387. The Vikings Invade Britain (Ep 5)

Why did the Vikings invade Britain, and how did they mix into society? What did they do with the gold they stole from churches? Which Viking stereotypes are true - and which ones are total myths? In Episode 5 of this series, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple are joined by Dr Eleanor Barraclough, author of Embers of the Hand, to discuss the dramatic arrival of the Vikings in Britain. They dismantle Viking stereotypes, and explore how the raiders reshaped British society. Summer sale is here: get an annual Empire Club membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26. That's ad-free listening, early-access, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [email protected] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Imogen Marriott Editor: Bruno Di Castri Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:13Speaker 03

  Hordes of tall bearded men in horned helmets arriving on the British shores and pillaging the coast. This is the Viking stereotype. Many of us were fed as children and we loved it. And we know that the helmets actually had no horns, but what else have we got wrong? In this episode of Empire, we are joined by our wonderful friend Eleanor Baraklaff to discuss the arrival of the dragon ships. Who were the Vikings? What gold bling did they steal from the monasteries like Iona? And how did they not only invade, but settle the British Isles?

• 1:46Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnn.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  And me, William Derumpel.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  I think this has become so much of our cultural consciousness. It's basically, it's a cartoon stereotype, isn't it? Raiders coming from across the North Sea, hitting up the monasteries around the coastlines of the British Isles and Ireland, you know? And we've got it in our head. It's blokes with beards and boats and battle axes. You know, it's very much, every, every child at primary school can paint that image.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  You have two, two splendid boys who are at primary school at the moment with Viking haircuts, I seem to remember.

• 2:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, there is a whole long plat thing going on right now because of the heat. Yeah, exactly. But even they know, and this is important to say, you do not draw your Viking stereotype cartoons with horned helmets. Although having said that, my signature actually has exactly that in it. I get into trouble sometimes. And small children come up to me and say, no, no helmets.

• 2:41Speaker 05

  I mean, what's interesting is that Norway, though, you know, some of Scandinavia embraces that stereotype themselves. And we are recording this just after England's fabulous victory over Norway, by the way. And the number of Norwegian fans with horned helmets on, uh, it's sitting in the stands was extraordinary.

• 2:58Speaker 04

  I am absolutely living for these Norwegian fans, even though Norway's technically out of the World Cup. As far as I'm concerned, they've won. And we've got these images of, you know, even down to little toddlers, up to all the, all the fans in the stands doing their roo, roo, and they're rowing their boats. But there's one fan in the, in one of the games who was refusing to row. He was just sitting there with his arms folded and someone asked him why. And he explained, because they didn't row, they had square sails, they were sailing.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  But you know, they did have, have oars.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  They had both, didn't they? Yeah.

• 3:34Speaker 05

  I'm sure he had a lovely time with his hands folded, arguing with everyone around him. But can we talk though, I mean, you know, if not the horns, but this idea that they did sort of hit monasteries and hit them hard and, you know, the monks had no means of defending themselves. Is that true? You know, they didn't have any way of keeping these guys out and therefore they could just come and why, you know, sort of rush through them like a storm?

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, exactly that. They are absolute sitting ducks. And I think that's the problem, that behind the stereotype, sometimes we forget that there are real victims and real deaths here. And that's what, what we see in the annals, you know? So there's, there's the sentence describing 68 monks killed on Iona in 806. They've already potentially been attacked twice in 802 and 795. And of course, two years before then, we're familiar with that iconic attack on Lindisfarne, 793, off the coast of northeast England as it is now.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Which you did wonderfully in Anglo-Saxon for us last year.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  We were all in the pub and I did a, did a rendition because you accused me of reading off a screen. I was like, sir.

• 4:37Speaker 05

  Can I just say that in the pub by the river, Eleanor owned you, owned you, my friend.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Come on, show, show our readers.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Her wærin' raide komma na ofen Northumberland, on dem fólke emlids breddan, daran líkra shas en fyrin a drakk en vairi en svena on dem fljóf de fljógona.

• 4:57Speaker 05

  Sorry, the translation of that, can I just translate it? Shut up, Willie. Shut up. So just with these raids, if you said that, you know, they raided twice before, were they always bloody and were they, because there's 68 monks killed, sort of hangs in the air, as if it was something quite new, novel and grotesque. But only each time they came, I don't suppose they brought flowers. I mean, what was it like?

• 5:20Speaker 04

  No, I think, yes, they did not bring flowers. I think 68 is probably bad. It's hard to tell numbers. Other than the annals, the way we can look for evidence of what happens is, for example, on visual art, there's that very famous raider stone from Lindisfarne itself, a grave marker from a few decades later.

• 5:39Speaker 03

  Goes with the, the hands and the arm.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  Exactly. There were all, there's these seven figures and they were holding weapons and the weapons are raised and they're there to attack. We've also got from the other side, another island, but this time off the southwest coast of Scotland, we've got this tiny little island of Inchmanock. And there they found, and there was a monastery there. We don't know of any attacks there, tiny, tiny island. And there they found a piece of slate and on it, someone had basically doodled what seems to be the image of this punk haired Viking in chainmail, carrying off, like literally leading, like he's on the end of a fishing rod, a novice monk who's got a reliquary, this little box full of relics attached to him with a, with a chain.

• 6:22Speaker 04

  And this, this punk haired raiding figure is leading him off to a Viking longship. Now, what's interesting there is he's not on the floor dead, he's not surrounded by corpses, he's being taken off either to be sold into slavery or if he's important enough to be ransomed back. And again, we know from the annals that if they were particularly high status, people would pay for their return. So it's not always bloody. It can be that they, basically they're after cash, portable cash and wealth and money and stuff they can take back to their girlfriends sometimes.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  I've got a question. We always have these two in opposition, particularly the Anglo Saxons and Lindisfarne and the Vikings. But they are sort of vaguely cousins, aren't they? Their languages are related, the Anglo Saxons, think of Sutton Hoo arriving in ships, not completely different to the Viking ships. These are related words. Could they understand each other with the words? If they were captured, could the monk have talked a bit of Anglo Saxon and, and been understood?

• 7:23Speaker 04

  So there's a fabulous scholar in York called Matt Towland, and he wrote a book about this. And I once asked him for his intellectual scholarly summary of how they would have communicated. And he basically said, well, you know, I reckon with a few grunts and points and hand gestures and a few words, they'd have been all right. So you can hear it, for example, fish in Old English is F I S C, fish pronounced. In Old Norse, it's fisk. So it just becomes a hard K. And you can hear that in later on, when they settle a place named like Skipton, for example, that ship skip word again. So there's plenty that's similar enough, but it's not the same language. What's interesting is that genetically it's very hard to tell them about because Anglo

• 8:08Speaker 04

  Saxon settlers, as we think of it, come from parts of southern Scandinavia, as well as what's now the Netherlands and so on, when they come over the North Sea and settle Britain.

• 8:17Speaker 05

  I think when we were in the pub, we were talking about my old professor, a lovely man called John Porter, who did the translation of Beowulf. And I remember him reading Old English and then Old Norse poetry, and the cadences are the same. So they may, you know, genetically very similar, some words different, but they, you know, they, they really were very, very much alike.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  Exactly. They're both Germanic languages. I think technically, oh golly, Old Norse is sort of North Germanic and I think Old English is West Germanic. So they've, they've come out a bit. So Frisian is probably the closest to Old English. But yeah, absolutely. Particularly when I read them, because I basically read them both with an Old Norse accent.

• 8:56Speaker 05

  Oh, wonderful. Oh, I love that. I love that. Now, so, I mean, what we're talking about then is, you know, the raiders arriving on the horizon with no warning and absolutely very little capability for people to repel them.

• 9:09Speaker 04

  And that really tells us what, so people often say, who were the Vikings? What, what does Viking mean? And it's basically exactly what you described. Viking just means a raider or a pirate. There's an Old Norse word, vikingur. And again, if we're talking about similar languages, the Old English version of that is just weeching. It's the same word, once again. It just means a pirate or raider. And so when we think of the Viking Age, technically speaking, we are talking about the period in which these raids take place. But of course, it's not an ethnic descriptor and not everyone in the Viking Age is raiding. And that's not the only thing that happens in the Nordic world. And not even people who do raid are always doing it. It's something they tend to do over the summer when they're young, when they're trying to sort of increase their wealth and status.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  But how much does this destroy that golden age of Northumberland that's producing the Lindisfarne gospels? Because every one of these sites that gets excavated, whether it's Lindisfarne or Portmhamuk, which we had in Gordon's picked episode, with these wonderful vellum being produced and maybe the home of, the real home of the Book of Kells, which I'm very conformed to this idea. These are all burnt Iona four or five times. I mean, this is, you know, I'm all for giving the Vikings a decent hearing and saying they haven't got horned helmets on, but they're not doing much for recum medical relations here.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  They are most definitely not doing much for recum medical relations. No, exactly. So yeah, the, the evidence from Portmhamuk is exactly that. It's burning, it's metalwork smashed. It's, it's this idea that the monastery's productive life is being violently ended. Sometimes it takes time. So in the case of Iona, we have at least three raids.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  And there's nowhere to hide. I went there recently and I was just thinking, because I hadn't taken in it was three different raids. And there's one little hillock at the top, but you'd be very, very obviously visible if you tried to hide anywhere in that island. The Vikings could have got you in, in 20 minutes.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  Exactly. And it's the same on Lindisfarne. You know, on Lindisfarne, it's incredibly flat. And the really scary thing about Viking ships, again, you know, exciting. And as we say, we've just had the World Cup. It's all very sort of in our minds as this exciting cultural moment. But the whole reason that Viking ships were very flat bottomed with these very supple, flexible, clink-built style hulls is so they could get into these very shallow bays. And sure, you might want to get into these shallow bays like on Iona, like on Lindisfarne, if you're trading, but also if you're raiding, you're there and they can't get away. There's nowhere to hide. And that's, that's a really terrifying thought. In the case of Iona, that third raid, as you say, it's, it's potentially the third raid

• 11:41Speaker 04

  in 11 years. And eventually, we see these communities packing up. It's not necessarily just because of these raids, but there's something fundamental that's striking at the heart of those monastic communities.

• 11:55Speaker 05

  Do we have a, an account from the people who lived through it? I mean, what did they describe? Because it's an attack on their god. It's a, it's attack on, you know, the person that they kneel before and a defeat in many ways in their eyes, I suppose, of their gods and their emissaries on earth. So what do they think about it? What do they say?

• 12:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, the language is biblical. It's apocalyptic. So Alquien, he's writing from the court of Charlemagne, but he's from around York somewhere. And he knows those monastic communities around the northeast of England as it is now very well. So he writes to them, he says things like, this is after Lindisfarne, he says, never before has such a terror appeared in Britain as we've now suffered from the pagan race. So it's this idea. And then other, other accounts talk of this terror from the north. And it's this idea that from the north, evil breaks forth. And so they're absolutely setting it up in these apocalyptic terms of Christians versus pagans and, you know, good versus evil. That's how they're understanding

• 12:53Speaker 04

  it. And it absolutely makes sense that that's the case. And that's from, you know, the last decade of the eighth century, at least, that's when we see these raids being recorded for the first time. But they then carry on.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  And a lot of the stuff that we have from the Golden Age before it, whether it's in Peckland or in Northumberland or in Mercia, is moved it to safety at this point, isn't it? We have the, the, or it's hidden. So the St. Ninans' Al treasure is probably buried to hide from the Vikings, while the Book of Kells, this famous Pictish manuscript, is carried from Scotland to its, to its colonial home in Ireland.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  You're gonna get so much up. Do you know what he's doing? He's starting some kind of British Isles warfare, because he's so thrilled that the Scots might have originated the Book of Kells. Just in case you were wondering, Eleanor, what you've walked in on, that's what this is.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  It was a gleam.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  I have a festival in Trinity College, Dublin, and Jaipool has it seen. And I'm at war with the, with the display there, which makes it the, this Irish manuscript, exclusively Irish. And it, and it's clearly, you know, anyway.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  And it's also true of the Lindisfarne Gospels. They're made, they're very similar in some ways, artistically speaking. They're made around 700. So, you know, nearly a century before that famous raid on Lindisfarne. And what's really interesting is, if you think of what the raiders are after, these Viking raiders, they are not after the theological text. They don't care about the parchment, the vellum inside. They care about the bling.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  That they're wrapped in, yeah.

• 14:23Speaker 04

  And it's a bit like the reliquaries. They are well up for the reliquaries. They take the reliquary boxes, and you find them sometimes in the graves of Norwegian females from the period. You have one, she's even put her name in runes at the bottom. It says, Ranveig owns this casket. It's basically taking a nice present home, you know, turning them into brooches. In the case of the Lindisfarne Gospel cover, it looks like there was once one, and it was beautiful. It was made by a metalworker called Bilfleth. But then, it's probably ripped off by the raiders. That doesn't survive. And eventually, the, the community of Lindisfarne leaves, quite a few decades later, I should say, and sets off.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  With the body of St. Cuthbert.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  Exactly. Exactly. And then they do this like little, little road trip, as it were, all around the northeast.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Chesterla Street, and up in Durham.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  I mean, I, I'm a big fan of, of, of that, because I, I used to work up in Durham. That's where I was a lecturer for many years. And I was even a member of St. Cuthbert Society, which is one of the colleges. And so very close connection. And the fact that we've still got his body, we've got his relics, we've got the, the

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Lovely Petrel Cross with the equal arms. Yeah. Or just Durham Cathedral there, in the treasury. I love in the Lindisfarne Gospels, the fact that the interlace in that is made from the gannets that you can still see fishing in the sea off Lindisfarne and off the May Isle.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's the most, it's, it's, it's, it's one of those things where you can really feel that, that the embeddedness of these, these, these cultural artefacts in the landscapes that created them. But we also have to remember that was true of the communities as well. For them, these were religious landscapes, you know, the islands off the coast of Lindisfarne, where Cuthbert was as this hermit figure for many years. And so the destruction that the Vikings brought to these holy places, it's not just the monastery itself, it's not just the killings of monks, it's not just the stealing of the beautiful treasures, it's that desecration of the sacred landscape.

• 16:20Speaker 05

  Well, that, I mean, that sacrilege that you describe of a, a woman putting her necklaces and, you know, sort of bobbins in, in a, what used to house a holy relic. I, I like the fact that they don't even try and hide it. I mean, are there some, some where you've got an example of somebody basically fessing up to the cop, saying, I stole this, I got it from the heathens, and I brought it back. I mean, you'll, you'll tell me what it says more, more accurately. But, you know, there's no, there are, there are confessions carved in to some of the stolen booty.

• 16:50Speaker 04

  So this is a wonderful, the, the confessions carved into the stolen booty, I think, very much applies to Ranveig somewhere who owns this casket. And it's like, yeah, but, but

• 17:00Speaker 03

  You didn't make it.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  I suspect that because it's a bit later. This is actually an heirloom that's been passed down, the women in her household for generations from that first raider. But this, I think, yeah, this wonderful one, it's the Codex Aurius, the Golden Book. And that tells us everything. This is a bling book. This is the Book of Bling. And that's why the Vikings wanted it. We know, and this is, by this time, we're in Great Heathen Army territory. So we are in the, it was sort of 865, the Great Heathen Army.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  We're coming to the Heathen Army soon, yeah.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  We're not quite there yet. This isn't the first wave of raids. But the Codex Aurius is clearly stolen from its religious context. And an Anglo-Saxon Aeldorman called Alfred and his wife, Werbeg, ransom this book back. Basically, they hand over the gold that the Vikings want in order to give the book back to its religious community. And there's this wonderful little note that the Aeldorman writes on top. He says, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I, Aeldorman Alfred and Werbeg, my wife, obtained these books from the heathen army with our pure money that was with pure gold. And because we did not wish these holy books would remain longer among the heathens, and now we want

• 18:13Speaker 04

  to give it to Christ's church for God's praise. So twice there, it's heathens, it's pagans versus the holy books. And then we've got the reference to pure gold. That sums up the whole matrix that's going on within that one Book of Gold.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  See, I completely misunderstood. I thought that those who took it off said, yeah, I nicked this. And I'm not that clever. But actually, it is the people who get it back who say, this was stolen. We got it back from the awful heathens. We're going to take a break here. Join us after the break when we travel from, from the idea of raiding to the idea of settlement.

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• 20:22Speaker 03

  Welcome back. Now, we come to a crucial twist in the story because we often think of the Vikings raiding. We don't often so much perhaps think of them settling, but that's exactly what happens in 865. And I've got a personal story here because as an A-level student, I went down and worked at the dig at Repton. And we found in the vicar's garden in Repton, the Viking channell house where the SAS, these big strapping lads, all sort of like Norwegian strikers, sort of six foot five, were laid to rest in the first camp of the Great Army after they settled in England. This is the beginning

• 21:06Speaker 03

  of a move from raids to full-scale colonisation of the North. So take us here, dear Eleanor, take us to the Great Army. What are they up to? Why are they deciding to move? What's wrong with Norway?

• 21:19Speaker 04

  So this is the Mitchell Hara, the Great Army, sometimes called the Mitchell Hara, so the Great Heathen Army, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes it. As you say, arrives in 865. Not a raid, it's a conquest now. So they land in East Anglia, they sweep through Northumbria, they capture York, I think 866, and then they sort of split off and move south and east. And that's a really important part. This isn't one mass. They're really flexible. It's been described somewhere as bands of brothers, which I think is a really clever description because they're basically, they're coming in these boats, and within each of these boats, they already have the units, they have the leader, they have the people who are second in command. And so they, in a way, can transfer that quite nicely

• 22:04Speaker 04

  onto land. And so that means that various parties can join up for the big battles, but then they have that flexibility to go off in different directions. And yeah, by 873, they've established a winter camp at Repton, as you say, on the banks of the Trent.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Which they've sailed up in their longships.

• 22:21Speaker 04

  I'm so jealous that you got to excavate that. I can't even tell you.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  If you look at the DNA of some of these bodies, you can see actually a story being told of, you know, this invasion, settlement, and then, you know, generational melding.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  So this is the really interesting thing, because I think, yes, exactly, there is some evidence in the DNA that we've got sort of various different levels of populations that sort of have more in common with those over the other side of the North Sea. But I was actually talking really recently to a geneticist at the Crick Institute, who said, actually, it's much harder to tell than we think because of the Anglo-Saxon population, because the Anglo-Saxons have also come, for the most part, from the various parts sort of slightly south, but also from across the North Sea. You've got something that is genetically already very different to, you know, way back in the midst of time when we're talking about the Britons and the Romans. We've got a very different setup already,

• 23:20Speaker 04

  which is culturally fascinating, because that also explains, for example, why they're able to basically point and grunt and use a few words and communicate. There's a lot in common here. Having said that, when we look at the bodies of the dead themselves, you know, at Repton, at mass burials of sort of young warriors in kind of the context of this time, and then you do find really, really interesting parallels. One, now this is a little bit later, this is from a second wave of kind of Viking invasions and tension that comes in the wake of the settlement. You've got a mass burial from Oxford, and that's from around 1000. And they found a young man there who'd been killed violently

• 24:05Speaker 04

  in this mass burial. And they found a second degree relative of his over in Denmark, I think on Oudense. And so they were able to bring these two together. So he was either uncle and nephew, or half brothers, or grandfather and grandchild, something like that.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  And just see dot com for the 10th century.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly that. So they brought them together for an exhibition in Copenhagen a couple of years ago. Where we see that sense of settlement in England, let's talk about, but it's true all over the British Isles, is in the language, in the place names. That's where we see that. That's not raiding. You don't bring over your language, you don't bring over your place names if you're just in and out and grabbing a reliquary in a gospel book in a couple of months. It's when you're settling, when you become part of that cultural landscape, that we start to see it embedded in the landscape, in the place names, in the words themselves.

• 24:59Speaker 05

  A lot of people will have heard of Danelaw, you know, the Danelaw, which was this area of Norse settlement. But, you know, what you found actually is that that wasn't the outline. It's a much more dotted outline. And, you know, that Norse settlement extends far beyond Danelaw.

• 25:15Speaker 04

  The interesting thing about the Danelaw, for a start, that word doesn't get used until a little bit later. I think, just, I mean, not crazily later, but sort of, I think it first starts appearing in maybe even the 11th century, something like that. But what we see is this partition. Now, there is, so the era of the Great Heathen Army ends famously with the battles in the West between Gudrun, who's one of the leaders, and Alfred of King Alfred the Great fame. And after their final battle, they come to a peace agreement where Gudrun is going to be baptised, he's going to be given a Christian name, and he's going to be sent off to rule East Anglia. But very crucially, Alfred stood

• 25:56Speaker 04

  in as his sponsor, his godfather, when he was baptised. And so Alfred is very much, shall we say, sort of, he's got the upper hand, which helps. Now, they draw up a bit later, a very famous peace agreement, where they talk about the line that's going to separate their legal territories. And it's sort of this line that goes up through the Thames, up what's basically Watling Street. It's kind of going from south-east to north-west across the country. And north of that line, or up from that line, that's what we think of as the Danelaw. So it's the East Midlands, it's East Anglia, it's Yorkshire, it's Lincolnshire. And that's where we get this concentration of place names.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Are we thinking of it a bit like partition of India-Pakistan? Are the populations moving in different directions?

• 26:43Speaker 04

  I think there is definitely movement between. We have even in that agreement, they say things like, we won't harbour each other's slaves, for example, or we will make sure that the amount of money, the wer geld for killing someone, is the same on both sides. And so it's not this sense of, here is a line, you will not cross it. I think it's very, and that's why that Christian element, that conversion of Gudrun, now Athelstan, is so important, because we need that sense of parity, that sense of movement. But on the other hand, in terms of settlement, yes, there are Norse place names away from that line, but there's not many.

• 27:23Speaker 05

  So Eleanor, what I want to know is what place names here in Britain do we get directly from the Vikings?

• 27:30Speaker 04

  So obviously Twat, we're starting with Twat.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Well, it's a good start.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  But it's a version of Thwait, which we might be more familiar with from further south, sort of Yorkshire area. It means basically a meadow, a cleared area, something like that. And then you've got anything with a BY at the end, by, that just means farm. So Grimsby, Whitby, Selby, Naesby, Derby, Crosby, Rugby.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Thorpe?

• 27:52Speaker 04

  Thorpe, yes, so sort of Scunthorpe, that sort of thing. Again, it's the, those kind of farming areas, and which is important. We think of Vikings reasonably as raiders, but here we are, have them as settlers, and therefore farmers, and that's more important. We've all got the personal names as well. Grimsby, Grimer's Bu, Grimer is a name, and it's his farm. Grimsby is a really good example of it. So, yeah, but, I mean, we can't, we can't not start with Twat.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  And then we also have, just to move on from Twat, without pausing, we're moving on to Dingwall in Scotland, which is the place for the parliament, the Thinga.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Dingwall, it's Thingvettler, the Parliament or Assembly Plains. And if anyone's been to Iceland, or if anyone is a geologist, they'll know Thingvettler, which is the place in Iceland, they had the original parliament, I think it's 934, they establish it, making it the oldest continuous parliament anywhere in the world. And it's the place where the two tectonic plates are moving apart, hence the vettler, the plains word. But yeah, we've got one in Scotland as well.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  And Ness, that's another, another, Loch Ness as in Nessie, is actually a Norse name, isn't it?

• 29:06Speaker 04

  Yes, so Ness is another one. And there are a few like this, where there's a sort of, there's a Norse version, and there's also sort of, there are other equivalents that do the rounds, because these have really ancient origins. But yeah, it's very interesting that we have, lots of our oldest water names and mountain names in the British Isles in particular, are actually Bretonic, they're from even before the Romans come.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Because people don't change the names of rivers. They found a farm, but the river's always there.

• 29:37Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. But then you get this new, and the interesting thing with some of these, is that they're, they are in parts of the British Isles that look more Nordic, maybe we might say sort of more Norwegian in particular, you know, have the long fjords and the fells and the mountains. So where it gets more dramatic, we start to see some of these new layers coming into those place names.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  Can we, we haven't talked about Ireland though, have we? I mean, you know, Waterford, Limerick, Wexford, Cork. I mean, how have the Vikings left their fingerprints all over these places?

• 30:09Speaker 04

  That's a really interesting one, because, yeah, Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, yeah, as you say, Wexford, Cork, all those, they are established sort of properly. It's not that there's no one living there before, but they're established as these sort of langfords, these ship camps in the 9th century. So that same era as the Great Heathen Army. And then they become permanent trading settlements quite quickly, sort of within a generation or so. Some of these place names are very sort of Irish, kind of Celtic language elements. But sometimes you end up with Norse versions of those. So Dublin, Duflin, it's like the Dark Pool. And then you have a Norse version of that, Duflin, and then we have modern Dublin. But there are a few that are Norse. So I think Waterford, it's not quite clear,

• 30:53Speaker 04

  it might be something like Wetherfjörður. So it's a sort of ram fjord, something like that, a weather. We get the same thing, Wetherby, you know, sheep farm, basically, same thing. My favourite, and I really hope this is true, but this is my understanding, is Carlingford. So Kerlinga fjörður. And a Carling, a Kerling is an old hag.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Nothing to do with the Lager?

• 31:18Speaker 04

  No, weirdly, I kind of always assumed it was, but I think it's something to do with those three peaks. It's like the three nuns peaks, but you often have, they don't bother with nuns. They have, they often have like the old woman, the old man, the hag, yeah, the troll. That's, that's the sort of Nordic version of that. I also, I should say, I have a very personal connection to one of them, which is Huth, which is that peninsula on the north side of Dublin, which is from Old Norse, Huth, it's like head, basically. Apparently, my grandfather was conceived on that very peninsula on a wild night out once, back in, I don't know, back in the 1920s or 30s. So that was his middle name.

• 31:54Speaker 05

  Did your granny tell you that lovely story?

• 31:58Speaker 05

  How do you know?

• 31:59Speaker 04

  They gave it as a middle name. It was like, you know, like sort of thing.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  It was obviously a good night.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  Your family gatherings have very different conversations to mine. Like, just that's all I'm thinking, you know?

• 32:09Speaker 03

  Orkney is somewhere which I always grew up thinking of as being the most sort of Nordic of all the places in Scotland, where until what, the 17th, 18th century, they spoke Norn, which was a kind of version of Norwegian.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  Yep, exactly that, exactly that. So Orkney is, and Shetland, so the Northern Isles, absolutely, those are Norse. They, and they continue being Norse. So when we think of, you know, when is the end of the Viking Age? Well, we've, we've got these like important Norse settlements off the northern coast of mainland Scotland, going into the 15th century. And exactly as you say, there's a form of Old Norse that's still the main language there, until I think it's about 1800 or something like that. You see it in the place names. I mean, the, the most obvious example would be something like Kirkwall, which is on the mainland, and it's sort of where you have St Magnus Cathedral, very much a kind of Viking, or at least Norse cathedral, because of the

• 33:01Speaker 03

  St Magnus, yeah.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  And Kirkwall is just Kirkjuvalgur. It's the, the church bay, basically, after that. So yeah, that's a very, very strong connection that keeps on going. And keep, is, is still part of that. You, you go to the airports at Kirkwall, you've still got runes that they've put over the top. So Kirkwall is pulled out in runes.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Brilliant.

• 33:21Speaker 05

  Eleanor, so, you know, with all of this settlement going on and displacement, if you like, of what was there before, what happens to the monasteries? I mean, are they, wherever the Vikings go, the monasteries don't exist anymore? I mean, just give us an idea of what happens?

• 33:38Speaker 04

  You have the ones that suffer repeatedly early on. You know, we, we've mentioned Iona and Lindisfarne, and then Clonmacnoyes and Cork and Ulrich Arma. But the interesting thing is that as Norse settlement becomes permanent, that relationship between the settlers and the surrounding community also changes. And of course, that surrounding community also includes the local religious communities.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  We're going to be doing a lot more on, on the next episode, where we're going to, we're still holding out for zombies, but certainly going into mythology and all this, all this amazing syncretism, which, which I did not grow up with at all, the idea that you get people preaching parallels between Christianity and the Norse myth, but that's for the next episode. But just, just give us an idea of, of, of how it pans out by the 10th century, when the, they've, these guys have settled, they've got the Dan law. What, what is, what is left of the old, the old Anglo-Saxon world and the old Pictish world?

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is a, is a really, so, so I mean, I'll leave the pics to Gordon, definitely. But it, it's not that this, so the problem is that we have this other layer that is much fainter, to mix my metaphors, much fainter echo than the Norse stuff in terms of, so that pre-Christian religious belief and practice, because of course, the Anglo-Saxons also came in as pagans. And then, you know, they become Christianised. And so you're sort of seeing this rebooting of the same thing under the Norse. I already mentioned how Gudrun, one of these leaders of the Great Heathen Army, is converted to Christianity and then is allowed to become king, very much an Anglo-Saxon king of East

• 35:16Speaker 04

  Anglia. If we look at his coins, we can see, you know, it's got his name on the coins, but they're absolutely Christian Anglo-Saxon style coins. He's got a cross in the centre. But having said that, you've got some really interesting, slightly later examples, where there are still hints of this syncretism. So there's a really good example of this from York. And this is, it's called the St Peter's Pence, and it's a coin, and I think it's, I want to say like the early 10th century, something like that. And you have a Christian cross on it. It's very obviously Christian, but you've also got a little Thor's hammer just, just there, just, just put on there, just like worked into the lettering. And so it's a sense there that maybe this is about religious belief, but it's also saying something

• 36:00Speaker 04

  about cultural identity that's very important.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  We were talking about how Bath is one of those places that transfixes reluctant small people. And, and York is another one, Jorvik, because it is, it is absolutely fascinating and in-your-face synergy between cultures. Can you tell us a little more about Jorvik, York?

• 36:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, there is nothing like York. So Eirforwich, which is the Old English name, becomes, as you say, Jorvik, the Old Norse equivalents. There were these incredible excavations, the Coppergate excavations in the 70s and 80s. And what's really unusual about that is that they revealed this thriving urban settlement, which isn't typical. We think of typical representative, it really isn't. It's so unusual in terms of its density, the complexity. You know, we've got workshops producing amber and jets and antler, we've got metal objects, we've got evidence of long distance trading with Byzantium and the

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Islamic world and Scandinavia, of course, you know. So it, and we've got my absolute favourite, and I'm sorry, it's not horny zombies, but I am going to bring down the tone, because we can't not talk about the Lloyds Bank coprolite, which is the biggest fossilised human poo, I think, anywhere in the world. And it is a chunky monkey. It's over 20 centimetres long. I think it's about five centimetres wide, something like that. And it's fascinating because it's one person's turd from Viking Age York. It tells us that, you know, they were eating bread and meat, they had a hell of a lot of intestinal worms. My favourite fact about it is that about 20 years ago, there was a school party visiting

• 37:42Speaker 04

  it. The teacher was allowed to hold it, dropped it and broke it into three pieces. And so if you see it, it's, it's been glued back together.

• 37:51Speaker 05

  I have seen it. I didn't really, I didn't see the glue marks. So, I mean, the thing is, York, York has done this so beautifully. I don't, I don't know whether we talked about this before, but when I took the kids, we went on that, you know, they excavated down to the, the Scandinavian sort of layer, you know, the Norse layer. And you go on this little train journey past these mannequins who are reliving, and it's meant to have sort of smell-o-vision, and you go through quite a whiffy little bit. I mean, it's, it's, it's brilliantly done. And considering it's really old, I mean, I, I don't know when they, they did this, when they built this. But you, you go down, you are part of that world, you hear the noises, and then you learn about the, the poop. And I mean, it's all fabulous. I, I think it's one of the best, best places. It's fantastic.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  And it lasts. So, you know, from the time of the Great Heathen Army, so, I don't know, about 866. And it comes and goes, you know, there, there are, there's lots going on there. But we get to the middle of the 10th century, and that's when it's likely, now the problem is, he is swathed in the mists of historical mystery, but we don't quite know what's going on. But Eric Bloodaxe.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  We haven't had Eric Bloodaxe. We've got to have Eric Bloodaxe.

• 39:01Speaker 05

  What, who was it? Tell us, who, who is Eric Bloodaxe?

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Eric Bloodaxe is said to be the last Norse ruler. He's really shadowy. I think much more shadowy as a figure than people realise. He also appears in some of the Icelandic sagas, so Ael's saga in particular, where Ael ends up, they're terrible enemies. And there, he's given this incredible wife, I think she's called Gunnhildur, and she's a magical practitioner. She transforms herself into a bird and sings at a window all night to stop Ael from composing the poetry that will save his life, you know. So he's a figure that all sorts of amazing myths and legends spring up about. But it looks like he was a real person. And then he's killed at Stainmore, out in the wilds, possibly fleeing from York,

• 39:48Speaker 04

  possibly fleeing to, not sure. But he's killed there. And so we then have it, I think, you know, reverting from Norse hands. But what's interesting is that the, the city that emerges from that good century of, of Norse rule is still absolutely there. We walk around, you know, there's Gudrun Gate, Gudrun's Gata, Gata means street. There's Mickel Gate, big streets, Coppergate, Coppergata, I think it's the

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Woodworkers.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Woodworkers, yes. All the Norse names. So it's this sense that it is permanently transformed. It's not just those layers of archaeology that are in themselves so fascinating.

• 40:28Speaker 05

  You know, at the beginning, we were talking about what happened in Lindisfarne and, and the fact that the people fled, you know, the monks fled, their worshippers fled, and they carried with them the body of St Cuthbert. We kind of have left them alone. I mean, how long have they been wandering around with this coffin? And what happens to it eventually?

• 40:47Speaker 04

  Okay, so the community of St Cuthbert is really, it's a remarkable story within this remarkable period. They don't immediately abandon Lindisfarne at all after that famous sack of 793. They stay for, it's, it's a good century after that, nearly. But then, I think it's 875, there's more Norse pressure, and so they leave. We've got Cuthbert, we've got the Lindisfarne gospels. I think we've got the relics, you know, various, various saints' relics as well, you know. So they're wandering around for several years. They're moving through Northumbria, Cumbria. They're looking for somewhere safe to settle. They, you know, they're at Chesterley Street for a while in County Durham. And then about a century later, there's more threat, this time I think it's Danish. They move again,

• 41:32Speaker 04

  and they finally settle in Durham in 995. And you think of Durham, it's basically, it's the bailey, it's this, it's, it's almost completely surrounded by water, this huge, very defensible, like hill, basically. And so that's where they settle. And so the Lindisfarne gospels survive this, and the relics survive, the community survive. It's, it only just, this is, this is a remarkable survival. It was much more likely that that wouldn't happen, but it did.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  It's all still there, isn't it? You get a Durham cathedral, the, the, the Petrel cross, the, the fragments of the coffin, you can still see little incised images. It's wonderful. Eleanor, you've described this catastrophe, and it turns out to be much more complicated. What does the Viking impact on the sacred world of Britain and Ireland look like to you from the vantage point of a historian, leaving aside now all the zombies and everything else, that when you think of it in your scholarly hat, what does it, what does it look like to you?

• 42:32Speaker 04

  I think it's not just one thing. I think it's about, yes, destruction, but also transformation. And it's really important that we're able to carry those two ideas together. So, you know, the destruction is real and we can't, as we said up top, we can't minimise what was lost at Iona and Lindisfarne, the lives, the culture, you know, it was traumatic. And that's really important to say in terms of how the communities experience them. But then that later transformation is equally real. And so the world that emerged from the Viking Age, and we've got Norse Irish cities, we've got the Danish place names, we've got the Danlaw place names, we've got the earldom, that yaldom on Orkney,

• 43:14Speaker 04

  we've got, you know, it's, it's richer and it's stranger and it's more various than I think we sometimes give it credit for because they are interacting with different people in so many different ways. And it's this idea that the islands in some ways sort of absorbed the Vikings, but in all these different flavours of what that looks like and what those interactions look like.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Thank you so, so much. Now, we're going to stay with Eleanor, our wonderful guest in the next episode. And we're going to look specifically at the Norse effect on the religion of the Sun. This series is all about the gods and the transformations that take place with these different waves of migration. And this extraordinary world where you've now got the Vikings in York, all over Cumbria, all over what's now Scotland and much of Ireland. How does it affect the religious faith and the beliefs and the mythologies of the people in these islands? Eleanor, we'll be back for that in the next episode.

• 44:18Speaker 05

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• 44:31Speaker 03

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