The Ancient Sagas of Iceland | The Viking Sagas | Timeline

hi everyone welcome to this timeline documentary just before you watch i want to tell you about my new history channel it's called history hits it's like the netflix for history it's got hundreds and hundreds of his documentaries on there and interviews with some of the world's best historians we're adding new stuff all the time for example today i'm filming in this one of the few remaining lancaster bombers for a show about the dambusters raid in 1943. if you want to know more about history hit follow the information just below this video or search online for history it and make sure you use the code timeline to get a special introductory offer now enjoy this show every country has its treasure trove of beloved tales but one nation has an unrivalled passion for storytelling for 10 centuries icelanders have been enthralled by a series of homespun stories they're some of the most wonderful tales ever told how they came to be written is one of the great mysteries of the dark ages a thousand years ago at the edge of the arctic circle there was an explosion of creativity which remains pretty much unparalleled in history when the vikings came here to iceland one of the first things they did strangely was to settle down and begin telling each other tales these sagas as they're now known are some of the greatest stories ever told they're haunted by ghosts and plagued by witches mighty heroes ride to the rescue wielding magical swords the sagas captivated audiences 10 centuries ago and they're still entertaining millions of people today they're about money and sex and you know and death and if this is just you know the essence of good story sex and death this is probably the greatest book ever written you know this is magnificent story both has everything's good novel is supposed to have she has love and bottle and great poet and everything it's everything [Music] the sagas are not only great works of fiction they're based on the lives of real people and they challenge many of the stereotypes of the viking age they revealed the power scandinavian women wielded they were explorers and colonisers they may even have written some of the sagas iceland's ancient tales also had a profound effect on us the sagas influenced many of britain's greatest writers and inspired some of our most treasured stories [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] this is how great stories begin with a journey a quest a search for a promised land [Music] and so it is with the sagas they recount the moment when norwegian exiles set sail in their long ships [Music] they defied the wild oceans to found a brave new world [Music] they named it iceland i wonder what the first settlers here in iceland thought when they arrived it's the least likely of promised lands certainly the strangest place i've ever been to it feels prime evil like a woolly mammoth should come lumbering along the horizon there's nothing growing here there's no trees or crops and under the ground there's no iron ore or gold and yet these hardy pioneers didn't just turn tail and sail off in their longboats they stayed and tried to create something out of this extraordinary landscape and what they created was truly magical [Music] words [Music] foreign [Music] iceland is where europe ends and the arctic begins it's more than 700 miles northwest of scotland remote far flung isolated [Music] but when it comes to the world of words this country has always been one of the centres of literary activity one in ten icelanders is a published author and this love of letters began long ago with the writing of the sagas i think all modern icelandic writers they have their background in this one way or the other during the centuries we didn't have any universities no academies and we didn't have many types of arts no architectures no no theaters no music no opera no sculptures no ballet of course maybe if you look at our history this is the only thing that we have ever been good at it's writing stories and telling stories the greatest of these stories are known as the family sagas they're set in the first 150 years of iceland's history from the original settlement in 870 a.d the sagas were written down in the 13th and 14th centuries in just over a hundred years dozens and dozens of stories were composed it's a creative outpouring that has few parallels in history well it was very very remarkable that such a lot of such a large volume of literature should come out of this really relatively tiny ice uh tiny island with you know really a very small population but remarkable too is the the genres the forms of this literature while the rest of medieval europe was writing courtly romances about knights and princesses the icelanders were creating dramas about real families in real locations doing real things the thing that they're most like actually is much much later 19th century novels they're they're um they're in prose they're naturalistic they they um deal with social issues so they're they're big expansive narratives you see something that is so much in common with our time and in this time so you feel wow this is really humid that's how human being is you know you get something like ah we have no chance in a way i know this it's like peep into a hole into our class and say they're doing the same thing they are of course about in essence always about a very primitive thing they are about the inner circle in human action about you know lust and power and fight and they're about you know they're about the glue that band sauce out of the many sagas that were written four or five are classics but there's one in particular that's always intrigued me we all love a good story the who the thought when you're flicking through a book at bedtime or lying reading on the beach that this is where it all began one of the first great works of fiction the pages may be blackened by the passage of time but despite being over 700 years old the story still leaps out at you it's got everything a good book needs love and lust violence betrayal and revenge it's called lax de la saga and in my opinion it's the greatest of the icelandic sagas laksdella means salmon river valley and it's in the rich farming and fishing country of north west iceland that the story takes place the lax de la saga charts the fortunes of the families who settle in the area it follows their triumphs and tragedies over several generations the love affairs the blood feuds the marriages the murders the story is rooted in a timeless landscape it's still possible to pinpoint the fells and fjords where key events occurred this sense of place underpins the relationship between icelanders and their ancient stories this happens in my area these characters are my forefathers and they are still in my mind as they you know i know the farmers who lives on their farm and i found a similarity to them [Music] i don't think we have so much change since this time we are still the same farmers as we were in these days and i almost imagined myself when i was for example taking sheep down from the mountains i was sometime thinking about these things that they have done i'm in the same steps as they were and they were there and there and there [Music] you start blackstar lasaga with a portrait of the great matriarch and her nickname is the deep-minded what's the deep-minded mean clever wise with a huge memory philosophical what a wonderful epithet what a surprising maybe epithet for for a a woman in in a saga they're deep-minded at la breda [Music] m many of the characters in the sagas are real people the moments of high drama can be traced to genuine historical events and few moments are more dramatic than the discovery of the new land so who are the first settlers in this area then that was either the deep-minded erdogans we call it on iceland she she was she came sailing up this bay and had settlement over there by the other end of the base she settled there on a farm called clander so it's a woman it was a woman yes tell me a bit about her then she was uh she probably came here on the year of 892. she she came from scotland that is what happened is that her husband went into battle there and he died and and she had to go away with her crew and and she established a crew on the boat made the boat ready yet uh so nobody nobody was supposed to know it and then she sailed away from scotland she was what you should say running away from there but but that was a magnificent that a woman could do that on those those days so she so the first settler in this area is a woman yeah and she's scottish yes and she's able to control a boatload of men yes commander and then what happened when she got here she settled down in in this farm called kwameren and what she did is that she gave her crew all the men got independency they they they lived here in this area in the stylish isla area you can imagine that she must have been at least a very big woman very big-minded you can imagine that she she must have been very clever and she must have been very fair she was fair to people she gave everybody with her so she must have been what she does is a very big woman in mind she must have been great woman wonderful gosh and she earns the title and the deep-minded yes yes it's a good it's a very apt one isn't it it tells a lot yeah about it [Music] is it really possible that a thousand years ago a british woman colonized part of iceland it sounds like the stuff of adventure fiction not historical fact [Music] but recent archaeological evidence actually supports the story told in the lax della saga [Music] this is the skeleton of one of the first settlers in iceland she's a woman only 25 years old when she died she was probably someone's wife mother daughter she's here in a position of rest just as she was laid in the ground a thousand years ago and it was precisely this time that the lax de la saga was being composed but is there any truth to these tales that iceland was settled by foreign women well dna studies on bones just like this have shown that while the majority of the male population were coming over from the nordic homelands in scandinavia over 60 percent of the women were british so this evidence shows us that right from the word go iceland was a multicultural melting pot [Music] [Laughter] the story of on the deep-minded shows us how close the links were between iceland and the british isles both countries were staging posts in a maritime empire which stretched from norway right across the north atlantic and beyond [Music] here we have a collection of silver coins discovered in iceland and dated to the turn in the first millennium but what's really remarkable about this collection is the majority of coins are english at this point around the year a thousand over two-thirds the british isles was ruled directly by vikings and here we have a payment known as the dan geld which was made by the english kingdoms to the vikings in order to keep them off their land but we've also got coins here from germany and arabia and the middle east which shows that the vikings were also raiding trading and settling right across the known world the viking age began in the 8th century over the next 300 years they raided traded and settled leaving a profound mark on europe and especially the british isles well i suppose the most obvious effects are on place names i mean so many place names in in northern and eastern england just thinking about where i grew up there was thornaby olmsby norman b the language of course um that's even more obvious if you like um there's the scandinavian long words are very basic words so they're words like husband window law egg and even the pronoun system in english is derived from scandinavian pronouns so they them there they're derived from the scandinavian pronouns not from the the corresponding old english ones [Music] the scandinavian settlements resulted in a thorough enrichment of english society [Music] the vikings who settled britain had to fit in alongside other people but the scandinavians who sailed to iceland found an uninhabited land here the vikings had to build a new nation from scratch and what they created was unique for the dark ages [Music] we're in this very significant place aren't we it's got geographical and political and spiritual significance can you tell me a little bit more about it this is the site of the al thinking the early meeting place of the icelandic commonwealth where people came from all over the country to discuss legal matters formulate a new law and settle disputes so history more or less happened in this location [Music] this is a parliament that the settlers come up with here after a few decades of living in the country as a free man and they sit here in a very structured assembly that has a democratic function in a way for free farmers and males and and decide by voting is it unusual in terms of what what's going on elsewhere in europe at this time uh in terms of european history this is quite unique because they don't have a king they don't have a centralized power and that is the beauty of the system you have independent chieftains coming together and they decide on something and execute whatever is decided [Music] iceland has set up a nation from about from from 870 onwards and they set up a parliament and they set up a legal system and in a way i think perhaps that the the outpouring of literature um that you get in iceland this huge flowering of not just sagas but also um unique kinds of poetry i think maybe that was part of being a new nation that you had a terra nova and you didn't only um settle that and build it up as a nation socially you also inscribed a kind of literary culture the first things that were written were family trees tracing the icelanders back to very noble people in scandinavia and i think one of the reasons they did this may have been that there were rumors in our neighboring countries about the people that moved to iceland right in the years of around 900 or 1000 were mostly anti-social elements thieves fugitives murderers people that didn't survive around civilized people so maybe the first reaction was when they had this alphabet and could write down they were building these family trees saying that this was the most noble people because all icelanders they can trace their roots back to kings and queens and and even oden and tor and so on [Music] for some storytelling may have served an even more profound function reminding them of the homes and loved ones which they would never see again while a few british women like allen the deep-minded chose to settle in iceland others were brought by force one of the next characters we meet in the lax de la saga is a concubine today we call her a sex slave she's been abducted from ireland her name is malcorka most of the women they were bought either in slave markets in scandinavia or brought directly from the british isles mostly from ireland of course when they came here they became a part of the population and the male culture the scandinavia became dominant their language and so on but they had an experience for uh generations of telling stories in their own language and even writing books in their own language the celts the book of celts and so on there's something really interesting taking place in icelandic literature then you've got this male population with the oral tradition of storytelling combined with this influx this exodus of women coming from britain so the celtic influence could be this idea that you take that literature and then write it down absolutely absolutely foreign women like mel corker weren't just characters in the sagas these lonely literate exiles may have helped create the sagas by writing down their stories in the lax de la saga we find out that melkorka the irish slave girl is pregnant by her master a viking called hospit [Music] [Music] [Music] is olaf is a major character in the early part of the saga he's kind and wise he marries and raises a family olaf has one child that he doubts upon a boy called kyatan [Music] foreign olaf also has another lad a foster son by the name of botley botley is a gifted child but he grows up in kyatan's long shadow olaf's family and farm are flourishing all is going well rather too well of course it's at this point that a new and sinister character enters the story [Music] sorcery is ever present in the sagas reflecting the viking belief that magic really could transform the lives of ordinary folk [Music] [Music] [Music] today we modern people we we often look at magics as some kind of superstitions it's difficult for us to understand it because we live in another time and perhaps in another world in a way but for them that was a real thing they knew they they knew that they could achieve something by doing some rituals and the with that they could affect the world around them both in good and bad ways of course in a way it was very much practical magic to let the cow build more magics to let the grass grow faster [Laughter] and therefore people had some kinds of magics that could could help them to to to look more positive in in the coming days and and have extra power to to to survive but sorcery could also be used to maim and kill for vikings curses were weapons of malign magical power the world in iceland has always been the most important thing in in in the whole culture people believed that if if you had the power to control the the language and and put the words in out of your mouth in the right order then it could give you actually more power [Music] [Music] inherits the cursed sword and with the handing over of the weapon the story takes a new turn the focus shifts to kyatan and botley and a beautiful young woman with whom their fate will be intertwined [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] there are many leading ladies but towering above them all is gudrun a complex and tempestuous beauty the number of strong women characters is a striking feature of the lacks de la saga so too is the delight the writer takes in clothes and jewelry love and romance and this has led some historians to question the authorship of the saga so we'd think that probably the traditional view of the sagas is that they're very heroic tales they're written by men four men and starring men is that the case with lex de la saga no i think it's the other way around an islamic scholar professor halka cress has suggested that the writer the the the one who wrote down like style of sora was a woman there are so many scenes in that book that tell you about women's lives it must have been told by women and listened to by women and you see up to the time of television probably you would have storytelling evenings in iceland in the farmhouse you have this long winter months eight or nine months and you have to pass the time there's no telling so you tell stories [Music] you would have people sitting on those benches on both sides of the long house and you would have one person at the in the middle reading or telling stories [Music] women's domain is within the house the man's domain is without them so storytelling must have been a great part of life of women just as men absolutely so we have this saga centered on women possibly told by women about women women's roles within society definitely i would say so yes this is the site of one of the greatest romances in all of icelandic literature it's the hot spring at the tiny hamlet of laughing laughar is gudrun's home and it's at this spa that kyatel and gudrun begin their courtship gudrun falls passionately in love but kyatan is a true viking he's consumed not by love but by lust wonderlust with marriage beckoning he up sticks and leaves iceland [Music] jarton and buckley sail away to norway they arrive in scandinavia at a pivotal moment in european history [Music] take a look at this amazing little object this man just oozes character he's got a flamboyant moustache deep penetrating eyes and really strong features he's wearing this conical hat and he's sitting on a chair holding a very weird looking object but when we take a closer look you can see that the hat is in fact a crown he's seated on a throne and the object could be either an upside down crucifix or the hammer wielded by the pagan god thaw as he creates thunder this wonderful little man encapsulates the moment when the viking world has one foot in the pagan past and one in the christian future this is a ceremony to mark the end of summer and the beginning of winter it's the last remnant of a once mighty faith the religion of odin and thor norse paganism the word paganism comes in many negative connotations it might seem odd peculiar perhaps even a little sinister but that's because for 2 000 years christians have been writing tracts and treaties that damn these so-called pagans to hell in fact for thousands of years this norse paganism was the religion of the scandinavian people it helped them make sense of the universe it acted as a comforter to them in times of need and it even helped them chart the passage of time it's a mark of its influence that it's still doing this today [Music] a thousand years ago this ancient religion was under attack from a new crusading faith christianity [Music] the man who was driving the conversion of the vikings was olaf the king of norway were there reasons then for converting to christianity what were the benefits basically joining the european the union thing right so it was trade and yeah it was great because the markets were closing down uh we couldn't no longer to trade with england because uh they would not accept pagans and for a period of years so people could do what they call prime signing which was uh uh basically uh crossing yourself before you did cameras but that was no longer accepted denmark was basically a very strong question norway had become christian after one bloody battle sweden was about to become christian so it was basically everything was closing so it was a very practical business decision but many people didn't want to give up the faith of their ancestors the icelanders resisted christianity to make them convert the norwegian monarch king olaf decides to keep kyaten as a sort of vip hostage the king's sister ingibjorg keeps kyotan entertained in medieval courtly romance the hero would have escaped from norway and returned to his true love but what sets the family sagas apart is their realism what's so surprising is that the characters are archetypal kind of hum it's so easy to identify with the characters i mean sometimes deceptively easy we forget how very different their circumstances and beliefs and cultural traditions were but the characters in family sagas um are their feelings and their failings their hopes and their fears their their passions and and and their weaknesses they're very easy to identify carton is not only beautiful and good you know he's also he come on he's doing the princess in in norway and he's not a holy figure or a holy guy all the literature in europe is very christian in that sense that there are martyrs there are good guys and they're bad guys and and good things happen to good guys and bad things happen to bad guys in the saras this is not so desires can be about bad guy an [ __ ] that does something very bad to everybody and has success with it is happy to stay in norway but botley wants to go home before he leaves he criticizes kyotan for the way he's treating goodren [Music] [Music] sister botley arrives home he tells gudrun about kyatan's affair with the king's sister the reason for his anger with kyota now becomes clear botley is in love with gudrun a few months later he takes a fateful step and proposes in the year 1000 iceland finally converts to christianity chiatun is free to return home he brings with him a wedding gift a priceless headdress for his fiancee goodrun kyarton has the bridal gift but not the bride he marries another woman but he's consumed by what he sees as a double betrayal there were regular feasts in the area so the two couples botley and goodren and kyotan and his new wife couldn't avoid each other whenever they met kyarton publicly humiliated godren and he spurned botley's attempts at reconciliation with each slight the hatred grew the precious headdress that was supposed to have been goodruns was now the property of chiarton's new wife and this headdress became the focus of the feud one particular feast the headdress goes missing everyone suspects it's gudrun's doing if she can't have it then no one can with the destruction of the headdress kyarton's pent-up fury explodes he barricades botley and gudrun in their home cutting them off from the toilets which are outside is deliberately inflicting maximum humiliation [Music] revenge is the kind of engine of quite a lot of saga narrative because obviously if you get a feud for instance that's going to kind of keep on through generations for instance resentments build up a number of family sagas it's these proud uh independent women who are pushing the vengeance and it's quite often the men who are trying to kind of dump it down by due lethal process and make settlements and the women are inciting the violence as in laxter guzrun provoking motley to kill kiaptan because she can't bear not to be married to him goaded on by his wife butley and his men ride out to confront kyoto so siggy the tension is really mounting in the saga now isn't it gudrun has goaded her brothers and botley to ambush kyotan and then then what happens this is the place where everything happened carton was coming from this direction with his friend he was coming from surprise and and potly and the brother of gudrun they came from this direction and probably they picked up this place because they the valley is slimmers here and probably they were staying or we think that they were staying up there in the hill on the reds there there's a hole down there very deep hole and they could hide themselves with the horses and having look to both directions easily so when when captain is in this direction they saw that they could fight him then they went down here and attack him of course they were attacking him three or four attacking one person so it must have been a lot of noise with weapons they were three four attacking one person a lot of sweat probably some plot because carton was punishing him a little bit with his sword and it was a paired sword so you can imagine that he got tired for example you can imagine that it was a lot of hype eating and they were they were tired [Music] kyarton fights bravely but finally he weakens with his strength failing he turns and addresses bockley [Music] so [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign virgins blood has been shed the curse of leg biter has been fulfilled all this sorcery and violence and vengeance has led to this a bloodied corpse lying on the ground botley has killed his brother and his best friend he's broken two of the great viking taboos by severing the sacred bonds of friendship and family what must he be feeling right now intense guilt profound shame or perhaps a sense of deep foreboding because the wheels of revenge have now been set in motion a posse tracks down botley and slaughters him goodren sends her son to avenge his murder both families are trapped in a bloody spiral of revenge it seems that the feud might go on forever but then the saga takes an unexpected twist [Music] gudrun the woman who has helped send kyatan and botley to early graves converts to christianity and becomes iceland's first nun it's an unlikely act of repentance was it genuine or not i'm not sure i don't know but i do think that's you know perhaps those who told the story the audience may like the flair of that perhaps you know it's a way for the for the author or the authors if you can say that that you know this perhaps this woman was just you know there was no one worthy of her but the king of kings gudrun's repentance sent out an important social message in the 13th century when the lax de la saga was being written down the republic had disintegrated iceland was racked by civil war and this may have persuaded the writers to pen an overtly christian ending some chieftains are getting more powerful than they should be according to the quota system for power and influence that was set up in the beginning and they seem to long for peace in the texts that we have so the saga tests they are written with the idea in mind to show how christianity brought peace to the country what gets them into problem is that pagan ethics and the code of ethics that tells you that you have to take revenge and one revenge after another and leads to more death and in the text you see that christianity is believed to bring peace and forgiveness into society finally calming down the feuds family views that have been going on for generations and you can just stop and go to rome and be blessed and live happily ever after peace came in 1262 but at a heavy price [Music] the icelanders were forced to accept the rule of the norwegian king it was the prelude to centuries of suffering things went downhill for the icelanders we were almost extinct because of of diseases starvation isolation and so on and do you at that time maybe one of the reasons that we survived the few who did was because they had this mythology based in the literature we were we were taking all our courage and all our identity from the sagas this was what we based our hope and ambitions on [Music] ironically just when iceland's pain was most acute britain was discovering the great stories iceland had produced in the 18th century the sagas reached our shores they had a profound influence on one of our greatest poets i think it's a very very big influence actually on on blake's work i mean perhaps one of the most characteristic things about about blake's poetry and and one of the most notoriously difficult things really is that he he has um created this huge and hectic mythological world this he's created a kind of alternative blackian mythology so many of blake's poems contain elements derived from old norse myth very significant i think by the 19th century more and more writers were borrowing from norse literature [Music] britain was hooked on the romance and heroism of the viking age victorian entrepreneurs industrialists and explorers i had a kind of fellow feeling with with what they saw as the viking achievement that is the exploring the white heat the the white heat of technology the the new ships the the seafaring the great ships of the of the vikings and that sense of independence and and and taking your fit in your own hands and and getting ahead and so on [Music] the influence of icelandic literature reached its high watermark in the 20th century in the work of one famous oxford academic tolkien taught road north talking published on old norse and tolkien's imaginative world was was surely shaped by his reading of old north and a lot of the rings he definitely uses names that he's called from his old norse reading actually the silmarillion which people don't read so much echoes more some of the themes of of of the sagas this betrayal and and darkness in the same religion so i think tolkien was really steeped in old nose literary culture through tolkien the world had woken up to the power of the ancient stories but in iceland the sagas had never gone away generation after generation had fallen in love with these strange otherworldly tales [Music] it's very unusual in britain for people to read such old literature and find it exciting still why is it the sagas are so exciting just the drama and the action you know a girl can choose who he marries if she wants someone and the brothers don't like him they say no and if he doesn't understand they kill him i think it's the revenge and what they believe in because they believe in very strange things very strange things what sort of things um like when someone cheated on their wife they like have to kill him and burn them something like that so that's enjoyable to read now sometimes yeah i think it's just very interesting that we live the way they lived or around the places that they did yeah it's like learning about your ancestors and what they did in the past yeah somebody cheats on your wife they kill him she's just creepy that's mostly fun to read actually [Music] the sagas were written to help the vikings make sense of a bewildering new world a thousand years later they still serve the same purpose as iceland has come to terms with a country transformed by financial crisis they're turning once more to their stories some years ago we decided that we were the most brilliant international bankers of the world it turned out to be not a good 800 or 1 000 years of tradition of of making literature so and and the me like other writers we go back to the circus to find our ideas for how to tell stories and even what to tell stories about we are of course a small island in the north and that's what we are famous for are the writers and the books the old books i think that's that's like inherited of the icelanders to read these books the language and the words and the poetry that's what our culture is about having control over the world and and the language so therefore the the language for icelanders for example is is the most important thing in the whole world you feel that you are discovering something you are seeing something it's like mind openers and you're like you get a window into another world and for me it's a great thrill because this is a true winter there's something about the backgrounds of the stories and just the magic of good story how good story works a good story becomes a classic because it works i feel really inspired being here in iceland i've been trying to work out what it is and i think the thing is that it's such a sparsely populated country just a third of a million people and it does feel very distant from the heart of europe up here on the edge of the arctic but despite that the people haven't developed an island mentality or turned in on themselves in fact they've done the opposite they've gone out into the world they've embraced the world and had given something back for 10 centuries they've been welcoming us into their homes and settling us down around their hearts and entertaining us with their stories

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 488,485

Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, norse mythology, vikings, viking history, norse history, viking sagas, ivar the boneless, ragnar lothbrok

Id: ZB06Ivfv2Wg

Length: 59min 2sec (3542 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020