How The Norsemen Became The Seafaring Vikings | Wings Of A Dragon | Timeline

their flames were burning they were soon to conquer their world they are not yet a nation and no single ruler will command their troops still for some time they will call on their pagan gods to give them strength and prosperity but soon their voices will be heard in distant lands and others will fear and admire love and hate them steadfast their axes will shape the ships that will bring their people across Europe into Asia and two lands yet unknown beyond the horizon to the west stories will be told and retold over centuries their sagas sending messages over millennia when people see their ships coming they will either be very impressed or very frightened the dragon has come for its prey and its wings will fly in the wind and carry men across oceans I think they were at least down to New York I think they were down to Florida maybe into Mexico they will be known to the world as Vikings the Vikings avoids had a bad press in European history in part because their tendency to burn down the newspaper office by attacking monasteries and other centers of literacy and this course didn't get them the good write up their names forever etched into the history of places both near and far [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] death and destruction the trails of some Vikings end in a dark vault in Copenhagen perhaps as a legacy of their violent past we have the remains of about 450 Norse Vikings from Greenland at one of the early probably one of the most early church yards in Norse Greenland there's a mass grave with 13 individuals completely dismembered bones completely jumbled up with the skulls arranged nicely along one edge of the other grave and several of the skulls had very violent cut marks from other swords or axes maybe the obvious signs of a violent life are only distracting us from the other and possibly more truthful story about a culture that rose above others and reigned for half a millennium this was once a man who worked the land in distant Greenland his remains and those of other men women and children who settled on an Arctic coast adds a chapter to an astonishing story of survival and heroism every bone now reads like the chapter out of a book giving scientists insight into daily life a thousand years ago well we look at the skeletons we can certainly see that that nutrition at least at the beginning of the settlement period was was okay we don't see any overt signs of malnutrition but the story begins in Scandinavia in the year 750 ad at one of the many small farms and villages along the coasts and waterways even though the people involved were often blond Scandinavians the term Viking is not an ethnic term and cannot be taken for any national identity there are also Slavic Vikings Irish Vikings and to go Viking is more a term for an activity that was carried out by this diverse group of people living in northern Europe at the time [Music] and Arab emissaries traveling to the north were both surprised and frightened by what they saw they are the filthiest of God's creatures every day they must wash their faces and heads and this they do in the dirtiest and filthiest fashion possible rights I've fallen in 922 also noting that they to his surprise comb their hair every day [Music] because of the thousands of miles of coastline seafaring activities have been part of a cultural heritage long before the Viking died the rich fishery along the Atlantic coast was the base for many important settlements and farms in the area were self-sufficient and affluent with dwellings for extended families [Music] gold silver glass and textiles the Vikings proudly express their beauty and status and original art [Music] [Music] but more than anything they were farmers peacefully tilling the land and clearing the forests for agriculture and at most big farms there was a boatyard over a few months a new boat would take shape [Music] based on a boat building tradition with roots going back hundreds of years the craftsman developed ships that would forever change the face of history [Music] and in the houses women would use the standing loom to weave the dragon's wings the mighty sails that gave the ships extraordinary power the Vikings were proud of their ships and artists made sure that the impression was lost on none but were they truthful or did they allow for artistic freedom when depicting the ships modern boat builders and maritime archaeologists have been puzzled for a long time over the depicted rigs of the Viking ships for the experience okay in trying to reconstruct the boats and make them sail worthy history has offered little help we have a problem with the Viking ship finds you see most of the finds have been done on very shallow water or along the coastline and in places where the local people have been able to get Edler ships and steal all the ships clear out of them and in consequence will find no Wars no rawness no sales no mast no nothing of the pia belonging to the ship only a few viking ships have been found and finds have often only consisted of scattered planks and parts of the rigging by carefully piecing together the remains Ola Kremlin P Edition and his colleagues can draw the conclusion that the Viking ship fleet was surprisingly diverse the bulky cargo ship known as a Qatar had 950 square feet of sail and became the freighter along the Vikings trading routes there are the small ships used for fishing fairing and short local travel the long boat powered by sail and oars is the warship dragon of the sagas built to put fear into enemies I'm personally very much attracted by the combination of aesthetics and functionality and this is the supreme expression of that and the Danish scientists were lucky to find several sunken Viking ships the five Viking ships from school ative extraordinary in the sense that here we have five different types of ships from the late Viking Age from the 11th century representing five different types of ships and different origins one ship from Island - from western Norway and two from Denmark it was left to Max Vina and Eric Anderson to figure out how the ships were sailed and they look at every hole and every detail to understand their functions wear and tear around the holes indicates the former direction of ropes and rigging details in a way you have to be a sailor yourself to understand all the clues you find in the finds for example and so on that's very important and it's practical sailors they didn't search for answers in books they took to the sea the tradition of the single square sail has in fact continued for more than thousand years in northern Norway where they up to the 1st grade one actually say it's little Viking ships for the Lofoten fishery among many things finding a hole in the boat and understanding how it was used as part of the Riggin sailing gave Eric and Max the final clues suddenly it all made sense and the sale of Viking times could be recreated [Music] adding the sale to a hull form people had used in this part of the world for hundreds of years was probably the single most important factor in establishing Viking rule suddenly a world of trade opened up [Music] the biggest ships were capable of transporting as much as 40 tons most often in wooden barrels but also in the form of people and farm animals despite this the ship the draught of only five feet could enter shallow harbors and at this place in northern Germany were only fields remain today a town known as height to be grew to become a powerhouse of the Viking world this is the first town and in this tone we have a very special town architecture so that it is possible that a lot of people find place on a very small site farmers became traders a rural lifestyle exchanged for an urban one maintaining control over trade and controlling the merchants routes using warfare and defensive tactics soon gave Vikings the upper hand amber eiderdown and good quality wet stones were important ingredients in the Vikings trading system and with an extensive wilderness to the north and east Vikings soon commanded the lucrative fur trade skin and fur would soon drape the kings and Sultan's of distant empires and Viking merchants would sell and trade for salt and precious metals but their bounty also included the living during the excavations in HIDA boo archaeologists found Erin handcuffs unchanged and that is a hint that here in Haida boo they sold slaves on the market no doubt the town of hai therby was a place where many different people and cultures met from here boats would depart in all directions Vikings from what is now Sweden took to their oars and sailed across the Baltic Sea entering the extensive river system which would bring them to the Caspian and Black Seas in the south to the people that they met they were known as the Rus and they soon established rule over a land which still bears their name Russia again a successful boat design with a boat that could be pulled over land when necessary gave Vikings the advantage but the trips took their toll many warriors died far away from home with the emergence of a written language their deeds and heroism were immortalized on elaborate rune stones the shots the Slavs the Davidians and the vests then said to the people of the Rus our land is great and rich but there is no order in it come to rule and reign over us the land under US control extended far and Kiev became the capital they often sailed to Constantinople but failed in two attempts to conquer the Byzantine Empire however the Emperor noted their strength and bravery and made Vikings his personal mercenary guard the Vikings were merchants elite backed by their own military power and the exact atribute infers enslaves from their slavic subjects to trade with the arabs for silver but Viking expansion whether East or West still relied on the development of the ships at the Viking ship Museum in Denmark Suren Nielsen is in charge of building replica ships but the important thing is to follow the fiber that the piece of wood which is put into the boat follows the fibers of the wood so it is it has grown in the in the right shape I make two pieces here just to show you the important thing and this piece the fibers are going here like this straight and this is a grown piece from the nature and if I hit it here as you can see here the fibers didn't follow the shape of the piece so it broke and that is the important thing as you can see in this piece of wood the fibers is following from one end to the other and therefore it's unbreakable so that is what makes this piece very strong in the forests of Viking times an industry was developed skilled boat builders looked for natural curves in the wood lines that fit the hull shape of the boat they plan to build planks were cleaved out of the tree trunk and beams carved out of the curved branches [Music] oak was definitely the preferred material but boat builders in the north of Scandinavia would have to settle for pine I think it was impossible to for one build for boat builder or ten build papers to build a boat like this it has to be you had an industry with a lot of people in the forest shopping the the big planks out and they were taking rough roughly chopped planks down to the harbour and down there there were boat builders putting the boat together today the tradition is upheld by a small team of boat builders at the Viking ship museum it was skilled ER in Denmark on this bed is the longest replica ship ever built at 100 feet in length this slender ship seems to defy the rules of boat building there is a lot of points where I think this is not strong enough this is too thin this is too weak in all those cases when when the boat is going out sailing it's it's strong enough it would be okay the ship is built using clinker technique with overlapping planks I think it's one of the few elements in life which has survived for more than thousand years in living tradition over a large part of northern Europe and North America as a true Viking heritage the design allows for a considerable flexes they can be like a dolphin in the sea move and and do not stand out as a stiff element which would hammer into the the waves this is the the the secret of the the Viking ship the modern shipbuilders decided to put their ancestors and their design to test at the Danish maritime Institute naval architect Kim Henrickson prepares for an examination of the halls characteristics the clinker construction method quickly proves its quality concept so to say of the ridership is very similar to the modern ocean raisers for example in the Volvo Ocean Race the ridership is a light displacement boats even when carrying cargo and it is skimming the surface you see there's no water friction air bubbles are forced under the boat along the overlapping boards the air works like lubrication resistance is minimal gyoon our moral egerton built and sails his own Viking ship the Viking ships they were built from the very beginning to serve your going faster than 30 knots it starts starts to serve and then it's easy to to sail as fast as 15 18 20 knots only the fastest modern sailing boats can match such speeds but it will take more than a fast ship to conquer the world the Viking sailors skills were outstanding and they dominated the oceans for nearly half a millennium initially the Vikings surfed along the coasts as long as they could see land navigation was easy once they set course over open sea the rules changed sir enter schlund a retired Danish sea captain has many things in common with his ancestral Viking captain's and he is certain they knew how to navigate the oceans a small wooden piece found during an excavation in Greenland could hold the truth - Viking navigation certainty schlund believes the piece originally looked like this and that the Sun at different times of the year would cast a shadow along the lines carved in the wood the curved line fits the sun's movement during a day in the summer in Scandinavia the curve is relevant to the sixty degrees north latitude we have been experimenting with it we have Ruud run it on the computer and they fit quite well with 60 or 61 North which is the line you saved from Canton a via to Greenland there are others that do not believe sir and tear salon can substantiate his claim about a Viking Sun compass prepared to put the theory to a test he asked for an analysis to be made by the forensic technical department of the Danish police Carl who burg took a close look at the wooden piece from Greenland he was most interested in the lines carved in the wood were they accidental or were they done for a purpose his conclusion is clear and simple conclusion Palomas my conclusion from the investigation is that the lines are purposely drawn not lions randomly carved the pine SQ r x and past old to fill the AppStore the Viking captain would hold the Sun compass horizontally and as long as the shadow fell along the line he knew that he was on a correct east westerly course and he could deduct the other directions as well in Rheem a book from late Viking times it is made absolutely clear that the Vikings had a superb knowledge of astronomical navigation for example they knew and used the knowledge of a spherical world they knew about the moon and tidal currents and they could calculate the time for Evan flow for any place on earth and the quadrant is described which made it possible for them to measure the height of the Sun make tables for its declination day by day during the year and used the Polar Star for navigation the stroke of the oars was their clock and measuring the distance they rode in a few strokes as observed by passing a floating object gave them distance over time based on all this knowledge they laid down distance charts for most European sailing routes even in the Mediterranean comparing their numbers to modern satellite navigation we can conclude that the Vikings estimations of distance were off by less than 2 to 4 percent the information and ream clearly shows that the Viking culture did not develop in isolation in Scandinavia during hundreds of years prior to this time knowledge had survived and spread from people like the Greek geographer ptolemaeus active in the second century AD or reached the Vikings from the distant Court of the Caliph of Baghdad but the experienced Mariner would also use other signs for navigation he knew that whales would appear when approaching Iceland and that sea birds in the air indicated he was fairly close to land following the flying birds would bring him ashore in the early 8th century Irish monks seeking voluntary exile for service to God drifted ashore on the remote island of Iceland stories telling of their arrival must have reached the Vikings in Norway and prompted the first wave of emigration to the new land the Vikings of the North Atlantic were known as the Norse middle ranking chieftains were outmaneuvered by others as the kingdoms of Scandinavia slowly formed saw their chance to rule by finding a new land I think that it's useful to distinguish between the mindset of the Chieftains were going out mainly to find someplace where they could be chieftain almost all of them had lost power struggles someplace further east either in Norway going to Iceland or in Iceland then going to Greenland I think for the other people are going with the Chieftains basically they were looking for land that they were looking for a better life they're looking for someplace where they could be more prosperous farmers they brought their extended families slaves and their animals to Iceland a whole farming community relocated many early settlers were also of mixed Norse Celtic marriages and some scientists claim East European Slavs were also among the first at the beginning of the settlement period Iceland had extensive forests but within 50 years the land was cleared possibly for obtaining timber but more likely to clear the land for grazing anthropologist Tom McGovern at Hunter College in New York has sifted through the remains of early settlements in Iceland is easy to see the Viking colonizers of North Atlantic coming in and essentially infecting these these virgin lands with European insects and themselves and destroying the ecosystem it's quite clear that when the Vikings moved out across the North Atlantic they carried with them a set of ideas in their head about what they wanted in terms of an ideal farm it certainly included pigs cows sheep goats horses the whole mix that they had grown up with for thousands of years back in Europe as they introduced this package into the North Atlantic it had impacts it caused deforestation it caused the loss in many cases of grass and opening up of erosion but another part of the Viking settlement strategy was that people arriving later were forced to rent their animals from the pioneers who in turn grew richer and politically stronger for late comers it was also difficult to gain access to fertile land and many of them probably thought about moving on to new virgin territories it was still a tough life in Iceland on the threshold between the old pagan religions and the promises made by Christianity some would not give up the heathen traditions such as eating horse meat committing infanticide or sticking to pagan burial traditions [Music] [Music] the remote colony had a choice but had no timber available for houses and ocean-going vessels a trade pact with Norway which hinged on the Norwegians demand that the landed here to Christendom was inevitable but on the Icelandic farms stories were told of distant lands cited by brave seafarers for many young Norse the stories and sagas created dreams of a different life but they also describe the dangers of going further west the arne then spoke our journey will be thought and he considered one since none of us sailed the Greenland Sea despite this they set sail and sailed for three days until the land had disappeared under the horizon they were beset by winds from the north and fog for many days they didn't know where they were safe Eric the Red a low-ranking chieftain fled west after slaying a man in Iceland his was the first attempt to settle a new land further west after rough times in the pack ice they were rewarded by a beautiful sight in the years to come Eric the red now the highest-ranking ruler of a new land sold his concept of a green land to followers creating an exodus out of Iceland which was torn by religious and political disagreements but the first convoy to sail to Greenland was hit hard of the 25 ships leaving Iceland only 14 made it to Eric the red settlement his promise of a green land was not a lie a thousand years ago the climate was much warmer than it is today and in sheltered fjords the forests grew tall grazing areas were good and soon some 3,000 people occupied hundreds of new farmsteads along the southwest coast of Greenland [Music] [Music] if and when the ships reached the southernmost tip of Greenland they could find shelter away from the pack ice today a group of Danish archeologists are trying to paint a picture of harriel sness the community that grew here they do not find a lot of remains but one unearthed discovery is especially interesting what we believe to have found here is a north pole house it is a shipshape building no wall towards the sea so we believe it's a house that they have pulled up there built boats maybe during the winter so that they had shelter for storms and things like that and we believe this to be one of many norse boat houses in Greenland so this is just the start of a bigger project maybe this is also the shipyard the wharf were battered ships could be repaired before attempting ongoing journeys further West for the Vikings this was a new world and they had yet to learn how to make the most of it many things were new and surprising [Music] the Inuit and the Norse arrived in Greenland about the same time the Inuit arrived in the north crossing over from Arctic Canada the meeting was probably a surprise to both and even though there were stories of hostilities the encounter was most likely friendly unlike the Norse the Inuit already knew which Arctic resources were their rope made out of sealskin ivory from walrus tusks and fur from seals and polar bear the ivory in rope in particular made highly prized trading goods that made the Greenland colony flourish and made European traders willing to maintain regular contacts but Christianity grew stronger and even the pagan chieftain Eric the red was forced to build a small church for his wife and we can only guess what was on the bargaining table but the Norse true to their trading reputation also made Christianity a source of income renting their small churches to settlers who needed consecrated earth for their dead [Music] Barney a daring young Norseman once lost his way at sea and drifting in fog to a land he didn't know but he was sure it wasn't the Greenland he had heard of his story of an unnamed land sparked the interest of other Norse sailors one of them was Eric the red Sun life Eriksson the currents and wind patterns close to Greenland favor a trip to North America the ever-present fog is a problem but by riding the currents a ship would slowly approach Baffin Island Leif Erikson called this barren land held Island meaning slab land because of its stony appearance they sailed on to the South they encountered forests and the further south they went the taller with the trees he called the placemark land the land of trees encouraged by what they saw they continued they spent two days at sea with the northeasterly winds before they saw land they sailed towards it and came to an island in the fine weather they found jus on the grounds that they collected in their hands and drank and thought they had never tasted anything as sweet archaeologist Brigitta Wallace has followed in life Erickson's footsteps finding the remains of his and other Norse expeditions to North America she knows the Vikings called their Newfoundland Finland the land of wine and she is convinced that the name reflects the finds they made looking for Vinland I think I really like to turn my map upside down and remember we are coming from Greenland and here is lonesome meadows in northern Newfoundland where I worked and I think Vineland is this all the coast around the Gulf of st. Lawrence the only remains of a Norse settlement found in North America at present-day lanzi meadows is most likely late Erikson's original camp as described in the sagas there has been a long debate over the accuracy of the sagas accounts the stories were written down more than 200 years after the original events took place and details have no doubt been lost or changed through oral storytelling over time but enough can be verified through archaeology to allow for a number of conclusions the men dominated but some women were along to do the what was normal female choice such as cleaning cooking how maintenance of clothing we can also guess that the exploration team consisted of a strong leader a skilled craftsman and a number of slaves the sagas also tell us that the trips were exploratory but that if they found the right place they would settle and establish a colony there a lot of artifacts found at the North site indicate that boats were repaired there they had arrived in their large vessels but had smaller dinghies in tow we know that the blacksmith was busy making new rivets to replace corroded ones and to attach new planks to the hull close to the boat repair site archaeologists found lumps of corroded iron using x-ray photography revealed the old rivets inside but one of the most striking results from excavations is the neutron analysis of Jasper stone used for making fire Jasper found in the bedrock in Greenland Iceland and North America was tested and compared to the stones found at the ruins in Newfoundland the stones in the largest building came from Greenland suggesting that this was the house of Leif Ericson who had come from their fire strikers in the next house originated from Iceland fitting in well with the sagas description of Erikson's companions coming from Iceland butternuts found at the site indicate that the Explorers had been to the inner parts of the Gulf of st. Lawrence which was the nearest place to find these nuts and the wild grapes which produced the much-sought-after wine came from warmer climes from the tip of Newfoundland the norse must have launched journeys to other sites it's not very likely that so ambitious people as they were would have been content to stay after a very cold place in Newfoundland or in the northern places where they had sea ice half of the year Icelandic writer Paul berry Thorsen's theories have sparked a debate especially his claim that the north sailed to present-day New York none of this has been substantiated in archaeological discoveries we know there was a Norse an important Dorset and in northern Newfoundland and I have a very hard time to see that they would continue all the way south to New York already in the Gulf of st. Lawrence you get the most wonderful resources to a Norseman why would anybody bother to go further sailing along Newfoundland and Nova Scotia's coasts is still tough work today a millennium after life Erickson's original voyage Gunnar Morrow Edgerton decided to sail the same distance from Iceland to Greenland and to North America smaller replica ships joined him along the Newfoundland coast to commemorate the Vikings original journey but only the bigger books could have sailed farther and as a sailor goona is convinced he knows the mindset that was life Erickson's and his followers their thinking is no different than his own today we are always trying to get further and further that's in the nature of man for a for a Viking on a Viking ship to sail to tomatos Newfoundland and stop there would be really stupid thing to do I think they were at least down to New York I think they returned to Florida maybe into Mexico when Gunnar sails into New York Harbor he is certain that the sagas have accurately described this as one of the places the Norse explorers traveled to Paul Barry Thorson is of the same opinion the harbour of New York is I think what they called hope which means she lagoon actually which it is and they told about a river flowing from North that she Hudson River call Stephanie and his company sailed into the lagoon and called the land whoo there they found fields of self sown wheat and vines growing on the hills they dug trenches along the high-water mark and when the tide ebbed there were holy fish in them Paul berry Thorsen's conclusion is that the settlement of hop could have been situated at present-day Brooklyn and that the fish they found was the winter flounder the sagas tell us about the Norse meeting Native Americans the Norse speaking derogatory terms of the natives calling them scalings one of the passages in the sagas which is hard to understand initially was why this grayling as the Native Americans went from happily trading with the Norse one day accepting strips of red cloth and buckets full of milk for vowed for furs and then the next day they come back angry and they don't even talk they just start fighting and of course today we know what happened the screenings went home and drank the milk coming from hunting and gathering population they are lactose intolerant most them couldn't digest the milk and reacted to it as though they've been poisoned I'm sure they assume that they were and came back looking for revenge the day after so I think that that milk is certainly part of the reason why scaling and Norseman got along badly in North America there would be no peaceful coexistence with the Native Americans the Norse had no superior weapons and knew that they were losing the battle it's very easy to tell from the sagas that the Norse were fearful of the Aboriginal people already in North America and why shouldn't they be I mean they were outnumbered by the thousands karlsefni and his men had realized by now that although the land was excellent they could never live there in safety or freedom from fear because of the native inhabitants so they made ready to leave the place and return home but perhaps the attempt to settle a new land was ill-fated from the beginning you can't start a new settlement with just a couple of handful of people you need hundreds and they didn't have hundreds to spare the attempt to stay in North America went on for possibly as much as 40 years and even though the sagas only mentioned five different trips we have reasons to believe that many more ships sailed along these coasts on returning to Greenland these people soon faced a new problem the climate had turned for the worse and farming became increasingly difficult the climate theory to explain the Norse demise in Greenland has been the accepted fact for a long time but scientists are starting to challenge this theory pointing more at ecological and socio-economic factors that added to the existing climatic aproblem x' danish scientist Nadja Mickelson is looking for new evidence there are many theories why the North disappeared from Greenland one of them is that they actually caused heavy erosion in the area by over grazing and by cultivating the landscape making grass for their guests livestock and cattle and what we want to do is we want to see whether we can prove that theory or disprove it by finding heavy sand deposits and soil erosion in this area other evidence comes from the bones left behind in the houses we see evidence that the bones released smashed up very finely and it looks as though they've gone the trouble of making this bone soup extracting a last bit of good from the bones we have in several sites in the Western settlement area dog bones cut sometimes gnawed on the uppermost floor layers the houses Norse people at Iceland and Greenland and elsewhere didn't normally eat their dogs but it looks as though in that the final day is in these settlements that that made for it all have happened so we do have evidence for something really bad happening in the Western settlement the end starvation took its toll more bodies ended up in the Greenland churchyards and the people who died far when Vinland North America were also brought back home to Greenland for burial as Christians they had to be buried in consecrated earth [Music] I'm now walking on one of those such which we think could be a church on my left hand you have the defense around the churchyard and on my right the ruin but to be sure that it's actually is a church we have to excavate as soon as we have found a grave with a skeleton in we know that people have been buried here and we are sure that we have found in a church back in Copenhagen archaeologist Jetta Arne Borg has teamed up with medical doctor niels linear at the Panama Institute hoping that his analyses can shed light on the Norseman's final days in Greenland using tooth enamel for analyses provides some of the answers the oxygen isotope readings from the teeth made it clear that this climate change which we knew from ice-cold borings also directly affected the humans living up there the bones also show signs of more infections and the possibility that people got shorter perhaps as a result of malnutrition which could indicate that indeed living conditions deteriorate somewhat over the four five hundred years of living in in Greenland but who or what is the blame for this change to life in Greenland what about the animals did they contribute to the problems of survival nausea hasn't found the sand deposits she's looking for so this seems to indicate that it wasn't the Norse who actually caused any soil erosion and that the decline of the Norse culture here in Greenland wasn't caused by them over grazing and destroying the coal is their landscape but no doubt the climate became colder and the fjords were blocked by more ice the residents couldn't bring timber in from Labrador or Norway and maintaining the ships was very difficult what did happen was the ice lenders and the green lenders become increasingly isolated increasingly dependent on other people's ships to come to them and it's sort of a terrible irony these two initially great seafaring peoples wind up being effectively landlocked by their lack of seagoing ships as the Scandinavian kingdoms formed in the 12th and 13th centuries the Viking Age came to an end in Europe but the Norse in Greenland continued to live for another 200 years as they had done for almost half a millennium and then suddenly they were gone only ruins remained in green not a single Norseman I don't think we need a catastrophe to explain why the north's disappeared with lower population numbers a slow and orderly immigration over a hundred to two hundred years could explain why the Norse settlements were abandoned the Vikings in the Norse remained Europeans to the bitter end not opting to live like the Inuit people and survive in an Arctic land for many of them the final Viking voyage was back to Iceland Scandinavia or other European sites where they would be comfortable and feel at home but the Vikings had forever made their mark on shipbuilding maritime navigation and naval language the dragon had folded its wings but history will always remember the people who made the Viking voyages you [Music] you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: death, BBC documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic, Documentary, Viking Voyages, Norse, Viking Documentary, History, documentary history, TV Shows - Topic, Documentaries, Channel 4 documentary, Full Documentary, Viking dragon, Dragon, history documentary, Full length Documentaries, Europe, Voyages, Scandinavia, 2017 documentary, Viking, destruction, stories, real

Id: hOsTfZ8gTM8

Length: 52min 4sec (3124 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 01 2018