Vikings, Ragnar, Berserkers, Valhalla & the Warriors of the Viking Age | Lex Fridman Podcast #495

0:00 The Viking longships could average 70 to 120 miles a day.

0:04 They could hit a place, raid it, drag off whoever they wanted,

0:08 and get away before you could get your army there.

0:11 That's just absolutely terrifying.

0:14 What do you think it felt like for Alcuin

0:16 and the monks to see the Viking ships on the horizon?

0:21 Honestly, I think it's the end of the world,

0:23 and I don't think they were wrong to think that.

0:25 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the night before Lindisfarne,

0:29 the monks saw sheets of lightning in the sky in the shape of dragons,

0:33 and this obviously meant to foreshadow the dragon ships coming up.

0:37 But if you were brave,

0:39 then you got taken to the House of the Dead, which was Valhalla.

0:43 Every day you would fight,

0:44 and whatever wounds you got would be magically healed that night,

0:47 and then the next morning, you'd get up and do it again,

0:50 so you're essentially practicing for Ragnarok, the final battle.

0:53 You know, there's this poem by Tennyson, Ulysses, my favorite poem.

0:58 I think it captures the Viking spirit.

1:00 The last line of it is to strive, "To seek, to find,

1:04 and not to yield." I think that's very much like the Viking,

1:07 you know, my purpose holds,

1:08 to sail beyond the baths of all the Western stars until I die.

1:12 We may die, but I'm gonna do this, I'm not gonna yield.

1:18 The following is a conversation with Lars Brownworth,

1:21 a historian and author of many excellent history books,

1:24 including The Sea Wolves:

1:26 A History of the Vikings and The Normans: From Raiders to Kings.

1:32 He's also the host of two history podcast series.

1:35 The first called 12 Byzantine Rulers:

1:39 The History of the Byzantine Empire is one of the first, if not the first ever,

1:45 history podcasts launched over 20 years ago in June, 2005.

1:50 His second series, Norman Centuries,

1:53 explores the remarkable rise of the Normans from Viking raiders

1:58 to the rulers of kingdoms stretching from England to Sicily.

2:03 In this conversation, we focus primarily on the Vikings,

2:07 the seafaring Norse warriors and explorers who, over a period of just 300 years,

2:14 reshaped the medieval world and the trajectory

2:17 of Western civilization as we know it.

2:20 This is a Lex Fridman podcast.

2:22 To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description

2:25 where you can also find links to contact me,

2:29 ask questions, give feedback, and so on.

2:32 And now, dear friends, here's Lars Brownworth.

2:37 Your writing and podcasts take us from the Vikings to the Normans to Crusades,

2:44 to the collapse of the East Roman Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire.

2:50 There's a thread, I think, that connects the Vikings through all of it,

2:54 so let's start at the beginning.

2:55 Let's start with the Vikings.

2:58 So the age of the Vikings was intense and violent,

3:03 as you write about, often dated from 793 AD to 1066 AD.

3:09 It lasted less than three centuries.

3:12 So the start is often dated to June 8th, 793.

3:18 What happened on June 8th, 793?

3:24 In June of 793, a group of Vikings,

3:27 probably originating from Norway, arrived at the Holy Island of Lindisfarne,

3:32 which was a monastic community, and they essentially slaughtered everyone,

3:36 burned a couple of buildings and grabbed everything that had any value and left.

3:41 And that was the first Viking raid that came in force.

3:45 And I do think Lindisfarne is a good beginning date because the terror that it

3:50 brought really signified what was to come for the next two to three centuries.

3:55 So the word of it has spread.

3:57 Like there's a bunch of accounts, like the monk Alcuin wrote about this event

4:02 in a letter to King Ethelred of Northumbria,

4:06 quote, "It is nearly 350 years that we

4:10 and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land,

4:14 and never before has such terror appeared in Britain

4:18 as we have now suffered from a pagan race,

4:21 nor was it thought that such an inroad

4:24 from the sea could be made." What made this race so

4:29 psychologically devastating to this monk and to the many other

4:32 monks on the island and then to all of Britain?

4:37 That's a great quote.

4:38 Um, Alcuin was not just a regular scholar,

4:41 he was Charlemagne's favorite scholar and he's largely responsible,

4:45 as much as one person can be, for the Carolingian Renaissance that had done

4:49 so much to elevate the early medieval world.

4:52 In fact, the spaces we have, the punctuation we have,

4:56 spaces between words are likely a result of Alcuin's work.

5:00 He was an extremely literate man,

5:02 and you can hear the terror creeping into that.

5:05 Um, and part of that has to do with monastic communities,

5:10 the Church and the- what they thought a monastic community was.

5:15 So the Church was viewed as a sacred place.

5:18 Everyone in Europe, everyone in quotes, is nominally Christian,

5:22 and the Church is an area of safety.

5:24 It's a literal ark from the troubles of the world that you can flee to.

5:28 I believe there are even rules in England,

5:31 for example, that if you had killed someone,

5:33 you could flee to a church and the civil authorities

5:36 were not allowed to enter for up to 40 days.

5:39 So you could have sanctuary there.

5:41 And to violate this would've been

5:43 the worst possible offense you could have given,

5:45 which is why, you know, Thomas Becket's murder is so, so horrible in England.

5:51 And the monks had dedicated themselves to a life of studying the Bible,

5:55 to copying scriptures to prayer,

5:58 to removing themselves literally from the temptations of the world.

6:02 And so they would seek monasteries that were remote,

6:05 and the most remote locations you could find were islands in the North Atlantic,

6:10 because it's just so difficult to get there....

6:12 So the ocean was considered a place of safety.

6:15 Not sailing on the ocean, but these islands were literal havens

6:20 of peace and security and closeness to God.

6:25 And so the fact that the Vikings hit this place

6:27 of all places you could hit was the worst,

6:29 the most terrifying kind of offense against medieval sensibilities.

6:33 So there's a kind of line that you understand you don't cross.

6:36 Like, everybody agrees.

6:38 That's right.

6:38 It's the kind of thing that there's a social contract that most societies,

6:41 most civilizations sign.

6:42 There's a line that we don't cross.

6:45 Let the scholars do their scholarly work.

6:47 That's one line.

6:48 The other line is more kind of from a military perspective,

6:53 from a, Mobility perspective,

6:55 you just assume the sea is not a place from which a threat could come-- Yeah,

7:00 that's exactly right-...

7:01 especially the north.

7:02 So your conception of the world is shattered by, one,

7:07 the brutality that can come, two, that the sea can bring a threat,

7:12 and three, that you don't give a damn about

7:15 any of the lines that we as a society, as a Christian society, have established.

7:20 That's exactly right.

7:21 I mean, even Alcuin, I think he writes a little later

7:23 on that the dead were left as dung in the streets.

7:26 So he's describing dead monks as literal dung in the streets.

7:29 And, you know, who would do this to men of God?

7:33 Inhuman monsters.

7:35 So who were they, the Vikings, coming from the north?

7:38 How did they think of the violence that they were doing?

7:43 Now, that's a very good question because...

7:44 and it brings up a central problem, of looking at the Vikings,

7:48 which is the story is almost always told from somebody

7:51 else's perspective largely from the pens of those they're attacking.

7:55 So they're not gonna come across well.

7:58 Um, they're often portrayed as demonic and inhuman.

8:01 The Vikings themselves though, as much as we can piece together from archeology,

8:06 from the stories they wrote later but that was another problem there,

8:11 the written alphabet, the runes.

8:12 It was mostly used for spells,

8:14 naming your sword, things like that, cursing someone,

8:16 but it wasn't really useful for writing long poetry or literature.

8:21 So the only Norse literature we have comes at the end

8:24 of the age when they had adopted the Latin alphabet.

8:29 So it's...

8:29 you can almost never see the Vikings in their own words as they saw themselves.

8:34 But we can piece certain things together.

8:37 Most importantly, Viking was not their day job.

8:42 They were were mostly merchants and farmers,

8:45 mostly farmers who lived in little bays called Viks in Old Norse,

8:50 which is probably where we get the word Viking from.

8:54 Um, one other note about how hard it is to- to tease apart what's happening

9:01 here is the- the English and the Frankish

9:04 and the Irish writers all call them Danes, no matter where they came from.

9:08 They didn't stop to ask, "Now, excuse me, are you from Norway,

9:11 or are you from..." So they're all called Danes or Pagans, heathen, or Northmen.

9:17 Um, so this is not very helpful in figuring out where they came from.

9:22 Um, the language was interchangeable.

9:23 You know, Old Norse was spoken in all three of those Scandinavian countries.

9:27 But living in the north, so far up near the Arctic Circle, is...

9:33 that's at the very limit of where technology

9:35 of the time could allow humans to survive.

9:37 And that kinda, that kinda harsh climate bred, I think, very hard people.

9:41 Mercy was not a quality they seemed to favor, value.

9:47 There's a very famous story of a Swedish Viking putting

9:51 a sword in the crib of his newborn son, and saying,

9:54 "May you have nothing in this life but what you can gain with this." I mean,

9:59 I can't imagine doing that.

10:01 You know, to any of my children, you know, putting a gun in the crib, or-...

10:06 you know, I'd be carted away.

10:07 But the...

10:08 I think that kind of underscores the kind of violent life that was...

10:12 you could expect as a Viking.

10:14 I mean, strength was valued more than anything else.

10:17 So the understanding of the world is harsh,

10:20 and that strength is the way you must face that world.

10:24 So when you have those people,

10:26 and especially the ones that self-select to get on a boat,

10:29 to face the ocean with all the uncertainty,

10:32 that results in the kind of brutality that we got to see.

10:35 I think so.

10:36 I mean, the way they would build their ships,

10:38 they were clinker built, so they were overlaid, like planks overlaying.

10:40 So they were undecked as well.

10:43 And so they'd have tents.

10:44 So can you imagine crossing the Atlantic, the northern Atlantic, you know,

10:48 with these huge waves splashing over with an inch

10:52 of oak between you and the ocean?

10:55 I mean, the amount of bravery that must have taken to undergo is astounding.

10:59 Plus they didn't have a compass.

11:01 They navigated by, "Where's the sun?

11:04 Where are the stars?

11:05 What...

11:06 are there birds in the sky?

11:07 Do I see a different color of water?

11:09 Do I see leaves floating?" I mean, it's terrible.

11:12 If you're traveling 2,000 miles, that's not great.

11:15 So it's kind of an intrepidness to them that I think is

11:21 part of the reason why they're so fascinating to us in our sanitized,

11:24 more or less sanitized world.

11:26 That this incredible courage to do this, and some horror

11:31 at what they did on the other end when they arrived.

11:34 But, you know, we'll talk a little bit more about their religion,

11:36 but they- they do not view the Christian God in particularly flattering terms.

11:42 I mean, to them, he's a weak God who won't protect his adherence,

11:46 and they can just come in and plunder as they...

11:49 I mean, they'll...

11:50 One Viking famously says, "On land, I'm a Christian.

11:54 When I'm on the sea, I worship Thor." It was very much

11:58 the kind of pragmatic take that the Vikings had.

12:01 Yeah.

12:01 There are gods, and they have many, but Odin and Thor are pretty hardcore gods.

12:07 So everything, just their whole philosophy on life is pretty- pretty hardcore.

12:12 Probably some of the toughest humans to have ever lived.

12:16 I think so.

12:17 Yeah.

12:17 I mean, their gods are horrifying.

12:18 They're polytheistic.

12:20 There was no universally accepted, Head god.

12:26 I think Marvel has also led people astray in this.

12:30 Well, we'll talk more about, religion, but since you mentioned the boats,

12:34 what- what do we understand about the technology that they were using?

12:37 Can you just speak a little bit more to this one inch of oak idea?

12:42 So, these were these long ships that, Were also able to travel on rivers.

12:51 So they're not...

12:52 Like, what- what is structurally, do we know about the boats that allowed them

12:56 to be so flexible in terms of where they can travel?

13:01 Yeah.

13:01 I mean, and this was the Vikings' great secret,

13:03 and I think it's underappreciated.

13:04 They built different types of ships, obviously for different purposes,

13:07 but the thing that blows my mind is

13:10 that they built these ships that could cross an ocean,

13:13 cross the Atlantic Ocean, and at the same time,

13:16 when they had a draft of less than two feet,

13:20 so they could sail up rivers that were two feet deep.

13:23 And if they came to an, you know, a block or something,

13:27 20 men could pick up the ship and port it around.

13:31 They were incredibly portable and their speed,

13:34 the speed was the most frightening thing about the Vikings.

13:38 So the...

13:38 These are the same kind of ship that they sailed the ocean on.

13:42 Yeah.

13:42 I mean, it's insane.

13:44 So they're pretty sufficiently robust to handle the ocean and sufficiently

13:51 mobile to travel on rivers and do so really fast, so-...

13:57 you mentioned speed.

13:57 That seems to be, from a military perspective,

14:00 the great advantage of the Vikings-...

14:03 because they can move much faster than the land armies can.

14:08 So, and not just the element of surprise, which they often had,

14:11 but the element of speed was the thing that gave

14:14 them such an extreme advantage against the British armies.

14:17 That was the big one.

14:18 So, an English army,

14:20 if it had access to a good Roman road that was well maintained,

14:23 which frankly there weren't tons of them,

14:25 but they could average something like 10 to 15 miles per day-...

14:29 on a good day, if they didn't have a large baggage train to slow them down.

14:32 If you had a cavalry unit that didn't have to travel with the army,

14:35 they could average about 20 miles a day.

14:38 The Viking long ships could average 70 to 120 miles a day.

14:42 So, they're just moving in super fast motion.

14:45 They could hit a place, raid it, drag off whoever they wanted,

14:49 and get away before you could get your army there.

14:53 That's just absolutely terrifying.

14:56 What do you think it felt like for Alcuin

14:59 and the monks to see the Viking ships on the horizon?

15:03 Do you ever think about trying to put

15:05 yourself in the mind of those folks and imagining...

15:10 In that time, you don't have a full map of the world, right?

15:13 And the oceans are not mapped, and you have a hazy conception of the world.

15:19 And so out of the darkness from the ocean where you thought nothing can come,

15:24 comes this terrifying, this brutal force.

15:28 What do you think that felt like?

15:31 Honestly, I think it's the end of the world, and I don't think that's...

15:35 I don't think they were wrong to think that.

15:37 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says the night before Lindisfarne,

15:41 the monks saw sheets of lightning in the sky in the shape of dragons.

15:45 And this obviously meant to, you know, foreshadow the dragon ships coming up.

15:51 I can't imagine the horror.

15:53 It would shake my faith, I'm sure,

15:56 to have these- these giant men jumping out of their ships with swords raised.

16:01 And you're...

16:02 What do you have?

16:03 Your cross?

16:04 Were the Vikings aware of the fear that they had caused?

16:08 So, did they use fear as a kind of weapon,

16:11 or was this just a side consequence of their actions,

16:16 or did they understand and use it?

16:19 Like the Mongols, Genghis Khan,

16:20 the Mongols used the fear and the terror on purpose-...

16:25 to increase the chance that they wouldn't have to avoid fights, basically.

16:30 Yeah, yeah.

16:30 The Vikings absolutely used terror.

16:32 It was a main weapon in their arsenal.

16:35 They would attack specifically on high holy days like Easter, Christmas,

16:41 because they knew there'd be higher value

16:43 targets there with richer clothing, richer offerings.

16:45 There'd be a lot of money available.

16:47 So they were rather sophisticated,

16:49 which I think is something also that they don't get much credit for.

16:53 It's like they were just dumb brutes attacking and just destroying.

16:56 But they were...

16:57 It was very sophisticated.

16:58 They would show up.

16:59 That's what I mean when I say Viking wasn't their day jobs.

17:02 They would be traders in say an English port, kind of looking around.

17:07 They'd get everyone's schedule,

17:08 then they would sail away and come back as Vikings,

17:12 and they knew exactly where to go.

17:13 They knew where all the money was held.

17:15 They knew where all the, you know, the churches were, when to attack.

17:18 They knew the entire Christian calendar.

17:21 They knew when someone's baptism was, when someone's confirmation.

17:23 I mean, they were aware of all of this.

17:27 And they would...

17:28 They would definitely attack to increase terror.

17:32 One of the signs of the intelligence of the Vikings

17:37 is that the Viking Age is so short.

17:40 So what happens is these explorers and these Rough men who do the raids,

17:48 they very quickly are good at conquering and then start state building,

17:53 or conquering and then establishing trade routes and stop being the quote,

17:58 unquote, "Vikings." So basically, they just...

18:01 They conquer, and then they start

18:03 doing the usual instit- build the institutions,

18:06 start a state, and now they're normal kind of nation,

18:11 civilization kind of thing.

18:12 So this kind of force that is the conquering, raid, violent,

18:18 intense explorers, it's like a short-lasting thing,

18:22 a couple of generations at most.

18:26 Yeah, that's right.

18:27 I mean, the Vikings were ultimately a pragmatic people who, if it worked,

18:31 they would keep it, which is frustrating

18:34 because they disappear so quickly because of that.

18:38 With very little trace in the records-- With very little trace.

18:41 That's right.

18:41 with very little writing.

18:42 That's right.

18:44 No time for writing it down.

18:46 No.

18:46 Yes.

18:46 Not doing that.

18:49 Yeah.

18:49 Why were monasteries such good targets for these early raids?

18:56 This is where I imagine myself as a Viking and one of my ancestors perhaps.

19:01 And sailing in...

19:02 I mean, they must have thought they had won the lottery.

19:06 You got this rich, these rich buildings, rich gold everywhere.

19:11 Decorated books, jewels, all guarded by old men who don't know how to fight.

19:16 You just take it.

19:17 I mean, we should make clear that the monasteries had...

19:20 They were used as almost like storage for gold.

19:24 Yeah.

19:24 And this goes all the way back to, you know,

19:27 the Roman Empire where, you know, think of, for example, the Emperor Augustus.

19:29 When he was writing his will, he put it in the Temple of the Vestal

19:33 Virgins as well as Mark Antony and Cleopatra.

19:36 They'd all done that because there's this additional protection of religion-...

19:42 and this taboo against violating that.

19:44 And the same thing happened when Europe was Christianized.

19:47 Monasteries were...

19:48 I mean, rich people, their faith had to be an active faith.

19:54 They couldn't just say their prayers and go to church on Sunday.

19:57 They would have to do something to publicly show that they were,

20:01 you know, worthy of forgiveness or, or whatever.

20:03 And so they would donate huge sums to the church.

20:07 I think, you know, by the time of the French Revolution,

20:09 which is obviously way in the future,

20:11 the Church is the largest single landowner in France.

20:14 I mean, the monasteries where...

20:16 These, these monasteries filled with monks who had taken vows

20:19 of poverty were some of the richest places in Europe.

20:23 It's kind of a strange dichotomy here.

20:25 And then we should also say that the Vikings, many of them pragmatic people,

20:29 so a lot of them would eventually then convert to Christianity,

20:32 so you get-- That's right-...

20:34 you integrate yourself into the system.

20:36 That's right.

20:36 In some sense, religion creates this backbone of a society that stabilizes it,

20:41 and then you create a bunch of rules about behavior,

20:43 how you're supposed to behave.

20:45 One of the rules is you don't

20:47 mess with the church buildings and-- That's right-...

20:50 the religious-...

20:51 institutions and therefore they become great storage places for gold.

20:54 That's right.

20:55 And then the Vikings here just test the system.

20:59 Uh, I mean, it's the fortune of geography

21:02 for them and the fortune of their way of life,

21:07 To be able to raid, to become extremely rich and therefore this...

21:10 It both spreads the terror across England,

21:14 and the message across Scandinavia that there's a lot of riches to be had.

21:19 And so the raids, that's why there's an explosion of raids.

21:23 That's right.

21:23 And I think it's not a coincidence that it happens when it does.

21:27 I mean, you have both...

21:28 So there's two main theories about why the Viking Age starts.

21:31 The first, Will Durant puts it, I think, the best.

21:33 He says, "The fertility of the Viking women outstripped

21:36 the fertility of the Viking land." It's basically overpopulation.

21:41 Um, and then they're searching for food.

21:43 And then the second is there's this technological breakthrough with the keel

21:48 and maybe pressure put on Charlemagne's

21:51 consolidation and a little worries like that.

21:54 I don't see why both can't be true but I do, I do also think Europe...

22:01 Like, Charlemagne puts together this vast empire that, you know,

22:06 fairly approximates the Western Roman Empire.

22:08 If you squint-...

22:10 it looks like the Western Roman Empire.

22:11 He's calling himself, The new Roman emperor.

22:15 This will eventually mutate into the Holy Roman Empire.

22:19 But it's very much this idea that it's back.

22:22 The Roman Empire is back.

22:24 He's crowned on Christmas Day in the year 800, and the empire is back.

22:28 Unfortunately, it was sprawling.

22:30 It hadn't been thought through.

22:33 There was...

22:35 The communication was terrible.

22:37 You just couldn't do it.

22:38 And so it was wealthy and weak, and that kind of attracts predators.

22:45 By the time the Vikings crash into it,

22:47 you also have the added bonus for them of really feckless rulers.

22:52 And we should say, going to Perplexity here,

22:54 that Charlemagne, also known as Charles the Great,

22:57 is the Frankish king who became emperor in 800 and ruled much

23:01 of the Western and Central Europe in the late eighth and early ninth centuries.

23:07 And, There's a theory that the Viking Age

23:11 was also a reaction to the South expanding north, as you're talking about.

23:16 You tell the story of Charlemagne weeping because

23:18 he foresaw the evil his descendants would suffer.

23:22 Did the Franks accidentally wake the sleeping giant by crushing

23:26 the Saxons and removing the buffer zone between them and the Vikings?

23:31 I'm sure that had something to do with it.

23:33 But yeah, as power was consolidated throughout specifically Central Europe

23:38 it did put a little pressure on the areas of Denmark.

23:43 And those are the areas that first kind of erupt down toward, um...

23:50 Norway and Denmark contribute most of the early Vikings that hit the Franks.

23:55 And the Frankish Empire is the most wealthy state in Europe.

24:00 It's poured money into religious houses for the reasons you outlined.

24:05 And all sitting there, easy pickings for people who've just developed the keel.

24:10 And so the word of the raids sent terror through,

24:14 through England and through Europe.

24:18 How much of the raids were reconnaissance, and how much was it just raids,

24:24 and how much was it preparing for greater scale?

24:29 That's a good...

24:30 That's a really good question.

24:31 I think a lot of the early raids are probing raids, to see what's there.

24:37 Um, definitely when Ragnar Lothbrok, for example, sacks Paris in 845,

24:45 that definitely results in waves of Viking attacks throughout the 860s,

24:51 trying to copy that.

24:53 And he actually is the template which everyone wants to follow.

24:57 And so that provokes large-scale invasions.

24:59 And they hit England.

25:01 They kind of switch off.

25:03 When France is pretty much exhausted, they switch over to England,

25:06 and then when England is pretty much conquered, they switch back to France.

25:11 So I think a lot of these are just probing raids at first,

25:13 but they're proof of concept and then they come in force.

25:16 For example, there was one king in England,

25:19 his name was Ethelred the Unready, which is a pretty funny...

25:23 Pun on his name.

25:25 But he paid, in one year,

25:29 7.5 million silver pennies to the Vikings to get them to go away,

25:32 which is a bit like someone's mugging you,

25:34 so you pay them more money so they'll go away.

25:36 It's-- That's not gonna work, is it?

25:37 It's not gonna work, but it will bring more muggers.

25:40 Um, so he paid the equivalent of 50 adult elephants,

25:46 48,000 pounds of silver, to get the muggers to go away.

25:51 And it's unsurprising that throughout the course of his reign,

25:54 he paid something like 20 tons of gold and silver,

25:58 which he had to tax his people for.

26:02 Um, yeah, the Vikings are not the kind of people that would make go away, right?

26:07 Nope.

26:07 That's not gonna happen.

26:08 Yeah, they would just come back in force.

26:10 Yeah, they trust silver to do the work of swords.

26:14 Uh, you mentioned Ragnar Lothbrok.

26:17 Who was Ragnar Lothbrok?

26:19 Did he actually exist?

26:21 Some people believe he's a composite

26:23 from several real ninth century Viking leaders, versus an actual singular human.

26:31 Yeah, I'm a romantic.

26:32 I would like to believe he existed.

26:34 Um, I think probably he's a compilation of a lot of different...

26:39 There probably is a seed of truth there.

26:43 There probably was someone named Ragnar.

26:46 The last name's a little suspicious.

26:48 Lothbrok means hairy breeches.

26:50 He supposedly had magic pants that would prevent

26:52 him from being poisoned by dragons or snakes.

26:55 That's maybe a clue.

26:57 We're dealing with myth here.

26:59 But he is really the template for Vikings.

27:01 You want to figure out, like, what the Vikings wanted,

27:04 who's their success story, it's Ragnar Lothbrok.

27:08 He's born Norway, Denmark, countries argue over that.

27:13 Maybe Sweden.

27:14 Some sagas say he's in Uppsala.

27:17 Anyway, he is, you know, penniless,

27:19 and when he is in his late teens or early 20s,

27:24 he decides to invade, sail up the Seine.

27:28 Uh, there is a well-known city on the Seine and he raids it.

27:33 Supposedly, he takes the hinge of one of the gates

27:36 from Paris to prove that he's been there.

27:40 The- the Frankish king, I love the Frankish kings because they- their citizens

27:46 give them names based on how much they hate them.

27:49 So you have- you have Charles the Great, right?

27:52 Charles the Great, Charlemagne.

27:54 He's followed by Louis the Pious.

27:55 That's probably the best one.

27:57 And Louis the Pious is followed by Charles the Fat-...

28:01 who's followed by Charles the Bald-...

28:04 who's followed by Charles the Simple or Stupid.

28:07 Nice.

28:07 So you can trust the names-- You can trust—- to give

28:10 you the TLDR of how good of a ruler they were.

28:12 Yeah.

28:13 Yeah, exactly.

28:14 Exactly.

28:14 So Charles the Great, widely acknowledged as sort of one

28:18 of the great leaders of the Frankish Empire-...

28:21 aka Charlemagne.

28:22 Uh, so what else do we know about him?

28:25 So, there's going to Perplexity, "Ragnar's portrayed as a Scandinavian warlord,

28:31 often called a Danish or Swedish king," like you mentioned.

28:36 Uh, "Active in the ninth century during the height of the Viking

28:39 raids." And then descriptions of the raids and the exploits.

28:45 "Medieval traditions link Ragnar to famous raids on the Frankish realms,

28:49 especially the attack on Paris in 845,

28:53 where he reputedly sails up the Seine and extorts a huge ransom

29:00 from King Charles the Bald." He's also

29:04 associated with repeated attacks on Anglo-Saxon England,

29:07 embodying the archetypal Viking chieftain, charismatic, brutal,

29:11 and focused on wealth, fame, and honor in battle.

29:18 So that, those are the ideals of the Vikings.

29:21 Charisma, brutality-...

29:23 and focusing on wealth, fame, and honor, especially honor in battle.

29:27 Then also, what does he do with it, right?

29:30 What does he do with it?

29:31 So, he gets about 7,000 pounds of silver from Charles the Bald,

29:34 which destroys, essentially destroys Charles the Bald's kingship.

29:37 But he goes back home to Denmark, and the Danish king doesn't want him around,

29:43 because he's too powerful, he's too rich.

29:46 He's a ring giver.

29:48 You know, think Beowulf here, right?

29:50 He's got this large personal army which wants

29:53 to join him for ad- he can do, you know, they'll follow him, and he is a threat,

29:58 and so he kind of is encouraged to go elsewhere.

30:00 He ends up raiding England for something like 15 years,

30:04 and then there's a, probably the most

30:06 famous bit of the story is he's shipwrecked,

30:08 and King Aella of Northumberland captures him and decides

30:12 to kill him by throwing him into a pit with vipers.

30:17 They throw him in this and the snakes are biting him,

30:19 but he's got his hairy breeches on, so it's not working.

30:23 So, he's singing a hymn to Odin and he gets pulled

30:27 out and he's asked why he's not dying and he explains,

30:30 rather foolishly, that he has these hairy breeches.

30:32 So, they take the pants off and throw him back,

30:35 and his last words are, um, "When the boar bleats, the piglets come."...

30:41 by which he means, "My s- I have sons," he had 12 of them,

30:45 "and they will avenge me." And they do,

30:48 they lead the the Great Heathen Army to invade and eventually conquer England.

30:54 Aella, fun fact, not so fun for him,

30:57 is the, supposedly was captured by the son of Ragnar,

31:01 his name is Ivar the Boneless, which is somewhat terrifying of a name.

31:04 And he is, he's the first person that a blood eagle was performed on.

31:09 What's the blood eagle?

31:11 It's when they remove the lungs, they, while you're still alive,

31:13 they cut you open and remove the lungs and put the lungs on your back.

31:18 And then when you try to breathe,

31:20 they flutter like wings, so it's called, like an eagle.

31:22 It's called the blood eagle.

31:24 That is horrible.

31:25 It's disgusting, yes.

31:26 And this is what Aella, you know, deserves, according to, you know,

31:30 Bjorn Ironside and Ivar the Boneless, the sons of Ragnar.

31:34 Like, this is what they get.

31:35 Offense.

31:36 This is the piglets coming-...

31:38 to their own boar, you know?

31:41 One last thing about Ragnar, is his wife is also an important part.

31:46 He had something like 12 sons,

31:49 the accounts differ, and probably three marriages.

31:52 But his most famous wife was named Aslaug, and she fell in love with him.

31:58 He was on a ship, he was passing through, so-...

32:01 kind of a glamorous sea king, right?

32:03 With his, he's living the dream.

32:05 And she sees him and she wants to be married to him, and he says no.

32:10 He says, 'cause he wants a clever wife, and so he says,

32:13 "If you can accomplish these three things, you can marry me.

32:16 So tomorrow, I'll be here tonight, and then tomorrow,

32:19 I want you to come to my ship.

32:22 I want you to have no clothes on-...

32:27 but not be naked.

32:28 I want you to have not eaten a meal, but not have fasted.

32:33 And I want you to come without a companion,

32:36 but not alone." And so she shows up with a dog.

32:41 She doesn't have a companion, but she's not alone.

32:43 She's taken a bite out of an onion, so she's eaten.

32:46 She hasn't fasted, but she hasn't had a meal.

32:49 And then she has very long hair, and so she's using the hair to cover herself.

32:53 So she has no clothes-- Oh, she shows up naked, but she's--...

32:57 but clothed.

32:57 Right.

32:58 Wow.

32:58 Yeah, so in this, so this is kind of the cleverness

33:01 that would be expected of a, of a Viking woman.

33:03 So they're well matched, they're like the ideal couple.

33:06 And then they have 12 kids, 12 sons.

33:08 Not just 12 kids, 12 sons.

33:10 And many of them end up...

33:11 Many of them end up almost as famous as their father.

33:14 Ivar the Boneless.

33:16 Uh, Bjorn Ironside, and many others.

33:19 These sons later appear as leaders of major Viking forces in England,

33:23 particularly the so-called Great Heathen Army-...

33:26 that invades in 865.

33:29 And they are historical.

33:30 They are, I mean, there's no,

33:31 these were the names of Vikings who attacked and conquered England.

33:36 They end up attacking Islamic Spain.

33:38 They go all over Europe.

33:41 Well, for them, it sounds like glory in battle is really important.

33:45 That's right, yeah.

33:46 And so it's not even- It's just part of the culture,

33:48 it's part-- That's right-...

33:49 the honor culture.

33:50 Men die, but names live forever.

33:54 Uh, as a small aside, since Ragnar is the star of the Vikings TV series,

34:01 I don't know if you've gotten a chance to watch any of it.

34:04 Is there any accuracy to it?

34:08 I think it's well done.

34:10 My one quibble, Ragnar's brother is Rollo in the show, right?

34:16 They weren't brothers.

34:17 In fact, by some accounts, they were born 80 years apart.

34:22 But as a storytelling device, I applaud that.

34:26 Yeah, they basically take all the main Vikings and put them all together.

34:30 Just so it's a-- I mean, I get it.

34:32 I get it, it's confusing.

34:33 Honestly, in writing a book about it,

34:34 the hardest part was coming up with an organizational scheme.

34:37 Like, what's the overarching thing that links them together?

34:41 Well, there's certainly an overarching thing,

34:43 but we don't have information about it.

34:45 This is, the problem is we get to see

34:49 just slivers of the information-- That's right, that's right-...

34:53 from the raids.

34:54 There might be just this rich history that we know nothing about.

34:57 Like where did this warrior culture come from?

35:00 Like, what was the evolution of these ideas of honor and battle?

35:06 I mean, maybe it's being overly romantic,

35:09 but you can imagine the ideals of battle from the Roman Empire,

35:15 from the Roman Republic and the early

35:18 imperial period coming up north to Scandinavia.

35:22 And we just know very little traces about that.

35:26 Yeah.

35:27 Even the name Scandinavia is from a Roman author.

35:30 I mean, they thought it was an island.

35:32 They thought Scandinavia was an island with one tribe,

35:34 the Scandia tribe, but you know, close enough.

35:40 And uh, who was the, what was

35:43 in this Great Heathen Army that invaded England in 865?

35:48 What can we say about that?

35:51 Well, there's this famous scene in the Viking siege of Paris in 845,

35:55 which is really the Europeans' introduction,

35:57 or Europe as a whole, to a Viking army,

36:00 not just a raid and then what it could do.

36:04 And the king, the emperor, Charles, said, "You know,

36:08 let's find out what they want and how much do I have to pay

36:11 to get them to leave?" And so his ambassador went to a Viking and said,

36:15 "Who is your king?" And the Viking looked at him,

36:19 he didn't understand, and he said, "We have no king.

36:21 We are all kings." So they're very like decentralized, tough.

36:26 They only valued leaders who could prove that they had, they had won.

36:32 You know, could give out the rings.

36:34 So flat organization, very meritocratic.

36:37 Yes.

36:37 If you're good at what you do, you demonstrate that skill in battle.

36:41 That means you get to have maybe a leadership position.

36:45 That's right.

36:45 And the moment you're no longer effective,

36:47 you don't get to have this leadership position.

36:49 We're all kings.

36:51 That's gangster.

36:52 Throughout history, the Mongols, Genghis Khan was famous for this meritocracy.

36:59 That's right.

36:59 Yeah.

37:00 That's one of the components of an extremely

37:02 effective military force is if meritocracy is prized.

37:05 Same is true for who gets to rule.

37:10 How do you determine the succession?

37:12 If you're just giving it to your oldest son, that's gonna be a problem.

37:16 Yeah.

37:17 Yeah, that...

37:17 I could not agree more.

37:18 There are some problems with, with meritocracy

37:22 in civil war because it tends to...

37:23 The only way you can find out, like Alexander the Great, right?

37:26 Who does your empire belong to?

37:28 To the strongest.

37:29 That kind of guarantees the civil war.

37:30 At least with giving it to your older son, you know who's gonna be...

37:35 There's an element of stability there although you may end up with a Caligula.

37:40 More likely than not, you're gonna end up with a Caligula,

37:43 I would say, human nature being what it is.

37:47 It's— It's...

37:48 Yeah, yeah, it always converges to the asshole,

37:50 and the asshole holds power, a crazy asshole.

37:54 Uh, so yeah, Great Heathen Army, 865.

37:59 So the Great Heathen Army, they were war bands that...

38:01 Each followed this guy and this guy.

38:03 "And I'm gonna sit you down in this room.

38:05 I'm gonna tell you my plan.

38:06 You're gonna listen or you're gonna push back.

38:08 I'm gonna push back,

38:09 and we'll just have this kind of creative discussion and come up with a plan we

38:12 all agree on."- So it used to be

38:15 relatively small Viking groups that were doing raids.

38:18 And then the Great Heathen Army is

38:20 this large coalition of Viking groups-- That's right-...

38:23 without a real leader that was able

38:27 to somehow stabilize enough to have something like governance.

38:31 Basically, there seems to be a very rapid evolution

38:34 of a Viking in every part of the world they touch.

38:41 You go explore, Raid, conquer, establish state-...

38:48 And trade routes, and always maintaining a grand ambition,

38:55 but no longer doing the violence,

38:58 and always being sufficiently programmatic and flexible

39:01 where you can accept a conversion to Christianity,

39:05 for example, if it's useful-- That's right-...

39:08 and then they accept the culture, accept the language.

39:10 So that's why they integrate and the thing that we think

39:13 of as Viking dis- kind of dissipates and disappears pretty quickly.

39:17 Yeah, and I think the best example of this is France, right?

39:20 So the Vikings, which is we'll talk about

39:22 this more probably with Rollo, but, you know, the Vikings settle in France,

39:27 in the North Man's Duchy, which is shortened to Normandy.

39:30 And they, within a generation...

39:33 I mean, Rollo, whose real name is Hrolf, he names his son William.

39:40 That's not a Viking name.

39:42 And within a generation, the language is gone.

39:47 The Viking names are gone.

39:48 The worship of Odin is, as far as we can tell, gone.

39:53 And the Normans are building churches

39:55 and marrying into the local aristocracy in there.

39:57 Their...

39:58 Essentially, their Viking-ness is gone except for one thing, their, like,

40:03 incredible vitality,

40:05 which the Normans essentially conquer kingdoms at both ends of Europe,

40:09 Sicily and England, and found two

40:11 of the foremost powerful states in medieval Europe.

40:15 Yeah, so the ambition is there.

40:17 Is there.

40:17 The vitality is there, but it's-- The methods have changed.

40:20 Yeah, and they change rapidly, which is fascinating.

40:23 So you have a book.

40:24 You have a podcast series on, The Normans, so let's talk about Rollo.

40:29 Who was Rollo?

40:31 The famous Viking war leader who became

40:34 the first ruler of Normandy, Northern France.

40:38 Well, first I should say, as someone of Norwegian descent,

40:41 I'm gonna fall down on the Norwegian side of the argument here because-...

40:46 Norway and Denmark almost came to blows over which was the birthplace of Rollo.

40:52 But the consensus seems to be Norway- Not just biased.

40:56 Um, so he was...

40:59 The only thing we...

40:59 The only glimpse we get of Rollo as a young man is he was very tall,

41:04 so he's called Hrolf the Walker,

41:06 Hrolf Ganger because he was so tall he couldn't ride the little Viking ponies.

41:10 So he had to walk everywhere.

41:13 But...

41:14 Kinda poor probably raised on stories of Ragnar

41:18 and the other Viking lords, and he goes.

41:22 He may have participated in some of the earlier,

41:24 like the 860 raids that the Vikings did on Paris or the Seine,

41:30 you know, and then he eventually ends up

41:35 plundering the, what will become the Norman coast.

41:39 And in the, in the year 911, he makes a treaty,

41:44 the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte with the Frankish King,

41:47 Charles the Simple, which is not stupid.

41:50 It's, it's more like straightforward.

41:52 There's no guile in how he talks.

41:54 Uh, and Charles makes a really interesting deal with Rollo,

41:59 which is, um, "Why don't you settle here,

42:03 integrate into the local aristocracy and defend the French

42:08 coast against the Vikings?" Which I don't know.

42:12 It's like putting a burglar in charge of your security

42:15 or some- I don't know, but it works.

42:17 It works.

42:18 And Rollo, by the time he makes that deal,

42:22 he's probably in his mid-fifties to mid-sixties.

42:27 It's unclear when he was born, but the point is he's lived the Viking life.

42:33 He's, he's got something like 20 or 30,

42:36 if you add up all the sagas they say that he...

42:38 they gave him this many coins or whatever.

42:40 He has probably 20 or 30 tons of silver

42:42 that he has acquired and then probably given out to whatever.

42:45 So-- So yeah, so he's done the full-- He's done the thing.

42:49 Yeah-...

42:50 and then the conquering and then-- And then the king says,

42:53 "Can you settle here?" "Can I give you

42:55 legitimacy?"- So he does the diplomacy of a treaty.

42:58 then he does the good statecraft and state

43:01 building and then becomes, I mean, European.

43:04 In one life, he goes through the full journey.

43:08 It's...

43:08 Yeah.

43:09 And then his son, William Longsword-...

43:12 succeeded him and, uh...

43:14 Gets assassinated, but he does enlarge Normandy.

43:17 So basically, every ruler after Rollo enlarges Normandy until

43:21 it- it essentially becomes more powerful than the king—...

43:26 By far.

43:27 There's a wonderful scene when Rollo, Signs the treaty.

43:32 He becomes a liege lord of the French king,

43:35 and there's this great scene 'cause Rollo has

43:38 to bend down and kiss the foot of the king.

43:40 So Rollo's probably, you know, he's a Norwegian Viking.

43:43 He's probably, I don't know, six foot.

43:47 Charles, this little Frank, he's probably five ten.

43:51 So he's like Rollo's towering over him,

43:54 and there's a large- both armies are watching.

43:56 There's a bunch of people who have come in from the countryside.

44:00 They've heard something's going on, and this important

44:02 part of this feudal ceremony,

44:03 you have to kiss your lord's foot to- to, you know, be in a subservient role.

44:08 And Rollo says, "I'm not gonna do that." So

44:10 he turns to one of his guards and says,

44:12 "You kiss the foot," and the guard's probably taller than he is.

44:15 So he bends down and he picks the king's foot

44:17 up to his mouth-- That's the way to do it-...

44:20 which Charles goes falling on the back.

44:22 I mean-...

44:22 I can't think of a better example of the relationship

44:25 between the Norman dukes and the French kings.

44:27 I mean, it's perfect.

44:28 It's perfect.

44:30 Oh God, I love the Vikings.

44:31 So as you've covered, and maybe you could speak to that a bit more,

44:35 for a long time to come, Normans have influence on Europe and beyond.

44:42 Yeah, it's hard to overstate Normandy's impact on Europe in the Middle Ages.

44:49 Of course, they will go on to conquer England as well.

44:52 But Rollo, when he signs the treaty, it's an ambiguous treaty.

44:59 He's given a title which is rather ambiguous.

45:04 He's not a duke, and it's not clear.

45:07 He's not an earl.

45:08 He's not a duke.

45:09 He's just subservient to the king.

45:10 Which means Normandy is not a duchy.

45:12 It's not a principality.

45:14 It's kind of this ambiguous, no one really knows what it is.

45:18 And so Rollo, being a good Viking, and his descendants being good Vikings,

45:23 despite becoming French, they just call themselves Duke.

45:27 And they essentially seize whatever power they want.

45:31 There's one Norman duke, I think he's the grandson of Rollo.

45:36 He's kidnapped by the French king when he's 14.

45:40 He escapes the captivity and kidnaps the king.

45:44 As a 14-year-old, I mean, it's just- these are- these guys are crazy.

45:50 How far geographically and in time does

45:53 the influence of the Normans and Normandy go?

45:58 So what should we understand about the impact of Normans-...

46:04 in history?

46:06 I'm a romantic, so I, when I read history,

46:09 I usually end up rooting for the losers.

46:11 Um, I want Harold Godwinson to beat No- William the Conqueror.

46:14 You know, I want Hector to beat Achilles.

46:17 Never works, no matter how many times I read it.

46:19 But I was always interested in the Normans

46:21 because of the Norman conquest of England.

46:23 And my I have a twin brother, and he asked me,

46:26 we were taking a walk, and he asked me, "How did Europe..." Uh, 'cause we,

46:30 I was reading about the Dark Ages at the time, the the early Middle Ages.

46:34 "And how did Europe, this kind of backwards place, become the dominant-""...

46:38 force in the world?" And I started thinking

46:43 about that, and my answer really is the Normans.

46:47 The Normans, that's the great change between Europe as a backwards,

46:52 inward-looking place, and Europe as a kind of confident, outward-looking place.

46:58 And that change happens under- under the Normans.

47:02 I mean, the Normans,

47:03 it's not a coincidence that they- they lead the charge in the First Crusade.

47:09 They create the state of England.

47:11 If you look at England before the Vikings arrive,

47:13 there are seven, it's the Heptarchy,

47:15 there are seven kingdoms in England, and the Vikings destroyed all but one.

47:20 Only Wessex is preserved, and they've conquered about half of Wessex.

47:24 And there's a young king.

47:25 What's he gonna do?

47:27 But that king is Alfred the Great, and he conquers the rest.

47:30 And then his grandson, Athelstan,

47:31 is the first man called King of England, king of all Angles.

47:37 And then they do the same thing almost wherever they go.

47:41 They help create modern France by ripping apart,

47:44 uh, Charlemagne's empire, which was unwieldy.

47:47 It looked good on paper, but it was unwieldy.

47:49 It was replaced by this leaner, meaner, compact thing.

47:52 They figure out how to deal

47:53 with the Vikings by essentially building fortified bridges,

47:57 changes to their army, and so forth.

48:02 The Vikings, I—I like to call it creative destruction.

48:05 It—they, by destroying the things they destroyed,

48:07 they cleared the ground for something stronger to grow.

48:11 Uh, that's brilliant.

48:12 The creative destruction engine that created

48:14 Europe was the Normans and the Vikings.

48:18 And then you also, you have another book that talks about the Byzantine Empire,

48:23 so you have the creative destruction that resulted in Europe,

48:28 that Europe led to this Western,

48:30 quote-unquote, civilization that we think of now.

48:34 And the thing that protected Europe for centuries

48:39 was the existence of the Byzantine Empire,

48:41 the East Roman Empire, because of all the threats-- That's right.

48:48 That came towards Europe.

48:49 This strong, stable empire that is the Byzantine Empire

48:56 protected the forces from everything that came from the east.

49:00 Yeah, that's right.

49:01 They were a buffer.

49:02 They were a buffer, giving Europe this kind of vital

49:04 time to develop the way it needed to develop.

49:07 So it's—it's interesting to think that the world as we see now was a result—...

49:15 of a sequence of quite lucky geographical and leadership decisions in history.

49:22 I mean, it really does pivot on a few

49:27 points of geography and a few special leaders-...

49:29 that conquer.

49:31 Yeah.

49:31 Had Constantine chosen his side a little less wisely,

49:35 the world's going to be very different.

49:37 Yeah, so Constantine is the guy who moved

49:39 the capital of the empire from Rome to Constantinople,

49:43 thereby giving a lot more focus to the east.

49:48 Thereby protecting Europe from the gigantic threats that—- That's right.

49:56 loomed in the east.

49:57 That's right.

49:57 And the Islamic invasions of the seventh century,

50:00 they couldn't get past that choke point of Constantinople.

50:02 So they had to take the long way across Africa.

50:05 You know, and by the time they get to Spain,

50:08 And conquer Spain and into, that's the Battle of Tours,

50:11 you know, Charles Martel is able to stop them,

50:14 and they're, they're massively overextended.

50:15 You know, I think it's a very different story

50:18 if they can come in through the Black Sea.

50:21 And all the times the East Roman Empire almost died from all the invasions,

50:26 all of those invaders would have just conquered the entirety of Europe.

50:31 Yeah, I mean, I don't think they would've met much resistance.

50:34 Yeah.

50:35 So rewinding back, what was the religion, the religious beliefs,

50:39 the gods that the Vikings believed that we've mentioned a little bit of?

50:44 Thor and Odin, how did they see this, this world and the universe?

50:52 It's, so the Viking gods are...

50:55 I mean, they've been sanitized, but they're quite terrifying.

50:59 But their basic conception of the universe

51:02 is an eternal struggle between chaos and order, which chaos will eventually win.

51:07 So I think the best view of cosmology is of concentric circles,

51:12 with Utgard is the outer realm and that's where the chaos is.

51:16 And those are the, that's where the frost giants are,

51:19 all the monsters that seek to destroy.

51:21 The gods represent order and stability, and the monsters represent chaos,

51:26 and it's an eternal war between the two of them.

51:30 Um, so there are different categories of gods

51:33 depending on which circle you come from.

51:35 The gods don't all like each other.

51:38 They're not...

51:38 Sometimes they engage in wars.

51:41 Some of the most famous gods, the Norse gods, you know,

51:45 Loki or Freya, come from outside the Aesir, the main gods.

51:50 So it was kind of a fluid thing.

51:53 It's more a way to understand the world.

51:56 I think so, yeah.

51:57 The thunder is Thor fighting the ice giants, and that's what that is.

52:03 Uh, going to Perplexity.

52:05 Vikings followed the polytheistic,

52:07 ritual-heavy religion centered on a pantheon of gods

52:09 and spirits with no single holy book or unified church,

52:12 and practices varied a lot by region and family.

52:16 And so the major gods were Odin and Thor and Freya.

52:21 Odin was, his domain was war, kingship, wisdom, death.

52:26 Thor was protection, thunder, fertility.

52:29 Freya was love, magic, battle dead.

52:34 Um, typical worshipers for Odin were chieftains and elite warriors and poets.

52:41 Typical worshipers for Thor were farmers and "ordinary

52:46 people," and typical worshipers of Freya were women,

52:50 magic practitioners, and lovers.

52:53 Yeah, yeah.

52:53 I mean, I've heard it...

52:54 I think you can break it down saying like, Odin was the elite.

52:57 He's kind of more aristocratic, right?

52:59 Yes.

53:00 He's the god of poetry, you need to read, et cetera.

53:02 Only the elite would know how to do that.

53:04 A farmer wouldn't really care about that.

53:06 Wherein Thor is a more earthy god.

53:08 You know, you want the waves to be less, you know, pray to Thor.

53:12 Um, I find Odin, I think, most disturbing.

53:15 He's the god of madness and the god of poetry, which, I guess those are related.

53:22 Yeah.

53:22 Um, but in battle, I mean, the berserkers,

53:24 probably the most famous type of Viking warriors,

53:26 were considered to be Odin's chosen warriors.

53:29 They would show no pain,

53:30 and they'd just run at the enemy and attack with their nails and their teeth.

53:36 Even if they could have their arms hacked off, they would still keep going.

53:39 Like they would just...

53:40 And they would attack other Vikings.

53:42 They were berserk.

53:43 That's where we get the word from.

53:45 Uh, what do we understand the mindset leads to that?

53:48 I mean, it wasn't religious in nature.

53:50 There's not this kinda ideology.

53:53 It's just the way of life and then the prized honor and intensity in battle.

54:00 Yeah.

54:00 I mean, one of Odin's names is the raven feeder.

54:03 I mean, you were, by creating corpses,

54:05 which ravens feed on, you are, you're doing the work of Odin.

54:09 And, you know, the, the Viking view of the afterlife was unique.

54:17 There weren't really punishments, not really, for doing bad things.

54:22 Unless you did something really bad.

54:25 Then you ended up as basically an evil spirit, haunting your grave.

54:32 But if you were brave,

54:33 then you got taken to the house of the dead, which is Valhalla to...

54:37 And you were resurrected.

54:39 Every day you would fight,

54:41 and whatever wounds you got would be magically healed that night.

54:44 And then the next morning you'd get up and do it again.

54:47 So you're essentially practicing for Ragnarok- ...the final battle,

54:52 which you would lose.

54:54 So I'm not sure.

54:55 It seems, it's rather pessimistic.

54:57 The battle's what...

54:58 I mean, it sounds like losing is not a thing.

55:01 The battle itself is what matters,

55:03 so Valhalla...It's a place where you fight a battle every day.

55:07 Every day.

55:09 Unlimited food, there's like a boar or whatever.

55:11 Yeah.

55:11 Yeah, that's right.

55:12 There's unlimited wine.

55:13 Yep.

55:13 And you can die as much as you want-- As much as you want,

55:16 yeah- ...and you'll be born again.

55:18 And this is the idea of the highest...

55:22 This, I guess, if there's such a thing as heaven

55:24 in this kind of construction of the universe, this is heaven.

55:28 This is heaven, yeah.

55:28 This is the highest form.

55:29 This is the highest place you can go to is Valhalla.

55:33 Is fight every day, eat as much as you want,

55:36 drink as much as you want, die and are reborn the next day.

55:41 And this is forever, preparing yourself for the final battle of Ragnarok.

55:48 Ragnarok.

55:49 So this is where, this is the end of the world, this is the cataclysm.

55:52 Mm-hmm.

55:52 That's right.

55:52 Odin's gonna die, Thor will die.

55:55 He'll get killed by one of Loki's children, the Midgard Serpent.

55:59 Odin will be devoured by a wolf.

56:04 The sun and moon, which are being chased by monsters, by giants,

56:09 will be caught and swallowed by the giants,

56:11 plunging the world into eternal darkness.

56:15 Essentially all the gods will die and darkness and chaos will then ensue.

56:21 And then at the very end the...

56:24 This is mostly from a guy named Snorri Sturluson who was

56:27 living right at the end of the Viking Age and writing this.

56:29 And he was, I believe, a Christian.

56:31 So there's...

56:32 I think we're fusing things here.

56:34 So then there would be a new Earth

56:36 and a new heaven and a new god, who's all powerful.

56:40 Yeah, if you think of religion as a kind of technology,

56:44 a social technology that stabilizes or helps guide the evolution of a society,

56:51 it's interesting to see what the Vikings came up with.

56:54 And do you ever think from a history, the grand view of history,

57:00 how effective these different technologies of religion have been?

57:05 Yeah, I mean, I think that's certainly...

57:07 I'm thinking of the Viking rituals.

57:10 Hospitality is very important in a northern climate where,

57:13 you know, food is scarce, winters are long and harsh.

57:17 And if you don't share your hearth with, you know,

57:22 someone knocking on your door,

57:23 then someone else might not share it with you and you could be facing death.

57:27 So in this case hospitality becomes a core belief and—...

57:30 you know, the idea was that Odin would travel incognito,

57:35 knocking on people's doors, and he would remember if you let him in or not.

57:40 And if you were hospitable, he would bless you,

57:41 and if you were inhospitable, he would murder you.

57:44 And—...

57:45 you know, I think these rituals are obviously

57:49 intended for, "How do we survive this winter?"- Yeah,

57:53 how do we effectively spread the message that hospitality is pretty?

57:58 Good thing and it's characteristic of religion.

58:01 If you do a good thing, you'll be rewarded.

58:03 If you do a bad thing, you'll be punished.

58:05 And then different religions play the different ways of communicating that.

58:11 Yeah.

58:11 I mean, I think also religion gives you, it gives you a world view, right?

58:16 It gives you a morality and these are core parts of society.

58:24 And the beautiful thing about religion is it

58:28 interplays with human nature and it guides humans.

58:31 But then of course, human nature

58:33 and humans project themselves onto the religion,

58:37 sometimes they use their religion.

58:40 It's to accomplish goals in a pragmatic sense, in a political sense,

58:45 in a geopolitical sense, in a military sense, in a social sense.

58:50 And so there's that dance of how religion invigorates and guides the peoples,

58:58 and then how the peoples use the religion to guide the direction of the world.

59:06 And that's certainly the history of Christianity has

59:08 a big role to play in the history of Europe,

59:11 in the history of the Byzantine Empire, And that part of the world.

59:15 And it was an incredibly effective religion, Once Constantine converted.

59:23 It spread extremely quickly, relatively speaking, across a couple of centuries.

59:27 Just to linger on the Viking views of the world and the afterlife.

59:31 So we mentioned Valhalla.

59:33 There's the Norns, which are the three spirits that represent the past,

59:36 the present and the necessity.

59:38 They spin the fates of all men and gods at the Roots of Yggdrasil.

59:44 Yeah.

59:44 Yggdrasil.

59:45 Yggdrasil.

59:46 So there's a notion of like determinism and fate to the Viking life.

59:52 And there's Valhalla, there's Hel, Niflheim.

59:55 This was the destination for the vast majority of people.

59:58 So if you don't make it to Valhalla, this is where you go.

1:00:01 That's where you go.

1:00:02 Unless you're a real bad person,

1:00:03 then there's some punishment for the truly wicked.

1:00:06 And we should point out that Hel, spelled with one L was a daughter of Loki-...

1:00:12 And was not the same as the...

1:00:15 Hel with the two L's.

1:00:16 Hel with the two L's.

1:00:17 Very different.

1:00:18 It's more like purgatory type of situation.

1:00:21 Yeah, so it's the house of the, it's like the house of the dead,

1:00:23 the house of the underworld.

1:00:24 A colorless twilight,

1:00:25 not necessarily a place of punishment but simply the inevitable end for most,

1:00:31 unless you end up in Valhalla,

1:00:33 which means you're a great warrior dying in battle.

1:00:36 It reminds me of the Greek view of the afterlife, right?

1:00:38 Where you essentially get amnesia and forget who you

1:00:40 are unless someone makes a sacrifice and says your name,

1:00:43 and only then you'll remember it.

1:00:45 So your destiny is ultimately to just become gray and fade away.

1:00:51 So you might as well- you might as well be brave.

1:00:54 You might as well run at that spear.

1:00:57 So that was the engine of their- the warrior

1:01:01 culture that was core to their society.

1:01:05 I think probably.

1:01:06 I have to ask about Vikings as explorers.

1:01:08 They were......

1:01:09 truly one of the greatest explorers in history.

1:01:11 What can you say to, what is it in their spirit that motivated them?

1:01:16 I mean, they sailed, they reached North America 500 years before Columbus.

1:01:21 They sailed, Obviously to England, Spain, Italy,

1:01:26 Russia, North Africa, the Middle East, Paris,

1:01:30 and I'm just showing here a map of the ocean

1:01:33 routes and the river systems that they connected to and sailed.

1:01:37 What do you think drove them to explore the unknown?

1:01:42 This boggles my mind.

1:01:43 This, like this map here just,

1:01:46 it messes with me because they didn't have a compass.

1:01:50 I mean, can you imagine shoving off from some fjord in Norway west.

1:01:55 That's your only, west.

1:01:57 And there was a Viking named Naddodd.

1:01:59 He's actually the first Norseman to reach Iceland,

1:02:02 though it was a total accident.

1:02:03 But here's the, here's the mind-blowing part.

1:02:05 He decides to land and explore, and he gets off and he sees two humans.

1:02:12 They're monks from Ireland.

1:02:14 They got there in a canoe.

1:02:16 You look at Ireland, look at Iceland, that's even more impressive.

1:02:21 They got in a canoe, a skin boat-...

1:02:23 and they just went north because they were trying to get away from the world.

1:02:26 They found Iceland, and in a very excellent move on their part,

1:02:30 they ran away as soon as the Vikings arrived, which is, you know, pretty smart.

1:02:35 I don't know if you know there's this video

1:02:37 of the deranged penguin with the Werner Herzog documentary,

1:02:43 where Werner Herzog is like, overdubbing,

1:02:47 explaining the thinking of the penguin.

1:02:50 But the penguin leaves the tribe and he just goes out into the mountains.

1:02:53 I have to show you this video.

1:02:55 This is my favorite video of all time.

1:02:59 There's this low-key documentary where they're talking about penguins,

1:03:04 and then there's one penguin that leaves-- I'm out.

1:03:10 leaves the tribe and just goes towards the mountains, and as Werner Herzog says,

1:03:15 "Towards certain death." It always reminds me

1:03:18 of this kind of Viking spirit or the—...

1:03:20 or the monk spirit.

1:03:22 There's something, one human or a small group of humans just decide to go.

1:03:28 Just go, yeah.

1:03:29 And not look back.

1:03:30 Are there sea monsters out there?

1:03:31 Maybe.

1:03:32 Maybe.

1:03:32 Is there any land?

1:03:33 Are we gonna fall off the edge of the earth?

1:03:34 Maybe.

1:03:35 And just as Werner Herzog says, you know,

1:03:38 "There's certain death." Now, he doesn't romanticize it.

1:03:41 He says the penguin is just deranged and crazy.

1:03:45 But look, the penguin did look back briefly.

1:03:48 Right.

1:03:49 He did think about this.

1:03:52 So this—...

1:03:53 there's two ways, there's multiple ways,

1:03:55 but you just highlighted two ways to explore.

1:03:58 One is 'cause you're this hardcore dude that just is looking to raid

1:04:05 and just goes and goes and just you have the resilience and the will-...

1:04:10 to keep going.

1:04:11 And then there's the monks that just want to leave.

1:04:15 Escape, yeah.

1:04:16 Yeah.

1:04:16 They just go toward the, they want to leave far away-...

1:04:20 so they could be closer to God.

1:04:21 They could be closer to themselves and to-- And away from sin.

1:04:24 Yeah.

1:04:25 You know, there's this poem by Tennyson, Ulysses, my favorite poem.

1:04:29 Uh, I think it captures the Viking spirit.

1:04:31 The last line of it is to strive, "to seek, to find,

1:04:34 and not to yield." I think that's very much like the Viking, you know,

1:04:38 "My purpose holds, to sail beyond the baths of all

1:04:40 the western stars until I die." You may die,

1:04:42 but I'm gonna do this, and I'm not gonna yield.

1:04:46 That spirit is one of my favorite aspects of human beings.

1:04:50 I think that's why the Vikings remain so popular today, you know?

1:04:54 We name our satellites, our football teams, you know, our cruise ships.

1:04:58 There's this like, there's this romantic hook-...

1:05:01 of a people who did not yield.

1:05:05 Yeah, they embodied the part,

1:05:06 the flame that burns in all of us that we admire most about human beings.

1:05:15 Is that like unyielding focus on going out there,

1:05:22 of taking a leap into the unknown, into the scary, and never stopping.

1:05:28 That's right.

1:05:28 It's not too late to seek a newer world.

1:05:31 I have to ask you about, speaking of a newer world, America.

1:05:36 And Leif Ericson.

1:05:37 But first, a quick bathroom break if it's okay.

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1:06:07 Choose wisely, my friends.

1:06:08 And now, back to my conversation with Lars Brownworth.

1:06:14 All right, we're back.

1:06:15 Let's talk about this incredible fact of the Vikings,

1:06:18 that Leif Ericson, who was a Viking explorer,

1:06:22 was the first European to reach North America around the year 1000,

1:06:26 five centuries before Columbus reached North America.

1:06:31 Tell the story of his journey.

1:06:33 What do we know about him?

1:06:35 So let's begin with his dad.

1:06:37 His dad's name is Erik the Red,

1:06:39 who was forced to flee Norway when he was probably

1:06:44 10 years old because his dad had killed some people.

1:06:47 It's kind of hilarious.

1:06:49 In the saga it says, "For a few killings..." Okay, I guess that's a thing.

1:06:55 So he went to Iceland and he got a farm

1:06:59 in Iceland which was already starting to become overpopulated.

1:07:01 They had cut down all the trees.

1:07:03 There were some climate problems of deforestation and farms just blowing away,

1:07:10 so the population was essentially beginning to crash in Iceland.

1:07:15 And he got into a fight with his neighbor and ended up killing his neighbor,

1:07:21 and so he was exiled from Iceland.

1:07:23 He was exiled from the place his father had been exiled from.

1:07:26 So it runs in the family, this whole outlaw thing.

1:07:29 What also ran in the family apparently was this streak, this courageous streak.

1:07:33 And he had heard that there had been people...

1:07:36 So the, the Norwegian Vikings, they were aiming for England,

1:07:40 and they hit the Hebrides,

1:07:42 which are these kind of treeless islands above Scotland,

1:07:45 and they found they were good for refueling 'cause they'd get,

1:07:49 pick up water or whatever, and then on your way to Scotland to raid.

1:07:53 And then a Viking had missed the Hebrides and discovered Iceland,

1:07:57 and then another Viking had aimed for Iceland, missed, and hit Greenland.

1:08:03 And a little fun fact about Greenland,

1:08:06 it is both north, south, east, and west of Iceland.

1:08:09 So it's any direction, you're gonna hit Greenland.

1:08:13 So Greenland is hard to miss.

1:08:15 It's hard to miss, which is not

1:08:17 to take away anything from the extraordinary danger,

1:08:19 the certain death of going further west.

1:08:22 But there was this...

1:08:23 By this time, there was this idea that, you know,

1:08:26 enough people had become famous by sailing

1:08:28 west into the unknown and discovering things,

1:08:30 that I think there was a general idea of there's more out there to the west.

1:08:34 And so he had talked to someone who had seen

1:08:38 Greenland and reported that there was this good land further west.

1:08:42 And so he hired the ship's crew of that Viking.

1:08:45 So it's kind of the deck was loaded,

1:08:48 and he went to Greenland where he was able to settle two different colonies.

1:08:53 One was called the Western Settlement in the west,

1:08:56 and one was called the Eastern Settlement in essentially the extreme south.

1:08:59 And that was essentially the edges of where Viking technology could be.

1:09:03 A cool factoid is that the Vikings practiced husbandry, raised animals,

1:09:08 and obviously this is not an option in Greenland,

1:09:12 although they couldn't have known it at the time.

1:09:14 But they brought plants with them.

1:09:16 So, and then they were able to trade with the native Inuit

1:09:20 for walrus blubber and things like that, and they made a go of it.

1:09:24 But what's obvious, you know,

1:09:26 anyone who's seen Greenland, there's, there are no trees.

1:09:31 It's almost impossible to survive by practicing husbandry.

1:09:34 It is impossible to survive, as it turns out, just practicing husbandry.

1:09:38 And by this point, I think this extraordinary

1:09:42 Viking pragmatism is beginning to be played out.

1:09:46 Because one of the reasons the Greenland experiment fails

1:09:51 ultimately in 300 years is they fail to adapt.

1:09:56 It's clearly they should, they should focus more on fishing,

1:10:01 on other sources than, than just raising pigs and cows.

1:10:06 But-- Oh, so we hit the limit of the, the Viking

1:10:10 adaptability which they have demonstrated throughout the world, I'd say.

1:10:14 Interesting.

1:10:15 So Erik the Red is this, he makes his name by exploring,

1:10:19 and he does in fact, once he discovers Greenland, he calls it green.

1:10:25 He says there's so many salmon in the rivers of, in the fjords

1:10:28 that you can just scoop them out with your hands.

1:10:31 You don't even have to fish.

1:10:32 Was this real?

1:10:33 It's a lie.

1:10:34 Okay.

1:10:34 That's not true at all.

1:10:35 So he's doing propaganda.

1:10:36 He's doing propaganda.

1:10:37 So is that...

1:10:38 Is this story true that he called it green just so he can attract-- It is.

1:10:41 So-- The greatest real estate scam in history.

1:10:45 Yeah.

1:10:46 Okay.

1:10:46 Genius.

1:10:47 I mean, just stuck to this day.

1:10:50 Yeah.

1:10:50 It's the most misnamed place in the world.

1:10:53 But in the Europe of the time, even in Iceland, the dream was to have land.

1:10:58 I mean, land equaled wealth in Europe.

1:11:00 And here he says there's enough land for the taking,

1:11:04 like anyone who wants it, which is true.

1:11:06 It's the largest island on earth.

1:11:07 I mean, it's, it's unusable,

1:11:09 but it should be called Iceland, Glacier Land or something.

1:11:13 But it worked.

1:11:14 He took 500 men with him from Iceland.

1:11:17 It's gotta be a significant chunk of the population, but there's enough people,

1:11:21 kind of land hungry, there's no more room in Iceland.

1:11:24 It's too restrictive.

1:11:25 We're gonna go further west.

1:11:28 So he takes 25 ships and then 14 make it, which is pretty good.

1:11:36 And then those 14 ships with their 300 or so people start the western colony.

1:11:45 And then word gets back to Norway,

1:11:48 but Norway's 2,000 miles away, 2,000-plus miles away.

1:11:51 So it's, you know, contact...

1:11:53 They're having to get resupplied.

1:11:55 In the first winter, all their cattle die.

1:11:57 That's not a great, that's not a great start for people who practice husbandry.

1:12:02 So they've got to get resupplied from Norway, but, you know,

1:12:05 the chances of making it to Norway and back are

1:12:08 actually not that great if you're sailing without a compass.

1:12:11 You're just kind of hoping.

1:12:12 But they do it.

1:12:13 They do it.

1:12:14 And the colonies survive until the 1400s, where they just go silent.

1:12:21 So let's talk about Erik the Red's son, Leif Erikson.

1:12:25 How does the journey continue west?

1:12:28 So Erik is getting a little older.

1:12:30 The Greenland settlements are becoming filled up.

1:12:32 Erik is happy where he is.

1:12:34 He's been kicked out of enough places.

1:12:36 He's made his home here, and this is where he wants to be.

1:12:39 But his son...

1:12:40 They're running out of resources.

1:12:42 There's no wood.

1:12:43 You know, there's limited food, et cetera, et cetera.

1:12:46 And so his son proposes going west because

1:12:49 he's heard stories that there are other lands.

1:12:52 So another Viking had gotten lost,

1:12:53 aimed for Greenland and missed, and had seen something.

1:12:57 He said he saw clouds and mountains and there's land there.

1:13:01 And then he had turned around.

1:13:03 And Leif again did the same thing, he hired the man's crew.

1:13:07 He asked his dad to come, his dad wouldn't.

1:13:09 He went with his half sister Freydis, who was a whole nother story by herself,

1:13:13 and a bunch of other colonists, and they went, and they landed in a place.

1:13:18 He called it Vinland because he found-...

1:13:23 things that he could ferment.

1:13:24 So, of course, the Vikings, they made wine, or a wine-like alcohol.

1:13:27 So Leif Erikson is, he's landed.

1:13:29 He doesn't know this, but he's landed on a new continent

1:13:35 with essentially inexhaustible stores of food

1:13:39 and timber and everything he needs.

1:13:42 It's the perfect place.

1:13:43 Unfortunately for him, it's also inhabited by some natives,

1:13:48 probably the Algonquin tribe.

1:13:50 He calls them the Skraelings,

1:13:52 which is just Norse for screechers because he can't understand their language.

1:13:57 They just yell at them and attack immediately.

1:14:00 They stay there for three years and then give up and go back home.

1:14:06 So ultimately, it...

1:14:07 and then really don't tell anyone about it.

1:14:08 They just keep it in their northern sagas.

1:14:11 Why do you think they left?

1:14:12 Why do you think they didn't stick around longer?

1:14:15 I think there are a number of things working against them.

1:14:17 Of course, I would like to believe there's

1:14:18 an alternate history where the Vikings successfully make it down,

1:14:23 you know, maybe down to Maryland or something,

1:14:25 and there's an alternate history of the US and Canada here,

1:14:29 but I think there's a number of things working against them.

1:14:32 The first is they stubbornly refused to give up husbandry,

1:14:36 so they're trying to make this work.

1:14:39 L'Anse aux Meadows I think is where they were, in Newfoundland.

1:14:42 It doesn't work.

1:14:44 The climate's too cold.

1:14:45 It's not...

1:14:46 the grasses aren't appropriate, you know,

1:14:48 it's just not gonna work and they do not adapt, number one.

1:14:51 Number two, they're 2,000-plus miles away from Norway and getting resupplied,

1:14:55 and although they are extremely good sailors and explorers and traders,

1:14:59 I think this is a little too far.

1:15:02 And then thirdly is the native resistance.

1:15:04 It's just too incessant.

1:15:06 They are outnumbered, you know, millions to one.

1:15:11 And the Algonquin do not want them there.

1:15:13 It's clear, and they're not gonna stop attacking.

1:15:18 It's so fascinating because they really didn't understand

1:15:22 the full scale of the land they've encountered, right?

1:15:26 That's right.

1:15:26 That's right.

1:15:27 I mean, had they known, had he known-...

1:15:30 what he had found-- That there's more south.

1:15:32 Maybe they, their intuition-- That's right.

1:15:34 was like there's not...

1:15:36 it's just all northern land, it's void of resources.

1:15:39 We can't do the whole husbandry thing.

1:15:43 But you would think they could go down the coast.

1:15:46 I mean, if they could have gotten enough people from Norway,

1:15:50 you know, or Iceland or whatever, you know, a sizable enough colony,

1:15:54 and build some kind of defenses to fight off the incessant attacks-...

1:15:58 then I think that's the difference there,

1:16:00 'cause there certainly the resources are all there.

1:16:02 Mm-hmm.

1:16:02 Or just keep staying in the water, keep going down the coast-- Yeah.

1:16:05 Yeah.

1:16:06 not necessarily camp out until, until you get further south.

1:16:10 It is fascinating to think about that alternate history

1:16:12 where they would have discovered America and settled there.

1:16:16 So this is 500 years before Columbus.

1:16:19 There's...

1:16:20 first of all, they could have done a lot

1:16:22 of the stuff we think about the European nations doing,

1:16:26 including brutality towards the natives.

1:16:28 But there could have been a coexistence also,

1:16:32 and some of the diseases that come with them could

1:16:37 have done the damage that they did 500 years later.

1:16:42 But now, it would have stabilized

1:16:46 the populations to where the Europeans, the French,

1:16:49 the Spanish, and so on who come, the natives would be more ready.

1:16:53 So they would...

1:16:55 Europe would then encounter a sizable population

1:16:58 of the Viking descendants and the natives to where

1:17:02 the two could hold onto the land

1:17:06 and bring a different kind of civilization there.

1:17:09 Because ultimately Europe, with the European ways, of the Western civilization,

1:17:12 expanded out into North America,

1:17:16 but there could be this whole Scandinavian vibe-...

1:17:19 that would have taken over.

1:17:22 Just a hair's breadth.

1:17:23 My favorite museum in New York is called The Cloisters.

1:17:26 It's part of the Met, and in the Cloisters, there's an ivory cross.

1:17:32 And the ivory cross has been richly carved with Christian scenes.

1:17:39 It was carved in England, but it's made of walrus ivory,

1:17:45 and they got it from the New World.

1:17:49 And the Viking, you know, Viking traders.

1:17:51 It represents, you know, the great arc of the northern trade.

1:17:54 So it's walrus ivory from the New World via Norway to England to New York.

1:18:01 It's a great symbol of that trade.

1:18:04 This whole just period of thousands of years

1:18:09 of exploration that we no longer can do,

1:18:13 so it's kind of geographic exploration of the world, is fascinating.

1:18:17 It takes true courage.

1:18:20 It takes true wander.

1:18:22 Uh, the kind of exploration we could do now

1:18:24 is more in the scientific realm and the realm of ideas and then maybe in terms

1:18:28 of geography out into space and exploring the universe.

1:18:32 Yeah, I think the closest analog is probably Mars, right?

1:18:35 I mean, what would it take for you to be like,

1:18:37 "All right, I'm gonna leave and I'm gonna go to Mars"?

1:18:39 You're, never coming back.

1:18:40 There's nothing there as far as you know.

1:18:43 You know, all the accoutrements of civilization are not there.

1:18:46 It's- that's the kind of courage you would have taken.

1:18:49 Yeah, but there's, on top of that, with Greenland, with Iceland,

1:18:52 with Finland, there's just so much uncertainty,

1:18:56 like literally what's beyond this hill.

1:18:59 So with Mars, everything is mapped.

1:19:01 So, so it's really you, you understand the full harshness of the situation.

1:19:06 Of what you're gonna face, yeah.

1:19:08 So it's more, it's that's more akin to like,

1:19:09 all right, I'm running an ultra-marathon.

1:19:11 I understand the challenge.

1:19:14 I think more akin would be like traveling out into like the Oort Cloud,

1:19:20 like beyond the solar system.

1:19:23 What's scarier, the known or the unknown?

1:19:26 I think that deeply, the human nature pulls us towards the unknown.

1:19:30 No, it's true.

1:19:31 Yeah.

1:19:32 All right.

1:19:32 Speaking of which, going to the East.

1:19:36 So like we mentioned, the Vikings really went all over.

1:19:39 And one of the directions they went that ended up

1:19:42 touching the Byzantine Empire in Constantinople, is they went East.

1:19:46 What can you say about the 8th century journey

1:19:51 East in the river networks that the Vikings did,

1:19:55 the Swedish Vikings, the Varangians,

1:19:57 as they began to explore the river systems of Russia?

1:20:02 So this was the most surprising part for me when

1:20:04 I was first thinking about writing the book and, you know,

1:20:08 discovering where the Vikings went.

1:20:10 I never...

1:20:10 In a million years, it would've never occurred to me that the Vikings went East.

1:20:14 But a- a good way to think of this is

1:20:18 the Vikings launched themselves in whatever direction their country is facing.

1:20:22 So Sweden goes to the East, Denmark goes down toward Germany,

1:20:27 and Norway goes England and the New World.

1:20:30 So there's a Viking named Rorik who goes East and manages

1:20:36 to set up an encampment on this lake called Staraya Ladoga.

1:20:42 Which is a launchpad to both the Volga River and the Dnieper River.

1:20:46 Yeah, and these are major river systems in the East that take

1:20:49 you all the way down to the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

1:20:53 Because the Vikings, you know, such sea-born people, they can sail up rivers.

1:20:58 This allows them access to the caliphates

1:21:01 in the East and to the Byzantium Empire,

1:21:05 where they, being Vikings, immediately decide to attack the city.

1:21:11 The Byzantines essentially set the Sea

1:21:13 of Marmara outside of Constantinople on fire-...

1:21:16 and burn up all the Viking ships.

1:21:18 So then the Vikings decide, "Okay, we can't, we can't take Constantinople,

1:21:22 so we might as well join 'em if we can't beat 'em."

1:21:25 And they end up as probably the most famous guard in Byzantine history,

1:21:32 the Varangian Guard.

1:21:33 Varangian means the men of the oath.

1:21:35 Or the men who've sworn an oath.

1:21:37 This is kind of an analog of the Praetorian Guard in Ancient Rome.

1:21:42 They were famously loyal to the throne,

1:21:45 but not necessarily to the person sitting on the throne.

1:21:50 they're major power players.

1:21:52 The last of the great Byzantine emperors,

1:21:56 Basil the Bulgar Slayer, forms them in the late 900s.

1:22:02 And they're there with the history all the way up until the end of it.

1:22:05 In fact, many of our famous Vikings,

1:22:08 Harald Hardrada serve in the Varangian Guard.

1:22:10 If you go to Constantinople today, inside the Church of the Hagia Sophia,

1:22:14 on the second floor there's a marble balcony, and on the railings,

1:22:18 you can find Norse runes that are carved in by Varangian

1:22:22 Guards who were bored during a particularly long sermon,

1:22:26 in a language they didn't understand, but they had to stand there.

1:22:29 So that's a fascinating thing,

1:22:31 which is the Varangian Guard guarding the emperor of the East Roman Empire,

1:22:36 is made up initially, for quite a bit of time, of Vikings.

1:22:44 I mean, like speaking of pragmatic, they just integrate into everything.

1:22:50 Now eventually, the Varangian Guard became less and less Viking over time.

1:22:56 But this whole...

1:22:57 You fast-forwarded the story,

1:22:58 we should mention that Staraya Ladoga in 753 AD is when it was established,

1:23:05 opening the connection to the two rivers, and they began trading on the rivers

1:23:11 and establishing more stable states along the rivers,

1:23:15 including the Kievan Rus in 862, 882,

1:23:20 where the Varangians, so it's the Swedish Vikings,

1:23:23 they took Novgorod, they took Kiev, and they established the Kievan Rus there.

1:23:28 And that is what led to the connection to the Byzantine Empire,

1:23:33 where they started to...

1:23:34 Again, the Vikings went from being Vikings.

1:23:37 They go through this process of trading and then establishing a state,

1:23:42 now they're doing treaties of different kinds,

1:23:45 and they're also waging, or trying to wage war.

1:23:51 And going all the way to Constantinople,

1:23:54 and having a deep admiration for Constantinople,

1:23:56 enough to then begin to dream of sacking Constantinople.

1:24:03 Yeah.

1:24:03 I mean, once they're alerted to the wealth that's there,

1:24:06 you know, Vikings being Vikings, they show up.

1:24:11 Can you speak to the Greek Fire?

1:24:13 So this was 941 and 944 when they tried,

1:24:18 and then Greek Fire was this technology developed by the Romans.

1:24:23 We don't really know what it was, Greek Fire.

1:24:25 It was a form of napalm, obviously.

1:24:27 We have the ingredients what made it up, naphtha and oil and things like that.

1:24:33 But it was this very flammable material that would ignite on contact.

1:24:38 So the Byzantines would fill it into clay pots and then throw the clay pots.

1:24:43 As soon as it's exposed to oxygen, it would start burning.

1:24:46 They also had siphons.

1:24:48 They would carry, like,

1:24:49 flamethrowers on their back and they would just spray it at enemies.

1:24:53 And the real devious thing about it is that if you

1:24:56 launch this clay pot at a ship and the material, you know,

1:25:00 pooled across the wood and then dripped off into the water, being oil,

1:25:04 it would float on top of the water and continue to burn.

1:25:07 So that if you were a sailor and you jumped off the ship

1:25:11 'cause it's on fire and jumped into this oil patch that's on fire,

1:25:15 you'd be coated with it and you'd burn underneath the water.

1:25:19 It was a horrible way to go.

1:25:21 So this was a state secret, closely guarded secret.

1:25:25 So closely guarded—it remains a mystery to this day of what exactly it was.

1:25:30 Which is incredible, right?

1:25:31 Yeah.

1:25:31 But it, in the 944 attack on Constantinople,

1:25:34 I mean the Vikings are coming on their ships.

1:25:37 They brought these ships from Sweden.

1:25:39 I mean that's crazy.

1:25:40 They're in the Black Sea.

1:25:42 They've sailed and they kind of swarm at the Byzantines.

1:25:46 The Byzantines launch a bunch of decrepit old

1:25:49 ships toward them that have Greek fire on them, and that turns the tide.

1:25:54 But the Byzantine emperor so appreciates the strength

1:25:57 of these horrifying Vikings that he forms a bodyguard of them.

1:26:03 And hence we get just a few years later,

1:26:06 again, tried to sack Constantinople and then join them.

1:26:09 Join 'em, yep.

1:26:10 The Varangian Guard in 988 with Basil II and Vladimir,

1:26:14 they make Varangian Guard into an institution,

1:26:16 and then the word of mouth spreads that this is

1:26:20 a real career path for the, for the Viking, is to join the guard.

1:26:25 Yeah, that's right.

1:26:27 'Cause not only do you get paid very,

1:26:29 you're compensated very well obviously for defending the emperor,

1:26:32 particularly if you do a good job,

1:26:33 but you also have opportunities 'cause the emperor sends you, "Let's go attack,

1:26:37 you know, this tribe," and you get to keep whatever you take.

1:26:41 So there's tremendous amounts of war profiteering you can accomplish.

1:26:45 And the other great river system, the Volga,

1:26:49 that brings you to the the great enemy of the Byzantines, the Abbasid Caliphate.

1:26:53 And they had a lot of trading links with the north.

1:26:58 So you get things like fur and amber,

1:27:02 lots of slaves from the from the Islamic world going up.

1:27:08 You even have in a Swedish coin hoard, there's a Buddha that's been found.

1:27:15 I mean-...

1:27:17 it's Sweden.

1:27:19 Yeah.

1:27:19 So these networks of trade, just how incredible are they with geography, right?

1:27:25 You can transform your understanding of land from the geography

1:27:29 of the land to the geography of the river networks,

1:27:33 because the way they raid and then invade

1:27:35 and then conquer England is through the rivers.

1:27:39 It's an incredibly different way of seeing the world.

1:27:43 Yeah.

1:27:43 And if you look at the kingdoms the Vikings created,

1:27:45 I'm thinking particularly of like Eric Bloodaxe in, you know,

1:27:50 in York, he's controlling parts of Ireland parts of Scotland, Wales, England.

1:27:58 Like there's no...

1:28:00 That doesn't make sense unless, unless you're a Viking.

1:28:03 You know, he's...

1:28:06 That also added tremendously to the terror that the Vikings brought,

1:28:10 because I mean you should probably be

1:28:12 a little careful with absolute statements here,

1:28:14 but I can't think of a major European city that's not on a river.

1:28:20 Uh, which meant now with the Vikings, 'cause they could travel up,

1:28:23 you know, rivers, the shallow rivers and then carry their boats whenever,

1:28:28 they would, everything was on the table now,

1:28:31 even hundreds of miles inland is on the table.

1:28:34 Mm-hmm.

1:28:34 And an incredible speed, much faster than the land armies.

1:28:37 It's terrifying.

1:28:38 It's terrifying.

1:28:38 So you're living in a constant state of fear.

1:28:39 Constant state of fear.

1:28:42 We've talked about this transition in several different contexts,

1:28:47 but you've written about this.

1:28:49 It's really interesting.

1:28:50 Is the Vikings, like Ragnar,

1:28:54 going from this mode of sea kings with no territory to the mode of land kings?

1:29:03 Do you have like somebody like Harald Bluetooth,

1:29:05 10th century Viking king of Denmark,

1:29:07 you go from being these grand explorers that are free to being state builders.

1:29:14 Was this always inevitable for all of these Vikings?

1:29:17 Could we speak to the different transitions, maybe in England?

1:29:21 I think in one way, it's inevitable.

1:29:24 There's so many examples of destroyers who just wreck civilizations.

1:29:30 The builders are much more rare, you know?

1:29:33 So I think it's, it's one of the reasons I think

1:29:36 Augustus is a much more interesting person than Julius Caesar is.

1:29:39 Augustus was a builder, and I like to see that.

1:29:42 I like to see not just can you pull down, but can you build up?

1:29:47 You know, just to take Ireland for example, Dublin, Limerick,

1:29:51 almost every major city in Ireland was founded by the Vikings.

1:29:58 So I don't think it's just a given that it would have happened.

1:30:01 I think there's something about the Vikings,

1:30:03 and it's probably tied to their pragmatism,

1:30:05 their, like this pragmatic streak of, "We're gonna use whatever.

1:30:10 Oh, this system of king works.

1:30:12 This taxation system's pretty good, let's keep it." You know,

1:30:15 "Oh, this is, this doesn't work.

1:30:17 Let's ditch it."- Yeah, they,

1:30:19 I mean the, they went from destroyer to builder very naturally and very quickly.

1:30:25 Yeah.

1:30:25 There's a natural process from conquering to building,

1:30:30 but it does take talent and it does take a certain something.

1:30:34 Can we talk about so one of the great Vikings, Canute the Great?

1:30:39 I love Canute.

1:30:40 I love Canute.

1:30:40 I think he never, he doesn't get his due.

1:30:42 He's one of those unsung heroes, I think, of the Viking world.

1:30:45 He had a reputation.

1:30:47 He was called the Emperor of the North.

1:30:49 He had this massive, you know,

1:30:52 England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark.

1:30:55 I mean he's just tying it all together.

1:31:00 He was an extremely effective English king.

1:31:04 I believe he introduced the penny, sadly discontinued, but I—- Oh wait, really?

1:31:09 Discontinued?

1:31:10 Discontinued.

1:31:10 They're no longer making...

1:31:11 The penny is discontinued.

1:31:12 2025's the last, the last penny.

1:31:14 Oh, no.

1:31:16 Everything's gonna go up by five.

1:31:20 Uh, so going to Perplexity.

1:31:22 Canute the Great was an early 11th

1:31:25 century Danish ruler who became king of England, Denmark and Norway....

1:31:31 creating what historians call the North Sea Empire.

1:31:35 He's often regarded as one of the most effective kings in Anglo-Saxon

1:31:39 English history for stabilizing the realm after decades of Viking warfare.

1:31:44 Again, an example of a destroyer becoming a state builder.

1:31:47 Yeah.

1:31:48 He was, he was extremely strong.

1:31:50 He was effective.

1:31:53 You know, England went from being the whipping

1:31:56 boy of the Vikings to controlling the Vikings.

1:32:01 And ended up on a pilgrimage to Rome.

1:32:04 Went to Rome.

1:32:05 Yeah.

1:32:06 So he although a Viking war leader, Canute ruled as a Christian king—...

1:32:11 Patronizing churches and monasteries and going on pilgrimage to Rome

1:32:15 in 1027 where he attended the Holy Roman Emperor's coronation.

1:32:21 Yes, he was recognized by his contemporaries as something special, right?

1:32:24 You don't get invited to those coronations if you're a nobody.

1:32:28 But the most famous story of Canute that I know,

1:32:32 my favorite story, is, you know, being in positions of power,

1:32:36 being famous, a lot of people sucking up to you,

1:32:38 a lot of people telling you whatever they think you wanna hear.

1:32:41 And so people are telling him all the time how wonderful he is,

1:32:45 and he takes his whole court down to the seashore and orders

1:32:49 his, his courtiers to carry him on his throne into the water,

1:32:54 and then he commands the seas to stop, the waves to stop and to retreat.

1:33:00 And they don't obviously, and everyone thinks he's a little...

1:33:03 But his point is that, "Y'all are saying how great I am.

1:33:07 I have no control." I mean, this is his active humility to kind of embarrass...

1:33:10 "I have no control over anything.

1:33:12 Stop telling me I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread."- I like the leaders,

1:33:16 and there's a few of them in history that rise to the very top,

1:33:21 and they're still able to maintain humility.

1:33:23 Marcus Aurelius in the Roman Empire is an example that, you know,

1:33:28 reading Meditations is also just an insight

1:33:31 into the mind of a man who's to himself,

1:33:35 'cause Meditations is not supposed to be work that's published.

1:33:40 It's just a diary.

1:33:42 To himself, he's deeply humbled.

1:33:45 And-...

1:33:45 and one of the most powerful humans in history-...

1:33:48 is still humble.

1:33:50 The two most famous stoics, one was an emperor and one was a slave.

1:33:55 So in the other part of the world, you've written a book and you did

1:34:01 a legendary podcast series on The Byzantine Empire,

1:34:04 the East Roman Empire, AKA, The Roman Empire.

1:34:08 Well, let me actually just as a tangent of a tangent ask you about the podcast.

1:34:13 So you're, you created what is widely

1:34:16 considered to be the first history podcast.

1:34:19 This is before Dan Carlin, before all the amazing podcasts we all know and love.

1:34:26 So the podcast series of course is The Twelve Byzantine Rulers:

1:34:29 The History of the Byzantine Empire.

1:34:31 What motivated you to explore this medium of podcasting?

1:34:37 What...

1:34:37 In, in the early, this must've been 2005, something like this.

1:34:41 It was, it was '05, yeah.

1:34:42 And people should go listen to it because it, it's still, I mean, it's like,

1:34:46 it's like we're talking about like ancient times or something,

1:34:49 'cause it is now a long time ago, but it's still an incredibly good podcast.

1:34:52 It's a great podcast series.

1:34:55 Thank you.

1:34:55 At the time, there's a series that I

1:34:58 would get at the library called The Great Courses.

1:35:00 I don't know if you're familiar with-- Yes.

1:35:02 Great Courses, yes.

1:35:03 There was one particular professor.

1:35:04 His name is Bob Brier, and he was, he's an Egyptologist,

1:35:08 lives on Long Island where I'm from, and he, I mean, it's a massive thing.

1:35:14 It's like 24 hours-...

1:35:16 of lectures about the entire history of Egypt,

1:35:18 and it was fascinating, 'cause he was, he's such a good storyteller.

1:35:23 And I was reading...

1:35:25 As a kid I could never figure out if I

1:35:28 liked the medieval period better or the Roman period better.

1:35:32 I was constantly going back and forth,

1:35:34 and I stumbled across a book which referred to the medieval Roman Empire,

1:35:40 and it was a bit like discovering your favorite

1:35:44 TV show had 12 extra seasons you didn't know about.

1:35:47 And they were just as good.

1:35:49 So I...

1:35:50 It really was a labor of love.

1:35:52 I couldn't, I would not shut up about The Byzantine Empire.

1:35:55 So my older brother,

1:35:56 we would go on walks together and I would be like, "And then Justinian,

1:35:59 you know, da, da, da." And he stopped me,

1:36:02 he said, "I have no idea what you're talking about.

1:36:03 I have no idea, like, I need a framework.

1:36:05 Give me a framework for this." So I

1:36:08 went home and I recorded myself giving a framework,

1:36:13 which turned out to be episode one, but I think I said it,

1:36:17 I did it in a British accent, a really bad British accent.

1:36:21 I was just messing around.

1:36:22 And I gave him the...

1:36:23 Luckily, I did it in my regular voice as well as this goofy accent,

1:36:27 and I gave it to him and then I forgot about it.

1:36:32 And that summer I was on a dig

1:36:37 in Petra excavating the Temple of the Winged Lions,

1:36:40 which was like a dream come true for me.

1:36:42 And I get this email from my brother and he said, "Oh,

1:36:46 I just submitted it as a podcast." So he had to tell me what that was.

1:36:51 But I was going for, to the extent that I had put thought into it,

1:36:56 I was going for kind of a longer

1:36:58 form lecture Great Courses series on the Byzantines.

1:37:06 and then a bunch of people started emailing me saying,

1:37:08 "When's episode two coming out?" Oh, okay.

1:37:10 So I guess there has to be an episode two.

1:37:12 And then the thing kinda snowballed from there.

1:37:13 I had no idea what I was doing.

1:37:16 Uh, your brother, by the way, is super tech savvy.

1:37:18 He is.

1:37:19 It wouldn't have happened without Anders.

1:37:20 So Anders, thank you.

1:37:22 But like looking back now, what do you think about that medium?

1:37:26 Why do you think it connected so much, To people?

1:37:30 Because you've also written several amazing books.

1:37:34 One of them is on The Byzantine Empire.

1:37:36 Just looking back in a retrospective kind of way,

1:37:40 because that from there blew up an entire industry

1:37:44 of incredible other history podcasts and podcasts in general.

1:37:49 Yeah, I've been...

1:37:50 That's a great question.

1:37:51 I've been trying to think for the past 20 years,

1:37:55 like why it's such a, such a niche field, right?

1:38:02 Why would people be interested in it?

1:38:05 Um, I think number one, it's a great story.

1:38:09 And people are people, and we haven't changed much,

1:38:14 which is one of the reasons why it's accessible, because it's very...

1:38:17 These are people you could meet today.

1:38:20 Um, but I think podcasting in general,

1:38:23 because there's such a low bar to get in, or there was at the time.

1:38:27 I mean, there's nobody else,

1:38:29 so just by virtue of being first, you know, it attracted attention.

1:38:33 Whatever its merits, being first was the strongest one.

1:38:39 Which is say you also did another series on the Normans who no

1:38:44 longer had the benefit of being first

1:38:45 and were still nevertheless very good, so...

1:38:48 Oh, I appreciate that.

1:38:49 Thank you.

1:38:49 It was...

1:38:51 But I think podcasting in a way democratizes learning.

1:38:57 Um, you know, it unlocked the potential of all these armchair historians.

1:39:01 I'm one of them who's like, "Hey this is really cool.

1:39:04 I'm passionate about this." You know,

1:39:06 anything that allows you to tap into your passion,

1:39:10 you know, I think is gonna be, is gonna be great.

1:39:14 And the Byzantine Empire's an interesting one.

1:39:16 I don't understand maybe...

1:39:18 And, and you articulated this well,

1:39:20 but it doesn't get like the love that it maybe deserves in history.

1:39:25 I think the, the framing of the book you wrote

1:39:28 on the topic is the reason we have Western civilization as we know,

1:39:32 or European-based Western civilization.

1:39:34 In a sense because you have...

1:39:37 They...

1:39:37 Let's see, maybe you can articulate

1:39:41 the different ways they connected the thread,

1:39:43 but one of them is they preserved the knowledge when

1:39:46 the West was when- when Europe was going through a dark period,

1:39:50 they protected Europe in all those ways.

1:39:53 And then eventually they jumpstart the Renaissance, 'cause people are...

1:39:56 Constantinople's gonna fall.

1:39:57 It's inevitable.

1:39:58 It's surrounded by hostile powers, and so they start migrating to Italy.

1:40:05 Um, just at the moment Italy is receptive to its Greco-Roman past.

1:40:11 Uh, Greek had died out in the West actually

1:40:15 as early as the time of Justinian in the 500s, 560s.

1:40:23 They needed...

1:40:23 If you wanted to travel between the eastern and western parts of the empire,

1:40:26 you needed, you know, guidebooks with helpful Latin or Greek phrases.

1:40:31 So Latin had died out in the East and Greek

1:40:33 had died out in the West by the 14th century,

1:40:37 so you needed Byzantine teachers to be able to read Plato and Aristotle.

1:40:42 The book also emphasizes as we've mentioned,

1:40:44 a kind of great man view of history.

1:40:47 So celebrating people like Constantine and Justinian.

1:40:50 Or Justinian, who would be your number one top emperor

1:40:55 in the history of the East Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire?

1:40:58 Hmm, that's a good question.

1:41:00 I mean, romantically, it's gotta be Justinian.

1:41:02 He dreams big.

1:41:03 He dreams big.

1:41:04 He doesn't always get there, but he dreams big.

1:41:08 He dreamed and tried to reconquer the Western Roman Empire.

1:41:13 I mean, he was a- a lot of wars of conquest-...

1:41:18 and built the...

1:41:19 Built the Hagia Sophia.

1:41:20 I mean, I think this is...

1:41:22 You know, we- we're interested in the Egyptians because they built the pyramids.

1:41:26 We're not interested in the pyramids because

1:41:28 they were built by the Egyptians, right?

1:41:30 It's like what is the great thing that your society has created?

1:41:33 I think the Hagia Sophia is that for the Byzantine Empire.

1:41:36 I mean, to go in it today is still

1:41:39 the closest you can come to the fifth century.

1:41:42 You know, and it peeled back the imperial splendor of what it must've been like.

1:41:46 You know, you can still see it.

1:41:47 You can smell it.

1:41:48 You can feel it.

1:41:49 Like, it's there.

1:41:53 There's actually a really nice video on YouTube of you

1:41:56 going from I think 50 to 60 years ago.

1:41:58 I don't know.

1:42:00 Seems like that.

1:42:01 It does seem like that, yeah.

1:42:02 We actually were kicked out.

1:42:04 Oh, what'd you do?

1:42:04 My brother and I went.

1:42:05 What would you do?

1:42:06 Well, you know, they- as you know, they're very strict as to guides.

1:42:10 They want to promote the local economy, so you have to have a local guide.

1:42:14 You can't go in there and look like

1:42:15 you're being a tour guide if- without a license.

1:42:18 You have 15 different organizations.

1:42:20 So we went there early, the- the hour it opened,

1:42:24 and we had the entire cathedral to ourselves.

1:42:26 And so we went around and my brother's holding this camera and I'm,

1:42:31 you know, goofily pointing things out.

1:42:34 And one of the guards noticed us, and, you know,

1:42:38 we had to remove ourselves from the building.

1:42:41 And so one of the things, I mean Justinian was a critical person in this too.

1:42:45 He overhauled the Roman law.

1:42:48 The legal system, the law...

1:42:51 First of all, the Roman Empire in general, the East Roman Empire propagated it.

1:42:57 They believed in the law.

1:42:58 They held onto the law.

1:43:00 That's right.

1:43:01 And that's many of the legal ideas we take for granted is

1:43:05 grounded in everything developed in the Roman

1:43:07 Empire and stabilizing the Roman Empire, so they carried that flag forward.

1:43:12 Yeah.

1:43:12 I mean, outside of Great Britain, all European legal systems are based

1:43:16 on, ultimately based on the Code of Justinian,

1:43:19 and then weirdly, because of the French connections, the State of Louisiana.

1:43:24 Actually, if you want to be a lawyer,

1:43:26 you have to pass a different bar in Louisiana than in everywhere else in the US.

1:43:32 Why do you think the Western Roman

1:43:36 Empire and then the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed?

1:43:39 Just looking at the grand picture of the history of the Roman Empire,

1:43:43 it's 2,200 years starting from the kingdom to the republic....

1:43:47 and to the imperial period, to the East Roman Empire period.

1:43:51 Why do societies rise and fall?

1:43:55 That's a really interesting question,

1:43:56 and there are probably as many answers as there are different kingdoms.

1:43:59 But just the Roman Empire.

1:44:02 My take on it is that the collapse really

1:44:07 starts at the end of the reign of Basil II.

1:44:10 So the year is 1025.

1:44:12 Basil is the last monarch of the Macedonian dynasty,

1:44:17 which had seen the empire become the most powerful state in the Mediterranean,

1:44:23 much more powerful and advanced than its Muslim or Christian neighbors.

1:44:27 He had expanded the empire essentially as large

1:44:31 as it was going to be after Justinian.

1:44:34 It was wealthy, it was glittering, it was educated.

1:44:38 I mean, courtiers had to memorize the works of Plato by heart.

1:44:43 The emperor, one of his favorite activities was to go,

1:44:46 and he would begin a quote, and you would have to finish it,

1:44:49 but you didn't know where he would begin or what he was thinking that day.

1:44:53 This is kind of what amused him, so they're incredibly literate.

1:44:57 I mean, inside Constantinople itself,

1:44:59 the literacy rate was close to 100, which is...

1:45:03 crazy.

1:45:03 But when he died, the court, which had been this magnificent court,

1:45:07 this bureaucracy which had been running the empire,

1:45:09 and which is vital to the workings of the empire,

1:45:13 they convinced themselves that they could run the empire,

1:45:15 they didn't actually need the emperor.

1:45:17 And so they specifically selected weak rulers,

1:45:22 and then that led directly to the disastrous Battle of Manzikert in 1071,

1:45:26 where the Turks enter the story and defeat,

1:45:30 destroy the Roman army under Romanos Diogenes,

1:45:33 who's attempting to break free of the bureaucratic constraints.

1:45:38 And then Anatolia gets flooded by these nomadic warriors,

1:45:43 and the Byzantine gets pushed out on the...

1:45:46 So once they've lost the heartland, they've lost their source of troops,

1:45:50 they've lost their source of taxation, they've lost their source of food.

1:45:54 At this point it's impossible to recover, and the crusades are an attempt,

1:45:59 the First Crusade anyway is an attempt

1:46:02 by the Eastern Emperor Alexius to recover Asia Minor, more than Jerusalem.

1:46:07 He wants to recover Asia Minor, and obviously it doesn't work out.

1:46:11 So I think at that point, it's on a trajectory that can only end in collapse.

1:46:16 And I think that's, you can see that same kind

1:46:18 of thing in the Viking world that we talked about,

1:46:25 this stultifying, bureaucratic, this inflexibility.

1:46:29 Combined with the growing threats from all directions.

1:46:32 Growing threats in all directions.

1:46:33 Maybe your own success is beginning to be a problem.

1:46:35 And you can't adapt as quickly, you're not as lean and mean anymore.

1:46:41 There's too many traditions, too many,

1:46:43 too much, the weight of history breaks you.

1:46:46 You sort of mentioned the Macedonian period,

1:46:48 the dynasty where it's where the East Roman Empire flourished once again,

1:46:52 but like, they have gone through so many periods like that, and they lasted.

1:46:56 That's true.

1:46:56 That is true.

1:46:57 I don't know what the reason is, but you can really trace the Roman spirit,

1:47:04 the Roman state, the core of whatever that is, through that 2200-year period.

1:47:12 There's a real connection there,

1:47:13 a thread that connects all of it, and so that, there's lessons.

1:47:17 That's why we do need to study the Byzantine

1:47:20 Empire for lessons of what makes societies last.

1:47:24 Eventually everything collapses,

1:47:25 but like that one lasted-- That one lasted a long time.

1:47:30 longer.

1:47:30 It's easier to last when you're hidden away somewhere,

1:47:32 but they were in the middle of everything.

1:47:34 Everybody wanted what they had.

1:47:35 Yeah, they were getting hit on all sides.

1:47:38 There was, in their entire 2200-year history,

1:47:40 there was not a single year they were at peace on all frontiers.

1:47:45 And it wasn't always because they were looking for trouble.

1:47:47 No.

1:47:48 They're, a lot of it is defensive.

1:47:51 Yep, including with those pesky Normans.

1:47:56 Yeah, yeah.

1:47:57 On the topic of great men in history, so where do you land on this great debate?

1:48:04 How important are individual humans versus systems?

1:48:07 So what do you think turns the tides of history?

1:48:11 Can individual rulers or individual warriors or individual humans

1:48:17 have the power to change the course of history?

1:48:20 Yeah, that's the question, isn't it?

1:48:21 I...

1:48:23 The short answer is I subscribe to the great man or great woman theory.

1:48:29 Um, I think there's moments I can't imagine the Protestant Reformation.

1:48:32 I don't think you can just swap

1:48:34 out Martin Luther and have a Protestant Reformation.

1:48:36 I don't think you can swap out Augustus and have the Roman Empire.

1:48:40 I mean, there are...

1:48:41 I don't think you can swap out con- and so on and so forth.

1:48:46 I think ultimately these impersonal forces are insufficient for explaining,

1:48:51 because we are people.

1:48:53 We are humans.

1:48:54 We are, you know, everything is kind of a relational thing.

1:48:58 And but at the same time, you know, the moment needs the man,

1:49:04 but the man also needs the moment, you know?

1:49:08 Some of it is timing, some of it is the environment—- Yeah-...

1:49:11 the system around it.

1:49:12 But yeah, I've just seen so many incredible humans

1:49:17 that persevere through things that would break basically everybody.

1:49:23 And they, the power of the belief they have.

1:49:27 We were talking offline about Napoleon.

1:49:30 Here's a guy who was a student of all the great military generals of the past.

1:49:37 Extremely competent in being able to micromanage

1:49:40 every aspect of military affairs of a nation,

1:49:44 but also extremely confident in his vision

1:49:49 of the world and ability to conquer anyone.

1:49:52 And you have the same thing with Genghis Khan.

1:49:57 This boy that came from nothing.

1:50:01 Everything was taken away.

1:50:03 He united all of Mongolia,

1:50:07 and then conquered most of the known world to them, including eventually China.

1:50:14 And it's like, well,

1:50:16 can you possibly have the great Mongol Empire without Genghis Khan?

1:50:25 No.

1:50:26 And the same, and we as Americans

1:50:28 ask ourselves that question about the founders.

1:50:30 I mean, George Washington, not to romanticize it,

1:50:34 but to give away power symbolically is

1:50:38 a really powerful statement like we'll mention with Augustus.

1:50:42 There's...

1:50:43 When somebody's given power, and in some sense absolute power,

1:50:48 what they do with that power can reverberate through generations,

1:50:53 and that's in the hands of an individual.

1:50:57 Yeah.

1:50:57 Yeah, that's exactly right.

1:50:58 That's well put.

1:51:00 You know, Cincinnatus in Ancient Rome, same thing.

1:51:05 What lessons from...

1:51:06 This is a big, ridiculous question, but-...

1:51:09 what lessons from all the things we've talked about,

1:51:12 the exploration of the Vikings?

1:51:15 What lessons do you learn from Vikings?

1:51:18 Lessons, lessons to learn from the Viking Age.

1:51:21 By the way, I should mention one thing.

1:51:23 It's a very practical lesson,

1:51:25 That we didn't talk about that you taught me is the, the Vikings were,

1:51:31 like groomed themselves.

1:51:34 Oh yeah, yeah.

1:51:35 They were like clean.

1:51:35 This is so very surprising to me.

1:51:38 That they like washed themselves and then both the men and the women-...

1:51:41 really took care of themselves.

1:51:43 You don't often think about that.

1:51:45 There was this whole...

1:51:46 Like, the Vikings, everyone at this...

1:51:48 Everyone has this very clear picture of what a Viking looked like-...

1:51:51 and also has no idea what a Viking looked like somehow at the same time.

1:51:55 Like, almost everything about them is wrong-...

1:51:58 that we think of.

1:51:59 You know, almost everything about them is wrong.

1:52:01 They didn't wear horned helmets.

1:52:03 Um, they, their hair probably was blonde disproportionately,

1:52:07 but that was more because they used lye

1:52:10 to dye it because it would kill the lice.

1:52:12 And then they would take baths on a more regular basis than...

1:52:17 I mean, this depended on where you were.

1:52:19 So in England, for example,

1:52:20 they were mocked as being soft, which always blows my mind.

1:52:24 Like, really?

1:52:24 You're gonna mock the Vikings for being soft?

1:52:26 Because they took too many baths.

1:52:29 But then in the Muslim east one Muslim traveler writes that they were

1:52:34 God's filthiest creatures because of their habits

1:52:37 of kind of disgusting shared bathing.

1:52:42 Oh, that aspect of it.

1:52:44 Yeah.

1:52:44 So, it's not that they didn't bathe, they bathed a little too much and together.

1:52:48 They bathed, but they also like would brush their teeth-...

1:52:53 using like recycled water.

1:52:54 Like, they would then spit into a cup and pass it to the next guy.

1:52:57 Got it.

1:52:57 It was...

1:52:58 It's not awesome.

1:52:59 I read that...

1:53:00 This is, this could be propaganda,

1:53:02 but I read that in England there was worry that the Vikings

1:53:07 were a bit too attractive to the women of England because,

1:53:11 because of how much the Vikings took care of themselves in terms of grooming.

1:53:18 Yeah.

1:53:18 In the Danelaw, like you get invaded by these people-...

1:53:22 they're kicking your rear end militarily.

1:53:25 Now they're stealing your women just to insult you as well.

1:53:27 You know?

1:53:28 Yeah.

1:53:29 They're...

1:53:30 They wash themselves daily.

1:53:33 They've got good teeth.

1:53:34 What is this bullshit?

1:53:35 Whether they need it or not, I know.

1:53:36 It really is...

1:53:38 Why you guys can't have everything?

1:53:40 What are you doing?

1:53:40 Anyway, I, so yeah, so one of the lessons

1:53:42 I think we need to draw is shower daily.

1:53:46 Shower daily.

1:53:46 Yeah, there you go.

1:53:47 That's right.

1:53:48 That's the one thing I forgot.

1:53:49 That's the lesson, that's the takeaway, that's the big profound takeaway.

1:53:52 Is there something bigger about the exploration,

1:53:54 about the leaps into the unknown?

1:53:57 Yeah, I think a couple of years ago, there were all these debates about statues.

1:54:00 Make sure we pull these statues down.

1:54:02 This person did a bad thing, let's pull these statues.

1:54:04 You know, and, and I always thought they were kind of silly, too.

1:54:06 I mean, I understand the point, but...

1:54:09 Like, we don't...

1:54:10 When you have a statue of Christopher Columbus, for example,

1:54:12 you're not glorifying every single thing the man ever did

1:54:16 and, and all the bad stuff that comes from this or that.

1:54:20 You're honoring something about him,

1:54:22 like the spirit it takes to cross an ocean not knowing what's on the other side,

1:54:28 and, and that's that spirit of exploration.

1:54:29 I think with the Vikings, it's the same.

1:54:32 There's this way you, you approach the world, this fearless, pragmatic approach.

1:54:39 I think as an American too, it's the ultimate, it's the ultimate rags to riches.

1:54:44 It's the myth we tell ourself.

1:54:45 You know, the, the man who starts with nothing and ends up as a sea king,

1:54:50 well respected and sung about by poets.

1:54:52 I mean, that's, that's it right there.

1:54:54 You know, this is...

1:54:57 And when you're, when you're a society and you

1:54:59 stop doing this, you run into trouble as well.

1:55:03 Uh, what about the, the Byzantine Empire?

1:55:05 What lessons you draw from them?

1:55:08 This is a much...

1:55:09 That's a much bigger one.

1:55:10 Um-- 1000-year history.

1:55:12 1000-year history, and it's also what I think is so cool about the Byzantines is

1:55:15 that in the ways that they are like us and the way that they are unlike us.

1:55:19 In some ways, they're very analogous to the United States.

1:55:24 The kind of the polyglot nature of their inhabitants,

1:55:28 you know, the, their roots, the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian roots.

1:55:35 And yet it was a place of incredible alien things as well.

1:55:43 Men sitting on top of pillars.

1:55:44 You know, a king, an incredibly hierarchical system which abhorred democracy.

1:55:50 Um, so I think it's a way, it's a route we could have taken...

1:55:57 um, and it's the way they handled things.

1:56:01 Immigration, inflation, war, peace, diplomacy.

1:56:05 I think there are lessons there for us.

1:56:09 Yeah.

1:56:09 Yeah, I think from the Vikings, the lessons are a bit more poetic.

1:56:13 The lessons from the Byzantine Empire are quite literal,

1:56:15 like how to run a government, how to run the law, how to-- Yeah.

1:56:20 How to build a stable society.

1:56:21 And honestly, like you can count on the fingers of one hand,

1:56:25 states that have lasted a thousand years, right?

1:56:28 Byzantium and Venice, I think.

1:56:31 And Venice was an offshoot of the Byzantines.

1:56:34 Like that's a gov- for a government to last a thousand years is a rare thing.

1:56:37 Like, we should be taking a look at this.

1:56:40 Like how?

1:56:40 And how much of that is due to Augustus?

1:56:44 Can we give him any credit for this?

1:56:46 He built the system.

1:56:48 Yeah.

1:56:48 But there was a lot, like you mentioned a lot of people along

1:56:52 the way from Constantine to Justinian, the Basils.

1:56:56 There's so many emperors along the way that revolutionized

1:56:59 and then restabilized the empire after it was almost falling apart.

1:57:04 Oh, yeah.

1:57:05 You know what else too though?

1:57:06 Like what happens to a human when

1:57:10 you give that human essentially absolute power?

1:57:13 'Cause the Byzantine emperor stood halfway there.

1:57:16 I mean, he was more autocratic than anything other than, I don't know,

1:57:19 the pope that we, you know, have in the modern world.

1:57:24 What happens when you give someone that level of power?

1:57:26 Like, I love Justinian, but I wouldn't have liked to know him.

1:57:32 You know, I wouldn't like to be one of his subjects.

1:57:35 I love Basil I, but the man was a bloodthirsty tyrant.

1:57:39 Like, I think it shows you what happened.

1:57:41 What is it?

1:57:42 Lord Acton, "Absolute power corrupts,

1:57:43 and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Like

1:57:46 that's quite clear throughout Byzantine histories, and it's a long, long list.

1:57:53 And as technologies become more powerful,

1:57:59 absolute power becomes potentially more destructive,

1:58:02 so-- Yeah, it's more absolute.

1:58:04 It's more absolute.

1:58:05 You know?

1:58:05 And it's, I mean, this is the project for the 21st century,

1:58:10 the 20th and the 21st centuries post-Industrial Revolution,

1:58:15 post the computer technological revolution, post nuclear weapons discovery.

1:58:24 How do we construct societies that last

1:58:26 like the Byzantine Empire did a thousand years?

1:58:30 It's just like a new challenge for us.

1:58:34 There's gonna be history books written about

1:58:36 us 'cause like nuclear weapons, you know,

1:58:40 80 years ago, it's like Greek fire that you

1:58:45 can apply to the entirety of human civilization.

1:58:49 And so—...

1:58:50 there's gonna be good history books,

1:58:51 and I hope there's gonna be these stories about the American empire,

1:58:56 about the rest that sound similar to Byzantine Empire,

1:59:01 um, versus the Viking age.

1:59:04 It only lasted-...

1:59:06 three centuries.

1:59:07 I mean, I suppose the good news is it can be done, right?

1:59:10 Or it has been done.

1:59:12 It has been done.

1:59:13 What gives you hope about the future, having looked at the deep history of us?

1:59:18 What gives you hope?

1:59:21 During grad school, I was reading

1:59:25 Frederick Douglass' autobiography, and he said,

1:59:28 "I could sit with Plato and Cicero, and they would not flinch." You know,

1:59:34 by which he meant that the great conversation was for everyone,

1:59:37 no matter what your skin color, no matter what your level of income,

1:59:40 and even no matter your intelligence, you know?

1:59:42 And I think that's actually what, that's why history comes alive for me,

1:59:47 is because these are not alien people.

1:59:50 You had asked how similar are ancient people to us psychologically.

1:59:57 You know, and what their goals were for life.

1:59:59 And I think the short answer is they were identical to us,

2:00:02 which is why we can understand them.

2:00:04 It's, why you should read things.

2:00:06 It's why you should read the Meditations because this is not just some dry

2:00:12 whatever talking to himself in a culture

2:00:14 that you cannot understand and can never recreate.

2:00:17 It's a human talking about being human, you know?

2:00:20 And I think human nature has not changed,

2:00:22 and I don't think human nature will change.

2:00:25 So we are flawed and broken, and we're—that's the human condition.

2:00:32 We're gonna be flawed and broken.

2:00:35 So I don't think...

2:00:36 I actually think that's the great, that's the great question of history.

2:00:41 If you wanna understand history, you have to know about human nature.

2:00:46 What is our human nature?

2:00:47 If you think it's a blank slate,

2:00:49 and we can kind of educate ourselves to a utopia or, you know,

2:00:52 like the Marxists said then, okay.

2:00:56 Hasn't really worked out, but okay.

2:00:57 If you believe we're basically bad,

2:01:01 there's a whole set of things that come with that.

2:01:02 If you believe we're basically good, there's a whole set of...

2:01:04 Right?

2:01:04 So, you won't learn the appropriate lesson if you misdiagnose human nature.

2:01:10 Yeah.

2:01:11 I think the diagnosis that you're kinda

2:01:12 hinting at is seemingly the most accurate one, which is we're flawed.

2:01:19 A mix of good, a mix of evil, capacity for both.

2:01:22 That's right.

2:01:23 That's right.

2:01:23 I mean, I have to teach my kids to be kind.

2:01:26 I don't have to teach my kids to be unkind.

2:01:28 I mean, one of those is natural, and one is not.

2:01:31 I think my kids can become kind, you know?

2:01:36 The capacity.

2:01:37 The capacity.

2:01:37 Is there.

2:01:38 Humans have the capacity for much great things.

2:01:42 But not perfection.

2:01:43 It has to come outside of us.

2:01:47 Well, what is it?

2:01:48 That line of all of us are in the gutter,

2:01:52 but some of us are looking up at the stars.

2:01:55 And so you gotta teach as many of us and to look up at the stars and dream.

2:02:03 Because once you allow yourself to dream of a better world, you try, you try.

2:02:08 Like the Vikings did, go out there.

2:02:11 Don't try to not to murder your neighbor,

2:02:13 but if you do, all of us have, of course.

2:02:17 If you do, there's Greenland.

2:02:18 There's Greenland.

2:02:18 There's Greenland.

2:02:19 Thank you for everything you've done for the world.

2:02:21 Thank you for the podcast you put out there.

2:02:23 Thank you for your incredible books, and thank you for the conversation today.

2:02:27 Thank you.

2:02:28 I really appreciate the opportunity.

2:02:29 Thanks a lot.

2:02:31 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Lars Brownworth.

2:02:33 To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description

2:02:37 where you can also find links to contact me,

2:02:39 ask questions, give feedback, and so on.

2:02:42 And now, let me leave you with some words from the Volsunga Saga,

2:02:46 a 13th century Icelandic prose epic that tells the story of the Volsunga clan,

2:02:52 a legendary Norse dynasty of heroes and dragon slayers.

2:02:57 "Fear not death, for the hour of your doom is set,

2:03:02 and none may escape it." And another powerful quote from this saga is,

2:03:10 "Better to fight and fall than to live without hope." Thank you for listening,

2:03:17 and hope to see you next time.