What Caused the Viking Age?

Summary

Gone Medieval (History Hit)

Episode: What Caused the Viking Age?

Date: January 27, 2026
Host: Dr. Eleanor Janega
Guests: Dr. Terry Barnes, CJ Adrian (historians; hosts of the Vikingology podcast)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Gone Medieval dives deep into the puzzle of what caused the Viking Age: What motivated the people we call “Vikings” to set forth from Scandinavia and become some of the most famous navigators, raiders, and settlers in history? Host Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by historians Terry Barnes and CJ Adrian to unravel this classic conundrum. Together, they examine the complexities surrounding the "start" of the Viking Age, scrutinize popular theories such as technological innovation, climate change, social factors, economic motivations, and political transformations, and discuss how these forces entwined to spark centuries of expansion and adventure.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. When Did the Viking Age Begin?

(04:38–11:06)

• There isn’t a single, universally agreed upon date for the start of the Viking Age.
• English Perspective: Traditionally, it starts with the raid on Lindisfarne in 793, but this is seen as "very Anglo-centric."
  • CJ Adrian: “A couple of English historians got together and said, well, when did the violence in the west start? 793 in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. But... in 789 the Vikings appeared at the port of Portland and killed the king's reeve. So it wasn’t actually the first.” (06:23)
• French/Continental Perspective: Early raids such as that on the monastery at Noirmoutier in 799 are cited.
• The term “Viking Age” itself is a modern construct and somewhat nebulous.
  • CJ Adrian: “That term in and of itself is problematic. It's just another label that we modern people are putting on something that's a little bit more nebulous.” (06:56)
• Technological innovation (keel, sail) is a more meaningful marker for the beginning.

2. Ship Technology as a Catalyst

(07:33–09:14); (14:30–15:49)

• Introduction of the keel and large sails revolutionized mobility and reach.
• Ships became larger and more structurally complex, allowing longer and more daring voyages.
  • Dr. Janega: “They certainly don't have the kind of ships that can, for example, float in really shallow bodies of water. Right. And that is one of the things that is incredibly important.” (14:30)
• However, possessing advanced ships alone doesn’t “cause” raiding; it facilitates it.

3. Is Technology Cause or Enabler?

(09:14–10:36); (15:49–15:58)

• Shipbuilding improved the options available, but doesn’t explain the why.
• Dr. Janega: “It facilitates it, but it doesn't cause it.” (09:14)
• The shift from travel and trade to aggression requires further social and economic context.

4. Pre-Viking Raiding – A Deep Historical Context

(16:58–18:12)

• Raiding and piracy were not new; similar activities by Northern Europeans predate the “Vikings.”
• The label "Viking" is activity-based; not all Scandinavians were “Vikings,” and others had been raiding before.
  • Dr. Janega: “Stealing... via boat is like human activity that's been going on forever. And the Scandinavians don’t live on a separate planet...” (16:58)

5. Climate Change as a Factor

(20:14–24:20)

• The theory that the Medieval Warm Period spurred Viking expansion is contested and likely overstated.
  • Dr. Janega (citing James Barrett): “Climate is an old chestnut of limited relevance.” (21:01)
• The timing of climatic shifts doesn’t perfectly align, and scant evidence connects climate changes to the initial burst of raiding.
  • CJ Adrian: “...They found this really interesting dip in the average height during the Viking Age. ...But does that mean climate hypothesis has any teeth? ...with the evidence we have, we can't really say, oh, it was climate.” (25:39)

6. Social & Cultural Motivations

(27:39–32:05)

• Reputation, social capital, and glory played roles: fame was crucial in warrior society and motivated aggressive actions abroad.
  • CJ Adrian: “My titular character, Hasting, is all about ... reputation is everything. ... But to get reputation, you can't just sit idly in Scandinavia. You have to go do things.” (28:27)
• Material gains – "bling" and loot – are historically evidenced in grave goods and cultural narratives.

7. Demographics, Bride Price, and Polygyny

(32:16–37:14)

• The “bride price” hypothesis: A surplus of young men, exacerbated by polygynous elites, spurred raiding to obtain wealth/marry.
  • Dr. Janega: “Maybe a little bulge of young men in population demographics ... need to compete in the marriage market ... so they get in boats and go out and steal things.” (32:44)
• Genetic and archaeological evidence shows movement and mixing, not static populations.

8. Political Upheaval and State Formation

(42:37–54:07)

• Political centralization, nascent kingship, and chieftains seeking resources and prestige contributed to instability.
  • Dr. Janega: “Of all the things that we've talked about, I would say that's probably one of the biggest ones that you could say. Yes.” (43:22)
• External pressures: Frankish/Carolingian expansion, e.g., Charlemagne’s wars and mass killings, had ripple effects in Scandinavia.
  • CJ Adrian: “Charlemagne ... took ... prisoners and drowned them in the river ... He was sending a message to the Saxons and anybody else who dared to challenge him.” (46:39)
• Push factors (overpopulation, excluded elites) and pull factors (political and economic opportunity) worked in tandem.
• Harald Fairhair’s unification of Norway (late 9th century) drove displaced chieftains to leave and seek fortunes abroad—particularly towards Iceland, but this is a later development, not the initial spark.

9. Trade Networks, Silver, and Economic Causes

(54:07–67:07)

• Scandinavia had robust trade networks pre-raiding; Vikings were not venturing into the unknown.
• Silver—primarily imported from the Islamic world—was critical for social transactions (e.g., bride price).
  • CJ Adrian: “There was so much silver coming into Scandinavia, they didn't know what to do with it ... if the silver economy is what's holding family units and the social order together, that's a problem.” (59:13)
• Overabundance or fluctuations in silver may have destabilized the traditional social order and incentivized expansion.
• The search for salt (for preserving herring) may have motivated repeated raids on certain regions, including Noirmoutier.

10. Popular Misconceptions & Modern Narratives

(67:53–70:11)

• Modern perceptions are often shaped by gaps in the historical record and anachronistic ideas.
  • Dr. Janega: “People just love to pour themselves right in, you know, and just, you know, manipulate that stuff and make the Vikings who they want them to be.” (68:26)
• The idea of “Vikings” has shifted and been repurposed throughout history—from 19th-century nationalism to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
  • Dr. Janega: “The Vikings don't change—who looks at them and what they see does.” (70:11)

11. Why Did the Viking Age End?

(70:15–74:31)

• Christianization and the formation of strong, centralized monarchies in Scandinavia are the main reasons.
  • Dr. Janega: “I say Christianization, and I'd also say state building. I'd say monarchies in Scandinavia.” (70:40)
• Fortification, changing economics, and shifting European political landscape reduced opportunities for raiding.
  • CJ Adrian: “...the Christianization of Scandinavia, the fortification of Western Europe... consolidation of power...” (71:02)
• Such “ages” fade gradually—no one “woke up and declared” the Viking Age over.
  • Dr. Janega: “As much as we like, as historians, to have neat categories ... fundamentally, things—no one wakes up and says, hey, guys, I think the Viking age is over.” (73:36)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• CJ Adrian on periodization:
  “The paleontologist Jack Horner said scientists like to name things, and I like to say historians like to delineate things.” (14:18)

• Dr. Janega on monocausality:
  “Obviously we can't chase monocausality either. So it's like, yeah, sure, climate change probably did, you know, have an effect ... but it's always going to be, you know, sort of part of a network of ... complex factors all sort of coming together, I think, at a certain point in time.” (23:04)

• CJ Adrian on the patchwork of causes:
  “...when you zoom in just a little bit, you start to see that it's really just this patchwork of all these different people doing all these different things all at once...” (67:07)

• Dr. Janega on popular perceptions:
  “The Vikings don't change, who looks at them and what they see does.” (70:11)

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Timeline & Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------| | 04:38 | Beginning of the Viking Age – Dating and Periodization | | 07:33 | Technological innovations (keel, sail) and their impact | | 16:58 | Pre-Viking and early medieval raiding traditions | | 20:14 | Climate change and environmental factors discussed/debated | | 27:39 | Social and cultural drivers – glory, reputation, prestige | | 32:16 | Bride price, polygyny, and demographic explanations | | 42:37 | Political upheaval, state formation, kingship | | 54:07 | Pre-raiding trade, commerce, and silver economy | | 59:13 | Deep dive into silver, salt, and fluctuating economic needs | | 67:53 | Modern misconceptions and popular images of Vikings | | 70:15 | The end of the Viking Age – Christianization, monarchy, aftermath |

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Conclusion

Gone Medieval’s exploration of “What Caused the Viking Age?” reveals that there is no single answer—no isolated trigger—but rather a complex intersection of technological innovation, social transformation, political ambition, changing trade and economic circumstances, and shifting climates (plus a healthy dose of the unpredictable chaos of history). Throughout, the hosts demystify simplistic or nationalistic narratives, underline the challenges posed by sparse evidence, and celebrate the enduring fascination (and occasional confusion) that “the Vikings” inspire today.

End Note:
If you enjoyed the episode, check out the Vikingology podcast for more on Norse history and culture.

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Transcript

[Matt Lewis]

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

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The official Game of Thrones podcast is.

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Back to break down the brand new HBO original series.

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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Set one century before the events of Game of Thrones, this series tells the tale of a lowly hedge knight, Ser.

[Professor Susanna Lipscomb]

Duncan the Tall, and his squire Egg.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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And I'm Jason Concepcione.

[CJ Adrian]

Together we are your guides to Westeros.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Unpacking every episode of this brand new.

[CJ Adrian]

Series immediately after it airs on HBO Max.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

You can watch us on HBO Max or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jason Concepcione]

Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Jennica and welcome to Gone Medieval From History Hit. The podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research. From the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to Popes to the Crusades, we delve into the rebellions, plots and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here. A wind whips amid stormy seas. Waves caress the sand skinned shores of Anglo Saxon England. And on the horizon looms a pack of dragons. An armada of wood whittled ships, lithe and nimble, cut through the froth and ebb of the North Sea tide like the bark of a tree. The ships are encased by rows of hardwood shields and manned by hulking northmen who tame flailing sail and oar. And at their bow, at the very front of each ship dwell the faces of monsters hewn into oaken fabric, instilling fear and despair upon those that bear them witness. These are the Vikings. And with their coming, a new era begins. Today on Gone Medieval, we're asking where exactly did these Vikings come from and why? What caused them to abandon their Scandinavian homelands and take up riding the shores and rivers of medieval Europe with untamed abandon? Was it to do with climate change? Political upheaval? Or was it tangled up with the discovery of a sailship technology capable of ferrying them across precious, previously unnavigable seas? I'm Dr. Eleanor Janica and help me traverse the beginnings of the Viking age and unpick this most classic of medieval conundrums. I'm thrilled to be joined by the historians, authors and hosts of the fabulous Vikingology podcast, Terry Barnes and CJ Adrian.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Welcome to Gone Medieval.

[CJ Adrian]

Hello again. Thank you.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

We are so excited to have you guys. And particularly interesting, very good to get the host of Vikingology over here, because here at God Medieval, we love a Viking, we love a Viking moment. We love a named Viking, we love a saga. But a thing that I don't think we've really ever covered before is exactly how all of this came to be, how a Viking in and of itself came into being. So I've dragged you here in order to hash this out today, and I'm going to start you off with a huge question. All right? When does the Viking age start? A and B? Is that kind of like a clear starting point or date or. It's probably more complicated. I can see Terry's giving me a look. It's more complicated than that. I can tell already.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

It always is.

[CJ Adrian]

Do you want the English answer or the French answer?

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Yes, I want both.

[CJ Adrian]

Yes, because they are different.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

I don't know.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

CJ, what do you got?

[CJ Adrian]

A couple of English historians got together and said, well, when did the violence in The west start? 793 in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. But they missed that. In 789 the Vikings appeared at the port of Portland and killed the king's reeve. So it wasn't actually the first. Oh, we think they were Vikings, but they wasn't actually the first attack. And so there's evidence to show that they were traveling the world a little bit before. For me, I think we could make a good argument that the beginning of the so called Viking age. First of all, that term in and of itself is problematic. It's just another label that we modern people are putting on something that's a little bit more nebulous. Right. So I don't want to get too far into the nitty gritty of nomenclature, but I think a good argument for when the so called Viking age started would be when somebody somewhere in the middle of the 8th century in Scandinavia figured out how to put down a keel. We don't know when, we don't know who, we don't know how. We have the. Oh, I'm forgetting the name of the boat from the 7th century where we have actually a preserved boat from the 7th century that is a proto longship. I'm trying to remember the name. I think it starts with a K. Terry, any ideas?

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Yeah, I can't remember. Yeah, you're right. Or you can even go back to earlier. Is similar, built like the Klinko.

[CJ Adrian]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Well, look, in England we're used to feed. It's fine.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Yeah, there you go. Okay, good.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Right. No, it facilitates it, but it doesn't cause it. If that's what you're actually looking for is the cause, you're gonna have to go back way, way, way farther than the 8th century, probably, if you're looking for causes.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[CJ Adrian]

Well, we can start with that one, which is the so called technological determinism, right? Which is the. Now they have these ships. Now, it's impossible to prove that this was the case. This is all we're just theater of the mind kind of thing. But I just imagined, I find the idea compelling that, well, now we have these ships, what do we do with them? Well, let's sail to England and attack them on. And they would have had contact, but for me, it's kind of like a kid with a BB gun. You give a kid a BB gun, what's he gonna do? He's gonna shoot a bird or something, right? He's gonna get in trouble. And so it's this idea of maybe, maybe, but is that really, I mean, because then does that justify 300 years of westward expansion and violence? I mean, now we're getting into some territory where that can't be the only thing to explain it. Well, and then the other thing too is the keel was put down somewhere in the middle of the 8th century. Lindisfarne was in 793. So they sat on this technology for multiples of decades without really doing anything with it.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[CJ Adrian]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

And like, fair enough. But I' like. All right, so what's the answer then, like for them? Is it, you know, people in the Loire, is it, you know, going onto the set, do they have for themselves a particularly French answer to when Vikings begin showing up there?

[CJ Adrian]

Well, it's actually quite fascinating to when we see the progression of the first rate. So789, Port of Portland. We I sort of count that. Then they go to 793Lindisfarne. Then in 795 they go over to Iona. And then from there in 799 they hit the western coast of France, an island called Nolmoutier, which is the monastery of St. Philibert, which is really out in the middle of nowhere. And now here's where it gets really interesting. When I visited Lindisfarne, I made a mistake and I told my dad when we said when we went, don't ever tell anybody we did this. We went and there's a submersible road and I didn't know about it and we couldn't cross. So we had to go have lunch and have the best fish and chips I've ever had in my life at a nice little restaurant right on the hill, right across from Lindisfarne. Then once the water went down, we went over, but my dad looked at it and he says, le Viquin. The Vikings weren't stupid, were they? Because now has what, a submergeable road. So they knew exactly where they were going. In my mind, I mean, I imagined. I mean, there's. It's not their targets. Early targets don't seem random to me. Especially when you compare say Holy island with Normuti at the time, which would. Nowadays Nomuti is much bigger than it would have been back then because dikes and stuff that were built and so there was expanded on the sandbar and so forth. But back then it probably would have been about the size of Holy island anyway. But yeah, so 799 is really the start of the French experience. We can't really even call them French. They were the Franks at the time, Proto French. Right. But 799 is kind of the beginning of their experience. And then they did experience the full breadth of the Viking age, as I like to call it. We have a French historian, Lucien Musset, who came up with the three phases of Viking expansion, because it's something that the Brittany region, at least in France, got the full experience of outside of the British Isles.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

And I think that that is a really important point because I do think that there is this tendency, if we talk about the experience of Viking raids, to say, oh, here's all the things that happened in England, you know, this is what's happening in Ireland, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, the Vikings attack France regularly, Paris, etc, things like this. But I think also within the English historiography, we have a tendency to say, ah, Normans. You know, you kind of like skip right to the Norman bit and the, I suppose, normalization, Normanization, if you will, to, To. To go that way, of this group of Vikings who settle in what will become Normandy. Right. But it's a fairly open question as to what that means. And yeah, okay, of course, it's periodization. So it's just something that historians are doing to do it. Right. That's what we like, because we like to have a way of discussing anything. But yeah, I do think that you have to kind of squint in order to see it sometimes.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Yeah.

[CJ Adrian]

The paleontologist Jack Horner said scientists like to name things, and I like to say historians like to delineate things.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

That's right. That's absolutely the thing.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

All right, so we know that part.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Of the reason why the Viking Age starts is that these guys come up with a really cool keel. These guys come up with really cool sails, and those are real new techs in terms of shipbuilding. You know, it's not as though Romans don't have ships, but they don't have the kind of ships that can move this quickly. They certainly don't have the kind of ships that can, for example, float in really shallow bodies of water. Right. And that is one of the things that is incredibly important. No, yeah, eventually.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

But again, I mean, we're talking about. Is the question on the table the causes of the Viking Age or, you know, what's actually going on during the Viking Age? Because a lot of that, you know, what would be probably river and highways travel is going on, you know, once the Viking Age gets going. And so that's pretty much 9th century, you know, kind of stuff. But yeah, I mean, it definitely gave them an advantage that they had these shallower boats that were shaped so that they could get up these rivers and stuff. Yeah. I mean, and it sort of points to the adaptability and flexibility in general that we see about Them in many ways, not just the ships, but other things as well. So, yeah, while they're doing the Viking thing, you know, those boats are, those boats are important.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Right, right, right, yeah, yeah, exactly. So then that's. Yeah, that's the question, I think, you know, I mean, for my money, like the. I'm a long dure gal, I'm not an archaeologist, I'm a historian. And I'm like cause and effect and that kind of stuff. And so I think, you know, there's always going to be, you know, these, these antecedents that set up the whole scenario. But I think, you know, for us we're trapped in this tiny little sort of detail that is the written sources. And so the Viking age, to my mind doesn't begin in the 8th century. What begins in the 8th century is that we were just lucky enough to have sources from then that survive that tell us about Viking quote unquote activity. But you know, it's not like those people just sort of, you know, appeared out of thin air in that period of time.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[CJ Adrian]

They'Re definitely not the first. I mean, that's one of the things that I'm putting together a course on early medieval Brittany. And one of the things I'm going to be looking at is the first Atlantic wall built by the Romans in Brittany, what's now Brittany and Normandy, to repel sea raiders, which were at the time the Franks who were Launching out of what would now be like northern Holland and a little bit farther north. And we could almost call it like the first Viking age.

[LifeLock Advertiser]

Right.

[CJ Adrian]

It's a Germanic population that's getting into boats and then sailing south and taking wealth from richer areas. And so it's interesting to see that this plays out kind of in different waves with different people. Right. And we actually had guests on the Vikingology podcast that I'm thinking of, Alex Harvey, who talks about kind of that deeper time look, as could the Viking age even be considered to have started with the fall of Rome, with these population movements over time and some of the things that happened then setting the stage for then what we encounter later in the late 8th and early 9th centuries?

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Correct.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

No. That just makes you a Scandinavian person. So there are certain people who are getting in these boats to do the raiding, and those are Vikings.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Yeah.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[Matt Lewis]

Spicy.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

For a long time. Yeah, yeah, right. For a long time, I think people thought, oh, okay, well, we have. Which maybe some people will know this. You know, it's kind of this period. Well, we're going through kind of maybe one of. Of these ourselves, a Medieval Warm Period. And so. And this is, you know, supposed to last maybe for around 300 years. Right. Maybe coinciding with the time of the beginning of the Viking Age. And so hence it made it easier for Scandinavians to set out unmasked because, you know, maybe the conditions were better, weather was nice, there weren't as many sort of icebergs the size of, you know, houses floating around and to dodge and all of that. And so. But I think with climate science, even since Barrett wrote that in like, what, 2008 or something, it's just gotten better and better. And I think the, the adjustment of when that period actually was, is now less later. So it's more like maybe mid 10th century to mid 13th century. So if you're going to look at climate conditions as a potential cause for the Viking Age, there, again, it's kind of a timing problem.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Yeah, I don't know, maybe Iceland. I mean, I think far as we can tell, the green Lenders had a pretty tough go at it. They actually gave it up after a certain point. Right.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

I don't know. I mean, one of the things that I think is also a little bit problematic with some of the approaches with regard to this whole. I mean, this is a big deal, right? Or so we think historically. And, you know, in the same way we were talking earlier about like, you know, historians sort of chunk things up and it's fake, you know, in these time periods or whatever, when I think we also, you know, obviously we can't chase monocausality either. So it's like, you know, yeah, sure, climate change probably did, you know, have an effect on certain things or maybe at the very least, you know, if it was colder there for a while and then make maybe getting them to think like, let's just pick up and go move somewhere warmer where it's easier to grow crops, you know, that kind of stuff. But it's always going to be, you know, sort of part of a network of, you know, different kind of complex factors all sort of coming together, I think, at a certain point in time. You know what I mean?

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Is like you just go across, you just go over there. You don't have to get actually in the boat and go anywhere. It's just like you can just walk over there and steal their stuff. That's fine.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

It's fine. Yeah.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

We never talk about the overland Viking raids.

[CJ Adrian]

The climate idea, what is it? Climate determinism. What I've encountered, and I think there's a popular theory on the Internet that a lot of people jump onto, that I've seen in web forums and so forth, which is that there was a warming period before the so called Viking Age and then it cooled down again and so there's a population explosion and then after that there was a restriction of resources and so people left home to go raid because they're just one wasn't enough at home for the larger population. And what's interesting is there was a study, and I can't remember the study authors, but we could probably look it up, that looked at the average heights of Viking Age Scandinavians and found this really interesting dip in the average height during the Viking Age. So Scandinavians were taller before and they were taller after, but during the Viking Age there's this obvious drop in the average height of the bones that were collected. Now, of course we have to be careful when we look at population, you know, sample sizes and so forth, but it was not statistically negligible. So. But does it, does that mean that this climate hypothesis has any teeth? You know, it's what it really boils down to. And there's a great paper by a group of archaeologists, Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ugrada a couple years ago that looked at all of the ins and outs of this climate hypothesis. And really at the end, as so many things to do with the Viking Age, they just said there's just not enough evidence to say one way or the other. So to Terry's point, we're kind of swirling around this idea of, well, could climate have done this? Whatever, you know, it very well probably did play a certain role. It's just from today's lens, with the evidence we have, we can't really say, oh, it was climate.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[CJ Adrian]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Okay, so there are, though, then, you know, another series of hypothesis or, you know, not saying that this is everything, but there's a series of ideas also that say there are kind of social or cultural trends that could have led to this. And, you know, among those being that raiding or coming back with really cool things that you have stolen from other people, having, you know, incredible booty. That's glamorous. Right? And, you know, maybe one of the things that's kind of going on is just an idea of glory or an emphasis culturally on the acquisition of these goods, very specifically through a means of battle.

[CJ Adrian]

Yes. Well, this is near and dear to me because as a historical fiction writer, my titular character, Hasting, is all about. He says it so many times, reputation is everything. And he's able to raise fleets and armies and move mountains, essentially based on his reputation of. Oh, that's so. And so he killed Hagar and Rurik. And, you know, and he gets. He's very good at dueling. And so it's this idea that. That my reputation is what I bring to the table. But to get reputation, you can't just sit idly in Scandinavia. You have to go do things. And so then he shows up at Nantes in 843, in Paris in 845, and then. And more recently, I send him to Constantinople just for giggles, because why not? You know, he's like, I'm going to take the biggest city in the world. And they get there and they're like, it's too big. But I have another idea. But, yes, and there's a 2015 paper by Stephen Ashby, which Terry and I were actually discussing yesterday, that talks about this idea of social capital. And if you want to think about it as the. I would call it the proto chanson de geste that we know from the later medieval period, it is the story of your deeds. And the better the story, the more weight you can throw around with your peers in the warrior culture. Makes it easier to raise armies and so forth. It can also be problematic, too. Right. If somebody is a little too popular and you're a king, you're trying to hold on to power, and then, you know, this guy might show up with an army at my door. You know, there's. There are. There are caveats to this.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Terry, any thoughts?

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Yeah, I. So I'm kind of steeped in the period, actually, 500 to 800 in my own research. And again, I kind of like, sort of go back to all right. As a cause for the Viking Age. It's like that I mean, social capital is an interesting. And it's actually quite a very modern sort of idea. There's a lot of discussion, like, in economic circles and sociological circles and stuff about, you know, what does that even mean, you know, in terms of capital and. And stuff. And so applying it to the Viking Age, I guess, is kind of. Is it anachronistic? I don't know. But. But if you have that kind of sort of social, sort of, you know, zeitgeist, right, where this is a culture that believes it's cool and it adds to your reputation to go out and do these things, like, did that just become part of the culture in the 8th century? You know, like, that would have to be something that's just sort of embedded in Scandinavian whatever, for probably a longer period of time. So the idea that you could go out and achieve something and then gain some kind of renown doesn't, to my mind, you know, and again, we're probably, you know, lacking, you know, solid evidence, but. But actually, there's archaeological evidence for, you know, various types of, you know, bling, especially connected to getting it from the Roman Empire Empire or the old Roman Empire and stuff in graves and all of that. And then we see very clearly in the archaeology that there's periods where that actually stops in Scandinavia and then, you know, kind of picks up again during the period of the Viking Age. So we kind of have this waxing and waning of interest in, you know, showing off. So, again, I don't know, you know, how you sort of peg that, at least if we're going to talk about or sort of nominal Viking age of, you know, like the 7 hundreds to around 1100? I don't know that it's something that is. Again, it's probably part of it, like the ships and, like, the climate, but it's. Is it the thing that actually, like, lights the spark? I. You know, who. Who's to say, really? I mean, I hate to be. It sort of sounds like I'm like the buzzkill all over the place here.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

But, yeah, I love this. I love it. That's. For me, the. For me, the most fun thing to be is the person who says, actually.

[CJ Adrian]

No, but total buzz kill, Terry.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

This is actually an interesting hypothesis and somewhat controversial. I've talked to definitely historians and archaeologists who are like, I don't know, you know, and then others who are like, yeah, and Barrett actually was one that I mentioned earlier in his famous article and people can Google it, look it up. What caused the Viking age? Question mark is the title. And it was from, yeah, 2000, 2008, where he, he talks about this thing called the marriage imperative. And the idea that you've got, you know, maybe a little bulge of young men in population demographics and they need to be able to compete within the marriage market in Scandinavia. And you know, you've got to pay a bride price which, you know, for some people maybe would recognize the word like a dowry, but the bride price, you know, the dowry usually comes from the female side and then the bride price price is paid by the male side. So the intentional or the intended groom needs to effectively, you know, to put it quite rudely, like buy the bride from her family. And so you, you've got to have some kind of wealth and maybe some young men don't have it. So they, the idea is that's why they get in boats and go out and steal things from other places is because then they can come home and say, see, I've got the money, you know, I can, I can now get married. And another kind of wrinkle to it came in some research that was done by Ben Raffield and I think Neil Price is on that, maybe Mark Collard. Anyway, yeah, in like 2016 where they talked about this thing called operational sex ratios. And you know, so again, getting to a demographic imbalance in Scandinavia. But their hypothesis had to do with the fact that the demographic imbalance was caused by polygyny being practiced by Scandinavians, which was a very long standing practice in Germanic cultures. And then it doesn't really get stopped until Christianity comes to Scandinavia. But when you have polygyny, effectively what it means is, you know, men can have more than one wife or concubines etc, whereas females legally are supposed to only be, you know, sexually attached to one man at a time. But you get this concept of, you know, the rich guy is hoarding all the women and then it leaves, you know, some of the guys who are probably younger and obviously not as rich, kind of out in the cold. And so in order to come back and compete again, they maybe, you know, got into boats and went out to get the bride price money. So I mean, I think it's interesting would I say it would be the cause of the Viking age. No, but for some of those guys. Yeah, probably it was.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Yeah, yeah.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[CJ Adrian]

There's some of that. I think what's being revealed now is in all the new genetic testing and the studies are done on that that are expanding our view on the genetic diversity that existed in Scandinavia at the time. What's really interesting is evidently they found traces of an inward migration into Scandinavia from Poland and then a reverse migration out into Central Europe. It's wild. I mean, these people were not staying still before, during or after the Viking age. I mean, it's an era defined by movement. And so trying to pin everybody down as quote, unquote, Vikings is difficult because it's. What does that even mean, really? Because these people are swapping around and, you know, they're. And one of the studies that I love, I love bringing this one up is somebody did some genetic testing on cats. They found that so to keep the rats at bay on the ships, they would bring cats and the cats would go with them to these far flung places. And the cats also got very busy genetically and then left traces of that. And so there's a study done, I want to say, five or six years ago that basically found these traces of Nordic cats mixed in with other cat breeds all across Europe. It's wild. And that's just another piece of evidence that shows that these were people that were on the move.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[CJ Adrian]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

But I think this is a really important point, though, because I think that there is this modern tendency, like at least since the 19th century when we invented the concept of nationhood.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Right.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

And the idea that there Are nations, you know, capital N nations and people in nations behave in this particular way and we all have particular customs and you can trace yourself to a lineage. You know, a lot of what, especially in the 19th century, people were doing at the time was looking to the Middle Ages to justify these ideas that, that there is something unique to this nation that can be traced through history. And I do think that this idea really disregards the fact that people move around all the time and they move around all the time. In the Medieval period, you know, people say, oh yes, well there's the period of the great migrations and does that contribute to bringing down Rome, et cetera, et cetera. But that also supposes that yeah, you have this period of great migration, so then everyone just kind of settles and, and they are what they are. But that's just not the case.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Oh my God, it's so not the case. And the, like C.J. said, I mean, some of the, you know, more recent actually even going back like 20 years or so, that since we've been able to map the genome and everything and then unleash this, you know, scientific tool, we know a lot more. But even despite that, because I talk about this with my students when you talk about, you know, so the Nazis co opting Nordic history and heritage and saying, you know, they're, you know, the pure Aryan race and all this kind of stuff. And it's like people who talk about pure, racially pure people in the world or suggest that there is that it's just bullshit. They just don't understand human history and human migration period all throughout history. And also the fact that as I just mentioned, right, like Scandinavians were slavers, you know, they were human traffickers. And so, so that means, you know, for, you know, I don't know, can you point to a culture in history that had slaves or that trafficked in human beings and that every once in a while didn't have sex with those slaves, you know, so it's like you can't have pure genes when those kinds of things happen. And then lastly, I mean, there's a famous study from Iceland, you know, which you probably know about, that talks about the settlers there. And you know, the DNA on them is that, you know, the male population of the early settlers was, I can't remember the exact numbers, but something around the order of like 70%, you know, came from Scandinavia, probably, you know, Norway or western Scandinavia. Whereas the women, like an equal percentage actually came from Celtic places. And so, you know, there's, yeah, there's just so much intermixing going on in that world. It's just impossible to have this kind of racially pure. I mean, it's just a myth in the bad sense of that word, a falsity.

[CJ Adrian]

Hey, it's Raj and Noah.

[Raj]

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[Noah]

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[Raj]

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[Noah]

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[Raj]

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[Noah]

And for the first time ever, we're gonna have full video episodes on YouTube. Because as long as there are things to get wrong, we're gonna be right here to help you do them better.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Love y'.

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[Professor Susanna Lipscomb]

I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on not just the Tudors from History hit, we do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry viii, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors. Murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title really. So follow not just the Tudors from History hit wherever you get your podcasts.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Of all the things that we've talked about, I would say that's probably one of the. The biggest ones that you could say. Yes. And in my research on these kind of evolutionary long Duray sort of processes, you certainly have that.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

And it's.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

And well documented for Scandinavia. Budding kingship, you know, dudes on the make and then, you know, sort of jockeying first with each other at home and then taking that show abroad in order to increase power, prestige and you know, to fund a war machine costs money. And you then need to go out and loot and do the Viking thing, whatever, at times, in order to, to make that possible. So, yeah, that, that political aspect of it is important from the kind of the internal side of it, or what we would call maybe a push factor, but maybe CJ can look to the like a pull factor, like, you know, political situation and maybe the Carolingian empire or something that might draw Vikings.

[CJ Adrian]

Yeah, I mean, it ties in a little bit. We're starting to paint a picture here, right? It's. It ties a bit into that youth bulge. If you think about the Crusades again, we have all of these Norman knights with no land to inherit and they're all fighting each other and well, what do we do to curb the violence? I mean, the goal is to curb violence in Europe. Oh, send them on a crusade. It's a wonderful idea. And it worked sort of. And so you can think of Scandinavia, right? We talked a little bit about the climate and sort of the shorter heights because maybe there's an overpopulation and we have a youth bulge and then we have the co concubinage and the operational sex ratio issue. And so now. And we're also talking about a time and place where from. From where I'm sitting and everything I've looked at, it doesn't look like there's any restriction on who can become a warrior. I can be a farmer's son and pick up an ax and I can get on a ship and I can go be a war. You know, I can go join the best of them and maybe not successfully, but so without any limitations on that, then if I'm a chieftain and I have, and I'm trying to keep peace and limit violence within my realm, then I have a vested interest in figuring out how to get rid of these guys because A, I don't want them to have anything to do with my eight girlfriends and, and B, he's violent. So let's put them somewhere. And then there's this other issue too, coming from the east, because we haven't really talked about the east, right? We've really stayed Anglocentric. And then we talked about the keel in the mid 8th century. But we also know that there was silver coming back from the east, the Byzantines, starting about in the mid 8th century too. And there are theoretical frameworks. I'm thinking of a great paper by Soren Sindebeck that looked at the long distance trade networks that brought back some of the silver. And in fact, James Barrett, I think is in his 2010 paper, kind of admits at the end that, well, the best we can say is the Viking age may have started because of a youth bulge and also an influx of silver from the Islamic world that then kind of offset the silver standard. So then we're also adding to the equation that not only do these young men not have access to brides, but the brides they do have access to are getting more and more expensive because the value of silver is dropping from this influx of silver coming from the East. Now, did this all actually happen? We have like little pieces that tell us maybe kind of going on. And so we have this really unstable moment in history where all this stuff is going on to some extent, right. And then we get into the relations with our neighbors and something that I actually latched onto this early. Now, I don't know. Again, the evidence is really light, right? But I think the story is really interesting. So we have the Carolingians, who are these aggressive expansionist Christians, and when they move into Northern Europe, Charlemagne specifically, I've seen the mistake, and I've made the mistake of thinking that like the Saxons are different from the Danes. They're not talking to each other. Well, there's one particular event that shows how interconnected everybody was at the time, which is there was a rebellion in Saxony led by a Saxon chieftain named Widukind, and they were quite successful. In fact, Charlemagne had to pull away from his campaign in Poland to come back and put them down. They fought this big battle on the shores of the Aller river at a place called Verdun. Not Verdun, but ver den slight nuance there. So they fight this battle and then Charlemagne takes 4,500 prisoners and decides, you know, what we're going to do, we're going to baptize them all to save their souls. But while they're in the water, like, don't let them back up. The numbers are dubious. We don't know. It could have been a thousand, could have been 4,500. So the estimates are kind of, you know, range, you know, kind of swing wildly. Right. But we do know that they took their prisoners and drowned them in the river. The particular thing about Wittukind is that he was sort of an important person because he was married to the sister of the king of the Danes, Sigefried. Uh oh, whoops.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Not great for political unrest purposes, right.

[CJ Adrian]

And the Danes are, you know, you can just imagine the Danes like, he did what to my brother in law. I mean, on one hand I'm kind of happy about it because I didn't like him, but on another, the outrage. The outrage. So then we see there is an obscure document from England by a contemporary document from the time, or a little bit after, by Simeon of Durham, that described the raid at Lindisfarne. And he described one of the things that the Vikings who attacked Lindisfarne did, which was they took some of their prisoners and drowned them in the water in kind of this showy display. And so some historians have thought that this was a sign that, at least in the Scandinavian consciousness, there was this memory of the assault against their kin. Now, even though it was Saxons, they would have. They obviously knew the story and they obviously understood. And Charlemagne wasn't drowning these people in a vacuum either. He was sending a message to the Saxons and anybody else who dared to challenge him. So we think there may have been a connection there. And then when we couple that in with, it's basically we've got this very unstable situation in Scandinavia and the Carolingians kind of come up and start poking at it like a beehive, right? There's this idea that maybe these political relations had something to do with that westward expansion kind of exploding all at once. It also explains why, or could explain why France, for example, was such an early and frequent target of the Vikings, because the Carolingian realm was of interest to marauding Scandinavians. Could be. Maybe.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Yeah, exactly.

[Noah]

Right.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

I mean, at least that's what, you know, the hypothesis is, based on the evidence that Harold Fairhair was one of those that gets a little bit too big for his britches and, you know, but he does, he does expand and take over and then starts to lean on these other chieftains and they're like, hey, dude, you know, like, see ya. We're not interested in being, you know, a vassal to you. So, you know, and. But then again, you know, Harold Fairhair is living in the late 9th century. So this is not the beginning of the Viking age. This is a century in when he's doing that. But he, at least as far as Neil Price is concerned, you know, he's a Sacklinger, which is, you know, a legit sea king. He would be a legit kind of Viking kind of guy probably if we went back and met him and looked at, you know, who he was and what he did. Because he controlled spirit access to the sea, basically, you know, and so he's a person that's a king. That's not necessarily land based as much as it is, you know, kind of more Viking activity based because it's, it's controlling access to the water. So, you know, he is a Viking and it's kind of, you know, it's full stop then. I mean, if people are interested in like the Viking age and like, what really is, like serious Viking activity in the sense that our kind of modern pop culture, like, likes to see it, man. The 9th century is where it's at. Like, it's just like exploding everywhere, you know, and then they start to, you know, then the Christian thing starts to come in and kill the buzz and change, change things a little bit. But yeah, so, you know, you know, Harold Fairhair as a cause for the Viking age, I think he's actually the result of the Viking. I mean, he's like the poster child for the Viking age. In my mind, it's like winning a.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Monopoly, but for Vikings.

[CJ Adrian]

Harold Fairhair, didn't he grow up in England as a hostage? Wasn't that part of his story? Or was that. I think it was another one. No, I think it was Fairhair. Yeah.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

I can't remember.

[CJ Adrian]

Yeah, I think, yeah, because there was actually close relations between the Norwegians and the English at the time. And I think he grew up in the English court. So there's that rapprochement, as we like to call it in French, but also shows that these worlds were not separate. There was this kind of molding. This actually brings up a good idea. I'm thinking of a study that was done on whetstones, the whetstone trade, a couple years ago, what, 2018, I want to say it came out tremendous work. They found whetstones from way north in Norway, as far south as Normandy and England. And so it showed that there were trade networks that connected Scandinavia as far as the far reaches of Norway and then Western Europe long before the Viking Age. And part of the paper was looking at what's driving this. And then one of the things that they had in there was it had to do with the power structures with the chieftains that were running this trade. And then kind of looking at what was it that caused them to shift their intentions from trading to raiding. It's a really interesting paper, but it's something that's been looked at because at the beginning of the Viking Age, we really don't have a lot of information on individual figures. So it's mostly just themes and trends that we're looking at. And so with this to your question about rulers and politics, they did look at how that interplay with the ruling class might have contributed to the outbreak of violence in the West.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

I find this to be a really interesting point because there are some people who say, oh, you know, we have these established trade networks before the Viking Age, such as it is. You know, air quotes around Viking Age kicks off. And so clearly we have people in Scandinavia trading up and down the seaboard, getting in boats and making this happen. And, you know, there are some that say, oh, like these are akin to scouting missions, right? It's not just trade that was going on here. It's saying, oh, it seems that you guys have money for a very fine way stone. So, like, I'm going to come back and see to that, right? I mean, what. What do you think about that? Like, to me, that seems a little bit too much. Like, I, I do think that this is actual trading going on, but then maybe you get a nicer boat. And then you say, hm, well, I'm down there. Who needs trade if you can just take the stuff, right?

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Oh, I think this is a really. Yeah, I, I agree with you. This is really interesting. And I think one of the things that we often don't think about, we're like so tied into this commodities, whether it's silver or whetstones or slaves or whatever, like information was a commodity. These people had information networks that like, they're not just like, oh, let's just point the boat in that direction and see where we end up. I mean, they knew and they knew what was out there. And like you said, I mean, they have been trading around. I mean, especially if we're talking about the west, like the North Sea stuff. But certainly the Baltic is really active from very early on. And so I think we underestimate and I think the historians for the longest time too is sort of this idea of like, oh, medieval peasant never goes any farther than two miles from their house or whatever. And it's like we're finding more and more and especially like with DNA stuff as well. Like now these people are on the move and even though it's a three mile an hour world, what's faster if you get a boat? But they are on the move and they're interacting with each other and they, I mean, in Neil Prices, like some of the, he argues that some of the, you know, sort of shock and awe that appears in the accounts, like the raid on Lindisfarne or some of the stuff in the annals and chronicles and you know, in the, in Frankia and stuff is not shock and awe. Like, what the hell is going on here? You know, like, we never seen this before. It's more of like, hey, we were just trading with you last week and now you're like being mean to us and just taking our, like, what the hell, what happened here? Why did, what's, what's happening, the switch, you know, and so I think that there is definitely some of that and there's certainly. And actually Chris Koimans has written about this. Even somebody that I've researched who existed like a hundred years ago was writing about this. That the idea that these people were way more calculating and sophisticated about logistics and you know, what, what is the sort of, you know, return, you know, sort of risk reward calculations of like return on investment. Yeah, we're not going to go right over there because that's going to take too long and there's not enough there to get whatever. They start to become very calculated about it and become what we would see in our modern times as, you know, kind of pretty savvy businessmen. I mean, I do think that there's something to that.

[Raj]

Hey, it's Raj and Noah and we're back with a new season of Am I Doing It Wrong? The show that explores the all too human anxieties we have about trying to get our lives.

[Noah]

Because we're still doing a lot of stuff wrong.

[Raj]

But who isn't? That's why each week we're talking about the topics that we could all use a little helping hit with. Whether it's making new friends as an adult, managing our emotions, or even dreaming.

[Noah]

We'll be talking to experts in their fields who are definitely doing things right, so the rest of us can be a bit wiser and a lot better equipped to handle whatever life throws at us.

[Raj]

Subscribe now and listen to new episodes of Am I Doing It Wrong? Dropping every Thursday starting January 1st, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Noah]

And for the first time ever, we're going to have full video episodes on YouTube. Because as long as there are things to get wrong, we're going to be right here to help you do them better.

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[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[CJ Adrian]

Yeah, so there's there's a lot of work that's been done on trying to figure out how important silver was. And from what I've seen, I think a lot of historians come to the conclusion that the social networks in Scandinavia were heavily reliant on silver, going back to this idea of the bride price, it was paid in silver. So if I want to get married, I have to have silver if I want to do all these different things. And so then your family networks now rely on silver. So any disruption of the value of silver may have had deleterious effects. So an influx from the east, for example. So we have evidence to show that there was Islamic silver being brought back way before what we would call the Viking Age in large quantities. And in fact, it was on the our guest Octavia Randolph on the Vikingology podcast. She's a writer and she Also lives in Gotland now. And she was telling us about all these weird rules in Gotland, about you can't dig deeper than 30cm in your yard in Gotland without a state representative because the likelihood of you running into a silver hoard is so high. And then she had this story that she told us about a farmer who. There was a rabbit den. The rabbit was like kicking out the dirt to dig its den, and it was shooting out silver dirhams and like a tree that fell over and a treasure hoard just came up with the roots, right? So they have these weird stories which tells us that there was so much silver coming into Scandinavia, they didn't know what to do with it. And if the silver economy is what's holding family units in the social order together, that's a problem. And so the first people who brought it back thought, look at us, look how wonderful it is that we're bringing in all this silver and look how rich we are. But now they're so rich with something that's so. With so much silver, there's just nobody else who can compete. That actually ties into a theory that, that I have. It's my own personal theory that I have and caveat. I am starting to distance my idea away from the start of what caused the Viking age sort of thing. I use the silver economy to kind of say this is kind of how it works. But it really has to do with. Back to this idea of the Vikings being really intentional and going to Western France as early as they did to Noutier in 799. Why? Well, they didn't just go to nomoutier, because in 793, Lindisfarne, 795, Iona. And then after that, those sites were essentially bypassed. And sites after that were also bypassed after the kind of first hit and run raid vs Nomoutier and St Phil Bea. We have evidence to show in 819, there's a diploma from the Carolingians talking about frequent and persistent raids on the island. And as far as we can tell, the monks of St Vibert started their annual pilgrimages away. Right? They got permission to build a satellite priory on the continent to go hide away during Viking season. Right. So it appears they were coming back with alarming frequency every year there is a Viking season. And then they even tried to defend the island one summer. They're like, hey, what if we built a castrum to defend the monastery? And so they did, and then they stationed it with soldiers. And the Vikings came and were like, okay, what's this? Oh, we're defending against you. Okay, well, we're still taking it. And it failed. And then there's a big battle in 836 where the Franks tried, you know, the local. You know, the Comte de Poitou de la Garnache. It was Renaud d' Herboughs who brought an army to Normoutier to try and save it, because it was a very valuable island to the Carolingians because it made salt, and salt was critical to the empire. So they go and try to defend the island, and we think 835, maybe 836, the chronicler or Mentarius was kind of off by his dates versus some other annals, but whatever. And so there's just this big battle on Nomoutier and the Franks win a landslide. They kill a ton of Vikings. They barely lose any men. So they tell us, I mean, histories written by the victors. And then they're like, okay, we won, we go home. And then two months later, the Vikings come back and take the island.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Oh, bless.

[CJ Adrian]

It wasn't even the same group. It wasn't the same group. It was a different group. So they're showing up with alarming frequency in this area. Why? And so there's this kind of idea that they're there for something other than silver. I can get silver much closer to Scandinavia than Normoutier. Right. And the other presumption, too, is if the monastery is where we hold all the silver, they're not going to restock the monastery full of silver every year. You would think. Now, we did have a guest on Vikingology who talked about how actually, probably they did. Oh, no, that was Matthew Panesi, who's an expert on 9th century monasticism, and he changed my ideas on that a little bit of, like, they probably did bring some stuff, because this stuff was really important to them if they were going to live there. But with the pilgrimages, they probably would have taken it back and forth. In fact, Ermentarius tells us about that, about how they would pack up the wagons and put all their valuables and leave. So there must have been something else there that they were interested in. And I've always thought, and I was taught from. Because the local mythology here is that they came for salt, which is kind of like a no duh, Right? But then the no duh turns into, I have a friend in Denmark who said, look, I've got ocean in 50 km in any direction. I don't need salt. Plus, in the Viking age, cod was dried and we didn't need it. So there's no demand for salt in Scandinavia. So then my next idea was, well, maybe, maybe this trade disruption with the silver is the answer.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Right?

[CJ Adrian]

And essentially the idea was, originally my idea was that the silver came in from the east, disrupted the silver trade. Then we have all the co concubinage, youth bulge, et cetera, that are all playing this role and kind of frothing together this soup. And then the Danes and the Norwegians are trying to figure out, well, what do we trade with the Swedes who have all this silver? Obviously they're not going to want silver, right? So what do we trade with them? And so they're trying to figure out what are we going to do? So I thought maybe that could explain why they go back, get salt from western France, take it back into Scandinavia, high quality salt, trade it with the Swedes who are going up freshwater river system to the Byzantine Empire, and they would need salt to preserve their food. In fact, Saint Olav in his life story, I'm forgetting the name of the document. But anyway, they talk about there's a. Somebody died and they preserved his body in a barrel of salt. So we know that they were using barrels of salt to transport up and down the river. So that was the original idea. But then a new study came out recently, I want to say 2022, that found evidence that there were herring fish bones caught in the North Atlantic and traded into the Baltic as early as the early 9th century.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Wow.

[CJ Adrian]

Now the dates are a little off. And so there's just this little, you know, but the idea is cod was dried, but herring has to be salted. And so then now there's this idea of the herring trade may have started several centuries before we originally thought. And now we're in this territory where if I'm a Norwegian fisherman and I'm fishing for herring off the coast of Norway, I need to preserve it, I need salt. Where do I get it? And this is. We're talking about the early 8 hundreds versus the first attack in Nomoutier in 799. But then the repeated attack starting in the 8 10s, I want to say. Right. Ramping up in the 820s. So you kind of see this economic tie now. Okay, so can I come back and say, did salt play a role in the beginning of the Viking Age? I think I just solved the repeated attacks in Nomiti. That's it. It. That's it. But I think it also shows that when we look at the causes of the Viking Age, right. Well, my favorite answer to this is, what caused the Viking Age? Somebody commented one time on my article that said, the Vikings. Okay, thanks. Fair play.

[Matt Lewis]

Yeah.

[Jason Concepcione]

All right.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Yeah.

[CJ Adrian]

I think it also shows that we're talking about. I think Terry mentioned this earlier, that we have different groups of people all over the place with different motivations and needs.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Right.

[CJ Adrian]

So. So we look at, for example, the people who came from Norway and traded the whetstones. Then they come back the next year and attack. Well, why did you attack? Well, maybe they got raided by Danes. Maybe they. Who knows? They live these lives of necessity where life is hard, the seasons can change very quickly, weather, raiders, everything. So they're just trying to scrounge together a living. And so then when we look at all of this and we think, oh, these. It's Six Determinisms by James Barrett. I think an honorable effort to try and explain all this, but when you zoom in just a little bit, you start to see that it's really just this patchwork of all these different people doing all these different things all at once, and then it just kind of radiates out right over time.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Well, so, you know, it's all part of a complex tapestry. Historians love to be like, well, it's complicated because we're. Right. Exactly right. But what do you think exists kind of in the popular imagination about it? You know, this is. The troubles is we're historians, and so we'll say, oh, here's these eight different factors that we think contribute to a Viking age. But I think that popular perceptions of things like this is that you can have something simple. So what's kind of floating out there in the Zeitgeist? What are the Viking age vibes?

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Well, at least in my experience, like with my students and sort of public speaking that I do and whatever. I mean, people don't really spend a lot of time thinking about what started it. They just know it is. And that these people existed that they call Vikings, and they have a kind of trope in their mind of, you know, shield maidens and dudes with axes and, you know, IKEA rugs on their shoulders and things like that, you know, So I, you know, I think for my money, like, I'm always sort of. I mean, I'm not like one of those, you know. Well, actually historians like we were talking about earlier, but I am one of the people. People who sort of rail on, you know, the problem with the Viking age and especially what we're talking about today with the beginnings of it, is the evidence is just so spotty And Scandinavia is still what we call a prehistoric culture at that period in time, because other than runic inscriptions, we don't have anything written, and we certainly don't have anything written by them telling us their own story. And so then what happens when you have gaps and silences? Well, people just love to pour themselves right in, you know, and just, you know, manipulate that stuff and make the Vikings who they want them to be. And I think that to a large degree, that's just kind of what we see in modern popular culture. And again, going back to, like, what we said, so the corrupting of Nordic history and heritage by the Nazis. I mean, they're doing the same thing that people do now by Marvel universe 10 years ago, creating a female Thor. You know, I mean, it's like, okay, fine, it's all up for grabs. Just make it what you want it to be, because the evidence isn't there to really refute you too much. So, like. Okay. And so, yeah, I mean, I just think that that's kind of. Kind of where we are. And I always tell my students, too. It's like, the Vikings don't change who looks at them and what they see does.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Oh, I love that. That was really good, Terry.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Okay, well, just to.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[CJ Adrian]

Yes, Yes, I did. I wrote an article about the end of the Viking Age, actually. And that's just, you know. Yes. All the usual suspects, right? The Christianization of Scandinavia, the fortification of Western Europe. Right. We start to see kestrems pop up, and so now these areas are better defended, consolidation of power, etc. Etc. But one of my favorite stories is what happens after the end of the Viking Age. And taking us back to 1089, when Pope Urban. It was 1089. Right. Pope Urban II called for a crusade, saying, we need you. Oh, 1095. Sorry. Okay, what was 1095 anyway? 1095. Thank you. He calls for the crusade and he says, yes, we want you to leave. Leave your land and go abroad and fight. And the first kingdom to join was Denmark. Denmark. Denmark. It was Denmark. The days were like, we're going. So I think that spirit. I think that spirit remained after. Right. And it's not like raiding just stopped overnight, Right. Like, there's examples of raids that persisted well into to 12th century. Arguably, the Icelanders kept raiding each other that way. I mean, wasn't. There was a whole. Anyway, there's. So it's kind of. It kind of. It's more like, you know, bleeding out a little bit.

[Noah]

Right?

[CJ Adrian]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Well, you know, but that's the thing, isn't it? Again, as much as we like, as historians to have neat categories and ways of talking about things, fundamentally things, no one wakes up and says, hey, guys, I think the Viking age is over. You know, these things are going to eventually peter out. And I mean, much in the same way that I don't think anyone got up in the morning one day and said, hey, everybody, we're Vikings now, right?

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

It's.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

It's just it's not that easy, but thank you for coming and talking about something annoyingly difficult to categorize. You know, it's like trying to kind of catch a glimpse of something floating in your eye.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Right.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Like the moment you try to focus on it, it darts away.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

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

[Host of Gone Medieval]

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

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

I'm going to York in February.

[CJ Adrian]

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

[Noah]

Sure.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Words never spoken about medieval history. What can I say? Yes, exactly. Well, C.J. and Terry, thank you so, so much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure.

[Jason Concepcione]

Thank you.

[CJ Adrian]

Thank you.

[Jason Concepcione]

My thanks again to Terry Barnes and CJ Adrian for such a fantastic episode. If you enjoyed what we've been talking about today, then do go check out Terry and CJ's Vikingology podcast and the episode I featured in about the rise of the Normans. And most importantly, more. My thanks to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to ad free award winning original TV documentaries, including my recent film the Trial of Joan of Arc by signing [e-mail] subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

Where you can leave us comments and.

[Jason Concepcione]

Suggestions or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family.

[Host of Gone Medieval]

That you've gone medieval. Until next time.

[Raj]

Hey, it's Raj and Noah and we're back with a new season of Am I Doing It Wrong? The show that explores the all too human anxieties we have about trying to get our lives right.

[Noah]

Because we're still doing a lot of stuff wrong.

[Raj]

But who isn't? That's why each week we're talking about the topics that we could all use a little helping hit with. Whether it's making new friends as an adult, managing our emotions, or even dreaming.

[Noah]

We'Ll be talking to experts in their fields who are definitely doing things right. So the rest of us can be a bit wiser and a lot better equipped to handle whatever life throws at us.

[Raj]

Subscribe now and listen to new episodes of Am I Doing It Wrong? Dropping every Thursday starting January 1st, where every you get your podcasts.

[Noah]

And for the first time ever, we're going to have full video episodes on YouTube. Because as long as there are things to get wrong, we're going to be right here to help you do them better.

[Dr. Eleanor Janica]

Love y'. All.

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