeah, our sense of who we are as humans. And they're incredibly important to understanding where we're going. But we need to then know where we came from.

And I think that's what the sagas really tell us, you know, essentially this tiny little medieval culture out on a rocky volcanic island, out in the middle of the North Atlantic. What did they make of their place in the world and their present and their past? and that's as important for us as it was for them. That's an excellent answer. Thank you. And I think we're going to leave it there. I would highly recommend our listeners, have a look at Elena's book.

It's called Beyond the Northlands, Viking Voyages and the Old North Sagas. And Eleanor does really well in going through all of this, how those sources, how those sagas actually link in with the evidence and, you know, how we can tie it and peg it to the real world and the evidence there. and so many more characters. I have a whole list of characters I was thinking we might talk about, but there's not time. We'll be here all day if we did that. But Eleanor Berthel, thank you so much for joining me and sharing all your knowledge today.

Thank you so much. It's been a complete pleasure. Thank you. So this has been an episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Thank you all so much for listening. And don't forget before you go that if you want more news in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in the episode.

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