Pod Insights Short History Of... Introducing: Real Vikings - Episode 1 About this episode This is a preview of a brand-new show from the Noiser podcast network. Hosted by Iain Glen (Game of Thrones, Silo), Real Vikings takes you on a deep dive into the Viking age.
You’ll board longboats bound for new lands, follow mighty warlords, meet master navigators, and uncover the real figures behind the legends of the sagas.
But we begin on a quiet beach in the south of England, where a cold-blooded murder on the shingle sends shockwaves reverberating throughout Europe…
For more episodes, search ‘Real Vikings’ in your podcast app and hit follow. You can listen to Episode 2 straight after this.
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Transcript 6,845 words · 10 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Hi listeners. Today, we're bringing you a preview of a brand-new show from the Noiser Podcast Network. It's called "Real Vikings." Hosted by Ian Glenn, the show takes you on a deep dive into the Viking Age. You'll board longboats bound for new lands, from Greenland to North Africa, Constantinople to Canada. Follow mighty warlords like Eric Bloodaxe and Olga of Kyiv, meet master navigators like Leif Erikson, and uncover the real figures behind the legends of the sagas. You'll hear contributions from leading historians, as well as original music and immersive sound design. If you enjoy this taster episode, search "Real Vikings" in your podcast app and hit "Follow."
0:45 Speaker 00 You'll find more episodes waiting for you now.
0:55 Speaker 01 The year is 789 A.D. It's market day in the town of Dornwall, Rochester, Dorchester, as it's known today, in England's southwest. Dense clouds sweep in from the east, gathering mass. The air grows oppressive beneath them.
1:17 Speaker 01 Situated on the banks of the river Frum in the ancient kingdom of Wessex, Dorchester is an important settlement. It has royal connections. The West Saxon king has a winter residence here.
1:32 Speaker 01 A man patrols the market stalls with a watchful eye. There's a haughty swagger to his walk as he taps his staff on the cobbles. Traders touch their forelocks respectfully. This is not a man you want to cross. His woolen clothes are of quality, revealing his high status.
1:53 Speaker 01 Meet Beadahard. He's the reeve, an official responsible for ensuring that the king's laws are upheld. The market is a honeypot for ne'er-do-wells: drunks, pickpockets, cheats. And it's Beadahard's job to police and punish every kind of criminality. There's one rule above all others that he's determined to enforce: That the king must receive his portion, his cut, of every transaction that takes place in his realm. It's not just about the money, it's about maintaining order.
2:34 Speaker 01 When Beadahard overhears a group of men talking about some foreigners trading furs over the side of their boats, his ears prick up.
2:44 Speaker 01 The alleged infringement is taking place on the Isle of Portland, down on the coast, about thirty miles to the south. Beadahard hurries to the guild hall and gathers his attendants. If he's to confront these strangers, he's determined to impress on them the full dignity of his office.
3:06 Speaker 01 Dorchester is an old Roman town. The roads are laid out in the classic grid pattern, but it's fallen into disrepair since the legions left, long, long ago. The amphitheater turned to rubble, its arena overgrown, sheep nibble at the grass where gladiators once fought. The reeve leads his men along South Street. They leave through a gap in the town walls where the old gate used to be, then take the long, straight Roman road down to the sea.
3:38 Speaker 01 For Beadahard, the issue is simple. The foreigners are welcome to trade, but they must follow the rules. He sits up in the saddle. All he has to do is to show them who's boss.
3:55 Speaker 01 As they reach Chesel Beach, the thin isthmus that connects Portland to the mainland, Beadahard sees the strangers' boats drawn up ahead, three masted longboats with their sails stowed. Their crews mill about on the shingle, a campfire burns.
4:14 Speaker 01 Suddenly, they stop what they're doing and turn to face the approaching posse.
4:20 Speaker 01 Beadahard and his men draw to a halt.
4:25 Speaker 01 At close quarters, the size of the strangers is striking. They are a formidable sight.
4:33 Speaker 01 The reef touches a crucifix on his belt buckle. The ultimate source of his authority is gone. The strangers wear helmets of either leather or metal. Axes, daggers, and swords hang from their bouldricks, the loose belts slung about their hips. Their muscled arms are ringed with gold. One or two wear small gilded hammers around their necks, the symbol of a pagan god, Thor, the bringer of thunder. Their hair and beards appear well groomed. Dark green tattoos are visible on their exposed skin.
5:13 Speaker 01 Beadahard dismounts and strides towards them, one hand on the hilt of his dagger.
5:20 Speaker 01 He gestures towards a pile of lush Arctic firs. "You can't trade that here," he shouts, explaining that they will have to pass through a king's port in order to pay the correct taxes.
5:35 Speaker 01 The foreigners are unmoved by his words, if they even understand them.
5:41 Speaker 01 Then one of them reaches for a long-handled battle axe. His hand rises before shooting forwards and releasing the weapon.
5:52 Speaker 01 Time seems to slow down as it spins through the air. Beadahard is rooted to the spot as the axe hits its target, the middle of his chest.
6:07 Speaker 01 With a deafening roar, the men from the ships rush forward and drag Beadahard's stunned men from their horses.
6:22 Speaker 01 As the storm clouds break, the strangers load up their long, sleek vessels and heave them back into the water.
6:33 Speaker 01 The only trace of their presence: the smoldering fire and the Saxon bodies lying on the blood-soaked pebbles.
6:50 Speaker 01 Today, Chessel Beach, with its tidal lagoons, is one of Dorset's most popular tourist locations: a favoured spot for ramblers and bird watchers. It's hard to imagine it as a setting for such a shocking drama.
7:07 Speaker 01 So who were these men who pitched up on this beach a millennium ago, dispensing such violence and casual brutality? They are, in a word that will soon strike fear into the hearts of every Anglo-Saxon, every Celt, every Frisian, every Frank across the early Middle Ages: Vikings.
7:30 Speaker 01 Say the word Viking today, and it conjures a certain image: one represented in countless films, TV shows, video games, comic books and superhero franchises. One of pillage and savagery: a cliched world of horned helmets and blood eagles, of barbaric, pursuit heathens enthralled to gods and monsters, the Hell's Angels of the high seas. Men who came in longboats to terrorise and slaughter the innocents of Britain, France, Ireland and beyond. If those men who killed Bejartard are anything to go by, then certain aspects of this legend are true. But it only tells part of a bigger story:
8:15 Speaker 01 of a people who were so much more than the fur-clad thugs of popular imagination.
8:22 Speaker 01 The Vikings hailed from a sophisticated and developed civilization. They were master navigators, fearless explorers, diplomats, traders, craftsmen, storytellers, and, yes, warriors. Moreover, they were adventurers, men and women whose feet still defy the imagination. A people who crossed vast oceans and discovered new lands, building up an impressive trading empire that spanned four continents for centuries.
8:57 Speaker 02 The Viking Age is perhaps the most revolutionary, crucial, and seminal period ever in the history of the Scandinavians.
9:07 Speaker 03 We're dealing with a group of people who really transformed the history of Europe. There's a real sense in which there's almost no parts of Europe they leave completely untouched.
9:16 Speaker 04 They founded just about every major city in Ireland. They founded the first centralized state in what is now Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus. They founded perhaps the greatest of the medieval kingdoms, which is the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. And then, of course, medieval France and England were also largely created by the Vikings.
9:35 Speaker 05 They ended up travelling these thousands and thousands of miles across the North Atlantic, heading west, settling Greenland, reaching the edge of the North American continent. They end up all the way in the Arctic. They go east, they go down the waterways of the Eurasian steppes, all the way to Byzantium, even to Baghdad.
9:55 Speaker 06 What really fascinates, I think, is this exploration, this human urge to move beyond the known and into something that has not yet been discovered.
10:07 Speaker 01 Much of their history was written by their enemies, which means their true achievements were often overlooked, the achievers themselves demonized.
10:18 Speaker 01 But the Vikings changed the world and were themselves changed as they sailed and battled their way through it.
10:27 Speaker 07 The Vikings, they do have a unique place in the public mindset. They are framed as the barbaric other. And there is something fascinating about that. And more than that, this idea of people who left everything behind to quite literally sail over the horizon.
10:45 Speaker 08 The Viking period is still extremely compelling today, partly because it's just so colorful. It's full of dramatic figures, dramatic events.
10:55 Speaker 09 They've got amazing tattoos and they've got these wonderful hairstyles and they're the absolute epitome of cool.
11:06 Speaker 01 I'm Ian Glenn, and from the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Real Vikings.
11:36 Speaker 01 We start with a whodunit. Who are Biedhard's killers exactly? These men who appeared out of the blue on that Dorset beach 12 centuries ago. Contemporary accounts refer to those who murdered the king's reeve as Danish, Northmen, Norse, or even just heathens. They are all synonyms for Viking. All we really know for sure is that these killers, these Vikings, came from the north, from the land we call Scandinavia.
12:11 Speaker 01 The world back then is very different to the one we know today. The western part of the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, over 300 years previously. Since then, there's been a period of decline across Europe. The Dark Ages, as they are usually called, a time of great social upheaval, a sense of barbarians at the gate of classical civilization. The name tells all. It's an era with little documented testimony as to what actually occurred.
12:44 Speaker 01 By the ninth century, when the Vikings begin to make their mark, we do know that two new power blocks have emerged, both dominated by the new religions that have swept across from the east. Francia is a Christian territory. It covers much of modern-day France, Germany, the Low Countries and northern Italy, with its emperor Charlemagne, God's anointed ruler on earth. Further south, there is the vast Umayyad Caliphate, a Muslim realm which stretches across North Africa and the Middle East, from Spanish Al-Andalus to Persia.
13:24 Speaker 01 Out on the fringes, in Britain or Ireland, say, the more inconsequential things become.
13:34 Speaker 01 England, at the end of the eighth century, doesn't exist. Its emergence as a nation is a story for another day. Back then, the land that we now call England is divided into four main kingdoms: East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex. They have emerged out of the power vacuum left at the end of Roman rule in its province of Britannia. The native population of Celtic-speaking Britons has been faced with an influx of Germanic migrants from northern Europe: tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians. Out of this melting pot, a new people have emerged. They speak what we classify today as Old English
14:18 Speaker 01 and have come to be known as Anglo-Saxons.
14:23 Speaker 01 By Beadahard's time, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are resolutely Christian. The process of conversion from paganism, worshipping the same old gods that the Vikings still cling to, began in the late sixth century when missionaries sent by Pope Gregory landed in Kent.
14:43 Speaker 01 To the Anglo-Saxons, to people like Beadahard, the northern lands beyond British shores are a distant and unsettling mystery. An old idea rooted in the pagan past links the north with hell. Tucked away at the very top of the map, the region we know as Scandinavia is a land far, far away.
15:08 Speaker 01 Across the fjords and mountains, this territory of the north plays host to a rural society. Most folks live in villages and isolated farms, growing crops and raising cattle, as well as hunting and fishing. People subsist on fish, grain, and meat—beef, pork, goat, venison, sometimes horse. They wear simple clothes spun from wool, flax, and hemp. They are a practical people, handy craftsmen skilled at carpentry, metalwork.
15:43 Speaker 01 The further north you go, the sparser the villages become, breaking up into individual farmsteads. But even in these remote settings, up in the Hologa land, land of high fire or the northern lights, bonds of community hold scattered neighbors together.
16:04 Speaker 01 Lars Brownworth is the author of Seawolves: The History of the Vikings.
16:10 Speaker 04 About a third of Norway is above the Arctic Circle. This was a punishing climate, and so hospitality was obviously a very important thing. And women usually had greater rights than in the rest of medieval Europe because they were largely in charge of making sure there was enough food for the winter. And this is obviously a job that lives depend on.
16:33 Speaker 01 It's a vast area. From the tip of Norway's North Cape to the present-day Danish-German border, it's over 1,500 miles. That's further than the distance from Copenhagen to Rome. The geographic variance is immense, from frozen tundra through dense spruce tiger to temperate grassland.
16:58 Speaker 01 Eleanor Baraklaff is a senior lecturer at Børstvar University, and author of Embers of the Hands: Modern Histories of the Viking Age.
17:08 Speaker 05 So we've got a huge span in terms of geography. We've also got a huge span in terms of the different sorts of people who are living in this world. So for example, if you're a trader or a craftsperson in Denmark, your experience of life is going to be much more multicultural, but much less centred compared to, say, if you live in an agriculturally prosperous valley somewhere in the lowlands of Norway or Sweden, where generations of your family have farmed. So we already have to start breaking down this idea that it's
17:49 Speaker 05 just one thing and that we can know what it would be like to live at one time in the Viking Age. It's much more complex than that.
18:02 Speaker 01 But there's one thing that unites all Scandinavians: water.
18:09 Speaker 01 It connects. It defines. Travelling by land across a snow-bound, mountainous interior is slow and hazardous. Far easier to navigate a river network from one trading settlement to another, or skirt the jagged coast of Norway, ducking in and out of fjords, sailing the great north way that gives that land its name.
18:36 Speaker 01 In the Viking Age, the sea is not a barrier, it's a pathway. It leads to a world of opportunity, new sources of wealth, new markets to trade in, new targets to plunder.
18:50 Speaker 01 And it turns out there are riches aplenty, right there across the North Sea, the so-called Quail Road, just a few days' sail away to the west.
19:04 Speaker 01 Quite why and when Scandinavian warriors start harassing the coastal communities of Britain is open to debate. We shall come to that shortly. But it is this seaborne plundering that most likely gives us the term Viking.
19:22 Speaker 05 The word Viking is really interesting. It does come, at least in one form, from Old Norse and is contemporary with the Viking Age itself. So there's a version of the word Viking, which is vikingur, which is essentially a raider or a pirate. There's also a very related form of that word, which is essentially to go on a Viking, to go on a raid.
19:44 Speaker 01 Another suggestion is that it's related to the Old Norse word for a bay, vik. So a Viking is someone who comes from a bay. There's also a region in Norway called Viken. Perhaps the original Vikings came from there.
20:01 Speaker 01 Whatever the origins of the word, its meaning soon broadens out.
20:07 Speaker 01 Davide Zori, Associate Professor of History and Archaeology at Baylor University, is author of Age of Wolf and Wind: Voyages Through the Viking World.
20:19 Speaker 06 Viking essentially meant a seaborne pirate. So not all Scandinavians of the Viking Age would have been, or considered themselves to have been Vikings. Only once you get on a boat and try to pirate stuff, would you become a Viking.
20:37 Speaker 01 In the beginning, going a Viking is something you do to supplement your regular income, an eighth-century side hustle.
20:45 Speaker 06 And that's how it started, with people going seasonally abroad to opportunistically engage in some kind of wealth production. That could be trade, or it could be raiding. And I think sometimes they probably brought trading goods on board and then decided as they showed up whether it'd be more profitable to raid or to trade.
21:12 Speaker 00 Hi listeners. If you're enjoying this taster episode, then search Real Vikings in your podcast app and hit follow. You can listen to more episodes of Real Vikings straight after this one.
21:25 Speaker 00 This October on the Noiser Podcast Network, Real Dictators returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On Short History of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On Real Survival Stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea, and a man is struck blind, all alone, at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen Stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews, and in Sherlock Holmes' short stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in The Sign of Four.
22:07 Speaker 00 Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.
22:16 Speaker 01 At this time, as the eighth century draws to a close, the modern nations of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, like England, have yet to come into being. Power is concentrated locally in the hands of chieftains and warlords, and based on close bonds of allegiance. It's a shifting, unstable political picture.
22:38 Speaker 06 We have to imagine a constellation of chieftainsies that are in alliance with each other, that are fighting each other, sometimes expanding, claiming more power, and then, I would say, collapsing again.
22:51 Speaker 01 We generally think of Vikings engaging in overseas adventures, with their victims being mostly foreigners. But they fight each other too, in what we might call Viking-on-Viking action. Ultimately, dominance comes through wealth: silver, which is used to buy the loyalty of supporters.
23:13 Speaker 06 The drive of a sort of alpha-type chieftain to control and to sustain power is one of the motors, engines, of the Viking Age that pushed them beyond their own shores as they tried to accumulate more wealth to reinvest in the political economy and generate bonds of loyalty with their supporters.
23:41 Speaker 01 Religion too plays a key role in convincing men to follow charismatic leaders on long voyages to unknown lands. Unlike much of Europe, Scandinavia is still pagan. Stefan Brink is professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands and a research professor at Cambridge. He's the author of Thraldom: A History of Slavery in the Viking Age.
24:08 Speaker 02 Well, the pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia was a polytheistic religion, with many gods and goddesses, minor deities, living with the people in the barn, in hills, etc., in a landscape charged with saccharity and with a mythology we today find fascinating.
24:38 Speaker 01 We'll delve into Norse religion more fully in a later episode. But for now, the thing to remember is that for a Viking warrior, death is something to be welcomed, not feared. To die with your sword in your hand ensures immortality, allowing you to enjoy a glorious afterlife in Valhalla, the Hall of the Fallen. That belief gives rise to a culture of warfare, a sense of fearlessness, of invincibility even, underpinned by a code of valor.
25:11 Speaker 06 I think that it's important to consider the ideological motivation. I think that the fatalism and the push towards honour, generating stories about your accomplishments, was a high motivator.
25:25 Speaker 01 But alongside religion and mythology, there may be more practical considerations at play in pushing the Vikings out from Scandinavia.
25:34 Speaker 05 It's also been suggested that there might be something of a gender imbalance. So essentially, there are fewer women for the men to marry and settle down with and kind of build up a farmstead and raise a family.
25:54 Speaker 01 The Vikings' practice of polygamy doesn't help with the most powerful men taking multiple wives. It provides an incentive for lesser males to venture abroad in search of foreign brides, or come back home with wealth they can use to compete for the hand of a local girl. Another driver is climate. At the time, there are some significant meteorological shifts. Pragya Vora is lecturer in medieval history at the University of York.
26:27 Speaker 09 One likely explanation is that there was, as a consequence of a sort of warm period, the medieval warm period, an explosion in population. And as a consequence, there wasn't enough land in Scandinavia. And so people started moving abroad to take their chances, really, to make something of their lives.
26:53 Speaker 01 In some cases, the accumulation of wealth overseas comes through what we might call legitimate trading, exchanging resources such as furs and walrus tusks for silver. But in the Viking Age, the men from Scandinavia will come to specialise in one particularly lucrative form of commerce.
27:15 Speaker 02 In the ninth century, the slave trade with the Muslim world exploded on the continent. Slavery became very important for the Scandinavians in the Viking Age. Slaves became the major trading commodity for the Scandinavians. And slavery, I believe, in a way came to characterise the Viking period at that time.
27:44 Speaker 01 In fact, so rife is slavery that it forms part of a three-tiered Viking society. At the top, there's the chieftain, or jarl, from which we get our word "earl". Below him come the freemen, or karls. And right at the bottom sit the slaves, or thralls, the origin of another English expression, "to be enthralled to someone".
28:12 Speaker 01 The Vikings are not the only ones practicing slavery at the time. The Christian Anglo-Saxons do it too. But whatever romantic ideas we may entertain about the Norsemen, we have to acknowledge that their economy is founded on the trafficking of human beings.
28:35 Speaker 01 It is partly their notoriety as slavers that accounts for the Vikings' enduring reputation for violence. But it also has a lot to do with the sources we're using.
28:48 Speaker 01 Professor Elizabeth Rowe, reader in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Vikings in the West: The Legend of Ragnar Lothbrok and His Sons.
29:01 Speaker 08 Nearly all of the contemporary accounts that we have for the Scandinavians in Western Europe are from the point of the victims of Viking raids and attacks.
29:16 Speaker 01 A by-product of the Vikings' paganism is that, when held up against Christendom, they are comparatively illiterate. No Bible, no libraries, no monastic scholars to record events. Anything approximating a written language is carved in a crude, stick-like alphabet we know as runes, with each of its 24 characters corresponding to a vocal sound. It's a functional means of notification, rather than a means of archive or record. As a result, the history of the Vikings in this early period is that their story is told by their victims, those who hate them.
29:58 Speaker 01 Evidence written by Scandinavians themselves, for instance in the epic Icelandic sagas, doesn't come until much later.
30:07 Speaker 08 Partly it's a problem that in Scandinavia, writing didn't come until the conversion to Christianity, let's say around the year 1000. And so whatever was written down about the Viking Age was written down hundreds of years after the events that are being told.
30:26 Speaker 01 One source that historians lean on heavily is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle is an old English manuscript, a collection of annals documenting the history of the Anglo-Saxon people. It was begun in the ninth century at the court of King Alfred of Wessex. It's this source that recounts the attack on the king's reef, Bejardahard, in Portland.
30:52 Speaker 01 The Chronicle pinpoints the eighth century as the time when Viking raids kick off. This is the traditional narrative, that the Viking Age begins in the late 700s. Indeed, the Chronicle tells us that the three ships involved in the murder of Bejardahard are the first ships of Danish men to come to England. Actually, we know that there were Norsemen trading in England for at least a century before this. And recently analyzed DNA evidence suggests that people with Scandinavian heritage may have been present in Britain even earlier than that.
31:29 Speaker 01 Nordic remains found in the city of York have been dated to as far back as between the second and fourth centuries AD, well before the wide-scale Anglo-Saxon settlement. And it's likely that those men on Chesel Beach are not the first Scandinavians that Bejardahard has ever dealt with either. The way he gallops off to confront them suggests he was not expecting trouble. It seems he thought they were merchants, not marauders.
31:58 Speaker 09 When he sees these three ships from a foreign land show up in Portland, he goes rushing down to meet them, mainly to try and get them to leave in order to go to a king's port. And the reason for that is that when merchants come in, they have dues to pay, and those dues need to be paid in a king's port. So he wasn't really trying to shoo them away or scare them away. He was just trying to do the right thing.
32:30 Speaker 01 Clearly, the presence of Northmen and Dorset is nothing new. What is, shockingly so, is the violence they meet out. If not the first Scandinavians in England, Bayardahard's killers are the first recorded Vikings. It's a crucial distinction, one that we now understand, though it may not have been clear at the time, between earlier traders and these new raiders.
33:02 Speaker 00 This October, on the Noiser Podcast Network, Real Dictators returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On Short History Of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On Real Survival Stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea, and a man is struck blind, all alone, at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen Stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews. And in Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in The Sign of Four.
33:45 Speaker 00 Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.
33:54 Speaker 01 The Anglo-Saxons may have found the Viking raiders enigmatic and terrifying, but to the Scandinavians themselves, England was less of a mystery. They likely had longstanding knowledge of its shores. Before the Viking Age, a network of trading settlements known as emporia, or wicks in Old English, sprang up along rivers and coastal areas across Europe. These include Ypezwick and Norwick, Ipswich and Norwich today. There's also Hamwick, which becomes Southampton, while Londonwick is London, and Earfulwick, today's York.
34:34 Speaker 06 Based on the trading that took place in the pre-Viking Age, the Scandinavians had a great deal of information about where the towns were, where the stored wealth might be, let's say, in monasteries, perhaps.
34:49 Speaker 01 Unsurprisingly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is Anglo-centric. But it's not just England where the Scandinavians have been active. Perhaps even earlier, the Vikings were founding emporia in mainland Europe and striking out towards the east.
35:07 Speaker 06 They were trading even as far as what's today Estonia, Lithuania. We have pretty clear evidence of that.
35:24 Speaker 01 It's 2008. We're in the village of Salme on the island of Sarema in Estonia. A team of construction workers is digging a trench for an electric cable. The bucket of the hydraulic excavator claws at the earth, breaking the ground and dragging rubble backwards. Suddenly, one of the workers cries out for the operator to stop. The man crouches down and peers into the hole. A moment later, he holds up the object that caught his eye. It's a human skull, darkly discolored and covered in mud. His fellow workers rush forward to join him.
36:07 Speaker 01 Before long, they have retrieved a small pile of human bones, together with other strange items. Work comes to a standstill.
36:18 Speaker 01 At first, it's thought that these are the remains of a World War II soldier, but they don't look like 20th-century artifacts. An archaeologist, Marge Konzer from the University of Tartu, is called in. Konzer is in no doubt that the find comes from much, much earlier, over a thousand years, in fact. Among the items recovered, she identifies an ancient spearhead and gaming pieces.
36:47 Speaker 01 Gradually, over a period of months, Konzer and her team uncover what appears to be a boat. There are no actual timbers left, they've rotted away. But the ground is discoloured where they once were. And 275 iron rivets are still in place, clearly indicating the shape of a 38-foot-long craft. It is a longboat of Scandinavian origin, and with seven dead men buried with the ship, propped up on their benches as if about to row into the next world.
37:22 Speaker 01 The men are all aged between 18 and 45. Some of the bones bear the marks of lethal wounds. These are warriors who died in battle.
37:34 Speaker 01 Konzer is in no doubt, what she has uncovered is a Viking warship. But here's the thing. She and her colleagues date the burial site to between 700 and 750 AD. When a second vessel is found nearby, it's clear that this is a site of major archaeological significance. At 55 feet long, it is larger and even more spectacular than the first. Remarkably, it's equipped with a mast with fragments of sails still attached. This makes it the earliest-known sailing ship ever found in the Baltic.
38:13 Speaker 06 And that pushes the mast and the sail on top of a wooden ship back by 40 or so years. Alright, so now we're back to the middle of the 8th century. And then with that, we get this debate of when does the Viking Age begin?
38:30 Speaker 01 Inside the hull of the second boat, archaeologists make a macabre discovery. The remains of a further 33 warriors, stacked neatly in rows and buried beneath a covering of shields.
38:44 Speaker 01 Isotope analysis of the men's teeth will reveal that many of them came from the Meila Valley in Sweden. Their weapons similar to ones recovered from other boat burials there.
38:57 Speaker 01 The Saumey find suggests that the Viking Age began at least 50 years, possibly even a century, earlier than once believed.
39:13 Speaker 01 Ship burials like those at Salmy underline just how central boats are to the lives and deaths of Viking men and women. The longboat is at the heart of a technological revolution taking place in Scandinavia. Thanks to advances in shipbuilding techniques, they're evolving into sophisticated war machines.
39:35 Speaker 06 The Viking ship is the catalyst of the Viking Age.
39:39 Speaker 09 They're getting more streamlined, particularly with the development of the true keel. They're more able to sail further out into the ocean. So we start getting ships that can go not just along coastlines, but can cross the open ocean and deal with particularly the strong ocean currents that you find in the North Atlantic.
40:03 Speaker 01 It's hard to overstate the importance of the keel to the Vikings. It was part of their cultural identity. Even the range of mountains that runs down the spine of Norway is named Shirlen, the Norse for keel. Viking longships are "klinka" built, which means they're made from overlapping planks. The timber used is often green wood, preferably oak, freshly hewn with axes and with pine pitch used to seal it all up. This creates an incredibly flexible structure. The planks open and close, breathing like a living creature as the hull passes through the water.
40:46 Speaker 06 It allows them to show up quickly, hold their shallow drafted ships onto the beaches and sail out quickly. They can go up the rivers with these shallow drafted boats. They can easily take down or put up their sails, so it makes these ships really versatile.
41:04 Speaker 04 And because the keels are relatively shallow and the ships are clinker-built, they can actually be lifted by as few as ten men, so they can sail then up rivers as well as across oceans. And they do it at truly frightening speed. They could cover about 50 miles in a day, and even a cavalry using a good Roman road could do about 30. So the Vikings are just faster than everyone. I think the most telling example of this is for the first two centuries of the Viking Age, so roughly 800 to 1,000 AD, there is no naval battle in northern Europe except between Viking fleets. So they just have complete dominance of the sea.
41:46 Speaker 01 With their prowls carved as elaborate dragons, the better to ward off evil spirits, these longships are an awesome sight. Their devastating impact is soon to be felt right across Europe.
42:06 Speaker 01 Back in England, in the wake of the attack on Beadahard and his men, Viking raids are on the increase. A charter issued in 792 by King Offa of Mercia talks of fleets of seaborne pagans causing trouble along the coast. 250 miles north, a year after Offa's charter, a Viking raid is about to take place, which will send shockwaves throughout the whole of the Christian world.
42:44 Speaker 01 It's June 8, 793 AD. We're on the holy island of Lindisfarne, just off the northeast coast of England, in the kingdom of Northumbria. There's a bleak, craggy beauty to the place, lashed by the winds and rains of the North Sea. It faces out towards a pewter horizon. A causeway connects it with the mainland at low tide. When the tide's in, it's completely cut off.
43:15 Speaker 01 Isolated as it is, Lindasfarn is an important religious centre. It's the shrine of the 7th-century hermit Saint Cuthbert, a place of pilgrimage where a thriving community of monks live. They wear the coarse woolen habits of the Benedictine order, dyed black to symbolise repentance.
43:38 Speaker 01 Today, there's a new arrival, a fifteen-year-old novice. The novice is shown round his new home by a senior monk. Like many early medieval monasteries, the sprawling abbey is a working farm. The monks grow wheat and raise cattle. The calves hides are valuable sources of vellum, a key component in the abbey's other main activity: the production of illuminated manuscripts. The novice is taken to the room where the scribes and illustrators work, the tonsured heads shaved at the crown, bowed in concentration. He gazes in wonder at the gorgeous folios taking shape.
44:22 Speaker 01 Inside the church, a group of pilgrims kneel before the shrine. A rich lord presents the abbot with a gold chalice, a sign of his devotion.
44:34 Speaker 01 The wealth on open display is dazzling. Gifts from esteemed pilgrims include gold and silver plates and liturgical objects studied with precious gemstones.
44:46 Speaker 01 But the most treasured object of all has been made right here at the abbey: the famous Lindasfarn gospels, enclosed in a priceless, jewel-encrusted leather binding.
44:59 Speaker 01 It may seem strange to us that such valuable artefacts are not locked away in a strong room, but as far as the monks are concerned, no Christian would dare rob the church. It would mean eternal damnation.
45:16 Speaker 01 Abel summons the monks to worship. Prayer and work, work and prayer. This will be the novice's life from now on. He is assigned to duties in the vegetable garden. On his way, he pauses at a clifftop to gaze out to sea.
45:35 Speaker 01 Suddenly, he spots a few dark specks on the horizon. The specks take on shape. They're ships.
45:46 Speaker 01 Other monks join him, tracking the fleet's approach. There's no doubt now, the vessels are coming towards Linda's farm. And the tide is in, which means the community is effectively trapped on the island.
46:01 Speaker 01 The boats have appeared from the north. As they get closer, the monks are able to make out the dragon-shaped prowls riding the waves. The square sails too are distinctive, brightly decorated with animal symbols. These are the longships of the Norsemen.
46:21 Speaker 01 Soon the ships are close enough to hear the ferocious roar of the men sailing them, and to see that they are armed. The monks can make out the shields arrayed along the sides of each boat, round and colorful with an iron boss in the center. Some of the monks run in terror towards the church. God and the bones of Saint Cuthbert will protect them. But the young novice remains rooted to the spot. He stares down as the shallow-killed boats hit the beach at speed. He sees the Norsemen leap out, their leather boots striking Northumbrian territory. In their hands, they brandish axes, swords, daggers, bows, and arrows.
47:06 Speaker 01 A delegation of senior monks has gone down to the beach to find out what the men from the boats want.
47:13 Speaker 01 The novice watches in horror as they are ruthlessly struck down.
47:21 Speaker 01 One of the attackers looks up, glaring at the novice. The boy finds his feet and runs to join the others inside the church. A hail of arrows hits the door.
47:34 Speaker 01 Soon after, a violent hammering begins, axe blades smashed through the wood.
47:41 Speaker 01 The boy hides behind a pillar and watches as the attackers charge at the defenseless monks and put them to the sword.
47:50 Speaker 01 Blood washes across the floor. The air is filled with the sounds of slaughter. The crunch of blades on bone, the cries of the dying, and the wolf-like howls of their killers.
48:09 Speaker 01 The raiders vandalize the church and gather priceless objects. They even dig up the altar and drag that away.
48:19 Speaker 01 As a final blasphemy, they rip the jeweled cover from the Linder's Farm Gospel and add it to their haul. They have no use for the pages. The novice is yanked from his hiding place.
48:34 Speaker 01 Certain that he is about to die, he utters a prayer to God.
48:42 Speaker 01 Perhaps his prayer is answered. The Vikings spare his life, for now at least. He's bound in chains and loaded into a boat, together with other survivors. The Norsemen push their ships back into the water.
48:59 Speaker 01 A very different future awaits the novice now.
49:08 Speaker 00 This October on the Noiser Podcast Network. Real Dictators returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On Short History of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On Real Survival Stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea and a man is struck blind, all alone, at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen Stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews. And in Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in The Sign of Four.
49:51 Speaker 00 Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.
49:59 Speaker 01 Anglo-Saxon intellectuals, like the cleric Alquin, struggle to make sense of the horrific incident. A revered holy shrine destroyed by heathens, the monks murdered and trafficked into slavery. In one letter, Alquin writes: "Behold the church of Saint Cuthbert, spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments, a place more venerable than all in Britain, is given as prey to pagan peoples." According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, there were warning signs before the attack.
50:38 Speaker 05 It's full of portents, it's full of, you know, the whole drama of the natural world sort of rises up in concert with these raids, you know, here there were dreadful sheets of lightning and dragons were seen flying through the air and there was terrible famine.
50:56 Speaker 01 Alquin also mentions a bloody rain which fell out of a clear sky onto Saint Peter's church in York. Despite these omens, the attack on Linda's Farn stuns everyone. From the Viking perspective, everything went according to plan.
51:15 Speaker 09 The Vikings who came in, they got what they wanted. They looted, they took all the gold and silver that was held at Lindisfarne, and that was them sorted. There's nothing more complex about that.
51:29 Speaker 01 Lindisfarne has also provided them with a business model that they can scale up, targeting remote holy sites, not just in England, but all across coastal Europe.
51:41 Speaker 06 This is a place where wealth has been stored up, where the elites sometimes are retiring to and giving wealth to monks so that they have prayers for their souls after their death.
51:53 Speaker 01 Monasteries like Lindisfarne are isolated and vulnerable, often undefended. They may be protected by God, but that only works if you're a believer.
52:05 Speaker 01 As for the monks...
52:07 Speaker 06 They're not... These aren't the most fierce soldiers around. The Vikings, to me, are the ultimate opportunists. They're gonna go where the potential is, and they're gonna go where it's easy.
52:21 Speaker 01 In the aftermath of the attack on Lindisfarne, the four kingdoms of England are left reeling. Panic even spreads as far as the Frankish Empire, where Alquin is living. In a dispatch to King Ethred of Northumbria, he writes, "Never before has such terror appeared in Britain.
52:42 Speaker 01 The Viking Age has truly begun."
52:54 Speaker 01 In the next episode,
52:57 Speaker 01 the Vikings step up their raids, hitting more sites in Britain and Ireland, as well as northern France. Their arrival there will plunge the Frankish Empire into an existential struggle: Christian versus pagan, good versus evil. It will culminate in an extraordinary attack on Paris, led by the most famous Northman of all: Ragnar Lothbrok. That's next time.
53:40 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening. To hear more episodes of Real Vikings right now, find the show in your podcast app and hit follow, or listen at noiser.com.
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