Show 70 - Twilight of the Aesir II

far north of Europe and the last holdouts who still believe in the ancient pagan Germanic

“gods of the Norse saga as the Odons and the Thoras and people like that.”

If you didn't happen to hear part one, you might want to catch that before you hear this show. Both shows are actually a continuation of our 2012 series called Thorazangels and if you want that, that's available for a nominal fee from our website. One last thing, stay tuned at the end of today's show for some announcements of live appearances.

I might be making an Italian near you. So without further ado, let's kick off today's

ending of our two-part series here with twilight of the eyes here, part two. December 7th. It's history. A date which will live in in the events. The figures. I take pride in the words "The drum is been ironed, dear Lena." This is the world which all care down this year. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not

their president should come. Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history in our document,

“and remember that we are not descended from a fearful man. It's hardcore history.”

Parallel universes. Simulation theory. Infinite world hypotheses. Other dimensions. I'm not smart enough to understand these concepts, but I have been fascinated by them ever since I was first exposed to the ideas. Obviously, these are concepts that people like physicists,

study. Another reason I wouldn't understand them could never understand the math or you just

take it to face value. But I've often wondered if such concepts couldn't explain or put some sort of scientific sort of patina or as they would say in the UK patina. On top of some of the ancient beliefs that earlier people had that they talked about in ways that have come down to us as fairy stories or myths or legends or folklore that would be much more easy for us to grasp and accept if some physicist explained it to us as something that was a part of another dimensional realm or a

parallel universe or something connected to a physicist type theory that sounds a lot more logical and acceptable than talking about the existence of something like elves or trolls or of course magic. Sometimes I wonder if earlier peoples couldn't understand those higher concepts, how would they explain things in their world that they saw or thought they saw or believed in. As we've said before, if a lot of people believe in something like magic, fervently, doesn't that create a reality

in all its own? There's something known as the Tinkerbell effect, maybe you've heard of it.

“Do you remember the Walt Disney production of Peter Pan? There's this moment where you have to”

believe in Tinkerbell or Tinkerbell is going to die. If you go look up the definition of it, it describes the phenomenon of thinking something exists because people believe it exists, right? Magic, sorcery, elves, dwarves, trolls, valkyries, norns, these are Viking belief systems. Things that they believed in would to be interesting if it turned out someday that these were their representations of things that a physicist could explain in scientific terms.

One of my favorite parts of any Shakespeare play and I'm not alone in this is the earliest part of Hamlet. We have this moment where the night watch comes and tells Hamlet and Horatio is somewhat skeptical. We would call him today more of a scientific terra firma kind of guy

So Hamlet and Horatio run up to the battlements to sure enough the ghost appears.

Horatio and his wonderfully skeptical, but can't deny what he's seeing in front of him sort of way, is stunned. Doesn't believe in ghosts and says, "Oh, day and night, but this is wonder strange." Then Hamlet replies were that wonderful line that I feel covers up a lot of what we just said. He says, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than a dreamt of in your philosophy." Suggesting, of course, that the human imagination is limited and there are many things we don't know

things that haven't been discovered and in fact, things we haven't even dreamt of.

As we've said about magic before, what happens if lots of people believe in it and act on it?

Magic might not be real, but the effects are. If some king goes to the oracle at Delphi in the ancient world and ask the, the prophetess on the oracles seat, should I go and attack this

“rival kingdom and the prophetess says, "Yes, you should go and attack this kingdom." And he does,”

well, that may be a bunch of bunk, but he acted on it and people died and kingdoms rose or fell because of it, how real does that make the magic? If you believe yourself to be cursed and then things start going wrong, does that double down

on this belief that you're cursed? And does your mind start working against you? I mean,

there's a lot of things here where the human mind can interact with belief in a way that manifests a kind of reality that even if it is a phantom sort of reality at its core, manifests in real world consequences, maybe the effect of the human mind and positive or negative thinking is just as much of a physicist, undiscovered country as parallel universes, simulation theory, infinite world hypotheses or other dimensions. But when you talk about what the people in the

Viking world believed in, they believed in elves and dwarves and trolls and valkyries and norms, they also believed in beings like giants who they believed were an integral part of the creation of the universe and may not have been these overly large beings that we normally associate with the term, just like their view of dwarves, may not have involved beings who were smaller than human in stature, but many of these beings constituted what historian Neil Price in his book

the Viking way refers to as the invisible population. And he says that to many in the Viking world,

“the invisible population of things like elves may have been more important to their daily life”

than the gods themselves because in a polytheistic religion, the gods had their own problems and people were just one of the things that they may have been concerned with. This is difficult for those of us raised in an environment of monotheism to understand, just like trying to get your mind around a belief system that may not have been orthodox and may not have been learned and may not have been understood by everyone similarly, right? They didn't all read the Bible and learn in Sunday school how things were,

people just had an innate understanding and it could differ person to person in the Viking way, Neil Price writes quote, "In the same spirit as Philip Velocats' description of the gods of classical Greece, the worship in air quotes, required by the Norse Pantheon, was not adoration or gratitude or even unreserved approval and was thus utterly unlike the Christian relationship to the divine. The religion of the Isaiah and the Vanier demanded only a recognition that they existed as an

integral and immutable part of human nature and society and of the natural world and that is such they possessed an inherent rightness, perhaps even a kind of beauty. If one wished to avoid disaster, it was necessary to come to terms with the gods and the terms would be theirs, not those of their

“followers. This is an important point in relation to the interpretations he writes that I will”

develop in the following chapters because it refusal to acknowledge the gods in this way could have dire consequences. It would also involve a contradiction as such an act would be a denial of the undeniable, the question of "believing" in the Norse gods was probably irrelevant and quote. Price also points out that there wasn't the sort of orthodoxy of belief that we are accustomed

and be on the same page with. There might be quite a bit of variation in the belief systems,

also unlike the religions of the book, you could not automatically assume that the deities were on your side because they had their own problems, their own goals and their own issues that they were involved with, you might be a secondary or even lower on the list concern, Odin who is sometimes considered to be the chief of the gods, but maybe not Odin is the perfect example, right?

“It is said that you have to be careful because Odin can be tricky. He might sleep with a man's wife”

or he might sleep with the wife's husband. These are not the sort of things one in the religions

of the book need to worry about. Odin is a fantastically interesting figure that when you contrast it with the monotheistic religions shows many of the various differences. I mean famously, the god of the Bible is supposed to know when any sparrow falls from a tree. Odin doesn't. Odin has a couple of ravens that he keeps for reconnaissance purposes. One is named mind the other memory. Sometimes you'll hear one is named thought too. You'll run into that neoprices mind and

memory of the translations that he would ascribe to and these ravens go out in the world and report

back to Odin so that he can know when some sparrow falls if even cares about something like that. Odin also has powers and magic that he can use to gain further information. Again, one would assume that the god of the Bible has this information. Odin needs to search for things

“like wisdom. He gave up an eye in his pursuit of wisdom. That's why he only has one.”

He's known by perhaps hundreds of different names and one of the powers that he has and uses all the time is he talks to dead people. He goes up to the bodies that are hanging on the gallows after someone is hanged and he talks to them. He raises the dead so that he can question them. He has the decapitated head of another god that he has preserved and keeps with him so that he can ask it questions. It reminds me a little bit like a very gory version of a Harry Potter painting

where you can ask the figures in the painting for information. Odin talks to the head. There is no clear separation of powers and authorities and responsibilities amongst the gods.

“There's overlap. For example, Odin and Thor. Thor is Odin's son and from the comic books and”

movies and stuff. Thor is very famous. Thor, the god of thunder and weather also rules a part of military affairs. War, the actual brute strength of fighting, whereas his father Odin is the strategist and the god of that. Also, apparently the god of the zir kind of fanaticism. Odin also gets slammed sometimes for using things like magic because in the Norse religious beliefs and society magic is where the women shine. It's a female thing to do and there is in one of the Norse

sagas Loki who was thought to be the son of a god and a giant or giantus. Loki sort of takes a slam at Odin by saying the fact that he practices magic is perverted and makes him feminine. But this is part of what makes women so both respected and in some cases feared. They are spell weavers and shaman and sorceresses. The three women who supposedly weave the destinies of human beings, the Norns fall into this category. And there are some who think that there are similarities

between many of the different European pre-Christian mythologies because there are figures in Greek mythology for example, the famous fates and the names are similar. The three women. One is named something akin to a version that means the past. Another is named with a version that means something like the present and another is named with a version that means something like the future. It's sort of like Ebenees or Scrooge as a Christmas Carol's ghosts. Ghost of Christmas past, Christmas present,

they weave the fate of mankind on a loom with the entrals or bloody body parts of human beings.

“I've also heard that a scribe to valkyries and valkyries also have been completely”

distorted by things like comic books and male fantasies into sort of Scandinavian versions of Baywatch women that a man might watch and admire and lust after when the actual accounts from the saga's and what not describe looking at a valkyrie as terrifying and akin to staring into flame. The entire universe in Norns mythology is held together or girded by a tree and evergreen

ash tree known as Iggdrasil. And the Norns care for Iggdrasil and Iggdrasil is sometimes

thought by some to refer to sort of a version of the Milky Way and Iggdrasil connects the various

“realms of existence. This gets us back to our physicist idea of other dimensions or multiple”

world theories. I mean Iggdrasil connects like a interstate highway places like Midgard, which is where human beings live and which is the term J.R.R. Tolkien used and translated into Middle-earth, connects Midgard to Asgard and Midgard and Asgard to the realm of the giant Jiodenheim and the land of Midgard and Asgard yodenheim to the lands of fire and ice and all the other different realms. There's an interesting connection between ancient Germanic religion across Europe

and this question of this sacred tree because when the Christian bishops are going around trying to

“convert people like the Saxons or other Germanic tribes or the Friesians or any of those people,”

they all sort of have a tree that is connected to their worship. In fact hundreds of years before when Tacitus is writing about Germanic beliefs, he talks about sacred trees in sacred groves where they have sacrifices that involve the bloody killings of human beings and animals who are then ritually hung up around sacred sites. In his 11th century writings, Adam of Braemen who has, as his source, a Danish king talks about one of these sacrificial places

at Oopsalai and what's now Sweden. And by the way, when Adam of Braemen says "Wolden" that's the more Germanic version of the name Odin when he says "Freco" he means "Fray or Frayer" and when he says "birco" when he's talking about a city, he means the city of Berco which is the trade center in the island in the middle of a lake that's so famous and he says "that folk meaning the Swedes has a very famous temple called Oopsala situated not far from the city of Sikterna and Biorco

in this temple entirely decked out in gold the people worship the statues of three gods in such wise that the mightiest of them Thor occupies a throne in the middle of the chamber, Woden and Freco have places on either side. The significance of these gods is as follows, Thor they say presides over the air which governs the thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather and crops, the other Woden that is the furious carries on war and in parts

to man strength against his enemies, the third is Freco who bestows peace and pleasure on mortals,

his likeness too they fashion with an immense fallus but Woden they chisel armed as our people are want to represent Mars Thor with his septer apparently resembles Jov the people also worship heroes made gods who may endow with immortality because of their remarkable exploits." End quote "The septer that he says Thor has is probably the famous hammer you all near. Adam of Bram and then describes what the sacrifice of these various places is like and he writes

quote. "The sacrifices of this nature of every living thing that is male they offer nine heads with

grove that adjoins the temple. Now this grove is so sacred in the eyes of the heathen that each

“and every tree in it is believed divine because of the death or future vacation of the victims.”

Even dogs and horses hang there with men. A Christian 72 years old told me that he had seen the bodies suspended promiscuously. Furthermore, the incantations customarily chanted in the ritual of a sacrifice of this kind are manifold and unseemly, therefore it is better to keep silence about them." End quote. Given how little is actually known about what went on at these sorts of viking religious ceremonies, one wishes Adam of Bram and wouldn't have been so scared or horrified and could have

told us what the Danish king told him about them, but Adam of Bramans response to this is what

you would have expected for most Christians of the Middle Ages who would have seen these viking

“ceremonies as little more than satanic rituals designed to play Kate or even conjure devils and”

demons, and the people involved in them as folk who were headed for the fiery pits of damnation. Viking expert in University of Oslo historian John Vidar Sigurtson in his book Scandinavia in the age of Vikings points out two interesting facts about the Scandinavians in this era and their belief system. He says that the worship of deities like Thor and Odin is part of an ethnic religion, meaning it apply to a specific people. Contrast that with something like Christianity,

which is a universal religion, Islam is too the idea that anyone can convert to this, and it applies equally well to people all over the world. Sigurtson points out that that's not how the Scandinavians would have seen their gods, their gods were exactly that, their gods. Sigurtson also says that you could classify this religion as an elite religion, meaning the people that communicated

“with the gods were people like the kings. And this is key because the biggest threat to this religion”

in this time period is people like Adam of Bramans who simply want to keep these people from the fiery pits of hell and stop them from worshiping demons and devils, but to the people of Scandinavia, it's the same as saying that you want to kill their gods and destroy their world view and make them stop believing in the traditional spirits and the invisible population, the elves, the dwarves, and yes, the giants and the valkyries. And as we said in part one, the Christian assault against the

traditional Viking beliefs is a two-pronged one, both from above and below. They're able to find inroads in the Viking world through the Christian slaves that the Vikings take who can't help, but share their belief system with their slave masters and also through the elite. As Sigurtson said, these are the people who communicate with the gods. Well, what if you convert those people? And you can see exactly what happens if you look from a little earlier in this story

when Charlemagne and his Frankish Christians are able to use this same sort of tendency among the German peoples of Saxony to achieve the same sort of result, the long-standing tactic of converting the kings to Christianity who then take their people with them. But make no mistake about it, Odinthor and the rest of the Norse pantheon are fighting a defensive rear guard action against the most dangerous foes. These gods have ever faced and it's not the giants and the

eventual destruction of Ragnarok. It's the Christian god and the many powerful states and their armies

who go to war under that banner. But the followers of Odin are not the only peoples who feel threatened during this era. The people that threaten the people of Odin are themselves beset by portents of doom in their near future. The Christian states of Europe and their power is more latent than manifest in this era and we see it more clearly than the people living through this time period right around 899-980 CE when Alfred the Great died. We see it more clearly than they do

we know how the 900s are going to go for Europe. The people in Europe during the 900s don't

“and they see a quadruple threat on their horizon. The first of which has been plaguing them for more”

than 100 years by this time period. The Scandinavian Vikings have gone from smash and grab piracy raids to full-on colonization and settlement. Historian Neil Price suggests that there were 40 to 50,000 dains taking up residents in Britain during this time and they control about half the island. It's called the Dane Law. They are settling elsewhere as well. In addition, the long running feud between Islam and Christianity takes a decidedly negative turn during this time period

in the Mediterranean where the island of Sicily which had been attacked and temporarily occupied

by Vikings at one point is finally swamped and overwhelmed by Arab conquerors from North Africa.

“And by 902 they control the island and they are putting great pressure on the Christian”

Byzantines in the Ejian and the Eastern Mediterranean. Add to that the latest and newest threat from the Eurasian step breaking like a tsunami on the defenses of Central Europe and penetrating them the Magiar Hungarian peoples who were raid into Bavaria and then finally into Southern France and as Tom Holland in his wonderful book The Forge of Christendom points out perhaps the greatest threat looming on the horizon for Christians in 980 CE is coming at the appointed date

a hundred years in the future when the long-awaited promised appearance of the anti-Christ is expected like a giant exponentially worse version of the Y2K of virus from the year 2000.

“All of those things together create a climate of pessimism and negativity that shows up in the”

sources in his classic work the age of faith historian will derat in a condensed and edited account from a it appears monk in southern France gives a sense of the feeling when that monk writes quote the cities are depopulated the monasteries ruined and burned the country reduced to solitude as the first men lived without law so now every man does what seems good in his own eyes despising laws human and divine the strong oppressed the weak the world is full of violence against

the poor and of the plunder of ecclesiastical goods men devour one another like the fishes in the sea and quote now as I always say I'm addicted to context and I also have a background in journalism

which some people have said is the first draft of history and there've always been criticisms

about journalism for example one is the idea that stories get chosen because of their shocking or violent nature maybe you've heard the phrase if it bleeds it leads well maybe there's a little of that going on in this story too because right after he uses that quote we just sighted the one about the men devouring each other like fishes in the sea will derand in his nearly seventy five year old history notices that maybe there's a little trick

histories playing on us about this as well maybe it's a case of historically speaking something bleeding and so making the history books more than the much more boring stuff like peace and commerce and happiness and he writes quote perhaps we exaggerate the damage done by the Norse and Magiar raids to crowd them into a page for brevity's sake darkens unduly the picture of a life in which there were doubtless intervals of security and peace. Monasteries continue

to be built throughout this terrible ninth century he writes and we're off in the center as a busy industry. Ruong despite raids and fires grew stronger from trade with Britain, Colone and mates dominated commerce on the Rhine and in flanders thriving centers of industry and trade developed and quote there's another line we used to have in the news business and it was that

good scintillating tale the more you looked into it the less scintillating it appeared to be

“there's a case to be made that there's a very discussion on the Vikings falls into this category”

because Hollywood and accounts like Hollywood have so transformed the Vikings into this uniquely barbaric and terrible entity that almost anything you do to put a more accurate sort of cast on top of them makes them look well less worthy of leading because of the lack of bleeding if you will also because I'm addicted to context the other reason that the Vikings look less outrageous the more you dive into this time period is because compared to the people they're up against they don't look

anywhere near as barbaric great they may score a 10 out of 10 on the barbarity scale

but what Hollywood doesn't often show is that the people they're fighting would often score a nine or an eight on the barbarity scale right take the opponents of these Viking raiders in Europe

“the proto knights as I like to call them these horsemen from western and central Europe”

who several hundred years after this time period will take all sorts of vows to protect the weak and the poor well they need to take those vows because that contrast greatly with the behavior of the proto knights in this era people Tom Holland in his book the forge of Christendom labels

a gang of male clad thugs who prey on the peasantry of Europe in ways that make them sound

little different than the Viking attacks in the forge of Christendom Tom Holland writes about these gangs of male clad thugs quote month by month season by season year by year their exactions grew ever worse how gruesomely apt it was that their favorite mode of torture should have been a garriding chain notorious for inflicting upon its victims now quoting a contemporary

“source not one but a thousand deaths he continues a literal tightening of the screws”

robberies to and rapes and kidnappings all were deployed with a brutal gustow by hit squads determined to trample underfoot every last vestige of independence in the countryside and to reduce even the most prosperous of peasants to servitude and to quote as the old line goes with friends like that who needs enemies and if your enemies are barbaric how much less do they stand out when your friends are pretty barbaric too

in the nine hundreds the era we are in this story they will be such a reaction to the depredations of these gangs of male clad thugs that a movement that I was surprised to read is considered one of the greatest peace movements in world history will get going it's known as the peace of god but in the early nine hundreds we're still seeing the sorts of activities that will create you know the equal and opposite reaction that leads to that movement in another

century this is the era of the castalines as they're known in Holland talks a lot about them local warlords who put up what we would consider today to be rudimentary small primitive type castles wherever they can and then fleece the local area that they could now control using these castles and use the money to hire more and more gangs of male clad thugs and to show how history can be seen in multiple different ways there are different ways to view this development whether

it's positive or negative let's go back to charlament in the late seven hundreds with a united Europe which won't happen again for a thousand years after charlament's time right it'll take Napoleon in the late 1700s early 1800s through war to unite Europe similarly again this is often seen as a golden age by people who laud all the benefits of centralization and who see the disintegration of that empire as a terrible tragedy and the fragmentation of it as something that invited things

like Viking attacks right when we when you have something we would call today a failed state well that invites terrorism doesn't it and warlordism and the era that is the one that Europe is going into now's often have a chapter of a book that calls it the rise of the dukes well who are these dukes and counts and lords and barons well these are the castalines and the

empire and rule all these little territories themselves is this a plus or a minus history has seen it

“differently during different time periods if you are a fan of centralized authority and that whole”

thing will you see this as a terrible negative in Europe descending into a fragmented unable to coordinate their activities sort of entity and you will say something like well charlament didn't have Viking attacks to worry about because he could fight those things off he could build all sorts of defenses and the minute all that you know falls apart into anarchy well that's when you know you create the conditions of you know it's like taking the police force out of your community and keeping all your

doors unlocked you're inviting robbers right in interlopers but the other way to look at it

and it's been seen this way throughout different areas also is that the decentralization here is a reaction to things like Viking raids right if the emperor or the king is so far away that by the time

“they're able to send soldiers to protect the people who are hit by Viking raids the Vikings are”

long gone well what if the central authority isn't who sends out the equivalent of the local police force what if that's a local duke count lord barren or what have you right nearby with a little local castle right there on the spot right so there are historical accounts over the areas that see this fragmentation not as a downside but as a reaction to the need to have local protection and authority in decision making on site because otherwise it's hard to respond to these

you know quick hidden run raids that the Vikings are launching but by the time we are where we are in this story right we've gone from the 700 to the 800s now we're in the 900s the conditions on the ground are much different and the easy pickins of undefended monasteries and all that from the 800s is a thing of the past now the Vikings are encountering the equivalent of locked doors burglar alarm systems and local police forces nearby and the 900s will prove to be an entirely

different sort of affair as we said in the last part of this discussion in places like modern day France West Francia they're starting to fortify the bridges because the Vikings use the river systems as a kind of super highway to get into the inside of the territory well if you fortify bridges at the mouth of these rivers well all of a sudden you have the equivalent of a toll booth or a police bureau or a guarded border in Britain kings like offered the great and

his successors will start to create fortified cities they're called birds and they'll do similar

“sorts of things they'll put them in important sites where the Vikings would use as super highways”

roads or river crossings and once again it doesn't mean you can't have Viking attacks but it means all of a sudden the defenses are there to make something that used to be considered you know a relatively easy score something where you can expect to lose people and maybe a lot of people and maybe just lose because the 900s start to see a lot more times with a Viking Raiders and maybe even larger forces than Raiders start losing of course losing in quotation marks is a bit of an

eye of the beholder thing sometimes isn't it there's a phrase often used about winning the war and

losing the peace for example one of the most important cases of maybe winning the war and losing the peace

happens in the year 9-11 when one of the most famous Viking figures in all Viking history and one of the earliest that we can say conclusively actually lived and was a real person and there's no doubt about it is this guy known to history as Raolo because Viking name was probably some version of Raulf and his nickname because those Vikings often had you know Raulf the in his case it was Raulf the Ganger and that supposedly was a reference to his size and he was supposed to be so large that he couldn't

ride a horse and that he had to walk he's not the only Viking that that is said about but this Raulf the Ganger the future Raolo the future Robert is one of the many Viking supposed to have been involved in the famous siege of Paris in the late 800s that we talked about in the last segment of this discussion it is not known whether he is Danish or Norwegian both traditions

many with the West Franki and King right what will in the future be friends a guy named Charles the

“simple that we mentioned earlier and simple doesn't mean you know not intelligent it kind of means”

sincere right not not simple minded but he will Raulf will lose this encounter in West Frankia and as part of the peace agreement he will be given a territory that in the future will be called Normandy which is a reference to the people who settle there after this peace agreements the Northman under Raulf the Ganger Raulf is fully a Viking right out of the Hollywood movie trope

in his book Powers and Thrones Dan Jones writes quote the creation of Normandy was directly linked

to the dramatic siege of Paris in 885-886 among the Viking leaders of that expedition was a man called Raolo who was probably born in Denmark and whose career was described by a later biographer

“Dodo of San Quentin in idealized but undeniably thrilling terms end quote Jones is going to”

interspersome of those quotes from Dodo in this next part where he says quote Dodo described Raolo as a predator naturally tough and doggy soldier quote trained in the art of war and utterly ruthless end quote who could typically be seen quote in a helmet wonderfully ornamented with gold and a male coat end quote Jones continues quote Raolo was one of the most violent men of his exceptionally bloody times on one occasion he prevailed in battle by ordering his men to kill all the animals

chop their carcasses in half and build a makeshift barricade out of their freshly butchered meat

but he was a canny negotiator Jones writes during the second half of the 9th century

Raolo made a tidy living among the Franks doing as all thrusting young Northman did burning laying towns and villages to waste plundering and killing by the early years of the 10th century he and his Viking comrades had driven the rulers of the Franks to distraction and their people to the state of abject war weariness end quote is biographer Dodo then says that the subjects of West Francia were complaining to their king that the land in the realm was quote no

better than a desert for its population is either dead through famine or sword or is perhaps in captivity end quote so Charles the simple defeats Raolo in the battle a siege perhaps and the peace agreement is one that the people who are the fans of the highly centralized sorts of governments to cry as a huge mistake but those who see the decentralized approach has something maybe more akin to you know doing the best with what you have available if you have terrorists continually

destroying and rating a region and taking off captives and killing the population and robbing everything what would you think of turning that area over to the terrorists telling them that they now owe their allegiance to you that they need to convert to your way of thinking you know in these days we might make it a rule that they have to then become a democracy but back in these times the

“rule is you have to become Christians and then telling them to defend that territory against”

other terrorists like themselves because that's gonna be the deal Charles the simple is going to grant to Raolo the Viking the area is that Raolo is sort of already controlling and occupying these areas that will become Normandy around the entry to the sane river and then tell him that you know if you accept this deal you're my vassal which may sound weird except that this is the era as we said when the dukes and counts and lords and barons are going to start to come to the floor and what's

the difference if your warlord happens to be you know a locally grown warlord or if it's somebody you know from outside right I mean if if you're giving lands to a bunch of barons who are going to throw up their own castles and be you know sometimes loyal to you and other times rebellious well

repel Viking Raiders because he is himself a Viking Raider and in his book northmen historian John

“Hayward writes about Raolo in this agreement quote in return for his homage conversion to”

Christianity and agreement to defend the sane against other Viking Raiders Charles appointed Raolo as count of role it was a mutually advantageous arrangement Charles got recognition of his sovereignty over lands he did not actually control while Raolo's de facto rule over the lower sane was legitimized and quote Hayward then points out that this is hardly a new arrangement and that other kings have done this with Vikings before in fact one can go all the way back to certain Roman

practices from the Roman Empire that sounds similar including the way the Romans treated the

Franks themselves when the Franks were much more Viking like than they are in this time period

“famously Raolo may not be the submissive”

vassal to Charles the simple that the peace agreement may have expected the biographer dodo tells a story where at one point during the ceremony Raolo is supposed to kiss the feet of the Frankish king and instead says he's not kissing anyone's feet and orders an underling to do it for him and normally you bend down and kiss the feet of the king instead the Viking underling lifted up the kings foot to his mouth toppling the king on his back

and supposedly the Vikings all laughed about this it's a sign of exactly how much respect they have for this agreement and this king but Raolo did convert to Christianity but like so many other

“Vikings who did first generation Christian converts from Scandinavia often hedged their bets a little”

bit and John Hayward in Northman explains how that worked for Raolo when he says quote although Raolo was still a pagan when he won control of Rao it appears he allowed what was left of the church to function in that area under his control much as the Danish rulers of York had done pagan Vikings he writes were rarely positively hostile to Christianity sacking churches and monasteries and selling their occupants into slavery was just good business

even after his baptism in 1912 Raolo like many first generation Viking converts to Christianity

hedged his bets and worshiped the pagan gods alongside Christ shortly before he died Raolo ordered 100 Christians to be beheaded as an offering to the pagan gods but he also gave 100 pounds of gold to the churches of Rao and quote the interesting thing about this though is that you can see the long term anti-terrorism strategy at work here what the Chinese would have called in their long term anti-terrorism strategies with their so-called barbarians nearby them

cooking right cooking the barbarians because you turn them into people more like yourself and when that happens it changes the relationship it's a good thing for a ruler like Raolo because becoming a Christian and beginning to organize your society the way the Christian states did exalts the king turn as the societies into one organized as a hierarchy not so good for the individual freedom loving Viking farmers who used to get together at their

assemblies known as things and make decisions that way right if you're freedom loving and you like a nice decentralized system having your ruler convert to Christianity then mandating all his people do all of a sudden puts you under the control of a much stronger despotic ruler maybe the other thing though that it does for the other Christian states is it takes away one of the great Viking Scandinavian advantages and war all of a sudden instead of the circumstances being

that they can rage you but you can't go and attack them because they live far away and who knows where and you can't get to them when the Vikings begin to settle in places for example in the Dain law in the British Isles or in Normandy they lose the main advantage that they have of mobility and now all of a sudden their farms their homes their families and their wealth are right next

and now their foes can do to them what they've done for more than a century to their foes

and one of the really interesting things to follow during the Viking era are these overseas settlements by these Scandinavian pirates conquerors colonists settlers whatever you want to call them because they become part of the societies that they're embedded in over time they become absorbed

“I think we compared the Viking age in part one to a hand grenade detonating in the Scandinavian”

homeland and spreading burning shrapnel in all directions it's part of why this story so hard to follow

you're following all those pieces of shrapnel as they embed themselves in the surrounding societies

but if shrapnel doesn't kill you eventually the wound closes up and skin forms around it and while the metal may impact your life and cause a lingering amount of influence forever it just becomes one piece of a larger hole and there are interesting stories about rollo for example having dreams of creating a society that is the equivalent of a whole flock of birds that shows up in one place of all different breeds and types but all bearing the same blood red left wing and creating

“what one historian refers to as a mongrel society out of these many different parts”

sort of foreshadowing the fusion to come it reminds me of the American experience where the United States often referred to itself as the Great Melting Potter had Latin phrases associated with it like epluribus unum epluribus unum which means out of many one and that is not a bad phrase to describe the Normans and of course Norman just means Northman and Normandy is the land of the Northman but these men came from all over and quickly found themselves a part of the society around them

maintaining perhaps though something in their blood or their DNA or their cultural makeup that harkened back to the ferociousness and the fierceness of their Viking roots because you can hear

“chroniclers and even historians up until the mid-20th century and maybe even today talking about”

that weird sort of extra ferocity that the Normans had even when they were Christian and French

and you can see how quickly they're absorbed by the local population rollo who's the first to

settle there right this Viking who is almost the quintessential example of the type will marry a local woman in the Danish way we're told and have a son who's already only half Viking and who speaks French and who's Christian he will have the respectively French name of William attached to him and get a surname or a nickname afterwards he'll be known as William Longsord he will have a rebellion rollo's son launched against him by a bunch of his own Scandinavian Viking

peoples who consider him already too frankified and then he's gonna in the Danish way which means sort of like a confubine or a hookup or what would they say today a baby mama he will hook up with another local woman which means that his kid who will be named Richard is only one quarter Viking so in the space of two generations you can already see the burning piece of shrapnel being absorbed by the much larger West Frankish body but as we've been saying all along

what happens to rollo and his pirate Vikings in what will be Normandy is just a continuation of a process that's been going on since long before the Roman Empire fell centuries before and it's the timing of these Germanic language pagan peoples and earlier versions of them from Goths to Lombards to Vandals to Burgundians to Franks yes even these Frankish people they've already gone through this process they're being well 150 years ago somebody would have seen a very superiority kind of

way of looking at things that they're being civilized these savages are being turned into reputable members of the Christian community answerable to God and the surrounding other nobles but

doing a little piracy work to better yourself go home marry the girl next door and start a farm

with you know your winnings from your pirate affairs you might look at something like this is being sold out right the the big guys like rollo and his yarrals and yarral could mean Earl or Lord or anything like that those guys are the ones who benefit greatly from these sorts of deals it's the average Viking who wants upon a time used to be considered sort of an equal

“who loses if you want to make the Hollywood movie about the Vikings and you want them to be these”

barbarian type pirate you know movie tropes and you want them to be a bunch of warriors involved in

an equal brotherhood that when somebody says who is your leader you say we have none right that's a

famous line from the old Viking that we have no lead we're all equal here then you want to set your movie in the 700's or the 800's because in the 900's ADCE the Viking world begins to become more like the non Viking Christian world and the hierarchies that are taking over in places that will become France and Germany in places like that arrives in Scandinavia and you can begin to see the consolidation of these independent small time rulers the so-called

“petty kings by the great kings and it's a bit like watching corporate giants swallowing up”

small time businesses and mom and pop operations until they create the geopolitical equivalent of a monopoly and in keeping with histories love of consolidation and consolidators the men who do this are often lauded as the founding fathers of the modern day nations of Scandinavia right there version of a George Washington type figure it's worth pointing out that the people who do this in the places like modern day Sweden or modern day Denmark or modern day Norway are figures

that you can't 100% confirm or even real welcome to the early Middle Ages take for example the guy who famously does this in what will become the country of Norway this name is harrowed

“fine hair also known as harrowed fair hair also known as harrowed hair fair neoprice the historian”

of Viking times says that his nickname was Lufa which means mop head and price points out that these guys often had pirate last names in nicknames compare it to something like blackbeard from the 16th or 17th century and mop head is a famous figure in one of the sagas written by one of the most famous sagas writers of all time and Icelandic writer named Snorri Sterlison and in his work known as the himeskringla or the lives of the Norse kings he writes about mop head and in very

story book like fashion traces his desire to conquer all of Norway and be the king that unifies the entire place to a woman that he wants and he goes to her and basically you know proposes that he become her man and she says something like why would a petty king like you appealed to me I mean she says when we have kings who are unifying Sweden and kings who are going to find Denmark why don't you go unifying Norway and then come back to me when you've made something of your

yourself he in the sagas says something like oh yeah thanks for reminding me I was always going to

do that and then he vows to not cut his hair until he does and then he goes around like a mafia dawn making the sort of offers that the other petty kings can't refuse because if they do he kills them and all of their top men with them if they instead join him as we say with rollo all this top men can become his men or else and they can be bigger than the petty kings of old but if they resist he's going to kill them and this creates a Newtonian equivalent opposite reaction

that precipitates one of the things that the Viking era is most known for right the pushing out and exploring farther and farther away lands in part because these people need to get away from herald fine hair who's going to kill them if he catches them it's a little bit more complicated than that but let's let Snorri Sterlison in his work written farther away from the time that he's

career of herald fine hair to show us what we're dealing with here I'm using the erling monson

“translation by the way and it needs to be pointed out that there are reasons that people would resist”

what fine hairs trying to do they often were people who were farmers on ancestral land that had been handed down from father to son from time immemorial and all of a sudden this great king comes in and says all this land is mine and you can stay on it if you pay taxes and a lot of people said to help with you I'm going elsewhere and that's described by Sterlison when he says quote amid all the unrest when herald was seeking to subdue all the land of Norway the Pharaohs

which are islands and Iceland lands out beyond the sea were found and settled at that time also there was a great fairing to shetland and many great men fled his outlaws from Norway and they went on Viking raids to the west in the winter they were in the orphanies and the hebrides but in the

“summer they carried in Norway and did great scathe there in the land and quote what Sterlison means”

by that is that these people didn't just run away from herald fine hair and everybody let bygons be bygons they came back and treated Norway or what will become Norway the same way that Viking raiders had treated the rest of Europe they raided and robbed and took slaves from herald fine hairs growing kingdom and this recall something we said earlier in the story that before the Viking age supposedly begins it was probably already going on in the deep dark

Scandinavian myths before Europe ever knew about them and it continued probably long after the Viking age sort of officially in air quotes ends the Vikings raided Scandinavia too and like all the kings of Europe who whose main job is protecting their subjects herald fine hairs main job was protecting his and so when Vikings who had fled Norway came back and raided Norway herald fine hair goes after them Sterlison continues quote King herald learned that the Vikings

who in the winter were in the westlands which means Britain and Ireland were harrying in the midlands which means Norway he went out to war each summer and ransacked the islands and the outlying rocks but when his army came near the Vikings they all fled most of them out to see and when the king was weary of this it happened one summer that he sailed west with his army

across the sea first he came to Sheppland and there slew all the Vikings who had not fled

fence next he sailed south to the orphanies and cleans them all of Vikings thereafter he went right to the hebrides and hairy there he slew many Vikings who before had warriors under them and he held their many battles and most often had the victory and quote so herald lufa mop head hair fair fine hair adopted the same anti-piracy strategy common in the ancient world when it becomes too much you go find the pirate layers launch the equivalent of marines

from your boats and wipe out all the pirates where they live now if you're trying to clear pirates

out though the problem is is how do you keep the areas from being reestablished as pirate bases

later if you look at the history of the Mediterranean for example in piracy in that area you can have successive empires and kingdoms clear out pirate layers only to have those places get reinfested later usually because they're perfect I mean they're just it's easy to hide they're uh these

“certain islands that become known for piracy are right along important shipping routes they just”

lend themselves to reinfestation so according to the sagas herald will put some of his own people in charge of these islands like the hamburgies in the orphanies and whatnot and their job is to sort of you know create a stable business climate and settled people there and make it one of those areas where there's just too many eyes and too much law in order in too many authorities for it to be a good place for pirates anymore i don't know if that's true and the sagas are not

necessarily all that trustworthy on this sort of stuff there is another aspect though of herald's rule that more modern histories are taking a much more jondist view of them my earlier ones and that the sagas take which is that herald's tyranny and people fleeing from it are the reason for many of

of the america's and you know places like the orphanies and the hamburgies and the reason that

“modern historians are discounting that as a major reason is because the dating doesn't line up”

he couldn't have been his tyranny couldn't have been the reason that the hamburgies and the orphanies and those places are settled because they're settled long before herald's time even Iceland is settled before herald is putting immense pressure on other Norwegians and greenland and the america's aren't settled until long afterwards so the dating doesn't line up john hay would point this out northmen that just that that couldn't have been the reason but what he does say

is it could be a reason for further settlement you know new waves of people leaving

Norway to escape the new restrictions that a guy like herald is putting into place through consolidation

right if you don't like it get out and they do and what do you go well american drafties fleeing

“the draft during the Vietnam war would over the border to Canada if you're someone located in modern”

day Norway maybe you go to the hebrides or the orkney's or if those are becoming to established and controlled by herald's man maybe you go farther and farther in herald fine heres lifetime would have been a place like Iceland and then after his lifetime would have been a place like greenland when you look at how those places were probably discovered that's an interesting story in and of itself and something that is undetermined as of yet but more and more the history suggests that some

of these places were found before the Vikings even found them take Iceland for example Iceland may

have had Irish monks find the place first now we need to take a different sort of approach with a

place like Iceland then with most of the places the Vikings settled in Europe because we talked

“about the piece of shrapnel you know the Vikings embedding themselves in these larger societies”

and eventually being absorbed it's a little different when the Vikings discover places that don't have pre-existing large societies to begin with then the shrapnel acts more like a seed and grows into a real sort of Viking settlement and Iceland falls into that category because Irish monks would have been celibate anyway they wouldn't have gone to a place like Iceland to try to start families and settle down and be fruitful and multiply and there's no evidence that when the Vikings

actually got there the Irish monks were still there although they supposedly found some left over stuff bottom line though is it's like finding free land with nobody there occupying it the various histories that I've read suggest what would probably be considered a rather obvious way that these places get discovered initially and that's not because you seek out places because no one knows these places are here they get found accidentally when the Scandinavian ships get blown off course I mean if you're

a sailing ship and all of a sudden you get caught in a place like the north Atlantic or the Atlantic above what's now Scotland and those islands and the wind starts taking you where it's going to take you're kind of along for the ride aren't you and this is the part of the story that I find personally terrifying it is also the part of the story where we've been making connections between the Vikings and their contemporaries and the Vikings and their predecessors right the Germanic language pagan

peoples like the Saxons and all these people who came before the Vikings and the people in western and central Europe during their time period and trying to show the context that shows continuity and how the Vikings don't really stand out so much from all these other peoples in most respects the area where they really do stand out and where they break new ground completely is the seafaring part and that's the part that blows my mind and has fascinated people well for a very long time

you know the Vikings became very big in the 19th century but people knew about the seafaring things long before then the people in Iceland for example who were fascinated because they were an immigrant people too like the United States and like Australia and a lot of other places now you become fascinated with your roots and it was people like Snorris Stirlis and all those folk who were writing about how their island originally got populated from the home country and so everyone

has been fascinated with both of the Vikings we're doing with ships because what they were doing with ships was relatively unprecedented and I say relatively because there were other peoples but there's some of the most famous seafaring peoples in history people like the Polynesians

Pacific mostly south of the equator and the big difference between the Polynesians and the Vikings

“and all the other seafaring peoples before them was the willingness to go out into the open sea”

because seafaring pretty much from the beginning of time until about the Vikings and the Proto Polynesians was all about staying within sight of land hugging the coast or going point to point like a connect the dots game you know from this island to that island to this island

never getting too far away from land even when you see for example um the transfer of shipping

or some of even the great naval battles in the Mediterranean you can always see that it's a point to point to point navigation system they're never getting far away from land they're never getting there's always an island here or there that they're nearby once you go the old line was beyond the pillars of hercules or heracles the Gibraltar area out into the Atlantic you were going off into the dragon territory on the edge of the map where people go and never come back

that's where you lose ships but it's funny what you can discover while still hugging the

coast the great Phoenicians who were the greatest seafares of the ancient Mediterranean they were

able to get allegedly all the way up to the British Isles and and the Scandinavian areas and everything simply following the coastline but what the Vikings do is as far as I can tell except for the Polynesian types unprecedented in this era and before which is they will venture out into the open sea now after pointing out that both the Polynesians and the Malais in the Indian ocean had gone farther distances in this era or earlier areas than the Vikings history in John

Haywood in Northman mentions that both those peoples at least had warmer weather and more predictable

seas working in their favor whereas these Scandinavians are operating in close to Arctic conditions

sometimes I mean go look at a map look at where the latitude of a place like Iceland is there are no major cities above something like Reykjavik that I can see it's sub Arctic maybe you would say and Haywood says that like earlier peoples the Viking Scandinavian explorers and sea fairs preferred to stay within sight of land go point to point you know so that they were going from island to island and stay as close as they could to areas you know where they felt safe to pull

their ships into coves and harbors and places where at night time they didn't have to be out in the water but often they were out in the water and when you realize that these are open boats in sometimes Arctic conditions it boggles the mind you can go online by the way and see videos of modern recreations of Viking long ships and people traveling on them and you just can't

“imagine doing it for days at a time but that's what had to be done and these Viking warships”

that are often used in the recreations are usually not the kind of ships that Viking settlers traveled on they traveled on tubby or merchant men called nars or nors and Haywood describes these and he says quote most of the leading settlers or he uses the Scandinavian word that means land takers because that was the phrase used or land takers arrived in their own ships these were not long ships but sturdy merchant ships called nars with shorter broader and deeper hulls

than long ships nars relied on sails alone carrying only a couple of pairs of wars from maneuvering in harbour and quote he didn't point out at the time of the settlements the nars probably had a cargo capacity of 25 to 30 tons this would go up as the Viking age went on to probably more like 50 tons he says modern replicas of these merchant vessels have sailed around the entire world but the one that sailed around the entire world sank up the Spanish coast in 1992 so you know just

“like modern day fishing fleets and I believe that fishing is still considered per capita”

the most or one of the most dangerous professions you can have and that's with satellites, modern ships, coast guards and all those kinds of things imagine what it's like with a wooden boat with open decks and people navigating well with none of those tools and hey would write's

shetland and the ferro islands the voyage cannot have been a comfortable experience

“nars were basically just large open boats without cabins to give crew and passenger shelter in bad”

weather tents were stretched over ships decks to provide shelter in harbor but it is unlikely that this could be done at sea because the tent would catch the wind and drive the ship off course people probably had to huddle under seal skin or greased leather coats in the hold along with the livestock to keep warm nor was there any possibility he writes of enjoying any hot food on the high seas ship wreck was a real possibility in one bad year of the 35 ship sailing to Iceland

all but eight were wrecked and quote I've spent my entire life except for when I was in college within a 35 minute drive of the Pacific Ocean I grew up a body surfing at an age that was almost child abusive to have left me out in the waters at that age I'm very brave on the coast but you

“get me out into the open water and I get just terrified much more cowardly I remember a cousin of mine”

an idiot cousin of mine tipping us over in a catamaran three times in a day until the coast guard said that's enough of that you get to go in within sight of land and feeling absolutely helpless I can't imagine what it would be like in subarctic conditions in the middle of nowhere with no help anywhere I was looking for accounts that could give us some semblance of what it was life for these Vikings but they don't exist during this period and the best ones that I found are

actually in a book called The Perfect Storm now you might have seen the movie based on the book but the book is a very different animal and it combines the story that the movie focused on with

historical accounts first hand eyewitness remembrances the science of the ocean and waves

and shipping and all that it's absolutely fascinating you can get your hands on it it's by Sebastian Younger it's wonderful and he has some accounts that give us a sense of what it might be like in the open sea and how absolutely terrifying it can be so for example one of the scientific parts of the book talks about the difference between waves that are not crashing versus waves that do crash in the open ocean and younger rights quote a general rule of fluid dynamics holes

that an object in the water tends to do whatever the water it replaces would have done in the case of a boat in a breaking wave the boat will effectively become part of the curl it will either be flipped end over end or shoved backwards and broken on instantaneous pressures of up to six tons per square foot have been measured in breaking waves breaking waves he writes have lifted a 27 hundred ton break water and mass and deposited it inside the harbor at Wick Scotland they have blasted open

“a steel door a hundred and ninety five feet above sea level at I think it's onst light or”

unslite in the Shetland Islands they have heaved a half ton bolder ninety one feet into the air at telemoke rock or again end quote so that gives us a sense of the power of the waves that these early mariners are having to potentially encounter and then younger talks about a phenomenon that used to be considered sort of an old wives tale or one of those tall stories that a salty sea captain would would relate but it turns out that they're true and buoys in the middle of

the ocean and people in oil rigs in the middle of the sea have now conclusively proven that the phenomenon known as rogue waves are real and younger points out that the problem with eyewitness accounts is that a lot of people especially in the pre-modern sea fairing era who encountered large rogue

waves never survived to tell anybody about them speaking about the rogue waves he writes quote

in the dry terminology of naval architecture these are called non-negotiable waves mariners call them rogue waves or freak seas typically they are very steep and have an equally steep trough in front of them a so-called hole in the ocean as some witnesses have described it ships he writes cannot get their bows up fast enough and the ensuing wave breaks their back maritime history is full of encounters with such waves when Sir Ernest Shackleton was forced

to cross the south polar sea in a 22 foot open lifeboat he saw a wave so big that he missed

before the wave broke over his boat miraculously they didn't sink he continues in February 1883

“steam ship Glamorgan was swept bow to stern by an enormous wave that ripped the wheel house right”

off the deck taking all the ships officers with it she later sank in 1966 he writes the 44,000 ton Michelangelo an Italian steam ship carrying 775 passengers encountered a single massive wave in another wise unremarkable sea her bow fell into the trough and the wave stove inner bow flooding her wheelhouse and killed a crewman in two passengers in 1976 he says the oil tanker Creaton star radioed now the radio message was quote vessel was struck by huge wave that went

over the deck end quote and he says was never heard from again the only sign of her fate he wrote

was a four mile oil slick off bombay end quote he then tells an amazing story of one of the people

“who lived after seeing and surviving one of these waves hitting and the waves are very different”

sometimes sometimes they create they they come together several waves come together and get larger than than the some of its parts so to speak and that's a phenomenon known as the three sisters sometimes when they come in threes but this 1966 encounter off South Africa was a wave that stretched from horizon to horizon and younger rights quote most people don't survive encounters with

such waves and so firsthand accounts are hard to come by but they do exist and English woman named

Barrel Smeaton was rounding Cape Horn with her husband in the 1960s I guess I said 66 1960s when she saw a showling wave behind her that stretched away in a straight line as far as she could see

“now quoting the survivor quote the whole horizon was blotted out by a huge gray wall she writes in”

her journal it had no curling crest just a thin white line along the whole length and its face was unlike the sloping face of a normal wave this was a wall of water with a completely vertical face down which ran white ripples like a waterfall end quote younger than points out that the wave flipped the 46 footboat end over end snapping the eyewitnesses harness and throwing her overboard now I know in this era where we see people surfing almost hundred foot tall waves

and whatnot that we are blose to the power of the surf sometimes but even a 12 foot wave and I've been in 12 foot waves churning around after wiping out body surfing on the coastline and I can just tell you the power of a mere 12 foot wave is absolutely shocking and I can't imagine what this woman's experience was like after being having her ship turned over with a wave like that and then finding herself cord snapped in the open ocean and then I recall that all those vessels that we just

talked about had multiple decks so you could go below deck when things got hairy up above they had modern communications equipment modern navigational tools they knew their relative geographic position on the map perfectly and it still freaks me out now imagine having none of those things and being a Viking iris Scandinavian in an open boat no communications tools at all no modern navigational equipment at all and you know no below decks and you're out in the open ocean

there's a part of me that thinks those people are crazy but that might be an eye of the beholder sort of thing right try telling them that we routinely go up in man-made metal tubes that fly higher than birds fly and take us across whole oceans continent to continent and see if they don't think we're the crazy ones and I imagine if you told people like that that we could do what we do with air travel they'd probably want to see what manner of human being it was who could

do that and I feel the same way about them and if you discount the sagas which as I said I don't know what Hollywood would do in portraying Vikings if they didn't use the sagas because discounting the sagas means you're left with very few eyewitness accounts of who these people were and like

or even just very different cultural norms and standards hard to accept the idea that the Viking

“iris Scandinavians are getting a good shake I mean if you're a monk writing about these people”

who as part of their business strategy aren't just pagans but like to assault holy sites and monasteries and kill monks well is a monk's account of these people going to be particularly even handed I doubt it we do have the rare accounts though that show up from my witnesses who are not Christian monks and who run into people who may be Viking iris Scandinavians and the most famous happens right around where we are in this story it is an account which like the sagas a lot of people

have to hang a lot of assumptions on because you have so little to work with and it's such a famous

account and so rare that it has been used by fictional authors to sort of build stories off of Michael Creighton the author of eaters of the dead for example used this account as the foundation

“on which to build a fictional story and a movie was built on top of that book called the 13th”

warrior so you may have seen that but neither one of those tales gets told if not for the original account the eyewitness account of a Muslim traveler named Ibn Fadlan and he traveled two regions in what are now Russia in the year 921 and 922 ADCE and along the way ran into a people who were

trading on the rivers back then who very well may have been Viking iris Scandinavians let's put some

disclaimers in here though shall we for accuracy sake disclaimer number one these may not have been Viking iris Scandinavians these may have been people who were slavic for example or it may have been what we would call today an international crew of people a mixed crew of people that included some Scandinavians mixed with some slaves mixed with some bought bolts you just don't know disclaimer number two even if these were Scandinavians they may not be representative of the

Scandinavians back in Scandinavia or Vikings in other places even though it's very possible that these same people that ibn Fadlan talks about were migrating back and forth to Scandinavian maybe then going west to Britain and maybe then to fray you you just don't know because how representative of Scandinavian culture back in a place like what will be modern day Sweden modern day Norway modern day Denmark are the seaförers it's possible that you could look at them the

way we would look at you know sailors today who spent their life at sea and then come back home covered in tattoos the salty pop by the sailor slash you know long john silver characters from treasure island where they are people from your culture but they're not representative of most of the people in your culture for example one of the thing Fadlan talks about in this eyewitness account is how dirty these people were but this clashes with other accounts that suggest the Viking

iris Scandinavians in Scandinavia were meticulously clean people with clean clothes and clean hair and all so these are the disclaimers in one of these very very rare eyewitness accounts of a people that very well may be or include Viking iris Scandinavians probably if so

“mostly sweet now here's the backstory of fadlan's account he sets out from Baghdad I think it was”

where his bosses and he doesn't want to lie to them so these aren't like Marco polo type accounts where you know there could be all kinds of exaggeration this guy's trying to give a good account of what he runs it runs into and he's not looking for Vikings remember in the part of the world where fadlan's traveling they don't call him Vikings they call him varangians and this is the era where these varangian people are morphing perhaps again another disclaimer into that

people we introduced in part one the ruse who these ruse are is another one of these great non understood things and historians over the areas have different opinions I think we introduced the concept of the Normanist and the anti-Normonist controversy in part one when we talked about the ruse because in a place like the old Soviet Union you didn't want to assume or acknowledge that there was any Scandinavian influx of DNA or cultural influence in a

I mean Hitler and his Aryan supremacists I think Hitler famously said something like if not for

“the infusion of the Scandinavian blood into the Russian bloodline they would still be like rabbits in”

a forest right the only reason they're they're advanced in any way shape or form is due to the Aryan blood so you know those are the two extremes of the pendulum there DNA bioarchiology and the assessment of artifacts that are being found is helping to clarify this this would be a different show if we could have this conversation 20 years from now nonetheless fadlan talks about these people that he sees on his travels to what's now southern Russia he's there to talk to some

step no mad maybe semi no mad by this point leader of a group called the ball gars right this is a you know ball gary and comes from that so this guy is Islamic but his ball gars are practicing a form of Islam that might not exactly be kosher if you'll pardon the mixed metaphors there and so we ask for some instruction on the faith you know come on up here tell us what we're doing

“wrong in practicing Islam and oh by the way like to make some deals with you like to do some”

training with you so fadlan goes up there and it's like a travel log if you will and as with anything from that long ago it's a miracle it's come down to you know be read by us today that it's survived but amongst the many people he talks about these people he calls the Rus or the Rusaya now I'm using the translation by Richard Fry there are others but fadlan talks about these people that he encounters along the rivers who are trading and in the east if these are virgins if these are you know

the Viking people from Scandinavia trading in what's now southern Russia they are you know what are we seeing the first part of the show that the Vikings in the west are like 60% Raiders and 40% Traders and in the east it's it's reverse like 60% Trader 40% Raider in part because there's a lot of

powerful entities in the east that make it a lot tougher to just go along sacking everything and killing

everyone they'll be pushed back and these ball gars are a perfect example of the kind of people that would push back so fadlan's a kind of talks about these people now to show you how difficult it is he talks about them having tattoos now we mentioned in part one there's all kinds of things that they've found on the Viking skeletons that have been uncovered for example the tooth grooves right horizontal cuttings or carvings in the teeth of some of these skeletons that may have been

died when they were alive you know so you put a die in there so you can see them even more pronounced and this may have been the the mark of certain warrior bands or any shows that you're in this particular group of people there are the accounts of course of the eye makeup what have we called part one war maskara that the Vikings are supposed to have used and it was one of those things it was thought to be so cool by other people who saw it that the Anglo Saxons in Britain

right on the opposite side of this great divide between they and the deans they start wearing it sounds like the girls liked it reminds you a little bit of like how the Romans in the Roman era started adopting garlic and German fashions like the tight pants because once again seemed to be popular with the opposite sex right I can look cool like a barbarian to give me that led the jack and give me those tight pants a little bit of the eye makeup the guideline of the war maskara

“and you know maybe the hairstyle there's an account by I think it was a monkey and I think it's in”

Britain it was talking about how scandalous it was to see Anglo Saxon youth you know adopting the fashions of the barbarians in the heathen well Fadlan has these people that he encounters he says they're tattooed now once again we're brought into the situation where do you extrapolate that and say well we have an eyewitness account of Vikings so they must all be tattooed or is this like pop by the sailor and long john silver and this is what Vikings are like at home this is what the ones who go to see

and you know it's a brotherhood of guys and they act a certain way where dirty were scroundy were were a bunch of you know guys on the road were like musicians on the road it's different on the road you get home and you know your monks your own kind and you want to look clean and pretty and reputable and maybe you look different so don't know how much you can extrapolate the Fadlan stuff but what he says is awesome and more awesome because it's one of the few accounts you

have this isn't a saga right this is a guy who saw these people and this is what he writes from the Richard Fry translation of ibn Fadlan's journey to Russia quote I saw the rusea or rusea when they came here they're on their trading voyages and had encamped by the river

i tell or a tell that's the vulga by the way i have never seen people he writes with a more

developed bodily stature than they there is tall is date palms blonde and ruddy so that they do

half of his body and leaves one of his hands free each of them has an axe a sword and a knife

“with him and all of these whom we have mentioned never let themselves be separated from their weapons”

their swords are broad-bladed provided with rills and of the frankish type each one of them has from the tip of his nails to the neck figures trees and other things tattooed in dark green and quote so this chives with what we know about the Vikings that they don't stray too far from their weapons it also jives with the fact that they like frankish swords but if you're in Europe who doesn't right then the great arms manufacturers of the frankish war warehouses and factories

produce the best European weapons so everybody wants them it does show how much the trading there

is is completely interactive and interspersed in Europe so that if you can get your hands on a good

frankish sword it's like a Winchester rifle of that era you get it now he also talks about as I said how dirty these people are and as we've said this doesn't necessarily drive with other things that are asserted about life at home but this may be like a bunch of dudes on the road and you know we don't have to be so clean and when we get home we'll you know smart enough clean up a little bit get the nice clothes out but you know we've been on you know safari here for a long

time and you know your clothes get a little dirty and we live a little rough and ready and close to

“the ground and futlon rights and remember he's from a very you know in air quotes civilized”

place during this time period where there are lots of manners cleanliness a lot of white

collar jobs going on we would say in his world and he writes quote they are the dirtiest creatures of God they have no shame in voiding their bowels and bladder nor do they wash themselves when polluted by a mission of semen nor do they wash their hands after eating they are then like asses who have gone astray and quote now he starts to talk about what they're selling and they're selling goods but the number one goods that they're trying to

sell off to other people are other people the Vikings were great slavers these people are too they take slaves according to the Muslim accounts often from the Slavic people and there are

“historians who say that the term Slav is connected to the term slave but this is the part that people”

sometimes minimize when you talk about people like the Vikings they are a great slaving people and they're a great trading people and the number one thing probably that they make the most money off of our slaves and a lot of their raids are connected to the idea of getting more shall we say raw materials for sale this is also where you get a chance to see a reminder shall we say of the absolute horrificness of slavery of human bondage because there are women for sale

mostly from according to flood lawns account anyway the people he run into are selling women and when they're selling women they're also using women it's horrible it's rape it's slavery and he writes quote they come from their own country more their boats on the strand of the I tell which is a great river it's the vulgar right and build on its banks large houses out of wood in a house like this ten or twenty people more or less live together each of them has a couch

we're upon he sits and with them are fair maidens who are destined for sale to the merchants and they may have intercourse with their girl while their comrades look on at times a crowd of them may come together and one does this in the presence of the others it also happens that a merchant who comes into the house to buy a girl from one of them may find him in the very act of having intercourse with her then he the Russ will not let her be until he has fulfilled his intention

and quote one gets the vibe again this is a non-history and vibe so take it for what it's worth but one gets a sort of a vibe here that this is not how these guys are gonna behave amongst their own women folk back in Scandinavia this is a bunch of dudes far away from women folk and manners and oversight and you know wink wink not not what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and the levels of cleanliness and upkeep may not meet the standards expected of them back in their home territory

and futon rights quote as a matter of duty they wash daily their faces and heads in a manner so dirty and so unclean as could possibly be imagined thus it is carried out a slave girl brings

hands and face and the hair of his head he washes it and comes it with a comb into the bucket then

blows his nose and spits into the bucket he holds back nothing impure but rather let's it go into the water and quote so far no problem right guys just being clean washing you know that whole thing but the problem comes with what flood lawn says next quote after he is done what was necessary the girl takes the same vessel to the one who is nearest and he does just as his neighbor had done she carries the vessel from one to another until all in the house have had a turn at it and each

“of them is blown his nose spat into and washed his face and hair in the vessel and quote remember”

what's so unusual about this is this isn't some story from some monk that some monk may have

heard or is lying about this is an eyewitness writing for his master his accuracy is probably better than any other accurate account you're going to get about the Vikings in this period asterisk here if these are Vikings then it gets truly dark where he talks about what happens when one of their numbers one of these chieftains of this group dies he gets to witness this he says he's curious and wants to see what happens and what the burial practices are like and by the way one of these

rusea people comes up to him and tells him through an interpreter that people like him are stupid where he

“comes from because they bury their loved ones to allow them to be eaten by worms and frogs and”

slimy things he's as we burn them and then they go straight to paradise no must no fuss but the ceremony

itself is a scene of gang rapes drunkenness killings and the archaeology of Scandinavian Viking Arab burial practices seem to indicate that at least some of the things Fadlan witnesses is in sympathetic with what has been found archaeologically speaking and he writes quote when a high chief dies his family says to his slave girls and servants which one of you wishes to die with him then one of them answers I when he or she has said this he is bound he can in no way be allowed to withdraw his word

if he wishes it or she wishes it it is not permitted for the most part this self-sacrifice is made by the maidens and the quote then there's a whole ceremony involves a lot of drinking a lot of pronouncements and all kinds of things it also involves a person a female known he says as the angel of

“death remember he's an eyewitness to this this is why this account is so important he's not telling you”

something he's heard this is something he saw how many people ever wrote anything down like this and of course you know how many of those accounts ever survived to come into our hands today so he talks about this boat that is laid out with all sorts of precious material and whatnot and a couches put on it and the boat is dragged on to shore and they they build sort of a facade around it and over it and then talks about the slave girl who drinks to insensibility makes a bunch of pronouncements

she's got a role to play in this whole ceremony too and then he writes quote they're upon an old woman came whom they call the angel of death and spread the draperies mentioned over the couch mean the couch on the boat she had held the oversight over the sewing of the garments of the deceased and their completion this old woman kills the girl I saw that she was an old giantus fat and grim to behold and the quote he says that they then bring a bunch of different animals to the boat that

the chieftain is laid in including all sorts of food drink fruits flowers and everything else bread meat onions then they brought a dog he says and shot it into two halves and laid the house on the boat then they brought weapons and laid them by his side then they took horses and shot them in half which is not an easy thing to do but it's probably a little bit easier than what they do next which he says they take to whole live cows and cut them into again

not an easy thing to do and then laid them in the boat and then he writes quote the maiden who wished to be put to death went here and there and entered each of the tents where the head of each tent had intercourse with her saying say to thy lord I have done this out of love of the end quote

just died is and tell him I'm having intercourse with you because I love him interesting how the

“different cultures of the world it can seem to us now she then takes part in some ceremonies involved”

in some drinking its statements and then he says as it gets time for the killing of her to happen he says quote I saw then how disturbed she was she wished to go into the tent but put her head between the tent and the side of the boat then the old woman the angel of death took her by the head made her go into the tent and also entered with her we're upon the men began to beat their shields with the stabs so that her shrieks would not be heard and the other maidens became terrified

then six men went into the tent and all had intercourse with the girl then they placed her beside

her dead lord two men seized her by the feet and two by the hands then the old woman placed a rope in

which a bite meaning a news had been made and gave it to two of the men to pull at the two ends

“then the old woman came to her with a broad bladed dagger and began to jab it into her ribs”

and pull it out again and the two men strangled her until she was dead and the quote the end result of all of this is she's laid in the boat next to the dead shefton the boat is then set on fire goes up in smoke and you have a very high ranking version of the Viking funeral the low ranking version by the way they say but it's not achieved and they often just put them into a boat with weapons light it on fire and push it out into a river or the ocean

or whatever it might be and as we've been mentioning it is difficult to know how much one can talk about this is a you know an air quotes Viking funeral versus some sort of hybrid Viking slash Slavic slash eastern sort of deal because in all the areas as we've said that the Scandinavians sort of touch upon and enter into they become more like the locals they start to fuse with them and they certainly adopt styles and practices weapons armor tactics maybe sometimes even religious

“beliefs of the locals that's how you get people like the Norse Irish in Ireland for example”

right this this what do we say the shrapnel begins to be absorbed you know into the flesh of the local population well here in the east it's an eastern population you want to get a sense of the vibe go look at artist renderings of these eastern Vikings or these roast people they look like Vikings with an eastern sort of flare right the hairstyles the weapons the armor the armor is sometimes laminar armor which is sort of fish galey looks different than chain mail you don't see a lot of

laminar armor in the west but this is something you see all through on history I mean the step people are famous for this they nomadic horse archer people from the entire Eurasian land mass they tend to look like the big settled societies that they operate near I mean if you're on the borders of China and you're a step tribe well you're trading with China aren't you you're trading with China you're intermarrying with the Chinese and the border areas and you tend to look kind of

well Chinese if you're step tribes north of Persia you have an Iranian sort of feel if you're step tribes in the west and you're getting your fabrics and your armor and your weapons from the Byzantines either through raiding or trading well you tend to look like a western step tribe and these Scandinavian peoples have this same sort of feel to them and if you ever go look at an artist rendering of the Scandinavian peoples in eastern Europe they sort of look different than the

Scandinavian peoples in Ireland for example or north western France in graves in the merchant town that's located in modern based Sweden now Berke they have found clear influences from the east

and the step nomads and hairstyles for example the Rus will always look a little step nomad in terms

of their particular look and in his book The Children of Ashenelm historian Neil Price talks about these Berke burials and the fact that the eastern Vikings were starting to look well very eastern indeed and he writes quote recalling the people in the Berke chamber burials the mounted arches with their recurved bows and special thumb rings the Rus appear as military elites who have adopted the best equipment and tactics of those they might have to fight or

Nate silks and calfdans have been found engraves across Scandinavia and depictions on gotlandic pictures stones of warriors wearing the wide baggy trousers that characterized Persian and Arab

the same individuals also had armor of the Byzantine type as well as the lamellar that was

“particular to the mounted step nomads of eurasia all while the isotopes and genomic analysis”

indicate that they themselves were Scandinavian origin in a way this almost appears to be a uniform not in the sense of identical clothes but in a recognized repertoire of symbolism and style what one scholar has called a turkic military outfit and quote there are some other elements in play too where you can see why the Scandinavian Vikings in the east would start to diverge a little bit from the ones in the west one has to deal with cultural affinity in some places in the west England's

a perfect example the Vikings are running into people that are quite a bit like themselves in some respects I mean the Anglo-Saxons in England spoke a language that was probably mutually intelligible they could probably speak to the Vikings in the past they had the same gods they look like them they sound like them they have a bunch of the same sorts of customs thought that way in the east what's more as we've said before the east is a much more dangerous

neighborhood there are many more cultures coming together in a kind of a cultural estuary in the east a sort of a meeting of a bunch of different worlds the Scandinavians in the east are much more in a population and numbers since a drop in the bucket we quoted historians in part one of this discussion who suggested that the population of Scandinavia in its entirety during this era

“might have been around 2 million human beings and remember it's only a small percentage of that”

2 million that's going to go down the river systems in the east and become the roast well they're

in your mixing with a Slavic population that's enormous the Slavs today are still the largest I believe ethno linguistic group in Europe during this time period there would have been many many millions of Slavs divided into all sorts of different Slavic tribes how much of an impact could a small amount of Scandinavian adventurers or conquerors have had on such a large population maybe they're a you know layer of leadership or a dominant group amongst a bunch of different tribes

hard to know archeology is helping to flesh out some of the answers to these questions by studying graves grave goods skeletons but what's missing are the stories the sort of things that you would

get from written accounts and as we've said and said extensively in the first part of this series

the Byzantines would write about some of this stuff but when the roast first appearing the Byzantine

“accounts they're treated like an almost unknown people remember let's review here for a minute”

the first time you hear about these roses in the eight thirties back in western Europe we told the story of the two or three roast travelers who show up in a court of a frankish king and the Byzantine send them there and say can you help these people get home if they go the direct route for roachus tribes will kill them and the frankish emperor has to say well tell me who you are we'll try to get you home and they say we're roast and he doesn't know what that means they have to

go do some investigative work and they finally determine that roast means sweeds and these are

sweeds so that's in the eight thirties there is a rumor is a good way to put it or a tradition that there might have been an attack on some Byzantine territories in the eight thirties also but most historians seem to discount that what they don't discount is the story we told in the first part of the show about the great raid on the suburbs of Constantinople modern day Istanbul in the eight sixties right eight sixty famously we told that story in the Byzantines treated that like a brand new

people it's shown up in their territory you know from some parts unknown which doesn't make any sense if a couple decades before they'd been sending them to the frankish emperor and telling them these are roast people get them home nonetheless in that whole era we really don't know who for example the rulers were what the politics were or any of that sort of stuff now you'll get some of that from the Byzantine records later we do have some information about what's going on

in terms of the stories from this era but as is usual with these sorts of situations they're not written down for hundreds of years and the people who wrote them down have their own reasons for writing them down which makes the information suspect and requires historians to be very vigilant about what they accept and what they don't and try to cross reference and double check things those of you who know the story norm talking about a bunch of documents put together in chronicle in something

called the Russian primary chronicle supposedly written by Christian monks one specifically named

hundreds of years after the events in question and there are reasons why these monks might have

“skewed the story including trying to sort of trace back the ruling dynasties lineage and give”

support to the legitimacy of that it is a fascinating text though anyway you slice it and when you hear the accounts you realize what a different animal it is than the sorts of information we have from archaeology from Byzantine accounts or anything else so it makes it very valuable and that respect maybe as a jumping off point for detective work but boy when you read it you also see stuff that reminds you of like grim's fairy tales Greek mythology J.R.R. Tolkien stuff so

well take it with the grain of salt I by the way use the Samuel hazard cross and old

group he sure but that's that's her translation but this you know and what's wonderful about these sorts of documents is that they they will like start the story at a logical beginning point and the Russian primary chronicle begins with the biblical flood of Noah and sort of works it's way down we call that comprehensive where I come from but the chronicle tells the show we call it legendary story of the founding of what will be called the Chieven Rus state and it involves

three brothers from Scandinavia the story is that the Slavic tribes in what's now

Poland the Baltics Ukraine Russia that whole area really a central area sort of if you

if you drew a line from like St. Petersburg now all the way down to Istanbul and there's a whole area

“in between because the people who became the key even roast desperately want to get to where the”

money is and the money's in Constantinople so if you start in Sweden and you want to get to Constantinople and you want to control the the pipeline in between well that's the area we're talking about here and the Russian primary chronicle says there were all these Slavic tribes in that area that the varangians as they call them the Scandinavians come in there try to you know bully their way around force the locals to pay tribute the locals eventually throw them out but then ask them back later

and they ask them back later because the tribes of Slavs are all fighting with each other but they need someone to come in and rule them this is the very basis by the way of that Normanist anti-Normonist controversy we've talked about you know is this a bunch of Scandinavians who are imparting their DNA and their culture on the locals and improving them what did Hitler say something like if it weren't for the Scandinavian infusion of blood the Russians would still be

living like rabbits the opposite viewpoint are the people in the Soviet Union who think that the whole thing is a bit of a scam and that this is mostly a Slavic story and all this other stuff is a bunch of meaningless sort of fringe material that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things but the story is that these three brothers are asked by the Slavs to come back and rule over them because they need someone to prevent the violence between the Slavic tribes this might sound weird

except we should realize that bringing in royal families from completely other dynasties and places is not unusual at all the current British royal family for example is German you look at people like the hapspurs that besides marrying into all kinds of places and conquering all kinds of places sometimes when you just needed a ruler and you didn't have one you'd bring a hapspur again it also kind of makes sense if you have a bunch of tribes none of whom wants to have

their royal family ruling over them from one of their competitors so you bring in a non biased outside source right with no allegiance to any of the tribes they're involved in the current conflict right outside you know unbiased person to come in here and rule fairly so the Russian primary chronicle written by these monks in caves supposedly hundreds of years later tells the story and here's the way they tell it quote the verangians from beyond the sea imposed tribute upon the

chuds the slavs the marians the vests and the kravichians but the kazaars imposed it upon the italianians the savareans and the vyachians and collected a white squirrel skin from each heart and

“quote the kazaars are in a very important group of people in this era they are a step tribe confederacy”

they are Turkish and other ethnicities as these step tribes tend to be and the upper echelons of the

comment because if you think about peoples who exist in a mostly non currency sort of society if

“somebody wants to force them to pay tribute how did they pay and the story basically says that they”

required each you know homeowner to deliver their share of the tribute in this case a white squirrel skin well if you have hundreds of homes that pay tribute to you and you say i want a white squirrel skin from each of you end up at the end of the day with hundreds of squirrel skins don't you the Russian primary chronicle continues talking about how these slavic peoples and others by the way those aren't all slavic groups as i understand it throw the verangians out the

send of home to where they came from quote the tributaries of the verangians drove them back beyond

the sea and refusing them further tribute set out to govern themselves there was no law among them but tribe rose against tribe discord thus ensued among them and they began to war one against another they said to themselves let us seek a prince who may rule over us and judge us according to the law they accordingly went overseas to the verangian russes these particular verangians were known as russes just as some are called Swedes and others Normans English and godlanders for they were thus named

the chuds the slabs the crevichians and the vess then said to the people of russes our land is great

and rich but there is no order in it come to rule and reign over us end quote the chronicle then

says that they selected three brothers who would come and rule over them and each of the brothers

“was going to take in rule one of the key trading post towns along the rivers that form sort of the”

pipeline from the Baltic to you know the money port of you know Constantinople and Byzantium but within two years the chronicle says two of the three brothers died leaving the one brother that's famous his name is Rurek now to me Rurek is an eastern version of a figure that reminds me of ragnar lawthbrook in the west right famous Viking you see him on television in the movies all the time but ragnar lawthbrook's a figure that no one's exactly sure if he was even real

or if he was really said so much myth and legend piled on top of him that maybe the real person doesn't even resemble the figure you know in the stories but what you can't say about ragnar lawthbrook is his descendants are real and you can say the same thing about Rurek you get a sense in the Russian primary chronicle that stuff is happening without it necessarily being spelled out to you that you know more of these Slavic tribes are paying tribute that things are being consolidated

by the time Rurek dies it seems like it's a more subtle situation the chronicle says he turns things over to a member it says if his kin not his child but his kin who be known to history is Oleg the Russian histories call him Oleg the wise now if these don't particularly sound like Viking Scandinavian names to you there's a reason for that they are all sort of reimagined through a Slavic lens so when you read the history books the historians will often go to

great pains to give you the likely Viking name for these people originally and then you get to see what the Slavic version of it is so Rurek was probably Eric Oleg was probably Helgi it goes like that eventually the names will be Slavic from the get go and then that's supposedly signifies some major change there right when you're not any longer giving them Viking Scandinavian names but naming them Slavic name something's gone different the Oleg the wise is famous he does the same thing

Rurek does in terms of consolidating things expanding things these early rulers changed the tribute that people are paying so oftentimes they'll deal with these tribes who are paying tribute to someone else the casars we mentioned earlier are famous the bolgars are another one and they'll say you know who you're paying tribute to and they'll say in the Scandinavian Rus virgins we'll say well stop paying tribute to them and start paying it to me sometimes they'll say will charge you less usually they'll say if they give you

any trouble they can come talk to us and so there's this process of sort of taking over in the last show we compared some of the Viking activities to sort of the organized crime or the

“mob moving in if you want to give that overtone to this it still sort of works coming in here”

and taking over the territory from the other mob the best story in the Russian primary chronicle whether

and you can tell by the story of how Oleg dies so the story about how Oleg dies involves a wizard

“and the wizard tells Oleg that his horse is going to be the reason he dies now somebody told you”

that your horse was going to be the reason you died long before your horse does anything to you what would you do probably the same thing that Oleg does when the wizard says your horse is going to be the main of your existence he sends the horse away doesn't hold anything against the horse tells his underlings to take it far away feed it take good care of it just don't you know have it near me and then one day when the prophecy is supposed to come true and Oleg finds himself still alive

he says to one of his squires the Russian primary chronicle says and you can see how very different this is can't you from information in archaeologists would provide or something the Byzantines would write right this is the origin story as told by the descendants of the people they're writing about but Oleg says to the squire what ever happened to that horse that was supposed to be the death of me and the Russian primary chronicle says quote the squire answered that he was dead meaning the horse was dead

Oleg laughed and mocked the magician meaning the wizard exclaiming soothsayers tell untruths and their words are not but falsehoods this horse is dead but I am still alive then he commanded that a horse should be saddled let me see his bones said he he wrote to the place with the bare bones and skull lay dismounting from his horse he laughed and remarked so I was supposed to receive my death from this skull and then he stamped upon the skull with his foot

but a serpent crawled forth from it and beat him on the foot so that in consequence he

“sickened and died and quote now I suppose there's a tiny chance that that's what actually happened”

but you can see why people take the Russian primary chronicle especially these early parts of the story with more than a grain of salt and you can also see the why it's the kind of material you just don't get from the other sources right sometimes you're left with something that might not be good enough to hang your hat on but if it's all you have well it's hard to throw away and it's entirety isn't it now Oleg leads to Igor and Igor is a fascinating character including because

of the woman who marries Igor marries Olga there's a lot of names I realized but Olga is also supposed to be a Scandinavian person her name was probably Helga in the Scandinavian naming system she's fascinating in fact I'm trying to think I know there has to be more because there's so many Christian saints I'm trying to think of a Christian saint where they more bloody vindictive retributionally violent sort of temperament that would outstrip Olga's reputation and I can't

think of one off the top of my head but some would say Olga had a good reason for being the way that she was because Olga's husband will be killed by a Slavic tribe now if you are a Slavic proponent you will say that they had a very good reason to kill Igor because what happens is like his predecessors before him Igor will go and lay tribute on these Slavic tribes he

shows up according to the Russian primary chronicle to this one tribe with his army and basically

says you know that amount you were paying to my predecessor where we're raising the rat right so you're gonna pay me more and what could they do he had the army with them they just sort of makely said okay and then he and the army head back to you know headquarters but on the way the primary chronicle says he decided he was gonna raise it even more so he goes back to the people who's rent you know the tribute he just raised but he only brings a small body guard with him and when he tells the

Slavic tribe he's raising the rent even more than he said he was they kill him the traditional account is and you'll run into this quite a bit that they tie each of his legs to a birch tree that has bent over you know under tension and that will pull his legs in opposite directions and then when they let go of the birch tree it splits and right up the middle and then they have the gall to go to his wife Olga and tell her what they did to her husband and then they have the greater gall to

“say well now that your husband is dead we think you should marry our leader and that's where the”

story gets fantastic again is it true who knows it's not something the archaeologist at least at

this time can confirm and it's not something that the Byzantine documents confirm but Olga basically

just wickedly retributional quote Olga was informed that the derrevliens that's the Slavic tribe

“question had arrived and summoned them to her presence with the gracious welcome when the derrevliens”

had announced their arrival Olga replied with an inquiry as to the reason of their coming the derrevliens then announced that their tribe had sent them to report that they had slain her husband because he was like a wolf crafty and ravening but that their princes who had thus preserved the land of derriva were good and that Olga should come and marry their prince whose name was Mal Olga made this reply quote your proposal is pleasing to me indeed my husband cannot rise again from the dead but I

desired honor you tomorrow in the presence of my people return now to your boat and remain there with an aspect of arrogance I shall send for you on the tomorrow and quote she then has her people show up the next day after they have dug a big trench without the derrevliens knowing about it they pick

“them up in this boat they carry them in this boat to the trench they throw them in the trench”

and then they bury them alive Olga's not even close to being done though she then according to

the chronicle sends a message back to the derrevliens basically saying quote if they really

required her presence they should send after her their most distinguished men so that she might go to their prince with due honor for otherwise her people in Kiev would not let her go and quote right send me your best people they'll conduct me to you and we'll get this marriage thing underway basically so they send their best people to her when they arrive she says that she set up a wonderful bath in the bath house for them they should go sort of wash off the dirt

from the trip and then she'll receive them when they all go into the bath house she has

“her people burn it down with them in it but Olga's not done yet she then tells the derrevliens”

that she's coming to them that she they should prepare a feast with lots of alcoholic beverages

and they'll party it up well and then she shows up everybody gets drunk she has a small escort with her and when everybody gets drunk she has her followers kill everyone the Russian primary chronicle says that her followers killed down 5,000 of the derrevliens but that she wasn't done even yet Olga then returned to the Kiev the chronicle says and prepares her army to attack the survivors it does she puts their city under siege it says for a year eventually both sides tire of the

siege and they say you know what do we have to do to get this you know resolved and she says I only want a sparrow actually three pigeons and three sparrows I correct myself from each house and then when they're really happy to find out that that's all she wants they deliver up the three sparrows with three pigeons from each house she ties sulfur and other inflammatory materials to each one of them releases them the primary chronicle says they instantly returned to where they

came from all the various houses with their fetched roofs like the whole city on fire the whole thing burns down and as the Russian primary chronicle says quote there was not a house there was not consumed and it was impossible to distinguish the flames because all the houses caught fire at once the people fled from the city and Olga ordered her soldiers to catch them thus she took the city and burned it and captured the elders of the city some of the other captive she killed

while she gave others as slaves to her followers the remnant she left to pay tribute and quote now spoiler alert in the future Olga is going to be saintage you're going to become a Christian saint when was the last Christians saint that you can think of off the top of your head responsible for as much retribution of violence as Olga is she's clearly one of the women in history you would least want to make angry with you but is any of this stuff about Olga or for that matter

rick or olig or ego or true all this stuff from the Russian primary chronicle is open to debate an inspection and critique what's more I like the other name that the Russian primary chronicle is known by it's also called the tale of bygone years which makes it sound less authoritative and more like a hobbit might have written it right it's the red book of west march or something like that

now for generations but they often disagree on what they considered to be truth and falsehood

“I mean there are several attacks on constant and open that some historians think happened”

and others think didn't the question of Olga all by herself is interesting in the emergence of real historian Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepherd point out that the Olga's story is formulaic and symbolic and they write quote Olga has ample space in the primary chronicle and she also became the subject of a quasi-hageographical eulogy and quote they point out that she meets certain specifications for how women are supposed to behave in the time that the primary chronicle

was written saying quote yet Olga emphatically confirms the rule in the first place her status is

within the norms she is shown as holding power not in her own right but as her husbands without during her sons minority and her actions against the derevliens were her revenge for her

“husband's murder secondly they write most narratives about her have a curiously feminine texture”

unlike the equivalent narratives about men mal the prince of the derevliens since and voice to Olga proposing marriage Olga agrees and orders that the end voice be carried up to Kiev in their boat when the end voice reach Olga's compound the boat is cast into a pit and the end voice

are buried alive in it this they say is Olga's first revenge she then requests more end voice

to escort her on her journey to her bridegroom when they arrive she suggests they take a bat the doors are then locked the bathhouses set on fire and the end voice are burned alive finally they write Olga goes to the land of the derevliens requesting only that before marrying she might hold a funeral feast for her husband at the feast the derevliens drink themselves into a stupor whereupon Olga's men set upon them and cut them to pieces all 5,000 of them these they write

are formulaic tales under the guise of betrothal Olga sets a series of riddles with cryptic clues symbolizing not a marriage but a funeral boat burial washing the body cremation the funeral feast the penalty for not decoding the riddle is death and the derevliens drink at their own funeral feast and quote during the time period we just mentioned there are a couple of treaties that are signed between the russ or some of the russ and the Byzantines these treaties are interesting

because trying to figure out why treaties are being signed has created confusion the Russian primary chronicle says they're signed because while they're ending conflicts right when do you sign a treaty when you end a war but whether these conflicts occurred or not is also controversial I have many books on the subject I would you know off the top of my head say about 60% believe that these conflicts but the treaties are supposed to settle didn't happen about 40% by the

idea that they did the Russian primary chronicle the tale of bygone years says that they did but this may be a later insertion to explain why there are treaties for example Viking historians February or Jacobson in the varangians god's holy fire writes quote the treaty is placed into the primary chronicle in context of the attack by Prince Oleg on Constantinople in 907 there is however no distinct reference to such a raid in any Roman sources meaning any Byzantine sources which is

in stark contrast to the rate of 860 it could thus be surmised that Oleg's attack on Constantinople was a later invention perhaps intended to explain the circumstances of the treaty which itself does not refer to any raid only to a longstanding friendship between the russ and the Roman Empire end quote in his book north men the Viking saga Viking expert John Haywood puts it this way quote according to the primary chronicle Oleg led in attack on Constantinople in 907 if he did

no one in Constantinople appears to have noticed because it is not mentioned in any Byzantine sources end quote yet as I said about 40% of the history you'll read by the idea that those attacks happened I'm not a historian I can't make distinctions between arguments between historians so I'm going to treat those attacks as suspect and stick with the ones we know happened because there's

“going to be another one but before we get to it you have to know about a geopolitical firestorm”

that erupts the changes everything in the eastern Viking barangian russ world and that is the latest

break like waves upon the settled societies that ring the erasian step and there's always another

“wave behind the current breaking crest and in the late 800's early 900's the newest wave is the”

patchen eggs and these people blow through the casars and the magas and destroy the stabilization that has occurred in that region over the previous decades just rupt everything when the Byzantine suggests to the magas also known as the Hungarians that they fight these new tribal peoples from the east the Hungarians say they can't in the emergence of russ Simon Franklin the Jonathan Shepherd have this quote quote the patchen eggs overran the grazing grounds of the Hungarians during

the eight 90's having been egg dawn by the ruler of Bulgaria cimeon the region between the dawn

and the don yet steps in the east and the neaster and then subsequently the Danube in the west lay at their disposal they were markedly poorer than the Hungarians in terms of material culture ornaments and writing gear but they were perhaps for that reason more ferocious when a Byzantine emissary tried to stir up the Hungarians against the patchen eggs they protested now quoting the Hungarians quote we cannot fight them for their country is vast and their people numerous

and they are the devil's brats and quote the devil's brats I love that term and the devil's brats are

going to create geopolitical upheaval threaten the trade routes make life miserable for lots of

different people the russ not least amongst them on this super high way from the Baltic to Constantinople and beyond that to Baghdad there are going to be spots where the russ traders have to take their boats overland and that we are told in the original sources is where the pension eggs wait for them and they get them but crisis can create opportunity and in many places it is thought that these russ warriors are able to make new inroads and create new tributary

societies amongst the slabs because all of a sudden these slabs desperately need protection from the patchen eggs and these russ these Vikings of the east are strong well equipped warriors and one of the things I find interesting is you can start to see the development of what we can call true cavalry here in the east that's part of a you know new Tony and formula and warfare for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction when you are fighting mounted people

“in wide open country eventually you learn that you need to be mounted to and true cavalry”

meaning fighting as cavalry will start in the east long before it does in the west and of course when I say that I mean Scandinavian cavalry because of course cavalry had been fighting as cavalry in some parts of the world for 2,000 years or something by this time but the Scandinavians in the eastern areas will adopt true cavalry quite a bit of time before the Scandinavians in the west will it's in 941 that we see the famous great attack on Constantinople by the russ that

no one denies that there are multiple sources for as we said earlier if it bleeds it leads kind of works for history the same way it does for journalism and that's why the earlier attacks that supposedly happened in 907 for example are harder to believe because you know you can't really have one of those big attacks without a bunch of people writing about it will not easily anyway and the famous 940 one attack is written by about by a lot of sources proving the point

we should talk a little bit about the place that's attacked because we've mentioned it before but it bears some discussion we call it the Byzantine Empire this is a misnomer that's not something anyone living during this time period we're talking about what if understood or used or called themselves the people in what we call the Byzantine Empire call themselves Roman and it's easy to

“understand why all you have to do is pretend that the same thing that left the Byzantines in the”

position the Byzantines are in by this time happened to a place like the United States and what would happen if in some future time and invasion of the United States happened and the invaders were able to conquer all the way to somewhere in the Midwest let's just say you know Iowa you know Illinois

separate kingdoms but every place east of that you know from like you know Michigan all the

way to the east coast remained you know as it was the United States as we halted the invaders at the Midwest and we continued on for another thousand years would you call that something different would the people in those territories rename the United States as something else just because they lost

“some of it well that's what happened to the eastern Roman Empire when the you know barbarian tribes”

and the various other groups were able to eventually let's just say extinguish government in the Roman west the Roman east remained for another thousand years what matters though in this discussion is that there is an unbroken historical tradition in those places that dates back well a good 1300 years what would you say I mean Julia Caesar's in the 50s BCE well they still call their emperor Kaiser you know that's what Caesar would have been called in the Roman Latin right

Kaiser and by Julia Caesar's time in the 50s BCE Roman military tradition is hundreds of years old already you know they write this stuff down it continues to build upon you know the information that's been compiled since at least the period invasions of the 280s BCE so there's a huge amount a wellspring we can say of military and technological knowledge in a place like Constantinople in this time period the dates back well a long way during this time the estimated population of the city of Constantinople

about a half million people this is probably somewhat less than the city of Rome at Rome's height

which has been estimated somewhere between 750,000 and a million people but this still makes it you know a half a million people the largest European city the most technologically advanced European city the most wealthy European city and they have weapons that these russ can't even dream of and when the russ attack in 941 just like in the attack in 860 it is well timed and that might not be an accident they may know intelligence wise that the Byzantine navy and army is away fighting elsewhere

because just like in 860 in 941 it is away in fighting elsewhere and the emperor is too and the russ attack they come down the rivers they head into the black sea they sail over to the boss for us and they begin to attack the suburbs and the places that have lighter defenses because the

defenses of Constantinople are famous and it's part of the reason why it never fell to the barbarians

back when the western Roman Empire fell it's one of the great defensible cities of all time it's mainly surrounded by water and the places where it's not it has massive walls we should point

“out as I believe we did for the earlier attack in 860 that the ships or boats whatever you want to”

call them it's it's somewhere between a ship and about that the russ are using are not the long ships that they're using in the west because the long ships they're using in the west would never survive the river journeys with all the falls and the wrappings and the rocks they had to have boats that could be carried at times so these are smaller craft the Greek name for them makes them sound like they're kind of like large dugout canoes but they're wood if you today were

faced with a bunch of wooden boats that you need as a defender self against what would be a good weapon to use against them because in 941 when the Byzantines are faced with this attack the eastern Romans maybe we should say are faced with this attack they pull out all the technological stops we are told in the sources that they have 15 old hoax we would use the term moth balled today and they pull them out of moth balls and they fit them with one of their great technological marvels

“I think the best term to use for it probably to be somewhat near accurate would be to call them”

flame throwers the Byzantines the eastern Romans have a weapon that the technological scientific experts of today still can't figure out what it was composed of we have all sorts of accounts because they used it to keep themselves free for a very long time the historical term you will usually hear it referred to by is Greek fire it is sometimes called Median fire it is sometimes

formula for this was but it should be pointed out that the reason that this isn't better understood

is because this is a jealously guarded state secret in fact I was reading that the Byzantines the eastern Romans would make sure to keep the people who dealt with the Greek fire in compartmentalized situations right so no one knew everything about it this these people might handle the making of it these other people might handle the distribution of it these other people might handle the wielding of it

“but no one knew everything and that's how you kind of keep the secret from getting out”

there's a famous Byzantine man you were written by one emperor to his son and in it he talks about a lot of different things of importance that his son should know and in ruling the empire but one thing he wants his son to understand is you keep this technological marvel the superweapon secret or else and the account says quote similar care and thought you must take in the matter of the liquid fire which is discharged through tubes so that if any shall ever venture to demand this

too as they've often made demands of us also you may rebut and dismiss them in words like these now he's telling us what to say to people that might want to put him in a position where he's forced

“to reveal the secret to Greek fire quote this too was revealed and taught by God through an angel”

to the great and holy Constantine the first Christian emperor and concerning this too he received

great charges from the same angel and as we are assured by the faithful witness of our fathers and grandfathers that it should be manufactured among the Christians only and in this city ruled by them and nowhere else at all nor should it be sent nor taught to any other nation whatsoever and so for the confirmation of this among those who should come after him this great emperor caused curses to be inscribed on the holy stable of the church of God that he who should dare

give of this fire to another nation should neither be called a Christian nor be held worthy of any rank or office and if he should be the holder of any such he should be expelled there from and be a nephamassized and made an example forever and ever whether he were emperor or patriarch or any other man whatever either ruler or subject who should seek to transgress this commandment and he adjured all who had had the zeal and fear of God to be prompt to make away with him who attempted

to do this as a common enemy and a transgressor of this great commandment and to dismiss him to a death most hateful and cruel and it happened once as wickedness will still find room that one of our military governors who had been most heavily bribed by certain foreigners hand it over some of this fire to them and since God could not endure to leave unabanged this transgression as he was about to enter the holy church of God fire came down out of heaven and devoured and

consumed him utterly and thereafter mighty dread and terror were implanted in the hearts of all men

and never since then has anyone whether emperor or noble or private citizen or military governor

or any man of any sort whatever venture to think of such a thing far less to attempt to do it or bring it to pass end quote that is quite an admonition isn't it and that shows exactly how

“much of an important secret weapon this Greek fire was in his a short history of Byzantium the historian”

of Byzantium John Julius Norwich puts it this way quote it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Greek fire in Byzantine history to the Sarasins it was all too familiar to the Russians a total surprise and quote earlier in the work he describes how it worked against the Sarasins and says quote the Byzantines more over possessed a secret weapon to this day we are uncertain of the composition of Greek fire whether it was sprayed over an enemy vessel or poured into long narrow cartridges

and catapulted against its objective the results were almost invariably catastrophic the flaming oil-based liquid floated upon the surface of the sea frequently igniting the wooden hulls of the ships causing an additional hazard to those who tried to jump over board and quote

about something different seems to slip and give a little bit of the recipe maybe when she wrote quote

“now this fire was chemically prepared in the following manner from the pine and other similar”

evergreen trees they gather resin which burns easily this is rubbed with sulfur and introduced into reed tubes a man blows on it with a strong sustained breath as though he were playing a pipe and then it comes in contact with the fire at the end of the tube bursts into flames and falls like a flash of lightning on the faces in front of it and quote she also describes how they would use this in a way where it was sprayed out of the sculptures the metal carvings

and images of like wild animals and lions and dragons and she says quote the emperor they're upon

ordered all provinces of the Roman Empire to provide ships many were also made in Constantinople itself from time to time he used to board a ship with one bank of wars and give advice himself to the ship rights about their construction he meaning the emperor knew the pizons were masters of naval warfare and he feared to see battle with them end quote let me stop here they were fighting the pizons at the time this is hundreds of years after the time period we're talking about

“but this is what matters for the time period we're talking about quote accordingly he”

affixed on the prow of each vessel the heads of lions and other land animals they were made

of bronze or iron with wide open jaws the thin layer of gold with which they were covered made the very sight of them terrifying Greek fire to be hurled at the enemy through tubes was made to issue from the mouths of these figure heads in such a way that they appear to be belching out the fire end quote so these 15 mach-balled rotting hulks of galleys are brought out of storage they are loaded with these tubes that can shoot out essentially this explosive

flamethrower like material and when these wooden dugout canoes end up surrounding these galleys the Byzantines these eastern Romans turn the flamethrowers on the wooden vessels of the russ and it is as the historian we recently quoted said catastrophic there are multiple accounts

“that confirm that the russ are defeated by fire that's how many of the accounts were by fire”

one account is by a man who stepfather visits constant an opal right after this four month long attack occurs his name is and I think it's pronounced lude prund of cramona and he talks about how the Byzantines just like in 860 were taken by surprise in 941 and that the russ devastated the area near the coast they were said to be crucifying people driving nails into their heads shopping them up using them for target practice with arrows raping women taking slaves the whole nine

yards and this lude prund of cramona says that the 15 old galleys were rigged with the Greek fire and in their book the emergence of russ historian Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard talk about this original story from lude brund of cramona and say quote if we believe lude prund the Byzantines were taken by surprise in June 941 as they had been in 860 and the emperor romano s la capano s spent quote not a few sleepless nights in reflection and quote those are

quote from the original source by lude prund while the russ devastated area is near the coast the day was saved by bringing 15 quote battered old galleys and quote out of moth balls and rigging up Greek fire throwers at the bowels, stirrens and broadside lude prund to picks the Byzantines as winning fairly easily thanks to this non-conventional weaponry russ boats swarmed around the galleys which began to quote project their fire all around

and the russ seeing the flames hurled themselves from their boats preferring death by water to live incineration some sank to the bottom under the way to their querises and helmets

saved those who made it to the shore and quote the Byzantine army finally makes it back

“from where they were otherwise engaged starts picking off the russ soldiers on the shoreline where”

they're continuing to loot and commit atrocities john julius nor witch writes about the final part of the drama as the four month long attack is winding down and says that the Byzantine fleet as the ships would return would go right into combat with the russ boats and he says quote the fleet too was on its way and as each new squadron arrived it went straight into the attack soon it was the Russians who were on the defensive autumn was approaching and they were anxious

to sail for home but it was too late the Byzantine fleet was between them in the open sea

and slowly closing in early in september they made a desperate attempt to slip through the blockade but suddenly the whole sea was a flame as the Russians ships went up like matchwood

“their crews left overboard the lucky ones were dragged down by the weight of their armor”

while the rest met their death in the oil covered water which blazed as fiercely as the ships and quote according to leard prund of cramona his father was there when the emperor perated a bunch of the russ captives in front of an Italian diplomat and had them all beheaded in front of him the nine forty one attack is fascinating to me clearly because I'm interested in the technological and military capabilities of early states you know in the middle ages and

the ancient world and the use of things like flame throwers or naptho weapons is going to be intriguing to me regardless but it's also interesting because in this story of the russ right these these Vikings from the eastern european sphere this is the encounter that gives us multiple different sources that you can then use to sort of play off against each other and comparing contrast. Svever Jacobson in the brain genes in god's holy fire lists no less than five

“separate accounts of this affair all of which have key differences so what this says is well two major”

things one it actually happened two that the Byzantine victory was clearly gained through fire because all the sources mentioned the fire but something else is involved too and you can tell when you compare these different sources and see that there are major differences between them so something's not right how about this major difference you don't know who's in charge of the russ during this period and the differences in the sources point that out if you just believe the

Russian primary chronicle it's clear right they go from rurik clearly then you have oleg right the guy who stomps on the horses skull and gets bitten by the snake and then clearly after that you have egor I mean you know who's married to olga I mean it's a very clear succession but maybe the best source according to Jacobson for this entire 941 attack is a Hebrew letter and the Hebrew letter which is considered to be relatively contemporary says that the leader of the 941 attack on

Constantinople is oleg the guy who stomped on the horses skull and got bitten by the snake on the foot he's according to the Russian primary chronicle clearly dead and buried by this time so you start to see that that history before this Constantinople attack in 941 is hard to pin down and these figures are less flesh and blood than some compilation of legendary accounts that's hard to you know peel the layers back from and get get your mind around in fact

the first couple of figures that seem unequivocally real are olga that we just mentioned right

she of the retribution of violence against the drivliens although that story may be legendary and her son the first of the rose rulers to clearly have from birth a Slavic name if you've taken Russian history you know it because he's famous he's so you had a Slav we'd mentioned earlier that most of these earlier rose rulers almost certainly had Nordic names that were reimagined to a Slavic lens right so olga was Helga Egor was Ingvar that kind of thing but Sviatislav was

Sviatislav from birth apparently and this is telling Spever Jacobson writes about that quote it is noteworthy that the son of Ingvar Egor has a Slavonic name rather than a Scandinavian one

and quote in fact it's really hard to try to figure out what percentage of these people

that the Byzantines were incinerating with their flame throwers were actually Scandinavians and what percentage of them were Slavic tribes or step peoples or you know other groups of linguistic or ethnic elements from that region it's a as we said a cultural and ethnic estuary in that part of the world and a lot of times it's not that hard to get a whole bunch of different peoples to join you on an endeavor like let's go attack Constantinople and get rich

“my favorite story about the attack on Constantinople is also I believe from one of these letters”

to the casars that suggests because they were trying to figure out why the Russ would attack Constantinople if the trade with the Byzantines was going so well and that story is that the Byzantines encouraged the Russ to go attack the casars which they did but then they were defeated by the casars and the casars made sort of an extortion blackmail demand on the Russ and said well you know now that you attacked us because the Byzantines go did you into it weird demanding that you attack

the Byzantines or else and so the Hebrew letter to the casars paints the entire attack of 941 as being done reluctantly by the Russ and it may be the Russ knew darn well what their chances of success were and felt like they had to do it anyway ancient and medieval histories wonderful that way isn't it you just don't know what really happened it is with Olga as Viana Slava that you

“start to see things that you can actually you know grasp and hold and look at and say okay this is”

real with Olga it's less the story about her treatment of the derevlions than her conversion to Christianity and her conversion to Christianity is one of those things you see over and over again well I was going to say in all history but especially in the story of and I'm using air quotes here Christianizing the barbarians in those angels we talked about it extensively how often it was that it was the wives of barbarian in air quotes rulers who managed to either convert their

husbands or their peoples or start the process of transitioning from the pagan religious to Christianity

my mother was always fond of saying that you know the women get the short-ended the stick

in the historical accounts because the historical accounts up until recent times really followed the if it bleeds it leads sort of approaching so often it's about generals and these great kings and figures and the women are there though they're 50% of the population they're not slaves they're influencing the population all the time in ways that aren't always clear in the historical accounts they're more like a gravitational force acting on these figures that get all the publicity

“but you can see in the Christianization process over hundreds and hundreds of years how important”

their role was and Olga does this again she doesn't manage to convert the rust too Christianity but it's hard to see them doing so you know with her grandson as they will you know spoiler but as they will do without her sort of laying the groundwork for it sometime after the attack of Constantinople in 1941 within about 15 years she goes to the Byzantine emperor he converts her and baptizes her into the faith she goes back she tries to convert her son Spiata's love

who says that he can't adopt the Christian religion because his entourage will laugh at him

but you can see that she has replanted the seeds because we said in eight sixty the first time

that the rules ever appeared in Constantinople is this sort of unknown people the sources say that after that encounter that the Byzantines sent out their evangelists to go convert them right the formula of cooking the barbarians the same one that they were doing in the west you know the Frankish empire was sending out their evangelists to go convert the heathen right Saint Lebwin and all those guys this is the way what have we

call it in part one the the long term anti-terror strategy here is turn these heathen pagan people who worship bloody warrior gods into you know fellow Christians now that doesn't mean you're not going to have problems with them it just means that they're going to have societies more like your own they're going to be more hierarchical that's easier for you to deal with you're going to incorporate them into what we would today call the family of respectable nations and then they also become subject

to the kinds of military and economic pressures that one organized state can impose upon another one there's another aspect of this that is sometimes overlooked unless you are a fan of the history

Middle Ages in Europe and that is who gets to decide who the bishops and arch bishops are in all these

areas you'll see German emperors fighting with pop shall see English kings fighting with arch bishops

“I mean it's a huge thing because all you have to realize and we said this in the first”

part of this discussion which is what it means to have Christianity introduced into a pagan realm it's a lot more than religion it's a lot more than saving souls it's things like an instant bureaucracy just at Jesus I think is the way we put it well if you think about it that way try to imagine how that would work in the modern world I mean can you imagine the Chinese or the Russians being able to decide for example who the United States Secretary of State might be that's why so many of

these rulers will try to create some sort of self-sufficiency over time so that they don't have

a foreign power deciding who some of their most important officials are going to be I mean

it's explained very well in German historian Christian reference burgers book reimagining Europe

“chief and Russ in the medieval world when he says quote it must be noted that the conversions”

discussed in this chapter are what are referred to as a ecclesiastical conversions which are and he's quoting someone else now quote often the consequence of sociopolitical strategies power economics intellectual or psychological issues and other motives or expediencies that have in fact very little to do with religious feelings end quote reference burger continues quote and though conversion due to true religious feeling and religious motives can be found throughout

medieval history including at the royal level it is the more geopolitical reasoning behind conversion that will be examined here because of these social political and economic reasons behind medieval royal conversion historians for years have practically assumed that whoever christianized a kingdom gained tacit control over that kingdom that control was enforced by the appointment of bishops by the christianizing power bishops who were loyal to those who appointed them rather than to

those they ministered to this created a strong foreign power center in a kingdom that could potentially have strong political consequences for the orientation of the kingdoms foreign policy interests end quote so while the Byzantine emperor might be thinking he's getting some you know extra value points that would help help and get to heaven if he you know gets a lot of souls converted amongst the Russ for Jesus there is some more real world political things on his mind also

and once olga gives way to her son spiata sloth a man the Byzantines refer to as spendaslavos all of a sudden every trick that the Byzantine emperor has every tool in his toolbox has to be employed because spiata sloth is a handful he is a warrior he is one of these rulers that the minute he takes control he starts attacking the people around him and turning the Russ into a major power in the region it's interesting to watch Byzantine diplomacy at work

because they will often use money and diplomatic agreements to try to play off potential trouble makers to their foreign policy against each other and they try to use spiata sloth this way too but it backfires when they get him to attack some of their other enemies and he defeats them and becomes stronger with every victory now the Byzantines have created their own kind of monster the Russian primary chronicle the tale of bygong years describes viatta sloth this way when he

“takes over from his mom olga remember he's the one that when olga tries to tell him to become a”

Christian says if I do that my retina will laugh at me he's also by the way the physical living embodiment of the sort of linguistic and ethnic fusion that you're seeing amongst the

is a you know blending of all sorts of different people and sviata sloth the first of these rulers with a

slavic name when you see what he looks like he looks the physical part of that blending and we know this because agai was probably an eyewitness to what he looked like a guy named Leo the Deacon describes this whole period so we have something as a counterpoint to the Russian primary chronicle

and they describe a figure here who looks like he's something between a 12th century Russian

“and a 9th century Viking the Russian primary chronicle describes him in a way that would fit very”

nicely for a till of the hunt also one of these people who was a warrior in the field who doesn't need all these wonderful luxuries but sleeps with a blanket and a saddle for a pillow the Russian primary chronicle says quote when Prince Vietta sloth had grown up in matured he began to collect enumerous and valiant army stepping light as a leopard he undertook many campaigns upon his expeditions he carried with him neither wagons nor kettles and boiled no meat but cut off small strips of horse

slash game or beef and aided after roasting it on the coals nor did he have a tent but he

spread out a horse blanket under him and set his saddle under his head and all his retinue did likewise he sent messengers to the other lands announcing his intention to attack them and quote

“and the Russian primary chronicle has this guy attacking a new opponent every year he becomes the”

one who breaks the backs of the kazars which was probably a shock if this was a sporting event you would have favored the kazars in any Las Vegas bets and yet he destroys their power very soon afterwards he starts destroying the power of the Bulgarians some of this may have been

done at the instigation of the Byzantines but they didn't expect him to be so successful they kind

of created a geopolitical monster here and then they have to deal with him all of these vector trees we should point out are done less for the expansion of ones borders than they are for well essentially doing what organized crime would do so he had his love is going into other mob bosses territory like the kazars and the Bulgarians and taking over their rackets going in and shifting the protection money paid to one group of overlords to the ruse and a lot of the

ruse income during this time period and old go was doing the same thing by the way before spanish law is designed to have the people that they protect or rule or strong arm pay them a portion of you know they're living wages right they're the ones doing the farming they're the ones doing the trapping they're the ones doing the resource extraction and then providing it to the ruse at a certain point the Byzantines will essentially tell

spanish law from the ruse okay you're taking over lands now that even though the Bulgarians were occupying them belong to us traditionally so give them back and spanish law said why don't you just get out of Europe you don't even belong here and it's going to cost you a lot if you want me to leave this territory I just took Leo the Deacon says when he took one of these Bulgarian towns he impaled 20,000 people on a bunch of forked poles whether that happened or not is debatable

we talk a lot on the show about the actual physical challenges of things like this killing 20,000 people is about a mid-sized American universities student population it's not easy although there are ingenious ways that have been suggested over the areas for this to be done the Mongols for example are supposed to have made this something that was the responsibility of every individual soldier so if you have 30 or 40,000 Mongol warriors and you say every one of

“you gets five captives and you have to execute those five captives bring me the ears when you're”

done so I know you did it well you could kill a lot of people pretty quickly couldn't you it's a pretty efficient way to destroy a ton of human lives and spanish law is supposed to have done that eventually so you had a sloth and the Byzantine army will come to blows and this account is recorded in Leo the Deacon's work and he talks about this arrogant barbarian getting very puffed up after beating the Bulgarians a people the Byzantines call them the Seans and Leo the Deacon

writes quote spend a sloth us spanish love was very puffed up by his victories over the messians and swaggered instantly with barbarian arrogance for he already held the land securely and since he had reduced the messians to terror and stun submission with his innate cruelty for they say that when he took philopolis by force he cruelly an inhumanely affixed to a stake twenty thousand of the men captured in the town thus terrifying all his enemies and making them come

renounce his claim to this fertile land except in return for the payment of vast sums of money

and the ransom of the cities and prisoners that he had taken in warfare if the Romans were not willing to pay this then they should quickly withdraw from Europe which did not belong to them and move to Asia and quote Leo the Deacon says that the response from the Romans was

“essentially something like remember what happened to your father when he tangled with us”

remember what those flame throwers ships did to him remember how he ended his days being torn in two by the drivelians tying his limbs to trees and then letting them snap back Leo the Deacon says that spend a slavos vietta slav was enraged by that answer quote spend a slavos became furious at this response and carried away by barbarian frenzy and rage made the following reply I see no need for the emperor of the Romans to come to us

therefore let him not tire himself out by coming to this land for we will soon pitch our tents before the gates of Byzantium will surround this city with a mighty palisade and will meet

“him bravely when he sallies forth if he should dare to undertake such a great struggle we will”

cheat him with very deeds that we are not mere manual laborers who live by the work of our hands but blood thirsty warriors who fight our foes with weapons although the emperor believes in ignorance that rose soldiers are like pampered women and tries to frighten us with these threats as if we were suckling infants to be frightened by hobgoblins and quote after that clearly it's on there will be several fights between sphatus lawf and the Byzantines and the Byzantines

doing typical Byzantine things will offer enemies of the ruse incentives to attack them which is

how they created this big problems vianis lawf in the first place they used him as a puppet to attack

“other enemies of there sometimes Byzantine diplomacy can backfire eventually a meeting happens”

and Leo the Deacon may have been there this may be an eyewitness account but it's the best eyewitness type account that we have since it been filed long described the you know tall as date palms roast that he personally saw in the 920s and Leo the Deacon says that sphatus lawf says he wants to have a meeting with the emperor the emperor with his gold and crusted body guard shows up to meet this living embodiment of the fusion going on in the rust people during this time period

Leo the Deacon as I said very good chance he saw this first hand describes it and says quote

after the treaties were arranged between treaties between the ruse and the Byzantines sphatus lawf asked to come and speak with the emperor and the latter came without delay the emperor on horseback to the bank of the estrus river clad in armor ornamented with gold accompanied by a vast squadron of armed horsemen adorned with gold svendus lawf us arrived sailing along the river in a skithy and light boat grasping an ore and rowing with his companions as if

he were one of them his appearance was as follows he was of moderate height neither taller than average nor particularly short his eyebrows were thick he had gray eyes and a snub nose his beard was clean shaven but he let the hair grow abundantly on his upper lip where it was bushy and long and he shaved his head completely except for a lock of hair that hung down on one side as a mark of the nobility of his ancestry he was solid in the neck broad in the chest and very well articulated

in the rest of his body he had a rather angry and savage appearance on one ear was fastened to gold earring adorned with two pearls and with a red gemstone between them his clothing was white no different from that of his companions except in cleanliness after talking briefly with the emperor about their reconciliation he departed sitting on a helmetsman's seat of the boat thus the war of the Romans with the skithians he means the ruse came to an end and quote but forgiving and forgetting

was not really the style of the time period on either side the Byzantines almost certainly

the Byzantine sources had said that the pension eggs waited until the ruse had to take their

“boats overland to transfer from one river system to another that's where they caught Sviatislav”

they killed him and a bunch of his men and the pension eggs in a very step warrior sort of traditional

thing cut his head off poured gold into the skull and used it as a drinking cup which I've always

thought was a kind of an interesting thing I mean imagine being able to look into the face the actual face of one of your enemies as you drank your wine do you talk to it I mean it's a little like the real version of Dan Aquarides crystal skull vodka which comes in that wonderful glass skull shaped bottle but this isn't a reasonable facsimile of a skull shaped container this is the real deal and so Sviatislav ends his days not a whole lot better than his father did

when you look at Leo the deacons description physical description of Sviatislav as we said he

seems like the physical embodiment of the fusion that's been going on now in the east between

all the different peoples where the Scandinavians are just one of the groups that are coalescing into a new ethno linguistic group I mean he doesn't sound like the Vikings in Ireland or England or the Frankish Empire when the description of his clothing and hairstyles and all that is

“put forward by Leo he sounds like a 16th or 17th century eastern European cosac doesn't he?”

go look at an artist rendering of those guys or go watch a modern day recreation of cosac you know riding and you'll see the people dressed in the traditional cosac outfits with hairstyles and everything that's almost a dead ringer for Leo the deacons description of Sviatislav so right there you can see that he represents this blending of cultures and ethno linguistic elements you can see that by the way also in the treaty of 944 between

the Byzantines and the Rus the one that ended the war that involved the ships and the flame throwers and all that that we talked about because as the treaty is being signed the Rus have to

“swear to the various you know deities and religious elements that they hold dear some of the”

leading Rus are already swearing to the Christian gods so you can see Christianity making in roads already but the ones that swear to pagan deities aren't swearing to Thor and Odin they're swearing to Slavic pagan deities you know rulers and gods like Peron and people like that now in case can be made that those Slavic pagan deities have counterparts you know Peron could be Thor in terms of the way one might view him but this entire series we've been

doing is called twilight of the hicer and the hicer of course represent the pantheon of Germanic

gods that dates way back in history right when the Romans first encountered Germanic peoples

their worshiping those gods and ever since then it's been sort of a struggle to try to maintain that pagan belief system in the face of the overwhelming power and growing power of Christianity right essentially a religion from the Near East that's continually expanding outward pushing back the traditional pagan beliefs of a bunch of different peoples the Germanic peoples just being one of those but what the 944 treaty shows is that already in the East by the middle 900s the

ice here that Odin's and the Thor's and those gods may have already been supplanted by another pagan group of gods before they're all overwhelmed by Christianity it will be one of Christianity it will be one of the Siyatislav's sons who will take the russ into the long term direction that Siyatislav's sainted mother Olga wanted them to go in his book northmen the Viking saga Viking expert John Haywood puts it this way quote Siyatislav's empire was a femoral soon after his

death civil war broke out between his teenage sons Yeropolk, Oleg and Vladimir after Yeropolk killed

Yeropolk out of Kiev Vladimir lured his brother into a peace conference where two virangians murdered him

Vladimir's reign from 980 to 1015 was one of the most important in Russian history marking the

end of Chieven Rus as a Viking state in his early years Vladimir was a devotee of the thunder god Perron the Slavic deity but in 988 he made the momentous decision to convert to Orthodox Christianity

“and to quote the truth is when you read the civil war between Vladimir and his two brothers it sounds”

like a lot of Russian history and Russian history is wild, weird, wonderful I mean if you've never taken a Russian history course other than the names always reoccurring or variations of the names reoccurring it will blow your mind this sort of infighting of what not's not unusual at all when Vladimir ends up being the one who comes out on top in this sort of civil war between brothers or half brothers he ends up looking initially a lot like his dad so he had a sloth he's got tons of concubines something like

800 is the amount normally given multiple wives he ends up sounding very much like a Viking warlord but over time the publicity shall we call it in the historical sources get somewhat more positive

“which is what will happen if you convert to Christianity in some of the sources writing about your”

Christian Vladimir goes through a very famous and almost certainly legendary weighing of the various other religions that are out there supposedly has a bunch of the different peoples of the book send representatives to him so he can hear about all these different religions and how they believe in what they do so supposedly Islamic representatives come to him and he says tell me about your religion and they tell him all the things about it but point out he can't eat pork and he can't

drink alcohol and he has that wonderful line where he says the drink is the love of the russes and that they can't exist without it so his slums out Jews come to the court and explain to him their

“view of the religion and he asks them where their homeland is and they say it's in Jerusalem and he”

basically says well why aren't you there now and they explain how they've been exiled and scattered all over the world well this sounds of Vladimir like God must not be you know thinking too highly of you if you'll let you get scattered all over the world so they're out then the Latin Christian you the Western European Christian representatives visit him and they look a little poor and like they're not that grand because he also gets representatives from the Byzantines and of course they look like

well Rome and his representatives go to Byzantium the legends say and they see the amazing

ostentatiousness of the churches and the rituals and all this stuff and they come back and say something to the effect of we couldn't tell whether we were on earth or in heaven anymore so he's going to do the legends say adopt Orthodox Christianity but there's a more real world diplomatic side of this too and that's that Byzantium falls into civil war during this time period and they need some help and guess what Vladimir and the Rus can provide it Vladimir says he wants a Byzantine princess

to marry and that's a problem because they're not going to allow one of their princesses to marry a pagan he'll have to convert to Christianity he does he gets a Byzantine princess it's immense the ties between Byzantium and the Rus and then he sends help to one of the you know sides in this civil war supposedly six thousand verangians it sounds a little high but we're told that the Scandinavian Viking types that have been imported from Scandinavia as mercenaries goes down fights amazingly

for the Byzantine emperor crushes his opponent and from about this moment on you're going to see a unit created that will fight in the rest of Byzantium's major wars until late in the 13th century their famous they called the Berangian guard Vladimir when he converts by the way will order his subjects to show up by the water or else he says become my enemies so that they're all baptized that's the sort of mass baptisms that were not uncommon when you convert a ruler and expect him to

convert everyone he rules the bottom line though is that in this story of you know the Twilight of the

if Vladimir hadn't already ditched Germanic paganism by worshipping these Slavic pagan gods

“he does ditch it around 98 and the story in the east from this moment on from these Scandinavian”

Slavic step people Finn Baltic, Finn Ongryen, Turk Asian, Iranian fusion of peoples

goes off on a permanent side tangent never to return to Thor and Odin again

and from here our story shifts back to the west now I've been enthralled with the way the newer breed of Viking historians treat the entire Viking world for lack of a better term for it all east west the places with a Viking settled all that kind of stuff because it explains and helps us to understand so much of what's going on better back when I was a kid and they treated things like the Scandinavians and what's now Ukraine or Russia as an entirely hermetically sealed

different theater from Iceland and France and Ireland and Britain certain questions kept

“arising when you start to realize as a Neil Price or a Kat Jarman or a Sigurdson or any of those”

people keeps pointing out that the same people are traveling from one of these parts of the Viking world to the others in a mixing so imagine for example a person born in Sweden in say 950 maybe and they travel down the river systems in eastern Europe when they're a teenager to a place like modern day your crane maybe in they stay a while then they go a little farther south to Byzantium and join the Verencian guard for decade and these by the way I'm not making this up this sort of

thing happened all the time and then they go back to the homeland after that think about all that

they've experienced while they were gone first of all the exposure to things like Christianity

to name only one thing so then they go back to the home country and they're influencing people there

“those people then may go to the west or the same individual who'd been to Byzantium might”

then go to the west to what's now France or Frisia the coast of modern day the Netherlands and or Britain or Ireland in other words it's the very same people traveling from one part of the Viking world to another it's a giant inter mixing it's like a Scandinavian cultural estuary where all of the influences in all the parts of the world the Vikings are touching and they're one of them are well-traveled people in the middle ages is inter mixing and influencing Scandinavian affairs

when we last dealt with the west we had to roll the chronology back a little bit from where we were with the roots we were in like the nine tens right we were talking about you know herald fair hair herald fine hair herald hair fair being involved in the political consolidation allegedly legendary maybe of Norway this is a trend that's going on in the entire Viking world if you were taking a college course on this they would you know for the test have you know three major

themes that you had to pay attention to state building political consolidation and the conversion especially of the Scandinavian elite to Christianity okay that's all well and good but when a guy like herald dies like so many of these Scandinavian leaders involved in political unification his sons will tear it all up and fight amongst themselves there's a very a very bunny hop sort of rhythm to this state building in Scandinavia you know two steps forward one step back but even if

herald fine hair did live and even if herald fine hair did what he was supposed to do and even if

herald fine hair's kids screwed the pooch and screwed up the whole thing it never goes back to the

level of fragmentation that existed before the unifiers so when the unification process gets started again they don't have to start from ground zero right so you begin to see progress towards the creation of what Norway will turn into and Denmark will turn into and Sweden will turn into by the time you get to the middle ages or the later middle ages we had last spoken about what was going on in Normandy right with rollo the Viking warlord who gets defeated by

the west frankian king so he settles for being given control of the area that will become Normandy which means land of the north men and he's told to guard it against people like himself right what do we say if you gave a terrorist the territory they were operating in and said uh you now owe your allegiance to me but defended from other terrorists like yourself I think I said

I read said it was like promoting the lead poacher to the post of game keeper but it kind of worked the Normans are going to be a thorn in everybody's side especially the king of Francis

side and a whole bunch of other problems but basically they do what Charles the simple of west

frankia hoped they would and keep the area for being overrun with new Vikings

“and perhaps the most important aspect of this entire affair is that the people that are being”

granted these lands in what's now modern day friends these pagan he then Viking conquerors are being forced to convert to Christianity as an element of the deal and even if a Viking pagan warlord like rollo is providing more lip service than reality to his conversion and that's debatable his children aren't and his grandchildren aren't they're going to be real Christians and that undercuts the entire culture that led to the

Scandinavian Viking pirate age to begin with and it should be pointed out that the very people who are doing the converting here whether we're talking about the Franks in what's now modern day friends or the Germans in Germany or the Anglo Saxons in England all three of those people

used to be the worshipers of the old Germanic pantheon of gods basically worshiping Oden

basically worshiping Thor they might have had suddenly different names for them but now they're converting the people who still believe what they used to believe and it's worth noticing if you're a military history fan as I know many of you are but in this centuries long religious war between Christians and Germanic pagans only one side's really playing offense for centuries really since Rome you've seen these evangelists go out to convert these

“Germanic peoples that's how the Germans got converted that's how the Franks got converted that's how”

the Anglo Saxons got converted the other side's not playing offense at all you don't see Scandinavian or Germanic evangelists going to Christian areas and converting Christians to the worship of Thor or Oden and so even if progress slows or even if people backslide it's an inevitable slowly and sometimes not so slowly movement towards a specific outcome and when you're able to get people like rollo to convert when you're able to make deals with Viking warlords

and as part of the deal require that they convert to Christianity you are creating a long-term solution to a long-term problem and let's recall it's easy to say that by 9 10 9 11 9 12 the European world has been dealing with the Viking problem for 110 120 years but if you put it in terms relating to our own time I mean imagine we had a problem like that that been going on since 1900 or 19 10 well even in a world that changed more slowly than our current world one would

expect us to have created countermeasures one would expect that our long-term policies designed

to change the circumstances would finally be bearing fruit and the 900s is an example of that

because they're going to be very different than the 800s especially on the continent the different areas will have different circumstances of course in a place like modern day Germany it's going to be based on strong leadership really I mean they're going to get as we've mentioned earlier several

“important kings Henry the Fowler all the great and they're going to have knights mounted knights which”

we spoke about earlier which are a very dangerous to the Vikings and most good Viking pirate raiders want nothing to do with mounted knights not because they couldn't best them in a one on one encounter but because it changes the odds of a pirate expedition you're hoping for an easy score you don't want to life and death struggle every time you go out there to try to take what you hope is a bunch of peasants goods or a bunch of monasteries you know relics and you will still see

some Viking attacks in what's now Germany in the 900s but oftentimes on the way home after striking you know targets that weren't ready for them the Viking raiders will find themselves encountering

Scandinavians in Denmark in Viking era Denmark can do sometimes to keep the Germanic people from

“turning the tables on them and invading Denmark from Germany the sorts of scenes that we saw in the”

800s where Scandinavian raiders were stapling their horses almost incomprehensibly in the former royal palace at often where Charlemagne ruled you're not going to see that in the 900s in what's now modern day France the results are similar but the methods a bit different in northern France you're going to see maybe the most famous example of feudalism early medieval feudalism anywhere yet to be careful with the term feudal because when I was a kid that's my

famous phrase isn't it when I was a kid back in the old days feudalism was considered to be mostly

a early medieval thing now it's considered to be a sort of a political system and it's applied to all sorts of other systems I mean you'll hear the early achaemenid Persians the ones who fought the Greeks and the Greek and Persian wars the society that was overthrown by Alexander the great you'll often hear them described as a feudal society but the poster child for that system was in northern France during this era where it's not going to just be rolloe in Normandy but

a bunch of Frankish and later French, Counts and Dukes and Lords and Barons who are all going to

have their own little piece of the King's territory they're going to put up their own little

castles they're going to have their own little group of knights and retinue and all that sort of stuff and it'll be their job to defend this territory ostensibly for their ruler but sometimes they'll

“fight amongst themselves sometimes they'll be rebellious against the king that's what early medieval”

feudalism's known for also but they'll also have mounted knights with all of the same advantages that that gives the German mounted knights and they'll also have castles just like in Germany and the castles have a couple of different aspects we talked about them in part one a little bit and early in this discussion it's not just that you have a place where you have defenses so that if the Viking show up on the horizon unexpectedly there's a place that can defend the

territory because there'll be a garrison of soldiers there as well but I was reading something that brought an aspect ahead and thought about which is that when the Viking sales appear over the horizon and you have a tiny little bit of warning that they're coming if you're the

“peasants and the farmers living in that area that's about to be assaulted by these Viking pirates”

you grab any valuables you have any livestock that you own anything you want to keep and you put it in a wagon and you card it up to the walls of the castle and you go inside so not only do the Viking pirates now have to deal with the garrison and walls and all that sort of stuff but whatever they were coming to steal might now be behind the walls of that very protective bastion making the entire affair not just more dangerous for them if they want to try to take

stuff but maybe not even all that valuable which leads us to the Viking age in the 900s in Britain and Ireland. Britain and Ireland do not have mounted knights and I was reading a book by author Ian Howard called Simon Fortbeard's invasions and the Danish conquest of England and he said and I hadn't read it elsewhere but I'm sure it's mentioned elsewhere that that's a very specific reason that explains why Viking attacks shifted so strongly away from Germany and France what

will be Germany and France in this area in the 900s and over to Ireland and Britain. If you don't want to deal with heavily armed mounted knights go to a place where they don't have that and the English for example won't have mounted knights until after the Norman conquest in 1066 it's an army that is mostly infantry some would suggest all infantry that's debatable they do use horses but they use them the same way the Vikings do is mounted infantry right so you use them to get from place to place

but when you want to fight you dismount and so in the early 900s you see the story shifting more towards what's going on in Britain but if you are a fan of the Vikings you can't help but notice that not only are the fortunes of the Scandinavians being challenged in

or Britain either Winston Churchill we had quoted him earlier from his history of the English

“speaking peoples and he's so wonderful because he supposedly dictated all of the works that he wrote”

and so they have a real sort of a oral feel about them it sounds a little like a hardcore history conversation and when he talks about Britain for example during Alfred the Great who died in 899 we spoke of Alfred he almost sounds like he's narrating his own story from the darkest years of

1940 in the Second World War but then the story after Alfred also parallels the story in the

Second World War where Britain survives the darkest times and begins to crawl out of it and issue payback the reconquest if you will and Churchill writes quote Alfred meaning Alfred the Great died in 899 but the struggle with the Vikings had yet to pass through strangely contrasted phases

“Alfred's blood gave the English a series of great rulers and while his inspiration held”

victory did not quit the Christian ranks in his son Edward who was immediately acclaimed king the armies had already found a redoutable leader and quote if you look at the

first 50 years of the 900 you see the equivalent of a British or English or Anglo-Saxons the

more proper way to put it reconquest of territory that the Vikings had taken from them during the 800s but it's a bit of an urban flow sort of an affair by and large the Anglo-Saxons are winning think about a boxing match where they're getting the rounds handed to them by the judges score cards but they're still taking damage they're still getting punched they're still getting knocked to the

“canvas from time to time and that often happens when new reinforcements arrive from either Scandinavia”

or from the Vikings in Ireland turn the tide sometimes temporarily but eventually the several rulers after Alfred the Great and their blessed with several good ones in a row see rulership matters look at the German kings we mentioned earlier they will slowly grind things back towards a reconquest Churchill talks about another battle that eventually the English gained the victory the Danes are just like rolloin Normandy required to convert to Christianity and then he talks about

this treaty being broken and says quote in 910 this treaty was broken by the Danes and the war was renewed in Mercia the main forces of westics and Kent had already been sent by Edward who was with the fleet to the aid of the Mercians and in heavy fighting at Tenten Hall in Staffordshire the Danes were decisively defeated and quote now remind your places like westics and Essex and Northumbria and East Anglia these are all the places that had been separate independent

kingdoms when the Viking age started and one of the reasons that Anglo-Saxon territory was so vulnerable to the Vikings was this fragmentation and why so many historians suggest that the Viking era helped create the modern day Britain and created England out of Anglo-Saxon territories was because the Vikings swept away a lot of those independent territories clearing the way for unification but those places still maintained some semblance of a self-image and an independence

places like Mercia for example Churchill continues quote this English victory was a milestone in the

long conflict the Danish armies in Northumbria never recovered from the battle and the Danish

Midlands and East Anglia thus lay open to English conquest up to this point Mercia and westics have been the defenders often reduced to the most grievous straits but now the tide had turned fear a camped with the Danes and quote there's a lot of reasons for this one is that all of a sudden the Danish settlers in Britain who lived in the North and the East in the scenario we talked about earlier the Danes law the land where the Danish laws predominated they had settled they had farms

they had families and this made them vulnerable we had talked earlier about how much of an advantage

stuff and then run away to a place where they couldn't get you but if you settle right next to the

people you're raiding they can get you and his Charles O'Mon the military historian for more than 100 years ago pointed out by this time if the Danes in Britain rated their neighbors the English the English hit them right back what's more whereas once before when these raiding parties arrived in Britain they were unified groups of people the Danes in the British Isles during this period were composed of a bunch of different groups of people not united who could be picked off

“bit by bit and during the early 900s that's what happens and it doesn't just happen with these”

male Anglo-Saxon kings uniquely enough and in an event that is sometimes called one of the most unique

in all of early medieval history they also are subject to attacks by female military rulers this reconquest of territory from Danish settlers in the British Isles creates a different sort of dynamic than the Viking attacks from the 800s my encyclopedia of military history from Ernest and Trevor to Puy puts it this way and it's a good way to look at it it says quote during the tenth century the Anglo-Saxon struggle with the Danes was no longer a matter of

Viking raiders against local inhabitants but rather a more or less constant war between southern

“and northern England and quote southern England being the part occupied by the Anglo-Saxon rulers”

and people the northern part mostly by Danish settlers or people who had some affinity for the Scandinavian's and often cited with new Vikings that showed up on the shores they're sort of a fifth columnist group in Britain entering the 900s after Alfred the Great Dyes two of his children take the lead in starting to push back with the eye towards eventually eliminating entirely that group of fifth columnists one of them is the king that Churchill mentioned Edward but the

other is his sister Ethel fled now Ethel fled an interesting lady because if you watch the

Hollywood movies there's always this bending over backwards to include female characters where perhaps

“they didn't actually exist or female warriors were perhaps the evidence for them is very scanty”

but that means that when you actually encounter real historical figures that live up to all the hype they deserve a little bit more attention and Ethel fled is one of those people if you look at statues of her she's often shown bearing a weapon and if this were the Hollywood movie version of her she would certainly be a swash buckling robin hood type character cutting the heads off enemies dressed in armor and performing all sorts of

acrobatic military feats but that's not the way we should probably see her she is instead a somewhat you know anglo sacks in version of an apolyonic figure maybe an inspiring leader of men a tactician a strategist there is what some historians have referred to as a conspiracy of silence around her and our modern temptation would be to suggest that this conspiracy exists because she was a woman and there may be some truth to that but an actual better reason something that is lost in

sort of the years that had passed since then but would have been very apparent and a lot of historians pointed out it might have more to do with the fact that she was known as the lady of the Mercians the Mercians as we just mentioned Mercians one of these places that used to be an independent kingdom before the Vikings swept all that away the people that wrote the chronicles that have come down to us like the Anglo-Saxon chronicle were working for the kings of westsix

and the last thing that they wanted was to do anything that inspired what today we would call patriotism amongst these formerly you know independent areas like Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, or separatist tendencies and a figure that a place like Mercia could rally around to sort of bolster their credentials as an independent kingdom is someone like Ethelflad but along with her brother from about 9/11 the time that Ralu takes over in Normandy when her husband dies she takes over in

England and they do it in an interesting way we had mentioned that with her father Alfred that one

“of the things he did was to set up these fortified towns known as burrs sometimes very rudimentarily”

fortified it must be said just a ditch around them sometimes are a palisade or an earthen wall but it's enough to do the job and what you do is you fortify these towns you stash a garrison in them so some defenders and all of a sudden you make life difficult for Viking raiders will she and her brothers start using these fortified towns in an offensive way it's a little like taking a place and then fortifying what you just won in concrete because once you dig the ditch around it put up the

palisade wall put a garrison in there it becomes very hard for anyone on the Danish side to retake it and over a period of about a decade they will fight battles she and her brother take retake towns that used to be Anglo-Saxon towns fortify them with the burr and very soon you know maybe by their

“standards by our standards their wars look like they take place in a very sort of slow motion”

way but she and her brother begin to reconquer the territory and you will have this interesting sort of scene

where she will have all of these again Hollywood I'll say that a million times because they've

warped our view of these Scandinavians but you will have this amazing scene where you will have these alpha male hairy barbarian types pledging their submission to a woman the Lady of the Mercians Ethelfled and she'll kill a bunch of them a bunch of Viking yarrals and kings and lords in these battles not personally but her armies will and historian Kat Jarman points out that this is a huge rarity there's only one other woman and Kat Jarman mentions her during the early medieval

period where you can see them commanding troops Kat Jarman talks about her and the other one

“who's related to all of the great of Germany and she says quote if we look elsewhere in northern”

Europe there are contemporary examples of women wielding military power the best known being Ethelfled Lady of the Mercians who was the daughter of Alfred the Great possibly the only woman from Anglo-Saxon England known to have led military forces meanwhile on the continent another woman was in charge of a fight against Vikings too Gerberga of Saxony the sister of

auto the first of Germany organized the defense of Leon in northern France in 945 946

when her husband Louis IV was captured with both Ethelfled and Gerberga having common is that they independently led forces and attacks and organized defenses in a tenth century environment which is typically thought of as a time when only men could hold power in both cases these women owed their political position to a family connection but at the same time both are described as well-educated intelligent and possessing the ability to lead military strategy with the support

of their contemporaries end quote now there are not a lot of sources as we said talking very much about Ethelfled from the era the Irish chronicles refer to her as an Anglo-Sax the renowned Anglo-Saxon queen but she wasn't a queen but in the 12th century the early English historian William and Mounds are a make sure that we don't forget about Ethelfled and by the way he uses an interesting term when he describes her he calls her a Virago and I had to look

it up and apparently the the meaning of the term has changed over time but in the era he was writing it sort of means a great soul or a formidable person or maybe a woman who has tendencies you normally associate with a man like a war leader and William and Mounds very writes quote at the same time we must not overlook the king's sister Ethelfled at the Reds Widow who carried no small weight in party strife being popular with the citizens and a terror to the enemy

she was a woman of great determination who after having difficulties with the birth of her first

or rather her only child a poor her husband's embraces ever after declaring that it was beneath the dignity of a king's daughter to involve herself in pleasures which would be followed in time by such ill effects and quote he's talking about child birth by the way remember that could easily be fatal

when he's really talking about his a fortified of cities as we said taking these cities and then creating these fortified towns out of them so he continues quote she was a Virago

a very powerful influence in help in her brother's policy and no less effective as a builder of

cities it would be hard to say whether it was luck or character that made a woman such a tower of strength for the men of her own side and such a terror to the rest and quote Ethelfled dies in 1918 ADCE and her brother will continue what's been going on the reconquest of the day and law until he dies about six years later their successor a guy named Ethelfled Stan will continue it even more he'll include you know fighting the scots and the Welsh I mean

this is all part of carving out England and Ethelfstand will be by many considered the first truly

“English king if not him then his successor this is all important stuff for British history obviously”

but also for the history of peoples who can trace their at least political DNA back to England

and that's anyone who was a part of the British Empire you think of the Canadians the Americas, the Australians etc etc I mean this is all part of their history which is often made me think that this is partly why the Vikings have such a prominent place in the past I mean why do we pay more attention to them than the visigoths as we said or the ostracoths you know are the Lombards or any of these other Germanic barbarian peoples well because they play a huge role in the

creation of places like England and England well has a political strand of DNA that goes through

a lot of modern day countries the interesting thing though is that what's going on in places like

“England during this era is not hugely important in 99% of the respects to life in Scandinavia”

to the average pig farmer is Neel Price historian who wrote the children of Ashaneel and puts it I mean the average pig farmer's Scandinavius and concerned to wit with these colonial possessions or these you know settlements or these diaspora is going on in the edges of the Viking world right they're in the lands that encompass modern day Denmark nor where Sweden just living their lives right believing the old ways the old gods and all these kinds of things but as we

said there is cultural transmission going on through all these areas and if you are let's just say a very conservative traditionalist living in Scandinavia standard pig farmer who believes in the old ways the old gods the traditional culture of your ancestors all of a sudden you can't help

“but notice by the middle 900s that there's a whole lot of new stuff infecting your community”

I love the term and I use it all the time and I'm sorry if I overuse the same terms but it's just so wonderful intellectual contagion seeing ideas and beliefs the same way one would see a pathogen that can spread like a disease well it's hard not to notice that at the exact same time you see old in the eastern Scandinavian areas of the rust really beginning to explore Christianity and that neck of the woods you see the same thing happening on the opposite side of the Viking

world in places like England more and more of these warlords converting as parts of arrangements and deals and treaties and settlements more and more Scandinavians living away from the home countries and places like the dain law converting due to exposure to Christianity if you actually zoom out look at how long evangelists have been traveling to Scandinavia trying to convert the people there but the time he reached the middle 900s it's been like 24250 years right

as far back from where we are today as the American Revolution now it's hard to say how much fruit that has borne by this time period but when you add all the conversions in the you know far flung territories to the few people who maybe these evangelists have converted to the few rebel rulers like Harold a clock that we mentioned from the eight 20s eight 30s who converted and then converted some of his followers to all the slaves that the Vikings took who were Christian who couldn't help

but share their intellectual pathogens with their slave masters and whatnot it's not hard to see that you're going to have pockets of Christianity beginning to pop up in Scandinavia also Denmark maybe more the Norway Norway maybe more than Sweden but it's a thing and then you look

flips from what it was in the 800s and all of a sudden the Germans are very dangerous to the dains

“and one of the things that the dains kind of due to maybe lessen the danger of Germanic”

attacks on them is treat Christianity a little bit more positively all these things together are

beginning to sort of reach a critical mass by the middle 900s now we should point out that there's

something that's often overlooked when we talk about religion and that's that even when nations or rulers decide that they're going to change their faith overnight that's not how people really behave right people don't change the gods that they believe in the religious practices that they take part in the ancestors faith and and traditional narratives that they grew up with those things don't change overnight so anytime we talk about a huge relatively quick change

in a religious belief let's not pretend that that means the people on the ground of all of a sudden is shifted their faith 180 degrees but it should also be mentioned that the traditional faith of the Scandinavians is not some orthodox by the book kind of belief system in fact it's fair to say and this is a little surprising that experts aren't really all that sure what it was I'm partly the reason this is strange is because there's a neo paganist movement today that

is trying to sort of resurrect a lot of these ideas and re-establish worship of you know the ancient Norse gods for example but who these ancient Norse gods and how they were worshiped and what this all meant to the practitioners of this faith is up in the air there's a wonderful history book written by Scandinavian historian called The Wolf Age the Vikings the Anglo Saxons and the battle for the North Sea Empire and I hope I don't murder this guy's name I looked it up

“Torah Shia is I think close to the pronunciation and he says with all these other histories that”

I've been reading say and it's a little bit shocking when you think about how much we pretend we know about the Nordic religious beliefs and he says quote like all Germanic religions pre-Christian Nordic

worship centered around war fertility and the making of sacrifices to powerful spirits along

with an entire pantheon of gods above all it was Odin for and frayer who were worshiped across Scandinavia the people who practiced the ancient religion left behind no proclamation no tablet inscribed with commandments no religious book the depictions of their faith and rituals were written down by Christian and Muslim observers who regarded them as law souls in need of saving or as frightening and exotic barbarians the lavish and intricate universe of gods and monsters

born of fire and frost and the resounding deaths of Gananganap which goes up in flames in the war

in furno of ragnarok has primarily been handed down to us through the eddas poems that were first

written down in the 1200s in the anonymous poetic edda and in snoray sterless and edda his tribute to scaldic poetry and inherited knowledge of the ancient forefathers mythological narratives and despite both works he says strikingly detailed accounts both snoray and the author of the poetic edda viewed their ancestors stories from a great distance from their own thoroughly christianized age with a stranger's wonderment and fascination just as we do today and quote

in addition to that the christian evangelist framings of christianity are often done in a extremely clever fashion and this is something we discussed at length in Thor's angels when we were talking about how early christian evangelists tailored the traditional christian beliefs to mesh the views of a bunch of germanic warriors like francs and lumbarids and visigoths and all those people who might not be all that

positively disposed to a prince of peace from a middle eastern based religion when they came from dark deep forests filled with spirits you know who were involved in human sacrifice of captive war

“prisoners maybe you have to you know modify the message a bit for the audience and historian”

Neil Price in the Children of Ashenelm says that's exactly what these same evangelists centuries later did for this Scandinavian audience that they were trying to interest shall we say

through a document known as heliand the savior written in old sacks and during the first half of

the ninth century it is a paraphrase of the gospel for a Germanic audience tweaked for their sensibilities and pitched almost as a Norse saga though with biblical heroes thus we read of Jesus' birth in gallantly land his later travels to Jerusalemburg and how the Lord lives in a great

“hall in the sky clearly Valhalla the Lord's prayer he writes is in quote and quote secret rooms”

Peter is given commands over the gates of hell or heal with one hell and so on Satan's temptation of

Christ he writes takes place in a northern wilderness filled with vague forces powerful beings

that seem to live among the trees and one wonders what this implies of the traditional northern beliefs that were once known by the Christian clerics he continues and think about how this tweaks the traditional religion of peace for a warrior people quote by the same token Jesus' disciples were warrior companions in quotes framed in the language of a warlord's retinue and the last supper is the quote and quote final meet hall feast even God he writes is called by

“the adenic epithets such as victory chieftain and all ruler this is the kind of message that”

was taken in the Scandinavia by the first missionaries a doctrine meshed with the ancestral

stories of the north and following a model found in many other conversion histories and quote as we said the conversion histories of the Germanic people to the south of the Scandinavians who converted before they did it's interesting to note that this tool of blending this new religion that evangelists and Christian states are trying to spread to the far north isn't just used by those evangelists it may have been used by the rulers of the far north

as a way to make this transition between the old belief system and a new belief system more palatable or more seamless take for example the famous yelling stones put up by one of the first Scandinavian rulers that you really have clear evidence for and how weird is that this far into the so-called Viking age and you're just now getting to the point where you get the Scandinavian side of this story stuff from the indigenous peoples themselves as opposed to the people who wrote

about them who hated feared reviled and looked down on them the literary peoples of Britain

“or the continent or Byzantium king herald bluetooth and yes that's what the term blue tooth was”

named after arises in the mid nine hundreds there are all sorts of theories as to why he was called blue tooth including potentially having a blue or black rotted tooth but I've also read that he may be one of those Scandinavians who have the horizontal grooves cut into his teeth and then died so lots of reasons one might be called blue tooth but herald is famous and he writes down in the stone carved into this heavy well it would have been seen at the time as a near permanent monument

why he should be thought of as famous and why he should be remembered the yelling stone which is actually pictured the artwork is pictured on the Danish passports to this day carried by Danish citizens says quote king herald ordered this monument made in memory of gorm his father and in memory of Tira his mother that herald who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danish Christian and quote that's quite a claim to fame and it is actually

arguable but I mean he's the one to put up the monument that survived so he got first crack at how he was going to be remembered but herald blue tooth is one of the most famous Scandinavian rulers and not just because he supposedly brought Christianity to Denmark

this isn't a legendary ruler this is a real guy on this yelling stone is a piece of artwork

“which used to be painted and now is weathered to stone color although there are recreations of what”

it looked like painted and on the yelling stone you can see a figure of Christ being crucified but the way that the figure is shown makes it look arguably quite a bit like Odin being hung in the tree that he hung himself in so that he could gain wisdom and so you have a potential meshing of the old tradition with the new and maybe Christ being portrayed as a kind of Odin like figure it's arguable experts debated and people who know a lot more than I do about it

go back and forth but you can see how fascinating it is to see the early Scandinavian Christian

artwork infused with some of the old flavor of the pre-Christian times and this is not unusual you

“see many societies go to Ireland and look at the way the Celtic forms are overlaid with later”

Christian artwork so it's normal for there to be regional variations on this stuff and maybe some of that is intended to you know as we said make it easier for the locals to sort of latch on to a new religion and connect it to the old I find it interesting also that the way this is sometimes portrayed the conversion process is that the people in Scandinavia are shown sometimes as having no problem believing in the Christian God at all their issues sometimes is not quite understanding

the exclusivity of monotheism the idea that you can't just believe in Christ and all those gods you used to believe in right when you come from a religion that believes in a lot of gods

“seems like you should just be able to add another one but it doesn't work that way with monotheism”

does it there's a wonderful account maybe is a good way to put it by a near contemporary named Vidakund who wrote a famous book translated into the English it's called deeds of the Saxons and in it he describes supposedly how Harold Bluetooth is converted and if you know about the history of the Middle Ages in Europe you know that there's all these different things that they used to do to sort of give God a chance to weigh in on things right so you'd have things like

trial by combat where two people who disagreed about something could be sentenced to fight it out and the winner was perceived to be the one God favored in other words the one telling the truth will win the trial by combat therefore God has weighed in and shown people it's like a giant pro Christian Ouija board type thing and by the way I'm using the Bernard Esbach Rock and David Esbach Rock translation of the work and indeed of the Saxons Vidakund portrays the

conversion of Harold Bluetooth the same way Harold Bluetooth gives God a chance to weigh in on whether or not he's the real God and Vidakund tells the story thusly written in the nine hundreds and says quote in times past the Danes were Christians but nevertheless continued to worship idols in their traditional manner but then there was a dispute in the presence of the King during a feast regarding the worshiping of their gods the Danes affirmed that Christ was a God but they

claimed that there were other gods greater gods who manifested themselves to people through even

more powerful signs and prodigies against this a certain cleric named Papo who is now a bishop

and leads a religious life proclaimed that there is one true God the father along with his only begotten son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit the images meaning the images of the Norse gods he proclaimed were of demons and not gods King Harold who it was said was quick to listen but slow to speak asked if Papo wished to demonstrate his faith through his own person Papo responded without hesitation that he wished to do so the King then ordered that the priest be placed

under guard until the next day when morning came the King ordered that a very heavy piece of iron be heated in the fire he then ordered the cleric to carry this glowing iron for his Catholic faith

had ordered the priest then showed everyone his unharmed hand and gave proof to everyone there of

his Catholic faith as a result the King became a Christian and decreed that God alone was to be worshiped he ordered all his subjects to reject idols and gave all due honor to the priest and servants of God by these events also he writes are to be ascribed to the virtues and merit of your father by whose efforts the churches and order of priests shined forth in these regions end quote it's interesting to note that if you zoom out and you look at the history of Scandinavia from

about nine fifty to about ten hundred or ten ten or ten twenty really a single person's lifetime

they go from basically being pagan countries to basically being Christian countries it is shocking

the speed at which this occurs and it wouldn't have happened if the rulers themselves didn't convert

“and then proclaim that everyone else had to convert to that's what the yelling stone talks about”

made the deans Christian didn't ask them to become Christian didn't encourage them to become Christian made them Christian but as biking historian from the University of Nottingham due to the end points out there is a difference between conversion which can be done overnight by decree and Christianization which can take centuries should it hence makes another distinction that's very interesting a distinction between religion and myth and where one ends and the other

begins I mean for example if a people like the Scandinavians convert to Christianity does that mean they can't believe in things like dwarves and elves and trolls anymore can they still believe in the female spirit that supposedly inhabits all of us I mean how much of the old folklore do they

“give up also another thing worth pointing out is that even if the rulers and the rulers”

retinues and the people that are vassals to the rulers convert to Christianity so as we said by about the ten hundred's mid ten hundred certainly officially those kinds of people have in all the Scandinavian countries doesn't mean they're still aren't temples and out of the way places still having the old blood sacrifices they're going to have those in the out of the way territories of Sweden into the eleven hundred's so it's a process in addition it's not

necessarily being treated the same way that for example charlament treated conversion 150 years before this time period where if you recall as we said in part one of this story he was cutting the heads off Saxons who had the audacity to eat during a fast day I mean it was draconian

“when Iceland converts by democratic decision by the way in ten hundred they agreed to keep some”

of the heathen practices going for a while and sort of let them wither on the vine rather than get rid of them overnight for example they decree that you can still have the practice of in fantasy writing exposing unwanted children continue just do it in private right they also say you can continue to eat horse flesh just do it in private let that die out I didn't even know shows you what I know I didn't even know that eating horse flesh was against the Christian religion

at this time period but it was a big deal and you can see it was a big deal when you look at how Norway gets into the conversion process during the same time period now let's do not for a minute realize that one of the things we get from being able to finally see some history in Scandinavia that you can sort of rely upon during herald bluetooth time is that you get a window into what it

must have been like before history sort of pulls the veil off what's going on archaeology has always

hinted at this so have the old sagas and whatnot but the fighting amongst peoples within Sweden Denmark Norway and between Sweden Denmark and Norway we should also include Finland and this to some degree has been going on from time immemorial probably and when the herald bluetooth era sort of shines the light on what's going on in Scandinavia we see it still going on so when the yelling stone says that herald you know unite Denmark and Norway well you might ask yourself what the heck is herald

doing in Norway right what does he have to do with Norway now we should say and we have already but let's remind ourselves that the borders of the modern Scandinavian countries are not the borders back in this time Denmark in air quotes controls parts of southern Sweden they have the rulers of

more we had talked about the great legendary leader harald fine hair herald fair herald hair fair

“who supposedly legendarily united Norway well when he dies as we said his kids begin to tear”

things apart and fight each other I mean I'm looking at you Eric blood axe one of the most vicious Vikings of all time supposedly they're killing each other they're setting their meat holes on fire and burning them and they're retinues up I mean it's it's horrible stuff but there's one of herald fair herald kids who his safely in sconce away from all this violence he's in England and I say allegedly because once again we have to rely on the sagas for this to a degree so hard to

parse how much of this is real and how much of it isn't but but there's one of herald fine herald sons in the court of Atholstan king of well let's call it England at this time period in his book on the sagas the himes kringlet snoray sterless and has the story of this guy and I must say right off the bat it's wonderfully refreshing that he doesn't have the same name as everyone else

“because by the time we get to where we are in this story you must feel like I do that the”

Norse needed a bigger book of potential baby names to choose from because there's far too many heralds and erics and o-lost and it becomes very confusing so whenever you run into a surprise in this case the son of herald fine hera who is in England during this time period's name is hack on h-a-a-k-o-n is the way it's usually written and if you believe snoray sterless and sagas he is the foster son of Atholstan because Atholstan was tricked into accepting him

but that doesn't mean he wasn't happy with the result snoray sterless and comments on the young life of hack on who will eventually be known as hack on the good say this quote King Atholstan had hack on christened and taught him the right faith and good habits and all kind

“of learning and manners he loved him much more than he did his own kin and so did everyone who knew”

the boy he was afterwards called Atholstan's foster son he was the greatest in sports bigger and stronger and more handsome than any other he was wise of fair speech and a good Christian King Atholstan gave hack on a sword of which the hilton grip were of gold but the blade was even better and with it hack on cleaved a millstone to the eye and it was afterwards called the current bit or millstone biter it was the best sword that ever came to Norway hack on had it till his death day

and quote there are a couple of things that pop into my mind when I read that the first is

is that current bit is like sort of a Norwegian version of x caliper in my mind and I'm fascinated by how swords acquire these sorts of lineages or almost like magic qualities by the way if you don't know what a millstone is it's like a wagon wheel sized stone used to grind grain and it's basically when he says it cleaves it to the eye this is a guy who then took a sword and cut a piece of stone the size of maybe a wagon wheel to the midsection. Current bit very interesting right um it is

interesting to me to the swords can acquire this sort of soul if you will or personality in a way

that things like firearms never quite did and it's not a Scandinavian thing look at the way the

Japanese for example do the same thing with their swords right hand them down from generation to generation have ancient lineages and all I can figure is because of these speed at which technology changes in the firearms era you wouldn't want an ancient gun right you wouldn't want to try to fight your enemies with a you know musket from the Daniel boon era in the 1950s or the 1960s right using an M16 instead whereas good old current bit would have been useful 200 300 years after the

time period where you know apple stand gave it to him just like it would have been useful 200 or 300 or 300 years before that period the other thing that comes to mind and when you read Snorri Stirlison and you get any of his works that have illustrations in it you can't help but notice it it's the stream contrast between those illustrations and the Hollywood trope of the Vikings. Now I had to look up when the illustrations were penned but they were penned in 1899 right so very modern but not quite

the Hollywood trope has a see them right this fire breathing berserkers you know who look like they belong in a heavy metal rock concert I mean there's a whole bunch of tropes involved in the Hollywood view these things it make the Vikings seem almost like you could live next to them and the

monks didn't help right though the monks always portray these heathen pagan types as you know one

step above animals sometimes but the Snorri Stirlison illustrations make them look very much like say the English and Ethel stands court might have looked in other words normal people clean well dressed when they're not going to war in their armor and stuff they were nice clothes they look like you know typical early middle ages type people right respectable types and in fact if Ethel stand can raise hack on Harald fine hairs son in his court as a Christian basically being

indistinguishable from an English angle Anglo-Saxon person and then send him back to Norway well he's got to be enough like those people if they're to accept him as a king

“doesn't he have to be that way because that's what Ethel stand does because after Harald fine”

hair dies and his kids start going to war with each other basically and tearing things apart

Eric blood acts supposedly takes control for a couple of years but so anger is everybody that he causes problems and they want a new king and well loan behold there's one sort of exiled in England just ready to return the return of the king at the right time Ethel stand supposedly gives him boats and followers and monks and sins hack on over to the land of his birth that he did not grow up in so that he can become the king there and oh yeah when he arrives he's a Christian now

hack on the good and Harald Bluetooth are contemporaries basically and in fact they're going to fight each other so what you see is all of this Christianity coming to Norway and Denmark especially all in a very short period of time and all in a very strong way right amongst rulers

but whereas Harald Bluetooth is so powerful and so scary and has the support of so many

nobles that he can sort of enforce his will when it comes to Christianity hack on has a harder time

“and this is where you can see that you have to kind of be careful how you impose a new religion on”

people not necessarily because they are opposed to changing their beliefs if they believe in the new god but they're worried about pissing off the old gods this is the part we often forget what happens if you believe that the gods control things like the harvest and the health of your family members and everything like that and then things go bad with that right if you have a bad harvest all of a sudden and you just threw out the old gods and your king is trying to push in a new god

well what do you think that might be from in other words these have two people what do we say earlier when we were talking about if magic is real or if you think magic is real if the tinker bell effect is real well if you think that gods control things like the harvest and a new god is brought in and all of the sudden you have a lot of bad harvests what then I love the way uh Gwen Jones in his famous late 1960s work a history of the Vikings so to portrays this time period not as a struggle between

Scandinavian to want to be Christians as Scandinavian to want to be pagans but against the Christian god and the Norse pantheon themselves and at one point he's talking about how in order to force all the Christian conversion in a place like Norway the iser the Norse pantheon has tools to fight back and Jones writes quote men could do little except grumble and hope for a change but the eyes here defended themselves with bad harvests bad fishing bad weather the snow lay through midsummer

and cows stayed in stall as north among the laps which may be a poetic way of saying that the all

“important farmer class felt itself pinched and alienated and quote this is the other problem”

trying to disentangle Christian conversion from an actual belief level from the power politics of the day and everything else going on's very difficult and in fact when you read the sagas you can see how often the kings here whether it's harrow blue tooth or others will see people's reticence to convert to Christianity as a personal attack on their authority right because partly they're converting to Christianity because it enhances their authority right the Christian hierarchy the power

hierarchy has them at the you know tip of the pyramid and if people don't want to convert to Christianity

so all of these things weave into a kind of a tangled rope and it's tough to disentangle true belief

“from geopolitical realities from power politics and all this other stuff there's a real transactional”

nature to a lot of the ancient and medieval beliefs with gods that you don't see as much anymore I mean of course you still do but not like in the days when you almost have people sort of weighing

the different deities against each other and basically saying you know what if you don't

for me lately right this is a this is a question of you know who's been on my side most recently I mean take for example the famous story of how a constant teen the Roman Emperor converts to Christianity it's a very sort of a transactional deal he's about to fight a battle in a civil war and he has a dream this is the legend he has a dream where it says if you paint your shields with the Christian symbol you will triumph tomorrow so he gets up from the dream he has all his soldiers

paint the Cairo on their shields which was the symbol before the cross became so viewed as

“the symbol of Christianity and of course loan behold he wins the battle boom so he's going to”

become a Christian he's going to start to become an established religion in Rome and if that dream really happened think about what a effect on future history that had but there's a lot of this in this world too where it's all about you know what god has done something for me lately and when a guy like Harold Bluetooth watches a guy like Papa supposedly lift a glowing iron piece of metal and carry it around and not have blisters he's not converting to Christianity so

he can get it to heaven he's converting to Christianity because who wants to not have the god on their side right you really want to be going into battle and trying to conquer things and have God mad at you I love the way the Mongols supposedly handled all this we talked about it in the Mongols show where they left all of the religions of the people they conquered intact but supposedly

“just required them to pray for the cons health figuring that they were hedging their bets right”

they didn't know which religion was true and which god was real but if everybody was praying for the cons health then the real god was getting the message somehow but you will even see after this period attempts to almost woo the Scandinavians who convert to Christianity back to the old ways and it's all transaction right come back and believe in me and I'll save you from this problem or come back and believe in me and I'll help you out with this thing you're having to

deal with I mean it's very like we said transactional they're not thinking about getting into heaven when they die as much as they're thinking about who can help me the most while I'm alive University of Oslo historian John Bedar's Sigurdson in his book Scandinavia in the age of the Vikings points out that this transactional attitude applies when it comes to Scandinavian nobles and kings to other kings and other chieftains so why not to the gods they have unstable relations

ships with all of these entities he says and then he says quote to their way of thinking if

another more powerful god existed who could offer better protection and help than the Norse gods had

failed and it was therefore necessary to change sides and begin worshiping the new god in this case the Christian god end quote now it's possible that this was a foreign concept to a guy like hack on the good right viewing religion in a transactional sense because after all hack on the good was as far as Norway was concerned for in himself right allegedly raised in England allegedly the foster son of the king of England so he may have viewed religion in a much more Anglo-Saxon or

English way than the way of Viking Scandinavian might have viewed it when he returns to rule Norway he lacks the traditional you know alliances with power the nexus of authority the the personal partnerships and relationships your average Scandinavian would have developed over a lifetime that allows them to rule effectively so he's like an American president who's from one political party that has to somehow rule with a congress dominated by the other political party

right so he's from the Christian political party is congress or a bunch of Oden worshippers and he'll have to make religious concessions during his reign so there might be some compromises with paganism or if you believe some of the sources maybe even a full blown relapse into paganism but he's doing something right because hack on the good is going to rule in Norway for almost

30 years which is an amazing feat he will in a bunch of battles during this time the last one

against his own nephews or probably half nephews of course this is not unusual right when you are involved in kingship and blue blood matters the only people that have blue blood are

“likely to be related to you and that's why when you watch the Carolinians descend into fratricidal madness”

it's always brother against brother or uncle against nephew and it's the same in the Scandinavian

royal situation the battle of Fittjar between hack on the good and his half nephews ends with hack on the good winning the battle but losing the war and he will be famously hit by an arrow and either the arm or the shoulder and medicine being what it is in the early middle ages this is often a mortal wound and it hack on's case it is and it kills and he bleeds out and the people that take over from him are these half nephews now a little on their background just because

it's not confusing enough yet they are allegedly the sons of eric blood acts eric blood acts is allegedly the son of our friend Harold fair herald fine hair herald hair fair lufa mop head whatever you want to call him who is quickly becoming the equivalent of the fountain head of

“blue bloodedness in Norwegian royal history so if you want to rule Norway you kind of have to tie”

yourself to him just to confuse everyone one more degree they're also the full nephews apparently of our friend and Denmark herald blue tooth so all these people are related the guy who gets the lion share of Norway after winning the battle of Fittjar or really losing the battle of Fittjar but killing hack on the good is also named herald his name is herald gray cloak and herald gray cloak is well he's notable because he's going to take the conversion process in a little bit of a different

direction than hack on the good he's not going to settle for sort of a compromise with paganism he's going to try to dominate the pagans and take an almost charlamini an armed evangelistic approach to converting the heathen he's going to do so at the point of a sword you're going to convert

“your going to die during his reign he will kill a bunch of minor chieftains and absorbed their”

territories he will have a falling out with his uncle herald blue tooth and in 1970 herald blue tooth somehow lures herald gray cloak to Denmark and has him whacked he's either killed by herald blue tooth himself he's either killed by an assassin the herald blue tooth or he's killed by an ally of herald blue tooth but herald blue tooth will then put a compliant yarl on the throne that had been formally occupied by the guy he just whacked and he will rule through him which probably

accounts for how herald blue tooth can say on the yelling stone that he ruled Denmark and Norway even if it's a bit of an exaggeration hopefully herald blue tooth is enjoying his time on the throne because the next generation that is by nine seventy toppling around on the long house floor

he's going to be the ones that take him out and a bunch of other people too it's an amazing

generation of Scandinavian leaders one of whom will be called the most spectacular Viking of his age by historian Gwen Jones another who will be the guy who topples herald blue tooth that'll be his own son a guy named Spine Sven Swain take your pick fork beard and the other one the most spectacular Viking of his age is a guy known as Olaf Trigvison this is all part of let's call it the class of nine sixties the people born in the nine sixties who by the nine seventies are starting

to grow up and by the nine eighties are making their presence known Olaf is famous for his youth he's he's running for his life before he can even probably speak his mother moving around in various places to keep him alive he gets sold in the slavery he ends up fighting in the retinau of you know king or prince of Latamir in in the territory of the ruse he'll end up in Iceland for a while

and then he'll famously end up in England when the second so-called second Viking age hits in

England so we need to switch over there for a minute to show where all of the money is going to come from that allows guys like Olaf Trigvison and Spain fork beard to do what they're going to do back in Scandinavia because by about the nine eighties England is having nice respite from Viking attacks

fact one of their kings is going to be called Edgar the peaceful because there's no Viking attack during his reign at all sounds great maybe you if you were in England you would be forgiven for thinking that the Viking age is over until it starts again and what's interesting is

when I was growing up reading mid twenty a century history they did not blame the second Viking

age in England on the Viking rulers they blamed it on the English ruler they're going to famously have what a guy like Winston Churchill probably would have described as a loser getting the throne of England and he's a guy who gets blamed by people like Churchill for everything bad that happens

“afterwards but remember a guy like Churchill's firmly in the camp of those people who believe in”

what's known as the great man theory of history right doesn't take trends in forces into account doesn't take geography doesn't take environment he blames rulers and Churchill amongst many other people look at the people from out for the greats time on and see a bunch of really strong rulers right the reason there's no Viking attacks is because you have these august figures you know leading Britain into prosperity and peacefulness and and the era of greatness and then all of a

sudden the lottery of monarchy comes up snake eyes with a guy like Arthur read the unready and listen to how Churchill describes this poor figure who takes control of Britain in the late 970s this is from Winston Churchill's history of the English-speaking peoples quote it must have

“seemed to contemporaries that with the magnificent coronation at bath in 973 on which all coronation”

orders since have been based the seal was set on the unity of the realm everywhere the courts are sitting regularly in shire and burrow and hundered there is one coinage and one system of weights and measures the arts of building and decoration are reviving learning begins to flourish again in the church there is a literary language a king's English which all educated men write civilization has been restored to the island but now he writes the political fabric which nurtured it was about to be over

throne hitherto strong men armed had kept the house now a child a weakling a vacillator a faithless feckless creature succeeded to the warrior throne 25 years of peace slapped the island and the English so magnificent and stress and danger so invincible under valiant leadership relaxed under its

“softening influences we have reached the days of ethyl red the unready and quote now poor ethyl red the”

unready may be getting a bad rap here in any time you see such a visiferous denunciation of someone's reputation you're just inviting later historians to sort of play devil's advocate and 21st century historians have been quite a bit more gentle with ethyl red the unready than mid-20th century historians were a guy like Churchill and his ilk would suggest that the reason the Viking raids begin again during effl reds rain is because they can smell fear and they can sense disorder and poor leadership

which is not untrue but there's a lot of other reasons why the raids could start up again in the 980s partly because the English have become rich fabulously wealthy they may be the richest kingdom

in all of western Europe during this time period for all those reasons Churchill just mentioned first of

all their unified realm they've got a new coin age in minting their exporting lots of raw materials and getting gold and silver in return they've reorganized the structure of the realm it's a fabulously wealthy place and that's going to attract criminal pirates all by itself isn't it an ethyl red comes to the throne in the 970s he's a young guy 1314 years old by about the 980s the Viking sales start appearing on the horizon again and it's been 30 years or so since the

last attacks but historian Mark Morris pointed out something I didn't realize he said that the attacks that had happened previously you know 40 50 60 years ago it all come from relatively nearby Ireland the Orkney Islands places where Vikings were sort of based near the British Isles he says

that in the 980s these are the first attacks that come directly from Scandinavia in like 100 years

it starts off with seven ships here three ships there although according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle those small numbers of ships managed to do quite a bit of damage there may be something

that show up 991 almost 100 long ships appear off the eastern coast of Britain led according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle by a guy name Olaf now as we've talked about Olaf's pretty common name during this period and the best historians in the business are split over whether this is some Olaf were not aware of or whether it's Olaf Trigvison right the guy who will

become Olaf the first of Norway the guy that Gwen Jones referred to as the most spectacular

“Viking of his age it's really hard though if you want to try to connect the dots on you know where”

any of these great Viking figures are at any given time you know nailed down their location really difficult to do I mean Spain forkbeards a perfect example over throws his father harrow blue tooth in the late 980s and blue tooth dies is he in Denmark after that some people think so others say that the king of Sweden comes over rules Denmark for a while in Spain goes elsewhere where we don't know so is this Olaf Trigvison in 991 could be but the Viking

fleet of almost 100 long ships raids a little bit along the eastern coast of the Anglo-Saxon realm before putting into an island off the coast which is what they normally did right you drag your long ships up on the sand you must do your troops you fortify the little island and then

“you use that as a jumping off point for raids and in 991 they take this little island over”

and they're looking to attack a town called Maldon when the Anglo-Saxons confront them on the coast a force of locally raised troops to fight the Scandinavian raiders and this will result in one of the most famous battles of the period the 991 battle of Maldon it's called and the guy who confronts the Scandinavian raiders this large fleet and no one knows the numbers I bred from 2000 to 4,000 Vikings which is of course a huge discrepancy and 4,000 troops would have meant nothing

to the Chinese in this period or the Indians or the Byzantines or the Arabs but 4,000 Vikings in you know early medieval western Europe is a lot of Vikings they're confronted by a nobleman he's sometimes referred to as an Earl he was certainly an alderman he's got the wonderful Anglo-Saxon

“old Germanic style name of Ratnoth maybe 60 years old shows up with his personal retina of”

thines and as we had talked about earlier in part one we dealt extensively with the military situation and in Anglo-Saxon thane is in some ways nearly indistinguishable from a high ranking

Viking warrior we called them first string players like a sporting analogy and the first stringer

on both sides are comparable it's the second stringers where the Viking warriors have a real advantage over the British well English is the more proper term obviously during this time period Anglo-Saxons maybe even is the proper term but Ratnoth has raised with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle refers to as the people the fear it is the other word that you'll see used and historian sometimes divide the fear into what's called the select feared which is the better equipped more formidable

version of the people and the great feared which is the guys who harvest the wheat in the field but this is a second string that is nowhere near as good as the Viking warrior second string because

the Viking warrior second string has shown up here to fight they expect to fight they plan to

fight they probably fought before and they probably have better equipment and they adhere to a religious belief at least those ones who are not yet Christian and come from a culture that exalts the idea of fighting and they're going to have combat with a bunch of people from a culture that amongst the the farmer class doesn't I mean the fanes exalt fighting that's their job but the feared these are the guys who harvest you know the the wheat right so it's a different

group of people the numbers again are unknown some suggest that they're equal to the Viking numbers some suggest that they're less than the Viking numbers no one suggests that I've read that the Anglo-Saxons here out number the Viking force but what that means is breath and off's best troops are as good as the ones he's facing but his other troops are far inferior there is a poem that's famous and that's helped make this battle famous that was composed to historians think not that long after

the event it's also called usually the Battle of Maldon it is not written as a historical document there's lots of things in it that are trying to send messages or evoke certain feelings that

out of it and that historians have to help get a sense of things one thing is that and if you believe it this breath knob has to sort of explain to some of these militia troops would be a good way to describe them how to do the most basic sorts of things how to hold your shield how to stand next to the guy next to you I mean if you're about to fight a bunch of Viking warriors

“who know how to fight with a bunch of guys that you have to show how to hold their shield and how”

or before they're going to fight these guys well you can see how that might be a problem there's an interesting aspect to militia troops and we had mentioned in part one of this show that you could probably classify most armies in human history as militia armies right with the people who are armed right you just armed the the locals and they go out there and fight militia armies tend to get better over time the early Roman Republican legions were militia

armies and they famously would start wars not doing very well and then the longer the war went on they got better and better but these are people this feared who fight only when needed and they have to get back to the fields before too long because otherwise you face a famine if they're not

there to harvest the wheat so they never have time to get really good there's also a difference

between militia armies fighting in the age of missile weapons being the dominant sort of weapon versus the kind of fighting that they're going to do at the Battle of Maldon many countries the United States is a perfect example celebrate our early militias right we had a group of people known as the minute men in revolutionary war american history guys who would keep a musket over the fireplace and if a guy like Paul Revere and he probably didn't do this quite the way it was

suggested but if he sits up there in the you know north church tower and says the British are coming the British are coming everybody grabs the musket off the you know mantle of the fireplace runs out into the field lines up next to your neighbor and shoots at the red coats 50 or 100 yards away with a musket that is a very different thing to what the feared has to do against the Vikings there is no countering a musket ball in the air mean one of the reasons that people used

crossbows in an era where a longbow was a much better weapon is it takes a long time to learn how to use a longbow well you can teach a person how to use a crossbow in an afternoon and there's no defense right you can't that these aren't like movies with Shaolin priests who are who are knocking away arrows and quarrels with their hands you shoot them they're in trouble

“but this is like fighting somebody in an MMA fight if you have to walk up as a member of the”

feared and you know launch your spear out of Viking from close range well they can counter that can't they they can pariet they can duck there's acrobatics there's moves there's counter moves it's a very different sort of situation you're going into your first MMA fight and you're fighting people who are experienced in the octagon it's a whole different story and it is very scary and very intimidating and the story and I was reading Tora Shaia in his book The Wolf Age

points out that according to the Anglo-Sax and Chronicle before some of these battles that the Anglo-Saxons fought with the Vikings some of the leaders were vomiting and the implication is they're vomiting because they're scared and in the wolf age Tora Shaia writes quote

the nervous tension during the preparations could be unbearable this is something never just

closed in the heroic scaldic poems but which shines through in the more down to earth Anglo-Saxons sources in the tense and oppressive atmosphere before battle the men found an outlet for their anxiety through aggressive and obscene shouting wild battle cries he writes and primitive howling could be heard across the plane as the men of both sides shook their quivers and raised their spears to the sky the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells of an older man who had led an army in a previous fight

against the Danes who were so nervous before the battle that he began to vomit in front of his men his people consequently refused to fight and the army then disbanded and quote I actually went up and looked up that entry in my copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes

it sound like that guy was faking it because he was working with the Vikings so you never know

“but the thing to remember when these two sides come to grips at the Battle of Maldon”

is that they're basically very similar armies in terms of how they fight they're armed basically the same they're armored basically the same their numbers are probably close there is no cavalry on either side there is no complicated tactical maneuvers involved

differentiate between the two forces are left are exalted so if one side is much more experienced than the other or has much higher morale these become determining factors and if Brent North commanding the Anglo-Saxons literally has to tell his people how to hold their shields in the hour before they're expected to do so that's not a good sign in addition there is as we said earlier this tendency in this time period for the people who win these battles to be the

side that doesn't run away if you look at runic inscriptions on a lot of runes stones in Scandinavia during this period when they're trying to exalt the reputation of a warrior they will say he fled not he didn't run away and if one side runs away before the other side does that becomes the determining reason the battles lost and the reason it matters in these battles is because

“that's what's going to happen so often in these battles and the people that run away first”

are usually going to be the second stringers on the Anglo-Saxons side according to the poem

the Battle of Maldon things start off with a Viking herald showing up and basically saying to the English or the Anglo-Saxons whichever term is more proper during this time period we're in the sort of a transition period he basically says to them listen I bring the message for the from the Viking guys and this is what they need to let you live and from the Battle of Maldon the poem written soon after the affair I'm using a translation I found online that I really

like from Dr. Aaron K. Hostetter and from the middle of the piece he talks about the herald showing up and says quote then one stood on the shore sternly calling out of Viking herald conversing in many words he delivered in a vault the message of the brim sailors to that nobleman where he stood on the river bank end quote and he's talking about breath not right the commander of the Anglo-Saxons the herald says quote they have sent me to you the hearty

“c man they bid you to be informed that you must quickly send rings in exchange for protection”

rings by the way means wealth and it would be better for you to buy off with tribute this storm of spears otherwise we should deal in such a hard battle we need to destroy ourselves if you were sufficiently rich we wish to establish a safeguard in exchange for gold if you decide this

you who are most powerful here and you wish to ransom your people and give to the c men according

to their own discretion money in exchange for peace and take a truth at our hands we will go back to our ships with our payment and sail away holding the peace with you and quote that's not why this breath not this here though his job is to confront these people and the poem has him saying quote breath not spoke back raising up his shield waving his slender spear

“speaking in words angry and resolute giving the mancer now he's speaking quote have you heard”

sailor what these people say they wish to give you spears as tribute the poisonous points and ancient swords this tackle of war will do you know good in battle herald of the brim men deliver this again say unto your people a more unpleasant report here stands with his troops are renowned or old who wishes to defend this homeland the country of effo red my own lord and his citizens and territory the heathens shall perish in battle it seems a humiliation to let

you go to your ships with our treasures unfought now you have come thus far into our country you

must not get our gold so softly points and edges must reconcilest first a grim war playing

before we give you any tribute end quote so what happens in the battles very interesting the island that the Scandinavians the Danes here have camped out on is connected to the mainland by a small narrow causeway right a path and this path is submerged except at low tide so at low tide it appears and the Scandinavians cross but they're only you know a narrow width in which to cross and there's several Anglo-Saxon thanes blocking the way and they're able to keep the Vikings

pinned up on this small island so the Vikings say to the Anglo-Saxons let us have free passage across this path and let us set up fairly on the other side and then we'll have a battle and see who's better now think about this for a minute imagine the Spartans at the famous battle of thermopoli right

point was to choose a place where you could hold off a giant army with a small number of quality

“troops imagine the Persian saying to the Spartans this isn't fair you're able to block up our”

whole army in this little past let's go out into a big field where we can both line up and settle at mono amona right you know man to man the Spartans would laugh and say the reason we're here is we chose this spot because it's so narrow so what do you think the Anglo-Saxon earlier Alderman says to the Viking request that you let us set up fair and square on the other side he says okay another poem chastises him for this and suggests that it's his overwining pride but there are

other ways to look at this first of all in the Germanic tradition of warfare in the early Middle Ages

or what used to be called the dark ages they kind of do things this way the Vikings actually are supposed to fight some battles on what's called a hazelled field where they mark off the boundaries in advance so imagine it looking like a sporting event a football game or soccer match where there's outer bounds lines can't go out of bounds go out of bounds you can't come back onto the battlefield I mean that sounds crazy doesn't it but they fought that way and so it could have that factoring

into the question of why breath north would allow the Vikings you know to sort of set up free and clear and then we fight it out there's another theory too and that is that his job is to stop this

hundred long boat fleet from going and raiding and killing and kidnapping local people right he's

the Lord he's supposed to do this and if he doesn't fight them here if he says oh I'm not going to let you cross and they go find them we're leaving well then they're gone they're going and doing all the things your job is to prevent them from doing so maybe better that you take your chances here and fight them but it doesn't go well and famously breath north and his loyal retainers will get chopped up dying to a man while some people flee the battle and the whole thing falls apart

the battle of Maldon is inexplicably decisive and I say inexplicably because as a modern person

“looking back on this it shouldn't have been so important right a locally raised force commanded by a”

local you know alderman with the local you know farmer class of people is defeated by Danish

Raiders but we just got done talking about a prosperous unified populist realm Anglo-Saxon England is so go raise another force right but this is part of what separates us from the people of the past what's that wonderful quote that you know the past is like another country they do things differently there when you look at why you're defeated modern people might come up with all kinds of theories you know there might not be any sort of unified ideas why defeat happens some people might say well you

know bad general ship others might say well the way that the military was organized in this case was ineffective in these circumstances others might say well you know bad reconnaissance bad information the troops on the ground were weary or overextended or you know any experience there might be all kinds of reasons another reason you know with a segment in the modern world might actually look at it for a religious viewpoint say well you know everything happens because God

wants it to happen that way and if we lost this battle it's because God wanted it that way right that might be a segment of the population too the difference between the now and the then though is in the early middle ages the segment of the population that would adopt that last reason for the loss right the loss happened because God wanted it that way is going to be the overwhelming majority of people and that's a little hard for Western audiences now to get your mind around because think about

how you diagram a military defeat right how you decide the defeat occurred determines what you're going to do to see that it doesn't happen again right if it's a bad general that

“caused the loss you get rid of the general the organization is the key issue that led to the”

defeat will you reorganize things but if God being angry with you is the reason you lost well then what you do to make sure you don't lose again is going to be a solution that's based in religion historian mark Morris and his book the Anglo-Saxons a history of the beginnings of England talks about the Battle of Maldon and the loss there and how devastating it was and why it was so devastating and he writes quote defeat at Maldon was a devastating blow to the English as much

psychological as physical ever since the days of King Alfred their identity had been defined by military success against the Danes the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was a celebration of over a

those earlier glories by naming his first born son Ethel Stan the church Morris writes had been

“telling Englishmen that their success was due not to their prowess but due to their piety especially”

when it was expressed in the support of monastic reform things had improved greatly in King Edgar's reign according to the Chronicle because now quoting the Chronicle quote he exalted God's praise far and wide and loved God's law and quote Morris continues quote the slaughter at Maldon shattered that self-confidence and raised the troubling question of why God had allowed it to happen and quote now Ethel read the unready doesn't refer to the fact that he was unprepared it actually means that

he was ill-counciled and Morris says it's a bit of a pun because Ethel read means noble council so

his nickname kind of turns that on its head he's noble council who's ill-counciled and the council he receives after the Battle of Maldon is he should give these Danish raiders what they

“asked for before the Battle right with their herald said give us rings so Ethel read gives them”

the rings which is the wealth and in this case it's 10,000 pounds of silver this is considered to be the first of Ethel Red's payments that will eventually be called Dane Geld and there is ample precedent throughout the entire history of the Viking era for paying Vikings to leave

you alone the problem that Ethel Red's going to have is that those earlier payments were always

connected to trying to gain some time some breathing room to come up with a better solution so you didn't have to pay them forever Ethel Red's 10,000 pounds of silver which seems like a lot of money in 991, 992 is going to seem like nothing compared to the ever increasing amounts of money he's going to have to pay these people to leave his people alone to not kill Rob or kidnap his

“citizens in the middle 20th century heck even in the middle ages the critics of Ethel Red suggested”

he had no better plan than to just keep paying people off but more modern historians point out Ethel Red did try to do whether things tried to build a couple of fleets a couple of times those fell through tried to solve the problem apparently with God and deal with some sorts of reform and tried to fix circumstances so that if God felt like the English needed to be punished maybe he wouldn't feel that they needed to be punished in the next battle that didn't work but giving the

10,000 pounds of silver when he did in 991, 992 is like putting out an open for business sign for pirates in the northern world it turns England into a kind of a vortex a world pool sucking in opportunists from the entire Viking world and beyond right there's a reason that you don't negotiate with terrorists supposedly right or you don't pay hostage takers to get the hostage is back because you encourage more hostage taking and by well 993 994 995 a couple of years

after the battle of Maldon the Anglo-Saxon realm is sucking in opportunists from not just Denmark and Norway and Sweden but people who aren't Scandinavian at all. Calts, frisions, slabs even rust adventurers from eastern Europe I mean these armies operating in England after the battle Maldon are multinational multi-ethnic forces and what they haven't common is that they're there to get some of the money that's being dulled out to people you know to get them to stop

doing exactly what they're doing it even sucks in some of the greatest Scandinavians of the age what do we call them the class of 960 I mean if Olaf Trickvison wasn't commanding at the battle of Maldon he's certainly there not that long afterwards and most historians believe that the money and the opportunity and the open for business sign for pirates you know the vortex sucks in Spain forkbeard from Denmark also and these two guys are operating together in England in the early

990s in a way that sort of reminds you of like a couple of action figures in an adventure movie together right just so vistas alone could play one of these guys Arnold Schwarzenegger could play the other they're operating together they know each other one of the ideas that ethical rather apparently has to try to you know come up to some sort of long-term solution for this issue is to try to co-opt at least one of these guys and use him against the others and the one he chooses

than double the 10,000 pounds of silver he treats him royally has him come to a meeting and he basically

“tries to do with Olaf according to a lot of the historians I was reading what the you know the realm”

in what's now modern day France did with rollo right who created Norma to turn the poachers into game keepers if you don't have an army that can resist the Scandinavians buy one and Ethoreg tries to buy Olaf and use him his troops and his fleet to protect England from other people like him and of course as usual with this sort of a deal he's supposed to convert to Christianity as part of the arrangement but most sources believe Olaf already was Christians so this may be like a

second baptism and part of the deal is that Olaf will not come back to England as a hostel and he

apparently keeps this deal and in fact his troops may stay to fight for after red and the Anglo Saxons in England but Olaf leaves in like 995 goes back to Norway apparently converts a bunch of this money he made you know in England when the open for business for pirate sign was out hires mercenaries and troops goes back to Norway and takes over there and becomes the king of Norway in like 995 and when he does he does so as a Christian and as somebody who is not going to

allow the people of Norway the option of continuing to worship the old gods right he's not going to like hack on the good ask them or hope that they convert to Christianity he's going to act more like the predecessor herald gray cloak right the guy who started to try to convert Norway by force before herobloot to killed him well he comes back to Norway and follows that strategy on steroids if you read the sagas of snorey sterlison and I use the early monson translation as I've said

“before and remember snorey's writing several hundred years later but he's utilizing oral histories”

poems sagas all kinds of things that he knows by heart and some of those things may have been locked in verse in a way that prevents the telephone game sort of phenomenon from destroying the information right so if you have a rap song and everything in it rhymes you can't change some of the words without the rhymes being ruined so maybe snorey had some of that going form but if you read the hymns kringla his most famous work the chapter on oloft trigvison who will become known as

oloft the first in Norwegian history is maybe the best chapter in the whole work the best sagas in

the entire hymns kringla because trigvison's an amazing guy first of all let's start with

him what he's like i mean we already talked about the fact that he's all over the Viking

“world he seems to go from one end to it to another his mother was moving him around when he was a”

little kid to keep him alive he was taken into slavery as we said at one point in his life but he's a physical specimen according to snorey if there was a an Olympics with a category for Vikings he would be a gold medal winner he has this quality that you'll see other unbelievably athletic formidable Vikings are also supposed to be able to do this but only the best he can apparently throw a spear with his left hand and his right hand simultaneously accurately

and with great power so he's like a repeating rifle for spear throwing and you win the gold medal of the Viking Olympics just for that you also was supposed to have one of the great tempers of all time and the thing about reading snorey sagas is they're almost too perfect there's so much like Greek tragedies you know where the cause and effect in this guy's life adds up so perfectly to his fate right it looks like a Lego like construction and you know the wrathful temper

and the various things that he does so you know one plus one equals two leads to the outcome of his fate and sort of the the object lesson there it's like a Greek tragedy where the lead character is like a killies and he's got a tragic flaw that eventually sinks him literally but in this case Olaf goes back to Norway and begins to convert the locals through violence and just as with all these other people you can't figure out how much of this is because he is a

fervently believing Christian and how much of this is connected to the fact that Christianity supports

motivations ends and the other begins it does seem like when people won't convert to Christianity

“Olaf takes it personally like you don't want me to be the king and people suffer accordingly”

these stories that snorey tells of the kinds of suffering that Olaf inflicts upon these people

are draconian I mean the first thing that he does as he goes after all these people who sort of

live in the magical world of the Norse reality that we talked about elves and dwarves and trolls and magic and all these kinds of things Olaf goes after these guys goes after wizards snorey says and magicians and people that are called troll wise meaning you know people that are wise about trolls and things like that I mean one story is that he invites a bunch of them to a big feast gets them all drunk and then burns the building down where he's hosting the feast

he takes a bunch of these magicians that he finds and he stakes them down in the sand off

“the coast of an island where it low tide the island appears you stake him down at low tide and”

wait for the tide to come in and drown them he has some people torn apart by dogs he has people thrown off of high places snorey tells a story of one guy that he had who wouldn't convert to Christianity so he had his underlings bring a ball filled with glowing coals in and place the ball on this guy's stomach until his stomach exploded he sentenced another guy who wouldn't convert to Christianity

to have his eyes ripped out so the handlers who were supposed to do this ripped out his first eye

and the victim handled it so well it intimidated the you know the executioner guys who wouldn't rip the second one out they just didn't know how to handle it dude like that the most famous of the stories connected with Olaf though and what he did to people who wouldn't convert to Christianity involves the snake incident where he had one of these people brought to him he had his mouth pride open and they put like little sticks or something in the mouth to keep

the guy from closing his mouth and they put like a funnel type object in his mouth stuck a snake in one end burn the tail of the snake so the snake would slither down this guy's throat into his stomach and the guy died as the snake tries to you know bite his way out of the guy's side Olaf is also someone who goes to the various temples dedicated to the traditional German gods right the eyes here and he visits one in Snorris saga where he goes to the temple and the

local show up including the guy whose job it is to sort of run and guard the temple and they show

up out there and they basically beg Olaf to allow them to continue the ancient practices right to

continue to uphold the law is the way it's described and Olaf and his men listen to this pleading and turn around and in the temple are all these statues right idols that the Christian church would refer to them a statue of Thor a statue of Odin the statue of Frayer all the guys and Olaf Trigvison takes his weapon and destroys the statue of Thor and his men then begin to destroy the statues of the other gods you're going to imagine how this must have horrified the faithful right the

guy whose job it is to defend the temple is watching his new king destroy all the gods what's interesting about this though is there's a meaning to this it's sort of the reverse in a weird way

“of the story of how Harold Bluetooth in Denmark converts to Christianity remember that one”

where the monk popo agrees to carry the glowing you know peace of iron in his hands and the Christian god protects his hands from being burned this is like a weird twist on that where Olaf Trigvison destroys the images of the Norse gods and nothing happens to him right what is that say to the followers when they watch you know Thor allow his statue to be destroyed it does nothing and then Olaf and his men killed the guy whose job it is to guard this temple and we're told

that all the other men who showed up to defend Thor and Odin and the traditional ways and the law they're all armed by the way meekly submit to Olaf at that point so you have this guy who's out there converting by force and intimidating the locals and there's a wonderful story snoray tells it it may be my favorite story in the entire saga but it sounds like the Norse gods if they didn't deal with Olaf the moment that he's destroying their statues decide to deal with him later

their own way it snoray tells the story and says that Olaf is holding a feast and everybody's having a good time and there's a man in the corner an old guy one eye a Gandalf style hat

he can tell you about things that happened long ago he can tell you you know who's buried under

that great ancient mound in the distance and tell you all about him and when the party breaks up Olaf has this guy come with him to a private room and they talk and he's he can't stop talking to the guy he's so interesting and eventually Olaf's advisor has to say to the king listen you got to go

“to bed can't stay up all night talking to the guy you have to go to bed so he goes to bed”

and snoray says he wakes up the next morning and says what happened to that guy and it turns out that after Olaf went to sleep this old guy with the one eye and the hat went to the cooks who were preparing the next night's meal for the king and said to the cooks you can't give the king this food this way this isn't fit for a ruler like him and supposedly gives the cooks some really you know a couple of big slabs of good meat and says put this in the stew or whatever they're

making and when Olaf hears that you can almost feel like the hair on the back of his neck must have stood up and he told the cooks to throw it all out wasted all is what snoray sterless and says he said

“because he thought that this was Odin and that Odin was going to poison him and this was how Odin”

gets back for all the things that Olaf was doing to the people that worshipped him and his son Thor and all the other gods and the pantheon of the ice here surprisingly though it's not going to be the pagan gods though if you believe snoray sterless and that are responsible for Olaf

drinkessence fate but it's going to be another powerful pagan who lives in the here and now her name is

Sigrid the Houghty sometimes called Sigrid the Proud or Sigrid the strong snoray sterless and says she's the queen of Sweden historians aren't sure she even existed and if she did she may not have been Scandinavian at all she may have been slavic Polish specifically so she's a rather hard to pin down figure

“she's also linked to the royal families of Sweden Norway and Denmark it seems like everyone wants to”

marry this woman or has the story that snoray tells involves the moment that Olaf right the king of Norway now decides he wants to marry her and she seems good with it for a while until a huge sticking point develops in the relationship and snoray sterless and describes it and I'm going to take the these and vows and those kinds of things out of my translation and just you know make it more the vernacular and put you and he and things like that in place but snoray sterless and tells of Olaf and

Sigrid's conversations about getting married and how Olaf's temper gets the best of him in a way that might lead to his eventual fate and sterless and writes quote early in the spring king Olaf went east to calling a hello to meet Queen Sigrid and when they met they spoke about the matter which had been discussed during the winter that they should be married and things were progressing well then king Olaf said that Sigrid should be baptized and take the true faith she answered

I will not go from the faith I've had before and my kids been before me I will not say anything against you if you believe in the God that pleases you king Olaf snoray says was very rough meaning wrathful and answered hastily why should I wed you you he then bitch and he struck her in the face with the glove he was holding in his hand after that he stood up and she likewise and Sigrid said this may well be your death and quote I've read other translations where she says you may have just

killed yourself I read one that said you're finished but he has destroyed the images of whole pantheons of gods but according to snoray's history this is where he messed with the wrong pagan

Sigrid the strong has powerful friends and Olaf's going to find out what it means when you're

wrathful anger makes enemies of everyone now it seems incomprehensible that Olaf tricked us and wouldn't know that he was going to have all these enemies right when you're ripping people's eyes out and drowning troll wise wizards and putting glowing coals on people's

right but there are so many different ways that Olaf seems to be pissing people off that he seems

“to have a natural gift for it and he may be even being exploited by sort of a puppet master here”

right I mean as well read the unready the king of England may deliberately be trying to get these Scandinavian rulers angry with each other because if they're mad at each other and fighting amongst themselves well then they're less focused on fighting him it's a one of the theories here is that after read the unready deliberately tries to pay Olaf to kind of get mad and fight same fork be it right so get sliced alone mad at Arnold Schwarzenegger get them each other's throat

so that might be one reason then as we said Olaf is pissing everybody off at home by being such a rough ruler that's another reason when he goes back to Norway he starts a certain control and authority over the parts of Norway that are traditionally claimed by the Danish king who in this case is

“now Spain fork beard so that's not going to make him friendly with his old action hero buddy”

and then there's the wonderful personal relationship aspect to this which you know is the most interesting from a storyteller's standpoint and it's not all made up I mean you're not trying to create something where there's a soap opera element to it that element exists all throughout history in the pre-modern age when royal families composed of people who thought they had blue blood and they intermarried with other royal families as a way to cement diplomatic relationships with each

other which happens all over the world we look at the biblical era you know the times of the Syria and ancient Egypt and Babylonian all those places happened in China happened all over the world right you marry the king's sister to the king of another country and then we're buddies and brothers and all these kinds of things but this is what supposedly happens in Scandinavia now we have to make our disclaimers here because it all requires that sacred the haughty be a real person and she

may not be now she also might be this as we said slavic princess who's sometimes known as gunhilled but it's also some historians think that gunhilled and sacred are the same person so this is how complicated they can get but if we assume that the sagas are correct and a lot of historians are

“willing to buy this they're just isn't proof and that sacred is real and that her life is real”

well sacred the haughty sacred the strong, she got a lot of names she is the axis upon which this whole story revolves because when Olaf Trigvison decides he wants to marry her before he slaps her in the face she's already been the queen of Sweden and already married to the king of Sweden and has become the mother of the next king of Sweden when our Sylvester Stallone character slaps her in the face she ends up going in marrying our Arnold Schwarzenegger character and becomes the wife

of Spain forke beard in Denmark while already being the mother of the new king of Sweden his name is and it's going to be shocking Olaf last name and English speaking person would probably pronounce scott cunning but if you listen to a sweet pronounce it it becomes the almost unpronounceable in English word halt or hot cunning so now you have this woman who hates Olaf's

guts who may have said by slapping him he's basically forfeited his life and now she's connected to

two of the people you know the king of Sweden and the king of Denmark who can make that promise a reality to make it even more wonderfully family oriented sounds like Olaf Trigvison in Norway when he can't marry Sigrid the Hottie instead marries Spain forke beard sister who is mad at her brother and my mother used to say that the missing 50% of the human population that is not present in the most of human geopolitical history females are still a part of the story they're just

acting in ways that don't get into the history books as much they're exerting their influence

behind the scenes through a lot of the powerful people who do make the history books and according

to snorey sterlessen which is not the greatest source of all time but the women in the story are driving everything and Olaf Trigvison's wife right Spain forke beard sister is basically pushing him into war against her brother and Sigrid the Hottie the now angry at her former suitor and now marry to the king of Denmark his pushing her husband to go after the guy who slapped

This is wonderful stuff from a storytelling point of view I mean if we're just sticking with the

“story I should probably mention one of my favorite Sigrid the Hottie stories is when a bunch of people”

she thought weren't worth her time we're trying to marry her right she wants to marry kings of Denmark kings of Norway kings of Sweden and she gets all these petty kings trying to marry her snorey sterlessen says she eventually invites them all to come and sort of woo her at the same time all these people she thinks are beneath her she gets them all into one building at kind of like a feasting situation and then you know this is a very traditional Viking era way to kill people

burns the building down kills them all and then basically wipes her hands and says well that

ought to keep these petty kings from trying to become my husbands but when she marries people she marries the kings of Scandinavian countries and then she pushes them into these sorts of conflicts

“that put a sort of a personal relationship sort of touch on geopolitical”

you know occurrences and in the year ten hundred traditionally she has her son the king of Sweden and her husband the king of Denmark ally with some girls in Norway that are also unhappy with Olaf Trigbison and those three or four entities you know in a circumstance that is not

well understood known or recorded all you can say is they somehow ambush Olaf Trigbison and his

fleet at sea somewhere in the Baltic and no one knows where the battle is known as the battle of Sfolder the battle of Sfolder's and not a lot of different ways you can pronounce this thing it is probably the most famous Viking sea battle in all history if indeed we even refer to it as Viking because interestingly enough the king of Sweden who is leading part of the fleet

“the king of Denmark who is leading another part of the fleet and the king of Norway”

who is leading the fleet that they are fighting are all Christian by this time period also it seems like Olaf Trigbison the king of Norway's fleet is heavily outnumbered multiple different traditions agree that he has like eleven ships the traditions all disagree on how many his enemies have but it is multiple times that eighty ninety hundred ten hundred thirty he is woefully outnumbered he has maybe the greatest certainly the most famous Viking ship

with him it's called the long serpent in English it's a beautiful ship lots of wars lots of people on board and this battle of Sfolder that happens involves the traditional Viking approach to these naval battles which is both sides sort of strap these ships along side each other with the big ships in the middle and then gets rid of the masks and all the things that would impede movement between these ships that are now strapped and attached to each other and they create

big fighting platforms and then have as close to a land battle as they can have on these floating fort like platforms and the battle of Sfolder is supposed to be a hard fought affair even though it's so one sided and at the very end of it it's like a movie where the enemies of Olaf Trigbison have taken all the other boats by storm and then as they take each one they cut them apart and have them floating away and the last great battle is happening aboard the long serpent the biggest

of these ships and Olaf Trigbison is fighting with his men and they're getting overwhelmed from all sides and eventually they're down to like the last few people and Olaf Trigbison is supposed to be one of the last two be alive on the ship and before they can capture and kill him he turns around and he's fought all the way from like the front of the ship to the very end the stern he turns around and in full armor dives off the back of the ship and sinks into the water

well this is a spectacularly cinematic death for a pagan Viking ruler if you're making a movie that contains Vikings it is a mortal sin in this time in place for a Christian and it is a reminder that this period around ten hundred when the pivotal battle of Swald or Swald or Swaldor or Swaldor which ever pronunciation you prefer happens between the earlier era of Thor and Odin and blood sacrifices and the era to come where the so-called

white Christ is the focus of worship and devotion and maybe a guy like Olaf is given a sort of

there certainly must have been some great satisfaction in being able to deny your former action

“here nobody the pleasure of separating your head from your body but this person that when Jones”

called as we said the greatest most spectacular Viking of his age is able to gain that reputation after ruling Norway for a mere five years when you get to become Olaf the first of Norway when you're on the throne for such a short period of time that's quite an accomplishment I also like another phrase when Jones sort of wrote the epitaph of Olaf Trigmas and then he said in his day in place he was Christ's best hatchet man the problem was is that he gets axed by a guy

who probably after this battle in ten hundred becomes the most powerful Scandinavian ruler

up until this time in history. Swain Fork beard after the Battle of Swald will rule all of

“Denmark he will have recovered the Danish areas that are traditionally ruled by Danish kings in”

southern Sweden and in Norway he is probably the father-in-law of the new and relatively young king of Sweden and he has put in charge of the parts of Norway he doesn't rule directly a couple of vasor rulers this is a very dangerous very powerful Scandinavian ruler that you do not want to antagonize unless you have a reputation for not making good decisions or not having good counsel and that's specifically what the name Ethel read the Unready refers to and a mere two years

after the Battle of Swald or Swald or Swald or Swald at the read the Unready manages to make a permanent enemy a spain fork beard by killing his relatives or maybe I should say probably killing his relatives or if not killing his relatives then killing the relatives of people who would then demand satisfaction from their king in the year 1002 on November 13th Ethel read the Unready puts into play a simultaneous mass contract hit on all the Danes in Britain

well that's the way the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes it was also the way the history's generally treated it when I was younger right kill all the Danes in Britain modern historians think that that would have been an impossibility what did we say Neil Price suggested there might have been before this period 50,000 Danes living in the British I also that's a form of genocide and ethnic cleansing that would seem to be beyond the abilities of the

“Anglo-Saxons at this time in place but it does seem clear that what he did do was issue secret”

orders to his followers that at the same time they were all to go after the Danish mercenaries living near by them and wipe them out this is something that a couple of years later Ethel

read the Unready would take pride in and refer to as a most just extermination the problem is

is that he either killed directly close relatives of Spain forke beard in what's known as the Saint Bryce's Day Massacre or he killed enough close people to people close to Spain forke beard that they demanded satisfaction from their king if you recall when Olaf Trigvison left England and made a deal with Ethel read the Unready he was supposed to convert to Christianity if he hadn't already and not come back to Britain as a hostel which he didn't he went to Norway and became the

king there but he left behind fighters right the people who were you know the mirrotters that he led in Britain and they were going to turn into guys who were mercenaries fighting for the king of England and protecting England from other Vikings like themselves but that deal didn't last for very long there's a lot of different historical theories on this the one I like is that the people who made the original deal were paid off in the dang galt right the the huge amounts of

silver that the English king gave them to be nice plain ice and defend the kingdom that those guys slowly but surely drifted away some probably went homes some probably sought other adventures elsewhere and in the meantime lots of new people are arriving right adventurers Scandinavians, slabs, calts, frisions and others who hadn't been part of the original deal right they didn't

like that don't feel like they have to honor the deal since they weren't the beneficiary since

“so according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle these mercenaries were supposed to protect the realm”

start raiding the realm and burning villages and cities and after a while if you're the king and you thought you paid these people to protect the realm you might feel as though you know the deal was off to but by killing all these people instead of reading himself from one problem he creates the circumstances of a much greater problem he makes fame for beard angry and like the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the Terminator films Spain Forkbeard had left England gone back to Scandinavia and was

ruling there but now has a reason to tell the king of England I'll be back and the traditional story which may or may not be true is that the people killed at the St. Bryce's Day Massacre included

“the sister and brother-in-law Spain Forkbeard writing a couple hundred years later the famous medieval”

historian William of Malm's Berry says that the sister of Spain Forkbeard was named Gunhilled the brother-in-law was a mercenary Viking leader named Palig and Malm's Berry writes quote Gunhilled who was a woman of some beauty and much character had come to England with her husband the powerful yarl Palig adopted Christianity and offered herself as a hostage for peace with the Danes. Adrick which is one of Ethorens officials in his disastrous fury had ordered her to be beheaded

with the other Danes though she declared plainly that the shedding of her blood would cost England

deer and for her part she faced death with presence of mind she never grew pale at the prospect

nor did she change expression after death even when her body was drained of blood though her husband had been killed before her eyes and her son a very likely child pierced by four lances and quote they have found bodies historians and archaeologists who they believe were probably from the same prices day massacre although it's impossible to know you can do isotope testing which shows that these people were raised in an environment like Scandinavia but that doesn't tell

you if they were specific victims of the same prices day massacre but they found bodies that have been burned bodies that were obviously the result of mob violence and with wounds all in the back like they were trying to escape and they've found bodies where the heads have been cut off from the front which is a very unusual way to be had someone if you look at the way the Saudi

Arabians behead prisoners today in executions or the way the Japanese did in the second world war

beheading someone from the rear is the standard way it's done so one can ask the question why you would find figures who had been beheaded facing the sword and there's an interesting Scandinavian saga that gives an account that might explain it in his book northmen the Viking saga historian John Haywood quote this saga as an impossible explanation why some of the victims that they think might have been from the St. Bryce's day massacre might have been executed from

the front and he suggests that it's something like a possible last request on the part of the condemned right a chance for one final opportunity to display their bravery and he writes quote the method used to kill these men was described in the 13th century saga of the yams Vikings about a semi-legendary band of elite Vikings said to have been founded by Harold that would be Harold Bluetooth a yams Viking who was about to be executed was asked what he thought about dying he

“said I think well of death as to all of us but I am not minded to be slaughtered like a sheep”

and would rather face the blow you hew into my face and watch closely if I flinch they did what he asked for and let him face the blow the executioner stepped in front of him and he would into his face and he did not flinch a wit except the designs closed when death came upon him end quote there are no reliable figures for how many daines were killed in the November 13th, 1002

secure over time but as I said in the mid 20th century when a lot of historians were taking the Anglo-Saxon chronicle at face value right killed all the daines you would have been talking about an ethnic cleansing genocide type affair that would have killed tens of thousands of people that

“seems far too many now I've seen low numbers I think Ian Howard headed that a couple of hundred”

maybe I think if we suggested it's the majority of mercenaries working for Kingeth already we're probably talking maybe two or three thousand people which is a ton and in this day and age that would probably mean that tons of people in Denmark would have had loved ones or people they knew

be victimized by this and whether or not King's fame fork beard right the most powerful King

in Scandinavia at this time period had close relatives among the victims or whether or not is the king of the daines he just had a responsibility to avenge the family members of some of his subjects or whether or not neither of those things were true and it just becomes a wonderful excuse to go back and attack the realm of that the ruddy and ready which he'd been doing for 20 years already by this time period we don't know but you can say that the Scandinavian fleets were

back and the Vikings were back burning English towns the year of the St. Bryce's Day Massacre right 1002 they're already back 1003 they're back in force 1004 1005 every year 1005 is a weird year because what probably made worse by the Viking attack but there's massive crop failures there's a terrible famine in England the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles says it is the worst famine that

“anyone can remember and it is so bad that the Scandinavians actually have to leave England and go”

back home to find food which means for the first time in like nine years they're spared

Viking attacks but then in 1006 Spain's forces are back and in 1007 and in 1009 what's happening here is you're going from the most prosperous maybe wealthy kingdom in western Europe to something far lower on the economic scale England is bleeding out year after year and it's a multi-pronged sort of attack on them I mean first of all you have defeats in the field right which means you lose soldiers and people and then after these Scandinavians defeats you in battle they burn

your towns and they loot your villages right that costs including the rebuilding costs all during this period Scandinavian fleets start interdicting and begin to control

“the seaborn trade that goes from England to the continent a lot of English wealth is because”

they send wool from England over to the continent to be turned into cloth all of a sudden the Viking sees control of that and are getting a piece of that action and they are extracting straight up cash from this wealthy realm we told you about the 10,000 pounds of silver that they collect in 1991 to keep the peace but that extraordinary amount of money just turns

out to be the first payment in an ever increasing amount of money that seems to buy less and less

for the English crown but they seem to have fewer and fewer options other than to pay it the 10,000 pounds of silver in 1991 is followed by a 16,000 pounds of silver a mere three years later to keep the peace in 10,02 which is eight years after that they need 24,000 pounds from the English crown if the Vikings are going to keep from savaging the realm and in 10,07 Spain forkbeards forces require 36,000 pounds of silver to keep from rating the realm Winston Churchill says this is

the equivalent of three or four years of the national income of the realm that number will eventually reach 48,000 pounds of silver in 10, 12 and the way that this is collected is fascinating too and the in numbers of carts and wagons required to cart 48,000 pounds of silver to the Vikings who are going to count and collect it well let's just say that is in and of itself a feat for early medieval states to do after paying Spain forkbeard the 36,000 pounds of silver in 10,07

ethyl read the unready in his advisors decide they have to try something else a national effort to raise an army and a navy that can defeat these people because you can't keep bleeding out like this and survive as a state right so a concerted effort involving pretty much everyone from the

Torah Shia describes it it gives you a sense of this national effort and this attitude that enough

“is enough and if we don't make a stand here there'll be nothing left to the kingdom the”

locus will have picked it clean and the blood will be drained from the corpse and Shia writes quote "etha read's machinery of power set in motion what an all likelihood was the most intense mobilization of armed forces to be seen in England since the days of the Romans. These coordinated efforts are an impressive testimony to the authority and organizational skill of the Anglo-Saxon Crown under the supervision of alderman and bishops thousands of subjects

all across England men women and children the free and enslaved peasants and merchants were

set to work fellows cut down and de-limmed thousands of trees in England's forests men and animals transported the logs to the coasts where the shipbuilders constructed a number of new large

“warships and smaller cutters in great haste the crown's old ships were repaired women spun”

thread which the sail makers used to make sails farmers cultivated hemp which the rope makers used to make rope the or makers hacked and cut out ors blacksmiths forge nails and parts for all kinds of equipment including swords shield bosses spearheads arrowheads axe heads helmets and breastplates

in a kingdom still shaken from the famine of just a few years earlier great volumes of butter

grain bread and dried and salted fish and meat were collected and stored and quote now if this had been an Alfred the great type figure or maybe Winston Churchill would say a figure like himself you might have the makings here for the kind of response to the Scandinavian raids that would return England to a state of peace or security but this is how a guy like

“ethical read the and ready gets the reputation he has because England goes to all this trouble”

to build this fleet and it's stationed off the shore something like 200 ships and then you get to see one of the other aspects that ethical read the and ready's realm is known for the fact that his top advisors and main men in the kingdom are constantly at each other's throats fighting undercutting one another and the fleet is waiting for the Vikings you know they're going to interdict them at one of these islands where the Vikings tend to land and there's a conflict

between a couple of these nobleman and one of them takes his 20 ships that he's contributed to the 200 and leaves and after he leaves he goes and starts raiding Britain's coast right his own country although it might be the part of the coast run by the guy he had the fight with so the guy he had the fight with takes 80 ships and goes after him well a storm arises in the English channel and blows most of those ships over destroying them the ones that aren't destroyed in the storm are

pulled up on the beach and ambushed by the guy who took the 20 ships who then burns them and all of a sudden half the fleet that England conducted this entire national effort for his gone the king takes his ships and goes back to the tames outside of London and essentially this 200 ship fleet is extinguished as a force that can resist the Vikings and is the Anglo-Saxon chronicle puts it quote talking by the way about when the king and the rest of the fleet found out that half

the fleet was lost in an instant having done no damage to the Vikings at all quote when this was known to the remaining ships where the king was how the others spared it was then as if all were lost the king went home with the alderman and the nobility and thus lightly did they forsake the ships wills the men that were in them road back to London thus lightly did they suffer the labor of all the people to be in vain nor was the terror lesson as all of England hoped when this naval expedition

was thus ended the chronicle says thus came soon after lamas the formidable army of the enemy and quote history and mark Morris in the Anglo-Saxon's history of the beginnings of England makes the real salient point when he says that the English had been blood dry to pay for all these anti-viking activities and wouldn't have minded the sacrifice so much if it had achieved any results but he says quote the huge sums that were raised have been repeatedly squandered through a combination

of cowardice and incompetence on the part of the king and his counselors many people he rights

reins go away it might be preferable simply to let them take over end quote well ideas of letting

“them take over will be put on the back burner for a while because the army that shows up in”

England in 1009 is led by a particularly nasty viking leader named Thor killed the tall who's also famous and historians have been debating for well forever exactly what this guy's motivations were and whether he was working for sane fork beard or at cross purposes for sane fork beard or whether he was originally working for him but then it cross purposes but what you can say is that the attacks that he leads for a couple of years in England are amongst the worst that they have

ever faced in the more than 200 years of Scandinavian attacks on the island the killings the

kidnappings the burnings and wiping out of whole towns is well on the heels of the demoralization

“of you know the fleet being squandered is adding insult to injury and it will be Thor killed”

the tall in 1012 who will receive the 48,000 pounds of silver in order to create a peaceful situation by that time he is one of the most reviled and feared figures in England which makes what happens as part of the 1012 peace agreement so specifically hard to swallow Thor a Shia in the wolf age describes it this way quote in the summer of 1012 old hostilities were therefore renegotiated and new alliances forged in now devastated England in a maneuver that must have caused quite a

stir amongst both Anglo-Saxons and Danes ethyl red joined forces with the only man in England able to protect his position Thor killed the tall himself the man who had led the Danish army for

“the past three years and who had done his utmost to destroy ethyl red's country to murder and”

ransack his subjects and to fleece the king for money Thor killed naturally become a widely renowned and deeply feared figure in England perhaps even as renowned and feared as the man for whom he had worked spanned fork beard and quote so in 1012 ethyl red's best idea he can come up with to continue to figure out how he's going to defend his realm from Scandinavians is to renew the strategy that he'd managed to jettison in a genocidal and ethnic cleansing like

fashion back in 1002 to higher Scandinavian mercenaries to do the job this time led by the main devil himself who'd wreaked havoc on his realm for the past three years Thor killed the tall and who must have once again made the people in his realm shake their heads in befuddlement like not only are we not resisting the enemy now we're hiring and paying the enemy to protect the very villages and towns that he himself had burnt there are lots of theories as to how spanned

fork beard back in Denmark viewed all this one theory is that he was scared that Thor killed the tall was making too much money in England you know 48,000 pounds of silver will buy you a lot of mercenaries in history has shown that sometimes you know powerful war leaders take those mercenaries come back to Scandinavian seas the wrongs when they do or it might have been all part of the plan where Thor killed the tall was laying the groundwork for something to happen that in more than

200 years of Viking attacks in England never could have happened before for a Scandinavian ruler to

incorporate England into his realm and the reason it couldn't happen before was there was an absolute deal breaker involved in the earlier errors of Viking attacks an impediment that had been removed relatively recently there was no way the Anglo-Saxons in England a Christian people were going to stand for being ruled by a pagan war lord but now the king of Denmark was not a pagan war lord he was a Christian king and this opened up the doors to possibilities that never existed

well for the entire time the Viking wars had been going on earlier we had said that you know sometimes especially amongst elite rulers religion has a somewhat transactional sort of nature to it right it's not you know what are you going to do for my soul when I get to heaven and save me it's a little

when we talked about constantine and how he had that dream that if you paint the Christian symbol

“on the shields of your soldiers in the morning I'll you know give you victory in the battle the”

battle of the milby and bridge by the way so that's not promising constantine eternal salvation it's promising a victory in the battle within the next 24 hours that's very transactional there's a little bit of that going on here too and in his book canoeed the great historian Timothy Bolt and sort of lays out what this means for someone who might want to conquer and actually rule a Christian country like Anglo-Saxon England and he says quote from the English perspective Spain's Christianity

must have set him apart from many previous Viking raiders and may have made him a more palatable figure

to accept as an overlord this was not an invading army whose leader could be baptized and sent home pacified once his men had been defeated or paid off as Alfred had done with Guthrum in 878

“or rebel red with Olaf Krikvus in in 994 many of the rank and file of the forces must have”

retained pagan beliefs or worshiped Christ only as one amongst a pantheon of gods but Spain he writes was unequivocally Christian and most probably traveled with a retinue that included chaplains so much of what we can now know as Spain's invasion comes from the partisan voice of the writer

of this section of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle who viewed his arrival as an inversion of all that was

natural and right and one wonders whether other figures such as secular elites were more comfortable with him and quote in the summer of 1013 the king of Denmark's fain forkbeard leading his army in person which was hugely unusual because normally a king in Scandinavia couldn't risk being away from Scandinavia for long periods of time without you know threats of a rebellion breaking out but it is a sign of how much things have changed and how much have been organized sort of hierarchical

Christian kingdom this has become that just like many other Christian kings of what will be the future middle ages will do he will lead his army in person and it will not be a bunch of scattered war bands who make their money off the individual loot they pillage john haywood will describe them his troops as employees and Ian Howard will point out that this is not an army that hits and runs like a pirate force it is a unified core of an army that marches around looking for

the main force of the enemy so that it can defeat it in battle and conquer same forkbeard is leading a fully medieval army as he looks for the king of England to become the king of England and upon his arrival in 1013 he does not attack this realm that he hopes to rule he goes up to the north to the areas that used to be dominated by the deans or now would be the descendants of deans where maybe there's a lot of sympathy for a Danish king lands and gives speeches

to cheering crowds promising to bring stability and peace to the island and he is hailed where he lands as the new king of England he's brought his son something like 24-year-old canoeed with him who he marries to the daughter of a local nobleman he then advances his forces into another area known as the five burrows which is also part of the dain law they hail him as the new rightful ruler and if you are at the red in London behind the walls of that city protected by

“the very Viking warlord who threatens your regime for the last three years you must be subtly worried”

about this. Spain treats the north gently when he crosses the traditional dividing line between the north and the rest of the kingdom his army starts pillaging and looting and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says doing every evil and army can do so those areas start submitting to him and declaring that he's the rightful king eventually he attacks London where Ethel Red is hiding with his mercenaries and like almost all the people who have tried to attack London before this time Svane forkbeard

and his forces fail London's not the capital of Anglo-Saxon England but it is a very difficult town to take and Svane doesn't take it either but it is fascinating to notice the irony of the whole situation as pointed out by Tora Shia in the wolf age when he says quote it was a fundamentally absurd situation a Danish king besieging London which was being defended by a Danish warlord who had

London he simply takes his army west to places like Bath and that part of the country and those

“people submit to him which essentially means the entire country except London has declared that”

they're willing to have this Danish leader be their king also which leaves Ethel Red in an untenable situation the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the people of London are becoming nervous that being the only people who haven't declared Svane forkbeard their king they're going to pay a horrible price when eventually they have to submit to reality and give in so by hook or by crook Ethel Red decides he has to leave London and you will have this sad spectacle of the Anglo-Saxon king boarding Viking

warships with his retinue of Viking mercenaries that up until recently we're trying to overthrow

“his realm and we're killing his people but now are the only thing keeping him alive as they leave”

London head out to the sea they will spend a what must have been unbelievably depressing Christmas on the island white before heading to Normandy and exile and Svane forkbeard will enter London and be

declared the king the Vikings who attacked the monastery at Lindisfar in 793 never intended to conquer the

island but what an interesting 220 years it's been leading to this and if one wants to take the zoom out long view of things it's interesting that these Scandinavians who started off as worshipers of Odin and Thor were conquering a regime the Anglo-Saxons that were themselves originally conquerors of the British Isles who hailed from Denmark and Northern Germany and that area who were themselves at the time worshipers of basically Odin and Thor there's a circular sort of a rhythm to

history sometimes and it's come full circle here. Svane forkbeard will only rule England for five

weeks before he will mysteriously perhaps one might suggest die he won't even get to make it to his coronation ceremony there is a wonderfully sort of almost retributionally and religiously romantic sort of an idea amongst some that he was killed by a ghost the ghost of

“Saint Edmund the former English king if you remember from part one of the story that had been”

martyrt is the word live Viking Raiders and was now paying back this Danish king for what he went through by stabbing him with a ghostly lance and ending his life but Svane was in his 50s when he died and could have easily died from natural causes one account has him crying out the name of his son as he passes away saying "canute" "canute" there is a post script to this story and it starts with canute the son of Svane forkbeard will

succeed him and become the king of England but not without a fight against his father's former foes because as my encyclopedia of military history puts it the conflict in England during this time period is more like a civil war between the north and the south and the north being sort of the pro Danish part of the British Isles and the south being more the pro domestic royal family and after Svane dies the supporters of Ethel Red ask him to come back out of exile come back to England if

he will only rule them more justly they say I guess he promises to do that because he comes back but he's no different they will manage to drive canute out of England send him back to Scandinavia where he raises another army and in 1016 comes back and there's a lot of fighting and Ethel Red dies and his son Edmund Einstein continues the fight fights like five battles with canute before they've just all worn out and they decide to split the British Isles together

and then in a similar amount of time to how long Svane forkbeard got to rule Edmund

kingdom to the other guy and so Kenut's the king there is a rumor would be a good way to put it that Edmund Ironside's death was not completely natural and one scurrelous sort of report of his

assassination occurring from below as he empties his bowels into what was basically an outhouse

but there is no confirmation of this but the idea that it might not have been a natural death isn't very far-fetched at all but what this means is Kenut becomes the first of what will be

“called an Anglo Danish dynasty he rules a big chunk of Scandinavia and now England and remember”

all these places that the Scandinavians have been discovering for a long time now Iceland in the late 900's at Greenland to that about 1000 ad parts of the new world it's still unknown which parts but certainly newfoundland also maybe parts of Canada maybe even the upper

northeast of the United States all this area was called Vinland by the Scandinavians and famously

the sagas talk about encounters between the Scandinavians settlers and the indigenous American population they called them scraylings which of course turned out to be you know as full of misunderstandings and violence as the later Colombian stuff would occur after 1492 it's probably a bloody miracle you didn't get the other downsides of the Colombian exchange with disease transfers and all that

“but I've read some interesting theories on why that might have been including the fact that”

there weren't very many Viking settlers and they were a long way from sort of you know where they

would catch these diseases and spread them but canoe rules are realm which could probably be

referred to as a sort of a northern empire including you know Scandinavia if not all of it then most of it England, Scotland the islands around them like the Orcnes and the Pharaohs, Iceland, Greenland the parts of the new I mean it's it's one of these things where the counterfactual could have seen a great northern empire lasting a long time if you look at a map it looks like Ireland should be a part of any Scandinavian northern empire but of course as we mentioned earlier

nowhere did the Vikings get so sucked into the internal politics of a place as the way they got sucked into the Irish situation and became the poster children for those pieces of shrapnel that we mentioned earlier that get grown over and absorbed by societies and of course at the 1014 Battle of Klamtar for the Irish High King Brian Baru shuts the door on any suggestions that the Vikings will dominate the Emerald Island included in any larger Scandinavian realm whether you can still

call this the Viking age depends on who's opinion you want to accept there are multiple different endpoints and lots of historians you know ascribe to each of them there's no right answer those of us who come from the English slash British tradition which is many in America that tradition usually has a very convenient and cut and dried end date for the Viking era and that is 1066 in 1066 of course Harold Hardrata in league with one of the claimants to the throne of England

shows up in the north of England once again were up usually there's quite a bit of Danish sympathy land there with the intention of taking over the realm are met by the English king of the day who defeats them and kills both Harold Hardrata and the other rival claimants of the throne and a battle that's called the Battle of Stamford Bridge those who know their history know that this same English king has to then quickly as fast as he can go run down to the opposite

end of the British Isles to meet another invasion coming from across the English channel by a guy named William the Bastard who will eventually be known as William the Conqueror because he will win the battle that happens the Battle of Hastings and take over England and lead a beginning of a new era in English history that is once again highlighted by the fact that this guy is the descendant of Scandinavian Vikings as well he is the leader of Normandy

“remember what that means land of the north men he's the direct descendant of rollo the pirate king”

who's given that land and told to defend it from people like himself right the original poacher promoted to gamekeeper and it almost seems like one way or another England was going to be ruled by some Scandinavian or Scandinavian offshoot and all these battles were just to decide which

Sigurdson's estimation and he says a completely rough estimation he doesn't want to be tied to this

“but about how many Scandinavians had been killed rating and settling and drowning all during the”

Viking age and he said the very speculation type estimate he came up with is about 250,000 killed and another 250,000 either drowned or settling away from Scandinavia so that you essentially

had half a million people gone from Scandinavian population roles at a time when there were probably

a million Scandinavians overall and he ties this into theories about the exalted status of women during the Viking era you know for example if you will have a lot of men folk anymore if a lot of the men folk that you have returned to the country forever maimed and crippled from their Viking endeavors you have no choice but to take over a lot of the sorts of tasks menus to handle and he compared it to how women in both world wars took over a lot of the tasks that men had done because

“the men were all fighting it's a fascinating theory but some of the other end points for the Viking age”

are connected to what makes a Viking a Viking and I'm in the camp of those who believe it has to

do with the gods they worship right because so much of that is connected to the motivation for people acting the way they do right a lot of times you can figure out a lot about a culture by looking at the gods they worship and what those gods prioritize because people tend to want to please the deities and if the deities prioritize something like raiding and fighting and bravery and not running away and battling all those sorts of things we normally associate with the Vikings

well then once they shift their allegiance from those gods to other gods they turn into a different kind of culture and whereas Spain, forkbeard and canoeed and these rulers in Scandinavia are now all Christian by this time period the people took a lot longer to convert jump that there are cigarettes and had said that the Scandinavian religion was in elite religion and required the ruler to act to sort of the go between between the people and the gods which means

if the leaders have changed their allegiance it's like cutting the heads off of the faith in a sense the people no longer have their direct connection to the deities but it still takes a long time for the ways of traditional folk to be altered in Sweden for example the blood sacrifice temple at Uppsala won't be repurposed until the middle of 1100s and in his book The Children of Ash and Elm historian Neil Price says many people in Scandinavia still believe in aspects that

he called the invisible population today if not elves and dwarves and trolls then maybe still that feminine aspect to our personalities that the Scandinavians also believed in let's not pretend that the gods of the old Scandinavian Germanic pantheon

“didn't attempt to make a comeback remember I compared them to the American bison right the”

buffalo one time they used to roam across a huge range of territory everything north of the old Roman Empire for example and by the mid 1100s they are confined to small areas around Sweden and some of these outcroppings of Scandinavian settlement but that doesn't mean they don't occasionally make contact and try to entice some of the people that used to worship them back to the fold I love a story that Scandinavian professor John Lindell he's a professor in the Department of Scandinavian

in my book it says he's at the University of California Berkeley he may or may not still be but he wrote a book called Old Norse mythology where he quotes from a saga where the protagonist who's a Christian finds himself about to take a dangerous sea voyage and all of a sudden Thor comes to him in a dream Thor is one of the gods that sort of protects people at sea at least until the Christian

god takes over and Thor basically says to him listen you're about to go on a really tough journey

you sure you don't want to rethink this Christian thing and come back to the guy you can protect you with sea and Lindell says quote shortly after his conversion meaning the conversion of this poor gills guy who is the protagonist Thor begins to plague his dreams upgrading poor gills for a

dream according from the saga he dreamt that a man came to him large and red bearded and said

“you decided on a journey and it will be difficult the dream man looked huge to him it will go”

ill for you he said unless you believe in me again then I will watch over you Thor gills said he

would never want his help again and told him to go away as fast as his legs would take him but my journey

will go as almighty god wills it then he thought that Thor led him to a certain crag where ocean waves were dashing against the rocks you will find yourself in such waves and never get out unless you return to me no set Thor gills go away from me you loth some beamed he will help me who redeemed us all with his blood and quote but we talked earlier about the tinker bell effect right this idea that if a lot of people believe in something it has a power even if that's something might not be real

there are more things in heaven and earth heratial that are dreamt of in your philosophies right the Scandinavians like a lot of earlier peoples think about the akeens that Homer talks about in

the Iliad believe that lasting fame and your name never being forgotten is the true immortality that's

“why you do all these great deeds that's why you carve rooms into stones so that these people's”

memory lives on and then they're not truly dead they live on somewhere i'm going to make the obvious point that more people know who Thor is today then ever knew about him during all the ages when all the Germanic peoples everywhere worshiped him if i estimated that a billion people knew who Thor was that's more people than existed in probably all Germanic pagan

existence added up together these gods live on in our days of the week being Tuesday

Wednesday Thursday Friday all named after members of the Izeer Thursday's Thor's day that's pretty easy isn't it so by the standards of the people who worshiped him Thor has achieved a

“kind of an immortality well so far right so long as it lasts and maybe if we want to buy”

in for a minute to the ancient myths or prophecies of these Germanic pagan peoples who worshiped to figure like Thor we should be hopeful that he lasts a good long time because in the famous Norse tale that's recounted in the poetic et uh i'm using the Jackson Crawford translation by the way Odin raises a witch from the dead so that he can question her about the beginnings in the end of the world and she tells him about how things end the famous ragnarok the twilight of the gods

where the gods and all the dead people that have been brought into Valhalla come out for the climactic last battle against the giants and the forces of chaos and all the monsters and Loki for example is aboard a ship raised from the depths of the ocean constructed from the fingernails of everyone who's ever drowned leading the giants against the gods and in this climactic battle that the witch tells Odin about Odin dies but Odin's not the only one after Odin dies she tells about what

happens to his son and then because of what happens to his son what happens to the rest of us and the witch in the poetic et et tells Odin quote then Thor comes earth's son Odin's son to fight the midgard serpent the protector of midgard will kill that serpent in his rage but all human kind will die out of the world when Thor falls after only nine steps struck down by the venom of the honorless serpent the sun turns black the earth sinks into the sea the bright stars fall out of the sky

flames scorched the leaves of igrecil a great bonfire reaches to the highest clouds end quote I've heard all sorts of suggestions of both natural and unnatural disasters that might manifest to create the conditions where that dead witch's prophecy is fulfilled everything from

witch's prophecy to Odin as long as Thor continues to exist we're all okay if he's really the

beneficiary of something like the tinker bell effect and as long as he's remembered he continues to live on and the only way to kill tinker bell is for the people who believe in tinker bell to cease to exist there's been no ragnarok no ending of things but when dealing with things

“like immortals we should remember that they operate on very long timelines”

to the Norse and the ancient Germanic pagan peoples ragnarok was an event in humanity's future pro we know it still is support us with patreon by going to patreon.com forward slash Dan Carlin or go to our donate page at dancarlin.com forward slash dc-donate wrath of the cons pionic nightmares a patchy tears and of course ghost of the aust front just a few of the classic hardcore

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meantime but as always thank you for everything everyone you make my entire life possible and

I'll never forget that stay safe