Viking Pagan Gods in Britain

(racy music)- The last half a century has seen a transformation in historians' attitudes to the Vikings. The traditional picture of them was that of plundering psychopaths in helmets and beards who destroyed civilization wherever they found it. From the 1970s, Peter Sawyer led the way to a more supportive view, arguing that the Vikings were great civilisers themselves, as explorers, traders, founders of towns and kingdoms and talented poets and craftspeople. It seems now that both views are true. They arrived as looters and turned into farmers, traders and town builders. They certainly did all the wonderful things that Sawyer has described, but only when they stopped being Vikings. The term Viking means a Scandinavian raider, not trader or settler. And when they were Vikings, they were every bit as nasty as the traditional picture made them. They were not driven to attack other peoples by population pressure. They came to plunder when expanding trade works revealed how rich Europe further south was and how poor they were by comparison. They at first especially attacked monasteries built on seashores and peninsulas to afford their occupant seclusion, and now easy targets to seaborne enemies. And the loss of much early Anglo-Saxon literature can probably be blamed on the Viking raiders. It is a simple truth that Scandinavian literature, which derives from or celebrates the Viking age, shows an admiration for psychotic violence, which is rare in most cultures. For example, there's a heartwarming story about a school sports day from "Egil's Saga Skalla-Grímssonar" which means "The Story of Egil, Son of Grímr the Bald," who's an actual historical character. This is what happens when he's six years old. Early in the winter, a ball game was arranged to which people came from all over the district. Egil asked a teenage friend to take him along. There were lots of youngsters at the gathering and they were given their own separate game. Egil was to play against a boy called Grim, 10 or or 11 years old and strong for his age. The game began and Egil proved the weaker, while Grim made the most of his strength. Then Egil got so angry, he lifted the bat and struck at Grim with it, but Grim picked him up, flung into the ground and beat him up. He said that if Egil didn't behave, he'd really hurt him. Egil scrambled back into his feet and left the field with the other youngsters jeering at him. So Egil then got a thick bladed ax and went back to the sports field. Grim had just caught the ball and was racing along with the other boys after him. Egil ran up to him and drove the ax into his head straight through his brain. After that, the adults divided into two opinions over the matter and got into a fight in which seven men were killed. When Egil came home, his father made it clear he was far from pleased, but his mother said that Egil had the makings of a real Viking and it was obvious that as soon as he was old enough, he ought to be given fighting ships. Ah.(audience laughing) Egil grew up to be a great poet and warrior, but with continued anger management issues as the modern picture on the board suggests. A different example is a poem by Bjorn Cripplehand, court poet of the Norse king Magnus Bareleg's, about the king's cruise through the Hebrides in 1098. Now, this is a contemporary account."In Louis Isle with fearful blades, our house destroying fire plays. To hills and rocks, the people fly, fearing all shelter, but the sky. In uest, the king deep crimson made, the lightning of his glancing blade. The peasant lost his land and life who dared to buy the Norseman's strife. The hungry battle birds were filled in sky with blood of locals killed. And wolves on Tyree's lonely shore dyed red their hairy jaws in gore. The men of Mal were tired of flight, the Scottish foreman would not fight. And many an island girlies wail was heard as through the isles we sail, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Magnus, should be noted, ruled at a relatively late period when Vikings were Christian and regarded as much more civilized than before. As heathens, the initial Viking Raiders were especially terrible to the Christian societies they struck because they despoiled churches and carried off clergy as slaves. They became, in fact, the greatest slave traders of the northern world. So what is the evidence for their paganism? The great traditional source is medieval Scandinavian literature, especially that from Iceland. This however, all dates from 150 to 400 years after the conversion to Christianity. It consists of scholarly works, poetry or sagas, which are long prose tales. Our problem is that medieval Icelandic writers were not only Christian, but really sophisticated. All but 40 of the 1,600 surviving Icelandic sagas are about foreign subjects, such as the Trojan War, Charlemagne, Biblical characters and Christian saints. The main sources of the scholars and saga-writers for northern paganism were poems which they may no longer have fully understood. Their portraits of it may also have been influenced by the later paganism of the Slav and Baltic peoples against whom the Christian Scandinavians launched crusades, with their large, well-built temples. As a result of all this, those portraits seem to be a mixture of old native tradition, which is the good news, Christianity and Graeco-Roman paganism and it can be very hard to distinguish between those elements. For example, one of the most famous poems that refers to Viking paganism is from the collection called the "Havamal." It portrays the god Odin achieving wisdom by hanging nine days and nights on a tree, stabbed with a spear as a sacrifice to himself. Is this a memory of authentic pagan tradition or an assimilation of Odin to Christ? The only clear difference between them is that Odin hangs for nine days and nights before resurrecting. There are similar problems with other aspects of the literature. It states that there are ten or twelve Norse deities in their mountain home of Asgard, but the actual stories show either fewer or more of them. The reason why those numbers are cited as canonical seems to be because the ancient Greeks had 10 or 12 major deities dwelling on their mountain of Olympus. And to look good, the Norse gods had to be grouped together in a similar way. It also complicates things that Norse poets, the skalds, loved puns and word plays. So, if you find a deity mentioned in verse who is found nowhere else, she or he could be a genuinely distinct one or a nickname for Odin, Thor, Freya, et cetera. Goddesses tend to be few and subordinate in the stories, but many and mighty in older poetry. Kormak's Saga, for example, has chunks of poetry by the original hero, which name six well-known deities, one slightly known one and 10 goddesses who only appear in those chunks of poetry by Kormak. The literature does contain some definite memories of paganism. Volsunga Saga has two in verses included in the text. One runs, "Runes of war know thou if great thou would be. Cut them on hilt of hardened sword, some on the brand's back, some on its shining side, twice name Tyr therein." Tyr was the war God and Viking swords had been found with exactly this rune upon them. Another verse speaks of the lack of a common picture of the life after death, listing different kinds of superhuman being with whom dead humans were thought to take up residence."Some abide with the Elves, some abide with the Aesir gods, or with the wise Vanir gods, some still hold with humans." Major elements of Norse mythology therefore remain doubtful as aspects of earlier pagan tradition. Sorry about this, folks, but Valhalla, the Viking paradise to which warriors slain in battle were taken, and Ragnarok, the predicted destruction of the pagan gods in a final battle, are two of these. They only appear in relatively late sources and may be paganized versions of the Christian heaven and apocalypse. We just don't know. In general, saga heroes, whether pagan or Christian, were very rarely religious. Their general attitude is summed up by the leading character of Finnbogi's Saga, who upon asked by a Christian emperor of what he believed, replied, "Me." This made a fit with the stoic, self-reliant attitude of the rootless, adventurous Vikings. There are however some clearly distinctive and recurrent deities in the literature. It's kind of the modern Marvel comic and films franchise characters. The greatest, and their leader, is Odin, god of travel, wisdom, knowledge, war and poetry. Second in importance is Thor, god of the sky, weather and farming. Next comes Frey, the dude of Norse gods, patron of fertility in crops and animals, and the babe, Freya, goddess of love, war and magic. Baldur was the most handsome and beloved god of all in a prettier way than Frey. And Tyr, the heroic war god who sacrificed his hand to bind the monstrous wolf, Fenris. Finally there is the trickster Loki, sometimes merely cunning and devious and sometimes downright evil. And mortal heroes are also prominent in the tales, especially the dragon-slayer, Sigurd. So how does all this relate to the British Isles? The first point to make here is that Pagan Viking Britain lasted a very short time. Vikings arrived in it from the 790s and were all converted to Christianity there by the 990s, and in their Scandinavian homeland by 1030. So we're looking at around 200 years at most. In most of Britain, the period was actually even shorter. In England, settlement only really started in the 860s, and the last pagan Viking ruler was removed in 954. So the pagan period is less than a century in southern Britain and less than two centuries in the north. Vikings were, after all, settling among a more numerous and sophisticated Christian population that readily assimilated them. All in all, this was the paganism that made the slightest impression on Britain. Colorful, though it is in general. So what is the evidence for British Viking Paganism? The first come the literary resources and the first category of these consists of place names. Only those of Orkney have been properly studied so far, and they have lots derived from Odin and none from Thor. And the exact opposite is true of Iceland, perhaps because the settlers there were mostly farmers who venerated Thor, while most of those in Orkney were warriors and traders who worshiped Odin. The second category of literary source consists of Christian chronicles and Icelandic sagas. I'm lumping these together because they have very little relevant to Britain, but they do agree that Viking armies carried raven banners probably sacred to Odin. And the third category consists of law codes issued in the early 11th century by King Canute and Archbishop Wulfstan to wipe out pagan practices among Viking settlers in England. They prohibit the veneration of trees, pools and stones, and of the sun and the moon, and the use of pagan songs and charms. This looks like a family-based religion which used natural landmarks. There's absolutely no mention of temples, shrines or priests, and they are invisible in archeology if they are ever there. One especially famous and lurid alleged pagan rite found in literature is that of the Blood Eagle. It's an especially tacky ritual, in which an enemy leader, once captured alive, was said to be killed by having his ribs cut from his spine one by one and spread in the form of an eagle's wings. Do not try this at home, folks, but it's an absolute gift to modern script writers running folk horror images of the Vikings and they've made full use of it. But it actually appears in just four stories from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Two are legends and two are bits of the alleged ninth century history. In 1984, Roberta Frank, one of our best experts in the sources, pointed out that all of them actually derive from one original in the late 12th century Orkneyinga Saga, the story of the leaders of Orkney, concerning one of them, Torf-Einar. The saga version in turn depends on a skaldic poem, Torf-Einar having lived hundreds of years before the saga. And in this poem, Torf-Einar boasts of an enemy of his being torn by the eagle's talon before burial. And that's the beginning of the whole Viking urban legend of the rite of the Blood Eagle. And it could just mean that the enemy's corpse was eaten by carrion birds. So the entire myth of the Blood Eagle may hang on that misreading. Archeology is now the main source of evidence for British Viking paganism and can be especially useful if combined with overseas material and literary texts. No temples or shrines have been found anywhere. There's only one apparent ritual foundation deposit, that means providing presence for spirits of the land or deities on the place in which you're going to build something important. This is a dump of animal bones and of human tools found under a jetty or bridge end at Skene on the River Humber. 34 Viking swords have been found in English rivers, which are probably offerings rather than accidental losses from ships as they're always found by themselves. If things were slipping off a ship, you'd expect to find more with them. There are also carvings on crosses, in churches or churchyards. Many are in the Isle of Man and many more in northern England. By definition, they were made by Christians, but they sometimes have apparent pagan images. The trouble is the images concerned could suit both religions. The dragon was a symbol of evil in both. Loki could be equated with Satan and Ragnarok with the Christian apocalypse, which might have inspired it. Heroes are more common than deities in the carvings, especially Sigurd, the dragon slayer, who could be a match for the Archangel Michael, the Christian dragon slayer. There's some mythology on them. Tyr, the war god, and the wolf Fenris, his binding, appear on a slab in a church at Sockburn in County Durham. And gods feature occasionally, so that on the scores of Manx crosses, Odin appears twice and Thor once. The Vikings had no tradition of carved stone scenes before the conversion period, so these must have been made for the crosses and we don't know why. They could have represented an assimilation of paganism to Christianity, that's converted pagans bringing some of their images into Christian iconography with them. Or they could be a sign of the two religions existing side by side peacefully for a time. Burials now represent the greatest single source of information for pagan Viking Britain. Across the island, most of warrior leaders, that's high status males with weapons, their graves just oozed testosterone. Carvings on cross slabs show men lying in graves with swords and swords are indeed sometimes found in northern English churchyards. Such graves are common in north settled areas of Scotland, the far north and the islands. The men have weapons, the women, jewelry, and both have horses and dogs. At Sanday, Orkney, in 1992, a family vault was found of a child, woman and man lying in a wooden burial chamber constructed inside a 20-foot boat. They had a cross-section of ninth century personal goods including a sword, a quiver of arrows, a comb, a sickle and a brooch, and even, here's the really lovely domestic touch, an ironing board. The most awe-inspiring Viking deposits in Britain are those excavated over the past 50 years at Repton, on the river Trent in Derbyshire, the base of an invading Viking army in the early 870s led by the sons of the legendary hero Ragnar Lothbrok. Now historic Viking heroes tend to have nicknames by which you distinguish a lot of leaders who have similar names. And translating them can be very difficult. So the leader of the plundering army that settled at Repton is translated as Ivar the Boneless, but it could equally mean Ivar the Snake or Ivar the Treacherous or Ivar the Unreadable, the Enigmatic. Ivar the Enigmatic even as a nice kind of alliteration to it and we don't know which. Likewise, his brother was called Halfdan the Wide Embracing. Now we kind of assume that this doesn't just mean that he enjoyed hugging,(audience laughs) but it could mean that he had an enormous broad chest or it could mean he liked conquering lots of lands. And historians have thought the last of those is probably the most likely. So we rather queasily settle for calling him Halfdan the Conqueror. At any rate, Ivar the Boneless may be preposterously misnamed because he seems to have died at Repton and to have been buried there, and his skeleton, which was gigantic, found in the 18th century. And around it was a huge dump of bones which mixed the bodies of Vikings with those of long dead monks from the Anglo-Saxon monastery on the site. And the site's very important because it's the mausoleum of the kings of the Midlands, the Anglo-Saxon rulers of Mercia, a kingdom which Ivar the Boneless and his brothers had just comprehensively, and in the long run, finally destroyed, wiping it from the map except in name. And we honestly don't know why the Vikings should wish to bury a formidable pagan war leader next to the burial place of the Mercian royalty and surrounded by the bones, not just of some of his followers who, like him, didn't make it, but bodies of long dead monks. Now every time early medieval armies camp, you expect them to start dying because right up to near the modern period, static armies are unhealthy armies. Quite simply, once you get a larger body of men together, then the ecosystem of support, then epidemics begin. And they begin when the fleas, the lice and the latrines all start overflowing and the inevitable result is large body loss. But why they should put dead monks with the dead Vikings is an open question. Did the Vikings want to give their dead extra sanctity by associating them with native holy men or were the monks skeletons dug up to mock and defile them? Did the Vikings camp around that old church with the royal burials to identify with those native kings and show that they were now their legitimate successors or were they desecrating the site to destroy native English authority? There's the reconstruction of the camp there and we don't know the answers. It could even be that the long dead monks were piled around the graves of the dead Vikings and their leader in lieu of human sacrifices. That's the most gothic of interpretations, but it's a possibility along with so much else. And there are also some individual burials in the churchyard of which one was that of an absolutely classic pagan Viking. He had been killed by a sword slash that had opened the artery in his thigh. We know this because it'll also cut through the bone and you can't take out the bone with a cut like that without taking out the femoral artery and then it's goodbye to the occupant to the body. So we know how he died. He had a silver Thor's hammer amulet showing he's a Viking and a follower of Thor. He has a sword, of course, a knife, which is also another weapon, but also the standard means of eating at table. Forks didn't come in till the other end of the middle ages. And a key perhaps to his strong box in which he kept his valuables. And a jackdaw's bone, which could have been a lucky charm. And a boar tusk, which could have been another or maybe an amulet to ward off evil. The interesting thing is that, anatomically, we know that the sword stroke that opened his artery and sliced through his thighbone would've cut off something more obviously masculine as well when it fell. And the boar's tusk had been put in place of the organ, which the sword would've cut off to equip him again as he was going into what they clearly hoped would be a good afterlife. But what is this archetypal pagan hero doing in a Christian churchyard? Is he there because he or his followers felt this was a holy place originally and he'd have a better chance for an afterlife if he was there? Or did they stash one of their ace Christian killing raiding Viking warriors in the churchyard to render it pagan they hoped once and for all? We can't read this, there are no records. So all we can do is reconstruct it as we wish in different ways. And these questions are complicated further by the discovery at Henley Wood, which is up or down the same river, the Trent near Repton. It's a ridge overlooking the river and it's got a cemetery of around 60 mounds left by other members of Ivar the Boneless's army at Repton or just possibly by pagan Vikings who just followed them soon after. But the ridge is clearly visible from the river. And so, Viking long ships cruising up and down it would've seen the funeral pires flaming up there on the ridge and know what was happening to the bodies of their friends or co-religionists. Bodies of both sexes were cremated on wooden platforms with food, beef, mutton and pork, domestic animals, horses and dogs and swords and belts. Mounds were then raised over them. So why are they there? With the Viking remains, I think that their nature suggests these are personal objects which are expected to travel somehow into another world with the dead in the graves. They're not put there to propitiate deities or gifts to the spirit of the land because giving quite valuable objects to spirits of the land and deities makes sense for about half the objects, but a key to a strong box and an ironing board probably aren't going to go down too big in Asgard or Valhalla. So these do look like deeply personal objects. But why are some of the Vikings at Repton in the Christian area and some up on the ridge in the completely pagan area? Were these the resting places of invaders who identified as died-in-the-wall heathens while those who related better to Christianity and the local population chose to be buried beside the church at Repton? We just don't know and that sounds like a really neat plausible explanation and it fits the evidence, but it may be wildly wrong. The capital of Viking archeology is however the Isle of Man, which was established as an independent rulership by the Vikings and it still is. Our new King Charles is Lord of Mann in Mann. He is not fair's king of England and as such, he is direct successor to the Viking kings of Mann. There was still kings there until Henry VIII who was irritable enough to execute hundreds of people and it was felt tactful that the current Lord of Mann should downgrade, sorry, current king of Mann should downgrade to being a lord to avoid annoying Henry and it worked. And the people of Mann still have one of the oldest parliaments on earth, the Tynwald, which still rules the island. It's not part of the United Kingdom. So it's still in many ways a classic successful Viking polity and it has the greatest collection of Scandinavian calved stones outside Scandinavia and 40 burials with goods. It's a very varied and fascinating island, but it's not that big. So 40 burials are kind of within half an hour's drive of each other. In Jurby parish on the far northwest, six of the eight farms had a great burial mound on their land visible from the sea, probably that the original Viking settler to found the farm and the farms are still there, passed down through the ages intact with the great burial mound still visible to anybody sailing by that coast as a welcome here if you're Vikings or trespassers will be prosecuted announcement to sailors. Some of the Manx burials are especially interesting. At Balladoole, a ship burial was put into an existing Christian cemetery. And this time, to me, the intrusion seems to be a deliberate act of desecration and oblation of the Christian holy sight because the ship burial was dug straight through existing graves to destroy them. Into the ship was put a man with a severed head, apparently female, placed next to him. Not the kind of thing most of us keep in our mantle pieces, but clearly an important accessory in the grave. And the two of them were overlaid by the burned bones of horse, ox, sheep or goat, pig, dog and cat. They clearly needed a cat to complete the retinue of animals going into the afterlife. Again, the animals going there, some of them could be food, but clearly not the cat. So it's a companion. This may therefore have been a scene of animal sacrifice and also of human sacrifice, we think of the woman's head. But again, we can't be certain because both the woman and the animals may not have been sacrifices, but beloved companions and the woman killed in a raid alongside the man and only her head rescued when the action was over and the couple brought back to lie together. A big post had stood at the end of the ship, perhaps a ship mast or figurehead or totem pole. The effective illiteracy of the Vikings in the Pagan period rendered as it impossible to give them human stories from the time of the kind that we can give to the Romano British, for example. But what we have are these vivid bits of image, which, again, we can read in different ways. So let's look at some more. At Knock-y-Doonee, a man was buried in the prow of a boat, wrapped in a cloak with a knife, sword, ax, spear, shield and an iron bowl covered in a cloth. So far, so usual. But uniquely, he also had a blacksmith's hammer and a fishing net left in the stern, perhaps emblems of his occupations in life or perhaps otherwise an expectation he might need to learn a trade in the afterlife once he'd given up being a Viking. A horse and probably a dog were laid in the middle of the boat. At Cronk Mooar, a planked burial chamber was built in a pit and contained a man in a cloak and a belt. A knife was stuck in the belt and the sword laid beside him. The body had maggots in it before burial. So either they kept him lying in state for a very long time before burying him, or more likely he died elsewhere and they took care, smelly though he must have been, to bring him all the way back to Mann for burial in that special place. The most ghoulish site is Ballateare. There, a young man had been put in a coffin surrounded by a shattered sword and shield, plus three spears and a knife. Again, why are the sword and shield shattered? Is it simply to prevent valuable things being dug up later and reused and profaning the grave or is it ritually to kill them so they can better follow the dead into the afterlife or were they simply shattered in the battle in which the man died? Again, three different equally plausible readings. But here's where it gets gruesome. Laid over the coffin was the body of a young woman who had been killed by a great blow from a sword or an ax, which had sheered off the back of her skull. You can see the hole it created on the screen. And over them, as at Balladoole where only the head survived of the woman, was laid piled a layer of burnt bones of dog, sheep, ox and horse. And then a big mound was built over the lot, which again was visible from a long way around. So what's going on here? Was the woman a sacrifice like the animals to accompany the warrior? A lot of people who've looked at the Ballateare grave have gone straight to a famous account by the Arab traveler, Ibn Fadlan, of people who may have been Vikings on the Volga river in Russia. And it gives a long description of the funeral of a chief of these people who were called the Rus. It's the origins of our word Russian. And it took several days and as part of it, one of the former slave girls of the dead chief allegedly volunteered to accompany him and went through a long process of preparation at the end of which she was knifed to death by an old lady called the angel of death or equivalent local expression and was cremated with the dead chief or interred with him. And we may be seeing a parallel here, and of course, for anybody who wants the hard view of the Vikings or just has a gothic taste in history, this is almost irresistible. So you can simply add Ibn Fadlan's soundtrack to the story of our couple at Ballateare. There is incidentally a truly wonderful film, the 13th Warrior, which starts with that funeral and stars Ibn Fadlan, except in the film, he's taken north to the Viking lands to take part in a saga before going home to write it all up. Antonio Banderas is a Mexican, of course, is the perfect actor to play an early medieval Arab traveler. On the other hand, we can reconstruct it in other ways as well. For example, the young man and the young woman may have been a devoted couple who died together in the same violent incident somewhere, the woman dying with a blow that took off the back of her skull and the man stabbed through the heart or some other vital organ, which would not show on the bones. And the two of them were brought back together to lie in honor together in the grave and accompany each other into the afterlife with the dog, the sheep, the ox and the horse, a complete set of equipment for all needs. And the three spears and knife and the shattered sword and shield. If the shield and the sword were broken in battle, that's another gift to a script writer, maybe bringing back Antonio Banderas to play a part in the story. It can be that visual and we can see these people because the face of the young man like that of the burial at Balladoole can be reconstructed by modern forensics. So we can gaze it accurately at the very features of the person concerned. We can see their faces again, but we can't hear them. Because of the lack of writing, their stories are lost. And as I've suggested, at least two or three different stories can be told of each of these burials to account for the archeological data. To me, the finest story about the Viking graves of man is the modern one, and it's one at least for which we do have good records and it happens to be true, which is that they were excavated by a superlative German archeologist called Gerhard Bersu, who was loved and prized in his native Germany that hated the Nazis. And so, he fled a good place in Germany in the 1930s to come to Britain and live free among the British who repaid him by locking him up as an enemy alien as soon as World War II came along. And he was in terms with various Nazi prisoners of war, whom he, of course, hated as much as they hated him on the Isle of Man. But the British were shame faced enough to realize that Bersu was not as obvious an enemy as the others and he was allowed out. He was able to identify the mounds as Viking tumuli and got permission to excavate them. But to excavate a viking mound, you need to use tools. They wouldn't give him a team to lead, he had to do the job himself. And they wouldn't allow him to use things like shovels and spades because they could be turned into weapons and you don't put those in the hands of interned enemy aliens. So in the end, they gave him a teaspoon and using a teaspoon, he excavated the classic sites, which I've been describing patiently, expertly and delivered this to us. And of course, with the war's end, he could be released and gained the credit that these actions had given him. Now there is a true story of travel adventure, ideology, conviction and survival, worthy of any Viking. It's Gerhard Bersu Saga. So taking him out of the picture, once more we're left not with certainties, but with questions and choices and the choices hark back, like so much to the dual aspect of the Vikings as barbarous destroyers or courageous explorers and creators or creatorsees. Whether you yourselves choose one of these or neither or make a blend of them is up to you. And the glorious thing about posing so many alternatives to you and so many unresolved questions is that this does leave you with the freedom to choose. And since freedom was a quality the pagan Vikings prized almost more than any other and remembering Finnbogi's declaration to the emperor,"What do I believe in? Me." That is I think perhaps one of the most fitting conclusions to draw.(audience applauds)- Thank you very much. That was a wonderful talk this evening. We've got time for some questions. I've got some online which I will start with and then if anyone in the audience wants to ask a question, we'll come round to you. The first one is about the cat. So (laughs), you said that you thought the cat might be for company, but it could also be to catch mice or rats presumably. We have a listener who's wondering if it could be to provide catgut for a bow or a musical instrument.- True. I'll go completely with the catching mice, but then catching mice is a part of being company. My own cats are both wonderful company most of the time and they're also great exterminators of rodents. So the two are compatible. As for catgut, yes, possibly, likewise fur, but you need more than one cat in order to get a decent quantity of both for manufacturing things. And this was a lone Viking pussy cat.(audience laughs)- A very small bow.- Perfect for a voyage.- And also we've been asked, do you think the burials happened in the Christian burial grounds because that was a predug bit of ground, so a bit easier to get your shovel in?- Sorry, what did-- So if the burials were happening in Christian burial grounds, was that because they had already been dug, therefore they were actually easier?- No, they were fresh graves. These are not ready-made mausoleum that are being reused. They're fresh excavations.- Our next one is about names. We've had a few about names. Ivar the Boneless, was this a joke, do you think, in relation to his stature or was he actually rather you know?- Well, it may have been. It may have been a joking nickname. They were jokers in a rather grim kind of way. Or alternatively, this was superbly realized in the modern American-made series, Vikings, he may actually have been a paraplege. He may have had a very well-known condition which leaves you without use of your legs and sometimes without your arms. So he'd have been been carried around or driven in a chariot, but would've been a very effective leader. And that's utterly possible and a rather pleasing interpretation of it. It makes another dimension to history. But of course, we have at least four other explanations for his name. He would've pronounced his name Ivar and spelled it Ingvar. And just for the semantic record, the modern Russian name Igor is the modern form of it'cause the Vikings founded Russia as well.- Of course, of course. They got around, didn't they? Lovely, so should I ask someone in the audience? Got hands everywhere.- Oh yes, it's terrifying.- The lady in the middle, yes.- [Audience Member] Hi, thank you. I was just wondering, is there any evidence for Wayland the Smith being known or interacted with in this country?- Yes, he's Saxon rather than Viking. He's a part of Anglo-Saxon mythology, but we do know his story also from a Scandinavian source. He's on the famous Anglo-Saxon Franks Casket, a bone casket which is in the British Museum with his story wrought upon one of the panels. And so, he's a general German Scandinavian figure, but where place names go and representations go, he's much more anchored in Anglo-Saxon than in Norse culture.- [Audience Member] Thank you.- [Audience Member] Thank you. In the Orkney family vault, did the ironing board, was it accompanied by an iron or not?(audience laughs)- Alas, apparently no, but maybe, they made the selection on the different criterion or maybe they expected to be an abundance of irons in the next world.(audience laughs)- Right next to you.- [Audience Member] Thank you. Your assessment of the Scandinavian sort of saga poetry seemed to me as though it could have been equally applied to Irish, Welsh, Anglo-Saxon, Frankish song of Roland et cetera, psychopathic violence with a veneer of Christianity or religion. What is it that you think makes these Viking sagas distinctive or different from all those other literary editions?- Because they're so much more realistic. The Irish and the Welsh sagas are really magical realism. They're full of magic. And so, there is violence, but it's largely violence of heroic exaggeration as Cú Chulainn gave his war cry and 90 warriors died of fright sort of thing. And the Irish sagas aren't anatomically specific. Homer, by contrast, is from the Iliad is a butcher's shop or a knacker's yard with very precise descriptions of how you manage to kill warriors in bronze armor. They are anatomically detailed, but they are regarded with pity and sometimes with horror, not with exaltation. The thing that is so bracing about the Viking attitude to violence is that it is celebrated and it's realistic. And that's a very unusual and very potent combination in traditional literature. And you don't get other literature in which six year old kids kill a schoolmate with an ax and have it applauded in that sort of way. Six year old kids in other mythologies strangle monstrous serpents, kill a dragon to cut their teeth, that kind of thing. But this gritty realism is what's so specifically Scandinavian.- [Audience Member] Thank you. So we tend to think of Scandinavian culture starting at the Viking period. What do these grave sites and these archeological digs tell us about life in Scandinavia before the Viking era and vice versa?- Okay, great question, like the others. It's all a question of semantics because in a sense, there are two Viking eras, but we don't call the earlier one the Viking era because the term wasn't used at the time about it. We call it rather bloodlessly the migration period. And it's when the Germanic tribes break into the Roman Empire and take the western half of it. So in that sense, the vandals, the goths are landlocked Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons are absolutely generic Vikings. They come by sea, they raid to soften up and then they settle. And there are horror stories about their earlier deeds as well. And Anglo-Saxon heroes like Beowulf look archetypically Viking, except there's a far stronger supernatural element in it. But then, there are dragons and living dead and so on and deities in some of the Scandinavian stories. They do have an element of magic. On the whole, the sagas, as I've said, are realistic. You don't tend to get deities appearing in the sagas, though some people worship them in the sagas. It's a realistic soap opera. So there is kind of a continuum in Scandinavian epic from the fifth century, the Anglo-Saxon descent on Britain to the 12th century when the Viking era comes to an end. But there's a gap of a couple of hundred years in which, for reasons that are still being debated, the Scandinavian stop raiding outward.- Thank you very much. I think that's the end of our time. I'm so sorry. And I'd just like you all to join me please in thank you Professor Hutton very much indeed.(audience applauds)