Vikings, Ragnar, Berserkers, Valhalla & the Warriors of the Viking Age | Lex Fridman Podcast #495

The Viking long ships could average 70 to

120 miles a day.

They could hit a place,

raid it, drag off whoever they wanted, and get away before you could get your army there.

That's just absolutely terrifying.

>> What do you think it felt like

for Alen and the monks to see the Viking ships on the horizon?

>> Honestly, I think it's the end of the world.

And I don't think they were wrong to think that.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says, "The night before

Lindesfarn, the monks saw

sheets of lightning in the sky in the shape of dragons."

And this is obviously meant to foreshadow

the dragon ships coming up.

But if you were brave,

then you got taken to the house of the dead, which was Valhalla.

Every day you would fight and whatever wounds you got would be magically

healed that night and then the next morning you get up and do it again.

You're essentially practicing for Ragnarok,

>> the uh the final battle.

You know, there's this poem by Tennyson

Ulisses, my favorite poem.

I I think it captures the Viking spirit.

The last line of it is to strive to seek to find and not to yield.

I think that's very much like the Viking,

you know, my purpose holds to sail beyond the bass of all the Western

stars until I die.

We may die, but I'm going to do this and I'm not going to

The following is a conversation

with Lars Brownworth, a historian

and author of many excellent history books,

including The Seawolves, a history of the Vikings

and the Normans: From Raiders to Kings.

He's also the host of two history podcast series.

The first called 12 Byzantine

rulers, the history of the Byzantine

Empire is one of the first, if not the first ever history podcast,

launched over 20 years ago in June 2005.

His second series, Norman

Centuries, explores the remarkable rise of the Normans

from Viking raiders to the rulers of kingdoms

stretching from England to Sicily.

In this conversation, we focus primarily

on the Vikings, the seafaring

Norse warriors and explorers

who over a period of just 300

years reshaped the medieval world and

the trajectory of Western civilization

as we know it.

This is the Lex Freedman podcast.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description

where you can also find

links to contact me, ask questions,

give feedback, and so on.

And now, dear friends,

here's Lars Your writing and podcast

take us from the Vikings

to the Normans, the Crusades

to uh the collapse of the East Roman Empire,

also known as the Byzantine Empire.

There's a thread, I think, that connects the Vikings through all of it.

So, let's start at the beginning.

Let's start with the with the Vikings.

So the age of the Vikings

was uh intense and violent

as you write about

often dated from 793

AD to 1066 AD.

It lasted less than three centuries.

So uh the start is often dated

to June 8th 793.

What happened on June 8th 793?

In June of 793,

a group of Vikings,

probably originating from Norway,

arrived at the Holy Island of Lindes Farm, which was a monastic

community, and they essentially slaughtered everyone,

uh, burned a couple of buildings and grabbed everything

that had any value, and left.

That was the first Viking

raid that came in force.

And I I do think Lindwar

is a good a good beginning

date because the terror that it brought

really signified what was to come for the next two to three centuries.

So the word of it has spread

like there's a there's a bunch of accounts like the monk Alquin

wrote about this event

in a letter to King Eth of uh Nithria.

Quote, "It is nearly

350 years that we and our fathers

have inhabited this most

lovely land, and never before

has such terror appeared in Britain

as we have now suffered

from a pagan race.

Nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made."

What made this race so psychologically

devastating to this monk and to many other monks on the island

and then to all of Britain?

That's a great quote.

Um, Alquinn was not just a regular scholar.

He was Charlemagne's favorite scholar.

Uh, and he is largely responsible

as much as one person can be for the Carolyn Gene Renaissance that had

done so much to elevate the early medieval world.

Uh, in fact, the

spaces we have, the punctuation

we have, spaces between

words are likely result of Alwin's work.

He was an extremely

literate man and you can you can hear the terror creeping into that.

Um, and part of that has to do with

monastic communities, the church,

uh, and the what they thought a monastic community was.

So, the church was viewed as a sacred place.

Everyone in Europe, everyone in quotes,

as nominally Christian, and

the church is an area of safety.

It's a literal ark from the troubles of the world that you can flee to.

I believe there were even rules in England, for example, that if you had

killed someone, you could flee to a church.

uh and the civil authorities were not allowed to enter for up to 40 days.

So you could have sanctuary there

and to violate this would have been the worst possible

offense you could have given which is why you know Thomas Beckett's murder is

so so horrible in England

and the monks had dedicated themselves to a life of studying the Bible to

copying scriptures to to prayer

to removing themselves literally from the temptations of the world

and so they would seek monasteries

that were remote and the most remote locations you could find

were islands in the North Atlantic

because it's just so difficult to get there.

Um, so the ocean was considered a place of safety,

not sailing on the ocean, but these these islands were were

literal havens uh of peace and security and closeness to God.

Uh, and so the fact that the Vikings hit this place of all places

you could hit was the worst the most terrifying

kind of offense uh against medieval sensibilities.

So there's a kind of line that you understand you don't cross. Like everybody agrees.

It's the kind of thing that there's a social contract that most societies, most civilizations sign.

There's a line that we don't cross.

Let the scholars do their scholarly work. That's one line.

The other line is more kind of

from a military perspective,

from a a mobility

perspective, you just assume the sea

is not a place from which a threat could come, >> especially the north. >> Yeah.

sort of your conception

of the world is

shattered by one the brutality

that can come two that the sea can bring a threat

and three that you don't give a damn about any of the lines

that we as a society as a Christian society

have >> That's exactly right.

I mean even Alon I think he writes a little later on that

the dead were left as dung in the streets.

So he's describing dead monks as literal dung in the streets.

And you who would do this to men of God um inhuman monsters.

>> So who were they

uh the Vikings coming from the north?

How did they think

uh of the violence that they were doing?

>> Now that's a very good question

because and it it brings up a central problem

of looking at the Vikings, which is

the story is almost always told from somebody else's perspective.

Um largely from the pens of those they're attacking.

So they're not going to come across well.

um they're often portrayed as demonic and and inhuman.

The Vikings themselves though, as much as we can piece together

um from archaeology, from the stories they wrote later,

um that was another problem.

Their written alphabet, the runes, it was mostly used for spells,

name your sword, things like that, curse someone, but it wasn't really

useful for writing long poetry or literature.

Um, so the only Norse literature we have comes

at the end of the age when they had adopted the la the Latin alphabet.

So it's you can almost never see the Vikings

in their own words as they saw themselves.

Um, but we can piece certain things together.

Most importantly, Viking was not their day job.

Um, they were they were mostly merchants and farmers.

It's mostly farmers uh who lived in little bays called Vicks

in Old Norse, which is probably where we get the word Vicking, Viking from.

Um, one other note about how hard it is to to tease apart

what's happening here is the

the English and the Frankish and the Irish

writers all call them Danes.

No matter where they came from, they didn't stop to ask, "Now, excuse me.

are you from Norway or are you from

So they're all called Danes

or pagans, heathen or Northmen.

Um so this is not very helpful in figuring out where they came from.

Um the language was interchangeable.

You know, Old Norse was spoken in all three of those Scandinavian countries.

But living in the north

so far up near the Arctic Circle is that's at the very limit of

where technology of the time could allow humans to survive.

and that kind of that kind of harsh climate

bred I think very hard people.

Mercy was not equality

they seem to favor value.

Um there's a very famous story of a Swedish Viking

putting a sword in the crib of his newborn

son and saying may you have nothing in this life but what you can gain with this.

I mean, I can't imagine I can't imagine doing that

um you know, to any of my children, you know, putting a gun in

the crib or >> you know, I'd be carted away.

Um but I think that kind of underscores

the kind of violent

life that was you could expect as a Viking.

I mean, strength was valued

more than anything else.

>> So, understanding the world is harsh

and that strength is the way you

you must face that world.

So when you have those people, especially the ones that self- select to get

on a boat to face the ocean with all the uncertainty

that results in the kind of brutality that we got to see, >> I think so.

I mean, the way they would build their ships, they were clinkerbuilt,

so they were overlaid like planks overlaying.

So they were undecked

as well, and so they have tents.

So, can you imagine crossing the Atlantic,

the northern Atlantic, you know, with these huge waves splashing

over um with an inch of oak between you and the ocean?

I mean, the amount of bravery that must have taken to

to undergo is astounding.

Plus, they didn't have a compass.

They they navigated by

where's the sun, where are the stars,

what are there birds in the sky, do I see different color of water,

do I see leaves floating?

I mean, it's terrible

for traveling 2,000 mi.

that's uh that's not great.

So, it's kind of an intrepidness

to them that I think is part of the reason why they're so fascinating

to us in our sanitized

more or less sanitized

world that this this incredible

courage to to do this

and some horror at what they did on the other end when they arrived.

But, you know, we'll talk a little bit more about their religion, but they

they do not view the Christian God

in particularly flattering terms.

I mean to them

he's a weak god who won't protect his adherence

and they can just come in and plunder as they I mean they'll

one Viking famously says on land I'm a Christian

when I'm on the sea I worship Thor

it was very much the

kind of pragmatic take that the Vikings had.

>> Yeah they're gods and they have many but Odin and Thor are pretty hardcore gods.

So every everything just their whole philosophy

on life is pretty pretty hardcore.

Probably some of the toughest humans to have ever lived, >> I think.

So yeah, I mean their gods are horrifying. They're they're polytheistic.

There was no universally um head god.

>> I think Marvel has also led people astray in this.

Well, we'll talk more about

um a religion, but since you mentioned the boats,

what what do we understand about the technology they were using?

Can you just speak a little bit more

to this 1 in of oak idea?

So, these were these

long ships uh were also able to travel on rivers.

So they're not like what what is structurally

do we know about the boats that allow them

to be so flexible

in terms of where they can travel? >> Yeah.

I mean, and this was the Vikings great secret, and I think it's

They built different types of ships obviously for different purposes.

But the thing that

blows my mind is that they built these ships that could cross an ocean,

cross the Atlantic Ocean,

and at the same time

when they had a draft of

less than 2 feet,

so they could sail up rivers that were 2 feet deep,

and if they came to an, you know, a block or something,

uh, 20 men could pick up the ship and port it around.

They were incredibly portable.

Uh and and their speed the speed was the most frightening thing about the Vikings.

>> So the these are the same kind of ship that they sailed the ocean on. >> Yeah.

I mean it's it's insane.

>> So they're pretty pretty

sufficiently robust to handle the ocean

and mobile to travel

uh on rivers and do so really fast.

So you mentioned speed.

That seems to be

from a military perspective

the great advantage of the Vikings because they can move

much faster than the land armies can.

>> Uh so in not just the element of surprise which they often had

but the element of speed

was the thing that gave them

extreme advantage against the British armies.

>> That was the big one.

So, an English army,

if it had access to a good Roman road that was well-maintained,

which frankly there weren't tons of them, but they could average something like 10

to 15 miles per day on a good day if they didn't have a

a large baggage train to slow them down.

If you had a calvaryary

unit that didn't have to travel with the army, they could average about 20

m a >> The Viking long ships could average 70 to

120 m a day.

So, they're just moving in super fast motion.

They could hit a place,

raid it, drag off whoever they wanted, and get away before you could get your army there.

That's just absolutely terrifying.

>> What do you think it felt like

for Alquinn and the monks to see the Viking ships in the horizon?

Do you ever think about

try to put yourself in the mind of those folks

and imagining in that time you don't have a full map of the world, right?

And the oceans are not mapped

and you have a hazy conception of the world.

And so out of the darkness from the ocean where you thought nothing can

comes this terrifying this brutal force.

What do you think that felt like?

Honestly, I think it's the end of the world.

And and I don't think that's

I don't think they were wrong to think that.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says, "The night before

Lindesvarn, the monks saw sheets of lightning in the sky in the shape of dragons."

And this is obviously meant to,

you know, foreshadow the dragon ships coming up.

I can't imagine the horror.

I would it would shake my faith,

I'm sure, to have these

these giant men jumping out of their ships with swords raised and your

what do you have you cross?

Were the Vikings aware of the fear that they had caused?

So did they use fear as a kind of weapon

or was this just a

side consequence of their actions or did they understand and use it?

Like the Mongols, Jenghis Khan, the Mongols

used the fear and the terror

on purpose to increase the chance that they wouldn't have to avoid fights basically. >> Yeah. Yeah.

The Vikings absolutely used terror.

It was a a main weapon in their arsenal.

They would um they would attack

specifically on high holy days like Easter,

Christmas, because they knew there'd be higher value targets there with richer clothing, richer

offerings, and there'd be a lot of money available.

So, they were rather sophisticated,

which I think is something also that

they don't get much credit for.

It's like they were just dumb brutes

attacking and just destroying.

Uh but they were it was very sophistic.

They would show up.

This is what I mean when I say Viking wasn't their their day jobs.

They would be traders

in a say an English port.

Kind of looking around.

They'd get everyone's schedule.

Then they would sail away and

come back as Vikings.

And they knew exactly where to go.

They knew where all the money was held.

They knew where all the, you know, the churches were, when to attack,

they knew the entire Christian calendar.

They knew when someone's baptism

was, when someone's confirmation.

I mean, they they were aware of all of this.

uh and they would

they would definitely attack to increase terror.

>> One of the signs of the intelligence

of the Vikings is

is that the Viking age is so short.

So what happens is these explorers

and these uh uh rough men who do

the raids, they very quickly are good at conquering

and then start state building or

conquering and then establishing

trade routes and stop being the quote unquote Vikings.

Basically they just they conquer

and then they start doing the usual institute

build the institution start a state

and now they're normal

kind of nation civilization kind of thing.

So this kind of force

that is the conquering

raid violent intense explorers

is like a shortlasting

thing a couple of generations at most. >> Yeah that's right.

I mean the the Vikings

were ultimately a pragmatic

people who if it worked they would keep it

which is frustrating because they they disappear so quickly

uh because of >> with very little trace

record with very little writing. >> That's right.

>> No time for writing it down. >> No. Yes.

We're not doing that. >> Yeah.

Uh, why were monasteries

um such good targets

for these early raids?

>> This is where I imagine myself as a Viking

and um one of my ancestors

>> and uh sailing in.

I mean, they must have thought they had won the lottery.

>> You got this rich these rich buildings,

rich gold everywhere, decorated

books, jewels, all guarded by old men who don't know how to fight.

You just take it.

I mean we should make clear that the monasteries

had they were used as almost like storage for for gold. >> Yeah.

And this goes all the way back to you know the Roman Empire where

you know think of for example the emperor Augustus

when he was writing his will he put it in the temple of the

vestal virgins as well as Mark Anthony and Cleopatra.

They they'd all done that because there's this

additional protection of religion

and this taboo against violating that.

And the same thing happened when Europe was

Um, monasteries were placed.

I mean, rich people,

their faith had to be an active faith.

They had they couldn't just say their prayers and go to church on Sunday.

They would have to do something

to publicly show that they were,

you know, worthy of forgiveness or or whatever.

And so, they would donate huge sums

to the the church.

I think you know by the time of the French Revolution which is obviously

way in the future the church is the largest single land owner in France.

I mean the monasteries

were these these monasteries

filled with monks who had taken vows of poverty

were some of the richest places in Europe.

It's kind of a dichotomy here.

>> And then we should also say that the Vikings

many of them programmatic people.

So a lot of them would

eventually then convert to Christianity.

So you get you integrate yourself into the system. >> That's right.

In in some sense, religion

creates this backbone of a society that stabilizes it.

And then you create a bunch of rules about behavior,

how you're supposed to behave.

One of the rules is you don't mess with the church buildings and

the religious >> institutions and therefore they become great storage places for gold. >> That's right.

>> And then the Vikings here just test the

uh I mean it's the the fortune of geography

for them and the fortune of their way of life

uh to be able to raid to become extremely rich and therefore this

it both spreads the terror across England

and the message across Scandinavia

that there's a lot of riches to be had

and so the raids that's why there's an explosion of raids. >> That's right.

And I think it's not a coincidence that

it happens when it does.

I mean you have both.

So there's two main theories about why the Viking age starts.

The first, Will Durant puts it I think the best.

He says the fertility of the Viking women outstripped

the fertility of the Viking land. It's basically overpopulation.

>> Um and then they're they're searching for food.

And then the second

is there's this technological

breakthrough with the keel

uh and maybe pressure put on Charlemagne's

consolidation uh and and a little worries like that.

I don't see why both can't be true.

Uh but I do

I do also think

Europe like Charlemagne puts together

this vast empire that

you know fairly approximates

the Western Roman Empire.

If you squint it looks like the Western Roman Empire.

He's calling himself um the new Roman Emperor.

Um this will eventually

mutate into the Holy Roman Empire.

Uh but it it it's very much

this idea that it's back.

The Roman Empire is back.

He's crowned on Christmas Day in the year 800 and the empire is back.

Uh unfortunately it was sprawling.

It hadn't been thought through.

There was the communication was terrible.

You just couldn't do it.

Uh and so it was wealthy and weak

and that kind of attracts predators

by the time the Vikings crash into it.

You also have the added bonus for them of really feckless rulers.

And we should say going to perplexity

here that Charlemagne, also known as Charles the Great,

is the Frankish king who became emperor in

800 and ruled much of the Western and Central Europe in the late 8th

and early 9th centuries.

And uh there's a theory that the Viking age

was also a reaction to the south expanding north as you're talking about.

You tell the story of Charlemagne

weeping because he foresaw

the evil his descendants would suffer.

Did the Franks accidentally

wake the sleeping giant by crushing the Saxons and removing the buffer zone

between them and the and the

>> I'm sure that had something to do with it.

But yeah, as power was consolidated

throughout specifically central Europe,

um it did put a little pressure on

the areas of Denmark.

And those are the areas that

first kind of erupt

down um Norway and Denmark contribute

most of the early Vikings that hit the uh the Franks.

And and the Frankish Empire is the the most wealthy state in Europe.

It's poured money into

religious houses for the reasons you outlined

and all sitting there easy pickings for

people who've just developed the keel

and so they the word of the raids

sent terrorists through through England and through Europe.

Uh how much of

uh the raids were

reconnaissance and how much was it

just raids and how much

is it preparing for greater scale?

That's a good that's a really good question.

I think I think a lot of the early raids are probing raids.

Let's see what's there.

Um definitely when they're

when Ragnar Lothbrook, for example,

sacks Paris in that definitely

results in waves of Viking attacks

throughout the 860s trying to copy that.

And he he actually is the template which

everyone wants to follow.

Uh, and so that provokes largecale invasions.

Um, and they hit England.

They kind of switch off.

When when France is pretty much exhausted, they switch over to England.

Then when England is pretty much conquered,

they switch back to France.

So I think a lot of these are are just probing raids at first,

but they're proof of concept

and then they come in force.

For example, there was one king in England.

His name was Ethed

the Unready, which is a pretty fun funny

uh pun on his name.

Uh, but he paid in one year

7.5 million silver pennies to the Vikings to get them to go away, which

is a bit like someone's mugging you, so you pay them more money so they go away.

It's >> that's not going to work.

>> It's not going to work, but it will bring more muggers.

>> Um, so he paid the equivalent of

50 adult elephants, 48,000

pounds of silver to get the muggers to go away.

And it's unsurprising that throughout the course of his his reign, he paid something

like 20 tons of gold and silver, which he had to tax his people for. >> Um, yeah.

The Vikings are not the kind of people

that that would make go away, >> Yeah.

They would just come back on in >> Yeah.

They trust silver to do the work of swords.

>> Uh, you mentioned Ragnar Lothbrook.

Uh, who was Ragnar Lothbrook?

Did he actually exist?

Uh, some people believe he's a composite

from several real 9th century Viking leaders

versus an actual singular human.

>> Yeah, I'm I'm a romantic.

I would like to believe he existed.

Um, I think probably he's a he's a compilation

of of a lot

of different There probably is a seed of truth there.

There probably was someone named Ragnar.

Um, the last name is a little suspicious.

Loathbrook means uh hairy breaches.

He supposedly had magic pants that would prevent him from being poisoned by dragons or snakes.

It's maybe a clue

we're dealing with myth here.

Um but he is really the template for for Vikings.

You want to figure out like what the Vikings

wanted, who's their success story. It's Ragnar Lothbrook.

He's born um Norway, Denmark.

Countries argue over that. Um maybe Sweden.

Some some sagas say he's in Absala.

Anyway, he is, you know, penniless

and when he is in his

late teens or early 20s,

he decides to invade

sail up the Sen.

Uh there is a well-known city on the Sen

uh and he raids it.

Supposedly, he takes the hinge of one of the gates from Paris to prove

that he's been there.

uh the the Frankish king.

I love the Frankish kings because they

their citizens give them names

based on how much they hate them.

So you have you have Charles the Great, right?

Charles the Great, Charlemagne,

who's followed by Lewis the Pious.

That's probably the best one.

>> And Lewis the Pas is followed by Charles uh the Fat.

>> Who's followed by Charles the Bald.

>> who's followed by Charles the Simple or >> Nice.

So you can trust the names

to give you the TLDDR

of how good of a ruler there were. >> Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

>> So Charles the Great

widely acknowledges sort of

one of the great leaders of the Frankish Empire. Yeah. Aka Charlemagne.

>> Uh so what else do we know about him?

So there's um going to perplexity.

Ragnar is portrayed as a Scandinavian

warlord often called a Danish or Swedish king like you mentioned.

uh active in the 9th century during the height of the Viking

raids and then descriptions

of the raids and the exploits.

Medieval traditions link Ragnar

to famous raids on the Frankish realms,

especially the attack on Paris in 845

where he repeatedly sails

up the sun and extorts

a huge ransom from King Charles the

He's also associated with repeated attacks on Anglo-Saxon

England, embodying the archetypal

Viking chieftain, charismatic, brutal,

and focused on wealth, fame, and honor

in So that those are the ideals of the of the Vikings.

Charisma, brutality, >> and focusing on wealth, fame, and honor,

especially honor and battle.

>> Then also, what does he do with it, right?

What does he do with it?

So this he gets about £7,000

of silver from Charles the Bald which destroys

essentially destroys Charles the Bald's kingship

but he goes back home to

to Denmark and the Danish king doesn't want him around

because he's too powerful he's too rich he's a ring giver

you know think Beaolf

here right he's he's got this large personal army which

wants to join him for ad he can do you know they'll follow him

and he is a threat and so he is he kind of is encouraged to go elsewhere.

He ends up raiding England

for something like 15 years.

And then there's a

probably the most famous bit of the story is he he's shipwrecked

and King Ayella of North umberland captures him and

decides to kill him

by throwing him into a pit with vipers.

>> They throw him in this and the snakes are biting him, but he's got

his hairy breaches on, so it's not working.

So he's singing a hymn to Odin

and he gets pulled out

and he's asked why

he's not dying and he explains

rather foolishly that he has these hairy breaches.

So they take the pants off and throw them back

and his last words

are um when the boar bleeds the piglets come.

Uh by which he means my I have sons.

He had 12 of them

and they will avenge me and they do.

They lead the uh the great heathen army

um to invade and eventually conquer England.

Ayella, fun fact, not so fun for him,

is the supposedly was captured by the son of Ragnar.

His name is Ivar the Boneless, which is somewhat terrifying of a name.

Uh and he is he's the first person that a blood eagle was performed on.

>> What's the blood eagle?

>> It's when they remove the lungs.

They while you're still alive, they cut you open and remove the lungs and

put the lungs on your back.

>> And then when you try to breathe, they flutter like wings.

So it's called like an eagle.

It's called the blood eagle. >> That is >> disgusting. Yes.

>> And this is what Ayella,

you know, deserves according to,

you know, Bejorn Ironside

and Ivar the boneless, the sons of Ragnar.

Like this is what they get.

This is the the piglets coming

>> to the old boore, you know.

Uh one one last thing about

our um about >> is his wife is also an important part.

He had something like 12 sons.

The accounts differ and probably three marriages but his most famous wife was named

Olog and she fell in love with him.

He was on a ship.

He was passing through.

So kind of a glamorous sea king,

right, with his he's the he's living the dream.

and she sees him and she wants to be married to him and he he says no.

He says cuz he wants a clever wife.

And so he says if you can accomplish

these three things you can marry me.

So tomorrow I'll be here tonight and then tomorrow I want you to come to my ship.

I want you um

to have no clothes on

>> but not be naked.

I want you to

have not eaten a meal

but not have fasted.

and I want you to come without a companion but not alone.

And so she shows up with a dog.

She doesn't have a companion, but she's not alone.

She's taken a bite out of an onion, so she's eaten.

She hasn't fasted, but she hasn't had a meal.

>> And then she has very long hair, and so she's using the hair to cover herself.

So she >> naked, but she's >> but clothed. >> Right. Wow.

>> So in this So this is kind of the cleverness that would be expected

of a of a Viking woman.

So they're well matched.

They're like the ideal couple

>> and then they have 12 kids. 12 sons.

Not just 12 kids, 12 sons.

>> And many of them end up >> many of them end up almost as famous as their father. >> Ivor the boneless.

>> Uh Buer and Ironside and many others.

These sons later appear as leaders of major Viking forces in England,

particularly the so-called great heathen army

that invades in 865.

>> And they are historical.

Um, they are I mean there's no these were the names of Vikings who

attacked and conquered England.

They end up attacking Islamic Spain.

They go all over Europe.

>> Well, for them it sounds like glory in battle is really important. >> That's right. Yeah.

>> So, it's not even

It's just part of the culture.

It's part the the honor

>> Men die, but uh names live forever.

Uh, as a small aside,

since Ragnar is the star

of the Vikings TV series,

I don't know if you've gotten a chance to watch any of it.

Uh, is there any accuracy to it?

I think it's well done.

My one Ragnar's brother

is Rolo in the show, >> They weren't brothers.

In fact, by some accounts,

they were born 80 years apart.

Um, but as a storytelling

device, I applaud that. >> Yeah.

They basically take all the main

Vikings and put them all together and >> I get it. I get it.

It's confusing honestly in writing a book about it.

The hardest part was coming up with an organizational scheme.

Like what's what's the overarching

thing that links them together?

>> Well, there there's certainly an overarching

thing, but we don't have information about it.

This is the problem is we get

uh to see just

slivers of information right from the raids.

There's there might be just this rich history that we know nothing about.

>> Like where did this warrior culture come

>> Like what was the evolution of these

of these ideas of honor in battle?

I mean, maybe it's being overly romantic, but you can imagine

the ideals of battle from the Roman

Empire, from the from the Roman Republic and the early

imperial period coming up

north to Scandinavia, and we just know very little traces about that.

>> Yeah, even the name Scandinavia

is is from a Roman author.

>> I mean, I mean, they thought it was an island.

They thought Scandinavia was an island with one tribe, the Scandia tribe.

But, you know, it's close enough.

>> And uh who who was the what wasn't

this great heathen army

that invaded England in 865?

What can we say about that?

>> Well, there's this famous scene in the Viking siege of Paris in 845,

which is really the Europeans's

introduction or Europe as a whole

to a Viking army, not just a raid.

uh and then what it could do.

And the king, the emperor

Charles said, you know, let's find out what they want and

how much do I have to pay to get them to leave.

And so his ambassador

went to a Viking and said, who is your king?

And the Viking looked at him, didn't understand, and he he said, "We have no king.

We are all kings."

So they were very like decentralized, tough.

They only valued leaders who

could prove that they had

they had won, you know, could give out the rings.

>> So flat organization, very meritocratic.

>> If you're good at what you do, you demonstrate that skill in battle,

that means you get to have

uh maybe a leadership position.

And the moment you're no longer effective,

you don't get to have this leadership position. We're all kings. That's gangster. They're all history.

The Mongols, Jenis Khan was famous for this. >> That's right.

Yeah, >> that's one of the components of an extremely effective military force is if

it is uh prized.

Same is true for who gets through rule.

How do you determine the succession?

If you're just giving it to your oldest son, that's going to be a >> Yeah. Yeah.

I could not agree more.

There are some problems with

with meritocracy and civil war

because it tends to the only way you can find out like Alexander the Great, right?

Who does your empire belong to to the strongest?

What kind of guarantees the civil war at least with

giving it to your older son,

you know, who's going to be there's an element of stability there.

Um although you may end up with a

uh more likely than not, you're going to end up with a Caligula.

I would say human nature being what it is.

Um, >> it's it's a >> Yeah. Yeah.

It always converges to the

and the holds power.

>> The crazy >> Uh, so yeah, great heathen army 865.

>> So the great heathen army,

they were war bands that each followed this guy and this guy and I'm

going to sit you down in this room.

I'm going to tell you my plan.

You're going to listen.

You're going to push back.

I'm going to push back and we'll just have this kind of creative discussion

and come up with a plan we all agree on.

So it used to be

relatively small Viking groups that are doing raids,

>> And then the great heathen army is this large coalition

of Viking groups without a real leader

>> that was able to somehow

stabilize enough to have something like

>> Basically, there seems to be a very rapid evolution

of a Viking in every part of the world they touch.

You go uh raid, conquer, establish state. >> Yeah.

Uh and trade routes

and always maintaining an a grand

ambition but no longer doing the violence

and always being sufficiently

programmatic and flexible where you can accept

accept uh conversion to Christianity

for example if it's useful

>> and then accept the culture, accept the language.

So that's why they

integrate and the thing that we think of as Viking dis kind of dissipates

and disappears pretty quickly. >> Yeah.

And I think the best example of this is France, right?

So the Vikings, this is we'll talk about this more

probably with with Rolo, but

you know the Vikings settle in France in the north man's duche which is

shortened to Normandy and

they within a generation

I mean Rolo whose real name is is Ralph

Eric um he names his son William.

That's not a Viking name.

And within a generation

the language is gone.

The Viking names are gone.

The worship of Odin

is is, as far as we can tell, gone.

And the Normans are building

churches and marrying into the local aristocracy.

And they're they're essentially their Vikingness

is gone except for one thing, their like incredible

vitality, which the Normans

essentially conquered kingdoms at

both ends of Europe,

Sicily and uh England,

and found two of the four most powerful states in medieval >> Yeah.

So the ambition is there,

the vitality is there, >> the methods have changed. >> Yeah.

And they change rapidly

which is >> So you have a book, you have a podcast series

on uh the Normans.

So let's talk about Rolo. Who was Rolo?

Uh the famous Viking war leader who became the first

ruler of Normandy, northern France.

Well, first I should say as someone of Norwegian

descent, I'm going to fall down on the

Norwegian side of the argument here because

Norway and Denmark almost came to blows

over which was the birthplace of Rolo,

>> but the consensus seems to be Norway, not just biased.

>> Um, so he was

>> the only thing we the only glimpse we get of Rolo as a young

man is he was very tall.

So he's called Ralph Walker,

Ralph Granger because he was so tall he couldn't ride the little Viking ponies.

Uh so he had to walk everywhere.

>> Um but kind of poor

uh probably raised on stories of Ragnar

and and the other Viking lords.

and he goes uh he may have participated

in some of the earlier

like the 860 raids that they they

the Vikings did on Paris

or the Sen, you know, and

then he eventually ends up

plundering the what will become the Norman coast.

And in the in the year 911,

he makes a treaty,

the treaty of St.

Clarispt with uh the Frankish

king Charles the simple

uh which is not stupid.

It's it's more like straightforward.

There's no guile in how he talks.

Uh and >> Charles makes a really interesting deal with Rolo, which is

um why don't you

settle here, integrate into the local aristocracy,

and defend the norm the French coast against the Vikings,

which I don't know.

It's like putting a burglar in charge of your security or I don't know, but it works. >> It works.

Um, and Rolo, by the time he

makes that deal, he's probably in his mid 50s to mid60s.

It's it's unclear when he was born, but

the point is he's lived the Viking life.

Um, he's he's got something like 20 or 30, if you add up all

the sagas, they say he they gave him this many coins or whatever,

he has probably 20 or 30

tons of silver that he has acquired and then probably given out to whatever. So, >> so yeah.

So he's done the full

raid >> and then the conquering

and then >> and then the king says can you settle here?

Can I give you legitimacy?

>> So he does the diplomacy of a treaty.

>> Then he does the the good

state craft and state building and

then becomes I mean European.

>> In one life you go through the full >> Yeah. Yeah.

And then his son

William Longord succeeded him and

uh >> gets assassinated but

he does enlarge Normandy.

So basically every ruler after Rolo

enlarges Normandy until it

it essentially becomes more powerful than the than the king um by far.

There's a wonderful scene when when Rolo

uh signs the treaty,

he becomes a leisel lord of the French king.

And there's this great scene because

Rolo has to bend down and kiss the foot of the king.

So Rolo is probably, you know, he's a Norwegian Viking.

He's probably, I don't know, 6

>> Charles, this little Frank, he's probably 510.

He's like roll is towering over him

and he's there's a large both armies are watching.

There's a bunch of people who have come in from the countryside.

They've heard something's going on and this

important part of this feudal ceremony you have to kiss your lord's foot to

to you know be in a subservient role.

And Rolo says I'm not going to do that.

So he turns to one of his guards and says you kiss the foot.

And the guard's probably taller than he is.

So he bends down and he picks the king's foot up to his mouth,

>> which the way to do it.

>> Charles goes falling on the back.

I mean, I can't think of a better example

of the relationship between the Norman Dukes and the French kings.

I mean, it's perfect. It's perfect.

>> Oh god, I love the Vikings.

>> So, as you've covered, and maybe you could speak to that a bit more,

for a long time to come,

Normans have influence on Europe and beyond.

Yeah, it's hard to overstate

Normandy's impact on Europe

uh in the Middle Ages.

Of course, they will they'll go on to conquer England as well.

Um but Rolo when he is when the he signs the treaty,

it's an ambiguous treaty.

He's not he's given a title

um which is rather ambiguous.

He's not a duke and it's not clear.

He's not an earl.

He's not a duke.

He's just subservient to the king.

And which means Normandy

is not a duche.

It's not a principality.

It's kind of this ambiguous.

No one really knows what it is.

And so Rolo being a good Viking

and his descendants being good Vikings despite becoming French.

Um they just call themselves Duke.

>> And they they they

essentially seize whatever power they want.

Um there's one Norman Duke.

I think he's the grandson of Rolo.

He's kidnapped by the French king when he's 14.

He escapes the captivity

and kidnaps the king

as a as a 14-year-old.

I mean, it's these are

these guys are crazy.

How far geographically and in time

does the influence of the Normans and Normandy go?

So, what should we understand

about the impact of Normans in history?

I'm a romantic, so I I

when I read history, I usually end up rooting for the losers.

Um I want Harold Godwinson

to beat William the Conqueror,

you know, I want Hector to beat Achilles.

Never works no matter how many times I read it.

But I was always interested in the Normans

uh because of the Norman conquest of England.

And my I have a twin brother and he asked me, we were taking

a walk and he asked me

how did Europe uh because we I was reading about the dark ages at

the time, the the early middle ages.

How did Europe, this kind of backwards place, become the dominant

>> force in the world?

And I I started thinking about that and

my answer really is the Normans.

The Normans that that's the great change

between Europe as a backwards

inward-looking place and Europe as a

kind of confident outward-looking place.

And that change happens

uh under under the Normans.

I mean the Normans, it's not a coincidence that they

they lead the charge in the first crusade.

Um they create the state of England.

Uh if you look at England before the Vikings arrive,

there are seven it's the heptar.

There are seven kingdoms in England and the Vikings destroyed all but one.

Only Wessex is preserved

and they've conquered about half of Wessex.

And there's a young king.

What's he going to do? Mhm.

>> But that king is Alfred the Great and he conquers the rest.

And then his grandson

Ethleston is the first man called King of England,

King of all angles.

Um, and then they do they do the same thing almost wherever they go.

They they help create modern France by ripping apart

uh Charlemagne's empire, which was unwieldy.

It looked good on paper, but it was unwieldy.

It was replaced by this leaner, meaner, compact thing.

They figure out how to deal with the Vikings by

essentially building fortified bridges.

Um, changes to their army and so forth.

The Vikings, I I like to call it creative destruction.

It they by destroying

the things they destroyed,

they cleared the ground for something stronger to grow. >> Uh, that's brilliant.

The the creative destruction

engine that created Europe

was the Normans and the Vikings.

And then you also

you have another book that talks about the Byzantine Empire.

So you have the creative destruction that

resulted in Europe that uh Europe led to this

western quote unquote civilization

that we think of now.

And the thing that protected

Europe for centuries was the existence of the Byzantine

Empire, the East Roman Empire

because of all the threats

uh that came towards Europe.

This strong uh stable

empire that is the Byzantine

Empire protected the forces

from everything that came from the east.

>> They were a buffer.

they were a buffer giving Europe this kind of vital time to develop the way

it needed to develop.

>> It's interesting to think

that the world as we see now

was a results of of a sequence of quite

lucky geographical and leadership decisions in history.

I mean it really does pivot on

uh a few points of geography

and a few special leaders. >> That conquer. >> Yeah.

Had Constantine chosen his sight a little less wisely,

the world's going to be very different. >> Yes.

So, Constantine is the guy who moved

the capital of the empire

from Rome to Constantinople,

thereby giving a lot more focus to the east,

thereby protecting Europe from

the the gigantic threats

that loomed in the east. >> That's right.

and the Islamic invasions of the 7th century,

they couldn't get past that choke point of Constantinople.

They had to take the long way across Africa,

you know, and by the time they get to Spain

uh and conquer Spain and into at the Battle of Tour,

you know, Charles Martell is able to stop them and they're they're massively overextended.

You know, I think it's a very different story if they can come in

through the Black Sea.

>> And all the times the East Roman Empire almost died from all the invasions,

all of those invaders

would have just just

conquered the entirety of Europe. >> Yeah.

I mean, I don't think they would have met much resistance. >> Yeah.

So, rewinding back, what was the religion, the religious beliefs, the gods

that the Vikings believed

that we've mentioned a little bit of Thor and Odin?

How did they see this this

world and the universe?

>> So, the Viking gods are

are I mean, they've been sanitized,

but they're they're they're

quite terrifying, but at the b their basic conception of the universe

is an eternal struggle between chaos and order,

which chaos will eventually win.

So I think the best view of cosmology

is of concentric circles

with Utgard is the outer realm and that's where the chaos is and those

were the that's where the frost giants are.

All the monsters that seek to destroy

the gods represent order and stability

and the monsters represent chaos

and it's it's an eternal war between the two of them.

Um so there are different categories

of gods depending on which circle you come from.

The gods don't all like each other.

They don't they're not

sometimes they engage in wars.

Um some of the most famous gods

the Norse gods you know Loki or Freya

come from outside the

aier the main gods.

So it was kind of a fluid it was kind of a fluid thing.

>> It was more a way to understand the >> I think.

So yeah the thunder is

Thor fighting the ice giants and

and that's what that is.

Uh going to perplexity,

Vikings followed a polytheistic

ritual heavy religion centered on a pantheon

of gods and spirits with no single holy book or unified church

and practices varied a lot by region and family.

And so the major gods was Odin and Thor and

Odin was his domain was war, kingship, wisdom, death.

Thor was protection, thunder, fertility.

Freya was love, magic, battle dead.

typical worshippers for Odin were chieftains and elite warriors and poets.

Typical worshippers for Thor were

farmers and quote ordinary people.

And typical worshippers of Freya were women, magic practitioners, and lovers. >> Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I've heard it.

I think you can break it down saying like Odin was the elite.

He's kind of more aristocratic, right?

He he's the god of poetry.

You need to read, etc.

Only the elite would know how to do that.

A farmer wouldn't really care about that.

Where Thor is a more earthy god.

You know, you want the waves to be less, you know, pray to Thor.

>> Um, I find Odin,

I think, most disturbing.

He's the god of madness

and the god of

poetry, which I guess those are related. >> Yeah.

Um, but in battle, I mean, the berserkers,

probably the most famous type of Viking warriors,

were considered to be Odin's chosen warriors.

They would show no pain

and they just run at the enemy

and attack with their nails and their teeth.

>> Even if they could have their arms hacked off, they would still

keep going like uh they would and they would attack other Vikings.

They would just they were berserk.

It's where we get the word

>> What do we understand the mindset that leads to that?

I mean, it wasn't it wasn't religious in nature.

There's not uh this kind of ideology.

It's just a way of life and and

then prized honor and intensity in battle. >> Yeah.

I mean, one of Odin's

names is the raven feeder.

I mean, you by creating corpses, which ravens feed on,

you are you're doing the work of Odin.

And you know, the the the

Viking view of the afterlife

was There weren't really punishments,

not really, for doing bad things.

Uh, unless you did something really bad.

Uh, then you ended up

as basically an evil spirit,

uh, haunting your grave.

Uh, but if you were brave,

then you got taken to the house of the dead, which was Valhalla,

uh, to and you were resurrected.

Every day you would fight

and whatever wounds you got would be magically

healed that night and then the next morning you'd get up and do it again.

You're essentially practicing for

>> the uh the final battle.

>> Uh which you would lose.

So I'm not sure.

It seems it's rather pessimistic.

>> The battle is what I mean it sounds like losing is not a thing.

The battle itself is what matters.

So Valhalla is a place where you fight a battle every day. >> Every day. unlimited food.

There's like a boar or whatever this and there's unlimited wine.

>> And you can die

as much as you want. You'll reborn again.

And this is the idea of the

>> This is the idea of the highest.

This I >> if there's such a thing as heaven in this kinds of construction of the universe. This is heaven.

This is the highest form.

>> This is the highest place you can go to is Valhalla. Yeah.

Is fight every day.

>> Eat as much as you want.

Drink as much as you want,

die, and are reborn the next day.

Ends for >> forever preparing yourself for the final battle of Ragnarok.

>> So, this is where this is the end of the world. This the cataclysm. >> That's right.

Odin's going to die.

>> U Thor will die.

He'll get killed by one of Loki's

children, the Midgard Serpent.

>> Um Odin will be devoured by a wolf.

uh the the sun and moon which are being chased by

monsters by giants will be caught and swallowed by the giants plunging the world into eternal darkness.

Um essentially all the

all the gods will die

and darkness and chaos will then ensue and then at the very end

the this is mostly from a guy named Snory Sterles

who was living right at the end of the Viking age and writing this

and he was I believe a Christian.

So there's I think we're fusing things here.

So then there would be a new earth and a new heaven

and a new god >> who's all powerful. >> Yeah.

If you think of religion

as a as a kind of technology,

a social technology that

stabilizes or um helps guide the evolution of a society.

It's interesting to see what the Vikings came up with.

And do you ever think from a history the grand

view of history how effective these different technologies

of religion have been?

Yeah, I mean I think that's certainly

I'm thinking of of the Viking rituals.

Hospitality is very important in a northern climate where

you know food is scarce, winters are long and harsh

and if if you don't share

what your hearth with,

you know, someone knocking on your door then

someone else might not share it with you.

You could be facing death.

So in this case, hospitality

becomes a core belief.

And >> you know, the idea was that Odin would travel

incognito knocking on people's doors and he would remember

if you let him in or not.

And if you were hospitable,

he would bless you.

And if you were unhospitable,

he would murder you.

And >> you know, I think these rituals are obviously

intended for how do we survive this winter?

>> How do we effectively

spread the message that hospitality

is pretty >> good thing?

and is carrot in the stick of religion.

>> If you do a good thing, you'll be uh rewarded.

If you do a bad thing, you'll be punished.

And then different religions plays a different ways of communicating that. >> Yeah.

I mean, I I think

also religion gives you

it gives you a worldview, right?

It gives you a morality

and uh these are these are core parts of society.

And the the beautiful thing about religion

is it uh interplays with human nature and it guides humans.

But then of course

human nature and humans

project themselves onto the rel religion.

Sometimes they use that religion.

It's um to accomplish goals in a pragmatic sense, in a political sense, in

a geopolitical sense, in a military sense, in a social sense.

And so there's that dance

of uh how religion

invigorates and guides the peoples

and then how the peoples

use the >> to guide

the direction of the world.

>> And that's certainly the history of

Christianity has a big role to play in the history of Europe,

the history of the Byzantine

Empire and that part of the world.

And it was an incredibly effective religion.

uh once uh Constantine

converted it spread extremely

quickly relatively speaking across a couple of centuries

just to linger on the Viking

views of the world and the afterlife.

So we mentioned Valhalla

there's the Norns which are the three spirits that represent the past the present

and the uh the necessity

they spin the fates of all men and gods

at the roots of drizzle. >> Yeah. Drizzle. >> Yeah.

So there there's a notion of like determinism

and fate to the Viking life.

And there's Valhalla, there's hell,

>> This was the destination for the vast majority of people.

So if you don't make it to Valhalla,

>> this is where you go.

Unless you're a real bad person, then there's some punishment

for the truly wicked.

>> And we should point out that hell, spelled with one L,

uh was a daughter of >> Mhm.

uh and was not the same as the

>> hell with the two L's.

>> Hell with the two L's. Very different.

>> It's it's more like purgatory type of >> Yes.

This house of like the house of the death, the house of the underworld,

>> a colorless twilight, not necessarily

a place of punishment, but simply the inevitable

end for most, unless

you end up in Valhalla,

which means you're a great warrior dying in battle.

It reminds me of the Greek view of the afterlife, right?

where you essentially get amnesia and forget who you are unless someone makes a

sacrifice and says your name and only then you'll remember it.

So your your destiny is ultimately to

just become gray and fade away.

So you might as well you might as well be brave.

You might as well run at that

>> So that was the engine of

uh their the warrior culture that was core to their society.

I think probably >> I have to ask about Vikings as explorers.

They were truly one of the greatest explorers in history.

>> What can you say to

what is it in their spirit that motivated them?

I mean they sailed they reached North America

500 years before Columbus.

They sailed uh obviously to England,

Spain, Italy, Russia, North Africa,

the Middle East, Paris.

And I'm just showing here a map of the ocean

roots and the river systems that they connected to and sailed.

What do you think

drove them to explore the unknown?

This boggles my mind.

This like this map here just

that messes with me cuz

they they didn't have a compass.

>> I mean, can you imagine

shoving off from some fjord in Norway West?

That's your only west. Mhm.

And there was a Viking named Nad.

He's actually the first Norseman to reach Iceland, though it was a total accident.

But here's the here's the mind-blowing part.

He decides to land and explore.

And he gets off and he sees two humans.

They're monks from Ireland.

>> They got there in a canoe.

Now, look at Ireland. Look at Iceland.

That's even more impressive.

They got in a canoe, a skinboat,

>> and they just went north because they were trying to get away from the world.

>> they found Iceland and

in a very excellent move on their part, they ran away as soon as

the Vikings arrived, which is, you know, pretty smart.

>> I don't know if you know, there's this uh video of the deranged

penguin with the Warner Herszog

documentary Warner Herszog is like

uh overdubbing explaining the thinking of the penguin,

but the penguin leaves the tribe and he just goes out into the mountains.

I have to show you this video.

This is my favorite video of all time.

There's this lowkey uh documentary

where they're talking about penguins

and then there's one penguin

that leaves >> I'm out.

>> Leaves the tribe and just goes towards the mountains and as Warner Herszog

says towards certain death.

It always reminds me of this kind of Viking spirit or the or the monk spirit.

There's something one human or a small group of humans just decide to go

>> just go >> and not look back.

>> Are there sea monsters out there? Maybe.

>> Is there any land?

Are we going to fall off the edge of the earth? Maybe.

>> And just as Warner Herszok says,

you know, this certain death.

Now, he doesn't romanticize it.

He says the penguin is

just deranged and crazy.

But look, the penguin did look back briefly,

>> And he he did think about this.

So this there's there's two ways.

There's multiple ways, but you just highlighted

two ways to explore.

One is cuz you're this hardcore

dude that just is

looking to raid and just goes and goes and just you have the resilience

and the will >> to keep going.

And then there's the the monks that just want to >> leave. Yeah.

>> Versus go toward their they want to leave far away

so they could be closer to God.

they could be closer to themselves and >> and away from sin. Yeah.

>> You know, there's this poem by Tennyson

Ulisses, my favorite poem.

I think it captures the Viking spirit.

The last line of it is to strive to seek to find and not to yield.

I think that's very much like the Viking,

you know, my purpose holds to sail beyond the bass of all the Western

stars until I die.

We may die, but I'm going to do this.

I'm not going to yield.

That spirit is one of my

favorite aspects of human beings.

I think that's why the Vikings

remain so popular today.

You know, we name our satellites,

our football teams, you know, our cruise ships.

There's this like there's this romantic

hook >> of a people who did not yield. >> Yeah.

They embody the part,

the flame that burns in all of us

that we admire most about human beings

is is that like

unyielding focus going out there of

of taking the leap into the unknown, into the scary, and never stopping.

>> It's not too late to seek a newer world.

>> I have to ask you about speaking of a newer world, America. Yes.

And uh Leaf Ericson.

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And now back to my conversation with Lars Brownworth. All right, we're back.

Let's talk about this incredible

fact of the Vikings

that Leaf Ericson who was a Viking explorer

was the first European

to reach North America

around the year 1000

5 centuries before Columbus reached North America.

Um tell tell the story of his journey.

What do we know about him?

So let's begin with his dad.

Uh, his dad's name is Eric the Red,

who was forced to flee Norway when he was probably 10 years old because

his dad had killed some people.

It's kind of hilarious.

In the in the saga, it says

for a few killings. >> Okay.

I guess that's a thing.

Um, so he went to Iceland

and he got a farm in Iceland

which was already starting to become overpop populated.

They had cut down all the trees.

There were some climate

problems of deforestation and farms just blowing away.

So, the population was

essentially beginning to crash in Iceland

and he got into a fight with his

neighbor uh and ended up killing his neighbor

and so he was exiled from Iceland.

He was exiled from the place his father had been exiled from.

>> So, it runs in the family this whole outlaw thing.

What also ran in the family apparently was

this streak, this courageous streak.

Uh, and he had heard that there had been people.

So the the Norwegian Vikings,

they were aiming for England

and they hit the Hebdes,

which are these kind of treeless

islands above Scotland and they found they were good for refueling.

Get pick up water or whatever and then on your way to Scotland to raid.

Uh, and then a Viking had missed the Hebdes and discovered Iceland.

And then another Viking had aimed for Iceland,

missed and hit Greenland.

And a little fun fact about Greenland,

it is both north, south, east, and west of Iceland.

So it's any direction you're going to hit Greenland.

>> So Greenland is uh hard to miss.

It's hard to miss,

which is not to take away anything from the

extraordinary danger, the certain death of

going further west, but there was this by this time there was this idea

that, you know, enough people had become famous by sailing west into the unknown

and discovering things that I think there was a general idea of there's more

out there to the west.

Uh, and so he had talked to someone who had seen Greenland

and reported that there was this good land further west.

Uh, and so he hired the ship's crew of that Viking.

So it's kind of the deck was loaded

and he went to

Greenland where he was able to

settle uh two different colonies.

One was called the Western Settlement in the West and one was called the

Eastern Settlement and essentially the extreme south.

And that was essentially the edges of where Viking technology could be.

A cool factoid is that the Vikings practiced husbandry,

raised animals, and obviously this is not an option

in Greenland, although they couldn't have known it at the time, but they brought plants with them.

So, and then they were able to trade with the the native Inuit

for walrus blubber and things like that, and they they made a go of it.

But what's obvious, you know, anyone who's

seen Greenland, there's there no trees.

It's almost impossible to survive by practicing husbandry.

It is impossible to survive as it turns out just practicing husbandry.

And by this point, I think this extraordinary

Viking pragmatism is beginning to be played out

u because one of the reasons the Greenland

experiment fails ultimately in 300 years

uh is they fail to adapt.

Um it's clearly they should they should focus more on fishing

on other sources um than than just raising pigs and cows.

>> well, so we hit the the limit of the

the Viking adaptability which they have demonstrated

throughout the world >> So Eric the Red

is this he makes his name by exploring

and he does in fact

once he discovers Greenland

he calls it green.

He says there's so many salmon

in the rivers of in the fjords that you can just scoop them out with your hands.

You don't even have to fish.

>> Well, is this real? >> Is a lie.

>> That's not true at all.

So, he's doing >> Is this story true that he called it green just so

he can attract people?

>> It is the greatest real estate scam in history. >> Okay. Genius.

Um I mean it stuck to this >> Yeah.

It's the most misnamed

place in the world. >> Yeah.

But but in the Europe of the time,

even in Iceland, like the the dream was to have land.

I mean, land equal wealth in Europe.

And here he says there's

enough land for the taking like anyone who wants, which is true.

It's the largest island on Earth.

I mean, there it's unusable,

but it should be called Iceland,

glacier land or something. But it worked.

He took 500 men with him from Iceland.

It's got to be a significant chunk of the population,

but there's enough people kind of land hungry.

There's no more room in Iceland. It's too restrictive.

We're going to go further west.

Um, so he takes 25

ships and then 14 make it,

which is pretty good.

Um, and then those those

14 ships with their

300 or so people

start the western colony.

And then word gets back to Norway,

but Norway's 2,000 mi away, 2,000 plus miles away.