Show 69 - Twilight of the Aesir

Introduction

0:00Today's show is sponsored by Sega's Company of Heroes 3, available February 2023.

0:09This story begins, well, probably like most stories, before this story begins. I mean, what historical account doesn't have its precursors or its backstories or its prologues? In this case, we had an entire show and an extra show devoted to this very story. We called it Thor's Angels, and you'll hear me say that a couple of times in this discussion upcoming.

Viking History

0:40This is the last chapter in that story involving a people history often calls Vikings, but Vikings are not a people. And how connected the people in this era are to today's modern-day Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes is iffy.

1:02And the idea of ethnicity and cultural aspects and everything else is fraught with all sorts of baggage. I mean, this story about who these people we're about to talk about really were is buried beneath layer upon layer and century upon century of romanticizing and demonizing and fetishizing and nationalizing of a people that once upon a time were just real folk

1:32and converting them into Hollywoodized barbarian tropes. Once upon a time, there were people all over northern, western, and central Europe who had a linguistic affiliation, a cultural affinity, and believed in the same sorts of values and deities that these Viking-era Scandinavians believed in. And by the time the early Middle Ages rolls around,

2:04these people in modern-day Scandinavia and maybe just north of Germany are the only people left who do.

Frankish Empire

2:13And there's a certain historical irony that the peoples who will put the lion's share of sweat into extinguishing these old gods, these ancient deities, are people who not that long before this time period believed in them themselves.

2:38This is as the old radio announcer Paul Harvey would have said that when it comes to the Thor's Angels tale, this is the rest of the story. December 7th, 1941. It's history. A date which will live in infamy. It's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

3:10The events.

3:16The figures. We'll have fighting power. Not quite to the more. Let the word go for humanity. From this time and place. I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Bialino. The drama. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this world.

3:37Game 6 to bad, urgent. Marine 6. Tower 2 has had a major explosion and what appears to be a complete collapse surrounding the entire area. I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president should crush them. The deep questions. Well, I'm not a crush. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.

4:01Go down to field cops. It's hardcore history. One of my favorite quotes in all history, and I'm careful about famous quotes now because so many of the ones in my quote books have been debunked over the years. This one's pretty well attested to. I wouldn't swear by it, but it's pretty well attested to. It involves something said by Joseph Stalin, autocratic leader of the former Soviet Union, a communist state,

4:31a state, by the way, that is officially an atheistic state, and Stalin himself was probably an atheist. And the reason it matters is because the quote has something to do with that. The circumstances are that he's supposed to be talking to a French politician in the middle 1930s who, in an attempt to solve a problem they're dealing with, suggests they might be able to solicit the help of the Vatican, right, the Pope. And Stalin's response is so cynical,

5:02terra firma, rubber meets the road type of an answer that it just sums up the situation perfectly. He's supposed to have said, and he wouldn't have said it in English, which is why you sometimes see different wording. He's supposed to have said, the Pope, how many divisions does he have? You know, meaning armor and soldiers and guns and those kinds of things. Stalin doesn't want to talk about spiritual help. He wants to know, you know, how many soldiers the Pope is going to provide.

5:32And of course, the Pope can't provide any. The number of divisions that the Pope has is zero.

5:39This sums up a problem that has existed for the Popes and the center of Catholic authority in Italy since the fall of the Western Roman Empire. And the way that they managed to solve this problem goes a long way to explaining why Europe turned out the way it did. Now, full disclosure, we've already discussed this process in an earlier show called Thor's Angels. We even did an extra show, a Thor's Angels Extra,

6:10utilizing some of the cutting room floor stuff that we had to cut out. But that show is about what happened to a religion that started off as a minority offshoot religion from Judaism, goes to a much-persecuted religion, a minority religion in the Roman Empire, to eventually getting a Roman emperor converting to Christianity, and then a later Roman emperor converting the whole empire to officially Christian. And you have the Pope

6:41and Christianity in a pretty good position until the Roman Empire in the West disintegrates, which means Roman protection in Italy goes away at a time when the entire Western European area, Italy included, is becoming a very dangerous neighborhood, a time when the Pope really could have benefited from having a few divisions. the way that successive popes solve this problem of living

7:12in a bad neighborhood with no military protection is to form a partnership with some entity that can provide it. That entity turned out to be a people, another one of those people the Romans would have called barbarians, a people known as the Franks, located in the modern-day area of sort of France, just change the soft sea in France to a hard sea and you see the connection, right, Frank? Look at the German name for France even today, Frankreich, right?

7:43Empire of the Franks. The Franks were sort of the odds-on favorite to be the up-and-coming people in Europe and so when the church and the Frankish leaders over generations create this relationship, it becomes a symbiotic one, one that protects and allows the church to develop and expand its authority and the number of its followers while at the same time blessing the Franks with a sort of legitimacy

8:13that they wouldn't have had otherwise. But this relationship changed both entities and changed Christianity also.

Charlemagne's Rise

8:25The show we did earlier, Thor's Angels, got a little bit farther in the story than the era of Charlemagne, but Charlemagne seems to be a good person to sort of pivot back towards as a pivot point for the rest of the tale. For those who don't know, Charles the Great, Carl der Grossa has a lot of names, Charlemagne's how he's known to history, is probably, you could make a very good argument, the most important geopolitical figure in European history after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. He's absolutely astoundingly

8:57influential and important. And like so many people like him in history, he's overshadowed his direct ancestors, which if he didn't live, you'd have known about. I mean, the same way you'd know Alexander the Great's father's name if Alexander the Great hadn't been so great. I mean, Charlemagne, his dad, Pippin, his grandfather, Charles Martel, nicknamed the Hammer. The three of them gave the Franks about 90 years of really energetic, strong leadership that catapulted

9:27that people to really the heights of European power and dominance.

9:34Charlemagne will be, when he starts out, a king of the Franks and by the time he ends, he's the emperor of a renovated Roman Empire is the way it would have been seen and the church with him all the way.

9:49But somewhere along the way, the sword arm of the church, this protection provided to the Pope by this Frankish people, turned from defensive in character to offensive in character. And it's hard to know how much the church wanted this or didn't want it. There were some complaints at the time by how this situation was actually playing out on the ground. But by the time you get to Charlemagne, the way it's playing out on the ground

10:20is genocidal and has a direct bearing on what happens afterwards. Charlemagne was famously involved in a multi-generational war against a people to his east who are called the Saxons. Now, using ancient sources to describe people's ethnicities, cultures, or political affiliations of tribal peoples is difficult because they're not always consistent and people change.

10:51The Saxons, though, were a people that before this period were part of the great immigration of peoples from, you know, Western Europe around the north of Germany and Denmark and those places to England. And they create a fusion of peoples that history calls Anglo-Saxons.

11:11And these Anglo-Saxons will convert to Christianity eventually and then send missionaries from England back to Saxony where the Saxons are to try to convert that pagan people. As you might imagine, sometimes the Saxons were amenable to this and sometimes they weren't. Charlemagne isn't about giving them choices in the matter, though.

11:40His wars against the Saxons will go on for like 30 years and get progressively nastier. Saxony's a tough place to fight, by the way. In his book Charlemagne, Father of a Continent Historian Alessandro Barberos sets up the conflict this way, quote, It was a ferocious war. In a country with little or no civilization, with neither roads nor cities, and entirely covered with forests and marshland.

12:10The Saxons sacrificed prisoners of war to their gods, as Germans had always done before converting to Christianity. And the Franks did not hesitate to put to death anyone who refused to be baptized. End quote. That was not normally policy in converting the heathen, but Charlemagne's geopolitical goals and his religious ones dovetailed, and it's hard to know where one ended

12:40and the other began. He will famously have 4,500, and you know, you never know about these numbers, 4,500 Saxons beheaded in a single afternoon at the edge of a river in a town called Verden because they were allegedly the leaders of one of the many Saxon rebellions against him. Every time he would take his army away from Saxony after chastising

13:11the Saxons and go fight one of his other wars, they would rise up and rebel, and they would often destroy monasteries and kill monks and raid and all kinds of things.

13:21The victory conditions that Charlemagne set up in this war were that the Saxons had to give up their traditional religion. They were going to convert to Christianity or else they were going to die. Now, defenders of Charlemagne will point out that the legitimate reason for this was he planned to conquer Saxony and incorporate it into his kingdom and his kingdom was Christian and they weren't going to have any pagans in his kingdom. The problem was is that the way he went about it was so draconian

13:53and totalitarian that he got many complaints from missionaries whose job it was to go convert these people sort of through good argument and through preaching the Gospels and showing the way to the light and the saving of souls.

14:11Charlemagne at some points will have rules in place that say Saxons who won't be baptized are to be killed. Saxons who don't follow the meal restrictions during Lent are to face the death penalty. I mean, it's that heavy duty.

14:26The missionaries that have been going preaching to people like this often were putting their own lives at risk as you might imagine if somebody came into your community and started assailing your religion might not be the safest thing to do and some of these missionaries who are very brave people would go to places like, I mean, St. Boniface famously will try to convert the Frisians and will be martyred. That's the term that is used, right? Martyred means that one way or another they killed him. A lot of these missionaries

14:56will be killed and be martyred trying to convert the Germanic type heathen, the barbarian heathen. My favorite amongst these is a saint called Lebwin and Lebwin, like so many of these other people trying to convert the people in what's now northern Germany or the Netherlands is from Anglo-Saxon England and Lebwin is not going to be martyred. He's going to be one of these ones who survives. He goes to preach to the Saxons and these guys

15:26would come in by the way and they would do things like burn or chop down their sacred trees that they believed held up the universe or were the pathways from the gods to man. I mean, sacred sites, they'll come in here and chop them down. What kind of guts do you have to have to be an unarmed cleric who comes in and does that amongst a warrior people that don't even leave home without weapons? But the story of St. Lebwin involves one of the greatest speeches ever given by a figure in the Middle Ages

15:57if it really happened. And if it really happened, this guy is absolutely one of the more gutsy people you will ever see. The version I have comes from a book called The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany translated and edited by a guy called C.H. Talbot. He claims that this version of the story of Lebwin is from an unknown author and that a later version that is attributed is simply taken from this version but he describes this saint who wasn't a saint at the time just a missionary named Lebwin

16:27who goes to the Saxons during one of their big assemblies that they have. To call them democratic would be false but they didn't have a king who ruled over every little thing. They would get together and have assemblies and hash this stuff out but what that meant is that there's a lot of armed barbarians in a single place at a single time and this story has Lebwin just sort of appearing amongst them. It's hard not to see how many of these figures would have made great superheroes in the Marvel cinematic universe

16:57and you know for reasons of not wanting to be accused of blasphemy I understand why the Marvel universe did not include the monotheistic religions like Islam and Christianity in their universe but they have the Norse gods they have the Greek gods and yet who wiped out all those gods? Well, in Europe it was Christianity that killed pantheism right? And if you read the account of Lebwin he sounds like he can make himself invisible. They don't explicitly say that but he appears out of nowhere

17:28and when they want to kill him he can manage to disappear and when he first appears to these people in their assembly he's wearing his religious vestments which might have looked like a superhero outfit to these barbarian types. He's got the gospels in the crook of his arm which is like a book of magic and he's got a cross with him which is almost like a religious weapon if you're looking at it from a people who believe heavily in things like magic. And according to the unknown author who chronicles Lebwin's life this is how it

17:59goes. Quote Suddenly Lebwin appeared in the middle of the circle clothed in his priestly garments bearing a cross in his hands and a copy of the gospels in the crook of his arm. Raising his voice he cried Listen to me listen I am the messenger of almighty God and to you Saxons I bring his command. The author says astonished at his words and at his unusual appearance a hush fell upon the assembly.

18:30The man of God then followed up his announcement with these words The God of heaven and ruler of the world and his son Jesus Christ commands me to tell you that if you are willing to be and to do what his servants tell you he will confer benefits upon you such as you have never heard of before. Then he added As you have never had a king over you before this time so no king will prevail against you and subject you to his domination

19:00but if you are unwilling to accept God's commands a king has been prepared nearby who will invade your lands spoil and lay them waste and sap away your strength in war he will lead you into exile deprive you of your inheritance slay you with the sword and hand over your possessions to whom he has a mind and afterwards you will be slaves both to him and to his successors end quote

19:31now I can't figure out if that is a warning or a prophecy or a threat but that king he's talking about is Charlemagne and he does just what Leibwin says he will and when the Saxons are eventually crushed some of the leaders who fostered

20:02the rebellions flee to one of the last places they can still practice their traditional religious beliefs which are being pushed farther and farther to the peripheries of the known world they flee to Denmark Denmark during this time period is like the rest of Scandinavia it is not any kind of a unified kingdom or state of any kind there are lots of what are called

20:33petty kings sometimes these sorts of entities are referred to as chiefdoms I mean Norway for example I believe during this period has something like 15 different petty kings who are more like warlords in a lot of these cases University of Oslo historian and Viking expert John Vidar Sigurdsson estimates the Scandinavian population around this time period to be about 650,000 people half of

21:03which would fall into the realm of what would be controlled by Danish rulers he says those numbers will rise to about a million these are just estimates he cautions in the year 1050 so sort of brackets the Viking Age but the petty king who's ruling the part of Denmark over by Jutland that butts up against Saxon territory is about to have Charlemagne

Danish Involvement

21:30for his next door neighbor when Charlemagne is conquering the Saxons so his involvement in this war between Charlemagne and the Saxons may be a little like a proxy war situation where he's hoping to help the Saxons defeat Charlemagne so that he doesn't have to directly fight him one of the main leaders in the Saxon rebellion is a hero in Germanic history called Vidukent who may be married to one of the daughters of one of these Danish petty kings and when

22:00Vidukent is fleeing Charlemagne he flees to Denmark and is given sort of sanctuary by one of these Danish petty kings this is where the story gets interesting though and a hundred years ago in his book The Art of War in the Middle Ages Sir Charles Oman describes the situation as it might have been seen from the Danish point of view and remember by about this time your history books are going to start labeling this entire era in this region

22:31as the Viking age and people like the Danes are one of the key peoples who make up these so-called Vikings who we always think of as aggressive pirates who are on the attack all the time but a people that more modern day historians are starting to see that from their point of view they may have felt like they were the ones threatened and interestingly enough a hundred years ago Sir Charles Zulman's already saying stuff like that when he writes quote perhaps

23:02the first seeds of trouble were sown when Vida Kint the Saxon fled before the swords of the Franks and took refuge in Jutland we need not doubt that he told his Danish hosts terrible tales of the relentless might the systematic and irresistible advance of the Iron King of the Franks he means Charlemagne the danger was now at their doors the fate of Saxony might soon be that of Denmark the kings of the southern Danes gave shelter to Vida Kint but they sent

23:33fair words to Charles and did their best to turn away his wrath yet when Vida Kint yielded and was baptized in 785 they must have felt like their own turn to face the oncoming storm had now arrived end quote the Danish kings during this era will fortify and perhaps expand an already existing fortification which separated sort of the territory of the Danes from the territory of the Saxons or soon to

24:04be the territory of the Carolingians it was called the Danework or the Danewirka or the Danewirga and you can still go see the remains by the way of that long I think it's something like miles and miles wall across the entire sort of narrow area of Jutland I believe the last time it was used was in the 1860s against the Prussians

24:34who will fight the Franco-Prussian War something like a decade later I mean you're getting pretty modern and in more modern histories this point of view of the Scandinavian peoples during the Viking age is much better examined for example historian Neil Price in his book The Children of Ash and Elm suggests that these Danish peoples these Scandinavians in the Viking era felt threatened the entire time and may have thought of themselves

25:05the ones who were on the defensive sort of the last stand of the Norse gods if you will and he writes quote not withstanding the traditional focus on Viking aggression for much of the period the peoples of southern Scandinavia were under near constant threat from the belligerence of their Christian neighbors the Frankish empire was being carved out at the point of a sword by