- 17/07/2025
Documentary, Vikings: Who Were The Vikings Part 1
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00:00York, founded by the Romans, by the 9th century AD, this was one of the great Christian cities
00:17of Anglo-Saxon England. But York had a shock coming, because in 866 AD, an entire army
00:26arrived here, turned the place Viking, and called it Jorvik. This city, and half of England
00:31besides, became part of Scandinavia. Today, even over a thousand years later, the image
00:41of the marauding Viking warrior is as strong as ever. Thank you. Especially up here. What
00:50we know, or think we know about the Vikings, is much more myth than reality. Even the famed
00:56horned helmets are a modern invention. So, just who were the Vikings?
01:04I'm going to find out the truth about the Vikings, leaving Britain behind to enter their land,
01:17and their own mysterious world. Even now, this place feels like it's on the edge of everything.
01:27It's going to take me all over Scandinavia. Do you have a map?
01:34And far beyond. These are Arabic dirhams, minted in places like Baghdad.
01:41And, as an archaeologist, I'll be seeking out some of the most telling evidence of all.
01:50The remains of ancient people.
01:52This flamboyant hairstyle just adds to his allure.
01:59And the stunning treasures they left behind.
02:02All to get inside the heads of the Vikings themselves.
02:11Oh, wow. How can that be a thousand years old?
02:16The real Vikings, from their point of view.
02:19To start my investigation, I've come to Norway.
02:42Smoked salmon.
02:49In particular, Bergen.
02:52A port that faces the wild Atlantic Ocean.
02:59If I'm going to understand the origins of the Vikings, then this is the place to start.
03:03Because at the end of the 8th century, it's likely that the ships carrying those first raiders set out from this coastline.
03:14It's hard to imagine that it was from here, 1200 or so years ago, that so much terror was unleashed.
03:21But, this is how I wanted to feel at the beginning of this journey.
03:27So that I could try and understand this seismic moment in European history.
03:33From the Viking point of view.
03:35The Vikings weren't just savage pirates, but sophisticated traders.
03:48Who crisscrossed the known world, running silks and silver, as well as slaves and stolen booty.
03:57Epic adventurers who voyaged to the exotic cities of Asia and the unknown mysteries of America.
04:06While much of dark age Europe had been shaped by the civilising influence of Rome.
04:15Up here in Scandinavia, the Vikings had emerged from a distinctive, in fact, a unique culture.
04:22They were untainted by concepts like the written law and life in towns.
04:28Far less by belief in a Christian God.
04:30The Vikings bequeathed to us a part of our cultural DNA that's wilder, darker, more mysterious than anything that was to be had from Rome.
04:43And it wasn't just what they did that made them dangerous.
04:47It was what they thought.
04:49And what they believed.
04:51Right here, in Bergen, are some of the preserved remains of one of the very earliest Vikings ever found.
05:05Although, it has to be said, they're not exactly in the best of shape.
05:11These poor fragments are all that remains of the skeleton of a man.
05:23These are arm bones, and these are parts of one leg.
05:33Alongside him were grave goods, including his sword.
05:38So it's safe to say that he was a warrior.
05:47But what's remarkable about him, what's fascinating, is that this individual is the first that we know of to have been buried in true classic Viking style.
05:59He was buried inside a Viking ship that was intended to take him to the afterlife, to Valhalla, where he would feast and fight alongside the Norse gods themselves.
06:13He was a sea-born warrior.
06:17He would have been carrying the responsibility and the expectations of his family, who would be hoping that he would return richer, more famous, with a great reputation that would change not just his life, but theirs.
06:32A Viking wasn't only something you were, but something you did.
06:36To go a Viking was to head out into the open seas in search of adventure.
06:48Their transport was a technological miracle, the notorious Viking longboat, an icon of an entire age.
07:06From Bergen, it's just a short hop to Norway's capital, Oslo.
07:16Resting place of the finest Viking ship ever unearthed.
07:20Like our man, it dates from the very beginning of the Viking age.
07:35This stunning craft is the Ouseberg ship.
07:41It's certainly the most famous Viking ship we have.
07:46And to my eyes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most beautiful.
07:53This was once one of the most sophisticated ships in the world.
07:57The epitome of technological brilliance and maritime audacity.
08:08The ship itself is the work of many craftsmen, but here in this carving is the imagination and the skill of just one artist, one person.
08:21It's this exciting, vivid depiction of a dragon or sea serpents twisted together, biting tails.
08:33The scales on the skin are picked out with these carefully etched lines.
08:38And while it's one thing to be handed an object that you can hold in your hand
08:42and be told this is a thousand or twelve hundred years old.
08:48It's of another order of magnitude to stand beneath something like this.
08:55This says that the Vikings were real people with huge ambition.
09:03This is just one of hundreds or thousands of ships built during the Viking age.
09:07This is what the Vikings were capable of.
09:20The Vikings may well have burst into our British history in a blizzard of flashing axes.
09:27But the culture that gave rise to them certainly didn't appear out of a clear blue sky.
09:32Instead, they were the product of thousands of years of cultural evolution.
09:38They were shaped by their land, by the sea and by countless generations of Scandinavian proto-Vikings.
09:47And it's only by understanding the world of their most distant ancestors that we can hope to dig down to their real roots.
09:56To distill the very Viking essence, if you like.
10:01And to see why and how the terrifying phenomenon of the Vikings ever came to be.
10:08To discover the very earliest roots of the Vikings, I'm leaving Oslo behind and heading east to the very heart of the Baltic.
10:25It's taking me 450 miles from Norway to a Swedish island called Gotland.
10:36To really get to grips with the Vikings, to have any chance of seeing who they were and where they came from, you have to dig down towards the roots of the world that bore them.
10:49And that means going all the way back to prehistoric Scandinavia.
10:55And I can tell you, there's some pretty strange stuff down there.
10:58The streamlined longboat was key to everything the Vikings achieved.
11:13And the very beginning of the longboat's story can be found here in the Baltic, on Gotland.
11:19Joachim Veilen is a local archaeologist who's promised to help me find some ancient rock carvings.
11:30The only trouble is, they're submerged and in winter also stuck under a lot of ice.
11:38And to make matters even worse, it's getting dark.
11:41It's getting dark.
11:49This is exactly what they tell you not to do in all the warning films.
11:55Exactly.
11:57It's not...
12:01Oh, how frustrating. I mean, they're just...
12:04You can... I can see them.
12:06Honestly.
12:07Yeah?
12:08I've got... Yeah, yeah, yeah, I can.
12:10I can see it.
12:13You see there, the dark.
12:15There's the line of the boat.
12:16There it is.
12:17You can see the curving hull.
12:19It's there.
12:20Amazing.
12:21Yeah, it is.
12:23It's really cool, actually.
12:24That's great.
12:26Effectively, what we've got is a sunken bronze age rock carving.
12:30It's great.
12:33Just amazing.
12:38I suppose the obvious question is, why is that rock art here?
12:41Because it feels like the middle of nowhere.
12:44Yeah, today it's the nowhere, but back in the bronze age, I think this is a meeting place.
12:49People gathering around here.
12:50You see the open landscape.
12:52You have high points all over here.
12:54And would, in the bronze age, would the sea have been closer and therefore easier to see?
12:57Yeah, the sea would have been closer and also there was a fresh water lake just next to see the remains just fine.
13:06So this is the only place for fresh water at the time.
13:09And so if it was a place that mattered because people were accustomed to coming here to talk or to trade or whatever, then it would have made sense to make carvings in the rock here.
13:21Exactly.
13:22If you look at the rock arts that's made on the mid-eastern part of Sweden, it is the same kind of rock art.
13:32There's something symbolic about something from so long ago being trapped under the ice.
13:38Rock carvings have been found all over Scandinavia, going back thousands of years into the Iron Age and beyond.
13:51And there's a very definite recurring theme.
13:55I can see right away the ships with people in them, with a crew.
14:00Yes, people with weapons, swords and answers.
14:04And the ships are actually really good. There's quite a lot of detail coming up at the bow and then you've even got a serpent head at the bow of the ship.
14:16And sometimes it looks almost like you can see the direction of it.
14:20So the people who are making the carvings, you kind of get a sense of how familiar they are with ships.
14:27Because there's detail and a real familiarity with the shape.
14:34The rock carvings are stunning.
14:37But they're not the only remains that testify to the Vikings' ancient, seafaring routes.
14:41Very evocative.
14:45Next morning, and still on Gotland, I'm searching out more evidence of the earliest maritime ancestors of the Vikings.
15:05What I've come to see here is much, much older than these trees.
15:12But the fact that it's partly concealed by a forest just adds another layer of mystery.
15:18It kind of sets you up for the expectation that you're about to see something magical.
15:23This vast monument is called the Stone Ship of Ansarve.
15:46And it's around 3,000 years old.
15:56Anyone coming here couldn't help but be struck by its sheer scale.
16:01I've walked into lots of stone circles in my time, but nothing like this.
16:10In a stone circle, you never quite know how to feel.
16:13You don't really know for sure what you're being told.
16:16But you come in here, and without anyone saying a word, you know exactly what this is.
16:21Like Britain's stone circles, the purpose of ancient ship monuments is mysterious.
16:38Many are graves, but not all.
16:41Every one of them, though, testifies to the symbolic importance of the sea.
16:50To the people who lived on Gotland long before the Viking Age.
16:57It's such a Baltic thing to do.
17:00You don't get ship settings in France or in Britain.
17:04But you get them here.
17:06Lots and lots of them.
17:11The prehistory of Scandinavia was dominated by the sea.
17:20With its rugged coastline of fjords and inlets,
17:24it was often much easier to travel by sea than over land.
17:31In the Baltic Sea alone, there are over 50,000 islands.
17:36Convenient stopping-off points.
17:37Service stations or lay-bys, if you like, along an ancient maritime motorway.
17:46It was these ancient maritime skills that evolved into the sea-going prowess of the Vikings.
17:53Their daring raids and their great, epic voyages.
17:57The ancestors of the Vikings had the salt of the sea running through their veins.
18:06But they were also a people who were shaped by their land.
18:11When you travel through Scandinavia, you begin to realise just how huge and varied a land the Vikings inhabited.
18:23From the cold northern mountains of Norway, where arable land was scarce.
18:33All the way down to the fertile plains of Denmark and the south.
18:37Travel in prehistoric Scandinavia might have been dominated by the sea.
18:45But survival depended on the land.
18:49How successfully you could tend animals and grow crops.
18:53The geography of Scandinavia provides for many different landscapes and many different climates.
19:07And people living in different parts are affected in different ways.
19:10In the far north, where the soils are thin and the winters are long and dark, it's very difficult to grow crops.
19:18It's even a challenge to keep animals.
19:20But in the south, especially during the Bronze Age, the time when people were making those ship carvings,
19:26there was actually an economic surplus.
19:29There was plenty of good grazing and the land was good for many crops.
19:40Having visited the coasts of Norway and Sweden, I'm now heading for Denmark and its capital, Copenhagen.
19:48Because just a hundred miles from here, there's a remarkable sight that reveals how Bronze Age people thrived off the fertile land of the south.
19:57Three and a half thousand years ago, this place was an important settlement of wealthy farmers.
20:12These are the burial mounds of Borum Eshoy and they were built between 1400 and 1300 years BC.
20:20At that time, there were more than 40 mounds in this area alone.
20:28And 45,000 dotted right across Denmark.
20:33One of the many extraordinary things about these mounds is the effort, the colossal effort it takes to build them.
20:43And it's estimated that when this was first completed, it was eight times as big.
20:47To build one of these, you need 150 people working flat out for three or four months.
21:02So whoever commissioned it had to have resources to organise those people, to feed those people and to give them the tools for the job.
21:09But all of this is and was rich farming land. It provides surplus grain and surplus animals.
21:17So the families who were buried in mounds like these weren't just trying to survive off the land, they had control over it.
21:25These mounds suggest that the people here enjoyed a relatively good life, especially compared to the tougher conditions of the north.
21:36But wherever you lived, north or south, surviving a Scandinavian winter wasn't easy.
21:43Experimental archaeologists working here have created an exact replica of the houses these Bronze Age farmers would have lived in.
22:00And since I've come here in February, it's just the right time to get a taste for the winter food their lives depended on.
22:13My guide is food expert Bea Scarrop.
22:22You know, it's all very well for us in the 21st century, but what kind of challenges faced Bronze Age farmers as the long dark nights of winter set in?
22:31The most important thing was to get enough provisions to get you through the winter.
22:38If you were completely starved in the spring, you couldn't, you know, start working with the land and that was very important.
22:46And is there anything interesting to drink in the Bronze Age?
22:49Yes, definitely. And I've made some for you.
22:52I was hoping you'd say that.
22:53The residue of this drink was found in a bark bucket in a burial mound.
23:03So it's malted wheat, honey, a bark myrtle to give a bit of bitterness and cranberries.
23:12Slangevar.
23:14Skull.
23:15That's fantastic.
23:22That really is. It just tastes like fruit juice.
23:25Yes.
23:27But that's a fermented...
23:28It is, yes.
23:30And so that would last.
23:31It would.
23:32Yeah, that would see you through a winter's night, wouldn't it?
23:34Yes.
23:36Fermented drinks may have kept the cold at bay, but more of a problem was keeping food through the winter.
23:43Especially meat.
23:45Meat.
23:46I brought some meat, marinated in whey.
23:49What sort of meat is that?
23:51It's pork.
23:52Right.
23:53And that's, that is edible now, just having been soaked or sat in quay.
24:01Now you're not just having me on, are you?
24:02No, I'm not.
24:03Okay.
24:04It's got all the texture, but it only tastes very faintly of meat.
24:11Mm-hmm.
24:12But, you know.
24:16But then I do like raw meat.
24:18I've always been drawn that way.
24:23Preparing for winter.
24:25Surviving it.
24:26Together.
24:28It's such a shared human experience for anyone in Northern Europe.
24:33I remember speaking to a woman in Shetland once and asking her how she coped with the winter.
24:39And she said she enjoyed it and looked forward to it.
24:41And I asked her why.
24:42And she said the satisfaction was preparing for it and feeling proof against the winter.
24:48And so the people here in the Bronze Age, they would have been making plans for the winter, laying down supplies.
24:58And as well as making sure they had the basics of life, they were finding time to prepare, you know, a few barrels of fermented drinks so that, as well as surviving, they could also take the edge off and enjoy themselves as well.
25:11So they'd been here with their extended families, with the animals for extra warmth.
25:17And if they had got their plans right and they pulled together, then they would survive.
25:22And having survived the winter like that, then I'm sure it would make the spring and the summer that followed that bit sweeter.
25:29Having eaten like a Viking ancestor, I'm going to spend the night like one in the moonlit shadow of those ancient mounds.
25:40Now, you can read all the books you want, but the only way to even get close to having a Bronze Age experience is to do it.
25:57And hopefully these sheepskins will make all the difference.
26:03I don't suppose there were many occasions when a Bronze Age person had a knight to him or herself inside a house like this.
26:17They would have been with their family almost all of the time.
26:22In Britain, Bronze Age people lived in round houses.
26:29But over here, the rectangular timber houses of Borum Eshoi were the direct ancestors of the Viking longhouses that would appear 2,000 years later.
26:41Well, there we go.
26:54I have to report, first of all, that despite all my best intentions to report throughout the night, I fell asleep.
27:04All I can really say is that it was warm enough, and here I am.
27:15I've survived by Bronze Age winter's night.
27:19It's quite good, really.
27:21Incredibly, it's even possible to get a glimpse of the very inhabitants of Borum Eshoi themselves.
27:42In Copenhagen, an entire 3,000 year old family from the settlement has been carefully preserved.
27:51This is the mum.
28:06What's most moving of all to me is the preservation of the clothing that she was put into after she died.
28:14She's wearing a short-sleeved wool and blouse.
28:17The lower half of her body is covered by this perfectly preserved folded blanket or skirt also of wool.
28:24And you can't resist the possibility that if you could somehow bring someone back who was there that day,
28:32they could look at this and recognize her and know who she was.
28:37And this splendid individual is the sun.
28:52The fact that his hair has been preserved, this flamboyant hairstyle, just adds to his allure.
29:00And you get this sense, looking at how he's styled himself, that there is just a trace of his personality in there as well.
29:11But it's the husband and father, whose remains are the most telling of all.
29:21Everything about this guy says big man.
29:29The size of him, his musculature, the mass of his bones, all of his life he had access to a good diet.
29:36That in itself suggests wealth.
29:40His fingernails were neatly manicured so that he was the kind of man who had the time to take care of his appearance.
29:48He lived to be around 60 years old, which is a good age really by any standards.
29:54In life and in death, he was the centre of the family.
29:59It's clear that in Denmark and the south, the Bronze Age ancestors of the Vikings lived a good life.
30:13But the further north you lived, the progressively tougher things must have become for anyone trying to farm the land.
30:20For the Vikings themselves, 2,000 years later, the varied geography of their lands would shape very different destinies.
30:37Scandinavia was always a land divided.
30:41In the south, there was plentiful farmland and relative affluence.
30:45But the north was always a different, a tougher prospect.
30:50There was land available, but it was limited.
30:54A lot of it around the sides of and at the necks of the fjords.
30:58So perhaps it's no surprise that of all the Vikings, it was the Norwegians who ventured furthest.
31:05In search of, quite literally, pastures new.
31:09Where a man wasn't just wedged in between the mountains and the sea.
31:16But of course, we know that the Vikings weren't just expert sailors and skilled shipbuilders.
31:26They were also warriors.
31:29Even by the standards of the Dark Ages, the Vikings were especially adept when it came to the messy business of killing.
31:37And again, it was something deeply rooted in their Scandinavian past.
31:45To discover the origins of the Vikings' natural talent for bloody combat.
31:54And moving on from the peaceful farmers of Bronze Age Jutland to later and much more violent times.
32:01The Iron Age.
32:06This is the Hurt Spring boat.
32:08And it's one of the most famous seagoing vessels that you will ever lay eyes on.
32:25I've seen lots of photographs of this over the years, but they can't do it justice.
32:32It's a bit like if you've only ever seen a Hollywood star in movies and magazines.
32:36And then one day you find yourself standing next to them.
32:39And all at once you have to deal with their physical presence as well.
32:42So it's like that in here for me.
32:46The Hurt Spring boat dates to around 350 BC.
32:48That's around 1,000 years after our Bronze Age family.
32:54But still 1,000 years before the first Viking raids.
32:57About a third of it was recovered.
32:58Enough to allow its shape to be recreated as a metal frame.
33:00Cradling its precious timbers.
33:01The Hurt Spring boat dates to around 350 BC.
33:03That's around 1,000 years after our Bronze Age family.
33:08But still 1,000 years before the first Viking raids.
33:14About a third of it was recovered.
33:20Enough to allow its shape to be recreated as a metal frame.
33:24Cradling its precious timbers and revealing a form that was perfect for war.
33:33One of the most important things to notice about the Hurt Spring boat
33:36is that it's beautifully symmetrical.
33:39It has an up-thrusting prow at this end and exactly the same at the other.
33:47There's room for about two dozen men.
33:50Each using paddles like these.
33:52These are made from maple wood.
33:55And they could fairly get it skipping along through the water.
33:58Now, because it's got the prow at each end,
34:04it means as soon as you beach it, you're already in position
34:07to go back out into the water as soon as you want.
34:10Why is that important?
34:11Because the Hurt Spring boat is designed for a quick getaway.
34:23We know that this very boat experienced bloody battle.
34:25When it was discovered, it was packed with shields, swords and spears.
34:32All the weapons of a small army.
34:37Men like these were well practiced in war and seaborne raiding a thousand years before the first true Viking raid.
34:48And so the Vikings didn't just spring out of nowhere, fully formed.
34:51Instead, they were the product, the evolution of a dynamic and often violent history.
34:58All across Scandinavia there were tribes with their own identities and territories and allegiances.
35:05And they learned to fight, first of all, by fighting each other.
35:08Warriors like those who paddled the Hurt Spring boat were the forefathers of the true Vikings.
35:15They were the seeds from which the Vikings grew.
35:22The Iron Age was a violent time right across Europe.
35:28And Scandinavia was no exception as local tribes 2,000 years ago tussled for power.
35:38But as they did so, another force was on the move.
35:43The Romans.
35:47The southern edge of Denmark is as close as the Scandinavian world ever came to the might of Rome.
35:56And the presence of the Roman Empire would play its own part in how the Vikings came to be.
36:01Rome had seemed unstoppable, but in 9 AD an event occurred that was to send shockwaves throughout Europe.
36:09And it even had implications for the far north and Scandinavia.
36:15About 250 miles to the south of modern day Denmark, in the dense woodland of northern Germany,
36:21Rome's northern army was brought to an abrupt halt by an alliance of local Germanic tribes.
36:27Three legions of Roman soldiers, around 32,000 men, were lured deep into the Tutenberg forest.
36:36And there, annihilated.
36:42It marked the end of Roman expansion into northern Europe.
36:46Scandinavia was, and would always remain, outside the empire.
36:49The halting of Rome brought another level of division between the north and the south.
37:02Now, as well as their different geographies, you could add a divergent economic landscape as well.
37:11This land, Denmark, and the rest of Scandinavia, was never ruled by Rome.
37:17But the Roman Empire had an insatiable appetite for exotic goods from the north.
37:23Animal furs, oils, and this stuff, amber.
37:27It's relatively common in Denmark and Norway, but it's extremely rare in the Mediterranean.
37:34And the Romans loved it for making jewellery.
37:37All of this meant trade, and trade meant new wealth for a few people.
37:42And a desire for luxury goods from the empire.
37:45The sort of stuff that only Rome could provide.
37:47And that only the rich and powerful could afford.
38:04Many Roman discoveries in Scandinavia are of simple pottery, or occasionally coins.
38:09But some finds have been spectacular.
38:22This is the Hobie burial horde.
38:25It was found in the grave of a chieftain.
38:29A man aged somewhere between 40 and 60 years old.
38:32We don't know how he died, but this collection that went into the ground with him, tells us a lot about what he had achieved in life.
38:44It's the kind of banqueting set that you would normally expect a high-ranking Roman official to have.
38:52It's a wonder to behold.
38:55It's so rich and elegant.
38:56But the piece de resistance are two solid silver cups, each weighing about a kilogram.
39:03Now the originals are a way being conserved and analysed, but what I have here, what I'm allowed to handle, are two replicas.
39:13What they show are various scenes from Homer's Iliad.
39:18This lavish collection was handed over to a man who could appreciate Roman finery.
39:27Who was schooled enough in Roman ways to understand classical stories from the classical world.
39:38It's telling that nothing of this magnificence has ever been found in the far north.
39:48Scandinavia always remained outwith the Roman Empire, and it's important to remember that when thinking about how the countries here developed.
40:01We take it for granted, in the English part of Britain at least, that Rome brought more than the legions.
40:08It brought towns and roads, public entertainments.
40:14Towards the end of the period, it brought Christianity as well.
40:18But more than that, Rome brought literacy and the rule of law.
40:22You can quite justifiably argue that the Romans brought the time of our prehistory to an end.
40:28But none of that happened here.
40:31There were no towns, there was no literacy, there were no new religions.
40:35Right through the Roman period and the Viking Age itself.
40:39An extra thousand years of being left alone.
40:42And that made all the difference.
40:45Because here was a culture that was left to do what it wanted.
40:50People who were left to do what they wanted to do.
40:53Their own way of being.
40:55They had their own leaders, their own gods.
40:56And so, in that light, perhaps it comes as no surprise that when those first Viking raiders attacked a remote Northumbrian monastery, they felt they had nothing to fear from a Christian god.
41:09Because he was obviously no match for Odin and Thor.
41:13Shipbuilding skills and warrior prowess gave the Vikings the means to terrorize the Christian world.
41:26But it was the Norse gods that defined their Viking spirit.
41:34Sagas written in the 13th century give us a unique insight into beliefs that can be traced right back to the Vikings prehistoric ancestors.
41:47They believe in a pantheon of gods, but the main god was Thor.
41:56Thor is the strongest of all gods, which means Thor is the strongest of all the gods.
42:03Because I remember, as a little boy, from the comics I was reading, knowing about Thor, is it true?
42:09I mean, he had the hammer, he had the belt of power.
42:12Yes.
42:13Is all that in the old versions?
42:14Yes.
42:15Yes.
42:16Thor á þrjá kost grepi.
42:18Eitnir hammer in Mjölnir.
42:21Which means Thor has three special objects.
42:24One is the hammer Mjölnir.
42:26I remember mighty Mjölnir.
42:29Does Mjölnir mean anything?
42:30As a name, does it have a sense of something powerful in the name?
42:33Yes, it means, it designates the crushing power that he has.
42:39It says that the giants are well familiar with the hammer, because Thor is always crushing, crushing their skulls with it.
42:45There is the girdle of might, obviously.
42:48That's not quite so catchy, is it?
42:51Eitnir á þrjá kost grepi.
42:54Mjölnir.
42:55So when he puts on this girdle, his strength doubles.
43:00And he gets a much neater waist.
43:03Probably as well.
43:05Is Thor top of the tree, top god?
43:11Well, he's among the top gods, but probably the highest one is Odhin.
43:17And as it says here, he is the highest and most glorious of the gods that we know of.
43:23And so he's the one who is worshipped by chieftains and kings.
43:31Unlike Christianity, Viking belief wasn't so much about an immortal soul, but an immortal reputation.
43:40They didn't really care about the afterlife.
43:44They wanted glory and honour in this life.
43:48And then it says in Hávamál, the sayings of Odin,
43:52They are fear, they are friends, they are viner, they are sjálfur is sama.
43:58Your cattle will die, your friends will die, you'll die.
44:01And ærstýr, they are aldrei kveimur sér góðan gétur.
44:05Your reputation will never die if you get a good one.
44:09That's why they weren't afraid of dying in battle with courage and honour.
44:15The worst thing that could happen to a Viking was to be said a coward.
44:25The end of the Roman Empire, early in the 5th century, saw Scandinavia standing on the brink of the Viking Age.
44:32A final piece of the jigsaw was the emergence of bigger regional leaders.
44:44Heading back to Sweden, 40 miles north of Stockholm,
44:48there's evidence of a consolidation of power across ever greater areas of land.
45:02Stretching away ahead of me are the burial mounds of Gamla Uppsala.
45:08They were built sometime between around 550 AD and 700 AD.
45:14That's a time after the Romans, but before the coming of the Vikings.
45:24These mounds seem truly vast, even compared to those of Bronze Age Denmark 2,000 years earlier.
45:32And crucially, these were only built for a very select few.
45:38We'll never know exactly who was buried here.
45:42The pyres, the funeral bonfires that raged here and that these mounds were built on top of,
45:47burned so intensely that nothing survived to be buried except some charred human bone and some melted grave goods.
45:55But whoever they were, the people who could command this kind of burial
45:58were certainly amongst the wealthiest and the most powerful in all of Scandinavia.
46:02And they wielded power all across the land.
46:05The mounds were built one after the other, during a period lasting a hundred years, maybe more.
46:14So it's tempting to think about a dynasty, a royal lineage.
46:19One family retaining control generation after generation.
46:23So the people buried in these mounds might be the very first kings and queens.
46:28In the shadow of these mounds, evidence has even been found of an ancient royal palace.
46:37Archaeologist John Younquist has found some remarkable remains that revealed just how lavish a palace it once was.
46:56Here we got two, two of the spirals that we find on the doors of the hall.
47:21Oh, look at that.
47:23Oh, fantastic.
47:24I mean, there would have been a longer bit as well, extending.
47:28Yeah, but we would have had a tang going like this.
47:32Ah, okay.
47:33It's unfortunate it's broken on this one.
47:35Take it away.
47:36Take it from me.
47:38And what else?
47:40Oh, so that would have been, that would have been all as one?
47:46Yeah, absolutely.
47:47Absolutely.
47:48Oh, that's amazing.
47:49You get that sense that it's not just a functional building, it's been decorated to be stunning.
47:56It's when you see these beautifully crafted, beautifully wrought finishing touches that you realise it wasn't just a big hall.
48:03It was the best hall, finished to the highest standards.
48:07Absolutely.
48:08It is a fantastic house.
48:10I've never seen anything similar.
48:14The fine ironwork adorned huge timber doors to an interior that would have both impressed and intimidated visitors.
48:22The inside would be huge.
48:26It's like a living room, 200 square meters big.
48:29Yeah.
48:30And the walls have been whitewashed.
48:33So it's not like a smoky, really dark age.
48:36It's really a very nice palace with white, shiny, nice walls.
48:41I wonder how they maintained it, because there would have been big fires inside as well.
48:45Yeah.
48:46So they'd have to be constantly whitewashed in the inside.
48:49Yeah, yeah, yeah.
48:50Yeah, absolutely.
48:52This was the royals, the princess reception rooms, the reception area.
49:00And it's the lofty position that it has in the landscape, down to those fields, is way below us.
49:08So the working people are literally beneath us, and we are above everybody else.
49:14Just over there, of course, they've got the presence of their ancestors buried in these mines.
49:21They've got people.
49:22Yeah.
49:23So that they can say, this is ours, and I can prove that because my father was here and his father was here.
49:29Yeah.
49:34Gamla Uppsala is one of the most important pre-Viking sites in all of Scandinavia.
49:43It reveals a new centralisation of power in the east.
49:46The first people who are not just chiefs, but regional kings and queens.
49:54But it's important for another reason too, because this place was also a centre of a very violent religion.
50:02A reminder that this world was very different to the emerging Christian kingdoms, beyond the borders of the Viking world.
50:09There are disturbing reports of ritual sacrifice, of nine males, of every living creature, dogs, horses, even men,
50:24being taken to a nearby grove, and their dead bodies hung up on the branches, where they were left to rot together.
50:30Archaeologists working hereabouts are tempted to think that this might be the location where it all went on.
50:43Now, all over the trees here, there are little runes, little offerings of little bits of jewellery and ribbons.
50:50Here, someone's even made and brought in a plaster cast of Thor's hammer.
50:57So, even after all this time, this place matters on some level to all sorts of people.
51:04Evidence of exactly what went on here has been lost, but one extremely rare pagan find has been unearthed nearby.
51:19The object is a clue as to why the people of Scandinavia were so different from those living in the rest of Europe.
51:34It's a bronze pendant. Once upon a time, it would have been worn around the neck of a woman,
51:41who lived sometime towards the end of the 7th century.
51:44It's quite obviously a horse, but this is no ordinary horse.
51:50This is the mount of Odin himself, one of the most important and powerful of the old pagan gods.
51:58This is Old Norse. The woman who wore this didn't believe in one god. She believed in many.
52:15After a journey that's taken me all over Scandinavia, I'm coming back to Oslo.
52:25And to the Ossiburg ship that also played its part in Viking belief.
52:29Because this vessel wasn't only to be used to ferry the living, but also the dead.
52:42Viking funerals, at least for the high and mighty, were massive, elaborate affairs, with rituals lasting maybe weeks at a time.
52:52Of course, the dead had to be placed aboard, because it was them who were making the journey.
53:00And then around them would be heaped all of the things that they might need and want in the next life.
53:05So, sumptuous clothes, jewellery for display, food and drink.
53:11And also, and importantly, there was usually an element of sacrifice.
53:17And so, dogs, maybe hunting dogs, and also lap dogs and pets, would be killed and put beside their owners.
53:25In this instance, as many as fifteen horses were slaughtered and laid out for use in the next world.
53:34And you have to imagine the impact that that would have had on the people who were watching.
53:40For one thing, it was a display of wealth beyond their reach.
53:45This only happened to the few.
53:46And they would see all the valuables going in, then the animals being killed and put alongside.
53:55It would have stayed with those spectators for a lifetime.
53:59And they, in turn, would have passed stories about what they had seen down through the generations.
54:05So whoever went into the next life aboard this ship would never be forgotten.
54:10When I look out into the Atlantic from here, I feel a great deal of respect, if not downright admiration, for the people who embarked on their journeys.
54:30I don't think they were driven by greed, far less bloodlust.
54:35Instead, I think the motivations were ambition and opportunity.
54:38They were living at a time when the populations of Europe were expanding.
54:43But here in Norway, beautiful though it is, space is finite.
54:47There's a limit to how much good land there is available to expand into.
54:52So who could blame some of them when they knew that out there was plenty of land, as well as gold and silver, that might be acquired?
55:00I've seen how, over thousands of years, a strange and unique Scandinavian culture gave rise to the Viking Age.
55:16But when the magnificent Ossiburg ship burial was unearthed, it contained an unexpected twist in the tale.
55:29As an archaeologist, I tend to spend a lot of my time talking about powerful men.
55:40But when the Ossiburg ship was excavated, the big surprise was that it contained two women.
55:47And these are the remains of one of them.
55:51In fact, the older of the two.
55:53We can tell that this venerable lady was perhaps as much as 80 years old when she died.
56:06And it was cancer of some sort that finally claimed her.
56:11But beyond those two certainties, we know very little about this woman or about the other woman that she was buried alongside.
56:24The remains of a high-status woman is another reminder that the Vikings weren't all about warrior men.
56:32And analysis of the second woman makes things even more complicated.
56:37While there's every reason to believe that the older woman was Scandinavian born and bred,
56:44analysis of DNA taken from the younger woman's skeleton at least allows for the possibility that she was from as far away as the Middle East.
56:54So that by as early as the end of the 8th century, the Vikings were doing much more than just cause trouble for their neighbours,
57:01like the people in the British Isles.
57:03They had contacts into the East, into Eastern Europe.
57:13I started out on the Atlantic coast wanting to discover how the Vikings came to be.
57:18But even the possibility that the younger Ossiburg woman came from so far away is the beginning of a whole new story.
57:32After thousands of years, the age of Vikings had begun.
57:35No borders or boundaries could contain them.
57:39And the oceans and rivers gave them unlimited access throughout the known world and beyond.
57:46Next time, the Vikings go east, building a vast trade network of luxuries.
57:59Silk was so valuable, it made the perilous river journeys to get here more than worthwhile.
58:04And slaves.
58:08These are slave callers.
58:11You can imagine the humiliation of having something like this placed around your neck.
58:17And beginning a process of colonisation that was the beginning of a Viking Empire.
58:22By marrying the locals, their blood mixed with our blood.
58:28And they're still here with us today.
58:38We're down on the wartime farm here on BBC HD at eight o'clock on Thursday.
58:42But next this evening, never mind the Vikings, we've a Celts with a voice like silk.
58:48Stay with us for The Rob Brydon Show.
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