If You Want to Listen

Shameless self-promotion has not generally been the main purpose of this blog. I've tended to aim for the slightly quirky, or even personal, just recording things that I have found interesting. But I have also enjoyed bringing to light various Norse and Viking things that I have observed in my studies or my travels. And every once in a while I am minded to comment on books or other phenomena from the academic world of Viking studies. Over the last few years (and especially during the pandemic) I have increasingly been doing this in the form of podcasts and other audio discussions or interviews. While my preferred medium is still the written word, I have noticed that more and more people seem to like listening to something more than reading something (and unlike reading it's something they can more easily do while doing something else). So I have enjoyed this way of communicating with people who might not otherwise read anything I have written. The audio experience is also different from this blog (and from much of what I write) in that in these contributions I am not necessarily following my own nose but more likely responding to questions or topics suggested by those who produce them, and this can force me to look at things differently.

So, for those who think this blog has been a bit thin of late, or who can't be bothered to browse in it, here are some links to the things that I have been broadcasting to the world in recent times, in reverse chronological order:

The Viking Diaspora - podcast interview with two of the guys who run the Seven Ages website, 'Exploring History, Archaeology, Science and Culture' (November 2020)

Inghen Ruaidh, the Birka Grave and Viking Warrior Women Not What You Thought You Knew with Fern Riddell and one other guest (September 2020)

Valkyries: Fierce women of war BBC World Service, Forum with Bridget Kendall and two other guests (July 2020) 

Everything you ever wanted to know about the Vikings, but were afraid to ask History Extra podcast with David Musgrove (May 2020)

The Danelaw In Our Time BBC Radio 4 with Melvyn Bragg and two other guests (March 2019) 

Runes: The Vikings in their own Words  on The History of Vikings podcast with Noah Tetzner (October 2018) 

By the way, the title of this blog post is a quotation from the first stanza of Háttalykill 'Key of Metres' by Earl Rǫgnvaldr Kali Kolsson and Hallr Þórarinsson, ed. by Kari Ellen Gade for the Skaldic Poetry of the Scandinavian Middle Ages project.

Britain's Viking Graveyard

Viking ship model in Repton. Photo Judith Jesch

This blog started off as a light-hearted romp through some of my interests, mainly to do with Vikings and Scandinavia. I hope it is still mostly light-hearted, but I have come to realise that it is also, and now perhaps primarily, an outlet for some of the knowledge I have amassed over the years. Over the eleven (!) years I have been writing this blog, public interest in the Vikings, though it has always been there, has increased exponentially. In response to this, I have, almost subconsciously, more and more wanted to make sure that each post, however frivolous, is underpinned by that knowledge. The other thing that has changed enormously in the last decade is that academic research is now often consumed directly by people who are not themselves academics ('open access' we call it). Blogs like this may be conduits to that research which means that even a frivolous blog has some responsibilities for how it presents academic research. So I find myself taking that responsibility more and more seriously, but it's not always easy to be both engaging and correct.

Another common outlet for research into the Viking Age is the television programme. There have been noticeably many over the last decade, one or two of which I have even participated in, or at least been interviewed for only to end up on the cutting-room floor. I have on the whole not touched on these in this blog. Television programmes have their own raison d'etre, their own ways of doing things which sometimes serve the academic cause and sometimes undermine it. They have to achieve the tricky balance of edutainment, and operate within the constraints of time, budget, and how far the researchers are really able to read up on and understand the issues. In any case, there is little room for nuance or subtle arguments. For these reasons, it's not easy for an academic to evaluate them, especially from the point of view of the general audience at whom they are aimed, best to leave that to television critics.

So the following is not an evaluation, or a review, but simply my take on the programme Britain's Viking Graveyard, which was on Channel 4 last night and will no doubt sweep its way around the world fairly soon. The programme highlights excavations in and around Repton, in Derbyshire, a place I have taken an interest in since the late 1980s when I visited the excavations then being carried out by Martin Biddle and Birthe Kjølbye-Biddle. Repton and the nearby Viking cemetery at Heath Wood, Ingleby, were one of the excursions we organised for the Thirteenth Viking Congress in Nottingham in 1997 and the Biddles' work featured prominently in the Proceedings of that Congress, published in 2001. More recently, we in Nottingham have followed with great interest the excavations being carried out at Repton by Dr Cat Jarman (of whom much more later), and some of our students have been lucky enough to participate in them, too. As more or less our nearest Viking site, Repton was an important reference point for our AHRC-funded project Bringing Vikings Back to the East Midlands of 2017-18. A legacy of that project is the Vikings in the East Midlands website, which at the moment has too little on Repton, though it does have a great lecture by Cat Jarman. We are still working on this website so no doubt there will be more soon.

But on to last night's programme, which is what I really want to write about. First and foremost let me say I thought it was a really good programme - superior to most other 'Viking' programmes I have seen. There were several reasons for this, I think. Most importantly, there was no star presenter acting dumb and asking questions 'on behalf of the audience', but who inevitably becomes a bit too central to the film and overshadows the story. The voiceover narrator explained what needed to be explained, but luckily there wasn't too much going over old ground about who exactly the Vikings were and when and why. Instead, the bioarchaeologist Dr Cat Jarman was allowed to shine, with her store of knowledge, her enthusiastic personality and her ability to explain things succinctly and clearly. The other academic contributors were also well-chosen. Importantly, much of the programme was presenting real, current research, rather than the clichés that too many Viking programmes fall victim to. (Not that there weren't some clichés, but more on that later). So all in all, my preliminary conclusion is that the programme is A Good Thing and well worth watching. But beware, there are a few spoilers below.

Repton. Photo Judith Jesch

Now comes my own take on the presentation and content of the programme. I will try not to forget that a programme is not an article in an academic journal, and cannot be subjected to the same kind of forensic analysis and criticism, given all the caveats I outlined in the second paragraph above. So this is just a list of things I liked more and other things I liked less, for what it's worth. I hope these comments might be of interest to readers of this blog.

When I first saw the publicity for the programme, there were two things that caused my eyebrows to head north. One was the title and the other was the claim that '[I]t reveals the extraordinary stories of female Viking warriors'. Readers of this blog will understand my trepidation at the second of these in particular. Had Cat really found another female warrior?

Dr Roderick Dale face to face with a reconstruction

of the Repton warrior in Derby Museum.

Photo Rob Ounsworth.

Although my first reaction to the title was disapproval ('don't people know the difference between Britain and England anymore?'), it became clear that the title was actually quite carefully chosen, given that one of the arguments made in the programme was that the well-known burial of a warrior and his companion near St Wystan's church in Repton was that of two identifiable Vikings, the father and son Olaf and Eystein, who had died in Scotland and had their bones brought to Repton to be buried. Although I find this kind of identification of individuals unconvincing, I shall reserve judgement until I read the article Cat is promising on this. And certainly the mass burial in the Vicarage garden at Repton does allow for the possibility of bones having been brought there from all over Britain, not just England. Which, if true, makes the title highly appropriate.

As to the female warriors, mercifully it turned out this was mostly just clickbait, a particular kind of hype to get people to watch the programme, unfortunate but not a huge element in the programme. It is true that Cat did fly to Sweden to view the Birka 'warrior woman' with Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson. Cat also mooted the possibility that she might find a female warrior at Repton, but no evidence for this was produced beyond the fact, which we knew already, that both women and children had been present at Repton. Even Charlotte admitted that she wasn't sure whether or not her 'baby' had ever actually fought. And Cat's conclusion in the programme, which is in line with current academic thinking, was that the 'Great Heathen Army' at Repton and Torksey was not so much a purely military affair but more of a mobile community. The programme did acknowledge that women often accompanied armies, but did not suggest that they actually fought. The closest it came to suggesting this was when the camera panned along a line of female Viking re-enactors, of whom the last one was armed.

By the way, I did like the way the re-enactors featured included quite a large number of women and children - I think this might be a first for this kind of use of re-enactors in archaeological documentaries about the Vikings. And I'm sure this is partly down to the choice of my excellent friends Einar Blueaxe, Sigurðr and their families and colleagues to do the re-enactments. So in a way it was a shame that this innovative use of women in the programme just HAD to be associated with the so far quite chimerical female Viking warrior.

I was not particularly enamoured of the more clichéd use of snarling hairy guys to represent the violent activities of the Vikings. Not because Vikings weren't violent (as well as many other things) but because of the way they always look like the same hairy snarling guy in all documentaries about Vikings. I'd like to see some snarling Anglo-Saxons next time. Please. Another cliché was the use of images of large numbers of Viking ships. In this case they looked like they were made of papier maché and were all far too influenced by the Oseberg ship, when Gokstad would have been a better model. Not sure about the red-and-white striped sails, either. These graphics were EXECRABLE. (Sorry for the shouting).

But back to women warriors. There was a narratorial comment about the 'shield-maidens' of Norse mythology. Let me just repeat myself, as I have pointed out in quite a lot of lectures recently, there are no shield-maidens in Norse mythology. Any shield-maidens in other genres of Old Norse literature are a learned construct based on the Amazons, who also did not exist. (I really must get my article on this published soon, to stop the rising tide of shield-maidens engulfing serious academic as well as popular discourse). Valkyries yes, shield-maidens no. And it's not just a matter of words, but how we use words and texts in studying the Viking Age. But that's another rant, some time.

For me, the most important and exciting revelation of the programme was the discovery of a potential Viking site at Foremark. This could be extremely important in understanding the process by which the mobile community turned into permanent settlers. I really look forward to further investigations there and what they will come up with. Cat quite rightly mentioned the Scandinavian origins of the place-name, and I think this deserves further consideration, preferably by a specialist. In fact, the programme would have been much better if it had included more onomastics and fewer papier maché Oseberg ships. There is a distressing tendency among television producers (and the world at large) to assume that Vikings are only about archaeology. It distresses me, anyway. Let's bring on the specialists in Old Norse mythology, Old Icelandic poetry and prose, and place-names, whose work underlies some of the statements on which archaeologists build their interpretations. That's my rallying cry.

Overall, then, a few things that rankled. But with the River Trent, skulls and bones, playing-pieces, women, and some great participants, what's not to like? Congratulations to Cat Jarman and the Windfall films team for a programme that both informed and stimulated thought and discussion.

Of Dragons and Longships

Erik Werenskiold, 'Slaget ved Solskjel'
Public domain image
from heimskringla.no

The media are currently reporting on the interrupted journey (because of a broken mast) of what is being touted as the 'largest replica Viking longship', the Dragon Harald Fairhair. There are so many potential misunderstandings, just in the name of the ship, let alone that description of it, that the academic in your blogstress just cannot resist putting her oar in.

First, the positive side of things. This is a fun project initiated by a wealthy Norwegian businessman, Sigurd Aase, who has a love of Vikings. It has given him some fun, other people some work, and yet other people the pleasure of rowing or sailing in an old wooden ship.

But as usual with the media and Vikings, there is a danger of hype and misrepresentation here. Despite what the captain said on Radio 4's Today programme this morning, the ship is in no sense a 'replica' of anything, let alone of 'Harald Fairhair's' ship. Unlike those replicas which are based on actual ship finds, this is not a reconstruction of any one particular ship. A Norwegian king known by the name of Haraldr hárfagri is most likely a historical figure, but if he was, he lived in the ninth century and we have little if any reliable evidence about him. We also do not have his ship.

The project website gives quite a lot of information which makes clear to the initiated at least that the building of the ship is based on a variety of sources, mainly from later periods, in particular sagas and laws relating to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Since there was enormous development in the building of ships between Haraldr's time in the ninth century and our written sources from the thirteenth, the claim that this is a 'Viking longship' is really stretching it. Undoubtedly, there is some continuity in the Norwegian boatbuilding tradition and the builders have also used their knowledge of later Norwegian boatbuilding in designing this vessel. But then it is disingenuous to describe it as a 'Viking warship'. The term 'longship' also has no real meaning. Some ships were longer than others. At 35m., the Dragon is in any case pipped to the stem-post by Roskilde 6, the genuine Viking ship that, however fragmentary, was the highlight of the recent Viking exhibition, at 37 m.

Calling it a 'dragon' is also unhistorical, if this is meant to refer to Harald's time - calling ships 'snakes' is a poetic conceit found from quite early on, but a dragon-ship is something different, not being a native animal. The word dreki really only makes its appearance in eleventh-century poetry, when it is first used to describe the large warships that emerge in that period. All in all, it is hard to see whether the people on this project see their ship as belonging to the ninth, eleventh or thirteenth century, nor do they seem to care. This is OK for a bit of fun, but no one should be led to believe that this exercise has any actual academic merit, though I am afraid some university folk, as well as the media, have been taken in.

As I pointed out two years ago, there are plenty of other and better reconstruction projects around - check those out instead!

Jorvik Revisited

Some specialists are a wee bit sniffy, I'm told, about the Jorvik Viking Centre, but I've always thought it's rather a good thing. It has certainly been around for nearly three decades now, so it has had to have a few revamps along the way, and it's been a while since I last saw it. Taking a relative for a mini-break in York the other day gave me a welcome chance to view its latest incarnation, and I've come away with the conviction that it's still excellent edutainment. It simplifies, as it has to, but not in a bad way.

What's interesting is that the balance seems to be swinging more and more to the edu-, but still with sufficiently good -tainment for the punters to keep flocking there. The ride is more or less as ever, though regularly tweaked, and not so long ago spiced up with new dialogues (written and voiced by a colleague and students at the University of York). But the before and after the ride are both impressive, with some real nuggets of knowledge presented in an accessible way. The before gives you a useful summary of the excavations which form the basis of the ride, and lets you stand on the site, as it were. The after plays a bit to the gallery with skeletons, the famous Great Viking Turd, and so on, but also smuggles in a lot of useful stuff about palaeopathology, isotope analysis, metalworking techniques, and much more. All kinds of multimedia are used, prerecorded speakers, live intepreters with horns for you to blow if you dare, computer graphics, touch screens. The main criticism of the after bit is only that it's too small. It's a tribute to how interesting the stuff is that the rather narrow corridor with all this excitement was jammed with people looking, reading and learning, rather than heading straight for the shop.

We also dropped into the new temporary exhibition, Valhalla: In Search of the Viking Dead, around the corner. It had far fewer bells and whistles and for me it didn't fully explain the links between the various skeletons, sculpture and reconstructed artefacts on show, while the children's section had some nice things about Norse mythology, without for obvious reasons going too much into death and dying in Norse life and myth... Still, at least it was free with a Jorvik ticket, and the York Minster sculptures were well worth seeing.

The Vikings are Coming!

That was the headline in my copy of this morning's Observer which has quite a large feature on the cultural invasion of Britain by a number of forthcoming 'TV sagas, epic novels and a major exhibition' which 'testify to a fascination with all things Norse'. All of that is excellent news. But OK, dear Observer, if only you'd been reading this blog, you'd have known that they never really went away!

Viking Cats and Kittens I

As the proud slave of two Siamese (one pictured left), and general lover of all moggies, I have often wondered about the Vikings and their relationship (if any) with felis catus, the domestic cat. This is a complex topic which will involve archaeology and art history, as well as texts, and I'll leave the difficult bits, as well as some of the more obvious references, to another post. In fact, I'm thinking of making this an occasional series. But today I'll start gently with two very minor, but I think illuminating, feline felicities.

The Old Norse translation of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus compares Satan, crushed by the falling cross, to a mouse in a mousetrap, except that it doesn't say that, it says mús undir tréketti, literally 'mouse underneath a wooden cat'. There has been much learned discussion of whether this interpolation is native or patristic in origin, and Thor, the World Serpent, Leviathan and much else get dragged in. But who cares about all that - it's the word itself that I like, for 'wooden cat' is of course a simple kenning. Trust those Vikings to make poetry out of an everyday object.

My other reference concerns an anecdote about Sigurðr slembidjákn Magnússon, an early 12th-century king of Norway who, according to an anecdote in Morkinskinna, was spending time on a farm in Iceland (eh?), when he helps a fellow-Norwegian beat an Icelandic farmhand at a board game with the following trick (quoted from Andersson and Gade's translation, pp. 369-70):

The man who was playing with the Norwegian had a sore foot, with a toe that was swollen and oozing matter. Sigurðr sat down on a bench and drew a straw along the floor. There were kittens scampering about the floor, and he kept drawing the straw ahead of them until it got to the man's foot. Then the kittens ran up and took ahold of the foot. He jumped up with an exclamation, and the board was upset.

Really quite a pointless anecdote, as the learned translators note, but at least it shows that kitten behaviour is as it ever was. (Funny thing about sore toes, too, remember Hrafnkels saga?).

But enough serious textual analysis. If you want to laugh (or at least smile) at something even more frivolous, I suggest you google 'viking kittens led zeppelin' and enjoy the video.

Rerunning the Real Vikings

In case you missed it when it was first on last autumn, the Time Team Special slightly archly named 'The Real Vikings' was shown again last Wednesday on More4, and readers in the United Kingdom therefore still have nearly four weeks to watch it again on 4oD on the web. Despite the title (note the absence of a question mark!), it is not really the last word on the Vikings. Your blogstress, dear reader, plays a very small part in the show, so had better not comment further.... But I can assure you it has some interesting stuff (including my favourite chessmen...), and at least one blogger colleague (another 'rambler'), seems to have liked it, back when it was first shown.

Vikings and Sausage Rolls

There's no stopping the march of Vikings into the world of advertising. The latest one I have just caught is an advert for Walls' sausage rolls, showing one of the Vikings of Middle England tucking into one just after he becomes 'dead' on the battlefield. I reckon the ad company got the demographic, of both sausage rolls and Viking re-enactors, just about right. What's a bit odd is that it is all part of a 'Bring it on Britain' campaign. But then Vikings have been an essential part of Britishness since at least Victorian times.
Re-enactors obviously have a lot of fun and good luck to them. I find the whole phenomenon fascinating though, as a 'proper academic' I can't help shuddering at their ideas of 'authenticity' which some groups, like the VME, make a great song and dance about. It's not that difficult to find out about Viking runes (a topic on which I have moaned before), but they never seem to bother, thus the VME website has both a slightly dodgy runic logo, and some curious misinformation about rune stones.
Ah well, it's all part of the fun. And it provides a raison d'etre for degrees in Viking Studies which some people see as somewhat Mickey Mouse, but someone has got to teach people 'proper' Viking stuff.

Are You Inspired by Iceland?

Doubtless, dear reader, if you have the slightest interest in these things, you willl already have become aware of the new campaign to promote Iceland, now at http://www.inspiredbyiceland.com/. It is described as 'the biggest campaign ever made to promote Iceland abroad' and is a cooperation of the government and the tourist industry, to counter the effects of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, since many people abroad now apparently labour under the misconceptions that 'the whole land is covered with ash and that Iceland is in a state of emergency'. The website uses stories from people who have visited Iceland (including one who only spent four hours at the airport, but fell in love with the language!). But the best thing on it is the video, in which you see lots of people dancing in lots of scenic Icelandic places, including two Vikings, and some very wacky folkloric ladies. Well worth a look.

Mini-Vikings

The Guardian reports that the latest TV advert for the Mini features a bunch of marauding Vikings driving Minis off their boat to terrorise the innocent bikini-clad, volleyball-playing denizens of a warm beach somewhere. You can watch the ad by following this link. Naturally, the 'Vikings' have horned helmets, and rather curious ones at that, with long thin horns (a bit like this picture) and not those big fat cow horns they sometimes have. The advert ends with the slogan 'BAN BOREDOM.COM'. Well, I suppose we can agree the Vikings weren't boring!

The Battle for Asgard

Today's Observer has a review of a computer game called Viking: Battle for Asgard. The blurb for it suggests the authors have a rather superficial understanding of Norse mythology... This trailer clip suggests a rather heavy influence from the Lord of the Rings films, but it does have a brief glimpse of quite a nice Viking ship...

Living History

On a recent visit to Norway I discovered a magazine called Levende Historie ('Living History'), a kind of equivalent to History Today, but with lots more Norse and Viking stuff. The current issue (pictured) has an article by Claus Krag on Haraldr harðráði, a column by Dagfinn Skre on how to do archaeology and a brief item about the recently-published genetic study of the north-west of England (though the magazine gets it wrong: the Vikings did not found Liverpool!). There is also a website (http://www.levendehistorie.no/) on which older articles can be read, for instance this one on Óláfr Haraldsson (the Stout, or the Saint, whichever you prefer!): http://www.levendehistorie.no/levende/forside/raaskinnet_olav_digre