Viking Origins: The Nordic Iron Age

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The Long Nordic Iron Age

0:30Two thousand years ago, centuries before the Vikings, there was another Scandinavia. An Iron Age world of shifting settlements, changing burial rites, growing hierarchy and far-reaching contacts was already taking shape long before the longships ever set sail.

1:04The Viking Age was still centuries away, but the societies that would give rise to it were already developing trade connections, maritime skills and warrior ideologies that would later shape the medieval north. So how should we understand this much longer story? What is archaeology revealing about life in Iron Age Scandinavia before the Vikings? To answer that and more, today on The Ancients, I'm joined by Dr. Marianne Hem-Eriksson,

1:35Research Professor of Viking Studies at the National Museum of Denmark. Together, we're travelling back through the Long Nordic Iron Age to explore the societies, beliefs, technologies and networks of Scandinavia's deep past. From Bronze Age legacies and Roman contact, to elite drinking halls, burial customs and the deep roots of the seafaring north.

2:03Marianne, it is great to have you on the podcast. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Now, I'm sorry, I have to start with the word Viking, Vikings, and the question, who really were the first Vikings? Interesting question. Impossible to answer, obviously. I remember when I was an undergrad, I was lucky enough to have a lecturer called Neil Price. He's a quite prominent Viking archaeologist, some of you may have heard of, and is now a good friend. And I remember in one of his first lectures, he had a slide with a picture of a bunch of warriors

2:37and a Viking ship. And there was a speech bubble. And the speech bubble said, hurry up, lads, or we'll miss the Viking Age. And it was a great intro to problematize that the terms we use for the past, right, they come from us. It's a kind of retrospective exercise. So the Vikings didn't know that they lived in the Viking Age, etc. And that really goes for all periods. So to say who were the first Vikings is kind of an impossible exercise.

3:09And to just problematize further, they also didn't necessarily refer to themselves as the Vikings. But if you want to ask me, when do I think the Viking Age started? I think the traditional narrative of, you know, the whatever June 793 with the attack of Lindisfarne is probably not accurate. And it might have been a bit before. We can get into that. 793 is a bit too modern for us on the ancients, I must admit. But can we explore, if we go back into ancient times, kind of learn more about the story about

3:42how these so-called Vikings and the Viking Age came to be by exploring the archaeology, by exploring what we know about Scandinavia back, let's say, roughly some 2,000 years ago. So we can go back into ancient times. Absolutely, we can. So we often call the Iron Age of Scandinavia the Long Nordic Iron Age, because it is a very, very long period after the end of the Bronze Age. We often started at 500 Common Era, CE. And at least in parts of Scandinavian archaeology, we actually include the Viking Age in the Iron

4:19Age, in the Long Iron Age. It's seen as the final period of the Iron Age, and it's seen as the final period of prehistory. And that's because in Scandinavia, we didn't have the conversion to Christianity, the Romans never made it that far north. So we didn't have writing systems, except for the runes, which are, you know, runic inscriptions are short and formulaic. So the Iron Age, the Long Iron Age, is actually kind of one long continuum, obviously full of transitions and change. It was not static, but it is one kind of deep slice of prehistory and the final parts of

4:54prehistory in our chronology. So how long roughly, I know you can't give exact dates, but how long roughly, what are the traditional kind of the start and endpoints that scholars put on the Iron Age in Scandinavia? How large a period of time are we talking? So about 1500 years, I'd say. So 500 BCE until the end of the Viking Age, I'd say. So let's say 1050 CE. And when we're talking about Iron Age Scandinavia, should we be thinking the same as today, like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, that area?

5:28Excluding Finland, I think. So Finnish is a different language group. So outside of the Scandinavian sphere, but I'd say for ease, the modern nation states of Norway, Sweden and Denmark. And so roughly 500 BCE, if you say that that's kind of the point when the Iron Age roughly begins in Scandinavia, what transitions, what changes do you see in the archaeology around that time?

Shifts in the Bronze Age

5:54The end of the Bronze Age famously came with this collapse in these widespread networks of bronze and bronze exchange, right? So to make bronze, you need copper and tin. I'm sure you covered this in a previous episode on the Bronze Age, which needed to facilitate these wide networks of contact and exchange. And then something happens. The bronze networks fall. And with them, also the local elites that were controlling the import of bronze to Scandinavia

6:25probably lost a lot of their prominence. From the late Bronze Age onwards, you no longer have mound burial, monumental mound burials. So in the later parts of the Bronze Age, cremation became ubiquitous. And in that transition into the first part of the Iron Age, which we call the pre-Roman Iron Age, so 500 BCE to year zero, we have quite a shift in material culture in the sense that it's a gradual transition through the late Bronze Age, but there is no longer much

6:56monumentality in any form of material culture. So burials are, as I said, they burn the bodies. They place parts of the burnt bones into simple containers like urns or even just in little pits. There's no or very limited exterior marking of the burials, and there are very few or no grave goods. So these new burial field cemeteries, they seem to be expressing more collective identities and perhaps kinship groups and household groups rather than individual prominence.

7:30So in death, all seem the same. Similar things are happening with the architecture you no longer have. I'm painting with a broad brush here. But you no longer have these standout larger houses. House sizes are standardized. They are quite small. And so you're kind of lacking expression of hierarchy in the archaeology. And that has been connected possibly to the introduction of Iron, which was also a slow and gradual

8:00process. But unlike bronze, where you needed these large scale networks in order to accrue and create bronze, iron could be extracted locally. It took a couple of centuries before that iron production actually really geared up. But it has been denoted as potentially a kind of great equalizer because it was more self-sufficient and local communities could create the iron they needed rather than export this exotic and precious material. Do we think in Scandinavia there are new people coming in or is it the same people?

8:33But as you say, it's just the collapse of the kind of the copper and the tin and the bronze trade. That means that they have to rethink their kind of societal structures in that time of change. And it is still the same people. We think it's largely the same people. Obviously, people have moved at all times. So if you look at genetic history, I'm not a geneticist, so I will not try to represent genetic history in any precise manner. But of course, there are always admixture events, as they would call it. But, you know, there are flows of people coming and going. So I'm not saying it was static.

9:04But I think largely, yes, it was a continuation of the same societies and the same people as in the Bronze Age. What is happening on the continent, though, does influence Scandinavia as well. And so what we have is a major new player in Central Europe, which are the Celts. So we start getting exotic artifacts in South Scandinavia as the pre-Roman Iron Age progresses, like artifacts from the Etruscan areas, for instance, end up in Denmark in particular.

9:37So there seems to be lots of cultural contact. And particularly from the Danish side of things, there's also some connections to Eastern Europe, to Poland. So it's, I guess, the conventional narrative was that this was a very dark period. You have the kind of the glory of the Bronze Age, and then you get into this more egalitarian and modest pre-Roman Iron Age. There was also conventionally a story about climate change that was seen as very catastrophic.

10:08And there was climate change, but it was probably not as severe as the earlier narratives wanted to portray it. There was a kind of the story of this dark time of isolation, and that doesn't seem to be the case at all. We were still interconnected, but it was expressed in a different way. Let's focus on that kind of that pre-Roman Iron Age. So as you say, roughly 500 BC to about zero or one, as we should say. Overall, in Scandinavia, what should we be thinking about kind of the power structures? Should we be thinking of a lot of unity across the land or very much dispersed communal groups,

10:43you know, each with their kind of own distinct identity, so to speak?

Power structures and society

10:46I think probably the latter, in that this is way before the nation-states of Denmark, Sweden, or Norway existed. So probably the region, the landscape was quite important. And of course, Scandinavia is also very varied geographically. And so, for instance, in Norway, where I come from, I'm Norwegian originally, the topography is extremely challenging. You have mountain ranges that divide little valleys that naturally creates a lot of boundaries

11:18in the landscape and may have helped produce, co-produce, and generate these regional kind of identities, interconnected. And I think that is broadly similar for southern Scandinavia, although less challenging topography. But I think that people were probably quite dispersed. In south Scandinavia, you start getting hamlets and villages. So they were dwelling more collectively. In central Scandinavia, in Norway and Sweden, you could have settlements that were kilometers

11:49apart. So they were networked. They were probably in kinship alliances and that sort of thing, but quite low population and quite isolated. And do we have any insight into kind of the power structures of these various kind of these various settlements that, as you say, could be divided, could be separated by quite a distance from each other? So the fact that they don't express hierarchy in monuments and furnished burials does, of course, not mean that no hierarchy existed.

12:20And some have argued, kind of conversely, that they didn't need to express hierarchy in large monuments because it was understood who the rulers were, the powerful people were. I think it was probably more collective. We would traditionally say these are tribal societies, perhaps kind of petty chiefdoms. This is prior to any kind of kingdom. What we seem to have is a system, for instance, of what we call wandering settlements, which means

12:51that rather than leader ideas where you own a plot of land and you build your house on that land and you rebuild and rebuild and rebuild as a kind of, this is an estate, this is a territory that is owned by this family or these people. In the pre-Roman Iron Age, the settlements are wandering in the sense that they probably stand for one generation. So it seems like people built a house to live there, to have children, whatever, living their lives. But once that generation was done, they would move and build a new house.

13:26And that's been seen as possibly reflecting a kind of collective reorganization of land and that the idea of private property and landholding actually didn't exist yet. So it's difficult to know how hierarchical was this? Was there a chief in charge or not? In the last 10 or 20 years in archaeological theory, so in the interpretive frameworks that we use, anarchism has been an anarchic theory, has been quite prominent. And there are those who will say, is it us that's kind of obsessed with seeing chieftains

14:01and power structures everywhere? And perhaps they were living in a more communal, collective way. But if there is that movement across Scandinavia, as it seems to be in the early Iron Age, Marianne, do we think that there's evidence of kind of at least roughly some sort of overarching culture, whether it be with a language or beliefs that, you know, at least generally speaking, people all across Scandinavia, you know, they could understand one another in those kind of overarching aspects?

14:31Yeah, I'm among those who think that Scandinavia was one cultural sphere. I think archaeology as a discipline, you know, it emerged during National Romanticism. And so as many of the historical disciplines, originally it was there to serve a purpose of telling national stories and produce identities, whether it was English history or French history or Swedish history. So I think there has been a little bit of a tendency for silo thinking in archaeology,

15:01conventionally speaking, where the national or even regional identity became really important in the narratives because that was the role, telling our story and the story of our identity. And I think that's created some, a little bit of skepticism into seeing the cross-regional period. But in my research, I often work with Scandinavia as a whole. That means sometimes sacrificing the nuance because, of course, there are regional differences because I was just talking about how these landscapes would generate kind of different little communities. But if you accept that was the case, there are still shared way of burying your dead, shared

15:37architecture and ways of living, shared forms of dress, presumably shared language, not without dialects and differences, but still inter-understandable. As the three Scandinavian languages are still today, we can still speak our own languages and understand each other. So I'm among those who think, yes, there was probably a kind of cultural package that was shared. Let's explore certain aspects of that now and let's go into the settlements themselves. And we can start in the early Iron Age and then explore if there are any kind of clear

16:08changes that we see archaeologically in the later Iron Age period, the post-Roman interactions. And we'll get to the Romans as well in a bit.

Life in Iron Age settlements

16:16But Marianne, give us a picture. So what do we think from the archaeology that a typical settlement in Iron Age Scandinavia looks like? So as I said in the earlier parts, in the pre-Roman Iron Age, it seems that the houses were quite small and one generation of lengths. The complexity of the household was probably a little bit reduced. This is before we have lots of mobility and travel. This is before we have outsider groups coming in as we get later in the Iron Age and possibly

16:47most famously in the Viking Age. Houses were small. They were conventionally, we think, divided into two parts. An animal buyer, where the animals lived, and a dwelling buyer for the humans. So it means that humans and animals were living under the same roof. There will have been seasonal changes when the animals were out grazing, etc. But generally, a kind of intimate relationship between humans and animals that's quite foreign to many of us today who live in a time of industrial farming and quite remote from the animals that

17:22we put on our plate and eat, perhaps. So I think that had lots of consequences in terms of the sensory experience of living in these houses, the sounds and the smells. You would obviously have a household of some variation. We don't know, really. People often just assume that the idea of marriage, for instance, existed in deeper history. We talk about marriage all the time. We don't actually know whether people would pair up. For life, we don't know what their moral codes around sexuality and monogamy.

17:55And if you go to anthropology and ethnography, there are lots of different ways to organize family lives. So sometimes I think that we project the idea of the nuclear family a bit too easily onto the past. And it may have been more complicated than that. Also because things like maternal mortality was presumably very high, as it is in other pre-industrial societies. So I don't think it's unlikely that some people would at least then remarry. I'm saying remarry with quotation marks here, because they would perhaps lose their first

18:26spouse or partner in childbirth or in other kinds of accidents. Life was probably harsh and quite short for the earlier parts of the Iron Age, I think we might expect. It's difficult to say anything about life expectancy for the very earliest part, because everyone was cremated. So you don't have this colletial evidence. But let's say, you know, 40 was probably quite old for many people throughout this long period, also including the Viking Age. That was probably, you know, I'm turning 41 now, so I might be looking kind of sunset in

18:59the horizon if I was living in the period. Children will naturally have occurred, again, depending on how they organized sexual partners. That might have been just our children, or it might have been our children and your children and bonus children and the kind of more broad way of living. Here in Britain, if someone mentions an Iron Age settlement and an Iron Age house, we're naturally going to think round, okay? The round house. But is that the case in Scandinavia?

19:31Do we know much about these early houses that they would have lived in? Should we be thinking round houses or something different? Something different. We do not have the round tradition at all in these areas, except I should say, just so it is mentioned, that we also in the North, in the Arctic, we also, of course, have Sami populations, or what are the predecessors of the Sami? And they have a rounder architecture. But since we're now focusing on the kind of the pre-Norse Scandinavian populations, their houses were rectangular.

20:03In the beginning of the Iron Age, more towards the, if not square, then at least quite short rectangles. And then they become the long houses, the perhaps more famous long houses of the later periods and then up to including the Viking Age. So they are trestle built. The roof is carried by posts. They have waddle and daub walls, perhaps thatched roofs or wooden roofs built entirely inorganic materials, perhaps with some stones for building foundations.

20:35So also susceptible to fires, for instance. And so in these earlier settlements of the early Iron Age, should we be imagining with these settlements, as you mentioned already, this idea of maybe one, two or three families, as you say, men, women, children in one settlement, and not anything larger than that, that could resemble anything like a proto-town or anything like that? So in southern Scandinavia and Denmark, there are aggregate houses, so in little hamlets, where each house may have one household, but they're living more collectively.

21:10Whereas, as I mentioned in other areas, there's much more dispersed settlements. When we get a bit further into the Iron Age, perhaps during the late Roman Iron Age, so let's say 4th century AD or CE, then we get houses of such a size, the long houses are getting longer and longer and longer, that I think, I have at least argued, we are probably looking at multiple households within one house. So we're beyond a nuclear family. And do we have evidence, so you see the settlements, you see the buildings themselves

21:42getting larger, the domestic buildings, do you have any evidence of communal buildings as well, kind of that sometimes we associate with Iron Age societies, almost like a drinking hall or something similar from that time period? Drinking halls, which are probably not communal, by the way, they're probably owned and controlled by the elites. Ah, okay. They come in, I think, as quite a direct influence from the Romans. So then we're into the Roman period. So just to answer your question first, and then we can get into the drinking halls, if you wish.

22:12I think in the earlier periods, there is no communal architecture. It is very based around the domestic houses and the fields and the agricultural way of life, rather than having, you know, there are no inns, there are no guest houses, there are no assembly halls. There is nothing except the long house, which is why I think that was quite a central institution in Scandinavia for a really long time period. I could have mentioned too that the long house tradition, it didn't start in the pre-Roman

22:43Iron Age, it starts in the Bronze Age. Ah, so that's a continuation. And the basic architectural form survived in Scandinavia for about 3,000 years, which I find absolutely fascinating. Come on then, you can't leave us on with that other part of your answer unfinished. That emergence in that later period of those bigger communal structures. I mean, I just said drinking halls because I couldn't think of any other words for it. But then you've said that actually we do have these things archaeologically, which seem to be Iron Age drinking halls in Scandinavia.

23:13Absolutely, we do.

Roman influence and drinking halls

23:16Towards the end of the pre-Roman Iron Age, there's a new player in Europe, and that is, of course, with the emergence of the Roman Empire. And that has an influence way north of the Lemus, way north of the Roman frontiers as well. So although the Romans never made it that far, the Roman Empire had a profound effect. And one of the most tangible examples is actually the innovation of the hall building and the import of Roman drinking culture.

23:47So not to say that they didn't have alcohol before that. In Scandinavia, surely they did. People have always been interested in alcohol, I think. Some people even connect the innovation of agriculture to the Neolithic revolution to being able to produce alcohol. But it takes on a different form. So the encounters with the Roman Empire would have been through trade exchange, but also actually some Scandinavians serving in the Roman army, which I've always, by the way,

24:18found really fascinating. Because coming from these very dispersed, quite modest societies, and then coming to somewhere like Rome, it must have been impossible to take in. And it must have been impossible to come back to Scandinavia afterwards and try to explain what you'd seen. And I've often thought about them coming back into their local communities and trying to explain something like a triumph or the Roman Senate. And how do you explain that when people are living in such a different world and such a different way of life? One of the things they definitely picked up through trades, just knowledge exchange or through

24:52living in the Roman Empire for a bit was the drinking culture. And so they start bringing in these sets of Roman glass and cauldrons and ladles that were used for wine in the Roman Empire, presumably used for beer or maybe mead in the homelands. And that becomes a kind of distinguishing feature in some burials. So a kind of rich exotica that might mark out some people as different. So the halls were probably built and controlled by the elites, because we are also seeing at

25:29this time increased hierarchies and hierarchization again. And the hall buildings became a place for, in addition to perhaps being the dwelling of the leading family, it also became a space for representation and for feasting. And that has been connected to the idea of gift exchange, that in the Mossian sense, so you may know from different cultures that to give gifts to others can be a way of creating alliances, but also creating debts.

25:59And to be able to offer your warriors, say you're a petty chief somewhere in Jutland, and you are able to invite your warrior retinue, the people that you want fighting for you and on your side, to a lavish feast where they can have lots of food and lots of beer, and they can never repay that. So this is part of the kind of creating a loyalty bond. There's an anthropologist called Michael Dietler who would say that feasting is a way of actually making other people literally devour the gift that you're giving.

26:31And so they're kind of internalizing that social debt into their bodies, which I think is a fascinating thought. But of course, there will have been other things like the gift exchange of weapons and other things that would tie people together, both people that were subordinate to you and perhaps also creating alliances with people that were on the same rank. So can you see, as we've also then talked about the earlier period as well, clearly in the archaeology, a sense of significant cultural evolution over those centuries?

27:01You see, Rome seems to be a big part in this, but throughout Scandinavia at that time, clear shifts in the cultural and how people were living. There are absolutely clear shifts. There's also continuity. And I also like to complicate the term cultural evolution because it evokes an image in the mind. I'm not saying you meant this, but it evokes an image in the mind of societies going from complex and primitive and this kind of unilinear development into social complexity, where as

27:36what we've just seen, starting with the Bronze Age, where there were these vast global networks and elites controlling it, and then that collapsed. And then there was a more quiet, perhaps egalitarian period. And then hierarchization starts again. And I think that's more a way of thinking is ebbs and flows. So that's how I would say that in terms of the transition or trajectory towards what would later become Viking raids and kingdoms and ultimately state consolidation.

28:06Yes, I do think there's both change and continuity in the political and social structures that lead to that. So something I think does happen during the Roman Iron Age is that for the Germanic tribes, which are now counting Scandinavia as part of the Germanic tribes, they're sitting outside the Roman Empire. They have a complicated relationship with the Roman Empire. The people living closest are often in violent conflict with the Roman Empire, whereas further away, there could be easier to do trade and exchange, etc. It fuels both domestic political upheaval and perhaps more need for power consolidation, more

28:44wish for power consolidation among the tribes. But it also leads to what we often call the migration periods, where these Germanic tribes are putting lots of pressure on the Roman Empire because they are on the move. That's why it's called the migration period. You have these groups that we know from the so-called barbaric invasions of Rome, the Franks and the Goths and the Alamanni, and there's a whole plethora of these Germanic tribes, some

29:16coming from Central Europe and some coming from further north. And they are keeping an eye on what's happening in the Roman Empire. They're quite opportunistic. And when there's political instability, they start pressuring the borders and they start coming in. Interestingly, a lot of these Germanic groups trace their origin, whether ideally or realistically, to Scandinavia. So from around 500, we start having written sources about them saying that they tell a narrative that they're from Skansa, which we think is Scandinavia.

29:50A lot of the groups also trace their mythological origin to Odin or Vodin, the god. And that is absolutely both a kind of migratory movement and political pressure in a kind of small scale way. But it's also paving the way, I think, for new ways of thinking power in Scandinavia as well.

30:20Right, well, let's go on to something else then. In regards to burial in Scandinavia, you mentioned cremation in the Iron Age. But do we have many burials surviving from this period that give us more insights into everyday life and how people lived as we go further on? I mean, do we have a rich burial record from Iron Age Scandinavia?

Burial practices and bog bodies

30:50After the pre-Roman Iron Age, when we get into the Roman Iron Age proper during the time of the Roman Empire, inhumation makes a comeback. And that means that we have more osteological information, so information from the bodies and the skeletons, so you kind of more lived life, if you will. But there is also, because probably of that increased hierarchy, there is also more furnished burials, again, with the Roman exotica or other kind of. Rich artifacts.

31:21So we get, in some ways, a larger evidentiary basis. What's interesting in terms of mortuary practice is that it actually stays really varied from then on. Again, I'm painting with a broad brush. There are regions that look different. But broadly speaking, cremation and inhumation will now coexist for the next thousand years, basically, for the first millennium proper. In some areas, cremation is more normal. In some areas, inhumation on bird bodies is more normal. But they both coexist, which means there are lots of ways to treat a dead body.

31:55We haven't touched on it yet, but we also, of course, have, from the late Bronze Age, pre-Roman Iron Age onwards, the bog bodies, which we also have in Britain, etc. Shall we start with the bog bodies then, at the beginning? So what do we know about the bog bodies when we get to the Iron Age in Scandinavia? We have this really rich set of material from Northern Europe in general of this idea of let's treat some bodies very different to whatever is the customary norm in our communities,

32:28which will vary depending on where we are in time and place, and let's lower them into bogs where they are very well preserved. Anyone who's seen Lindelmann or Tollandmann, I think they are mesmerizing because you are absolutely face-to-face in the past, with the past, in a way that you are rarely. Some of them using the facial features are still there. It's a really striking set of material. And the question is, why were some people treated like that? And I mean, the conventional narratives would be, you know, some would say they are criminals

33:03or, I'm saying this with quotes, but deviant in some way, including sexual deviancy, would be a kind of more conventional, perhaps somewhat outdated interpretation now. Are they human sacrificed? Or is it just another variation of burial practice? I don't think there's one monocausal explanation. Some of them have seen trauma and violence. Some of them haven't. Even the ones where there is no sign of trauma on the bodies, they're sometimes found with,

33:34particularly in Denmark, with nooses around their necks, etc. So there seems to be symbolism of violence occurring. And from the, let's say with the bog bodies in particular, first of all, do we have evidence of men and women and maybe even children surviving as well? That can give us insights into kind of those aspects of society, their lives? I'm not aware of any children bog bodies, I have to say. That doesn't mean they might not exist on the top of my hand. But yes, there are some women as well. There's also lots of other things that often kind of become a bit overlooked because the

34:09bog bodies themselves are so fascinating. So from Denmark, and I believe also northern Germany, you have braids of hair. So a part of the body, not necessarily from a dead person, could be from a living person, but these elaborate braids of hair that have been lowered into the bogs as some sort of deposition or offering, you have butter, which may be a practical way of storing and creating butter, but it's also interesting. You have dress, but without the body itself.

34:40And you also, particularly from the Roman period onwards, weapons deposited en masse in the bogs. So I think, yes, we do get some glimpses of at least biological men and women and their health from the bog bodies, etc. But we also, through the artefacts, we also get lots of ideas of, yes, how people dress, the dyes that they use to colour the textiles, foodstuffs, etc.

Textiles and changing dress

35:10I was going to ask about that next, like kind of textiles and food. Do we know much about that key aspect that's so easy to overlook, let's say in that earlier period of the Iron Age? The interesting thing, which I've learned from my colleagues here at the National Museum, where there's textile research, this is very strong, is that, for instance, in the earlier periods, there seems to be no gendered difference in dress. So it seems like men and women actually wore these same garments. There's a sheepskin cape type that they know from a couple of the bog finds

35:43that's associated both with biological men and biological women. The garments themselves, the part of the dress seem to be identical. So that doesn't mean that gender was not important to them or biological sex wasn't important to them, but they don't seem to mark that very clearly in the pre-Roman Iron Age in the way that people dress, which I find absolutely fascinating. And then the colours and the dyes, that comes in increasingly through the Long Iron Age, I believe. So I believe there's a shift towards the end of the pre-Roman Iron Age.

36:17Before that, it seems like most of them were quite naturally coloured, and then they start experimenting more with different kinds of colour, including some quite glaring colours to our view, perhaps. By natural colours, what do you mean? Kind of like the colour of a deer hide, or I don't know if they're using sheep as well, and leather, those kind of natural browns and greys and the like. Exactly, from wool and plant fibres, etc. And then a wider repertoire comes in when they explore other kinds of plant dyes, etc.

36:49We did a documentary about the Picts last year and Iron Age Scotland, and actually going back into the Stone Age as well, many thousands of years earlier. The use of iron, but not as a metal material, haematite, the blood red colour that you get from iron. Do we see them using red as well, potentially? They use red. I don't know if it's from iron. I know that they use different types of plant dyes and a quite wide repertoire of them. And they also mix some of them together to create different kinds of colours.

37:19So yeah, red is definitely, and particularly when you get up to the Viking Age, I believe red and yellow are among the quite prominent colours of that time. Well, yes, I mean, let's move on to that second stage again then. So kind of the post-Roman or the Roman period onwards. You mentioned with the earlier Iron Age how there doesn't seem to be any difference in the clothing they're wearing and so on and so forth. I'm guessing when we get to this later period, is it quite different in the surviving record? In terms of adornment of the body, yes. When we get into the late Iron Age, there seems to be a quite standardised set.

37:52I have to caveat this because, of course, we're basing this on the burial record, and the burial record is partial. I said earlier that, you know, we say that history is written by the victors and that that can go for archaeology as well. There are some people in, when we get into like a proper hierarchicised society, a quite socially stratified society, as late Iron Age was, there are some people that are buried in ways that archaeologists recognise and have been interested in, and that is the monumental mounds, and that's often the high-status people. So they are the ones that conventionally

38:25would also unearth the most precious artefacts, which the antiquarians were mostly interested in. So our record is a little bit biased, but for the elites, yes, we have an idea of how they dressed, and at least in death, not necessarily in life, but at least in death, they're staged with a quite strict repertoire of dress. So women's dress, particularly for the Viking Age, but also from the periods before, just with some changes, would be two sets of brooches

38:55that were attached in some way on the shoulders, perhaps, and then long dress-like garments with some sort of undershirt. Between the brooches, there could be strings of beads of different kinds. In earlier periods, you could also have a central brooch or just one large, often exaggerated-sized brooch for women's dress. So there was, without going into too much detail, but there was clearly a set way of presenting the female body.

39:26Men's bodies also were adorned, but perhaps a bit more with the sword and the weapon set, at least again in death, being kind of an integral part and extension of the body. And that's been an interesting line of research, talking again about, could houses have personhood, which I've argued in my research, some people also think that swords could have personhood. This is based also on the later written sources, the sagas, etc.

39:56We're now a bit later, which are about the Viking Age and the late Iron Age, where some swords could have personal names, like the sharp one and the stinging one and these kinds of things. And there's a question of whether that meant that they had a name, they worked as an extension of the body, they're placed into the burial when the wearer dies. And at least in some parts of Scandinavia, including in Norway, the swords are often bent or broken at burial. And so that was seen as perhaps a kind of ritual killing of the weapon.

40:28So the bearer, the weapons bearer has died. The weapon is to accompany him or possibly her in some cases into the burial. And now we break the weapon as well. The words warrior culture, people love asking, was this warrior culture with so many different places when you find lots of weapons and with burials and so on and so forth. So I'm sorry, Marianne,

Warrior culture and weapons

40:49I have to ask the question. Do we think by the time we get to the later Iron Age with the surviving archaeology, can we say that these societies are warrior cultures? I'm going to say yes. And then I'm going to nuance that. Okay.

41:04Yes, in the sense that I think particularly when we get up to the Vandal period and the Viking Age, which is kind of perhaps slightly later than what you wanted to talk about for this show, we are talking about warrior ideology that I think permeates society. The nuance comes in where, of course, not everyone was engaged in war all of the time. Not everyone was a bearded, frenzied male warrior. Most people were living their lives and they were cultivating the earth and they were hunting and they were fishing and they were trying to provide.

41:36But I do think from those, just going back a little bit again, but from those Germanic migrations, pressuring and ultimately being part of the cause of the Roman Empire together with the Huns and other pressure points and internal instability, but also afterwards, in the centuries afterwards, warrior ideology presumably became more and more important. And with that, a sense perhaps of fatalism, that a good death was to die bravely.

42:07A good death was to die in battle. And when we get to the Viking Age and again the later sagas tell us that one of the most shameful things would actually be to die of old age in a sickbed. That was not a great death. That was not honourable. And so I have a colleague, Ben Raffield, who's looked at childhood and children's socialisation into violence and he's looked at things like toys, swords, wooden swords, etc. from the late Iron Age, Viking Age

42:39and makes the argument that to have this kind of warrior ideology permeating society, even if it's an ideology that not everyone partakes in, then children also would presumably be socialised into it from quite a young age. How do you normalise violence? How do you see violence as an honourable and aspirational thing to have this kind of, the craziness that it is of throwing yourself into battle in the way that they did? And that's also quite heartbreaking

43:09to think about that children were presumably trained into quite a violent mindset from an early age on. And do we think that that can step back into kind of that Iron Age time when the Roman, before the kind of the migration period as well, when you have those kind of, as we mentioned earlier, those inhumation burials and so on with some evidence of swords that it might kind of predate into that time? You also mentioned earlier how there seems to be some evidence that Scandinavian, some men did go into the Roman Empire to serve as mercenaries and fight.

43:39So we have the caveat that you've already mentioned that many others were staying, the hunting and fishing in the daily life sustenance, but there was still maybe even a growing reputation that, you know, these people from Scandinavia and these societies, they were very hardy warriors kind of thing. Yes. I think there is a long trajectory there and presumably going back even further and perhaps into the Bronze Age as well. It's just that we, because of the changes in material culture and the mortuary practice, we do have a little bit of a lacuna in the pre-Roman Iron Age.

44:10But yes, I think that is fair to say. We spoke about the bog bodies and I mentioned that artifacts are also deposited in the bogs. And from the perhaps end of the pre-Roman Iron Age and at least from the Roman Iron Age onwards, you get these massive weapons deposits in the bogs, particularly in Denmark, where it looks like the remnants of battles, you've had a violent skirmish among two tribes or two chieftains or whatever it might be. In a quite famous example

44:40from Jortspring, there seems to be a fleet coming from the southwest coast of Norway and they've rowed, presumably, to Denmark. They estimate perhaps several hundred to a thousand people or warriors and they have tried to raid or perhaps a more kind of territorial takeover and they presumably lost. And so their entire weapons kit, their weaponry has been, again, deposited in the bogs.

45:11And as a kind of a precursor to that idea of the the sword with personhood in, you know, 800 years later, also in this period, they seem to be after these battles bending and breaking the weapons, sometimes also like chopping the shields, et cetera, and then depositing them all in the wetlands as perhaps a kind of ritual vanquishment of the conquered enemy. And if I may, I'll just continue with one other find which is fascinating,

45:43which is from the first century AD or CE, also from Denmark, where we'd kind of gotten accustomed to these massive weapons deposits which are fascinating in and by themselves. You often have runic inscriptions on some of the weapons which may have personal names. So you can imagine that it's the name of whoever carried that spear or whatever it might be. But then from the first century, from Jatlin, there's a site called Alkin Engje where for the first time they didn't only have the weapons in the wetlands deposit,

46:13but they also found the human remains. And with the contemporary osteological method, the way we can now analyze human remains, they found that presumably this was also the remnants of a violent battle in the early Roman Iron Age where these warriors had been left on the battlefield for at least six months. They had no marks from animals and signs of weather and exposure. So they've been basically left to decompose

46:45on the battlefield. And then after six months to a year perhaps, someone has come by, whether it's the in-group, the people from whose community they were from, or whether it's the opposing side who wanted to let them rot, they're now coming and clearing the field and they're picking up the human remains, sometimes placing them in little bundles and then depositing them into the wetlands. And there's some interesting little tidbits there, like a pelvic,

47:16a set of pelvic bones, I think it's three male pelvic bones that have been, as you would thread a needle, they've been placed onto a wooden stick. So there's a wooden stick with three pelvic bones hanging from it and then into the wetland. And I guess that's an insight into conflict between various Iron Age Scandinavian societies if your crops fail one year and your neighbour's crops are good and you know you see that similar in Bronze Age Scotland and Ireland and Britain and so on and so forth. We've talked quite a bit about the military

47:47and warriors and that part of it, Marianne. I would like now to ask a bit about a little bit more about trade contacts and the relations they had with cultures nearby. We've talked a lot about the Roman Empire already and the contacts that it seems these Iron Age Scandinavians had.

Trade networks and resources

48:04Just give a sense

Trade networks and resources

48:05in regards to kind of the resources that went to and fro between Scandinavian, Iron Age Scandinavian societies and the Roman Empire. You mentioned how kind of drinking and feasting equipment that goes into Scandinavia, that's a big deal. But what were the Romans getting from Scandinavia? What was being traded the other way? What should we be thinking with these trade networks and how extensive they were? So all the way to Central Europe and into the Roman Empire, we think that presumably organic materials such as furs,

48:36pelts, etc. I've also heard speculation of things like women's hair. I don't think we have any archaeological evidence for that. So I'm a bit I'm a bit sceptical of that one. But presumably, yes, fur trade may have been a kind of big export. But I think lots of the trade did not happen over such great distances, but it was also lots of inter-Scandinavian trade within the areas. So for instance,

49:06in parts of Norway and Sweden, there were kind of more large-scale iron production into standardized iron bars, for instance, and they end up in late Aryan Age, Viking Age, Denmark, these pre-made iron bars. Antlers from deer and reindeer that could be used into comb-making, etc. So, yeah, I think the inter-Scandinavian trade is also quite prominent. And then, of course, when we get into the Viking Age,

49:37then we get into the British Isles, but also the Arabic dirhams that are the masses of silver that flow into Scandinavia from their way through the river systems of Russia and into the Arabic Caliphate.

50:07A quick question on the non-Roman trade, and you say the trade within Scandinavia in the Iron Age. You mentioned earlier you've got predecessors of the Sami people as well in present-day Finland. Do we see evidence of trade there between Iron Age Scandinavian societies and the prehistoric Sami populations? Yes. The Sami is a northern territory, northern Norway, northern Sweden, Finland, parts of Russia today. Just to clarify that. And yes, there's even in the later saga stories

50:37of the contacts between the Sami and the Norse. The Sami were by the Norse perhaps seen as somewhat magical. Really? And there's ideas of Viking men marrying Sami women to also get hold of esoteric knowledge and that sort of thing. I should also say that the Sami territories were much further south in the Viking Age than they are today. So you also get Sami settlements far into central and even south Norway in the

51:09Viking Age, which is quite interesting. So the cultural contacts there have been quite extensive. We're going to move on to one other kind of key area that we haven't covered yet, but I guess is big, especially if the word Viking is in the title, which is of course ships and seafaring. Now Marianne, I remember doing an episode with Johan Ling about the Nordic Bronze Age and one part I loved was talking about the rock art that survives and including amazing ships and hearing about how extensive the trade connections were back then to get hold of the tin and the copper from Britain

51:40and so on and so forth. So what do we know about Iron Age Scandinavian societies, those along the coast and their interest, their quality, their expertise around shipbuilding

Ships and seafaring technology

51:52and seafaring? It probably started quite early. Johan Ling presumably brought up the depictions of the ships from the Bronze Age because they are fascinating. The coastal areas were extremely maritime and they must have been good at roaming. I just mentioned that for one of these weapons deposits in Denmark in the pre-Roman Iron Age presumably the incomers, the enemies came rowing from the coast of Norway to Jutland in Denmark.

52:22Slightly later when we think about, for instance, the Angles and the Saxons, the Germanic tribes from Denmark and northern Germany that became the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, they also got to that island somehow, presumably through maritime vessels. So there was a strong maritime culture. We also see that in the contact networks that are expressed in the similarities between the Sutton Hoo ship burial and the helmet,

52:53the famous Sutton Hoo helmet, which is very, very similar to some of the Vendor period helmets from Sweden, may have even been made in the same workshop. Those networks were presumably based on maritime connections. So the ship technology and the sailing technology is really important. The big innovation there is the innovation of the sail, and the experts do not agree on when that happens. Some people want to put it in the even 6-7 centuries,

53:24that that's when the sailing ships, because there's a difference between a rowing ship and the clinker-built sailing ships. The earliest concrete archaeological evidence we have might be the Salma ship which is a Swedish ship burial from about 750 in Estonia, which probably was an either invading or trading expedition of Swedish late Iron Age slash Viking Age people, men in this case, who came to Estonia.

53:54Something happened because they all died. 44 of them, I believe, were buried on the ship in a really interesting matter, kind of stacked the bodies. One person had a gaming piece placed in his mouth, a really interesting archaeological find, which many will see, that is actually the beginning of the Viking Age, that is actually the first Viking raid we have documented around 750 CE. And that vessel may have had a mast,

54:25and in order to have a sail, you need a mast. The other interesting thing I'd like to just point out and highlight about the ship technology is that that innovation of the mast and the sail has been seen as this breakthrough. Some people would even say that's the catalyst for the later Viking phenomenon, the raids and explosion along seafaring vessels. But what you also need in order to have that technology is textile technology. But because that has been associated with women, that has

54:56been completely overlooked. Let's look at it now. So in addition to the wonderful technical clinker-built ships, which were very narrow and agile, could go through coarse waters, could also be rowed up rivers, they were versatile, quick vessels. But the sail was increasingly important, and you needed enormous amounts of labour to just create one sail. So they've done estimates saying that you would need two

55:26full-time spinners just to spin the fibres or wool. They would need to work full-time one year in order to just spin the wool to create one sail. So it is an enormous undertaking, both in terms of hard labour, but also the technological finesse of doing the weaving. And an absolute prerequisite for that maritime technology. You also need other beings to

55:56be part of that. So you might need sheep to get the wool, and or if plant fibre-based, you need to sow enormous fields of hemp or linen in order to create the fibres for the sail. So it was an enormous undertaking that will have really influenced landscapes and landscape management and agricultural production, as well as having lots and lots of workers grading the sails. And that entire narrative has gotten a little bit to

56:27the shadow of the idea of the master ship builder, etc. And when we're talking about the late iron Viking age, another question then is who is doing all this labour of spinning the wool and weaving, often in these little pit houses which are quite dark and full of smoke and it's not ideal working conditions. And the question is whether that is the enslaved populations of the Viking Age and whether it's actually coerced labour that is the foundation on which that ship technology

56:58stands. Is it just very much clearly later on in what we might say is the early medieval period that you see clearer evidence of the clinker built vessel technology coming to the fore in Scandinavia? That is the consensus, I believe. But this is, as I say, for the boat and ship building maritime archaeologists, this is a point of some contestation. I don't know if I dare go in any further into that. I think what we can say is there's clearly a long-lived tradition of building seafaring

57:29vessels and building them really well. But particularly that breaking point of when does the mast and the sail get introduced, that is sometime towards the end of the or in the Vandal period presumably right before the Viking Age. You mentioned earlier the mythology part of it, Norse mythology later on and how there's stories of adventurers and people who go far and wide. Could it be hearkening back to a time like in the Iron Age earlier on if there was that popular tradition, seafaring tradition and

57:59so on? Could there have been figures even then, even when it's just to do with the rowing boats, going quite far on these kind of adventurous stories that were then remembered for many, many centuries into what ultimately becomes the Viking Age? Absolutely. I think when we talk about these ventures of this little South Norwegian army rowing for two or three days or however long it would take to row one of those vessels into Denmark, I think yes, and then they were totally totally vanquered.

58:30Yeah, I think that was part of the storytelling and that might be even further back to the Bronze Age, I think for the coastal communities in particular, the sea and the connection to the sea will have been really very, very important. Right, well we covered a lot and I wanted to focus largely on the earlier Middle Iron Age Scandinavian story as that is very much the ancient territory. But to wrap it all up, I'm sure that Matt and Eleanor won't mind us venturing

59:00slightly into medieval times with the so-called Viking Age, Marianne. So can you give us a sense of how we go from the Western Empire declining to what is definitively the Viking Age in Scandinavia? Because you've already mentioned these periods, the migration period and also the Vendor period. So can you explain what these are and how they are kind of steps to getting towards what we know as the Viking Age?

Climate events and the Viking Age

59:25Yes. So the migration period as we have alluded to is this time of vast mobility in Scandinavia and in Central Europe at large where we don't quite know why but lots of people are on the move and they will reshape the European map. You know, we mentioned the Anglo-Saxons earlier ultimately giving the name to England. We mentioned the Franks ultimately giving their name to France, etc.

59:56There is a really important event at the end of the migration period which we haven't touched upon yet, which is the 536 climatic event. So in 536 CE, something happens. I believe the consensus now is a volcanic eruption but I know there have been other explanations purported as well. But something really, really dramatic happens. They can see traces of this in the glacial ice course in Greenland and

1:00:27in really wide areas. Possibly a kind of dust veil event after volcanic eruption which means that the sun is basically blocked for a really long time. And without the sun, you can't grow food. You need sunshine and photosynthesis to grow crops. So this has been seen as a quite, particularly in Scandinavia, but as far as I understand, quite wide-ranging, catastrophic events that led to famine.

1:00:57And it came quite close in time to an outbreak of the Justinian Plague, so one of the plague waves, which means that in combination that was a period of quite stark decline, presumably. And so we can see this in the archaeological record in that we get a complete slump in settlements, in burials, presumably quite a stark population decline. and it took some time to rebuild societies after that. Whatever the details of that and however it may have looked,

1:01:28it will have taken some time to rebuild society. After that, there were decades of little activity. Obviously not everyone perished, but enough that it really did influence society. And in those decades, maybe half century after, some people may have seen that kind of vacuum of power as a proper opportunity. And so the idea is that coming in to the Vendel period, named after an important site, Vendel,

1:01:59in Sweden, but we can also call that, sometimes we call that period the Merovingian period after the Merovingian dynasty in France at the same time. But that kind of 550 to 750 CE period is first a time of rebuilding after this massive climatic event. And then that's when we really do start to see this massive hierarchization again. The feasting halls that we talked about earlier that came in with the Romans, they continue, but they become perhaps even more centered on the elites and they

1:02:30actually become more royal estates. You have this exquisite metalwork. I mentioned earlier the parallels between the Sutton Hu helmet and these Vendel helmets, and they are really, really exquisitely made, perhaps even made in the same workshop, because the Germanic tribes do have a shared symbolic language in terms of some of the artifacts that are used. You get a reprise of these amazing monumental mounds, such

1:03:01as the mounds of Uppsala in Sweden, which are absolutely enormous. And so clearly you are getting into a period of power consolidation. consolidation. And that power consolidation may indirectly also influence the beginning of the Viking Age, because before that you had lots of these petty chieftains, tribal societies, regionally focused, sometimes at war with another, sometimes in alliance, etc. Now there are some powers that are positioning,

1:03:31that are consolidating more and more of these into larger and larger entities, and that might create some pressure on other parts of society or other people who are aspiring power, but aren't within those alliances. And so indirectly this might be one of the many, many causes of what happens next. Of what happens next indeed, on ground that we dare not touch here on the ancients. I mean, Marianne, it has been such a pleasure in particular to focus on Scandinavia's

1:04:03Iron Age story, very long Iron Age story, and what you can see from the archaeology, how society and how there are changes over time, and various different aspects of it. We can get obsessed with the word Viking, can't we, and want to really focus on that period, but just how important to you, how significant is it to you? Is it to bring that earlier story of Scandinavia, of pre-Roman and then Roman aligned kind of Scandinavia, Iron

1:04:33Age time, to the wider audience, to understand that much larger, that much wider, bigger story of the Vikings and Iron Age Scandinavian societies? With some danger and trepidation, as my official title is Research Professor of Viking Studies, I think that we focus too much on the Vikings. Hope my employers don't listen to this podcast, but I understand why the Vikings hold such

1:05:04a fascination. It's a good story, right? It's these somewhat underdogs coming from a peripheral area of Northern Europe and like with a blast onto the global scene and getting all the way to Newfoundland and Canada into the Arabic Caliphate and the Silk Roads in Asia. I mean, it's a great story in many ways, but they are so romanticized and so popular and I think often quite misunderstood, whereas the earlier parts of the Iron Age, both

1:05:35the parts that lead and feed into some sort of trajectory towards that, but also the periods that are completely different in doing their own thing, is ultimately also extremely fascinating and I get a bit worried when we need to label everything as pre-Viking or whatever it might be, because we're letting the Viking Age be the defining period of Scandinavian deep history, whereas actually it's that

1:06:05plethora from the bog bodies with their sacrificial meals in their bellies and their nooses around the neck and the sacrificed braids through seeing an eternal winter where there's no sunshine in the 6th century. There's so many stories. To tell that particularly that focus on the Viking warrior and that side of thing, it overshadows so many other interesting and fascinating stories we could tell about the past.

1:06:35Well, we have certainly covered a lot of those stories today, going from here, there, and everywhere over many, many centuries, many, many archaeological sites. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. It's been a pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Marianne Hem Ericsson talking all things the Nordic Iron Age. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you so much for listening. Now, if you want to learn more about Scandinavia's prehistory, well, we do have almost a prequel

1:07:06episode to this one all about the Nordic Bronze Age that we recorded last year with Professor Johan Ling. And we've also done an in-depth episode all about bog bodies. Bog bodies in Scandinavia, in Britain, and in Ireland. And we'll put a link to both of those episodes from last year in the show notes. Now, if you've been enjoying The Ancients, please make sure to follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps. You'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well,

1:07:37well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. You can also get early access to all of our History Hit podcast episodes, plus exclusive subscriber episodes of The Ancients. Simply sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.