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Archaeologist Cat Jarman, a Viking Age specialist, joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the Vikings. When did the Viking Age begin? How do we know about the Vikings? Where did they voyage to? How did they navigate so effectively? Did Vikings really sacrifice humans? Were the Vikings actually more violent than other cultures of their day? Answers to these questions and many more, today on Viking Support.

0:00 Viking Support
0:15 Nicknames
1:13 How violent were the Vikings?
2:08 Vikings on TV
3:50 Did Vikings really sacrifice humans?
5:02 How do we know about the Vikings?
7:54 Fun, if you’re a Viking
8:18 Where did the Vikings go?
9:57 When did the Viking Age begin?
10:39 Norse and Vikings
12:01 How did Vikings navigate?
12:39 …did they?
13:26 Everything you wanted to know about Viking sex but were afraid to ask
14:55 Did Vikings use soap?
16:28 What did the Vikings look like?
17:29 What do modern Norwegians and Danes think of the Viking era?
18:50 Descendants of Vikings online?

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Transcript
00:00I'm Kat Jarman, an archaeologist specialising in the Viking Age.
00:03Let's answer your questions from the internet. This is Viking Support.
00:12From at Lungafish2k, who knew that Vikings had cool nicknames?
00:17I completely agree, they really did have some very cool names.
00:20Well, hopefully some were quite rude and offensive as well.
00:24So Vikings had normal given names, they didn't have surnames in the same way that we do.
00:30They might have what we call patronymics, so you could be the son of Thor or whoever.
00:33But after that, they gave them some really good other names,
00:37depending often on some quality that you had or a skill, for example.
00:42I have a little list here of some of my favourite names.
00:45We've got Eirik, Ale Lover, Kertil Flatnose.
00:49We have Olaf the Witch Breaker,
00:52Eistein Foulfart,
00:54and then we have Kolbein Butterpenis.
00:57Some female names include Thorid Soundfiller,
01:01Halgard Twistbreaks,
01:03and Thorbjörg Shipbreast.
01:05I guess it depends a little bit what your main qualities were,
01:08how people wanted to remember you.
01:10From at DavidKruger01, how violent were the Vikings?
01:16Yes, they were very violent people, but they weren't actually the only ones.
01:20Early medieval, this sort of whole period in Europe, was a very violent one.
01:24They were certainly very successful.
01:26We know that they had really good battle techniques.
01:28They had really good weapons.
01:30But we also have to remember that a lot of the sources we have about the Vikings
01:34were written by their enemies.
01:36Sometimes there's a little bit of a bias in those sources.
01:38We do also know from a brand new study, actually,
01:42that back in Scandinavia, there's a difference between the different Vikings.
01:45The Norwegian skeletons had far more injuries than the Danish ones.
01:50In fact, about a third of the skeleton studies all had violent trauma to the bones,
01:55but only about 6% of the Danes.
01:57They also had far more weapons in their graves,
02:00which all points to a society that was extremely violent compared to others.
02:06From at Finuas, so how accurate are the Vikings TV shows on Netflix?
02:12They're not very accurate, but they are inspired by a lot of real events.
02:18A lot of them are inspired by their sagas.
02:21So, for example, in the latest ones where you have King Knut and Emma,
02:26there's a lot of the facts around these people
02:28that are really quite close to what we know happened from historical records.
02:32There are other things that aren't quite right or that go a little bit too far.
02:36One of those is the portrayal of women and female warriors.
02:40This is something that's caught quite big debates
02:42because certainly in the Vikings show, we have plenty of female warriors.
02:47In fact, entire armies made entirely just of women.
02:50We do have records of what we call shieldmaidens,
02:54so these sort of fighting women, but they're usually thought to be mythical.
02:58We have female goddesses like Freya, for example, the goddess of warfare.
03:03You have the Valkyries up in Valhalla, for example,
03:06that swoop down onto the battlefield
03:08and take the fallen warriors up to Odin's Hall.
03:11But do they really fight?
03:12This is a so-called bigger warrior woman, better known as BJ581.
03:18This is a grave that's got quite a long time ago
03:21that we classified as a warrior grave.
03:23It was an individual buried in a very rich grave,
03:26full of every type of weapon imaginable.
03:29Ancient DNA of this show that this individual was actually genetically female.
03:34I think the likelihood is that it was possible for women to also take part in battle,
03:38but we really didn't have that many of them
03:40because we would have had more evidence.
03:42We would have more graves, female graves, with weapons and with weapon injuries.
03:47By Nick727, did Vikings really sacrifice humans?
03:53There are a couple of archaeological finds that suggest perhaps people did get sacrificed.
03:58One of them is a site I worked on myself.
04:01We have a very peculiar grave of four young children
04:06who are buried together right outside a huge communal grave
04:09that we associate with the Viking Great Army in the 9th century.
04:13Chemical signatures in their teeth have shown that they've come from different places
04:17and they actually ate very different diets,
04:19but they died at exactly the same time.
04:21And quite a few people have suggested perhaps this is one of those examples
04:25where people were sacrificed.
04:26We do have some written records that suggest that the Vikings did actually practice this.
04:31Particularly rather horrific rites.
04:33So one record is from somebody called Adam of Bremen,
04:37who writes that he visited the temple of Odin, Thor and Frey in Gamla Uppsala in Sweden.
04:44And there, every nine years, people would sacrifice
04:49nine of each of the male species, including humans.
04:55Whether that's true or not, we don't really know.
04:57Next question is from Shoflopagus.
05:01How do we know about the Vikings?
05:04We don't really have many direct written sources from the Vikings themselves.
05:10We do have historical records that are contemporary from other people.
05:14Typically, their enemies are the people who encountered the Vikings.
05:18That could be the Anglo-Saxons, for example.
05:20Now, they have to be taken sometimes with a pinch of salt.
05:23Often, they only really involve things like rulers, the battles, the bigger movements.
05:28They don't tend to tell us very much about everyday events and normal people.
05:33The Vikings themselves did have a writing system.
05:36They had runes, but they were only used for very short inscriptions.
05:40So there's not really that much to get from them.
05:42We do also have what we call sagas, kind of like historical fiction, really.
05:47They are stories that are written about the Vikings,
05:49mostly written down in Iceland in the 13 and 1400s,
05:53several hundred years after the Viking Age has finished.
05:57They're typically also written through a very Christian perspective,
06:00when a lot of the Vikings were pagans.
06:02So we are getting a bit of a skewed idea about what the Vikings were about.
06:08We then also have what I'm particularly interested in, which is the people themselves.
06:13So we can look at the human remains.
06:15We can look at the evidence from the bodies and the graves.
06:19So that's where things like bioarchaeology comes in.
06:21One really good example of this is the Viking Great Army Winter Camp of Repton in Derbyshire,
06:28in England.
06:29And we know about this one from written records.
06:31Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that this great army overwintered in Repton in the year 873.
06:37Now, archaeologists in the 80s actually found Viking graves at that specific site.
06:44And one of them had an artifact.
06:46It had a Viking sword and also a Thor's hammer around his neck.
06:50That's a pretty good sign that this was someone of Viking origin.
06:53Radiocarbon dating actually tied him to that group, to the 9th century.
06:58So that was perfect.
06:59In my own research, I've been looking at this grave called Grave 511.
07:02This man who seems to have been a warrior, possibly even the leader of the great army.
07:07He had lots of evidence in his body about violent injuries.
07:12Some of them probably carried out with an axe.
07:15And I was able to look at the isotope from his teeth,
07:18showing he most likely grew up in southern Scandinavia, quite possibly in Denmark.
07:23Interestingly, he was buried next to a younger man.
07:26And they had the same isotope ratios in their teeth,
07:29showing they probably grew up in the same place.
07:31And when we carried out ancient DNA analysis of these two bodies,
07:35we could actually show that they were related.
07:38But not just that, they were father and son.
07:41All those sources about the Viking Age come together to tell this story about,
07:45presumably, a Viking leader and his son,
07:47who both died around about the same time in Repton in England.
07:51Michaelangelesque adds,
07:54What did Vikings do for fun?
07:56They certainly had parties.
07:57They had feasts where they would quite enjoy drinking mead and beer and get quite drunk.
08:03We know they did lots of other things.
08:04We found ice skates and skis,
08:06psychological evidence for skis dating to the Viking Age.
08:10Well, they also had practical purposes.
08:12Next question from someone with a bit of a Viking name here.
08:16That's at Ragnar Belial.
08:18Where did the Vikings go?
08:20Vikings start out in Scandinavia, so Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
08:24And from there, they go all sorts of directions.
08:26A lot of them go up to what is now Britain, across to Ireland.
08:29We have those that go past the English Channel to France and Spain.
08:33Some go across the North Atlantic over to Iceland
08:36and further beyond to Greenland and even North America.
08:39And then again, others across the Baltic.
08:42From there, they go down these river routes in Eastern Europe,
08:45in what is now Russia, Ukraine, further down to the Mediterranean.
08:49And then even further than that, we know that some made it all the way to the Caspian Sea
08:54and also overland to Baghdad.
08:57So we really have a huge range of travel, both north, south, east and west.
09:05We know about this from a number of reasons.
09:07We have runic inscriptions, especially in Sweden,
09:10that actually tell us that people went to these specific places.
09:13Elsewhere, the archaeology is hugely informative.
09:16So when we, for instance, at L'Anse aux Meadows in North America,
09:20find a site that has a very typical pattern of settlements, of houses,
09:26of artefacts that we know that we can associate with the Scandinavians,
09:30we can show that these people moved along.
09:32It's also a traded object.
09:34So for instance, in my own research, I looked at a Carnelian bead found in England.
09:38We've got exactly the same beads in Scandinavia.
09:41We've got them in Eastern Europe.
09:43But they come all the way from India.
09:45And that tells us that the Vikings traded really far.
09:48They moved along these river routes and tapped into other networks,
09:52like the Silk Roads, for example.
09:54From at fake lizard squad,
09:57when did the Viking Age begin?
09:59It's almost a bit of a trick question.
10:01Seems to have a very easy answer.
10:038th of June, 793,
10:06with the attack on the Lindisfarne that kicked off the entire Viking Age.
10:10But now we've actually been able to push back the start of the Viking Age
10:14even further than that, to about 750 or so.
10:17And this has come with a new discovery,
10:19a Viking ship in Salma in Estonia,
10:23where lots of people died and were buried,
10:25clearly killed as part of some kind of raid or attack.
10:29It dates back much further.
10:31And interestingly, also in the East,
10:33and not in Western Europe, as previously thought.
10:36This question is from at Erdridgnimr.
10:40What is the technical difference between Norse and Vikings?
10:44Aren't they from the same tribes?
10:46Norse really is the language spoken,
10:48and Vikings is the name that we've been given to these people
10:51who come out of Scandinavia in between the 8th and the 11th century.
10:55We don't really know what these people called themselves.
10:58We're pretty certain they didn't call themselves the Vikings.
11:00But the name comes up quite a lot.
11:02It actually has a couple of meanings,
11:03and one of them is a person, an individual,
11:07and the other is a verb.
11:09It means essentially to go on a journey,
11:11which could be a raid,
11:12or it could be something a little bit more peaceful than that.
11:15But this word Norse,
11:17which is quite often used about the same people,
11:19actually comes from the language that they spoke.
11:21So Old Norse, which is the root of all the Scandinavian languages.
11:25So Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish.
11:27And as does Icelandic,
11:29which is probably also the closest in sound to what Norse would have sounded like.
11:35What happens if you settle somewhere else?
11:36So if somebody comes from Scandinavia and settles in, say, England,
11:40how long do they speak Norse?
11:42When do they swap over to English?
11:44We don't really know.
11:45The same sort of people that come out of Scandinavia
11:48and the countries that we call Norway, Sweden, and Denmark,
11:51they come into play much later towards the end of the period.
11:54So we tend to just lump them all together really
11:56and call them all Vikings.
11:59Next up is at Gregastronomus.
12:02Vikings didn't use a compass while navigating their ships.
12:05So how did they get to know where they were going?
12:07There's a possibility they used something called sunstones,
12:10which would help to show where the sun was,
12:13and so where north was, and so on.
12:16But a lot of the time, they're really just looking at their geography.
12:20They're looking at the sea,
12:21hugging the coastline quite often.
12:23So if you're going across from Scandinavia
12:25and over to Britain,
12:27you're taking the sort of shortest route.
12:28So you're looking for sites of land,
12:30going literally along the coastlines,
12:32and knowing what the oceans are doing as you're moving around.
12:36From at the Grimfrost,
12:38did Vikings smoke pot?
12:41We have found evidence of cannabis seeds, in fact, in Scandinavia.
12:46So there's a couple of places where we've found this.
12:48One of them is one of my favourite graves,
12:51is the Oseberg Ship Grave,
12:52one of these most spectacular, huge, big Viking ships.
12:56It was actually the grave of two women.
12:59They had a lot of grave goods,
13:00and one of these women had a little pouch,
13:04and inside the pouch,
13:05we found several little seeds of the cannabis plant.
13:09Of course, what we don't know is how these seeds were used.
13:13Presumably, they were planted.
13:14They could have used them for smoking.
13:17They could have used the herbs medicinally,
13:19or alternatively, they could have been used for hemp.
13:21We know that people make a rope out of hemp.
13:23At Arsamota asks,
13:26watching Vikings Valhalla and wondering
13:28how they were just having unprotected sex
13:31and not afraid of disease or pregnancy,
13:34were there special Viking condoms?
13:37I think the answer to that is no.
13:39Just sort of hypothetically, if they did have any,
13:41they would be made of organic materials
13:43that don't actually last in the archaeological record.
13:46So even if there were, we probably wouldn't know.
13:48Were they afraid of disease and pregnancy?
13:51Almost certainly, yes,
13:52but we don't have any evidence
13:54of sexually transmitted diseases.
13:56There are some that leave a trace in a skeleton,
13:59like syphilis, for example,
14:00can actually be so severe
14:02that it makes huge alterations into the bones.
14:05In terms of pregnancy,
14:06we don't know that they had any ways of dealing with that,
14:09but slightly less pleasant knowledge that we do have
14:13is the possibility that they carried out
14:15what we call infanticide.
14:16We do have one written record,
14:18which is quite interesting on this,
14:19from an Islamic traveler, a man called Al-Tatoushi,
14:23who came from Spain.
14:25He visited a town called Hedeby,
14:27which is now right on the border
14:28between Denmark and Germany.
14:30And he said that their unwanted babies,
14:34for economic reasons, were thrown in the sea.
14:37Is that true or not?
14:39We don't quite know,
14:40but probably the answer to the question
14:42is that yes, they were afraid.
14:44No, probably didn't have condoms,
14:46and they may have had to deal with the unwanted babies
14:48rather than the pregnancy itself.
14:50Next up, we have at Viking Historic, who asks,
14:55did Vikings use soap?
14:57We have some records that they did use soap,
15:00possibly something made out of lye and animal fat.
15:05More broadly, we know that they were really concerned
15:07with hygiene and especially things like their hair,
15:10very careful with washing their hair and combing their hair.
15:14Now, we know that both from written sources
15:16and from things like this,
15:17combs made of bone or antler.
15:20There's one record from an Arabic traveler
15:22who encounters some of the people called the Rus.
15:25And Ibn Fadlan said that these were some of the filthiest people
15:29he'd ever come across.
15:31They did wash every day, but they did it in a way
15:33he really didn't approve of.
15:35This group of men were given a bowl of water.
15:38The bowl was passed to the first person
15:40and then even spit into the same bowl.
15:42But at the end of it, he wouldn't throw the water out.
15:45He would actually pass it to the next person
15:46who'd do the same thing,
15:48just following all the way down the line.
15:49But if we go to Anglo-Saxon England,
15:52we've got quite a different perspective.
15:54We have a quote from somebody called John of Wallingford,
15:58who complained actually about all those Scandinavians,
16:01all those Vikings that settled in England.
16:03They caused so much trouble,
16:05not only because they would comb their hair every single day,
16:08they would also change their garments often
16:11and they'll have a bath every Saturday.
16:14In that way, they actually attracted all the local women
16:17who were so much more impressed
16:20by these incoming, clean Vikings
16:23than the local men they were used to.
16:25From at sarcasmcat24,
16:28what did the Vikings look like?
16:30We generally speaking think of these people as quite tall
16:34and normally, as in Scandinavia today,
16:37a lot of people who are blonde and have blue eyes.
16:40We have, however, recently discovered
16:43through ancient DNA studies
16:44that quite a few of them actually had much darker hair.
16:48So lots of people with brown hair,
16:49even some people with brown eyes.
16:51We have one eyewitness description
16:54from a slightly unlikely place, which is the East.
16:57This is from Ibn Fadlan,
16:59who describes these people called the Rus,
17:02who he meets near the Volga.
17:04And he says,
17:05I have never seen men more physically perfect than they,
17:08being tall as date palms, blonde and ruddy.
17:11We don't actually have any pictures.
17:13We don't have any paintings.
17:14And apart from some of these other sources,
17:16we don't really have the descriptions either.
17:19It seems a bit like similar to Northern Europeans today,
17:22but not quite as stereotypical as we might imagine.
17:27At blackredguard1,
17:29what do modern Norwegians and Danes think of the Viking era?
17:33Are they proud of that heritage?
17:35Was it seen as a cruel and barbaric time?
17:38I'm from Norway.
17:39I grew up in Norway.
17:40Then moved to England and started studying the Vikings.
17:43I have to say in Scandinavia,
17:44we are very proud of the Vikings.
17:46Not necessarily the actual violent parts.
17:49There's some quite horrific things took place,
17:51including quite extensive enslavement of people.
17:54But we have the arts and the objects, the artifacts,
17:58all those trading networks.
18:00All of that is something that is seen with quite good pride,
18:04actually, in all those countries.
18:05I've seen in England, for example,
18:07you see it very much from the,
18:09I suppose, the enemy's perspective.
18:11A lot of the written records really very much
18:13talk about how the Vikings were defeated.
18:15So you have people like Alfred the Great,
18:18who's hailed at this great hero who defeated them.
18:20In fact, I recently had to take
18:22the Life in the UK Citizenship Test,
18:24where one of the questions that comes up on the syllabus
18:27is who defeated the Vikings?
18:30And the answer to that one is Alfred the Great,
18:33even though it's not actually true
18:35because not very long after we have a Viking king,
18:38Knut, who actually successfully takes over all of England
18:42and rules it for nearly 18 years.
18:44So I can't really say that Alfred defeated them.
18:47Now we've got a question from AtDibbleGaming.
18:50What's with all the Vikings all over social media?
18:52Is it a trend or did a bunch of people take a 23andMe
18:56and they're super proud of their 0.13%?
19:00The one key point here is no test or DNA
19:03can tell you that you were a Viking
19:05because that wasn't really a clear identity.
19:08People can call themselves Viking.
19:09There are quite a lot of people
19:11moving in and out of Scandinavia.
19:13They interacted with lots of other different cultures,
19:16for example.
19:16So genetics, different from identities.
19:19That's the first point.
19:20The other is that when you go that far back,
19:23the information you get from these tests,
19:25it's a little bit meaningless
19:27because there are so many generations.
19:29You have two parents, four grandparents,
19:31and then it increases exponentially.
19:33So when you go back in time more than a thousand years,
19:36you get a vast number of ancestors.
19:39But the population at that time was really quite small.
19:41So geneticists have worked out
19:44that you have these things called isopoints,
19:46so genetic points where actually all the people
19:51who had descendants and passed on their DNA
19:54are essentially related to all the people alive today.
19:58And that point in Northern Europe is in the 10th century.
20:01So essentially, if anybody in the Viking Age
20:04had children passed on their DNA
20:06and you've got ancestry in Northern Europe,
20:08then you're going to be related to those Scandinavians.
20:11That makes it a little bit less meaningful.
20:13And the other point is that
20:14you're not actually comparing your sample
20:16to those ancient populations directly.
20:19You're comparing it to other people,
20:21quite recent populations,
20:22who live in those countries today.
20:25It's telling you quite a lot about,
20:27say, the last 300 years or so,
20:29but not really about the Viking Age itself.
20:33This has been Viking Support.