The Rest Is History - 358: Viking Sorcery

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Warning! This one isn’t for the faint-hearted... A naked, torch-carrying man, who would walk backwards around a funeral pyre, with his fingers covering his anus. The armed woman who worked a loom made from human body parts. 6-legged reindeers. Slaves buried alive with their owners, tapestries woven of human flesh, and rituals with horse penises. Tom and Dominic, in one of the most eagerly-awaited The Rest Is History episodes of all time, are joined by archaeologist Neil Price, as they delve into the strange and gruesome world of Viking Sorcery. *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 Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor 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. I know that I hung on the windy tree, wounded with a spear for nine long nights, dedicated to Odin, myself to myself, on that tree whose roots run from a place that no man knows. No bread did they give me, nor a drink from a horn down i peered i clutched the runes screaming i took them and then fell back again so tom holland that was odin i know the uh poetic edda so compiled in the 13th century but probably drawing on a longer tradition although that of course is is up for debate it's one of the best known things about Odin and the Norse myths and the world of the Vikings, the Allfather and his runes,

the Raven God, all this sort of stuff. It's tremendously exciting material, isn't it? And Odin, of course, very much a friend of the show because he's featured in the episode we did on the Norse gods, but also he did tremendously well in our World Cup of Gods, didn't he? Well, he reached the final and I frankly thought... He was thrashed by Athena, it has to be said. I wanted Odin to win. I'm not going to deny that I wanted Odin to win and I feel slightly cheated. I mean, you know that the World Cup of Gods is a very sore spot with me, Tom.

Yes, I do. Because of your shameful campaign against Anubis. However, let's move on from this. I do. But I think... So when we talked about Odin in the World Cup of Gods, we were talking about him very much as a kind of fan favourite, the star of Marvel comics and films. You are a foolish and petulant boy.

Yes. Sorry, that was my Anthony Hopkins. Very, very good. I mean, all that kind of stuff. But lurking over Odin and over the stuff that the Vikings believe, and indeed over the Vikings generally, is the nagging sense that it's all altogether weirder than perhaps we care to think. Because a lot of the weirdness, it turns out, is actually quite unsettling. There is one scholar who I think more than any other, who for me has articulated this, and it's

Neil Price, who is British, but went to work as an archaeologist in Sweden. Very, very distinguished. He's a professor of archaeology now at Hübsler. He wrote an excellent book called Children of Ash and Elm, didn't he, that came out and I think was nominated by a leading historian who writes for the Sunday Times, perhaps not a million miles from where you're sitting now, as the history book of the year. Britain's top book critic, I think, is the technical description, Tom, as the Sunday Times history book of the year. So

there is no higher praise. No higher praise indeed. And I speak with experience of that. Neil was also the advisor on The Northman, that brilliant recent film about Icelandic epic. Yeah, you loved it, didn't you? Yeah. However, the book that Neil wrote that really had an impact on me was a book called The Viking Way, which had kind of legendary status among anyone who was interested in the period, because it was almost impossible to get hold of. And you'd kind of go on book groups and people would say, oh, I think there might be a copy in some obscure library buried in some distant land. And the whole thing came to take on the kind of connotations of a quest in Tolkien or something. Anyway, I finally tracked down a copy of this book.

And basically, to sum it up, it's about how unbelievably weird the Vikings were. And when I read it, I immediately knew that I was onto something because I just want to read what Neil wrote. When he went from England to Sweden, he's sitting out looking at a forest. He wrote, I was disturbed by the fact that the ancestral stories of the North should seem so much more intelligible when looking out over those Swedish trees than they had done while sitting in my office in England. So that immediate sense that perhaps an academic study in England isn't necessarily the best place to come to terms with the Vikings and with Odin and all that stuff. But he then went on to write about the way that the models, the frameworks of explanation that academics have constructed around the Vikings. And he says, where do we find in these?

Serious consideration of the torch carrying man who walked backwards around a funeral pyre, completely naked and with his fingers covering his anus. We've all done that, Tom. We've all, have we? The herd of six-legged reindeer depicted on a wall covering, the armed women who worked a loom made from human body parts. The elderly Sammy man who was buried in a Nordic woman's clothes. The men who could understand the howling of wolves. The women with raised swords who paced beneath trees of hanging bodies.

The men who had sex with a slave girl and then strangled her as a formal sign of respect for her dead master. The woman buried with silver toe rings and a bag full of narcotics. Now, Dominic, you've written a book about the Vikings. Have you put any of that in? Well, it's a children's book, Tom. Actually, do you know what? The Strangling of the Slave Girl is in that book. Right.

Because I have the funeral. I have Ibn Fadlan, the great traveller, the great sort of Arabic travel writer, describing this funeral. I mean, I did tone it down for child readers, but I have to say Penguin did raise their eyebrows when I put that in. And as always, my son said, it's the best thing in the book. More of this stuff, please. And we had it in our episode on the Vikings going up in the East, didn't we? In the East.

Yeah, a lot of people, if you haven't listened to that episode, I mean, that's one of the strangest episodes we did, isn't it? Well, I think this episode is going to be stranger because we have with us none other than the great Neil Price himself. So Neil, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to the rest is history. Thank you. Would you say that kind of Viking weird shit sums up what you've written about in the Viking way? Sadly, yes. I think in your introduction, you really captured what I felt, my motivation for working on all of that. And it's not so much things that I discovered that no one knew before. It's more things that we all knew about, but just had kind of collectively ignored. And when I did my first degree back in the 80s in London, the Vikings I learned about were very traditional people. And there was nothing wrong with that Viking age.

It's just that there was something missing from it. And the more I read and the more I encountered all these weird things, I wanted to put them back into that picture. So that's really where it started. So do you think what happened to the Vikings? I mean, we don't want to sort of get into a massive historiographical discussion, but is what happened to them a combination of Christianity, Wagner, Marvel comics and so on, that basically sort of tamed them and took the strangeness out, if you like. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. I think also that their strangeness has kind of been weaponized and taken on new forms.

And the thing to remember about all of those legacies of the Vikings is that wherever they come from, whether it's sort of Victorian imperialism or the Nazis or whether it's reenactors or Marvel movies, a whole spectrum of different things, they say nothing whatsoever about life as actually lived in the Viking Age. And it's that life that I'd like to try and look at. But there's a challenge, isn't there, for an academic? A huge one, yeah. Who has to kind of, you know, be objective, use the cool measured language of scholarly prose to deal with people for whom that is not an aspiration at all, whose kind of visions and whose understanding of the

world may be profoundly impossible to articulate in that way. I mean, do you think that's a kind of a fair summation of the problem perhaps that you face? Yes, I do. I think it's one that all academics face. And I was conscious when I wrote The Viking Way, it came out in 2002 originally, so it's 20 years old now. That sort of sentiment that you quoted about me being disturbed by the fact that those ancestral stories seem so much more intelligible when looking out over Swedish trees. There's a risk that that's a kind of romanticising view. There's me thinking, wow, I'm in touch with the Viking Age. And of course I'm not. So you have to guard against that as well. But I do think that whatever you're studying about the past, it really does help to go to the places that you're talking about, to see the landscapes, to, you know, to experience what a Scandinavian winter is like. When you look at,

say, reconstruction drawings, it's always summer, you know, they're never sort of hunkered down in a sort of snowed-in building, and yet that's a very large part of the year. So to sort of try and get that kind of experiential aspect of things i think is quite important but always to to keep your guard up around that kind of romanticization and it's that romanticizing that i think the vikings have been freighted with for centuries really so let's start at the very most basic sort of fundamental level neil um we're talking about scandinavia um so what what's now denmark norway and sweden in what sort of Sweden. Do you stick to the fairly traditional dates for the Viking Age, so roughly a couple of hundred years after the fall of the Roman Empire

in the West through to 1066 or so, or do you think those dates are wrong? It's not so much that they're wrong. I think that I'd go for a broader time span and also one that's less specific. The traditional Viking age was always taken to begin with the raid on the monastery of Lindisfarne in Northumbria in 793 and then as you said end in 1066 with the Battle of Stanford Bridge. But I think that

apart from getting away from a kind of kings and battles history, looking at it in more social terms, I think the first half of the 8th century, so we're talking about the period 720 to 750, I think there's a lot of different trends in society, a lot of social processes all coming together kind of randomly to kick something off. And I think understanding what that something is

that historians call the Viking Age, that's one of the big tasks we have ahead of us. And then broadly speaking, I'd say about the middle of the 11th century, sort of 1050s, 1060s. And just as there's no one start to the Viking Age, there's no single end to it either. Its motors wind down in different ways, different speeds in different places. So as long as we keep that broad vagueness in mind, I think that's where we are. But Neil, I mean, one of the things, obviously, probably the main cultural trend that happens in, it's happened by the 11th century, is that the Viking world is becoming Christian. And Christianity imports a particular understanding of humanity's relationship with the supernatural and the divine. And it's one that gives rise to what we call religion, this category that is separate

from what we would call the secular. We can divide them in two. Whereas the sense I very much get from your book is that that would be a division that you wouldn't accept as something that the Vikings would have recognized, that they didn't have a kind of a division that you wouldn't accept as something that the Vikings would have recognised, that they didn't have a category of religion. The supernatural and what we would call the kind of the everyday world were absolutely interwoven. Would that be fair? Yes, absolutely, Tom. That was one of the things I reacted against when I was first writing that book or starting the research for it, was that so many syntheses of the Viking Age would have kind of chapter four religion. It was compartmentalised and packaged. And I think it's part of their perception of reality. Nothing more or less than that.

So even the concept of supernatural, I think that's wrong because it's all natural. It's just different kinds of nature. And asking, I mean, today we can ask people of any faith, do you believe in God? It's a meaningless question in the Viking Age. If you ask, do you believe in Odin? It'd be like saying, do you believe in a mountain? It's just part of the world. And I suppose trying to sum up the way I look at the Viking Age is to take as my starting point, it's a very difficult thing to do, but this idea of their view of the world. And I think that's what makes them different as well to the people around them. And it's something I think we've underestimated because most of the cultures on the European continent,

certainly to the south and west of the Vikings, not so much in the east, are Christian. And the way in which they approach everything, as you just said, Tom, it's an utterly different starting point to that of the Viking or Scandinavians. And I think recognising what their starting point might have been is the place we need to start. And that's what I've tried to do. Can I ask a very sort of basic question? So you talk about the starting point might have been is the place we need to start. And that's what I've tried to do. Can I ask a very sort of basic question? So you talk about the starting point. Let's imagine I have started out in the Viking Age. In other words, I'm a child. What do people tell me about the world and about, okay, I can't use the word the supernatural, but what we would now call the supernatural. So do people tell me stories of a pantheon of gods?

Do they have a sense of, as it were, the Marvel Comics kind of view of Norse mythology is this idea that the inevitable progress towards Ragnarok and all that sort of narrative thrust. Am I told that as a child, or am I told the same thing as children in other parts of Scandinavia, or is it localized? You mentioned the word telling, and I think that is the absolute key, because they live inside a world of stories. And one of the things I bore my students with is to say repeatedly that the Norse, for want of a better word, didn't know that they had the Norse myths. That's something that we've created, that scholars have created. When you go in a bookshop now, you can buy loads of books on the Norse myths, but that's because they've been fossilised as a sort of effectively a kind of holy book for the Vikings,

but which is not real at all. And at the time, I think that those stories were organic and they changed. You mentioned whether they were local or not. We don't know exactly what they told their children in this valley as opposed to the one over the other side of the mountains. But the sheer sort of variety and contradiction in the mythology that we have suggests that it was a very varied world. And in terms of what you tell your children, in the same way as you don't go in the forest because you might get eaten by a bear or you might meet an elf and you you want to be careful of them and that kind of advice for life i think is something that's baked into existence from childhood onwards and in terms of the gods i think they're a kind of a much more distant element of people's lives

than we might think we tend to centralize the gods as a pantheon. You've mentioned them, there's Odin and Thor and Freya and people like Loki, the Marvel gods as well. I don't think anybody thought they were going to encounter Odin on a Saturday night, but I think that you might well meet those elves who lived in the stone behind your house and putting some butter out for them. And what would that mean to meet an elf? That's a good question. And this is one of the things that it's hard to be specific about. This might sound like a tangent, but it kind of answers your question. There is a remarkable sort of poetic list of the kings of central Sweden called the list of the

Inglings. The Inglings is the name of their family. And it tells you what happens to each of the Inglings kings. And one of them falls into a vat of mead and drowns. And another one gets kicked in the head by his horse and so on. But the one I like best is led into a rock by a dwarf and never seen again. So that's what happens if you meet a dwarf or an elf. There's this idea of nature as a force in itself, something you have to encounter, something you have to negotiate with, keep on the right side of. And I think that idea of life as a conversation with a kind of invisible population is close to what we've later called Norse religion. And I think the gods are kind of the highest part of that. They're the most remote part of it. But if you're part of the highest levels of society,

if you're a king or a jarl or something like that, then you're probably rather closer to that level of the other than the average farmer. Because there's a story, isn't there, of one of the kings of Norway who has got an English bishop with him and is supposedly converted to Christianity. And then this Gandalf-like figure with one eye and a brimmed hat turns up and lays on a kind of enormous feast in a big cauldron and everyone tucks in. And then the bishop in the morning, when he learns about it, has it thrown over. And obviously Odin has come to visit. So presumably for kings, there is a sense that Odin might come, and particularly on a battlefield, that Odin might be someone who is present watching what is happening. Yes, and one of the things that is attached to the Norse gods is that they're gods

of something. So Thor is the god of thunder, or Freyja as the goddess of love usually. And these things are not, I think they're a kind of misunderstanding because the Norse divinities are not necessarily gods of any one thing at all. So there are lots of war gods, for example, but they're gods of different aspects of war. And you mentioned Odin, He is very much the god of elites, but he's also the god of the homeless. He's the god of wanderers. He's the god of the mind. He's one of the gods of magic. He's certainly a war god. But most of all, he's the god of wisdom and a kind of elevated mental faculty, the thing that kings ought to have. And this idea of kings having a personal relationship with someone like that is very important. And some of the early Viking

monarchs, they claim descent from the gods. They try to build themselves in to those genealogies as well. The queen is descended from Odin, isn't she? So that's an ongoing thing. So just on Odin, Odin in the version that has passed down to generations of British children, is Zeus, basically, isn't he? But I get the sense from your books that Odin is a much stranger and more terrifying figure than Zeus. Is that fair? I think so. I think this idea of relating the Norse gods to classical divinities certainly has some truth to it. There are many aspects of Norse mythology that you could clearly see have something to do with Greek and Roman stories and so on. And there's this idea of the gods as basically a kind of large squabbling family who are not entirely trustworthy. And I think that lack of trust is something that particularly sort of coalesces around Odin.

He's a very contradictory figure. Like I said, he's the god of elites, but also the god of wanderers. He's a being in whom it's very unwise to place any real faith. He can support you and support you and support you and then stab you in the back or suddenly give victory to your enemies. But there's also a kind of odd fairness to him, I think, that there's still a kind of sort of basic justice behind what he does. There are consistent stories of, say, warriors, human warriors, who are enemies in life, expecting to meet in Valhalla as equals, and then they'll be sitting at the benches and drinking and so on. So there's this kind of cycle of completeness around Odin as well, looking for one thing to really

characterize what Odin is about. It's knowledge and the fact that he will give anything at all for knowledge. So his eye. But also hanging on the tree, right? Exactly, yes. As you read at the beginning, he sacrifices himself to himself, which is a deeply weird thing to do. And in this sort of delirium, he has a vision. That's where the runes come from. He sees them in this vision and picks them up. But Neil, they're hanging on the tree. So I assumed, maybe because I've spent too much time talking to Tom, I had assumed that that was a later Christian formula that the Icelandic writers or bards or whatever had just picked up and imposed onto Odin. But do you think

people in the ninth century, let's say, that they're hanging on the tree, you know, that it was there then as an idea? I think it's hard to be sure, but the influence of Christianity on lots of different aspects of the Norse mythological stories is very clear. There is a kind of holy tree in the Norse sort of traditional tales, this Yggdrasil, it's this great ash tree that holds the universe together. And it's usually assumed that that's the tree that is being talked about in that poem. But the idea of Odin sacrificing himself could have merged with the idea of a man nailed to a cross. And he's pierced with a spear so you know also resonance is there but at the same time odin

has a holy spear himself so there's there's this sort of blending of different stories and it's very very hard to pick them apart one of the things that bugs me most about this is and i used it as the title of my recent book because i was looking for a way to describe the Vikings that wasn't the Vikings. I called it the Children of Ash and Elm, because the first human couple, the first man, the first woman, were fashioned from trees, an ash tree and an elm tree. The Old Norse words are Asker and Embla. And then there's the fact that the first human couple have names beginning with A and E. And it's like, ah, and I don't know. Well, Neil, could we just focus in on an aspect that pretty clearly doesn't come from Christianity? Because as you point out in The Viking Way, the thing that's distinctive

about Scandinavia, the Viking world, is absolutely it has the Christian German world to the south and in England, of course. But in the north, we have in the kind of subpolar regions, the really frozen wastes of Scandinavia, we have people called Sami. And your thesis in the book is that they actually have quite an influence on the Vikings and perhaps the way that the Vikings conceptualized the world. And focusing in on Odin, you say about him and this idea that Odin is a god full of contradictions and paradoxes, that chief amongst his many powers is his role as the male war god, but simultaneously as master of the female sorcery of Seitha, which was supposedly shameful for men to perform. So Seitha, the role, the influence of people in the

far north, the sense of Odin as a god who blends warfare, but also a kind of more female practice of sorcery. What is going on there and how important is it, do you think? To take the first part with the Sami, I think they're perceived as the people of the land of the midnight sun and the people of a northern periphery, even now as well, actually. But in the Viking Age, we know that the Sami lived over an awful large part of the Scandinavian Peninsula. And I think one of the things that's been missed about the Viking Age is that to a large degree, Scandinavia is a place that supports two quite distinct populations, the Norse and the Sami living side by side, almost literally side by side in adjacent settlements and so on. And that arena of contacts between the two is very complicated and as you can imagine operates at all kinds of levels, including that of the spiritual

and what we later call religion. And part of that is that Sami spirituality, their beliefs and their practices is very much part of the kind of circumpolar belt of what anthropologists call shamanism, this idea of a world full of souls and special people, shamans, one of the Sami words for them is noaiti, special people whose job it is to get in touch with that world and act as an intermediary to communicate with it on your behalf. And, you know, to do all kinds of things, to cure illnesses, to make sure that your reindeer are okay, or to harm your enemies, you know, get rid of your horrible neighbours or whatever you want. And I think, and I'm not alone in this, it's quite a long tradition of research

in here there's a lot of similarities in this with this sort of magical practice called say that which is I think the the central component of the Viking relationship with for want of a better word the supernatural and when I said earlier that I think the gods are in some ways quite distant from ordinary people's lives I think magic is central to them. And even if you look at the later medieval sources, the great Icelandic sagas, they're saturated with magic. Almost in every story, there's some kind of either magical process going on or people who know a bit more than other people. You know, it's there all the time. And at the centre of this, I'm going to mix my metaphors in some grotesque way now, but the centre of this sort of web

is Odin. He is the supreme master of this saver magic. And in the medieval sources, it's very clearly described that this is a magic primarily for women. It's only proper for women to perform it. And in that, as in many other things, it's clear that women have a peculiarly powerful access to the supernatural. It's one of the central roles of female power in the Viking Age, this gateway to the other and control of that access, which is a bit surprising in Odin's case, because he's, you know, the god of kings, the god of elites. He's one of the main war gods, as you said. And here he is practicing women's magic. And those kinds of contradictions, there's a lot of enormous packages of prejudices

attaching to men who perform magic. They're sort of everything that a proper viking age man should not be that's often been interpreted in terms of um cowardice or homophobia and things like that but it may equally be a challenging of boundaries it's very hard to be sure yeah but what's clear with odin is that it's a very long answer to your long and complicated question but it was a very long question wasn't it yes it was but he's the thing with Odin is that he embodies those contradictions. Yeah. And I do wonder sometimes, bearing in mind how hard it is to really know about this, I wonder whether what we see as, isn't that strange that this doesn't quite make sense,

is actually just a way of presenting ambiguity that nobody found strange at the time. And if my kind of work with the Vikings has any kind of single takeaway mission, it's to acknowledge the complexity of the Viking Age, the diversity of it. Well, Neil, I think that sets us up perfectly for part two, where I would love to look a bit more closely at how this sorcery, this magic, this Seitha might have operated in the Viking world. So we'll take a break now. And then when we come back, we'll be looking at all kinds of things, including, and I'm going to give the listeners a teaser here, probably, I think one of my

favorite sentences in any work of scholarship I've ever read. And you say, as we shall see, horses and their genitals had associations with sorcery in the Viking Age, and Odin's stallion may be seen in this context. Inside Tom Holland, there is a 14-year-old boy struggling to get out. As we shall see in part two, all kinds of remarkable weird shit to tease out. See you in a few minutes. 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 therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. How did onlookers feel watching this ritual entombment and then walking away, going home or to some continued funeral ceremony or passing the sealed mound

in the subsequent hours and days? How did they articulate their knowledge that inside that grave, a woman they articulate their knowledge that inside that grave a woman they knew was slowly suffocating, dying in the dark beside the rotting body of her partner, that one day the same fate might be theirs? To us this seems unthinkable, and yet to at least some of the people of the Viking Age it clearly was not. Why? What does this tell us about them? And in this, how far can we trust the judgment of a thousand years of hindsight? So that was Professor Neil Price talking about the entombment of Viking slave girls alongside their dead masters. And Tom, we talked about a

horrific Viking funeral in our episode on the Vikings in the East. And that's actually something that there's been a lot of correspondence about among our listeners, a lot of chat on our Discord channel for our Restless History Club members, because that image of the funeral and the sheer horror of it is something that really lingers in your mind. You can never forget it, can you? Yeah. I got Neil with us talking about Viking sorcery. That's why that passage where you talk, basically, it reads like you as a scholar are essentially throwing your hands up and saying, I cannot compute what it must have been like to live in that world. I mean, your understanding of Viking sorcery, of magic, of how they saw the

world, has that enabled you to get a handle on, to answer questions that you ask in that? What is this telling us about how they saw the world? How would they have felt about knowing that a girl was starving to death next to the corpse of her owner? I'd like to think that after 30 years of studying the Vikings, I understand them better. There's a danger in that as well. And in writing the kind of passage like Dominic's just cited, and I still do this every now and then, I write sort of things that are slightly more fictionalised and almost like little stories.

And I think it's important to try to approach that experiential view of the past. And in particular with regard to Ibn Fadlan, the Arab diplomat who described this funeral on the Volga, there have been so many earlier accounts that focus on the sex and violence as if it's something almost like some kind of spicy orgy. And it's not, it's horrific. And if anyone has the slightest tendency to see the Vikings in a heroic light, they need to read Ibn Fadlan carefully carefully because it's a powerful antidote to that. So that was part of what I wanted to get closer to it.

I think to answer your question, Tom, I'm reminded of a remark I really liked in a review of my recent book, which is not really positive or negative. It's a comment that first I thought was a bit superficial, and then I thought it was really deep. It's one of those. And it really made me think. It was the better we understand the Vikings, the more comfortable we are with how little we really know about them. Yeah. And that gave me comfort. And I think that's where we are. But that attempt to understand the difference of their view of the world, like in the kind of things that you just described,

particularly funerary sacrifice, and not just of enslaved people, but of people's partners and even friends sometimes. It's so alien to us and it clearly wasn't to them. And it's that kind of extremity of experience that is part of what I think we need to look at in the Viking Age. At the same time, it's not exoticising it because I think most people just stayed on their farms and never went anywhere or did any harm to anybody. So you've got this tremendous richness in there.

Would it be fair to say, based on something like that, the sacrifice of the girl in the Ibn Fadlan account, or the example that you gave there about the ritual entombment, would it be fair to say that the Vikings, in their view of the world and their view of the relationship between the sort of material and the spiritual are a crueler more violent people than a we are now i mean i don't mean to to sort of heap praise upon ourselves or b then we have given them credit for as it were than we than we commonly think in other words are they more are they are they more unsettling do you think i'd go with the last part i certainly think they more unsettling, do you think? I'd go with the last part. I certainly think they're unsettling. They unsettle me. I often say that the Vikings are supremely interesting, but that's not at all the same as being admirable.

Right. It's a good thing to bear in mind. As to whether they were crueler, it's not a comparison I'd make, really. Violence is a big part of the Viking stereotype, particularly with the raids. And I don't think we should minimise that. it's not a comparison I'd make really. Violence is a big part of the Viking stereotype, particularly with the raids. And I don't think we should minimise that. They really did do their level best to burn down half of Europe.

And the cliches of them, you know, chasing the English and frightening the clergy and so on, they're real. But that's only part of their world. And it's not as if the rest of the world was wonderfully peaceful, because it certainly wasn't. I think that the violent aspects of their religion are startling. And they were clearly startling to their contemporaries.

And not just to people, to their treatment of animals, the mass slaughter of horses and cattle and dogs and birds and things as part of their funerals and that's something we really see in the archaeology um is difficult for us to imagine and in some of the big boat burials the classic sort of viking ship graves um you find sort of 13 14 decapitated horses you know that the ground around those ships was sorry this isn't probably an episode for children is it but the ground around those ships would be crimson and they'd hang them from trees wouldn't they so at upsala your home university there was kind of great trees weren't they at least according to christian sources yes to uh to adam of bremen who was writing about 1070 there's there's a sacred grove at the temple precinct of Old Uppsala,

where trees are full of hanging bodies. And there's one archaeological example that does seem to be something like that. It's up in the north of Sweden, where, if I remember correctly, there's five whole bears that seem to be hanging from this tree. Yeah, that's very odd, isn't it? I once alarmed some people. I was on a committee to design new museum displays for the National Museum here, and I suggested that they should stuff five bears and string genitals. I should say that I sent some notes about what I wanted to talk about, and I put horse penises, WTF? So WTF? What's going on

with horse penises? This comes down to a poem that's recorded in a much later manuscript. So this is a medieval story. And its title translates to The Tale of Volsi. Volsi is a name. And what it's about really is a Christian king of Norway in the late Viking Age, who's heard some rumours that some of his more rural subjects are not as Christian as he'd like. So he disguises himself and with his men, he goes off on a sort of tour.

And at one point he comes to a farmhouse and is invited in as a guest because they don't know who he is. And he finds himself a participant in a ritual where the woman of the household who seems to be in charge fishes out from a box a preserved horse's penis that's been wrapped in in linen and preserved with herbs and things and uh so around the dinner table they they pass this object from one person to another as you do and uh and as each person takes the horse's penis and this is the thing called volse um the the penis itself um they speak a verse and the verse is is highly sexual and explicit it's kind of 101 things to do with a preserved horse's penis basically you can let your imaginations dwell on that and um and and the king is appropriately horrified because this isn't really what he has

in mind with you know the new christianity and um and he interrupts the ritual and um seizes this object and throws it to the dog and what happens is you know hilarity ensues and the the the local people of the farmhouse are not very happy about this and the the the woman who's in charge she asks the men to lift her up to look over door lintels and door hinges. So she's being lifted up to look over the door. And this makes as much sense as it sounds. It's very hard to understand what's going on. But when she looks over the door, she seems to have a vision of some other place. And she's trying to retrieve the volse that the king has desecrated. That's so interesting because that is in Ibn Fadlan's account, isn't it? The slave girl looks over the door and she says,

I see my master. Isn't that right? Yes. This is the thing that for a long time, Welsathata, the tale of Welsi, was dismissed as a kind of medieval burlesque of sort of racy goings on among the peasantry that had nothing to do with any kind of Viking Age reality. There have been other studies that actually really are taking it quite seriously as a preserved poem that has something to do with an actual Viking Age ritual. But the thing that really kind of charges that discussion is what you've just mentioned is that in ibn fadlan's account of this great ship burial that the one that's so horrific and so detailed on the volga in 922 and just to be to be clear you know we're talking an arab account of a burial in russia

a hundred years earlier than this totally independent account that comes out of norway describing the 11th century and he's actually written down much later so there's no relationship years earlier than this totally independent account that comes out of Norway describing the 11th century and he's actually written down much later so there's no relationship at all between these accounts and yet in Ibn Fadlan as he said he describes the enslaved woman being lifted up to look over a door which is a very specific thing to do and as she does so she has a vision of another world and I think that is really such a close link to Vilsa Thutter. And bearing in mind, Ibn Fadlan is an eyewitness account, and I think we can trust it.

It really does imply that whatever it is they're doing with their preserved horse's penis might be real. Well, that sends a shiver down the spine. If ever you go to a dinner party, Tom, and somebody passes you one of those, you know what's coming. Well, it depends. I don't think I'd have the courage to throw it to a dog. Would you? I don't think so. But Neil, just sticking to, as it were, to horse penises, you associate it also with Sleipnir, who is the eight-legged horse that Odin rides. And that's quite shamanistic, isn't it? Going back to that idea of Seyðar, of this distinctive understanding of sorcery that you get from the far north.

Yeah, in two ways. There are so many kind of crossovers between the descriptions of these Seyðar rituals, and there's other kinds of magic as well, but Seyðar is the main one. Descriptions of that magic in a whole range of Icelandic saga sources and some poems as well, but say there is the main one. Descriptions of that magic in a whole range of Icelandic saga sources and some poems as well, that have clear links to what we know of circumpolar shamanism from much later periods. So if you bring all these sources together, you really can make a coherent case for this being part of a kind of, broadly speaking, a shamanic, circumpolar ritual world. And in particular, for example, animals that have more legs than they do in nature, like Sleipnir. This is Odin's eight-legged stallion. His name means the sliding one. He can

slip between the worlds. He has runes etched on his teeth. So that's one of the links there. But also this idea of sexuality as one of the big constants of, say, the magic. And it may also be that part of the rituals themselves are sexual in nature. So there is the sort of multiple layers of meaning in this magic. And we know that there are sexual, shall we say,

restrictions, taboos built into it, like, for example, that it can only be properly performed by women. And it may be that some of the sexual aspects of the magic itself and the purposes of the magic are linked to that. So along with this idea of war magic broadly speaking or shamanism and and the importance of all of this in people's lives the the aspect of of sexuality in that ritual world is also something that i think was ignored for a very long time and it's something that a lot of people are working on now are the um are the valkyries sexual figures neil do think? Or are they purely war figures? I think absolutely not. I think also, as with so much else to do with the Vikings, to get at anything resembling a kind of Viking Age reality, which, as you know, is a very difficult thing to do, we have to unpeel layers and layers of later kind of

stories and accretions. And this idea of the Valkyries as kind of beautiful handmaidens of Odin who sort of sweep warriors off the battlefield to some kind of eternal party in Valhalla is very much something that begins in the Middle Ages and then builds and builds. And then obviously the sort of ultimate manifestation of it is Vagner. That's where we get our view of the Valkyries now, really. Yeah.

If you try and go back to a kind of primal Valkyrie, for want of a better term, and that's very hard to do. If you look at things like the Valkyrie names. Oh, yes. So give us some of your favourite Valkyrie names. Well, I found 52 of them. There may be more. And it's clear that there are lots of others, just sort of general Valkyries that don't happen to get named in the source. But there's a lot of Valkyries.

And their names are overwhelmingly graphic descriptions of aspects of battle and war, which is not surprising because their name means choosers of the slain. Their purpose is to intervene on the battlefield and take the the spirits of of the best warriors to odin's hall so you list all these names and you've got helmet clatter sword noise battle weaver howling chain pricker uh council trace shield scraper disorder very violent very cruel victory urger and teeth grinder i mean that just scratching the surface there but shield scraper is one of my favorites but i mean if any listeners out there you know they've got daughters and they they need a hey very cruel is a great name yeah i know

there's also a lot of them whose name means noise different aspects of noise it really gives you the idea of what a chaotic, loud place a medieval battlefield was. And I see those early Valkyries not so much as sort of handmaidens of Odin who kind of visit the battlefield. I think they're unleashed on it, and I think they're more like demons of carnage than anything else. There's very little to suggest that they're physically attractive or any of those later stereotypes. They're terrifying, basically. You quote also from this terrifying poem.

The web of spears. The web of spears. So men's heads served as loom weights, intestines from men as weft and warp. I mean, it's such a, I mean, one of the most unsettling poems that you could ever imagine. This idea of a battle as a tapestry woven out of intestines. It's appended to a famous saga, but it's probably much older than the saga itself. And it describes a group of women who are later described as Valkyries, who are weaving on a loom completely constructed of human body parts, as you say. And the fabric that they're creating is built of blood and flesh.

And there's this very clear idea that as they're weaving, they are weaving the outcome of a distant battle taking place at the same time. And you get this sense of when they're moving the the weaving tools that are in and out of the fabric, this is the flight of arrows and the people throwing spears. They're actually making the battle. And this is another thing that attaches to the Valkyries. It's a kind of crossover with the Norns, these three women of fate. This idea that the Valkyries not only kind of deal with the aftermath of battle, they might shape it as well. Presumably, I mean, that's part of the appeal of Seyther, if it's going on, is that you can invoke this magic to influence the course of battle and to kind of blunt the weapon of your enemy or make him freeze or something like that.

Yeah, I think it's also, we talked earlier about how important Odin is in this sort of web of magic. Part of his qualities to do with war are concerned with the mind. If you think about all this chaos of a medieval battlefield, as in the names of the Valkyries, the noise and the violence and so on, there's a constant emphasis in poetry of being clear-headed in battle. You really need to know who's in front of you who's beside you who's that over there and they're not wearing uniforms you know um and this idea of mental clarity or a kind of mental fog which is lethal um that is the kind of thing that odin brings to the battlefield so one of the valkyrie names means the war fetter um like the the chain and

what that means in practice is that's the thing that makes you hesitate when you absolutely shouldn't. It's the thing that makes you trip or drop your weapon or whatever. And that is the form that some of this battle magic really took, I think. So does that imply, Neil, that the common, as it were, urban myth that Viking warriors are turning themselves into berserkers by swallowing mushrooms or drinking or whatever that's incorrect because i mean it's always struck me that if i were in a battle i would want to be i'd really want to have my wits about me

so so do you think that is that is overstated the sort of berserker um stereotype very much so yes even in the in the most sort of lurid sources, the berserkers, and there's a sort of cousins to them called Ulfhednar. Basically, berserkers are connected with bears and Ulfhednar are connected with wolves, but they're kind of the same thing. They're always in a minority, a tiny minority. There's a big debate in scholarship at the moment as to whether they were real at all, or whether they're a kind of literary motif from the Middle Ages, or alternatively whether they were real, but more a kind of a matter of ritual performance, a sort of way to psych yourself up

rather than anybody actually doing this in battle. Personally, I'm more inclined to the idea that they really existed and that they are, it's easy to make these kind of crass comparisons, but a sort of Viking special forces, basically. They're elite soldiers. There is no suggestion whatsoever in early sources that they took mushrooms or any kind of hallucinogen. And there are plenty of other ways to sort of work yourself up

into a fighting rage. So I think the jury's out on the berserkers. There are a lot of depictions in Viking Age art or Viking Age iconography of men and sometimes women who appear to be wearing animal skins or costumes. And there are a couple of masks that have been found as part of a shipwreck actually in a danish town harbor um which are made of felt and just cover the the portion of the face that wouldn't be covered by by chain mail for example and they they look it's hard to say what animals they are but they're definitely animals they look to me a bit like bulls but they could be dogs. God, I mean, imagine you're a monk. And all these guys with masks are terrifying.

And very different. Well, very different. And so I'm just prompted to wonder whether for Vikings, the actual experience of battle itself is a kind of a ritual in which you experience spirits or the divine. Obviously, battle is a way of defeating your enemies and stealing their wealth. But is it also a way of having communion in a very intense form, perhaps, with spirits that you wouldn't otherwise have experience of, do you think?

I suspect that for some of them, the answer is probably yes. I don't think that's a general experience of everybody in the Viking Age, even every sort of proper Viking, you know, an actual sort of piratical Viking. But we know that, for example, the kind of war cult of Odin has an element of kind of ecstatic fury, for want of a better word. And there's an element of rage and being out of yourself um that very much attaches to odin and i think this idea of there being kind of odinic warriors is is probably real um but it's again it's very hard to get back to any kind of detail about it i'm very conscious when i talk about things like this it's's kind of speculation upon speculation, but that's what we've got. That's your job. I mean, well, Neil, you've given, you've given, you know,

brilliant kind of tour de raison. Can I ask one question before you wrap up, Tom? Yeah, of course. Sorry. Yeah. The question is how long does this mindset, this attitude towards the spiritual world endure? Because obviously Scandinavia was Christianized, and you gave the example of the, I mean, you said the 1050s, 1060s is the end of the Viking Age, and Christianity and the Christianization obviously plays an enormous part in that kind of dating. But presumably, this way of thinking about the natural, and I know we're not meant to use the word the supernatural must have endured for generations after the sort of nominal christianization of what become the scandinavian

kingdoms yes i think i think it did if you look at the kind of classic superstructure of norse spirituality the gods i think they disappear rather fast um and there it's there's clearly an attempt to introduce a kind of christian concept of the divine that replaces the Norse one, especially obviously with one God. But all of those more everyday aspects of belief, the elves that live behind your house that we talked about, I think they stay for a very long time. You can trace them in later folklore and folk custom. You can trace them in laws as well. I mean, medieval Christianity still had quite a lively belief in dark powers of various kinds. I mean, Neil, Alfred the Great, who's impeccably Christian, is named after an elf. So elves are clearly still part of the fabric

in Christian England as well as in scandinavia i would guess and i find law codes are very useful like that because they tend to be rather dry documents and you don't forbid people from doing something that nobody ever does and if there are laws that you mustn't wake up trolls and ask them things and and so i think they do that yeah so yeah good advice but um but lots of lots of things like that that you you know mustn't perform magic in various ways which which implies that that that might you know succeed if you if you did it and i think there's a a very clear path to be traced from say there and there's things we were talking about earlier to to medieval witchcraft this idea of a different world of powers what What changes in the Middle Ages is that this is given negative connotations,

which it doesn't necessarily have in the pre-Christian period. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much, Neil. Thank you. Something we've been looking forward to for ages. Definitely. Very, very grateful. Such a strange and interesting story. Absolutely fascinating story.

And I gather you're off to Borneo, is that right, in a couple of days? Yes, I am. No Vikings there. So have a wonderful time in borneo and many many thanks and thank you everyone for listening and we'll be back soon with more bye-bye bye-bye bye 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

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