#495 – Vikings, Ragnar, Berserkers, Valhalla & the Warriors of the Viking Age
Episode publishedPodcast: Lex Fridman PodcastLex Fridman Podcast
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The following is a conversation with Lars Brownworth, a historian and author of many excellent history books, including the sea wolves, a history of the Vikings, and the Normans from raiders to kings. He's also the host of two history podcast series. The first called 12 Byzantine rulers, the history of the Byzantine Empire is one of the first, if not the first ever history podcast launched over twenty years ago in June 2005. His second series, Norman Centuries, explores the remarkable rise of the Normans from Viking raiders to the rulers of kingdoms stretching from England to Sicily. In this c
In July '93, a group of Vikings, probably originating from Norway, arrived at the holy island of Lindisfarne, which was a monastic community, and they essentially slaughtered everyone, burned a couple of buildings, and grabbed everything that had any value and left. And that was the first Viking raid that came in force. And I I do think Lindisfarne is a good a good beginning date because the terror that it brought really signified what was to come for the next two to three centuries.
So the word of it has spread. Like, there's a there's a bunch of accounts, like the monk Alcuin wrote about this event in a letter to king of Nisambria, quote, it is nearly three hundred fifty years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. What made this race so psychologically devastating to this monk and to many of the monks on the island, and then to all of Britain?
That's a great quote. Al Quynh was not just a regular scholar. He was Charlemagne's favorite scholar, and he is largely responsible as much as one person can be for the Carolingian Renaissance that had done so much to elevate the early medieval world. In fact, the spaces we have, the punctuation we have, spaces between words are likely a result of Alcuin's work. He was an extremely literate man, and you can you can hear the terror creeping into that. And part of that has to do with monastic communities, the church, and the what they thought a monastic community was. So the church was viewed as
So there's a kind of line that you understand you don't cross. Like, everybody agrees. That's the kind of thing that there's a social contract that most societies, most civilizations sign. There's a line that we don't cross. Let the scholars do their scholarly work. That's one line. The other line is more kinda from a military perspective, from a a mobility perspective, you just assume the sea is not a place from which a threat could come, especially in the North. Yeah. So your conception of the world is shattered by, one, the brutality that can come, two, that the Sikh can bring a threat, and
That's exactly right. I mean, even Al Koon, I think he writes a little later on that the dead were left as dung in the streets. So he's describing dead monks as literal dung in the streets, and who would do this to men of God? Inhuman monsters.
So who were they, the Vikings, coming from the North? How did they think of the violence that they were doing?
Now, that's a very good question because and it it brings up a central problem of looking at the Vikings, which is the story is almost always told from somebody else's perspective, largely from the pens of those they're attacking. So they're not gonna come across well. They're often portrayed as demonic and and inhuman. The Vikings themselves though, as much as we can piece together from archaeology,
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