Vikings Live: a tour from the British Museum

[Music] welcome to the British Museum in London and thank you for joining us I hope you're settled in your seats now ready to enjoy your very own private view of the British museum's latest blockbuster exhibition on the Vikings as we take you through the exhibition will be travelling to four continents and back across a thousand years in time and we'll be revealing the spectacular centerpiece of this show the remains of a Viking royal warship it was an age that helped shape our world welcome to Vikings live [Applause] [Music] the British Museum's BP exhibition Vikings life and legend has been here [Music] it's the first exhibition to be held in the brand new seeds bring exhibition gallery this massive climate-controlled space has become - over [Music] including the longest warship never discovered [Music] the curator of the exhibition dr. Gareth Williams was with us tonight led a team of experts from the British Museum along with colleagues and Hagan to bring precious objects to London the queendom second was the exhibition I'm delighted to declare the exhibition Vikings life and legend open what a thrill it is to enter this magical spectacular space we've got some of the the world's great Viking experts with us tonight but first of all let's meet the director of the British Museum Neil MacGregor Neil so why a Viking exhibition and why now we put on an exhibition when there's new information to present and we've got a huge amount of new information about the Vikings they've been great archaeological finds in the last 30 years you'll see some of them we can look at those files with new scientific techniques which gives us more information and since the last exhibition the cold war's come to an end and we can work much more closely with our colleagues in Eastern Europe so we can now present a quite new view of the Viking world at a world of extraordinary reach and contact so that's what's fascinating this is a world of water sailing from Scandinavia from the Baltic the Vikings go west of course to Britain Ireland then on to Canada South Africa they go north to the effort to the Arctic Circle and then perhaps most interesting of all they go down the great Russian rivers and they get to the Caspian Central Asia of the Black Sea Constantinople it's a whole world that they bring together it's just amazing amazing what they achieved doesn't it so not just a view of the Viking world but a view of the world or at least the wizard worlds that through the Viking are any particular objects attract their attention it's a very difficult question if I had to steal one if I were allowed to steal one I think it would be a tiny little statue in silver of the God of War Odin there's great masculine God whoever sees the looting the raiding the raping everything and this little statue shows him in female dress keeping in touch with his feminine side because he's not only the God of War he's exercising his female skills in magic sorcery prophecy and it is wonderful these two sides together either side of Odin the Ravens won Raven of memory one Raven of thought they fly all over the world and they come back and tell him what's going on and in a sense that's what we're doing the exhibition's what we're doing the Busch Museum we are Odin's Ravens going all over the world bringing it together and thinking about thought it was a raven now we're approaching the Sainsbury exhibitions galleries a great new space for the museum isn't it with conservation facilities and scientific facilities but also I guess it gives you the space to show astonishing things that's the great advantage of this new space it allows us above all to show the great warship one of the main discoveries in the last thirty years and we at last of a space big enough to show it and with the conditions that we need to exhibit it it's great well thanks very very much we'll chat a little later we'll see you a bit later and we'll see those ships very soon good Viking ship of course is the most recognizable symbol of the age an age which I guess we could say extends for about 300 years from the 750 s to 410 60s and it's the ship which is one of the key themes of the exhibition ahktar said that the region that it wellton is called hal gallant he said that no man lived to the north of him there is a port on the southward side of that land that man called skidding his hair he said a man might hardly sail that if he camped at night and to the fair wind each day the original Viking homelands are today's Denmark Norway Sweden and Finland the territories are physically fragmented laced for millennia this meant that transport was much easier by river fjord and sea than by land the tribal farming societies here had access to rich goods furs whale bone amber and Loris ivory marketable resources that the Vikings were trade once they went global and as they traveled and traded and raided they shaped not just the past but the world we all live in today [Music] now what it's critical to remember is that the name Viking didn't originally refer to a single ethnic group today we use the word Viking to describe all scandinavian society from 750 ad onwards but when it first appears in Old Norse V kinga actually just means a pirate or a Raider and of course a pirate is not a pirate without his or her ship which is why professor Neal price the exhibition starts with this really exquisite representation of a Viking ship absolutely and the reason it's at the beginning is that this is the absolute key to the Viking Age without the ship none of this would happen at all what we've got here is a beautiful brooch from Denmark made of copper and you've got the classic Viking ship these beautiful clean lines the dragon heads at either end the square sail you can see it filled on the mast there and if you look very closely all along the hull are these little circular things which are either shields or the the holes for the oars and why do we have this special relationship between Vikings and boats I mean what why is the boat so central to their identity the really critical thing to understand about the Viking period in Scandinavia is that this is a maritime society everything depends on the sea and the rivers and access to water one way or another everybody was affected by the sea and they had some kind of contact with the means of transport to get out onto it and that's so important to remember isn't it because I think when we think of Vikings we kind of automatically imagine macho male warriors but but but as you say this is something that everybody at every level of society is involved with and and really everybody what we're coming to here is two of my really favorite exhibits in the show these are toys and the lives of Viking children are some of the most in accessible aspects of the Viking Age is so hard to reach Viking kids but every now and then when we're lucky enough to get preservation conditions that mean that woods and organic things survive we get things like this little toy boats the smaller one at the top is from Dublin the lower one here is from Hedeby and Denmark and I think it's easy to imagine little Viking girls and boys floating these down the streams so it really is everyone in Viking society that has the ship in their minds something like this tells us what Vikings of all ages did but can the archeology ever get us into their minds into the Viking up mind yes I think it can one of the the exciting things about Viking material culture the things they made is that wherever possible they decorated them we've just seen this this ship brooch a ship you can wear so some some Viking person has had this on their clothes but the same idea goes through anything that you can decorate so jewelry is not just something to hold your clothes together it's it's a visual world full of decoration and an art with meaning a weapon is not just something to bash people with it's covered in decoration so you see some of these things here look in there the middle here this this beautiful dress pin with the with the dragon head this is something to hold your cloak together but it's not just a functional object this this marvelous head on the top there looks like a dragon this is this leads us into this this thought world of of mythological creatures the the invisible population of supernatural beings with which the Vikings shared their world and what's so important isn't it to remember at this time is we shouldn't really be using words like religion and and belief because that those weren't options for the Vikings I mean for them dragons work we're real absolutely I think we should talk about knowledge if if you can imagine asking of King do you believe in trolls do you believe in Odin it's like asking do you believe in the sea it's it said something obvious it's it's when we use the word supernatural it's entirely wrong their natural purely natural but our best chance to really get inside the Vikings heads is through burials because unlike all the rest their deliberate so when we find a Viking grave and excavated we're encountering something that is a direct product of the Vikings themselves what they wanted to do barrios can take all kinds of different things from the most mundane objects items of personal dress things you clean your ears where there's there's ironing boards all kinds of things like that weapons of course and all the way up to the the biggest things of all ships because sometimes they're actually buried in ships aren't they're in in bows they certainly are we're actually reconstructing a Viking boat burial army we are and so is it gonna be your sort of archaeologists dream burial you're gonna put in everything there that you would love to find I'm to a point well have a go yeah okay see what we can do make those Vikings lose so when you find a dead person with all the objects laid out around them they're there because the Vikings wanted them to be there and what do you think the ships in those graves actually mean what do they represent it's hard to really say but they could be a means of transport to take the dead to wherever it is they're going a ship from this world into another world equally they might just be the most expensive possession of the dead person or their community a bit like being buried in your Mercedes fantastic sources of information and they're fantastic windows on that Viking mind [Music] see where the long-sighted warship lies splendid off the shore the pride track ins main above the caracal shines since he was launched from rollers his decorated neck is furnished with gold [Music] of the early viking period were relatively small with cruise of around 40 mm but through the Viking Age ships grew larger and more sophisticated they were powered not only by many oars but by splendid sails as so often technology matched desire and impulse for exploration and a hunger for wealth powered the development of both deeply built cargo ships that could cross oceans and great warships these were the true Viking longships which inflates could conquer nations just warship ever discovered is at the heart of the exhibition [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] and this is it the longest Viking ship ever found and not only that but the remains of a royal warship what's been teased out of the earth has been housed in this giant steel frame to give us a sense of the scale and size of the original ship and you just have to think of it in its prime almost exactly a thousand years ago nudging its way out to the sea a hundred men on board 80 rowers powering those oars and up above them a giant mast with a sail made of wool or linen dyed in bright colors [Music] a wonderful ships they are they are remarkable but they are very very good seedbed of extremely seaworthy boat I think that's one of the things that always excite me when I see they have made quite a lot of yourself several full-sized copies of where biking ships and if you see a boat like that on the sea but you imagine you suddenly look at or to see and you've heard me find a half the horizon is full I think you're really your heart went to the bottom your boots [Music] [Music] the remains of this magnificent ship were found by chance in 1996 in a harbor just next to the Viking ship Museum at Roskilde in Denmark workers were dredging the harbour to expand the museum and unearthed a ship's graveyard right beneath their feet it must have felt like a gift from the old gods getting the ship's timbers safely onto dry land and over here was an immensely delicate operation and one of the people responsible for that and then the two-week job of installing them in the exhibition is Christiana stret cavern working with curator Gareth Williams the discovery of the ship's a fascinating story isn't it not only is it the longest one but we can see from the ship Timbers that is dated back to 1025 but you know but also the dendrochronology so that the ship was built in Norway while we were investigating the ship we could see that they were repairs they show that the ship has been repaired in the Baltic area in 1039 meaning that the ship has been sailing from Oslo to the Baltic and ends up in the bottom of Roskilde field so it has an amazing story really before it ends up there they they put the ship together with lots of small parts and pieces and then they fit it together with all these smaller parts also been the the ribs that will come in between and all these fittings it makes it makes the ship flexible and strong yes we can see very clearly here how the planks themselves are riveted together oh yeah the square road plate for the plank so each of these major ribs marks where a rowing bench would yes exactly so we have a rowing bench across the ship on top of that and that gives us the space between the rowing benches that helps us estimate the overall length of the missing parts and gives us an idea of the total idea of the total size of yes sir and we know that have been a steersman as well at the back and the steering-oar on one side the steer these board gives us of course the modern name starboard yeah for this site the right hand side of the ship but we also here in historical accounts about forecastle men so that the extra fighting men at the front of the boat with this width there's space for more than just the two people to either side so how many how many do you think the total crew would have been the estimate is approximately a hundred hundred people on board his ship and they would live here and they would roll and they would sail and they would do everything you need to do Hey they are now putting in first of all the plank line the steel line has to be there and they are looking on them on the drawing to figure out the exact number of the plank and the Excite placement and if you building this part now and we have laid out plank number five and six to this one here this is the keel the key is to fish the full length of the ship in fact the keel from one from the aft to the front was 32 meter and that is the longest you ever found ship the remains of Roskilde is six hint at the skills that went into this high point of Viking craftsmanship and colleagues from the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall are using traditional tools to show the shipbuilding techniques of a thousand years ago so my cross-section of a Viking ship I've always wanted to see one of these tell us about how they did it well we start with the keel and what's essentially the backbone of the ship to which we add the stem post and that has a special joint and and the keel enables our boat to keep way especially it so if it's under sail the the lightness of the construction enabled the boat to flex and three and also the flatness of the keel almost created a planing hull which enabled the to move very quickly through water it's like the descriptions in the poetry isn't it of them almost riding across the surface of the sea and I think it was a slow evolution because they got braver and braver as they built the ships in a more seaworthy state so as with everything it's not just one design that goes on a drawing board it it becomes an evolution it's almost as if the technology grew as the desire grew and the curiosity grew isn't it that's very true Iceland let's go to Greenland let's see what's over for ya and it must have been pretty scary when they were heading out and maybe did we think we fell over the edge of the ocean then I don't know but certainly the voyages were fantastic and there's linka bilked we call it clinker built thank you yeah we're always taught that at school yeah does that actually mean well clinker is the Danish word I understand and that's where it developed from so in America they call it lap strake which is probably a more accurate description and and then we fastened with with nails with nails yeah yeah we they use nails metal nails yes and and we use these little washers or roads which they're fastened through shall I show you how that's yeah yeah please Brian can you give me a hand hi Brian easy all right all right yet so we put the nail through okay okay ready yep and then the road goes on and then we peen the nail head o-over okay okay how long do you think it took him to actually make one of these well I mean we know for a fact Roskilde museum in Denmark they built a full-size version of this 60-foot and I it took them about eighteen months was a team of and maybe ten men but in in of Iceland days I think they were doing much faster there were very skilled people they used to building them mass-produced maybe do Alma you almost think that don't you and just about the shape Brian I mean how'd you get this lovely curve Ollie you know when you hear the poems of the Viking Age they talk about that my curving ship my slender ship how'd you get that I think monster ship right boat building decided on the ship he wanted how wide he wanted it how long he wanted it then it was simply a matter of steam your planks around steam your planks yeah and people who've sailed these as reconstructions say that in any even a medium sea they sort of twist as they sail does that make sense to you well part of the Viking boats was their lightness they were built white for speed and for his fin isn't beaching them and raiding and they were all nailed together so the boat's twisted quite a lot and that was part of their character and part of the whole structure in a boat made them able better to cope with difficult ceaseless ride very heavy seas whatever so light and she's finally decoration I mean we have this image don't we of Viking ships with their great prowess there's a wonderful account of the Viking attack on Paris by a French monk who says that as they came up the same that people were astonished to see these rows of the great Prowse coming down the river we couldn't even see the water he's as it was like a forest yeah visual impact as well do you think I think sent me to frighten yeah yeah there are so many variations in styles they wouldn't worry too much about one imitation on it on a medium warship let's just get over to England and plunder it that's about it yeah and you've got a figurehead for us today we have we made a figurehead specially for this project that was based on the pinhead that is on exhibition in the museum in the newsroom and if you'd like to come around and have a look yeah shall I come yes please Wow I'll grab you by the ear that's underneath the truth never tweak a sleeping dragon under the ears run wow that's magnificent [Applause] they journeyed boldly went far for gold fed the eagle out in the east and died in the South sarsen locked [Music] [Music] jurnee boldly inquests of gold and prepare to die in foreign lands now that's what the literature says and Gareth Williams here is the lead curator of this wonderful exhibition and those themes of travel and exploration a really central aren't they to your organization here absolutely that the exhibition is very much one about the wider Viking world not just about the Vikings in Scandinavia or in Britain but that wide unprecedented world spanning four continents that the Vikings created and that is driven by contacts interactions and the travel that underlied that and your beautiful objects represent that travel absolutely here's a case in point this may not look much today but this is silk it's come from somewhere at the eastern end of the Viking world maybe the Byzantine Empire maybe the Islamic caliphate and it ended up right across at the other side of the Viking world in Dublin in Ireland I mean something like that so it doesn't look like much on the face of it but you have to think what that represents don't you that I think we often imagine in our heads the Vikings in sort of sackcloth putty colours but they used to work gorgeous textiles and cloths woven with gold and silver and that little silver scrap is just a tiny fragment of that they have access to a wide variety of brightly colored dyes that's all been leached out of it by the wet conditions which enabled the fabric itself to survive but this would have been bright and beautiful there's no evidence in this example of gold and silver thread but there there in other silks as a period and this must have been very fragile to deal with what is it the most fragile X a bit here it's one of the most fragile but probably the most fragile is a group of material from a boat burial in our dimension in western Scotland that was found only in 2011 it's still not being fully conserved and that means that it's very fragile very unstable we're lucky to have been able to display it to the public for the first time here and you'll see when you look at it the iron is rustier than any of the other material in the exhibition because it's not yet been fully conserved and that's so brittle and flaky that putting that in place it's been an enormous job because there are so many pieces as well there are hundreds of rivets in the boat as well as the larger burial goods it's taken a small team two or three days to get every piece of that in place huge job roster had so much loving attention I suspect I'm glad you showed me that that little bit sometime bitter silt because Byzantium Constantinople was terribly important to the Vikings wasn't it absolutely it's very different from anything they knew in Northern Europe we hear about Constantinople as a Mick Lagarde the great city and both the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world offered much more sophistication and civilization than the Vikings were used to and they were capable of learning from it and taking new ideas new objects but equally they left things behind them everywhere they went let me show you here some examples these are two burials one from Denmark and one from Noi and both you see contain these oval brooches that's what the well-dressed Viking lady wore in this period two brooches pinning an apron dress to her shoulders and these are absolutely typically Viking but we find them across the Viking world as well we've got three more sets here this one from Ireland this from Yaroslavl in modern Russia and some from Kiev in modern Ukraine so the fashions then as now Scandinavian fashion was hugely desirable and so we see the well-dressed Viking lady much the same wherever she is in the Viking world interesting that you say these pieces are from modern-day Russia and these are from Ukraine where do you stand on that debate as to whether the Vikings who were often known as the Rus whether they gave their name to Russia are are the Vikings the ancestors of modern day Russia there's certainly some of the ancestors of modern day Russia the word Russia comes from the name drous as you say that sometimes certain use of the for her clearly Vikings it's also used of the mixed society that develops in earlier Russia which contains Vikings and Slavs and other people like the cars so it's not an ethnically pure society it's a mixed society of which the Vikings are a key element I imagine with the opening up of the old Soviet Union that must have given a lot of new territories for you isn't as an archaeologist to to learn from and presumably some new objects that kind of came into the global scene absolutely it's fantastic to have as much material as we have in this exhibition from Eastern Europe a lot of it never shown before in this country but it's also the opening up of the academic subject under the former Soviet Union the history of Greater Russia was purely Slavic so there was no real academic dialogue we all knew that the Vikings had been in that area but now we're able to discuss just how much influence there was and Russian and other Eastern European scholars are part of that discussion as well as lending us their objects so it's a wonderful new source of information but we also have new sources of information of our own there's new material turning up all the time in this country and metal detecting has been a major source of that just over here we've got one of the most exciting finds in the exhibition to my mind and one that I've been working on ever since it was found in 2007 so talk me through it Gareth because this is real treasure absolutely what we've got here is around 700 individual items all found together and buried round about 97 to 98 AD why they buried do you think well it's a key moment in English history England was unified for the first time Athelstan the grandson of Alfred the Great conquered the Viking kingdom of Northumbria this was buried within that kingdom so almost certainly it's a powerful Viking hiding his treasure at this time of conflict and then the unification of England but what's really exciting about this hoard is we got the whole of the Viking world buried in a single cup we've got items from the Irish Sea we've got items from England both anglo-saxon and Viking from the Frankish kingdoms on the continent from Russia and the coins at the far end of the case from the Islamic world from as far away as Afghanistan and Uzbekistan now you're probably thinking where's the cup and I've got it out ready for you here I thought you'd like to look at it eternally grateful you can put some gloves on because this this is the most exquisite thing this I dunno this car how do you think seven hundred items fitted into that kind of see well III helped to unpack it so I know exactly how they fit it in all very tightly packed inside there the coins are very very thin they're slipped in between the larger items and then just a few pieces the very largest bits resting on top and all held together with lead wrapped around it sheet led wrapped round it's just I can't tell you how brilliant it is to be close to this because it is so beautiful in so many ways it's close on twelve hundred years old it's exquisite I mean the workmanship on that is just fabulous is amaze really fabulous but I think I love it best because of the story it tells beautifully worked I covered with animals lions and lionesses and and a few deer presumably being chased by the by the carnivores we know that this is from a church so we know that this is some kind of sacred vessel probably do you think for communion bread very likely yes yeah we can't say exactly where it came from but probably France Belgium Netherlands western Germany and it's we can say it's a church cut because it's guilt inside and out and this line around the top it's a line of vine leaves and the vine as a symbol for Christ as the one true vine of the church very likely the animals around the edge we've got this beautiful lion here and then these deer being chased it's almost a hunting scene but it may well be a scene from the Bible can I hold it I feel very Curt I promise I'll be very careful I tell you why I once hold it is quite heavy it's heavier than I was expecting just because I think this cup contains such a story it's got that Vale of York hoard inside it but originally this would have been used for communion bread wouldn't it paralyze them and you know what how's it ended up in England was it given as some kind of Viking blood money is a sort of forced tribute demanded by the Vikings for to ensure sort of peremptory peace or and if you think more likely was this snatched from the hands of a priest taken in a raid on a church I mean it you know this would tell quite a story if it could speak absolutely and I think that's another of the wonderful things about this horde there's a big debate about the character of the Vikings were they raiders or traders well the coins coming right away across the Viking world from the far eastern side of that they're probably coming through trade there's something like this this is raiding whether it's tribute or loot this is the product of Viking raiding in continental Europe and that takes us right back to where the whole idea of Vikings started from and what you've got to remember as well as that those Vikings we're talking about those men on the raids I mean you you'd know this from the bone evidence quite often they're teenagers they're in their early twenties so you've got to think of these pumped up lads tearing into this Frankish church and stealing it yes but what his remarkable despite that is this is remained intact this has not just been broken up for use as precious metal this has been treasured and kept and buried perhaps as much as a hundred years after it was made so the Vikings appreciated good workmanship in others it really is a traveller in time definitely yes I can tell you're itching to get it back safe and sound so the Vikings were ready to head out across the world and I'm with somebody who's done that so Robin Knox Johnson great to be with you tonight Robert thanks for coming it's an obvious question but what's it actually like to sail across the ocean in northern climes in an open boat well I think simple answers is probably quite cold but lived in their time they were used to adjusting to it but when we cross the North Sea in a boat and when we had furs and we just covered ourselves for them that you would warm us toasted inside that that was in a Viking replica sailing from Bergen to the Shetlands that's right trading ship now yes so sitting on their rowing benches did that give you a sense of what they were like as sailors and as people they did a bit I mean all the crew up out for myself for Norwegians or Danes and yes it was it was quite interesting you know the boat actions except the incredibly see where they're you felt very safe in it but it's if handled easily I mean it was fascinating we had enough crew to manage it we didn't row I have to earn them food what did they survive on do you think well we tried it we use salt cod ah I have to say actually it was really rather I just I suspect you know you'd hang a few carcasses in the rigging eat off that and they had Tim deep-frozen card out on wooden racks up in Svalbard even little recently been there they took those on their Viking ships but navigation most of all Robin how did they do these extraordinary voyages across to you know northern Canada and places like that did they have any navigational instruments well they had to have some things labeled and orienteer we know that and one of the things they might have had is is this basic there's Sun compass and all you do is go out and plot the shadow of that from the Sun on that and make a curve next they turn it round till that shadow hits that curve where the curves ptosis the middle is not simple been a lot of argument about this hasn't they I mean they haven't found one of these yet in a Viking context but you're pretty sure that they they had something extra like well actually found two one in Greenland in the convent and more recently they found one it on the river Odo's a Viking settlement so a pretty convince the main point is it does work great well thanks ever so for giving us an insight into what it actually felt like to be a Viking thanks very much Robin here terrible portents appeared over the land of the north on dreams but miserably frightened the people they will create storms of lightning and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky a great famine soon followed those signs and a little after that in the same year on the 8th of January and a sort of wretched heathen men destroyed God's church on the island of Lindisfarne by robbery and slaughter as the Vikings spread out from their homelands many sailed west to Britain and Ireland early raids targeted coastal monasteries easily accessible by ship undefended and rich in Church trend the Viking attack on the Northumbrian monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 is generally seen to mark the start of Britain's Viking Age in the seven 80s and seven 90s we start getting the first reports from British and Irish monasteries of this first phase of Viking raiding almost like news bulletins from across the British Isles in Ulster in Latin they speak of the vast @eo the devastation of the island of Britain in Gaelic of the ruin of the great shrine on Iona in Northumbria the devastation of their most sacred place in Lindisfarne was felt to be so shocking so unprecedented that it must be a visitation from heaven accompanied by omens by fiery lights fear in Drakon on thumb lifter fiery dragons in the northern sky the motive for these early raids was of course plunder loot treasure slaves you name it and they took it here in this case two wonderful examples the little box there perhaps originally a reliquary containing the bone of a saint may be plundered from an irish monastery now with an inscription underneath saying rannveig owns this box a Viking woman's name perhaps her husband brought it back from a raid and above it this magnificent neck adornment perhaps melted down loot from a Viking raid found in Norway and in the hammered flattened ends an inscription saying we fared down to freeze here the coast of Holland and there exchanged war garments with the Friesians in other words we slaughtered them and stripped their bodies of their war gear a very dark dry line in irony of Vikings had now the size of these early expeditions maybe most thirty or forty ships and scholars for a while have believed that the armies themselves were correspondingly small maybe only a few hundred at most but quite sober Chronicles soon begin to talk of fleets of two hundred three hundred six hundred and fifteen ships coming from Dublin to invade Northumbria in I'm 37 and they don't have to be the size of the Roskilde ship with 80 rowers to suggest an army of well thousands thousands and but very latest evidence very exciting evidence it is to has come from the excavation of a Viking camp in North Yorkshire this material here these coins and beads came from that site it's a thirty five acre sign plenty big enough to take an army of many thousands terrifying it must have been no wonder those monks thought that it was all a sign of God's anger [Music] [Music] I went with bloody sword and a resounding spear to a hard Viking attack we had a raging fight fire raced over houses I made bloody bodies fall within city walls [Music] [Applause] Oh Gareth Cole that is impressive fabulous there's nothing like seeing a Viking warrior close up looks as if it weighs it it doesn't feel for yourself Wow and this isn't as big as the ones that have been excavated yes about the same size of some of them but it's not as big as the largest ones terrific so this is all part of the protective gear of a what what kind of status are you a fairly fairly high state it's not an absolutely top I'm I'm fairly wealthy as you can see from the assorted jewelry and weapons but not absolute top of the tree and the shield made of wood but with a leather coating helps bind the individual planks together and the metal boss this is the one part that normally survives like the one behind you you know the case there yeah so normally all we have surviving is the boss we do have one example in the exhibition of a complete shield from the ghost and burial yeah fantastic let's take the helmet off good idea hey we can see your big this is very hot under the light it's a little on the warm side fighting a battle in this kind of gear is a strenuous it is and we have accounts of battles fought on hot days the Battle of Stamford Bridge it was so hot the Norwegians took their armor off and fought without it and were killed and it's a very different style of fighting if you're used to fighting without armor you can move more quickly but you're used to protecting yourself in a different way you take chances if you're wearing male because with this male / padding i've got leather under there leather over wall / linen over my normal clothes and then the helmet protects the head so a huge investment in on the body of a viking warrior absolutely there's something like six months of work goes into making this this shirt you can see if you look closely every link riveted closed and some have that some have solid rings mixed in with riveted it stops them swinging apart the amount of labor that goes into that as well as just the raw materials it's it's colossal yes fantastic let's put that over there and just show us some of the let's look at a sword well the sword is the ultimate status weapon for the Viking warrior no curator should do without one absolutely come in very handy on a day-to-day basis actually you know it you get a better idea of of it looking at these new remade weapons than anything I've ever seen this really fabulous isn't it and these were incredibly expensive at the time when you look at the Wills when they yes I was trying to work it out it's the equivalent of a incredibly high-end sports car in terms of modern purchasing for the top level sword and the swords come in various families if you look at the different swords in this exhibition we've got some quite plain ones those are maybe not in quite the luxury league but then we've got the designer swords there's one particular sword maker off bet he's such a successful name he's such a sexual brand that we get swords with the ulfberht name etched into the blade or inlaid in for probably 200 years designer bleh it is and like designer labels today recent analysis of the blades show that though the cheap knock-offs as well so there are blades which it's been calculated are so badly made with that label on they fall apart the first time you use them in in battle it's the Viking equivalent of the knockoff Louie Vuitton handbag and looking at some of these exhibits personal adornment I mean they're real individualist some there's some of these Viking leaders in our sources and and that suggests it doesn't file yes this is an extreme example as a small number of these known always from warrior grape so with horizontal fire marks probably colored in on my teeth it's on the one hand immediately recognizable it's also saying very clearly if I'm willing to do this to myself what am I willing to do to you and meeting that on the battlefield quite terrifying but we also have accounts of the Vikings with tattoos from the tips of their fingers to their necks and to both men and women in the Viking Way age wearing makeup to make their eyes brighter so we can imagine these highly decorative warriors it's like Pirates of the Caribbean isn't it kind of Johnny Depp Coast v King exactly exactly I think there's a very good analogy but the leaders with their by names you know Ragnar lothbrok and hairy breeches and all those kind of please so these are these are guys whose fame went before them I suppose yes and and some of those names very clear where they come from it you know and they might thought fin skull-splitter no guesses how he got that name why not buttered bread slightly harder to tell Eric black one of my favorites as well fantastic battles Gareth I mean we read rather conventional battle descriptions don't we in the poetry both the Norse poetry and the anglo-saxon poetry yes hacking the shield wall bored wheel cliff fan and all this stuff did they make shield walls how did they actually fight in battle line will we know if the shield wall seems to be and we have one or two surviving representations of this in stone carvings and so on you stand in a line all the shields overlapping and that provides a solid wall and it's if someone's charging into that you can make quite a solid barrier against that the difficulty with that is if you've got a sword or an axe like the one I have here to use this effectively they can axe a very common weapon of the Viking aid you need room to swing that effectively if you're packed in with people around you you can't swing that so there's no room to use that and that I think is where the sax the fighting knife comes in it's useful at close quarters and this is blunted for safety but the real examples have wicked points and although you can use it as a cutting weapon it's ideal at close quarters you can go over the shield you can go under the shield and there's a skeleton at Repton with serious injuries to this inner thigh it's been suggested that particular warrior may even have being castrated well upwards blow was one of these under the shield what better way to do it and death in battle I mean thousands of Vikings died violent deaths in the Viking Age didn't say what did they think happened to them after death well according to the later traditions which is what we mostly have and these are mediated through a Christian viewpoint they believed that they would go to Valhalla the Hall of the slain and they'd feast and fight there that means great every day you can go out fight get killed wake up again in the evening get drunk and do it all again the next day so it was the perfect afterlife for a warrior warrior they'd be waiting for the great battle of Ragnarok at the end of time but until then it was a great half-life and something to aspire to only the best warriors were chosen and that meant that the Viking gods and Odin in particular was a pretty fickle God to worship because he wanted the best warriors on his side which meant he wanted them dead and in Valhalla waiting for that battle that might come so a treacherous gone to worship fantastic and I've got to ask you this kind of I mean you know I've known you for all these years as a scholar of the age and here we are you're in this scare and you're telling me these stories your eyes are blazing this is a world which obviously has captivated you for a long time what is it about it that gets you well I've I've loved a Viking since I was a small child I still remember the last exhibition back here in 1980 being brought along as a birthday treat but yeah the Vikings grabs the imagination and actually all of this stuff maybe there's still a little boy dressing up in there but there's also a lot of practical experimentation I first got into this talking to a reenactor I asked him what he'd learned from doing it and he said what wouldn't you learn more just trying it yourself I thought fair enough and that's 15 years ago and there's something about their character as well though isn't it do you think oh yes when you read their proverbs and there were wisdom there's such stuff down-to-earth clarity about life is Network what do you think well absolutely I think the that just laconic humor is very much in keeping with our own today they've got a certain sense of grim style [Music] [Music] of course thousands of Vikings died violent deaths during the Viking Age and these are some of them these bones are part of an extraordinary thrilling fine that was made only recently 2009 near Weymouth in Dorset when a bypass was being built and there in a lonely Combe in an old Roman quarry were found the bones of around 50 men here's the clues the age range most of them between 18 and 25 the isotopes in that teeth showed that they came from the Scandinavian region not one country but the countries around the Baltic the carbon-dating suggested a date between say the nine seventies and the ten twenties in other words the reign of Ethelred the unready the period in English history when the Viking Danish invasions were resumed and wars were fought with incredible bitterness and savagery right across England the historian of course can't resist speculating who are they why were they here when did it happen they could just have been a boatload of Danes who got lost and ran out of luck or killed by the locals during those Wars they might even be mercenaries ethelred's government employed danish mercenaries who on one occasion turned against their employers maybe these were those kind of men who were captured and killed by the local Earl and his Thane's because they weren't killed in battle they haven't got war wounds they heads were severed and left to one side in the death pit there are skulls with Slash marks of swords across them there's a hand even you can see the bones perhaps the person lifted the hand up to protect themselves and their fingers were cut off so who were they they maybe something to do with one of the most infamous moments in the story of ethelred's the so-called massacre of Saint Bryce's day 13th of November 1002 when ethelred's government in despair about the incessant danish attacks gave the order so it's thought to Massacre the danes of the population of towns in southern england towns like oxford don't know whether it was carried out everywhere but it seems to have happened in some places we'll never know for sure of course but it's a chilling pointer to the ethnic tensions which could still bubble up in a country which had been mixed Anglo Danish society for more than a century chop wood in the wind throw out to sea in good weather speak to a girl in the dark the day's eyes are many you need a ship for gliding a shield for protection sword for striking a maiden for kissing volley King poetry Denis I mean on the face of it it's at any rate seem to be describing a pretty male world there's all this macho talk about battles and swords and shields and the old mention of a yearning for a kind of good woman so where are all the Viking women where's the female of the species and all of this she's everywhere if you're thinking about Viking armies there's plenty of evidence that they took women and children with them on their especially if they were away from home over many years but probably most women stayed at home and they were they had full authority within the home they were there making sure the household was fed and clothed and looking after the the young and the old and the sick and do they have status I mean there's some gorgeous objects in front of us here some of which I know belonged to women and you know they look like the woman who wore that would have had commanded quite some respects well there's that there's a chain there that's made of gold it's a practical item is it's for hanging your keys in' women were in charge of all the chests and everything that was the belongings of the household so he had kept the keys but for the change of e gold that would have been a very high-status woman and next to it we have a woman perhaps from a slightly different class these these two oval brooches are the characteristics of your average Viking woman of the free class the wife of the head of the household the mistress of the household who had complete charge and authority within the household and then next to it there's also a wonderful little object which is an ear scoop for cleaning your ears out and that's made of gold as well so a practical object but showing the status of its owner I think we should bring back air scoops and the only first thing should be very useful in polite society be grave net and what about religion because what you quite often get in societies at this time actually earlier is that women have this very special relationship with the gods in the spirit world they're almost supposed to have a kind of hotline to that world is that the same for the so yes there's certainly they because of this authority they had within the house they were they were able to conduct the sacrifices to the gods and spirits so they were often responsible for that I think there is good evidence for that they also practiced healing though they knew their herbs and and other ways of getting people better and some of them probably did things that we would describe the sorcery that's quite difficult to find out exactly how they did that I mean that must have given them status in society if you're in charge of magic absolutely and probably some such women were feared I mean there's a lot of stories about my women who practice magic and people were very afraid of them really because of their powers that you sometimes get references to them being military saucers as well so they're actually there or on the battlefield yes so these are the Valkyries they were the assistants of the god Odin so they went to battles with him they helped Odin select those warriors who would die in battle and be taken to Valhalla once they got to Valhalla they serve drink to the warriors there but I mean these are imagined creatures I mean if we look at we've got some fabulous swords here yes we do you think would we ever have seen a real flesh-and-blood Viking woman wielding something like this well I would say the sword is the male weapon par excellence mm swords are the status symbol warrior of the elite male warrior however our view keeps changing with new finds and there's a very exciting fine that was made just over a year ago in Denmark by a metal detectorists a very small silver figure of a female very clearly female she has long hair in a plot down the back she has a long dress and she's holding a shield and a sword and it's very very interesting because normally Valkyries are associated with Spears they normally have a shield and a spear it would be very unusual for Valkyrie to have a sword because of the male associations of the sword so I don't quite and I haven't quite worked out what that figure actually means but she does have a sword there's no doubt about it's a female figure for the sword that is what is so brilliant about archaeology you get these new little pieces in the jigsaw puzzle which which slotted in can give you a whole different picture because they're a byzantine source that talks about in a been a battle with the Vikings and the Byzantine army go and kind of rip the armor off and lo and behold some of the fighters are women they say only that it's just a story but but they reported as very like there's a very similar story in Old Norse poetry about Valkyrie she's on in battle with Odin and the hero Sigurd comes along and cuts open her armor it turns out to be a woman but I think that's still that's still part of a Valkyrie myth it says she's in it very much an imagined figure not a real one I tell you what unfortunately I'm almost certain actually woman's experience of the battlefield would have been the bat would have happened and then one or that the army wins and the women then become plunder they become human booty and there's actually there's some really horrible evidence of that over here what you've got here your think really is it's kind of chilling truth of that story of Viking adventure well certainly what we have here are leg irons and they're an iron collar from Dublin Dublin was the center of the slave trade so it's very likely that this is something used to restrain slaves slaves that have been captured perhaps as a result of war hmm and then we actually use a word dairy the whole time that the Old Norse for slave was a was thrall so let me talk about being in thrall or enthralled by people we should remember that yes well slavery is very important part of the Viking world and as I say Dublin was the center of the slave trade and it's it's very interesting because where did these people end up now both men and women were captured as slaves I think a lot of them were ransomed back by their families or sold on but quite a lot of them also ended up travelling with the Vikings to Iceland the DNA evidence from Iceland shows that something like sixty percent perhaps of the female population of Iceland has its origins in in Britain and Ireland and it's quite likely that many of these were slaves that the Viking settlers brought with them it's still very sobering though isn't it looking at that cuz I know there are some sources that say the Vikings looked after their slaves very well but still I mean tha-that's and and a thousand times over just represents so many personal tragedies well if you were a slave you had no rights whatsoever you were just the property of your master quite different from the people we're talking about earlier who had their freedom but the Vikings were not just raiders plunderers and slave traders in many of the lands they invaded they settled down and in time they took on the culture and the Christian religion of the conquered peoples as the Vikings extended their power and influence along the Seaboard of Western Europe and across the British Isles they founded kingdoms in Northumbria and Ireland in Normandy of course the Normans were originally Vikings and eventually they came to rule England as a whole which brings us to this manuscript just take a look this is the liber VI the book of lives of the monastery of the new Minster in Winchester it was the family shrine and the Moores eleum of the dynasty of Alfred the Great the kings of Wessex and the creators of the kingdom of England and this was the book which contained the names of the benefactors of the monastery who sells the monks would pray for and here in a full-page picture in pride of place is a young Viking just look with his beard it's Knut the son of Sweyn Forkbeard the King of Denmark he's got one hand on the gold cross that he's giving as a gift to the monastery and I love this detail his other hand holding the hilt of his sword he'd conquered England with the sword Knut conquered England in 1016 he ruled till 1035 eventually controlling a great north sea empire not only England and Denmark but Norway and parts of Sweden and in that time the young Viking became a respected member of the Christian community of Kings in European Christian laws he went on pilgrimage to Rome and of course he's remembered in famous English folk story in which he puts his throne on the seashore and commands the waves to go back just to show his sycophantic courtiers that there are limits to a king's power even to that of Knut the great [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the first millennium is a rich melting pot of culture and ethnicity and we have assembled a crack team of experts who've been tracing the legacy of that cultural mix right across time Martin findell is a historian of language and can literally read the runes Jane Carroll is working on Old Norse and Old English and in particular Old English place-names and cheery King has become a household name thanks to rediscovering Richard the third underneath that car part from DNA analysis and is now working on a large scale project tracing the genetic legacy of the Vikings now Martin there are runes in this room aren't there yeah there are several objects with runic inscriptions in the exhibition we've got in the corner the very impressive replica of the yelling stone from Denmark with a with the inscription dedicated by Harald Bluetooth one of the most interesting objects I think is is the hunter stone brooch it's a it's a very very fine quality brooch made probably in the seventh or eighth century in southwest Scotland and it's a nice example of the different cultural mix that you've got in in that part of Britain at that time the art styles are used by used by the Scots and by thee and by the anglo-saxons are already influencing one another and then in the 10th century this this brooch was reacquired by somebody and reused and it has an inscription on it in Viking runes or Viking period runes and it says Mel brigde owns this brooch what's most interesting about that is we've got this reuse of an of an old beautiful object with an Old Norse inscription using Scandinavian Viking writing but the name on it is is Celtic shows the the the influence of of the language and the culture between Scandinavian Scots and Northumbria n--'s in the 21st century apart from in graphic novels and fantasy TV series have the runes stayed with us well they pop up all over the place in in popular culture one of the one of the examples that that everybody will be familiar with is the Bluetooth logo which is what rhinology is call a binder oon it's it's two - runic characters joined together it's a it's an ancient ubi Harald Bluetooth initials and the reason for that is that one of the engineers who was working on the Bluetooth project happened to be reading a historical novel about Vikings and and decided that as Harald brought together the Danes under his rulership that was a good analogy for the way bluetooth enables different types of devices to to talk to one another and and and and communicate very good so thanks to him we've all got a little bit of a Viking in our pockets what about the landscape that we walked through I mean in in Britain is is that still a Viking landscape as far as the names are concerned we're certainly walking through a linguistic a Viking landscape so every day we're using words which are Scandinavian origin even though obviously we think of them as being English and and his egg as a Viking word that's what I've been told yes yes I love that I can window I come in today so we think of them each let me throw a negative window we think at the very thing and also on the signpost we see place names which are derived from Scandinavian as well so yeah and what are the clues if we're trying to find varieties on landscape what do we need to look out for well in England the most obvious one is names ending in B so this is a very common Scandinavian word which means farm or village so if I give you a couple of Leicestershire examples we've got ode be the first element of that is possibly the personal name earthy or possibly an adjective or which means desolate or waste and then some RB and other letters for example the first element of that is probably the Scandinavian personal name Sumalee V which means summer traveler so there's a to be needs but some of the very important places have Scandinavian names so Swansea for example means faint Island and Fishguard mean it has this gun and even word for fish and the Scandinavian word for enclosure in it so those are those are two examples of major places which bear Scandinavian names and what about family names yes so a number of surnames which are still in use in the present day derived from a Scandinavian personal name so a surname like brand for example might from the Scandinavian name branded the surname gonna come comes from the Scandinavian woman's name Gunnhild which was very very popular in the Middle Ages Thole is another family name which derives from a Scandinavian personal names so these linguistic traces are all around us because I use surnames as a way of looking for men who might have Scandinavian ancestry so my work is looking at the genetic legacy of the Vikings and I'm really interested in looking in areas where we know that the Vikings got to and this is how I use surname so surnames in this country are about on average 700 years old and if I'm looking for people with very very old surnames tied to the north of England probably that's because their ancestry comes from there so even though the Vikings didn't have hereditary names I'm looking at people who've got surnames that probably originated about 700 years ago in the north of England and then looking at their DNA in particular the Y chromosomes to see whether as a group they've got higher proportions of Scandinavian ancestry in areas that we know the Vikings got to I know you've actually taken a sneaky DNA song - Gareth yes my club Neil I was devastated that I couldn't be involved yeah but that'll be very very interesting yes a Viking they are yes I need to do their eyes tell me kind of off the record do you think you can tell if people have a bit of Viking in them ok so that that is actually quite an important thing you cannot look at a man's Y chromosome type and say that's by king or or son and so forth but I mean given that the number of ancestors that we all would have had alive at the time the Vikings were around it's safe to say that we will all have Vikings somewhere in our family tree we've all got a bit of Viking ancestry somewhere that is amazing there's a little bit of Viking in all of us right thank you so much what is this dream cried Odin just before dawn I dreamed I was preparing Valhalla for a new hero I woke the guard of the Dead and bid them rise up cover the benches clean the cups tell the Valkyries bring wine fitting for a great chief noble heroes are coming from the world my heart is glad so we're nearing the end of our live broadcast preparing our Viking boat burial I'm with Professor Neal Price who's carrying a mysterious looking Viking artifact on which more very soon Neal now a thousand years ago to the day a great battle was fought at Clontarf outside Dublin between the Irish kings and the Vikings which thousands were killed including the great Irish hero Brian Boru and this week hundreds of reenactors have recreated that battle - all vast audiences tens of thousands Neil a thousand years ago exactly to this evening the Vikings would be burying their dead at Clontarf what do we learn about them from their burial customs well there are many many different kinds of Viking burials in kiddin cremations but what all of those funerals have in common is a sense of spectacle of drama of ceremony and remembrance and also above all the idea of preparing a dead person for transition to a new life in the next world with all their possessions intact and sometimes human possessions people could take their slaves into the grave with them so if you imagine a warrior like those who died at Clontarf buried with his weapons and armor fighting fit to wake up in the next world and off it's our colour as we're told it's cool indeed the men but women too Viking women could receive burials every bit as spectacular as the men and just now inside we heard about some of the Sorceress's people buried with with amulets and charms and hallucinogenic drugs and that's where this comes in a staff of sorcery a kind of witch's wand whoa it looks like something you'd find in Ollivanders one shopping Harry Potter doesn't exactly and the kind of woman that would have wielded one of these might well have been a funeral director we're learning more about them all the time a Viking female funeral director brilliant Neil thanks for sharing your scholarship with us tonight over to you better leave well whatever the Vikings imagined their afterlife would be the reality is that they do still live on in the genetic code of many millions of us and results of that DNA test of Michael Gareth and your good self meal will be published on the British Museum's website in just a couple of weeks and just tell me honestly are you going to be horrified or or really secretly rather pleased if you discover you are a true child of the Vikings and one pleased I'd be delighted I come from the west of Scotland so I think there's quite a chance that there's some Viking blood and I love the idea of my ancestors a thousand years ago sailing up the Volga no I'm hoping well though I have to say I have you down as coming from from poets talk perhaps rather than kind of genocidal Raider well I think as the statue of Odeon shows the poetic and the genocidal can coexist what's so interesting about the Vikings isn't it is that whatever your genetic inheritance actually they are almost inescapable but because they have had such a massive impact on the shape of our modern world that's absolutely true they obviously shaped the British Isles in lots of ways very much today but more than that they've shaped the whole of Europe because they established the Baltic as the other Great Sea with the Mediterranean where ideas move from the east to the west there you're from Scandinavia that the Vikings had embracing the Islamic Middle East and the Christian Western Europe that's a really interesting idea for the world now I think it's so important that that as global populations we have to remember how intimately connected we have been for centuries forever yes but what we mustn't do though is we mustn't whitewash the Vikings because they did also do some truly horrific things they did they destroyed wonderful things but in an exhibition you can't of course show what's been destroyed what we can show are the things that the Vikings made and kept and those things take us back to that world and not just the world of their actions but the world of their thoughts and their poetry to the Great North sargans with their tales of heroes and Dragons and the great burning ships the ships carrying the heroes into the afterlife that goes on so for good and for bad they will still live on in our imaginations I hope so and now Michael has been dealing with a huge number of queries and questions about the exhibitions so back to you Michael we've had messages from all over the country quick ones for Gareth cat from Swansea you talked about dendrochronology how does he actually work well dendrochronology is the analysis of tree rings so as long as the Timbers well enough preserved you can see from the spacing of the of the Rings in the wood how old the wood is and where it comes from and that's how we know the ship was made in Norway in the ten twenties brilliant you're gonna love this one this is from Steven and Liverpool why do we not see any Viking helmets with wings and horns on them that's because they're an invention that they invented in the 19th century it's what the Victorians and that and pre Victorians thought Vikings ought to look like Robin what they did not like I'm very very disappointed though they were in my ladybird books when I was at one more fantastic this is a great question what do contemporary Islamic writers say about the Vikings they give us a mixed view we're told by one of them on the one hand they're the filthiest of God's creatures but he also talks about how tall and good-looking they are so they're pretty pretty damning on personal hygiene but they look of them but even handed thanks very much kind of brilliant exhibition thanks for being with us tonight well as our crew of mildly intimidating 21st century Vikings take up their final positions of the burial it is time for us to bid you farewell we hope you've enjoyed yourselves if you want to learn more about the Vikings just go to the British Museum website British Museum dot org and please kion speaking to us on Twitter hashtag Vikings live at British Museum Michael they kept us in one another for 90 minutes we're gonna leave you now with the Vikings have their torch lit burial from the British Museum live in London goodbye or as the Vikings say for Val for the Bell [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: The British Museum

Views: 3,698,694

Rating: 4.732305 out of 5

Keywords: British Museum, History, Art, Archaeology, Anthropology, Museum, vikings, Norse, Oden, Exhibition, viking warrior, valhalla

Id: NuL0Q0tsid4

Length: 88min 52sec (5332 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/PictishPress]

Fantastic, thank you for posting!

[u/Monsieur_Roux]

I saw this exhibition in person back in 2014 and, while I had already had an interest in Norse history and culture, it really did reinforce the passion I felt for the era.

Nice to see the British Museum making this video free for all to see 6 years after its creation!

[u/Meredew]

Fab! Thank you