Gone Medieval - Viking Travels

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Vikings have long been depicted as that stereotype of the hairy, nameless warrior, leaping ashore from his longboat, ready to terrorise a hapless local population in a northern European country. But there were also seers, artisans, travellers, and writers, too whose stories can now be pieced together through the traces that they left behind.Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Alex Harvey to bring to light new research and challenge our conventional understanding of the Viking era, which may not be as accurate as we thought or as the sagas would have us believe.Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega and edited by Max Carrey. The producer is Rob Weinberg, the senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off your first 3 months using code ‘MEDIEVAL’ https://historyhit.com/subscriptionYou can take part in our listener survey here: https://uk.surveymonkey.com/r/6FFT7MK Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianaga and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades.

We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here. We all love the Vikings. So we need no excuse to revisit them and their beardy barbaric ways. But Eleanor, wait, I hear you say, you've just gone and perpetuated the stereotype of the hairy, nameless warrior, leaping ashored from his longboat, ready to terrorize a hapless local population in a northern European country.

And, well, that's true. Mayacope. Because across this week on Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis and myself will be bringing to light some of the new research that challenges our conventional image of the Vikings. Sure, there were the marauding warriors, but they were in the minority. In fact, the Viking Age was filled with real people of different ages, genders, and ethnicities. There were also seers, artisans, travelers, and writers, too, whose stories can now be pieced together through the traces that they left. behind. In this episode, I'm going to challenge our conventional understanding of the Viking era, which may not be as accurate as we thought, or as the sagas would have us believe. For example,

is it possible that there were Viking raids on Britain that predated the famous Lindisfarred attack of 793? Could the Vikings have made a significant impact on parts of modern-day Netherlands and Germany long before they became involved in other countries? Could they have even made it to Mexico or the Canary Islands? Alex Harvey at the University of York has a great new book entitled Forgotten Vikings, New Approaches to the Viking Age, in which he delves into some of the lesser-known aspects of Viking culture, some of its less famous characters,

and parts of the world that they visited that rarely make it into the regular history books, expanding our understanding of this iconic era. So hold on to your helmet, and join us as we set sail into uncharted waters of Viking history. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and this is Gone Medieval from History Hit. Alex, welcome to Gone Medieval. Thank you for having me. I am incredibly excited to have you here because you are doing the Lord's work,

which is something that most medieval historians want to do for generalized audiences, but no one's really done yet. You know, because I think that there is this generalized understanding of, you know, the so-called Viking ages and we're like, ah, it begins with Linda's farm in 793. It ends with the Norman invasion in 1066, and that's when there were Vikings. But it's not as though everyone just woke up one day in 793 and said, oh, shall we be Vikings, right?

How suddenly we're in the Viking Age? What do we do? Exactly. Let's start making sales. I mean, I really think that it's important to consider this framework. and I think that this is something that really benefits general audiences. Can you just tell us a little bit about why you are so excited by this reimagining? Yeah, well, I mean, I've been into the Viking Age at first at a very amateur level

just from watching TV as a youngster with my dad. Like the Last Kingdom on telly, I think, was one of the first things that really sparked my imagination. And then from there it was, I'd like to study it at A level when I got a chance to work on my own coursework and then from there it was at the university of york my undergrad and then master's degrees one of my favorite parts about history is applying the more obscure more niche different ways of approaching history to my favorite period which was the viking age i'm sure i'm not the first to have done it i read a lot of viking books

i read a lot of academic papers and also you know mainstream publications in waterstones and all good book retailers and they're all you know brilliant they all try and do their own things but they all do stick to a similar formula of, you know, 793, that's normally chapter 1, and then they end more or less at 1066. And there are many positives in doing it via that method because it's a nice, clean narrative. It's very easy to understand it. So it's a good way of onboarding readers to the subject. I mean, it's certainly how I learned.

But in obsessing over, you know, neat periods of history, as we do, we put up unnecessary walls and barriers. And we move away from observing history on its own terms, I think, because on the 25th of September 1066, the world didn't change overnight to the high medieval period in England. People waking up on the 26th of September didn't suddenly think, oh, that's the Viking Age done. Thank God.

Now we're in the Norman period. I mean, quite so. I think that this is one of those things where periodization, is obviously something that historians do it so that we have quick ways of referring to various things. But, I mean, for me, using this kind of definition of the Viking Age takes away my favorite stuff, which is like Viking Greenland,

which is my pet interest in terms of all this. So how do you explain that if we say the Viking Age is over? And so I suppose that brings me to my next question, which is when you extend the timeline, how does this then change? the understanding of Viking culture and influence in Europe more generally? Well, I'm glad you mentioned Greenland because, you know, while we're sat here today and thinking about approaching the Viking Age from a fresh perspective

and a much longer discrete time period for the individuals in Greenland and Iceland, especially Iceland, compiling sagas, they didn't view the narratives of the Viking Age as just ending in 1066. The saga of Orkney, for instance, that is a continuous narrative from about 850 all the way up to the 13th century. And there's no need for the compilers of those sagas to signal when we get to 1066 and say, oh, everyone, here's a watershed moment. Everything's different after this point. For them, nothing changed really. So it's still the same narratives of blood feuds. There's still naval, coast-based raiding and warfare going on. Even in some of King John's charter roles and tax roles, we have references.

to Wikini, which is a Middle English version of the word Viking, active between the Isle of Man and the West Coast. So by, I think, approaching the period from a much broader lens, you're actually getting closer to how the people of the time would have seen it. You know, they wouldn't have signalled these somewhat arbitrary divisions in time. Well, I want to stop you right there because one of the things that I think is great about your book is that it's looking at what would be more obscure for a general audience ideas about Vikings. And you've hit on one of the things that I'm really excited about,

which is the Viking Isle of Man. Yeah, it's brilliant. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. Well, I find it so compelling. So I started reading about the Isle of Man through the work of Andrew McDonald. He's one of the leading scholars on this subject along with Tim Clarkson. And it's a really understudied period of the Viking Age.

at least in English circles. Because it's after 1066, it's more connected to Scottish history, which isn't something often taught in English schools. Loathers, we are to admit that. But the Viking Age, it's called the Long Viking Age or the Norse period of the Isle of Man.

Really what we see is a basically seamless transition from Viking activity in the Irish Sea, you know, between Dublin, man, areas in Scotland, that was already going on since the 9th century or earlier, seamlessly transitions into a post-1066 world, and over the 250 years, more or less, that the, quote, kingdom of the man and the aisles exists, which is this kind of sea kingdom spread across the Irish Sea.

We see a slow transition of the locals who are somewhat Scandinavian, somewhat Gaelic, somewhat monks, they're a real kind of hodgepodge. They start to employ statecraft. They start to emulate ideas of chivalry and knighthood to be seen as kings on par with the English and the Welsh. And they're still raiding all throughout this period. They're still trading in slaves,

especially at the start of this long Viking Age and Bullion. And they're dominating the waterways with exactly the same ship technology they would have had in the Viking Age. So it's more or less just a bit more of the Viking Age. Age, you know, it pushes that arbitrary end date a full 200 years after 1066. Normally, I think we'd call the end of this Irish Sea Viking Age in 1265 in the Battle of Largs. But really, you know, a lot of the motifs of the Viking Age, if you like, persist way later, like influence on language.

The ship technology, especially, went on to influence all sorts of crafts all up and down the in the oceans. Well, can you tell us a little bit more about that? Because I think one of the things that the book really is great at highlighting is there are innovations that are happening as a very direct result of what we could call Viking culture, both before and after the traditional dates of the Viking Age. And I think that that is really important to highlight. Yeah, well, it's a great period to study because there's a constant motif of pushback,

I think all throughout the period. With regards to what we'd call, I suppose, Viking culture, the impact it has, especially in England, is that the constant attritional process of raids and then invasions leads to a stronger pushback on behalf of insular governments within England. And then it leads to the breakdown of several former kingdoms, like Mercia. East Anglia, for instance, is basically wiped off the map.

So we are missing an East Anglian Chronicle and a lot of its own narrative histories because presumably it was burned or lost during the Viking Age. And as the identities of these other kingdoms like Northumbria shattered and fragmented, it allowed Wessex and to a lesser extent a small kingdom in Bamba to centralise and re-consolidate their power. And then that changed how England was perceived. And then through that, you know, you had king. Alfred and his son and daughter formalising the Burr system by making these kind of centralised

strong points along rivers, which made raiding harder, which then created different circumstances for raiding. So it's a real back and forth. Harold Bluetooth, who's normally listed as like a Viking king in the middle of the 10th century in Denmark, he's actually embodying quite a few character traits, I'd argue, that are not just not Viking, but they're kind of explicitly anti-viking. So in his reign, he commissions the construction of several of these really large ring forts that we nowadays call Trellaborgs. They're these huge eagles-eye view that these really well-organized circular forts with massive longhouses inside, and they're linked by what we can assume were networks of hollow ways

and roads all across the Jutland Peninsula and parts of Sweden. Scholars have argued about the purpose of these structures. It used to be thought that they were training barracks to launch raids. on England, which is just, you know, silly. I think that idea faded out in the 70s or 80s. The common argument today is that Harold Bluetooth built them because they show off his status as a king. It's a new form of expressing power. But at the same time, these forts were built. There was raiding going on in Germany from the Hungarians, the Maggiard Raiders. And the German monarchs of East Francia, so Otto's one through three, they were constructed.

a number of border forts called Bergen. And these were very similar to Alfred's births. They're these centralized strong points that stop raiders. So then when Harold Bluetooth is building these more or less identical structures, he's creating forts that stop raiders in his kingdom, which is anti-viking, if you ask me. So it's really interesting that the Vikings create circumstances in England that lead to the construction of these forts that then make raiding harder.

And then those motifs are borrowed over. the English channel by the Vikings themselves. I absolutely love this, you know, because I think that there is a tendency to kind of think of inflection points as always being one way. You know, there's an outside force which creates a problem and then that's it, you know, but you really see that there is a very rich back and forth in this period. And I suppose one of the things that's always important about Vikings and what makes them such a lasting force, really, in Europe, is that a adapt?

Oh, yeah, there's a lot of cultural pragmatism and religious syncretism, I suppose, two-way. I mean, the entire Viking age is a process by which the Viking homelands, if we're to use such a term, were borrowing elements from their neighbours, and then their neighbours were borrowing elements from them. The whole idea we have in our modern age of viewing the Old Norse religion as a set religion with a power structure of gods that's always organised in that same way. is really wrong because if you observe the archaeological evidence, like kind of pendants and votive deposits, it really seems like that entire cosmology is basically random and individualized. And it's so different all over Scandinavia

because of the constant interactions with Christianity on the borders of Denmark, but then also in Sweden, there's quite a lot of influence from Greek Orthodox Christianity as well, long before Denmark started to be Christianized. And these narratives, are obscured in our modern age, outside of academia, I mean, because of, I suppose, pop culture's tendencies to rigidly organize elements of the Viking Age.

You know, I blame Marvel films quite frequently for that because they position Thor as like the always strong macho gods and then Loki's always the trickster and Odin's always on top. When in reality, we can't make those estimations. We're viewing the cosmology largely from only a small number of. sources and the archaeology would suggest it was a lot more randomized. So you've hit on one of the next things I was going to ask you about, which is one of the things that's really excellent about your work in this area is you're doing a lot with archaeology. And I think that there is a limitation, of course, always with written sources in that we can only

use what is written down. And it does lead to these simplistic ideas about, oh, well, there's a pantheon and this sort of things. And it works in this way. And of course, that also is influenced by our readings of things, right? Because, you know, there's a tendency in the medieval period. Anytime they are confronted with a religion that is not Catholicism, they're like, but it's like Catholicism, right? Surely it has... Make analogs to what we know. Exactly. And so they create a structure that becomes familiar, and then people who don't necessarily know to control for that, take it on board, right? But you've been able to work around and not just look at, for example, the sagas or, you know, when it's written down that the Vikings are here again. And how does that

really open up more understandings of what's going on with the Vikings? Well, for instance, to use a classic example of when not to use the historical documents, when not to take them out their word, would be Spain during the Viking Age. Because in the 10th and 11th centuries, we have frequent references to Viking raids. And quite a lot of them cannot be verified placed. The people mentioned who are defending against the raids have no other records anywhere else, so they might not have existed. And many of these Viking raids on Spain are mentioned immediately before the consecration of a monastery on that site, almost as if they're basically fictional holy battles that big up the status of a place. And then you ask, why would Vikings always

be mentioned then? Probably because they're the equivalent of like a textual bogeyman. So they're a really common threat so people could just make up whenever they appear. Because you'd read this will of how a monastery was made and you'd read that there was a holy battle against Vikings. And you wouldn't think twice because you'd think, oh, yeah, of course. They were probably here. But the actual details are just so obscured and fragmented in these sources. How perceptions of the Viking Age can be chained through looking at the archaeology? I mean, I'd have to look at England.

That's one of our best. Of course, I live here. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle never usually waste any ink talking about how people adapted to settling in England. They very rarely talk about the willingness, perhaps, of some of the settlers to convert to Christianity, unless it's for a specific religious narrative. Whereas if you look at the archaeology, you see there's a real increase in regionalism during the making age. So England, of course, used to be made up of numerous petty kingdoms, too many to list, really. The big names like Wessex, Northumbria and Mercia, these are only a very small handful.

These are like the top layer. There were various other regional king groupings. And from charter evidence and archaeology, we can be pretty confident that these regional groups remained important. And they started to fade in about the 8th century when those aforementioned big name kingdoms grew bigger and bigger. started to centralise. But in the advent of the Viking Age, when you have these raiders going up and down the country tearing through governmental ties and administrative structures, you find that these regional groups reassert themselves. So you get a lot of instances across England using kind of like things metal detectorists find on the portable antiquities scheme of unique forms of

material expression. The one I use in the book is there's this amazing silver gilt pendant that was found in Lincolnshire. And on it is the face of Odin is believed. It's this one-eyed man with two ravens, one on either side. And that's a clear depiction of Odin, and that's been dated to about the middle of the 10th century, when, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, all of the settlers had converted to Christianity.

And you see that through, you know, the stone sculptures, the Gosphith Cross, Kirby Stephen Cross, for so on. But clearly, that wasn't the case. you know, we use the term Anglo-Skandinavia and that homogenizes the identities that all these people would have been feeling. You would have got, in Lincolnshire, a pocket of people, clearly you were like, I don't want to be a Christian. I'm going to, in fact, wear a necklace with my God on it, but I'm proud to not be a Christian. But then elsewhere, maybe these religious changes were a lot more subtle. People were slightly more progressive.

And you can observe that through archaeology, and that's something that's more or less absent from the textual sources. Yeah, because textual sources are texts. You know, they want to present us with a narrative of a kind of beginning, middle, and end, about an unending progress, I suppose. You know, saying, oh, well, this happened and then everyone became Christian, and it was great. There are also objects in their own text, because they've been, like, edited by numerous hands. You can use paleography, which is the study of handwriting styles to work out where an author changes, where it's not telegraphed, and how they write their Gs might be.

tell you, you know, what monastery they were trained in, and then the biases from all these different viewpoints. So they are still really useful. My background is archaeology, so it's one of the things I feel more comfortable talking about as opposed to, let's say the linguistic side of things, which is a very different discipline. But I think to approach any historical period, especially prior to 1066, it does require a blending of disciplines. Okay, well, I'm going to ask you some archaeological questions now then because you basically opened yourself up to allow me to do that. Okay, yeah. Okay, so just kind of going back down to Spain, I know you just said it's not your favorite, but I think a lot of people wouldn't be aware of the fact that there are these traditions that say that there are Vikings in Spain.

And you've already covered why probably there were not some Viking attacks. but how do you then look in the archaeological evidence to disprove that, you know, Vikings were not actually here, my love. Well, so with Spain, so it's tricky because there definitely was Viking activity in Spain. The sheer fact that we have so many references to it, even if some of those references are clearly making things up, would tell us that Viking activity in Spain must have been quite a mundane affair for it to be then used as like a made-up excuse to found a monastery,

if that makes sense. So it's not that the idea of Viking activity in Spain is made up, just that it was so frequent that people could get away with making up instances of it because it was more or less just, oh yeah, the Vikings. Yeah, of course. Part of the reason why, I suppose, the Spanish Viking Age isn't often thought about is because geographically, if you were to look at a map of Europe in the early medieval period,

and you see the trade routes. Spain always seems to fall out of the periphery, at least in modern perceptions, it's always viewed as like the southern bit of Europe, when it was actually just as intrinsically plugged in to the Bay of Biscay, the North Sea trade networks, as everywhere else. It was definitely not disconnected.

So the Vikings being down there, they were just taking advantage of trade routes and connections that were already there. One of the things in the book, which I could go either way on, is an early mention of possibly Vikings in Spain in the same year as the Lindis farm raid. So we've got this reference to people called the Madjus who fought alongside Christians in northern Spain. So that term Madjus, it's an Arabic term and normally it's used to refer to Scandinavian heathens when it's in a Spanish context. Elsewhere, it's used to refer to Zoroastrian pagans or people of non-Abrahans.

religions, and it's sometimes used in Spain to refer to the Basque. So it's unclear if this specific mention in 793 is a reference to the Basque pagans or Scandinavians who are there much earlier than anticipated. I've kind of left it up to readers to decide, but I do think it's one of those things that's worth mentioning because it opens up a modern conversation, it opens up a discussion, and we can debate about these underseen aspects of the Viking Age. Archaeological evidence for Viking Age Spain's quite slim. They've got very different rules on metal detecting over there. But recently, I do talk about this briefly in the book, is there's been lots of, they're called D-shaped camps identified across Portugal. And these are very similar in plan to the kind of army camps

you find in England that are attributed to Viking Raiders. So it's very likely that similar activity was going on in Spain. It's just not being treated with that same level of scholarly attention yet. But I think that this is one of those other times we run into problems with narratives, right? Because this isn't a part of the quote-unquote narrative that we have of medieval Spain, which is, you know, the story about you have Visigoths and then you have the Muslim incursions. And then you have... Yeah, exactly. Which is a really easy thing to report to people.

And so I think that's an important thing to kind of think about because it shows it's not just people writing Vikings. sagas or chronicles in the medieval period who do this. And we do this all the time. Yeah, we do. And a lot of the times we don't realize we're doing it because at least when I was writing the book, I was challenging, I suppose, a lot of my former teachings because I'd grown up also learning about the Viking age from 793 to 1066. I'm just viewing it like that. And I was having various debates with myself about how many pages I wanted to write before I even got to Lindisfan. because I thought, you know, it needs to be there because average person who picks up a Viking Age book

will be like, all right, Lindisfan, I'm familiar with this. And you don't want to lose that. But I do think it's important to treat Lindisfarne, just as one example, from the perspective of the people who were doing the raiding, you know, it would have just been, here's an opportunity to grab some cash lads, let's go. It wouldn't have been, here is the first raid of the Viking Age. Let's treat this really, you know, with a lot of reverence

because this is a big deal, everything's going to change now. It definitely would not have been like that at the time. I think that's a really important point because we tend to reify these things after the fact. And we love that. It's a nice way to write, building things up into being huge and important, is human, I suppose.

You know, we have to... Yeah, finding patterns in things that aren't there. Exactly. And we have to, I think, balance our desire to do that with an acknowledgement of the fact that it happens. And some of it isn't a terrible thing, but, you know, as you say, it just makes it seem as though Vikings appeared out of whole cloth one day.

Yeah. And this is something I feel very passionate about, especially in today's age, where you always hear, you know, a lot of the time people online complaining that, oh, they're rewriting our history, they're rewriting our past. You know, whenever, you know,

the Guardian or a newspaper will publish something that's happened in academia, where we change our definition of a term or we realize we've been approaching a subject wrong and we reinterpret it and you get people who are out of the loop who think, oh no, no, they're changing things, they're making it up.

When really most of history is made up and the study of history should only ever be a discussion. It needs to always be a back and forth. So there are a lot of things in the book that I've just put in because I've never seen them written in mainstream publications before and I've thought, you know, I want someone to pick this book up as I have, you know, books that I've bought and get inspired to then look into it and then

challenge it to write something in response because, I mean, that's the whole point of studying the past. That's why we do it. You've hit on something that for me is so important, this idea of rewriting history. I'm like, that's just called doing history. That's just history, yeah. That's just history. You know, nothing is ever written in stone, you know, and I think that's such an important point. I do want to ask you about a little bit more about the kind of Mediterranean Viking-ness, though. Because one of the things that you cover, it's not just, I suppose, when I was saying Spain, it's, this is not just necessarily a Spanish thing that we're talking about, because there may be some evidence you're saying that the Vikings got to places like

Madeira or the Baleariacs or the Azores. And I'm, wondering if you could talk us through what you found that shows us this. Sure. Well, I'll hit those one after another. So I'll start with the Balearic, so like Mi Yorka, Ibiza, you know, classic holiday destinations for many. So there's textual references to Viking raids on those islands, both before and after the traditional Viking age.

On Sigurd's Crusade, which is about 40 years after 1066, we have really obvious mentions of they're not called Vikings. At this point we'd say Scandinavian crusaders going to Ibitha, for instance, and pillaging everyone. But, you know, they would have been wearing the same sorts of armour, in the same sorts of boats, doing the same thing as traditional Vikings. So, I mean, that counts for me. But there's a, there's a reference in the semi-legendary voyage about Bjorn Ironside, travelling the Mediterranean, that he raided parts of the Balearics at the time. So I was very fortunate to listen to a really interesting talk on the early medieval Balearics at one of the lead international medieval congresses. So the talk was by James Highland. It was superb.

And then from that research, I started to look into, you know, what were the Balearics like at the time? And how did they connect to 9th century Spain, 9th century Italy, these two, you know, big landmasses that they're right next to? And they're not peripheral islands by any means. They a really high proportion of monasteries and extant Roman ruins that would have been really visible in the landscape when a Viking fleet went through here. So then I wanted to put myself in the shoes of travellers and what they would have seen going to these islands, sailing past them. And for me, it just seems like the Balearics plug right into Viking Age Spain, Viking Age Italy. You know, they're not this exotic location where we should be surprised that the Vikings got there.

they're more or less on the way and they were connected to these trade networks. You even had people from England visiting Abitha, I think. We found a ring, I think, that's inscribed with Wilfrid, which is a standard old English name. So that's probably, you know, someone who's gone down perhaps through France and made their way to the Balearics. The activity that was going on on those islands was very much of a raiding nature from what we can work out. again there's minimal archaeological evidence that they were there but saying that if we were to find something I doubt it would be diagnostic because the only references we have is that there were raiders going there every now and then and they raided things but you know that wouldn't

necessarily be diagnostic to anyone if you were to find a layer of slightly dark at earth you know you could say there was accidental fire you know you wouldn't know more conclusively is the evidence for, and I say Vikings very loosely here, people from Scandinavia arriving at Madeira and the Azores sometime between the 8th and 10th centuries. So there are some more specific dates, but this evidence is quite vague. So on Madeira, it takes the form of mice bones that were found in a layer that's more or less kind of roughly the 9th century. And when they traced the isotopic origin of these mice bones. They were from the northern hemisphere, most likely Scandinavia. And that's the same evidence in the Azores, whereas over there it's, I think, sheep poo and pollen

as well as mice bones. So the Madeira instance, for me, just seems like maybe a shipwreck or a stopover, and there were some mice on board a long ship, and they hopped overboard, and there you are. There's Madeira's mice population. No one was living on era at the time. It was a completely empty, beautiful, kind of bleak, desolate volcanic island. I can only imagine the wonders that visitors must have felt when they looked upon this pristine landscape. You know, there's no evidence biking settled there at all, but I'd put money on them definitely visiting. They definitely went past it, and that's where the mice have come from. With the Azores, the evidence, although it's very limited, would suggest that we're looking

at a short stay, maybe even some farming, given the presence of pollen. kernels and sheepdom. But again, that's all we know. The Azores at the time were really forested. And what I tried to do in the book was to, you know, look at these locations. I've been to a few of them. I haven't been to the Azores, sadly, but to look at the Azores and what they would have looked like prior to extensive Portuguese settlement. So they would have been really, really heavily forested. And what that landscape would have looked like in the vacuum age, were there any parallels, you know, other forested islands that the Vikings reach that we know about. And that was a really interesting way of getting into the minds of people in the 9th century,

these intrepid travellers who are basically crossing the known world and finding all of these unexplored locations. I just find that stuff so compelling and inspiring. And then that prompts me to write a little narrative about it, which I tried to weave into the longest chapter of the book, which is the one on all the different places, the Vikings visited. But then contrasting that with the nine realms of Norse mythology,

which I thought was a novel way of exploring these places that I haven't seen done before. Now, you hit on in the book a particularly far-flung location that you think there may be evidence. So you posit that it might be possible that the Vikings at least know about the Canary Islands. and I wonder if you could talk us through that a little bit. Yeah, so I suppose a big disclaimer here would be there's no evidence whatsoever.

Yay! The Vikings got to the Canary Islands. This is just something that I think is not at all impossible. If you think about the distance covered between Madeira, the Azores, the Balearics, the Canary Islands are within what I'd call the reasonable firing line. So we know that there was Viking activity on the North African coast. You can see the Canary Islands from some places along the coast on a clear day. There's a few bits of Roman material that's ended up in the Canaries.

Whether or not that's through shipwrecks or they were part of trade networks, I'm not sure. But the Romans knew about the Canary Islands. And just kind of via a process of elimination, I just thought it is very possible that the Vikings knew of them. Whether or not there would have been any use at all to go to the Canary Islands, because we're not talking about very splendid, rich Christian monasteries over there, nor is it plugged into international trade networks. I just think that the Canaries, they're a cool place, especially for English readers.

The Canary Islands are like one of the number one tourist destinations, I think, of the country. So readers will recognise the Canary Islands. And thinking about them on their own terms as a historical location, rather than just, oh, there's those of hotels. I thought was something really interesting. So I will say, yeah, Vikings in the Canaries, you know, you'll never know. There definitely is a long Viking legacy in the Canary Islands, which I find really interesting. There's a lot of people who live there who are adamant that they've descended from Vikings.

There's a newspaper hoax that's ran a few years where they've allegedly discovered a long ship burial on Tenerife. And that's part of a local tradition where they prank people on the 28th of December, I believe. locally along the Canary Islands, there is a love for the Vikings. I suppose the same love we have in England and all over the world for these really enigmatic people of this time period. In terms of real evidence, though, there's none. I just thought it was a really interesting thing to include. I think it is a really interesting thing to include because one of the things that's true about Viking sagas, at least, is we get some where we can say, oh, this is fairly historically accurate, I can pin this.

to this, but we also have these quite, I suppose, fabulous Viking sagas, one of which you've already mentioned. Yeah. And I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about how we use really wild Viking sagas and what they can actually do for us from a historical's perspective. Well, first of all of the sagas are useful. Like, just because one might be clearly describing something nonsense doesn't mean that it's not a useful historical source. We can use sagas, even the crazy ones, to learn mundane information, to get a window into that kind of narrative obsession

of the 14th and 15th century with blood feuds. We can see how people of the 13th century onwards perceived their own past through these fictional tales, which is really useful. I suppose on the spectrum of sagas, on one end you'll have the ones that are more or less retelling family histories. So while they're probably not 100% accurate all the time,

they're at least describing real locations, real people, and they might have smudged the details quite a lot, but they're still more or less true. And then on the other hand, you've got basically fictional tales that have no basis in reality. And they can often be nursery rhyme-esque. There's a good saga about someone called Arrow Odd

who fights basically death on the far end of the world. in Greenland, but Greenland in this context is like a made-up location beyond the North Pole. It's got nothing to do with the real Greenland. But the usefulness of that saga tells us that by the time that was written, and I believe that one's 14th or 15th century, it's one of the older sagas, or later sagas, Greenland had basically faded from contemporary perceptions. It was no longer even viewed as, here's the Wild West frontier over there. It was like, mate, I don't know what's going on in Greenland, so you can say what you like, because we've got no eyes on the ground over there.

So what if trolls live there? We don't know. And, you know, a classic example of using sagas to find locations would be the Vinland sagas. They're not actually called, that's just the name we've given two sagas. And they contain the references to North America, or this place called Vineland, the Good. Obviously, there's only one archaeological site on the North American continent, which is on the

nor the most tip of Newfoundland. And there's a few scant traces that might be Viking Age evidence elsewhere on the mainland in Canada. But using the sagas, until the 1960s when that site was discovered, the sagas were our only, quote-unquote, evidence that Scandinavians ever got to America. And many people have tried to use other sagas to kind of find hitherto unknown locations that the Vikings visited. You know, some are really crazy.

is he like Paraguay. There's no way. That's just mental. Sorry. Yeah, but I think we need to always be aware that a lot of the sagas, even the ones that tell true stories, they infuse it with so much legend. There's a classic one about Ingvar the Far Travelled

who sailed to the Caspian Sea with a big army. So this is a historical person. He did exist, and this military campaign definitely happened. We've got runestones that commemorate it in Sweden dated to the same period. But the saga that talks about it adds dragons. It confuses the geography loads. There's like these Lord of the Rings-esque river valleys that they sail through,

and there's floating cities. So you wouldn't read that and think, oh, yeah, of course. Yeah, brilliant. And we're looking for some dragon bones. If we can find them, then we know this is true. But at the root of that fictional narrative, there is a kernel of truth. And many of the sagas will be like that. But there's a real blender of traditions in sagas.

We do tend to view them all homogenously as the sagas, or like the Viking sagas. But they're all very different. They contain lots of different genres, depending on when they were written. Well, I've got one kind of spicy question for you. Let's go. As we're coming towards the end. Because some of these really fantastic sagas,

I think there are, as you say, real ways that we can use to learn more, at least about how imagination works with Vikings or what their aspirations are in terms of travel. But some people, usually not academics, but some people, for example, you know, Paraguay is like one of the locations that people want to place Vikings, but there's also some people that really go to bat for Mexico. Yeah, Mexico is a big one. That tops the list. So I came on to the topic of Vikings in Mexico as an undergraduate. It was during lockdown, actually. So the COVID pandemic had a lot of free time.

I remember just typing in Vikings in and then insert location on Google. Mainly to look at archaeological sites that I didn't know about. So in Finland, for instance, where there definitely was Viking activity. But then I started to branch further out and I thought, in Vikings in Japan, let's see what people are coming up with here. or Vikings in China. I got to Vikings in Mexico, which is a fascinating subject on pseudo history.

So it's really interesting to look through the different claims over the years of quote-unquote evidence. The most compelling for me, purely in the sense of kind of interest in how we use sagas, is there's this one saga that references an unknown alien land where this character called Bjorn ends up and then 30 years later, people find him at this mysterious place

and he's become the chief of these native peoples. And several people have argued that this is a reference to the Quetzal Quattel myth based on what Hanan Cortez wrote, which is obviously not to be trusted anything that boat wrote. But I mean, there are a lot of coincidences, I will admit, but that's all they are.

They're coincidence, as he. humans finding patterns in things that aren't there. And that rabbit hole, you know, Vikings in Mexico, that saga is just describing a made-up location. But because it's so vague, people are seeing what they like in. So some people might see Mexico. Some people might see Paraguay. I'm sure Australia might be claimed at one point.

The whole point of history is to open these discussions. And I think even something as ridiculous as the idea is Vikings in Mexico deserves to get eyeballs on just to disprove, to talk, to make jokes. You know, I think these are the bread and butter of talking about the past. We need to identify all the silly things just as we do the serious ones. Well, I really quite like having a look at it as well because it does make me feel quite connected, actually, to the way that Vikings are writing about their world as well. Because, you know, yeah, okay, they're writing about floating islands and made up locations and the faraway exotic. but is not saying there are Vikings in Mexico a similar tendency from the same place.

I like that there's this kind of human connection and desire to make fantastic claims about people from our past. Because we so often depict the past as like no one had the free time to do anything but work. So their minds were preoccupied with worldly issues. They never once, you know, thought about, quote, wasting time, you know, writing a story or something. when really, you know, imagination is not a 21st century invention.

You know, people have always had imaginations, and they're influenced by the things they saw, the people interacted with, so that the imagination of the Viking Age, which is where much of the cosmology would have come from and been maintained, was always influenced by real things and real locations. And considering the Viking Age saw people travelling all over the known world,

there must have been a vast arsenal of inspirations to choose from when, you know, imagining things. We know people were imagining things constantly in the past. Just look at the Viking Age art styles that are filled with beautiful, you know, gripping beasts and these sinewy snake-like creatures, the vast array of characters from the Sarkas and the Edders, you know, dwarves, the wolf Fenrir, moon-eating dogs. You know, it's crazy. You know, that imagination is just brilliant.

It doesn't always have to be inspired by something either, because if we'd look at it, at our own world now. Some of the greatest craters in the world just have nothing but their own brain and they think of all sorts. And undoubtedly, those people existed in the Viking Age too. Alex, unfortunately, I think we're going to have to leave it there, but I cannot thank you enough for being on today. That's been great. Thank you. Thanks to Alex Harvey and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Later this week, Matt Lewis will continue our attempts to dispel the myths about the Vikings. He's going to be joined by the brilliant Eleanor Bariclaw, whose research takes us into the lives of real people of the Viking Age.

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