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We're being told all about Vikings by Catcha. And you've heard of her before. She's a bio archaeologist. She uses cutting edge forensic techniques to uncover more about this group of people that we call Vikings. Who were they? What do they want? What were they doing and where were they going? She's just written a wonderful new book called River Kings, and it's giving us a new history of the Vikings and how they emerged from Scandinavia and tapped not into just life in Britain and Ireland, but all the way into Central Asia and connected themselves, plugged themselves in to that superhighway at the time.

The Silk Roads, it's great talking to Cat's been on the podcast many times before, talking about the Vikings. Also Easter Island. Weirdly, she and I are going to go on a road trip as soon as this lockdown ends. And we can look for some Viking sites in England, hopefully Scotland as well. So that will be something look forward to. You can listen to all Cats episodes of the podcast. You can see me interviewing her in Repton about the possible burial site of over the bonus.

I love saying that. And she's taken many of the history projects. You can see all of those. Listen to all of those over at history hit TV. It is a digital history channel. It's like Netflix. But just for history, it's awesome. Check it out. History hit. TV can sign up. You're going to absolutely love it. In the meantime, everybody here is the wonderful cat Jomon Enjoy.

Hey, thanks for coming back on the podcast. My pleasure. You've now been on quite a lot. So thanks for putting up with me.

Well, thanks for letting me come back even more times.

Well, you need to be on this time because you've written a huge new book about the Viking age. But I think the main thing I took away from your book is that we in Britain are obsessed with Norse and Danish influence in the aisles, or really a lot of English people only think about it in English, if I can. It started with Lindisfarne. Go really wide. Like, first of all, what should we call them? Are we going to call them Vikings?

I think we haven't really got anything better to call them, unfortunately. So that word is a bit problematic, but nobody's really come up with a good alternative. But part of the problem is that it depends where you go. So if you go to the east, which is what I lost my book it talks about, then we don't really talk about the Vikings. We talk about the roots. And so I talk about this connection in the book. How do we know if somebody moves out of Scandinavia?

How long do they stay in Scandinavia and how many generations? How do you detect that several hundred years later on? So it's tricky, but I think for now, the best we can do is to keep calling them the Vikings, the Normans, the Russians.

I mean, when do they stop being Vikings? So we're talking about Scandinavian seafaring, migrating traders, settlers, explorers, slaves. When should we take the Viking age from, if not the assault on? When do these people from the Baltic start to exercise this remarkable influence over a huge swathe of Eurasia and beyond?

I think we need to push it back a few decades, at least that seven nine three Lindisfarne attack has become kind of crystallized as a start. But the more we look at it, the more we see that things are happening a few decades before that. So at least from about seven fifty. But perhaps it isn't really so clear. I think some changes around about that time. And so we have something that started around seven hundred with a lot of trading networks is huge trading settlements around the Baltic and also stretching across the North Sea and the English Channel.

But then somewhere around about seven fifty. I think there's definitely a change that perhaps that's for now. Why should start that we keep changing our minds on it and change?

Is that a bit of boat building technology, the Victorian's of this idea that there was a sort of demographic explosion, all these young people were kind of seeking fortune and partners elsewhere. What is your sort of theory on why we suddenly start hearing about these peoples?

So this point is really when the expansion starts out from Scandinavia, this is where so much of that trouble really starts to happen. But it has been happening before as well. This isn't the first time that Scandinavians work out how to get across the North Sea. For example, just look at something like Sutin, who which obviously has had a lot of attention recently that has very strong connections to especially Sweden and Graps and Sweden. So we know there's contact, but the raids and the attacks really do start in the late 8th century and nobody's quite yet worked out why that happens.

There's lots of theories, lots of hypotheses on that. And one of those is that there's demographic pressure, that there's even perhaps too many young and slightly violent men who need to go upbraiding in search of wealth so they can get themselves a wife back home. We know there's political pressure as well, but it seems to be a really quite complex scenario. The technology definitely plays a big part. It's not the reason for the attacks, but it kind of facilitates it.

So it makes it possible the fact that we now have these really wonderful ships with a keel and with a sail, but even that is being pushed back a little bit. So we now know that the earliest Viking ships that we would recognize as such probably data about 750 as well.

Well, at 750 isn't around about the date of Celmo because you have written about this and I've been lucky enough to visit this wonderful island in the Baltic of Estonia that those very, very, very entries discovered during the building of a school, I believe, an amazing burial, which we cannot go into all the detail now.

But it's one of the most brilliant bits of archaeology, I think, of my lifetime, all sorts of weird and wonderful details. For example, it was actually a burial, was it? We believe the ship was actually left as a kind of a monument above the ground.

So we don't quite know because so much of it eroded away afterwards. It's possible that it was covered with a mound, but that's vanished. So we don't quite know. But yeah, it's actually two ships next to each other. But the largest one was really quite spectacular in total. They contained, I believe, forty one men buried or died of very violent injuries and is quite spectacular. The grave is a really spectacular as well as lots of weapons, animals, sacrifices, gaming pieces is a really quite incredible grave.

And the bent swords, the symbolic bent swords, which are beautiful. But he's got the top of this podcast, everyone. It's one of the great sites. So some fifty years before this one. And they seem to be from Sweden. Yeah.

So there's now some really exciting scientific evidence. We're not looking at those bodies of both DNA and strontium isotope analysis very strongly support that they were not local at all, but that they came from south eastern Sweden, which is a. What the artifacts suggest as well, so that's really backed up. So that's an important reminder that features a lot in your book that this so-called Viking age, it occurred in the northwest Atlantic. So the northwest of Europe, the Isles normally, of course, Paris famously, but it's just as important.

There was a push to the east as well. Yeah.

And that's what we're seeing more and more. And that's what I wanted to really point out in my book, that actually those two parts of the Viking world were very, very closely connected and we've kind of treated them as separate for so long. So you have people studying the Vikings in the West and then other people studying the Vikings in the east, and they've been sources and artifacts. So we've known that it's not new that Scandinavians went to the east as well.

But is that connection is that link between the two? That's something that we really now starting to see just how closely connected it was. And that's through other evidence, through objects and things turning up in England as well that are quite surprising in many ways.

And so let's talk about the geography then. I guess I love boats as long time listening to this podcast will attest to is often lamented fact. But what really excites me about the oceanic seafarers in the west, but to the east, it's about rivers. It's kind of riverine empire. If you go in through the eastern Baltic Sea in a shallow draft long ship, where can you get to?

If you get reasonably far, you can start going down the rivers, but quite soon you get to some large lakes as well. But at some point you do need to deal with things like rapids. You need to go over land. There's lots of portages. I think it's extremely unlikely that you can sail a ship, even though some of the saga suggested that you could sell a ship from Sweden and all the way down to the Black Sea, you probably would have to stop.

You would have to drag your boats across. And we have some brilliant records that actually tell us about some of those portages and some of the ways that they dealt with that, some of the local boats as well. So quite often not talking about the big Viking ships that we might find in Scandinavia. But you're talking about smaller vessels that are really suitable for the rivers. So those sort of logistics of travel is something that we're also really starting to open our eyes to now.

And why were they travelling?

What were they up to? Is it Fiorenzo or is it trade, exploration, curiosity, settlin? It definitely seems to start with a trade.

So we start seeing these trading settlements. The first one, I think most likely seems to be psychological, which is just to the east of St. Petersburg. So not too far from this ownership. And that really is the kind of entry point into these rivers. And that begins probably somewhere again, around seven fifty. And we start to see Scandinavian artifacts, a clear Scandinavian presence there.

But there's a lot of objects, craft objects as things being traded and it seems peaceful. So there's no fortifications, there's no weapons. It's not somewhere just to sort of defend. That really happens a bit later on. So I think it seems to very much start with that trade and the spread and expansion. And when we have objects like Fer's, especially going south and also slave. So there's a lot of slave trading going on. And the Vikings obviously were brilliant at this.

They were very prolific slave traders taking people from all over the place and trading them. And in return, they get a lot of luxury goods, things like silver and silks, even things like spices and beads, which is one of the things I talk about in the book as well. So there's this clear, good exchange. The Vikings seem really, really good at taking advantage of various natural resources that they are no of really desirable in other parts of the world.

And you mentioned silk. You mentioned spices. I mean, do we need to start thinking about this in terms of that avalanche of scholarship we've been hearing about over the last 30 years now about the importance that Eurasian trading route, the kind of sensuality of it, is this the Vikings plug into that, but coming in from the north west? Absolutely.

I think that's just what it is. And they find a way to tap into those networks. Those networks are already existing. So Silk Road networks and there find a way of essentially just extending their own trade, building on some of these earlier connections, taking over some of the local people, some of the local groups. They sort of take advantage of a little niche and essentially are able to very rapidly bring all those goods right back to the north. That's something we haven't really seen before.

The Viking age. We see goods going to the west, we see them going to places like Britain, but it's usually through the Mediterranean and this sort of eastern back route, which is so effective that really starts sometime then in the 8th century.

In your book, it's almost unbelievable how Far East they get. Looking at the archaeology, what are some of the more recent finds and scholarship? And just explain to everyone just how far into Asia Viking traders and Viking goods were penetrating. The furthest east, unfortunately, we don't have that many definite really Far East connections, a lot more from the written sources and written sources tell us that the Vikings certainly rallied around the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea, the menace around the Caspian Sea in the 10th century and onwards.

And we also know that they traveled and overland to Baghdad. So they go from the southern cities of the Caspian and overland to Baghdad. And from there, it seems that they are getting a lot of these goods that we see in Scandinavia that come from places perhaps like India in the Asian region as well. So we have things like Bede's especially going all the way back up north. Well, we haven't really found yet is the definite evidence of the people.

So we haven't got any barrels. We haven't got any Scandinavian artifacts in the Caspian Sea region, for example. But we are starting to find some more in Turkey, for example, there's a lot of work going on in Eastern Europe, in Ukraine with objects, with definite Scandinavian origin. So hopefully it's just a matter of time before we find something further east as well. I mean, at least not for me did this little sunburnt Brit, the Caspian Sea feels like a pretty exotic destination to go riding and trading.

If I was a Viking initially, is trading does the sword follow the merchant?

I think for a while they definitely go hand in hand. And I think it's a matter of you can be peaceful if that works. And if it doesn't, you bring the sword out and you ride in your tank. So they seem very adaptable. I think they seem very able to just see what they can take advantage of. So especially the relationship with Constantinople and Byzantium and the trading that goes on between the Russians, Canadians and Constantinople. There are lots of resources that show us that the trading relationships are actually functioning quite well for a lot of the time.

But at the same time, there are attacks as well. So it just seems to be whatever works, whatever opportunity they can take advantage of. But the trade is always there in the background and it's clear that the goods coming in to those other parts of the world. So anywhere from Constantinople eastwards is so beneficial that it's worthwhile for other people to trade with the Vikings as well.

You Dunston's history. We've got Cat Jomon on again, she's talking about the Vikings more after this. What about settling in England after the original raids, they come to settle what became known as the Dean law, but in fact all over they eventually Canute in the 11th century or so in orbit, confusingly, socially. What about in the East? Talk me through kind of routes and what routes means and whether it's the ancestor of Russia and why or that's quite contested.

Yes, this is a really big multi-million pound question actually, that everybody wants to answer. How many of the Scandinavians really did settle there? And are they one and the same as the this word versus his name is a really interesting one. And it's actually one that we first hear about in one of the Frankish. And also now France is an entry from the year eight three nine. And it's in an account of a visit made to the Pius who was the emperor at the time, though he has this group, a delegation coming from Byzantium, and they bring with him some people calling themselves The Roots.

And he had never heard of the rooster before. And he was very suspicious. He thought they were probably spies and he interrogated him for quite some time. And eventually they explained a bit further and they said that they were a Swedes, basically. So who we would call the Vikings. And this is in the early 19th century. And then later on, that same name appears again in documents like the Russian Primary Chronicle, which is a sort of origin story for the Russian state, which we don't quite know whether it's true or not.

And in this one, we hear that in the late 60s, there's complete turmoil in the land of the Slavs over what's now Russia and Ukraine especially. And they ask for help essentially from this group coming from the north, asking them to help them rule over their country because they can't do it themselves. And the call is answered by somebody called Rurik and his brothers. And they essentially come and set up the state of the roo's, which then becomes the Russians or the Russians.

So that is the sort of second origin or the second time. So from the records, it seems like these Roo's Swedes that they are Vikings, essentially. But then obviously that's quite contentious because we don't know if that's really true. And it's suggesting that the slightly peoples were unable to rule for themselves, which is obviously not a very popular history, at least not in recent times. So that's the kind of historical basis. And then we have all these Scandinavian artefacts.

But it's really difficult to tell if the objects are being traded or if people are bringing them themselves so that the question is still open, I think. But we now know that there's a lot of contacts, a lot of people. But the question of ethnicity and cultural origins is probably quite a complicated one.

So from the east, let's go back to Central Europe and in Western Europe and maybe even North America as well. I'm not being drawn here about Viking penetration of the Oder, the Vistula, the Rhine and those great Europeans. Quite as much as I hear about them on the western seaboard of Europe does century or get away without too much in the way of Viking raids.

It seems to be that most of the raids certainly are in and the sort of fringes really of Europe. So you have far more on the coast of France and even Spain going down into the Mediterranean. And then there's not quite so much happening in the center of Europe, as it were. So I think that is in part because of the internal politics and the fact that it's much more difficult to launch large raids going south, so going on those rivers than it would be along the coast, for example.

So it's on this eastern side of Europe that the Vikings make themselves particularly felt to be getting lots of geography. I mean, it's not beyond the way to learn to ride that easterly winds from Denmark or Norway, the east coast of Scotland, the northeast and east coasts of England.

Yeah, and absolutely. It's actually really quite short distance from western Norway as well along to the Orkneys. And the Northern Alliance is actually quite a straightforward trip.

Let's talk about the West now. Geography makes England, Scotland Islands, Western France very vulnerable to sea borne readers. What brings the Vikings West?

That's a good question as well. At the start of the Viking age, it seems like the richest there's a wealth that they can find in these undefended monasteries is a clear attraction. So I think in an early phase, that probably is one of the main reasons why they start spreading to the West. But then quite soon, we have people definitely in search of settlements. So one of these theories for why the Viking age kicked off in the first place was demographic pressure, that people did not have quite enough land on a farmland, that there was political competition back home, especially in places like Norway.

So that would have been a factor, too. But is from about the 20s, 30s, onwards, we start to see a bit of a step up. So you have more sort of larger scale attacks. And then from at least the late sixties, we're beginning to get clear signs that they're looking for political conquest. They're not just looking for hit and run raids. They're not just looking for trinkets to take home and sell, but. They are trying to take over and then the Vikings very much become involved in politics in places like England and Scotland and Ireland as well, and it sort of starts a new phase.

You then have a great army especially, and that's when from the 70s that the written records tell us that these are people who are settling, they are actually taking land and they're sharing it out among themselves and they're starting to farm, which is interesting because we have that in the records. We don't know if the same thing happens in the east, but it's really quite possible. Perhaps that's also another place where you're looking for farmland or looking for somewhere to live, but certainly in the West.

And when they develop the settlement, UVic York today obviously built on the ruins of a significant Roman city that becomes your book, almost a terminus of this great route that leads right the way back into Central Asia. So often people can think of the Vikings in the UK is almost sort of quite barbaric. But if anything, they were introducing trade goods, quite a cosmopolitan worldview, into York at that time. Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely.

I think they're very heavily involved in trade. And some of these settlements really served as a bit of a catalyst, I think, for a lot of economic development and cultural developments, things like arts. And obviously the Vikings had a huge impact on the English language.

So I think we tend to kind of give the violent sides a bit too much emphasis. It's not to say that a lot of them weren't carrying out some really atrocious things, but actually the overall effect was one that had a huge impact on the country in terms of things like the development of towns like you, like lots of other places, especially in the east and north of England.

And of course, we can't talk about anything, the podcast these days about discovering the importance of pandemics in the past. And you've got a really important idea about a Viking age pandemic. And we talk about the 20th century pandemics caused by this remarkable mixing of populations, globalisation, whether it's to armies gathering for the First World War that led to the great influenza or whether it's the huge migrations that occur today. But actually, you would argue that the Vikings tripped off something quite similar.

Yeah.

So this is something that came out. I was just getting towards the end. I'd written my first draft of the book and then a new study was published and I had to add another little section to it because some scientists working on ancient DNA of a huge range of sample from across the world actually were looking for the smallpox virus. So the earliest evidence of the smallpox virus and they identified 13 samples of people who died with this virus, turns out that all of these were associated with Viking sites, all dating to the Viking age and none of them any earlier than that.

And that was really quite remarkable because when you then start digging into it, who those 13 individuals were, there seems to be a really interesting pattern. Turns out two of them were from Viking sites in Russia. A lot of them were from sites in Scandinavia that have a lot of mobility. So island sites like Ireland, for example, where we already know that there's a huge amount of mobility. And then there was one in England, which I think is the earliest evidence of smallpox in England from St John's College in Oxford, which is a mass grave thought to relate to St Bryce's Day massacre of a thousand and two.

So there was one man in that grave who died with the virus, a lot of it because he was quite brutally murdered, unfortunately. But it turns out that somebody else from the same group was actually related to another burial in Denmark of another man who also had the smallpox virus. So we have family members across the North Sea where you have the virus in one place and in the other, and then you have all these other sort of Scandinavian connections as well.

And I don't think is a coincidence that this happens in the Viking age. So the researchers, they were studying skeletons from huge, long period. I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened in the Viking age, because this is when we start to see this huge globalized travel and travelling really rapidly as well. So you can go from England to Scandinavia and all the down the rivers really, really quite fast and taking with them things like smallpox. So I think there's something really interesting in looking at the spread of disease and the new mobility that we have at that time.

And it's a strange thing to discover and to write about during the first pandemic in our lifetime just for you guys are doing.

But one thing people have heard me discuss on the podcast, the role of women in the Viking world. And I get criticized for it rightly because we kind of buy into this myth about warrior women. And for some reason, we get much more excited about it in the Viking world than other cultures. But is there something about the place of women in Viking culture and certainly mythology and perhaps politics?

As much as we can work out that you think is different from other early medieval contemporary cultures is an interesting one, is a tricky one to tease apart what we mean by these terms of what is an actual warrior and what is a female warrior. And I think that's where it gets a bit contentious. But it's a. To me, what's really important to understand is that women in this time period could be in quite serious positions of power and I think the best evidence of that probably is in the Sjöberg ship burial, which is one of our most wonderful ships ever discovered in the Viking age.

This gorgeous, huge, big ship dating to about eight, three, four with extremely elaborate grave goods, something like 15 horses and all sorts of equipments. And this happens to be the grave of two women. And we believe this would have been at least one of them. Somebody might have been a queen or a local ruler of some sort. But the important thing is that at that point, you could be in that position of power. You could be buried with so much wealth, which must mean that you had this really high social standing and she wasn't the only one, those historical records of others as well.

So whether or not they were fighting, I think to me that doesn't really matter is it's a fact that we have these women who are playing a huge part in politics and in society, which I think is quite unusual from other times. And we don't necessarily know about them from the Western sources, but they are there. Well, thank you very much.

A lot of things going back on the podcast title, what the book is called the my book is called River Kings A New History of the Vikings From Scandinavia to the Silk Roads.

And it's out on the 18th of February. And that book's out now.

So hurry up and buy it. And then you and I discuss whether a major British road trip in the footsteps of the great heathen army, which I cannot wait. Yeah, definitely.

We need to do that. We need to track them down and find them soon as this lockdown is lifted. We're going on the warpath. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. My pleasure.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

I hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go, a bit of a favor to ask. Totally understand. If you want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you could just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or have you get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, perjure yourself, give it a glowing review. I really appreciate that.

Tough well, law of the jungle out there and I need all the support I can get, so that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you do, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.