What Caused the Viking Age?

A wind whips across the North Sea as dragon-headed ships cut through the waves towards Anglo-Saxon England. Their arrival marks the start of the Viking Age. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr Eleanor Janega is joined by Terri Barnes and C. J. Adrien of the Vikingology podcast to explore why Vikings left their Scandinavian homelands. From climate change and political upheaval to innovations in shipbuilding, they examine the forces that set these raiders and explorers on a path that would reshape medieval Europe. MORE The Viking Age: What New Discoveries Reveal Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/gone-medieval/id1564113746?i=1000652251361 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aChBL6wP2qPpSz5al8tp2?si=5f2466c3ba464049 Viking Warrior Women Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/tj/podcast/warrior-viking-women/id1564113746?i=1000668596291 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/36PN8IaGMAw81esxtsEPy2 Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Yanega, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:20Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanega, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

• 1:58Eleanor Janega?

  A wind whips amid stormy seas. Waves caress the sand-skin shores of Anglo-Saxon England. And on the horizon, looms a pack of dragons. An armada of wood-wittled ships, lithe and nimble, cut through the froth and ebb of the North Sea tide. Like the bark of a tree, the ships are encased by rows of hardwood shields and manned by hulking Northmen, who tame flailing sail and oar. And at their bow, at the very front of each ship, dwell the faces of monsters, hewn into

• 2:43Eleanor Janega?

  oaken fabric, instilling fear and despair upon those that bear them witness. These are the Vikings. And with their coming, a new era begins. Today on Gone Medieval, we're asking, where exactly did these Vikings come from? And why? What caused them to abandon their Scandinavian homelands and take up riding the shores and rivers of medieval Europe with untamed abandon? Was it to do with climate change? Political upheaval?

• 3:27Eleanor Janega?

  Or was it tangled up with the discovery of a sailship technology capable of ferrying them across previously unnavigable seas? I'm Dr. Eleanor Janega, and help me traverse the beginnings of the Viking Age and unpick this most classic of medieval conundrums. I'm thrilled to be joined by the historians, authors, and hosts of the fabulous Vikingology podcast, Terry Barnes and CJ Adrian. Welcome to Gone Medieval!

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Hello again!

• 3:59Eleanor Janega?

  Thank you. We are so excited to have you guys. And particularly interesting, very good to get the hosts of Vikingology over here because you're a gone medieval. We love a Viking. We love a Viking moment. We love a named Viking. We love a saga. But a thing that I don't think we've really ever covered before is exactly how all of this came to be, how a Viking in and of itself came into being. So I've dragged you here in order to hash this out today, as I'm going to start you off with a huge question. All right. When does the Viking Age start?

• 4:42Eleanor Janega?

  A and B, is that kind of like a clear starting point or date? Or it's probably more complicated. I can see Terry's giving me a look. It's more complicated than that, I can tell already. It always is.

• 4:56Speaker 03

  Do you want the English answer or the French answer?

• 5:00Eleanor Janega?

  Yes. I want both. Yes.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Because they're different, huh?

• 5:04Eleanor Janega?

  Ah, well.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  Well, I'll say, you know, CJ and I are old hats at this one because that's actually the question on, partially on the basis on which we met of sussing out this whole idea of when, when did the Viking Age begin or what caused it? And we have spoken many times on Vikingology, as our listeners will know, that we think the old Lindisfarne in 793 is very Anglo-centric view of the Viking Age. And so, yeah, 793, we kind of called, called BS on that a little bit. CJ, what do you?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  A couple of English historians got together and said, oh, well, when, when did the violence in the West start? And what, 793 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle? But they missed that in 789, the Vikings appeared at the port of Portland and killed the King's Reef. So it wasn't actually the first. Oh, we think they were Vikings, but they wasn't actually the first attack. And so there's evidence to show that they were traveling the world a little bit before. For me, I think it, we could make a good argument that the beginning of the so-called Viking Age, first of all, that term in and of itself is problematic. It's just another label that we modern people are putting on something that's a little bit more nebulous, right? So I don't want to get too far into the nitty gritty of nomenclature.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  But I think a good argument for when the so-called Viking Age started would be when somebody, somewhere in the middle of the 8th century in Scandinavia, figured out how to put down a keel. We don't know when, we don't know who, we don't know how. We have the, oh, I'm forgetting the name of the boat from the 7th century, where we have actually a preserved boat from the 7th century that is a proto-longship. I'm trying to remember the name, I think it starts with a K.

• 6:48Eleanor Janega?

  Terry, any ideas?

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can't remember. Yeah, you're right. Or you could even go back to my damn ship earlier, is similar, built like the clinker built.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  That too. Were they like, you have the shape?

• 7:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  But you're like, they're almost there, you can see them, they're almost there. And then somewhere in the middle of the 8th century, somebody figured out how to put up a sail. And just for reference, I think it's to impress on the listeners, the technological marvel that putting down this keel was, they were able to put up these sails that were massive. We're talking 800 square feet, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong, Terry? Like, some of them, like the biggest ones, right? Like, they could be these huge tapestries, right? And that really changed how the mobility of Scandinavians at the time, right?

• 7:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, because the sail, I mean, probably existed before that, but they do get bigger because of the structural support of the boat, so to speak. But yeah, I think, like, I know for sure the Ladbe ship, which is a medium-sized warship in Denmark, and that sail is like 32 by 20 feet. Sorry for the Europeans, I'm not sure, I can't do the quick meters calculation on that.

• 8:05Eleanor Janega?

  Well, look, in England, we're used to feet, it's fine.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, there you go, okay, good.

• 8:09Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, is that a catalyst, though? Like, I mean, can we just say, oh yeah, well, they made a really cool ship, so therefore they had to go and kill the king's reef, right? Like, it doesn't necessarily follow, right? It's like, you could have a cool ship, and you don't necessarily have to then devote yourself to reef-killing, et cetera.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  Right. No, it facilitates it, but it doesn't cause it, you know, if that's what you're actually looking for, is the cause. You're gonna have to go back way, way, way farther than the eighth century, probably, if you're looking for causes.

• 8:46Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, all right, so let's do it. Where are we going? Where's a cause?

• 8:50Speaker 03

  Well, we could start with the, with that one, which is the, you know, the so-called technological determinism, right? Which is that now they have these ships and the, I, now it's impossible to prove that this was the case. This is all, you know, we're just, you know, theater of the mind kind of thing, but I just imagined, you know, this, I, I find the idea compelling that, well, now we have these ships. What do we do with them? Well, let's sail to England and attack them. You know, we don't, and they would have had contact, right? But for me, it's kind of like a kid with a BB gun. You give a kid a BB gun, what's he gonna do? He's gonna shoot a bird or something, right? He's gonna get in trouble. And that's, and so it's this idea of maybe, maybe, but is that really? I mean, cause then, does that justify 300 years of westward expansion and violence?

• 9:35Speaker 03

  I mean, now we're, we're getting into some territory where that can't be the only thing to explain it. Well, and then the other thing too is the keel was put down somewhere in the middle of the eighth century. Lindisfarne was in 793, so they sat on this technology for multiples of decades without really doing anything with it.

• 9:54Eleanor Janega?

  But you've already mentioned, right, that are we saying when we talk about the beginning of the Viking Age, that there maybe is a French answer as opposed to an English answer? If we were to look at it that way, when would the French say that the Viking Age begins?

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm, I'm sorry. I, I, I guess I wasn't clear. Terry gave you the French answer was, was to accuse the 793 event at Lindisfarne to be very Anglo-centric. I know, we cannot just look at the world through the English lens. That's, that's what I was going for.

• 10:23Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, okay, and like, fair enough, but I'm just like, all right, so what's the answer then? Like for them, is it, you know, people in the Loire? Is it, you know, going on to the Seine? Do they have for themselves a particularly French answer to when Vikings begin showing up there?

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Well, it, it's actually quite fascinating to, when we see the progression of the first rate, so. 789, port of Portland, I sort of count that. Then they go to 793, Lindisfarne. Then in 795, they go over to Iona. And then from there, in 799, they hit the western coast of France, an island called Normutier, which is the monastery of Saint Philbeau, which is really out in the middle of nowhere. And now here's where it gets really interesting. When I visited Lindisfarne, I made a mistake. And I told my dad when we went, "Don't ever tell anybody we did this." We went and there's a submersible road and I didn't know about it and we couldn't cross. So we had to go have lunch and have the best fish and chips I've ever had in my life

• 11:24Speaker 03

  at a nice little restaurant right on the hill, right across from Lindisfarne. Then once the water went down, we went over. But my dad looked at it and he says, "The Vikings weren't stupid, were they? Because Normutier has what? A submersible road." So they knew exactly where they were going, in my mind. I mean, I imagine, I mean, it's not, their targets, early targets, don't seem random to me. Especially when you compare, say, Holy Island with Normutier at the time, which would, nowadays, Normutier is much bigger than it would have been back then because dikes and stuff that were built and so there was expanded on the sandbar and so forth. But back then, it probably would have been about the size of Holy Island, anyway. But yeah, so 799 is really the start of the French experience.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  We can't really even call them French, they were the Franks at the time.

• 12:12Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, obviously, yeah.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  Proto-French, right? But 799 is kind of the beginning of their experience. And then they did experience the full breadth of the Viking Age, as I like to call it. We have a French historian, Nusian Mousset, who came up with the three phases of Viking expansion. Because it's something that the Brittany region, at least in France, got the full experience of, outside of the British Isles.

• 12:34Eleanor Janega?

  And I think that that is a really important point because I do think that there is this tendency, if we talk about the experience of Viking Age, to say, "Oh, here's all the things that happened in England, you know, this is what's happening in Ireland, etc., etc." And of course, the Vikings do attack France regularly, Paris, etc., things like this. But I think also, within the English historiography, we have a tendency to say, "Ah." Normans, you know, you kind of like skip right to the Norman bit and the, I suppose, normalization, Normanization, if you will, to go that way, of this group of Vikings who settle in what will become Normandy, right?

• 13:17Eleanor Janega?

  But it's a fairly open question as to what that means. And yeah, okay, of course, it's periodization. So it's just something that historians are doing to do it, right? That's what we like because we like to have a way of discussing anything. But yeah, I do think that you have to kind of squint in order to see it sometimes.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, the paleontologist Jack Horner said, scientists like to name things. And I like to say historians like to delineate things.

• 13:42Eleanor Janega?

  That's right. That's absolutely the thing. All right. So we know that part of the reason why the Viking Age starts is that these guys come up with a really cool keel. These guys come up with really cool sails. And those are real new texts in terms of shipbuilding. You know, it's not as though Romans don't have ships, but they don't have the kind of ships that can move this quickly. They certainly don't have the kind of ships that can, for example, float in really shallow bodies of water, right? And that is one of the things that is incredibly important, no?

• 14:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, eventually. But again, I mean, we're talking about, is the question on the table, the causes of the Viking Age or, you know, what's actually going on during the Viking Age? Because a lot of that, you know, what would be probably riverine highways, travel is going on, you know, once the Viking Age gets going. And so that's pretty much ninth century, you know, kind of stuff. But yeah, I mean, it definitely gave them an advantage that they had these shallower, you know, boats that were shaped so that they could get up these, you know, rivers and stuff. Yeah, I mean, and it sort of points to the adaptability and flexibility in general that we see about them in many ways, not just the ships, but other things as well.

• 14:59Speaker 04

  So, yeah, while they're doing the Viking thing, you know, those boats are, those boats are important.

• 15:06Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm. I mean, I guess that that as a general rule of thumb is kind of a question of how the Vikings leave Scandinavia. It's not a why, right?

• 15:16Speaker 04

  Right, right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So then that's, yeah, that's the question. I think, you know, I mean, for my money, like the, I'm a long duration gal. I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a historian and I'm like cause and effect and that kind of stuff. And so I think, you know, there's always going to be, you know, these, these antecedents that set up the, the whole scenario. But I think, you know, for us, we're trapped in this tiny little sort of detail that is the written sources. And so the Viking Age, to my mind, doesn't begin in the eighth century. What begins in the eighth century is that we're just lucky enough to have sources from them that survive, that, that tell us about Viking quote unquote

• 16:00Speaker 04

  activity. But, you know, it's not like those people just sort of, you know, appeared out of thin air in, in that period of time. So

• 16:09Eleanor Janega?

  Do you think that perhaps that there was then raiding before? Do you think that they, they were ever involved in it?

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, we know there's raiding before. There's good, you know, evidence. There's other historians who've written about it. I mean, God bless Mary Beard. I love her. Shout out to Mary Beard. She's also a history hit person. I mean, she, in her book SBQR, talks about the menacing of pirates and raiding in the Roman Empire, right? I mean, stealing, stealing via boat is like just human activity that's been going on like forever. And the Scandinavians are, don't, don't live on a separate planet, you know, they're like up there in the North shore, but they're still connected to that world. And the North Sea was pretty active. There's good scholarship on that. So they're around. It's just that we, you know, for, for various reasons, we just don't have, you know, documents

• 16:59Speaker 04

  saying that it's Scandinavians doing that stuff. Yeah. So

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're, they're definitely not the first. I mean, that's one of the things I, I'm putting together a course on early medieval Brittany. And one of the things I'm going to be looking at is the first Atlantic wall built by the Romans in Brittany and what's now Brittany and Normandy to repel Sea raiders, which were at the time, the Franks, who were launching out of what would now be like Northern Holland and a little bit farther north. And we could almost call it like the first Viking Age, right? It's a Germanic population that's getting into boats and then sailing south and taking wealth from richer areas. And so it's interesting to see that this this plays out kind of in different waves with different people, right? And we actually had guests on the Vikingology podcast that I'm thinking of Alex Harvey,

• 17:47Speaker 03

  who talks about kind of that deeper time look as, you know, could the Viking Age even be considered to have started with the fall of Rome? With these population movements over time and some of the things that happened then, setting the stage for then what we encounter later in the late 8th and early 9th centuries?

• 18:04Eleanor Janega?

  I guess that makes sense because a lot of the time, you know, one of the things that historians hasten to point out is that when we say the term Viking, you know, a lot of the time, it's more of a verb than it is a cultural marker of any sort. Because if you are Scandinavian and you stay on the farm, and you never get into a boat and go raid a monastery, that doesn't make you a Viking.

• 18:29Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 18:30Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, that just makes you a Scandinavian person. So there are certain people who are getting in these boats to do the raiding, and those are Vikings.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:39Eleanor Janega?

  But you can't, you can't just have a blanket statement about every Scandinavian person being a Viking, even if there is rather a lot of money exchanging hands as a result of this particular line of work. Let's call it that.

• 18:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, actually, it is. Yeah, that, that is the thing, the distinction, the job distinction thing is important, I think. Well, because as like what CJ just said, I mean, as a like a first Viking Age, I mean, Ian Wood in like the 1980s wrote about this and called the first Viking Age actually the Saxon raids on England, because they're doing the same shit, you know? So that's, that's, like I said, people have been stealing things via boat for a long time and that, you know, Viking just happens to be sort of the Norse word for that, but as far as we can tell, but otherwise, yeah, it's pretty much just an activity.

• 19:32Eleanor Janega?

  But when we want to talk about the Viking Age, when we talk about Vikings, I guess that one of the things we sort of mean is it is a particular iteration of guys in boats who show up. They've got pretty cool boats. We can all agree, the boats rock. I think we're all pretty settled on that one. But one of the things that people kind of bring up a lot when we talk about why the Viking Age starts, especially over the long duration, is climate change. Right? Can you talk a little bit about that? Oh, Teri's giving me the thumbs down. She doesn't agree. All right. Speak on it.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  So I'm with James Barrett on this one, which he says the climate question is, quote, "an old chestnut of limited relevance."

• 20:18Eleanor Janega?

  Spicy.

• 20:19Speaker 04

  For a long time, yeah, yeah, right? For a long time, I think people thought, oh, okay, well, we have, which maybe some people will know this, you know, it's kind of this period. Well, we're going through kind of maybe one of these ourselves, a medieval warm period. And so, and this is, you know, supposed to last maybe for around 300 years, right? Maybe coinciding with the time of the beginning of the Viking Age. And so hence, it made it easier for Scandinavians to set out en masse because, you know, maybe the conditions were better, weather was nice, there weren't as many sort of icebergs the size of, you know, houses floating around and to dodge and all of that. And so, but I think with climate science, even since Barrett wrote that in like, what, 2008 or something?

• 21:01Speaker 04

  It's just gotten better and better. And I think the, the adjustment of when that period actually was is now later. So it's more like maybe mid 10th century to mid 13th century. So if you're going to look at climate conditions as a potential cause for the Viking Age, there again, it's kind of a timing problem.

• 21:21Eleanor Janega?

  But I would say climate conditions, though, do they not make it easier for later in the Viking period? Or at least, you know, in terms of Scandinavian settlement, a little bit easier? I mean, doesn't it make it easier to live in Greenland, for example, or Iceland? Like if things warm up a little bit?

• 21:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe Iceland. I mean, I think as far as I can tell, the Greenlanders had a pretty tough go at it. They actually gave it up after a certain point, right?

• 21:46Eleanor Janega?

  Bless them. Yeah. Okay, so climate change might be limited in terms of a reason why guys get in a boat. I will grant you that. I think that's that's probably true. But climate change surely has to help in terms of settlement of places like, for example, Iceland, right? Maybe Greenland? I mean, like, I'm not saying that Greenland worked out. Obviously, obviously Greenland is is a bit of a fiasco eventually, and then they have to give it all up. But could it be that warmer temperatures encourage them to to give it a go in these further flung places?

• 22:22Speaker 04

  I don't know. I mean, I, you know, one of the things that I think is also a little bit problematic with some of the approaches with regard to this whole. I mean, this is a big deal, right? Or so we think, you know, historically. And, you know, in the same way, we were talking earlier about like, you know, historians are chunk things up and it's fake, you know, in these time periods or whatever. I think we also, you know, obviously, we can't chase mono causality either. So it's like, you know, yes, sure, climate change probably did, you know, have an effect on certain things. Or maybe at the very least, you know, if it was colder there for a while and then make maybe getting them to think like, let's just pick up and go move somewhere warmer. Where it's easier to grow crops, you know, that kind of stuff.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  But it's always going to be, you know, sort of part of a network of, you know, different kind of complex factors all sort of coming together. I think at a certain point in time, you know what I mean?

• 23:14Eleanor Janega?

  Of course, of course. And I mean, I guess that I I've sort of always been slightly confused by that because, okay, so, yes, it might make it easier to get in a boat. It might make it easier to settle somewhere else. But wouldn't it being warmer make it a little bit easier to grow crops in Scandinavia? Like, is it like, why would it being a problem? Why would that be a problem for Scandinavians?

• 23:38Speaker 04

  One of the things with sort of looking at the Viking Age and talking about Scandinavia, we also sort of lose the nuance of like, hey, it's a lot different in Denmark than it is in northern Norway. Right? You know, or Iceland or whatever. And so I think I had a statistic that I tell my students where it's like 3%. Of the land in Norway is arable. And, you know, it's not that way in Denmark. It's much flatter and more amenable to growing crops. And so you do get differences in, you know, what they can grow or if they can grow anything at all. And so, yeah, I think that matters too. You know, when you're talking about quote unquote Vikings, actually, who are you talking about?

• 24:20Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm, hmm. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's interesting though, because, you know, you say earlier on, people in Brittany are having problems with the Franks who have come out of Denmark. And I'm like, is it something about Denmark? I see you, you, you get to Denmark and you say, you know, I feel like doing a spot of raiding. Is there, there's something about the flat land that makes you want to get in a boat?

• 24:40Speaker 04

  The fact that the border is like, you just go across, you just go over there. You don't have to get actually in the boat and go anywhere. It's just like, you can just walk over there and steal their stuff.

• 24:49Eleanor Janega?

  That's fine, that's fine, yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 04

  We never talk about the overland Viking raids.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  The, the climate idea, what is it, climate determinism? What I've encountered, and I think there's, there's a popular theory on the internet that a lot of people jump onto that I've seen in web forums and so forth, which is that there was a warming period before the so-called Viking Age, and then it cooled down again. And so there's a population explosion and then, and then after that, there was a restriction of resources. And so people left home to go raid because there just wasn't enough at home for the larger population. And what's interesting is there was a study, and I can't remember the study authors, but we could probably look it up, that looked at the average heights of Viking Age Scandinavians and found this really interesting dip in the average height during the Viking Age.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  So Scandinavians were taller before and they were taller after. But during the Viking Ages, this, this obvious drop in the average height of the bones that were collected. Now, of course, we have to be careful when we look at population, you know, sample size and so forth. But it was not statistically negligible. So, but does it, does that mean that this climate hypothesis has any, any teeth? You know, it's, what it really boils down to, and there's a great paper by a group of archaeologists, Morgan Kelly and Cormac O'Grady, a couple of years ago, that looked at all of the ins and outs of this climate hypothesis. And really, at the end, at the end, as so many things to do with the Viking Age, they just said, there's just not enough evidence to say one way or the other. So to Terry's point.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  We're kind of swirling around this idea of, well, could climate have done this, whatever? You know, it very well probably did play a certain role. It's just from today's lens with the evidence we have, we can't really say, oh, it was climate.

• 26:40Eleanor Janega?

  We love the early medieval period, don't we, folks? It's fantastic to try to take the four pieces of a hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle and try to make something of it.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  Right. It's a cat. No, it's a cow. I don't know.

• 26:56Eleanor Janega?

  I don't know. Okay, so there are, though, then, you know, another series of hypotheses, or, you know, not saying that this is everything, but there's a series of ideas also that say that there are kind of social or cultural trends that could have led to this. And, you know, among those being that raiding or coming back with really cool things that you have stolen from other people, having, you know, incredible booty, that's glamorous, right? And, you know, maybe one of the things that's kind of going on is just an idea of glory

• 27:34Eleanor Janega?

  or an emphasis culturally on the acquisition of these goods very specifically through a means of battle.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, this is near and dear to me because, as a historical fiction writer, my titular character, Hastings, is all about, he says, he says it so many times, "reputation is everything." And he's able to raise fleets and armies and move mountains essentially based on his reputation of, oh, that's so-and-so. He killed Hagar and Rurik, and, you know, and he gets, he's very good at dueling. And so it's this idea that my reputation is what I bring to the table. But to get reputation, you can't just sit idly in Scandinavia. You have to go do things. And so then he shows up at Nantes in 843, in Paris in 845, and then, and more recently, I send him to Constantinople just for giggles, because why not?

• 28:26Speaker 03

  You know, he's like, "I'm going to take the biggest city in the world." And they get there, and they're like, "It's too big." But I have another idea.

• 28:33Eleanor Janega?

  Can't do that.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  But yes, it's a, and there was a, there's a 2015 paper by Stephen Ashby, which Terry and I were actually discussing yesterday, that talks about this idea of social capital. And, and if you want to think about it as the, I would call it the proto Chanson de Gestes that we know from the later medieval period. It's the, it is the story of your deeds. And the better the story, the more weight you can throw around with your peers in the warrior culture, makes it easier to raise armies and so forth. It can also be problematic too, right? If somebody's a little too popular and you're a king, you're trying to hold on to power and then, you know, this guy might show up with an army at my door, you know, there's, there are, there are caveats to this.

• 29:18Eleanor Janega?

  Terry, any thoughts?

• 29:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, so I'm kind of steeped in the period, actually 500 to 800 in my own research. And again, I kind of like sort of go back to, all right, as a cause for the Viking Age. It's like that, I mean, social capital is an interesting, and it's actually quite a very modern sort of idea. There's a lot of discussion like in economic circles and sociological circles and stuff about, you know, what does that even mean, you know, in terms of capital and, and stuff? And so applying it to the Viking Age, I guess is kind of, is it anachronistic? I don't know. But, but if, if you have that kind of sort of social sort of, you know, zeitgeist, right? Where, where this is a culture that believes it's cool and it adds to your reputation to go out and do these things, like, did that just become part of the culture in the

• 30:04Speaker 04

  eighth century? You know, like, that, that would have to be something that's just sort of embedded in Scandinavian whatever for probably a longer period of time. So the idea that you could go out and achieve something and then gain some kind of renown doesn't, to my mind, you know, and again, we're probably, you know, lacking, you know, solid evidence, but, but actually there's archaeological evidence for, you know, various types of, you know, bling, especially connected to getting it from the Roman Empire or the old Roman Empire and, and stuff, and graves and all of that. And then we see very clearly in the archaeology that there's periods where that actually stops in Scandinavia and then, you know, kind of picks up again during the period of the Viking

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Age. So we kind of have this waxing and waning of interest in, you know, showing off. So again, I don't know, you know, how you, you know, sort of peg that, at least if we're going to talk about our sort of nominal Viking Age of, you know, like the 700s to around 1100. I don't know that it's something that is, again, it's probably part of it, like the ships and like the climate, but it's, is it the thing that actually like lights the spark? Um, you know, who's to say, really? I mean, I hate to be, it sort of sounds like I'm like the buzzkill all over the place here, but, um, yeah.

• 31:26Eleanor Janega?

  I love this. I love it. But that's for me, the, for me, the most fun thing to be is the person who says, mm, actually, no, but.

• 31:35Speaker 03

  Total buzzkill, Terry.

• 31:38Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, exactly. Listen, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tee another one up for you. What do you think about the idea that one of the things that might have sparked all of this is the idea of a bride price? All right. Can you tell us a little bit about what a bride price is and why it is that people think people may have left Scandinavia as a result of it?

• 32:02Speaker 04

  This is actually an interesting hypothesis and somewhat controversial. I've talked to definitely historians and archaeologists who are like, I don't know, you know, and then others who are like, yeah. And Barrett actually was one that I mentioned earlier in his famous article, and people can Google it, look it up, what caused the Viking Age? Question mark is the title, and it was from, you know, 2008, where he, he talks about this thing called the marriage imperative. And the idea that you've got, you know, maybe a little bulge of young men in population demographics, and they need to be able to compete within the marriage market in Scandinavia. And, you know, you've got to pay a bride price, which, you know, for some people maybe would recognize the word like a dowry, but the bride price, you know, the dowry usually comes from

• 32:47Speaker 04

  the female side, and then the bride price is paid by the male side. So the intentional or the Groom needs to effectively, you know, to put it quite rudely, like buy the bride from her family. And so you you've got to have some kind of wealth. And maybe some young men don't have it. So the the idea is that's why they get in boats and go out and steal things from other places is because then they can come home and say, see, I've got the money, you know, I can I can now get married. And another kind of wrinkle to it came in some research that was done by Ben Raffield, and I think Neil Price is on that, maybe Mark Collard. Anyway, yeah, in like 2016, where they talked about this thing called operational sex ratios. And, you know, so again,

• 33:30Speaker 04

  getting to a demographic imbalance in Scandinavia. But their hypothesis had to do with the fact that the demographic imbalance was caused by polygyny being practiced by Scandinavians, which was a very longstanding practice in Germanic cultures. And then it doesn't really get stopped until Christianity comes to Scandinavia. But when you have polygyny, effectively, what it means is, you know, men can have more than one wife or concubines, etc. Whereas females legally are supposed to only be, you know, sexually attached to one man at a time. But you get this concept of, you know, the rich guy is hoarding all the women. And then it leaves, you know, some of the guys who are probably younger and obviously not as

• 34:11Speaker 04

  rich kind of out in the cold. And so in order to come back and compete, again, they maybe, you know, got into boats and went out to get the bride price money. So, I mean, I think it's interesting. What I say would be the cause of the Viking Age, no. But for some of those guys, yeah, probably it was.

• 34:28Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  Thing, you know, like otherwise, you know, or the other option, which we know that Scandinavians did with because they were human traffickers, is that they're if they don't go out and get the wealth, they're just going to go out and take captive women. So that they can have a woman, or more.

• 34:44Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, and we we have some some evidence on this, right? Like in terms of Vikings being intermarried with people that they are, you know, raiding, people they are stealing humans from, or even people that they subsequently invade and subjugate, right?

• 35:01Speaker 03

  There's some of that. I think what's being revealed now is in all the new genetic. Testing and the studies are done on that that are expanding our view on the genetic diversity that existed in Scandinavia at the time. What's really interesting is evidently they're they found traces of of an inward migration to Scandinavia from like Poland and then a reverse migration out into Central Europe. It's it's wild like I mean, these people were not staying still before, during or after the Viking Age. I mean, it's a it's an era defined by movement. And so trying to pin everybody down as quote unquote Vikings is difficult because it's it's what does that even mean really?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Because it's these people are swapping around and you know, they're and one of the studies that I love, I love bringing this one up is is somebody did some genetic testing on cats. They found that so to keep the rats at bay on the ships, they would bring cats and the cats would go with them to these far flung places and the cats also got very busy genetically and then left traces of that. And so there's a study done, I want to say five or six years ago, that basically found these traces of Nordic cats mixed in with other cat breeds all across Europe. It's wild. It's and that's just another piece of evidence that shows that these were people that were on the move.

• 36:24Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I've got a Viking cat. I've got I've got a Manx, you know, and so the yeah. Yeah, it's great.

• 36:32Speaker 03

  And there's a cat there's a cat today in Spain that's got 1% Scandinavian cat minks DNA who's going around to the other cats and going, I'm a Viking.

• 36:40Eleanor Janega?

  I love that. But I think this is a really important point, though, because I think that there is this modern tendency, like at least since the 19th century, when we invented the concept of nationhood, right? And the idea that there are nations, you know, capital N nations and people in nations behave in this particular way and we all have particular customs and you can trace yourself to a lineage, you know, a lot of what, especially in the 19th century, people were doing at the time was looking to the Middle Ages to justify these ideas that that there is something unique to this nation that can be traced through history.

• 37:22Eleanor Janega?

  And I do think that this idea really disregards the fact that people move around all the time and they move around all the time in the medieval period. You know, people will say, oh, yes, well, there's the period of the great migrations and does that contribute to bringing down Rome, et cetera, et cetera. But that also supposes that, yeah, that you have this period of great migrations and then everyone just kind of settles and they are what they are. But that's just not the case.

• 37:49Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, it's so not the case. And like CJ said, I mean, some of the more recent, actually, even going back like 20 years or so, since we've been able to map the genome and everything and then unleash this, you know, scientific tool, we know a lot more. But even despite that, because I talk about this with my students, when you talk about, you know, so the Nazis co-opting Nordic history and heritage and saying, you know, they're, you know, the pure Aryan race and all this kind of stuff. And it's like, people who talk about pure racially pure people in the world, or suggest that there is that, it's just bullshit. They just don't understand human history and human migration, period,

• 38:29Speaker 04

  all throughout history. And also, the fact that, as I just mentioned, right, like Scandinavians were slavers, or, you know, they were human traffickers. And so, that means, you know, for, you know, I don't know, can you point to a culture in history that had slaves or that trafficked in human beings and that every once in a while didn't have sex with those slaves? You know, so it's like, you can't have pure genes when those kinds of things happen. And then, lastly, I mean, there's a famous study from Iceland, you know, which you probably know about, that talks about the settlers there and, you know,

• 39:09Speaker 04

  the DNA on them is that, you know, the male population of the early settlers was, I can't remember the exact numbers, but something around the order of like 70% came from Scandinavia, probably, you know, Norway or Western Scandinavia, whereas the women, like an equal percentage, actually came from Celtic places. And so, you know, there's, yeah, there's just so much intermixing going on in that world. It's just impossible to have this kind of racially pure, I mean, it's just a myth in the bad sense of that word, a falsity.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  After civil war, regicide and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 41:13Eleanor Janega?

  What about the idea that the political makeup of Scandinavia contributes to the beginning of the Viking Age? You know, we have a kind of particular landscape in the 8th century, right? Like, is this a way of, I suppose, organizing society? Organizing yourself as a king? Like, Terry, you already mentioned that sometimes, you know, you have these really good warriors, but you're the king, and you're like, uh-oh, he's getting a little bit too big for his britches, you know? Do these tensions lead to the kind of conflicts that sort of push people into boats? Because, you know, there's a whole line of thinking that one of the reasons we come up with the Crusades is that there are simply too many nobles fighting each other, and the pope has to point them somewhere else. I mean, is it a similar thing with the Vikings?

• 41:58Speaker 04

  Of all the things... That we've talked about, I would say that's probably one of the biggest ones that you could say yes. And in my research on these kind of evolutionary long duration sort of processes, you certainly have that. And it's been well documented for Scandinavia budding kingship, you know, dudes on the make and then, you know, sort of jockeying first with each other at home. And then taking that show abroad in order to increase power, prestige. And, you know, to fund a war machine costs money. And you then need to go out and loot and do the Viking thing, whatever, at times in order to make that possible.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  So, yeah, that that political aspect of it is is very important from the kind of the internal side of it, or what we would call maybe a push factor. But maybe CJ can look to the like a pull factor, like, you know, political situation and maybe the Carolingian Empire or something that might draw Vikings.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it ties in a little bit. We're starting to paint a picture here, right? It's it ties a bit into that youth bulge. If you think about the Crusades, again, we have all of these Norman knights with no land to inherit. And they're all fighting each other. And well, what do we do to curb the violence? I mean, the goal is to curb violence in in Europe. Well, send them on a crusade. It's a wonderful idea. And it worked, sort of. And and so you can think of Scandinavia, right? We talked a little bit about the climate and sort of this this the shorter heights, because maybe there's a overpopulation and we have a youth bulge. And then we have the co-concubinage and the operational sex ratio issue. And so now, you know, and we're also talking about a time and place where from from where I'm sitting

• 43:43Speaker 03

  and everything I've looked at, it doesn't look like there's any restriction on who can become a warrior. I can be a farmer's son and pick up an axe and I can get on a ship and I can go be a warrior. You know, I can go join the best of them and maybe not successfully. But so without any limitation on that, then if I'm a chieftain and I have and I'm trying to keep peace and limit violence within my realm, then I have I have a vested interest in figuring out how to get rid of these guys. Because A, I don't want him to have anything to do with my eight girlfriends and B, he's violent. So let's let's put them somewhere. And then there's this other issue too, coming from the East, because we haven't really talked about the East, right? We we've really stayed Anglo centric. And then we talked about the keel in the mid 8th century, but we also know that

• 44:26Speaker 03

  there was silver coming back from the east, the Byzantines, is starting about in the mid 8th century too. And there is, there are theoretical frameworks, I'm thinking of a great paper by Soren Sindebeck that looked at the long-distance trade networks that brought back some of this silver. And in fact, James Barrett, I think is in his 2010 paper, kind of admits at the end that, "Well, the best we can say is the Viking Age may have started because of a youth bulge and also an influx of silver from the Islamic world that then kind of offset the silver standard." So then we're also adding to the equation that not only do these young men not have access to brides, but the brides they do have access to are getting more and more expensive because the value of silver is dropping from this influx of silver coming

• 45:10Speaker 03

  from the east. Now, did this all actually happen? We have like little pieces that tell us maybe kind of going on. And so, so we have this really unstable moment in history where all this stuff is going on to some extent, right? And then we get into the relations with our neighbors. And something that I, I actually flashed on to this early, and I don't know, there's, again, the evidence is really light, right? But I think the story is really interesting. So we have the Carolindians, who are these aggressive, expansionist Christians. And when they move into Northern Europe, Charlemagne specifically, I've seen the mistake, and I've made the mistake, of thinking that like the Saxons are different from the Danes, they're not talking to each other. Well, there's one particular event that shows how interconnected

• 45:55Speaker 03

  everybody was at the time, which is there was a rebellion in Saxony led by a Saxon chieftain named Widukind. And they were quite successful. And in fact, Charlemagne had to pull away from his campaign in Poland to come back and put them down. They fought this big battle on the shores of the Allo River, at a place called Verdun, not Verdun, but Verdun, slight nuance there. So they fight this battle, and then Charlemagne takes 4,500 prisoners and decides, you know what we're going to do, we're going to baptize them all to save their souls. But while they're in the water, like, don't let them back up. The numbers are dubious. We don't know. It could have been 1,000, could have been 4,500. So the estimates are kind of, you know, range, you know, kind of swing wildly, right? But

• 46:39Speaker 03

  we do know that they took their prisoners and drowned them in the river.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  The particular thing about Wittikind is that he was sort of an important person, because he was married to the sister of the king of the Danes, Sigefried.

• 46:54Eleanor Janega?

  Uh oh.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Whoops.

• 46:56Eleanor Janega?

  Not, not great, not great for political unrest purposes.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  Right. And the Danes are, you know, you can just imagine the Danes like, he did what to my brother-in-law? I mean, on one hand, I'm kind of happy about it because I didn't like him.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  But on another, the outrage, the outrage. So then we see there is an obscure document from England by a contemporary document from the time, or a little bit after, by Simeon of Durham, that described the raid at Lindisfarne. And he described one of the things that the Vikings who attacked Lindisfarne did, which was they took some of their prisoners and drowned them in the water in kind of this showy display. And so some historians have thought that this was a sign that, at least in the Scandinavian consciousness, there was this memory of the assault against their kin.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Now, even though it was Saxons, they would have, they, they obviously knew the story and they obviously understood. And Charlemagne wasn't drowning these people in a vacuum either. He was sending a message to the Saxons and anybody else who dared to challenge him. So we think there may have been a connection there. And then when we couple that in with, you know, it's basically, we've got this very unstable situation in Scandinavia, and the Carolingians kind of come up and start poking at it like a beehive, right? There's this idea that maybe these political relations had something to do with that westward expansion kind of exploding all at once. It also explains why, or could explain why France, for example,

• 48:32Speaker 03

  was such an early and frequent target of the Vikings, because the Carolingian realm was of interest to marauding Scandinavians. Could be, maybe.

• 48:43Eleanor Janega?

  Well, okay. What do you also think of the idea that perhaps one of the things that gets a lot of guys into boats is the unification of Norway, right? We have Harald Fairhair, who comes together and says, guess what, guys? It's one kingdom. Is it a long, skinny kingdom? Yes, it very much is, but it, this belongs to me now. And then all the little guys who had their 20 acres or whatever and said that they were, you know, the Earl of this bay, they're, they're in trouble.

• 49:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then they go, see ya. We're going to Iceland.

• 49:18Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  I mean, at least that's what, you know, the hypothesis is based on the evidence that Harold Fairhair was one of those that gets a little bit too big for his britches. And, you know, but he does, he does expand and take over and then starts to lean on these other chieftains. And they're like, hey dude, you know, like, see ya. We're not interested in being, you know, a vassal to you. So, um, you know, and but then again, you know, Harold Fairhair is living in the late ninth century. So this is not the beginning of the Viking Age. This is a century in when he's doing that. But he, at least as far as Neil Price is concerned, and you know, is a seikundingur, which is a, you know, a legit sea king. He would be a legit kind of Viking kind of guy, probably if we went

• 50:01Speaker 04

  back and met him and looked at, you know, who he was and what he did, because he controlled access to the sea, basically, you know? And so he's a person that's a king that's not necessarily land-based as much as it is, you know, kind of more Viking activity-based because it's, it's controlling access to the water. So, you know, he is a Viking and it's kind of, you know, it's full stop then. I mean, if people are interested in like the Viking Age and like what really is like serious Viking activity in the sense that our kind of modern pop culture likes to see it, man, the ninth century is where it's at. Like, it's just like exploding everywhere, you know? And then they start to, you know,

• 50:41Speaker 04

  then the Christian thing starts to come in and kill the buzz and change, change things a little bit. But yeah, so, you know, Harold Fairhair as a cause for the Viking Age, I think he is actually the result of the Viking Age. I mean, he's like the, the poster child for the Viking Age in my mind.

• 50:58Eleanor Janega?

  It's like winning at Monopoly, but for Vikings.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  Harold Fairhair, didn't he grow up in England as a hostage? Wasn't that part of his story? Uh, or was that?

• 51:08Speaker 04

  I think it was.

• 51:08Speaker 03

  Another one? I think, no, I think it's Fairhair.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I can't remember.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, yeah, because there was, there was, there was actually close relations between the Norwegians and the English at the time, and I think he, I think he grew up in the English court. So there's, there's that rapprochement, as we like to call it in French, that, you know, but it also shows that these worlds were not separate. There was this kind of molding. This brings, actually brings up a good, you know, I'm thinking of a study that was done on whetstones, the whetstone trade. A couple of years ago, what, 2018, I want to say it came out, tremendous work. They found whetstones from way north in Norway, as far south as, as Normandy in England, and, and so it showed that there were trade networks that connected Scandinavia as far as the far reaches of Norway and then, you know, Western Europe, long before the Viking Age. And, and part of the paper was

• 51:56Speaker 03

  looking at, you know, what, you know, what, what is, what's driving this? And then, one of the things that they had in there was, it had to do with the power structures, with the chieftains that were running this trade. And then kind of looking at what, what was it that caused them to shift their intentions from trade, trading to raiding? It's a really interesting paper, but they, it's something that's been looked at, because at the beginning of the Viking Age, we really don't have a lot of information on individual figures. So it's, it's mostly just themes and trends that we're looking at. And, and so with this, you know, to your, to your question about rulers and politics, they, they did look at how that interplay with the ruling class might have contributed to the outbreak of,

• 52:41Speaker 03

  of violence in the West.

• 52:42Eleanor Janega?

  I see. I find this to be a really interesting point, because there are some people who say, oh, you know, we have these established trade networks before the Viking Age, such as it is, you know, air quotes around Viking Age kicks off. And so clearly, we have people in Scandinavia, trading up and down the seaboard, getting in boats and, and making this happen.

• 53:05Eleanor Janega?

  And you know, there are some that say, oh, like, these are akin to scouting missions, right? It's not just trade that was going on here. It's saying, oh, it seems that you guys have money for a very fine whetstone. So like, I'm going to come back and then see to that, right? I mean, what do you think about that? Like, to me, that seems a little bit too much. Like, I do think that this is actual trading going on, but then maybe you get a nicer boat, and then you say, hmm, well, I'm down there. Who needs trade if you can just take the stuff, right?

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Oh, I think this is a really, yeah, I agree with you. This is really interesting. And I think one of the things that we often don't think about, we're like so tied into this commodities, whether it's silver, or whetstones, or slaves, or whatever, like, information was a commodity. These people had information networks that like, they're not just like, oh, let's just point the boat in that direction and see where we end up. I mean, they knew, and they knew what was out there. And like you said, I mean, they have been trading around, I mean, especially if we're talking about the West, like the North Sea stuff, but certainly the Baltic is really active from very early on. And so I think we underestimate, and I think the historians for the longest time, too, is sort of this idea of like, oh, medieval peasant never goes any farther than two miles

• 54:20Speaker 04

  from their house, or whatever. And it's like, we're finding more and more, and especially like with DNA stuff as well. Like, now, these people are on the move. And even though it's a three mile an hour world, what's faster if you get a boat? But they are on the move, and they're interacting with each other. And they, I mean, and Neil Price says, like, some of the, he argues that some of the, you know, sort of shock and awe that appears in the accounts, like the raid on Lindisfarne, or some of the stuff in the animals and chronicles, and, you know, in the, in Francia and stuff, is not shock and awe, like, what the hell is going on here? You know, like, we've never seen this before. It's more of like, hey, we were just trading with you last week, and now you're like, being mean to us and just taking our shit? Like, what the hell? What happened here? Why did, what's, what's the switch? You know?

• 55:05Speaker 04

  And so I think that there is definitely some of that. And there's certainly, and actually Chris Coimans has written about this. Even somebody that I've researched to existed like 100 years ago was writing about this, that the idea that these people were way more calculating and sophisticated about logistics. And, you know, what, what is the sort of, you know, return, you know, sort of risk reward calculations of like return on investment? Yeah, we're not going to go right over there because that's going to take too long and there's not enough there to get or whatever. They start to become very calculated about it and become what we would see in our modern times as, you know, kind of pretty savvy businessmen. I mean, I do think that there's something to that.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Adam Grant from TED's Rethinking Podcast. As businesses scale, success depends on how well knowledge is captured, shared, and kept up to date. Camtasia Pro turns teams' expertise into engaging training, onboarding, and documentation. No professional editing experience required. With the industry's best screen recording, video editing, and AI-powered workflows, you can train faster and boost operational efficiency. Get over $100 off your first year at camtasia pro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 56:33Speaker 05

  After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.

• 56:43Speaker 05

  I'm Professor Suzanne Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 57:16Eleanor Janega?

  CJ, you've touched on this already, but the idea that silver plays a large part in Viking expansion and Viking more generally. How important is silver to Scandinavian economy at this point in time? And where is it coming from?

• 57:37Speaker 03

  Yes, so there's a lot of work that's been done on trying to figure out how important silver was. And from what I've seen, I think a lot of historians come to the conclusion that the social networks in Scandinavia were heavily reliant on silver. Going back to this idea of the bride price, it was paid in silver. Right? So if I want to get married, I have to have silver. If I want to do, you know, all these different things. And so then your family networks now rely on silver. So any disruption to the value of silver may have had deleterious effects. Right? So an influx from the east, for example, so we have the, we have evidence to show that there was Islamic silver being brought back way before what we would call the Viking

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Age, in large quantities. And in fact, it was on the, our guest Octavia Randolph on the Vikingology podcast, she's a writer and she also lives in Gotland now. And she was telling us about all these weird rules in Gotland about you can't dig deeper than 30 centimeters in your yard in Gotland without a state representative because the likelihood of you running into a silver horde is so high. And then she had this story that she told us about a farmer who, you know, there's a rabbit den, the rabbit was like kicking out the dirt to dig its den and it was shooting out, you know, silver deroms. And then, and like a tree that fell over and a treasure horde just came up with the roots, right?

• 59:03Speaker 03

  So they have these weird stories, which tells us that, that there was so much silver coming into Scandinavia, they didn't know what to do with it. And if the silver economy is what's holding family units and the social order together, that's a problem. And so the first people who brought it back thought, you know, look at us, look how wonderful it is that we're bringing in all this silver and look how rich we are. But now they're so rich with something that's so, you know, with so much silver, there's just nobody else who can compete. It actually ties into a theory that I have, it's my own personal theory that I have. And caveat, I am starting to distance my idea away from the, the start of, you know, the what caused the Viking Age sort of thing. Like I use the silver economy to kind of say, this is kind of how it works.

• 59:48Speaker 03

  But it really has to do with, uh, back to this idea of the Vikings being really intentional and going to Western France as early as they did, to Normutie in 799. Why? Well, they didn't just go to Normutie because in 793, uh, 793 Linizfar and 795 Iona, and then after that, those sites were essentially bypassed. And sites after that were also bypassed after the kind of first hit and run raid. Versus Normutie, in Saffibert, we have evidence to show in 819, there's a diploma from the Carolindians, talking about frequent and persistent raids on the island. And as far as we can tell, the monks of Saffibert started their annual pilgrimages away, right? They got permission to build a satellite priory on the continent to go hide away during Viking season. Right?

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  So, so they, it appears they were, they were coming back with alarming frequency. Every year there was, there is a Viking season. And then it even, they even tried to defend the island one summer. They're like, hey, what if we built a castrum to defend the monastery? And so they did. And then the, they stationed it with soldiers and the Vikings came and were like, okay, what's this? Oh, we're defending against you. Okay, well, we're still taking it. And it failed. Aww. And then there was a big battle in 836 where the Franks tried, you know, the, the local, you know, the, the Comte de Boiteau de la Garnesche, uh, it was Renaud d'Arboge, uh, who brought an army to Normutie to try and save it because it was a very valuable island to the Carolindians because it made salt and salt was critical to the empire. So they go and try to defend the island and we think 835, maybe 836, the chronicler or

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  mentarius was kind of off by his dates versus some other annals, but whatever. And so there's just this big battle on Normutie and the Franks win. A landslide, they kill a ton of Vikings, they barely lose any men, so they tell us. I mean, history is written by the victors. Sure. And then they're like, okay, we won, we go home. And then two months later, the Vikings come back and take the island.

• 1:01:36Eleanor Janega?

  Oh bless.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  It wasn't even the same group. It wasn't the same group. It was a different group. So they're showing up with alarming frequency in this area. Why? And so there's this kind of idea that they're there for something other than silver. I can get silver much closer to Scandinavia than Nohmudie, right? And the other presumption too is if the monastery is where we hold all the silver, they're not going to restock the monastery full of silver, right? Every year, you would think. Now, we did have a guest on Vikingology who talked about how, actually, probably they did.

• 1:02:07Eleanor Janega?

  Oh no.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  That was Matthew Panesi, who's an expert on 9th century monasticism. And he kind of changed my ideas on that a little bit of like, they probably did bring some stuff, because this stuff was really important to them if they were going to live there. But with the pilgrimages, they probably would have taken it back and forth. In fact, Ermentarius tells us about that, about how they would pack up the wagons and put all their valuables and leave. So there must have been something else there that they were interested in, right? And I've always thought, and I was taught from, because the local mythology here is that they came for salt, which is kind of like a no-dah, right? But then the no-dah turns into, I have a friend in Denmark who said, "Look, I've got ocean and 50 kilometers in any direction. I don't need salt." Plus, you know, in the Viking Age, cod was dried and we didn't need it. So there's no demand for salt in Scandinavia, right?

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  So then my next idea was, well, maybe, maybe this trade disruption with the silver is the answer, right? And essentially, the idea was, originally my idea was, that this, the silver came in from the east, disrupted the silver trade. Then we have all the co-concubinage, you know, youth bulge, et cetera, that are all playing this role and kind of frothing together this soup. And then the Danes and the Norwegians are trying to figure out, well, what do we trade with the Swedes who have all this silver? Obviously, they're not going to want silver. Right, so what do we, what do we trade with them? And so they're trying to figure out, what do we, you know, what are we gonna do? So I thought maybe that could explain why they go back, get salt from Western France,

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  take it back into Scandinavia, high-quality salt, trade it with the Swedes who are going up freshwater river systems to the Byzantine Empire, and they would need salt to preserve their food. And in fact, Saint Olaf, in his, in his life story, I'm forgetting the name of the document, but anyway, they talk about there's a, somebody died and they preserved his body in a barrel of salt. So we know that they're using barrels of salt to transport up and down the river. So that was the original idea. Then a new study came out recently, I want to say 2022, that found evidence that there were herring fish bones caught in the North Atlantic and traded into the Baltic as early as the early 9th century.

• 1:04:14Eleanor Janega?

  Wow.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  Now, the dates are a little off, and so there's just this little, you know, but the idea is cod was dried, but herring has to be salted. And so then now there's this idea of the herring trade may have started several centuries before we originally thought. And now we're in, in this territory where if, if I'm a Norwegian fisherman and I'm fishing for herring off the coast of Norway, I need to preserve it, I need salt. Where do I get it? And this is, we're talking about the early 800s versus the first attack in the Mute in 799, but then the repeated attacks starting in the 800s, I want to say, right? Rampant up in the 820s, so you kind of see this economic tie.

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  Now, okay, so can I come back and say, did salt play a role in the beginning of the Viking Age? I don't, I, I think I just solved the repeated attacks in the Mute. That's it, that's it. But I think it also shows that when we look at the causes of the Viking Age, right? Well, my favorite answer to this is what caused the Viking Age? Somebody commented one time on my article that said, "The Vikings." Okay, thanks.

• 1:05:18Eleanor Janega?

  Fair play, yeah, all right, yeah.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  But I think it also shows that- We're talking about, I think Terry mentioned this earlier, that we have different groups of people all over the place with different motivations and needs, right? So, so we look at, for example, in the people who came from Norway and traded the whetstones, then they come back the next year and attack. Well, why did you attack? Well, maybe they got raided by Danes. Maybe they, you know, who knows? It's, it is this, this is a, they live these, you know, lives of necessity where life is hard, the seasons can change very quickly, weather, raiders, everything. So they're just trying to scrounge together a living. And so then when we look at all of this and we think, oh, these, it's Six Determinisms by, by James Barrett.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  I think an honorable effort to try and explain all this, but when you zoom in just a little bit, you start to see that it's really just this patchwork of all these different people doing all these different things all at once. And then it just kind of radiates out, right? Over time.

• 1:06:17Eleanor Janega?

  Well, so, you know, it's all part of a complex tapestry. Historians love to be like, well, it's complicated. Because we're right.

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:06:25Eleanor Janega?

  Right? But, but what do you think is this kind of in the popular imagination about it? You know, this is the troubles is we're historians and so will say, oh, here's these eight different factors that we think contribute to a Viking age. But I think that popular perceptions of things like this is that you can have something simple. So what's kind of floating out there in the zeitgeist? What are the Viking age vibes?

• 1:06:50Speaker 04

  Well, at least in my experience, like with my students and sort of public speaking that I do and whatever, I mean, people don't really spend a lot of time thinking about what started it. They just know it is and that these people existed that they call Vikings and they have a kind of trope in their mind of, you know, shield maidens and dudes with axes and, you know, IKEA rugs on their shoulders and things like that, you know, so. Um, I, I, you know, I think for my money, like, I'm always sort of, I mean, I'm not like one of those, you know, well, actually historians like we were talking about earlier, but I am one of the people who sort of rail on, you know, the problem with the Viking Age and especially

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  what we're talking about today with the beginnings of it is the evidence is just so spotty and Scandinavia is still what we call a prehistoric culture at that period in time because other than ruining inscriptions, we don't have anything written and we certainly don't have anything written by them telling us their own story. And so then, well, what happens when you have gaps and silences? Well, people just love to pour themselves right in, you know, and just, you know, manipulate that stuff and make the Vikings who they want them to be. And I think that to a large degree, that's just kind of what we see in modern popular culture. And again, going back to like what we said, so the corrupting of Nordic history and heritage by the Nazis, I mean, they're doing the same thing that people do now by Marvel Universe 10 years ago, creating a female Thor, you know, I mean, it's like,

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  okay, fine, it's all up for grabs, just make it what you want it to be because the evidence isn't there to really refute you too much. So like, okay. And so, yeah, I mean, I just think that that's kind of, kind of where we are. And I always tell my students too, it's like, the Vikings don't change. Who looks at them and what they see does.

• 1:08:35Eleanor Janega?

  I love that. That was really good, Terry.

• 1:08:38Eleanor Janega?

  Okay. Well, just to, to finish this off. So I've been asking you what the causes of the Viking Age are. What are the causes of the end of the Viking Age? Why, why do these guys knock it off? You know, is this, is this just a Christianization? Um, is it just, we kind of got as far as we can, like, you know, made it to Greenland, guys, pretty good. We're to settle down here.

• 1:09:04Speaker 04

  I'd say Christianization and I'd also say, um, state, state building. Let's say monarchies in Scandinavia, all of that happens during the Viking Age, roughly beginning, say, the 10th century. And then by the end of it, you know, it's pretty solid. And well, actually to quote Anders Winroth, what happens is the Scandinavians finally become European.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. I did. I wrote an article about the end of the Viking Age, actually. And that's just, yeah, it's all the usual suspects, right? The Christianization of Scandinavia, the fortification of Western Europe, right? We start to see Kestroms pop up. And so now these, these areas are better defended, consolidation of power, et cetera. But one of my favorite stories is what happens after the end of the Viking Age. And taking us back to 1089, when Pope Urban, it was 1089, right? Pope Urban II called for a crusade, saying, "We need you." Oh, 1095, sorry. Okay. What was 1095? Anyway, 1095, thank you.

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  So he calls for the crusade and he says, "Yes, we want you to leave your land and go abroad and fight." And the first kingdom to join was Denmark. Denmark, Denmark. It was Denmark. The days were like, "We're going." So I think that spirit, I think that spirit remained after, right? And, and it's not like raiding just stopped overnight, right? Like, there's examples of raids that persisted well into 12th century. Arguably, the Icelanders kept raiding each other that way. I mean, wasn't, there was a whole, anyway, there's, so it's kind of, it's kind of, it's more like, you know, bleeding out a little bit, right?

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  It's kind of like blood and sand. It kind of reaches out like little hands. And then, so it's like, okay, here's the spot. And again, historians like to delineate things.

• 1:11:03Eleanor Janega?

  What do you think, Terry? What would your answer be?

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  No, I think he's right. I think it, you know, there's, there's just like a couple of, you know, sort of monumental things that happens. Like we said, like the Christianization or the state building. But then, you know, after a while, you know, I mean, everything has its moment, right? Nothing lasts forever. And then eventually to be a Viking isn't cool anymore. And so, you know, it's like, yeah, we don't need that. Those people are just destabilizing things and whatever. So it just kind of, yeah, it starts to leach out, to bleed out. But even like, it makes me think of, you know, the Sort of the famous, you know, things that the church still allows the Icelanders to do, you know, after they, that goes back to the pagan or the pre-Christian traditions of, you know, infanticide, eating horse meat and then sacrificing to the Norse gods.

• 1:11:50Speaker 04

  And it's like, yeah, you can do that for a few years, but after a while it's got to stop, you know? And so it's like, everything just sort of bleeds out into a, yeah, into a transition into a new time.

• 1:12:00Eleanor Janega?

  Well, you know, that's the thing, isn't it? Again, as much as we like as historians to have neat categories and ways of talking about things, fundamentally, the things, no one wakes up and says, hey, guys, I think the Viking Age is over. These things are going to eventually peter out. And I mean, much in the same way that I don't think anyone got up in the morning one day and said, hey, everybody, we're Vikings now, right? It's, it's just, it's not that easy. But thank you for coming and talking about something annoyingly difficult to categorize. You know, it's like trying to kind of catch a glimpse of something floating in your eye, right? Like the moment you try to focus on it, it darts away.

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Yes, yes. I'm always sort of like, why did I pick these people to make my life work? It's like, I'm putting together a puzzle, knowing full well I don't have all the pieces. Like, what kind of idiocy is that?

• 1:12:56Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, this is just an excuse to go to Gotland. I know. I know what this is.

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  I'm going to New York in February.

• 1:13:04Speaker 03

  My, my answer lately, I've had a couple people at book fairs who are like, so why, how'd you get into the Vikings? Well, I sort of fell into it and I just couldn't get back out.

• 1:13:14Eleanor Janega?

  True, we're never spoken about medieval history. What can I say?

• 1:13:19Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:13:20Eleanor Janega?

  CJ and Terry, thank you so, so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure.

• 1:13:24Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:13:28Eleanor Janega?

  My thanks again to Terry Barnes and CJ Adrian for such a fantastic episode. If you enjoyed what we've been talking about today, then do go check out Terry and CJ's Vikingology podcast and the episode I featured in about the rise of the Normans. And most importantly, my thanks to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to ad-free, award-winning, original TV documentaries, including my recent film, The Trial of Joan of Arc, by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family

• 1:14:11Eleanor Janega?

  that you've gone medieval. Until next time.

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

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