Hey extra historians, welcome to lies the portion of the show or we confess all the things we got wrong tell you some stories we didn't get to fit in which is a lot because we basically covered half the world in this series and in general just Sort of take stock of the series. So today we're doing the Viking expansion, which was a fun series it was a technically pretty difficult series because we were doing a lot of places and we had a lot of Mispronunciations as a result of that. I'm just gonna go through them really quickly the worst one probably was Clontarf the Battle of Clontarf in Ireland I think we said clon truth. Our ma is the proper way to say it. I'm probably still not doing it I'm very sorry Irish fans and lots of Scandinavian words So we don't really have a lot of time and we have a lot of ground to cover all the way from North America to Baghdad, so let's just dive in for a recommended reading if you want to get just like a Fairly surface level idea of what happened. When who did it? There's a pretty good popular fiction or popular history book called the sea wolves a history of the Vikings by Loras Brown worth It's gonna give you kind of a blow-by-blow. It's not it's very popular in his pop history Right, like it's not very crunchy and academic, but it's very exciting. It hits the highlights you're not gonna learn a whole lot about Scandinavian culture, but It'll give you the battles and the raids and things like that If you want to get like a little more into detail, I'd go with the Vikings by l-c roast all It's a little more. It's not quite academic, but it's a little more academic It's not quite as entertaining though There's also a really good version of the Finland sagas, that's put out by penguin And I like to always give a couple of free resources to the podcast Norse by north northwest. I liked a lot when I came across it because partially the Who runs it has a very charming Scottish accent? And the other thing is he has a very cool way of kind of stopping in the middle and being like alright Let's make sure we understand this one thing before we move on and because we kind of had to skim over a lot It's a good way Particularly in the Roose episodes that if you wanted to dive in a little bit just in like an hour or two That's a pretty good place to do it also Here on YouTube Yale puts like full courses, right? You can watch an entire course of lectures on the early Middle Ages Over at Yale open course Paul Friedman as the professor. It's very good It's like being back in school if that's something you liked, which I do Alright, so let's talk about episode one. First of all, thank you for the positive feedback on this one. I Didn't really know how it was gonna go. It's a little bit different than what we normally do, but one thing as I was planning the show is I was a little frustrated by the thought that We were going to talk about the Vikings. Like that's all that was going on in Scandinavia. I really wanted to put one episode of side to kind of like Look at some people who are experiencing the Viking Age, but nitin might not be going out and stabbing anglo-saxons to death, right? So they're they're taking advantage of what's being formed, but they're not violent participants in it And overall you seem to really like that. We did have a few things a lot of them were like some visual things one big one was Mead We probably should not have had them drinking Mead We probably should have had them drinking beer Mead was generally a drink for the rich their traders though So maybe they came on a big cache of honey and just desire to blow it We probably should have had more axes and fewer swords swords were again, like an item mostly for the rich This kind of did come across my desk when I was reviewing the episodes, but I was sort of like well You know what? I'll just talk about it and lies. I I don't have to Nick go and like draw axes into everyone's hands retroactively Lee Many of you asked about population density in Scandinavia. So this is an interesting thing Population density is one of the theories about by the Viking expansion happened It's not Necessarily the right one. It's probably a combination of factors but many of you asked like how could Scandinavia which is very large B population dense in the Middle Ages and Basically without technology is to improve land And with a lot of arable land being along coastlines. It's not necessarily about there not being enough space It's about the amount of cultivatable land and how much that land can produce so that's how that theory goes, you know? Believe it or not. That's essentially what it's arguing We got a couple of shields inside out that was fun during the review I thought it was just a boss with a band over it But actually was the inside of the shield we corrected it for the other stuff Someone mentioned that there are boat shaped graves in Sweden but not in Norway. They're all over, Scandinavia they're just particularly large and prominent in Sweden and the most famous ones are there but from the research I did and again, like I am NOT final authority on any of this kind of thing, right but Apparently those those stone ship burials do exist in other places in Scandinavia now the big one so we talked about Viking as a noun and Viking her as someone who goes Viking and We got some pushback here including from some linguists that Viking Viking is not a verb that Viking er in Old Norse In Old Norse you add an R to masculine nouns in the nominative singular and Viking ER as just the nominative singular of the Viking Stem not the derivative of a verb Thank you for to viewer copyright infringment who's a linguist who pointed this out to us? Your name scared me a lot when I saw it in the comments copyright infringement, I think and Yes, thank thank thank you for that. I Have seen this a bunch different ways. So I'm not sure if this is 100 one of those things is 100 percent settled We'll get into this later a lot of linguistic and naming things about the Viking Age people aren't necessarily sure about But I would bet on you being right rather than me being right Episode 2 Rollo the Walker. I didn't know before I started this job that I have a linguistic tic About the words ancestor and descendant we said that William the Conqueror was the ancestor of Rollo Obviously, that's not correct. He's the descendant I Just get them mixed up in my brain apparently because this is the second time it's happened That people have noticed I also did it verbally analyzed episode and we've retake tit But yes Rollo who is the ancestor unless of course Rollo the Walker is Rollo that time Walker Embarrassing nicknames for French kings. I was really excited that we were getting into the embarrassing nickname period of French history I've kind of wanted to do a running gag about this ever since I came on as a writer uh the sad part of these nicknames is Probably none of them are contemporary. They really come in a couple hundred years after these These guys are all dead to try and like tell them apart a lot of them might have been Ironic Charles the bold may have been particularly hairy or he might have been the bald because he was the only one who ended up coming to throne without being landed first, so he was bald and that he didn't have Lands not he was bald But you know, this is not just a French monarchy thing, right we talked about Michel the drunkard who was by the way Probably not a drunkard. That was probably a smear on him by later Emperor's in the Muslim sources. He's actually a pretty competent guy also Ragnar lothbrok, is he the guy that sacked Paris real answer? We don't know It could have been another guy named Ragnar. The problem is with a lot of the Viking Age you're Depending on people who are not the Vikings writing about the Vikings. They don't always understand going on And we sort of have to piece together Who's doing what and if these guys are the same guy? We'll talk about this a little bit when we talk about evaru the boneless and Ireland also So know we don't know if this was the same Ragnar as Ragnar lothbrok or if even Ragnar lothbrok really existed or Heaphy was legendary or semi legendary? This is just a tough thing about this period in time Lots of folks didn't believe that the Queen of England is related to Rollo the walker. She is a few also Well wrote they didn't believe she was descended from him She is descended from him. If you're just talking about relations like bloodline, right if you follow the minor sons and Daughters that were alike shipped off to the continent and married to someone else and then their lines end up marrying back into the family And you follow the the women particularly? Yes, she's she's related to him. She is still related to William the Conqueror. Who is the grandson of Rahl of the Walker? It's just not a direct line, right? There's a lot of interruptions Episode three, Ireland so we talked about how there were two high kings of Ireland fighting really there should only be one High King of Ireland my Understanding which could be inaccurate is that both of these Kings were actually claiming the title at the same time They were essentially fighting over it. I Had not totally realized and this is my fault. Absolutely because it should have occurred to me that referring to the British Isles Including Ireland even doing it geographically is a very sensitive subject for For the Irish and I totally understand why there is a long and painful history They're going to be doing the Irish potato famine. Actually, not next series, but the one after and we'll try and improve our Gaelic before then but Yeah, we I will try not to do that in the future It's kind of like a contentious thing because geographically you could make an argument But the Irish government actually refers to them as these islands rather than the British Isles and again, totally understandable Why they would want to do that? Is the 'var that we talked about in Dublin Ivar the boneless the one that's famous for invading England with the Great heathen army maybe The annals of Ulster called him Emir that is generally interpreted as being a version of Hvar but It's not a sure thing. It could be a different guy. I Made him. 'var because Basically, I wanted to have Vivar in there Between having him there and not having him there. I Kind of wanted to put him in because at some point I'm sure we're gonna see him again And I can always confess in lies Episode four lines of the ruse. We had some stuff in this one Sorry The biggest one the really embarrassing woman I feel really bad about is We said Cyrillic was a Byzantine writing system. It is absolutely not What I had meant to say is that it's a Greek influenced system I was in an earlier draft trying to make this point about how People that aligned with the great church, right the Byzantine church Tended to end up with writing systems that had Greek influence Whereas people who ended up Roman Catholic had like more latin-influenced writing systems but basically things got cut and slammed together and it created a really bad error So Cyrillic is not not Byzantine It is glue garlic and It was developed in bulgaria by Students of a guy named cyril and another guy named Methodius. It's called Cyrillic because they named it after cyril Yes, Bulgarian Greek and Greek influenced but Bulgarian made Sorry about that So the debate about who actually founded Kiev is a big deal my understanding is the ruse Vikings were always a very very very small part of the population that they were a military elite and there is always a very small number of them and they basically immediately started marrying into Slavic Baltic Turkic Families and part of that is because that's what you do If you're a military elite and you're living amongst people where you are vastly outnumbered as you start to take on their cultural practices and you start enlisting them as allies, right and Like we've seen in places like Normandy and Ireland right the Viking culture starts like the Scandinavian culture starts to disappear Pretty quickly they start to meld with local groups but Here's the thing he have already existed when they founded Kiev. There was a settlement right and By the way, that the Viking Kiev is actually not in the same place as modern Kiev They're not too far apart, but they're not the same place So there was a settlement That the Vikings then took over and massively expanded into a city. It's kind of the same thing with Dublin right? There was already A system there, but it was nowhere near what the Vikings would turn it into But again, there had to have been these local alliances that happen really early We know that Scandinavian culture starts disappear by the time Russia has found it. Literally there is Nothing Viking left about the ruse only the name that ends up actually icing Like practically not even the name. I think it was actually carried forward from the past So, yeah, really Their only contribution to Russia is the name But even that is still a hot topic Go to the comments. I'm sure you will find other arguments We had a Big Geographic mistake we said we went to modern-day Ukraine when he founded Kiev We started talking about Novgorod immediately after we didn't mention that he moved into what is modern day, Russia Sorry, that was just my fault of explaining things while not looking at a map and not looking at a map of Viking arrow World next to a map of the modern world my fault entirely And it's important to remember that we talked a lot about Slavic people in in this episode There's a whole bunch of different groups. We talked a little bit about it at one point in the episode but we didn't emphasize that REM ffice eyes it later so between Modern-day Russia and the Baltics is just really a whirlwind of different groups and people Like we talked about Turkic nomads some of them were Jewish or practice Judaism which is fascinating and You know, we didn't really get into the Baltic people as we talked about the Finns been at the Baltics So sorry about that. We didn't mean to suggest that you know, it's it's all one thing in Eastern Europe. Absolutely. Not true Did the the respecting is mostly get chased off by Greek fire? I have a slightly alternate theory I think Greek fire played a big part But you start seeing long ships disappear from Europe when other nations start building ships with raised decks but particularly like large raised towers on the bow and stern of a ship and Because of that you're able to fire down into the long ships and the long ships have a really difficult time fighting and boarding These other ships interesting thing about Byzantine ships. They have a big race second deck where they keep all the archers So maybe that was something the Byzantines figured out before the rest of Europe something we didn't mention in these episodes is Olga is a saint a terrifying saint seriously go Google Saint Olga of Kiev and Yeah, just just do it oh wait, okay Zoey, let's see what we find here Terrifying right, like look at those hooded eyes. She is so full of threat. I have never seen st. Portraits that looked more sinister They kind of fit her. I sort of loved her episode 5 Greenland So there are a lot of alternate stories about how Greenland got named one of them my personal favorite alternate is that when Iceland started getting overpopulated again see our Description of Scandinavian overpopulation it's not so much. There's not enough room. It's that there's not enough arable land The ice lenders start saying oh hey there's this great place over there. I recalled Greenland. You should totally not settle here You should go to Greenland. It's way better We cast a little bit of aspersions on Scandinavian navigational skills. The reason I said that is because We had really built up the maritime skills of Medieval Scandinavians, and I wanted to puncture it a little bit I thought actually in the first episode maybe we even went a little bit overboard And I just wanted to point out that like look they had perfectly good Navigational skills for what they needed to do where they needed to do it and the point in time when they lived they got there Right. They got all the way to North America with the skills that they had They had a difficult time reorienting themselves sometimes after they got blown, of course Not an unusual thing, but it was not They didn't have bad navigational skills Based on the area they were what they needed to do and the seas they were sailing in However, I just want to point out, you know They're not doing what the austronesians the Polynesians are doing around at the same time where they're crossing you know thousands of miles of open water finding tiny islands and at one point Establishing a trade between who I am - he right their navigational skills could not have done that But again, it didn't need to because they're not in a place where they're having to cross that much ocean Also the Pacific is a lot easier to sail Than the Viking territory. I'm just putting that out there. We talked about how Greenland was on habited my understanding Is that the the Thule people who had become the Greenland Inuit? Either lived very far north in Greenland at that point or Lived in North America hadn't come back over yet or they had been in Greenland, but they went back over to North America We'll talk about that a little bit later We talked about one guy who got lost and sacked an Italian City thinking it was Rome I just want to tell you this story because it's amazing It's a guy named Heston. He and two other commanders end up going to the Mediterranean thinking this is like the greatest new front in The Viking expansion right first they attacked the emirate of Cordoba, but doesn't go that great the Muslims have Greek fire also They have big walls. Yeah, not so great they start sacking places in Italy the other two decide to leave and has to decides that he really likes the idea of this city Rome that he's heard about it sounds really rich sounds like The jewel of the Christian world. I think I'm gonna go like take it over and take all their stuff So he finds Rome He gets out and he looks up at the walls and it's like oh This isn't a good idea. Like these are the biggest walls I've ever seen So they developed this plan He pretends to be sick They go up to the gate and essentially knock on it and say hey are our captain and sick our URL is sick But he wants to convert to Christianity Ok, so they baptize him They come back the next day carrying Heston in a coffin and say our leader died and his last Hope was to be buried as a Christian in the cathedral so the poor Bishop opens the gates brings in the coffin brings in 50 mourners in big long robes and He's conducting a funeral service in the cathedral when Heston basically opened this coffin jumps out with a sword Decapitate, it's the poor Bishop and all the mourners throw off their cloaks and they have weapons and they the Cathedral they sack the city and they take the bar because that's how you Prove that you sacked a big city because you have Hey look at the side of this bar That was on the gate. The gate was really big They throw it in their longships and they like run off talking about how great they are for sacking Rome turns out they got lost sacked a relatively minor city called Luna And I kind of think this story got passed on just because it's it's pretty funny like I mean did you know it happened like 1,200 years ago and that's why it's funny but Yeah, it's hilarious how they killed all those people in that city, especially the bishop who trusted them hilarious All right Episode six unfortunately, so we're gonna go to a five episode cycle with a one-off and mentalize Beginning with their next series and that's so that six can be out and you can comment on it and I can address your questions Unfortunately, the schedule didn't let us do that this time So I'm just kind of anticipating what you want me to talk about with Vinland So we actually ended up naming this episode Wineland rather than Vinland, which is one of the two possible Translations for Vinland or Vineland the other one is Suggest that it refers to meadows rather than wine Which would make sense because the Viking settlement that we know today is in a very meadow II area. In fact, it's named Named after its meadows, I'm not going to pronounce the French because again, I have too much respect for the French We I didn't intend for that to be the title of the episode but basically The one time we had Vinland and text we didn't explain what it was supposed to mean so I had Nick replace it with Vineland and That just sort of became the date of the episode as a result and I liked it It was way better than the original episode title, which was Van Lundt Who were the Native American First Nation tribe that the Vikings contact we don't know Probably the most likely are the fool who are proto Inuit people who are also the same ones who would move into Greenland and Replace the Scandinavians after it got too cold and deadly and starving therefore the Scandinavians But yeah, the real answer is we don't really know Probably the fool. We went through a couple of different options for pronouncing life Ericsson So interestingly there are many different ways to pronounce life in Scandinavia life life One of them is not the American version which is leaf Yeah, that is not a pronunciation in Scandinavia at all, which actually kind of surprised me They were doubts about Freitas massacring the other settlement. I think that probably comes through with our caveat that This saga is generally just trying to make her look bad, but just in case we needed to say that out Right there have been people that argue that this never happened Someone said that they were excited to hear me pronounce, Newfoundland and get it wrong. We didn't use it in the episode So there you go, Newfoundland so Walpole fact How do we gonna connect Walpole to the Viking Age pretty easily basically in one step his son? So horace walpole is the son of Robert, Walpole He is well known for building a really weird house inventing the gothic novel and being a member of parliament He also had this friend Thomas Grey. They toured Europe together. They were at school together and one of Thomas's most fame or one of gray's most famous poems is Ode on the death of a favorite cat drowned in a tub of gold fishes which was about Horace Walpole's cat who jumped up on a China vase dead goldfish inside and sort of fished around inside and fell inside and drowned and died and then Thomas wrote this really funny poem about it Because in the 18th century, you don't people don't really think that animals are people so you can say like hey I wrote this funny poem about your dead cat and you'd be like great I'm Horace Walpole, and I'm okay with this But the interesting thing about Thomas as He's part of this Romantic movement. That's starting to resurrect Old Norse poetry and translated into English And then used some of those elements in his English English language poetry Funny thing about this though is that Horace who was his friend and was to a certain? Extent as patron or at least as champion Was not a fan of this movement He wrote a couple of letters that are basically making fun of gray and my first one which is kind of my favorite It's a little bit hard to directly quote, but he's essentially saying like so Gray went back and he found some dude who was in Denmark In the Middle Ages who was exactly like gray and now he's translating all of his poetry The second one he's sort of making fun of The fact that anyone would be interested in what these savages the Vikings were thinking Who can care what horrors a runic Savage arrived at all the joys and glories they could conceive The supreme Felicity of boozing ale out of the skull of an enemy in Odin's Hall Yeah, so not a fan of the Vikings. However, 15 years after Gray's death I think maybe he was feeling a little nostalgic because he has this new friend. He's kind of patronizing and His friend writes a poem that involves Scandinavian themes and Horace Walpole's feeling is basically like yeah, this is the best thing you've ever written It's not as good as grace. All right, so we got some really cool stuff coming up on extra history We're just gonna run through it a little bit next week. We're gonna start soon yachts and the 1911 revolution I am really excited for this series. It's gonna be state-sponsored assassinations and people living under false passports and Bombings and army mutinies lots of fun. It's basically a spy series And it's a guy who is not too familiar in the West but you should know who he is because he's amazing After that, we're doing the Irish potato famine and forget try and brush up our Gaelic before then. Sorry Irish fans and Yeah, we've got some great stuff coming up an extra mythology to write now we're running through the origins of the Japanese pantheon Japanese creation stories essentially and we have a Christmas episode coming up that is written by me and I'm very very excited and you get to Just wait, you'll wait and find out what it is. It's grandpa's it's Krampus. We're gonna do Krampus. I'm I couldn't I couldn't hold it in sorry James. It's Krampus
