History Daily - Saturday Matinee: Real Vikings

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

On today’s Saturday Matinee, we set sail across the North Sea into the Viking Age and hear tales of these brute Scandinavian warriors. Link to Real Vikings: https://open.spotify.com/show/55VhMsL7wqEQ9gnNhH6TMR Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more. History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.

Tarkca harcithuying harktoolotra hoited piquot PINET and sullen menot. Tutustu O.P.fittk-cautautau. Luoton myontowicz vohyndtowicz. You know, I've never much liked boats. Smaller ones feel too fragile. Larger ones seem unnatural out there in the water. And whatever the size of vessel,

it's really the endless depths below that creep me out. It's not a rational fear, I know. But whenever I can't see the bottom, I grow uneasy. It's like vertigo, but in the water. And while I'm thinking about things I don't like, there's the cold. I live in Dallas, Texas, and yeah, sure, I can certainly complain about the heat. It can be oppressive, and you might like to think that it's easier to get warm than to cool off. You just put on more layers, but there's a certain type of cold that gets in your bones. I just shiver, no matter how thick my sweaters are. And I'll add a third to this list,

violence. I have a real sympathetic response. to seeing people get hurt. Those fun little video shorts of trips, slips, and falls, I wince. And I've never been in a fight. I don't care if that disqualifies me from some Neanderthal definition of masculinity. I am not interested in physical violence. So in short, I don't like boats. I don't like the cold.

And I don't like violence. So I would be a miserable Viking. But on today's Saturday matinee, we're bringing you the tales of some other men who very much enjoyed their cold, boats and violence from the new Noisor podcast, Real Vikings. I hope you enjoy. While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow Real Vikings.

We put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you. Tarkkao-Harktoolotola rooited, Piennett, Pienet, and Suerctalut. Tutustu O.P.F.C.C.comptuant, Luoton-Muant, O.J. How, how many-what-sa-laughts? What do you lait up there? and then a pair lachycourt and maista

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Tarkkolotolot Rhoits PINet PIC Kautta Tarkkluot LOTO MENTT MOUntt

O.M WITES MOYE I'm pith What you you laid on the Leavent Pellell

I laid a little one one elamukson and then a lothocortia. Maista. Vaasan Club. Osta Vaasan

Tuotteita, kerapiste and lunasta palkintoa. The year is 789 AD. It's market day in the town

of Dornmore, Rochester. Dorchester, as it's known today, in England's southwest. Dense clouds sweep in from the east,

gathering mass. The air grows oppressive beneath them. Situated on the banks of the river Frum in the ancient kingdom of Wessex, Dorchester is an important settlement. It has royal connections. The West Saxon King has a winter residence here. A man patrols the market stalls with a watchful eye. There's a haughty swagger to his walk as he taps his staff on the cobbles.

Traders touch their forelocks respectfully. This is not a man you want to cross. His woolen clothes are of quality, revealing his high status. Meet Beadehar. He's the Reve, an official responsible for ensuring that the king's laws are upheld. The market is a honeypot for ne'er-do wells, drunks, pickpockets, cheats, and it's Beada Harder's job to police and punish every kind of criminality. There's one rule above all others that he's determined to enforce, that the king must receive his portion, his cut,

of every transaction that takes place in his realm. It's not just about the money, it's about maintaining order. When Piadahad overhears a group of men talking about some foreigners trading furs over the side of their boats, his ears prick up. The alleged infringement is taking place on the Isle of Portland, down on the coast, about 30 miles to the south. Bayadahad hurries to the Guildhall and gathers his attention. If he's to confront these strangers, he's determined to impress on them the full dignity of his office. Dorchester is an old Roman town. The roads are laid out in the classic grid pattern, but it's fallen into disrepair since the legions left, long, long ago.

The amphitheatre turned to rubble, its arena overgrown. Sheep nibble at the grass where gladiators once fought. The Reve leads his men along South Street. They leave through a gap in the town walls where the old gate used to be, then take the long straight Roman road down to the sea. For Biaadahad, the issue is simple. The foreigners are welcome to trade, but they must follow the rules. He sits up in the saddle.

All he has to do is to show them who's boss. As they reach Chesel Beach, the thin isthmus that connects Portland to the mainland, Badaahad sees the stranger's boats drawy as far as to the mainland. Rangers' boats drawn up ahead. Three masted longboats with their sails stowed. Their crews mill about on the shingle. A campfire burns. Suddenly they stop what they're doing and turn to face the approaching posse. Beada Hard and his men draw to a halt. At close quarters, the size of the strangers is striking. They are a formidable sight. The Reeve touches a crucifix on his belt buckle. The ultimate source.

source of his authority is God. The strangers wear helmets of either leather or metal. Axes, daggers and swords hang from their bouldricks. The loose belts slung about their hips. Their muscled arms are ringed with gold. One or two wear small gilded hammers around their necks, the symbol of a pagan god, Thor, the bringer of thunder. Their hair and beards appear well-groomed. Dark green tattoos are visible on their exposed skin. Beadahaer dismounts and strides towards them, one hand on the hilt of his dagger. He gestures towards a pile of lush Arctic furs.

You can't trade that here, he shouts, explaining that they will have to pass through a king's port in order to pay the correct taxes. The foreigners are unmoved by his words, if they even understand them. Then one of them reaches for a long-handled battle axe. His hand rises before shooting forwards and releasing the weapon. Time seems to slow down as it spins through the air.

Beada Hard is rooted to the spot as the axe hits its target, the middle of his chest. With a deafening roar, the men from the ships rush forward and drag Beadahard's stun men from their horses. As the storm clouds break, the strangers load up their long, sleek vessels and heave them back into the water. The only trace of their presence, the smouldering fire, and the Saxon bodies lying on the blood-soaked pebbles. Today, Chesel Beach, with its tidal lagoons, is one of Dorset's most popular tourist locations,

a favoured spot for ramblers and birdwatchers. It's hard to imagine it as a setting for such a shocking drama. So who were these men who pitched up, on this beach a millennium ago, dispensing such violence and casual brutality. They are, in a word that will soon strike fear into the hearts of every Anglo-Saxon, every Celt, every Frisian, every Frank, across the early Middle Ages, Vikings. Say the word Viking today, and it conjures a certain image. One represented in countless films, TV shows, video games, comic books and superhero franchises,

franchises, one of pillage and savagery, a cliched world of horned helmets and blood eagles, of barbaric hirsute heathens enthralled to gods and monsters, the hell's angels of the high seas, men who came in longboats to terrorise and slaughter the innocence of Britain, France, Ireland, and beyond. If those men who killed Beadahardt are anything to go by, then certain aspects of this legend are true. But it only tells part of a bigger story. Of a people who were so much more than the fur-clad thugs of popular imagination, the Vikings hailed from a sophisticated and developed civilization. They were master navigators, fearless explorers, diplomats, traders,

craftsmen, storytellers, and, yes, warriors. Moreover, they were adventurous. Men and women whose feet still defy the imagination. are people who crossed vast oceans and discovered new lands, building up an impressive trading empire that spanned four continents, four centuries. The Viking Age is perhaps the most revolutionary, crucial and seminal period ever in the history of the Scandinavians. We're dealing with a group of people who really transform the history of Europe. There's a real sense in which there's almost no parts of Europe they leave completely untouched.

They founded just about every major city in Ireland. They founded the first centralized state in what is now Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus. They founded perhaps the greatest of the medieval kingdoms, which is the kingdom of the two Sicilies. And then of course medieval France and England were also largely created by the Vikings. They ended up traveling these thousands and thousands of miles across the North Atlantic, heading west, settling Greenland, reaching the edge of the North American continent. They end up all the way in the Arctic. They go east.

They go down the waterways of the Eurasian steps all the way to Byzantium, even to Baghdad. What really fascinates, I think, is this exploration, this human urge to move beyond the known and into something that has not yet been discovered. Much of their history was written by their enemies, which means their true achievements were often overlooked. The achievers themselves. demonized. But the Vikings changed the world and were themselves changed as they sailed and battled their way through it. The Vikings, they do have a unique place in the public mindset. They are framed as the barbaric other. And there is something fascinating about that. And more than that, this idea of people who left everything behind to quite literally sail over the horizon.

The Viking period is still extremely compelling today partly because it's just so colorful. It's full of dramatic figures, dramatic events. They've got amazing tattoos and they've got these wonderful hairstyles and they're the absolute epitome of cool. I'm Ian Glenn. And from the Noysa podcast network, this is Real Vikings. Tarkka hardtied to their hankintoes. O.P. Tarkkaluatala rooited, Pienet and suerate elamonement. Upstustust to OP.5Fiqqqqqq.

Luoton-myunted O-P-V-V-Vey-Paij. It's been a day. I'm pretty. What you laid-in'clock? I laid-in' this one elamuxes and then parliacortia. Maista. Vaasan Club. Osta Vaasan tuotteita,

and runnasta pique and lunasta palkintoes. Tarkka-hurtedu-hanktowing. O.P. Tarkkulot-Lot-Rot-P-Tark-FIC-Couttaught. We'll be OP.5Fiq Kautau. Luoton Mytons Munted

O.P. How many Payv? I'm, how much you laid on the leifeng

I laid this one one and then par lhiacort and maista.

Vaasan Clup, Osta Wazan Tuotte and Prestestey and

put up Pacte And We start with a Who done it Who are Badaard's

killers exactly These men who appeared out of the blue on that Dorset beach 12 centuries ago. Contemporary accounts refer to those who murdered the King's Reve as Danish, Northmen, Norse, or even just heathens.

They are all synonyms for Viking. All we really know for sure is that these killers, these Vikings, came from the north, from the land we call Scandinavia. The world back then is very different to the one we know today. The western part of the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, over 300 years previously. Since then, there's been a period of decline across Europe. The Dark Ages, as they are usually called, a time of great social upheaval, a sense of barbarians at the gate of classical civilization.

The name tells all. It's an era with little documented testimony as to what actually occurred. By the 9th century, when the Vikings begin to make their mark, we do know that two new power blocks have emerged, both dominated by the new religions that have swept across from the east. Francia is a Christian territory. It covers much of modern-day France, Germany, the Low Countries and Northern Italy, with its emperor Charlemagne, God's anointed ruler on earth.

Further south, there is the vast Umayyad Caliphate, a Muslim realm which stretches across North Africa and the Middle East, from Spanish Al-Andalus to Persia. Out on the fringes in Britain or Ireland say, the more inconsequential things become. England, at the end of the 8th century, doesn't exist. Its emergence as a nation is a story for another day. Back then, the land that we now call England is divided into four. main kingdoms, East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. They have emerged out of the power vacuum left at the end of Roman rule in its province of Britannia.

The native population of Celtic-speaking Britons has been faced with an influx of Germanic migrants from northern Europe, tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. Out of this melting pot a new people have emerged. They speak what we classify today as Old English and have come to be known as Anglo-Saxons. By Biaadahard's time, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are resolutely Christian. The process of conversion from paganism, worshipping the same old gods that the Vikings still cling to, began in the late 6th century when missionaries sent by Pope Gregory landed in Kent. To the Anglo-Saxons to people like Badaahard, the northern lands beyond.

on British shores are a distant and unsettling mystery. An old idea rooted in the pagan past links the north with hell. Tucked away at the very top of the map, the region we know as Scandinavia is a land far, far away. Across the fjords and mountains, this territory of the north plays host to a rural society. Most folks live in villages and isolated farms, growing crops and raising cattle, as well as hunting, and fishing. People subsist on fish, grain and meat. Beef, pork, goat, venison, sometimes horse. They wear simple clothes spun from wool, flax and hemp. They are a practical people, handy craftsmen, skilled at carpentry, metalwork. The further north you go, the sparser the villages

become, breaking up into individual farmsteads. But even in these rancers, remote settings, up in the holoca land of high fire or the northern lights, bonds of community hold scattered neighbors together. Lars Brownworth is the author of Sea Wolves, a history of the Vikings. About a third of Norway is above the Arctic Circle. This was a punishing climate. And so hospitality was obviously a very important thing. And women usually had greater rights than in the rest.

of medieval Europe because they were largely in charge of making sure there was enough food for the winter, and this is obviously a job that lives depend on. It's a vast area. From the tip of Norway's North Cape to the present-day Danish-German border, it's over 1,500 miles. That's further than the distance from Copenhagen to Rome. The geographic variance is immense, from frozen tundra through dense spruce tiger to temps.

Emperor Grassland. Eleanor Baraklough is a senior lecturer at Bath Spa University, an author of Embers of the Hands, Modern Histories of the Viking Age. So we've got a huge span in terms of geography. We've also got a huge span in terms of the different sorts of people who are living in this world. So, for example, if you're a trader or a craft person in Denmark,

your experience of life is going to be much more multicultural but much less centered compared to say if you live in an agriculturally prosperous valley somewhere in the lowlands of Norway or Sweden where generations of your family have farmed. So we already have to start breaking down this idea that it's just one thing and that we can know what it would be like to live at one time in the Viking Age.

It's much more complex than that. But there's one thing that unites all Scandinavians. Water. It connects. It defines. Traveling by land across a snowbound, mountainous interior is slow and hazardous. Far easier to navigate a river network from one trading settlement to another. Or skirt the jagged. coast of Norway, ducking in and out of fields, sailing the great North Way that gives that land its name. In the Viking Age, the sea is not a barrier. It's a pathway. It leads to a world of

opportunity, new sources of wealth, new markets to trade in, new targets to plunder. And it turns out there are riches are plenty. Right there across the North Sea, the so-called Quail Road, just a few days sail away. way to the West. Quite why and when Scandinavian warriors start harassing the coastal communities of Britain is open to debate, we shall come to that shortly. But it is this seaborne plundering that most likely gives us the term Viking. The word Viking is really interesting. It does come, at least in one form, from Old Norse and is contemporary with the Viking Age itself. So there's a version of the word Viking, which is Wikinger, which is essentially a raider or a pirate. There's also a very related

form of that word, which is essentially to go on a Viking, to go on a raid. Another suggestion is that it's related to the old Norse word for a bay, Vik. So a Viking is someone who comes from a bay. There's also a region in Norway called V-Ken. Perhaps the original Vikings came from there. Whatever the origins of the word, its meaning soon broadens out. Davidae Zori, Associate Professor of History and Archaeology at Baylor University, is author of Age of Wolf and Wind, Voyages Through the Viking World. Viking essentially meant a seaborne pirate. So not all Scandinavians of the Viking Age would have been,

or considered themselves to have been Vikings. Only once you get on a boat and try to pirate stuff, would you become a Viking. In the beginning, going a Viking is something you do to supplement your regular income, an eight-century side hustle. And that's how it started, with people going seasonally abroad to opportunistically engage in some kind of wealth production that could be trade or it could be rating. And I think sometimes they probably brought trading goods on board and then decided as they showed up, whether it'd be more profitable to raid or to trade. At this time, as the 8th century draws to a close,

the modern nations of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, like England, have yet to come into being. Power is concentrated locally in the hands of chieftains and warlords and based on close bonds of allegiance. It's a shifting, unstable political picture. We have to imagine a constellation of chief cities that are an alliance with each other, that are fighting each other, sometimes expanding, claiming more power, and then, I would say, collapsing again.

We generally think of Vikings engaging in overseas adventures, with their victims being mostly foreigners. But they fight each other too in what we might call Viking-on-Viking action. Ultimately, dominance comes through wealth, silver, which is used to buy the loyalty of supporters. The drive of the sort of alpha-type chieftain to control and to sustain power is one of the motors engines of the Viking Age that pushed them beyond their own shores as they try to accumulate more wealth to reinvest in the political economy. generate bonds of loyalty with their supporters. Religion too plays a key role in convincing men to follow charismatic leaders on long voyages to unknown lands. Unlike much of Europe, Scandinavia is still pagan.

Stefan Brink is professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands, and a research professor at Cambridge. He's the author of Thraldom, a history of slagher of slavery in the Viking Age. Well, the pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia was a polytheistic religion, with many gods and goddesses, minor deities, living with the people, in the barn, in hills, etc., in a landscape charged with sacriety, and with the mythology we today find fascinating. We'll delve into Norse religion more fully and a later episode. But for now, the thing to remember is that for a Viking warrior, death is something

to be welcomed, not feared. To die with your sword in your hand ensures immortality, allowing you to enjoy a glorious afterlife in Valhalla, the whole of the fallen. That belief gives rise to a culture of warfare, a sense of fearlessness, of invincibility even, underpinned by a code of valor I think that it's important to consider the ideological motivation. I think that the fatalism and the push towards honor generating stories about your accomplishments was a high motivator. But alongside religion and mythology, there may be more practical considerations at play in pushing the Vikings out from Scandinavia. It's also been suggested that there might be something of a gender imbalance. So essentially there are fewer women for the men to marry and settle down with

and kind of build up a farmstead and raise a family. The Vikings practice of polygamy doesn't help with the most powerful men taking multiple wives. It provides an incentive for lesser males to venture abroad in search of foreign brides or come back home with wealth they can use to compete for the hand of a local girl. Another driver is climate. At the time there is some significant meteorological shifts. Pragyavora is lecturer in medieval history at the University of York. One likely explanation is that there was, as a consequence of a sort of warm period, the medieval warm period, an explosion in population. And as a consequence, there wasn't enough.

of land in Scandinavia, and so people started moving abroad to take their chances, really, to make something of their lives. In some cases, the accumulation of wealth overseas comes through what we might call legitimate trading, exchanging resources such as furs and walrus tusks for silver. But in the Viking Age, the men from Scandinavia will come to specialize in one particularly lucrative form of commerce. In the 9th century, the slave trade with the Muslim world exploded on the continent. Slavery became very important for the Scandinavians in the Viking Age.

Slaves became the major trading commodity for the Scandinavians. And slavery, I believe, in a way, came to characterize the Viking period at that time. In fact, so rife is slavery that it forms part of a three-tiered Viking society. At the top there's the chieftain, or yarl, from which we get our word, Earl. Below him come the freeman, or Karl's, and right at the bottom sit the slaves, or thralls, the origin of another English expression to be in thrall to someone. The Vikings are not the only ones practicing slavery at the time. The Christian Anglo-Saxons do it too.

But whatever romantic ideas we may entertain about the Norsemen, we have to acknowledge that their economy is founded on the trafficking of human beings. It is partly their notoriety as slavers that accounts for the Vikings' enduring reputation for violence. But it also has a lot to do with the sources we're using. Professor Elizabeth Rowe, reader in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Vikings in the West, the legend of Ragnar Lothbrock and his sons. Nearly all of the contemporary accounts that we have for the Scandinavians in Western Europe are from the point of the victims of Viking raids and attacks.

A byproduct of the Vikings paganism is that when held up against Christendom, they are comparatively illiterate. No Bible, no libraries, no monastic scholars to record events. Anything approximating a written language is carved in a crude, stick-like alphabet we know as runes, with each of its 24 characters corresponding to a vocal sound. It's a functional means of notification rather than a means of archive or record. As a result, the history of the Vikings in this early period is that their story is told by their victims, those who hate them.

Evidence written by Scandinavians themselves, for instance in the epic Icelandic sagas, doesn't come until much later. Partly it's a problem that in Scandinavia, Writing didn't come until the conversion to Christianity, let's say, around the year 1000. And so whatever was written down about the Viking Age was written down hundreds of years after the events that are being told. One source that historians lean on heavily is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle is an old English manuscript, a collection of annals documenting the history of the Anglo-Saxon people.

It was begun in the 9th century at the court of King Alfred of Wessex. It's this source that recounts the attack on the King's Reve, Beadahardt, in Portland. The Chronicle pinpoints the 8th century as the time when Viking raids kick off. This is the traditional narrative, that the Viking Age begins in the late 700s. Indeed, the Chronicle tells us that the three ships involved in the murder of Beadahard are the first ships of Danish men to come to England. Actually, we know that there were Northmen trading in England for at least a century before this. And recently analysed DNA evidence suggests that people with Scandinavian heritage may have been present in Britain even earlier than that.

Nordic remains found in the city of York have been dated to as far back as between the second and fourth centuries AD, well before the wide-scale Anglo-Saxon settlement. And it's likely that those men on Chesel Beach are not the first Scandinavians that Beada Hard has ever dealt with either. The way he gallops off to confront them suggests he was not expecting trouble. It seems he thought they were merchants, not marauders. When he sees these three ships from foreign land show up in Portland, he goes rushing down to meet them, mainly to try and get them to leave in order to go to a king's port. And the reason for that is that when merchants come in,

they have dues to pay and those Jews need to be paid in a king's port. So he wasn't really trying to shoe them away or scare them away. He was just trying to do the right thing. Clearly, the presence of Northmen and Dorset is nothing new. What is, shockingly so. is the violence they meet out. If not the first Scandinavians in England, Beada Hard's killers are the first recorded Vikings.

It's a crucial distinction, one that we now understand, though it may not have been clear at the time, between earlier traders and these new raiders. The Anglo-Saxons may have found the Viking raiders enigmatic and terrifying, but to the Scandinavians themselves, England was less of a mystery. They likely had long-standing knowledge of its shores.

Before the Viking Age, a network of trading settlements known as Emporia or Wicks in Old English sprang up along rivers and coastal areas across Europe. These include Yipeswick and Norvik, Ipswich and Norwich today. There's also Hamwick which becomes Southampton, while Londonwick is London, and E.O.4wick, today's York. Based on the trading that took place in the pre-Viking age, the Scandinavians had a great deal of information about where the towns were, where the stored wealth might be, let's say, in monasteries, perhaps.

Unsurprisingly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is Anglo-centric. But it's not just England where the Scandinavians have been active. Perhaps even earlier, the Vikings were founding Emporia in mainland, land Europe and striking out towards the east. They were trading even as far as what's today, Estonia, Lithuania. We have pretty clear evidence of that. It's 2008. We're in the village of Salme on the island of Saremar in Estonia.

A team of construction workers is digging a trench for an electric cable. The bucket of the hydraulic excavator claws at the earth. breaking the ground and dragging rubble backwards. Suddenly, one of the workers cries out for the operator to stop. The man crouches down and peers into the hole. A moment later, he holds up the object that caught his eye. It's a human skull, darkly discolored and covered in mud. His fellow workers rush forward to join him.

Before long, they have retrieved a small pile of human bones. together with other strange items. Work comes to a standstill. At first, it's thought that these are the remains of a World War II soldier, but they don't look like 20th century artifacts. An archaeologist, Marge Konser, from the University of Tartu, is called in. Concer is in no doubt that the find comes from much, much earlier, over a thousand years, in fact.

Among the items recovered, she identifies an ancient spearhead, and gaming pieces. Gradually, over a period of months, Konzerina team uncover what appears to be a boat. There are no actual timbers left. They've rotted away. But the ground is discolored where they once were. And 275 iron rivets are still in place,

clearly indicating the shape of a 38-foot long craft. It is a longboat of Scandinavian origin, and with seven dead men buried with the ship, propped up on their benches as if about to row into the next world. The men are all aged between 18 and 45. Some of the bones bear the marks of lethal wounds. These are warriors who died in battle. Concer is in no doubt.

What she has uncovered is a Viking warship. But here's the thing. She and her colleagues date the burial site to between 700, and 750 AD. When a second vessel is found nearby, it's clear that this is a site of major archaeological significance. At 55 feet long, it is larger and even more spectacular than the first. Remarkably, it's equipped with a mast with fragments of sails still attached.

This makes it the earliest known sailing ship ever found in the Baltic. and that pushes the mast and the sail on top of a wooden ship back by 40 or so years. So now we're back to the middle of the 8th century. And then with that, we get this debate of when does the Viking Age begin? Inside the hull of the second boat, archaeologists make a macabre discovery. The remains of a further 33 warriors stacked neatly in rows and buried beneath a covering of shields. Isotope analysis of the men's teeth will reveal that many of them came from the Malar Valley in Sweden. Their weapons similar to ones recovered from other boat burials there.

The Salme find suggests that the Viking Age began at least 50 years, possibly even a century, earlier than once believed. Ship burials like those at Salme underlined just how central boats are to the lives and deaths of Viking men and women. The longboat is at the heart of a technological revolution taking place in Scandinavia. Thanks to advances in shipbuilding techniques, they're evolving into sophisticated war machines. The Viking ship is the catalyst of the Viking Age. They're getting more streamlined, particularly with the development of the true keel. They're more able to sail further out into the ocean.

So we start getting ships that can go not just along coastlines, but can cross the open ocean, and deal with particularly the strong ocean currents that you find in the North Atlantic. It's hard to overstate the importance of the Kiel to the Vikings. It was part of their cultural identity. Even the range of mountains that runs down the spine of Norway is named Sherlin, the Norse for Kiel. Viking long ships are,

clinker built, which means they're made from overlapping planks. The timber used is often green wood, preferably oak, freshly hewned with axes, and with pine pitch used to seal it all up. This creates an incredibly flexible structure. The planks open and close, breathing like a living creature, as the hull passes through the water. It allows them to show up quickly, hold their shallow drafted ships onto the beaches and sail out quickly. They can go up the rivers with these shallow drafted boats. They can easily take down or put up their sails so it makes these ships really versatile. And because the keels are relatively shallow and the ships are clinker built,

they can actually be lifted by as few as ten men so they can sail then up rivers as well as across oceans. And they do it at truly frightening speed. They could cover about 50 miles in a day. And even a cavalry using a good Roman road could do about 30. So the Vikings are just faster than everyone. I think the most telling example of this is for the first two centuries of the Viking age, so roughly 800 to 1,000 AD, there is no naval battle in northern Europe except between Viking fleets. So they just have complete dominance of the sea.

With their prows carved as elaborate dragons, the better to ward off evil spirits, these long ships are an awesome side. Their devastating impact is soon to be felt right across Europe. Back in England, in the wake of the attack on Biedehar and his men, Viking raids are on the increase. A charter issued in 792 by King Offer of Mercia, talks of fleets of seaborne pagans, causing trouble along the country. coast. 250 miles north, a year after office charter, a Viking raid is about to take place

which will send shockwaves throughout the whole of the Christian world. It's June the 8th, 793 AD. We're on the holy island of Lindisfarm, just off the northeast coast of England, in the kingdom of Nathumbria. There's a bleak, craggy beauty to the place, lashed by the winds and rains of the North Sea. It faces out towards a pewter horizon. A causeway connects it with the mainland at low tide. When the tides in, it's completely cut off. Isolated as it is, Linda's Farn is an important religious centre. It's the shrine of the 7th century hermit St. Cuthbert, a place of pilgrimage where a thriving community of monks live. They wear the coarse, woollen habits of of the Benedictine order, dyed black to symbolize repentance.

Today, there's a new arrival, a 15-year-old novice. The novice is shown round his new home by a senior monk. Like many early medieval monasteries, the sprawling abbey is a working farm. The monks grow wheat and raise cattle. The calves hides of valuable sources of vellum, a key component in the abbey's other main activity, the production of illuminated manuscripts. The novices taken to the room where the scribes and illustrators work, their tonsured heads shaved at the crown, bowed in concentration.

He gazes in wonder at the gorgeous folios taking shape. Inside the church, a group of pilgrims kneel before the shrine. A rich lord presents the abbot with a gold chalice, a sign of his devotion. The wealth on open display is dast. Gifts from esteemed pilgrims include gold and silver plates and liturgical objects studied with precious gemstones. But the most treasured object of all has been made right here at the Abbey, the famous Lindisfarne Gospels, enclosed in a priceless, jewel-encrusted leather binding. It may seem strange to us that such valuable artifacts are not locked away in a strong room, but as far as the monks are come,

No Christian would dare rob the church. It would mean eternal damnation. A bell summons the monks to worship. Prayer and work, work and prayer. This will be the novice's life from now on. He is assigned to duties in the vegetable garden. On his way he pauses at a cliff top to gaze out to sea. Suddenly, he spots a few dark specks on the horizon.

The specks take on shape. They're ships. Other monks join him, tracking the fleet's approach. There's no doubt now, the vessels are coming towards Lindersfarn. And the tide is in, which means the community is effectively trapped on the island. The boats have appeared from the north. As they get closer, the monks are able to make out the dragon-shaped prows riding the waves. The square sails too are distinctive, brightly decorated with animal symbols.

These are the long ships of the Norsemen. Soon the ships are close enough to hear the ferocious roar of the men sailing them, and to see that they are armed. The monks can make out the shields arrayed along the sides of each boat, round and colourful with an iron boss in the centre. Some of the monks run in terror towards the church, God and the bones of St Cuthbert will protect them. But the young novice remains rooted to the spot.

He stares down as the shallow, keeled boats hit the beach at speed. He sees the Norsemen leap out, their leather boots striking Northumbrian territory. In their hands they brandish axes, swords, daggers, bows and arrows. A delegation of senior monks has gone down to the beach to find out what the men from the boats want. The novice watches in horror as they are ruthlessly struck down. One of the attackers looks up, glaring at the novice. The boy finds his feet and runs to join the others inside the church. A hail of arrows hits the door.

Soon after, a violent hammering begins. Axe blades smashed through the wood. The boy hides behind a pillar and watches as the attackers charge at the defenseless monks and put them to the sword. Blood washes across the floor. The air is filled with the sounds of slaughter. The crunch of blades on bones, the cries of the dying,

and the wolf-like howls of their killers. The raiders vandalize the church and gather priceless objects. They even dig up the altar and drag that away. As a final blasphemy, they ripped the jeweled cover from the Lindersfan Gospel gospel and add it to their hall. They have no use for the pages. The novice is yanked from his hiding place. Certain that he is about to die, he utters a prayer to God. Perhaps his prayer is answered. The Vikings spare his life, for now at least. He's bound in chains and loaded into a boat,

together with other survivors. The Norsemen push their ships back into the water. A very different future awaits the novice now. Anglo-Saxon intellectuals, like the cleric Alquin, struggled to make sense of the horrific incident. A revered holy shrine destroyed by heathens, the monks murdered and trafficked into slavery. In one letter, Alquin writes, Behold the church of St. Cuthbert,

spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments, A place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, there were warning signs before the attack. It's full of portents. It's full of, you know, the whole drama of the natural world sort of rises up in concert with these raids. You know, here there were dreadful sheets of lightning and dragons were seen flying through the air and there was terrible famine. Alquin also mentions a bloody rain which fell out of a clear sky onto St Peter's Church in York.

Despite these omens, the attack on Lindisfarne stuns everyone. From the Viking perspective, everything went according to plan. The Vikings who came in, they got what they wanted, they looted, they took all the gold and silver that was held at Lindisfarne and that was them sorted. There's nothing more complex about that. Lindisfarne has also provided them with a business model that they can scale up, targeting remote holy sites, not just in England,

but all across coastal Europe. This is a place where wealth has been stored up, where the elites sometimes are retiring to and giving wealth to monks so that they have prayers for their souls after their death. Monastries like Linda's Farn are isolated and vulnerable, often undefended. They may be protected by God, but that only works if you're a believer.

As for the monks, they're not, these aren't the most fierce soldiers around. The Vikings, to me, are the ultimate opportunists. They're going to go where the potential is, and they're going to go where it's easy. In the aftermath of the attack on Lindisfar, the four kingdoms of England are left really. panic even spreads as far as the Frankish Empire where Alquin is living.

In a dispatch to King Ethelred of Nathumbria, he writes, Never before has such terror appeared in Britain, the Viking Age has truly begun. In the next episode, the Vikings step up their raids, hitting more sites in Britain and Ireland, as well as northern France. Their arrival there will plunge the Frankish Empire into an ex-examination. existential struggle, Christian versus pagan, good versus evil. It will culminate in an extraordinary attack on Paris, led by the most famous Northman of all, Ragnar Lothbrook.

That's next time.