Vikings: The Incredible Origins Of Europe's Bloodthirsty Pirates | The Vikings | Absolute History

the sun rises over the sea straits that gave norway its name this narrow passage was the cradle of the vikings masters of the sea and the wind the last barbarians today modern archaeology and science shed new light on where they came from and how they succeeded in dominating the seas and waterways of europe from the ice fields of the north to the russian steppe these fearsome scandinavian warriors sailed the globe for three centuries spreading their net of trade and pillage they built kingdoms and empires but their origins still puzzle archaeologists and historians the world over the vikings were great explorers and sailors they exceeded all others in that area i and many people along with me understand the concept of viking as activity as a characteristic it is something that you do you are out a viking today the viking legend attracts men and women from all over the world who reenact their epic voyages and battles but many sources tell us that vikings were feared as ruthless pirates gunner anderson is an archaeologist and curator of the stockholm national historical museum's viking exhibit there are actually some on the runestones as well there is also confirmation on a few runestones that vikings were not only feared outside of scandinavia on the continent but there are occasional runestones that tell stories about him or her being a guard against vikings here in scandinavia as well how do you come to normal today modern science and stunning new discoveries reveal who these scandinavian adventurers really were the swedes norwegians and danes spoke the same language and worshiped the same pagan gods but we shall see that it was their life and death relationship with the sea that defined viking culture for centuries before the viking era the scandinavian populations buried their dead in ship-shaped stone graves called ship settings such as these two on the windswept island of urland that stands side by side with meniere's as entrances to the world of the dead so it is a motif a ship motif that recurs above ground and it is supposed to be visible in that way then the burials in the big ones are in most cases only common cremations so to speak the cremation layer as it is called but then we have first and foremost from the middle of the viking era and in the late viking era great quantities of ship burials where they actually burned the boats far across the baltic sea on the island of sarima in estonia no less than 40 viking warriors were excavated in 2011. they were buried in two boat graves when the carbon dating results came back director of the history faculty at italian university yeri petes was shocked to find out that the ships dated back to 650 a.d these were pre-viking age vikings that makes them pre-vikings of the pre-viking age according to the estonian calendar the vandal age according to swedish chronology [Music] the bodies found in the sarimar ships had been hacked to death battle they died in must have been major if 40 men were killed and enough survivors were left to bury them we can see for sure that it was a battle burial ceremony but there was a serious battle with more than 40 victims in two ships i mean says it all the battle had to be hard we can see vicious wounds on the skeletons for example hacked hands and broken heads so it was hard and they had to bury those victims fast the men who died on sarima island were buried with full military honours riley almei is an anthropologist and was amazed at the care with which they were laid to rest i think that this burial was done with great respect because we can see separated body parts heads hands or legs but they were buried in an anatomically correct order i think that this is a very important sign that they were buried with high respect the strontium isotope readings from the enamel of the teeth of the sarimar warriors suggest they originated from sweden around lake malarin north of lake malarin the heart of a thriving pre-viking age scandinavian community where noble men and women were buried with rich grave goods for centuries before the first recorded viking raid as we shall see the massive lake malarine was the gateway to the baltic for communities like these here ingmar janssen found the best preserved pre-viking age burial site in this part of scandinavia the first grave of this kind dates from about 600 thus the beginning of what we call the vendel era but anyway it's just one man that's laid out like that intact all the other families they lie in simple graves you don't see them over there in a pile cremated these vendel era boat graves were rich in artifacts buried with the dead objects they believed would serve in the afterlife including magnificent helmets they give us an insight into the lives of these pre-viking adventurers and the mine lies in the middle of the boat surrounded by his weapons the vendel era was a prosperous period so they would bury three shields and there would be other things too such as drinking vessels horns and glass from france and so on cemetery shows how cremation and boat burial went together in the pre-viking era noble women were buried with their typical oval broaches there was a woman buried over there in a two metre high mound she was buried with glass pearls and bronze jewellery and so on but the one thing that was so special was a little dragon head that must have been made out of some kind of ivory a woman was the owner of the finest ship grave ever found it was uncovered in a burial mound at oseberg south of oslo and dates to the earliest part of the viking age the ship now stands in the oslo viking ship museum directed by jan bill [Music] during the excavation it became clear that even though there weren't two complete skeletons in the grave it did contain the remains of two distinct individuals it was also evident that they were probably female this was confirmed by the osteological examinations and they also confirmed that the remains were from an older and a younger woman archaeology confirms how ships were central to scandinavian society and how rich men and women would literally take them to the grave the powerful lady who owned the ship was in her eighties and was buried with a cart a sledge and a slave woman aged about fifty whose dna can be traced to populations living around the caspian sea the furthest east the vikings ever went dendrochronology or study of tree rings revealed the ship's place of origin it was only later when other dendrochronological examinations of two ship findings from karma in west norway were carried out that it was suddenly possible to find an exact match with the tree-ring characteristics from the ozberg ship when it was possible to demonstrate that the tree ring pattern seen in the wood from the ozerberg ship was the same that was seen in the ships and the grave on carmeli then it was possible to state that the ozerberg ship must have been built in that same area of west norway the ship sailed for decades in the early 9th century before it was buried with the old lady of ozerberg it was built here on carmoya island western norway maritzva leads the excavations at arvaldsnes the seat of the first kings of the northmen the if novatlan ships lie norway is named after a sea lane and this northway started here when people in the olden days came sailing past the open yaya coast just when they turned north kamson outside here is like a road of water so this is where the north way started this is where the story of the first viking raiders of the west started the homeland of the terrifying predators of the sea [Music] the story of the vikings starts many centuries before the first recorded attack the sea was the lifeblood of the nordic communities that lived along these rocky shores of kharmoya island in modern day norway the vikings here lived and died by their ships the ship grave on its own is a manifestation a communication with the gods in a way it's almost like a theatrical play where you are connecting with the gods and it wasn't like they made these graves in a couple of days there were a lot of rituals and they stood open several months we can see that on the logs that we found in the graves the sagas written in iceland two centuries after the end of the viking era records stories passed on orally by norse poets from one generation to the next and they tell of the first kings of orwalzness the last saga from oval's ancestry was the king at avalnis he traveled all the way to siberia which the norse people called biamoland there he met a mongolian princess of siberian ancestry and to ensure the whale hunt trade he married her and brought her back to avaldness and so there was a dark-skinned queen here on avaldnis although for hundreds of kilometers northwards norwegian geography offers nothing but mountains and deep fields perfect for sheltering ships from the atlantic gales but hopeless for farming here local chieftains found a profitable way of exploiting the rocky coastline by extorting a tong from rich merchants passing through they sent their ships out to control the sea traffic and it is this channel outside avalnis that created our wildness and turned our wildness into a center of power for 3000 years one has to be clear about the fact that voyages down to the continent from sweden and scandinavia were something that had been going on many years before the period that we call the viking era in that way the vikings only followed an already well-worn path we know that the contacts between the continent and sweden and scandinavia were comprehensive and extensive already during the early iron age evidence of ancient trade links with the east along russia's rivers were found here on the shores of lake malarin in sweden where archaeologists found this bronze buddha dating back to 750 a.d yes the little buddha statue was found in the 1950s in a settlement on an island outside of stockholm named helio it was found in a house there and we know that it was made in today's pakistan in the swat valley and that it dates to about 400 years after the christ helio and birker were trading emporia on lake malarin near stockholm here on adelson island on the other side of the lake from birker the local chiefs taxed and extorted protection money from traders and industrialists creating easily disposable wealth that they could spread among their followers there was a long house a port and reception homes as the seat of political power it was built at a healthy distance from the industrial town where traders and craftsmen labored in grimy and filthy conditions the layers of waste are so thick and there is so much garbage that lies inside these places you must also remember that many of these places first and foremost birka had no natural surrounding areas out on the farms they removed the waste they used as manure for the fields and things like that but in these places that space was missing other trading towns grew and faded away in norway all that is left of cowpen on the shore of oslo fjord are a few mounds dating back to the earliest years of the viking age as at birka here a powerful military elite taxed trade in exchange for protection what we can see in the whole of europe is that when these early cities rise they have connections to kings and the powerful the connection can be indirect cities need protection they need military protection because trade is not a barbaric thing it's a peaceful thing and tradesmen are mostly engaged in other things than war they want protection kaopang on the edge of norway's oslo fjord actually revealed surprising cultural influences from the south and the first self-proclaimed king of denmark and in kaopang we look south because if we look at the scandinavian jewellery in the graves in kaopang culturally it's a connection to the south and what was there of powerful kings in the south of scandinavia around the 800s king gottfried king gottfried was little more than a warlord based in northern denmark competing with others to control farmland and trade he founded the trading towns of haiderby and ribe on the very edges of the lands he controlled taxing all those who traded in his realm it was a violent way of life where workers toiled in miserable conditions and traders risked their lives on the high seas suffering attacks but also pillaging themselves where they could armed to the teeth and ready for anything so we don't have clear traces of plunder there but at the same time they did plunder other places that's obvious and we have some indirect traces we've got pieces of ecclesiastic inventory from the british isles where they had been broken off and robbed and made into the jewellery that we found lying in the graves the most ancient power center found in denmark was a chieftains camp at leiden close to the modern city of roskilde on the island of zealand the ancient burial grounds and the royal halls here date back to the late iron age and viking age scholars believe this is the place that inspired the old english epic poem about beowulf proving an ancient tie between the two lands tom christensen has excavated here for decades and explains the ancient ties with england what happens in england is that the romans leave the island and then the german immigration begins together with danish tribes we know that people from jutland settled in kent for example so there must have been cultural and perhaps also personal contact between the head of clans between denmark and england the legendary era kings here in denmark were known as the scholdings descendants of odin the ancestral pagan gods legitimized the rule of the kings here committing them to defending the old religion as long as they could was the son of odin so he was the son of god it was quite common that the royal families created connections to the gods as a baby schooled was sent on a ship to the country of the danes so a ship arrived from nowhere with this baby on board relations with the gods were necessary to be able to call yourself king you had to have a godly descendant and afterwards we have got these stories the purana sagas about the genealogy of the kings that were here [Music] if the origins of viking culture have been lost in the mists of time today archaeologists and scholars are shedding new light on the dark ages in scandinavia today we know very little about early scandinavian culture but the extraordinary viking sagas written down 200 years after the end of the viking age did record the legendary feats of vikings as repeated in poems handed down orally generation after generation by court poets the old norse [Music] the old norse sagas the ancient nordic sources are from a later date they are written down several years after the viking era and they are also written down by chroniclers in scandinavia who were christians and who lived in a christian context and who wrote from their own christian conception of the world so to speak runic inscriptions show a common language between the inhabitants of norway sweden and denmark this non-standardized 16-letter runor alphabet used sound values inscribed on stone or wood by scandinavians then there are the runic inscriptions first and foremost in this part of scandinavia and they are contemporary but they have their own special problems because the messages are often very short and concise really they tell us nothing about society at that time the runestones used a standard layout of scandinavian iconography mainly to commemorate the dead and sometimes for magic carl dahlberg is a modern-day runestone carver who lives on adelson island this ornament shows a flying dragon and is maybe the most beautiful i've seen on a runestone unfortunately the stone once fell so half the dragon's nose has broken but we see the eye and the neck goes down here and a beautiful wing here then the paw is here with two claws and the tail goes down in a circle here and another circle here with some artistic license the tail is turned into a foot with two claws and a small thumb the runestones were usually red starting with the head of the dragon but this one was different well that's kevin and here he writes your girl and fastgear and eric had this stone painted after their father voger then there is an addition f r e h n their father something very special even after the vikings had become christians the dragon remained a key feature of their culture and figured on runestones for centuries the dragon painted on these runestones is generally tied in some way either there is a leash between the neck and the tail that binds the two together or the leash is interwoven here it is interwoven and therefore it is a sort of rule that if you follow this tail for example it goes over next time under the leash over under over under over under and it has to be like that all the way so if the dragon tries to flee it just gets tangled up unlike parchment or paper carving a rune stone left no margin for error then he cuts the runic inscription that is ordered he cuts runes after runes and at the end he writes his father he forgot the r he must of course have an r so the solution is that either he must cut an r here below or he must place it inside the sentence he then chooses to place it inside and i know being a rune carver myself that when he discovered that he forgot the r then he got so angry it really bugs him he pulled his hair how could i do that and the whole day is ruined outside the scandinavian world churchmen wrote about the pagan vikings as a scourge of god threatening centuries of work building new christian kingdoms to protect and propagate the faith the pan-scandinavian culture that was so threatening to the christian world was cruel but effective only warriors who died in battle made it to the mythical paradise of valhalla to fight during the day and feast by night here the one-eyed god odin ruled this warrior paradise with the aid of a raven and the valkyries dead vikings played board games that simulated battle the fine game pieces found in the sarima ships were carved with dragons there were about 325 gaming pieces some were fragmented but still it's a huge number and there were a few dice made from tusk and in general there are two types of gaming pieces the game was called nefertaful and was very popular in pre-viking and viking times so this is a swedish king who is the main character nefertaful means the king's table so it is the king who is being attacked by the muskets the enemies the gods were not necessarily good the viking chief buried on sarima island possessed a luxurious jewel encrusted sword the representation of the canine god fendrier tells us a lot about the early viking beliefs the dog's father loki was a famous trickster revered by pirates now here we have a very nice sword handle detail and it's a bit different from the others we can see a very nice symbol in the form of a two-faced animal it is possible that it was the mythical hunter the son of loki called fendria with a human face and animal hands odin and his brother thor whose hammer amulets are present in every viking excavation had killed the previous god emir and made the world out of his body odin's family was vast and if loki was destined to betray his brothers cousin freya had quite [Music] who was both the goddess of war and of love and when there had been a battle freya was the first to come to the battlefield with her wagon drawn by big cats and it was freya who first got to pick out her half of the men who had fallen those that she didn't want went to odin in valhalla women played a vital role in religion here at the lyder land of legends experimental center in denmark a priestess shows how the gods and spirits would be summoned there were female priests they had the same status they were volvas for example volvas that could see the future and the past and it is said in the volus pass saga that odin himself goes to a volva and asks her to tell him about the past and the future most of pre-christian viking religious worship took place outdoors in open spaces and sacred groves no temples remain though the german cleric adam of bremen described one at old uppsala in modern-day sweden as a large feasting hall ahmud al-fatlan was a 10th century arab traveler along the wonga river in modern day russia al-fatlan tells us the russian vikings worshipped in open places often in woodland or by springs he describes an elaborate viking funeral rite with the sacrifice of a slave girl and a ship burning there were two forms of sacrifice known as plot one in which animals objects and at times humans were sacrificed to a god and the remains would be thrown into peaked bogs or springs such as this one recreated here at the experimental settlement at lyra in denmark in another form of sacrifice the participants ate the meat of the sacrificed animal in company in a common building at some edible all you see here is based on archaeological findings for example the horses have been recreated after we found a horse skull the hoofs and the bones of the lower leg in a danish bog the rest was not found so this is our interpretation what may have happened is a feast to the gods where the horse meat was eaten and then they hung up the skin on a support with the hoofs dangling at some point the horse pelt and the support decomposed and the remains fell down into the bog the idea that a man or woman might be sacrificed to the gods to propitiate some divine intervention went back to the earliest times of scandinavian history we have the talent man with a rope around his neck and a belt around his waist the whole drama is a woman with all her clothes and equipment like combs that have been carefully laid down in the bog the tolland man was hanged to death in sacrifice and found in the peat bog of silkeborg in southern denmark the remains date back to the 4th century bc vikings 2 through valuable objects and the bodies of sacrificial victims into bogs and springs like these two four-year-old boys found in a well at trelleborg it was an ancient pagan tradition three christian clerics described human sacrifices among them teeth of maesborg wrote that every nine years humans and animals were sacrificed by the dozen at lyra describes the terrible and cruel things taking place in laere blood sacrifices and the like then you have to remember that this is a christian's point of view of pagan traditions besides this titmar was of noble family and some of his relatives had been taken hostage by the danish king so he was personally involved and may not have been completely neutral in his presentation and here we are already in about the year 1000. so there is a big difference in time here but there is also the fact that we know that different parts of scandinavia performed different ceremonies first and foremost regarding funerals and events like that how extensive human sacrifice was is incredibly difficult to say because then we must be able to define how these people came to lie in the grave so to speak the norsemen spread westwards to the british isles and iceland taking with them their ancient pagan culture which clashed with the christian empires power and religion went hand in hand in the merciless struggle that lasted 300 years in europe the pagan viking culture clashed violently with the expanding christian world but in iceland the settlers kept their traditions for centuries to come sacrifices were held in a room at the end of the larger longhouses that served as a shrine and the banqueting hall was the place where the members of the community came to eat the flesh of the sacrificed animal the icelandic law books tell us that the richest farmer the most powerful man in any one area would also be the priest the priests were also the speakers at the assembly of all free men here at the thin villa where icelanders exercised their right to debate public issues making iceland the earliest modern democracy in the world the typical scandinavian home was called a longhouse the northernmost of the shetland isles unst has the highest concentration of longhouses in all of britain and was a hub of scandinavian expansion into the atlantic shetland and ernst in particular is right in the middle of the viking seaways so it's the obvious place if you're going from norway across to faro iceland greenland or even america or even up and around going sort of north about and then down to ireland and man and that direction shetland's right in the middle here at yalzhofe in the shetland isles there is evidence that the early scandinavian settlers reused the houses built by the original pictish people who inhabited the islands before they arrived initially people came here trading and that would have been the first contact and the first contact would certainly have have been on that level and they would have been finding out what it was like in shetland as a result of of that we do know that in the end the pictish people kind of completely their their way of life was subsumed completely by the vikings viking society was based on family allegiances and laws there was a three-tier class system split into a small ruling elite or yals free farmers known as bondi and slaves as prosperity increased the scandinavian birth rate grew and family leaders had to find more land and ever greater opportunities for their offspring independence while the rise of the warlords left little space for the more independent-minded petty chieftains it seems that prosperity rather than starvation drove the first raids ships were expensive to build and required social cohesion [Music] armor and weapons too took organization and taking men away from farming during the summer months meant that someone else was looking after the crops the role of women therefore was key to keeping the community functioning it was the women who ruled the farm and as a symbol of that they had keys and they kept those keys with the rest of their valuables and since the men travelled out a lot they were counting on the women to keep order back home [Music] women enjoyed greater political and economic rights than in the christian world too as the lady of ozerberg demonstrates with her rich funeral goods and fine trading ship when they held a meeting the people went to those meetings when they gathered in the small villages the women also had the right to join that means they had the right to vote in 793 calamity struck the english kingdom of northumbria raiders of unknown origin attacked the undefended monastery of lindisfarne and took away everything of value these men would soon be known as the vikings considered by christians to be a scourge of god but the vikings had been raiding and dominating key points on trade routes as far away as russia long before they officially entered the history books [Music] it's almost like we found seven male skeletons in the first ship in sao may and they were not buried systematically they were located in different places and in the second ship we found 33 or 34 human skeletons and fragments and now we know that 10 of these have blade wounds and six have multiple injuries the ship graves puzzled the archaeologists the battle wounds of the 40 men buried here show that the relationship with the local inhabitants was probably violent yet the rich grave goods show that there was a lot more to this expedition than pure pillage these people were killed in battle because we have evidence of that on their remains especially on hands and legs for example we have an upper arm that was hacked in four different places also we have injuries from swords on other arms like someone was defending himself with the upper arm also we have skulls with obvious injuries i don't know what those people were doing there they might even have been a wedding delegation peaceful visitors but we really don't know for sure what was the main reason for their being here and it is very strange that there are so many luxury items swords gaming pieces dogs birds and so on not typical battle ammunition the vikings penetrated the baltic coastline and traded and raided deep into the east european plain the roots passed through staria ladoga north russia where fines of scandinavian amulets and runic inscriptions on wood show that the vikings were trading with if not ruling this strategic place on the volkov river by the mid-8th century the finns slavs and eventually the militarily dominant scandinavians traded here for centuries before the vikings are mentioned in written chronicles they founded the trading town of novgorod just as on the other side of europe other vikings were plundering paris the question is why does it escalate why this sudden rush the factors that have contributed to it first and foremost are the fact that people then as well as now are opportunistic in the sense that some areas where the situation was unstable we must remember that for example the frankish empire was in dissolution and not to mention the british isles there were lots of conflicts in that area as well the great frankish empire to the south was ruled by charlemagne who aggressively expanded his realm in the late 8th century he began a 30-year campaign to forcibly convert the saxons the southern neighbors of the danes to christianity pressing north toward the fiercely pagan scandinavian world just as much blood as the vikings so maybe the viking raid started out as a military operation but after a while people discovered that there is money to be earned here and then it developed into ordinary plunder here at orwell's nest harald fairhair gathered around him a military force that was able to hold together most of norway a great battle at hayjard's fjort brought him final victory over the petty kings and pirates of westfald and caused an exodus to iceland indeed it was during the upheavals of the war to unify norway under harald feyer that we see the greatest viking emigration between 846 and 865 the vikings attacked both england and france often taking advantage of the chaos that afflicted the great empire of charlemagne the norwegian vikings went the furthest of all people in their time and they went as explorers not as bandits to rob but as explorers and tradesmen all of that comes down to the ship technology they developed it was a case of life or death [Music] the baltic and north seas facilitated the sense of pan-scandinavian community ships traveled swiftly along the coast or across the sea while land travel was slow and dangerous it is no surprise therefore that expansion into the rich plains of russia or raiding up the rivers of prosperous england and france was an easier option than cutting the forests and farming the land of inland sweden and norway while early scandinavian society became more organized and benefited from trade between the far north and the far south its appetite for wealth earned or stolen grew its ability to organize a predatory economy grew with it although they instilled terror in their victims the vikings were just the more aggressive face of a fast evolving scandinavian society whose influence spread from modern-day canada to the caspian sea the secret of their success lay in their nautical technology and unique social cohesion which together were a formidable weapon for these empire builders

Channel: Absolute History

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Keywords: Medieval Europe History, New Discoveries, Nordic history, Norse Invaders, Raid and Conquer, Raiding Techniques, Sea Exploration Journeys, Valhalla Legends, Viking Cities, Viking Grooming, Viking Trade Routes, Viking Warfare, Viking legends, Viking revolution, World History Events, epic sagas, grooming habits, medieval raids, plundering voyages, sea exploration

Id: kURhyeHxb14

Length: 44min 50sec (2690 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021