What Was Life Like For Viking Women?

[Music] the sun rises Over the Sea Straits that gave Norway its name this narrow passage was the Cradle of the Vikings masters of the Sea and the wind the last barbarians today modern archaeology and science shed new light on where they came from and how they succeeded in dominating the Seas and waterways of Europe [Music] from the ice fields of the North to the Russian step these fearsome Scandinavian Warriors sailed the globe for three centuries spreading their net of trade and pillage they built kingdoms and Empires but their Origins still puzzle archaeologists and historians the

world over the Vikings were great explorers and sailors they exceeded all others in that area I and many people along with me understand the concept of Viking as activity as a characteristic it is something that you do you are out a viking today the Viking Legend attracts men and women from all over the world who reenact their epic voyages and battles but many sourcerers tell us that Vikings were feared as ruthless Pirates gunar Anderson is an archaeologist and curator of the Stockholm National Historical Museum's Viking exhibit ins there are actually some on the runestones as

well there is also confirmation on a few runestones that Vikings were not only feared outside of Scandinavia on the continent but there are occasional runestones that tell stories about him or her being a guard against Vikings here in Scandinavia as well today modern science and stunning new discoveries reveal who these Scandinavian adventurers really were the swedes Norwegians and Danes spoke the same language and worshiped the same pagan gods but we shall see that it was their life and death relationship with the sea that defined Viking culture for centuries before the Viking era the Scandinavian populations

buried their dead in ship-shaped stone Graves called ship settings such as these two on the Windswept island of erand that stand side by side with menhir as entrances to the world of the dead so it is a Motif a ship Motif that recurs above ground and it is supposed to be visible in that way then the burials in the big ones are in most cases only common cremations so to speak The Cremation layer as it is called but then we have first and foremost from the middle of the Viking era and in the late Viking

era great quantities of ship burials where they actually burned the boats far across the Baltic Sea on the island of s in Estonia no less than 40 Viking warriors were excavated in 2011 they were buried in two boat Graves when the carbon dating results came back director of the history faculty at talian University Yi Petz was shocked to find out that the ships dated back to 650 ad these were pre-viking age Vikings as that makes them prev Vikings of the prev viiking age according to the Estonian calendar the vendal age according to Swedish chronology and

the maravian age according to the European chronology the bodies found in the SAR ships had been hacked to death battle they died in must have been major if 4 men were killed and enough survivors were left to bury them we can say for sure that it was a battle burial ceremony but there was a serious battle with more than 40 victims in two ships I mean says it all the battle had to be hard we can see vicious wounds on the skeletons for example hacked hands and broken heads so it was hard and they had

to bury those victims fast the men who died on Sima Island were buried with full military honors Riley alme is an anthropologist and was amazed at the care with which they were laid to rest I think that this burial was done with great respect because we can see separated body parts heads hands or legs but they were buried in an anatomically correct order I think that this is a very important sign that they were buried with high respect the strontium isotope readings from the enamel of the teeth of the simar Warriors suggest they originated from

Sweden around Lake malarin north of lake malarin lies valer the heart of a thriving preing age Scandinavian Community where noble men and women were buried with Rich grave goods for centuries before the first recorded Viking raid as we shall see the massive Lake Malin was the gateway to the Baltic for communities like these here ingar yansen found the best preserved preing age site in this part of Scandinavia the first grave of this kind dates from about 600 thus the beginning of what we call the vendal era but anyway it's just one man that's laid out

like that intact all the other families they lie in simple Graves you don't see them over there in a pile cremated these vendel era boat Graves were rich in artifacts buried with the dead objects they believed would serve in the afterlife including magnificent helmets they give us an insight into the lives of these pre viiking adventurers and the man lies in the middle of the boat surrounded by his weapons the vendel era was a prosperous period so they would bury three Shields and there would be other things too such as drinking vessels horns and glass

from France and so on the cemetery shows how cremation and boat burial went together in the prev viiking era Noble women were buried with their typical oval broaches there was a woman buried over there in a 2 m High Mound she was buried with glass pearls and bronze jewelry and so on but the one thing that was so special was a little dragon head that must have been made out of some kind of ivory a woman was the owner of the finest ship grave ever found it was uncovered in a burial mound at oer South

of Oslo and dates to the earliest part of the Viking age the ship now stands in the Oslo Viking ship Museum directed by Yan bill as the during the excavation it became clear that even though there weren't two complete skeletons in the grave it did contain the remains of two distinct individuals it was also evident that they were probably female this was confirmed by the osteological examinations and they also confirmed that the remains were from an older and a younger woman archaeology confirms how ships were Central to scan Scandinavian society and how rich men and

women would literally take them to the Grave the powerful lady who owned the ship was in her 80s and was buried with a cart a sledge and a slave woman aged about 50 whose DNA can be traced to populations living around the Caspian Sea the furthest East the Vikings ever went dendrochronology or study of tree rings reveals fed the ship's place of origin it was only later when other dendrochronological examinations of two ship findings from car in West Norway were carried out that it was suddenly possible to find an exact match with the tree ring

characteristics from the oberberg ship when it was possible to demonstrate that the tree ring pattern seen in the wood from the oberberg ship was the same that was seen in the ships and the grave on Caro then it was possible to state that the oeberg ship must have been built in that same area of West Norway the ship sailed for decades in the early 9th century before it was buried with the old lady of oeberg it was built here on caroya island Western Norway marit vea leads the excavations at Aral NES the seat of the

First Kings of the northmen the nor Norway is named after a sea Lane and this Northway started here when people in the olden days came sailing past the open Yaya Coast just when they turn north kamun outside here is like a road of water so this is where the Northway started again this is where the story of the first Viking Raiders of the West started the homeland of the terrifying predators of the sea the story of the Vikings starts many centuries before the first recorded attack the sea was the lifeblood of the Nordic communities that

lived along these rocky shores of caroya Island in Modern Day Norway the Vikings here lived and died by their ships ship the ship grave on its own is a man estation a communication with the Gods in a way it's almost like a theatrical play where you are connecting with the gods and it wasn't like they made these graves in a couple of days there were a lot of rituals and they stood open several months we can see that on the logs that we found in the graves the sagas written in Iceland two centuries after the

end of the Viking era records stories passed on orally by Norse poets from one generation to the next and they tell of the First Kings of oral Ness the last Saga from oval's ancestry was the king at aalis Gua he traveled all the way to Siberia which the Norse people called baland there he met a Mongolian princess of Siberian ancestry and to ensure the whale hunt trade he married her and brought her back to arales and so there was a dark skinned Queen here on Arness although for hundreds of kilometers northwards Norwegian geography offers nothing

but mountains and deep Fields perfect for Sheltering ships from the Atlantic Gales but hopeless for farming Here Local Chieftain found a profitable way of exploiting the rocky coastline by extorting a t from Rich Merchants passing through they sent their ships out to control the sea traffic and it is this channel outside Arness that created Arness and turned Arness into a center of power for 3,000 years one has to be clear about the fact that voyages down to the continent from Sweden and Scandinavia were something that had been going on many years before the period that

we call the Viking era in that way the Vikings only followed an already well-worn path we know that the contacts between the continent and Sweden and Scandinavia were comprehensive and extensive already during the early Iron Age of ancient trade links with the East along Russia's Rivers were found here on the shores of lake malarin in Sweden where archaeologists found this bronze Buddha dating back to 750 [Music] ad yes the Little Buddha statue was found in the 1950s in a settlement on an island outside of Stockholm named Halo it was found in a house there we

know that it was made in today's Pakistan in the SWAT Valley and that it dates to about 400 years after Christo and Beka were trading in Poria on lake malarin near Stockholm here on alelo island on the other side of the lake from Beka the local Chiefs taxed and extorted protection money from Traders and industrialists creating easily disposable wealth that they could spread among their followers there was a long housee a port and reception halls as the seat of political power it was built at a healthy distance from the industrial town where Traders and Craftsmen

labored in grimy and filthy conditions the layers of waste are so thick and there is so much garbage that lies inside these places you must also remember that many of these places first and foremost Beka had no natural surrounding areas out on the farms they removed the waste that they used as manure for the fields and things like that but in these places that space was missing other trading towns grew and faded away in Norway all that is left of cang on the shore of Oslo Fjord are a few Mounds dating back to the earliest

years of the Viking age as at bka here a powerful military Elite taxed trade in exchange for protection what we can see in the whole of Europe is that when these early cities rise they have connections to Kings and the powerful the connection can be indirect cities need protection they need military protection because trade is not a barbaric thing it's a peaceful thing and Tradesmen are mostly engaged in other things than War they want protection cang on the edge of Norway's Oslo F actually revealed surprising cultural influences from the south and the first self-proclaimed king

of Denmark and in Kang we look South because if we look at the Scandinavian jewelry in the graves in cang culturally it's a connection to the South and what was there of powerful kings in the south of Scandinavia around the 800s kingfred King godfred was little more than a warlord based in Northern Denmark competing with others to control farmland and trade he founded the trading towns of hadab and TBE on the very edges of the lands he controlled taxing all those who traded in his realm it was a violent way of life where workers toiled

in miserable conditions and Traders risked their lives on the high seas suffering attacks but also pillaging themselves where they could armed to the teeth and ready for anything so we don't have clear traces of plunder there but at the same time they did plunder other places that's obvious and we have some indirect traces we've got pieces of ecclesiastic inventory from the British Isles where they had been broken off and robbed and made into the jewelry that we found lying in the [Music] graves the most ancient power center Found in Denmark was a chieftain's camp at

lra close to the modern city of rosilda on the island of Zealand the ancient burial grounds and the Royal Halls here date back to the late Iron Age and Viking age scholars believe this is the place that inspired the old English epic poem about baywolf proving an ancient tie between the two lands Tom Christensen has excavated here for decades and explains the ancient ties with England what happens in England is that the Romans leave the island and then the German immigration begins together with Danish tribes we know that people from Jutland settled in Kent for

example so there must have been cultural and perhaps also personal contact between the head of Clans between Denmark and England the legendary era Kings here in Denmark were known as the scoins descendants of Odin The ancestral pagan gods legitimize the rule of the Kings here committing them to defending the old religion as long as they could in L the kings were called skoa sco was the son of Odin so he was the son of God it was quite common that the royal families created connections to the gods as a baby scho was sent on a

ship to the country of the Danes so a ship arrived from nowhere with this baby on board relations with the gods were necessary to be able to call yourself King you had to have a Godly descendant and afterwards we have got these stories the puran sagas about the genealogy of the kings that were here if the origins of Viking culture have been lost in The Mists of time today archaeologists and Scholars are shedding new light on the Dark Ages in Scandinavia today we know very little about early Scandinavian culture but the extraordinary Viking sagas written

down 200 years after the end of the Viking age did record the legendary Feats of Vikings as repeated in poems handed down orally generation after Generation by cour Poets the old nors don't don't don't from from the old Norse sagas the ancient Nordic sources are from a later date they are written down several years after the Viking era and they are also written down by chroniclers in Scandinavia who were Christians and who lived in a Christian context and who wrote from their own Christian conception of the world so to speak runic inscriptions show a Common

Language between between the inhabitants of Norway Sweden and Denmark this non-standardized 16l runor alphabet used sound values inscribed on Stone or wood by Scandinavians then there are the runic inscriptions first and foremost in this part of Scandinavia and they are contemporary but they have their own special problems because the messages are often very short and concise really they tell us nothing about Society at that time the Run stones used a standard layout of Scandinavian iconography mainly to commemorate the dead and sometimes for magic Carl dalberg is a modern-day runstone Carver who lives on Adela Island

this ornament shows a flying dragon and is maybe the most beautiful I've seen on a runstone unfortunately the stone once fell so half the dragon's nose has broken but we see the eye and the neck goes down here and a beautiful Wing here then the Paw is here with two Claws and the tail goes down in a circle here and another Circle here with some artistic license the tail is turned into a foot with two Claws and a small thumb the Run Stones were usually red starting with the head of the Dragon but this one

was different and here he writes Yar and fast gear and er had this Stone painted after their father vorar then there is an addition f r e h n their father something very special even after the Vikings had become Christians the dragon remained a key feature of their culture and figured on runestones for centuries the dragon painted on these run Stones is generally tied in some way either there is a leash between the neck and the tail that binds the two together or the leash is interwoven here it is interwoven and therefore it is a

sort of rule that if you follow this tail for example it goes over next time under the leash over under over under over under and it has to be like that all the way so if the dragon tries to flee it just gets Tangled Up unlike parchment or paper carving a runstone left no margin for error then he cuts the runic inscription that is ordered he cuts runes after runes and at the end he writes his father he forgot the r he must of course have an R so the solution is that either he must

cut an R here below or he must place it inside the sentence he then chooses to place it inside and I know being a rune Carver myself that when he discovered that he forgot the r then he got so angry it really bugs him he pulled his hair how could I do that and the whole day is ruined outside the Scandinavian World churchmen wrote about the Pagan Vikings as a scourge of God threatening centuries of work building new Christian kingdoms to protect and propagate the faith the pans Scandinavian culture that was so threatening to the

Christian world was cruel but effective only Warriors who died in battle made it to the mythical Paradise of Valhalla to fight during the day and feast by night here the oneeyed god Odin ruled this Warrior Paradise with the aid of a raven and the V kiras dead Vikings played board games that simulated battle the fine game pieces found in the SAR ships were carved with Dragons there were about 325 gaming pieces some were fragmented but still it's a huge number and there were a few dice made from Tusk and in general there are two types

of gaming pieces the game was called neph and was very popular in pre-viking and Viking times so this is a Swedish King who is the main character neat means the king's table so it is the king who is being attacked by the mavids the enemies the gods were not necessarily good the Viking Chief buried on Sima Island possessed a luxurious jewel encrusted sword the representation of the canine God Fender tells us a lot about the early Viking beliefs the dog's father Loi was a famous trickster revered by Pirates now here we have a very nice

sword handle detail and it's a bit different from the others we can see a very nice symbol in the form of a two-faced animal it is possible that it was a mythical Hunter the son of Loki called fendri with a human face and animal hands and his brother Thor whose Hammer amulets are present in every Viking excavation had killed the previous God imir and made the world out of his body Odin's family was vast and if Lori was destined to betray his brothers cousin Freya had quite a different role it was Freya who was both

the goddess of war and of love and when there had been a battle Freya was the first to come to the battlefield with her wagon drawn by big cats and it was Freya Who first got to pick out her half of the men who had fallen those that she didn't want went to Odin in Valhalla women played a vital role in religion [Music] here at the lra land of Legends experimental Center in Denmark a priestess shows how the gods and Spirits would be summoned there were female priests they had the same status there were volvas

for example volvas that could see the future and the past and it is said in the verus Saga that Odin himself goes to a Volva and asks her to tell him about the past and the future most of pre-christian Viking religious worship took place outdoors in open spaces and sacred Groves no temples remain though the German cleric Adam of Breman described one at Old Upsala in modern-day Sweden as a large feasting Hall ahmud Al fatlan was a 10th Century Arab traveler along the vulga river in modern day Russia Al fatlan tells us the Russian Vikings

woried in open places often in Woodland or by Springs he describes an elaborate Viking funeral right with the sacrifice of a Slave go and a ship burning there were two forms of sacrifice known as blot one in which animals objects and at times humans were sacrificed to a God and the remains would be thrown into peaked bogs or Springs such as this one recreated here at the experimental settlement at Lyra in Denmark in another form of sacrifice the participants ate the meat of the sacrificed animal in company in a common building all you see here

is based on archaeological findings for example the horses have been recreated after we found a horse skull the hoofs and the bones of the lower leg in a Danish bog the rest was not found so this is our interpretation what may have happened is a feast to the gods where the horse meat was eaten and then hung up the skin on a support with the hoofs dangling at some point the horse Pelt and the support decomposed and the remains fell down into the bog the idea that a man or woman might be sacrificed to the

gods to propitiate some divine intervention went back to the earliest times of Scandinavian history we have the Tallen man with a rope around his neck and a belt around his waist the HOSA woman with all her clothes and equipment like Combs that have been carefully laid down in the Bog the toand man was hanged to death in sacrifice and found in the Peete bog of silker Borg in southern Denmark The Remains date back to the 4th Century BC Vikings too threw valuable objects and the bodies of sacrificial victims into bogs and springs like these two

4-year-old boys found in a well at tror it was an ancient Pagan tradition three Christian clerics described human sacrifices among them tietar of meisburg wrote that every 9 years humans and animals were sacrificed by the Dozen at Li when ttma describes the terrible and cruel things taking place in Liar blood sacrifices and the like then you have to remember that this is a Christian's point of view of pagan tradition besides this ttma was of noble family and some of his relatives had been taken hostage by the Danish King so he was personally involved and may

not have been completely neutral in his presentation Adam from Breman relates what the Danish King Sven eston has told him and here we are already in about the year 1000 so there is a big difference in time here but there is also the fact that we know that different parts of Scandinavia performed different ceremonies first and foremost regarding funerals and events like that how extensive human sacrifice was is incredibly difficult to say because then we must be able to Define how these people came to lie in the grave so to speak the Norman spread westwards

to the British Isles and Iceland taking with them their ancient Pagan culture which clashed with the Christian Empires power and religion went handin hand in the merciless struggle that lasted 300 years in Europe the Pagan Viking culture clashed violently with the expanding Christian world but in Iceland the settlers kept their traditions for centuries to come sacrifices were held in a room at the end of the larger long houses that served as a shrine and the banqueting hall was the place where the members of the community came to eat the Flesh of the sacrificed animal the

Icelandic law books tell us that the richest farmer the most powerful man in any one area would also be the priest the priests were also the speakers at the Assembly of all free men here at the thing V where icelanders exercised their right to debate public issues making Iceland the earliest modern democracy in the world the typical Scandinavian home was called a long housee the northernmost of the Shetland ises unst has the highest concentration of L houses in all of Britain and was a hub of Scandinavian expansion into the Atlantic Shetland and UN in particular

is right in the middle of the Viking seaways so it's the obvious place if you're going from Norway across to Pharaoh Iceland Greenland or even America or even up and around going sort of North about and then down to Ireland and man and that direction shetland's right in the middle here at yalof in the Shetland Isles there is evidence that the early Scandinavian settlers reused the houses built by the original pictish people who inhabited the islands before they arrived initially people came here trading and that would have been the first Contact and the first Contact

would certainly have have been on that level and they would have been finding out what it was like in chetland as a result of of that we do know that in the end the pictish people um kind of completely their their way of life was subsumed completely by the Vikings Viking Society was based on family allegiances and laws there was a three- tier class system split to into a small ruling Elite or yals free Farmers known as Bondi and slaves as Prosperity increased the Scandinavian birth rate grew and family leaders had to find more land

and ever greater opportunities for their offspring Independence while the rise of the Warlords left little space for the more independent-minded Petty Chieftain it seems that Prosperity rather than starvation drove the first raids ships were expensive to build and required social cohesion armor and weapons too took organization and taking men away from farming during the summer months meant that someone else was looking after the crops the role of women therefore was key to keeping the community functioning it was the women who ruled the farm and as a symbol of that they had keys and they kept

those keys with the rest of their valuables and since the men traveled out a lot they were counting on the women to keep order back home women enjoyed greater political and economic rights than in the Christian world too as the lady of osberg demonstrates with her rich funeral goods and fine trading ship when they held a meeting the people went to those meetings when they gathered in the small villages the women also had the right to join that means they had the right to vote in 793 Calamity struck the English Kingdom of North hria Raiders

of Unknown Origin attacked the undefended monastery of lindes van and took away everything of value these men would soon be known as the Vikings considered by Christians to be a scourge of God but the Vikings had been raiding and dominating key points on trade routes as far away as Russia long before they officially entered the history [Music] books we found seven male skeletons in the first ship in salme and they were not buried system atically they were located in different places and in the second ship we found 33 or 34 human skeletons and fragments and

now we know that 10 of these have blade wounds and six have multiple injuries the ship Graves puzzled the archaeologists the battle wounds of the 40 men buried here show that the relationship with the local inhabitants was probably violent yet the rich grave Goods show that there was a lot more to this Expedition than pure pillage these people were killed in battle because we have evidence of that on their remains especially on hands and legs for example we have an upper arm that was hacked in four different places also we have injuries from swords on

other arms like someone was defending himself with the upper arm also we have skulls with obvious injuries I don't know what those people were doing there they might even have been a wedding delegation peaceful visitors but we really don't know for sure what was the main reason for their being here and it is very strange that there are are so many luxury items swords gaming pieces dogs birds and so on not typical battle ammunition the Vikings penetrated the Baltic Coastline and traded and raided deep into the East European plane the routs passed through staria ladoga

North Russia where finds of Scandinavian amulets and runic inscriptions on wood show that the Vikings were trading with if not ruling this strategic place on the vulu river by the mid e8th century the fins slaves and eventually the militarily dominant Scandinavians traded here for centuries before the Vikings are mentioned in written Chronicles they founded the trading town of novarad just as on the other side of Europe other Vikings were plundering Paris the question is why does it escalate why this Sudden Rush the factors that have contributed to it first and foremost are the fact that

people then as well as now are opportunistic in the sense that some areas where the situation was unstable we must remember that for example the Frankish Empire was in dissolution and not to mention the British Isles there were lots of conflicts in that area as well the great Frankish Empire to the South was ruled by shamain who aggressively expanded his realm in the late 8th Century he began a 30-year campaign to forcibly convert the Saxons the southern neighbors of the Danes to Christianity pressing North toward the fiercely Pagan Scandinavian World Charlamagne spilled just as much

blood as the Vikings so maybe the Viking raid started out as a military operation but after a while people discovered that there is money to be earned here and then it developed into ordinary plunder here at orval's Nest Harold Fair gathered around a military force that was able to hold together most of Norway a great battle at haard F brought him final victory over the petty Kings and Pirates of vestfold and caused an exodus to Iceland indeed it was during the upheavals of the war to unify Norway under haral fare that we see the greatest

Viking immigration between 846 and 865 the Vikings attacked both England and France often taking advantage of the chaos that Afflicted the great Empire of shamain or the Norwegian Vikings went the furthest of all people in their time and they went as explorers not as Bandits to Rob but as explorers and Tradesmen all of that comes down to the ship technology they developed it was a case of life or death [Music] the Baltic and North Seas facilitated the sense of pan Scandinavian Community ships traveled swiftly along the coast or across the sea while land travel was

slow and dangerous it is no surprise therefore that expansion into the rich Plains of Russia or raiding up the rivers of prosperous England and France was an easier option than cutting the forests and farming the land of Inland Sweden and Norway while early Scandinavian Society became more organized and benefited from trade between the far north and the far south its appetite for wealth earned or stolen grew its ability to organize a predatory economy grew with it although they instilled Terror in their victims the Vikings were just the more aggressive face of a fast evolving Scandinavian

Society whose influence spread from modern-day Canada to the Caspian Sea The Secret of their success lay in their nautical technology and unique social cohesion which together were a formidable weapon for these Empire builders