The Rest Is History - 103. The Norse Sagas

Episode Date: September 30, 2021

In today’s episode, Tom and Dominic are joined by Dr Eleanor Barraclough as they sail across the Atlantic in a dragon-ship, bound for the epic world of the Norse sagas. What society did the Vikings set up in Iceland? How did they get to America? Why were they always so violent? *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. There was a man named Ulf, son of Bialf, and Halbera, daughter of Ulf the Fearless. She was sister of Halbjorn, half-giant in Hrafnister, and he the father of Ketel Heng. Ulf was a man so tall and strong that none could match him, and in his youth he roved the seas as a freebooter. In fellowship with him was one Kari of Berdla, a man of renown for strength and daring. He was a berserker. Ulf and he had one common purse and were the dearest friends. So begins Egil's saga, one of the best known of all the Icelandic sagas. Set in the 9th century but written down, as we'll discover much later,

it plunges us into a world of Vikings and shipwrights, kings and poets, blood feuds and shapeshifters. Tom Holland, it sounds like a production meeting from The Rest Is History. It does indeed. What are you, king, poet, berserker, troll? I think all of them. I think that's true.

I love Egil's saga because it features Athelstan. Yes, it does. I think all of them. I think that's true. I love Egil's Saga because it features Athelstan. Yes, it does. I thought we'd get to that. Yeah. So there's sort of bits of history that float into these things, aren't there? Now, you are doing this on location, effectively. I'm literally in Norway. Yeah, amazing.

I'm literally in Norway. I'm in the basement of a university department in Oslo. Such a glamorous life you lead. Yeah, it is. And I'll tell you how glamorous it is, is that as I'm saying this, I'm being photographed by Julia, who is a photographer from...

Norwegian Vogue? Norwegian newspaper. Norwegian Vogue. Well, so the rest of history is absolutely massive in Norway. People keep rushing up to me saying, are you the rest of history's Dominic Sandbrook? And when they find out, I'm not. Huge disappointment. But Julia, do you want to just absolutely i skulle bara si hej till alle de

norske littera so there you go wow what was that it was it was a hello to everybody oh that's very nice that's very nice hello julia it's always good to have a guest star on the podcast isn't it but we have another guest star do we we do We do. We have a real guest star. So a few years ago, I went to Iceland on holiday, which I heartily recommend. Tom, you must have been to Iceland. I have. I've been on a cricket tour to Iceland. Oh, of course.

God almighty. And I actually wrote a Scaldic verse about it. Did you? Celebrating the defeat of the puffin eaters. I don't think anyone wants to hear about that. Do they? I don't. Anyway.

Well, maybe you can put that on twitter and everybody can can read about it so i went to iceland and i took a book with me called beyond the northlands viking voyages and the old norse sagas an absolutely brilliant book beautifully illustrated a book about the vikings kind of world view and their sense of geography and their sense of all these kind of monsters and weird lands that were out there. And the author of that book is Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough from Durham University. And she's with us here today. Hello, Eleanor. Thank you for coming on the show. Hi, it's such a pleasure. I'm hoping that Tom's got some Scaldic verse in Old Norse to give us, otherwise that's it, I'm off. It's not in Old Norse, but I might dig it up for the second half.

In fact, you know what, I'm going to do that. I'm going to dig it out and I'm going to quote it at the start of the second half so that's something for Dominic to look forward to yeah no I'm afraid it's in English all our listeners all our listeners will I mean they never desert us halfway through anyway but even if they're tempted they would they would stick around for that they'll be fleeing to Iceland so um Eleanor let's get into the subject. So Iceland, when do human beings first arrive in Iceland and where do they come from? That's a really good question. And it's not entirely clear because although we know more about the Scandinavian and British Isles settlement, it seems possible that actually there are holy men called Papa who are part of this peregrination

from possibly Ireland who are setting out this peregrination from possibly Ireland who are setting out across the North Sea trying to find little corners of the world, little islands where they can get a bit of peace and do some communing with God and nature. And it's possible that some of these end up in Iceland. There's a man called Dickwill who's in the Frankish kingdom. What's he called? Sorry, Dickwill. Dickwill. D-I-C-U-I-L got it if there's another way of pronouncing it that's gonna be really embarrassing because that's no wonder no wonder he fled to Iceland for the name like that well see he didn't even flee but he says that in around what is it 794 something like that so just after Lindisfarne gets gets attacked by by Vikings over off the

Northumberland coast he gets visited by a group of papa these Irishmen who say that they went to the very far north to an island where it was so bright that even at mid-summer in the middle of the night they were able to pick lice off their clothes which also says something about their their general hygiene in this period so it's possible that's Iceland it's possible it's not you know they also got to Shetland or New Faroes but then we know a little bit more about the Scandinavian settlement so we have a few sources that start to be written down in Iceland in the 12th century and they describe how Iceland is settled predominantly from Norway and first in about yeah 860 or something like that someone gets blown off course there they come back someone else then decides to

do a circumnavigation of of iceland someone else then stays there over winter but we're really talking around 871 that sort of era that that we start to get permanent settlement there this is what the later uh textual sources from iceland from medieval iceland tell us but what's really wonderful is that we also have evidence from the most Icelandic of sources, which is a volcano, which erupts around that time. Yeah. So the volcano erupts. We can date that volcano because we've got the ice cores from Greenland

that also show up that same layer. So we know it's around 870, 871 or something. And then most of the settlement layers, the archaeological settlement layers from that first occupation period of Iceland are directly on top of that volcano. So we know it is around that time. There's a writer called Auri the Wise, and he's writing in Iceland, kind of like 1122, that sort of time. And he says there were papa there when the Icelanders first arrived, but they didn't want to stay there with a load of heathens and so they left. So who knows, it's possible that someone was there before, but that's when we're talking about the settlement of Iceland. We also know that there are lots of people from the British Isles

who come over, particularly the females. And that's something you can see in modern Icelanders' DNA, that there seems to be more Norwegian DNA in more of the male settlers or more male modern Icelanders and more DNA from the British Isles from modern Icelandic females. And are they being taken there as slaves? That's what I was going to ask. Well, that's the general perception. And certainly, we know there are a lot of slaves. And when we look at, again, later textual sources, a lot of the slaves have Irish-sounding names. So

yeah, there will be some of that. But we've also got to think that by that time in the British Isles and in Ireland, there are a lot of Norse settlers. And so it's possible that some of these Norse settlers are kind of mixing culturally with people who are going to sort of genetically look like they're, say, Irish or from British Isles. But culturally, they're going to be very much in that Norse cultural milieu. So, you know, yeah, it's hard. It's hard to tell, really, a bit of both. There was an Irish princess called Ord the Deep-Minded. Oh, sort of, sort of. So, yes. So, Eidr or Ord, or she's also known as Unnur the Deep-Minded, one of the first settlers of Iceland, according to the sagas. And certainly, she comes from a context of the British Isles.

She's not a princess herself, but there is a saga, and I know we'll come back to the sagas later, called Laxdala Saga, the saga of people of Salmon Valley, literally, where there is a female slave who is brought to Iceland and ends up having a child there who becomes a very prominent saga character, a great hero. And she seems to be completely mute. And it's only that one day they hear her talking in Irish, essentially to her child. And it turns out she's not mute at all. She's just decided she doesn't want to talk. And she says, well, yes, I'm the daughter of one of the Irish kings. But, again, we're talking about a saga, and everything gets a bit pimped up and romanticised in the saga.

That's a good academic expression. So here's a question for you. I mean, a question that will occur to anyone who's been to Iceland. Why would you go to Iceland? I mean, it's very hard to grow anything. You know, the British Isles are kind of in the way, which are famously, you know, the lowlands of England, very fertile and all that. Why Iceland? Are you fleeing? Are you running away? Is that why you go? Again, depends who you ask. So again, if we look at the later textual sources coming from Iceland, they've got a very clear origin myth.

And what they say is the king of Norway was really tyrannical, wanted to take over all our lands, and that's Harald Fairhair. And so we decided to leave. We didn't want to be under his yoke. And so we went to Iceland. He's kind of seen as the Norwegians as their first king. Yeah. And he's becoming king basically at the same time

as the immigration is starting. Yeah, it's a little bit hazy. You know, the sources are all a bit dodgy, but yeah, pretty much. But you have to think about various things there. One of which is that by the time that these sagas, these texts are being written down, and again, I don't want to sort of talk about this too much

because I'm sure we'll come back to it, But we're talking about the 13th century in Iceland is very politically volatile. And there's a lot of outside interference from the Norwegian crown. So that's the perfect point where Icelanders are going to be trying to define themselves in opposition to that and say, look, we've always been independent, we've always been free. We've never been under the Norwegian yoke. In fact, we left Norway because of that. So you have to think, okay, maybe there's some truth there, but maybe there's something else going on that's more to do with the context in which those texts are being transmitted and written down. You have to also think that it might be as simple as people needing more land, people needing... and i mean iceland isn't isn't a terrible place to to try and grow some crops and and and uh you know keep keep farms and all the rest of it it is it's possible um

so there's so presumably there there is only a finite amount of good land. And I guess it fills up quite quickly, does it? Exactly. And so again, what we're told is that within 60 years or so, so by around 930, Iceland is pretty much settled. All the good land has been taken, which, yeah, maybe true to some extent. Again, it's a nice, neat narrative. A nice, neat narrative is always problematic, right? But yeah, exactly. I mean, the problem with iceland and yeah dominic you might remember this i don't know how far you got but the the interior is really not very habitable at all there's nothing there right i mean you couldn't live there no no no it's mountains and glaciers and and few volcanoes knocking around and in the saga is an awful lot of trolls and other um strange creatures So we're talking really around the edge.

That's where the fertile land is. And so, as you say, there's only so much of it. But that's where they go. That's where they end up. And is that the point at which, once it's full, that they move on? Because obviously there's a point at which they move on, right, to Greenland and then to, well, arguably. I mean, there's a huge debate about this north america yeah so land keeps on being parceled up and there's better land and there's

worse land and and so if you're there first and you're you're powerful you get a really good amount of land there's there's a text called land well there's various versions of a technical land armor book which means the book of settlement, which describes those first settlers and where they go and where they settle. But really, they're talking about the top dogs a lot of the time. And so we don't know how many other people have got small parcels of land. And it's not a case that you get there, you can't find any land. And so, well, on we go, let's try to find somewhere else. But the settlement of Iceland is part of this general movement, this kind of diasporic movement across the North Atlantic. The settlement of Greenland is something that happens quite a lot later and under different circumstances. And there is, again, farmable land. But really, by the time we get to Greenland, we're at the very edge of the sort of physical environment you can use to have a sustainable European style farming economy, which creates a lot of problems going forward.

And is it true that the name Greenland is coined as a kind of marketing scam to try to force people to go there. Yeah, well, that's what it says in the sagas. So Greenland isn't settled by the Norse, at least until the traditional date is around 985. So we're talking over 100 years since the start of the settlement of Iceland. And it's said to have been initially settled by this rather murderous outlaw who is outlawed from Norway for killings, goes to Iceland, is then outlawed from Iceland for killings and then goes off west and spends the three years of his outlawry going up and down the fjords of western Iceland, the coastline, trying to find somewhere to live, habitable land to settle and colonize then which and this is around 985 then we're told he goes back to iceland picks up his followers and his family and goes back then to settle greenland properly um and it's according to the two sagas that describe

that settlement of green and most strongly they're called the Vinland Sagas, the saga of Eric the Red and the saga of the Greenlanders. It is said that Eric calls Greenland, Greenland, because then it would be a more favourable place to settle. But to be fair- He's an estate agent. He's an estate. But I mean, I've spent time out

in Greenland doing research. And in the summer, it is, well, certainly. So there are two settlements in Greenland that the Norse, what they call the Eastern Settlement, which is a lot bigger. These are both on the West Coast, confusingly. And then there's the Western Settlement, which is about a third of the size. It's around modern day Nuuk, which is the capital of Greenland, about 300 miles further up the coast. And certainly the bigger Eastern Settlement, which lasts a lot longer, it has its own bishopric, it's really beautiful and green and lush in the summer, in many ways more habitable. The problems partly come later, but also the winters are longer and much, much harsher. So that's really

the issue with Greenland, but it's not all ice. Just a question about the voyages and stuff. So, I mean, I can't imagine what would possess you if you're standing on the west coast of Iceland to think, I'm going to get on a ship and just keep going and see what's... What possesses them to think that there's even anything there? Because it's not like Columbus thinking, I'll get to India. You know, I know I can get there. You know, they have no sense of anything.

Or do they? Or is there some vague sense? And do they think that there are kind get there you know they have no sense of anything or do they or is there some vague sense and do they think that there are kind of you know the Midgard serpents and things toiling out there in the depths and giants roaming the seas and it's yeah I I suspect um I suspect there is a sense of yeah here be monsters at the edge of the world but I don't think that's the case when it comes to Greenland because well for, what you often find is the initial discovery and kind of semi-settlement of these places is accidental. People get blown off course. They might be trying to reach a parent somewhere further up the coast of Iceland, and then they just get blown out to sea. And then they are lucky enough to be the ones that then find land. I'm sure there are plenty of others

that didn't, and therefore didn't discover Greenland. So that's the case in Greenland. But it's also you have to think that, you know, the Norse are a seafaring culture, and they're going to be picking up on a lot of signs that we wouldn't necessarily be picking up on so migratory birds for example so if you're seeing the birds heading out west well there's probably something out there you know you see it it's not that sense of we're at the edge of the world exactly yeah exactly yeah yeah there's there's plenty going on and driftwood even and so they settle greenland and then the same thing happens that people get blown off course and they end up basically in north America. I mean, and that's definite, isn't it? Because they found the settlement and all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Well, settlement is a grand word for what they find. And this in itself is significant. So, yeah. So Greenland, around, say, like I said, 985 or so, people start going out there what they call vinland like the like wine or you know berry land that is around the year 1000 which makes it nice and easy to remember and what that seems to be is a series of expeditionary parties possibly led by well certainly according to the

sagas led predominantly by er Eric the Red's children. So Leif the Lucky is the classic one that everyone knows about. And they go out there. And the first place, according to the sagas that they come, they call Hedluland, which seems to be sort of Baffin Island. It's very stony and rocky. That's what Hedluland means. It's like stone slab land they then come further down the coast to a much more green and wooded um place which they call mark land which means forest land and then they keep

heading down and this is according to the sagas they keep heading down the coast and they then build huts and overwinter and men ships and um meet people do some some some nascent trading all goes a little bit wrong there's there's quite a lot of tension they go back but there's a series of these of these of these expeditions and it's really those the sagas those same the saga of the greenlanders and the saga of eric the red that describes these voyages to the edge of the North American continent. And so for many, many, many years, it was suspected that they had got there. But the sagas were really the main reason for that suspicion. But there was no archaeological evidence.

Then in the 60s, a husband and wife team called Helgi and Anna Ingstad actually were then directed to a place at the tip of Newfoundland, where locals said, look, I think there might be something there. And indeed, they found remnants of not permanent sites. So there are middens, there are rubbish heaps, but they're not very full. There's no evidence of burials we're looking more at something that may have lasted a decade or something it's used for overwintering for mending ships and then maybe as a springboard for going further south and seeing what they could find there um from that archaeological evidence and also from the sagas, it looks like the Vinland voyages are pretty short-lived.

We don't have permanent settlement. And according to the sagas, that's mostly because of the tensions they run into when they're dealing with the people who already live there. These are the skrylings, is that right? Yeah. So it's not a polite term so so so in the sagas skylings is the term for any um non-norse native inhabitants that they find in greenland so particularly the north of greenland where you've got inuit hunters and then over on the edge of the north american continent yeah and it's not polite it means like wretched scrawnywny little ones or something like that.

Yeah, well, of course. I mean, they would, wouldn't they? Yeah. It's like humans are humans. And Finland is thought to be New England. Is that the kind of likeliest? It's sort of slightly up. We're talking sort of tip of Newfoundland heading down to the St. Lawrence River area. We think archaeologically, we think they got as far as the St. Lawrence River because they find a type of nuts, butternuts in the archaeological layers up at the site that's called Lansome Meadows at the tip of Newfoundland. And those really only seem to grow as far north as it were as the St. Lawrence River area so so it looks like they got that far but we don't know how much further they got now you've mentioned a few times the sagas and we should probably get into the sagas because not so much of our evidence comes from the sagas I know

we've got a break coming up but before the break what are the sagas they're not contemporary are they that's the thing no well they're not in the form we have them written down so you should probably start with the word saga it comes so we use it, yeah, if you're stuck in a horrible traffic jam or a family feud, oh, I've got a saga to tell you. gives us a clue as to the oral storytelling origins of the sagas. So the sagas are stories that are told in Iceland and over the years, from the earlier settlement period at least, you know, and over the years they're transmitted, they change, they're shaped by the mouths that tell them, you get new elements added, you get other elements taken out. Eventually, when we come to the 12th and very much 13th century, they start to be written down in Iceland. And those written forms of the sagas are what survive today, what we have. And they talk about all sorts of things. So the most famous

ones are the sagas of Iceland, as you mentioned, Eil Saga at the top. I didn't pronounce it properly though. Oh, pretty close. I mean, honestly, I always worry very much about my pronunciation of everything, so I think we can put that to bed. We just enjoy the words and the names and the rest of it. That's good. You can definitely come again. But Eil Saga

is one of the sagas of Icelanders. Eil is one of the first settlers of Iceland. You talked about, well you the the the extract you had is ulfer who's his father um he's he's meant to be a shapeshifter ulf literally means wolf um and he's one he they they that that's their their movement out to iceland and that's very typical of the sagas of iceland as you see their, what do you call it, their migration to Iceland, their settlement, and then it goes through stories of the settlers through the first decades or

centuries. Sometimes these sagas are about individuals. You get these amazing outlaw sagas, for example, the saga of Gísli, the saga of Gretir, these tragic, disruptive, socially disruptive outlaw figures. But then you get other sagas that are about whole valleys over 100 years or families spreading over several generations. But then you have other sorts of sagas as well. You have king's sagas that are about predominantly the kings of Norway, sometimes Denmark. You have chivalric sagas, which are basically the medieval Icelandic and broader more broadly Scandinavian equivalent of romances you know so Arthurian characters for example you have

you have um uh legendary sagas about about heroes of old um so you have all these different stories they're all sagas and Eleanor also um we have things called the prose and the poetic eddas. Yeah. So they would also come under the rubric and they tell the stories of the gods. So they're basically the source for Norse mythology as we now understand it. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So they're not sagas, but they're very much part of that body of Old Norse literature. And it's coming from Iceland.

Very much. And written in a very similar cultural context. So to give you an example, most sagas are anonymous in the sense we don't know who wrote them down or transmitted them, of course. There are some King's sagas where we do know in all likelihood they're written by a 13th century chieftain, politician, poet called Snorri Sturtlusen. We might talk more about him later. Snorri is also the person who wrote down the Prose Edda. And the Prose Edda is a, it's written in the 13th century, it's a handbook for poets. And Tom, this will come straight onto your favourite subject. Part of the reason that they have to be written down is because traditional nordic poets need to know an awful lot about um the old religion you know the gods and has something intervened something that might i don't know what would that be could it be christianity tom i think it could i think

it could i think this is i think this is the perfect spot at which which to take a break so what we'll do is we'll take a break. You can talk to Eleanor about Christianity in the break while being photographed for Norwegian Vogue. And then we can come back and talk about something more interesting after the break. So after the break, I'll come back, read my Scaldic verse from our cricket tour, and then we'll talk about the Christianisation of Iceland and the complications that this sets up for interpreting the sagas.

Very good. See you in a minute. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our

Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to ther to the rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com the deep tracks of iceland's blizzards fell wielders of the bat foe and ball slayer favoured by Odin, they fought the puffin. That was a poem written in Iceland, written by me to celebrate our 2-1 defeat by the Icelandic cricket team about four years ago.

And I can see Dominic's happy face on the Zoom call at that. And he's about to get even happier because we're with Eleanor. And we're going to talk about the year 1000 when, by tradition, the people of Iceland decided to become Christian. And Eleanor, just, you know, I'm facing the scepticism of Dominic here. Please reassure me this is a significant moment. It's not only significant. Dominic, I'm going to try and a significant moment it's it's not only significant Dominic I'm going to try and make it sexy and bloodthirsty right okay Tom never does he Tom is neither of those things well let's let's give it a go so so we've got the whole of Europe

either Christianized or Christianizing Norway comes a little bit late to the party, but it has a big Christianizing king who comes to the throne in 995 AD, right? He's called Olaf Trudforsen. We need to know about him to understand. Over the two decades leading up to around 1000 AD, we start to see some missionaries coming into Iceland. So these are generally Icelandic missionaries. They leave, they go to the continent, and then they come back trying to bring Christianity with them. This is where it gets a little bit sexy. Don't hold your hopes up too much.

But because these are really quite unpleasant people. We're talking Viking missionaries. These are people who go around the country trying to convert people by force, smashing up idols. There is a brilliant um that so one of the first missionaries gets really really cross he comes to iceland with a bishop and no one wants to be christian and everyone starts taking the piss out of him and composing scurrilous verses questioning the pure nature of the relationship between said missionary and said bishop. I think there's a point where, what's it, what's it,

you're the mummy of all the bishop's babies. It's that sort of stuff. And they get so, this is a really insulting thing to say if you are a Viking at this time. So he then goes and kills some people and gets outlawed. And then the next one smashes up all the pagan idols and gets outlawed. And then the next one has the piss taken out of him and so kills people and gets outlawed. And then the next one smashes up all the pagan idols and gets outlawed. And then the next one has the piss taken out of him and so kills people and gets outlawed. So it's not-

It's muscular Christianity. It's very muscular, quite fragile Christianity. Yeah, they're not good at having a joke at their expense. So it gets up to the year 1000. And basically the Christians in Iceland and the pagans in iceland and the pagans in iceland are all pretty pissed off at each other and they want different law courts they want different procedures they just they don't want anything to do with each other

meanwhile this norwegian christianizing king is lurking in the wings basically saying you need to start christianizing or i'm going to come and do it for you and so the iceland is like right okay fine fine so at the big parliament, it's called the Althing, so everyone meets together, and one of the chieftains is tasked with deciding whether the country is going to turn Christian or not. And so he goes and hides under a skin in his tent for a day and a night or something.

That's how they do it in Christianity in Iceland. And I think, I'm pretty sure he's pagan himself, but he decides the most pragmatic thing is that, no, they do Christianize. Except he says, well, look, the pagans can carry on eating horse flesh. You can still sacrifice babies. You can still worship idols. Just do it privately, you know. That's not how Christianity works, right? In the Nordic world, works right in the world it's very very general

simmer and and in fact my my favorite detail is that when they're all then told well you're going to have to be baptized because it's iceland there's a lot of nice cozy um hot springs and so everyone at the parliament basically says well we're not getting not getting baptised here because the water's cold. So we'll wait till we're on the way back. When we get to our local hot springs, then we'll get baptised. Thank you very much. So that's the context for the official baptism of the official conversion of Iceland. But it takes a long time and there are still plenty of people who are uh you know believing in the old gods or believing in the old gods in particular circumstances so if you go to sea you might pray to thor if you're on land you might pray to christ it just depends on so when i went to iceland there was there

were all these stories about you'd be driving along a straight road and then there'd be a bend and the big and and and the the ic would say, well, this is because the elves were there. And therefore we had to... And is that just a story that they tell gullible tourists or is there actually a belief still to this day that elves and such spirits are manifest in the landscape? So obviously I'm not Icelandic. I can't talk for people's inner beliefs. But certainly, well, I mean, there are quite a lot of, let's tour the elf houses of southern Reykjavik for a fair price sort of tours going on. But no, you're right that yes, they do have a sense that there are other things in the landscape that aren't human. And that's okay, but just be respectful. So I think, yeah, there are certainly people who do believe things like that still. And yeah, I mean, you've both been to Iceland. The landscape itself is uncanny. A lot of the, you know, there are things that look like trolls, just petrified. Yeah, and you've got smoke coming out of the ground and all that sort of

stuff. Why wouldn't you believe in trolls and elves and dragons? Exactly, yeah. So then going back to what we were saying before the break, you know, when we have these 13th century texts, we have the Prose Edda written by Snorri Sturluson. It's this mythological handbook to help poets because these poets are now Christian. The worry is that they've forgotten all the old stories that mean that they can write poetry

just as beautifully as Tom tom did you know but because a lot of this that's the right thing to say but a lot of this poetry does draw on the old myths and the god odin the one-eyed god is meant to be the god of poetry so you really need those cultural um points in order to in order to participate in this very important sort of um cultural practice the the the other big text for the mythology is again 13th century um from a manuscript from about 1270 called the the codex regis the the king's codex um and that is the poetic edda and that's all the that's a collection, it's an enormous collection of all the poems

of the gods and the heroes of old, the sort of heroes that end up in Wagner's Ring Cycle, but also the gods that end up in Marvel films, Loki, Thor, Odin, Frey, all the rest of it. And so what is the scholarly thinking on how authentic the transmission of the poetic edda is so are these unmediated by christian influences can we kind of say this is what you know what the ancient vikings it's a genuine question um Or, you know, are things like Ragnarok, the end of the world, and the stories of Odin and Thor and everything, have they been kind of, well, slightly transmuted by Christian assumptions and influence? unmediated trust nothing basically everything's dodgy particularly when it's gone through hundreds potentially potentially hundreds of years of or when i say it's gone through hundreds

of years of being orally transmitted that doesn't make it intrinsically unreliable not at all it's just that anything that is that old from source to text we can't tell exactly what's happened to it also we only have really we have a couple of poems knocking around elsewhere but but really if this manuscript hadn't survived we wouldn't have yeah the vast vast majority it really and then you have to think how many other things didn't survive you know we know there were shipwrecks in in the early modern period carrying potentially dozens of these manuscripts who knows what was was there? That's terrible. How many Marvel superheroes are we missing out on? It's tragic.

So we don't really know what we don't know is the point. And we don't know how... I mean, so some of these poems look like they could be taking the piss out of the gods. Others look like they could have much older authentic roots. And certainly some of the things that are described in the poems, we then see in other sorts of sources. So runic inscriptions, picture stones, things that make us realise, okay, there's some truth behind these stories. We just have to piece all the little bits together. And Eleanor, so, I mean, by the 13th century, the saga writers are devoutly

Christian. I mean, it's not like they're kind of secretly Odin worshippers or anything. So, what is their attitude to this body of mythology? It's quite comfortingly nice for the most part of it. So, let's talk about the sagas, because yeah, there are conversion narratives in a lot of the sagas. And what that means is then there are a lot of pagan characters in the sagas, pre-conversion or in the process of being converted. But really, the sense you get there is that these are people's ancestors. This is people's cultural and personal heritage. So you're not going to be disrespectful of them. So there will be comments such as,

you know, he lived in a time before the conversion or, you know, he believed in these gods or, but he acted in a way that was, you know, good and noble. It's not this sort of demonization that you get.

But what about the gods themselves? Oh, the gods themselves. Because the gods themselves, I mean, Odin is an incredibly powerful kind of menacing, hypnotic figure in a lot of these. Yeah. So in the sagas, the gods do sometimes crop up, particularly in the more outlandish sagas.

And there they often are quite unpleasant. You know, there's a ship um lost at sea on the way to greenland and suddenly thor will appear and say i'll wreck you on these rocks if you don't believe in me you know so they are a little bit demonic um but then they don't crop up very often in the sagas in the eddas in the prose edda by snorri and in the poetic edit of all those poems. No, it's more like what you would see in, I don't know, Greek or Roman pantheons of gods. They're more than human. They're bawdy.

They're badly behaved. They're dangerous. They're funny, you know, but they're not necessarily evil. The only sort of exception is that, of course, Snorri is writing within this Christian framework. And so it's sometimes hard to tell how many of his stories are being mediated through that lens I mean they have to be to some extent so for example he calls Loki something like that you know the the malevolent culminator of all the gods he's that he's the baddie he's the mischief maker

and there's and he calls Odin the all-father. And so it's possible he's drawing on that sort of Christian framework with which to explain the gods to a Christian audience. And the notorious issue is around Ragnarok, isn't it? Which is the end of the world, the end of the gods, the wolf, Fenris, the wolf turning up and devouring everything. And there is debate, isn't there, about the degree to which this might be influenced by Book of Revelation and Christian anxieties about the end of the world? Exactly. And what's your thought on that? Well, I think that there are an awful lot of cultural influences that are going to be just in the air, just knocking around 13th century

Iceland. Some of these are going to be Christian, some of these are going to be learned European, some of these are going to be older sort of native tradition, there's going to be all sorts. So at the end of one of the poems, yeah, it's been suggested suddenly this dragon appears in the sky, but it is sort of Book of Revelation, the sort of dragon rather than traditional Nordic Fafnir-type dragon, possibly. On the other hand, there are other potential influences. So in the case of Ragnarok, in the poems that describe Ragnarok, it's fire and it's darkness covering the world and it's nuclear winters almost.

And it has been suggested there that what they're drawing on is a long, long lived cultural memory of really terrible events or huge volcanoes that have gone off in the past. Yeah. Maybe going back to the 5th century,

6th century, even that sense that the world is unstable and may end in ways that we have very little control over. So who knows how much of that is also working its way into myths such as Ragnarok. Great. That's enough Christianity.

We haven't talked about sagas very broadly, but we haven't really zeroed in on any particular sagas. So do you have a favourite? Do you have a couple of favourites? Oh, I have so many favourites. Well, I mean, I suppose it depends what direction we want to go in. Should we go back to Greenland? Because there's some quite lovely... Sure. Well, Eleanor, I wondered if... Because my two favourite characters are both women.

Yes. And one of them is the evil sister of Leif Erikson, Freydis. Evil according to one saga and good according one. Good according to the other. Yes. So she's a complex figure. And then there's this remarkable woman, Gudrid, who supposedly gives birth. Could you just tell us about them?

Because they're both kind of wonderful figures. And it's a reminder that the female figures in the sagas are kind of just as amazing as the men. I totally agree. And that's sort of why I wanted to head back to Greenland

because exactly like you say, these two wonderful characters, there are very strong female characters throughout the sagas. And in fact, often you'll find that the females are more psychologically complex than the males. The males are often quite, you know, Yeah, the vegan, yeah, off I go.

But, you know, the women women are what's the music they do again it's the music again you did us a little tune there i did like to have a musical you can see was me flexing my um my my muscles your muscles yeah if i if i had an axe i would hold up it was very intimidating i think you've been watching too many children's cartoons yeah that was definitely more nog in the nog wasn't it yeah anyway i threw you off tell us about the women so so for example i i lack style a saga the saga of the the people of salmon valley it has this very very strong woman at the heart of it um gudrun who ends up with four husbands another lover and outlives them all not entirely coincidentally and is

it's really really strong and powerful and quite formidable. But yes, in Vinland, in the two Vinland sagas, the saga of Eric the Red and the saga of the Greenlanders, we have these extraordinary characters. Do we know if they're historical? They may well have been, maybe not in the form that we have them good read that or good read is um she ends up on these voyages to uh the edge of the north american continent she at that point is married to a man called carl stephanie which means sort of the stuff that men are made of and she is a very very important figure earlier in Earlier in the sagas, she helps this... The Old Norse term is vulva, but it's sort of like a seeress.

I know, Dominic, yeah, again, you can't see. There was definitely a raised eyebrow going on there. It's the Old Norse term for a pagan seeress. And Greenland is going through a terrible famine. And so this seeress is called upon to perform these spells that Gudrid helps with in order to try and summon good spirits in order to bring about the famine. She then goes off to Vinland and exactly like you say, Tom,

she's in the sagas said to be the first European person from over want to say, yeah, European sort of person from over the seas to the west to give birth. She gives birth to a little boy called Snorri. So he's the first European American. Yes, according to the sagas. Yeah, exactly.

Freydis, who is one of the children of Eric the Red, and also takes part in, according to the sagas, these adventures Freydis, who is one of the children of Eric the Reds and also takes parts in, according to the sagas, these, um, these adventures to the West is even more interesting. Part of the reason she's so interesting is because in one of the sagas, she is most definitely a baddie. Uh, she's quite terrifying. She gets into a feud with another ship that they've gone out with, um, which is led by two brothers. She doesn't like where this is going. And so she persuades her husband and the other people in her party to murder the brothers. And there are, I think, five women in the brothers' party, and so

no one will murder them. And so she just says, put an axe in my hand, hand me an axe, and she finishes them off for herself. It's quite terrifying. And then it's said that she swears everyone to secrecy. When they get back to Greenland, things start to come out, what's happened. And it's meant to be a really, really dark and terrible event. But what's interesting is in the other saga, she's nothing like that. She is very formidable. And there's a point where relations between the Norse explorers and the locals, the tribe who live there, have broken down and people have been killed. And it's very unpleasant. At one point, all the Norse run away.

But Freydis is heavily pregnant, and so she can't run away and so the saga tells us that she picks up a sword from one of the the fallen people and she bears her breast and she slaps the sword against her breast and the the the natives who are um and they're so terrified that they run away and so that's how they might well this is it so so that's one of those strange things where you don't know whether that would have meant more to the original saga audience when they were listening or later reading, or that would be absolutely bizarre because when they get... Presumably this was in the summer.

Well, we hope so. Yes, that's not frostbite you'd welcome, is it? No, so what's interesting there is that these two the vinland sagas the greenlanders and um the um the saga of oak the reds they don't seem to have any when i say textual connection they don't seem to have been copied from each other they seem to be drawing from the same pool of oral traditions that have been brought down the centuries and so the fact that there are so many similarities between them says something about the strength of that oral

tradition that is being passed down but also the fact that then you end up with a character like Freydis who is presented so differently in each one is is fascinating isn't it it's like what's the truth behind that is there any at all and are these stories that are being you we've talked a bit about how they're told and retold and so on so are they told within family groups um as sort of bedtime stories or as sort of a shared heritage or are they told publicly at big sort of feasts and sort of you know council meetings and stuff like that how does that work it's probably a bit of both um certainly we know that medieval Icelandic society is operating on all sorts of levels on this, this oral, kind of different levels of public oral tradition and then private oral tradition.

So we mentioned Snorri in the 13th century. Snorri is at one point the chief law speaker at the National Parliament. But these law speakers up to the early 12th century, their main duty is over the course of three years, every yearly parliament, they recite a third of the laws. So then all the laws have been recited. So we have oral tradition operating on that scale and so when we're talking about the saga stories the genealogies there's no reason why that wouldn't be the case but at the same time we then have we have family groups what we tend to have is is farms that don't just have one family but they have an extended family or they have you know people working there people

staying there from other family groups people being fostered as children there so they're quite large they're not nuclear families and the the sense seems to be that these stories these saga stories were told in the evenings around particularly the winter fires but around the fires this tradition called kvuldvaka or evening wake where these stories are told and retold. What about the violence of them? They're incredibly violent often aren't they and is that reflecting a genuine violence in a competition within these farms or for land or what? Yeah I think it's going to be a mixture I mean it's like you know if we if we look at Hollywood

films nowadays I mean please god they're not reflecting normal levels of violence. If that's all that's left of us, if, yeah, Die Hard 2 is all that remains of Western civilization. Exactly. So I suspect that, you know, what makes a good story? What makes the drama? You're not really going to have everyone sitting around the winter fire and listening to the tale of Thorfinn who who spent his day looking after a cow, then went to the loo and ate a bowl of porridge. But on the other hand, no, I mean, this is a violent time and there are feuds.

And a lot of the saga stories are based on the large-scale family feuds of the past. I mean, Njál's saga, classic. I mean, if you want to read one saga, read Nial's saga, the saga of Burnt Nial, the fact that he's nicknamed Burnt tells you a lot about what happens. I think the body count is around 100 dead by the end of the saga. So again, it's not necessarily going to be typical, but there are feuds and there are redresses that have to be done. Elena, also, one of the things that struck me, and I wonder how it struck me correctly, was that despite the violence and the strangeness and everything, it's also very kind of domestic

in many ways. It's kind of, because this is being written at the same time as Arthurian romance and Dante and all that kind of stuff in continental Europe. But this is, you know, there are no aristocrats, there's no kings. This is about groups of farmers, basically. And it's reflective of that in a way that I guess is kind of unique for medieval Christian literature. Yeah, it absolutely is.

And that's part of what makes it so interesting. Part of that is the context, not only in which these stories are being created the the material from which they're being created as you say these are these are families these are these are farming groups um it's also reflected in the sort of people who are writing them down so what we're seeing oh i don't know for example anglo-saxon england you know a few centuries earlier most of our textual sources come from the monasteries so it's material that's written down in the scriptoria and so okay we get a few dirty poems here and there and a few riddles but for the most part you've got to think that the context in which these things are being written down

then creates a lens through which we are viewing what existed in that society because it's it's what people choose to record in medieval iceland a lot of these sagas are not only being told on the farmsteads, but written down on the farmsteads. There are some monasteries and there are scriptoria and people are writing there. But exactly as you say, it's a much less, it is still stratified, but it's a much less stratified society. And you do end up by the 13th century with power concentrated in the hands of six, you know, six, broadly speaking, major families. And we're talking about a context of civil war and an awful lot of bloodshed.

But the fact is that these are stories. These are sagas written down by Icelanders, often on their farms for Icelanders. And in the case of the sagas of Icelanders, literally about Icelanders. So yeah, it's the domestic dramas. And you said as well that the time when these sagas are being written down is a period when Norwegian influence is growing and growing, and Iceland's independence is coming under threat. So that presumably is also part of the context for why they're being written and the way in the subjects that they cover exactly very strongly so so yeah by the 13th century some from around 1220 to 1264 we have this period of really really nasty civil war snorri sturtleson you know author of many king sagas and author of

um the prose edda is is a real mover and shaker in the civil war and it kills him because he, like so many prominent Icelanders that time, becomes the vassal of the Norwegian king or the Norwegian jarls who are co-ruling with the king at that point. written down they're written down at a time when the world is changing and people need to define their identity in opposition to this new order that is gradually encroaching on what they knew and so yeah by the time we get to the end of the 13th century well way before the time we get to the end of the 13th century um the the commonwealth the the independent first centuries of Icelandic settlement culture has come to an end and Norway is very much in control. Well, that's the perfect point on which to end because we've gone on for almost an hour.

Eleanor, that's brilliant. But before you go, tell us two things. One, tell us the one saga that everybody listening to this should read. And secondly, you can do it much better than me. You can tell them about your book and your brilliant book about the world of the uh the world of the vikings so so go on go for it one saga that's that's genuinely difficult i'm gonna i'm gonna go for niel saga it's a it's a classic but it's incredibly it's tragic it's complicated it's got

beautiful relationships between the two central male characters. It's got a lot of very strong female characters. It's got supernatural elements. It's got politics. It's got the conversion in the middle for Tom. You know, it's got everything. I would say, though, and this is true of most sagas, one caveat. Sometimes it's necessary to get through the first chapters, which can be a little dense and very much full of genealogy. So don't give up. You know, it does get better. If you want shorter ones,

I go for the Outlaw Sagas, the Saga of Gísli, the Saga of Grettir. They're more character studies of individuals and they're absolutely beautiful. Beyond the Northlands, it's the world beyond Iceland, but told through the eyes

of these later medieval storytelling Icelanders. So it's how this far-travelling culture, they go north to Arctic Scandinavia, they meet, there's the people they meet there, it's the Saumi, the nomads, the trolls, the giants often. They go east down the Russian waterways, they end up in Byzantium,

they end up on pilgrimage to Rome and the Holy Land. And then, yeah, from the south, it's heading west out to Greenland, out to North America. So it's the history of the Viking world in its broad, global, interconnected sense, but it's also the stories that these people brought back, how these stories got transmitted

over the centuries how they ended up in Iceland and what humans do when they when they need to imagine the world and their place within it and an awful lot of of dragons and trolls too it's such it's such a great book and it's such a wonderful portrayal of I think the only ancient people to have killed people on four continents oh what an achievement i'm not sure i'm right but but and also i would like to thank you for doing this on three hours sleep so thank you so much um thank you everyone for listening and we will see you again very soon bye-bye bye-bye Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening,

and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.