The Last Journey of the Vikings (Vikingernes sidste rejse) - First Season

This is a story about the people who came sailing across the ocean.

It's a story about a long and perilous journey of upheaval.

Which came to change populations, and

influence politics, trade, culture, religion and entire societies.

It's a story about the Vikings... and how they transformed the world.

For most people, the Vikings are seen only as plunderers and pirates.

But is that the whole truth?

The process of converting Scandinavia to Christianity is a long story.

They were skilled tradesmen, in part because of their ability to travel.

They're going abroad to take what they seek.

In this series, we will dig deeper and gain more insight

into who the Vikings really were.

And the truth turns out to be surprising.

THE LAST JOURNEY OF THE VIKINGS

In the late eighth century,

the Vikings started appearing along the coast of Europe.

With their longboats adorned with dragon heads

and loaded with well-armed warriors,

the Vikings soon became infamous for their swift and brutal raids.

Initially, they mainly targeted monasteries,

pillaging them for gold and silver.

The monks whose only weapon was their Christian faith,

were an easy prey, and would seldom be spared the wrath of the Norsemen.

Over the years, the Vikings' strategy changed.

They weren't only brutal warriors, but also skilled diplomats.

Not afraid to mix with powerful rulers

who wanted to create a new Europe.

In fact, the Vikings would reshape several European countries.

One of these was Francia.

A kingdom that we will come back to over the course of this series.

But why did the Scandinavians set sail

across the seas and become pirates?

In order to answer this,

we must go back to a time before the Vikings' journey into Europe...

to sixth century Scandinavia.

THE EMIGRANTS

The sixth century is a really interesting time.

Not just for the Nordic countries, for the whole of Europe in general.

It's the period following the collapse of the Roman Western Empire.

And characterised to a great extent by political instability and turmoil,

conflict, and also large scale human migrations, and

it's that aspect of the period that lends its name

to how we characterise this time,

which is often as the migration period.

We need to keep in mind that Scandinavia at the time

was an essentially rural region where communities lived

from the exploitation of natural resources and agriculture.

The resources needed for survival existed.

But still, for some reason, the people of Scandinavia migrated.

There are very many various political, social

factors that would contribute to all of this, but

there is a suggestion now that part of this might be linked to

some kind of climatic event that takes place around

the mid sixth century.

What has been suggested is that, either in the 530s, around 536,

or over a slightly longer period of time, between the 530s and the 550s,

what we're looking at is a series of one or more volcanic events.

These eruptions spewed out ash into the atmosphere

and the ash lingered for several years.

This led to a dimmed sun,

colder summers, or frost in the middle of summer.

This caused crop failures several years of bad harvests.

And in the early medieval world,

a couple of bad years of harvest

would be enough to really enforce some quite dramatic changes.

First, the animals die for lack of food, and then the people die.

And in 541 and a few years afterwards,

we don't really know how many died, but we assume

maybe between a third of, or half of the population,

both down in Europe and up here in Scandinavia.

This creates terrible change for those who survive it.

How do we know that the climate crisis actually happened?

What evidence do we have?

That climate disaster is rather well documented

in contemporary written sources in the Mediterranean

and other regions of the northern hemisphere.

We have descriptions of a veil of dust that was covering

the sky and the sun.

They couldn't see the sun for a few months.

It's there, but it's dim. It's not giving out heat.

It's not even creating shadows during the day.

The sun, essentially, isn't doing what it's supposed to do.

Now, we also have scientific evidence.

For example, in ice cores from Greenland.

We can see a layer of volcanic dust that we

can link to that event.

We can also see it in the way trees grew during that time.

The research was conducted in Ireland.

They managed to measure the growth of the trees for those years.

Trees normally grow each year.

For the years 536 and 537,

we can see that the growth was negligible or even non-existent.

We can also see the archaeological remains,

as many villages were abandoned. Large farms that people left behind,

no one lived there anymore.

It also seems that large areas

of agricultural land are returning to forest

and, on top of this, there is some quite dramatic evidence

for violence.

As we can tell from the archaeological evidence,

we see certain settlements that seem to have been attacked.

Sometimes burnt down.

And the main, key bit of evidence that leads us to believe that

these were attacks, not accidents, is that in some of these places,

people are left unburied within the burnt houses.

It is believed that, around the year 580,

more than one million people may have lived in Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

Of these, perhaps 300,000 or 400,000

would suffer an early death because of the climate crisis.

It seems that powerful landowners

used the climate crisis to brutally seize even more land and resources

from rival villages and families.

It could be said that the power struggles that took place

during these years transformed the society's ruling class.

After the immediate crisis,

it's more then 50 years before the dust in the atmosphere clears,

and the temperature returns to normal.

Soon the population starts to grow again, however,

Scandinavian society has changed.

So, of course if such a climate disaster happened,

the agricultural production was limited for several years,

which caused famines that affected those populations.

It doesn't necessarily mean that populations

in their entirety disappeared.

But they were deeply affected when it came to

having access to natural resources.

This is what we connect to that new organisation of territories

with abandoned villages.

That's where most of the agricultural production was set.

The survivors of these catastrophes grew up in a brand new world

that was less crowded, there weren't as many people.

There were plenty of abandoned farms and villages.

Basically, you have large tracts of land that can then be snapped up,

essentially by those who are seeking to preserve their lives and status.

It was fairly crowded prior to these natural disasters.

All arable land was already held by someone.

Suddenly there was room to grow again.

It seems to be much more hierarchical,

in which power is, to a great extent,

based on the ownership of land and territory.

So, if we are looking at a time where

we're seeing increased social stratification,

that's going to make the social and economic differences

between different social classes, if you want, become more apparent.

It may be time where we see an intensification of slavery or

dependency of the lower classes on the aristocracy,

and, as a result, that gives the aristocracy the means and the power

to consolidate their hold on the landscape.

But, as well as this, we also have increasingly stratified societies,

and people's roles might become more defined. Of course,

Scandinavia, like other medieval societies,

they're essentially subsistence societies, they...

people need to produce what they need to live, so agricultural practices

are incredibly important, as are all kinds of production processes

that take place within the household to produce what people need

to live out their daily lives.

The warrior ideal became more important during this time.

So the ideal man was a strong warrior.

He needed to be honourable. He had to honour his family and his lineage.

He had to be a strong fighter and take care of the weak in society.

And now, when the warrior ideal is upheld to an even greater extent...

powerful leaders start to emerge.

Leaders who will play important roles in what lies ahead.

Societies are becoming increasingly militarised.

Warfare becomes a really prominent theme

in material culture of the period.

Leading to a time where we have the highest status of boat burials

in places like Vadstena in Sweden. These beautiful, ornate pieces

of arms and armour speaking to a militarised aristocracy

who are engaging in endemic, perhaps smaller scale conflict.

But this becomes an essential aspect of elite power at the time.

The women of the time lived relatively good lives.

It's easy to believe that women were viewed as inferior

because men held such dominant positions,

but their society had clearly defined roles for men and women.

Women were essential for society to function.

Marriages were a large part of it. When a couple married,

their lands were merged,

but women's main responsibility was to ensure that homes and households,

fields, cattle and so on were taken care of,

especially when the men weren't home.

When a man and a woman married, the woman was given a large dowry.

If they divorced, which was possible at the time,

the woman was granted the dowry as her own property.

So even if they divorced, she would have been fine.

And if she remarried, even more assets would have been merged.

Women served a particularly important role as crafts specialists,

especially in the process of textile production,

which, during the Viking age, would have ranged from producing everything

from, in addition to the everyday items the family needed

to survive, their clothes, for example, but also travelling clothes.

So in this, they're in a very important place in the organisation

and the ability of communities to engage in travel and warfare.

It's an issue about the Middle Ages that has been debated.

Did they have a concept of childhood that was similar to ours?

At what age did they become adults?

And what were the children's roles?

I think that in the Viking society,

based on the very few pieces of information we have,

the concept was rather different from ours when it comes to childhood.