Vikings

We all think the Vikings were just violent warriors but they weren't.

Heave!

How can that be a thousand years old?

I'm going on a journey to find out who they really were.

< CALLS IN HIS OWN LANGUAGE

Over 1,000 years ago York, in northern England,

was one of the greatest cities of the Anglo-Saxon world...

..and the people who lived here spent their time

going about their daily lives.

'But York had a shock coming because in 866 AD'

an entire army arrived here and turned the place Viking

and called it Jorvig,

this city and half of England besides became part of Scandinavia.

Today, even over 1,000 years later,

people still believe the Vikings were simply dangerous

and fearsome warriors.

Thank you.

I just want you to tell me what you think of

when you hear that word Vikings.

-What's the picture in your head?

-Big bloke with a beard and horns.

The guys are, like, big brutal men, very hairy,

perhaps with horns on.

-What about the women?

-They were probably quite hairy as well!

Big furs on their shoulders, big swords,

beards and quite scary, actually.

What we know, or think we know, about the Vikings

is much more myth than reality.

Even the famed horned helmets are a modern invention.

So, just who were the Vikings?

Here in Shetland, off the north coast of Scotland,

is a place called Jarlshof.

It's one of the best preserved Viking settlements anywhere.

And by looking at these archaeological remains,

the buildings the Vikings left behind,

we can see that they weren't just violent warriors...

but that many were farmers trying to live peaceful lives...

..because this is a farmstead.

Over here there are the foundations

for seven long rectangular buildings.

These were built and used by the Vikings.

This would have been part of the main family quarters.

Along here there would have been wooden topped benches

for sitting on and sleeping on - on either side,

a central hearth, there would have been a timber support, probably,

holding up the roof beam

and then at the far end was a corn drying room,

where there would have been heat

that would have dried the crop for storage.

And then at the far end the archaeologists found burnt stone

so it suggests there may even have been a primitive sauna in use here.

In this end, where it's got all the hard standing,

this would have been byre for the animals.

The cattle would have been in here, especially during the winter months.

The bones of sheep, cows, pigs and ponies

have all been found on this site...

..but it's the many Viking objects dug from Earth across Shetland

that show us how the people here really lived.

What it specifically for? I mean, it's some kind of scoop...?

It is indeed a scoop but it's not a scoop for grain, as you might think.

The thing is used in a boat and you're bailing water.

-Our, it's a bailer, right!

-Yeah, that's right.

It would be all too easy just to let the thing to shoot out of your hand

and it might plop in the sea.

So, you want to have a little bit of a back strap on it,

to stop it shooting out.

That's gorgeous, look at that!

looked at the shine on it from being handled.

You know, that patina know they're being held and used.

Exactly. That's what brings the past to life.

Ian showed me many amazing objects from Viking times.

It's got this little depression, there, and that's for your thumb,

so as you can carry it.

Things they used in their everyday lives.

A cooking pot but it's much more interesting than just a cooking pot

because it's a half-made cooking pot.

'But there was one single item that completely blew me away.'

It's a piece of a glove or a mitten that's been carbon dated to 975 AD.

Oh, wow! How can that be 1,000 years old?! Is that knitted?

-It's woven, believe it or not.

-Gosh!

I think it's just absolutely electrifying to see an item like this

where something as powerful as the human hand is...

is there to be seen.

I think what makes these so special is that you think of Vikings

and you think of men, warrior, graves, swords

and all the rest but this kind of material reminds you that...

there are men, that there are women and children as well.

Finding objects in the ground shows us how the Vikings lived...

..but I was interested in how they survived the winters

because Shetland and Scandinavia, where the Vikings came from,

are northern places.

So, food is hard to find in the long, cold, dark winter months.

So, I've come to a reconstruction of a house

of the Vikings' ancestors, in Denmark,

to ask an expert how they coped.

What kind of challenges faced farmers...

as the, the long, dark nights of winter set in?

The most important thing was to get enough provisions

to get you through the winter.

If you were completely starved in the spring

you couldn't, you know, start working the land and that was very important.

The residue of this drink was found in a bark bucket in a burial mound.

-OK.

-So, it's malted wheat, honey...

bog myrtle to give it a bit of bitterness and cranberries.

-Slainte mhath!

-Skal.

That's fantastic! That really is.

-It just tastes like fruit juice.

-Yes.

'We know that the Vikings could make drinks that would last the winter

'but more of a problem was keeping food for months on end -

'especially meat.'

'And they did this by preserving it in a milky liquid

'to stop it becoming rotten.'

It's raw pork, yes.

And all that happened is it's sat in some liquid acquired from milk?

Yes.

OK!

-It's got all the texture but it only tastes very faintly of meat.

-Hm-mm.

But, you know...

-..but then I do like raw meat! I've always been drawn that way!

-SHE LAUGHS

'Preparing for winter, storing and preserving food,

'collecting firewood and keeping warm were all necessary

'if you were going to survive freezing weather.'

'But I wanted to find out how comfortable it was to sleep

'in a house that the Vikings' ancestors would have slept in.

'One thing I did know was that I needed to wrap up warm.'

Let's see how I get on.

Hopefully these sheepskins will make all the difference.

'I don't suppose there were many occasions'

when a person had a night to him or herself inside a house like this.

It would have been...with their family, almost all of the time.

There we go.

I have to report, first of all...

that despite all my best intentions to report throughout the night

I fell asleep!

HE LAUGHS

So, I survived my winter's night.

Quite good, really.

After spending a night as the Vikings would have done,

I've learned that they found ways of overcoming the wind and the cold...

..but I've also discovered that the Vikings weren't just fierce warriors,

they were farmers as well - with families and communities.

The Vikings came from Scandinavia, where there are many mountains.

Crossing those mountains was difficult,

so the easiest way to travel was by boat...

..through the steep, sea-flooded valleys known as fjords.

And over thousands of years, the Vikings learned how to build

seagoing boats and become expert sailors.

Today, in Oslo, the capital of Norway,

is the best Viking ship ever discovered.

It is over 1,000 years old, and just as the Vikings left it.

This stunning craft is the Oseberg Ship.

It's certainly the most famous Viking ship we have,

and, to my eyes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most beautiful.

This ship was built almost entirely of oak, and is over 18 metres long.

It has a steering board on its right hand side and an iron anchor.

And it would've had a crew of around 35 men,

and could be powered by either oars or sails.

But it's the carving on the ship that I find truly incredible.

The ship itself is the work of many craftsmen,

but here, in this carving,

is the imagination and the skill

of just one artist, one person.

It's this exciting, vivid depiction

of a dragon or sea serpents twisted together, biting tails.

The scales on the skin are picked out

with these carefully-etched lines.

To be reminded that these people

were capable of this kind of imagination,

to make something so big, it makes them that bit more real.

This, this is what the Vikings were capable of.

For centuries, the secret of Viking success was their ships.

To sail in them was to be a Viking.

They were built from shaped, wooden planks

held together with iron rivets and wooden frames.

Any gaps were sealed with animal hair to make them waterproof.

Rowing one of these on a day like today is actually quite pleasant,

if you can get into the rhythm.

It's not such a bad way to spend a morning.

Oh, hold on, hold on! It's all gone terrible.

If there was no wind, the Viking boats could be powered by oars.

But they really came into their own as sailing ships,

then there were able to travel much, much further.

It seems remarkable that when the Vikings reached the open sea,

far away from land,

somehow they still knew where they were going.

One expert sailor thinks she knows how this was done.

They were dependent on the sun.

If they didn't find the sun, they were lost at sea.

-That's something you don't want to hear on a Viking ship.

-Right.

But what happens if you're in the open ocean

and the weather is bad and you don't see the sun for hours on end?

I've done it several times. The sky is all grey.

We really need the sun, we haven't seen it for a long time,

it's raining, I'm looking and looking and looking, where's the sun,

maybe there, maybe there, yes! And then you just get it for 10 seconds.

Like that. Wow, you've got it.

And you adjust your course because you can see, OK,

maybe we've been sailing 30 degrees wrong, but we are on course again.

Thank you. I'm so happy with that sun.

But not all Viking boats and ships

were meant for sailing across the open ocean.

Some Vikings used their vessels to sail up the mighty rivers in Russia

and beyond.

This would take them to the mysterious lands in the East,

where they could find riches beyond their wildest dreams.

Morning, Vikings. Where can I be?

Up here?

But travelling along the rivers presented a whole new challenge.

If they reached a point where the river was blocked,

by ice or rapids, the boats could be taken out of the water

and rolled on logs beyond the obstacles.

Sometimes, they would even transport their vessels

between different rivers.

That's why these boats are smaller than the ocean-going ships.

They weren't so heavy, and they could be moved

metre by metre overland from one place to another.

Imagine how long it'd take to get anywhere.

You leave home in Sweden, across the Baltic in ships,

and then get everything onto boats like this.

Every now and again, you've got to take the boat out of the water

and move it overland.

These guys must have been away for years at a time.

It's time-consuming and it is laborious,

but there's enough men here to move a boat this size,

so the system does work, as history shows.

As well as exploring and travelling along the rivers

east across Russia, the Vikings also explored new lands far to the west,

across the vast North Atlantic Ocean.

One stormy day, some time in the second half of the ninth century,

a Viking ship

sailing from Norway to the Faroe Islands was blown off course.

After several more days sailing,

it finally beached up on an uninhabited, unexplored shore,

here on Iceland.

Some of the Vikings settled on Iceland and built farms there,

but in time, they headed even further west.

And in 1000 AD, the unforgettably-named Erik the Red

led a fleet of 25 ships out into the North Atlantic

in hopes of founding a new colony.

After a difficult voyage, during which many Vikings lost their lives,

just 14 boats arrived on what we now know as Greenland.

But in the years to come,

other Viking explorers would go even further.

Objects dug up in Newfoundland

tell us that the Vikings set up a trading camp there,

and that makes them the first Europeans ever to reach America.

The distance from Norway to Newfoundland is 4,500 miles,

and we're talking about a time

when that land mass was beyond the knowledge,

far less the reach, of any other Europeans.

What those Vikings did, then, was simply staggering.

The Vikings travelled far and wide,

not just to raid, plunder and find land,

but also to trade, to buy and sell goods.

And this took them to new, exotic places far from home.

When I started investigating the Vikings,

I didn't think I'd have to travel 1,500 miles south of Scandinavia.

But here I am, in an ancient city that links Europe to Asia.

Istanbul.

In Viking times, this was the greatest city on Earth,

and it was called Constantinople.

And for those Vikings,

it was the end of a long and dangerous journey from the north.

Because within its walls were some of the richest markets in the world.

For a Viking, this would have been all but overwhelming,

because this is on a completely different scale

from anything he would have witnessed before.

Instead of hundreds of people,

here it would have been thousands, or even tens of thousands, and from all over the world.

And then, there were all the exotic sights and sounds and smells.

It's all but an assault on the senses.

-Hey!

-Yes?

-Do you speak English?

-I speak English, my friend.

-Can I have 100 grams of the red spice?

-100 grams.

-OK.

-Something else?

No, that's all. How much?

Once here, they could buy finely woven silk

worth its weight in gold

in exchange for the goods they had brought with them from the north.

Precious amber, Arctic furs, and slaves.

Any Viking who spent three months or more in the city

was entitled to buy silk up to the value of two slaves.

That silk was so valuable, that when the Vikings took it home,

it made them rich beyond their wildest dreams.

But some of the Vikings never went home.

They stayed, and made Constantinople their home.

One of them even left his mark on the city

in one of the most historic and holy places on the planet.

This is the Hagia Sophia.

Most of what you're looking at was built in the sixth century,

which means that, by the time the Vikings turned up,

that building was already old.

Think of the impact it must have had on them

when they arrived from their Dark Age world.

Some of them at least said that when they were inside,

they didn't know if they were on Earth or in Heaven itself.

But to find any evidence of the Vikings, I have to go inside.

The Hagia Sophia was built as a Christian church,

but later turned into a Muslim mosque.

All around me are remnants

of over 1,000 years of Christian and Muslim worship.

In one tiny corner is proof that a Viking once came to this place.

These dark lines etched into the marble are Viking runes,

ancient Viking writing.

They're almost indecipherable.

The only bit that's in any way clear is part of someone's name,

a man's name - Halfdan.

And the rest of it is assumed to read "was here."

So you've got, "Halfdan was here" or, "made these runes."

Halfdan may have been part of the bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor,

the great ruler of Constantinople,

or he may've been just a trader.

These few lines show us

how far the Vikings had travelled from the homeland.

If and when the Vikings did return home,

they took with them the valuable goods they had traded.

The silks, spices and silver.

Birka is a small island near Sweden's capital city, Stockholm.

No-one lives here today.

But in Viking times,

it was one of the most important towns in Scandinavia.

It's the places like this that the Vikings brought their goods

from Constantinople to sell them in the market.

In Birka, we should glimpse traces of everyday life.

What's preserved in Birka is more than just a town.

It's an entire culture.

Merchants came here from all over Scandinavia, so Birka market

would have been very busy, full of people buying and selling goods.

Is it fair to say that Birka was a completely new kind of settlement?

It is totally a new kind of settlement, a new way of life,

people from all over the world probably came here to do trade.

So Birka is like a department store where you can get clothes,

you can get jewellery, you can get furnishings for your home...

Weaponry, food...

Imported food, I should say.

-Um... Spices, textiles.

-What kind of things do you find?

You know, is it rich pickings out where the people lived?

Yeah, it's very rich pickings.

-Gold and silver?

-No, not today.

-This is an iron weight.

-OK.

What is the significance of finding a weight here?

It's a very good example of what they actually did here.

The trade is at the heart of everything.

Silver is the main currency, and it's the silver weight that's interesting.

-So this isn't for weighing the goods themselves?

-No.

-This is how you make sure someone's paid the right price.

-Exactly.

Items from all over the world were traded here,

and in nearby Stockholm, there's an amazing collection of treasure

that shows us just where they came from.

Look at these three marvels.

They are known collectively as the Helgo Treasure.

They were all found together in one house.

First of all, there's a bishop's crosier,

which is the headpiece that would be on top of a staff

carried by a bishop as a mark of his office and status.

Everything about its decoration is typically Irish.

Next here, we have a ladle.

It would've been used in religious ceremonies,

specifically for baptism.

It's to pour water over the head of someone

who's being welcomed into the Christian church.

It's made of bronze, and it's probably from North Africa.

The crosier and ladle are priceless objects.

But there was something found beside them

that I find even more extraordinary.

It's a bronze Buddha.

This was probably made

in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent.

Maybe Pakistan or Afghanistan.

And it has made its way here, passing through many hands,

going through Constantinople, through Russia,

and eventually finding its way to Helgo.

It's incredible that these objects came from places as far away

as Africa, Ireland and India, and all ended up here,

in one Viking home in Scandinavia.

Think how far the Vikings have come.

It's only 100, maybe 150 years since those first raids, but by now,

those Vikings have stretched their hands

across the face of the known world.

The Vikings have arrived.

Over 1,000 years ago, on June 8th 793 AD,

a small band of Vikings sailed down the eastern coast of England.

Their target was a monastery, called Lindisfarne,

and they decided to launch a surprise attack.

It's likely that the first thing the monks saw

was the outline of two or three ships on the horizon,

but that would hardly have been unusual.

Living here, there would have been accustomed

to the arrival of ships from all sorts of places.

Maybe a few of the monks came down onto the beach

to welcome the newcomers with open arms.

But the monks weren't prepared for visitors like these.

Because these were Viking warriors.

And they had come to kill the monks and steal the monastery's treasure.

Life in England was about to change for ever,

because the savage attack on Lindisfarne was just the beginning.

50 years after the attack on the Lindisfarne monastery,

a huge force of around 3,000 Vikings arrived on our shores,

and they wanted to conquer the whole of England.

This was truly a force to be reckoned with.

The Anglo-Saxons called it the Great Heathen Army,

and it wasn't just a raiding party intent on slaves and gold.

The Great Heathen Army wanted everything, and to get it,

they would have to take on the Anglo-Saxons.

The conquest of England was a task far greater

than anything the Vikings had ever attempted before.

England was divided into four powerful, well-organised kingdoms.

Northumbria, East Anglia, Mercia and Wessex.

So to succeed, the Vikings would have to defeat them all.

The Viking army didn't stay on the English coast,

but struck at the very heart of England,

a town in Derbyshire called Repton.

When the Great Heathen Army arrived here in Repton,

they'd come to take Mercia.

Now, Repton's small and out of the way today,

but 1,000 years ago, it was the most important town in Mercia,

and Mercia was the second most powerful kingdom in all of England.

When the Vikings came to Repton in the winter of 873 AD,

they transformed the sacred church of St Wystan into a fortress.

It was an important step in their bold attempt

to take the whole of England.

If you look down just beyond the graveyard,

you can see a stretch of water,

and that's a relic of a much older course of the River Trent.

That's how the Vikings would have approached, along the river,

and then they would have moored the ships just down there

and come out onto the bank to set about the business of takeover.

In the churchyard, archaeologists have dug up the remains

of the Vikings' impressive fortress.

We've got a D-shaped enclosure with a fourth side created by a river.

And, great tacticians that they were,

the Vikings here have even employed the Christian church

and turned it into a defensive gateway into their fortress.

Genius!

There's not only a fortress,

but the remains of the warriors themselves.

Just here is grave number eight.

That's one of the most important Viking graves ever found in Britain.

I must be just about standing on the spot.

Just about here. Imagine that!

Right here, archaeologists discovered the remains

of a six-foot-tall skeleton.

A typical Viking warrior.

He was not a Christian. He was a pagan, believing in many gods.

He was buried with his most precious possessions.

The Viking belief dictated that whatever you needed

and wanted in the next life had to go into the ground with you.

First of all, you've got the perfect weapon.

Which is not just giving him the ability to fight,

but it says something about who he is in life.

This is actually an iron sword in a scabbard.

It's a wooden scabbard with a fleece lining

to protect the blade, and then on the outside,

there's a leather casing.

So a man on the battlefield

with a sword is already someone you would notice.

But a man with a sword and a scabbard is another step up again.

So this man was clearly a leader amongst his own kind.

This is a little silver hammer.

The Repton Warrior was wearing this around his neck

in the same way that a Christian would wear a cross.

It's connecting him physically to the god Thor.

For a man like the Repton Warrior, everything about him was building

to one ideal conclusion.

He wanted a heroic death on the battlefield

that would guarantee him access to the next world,

which for him was Valhalla,

a place where he would fight all day with other heroes

and then feast all night.

It was the perfect Viking heaven.

For the Anglo-Saxons, this is the worst-case scenario,

because it's in the Viking mindset to fight to the death.

And it's a horde of men

who think like this that the Anglo-Saxons here had to face.

The English kingdom fell into the hands of Vikings

like the Repton Warrior.

Only Wessex, led by its king, Alfred, withstood the brutal attack,

and even he wasn't quite strong enough to drive them out completely.

Eventually, Alfred and the Vikings agreed to make peace,

the terms of which basically gave the Vikings control

of a territory north of a line

stretching between Chester and the Thames.

The territory became known as the Danelaw.

It was basically a Danish Viking colony.

All of this land that I'm travelling through now

was under Danish Viking control.

The most important city in the Danelaw was called Jorvik,

or York as we know it today.

Over 10,000 people, men, women and children, lived here,

and it became an important place to buy, sell and make goods.

The things Vikings used in their everyday lives.

There's a comb for personal grooming and taking care of head lice.

You've got amber jewellery, possibly from the Baltic.

This is a gaming piece, and it's walrus ivory,

maybe from as far away as Greenland.

Along with these fascinating objects the Vikings left in the ground,

there's something else that remains from the Viking age,

something that we all use every day, and that's our language.

How many of the words we use every day

actually have their roots in Viking words?

Lots and lots of really basic everyday words.

Things like eggs, skirts, I see some bags over there.

The sky, windows, other things that I can see

include skin, leg, skull...

-So very simple words?

-Very simple, basic words for things, yeah.

Also words which describe how we feel and how we react to stuff.

So if you're angry, if you're happy, if you're ill...

-Those words as well?

-All these words come from Norse.

Does language reveal anything about the extent of Viking colonisation?

There are lots of Old Norse place names.

Words which are wholly or partly from Old Norse.

So anything involving '-by'. B-Y.

-Places like Grimsby...

-Or Whitby.

-Whitby, yes. Selby.

-And what does the '-by' mean?

-"-By" seems to mean a settlement, village.

It's amazing, isn't it?

We're talking about people who arrived, you know,

1,300, 1,200 years ago,

and yet the words they brought with them

are still echoing around us today.

They're all around, yes. That's right. That's right.

When you come to a place like this, is easy to see the impact

the Vikings have had on us.

And it's not just the place names

or the words in our everyday language.

The Vikings are part of who we are.

By setting up their own towns, and by marrying the locals,

their blood mixed with our blood.

And they're still here with us today.

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