Who Were The Real Northmen Of Scandinavia? | With W B Bartlett

thanks so much for coming on the podcast absolute pleasure i mean i never tire of talking about the vikings and what i like about your book is you you try and give it you give the whole chronology you're right so right up to the later christian vikings as well as as well as perhaps the more famous early uh some almost semi-mythical ones but let's start really what the big question is is uh why does the world witness this explosion of seafaring traders settlers and pirates out of the north world in the early medieval period where they come from there's a very good question and what's very interesting in the research for my book i found that for several centuries before the viking raids began scandinavia in the baltic was still quite violent and there was lots of local raiding going on so they didn't quite come out of the blue in terms of their origins though it was only in around 793 that they started to attack the wider christian world so there was a tradition of raiding albeit local raiding and that was allied at the end of the 8th century to several coincidental events i think first of all seafaring generally in the scandinavian world developed enormously during the course of that century they could build ships that would go further than ever before and were more navigable than ever before so they had a technological uh kind of impetus there for one thing and then we have the impetus of the fact that the eighth century was actually quite uh quite a wealthy century there was an economic boom lots of trading ports grew up on the coast of what we would now call france and england and the low countries so there was a lot of wealth around and vikings particularly from norway who were somehow left left out of this boom because of their geographical location suddenly thought hang on a minute there's some available welfare uh maybe they'd done some small scale trading so they kind of knew where they were going anyway and all of a sudden they had this opportunity they could see the ports were not very well defended and uh there was an opportunity that they took advantage of the victorians had this kind of strange idea about sort of suddenly there was agricultural surplus or overpopulation or there was something going on within the scandinavian world do we the modern scholars think that that's that's not true i don't think we can totally dismiss that uh if you travel around scandinavia especially the coast of norway the arable land is is quite limited in scope if you look at the geographical design if you like of norway you will see lots of mountains and very narrow coastal strips where people could grow things and you know if you did have a population explosion that would inevitably have some impact on on the availability of land and the need for to find somewhere else to to grow things and to expand into so i think the modern view is that probably we can't just blame it on that but it may have been one of the contributory factors what does the word viking mean and why do scholars get very upset or otherwise when you use it well it's very interesting because they're we don't really know is the honest answer there are several theories and perhaps the most most popular one is that they're named after a scandinavian word vic which means a bay or a creek somewhere where where vikings would moor up but not particularly a convincing theory and i guess the reason people get upset about it is because uh at the time they were called many things they were called vikings it would be wrong to say that the contemporary accounts never talk about vikings but they mentioned lots of other words as well usually to do with their non-christian perspective so they would be called heathens they would be called pagans they would be called gentiles and very very occasionally they would be called vikings so you know it wasn't it wasn't common though it wasn't unknown to call them vikings at the time you mentioned the day in the 8th century there when vikings appear in britain but can we just actually briefly talk about the viking expansion eastward for a second shelter the baltics and the great rivers of russia and the eurasian because only yesterday i saw a coin that was minted in tashkent and was found in the north west of england lancaster the the very interesting thing is we think of vikings as one homogenous group but they were totally not that uh and many of the people going east not all of them but many of them came from what we would now call sweden sweden at the time didn't exist but that area we call sweden this is where they were coming from and uh partly it's geographical if you look at norway the natural way to go is west because of the weather and the ties and that kind of thing on the other hand if you're safely wrapped up inside the baltic it's much easier to go east and then you have some very big river systems emptying out into the baltic uh things like the deneber and and and other major rivers would link uh with some difficulty they would link to the black sea to the caspian sea so vikings particularly from sweden saw an opportunity to start trading there and again it's likely they were doing that before the traditional uh beginning of the viking age so you know there is there is a lot of activity early on in what we call the viking age which makes me think this was going on long before and uh i myself was in samacand uh just two or three months ago and there are also coins from samacant founder found in england and ireland and what was happening here is there was this massive uh long-distance trading network probably with a lot of middlemen involved so people would not travel from say tashkent to ireland but they would pass on things to to people who were intermediaries and eventually those coins would end up on the other side of the viking world the other thing to remember though is the value of these coins was not so much in their monetary value it was the fact they were made of silver and the viking world treasured silver very very highly so so more often than not they were more interested in the silver content of those coins than the monetary value of the coins themselves and that tended to be traded right across the viking world so the vikings are taking their long boats into these rivers they were giant rivers you could get viking ships deep into massive yeah russian uk and stuff so what are they are they taking slaves from the baltic and or what what are they what's being traded by these vikings slaves were certainly a big part of it and they they really developed the the slave trade enormously because they were able to move vast numbers of slaves around we have contemporary accounts of 200 viking ships full of slaves which is kind of an amazing number you know maybe thousands of slaves being traded but they were taking other things too so they would be taking things from the sami in the north of scandinavia things like furs that kind of thing which were very valued elsewhere they'd also be taking baltic amber which again was very widely traded so a number of things but uh slaves were certainly a big part of what they were doing so that's to the east to get this giant viking traces and and they maybe they speak one one possible derivation the word russia is is the ruse of the rose right correct yes and and uh in modern russia there is an ongoing debate between how influential the vikings were in founding russia as we know it and uh we find this often in viking history people get very protective about their own national history you know the part that the vikings played or didn't play in in their development so we we have an ongoing debate about that let's come west now uh we got um the isles britain island france what's the viking impact on those atlantic polities i i think the vikings had a massive impact on all of them but perhaps in slightly different ways so if we look uh if we start at the western extremity if we think about ireland uh the the north had a great part in in developing the major cities or towns of modern ireland particularly dublin and cork and limerick but actually did not really uh get too heavily involved in the hinterland you know they're the center of ireland so they never really had a universal rule over ireland on the other hand if we look at particularly scotland and england they had a massive impact in some ways they they gave previously divided people a common enemy to fight against so if you think about before the vikings came we had six or seven kingdoms in england and by the end of the viking age we had one country called england and i think the vikings played a very significant part in helping to unify opposition against them but also of course they they were heavily involved in contributing their own bloodline if you like to the development of england and if we look at the north of england and the midlands in particular you know they set up their own uh kind of culture there which which mixed with the english culture and played a very significant role in developing that york becomes one of the most dynamic cities in western europe because of the it's a place of exchange between exactly exactly and and the the position of york in particular was crucial to the viking world in england and in ireland it's very interesting that in the in the 10th century in particular the vikings who ruled york also ruled dublin and vice versa so so maybe we need to turn geography on its head a bit we think of england as one country unified but actually the viking part of britain if we can call it that kind of was more horizontal stretching across from ireland through the north of england and into the south of scotland the reputation of the vikings does it come largely as bloodthirsty pagans does it come largely from the fact that they didn't write the history books very much so um so so we have to remember that the people writing the history books were normally the victims of the vikings so pretty much the only people who could write back then were were members of the church so basically they were writing accounts of the vikings attack attacking their own establishments hardly like them to hardly like to be objective observers in that kind of situation um having said that i i don't think we should underplay the violence of the vikings either i mean they're looking at the evidence it doesn't really seem any doubt that they were extremely violent but but to caveat that we have to remember they were lots of christian people at the time you know yeah i've been to port monica scotland where that was interesting smashed long skulls alone uh so why did the vikings well they come close to defeat to conquering england in the 9th century why did they not do that i i think the major reason that they didn't manage to to conquer england was because they were divided themselves if we look at the the impact of the great heathen army in the latter half of the 9th century eventually the great heathen army starts to fragment and they attacked england pretty much as a unified force but before too long they were starting to have different objectives probably to fall out with each other people were going off in different directions and and that inevitably i think weakened the impetus and also that the kings of wessex at the time alfred uh and especially his elder brother ethelred who tends to get ignored a bit in in history they they were order pretty strong pretty coordinated state that was able to resist probably better than anywhere else in england but still very close could easily have gone the other way well come to the sort of curious overlooked viking conquest of england in the 11th century second indeed but okay let's talk about the things we don't hear about now the vikings in in france and into the mediterranean sure um so the vikings were were attacking frankie as it was called them which was really a combination of what we would now call france and much of germany and the low countries during the time of charlemagne now charlemagne was a very powerful man uh and yet even he had to deal with viking attacks they had the nerve if you like to attack his his uh coastal territories quite early on in the traditional viking age um and uh basically they they carried on those attacks throughout the course of the ninth century with varying degrees of success and then at the beginning of the 10th century we find one of the french kings deciding i'm not going to beat these vikings so i'm going to recruit some of them so this is where duke rollo uh of normandy emerges a traditional viking uh who gets given some land uh ergo normandy to to to kind of keep him sweet and he will protect the french kings against other vikings which is pretty much what he did you know so so he eventually became a very significant part of france in its own right and so they could previously the vikings had attacked paris right with some success yeah they attacked paris on several occasions actually uh so again they could sail right up the the sen right into the heart of the city basically and there were several major battles there and usually they were bought off uh this is one of the recurrent themes uh the later english king ethel red the unready kind of unfairly gets uh gets gets the credit if i can call it that for the idea of danegeld buying the danes and the vikings off but people have been doing it for 200 years before him so we've got normally norseman you know the normans yes now guarding the mouth of the sen how quickly do they because this is now the argument because they then invade uh england 1066. how viking are they by that i mean how french they become and how rapidly does that happen it's a very good question and and there's contradictory evidence um in some ways the way they carried on acting after they took over normandy was very viking you know they're raiding other countries england sicily many other places so in some ways they they are traditional vikings in terms of their tactics but in other ways they lost them with their vikingness i mean the normans quickly started speaking french they they adopted christianity wholesale so they were adopting that aspect of french culture too and there's a very funny story i think it's quite amusing in its own way but during the campaign leading up to the battle of hastings most of the normans were scared to come over on ships which is completely the opposite of what you'd expect from vikings so contradictory evidence there let's talk about the mediterranean briefing is it bjorn yeah bjorn ironside um uh he was allegedly a son of the famous ragnar lothbrook who might never have existed but that's another story um but we think beyond existed don't we we we're very very confident bjorn existed because he gets lots of contemporary references and uh he he went on this extraordinary raid uh with with another famous but less remembered viking called heisten who was around for about 40 odd years so very much a veteran by the end they basically sailed down after attacking france after the first attack on paris in the 840s they decided we go a bit further here so they carried on exploring they raided various cities on the coast of spain uh they even attacked morris spain uh back then places like cordoba were were big moorish islamic cities in the south of spain they even attacked those and then they pushed on through into the mediterranean itself allegedly not 100 sure but might even have got as far as alexandria so really right into the heart of the mediterranean but it wasn't a total success the the number of ships that came back was less than half of those which had left uh they they didn't meet universal success even when they attacked cities in cordoba many of them were captured and hanged there was a story that there wasn't enough wood for for gibbets to hang all the vikings on so they were being hung from palm trees so it was a very mixed mixed bag vikings aren't they're not siegecraft guys are they they don't like it they look like a big rampart no then that though ironically as time went on they became a bit better at it um what they did i i mean they developed their own fortifications uh typically uh d-shaped enclosures they're called because the straight side is on the river and then you have walls around the other three sides forming a semi-circle around it and they proved to be quite successful in terms of keeping the enemy out they did lacey to paris later on in the 9th century there was a very very major siege which went on and on and on and and eventually again they were bought off but they didn't really enjoy siegecraft themselves but they were very good at developing their own defenses let's talk about then so that's the med let's talk about going north or north west the last major island on the planet to be inhabited by humans iceland which is empty i think uh talk talks about ice and greenland and newfoundland as well that's an extraordinary story um and i think we just have to go back to the beginning of the viking age they're almost like island hopping so they go across first of all to places like shetland and orkney in the western islands or scotland and then they push across to the faroe islands and then they push across to iceland and and iceland was their major uh colonial expansion into the north atlantic um when they got there it was a fairly fertile land uh not so much now partly because of the ecological damage they may have caused to the island but it was it you know as you say it was pretty much uninhabited apart from the old irish monk who allegedly might have been there but we don't really care and basically there was a lot of room that reasonably good climate despite the name iceland you know pretty pretty pretty good land um and ended up as certainly their major north atlantic settlement by the 10th century maybe about 100 years after they found iceland there's about 60 000 people we think living there scattered all around the island and uh and then greenland was almost a chance discovery uh somebody in fact a famous eric the red who uh who was really a bit of a rascal even by viking standards uh he being effectively thrown out of norway and then thrown out of iceland so he ends up he'd heard stories about greenland maybe someone had seen it before and he goes over there and he starts this settlement in this wonderful new green land as he calls it you know full of uh wonderful agricultural prospects not true of talk at all of course it's full of glaciers and things but hey it's a way of getting people there and then uh maybe maybe 20 or 30 years after this that they discover probably purely by accident the outer reaches of north america and the chance discovery uh was followed up soon after by a more detailed expedition that was trying to find out more about it and in fact we think there were three major expeditions uh to to north america and to newfoundland which we've set up some bases in newfoundland and quite possibly beyond that we don't know uh but one day one day we'll finish but basically what the problem they have in north america as opposed to greenland in iceland is there are already people there and people who do not necessarily welcome them in with open arms so they're surrounded by enemies basically and maybe because of that there's not enough of them you know the critical mass of people even in greenland was never more than two or three thousand people so you're not going to get large viking armies going across to north they're just not there so let's come back then to where they do uh sort of briefly um take over take over england why do we see this second great viking age this great viking assault on england i think england itself was in a difficult situation at the time it was very divided um the king ethel red the unready was in fact a very long-serving king he was king for nearly 40 years so i kind of think in some ways he's been slightly unfairly painted as this completely useless person who never did anything good i think maybe in the early part of his reign he was perhaps more effective than he was later on but uh england was very disunited uh ethelred really wasn't meant to be king his older half brother was assassinated probably with the involvement of his stepmother you know so and and really for the next 20 30 years we have a very dis disunited england at the same time we have the powerful development of particularly denmark uh under spain spain fort beard and his father um as so so basically we have this uh this this kind of unfortunate coincidence of events denmark's getting stronger strong sea power lots of troops england is slightly weaker so everything happens at the wrong time as far as the english are concerned the vikings could have occupied the isle of wight don't they and use it as a they do they do and this was a classic viking tactic you know to take an island uh not too far away from your target means no one can counter-attack you because you have mastery overseas and they tried it on a smaller scale in other islands off england and ireland and in frankie it's a classic way of the vikings undertaking their their their kind of campaigns it would be a classic way of the british doing it in the 18th century onwards as well who briefly has this great pan north sea stretching into sweden viking empire very much so and uh you know canoe was an extraordinary ruler and uh as you say he he kind of had this naughty empire and uh you know he even had what we would call soft power now it wasn't for canoe it wasn't just the conquest though he was perfectly capable of doing that he also developed very strong alliances with the german empire totally peaceful alliances he visits the pope he becomes like a mainstream christian king he probably had very good relationships with the vikings in ireland though again probably he never tried to rule them directly so he's a very clever statesman as well as a warrior capable of both you know and he's uh very effective i find it amazing that any time that the whole of england has been incorporated into a union that also includes denmark and norway it's it's absolutely so used to kind of the the european uh used to anglo french you know that they're whether it's the romans or or the normans or plantations with with our with that sort of french to the southeast it's so interesting yeah the words almost turned on at right angles you know the the scandinavian world as i say was almost a horizontal world in terms of its geography rather than its vertical nature thinking about us being linked to the mediterranean and france and you know it's a complete change which makes hastings perhaps an absolutely critical battle certainly in british and probably european history for 1066 you get harold gobertson king of england whose mother is danish william of duke of normandy whose ancestors are vikings and harold hardrada one of the greatest vikings of all time all battling out to be king of england exactly and uh it it's an interesting thought i mean one of the things which struck me when i was researching canoe in particular a couple of years ago is that uh actually we see the battle of hastings as an anglo-saxon versus norman thing but but you could equally argue as an anglo-danish army at hastings they're fighting in many cases with danish weapons so there'd already been a very big degree of assimilation in england even after canoes bloodline dries dries up in the early 1040s the influence of the danes in england was still very profound stanford bridge is seen as defeat in sick 1066 of harold hardrada the catastrophic feat seems the end of the vikings in england but actually the vikings are flittering around the coast worrying william the conqueror into the 10 uh 70s aren't they and in scotland obviously you get this norwegian presence in the isles that goes on right well into the middle ages but when do you when do you bring down the guillotine on the end of the viking age it's a very interesting question and i think you know my observations on that would be things like the vikings never really end they just morph into something else you know it's very hard to say okay maybe in my book i kind of arbitrarily almost pick 1100 when a norwegian king is killed fighting in ireland but you know you have the battle of largs 150 years later as you say you have aunty and shetland still part of of norway until the 15th century and what really happens is the viking age doesn't really end but it morphs into something different we have scandinavian kingdoms emerging uh denmark and norway and sweden which are really becoming mainstream nation states which in the viking age they really weren't in the viking age these states are just developing and maybe this is one of the great contributions of the viking age to evolve these new nation states which became part of the mainstream in europe what other legacy of the viking age in jaws to this day why they why do they still matter so much i think in part it's a human interest thing they are incredibly intrepid uh they undertake enormous risks and but manage risk one of the things i find interesting about the vikings is they probably wouldn't choose to fight a battle unless they had a good chance of winning it there was nothing wrong with running away so so i think they were kind of pragmatic i think that's also an attractive thing that but then whilst we might see them sometimes as cartoon heroes if you like they're much deeper than that they're they're kind of pragmatic they're realistic and i think that attracts this duality of the vikings that attracts the interest as well so they're capable of being horrific raiders at the same time they they can be amazing craftsmen uh they're very brave adventurous so they're a complex mixture you know and i think that continues to draw people in that they're not really one thing i mean you can't definitively say the vikings were were kind of awful raiders or or they were wonderful craftsmen as if the two are like mutually exclusive they're not this is all part of the viking world so i think they're incredibly interesting you know their complexity okay last question i forgot to ask you but gotta weigh in on it uh women shield maidens did they exist we've had a lot of archaeologists talking about this recently uh i think uh if you follow the evidence it's likely that they did exist but it would be nice to have a bit more definitive evidence but we found women buried with weapons that kind of thing um and there are some saga accounts so so on the balance of probabilities i would say yes that they they probably did exist my daughter'll be thrilled thank you very much indeed the book is called vikings a history of the northmen brilliant come by everyone thank you very much thank you hi folks i'm dante on a history hit tv adventure in antarctica you should subscribe because we've got a lot more of this kind of thing coming up including digs on the former battlefields of the western front as subscribers you can use the code youtube to get 50 of your first three months

Channel: History Hit

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Keywords: the northman, northmen, vikings, who were the vikings, what does northman mean, northmen explained, viking history explained, viking history documentary, w b bartlett, wayne bartlett, viking historian, northmen history, viking origins, vikings america discovery, vikings asia, varangian guard, ragnar lothbrok, ivar the boneless, bjorn ironside, vikings true history, viking expansion, dan snow history hit, dan snow history, dan snow vikings, history hit youtube

Id: QiucI7RoHfY

Length: 31min 23sec (1883 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022