Show 70 - Twilight of the Aesir II
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Today's show is part two of a two-part series on the spread of Christianity to the far north of Europe and the last holdouts who still believe in the ancient pagan Germanic gods of the Norse sagas, the Odins and the Thors and people like that. If you didn't happen to hear part one, you might want to catch that before you hear this show. Both shows are actually a continuation of

of our 2012 series called Thor's Angels. And if you want that, that's available for a nominal fee from our website. One last thing, stay tuned at the end of today's show for some announcements of live appearances I might be making in a town near you. So without further ado, let's kick off today's ending of our two-part series here with Twilight of the Isier, part two. December 7th. It's history. 1941.

A date which will live in infamy. The events. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. The figures. I take pride in the words. The drama. Ich bin ein Violiner.

Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The deep questions. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their presidents have come.

Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. It's hardcore history. Parallel universes. Simulation theory. Infinite world hypotheses. Other dimensions.

I'm not smart enough to understand these concepts, but I have been fascinated by them ever since I was first exposed to the ideas. Obviously, these are concepts that people like physicists study. Another reason I wouldn't understand them. Could never understand the math, right? You just take it at face value. But I've often wondered if such concepts couldn't explain the

or put some sort of a scientific sort of patina, or as they would say in the UK, patina, on top of some of the ancient beliefs that earlier peoples had that they talked about in ways that have come down to us as fairy stories or myths or legends or folklore.

that would be much more easy for us to grasp and accept if some physicist explained it to us as, you know, something that was a part of another dimensional realm or a parallel universe or something connected to a physicist-type theory that sounds a lot more logical and acceptable than talking about the existence of something like elves.

or trolls, or, of course, magic. Sometimes I wonder if earlier peoples couldn't understand those higher concepts, how would they explain things in their world that they saw or thought they saw or believed in? As we've said before, if a lot of people believe in something like magic fervently, doesn't that create a reality in all its own? There's something known as the Tinkerbell effect. Maybe you've heard of it.

If you remember the Walt Disney production of Peter Pan, there's this moment where you have to believe in Tinkerbell or Tinkerbell's going to die. If you go look up the definition of it, it describes the phenomenon of thinking something exists because people believe it exists, right? Magic, sorcery, elves, dwarves, trolls, Valkyries, Norns. These are Viking belief systems, things that they believed in.

wouldn't it be interesting if it turned out some day that these were their representations of things that a physicist could explain in scientific terms one of my favorite parts of any shakespeare play and i'm not alone in this is the earliest part of hamlet

where you have this moment where the Night Watch comes and tells Hamlet and Horatio, his somewhat skeptical, we would call him today more of a scientific, you know, terra firma kind of guy, and the Night Watch tells Hamlet that the ghost of his father has just appeared. So Hamlet and Horatio run up to the battlements, and sure enough, the ghost appears.

And Horatio, in his wonderfully skeptical, but can't deny what he's seeing in front of him sort of way, is stunned, doesn't believe in ghosts, and says, oh, day and night, but this is wondrous strange. Then Hamlet replies with that wonderful line that I feel covers a lot of what we just said. He says, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, suggesting, of course, that the human imagination is limited, and there are many things we don't know.

Things that haven't been discovered, and in fact, things we haven't even dreamt of. As we've said about magic before, what happens if lots of people believe in it and act on it? Magic might not be real, but the effects are. If some king goes to the oracle at Delphi in the ancient world and asks the...

you know the prophetess on the oracle's seat you know should i go and attack this rival kingdom and the prophetess says yes you should go attack this kingdom and he does well that may be a bunch of bunk but he acted on it and people died and kingdoms rose or fell because of it how real does that make the magic

If you believe yourself to be cursed and then things start going wrong, does that double down on this belief that you're cursed? And does your mind start working against you? I mean, there's a lot of things here where the human mind can interact with belief in a way that manifests a kind of reality that even if it is a phantom sort of reality at its core, manifests in real world consequences.

Maybe the effect of the human mind and positive or negative thinking is just as much of a physicist's undiscovered country as parallel universes, simulation theory, infinite world hypotheses, or other dimensions. But when you talk about what the people in the Viking world believed in, they believed in elves and dwarves and trolls and valkyries and norns.

They also believed in beings like giants, who they believed were an integral part of the creation of the universe and may not have been these overly large beings that we normally associate with the term, just like their view of dwarves may not have involved beings who were smaller than human in stature.

But many of these beings constituted what historian Neil Price in his book The Viking Way refers to as the invisible population. And he says that to many in the Viking world, the invisible population of things like elves may have been more important to their daily life than the gods themselves. Because in a polytheistic religion, the gods had their own problems and people were just one of the things that they may have been concerned with.

This is difficult for those of us raised in an environment of monotheism to understand, just like trying to get your mind around a belief system that may not have been orthodox and may not have been learned and may not have been understood by everyone similarly, right? They didn't all read the Bible and learn in Sunday school how things were. People just had an innate understanding, and it could differ person to person in the Viking way. Neil Price writes, quote,

In the same spirit as Philip Velikot's description of the gods of classical Greece, the worship, in air quotes, required by the Norse pantheon was not adoration or gratitude or even unreserved approval and was thus utterly unlike the Christian relationship to the divine. The religion of the Aesir and the Vanir demanded only a recognition that they existed as an integral and immutable part of human nature and society and of the natural world.

and that as such they possessed an inherent rightness perhaps even a kind of beauty if one wished to avoid disaster it was necessary to come to terms with the gods and the terms would be theirs not those of their followers this is an important point in relation to the interpretations he writes that i will develop in the following chapters because a refusal to acknowledge the gods in this way could have dire consequences

It would also involve a contradiction, as such an act would be a denial of the undeniable. The question of believing in the Norse gods was probably irrelevant." Price also points out that there wasn't the sort of orthodoxy of belief that we are accustomed to in the more monotheistic religions. No Sunday school, no singular text that everyone could study and be on the same page with.

There might be quite a bit of variation in the belief systems. Also, unlike the religions of the book, you could not automatically assume that the deities were on your side because they had their own problems, their own goals, and their own issues that they were involved with. You might be a secondary or even lower on the list concern.

Odin, who is sometimes considered to be the chief of the gods, but maybe not. Odin is the perfect example, right? It is said that you have to be careful because Odin can be tricky. He might sleep with a man's wife, or he might sleep with the wife's husband. These are not the sort of things one in the religions of the book need to worry about.

Odin is a fantastically interesting figure that when you contrast it with the monotheistic religions shows many of the various differences. I mean, famously, the God of the Bible is supposed to know when any sparrow falls from a tree. Odin doesn't. Odin has a couple of ravens that he keeps for reconnaissance purposes. One is named Mind, the other Memory.

Sometimes you'll hear one is named Thought, too. You'll run into that. Neil Price says Mind and Memory are the translations that he would ascribe to. And these ravens go out in the world and report back to Odin so that he can know when some sparrow falls, if he even cares about something like that. Odin also has powers and magic that he can use to

to gain further information. Again, one would assume that the God of the Bible has this information. Odin needs to search for things like wisdom. He gave up an eye in his pursuit of wisdom. That's why he only has one. He's known by perhaps hundreds of different names, and one of the powers that he has and uses all the time is he talks to dead people.

He goes up to the bodies that are hanging on the gallows after someone is hanged and he talks to them. He raises the dead so that he can question them. He has the decapitated head of another god that he has preserved and keeps with him so that he can ask it questions. It reminds me a little of like a very gory version of a Harry Potter painting where

where you can ask the figures in the painting for information, Odin talks to the head. There is no clear separation of powers and authorities and responsibilities amongst the gods. There's overlap. For example,

Odin and Thor. Thor is Odin's son, and, you know, from the comic books and movies and stuff, Thor is very famous, but Thor, the god of thunder and weather, also rules a part of military affairs, war, the actual brute strength of fighting, whereas his father Odin is the strategist and the god of that. Also, apparently, the god of berserk kind of fanaticism. Odin also gets slammed sometimes for using things like magic because in the Norse

religious beliefs and society magic is where the women shine it's a female thing to do and there is in one of the norse sagas loki who is thought to be the son of a god and a giant or giantess loki sort of takes a slam at odin by saying the fact that he practices magic is perverted and makes him feminine

But this is part of what makes women so both respected and in some cases feared. They are spell weavers and shamans and sorceresses. The three women who supposedly weave the destinies of human beings, the Norns, fall into this category. And there are some who think that there are similarities between many of the different European pre-Christian women

because there are figures in Greek mythology, for example, the famous Fates. And the names are similar, the three women. One is named something akin to a version that means the past.

Another is named with a version that means something like the present, and another is named with a version that means something like the future. It's sort of like Ebenezer Scrooge's A Christmas Carol's Ghosts, Ghost of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, Christmas Future. The Norns are somewhat more terrifying, and some of the mythology suggests that they weave the fate of mankind on a loom,

with the entrails or bloody body parts of human beings. I've also heard that ascribed to Valkyries. And Valkyries also have been completely distorted by things like comic books and male fantasies into sort of Scandinavian versions of Baywatch women.

that a man might watch and admire and lust after when the actual accounts from the sagas and whatnot describe looking at a Valkyrie as terrifying and akin to staring into flame. The entire universe in Norse mythology is held together or girded by a tree, an evergreen ash tree known as Yggdrasil.

And the Norns care for Yggdrasil, and Yggdrasil is sometimes thought by some to refer to sort of a version of the Milky Way. And Yggdrasil connects the various realms of existence. This gets us back to our physicist idea of other dimensions or multiple world theories. I mean, Yggdrasil connects like a

Interstate Highway, places like Midgard, which is where human beings live and which is the term J.R.R. Tolkien used and translated into Middle Earth, connects Midgard to Asgard and Midgard and Asgard to the realm of the giants, Jotunheim, and the land of Midgard and Asgard and Jotunheim to the lands of fire and ice and all the other different realms. There's an interesting connection between

ancient Germanic religion across Europe and this question of this sacred tree, because when the

Christian bishops are going around trying to convert people like the Saxons or other Germanic tribes or the Frisians or any of those people. They all sort of have a tree that is connected to their worship. In fact, hundreds of years before when Tacitus is writing about Germanic beliefs, he talks about sacred trees in sacred groves where they have sacrifices that involve the bloody sacrifice

killings of human beings and animals who are then ritually hung up around sacred sites. In his 11th century writings, Adam of Bremen, who has as his source a Danish king, talks about one of these sacrificial places at Uppsala in what's now Sweden. And by the way, when Adam of Bremen says Woden, that's the more Germanic version of the name Odin,

When he says Frico, he means Frey or Freyr. And when he says Bjorko, when he's talking about a city, he means the city of Berko, which is the trade center in the island in the middle of a lake that's so famous. And he says, quote...

That folk, meaning the Swedes, has a very famous temple called Uppsala, situated not far from the city of Sicturna and Bjorko. In this temple, entirely decked out in gold, the people worship the statues of three gods, in such wise that the mightiest of them, Thor, occupies a throne in the middle of the chamber. Woden and Frico have places on either side. The significance of these gods is as follows.

thor they say presides over the air which governs the thunder and lightning the winds and rains fair weather and crops the other woden that is the furious carries on war and imparts to man strength against his enemies the third is frico who bestows peace and pleasure on mortals his likeness too they fashion with an immense phallus

but Woden they chisel armed, as our people are wont to represent Mars. Thor, with his scepter, apparently resembles Jove. The people also worship heroes, made gods, whom they endow with immortality because of their remarkable exploits. End quote. The scepter that he says Thor has is probably the famous hammer, Mjolnir.

Adam of Braman then describes what the sacrifice at these various places is like, and he writes, quote, "...the sacrifices of this nature, of every living thing that is male, they offer nine heads, with the blood of which it is customary to placate gods of this sort. The bodies they hang in a sacred grove that adjoins the temple."

now this grove is so sacred in the eyes of the heathen that each and every tree in it is believed divine because of the death or putrefaction of the victims even dogs and horses hang there with men

A Christian, 72 years old, told me that he had seen the bodies suspended promiscuitously. Furthermore, the incantations customarily chanted in the ritual of a sacrifice of this kind are manifold and unseemly. Therefore, it is better to keep silence about them."

Given how little is actually known about what went on at these sorts of Viking religious ceremonies, one wishes Adam of Braman wouldn't have been so scared or horrified and could have told us what the Danish king told him about them. But Adam of Braman's response to this is what you would have expected from most people.

christians of the middle ages who would have seen these viking ceremonies as little more than satanic rituals designed to placate or even conjure devils and demons and the people involved in them as folk who were headed for the fiery pits of damnation

Viking expert and University of Oslo historian John Vidar Sigurdsson in his book Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings points out two interesting facts about the Scandinavians in this era and their belief system. He says that

The worship of deities like Thor and Odin is part of an ethnic religion, meaning it applied to a specific people. Contrast that with something like Christianity, which is a universal religion. Islam is too, the idea that anyone can convert to this, and it applies equally well to people all over the world. Sigurdsson points out that that's not how the Scandinavians would have seen their gods. Their gods were exactly that, their gods.

Sigurdsson also says that you could classify this religion as an elite religion, meaning the people that communicated with the gods were people like the kings. And this is key because the biggest threat to this religion in this time period is people like Adam of Bramman,

who simply want to keep these people from the fiery pits of hell and stop them from worshipping demons and devils. But to the people of Scandinavia it's the same as saying that you want to kill their gods and destroy their worldview and make them stop believing in the traditional spirits and the invisible population, the elves, the dwarves, and yes, the giants and the Valkyries. And as we said in part one,

The Christian assault against the traditional Viking beliefs is a two-pronged one, both from above and below. They're able to find inroads in the Viking world through the Christian slaves that the Vikings take, who can't help but share their belief system with their slave masters, and also through the elite slaves.

As Sigurdsson said, these are the people who communicate with the gods. Well, what if you convert those people? And you can see exactly what happens if you look from a little earlier in this story when Charlemagne and his Frankish Christians are able to use this same sort of tendency among the German peoples of Saxony to achieve the same sort of result, the long-standing tactic of converting the kings to Christianity who then take their people with them.

But make no mistake about it, Odin, Thor and the rest of the Norse pantheon are fighting a defensive rearguard action against the most dangerous foes these gods have ever faced. And it's not the giants and the eventual destruction of Ragnarok. It's the Christian god and the many powerful states and their armies

who go to war under that banner. But the followers of Odin are not the only peoples who feel threatened during this era. The people that threaten the people of Odin are themselves beset by portents of doom in their near future. The Christian states of Europe and their power is more latent than manifest in this era, and we see it

more clearly than the people living through this time period, right around 899-900 ADCE, when Alfred the Great died. We see it more clearly than they do, because like patrons at a movie theater who've already read the book the movie's based on, we know how the 900s are going to go for Europe. The people in Europe during the 900s don't.

and they see a quadruple threat on their horizon, the first of which has been plaguing them for more than a hundred years by this time period. The Scandinavian Vikings have gone from smash-and-grab piracy raids to full-on colonization and settlement.

Historian Neil Price suggests that there were 40,000 to 50,000 Danes taking up residence in Britain during this time, and they control about half the island. It's called the Dane law. They are settling elsewhere as well.

In addition, the long-running feud between Islam and Christianity takes a decidedly negative turn during this time period in the Mediterranean, where the island of Sicily, which had been attacked and temporarily occupied by Vikings at one point, is finally swamped and overwhelmed by Arab conquerors from North Africa, and by 902 they control the island.

and they are putting great pressure on the Christian Byzantines in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. Add to that the latest and newest threat from the Eurasian steppe, breaking like a tsunami on the defenses of Central Europe and penetrating them, the Magyar Hungarian peoples, who will raid into Bavaria and then finally into Southern France. And as we

Tom Holland in his wonderful book The Forge of Christendom points out perhaps the greatest threat looming on the horizon for Christians in 900 ADCE is coming at the appointed date a hundred years in the future when the long-awaited promised appearance of the Antichrist is expected like a giant exponentially worse version of the Y2K virus from the year 2000.

All of those things together create a climate of pessimism and negativity that shows up in the sources. In his classic work, The Age of Faith, historian Will Durant, in a condensed and edited account from a, it appears, monk in southern France, gives a sense of the feeling when that monk writes, quote,

the cities are depopulated the monasteries ruined and burned the country reduced to solitude as the first men lived without law so now every man does what seems good in his own eyes despising laws human and divine the strong oppress the weak the world is full of violence against the poor and of the plunder of ecclesiastical goods men devour one another like the fishes in the sea

End quote. Now, as I always say, I'm addicted to context, and I also have a background in journalism, which some people have said is the first draft of history. And there have always been criticisms about journalism. For example, one is the idea that stories get chosen because of their shocking or violent nature. Maybe you've heard the phrase, if it bleeds, it leads, right?

Well, maybe there's a little of that going on in this story, too, because right after he uses that quote we just cited, the one about the men devouring each other like fishes in the sea, Will Durant, in his nearly 75-year-old history, notices that maybe there's a little trick history's playing on us.

about this as well. Maybe it's a case of, historically speaking, something bleeding and so making the history of books more than the much more boring stuff like peace and commerce and happiness. And he writes, quote,

perhaps we exaggerate the damage done by the norse and magyar raids to crowd them into a page for brevity's sake darkens unduly the picture of a life in which there were doubtless intervals of security and peace

Monasteries continued to be built throughout this terrible 9th century, he writes, and were often the centers of busy industry. Rouen, despite raids and fires, grew stronger from trade with Britain. Cologne and Mainz dominated commerce on the Rhine, and in Flanders, thriving centers of industry and trade developed." There's another line we used to have in the news business.

And it was that another story is killed by overchecking. And what that meant is something that appeared to be a really good scintillating tale. The more you looked into it, the less scintillating it appeared to be. And there's a case to be made that this very discussion on the Vikings falls into this category because Hollywood and accounts like Hollywood have so transformed the Vikings into this uniquely barbaric and terrible entity that

that almost anything you do to put a more accurate sort of cast on top of them makes them look well less worthy of leading because of the lack of bleeding if you will

Also, because I'm addicted to context, the other reason that the Vikings look less outrageous the more you dive into this time period is because compared to the people they're up against, they don't look anywhere near as barbaric, right? They may score a 10 out of 10 on the barbarity scale, but...

But what Hollywood doesn't often show is that the people they're fighting would often score a 9 or an 8 on the barbarity scale, right? Take the opponents of these Viking raiders in Europe, the proto-knights, as I like to call them, these...

horsemen from Western and Central Europe who several hundred years after this time period will take all sorts of vows to protect the weak and the poor. Well, they need to take those vows because that contrasts greatly with the behavior of the proto-knights in this era. People, Tom Holland in his book The Forge of Christendom labels a gang of male-clad thugs.

who prey on the peasantry of europe in ways that make them sound little different than the viking attacks in the forge of christendom tom holland writes about these gangs of mail-clad thugs

Month by month, season by season, year by year, their exactions grew ever worse. How gruesomely apt it was that their favorite mode of torture should have been a garroting chain, notorious for inflicting upon its victims, now quoting a contemporary source, not one but a thousand deaths. He

He continues, a literal tightening of the screws. Robberies, too, and rapes and kidnappings all were deployed with a brutal gusto by hit squads determined to trample underfoot every last vestige of independence in the countryside and to reduce even the most prosperous of peasants to servitude. End quote. As the old line goes with friends like that,

Who needs enemies? And if your enemies are barbaric, how much less do they stand out when your friends are pretty barbaric too?

In the 900s, the era we are in this story, there will be such a reaction to the depredations of these gangs of male-clad thugs that a movement that I was surprised to read is considered one of the greatest peace movements in world history will get going. It's known as the Peace of God.

But in the early 900s, we're still seeing the sorts of activities that will create, you know, the equal and opposite reaction that leads to that movement in another century.

This is the era of the Castellans, as they're known, and Holland talks a lot about them. Local warlords who put up what we would consider today to be rudimentary, small, primitive-type castles wherever they can, and then fleeced the local area that they could now control using these castles and used the money to hire more and more gangs of male-clad thugs.

And to show how history can be seen in multiple different ways, there are different ways to view this development, whether it's positive or negative.

Let's go back to Charlemagne in the late 700s with a united Europe, which won't happen again for a thousand years after Charlemagne's time, right? It'll take Napoleon in the late 1700s, early 1800s through war to unite Europe similarly again. This is often seen as a golden age by people who laud all the benefits of centralization,

and who see the disintegration of that empire as a terrible tragedy and the fragmentation of it as something that invited things like Viking attacks, right? When you have something we would call today a failed state, well, that invites terrorism, doesn't it? And warlordism and the era that is...

The one that Europe is going into now is often, I have a chapter of a book that calls it the rise of the dukes. Well, who are these dukes and counts and lords and barons? Well, these are the Castellans and the more glorified, more decorated Castellans who will take over areas that used to be all part of Charlemagne's empire and rule all these little territories themselves. Is this a plus or a minus? History has seen it differently during different time periods.

If you are a fan of centralized authority and that whole thing, well, you see this as a terrible negative in Europe descending into a fragmented, unable to coordinate their activities sort of entity. And you will say something like, well, Charlemagne didn't have Viking attacks to worry about because he could fight those things off. He could build all sorts of defenses. And the minute all that, you know, falls apart into anarchy, well, that's when, you know, you create the conditions for,

of, you know, it's like taking the police force out of your community and keeping all your doors unlocked. You're inviting robbers, right? And interlopers.

But the other way to look at it, and it's been seen this way throughout different eras also, is that the decentralization here is a reaction to things like Viking raids, right? If the emperor or the king is so far away that by the time they were able to send soldiers to protect the people who were hit by Viking raids, the Vikings are long gone. Well, what if the central authority isn't who sends out the equivalent of the local police force? What if that's a local duke, count,

lord baron or what have you right nearby with a little local castle right there on the spot right so there are historical accounts over the eras that see this fragmentation not as a downside but as a reaction to the need to have local protection and authority and decision making on site because otherwise it's hard to respond to these you know quick hit and run raids that the vikings are launching

But by the time we're where we are in this story, right, we've gone from the 700s to the 800s, now we're in the 900s, the conditions on the ground are much different. And the easy pickings of undefended monasteries and all that from the 800s is a thing of the past. Now the Vikings are encountering the equivalent of locked doors.

burglar alarm systems and local police forces nearby and the 900s will prove to be an entirely different sort of affair.

As we said in the last part of this discussion, in places like modern-day France, West Francia, they're starting to fortify the bridges because the Vikings used the river systems as a kind of superhighway to get into the inside of the territory. Well, if you fortify bridges at the mouths of these rivers, well, all of a sudden you have the equivalent of a toll booth or a police bureau or a guarded border

In Britain, kings like Alfred the Great and his successors will start to create wars

fortified cities they're called burrs and they'll do similar sorts of things they'll put them at important sites where the vikings would use as super highways roads or river crossings and once again it doesn't mean you can't have viking attacks but it means all of a sudden the defenses are there to make something that used to be considered you know a relatively easy score something where you can expect to lose people and maybe a lot of people and maybe just lose because

Because the 900s start to see a lot more times where the Viking raiders and maybe even larger forces than raiders start losing. Of course, losing, in quotation marks, is a bit of an eye-of-the-beholder thing sometimes, isn't it? There's a phrase often used about winning the war and losing the peace, right?

For example, one of the most important cases of maybe winning the war and losing the peace happens in the year 911, when one of the most famous Viking figures in all Viking history, and one of the earliest that we can say conclusively actually lived and was a real person, and there's no doubt about it, is this guy known to history as Rollo. His Viking name was probably some version of Rolf.

And his nickname, because those Vikings often had, you know, Rolf the, in his case, it was Rolf the Ganger. And that supposedly was a reference to his size. And he was supposed to be so large that he couldn't ride a horse and that he had to walk. He's not the only Viking that that is said about.

But this Rolf the Ganger, the future Rollo, the future Robert, is one of the many Vikings supposed to have been involved in the famous siege of Paris in the late 800s that we talked about in the last segment of this discussion. It is not known whether he is Danish or Norwegian. Both traditions exist. The Norwegians often claim Rollo, Rolf, as one of their own.

But he gets into a scrap, one of many, with the West Francian king, right? What will in the future be France. A guy named Charles the Simple that we mentioned earlier. And simple doesn't mean, you know, not intelligent. It kind of means intelligent.

sincere, right? Not simple-minded. But he will, Rolf will lose this encounter in West Francia. And as part of the peace agreement, he will be given a territory that in the future will be called Normandy, which is a reference to the people who settled there after this peace agreements, the Northmen under Rolf the Ganger.

Rolf is fully a Viking right out of the Hollywood movie trope. In his book Powers and Thrones, Dan Jones writes, quote,

The creation of Normandy was directly linked to the dramatic siege of Paris in 885-886. Among the Viking leaders of that expedition was a man called Rollo, who was probably born in Denmark and whose career was described by a later biographer, Dudo of San Quentin, in idealized but undeniably thrilling terms. End quote. Jones is going to intersperse some of those quotes from Dudo in this next part where he says, quote,

Dudo described Rollo as a preternaturally tough and dogged soldier, quote, trained in the art of war and utterly ruthless, end quote, who could typically be seen, quote, in a helmet wonderfully ornamented with gold and a male coat, end quote. Jones continues, quote,

Rollo was one of the most violent men of his exceptionally bloody times. On one occasion, he prevailed in battle by ordering his men to kill all the animals, chop their carcasses in half, and build a makeshift barricade out of their freshly butchered meat.

But he was a canny negotiator, Jones writes. During the second half of the 9th century, Rollo made a tidy living among the Franks, doing as all thrusting young Northmen did, burning, laying towns and villages to waste, plundering and killing. By the early years of the 10th century, he and his Viking comrades had driven the rulers of the Franks to distraction and their people to a state of abject war weariness.

His biographer Dudo then says that the subjects of West Francia were complaining to their king that the land in the realm was, quote, no better than a desert, for its population is either dead through famine or sword, or is perhaps in captivity, end quote.

So Charles the Simple defeats Rollo in a battle, a siege perhaps, and the peace agreement is one that the people who are the fans of the highly centralized sorts of governments decry as a huge mistake, but those who see the decentralized approach as something maybe more akin to, you know, doing the best with what you have available are

If you have terrorists continually destroying and raiding a region and taking off captives and killing the population and robbing everything, what would you think of turning that area over to the terrorists, telling them that they now owe their allegiance to you, that they need to convert to your way of thinking? You know, in these days, we might make it a

rule that they have to then become a democracy but back in these times the rule is you have to become christians and then telling them to defend that territory against other terrorists like themselves because that's going to be the deal

Charles the Simple is going to grant to Rollo, the Viking, the areas that Rollo is sort of already controlling and occupying, these areas that will become Normandy around the entry to the Seine River, and then tell him that, you know, if you accept this deal, you're my vassal.

Which may sound weird, except that this is the era, as we said, when the dukes and counts and lords and barons are going to start to come to the fore. And what's the difference if your warlord happens to be, you know, a locally grown warlord or if it's somebody, you know, from outside, right? I mean, if you're giving lands to a bunch of barons who are going to throw up their own castles and be, you know, sometimes...

loyal to you and other times rebellious well why not make it the guy who's already in charge of that area and who knows probably best how to repel viking raiders because he is himself a viking raider and in his book northman historian john hayward writes about rollo and this agreement quote

In return for his homage, conversion to Christianity, and agreement to defend the Seine against other Viking raiders, Charles appointed Rollo as Count of Rouen. It was a mutually advantageous arrangement. Charles got recognition of his sovereignty over lands he did not actually control, while Rollo's de facto rule over the lower Seine was legitimized."

Heywood then points out that this is hardly a new arrangement and that other kings have done this with Vikings before. In fact, one can go all the way back to certain Roman practices from the Roman Empire that sound similar, including the way the Romans treated the Franks themselves when the Franks were much more Viking-like than they are in this time period. Famously, Rollo may not be the submissive

vassal to Charles the Simple that the peace agreement may have expected. The biographer Dudo tells a story where at one point during the ceremony,

Rollo is supposed to kiss the feet of the Frankish king and instead says he's not kissing anyone's feet and orders an underling to do it for him. And normally you bend down and kiss the feet of the king. Instead, the Viking underling lifted up the king's foot to his mouth, toppling the king on his back. And supposedly the Vikings all laughed about this. It's a sign of exactly how much respect they have for this agreement and this king.

But Rollo did convert to Christianity, but like so many other Vikings who did, first-generation Christian converts from Scandinavia often hedged their bets a little bit, and John Haywood in Northman explains how that worked for Rollo when he says, quote,

Although Rollo was still a pagan when he won control of Rome, it appears he allowed what was left of the church to function in that area under his control, much as the Danish rulers of York had done. Pagan Vikings, he writes, were rarely positively hostile to Christianity. Sacking churches and monasteries and selling their occupants into slavery was just good business.

Even after his baptism in 912, Rollo, like many first-generation Viking converts to Christianity, hedged his bets and worshipped the pagan gods alongside Christ. Shortly before he died, Rollo ordered a hundred Christians to be beheaded as an offering to the pagan gods, but he also gave a hundred pounds of gold to the churches of Rouen."

The interesting thing about this, though, is that you can see the long-term anti-terrorism strategy at work here, what the Chinese would have called in their long-term anti-terrorism strategies with their so-called barbarians nearby them cooking, right, cooking the barbarians, because you turn them into people more like yourself. And when that happens, it changes the relationship, right?

It's a good thing for a ruler like Rollo because becoming a Christian and beginning to organize your society the way the Christian states did exalts the king, turns the societies into one organized as a hierarchy. Not so good for the individual freedom-loving Viking farmers who used to get together at their

assemblies known as things and make decisions that way right if you're freedom loving and you like a nice decentralized system having your ruler convert to christianity then mandating all his people do all of a sudden puts you under the control of a much stronger despotic ruler maybe

The other thing, though, that it does for the other Christian states is it takes away one of the great Viking Scandinavian advantages in war. All of a sudden, instead of the circumstances being that they can rage you, but you can't go and attack them because they live far away and who knows where and you can't get to them.

When the Vikings begin to settle in places, for example, in the Dane law in the British Isles or in Normandy, they lose the main advantage that they have of mobility.

And now, all of a sudden, their farms, their homes, their families, and their wealth are right next door to the people that they're sometimes making angry with them or vengeful or warlike. And now their foes can do to them what they've done for more than a century to their foes.

And one of the really interesting things to follow during the Viking era are these overseas settlements by these Scandinavian pirates, conquerors, colonists, settlers, whatever you want to call them, because they become part of the societies that they're embedded in over time. They become absorbed. I think we compared the Viking age in part one with

to a hand grenade detonating in the Scandinavian homeland and spreading burning shrapnel in all directions. It's part of why this story is so hard to follow. You're following all those pieces of shrapnel as they embed themselves in the surrounding societies. But if shrapnel doesn't kill you, eventually the wound closes up and skin forms around it. And while the metal may impact your life

and cause a lingering amount of influence forever, it just becomes one piece of a larger whole.

And there are interesting stories about Rollo, for example, having dreams of creating a society that is the equivalent of a whole flock of birds that shows up in one place of all different breeds and types, but all bearing the same blood red left wing and creating what one historian refers to as a mongrel society out of these many different parts.

sort of foreshadowing the fusion to come. It reminds me of the American experience, where the United States often referred to itself as the great melting pot, or had Latin phrases associated with it, like e pluribus unum, e pluribus unum, which means out of many, one. And that

is not a bad phrase to describe the Normans. And of course, Norman just means Northman, and Normandy is the land of the Northmen. But these men came from all over and quickly found themselves a part of the society around them, maintaining perhaps, though, something in their blood or their DNA or their cultural makeup

that hearkened back to the ferociousness and the fierceness of their Viking roots because you can hear chroniclers and even historians up until the mid-20th century and maybe even today talking about that weird sort of extra ferocity that the Normans had even when they were Christian and French. And you can see how quickly they're absorbed by the local population. Rollo, who's the first to settle there, right, this Viking...

who is almost the quintessential example of the type, will marry a local woman in the Danish way, we're told, and have a son who's already only half Viking and who speaks French and who's Christian. He will have the respectively French name of William attached to him and get a surname or a nickname. Afterwards, he'll be known as William Longsword.

He will have a rebellion, Rollo's son launched against him by a bunch of his own Scandinavian Viking peoples who consider him already too Francified. And then he's gonna, in the Danish way, which means sort of like a concubine or a hookup,

or what would they say today, a baby mama, he will hook up with another local woman, which means that his kid, who will be named Richard, is only one quarter Viking. So in the space of two generations, you can already see the burning piece of shrapnel being absorbed by the much larger West Frankish body. But as we've been saying all along,

What happens to Rollo and his pirate Vikings in what will be Normandy is just a continuation of a process that's been going on since long before the Roman Empire fell, centuries beforehand. It's the taming of these Germanic language pagan peoples.

And earlier versions of them from Goths to Lombards to Vandals to Burgundians to Franks, yes, even these Frankish people, they've already gone through this process. They're being, well, 150 years ago, somebody would have seen a very superiority kind of way of looking at things, said they're being civilized. These savages are being turned into reputable members of the Christian community.

answerable to God and the surrounding other nobles. But if you're an average Viking farmer who goes on these raids, as your ancestors might have, doing a little piracy work to better yourself, go home, marry the girl next door, and start a farm with, you know, your winnings from your pirate affairs, you might look at something like this as being sold out.

right the the big guys like rollo and his yarals and yaral could mean earl or lord or anything like that those guys are the ones who benefit greatly from these sorts of deals it's the average viking who once upon a time used to be considered sort of an equal who loses

If you want to make the Hollywood movie about the Vikings and you want them to be these barbarian type pirate, you know, movie tropes, and you want them to be a bunch of warriors involved in an equal brotherhood that when somebody says, who is your leader? You say, we have none, right? That's a famous line from the old Viking. We have no leader. We're all equal here. And you want to set your movie in the 700s.

or the 800s, because in the 900s ADCE, the Viking world begins to become more like the non-Viking Christian world, and the hierarchies that are taking over in places that will become France and Germany and places like that arrives in Scandinavia.

And you can begin to see the consolidation of these independent, small-time rulers, these so-called petty kings, by the great kings. And it's a bit like watching corporate giants swallowing up small-time businesses and mom-and-pop operations until they create the geopolitical equivalent of a monopoly. And in keeping with

history's love of consolidation and consolidators the men who do this are often lauded as the founding fathers of the modern day nations of scandinavia right their version of a george washington type figure it's worth pointing out that the people who do this in

The places like modern-day Sweden or modern-day Denmark or modern-day Norway are figures that you can't 100% confirm were even real. Welcome to the early Middle Ages. Take, for example, the guy who famously does this in what will become the country of Norway. His name is Harald Finehair, also known as Harald Fairhair, also known as Harald Hairfair,

Neil Price, the historian of Viking times, says that his nickname was Lufa, which means mophead. And Price points out that these guys often had pirate last names and nicknames. Compare it to something like

Blackbeard from the 16th or 17th century. And Mophead is a famous figure in one of the sagas written by one of the most famous saga writers of all time, an Icelandic writer named Snorri Sturluson.

And in his work known as the Heimskringla or the Lives of the Norse Kings, he writes about mophead and in very storybook-like fashion traces his desire to conquer all of Norway and be the king that unifies the entire place to a woman that he wants.

And he goes to her and basically, you know, proposes that he become her man. And she says something like, why would a petty king like you appeal to me? I mean, she says, when we have kings who are unifying Sweden and kings who are unifying Denmark, why don't you go unify Norway and then come back to me when you've made something of yourself?

He, in the saga, says something like, oh, yeah, thanks for reminding me. I was always going to do that. And then he vows to not cut his hair until he does. And then he goes around like a mafia don making the sort of offers that the other petty kings can't refuse because if they do, he kills them and all of their top men with them.

if they instead join him as we said with rollo all his top men can become his men jarls and they can be bigger than the petty kings of old but if they resist he's going to kill them

And this creates a Newtonian equal and opposite reaction that precipitates one of the things that the Viking era is most known for, right? The pushing out and exploring farther and farther away lands, in part because these people need to get away from Harold Finehair, who's going to kill them if he catches them. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but let's let Snorri Sturluson in his work written...

Farther away from the time that he's chronicling than the American Revolution is to our time, let's have him discuss a little bit of the career of Harold Finehair to show us what we're dealing with here. I'm using the Erling Monson translation, by the way, and it needs to be pointed out that there are reasons that people would resist what Finehair is trying to do,

They often were people who were farmers on ancestral land that had been handed down from father to son from time immemorial. And all of a sudden this great king comes in and says, all this land is mine and you can stay on it if you pay taxes. And a lot of people said, to hell with you, I'm going elsewhere. And that's described by Sturluson when he says, quote,

"'Amid all the unrest, when Harold was seeking to subdue all the land of Norway, the Faroes, which are islands, and Iceland, lands out beyond the sea, were found and settled. At that time also there was a great faring to Shetland, and many great men fled as outlaws from Norway, and they went on Viking raids to the west.'

in the winter they were in the orkneys and the hebrides but in the summer they harried in norway and did great scathe there in the land end quote

What Sturluson means by that is that these people didn't just run away from Harold Finehair and everybody let bygones be bygones. They came back and treated Norway, or what will become Norway, the same way that Viking raiders had treated the rest of Europe. They raided and robbed and took slaves from Harold Finehair's growing kingdom. And this recalls something we said earlier in the story, that

Before the Viking Age supposedly begins, it was probably already going on in the deep, dark Scandinavian mists before Europe ever knew about them, and it continued probably long after the Viking Age sort of officially, in air quotes, ends.

The Vikings raided Scandinavia too. And like all the kings of Europe whose main job is protecting their subjects, Harold Finehair's main job was protecting his. And so when Vikings who had fled Norway came back and raided Norway, Harold Finehair goes after them. Sturluson continues, quote,

King Harold learned that the Vikings who in the winter were in the Westlands, which means Britain and Ireland, were harrying in the Midlands, which means Norway. He went out to war each summer and ransacked the islands and the outlying rocks. But when his army came near the Vikings, they all fled, most of them out to sea. And when the king was weary of this, it happened one summer that he sailed west with his army across the sea.

FIRST HE CAME TO SHETLAND, AND THERE SLEW ALL THE VIKINGS WHO HAD NOT FLED THENCE. NEXT HE SAILED SOUTH TO THE ORKNIES, AND CLEANSED THEM ALL OF VIKINGS. THEREAFTER HE WENT RIGHT TO THE HEBREDIES, AND HARRIED THERE. HE SLEW MANY VIKINGS WHO BEFORE HAD WARRIORS UNDER THEM, AND HE HELD THERE MANY BATTLES, AND MOST OFTEN HAD THE VICTORY."

So Harold Luffa, mophead, hairfare, fine hair, adopted the same anti-piracy strategy common in the ancient world. When it becomes too much, you go find the pirate layers, launch the equivalent of marines from your boats, and wipe out all the pirates where they live. Now, if you're trying to clear pirates out, though...

The problem is, is how do you keep the areas from being reestablished as pirate bases later? If you look at the history of the Mediterranean, for example, and piracy in that area, you can have successive empires and...

clear out pirate layers only to have those places get reinfested later, usually because they're perfect. I mean, they're just, it's easy to hide. These certain islands that become known for piracy are right along important shipping routes.

They just lend themselves to reinfestation. So according to the sagas, Harold will put some of his own people in charge of these islands, like the Hebrides and the Orkneys and whatnot. And their job is to sort of, you know, create a stable business climate and settle people there and make it one of those areas where there's just too many eyes and too much law and order and too many authorities for it to be a good place for pirates anymore.

I don't know if that's true and the sagas are not necessarily all that trustworthy on this sort of stuff. There is another aspect though of Harold's rule that more modern histories are taking a much more jaundiced view of than my earlier ones and that the sagas take which is that Harold's tyranny and people fleeing from it are the reason for many of the great Viking discoveries, you know, the islands overseas and

the Icelands, the Greenlands, the East Coast of the Americas, and, you know, places like the Orkneys and the Hebrides. And the reason that modern historians are discounting that as a major reason is because the dating doesn't line up. He couldn't have been, his tyranny couldn't have been the reason that the Hebrides and the Orkneys and those places are settled, because they're settled long before Harold's time. Even Iceland is settled before Harold is putting immense pressure on other Norwegians.

And Greenland and the Americas aren't settled until long afterwards. So the dating doesn't line up. John Heywood points this out in Northman that just that couldn't have been the reason. But what he does say is it could be a reason for further settlement, you know, new waves of people leaving Norway to escape the new restrictions that a guy like Harold is putting into place through consolidation. If you don't like it, get out. And they do. And where do you go? Well,

American draftees fleeing the draft during the Vietnam War went over the border to Canada. If you're someone located in modern-day Norway, maybe you go to the Hebrides or the Orkneys, or if those are becoming too established and controlled by Harold's men, maybe you go farther. And farther in Harold Finehair's lifetime would have been a place like Iceland. And then after his lifetime would have been a place like Greenland.

When you look at how those places were probably discovered, that's an interesting story in and of itself. And something that is undetermined as of yet, but more and more the history suggests that some of these places were found before the Vikings even found them. Take Iceland, for example. Iceland may have had Irish monks find the place first. Now,

We need to take a different sort of approach with a place like Iceland than with most of the places the Vikings settled in Europe, because we talked about the piece of shrapnel, you know, the Vikings embedding themselves in these larger societies and eventually being absorbed. It's a little different when the Vikings discover places that don't have pre-existing large

societies to begin with. Then the shrapnel acts more like a seed and grows into a real sort of Viking settlement. And Iceland falls into that category because Irish monks would have been celibate anyway. They wouldn't have gone to a place like Iceland to try to start families and settle down in

and be fruitful and multiply. And there's no evidence that when the Vikings actually got there, the Irish monks were still there, although they supposedly found some leftover stuff.

Bottom line though is it's like finding free land with nobody there occupying it. The various histories that I've read suggest what would probably be considered a rather obvious way that these places get discovered initially and that's not because you seek out places because no one knows these places are here. They get found accidentally when the Scandinavian ships get blown off course and

I mean, if you're a sailing ship and all of a sudden you get caught in a place like the North Atlantic or the Atlantic above what's now Scotland and those islands and the wind starts taking you where it's going to take you, you're kind of along for the ride, aren't you?

And this is the part of the story that I find personally terrifying. It is also the part of the story where we've been making connections between the Vikings and their contemporaries and the Vikings and their predecessors, right? The Germanic language, pagan people's

like the Saxons and all these people who came before the Vikings and the people in Western and Central Europe during their time period. And you're trying to show the context that shows continuity and how the Vikings don't really stand out so much from all these other peoples in most respects, the area where they really do stand out and where they break new ground completely is the seafaring part. And that's the part that blows my mind and has fascinated people greatly.

Well, for a very long time. You know, the Vikings became very big in the 19th century, but people knew about these seafaring things long before then.

the people in Iceland, for example, who were fascinated because they were an immigrant people too, like the United States and like Australia and a lot of other places now, you become fascinated with your roots. And it was people like Snorri Sturluson and all those folk who were writing about how their island originally got populated from the home country. And so everyone has been fascinated with what the Vikings were doing there.

with ships because what they were doing with ships was relatively unprecedented. And I say relatively because there were other peoples, but they're some of the most famous seafaring peoples in history, people like the Polynesians and what maybe we could call the proto-Polynesians who were doing similar things in the Pacific, mostly south of the equator.

And the big difference between the Polynesians and the Vikings and all the other seafaring peoples before them was the willingness to go out into the open sea. Because seafaring, pretty much from the beginning of time until about the Vikings and the proto-Polynesians, was all about staying within sight of land.

hugging the coast or going point to point like a connect the dots game you know from this island to that island to this island never getting too far away from land even when you see for example um the transfer of shipping or some of even the great naval battles in the mediterranean you can always see that it's a point to point to point navigation system they're never getting far away from land they're never getting there's always an island here or there that they're nearby

Once you go, the old line was, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, or Heracles, the Gibraltar area, out into the Atlantic, you were going off into the dragon territory on the edge of the map where people go and never come back. That's where you lose ships. But it's funny what you can discover while still hugging the coast. The great Phoenicians, who were the greatest seafarers of the ancient Mediterranean, they were able to get

allegedly all the way up to the British Isles and the Scandinavian areas and everything simply following the coastline. But what the Vikings do is, as far as I can tell, except for the Polynesian types unprecedented in this era and before, which is they will venture out into the open sea.

Now, after pointing out that both the Polynesians and the Malays in the Indian Ocean had gone farther distances in this era or earlier eras than the Vikings had,

Historian John Haywood in Northman mentions that both those peoples at least had warmer weather and more predictable seas working in their favor, whereas these Scandinavians are operating in close to Arctic conditions sometimes. I mean, go look at a map. Look at where the latitude of a place like Iceland is. There are no major cities above something like Reykjavik that I can see.

It's sub-Arctic, maybe, you would say.

And Heywood says that like earlier peoples, the Viking Scandinavian explorers and seafarers preferred to stay within sight of land, go point to point, you know, so that they were going from island to island and stayed as close as they could to areas, you know, where they felt safe to pull their ships into coves and harbors and places where at nighttime they didn't have to be out in the water.

but often they were out in the water. And when you realize that these are open boats in sometimes arctic conditions, it boggles the mind. You can go online, by the way, and see videos of modern recreations of Viking longships and people traveling on them.

And you just can't imagine doing it for days at a time, but that's what had to be done. And these Viking warships that are often used in the recreations are usually not the kind of ships that Viking settlers traveled on. They traveled on tubbier merchant men called Nars or Nors, and Heywood describes these, and he says, quote,

Most of the leading settlers, or he uses the Scandinavian word that means land takers, because that was the phrase used, or land takers, arrived in their own ships. These were not long ships, but sturdy merchant ships called nars.

with shorter, broader, and deeper hulls than longships. Nars relied on sails alone, carrying only a couple of pairs of oars for maneuvering in harbor. End quote. He then points out at the time of the settlements, the Nars probably had a cargo capacity of 25 to 30 tons. This would go up as the Viking Age went on to probably more like 50 tons.

He says modern replicas of these merchant vessels have sailed around the entire world, but the one that sailed around the entire world sank off the Spanish coast in 1992. So, you know, just like modern day fishing fleets, and I believe that fishing is still considered per capita the most or one of the most dangerous things

professions you can have and that's with satellites modern ships coast guards and all those kinds of things imagine what it's like with a wooden boat with open decks and people navigating well with none of those tools and haywood writes quote

The voyage to Iceland could take two to three weeks, often with stopovers in Orkney, Shetland and the Faroe Islands. The voyage cannot have been a comfortable experience. Nars were basically just large open boats without cabins to give crew and passengers shelter in bad weather. Tents were stretched over ships' decks to provide shelter in harbor, but it is unlikely that this could be done at sea because the tent would catch the wind and drive the ship off course.

People probably had to huddle under seal skin or greased leather coats in the hold, along with the livestock, to keep warm. Nor was there any possibility, he writes, of enjoying any hot food on the high seas. Shipwreck was a real possibility in one bad year of the 35 ships sailing to Iceland, all but eight were wrecked."

I've spent my entire life, except for when I was in college, within a 35-minute drive of the Pacific Ocean. I grew up body surfing at an age that was almost child abusive to have left me out in the waters at that age. I'm very brave on the coast, but you get me out into the open water and I get just...

terrified much more cowardly i remember a cousin of mine an idiot cousin of mine tipping us over in a catamaran three times in a day until the coast guard said that's enough of that you get to go in with inside of land and feeling absolutely helpless i can't imagine what it would be like in subarctic conditions in the middle of nowhere with no help anywhere

I was looking for accounts that could give us some semblance of what it was like for these Vikings, but they don't exist during this period. And the best ones that I found are actually in a book called The Perfect Storm. Now, you might have seen the movie based on the book, but the book is a very different animal. And it combines the story that the movie focused on with historical accounts

firsthand eyewitness remembrances, the science of the ocean and waves and shipping and all that. It's absolutely fascinating. You can get your hands on it. It's by Sebastian Junger. It's wonderful. And he has some accounts that give us a sense of what it might be like in the open sea and how absolutely terrifying it can be.

So, for example, one of the scientific parts of the book talks about the difference between waves that are not crashing versus waves that do crash in the open ocean. And Younger writes, quote,

A general rule of fluid dynamics holds that an object in the water tends to do whatever the water it replaces would have done. In the case of a boat in a breaking wave, the boat will effectively become part of the curl. It will either be flipped end over end or shoved backwards and broken on. Instantaneous pressures of up to six tons per square foot have been measured in breaking waves.

Breaking waves, he writes, have lifted a 2,700-ton breakwater en masse and deposited it inside the harbor at Wick, Scotland. They have blasted open a steel door 195 feet above sea level at, I think it's Unst Light or Unst Light, in the Shetland Islands. They have heaved a half-ton boulder 91 feet into the air at Tillamook Rock, Oregon."

So that gives us a sense of the power of the waves that these early mariners are having to potentially encounter. And then...

Younger talks about a phenomenon that used to be considered sort of an old wives tale or one of those tall stories that a salty sea captain would relate. But it turns out that they're true. And buoys in the middle of the ocean and people in oil rigs in the middle of the sea have now conclusively proven that the phenomenon known as rogue waves are real and

and Younger points out that the problem with eyewitness accounts is that a lot of people, especially in the pre-modern seafaring era who encountered large rogue waves never survived to tell anybody about them. Speaking about the rogue waves, he writes, quote,

In the dry terminology of naval architecture, these are called non-negotiable waves. Mariners call them rogue waves or freak seas. Typically, they are very steep and have an equally steep trough in front of them, a so-called hole in the ocean, as some witnesses have described it. Ships, he writes, cannot get their bows up fast enough, and the ensuing wave breaks their back.

Maritime history is full of encounters with such waves. When Sir Ernest Shackleton was forced to cross the South Polar Sea in a 22-foot open lifeboat, he saw a wave so big that he mistook its foaming crest for a moonlit cloud. He only had time to yell, Hang on, boys, it's got us! before the wave broke over his boat. Miraculously, they didn't sink. He continues,

In February 1883, the 320-foot steamship Glamorgan was swept bow to stern by an enormous wave that ripped the wheelhouse right off the deck, taking all the ship's officers with it. She later sank.

In 1966, he writes, the 44,000-ton Michelangelo, an Italian steamship carrying 775 passengers, encountered a single massive wave in an otherwise unremarkable sea. Her bow fell into the trough and the waves stove in her bow, flooding her wheelhouse and killed a crewman and two passengers.

In 1976, he says, the oil tanker Cretan Star radioed, now the radio message was, quote, vessel was struck by a huge wave that went over the deck, end quote, and he says, was never heard from again. The only sign of her fate, he wrote, was a four-mile oil slick off Bombay, end quote.

He then tells an amazing story of one of the people who lived after seeing and surviving one of these waves hitting. And the waves are very different sometimes. Sometimes they create, they come together. Several waves come together and get larger than the sum of its parts, so to speak. And that's a phenomenon known as the three sisters sometimes when they come in threes. But this 1966 encounter off South Africa was a wave that stretched from

And Younger writes, quote,

Most people don't survive encounters with such waves, and so first-hand accounts are hard to come by, but they do exist. An English woman named Beryl Smeaton was rounding Cape Horn with her husband in the 1960s, I guess I said 66, 1960s, when she saw a shoaling wave behind her that stretched away in a straight line as far as she could see. Now quoting the survivor, quote,

The whole horizon was blotted out by a huge gray wall, she writes in her journal. It had no curling crest, just a thin white line along the whole length, and its face was unlike the sloping face of a normal wave. This was a wall of water with a completely vertical face, down which ran white ripples like a waterfall. End quote. Younger then points out that the wave flipped the 46-foot boat end over end,

snapping the eyewitness's harness and throwing her overboard. Now, I know in this era where we see people surfing almost 100-foot-tall waves...

and whatnot that we are blasé to the power of the surf sometimes, but even a 12-foot wave, and I've been in 12-foot waves churning around after wiping out body surfing on the coastline, and I can just tell you the power of a mere 12-foot wave is absolutely shocking, and I can't imagine what this woman's experience was like after having her ship turned over by

with a wave like that and then finding herself cord snapped in the open ocean. And then I recall that all those vessels that we just talked about had multiple decks, so you could go below deck when things got hairy up above. They had modern communications equipment, modern navigational tools. They knew their relative geographic position on the map perfectly.

And it still freaks me out. Now, imagine having none of those things and being a Viking-era Scandinavian in an open boat, no communications tools at all, no modern navigational equipment at all, and, you know, no below decks, and you're out in the open ocean. There's a part of me that thinks those people are crazy, but that might be an eye-of-the-beholder sort of thing, right? Try telling them...

that we routinely go up in man-made metal tubes that fly higher than birds fly and take us across whole oceans, continent to continent, and see if they don't think we're the crazy ones. And I imagine if you told people like that that we could do what we do with air travel, they'd probably want to see what manner of human being it was who could do that, and I feel the same way about them. And if you discount...

the sagas, which as I said, I don't know what Hollywood would do in portraying Vikings if they didn't use the sagas, because discounting the sagas means you're left with very few eyewitness accounts of who these people were. And like all eyewitness accounts from people who found themselves on the receiving end of violence or mistreatment or even just very different cultural norms and standards, they

Hard to accept the idea that the Viking era Scandinavians are getting a good shake. I mean, if you're a monk writing about these people who, as part of their business strategy, aren't just pagans, but like to assault holy sites and monasteries and kill monks, well, is a monk's account of these people going to be particularly even-handed? I doubt it. We do have...

The rare accounts, though, that show up from eyewitnesses who are not Christian monks and who run into people who may be Viking-era Scandinavians, and the most famous happens right around where we are in this story. It is an account which, like the sagas, a lot of people have to hang a lot of assumptions on because you have so little to work with.

And it's such a famous account and so rare that it has been used by fictional authors to sort of build stories off of. Michael Crichton, the author of Eaters of the Dead, for example, used this account as the foundation on which to build a fictional story. And a movie was built on top of that book called The Thirteenth Warrior, so you may have seen that. But neither one of those tales gets told, if not for the original account. The eyewitness account...

of a Muslim traveler named Ibn Fadlan and he traveled two regions in what are now Russia in the year 921 and 922 ADCE

and along the way ran into a people who were trading on the rivers back then who very well may have been Viking-era Scandinavians. Let's put some disclaimers in here, though, shall we? For accuracy's sake. Disclaimer number one, these may not have been Viking-era Scandinavians. These may have been people who were Slavic, for example, or it may have been...

what we would call today an international crew of people, a mixed crew of people that included some Scandinavians, mixed with some Slavs, mixed with some Balts, you just don't know.

Disclaimer number two, even if these were Scandinavians, they may not be representative of the Scandinavians back in Scandinavia or Vikings in other places, even though it's very possible that these same people that Ibn Fadlan talks about were migrating back and forth to Scandinavia and maybe then going west to Britain and maybe then to France. You

You just don't know because how representative of Scandinavian culture back in a place like what will be modern-day Sweden, modern-day Norway, modern-day Denmark are these seafarers? It's possible that you could look at them the way we would look at

you know, sailors today who spent their life at sea and then come back home covered in tattoos, these salty Popeye the Sailor slash, you know, Long John Silver characters from Treasure Island, where they are people from your culture, but they're not representative of most of the people in your culture. For example, one of the things Fadlan talks about in this eyewitness account is how dirty these people were.

But this clashes with other accounts that suggest that Viking-era Scandinavians in Scandinavia were meticulously clean people with clean clothes and clean hair and all. So these are the disclaimers in one of these very, very rare eyewitness accounts of a people that very well may be or include Viking-era Scandinavians, probably, if so, mostly Swedes. Now, here's the backstory of Fadlan's account.

He sets out from Baghdad, I think it was, where his boss is, and he doesn't want to lie to them. So these aren't like Marco Polo type accounts where, you know, there could be all kinds of exaggeration. This guy's trying to give a good account of what he runs into, and he's not looking for Vikings. Remember, in the part of the world where Fadlan's traveling, they don't call them Vikings. They call them Varangians.

And this is the era where these Varangian people are morphing, perhaps again another disclaimer, into that people we introduced in part one, the Rus'.

Who these Rus are is another one of these great non-understood things. And historians over the eras have had different opinions. I think we introduced the concept of the Normanist and the anti-Normanist controversy in part one when we talked about the Rus, because in a place like the old Soviet Union, you didn't want to assume or acknowledge that there was any Scandinavian origin.

influx of DNA or cultural influence in a predominantly Slavic sort of historical account. But on the Germanic side, it was just the opposite. I mean, Hitler and his Aryan supremacists

I think Hitler famously said something like, if not for the infusion of the Scandinavian blood into the Russian bloodline, they would still be like rabbits in the forest, right? The only reason they're advanced in any way, shape or form is due to the Aryan blood. So, you know, those are the two extremes of the pendulum there. DNA, bioarchaeology and the

assessment of artifacts that are being found is helping to clarify this. This would be a different show if we could have this conversation 20 years from now. Nonetheless, Fadlan talks about these people that he sees on his travels to what's now southern Russia. He's there to talk to some

steppe nomad, maybe semi-nomad by this point, leader of a group called the Bulgars, right? This is a, you know, Bulgarian comes from that. So this guy is Islamic, but his Bulgars are practicing a form of Islam that might not exactly be kosher, if you'll pardon the mixed metaphors there. And so he asks for some instruction on the faith. You know, come on up here, tell us what we're doing wrong in practicing Islam. And oh, by the way, I'd like to make some deals with you, like to do some trading with you. So Fadlan goes up there

And it's like a travelogue, if you will. And as with anything from that long ago, it's a miracle. It's come down to, you know, be read by us today that it survived. But amongst the many people he talks about are these people he calls the Rus or the Rusaya. Now, I'm using the translation by Richard Frye.

There are others, but Fadlan talks about these people that he encounters along the rivers who are trading. And in the east, if these are Varangians, if these are, you know, the Viking people from Scandinavia trading in what's now southern Russia,

They are, you know, what did we say in the first part of the show that the Vikings in the West are like 60% raiders and 40% traitors and in the East it's reversed, like 60% traitor, 40% raider, in part because there's a lot of powerful entities in the East that make it a lot tougher to just go along sacking everything and killing everyone. They'll be pushed back and these Bulgars are a perfect example of the kind of people that would push back.

So Fadlanza Kant talks about these people. Now, to show you how difficult it is, he talks about them having tattoos. Now, we mentioned in part one, there's all kinds of things that they found on the Viking skeletons that have been uncovered. For example, the tooth grooves, right? Horizontal cuttings or carvings in the teeth.

of some of these skeletons that may have been died when they were alive. You know, so you put a die in there so you can see them even more pronounced. And this may have been the mark of certain warrior bands, right? It shows that you're in this particular group of people.

There are the accounts, of course, of the eye makeup. What did we call it in part one? War mascara that the Vikings are supposed to have used. And it was one of those things that was thought to be so cool by other people who saw it that the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, right on the opposite side of this great divide between they and the Danes, they start wearing it. Sounds like the girls liked it.

It reminds you a little bit of, like, how the Romans in the Roman era started adopting Golic and German fashions, like the tight pants, because, once again, seemed to be popular with the opposite sex, right? I can look cool like a barbarian, too. Give me that leather jacket. Give me those tight pants. A little bit of the eye makeup, the guy liner, the war mascara, and, you know, maybe the hairstyle.

There's an account by, I think it was a monk in, I think it's in Britain who was talking about how scandalous it was to see Anglo-Saxon youth, you know, adopting the fashions of the barbarians and the heathen. Well, Fadlan has these people that he encounters. He says they're tattooed. Now, once again, we're brought into the situation where do you extrapolate that and say, well, we have an eyewitness account of Vikings, so they must all be tattooed.

Or is this like Popeye the Sailor and Long John Silver? And this isn't what Vikings are like at home. This is what the ones who go to sea. And, you know, it's a brotherhood of guys and they act a certain way. We're dirty. We're scroungy. We're a bunch of, you know, guys on the road. We're like musicians on the road. It's different on the road. You get home and, you know, you're amongst your own kind and you want to look clean and pretty and reputable and maybe you look different. So don't know how much you can extrapolate the Fudlan stuff. But what he says is...

is awesome and more awesome because it's one of the few accounts you have. This isn't a saga, right? This is a guy who saw these people. And this is what he writes from the Richard Fry translation of Ibn Fadlan's Journey to Russia. Quote, I saw the Rusya or Rusya when they came hither on their trading voyages and had encamped by the river Aitel or Atel. That's the Volga, by the way.

i have never seen people he writes with a more developed bodily stature than they they are as tall as date palms blond and ruddy so that they do not need to wear a tunic nor a cloak rather the men among them wear a garment that only covers half of his body and leaves one of his hands free each of them has an axe a sword and a knife with him and all of these whom we have mentioned never let themselves be separated from their weapons

their swords are broad-bladed provided with rills and of the frankish type each one of them has from the tip of his nails to the neck figures trees and other things tattooed in dark green

So this jibes with what we know about the Vikings, that they don't stray too far from their weapons. It also jibes with the fact that they like Frankish swords. But if you're in Europe, who doesn't, right? The great arms manufacturers of the Frankish war warehouses and factories produce the best European weapons, so everybody wants them. It does show how much the trading, though, is completely interactive and interspersed in Europe so that

If you can get your hands on a good Frankish sword, it's like a Winchester rifle of that era. You get it. Now, he also talks about, as I said, how dirty these people are. And as we've said, this doesn't necessarily jibe with other things that are

asserted about life at home, but this may be like a bunch of dudes on the road and, you know, we don't have to be so clean. And when we get home, we'll, you know, smarten up, clean up a little bit, get the nice clothes out. But, you know, we've been on, you know, safari here for a long time and, you know, your clothes get a little dirty and we live a little,

rough and ready and close to the ground, and Fadlan writes, and remember, he's from a very, you know, in air quotes, civilized place during this time period where there are lots of manners, cleanliness, a lot of white-collar jobs going on, we would say, in his world, and he writes, quote,

They are the dirtiest creatures of God. They have no shame in voiding their bowels and bladder, nor do they wash themselves when polluted by emission of semen, nor do they wash their hands after eating. They are then like asses who have gone astray. End quote. Now he starts to talk about what they're selling. And they're selling goods, but the number one goods that they're trying to sell off to other people are other people.

The Vikings were great slavers. These people are too. They take slaves, according to the Muslim accounts, often from the Slavic people. And there are historians who say that the term Slav is connected to the term slave.

But this is the part that people sometimes minimize when you talk about people like the Vikings. They are a great slaving people and they're a great trading people. And the number one thing probably that they make the most money off of are slaves. And a lot of their raids are connected to the idea of getting more, shall we say, raw materials for sale. This is also where you get a chance to see

a reminder, shall we say, of the absolute horrificness of slavery, of human bondage, because there are women for sale, mostly from, according to Fadlan's account anyway, the people he run into are selling women. And when they're selling women, they're also using women. It's horrible. It's rape. It's slavery. And he writes, quote,

they come from their own country moor their boats on the strand of the itle which is a great river it's the vulgar right and build on its banks large houses out of wood in a house like this ten or twenty people more or less live together each of them has a couch whereupon he sits and with them are fair maidens who are destined for sale to the merchants and they may have intercourse with their girl while their comrades look on

At times a crowd of them may come together, and one does this in the presence of the others. It also happens that a merchant who comes into the house to buy a girl from one of them may find him in the very act of having intercourse with her. Then he, the Rus, will not let her be until he has fulfilled his intention."

One gets the vibe again. This is a non-historian vibe. So take it for what it's worth. But one gets a sort of a vibe here that this is not how these guys are going to behave amongst their own women folk back in Scandinavia. This is a bunch of dudes far away from women, folk and manners and oversight. And, you know, wink, wink, nod, nod. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas forever.

and the levels of cleanliness and upkeep may not meet the standards expected of them back in their home territory and fudlon writes quote as a matter of duty they wash daily their faces and heads in a manner so dirty and so unclean as could possibly be imagined thus it is carried out a

a slave girl brings each morning early a large vessel with water and gives the vessel to her master and he washes his hands and face and the hair of his head he washes it and combs it with a comb into the bucket then blows his nose and spits into the bucket

He holds back nothing impure, but rather lets it go into the water. End quote. So far, no problem, right? Guys just being clean, washing, you know, that whole thing. But the problem comes with what Fadlan says next. Quote,

after he has done what was necessary the girl takes the same vessel to the one who is nearest and he does just as his neighbor had done she carries the vessel from one to another until all in the house have had a turn at it and each of them has blown his nose spat into and washed his face and hair in the vessel and quote

remember what's so unusual about this is this isn't some story from some monk that some monk may have heard or is lying about this is an eyewitness writing for his master his accuracy is probably better than any other accurate account you're going to get about the vikings in this period asterisk here if these are vikings then it gets truly dark

where he talks about what happens when one of their numbers, one of these chieftains of this group, dies. He gets to witness this. He says he's curious and wants to see what happens and what the burial practices are like.

And by the way, one of these Rusia people comes up to him and tells him through an interpreter that people like him are stupid, where he comes from because they bury their loved ones to allow them to be eaten by worms and frogs and slimy things. He says, we burn them. And then they go straight to paradise. No muss, no fuss. But the ceremony itself is a scene of gang rapes, drunkenness,

killings and the archaeology of Scandinavian Viking era burial practices seem to indicate that at least some of the things Fadlan witnesses is in simpatico with what has been found archaeologically speaking and he writes quote

When a high chief dies, his family says to his slave girls and servants, which one of you wishes to die with him? Then one of them answers, I. When he or she has said this, he is bound. He can in no way be allowed to withdraw his word. If he wishes it, or she wishes it, it is not permitted. For the most part, this self-sacrifice is made by the maidens."

Then there's a whole ceremony, involves a lot of drinking, a lot of pronouncements and all kinds of things. It also involves a person, a female, known, he says, as the Angel of Death. Remember, he's an eyewitness to this. This is why this account is so important. He's not telling you something he's heard. This is something he saw. How many people ever wrote anything down like this? And, of course, you know, how many of those accounts ever survived to come into our hands today?

So he talks about this boat that is laid out with all sorts of precious material and whatnot, and a couch is put on it, and the boat is dragged onto shore, and they build sort of a facade around it and over it, and then talks about the slave girl who drinks to insensibility, makes a bunch of pronouncements. She's got a role to play in this whole ceremony too, and then he writes, quote,

thereupon an old woman came whom they call the angel of death and spread the draperies mentioned over the couch meaning the couch on the boat she had held the oversight over the sewing of the garments of the deceased and their completion this old woman kills the girl i saw that she was an old giantess fat and grim to behold end quote he says that they then bring a bunch of different animals

to the boat that the chieftain is laid in, including all sorts of food, drink, fruits, flowers, and everything else, bread, meat, onions,

Then they brought a dog, he says, and chopped it into two halves and laid the halves on the boat. Then they brought weapons and laid them by his side. Then they took horses and chopped them in half, which is not an easy thing to do, but it's probably a little bit easier than what they do next, which he says they take two whole live cows and cut them in two. Again, not an easy thing to do. And then laid them in the boat. And then he writes, quote,

The maiden, who wished to be put to death, went here and there, and entered each of the tents where the head of each tent had intercourse with her, saying, Say to thy lord, I have done this out of love of thee. So what it seems like they're saying there is, take this message to wherever the spirit of the guy who just died is, and tell him I'm having intercourse with you, because I love him. Interesting. Interesting.

how the different cultures of the world can seem to us now she then takes part in some ceremonies involved and some drinking and some statements and then he says as it gets time for the killing of her to happen he says quote I

i saw then how disturbed she was she wished to go into the tent but put her head between the tent and the side of the boat then the old woman the angel of death took her by the head made her go into the tent and also entered with her whereupon the men began to beat their shields with the stabs so that her shrieks would not be heard and the other maidens became terrified then six men went into the tent and all had intercourse with the girl

Then they placed her beside her dead lord. Two men seized her by the feet and two by the hands. Then the old woman placed a rope in which a bite, meaning a noose, had been made, and gave it to two of the men to pull at the two ends. Then the old woman came to her with a broad-bladed dagger and began to jab it into her ribs and pull it out again, and the two men strangled her until she was dead."

The end result of all of this is she's laid in the boat next to the dead chieftain. The boat is then set on fire, goes up in smoke, and you have a very high-ranking version of the Viking funeral. The low-ranking version, by the way, they say if it's not a chieftain, they often just put them into a boat with weapons, light it on fire, and push it out into a river or the ocean or whatever it might be.

And as we've been mentioning, it is difficult to know how much one can talk about this as a, you know, in air quotes, Viking funeral versus some sort of hybrid Viking slash Slavic slash Eastern sort of deal.

Because in all the areas, as we've said, that the Scandinavians sort of touch upon and enter into, they become more like the locals. They start to fuse with them and they certainly adopt styles and practices, weapons, armor, tactics, maybe sometimes even religious beliefs of the locals. That's how you get

people like the Norse Irish in Ireland, for example, right? This, this, what did we say? The shrapnel begins to be absorbed, you know, into the flesh of the local population. Well, here in the East, it's an Eastern population, right?

You want to get a sense of the vibe? Go look at artist renderings of these Eastern Vikings or these Rus people. They look like Vikings with an Eastern sort of flair, right? The hairstyles, the weapons, the armor, the armor, sometimes lamellar armor, which is sort of fish scale-y, looks different than chain mail. You don't see a lot of lamellar armor in the West.

But this is something you see all throughout history. I mean, the steppe people are famous for this. The nomadic horse archer people from the entire Eurasian landmass, they tend to look like the big settled societies that they operate near. I mean, if you're on the borders of China and you're a steppe tribe, well, you're trading with China, aren't you? You're raiding with China. You're intermarrying with the Chinese in the border areas and you tend to look kind of, well, Chinese, right?

If you're steppe tribes north of Persia, you have an Iranian sort of feel. If you're steppe tribes in the west and you're getting your fabrics and your armor and your weapons from the Byzantines, either through raiding or trading, well...

you tend to look like a Western steppe tribe. And the Scandinavian peoples have this same sort of feel to them. And if you ever go look at an artist rendering of the Scandinavian peoples in Eastern Europe, they sort of look different than the Scandinavian peoples in Ireland, for example, or Northwestern France.

in graves in the merchant town that's located in modern-day Sweden, now Berka, they have found clear influences from the East and the steppe nomads. In hairstyles, for example, the Rus will always look a little steppe nomad in terms of their personality

particular look, and in his book, The Children of Ash and Elm, historian Neil Price talks about these Berka burials and the fact that the Eastern Vikings were starting to look well, very Eastern indeed, and he writes, quote, Recalling the people in the Berka chamber burials, the mounted archers with their recurved bows and special thumb rings,

The Rus appear as military elites who have adopted the best equipment and tactics of those they might have to fight. Ornate silks and caftans have been found in graves across Scandinavia, and depictions on Gotlandic picture stones of warriors wearing the wide, baggy trousers that characterized Persian and

and Arab fashions similarly imply that Viking dress codes were infused with an element of foreign flair. The same individuals also had armor of the Byzantine type, as well as the lamellar that was particular to the mounted steppe nomads of Eurasia, all while the isotopes and genomic analysis indicate that they themselves were Scandinavian origin. In a way, this almost appears to be a uniform,

not in the sense of identical clothes, but in a recognized repertoire of symbolism and style, what one scholar has called a Turkic military outfit, end quote.

There are some other elements in play too where you can see why the Scandinavian Vikings in the East would start to diverge a little bit from the ones in the West. One has to do with cultural affinity. In some places in the West, England's a perfect example, the Vikings are running into people that are quite a bit like themselves in some respects. I mean, the Anglo-Saxons in England spoke a language that was probably mutually intelligible. They could probably speak to the Vikings.

In the past, they had the same gods. They look like them. They sound like them. They have a bunch of the same sorts of customs. It's not that way in the East. What's more, as we've said before, the East is a much more dangerous neighborhood. There are many more cultures coming together in a kind of a cultural estuary in the East, a sort of a meeting of a bunch of different worlds. The Scandinavians in the East are much more in a population and numbers sense a drop in the bucket than

We quoted historians in part one of this discussion who suggested that the population of Scandinavia in its entirety during this era might have been around 2 million human beings. And remember, it's only a small percentage of that 2 million that's going to go down the river systems in the east and become the Rus. Well, they're intermixing with a Slavic population that's enormous.

The Slavs today are still the largest, I believe, ethno-linguistic group in Europe. During this time period, there would have been many, many millions of Slavs divided into all sorts of different Slavic tribes. How much of an impact could a small amount of Scandinavian adventurers or conquerors have had on such a large population? Maybe they're a layer of leadership or a dominant group amongst a bunch of different tribes. Hard to know.

Archaeology is helping to flesh out some of the answers to these questions by studying graves, grave goods, skeletons. But what's missing are the stories, the sort of things that you would get from written accounts. And as we've said and said extensively in the first part of this series, the Byzantines would write about some of this stuff.

But when the Rus first appear in the Byzantine accounts, they're treated like an almost unknown people. Remember, let's review here for a minute. The first time you hear about these Rus is in the 830s.

Back in Western Europe, we told the story of the two or three Rus travelers who show up in a court of a Frankish king and the Byzantines send them there and say, can you help these people get home? If they go the direct route, ferocious tribes will kill them. And the Frankish emperor has to say, well, tell me who you are and we'll try to get you home. And they say, we're Rus and he doesn't know what that means. They have to go do some investigative work and they finally determined that Rus means Swedes and these are Swedes.

So that's in the 830s. There is a rumor, is a good way to put it, or a tradition that there might have been an attack on some Byzantine territories in the 830s also, but most historians seem to discount that. What they don't discount is the story we told in the first part of the show about the Great Raid

on the suburbs of Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, in the 860s, right? 860 famously. We told that story, and the Byzantines treated that like a brand-new people had shown up in their territory, you know, from some parts unknown, which doesn't make any sense if a couple decades before they'd been sending them to the Frankish emperor and telling them, these are Rus people, get them home. Nonetheless...

In that whole era, we really don't know who, for example, the rulers were, what the politics were, or any of that sort of stuff. Now, you'll get some of that from the Byzantine records later, but...

We do have some information about what's going on in terms of the stories from this era, but as is usual with these sorts of situations, they're not written down for hundreds of years, and the people who wrote them down have their own reasons for writing them down, which makes the information suspect and requires historians to be very vigilant about what they accept and what they don't and try to cross-reference and double-check things. Those of you who know this story know I'm talking about

a bunch of documents put together and chronicled in something called the Russian Primary Chronicle.

written by Christian monks one specifically named Nestor living in caves so you get a sense now of what we might be dealing with here it is compiled hundreds of years after the events in question and there are reasons why these monks might have skewed the story including trying to sort of trace back the ruling dynasties lineage and

and give support to the legitimacy of that it is a fascinating text though any way you slice it and when you hear the accounts you realize what a different animal it is than the sorts of information we have from archaeology from byzantine accounts or anything else

So it makes it very valuable in that respect, maybe as a jumping off point for detective work. But boy, when you read it, you also see stuff that reminds you of like Grimm's fairy tales, Greek mythology, J.R.R. Tolkien stuff. So, well, take it with a grain of salt. I, by the way, use the Samuel Hazard Cross and Olgur P. Shcherbovitz-Wetzer translation.

But this, you know, and what's wonderful about these sorts of documents is that they will start the story at a logical beginning point. And the Russian Primary Chronicle begins with the biblical flood of Noah and sort of works its way down. We call that comprehensive where I come from.

But the Chronicle tells the, shall we call it, legendary story of the founding of what will be called the Kievan Rus State, and it involves three brothers from Scandinavia. The story is that the Slavic tribes in what's now Poland,

the Baltics, Ukraine, Russia, that whole area, really a central area sort of if you drew a line from like St. Petersburg now all the way down to Istanbul and there's that whole area in between because the people who became the Kievan Rus desperately want to get to where the money is and the money's in Constantinople.

So if you start in Sweden and you want to get to Constantinople and you want to control the pipeline in between, well, that's the area we're talking about here.

And the Russian Primary Chronicle says there were all these Slavic tribes in that area that the Varangians, as they call them, these Scandinavians come in there, try to, you know, bully their way around, force the locals to pay tribute. The locals eventually throw them out, but then ask them back later. And they ask them back later because the tribes of Slavs are all fighting with each other.

when they need someone to come in and rule them. This is the very basis, by the way, of that Normanist, anti-Normanist controversy we've talked about. You know, is this a bunch of Scandinavians who are imparting their DNA and their culture on the locals and improving them? What did Hitler say? Something like if it weren't for the Scandinavian infusion of blood, the Russians would still be living like rabbits?

The opposite viewpoint are the people in the Soviet Union who think that the whole thing is a bit of a scam and that this is mostly a Slavic story and all this other stuff is a bunch of meaningless nonsense.

sort of fringe material that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. But the story is that these three brothers are asked by the Slavs to come back and rule over them because they need someone to prevent the violence between the Slavic tribes. This might sound weird, except we should realize that bringing in royal families from completely other dynasties and places is not unusual at all. The current British royal family, for example, is German-born.

You look at people like the Habsburgs that besides marrying into all kinds of places and conquering all kinds of places, sometimes when you just needed a ruler and you didn't have one, you'd bring a Habsburg in.

It also kind of makes sense if you have a bunch of tribes, none of whom wants to have their royal family ruling over them from one of their competitors. So you bring in a non-biased outside source, right? With no allegiance to any of the tribes that are involved in the current conflict, right? An outside, you know, unbiased person to come in here and rule fairly. So the Russian Primary Chronicle, written by these monks in caves, supposedly hundreds of years later, tells the story of

And here's the way they tell it, quote, The Varangians from beyond the sea imposed tribute upon the Chuds, the Slavs, the Marians, the Vess, and the Kravichians. But the Khazars imposed it upon the Polyanians, the Severians, and the Viachians, and collected a white squirrel skin from each hearth, end quote.

The Khazars are a very important group of people in this era. They are a step tribe confederacy. They are Turkish and other ethnicities, as these step tribes tend to be. And the upper echelons of the Khazars converted to Judaism, which is a rather unusual thing.

I'm interested in the squirrel skin comment because if you think about peoples who exist in a mostly non currency sort of society if somebody wants to force them to pay tribute how do they pay and the story basically says.

that they required each homeowner to deliver their share of the tribute, in this case a white squirrel skin. Well, if you have hundreds of homes that pay tribute to you and you say, I want a white squirrel skin from each of you, you end up at the end of the day with hundreds of squirrel skins, don't you?

The Russian Primary Chronicle continues talking about how these Slavic peoples, and others, by the way, those aren't all Slavic groups as I understand it, throw the Varangians out and send them home to where they came from. Quote,

The tributaries of the Varangians drove them back beyond the sea, and refusing them further tribute, set out to govern themselves. There was no law among them, but tribe rose against tribe. Discord thus ensued among them, and they began to war, one against another. They said to themselves, "'Let us seek a prince who may rule over us and judge us according to the law.'

they accordingly went overseas to the varangian ruses these particular varangians were known as ruses just as some are called swedes and others normans english and gotlanders for they were thus named the chuds the slavs the cravitchians and the vests then said to the people of ruse our land is great and rich but there is no order in it come to rule and reign over us

The chronicle then says that they selected three brothers who would come and rule over them. And each of the brothers was going to take and rule one of the key trading post towns along the rivers that formed sort of the pipeline from the Baltic to, you know, the money port of, you know, Constantinople and Byzantium.

But within two years, the Chronicle says two of the three brothers died, leaving the one brother that's famous. His name is Rurik. Now, to me, Rurik is an Eastern version of a figure that reminds me of Ragnar Lothbrok in the West. Right? Famous Viking. You see him on television and the movies all the time.

but Ragnar Lothbrok's a figure that no one's exactly sure if he was even real or if he was real he's had so much myth and legend piled on top of him that maybe the real person doesn't even resemble the figure you know in the stories but what you can say about Ragnar Lothbrok is his descendants are real and you can say the same thing about Rurik

You get a sense in the Russian primary chronicle that stuff is happening without it necessarily being spelled out to you, that more of these Slavic tribes are paying tribute, that things are being consolidated. By the time Rurik dies, it seems like it's a more subtle situation. The chronicle says he turns things over to a member, it says, of his kin, not his child, but his kin, who

who'll be known to history as oleg the russian histories call him oleg the wise now if these don't particularly sound like viking scandinavian names to you there's a reason for that

They are all sort of reimagined through a Slavic lens. So when you read the history books, the historians will often go to great pains to give you the likely Viking name for these people originally. And then you get to see what the Slavic version of it is. So Rurik was probably Erik. Oleg was probably Helgi. It goes like that.

Eventually, the names will be Slavic from the get-go, and then that supposedly signifies some major change there, right? When you're not any longer giving them Viking Scandinavian names, but naming them Slavic names, something's gone different. So Oleg the Wise is famous. He does the same thing Rurik does in terms of consolidating things, expanding things. These early rulers changed the tribute that people are paying. So oftentimes, they'll deal with these tribes who are paying tribute to someone else, right?

The Khazars we mentioned earlier are famous. The Bulgars are another one. And they'll say, you know, who are you paying tribute to? And they'll say, and the Scandinavian Rus Varangians will say, well, stop paying tribute to them and start paying it to me.

sometimes they'll say we'll charge you less usually they'll say if they give you any trouble they can come talk to us and so there's this process of sort of taking over in the last show we compared some of the viking activities to sort of the organized crime or the mob moving in if you want to give that overtone to this it still sort of works coming in here and taking over the territory from the other mob

the best story in the Russian Primary Chronicle, whether it's true or not. Again, this all sounds like Greek mythology or Grimm's fairy tales to me sometimes, and you can tell by the story of how Oleg dies. So the story about how Oleg dies involves a wizard, and the wizard tells Oleg that his horse is going to be the reason he dies.

now somebody told you that your horse was going to be the reason you died long before your horse does anything to you what would you do probably the same thing that ole does when the wizard says your horse is going to be the bane of your existence he sends the horse away doesn't hold anything against the horse tells his underlings to take it far away feed it take good care of it just don't you know have it near me

And then one day, when the prophecy is supposed to come true and Oleg finds himself still alive, he says to one of his squires, the...

Russian primary chronicle says. And you can see how very different this is, can't you? From information an archaeologist would provide or something the Byzantines would write, right? This is the origin story as told by the descendants of the people they're writing about. But Olenek says to the squire, whatever happened to that horse that was supposed to be the death of me? And the Russian primary chronicle says, quote,

The squire answered that he was dead, meaning the horse was dead. Oleg laughed and mocked the magician, meaning the wizard, exclaiming, Soothsayers tell untruths, and their words are naught but falsehoods. This horse is dead, but I am still alive.

Then he commanded that a horse should be saddled. "'Let me see his bones,' said he. He rode to the place where the bare bones and skull lay. Dismounting from his horse, he laughed and remarked, "'So I was supposed to receive my death from this skull?' And then he stamped upon the skull with his foot. But a serpent crawled forth from it and bit him on the foot, so that in consequence he sickened and died."

Now, I suppose there's a tiny chance that that's what actually happened, but you can see why people take the Russian Primary Chronicle, especially these

early parts of the story with more than a grain of salt and you can also see though why it's the kind of material you just don't get from the other sources right sometimes you're left with something that might not be good enough to hang your hat on but if it's all you have well it's hard to throw away in its entirety isn't it now oleg leads to igor

And Igor is a fascinating character, including because of the woman he marries. Igor marries Olga. There's a lot of names, I realize, but Olga is also supposed to be a Scandinavian person.

Her name was probably Helga in the Scandinavian naming system. She's fascinating. In fact, I'm trying to think, I know there has to be more because there's so many Christian saints. I'm trying to think of a Christian saint with a more bloody, vindictive, retributionally violent sort of temperament that would outstrip Olga's reputation. And I can't think of one off the top of my head.

but some would say Olga had a good reason for being the way that she was because Olga's husband will be killed by a Slavic tribe. Now, if you are a Slavic proponent, you will say that they had a very good reason to kill Igor.

Because what happens is, is like his predecessors before him, Igor will go and lay tribute on these Slavic tribes. He shows up, according to the Russian primary chronicle, to this one tribe with his army and basically says, you know, that amount you were paying to my predecessor, we're raising the rent, right? So you're going to pay me more. And what could they do? He had the army with them. They just sort of meekly said, okay. And then he and the army head back to, you know, headquarters. But on the way, the primary chronicle says, Igor,

he decided he was going to raise it even more. So he goes back to the people whose rent, you know, the tribute he just raised, but he only brings a small bodyguard with him. And when he tells the Slavic tribe he's raising the rent even more than he said he was, they kill him.

the traditional account is, and you'll run into this quite a bit, that they tie each of his legs to a birch tree that is bent over, you know, under tension, and that will pull his legs in opposite directions. And then when they let go of the birch tree, it splits him right up the middle. And then they have the gall to go to his wife, Olga, and

and tell her what they did to her husband. And then they have the greater gall to say, well, now that your husband is dead, we think you should marry our leader. And that's where the story gets fantastic. Again, is it true? Who knows? It's not something the archaeologist, at least at this time, can confirm. And it's not something that the Byzantine documents confirm.

But Olga basically says, oh, yeah, you know, what am I going to do? My husband's dead. And the story starts off from there. And it's just wickedly retributional. Quote,

Olga was informed that the Derevlians, that's the Slavic tribe in question, had arrived and summoned them to her presence with a gracious welcome. When the Derevlians had announced their arrival, Olga replied with an inquiry as to the reason of their coming. The Derevlians then announced that their tribe had sent them to report that they had slain her husband because he was like a wolf, crazy.

crafty and ravening but that their princes who had thus preserved the land of deriva were good and that olga should come and marry their prince whose name was mal olga made this reply your proposal is pleasing to me indeed my husband cannot rise again from the dead

but i desire to honor you tomorrow in the presence of my people return now to your boat and remain there with an aspect of arrogance i shall send for you on the morrow she then has her people show up the next day after they have dug a big trench without the derevlians knowing about it they pick them up in this boat they carry them in this boat to the trench they throw them in the trench and then they bury them alive

Olga's not even close to being done, though. She then, according to the Chronicle, sends a message back to the Derevlians, basically saying, quote...

if they really required her presence they should send after her their most distinguished men so that she might go to their prince with due honor for otherwise her people in kiev would not let her go end quote right send me your best people they'll conduct me to you and we'll get this marriage thing underway basically so they send their best people to her

when they arrive she says that she's set up a wonderful bath and a bath-house for them they should go sort of wash off the dirt from the trip and then she'll receive them when they all go into the bath-house she has her people burn it down with them in it but olga's not done yet

She then tells the Derevlians that she's coming to them, that they should prepare a feast with lots of alcoholic beverages, and they'll party it up well. And then she shows up. Everybody gets drunk. She has a small escort with her. And when everybody gets drunk, she has her followers kill everyone. The Russian primary chronicle says that her followers killed down 5,000 of the Derevlians.

but that she wasn't done even yet. Olga then returns to Kiev, the Chronicle says, and prepares her army to attack the survivors. It does. She puts their city under siege, it says, for a year. Eventually, both sides tire of the siege and they say, you know, what do we have to do to get this, you know, resolved? And she says, I only want a sparrow, actually three pigeons and three sparrows, I correct myself, from each house.

And then when they're really happy to find out that that's all she wants, they deliver up the three sparrows or three pigeons from each house. She ties sulfur and other inflammatory materials to each one of them, releases them, the primary chronicle says. They instantly return to where they came from, all the various houses with their thatched roofs, light the whole city on fire, the whole thing burns down.

And as the Russian primary chronicle says, quote, there was not a house that was not consumed and it was impossible to extinguish the flames because all the houses caught fire at once. The people fled from the city and Olga ordered her soldiers to catch them.

Thus she took the city and burned it and captured the elders of the city, some of the other captives she killed, while she gave others as slaves to her followers, the remnants she left to pay tribute." Now, spoiler alert, in the future, Olga is going to be sainted. She's going to become a Christian saint. When was the last Christian saint that you can think of off the top of your head responsible for as much retributional violence as Olga is?

she's clearly one of the women in history you would least want to make angry with you but is any of this stuff about olga or for that matter rurik or olag or igor true

All this stuff from the Russian Primary Chronicle is open to debate and inspection and critique. What's more, I like the other name that the Russian Primary Chronicle is known by. It's also called the Tale of Bygone Years, which makes it sound less authoritative and more like a hobbit might have written it. Right? It's the Red Book of Westmarch or something like that. And historians trying to disentangle truth from fiction in it

have not only been trying now for generations, but they often disagree on what they consider to be truth and falsehood. I mean, there are several attacks on Constantinople that some historians think happened and others think didn't. The question of Olga all by herself is interesting. In The Emergence of Rus, historian Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard point out that the Olga story is formulaic and symbolic, and they write, quote,

Olga has ample space in the primary chronicle, and she also became the subject of a quasi-hagiographical eulogy. End quote. They point out that...

She meets certain specifications for how women are supposed to behave in the time that the primary chronicle was written, saying, quote, Yet Olga emphatically confirms the rule. In the first place, her status is within the norms. She is shown as holding power not in her own right, but as her husband's widow during her son's minority. And her actions against the Derevlians were her revenge for her husband's murder.

secondly they write most narratives about her have a curiously feminine texture unlike the equivalent narratives about men mal the prince of the derevlians sends envoys to olga proposing marriage

Olga agrees and orders that the envoys be carried up to Kiev in their boat. When the envoys reach Olga's compound, the boat is cast into a pit and the envoys are buried alive in it. This, they say, is Olga's first revenge. She then requests more envoys to escort her on her journey to her bridegroom. When they arrive, she suggests they take a bath. The doors are then locked, the bathhouse is set on fire, and the envoys are burned alive.

Finally, they write, Olga goes to the land of the Derevlians, requesting only that before marrying she might hold a funeral feast for her husband. At the feast, the Derevlians drink themselves into a stupor, whereupon Olga's men set upon them and cut them to pieces, all five thousand of them. These, they write, are formulaic tales.

Under the guise of betrothal, Olga sets a series of riddles with cryptic clues symbolizing not a marriage, but a funeral, boat burial, washing the body, cremation, the funeral feast. The penalty for not decoding the riddle is death, and the Derevlians drink at their own funeral feast."

During the time period we just mentioned, there are a couple of treaties that are signed between the Rus or some of the Rus and the Byzantines. These treaties are interesting because trying to figure out why treaties are being signed has created confusion. The Russian Primary Chronicle says they're signed because, well, they're ending conflicts, right? When do you sign a treaty? When you end a war.

But whether these conflicts occurred or not is also controversial. I have many books on the subject. I would, you know, off the top of my head say about 60% believe that these conflicts, but the treaties are supposed to settle didn't happen about 40% by the idea that they did.

The Russian Primary Chronicle, The Tale of Bygone Years, says that they did, but this may be a later insertion to explain why there are treaties. For example, Viking historian Svevrier Jacobson in the Varangian's God's Holy Fire writes, quote,

The treaty is placed into the primary chronicle in context of the attack by Prince Oleg on Constantinople in 907. There is, however, no distinct reference to such a raid in any Roman sources, meaning any Byzantine sources,

which is in stark contrast to the raid of 860. It could thus be surmised that Oleg's attack on Constantinople was a later invention, perhaps intended to explain the circumstances of the treaty, which itself does not refer to any raid, only to a long-standing friendship between the Rus and the Roman Empire." In his book, Northmen, the Viking Saga, Viking expert John Haywood puts it this way, quote,

According to the Primary Chronicle, Oleg led an attack on Constantinople in 907. If he did, no one in Constantinople appears to have noticed, because it is not mentioned in any Byzantine sources. End quote. Yet.

As I said, about 40% of the histories you'll read buy the idea that those attacks happened. I'm not a historian. I can't make distinctions between arguments between historians. So I'm going to treat those attacks as suspect and stick with the ones we know happened because there's going to be another one. But before we get to it, you have to know about a geopolitical firestorm that erupts that changes everything in the Eastern Viking Varangian Rus world. And that is the latest eruption today.

of the newest steppe tribe du jour. If you follow Eurasian steppe tribe history, you know that they break like waves upon the settled societies that ring the Eurasian steppe. And there's always another wave behind the current breaking crest. And in the late 800s, early 900s, the newest wave is the Pechenegs. And these people blow everything

through the Khazars and the Magyars and destroy the stabilization that has occurred in that region over the previous decades, disrupt everything. When the Byzantines suggest to the Magyars, also known as the Hungarians, that they fight these new tribal peoples from the east, the Hungarians say they can't. In the emergence of Rus, Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard have this quote, quote,

The Pechenegs overran the grazing grounds of the Hungarians during the 890s, having been egged on by the ruler of Bulgaria, Simeon.

the region between the don and the donets steppes in the east and the niester and then subsequently the danube in the west lay at their disposal they were markedly poorer than the hungarians in terms of material culture ornaments and riding gear but they were perhaps for that reason more ferocious when a byzantine emissary tried to stir up the hungarians against the pechenegs

They protested, now quoting the Hungarians, quote, we cannot fight them for their country is vast and their people numerous and they are the devil's brats, end quote. The devil's brats, I love that term, and the devil's brats are going to create geopolitical upheaval, threaten the trade routes, make life miserable for lots of different people, the Rus, not least amongst them.

On this superhighway from the Baltic to Constantinople and beyond that to Baghdad, there are going to be spots where the Rus traders have to take their boats overland, and that, we are told in the original sources, is where the pensioners wait for them, and they get them. But crisis...

can create opportunity and in many places it is thought that these Rus warriors are able to make new inroads and create new tributary societies amongst the Slavs because all of a sudden these Slavs desperately need protection from the Pechenegs and these Rus, these Vikings of the East,

are strong, well-equipped warriors. And one of the things I find interesting is you can start to see the development of what we can call true cavalry here in the East. That's part of a, you know, Newtonian formula in warfare. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. When you are fighting mounted people in wide open country, eventually you learn that you need to be mounted too.

And true cavalry, meaning fighting as cavalry, will start in the east long before it does in the west. And of course, when I say that, I mean Scandinavian cavalry because, of course, cavalry had been fighting as cavalry in some parts of the world for 2,000 years or something by this time. But the Scandinavians in the eastern areas will adopt true cavalry quite a bit of time before the Scandinavians in the west will. It's in 941 AD.

that we see the famous great attack on Constantinople by the Rus that no one denies, that there are multiple sources for. As we said earlier, if it bleeds, it leads, kind of works for history the same way it does for journalism. And that's why the earlier attacks that supposedly happened in 907, for example, are harder to believe because, you know, you can't really have one of those big attacks without a bunch of people writing about it. Well, not easily anyway.

And the famous 941 attack is written about by a lot of sources, proving the point. We should talk a little bit about the place that's attacked because we've mentioned it before, but it bears some discussion. We call it the Byzantine Empire. This is a misnomer. That's not something anyone living during this time period we're talking about would have understood or used or called themselves Byzantines.

The people in what we call the Byzantine Empire called themselves Roman, and it's easy to understand why. All you have to do is pretend that the same thing that left the Byzantines in the position the Byzantines are in by this time happened to a place like the United States.

I mean, what would happen if in some future time an invasion of the United States happened and the invaders were able to conquer all the way to somewhere in the Midwest? Let's just say, you know, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, that whole area. So California to Indiana is gone, taken over, becomes a bunch of separate kingdoms. But every place east of that, you know, from like

Michigan all the way to the East Coast remained as it was, the United States. We halted the invaders at the Midwest and we continued on for another thousand years. Would you call that something different? Would the people in those territories rename the United States as something else just because they lost some of it?

Well, that's what happened to the Eastern Roman Empire when the barbarian tribes and the various other groups were able to eventually, let's just say, extinguish government in the Roman West. The Roman East remained for another thousand years.

What matters, though, in this discussion is that there is an unbroken historical tradition in those places that dates back, well, a good 1300 years. What would you say? I mean, Julius Caesar's in the 50s BCE. Well, they still call their emperor Kaiser. You know, that's what Caesar would have been called in the Roman Latin, right? Caesar.

And by Julius Caesar's time in the 50s BCE, Roman military tradition is hundreds of years old already. You know, they write this stuff down. It continues to build upon, you know, the information that's been compiled since at least the Pyrrhic invasions of the 280s BCE. So there's a huge amount, a wellspring, we can say, of military and technological knowledge in a place like Constantinople in this time period that dates back,

well, a long way. During this time, the estimated population of the city of Constantinople is about a half million people. This is probably somewhat less than the city of Rome at Rome's height, which has been estimated somewhere between 750,000 and a million people. But this still makes it, you know, at half a million people, the largest European city, the most technologically advanced European city, the most wealthy European city.

And they have weapons that these Rus can't even dream of.

And when the Rus attack in 941, just like in the attack in 860, it is well-timed, and that might not be an accident. They may know, intelligence-wise, that the Byzantine navy and army is away fighting elsewhere, because just like in 860, in 941 it is away and fighting elsewhere, and the emperor is too. And the Rus attack, they come down the rivers, they head into the Black Sea,

They sail over to the Bosphorus and they begin to attack the suburbs and the places that have lighter defenses because the defenses of Constantinople are famous. And it's part of the reason why it never fell to the barbarians back when the Western Roman Empire fell. It's one of the great defensible cities of all time. It's mainly surrounded by water and the places where it's not, it has massive walls.

We should point out, as I believe we did for the earlier attack in 860, that the ships or boats, whatever you want to call them, it's somewhere between a ship and a boat, that the Rus are using are not the long ships that they're using in the west because the long ships they're using in the west would never survive the river journeys with all the falls and the rapids and the rocks. They had to have boats that could be carried at times. So these are smaller craft ships.

The Greek name for them makes them sound like they're kind of like large dugout canoes, but they're wood. If you today were faced with a bunch of wooden boats that you needed to defend yourself against, what would be a good weapon to use against them? Because in 941, when the Byzantines are faced with this attack, the Eastern Romans, maybe we should say, are faced with this attack again.

They pull out all the technological stops. We are told in the sources that they have 15 old hulks. We would use the term mothballed today. And they pull them out of mothballs and they fit them with one of their great technological marvels. I think the best term to use for it probably to be somewhat near accurate would be to call them flamethrowers.

The Byzantines, the Eastern Romans have a weapon that the technological scientific experts of today still can't figure out what it was composed of.

We have all sorts of accounts because they used it to keep themselves free for a very long time. The historical term you will usually hear it referred to by is Greek fire. It is sometimes called Medean fire. It is sometimes called liquid fire. It is sometimes called sticky fire.

There are lots of theories as to what the formula for this was, but it should be pointed out that the reason that this isn't better understood is because this is a jealously guarded state secret.

In fact, I was reading that the Byzantines, the Eastern Romans, would make sure to keep the people who dealt with the Greek fire in compartmentalized situations, right? So no one knew everything about it. These people might handle the making of it. These other people might handle the distribution of it. These other people might handle the wielding of it. But no one knew everything, and that's how you kind of keep the secret from getting out.

There's a famous Byzantine manual written by one emperor to his son. And in it, he talks about a lot of different things of importance that his son should know in ruling the empire. But one thing he wants his son to understand is you keep this technological marvel, this super weapon secret or else. And the account says, quote,

Similar care and thought you must take in the matter of the liquid fire, which is discharged through tubes, so that if any shall ever venture to demand this too, as they've often made demands of us also, you may rebut and dismiss them in words like these. Now he's telling his son what to say to people that might want to put him in a position where he's forced to reveal the secret to Greek fire. Quote,

This too was revealed and taught by God through an angel to the great and holy Constantine, the first Christian emperor. And concerning this too, he received great charges from the same angel. And as we are assured by the faithful witness of our fathers and grandfathers, that it should be manufactured among the Christians only, and in this city ruled by them, and nowhere else at all.

nor should it be sent nor taught to any other nation whatsoever. And so, for the confirmation of this among those who should come after him, this great emperor caused curses to be inscribed on the holy stable of the church of God, that he who should dare give of this fire to another nation should neither be called a Christian nor be held worthy of any rank or office.

and if he should be the holder of any such, he should be expelled therefrom, and be anathemasized, and made an example for ever and ever, whether he were emperor, or patriarch, or any other man whatever, either ruler or subject, who should seek to transgress this commandment.

and he adjured all who had had the zeal and fear of God to be prompt to make away with him who attempted to do this as a common enemy and a transgressor of this great commandment, and to dismiss him to a death most hateful and cruel.

and it happened once as wickedness will still find room that one of our military governors who had been most heavily bribed by certain foreigners handed over some of this fire to them and since god could not endure to leave unavenged this transgression as he was about to enter the holy church of god

fire came down out of heaven and devoured and consumed him utterly and thereafter mighty dread and terror were implanted in the hearts of all men and never since then has anyone whether emperor or noble or private citizen or military governor or any man of any sort whatever ventured to think of such a thing far less to attempt to do it or bring it to pass end quote

that is quite an admonition isn't it and that shows exactly how much of an important secret weapon this greek fire was in his a short history of byzantium the historian of byzantium john julius norwich puts it this way

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of Greek fire in Byzantine history. To the Saracens it was all too familiar. To the Russians, a total surprise. End quote. Earlier in the work he describes how it worked against the Saracens and says, quote,

The Byzantines, moreover, possessed a secret weapon. To this day we are uncertain of the composition of Greek fire. Whether it was sprayed over an enemy vessel or poured into long narrow cartridges and catapulted against its objective, the results were almost invariably catastrophic.

The flaming, oil-based liquid floated upon the surface of the sea, frequently igniting the wooden hulls of the ships, causing an additional hazard to those who tried to jump overboard. End quote. The Byzantine princess Anna Komneny, writing a couple hundred years later, and maybe talking about something different, seems to slip and give a little bit of the recipe, maybe, when she wrote, quote,

Now this fire was chemically prepared in the following manner. From the pine and other similar evergreen trees, they gather resin which burns easily. This is rubbed with sulfur and introduced into reed tubes. A man blows on it with a strong sustained breath as though he were playing a pipe, and then it comes in contact with the fire at the end of the tube, bursts into flames, and falls like a flash of lightning on the faces in front of it.

She also describes how they would use this in a way where it was sprayed out of the sculptures, the metal carvings and images of like wild animals and lions and dragons. And she says, quote,

The Emperor thereupon ordered all provinces of the Roman Empire to provide ships. Many were also made in Constantinople itself. From time to time he used to board a ship with one bank of oars and give advice himself to the shipwrights about their construction. He, meaning the Emperor, knew the Paisans were masters of naval warfare and he feared a sea battle with them.

End quote. Let me stop here. They were fighting the Paisans at the time. This is hundreds of years after the time period we're talking about, but this is what matters for the time period we're talking about. Quote, accordingly, he affixed on the prow of each vessel the heads of lions and other land animals. They were made of bronze or iron with wide open jaws.

the thin layer of gold with which they were covered made the very sight of them terrifying. Greek fire, to be hurled at the enemy through tubes, was made to issue from the mouths of these figureheads in such a way that they appeared to be belching out the fire. End quote. So these 15 mothballed, rotting hulks of galleys are brought out of

they are loaded with these tubes that can shoot out essentially this explosive flamethrower-like material. And when these wooden dugout canoes end up surrounding these galleys, the Byzantines, these Eastern Romans, turn the flamethrowers on the wooden vessels of the Rus, and it is as...

The historian we recently quoted said, catastrophic. There are multiple accounts that confirm that the Rus are defeated by fire. That's how many of the accounts put it, by fire.

One account is by a man whose stepfather visits Constantinople right after this four-month-long attack occurs. His name is, and I think it's pronounced, Ludprand of Cremona, and he talks about how the Byzantines, just like in 860, were taken by surprise in 941.

and that the Rus devastated the area near the coast. They were said to be crucifying people, driving nails into their heads, chopping them up, using them for target practice with arrows, raping women, taking slaves, the whole nine yards. And this Ludprand of Cremona says,

that the 15 old galleys were rigged with the Greek fire and in their book The Emergence of Rosse Historians Simon Franklin and Jonathan Shepard talk about this original story from Ludbrand of Cremona and say, quote,

If we believe, Ludprand, the Byzantines were taken by surprise in June 941, as they had been in 860, and the emperor, Romanos Lekepinos, spent, quote, not a few sleepless nights in reflection, end quote. Those are quotes from the original source by Ludprand.

While the Rus devastated areas near the coast, the day was saved by bringing 15, quote, battered old galleys, end quote, out of mothballs and rigging up Greek fire throwers at the bows, sterns, and broadside. Ludbrandt depicts the Byzantines as winning fairly easily thanks to this non-conventional weaponry. Rus boats swarmed around the galleys, which began to, quote,

project their fire all around, and the Rus, seeing the flames, hurled themselves from their boats, preferring death by water to live incineration. Some sank to the bottom under the weight of their cuirasses and helmets. Others caught fire even as they were swimming among the billows. Not a man escaped that day, save those who made it to the shore."

The Byzantine army finally makes it back from where they were otherwise engaged, starts picking off the Rus soldiers on the shoreline where they're continuing to loot and commit atrocities. John Julius Norwich writes about the final battle.

part of the drama as the four month long attack is winding down and says that the byzantine fleet as the ships would return would go right into combat with the russ boats and he says quote

the fleet too was on its way and as each new squadron arrived it went straight into the attack soon it was the russians who were on the defensive autumn was approaching and they were anxious to sail for home but it was too late the byzantine fleet was between them and the open sea and slowly closing in

Early in September, they made a desperate attempt to slip through the blockade, but suddenly the whole sea was aflame. As the Russian ships went up like matchwood, their crews leapt overboard. The lucky ones were dragged down by the weight of their armor, while the rest met their death in the oil-covered water, which blazed as fiercely as the ships."

According to Leoprand of Cremona, his father was there when the emperor paraded a bunch of the Rus captives in front of an Italian diplomat and had them all beheaded in front of him. The 941 attack is fascinating to me, clearly, because I'm interested in

the technological and military capabilities of early states, you know, in the Middle Ages and the ancient world, and the use of things like flamethrowers or naphtha weapons is going to be intriguing to me regardless.

But it's also interesting because in this story of the Rus, right, these Vikings from the Eastern European sphere, this is the encounter that gives us multiple different sources that you can then use to sort of play off against each other and compare and contrast.

Svevar Jacobson in the Varangians and God's Holy Fire lists no less than five separate accounts of this affair, all of which have key differences. So what this says is, well, two major things. One, it actually happened. Two, that the Byzantine victory was clearly gained through fire because all the sources mentioned the fire.

But something else is involved too, and you can tell when you compare these different sources and see that there are major differences between them. So something's not right. How about this major difference?

You don't know who's in charge of the Rus during this period, and the differences in the sources point that out. If you just believe the Russian primary chronicle, it's clear, right? They go from Rurik, clearly then you have Oleg, right? The guy who stomps on the horse's skull and gets bitten by the snake. And then clearly after that, you have Igor. I mean, you know, who's married to Olga. I mean, it's a very clear succession. But maybe the best source, according to Jacobson, for this entire 941 attack is a Hebrew letter.

And the Hebrew letter, which is considered to be relatively contemporary, says that the leader of the 941 attack on Constantinople is Oleg, the guy who stomped on the horse's skull and got bitten by the snake on the foot. He's, according to the Russian Primary Chronicle, clearly dead and buried by this time. So you start to see that that history before this

Constantinople attacking 941 is hard to pin down and these figures are less flesh and blood than some compilation of legendary accounts that's hard to, you know, peel the layers back from and get your mind around. In fact, the first couple of figures that seem unequivocally real are

are Olga, that we just mentioned, right? She of the retribution of violence against the Drevlians, although that story may be legendary, and her son, the first of the Rus' rulers to clearly have from birth a Slavic name. If you've taken Russian history, you know it because he's famous, is Sviatoslav. We'd mentioned earlier that most of these earlier Rus' rulers were

almost certainly had Nordic names that were reimagined through a Slavic lens, right? So Olga was Helga, Igor was Ingvar, that kind of thing. But Sviatoslav was Sviatoslav from birth, apparently, and this is telling. Svevrier Jacobson writes about that, quote,

it is noteworthy that the son of ingvar igor has a slavonic name rather than a scandinavian one which suggests the rus were rapidly becoming assimilated into the surrounding slavonic population

In fact, it's really hard to try to figure out what percentage of these people that the Byzantines were incinerating with their flamethrowers were actually Scandinavians and what percentage of them were Slavic tribes or steppe peoples or, you know, other groups of linguistic or ethnic elements.

elements from that region. It's a, as we said, a cultural and ethnic estuary in that part of the world. And a lot of times it's not that hard to get a whole bunch of different peoples to join you on an endeavor like let's go attack Constantinople and get rich. My favorite story about the attack on Constantinople is also, I believe, from one of these letters, uh,

to the Khazars that suggests, because they were trying to figure out why the Rus would attack Constantinople if the trade with the Byzantines was going so well. And that story is that the Byzantines encouraged the Rus to go attack the Khazars, which they did,

But then they were defeated by the Khazars, and the Khazars made sort of an extortion blackmail demand on the Rus and said, well, you know, now that you attacked us because the Byzantines goaded you into it, we're demanding that you attack the Byzantines or else. And so the Hebrew letter to the Khazars said,

paints the entire attack of 941 as being done reluctantly by the Rus and that maybe the Rus knew darn well what their chances of success were and felt like they had to do it anyway.

Ancient and medieval history is wonderful that way, isn't it? You just don't know what really happened. It is with Olga and Sviatoslav, though, that you start to see things that you can actually, you know, grasp and hold and look at and say, OK, this is real. With Olga, it's less the story about her treatment of the Derevlians than her conversion to Christianity.

And her conversion to Christianity is one of those things you see over and over again. Well, I was going to say in all history, but especially in the story of, and I'm using air quotes here, Christianizing the barbarians.

in Thor's Angels, we talked about it extensively, how often it was that it was the wives of barbarian, in air quotes, rulers, who managed to either convert their husbands or their peoples or start the process of transitioning from the pagan religions to Christianity. My mother was always fond of saying that

You know, the women get the short end of the stick in the historical accounts because the historical accounts up until recent times really followed the if it bleeds, it leads sort of approach. And so often it's about generals and these great kings and figures. And the women are there, though. They're 50 percent of the population. They're not slaves. They're influencing the population all the time in ways that aren't always consistent.

clear in the historical accounts. They're more like a gravitational force acting on these figures that get all the publicity, but you can see in the Christianization process over hundreds and hundreds of years how important their role was, and Olga does this again.

She doesn't manage to convert the Rus to Christianity, but it's hard to see them doing so, you know, with her grandson as they will, you know, spoiler alert, as they will do without her sort of laying the groundwork for it.

sometime after the attack of Constantinople in 941, within about 15 years, she goes to the Byzantine emperor. He converts her and baptizes her into the faith. She goes back. She tries to convert her son Sviatoslav, who says that he can't adopt a Christian religion because his entourage will laugh at him.

But you can see that she has replanted the seeds because we said in 860, the first time that the Rus ever appeared in Constantinople is this sort of unknown people, the sources say, that after that encounter, that the Byzantines sent out their evangelists to go convert them, right? The formula of cooking the barbarians, the same one that they were doing in the West. You know, the Frankish Empire was sending out their evangelists to go convert the heathen, right? St. Lebwin and all those guys.

This is the way, what do we call it in part one, the long-term anti-terror strategy here is turn these heathen pagan people who worship bloody warrior gods into, you know, fellow Christians. Now that doesn't mean you're not going to have problems with them. It just means that they're going to have societies more like your own. They're going to be more hierarchical. That's easier for you to deal with. You're going to incorporate them into what we would today call,

the family of respectable nations and then they also become subject to the kinds of military and economic pressures that one organized state can impose upon another one

There's another aspect of this that is sometimes overlooked unless you are a fan of the history of the Middle Ages in Europe because it's a huge problem over the course of the history of the Middle Ages in Europe, and that is who gets to decide who the bishops and archbishops are in all these areas. I mean, you'll see German emperors fighting with popes. You'll see English kings fighting with archbishops. I mean, it's a huge thing because all you have to realize, and we said this in the first episode

part of this discussion, which is what it means to have Christianity introduced into a pagan realm. It's a lot more than religion. It's a lot more than saving souls. It's things like an instant bureaucracy. Just add Jesus, I think, is the way we put it.

Well, if you think about it that way, try to imagine how that would work in the modern world. I mean, can you imagine the Chinese or the Russians being able to decide, for example, who the United States Secretary of State might be?

That's why so many of these rulers will try to create some sort of self-sufficiency over time so that they don't have a foreign power deciding who some of their most important officials are going to be. I mean, it's explained very well in German historian Christian Raffensperger's book Reimagining Europe, Keeven Russ in the Medieval World, when he says, quote,

It must be noted that the conversions discussed in this chapter are what are referred to as ecclesiastical conversions, which are, and he's quoting someone else now, quote, often the consequence of socio-political strategies, power, economics, intellectual or psychological issues, and other motives or expediencies that have, in fact, very little to do with religious feelings, end quote. Raffensperger continues, quote, and

and though conversion due to true religious feeling and religious motives can be found throughout medieval history including at the royal level it is the more geopolitical reasoning behind conversion that will be examined here

because of these social political and economic reasons behind medieval royal conversion historians for years have practically assumed that whoever christianized a kingdom gained tacit control over that kingdom that control was enforced by the appointment of bishops by the christianizing power

bishops who were loyal to those who appointed them rather than to those they ministered to this created a strong foreign power center in a kingdom that could potentially have strong political consequences for the orientation of the kingdom's foreign policy interests end quote

So while the Byzantine emperor might be thinking he's getting some, you know, extra value points that would help him get to heaven if he, you know, gets a lot of souls converted amongst the roasts for Jesus, there are some more real-world political things on his mind also.

And once Olga gives way to her son, Sviatoslav, a man the Byzantines refer to as Svendoslavos, all of a sudden every trick that the Byzantine emperor has, every tool in his toolbox has to be employed because Sviatoslav is a handful. He is a warrior.

He is one of these rulers that the minute he takes control, he starts attacking the people around him and turning the Rus into a major power in the region. It's interesting to watch Byzantine diplomacy at work because they will often use money and diplomatic agreements to try to play off potential troublemakers to their foreign policy against each other. And they try to use money

Sviatoslav this way too but it backfires when they get him to attack some of their other enemies and he defeats them and becomes stronger with every victory now the Byzantines have created their own kind of monster the Russian primary chronicle the tale of bygone years describes Sviatoslav this way when he takes over from his mom Olga remember he's the one that when Olga tries to tell him to become a Christian says if I do that my retinue will laugh at me

He's also, by the way, the physical living embodiment of the sort of linguistic and ethnic fusion that you're seeing amongst the Rus during this period, where they're not just Scandinavian and Slavic anymore. They're Balt, they're Steppe,

tribes and remember the steppe tribes are themselves a interesting mix of turkic and iranian finno-ungarian and asian so this is a you know blending of all sorts of different people and sviatoslav the first of these rulers with a slavic name when you see what he looks like he looks like

the physical part of that blending. And we know this because a guy who was probably an eyewitness to what he looked like, a guy named Leo the Deacon, describes this whole period. So we have something as a counterpoint to the Russian Primary Chronicle. And by the way, my history of Leo the Deacon is translated by Alice Mary Talbot and Dennis F. Sullivan. And they describe a figure here who looks like

He's something between a 12th century Russian and a 9th century Viking. The Russian Primary Chronicle describes him in a way that would fit very nicely for Attila the Hun. Also, one of these people who is a warrior in the field who doesn't need all these wonderful luxuries but sleeps with a blanket and a saddle for a pillow. The Russian Primary Chronicle says, quote,

When Prince Fyatoslav had grown up and matured, he began to collect a numerous and valiant army. Stepping light as a leopard, he undertook many campaigns. Upon his expeditions, he carried with him neither wagons nor kettles, and boiled no meat, but cut off small strips of horse flesh, game, or beef, and ate it after roasting it on the coals.

nor did he have a tent but he spread out a horse blanket under him and set his saddle under his head and all his retinue did likewise he sent messengers to the other lands announcing his intention to attack them end quote

And the Russian Primary Chronicle has this guy attacking a new opponent every year. He becomes the one who breaks the backs of the Khazars, which was probably a shock. If this was a sporting event, you would have favored the Khazars in any Las Vegas bets. And yet he destroys their power. Very soon afterwards, he starts destroying the power of the

Bulgarians. Some of this may have been done at the instigation of the Byzantines, but they didn't expect them to be so successful. They kind of created a geopolitical monster here, and then they have to deal with him.

All of these victories, we should point out, are done less for the expansion of one's borders than they are for, well, essentially doing what organized crime would do. Sviatoslav is going into other mob bosses' territory, like the Khazars and the Bulgarians, and taking over their racket.

going in and shifting the protection money paid to one group of overlords to the Rus and a lot of the Rus income during this time period and Olga was doing the same thing by the way before Sviatoslav is designed to have

the people that they protect or rule or strong arm pay them a portion of, you know, their living wages, right? They're the ones doing the farming. They're the ones doing the trapping. They're the ones doing the resource extraction and then providing it to the Rus. At a certain point, the Byzantines will essentially tell, uh,

Sviatoslav and the Rus, okay, you're taking over lands now that even though the Bulgarians were occupying them belong to us traditionally, so give them back. And Sviatoslav said, why don't you just get out of Europe? You don't even belong here and it's going to cost you a lot if you want me to leave this territory I just took. Leo the Deacon says when he took one of these Bulgarian towns, he impaled 20,000 people on a bunch of forked

forked polls whether that happened or not is debatable we talk a lot on this show about the actual physical challenges of things like this killing 20 000 people is about a mid-size american university's student population it's not easy although there are ingenious ways that have been

suggested over the years for this to be done. The Mongols, for example, are supposed to have made this something that was the responsibility of every individual soldier. So if you have 30 or 40,000 Mongol warriors and you say every one of you gets five captives and you have to execute those five captives, bring me the ears when you're done so I know you did it.

well, you could kill a lot of people pretty quickly, couldn't you? It's a pretty efficient way to destroy a ton of human lives, and Sviatoslav is supposed to have done that. Eventually, Sviatoslav and the Byzantine army will come to blows. And this account is recorded in Leo the Deacon's work, and he talks about this story.

arrogant barbarian getting very puffed up after beating the Bulgarians, a people the Byzantines call the Messians. And Leo the Deacon writes, quote,

Svendoslavos, Sviatoslav, was very puffed up by his victories over the Messians, and swaggered insolently with barbarian arrogance, for he already held the land securely. And since he had reduced the Messians to terror and stunned submission with his innate cruelty, for they say that when he took Philopolis by force, he cruelly and inhumanely affixed to a stake twenty thousand of the men captured in the town, and

thus terrifying all his enemies and making them come to terms, he delivered arrogant and insolent responses to the Roman envoys, that he would not renounce his claim to this fertile land except in return for the payment of vast sums of money and the ransom of the cities and prisoners that he had taken in warfare. If the Romans were not willing to pay this, then they should quickly withdraw from Europe, which did not belong to them, and move to Asia."

Leo the deacon says that the response from the Romans was essentially something like, remember what happened to your father when he tangled with us? Remember what those flamethrower ships did to him? Remember how he ended his days being torn in two by the Drevlians tying his limbs to trees and then letting them snap back?

Leo the deacon says that Svendoslavos Fyodoroslav was enraged by that answer. Quote, Svendoslavos became furious at this response and carried away by barbarian frenzy and rage, made the following reply.

i see no need for the emperor of the romans to come to us therefore let him not tire himself out by coming to this land for we will soon pitch our tents before the gates of byzantium will surround this city with a mighty palisade and will meet him bravely when he sallies forth if he should dare to undertake such a great struggle

we will teach him with very deeds that we are not mere manual laborers who live by the work of our hands but bloodthirsty warriors who fight our foes with weapons although the emperor believes in ignorance that russ soldiers are like pampered women and tries to frighten us with these threats as if we were suckling infants to be frightened by hobgoblins end quote

After that, clearly, it's on. There will be several fights between Sviatoslav and the Byzantines, and the Byzantines doing typical Byzantine things will offer a

enemies of the Rus incentives to attack them, which is how they created this big problem with Sviatoslav in the first place. They used him as a puppet to attack other enemies of theirs. Sometimes Byzantine diplomacy can backfire. Eventually, a meeting happens, and Leo the deacon may have been there. This may be an eyewitness account, but it's the best eyewitness-type account that we have since Ibn Fadlan described the

you know, tall as date palms, Rus that he personally saw in the 920s. And Leo the Deacon says that Sviatoslav says he wants to have a meeting with the emperor. The emperor with his gold-encrusted bodyguard shows up to meet this living embodiment of the fusion going on in the Rus people during this time period. And Leo the Deacon, as I said, very good chance he saw this firsthand, describes it and says, quote,

After the treaties were arranged, meaning treaties between the Rus and the Byzantines, Svendoslavos, Sviatoslav, asked to come and speak with the emperor, and the latter came without delay, the emperor, on horseback to the bank of the Istros river, clad in armor, ornamented with gold, accompanied by a vast squadron of armed horsemen adorned with gold.

"'Svendislavas arrived sailing along the river "'in a Scythian light boat, grasping an oar "'and rowing with his companions as if he were one of them. "'His appearance was as follows. "'He was of moderate height, neither taller than average "'nor particularly short. "'His eyebrows were thick. "'He had gray eyes and a snub nose.'

his beard was clean shaven but he let the hair grow abundantly on his upper lip where it was bushy and long and he shaved his head completely except for a lock of hair that hung down on one side as a mark of the nobility of his ancestry he was solid in the neck broad in the chest and very well articulated in the rest of his body

he had a rather angry and savage appearance on one ear was fastened a gold ear-ring adorned with two pearls and with a red gemstone between them his clothing was white no different from that of his companions except in cleanliness

after talking briefly with the emperor about their reconciliation he departed sitting on a helmsman's seat of the boat thus the war of the romans with the scythians he means the rus came to an end but forgiving and forgetting was not really the style of the time period on either side

The Byzantines almost certainly encouraged the pension eggs to ambush Sviatoslav and his men, which they did. What did we say? That the Byzantine sources had said that the pension eggs waited until the Rus had to take their boats overland to transfer from one river system to another. That's where they caught Sviatoslav. They killed him and a bunch of his men and

and the Pechenegs, in a very step-warrior sort of traditional thing, cut his head off, poured gold into the skull, and used it as a drinking cup, which I've always thought was a kind of an interesting thing. I mean, imagine being able to look into the face, the actual face of one of your enemies, as you drank your wine.

"'Do you talk to it? "'I mean, it's a little like the real version "'of Dan Aykroyd's crystal skull vodka, "'which comes in that wonderful glass skull-shaped bottle. "'But this isn't a reasonable facsimile "'of a skull-shaped container. "'This is the real deal.' "'And so Sviatoslav ends his days "'not a whole lot better than his father did.'

When you look at Leo the Deacon's description, physical description of Sviatoslav,

As we said, he seems like the physical embodiment of the fusion that's been going on now in the East between all the different peoples where the Scandinavians are just one of the groups that are coalescing into a new ethno-linguistic group. I mean, he doesn't sound like the Vikings in Ireland or England or the Frankish Empire when the description of his clothing and hairstyles and all that is put forward by Leo. No.

He sounds like a 16th or 17th century Eastern European Cossack, doesn't he?

Go look at an artist's rendering of those guys, or go watch a modern-day recreation of Cossack, you know, writing, and you'll see the people dressed in the traditional Cossack outfits with hairstyles and everything. That's almost a dead ringer for Leo the deacon's description of Sviatoslav. So right there you can see that he represents this blending of cultures and ethno-linguistic elements.

You can see that, by the way, also in the Treaty of 944 between the Byzantines and the Rus, the one that ended the war that involved the ships and the flamethrowers and all that that we talked about. Because as the treaty is being signed, the Rus have to swear to the various deities and religious leaders

elements that they hold dear. Some of the leading Rus are already swearing to the Christian gods. So you can see Christianity making inroads already. But the ones that swear to pagan deities aren't swearing to Thor and Odin. They're swearing to Slavic pagan deities, you know, rulers and gods like Perun and people like that.

Now, a case can be made that those Slavic pagan deities have counterparts. You know, Perun could be Thor in terms of the way one might view him.

But this entire series we've been doing is called Twilight of the Aesir, and the Aesir, of course, represents the pantheon of Germanic gods that dates way back in history, right? When the Romans first encountered Germanic peoples, they're worshiping those gods. And ever since then, it's been sort of a struggle to try to maintain that pagan belief system in the face of the overwhelming power of

and growing power of Christianity, right? Essentially a religion from the Near East that's continually expanding outward, pushing back the traditional pagan beliefs of a bunch of different peoples, the Germanic peoples just being one of those.

But what the 944 treaty shows is that already in the East by the middle 900s, the Isir, the Odins and the Thors and those gods may have already been supplanted by another pagan group of gods before they're all overwhelmed by Christianity.

It will be one of Sviatoslav's sons who will take the Rus into the long-term direction that Sviatoslav's sainted mother, Olga, wanted them to go. In his book, Northmen, the Viking Saga, Viking expert John Haywood puts it this way, quote, Sviatoslav's empire was ephemeral.

Soon after his death, civil war broke out between his teenage sons, Yaropolk, Oleg, and Vladimir. After Yaropolk killed Oleg, Vladimir fled to Sweden. In 980, Vladimir returned with an army of 6,000 Varangians and drove Yaropolk out of Kiev.

Vladimir lured his brother into a peace conference where two Varangians murdered him. Vladimir's reign, from 980 to 1015, was one of the most important in Russian history, marking the end of Kievan Rus as a Viking state. In his early years, Vladimir was a devotee of the thunder god Perun, the Slavic deity, but in 988 he made the momentous decision to convert to Orthodox Christianity.

End quote. The truth is, when you read the civil war between Vladimir and his two brothers, it sounds like a lot of Russian history. And Russian history is wild, weird, wonderful. I mean, if you've never taken a Russian history course, other than the names always reoccurring or variations of the names reoccurring, it will blow your mind. This sort of infighting and whatnot's not unusual at all.

when Vladimir ends up being the one who comes out on top in this sort of civil war between brothers or half-brothers. He ends up looking initially a lot like his dad, Sviatoslav. He's got tons of concubines, something like 800 is the amount normally given, multiple wives. He ends up sounding very much like a Viking warlord.

But over time, the publicity, shall we call it, in the historical sources gets somewhat more positive, which is what will happen if you convert to Christianity in some of the sources writing about you are Christian. Vladimir goes through a very famous and almost certainly legendary weighing of the various other religions that are out there.

supposedly has a bunch of the different peoples of the book send representatives to him so he can hear about all these different religions and how they believe and what they do. So supposedly Islamic representatives come to him and he says, tell me about your religion. And they tell him all the things about it, but point out he can't eat pork and he can't drink alcohol. And he has that wonderful line where he says that drink is the love of the Russes and that they can't exist without it. So Islam's out.

Jews come to the court and explain to him their view of their religion, and he asks them where their homeland is, and they say it's in Jerusalem, and he basically says, well, why aren't you there now? And they explain how they've been exiled and scattered all over the world. Well, this sounds to Vladimir like God must not be, you know, thinking too highly of you if he'll let you get scattered all over the world, so they're out. Then the

Latin Christian, you know, the Western European Christian representatives visit him and they look a little poor and like they're not that grand because he also gets representatives from the Byzantines. And of course, they look like, well, Rome.

And his representatives go to Byzantium, the legends say, and they see the amazing ostentatiousness of the churches and the rituals and all this stuff. And they come back and say something to the effect of, we couldn't tell whether we were on earth or in heaven anymore. So he's going to, the legends say, adopt Orthodox Christianity. But there's a more real world diplomatic side of this, too.

And that's that Byzantium falls into civil war during this time period and they need some help. And guess what? Vladimir and the Rus can provide it. Vladimir says he wants a Byzantine princess to marry. And that's a problem.

because they're not going to allow one of their princesses to marry a pagan. He'll have to convert to Christianity. He does. He gets a Byzantine princess. It cements the ties between Byzantium and the Rus, and then he sends help to one of the, you know, sides in this civil war, supposedly 6,000 Varangians. It sounds a little high.

But we're told that these Scandinavian Viking types that have been imported from Scandinavia as mercenaries goes down, fights amazingly for the Byzantine emperor, crushes his opponent. And from about this moment on, you're going to see a unit created that will fight in the rest of Byzantium's major wars until late in the 13th century. They're famous. They're called the Varangian Guard.

Vladimir, when he converts, by the way, will order his subjects to show up by the water or else he says, become my enemies so that they're all baptized. That's the sort of mass baptisms that were not uncommon when you convert a ruler and expect him to convert everyone he rules. The bottom line, though, is that in this story of

you know, the twilight of the eiser and the rearguard action of the Germanic deities against the creeping power of Christendom. If Vladimir hadn't already ditched Germanic paganism by worshiping these Slavic pagan gods, he does ditch it around 988.

And the story in the East from this moment on, from these Scandinavian, Slavic, steppe people, Finn, Baltic, Finno-Hungarian, Turk, Asian, Iranian, fusion of peoples, goes off on a permanent side tangent, never to return to Thor and Odin again. And from here, our story shifts back to the West.

Now, I've been enthralled with the way the newer breed of Viking historians treat the entire Viking world, for lack of a better term for it all. East, west, the places where the Vikings settled, all that kind of stuff.

because it explains and helps us to understand so much of what's going on better. Back when I was a kid and they treated things like the Scandinavians in what's now Ukraine or Russia as an entirely hermetically sealed different theater from Iceland and France and Ireland and Britain, certain questions kept arising.

When you start to realize as a Neil Price or a Kat Jarman or a Sigurdsson or any of those people keeps pointing out that the same people are traveling from one of these parts of the Viking world to the others, intermixing. So imagine, for example, a person born in Sweden in, say, 950 maybe.

and they travel down the river systems in Eastern Europe when they're a teenager to a place like modern-day Ukraine, maybe, and they stay a while. Then they go a little farther south to Byzantium and join the Varangian Guard for a decade. And these, by the way, I'm not making this up, this sort of thing happened all the time. And then they go back to the homeland after that. Think about all that they've experienced while they were gone.

First of all, the exposure to things like Christianity, to name only one thing. So then they go back to the home country and they're influencing people there.

Those people then may go to the West, or the same individual who'd been to Byzantium might then go to the West, to what's now France or Frisia, the coast of modern-day the Netherlands or Britain or Ireland. In other words, it's the very same people traveling from one part of the Viking world to another. It's a giant intermixing. It's like a Scandinavian cultural estuary where all of the influences in all the parts of the world the Vikings are touching intersect.

and they're one of the more well-traveled people in the Middle Ages, is intermixing and influencing Scandinavian affairs. When we last dealt with the West, we have to roll the chronology back a little bit from where we were with the Rus. We were in like the 910s, right? We were talking about, you know, Harold Fairhair, Harold Finehair, Harold Hairfair, being involved in the political consolidation, allegedly, legendarily, maybe, of Norway.

This is a trend that's going on in the entire Viking world. If you were taking a college course on this, they would, you know, for the test have, you know, three major themes that you had to pay attention to state building, political consolidation, and the conversion, especially of the Scandinavian elite to Christianity. Okay. That's all well and good.

But when a guy like Harold dies, like so many of these Scandinavian leaders involved in political unification, his sons will tear it all up and fight amongst themselves. There's a very bunny hop sort of rhythm to this state building in Scandinavia. You know, two steps forward, one step back.

But even if Harold Finehair did live, and even if Harold Finehair did what he was supposed to do, and even if Harold Finehair's kids screwed the pooch and screwed up the whole thing, it never goes back to the level of fragmentation that existed before the unifiers. So when the unification process gets started again, they don't have to start from ground zero, right? So you begin to see progress towards the creation of what

Norway will turn into and Denmark will turn into and Sweden will turn into by the time you get to the Middle Ages or the later Middle Ages.

We had last spoken about what was going on in Normandy, right? With Rallo, the Viking warlord who gets defeated by the West Frankian king. So he settles for being given control of the area that will become Normandy, which means land of the Northmen. And he's told to guard it against people like himself, right? What did we say if you gave a terrorist the territory they were operating in and said, you now owe your allegiance to me, but defend it from other terrorists like yourself? I think I said it was like,

putting one of the foxes in charge of the chicken coop security. Another historian I read said it was like promoting the lead poacher to the post of gamekeeper, but it kind of worked. The Normans are going to be a thorn in everybody's side, especially the King of France's side and a whole bunch of other problems, but basically they do what Charles the Simple of West Francia hoped they would and keep the area from being overrun with new Vikings.

And perhaps the most important aspect of this entire affair is that the people that are being granted these lands in what's now modern-day France, these pagan, heathen, Viking conquerors, are being forced to convert to Christianity as an element of the deal.

And even if a Viking pagan warlord like Rollo is providing more lip service than reality to his conversion, and that's debatable, his children aren't and his grandchildren aren't. They're going to be real Christians. And that undercuts the entire culture that led to the Scandinavian Viking pirate age to begin with.

And it should be pointed out that the very people who are doing the converting here, whether we're talking about the Franks in what's now modern-day France, or the Germans in Germany, or the Anglo-Saxons in England, all three of those people used to be the worshippers of the old Germanic pantheon of gods.

basically worshipping Odin, basically worshipping Thor. They might have had subtly different names for them. But now they're converting the people who still believe what they used to believe. And it's worth noticing, if you're a military history fan, as I know many of you are, that in this centuries-long religious war between Christians and Germanic pagans, only one side's really playing offense.

For centuries, really, since Rome, you've seen these evangelists go out to convert these Germanic peoples. That's how the Germans got converted. That's how the Franks got converted. That's how the Anglo-Saxons got converted. The other side's not playing offense at all. You don't see Scandinavian or Germanic evangelists going to Christian areas and converting Christians to the worship of Thor or Odin.

And so even if progress slows or even if people backslide, it's an inevitable slowly and sometimes not so slowly movement towards a specific outcome.

And when you're able to get people like Rollo to convert, when you're able to make deals with Viking warlords, and as part of the deal require that they convert to Christianity, you are creating a long-term solution to a long-term problem.

And let's recall, it's easy to say that by 910, 911, 912, the European world has been dealing with the Viking problem for 110, 120 years. But if you put it in terms relating to our own time, I mean, imagine we had a problem like that that had been going on since 1900 or 1910, right?

Well, even in a world that changed more slowly than our current world, one would expect us to have created countermeasures. One would expect that our long-term, you know, policies designed to change the circumstances would finally be bearing fruit. And the 900s is an example of that because they're going to be very different than the 800s, especially on the continent.

The different areas will have different circumstances, of course, in a place like modern-day Germany. It's going to be based on strong leadership, really. I mean, they're going to get, as we've mentioned earlier, several important kings, Henry the Fowler, Otto the Great, and they're going to have knights, mounted knights, which we spoke about earlier, which are very dangerous to the Vikings and

And most good Viking pirate raiders want nothing to do with mounted knights, not because they couldn't best them in a one-on-one encounter, but because it changes the odds of a pirate expedition. You're hoping for an easy score. You don't want a life-and-death struggle every time you go out there to try to take what you hope is a bunch of peasants' goods or a bunch of monasteries' relics.

And you will still see some Viking attacks in what's now Germany in the 900s. But oftentimes, on the way home after striking targets that weren't ready for them, the Viking raiders will find themselves encountering Germanic knights and often lose, and sometimes badly.

and it will be all that the rulers of the Scandinavians in Denmark, in Viking-era Denmark, can do sometimes to keep the Germanic people from turning the tables on them and invading Denmark from Germany.

The sorts of scenes that we saw in the 800s where Scandinavian raiders were stabling their horses almost incomprehensibly in the former royal palace at Aachen where Charlemagne ruled. You're not going to see that in the 900s.

in what's now modern-day France. The results are similar, but the method's a bit different. In northern France, you're going to see maybe the most famous example of feudalism, early medieval feudalism, anywhere.

You have to be careful with the term feudal because when I was a kid, that's my famous phrase, isn't it? When I was a kid, back in the old days, feudalism was considered to be mostly a early medieval thing. Now it's considered to be a sort of a political system and it's applied to all sorts of other systems. I mean, you'll hear the early Achaemenid Persians, the ones who fought the

the Greeks and the Greek and Persian Wars, the society that was overthrown by Alexander the Great. You'll often hear them described as a feudal society, but the poster child for that system was in northern France during this era, where it's not going to just be Rollo in Normandy, but a bunch of Frankish and later French counts and dukes and lords and barons who are all going to have their own little piece

of the king's territory. They're going to put up their own little castles. They're going to have their own little group of knights and retinue and all that sort of stuff, and it'll be their job to defend this territory, ostensibly for their ruler. But sometimes they'll fight amongst themselves. Sometimes they'll be rebellious against the king. That's what early medieval feudalism is known for also.

But they'll also have mounted knights with all of the same advantages that that gives the German mounted knights. And they'll also have castles, just like in Germany.

And the castles have a couple of different aspects. We talked about them in part one a little bit and early in this discussion. It's not just that you have a place where you have defenses so that if the Vikings show up on the horizon unexpectedly, there's a place that can defend the territory because there'll be a...

garrison of soldiers there as well. But I was reading something that brought up an aspect I hadn't thought about, which is that when the Viking sails appear over the horizon and you have a tiny little bit of warning that they're coming, if you're the peasants and the farmers living in that area that's about to be assaulted by these Viking pirates, you're

You grab any valuables you have, any livestock that you own, anything you want to keep, and you put it in a wagon and you cart it up to the walls of the castle and you go inside. So not only do the Viking pirates now have to deal with the garrison and walls and all that sort of stuff, but whatever they were coming to steal might now be behind the walls of that very protective bastion or

making the entire affair not just more dangerous for them if they want to try to take stuff, but maybe not even all that valuable, which leads us to the Viking Age in the 900s in Britain and Ireland. Britain and Ireland do not have mounted knights.

And I was reading a book by author Ian Howard called Slime, Forkbeards, Invasions, and the Danish Conquest of England. And he said, and I hadn't read it elsewhere, but I'm sure it's mentioned elsewhere, that that's a very specific reason that explains why Viking attacks shifted so strongly away from Germany and France, what will be Germany and France in this era in the 900s, and over to Ireland and Britain.

If you don't want to deal with heavily armed mounted knights, go to a place where they don't have that. And the English, for example, won't have mounted knights until after the Norman conquest in 1066. It's an army that is mostly infantry. Some would suggest all infantry. That's debatable. They do use horses, but they use them the same way the Vikings do, as mounted infantry, right? So you use them to get from place to place, but when you want to fight, you dismount.

And so in the early 900s, you see the story shifting more towards what's going on in Britain. But if you are a fan of the Vikings, you can't help but notice that not only are the fortunes of the Scandinavians being challenged in Germany and France, even without Mounted Knights, they're not having things their way in Ireland or Britain either.

Winston Churchill, we had quoted him earlier from his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. And he's so wonderful because he supposedly dictated all of the works that he wrote. And so they have a real sort of a oral feel about them. It sounds a little like a hardcore history conversation.

And when he talks about Britain, for example, during Alfred the Great, who died in 899, we spoke of Alfred, he almost sounds like he's narrating his own story from the darkest years of 1940 in the Second World War. But then the story after Alfred also parallels the story in the Second World War where Britain survives the darkest times and begins to crawl out of it and issue payback, the reconquest, if you will.

And Churchill writes, quote, "'Alfred,' meaning Alfred the Great, "'died in 899, but the struggle with the Vikings "'had yet to pass through strangely contrasted phases.'"

alfred's blood gave the english a series of great rulers and while his inspiration held victory did not quit the christian ranks in his son edward who was immediately acclaimed king the armies had already found a redoubtable leader end quote if you look at the

first fifty years of the nine hundred you see the equivalent of a british or english or anglo-saxons the more proper way to put it reconquest of territory that the vikings had taken from them during the eight hundreds but it's a bit of an ebb and flow sort of an affair

By and large, the Anglo-Saxons are winning. Think about a boxing match where they're getting the rounds handed to them by the judges' scorecards, but they're still taking damage. They're still getting punched. They're still getting knocked to the canvas from time to time. And that often happens when new reinforcements arrive from either Scandinavia or from the Vikings in Ireland. We turn the tide sometimes temporarily, but eventually the success

several rulers after Alfred the Great, and they're blessed with several good ones in a row. See, rulership matters. Look at the German kings we mentioned earlier. They will slowly grind things back towards a reconquest. Churchill talks about another battle that eventually the English gain the victory. The Danes are, just like Rollo and Normandy, required to convert to Christianity.

And then he talks about this treaty being broken and says, quote,

In 910, this treaty was broken by the Danes, and the war was renewed in Mercia. The main forces of Wessex and Kent had already been sent by Edward, who was with the fleet, to the aid of the Mercians, and in heavy fighting at Teton Hall in Staffordshire, the Danes were decisively defeated. End quote. Now, reminder, places like Wessex and Essex and Northumbria and...

East Anglia, these are all the places that had been separate independent kingdoms when the Viking Age started. And one of the reasons that Anglo-Saxon territory was so vulnerable to the Vikings was this fragmentation and why so many historians suggest that the Viking era helped create the modern-day Britain.

and created England out of Anglo-Saxon territories was because the Vikings swept away a lot of those independent territories, clearing the way for unification. But those places still maintained some semblance of a self-image and an independence. Places like Mercia, for example. Churchill continues, quote,

This English victory was a milestone in the long conflict. The Danish armies in Northumbria never recovered from the battle, and the Danish Midlands and East Anglia thus lay open to English conquest. Up to this point, Mercia and Wessex had been the defenders, often reduced to the most grievous straits. But now the tide had turned. Fear camped with the Danes."

There's a lot of reasons for this. One is that all of a sudden, the Danish settlers in Britain, who lived in the north and the east in this area we talked about earlier, the Danelaw, the land where the Danish laws predominated, they had settled. They had farms. They had families. And this made them vulnerable, right?

We had talked earlier about how much of an advantage it was to be a pirate raider from far over the seas, where you could hit your opponents, take their stuff, and then run away to a place where they couldn't get you. But if you settle right next to the people you're raiding, they can get you. And as Charles Oman, the military historian for more than 100 years ago, pointed out, by this time, if the Danes in...

Britain raided their neighbors, the English. The English hit them right back.

What's more, whereas once before when these raiding parties arrived in Britain, they were unified groups of people, the Danes in the British Isles during this period were composed of a bunch of different groups of people, not united, who could be picked off bit by bit. And during the early 900s, that's what happens. And it doesn't just happen with these male Anglo-Saxon kings,

uniquely enough and in an event that is sometimes called one of the most unique in all of early medieval history they also are subject to attacks by female military rulers this reconquest of territory from Danish settlers in the British Isles creates a different sort of dynamic than the Viking attacks from the 800s my encyclopedia of military history is

from Ernest and Trevor Dupuy, puts it this way, and it's a good way to look at it. It says, quote, During the 10th century, the Anglo-Saxon struggle with the Danes was no longer a matter of Viking raiders against local inhabitants, but rather a more or less constant war between southern and northern England. End quote. Southern England being the part occupied by the Anglo-Saxon rulers and people, the northern part not.

mostly by Danish settlers or people who had some affinity for the Scandinavians and often sided with new Vikings that showed up on the shores. They're sort of a fifth columnist group in Britain. And during the 900s, after Alfred the Great dies,

two of his children take the lead in starting to push back with the eye towards eventually eliminating entirely that group of fifth columnists. One of them is the king that Churchill mentioned, Edward, but the other is his sister, Aethelflaed. Now, Aethelflaed's an interesting lady.

Because if you watch the Hollywood movies, there's always this bending over backwards to include female characters where perhaps they didn't actually exist, or female warriors where perhaps the evidence for them is very scanty. But that means that when you actually encounter real historical figures that live up to all the hype, they deserve a little bit more attention, and Ethelfled is one of those people.

If you look at statues of her, she's often shown bearing a weapon. And if this were the Hollywood movie version of her, she would certainly be a swashbuckling Robin Hood-type character, cutting the heads off enemies, dressed in armor and performing all sorts of acrobatic military feats. But that's not the way we should probably see her. She is instead a somewhat...

you know, Anglo-Saxon version of a Napoleonic figure, maybe an inspiring leader of men, a tactician, a strategist. There is what some historians have referred to as a conspiracy of silence around her and

And our modern temptation would be to suggest that this conspiracy exists because she was a woman, and there may be some truth to that. But an actual better reason, something that is lost in sort of the years that have passed since then but would have been very apparent and a lot of historians pointed out, it might have more to do with the fact that she was known as the Lady of the Mercians.

The Mercians, as we just mentioned, Mercia is one of these places that used to be an independent kingdom before the Vikings swept all that away. The people that wrote the chronicles that have come down to us, like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, were working for the kings of Wessex. And the last thing that they wanted was to do anything that inspired what today we would call patriotism amongst these formerly...

you know, independent areas like Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia, or separatist tendencies. And a figure that a place like Mercia could rally around to sort of bolster their credentials as an independent kingdom is someone like Aethelflaed.

But along with her brother from about 911, the time that Rollo takes over in Normandy, when her husband dies, she takes over in Mercia. She and her brother start a two-pronged approach, retaking territory from the Danes in Anglo-Saxon England.

And they do it in an interesting way. We had mentioned that with her father, Alfred, that one of the things he did was to set up these fortified towns known as burrs, sometimes very rudimentarily fortified, it must be said, just a ditch around them sometimes or a palisade or an earthen wall, but it's enough to do the job. And what you do is you fortify these towns, you stash a garrison in them, so some defenders...

and all of a sudden you make life difficult for Viking raiders. Well, she and her brother start using these fortified towns in an offensive way. It's a little like taking a place and then fortifying what you just won in concrete, because once you...

dig the ditch around it, put up the palisade wall, put a garrison in there. It becomes very hard for anyone on the Danish side to retake it. And over a period of about a decade, they will fight battles, she and her brother, retake towns that used to be Anglo-Saxon towns, fortify them with the burr, and very soon...

you know, maybe by their standards. By our standards, their wars look like they take place in a very sort of slow-motion way. But she and her brother begin to reconquer the territory, and you will have this interesting sort of scene where...

where she will have all of these, again, Hollywood, I'll say that a million times because they've warped our view of these Scandinavians, but you will have this amazing scene where you will have these alpha male, hairy barbarian types pledging their submission to

to a woman, the Lady of the Mercians, Æthelflaed. And she'll kill a bunch of them, a bunch of Viking jarls and kings and lords in these battles. Not personally, but her armies will. And historian Cat Jarman points out that this is a huge rarity. There's only one other woman, and Cat Jarman mentions her during the early medieval period where you can see them commanding troops.

Kat Jarman talks about her and the other one who's related to Otto the Great of Germany, and she says, quote, If we look elsewhere in northern Europe, there are contemporary examples of women wielding military power, the best known being Aethelflaed, Lady of the Mercians, who

who was the daughter of Alfred the Great, possibly the only woman from Anglo-Saxon England known to have led military forces. Meanwhile, on the continent, another woman was in charge of a fight against Vikings too, Gerberga of Saxony, the sister of Otto I of Germany, organized the defense of Lyon in northern France in 945-946 when her husband, Louis IV, was captured. With both Aethelflaed and Gerberga...

have in common is that the independently led forces and attacks and organized defenses in a 10th century environment which is typically thought of as a time when only men could hold power in both cases these women owed their political position to a family connection but at the same time both are described as well educated intelligent

and possessing the ability to lead military strategy with the support of their contemporaries. End quote. Now, there are not a lot of sources, as we said, talking very much about Aethelflaed from the era. The Irish chronicles refer to her as an Anglo-Saxon, the renowned Anglo-Saxon queen, but she wasn't a queen.

But in the 12th century, the early English historian William of Malmesbury makes sure that we don't forget about Aethelflaed.

And by the way, he uses an interesting term when he describes her. He calls her a virago. And I had to look it up, and apparently the meaning of the term has changed over time. But in the era he was writing, it sort of means a great soul or a formidable person or maybe a woman who has tendencies you normally associate with a man, like a war leader. And William of Malmesbury writes, quote,

at the same time we must not overlook the king's sister ethelfled ethelred's widow who carried no small weight in party strife being popular with the citizens and a terror to the enemy she was a woman of great determination who after having difficulties with the birth of her first or rather her only child

abhorred her husband's embraces ever after declaring that it was beneath the dignity of a king's daughter to involve herself in pleasures which would be followed in time by such ill effects he's talking about childbirth by the way

Remember, that could easily be fatal in this period. And he also praises her as a builder of cities. But rather than a builder of cities, what he's really talking about is a fortifier of cities, as we said, taking these cities and then creating these fortified towns out of them. So he continues, quote,

she was a virago a very powerful influence and help in her brother's policy and no less effective as a builder of cities it would be hard to say whether it was luck or character that made a woman such a tower of strength for the men of her own side and such a terror to the rest end quote ethelfled dies in 918 a.d.c.e.

And her brother will continue what's been going on, the reconquest of the Dane law until he dies about six years later. Their successor, a guy named Athelstan, will continue it even more. He'll include, you know, fighting the Scots and the Welsh. I mean, this is all part of carving out England. And Athelstan will be by many considered the first truly English king, if not him, then his successor.

This is all important stuff for British history, obviously, but also for the history of peoples who can trace their at least political DNA back to England. And that's anyone who was a part of the British Empire. You think of the Canadians, the Americans, the Australians, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, this is all part of their history, which has often made me think,

that this is partly why the Vikings have such a prominent place in the past. I mean, why do we pay more attention to them than the Visigoths, as we said, or the Ostrogoths, you know, or the Lombards or any of these other Germanic barbarian peoples? Well, because they play a huge role in the creation of places like England. And England, well, has a political strand of DNA that goes through a lot of modern-day countries.

The interesting thing, though, is that what's going on in places like England during this era is not hugely important in 99% of the respects to life in Scandinavia, to the average pig farmer, as Neil Price, historian who wrote The Children of Ash and Elm, puts it. I mean, the average pig farmer in Scandinavia isn't concerned a whit with these colonial possessions or these settlements or these

diasporas going on in the edges of the Viking world right there in the lands that encompass modern-day Denmark Norway or Sweden just living their lives right believing the old ways the old gods and all these kinds of things but as we said there is cultural transmission going on through all these areas and

And if you are, let's just say, a very conservative, traditionalist living in Scandinavia, standard pig farmer who believes in the old ways, the old gods, the traditional culture of your ancestors, all of a sudden you can't help but notice by the middle 900s that there's a whole lot of new stuff infecting your community.

I love the term and I use it all the time, and I'm sorry if I overuse the same terms, but it's just so wonderful. Intellectual contagion. Seeing ideas and beliefs the same way one would see a pathogen that can spread like a disease.

Well, it's hard not to notice that at the exact same time you see Olga in the eastern Scandinavian areas of the Rus, really beginning to explore Christianity in that neck of the woods, you see the same thing happening on the opposite side of the Viking world in places like England. More and more of these people

warlords converting as parts of arrangements and deals and treaties and settlements, more and more Scandinavians living away from the home countries in places like the Danelaw converting due to exposure to Christianity.

If you actually zoom out and look at how long evangelists have been traveling to Scandinavia, trying to convert the people there, by the time you reach the middle 900s, it's been like 240, 250 years, right? As far back from where we are today as the American Revolution. Now,

It's hard to say how much fruit that has borne by this time period, but when you add all the conversions in the far-flung territories to the few people who maybe these evangelists have converted, to the few rebel rulers like Harold Clack that we mentioned from the 820s, 830s, who converted and then converted some of his followers, to all the slaves that the Vikings took who

who were Christian, who couldn't help but share their intellectual pathogens with their slave masters and whatnot, it's not hard to see that you're going to have pockets of Christianity beginning to pop up in Scandinavia also. Denmark may be more than Norway. Norway may be more than Sweden. But it's a thing. And then you look at the political pressure there.

You know, we had talked about how in the 900s, the German-Danish relationship flips from what it was in the 800s. And all of a sudden, the Germans are very dangerous to the Danes. And one of the things that the Danes kind of do to maybe lessen the danger of Germanic attacks on them is treat Christianity a little bit more positively. All these things together are beginning to sort of reach a critical mass by the middle 900s.

Now, we should point out that there's something that's often overlooked when we talk about religion, and that's that even when nations or rulers decide that they're going to change their faith overnight, that's not how people really behave, right? People don't change the gods that they believe in, the religious practices that they take part in, the ancestors' faith and traditional beliefs.

narratives that they grew up with, those things don't change overnight. So anytime we talk about a huge, relatively quick change in a religious belief, let's not pretend that that means the people on the ground have all of a sudden shifted their faith 180 degrees. But it should also be mentioned that the traditional faith of the Scandinavians is not some orthodox, by-the-book kind of belief system. In fact,

It's fair to say, and this is a little surprising, that experts aren't really all that sure what it was.

And partly the reason this is strange is because there's a neo-paganist movement today that is trying to sort of resurrect a lot of these ideas and reestablish worship of, you know, the ancient Norse gods, for example. But who these ancient Norse gods and how they were worshipped and what this all meant to the practitioners of this faith is

It's up in the air. There's a wonderful history book written by a Scandinavian historian called The Wolf Age, The Vikings, The Anglo-Saxons, and The Battle for the North Sea Empire. And I hope I don't murder this guy's name. I looked it up. Tora Shaya is, I think, close to the pronunciation. And he says what all these other histories that I've been reading say. And it's a little bit shocking when you think about how much we pretend we know about the Nordic religious beliefs. And he says, quote,

Like all Germanic religions, pre-Christian Nordic worship centered around war, fertility, and the making of sacrifices to powerful spirits, along with an entire pantheon of gods. Above all, it was Odin, Thor, and Freyr who were worshipped across Scandinavia.

The people who practiced the ancient religion left behind no proclamation, no tablet inscribed with commandments, no religious book. The depictions of their faith and rituals were written down by Christian and Muslim observers who regarded them as lost souls in need of saving or as frightening and exotic barbarians.

the lavish and intricate universe of gods and monsters born of fire and frost in the resounding deaths of Ganunganap

which goes up in flames in the war inferno of ragnarok has primarily been handed down to us through the eddas poems that were first written down in the twelve hundreds in the anonymous poetic edda and in snorri stirlesson's edda his tribute to skaldic poetry and inherited knowledge of the ancient forefathers mythological narratives

And despite both works, he says, strikingly detailed accounts, both Snorri and the author of the poetic Edda viewed their ancestors' stories from a great distance, from their own thoroughly Christianized age, with a stranger's wonderment and fascination, just as we do today, end quote. In addition to that, the Christian evangelist

framings of Christianity are often done in a extremely clever fashion. And this is something we discussed at length in Thor's Angels when we were talking about how early Christian evangelists tailored the traditional Christian beliefs to mesh the views of a bunch of Germanic warriors like Franks and Lombards and Visigoths and all those people who might not be all that

positively disposed to a prince of peace from a Middle Eastern based religion when they came from dark deep forests filled with spirits you know who were involved in human sacrifice of captive war prisoners maybe you have to you know modify the message a bit for the audience and historian Neil Price and the children of Ash and Elm says that's exactly what these same evangelists centuries later did for the Scandinavian audience that they were trying to

to interest, shall we say, in this religion? And he writes, quote,

There is a remarkable glimpse of how this worked in practice through a document known as Heliand, the Savior. Written in Old Saxon during the first half of the 9th century, it is a paraphrase of the gospel for a Germanic audience, tweaked for their sensibilities, and pitched almost as a Norse saga, though with biblical heroes. Thus we read of Jesus' birth in Galilee land,

his later travels to jerusalemberg and how the lord lives in a great hall in the sky clearly valhalla the lord's prayer he writes is in quote end quote secret runes peter is given commands over the gates of hell or heal with one l and so on

satan's temptation of christ he writes takes place in a northern wilderness filled with vague forces powerful beings that seem to live among the trees and one wonders what this implies of the traditional northern beliefs that were once known by the christian clerics

He continues, and think about how this tweaks the traditional religion of peace for a warrior people. By the same token, Jesus' disciples were warrior companions, framed in the language of a warlord's retinue, and the Last Supper is the final mead hall feast. He

Even God, he writes, is called by the Odinic epithets such as victory chieftain and all ruler. This is the kind of message that was taken into Scandinavia by the first missionaries, a doctrine meshed with the ancestral stories of the north and following a model found in many other conversion histories, end quote.

As we said, the conversion histories of the Germanic people to the south of the Scandinavians who converted before they did. It's interesting to note that this tool of blending this new religion that evangelists and Christian states are trying to spread to the far north isn't just used by those evangelists. It may have been used by

by the rulers of the far north as a way to make this transition between the old belief system and a new belief system more palatable or more seamless.

Take, for example, the famous yelling stones put up by one of the first Scandinavian rulers that you really have clear evidence for. And how weird is that? This far into the so-called Viking Age, and you're just now getting to the point where

where you get the Scandinavian side of this story, stuff from the indigenous peoples themselves as opposed to the people who wrote about them, who hated, feared, reviled, and looked down on them, the literary peoples of Britain or the continent or Byzantium.

King Harold Bluetooth, and yes, that's what the term Bluetooth was named after, arises in the mid-900s. There are all sorts of theories as to why he was called Bluetooth, including potentially having a blue or black rotted tooth.

But I've also read that he may be one of those Scandinavians who have the horizontal grooves cut into his teeth and then dyed. So lots of reasons one might be called Bluetooth. But Harold is famous, and he writes down in stone, carved into this heavy stone,

well, it would have been seen at the time as a near permanent monument, why he should be thought of as famous and why he should be remembered. The yelling stone, which is actually pictured, the artwork is pictured on the Danish passports to this day, carried by Danish citizens, says, quote,

King Harald ordered this monument made in memory of Gorm, his father, and in memory of Tira, his mother, that Harald, who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway, and made the Danes Christian. End quote. That's quite a claim to fame, and it is actually arguable, but I mean, he's the one that put up the monument that survived, so...

He got first crack at how he was going to be remembered. But Harold Bluetooth is one of the most famous Scandinavian rulers and not just because he supposedly brought Christianity to Denmark, but because he is, as we said, one of the first really well-known, attested to Scandinavian kings, right? This isn't a legendary ruler. This is a real guy.

On this yelling stone is a piece of artwork which used to be painted and now is weathered to stone color, although there are recreations of what it looked like painted. And on the yelling stone, you can see a figure of Christ being crucified. But the way that the figure is shown makes it look arguably quite a bit like Odin, the

being hung in the tree that he hung himself in so that he could gain wisdom. And so you have a potential meshing of the old tradition with the new and maybe Christ being portrayed as a kind of Odin-like figure. It's arguable. Experts debate it and people who know a lot more than I do about it go back and forth.

But you can see how fascinating it is to see the early Scandinavian Christian artwork infused with some of the old flavor of the pre-Christian times. And this is not unusual. You see it in many societies. Go to Ireland and look at the way the Celtic forms are overlaid with later Christian forms.

So it's normal for there to be regional variations on this stuff, and maybe some of that is intended to

you know, as we said, make it easier for the locals to sort of latch on to a new religion and connect it to the old. I find it interesting also that the way this is sometimes portrayed, the conversion process, is that the people in Scandinavia are shown sometimes as having no problem believing that

in the Christian God at all. Their issue sometimes is not quite understanding the exclusivity of monotheism, the idea that you can't just believe in Christ and all those gods you used to believe in, right? When you come from a religion that believes in a lot of gods, it seems like you should just be able to add another one, but it doesn't work that way with monotheism, does it? There's a wonderful...

account maybe is a good way to put it by a near contemporary named Vidukund who wrote a famous book translated into the English it's called Deeds of the Saxons and in it he describes supposedly how Harold Bluetooth is converted and

And if you know about the history of the Middle Ages in Europe, you know that there's all these different things that they used to do to sort of give God a chance to weigh in on things, right? So you'd have things like trial by combat, where two people who disagreed about something could be sentenced to fight it out, and the winner was perceived to be the one God loved.

favored in other words the one telling the truth will win the trial by combat therefore god has weighed in uh and shown people it's like a giant pro-christian ouija board type thing and by the way i'm using the bernard s buckrock and david s buckrock translation of the work and in deeds of the saxons viducan portrays the conversion of harold bluetooth the same way

Harold Bluetooth gives God a chance to weigh in on whether or not he's the real God, and Viducun tells the story thusly, written in the 900s, and says, quote, In times past, the Danes were Christians, but nevertheless continued to worship idols in their traditional manner. But then there was a dispute in the presence of the king during a feast regarding the worshiping of their gods.

The Danes affirmed that Christ was a god, but they claimed that there were other gods, greater gods, who manifested themselves to people through even more powerful signs and prodigies.

Against this, a certain cleric named Poppo, who is now a bishop and leads a religious life, proclaimed that there is one true God, the Father, along with his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. The images, meaning the images of the Norse gods, he proclaimed, were of demons and not gods.

king harold who it was said was quick to listen but slow to speak asked if papo wished to demonstrate his faith through his own person papo responded without hesitation that he wished to do so the king then ordered that the priest be placed under guard until the next day when morning came the king ordered that a very heavy piece of iron be heated in the fire

He then ordered the cleric to carry this glowing iron for his Catholic faith.

The confessor of Christ seized the iron without any fear at all, and carried it as far as the king had ordered. The priest then showed everyone his unharmed hand, and gave proof to everyone there of his Catholic faith. As a result, the king became a Christian and decreed that God alone was to be worshipped. He ordered all his subjects to reject idols, and gave all due honor to the priests and servants of God.

by these events also he writes are to be ascribed to the virtues and merit of your father by whose efforts the churches and order of priests shined forth in these regions it's interesting to note that if you zoom out

and you look at the history of Scandinavia from about 950 to about 1010 or 1020, really a single person's lifetime, they go from basically being

pagan countries to basically being Christian countries. It is shocking the speed at which this occurs, and it wouldn't have happened if the rulers themselves didn't convert and then proclaim that everyone else had to convert too. That's what the yelling stone talks about. Made the Danes Christian. Didn't ask them to become Christian, didn't encourage them to become Christian, made them Christian. But as

Viking historian from the University of Nottingham, Judith Jentsch, points out there is a difference between conversion, which can be done overnight by decree, and Christianization, which can take centuries. Judith Jentsch makes another distinction that's very interesting, a distinction between religion and myth.

and where one ends and the other begins. I mean, for example, if a people like the Scandinavians convert to Christianity, does that mean they can't believe in things like dwarves and elves and trolls anymore? Can they still believe in the female spirit that supposedly inhabits all of us? I mean, how much of the old folklore do they give up also?

Another thing worth pointing out is that even if the rulers and the rulers retinues and the people that are vassals to the rulers convert to Christianity. So as we said, by about the ten hundreds, mid ten hundreds, certainly officially those kinds of people have in all the Scandinavian countries doesn't mean there still aren't temples and out of the way places for

still having the old blood sacrifices. They're going to have those in the out-of-the-way territories of Sweden into the 1100s. So it's a process.

In addition, it's not necessarily being treated the same way that, for example, Charlemagne treated conversion 150 years before this time period, where if you recall, as we said in part one of this story, he was cutting the heads off Saxons who had the audacity to eat during a fast day. I mean, it was draconian.

When Iceland converts by democratic decision, by the way, in ten hundred, they agree to keep some of the heathen practices going for a while and sort of let them wither on the vine rather than get rid of them overnight. For example, they decree that you can still have the practice of infanticide, right? Exposing unwanted children continue. Just do it in private.

right? They also say you can continue to eat horse flesh. Just do it in private. Let that die out. I didn't even know, shows you what I know, I didn't even know that eating horse flesh was against the Christian religion at this time period, but it was a big deal. And you can see it was a big deal when you look at how Norway gets into the conversion process during this same time period. Now, let's zoom out for a minute and realize that one of the things we get

from being able to finally see some history in Scandinavia that you can sort of

rely upon during Harold Bluetooth's time is that you get a window into what it must have been like before history sort of pulls the veil off what's going on. Archaeology has always hinted at this, so have the old sagas and whatnot, but the fighting amongst peoples within Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, and between Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, and we should also include Finland in this to some degree, has been going on from time immemorial probably.

And when the Harold Bluetooth era sort of, you know, shines the light on what's going on in Scandinavia, we see it still going on. So when the yelling stone says that Harold, you know, unites Denmark and Norway, well, you might ask yourself, what the heck is Harold doing in Norway, right? What does he have to do with Norway? Now, we should say, and we have already, but let's remind ourselves that the borders of the modern Scandinavian countries are not the borders back in this time. Denmark, in air quotes, controls Norway.

parts of southern Sweden. They have the rulers of parts of Norway, which is not a unified country, as vassals. So it's hard to get your mind around what's more.

We had talked about the great legendary leader, Harold Finehair, Harold Fairhair, Harold Hairfair, who supposedly, legendarily, united Norway. Well, when he dies, as we said, his kids begin to tear things apart and fight each other. I mean, I'm looking at you, Eric Bloodaxe, one of the most vicious Vikings of all time, supposedly. They're killing each other. They're setting their mead halls on fire and burning them and their retinues up. I mean, it's horrible stuff.

But there's one of Harold Fairhair's kids who is safely ensconced away from all this violence. He's in England. And I say allegedly because once again, we have to rely on the sagas for this to a degree. So hard to parse how much of this is real and how much of it isn't. But there's one of Harold Finehair's sons in the court of Athelstan, king of, well, let's call it England at this time period.

in his,

book on the sagas, the Heimskringle, Snorri Sturluson has the story of this guy. And I must say right off the bat, it's wonderfully refreshing that he doesn't have the same name as everyone else, because by the time we get to where we are in this story, you must feel like I do that the Norse needed a bigger book of potential baby names to choose from because there's far too many Harold's and Eric's and Olaf's and it becomes very confusing. So whenever you run into a Hrolf

or an Ivar or anything like that, it's a pleasant surprise. In this case, the son of Harold Finehair, who is in England during this time period's name, is Hakon. H-A-A-K-O-N is the way it's usually written. And if you believe Snorri Sturluson's sagas, he is the foster son of Æthelstan because Æthelstan was tricked into accepting him.

but that doesn't mean he wasn't happy with the result. Snorri Sturluson's comments on the young life of Hakon, who will eventually be known as Hakon the Good, say this, quote, "'King Eflstan had Hakon christened and taught him the right faith and good habits and all kind of learning and manners.'

He loved him much, more than he did his own kin, and so did everyone who knew the boy. He was afterwards called Athelstan's foster son. He was the greatest in sports, bigger and stronger and more handsome than any other. He was wise, of fair speech, and a good Christian. King Athelstan gave Hakon a sword, of which the hilt and grip were of gold, but the blade was even better, and with it

Hakon cleaved a millstone to the eye, and it was afterwards called the Kvernbit, or millstone biter. It was the best sword that ever came to Norway. Hakon had it till his death day." There are a couple of things that pop into my mind when I read that. The first is that Kvernbit is like

sort of a Norwegian version of Excalibur in my mind. And I'm fascinated by how swords acquire these sorts of lineages or almost like magic qualities. By the way, if you don't know what a millstone is, it's like a wagon wheel size stone used to grind grain. And it's basically when he says it cleaves it to the eye, this is a guy who then took a sword and cut a piece of stone the size of maybe a wagon wheel to the midsection.

current bit very interesting right it is interesting to me too that swords can acquire this sort of soul if you will or personality in a way that things like firearms never quite did and it's not a scandinavian thing look at the way the japanese for example do the same thing with their swords right hand them down from generation to generation have ancient lineages and all i can figure is

Because of the speed at which technology changes in the firearms era, you wouldn't want an ancient gun, right? You wouldn't want to try to fight your enemies with a, you know, musket from the Daniel Boone era in the 1950s or the 1960s, right? Using an M16 instead, whereas good old Kern bit would have been useful 200, 300 years after the time period where, um,

you know, Athelstan gave it to him, just like it would have been useful 200 or 300 years before that period.

The other thing that comes to mind, and when you read Snorri Sturluson and you get any of his works that have illustrations in it, you can't help but notice it. It's the extreme contrast between those illustrations and the Hollywood trope of the Vikings. Now, I had to look up when the illustrations were penned, but they were penned in 1899, right? So very modern, but not quite, you know, Hollywood modern, right?

And they portray all of these figures as far less barbaric than the way the Hollywood trope has us see them, right? There's fire-breathing berserkers, you know, who look like they belong in a heavy metal rock concert. I mean, there's a whole bunch of tropes involved in the Hollywood view of these things that make the Vikings seem almost like you couldn't live next to them. And the monks didn't help, right? The monks always portray these heathen pagan types as, you know,

one step above animals sometimes, but the snorriest, earless illustrations make them look very much like, say, the English in Ethelstan's court might have looked.

In other words, normal people, clean, well-dressed, when they're not going to war in their armor and stuff, they wear nice clothes, they look like, you know, typical early Middle Ages type people, right? Respectable types. And in fact, if Athelstan can raise Hakan, Harold Finehair's son, in his court as a Christian, basically being indistinguishable from an English Anglo-Saxon person, and then send him back to Norway...

well, he's got to be enough like those people if they're to accept him as a king. Doesn't he have to be that way? Because that's what Æthelstan does. Because after Harald Finehair dies and his kids start going to war with each other, basically, and tearing things apart, Erik Bloodaxe supposedly takes control for a couple of years, but so angers everybody that he causes problems and they want a new king. And well, lo and behold, there's one sort of exiled in England, just ready to return the return of the

king at the right time. Athelstan supposedly gives him boats and followers and monks and sends Hakon over to the land of his birth that he did not grow up in so that he can become the king there. And oh yeah, when he arrives, he's a Christian. Now, Hakon the good and

Herald Bluetooth are contemporaries, basically, and in fact, they're going to fight each other. So what you see is all of this Christianity coming to Norway and Denmark, especially, all in a very short period of time and all in a very strong way, right, amongst rulers.

But whereas Harold Bluetooth is so powerful and so scary and has the support of so many nobles that he can sort of enforce his will when it comes to Christianity, Hakon has a harder time. And this is where you can see that you have to kind of be careful how you impose a new religion on people, not necessarily because they are opposed to changing their beliefs if they believe in the new god, but they're worried about pissing off the old gods.

This is the part we often forget. What happens if you believe that the gods control things like the harvest and the health of your family members and everything like that? And then things go bad with that, right? If you have a bad harvest all of a sudden and you just threw out the old gods and your king is trying to push in a new god, well, what do you think that might be from? In other words, these have...

to people. What did we say earlier when we were talking about if magic is real, or if you think magic is real, if the Tinkerbell effect is real? Well, if you think that gods control things like the harvest and a new god is brought in and all of a sudden you have a lot of bad harvests, what then?

I love the way Gwyn Jones in his famous late 1960s work, A History of the Vikings, sort of portrays this time period not as a struggle between Scandinavians who want to be Christians and Scandinavians who want to be pagans, but against the Christian God and the Norse pantheon themselves.

And at one point, he's talking about how in order to forestall the Christian conversion in a place like Norway, the ICER, the Norse Pantheon, has tools to fight back. And Jones writes, quote,

men could do little except grumble and hope for a change but the isaiah defended themselves with bad harvests bad fishing bad weather the snow lay through midsummer and cows stayed in stall as north among the laps which may be a poetic way of saying that the all-important farmer class felt itself pinched and alienated and quote

This is the other problem. Trying to disentangle Christian conversion from an actual belief level, from the power politics of the day and everything else going on is very difficult.

And in fact, when you read the sagas, you can see how often the kings here, whether it's Harold Bluetooth or others, will see people's reticence to convert to Christianity as a personal attack on their authority, right? Because partly they're converting to Christianity because it enhances their authority, right? The Christian hierarchy, the power hierarchy has them at the

you know, tip of the pyramid. And if people don't want to convert to Christianity, maybe it's because they want to, you know, keep their petty king or petty chieftain power for themselves. So all of these things weave into a kind of a tangled rope, and it's tough to disentangle true belief from geopolitical realities, from power politics and all this other stuff. There's a real transactional nature to a lot of the

ancient and medieval beliefs with gods that you don't see as much anymore. I mean, of course, you still do, but not like in the days when you almost have people sort of weighing the different deities against each other and basically saying, you know, what have you done for me lately? Right. This is a this is a question of, you know, who's been on my side most recently. I mean, take, for example, the famous story of how Constantine,

the Roman emperor converts to Christianity, it's a very sort of a transactional deal. He's about to fight a battle in a civil war and he has a dream. This is the legend. He has a dream where it says, if you paint your shields with the Christian symbol, you will triumph tomorrow.

So he gets up from the dream, he has all his soldiers paint the Cairo on their shields, which was the symbol before the cross became so viewed as the symbol of Christianity. And of course, lo and behold, he wins the battle. Boom. So he's going to become a Christian. Christianity is going to start to become an established religion in Rome. And if that dream really happened, think about what an effect on future history that had.

But there's a lot of this in this world, too, where it's all about, you know, what God has done something for me lately. And when a guy like Harold Bluetooth watches a guy like Poppo supposedly lift a glowing iron piece of metal and carry it around and not have blisters, that's

He's not converting to Christianity so he can get into heaven. He's converting to Christianity because who wants to not have the God on their side, right? Do you really want to be going into battle and trying to conquer things and have God mad at you? I love the way the Mongols supposedly handled all this. We talked about it in the Mongol show where they left all of the religions of the people they conquered intact and

but supposedly just required them to pray for the Khan's health, figuring that they were hedging their bets, right? They didn't know which religion was true and which God was real. But if everybody was praying for the Khan's health, then the real God was getting the message somehow. But you will even see after this period that

attempts to almost woo the Scandinavians who convert to Christianity back to the old ways. And it's all transactional, right? Come back and believe in me and I'll save you from this problem or come back and believe in me and I'll help you out with this thing you're having to deal with. I mean, it's very, like we said, transactional. They're not thinking about getting into heaven when they die as much as they're thinking about who can help me the most while I'm alive.

University of Oslo historian John Vidar Sigurdsson in his book Scandinavia in the Age of the Vikings points out that this transactional attitude applies when it comes to Scandinavian nobles and kings to other kings and other chieftains. So why not to the gods? They have unstable relationships with all of these entities, he says. And then he says, quote,

to their way of thinking if another more powerful god existed who could offer better protection and help than the norse gods had failed and it was therefore necessary to change sides and begin worshiping the new god in this case the christian god end quote

Now, it's possible that this was a foreign concept to a guy like Hacon the Good, right? Viewing religion in a transactional sense, because after all, Hacon the Good was, as far as Norway was concerned, foreign himself, right? Allegedly raised in England. Allegedly the foster son of the King of England. So he may have viewed religion in a much more Anglo-Saxon or English way than the way a Viking Scandinavian might have viewed it.

When he returns to rule Norway, he lacks the traditional alliances with power, the nexus of authority, the personal partnerships and relationships your average Scandinavian would have developed over a lifetime that allows them to rule effectively. So he's like an American president who's from one political party that has to somehow rule with a Congress dominated by the other political party.

Right. So he's from the Christian political party. His Congress are a bunch of Odin worshipers and he'll have to make religious concessions during his reign. So there might be some compromises with paganism or if you believe some of the sources, maybe even a full blown relapse into paganism. But he's doing something right because heck on the good is going to rule in Norway for almost 30 years, which is an amazing feat.

He will win a bunch of battles during this time. The last one that he will fight will be in either 960 or 961. It's called the Battle of Fitjar, and it will be against his own nephews or probably half-nephews.

Of course, this is not unusual, right? When you are involved in kingship and blue blood matters, the only people that have blue blood are likely to be related to you. And that's why when you watch the Carolingians descend into fratricidal madness, it's always brother against brother or uncle against nephew. And it's the same in the Scandinavian royal situation.

The battle of Fitjar between Hack on the Good and his half-nephews ends with Hack on the Good winning the battle but losing the war. And he will be famously...

hit by an arrow in either the arm or the shoulder and medicine being what it is in the early middle ages this is often a mortal wound and in hackon's case it is and it kills him he bleeds out and the people that take over from him are these half-nephews now a little on their background just because it's not confusing enough yet they are allegedly the sons of eric bloodaxe

Eric Bloodaxe is allegedly the son of our friend Harold Fairhair, Harold Finehair, Harold Hairfare, Lufa, Mophead, whatever you want to call him, who is quickly becoming the equivalent of the Fountainhead of blue-bloodedness in Norwegian royal history. So if you want to rule Norway, you kind of have to tie yourself to him.

Just to confuse everyone one more degree, they're also the full nephews, apparently, of our friend in Denmark, Harald Bluetooth. So all these people are related. The guy who gets the lion's share of Norway after winning the Battle of Fitjar, or really losing the Battle of Fitjar but killing Hack on the Good, is also named Harald. His name is Harald Greycloak. And Harald Greycloak is...

Well, he's notable because he's going to take the conversion process in a little bit of a different direction than hack on the good. He's not going to settle for sort of a compromise with paganism. He's going to try to dominate the pagans and take an almost Charlemagnian armed evangelistic approach to converting the heathen. He's going to do so at the point of a sword. You're going to convert or you're going to die.

During his reign, he will kill a bunch of minor chieftains and absorb their territories. He will have a falling out with his uncle, Harold Bluetooth, and in 970, Harold Bluetooth somehow lures Harold Greycloak to Denmark and has him whacked.

He's either killed by Harold Bluetooth himself, he's either killed by an assassin of Harold Bluetooth, or he's killed by an ally of Harold Bluetooth. But Harold Bluetooth will then put a compliant Jarl on the throne that had been formerly occupied by the guy he just whacked, and he will rule through him, which probably accounts for how Harold Bluetooth can say on the Yelling Stone that he ruled Denmark and Norway, even if it's a bit of an exaggeration.

Hopefully, Harold Bluetooth is enjoying his time on the throne because the next generation that is by 970 toddling around on the longhouse floor is going to be the ones that take him out and a bunch of other people too. It's an amazing generation of Scandinavian leaders, one of whom will be called the most spectacular Viking of his age by historian Gwen Jones, another who will be the guy who topples Harold Bluetooth. That'll be his own son.

A guy named Svein, Sven, Svein, take your pick, Forkbeard. And the other one, the most spectacular Viking of his age, is a guy known as Olaf Tryggvason. This is all part of, let's call it the class of 960s, the people born in the 960s, who by the 970s are starting to grow up and by the 980s are making their presence known.

Olaf is famous for his youth. He's running for his life before he can even probably speak. His mother moving him around in various places to keep him alive. He gets sold into slavery. He ends up fighting in the retinue of, you know, King or Prince Vladimir in Russia.

in the territory of the Rus, he'll end up in Iceland for a while, and then he'll famously end up in England when the second, so-called second Viking Age hits in England. So we need to switch over there for a minute to show where all of the money's going to come from that allows guys like Olaf Tryggvason and Svein Forkbeard to do what they're going to do back in Scandinavia.

Because by about the 980s, England has had a nice respite from Viking attacks for almost 30 years. It's the longest break they've had since the Viking attacks first started. In fact, one of their kings is going to be called Edgar the Peaceful because there's no Viking attacks during his reign at all. Sounds great. Maybe if you were in England, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Viking age is over until it starts again.

And what's interesting is when I was growing up reading mid-20th century history, they did not blame the Second Viking Age in England on the Viking rulers. They blamed it on the English ruler. They're going to famously have...

What a guy like Winston Churchill probably would have described as a loser getting the throne of England. And he's a guy who gets blamed by people like Churchill for everything bad that happens afterwards. But remember, a guy like Churchill is firmly in the camp of those people who believe in what's known as the great man theory of history. Right. Doesn't take trends and forces into account. Doesn't take geography. Doesn't take environment. He blames rulers. Right.

And Churchill, amongst many other people, look at the people from Alfred the Great's time on and see a bunch of really strong rulers, right? The reason there's no Viking attacks is because you have these august figures, you know, leading Britain into prosperity and peacefulness and the era of greatness. And then all of a sudden, the lottery of monarchy comes up snake eyes with a guy like Ethelred the Unready.

And listen to how Churchill describes this poor figure who takes control of Britain in the late 970s. This is from Winston Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Quote, "'It must have seemed to contemporaries that with the magnificent coronation at Bath in 973, on which all coronation orders since have been based, the seal was set on the unity of the realm.'

everywhere the courts are sitting regularly in shire and burrow and hundred there is one coinage and one system of weights and measures the arts of building and decoration are reviving learning begins to flourish again in the church there is a literary language a king's english which all educated men write civilization has been restored to the island

but now he writes the political fabric which nurtured it was about to be overthrown hitherto strong men armed had kept the house now a child a weakling a vacillator a faithless feckless creature succeeded to the warrior throne

twenty-five years of peace lapped the island and the english so magnificent in stress and danger so invincible under valiant leadership relaxed under its softening influences we have reached the days of ethelred the unready

Now, poor Ethelred the Unready may be getting a bad rap here, and any time you see such a vociferous denunciation of someone's reputation, you're just inviting later historians to sort of play devil's advocate. And 21st century historians have been quite a bit more gentle with Ethelred the Unready than mid-20th century historians were.

A guy like Churchill and his ilk would suggest that the reason the Viking raids begin again during Æthelred's reign is because they can smell fear and they can sense disorder and poor leadership, which is not untrue. But there's a lot of other reasons why the raids could start up again in the 980s, partly because the English have become rich again.

fabulously wealthy. They may be the richest kingdom in all of Western Europe during this time period for all those reasons Churchill just mentioned. First of all, they're a unified realm. They've got a new coinage and minting. They're exporting lots of raw materials and getting gold and silver in return. They've reorganized the structure of the realm. It's a fabulously wealthy place, and that's going to attract criminal pirates all by itself, isn't it?

When Æthelred comes to the throne in the 970s, he's a young guy, 13, 14 years old. By about the 980s, the Viking sails start appearing on the horizon again.

And it's been 30 years or so since the last attacks. But historian Mark Morris pointed out something I didn't realize. He said that the attacks that had happened previously, you know, 40, 50, 60 years ago, it all come from relatively nearby. Ireland, the Orkney Islands, places where Vikings were sort of based near the British Isles. He says that in the 980s, these are the first attacks that come directly from Scandinavia in like 100 years.

It starts off with seven ships here, three ships there, although according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, those small numbers of ships managed to do quite a bit of damage. There may be something larger in the late 980s, but then in 991, there's an exponential explosion in the number of ships that show up. In 991, almost 100 long ships appear off the eastern coast of Britain.

led, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, by a guy named Olaf. Now, as we've talked about, Olaf's a pretty common name during this period, and the best historians in the business are split over whether this is some Olaf we're not aware of, or whether it's Olaf Tryggvason, right, the guy who will become Olaf I of Norway, the guy that Gwen Jones referred to as the most spectacular Viking of his age.

It's really hard, though, if you want to try to connect the dots on, you know, where any of these great Viking figures are at any given time, you know, nail down their location. Really difficult to do. I mean, Svein Forkbeard is a perfect example. Overthrows his father, Harald Bluetooth, in the late 980s and Bluetooth dies. Is he in Denmark after that? Some people think so. Others say that the king of Sweden comes over, rules Denmark for a while, and Svein goes elsewhere. Where? We don't know.

So is this Olaf Tryggvason in 991? Could be.

But the Viking fleet of almost 100 long ships raids a little bit along the eastern coast of the Anglo-Saxon realm before putting into an island off the coast, which is what they normally did, right? You drag your long ships up on the sand, you muster your troops, you fortify the little island, and then you use that as a jumping off point for raids. And in 991, they take this little island over and they're looking to attack a town called Malden when the Anglo-Saxons...

confront them on the coast. A force of locally raised men

troops to fight the Scandinavian raiders. And this will result in one of the most famous battles of the period, the 991 Battle of Malden, it's called. And the guy who confronts these Scandinavian raiders, this large fleet, and no one knows the numbers, I've read from 2,000 to 4,000 Vikings, which is, of course, a huge discrepancy. And 4,000 troops would have meant nothing to the Chinese in this period, or the Indians, or the Byzantines, or

or the Arabs, but 4,000 Vikings in early medieval Western Europe is a lot of Vikings. They're confronted by a nobleman. He's sometimes referred to as an earl who was certainly an alderman. He's got the wonderful Anglo-Saxon, old Germanic-style name of Rathnoff.

maybe 60 years old, shows up with his personal retinue of thanes. And as we had talked about earlier in part one, we dealt extensively with the military situation. And an Anglo-Saxon thane is in some ways nearly indistinguishable from a high-ranking Viking warrior. We called them first-string players, like a sporting analogy. And the first stringers on both sides were

are comparable. It's the second stringers where the Viking warriors have a real advantage over the British. Well, English is the more proper term, obviously, during this time period. Anglo-Saxon maybe even is the proper term. But Brethnoff has raised what the Anglo-Saxon chronicle refers to as the people. The feared is the other word that you'll see used. And historians sometimes divide the feared into what's called the select feared, which is the better equipped people

more formidable version of the people and the great feared, which is the guys who harvest the wheat in the field.

But this is a second string that is nowhere near as good as the Viking warrior second string because the Viking warrior second string has shown up here to fight. They expect to fight. They plan to fight. They've probably fought before and they probably have better equipment and they adhere to a religious belief, at least those ones who are not yet Christian and come from a culture that exalts the idea of fighting and

And they're going to have combat with a bunch of people from a culture that amongst the farmer class doesn't. I mean, the Thanes exalt fighting. That's their job. But the Feared, these are the guys who harvest, you know, the wheat, right? So it's a different group of people. The numbers, again, are unknown. Some suggest that they're equal to the Viking numbers. Some suggest that they are less than the Viking numbers. No one suggests that I've read that the...

Anglo-Saxons here outnumber the Viking force, but what that means is Brethnoff's best troops are as good as the ones he's facing, but his other troops are far inferior. There is a poem that's famous and that's helped make this battle famous that was composed, historians think, not that long after the event. It's also called, usually, The Battle of Malden. It is not written as a historical document. There's lots of things in it that are

trying to send messages or evoke certain feelings that have nothing to do with, you know, facts. But there are historical elements you can probably tease out of it and that historians have to help get a sense of things. One thing is that, and if you believe it, this Brethnoff has to sort of explain to some of these people

militia troops would be a good way to describe them, how to do the most basic sorts of things, how to hold your shield, how to stand next to the guy next to you. I mean, if you're about to fight a bunch of Viking warriors who know how to fight with a bunch of guys that you have to show how to hold their shield an hour before they're going to fight these guys, well, you can see how that might be a problem.

There's an interesting aspect to militia troops. And we had mentioned in part one of this show that you could probably classify most armies in human history as militia armies, right? With the people who are armed, right? You just arm the locals and they go out there and fight. Militia armies tend to get better over time. The early Roman Republican legions were militia armies and they famously would start wars not doing very well. And then the longer the war went on, they got better and better.

But these are people, this Fjerd, who fight only when needed and they have to get back to the fields before too long because otherwise you face a famine if they're not there to harvest the wheat. So they never have time to get really good. There's also a difference between militia armies fighting in the age of missile weapons being the dominant sort of

weapon versus the kind of fighting that they're going to do at the Battle of Malden. Many countries, the United States is a perfect example, celebrate our early militias, right? We had a group of people known as the Minutemen in Revolutionary War American history, guys who would keep a musket over the fireplace. And if a guy like Paul Revere, and he probably didn't do this quite the way it was suggested, but if he sits up there in the, you know,

north church tower and says, the British are coming, the British are coming. Everybody grabs the musket off the mantle of the fireplace, runs out into the field, lines up next to your neighbor, and shoots at the Redcoats 50 or 100 yards away with a musket. That is a very different thing to what the Fjord has to do against the Vikings. There is no countering

a musket ball in the air. I mean, one of the reasons that people used crossbows in an era where a longbow was a much better weapon is it takes a long time to learn how to use a longbow well. You can teach a person how to use a crossbow in an afternoon, and there's no defense, right? You can't. These aren't like movies with Shaolin priests who are knocking away arrows and quarrels with their hands. You shoot them, they're in trouble.

But this is like fighting somebody in an MMA fight. If you have to walk up as a member of the Fjord and, you know, launch your spear at a Viking from close range, well, they can counter that, can't they? They can parry it. They can duck. There's acrobatics. There's moves. There's counter moves. It's a very different sort of situation.

You're going into your first MMA fight and you're fighting people who are experienced in the octagon. It's a whole different story and it is very scary and very intimidating. And the historian I was reading, Tora Shaya, in his book, The Wolf Age, points out that according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, before some of these battles that the Anglo-Saxons fought with the Vikings, some of the leaders were vomiting. Vomiting.

And the implication is they're vomiting because they're scared. And in the Wolf Age, Torah Shia writes, quote,

The nervous tension during the preparations could be unbearable. This is something never disclosed in the heroic Scaldic poems, but which shines through in the more down-to-earth Anglo-Saxon sources. In the tense and oppressive atmosphere before battle, the men found an outlet for their anxiety through aggressive and obscene shouting. "'Wild battle cries,' he writes. And

and primitive howling could be heard across the plain as the men of both sides shook their quivers and raised their spears to the sky. The Anglo-Saxon chronicle tells of an alderman who had led an army in a previous fight against the Danes, who were so nervous before the battle that he began to vomit in front of his men. His people consequently refused to fight, and the army then disbanded."

I actually went up and looked up that entry in my copy of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes it sound like that guy was faking it because he was working with the Vikings. So you never know.

But the thing to remember when these two sides come to grips at the Battle of Malden is that they're basically very similar armies in terms of how they fight. They're armed basically the same. They're armored basically the same. Their numbers are probably close. There is no cavalry on either side.

There is no complicated tactical maneuvers involved. And we had said in part one that when all of those factors are equal, whatever factors that differentiate between the two forces are left are exalted. So if one side is much more experienced than the other or has much higher morale, these become determining factors.

And if Brethnoff commanding the Anglo-Saxons literally has to tell his people how to hold their shields in the hour before they're expected to do so, that's not a good sign. In addition, there is, as we said earlier, this tendency in this time period for the people who win these battles to be the side that doesn't run away.

If you look at runic inscriptions on a lot of rune stones in Scandinavia during this period, when they're trying to exalt the reputation of a warrior, they will say he fled not. He didn't run away.

And if one side runs away before the other side does, that becomes the determining reason the battle's lost. And the reason it matters in these battles is because that's what's going to happen so often in these battles, and the people that run away first are usually going to be the second stringers on the Anglo-Saxon side.

According to the poem, The Battle of Malden, things start off with a Viking herald showing up and basically saying to the English or the Anglo-Saxons, whichever term is more proper during this time period, we're in sort of a transition period, he basically says to them, listen, I bring the message from the Viking guys and this is what they need to let you live. And from The Battle of Malden, the poem goes,

written soon after the affair. I'm using a translation I found online that I really liked from Dr. Aaron K. Hostetter, and from the middle of the piece he talks about the herald showing up and says, quote,

End quote. And he's talking about Brethnoff, right? The commander of the Anglo-Saxons. The herald says, quote,

they have sent me to you the hardy seamen they bid you be informed that you must quickly send rings in exchange for protection rings by the way means wealth and it would be better for you to buy off with tribute this storm of spears otherwise we should deal in such a hard battle

We needn't destroy ourselves if you are sufficiently rich. We wish to establish a safeguard in exchange for gold. If you decide this, you who are most powerful here, and you wish to ransom your people and give to the seamen, according to their own discretion, money in exchange for peace, and take a truce at our hands, we will go back to our ships with our payment and sail away, holding the peace with you."

That's not why this breath not is here, though. His job is to confront these people, and the poem has him saying, quote,

Brethnoff spoke back, raising up his shield, waving his slender spear, speaking in words angry and resolute, giving them answer. Now he's speaking, quote, "'Have you heard, sailor, what these people say? They wish to give you spears as tribute, the poisonous points and ancient swords. This tackle of war will do you no good in battle. Herald of the brim men, deliver this again. Say unto your people a more unpleasant report.'

here stands with his troops a renowned earl who wishes to defend this home-land the country of ethelred my own lord and his citizens and territory the heathens shall perish in battle it seems a humiliation to let you go to your ships with our treasures unfought now you have come thus far into our country you must not get our gold so softly

Points and edges must reconcile us first. A grim war playing before we give you any tribute. End quote. So what happens in the battle is very interesting. The...

island that the Scandinavians, the Danes here, have camped out on is connected to the mainland by a small, narrow causeway, right, a path. And this path is submerged except at low tide. So at low tide, it appears and the Scandinavians cross. But they're only, you know, a narrow width in which to cross. And there's several Anglo-Saxon thanes blocking the way. And they're able to keep the Vikings pinned up on this small island. Right.

So the Vikings say to the Anglo-Saxons, let us have free passage across this path and let us set up fairly on the other side and then we'll have a battle and see who's better. Now think about this for a minute.

Imagine the Spartans at the famous Battle of Thermopylae, right? The narrow pass where they hold off the entire Persian army in ancient Greek history. The whole point was to choose a place where you could hold off a giant army with a small number of quality troops. Imagine the Persians saying to the Spartans, this isn't fair. You're able to block up our whole army in this little pass. Let's go out into a big field where we can both line up and settle it mano a mano, right? You know, man to man.

The Spartans would laugh and say the reason we're here is we chose this spot because it's so narrow. So what do you think the Anglo-Saxon earl or alderman says to the Viking request that you let us set up fair and square on the other side? He says, okay. Now the poem chastises him for this and suggests that it's his overweening pride. But there are other ways to look at this. First of all, in the Germanic

tradition of warfare in the early Middle Ages or what used to be called the Dark Ages, they kind of do things this way. The Vikings actually are supposed to fight some battles on what's called a hazel field where they mark off the boundaries in advance. So imagine it looking like a sporting event, a football game or a soccer match where there's out-of-bounds lines.

can't go out of bounds, go out of bounds, you can't come back onto the battlefield. I mean, that sounds crazy, doesn't it? But they fought that way, and so it could have that factoring into the question of why Brethnoff would allow the Vikings, you know, to sort of set up free and clear, and then we fight it out. There's another theory, too, and that is that his job is to stop this hundred-long boat fleet from going and raiding and killing and kidnapping local people, right? He's the lord. He's supposed to do this.

And if he doesn't fight them here, if he says, oh, I'm not going to let you cross, and they go, fine, then we're leaving. Well, then they're gone. They're going and doing all the things your job is to prevent them from doing. So maybe better that you take your chances here and fight them. But it doesn't go well. And famously, Brethnoff and his loyal retainers will get chopped up, dying to a man, while some people flee the battle and the whole thing falls apart.

The Battle of Malden is inexplicably decisive. And I say inexplicably because as a modern person looking back on this, it shouldn't have been so important, right? A locally raised force commanded by a local alderman with the local farmer class of people is defeated by Danish raiders. But we just got done talking about a prosperous, unified, a populous realm Anglo-Saxon England is, right?

So go raise another force, right? But this is part of what separates us from the people of the past. What's that wonderful quote that, you know, the past is like another country. They do things differently there. When you look at why you're defeated, modern people might come up with all kinds of theories. You know, there might not be any sort of

unified ideas why a defeat happened. Some people might say, well, you know, bad generalship. Others might say, well, the way that the military was organized in this case was ineffective in these circumstances. Others might say, well, you know, bad reconnaissance, bad information. The troops on the ground were weary or overextended or

you know inexperienced there might be all kinds of reasons another reason you know it with a segment in the modern world might actually look at it from a religious viewpoint and say well you know everything happens because god wants it to happen that way and if we lost this battle it's because god wanted it that way right that might be a segment of the population too

The difference between the now and the then, though, is in the early Middle Ages, the segment of the population that would adopt that last reason for the loss, right? The loss happened because God wanted it that way, is going to be the overwhelming majority of people.

And that's a little hard for Western audiences now to get your mind around because think about how you diagram a military defeat, right? How you decide the defeat occurred determines what you're going to do to see that it doesn't happen again, right? If it's a bad general that caused the loss, you get rid of the general. The organization is the key issue that led to the defeat. Will you reorganize things?

But if God being angry with you is the reason you lost, well, then what you do to make sure you don't lose again is going to be a solution that's based in religion. Historian Mark Morris, in his book, The Anglo-Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, talks about the Battle of Malden and the loss there and how devastating it was and why it was so devastating. And he writes, quote,

Defeat at Malden was a devastating blow to the English, as much psychological as physical. Ever since the days of King Alfred, their identity had been defined by military success against the Danes.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicle was a celebration of over a century of victories by Æthelred's illustrious forebears, and the king had recently reminded everyone of those earlier glories by naming his firstborn son Æthelstan. The church, Morris writes, had been telling Englishmen that their success was due not to their prowess, but due to their piety, especially when it was expressed in the support of monastic reform.

Things had improved greatly in King Edgar's reign, according to the Chronicle, because, now quoting the Chronicle, quote, he exalted God's praise far and wide and loved God's law. End quote. Morris continues, quote, the slaughter at Malden shattered that self-confidence and raised the troubling question of why God had allowed it to happen. End quote.

Now, Æthelred the Unready doesn't refer to the fact that he was unprepared. It actually means that he was ill-counseled. And Morris says it's a bit of a pun because Æthelred means noble counsel. So his nickname kind of turns that on its head. He's noble counseled who's ill-counseled. And the counsel he receives after the Battle of Malden is he should give these

Danish raiders what they asked for before the battle right with their herald said give us rings so Ethelred gives them the rings which is the wealth and in this case it's 10,000 pounds of silver this is considered to be the first of Ethelred's payments that will eventually be called Dengeld

and there is ample precedent throughout the entire history of the Viking era for paying Vikings to leave you alone. The problem that Æthelred's going to have is that those earlier payments were always connected to trying to gain some time, some breathing room to come up with a better solution so you didn't have to pay them forever.

ethelred's 10 000 pounds of silver which seems like a lot of money in 991 992 is going to seem like nothing compared to the ever-increasing amounts of money he's going to have to pay these people to leave his people alone to not kill rob or kidnap his citizens

In the middle 20th century, heck, even in the Middle Ages, the critics of Ethelred suggested he had no better plan than to just keep paying people off. But more modern historians point out Ethelred did try to do other things, tried to build a couple of fleets a couple of times. Those fell through.

tried to solve the problem apparently with God and deal with some sorts of reform and tried to fix circumstances so that if God felt like the English needed to be punished, maybe he wouldn't feel that they needed to be punished in the next battle. That didn't work. But giving the 10,000 pounds of silver when he did in 991-992...

is like putting out an open for business sign for pirates in the northern world. It turns England into a kind of a vortex, a whirlpool, sucking in opportunists from the entire Viking world and beyond, right? There's a reason that you don't negotiate with terrorists, supposedly, right? Or you don't pay hostage takers to get the hostages back because you encourage more hostage-taking, right?

And by, well, 993, 994, 995, a couple of years after the Battle of Malden, the Anglo-Saxon realm is sucking in opportunists from not just Denmark and Norway and Sweden, but people who aren't Scandinavian at all. Celts, Frisians, Slavs, even Rus adventurers from Eastern Europe. I mean, these armies operating in England after the Battle of Malden are multinational, multiethnic forces, right?

And what they have in common is they're there to get some of the money that's being doled out to people, you know, to get them to stop doing exactly what they're doing. It even sucks in some of the greatest money.

Scandinavians of the age. What do we call them? The class of 960? I mean, if Olaf Tryggvason wasn't commanding at the Battle of Malden, he's certainly there not that long afterwards. And most historians believe that the money and the opportunity and the open for business sign for pirates, you know, the vortex sucks in Svein Forkbeard from Denmark also.

And these two guys are operating together in England in the early 990s in a way that sort of reminds you of like a couple of action figures in an adventure movie together, right? Sylvester Stallone could play one of these guys. Arnold Schwarzenegger could play the other. They're operating together. They know each other.

One of the ideas that Ethelred apparently has to try to, you know, come up to some sort of long-term solution for this issue is to try to co-opt at least one of these guys and use him against the others. And the one he chooses to co-opt, apparently, is Olaf Tryggvason.

In like 994, Æthelred pays him even more money. I mean, it's more than double the 10,000 pounds of silver. He treats him royally, has him come to a meeting, and he basically tries to do with Olaf, according to a lot of the historians I was reading, what the realm in what's now modern-day France did with Rollo, right, who created Normandy, turn the poachers into gamekeepers. If you don't have an army that can resist the Scandinavians, buy one, right?

and Ethelred tries to buy Olaf and use him, his troops, and his fleet to protect England from other people like him. And of course, as is usual with this sort of a deal, he's supposed to convert to Christianity as part of the arrangement, but most sources believe Olaf already was Christian, so this may be like a second baptism or

and part of the deal is that olaf will not come back to england as a hostile and he apparently keeps this deal

And in fact, his troops may stay to fight for Æthelred and the Anglo-Saxons in England, but Olaf leaves in like 995, goes back to Norway, apparently converts a bunch of this money he made, you know, in England when the open for business for pirates sign was out, hires mercenaries and troops, goes back to Norway and takes over there and becomes the king of Norway in like 995.

And when he does, he does so as a Christian and as somebody who is not going to allow the people of Norway the option of continuing to worship the old gods, right? He's not going to, like, hack on the good, ask them or hope that they convert to Christianity. He's going to act more like the predecessor Israel.

Harold Greycloak, right? The guy who started to try to convert Norway by force before Harold Bluetooth killed him. Well, he comes back to Norway and follows that strategy on steroids. If you read the sagas of Snorri Sturluson, and I use the Erling Monson translation, as I've said before, and remember, Snorri's writing several hundred years later, but he's utilizing oral histories of

poems, sagas, all kinds of things that he knows by heart. And some of those things may have been locked in verse in a way that prevents the telephone game sort of phenomenon from destroying the information, right? So if you have a rap song and everything in it rhymes, you can't change some of the words without the rhymes being ruined. So maybe Snorri had some of that going for him. But if you read the Heimskringla, his most famous work,

The chapter on Olaf Tryggvason, who will become known as Olaf I in Norwegian history, is maybe the best chapter in the whole work, the best saga in the entire Heimskringla. Because Tryggvason's an amazing guy. First of all, let's start with

him what he's like i mean we already talked about the fact that he's all over the viking world he seems to go from one end of it to another his mother was moving him around when he was a little kid to keep him alive he was taken into slavery as we said at one point in his life but he's a physical specimen according to snorri if there was a an olympics with a category for vikings he would be a gold medal winner he has this quality that you'll see other um

unbelievably athletic, formidable Vikings are also supposed to be able to do this, but only the best. He can apparently throw a spear with his left hand and his right hand simultaneously, accurately, and with great power. So he's like a repeating rifle for spear throwing, and you win the gold medal at the Viking Olympics just for that.

He also is supposed to have one of the great tempers of all time. And the thing about reading Snorri's sagas is they're almost too perfect. They're so much like Greek tragedies, you know, where the cause and effect in this guy's life adds up so perfectly to his fate, right? It looks like...

a Lego-like construction. And, you know, the wrathful temper and the various things that he does. So, you know, one plus one equals two leads to the outcome of his fate and sort of the object lesson there. It's like a Greek tragedy where the lead character is like Achilles and he's got a tragic flaw that eventually sinks him, literally. But in this case, Olaf goes back to Norway and begins to convert the locals through violence.

And just as with all these other people, you can't figure out how much of this is because he is a fervently believing Christian and how much of this is connected to the fact that Christianity supports a powerful kingship and he wants to be a powerful king. So you can't figure out where one of these motivations ends and the other begins.

It does seem like when people won't convert to Christianity, Olaf takes it personally, like you don't want me to be the king, and people suffer accordingly. The stories that Snorri tells of the kinds of suffering that Olaf inflicts upon these people are draconian.

I mean, the first thing that he does is he goes after all these people who sort of live in the magical world of the Norse reality, right? We talked about elves and dwarves and trolls and magic and all these kinds of things. Olaf goes after these guys, goes after wizards, Snorri says, and magicians and people that are called troll wise, meaning, you know, people that are wise about trolls and things like that.

One story is that he invites a bunch of them to a big feast, gets them all drunk and then burns the building down where he's hosting the feast. He takes a bunch of these magicians that he finds and he stakes them down in the sand off the coast of an island where at low tide the island appears. You stake them down at low tide and wait for the tide to come in and drown them.

He has some people torn apart by dogs. He has people thrown off of high places. Snorri tells a story of one guy that he had who wouldn't convert to Christianity, so he had his underlings bring a bowl filled with glowing coals in and place the bowl on this guy's stomach until his stomach exploded.

He sentenced another guy who wouldn't convert to Christianity to have his eyes ripped out. So the handlers who were supposed to do this ripped out his first eye and the victim handled it so well it intimidated the, you know, the executioner guys who wouldn't rip the second one out. They just didn't know how to handle a dude like that.

The most famous of the stories connected with Olaf, though, and what he did to people who wouldn't convert to Christianity involves the snake incident where he had one of these people, uh,

brought to him he had his mouth pride open and they put like little sticks or something in the mouth to keep the guy from closing his mouth and they put like a funnel type object in his mouth stuck a snake in one end burn the tail of the snake so the snake would slither down this guy's throat into his stomach and the guy died as the snake tries to you know bite his way out of the guy's side and

Olaf is also someone who goes to the various temples dedicated to the traditional Germanic gods, right? The Iser. And he visits one in Snorri's saga where he goes to the temple and the locals show up, including the guy whose job it is to sort of run and guard the temple. And they show up out there and they basically beg Olaf to allow them to continue the ancient practices, right? To, to,

continue to uphold the law is the way it's described and olaf and his men listen to this pleading and turn around and in the temple are all these statues right idols that the christian church would refer to them a statue of thor a statue of odin the statue of frey or all the guys and olaf trigvason takes his weapon and destroys the statue of thor

And his men then begin to destroy the statues of the other gods. You can imagine how this must have horrified the faithful, right? The guy whose job it is to defend the temple is watching his new king destroy all the gods.

What's interesting about this, though, is there's a meaning to this. It's sort of the reverse, in a weird way, of the story of how Harold Bluetooth in Denmark converts to Christianity. Remember that one where the monk Poppo agrees to carry the glowing piece of iron in his hands and the Christian god protects his hands from being burned? This is like a weird twist on that, where

Olaf Tryggvason destroys the images of the Norse gods and nothing happens to him, right? What does that say to the followers when they watch, you know, Thor allow his statue to be destroyed and does nothing, right?

And then Olaf and his men killed the guy whose job it is to guard this temple. And we're told that all the other men who showed up to defend Thor and Odin and the traditional ways and the law, they're all armed, by the way, meekly submit to Olaf at that point. So you have this guy who's out there converting by force and intimidating the locals. And there's a wonderful story Snorri tells. It may be my favorite story in the entire saga.

But it sounds like the Norse gods, if they didn't deal with Olaf the moment that he's destroying their statues, decide to deal with him later their own way. And Snorri tells the story and says that Olaf is holding a feast and everybody's having a good time and there's a man in the corner, an old guy, one eye, a Gandalf-style hat.

and he starts talking and regaling the room with spellbinding tales.

He seems to know everything. He can tell you about things that happened long ago. He can tell you, you know, who's buried under that great ancient mound in the distance and tell you all about him. And when the party breaks up, Olaf has this guy come with him to a private room and they talk and he can't stop talking to the guy. He's so interesting. And eventually Olaf's advisor has to say to the king, listen, you got to go to bed. You can't stay up all night talking to this guy. You have to go to bed. So he goes to bed.

And Snorri says he wakes up the next morning and says, what happened to that guy? And it turns out that after Olaf went to sleep, this old guy with the one eye and the hat went to the cooks who were preparing the next night's meal for the king.

and said to the cooks, "You can't give the king this food this way. This isn't fit for a ruler like him." And supposedly gives the cooks some really, you know, a couple of big slabs of good meat and says, "Put this in the stew," or whatever they're making. And when Olaf hears that, you can almost feel like the hair on the back of his neck must have stood up. And he told the cooks to throw it all out. "Waste it all," is what Snorri Sturluson says he said.

because he thought that this was Odin and that Odin was going to poison him. And this was how Odin gets back for all the things that Olaf was doing to the people that worshipped him and his son Thor and all the other gods in the Pantheon of the Aesir. Surprisingly, though, it's not going to be the pagan gods, though, if you believe Snorri Sturluson, that are responsible for Olaf Tryggvason's fate.

but it's going to be another powerful pagan who lives in the here and now. Her name is Sigrid the Haughty, sometimes called Sigrid the Proud or Sigrid the Strong. Snorri Sturluson says she's the queen of Sweden. Historians aren't sure she even existed. And if she did, she may not have been Scandinavian at all. She may have been Slavic, Polish specifically. So she's a rather hard-to-pin-down figure.

She's also linked to the royal families of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It seems like everyone wants to marry this woman or has. The story that Snorri tells involves the moment that Olaf, right, the king of Norway now, decides he wants to marry her. And she seems good with it for a while until a...

huge sticking point develops in the relationship and Snorri Sturluson describes it and I'm going to take the these and those and those kinds of things out of my translation and just you know make it more the vernacular and put you and

he and things like that in place but Snorri Sturluson tells of Olaf and Sigrid's conversations about getting married and how Olaf's temper gets the best of him in a way that might lead to his eventual fate and Sturluson writes quote

early in the spring king olaf went east to koningehelle to meet queen sigrid and when they met they spoke about the matter which had been discussed during the winter that they should be married and things were progressing well then king olaf said that sigrid should be baptized and take the true faith

she answered i will not go from the faith i've had before and my kinsmen before me i will not say anything against you if you believe in the god that pleases you king olaf snorri says was very wroth meaning wrathful and answered hastily why should i wed you you heathen bitch and he struck her in the face with the glove he was holding in his hand

After that, he stood up and she likewise. And Sigrid said, this may well be your death, end quote. I've read other translations where she says you may have just killed yourself. I read one that said you're finished, but he has destroyed the images of whole pantheons of gods that

But according to Snorri's history, this is where he messed with the wrong pagan. Sigrid the Strong has powerful friends, and Olaf's going to find out what it means when your wrathful anger makes enemies of everyone.

Now, it seems incomprehensible that Olaf Tryggvason wouldn't know that he was going to have all these enemies, right? When you're ripping people's eyes out and drowning troll-wise wizards and putting glowing coals on people's stomachs until they explode and destroying the statues of their gods. I mean, you're going to make enemies, right?

But there are so many different ways that Olaf seems to be pissing people off, that he seems to have a natural gift for it. And he may be even...

being exploited by sort of a puppet master here right i mean ethel read the unready the king of england may deliberately be trying to get these scandinavian rulers angry with each other because if they're mad at each other and fighting amongst themselves well then they're less focused on fighting him

So one of the theories here is that Ethelred the Unready deliberately tries to pay Olaf to kind of get mad and fight Svein Forkbeard, right? So get Sly Stallone mad at Arnold Schwarzenegger, get them at each other's throats. So that might be one reason. Then, as we said, Olaf is pissing everybody off at home by being such a rough ruler. That's another reason.

When he goes back to Norway, he starts asserting control and authority over the parts of Norway that are traditionally claimed by the Danish king, who in this case is now Svein Forkbeard, so that's not going to make him friendly with his old action hero buddy. And then there's the wonderful...

personal relationship aspect to this, which, you know, is the most interesting from a storyteller standpoint. And it's not all made up. I mean, you're not trying to create something where there's a soap opera element to it. That element exists all throughout history.

in the pre-modern age when royal families composed of people who thought they had blue blood and they intermarried with other royal families as a way to cement diplomatic relationships with each other, which happens all over the world. I mean, look at the biblical era, you know, the times of Assyria and ancient Egypt and Babylonia, all those places happened in China, happened all over the world, right? You marry the king's sister to the king of another country and then we're buddies and brothers and all these kinds of things.

But this is what supposedly happens in Scandinavia. Now, we have to make our disclaimers here because it all requires that Sigrid the Haughty be a real person, and she may not be. Now, she also might be this, as we said, Slavic princess who is sometimes known as Gunnhild, but it's also, some historians think, that Gunnhild and Sigrid are the same person.

So this is how complicated they can get. But if we assume that the sagas are correct, and a lot of historians are willing to buy this, there just isn't proof, and that Sigrid is real, and that her life is real. Well, Sigrid the haughty, Sigrid the strong, Sigrid, she got a lot of names, she is the axis upon which this whole story revolves, right?

Because when Olaf Tryggvason decides he wants to marry her, before he slaps her in the face, she's already been the queen of Sweden and already married to the king of Sweden and has become the mother of the next king of Sweden. When our Sylvester Stallone character slaps her in the face, she ends up going and marrying our Arnold Schwarzenegger character and becomes the wife of Svein Forkbeard in Denmark.

While already being the mother of the new king of Sweden, his name is, and it's going to be shocking, Olaf. Last name, an English-speaking person would probably pronounce Skottkunning, but if you listen to a Swede pronounce it, it becomes the almost unpronounceable in English word, Hott or Hottkunning.

So now you have this woman who hates Olaf's guts, who may have said by slapping him, he's basically forfeited his life. And now she's connected to two of the people, you know, the king of Sweden and the king of Denmark, who can make that promise a reality.

to make it even more wonderfully family-oriented sounds like olaf tryggvason in norway when he can't marry sigrid the haughty instead marries svein forkbeard's sister

who is mad at her brother. And my mother used to say that the missing 50% of the human population that is not present in the most of human geopolitical history, females, are still a part of the story. They're just acting in ways that don't get into the history books as much. They're exerting their influence behind the scenes through a lot of the powerful people who do make the history books. And according to Snorri Sturluson, which is not the greatest source of all time, but the...

Women in the story are driving everything, and Olaf Tryggvason's wife, right, Svein Forkbeard's sister, is basically pushing him into war against her brother, and Sigrid the Haughty, the now angry at her former suitor, and now married to the king of Denmark, is pushing her husband to go after the guy who slapped her, and is willing to sort of influence her son, the king of Sweden, to come along and help.

This is wonderful stuff from a storytelling point of view. I mean, if we're just sticking with the story, I should probably mention one of my favorite Sigrid the Haughty stories is when a bunch of people she thought weren't worth her time were trying to marry her, right? She wants to marry kings of Denmark, kings of Norway, kings of Sweden, and she gets all these petty kings trying to marry her. Snorri Sturluson says she eventually invites them all to come and sort of woo her at the same time, all these

people she thinks are beneath her she gets them all into one building at kind of like a feasting situation and then you know this is a very traditional viking era way to kill people burns the building down and kills them all and then basically wipes her hands and says well that ought to keep these petty kings from trying to become my husband's

But when she marries people, she marries the kings of Scandinavian countries, and then she pushes them into these sorts of conflicts that put a sort of a personal relationship sort of touch on geopolitical issues.

you know, occurrences. And in the year 10,000, traditionally she has her son, the King of Sweden and her husband, the King of Denmark ally with some earls in Norway that are also unhappy with Olaf Trigvason. And those three or four entities, you know, in a circumstance that is not well understood, known or recorded, all you can say is they somehow, uh,

ambush Olaf Tryggvason and his fleet at sea somewhere in the Baltic and no one knows where. The battle is known as the Battle of Sfolda, the Battle of Svold, Battle of Sfold. There's a lot of different ways you can pronounce this thing. It is probably the most famous Viking sea battle in all history, if indeed we even refer to it as Viking because interestingly enough, the King of Sweden, who is leading part of the fleet,

The king of Denmark, who is leading another part of the fleet, and the king of Norway, who is leading the fleet that they are fighting, are all Christian by this time period. Also, it seems like Olaf Tryggvason, the king of Norway's fleet, is heavily outnumbered

Multiple different traditions agree that he has like 11 ships. The traditions all disagree on how many his enemies have, but it is multiple times that 80, 90, 110, 130. He is woefully outnumbered. He has maybe the greatest, certainly the most famous Viking ship with him. It's called the Long Serpent in English.

It's a beautiful ship, lots of oars, lots of people on board. And this Battle of Sfolda that happens involves the traditional Viking approach to these naval battles, which is both sides fighting

sort of strap these ships alongside each other with the biggest ships in the middle and then gets rid of the masts and all the things that would impede movement between these ships that are now strapped and attached to each other. And they create big fighting platforms and then have as close to a land battle as they can have on these floating fort-like platforms.

And the Battle of Svalda is supposed to be a hard-fought affair, even though it's so one-sided. And at the very end of it, it's like a movie where the enemies of Olaf Tryggvason have taken all the other boats by storm. And then as they take each one, they cut them apart and have them floating away. And the last great battle is happening aboard the Long Serpent, the biggest of these ships.

and olaf trigvason is fighting with his men and they're getting overwhelmed from all sides and eventually they're down to like the last few people and olaf trigvason is supposed to be one of the last to be alive on the ship and before they can capture and kill him he turns around you know he's fought all the way from like the front of the ship to the very end the stern he turns around and in full armor dives off the back of the ship and sinks into the water

Well, this is a spectacularly cinematic death for a pagan Viking ruler. If you are making a movie that contains Vikings, it is a mortal sin in this time and place for a Christian.

And it is a reminder that this period around 10,000 when the pivotal battle of swold or fold or fold or folder whichever pronunciation you prefer happens between the earlier era of Thor and Odin and blood sacrifices and the era to come where the so-called white Christ is the focus of worship and devotion.

And maybe a guy like Olaf is given a sort of eternal get your soul out of jail free card because he was born in one system and died in another. There certainly must have been some great satisfaction in being able to deny your former action hero buddy the pleasure of separating your head from your body.

But this person that Gwen Jones called, as we said, the greatest, most spectacular Viking of his age, is able to gain that reputation after ruling Norway for a mere five years. I mean, you get to become Olaf I of Norway

when you're on the throne for such a short period of time, that's quite an accomplishment. I also like another phrase. Gwynne Jones sort of wrote the epitaph of Olaf Tryggvason, and he said in his day and place, he was Christ's best hatchet man. The problem was is that he gets axed by a guy who probably after this battle in 10-100 becomes the most powerful Scandinavian ruler up until this time in history.

Svein Forkbeard, after the Battle of Svald, will rule all of Denmark. He will have recovered the Danish areas that are traditionally ruled by Danish kings in southern Sweden and in Norway. He is probably the father-in-law of the new and relatively young king of Sweden, and he has put in charge of the parts of Norway he doesn't rule directly a couple of vassal rulers,

This is a very dangerous, very powerful Scandinavian ruler that you do not want to antagonize unless you have a reputation for not making good decisions or not having good counsel. And that's specifically what the name Æthelred the Unready refers to. And a mere two years after the Battle of Sfold or Sfolda or Sfolder or Sfold, Æthelred the Unready manages to make decisions

permanent enemy of Svein Forkbeard by killing his relatives, or maybe I should say probably killing his relatives, or if not killing his relatives, then killing the relatives of people who would then demand satisfaction from their king. In the year 1002, on November 13th, Æthelred the Unready puts into play a simultaneous mass contract hit on all the Danes in Britain.

Well, that's the way the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes it. It was also the way the histories generally treated it when I was younger, right? Kill all the Danes in Britain.

Modern historians think that that would have been an impossibility. What did we say? Neil Price suggested there might have been, before this period, 50,000 Danes living in the British Isles. So that's a form of genocide and ethnic cleansing that would seem to be beyond the abilities of the Anglo-Saxons at this time and place. But it does seem clear that what he did do was issue secret orders to his followers that at the same time they were all to...

go after the Danish mercenaries living nearby them and wipe them out. This is something that a couple of years later, Æthelred the Unready would take pride in and refer to as a most just extermination. The problem is, is that he either killed

directly close relatives of Svein Forkbeard in what's known as the St. Bryce's Day Massacre, or he killed enough close people to people close to Svein Forkbeard that they demanded satisfaction from their king.

If you recall, when Olaf Tryggvason left England and made a deal with Æthelred the Unready, he was supposed to convert to Christianity, if he hadn't already, and not come back to Britain as a hostile, which he didn't. He went to Norway and became the king there, but he left behind fighters, right? The people who were, you know, the...

marauders that he led in Britain and they were going to turn into guys who were mercenaries fighting for the King of England and protecting England from other Vikings like themselves.

But that deal didn't last for very long. There's a lot of different historical theories on this. The one I like is that the people who made the original deal were paid off in the dangeld, right? The huge amounts of silver that the English king gave them to be nice, play nice, and defend the kingdom, that those guys slowly but surely drifted away. Some probably went home. Some probably sought other adventures elsewhere.

And in the meantime, lots of new people are arriving, right? Adventurers, Scandinavians, Slavs, Celts, Frisians, and others who hadn't been part of the original deal, right? They didn't sign the original contract. They didn't get any of the original Dane geld. And after a while, guys like that don't feel like they have to

honor the deal since they weren't the beneficiaries and so according to the anglo-saxon chronicle these mercenaries who were supposed to protect the realm start raiding the realm and burning villages and cities and after a while if you're the king and you thought you paid these people to protect the realm you might feel as though you know the deal was off too

But by killing all these people, instead of ridding himself from one problem, he creates the circumstances of a much greater problem. He makes Svein Forkbeard angry. And like the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the Terminator films, Svein Forkbeard had left England, gone back to Scandinavia and was ruling there, but now has a reason to tell the King of England, I'll be back.

And the traditional story, which may or may not be true, is that the people killed at the St. Brice's Day Massacre included the sister and brother-in-law's feigned forkbeard,

A couple hundred years later, the famous medieval historian William of Malmesbury says that the sister of Svein Forkbeard was named Gunnhild, the brother-in-law was a mercenary Viking leader named Palig, and Malmesbury writes, quote,

Gunnhild, who was a woman of some beauty and much character, had come to England with her husband, the powerful Jarl Palig, adopted Christianity, and offered herself as a hostage for peace with the Danes. Edric, which is one of Æthelred's officials, in his disastrous fury, had ordered her to be beheaded with the other Danes.

though she declared plainly that the shedding of her blood would cost England dear and for her part she faced death with presence of mind she never grew pale at the prospect nor did she change expression after death even when her body was drained of blood though her husband had been killed before her eyes and her son a very likely child pierced by four lances end quote

They have found bodies, historians and archaeologists, who they believe were probably from the St. Bryce's Day massacre, although it's impossible to know. You can do isotope testing, which shows that these people were raised in an environment like Scandinavia, but that doesn't tell you if they were Spaniards

specific victims of the saint bryce's day massacre but they found bodies that have been burned bodies that were obviously uh the result of mob violence and uh with wounds all in the back like they were trying to escape and they found bodies where the heads have been cut off from the front which is a very unusual way to behead someone

If you look at the way the Saudi Arabians behead prisoners today in executions or the way the Japanese did in the Second World War, beheading someone from the rear is the standard way it's done. So one can ask the question why you would find figures who had been beheaded facing the sword. And there's an interesting Scandinavian saga that gives an account that might explain it.

In his book, Northmen, The Viking Saga, historian John Haywood quotes this saga as a possible explanation why some of the victims that they think might have been from the St. Bryce's Day Massacre might have been executed from the front. And he suggests that it's something like a possible last request on the part of the condemned, right? A chance for one final chance.

opportunity to display their bravery. And he writes, quote, The method used to kill these men was described in the 13th century Saga of the Jomsvikings, about a semi-legendary band of elite Vikings said to have been founded by Harold. That would be Harold Bluetooth. A Jomsviking who was about to be executed was asked what he thought about dying. He said, quote,

I think well of death, as do all of us, but I am not minded to be slaughtered like a sheep, and would rather face the blow. You hew into my face, and watch closely if I flinch. They did what he asked for, and let him face the blow. The executioner stepped in front of him, and hewed into his face, and he did not flinch a whit, except that his eyes closed when death came upon him."

There are no reliable figures for how many Danes were killed in the November 13th, 1002 St. Bryce's Day Massacre. They'll continue to find graves and this number may get more secure over time. But as I said, in the mid 20th century, when a lot of historians were taking the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at face value, right, killed all the Danes, you would have been talking about an ethnic cleansing genocide type affair that would have killed tens of thousands of people. That seems far too

far too many now. I've seen loan numbers. I think Ian Howard had it at a couple of hundred, maybe. I think if we suggest it's the majority of mercenaries working for King Ethelred the Unready, we're probably talking maybe two or three thousand people, which is a ton. And in this day and age, that would probably mean that tons of people in Denmark would have had loved ones or people they knew be victimized by this.

And whether or not King Svein Forkbeard, right, the most powerful king in Scandinavia at this time period, had close relatives among the victims, or whether or not as the king of the Danes, he just had a responsibility to avenge the family members of some of his subjects, or whether or not

Neither of those things were true, and it just becomes a wonderful excuse to go back and attack the realm of Athelred the Unready, which he'd been doing for 20 years already by this time period. We don't know, but you can say that the Scandinavian fleets were back and the Vikings were back burning English towns the year of the St. Bryce's Day Massacre. In 1002, they're already back. In 1003, they're back in force. In 1004, 1005, every year. 1005 is a weird year because...

well, probably made worse by the Viking attacks, but there was massive crop failures. There was a terrible famine in England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says it is the worst famine that anyone can remember, and it is so bad that the Scandinavians actually have to leave England and go back home to find food, which means for the first time in like nine years, they're spared Viking attacks. But then in 1006, Spain's forces are back.

and in 1007 and in 1009. What's happening here is you're going from the most prosperous, maybe wealthy kingdom in Western Europe to

to something far lower on the economic scale. England is bleeding out year after year, and it's a multi-pronged sort of attack on them. I mean, first of all, you have defeats in the field, right, which means you lose soldiers and people. And then after the Scandinavians defeat you in battle, they burn your towns and they loot your villages, right? That costs, including the rebuilding costs.

All during this period, Scandinavian fleets start interdicting and begin to control the seaborne trade that goes from England to the continent. A lot of English wealth is because they send wool from England over to the continent to be turned into cloth. All of a sudden, the Vikings seize control of that and are getting a piece of that action.

And they are extracting straight up cash from this wealthy realm. We told you about the 10,000 pounds of silver that they collect in 991 to keep the peace. But that extraordinary amount of money just turns out to be the first payment in an ever increasing amount of money that seems to buy less and less for the English crown. But they seem to have fewer and fewer options other than to pay it.

The 10,000 pounds of silver in 991 is followed by a 16,000 pounds of silver a mere three years later to keep the peace. In 1002, which is eight years after that, they need 24,000 pounds from the English crown if the Vikings are going to keep from savaging the realm.

and in ten o seven spain forkbeard's forces require thirty six thousand pounds of silver to keep from raiding the realm winston churchill says this is the equivalent of three or four years of the national income of the realm

That number will eventually reach 48,000 pounds of silver in 1012. And the way that this is collected is fascinating too. And the numbers of carts and wagons required to cart 48,000 pounds of silver to the Vikings who are going to count and collect it. Well, let's just say that is in and of itself a feat indeed.

for early medieval states to do. After paying Svein Forkbeard the 36,000 pounds of silver in 1007, Æthelred the Unready and his advisors decide they have to try something else, a national effort to raise an army and a navy that can defeat these people, because you can't keep bleeding out like this and survive as a state, right?

So a concerted effort involving pretty much everyone from the lowest to the highest in England is made. I love the way in his book, The Wolf Age, historian Tora Shia describes it. It gives you a sense of this national effort and this attitude that enough is enough.

and if we don't make a stand here there'll be nothing left of the kingdom the locusts will have picked it clean and the blood will be drained from the corpse and shia writes quote

Ethelred's machinery of power set in motion what in all likelihood was the most intense mobilization of armed forces to be seen in England since the days of the Romans. These coordinated efforts are an impressive testimony to the authority and organizational skill of the Anglo-Saxon crown.

Under the supervision of aldermen and bishops, thousands of subjects all across England, men, women, and children, the free and enslaved, peasants and merchants, were set to work. Fellers cut down and de-limbed thousands of trees in England's forests.

men and animals transported the logs to the coasts where the shipbuilders constructed a number of new large warships and smaller cutters in great haste the crown's old ships were repaired women spun thread which the sail makers used to make sails farmers cultivated hemp which the rope makers used to make rope

The ore makers hacked and cut out ores. Blacksmiths forged nails and parts for all kinds of equipment, including swords, shield bosses, spearheads, arrowheads, axe heads, helmets, and breastplates. In a kingdom still shaken from the famine of just a few years earlier, great volumes of butter, grain, bread, and dried and salted fish and meat were collected and stored."

Now, if this had been an Alfred the Great type figure, or maybe Winston Churchill would say a figure like himself, you might have the makings here for the kind of response to the Scandinavian raids that would return England to a state of

or security. But this is how a guy like Ethel Reddy and Reddy gets the reputation he has because England goes to all this trouble to build this fleet and

And it's stationed off the shore, something like 200 ships. And then you get to see one of the other aspects that Ethelred the Unready's realm is known for. The fact that his top advisors and main men in the kingdom are constantly at each other's throats, fighting, undercutting one another. And the fleet is waiting for the Vikings. You know, they're going to interdict them at one of these islands where the Vikings tend to land. And then you get to see one of the other aspects that Ethelred the Unready's realm is known for.

And there is a conflict between a couple of these noblemen, and one of them takes his 20 ships that he's contributed to the 200 and leaves. And after he leaves, he goes and starts raiding Britain's coast, right, his own country, although it might be the part of the coast run by the guy he had to fight with. So the guy he had to fight with takes 80 ships and goes after him.

Well, a storm arises in the English Channel and blows most of those ships over, destroying them. The ones that aren't destroyed in the storm are pulled up on the beach and ambushed by the guy who took the 20 ships, who then burns them. And all of a sudden, half the fleet that England conducted this entire national effort for is gone.

the king takes his ships and goes back to the Thames outside of London, and essentially this 200-ship fleet is extinguished as a force that can resist the Vikings, and as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle puts it, quote,

Talking, by the way, about when the king and the rest of the fleet found out that half the fleet was lost in an instant, having done no damage to the Vikings at all, quote, when this was known to the remaining ships where the king was, how the others fared, it was then as if all were lost.

the king went home with the aldermen and the nobility and thus lightly did they forsake the ships whilst the men that were in them rode back to London thus lightly did they suffer the labor of all the people to be in vain nor was the terror lessened as all of England hoped

When this naval expedition was thus ended, the chronicle says, thus came, soon after Lammas, the formidable army of the enemy. End quote. Historian Mark Morris in the Anglo-Saxons, A History of the Beginnings of England, makes the real salient point when he says that the English had been bled dry to pay for all these anti-Viking activities and wouldn't have minded the sacrifice so much if it had achieved any results.

But he says, quote, the huge sums that were raised had been repeatedly squandered through a combination of cowardice and incompetence on the part of the king and his counselors. Many people, he writes, may therefore have drawn the conclusion that rather than paying endless amounts to make the Danes go away, it might be preferable simply to let them take over, end quote. Well, ideas of letting them take over will be put on the back burner for a while because, quote,

The army that shows up in England in 1009 is led by a particularly nasty Viking leader named Thorkell the Tall, who's also famous, and historians have been debating whether

for, well, forever, exactly what this guy's motivations were and whether he was working for Svein Forkbeard or at cross-purposes for Svein Forkbeard or whether he was originally working for him but then at cross-purposes. But what you can say is that the attacks that he leads for a couple of years in England are amongst the worst that they have ever faced in the more than 200 years of Scandinavian attacks on the island.

The killings, the kidnappings, the burnings and wiping outs of whole towns is, well, on the heels of the demoralization of, you know, the fleet being squandered is adding insult to injury and it will be Thorkell the Tall in 1012 who will receive the 48,000 pounds of silver in order to create a peaceful situation. By that time, he is...

one of the most reviled and feared figures in England, which makes what happens as part of the 1012 peace agreement so specifically hard to swallow. Torashaya in the Wolf Age describes it this way, quote, "'In the summer of 1012, old hostilities were therefore renegotiated and new alliances forged in now devastated England.'

In a maneuver that must have caused quite a stir amongst both Anglo-Saxons and Danes, Æthelred joined forces with the only man in England able to protect his position, Thorkell the Tall himself, the man who had led the Danish army for the past three years, and who had done his utmost to destroy Æthelred's country, to murder and ransack his subjects, and to fleece the king for money.

Thorkell had naturally become a widely renowned and deeply feared figure in England, perhaps even as renowned and feared as the man for whom he had worked, Svein Forkbeard. So in 1012, Æthelred's best idea he can come up with to continue to figure out how he's going to defend his realm from Scandinavians is

is to renew the strategy that he'd managed to jettison in a genocidal and ethnic cleansing like fashion back in ten oh two to hire scandinavian mercenaries to do the job this time led by the main devil himself who'd wreaked havoc on his realm for the past three years

Thorkell the Tall, and who must have once again made the people in his realm shake their heads in befuddlement, like, not only are we not resisting the enemy, now we're hiring and paying the enemy to protect the very villages and towns that he himself had burnt.

There are lots of theories as to how Svein Forkbeard back in Denmark viewed all this. One theory is that he was scared that Thorkell the Tall was making too much money in England. You know, 48,000 pounds of silver will buy you a lot of mercenaries, and history has shown that sometimes, you know, powerful war leaders take those mercenaries, come back to Scandinavia and seize thrones when they do.

Or it might have been all part of the plan where Thorkell the Tall was laying the groundwork for something to happen that in more than 200 years of Viking attacks in England never could have happened before for a Scandinavian ruler to incorporate England into his realm. And the reason it couldn't happen before was there was...

an absolute deal-breaker involved in the earlier eras of viking attacks an impediment that had been removed relatively recently there was no way the anglo-saxons in england a christian people were going to stand for being ruled by a pagan warlord

but now the king of denmark was not a pagan warlord he was a christian king and this opened up the doors to possibilities that had never existed well for the entire time the viking wars had been going on earlier we had said that

You know, sometimes, especially amongst elite rulers, religion has a somewhat transactional sort of nature to it, right? It's not, you know, what are you going to do for my soul when I get to heaven and save me? It's a little bit more, you know, what are you going to do for me in the here and now? What have you done for me lately? And we talked about Constantine and how he had that dream that if you paint the Christian symbol on the shields of your soldiers in the morning, I'll, you know, give you victory in the battle, the Battle of the Melvian Bridge, by the way.

So that's not promising Constantine eternal salvation. It's promising a victory in the battle within the next 24 hours. That's very transactional. There's a little bit of that going on here too. And in his book, Canute the Great, historian Timothy Bolton sort of lays out what this means for someone who might want to conquer and actually rule a Christian country like Anglo-Saxon England. And he says, quote,

From the English perspective, Spain's Christianity must have set him apart from many previous Viking raiders and may have made him a more palatable figure to accept as an overlord. This was not an invading army whose leader could be baptized and sent home pacified once his men had been defeated or paid off.

as Alfred had done with Guthrum in 878, or Ethelred with Olaf Tryggvason in 994. Many of the rank and file of the forces must have retained pagan beliefs, or worshipped Christ only as one amongst a pantheon of gods.

but spain he writes was unequivocally christian and most probably traveled with a retinue that included chaplains so much of what we can now know as spain's invasion comes from the partisan voice of the writer of this section of the anglo-saxon chronicle who viewed his arrival as an inversion of all that was natural and right and one wonders whether other figures such as secular elites were more comfortable with him end quote

In the summer of 1013, the king of Denmark, Svein Forkbeard, leading his army in person, which was hugely unusual because normally a king in Scandinavia couldn't risk being away from Scandinavia for long periods of time without, you know, threats of a rebellion breaking out. But it is a sign of how much things have changed and how much of an organized country

sort of hierarchical Christian kingdom this has become, that just like many other Christian kings of what will be the future Middle Ages will do, he will lead his army in person, and it will not be a bunch of scattered war bands who make their money off the individual loot they pillage. John Heywood will describe them, his troops, as employees.

and Ian Howard will point out that this is not an army that hits and runs like a pirate force. It is a unified core of an army that marches around looking for the main force of the enemy so that it can defeat it in battle and conquer. St. Forkbeard is leading a fully medieval army as he looks for the King of England to become the King of England.

And upon his arrival in 1013, he does not attack this realm that he hopes to rule. He goes up to the north, to the areas that used to be dominated by the Danes, or now would be the descendants of Danes, where maybe there's a lot of sympathy for a Danish king.

lands and gives speeches to cheering crowds promising to bring stability and peace to the island and he is hailed where he lands as the new king of england he's brought his son something like 24 year old canute with him who he marries to the daughter of a local nobleman

He then advances his forces into another area known as the Five Boroughs, which is also part of the Dane law. They hail him as the new rightful ruler. And if you are Ethelred in London, behind the walls of that city, protected by the very Viking warlord who threatened your regime for the last three years, you must be subtly worried about this.

Svein treats the north gently when he crosses the traditional dividing line between the north and the rest of the kingdom. His army starts pillaging and looting, and the Anglo-Saxon chronicle says, doing every evil an army can do. So those areas start pillaging.

submitting to him and declaring that he's the rightful king eventually he attacks london where ethelred is hiding with his mercenaries and like almost all the people who have tried to attack london before this time svain forkbeard and his forces fail london's not the capital of anglo-saxon england but it is a very difficult town to take and svain doesn't take it either

But it is fascinating to notice the irony of the whole situation, as pointed out by Toreshaya in The Wolf Age, when he says, quote, It was a fundamentally absurd situation, a Danish king besieging London, which was being defended by a Danish warlord who had himself besieged London just three years earlier, end quote.

When he proves incapable of taking London, he simply takes his army west to places like Bath and that part of the country, and those people submit to him, which essentially means the entire country except London has declared surrender.

that they're willing to have this Danish leader be their king also, which leaves Æthelred in an untenable situation. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the people of London are becoming nervous that being the only people who haven't declared Svein Forkbeard their king, they're going to pay a horrible price when eventually they have to submit to reality and give in. So by hook or by crook, Æthelred decides he has to leave London.

And you will have this sad spectacle of the Anglo-Saxon king boarding Viking warships with his retinue of Viking mercenaries that up until recently were trying to overthrow his realm and were killing his people, but now are the only thing keeping him alive. As they leave London, head out to the sea, they will spend a what must have been unbelievably depressing Christmas on the Isle of Wight.

before heading to Normandy and exile, and Svein Forkbeard will enter London and be declared the king. The Vikings who attacked the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 never intended to conquer the island, but what an interesting 220 years it's been leading to this.

and if one wants to take the zoom out long view of things it's interesting that these scandinavians who started off as worshippers of odin and thor

were conquering a regime, the Anglo-Saxons, that were themselves originally conquerors of the British Isles who hailed from Denmark and northern Germany and that area who were themselves at the time worshippers of basically Odin and Thor. There's a circular sort of a rhythm to history sometimes and it's come full circle here.

spain forkbeard will only rule england for five weeks before he will mysteriously perhaps one might suggest die he won't even get to make it to his coronation ceremony there is a wonderfully

sort of almost retributionally and religiously romantic sort of an idea amongst some, that he was killed by a ghost, the ghost of Saint Edmund, the former English king, if you remember from part one of this story, that had been martyred, is the word, by Viking raiders and was now paying back this Danish king for what he went through by stabbing him with a ghostly lance and ending his life.

But Svein was in his 50s when he died and could have easily died from natural causes. One account has him crying out the name of his son as he passes away, saying, Canute, Canute. There is a postscript to this story, and it starts with Canute. The son of Svein Forkbeard will succeed him in

and become the king of England, but not without a fight against his father's former foes, because as my encyclopedia of military history puts it, the conflict in England during this time period is more like a civil war between the North and the South, the North being sort of the pro-Danish part of the British Isles and the South being more the pro-domestic part

royal family and after Svein dies the supporters of Æthelred ask him to come back out of exile come back to England if he will only rule them more justly they say I guess he promises to do that because he comes back but he's no different

They will manage to drive Canute out of England, send him back to Scandinavia where he raises another army and in 1016 comes back and there's a lot of fighting and Ethelred dies and his son Edmund Ironside continues the fight, fights like five battles with Canute before...

They're just all worn out and they decided to split the British Isles together. And then in a similar amount of time to how long Svein Forkbeard got to rule, Edmund Ironside dies too. And there was a deal between he and Canute that whoever died first left the kingdom to the other guy. And so Canute's the king. There is a rumor, would be a good way to put it, that...

Edmund Ironside's death was not completely natural and one scurrilous sort of report of his assassination occurring from below as he empties his bowels into what was basically an outhouse but there is no confirmation of this but the idea that it might not have been a natural death isn't very far-fetched at all

But what this means is Canute becomes the first of what will be called an Anglo-Danish dynasty. He rules a big chunk of Scandinavia and now England. And remember, all these places that the Scandinavians have been discovering for a long time now, Iceland in the late 900s, add Greenland to that. About 1,000, add parts of the New World. It's still unknown which parts, but certainly Newfoundland.

also maybe parts of Canada, maybe even the upper northeast of the United States. All this area was called Vinland by the Scandinavians.

And famously, the sagas talk about encounters between the Scandinavian settlers and the indigenous American population. They called them scraelings, which, of course, turned out to be, you know, as full of misunderstandings and violence as the later Colombian stuff would occur after 1492.

It's probably a bloody miracle you didn't get the other downsides of the Columbian Exchange with disease transfers and all that, but I've read some interesting theories on why that might have been, including the fact that there weren't very many Viking settlers and they were a long way from sort of, you know, where they would catch these diseases and spread them.

But Canute rules a realm which could probably be referred to as a sort of a northern empire, including, you know, Scandinavia, if not all of it, then most of it. England, Scotland, the islands around them, like the Orkneys and the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland, the parts of the New World. I mean, it's one of these things where the counterfactual could have seen a great northern empire lasting a long time.

If you look at a map, it looks like Ireland should be a part of any Scandinavian northern empire. But of course, as we mentioned earlier, nowhere did the Vikings get so sucked into the internal politics of a place as the way they got sucked into the Irish situation and became the poster children for those pieces of shrapnel that we mentioned earlier that get...

grown over and absorbed by societies and of course at the 1014 battle of klontarf the irish high king brian beru shuts the door on any suggestions that the vikings will dominate the emerald isle and include it in any larger scandinavian realm

Whether you can still call this the Viking Age depends on whose opinion you want to accept. There are multiple different endpoints and lots of historians, you know, ascribe to each of them. There's no right answer. Those of us who come from the English slash British tradition, which is many in America, that tradition usually has a very convenient and

cut and dried end date for the viking era and that is 1066 in 1066 of course harold hardrada in league with one of the claimants to the throne of england shows up in the north of england once again where usually there's quite a bit of danish sympathy land there with the intention of taking over the realm are met by the

English king of the day who defeats them and kills both Harold Hardrada and the other rival claimant to the throne in a battle that's called the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Those who know their history know that this same English king has to then quickly, as fast as he can go, run down to the opposite end of the British Isles to meet another invasion coming from across the English Channel by a guy named William the Bastard,

who will eventually be known as William the Conqueror because he will win the battle that happens, the Battle of Hastings, and take over England and lead a beginning of a new era in English history that is once again highlighted by the fact that this guy is the descendant of Scandinavian Vikings as well.

He is the leader of Normandy. Remember what that means? Land of the Northmen. He's the direct descendant of Rollo, the pirate king who's given that land and told to defend it from people like himself, right? The original poacher promoted to gamekeeper.

And it almost seems like one way or another, England was going to be ruled by some Scandinavian or Scandinavian offshoot, and all these battles were just to decide which of those offshoots it was going to be. It'll be the Normans.

I was interested in John Vidar Sigurdsson's estimation, and he says a completely rough estimation. He doesn't want to be tied to this, but about how many Scandinavians had been killed, raiding and settling and drowning all during the Viking Age.

And he said the very speculation type estimate he came up with is about 250,000 killed and another 250,000 either drowned or settling away from Scandinavia so that you essentially had half a million people killed.

gone from Scandinavian population roles at a time when there were probably a million Scandinavians overall. And he ties this into theories about the exalted status of women during the Viking era. You know, for example, if you don't have a lot of menfolk anymore, if a lot of the menfolk that you have returned to the country forever, uh,

maimed and crippled from their Viking endeavors, you have no choice but to take over a lot of the sorts of tasks men used to handle. And he compared it to how women in both world wars took over a lot of the tasks that men had done because the men were all fighting. It's a fascinating theory, but some of the other end points for the Viking age are connected to what makes the

a viking a viking and i'm in the camp of those who believe it has to do with the gods they worship right because so much of that is connected to the motivation for people acting the way they do right a lot of times you can figure out a lot about a culture by looking at the gods they worship and what those gods prioritize because people tend to want to please the deities and if the deities are

prioritize something like raiding and fighting and bravery and not running away in battle and all those sorts of things we normally associate with the Vikings, well then once they shift their allegiance from those gods to other gods, they turn into a different kind of culture. And whereas Svein Forkbeard and Canute and these rulers in Scandinavia are now all Christian by this time period, the people took a lot longer to convert.

John Vidara Sigurdsson had said that the Scandinavian religion was an elite religion and required the ruler to act as sort of the go-between between the people and the gods, which means if the leaders have changed their allegiance, it's like cutting the heads off of the faith in a sense. The people no longer have their direct connection to the deities, but it still takes a long time for the ways of traditional folk to be altered.

In Sweden, for example, the blood sacrifice temple at Uppsala won't be repurposed until the mid-1100s. And in his book, The Children of Ash and Elm, historian Neil Price says many people in Scandinavia still believe in aspects that he called the invisible population today. If not elves and dwarves and trolls, then maybe still that feminine aspect to our personalities that the Scandinavians also believed in.

Let's not pretend.

that the gods of the old Scandinavian Germanic pantheon didn't attempt to make a comeback. Remember, I compared them to the American bison, right? The buffalo at one time, they used to roam across a huge range of territory, everything north of the old Roman Empire, for example, and by the mid-1100s, they are confined to small areas around Sweden and some of these outcroppings of Scandinavian settlement areas

But that doesn't mean they don't occasionally make contact and try to entice some of the people that used to worship them back to the fold. I love a story that Scandinavian professor John Lindau, he's a professor in the Department of Scandinavian. In my book, it says he's at the University of California, Berkeley. He may or may not still be, but he wrote a book called Old Norse Mythology.

where he quotes from a saga where the protagonist, who's a Christian, finds himself about to take a dangerous sea voyage.

And all of a sudden, Thor comes to him in a dream. Thor is one of the gods that sort of protects people at sea, at least until the Christian god takes over. And Thor basically says to him, listen, you're about to go on a really tough journey. You sure you don't want to rethink this Christian thing and come back to the guy who can protect you at sea? And Lindau says, quote,

Shortly after his conversion, meaning the conversion of this Porgil's guy who is the protagonist, Thor begins to plague his dreams, upbraiding Porgil's for abandoning him. When Porgil's plans a journey from Iceland out to Greenland, Thor comes to him in a dream. Now, quoting from the saga...

"'He dreamt that a man came to him, large and red-bearded, "'and said, "'You've decided on a journey, and it will be difficult. "'The dream-man looked huge to him. "'It will go ill for you,' he said, "'unless you believe in me again. "'Then I will watch over you.' "'Thor Gil said he would never want his help again, "'and told him to go away as fast as his legs would take him. "'But my journey will go as Almighty God wills it.'

Then he thought that Thor led him to a certain crag, where ocean waves were dashing against the rocks. You will find yourself in such waves, and never get out, unless you return to me. No, said Thorgils, go away from me, you loathsome fiend. He will help me who redeemed us all with his blood. End quote. But we talked earlier about

about the Tinkerbell effect, right? This idea that if a lot of people believe in something, it has a power, even if that something might not be real. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, that are dreamt of in your philosophies, right? The Scandinavians, like a lot of earlier peoples, think about the

Achaeans that Homer talks about in the Iliad believe that lasting fame and your name never being forgotten is the true immortality. That's why you do all these great deeds. That's why you carve runes into stone so that these people's memory lives on and then they're not truly dead. They live on somewhere. I'm going to make the obvious point that more people know who Thor is today

than ever knew about him during all the ages when all the Germanic peoples everywhere worshipped him. If I estimated that a billion people knew who Thor was, that's more people than existed in probably all Germanic pagan existence added up together.

These gods live on in our days of the week. I mean, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, all named after members of the Aesir. Thursday is Thor's day. That's pretty easy, isn't it? So by the standards of the people who worshipped him, Thor has achieved a kind of an immortality. Well...

so far right so long as it lasts and maybe if we want to buy in for a minute to the ancient myths or prophecies of these germanic pagan peoples who worshiped a figure like thor we should be hopeful that he lasts a good long time because in the famous norse tale

that's recounted in the poetic Edda, I'm using the Jackson Crawford translation, by the way, Odin raises a witch from the dead so that he can question her about the beginnings and the end of the world. And she tells him about how things end.

the famous Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, where the gods and all the dead people that have been brought into Valhalla come out for the climactic last battle against the giants and the forces of chaos and all the monsters. Loki, for example, is aboard a ship raised from the depths of the ocean, constructed from the fingernails of everyone who's ever drowned, leading the giants against the gods

and in this climactic battle that the witch tells Odin about Odin dies but Odin's not the only one after Odin dies she tells about what happens to his son and then because of what happens to his son what happens to the rest of us and the witch in the poetic edit tells Odin quote

Then Thor comes, Earth's son, Odin's son, to fight the Midgard serpent. The protector of Midgard will kill that serpent in his rage. But all humankind will die out of the world when Thor falls after only nine steps, struck down by the venom of the honorless serpent. The sun turns black.

The earth sinks into the sea. The bright stars fall out of the sky. Flames scorch the leaves of Yggdrasil. A great bonfire reaches to the highest clouds. End quote. I've heard all sorts of suggestions of both natural and unnatural disasters that might manifest in

to create the conditions where that dead witch's prophecy is fulfilled. Everything from climate change to nuclear war to an asteroid striking the planet. But if we want to believe that dead witch's prophecy to Odin, as long as Thor continues to exist, we're all okay. If he's really the beneficiary of something like the Tinkerbell effect...

And as long as he's remembered, he continues to live on. Then the only way to kill Tinkerbell is for the people who believe in Tinkerbell to cease to exist. There's been no Ragnarok, no ending of things. But when dealing with things like immortals, we should remember that they operate on very long timelines. To the Norse and the ancient Germanic pagan peoples,

Ragnarok was an event in humanity's future. For all we know, it still is.

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