Vikings Live: a tour from the British Museum

Welcome to the British Museum, London and thank you for joining us. I hope you're already settled into your seats and ready to enjoy your own private view of the British Museum's latest blockbuster exhibition on the Vikings as we guide you through the exhibition. Traveling to four continents and going back a thousand years in time, we will reveal the spectacular centerpiece of this show: the remains of a royal Viking warship. It was a time that helped shape our world. Welcome to the Vikings. Experience the British Museum's BP exhibition. Vikings. Life and Legend Have Been Here is the first exhibition to be held in the new Seeds Bring exhibition gallery which has been converted into this huge climate-controlled space, including the longest warship ever discovered, the curator from the exhibition dr.

Gareth Williams was with us tonight and led a team of experts from the British Museum along with his and Hagan's colleagues to bring precious objects to London. The second kingdom was exposition. I am delighted to declare the Life and Legend of the Vikings exhibition open. What a thrill. To enter this magical and spectacular space, we have with us tonight some of the world's great Viking experts, but first of all, let's meet the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor Neil, so why a Viking exhibition and why What now we organize an exhibition when there is new information to present and we have a lot of new information about the Vikings.

There have been great archaeological finds in the last 30 years. You will see some of them. We can look at those archives with new scientific techniques that give us more information and since the last exhibition the cold war has come to an end and we can work much more closely with our Eastern European colleagues, so we can now present a completely new to the Viking world in a world of extraordinary reach and contact. that's the fascinating thing this is a world of water sailing from Scandinavia from the Baltic the Vikings go west of course to Britain Ireland then to Canada South Africa they go north to the Arctic Circle and then, perhaps most interesting of all, they go down the great Russian rivers and reach the Caspian of Central Asia of the Black Sea Constantinople is a whole world what they bring together it is simply amazing amazing what they achieved, isn't it?

It is not just a view of the Viking world but a view of the world or at least the magical worlds that through the Vikings is there any particular object that catches their attention is a very difficult question if I had to steal one if they would allow me to steal one I think it would be a small silver statuette of the God of War Odin, there is a great male God who sees the looting, assault and rape of everything and this small statue shows him dressed as a woman, keeping in touch with his feminine side because he is not only the God of War, but is also exercising her feminine skills in prophecy of magical sorcery and It is wonderful that these two sides together, both sides of Odin, the Ravens gained the Raven of memory, a Raven of thought, fly by everyone and they come back and tell you what's going on and, in a sense, that's what we're doing.

We're at the Busch Museum, we're Odin's Ravens, we go around the world, we meet him and we think he was a raven. Now we approach the Sainsbury's exhibition galleries, a great new space for the

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, isn't it with conservation facilities? and scientific facilities, but I also guess it gives us the space to show amazing things. That is the great advantage of this new space. Above all, it allows us to show the great warship, one of the main discoveries of the last thirty years and we finally have a space large enough to show it and with the conditions we need to display it, it is great, well, thank you very much, we will chat a little later See you a little later and we will see those ships very soon good Viking ship Of course, it is the most recognizable symbol of the era, an era that I suppose we could say extends for about 300 years, from the years 750 to the years 410 and 60, and it is the ship that is one of the key themes of the exhibition.

Ahktar said that the region that Wellton is called hal gallant said that no man

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d north of it there is a port on the south side of that land which the man called skidding his hair said that a man could hardly navigate that if he camped at night and to the gentle wind every day the original Viking homelands are present-day Denmark Norway Sweden and Finland the territories are physically fragmented united for millennia this meant that transportation was much easier by river fjord and sea than by land tribal agricultural societies here had access to rich goods, whale skins, bone amber and loris ivory, marketable resources that the Vikings traded in once they globalized and, as they travelled, traded and raided, shaped not only the past but the world in which they

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d. that we all live today.

Now, what is essential to remember is that the name Viking did not originally refer to a single ethnic group, today we use the word Viking to describe the entire Scandinavian society since 750 AD. onwards, but when it first appears in Old Norse V, kinga really just means pirate or raider, and of course pirate is not a pirate without his ship, so Professor Neal Price, the exposition begins with this depiction really exquisite of a Viking ship and the reason it is at the beginning is that this is the absolute key to the Viking era without the ship, none of this would be What happens what we have here is a beautiful brooch from Denmark made of copper and you have the classic Viking ship, these beautiful clean lines, the dragon heads at each end, the square sail, you can see it full on the mast there and If you look very closely, along the hull there are these little circular things that are shields or oar holes and why we have this special relationship between Vikings and ships.

I mean, why is the ship so central to his identity? The really important thing to understand about the Viking period in Scandinavia is that it was a maritime society, everything depended on the sea, rivers and access to water, in one way or another, everyone was affected by the sea and had some kind of contact with the media. transportation to get on it and it's very important to remember that, isn't it? I think when we think of Vikings, we automatically imagine macho warriors, but, but, as you say, this is something that everyone at all levels of society is. involved with and really with everyone, what we come here for are two of my favorite exhibits in the show, these are toys and the lives of Viking children are some of the most accessible aspects of the Viking Age, it's very difficult to get to the

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children, but from time to time, when we are lucky enough to get conservation conditions that allow the wood and organic elements to survive, we get things like these little toy boats, the smaller one on top is from Dublin, the one on the bottom is from Hedeby and Denmark. and I think it's easy to imagine Viking girls and boys floating down the streams, so really it's everyone in Viking society who has the boat on their minds.

Something like this tells us what Vikings of all ages did, but can archeology ever catch up with us? in their minds in the Viking mind yes, I think that may be one of the exciting things about Viking material culture, the things that they did is, wherever possible, they decorated them, we just saw this ship brooch, a ship that you can wear, so some Viking people have had this on their clothes, but the same idea applies to anything you can decorate, so jewelry isn't just something to hold your clothes together, it's a visual world full of decoration and an art with meaning, a weapon is not just something. to hit people with their covered decoration so you see some of these things here look there in the middle here this beautiful dress brooch with the dragon head this is something to hold your cape but it's not just a functional object this this Wonderful head on top looks like a dragon This takes us to this thought world of mythological creatures the invisible population of supernatural beings with whom the Vikings shared their world and what is so important isn't it to remember it at this moment?

The point is that we really shouldn't use words like religion and belief because those weren't options for the Vikings, I mean, for them, dragons work, we're real, absolutely, I think we should talk about knowledge, if you can imagine asking him. King, do you believe in trolls? Do you believe in Odin? It's like asking do you believe in the sea? said something obvious, is that when we use the word supernatural it is completely wrong, they are natural, purely natural, but our best chance to really get into the Vikings. the heads is through burials because, unlike the rest, they are deliberate, so when we find a Viking grave and we excavate it, we find something that is a direct product of the Vikings themselves, what they wanted to do.

Neighborhoods can take on all kinds of different things from the majority. mundane objects items of personal clothing things that you clean your ears where there are ironing boards all kinds of things like that weapons of course and even the biggest things on all ships because sometimes they are actually buried in ships they are not they are in the bow , they certainly are, we are actually rebuilding a Viking ship burial army, we are, and it will also be the kind of burial dreamed of by archaeologists. You will put everything there that you would love to find. I'm To a certain extent, try it, yeah, okay, see what we can do to make those Vikings lose, so when you find a dead person with all the objects placed around him, he will be there because the Vikings wanted him to be there and what? what do you think?

The ships in those tombs actually mean what they represent. It's hard to really say, but they could be a means of transportation to carry the dead wherever they go. A ship from this world to another world. They could also simply be the dead person's or community's most expensive possession is a bit like being buried in your Mercedes. Fantastic sources of information and are fantastic windows into that Viking mind. See where the far-sighted warship lies splendid off the coast. The pride track is main up. the caracal shines since it was launched from rollers its decorated neck is trimmed with gold from the early viking period they were relatively small with a cruise of around 40mm but through the viking age the ships became larger and more sophisticated, not only were they powered by many oars but by splendid sails, as technology often coincided with the desire and drive for exploration and the hunger for wealth drove the development of deeply built cargo ships that could cross oceans and large warships.

These were the real Viking ships that inflated and could conquer nations. The only warship ever discovered is at the heart of the exhibition and this is the longest Viking ship ever found and not only that but the remains of an actual warship that has been dug out of the earth have been housed in this giant steel structure to give us an idea of ​​the scale. and the size of the original ship and you only have to think of it in its prime, almost exactly a thousand years ago, making its way out to sea, a hundred men aboard 80 rowers driving those oars and above them a giant mast with a sail .

Made of wool or linen dyed in bright colors they are wonderful boats, they are remarkable but they are very, very good breeding grounds for extremely seaworthy boats. I think that's one of the things that always excites me when I see that they've made a lot of themselves. several full-size copies of where boats ride and if you see such a boat at sea but you imagine that suddenly you look or see and you heard me find half the horizon is full I think it's really you Your heart has sunken boots The remains of this magnificent ship were found by chance in 1996 in a harbor right next to the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark.

Workers were dredging the harbor to expand the

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and unearthed a ship graveyard right under their feet. It must have felt like a gift from the old gods to bring the ship's timbers to dry land and here it was an immensely delicate operation and one of the people responsible for that and then the two week job of installing them in the exhibition is Christiana Stret Cavern working with curator Gareth Williams the discovery of the ship is a fascinating story, not only is it the longest, but we can see from the ship Timbers dating back to 1025, but also dendrochronology?

The boat was built in Norway while we were investigating the boat we could see that they were repairs. They show that the ship was repaired in the Baltic area in 1039, which means that the ship has been sailing from Oslo to the Baltic and ends up at the bottom of the Roskilde field, so it has an incredible history before it finished there, they assembled the ship with many small parts and pieces and then assembled it withall these smaller pieces and also the ribs that will be in the middle. and all these fittings that makes the boat flexible and strong yes we can see very clearly here how the boards are riveted together oh yes the square plate for the board so each of these main ribs marks where a would be rowing bench yes exactly So we have a rowing bench along the boat on top of that and that gives us the spacing between the rowing benches which helps us estimate the total length of the missing parts and gives us an idea of ​​the total idea of ​​the total size of yes, sir. and we know that there has also been a helmsman at the back and the oar on one side, the rudder, these boards give us, of course, the modern name of starboard, yes, for this site, the right side of the boat, but also We are here in history.

At the front of the ship at this width there is room for more than just the two people on each side, so how many do you think the total crew would have been? The estimate is about a hundred people on board their ship and they lived here and rolled and sailed and did everything that needed to be done. Hey, now they're putting in the board line first of all, the steel line has to be there and they're looking at them on the drawing to find out. the exact board number and the location of the Excite and if you are building this part now and we have placed boards number five and six on this one here, this is the keel, the key is to fish the entire length of the boat, so done, the keel. from stern to bow it was 32 meters and that is the longest ship ever found, the remains of Roskilde are six, a clue to the skills that were used in this highlight of Viking craftsmanship and that are being used by colleagues of the National Maritime Museum in Cornwall. traditional tools to show shipbuilding techniques from a thousand years ago, so my cross section of a Viking ship.

I always wanted to see one of these that tells us how they did it right. We start with the keel and what is essentially the spine. the boat to which we added the stem post and which has a special joint and the keel allows our boat to stay on track, especially if it is sailing, the lightness of the construction allowed the boat to flex and three and also the The flatness of the keel almost created a planing hull that allowed them to move very quickly through the water. It's like the descriptions in poetry, isn't it of them almost riding on the surface of the sea?

I think it was a slow evolution because they became braver and braver as they built the boats in a more seaworthy state, so all in all it's not just a design that goes to the drawing board, it becomes an evolution , it's almost as if technology grew as desire grew and curiosity grew, isn't it? that's very true Iceland, let's go to Greenland, let's see what happens for you and it must have been quite scary when they were leaving and maybe we thought we had fallen on the edge of the ocean so I don't know, but certainly the trips were fantastic and there is linka scammed it we call it built clinker thanks yes they always teach us that in school yes that really means good clinker is the danish word i understand and that's where it developed from so in the states they call it lap strake which is probably a more accurate description and then we fasten with brad nails, yes, yes, we use nails, metal nails, yes, and we use these little washers or paths that they are attached through, I'll show you how?

Yes, yes, please, Brian, can you? Give me a hand Hi Brian, calm down, okay, okay, still, so we put the nail in, okay, okay, done, yeah, and then the path continues and then we drill the head of the nail. Okay, okay, how long do you think it took him? I actually made one of these. Well, we know for a fact that the Roskilde museum in Denmark built a full size 60 foot version of this and it took them about eighteen months, it was a team of maybe ten men, but in Iceland. days, I think they did it much faster, there were very skilled people who used to build them en masse, maybe Alma, you almost think that, don't you? and about the shape, Brian, I mean, how did you get this beautiful curve, Ollie?

You know, when you listen to Viking Age poems, they talk about my curved ship, my slender ship, how did you get that? I think the monster ship, right, ship building decided what ship they wanted, how wide they wanted it, how long they wanted it, so. it was simply a matter of steaming your boards, steaming your boards, yeah, and people who have sailed these as rebuilds say that in any sea, even a medium sea, they twist while sailing. Does that make sense to you? Well, part of the Viking ships. It was their lightness, they were built in white for speed and so that their fin would not run them aground or attack, and they were all nailed together, so the boat twisted quite a bit and that was part of its character and part of the whole structure. in a made boat. they can better cope with a difficult and incessant voyage in very rough seas, whatever it is, so light and finally it is a decoration.

I mean, we have this image, don't we? of the Viking ships with their great skill. There is a wonderful account of the Viking attack on Paris by a French monk. Who says that when they went up the same, people were surprised to see these lines of the great Prowse coming down the river? We couldn't even see the water as it was like a forest, yes, visual impact too, do you think? I think. Made me scared, yes, yes, there are so many variations in the styles that you wouldn't worry too much about an imitation on a medium warship, let's go to England and plunder it, that's all, yes, and you have a figurehead for Us today we made a figurehead especially for this project that was based on the pinhead that is on display in the museum in the newsroom and if you want to come and take a look, yes, I must go, yes, please, wow.

I'll grab you by the ear underneath the truth you'll never pinch a sleeping dragon under the ears run wow that's magnificent they traveled bravely they went far in search of gold they fed the eagle in the east and died in the south sarsen locked up jurnee bravely search for gold and prepare to die in foreign lands, that's what the literature says and Gareth Williams is the lead curator of this wonderful exhibition and those themes of travel and exploration are really central to his organization here, absolutely that the exhibition is is very much about the wider Viking world, not just about the Vikings in Scandinavia or in Britain, but that unprecedented wide world spanning four continents that the Vikings created and which is driven by contacts, interactions and the journeys that underlie To that and its beautiful objects represent that journey, absolutely this is a case.

Actually, this may not seem like much today, but this is silk, it came from somewhere on the eastern edge of the Viking world, maybe the Byzantine Empire, maybe the Islamic Caliphate, and it ended up just on the other side of the Viking world, in Dublin, Ireland. I mean something like that, so it doesn't seem like a big deal at first glance, but you have to think about what that represents, don't you think? I think we often imagine the Vikings in our heads with sort of burlap putty colors, but they used magnificent textiles and fabrics woven with gold and silver to work with and that little piece of silver is just a small fragment of that, they have access to a wide variety of brightly colored dyes that have been leached by the moist conditions that allowed the fabric itself. to survive but this would have been bright and beautiful there is no evidence in this example of gold and silver thread but it exists in other silks as a period and this must have been very fragile to deal with which is the most fragile X a bit here is one of the most fragile, but probably the most fragile is a group of material from a ship burial in our dimension in the west of Scotland that was only found in 2011.

It is still not being completely preserved and that means which is very fragile, very unstable. How fortunate to have been able to show it to the public for the first time here and you will see when you look at it that the iron is more rusty than any other material in the exhibition because it has not yet been completely preserved and is very fragile. and flaky that putting that in place has been a huge job because there are so many pieces and there are hundreds of rivets in the boat, as well as the larger funerary objects, it took a small team two or three days to get each piece of that. instead, a huge list of jobs had so much loving attention.

I suspect I'm glad you showed me that bit of bitter slime at some point because Byzantium Constantinople was terribly important to the Vikings, wasn't it? It is very different from everything they knew in northern Europe. We heard about Constantinople as a Mick Lagarde the great city and both the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world offered much more sophistication and civilization than the Vikings were used to and they were able to learn from it and take new ideas new objects but they still left things behind them everywhere they went, let me show you some examples here, these are two burials, one from Denmark and one from Noi, and they both contain these oval brooches, that's what the well-dressed Viking lady wore in this period, two brooches holding a dress with an apron. up to her shoulders and these are absolutely typically Viking, but we also find them throughout the Viking world.

We have three more sets here, this one from Ireland, this one from Yaroslavl in modern Russia and some from kyiv in modern Ukraine, so the fashions then and now Scandinavian fashion was hugely desirable, so we see the Viking lady well dressed almost the same anywhere in the Viking world. It is interesting that you say that these pieces are from present-day Russia and Ukraine. What is your position in that debate? a yes the Vikings who were often known as the Rus if they gave their name to Russia are the Vikings the ancestors of modern Russia certainly there are some of the ancestors of modern Russia the word Russia comes from the name drous as you say that sometimes certain use of for it clearly Vikings, it is also used for the mixed society that developed in earlier Russia that contains Vikings and Slavs and other people like cars, so it is not an ethnically pure society, it is a mixed society of which the Vikings are key.

The element I imagine with the opening of the former Soviet Union must have given you a lot of new territory for yourself, not like an archaeologist to learn from and presumably some new objects that entered the global scene, absolutely it's fantastic. We have as much material as we have in this exhibition from Eastern Europe, many of them never before shown in this country, but it is also the opening of the academic topic under the former Soviet Union, the history of Great Russia was purely Slavic, so So there was no real academic dialogue, we all knew that the Vikings had been in that area, but now we can discuss how much influence there was and Russian and other Eastern European scholars are part of that discussion, as well as lending us their objects, so which is a wonderful new source of information, but we also have new sources of information of our own.

New material appears all the time in this country and metal detecting has been a major source. Right here we have one of the most interesting finds. In my opinion, there is an exhibition that I have been working on since it was found in 2007, so talk to me, Gareth, because this is a real treasure. What we have here is around 700 individual items, all found together and buried. around 97 to 98 AD. Why did they bury them? Do you think it is a key moment in English history? England was unified for the first time. Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, conquered the Viking kingdom of Northumbria.

This was buried within that kingdom, so it's almost certainly a powerful Viking hiding his treasure in this time of conflict and after the unification of England, but what's really exciting about this treasure is that we have the entire Viking world buried in a single cup, we have items from the Irish Sea, I got items from England, both Anglo-Saxon and Viking, from the Frankish kingdoms on the continent, from Russia and the coins at the other end of the box, from the Islamic world, from places as far away such as Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. Now you're probably thinking where is the cup? and I have it ready for you here.

I thought you would like to see him eternally grateful. You can put on some gloves because this is the most exquisite thing. I don't know this car. How do you think seven hundred items are included? in that kind of look, well, I helped unpack it, so I know exactly how they fit, everything very tight inside, the coins are very, very thin, they slide between the larger items and then just a few pieces, the most big. pieces resting on top and all held together with lead wrapped around it LED sheet wrapped around it I just can't tell you how bright it is to be close to this because it is so beautiful in so many ways it has about a thousandtwo hundred years old is exquisite, I mean, the workmanship is just fabulous, it's amazing, really fabulous, but I think I love it more for the story it tells, beautifully crafted.

I covered it with animals, lions, lionesses and some deer, presumably chased by the carnivores. We know this is from a church, so we know this is some kind of sacred vessel. You probably think that it is most likely communion bread. Yes, we can't say exactly where it came from, but probably France, Belgium, Netherlands, West Germany and that's us. I can tell it is a church cutting because there is guilt inside and out and this line around the top is a line of vine leaves and the vine as a symbol of Christ as the only true vine of the church, most likely the animals around the edge that we have I have this beautiful lion here and then these deer being chased it's almost a hunting scene but it may as well be a scene from the Bible can I hold it?

I feel very Curt, I promise I will be very careful. I tell you why I once held it. It's quite heavy, it's heavier than I expected just because I think this cup contains such a story, it has that Vale of York treasure inside, but originally this would have been used for communion bread, wouldn't that paralyze them and You know how it is? ended up in England whether it was given as a kind of Viking blood money, it is a kind of forced tribute demanded by the Vikings to guarantee a kind of peremptory peace or, if you think it more likely, it was snatched from the hands of a priest taken in a church raid, I'm serious, you know, this would tell quite a story if it could speak absolutely and I think that's another one of the wonderful things about this horde.

There is much debate about the character of the Vikings, whether they were raiders or traders. Well, the coins that arrive immediately through the Viking world from the eastern end of that country. they probably come through trade there is something like this this is a raid either tribute or loot this is the product of the Viking raids on continental Europe and that takes us back to the origin of the idea of ​​the Vikings and what you have to remember also that those Vikings we're talking about, those men on the raids, I mean, you would know from the bone evidence, very often they're teenagers, they're in their early twenties, so you have to think. of these excited boys breaking into this Frankish church and robbing it, yes, but the most remarkable thing despite that is that this thing remained intact, not only has it been broken down to use as precious metal, it has been hoarded, saved and buried perhaps as much as a hundred years after it was made, so the Vikings appreciated the good workmanship in others, it really is a time traveler, definitely yes, I can tell that you are eager to get it back safe and sound, so the Vikings were ready to travel around the world and me.

I'm with someone who's done that, so Robin Knox Johnson, it's a pleasure to be with you tonight, Robert, thanks for coming. It's an obvious question, but what is it really like to sail across the ocean in northern climates in an open boat? Well, I think the simple answers are probably quite cold but they lived in their time they were used to adapting but when we crossed the North Sea in a boat and when we had furs and we only covered ourselves for them that you warmed us toasty inside that was in a viking replica sailing from Bergen to the Shetlands, that's a trading ship, yes, so sitting on their rowing benches gave you an idea of ​​what they were like as sailors and as people, they did a bit, I mean the whole crew, for me, for Norwegians or Danes. and yes, it was quite interesting, you know the actions of the boat, except to see incredibly where they are, you felt very safe in it, but if it handles easily, I mean, it was fascinating, we had enough crew to handle it, we didn't row.

I have to earn food for them. What did they survive on? Do you think it's okay? We tested it. We use salt cod. Ah, I have to say that it was actually quite a bit. I just suspect you know you'd hang some carcasses on the rigging and eat that. and they had Tim's cards frozen on wooden shelves in Svalbard, although they were there recently, they took them on their Viking ships, but sailing, especially Robin, how did they make these extraordinary journeys through northern Canada and places like that? Did they have any navigation instruments? Well, they had to have some things labeled and oriented, we know, and one of the things they could have had is this basic one, there's a sun compass and all you have to do is go out and plot the shadow of that from the Sun on that and then it makes a curve, they turn it until the shadow hits that curve where the ptosis of the curves in the middle is not simple.

There's been a lot of discussion about this, hasn't there? I mean, they haven't found one of these in a Viking context yet, but you're pretty sure they had something extra, like they actually found two, one in Greenland at the nunnery and, more recently, they found one in the Odo River. It's a Viking settlement, so I'm pretty convinced the main point is yes. works great, thanks for giving us an idea of ​​what it's really like to be a viking. Thank you very much Robin, here terrible portents appeared over the northern land in dreams, but they scared people miserably, they will create storms of lightning and fire.

Dragons were seen flying in the sky, a great famine soon followed these signs and soon after, in the same year, on the 8th of January, a species of wretched pagans destroyed the church of God on the island of Lindisfarne by robberies and massacres such as the Vikings. They spread from their homelands, many sailing west to Britain and Ireland, the first raids targeting coastal monasteries easily accessible by boat, defenseless and rich in ecclesiastical tendencies. The Viking attack on the Northumbrian monastery at Lindisfarne in 793 is generally considered to mark the beginning of Britain's Viking Age in In the 1980s and 1990s we began to receive the first reports from British and Irish monasteries of this first phase of raids.

Vikings almost like news bulletins from all the British Isles in Ulster in Latin tell of the vast @eo the devastation of the island of Great Britain in Gaelic of the ruin of the great sanctuary of Iona in Northumbria, the devastation of its most sacred place in Lindisfarne it was considered so shocking and unprecedented that it must be a visitation from heaven accompanied by omens of fiery lights, fear in Drakon in the thumb. raisers of fiery dragons in the northern sky the motive of these first raids was, of course, to plunder loot treasure slaves whatever and they brought it here in this case two wonderful examples the small box that was originally perhaps a reliquary containing the bone of a saint looted from an Irish monastery now with an inscription underneath saying rannveig owns this box the name of a Viking woman perhaps her husband brought her back from a raid and on top of it this magnificent neck ornament perhaps melted loot from a Viking raid found in Norway and on the hammered flattened ends an inscription that says that we went to freeze here the coast of Holland and there we exchanged war garments with the Frisians in other words, we massacred them and stripped their bodies of their war equipment a line dry very dark irony that the Vikings now had the size of these early expeditions at most perhaps thirty or forty ships and scholars for a time believed that the armies themselves were correspondingly small perhaps only a few hundred at most, but quite sober.

The Chronicles soon begin to speak of fleets of two hundred and three hundred and six hundred and fifteen. ships coming from Dublin to invade Northumbria in I'm 37 years old and they don't have to be the size of the Roskilde ship with 80 rowers to suggest an army of thousands and the latest evidence is very exciting evidence that it has arrived. from the excavation of a Viking camp in North Yorkshire this material here these coins and beads came from that site it is a thirty-five acre sign large enough to support an army of many thousands terrifying it should not have been surprising that those monks They would think it was all a sign of God's wrath I went with a bloody sword and a resounding spear to a harsh Viking attack we had a furious fight the fire ran over the houses I made bloody bodies fall inside the city walls Oh Gareth Cole that it's awesome fabulous there's nothing like seeing a viking warrior up close it looks heavy, don't you feel it for yourself Wow, and this is not as big as the ones that have been excavated, yes, about the same size as some of them, but it's not as big as the biggest ones, fantastic. so this is all part of the protective equipment what kind of status are you a fairly high status is not absolutely superior I am quite rich as you can see from the variety of jewelry and weapons, but it is not absolutely superior of the tree and the shield are made of wood but with a leather covering that helps bind the individual planks and the metal boss together, this is the only part that normally survives like the one behind you, you know the case, yeah, so normally everything we survive It's the boss, we have an example on display of a full shield against the ghost and the burial, yeah, fantastic, let's take off the helmet, good idea, hey, we can see your big this is very hot under the light, it's a little warm fighting against a Battle with this type of equipment is strenuous and we have accounts of battles fought on hot days.

The Battle of Stamford Bridge was so hot that the Norwegians took off their armor and fought without it and died, and it's a very different style of fighting. fighting if you are used to fighting without armor you can move faster but you are used to protecting yourself in a different way, you take a risk if you wear men's clothing because with this man/padding I have leather under the leather. on the wall/linen over my normal clothes and then the helmet protects the head, so it's a great investment in the body of a Viking warrior. Absolutely, it takes something like six months of work to make this shirt, you can see if you look closely at each link. riveted closed and some have solid rings mixed with riveted which prevents them from separating the amount of work that goes into that as well as just the raw materials it's colossal yeah fantastic let's leave that there and just show some of Well , let's look at a sword.

The sword is the ultimate weapon of status for the Viking warrior. No curator should do without one. It's absolutely very useful on a daily basis, in fact, you know it, you have a better idea of ​​what it looks like. in these new remade weapons than anything you've ever seen, this is really fabulous, isn't it? -Ultimate sports car in terms of modern purchases for the top level sword and swords come in several families. If you look at the different swords in this exhibition, we have some pretty simple ones that may not be in the luxury league, but sure. we have designer swords, there is one sword maker in particular, I bet he has such a successful name, it is such a sexual brand that we get swords with the name ulfberht engraved on the blade or inlaid for probably 200 years, designer, it is and as a designer.

Today's labels, a recent analysis of blades shows that, although there are also cheap imitations, there are blades that have been calculated to be so poorly made with that label that they fall apart the first time you use them in battle, it is the Viking equivalent of the Louie Vuitton bag knockoff and looking at some of these displays of personal adornments, I mean, they're really individualistic. There are a few of these Viking leaders in our sources and that suggests he is not running. Yes, this is an extreme example as a small number. of these are always known from the warrior grape, so with probably colored horizontal fire marks on my teeth, on the one hand, it is immediately recognizable and also says very clearly if I am willing to do this to myself, what am I willing to do to you?

That on the battlefield is scary enough, but we also have stories of Vikings with tattoos from their fingertips to their necks and of men and women of the Viking Age who used makeup to make their eyes shine brighter, so we can Imagine these highly decorative. warriors is like Pirates of the Caribbean, isn't it kind of like Johnny Depp Coast v King exactly exactly? I think there's a very good analogy, but the leaders with their names, you know, Ragnar Lothbrok and furry pants and all that, please, so these are these are guys whose fame preceded them, I guess so, and some of those names are very clear where they come from, you know, and they might think of "skullbuster", no guess how he got that name, why not bread and butter, a little harder to tell Eric. black one of my favorites too fantastic battles Gareth I mean, we read fairly conventional descriptions of battles, isn't that the case in poetry, both Norse poetry and Anglo-Saxon poetry?

Yeah, hack the shield wall boring cliff fan wheel and all that they did make shield walls, how did they really fight in thebattle line? We will know if the shield wall appears to be one and we have one or two surviving representations of this in stone carvings etc, they are placed in a line with all the shields overlapping and that provides a solid wall and if someone is charging at that you can make a pretty solid barrier against that, the difficulty with that is that if you have a sword or an ax like I have here to use this effectively, they can cut through a very common weapon. from the viking aid you need space to swing effectively, if you're full of people around you you can't swing it so there's no room to use it and I think that's where the sax comes in, the combat knife, it's useful . up close and this is blunted for safety, but real examples have wicked points and although you can use it as a slashing weapon, it is ideal at close range, you can go over the shield, you can go under the shield and there is a skeleton in Repton with severe injuries to the inner thigh, it has been suggested that one particular warrior may have even been castrated, the upward blow was one of these under the shield, what better way to do it and death in battle, I mean, Thousands of Vikings died violently in the Viking Age.

I'm not saying what they believed happened to them after death, according to later traditions, which is what we mostly have and are mediated through a Christian point of view, they believed they would go to Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain, and they would feast and fight there that means great every day you can go out fight get killed wake up again in the night get drunk and do it all over again the next day so it was the perfect afterlife for a warrior warrior they would be waiting for the big battle of Ragnarok at the end of time but until then it was a great half-life and something to aspire to, only the best warriors were chosen and that meant that the Viking gods and Odin in particular was a rather fickle God to worship because he wanted what better. warriors on his side, which meant he wanted them dead and in Valhalla waiting for that battle that might come, so treacherous, gone to worship fantastic and I have to ask you these kinds of things, I mean, you know, I've known you for all these years as a scholar of the time and here we are you are in this shock and you are telling me these stories your eyes are burning this is a world that has obviously captivated you for a long time what is it about that?

It understands you. I've loved Vikings since I was a little kid. I still remember the last exhibition here in 1980 as a birthday present, but yes, Vikings capture the imagination and, in fact, all these things maybe exist. It's still a little kid dressing up there, but there's a lot of hands-on experimentation as well. I first got into this by talking to a reenactor. I asked him what he had learned from doing it and he said: What wouldn't you learn more if you tried it yourself? I thought it was fair and that was 15 years ago and there's something in his character too, though don't you think?

Oh yes, when you read their proverbs and there is wisdom, there are things like that. Down-to-earth clarity about life is the Internet. Are you thinking straight? I think that laconic humor is very much in line with ours today. They have a certain sense of sombre style. Of course, thousands of Vikings died violently during the Viking Age and these are some of them. The bones are part of an extraordinary and exciting find that was made recently in 2009 near Weymouth in Dorset, when a bypass was being built and there, in a lonely Combe, in an ancient Roman quarry, the bones of around 50 were found. men.

Here are the clues to the age range plus of them between 18 and 25 the isotopes in those teeth showed that they came from the Scandinavian region, not from one country but from the countries around the Baltic. Carbon dating suggested a date between, say, the 1970s and 1920s - in other words, the reign of Ethelred the Unprepared, the period in English history when Danish Viking invasions resumed and wars were fought with incredible bitterness and savagery throughout England, the historian, of course, cannot resist speculating who they are, why they were here, when it happened, simply There has been a ship full of Danes who got lost and were out of luck or were killed by the locals during those wars.

They could even be mercenaries. Ethelred's government employed Danish mercenaries who on one occasion turned against their employers. Maybe these were those kind of men who were captured. and killed by the local earl and his Thane because they did not die in battle, they have no war wounds, their heads were cut off and left aside in the pit of death, there are skulls with sword marks across them, there are a hand. you can even see the bones, maybe the person raised their hand to protect themselves and their fingers were cut off, so who were they? Perhaps it has something to do with one of the most infamous moments in Ethelred's history, the so-called massacre of St.

Bryce's Day on November 13, 1002 when Ethelred's government, desperate by incessant Danish attacks, gave the order for what It is planned to massacre the Danes of the population of towns in the south of England, towns like Oxford. I don't know if it was carried out everywhere but it seems. It may have happened in some places, of course, we will never know for sure, but it is an indicator. chilling of the ethnic tensions that could still arise in a country that has been a mixed Anglo-Danish society for more than a century. out to sea when the weather is good talk to a girl in the dark the eyes of the day are many you need a ship to slide a shield to protect you sword to strike a maiden to kiss volley King poetry Denis I mean, at first glance, it's in any case they seem to be describing a nice male world, there is all this macho talk about battles, swords and shields and the old mention of the longing for a kind of good woman, so where are all the Viking women, where is the female of the species and is all this her?

Everywhere, if you think about the Viking armies, there is a lot of evidence that they took women and children with them, especially if they were away from home for many years, but probably most women stayed at home and had full authority within the home. They were there making sure the house was fed and clothed and taking care of the young, the old and the sick and if they have status. I mean, there are some beautiful objects in front of us here, some of which I know belonged to women and you know. Looking like the woman who wore it would have commanded quite a bit of respect.

Well, there is a chain that is made of gold. It is a practical item to hang your keys. The women were in charge of all the chests and everything there was. the belongings of the house so she had kept the keys, if not for the gold exchange, that would have been a woman of very high status and next to it we have a woman perhaps of a slightly different class, these two brooches oval are the characteristics. of the average Viking woman from the free class, the wife of the head of the family, the mistress of the house who had full charge and authority within the house and then, next to it, there is also a wonderful little object that is a cleaning shovel the ears. ears out and that is also made of gold, making it a practical object but one that shows the status of its owner.

I think we should bring back air intakes and the first thing should be very useful in a polite society, be a serious network and what about religion because what very often in societies at the moment, actually before, is that women have this very special relationship with the gods in the spirit world, they are almost supposed to have some kind of direct line to that world, the same goes for him, so yes, there certainly are them. Because of this authority they had within the house, they could perform sacrifices to the gods and spirits, so they were often responsible for that.

I think there is good evidence that they also practiced healing, although they knew their herbs and others. ways to enhance people and some of them probably did things that we would describe as sorcery, it's quite difficult to find out exactly how they did it, I mean that must have given them status in society if you are in charge of absolute magic and probably some of those women were feared. I mean, there are many stories about my women who practice magic and people were very afraid of them because of their powers. Sometimes references are made that they are also military saucers, so they are actually there or on the battlefield yes, so these are the Valkyries, they were assistants to the god Odin, so they went to battles with him, they helped Odin to select the warriors who would die in battle and be taken to Valhalla, once they arrived in Valhalla, they served drink to the warriors. there, but I want to say that they are imaginary creatures.

I mean, if we look, we have some fabulous swords here. If you believe? Would we have ever seen a real, flesh-and-blood Viking woman wielding something like this? Well, I would say that the sword is the masculine weapon par excellence. Swords are the status symbol of the elite male warrior. However, our view continues to change with new findings and there is a very interesting fine that was made just over a year ago in Denmark for a very small metal detector. silver figure of a very clearly feminine woman, she has long hair in a weft on the back, she has a long dress and she is holding a shield and a sword and it is very, very interesting because normally the Valkyries are associated with Spears, they normally have a shield and a spear, it would be very unusual for Valkyrie to have a sword due to the masculine associations of the sword, so I don't know nor have I figured out what that figure actually means, but she has a sword, there is no doubt that it is a feminine figure for the sword, that's the brilliance of archeology.

You get these little new pieces in the puzzle that, when you fit them together, can give you a completely different picture because they're a Byzantine source that talks about a battle. with the Vikings and the Byzantine army they go and rip off their armor and lo and behold, some of the fighters are women, they just say it's just a story, but they reported that there is a very similar story in Old Norse poetry about Valkyrie is in battle with Odin and the hero Sigurd appears and cuts his armor. It turns out to be a woman, but I think that's still part of a Valkyrie myth.

She says that she is a very imagined figure, not real. one I tell you what unfortunately I'm almost sure that the experience of women on the battlefield would have been that the bat would have happened and then one or the army wins and the women then become booty, they become human booty and there is actually something really horrible. evidence of that here what you have here you really think is a chilling truth from that Viking adventure story, well certainly what we have here are leg shackles and they are a Dublin iron collar. Dublin was the center of the slave trade so it is very likely that this is something used to restrict slaves who have been captured perhaps as a result of the war hmm and then we use the word dairy all the time the old Norse for slave was a slave, so let me.

Speaking of being enslaved or captivated by people, we have to remember that yes, well, slavery is a very important part of the Viking world and, as I say, Dublin was the center of the slave trade and it's very interesting because where did these people end up? now? men and women were captured as slaves. I think many of them were rescued by their families or sold, but many of them also ended up traveling with the Vikings to Iceland. DNA evidence from Iceland shows that around sixty percent perhaps of Iceland's female population originates from Britain and Ireland and it is very likely that many of them were slaves that the Viking settlers brought with them.

Still, it's very sobering, isn't it? Because I know there are some sources that Let's say that the Vikings took very good care of their slaves, but I still want to say that that is and and a thousand times represents so many personal tragedies. Well, if you were a slave you didn't have any rights, you were just your master's property, very different from the people we talked about before had their freedom, but the Vikings weren't just raiders, plunderers and slavers in many of the lands they They invaded, settled, and eventually assumed the Christian culture and religion of the conquered peoples as The Vikings spread their power and influence along the coast of Western Europe and throughout the British Isles.

They founded kingdoms in Northumbria and Ireland in Normandy. Of course, the Normans were originally Vikings and eventually came to rule England as a whole, which brings us to this manuscript. just take a look, this is liber VI, the book of lives of the new cathedral monastery in Winchester, it was the family shrine and eleum of the Moores of the dynasty of Alfred the Great, the kings of Wessex and the creators of the kingdom of England. and this was the book that contained the names of the benefactors of the selling monastery that the monks would pray for and here, in a picture offull page, in a place of honor is a young Viking, just look with his beard, it is Knut, the son of Sweyn Forkbeard. the king of Denmark has one hand on the gold cross that he is giving as a gift to the monastery and I love this detail his other hand is holding the hilt of his sword he had conquered England with the sword Knut conquered England in 1016 he ruled until 1035 finally controlled a large North Sea empire, not only England and Denmark but also Norway and parts of Sweden and in that time the young Viking became a respected member of the Christian community of kings in European Christian laws, he went on pilgrimage to Rome and, of course, he is remembered in a famous English folk story in which he places his throne on the seashore and orders the waves to recede just to show his fawning courtiers that a king's power has limits, even that of Knut the Great.

The first millennium is a rich melting pot of cultures and ethnicities and we have assembled a team of experts who have been tracing the legacy of that cultural mix over time. Martin Findell is a language historian and can literally read the runes Jane Carroll is working on in Old Norse and Old English and, in particular, Old English place names and the jolly King has become a household name thanks to the rediscovery of Richard the Third under that part of the car from DNA analysis and is now working on a large-scale project tracing the genetic legacy of the Vikings (now Martin) there.

There are runes in this room, right? Yes, there are several objects with runic inscriptions in the exhibition. We have in the corner a very impressive replica of the screaming stone of Denmark with an inscription dedicated by Harald Bluetooth, one of the most interesting objects, I think it is the hunter's stone brooch. It is a very, very good quality brooch, probably made in the 7th or 8th century in the south west of Scotland and is a good example of the different cultural mix that there is in that part of Britain at that time the artistic styles were used by the Scots and you and the Anglo-Saxons are already influencing each other and then in the 10th century someone reacquired this brooch and reused it and it has an inscription. in Viking runes or runes from the Viking period and says that Mel Brigde owns this brooch.

The most interesting thing is that we have this reuse of a beautiful ancient object with an inscription in Old Norse using Scandinavian Viking script, but the name that appears is Celtic shows the influence of language and culture between the Scandinavian and Northumbrian Scots in the 21st century, apart from graphic novels and fantasy television series, runes have stayed with us and appear everywhere. In popular culture, one of the examples that everyone will be familiar with is the Bluetooth logo, which is what in rhinology they call a folder and there are two of them: runic. The united characters are an ancient ubi.

Harald Bluetooth's initials and the reason for this is that one of the engineers who was working on the Bluetooth project was reading a historical novel about Vikings and decided that Harald rallying the Danes under his rule was a good analogy for the way Bluetooth allows different types of devices to communicate with each other and communicate very well, so thanks to it we all have a little bit of Viking in our pockets, what about it? The landscape we walk through, I mean in Britain, is still a Viking landscape as far as names are concerned, we are certainly walking through a Viking linguistic landscape, so every day we use words that are of Viking origin.

Scandinavian, although we obviously think of them as English and their egg as a Viking word, that's what I'm told. Yes, I love that it can window. I'm coming in today, so we thought about each of them. Let me throw a negative window. We think of him. That's right and also on the sign we see place names that are also derived from Scandinavian, so yeah, and what are the clues if we're trying to find varieties in the landscape? What should we pay attention to in England? The most obvious. are names ending in B, so this is a very common Scandinavian word meaning farm or village, so if I give you a couple of examples from Leicestershire, we have ode, the first element of which is possibly the earthly personal name or possibly a adjective o meaning desolate or desert and then some RB and other letters, for example, the first element of that is probably the Scandinavian personal name Sumalee V, which means summer traveler, so there are needs, but some of the places very important places have Scandinavian names so Swansea means example means weak island and Fishguard means has this weapon and even the word for fish and the Scandinavian word for enclosure so those are two examples of important places that have Scandinavian names and what about last names?

Yes, several surnames that are still used today are derived from a Scandinavian personal name, so a surname as a brand, for example, could come from the Scandinavian name branded. The surname comes from the Scandinavian woman's name Gunnhild, which was very popular in the Middle Ages. Thole is another surname that derives from a Scandinavian personal name, so these linguistic traces are all around us because I use surnames as a way of searching for men who may have Scandinavian ancestry, so my work looks at the genetic legacy of the Vikings and I'm really interested in looking for areas where we know the Vikings came and that's how I use the surname, so surnames in this country are on average 700 years old and if I'm looking for people with very, very old surnames linked to the north of England is probably because their ancestry comes from there, so although the Vikings didn't have hereditary names, I'm looking at people who have surnames that probably originated about 700 years ago in northern England and then looking at their DNA in particularly the Y chromosomes to see if, as a group, they have higher proportions of Scandinavian ancestry in areas where we know the Vikings arrived.

I know you've actually sneaked a song from DNA - Gareth yes my club Neil was devastated I couldn't be involved yes but that will be very very interesting yes they're Vikings yes I need to make their eyes , tell me off the record, do you think you can tell if people have a little bit of Viking in them? That's actually a pretty important thing, you can't look at a man's Y chromosome type and say it's for king or son, etc., but I mean, given the number of ancestors we all would have had alive at the time of Vikings It's safe to say that we will all have Vikings somewhere in our family tree.

We all have a little bit of Viking ancestry somewhere. That is incredible. There is a bit of Viking in all of us. Thank you so much. What is this dream? Odin just before dawn I dreamed that he was preparing Valhalla for a new hero. I woke up the guard of the Dead and ordered them to get up, cover the benches, clean the glasses, tell the Valkyries to bring wine fit for a great chief, noble heroes come from my world. The heart is happy, so we approach the end of our live broadcast preparing our burial on a Viking ship.

I'm with Professor Neal Price, who is carrying a mysterious-looking Viking artifact that Neal will talk about very soon, a thousand years ago, the day a great battle took place. It was fought at Clontarf, on the outskirts of Dublin, between the Irish kings and the Vikings, in which thousands of people died, including the great Irish hero Brian Boru, and this week hundreds of re-enactors have recreated that battle, all for a great public, tens of thousands of Neil exactly a thousand years ago until tonight. The Vikings would bury their dead at Clontarf. What do we learn about them from their funeral customs?

Well, there are many different types of Viking burials in children's cremations, but what all such funerals have in common is a sense of spectacle, drama and ceremony. and remembrance and also, above all, the idea of ​​preparing a dead person for the transition to a new life in the afterlife with all their possessions intact and sometimes human possessions, people could take their slaves to the grave with them, so if you imagine a warrior like those who died in Clontarf buried with his weapons and armor fighting to wake up in the next world and out of our color, as they tell us, that's great, in fact, men, but women too.

Viking women could receive just as spectacular burials as men and Just now we heard about some Sorceress people buried with amulets, charms and hallucinogenic drugs and that's where this comes in a sorcery staff, a kind of witch's wand, it seems something you would find at Ollivanders, one buying Harry Potter. That's not exactly the case and the type of woman who would have wielded one of these might as well have been a funeral director. We are learning more about them all the time. A Viking funeral director. The brilliant Neil. Thank you for sharing your scholarship with us tonight.

You better get over what the Vikings imagined their afterlife would be, the reality is that they still live in the genetic code of many millions of us and the results of that Michael Gareth DNA test and your good food will be published in the British. museum website in just a couple of weeks and tell me honestly: will you be horrified or secretly happy if you find out that you are a real son of the Vikings and will you be happy? I'd be delighted to come from the west of Scotland so I think there's a good chance there's some Viking blood and I love the idea that my ancestors a thousand years ago sailed down the Volga.

No, I hope so, although I must say that I consider you coming from a poets' talk. perhaps instead of some sort of genocidal raider, well I think, as the Odeon statue shows, the poetic and the genocidal can coexist, which is so interesting about the Vikings, isn't it that whatever their heritage genetics, actually they are almost inescapable, but because they have had such a massive impact on the shape of our modern world, that is absolutely true, they obviously shaped the British Isles in many ways today, but more than that, they have given it shapes all of Europe because they established the Baltic as the other Great Sea with the Mediterranean, where ideas move from east to west, you are from Scandinavia, the Vikings embraced the Islamic Middle East and Christian Western Europe.

That's a really interesting idea for the world right now. I think it's so important that as global populations, we have to remember how intimately connected we've been for centuries forever, yes, but what we shouldn't do is we shouldn't whitewash the Vikings because they also did some really horrible things, they destroyed wonderful things. , but in an exhibition you can Of course, it doesn't show what has been destroyed, what we can show are the things that the Vikings made and preserved and those things take us back to that world and not just to the world of their actions but to the The sargans of the north with their stories of heroes and dragons and the great burning ships, the ships that carry heroes to the afterlife, that continue for better and for worse, will live on in our imagination.

I hope so and now Michael has been dealing with a lot of queries and questions about the exhibitions so I'm replying to you Michael, we've had quick messages from all over the country for Gareth the Swansea cat, you talked about dendrochronology, did you? how does it really work well? Dendrochronology is the analysis of tree rings to As long as the woods are well enough preserved, you can see by the spacing of the rings in the wood how old the wood is and where it comes from and this is how we know the Boat was built in Norway in the 1920s.

I'll love this one. It's from Steven and Liverpool. Why don't we see any Viking helmet with wings and horns? It's because they are an invention that they invented in the 19th century. It's what the Victorians and pre-Victorians thought the Vikings should have. look like Robin what they didn't like I'm very very disappointed although they were in my ladybug books when he was in a more fantastical one this is a great question what do contemporary Islamic writers say about the Vikings? They give us a mixed view. One of them tells us that on the one hand they are God's dirtiest creatures, but also talks about how tall and handsome they are, so they are quite damning about personal hygiene, but they look like them, but impartial .

Thank you very much, brilliant display guy, thanks for being with us tonight, as our crew of slightly intimidating 21st century Vikings take their final positions at the burial, it's time for us to say goodbye, we hope you enjoyed it if you did. they want. To find out more about the Vikings, simply go to the British Museum website British Museum dot org and please talk to us on Twitter hashtag Vikings live at the British Museum Michael, they kept us together for 90 minutes, we'll leave you now with The Vikings have theirburial with lit torches in the British Museum, they say goodbye live in London or, as the Vikings say, to Val for the bell.