Introducing: Real Vikings - Episode 1

25:08But alongside religion and mythology, there may be more practical considerations at play in pushing the Vikings out from Scandinavia. It's also been suggested that there might be something of a gender imbalance. So essentially there are fewer women for the men to marry and settle down with and kind of build up a farmstead and raise a family. The Vikings' practice of polygamy doesn't help, with the most powerful men taking multiple wives. It provides an incentive for lesser males to venture abroad in search of foreign brides, or come back home with wealth they can use to compete for the hand of a local girl.

25:55Another driver is climate. At the time, there are some significant meteorological shifts. Pragya Vora is lecturer in medieval history at the University of York. One likely explanation is that there was, as a consequence of a sort of warm period, the medieval warm period, an explosion in population. And as a consequence, there wasn't enough land in Scandinavia. And so people started moving abroad to take their chances, really, to make something of their lives. In some cases, the accumulation of wealth overseas comes through what we might call legitimate trading, exchanging resources such as furs and walrus tusks for silver.

26:49But in the Viking Age, the men from Scandinavia will come to specialise in one particularly lucrative form of commerce.

26:58Iain Glen:In the 9th century, the slave trade with the Muslim world exploded on the continent. Slavery became very important for the Scandinavians in the Viking Age. Slaves became the major trading commodity for the Scandinavians. And slavery, I believe, in a way came to characterize the Viking period at that time. In fact, so rife is slavery that it forms part of a three-tiered Viking society. At the top there's the chieftain, or jarl, from which we get our word earl. Below him come the freemen, or carls, and right at the bottom sit the slaves, or thralls, the origin of another English expression, to be enthralled to someone.

27:54The Vikings are not the only ones practicing slavery at the time. The Christian Anglo-Saxons do it too. But whatever romantic ideas we may entertain about the Norsemen, we have to acknowledge that their economy is founded on the trafficking of human beings.

28:17It is partly their notoriety as slavers that accounts for the Vikings' enduring reputation for violence. But it also has a lot to do with the sources we're using. Professor Elizabeth Rowe, reader in Scandinavian studies at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Vikings in the West, The Legend of Ragnar Lothbrok and His Sons. Nearly all of the contemporary accounts that we have for the Scandinavians in Western Europe are from the point of the victims of Viking raids and attacks. A byproduct of the Vikings' paganism is that when held up against Christendom, they are comparatively illiterate.

29:06No Bible, no libraries, no monastic scholars to record events. Anything approximating a written language is carved in a crude, stick-like alphabet we know as runes, with each of its 24 characters corresponding to a vocal sound. It's a functional means of notification, rather than a means of archive or record. As a result, the history of the Vikings in this early period is that their story is told by their victims, those who hate them. Evidence written by Scandinavians themselves, for instance in the epic Icelandic sagas, doesn't come until much later. Partly it's a problem that in Scandinavia, writing didn't come until the conversion to Christianity, let's say around the year 1000.

29:59And so whatever was written down about the Viking Age was written down hundreds of years after the events that are being told. One source that historians lean on heavily is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle is an old English manuscript, a collection of annals documenting the history of the Anglo-Saxon people. It was begun in the 9th century at the court of King Alfred of Wessex. It's this source that recounts the attack on the king's reeve, Beadahard, in Portland. The Chronicle pinpoints the 8th century as the time when Viking raids kick off. This is the traditional narrative, that the Viking Age begins in the late 700s.

30:46Indeed, the Chronicle tells us that the three ships involved in the murder of Beadahard are the first ships of Danish men to come to England. Actually, we know that there were Northmen trading in England for at least a century before this. And recently analysed DNA evidence suggests that people with Scandinavian heritage may have been present in Britain even earlier than that. Nordic remains found in the city of York have been dated to as far back as between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD, well before the wide-scale Anglo-Saxon settlement. And it's likely that those men on Chesil Beach are not the first Scandinavians that Beadehard has ever dealt with either.

31:31The way he gallops off to confront them suggests he was not expecting trouble. It seems he thought they were merchants, not marauders. When he sees these three ships from a foreign land show up in Portland, he goes rushing down to meet them, mainly to try and get them to leave in order to go to a king's port. And the reason for that is that when merchants come in, They have dues to pay, and those dues need to be paid in a king's port. So he wasn't really trying to shoo them away or scare them away. He was just trying to do the right thing. Clearly, the presence of Northmen in Dorset is nothing new.

32:16What is, shockingly so, is the violence they mete out. If not the first Scandinavians in England, Beadehard's killers are the first recorded Vikings. It's a crucial distinction. One that we now understand, though it may not have been clear at the time, between earlier traders and these new raiders.

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33:45The Anglo-Saxons may have found the Viking raid as enigmatic and terrifying, but to the Scandinavians themselves, England was less of a mystery. They likely had long-standing knowledge of its shores. Before the Viking Age, a network of trading settlements known as Emporia, or Wicks in Old English, sprang up along rivers and coastal areas across Europe. These include Jipezwick and Norwick, Ipswich and Norwich today. There's also Hamwick, which becomes Southampton, while Londonwick is London, and Iorforwick today's York. Based on the trading that took place in the pre-Viking Age, the Scandinavians had a great deal of information about where the towns were, where the stored wealth might be, let's say, monasteries perhaps.

34:41Unsurprisingly, the Anglo-Saxon chronicle is Anglo-centric. But it's not just England where the Scandinavians have been active. Perhaps even earlier, the Vikings were founding emporia in mainland Europe and striking out towards the east. They were trading even as far as what's today Estonia, Lithuania. We have pretty clear evidence of that.

35:15It's 2008. We're in the village of Salme on the island of Saarema in Estonia. A team of construction workers is digging a trench for an electric cable. The bucket of the hydraulic excavator claws at the earth, breaking the ground and dragging rubble backwards. Suddenly, one of the workers cries out for the operator to stop. The man crouches down and peers into the hole. A moment later, he holds up the object that caught his eye. It's a human skull, darkly discolored and covered in mud. His fellow workers rush forward to join him. Before long, they have retrieved a small pile of human bones, together with other strange items.

36:06work comes to a standstill. At first, it's thought that these are the remains of a World War II soldier, but they don't look like 20th century artifacts. An archaeologist, Marge Conser from the University of Tartu, is called in. Conser is in no doubt that the find comes from much, much earlier, over a thousand years, in fact. Among the items recovered, she identifies an ancient spearhead and gaming pieces. Gradually, over a period of months, Konsa and her team uncover what appears to be a boat. There are no actual timbers left. They've rotted away. But the ground is discolored where they once were.

36:53And 275 iron rivets are still in place, clearly indicating the shape of a 38-foot-long craft. It is a longboat of Scandinavian origin, and with seven dead men buried with the ship, propped up on their benches as if about to row into the next world. The men are all aged between 18 and 45. Some of the bones bear the marks of lethal wounds. These are warriors who died in battle. Konsa is in no doubt what she has uncovered is a Viking warship but here's the thing she and her colleagues date the burial site to between 700 and 750 AD when a second vessel is found nearby it's clear that this is a site of major archaeological significance at 55 feet long It is larger and even more spectacular than the first.

37:55Remarkably, it's equipped with a mast with fragments of sail still attached. This makes it the earliest known sailing ship ever found in the Baltic. And that pushes the mast and the sail on top of a wooden ship back by 40 or so years. So now we're back to the middle of the 8th century. And then with that, we get this debate of when does the Viking Age begin? Inside the hull of the second boat, archaeologists make a macabre discovery. The remains of a further 33 warriors, stacked neatly in rows and buried beneath a covering of shields. Isotope analysis of the men's teeth will reveal that many of them came from the Mela Valley in Sweden.

38:43They're weapons similar to ones recovered from other boat burials there. The Salme find suggests that the Viking Age began at least 50 years, possibly even a century, earlier than once believed.

39:05Ship burials like those at Salme underline just how central boats are to the lives and deaths of Viking men and women. The longboat is at the heart of a technological revolution taking place in Scandinavia. Thanks to advances in shipbuilding techniques, they're evolving into sophisticated war machines. The Viking ship is the catalyst of the Viking Age. They're getting more streamlined, particularly with the development of the true keel. They're more able to sail further out into the ocean. So we start getting ships that can go not just along coastlines, but can cross the open ocean and deal with particularly the strong ocean currents that you find in the North Atlantic.

39:55It's hard to overstate the importance of the keel to the Vikings. It was part of their cultural identity. Even the range of mountains that runs down the spine of Norway is named Schurlen, the Norse for keel. Viking longships are clinker-built, which means they're made from overlapping planks. The timber used is often green wood, preferably oak, freshly hewn with axes, and with pine pitch used to seal it all up. This creates an incredibly flexible structure. The planks open and close, breathing like a living creature as the hull passes through the water. It allows them to show up quickly, hold their shallow-drafted ships onto the beaches, and sail out quickly.

40:46They can go up the rivers with these shallow-drafted boats. They can easily take down or put up their sails, so it makes these ships really versatile. And because the keels are relatively shallow and the ships are clinker-built, they can actually be lifted by as few as 10 men, so they can sail then up rivers as well as across oceans. And they do it at truly frightening speed. They could cover about 50 miles in a day. And even a cavalry using a good Roman road could do about 30. So the Vikings are just faster than everyone. I think the most telling example of this is for the first two centuries of the Viking Age, so roughly 800 to 1000 AD, there is no naval battle in Northern Europe except between Viking fleets.

41:33So they just have complete dominance of the sea. With their prows carved as elaborate dragons, the better to ward off evil spirits, these longships are an awesome sight. Their devastating impact is soon to be felt right across Europe.

41:58Back in England, in the wake of the attack on Beadahard and his men, Viking raids are on the increase. A charter issued in 792 by King Offa of Mercia talks of fleets of seaborne pagans causing trouble along the coast. 250 miles north, a year after Offa's charter, a Viking raid is about to take place, which will send shockwaves throughout the whole of the Christian world.

42:36It's June the 8th, 793 AD. We're on the holy island of Lindisfar, just off the northeast coast of England, in the Kingdom of Northumbria. There's a bleak, craggy beauty to the place. Lashed by the winds and rains of the North Sea, it faces out towards a pewter horizon. A causeway connects it with the mainland at low tide. When the tide's in, it's completely cut off. Isolated as it is, Lindisfarne is an important religious centre. It's the shrine of the 7th century hermit St. Cuthbert, a place of pilgrimage where a thriving community of monks live. They wear the coarse woolen habits of the Benedictine order, dyed black to symbolize repentance.

43:30Today, there's a new arrival, a 15-year-old novice. The novice is shown round his new home by a senior monk. Like many early medieval monasteries, the sprawling abbey is a working farm. The monks grow wheat and raise cattle. The calves' hides are valuable sources of vellum, a key component in the abbey's other main activity, the production of illuminated manuscripts. The novice is taken to the room where the scribes and illustrators work. Their tonsured heads, shaved at the crown, bowed in concentration. He gazes in wonder at the gorgeous folios taking shape. Inside the church, a group of pilgrims kneel before the shrine.

44:18A rich lord presents the abbot with a gold chalice, a sign of his devotion. The wealth on open display is dazzling. Gifts from esteemed pilgrims include gold and silver plates and liturgical objects studied with precious gemstones. But the most treasured object of all has been made right here at the Abbey. The famous Lindisfarne Gospels, enclosed in a priceless, jewel-encrusted leather binding. It may seem strange to us that such valuable artifacts are not locked away in a strong room. But as far as the monks are concerned, no Christian would dare rob the church. It would mean eternal damnation.

45:08Abel summons the monks to worship. Prayer and work, work and prayer. This will be the novice's life from now on. He is assigned to duties in the vegetable garden. On his way, he pauses at a clifftop to gaze out to sea. Suddenly, he spots a few dark specks on the horizon. The specks take on shape. They're ships. Other monks join him, tracking the fleet's approach. There's no doubt now the vessels are coming towards Lindisfar, and the tide is in, which means the community is effectively trapped on the island. The boats have appeared from the north. As they get closer, the monks are able to make out the dragon-shaped prowls riding the waves.

46:01The square sails, too, are distinctive. brightly decorated with animal symbols. These are the long ships of the Norsemen.

46:13Soon the ships are close enough to hear the ferocious roar of the men sailing them, and to see that they are armed. The monks can make out the shields arrayed along the sides of each boat, round and colorful with an iron boss in the center. Some of the monks run in terror towards the church. God and the bones of St. Cuthbert will protect them. But the young novice remains rooted to the spot. He stares down as the shallow-keeled boats hit the beach at speed. He sees the Norsemen leap out, their leather boots striking Northumbrian territory. In their hands, they brandish axes, swords, daggers, bows and arrows.

46:58A delegation of senior monks has gone down to the beach to find out what the men from the boats want. The novice watches in horror as they are ruthlessly struck down.

47:12One of the attackers looks up, glaring at the novice. The boy finds his feet and runs to join the others inside the church. A hail of arrows hits the door. Soon after, a violent hammering begins. Axe blades smash through the wood. The boy hides behind a pillar and watches as the attackers charge at the defenseless monks and put them to the sword. Blood washes across the floor. The air is filled with the sounds of slaughter. The crunch of blades on bones. the cries of the dying, and the wolf-like howls of their killers.

48:01The raiders vandalize the church and gather priceless objects. They even dig up the altar and drag that away. As a final blasphemy, they rip the jeweled cover from the Lindisfarne gospel and add it to their hall. They have no use for the pages. The novice is yanked from his hiding place. Certain that he is about to die, he utters a prayer to God.

48:34Perhaps his prayer is answered. The Vikings spare his life, for now at least. He's bound in chains and loaded into a boat, together with other survivors. The Norsemen push their ships back into the water. A very different future awaits the novice now.

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50:34According to the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, there were warning signs before the attack. It's full of importance. It's full of, you know, the whole drama of the natural world sort of rises up in concert with these raids. You know, here there were dreadful sheets of lightning and dragons were seen flying through the air and there was terrible famine. Alcuin also mentions a bloody rain which fell out of a clear sky onto St. Peter's Church in York. Despite these omens, the attack on Lindisfarne stuns everyone. From the Viking perspective, everything went according to plan. The Vikings who came in, they got what they wanted, they looted, they took all the gold and silver that was held at Lindisfarne and that was them sorted.

51:27There's nothing more complex about that. Lindisfarne has also provided them with a business model that they can scale up targeting remote holy sites not just in England but all across coastal Europe. This is a place where wealth has been stored up where the elites sometimes are retiring to and giving wealth to monks so that they have prayers for their souls after their death. Monasteries like Lindisfarne are isolated and vulnerable, often undefended. They may be protected by God, but that only works if you're a believer. As for the monks... They're not... These aren't the most fierce soldiers around.

52:13The Vikings, to me, are the ultimate opportunists. They're going to go where the potential is, and they're going to go where it's easy. In the aftermath of the attack on Lindisfarne, the four kingdoms of England are left reeling. Panic even spreads as far as the Frankish Empire, where Alquin is living. In a dispatch to King Æthelred of Northumbria, he writes, Never before has such terror appeared in Britain. The Viking Age has truly begun.

52:55In the next episode, the Vikings step up their raids, hitting war sites in Britain and Ireland, as well as northern France. Their arrival there will plunge the Frankish Empire into an existential struggle, Christian versus pagan, good versus evil. It will culminate in an extraordinary attack on Paris, led by the most famous Northman of all, Ragnar Lothbrok. That's next time.

53:41Thanks for listening.

53:43Iain Glen:To hear more episodes of Real Vikings right now, find the show in your podcast app and hit follow. or listen at Noiser.com.