The Rest Is History - 148. The Vikings Go East

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

In this week's episode, Tom and Dominic take a look at the actions, influence and brutalisation of the Vikings in Eastern Europe, including their role in the formation of Russia and Ukraine. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *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. Hello, welcome to The Rest is History. We are recording this in early February 2022, at a time of escalating tensions in Eastern Europe, focused along the border of Russia with Ukraine. And Dominic, it's fascinating, isn't it, if you have any interest in early medieval history, because last summer, Vladimir Putin, or at least someone pretending to be Vladimir Putin, wrote an essay about the historical background to this. 5,000 words, Tom, I think it was.

5,000 words. And he went back, obviously, through the history of the Soviet Union, back through the emergence of the Russian Empire. But he ended up going all the way back to the 10th century and the emergence of the Kingdom of the Rus. Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, Vladimir Putin, I put that slightly in inverted commas, wrote, are all descendants of ancient Rus, which was the largest state in Europe. Slavic and other tribes across the vast territory were bound together by one language,

economic ties, the rule of the princes of the Rurik dynasty, and after the baptism of the Rus, the orthodox faith. And I guess two things leap out from that. One is Putin's argument that because there was this great empire, this great kingdom of the Rus, covering a vast expanse of territory, therefore, everybody who lives in lands that constituted that kingdom properly should be part of Russia, I guess, is the kind of implicit argument. And the other argument is, it's one from Silence, where he talks about Slavic and other tribes, but he notably does not mention anyone coming from Scandinavia, which is very much the sense that I have, that the foundations of the Rus kingdom, this kind of emergent kingdom in what becomes Russia and Ukraine were actually Vikings. Well, this is a massively controversial issue, isn't it, Tom? So this week's subject is the Vikings in the East, which is this impossibly kind of romantic, violent, exotic, exciting,

murky subject, but it's also politically very controversial. So in the Soviet Union, there were massive arguments, and there was a sort of a real movement in the Soviet Union, there were massive arguments and there was a sort of a real movement in the Soviet Union to say that basically, okay, there were some Scandinavians, i.e. Vikings there, but they weren't very important and their cultural imprint was soon kind of, you know, it was lost, buried by Slavic traditions and Slavic culture. We don't owe anything to these Scandinavians, basically. Yeah, so as I understand it, that argument first developed in the 18th century against the backdrop

of Peter the Great's kind of defeat of the Swedes. So obviously the Russians didn't want to think that, you know, the foundation of their kingdom was Swedish. And then again, isn't it right that it was the Nazi invasion that really turbocharged this idea? Because Hitler said that without, you know, the Norsemen going in, the Russians would be living like rabbits or something. Exactly. So this is sort of, there's obviously a Germanic aspect to kind of Norse culture. They're very closely related. And so in the 20th century, it became really important for Stalin to sort of say, you know, no, we don't know. I think because the story is often told with kind of Viking overlords, as we'll go on to describe, Viking overlords, in inverted commas, civilizing the Slavic tribes. And obviously, if you are a

very keen Slavophile, if you're a kind of Slav nationalist, that's very offensive, the idea that you needed to be civilized by kind of Vikings in horned helmets, which they obviously didn't wear, in their long boats and whatnot. But of course, I mean, if you come from Britain, actually, the perspective you have on the Vikings is that this civilizing process, by definition, I mean, it's incredibly brutal that acknowledging the influence that Vikings, you know, have on 9th, 10th century Europe, whether it's in Britain or whether it's in, you know, the lands of the of the Naipa and the Volga. This isn't necessarily a civilizing process. It's a process of kind of conquest and brutalization well i mean the the really interesting thing is that these these two things are happening in parallel so everybody think when

they think of the vikings i mean basically pretty much every primary school in britain as far as i can tell as the vikings at some point kids dress up in viking outfits and they put on horned helmets and they learn about dragon proud long boats and. But they almost always study it in terms of a story that the Vikings first pitch up at Lindisfarne. They sat in the monastery, and then they're constantly attacking England and France and Spain. And Alfred burns his cakes. There are a series of battles.

The Vikings said, you know, it's all the West, and then expeditions to Greenland and Iceland. But actually, a lot of Viking historians, Neil Price, for example, would say actually what the Vikings are doing in the West is a copy. They're copying what they've already started doing in the East. And it's the story in the East that is more exotic, more exciting, and also, crucially, I would say, more lucrative.

There's so much money for a Viking to make sailing to the East rather than to the west and and you could argue that in the long run couldn't you tom creating russia it's quite quite a big big thing crane yeah and ukraine right well the issue of which of those can lay claim it's a bit like the greek the argument we had in alexander the great podcast about greece and macedonia and north macedonia as it's now called fighting over over the legacy of Alexander the Great, isn't it? Yeah, because this stuff really matters. Yeah, they both see themselves as the heirs of the Kievan Rus civilization. Yeah, so we've, I mean, the Vikings are such a great topic. We've both, I wrote about them in

Millennium, I wrote about the Vikings in the East, you were writing a children's book about the Vikings right now, so you're absolutely kind of immersed in this. It's such a great topic. And we've done one episode already on the Norse epics, which essentially took us from Iceland to Greenland to Vinland and the New World. But even in Iceland, they are writing epics about what the Vikings are getting up to in the lands of the East, going down the rivers to Baghdad, the capital of the greatest empire on the face of the earth, to Miklagard, the golden city of Caesar, Constantinople.

And as you say, it's a story that is very, very thrilling because you have the same, you know, obviously the idea of of taking ship and discovering north america i mean that's an incredible story but so also is the idea that that people are going from scandinavia and kind of pitching up in baghdad you know or even further afield i mean it's it is an astonishingly romantic narrative well the before we get into the the um the sort of the narrative of it i mean the best example of that and the one that most, certainly British listeners and maybe English speaking listeners will know, everybody knows the story of 1066, certainly in Britain they do, the Battle of Hastings, Harold and William. But obviously there's a battle before that against a guy called Harold Hardrada, who comes over from Norway to try and claim the English throne.

And the life of Harold Hardrada is this whole business in microcosm. Yeah. You know, he had been in Norway. He ends up going to Kiev. He ends up going to Constantinople and commanding the Imperial Bodyguard. He may have gone to Sicily. He may have gone to the Holy Land. You know, this is incredible.

The Princess. Well, these incredible adventures, many of which are unquestionably true because they're backed up in kind of, you know, Byzantine sources. So, I mean, you think about that life. He had a more interesting, well-traveled life than probably most of our listeners, certainly than us. Yeah, definitely. Well, so we've got from Mary Kirk Alves, who asked very simply, why were the Vikings going east? Was it more of an expedition or a conquest?

So obviously the geography of Scandinavia, kind of, you know, the ancients thought of it as an island. They didn't realise it was a peninsula. So you can take ship and go west across the North Sea or into the Baltic, up the Gulf of Finland. And beyond the Gulf of Finland lies the vast expanse, basically, of Eurasia. And the Vikings knew it as Sweden the Great, Sweden the Cold, a land of giants, of dwarves, of dragons, of men with mouths between their nipples who never spoke but only barked so an intimidating place but a place that as it turns out with incredible courage with incredible fortitude with incredible daring can lead you to the richest lands on the face of the planet the lands of of the caliphate and of the byzantine empire yeah that's right and i think um

if you think about the geography so if you live in nor, if you live on one of the fjords or something, when you look out, you see the North Sea and beyond it, very rich kind of farmlands of England and the monasteries of Ireland and so on, and that's the way you go. But obviously if you live in Sweden, you're looking out east, southeast, and the first thing you see is an island called Gotland. Have you been to Gotland, Tom? I have. Have you? Yeah, I have. I went there on holiday a couple of years ago. Absolutely amazing place, beautiful island, fantastic churches, where Rachel Morley would

enjoy it. But also coin hordes, these incredible hordes of coins, thousands and thousands of Arabic dirhams that have come up the rivers. So basically what you would do, if you were an entrepreneurial eighth century Swede, you would go to Gotland and that's the sort of staging post where you maybe find people for your crew or you sign on with somebody. And then obviously the place to go from, I mean, you know, England or France, they're not really on your radar.

What you do is you keep going across the Baltic. And there, as you say, you get the mouths of these rivers. And you know that somewhere at the end of that river is one of the richest cities on earth, Miklagard, Constantinople. And beyond it, it's all the wealth of the caliphate. And you have, I think there are two things, crucially, that you have, if you're Scandinavian, that they will buy from you. one of them is furs which you can kind of pick up on the way and the other crucially is slaves so this is a real a massive slave trading enterprise

yeah it it absolutely is um and i think that um i mean let's so how do you get there if you're on you know if you're in sweden so there's um there, as you say, and there's this place called Birka, which is, I think, just west of Stockholm now. Been to Birka, Tom. And it's as close to a town as you get in kind of early 9th century Scandinavia. And from these kind of centres, you can head eastwards, up the Gulf of Finland. And there's the Volkov River. Yeah.

And there's a town, Stara Ladooga. Yeah, Stara Ladooga, Tom. Is that how you pronounce it? You're Russian, it's shocking. Yeah, okay. So this is a kind of – well, it's not Wild West, is it? It's Wild East. Well, Neil Price has a lovely thing in his book,

The Children of Ash and Elm, where he says it's basically Deadwood. So, you know, it's sort of saloons. But I think a couple of people, he's not the only person to have made that American analogy, because Tom Shippey in his book, Laughing Till I Die, about the Vikings, he has a nice section about how, he says, you you know the way you to answer mary kirk's question it's not really like the kind of raids on linda's farm and stuff

he says the way to think about it is about trappers and traders in north america with fur i mean the parallel is paddling down these rivers and there are sort of there are indigenous people tribes on either side sometimes they'll trade with them sometimes they'll kind of fight each other and that's sort of that's the and even the topography you know it's very heavily wooded lots of rivers lakes and things so you start off in storia ladiga and you kind of and that's kind of expanding as time goes and i think that's found in about 750 753 or something and then and then you go south don't you pick your river and you're kind of yes because what what the what the vikings are

bringing is the technology that enables them to navigate these rivers um and and that's evident i think even in the name right i mean that's so um there was a a message from um tapani simajoki friend of the show uh a finn um and he says an interesting tidbit on the linguistics of the east vikings and finland is the brackish meeting point of eastern west the finnish sweden ruotsi is probably derived from the same root as russ russlagen and russ so russlagen russ is rowing lagen is kind kind of the band, isn't it? So the land of the rowers. And that idea of ships going down rivers, people rowing often against the current, with the current.

And the ships are sufficiently, you know, they're built so that they can negotiate quite shallow waters and they're sufficiently light that, you know, you get to a lake, you need to go across to the head of a river, you can carry the ship. Yeah, but that's also where the slaves come in very handy. you get to the end of your bitter river or you get to the point where you need to cross over and basically you need to be able to get out either semi-dismantle your ship or or the ship is light enough to to for you to carry it or your slaves to carry or your slaves well this is where the slaves basically your cargo are carrying it for you i mean that's the sort of genius if you like the sort of horrific genius of the business model that you're trading human beings who are doing a lot of the work for you. And so, and so obviously there's, there's incredibly, you know, you're very vulnerable if you're having to carry a ship, you know, up mountains and, you know, where the rapids

are or, you know, through forests or whatever. So you're, you're, you're very vulnerable. And so that, that's why along the length of these lakes, these rivers, at certain key points, you start to get more and more kind of forts, really. So Novgorod, I mean, you're the Russian speaker here, Dominic. That means new fort, doesn't it? So that appears on Lake Ilmen. That's right. And they called it Holmgard home guard i think didn't they

um the um the russ themselves little the little fort and it's sort of i think a lot of these forts kind of a very north american style they're kind of made of logs on there so everything in novgorod is is made of wood yeah everything even the kind of you know rather than paper they're writing on kind of bark and things um so they're not, so to answer, go back to Mary Kirk's question, is it a conquest? I don't think they think of it as a conquest because they're not interested in, you know, it's not a risk where they're interested in kind of capturing lots of land.

What they're interested in is the route, is the river, and making money. And they establish the forts as kind of trading stations, basically. And you can imagine the kind of, I think Neil Price in his book has a little stuff about, you know, the scene. People drinking, probably lots of crime. Tinkling on the piano. Sassy, sassy madams. Sassy bar tarts. Yeah.

All that kind of stuff. Yeah, but that's the sort of atmosphere. And obviously, that's quite cosmopolitan in the sense that there are lots of these Scandinandinavians who are mostly i think swedes because that's obviously where where you come from um but there are also undoubtedly at this stage lots of slavs so even at this stage i think you've got the mix that that becomes russia the mix of scandinavian and slav yeah absolutely and um so so novgorod is it's a play i, it's very like a kind of Western. So you get lots of celebrated figures in the Norse epics, you know, when they're down on their luck, they go there and they kind of recruit men, you know, people to go off to Britain or, you know, attack Denmark or whatever.

But at the same time, obviously, from Novgorod, you can cross the lake and you can then either uh get the Dnieper which will take you down to the Black Sea and from the Black Sea to Constantinople, Miklagard the great city uh or to the Volga which will take you to the Caspian Sea and from the Caspian Sea to Baghdad or to lands even kind of you know in in Central Asia. They attack Azerbaijan at one point maybe it comes down it's kind of incredible um so so Novgorod is the kind of, I guess, the meeting point of Scandinavia, Naipa, and the Volga. And if you're going the sort of the Western route, as it were, the route down to Miklograd, the next stop is what becomes Smolensk.

So, I mean, these are, you know, if you think of a lot of kind of well-known russia western russian towns and cities they have routes along this kind of route or or indeed even further east along the volga so the smolensk is a place called um seems to be begun as a place called nezdovo and that's the confluence of the denipper and the Svinets River. And again, you know, it's the same sort of wild west kind of atmosphere. But it's like the tension is rising because you're about to approach, as you keep going south, you're going to approach these rapids, these very exciting rapids that bizarrely we know about

from this incredible source. You must have a lot of stuff. A Byzantine emperor, no less. Yeah, who wrote a handbook. Yes, for his son, Constantine VII. Born to the purple. He wrote Porphyrogenitus. He writes a foreign policy guide for his son, Romanus.

Basically, this is how you handle all our neighbors. I mean, just an incredible kind of, almost like a policy document to have survived. And in it, he says, so, you know, the Rus, well, this is the deal with them. And he basically explains, sets out the whole of the route. So he says they have these special boats called, what are they called? Monoxala, single keel boats. So they're basically, he says at this point, they're in kind of disposable boats,

kind of little dugout canoes. They all go together in a big flotilla, he says. And by this point, you're in what is now Ukraine. So you're going down the river through the center of what's now Ukraine. And the river's only navigable in the summer. And basically, you keep having to get out and as the rapids approach the slaves will carry your boats for you and the rapids all have

excellent names do you know all the names of these rapids yeah they're terrifying aren't they and they and there's one of them appears on an inscription actually in gotland i think does it i didn't know that um one of them's called the Drinker. Esupi, the Drinker. Gelandri, the Yeller. Iphor, the Ever Fierce. Leanti, the Laugher. So on and so forth. So there's sort of these weird names for all these different rapids,

and they navigate all them. But by the point at which they're coming down, they're now coming close to what are more like states and kind of confederations of tribes. Petch and Eggs. So there's the Petch and Eggs. They were terrifying. They're kind close to what are more like states and kind of confederations of tribes. Petch and eggs. So there's the Petch and eggs. They were terrifying. They're kind of nomads.

They've just vanished from history now, haven't they? I don't know. I mean, I think they became Tatars or something. But you wouldn't want to be caught by them. They're nomads. Well, they will cut your head off and they will make it into a goblet, won't they? Didn't they do that later?

As we'll discover later in the show. It's very, very blood meridian. So they'll do that. And there's also the Khazars who are incredibly interesting. Yes. Yes. So they're, so, so I mean, so that they are further east and they're basically a kind of buffer between the Slavs and the Caliphate.

So they're, they're nomadic Turkic people, but they amazingly convert to Judaism, which is a distinctive thing to do. Well, they're the world's only Jewish state, aren't they, between the Roman takeover of the Holy Land and the establishment of the State of Israel in the late 1940s, which is just an incredible thing to be. Why did they pick Judaism, Tom? Well, the story is, and this again will turn up later when we talk about the conversion of Kiev to Christianity,

the leader of the Khazars sends messages to all the various powers to send him a Christian monk, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim scholar to go and persuade him. And it's the Jewish, it's the rabbi who wins out. And this was the subject of a fabulous novel, I think written in early 80s by a guy called Milorad Pavic, a Serbian novelist called Dictionary of the Khazars, which is kind of a magical realist novel. Very good. I highly recommend it. And so the Khazars

seem to, in a weird way, have become Jewish. But it sort of makes sense, right? Because they're stuck between two rival powers. Yeah, a Christian and a Muslim empire. So whichever way they jump, they're doomed doomed so they jump a third way and it kind of works for them and i think that um to begin with that that it's the caliphate that is really the focus of of the energies of the russ rather than byzantium because it's it's an absolute you know we've so we've got um lots of questions about silver so stephan yensen himself a viking why are there such enormous amounts of arab about silver. So Stefan Jensen, himself a Viking, why are there such enormous amounts of Arabian silver coins in Viking graves across Scandinavia?

It's the volume of silver that is really attracting them. And so to begin with, I think they're going down the Volga much more than they're going down towards the Black Sea. So they're going towards the Caspian. So they have to negotiate with the Khazars. And some of them definitely do seem to have ended up in Baghdad. Well, they're drawn by the silver, but also by the slave markets, right? There's an inexhaustible demand for slaves in Baghdad.

Absolutely, yeah. And, you know, obviously they are bringing slaves who are slaves, but they also may well be bringing slaves that they've captured in some of their other raids further north. So there are lots of children's books. I mean, there's a wonderful book by Rosemary Sutcliffe called Blood Feud, where it's the story of a boy, I think it is, who is captured in Wessex. They take him to Dublin, to the great slave markets there,

and he ends up, one way or another, he ends up going down the rivers and he ends up in Constantinople. But obviously he could have ended up in Baghdad. And, you know, it's not impossible by any means to think of quite a lot of, you know, substantial number of Scandinavians, possibly Scandinavians themselves, English, Franks, Irish, Slavs, going down all that way. Well, I think, Irish, Slavs, going down all that way? Well, I think it is mainly Slavs. And the evidence for that is obviously the fact that we have the word slave. I mean, it's absolutely imprinted on the English language, and many other European

languages as well. Have you read, come across Michael McCormick's book, Origins of the European Economy? I haven't. It's a really, I mean, it's a massive book. And his argument essentially is that the caliphate in all, you know, so not just the Abbasid caliphate, but the Muslim lands of North Africa and Spain as well, are so economically advanced ahead of Europe that all that Europe can provide really is slaves. And so the main provider of slaves is Otto the Great, for instance, friend of the show. So he is, you know, they are harvesting

vast, vast numbers of Slavs, and they're being transported through Europe, down through Spain to North Africa. What the Vikings are doing is that they are going to the richest you know the heartland of the islamic world and going to baghdad and it's that that opens up you know the vast kind of stream of silver that they're then able to bring back um and and it's it's it's really that that um explains the rhythms of uh viking campaigns in the west as well because it's when the silver mines in uh in yemen and in central asia dry up that they then start to refocus their attention on on england which by this point also has a kind of very silver-based economy yeah and also because it's easier in some ways i mean if you can get silver flooding in that's that's more immediate than getting land

i mean land is great in england if you can get it um but you're's more immediate than getting land. I mean, land is great in England if you can get it. But you're right. I think we have to see the East and Western things sort of in parallel. That obviously, whenever that Eastern route is kind of cut off for some reason or there's a diminution in the trade, then you see a kind of intensification of the sort of Western attacks. But anyway, yeah. see a kind of intensification of the sort of western attacks yeah but anyway yeah well but it's just it's just so you get that the samanid emirs in central asia discover these vast silver mines uh i think in kind of 890s so um end of the 9th century and over the the first half of the 10th century,

silver is flooding in from there. And that, of course, is the period where in the West, the English state is able to construct itself, the fight back against the Vikings. So Alfred and his successors. Presumably because, actually, there's so much money to be made in the East that that becomes the main focus of attention and then after about 965 the silver mines in the east dry up and so uh burka gets abandoned

towards the end of the 10th century and you start to get vikings moving back towards england ethel red the unready and svain forkbeard and so on so i think it's it's it's really fascinating i mean we tend not to think of that you know that, the rhythms of the, you know, the emergence of the English state, and then the return of the Vikings, to a degree, is being conditioned by the availability of silver in the East. Okay, we'll just take a quick break, Tom, and we'll come back after the rest is history we are talking about the vikings in the east and we've got all kinds of um grues frankly gruesome stuff to come now talking of gruesome stuff tom um we we are very responsive as the public know, to popular opinion. We're the people's podcast. We are the people's podcast.

Now, last week, we released two podcasts about the trial and execution of Charles I. And they provoked a remarkably intense reaction. Did you see some of the... I don't want to say intemperate. I don't know whether intemperate is the word. Robust, some would say. I would say that the robust response came from one person in particular, who we actually name-checked at the start of the episode, Capple Loft, who had already got cross with us

during the World Cup of Kings and Queens, because we hadn't included Charles I in our... He had form. He had started his own rival World Cup, I believe. Yes, which Charles I did very well. Yeah, because he rigged the tournament. Yes, he did. Very Stuart behaviour.

Very Stuart behaviour. Anyway, so Capital Loft responded to our episodes by saying, and this was a tweet he put out, just made a second attempt to listen to the rest of his history on the trial of Charles, King and Martyr, but once again had to stop in anger. Every lazy bit of long since debunked Puritan and Whig propaganda is trotted out without challenge.

Falsehood and half-truth abound. Vile. Vile. I mean, that's strong. So there was then a huge discussion. So I went to bed having just seen that and got up the next morning to discover about several hundred messages, attacking each other about charles the first um so ted valence professor valence who i've known for 29 years was was a guest i knew when he was a teenager would you believe and um uh capel off said to me it pains me that as a fan

of baldwin and joseph chamberlain you can be so wrong on 20th 17th century politics though at least you're not quite as dead to all morality and decency as that hellhound valence so i mean to be fair he's nailed ted pretty well he is a hellhound he is so anyway but dominic i mean we've we've done um i mean we've done podcasts and all kinds of things we've done um fascism and communism and Mohammed and all kinds of stuff. And who would have thought that it would be the character of Charles I that would... Charles King of Martyrs, K. Poloff calls him. So anyway, this is by way of saying that because we are the People's Podcast and because we are responsive to deeply held beliefs um we have invited capital loft onto the members uh podcast

that goes out to uh the wangs as we like to call them the members of the resident history special club um and that will be going out uh tomorrow tuesday well indeed so if you are if if you're a member you've got that to look forward to um and'll be debating with him about our treatment of Charles I. What he sees, I think, is the cancer of wiggery that has eaten into The Rest Is History. If you're not a member of The Rest Is History Club, this is your opportunity, basically. You don't want to miss out on the big fight. It's massive. Yeah.

It's the big sports event of 2022 so far. And you can sign up to that on restishistorypod.com. Excellent. So back to the Vikings. Who were not Whigs. Definitely not Whigs. Definitely immune from the taint of Whiggery, I would say, the Vikings. Possibly even more immune to the taint of Whiggery than Kappel Loft.

That is saying something. So one last question on this issue of contacts with Baghdad, Tom. Diogo Morgado has an excellent question. Vikings and Arabs, clash of civilizations or trade-based contacts? Does Islam have any influence in the decline of Norse polytheism? Well, I don't have an answer to the second half. The first half, I would say, not really a clash of civilizations. I mean, we have some really, really interesting things

written by Arabs about the Norse and saying, you know,'re very dirty or they they have weird customs and so on maybe we'll come to that but i would say it's more trade fascination um exchange and so on but you'll have your own answer what do you think well i think um the question of whether visitors to the caliphate you know are influenced by muslim do do they become do some of them become muslim do they bring muslim brides back i mean the evidence so there's there's um the grave of a woman in sweden was found who had a a ring with um kind of invocation of allah yes on the ring yeah uh and various textiles have been found again with kind of uh quranic phrases woven into it um the woman herself seems to have have come from the islamic world whether you i

mean whether whether the fact that you have quranic messages on your robes means that you've become a muslim i'm not sure about that so it's surely unlikely surely it's just high status luxurious well because famously also there's a buddha was found wasn't it in the grave and um that doesn't imply they're buddhists and they're a kind of the crazier from uh you know from ireland um they're basically kind of garnering loot but i would have thought it wasn't beyond the bounds of possibility that um the caliphs were kind of sending missionaries to try and convert some of these barbarians. That's what they were doing. So who knows? Who knows?

It's a very kind of interesting question. But Tom, that raises a really, really interesting set of stories. So we do know that there are lots of people who are Arabs and are Arab messengers, envoys and so on. Ibn Rustah, for example, miss car wire um that i'm sure my arabic's not quite that good uh ibn kuradab hib um and apologies to listeners for the atonement doesn't have the courage to these fantastic arabic voice um voices but i do uh but the most famous one is ibn fadlan so ibn fadlan um is i mean this is the story that basically anyone who's interested in the vikings in the east is familiar with

he is a an envoy stroke missionary who was sent by the abbasid caliph al-muqtadir to go to the vulgar to the people who live on the bulgar who are turkic people called the bulgars so they're not the kind of slav bulgarians that we think of now they are they're living on the Bulgars. So they're not the kind of Slav Bulgarians that we think of now. They're living on the Volga in what's now Tatarstan. And Ibn Fadlan has been sent there basically as a diplomat, straight missionary, to build him a mosque. And when he gets there, he finds a load of Vikings.

Vikings, yeah. And he's quite struck by them, isn't he? I mean, he's quite impressed by them. He says they're as tall as date palms, blonde and ruddy. And he's quite struck by them, isn't he? I mean, he's quite impressed by them. He says they're as tall as date palms, blonde and ruddy. And he's very impressed by their weapons and their kit and stuff. But he's also, they are the filthiest of Alice creatures. They do not wash after shitting or peeing, nor after sexual intercourse, and do not wash after eating.

They are like wayward donkeys. Yeah. So he sort of thinks of them in a very, you know, they're barbarians basically to him, aren't they? They are in a kind of weird way, noble savages, I suppose. Impressive, tall, strong, self-confident and so on, but also weird and a bit unsettling. And he's obviously a really interesting guy because he's curious.

So he says, he hears that one of their chiefs has died and they're going to have this massive funeral. He's like, oh, can I come and... He makes the worst decision of his life. No, it's an amazing decision. He says, I'd like to come and watch. Yes. So in Baghdad, when the Vikings turn up,

they pretend to be Christian and they have to do that because if you're a follower of the book, then you can get in by paying a kind of tax. Whereas if you're a pagan, you can't. The thing that's interesting about this burial is that it's unapologetically pagan. There's no pretense about it being Christian whatsoever. And the fascination of that for archaeologists is when they dig up the ship burials or whatever, and they find kind of various dismembered animals and the skeletons of women and things inside it. It's very difficult. You know, you've got the hardware, but you don't have the software.

Ibn Fidlan's account provides the software that otherwise we simply wouldn't have. Yeah. And also he provides quite good ammunition for people who say when these guys went east they were still very much scandinavians because this is a scandinavian an identifiable scandinavian funeral ritual that is taking place i mean god knows how many hundreds of miles away on the volga in what is now the absolute kind of r heartland. And how long does it take, Tom? It takes 10 days, doesn't it? It takes 10 days to get ready for this funeral. I mean, it is the most colossal blowout, basically.

Presided over by a sinister old woman called the Angel of Death. I saw she was a witch, thick-bodied and sinister. It's a civil referred line. He's fattest unfortunately yeah he's not impressed by the angel of death at all i mean frankly with your name like that you're asking for oh for disobliging commentary but so yeah i mean it's um you wouldn't you wouldn't want i think to be a female slave um in the vicinity of the Angel of Death. You wouldn't.

That is for sure. So someone has to accompany the dead Viking chief to the afterlife. And so they ask for a volunteer. And actually, it doesn't have to be a woman. It could be a slave boy as well. But it's a girl who volunteers. So they've lined them all up, haven't they? And there's people. So the guy's ship has been propped up on the shore with wood yeah he's kind of half half buried is that right i think

something like that it's a half buried yeah so it's half kind of they've they've they've hit earth over half of it so that you then go in that's right yeah the other half is outside they've they've they've divvied up his the dead guy fortune three ways. So a third of it is spent on booze, unbelievably. Which is great, isn't it? A third of it is spent on... Like kind of death duties. On special kind of funeral gear. So on other funeral stuff like his burial clothes.

And then the remaining third is split up among his heirs, basically. So there's this massive kind of festival atmosphere. And they get the slaves together and they say which of you volunteers and im fadlon watches kind of fascinated he's got an interpreter with him who's explaining what's going on and this girl steps forward she's a teenager i think it's pretty clear she's a teenager whether she is coerced or whether she steps forward voluntarily is unclear i would say tom but she she um having volunteered she's then treated like a kind of princess and she gets given slaves she has clothes and jewels and

she gets given kind of drugs i think and it's kind of weird thing where she she goes to something that that looks like a doorframe that's on the last day isn't it um so on the last day, isn't it? Yeah. So on the last day, the 10th day, they set up a sort of a bed on the deck of the boat with this guy's presumably by now in quite putrid, rotting corpse in bed, dressed in these fancy clothes. And they lay out a huge feast around his body. Then they bring out the girl. The girl by now has been clearly, she's been very heavily drugged and given booze and stuff.

Then they bring a dog to the ship and they cut a dog in half, the dog in half. And they throw both halves of the dog on board. I mean, so strange. They put all the guy's weapons in the cabin. They tear the heads off some chickens yeah even fat line at this point is thinking god this was a very bad decision but the weird

what's this funeral the door frame yeah they lift her up they lift her up and she says she can see her father and her mother then they lift her up again and she sees all her family and then the third time she says that she sees her master in the afterworld and it's green and it's beautiful and there are all kinds of yeah then they they take off her jewels and they she walks onto the deck of the ship this is a weird detail she walks on the raised palm so she's being held up in a sort of you know mosh pit style scenario they hoist her onto the ship um she sings a leave-taking song and then they make her drink two big kind of flasks of of beer i assume or yeah or something um and then at this point so even fadlan at this point his story which is pretty dark becomes

genuinely very dark because he says at this point she's confused and she's crying out and she doesn't want to carry on or whatever but the angel eight yeah the angel of death at this point grabs her and sort of they drag what they do they drag her into a little cabin at this point everybody's on that side they're allming. Beating on their shields. Beating on their shields. It's such a terrible scene. To drown out the screams that she's giving. And then four of the men hold her down,

and two others strangle her while the angel of death is stabbing her with a knife. Even Fadlana's watching all this, and one of the guys standing next to him says god you have terrible rituals in the caliphate don't you i mean compared with this this is brilliant you must be absolutely and you can sort of tell from his account that he's thinking this is this is pretty awful yeah um yeah it's a it's a really it's a really weird i think it's so weird isn't it it's such a weird story't it? It's such a weird story. And it's sort of, you get this so much from Neil Price's books,

that our image of kind of Viking religion is all very kind of jolly. And it's kind of Thor and his hammer and Odin and all this stuff. But actually, this is the darkness. I'm not sure about that. I mean, all the main gods are kind of terrifyingly phallic. Yeah, but the way in which it's portrayed to children, Tom, and the way it's presented to the Marvel comics version of Norse mythology. But Thor, I mean, Thor is a serial rapist.

The Hammer is obviously very phallic. Odin is always raping. Yeah. Frey, I mean, he has the statue of him at Uppsala in Sweden he has an absolutely enormous phallus yeah it's unsettling I think and this story is incredibly

it's unbelievably rich and interesting for historians, archaeologists anthropologists and so on because it makes sense of a lot of the burials that you find across the Viking world the corpses of animals exactly of the burials that you find. Or the kind of dismembered corpses of animals. Yeah, exactly. And the weird things you find.

But it gives you a sense of, you know, the sort of the jolly adventure story in Rosemary Sutcliffe kind of way in which so many of these Viking stories are told actually misses out just how cruel and violent a world and strange and and unsettling a world it was anyway well i you know and i think i think that um you know you know what i'm going to say now that um it's about the the conversion of the vikings to christianity is it removes them from a world that i think to us is unimaginably strange. Yeah. Because we remain in the,

in the kind of the, the moral ethical world that Christianity gave, gave us, you know, or, you know, Islam as well. I mean,

they're, they're, you know, Ibn Fadlan sense of, of kind of the sense of the strangeness and the horror of it is, is to that extent hours. And that world to us, I think is very, very remote ours and and that world to us i think is

very very remote and difficult and strange and and weird and so the process by which um the russ end up becoming christian is very very kind of important uh as that passage from from putin that i read at the start of this episode okay well i think i think that that's enough for today's episode and and clearly we we thought we were going to get all this done in one episode. We're not. I think that tomorrow we should go to the Dnieper, we should go to the founding of Kiev, we should look at in a bit more detail the relationship of the Rus to Constantinople and the process by which the Kievan Rus became Christian. So we will see you back tomorrow. Bye.