Script AD 793. Raiders appear without warning off England’s east coast. They land at Lindisfarne, known as Holy Island, where they slaughter monks, steal treasure and holy relics… then vanish back across the dark sea.
It was western Europe’s first traumatic encounter with the Vikings. For three centuries, these pagan pirates from Scandinavia terrorised Europe, raiding, extorting, enslaving… and ultimately, conquering. They roamed deep into Russia and the Mediterranean, even daring to attack what they called Miklagard, ‘the great city’, Constantinople.
Viking longships, and a mastery of seamanship and navigation, gave them the ability to strike at will, with the element of surprise. But their enemies, including Anglo-Saxons and Franks, themselves belonged to proud warrior cultures. Was there something more, that gave the Vikings their lethal edge?
Professor Tom Shippey is an expert in Viking history and medieval literature. He believes their success can be attributed, in part, to a unique mindset… A mindset revealed in the Vikings’ own sagas. We have a great many sagas, written in the Vikings’ own language which is Old Norse.
There’s the famous Sagas of Icenlanders, but there’s also Konungasögur, that’s Sagas of Kings; there’s Fornaldarsögur, Sagas of Old times. These are looked on with suspicion these days because they were written hundreds of years later, mostly in far-off Iceland. And people say “oh well, can’t rely on those for history, they’re fiction!
” Well actually a lot of it is fiction, and some of it’s fairy tale, and you can pick that out quite easily. But a lot of it isn’t fiction. I think it’s based on family memory, and people who can’t read and write often have good memories and they take memories seriously, and they pass them on.
Leaving the fact or fiction question aside, they do all express, I think, a very characteristic and consistent attitude, which I call ‘the Viking mindset’. And that’s really quite distinctive. Two of the distinctive things about it are the fascination with scenes of death, with famous death songs, with famous last stands, all that kind of thing.
The other is the very characteristic sense of humour, which I call, I’m afraid… it’s not good sense of humour, it’s BAD sense of humour! It’s the kind of humour which is really rather cruel or grim. And we see quite a lot of it.
We’ll look at five famous death scenes from the Old Norse sagas, to see what they can Many tales are told of the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok. His own saga says he was the son of a Swedish king, and slew a dragon. .
. But that when he sailed to England seeking further fame and riches, he was shipwrecked off the coast of Northumbria. He was taken prisoner by its Christian king, Ella, who decided to inflict a terrible death on the famous Viking.
He had him thrown into a pit of venomous snakes. As he faced death, Ragnar called out to the king… The famous line from the death of Ragnar is “Gnyðja mundu grísir ef galtar hag vissi”. The piggie would grunt if they knew how the old boar died.
The word ‘gnyðja’, it means grunt, but it also kind of sounds like grunt, and I think you could actually translate it ‘go oink oink! ’, the piggies would go oink oink if they knew how the old boar died. It’s a joke.
And the joke is actually on King Ella, because there’s this barnyard vocabulary, piggies and oink, but what it means is ‘my sons are going to come, and what they do to you – won’t bear thinking about’. It’s a threat. The funny thing is, although it’s a late saga, this story about the piggies was known earlier, because it was actually quoted by a Latin chronicler.
He’d heard about the piggies, he’d got the phrase right, he just didn’t understand what it meant. He thought Ragnar was saying, ‘If my sons knew about this they’d come and rescue me. ’ But he didn’t.
He wasn’t hoping for rescue, he knew he hadn’t got any hope. He was saying, ‘my sons, when they hear about this, then they’ll avenge me. ’ And of course, they did.
Ragnar’s death in a snakepit is almost certainly invented. But his sons, ‘the piggies’, were very real. In 865 the Ragnarssons landed in England with a ‘Great Army’, rampaging across East Anglia and Northumbria, and killing King Ella.
Is there any link between these historical events and the saga tale of Ragnar’s death? England was invaded by men who were very early on identified as the Ragnarssons, and my suggestion would be that the whole story of Ragnar's death in the snake pit was made up later on in order to motivate the invasion of England. Why did the Ragnarssons invade England?
They did it to take vengeance for their father. And so you make up a story about the death of the father and the way that the vengeance was motivated According to legend, Hrolf-Kraki was a great Danish king of the 6th century – a Danish ‘King Arthur’. His great hall stood near Lejre, where he entertained a famous band of champions.
But many sought his throne. His own cousin Hjorvard made a surprise, dawn attack on the king’s hall. After a desperate last stand, Hrolf lay dead, surrounded by his champions.
Only one man survived - Vöggr, the weakest man in Hrolf’s court. He’d been the butt of all jokes - even when he’d sworn to avenge Hrolf’s death. Now he was hauled before the new king, Hjorvard….
Hrolf is dead, and all his champions are dead as well. That's the right thing to do. Except Vöggr, who is dragged out of a pile of bodies.
And for some reason Hjorvard thinks it would be a good idea to get a pledge of allegiance from Hrolf’s last surviving champion. So they get Vöggr and he is hauled up, asked to swear allegiance to Hjorvard, and Hjorvard gives him his sword to swear allegiance on. Bad idea.
Vöggr picks it up, runs Hjorvard through. That's the end of Hjorvard and the Scylding dynasty, and of course Vöggr is immediately killed. But he has fulfilled his vow.
So it's another example really of… the Viking love of… shall we say wit? ! Of being able to turn the tables in a funny kind of way once again?
Ragnar's joke was on King Ella and Vöggr’s joke is on King Hjorvard. Very funny… in a sort of way! Legends about King Hrolf come from a tumultuous period of Europe’s history, traditionally known as the ‘Dark Ages’.
But recent discoveries suggest the tales of King Hrolf have a basis in fact. King Hrolf is the Danish King Arthur. They lived at about the same time in the early 6th century.
For a long time the story of King Hrolf was regarded rather like the story of King Arthur, it couldn't be true. But then the archaeologists, alerted by a chance discovery, started looking at the traditional site of King Hrolf’s court, which is now the small village of Lejre in Denmark. And much to their surprise they discovered the site of one enormous hall after another.
I think they have now found six of them, all through the Viking and pre-Viking era. So that part of the story at least was true… Lejre, once upon a time Ledreborg, really was a major power centre in the early Viking period. The Jomsvikings were a legendary group of Viking mercenaries… picked men, bound by a code of honour.
According to Old Norse sagas, they had a fortified base on the Baltic coast, at Jomsborg. In 986 they were recruited by the King of Denmark to subjugate Jarl Hakon of Lade. But at Hjörungavágr, they suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Jarl Hakon and his son, Jarl Eirik.
Vikings rarely offered or expected mercy: After the battle, the Jomsviking prisoners were lined up for execution. The beheading started and the Jomsvikings, who had a code of their own which forbad them to express fear at any point - one of them for instance said he would not kneel down to be beheaded, he insisted on standing up and being beheaded from the front, so that people could see that he did not flinch from the blow. One guy does kneel down to be beheaded, and he says “I'm a bit worried about my hair, I don't want to get blood on it, could somebody very kindly take my hair and pull it over my head, and then the beheading can go on.
” But as the axe falls he jerks his head back… and the falling axe cuts off the hands of the man who's been holding his hair. Well, that's bad sense of humour for you! What a joke!
Everybody laughs like nobody's business, in particular actually Jarl Erik, who thinks he's never seen anything so funny in all his life. ‘It was such a good joke’, he says, ‘well, we'll let you off. ’ And the Jomsviking, very properly says ‘can't accept that unless you let all the others off too.
’ So the other Jomsvikings are then all spared. Well, you know, obviously complete fiction. No, I can't believe a word of it.
Hmm. Yeah… about 15 miles away in that direction from where we're standing, just recently, they were digging for a new road and they came upon a pile of skeletons, about 50 odd, and a separate pile of skulls. All the skeletons had been beheaded, and analysis showed they were all male, they were mostly young and they were all Scandinavians.
Okay, so there was a mass beheading just as described in the saga, and furthermore several of the men had been beheaded from the front, just as in the saga. So once again what appeared to be complete fiction turns out to have some corroboration in hard fact. Olaf Haraldsson, King of Norway - the man who’d one day become its patron saint - had been a feared Viking before he became a Christian king.
In 1029, the Danes, supported by local jarls, drove Olaf into exile. When he and his followers returned the next year to reclaim the throne, they were met by a huge army of hostile, pagan farmers. Retreat was not an option for Olaf.
On the morning of battle, the restless king rose early, and asked his poet Thormod to sing to him, to pass the hours before the army gathered. And Thormod immediately starts to sing the Bjarkamál, which is actually a poem supposed to be sung by Bodvar Bjarke on the morning of the last stand of Hing Hrolf, which we've discussed already. Dagr es upp kominn, dynja hana fjaðrar.
Mál es vílmögum at vinna erfiði. Vaki æ ok vaki vina höfuð, allir enir œztu Aðils of sinnar. Hár inn harðgreipi, Hrólfr skjótandi, ættum góðir menn, þeir es ekki flygja.
Vekka yðr at víni né at vífs rúnum, vekk yðr hörðum Hildar at leiki. “The day has come up, the roosters clap their wings. Time for the wretched serfs to do the heavy labour.
Wake now wake, company of friends, all you best ones of Adil’s people. Har the Hard-Grip, Hrolf the Shooter. men of good birth, they who do not flee.
I do not wake you to wine nor the whispers of women, I wake you to the hard sport of Hilda. ” It seems a strange choice for a poem because it is, in a way, a suicide poem. It's saying we're all going to get killed.
Is this a good morale raiser? Yeah they're Vikings! They think it's great, everybody says, ‘Super song, just the thing, let's get started on the battle.
’ But the odds were stacked against King Olaf and his men. Thormod’s song, of brave men rising to face certain death… proved a premonition. King Olaf is killed fighting in the front rank and is brought down by a series of spear and axe blows, and as you would expect, all his chosen companions, all his bodyguard, are killed around him.
But Thormod, Thormod the poet survives. Not his fault, he just happens to survive. And at the end of the battle, when it's all over, he laments that he has not been allowed to join his king.
And at that moment an arrow comes flying from nowhere and hits him. And the obvious implication is the dead king sent it. He sent it so as to give Thormod his wish, that he could join Olav.
And Thormod then composes a poem about his own wound, and dies without quite finishing it. He dies on his feet still reciting the poem, but he doesn't complete the last line. Which fortunately is completed for him by a bystander… and the bystander is the teenage Harald Hardrada Harold Hardrada grew to become King of Norway, and one of the greatest Vikings of all.
His adventures led him east to the city of Kiev, where he served at the court of Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise … then to Constantinople, where he commanded the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine Emperor. As King of Norway, Harald ‘the hard-ruler’ was brave, cruel and acquisitive… and in 1066 set his sights on the English throne. But King Harold Godwinson marched north to meet him, moving so rapidly he caught the Vikings off-guard.
. . .
at Stamford Bridge. The thing about the battle of Stamford Bridge is that Harald Hardrada and his invasion force - they were caught napping. Harold Godwinson marched very quickly up to York, and kept on marching through York, and the first thing the Norwegians knew about it was seeing the glint of weapons approaching.
But it was a hot day, and the Norwegians had left their heavy equipment, especially their armour and their shields, down on their ships. So they were actually facing an armoured force without their armour. Heedless of the risk, Hardrada advanced into battle at the head of his men.
According to the Heimskringla sagas, written by the Icelander Snorri Sturluson, he composed poetry even now. Fram gongum vér í fylkingu brynjulausir und blár eggjar: hjalmar skína, hefkat mina nú liggr skrúð várt at skipum niðri “Forward we go in formation, without armour against blue steel edges. Helmets shine, I don't have mine, now our gear lies down with the ships.
” I think it's quite good actually, the poem. But Harald, who is a terrible poetic snob, thinks about it for a bit and says, “No, that was too simple. ” And then he produces another poem in a much more complex and high-class metre, and says “That's much better!
” Hardrada threw himself into the thick of the fighting, unarmoured, wielding his sword with both hands. Fearless and defiant to the end, he died with an English arrow in his throat, alongside most of his army. He is often called ‘the Last Viking’.
According to the saga, the Norwegians arrived in 400 ships and the survivors went home in 24. The Anglo-Saxons let them go. Well that, you might say, put an end to ideas that England could be conquered by Norwegians or Danes or Vikings.
The Viking era then was over. Harold Hardrada, you can only say well, he died like a Viking, making jokes, making poems, lashing out with both hands until he was killed. But can these poems really be attributed to Harald Hardrada?
I don't see there's any way that the poems could be genuine. After all who was there to note it down or remember it? Practically none of the Norwegians survived.
I expect Snorri Sturluson made them up himself to help his story out. But they're good poems. They express a kind of… not regretful attitude, but it's sort of rueful: ‘Yeah, well, we're not going to win this one, they caught us this time!
Oh well, that's the way it goes, we will just have to fight it out. ’ And that strikes me as again a characteristic Viking attitude The Battle of Stamford Bridge had unintended consequences… paving the way for another invader to become King of England. The Battle of Stamford Bridge was of course a catastrophe.
It was a catastrophe for the Norwegians, but it was a catastrophe for the English as well, because they took very heavy casualties as well. And three weeks after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, they fought the Battle of Hastings against William the Conqueror. And you can't help thinking if they'd been at full strength, they'd have won.
On 14th October 1066, the English army suffered a crushing defeat at Hastings, and Harold Godwinson was killed. England’s new king, William the Conqueror, was himself descended from a Viking adventurer. The Viking age was at an end.
For nearly three centuries, Europe had been terrorised by Scandinavian warriors, whose attitude to death gave them a dangerous edge. What finally strikes me about the Viking mindset is not so much the defiance in the face of death - that's what you expect heroes to do. It's actually the matter of fact attitude, and also the liking for some kind of a joke.
You can actually use vulgar words like Ragnar in the snake pit… you can play dirty tricks like Vöggr with his pledge of allegiance… or you can play practical jokes like the Jomsviking getting the guy's hands cut off… or you can nitpick about poetry like Thormod and Harald Hardrada. All these say “Death is coming, it's certain. But actually I'm going to see what I can do to make this memorable.
” What it makes me think is that when it comes to Vikings, you can kill them, and speaking as an Englishman, we did, over there! But frighten them? That's not going to work.
They're always going to come back at you. You're not safe until the very last one of them is dead. Thank you to Curiosity Stream for sponsoring this video, and to our Patreon supporters for making Epic History TV possible.
You can find a link to Tom Shippey’s highly-recommended book on Viking sagas, ‘Laughing Shall I Die’, in the video description. Visit our Patreon page to find out how you can support the channel, get ad-free early access and help to choose future topics. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter for extra epic history content, and regular updates.
