Gone Medieval - Viking Sex

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

In this episode of Gone Medieval, presenter Dr. Cat Jarman swaps seats and becomes the guest of Dr. Kate Lister’s brilliant podcast from History Hit, Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. In it, she delves into the topics that they didn’t teach you about in history lessons at school.Today Cat answers everything Kate always wanted to know about sex and relationships in the Viking age - and it’s quite an eye-opener!*WARNING! There is adult language and discussions of sexual assault in this episode.*The Senior Producers were Charlotte Long and Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Sophie Long with Rob Weinberg. For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays 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. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. My name is Dr. Kat Jarman. And today's content is going to be a little bit different because in this episode, I'm the guest of one of History Hit's latest brilliant podcast called Patrix the Sheets, where historian Dr. Kate Lister delves into the topics. I'm almost certain they didn't teach you about in history lessons at school, the history of sex, scandal and society.

Kate's podcast is filled with fantastic stories from all periods of history, and this week, she wanted to know about Vikings and sex. So in this crossover episode between gone medieval and betwixt the sheets, I talk to Kate about what I know about sex and relationships in the Viking age. Now, as you can probably imagine, this episode will contain some themes of an adult nature. I'm ridiculously excited to speak to you today. Cat Jarman, hello. Hello, Kay. Great to be here.

I'm so thrilled that you are here because I have a bizarre fascination with Vikings that strays eerily into sexual fantasy lands. And I was really freaked out by that for a long time until I discovered that is actually quite a common fantasy to the point where there is an entire subgenre of Viking erotica. Absolutely. And I just found out the other thing.

the day that the book that I wrote, which is a very sort of archaeological book, has just inspired a whole Milton series. No! Yes. I mean, that's just the epitome of success, surely. So I'm quite pleased. I'm quite proud of that, really. That's a complete unintended impact that you can announce to the Research Excellence

Framework. What is it that they've taken away from your book, that they've read and gone, oh, yeah, that's done something for me. So I haven't actually read it yet, so I only to find out, I think, because I focus on the Eastern Vikings, so there's sort of contact with the Silk Road. So it's clearly some exciting adventures of Vikings going to Eastern territories

and doing all sorts of exciting things, but I can't wait to read it. I mean, if there's one thing I like from my historical erotica, it's for it to be grounded in fact and sensible research. I mean, you know, there are limits to your imagination. I want it to be accurate. Yes, absolutely. And there's definitely, when you get to the Vikings,

there's definitely a bit of both there. Some of it is very modern fantasies, and you're right, is an absolutely very normal thing. but some of it is based in the historical material. It's weird the viking, because as well as being sort of fascinated with them culturally and in other Mills and Boonsie ways, I have actually written about the Vikings before

in a proper academic book, reviewed by proper academic people. And it wasn't actually the Vikings as in the historical Vikings. It was about the myth of the Vikings today and about why it's so appealing. And so when you said there that it's kind of a lot of myth and a little bit of fact that we know, I find that so fascinating because an awful lot that we think we know about the Vikings is nonsense. Yeah, absolutely. And that makes it quite hard to be an academic specialising. I bet it does.

And you hate being the person who's always bursting people's bubbles. You go to parties and they go, oh, is it true? Is it true? And you go, no, no, no, no. There's such a mythologised group of people. What is it about them? Do you think that attracts that? Well, it's funny. It's a difficult one to answer because it's actually been going for a long time. time, it's not a recent phenomenon. It goes back a really long time. I think you can go as far back as the middle ages, you know, literally just a few hundred years later. And you get these stories and narratives of the Vikings and what they did and what impact they had on the different other societies. So it kind of starts way back in the middle ages. And then you get these sort of

national romantic periods in 17, 18, 19th centuries that are very much about nation building. And so in Scandinavia, you have this sort of glorious Viking past that this is where our countries were created. And then if you go to England, they have kind of the opposites. So you have heroes like Alfred the Great, it beats the Vikings. And a lot of this is very physical. You've got these fears, very strong, very virile men who go and maraud and do their things. Yeah.

That just ties. If you look at those earliest paintings of the Vikings, they're always big and huge and actually quite sexy and quite heroic. So I think it goes back along where it starts there and then we sort of take it and run with it, I suppose. I mean, they are generally depicted as male. They tend to be depicted as, it's a very strong masculine myth that we've got about them. They do tend to be depicted as the great big hulking warriors, don't they, intent on invading. Very little attention is actually paid on just the day-to-day life of the Vikings, in the public imagination at least.

There's all the archaeologists running around going, actually, no, no, no, no, they were actually quite, no, no, no, they didn't always do that. And the public's just like, shut up, no, we want more raiding, that's what we want. Yeah, I think that's sort of part of it. People actually want this and it's a bit of an escapism. And because this, I mean, if you look at topics in films and all the violence and warfare and all of that, it's obviously a very common theme in entertainment. So to have that grounded in some history and in reality, people really like that. And so have those themes, but grounding them in something real.

And it almost seems a bit more okay to be okay with sort of raping and pillaging if it happened a thousand years ago, which a bit of a disturbing. but yeah. It's weird, isn't it? That's exactly what my chapter in the book was about, was about that raping and pillaging myth, where it came from, what function does that serve? And how has it somehow got an air of almost knockabout fun with it? Because I remember when the TV show Vikings first came out, the one with the History Channel. And one thing that really fascinating me about it was, how are they going to tackle this particular trope of the Vikings? Because they can't ignore it, but the bottom line is, we've got absolutely no idea what levels of historical sexual violence were.

We've got no... But what was fascinating for me was to see fans online saying there wasn't enough. There wasn't enough rape in it. They needed more. It's like they were accusing them like being woke Vikings. Yeah, exactly. We want more. And I was like, that's really weird.

What does that say about us as a culture that we demand this from this historical path? Yeah, exactly. And the fact that we have these ideas. So we all know, and as I know it sort of equates here, what a Viking is like and what a Viking does. We have this clear, and I think probably more than any other historical period, we have these really clear ideas in our heads of what the Vikings were and what they did. But if you actually untangle that, and especially as an academic,

which is why I'm not always that popular when I have those conversations in the path, because I have to go, sorry, you know, where they're coming from. But it is such an interesting topic. That's why you're not being asked to write any Mills and Boone's erotica, because it would be very much focused on like local Icelandic economy. economy and trading routes. Well, you say that, but I have actually got some really good and juicy things to tell you about today.

Oh, see, that's what I wanted to get to. Yeah, don't worry. I'm not all dry factual. I've got some little good nuggets here. Oh, that's brilliant. So let's think about Viking sex and sexuality. So tell me about what actual proof, truth do we have about Viking sexuality. Is there anything that we can say with any certainty, other than that they were clearly having sex?

Obviously, they were, yes, because we are here and we're descendants. So we must, you know, have had people in the past. But this is one of the problems. And this is why it gets really tricky, because we don't have really the written sources that come from the Vikings themselves. And I should just sort of clarify when I talk about the Vikings, the term is obviously a controversial.

And this is what we usually refer to as the Vikings, so the people in Scandinavia or in any sort of Viking diaspora, Scandinavian diaspora, from about late 8th to 11th century. I mean, it's a huge span of time and a lot of people, isn't it, to be trying to like, So these people definitely liked this. Exactly, and that's one big problem. Lots of different places.

And we go from paganism to Christianity, which has got a big impact. Yeah, a huge shift. So we don't really have those written sources. They did have a writing system or runes, but we don't really have any big stories. So what is written about them is either from the enemies, so it's from the chroniclers in England, for example,

who might sort of go with the whole raping and pillaging bit to show what awful people they were. But then we have the sagas and the Icelandic saga, which is a hugely important source, and that's actually where we're getting the information. But we need to remember that those sagas are written down in the 13th century or aroundabouts at that time in Iceland, usually by men or mainly by one man, particularly,

and after the conversion to Christianity. So especially with sex and relationships and marriages and things, so there's quite a few things going on there. And they're basically historical fiction as well. Okay. So that's slightly problematic. So we don't have their voices, we don't have their sort of perspectives on them in the same way,

but that's not to say that there isn't an awful lot we can say about Viking Age society because those sagas are set in the Viking Age, so they are trying to tell stories about the Vikings, and that's really helpful. And that's sort of as close as we can get with sort of literature evidence that's left to us. And for anyone listening that's not quite sure what the sagas are, they're kind of like the Viking creation stories, aren't they? They're kind of like the Viking myths, basically.

Yeah, so some of them go into the myths, So they talk about the mythology and religions. Others are, well, sort of fictionized stories sometimes about real people that we know that we can verify a real. And they are sort of family sagas. They are tales, especially about the settlement of Iceland. So some of them are just amazing stories. They're really entertaining.

They're really fun. But they can talk about real people, imagineer people. We don't really know with most of them, to be honest. But they tell us about what they do, how they live. So, yeah, they're really good sources about everyday life. And one of my favorite things about the Vikings is their names. They have the most increasingly.

incredible, amazing. Do you know how they got these names? Because there's someone hairy breeches, someone hairy trousers, and Harold Bluetooth before the phones. And how did they get these names? Either the boneless, that was another one. Yes, that's right. Or the deep-minded is one of my favour of my favorites as well. She's brilliant. She's clearly a clever one. No, these are, that seems to be quite common. You give people a nickname. They don't really have surnames as such in the same way, apart from you, somebody's son or daughter. But then you have these nicknames which relate to their character or something about them, which is hilarious. In the sagas as well, there's lots of euphemisms, there's lots of what's called

Kennings, which are kind of a word that you use instead of the real words of it, like rhyming slang or something like that. Yeah, so you've got some really fun things. Oh, I like that. I often wonder, did they have any kind of say in what their name was, or was it like a school nickname that you just kind of ended up with it and you just kind of like, fuck's sake, just stop it with the hairy trousers, I didn't want. Yes.

I imagine seeing as some of them are really not that positive. There's some that are not flattering. No, not at all. At all. No wonder they were so angry. So we've got the sagas and do they talk about sex at all? What do they talk about? Yeah, so they're quite interesting.

So they talk a lot about relationships and a lot about marriages and a lot about, you know, because these are people's lives they're talking about. So that goes on quite a lot. Most of them are quite tame and talk about it quite gently. So, you know, if they are talking about a couple having sex, then it's, very often with euphemisms and things. But they talk about the marriages and relationships, and it's quite clear, you know, a lot of the social norms.

A lot of them are not consistent with that Christian society in the 13th century. So they are clearly describing something a bit earlier, which is quite useful to us. The other thing I should mention also, in terms of literary sources, we also have some law codes that are not, again, contemporary. They are 13th century, some possibly a bit earlier. But clearly also some of them relate to pagan practices. And some of those talk about things like marriage.

as well. So you said there were some euphemisms there. I'm endlessly fascinated with euphemisms and slang. What would be a Viking euphemism for sex? So I mean there's one in particular which is through goes, it's clearly quite explicit talking about having sex and he says, do you want me to turn toward you? Turn to me. That's like, I said one of the particularly tame ones. So those are sort of, they're lying in bed and they're going, yeah, yeah, okay. If that's Viking foreplay, just saying, shall I turn to you, I feel quite let down, because I would consider that a minimum. Exactly. So most of the songs are quite tame. like that, but there is, especially one exception, which is quite a fun one.

And I think I'm just going to have to tell you some of these and talk about the sort of language in because it's really brilliant. Please do. So it's basically, it's telling a story about a quest, so two half-brothers or foster brothers who go on a bit of an adventure and they're having to sort of rescue their kingdom and actually also to avoid being executed by the king and all sorts of things. The things you have to do in life. Yeah.

And they go out. And at one point, they actually have to go and find a vultras egg inscribed with golden letters, as you do. Okay, as you do. Yeah, so as they go out, they do find out this information. And one of these, it's a young man called Boti. And find information, he has to go out on his own. And one night they go and stay with a farmer who has a very beautiful daughter. And Bosi, being young and excited, goes flirting with her all day and then decides to go and sneak into her bed at night.

Scaliwag. Yes, I know. He's a bit of a, you know. He never canned that one. But the daughter is very happy about this, actually. Fair play. And this starts talking. And she says, what have you come for?

And she says, he wasn't really that comfortable. But what? So she goes, well, what do you want to do in my bed? And he says, he wants to temper his warrior. Oh, my God. So she then goes on and, yeah, that's quite cute. I just imagine that a guy actually trying to say that in real life. Sorry, right, go on.

Okay, so I'm being seduced. He wants to temper his wife. Warrior, right. And he gets better. So she has what sort of warrior? And he says, he's still very young and he's never been steeled. But a warrior ought to be hardened early on in life. So this is the start of it. Oh, given that, it's quite smooth. Yeah. If not a bit creepy. No. And it gets sort of even more. So she sort of asks him, you know, how are you going to do this? How is this going to... Fair question. How is this going to happen? Look, Satem and I sort of ask, why is he carrying a monster like that? Hard as a tree. That was written by a man. I think it might have been but she says that she could soften his warrior in her dark hole. See that is, that's interesting

for many reasons but like in our erotica and pod it's like be hard hard hard hard hard hard hard hard hard hard hard hard and there she is kind of going oh it's very hard I'll soften it up a bit. Yeah exactly so you know maybe she realised this is the effect it's going to

have maybe and who knows but yeah so she used to have afterwards ask if it was a success if he was tempered successfully and he says yeah yeah brilliant And she goes great. But it's quite nice, actually, because this is casual sex. He just goes in and meets this woman he likes. She clearly enjoys it at well.

And it's all very playful. So in addition to the euphemisms, all of that, it's quite a positive one. It's quite a flirty bans, isn't it? It is. It probably is. The picture is a very positive one on the sides. But he does, so he gets the information you want as well. She's quite happy with all of this, so she tells him where to find the golden egg.

But he actually comes across another scenario, pretty much the same. His warrior was not tempered enough. No, well, he doesn't just have a warrior. He uses other terms as well. He finds another household that he has to stay with overnight. And there was a woman who served the guests, who he again floated with and again at night decided to go over and sneak into her bed as well.

This is a theme with both of you, I think. It is, isn't it? Yeah. Viking fuck boy, honestly. Exactly. So she says, again, what do you want? So clearly these women are a bit surprised. Yep. And she says, I'd like to water my colts at your wine spring.

Oh, now see that, I think that's got a bit more art to it. Yeah, I think so. Than I've got a warrior in my pants. It's a temper. So she goes on to say, it's quite graphic, actually. She says, what do you think you can manage this? And then he says, well, I'll lead him right to the edge, then push him in if there's no other way to make him drink. Yes, that's, I think that's, it's weird, but I think that's a bit more seductive.

Yeah. Than the first time around, he's improving. Yeah, I think so. He sort of worked on it, hasn't it? So he keeps on going, and this goes on for quite a bit, and she asks where he is, this colt. And she has to sort of stroke him gently because he's a bit scared. And yeah, they continue.

And in the end, she's sort of, well, the storyteller, at least, the person who wrote this says, he awarded his cult generously, completely immersing him. And afterwards, she sort of, again, she's very concerned this woman as well for whether he's happy. She says, are you sure you're not drowning the cult? Do you know what? I like a lot about that.

But you know what I particularly like about that, that like centuries before Cardi B came up with WAP, there we go. Well, exactly. Viking Wap right there. Exactly. So there's quite a lot of this going on afterwards as well, quite a banter around this particular theme. So this is a lot more explicit than normally, but it's also talking about this young man who's out on an adventure and he's out meeting women, the women are all quite happy. I think that that is quite an important thing that I noticed from that is that they are quite keen and an active. part in this. There's no kind of lying back and thinking of Scandinavia. They're quite into this.

Exactly. And I think I do wonder if this in the saga, in and all this, is that one of the things that people quite like now, because we like to have this idea of, I think, Viking women also being quite sort of sexually available and part of it all, which certainly if you look at how they're portrayed in, say, Vikings or something like that. That seems to be quite new, which does sort of at least suggest to me that, yeah, that says it's more about our own time that we kind of want this sort of sexual egalitarianism from the Vikings. Because if you go back and you look at something like the film, the Vikings, the women in that are not equal. They're very much not really into it. They're just kind of there. Yeah. Absolutely. So I think there's a lot to how

we focus on our own place as researchers when we talk about the past. But I would say one quite interesting thing is looking at divorce. So marriage and divorce and the laws and stories about divorce. So if we talk about women being active, so not necessarily sexually as such, but in those relationships. So everything we know about marriage and divorce, again, comes from the sagas and the law codes, but there's quite a lot and different sources seem to sort of confirm the same things. So we know that you could get divorced quite easily in the Viking Age. That's significant, I think, That says a lot about a culture. Yeah, absolutely.

So it's clear that there was such a thing as marriage, which usually you would be just one man and a woman. But it wasn't an internal death-do-you-part sort of thing. You could get divorced actually quite easily. And if you look through the reasons, there's quite a few of them. And some are really interesting. And when this is talked about in the saga, so when divorces are described, actually,

a hell of a lot of the time, it's a woman who initiates the divorce, not the man. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, which is actually super interesting, isn't it? Because it's not something that a man can just sort of throw away his wife. It's actually the other way around. And it could be things like violence can be one. So if your partner is violent towards you, that's good grounds for divorce.

Even things like poverty, if you can't actually, basically can't afford to be together anymore. That's a reason as well. I mean, but that's a really strong reason, I think. There's none of this in sickness and health and in rich and poor. No. Yeah, if it doesn't quite work out and you can't bring up your children and just try again. Fair enough. most interesting thing, I think, it's also more sort of incompatibility so that can be all sorts

of things. You know, actually they're just not happy together. But there's actually quite a few that also talk to about sexuality and about, especially about a woman not being sexually satisfied by her husband as a ground for divorce. You could get divorced because he couldn't get your rock's off. Basically, yes. So this is a really interesting one. And it comes a couple of places. There's one actual law that says there's a three-year period. So if your husband hadn't been able to have sex with you for three years through negligence, which is quite interesting.

Negligence. Basically that he's not been doing what he should be doing. Right. Okay. Then that's a good reason to be divorced. So that's from one of the slightly later law codes, but again, one we think relates to the Viking Age. But then there's a saga story that's really, really interesting because that is exactly the thing that happens in the saga. It's actually quite an unfortunate event because the man in question was actually, he had a spell cast on him by a...

Well, that is unfortunate. It is unfortunate. But so what happens was he was engaged in Iceland and had to go to Norway, where the Queen of Norway was basically, well, at least of the kingdom he led to see, really fancied him and made him essentially be her lover. And he was reasonably happy, but after a year, wanted to go home. Queen was not happy about this and said, okay, well, do you have another woman? that you're going back to and he's like, well, not really, lying about it a bit. And she said, okay, well, here's a bracelet, which you cast a spell on. So with this, you'll be able to satisfy other women, but not her.

Oh, that's some outside the box thinking there, though. That's quite a creative curse. It's nothing else. Yeah, I think so. There's a lot to unpack that. But anyway, so he goes back, gets married to this woman he fancied before, but he cannot satisfy her. he actually cannot satisfy her because apparently he becomes too large

and so she so they cannot have sex physically because he's just enormous because it's too big so she after a while gives up and she goes to her dad and says look I need a divorce and so dad says why so she explains and she says you know he's he's normal sort of before and after but grow or not show her basically so that's interesting but I mean There's also some research done into this recently that actually this sort of sexual virility and penis size was actually something that was quite important, just as long as it didn't go too far the other way. Well, do you know, that's quite interesting because I think that if guys got to choose their

own size, everyone would go like King Kong jumbo, wouldn't they? But the sort of the thing that they forget is it's not that great, you know? Well, exactly. Like when you've got like something like King Kong's finger honing in towards you, it's just It's a curse, it's a Viking curse. Well, precisely there, here we go. That's the proof of that. It's got to be appropriate, doesn't it, for the purpose?

Yeah, you've got to have the right equipment. Exactly. You've got to have the right equipment to tend your warrior. The right tool for the job, literally. Yeah. That's fascinating. And again, we see the women getting into there. Yeah, absolutely.

So I really love that fact that, you know, you could actually have all these sort of opinions and thoughts and feelings about your relationship. and then you could get married again if that didn't work out for whatever reason. And it goes beyond that sexual side. And actually what's quite interesting, even though the Viking Age was definitely a patriarchal society, you know, it wasn't a free-for-all for women. Men were very much in control.

But if you came into that marriage with some wealth, with some money, you would keep that afterwards as well. So generally speaking, you'd have financial economic independence afterwards. Wow. So you could divorce and not just be left with nothing. You could take what you had, which again would probably encourage those women, you know, if they weren't happy, they could leave. God.

So you get lots of them. And we also have to remember this is a period of huge mobility. So people are leaving the travelling, especially men will be off on raids. You don't know if they're going to come back. There's no text messages and emails to say, oh yeah, I'm back next week, you know. When my husband goes somewhere, he'll text me and I'll know he's home in 10 minutes. You could have your husband go off and you don't know if he's back for the next three years, if he's dead, if he's ever going to come back.

God, yeah. So I think you need to have a society where you have a mechanism for dealing with that because otherwise you'd have no more children if everyone was just waiting endlessly. No, yeah, that's quite right. And if everyone was just sort of sat there, just staring at the sea, just like, oh, is Eric going to come back this year? Exactly. And, you know, because obviously for the very practical purposes of being able to have children,

and in somewhere like Iceland, where you've got a new population, quite a young population, you need children. So you need those men to come back. Plus, you know, people love, people live. You know, it's not all about procreation. It's very much about relationships. Airplanes, space suits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit,

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Yeah, so we have a tiny bit of evidence for people coming from the rich islands and back to Scandinavia. Iceland is another big one where there's a lot of DNA that clearly comes from the sort of northern and Irish parts, sort of gaelic parts as well. And a lot of that's been assumed to be slaves being taken, which obviously is one big deal. But there's also relationships and there's also clearly interaction going on. We're not talking about that sort of pure, sort of pillaging or going back or just settling in little enclaves. The Vikings and Scandinavians integrate in these societies very, very quickly. So you do have that exchange of DNA from that. And you definitely have women coming back as well into Scandinavia.

So I think we need to just sort of rethink some of those assumptions. Yeah. And potentially having a better time as well. Absolutely. Is there any evidence for, this is tricky, but some same-sex attraction in any other sagas. Yeah. So there is quite a lot that people have researched and there sort of seems to be rules as well. Rules. Oh.

Yeah, well, there are some. So it's a little bit difficult to tell again what's genuinely Viking Age and what's later because that's where the sort of Christianity aspect comes in quite strongly in terms of rules and regulations. Yes, of course, thou shalt not. Yeah. So that becomes a bit tricky. But there's clearly a lot of same sex relations happening. There's not a lot written at all about women. So lesbian, that doesn't really come up at all.

but male gay sex, for example, does come up quite a lot. And there are some indications, some rules, saying that gay sex is sort of okay as long as you're the active part. You're the top. If you're the passive part, it's not okay. You get that across all kinds of cultures, don't you, where same-sex attraction has been fine.

It's this kind of like, it's fine as long as you are being the man. Yeah, exactly. So that seems to be okay and not so much frowned upon. But there's also some other loose. So there's one Norwegian law code that dates possibly to the 11th century. We don't really know, but again, seems likely to go to the Viking Age. And there's a special name for a man or a woman who shun marriage, basically, because of not wanting women or not wanting women or whichever.

So for a man, for example, the word is footh floggy, which means a man who flees the female sex wargy. Oh, I'd say that one again, footh floggy. Yeah. So Footh is also the Old Norse word for female sex orgy, which means. organs. No. Like, is that, I wonder if that's related to footh today. I've heard that that's quite a common word. Foof. I was thought that was very new. Right. So, um, foof, flogger, no, that can't be right. Floggy, so as in fleeing. And then for a woman who tried to avoid marriage would be

somebody who flees the male sex organ is a flan fluga. Fluger. Okay. I love it. I love that's very literal, isn't it? Exactly. So there are sort of all these terms in there. But if If you go to look at the mythology, so you look at the Norse gods. Were they a gay gods? Yeah, so there's quite a lot written about, especially Loki and even Odin. There's a lot of this cross-dressing. There's what sort of seems to be same-sex relationships and things like that. So there's a lot to unpick there, and that's actually quite a big...

I would imagine Odin would be a top. Quite possibly. Like a big bear god. Mm. The all-seeing, all-knowing. But yeah, but when we talk about the Norse gods and the mythology, there's actually quite a lot of interesting things. to do with sex and relationships because compared to the sagas I think in a way we

know quite a lot about their sexual relationships and they were quite carouscous and there was a lot of sleeping around with the gods sometimes that seems to be absolutely fine and accepted and other times they're being quite rude about it and quite understandably one of the ones who comes up quite a lot is Freya so Freya is the goddess of sex of love of war of gold basically all the all the good things in life She's the goddess of well place. Yeah, exactly. And she does sleep around quite a lot.

And it's sort of accepted really. I mean, she's very beautiful. All the goddesses are very beautiful. And this sort of seems to be what comes with the territory. But in one of the stories, she goes down to see the dwarves, who are these really brilliant craftsmen. So they make beautiful, you know, fantastic weapons and beautiful jewelry. And they have this necklace that she really, really wants.

It's a gorgeous, stunning necklace. and she goes down to the walls and says, can I have your necklace? I'll pay for it. I'll buy it off you with all the gold you want. And they just went, well, we don't actually want gold. We have a lot of it. Silver, we don't want any thing like that. She's like, oh, but I really want the necklace.

What can I do? She says, well, what we do want is you. And she goes, oh, okay. Now, she doesn't really like them. They're not particularly pretty. They're quite ugly, and she's not. And she goes, well, so there's four of us, and you need to sleep with each of us.

And if you do, we'll give you the necklace. And she sort of thinks about it and goes, well, okay, so four, that's four nights. Okay, fine. So she goes and she sleeps with all the four dwarves and they give her the necklace. And she's happy ever after, basically. Was it a really good necklace? It was a beautiful, it was the most beautiful necklace ever made. Then I can understand that logic, I think, well played.

Yeah, well, there was no other way for her. But we hear these things quite a lot. And there's a lot of, I mean, the gods between them as well, they can be a bit mean about this. So it's not always accepted. And one of them, for example, is Loki. So he sort of tricks the God, the one who always gets himself and everybody else into trouble. And it's generally very naughty. He does actually go and accuse everyone of sleeping with everyone.

So he accuses, for example, one of the other gods, Frigg, of having a threesome with Odin's brothers. Wow. Which he isn't very sort of happy about. And then when Freya actually jumps to Frigg's defense, Loki says, well, do you have to remember that you can't really be up on your high horse here because every god and every elfin here has been your lover. So he's not, you know, not too happy about this. Can't be slut-shaming prayer. You can't be slut-shaming a goddess.

That's terrible behaviour. Not the goddess of sex, no, I think that's... No, that's ridiculous. She is the goddess of sex. I hope that she just smacked him down for that one and just, you know, basically will bur. Yeah, so... That's my job. Somebody else comes to the defence as well, and actually one of the sort of half-gods, half-grients

comes and teaches him a bit of a lesson. Good. I hope Frey was stood there with just this amazing necklace just going, how dare you? I imagine she must have been. How dare you? I ask you my morals. Exactly. Oh, I love her. Yeah, she's great. So I've got notes for the show that they send over to me. And here, in highlighted, it just says, horse penis cult. Yes. This one was someone that, yeah. Could you tell me about that, please? Yeah, so again, this is another story. another saga, which is a slightly odd one, which... Yeah, it started out quite strong. Yeah, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds, I have to say.

Oh, okay. But it's still interesting. So this is one that revolves around a little family on a farm in Iceland, living far away from other people. There's an old man and a woman, and their son comes around. There's also a sort of slave or servant girl and a man as well. And they have a horse that they slaughter for food, presumably. And then the slave was about to throw away the horse as peeing.

and the son sort of, but no, hang on a minute, took it to his mother. And they all sort of got slightly obsessed with his horse penis. The boy was teasing the servant girl saying, this would be fun between your legs and all of these sort of things. But the woman, everyone laughs at this. Take the penis and wrap it in textiles with onions and herbs and things. And then they keep on passing it around and they keep hold of it for years and years and years. And we don't quite know why.

Presumably it's some kind of fertility thing. but they have this sort of cultusantly around this horse penis. And it just became a family heirloom? Yeah, I think you did. The whole generation is going, honestly, you don't have to leave that to me. It's fine. Yeah, exactly. So it's sort of where we, as academic,

especially get a bit boring in the pub and go, wow, it's fertility symbol, obviously. Fertility. Fertility symbol, which is a fair point, representing good harvest and all of that. So it's quite a pervasive sort of interest in looking at this. these objects and thinking of them. So when you have some of these little figurines with huge giant penises, we tend to look at those as fertility symbols and all of that,

which we do need to obviously think that a lot of the time it may well have been. Yeah, I think that is important because what we see when we see a penis is not necessarily what other cultures saw when they, like if anyone's been to Pompeii, it's just wall-to-wall dicks. They're just everywhere. They're on the pavement. They're on the ceiling. They're on the frescoes.

And it can't have been that everyone, was walking down the street being turned on or horrified by this, it must have had a different quality than it does. If you walked out of your house right now and if there was a dick on every door, you would have a big reaction to that. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we are quite different societies. So now, actually, we don't want many children.

We try quite hard, not to have children a lot of the time, but actually in different societies, having children, being able to have children was hugely important. and it was very dangerous. You couldn't be guaranteed that you would survive, that your baby would survive. So it's quite a different, what that represents is quite different. But it is quite amusing how we interpret them. And there was an exhibition quite recently in Norway where these wooden fallacies were on display.

And one of them, which was found, I think in the 1960s or something like that. And it's, I mean, it's a penis. It's a very, very obvious penis. There's no doubt about it. but it was recorded as a nail. It's one of my favorite things that are journalists and historians do. It's not a nail.

It's not a nail. It's not a nail. It has testicles. It's not a nail. That's not going to keep any dry wall up at all. It's just really not. We just make you think, okay. But it reminds me my absolute favorite scene from Norseman.

I don't know if you've seen the comedy series Norseman, if you haven't you must is brilliant where one of the characters Orm has, who is gay, he's sort of slightly secretly, obviously. And he has all these items

which are, again, phallises, dildos, presumably. Takes them out and they're being discovered and he goes, oh, no, no, those are my tent pegs. Collection of ten pegs. It just reminds me of that little episode. I love that.

And to be fair to archaeologists and historians, like there's a hefty amount of embarrassment from, you know, times past when people are unearthing this stuff. but also is like we don't know for certain and that's kind of like the thing that all historians are in this bind with forever is there aren't any Vikings here to go oh thank you that's my tent peg they're like do you know so we're always kind of hedging our bets and like something that yeah that looks like a massive carved wooden penis and I'd almost certainly say it is but really all we can say is it's possibly a votive offering because we just don't know exactly exactly and I think there's a tradition as well of thinking of that first and I think there's a tradition as well of thinking of that first and I'm And I guess it's probably, it's likely quite realistic in a lot of the time because, as we just said, you know, these issues of fertility and all of that were hugely important and they didn't have the benefit of all the sort of science and technology and medicine and all of that stuff that we have. So we can't quite just take our own society and stick that a thousand years ago and think that people would deal with things in the same way.

Do you know, that'd be so funny if we could get an actual Viking though to go on and look at these exhibitions. It would be like transporting you to an exhibition to thousands of years. the future and seeing a dildo there with a description about what a great tent peg it is. I know. Before I let you go, I've got to talk to you about the rape and pillage reputation, just because that's kind of where we started, so it's a good place to pull it back to. So we've covered pickled horse penises and some fabulous euphemisms. And women being quite saucy in all of this, where did this ferocious rape and pillage reputation come from? And is there any evidence to support this at all. Yeah, so I think a lot of it does come from the written sources, obviously,

that talk about the Vikings as the enemies. Which is never going to be flattering, is it? No, it's not really. I mean, it's going to provide us with a very specific image. It's interesting that we don't really have that so much from the other side, so we don't know if they were unique. So, I mean, I think sexual violence would have been used as a weapon of war. It is everywhere anytime, still is, as we can see, unfortunately, in the news at the moment. And so there's no getting away from that, of course, it's going to happen because it's a horrible thing to say, but it's very effective, it's very easy. And you have all these young men, especially, who are probably made to do quite horrific things and will take their liberties. So clearly, that is

something that is going to happen. Were the Vikings worse than others? We don't know that at all, but it clearly does seem to have been a part of it. We do also have an interesting story from the Eastern Vikings, so the Rus, so there's an Arabic source that dates to the 10th. century where an Arabic missionary called Ibnford Lange travels up along the Volga River. And he's actually on his way somewhere else, but he happens to come across this group of Bruce who are basically the sort of, we can call them the Eastern Vikings, short-hand. But read my book to find out more. But anyway, so he comes across this group who are clearly, it's going to name with clearly

Vikings, and the chieftain dies, and there's a funeral, and he observes the funeral. So we actually have a sort of first-hand ethnographic account of a Viking funeral. as a part of that whole ceremony that goes over 10 days. One of the things is that they ask for one of the slave girls, slave girls or boys actually, interestingly, to volunteer to become the chieftain's wife in the afterlife. There's probably some small print to that, isn't there? Yeah, which becomes evidence quite soon.

But there's one girl who volunteers, or one young woman, volunteers. And over the next 10 days, she's applied with bees and drugs. And then as a final part of the whole set of, ceremony, she then is made to have sex with all the leading men in the group. So she has to go from tent to tent and have sex with these men as part of that. Yeah, so this is in the translation at least. So even Vodlan is observing it. He doesn't understand what they're saying, because he's got a translator. So he sees this as happening. And then there's a ceremony where she then becomes the wife and she's killed, she's murdered as a part of that. And it's an interesting one because I think this story is very,

very sort of vivid. There's films based on it. There's one that everybody knows. And this sort of rape scene at the end is a particular part of it. So it's the only thing that we have of that kind from the Viking age. I think that particular story has really put that sort of Vikings as rapists essentially. Using sexual violence for whatever purpose has become a big part of our understanding. How big it part of it really was we don't know. We just don't know because in our popular imagination it's just like wall-to-wall savagery. like Viking women couldn't walk to the shops without being assaulted again.

Yeah, absolutely. Like, you can't possibly live your life like that. Not that I want to suggest, because there is a kind of a revisionist movement about the Vikings, isn't there? And you wouldn't want to suggest that you wouldn't have been dead happy at Lindisfarne Monastery when they attacked. They definitely had a violent streak to them. No, I think we need to be really balanced about it.

And we can't go too far the other way and say, no, no, no, peaceful farmers, really. But actually, if you look at Scandinavian society and look at things like evidence for traumatic and violent injury in bones, there's a problem in that we don't have that many well-preserved skeletons from the Viking Age, unfortunately. But when we compare periods of the Viking Age with before and after, there's no more violence actually in the Viking Age than before or after. In fact, there's a little bit more in the Middle Ages. So that's an interesting one. Also, we do know that actually they were trying to avoid it quite a lot. They were using the threats of violence an awful lot. It's a good tactic, isn't it?

It's scare your enemy into submission before you have to do anything at all. And if you saw boatloads of hairy-ass Norwegian sailors coming towards you shouting and screaming, I'd surrender pretty quick. Yeah, precisely. And this is the tactic that becomes used in England, especially as we get towards the end of the Viking Age. The English kings, people like Ethelred, pay vast sums of money, like ludicrous sums of money, to get them to go away. It's such a bad idea that paying people to sod off is such a bad.

Yeah, it didn't actually work very well in the long term, but, you know, possibly in the short term, possibly you sort of protected your village or whatever. I suppose, yeah. My last question here, what is the one thing that you are hell-bent on correcting about the Vikings? Like, if I could kind of distill it down to one thing, that the thing that, like, you know,

you could do a half-hour speech on with no presentation, the thing that would have you been dragged off stage going, cat, that's enough now, stop it. What is it that you want people to know about the Vikings? I think it is very much about the women. It's that the women were a hugely active part of the Viking world. And they weren't just passive, they weren't just sitting at home. It doesn't mean that they were this huge big raiding armies,

flagathism, you know, whatever in Vikings. We don't go that far. It was still a patriarchal society. But these women had power. They had a lot of power. They were a big part. They traveled. far and wide across the Viking world, as we've just heard,

they had the right to divorce. They had a lot of agency. We're not talking about a world that was just a men's world. This was very much a men's and a women's world. And they could rise to power. They could be queens. They could, in some cases, be fighters. But actually, they were such a huge and active part of Viking society.

And we're still picking that apart and realizing just how much. Just how important they were. and they could tend a mean warrior for a local traveller should he turn up to the door. Absolutely. They could lead him to a well and temper his warrior. Oh, Cat Jarman, thank you so much for joining me. And if people want to know more about you and your work, and they should,

where can they find you? So they can follow me on social media, on Twitter or Instagram on at Kat Jarman, or they can look at my book, River Kings, a new history of the Vikings from Scandinavia to the Silk Roads. Or, of course, follow my podcast, which is called Gone Medieval, which I co-presented, Matt Lewis. Thank you so much. You have been an absolute revelation.

Thank you so much for inviting me. It was a great fun. You just listened to a cross-serve episode between Gone Medieval and Betwixt the Sheets, the latest History Hit podcast presented by Kate Glister. Do check out Kate's podcast. Just search for Betwixt the Sheets, and you'll find it. And don't forget to subscribe to both hers and Gone Medieval, if you haven't already. And don't forget to subscribe to the Medieval Monday's newsletter.

Just look in the episode and notes and you can see how to do that. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman. Thank you so much for joining me and I'll be back again next week.