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- [00:00]
Ian Glenn
Hi, listeners. Today we're bringing you a preview of a brand new show from the Noiser Podcast network. It's called Real Vikings. Hosted by Ian Glenn, the show takes you on a deep dive into the Viking age. You'll board longboats bound for new lands from Greenland to North Africa, Constantinople to Canada. Follow mighty warlords like Eric Bloodaxe and Olga of Kyiv, meet master navigators like Leif Erikson, and uncover the real figures behind the legends of the sagas. You'll hear contributions from leading historians, as well as original music and immersive sound design. If you enjoy this Taster episode, search Real Vikings in your podcast app and hit follow. You'll find more episodes waiting for you now.
- [00:56]
Narrator
The year is 789 AD. It's market day in the town of Dawnwa Richester, Dorchester, as it's known today in England's southwest. Dense clouds sweep in from the east, gathering mass. The air grows oppressive beneath them. Situated on the banks of the River Froome in the ancient kingdom of Wessex, Dorchester is an important settlement. It has royal connections. The West Saxon king has a winter residence here. A man patrols the market stalls with a watchful eye. There's a haughty swagger to his walk as he taps his staff on the cobbles. Traders touch their forelocks respectfully. This is not a man you want to cross. His woolen clothes are of quality, revealing his high status. Meet Beadahad. He's the reeve, an official responsible for ensuring that the king's laws are upheld. The market is a honeypot for ne' er do wells, drunks, pickpockets, cheats. And it's Berderhard's job to police and punish every kind of criminality. There's one rule above all others that he's determined to enforce, that the king must receive his portion, his cut of every transaction that takes place in his realm. It's not just about the money. It's about maintaining order. When Pierre Hart overhears a group of men talking about some foreigners trading furs over the side of their boats, his ears prick up. The alleged infringement is taking place on the Isle of Portland, down on the coast about 30 miles to the south. Bayada Hard hurries to the guild hall and gathers his attendants. If he's to confront these strangers, he's determined to impress on them the full dignity of his office. Dorchester is an old Roman town. The roads are laid out in the classic grid pattern, but it's fallen into disrepair since the legions left long, long ago. The amphitheater turned to Rubble, its arena overgrown. Sheep nibble at the grass where gladiators once fought. The reeve leads his men along South Street. They leave through a gap in the town walls where the old gate used to be, then take the long straight Roman road down to the sea. For Beatahad, the issue is simple. The foreigners are welcome to trade, but they must follow the rules. He sits up in the saddle. All he has to do is to show them who's boss. As they reach Chesil beach, the thin isthmus that connects Portland to the mainland, Berdahard sees the strangers boats drawn up ahead. Three masted longboats with their sails stowed. Their crews mill about on the shingle. A campfire burns. Suddenly they stop what they're doing and turn to face the approaching posse. Berdahad and his men draw to a halt at close quarters. The size of the strangers is striking. They are a formidable sight. The reeve touches a crucifix on his belt buckle. The ultimate source of his authority is God. The strangers wear helmets of either leather or metal. Axes, daggers and swords hang from their baldricks, the loose belts slung about their hips. Their muscled arms are ringed with gold. One or two wear small gilded hammers around their necks, the symbol of a pagan God, Thor, the bringer of thunder. Their hair and beards appear well groomed. Dark green tattoos are visible on their exposed skin. Bead Ahad dismounts and strides towards them. One hand on the hilt of his dagger, he gestures towards a pile of lush arctic furs. You can't trade that here. He shouts, explaining that they will have to pass through a king's port in order to pay the correct taxes. The foreigners are unmoved by his words, if they even understand them. Then one of them reaches for a long handled battle axe. His hand rises before shooting, shooting forwards and releasing the weapon. Time seems to slow down as it spins through the air. The Adehad is rooted to the spot as the axe hits its target, the middle of his chest. With a deafening roar, the men from the ships rush forward and drag Beadhard's stunned men from their horses. As the storm clouds break, the strangers load up their long sleek vessels and heave them back into the water. The only trace of their presence the smoldering fire and the Saxon bodies lying on the blood soaked pebbles. Today, Chesil beach, with its tidal lagoons, is one of Dorset's most popular tourist locations, a favored spot for ramblers and bird watchers. It's hard to imagine it as a setting for such a shocking drama. So who were these men who pitched up on this beach a millennium ago, dispensing such violence and casual brutality? They are, in a word, that will soon strike fear into the hearts of every Anglo Saxon, every Celt, every Frisian, every Frank across the early Middle Ages. Vikings say the word Viking today and it conjures a certain image, one represented in countless films, TV shows, video games, comic books and superhero franchises. One of pillage and savagery. A cliched world of horned helmets and blood eagles, of barbaric, hirsute heathens enthralled to gods and monsters. The hell's angels of the high seas. Men who came in longboats to terrorize and slaughter the innocence of Britain, France, Ireland and beyond. If those men who killed Beadharhad are anything to go by, then certain aspects of this legend are true. But it only tells part of a bigger story of a people who were so much more than the fur clad thugs of popular imagination. The Vikings hailed from a sophisticated and developed civilization. They were master navigators, fearless explorers, diplomats, traders, craftsmen, storytellers, and, yes, warriors. Moreover, they were adventurers, men and women whose feet still defy the imagination. A people who crossed vast oceans and discovered new lands, building up an impressive trading empire that spanned four continents for centuries.
- [08:57]
Stefan Brink
The Viking Age is perhaps the most revolutionary, crucial and seminal period ever in the history of the Scandinavians.
- [09:07]
Narrator
We're dealing with a group of people who really transform the history of Europe. There's a real sense in which there's almost no parts of Europe they leave completely untouched.
- [09:17]
Lars Brownworth
They founded just about every major city in Ireland. They founded the first centralized state in what is now Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus. They founded perhaps the greatest of the medieval kingdoms, which is the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. And then, of course, medieval France and England were also largely created by the Vikings.
- [09:35]
Eleanor Barraclough
They ended up traveling these thousands and thousands of miles across the North Atlantic, heading west, settling Greenland, reaching the edge of the North American continent. They end up all the way in the Arctic. They go east, they go down the waterways of the Eurasian steppes, all the way to Byzantium, even to Baghdad.
- [09:56]
Davide Zori
What really fascinates, I think, is this exploration, this human urge to move beyond the known and into something that has not yet been discovered.
- [10:07]
Narrator
Much of their history was written by their enemies, which means their true achievements were often overlooked. The achievers themselves demonized. But the Vikings changed the world and were themselves changed as they sailed and battled their way through it.
- [10:27]
Elizabeth Rowe
The Vikings, they do have a unique place in the public mindset. They are framed as the barbaric other. And there is something fascinating about that, and more than that, this idea of people who left everything behind to quite literally sail over the horizon.
- [10:45]
Historian/Academic
The Viking period is still extremely compelling today, partly because it's just so colorful. It's full of dramatic figures, dramatic events.
- [10:55]
Pragya Vora
They've got amazing tattoos and they've got these wonderful hairstyles, and they're the absolute epitome of cool.
- [11:06]
Narrator
I'm ian glenn and from the noiza podcast network. This is real vikings. We start with a whodunit. Who are be Adarhard's killers. Exactly. These men who appeared out of the blue on that Dorset beach 12 centuries ago. Contemporary accounts refer to those who murdered the king's reeve as Danish, Northmen, Norse, or even just heathens. They are all synonyms for Viking. All we really know for sure is that these killers, these Vikings, came from the north, from the land we call Scandinavia. The world back then is very different to the one we know today. The western part of the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century, over 300 years previously. Since then, there's been a period of decline across Europe. The Dark Ages, as they are usually called. A time of great social upheaval, a sense of barbarians at the gate of classical civilization. The name tells all. It's an era with little documented testimony as to what actually occurred. By the 9th century, when the Vikings begin to make their mark, we do know that two new power blocs have emerged, both dominated by the new religions that have swept across from the East. Francia is a Christian territory. It covers much of modern day France, Germany, the Low Countries and Northern Italy, with its emperor Charlemagne, God's anointed ruler on Earth. Further south there is the vast Umayyad Caliphate, a Muslim realm which stretches across North Africa and the Middle east from Spanish Al Andalus to Persia. Out on the fringes in Britain or Ireland, say the more inconsequential things become. England at the end of the 8th century doesn't exist. Its emergence as a nation is a story for another day. Back then, the land that we now call England is divided into four main East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. They have emerged out of the power vacuum left at the end of Roman rule. In its province of Britannia. The native population of Celtic speaking Britons has been faced with an influx of Germanic migrants from Northern Europe. Tribes of Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. Out of this melting pot, a new people have emerged. They speak what we classify today as Old English and have come to be known as Anglo Saxons. By Beadahad's time, the Anglo Saxon kingdoms are resolutely Christian. The process of conversion from paganism, worshipping the same old gods that the Vikings still cling to, began in the late 6th century, when missionaries sent by Pope Gregory landed in Kent to the Anglo Saxons. To people like Beadahad, the northern lands beyond British shores are a distant and unsettling mystery. An old idea rooted in the pagan past links the north with Hel Tucked away at the very top of the map, the region we know as Scandinavia is a land far, far away. Across the fjords and mountains, this territory of the north plays host to a rural society. Most folks live in villages and isolated farms, growing crops and raising cattle, as well as hunting and fishing. People subsist on fish, grain and meat, beef, pork, goat, venison, sometimes horse. They wear simple clothes spun from wool, flax and hemp. They are a practical people, handy craftsmen, skilled at carpentry, metalwork. The further north you go, the sparser the villages become, breaking up into individual farmsteads. But even in these remote settings, up in the Hologa land, land of high fire or the northern lights, bonds of community hold scattered neighbors together. Lars Brownworth is the author of Sea Wolves, a history of the Vikings.
- [16:10]
Lars Brownworth
About a third of Norway is above the Arctic Circle. This was a punishing climate, and so, you know, hospitality was obviously a very important thing. And women usually had greater rights than in the rest of medieval Europe because they were largely in charge of making sure there was enough food for the winter. And this is obviously a job that lives depend on.
- [16:34]
Narrator
It's a vast area from the tip of Norway's North Cape to the present day Danish German border. It's over 1,500 miles. That's further than the distance from Copenhagen to Rome. The geographic variance is immense, from frozen tundra through dense spruce taiga to temperate grassland. Eleanor Barraclough is a senior lecturer at Bath Spa University and author of Embers of the Hands, Modern histories of the Viking Age.
- [17:08]
Eleanor Barraclough
So we've got a huge span in terms of the geography. We've also got a huge span in terms of the different sorts of people who are living in this world. So, for example, if you're a trader or a craftsperson in Denmark, your experience of life is going to be much more multicultural but much less centered compared to, say, if you live in an agriculturally prosperous valley somewhere in the lowlands of Norway or Sweden where generations of your family have farmed. So we, we already have to start breaking down this idea that it's Just one thing. And that we can know what it would be like to live at one time in the Viking Age. It's much more complex than that.
- [18:02]
Narrator
But there's one thing that unites all Scandinavians. Water. It connects, it defines. Traveling by land across a snowbound mountainous interior is slow and hazardous. Far easier to navigate a river network from one trading settlement to another. Or skirt the jagged coast of Norway, ducking in and out of fjords, sailing the great north way that gives that land its name. In the Viking Age, the sea is not a barrier, it's a pathway. It leads to a world of opportunity. New sources of wealth, new markets to trade in, new targets to plunder. And it turns out there are riches aplenty right there across the North Sea. The so called whale road, just a few days sail away to the west. Quite why and when Scandinavian warriors start harassing the coastal communities of Britain is open to debate. We shall come to that shortly. But it is this seaborne plundering that most likely gives us the term Viking.
- [19:22]
Eleanor Barraclough
The word Viking is really interesting. It does come, at least in one form from Old Norse and is contemporary with the Viking Age itself. So there's a version of the word Viking which is Viking, which is essentially a raider or a pirate. There's also a very related form of that word which is essentially to go on a Viking, to go on a raid.
- [19:45]
Narrator
Another suggestion is that it's related to the Old Norse word for a bay, Vik. So a Viking is someone who comes from a bay. There's also a region in Norway called Viken. Perhaps the original Vikings came from there. Whatever the origins of the word, its meaning soon broadens out. Davide Zori, associate professor of history and Archaeology at Baylor University, is author of Age of Wolf and Wind Voyages through the Viking World.
- [20:19]
Davide Zori
Viking essentially meant a seaborne pirate. So not all Scandinavians of the Viking Age would have been, or considered themselves to have been Vikings. Only once you get on a boat and try to pirate stuff would you become a Viking.
- [20:37]
Narrator
In the beginning, going a Viking is something you do to supplement your regular income. An eight century side hustle.
- [20:46]
Davide Zori
And that's how it started with people going seasonally abroad to opportunistically engage in some kind of wealth production. That could be trade or it could be raiding. And I think sometimes they probably brought trading goods on board and then decided as they showed up whether it'd be more profitable to raid or to trade.
- [21:13]
Ian Glenn
Hi listeners, if you're enjoying this taster episode, then search real Vikings in your podcast app and hit follow. You can listen to more episodes of Real Vikings straight after this one.
- [21:25]
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- [21:54]
Narrator
per month at this time as the 8th century draws to a close, the modern nations of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, like England, have yet to come into being. Power is concentrated locally in the hands of chieftains and warlords and based on close bonds of allegiance. It's a shifting, unstable political picture.
- [22:19]
Davide Zori
We have to imagine a constellation of chieftainsees that are in alliance with each other, that are fighting each other, sometimes expanding, claiming more power and then I would say collapsing again.
- [22:32]
Narrator
We generally think of Vikings engaging in overseas adventures with their victims being mostly foreigners, but they fight each other too, in what we might call Viking On Viking action, ultimately dominance comes through wealth silver which is used to buy the loyalty of supporters, the drive of the
- [22:56]
Davide Zori
sort of alpha type chieftain to control and to sustain power as one of the motors engines of the Viking age that pushed them beyond their own shores as they try to accumulate more wealth, to reinvest in the political economy and generate bonds of loyalty with their supporters.
- [23:21]
Narrator
Religion too plays a key role in convincing men to follow charismatic leaders on long voyages to unknown lands. Unlike much of Europe, Scandinavia is still pagan. Stefan Brink is Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands and a research professor at Cambridge. He's the author of a history of slavery in the Viking Age.
- [23:49]
Stefan Brink
Well, the pre Christian religion in Scandinavia was a polytheistic religion with many gods and goddesses, minor deities living with the people in the barn, in hills, etc. In a landscape charged with sacrality and with a mythology we today find fascinating.
- [24:18]
Narrator
We'll delve into Norse religion more fully in a later episode, but for now the thing to remember is that for a Viking warrior, death is something to be welcomed, not feared. To die with your sword in your hand ensures immortality, allowing you to enjoy a glorious afterlife in Valhalla, the Hall of the Fallen. That belief gives rise to a culture of warfare, a sense of fearlessness, of invincibility, even underpinned by a code of valor.
- [24:52]
Davide Zori
I think that it's important to consider the ideological motivation. I think that the fatalism and the push towards honor, generating stories about your accomplishments, was a high motivator.
- [25:06]
Narrator
But alongside religion and mythology, there may be more practical considerations at play in pushing the Vikings out from Scandinavia.
- [25:15]
Eleanor Barraclough
It's also been suggested that there might be something of a gender imbalance. So essentially, there are fewer women for the men to marry and settle down with and kind of build up a farmstead and raise a family.
- [25:34]
Narrator
The Vikings practice of polygamy doesn't help. With the most powerful men taking multiple wives, it provides an incentive for lesser males to venture abroad in search of foreign brides or come back home with wealth they can use to compete for the hand of a local girl. Another driver is climate. At the time, there are some significant meteorological shifts. Pragya Vora is lecturer in Medieval History at the University of York.
- [26:07]
Pragya Vora
One likely explanation is that there was, as a consequence of a sort of warm period, the Medieval Warm period, an explosion in population. And as a consequence, there wasn't enough land in Scandinavia. And so people started moving abroad to take their chances, really, to make something of their lives.
- [26:34]
Narrator
In some cases, the accumulation of wealth overseas comes through what we might call legitimate trading, Exchanging resources such as furs and walrus tusks for silver. But in the Viking age, the men from Scandinavia will come to specialize in one particularly lucrative form of Commerce.
- [26:55]
Stefan Brink
In the 9th century, the slave trade with the Muslim world exploded on the continent. Slavery became very important for the Scandinavians. In the Viking age, slaves became the major trading commodity for the Scandinavians. And slavery, I believe, in a way, came to characterize the Viking period at that time.
- [27:24]
Narrator
In fact, so rife is slavery that it forms part of a three tiered Viking society. At the top, there's the chieftain or jarl, from which we get our word Earl. Below him come the freemen or Khals. And right at the bottom sit the slaves or thralls. The origin of another English expression, to be enthralled to someone. The Vikings are not the only ones practicing slavery at the time. The Christian Anglo Saxons do it too. But whatever romantic ideas we may entertain about the Norsemen, we have to acknowledge that their economy is founded on the trafficking of human beings. It is partly their notoriety as slavers that accounts for the Vikings enduring reputation for violence. But it also has a lot to do with the sources we're Using Professor Elizabeth Rowe Reader in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Cambridge, is the author of Vikings in the the Legend of Ragnar Lothbrok and His Sons.
- [28:42]
Historian/Academic
Nearly all of the contemporary accounts that we have for the Scandinavians in Western Europe are from the point of the victims of Viking raids and attacks.
- [28:56]
Narrator
A byproduct of the Vikings paganism is that when held up against Christendom, they are comparatively illiterate. No Bible, no libraries, no monastic scholars to record events. Anything approximating a written language is carved in a crude stick like Alphabet we know as runes, with each of its 24 characters corresponding to a vocal sound. It's a functional means of notification rather than a means of archive or record. As a result, the history of the Vikings in this early period is that their story is told by their victims, those who hate them. Evidence written by Scandinavians themselves, for instance in the epic Icelandic sagas, doesn't come until much later.
- [29:47]
Historian/Academic
Partly it's a problem that in Scandinavia writing didn't come until the conversion to Christianity, let's say around the year 1000. And so whatever was written down about the Viking age was written down hundreds of of years after the events that are being told.
- [30:06]
Narrator
One source that historians lean on heavily is the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle is an old English manuscript, a collection of annals documenting the history of the Anglo Saxon people. It was begun in the 9th century at the court of King Alfred of Wessex. It's this source that recounts the attack on the king's reeve Beadahad in Portland. The chronicle pinpoints the 8th century as the time when Viking raids kick off. This is the traditional narrative that the Viking Age begins in the late 1700s. Indeed, the Chronicle tells us that the three ships involved in the murder of Beadahad are the first ships of Danish men to come to England. Actually, we know that there were Northmen trading in England for at least a century before this. And recently analyzed DNA evidence suggests that people with Scandinavian heritage may have been present in Britain even earlier than that. Nordic remains found in the city of York have been dated to as far back as between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD, well before the wide scale Anglo Saxons Saxon settlement. And it's likely that those men on Chesil beach are not the first Scandinavians that be Adehard has ever dealt with either. The way he gallops off to confront them suggests he was not expecting trouble. It seems he thought they were merchants, not marauders.
- [31:38]
Pragya Vora
When he sees these three ships from a foreign land show up in Portland, he goes rushing down to meet them, mainly to try and get them to leave in order to go to a Kings port. And the reason for that is that when merchants come in they have dues to pay and those dues need to be paid in a Kingsport. So he wasn't really trying to shoo them away or scare them away. He was just trying to do the right thing.
- [32:10]
Narrator
Clearly, the presence of North Bend in Dorset is nothing new. What is shockingly so is the violence they mete out. If not the first Scandinavians in England, Berdahard's killers are the first recorded Vikings. It's a crucial distinction, one that we now understand, though it may not have been clear at the time, between earlier traders and these new raiders.
- [32:43]
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- [33:14]
Narrator
The Anglo Saxons may have found the Viking raiders enigmatic and terrifying, but to the Scandinavians themselves, England was less of a mystery. They likely had long standing knowledge of its shores. Before the Viking age, a network of trading settlements known as Emporia or Wicks in Old English, sprang up along rivers and coastal areas across Europe. These include Yip, Eswick and Norvick, Ipswich and Norwich. Today there's also Hamwick which becomes Southampton, while London Wick is London and Ereforwyck today's York.
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Davide Zori
Based on the trading that took place in the pre Vikings age, the Scandinavians had a great deal of information about where the towns were, where the stored wealth might be, let's say monasteries, perhaps.
- [34:09]
Narrator
Unsurprisingly, the Anglo Saxon chronicle is Anglo centric. But it's not just England where the Scandinavians have been active, perhaps even earlier. The Vikings were founding Emporia in mainland Europe and striking out towards the east.
- [34:27]
Davide Zori
They were trading even as far as what's today, Estonia, Lithuania, and we have pretty clear evidence of that.
- [34:44]
Narrator
It's 2008, we're in the village of Salme on the island of Saarema in Estonia. A team of construction workers is digging a trench for an electric cable. The bucket of the hydraulic excavator claws at the earth, breaking the ground and dragging Rubble backwards. Suddenly, one of the workers cries out for the operator to stop. The man crouches down and peers into the hole. A moment later, he holds up the object that caught his eye. It's a human skull, darkly discolored and covered in mud. His fellow workers rush forward to join him. Before long, they have retrieved a small pile of human bones, together with other strange items. Work comes to a standstill. At first, it's thought that these are the remains of a World War II soldiers. But they don't look like 20th century artifacts. An archaeologist, Marge Consa, from the University of Tartu is called in. Konsa is in no doubt that the find comes from much, much earlier. Over a thousand years, in fact. Among the items recovered, she identifies an ancient spearhead and gaming pieces. Gradually, over a period of months, Consa and her team uncover what appears to be a boat. There are no actual timbers left. They've rotted away. But the ground is discolored where they once were. And 275 iron rivets are still in place, clearly indicating the shape of a 38 foot long craft. It is a longboat of Scandinavian origin and with seven dead men buried with the ship propped up on their benches as if about to row into the next world. The men are all aged between 18 and 45. Some of the bones bear the marks of lethal wounds. These are warriors who died in battle. Konsa is in no doubt what she has uncovered is a Viking warship. But here's the thing. She and her colleagues date the burial site to between 700 and 750 AD. When a second vessel is found nearby, it's clear that this is a site of major archaeological significance. At 55ft long, it is larger and even more spectacular than the first. Remarkably, it's equipped with a mast with fragments of sail still attached. This makes it the earliest known sailing ship ever found in the Baltic.
- [37:34]
Davide Zori
And that pushes the mast and the sail on top of wooden ship back by 40 or so years. So now we're back to the middle of the 8th century. And then with that, we get this debate of when does the Viking age begin?
- [37:50]
Narrator
Inside the hull of the second boat, archaeologists make a macabre discovery. The remains of a further 33 warriors stacked neatly in rows and buried beneath a covering of shields. Isotope analysis of the men's teeth will reveal that many of them came from the Maelar Valley in Sweden. Their weapons similar to ones recovered from other boat burials there. The Salme find suggests that the Viking age began at least 50 years, possibly even a century earlier than once believed. Ship burials like those at Salm, underline just how central boats are to the lives and deaths of Viking men and women. The longboat is at the heart of a technological revolution taking place in Scandinavia. Thanks to advances in shipbuilding techniques, they're evolving into sophisticated war machines.
- [38:56]
Davide Zori
The Viking ship is the catalyst of the Viking age.
- [38:59]
Pragya Vora
They're getting more streamlined, particularly with the development of the true keel. They're more able to sail further out into the ocean. So we start getting ships that can go not just along coastlines, but can cross the open ocean and deal with the particularly the strong ocean currents that you find in the North Atlantic.
- [39:24]
Narrator
It's hard to overstate the importance of the keel to the Vikings. It was part of their cultural identity. Even the range of mountains that runs down the spine of Norway is named Sherlen, the Norse for keel. Viking longships are clinker built, which means they're made from overlapping planks. The timber used is often green wood, preferably oak, freshly hewn with axes and with pine pitch used to seal it all up. This creates an incredibly flexible structure. The planks open and close, breathing like a living creature. As the hull passes through the water,
- [40:06]
Davide Zori
it allows them to show up quickly, hold their shallow drafted ships onto the beaches and sail out quickly. They can go up the rivers with these shallow drafted boats. They can easily take down or put up their sails. So it makes these ships really versatile.
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Lars Brownworth
And because the keels are relatively shallow and the ships are clinker built, they can actually be lifted by as few as 10 men. So they can sail then up rivers as well as across oceans. And they do it at truly frightening speed. They could cover about 50 miles in a day, and even a cavalry using a good Roman road could do about 30. So the Vikings are just faster than everyone. I think the most telling example of this is for the first two centuries of the Viking Age. So roughly 800 to 1000 AD, there is no naval battle in northern Europe except between Viking fleets. So they just have complete dominance of the sea.
- [41:06]
Narrator
With their prows carved as elaborate dragons, the better to ward off evil spirits, these longships are an awesome sight. Their devastating impact is soon to be felt right across Europe. Back in England, in the wake of the attack on Beadahad and his men, Viking raids are on the increase. A charter issued in 792 by King Offa of Mercia talks of fleets of seaborne pagans causing trouble along the coast 250 miles north. A year after Offa's charter, a Viking Raid is about to take place, which will send shockwaves throughout the whole of the Christian world. It's June 8th, 793 AD. We're on the holy island of Lindisfarne, just off the northeast coast of England in the kingdom of Northumbria. There's a bleak, craggy beauty to the place. Lashed by the winds and rains of the North Sea, it faces out towards a pewter horizon. A causeway connects it with the mainland at low tide. When the tide's in, it's completely cut off. Isolated as it is, Lindisfarne is an important religious center. It's the shrine of the 7th century Hermit St. Cuthbert. A place of pilgrimage where a thriving community of monks live. They wear the coarse woolen habits of the Benedictine order, dyed black to symbolize repentance. Today, there's a new arrival. A 15 year old novice. The novice is shown round his new home by a senior monk. Like many early medieval monasteries, the sprawling abbey is a working farm. The monks grow wheat and raise cattle. The calves hides are valuable sources of vellum, a key component in the abbey's other main activity, the production of illuminated manuscripts. The novice is taken to the room where the scribes and illustrators work. The tonsured heads shaved at the crown, bowed in concentration, he gazes in wonder at the gorgeous folios taking shape inside the church. A group of pilgrims kneel before the shrine. A rich lord presents the abbot with a gold chalice, a sign of his devotion. The wealth on open display is dazzling. Gifts from esteemed pilgrims include gold and silver plates and liturgical objects studied with precious gemstones. But the most treasured object of all has been made right here at the abbey. The famous Lindisfarne Gospels. Enclosed in a priceless jewel encrusted leather binding. It may seem strange to us that such valuable artifacts are not locked away in a strong room. But as far as the monks are concerned, no Christian would dare rob the church. It would mean eternal damnation. A bell summons the monks to worship. Prayer and work, work and prayer. This will be the novice's life from now on. He is assigned to duties in the vegetable garden. On his way, he pauses at a cliff top to gaze out to sea. Suddenly, he spots a few dark specks on the horizon. The specks take take on shape their ships. Other monks join him, tracking the fleet's approach. There's no doubt now the vessels are coming towards Lindisfarne and the tide is in. Which means the community is effectively trapped on the island. The boats have appeared from the north as they get closer, the monks are able to make out the dragon. Dragon shaped prows riding the waves. The square sails too are distinctive, brightly decorated with animal symbols. These are the longships of the Norsemen. Soon the ships are close enough to hear the ferocious roar of the men sailing them and to see that they are armed. The monks can make out the shields arrayed along the sides of each round and colorful with an iron boss in the center. Some of the monks run in terror towards the church. God and the bones of St. Cuthbert will protect them. But the young novice remains rooted to the spot. He stares down as the shallow keeled boats hit the beach at speed. He sees the Norsemen leap out, their leather boots striking Northumbrian territory. In their hands, they brandish axes, swords, daggers, bows and arrows. A delegation of senior monks has gone down to the beach to find out what the men from the boats want. The novice watches in horror as they are ruthlessly struck down. One of the attackers looks up, glaring at the novice. The boy finds his feet and runs to join the others inside the church. A hail of arrows hits the door. Soon after, a violent hammering begins. Axe blades smash through the wood. The boy hides behind a pillar and watches as the attackers charge at the defenseless monks and put them to the sword. Blood washes across the floor. The air is filled with the sounds of slaughter. The crunch of blades on bones, the cries of the dying and the wolf like howls of their killers. The raiders vandalize the church and gather priceless objects. They even dig up the altar and drag that away as a final blasphemy. They rip the jeweled cover from the Lindisfarne Gospels and add it to their hall. They have no use for the pages. The novice is yanked from his hiding place. Certain that he is about to die, he utters a prayer to God. Perhaps his prayer is answered. The Vikings spare his life. For now at least. He's bound in chains and loaded into a boat. Together with other survivors, the Norsemen push their ships back into the water. A very different future awaits the novice now. So good, so good, so good.
- [48:31]
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Pragya Vora
Meet the New Avengers.
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Davide Zori
That's cool, man.
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- [49:29]
Narrator
Anglo Saxon intellectuals like the cleric Alcuin struggled to make sense of the horrific incident. A revered holy shrine destroyed by heathens, the monks murdered and trafficked into slavery. In one letter, Alcuin Behold, the church of St Cuthbert, spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments, a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples. According to the Anglo Saxon Chronicle, there were warning signs before the attack.
- [50:09]
Eleanor Barraclough
It's full of portents. It's full of, you know, the whole drama of the natural world sort of rises up in concert with these raids. You know, here there were dreadful sheets of lightning and dragons were seen flying through the air, and there was terrible famine.
- [50:26]
Narrator
Alcuin also mentions a bloody rain which fell out of a clear sky onto St. Peter's Church in York. Despite these omens, the attack on Lindisfarne stuns everyone. From the Viking perspective, everything went according to plan.
- [50:46]
Pragya Vora
The Vikings who came in, they got what they wanted. They looted, they took all the gold and silver that was held at Lindisfarne, and that was them sorted. There's. There's nothing more complex about that.
- [50:59]
Narrator
Lindisfarne has also provided them with a business model that they can scale up, targeting remote holy sites not just in England, but all across coastal Europe.
- [51:11]
Davide Zori
This is a place where wealth has been stored up, where the elites sometimes are retiring to and giving wealth to monks, so they have prayers for their souls after their death.
- [51:23]
Narrator
Monasteries like Lindisfarne are isolated and vulnerable, often underfunded, offended. They may be protected by God, but that only works if you're a believer. As for the monks, they're not.
- [51:38]
Davide Zori
These aren't the most fierce soldiers around. The Vikings, to me, are the ultimate opportunists. They're gonna go where the potential is, and they're gonna go where it's easy.
- [51:51]
Narrator
In the aftermath of the attack on Linda, the four kingdoms of England are left reeling. Panic even spreads as far as the Frankish Empire, where Alcuin is living. In a dispatch to King Ethelred of Northumbria, he writes, never before has such terror appeared in Britain. The Viking Age has truly begun. In the next episode, the Vikings step up their raids, hitting war sites in Britain and Ireland as well as northern France. Their arrival there will plunge the Frankish empire into an existential struggle, Christian versus Pagan, good versus Evil. It will culminate in an extraordinary attack on Paris, led by the most famous Northman of all, Ragnar Lothbrok. That's next time.
- [53:10]
Ian Glenn
Thanks for listening. To hear more episodes of Real Vikings right now, find the show in your podcast app and hit follow or listen@noiza.com.