Viking Age Expert Answers Viking Questions From Twitter

I'm Cat Jarman,

an archeologist specializing in the Viking Age.

Let's answer your questions from the internet.

This is Viking Support.

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From @lungfish2k,

Who knew that Vikings had cool nicknames?

I completely agree,

they really did have some very cool names.

Well, hopefully some were quite rude and offensive as well.

So Vikings had normal given names.

They didn't have surnames in the same way that we do.

They might have what we call patronymics,

so you could be the son of Thor or whoever,

but after that, they gave them some really good other names,

depending often on some quality that you had

or a skill, for example.

I have a little list here of some of my favorite names.

We've got Iric Ale Lover,

Ketel Flatnose.

We have Olaf the Witch Breaker,

Istein Foul Fart.

And then we have Colbine Butter Penis.

Some female names include Thoid Sound Filler,

Halgard Twist Breeks,

and Thorbjorg Ship Breast.

I guess it depends a little bit

what your main qualities were

how people wanted to remember you.

From @davidkrueger01,

How violent were the Vikings?

Yes, they were very violent people,

but they weren't actually the only ones.

Early medieval, this sort of whole period in Europe

was a very violent one.

They were certainly very successful.

We know that they had really good battle techniques,

they had really good weapons.

But we also have to remember

that a lot of the sources

we have about the Vikings

were written by their enemies.

Sometimes there's a little bit of a bias in those sources.

We do also know from a brand-new study actually

that back in Scandinavia,

there's a difference between different Vikings.

The Norwegian skeletons

had far more injuries than the Danish ones.

In fact, about 1/3 of the skeleton studies

all had violent trauma to their bones,

but only about 6% of the Danes.

They also had far more weapons in their graves,

which all points to a society

that was extremely violent

compared to others.

From @finuaz,

So how accurate are the 'Vikings' TV shows on Netflix?

They're not very accurate,

but they are inspired by a lot of real events.

A lot of them were inspired by the sagas.

So for example, in the latest ones

where you have King Canute and Emma,

there's a lot of the facts around these people

that are really quite close

to what we know happened from historical records.

But there are other things that aren't quite right

or that go a little bit too far.

One of those is the portrayal of women and female warriors.

Now, this is something that's caused quite big debates

because certainly in the WVikings show

we have plenty of female warriors.

In fact, entire armies made entirely just on women.

We do have records of what we call shield maidens.

So they're these sort of fighting women.

But they're usually thought to be mythical.

We have female goddesses, like Freya, for example,

the goddess of warfare.

You have the Valkyries up in Valhalla, for example,

that swoop down onto the battlefield

and take the fallen warriors up to Odin's Hall.

But do they really fight?

This is a so-called Birka warrior woman,

better known as Bj 581.

This is a grave that was discovered quite a long time ago

that we classified as a warrior grave.

It was an individual buried in a very rich grave

full of every type of weapon imaginable.

Ancient DNA of this show that this individual

was actually genetically female.

I think the likelihood is that it was possible

for women to also take part in battle,

but we really didn't have that many of them,

because we would've had more evidence,

we would've more graves, female graves,

with weapons and with weapon injuries.

By Nic727,

Did Vikings really sacrifice humans?

There are a couple of archeological finds

that suggest perhaps people did get sacrificed.

One of them is a site I worked with myself,

we have a very peculiar grave

of four young children

who are buried together

right outside a huge communal grave

that we associate with the Viking Great Army

in the ninth century.

Chemical signatures in their teeth

have shown that they've come from different places

and they actually ate very different diets,

but they died at exactly the same time.

And quite a few people have suggested

perhaps this is one of those example

where people were sacrificed.

We do have some written records

that suggest that the Vikings

did actually practices

this particularly rather horrific rite.

So one record is from somebody called Adam of Breman,

who writes that he visited

the temple of Odin, Thor and Freyr

in Gamla Uppsala in Sweden.

And there, every nine years,

people would sacrifice nine of each of the male species,

including humans.

Whether that's true or not,

we don't really know.

Next question is from shufflupaguss,

How do we know about the Vikings?

We don't really have many direct written sources

from the Vikings themselves.

We do have record, historical records,

that are contemporary from other people.

Typically, their enemies,

other people who accounted the Vikings.

So that could be the Anglo-Saxons, for example.

Now, they have to be taken sometimes with a pinch of salt.

Often they only really involve things like rulers,

the battles, the bigger movements.

They don't tend to tell us

very much about everyday events and normal people.

The Vikings themselves did have a writing system.

They had runes.

But they were only used for very short inscriptions.

So there's not really that much to get from them.

We do also have what we call sagas,

kind of like historical fiction really.

They are stories that are written about the Vikings,

mostly written down in Iceland in the 1300s and 1400s,

several hundred years after the Viking age is finished.

They're typically also written

through a very Christian perspective

when a lot of the Vikings were pagans.

So we are getting a bit of a skewed idea

about what the Vikings were about.

We then also have,

well, I'm particularly interested in,

which is the people themselves.

So we can look at the human remains,

we can look at the evidence

from the bodies and the graves.

So that's where things like bioarcheology comes in.

One really good example of this

is the Viking Great Army winter Camp, Repton,

in Derbyshire in England.

And we know about this one from written records.

Anglo-Saxon chronicle tells us that this great army

overwintered in Repton in the year 873.

Now, archeologists in the '80s

actually found Viking graves at that specific site.

And one of them had an artifact,

it had a Viking sword

and also a Thor's hammer around his neck.

That's a pretty good sign

that this was someone of Viking origin.

Radiocarbon dating actually tied him

to that group, to the ninth century.

So that was perfect.

In my own research,

I've been looking at this grave called Grave 511.

This man who seems to have been a warrior,

possibly even the leader of the great army,

he had lots of evidence in his body

about violent injuries.

Some of them probably carried out with an ax.

And I was able to look at the isotopes from his teeth,

showing he most likely grew up in Southern Scandinavia,

quite possibly in Denmark.

Interestingly, he was buried next to a younger man,

and they had the same isotope ratios in their teeth,

showing they probably grew up in the same place.

And when we carried out ancient DNA analysis

of these two bodies,

we could actually show that they were related.

But not just that, they were father and son.

All those sources about the Viking Age

come together to tell this story

about presumably a Viking leader and his son

who both died round about the same time,

in Repton, in England.

MichaelAngelesqueAdz,

What did Vikings do for fun?

They certainly had parties.

They had feasts

where they would quite enjoy drinking mead

and beer and get quite drunk.

We know they did lots of other things.

We found ice skates and skis,

archeological evidence for skis

dating to the Viking Age.

Well, they also had practical purposes.

Next question,

from someone with a bit of a Viking name here,

that's @RagnarBelial,

Where did the Vikings go?

Vikings start out in Scandinavia,

so Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

And from there, they go all sorts of directions.

A lot of them go up to what is now Britain,

across to Ireland.

We have those that go past the English Channel

to France and Spain.

Some go across the North Atlantic over to Iceland,

and further beyond to Greenland

and even North America.

And then again others across the Baltic.

From there, they go down these river roots

in Eastern Europe,

in what is now Russia, Ukraine,

further down to the Mediterranean.

And then even further than that,

we know that some made it all the way

to the Caspian Sea,

and also overland to Baghdad.

So we really have a huge range of travel,

both north, south, east and west.

We know about this from a number of reasons.

We have runic inscriptions,

especially in Sweden,

that actually tell us

that people went to these specific places.

Elsewhere, the archeology is hugely informative.

So when we, for instance,

at Lancer Meadows in North America,

find a site that has a very typical pattern of settlements,

of houses, of artifacts

that we know that we can associate with the Scandinavians,

we can show that these people moved along.

It's also traded objects.

So for instance, in my own research,

I looked at a cornelian bead found in England.

We got exactly the same beads in Scandinavia.

We got them in Eastern Europe.

But they come all the way from India.

And that tells us that the Vikings traded really far,

they moved along these river roots

and tapped into other networks,

like the Silk Roads, for example.

From @fakeLizardSquad,

When did the Viking Age begin?

It's almost a bit of a trick question.

Seems to have a very easy answer.

8th of June, 793,

with the attack on the Lindisfarne

that kicked off the entire Viking Age,

but now we've actually been able to push back

the start of the Viking Age even further than that,

to about 750 or so.

And this has come with a new discovery,

a Viking ship in Salme, in Estonia,

where lots of people died and were buried,

clearly killed as part of some kind of raid or attack.

It dates back much farther

and interestingly also in the East

and not in Western Europe,

as previously thought.

This question is from @erdreidgnimelf,

What is the technical difference

between Norse and Vikings?

Aren't they from the same tribes?

Norse really is the language spoken

and Vikings is the name

that we've been given to these people

who come outta Scandinavia

in between the eighth and the 11th century.

We don't really know what these people called themselves.

We're pretty certain

they didn't call themselves the Vikings,

but the name comes up quite a lot.

It actually has a couple of meanings,

and one of them is a person, an individual,

and the other is a verb,

it means essentially to go on a journey,

which could be a raid

or it could be something

a little bit more peaceful than that.

But this word, Norse,

which is quite often used about the same people,

actually comes from the language that they spoke.

So old Norse,

which is the root of all the Scandinavian languages.

So Norwegian, Swedish and Danish,

and as does Icelandic,

which is probably also the closest in sound

to what Norse would've sounded like.

What happens if you settle somewhere else?

So if somebody comes from Scandinavia

and settles in, say, England,

how long do they speak Norse?

When do they swap over to English?

We don't really know.

The same sort of people

that come out of Scandinavia

and the countries that we call Norway,

Sweden and Denmark,

they come into play much later,

towards the end of the period.

So we tend to just lump them all together really

and call them all Vikings.

Next up is @gregstradamus,

Vikings didn't use a compass

while navigating their ships.

So how did they get to know where they were going?

There's a possibility they used something called sunstones,

which would help to show where the sun was

and so where north was and so on.

But a lot of the time,

they're really just looking at their geography.

They're looking at the sea.

Hugging the coastline quite often.

So if you're going across from Scandinavia

and over to Britain,

you're taking the sort of shortest route.

So you're looking for sites of land

going literally along the coastlines,

and knowing what the oceans are doing

as you're moving around.

From @TheGrimfrost,

Did Vikings smoke pot?

We have found evidence of cannabis seeds,

in fact, in Scandinavia.

So there's a couple of places

where we've found this.

One of them is one of my favorite graves

is the Oseberg ship grave,

one of the most spectacular, huge, big Viking ships.

It was actually the grave of two women.

They had a lots of grave goods.

And one of these women had a little pouch,

and inside the pouch

were found several little seeds

of the cannabis plant.

Of course, what we don't know

is how these seeds were used.

Presumably they were planted.

They could've used them for smoking,

they could've used the herbs medicinally,

or alternatively,

they could've been used for hemp.

We know that people make rope out of hemp.

@asemota asks,

Watching 'Vikings: Valhalla'

and wondering how they were just having unprotected sex

and not afraid of disease or pregnancy.

Were there special Viking condoms?

I think the answer to that is no.

Just sort of hypothetically,

if they did have any,

they would be made of organic materials

that don't actually last in the archeological record.

So even if they were,

we probably wouldn't know.

Were they afraid of disease and pregnancy?

Almost certainly, yes,

but we don't have any evidence

of sexually transmitted diseases.

There are some that leave a trace in a skeleton,

like syphilis, for example,

can actually be so severe

that it makes huge alterations into the bones.

In terms of pregnancy,

we don't know that they had any ways of dealing with that,

but slightly less pleasant knowledge that we do have

is the possibility that they carried out

what we call infanticide.

We do have one written record,

which is quite interesting on this,

from an Islamic traveler,

a man called Altatushi, who came from Spain.

He visited a town called Herdebi,

which is now right on the border

between Denmark and Germany.

And he said that there

unwanted babies for economic reasons

were thrown in the sea.

Is that true or not?

We don't quite know,

but probably the answer to the question is that,

yes, they were afraid,

no, probably didn't have condoms,

and they may have had to deal with the unwanted babies

rather than the pregnancy itself.

Next up, we have @vikinghistoric,

who asks, Did Vikings use soap?

We have some records that they did use soap,

possibly something made out of lye and animal fat,

More broadly, we know that they were really concerned

with hygiene,

and especially things like their hair,

very careful with washing their hair

and combing their hair.

Now, we know that both from written sources

and from things like this,

combs made of bone or antler,

there's one record from an Arabic traveler

who encounters some what the people called the Rus'.

And even Fadlan said

that these were some of the filthiest people

he'd ever come across.

They did wash every day,

but they did it in a way he really didn't approve of.

This group of men were given a bowl of water.

The bowl was passed to the first person,

and then even spit into the same bowl.

But at the end of it,

he wouldn't throw the water out,

he would actually pass it to the next person

who would do the same thing,

just following all the way down the line.

But if we go to Anglo-Saxon England,

we've got quite a different perspective.

We have a quote from somebody called John of Wallingford

who complained actually about all those Scandinavians,

all those vikings that had settled in England.

They caused so much trouble,

not only because they would comb their hair

every single day,

they would also change their garments often,

and they'll have a bath every Saturday.

In that way, they actually attracted all the local women

who were so much more impressed

by these incoming clean Vikings

than the local men they were used to.

From @Sarcasmcat24,

What did the Vikings look like?

We generally speaking think of these people as quite tall,

and normally as in Scandinavia today,

a lot of people who are blonde and have blue eyes.

We have, however, recently discovered

through ancient DNA studies

that quite a few of them

actually had much darker hair.

So lots of people with brown hair,

even some people with brown eyes.

We have one eyewitness description

from a slightly unlikely place,

which is the east.

This is from ibn Fadlan

who describes these people called the Rus',

who he meets near the Volga,

and he says, I have never seen men

more physically perfect than they,

being tall as date palms, blonde and ruddy.

We don't actually have any pictures,

we don't have any paintings,

and apart from some of these other sources,

we don't really have the descriptions either.

It seems a bit like similar to Northern Europeans today,

but not quite as stereotypical

as we might imagine.

@BlackRedGuard1,

What do modern Norwegians and Danes

think of the Viking era?

Are they proud of that heritage

or is it seen as a cruel and barbaric time?

I'm from Norway, I grew up in Norway,

then moved to England

and started studying the Vikings.

I have to say, in Scandinavia,

we are very proud of the Vikings,

not necessarily the actual violent parts.

There are some quite horrific things took place,

including quite extensive enslavement of people.

But we have the arts and the objects, the artifacts,

all those trading networks,

all of that is something that is seen

with quite good pride actually

in all those countries.

I've seen In England, for example,

you see it very much from,

I suppose, the enemy's perspective.

A lot of the written records

really very much talk about

how the Vikings were defeated.

So you have people like Alfred the Great

who's hailed as this great hero who defeated them.

In fact, I recently had to take

the Life in the UK citizenship test

where one of the questions that comes up on the syllabus

is, Who defeated the Vikings?

And the answer to that one is Alfed the Great,

even though it's not actually true,

because not very long after we have a Viking king, Canute,

who actually successfully takes over all of England

and rules it for nearly 18 years.

So can't really say that Alfred defeated them.

Now we've got a question from @Dibble_Gaming,

What's with all the Vikings all over social media?

Is it a trend or did a bunch of people take a 23andMe

and they're super proud of their 0.13%?

The one key point here is no test of DNA

can tell you that you were a Viking

because that wasn't really a clear identity.

People didn't call themselves Viking.

They had quite a lot of people

moving in and out of Scandinavia.

They interacted with lots

of other different cultures, for example.

So genetics, different from identities,

that's the first point.

The other is that when you go that far back,

the information you get from these tests,

it's a little bit meaningless

because there are so many generations.

You have two parents, four grandparents,

and then it increases exponentially.

So when you go back in time

more than 1,000 years,

you've got a vast number of ancestors.

But the population at that time

was really quite small.

So geneticists have worked out

that you have these things called isopoints.

So genetic points

where actually all the people who had descendants

and passed on their DNA

are essentially related

to all the people alive today.

And that point in Northern Europe

is in the 10th century.

So essentially, if anybody in the Viking Age had children

passing their DNA

and you've got ancestry in Northern Europe,

then you're gonna be related to those Scandinavians.

That makes it a little bit less meaningful.

And the other point is that you're not actually comparing

your sample to those ancient populations directly.

You're comparing it to other people,

quite recent populations

who live in those countries today.

It's telling you quite a lot about,

say, the last 300 years or so,

but not really about the Viking Age itself.

Thank you for watching.

This has been Viking Support.

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