Introducing: Real Vikings - Episode 1

Hello listeners, today we're bringing you a preview of a brand new show from the Noiser

Podcast Network. It's called Real Vikings. Hosted by Ian Glen, the show takes you on

a deep dive into the Viking Age. Your board longboats bound for new lands, from Greenland

to North Africa, Constantinople to Canada. Follow mighty warlords like Eric Bloodaxx and

Olga of Kiev. Meet master navigators like Leif Erickson and uncover the real figures

behind the legends of the sagas. You'll hear contributions from leading historians as

well as original music and immersive sound design. If you enjoy this tastier episode,

search Real Vikings in your podcast app and hit follow. You'll find more episodes waiting

for you right now.

The year is 789 AD. It's market day in the town of Dolmoor-Richester. Dolchester, as it's

known today, in England, southwest. Dents cloud sweeping from the east, gathering mass.

The air grows oppressive beneath them. Situated on the banks of the river Froome in the

ancient kingdom of Wessex, Dolchester is an important settlement. It has royal connections.

The west Saxon King has a winter residence here. A man patrols the market stalls with

a watchful eye. There's a haughty swagger to his walk as he taps his staff on the cobbles.

It has touched their forelocks respectfully. This is not a man you want to cross. His

woolen clothes are of quality revealing his high status.

Meet Bayada Hard is the reef. An official responsible for ensuring that the King's laws

are upheld. The market is a honeypot for near-do wells, drunks, pickpockets, cheats, and

this Bayada Hard's job to police and punish every kind of criminality. There's one rule

above all others that he's determined to enforce, that the King must receive his portion,

his cut, of every transaction that takes place in his realm. It's not just about the money,

it's about maintaining order.

When Bayada Hard overhears a group of men talking about some foreigners trading furs over

the side of their boats, his ears prick up. The alleged infringement is taking place on

the Isle of Portland, down on the coast, about 30 miles to the south. Bayada Hard hurries

to the Guild Hall and gathers his attendants. If he's to confront these strangers, he's

determined to impress on them the full dignity of his office.

Dorchester is an old Roman town. The roads are laid out in the classic grid pattern, but

it's fallen into disrepair since the legions left, long, long ago. The amphitheatre turned

to rubble, its arena overgrown. Sheep nibble at the grass where gladiators once fought.

The reef leads his men along south-street. They leave through a gap in the town walls

where the old gate used to be, then take the long straight Roman road down to the sea.

For Bayada Hard, the issue is simple. The foreigners are welcome to trade, but they must follow

the rules. He sits up in the saddle. All he has to do is to show them whose boss.

As they reach Chessel Beach, the thin isthmus that connects Portland to the mainland. Bayada

Hard sees the strangers' boats drawn up ahead. Three mastered long boats with their sails

stowed. Their crews mill about on the shingle, a campfire burns. Suddenly they stop what

they're doing and turn to face the approaching posse. Bayada Hard and his men draw to a haunt.

At close quarters, the size of the strangers is striking. They are a formidable side.

The reef touches a crucifix on his belt buckle. The ultimate source of his authority is gone.

The strangers wear helmets of either leather or metal. Axes, daggers and swords hang from

their bouldricks. The loose pelts slung about their hips. Their muscled arms are ringed

with gold. One or two small gilded hammers around their necks. The symbol of a pagan god,

Thor, the bringer of thunder. Their hair and beards appear well groomed. Dark green to

twos are visible on their exposed skin. Bayada Hard dismounts and strides towards them.

One hand on their hilt of his dagger. He gestures towards a pile of lush, arctic furs.

You can't trade that here. He shouts, explaining that they will have to pass through a king's

port in order to pay the correct taxes. The foreigners are unmoved by his words if they even

understand them. Then one of them reaches for a long handled battle ax. His hand rises before

shooting forwards and releasing the weapon. Time seems to slow down as it spins through the air.

Bayada Hard is rooted to the spot as the axe hits its target. The middle of his chest.

With a deafening roar the men from the ship's rush forward and drag Bayada Hard's stunned men

from their horses. As the storm clouds break the strangers load up their long, sleek vessels

and heed them back into the water. The only trace of their presence, the small ring fire

on the sacks and bodies lying in the blood soaked pebbles.

Today, Chessel Beach, with its tidal lagoons, is one of Dorset's most popular tourist locations,

a favoured spot for ramblers and birdwatchers. It's hard to imagine it as a setting for such a

shocking drama. So who were these men who pitched up on this beach a millennium ago,

dispensing such violence and casual brutality? They are, in a word that will soon strike fear

into the hearts of every Anglo-Saxon, every Kelt, every Freesian, every Frank across the early

Middle Ages. Vikings. Say the word Viking today and it conjures a certain image.

One represented in countless films, TV shows, video games, comic books and superhero franchises.

One of pillage and savagery, a cliched world of horned helmets and blood eagles,

of barbaric, hersute heathens enthralled to gods and monsters, the hell's angels of the high seas.

Men who came in longboats to terrorise and slaughter, the innocence of Britain, France,

Ireland and beyond. If those men who killed Baderhard are anything to go by, then certain

aspects of this legend are true. But it only tells part of a bigger story, of a people who

were so much more than the fur-clad thugs of popular imagination.

The Vikings hailed from a sophisticated and developed civilization. They were master navigators,

fearless explorers, diplomats, traitors, craftsmen, storytellers and, yes, warriors.

Moreover, they were adventurous. Men and women whose feet still defy the imagination.

A people who crossed vast oceans and discovered new lands, building up an impressive

trading empire that spanned four continents, four centuries.

The Viking Age is perhaps the most revolutionary, crucial,

as seminal period ever in the history of the Scandinavians.

We're dealing with a group of people who really transform the history of Europe.

There's a real sense in which there's almost no parts of Europe they leave completely untouched.

They founded just about every major city in Ireland. They founded the first centralized state

in what is now Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus. They founded perhaps the greatest of the medieval

kingdoms, which is the kingdom of the two Sicilies. And then of course, medieval France and England

were also largely created by the Vikings. They ended up traveling. These thousands and

thousands of miles across the North Atlantic heading west, circling Greenland, reaching the

edge of the North American continent. They ended up all the way in the Arctic. They go east,

they go down the waterways of the Eurasian steaks all the way to Byzantium, even to Baghdad.

What really fascinates, I think, is this exploration, this human urge to move beyond the known

and into something that has not yet been discovered. Much of their history was written by their

enemies, which means their true achievements were often overlooked. The achievers themselves demonized.

But the Vikings changed the world and were themselves changed as they sailed and battled their way

through it. The Vikings, they do have a unique place in the public mindset. They are

framed as the barbaric other. And there is something fascinating about that. And more than that,

this idea of people who left everything behind to quite literally sail over the horizon.

The Viking period is still extremely compelling today, partly because it's just so colorful,

it's full of dramatic figures, dramatic events. They've got amazing tattoos and they've all

these wonderful hairstyles and they're the absolute epitome of cool.

I'm Ian Glenn and from the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Real Vikings.

We start with a who-done-it. Who are the ad-hards killers exactly?

These men who appeared out of the blue on that dorsid beach 12 centuries ago.

Contemporary accounts refer to those who murdered the King's Reef as Danish, Northmen,

Norse, or even just heathens. They are all synonyms for Viking.

All we really know for sure is that these killers, these Vikings, came from the North,

from the land we call Scandinavia.

The world back then is very different to the one we know today. The western part of the Roman

Empire collapsed in the fifth century, over 300 years previously, since then there's been a

period of decline across Europe. The dark ages, as they are usually called,

a time of great social upheaval, a sense of barbarians at the gate of classical civilization.

The name tells all, it's an era with little documented testimony as to what actually occurred.

By the ninth century, when the Vikings begin to make their mark, we do know that two new power

blocks have emerged, both dominated by the new religions that have swept across from the east.

Francia is a Christian territory. It covers much of modern-day France, Germany, the low

countries are northern Italy, with its emperor Charlemagne, God's anointed ruler on earth.

Further south, there is the vast Umayyad caliphate, a Muslim realm which stretches across North

Africa and the Middle East, from Spanish al-Andalus to Persia. Out on the fringes in Britain or

Ireland say, the more inconsequential things become. England, at the end of the eighth century,

doesn't exist. Its emergence as a nation is a story for another day.

Back then, the land that we now call England is divided into four main kingdoms,

East Anglia, Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex. They have emerged out of the power vacuum left

at the end of Roman rule in its province of Britannia. The native population of Celtic speaking

Britons has been faced with an influx of Germanic migrants from northern Europe, tribes of

Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Freesians. Out of this melting pot, a new people have emerged.

They speak what we classify today as Old English and have come to be known as Anglo-Saxons.

By the Adahards time, the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms are resolutely Christian.

The process of conversion from paganism, worshipping the same old gods that the Viking still

cling to, began in the late 6th century when missionaries sent by Pope Gregory landed in Kent.

To the Anglo-Saxons, to be like Be'adahard, the northern lands beyond British shores are a

distant and unsettling mystery. An old idea rooted in the pagan past links the north with Hell.

Tucked away at the very top of the map, the region we know as Scandinavia is a land far, far away.

Across the fjords and mountains, this territory of the north plays host to a rural society.

Most folks live in villages and isolated farms, growing crops and raising cattle, as well as hunting

and fishing. People subsist on fish, grain and meat. Beef, pork, goat, venison, sometimes horse.

They wear simple clothes spun from wool, flax and hemp. They are a practical people.

Handy craftsmen, skilled at carpentry, metalwork.

The further north you go, the sparser the villages become, breaking up into individual farmsteads.

But even in these remote settings, up in the Holo-Galand, land of high fire,

or the northern lights, bonds of community hold scattered neighbors together.

Lars Brownworth is the author of Sea Wolves, a history of the Vikings.

About a third of Norway is above the Arctic Circle. This is a punishing climate.

And so hospitality was obviously a very important thing.

And women usually had greater rights than in the rest of medieval Europe,

because they were largely in charge of making sure there was enough food for the winter.

And this is obviously a job that lives depend on.

It's a vast area. From the tip of Norway's north cape to the present day Danish German border,

it's over 1,500 miles. That's further than the distance from Copenhagen to Rome.

The geographic variance is immense, from frozen tundra through dense, spruce tiger to temperate

grassland. Eleanor Barraclough is a senior lecturer at Bar Spar University,

an author of Embers of the Hands, modern histories of the Viking Age.

So we've got a huge span in terms of the geography.

We've also got a huge span in terms of the different sorts of people who are living in this world.

So for example, if you're a trader or a craft person in Denmark,

your experience of life is going to be much more multicultural,

but much less centered compared to say if you live in an agriculturally prosperous valley,

somewhere in the lowlands of Norway or Sweden, where generations of your family have farmed.

So we already have to start breaking down this idea that it's just one thing,

and that we can know what it would be like to live at one time in the Viking Age.

It's much more complex than that.

But there's one thing that unites all Scandinavians.

Water.

It connects. It defines.

Traveling by land across a snow-bound mountainous interior is slow and hazardous,

far easier to navigate a river network from one trading settlement to another,

or skirt the jagged coast of Norway, ducking in and out of fjords,

sailing the great northway that gives that land its name.

In the Viking Age, this sea is not a barrier, it's a pathway.

It leads to a world of opportunity, new sources of wealth, new markets to trade in,

new targets to plunder.

And it turns out there are riches aplenty, right there across the North Sea,

the so-called quail road, just a few days sail away to the west.

The World Viking

Quite why and when Scandinavian warriors start harassing the coastal communities of Britain

is open to debate, we shall come to that shortly.

But it is this sea-born plundering that most likely gives us the term Viking.

The word Viking is really interesting. It does come at least in one form from Old Norse,

and is contemporary with the Viking Age itself. So there's a version of the word Viking,

which is Viking, which is essentially a raider or a pirate. There's also a very related form

of that word, which is essentially to go on a Viking, to go on a raid.

Another suggestion is that it's related to the Old Norse word for a bay,

Vick. So a Viking is someone who comes from a bay. There's also a region in Norway called V

Can, perhaps the original Vikings came from there. Whatever the origins of the word,

its meaning soon broadens out. Davide Zorry, associate professor of history and archaeology

at Baylor University, is author of Age of Wolf and Wind, voyages through the Viking world.

Viking essentially meant a sea-born pirate, so not all Scandinavians of the Viking Age would have

been or considered themselves to have been Vikings, only once you get on a boat and try to pirate

stuff would you become a Viking. In the beginning, going a Viking is something you do to supplement

your regular income, an eight-century side hustle. And that's how it started, with people going

seasonally abroad to opportunistically engage in some kind of wealth production that could be

trade or it could be raiding. And I think sometimes they probably brought trading goods on board

and then decided as they showed up whether it'd be more profitable to raid or to trade.

Hello listeners, if you're enjoying this Taster episode, then search Real Vikings in your podcast app

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shot at getting it. Get started at Redfinn.com. Own the dream. At this time, as the eight-century

draws to a close, the modern nations of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, like England, have yet to come into

being. Power is concentrated locally in the hands of chieftains and warlords and based on close

bonds of allegiance. It's a shifting, unstable political picture. Do we have to imagine a

constellation of chieftains that are in alliance with each other, that are fighting each other,

sometimes expanding, claiming more power, and then I would say collapsing again.

We generally think of Vikings engaging in overseas adventures with their victims being

mostly foreigners. But they fight each other too, in what we might call Viking on Viking action.

Ultimately, dominance comes through wealth, silver, which is used to buy the loyalty of supporters.

The drive of the sort of alpha-type chieftain to control and to sustain power is one of the

motor's engines of the Viking Age that push them beyond their own shores as they try to accumulate

more wealth to reinvest in the political economy and generate bonds of loyalty with their supporters.

Religion, too, plays a key role in convincing men to follow charismatic leaders on long voyages to

unknown lands. Unlike much of Europe, Scandinavia is still pagan.

Stefan Brink is professor of Scandinavian studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands

and a research professor at Cambridge. He's the author of Throlldom, a history of slavery in the Viking

Age. Well, the pre-Christian religion in Scandinavia was a polytheistic religion. With many gods and

goddesses, minor deities living with the people, in the barn, in hills, etc., in a landscape

charged with sacrality and with a mythology we today find fascinating.

We'll delve into Norse religion more fully in a later episode. But for now, the thing for

remember is that for a Viking warrior, death is something to be welcomed, not feared.

To die with your sword in your hand ensures immortality, allowing you to enjoy a glorious

afterlife in Valhalla, the whole of the fallen. That belief gives rise to a culture of warfare,

a sense of fearlessness, of invincibility even, underpinned by a code of valor.

I think that it's important to consider the ideological motivation. I think that the fatalism

and the push towards on our generating stories about your accomplishments was a high motivator.

But alongside religion and mythology, there may be more practical considerations of play

in pushing the Vikings out from Scandinavia. It's also been suggested that there might be something

of a gender imbalance, so essentially there are fewer women for the men to marry and settle

down with and build up a farmstead and raise a family. The Vikings practice of polygamy doesn't

help, with the most powerful men taking multiple wives. It provides an incentive for lesser males

to venture abroad in search of foreign bride, or come back home with wealth they can use to

compete for the hand of a local girl. Another driver is climate. At the time there is some

significant meteorological shifts. Pragyavora is lecturer in medieval history at the University of York.

One likely explanation is that there was as a consequence of a sort of warm period, the medieval

warm period, an explosion in population and as a consequence there wasn't enough land in Scandinavia

and so people started moving abroad to take their chances really to make something of their lives.

In some cases, the accumulation of wealth overseas comes through what we might call

legitimate trading, exchanging resources such as furs and walrus tusks for silver.

But in the Viking Age, the men from Scandinavia will come to specialize in one particularly

lucrative form of commerce. In the ninth century, the slave trade with the Muslim world

exploded on the continent. Slavery became very important for the Scandinavians in the Viking Age.

Slavery became the major trading commodity for the Scandinavians and slavery, I believe, in a way

came to characterize the Viking period at that time. In fact, so rife is slavery that it forms part

of a three-tiered Viking society. At the top there's the chieftain or yaw, from which we get our

word url. Below him come the Freeman or Karls and right at the bottom sit the slaves or thralls,

the origin of another English expression to be enthrall to someone.

The Vikings are not the only ones practicing slavery at the time, the Christian Anglo-Saxon

do it too. But whatever romantic ideas we may entertain about the Norsemen, we have to acknowledge

that their economy is founded on the trafficking of human beings.

It is partly their notoriety as slavers that accounts for the Vikings enduring

reputation for violence. But it also has a lot to do with the sources we're using.

Professor Elizabeth Rowe, reader in Scandinavian studies at the University of Cambridge,

is the author of Vikings in the West, the legend of Ragnar Lothbrok and his sons.

Nearly all of the contemporary accounts that we have for the Scandinavians in Western Europe

are from the point of the victims of Viking raids and attacks.

A byproduct of the Vikings paganism is that when held up against Christendom they are comparatively

illiterate. No Bible, no libraries, no monastic scholars to record events. Anything approximating a

written language is carved in a crude, stick like alphabet we know as runes, with each of its 24

characters corresponding to a vocal sound. It's a functional means of notification,

rather than a means of archive or record. As a result, the history of the Vikings in this early

period is that their story is told by their victims, those who hate them. Evidence written by

Scandinavians themselves, for instance in the epic Icelandic sagas, doesn't come until much later.

Partly it's a problem that in Scandinavia writing didn't come until the conversion to Christianity,

let's say around the year 1000, and so whatever was written down about the Viking age was written

down hundreds of years after the events that are being told. One source that historians lean on

heavily is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The Chronicle is an old English manuscript, a collection

of annals documenting the history of the Anglo-Saxon people. It was begun in the 9th century at

the court of King Alfred of Wessex. It's this source that recounts the attack on the King's Reef,

Bayadahard in Portland. The Chronicle pinpoints the 8th century at the time when Viking raids kick off.

This is the traditional narrative that the Viking age begins in the late 700s. Indeed,

the Chronicle tells us that the three ships involved in the murder of Bayadahard are the first

ships of Danish men to come to England. Actually, we know that there were Northmen trading in England

for at least a century before this. And recently analyzed DNA evidence suggests that people with

Scandinavian heritage may have been present in Britain even earlier than that. Nordic remains

found in the city of Yorg have been dated to as far back as between the second and fourth centuries

AD, well before the wide-scale Anglo-Saxon settlement. And it's likely that those men on

Chesel Beach are not the first Scandinavians that Bayadahard has ever dealt with either.

The way he gallops off to confront them suggests he was not expecting trouble. It seems he

thought they were merchants, not more orders. When he sees these three ships from

foreign land show up in Portland, he goes rushing down to meet them mainly to try and get them

to leave in order to go to a Kingsport. And the reason for that is that when merchants come in,

they have Jews to pay and those Jews need to be paid in a Kingsport. So he wasn't really trying

to shoot them away or scare them away. He was just trying to do the right thing.

Clearly, the presence of North Ben and Dorset is nothing new. What is, shockingly so, is the violence

they meet out. If not the first Scandinavians in England, Bayadahard's killers are the first

recorded Vikings. It's a crucial distinction. One that we now understand, though it may not have

been clear at the time, between earlier traders and these new radars.

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The Anglo-Saxons may have found the Viking raid as enigmatic and terrifying. But to the Scandinavians

themselves, England was less of a mystery. They likely had long-standing knowledge of its shores.

Before the Viking Age, a network of trading settlements known as Emporia or Wicks in Old

English sprang up along rivers and coastal areas across Europe. These include Yipezwick and Norvik,

Ipswich and Norwich today. There's also Hamwick which becomes Southampton, while Londonwick is

London and ear for Wicks today's York. Based on the trading that took place in the pre-Viking age,

the Scandinavians had a great deal of information about where the towns were,

where the stored wealth might be, let's say, monasteries perhaps.

Unsurprisingly, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is Anglo-centric, but it's not just England where the

Scandinavians have been active. Perhaps even earlier, the Vikings were founding Emporia in

mainland Europe and striking out towards the east. They were trading even as far as what's

today Estonia, Lithuania. We have pretty clear evidence of that.

It's 2008. We're in the village of Salme, on the island of Sarema in Estonia.

A team of construction workers is digging a trench for an electric cable.

The bucket of the hydraulic excavator claws at the earth breaking the ground and dragging

rubble backwards. Suddenly, one of the workers cries out for the operator to stop.

The man crouches down and peers into the hole. A moment later, he holds up the object that caught

his eye. It's a human skull, darkly discolored and covered in mud. His fellow workers rush forward

to join him. Before long, they have retrieved a small pile of human bones, together with other

strange items. Work comes to a standstill. At first, it's thought that these are the remains of a

World War II soldier, but they don't look like 20th century artifacts. An archaeologist,

Marge Concert from the University of Tartu, is called in. Concert is in no doubt that the fine

comes from much, much earlier. Over a thousand years, in fact, among the items recovered,

she identifies an ancient spearhead and gaming pieces.

Gradually, over a period of months, Concert and her team uncover what appears to be a boat.

There are no actual timbers left. They've rotted away. But the ground is discolored, where they

once were. And 275 armed rivets are still in place, clearly indicating the shape of a 38-foot long

craft. It is a long boat of Scandinavian origin, and with seven dead men buried with the ship,

propped up on their benches as if about to row into the next world.

The men are all aged between 18 and 45. Some of the bones bear the marks of lethal wounds.

These are warriors who died in battle.

Concert is in no doubt, what she has uncovered is a Viking warship. But here's the thing.

She and her colleagues date the burial site to between 700 and 750 AD.

When a second vessel is found nearby, it's clear that this is a site of major archaeological

significance. At 55 feet long, it is larger and even more spectacular than the first.

Remarkably, it's equipped with a mast with fragments of sails still attached.

This makes it the earliest known sailing ship ever found in the Baltic.

And that pushes the mast of the sail on top of a wooden ship back by 40 or so years.

And so now we're back to the middle of the eighth century. And then with that we get this

debate of when does the Viking age begin. Inside the hull of the second boat, archaeologists make

them a carpet discovery. The remains of a further 33 warriors stacked neatly in rows and buried

beneath a covering of shields. Isotope analysis of the men's teeth will reveal that many of them

came from the Mala valley in Sweden. Their weapons similar to ones recovered from other boat

burials there. The Salme find suggests that the Viking age began at least 50 years,

possibly even a century, earlier than once believed.

Ship burials like those at Salme underline just how central boats are to the lives

and deaths of Viking men and women. The longboat is at the heart of a technological revolution

taking place in Scandinavia. Thanks to advances in shipbuilding techniques,

they're evolving into sophisticated war machines.

The Viking ship is the catalysts of the Viking age. They're getting more streamlined,

particularly with the development of the true keel. They're more able to sail further out

into the ocean. So we start getting ships that can go not just along coastlines, but can cross

the open ocean and deal with particularly the strong ocean currents that you find in the north

of the Atlantic. It's hard to overstate the importance of the keel to the Vikings.

It was part of their cultural identity. Even the range of mountains that runs down the spine

of Norway is named Sherlin, the Norse for keel. Viking long ships are clinker built,

which means they're made from overlapping planks. The timber used is often green wood,

preferably oak, freshly humed with axes, and with pine pitch used to seal it all up.

This creates an incredibly flexible structure. The planks open and close, breathing like a living

creature as the whole passes through the water. It allows them to show up quickly,

hold their shallow-drafted ships onto the beaches and sail out quickly. They can go up the rivers

with these shallow-drafted boats they can easily take down or put up their sails so it makes these

really versatile. Because the keels are relatively shallow and the ships are clinker-built,

they can actually be lifted by as few as 10 men so they can sail up rivers as well as across

oceans, and they do it at truly frightening speed. They could cover about 50 miles in a day,

and even a cavalry using a good Roman road could do about 30. The Vikings are just faster than

everyone. I think the most telling example of this is for the first two centuries of the Viking

Age, so roughly, you know, 800 to a thousand AD, there is no naval battle in northern Europe

except between Viking fleets, so they just have complete dominance of the sea.

With their prowess carved as elaborate dragons, the better to ward off evil spirits,

these long ships are an awesome sight. Their devastating impact is soon to be felt right across

Europe. Back in England, in the wake of the attack on Beadahard and his men, Viking

raids are on the increase. A charter issued in 792 by King Offer of Mercia talks of fleets of

seaborn pagans causing trouble along the coast. 250 miles north, a year after Offer's charter,

a Viking raid is about to take place which will send shockwaves throughout the whole of the Christian

world. It's June the 8th, 793 AD. We're on the holy island of Lindisfar, just off the northeast coast

of England, in the kingdom of Nathumbria. There's a bleak, craggy beauty to the place,

lashed by the winds and rains of the North Sea. It faces out towards a pewter horizon.

A causeway connects it with the mainland at low tide. When the tide's in, it's completely cut off.

Isolated as it is, Lindisfar is an important religious center. It's the shrine of the 7th

century hermit St. Cuthbert, a place of pilgrimage, a thriving community of monks live.

They wear the coarse woolen habits of the Benedictine order, dyed black to symbolize repentance.

Today, there's a new arrival, a 15-year-old novice. The novice is shown around his new home by a

senior monk. Like many early medieval monasteries, the sprouting abbey is a working farm.

The monks grow wheat and raise cattle. The calves hides a valuable source of vellum,

a key component in the abbey's other main activity, the production of illuminated manuscripts.

The novice is taken to the room where the scribes and illustrators work. The tonsured heads

shaved at the crown, bowed in concentration. He gazes in wonder at the gorgeous

folio's taking shape. Inside the church, a group of pilgrims kneel before the shrine. A rich

lord presents the abbot with a gold chalice, a sign of his devotion. The wealth on open display

is dazzling. Gifts from esteemed pilgrims include gold and silver plates and liturgical

objects studied with precious gemstones. But the most treasured object of all has been made

right here at the abbey. The famous Lindisfarne Gospels enclosed in a priceless,

jeweling-crusted leather binding. It may seem strange to us that such valuable artifacts are not

locked away in a strong room. But as far as the monks are concerned, no Christian would dare

rob the church. It would mean eternal damnation.

Abel summons the monks to worship, prayer and work, work and prayer. This will be the novice's

life from now on. He is assigned to duties in the vegetable garden. On his way, he pauses at a

cliff-top to gaze out to sea. Suddenly, he spots a few dark specks on the horizon.

The specks take on shape. Their ships. Other monks join him, tracking the fleet's approach.

There's no doubt now the vessels are coming towards Lindisfarne, and the tide is in,

which means the community is effectively trapped on the island.

The boats have appeared from the north. As they get closer, the monks are able to make up the

dragon-shaped prowess riding the waves. The square sails to a distinctive, brightly decorated with

animal symbols. These are the long ships of the Norsemen.

Soon, the ships are close enough to hear the ferocious roar of the men sailing,

and to see that they are armed. The monks can make out the shields arrayed along the sides of each

boat, round and colorful with an iron boss in the center. Some of the monks run in terror towards

the church. God, and the bones of St. Cuthbert will protect them. But the young novice remains

rooted to the spot. He stares down as the shallow-killed boats hit the beach at speed.

He sees the Norsemen leap out, their leather boots striking Northumbrian territory.

In their hands, they brandish axes, swords, daggers, bows and arrows.

A delegation of senior monks has gone down to the beach to find out what the men from the boats want.

The novice watches in horror as they are ruthlessly struck down.

One of the attackers looks up, clearing at the novice.

The boy finds his feet and runs to join the others inside the church.

A hail of arrows hits the door. Soon after, a violent hammering begins,

axe blades smash through the wood.

The boy hides behind a pillar and watches as the attackers charge at the defenseless monks,

and put them to the sword. Blood washes across the floor.

The air is filled with the sounds of slaughter, the crunch of blades on bone,

the prize of the dying, and the wolf-like howls of their killers.

The raiders vandalize the church and gather priceless objects.

They even dig up the altar and drag that away.

As a final blasphemy, they rip the jeweled cover from the Linda's farm gospel

and add it to their hall. They have no use for the pages.

The novice is yanked from his hiding place.

Certain that he is about to die, he utters a prayer to God.

Perhaps his prayer is answered. The Viking spare his life, for now at least.

He's bound in chains and loaded into a boat, together with other survivors.

The Norsemen push their ships back into the water.

A very different future awaits the novice now.

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A place more venerable than all in Britain is given as prey to pagan peoples.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

there were warning signs before the attack.

It's full of importance. It's full of, you know,

the whole drama of the natural world sort of rises up in concert with these rates, you know,

here there were dreadful sheets of lightning and dragons were seen flying through the air

and there was terrible famine.

Alquin also mentions a bloody rain which fell out of a clear sky

onto St. Peter's Church in York.

Despite these omens, the attack on Linda's fans stuns everyone.

From the Viking perspective, everything went according to plan.

The Vikings who came in, they got what they wanted.

They looted. They took all the gold and silver that was held.

At Linda's fan and that was them sorted.

There's nothing more complex about that.

Linda's fan has also provided them with a business model that they can scale up,

targeting remote holy sites not just in England but all across coastal Europe.

This is a place where wealth has been stored up

where the elites sometimes are retiring too and giving wealth to monks that they have

prayers for their souls after their death.

Monasteries like Linda's fan are isolated and vulnerable, often undefended.

They may be protected by God but that only works if you're a believer as for the monks.

They're not, these aren't the most fierce soldiers around.

The Vikings to me are the ultimate opportunists.

They're going to go where the potential is and they're going to go where it's easy.

In the aftermath of the attack on Linda's fan, the four kingdoms of England are left

reading. Panic even spreads as far as the Frankish Empire, where Alquin is living.

In a despatch to King Ethred of Nathumbria, he writes,

In the next episode, the Vikings step up their raids, hitting more sites in Britain and Ireland,

as well as Northern France. Their arrival there will plunge the Frankish Empire into an

existential struggle, Christian versus pagan, good versus evil. It will culminate in an extraordinary

attack on Paris, led by the most famous Northman of all, Ragnar Lothbrock.

That's next time.

Thanks for listening. To hear more episodes of Real Vikings right now,

find the show in your podcast app and hit follow or listen at noiser.com.