What can we learn from Vikings’ teeth?

Jason Kingsley 0:01
What we know about the mediaeval period comes in large part for people wrote down about themselves and others. How do we find out about the less literate societies, like the Vikings for example? Cat Jarman has spent the last few years working on the remains of the Great Army at Repton and the material artefacts that they left behind. In her new book, River Kings, she talks about the huge leaps archaeology has made with new technologies, and all we can now learn from the teeth in particular, jewellery, and even the metals of the Vikings. Welcome to Future Imperfect.

Cat Jarman 0:42
I am an archaeologist and I specialise in the Viking Age. So it means that most of my work is based on looking at human remains and all of the scientific evidence that we can tease out of bones. I also write books about the Vikings. I run excavations from England and in Ukraine.

Jason Kingsley 1:03
That sounds wonderful, wonderfully interesting. But the term Viking brings with it quite a lot of popular culture, doesn’t it? That must be something that you have to fight against all the time. Going back to the earliest days of Hollywood, Vikings are quite sought after, aren’t they, as metaphors for adventuring and pillaging and stuff?

Cat Jarman 1:24
Yeah, it’s a bit of a double edged sword in some ways. It’s fantastic, because it creates a lot of engagement and a lot of interest. And I think, especially now, there’s so much interest in the Vikings. I don’t think that would have happened if it wasn’t for programmes like Vikings, the Lost Kingdom, and, you know, games and all. Vikings are kind of everywhere. They’re in the popular imagination. And that’s great for us, because actually, a lot of people take that and then they go, Okay, that’s great. But what about the real thing? So in some ways, that’s absolutely wonderful. But it does, as you say, carry with it some some quite difficult things as well, and quite a lot of misconceptions. Some of those are just annoying, the whole, you know, horned helmet things you have to keep on repeating. But other things are maybe a little bit more problematic is that it tends to be something that appeals to some parts of society that that might be quite problematic.

Jason Kingsley 2:11
Yeah, because you get into the whole sort of extreme politics. That’s all sort of tied up with this sort of oddness that goes with runes and all of those kinds of things. So you almost can’t fully disassociate yourself from that like, for example, the swastika. The swastika is an ancient symbol used in the Far East, it was used on Roman shields, for example, and I know some Roman reenactors just have to not use the swastika on their shields, even though it was authentic for the period. It means too many awful things for modern people to separate out. So they just don’t don’t bother. I suppose we’re not quite at that extreme yet with that with Viking symbolism, but we’re getting there sometimes.

Cat Jarman 2:11
Yeah, no, actually, I mean, unfortunately, in some some parts of the world, it is that extreme. So the Thor’s hammer, for example, which is used by so many different people in Scandinavia, that was very popular symbol has been and still is really among the neo Nazi groups. And so a lot of people feel like they can’t wear a Thor’s hammer, you know, because might signal to some people that that they are part of that particular demographic. And so that can get really problematic. And it’s really difficult what you do with that? Do you then sort of move away from those symbols? Or do you try to sort of get them back and say, No, you can’t appropriate that, and actually sort of fight against it, but it’s a tricky one.

Jason Kingsley 3:35
We’ve gone slightly down a darker area that I was expecting to straight away. I’ve read a little bit about the Vikings. And obviously, my area of interest is the mediaeval period, which encompasses 1000 years of European history. It is, of course, an absurd thing to say you’re interested in 1000 years. The Vikings are, broadly speaking, early mediaeval. That used to be called Dark Ages. Is that right? And where does that come on the scale of academia these days?

Cat Jarman 4:02
Yeah, so that term is another interesting one that a lot of people absolutely hated in order to stop using completely. And I guess, it is still quite descriptive in a way, because if you think of it, not in terms of this sort of idea that people weren’t able to do anything, you know, it’s not like a negative. It’s not that that people were living such horrible, miserable lives that it was as a dark age, but more that we don’t have the amount of information that we had you know, about the Romans, for example. So there’s a big contrast, we don’t have the written evidence, there’s so much we don’t know. So in that sense, it’s sort of helpful, but actually, really, we do know a hell of a lot about it. And certainly when we get into the Viking Age, or sort of from 750 onwards, even though the Vikings themselves didn’t write down, they haven’t been we haven’t got literature from the Vikings themselves. And the people who write about them, and later people write about them, but, you know, even so, there’s such a rich amount of evidence from the psychological record, especially so so he’s really not that dark in that sense.

Jason Kingsley 5:00
So the very term Viking, I was led to believe that it was more of a job description than an ethnic group. Is that accurate? Or is that an oversimplification? How would they have self identified? For example, as sea raiders or whatever?

Cat Jarman 5:16
It’s a really good question, because we actually don’t know we have no idea really, it’s quite clear that they wouldn’t have called themselves Vikings. Vikings is a useful term, but it’s a term that really we give them. It’s certainly not as you say, an ethnic labels, you can’t take a DNA set and say that you’re Viking, even though people try to do that. But you know, there isn’t really such a thing. It seems like identities were much more localised. So if you look at some of the records that we do have, and you know, where we talk with people, they might talk about where they’ve come from, and they talk about the region. So it’s much more small scale, and we don’t actually have the countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, the Scandinavian countries don’t form until right at the end of the period. So even though, you know, the English records, Anglo Saxon Chronicle, they talk about the Danes doesn’t necessarily mean that they are from what we think of as Denmark, that’s a sort of catch-all term, really. But I mean, the word Viking really does revert to sort of going out raiding or going out on these expeditions, not necessarily violent ones. But that really is where that comes from. So I don’t think somebody would say, Well, yes, I am a Viking. I think, you know, maybe they would say that they’re going, you know, on a sort of expedition that is a sort of Viking expedition. But yeah, absolutely. Not an ethnic term. But we don’t have anything else. So we were a bit stuck. So I’m quite happy because we all know, we, you know, we used as a shorthand, really, there’s an exhibition in Sweden called The People We Call The Vikings, which was the title of it. And I think that’s quite nice.

Jason Kingsley 6:41
That is quite sweet. Terms are funny, aren’t they? Because they mean, lots of things to lots of people. And it’s like having jargon, when you’d publish a book with Viking on the title. People kind of know what you mean. But once you start to open up the term, and look into it in a bit more detail, it becomes a bit more nebulous, I presume. You talked about going on seaborne expeditions. So was this very much part of the what we call Viking culture, the idea that you get in a boat with some friends, and go and explore? And is there a reason why that seems to have happened or caught the popular imagination of the time, that seems to be a thing they all wanted to do?

Cat Jarman 7:22
Yeah, it pretty much is one of those defining features of what we call the Viking Age, it is this outward expansion, especially overseas. I think it happens for a number of reasons. One of them is the technology. So it’s the ships. The ships are really developing right at the beginning of that period, these beautiful, wonderful Viking ships that are so well suited to long distance journeys. New developments are the big keel that makes them very stable, the shape of the hull that’s very flexible. So they go across the North Sea without any problems at all. And the use of the sail as well, which, although people have been using sails for much longer – Romans sail, Egyptians had sails – but in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, it wasn’t really used. So the combination of all of that suddenly meant that it was very possible. And so you’ve got these fantastic ships that can go across the north of Europe, or because the Baltic or wherever, and then they can land on a beach, you know, silently, quickly, easily in shallow water. And then as you know, one of the keys to my research in my book River Kings, rivers actually are really crucial to that success as well. So I think that technology is one big part, but then the fact that they can do this and travel the trade networks. Suddenly you can get not just to go to the North Sea, you can go to Iceland to Greenland, to North America, all the way down east and the rivers of Eastern Europe down to Constantinople, there’s this huge reach that brings things back. So it brings money, it brings wealth, silver, especially, and lots of exotic objects. So all these things become really treasured, really valuable in the period. So people want that both for the actual wealth, but also, I think, the social capital of going out. So in the same way that you might go on a gap year, and go travelling, and you come back, and tell everyone about your gap year and all these wonderful things you’ve done. There’s a sort of social capital involved in that. Also those connections, those those sort of experiences become very desirable. So all of those things sort of meet up together, I think to sort of make it a big part of the period.

Jason Kingsley 9:30
So how do we know that people travelled to Constantinople or to North America, as you say they didn’t really write much down, but they must have left things behind. Is that Is that how we can trace the expansion of the Viking expeditions?

Cat Jarman 9:45
Yes, there’s a few ways you can do that. One of the big problems we have in archaeology is that objects can move on their own. Same with ideas. So you know, designs on objects and art and types of buildings. You know, those things can move without people, so you never quite know for sure. In general, we see certain things that are specifically Scandinavian and Viking Age in all those places, types of houses. And there’s this sort of big collections of things that that make it pretty obvious that that these are Scandinavians are Vikings. But there’s also there’s accounts from other people. So people who have met these Vikings and describe them, talked about them. So we got, even though they themselves didn’t write them down, we’ve got those records. And then there’s also the work that I do, which is looking at actual skeleton. So we can look at chemical traces that we all have in our bodies of where we’ve grown up the sort of food we’ve eaten the water, we’ve drank all of that leaves trace in our bodies that, you know, makes us like walking diaries of our lives. We can look at that now, which is also another fascinating way of pinpointing exactly.

Jason Kingsley 10:45
So how does that work? And how detailed can you get these presumably chemical signals? Are they in parts of the body that well survive your death?

Cat Jarman 10:54
Yeah, absolutely. So, in terms of working out where somebody grew up, and where they came from, we look at isotopes in teeth, in tooth enamel, because we literally are what we eat. So everything you eat and drink becomes part of your skin and your hair and your bones. And those elements that are incorporated into your food have little chemical variations that reflect the sort of place that your food was grown or the wheat was grown, or the water fell as rain, and they’re different in different geographic regions. I grew up in Norway, for example. So I took up water oxygen from the water in Norway that I was drinking as a child, that became part of my tooth enamel, when that’s formed in childhood, it never changes. So my teeth have locked in the oxygen isotopes from Norway. So if I pull that over to my own teeth, and analysed in the lab, that would show me that I came from a colder climates. And then you can look at other things that show the geology, you know, older rock, granite rocks, and that sort of thing. Whereas my kids have grown up in the south of England, so they’ve got teeth, that are completely different from mine. So you can look at that the enamel stays the same, it’s really stable. So it lasts for 1000s of years, which is fantastic if you’re an archaeologist, and yeah, as you can pinpoint it, you can’t it’s not unfortunately, sort of postcode specific, so it doesn’t give you my home address but you can say that it’s somewhere like Scandinavia, so so it gives us a really good, broad geographical distribution, you can get a good idea.

Jason Kingsley 12:21
And then if you find a burial in Constantinople, and you look at the teeth, and that person grew up in what’s now Norway, it’s pretty clear they’ve travelled from one place to the other, right?

Cat Jarman 12:32
And then when you combine that with things like artefacts, maybe grave goods like the sites I’ve worked on Repton in Derbyshire, there’s a warrior who is buried with a sword or Thor’s hammer on his neck. And then we can look at his teeth and ever consistent with somewhere like probably Denmark. So then you have that combination of both the objects, and also the isotopes and then you know, that’s a pretty good clue.

Jason Kingsley 12:54
Did the Vikings leave any graffiti or symbols anywhere? And we talked about the Viking runes and things? Did they actually, given that they had a bit of a reputation of being capable of breaking the law, shall we say? Did they actually were they literate at all? Did they write anything? Do we have any records of that on ancient monuments or anything like that?

Cat Jarman 13:17
Yeah, we do actually a quite a lot of there’s quite a lot of graffiti, or mostly, it’s quite basic. The most famous, most exciting examples, I think, are in the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. So in what was then considered noble, which was one of the the key destinations around the eastern route. So what are their big trading places? We know that there were a lot of Scandinavians who travel there and actually worked as mercenaries, the so-called Verangian Guard, which was the personal bodyguards of the Byzantine emperor. In the cathedral or mosque, upon the railings, there’s actually graffiti in several places with names. One of them is Halfdan. So somebody with a proper Scandinavian name, Viking name, and is in runes. It basically pretty much says Halfadn was here, and somebody else called Arne down the road. And then there’s what’s probably a Viking ship one of the columns as well. And I just love that because you can imagine this bored, big, hulking great Viking soldier just scratching away

Jason Kingsley 14:17
A Verangian guard who travelled all that way. He wanted to have an adventure and he’s ended up being incredibly well-paid standing around doing absolutely nothing for this Byzantine emperor. Bored out of his mind, but he’s thinking about getting a lot of money. So maybe I’ll give it another year and then maybe I’ll buy a boat and go somewhere else. I love that human side and whilst I’m not particularly keen on modern graffiti these messages that are left behind from ordinary people are somehow very humanising. It was somebody was standing there and carved their name. I wonder if that Viking was carving his name going: I wonder if in a few 100 years somebody will read this and wonder who I was?

Cat Jarman 15:00
Exactly, I don’t think he’d ever have the perspective to think in 1000 years time somebody is gonna sit and talk about me. I don’t know, maybe he did.

Jason Kingsley 15:07
Maybe he did. His name has lived on him as much as some people in sagas. He came up with a really good way of living forever. So the Vikings went east all the way to Constantinople, and all the welfare and spices were hugely valuable and fighting men were sought after, and I presume they looked sufficiently different, and were they larger physically than the local people in Constantinople, in a broad sense?

Cat Jarman 15:32
Yeah, they would have been, and we know that that was noticed as well. So this brilliant record, by an Arab traveller called Ibn Fadlan, who wrote a sort of travel description, he was essentially a missionary mission on the Volga River. He encountered these people, these eastern Vikings that are known as the Rus. And he describes them and there’s a few accounts actually. And in one of these he explains that these are essentially the sort of tallest and most beautiful people he has ever seen. And he explains that they really are bigger, so they’re unusual enough for him to to describe that. So clearly, they did stand out quite noticeably

Jason Kingsley 16:11
With the physical remains, can you tell how muscled people were? Or how kind of physically competent, perhaps, I mean, they talk about some of the English longbowmen’s bodies being slightly warped by the training that was needed to draw the longbow of the power that they drew it. Is there anything like that, that we can tell from the Viking skeletal remains?

Cat Jarman 16:33
Unfortunately not. We don’t have that evidence, which isn’t to say that that wasn’t the case. Because there’s lots of bits of your bones that will strengthen the muscle attachments and things like that will actually alter your skeleton, so it is possible to see it. And there’s lots of examples in the medical record of that happening from the Viking Age. Unfortunately, we don’t have any partially because a lot of the bone material is really badly preserved in Scandinavia. So it’s possible that in the future, some of that might come up, but so far, we don’t have any evidence. Or it might be that actually, perhaps they weren’t as specialised because that that really happens when you’re very, very specialised, and you do certain things a lot. It does seem like some of the evidence that we have suggests that a lot of people would go out and fight just for a little bit. It wasn’t a sort of professional career, it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t that sort of really, really intense behaviour that that would cause a physical change. But people might just take part in raves for a couple of summers or something like that. So that could be another reason we just don’t quite know.

Jason Kingsley 17:37
Okay. And of course, popular culture often gets things like costumes and hairstyles are incredibly theatrically interpreted – basically wrong, horribly wrong – to the point that real Vikings would have just laughed uproariously about them. I’m particularly keen on armour, do we have much evidence in the way that Vikings were armed and armoured or the way they were dressed, or the way they held their hair or anything like that?

Cat Jarman 18:03
No, not as much as we’d like, unfortunately. Certainly things like helmets, there’s only a very tiny number, only really one quite well preserved helmet from Norway, from the Viking Age. There’s very few of them, whether that means that nobody really had helmets, or if they were made in several pieces, or if they were taken apart. We know lots of metal, iron especially, was recycled and reused. So that can happen quite quickly. And in a battle situation, we know that the opposite side would go after the battle and go pick up any remains of weapons or armour and actually take it and reuse it or recycle it. But it’s also possible that leather was used, and obviously leather doesn’t stay that well, in the archaeological record, certainly not in Scandinavia. So those problems do exist. There are some records and things like how we do know things like to see in popular culture, every seems like every Viking would have their head shaved off shaved and have undercuts and tattoos and all that sort of thing. Again, it’s one of those records that explains that some of those rules. People had tattoos had pictures drawn on them. So certain things we do know, we do have some some clothes. But again, it’s unfortunately not as well known as we would like,

Jason Kingsley 19:21
what about swords and spears those and shields, those I think have survived a little more. We have a bit more of the remains of those, I think,

Cat Jarman 19:31
Yes, certainly. We have an awful lot in Scandinavia.

Jason Kingsley 19:35
And those are incredibly, highly decorated, aren’t they sometimes with precious metals? Does that indicate wealth? Or were these high status weapons that are the ones we found?

Cat Jarman 19:46
Yeah, it could be a little bit of both, I think. But I think also, a sword was a very personal thing. And there’s lots of records and certainly in the Sagas, as well, of swords having names and being essentially almost human-like, as if they had personalities. All these things seem to be very, very special. So it’s certainly something that you would invest in, and it would be yours, so it might be passed on, and they come into burials quite often. Interestingly, a lot of them in burials also deliberately bent and broken, for whatever reason, whether that is for very practical reasons so that nobody would steal them – just dig them up from steal them and reuse them – or if it’s some other belief that you have to sort of ritually kill the sword when the person dies? We don’t know. Some of them are exceptionally beautifully inlaid with silver and gold. So clearly, the sword was very important to their warrior at the time,

Jason Kingsley 20:38
Which is interesting. Now I handle my own swords quite a lot in quite a lot of training from horseback totally different periods in the Viking period. But because the ones I have are custom made, they are very different. They do feel different in the hands. So I can completely understand how somebody would have a favourite sword or a sword would feel really good to them are very familiar. And interestingly, I find that the sword has a particular way around. And I don’t know whether we can tell anything about where or edges or anything like that. But I’ve always wanted to ask an expert on swords, historic swords, if you can tell if there’s a way around that the sword was used? Or was it equally used on both sides? Because my experience is sword has a particular way, right, even though it’s double edged. But Spears were probably the main fighting weapon, though, weren’t they in battle?

Cat Jarman 21:25
This is part of the problem, right? So we don’t necessarily know what was used in a battle, the sources that we have are either random finds that just turn up somewhere on their own, so a sword or, you know, spear or whatever, or they’re from graves. And both of those are sort of quite selective. So we don’t actually have a good source that says, Okay, here’s the battle has, you know, if you’ve got 1000 men, these are the weapons they had. There’s no rulebook, there’s no no description, we don’t have battlefield. So we can’t go out and count and say, Okay, here’s how many broken spears we have. So it’s very difficult to say, in reality, how those things actually happen. So unfortunately, we just don’t have those answers.

Jason Kingsley 22:04
I suppose it would depend very much on context. If you were going to just go on an adventure and try and settle somewhere, you would possibly take different equipment than if you were going to go and raid a monastery, and you’re going up against people that wouldn’t fight back, you probably want to move fast, have some big bags, so that you can put really important things in there, make sure you bring some rope to tie people up, send and capture them, you weren’t really expecting a proper scrap. Whereas if you were going somewhere where you might expect to scrap, you could imagine putting together a totally different set of equipment for that particular mission. And they were certainly bright enough and sensible enough to plan an expedition. Do we know how Viking crews were actually raised? Would there be a charismatic leader that would effectively send out the equivalent of a social media message saying, I’ve got a ship, I’m going to go out in the summer, and we’re going to go raiding? Do we know how any of that worked at all?

Cat Jarman 23:00
We think that’s probably what happened. I mean, I think some of it was localised a lot of the time, so it would be in the local community, there would be a need for it. So people who were the right age or stage of their lives, or whatever, and fit and suited to it would would join along. They might have some responsibilities, but they probably would also want to because we know that people were getting paid – usually in silver – for taking part in these missions. So they weren’t necessarily forced, some probably were. But it also seems like some were essentially mercenaries as well, who would just join in. There are plenty of records – not from the Vikings themselves, but from others – that people could join in and just come along. From the archaeology, from the bones there’s a few graves that we think are from armies of few mass graves. One of them is one I’ve worked on Repton in Derbyshire, where we’ve got a burial of nearly 300 people buried together that we think were part of the Great Army, the Great Heathen Army, and the isotopes from those. So they’re looking again, at those teeth and where they came from. It’s really interesting, because they’re not all from one place. They’re from really, really varied places that could be all over Scandinavia, a few also from slightly milder climates, which is a bit odd. But that’s really interesting, because that shows that it’s not just a very local group, it’s people from all over the place. So how and why that happens. We don’t quite know. But presumably, you know, you can join these forces along the way, if we have a long, it sort of works out for you, I suppose.

Jason Kingsley 24:28
I like the idea of a charismatic leader. So he’s sending messages out saying, right, I’m looking for 100 strong men to come with me on an adventure. I just think that would be brilliant if it happened that way.

Cat Jarman 24:40
Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of people will you know, they want that. Fortunately, they want all that wealth, and it’s become something that everyone does, certainly towards the end of the Viking Age. We have so many sources, things like rune stones. There’s a lot of them in Sweden that towards the turn of the millennium they talk about where people have gone to. There’s stones that say such-and-such went to England such-and-such went to the east. And sometimes they say they might have 14 in Knut’s army or whatever. But there’s such great big numbers. And they are almost like advertising posters saying how much wealth they came back with. So if you see everybody else around you, it’s like that sort of gap year effect of everyone else doing this and they’re having a great time and they’re posting their photos and they come back and tell you about all these amazing places, they went to the beach in Thailand or whatever. When you have all that coming back, there’s an incentive for young people, young men, presumably, to go out. So when that call comes up people go: Yeah, I could do with a bit of fun for a few years to build wealth.

Jason Kingsley 25:40
So those rune stones are very strong propaganda in many, many ways to encourage other people to do that. It look, these people had a wonderful time. If you don’t get your act together, you’re gonna have a very boring life instead,

Cat Jarman 25:51
You’re gonna miss out. Yeah.

Jason Kingsley 25:53
So what about the end of the Viking Age? I mean, it’s always funny to talk about the end of any particular historical period, because self evidently, nobody ever woke up. Not a Viking, you know, they were born a Viking, and then died one but people were born to probably didn’t self identify in the same way. Is there a sort of an official end to it as it were? Or is it one of those very sort of blurry things that academics argue about?

Cat Jarman 26:18
Yeah, we definitely argue about everything, of course, a little bit where you are, you know, if you’re in England, it’s 1066. And, you know, the conquest, but in Scandinavia, it depends which country you’re in as well. I mean, there’s definitely something that happens, there’s changes that happen that are quite clear. So there is a break, you don’t have the same race, you didn’t have that same outwards movement anymore. But also you have the formation of the kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. And that really happens around the millennium, roundabout the year 1000 or a little bit afterwards, as suddenly you have these great big kingdoms that are pretty unified. You’ve got lots of other social changes, you have things like actual proper towns, for the first time, you’ve started getting currency, proper money coming in. So there’s some really quite significant changes. Of course, the biggest one is Christianity that becomes almost completely adopted across Scandinavia. So with all of those changes happening, there’s a clear shift there. So it isn’t specific. It doesn’t happen in a day. It doesn’t happen at the same time and you got you know, contact for example, if you look at Britain, you have contact with Scotland and the Orkneys around Scandinavia and the Norwegian rule for really quite a long time. So you have a lot of connection, you got more raids going on. But there is a clear change there. There’s a difference. So it does make sense to talk about and

Jason Kingsley 27:36
it’s interesting because sometimes people have talked about the Norman Conquest and effectively it was one set of Vikings fighting against another set of Vikings really. How true is that because of course England was heavily settled by the Danes, as I believe they were largely called at the time, Dane axes and and the Britons themselves or the ethnic Britons were pushed to Wales and Cornwall and further away places but the Normans there were northmen – that’s the whole point of the name – they settled in France, and they were Vikings, too.

Cat Jarman 28:10
Yeah, absolutely. So the whole you know, Norman dynasty really starts with a Scandinavian. We don’t know if he’s Danish or Norwegian, but Rollo was essentially given Normandy. Yeah, they are the northmen. That’s where that comes from. So William, the Conqueror is descended, is something like the great great grandson or something of Rollo The First, so they really are Scandinavian as well. But also, I think you have to remember that England was very much shaped by Scandinavia and all that context, not just the settlers. Really not very long before you have someone like Cnut who’s a Danish king, who was actually ruling England and Norway and Denmark at the same time. So the Scandinavian impact on England really, I think must be taken into consideration, it’s a huge part of England itself. There’s so much more of it than people like to think

Jason Kingsley 29:04
I always find it funny because obviously, it’s school you learn a simplified form of history and it’s always the Normans who are French and the Saxons who are English and the Norman Conquest – we still call it that – but in fact, it’s basically a whole bunch of roughty-toughty Viking descendants having a big scrap over over who gets the kingdom. It’s not really anything that’s mappable in the same way to sort of England or France or Norway in the way we would like to think these days.

Cat Jarman 29:35
No, and I think those countries form in that period as well, so that’s part of the key of it. It’s really round about that time that all these countries, all these nations, start to form. So some of it is also what’s been passed on later because they were creating kingdoms, creating countries, all that sort of propaganda. I think that the written records relate to that as well. So it’s in their benefit to try and make it sound like that, so maybe that history that we’ve learned later on is quite often quite coloured by those latest sources.

Jason Kingsley 30:05
Yes, as you know, history is often completely coloured by the contemporary politics of the time and history of empire. It’s reflected in all sorts of odd things.

Cat Jarman 30:15
One record is their assessment of Iceland, for example, which is recorded in a book. There’s a book of settlements, essentially, which is a tiny bit later than the actual settlement itself. That describes all those first settlers, but it’s always where they came from, specifically, in Norway, what region they came from, whose son or daughter they were. It was all related to your family. And it was related to the very local region. So it wasn’t a big ethnic thing at all. They weren’t saying: Well, here’s a Norwegian, but he was very much: You’re from Wiltshire, You’re the daughter of such and such, or whatever it is. So it’s that smaller scale. I think we are so used to thinking on a bigger scale. But actually, for a lot of people, it was much more important who your father was, who your grandfather was, you know exactly where you grew up.

Jason Kingsley 31:01
I’d just like to finish on rivers, because we often think of the Vikings as doing everything by sea and landing on the coast. But I believe that rivers were absolutely essential to sort of their strategies and your River Kings book, I presume it’s all about that.

Cat Jarman 31:15
Yeah, it really is. And I wanted to when I wrote that book, I wanted to shift the focus of the big sea journeys and off the the expeditions across the North Atlantic, because I think, actually, it is those internal journeys that have a huge impact. If you think about England, the site that I’ve spent the last decade working on in Derbyshire, Repton, that’s really right in the centre of the country. And actually, to get there with a huge force of several thousand is quite tricky, if you think about muddy winters in England, with all those people, and you’re trying to move quite swiftly around the country, but it is right on the river Trent. And the Trent is like a motorway, and super convenient, and you can just go in the Humber and you can get down and right into the country. So, so fast. And if you look at all the sites, especially the early raids, in they start on the coast, and then they start moving inland, all the big sites are all cases along rivers and in Eastern Europe is so crystal clear, the way you can get from the Baltic and down to the Black Sea, on the reverse. And that route, opening up that sort of back route with those networks is absolutely incredible. That really is, to my mind, almost more important than going across the sea, because it just taps into so many other networks. And you can go over land. Also, the other thing they did was to control those rivers, they control the trade, they controlled who could go there. It’s not easy to control the big sea, you can just go across in a slightly different direction, and nobody can stop you. But a river is so narrow if you can stop that, that’s like having a toll road or something like that. You can really control movements so much. And I think that’s one of the things that the Vikings did so, so well.

Jason Kingsley 32:53
And of course, their boats were perfectly suited to shallow rivers. And of course, you have the two options you can sail if the wind is going in the right direction, or you go, and they were pretty fast at rowing and kept them fit.

Cat Jarman 33:05
Yeah, exactly. So it’s just perfect, really. And I think coming back to what we talked about earlier about that technology that really made this all happen. It is the base and it was the ability and they were pretty tough people. But if you look at someone like the geography of Norway, you really travelled by boat. So almost rivers are a bit like the coastline. And all the fjords is quite similar as a sort of idea that the way you have to travel. So I think that kind of makes sense to me.

Jason Kingsley 33:31
Wonderful, wonderful. Well, look, we’ve only just really scraped the surface of the Viking Age. But it’s been fascinating talking to you about it, I’d love to talk again a little bit more detail. And I’m particularly fascinated by this sort of science behind finding out where people are from and what they might have done in their lives. But we’ve run out of time to do that. If people want to find out you’ve got your book, river kings, and is there anything else you’d want to sort of you know, website or you know, people following you on Twitter or anything like that to find out more?

Cat Jarman 34:02
Yeah, absolutely. I do post quite a lot on Twitter. So my Twitter handle is just @catjarman and I’ve got a podcast as well called Gone Mediaeval where talk more about lots of topics and mediaeval topics, but just like various films and documentaries, so. So yeah, just just search online, and then there should be things coming up.

Jason Kingsley 34:21
Wonderful. Thank you so much for talking with us. And I look forward to speaking to you again.

Cat Jarman 34:25
And I likewise, thank you so much for having me.