How to Reach Valhalla

Gone Medieval is embarking on an epic journey through Norse Mythology; from the first creation myth to Ragnarok, Matt Lewis and Dr. Eleanor Janega are joined by our Viking king for immersive storytelling, cinematic sound design, expert interviews, and thrilling discoveries about Odin and his magical offspring, Asgard, Valhalla, and more. So if you think you can outdrink Thor and outwit Loki join us! Today, we ask; where do Vikings go when they die? Eleanor is joined by Carolyne Larrington to explore the role of Valkyries, the armed women who descended from the clouds, the realms of Thor and Freja and medieval stone carvings depicting divine beings and trolls, weaving together historical realities with tales of cosmic creation and epic battles. MORE Medieval Burials https://open.spotify.com/episode/3kD8EiLjYpMAQPehUOCeGs Treasures from Anglo-Saxon Graves https://open.spotify.com/episode/2HiTMuX1RvwK3s2RDS6Fy9 Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega, King Gilfi is played by Eric Nolan. 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 and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 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 Yarnagger, 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

  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 camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  This is Steve Covino from Covino and Rich. Quick trivia, fellas. Every guy listening is a contestant. Answer honestly to yourself. You got a belly and a little chest? Gassed by the afternoon, no drive left in the tank? You lack that confidence and mental edge? Those are classic signs that your testosterone's been sliding. And nothing drags it down faster than extra weight. So why not take matters into your own hands? Strip off the weight that tanks your testosterone with Bioma GLP-1 Booster. Every serving is packed with science-backed ingredients that crank up your natural GLP-1 production. Visit bioma.health/GLP1 and use code CRSHOW for 15% off your first order.

• 1:59Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga 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.

• 2:51Speaker 04

  At the dying of the day, when clash of arms is done, the sky itself splits open. A light shines from above, a blinding radiance, and from the clouds come Valkyries, a host of women dressed in armor, caked in blood. Their helmets rattle in the wind, their spears shine like distant beacons, their wings hammer like drums of war. And as they descend, heralded by bolts of lightning, they pluck the valiant from their deathly stupor to guide their souls to Odin's hall, Valhalla.

• 3:40Eleanor Janega?

  Welcome back to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga. This month on the podcast, we've been taking a deep dive into Norse mythology, bringing the tales of gods, giants, and the nine realms roaring back to life. Along the way, King Gilfi, a character from the medieval Icelandic sagas, has been our guide, helping us to retell these stories of cosmic creation and mythic mayhem, while Matt and I have been joined by world-class experts to help us untake the history behind these epic legends.

• 4:17Eleanor Janega?

  So far, we've witnessed how the nine realms came to be. Journeyed to Asgard to meet the Allfather Odin, and encountered the gods of Marvel fame: giants slaying Thor and Loki the Trickster.

• 4:32Eleanor Janega?

  Later this week, Matt will bring it all to an end, I mean, literally, with the story of Ragnarok: Apocalypse and the Death of the Gods.

• 4:43Eleanor Janega?

  But today, like all brave Vikings, we're ascending to the Hall of Valhalla. Soon, I'll be joined by Professor Carolyne Larrington, expert in Old Norse literature, to explore the dramatic impact Norse myths had on the lives of mere mortals. But first, here's King Gilfi to tell you more about Valhalla.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  I, King Gilfi, have wandered far and questioned much of the gods. In Asgard, I learned of fabled Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain, and heard stories of the fallen heroes who guzzle and gorge inside its mead-stained walls. How to reach its hearts before the world's end I will now share, if you have ears to hear.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  As you may already know, I am more than just a mighty king. I am a wanderer, a seeker of hidden truths. And on one large, arduous odyssey, as cosmic dust clung to my weary cloak, I came across the Realm of the Gods.

• 5:55Speaker 04

  And in their shining city of Asgard, I met three kings. Sat on high, upon thrones encased in shimmering gold. Their majesty was without question. And as I bowed to them, they spoke to me of the secrets of the gods and the stories of this world. From the birth, pains of creation, to the end of all things. Countless questions I asked of these three kings, seeking wisdom from the wellspring of celestial memory. But for my mortal subjects, a single, haunting question eclipsed all others: "Where do we go when we die?" This is what they told me.

• 6:51Speaker 04

  The place of joy and gold bright there stands Valhalla stretching wide. And there does Odin each day choose the men who have fallen in fight. Its rafters are spears, with shields it is roofed. On its benches are breastplates strewn. There hangs a wolf by the western door, and over it an eagle flies. Odin is all-father, for he is the greatest of all gods. But he is also the Valfather, keeper of the slain. Those who fall in battle become his chosen sons.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  Thus it is Odin, and Odin alone, who governs, who is worthy of Valhalla's embrace. Yet Valhalla is not the only hall of the dead, for the goddess Freya too claims her share of the slain. In her hall of Sesrum near, she gathers the brave to her side, a reminder that even among gods, glory is divided. Half of Odin, half to Freya, such is the fate of warriors. Not all are so chosen. Those who fall without honour, or who meet death not by steel but by sickness or shame, their lot is harsher still.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  They go to hell, the cold, mist-bound realm beneath the roots of the world. There they wander in shadow, without feast or song, until the end of days.

• 8:33Speaker 04

  I asked what became of the noble warriors chosen to grace Odin's heavenly heart? What did they drink, and what did they eat? How did they spend the rest of their days? The kings replied that they await the wolf, Odin's bane, whose coming is foretold. At the end of time, the wolf shall rise and Odin is doomed to die.

• 9:00Speaker 04

  But until that doom, they fight and feast forever on the fruits all father provides.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  At dawn each day, Odin's champions take up their arms and gorge themselves on battle. They fight, they fall, they rise again, training for that fated day. When forty score, and forty more will stride from Valhalla's gates to face the wolf in fight.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  And when light dims, their wounds are healed and peace breaks out among them. They file into halls with great hearts alight, and sit to eat and revel in their glory. Their meat comes from a wondrous boar, slain, cooked, and carved each day. Yet with the coming of dawn, it stands whole again, ready to feed Odin's warriors once more. Never shall the company in Valhalla be so great that its meat will not suffice. Meat too was had by Valhalla's kings and earls to quench their eternal thirst. For after the death wounds and agony suffered below, their hunger was vast, their thirst greater still.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  This mead flows not from cask nor cellar, but from the others of a goat who grazes upon the leaves of an ever-living tree. From her milk is filled a vat so vast that all of Odin's champions may drink their fill. Such is the hall of Odin, a house battle, a fortress of feasting, a place where death is but the doorway to endless war and endless glory. More I could tell you of my time in the presence of these three kings, but much have you already heard of the fate of heroes. Even I, King Gilfie, found my mind filled with as many questions as answers.

• 10:57Speaker 04

  For what is Valhalla truly? A hall of the gods blazing in the heavens? Or a story told among men to stir courage and steal their heart? Is it a promise of life beyond death? Or a mirror of all that warriors most desired? These things I pondered, and so I sought out the counsel of a wise one. To help me better understand what I had seen, and what it meant for mortal men and women.

• 11:37Eleanor Janega?

  Caroline, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 11:39Speaker 05

  It's a great pleasure to be here.

• 11:41Eleanor Janega?

  I'm very excited to speak to you today because I think a lot of the time when we speak about Norse mythology, we think about it almost as a form of literature or something that is just kind of happening over in a corner. But this was a living, breathing belief system that a lot of people had. So I guess to start us off, can you tell us a little bit about how belief in the Norse gods played out in the lives of people who believed in them?

• 12:10Speaker 05

  That's a more complicated question than you might think in a sense. Because whereas, you know, biblical myth or with Greek myth, we got a lot of records of what people did, what their rituals were, what their behaviors were, and how they related to the stories that they told themselves about the gods. We really don't have enough in Old Norse to give us a clear picture of what people were doing and how it related to the gods in any one time. And of course, our sources, such as they are, are all written down by Christians by and large. And so...

• 12:51Speaker 05

  What we get, for example, in the Icelandic sagas, which are all written in the 13th century, is a kind of set of historical novels which give a picture of what people in the 13th century thought their ancestors 250 years before were doing. At the same time as they wanted to kind of tone down anything that was too shocking because they didn't want their ancestors to be cannibals or human sacrifices or anything like that. Not that we think that their Norse ancestors were cannibals, but in some sagas we do have, some of the historical sagas set in

• 13:33Speaker 05

  Scandinavia rather than in Iceland, we have stories about human sacrifice. So the picture that we have of belief is very much filtered through this kind of Christian lens. But what we can probably say with all those caveats around how historical the sagas really are is that in Iceland at least, most people were worshipping the god Thor. He was the most dominant god, it seems, in western Norway, where most of the Icelandic settlers came from. And so what you do when you arrive in Iceland and you settle your farm, you consecrate it by taking

• 14:17Speaker 05

  fire around the boundaries to mark out your particular possessions. Then you build a temple or a kind of cult building in which you perform some kind of sacrifice. Usually it looks as if you would sacrifice an animal from time to time. And you would get people to swear on a ring if they were swearing an oath within that temple sometimes. But for the rest of the time, we don't really have very much more information about what people were doing. A couple of the settlers seemed to have worshipped the god Freyr rather than Thor.

• 14:57Speaker 05

  And they have slightly different habits, it seems that they they build temples. But in one saga, for example, a man decides to give half of his goods to Freyr. Not in a very practical way. He just says, I have a favorite horse and half of it belongs to Freyr. And therefore, nobody else must ride it except for me. And that has repercussions. And then the poets were often adherents of the god Odin, who was the god of poetry and the originator of poetry. So that's what we have in Iceland. But the picture that we have from the rest of Scandinavia is again quite different. Because we don't have early written sources.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  We don't really know what people were doing in Sweden, for example. But it does look as if the the gods Freyr and his sister Freya were more important in Sweden than elsewhere. Going on the evidence that you can derive from place names. And it looks as if Odin was quite important in Denmark. But what people actually did is really not all that clear. We're told that at the great feast in Uppsala in Sweden, which happened every nine years. There was a lot of sacrifice, sacrifice of horses, dogs and humans. And they were hanged on trees or thrown down a sacred well.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  But how that related to any stories that have survived isn't at all clear. So there's a bit of a sort of mismatch between what we can assume must have been going on because most peoples have got some kind of ritual. And what their descendants kind of invented for them.

• 16:46Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm. It's so tricky, isn't it? Because we're specifically hearing from people who have a vested interest in making their ancestors look good. And also a sort of vested horror in the practices of anyone who is behaving in an un-Christian manner. Which makes sense. It makes perfect sense. But I suppose, do we have any archaeological evidence for things like this? You know, I generally tend to find that it gets a little bit tricky. A lot of the time when we're talking about the the pre-Christian days, we're building exclusively in wood. Do we have? Objects that persist at all, or any idea of what temples looked like?

• 17:25Speaker 05

  We can find post holes for some really big halls. So they were, yes, they were built of wood and so they didn't survive. And of course, the fate of most wooden buildings is to get burnt down sooner or later. But were they halls or were they cult buildings? Who can say? Some of the archaeological work done in Sweden has uncovered kind of very early Viking age or pre Viking age cultic sites. And there you've got pottery deposits, you've got quite a lot of animal remains in a way that suggests it's not just where a household chucked the remnants of their dinners, but something that's a bit more cultic than that, sort of carefully arranged

• 18:09Speaker 05

  layers of different kinds of bones. And we have picture stones, particularly in Sweden and in, in the island of Gotland between Sweden and Finland. And they quite often seem to show us pictures of divine beings. But what you always need in that case is the kind of fingerprint that says, this must be this story. And of course, the, the rune stone or the picture stone carvers didn't helpfully label the picture stones. And so one example I always use is that there's a figure on one stone of a man with some serpents in a pit.

• 18:50Speaker 05

  And we might very well think, ah, that's the god Loki when he was bound with a serpent dripping into his face before Ragnarok. But it could equally be the hero Gunnar in the snake pit. Or it could be Ragnar Lothbrok, who famously perished in the snake pit. So absent a kind of little note by the carver saying, by the way, this is Ragnar. This makes it, these images quite difficult to decode. And with archaeology, I think there's always a kind of slightly, not exactly a vicious circle, but a difficult circle between written texts and archaeology that archaeologists are prone to saying, the written texts talk about this kind of item.

• 19:34Speaker 05

  Here's the thing, that thing is probably this kind of item. And then the literary scholars go, oh yeah, this is what that item must have looked like because the archaeologists have found one over here. So.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  There is quite a lot of archaeology which points to blood sacrifice, sacrifice of animals and humans in Sweden in particular. Whether, how much further west that went is something that it's quite difficult to, to figure out. But one of the key things that I think's really emerged from Scandinavian archaeology of this era in the last ten years or so is really we, we probably have to talk about different belief systems for each part of Scandinavia. And so the idea that a Viking who came from Iceland, when he bumped us into a Swede somewhere, when he's harrying down the Volga River or something like that,

• 20:33Speaker 05

  can swap notes on their favourite myths and say, oh, yeah, I see you worship Freya as well. That they'll have all that much in common is probably, it would be difficult to prove at least.

• 20:44Eleanor Janega?

  But that's such a really interesting point because I think we have a tendency to think about religion as organised, as having a universal mythos that everyone would understand. But that's really a product of very much medieval work, you know.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's the religion of the book, isn't it? That when you have a canonical set of scriptures, as we have with Christianity, with Judaism or with Islam, then you know what you're meant to believe and you've got a priest who will teach it to you. But that doesn't seem to be in the system at all in Scandinavia.

• 21:19Eleanor Janega?

  So we talked a little bit about varying deities that people might have understood in the Norse world. What about belief in other beings? Because, for example, when I was a child, I was really enamoured with all the troll stories that one would get, or, you know, the, the giant stories or the elves. Is this something that we see play out in people's everyday lives? Are you going to be, I don't know, thinking about trolls when you're making decisions or figuring out how you're going to work in your environment?

• 21:49Speaker 05

  Trolls are certainly a figure quite largely in the texts that we have. And they're the kind of creature which lives out in the wilderness, which is probably quite big, not very clever, very much like the kind of folkloric trolls that. We we know now in in modern culture, mostly from collective Norwegian Swedish stories from the nineteenth century. So they're kind of lumbering around out there. And you can you can see how they kind of operate as a a man goes up in the mountains, he doesn't come back. What happened to him? Well, he he probably fell into a glacier or he fell down a ravine.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  But yeah, just maybe the trolls took him. And so they they have quite a strong explanatory function. But we also have a kind of broader idea of trolls in the medieval texts at least. Not all trolls are really hideously ugly. Troll women can be a little bit more attractive than you might expect. And there's some a couple of sagas which talked about sort of doomed love affairs between humans and troll women. And the troll woman might be somebody who the human hero is really, really keen on, but the family are never going to accept her. And in one case, she turns up bringing the son that the hero left behind.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  And the hero's father says, well, you're not marrying that troll. So off she goes again, very sadly, back to Norway. So we have trolls. We have elves a little bit. There's one big feast that seems to occur in the winter months called Alvorblåt, which is when you sacrifice to the elves. But what the elves were is pretty mysterious. They're mentioned in the mythology, but as a kind of given. So we know what elves are, but we don't actually. They're not probably very much like our modern perception of fairies or the kind of elves that we've got from nineteenth century German stories like those collected by the

• 23:58Speaker 05

  Brothers Grimm. And we also have, in the mythology, we have these figures called Jötnar. Singular is Jöten. And that's normally translated as giants. But increasingly, scholars have decided just to leave the term untranslated, because sometimes these figures are big, but they're not huge necessarily, not as huge as the kind of giants you have in in European folklore. Again, the women can be quite attractive. Some of them even marry into the divine pantheon.

• 24:37Speaker 05

  And so though you do get some with three heads or in one exceptional case, one with nine hundred heads, which is, you know, obviously way too many heads. But you also have some who are quite sort of socially presentable. And so in a way, the giants represent a kind of other with a capital O. But with a society that's quite similar to human society, quite similar to the god's society in a way. But just always on the lookout for what they can get from the gods is and the gods are on the lookout for what kind of treasures the Jotunar might have, which they might want to take as well.

• 25:20Eleanor Janega?

  I love that. I love these third spaces or third groups of people like we see, for example, in the other world in Irish belief, you know, when you have the fairies, whatever you want to call them, the others that show up. It's always nice when you have these ambiguous groups of people because I think it really challenges our assumptions about these kind of neat binaries.

• 25:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, these, these kind of minor figures who are not deities. Because what we don't have very much of in Old Norse is unlike what you would find in Greek myth, for example, you don't have a kind of apotheosis. There are very few stories where Thor, for example, wanders into a human home and starts telling people they're not behaving themselves. Odin does it a bit more because he's interested in reinforcing ideals about kingship. That's one of his big projects is to make sure that rulers are ruling properly. But these other creatures like the elves, like the Dicer, who are a kind of female equivalent of elves and who seem to be almost death spirits.

• 26:24Speaker 05

  They're quite often involved in unexplained and peculiar deaths, a little bit like the Irish idea of being taken by the fairies when something happens, when somebody dies in a, in a manner that's not really expected. And the, the Dicer of perhaps female ancestors, who are always a kind of on the lookout for somebody that whose time has come and it's time for them to bring them into the next world.

• 26:50Eleanor Janega?

  I think that this is a really important point as well because I think that there are these.

• 26:57Eleanor Janega?

  Easy assumptions that we make, again, as a result of the way we think about religion and the fact that we tend to think that there is one way of looking at things and that there's a neat binary. I think when we oftentimes look at Norse mythology, a big thing that we tend to do is say, oh, here's the equivalent, you know, Odin is the equivalent of God.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  Here are the good guys, here are the bad guys.

• 27:20Eleanor Janega?

  Here's the bad, yes. And like, so for example, one part of this is this idea that Valhalla is heaven, right? And I've dragged you on today to ask you rather a lot about Valhalla in particular. And I think that a good place to start is to ask exactly what that is. How would you define Valhalla?

• 27:41Speaker 05

  Well, Valhalla, if it is a kind of heaven, it's a very exclusive version of heaven. It's a hall that's attributed to Odin. It's, and, and in a sense, it's important to know that in Norse myth, each of the gods, and some of the goddesses as well, seem to have a territory that they rule over. And in the middle of the territory, just as a human magnate would have, you have a nice big hall where you sit and you feast and you entertain your followers and so on. And Odin's main hall is Valhjöll in Old Norse,

• 28:19Speaker 05

  Valhalla. It's enormous. Armies of men can march in and out of its doors. It's a place where heroes go on death and gathered there. They're waiting for Ragnarok for the end, the final battle. And so every day, they're practicing fighting. And they seem to be able to kill each other with impunity. But the end of the day, because you're already dead, everybody gets up and is undead again, ready to fight the next day. And we're told that they drink mead, that it has benches, that you have rushes on the floor, very much

• 29:04Speaker 05

  like a human hall. And every day they get to eat wild boar stew, more or less, because there's a self-replicating boar that is cooked every day and it comes back every, every evening. And Odin sits there at the high table with his two wolves, Giri and Freki, and apparently drinks wine mostly, which would be quite an exotic, expensive southern drink where everybody else is drinking mead or beer. And also in Valhalla are the Valkyries, but we're probably going to come on to them in the moment, I guess.

• 29:40Eleanor Janega?

  You're not wrong.

• 29:43Eleanor Janega?

  You mentioned already that it's heroes who live in Valhalla, and I think this is a really important point because you sort of have to qualify to live there, right? It's, it's not just, oh, well, you were a nice guy, so you can come live in Valhalla now, right?

• 29:58Speaker 05

  No, definitely not. I mean, if you think of the god Baldur, for example, who is the best, the brightest, the most handsome, the most beloved of the gods, but he doesn't die in battle. And so his fate when he's killed, and the question of how it is a god can die is another matter altogether. But when he's, he's killed through the machinations of Loki, he didn't die in battle, so he's not qualified to go to Valhalla. So, which his grieving father Odin obviously wouldn't mind so much, I guess, if he was in the hall of the heroes and he could see him every day. But no, he has to go down to the world of the dead, to a place called Nipelheim, the

• 30:40Speaker 05

  world of, of mists, to a hall which is kind of like other halls, but full of those who died of sickness, women, those who didn't die a heroic death, and they're all kind of milling around. They're drinking mead or beer, they're sitting around feasting, but it's not the same as it is clearly in Valhalla.

• 31:06Eleanor Janega?

  This is a really interesting point because this suggests that we have a real

• 31:13Eleanor Janega?

  bifurcated way of looking at society. So you are just simply seen as a more courageous or worthy person if you're dying in battle, which isn't to say you're bad. It's not that you go to the land of the mists because you were a bad person. It's just that you weren't a courageous person. So

• 31:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:37Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, it kind of tells us rather a lot about society, I would argue.

• 31:41Speaker 05

  Yes, and it tells you probably about Viking society at a particular point because the latest thinking seems to be that although Odin was quite an old god, it seems, the whole of this sort of apparatus of Valhalla, of dying in battle, of this being really valorized in culture, goes along with the rise of Viking raiding, that this is a kind of ideology that you need to inspire people. And it's one thing to say to the lads on your farm in Norway, hey, kids, I've got a boat, let's go and raid England. And if we live, we'll come back with

• 32:24Speaker 05

  lots of treasure and you can buy small cows for your mum's farm and everything will be fine. And if you don't live, ah, well, yo, what's the payback there? Well, if you die fighting against the English or the Russians or who else, then you'll be with Odin. So, and you'll be enjoying this wonderful, ideal martial life in heaven. If all you like doing is fighting, then you can do it for all eternity. And you can see how that that works as a kind of ideological encouragement that, and particularly, again, this is where the Valkyries come in. You've got beautiful women in the hall, bringing you horns of mead, and presumably

• 33:08Speaker 05

  making the place look decorative. But the other side of these women is that they're also the ones who go to fetch you from the battlefield. And so there's both a terrifying aspect, a death-related aspect to them, as well as this kind of sexually inviting aspect.

• 33:43Speaker 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 camtasiapro.com and start building a smarter way to educate customers, onboard employees, and ensure valuable expertise is shared across teams.

• 34:16Speaker 06

  I always appreciate when thoughtful and luxurious design can help change the way a space feels. That's why I love how the 48-inch panoramic display stretches across the entire dashboard in my Lincoln Navigator SUV. It helps make it easy to stay connected while giving the cabin an open, expansive feel. Whether I'm juggling errands or just enjoying some quiet time, this feature brings a fresh perspective and helps elevate even the everyday moments. Visit lincoln.com to learn more.

• 34:51Speaker 05

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

• 35:36Eleanor Janega?

  So can we talk a little bit about the Valkyries then? Because I think this is one of these household words that we get from Norse mythology. And everyone kind of understands the word Valkyrie. Then they can probably hum the Flight of the Valkyries, right? So how does one become a Valkyrie?

• 35:55Speaker 05

  Well, the thing about Valkyries is I think that there are basically two different conceptions that have, in some of the poetry and certainly in some of the sagas, have kind of melded into one. But originally, I think we want to see the Valkyries as kind of minor death goddesses. There are lots and lots of them. And they have different names, which mean something like battle or violence or something like that. They are called Oden's Wish Girls. Their job is to fulfill Oden's wishes. And they go out to the battlefield, riding on horses. They don't have wings, which is something that you sometimes see in modern depictions

• 36:40Speaker 05

  of Valkyries. But they have these horses that they ride through the sky. They're fully armed, they've got helmets, spears and so on. And then they appear to the hero and say, "Okay, sonny, your time's up," in effect, and lead him back to Valhalla. And we do have a couple of very good poems in which the hero enters Valhalla. And the heroes are running around the place, the ones who are there, they're getting, making sure the beer's ready, they're clearing the benches, this great hero is coming. And the great hero himself is incredibly annoyed about the fact this is where he's

• 37:22Speaker 05

  ended up, because it's great to be in Valhalla, but it's even better being alive.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  And even if you say to your heroes, happens in one of the poems, well, your side kind of won. But, sorry, you're dead. And hey, come and meet these other heroes. And this Haakon, this particular king of Norway, is, hmm, well, I'm not really thrilled about this. And now I'm not going to put my weapons to one side because I just don't trust anyone round here. And all the kind of jollity of being in Valhalla takes a while to kind of kick in, I think. So you have the Valkyries who have a kind of desire for the heroes, but it's a desire to bring them to the hall.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  And so having a kind of feminine presence, particularly because Hel, the goddess of death, who rules over that Hall of Mist, where the other dead go, is one half a beautiful woman, one half of her is a corpse. And she really embodies the eroticized idea of death as something that will take you into her embrace. And you won't feel any pain or fear anymore. You'll be with her. But at the same time, you're still dead and you've got this corpse reminding you of the reality of death and decay. So that seems to have been the original conception of these divine war goddesses, if you like.

• 38:52Speaker 05

  But what we also have is the idea of the shield maiden. Warriors who are female, who ride through the air on horses, like the more divine kind of Valkyries, who go and choose heroes and say, right, you will have luck in this battle, your luck's running out in this one. But they're also still enmeshed in the kind of human patriarchal system. So we have some poems where the Valkyrie appears to a hero and says, you fought really well. And I was very pleased to see that. And in fact, I made some of your foes kind of melt out of the way. And I love you. And now I have a problem because my father wants me to marry this guy.

• 39:33Speaker 05

  And I don't want to marry him. So I need you to go and attack him and kill him preferably. And the hero says, well, yeah, sure. And off he goes and attacks the other guy and kills him. But in a couple of these poems, because the other guy, the kind of unwanted fiance is very much the person that the Valkyrie's father wants her to align with. The Valkyrie's father and her brothers are all fighting on the side of the hero. And it's kind of like a big wipeout that Helgi, the hero, takes out all of his opponents. And then afterwards, he's kind of saying, ah, sorry, also, your dad is dead too, and most of your brothers.

• 40:17Speaker 05

  But hey, we can still get married. And so at that point, the Valkyrie, kind of all this shield maiden Valkyrie figure, retires from battle and settles down to get married. But it's always the case that the hero's not going to live for very long. That having got embroiled in this feud with some group of people, vengeance is always on the way. And so you have a surviving brother, for example, turning up and saying, yeah, Oden persuaded me to kill your husband, and so I did. I'm sorry about the oath that I swore. I didn't really mean them.

• 40:57Speaker 05

  And then when he finds his sister's really upset about this, he's kind of, oh, what are you crazy? Why are you cursing me? He killed our father, remember? And then she dies of grief quite often. So it's a very different kind of pattern, but you get them run together in some of the poetry. And in particular, in the figure of Brunhilde, who we see in the Saga of the Vol songs and in some of the heroic poetry.

• 41:23Eleanor Janega?

  Well, you know, it's what a way to look at problems with the in-laws. What can I say? Can you tell us a little bit about Brunhilde?

• 41:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, Brunhilde is one of these shield maidens who has a human father and a brother.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  And has clearly had a kind of fighting career as well. But at the same time, she falls out with Odin, whose order she was following, by going to a battle and she's been told very precisely, she needs to bring the young hero back to Valhalla, because that's the one that Odin has his eye on. But she looks at him and then she looks at the older king that he's fighting with and goes, ah, I'll take the old guy.

• 42:09Speaker 05

  And that's the the kernel of her disobedience, that she makes her own choice here. She doesn't marry the younger hero, but she disobeys Odin. Odin is very cross. He puts her to sleep on the top of a mountain and says she must sleep there until a hero comes to awaken her and then she's probably going to have to marry him. And that means no more being a Valkyrie. And so she's sleeping there. And eventually the hero Sigurdur finds her. He's got a magic sword, he's very brave. And he cuts open her corset, he wakes her up. And in the poetry, they exchange wisdom.

• 42:54Speaker 05

  And then, in effect, he says, I think you're wonderful. If I marry anybody, it's going to be you. But I need to go off and do some more heroic stuff first. And as he goes off to do more heroic stuff, he kind of moves out of this heroic mythological world into a world of courtly romance and ends up being served a magical drink of forgetting, marrying somebody else. Meanwhile, his bride's brother has heard about Brynhilde, who is by now sitting, she's kind of revived, so she's not asleep. But she's sitting in her own independent hall, surrounded by flames. Story gets very complicated, but one way or another,

• 43:40Speaker 05

  Sigurdur aids his brother to win the Valkyrie, who still loves him, by changing appearances. And when Brynhilde thinks something very strange has happened, but she promised to marry whoever could cross the flame wall and come into her hall. And then, in a great argument with her sister-in-law, the sister-in-law reveals the truth. And after that, Brynhilde has got it in for everybody around her.

• 44:07Speaker 05

  Sigurður is going to have to die because he deceived her. Her husband is going to have to die because he deceived her. And various other people in the neighbourhood, a kind of collateral damage.

• 44:21Eleanor Janega?

  I was going to say good for her until the collateral damage.

• 44:24Speaker 05

  She commits suicide after that. And suicide is is pretty rare in Old Norse literature, particularly from women. But she commits suicide so that she and Sigurður can be together in the in the afterlife. And she's pretty confident that now they're going to be together for all time. Which is going to be awkward when Sigurður's actual wife finally, many, many years later, also turns up in the afterlife. But the the sources don't go into that.

• 44:59Eleanor Janega?

  Can these stories about Valkyries and shield maidens really tell us anything about the position of women in the Viking world? Do stories like these make it more desirable or acceptable for women to be involved in martial life? Or can we really extrapolate from this that perhaps women are fighters until they get married? Or is that just a way of desiring to see warrior women where they may not have existed?

• 45:29Speaker 05

  We really don't know, but it seems vanishingly unlikely there were kind of cadres of fighting women because they would have been mentioned, I think, in historical sources. But we have quite a lot of texts that talk about fighting women. But at the same time, we have, you know, the Amazons in Greek myth. Do we really think that a lot of fighting women turned up on the plains of Troy? I think this is a way of imagining a kind of group of fighters who are totally unlike the ones that you're used to. But at the same time, we do find

• 46:07Speaker 05

  Some evidence, and the most famous case is a grave labelled as BJ581, a grave that was where the gender of the occupant was re-examined back in 2017 and found to be female, even though this person was buried with swords, spears, a gaming board, two horses, a dog, I think as well. All the kind of accoutrements that have made the archaeologists who originally excavated the grave say, oh, high-ranking warrior here. And now the bones are female. Is this person now not a high-ranking warrior anymore? Or what were they? Were they a fighter?

• 46:53Speaker 05

  There wasn't enough skeletal trauma to suggest that they had wounds from fighting that had been healed. But were they strategists? Were they a kind of armchair general who decided how you might set about organising a raiding party or a campaign without actually going into battle? And of course, we always have to remember that the dead don't bury themselves. It's the living who bury the dead and decide what kinds of ceremonial and what kinds of objects they're going to go with. So there was a kind of flurry of excitement around this five or six years ago. But I think it's not possible to say there are a lot of fighting women.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  But what we do have to remember is that what we imagine when, or what you see in the movies, a bunch of Vikings appear on the coast. By the time you've got these huge armies, like the Great Viking, the Great Heathen Army of the mid 9th century in England, they've got vast numbers of women with them. And they're doing the cooking, they're doing the laundry, they have sexual partners, obviously. They're doing provisions, they're sourcing provisions, they're in the winter encampments, they're probably the ones making cheese and selling it to the natives. So an army needs its women if it's going on a long campaign. If it's a quick summer raid, you can whizz around.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  Raids and monasteries, burn down a few villages and go home at the end of the season, then you can probably manage with just men. But if you're you're coming on a big campaign like that, you need women. And places like the the great cemetery at Repton, for example, agog, a lot of female bones in there, too.

• 48:52Speaker 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.

• 49:26Speaker 06

  I always appreciate when thoughtful and luxurious design can help change the way a space feels. That's why I love how the 48-inch panoramic display stretches across the entire dashboard in my Lincoln Navigator SUV. It helps make it easy to stay connected while giving the cabin an open, expansive feel. Whether I'm juggling errands or just enjoying some quiet time, this feature brings a fresh perspective and helps elevate even the everyday moments. Visit lincoln.com to learn more.

• 50:16Eleanor Janega?

  I guess this brings me on to my next set of questions, which is, how do we know about these varying beliefs? You've talked a little bit about sagas, you know, the story of Brunhilde. You know, we're looking at graves, we're seeing what sorts of things people are buried with. Where does our understanding of Valhalla come from? I guess, what are our sources here?

• 50:41Speaker 05

  Well, our sources are a couple of texts. We have a description in an edic poem. And by the term edic, I mean the kind of poem that's usually mythological or heroical, and it's composed in a quite simple alliterative meter, like the meter of Old English or Old High German. So it's anonymous, it's oral, it's handed down over generations. It's written down in around 1270. So again, we've got the problem of Christians wrote this down. Did they change it? Did they?

• 51:23Speaker 05

  Probably not, but did they leave huge amounts out because they didn't like it? Very likely. And edic poetry is opposed to skuldic poetry, which is a very intricate, difficult poetic form, one which again is passed down orally till it's committed to writing, but one which is very difficult to tamper with in a sense. Because if you change one word, you're going to ruin the meter or the alliteration won't work or the rhymes won't work and so on. But skuldic poetry is usually praise poetry or lament. It has mythological allusions, but it doesn't really tell sustained stories about the gods.

• 52:03Speaker 05

  And so we have a poem called Grimnis Maol, in which the god Odin has come to a human hall because he's been told that the king has been stingy with guests. And the king seizes him and tortures him because he's come as a kind of wandering old man in disguise. And he begins to recite a monologue in which he gives a lot of information about the gods, including the names of the gods, their halls, their territories and so on. And this is where we learn the detail about Valhalla, that it's Odin's hall, that it's got gates that are so big, 540 men can march through side by side.

• 52:46Speaker 05

  And we have mentions of it in passing in some other poems. And then in the Prozedu, which is a mythological treatise written probably by the Icelandic scholar, politician, poet Snorri Sturtleson. It's sometimes called the Snorri edda as well as the Prozedu. Snorri writes an explanatory treatise about beliefs in the gods in order to tell aspiring poets what the mythological allusions are in the poems that are part of the kind of canon that they have to have to study, if you like. And so Snorri is very clear that

• 53:27Speaker 05

  the gods are not real, that they're refugees from Troy. It's a kind of euhemorist belief in which they've managed to clever humans have managed to persuade a lot of less clever humans to worship them. But he tells us quite a lot about Valhalla in that, mostly drawn from the the Eddic poems and explains about the Valkyries bringing the dead there and eating habits there and so on. He doesn't invent anything in particular about Valhalla. Everything that he has, he's sourced from Eddic poetry in some way. But what he does do later on in the Edda is to talk about some of the other halls

• 54:07Speaker 05

  that are mentioned in Old Norse poetry and kind of map them on to a Christian idea of heaven and hell. So after Ragnarok, when gods and humans come back, there's a very nice hall that's thatched with gold, very pleasant. And that's where the surviving gods sit around and talk about events of the past. And then there's a horrible place in an area called Nosterand, Corpse Strand. And the roof of that is made of serpents kind of woven together and the poison from the serpents drips inside. And Snorri says, that's where the bad people go.

• 54:46Speaker 05

  But that looks very much like Snorri imposing Christian ideas of punishment and hell on to a mythology that doesn't really have them.

• 54:56Eleanor Janega?

  Can you tell us a little bit more about the role of Valhalla in Ragnarok? You've mentioned already that, you know, what you're doing there theoretically, it's not just a heaven. You're not just hanging out, drinking meat and having a nice time. You're also hacking your friends to bits and getting your military skills ready for Ragnarok. And I always remember this because I had a really delightful illustrated Norse myths book as a child and the bits with the Vikings hacking each other up and then getting up and patting each other on their back.

• 55:27Eleanor Janega?

  Tickled me to no end. But i- is this something that also we would expect to see the Valkyries engaging in? Or the warriors on their own going to be at Ragnarok? Or what are we thinking of in terms of this army on Odin's side?

• 55:45Speaker 05

  Well, it's all a kind of massive disappointment in a way. Because they had been training for, you know, eons for this great battle. And in one poem, we're told that as they're marching out to the great battlefield, and we know the name of the battlefield, it's called Oskarpneir, which means unmade. And so it sounds like a kind of chaotic space where this confrontation between the einherja, as they're called, the fighters from Valheil, and presumably the giants, presumably the dead are going to come back on the great ship as well. Maybe they're fighting the other dead, as it were, the ones from Nipelheim, from Hell's Kingdom.

• 56:31Speaker 05

  But in one text, we're told that as they're riding across the Rainbow Bridge to get to this battlefield, the bridge breaks and they all fall in the river and the battle doesn't happen.

• 56:44Speaker 05

  And that's incredibly disappointing in all kinds of ways. And we only have very limited descriptions of Ragnarok, really in one poem, which is the source for it. And then various writers take bits out of that and retell it in slightly more detail. It's possible that they were riding back from the field, having had a very successful campaign of fighting. And then the bridge breaks and they all drown. But whatever happens, they're destined to be on the losing side because there's no place for them after Ragnarok. When the world comes back again, the old order is swept away and there's no more Valhalla.

• 57:27Speaker 05

  There's no more Odin and there's no more need to keep preparing for Ragnarok when Ragnarok has already happened and we're starting up again.

• 57:36Eleanor Janega?

  I think that's so interesting because you get this real ambiguity when you have a look at Norse mythology, which we're simply not used to. I think in the 21st century, we like these unambiguous, good guys, bad guys, heroic stories, happy endings, sort of a thing. I suppose my question is, why do you suppose it is that we are still interested in Norse myths when they are so different to what we're used to? I mean, why on earth did I, as a child, have a book of Norse mythology, you know, other than the fact that my parents raised me right? You know, what is it about this that that means that we still really want them to inhabit our imagination?

• 58:18Speaker 05

  There's a question I'm asked all the time, and you can see it's it's an interest which has kind of come and gone. So just after the Second World War, we weren't talking about this kind of thing at all because of the association with Nazism. But by as early as 1960, you're getting children's retellings again. And that's what I read when I was seven and what made me start to be interested in all of this. And I think there's a number of reasons for why we're interested in Norse mythology. I think partly it's because it seems accessible. There's not too much of it. And it's not a province

• 58:59Speaker 05

  of the elite. If you want to know a lot about Greek and Roman mythology, then in the 19th century, the early 20th century, at least, you would have to learn Latin, you would have to learn Greek if you thought you were going to understand it properly. And you would have to take in a lot of quite complicated stories. You have to remember all of the people in the Iliad and the Odyssey and so on. What you have in Norse is a group of gods who, there are not so many of them, they have fairly simple stories. Gods go and raid the giants, or the giants come and raid the gods. You have an arc from kind of creation to Ragnarok. You have stories about individual gods doing things. But

• 59:43Speaker 05

  you can also, and I think this is why the myth has been popular in Northern Europe and in in North America for the same kinds of reasons, that these are gods who kind of live in the same places that we live. They live where there are forests and mountains and the sea. They're not where the weather is bad. They're not living in in a kind of perpetual Mediterranean sunlight. They're wandering around through the olive groves in togas and sandals. Yeah, they're wearing furs and they've got to try and figure out how to keep warm. So I think it's partly that. I think you've got some very interesting relationships. You've got rivalries. You've got a kind of fifth colonist among the gods themselves in the form of Loki.

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  You've got monsters like Loki's children. You have beautiful women with their own particular roles. And you have a kind of family of gods, but they're not a family who are always fighting with each other, quite like the Greek gods. So I think it's it's partly we can imagine them living lives a bit like those of what we imagine our ancestors to have been like. And that, of course, lays open the myths to being the myths of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Because wasps are the kind of heirs of that kind of European stratum that emigrated to America.

• 1:01:11Speaker 05

  But I think if you look very closely at the Norse myths, in fact, not even that closely, you can see quite easily that what people with a kind of alt-right interpretation of the myths think were the good old days when men were brave and heroic, women were beautiful and knew their place. And everybody was very straightforward. And there were good guys and there were bad guys. Just doesn't stand up when you look at the cross-dressing, when you look at the kind of strange sexual practices, when you look at the things that drive the gods, which is very often either we really don't want to have to face Ragnarok. Can we find a way out of this? Or

• 1:01:56Speaker 05

  The giants have got something we want, how can we get our hands on it? Or how can we stop them getting their hands on our stuff? This very kind of reciprocal arrangement that's always being renegotiated all the time. I think those are things that people recognize in contemporary society. And so it's not just down to, oh, wow, Thor's really cool because he's got a big hammer. And he can fly around with it and whack people with it. It's, there's more going on in that kind of story world for people now, I think, than than the world of the Greek gods in some ways.

• 1:02:31Eleanor Janega?

  Can we talk a little bit about the misappropriation of Norse mythology, especially, you know, in the fascist movements of the 20th century? But, you know, it is one of those things, as you say, it's so funny to imagine, you know, here's a world where there's a story where Odin's horse is his son that he fathered with Loki, when Loki turned himself into a sexy mare and was supposed to see this as some kind of story that heralds, you know, a wonderful heterosexual white past, you know, it just, it seems at odds if you actually look at it for even five seconds and yet, you know, Heinrich Himmler existed, right?

• 1:03:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, though, I mean, to be fair, if we have to be fair to the Nazis, it was Himmler who was really, really crazy about this stuff. And Hitler liked it because he liked Wagner. And so he liked the ring, of course, and would drag all the party faithful off to Bayreuth to watch endless Wagner productions. And you did have some pretty crazy beliefs being encouraged by Himmler, but you also had beliefs that the Aryans were an original white, blonde, beautiful Superman, ubermensch kind of society. And their homeland, they must still be around somewhere in a kind of pure, untainted form

• 1:03:53Speaker 05

  in Iceland or in Tibet of all places or in various parts of South America. And could they be discovered if you sent expeditions to find them? So there was something about that belief, the kind of blutten boden belief, the belief of blood and soil, that there are particular stories about particular sets of gods that speak to you because.

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  They're the stories of your people and your people in a particular place. And I think there's, there's something in that, in that we find it more relatable

• 1:04:37Speaker 05

  as people living in the northern part of the world, to say these myths are myths that we can take for our own because they're set in a, a world which is like that of our, uh, what we understand our own early history to be like. But at the same time, the idea of blood is always very disturbing here. Who can, who can be part of this? Is it something that's genetically transmitted? Of course it's not. It's, it's something that's open to, to being understood by anybody from any part of the world and to be understood and thought about and enjoyed and

• 1:05:20Speaker 05

  to be reshaped in different ways. So I think, I think the misappropriation is very much the alt-right projecting onto Norse myth, a belief that there was a time when everybody was white. And, and a part of it has got to do with that kind of excitement that came about in the early sixties in North America when the Ingsdads found Lancy Meadows, the Norse settlement in Newfoundland, that showed that the, the Vinland sagas, while not being true in a historical sense, that the Scandinavians really did come to North America before Columbus.

• 1:06:05Speaker 05

  And then suddenly the original settlers were blonde, blue-eyed Scandinavians and not a bunch of Italians led by Columbus. And so the North, the white, the Anglo-Saxon Protestants could claim America back from the Mediterranean Catholic immigrant groups of later on. And so this is always enmeshed in the kinds of stories people want to tell themselves. And I think it's the same here in Britain, that the idea that you have Viking ancestry gets everybody really excited and they send off a DNA test to prove that they're 23% Viking.

• 1:06:46Speaker 05

  And what does that actually show if you're a normal person living a normal life now? I think that kind of yearning to discover your past and claim it for your own is part of a kind of personal myth-making that individualism in today's culture really encourages.

• 1:07:06Eleanor Janega?

  I think this also is quite an interesting point because we see Norse myths as still being a big part of our popular culture now. So I'm thinking the Marvel movies. Or how similar looking beliefs will sort of crop up in pantheons in imaginary places like, for example, Game of Thrones, or even in Tolkien's earlier works, if you actually sit down and read The Silmarillion, like me, because you're really cool, you see these kind of echoes there. And I mean, do you think that this is a desire when people say, oh, I'm 23% Viking, they just kind of want to think that they're some kind of a superhero or something like that?

• 1:07:45Speaker 05

  We can probably trace all of this back to the 18th century in the rise of Romanticism. And with that Romanticism and interest in primitive peoples, but primitive peoples who are ancestors, and in the British Isles, you began to get a kind of the hardy Anglo-Saxon versus the Normans who came over here with their fancy French ways and messed around with our language and so on. And part of that then fed into a rediscovery of Old English and then followed by translation, the availability of translations of Old

• 1:08:26Speaker 05

  Norse sagas and myths. And all of a sudden Iceland was a cool place and people like William Morris were going to visit it. But there was also a way of defining the English in particular as a race who'd always loved freedom, who had, and like the Vikings, travelled the world and made settlements in Greenland, in the British Isles, and in Normandy, and sailed down the Volga and through the Mediterranean and went to Byzantium and so on. So the British Empire was the legacy of the descendants of the Vikings. So it's tied into, I think, a very particular sort of British cultural myth that is that Viking spirit.

• 1:09:10Speaker 05

  That in part was an important factor in the self-image of the British Empire when it was at its height in the 19th century.

• 1:09:19Eleanor Janega?

  Caroline, I could probably talk to you about this for another five hours, but I'm afraid we've come to the end of our time. So I'll just have to thank you one more time. This has been an absolute delight.

• 1:09:30Speaker 05

  Well, it's been great fun to talk to you, really interesting.

• 1:09:34Eleanor Janega?

  Thanks once again to Carolyn for joining me. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you haven't already heard our previous Norse myths episodes on the creation of the world, Odin and Thor and Loki, do go back and have a listen to those three as well. You won't want to miss them.

• 1:09:53Eleanor Janega?

  Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film, The Medieval Apocalypse, released weekly and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription.

• 1:10:11Eleanor Janega?

  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 that you've gone medieval. Until next time.

• 1:10:43Speaker 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.