Gone Medieval - What Caused the Viking Age?

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

A wind whips across the North Sea as dragon-headed ships cut through the waves towards Anglo-Saxon England. Their arrival marks the start of the Viking Age.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr Eleanor Janega is joined by Terri Barnes and C.J. Adrien of the Vikingology podcast to explore why Vikings left their Scandinavian homelands. From climate change and political upheaval to innovations in shipbuilding, they examine the forces that set these raiders and explorers on a path that would reshape medieval Europe.MOREThe Viking Age: What New Discoveries RevealListen on AppleListen on SpotifyViking Warrior WomenListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  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. Eleanorianica 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 delved into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were.

And how we got here. A wind whips amid stormy seas. Waves caress the sand-skin shores of Anglo-Saxon England. And on the horizon looms a pack of dragons. In armada of wood-wittled ships, lithe and nimble, cut through the froth and ebb of the North Sea tide. Like the bark of a tree, the ships are encased by rows of hardwood shields and manned by hulking Northmen, who tain flailing sail and ore.

And at their bow, at the very front of each ship, dwell the faces of monsters hewn into oaken fabric, instilling fear and despair upon those that bear them witness. These are the Vikings. And with their coming, a new era begins. Today, on Gone Medieval, we're asking, where exactly did these Vikings come from? And why?

What caused them to abandon their Scandinavian homelands and take up riding the shores and rivers of medieval Europe with untamed abandon. Was it to do with climate change? Political upheaval? Or was it tangled up with the discovery of a sail-ship technology capable of ferrying them across previously unnavicable seas? I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonika, and help me traverse the beginnings of the Viking Age and unpick this most classic of medieval conundrums. I'm thrilled to be joined by the historians, authors and hosts of the fabulous Vikingology podcast, Terry Barnes and CJ Adrian.

Welcome to Gone Medieval. Hello again. Thank you. We are so excited to have you guys. And particularly interesting, very good to get the host of Vikingology over here because you're a Gone Medieval. We love a Viking. We love a Viking moment.

We love a named Viking. We love a saga. but a thing that I don't think we've really ever covered before is exactly how all of this came to be, how a Viking in and of itself came into being. So I've dragged you here in order to hash this out today, and I'm going to start you off with a huge question. All right. When does the Viking Age start A and B,

is that kind of like a clear starting point or date or it's probably more complicated? I can see Terry is giving me a look. It's more complicated than that I can tell already. It always is. Do you want the English answer or the French answer? Yes. I want both. Yes.

Because they are different, huh? Ah, well, I'll say, you know, CJ and I are old hats at this one because that's actually the question on parsley on, the basis on which we met of sussing out this whole idea of when, when did the Viking Age begin or what caused it. And we have spoken many times on Vikingology, as our listeners will know, that we think the old Linda Sparn in 793 is very Anglo-centric view of the Viking Age. And so, yeah, 793, we kind of call BS on that a little bit. CJ, what do you? A couple of English historians got together and said, Well, when did the violence in the West start?

793 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. But they missed that in 789 the Vikings appear to the port of Portland and killed the Kings Reeves. So it wasn't actually the first. Oh, we think they were Vikings. But they wasn't actually the first attack. And so there's evidence to show that they were traveling the world a little bit before. For me, I think we could make a good argument that the beginning of the so-called Viking Age, First of all, that term in and of itself is problematic.

It's just another label that we modern people are putting on something that's a little bit more nebulous, right? So I don't want to get too far into the nitty-gritty of nomenclature. But I think a good argument for when the so-called Viking Age started would be when somebody, somewhere in the middle of the 8th century in Scandinavia, figured out how to put down a keel. We don't know when, we don't know who. We don't know how. We have the, oh, I'm forgetting the name of the boat from the 7th century where we have actually. a preserved boat from the 7th century

that is a proto-long ship. I'm trying to remember the name. I think it starts with a K. Terry, yeah, ideas. Yeah, I can't remember you. Yeah, you're right. Or you can even go back to the side of a ship earlier is similar, built, like the clinker built.

That too. That's the fore. Like you have the shape. Yeah. But you're like, they're almost there. You can see them. They're almost there. And then somewhere in the middle of the 8th century, somebody figured out how to put up a sail.

And just for reference, I think it's to impress on the listeners, the technological marvel that putting down this keel was, they were able to put up these sales that were massive. We're talking 800 square feet, I think. Whoa. If I'm wrong, Terry. Right. Like some of them, like the biggest ones, right? Like they could be these huge tapestries, right? And that really changed how the mobility of Scandinavian.

of the time, right? Yeah, yeah, because the sail, I mean, probably existed before that, but they do get bigger because of the structural support of the boat, so to speak. But, yeah, I think, like, I know for sure the Ladby ship, which is a medium-sized warship in Denmark, and that sail is like 32 by 20 feet. Sorry for the Europeans. I'm not sure. I can't do the quick meters calculation on that.

Well, look, in England, we're used to feed. It's fine. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Good. I mean, is that a catalyst, though? Like, I mean, can we just say, oh, yeah, well, they made a really cool ship, so therefore they had to go and kill the King's Reef, right?

Like, it doesn't necessarily follow, right? It's like, you could have a cool ship, and you don't necessarily have to then devote yourself to reeve killing, et cetera. Right. No, it's facilitates it, but it doesn't cause it, you know, if that's what you're actually looking for as the cause. you're going to have to go back way, way, way farther than the eighth century probably if you're looking for causes. Okay, all right.

So let's do it. Where are we going? Where's a cause? Well, we can start with that one, which is the, you know, the so-called technological determinism, right? Which is now they have these ships. And now it's impossible to prove that this was the case. This is all, you know, we're just, you know, theater of the mind kind of thing. But I just imagined, you know, this idea, I find the idea compelling that, well, now we have these ships.

What do we do with them? Well, let's sail to England and attack them on. You know, we don't. And they would have had contact, right? But for me, it's kind of like a kid with a baby gun. You give a kid a baby gun. What's he going to do? He's going to shoot a bird or something, right?

He's going to get in trouble. And that's, and so it's this idea of maybe, maybe. But is that really? I mean, because then does that justify 300 years of westward expansion and violence? I mean, now we're getting into some territory where that can't be the only thing to explain it. Well, and then the other thing, too, is the keel was put down somewhere in the middle of the 8th century. Linda's farm was in 793. So they sat on this technology for multiples of decades without really doing anything with it.

But you've already mentioned, right, that are we saying when we talk about the beginning of the Viking Edge that there maybe is a French answer as opposed to an English answer. if we were to look at it that way, when would the French say that the Viking Age begins? Oh, I'm sorry. I guess I wasn't clear. Terry gave you the French answer was to accuse the 793 event at Lindisfarne to be very Anglo-centric. I know. We cannot just look at the world to the English lens. That's what I was going for.

And like, fair enough, but I'm just like, all right, so what's the answer then? Like, for them, is it, you know, people in the Loire? Is it, you know, going on to the sense? Do they have for themselves a particularly French answer to when Vikings begin showing up there? Well, it's actually quite fascinating when we see the progression of the first rate. So 789, Port of Portland, I sort of count that. Then they go to 793 Lindisfarne. Then in 795, they go over to Iona.

And then from there, in 799, they hit the western coast of France, an island called Normoutier, which is the monastery of St. Philibéil, which is really out in the middle of nowhere. And now here's where it gets really interesting. When I visited Lindisfarne, I made a mistake. I told my dad when we went, don't ever tell anybody we did this. We went and there's a submersible road, and I didn't know about it, and we couldn't cross. So we had to go have lunch and have the best fish and chips I've ever had in my life at a nice little restaurant right on the hill, right across from Lindisfar, and then once the water went down, we went over. But my dad looked at it and he says, he says, the viking, he says, the viking, the,

the Vikings weren't stupid, were they? Because Narmuitea has what? A submergeable road. So they knew exactly where they were going. In my mind, I mean, I imagine, I mean, there's, it's not the, their targets, early targets don't seem random to me. Especially when you compare, say, Holy Island with Nomi Tia at the time, which would, nowadays, no Muitia is much bigger than it would have been back then because, um, uh, dikes and stuff that were built. And so there was expanded on the sandbar and so forth. But back then, it probably would.

have been about the size of Holy Island. Anyway. But yeah, so 799 is really the start of the French experience. We can't really even call them French. They're the Franks at the time. Oh, obviously. Yeah. Proto French, right? But 799 is kind of the beginning of their experience. And then they did experience the full breadth of the Viking age, as I like to call it. We have a French historian, Nussimusay, who came up with the three phases of Viking expansion because it's something that the Brittany region, at least in France, got the full experience of outside of the British Isles. And I think that that is a really important point because I do think that there is this tendency if we talk about the experience of Viking race to say, here's all the things that happen in England,

you know, this is what's happening in Ireland, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, the Vikings do attack France regularly, Paris, et cetera, things like this. But I think also within the English historiography, we have a tendency to say, ah, Normans. You know, you, you, you, you, you, you, kind of like skip right to the Norman bit and the, I suppose, normalization, normanization, if you will, to go that way of this group of Vikings who settle in what will become Normandy, right? But it's a fairly open question as to what that means. And yeah, okay, of course, it's periodization. So it's just something that historians are doing to do it, right? That's what we like, because we like to have a way of discussing anything. But, yeah,

I do think that you have to kind of squint in order to see it sometimes. Yeah, the paleontologist Jack Horner said, scientists like to name things. And I like to say historians like to delineate things. That's right. That's absolutely the thing. All right. So we know that part of the reason why the Viking Age starts is that these guys come up with a really cool keel.

These guys come up with really cool sales. And those are real new techs in terms of shipbuilding. You know, it's not as though Romans don't have ships, but they don't have the kind of ships that can move this quickly. They certainly don't have the kind of ships that can, for example, float in really shallow bodies of water, right? And that is one of the things that is incredibly important, no? Yeah, eventually. But again, I mean, we're talking about, as the question on the table, the causes of the Viking Age or, you know, what's actually going on during the Viking Age? because a lot of that, you know, what would be probably riverine highways, travel is going on, you know, once the Viking Age gets going. And so that's pretty much ninth century, you know, kind of stuff. But yeah, I mean, it definitely gave them an advantage that they had these shallower, you know, boats that were shaped so that they could get up these, you know, rivers and stuff. Yeah, I mean, and it sort of points to the adaptability and flexibility in general that we see about them in many ways, not just the ships, but other things.

as well. So yeah, while they're doing the Viking thing, you know, those boats are, those boats are important. I mean, I guess that that as a general rule of thumb is kind of a question of how the Vikings leave Scandinavia. It's not a why, right? Right. Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So then that's, yeah, that's the question. I think, you know, I mean, for my money, like the, I'm not, I'm a long d'uray gal. I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a historian and I'm like cause and effect and that kind of stuff. And so I think, you know, there's always going to be, you know, these these antecedents that set up the whole scenario. But I think, you know, for us, we're trapped in this tiny little sort of detail that is the written sources. And so the Viking Age, to my mind, doesn't begin in the eighth century. What begins in

the eighth century is that we're just lucky enough to have sources from them that survive. tell us about Viking quote unquote activity. But, you know, it's not like those people just sort of, you know, appeared out of thin air in that period of time. So do you think that perhaps that there was then rating before? Do you think that they were ever involved in it? Yeah, we know there's rating before. There's good, you know, evidence. There's other historians who've written about it. I mean, God bless Mary Beard. I love her. Shout out to Mary Beard. She's also a history hit person. I mean, she in her book SBQR talks about the menacing of pirates and raiding in the Roman Empire, right? I mean, stealing via boat is like human activity that's been going on like forever.

And the Scandinavian don't live on a separate planet. You know, they're like up there in the north, sure, but they're still connected to that world. And the North Sea is pretty active. There's good scholarship on that. So they're around. It's just that we, you know, for various reasons. We just don't have, you know, documents saying that it's Scandinavian doing that stuff. Yeah.

They're definitely not the first. I mean, that's one of the things I'm putting together, of course, on early medieval Brittany. And one of the things I'm going to be looking at is the first Atlantic wall built by the Romans in Brittany and what's now Britain in Normandy to repel sea raiders, which were at the time, the Franks, who were launching out of what would now be like Northern Holland and a little bit farther north. And we could almost call it like the first Viking Age, right? It's a Germanic population that's getting into boats and then sailing south and taking well from richer areas. And so it's interesting to see that this plays out kind of in different waves with different people, right? And we actually had guests on the Vikingology podcast that I'm thinking of Alex Harvey, who talks about kind of that deeper time look as, you know, could the Viking Age even be considered to have started with a fall over home with these population movements over time and some of the things that have. happened, then setting the stage for then what we encounter later in the late 8th and early 9th centuries.

I guess that makes sense because a lot of the time, you know, one of the things that historians hasten to point out is that when we say the term Viking, you know, a lot of the time it's more of a verb than it is a cultural marker of any sort. because if you are Scandinavian and you stay on the farm, and you never get into a boat and go raid a monastery, that doesn't make you a Viking. Correct. That just makes you a Scandinavian person. So there are certain people who are getting in these boats to do the raiding, and those are Vikings.

Yeah. But you can't just have a blanket statement about every Scandinavian person being a Viking, even if there is rather a lot of money exchanging hands as a result of. of this particular line of work. Let's call it that. Yeah. Well, actually, it is, yeah, that, that is the thing, the distinction, the job distinction thing is important, I think.

Well, because as like what CJ just said, I mean, as a, like, the first Viking age, I mean, Ian Wood in like the 1980s wrote about this and called the first Viking age actually the Saxon raids on England, because they're doing the same shit, you know? So that's, like I said, people have been stealing things via boat for a long time. And that, you know, Viking just happens to be sort of the Norse word for that. But, you know, as far as we can tell. But otherwise, yeah, it's pretty much just an activity. But when we want to talk about the Viking Age, when we talk about Vikings, I guess that one of the things we sort of mean is it is a particular iteration of guys in boats who show up.

They've got pretty cool boats. We can all agree the boats rock. I think we're all pretty settled on that one. But one of the things that people kind of bring up a lot when we talk about why the Viking Age starts, especially over the long d'erre, is climate change. Can you talk a little bit about that? Oh, Terry's giving me the thumbs down. She doesn't agree. All right.

Speak on it. So I'm with James Barrett on this one, which he says, The climate question is, quote, an old chestnut of limited relevance. Spicy. For a long time, I think people thought, oh, okay, well, we have, which, you know, maybe some people know this, you know, it's kind of this period. Well, we're going through kind of maybe one of these ourselves, a medieval warm period. And so, and this is, you know, supposed to last maybe for around 300 years, right? Maybe coinciding with the time of the beginning of the Viking agent. So hence it made it easier for Scandinavians to set out en masse because, you know, maybe the conditions were better. better. Weather was nice. There weren't as many sort of icebergs the size of, you know, houses floating around and to dodge and all of that. But I think with climate science, even since Barrett wrote that in like, what, 2008 or something, it's just gotten better and better. And I think the adjustment of when that period actually was is now later. So it's more like

maybe mid-10th century to mid-13th century. So if you're going to look at climate conditions as a potential cause for the Viking age. There again, it's kind of a timing problem. But I would say climate conditions, though, do they not make it easier for later in the Viking period, or at least, you know, in terms of Scandinavian settlement a little bit easier? I mean, doesn't it make it easier to live in Greenland, for example, or Iceland? Like, if things warm up a little bit. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe Iceland. I mean, I think as far as we can tell, the Greenlanders had a pretty tough go at it. They actually gave it up after a certain point, right? um less um yeah okay so climate change might be limited in terms of a reason why guys get in a boat

i'll grant you that i think that's that's probably true but climate change surely has to help in terms of settlement of places like for example iceland right maybe greenland i mean like i'm not saying that greenland worked out obviously obviously greenland is a bit of a fiasco eventually and then they have to give it all up but could it be that warmer temperatures encourage them to give it a go in these further flung places? I don't know. I mean, you know, one of the things that I think is also a little bit problematic with some of the approaches with regard to this whole, I mean, this is a big deal, right? Or so we think, you know, historically. And, you know, in the same way we were talking earlier

about, like, you know, historians or chunk things up and it's fake, you know, in these time periods or whatever. I think we also, you know, obviously we can't chase monocausality either. So it's like, you know, sure, climate change probably did, you know, have an effect on certain things. Or maybe at the very least, you know, if it was colder there for a while and then maybe getting them to think, like, let's just pick up and go move somewhere warmer where it's easier to grow crops, you know, that kind of stuff. But it's always going to be, you know, sort of part of a network of, you know, different kind of complex factors all sort of coming together. I think, at a certain point in time, you know what I mean?

Of course, of course. I mean, I guess that I've sort of always been slightly confused by that because, okay, so yes, it might make it easier to get in a boat. It might make it easier to settle somewhere else. But wouldn't it being warmer make it a little bit easier to grow crops in Scandinavia? Like, is it like, why would it being a problem, why would that be a problem for Scandinavians? One of the things with sort of looking at the Viking Age and, talking about Scandinavia, we also sort of lose the nuance of like, hey, it's a lot different

in Denmark than it is in northern Norway, right? Or Iceland or whatever. And so I think I had a statistic that I tell my students where it's like 3% of the land in Norway is arable. And, you know, it's not that way in Denmark. It's much flatter and more amenable to growing crops. And so you do get differences in what they can grow or if they can grow anything at all. And so, yeah, I think that matters too. You know, when you're talking about quote unquote Vikings, actually, who are you talking about? Yeah. And I mean, I guess it's interesting, though, because, you know, you say earlier on, people in Brittany are having problems with Franks who have come out of Denmark. And I'm like, is it something about Denmark? You get to Denmark and you say, you know, I feel like doing a spot of

raiding. Is there something about the flat land that makes you want to get in a boat? And the fact that the border is like you just go across, you just go over there. You don't have to get actually in the boat and go anywhere. It's just like you can just walk over there and steal their stuff. That's fine. It's fine. Yeah. We never talk about the overland Viking raids. The climate idea, what is it, climate determinism, what I've encountered, And I think there's a popular theory on the Internet that a lot of people jump onto that I've seen in web forums and so forth, which is that there was a warming period before the so-called Viking Age and then it cooled down again. And so there's a population explosion. And then after that, there was a restriction of resources.

And so people left home to go raid because there just wasn't enough at home for the larger population. And what's interesting is there was a study, and I can't remember the study authors, but we could probably look it up, that looked at the average heights of, Viking Age Scandinavians and found this really interesting dip in the average height during the Viking Age. So Scandinavians were taller before and they were taller after. But during the Viking Age, there's this obvious drop in the average height of the bones that were collected. Now, of course, we have to be careful when we look at population, you know, sample sizes and so forth. But it was not statistically negligible. So, but does it, does that mean that this climate hypothesis has any teeth? You know, it's what it really boils down to, and there's a great paper by a group of archaeologists, Morgan Kelly and Cormacograda, a couple years ago, that looked at all of the ins and outs of this climate hypothesis.

And really, at the end, as so many things to do with the Viking Age, they just said there's just not enough evidence to say one way or the other. So to Terry's point, we're kind of swirling around this idea of, well, could climate have done this, whatever? you know, it very well probably did play a certain role. It's just from today's lens with the evidence we have, we can't really say, oh, it was climate. We love the early medieval period, don't we, folks? It's fantastic to try to take the four pieces of a hundred piece jigsaw puzzle and try to make something of it. Right. It's a cat.

No, it's a cow. I don't know. I don't know. Okay. So there are, though. then, you know, another series of hypothesis or, you know, not saying that this is everything, but there's a series of ideas also that say there are kind of social or cultural trends that could have led to this. And, you know, among those being that rating or coming back with really cool

things that you have stolen from other people, having, you know, incredible booty, that's glamorous, right? And, you know, maybe one of the things that's kind of going on is just an idea of glory or an emphasis culturally on the acquisition of these goods very specifically through a means of battle. Yes. Well, this is near and dear to me because as a historical fiction writer, my titular character Hasting is all about, he says it so many times. reputation is everything. And he's able to raise fleets and armies and move mountains essentially based on his reputation of, oh, that's

so-and-so. He killed Hagar and Rurik and, you know, and he gets he's very good at dueling. And so it's this idea that my reputation is what I bring to the table. But to get reputation, you can't just sit idly in Scandinavia. You have to go do things. And so then he shows up at Nantes in 843, in Paris, in 845.

And more recently, I send him to Constantinople. Just forget because why not? He's like, I'm going to take the biggest city in the world. And they get there and they're like, it's too big. But I have another idea. But yes, and there's a, there's a 2015 paper by Stephen Ashby, which Terry and I were actually discussing yesterday, that talks about this idea of social capital.

And if you want to think about it as the, I would call it the proto-chanson de jesse that we know from the later medieval period. It's the, it is the story of your deeds. And the better the story, the more weight you can throw around with your peers in the warrior culture makes it easier to raise armies and so forth. It can also be problematic too, right? If somebody is little too popular and you're a king, you're trying to hold on to power. And then, you know, this guy might show up with an army at my door. You know, there's, there are there are caveats to this. Terry, any thoughts?

Yeah. So I'm kind of steeped in the period actually 500 to 800. in my own research. And again, I kind of like sort of go back to like, all right, as a cause for the Viking Age. It's like that, I mean, social capital is an interesting and it's actually quite a very modern sort of idea. There's a lot of discussion like in economic circles and sociological circles and stuff about, you know, what does that even mean, you know, in terms of capital and stuff. And so applying it to the Viking Age, I guess is kind of, is it anachronistic? I don't know. But if you have that kind of sort of social sort of, sort of, you know, zeitgeist, right? Where this is a culture that believes it's cool and it adds to your reputation to go out and do these things. Like, did that just become part of the culture in the eighth century? You know, like, that would have to be something that's just sort of embedded in Scandinavian whatever for probably a longer period of time. So the idea that you could go out and achieve something and then gain some kind of renown doesn't, to my mind, you know, and again,

we're probably, you know, lacking, you know, solid evidence, but, but actually there's archaeological evidence for, you know, various types of, you know, bling, especially connected to getting it from the Roman Empire or the old Roman Empire and stuff in graves and all of that. And then we see very clearly in the archaeology that there's periods where that actually stops in Scandinavia and then, you know, kind of picks up again during the period of the Viking Age. So we kind of have this waxing and waning of interest in, you know, showing off. So again, I don't know, you know, how you, you know, sort of peg that, at least if we're going to talk about our sort of nominal Viking age of, you know, like the 700s to around

1,100. I don't know that it's something that is, again, it's probably part of it, like the ships and like the climate, but it's, is it the thing that actually like lights the spark? You know, who's to say, really? I mean, I hate to be, it sort of sounds like I'm like the buzzkill all over the place here. But, yeah. I love this. I love it. For me, the, for me, the most fun thing to be is the person who says,

Mm. Actually, no. Total buzz killed, Terry. Yeah, exactly. Listen, I'm going to see another one up for you. What do you think about the idea that one of the things that might have sparked all of this is the idea is the idea. is the idea of a bride price. Can you tell us a little bit about what a bride price is

and why it is that people think people may have left Scandinavia as a result of it? This is actually an interesting hypothesis and somewhat controversial. I've talked to definitely historians and archaeologists who are like, I don't know, and then others who are like, yeah. And Barrett actually was one that I mentioned earlier in his famous article, and people can Google it, look at what caused the Viking Age question mark is the title, and it was from 2008.

where he talks about this thing called the marriage imperative. And the idea that you've got, you know, maybe a little bulge of young men in population demographics, and they need to be able to compete within the marriage market in Scandinavia. And, you know, you've got to pay a bride price, which, you know, for some people maybe would recognize the word like a dowry. But the bride price, you know, the dowry usually comes from the female side. And then the bride price is paid by the male side. so the intentional or the intended groom needs to effectively, you know, to put it quite rudely, like buy the bride from her family. And so you've got to have some kind of wealth.

And maybe some young men don't have it. So the idea is that's why they get in boats and go out and steal things from other places is because then they can come home and say, see, I've got the money. You know, I can now get married. And another kind of wrinkle to it came in some research that was done by better. Raffield, and I think Neil Price is on that, maybe Mark Collard. Anyway, yeah, in like 2016, where they talked about these thing called operational sex ratios and, you know, so again, getting to a demographic imbalance in Scandinavia, but their hypothesis had to do with the fact that the demographic imbalance was caused by polygony being practiced by Scandinavians, which

was a very longstanding practice in Germanic cultures, and then it doesn't really get stopped until Christianity comes to Scandinavia. But when you have politely, you have politely, you know, effectively, what it means is, you know, men can have more than one wife or concubines, etc., whereas females legally are supposed to only be, you know, sexually attached to one man at a time. But you get this concept of, you know, the rich guy is hoarding all the women. And then it leaves, you know, some of the guys who are probably younger and obviously not as rich kind of out in the cold. And so in order to come back and compete, again, they maybe, you know, got into boats and went out to get the bride price money. So, I mean, I think it's interesting. What I say would be the cause of the Viking Age? No. But for some of those guys, yeah, probably it was. Yeah. Yeah. The thing, you know, like otherwise, you know, or the other option, which we know that Scandinavians did with because they were human traffickers is that they're, if they don't go out and get the wealth, they're just going to go out and take captive women so that they can have a woman or more. Yeah. And we, we have some, some evidence on this, right? Like in terms of Vikings, being intermarried with people that they are, you know, raiding, people they are stealing humans from, or even people that they subsequently invade and subjugate, right? There's some of that. I think what's being revealed now is in all the new genetic testing and the studies that are done on that,

that are expanding our view on the genetic diversity that existed in Scandinavia at the time. What's really interesting is evidently they're, they found traces of an inward microcontrad. into Scandinavia from like Poland and then a reverse migration out into central Europe. It's, it's wild. Like, I mean, these people were not staying still before, during, or after the Viking Age. I mean, it's a, it's an era defined by movement. And so trying to pin everybody down as quote, unquote, Vikings is difficult because it's, it's, what does that even mean? Really?

Because it's, these people are swapping around and, you know, they're. And one of the studies that I love, I love bringing this one up is, is, is somebody did some genetic testing on cats. They found that so to keep the rats at bay on the ships, they would bring cats. And the cats would go with them to these far-flung places. And the cats also got very busy genetically. And then left traces of that. And so there's a study done, like I want to say five or six years ago, that basically found these traces of Nordic cats mixed in with other cat breeds all across Europe.

It's wild. And that's just another piece of evidence that shows that these were people that were on the move. Yeah, I've got a Viking cat. I've got a Manx, you know. And so, yeah. Yeah, it's great. And there's a cat today in Spain that's got 1% Scandinavian cat minks DNA who's going around to the other cats and going, I'm a Viking. I love that.

But I think this is a really important point, that because I think that there is this modern tendency, like at least since the 19th century, when we. invented the concept of nationhood, right? And the idea that there are nations, you know, capital N nations, and people in nations behave in this particular way, and we all have particular customs,

and you can trace yourself to a lineage. A lot of what, especially in the 19th century, people were doing at the time, was looking to the Middle Ages to justify these ideas that there is something unique to this nation that

can be traced through history. And I do think that this idea really disregards the fact that people move around all the time. And they move around all the time in the medieval period. You know, people will say, oh, yes, well, there's the period of the great migrations and does that contribute to bringing down Rome, et cetera, et cetera. But that also supposes that, yeah, you have this period of great migrations and then everyone just kind of settles and they are what they are. But that's just not the case. Oh, my God. It's so not the case. And like CJ said, I mean, some of the, you know, more recent, actually even going back like 20 years or so,

since we've been able to map the genome and everything and then unleash this, you know, scientific tool, we know a lot more. But even despite that, because I talk about this with my students when you talk about, you know, so the Nazis co-opting Nordic history and heritage and saying, you know, they're, you know, the pure Aryan race and all this kind of stuff. And it's like people who talk about pure, racially pure people in the United States. the world or suggest that there is that. It's just bullshit. They just don't understand human history and human migration period all throughout history. And also the fact that, as I just mentioned, right, like Scandinavians were slavers, you know, they were human traffickers. And so that means, you know, for, you know, I don't know, can you point to a culture in history that had slaves or that trafficked in human beings and that every once in a while didn't have sex with those slaves.

You know, so it's like you can't have pure genes when those kinds of things happen. And then lastly, I mean, there's a famous study from Iceland, you know, which you probably know about that talks about the settlers there and, you know, the DNA on them is that, you know, the male population of the early settlers was, I can't remember the exact numbers, but something around the order of like 70% you know came from Scandinavia probably you know Norway or western Scandinavia whereas the women like an equal percentage actually came from Celtic places and so you know there's yeah there's just so much intermixing going on in that world it's just impossible to have this kind of racially pure I mean it's just a myth in the bad sense of that word a falsity

What about the idea that the political makeup of Scandinavia contributes to the beginning of the Viking Age? You know, we have a kind of particular landscape in the 8th century, right? Like, is this a way of, I suppose, organizing society, organizing yourself as a king? Like, Terry, you already mentioned that sometimes, you know, you have these really good warriors, but you're the king, and you're like, uh-oh, he's getting a little bit too big for his britches. do these tensions lead to the kind of conflicts that sort of push people into boats? Because, you know, there's a whole line of thinking that one of the reasons we come up with the Crusades is that there are simply too many nobles fighting each other and the Pope has to point them somewhere else. I mean, is it a similar thing with the Vikings? Of all the things that we've talked about, I would say that's probably one of the biggest ones that you could say, yes.

and in my research on sort of these kind of evolutionary long-d-ray sort of processes, you certainly have that. And it's been well documented for Scandinavia, budding kingship, you know, dudes on the make, and then, you know, sort of jockeying first with each other at home and then taking that show abroad in order to increase power, prestige. And, you know, to fund a war machine costs money. and you then need to go out and loot and do the Viking thing, whatever, at times in order to make that possible. So, yeah, that political aspect of it is very important from kind of the internal side of it or what we would call maybe a push factor.

But maybe CJ can look to the like a poll factor, like, you know, political situation and maybe the Carolingian Empire or something that might draw Vikings. Yeah, I mean, it ties in a little bit. We're starting to paint a picture here, right? It ties a bit into that youth bulge. If you think about the Crusades, again, we have all of these Norman knights with no land to inherit, and they're all fighting each other. And, well, what do we do to curb the violence? I mean, the goal is to curb violence in Europe. Oh, send them on a crusade.

It's a wonderful idea. And it worked, sort of. And so you can think of Scandinavia, right? We talked a little bit about the climate and sort of this shorter heights because maybe there's overpopulation. And then we have a youth bulge. And then we have the co-concubinage and the operational sex ratio issue. And so now, you know, and we're also talking about a time and place where from where I'm sitting and everything I've looked at, it doesn't look like there's any restriction on who can become a warrior. I can be a farmer's son and pick up an axe and I can get on a ship and I can go be a war, you know, I can go join the best of them.

And maybe not successfully. But so without any limitations on that, then if I'm a chieftain and I have and I'm trying to keep peace and limit violence, within my realm, then I have a vested interest in figuring out how to get rid of these guys because, A, I don't want him to have anything to do with my eight girlfriends and B, he's violent. So let's put them somewhere. And then there's this other issue, too, coming from the East, because we haven't really talked about the East, right? We've really stayed Anglo-centric. And then we talked about the Kiel in the mid-eighth century.

But we also know that there was silver coming back from the East, the Byzantines, starting about in the mid-eighth century, too. And there is, there are theoretical frameworks. I'm thinking of a great paper by Sorin Sinebeck that looked at the long distance trade networks that brought back some of the silver. And in fact, James Barrett, I think is in this 2010 paper, kind of admits at the end that, well, the best we can say is the Viking Age may have started because of a youth bulge and also an influx of silver from the Islamic world that then kind of offset the silver standard. So then we're also adding to the equation that not only do these young men. not have access to brides, but the brides they do have access to are getting more and more expensive because the value of silver is dropping from this influx of silver coming from the east. Now, did this all actually happen?

We have like little pieces that tell us maybe kind of going on. And so we have this really unstable moment in history where all this stuff is going on to some extent, right? And then we get into the relations with our neighbors. and something that I actually flashed on to this early. Now, I don't know, again, the evidence is really light, right? But I think the story is really interesting. So we have the Carolingians who are these aggressive expansionist Christians. And when they move into Northern Europe, Charlemagne specifically,

I've seen the mistake and I've made the mistake of thinking that like the Saxons are different from the Danes. They're not talking to each other. Well, there's one particular event that shows how interconnected everybody was at the time, which is there was a rebellion. in Saxony, led by a Saxon chieftain named Widukind. And they were quite successful. And in fact, Charlemagne had to pull away from his campaign in Poland to come back and put them down.

They fought this big battle on the shores of the Aller River, that a place called Verdun, not Verdun, but Verdun, but Verdin. So they fight this battle. And then Charlemagne takes 4,500 prisoners and decides, you know what we're going to do, we're going to baptize them all to save their souls. but while they're in the water, like, don't let them back up. The numbers are dubious. We don't know.

It could have been 1,000, could have been 45. So the estimates are kind of, you know, range, you know, kind of swing wildly, right? But we do know that they took their prisoners and drowned them in the river. The particular thing about Whittekind is that he was sort of an important person because he was married to the sister of the king of the Danes Sigafried. Uh-oh. who. Not great.

Not great for political unrest purposes. Right. And the Danes are, you know, you can just imagine the Danes like, he did what to my brother-in-law? I mean, on one hand, I'm kind of happy about it because I didn't like him. But on another, the outrage, the outrage. So then we see there is an obscure document from England by a contemporary document from the time, or a little bit after, by Simeon of Durham. that described the raid at Lindisfarne. And he described one of the things that the Vikings who attacked Lindisfarne did,

which was they took some of their prisoners and drowned them in the water in kind of this showy display. And so some historians have thought that this was a sign that at least in the Scandinavian consciousness, there was this memory of the assault against their kin. Now, even though it was Saxons, they obviously knew the story and they obviously understood. And Charlemagne wasn't drowning these people in a vacuum either. He was sending a message to the Saxons and anybody else who dared to challenge him. So we think there may have been a connection there. And then when we couple that in with, you know, it's basically we've got this very unstable situation in Scandinavia.

And the Carolingians kind of come up and start poking at it like a beehive, right? There's this idea that maybe these political relations, had something to do with that westward expansion, kind of exploding all at once. It also explains why, or could explain why France, for example, was such an early and frequent target of the Vikings because the Carolingian realm was of interest to marauding Scandinavians. Could be. Maybe. Well, okay. What do you also think of the idea that perhaps one of the things that gets a lot of guys into boats is the unification of Norfolk?

way. We have Harold Fairhair who comes together and says, guess what, guys, it's one kingdom. Is it a long skinny kingdom? Yes, it very much is, but this belongs to me now. And then all the little guys who had their 20 acres or whatever and said that they were, you know, the earl of this bay. They're there in trouble. Yeah. And then they go, see ya. We're going to Iceland. Yeah, exactly, right? I mean, at least that's what, you know, the hypothesis is based on the evidence that Harold Fairhair was one of those that gets a little bit too big for his britches. And, you know, but he does. He does expand and take over and then starts to lean on these other chieftains.

And they're like, hey, dude, you know, like, see ya. We're not interested in being, you know, a vassal to you. So, you know, but then again, you know, Harold Fairhair is living in the late 9th century. So this is not the beginning of the Viking age. Just as a century in when he's doing that. But he, at least as far as Neil Price is concerned, you know, is a Saikungnigr, which is, you know, a legit, you know, a legit kind of Viking kind of guy probably if we went back and met him and looked at, you know, who he was and what he did. Because he controls access to the sea, basically, you know. And so he's a person that's a king that's not necessarily land base as much as it is, you know, kind of more of.

Viking activity based because it's it's controlling access to the water. So, you know, he is a Viking and it's kind of, you know, it's full stop then. I mean, if people are interested in like the Viking age and like what really is like serious Viking activity in the sense that our kind of modern pop culture likes to see it, man, the ninth century is where it's at. Like it's just like exploding everywhere. You know, and then they start to, you know, then the Christian thing starts to come in and kill the buzz and change. change things a little bit. But yeah, so, you know, Harold Fairhair as a cause for the Viking Age, I think he's actually the result of the Viking. I mean, he's like the poster child for the Viking age in my mind. It's like winning at monopoly, but for Vikings. Harold Fairhair, didn't he grow up in England as a hostage? Wasn't that part of his story? Or was that another one? I think it was. No, I think it's fair hair. Yeah, I can't remember. Yeah, I think, yeah, because there was, there was actually close relations between the Norwegians and the English at the time. And I think he, I think he grew up in the English court.

So there's that rapprochement, as we like to call in French, that, you know, but also shows that these worlds were not separate. There was this kind of molding. This brings actually brings up a good, you know, I'm thinking of a study that was done on wetstones, the wetstone trade. A couple years ago, what, 2018, I want to say it came out. Tremendous work. They found wetstones from way north and Norway. As far south is Normandy in England. And so it showed that there were trade networks that connected Scandinavia as far as the far reaches of Norway and then, you know, Western Europe, long before the Viking Age. And part of the paper was looking at, you know, what is what's driving this? And then one of the things that they had in there was it had to do with the power structures with the chieftains that were running this trade.

And then kind of looking at what was it that caused them to shift their intentions from trading to rating? It's a really interesting paper, but it's something that's been looked at because at the beginning of the Viking Age we really don't have a lot of information on individual figures. So it's mostly just themes and trends that we're looking at. And so with this, to your question about rulers and politics, they did look at how that interplay with the ruling class might have contributed to the outbreak of violence in the West. I find this to be a really interesting. interesting point because there are some people who say, oh, you know, we have these established trade networks before the Viking Age such as it is, you know, air quotes around Viking Age kicks off. And so clearly we have people in Scandinavia trading up and down the seaboard, getting

in boats and making this happen. And, you know, there are some that say, oh, like these are akin to scouting missions, right? It's not just trade that was going on here. It's saying, oh, it seems that you guys have money for a very fine woodstone. So like I'm going to come back and see to that, right? What do you think about that? Like to me, that seems a little bit too much. Like, I do think that this is actual trading going on, but then maybe you get a nicer boat. And then you say, hmm, well, I'm down there. Who needs trade if you can just take the stuff, right? Oh, I think this is a really, yeah, I agree with you. This is really interesting. And I think one of the things that we often don't think about were like so tied into just commodities, whether it's

silver or wetstones or slaves or whatever. Like information was a commodity. These people had information networks that like they're not just like, oh, let's just point the boat in that direction and see where we end up. I mean, they knew and they knew what was out there. And like you said, I mean, they have been trading around, I mean, especially if we're talking about the west, like the North Sea stuff, but certainly the Baltic is really active from very early on. And, and And so I think we underestimate, and I think the historians for the longest time, too, is sort of this idea of like, oh, medieval peasant never goes any farther than two miles from their house or whatever. And it's like we're finding more and more. And especially like with DNA stuff as well.

Like, now these people are on the move. And even though it's a three mile an hour world, what's faster if you get a boat. But they are on the move. And they're interacting with each other. And they, I mean, in Neil Price is like some of the, he argues that some of the, you know, sort of shock and awe that appears. in the accounts like the raid on Linda Sfarne or some of the stuff in the annals and chronicles and you know in the and Frankia and stuff is not shocking on like what the hell is going on here you know like that we're never seeing this before it's more of like hey we were just trading

with you last week and now you're like being mean to us and just taking our shit like what the hell what happened here why did what's what's the switch you know and so I think that there is definitely some of that and there's certainly and actually Chris Coyman's has written about this. Even somebody that I've researched to existed like a hundred years ago was writing about this, that the idea that these people were way more calculating and sophisticated about logistics and, you know, what, what is the sort of, you know, return, you know, sort of risk reward calculations of like return on investment? Yeah, we're not going to go right over there because that's going to take too long and there's not enough there to get or whatever. They start to become

very calculated about it and become what we would see in our modern times is, you know, kind of pretty savvy businessmen. I mean, I do think that there's something to that. CJ, you've touched on this already, but this idea that silver plays a large part in Viking expansion and Viking more generally. How important is silver to Scandinavian economy at this point in time? And, you know, where is it coming from? Yeah, so there's a lot of work that's been done on trying to figure out how important silver. was. And from what I've seen, I think a lot of historians come to the conclusion that the social networks in Scandinavia were heavily reliant on silver. Going back to this idea of the bride price, it was paid in silver, right? So if I want to get married, I have to have silver,

if I want to do, you know, all these different things. And so then your family networks now rely on silver. So any disruption to the value of silver may have had dilaterious effects. right. So an influx from the east, for example. So we have the, we have evidence to show that there was Islamic silver being brought back way before what we would call the Viking Age in large quantities. And in fact, it was on the, our guest, Octavia Randolph on the Vikingology podcast. She's a writer and she also lives in Gotland now. And she was telling us about all these weird rules in Gotland about you can't dig deeper than 30 centimeters in your yard in Gotland without a state representative. Because, the likelihood of you running into a silver horde is so high. And then she had this story that she told us about a farmer who, you know, there's a rabbit den. The rabbit was like kicking out the dirt to dig its den

and it was shooting out, you know, silver dirhams. And like a tree that fell over and a treasure hoard just came up with the roots, right? So they have these weird stories, which tells us that there was so much silver coming into Scandinavia. They didn't know what to do with it. And if the silver economy is what's holding family units in the social order together, that's a problem.

And so the first people who brought it back thought, you know, look at us, look how wonderful it is that we're bringing in all this silver and look how rich we are. But now they're so rich with something that's so, you know, with so much silver, there's just nobody else who can compete. It actually ties into a theory that I have. It's my own personal theory that I have. And caveat, I am starting to distance my idea away from the start of what caused the Viking Age sort of thing. Like I use the silver economy to kind of say this is kind of how it works. But it really has to do with back to this idea of the Vikings being really intentional and going to Western France as early as they did to Norma Tia in 799. Why?

Well, they didn't just go to Norma Tia because in 793 Linusfar and 75 Iona. And then after that, those sites were essentially bypassed. And sites after that were also bypassed after the kind of first hit and run raid versus Normaite in San Fiberi, we have evidence to show in 819 there's a diploma from the Carolingians talking about frequent and persistent raids on the island. And as far as we can tell, the monks of San Fibir started their annual pilgrimages away, right? They got permission to build a satellite priory on the continent to go hide away during Viking season. Right? So it appears they were coming back with alarming frequency. Every year, there is a Viking season.

And then they even tried to defend the island one summer. They're like, hey, what if we built a castrum to defend the monastery? And so they did. And then they stationed it with soldiers. And the Vikings came and were like, okay, what's this? Oh, we're defending against you. Okay, well, we're still taking it. And it failed.

And then there was a big battle in 836 where the Franks tried, you know, the local, you know, the Comte de Puetu et la Gernesh, It was Renault der Boj, who brought an army to Normoutier to try and save it because it was a very valuable island to the Carolingians because it made salt. And salt was critical to the empire. So they go and try to defend the island. And we think 835, maybe 836, the chronicler or Menterius was kind of off by his dates versus some other animals, but whatever. And so there's just this big battle on Normoutier and the Franks win, a landslide. They kill a ton of Vikings. They barely lose any men.

So they tell us. I mean, history is written by the victors. And then they're like, okay, we won, we go home. And then two months later, the Vikings come back and take the island. Oh, bless. It wasn't even the same group. It wasn't the same group as a different group. So they're showing up with alarming frequency in this area.

Why? And so there's this kind of idea that they're there for something other than silver. I can get silver much closer to Scandinavia than Nomuite, right? And the other presumption, too, is if the monastery is where we hold all the silver, they're not going to restock the monastery full of the city. silver, right, every year, you would think. Now, we did have a guest on Vikingology who talked about how actually, probably they did. Oh, no. That was Matthew Panesse, who's an expert on ninth century monasticism. And he kind of changed, he changed my ideas on that a little bit of like,

they probably did bring some stuff because this stuff was really important to them if they were going to live there. But with the pilgrimages, they probably would have taken it back and forth. In fact, Ermentarius tells us about that, about how they would pack up the wagons and put all their valuables and leave. So there must have been something else there that they were interested in, right? And I've always thought, and I was taught from, because the local mythology here is that they came for salt, which is kind of like a no-dah, right? But then the no-da turns into, I have a friend in Denmark who said, look, I've got ocean in 50 kilometers in any direction. I don't need salt. Plus, you know, in the Viking Age, cod was dried and we didn't need it. So there's no

demand for salt in Scandinavia, right? So then my next idea was, well, maybe, maybe. be this trade disruption with the silver is the answer, right? And essentially the idea was, originally my idea was, that the silver came in from the east, disrupted the silver trade. Then we have all the co-concubinage, you know, youth bulge, et cetera, that are all playing this role and kind of frothing together this soup. And then the Danes and the Norwegians are trying to figure out, well, what do we trade with the Swedes who have all this silver? Obviously, they're not going to want silver, right? So what do we trade with them? And so they're trying to figure out what are we going to do. So I thought maybe that could explain why they'd go back, get salt from Western

France, take it back into Scandinavia, high quality salt, trade it with the Swedes who are going up freshwater river systems to the Byzantine Empire, and they would need salt to preserve their food. In fact, St. Olaf in his life story, I'm forgetting the name of the document. But anyway, they talk about there's a somebody died and they preserved his body in a barrel. of salt. So we know that they're using barrels of salt to transport up and down. So that was the original idea. Then a new study came out recently, I want to say 2022, that found evidence that there were herring fish bones caught in the North Atlantic and traded into the Baltic as early as the early ninth century. Wow. Now the dates are a little off and so there's just this little, you know,

but the idea is cod was dried, but herring has to be salted. And so then now there's this idea of the herring trade may have started several centuries before we originally thought. And now we're in in this territory where if I'm a Norwegian fisherman and I'm fishing for herring off the coast of Norway, I need to preserve it. I need salt. Where do I get it? And this is, we're talking about the early 800s versus the first attack in the Muitia in 799, but then the repeated attack starting in the 810s, I want to say, right, ramping up in the 820s. you kind of see this economic tie. Now, okay, so can I come back and say, did Salt play a role in the beginning of the Viking Age?

I think I just solved the repeated attacks in Nomi Tia. That's it. That's it. But I think it also shows that when we look at the causes of the Viking Age, right? Well, my favorite answer to this is what cause of Viking Age? Somebody commented one time on my article that said, The Vikings. Okay, thanks. Fair play.

Yeah, all right, yeah. But I think it also shows that we're talking about, I think Terry mentioned this earlier. we have different groups of people all over the place with different motivations and needs, right? So we look at, for example, in the people who came from Norway and traded the wetstones, then they come back the next year and attack. Well, why did you attack? Well, maybe they got raided by Danes. Maybe they, you know, who knows, this is a, they live these, you know, lives of necessity where life is hard. The seasons can change very quickly, weather, raiders, everything.

So they're just trying to scrounge together living. And so then when we look at all of this and we think, oh, these, it's six determinisms by James Barrett. I think an honorable effort to try and explain all this. But when you zoom in just a little bit, you start to see that it's really just this patchwork of all these different people doing all these different things all at once. And then it just kind of radiates out, right, over time. Well, so, you know, it's all part of a complex tapestry. Historians love to be like, well, it's complicated because we're right. Exactly.

Right. But what do you think exists kind of in the popular imagination about it? You know, this is the troubles, is we're historians and so we'll say, here's these eight different factors that we think contribute to a Viking age. But I think that popular perceptions of things like this is that you can have something simple. So what's kind of floating out there in the zeitgeist? What are the Viking age vibes? Well, at least in my experience, like with my students and sort of public speaking,

that I do and whatever. I mean, people don't really spend a lot of time thinking about what started it. They just know it is and that these people existed that they call Vikings and they have a kind of trope in their mind of, you know, shield maidens and dudes with axes and, you know, IKEA rugs on their shoulders and things like that, you know, so I, you know, I think, and for my money, like, I'm always sort of, I mean, I'm not like one of those, you know, well, actually historians like we were talking about earlier, but I am one of the people who sort of rail on, you know, the problem with the Viking age, and especially what we're talking about today with the beginnings of it, is the evidence is just so spotty. And Scandinavia is still what we call a prehistoric

culture at that period in time, because other than runic inscriptions, we don't have anything written, and we certainly don't have anything written by them telling us their own story. And so then, well, what happens when you have gaps in silences? Well, people just love. to pour themselves right in, you know, and just, you know, manipulate that stuff and make the Vikings who they want them to be. And I think that to a large degree, that's just kind of what we see in modern popular culture. And again, going back to like what we said, so the corrupting of Nordic history and heritage by the Nazis, I mean, they're doing the same thing that people do now by Marvel Universe 10 years ago creating a female Thor. You know, I mean, it's like, okay, fine,

it's all up for grabs, just make it what you want it to be, because the evidence isn't there to really refute you too much. So like, okay. And so yeah, I mean, I just think that that's kind of, kind of where we are. And I always tell my students, too, it's like the Vikings don't change. Who looks at them and what they see does. Oh, I love that. That was really good, Terry. Okay. Well, just to finish us off, so I've been asking you what the causes of the Viking age are. What are the causes of the end of the Viking Age? Why do these guys knock it off? You know, is this, is this just a Christianization? is it just, we kind of got as far as we can, like, you know, made it to Greenland, guys, pretty good. We're just settled down here.

I'd say Christianization and I'd also say state building. I'd say monarchies in Scandinavia, all of that happens during the Viking age, roughly beginning, say, the 10th century. And by the end of it, you know, it's pretty solid. And, well, actually, to quote Anders Winroth, what happens is the Scandinavians finally become European. Yes, yes. I wrote an article about the end of the Viking Age, actually. And it's all the usual suspects, right? The Christianization of Scandinavia, the fortification of Western Europe, right?

We start to see Kestrums pop up. And so now these areas are better defended, consolidation of power, et cetera. But one of my favorite stories is what happens after the end of the Viking Age. and taking us back to 1089 when Pope Urban, it was 1089, right? Pope Urban the second called for a crusade saying, we need you. Oh, 1095, sorry, okay. 1095, anyway, 1095, thank you. So he calls for the crusade.

And he says, yes, we want you to leave your land and go abroad and fight. And the first kingdom to join was Denmark. Denmark, Denmark. It was Denmark. The days were like, we're going. So I think that spirit, I think that spirit remained after, right? And it's not like raiding just stopped overnight, right? Like there's examples of raids that persisted well into 12th century.

Arguably, the Icelanders kept raiding each other that way. I mean, there was a whole, anyway, so it's kind of, it's more like, you know, bleeding out a little bit, right? It's kind of like blood and sand. It kind of reaches out like little hands. And then so it's like, okay, here's the spot. And again, historians like to delineate things. Mm-hmm. What do you think, Terry? What would your answer be? No, I think he's right. I think it, you know, there's just like a couple of, you know, sort of monumental things that happens. Like we said, like the Christianization or the state building. But then, you know, after a while, you know, I mean, everything has its moment, right? Nothing lasts forever. And then eventually to be a Vikingism. cool anymore. And so, you know, it's like, yeah, we don't need that. Those people are just destabilizing things and whatever. So it just kind of, yeah, it starts to leach out, to bleed out.

But even like it makes me think of, you know, the sort of the famous, you know, things that the church still allows the Icelanders to do, you know, after they, they go back to the pagan or the pre-Christian traditions of, you know, infanticide, eating horse meat and then sacrificing to the Norse gods. And it's like, yeah, you can do that for a few years, but after a while, it's got to stop, you know? And so it's like everything just sort of bleeds out into a, yeah, into a transition into a new time. Well, you know, that's the thing, isn't it? Again, as much as we like as historians to have neat categories and ways of talking about things fundamentally, the thing, no one wakes up and says, hey guys, I think the Viking age is over. You know,

these things are going to eventually peter out. And I mean, much in the sense, same way that I don't think anyone got up in the morning one day and said, hey, everybody, we're Vikings now. Right. It's just, it's not that easy. But thank you for coming and talking about something annoyingly difficult to categorize. You know, it's like trying to kind of catch a glimpse of something floating in your eye, right? Like the moment you try to focus on it, it darts away. Yes. Yes. I'm always sort of like, why did I pick these people to make my life's work? It's like I'm putting together a puzzle, knowing full well. I don't have all the pieces.

Like, what kind of idiocy is that? Oh, this is just an excuse to go to Gottland. I know. I know what this is. I'm going to New York in February. My answer lately, I've had a couple people at book fairs who are like, so how did you get into the Vikings? Well, I sort of fell into it, and I just couldn't get back out. True words never spoken about medieval history.

What can I say? Yes. Exactly. Well, CJ and Terry, thank you so, so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you. My thanks again to Terry Barnes and CJ Adrian for such a fantastic episode. If you enjoyed what we've been talking about today, then do go check out Terry and CJ's Vikingology podcast. And the episode I featured in about the rise of the Normans. And most importantly, my thanks to you for listening to Gaughan Medieval from History Head.

Remember, you can enjoy. unlimited access to ad-free award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film, The Trial of Joan of Arc, by signing up at historyhit.com slash subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.