You're Dead to Me - Old Norse Literature

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Greg Jenner is joined by historian Dr Janina Ramirez and comedian Kae Kurd in medieval Iceland to delve into the world of old Norse literature. It's full of elves, giants, trolls, gods, deadly mistletoe and eight-legged horse babies. Anything goes in a world created from the decapitated body of a giant where a squirrel runs communications! But what was the ultimate purpose of these stories? Who wrote them? And what do they teach us about Viking culture?Produced by Greg Jenner and Emma Nagouse

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, a Radio 4 history podcast for everyone. For people who don't like history, people who do like history and people who forgot to learn any at school. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. I'm the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. You might have heard my other podcast, Homeschool History,

but that one's mostly for the kids. On this podcast, we're all about being scholastic and lol-tastic as we forge an alliance between the comedy gods and the history giants. And today we're grabbing our mythological hammers and setting sail in Viking longboats for medieval Iceland to have an introductory rummage through Old Norse myths and literature. And rowing with me are two very special guests. In History Corner, she's a cultural historian, broadcaster and author.

She's a director in the history of art at the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. You'll definitely have seen some of her many BBC documentaries about art and medieval history on BBC4, including Secret Knowledge, The Art of the Vikings and The Viking Sagas. And she's also written a children's book and several books, in fact, about Viking stuff. So it's perfect guest is Dr. Janina Ramirez. Hi, Janina. How are you? Hi, Greg. Absolutely delighted to be talking Vikings with you today. And in Comedy Corner, he's a brilliant stand up and writer. You may have seen his hilarious debut show on YouTube, Curd Your Enthusiasm, or you definitely would have seen him on Live at the Apollo, Jonathan Ross's Comedy Club, Richard Osman's House of Games, and more importantly, you'll remember him from the Babylonians episode of You're Dead to Me.

It's Kay Curd. Hey, Kay, welcome back. Thank you. Thank you for having me back. It's a pleasure. I'm trying to beat Stuart Goldsmith's record for appearances on here. Okay, last time out, we heard that you enjoyed history at school. But how are you with, like, Viking history? Do you know your Norse gods? I know absolutely nothing. All I remember is going to Norway and spending 14 quid on a tuna sandwich. So, like, honestly, it was just so expensive.

So, yeah, no, I know absolutely nothing. And have you seen any of the Marvel movies? Have you seen Thor, Ragnarok? I've seen Thor, seen thor ragnarok that was quite funny but that's about it but i'm assuming like thor doesn't like beat up hulk in like actual real life so well you know not always there's a lost manuscript somewhere so what do you know that leads us to the first part of the podcast. It's called the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you at home might know about today's subject.

And I'm going to bet that you know quite a bit about Norse mythology, maybe through accident. I mean, you're going to know the names Odin, Thor and Loki, although technically they're pronounced Odin, Thor and Loki. Maybe you read about them in Neil Gaiman's Norse mythology, or perhaps more likely you've stared at a shirtless Chris Hemsworth and gone, yes, please, in the Thor movies. You may also know about, of course, the Norse mythology through Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit and Tolkien's worlds. But even if you're not into that, maybe you're just into the days of the week.

Tuesday is named after Chew, Woden is Wednesday, Thunor, Thor is Thursday. Friday, Freyja or Frigg. I loved your accent. You sounded like Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. It was great. Anyway, what else is there to know about Norse mythology and Icelandic literature? Let's crack on, shall we? Dr. Nina, when we talk about old Norse literature, we're kind of talking about Icelandic literature.

So why Iceland and when in history are we talking? Well, I was just still reflecting on what Kay said about a 14 pound tuna sandwich because there is this Scandinavian world that today has amazing healthcare and schools and very expensive sandwiches but there's a unified Scandinavian world if you like that goes back more than a thousand years. But the real high point of it is what we call the Viking Age. And technically, it begins in the 8th century with a recorded attack on a monastery in Lindisfarne in England. But these Viking people didn't pop out of nowhere. There's an ancient culture, ancient set of beliefs, ancient languages that come out

of what today we call Sweden, Norway, and Iceland, which if you've ever been is just the most amazing place on earth. It is so beautiful, but it's so barren, just nothing growing. What also makes Iceland weird is it wasn't inhabited for a really long time. It's only had humans living in it for 1,100 odd years. So we know that the first people migrated over there from Norway in 870 AD. So it's a really young country. And immediately the first thing they start doing is writing this extraordinary literature. Was it Abba?

There are strands of Abba. So the Icelandic sagas, they come a little bit later on. It's written down more in the 1200s. Well, when I was a history student, that's the period of King Arthur and Knights of the Round Table. I thought you meant that's when you went to uni. Yeah, I went to university with King Arthur. That guy is a boozer. So in the 1200s is the time of chivalric literature in France and England and Germany and Wales. But in Iceland, they've got their own thing going on.

We call it the Eddas and the Sagas. What does that mean? The Eddas are dealing more with the mythological stories. So there's a prose Edda written by a guy called Snorri Sturluson, who's a very impressive person, that tells us these stories that we all get so excited about, about Ragnarok, about Odin, about all the idea of the world tree and the

world serpent. And then there's the sagas. Now the sagas often take a back seat when people start to dip their toe into the world of the Vikings, but they are amazing. They're really gossipy. They're really modern. It's a bit like episodes of Coronation Street or EastEnders playing out page by page where so-and-so's getting revenge on so-and-so for having slept with so-and-so's sister. They are more like the novels of the last hundred years or so with that sort of immediacy and drama to them. And it's all sex and death, but they're really, really different stylistically to anything else from the medieval period. So loads of like their versions of Fifty Shades of Grey.

Yeah, but that's underneath who owns the bit, squabbling over who bought the last pint. Who's their version of Ian Beale? That's what I want to know. We're going to talk about Laxdala Saga and definitely Ian Beale is Botley. So we've got the prose Edda and we've got the poetical Edda. These are two different texts. Prose written not as poetry, poetical Edda obviously is. Why do they exist as different things? There's a sense in the prose Edda that Snorri is trying to create something more like the sagas in terms of family trees, relationships between the gods, the way the stories unfold in this narrative way. You can see time span moving on.

I study Old Norse literature and also Old English literature. They're very closely related. Their poetry is, the nearest thing to it is rap music because it's all rhythmical and it's all alliterative and it sounds absolutely amazing. It's because it's meant to be pronounced in these huge halls, right? So it's about performance and it's about standing up. the minstrel in the hall is the one that holds the room's attention and they tell these stories and they can memorize stories that can go on for three days they link it all together with these letters that bounce around in a rhythm do they have their own version of like deaf poetry jam or something like i'd love

to i think they do i mean you hear about people being killed for not doing good enough poetry. That's how it should be. And Snorri's, one of the reasons he creates the prose edit is to try and explain some of the myths. It's kind of like the Cliff Notes or sort of Bluffer's Guide to understanding all these really complicated stories. That text in some ways really helps us as historians. So it's quite handy. It's a textbook. It's supposed to be helping people learn this stuff and they would have done it with art as well so you can find the great big sculpted runic stones that would have had pictures of Yggdrasil the big world tree and then the different realms you know where Asgard is in relation to Midgard in relation to

Niflheim so it's all supposed to be helping them to understand that mythological world I love the idea of there being like some version of like you know the comic book guy in the simpsons yeah yeah just going worst saga ever like definitely the guy sort of complaining about plot holes guy that never would have happened actually exactly so nina i mean there's loads of sagas you know we've got we've got the prose editor and the poetical editor and then we've got the there's loads of sagas you know we've got we've got the prose editor and the poetical editor and then we've got the sagas and the sagas are more family stories about real people actual kings actual families and there's loads of them but i think you've chosen one that you want to talk about which is the lax dealer saga it's amazing it's telling

the story really about the original settlers at iceland in iceland not the supermarket the country i was gonna say that's Peter Andre human fish sandwich at Iceland's a lot cheaper than in Iceland is it presumably so it starts off with the original settlers now as I mentioned earlier Iceland as a as a landmass wasn't occupied by humans a couple of Irish monks managed to get over there, set up a tent, and I think survived for a short while because they didn't manage to reproduce, surprisingly. So it was only when people were being exiled out of Norway, they were finding new places to set up home. And in Laxdala, it starts with Un the Deep-Minded, which is the seriously coolest name for any woman in literature, Un the Deep-Minded.

She sets up a generation of families thriving around this fjord in Iceland. But the real story kicks in about halfway through, and it's a love triangle between Guthrun, who is described as the most beautiful woman ever to have grown up in Iceland, and no less clever than she was good looking. I'm using that. That's going to go on my business card. And so she's beautiful. These two best friends, well, they're foster brothers, are desperate to win her over. She's told by a wise man she'll have four husbands. She does end up having four husbands across her life. And the first one, she doesn't like him very much. So she divorces him. And the way she divorces him is in Icelandic law you could divorce a guy if he dressed up in ladies clothes so what she does is she takes his

shirt and cuts a really low neckline so when her husband goes out the next day with this low-cut neckline she's like oh my god he's dressing as a woman divorce so she's divorced by 15 and then she goes on and gets these other partners. Next, the husband dies drowning through witchcraft. And then ultimately it ends up in this horrible clash between these two best friends, Kjartan and Botli, where Botli kills Kjartan. She was like the Kim Kardashian at that age, just getting married to anyone. It's very Hollyoaks.

What, loads of bad acting? Under Deep Minded is originally from Scotland. So some of the earliest people who moved to Iceland and populated are Scottish. It's another reminder, of course, that Iceland is an immigrant community made up of people from different backgrounds, and they've all got their own different stories. The literature is a melting pot, isn't it, Nina? It's about everyone going, well, I've got this tale, it's pretty good, and I've got this story.

Well, also, they're pretty interesting people, the early settlers, because a lot of them have been kicked out for criminal activity or for you know being quite difficult in their native homes and they've been sent out on the sea so they have they've all got stories but also i think they all think they're quite heroic they're explorers they're adventurers they're settlers and they want to preserve these stories and pass them down to future generations so it's like a lot of gap year students. Oh, you're so right. I've got so much to give to the world. Kay, Snorri Sturluson, who is this great poet

who writes one of our texts we're talking about, he's living in the 1200s. He's a law speaker, which is a really important job because he's in charge of knowing all the law and all the history. He gets embroiled in politics. He's shagging around a lot. He's got a lot of girlfriends. He's murdered by his sons-in-law, so it doesn't end up that well.

But the thing I love most about him, he builds a hot tub in his garden. And that's one of the things we know about him. He built a David Lloyd in his back garden. I love this guy. So Snorri Sturluson, poet, lawgiver, hot tub aficionado. And the Laxdale saga, what's interesting about it is, as well as featuring some pretty extraordinary women, we think it might have been composed by women yeah it's difficult to know various studies we've done to look at word patterns that does it sound more like a woman

talks than a man talks i can't say that maybe you can say that i'm not allowed to say that did you see the way i just moved away from the microphone i was like i want no part in this. I'm not going to draw in on this one at all. What we can say is that we know from DNA analysis, the first set of people who seem to settle Iceland, the men seem to be your typical Viking men, warriors coming over, big Scandi guys. But the women seem to have come from Ireland and Hebrides and the British Isles.

And there's a combining of storytelling techniques between those two cultures. Celtic people have a really long tradition of telling amazing sort of fantasy stories and spinning yarns. And it's usually the women doing the storytelling in that society. Combine that with the sort of heroic sagas

of the Viking men, and you've got this unique flowering of storytelling. Nina, in these stories, there are three time periods. There's the mythical past, the mythical present and the mythical future. Let's start with the past, the creation of the universe. What is it? Big bang? Is it a god that's like, boom, seven days, no worries? Or is it a bit more Viking-y, a bit more magical and mysterious? It's crazy, but then so many of these world creation myths are amazing.

You know, imagining what comes out of nothing. And the way they imagine it is odin is there so there's this space that's sort of a void it's called yunga gap in order to fill the space in the void they kill this giant the first being called emir and then they pull his body apart and they make bits out of his body so the earth is made from his skin the seas made from his blood the mountains from his bones and there you go there you have existence it wouldn't make a good craig david song though would it like seven days is a classic like if you're just singing space in the void it's not the same monday ripped off his bones it's not quite the same but it gets a bit more interesting

once you start to get the essay and the vania the two houses of the gods and then it starts to reflect aspects of other mythological cycles like the greeks and the romans you know they all have different roles they all have different things that are strengths and weaknesses but interestingly they do have a lot of weaknesses i mean viking gods are an absolute handful they're really really difficult to work with human resources would be like oh for god for God's sake, Odin, what now? So it's a bit like watching a WWE. It's like interspecies WWE as well. Because there's wolves in there, there's serpents.

Yeah, dwarves and elves. Dwarves, elves, yeah. The universe is created. Odin is the grandchild of Ymir. They cut up his body like Dexter and they create the world with all of the various body parts. The blood drowns all the giants except for two. It's really, really gruesome. There is then this creation of this structure. So we have nine worlds, but only four of them I think are really important.

And they are connected up by a huge world tree, which is an ash tree. It's called Idragzl. You have got the world of men, the human world, which is Mithgard. You've got the underworld, Niflheim. these are all great furniture in ikea by the way you've got asgard or arsgard which is the world of the gods that's connected to the world of men by the bifrost or the bifrost rainbow bridge with idris elba on it he's heimdall then you've got the world of the giants at the bottom of the tree there's a serpent at the top of the tree there's an eagle in the middle of the tree do you want to guess

what animal there is there kay a wolf the squirrel and the squirrel's job is to pass information between all the different worlds that's your animal that's what you're putting on your coat of arms a squirrel get out of here bro and then the bottom of the tree, there are three norns, who are magical women who feed the tree, keep it alive. And they represent the past, the present, the future. You've got to imagine it in your head as this sort of huge tree with all these different branches. And there's a different world on each branch.

And then we've got the gods, Nina. You've mentioned already, there are two types. There's the Aesir and the Vanir. So what's going on there? The Vanir are the more earthy gods and goddesses they're the fertility gods and they're into some magic and mysticism whereas the Aesir it's like a party on Mount Olympus they have Odin who's married to Frigg, Thor among their children it's more of a family tree going on there but eventually there's

one person who crosses between the two and becomes goddess of the Aesir and the Vanir, and that's Freya. It's a bit like boxing where they combine the two belts and they become the undisputed heavyweight champion. She goes from being amateur to pro. So we've got Asgard is the world of the gods, the Aesir are the main gods, Thor, the Odin, the Lorci. We've also got magical dwarves, magical elves, trolls and giants. Nina, they're a big problem, aren't they? A giant problem, yep. Magic is pretty problematic. People

do bad spells on one another. Everybody likes to talk about Thor, but Odin is the really interesting over god, if you like, because he's a god of wisdom and poetry, which I think, again, going back to what we were saying about the power of poetry it was so important to them they expressed themselves they expressed their ideas through through this poetry but he also gives up one of his eyes to achieve ultimate wisdom so he's a one-eyed god i'll be honest with you i'm not giving up an eye for all of that he throws his eye down the magical well of mimir in order to gain knowledge he also stabs himself with his own spear, fasts for a week, and he hangs himself from a tree for nine days.

These are all his techniques for acquiring wisdom. I mean, Wikipedia is just there. Was this what Jackass was based on? It's literally just Steve-O. Odin in a massive shopping trolley rolling down a hill. Stabbing himself with a spear by accident. He's married to Frick. And then there's also Thor, their kid.

God of thunder, god of war. And he's a bit thick, Thor. I think what's also interesting is how Taika Waititi and the Ragnarok film do his dumbness. Because you think it's played up. You think, oh, come on, you wouldn't have a god that's really that dumb. But the stories about Thor, he is seriously lacking in the brain department and he's constantly being out

maneuvered by loki god of mischief who while being really bad is actually really funny and clever does he actually have a hammer or was that like a marvel yeah yeah it's quite a hard thing to say even harder to spell but mjolnir is the hammer m Mjolnir, Mjolnir. Yeah that's right. Sounds like the name of a centre back. Yeah exactly yeah Man United have signed him from Brondby. I just want to talk quickly about Freyja or Freyja is the the old Norse pronunciation. She is the goddess of sex, fertility, poetry and shamanic magic but mostly sex judging by the stories. What I love about her is she's got a chariot. Do you want to guess what it's pulled by? What animal, Kay?

Do you know, I don't want to say anything because then people are like, right, you find that animal sexy. Some people do find this animal sexy. Is it a rabbit? No. Good guess. It's cats. She's got a chariot pulled by cats, which I think is a terrible idea because cats, they don't go in the same direction. A team of cats.

They wouldn't do anything. They'd go nowhere. Because cats, just like, after a while, they're like, well, she seems to be going through hard times. See you later. And ends up in some other flat. In fairness, Freya does end up in a lot of other people's flats. She's having quite a lot of casual encounters with men, with gods, with dwarves.

There's a line in Snorri where he says, Freya has had sex with everybody, including all of the dwarves. It's the idea that everybody has had sex with her. I think she's seen as this sort of fertility goddess and but she's not really it doesn't transfer into being like a warm loving mum. She's just a party girl and she's really in control. She uses sex to get her way so she gets this beautiful necklace made for her by sleeping with the dwarfs that made it and they're not telling odin about it and keeping it all to herself she definitely has like a live pray love sign in her house or something i reckon she's got a second phone as well like a second social media account she's definitely got a second phone one of

my favorite stories actually is that thor's hammer is stolen because thor's so thick it gets stolen off him by a giant called thrym the giant blackmails them and says i will give you your hammer back if freya agrees to marry me good luck mate okay do you want to guess how they get out of this predicament? And I'll tell you that Loki, Thor and Freya are all involved in this plan. They lure him into Freya's house. Meanwhile, Loki takes the hammer. It's a good plan.

It's slightly different than the real plan, Nina. So they dress Thor, the macho god of thunder, up as Freya. And this wasn't obvious? Well, it wasn't obvious until at one point they sit down at the bridal feast and then Thor devours chickens and salmon whole and then proceeds to drink 10 vats of beer. This is like getting Conor McGregor to dress up like Holly Willoughby. They get far enough in the plan that they are actually able to take Mjolnir back.

And as soon as he gets Mjolnir, he just smashes through him to smithereens. We haven't said much about him so far, but Loki in the Thor movies is definitely the most fun, obviously, because he's a trickster, he's naughty, but he's really, really, really naughty. He's also, that's not the only time he's had to save Freya from getting married to a giant. There's a giant who turns up and says, I can build you a wall around Asgard. I can do it in record time. And if I do it in record time, I get to marry Freya. And the gods are like, sure, yeah, you'll never do it in record time.

And then he turns up with his stallion, this huge, mighty horse that helps him build the wall really fast. And they're panicking because they're like, oh, gonna have to marry Freya to this this giant so how does Loki save Freya from marrying this giant Frankie the Tory gets onto the horse and like goes riding off into the sunset you're closer than you think he lets the horse get into him uh let's put it that way I haven't seen that on a Lloyd's TSB advert, I'll tell you that much. He turns himself into a female horse and he seduces the stallion and has sex with it and then gets pregnant and Loki becomes a mother to an eight-legged horse called Sleipnir

that is then Odin's famous eight-legged horse. So Loki is a mum. I just love the chaotic wonder of their world. Anything goes. I'm just going to put it out there. These guys were on mushrooms when they were writing this. That's not the only story we've got with Loki. Another one I love is that, again, another giant turns up, demands compensation for something. I can't remember why. And one of the things is that the gods have to make the giant laugh and they're all failing. And so Loki drops his trousers, ties his testicles to a goat

and then has a tug-of-war with the testicles sort of pulling the goat towards him and the giant cracks up and the day is saved. That just sounds like a dead Edinburgh Fringe. Loki, as well as being a mum to an eight-legged horse, is also a dad to a normal human child with his wife called Sigyn. But he's also a dad to three monsters. Do you want to guess what the monsters are?

And one of the monsters you've already actually name checked and I shot you down. So one of them you were already right, which is the wolf. Do you know what, bro? Since you said three monsters, all I can remember is that scene from Toy Story. One of us, one of us. Where Mr. Potato Head becomes their dad. So that is the only thing in my mind right now. Given how ridiculous everything sounds,

I'm going to say a poodle and a goldfish. So the poodle, Kay, would be, I guess, the wolf. Goldfish, a little small. It's actually a huge serpent that curls all the way around the world and bites its own tail. And then the third, weirdly, is a sort of human, but a half dead, half living human. She's half blue, half pink coloured.

And she is called Hell. And you can probably guess which kingdom she's given to run. She's given the underworld to look after. Nice. So those are the three monsters that are born from Loki and a giant. He has sex with a giant and gets him pregnant three times. Sorry, it was the way you said three times, as in like once wasn't good enough and he went back.

He kept on going back. It was like it was his dirty little secret. Like, you're going back to that giant. Yeah, I am. But I'm just imagining her like, you never stay here. You just come and just chill. Kay, you've seen Thor Ragnarok. So you will know that Thor's brother is?

Loki, right? Sort of. In the movies he is. In the Norse mythology, Nina, he's sort of a kind of half brother, blood brother. Yeah. Ultimately there is the royal family,

which is Odin and Frigg. And their honourable son is Thor. And they have another son who they absolutely adore, who is Baldr, and he goes on to play a big role. So that's the proper brother, really. And Baldr is renowned for being incredibly beautiful. He's a total hottie. But he dies a pretty funny death.

Baldr has a dream, Kay, that he's going to die. And he tells his mum, Frigg, and she panics and she's like, oh my God, my beautiful boy cannot die. And she goes around the entire world getting every living thing on the planet to promise not to kill him. She forgets one thing. She forgets to ask Mistletoe. And so Loki hears about it. I love your face, Kay. You're like, what? Where's this going? Loki hears about this. He tells the gods to have fun with the fact that baldor cannot be killed so they are chucking stuff at him that would kill any other man like literally hurling rocks at him and it's just bouncing off his head i'm telling you this

is jackass bruv you lot aren't listening to me since you said that since you said that okay i can't get it out of my head i'm just thinking of it constantly then it gets even crazier doesn't it because loki finds out that mistletoe is the only thing that will kill him. So he fashions like a spear. Instead of throwing it himself, he gets Valdo's blind brother to randomly lob it into the air. And then it eventually hits Valdo and kills him. So Loki hasn't done the deed himself.

Loki's punishment, Kay. Do you want to guess how he's punished? man I'm not guessing anything else everything I've guessed it's just something even more ridiculous I don't know like a four-headed guinea pig eats him and he has to like fashion an escape route out of it he comes out with the guinea pig's excrement I mean I feel like you'd fit right in with the viking world the story goes that he is tied to a rock with intestines and then a giant snake drips poison onto his head and every time the poison touches him he has a convulsion and that's what causes earthquakes okay how are you feeling about the marvel movies now are you thinking they should go further i just

think like these are really bad marvel movies like i understand why they've changed all of them now. It's like these things are beyond belief. At least the Marvel ones seem a bit more believable. The idea of Thor fighting Hulk doesn't seem wild to me now. It's perfectly sensible, to be honest. The Marvel movie Thor Ragnarok is the one that we all love. It's the funniest one. And Ragnarok, or Ragnarok as I think it was called in Old Norse,

is the end of the world, Nina. It's really intense. It's like the end of Avengers, like, you know, when everyone turns up. Was there a virus involved? Yeah. Well, there is a very 2020 vibe going on in Ragnarok for sure. But already, you know, at the beginning when Ragnarok is going to kick off, there's all these different signs that start.

So crows start to make sounds in each of the different kingdoms and there's a blood red one down in hell that starts crowing the wolf garm that guards the gates of the underworld breaks free of his chains and it's all this sort of tension building up but ultimately it's a battle it's a cataclysmic battle and it's between the gods and essentially the giants. But you get all sorts of other people joining in. You get an army of the dead. Loki leads them. You have different creatures.

So the world serpent lets go of its tail finally. And that brings about crisis. Thor fights the world serpent. Both die. Fenrir manages to kill Odin, so it's sort of wiping the slate clean of the ancient gods and goddesses. A really interesting moment because Christianity has now come to most of Scandinavia and it is a sort of end of days but it's also the end of that worldview, that end of that world religion. But it is really really dark and really intense. And the descriptions of it are like nothing else you'll read. There's a real sense in the way it's written in the different versions as well

of the sound and the effects of it, all that. There's flames and the world tree is shaking. This is like an EastEnders Christmas special. Yes! Way too much going on at once. Ian Beale has been slaughtered by a giant wolf frank butch has come back from the dead an army of dirty dens just rolling in and this is loki obviously getting vengeance as well loki

switches sides and he joins the side of the giants he's on the side of darkness everyone basically kills everyone else but there are a couple of gods left over and there is a reincarnation isn't there Nina? Yeah there's a revisiting of the wonderful Baldir that golden boy and he's going to start the world afresh. So a lot of the gods die but there are these few that manage to make it through and create a better world afterwards. But as well as the gods there are also other creatures that we haven't mentioned. So just very quickly, Nina, who are the Valkyrie? So the Valkyrie in the movie seem to be against Hela, who in a rough sort of way is one of those children of Loki, the one that runs the underworld. But the Valkyrie actually are women who fly over

the battlefield. So they're mentioned a lot in battle poetry because they are the ones that are supposed to select the heroes that have died in battle. So the only way, hell, as in H-E-L, is almost the opposite of the Christian hell. It's not flames and torture. It's very cold and it's very boring. It's like an eternal winter. So it's like Iceland.

Absolutely. You basically carry on living your same cold life for eternity and anyone who doesn't do anything amazing as a hero

ends up there so there's a real sense in which you kind of want to be a warrior and you would quite like to die on the battlefield

because then you get a chance to go either to Valhalla the Hall of Odin or you get to go to Freya's Hall and the Valkyries are the ones that sweep around over the battlefield and choose those people,

choose who's going to go to Freya and who's going to go to Odin. I love that. That's like when your flight gets cancelled, isn't it? And the airline gives you an option of two places you could go. You could go Barcelona in May or you could go to Vienna in March. Which one do you choose?

So that's the Valkyrie. The other ones I just want to talk about briefly, because I love these, are the Draucher, who are the zombies. They're really interesting. They're super powerful. They're really strong. They're intelligent. But they are dead humans who can't remember their memories.

So they've died. They've been cursed somehow. And then they come back at night and they attack people and they hoard their treasure. They're not sluggish zombies like we think of them kate do you want to guess the way that you have to kill a drow her zombie right you have to like summon a eagle nice and the eagle sucks out the small intestine out of these things i don don't know. I love that. You are going to be writing your own Viking sagas by the end of this session. You have embraced this worldview.

Yeah, because I just go, what's the most logical explanation? Don't go for that. Pick the opposite of sensible and run with it. It's actually a bit more conventional. You have to wrestle them back into their tomb and then cut their head off and set fire to them. Standard practice.

That was actually in WWE. The Undertaker used to do that. They were called, like, casket matches. Again, alongside all of the characters I've loved for 20 years of my life being reinterpreted as the members of Jackass, I'm now also casting them all as members of the World Wrestling Association. Also, I'd love to see Thor in WWE

just stupidly getting caught out every week and then Loki turns up as a horse. That'd be good. So as well as the gods, the kind of real hardcore weird myths, and as well as the historical documents. So as a medieval historian, I read things like the Heimskringla,

which is a saga about kings, like actual proper real kings who lived and was written by Snorri Sturluson and tells us about 1066 and Harald Hardrada, those sort of real people from history. But we've also got a third category, which are the sort of fantasy, sort of legendary, but they're humans. So stories like Sigurd, who is the dragon slayer. And as well as Sigurd, there's also Brunnhilde, which brings us on to women in these stories. We're not sure if women were allowed to be warriors in Viking society, but they are allowed to be warriors in the stories they tell, aren't they?

Absolutely. Well, already we've mentioned Freyja and the fact that she takes warriors after life. We've mentioned the Valkyries and the fact that they play a role in the battlefield. There's many references that seem to suggest that women like Unna Demighted for example when she arrived she arrived in charge of a boat of 20 people so they're not taking this sort of weak back seat but recently there's been discoveries made from archaeology that suggests that we could be looking at warrior women being a real thing it It used to be assumed if a skeleton came out of the ground and it was holding a weapon, pun intended at this point, that it was probably a man.

And so there wasn't the DNA analysis being done. But now they're returning to skeletons, returning to bones and having another look and saying, you know, maybe some of these people that were buried with weapons were in fact women. So it's exciting. It's an exciting time. Discoveries are being made all the time. And in the Volsson saga, we have a saga here about power,

a cursed ring and a dragon. I mean, Tolkien has basically just nabbed that. He gets the names of all of his dwarves from Icelandic sagas. And what I love, I suppose, is that when you look at sagas, then it's killing your brothers, it's sleeping around,

it's fighting a dragon. But when we have a saga holiday, it's retired people going on a cruise. It's a bit different. But you can see, though mean this is i'm expecting uh k now to be the new tolkien because once you fall in love with these stories once you've heard them you can't unhear them and all other literature just feels really boring in comparison so when he was writing lord of the rings he was doing it as professor of old norse and Old English. And he had all these stories that he'd read and he thought, well, where better to turn than this mad world of characters? I mean, Tolkien, he was an Icelandic expert teaching at Oxford.

Gandalf is a word we get from Icelandic sagas. Oh, wow. He just nicked the names. He didn't even bother. He's just like, I'll have that. Thank you very much. So the sagas, Nina, are written in Old Icelandic. That's the language, which is pretty similar to Modern Icelandic. The language hasn't changed in a thousand years, but they're written late. They're written in the 1200s, after the Viking Age. These people were Christians. They weren't pagans anymore. Where does that get us? Are these texts people trying to cling on to the old stories? Are they Christian interpretations? How reliable are they as insights into actual Viking mindsets? Well this is really coming back

to the notion of writing and what writing does. Nowadays we tend to use the word illiterate to suggest someone's a bit thick or ignorant but actually in societies that didn't use writing people were using so much more of their brain to remember information. They had to remember who was married to whom, who owned what, and all their myths and all their stories. So their capacity to remember, for me, makes them all the more intelligent. But when writing comes along, that is not a Viking thing. They are not using long form writing as the continental world is to record information. It's Christianity that brings writing. So the only reason these things are written down at all is because they were

written down by people who've been Christianised. And that instantly makes you think, whoever this person is, however objective they are, they're writing it as a Christian hundreds of years after the original stories were being recited. So there's going to be some things that don't quite fit. But there's something else going on here, which is that Iceland were going through a period of such change and independence, but they became really traditional in the light of that. And so they cling on all the more in the 12th and 13th century to their old stories. So in a funny sort of way, I think they're trying really hard

to preserve things as accurately as they possibly could at the time. That's what, for me, makes the Icelandic stuff all the more exciting. And that's what Snorri Sturluson was doing in writing his prose, Edda. He was trying to give people a primer, a bluffer's guide to remembering the old stories. It was like their version of the guy going, let's go back to the good old days. It was! The days we're like horses because impregnate your god. Those days. Where a serpent was biting its own tail the good old days that is the reality of it unfortunately because that's the other thing

all of these stories because they were part of this oral tradition is it shared information that if they hadn't have actually written it down it could have all been lost so it is amazing that somebody took the time to write them down and they were popular they didn't just write it down once some of them like laxdala saga survives in loads of manuscripts which shows it was really popular people wanted to read it and carry it on these are stories for everyone right they're not scaldic poetry for a king they are told by a community living in iceland maybe traveling and off into different places around the world. The Vikings got around a lot.

Do you know what? All of this is like teaching me a lot about how like sex education is. Because they have to teach all of these stories from a very young age. It's like day one, it's like, right, this is what sex is. Because you're going to have to find out about what Loki's been doing. Yeah, it's going to get weird. So if you don't understand this concept, you're not going to get any of these stories, right?

The birds and the bees is the first thing that happens there. The birds, the bees, the horses, whatever else. The techniques that are so specific to Scaldic poetry, a Scald means a poet, and these techniques, the ones that I want to talk about, are called kennings. So a kenning is kind of like a euphemism so it's like a phrase that replaces a noun so instead of me saying my banana i might say my golden fruit or something something like that i

don't know i've improvised that this eu legislation that so we're going to do a little mini quiz with you kate before we do the big proper quiz at the end. We'll do a mini quiz. Oh, I wasn't told about this. I was only told there was one quiz. No, I mean, get my agent on the phone. I want you to guess what these phrases mean as a word. Okay, so the first one is,

what valuable thing was described as the serpent's lair, Freya's tears and Sif's hair? Sif was a beautiful woman married to Loki with long blonde hair. A comb or something. Oh, not bad. No, it's gold. So instead of saying gold, you would say Freya's tears. Oh, this is like Cockney rhyming slang, isn't it? Exactly. It's exactly it. So you're spot on.

So it's exactly that. It's a poetical allusion to an idea. Apples and pears, that kind of thing. All right. Next one. What bird was known as the Swan of Blood? I love this. A robin. That's good. That's so good. That's so good because actually in traditional folklore, the robin in Redbreast is supposed to be the blood from Christ's wound. But no, it's a raven because the ravens would sweep down on the battlefield.

Oh, man. Good guess. All right. right third one what's an icicle of blood i don't know like a solero like what we do in the shadows if they had their own sort of delicious desserts an icicle of blood is a sword. Oh, okay. And the fourth final one, what was a sea steed? You would ride it. No idea. It's a boat. So you'd ride your steed

in battle as a horse. Across the waves, you would ride your sea steed. I was going to go for jet ski, but I was like... I mean, that would be your sea steed. Yeah.

That's the 21st century version. I was like, they were in Iceland, not Dubai. So like... Yeah. All right. So, Kay, would you like to maybe invent your own kenning for the 21st century? What would was like, they were in Iceland, not Dubai. So like, yeah. All right. So, Kay, would you like to maybe invent your own kenning for the 21st century?

What would you call Nando's? Ah, what would I call Nando's? Spicy alarm clock. Nice. Take a trip to the spicy alarm clock. Yeah. I was thinking what I'd call Instagram. I think I'd call it the misery gallery because it's just endlessly better looking people than me.

Just making me sad. But yes, the Kennings are really important in Icelandic mythology and literature, Nina, because they're also referencing to the gods on it. You know, Saseev's hair, she has golden hair. It's another way of referencing back to those stories. It is. I mean, I'm often asked, why do you love studying this stuff so much? It is. I mean, I'm often asked, why do you love studying this stuff so much? Because it's all interconnected. And this idea that the gods are brought into the Kennings means that everybody has to know all the myths. They have to have all those little in jokes and references to make sense of it. But it goes back to what I was saying right at the beginning as well for hours and hours at a time trying to tell a story but having to make every single sentence alliterate so you had to put words together to make up another word that started with the letter you wanted so you were constantly kind of creating new words as you were going along trying to kind of keep the rhythm keep the patterns going and so kennings are absolutely amazing they're mini worlds you know each little kenning is like a little mini riddle a mini world i'm just trying to think about how i'll be explaining this to people like i mean the son of odin he was busy boning like that

a nuance window well that brings us on to the last segment of the pod. This is the nuance window. This is where Kay and I, well, we have a little horn of mead, maybe. I don't know. We're both non-drinkers. Is there non-alcoholic mead? Maybe there was. And we allow our expert, Dr Yanina, to talk for two uninterrupted minutes about anything she wants to talk about.

And today we're going to talk about the misrepresentation of the Vikings. So, without much further ado, Dr Nina Ramirez, some nuance window. Well, hopefully you've got the impression how much I love the Viking world that I've discovered through the literature, through the artefacts, the archaeology. But it is sadly misrepresented and has been for a long time. So the traditional idea of the bearded Viking warrior sailing out on the seas, attacking monks, we're learning constantly now about how that is not a true representation of the Viking world. It was much more about trade, about travel and about encounter. And the elements

of the bloodthirsty aspects of the Vikings is just a small part of it. What's much more exciting is learning about how cultured, how civilised, how their women behaved, how their societies were structured. But what's also worrying is how so many of these misrepresentations have just become commonplace. If you're going to go to a party as a Viking, what are you going to go and buy? A horned helmet. And in fact, just that basic symbol of the Vikings is wrong. There has never been a Viking horned helmet discovered. It doesn't make sense. If you whack someone on the head and they've got horns sticking out, it's going to cause more damage to them than to the other person. So why do we have it? We have it

because just over 100 years ago, Wagner, the Ring Cycle was being put on. Again, this sort of reclaiming of the Viking identity for nationalists. And the helmets were smooth originally, but they couldn't be seen from the back of the theatre. So the costume designer decided if they put big horns on the top, they'd be more visible. And it's carried on as this really unfair identifying symbol of the Vikings. But what's even more worrying is how the reputation of the Vikings are now being assumed by the far right. When we saw the attacks on Congress, we saw people with Viking-inspired tattoos claiming that they were part of this super race, this Aryan race. And if anything, this conversation you'll have been

hearing today will tell you quite what a rich, diverse and multiracial place the Viking world was. They traveled everywhere. They got over to the edges of the Americas. They went all the way down into Constantinople. These were traveled, cultured people who encountered other civilizations and were interested by them. So I want to see an end to this nationalistic hijacking of a period of the past that I love. Thank you so much. Kay, thoughts on that? There's an American football team called the Vikings. They need to change all their logos now.

They do, yeah. Minnesota Vikings. I've sent some strongly worded emails, Kay. I spend my weekends travelling around fancy dress shops removing all their horned helmets. So what do you know now? Time now for the So what do you know now it is the quickfire quiz to see what our comedian k curd has learned how much odin wisdom has gone into his head you haven't got your eye thrown down a well but you know last time out you got nine out of ten so hopefully you're gonna do

really well i feel like the best has already come. I don't think we're going to be expecting another 9 out of 10, but let's see how we do. I have faith in you, Kay. I think you can do this. All right, so I'm putting the stopwatch on. Question one, Kay. In which century did the people from Norway arrive in Iceland and Scotland as well? Was it the 1200s?

Yeah, that's when the writings were done. Yeah, I'll accept that. Yeah, it's 800s when they arrived, 1200s is when the writings happened. Question two. Un the deep-minded, written about in the Laxdale saga, settled in Iceland from which country? Oh, was it Ireland? Scotland.

Oh, I knew it was one of the two. Oh, yeah, sorry. Question three. In Norse poetry, what were kennings? It's like Cockney rhyming slang. Yes, yeah, exactly. Euphemisms for nouns. Question three. In Norse poetry, what were kennings? It's like Cockney rhyming slang. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Euphemisms for nouns.

Question four. Which important Icelandic saga writer also had a hot tub? Was it Snorri Sturluson? Yeah. Snorri Sturluson. Amazing. Well done. That's a hard name to remember.

Question five. In myth, name one of the ways that the god Odin acquired his knowledge. He put his eye down a well. He did, yeah. He also stamped himself and hung himself from a tree. Weirdo. Question six. How did Thor and Loki retrieve Thor's hammer from a giant

when Freya had to get married to him? So Thor dressed up like a woman. It was cross-dressing, essentially. It was like they were on a stag do. Absolutely right. Question seven. What was the name of Thor's magical hammer? It's Mjolnir.

Yeah, bang on. Well done. Question eight. The goddess Freyja had a chariot pulled by which animals? Cats. It is cats. Question nine. Doing really well.

Sagas and Eddas were intended to be read aloud, but they're written in which language from a modern country? Icelandic. It country? Icelandic. It is, Old Icelandic. And question 10, this is for nine out of 10, this to match your last score. Loki was father to three monsters,

but he was mother to what type of eight-legged animal? A horse. An eight-legged horse, yeah. Nine out of 10. Done really well. You've matched yourself from last time. Impressive stuff.

Do you know why I said Ireland? I think you said Celt or Celtic. Yeah, it was my fault. I said Ireland twice. I said about the Irish women. I said about the Irish months. And I'd set you up and I felt guilty as you said that answer. Nina, we'll have to punish you.

We'll tie you to a rock and get a snake to drip poison on your head. Yeah, with my entrails, please. Amazing stuff, Kay. Nine out of ten are you pleased with yourself i'm happy it was a tough performance but you know we dug deep and in the end we've got the three points and that's what matters i want to do my oligarch impression again now like yeah the boys did they're really good and uh all right well you clearly had some odin level wisdom in your teaching from dr nina absolutely so listeners if you're in the mood for

more literary history featuring undead monsters, you can check out the Vampire Literature episode with Ed Gamble and Dr Corin Throsby. Or if you want more of Kay, of course you do, go listen to the Babylonians episode again. And if you've had a laugh, if you've learned some stuff, please do share this podcast with your friends, leave a review online,

and subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But all that's left for me now is to say a huge thank you to my guests. In History Corner, we've had the wonderful Dr Yanina Ramirez from the University of Oxford. Thank you, Nina. Thank you. It's been so much fun. And in Comedy Corner, we've had the Kenning King, Kay Curd. Thank you very much.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we take another trip on the Rainbow Bifrost Bridge to a different mythic past with two new heroes. But for now, I'm off to go and round up the neighborhood cats and try and get them to pull my chariot it's going to be an absolute nightmare thanks very much bye you're dead to me was a production by the athletic for bbc radio 4 the researchers were charlotte potter and hannah mckenzie the script was by emin the goose and me The project manager was Isla Matthews and the edit producer was Cornelius Mendez.

Hello, I'm Melvin Bragg and if that episode has whetted your appetite for Norse mythology, you should check out In Our Time. We have episodes on the Norse gods,

the Volga Vikings and the Icelandic sagas in which we explore everything from the fierce Scandinavian warriors once called the filthiest of gods' creatures to the heroes, villains, ghosts and trolls in early Icelandic mythology.

So join me and expert academic guests as we examine Norse history and much more on the In Our Time podcast. You can subscribe to In Our Time on BBC Sounds.