Viking Age Expert Answers Viking Questions From Twitter | Tech Support | WIRED
I'm cat jman an archaeologist specializing in the Viking age let's answer your questions from the internet this is Viking [Music] support from at longer fish 2K who knew that Vikings had cool nicknames I completely agree they really did had some very cool names well hopefully some were quite rude and offensive as well so Vikings had uh normal given names they didn't have surnames in the same way that that we do they might have what we call Patron nimic so you could be the son of Thor or whoever but after that they gave them some really good other names depending often on some quality that you had or a skill for example I have a little list here of some of my favorite names we've got IC ale lover ktil flatos we have Olaf the witch breaker icin foul fart and then we have Coline butter penis some female names include thid sound filler halard twist breaks and thorborg ship breast I guess it depends a little bit what your main qualities were how people wanted to remember you from at David krueger1 how violent were the Vikings yes they were very violent people but they weren't actually the only ones early medieval this sort of whole period in Europe was a very violent ones they were certainly very successful we know that they had really good battle techniques they had really good weapons but we also have to remember that a lot of the sources we have about the Vikings were written by their enemies sometimes there a little bit of a bias in those sources we do also know from a brand new study actually that back in Scandinavia there's a difference between the different Vikings the Norwegian skeletons had far more injuries than the Danish ones in fact about a third of the skeleton studies all had violent trauma to their bones but only about 6% of the Danes they also had far more weapons in their graves which all points to society that was extremely violent compared to others from at Finas so how accurate are the Vikings TV shows on Netflix they're not very accurate but they are inspired by a lot of real events a lot of them are inspired by the sagas so for example in in the latest ones where you have King and Emma there's a lot of the facts around these people that are really quite close to what we know happened from historical records there are other things that aren't quite right or that that go a little bit too far one of those is the portrayal of women and female warriors now this is something that's quite big debates because certainly in the Vikings show we have plenty of female warriors in fact entire Army is made entirely just of women we do have records of what we call Shield maidens so they these sort of fighting women but they're usually thought to be mythical we have female fale goddesses like Freo for example the goddess of warfare you have the Valkyries up in Valhalla for example that sweep down onto the battlefield and take the Fallen Warriors up to Odin's Hall but do they really fight this is a so-called Baker Warrior woman better known as BJ 581 this is a grave that discover discovered quite a long time ago that we classified as a warrior grave it was an individual buried in a very rich Grave full of every type of weapon imaginable ancient DNA of this show that this individual was actually genetically female I think the likelihood is that it was possible for women to also take part in battle but we really didn't have that many of them because we would have had more evidence we would have more Graves female Graves with weapons and with weapon injuries by Nick 727 did Vikings really sacrifice humans there are a couple of archaeological finds that suggest perhaps people did get sacrificed one of them is a site I worked on myself we have a very peculiar grave of four young children who are buried together right outside a huge communal grave that we associate with the Viking great Army in the 9th century chemical signatures in their teeth have shown that they've come from different places and they actually ate very different diets but they died at exactly the same time and quite a few people have suggested perhaps this is one of those example where people were sacrificed we do have some written records that suggest that the Viking did actually practice this this particularly rather horrific right so one record is from somebody called Adam of Breman who writes that he visited the Temple of Odin Thor and Frey in gamla Upsala in Sweden and there every nine years the people would sacrifice nine of each of the male species including humans whether that's true or not we don't really know next question is from shaf lopus how do we know about the Vikings we don't really have many direct written sources from the Vikings themselves we do have record historical records that are contemporary from other people typically they're enemies are the people who accounted the Vikings that could be the Anglo-Saxons for example now they have to be taken sometimes with a pinch of salt often they only really involve things like rulers the battles the bigger movements they don't tend to tell us very much about everyday events and a normal people the Vikings themselves did have a writing system they had runes but they were only used for very short inscriptions so there's not really that much to get from them we do also have what we call sagas kind of like historical fiction really there are stories that are written about the Vikings mostly written down in Iceland in the 13 and 1400s several hundred years after the Viking age has finished they're typically also written through a very Christian Christian Perspective when a lot of the Vikings were pagans so we are getting a bit of a skewed idea about what the Vikings were about we then also have what I'm particularly interested in which is the people themselves so we can look at the human remains we can look at the evidence from the bodies and the graves so that's where things like bioarchaeology comes in one really good example of this is the Viking great Army Winter Camp of reptin in darbishire in England and we know about this one from written records anglosaxon Chronicle tells us that this great Army over wintered in repon in the year 873 now archaeologists in the 80s actually found Viking Graves at that specific site and one of them had an artifact it had a Viking sword and also a Thor's hammer around his neck that's a pretty good sign that this was someone of Viking origin radiocarbon dating actually tied him to that group to the 9th century so that was perfect in my own research I've been looking at this grave called grave 511 this man who seems to have been a warrior possibly even a leader of the great Army he had lots of evidence in his body about violent injuries some of them probably uh carried out with an axe and I was able to look at the Isotopes from his teeth showing he most likely grew up in southern Scandinavia quite possibly in Denmark interestingly he was buried next to a younger man and they had the same isotope ratios in their teeth showing they probably grew up in the same place and when we carried out ancient DNA analysis of these two bodies we can actually show that they were related but not just that they were Father and Son all those sources about the Viking Age come together to tell this story about presumably a viking leader and his son who both died round about the same time in repon in England Michael angelesque adds what did Vikings do for fun they certainly had parties they had feasts where they would quite enjoy drinking Mead and beer and get quite drunk we know they did lots of other things we found ice skates and skis psychological evidence for skis dating to the Viking age well they also had practical purposes next question from someone with a bit of a Viking name here that's at Ragnar bellal where did the Vikings go Vikings start out in Scandinavia so Norway Sweden and Denmark and from there they go all sorts of directions a lot of them go up to what is now Britain across to Ireland land we have those that go past the English Channel to France and Spain some go across the North Atlantic over to Iceland and further Beyond to Greenland and even North America and then again others across the Baltic from there they go down these River routes in Eastern Europe in what is now Russia Ukraine further down to the Mediterranean and then even further than that we know that some made it all the way to the Caspian Sea and also Overland to Baghdad so we really have a huge range of travel both north south east and west we know about this from a number of reasons we have runic inscriptions especially in Sweden that actually tell us that people went to these specific places elsewhere the Archaeology is hugely informative so when we for instance at lanso Meadows in North America find a site that has a very typical pattern of settlements of houses of artifacts that we know that we can associate with the Scandinavians we can show that these people moved along it's also traded object so for instance in my own research I looked at a Carnelian bead found in England we got exactly the same beads in Scandinavia we got them in Eastern Europe but they come all the way from India and that tells us that the Vikings traded really far they moved along these River routes and tapped into other networks like the Silk Roads for example from at fake lizard Squad when did the Viking age be so almost a bit of a trick question seems to have a very easy answer 8th of June 793 with the attack on the lindis fan that kicked off the entire Viking age but now we've actually been able to push back the start of the Viking age even further than that to about 750 or so and this has come with a new discovery a Viking ship in Salma in Estonia where lots of people died and were buried clearly killed as part of some kind of raid or attack dates back much further and interestingly also in the East and not in Western Europe as previously thought this question is from at ered giml what is the technical difference between north and Vikings aren't they from the same tribes North really is the language spoken and Vikings is the name that we've been given to these people who come out of Scandinavia in between the 8th and the 11th century we don't really know what these people called themselves we're pretty certain they didn't call call themselves The Vikings but the name comes up quite a lot it actually has a couple of meanings and one of them is a person an individual and the other is a verb it means essentially to go on a journey which could be a raid or it could be something a little bit more peaceful than that but this word no which is quite often used about the same people actually comes from the language that they spoke so old no which is the root of all the Scandinavian languages so Norwegian Swedish and danish and as ases Icelandic which is probably also the closest in sound to to what Norse would have sounded like what happens if you settle somewhere else so if somebody comes from Scandinavia and settles in say England how long do they speak North when do they swap over to England we don't really know the same sort of people that come out of Scandinavia and the countries that we call Norway Sweden and Denmark they come into play much later towards the end of the period so we tend to just lump them all together really and call them all Vikings next next up is at Greg stradamus Vikings didn't use a compass while navigating their ships so how did they get to know where they were going there's a possibility they use something called sunstones which would help to show where the sun was and so where North was and so on but a lot of the time they're really just looking at their geography they're looking at the sea hugging the coastline quite often so if you're going across from Scandinavia and over to Britain you're taking the sort of shortest route so looking for sites of land going literally around the coastlines and knowing what the oceans are doing as you're moving around from at the grimfrost did Vikings smoke pot we have found evidence of cannabis seeds in fact in Scandinavia so there's a couple of places where we've found this one of them is one of my favorite Graves is the osberg ship grave one of these most spectacular huge big Viking ships it was actually the grave of two women they had a lot of grave goods and one of these women had a little pouch and inside the pouch were found several Little Seeds of the cannabis plant of course what we don't know is how these seeds were used presumably they were planted they could have used them for smoking they could have used the herbs medically or alternatively they could have been used for hemp we know that people make rope out of him at Asam Mota asks watching Vikings Valhalla and wondering how they were just having unprotected sex and not afraid of disease or pregnancy were the special Viking condoms I think the answer to that is no just sort of hypothetically if they did have any they would be made of organic materials that don't actually last in the archeological record so even if they were we probably wouldn't know were they afraid of disease and pregnancy almost certainly yes but we don't have any evidence of sexually transmitted diseases there are some that leave a trace in a skeleton like syphilis for example can actually be so severe that it makes huge alterations into the bones in terms of pregnancy we don't know that they had any ways of dealing with that but slightly less Pleasant knowledge that we do have is the possibility that they carried out what we call infanticide we do have one written record which is quite interesting on this from an Islamic traveler a man called alushi who came from Spain he visited a town called hiu which is now right on the border between Denmark and Germany and he said that there unwanted babies for economic reasons were thrown in the sea is that true or not we don't quite know but probably the answer to the question is that yes they were afraid no probably didn't have condoms and they may have had to deal with The Unwanted babies rather than the pregnancy itself next up we have at Viking historic who asks did Vikings use soap we have some records that they did use soap possibly something made out of lie and animal fat more broadly we know that they were really concerned with hygiene and especially things like their hair very careful with washing their hair and combing their hair now we know that both from written sources and from things like this Combs made of bone or antler there's one record from an Arabic traveler who encounters some of the people called the Roose and even fedan said that these were some of the filthy EST people he'd ever come across they did wash every day but they did it in a way he really didn't approve of this group of men were given a bowl of water the bowl was passed to the first person and then even spit into the same Bowl but at the end of it he wouldn't throw the water out he would actually pass it to the next person who do the same thing just following all the way down the line but if we go to Anglo Saxon England we've got quite a different perspective we have a quote from somebody called John of Wallingford who complain actually about all those Scandinavians all those Vikings that settled in England they caused so much trouble not only because they would comb their hair every single day they would also change their garments often and they would have a bath every Saturday in that way they actually attracted all the local women who were so much more impressed by these incoming clean Vikings and the local men they were used to from at sarcasm cat 24 What did the Vikings look like and we generally speaking think of these people as quite tall and normally as in Scandinavia today a lot of people who are blonde and have blue eyes we have however recently discovered through ancient DNA studies that quite a few of them actually had much darker hair so lots of people with brown hair even some people with brown eyes we have one eyewitness description from a slightly unlikely place which is the East this is from Eben fedan who describes these people called the Roose who he meets near the vulgar and he says I have never seen men more physically perfect than they being tall as date palms blonde and Ruddy we don't actually have any pictures we don't have any paintings and apart from some of these other sources we don't really have the descriptions either it seems a bit like similar to Northern Europeans today but not quite as stereotypical as we might imagine at black red guard one what do modern Norwegians and Danes think of the Viking era are they proud of that Heritage or was it seen as a cruel and barbaric time I'm from Norway I grew up in Norway then moved to England and started studying the Vikings I have to say in Scandinavia we are very proud of the Vikings not necessarily the actual violent part there some quite horrific things took place including quite extensive enslavement of people but we have the art and the objects the artifacts all those trading networks all of that is something that that is seen with with quite good Pride actually in all those countries I've seen in England for example you see it very much from the I suppose the enem perspective a lot of the written records really very much talk about how the Vikings were defeated so you have people like Alfred the Great who's hailed at this great hero who defeated them in fact I recently had to take the life in the UK citizenship test where one of the questions that comes up on the syllabus is who defeated the Vikings and the answer to that one is Alfred the Great even though it's not actually true because not very long after we have a Viking king cot who actually successfully takes over all of England and rules it for nearly 18 years so really say that Alfred defeated them now we got a question from at dible gaming what's with all the Vikings all over social media is it a trend or did a bunch of people take a 23 and me and they're super proud of their 0 13% the one key Point here is no test of DNA can tell you that you were a viking because that wasn't really a clear identity people didn't call themselves Viking they had had quite a lot of people moving in and out of Scandinavia they interacted with lots of other different cultures for example so genetics different from identities that's the first point the other is that when you go that far back the information you get from these tests it's a little bit meaningless because there are so many generations ations you have two parents four grandparents and then it increases exponentially so when you go back in time more than a thousand years you got a vast number of ancestors but the population at that time was really quite small so geneticists have worked out that you have these things called isop points so genetic points where actually all the people who had descendants and passed on their DNA are essentially related to all the people alive today and that point in northern Europe is in the 10th Century so essentially if anybody in the Viking age had children passing their DNA and you got ancestry in northern Europe then you're going to be related to those Scandinavians that makes it a little bit less meaningful and the other point is that you're not actually comparing your sample to those ancient populations directly you're comparing it to other people quite recent populations who live in those countries today it's telling you quite a lot about say the last 300 years or so but not really about the Viking age itself thank you for watching this has been Viking support [Music]
2024-09-25 18:04
