Show 70 - Twilight of the Aesir II

0:00Today's show is part two of a two-part series on the spread of Christianity to the far north of Europe and the last holdouts who still believe in the ancient pagan Germanic gods of the Norse sagas, the Odins and the Thors and people like that. If you didn't happen to hear part one, you might want to catch that before you hear this show. Both shows are actually a continuation of our 2012 series called Thor's Angels, and if you want that, that's available for a nominal fee from our website. One last thing, stay tuned at the end of today's show for some announcements of

0:33live appearances I might be making in a town near you. So without further ado, let's kick off today's ending of our two-part series here with Twilight of the Eysir, part two. December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy. During the events. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

1:12The figures. Not quite to the noise, but all the humanity from this time and place. I take pride in the words. The drama. Ich bin ein violiner. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Game 6 to Manhattan, urgent. Marine 6. Tower 2 has had a major explosion. The deep questions. Surrounding the entire area. I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president's a crook.

1:46Well, I'm not a crook. If we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. It's hardcore history. And on the field, Tom.

2:02Parallel universes. Simulation theory. Infinite world hypotheses. Other dimensions. I'm not smart enough to understand these concepts, but I have been fascinated by them ever since I was first exposed to the ideas. Obviously, these are concepts that people like physicists study. Another reason I wouldn't understand them.

2:32Could never understand the math, right? You just take it to face value. But I've often wondered if such concepts couldn't explain or put some sort of a scientific sort of patina, or as they would say in the UK, patina, on top of some of the ancient beliefs that earlier people had. That they talked about in ways that have come down to us as fairy stories or myths or legends or folklore.

3:05That would be much more easy for us to grasp and accept if some physicist explained it to us as, you know, something that was a part of another dimensional realm or a parallel universe. Or something connected to a physicist type theory that sounds a lot more logical and acceptable than talking about the existence of something like elves.

3:33Or trolls. Or, of course, magic.

3:39Sometimes I wonder if earlier peoples couldn't understand those higher concepts. How would they explain things in their world that they saw or thought they saw or believed in? As we've said before, if a lot of people believe in something like magic fervently, doesn't that create a reality, you know, all its own? There's something known as the Tinkerbell effect. Maybe you've heard of it. If you remember the Walt Disney production of Peter Pan, there's this moment where you have to believe in Tinkerbell or Tinkerbell's going to die.

4:11If you go look up the definition of it, it describes the phenomenon of thinking something exists because people believe it exists. Right? Magic. Sorcery. Elves. Dwarves. Trolls. Valkyries. Norns. These are Viking belief systems. Things that they believed in. Wouldn't it be interesting if it turned out someday that these were their representations of things that a physicist could explain in scientific terms? One of my favorite parts of any Shakespeare play, and I'm not alone in this, is the earliest part of Hamlet.

4:49Where you have this moment where the Night Watch comes and tells Hamlet and Horatio, his somewhat skeptical, we would call him today more of a scientific, you know, terra firma kind of guy. And the Night Watch tells Hamlet that the ghost of his father has just appeared. So Hamlet and Horatio run up to the battlements, and sure enough, the ghost appears. And Horatio, in his wonderfully skeptical, but can't deny what he's seeing in front of him sort of way, is stunned, doesn't believe in ghosts, and says, oh, day and night, but this is wondrous strange.

5:26Then Hamlet replies with that wonderful line that I feel covers a lot of what we just said. He says, there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Suggesting, of course, that the human imagination is limited, and there are many things we don't know. Things that haven't been discovered, and in fact, things we haven't even dreamt of. As we've said about magic before, what happens if lots of people believe in it and act on it? Magic might not be real, but the effects are.

5:57If some king goes to the oracle at Delphi in the ancient world and asks the prophetess on the oracle's seat, you know, should I go and attack this rival kingdom? And the prophetess says, yes, you should go attack this kingdom. And he does. Well, that may be a bunch of bunk, but he acted on it, and people died, and kingdoms rose or fell because of it. How real does that make the magic? If you believe yourself to be cursed, and then things start going wrong,

6:31does that double down on this belief that you're cursed, and does your mind start working against you? I mean, there's a lot of things here where the human mind can interact with belief in a way that manifests a kind of reality that even if it is a phantom sort of reality at its core, manifests in real-world consequences. Maybe the effect of the human mind and positive or negative thinking is just as much of a physicist's undiscovered country

7:07as parallel universes, simulation theory, infinite world hypotheses, or other dimensions. But when you talk about what the people in the Viking world believed in, they believed in elves and dwarves and trolls and Valkyries and Norns. They also believed in beings like giants, who they believed were an integral part of the creation of the universe, and may not have been these overly large beings that we normally associate with the term.

7:42Just like their view of dwarves may not have involved beings who were smaller than human in stature, but many of these beings constituted what historian Neil Price in his book The Viking Way refers to as the invisible population. And he says that to many in the Viking world, the invisible population of things like elves may have been more important to their daily life than the gods themselves, because in a polytheistic religion, the gods had their own problems,

8:15and people were just one of the things that they may have been concerned with. This is difficult for those of us raised in an environment of monotheism to understand, just like trying to get your mind around a belief system that may not have been orthodox and may not have been learned and may not have been understood by everyone similarly, right? They didn't all read the Bible and learn in Sunday school how things were. People just had an innate understanding, and it could differ person to person in the Viking way.

8:47Neil Price writes, In the same spirit as Philip Velikot's description of the gods of classical Greece, the worship, in air quotes, required by the Norse pantheon, was not adoration or gratitude or even unreserved approval, and was thus utterly unlike the Christian relationship to the divine. The religion of the Aesir and the Vanir demanded only a recognition that they existed as an integral and immutable part of human nature and society and of the natural world,

9:19and that as such they possessed an inherent rightness, perhaps even a kind of beauty. If one wished to avoid disaster, it was necessary to come to terms with the gods, and the terms would be theirs, not those of their followers. This is an important point in relation to the interpretations, he writes, that I will develop in the following chapters, because a refusal to acknowledge the gods in this way could have dire consequences. It would also involve a contradiction, as such an act would be a denial of the undeniable.

9:51The question of believing in the Norse gods was probably irrelevant." End quote. Price also points out that there wasn't the sort of orthodoxy of belief that we are accustomed to in the more monotheistic religions. No Sunday school, no singular text that everyone could study and be on the same page with. There might be quite a bit of variation in the belief systems. Also, unlike the religions of the book, you could not automatically assume that the deities were on your side,

10:32because they had their own problems, their own goals, and their own issues that they were involved with. You might be a secondary or even lower on the list concern. Odin, who is sometimes considered to be the chief of the gods, but maybe not. Odin is the perfect example, right? It is said that you have to be careful, because Odin can be tricky. He might sleep with a man's wife, or he might sleep with the wife's husband.

11:05These are not the sort of things one in the religions of the book need to worry about. Odin is a fantastically interesting figure that, when you contrast it with the monotheistic religions, shows many of the various differences. I mean, famously, the god of the Bible is supposed to know when any sparrow falls from a tree. Odin doesn't. Odin has a couple of ravens that he keeps for reconnaissance purposes.

11:40One is named mind, the other memory. Sometimes you'll hear one is named thought, too. You'll run into that. Neil Price says mind and memory are the translations that he would ascribe to. And these ravens go out in the world and report back to Odin, so that he can know when some sparrow falls, if he even cares about something like that. Odin also has powers and magic that he can use to gain further information.

12:10Again, one would assume that the god of the Bible has this information. Odin needs to search for things like wisdom. He gave up an eye in his pursuit of wisdom. That's why he only has one. Odin is known by perhaps hundreds of different names. And one of the powers that he has and uses all the time is he talks to dead people. He goes up to the bodies that are hanging on the gallows after someone is hanged and he talks to them.

12:41He raises the dead so that he can question them. He has the decapitated head of another god that he has preserved and keeps with him so that he can ask it questions. It reminds me a little of like a very gory version of a Harry Potter painting where you can ask the figures in the painting for information. Odin talks to the head. There is no clear separation of powers and authorities and responsibilities amongst the gods.

13:16There's overlap. For example, Odin and Thor. Thor is Odin's son. And, you know, from the comic books and movies and stuff, Thor is very famous. But Thor, the god of thunder and weather, also rules a part of military affairs. War, the actual brute strength of fighting, whereas his father Odin is the strategist and the god of that. Also, apparently, the god of berserk kind of fanaticism. Odin also gets slammed sometimes for using things like magic because in the Norse religious beliefs and society, magic is where the women shine.

13:53It's a female thing to do. And there is in one of the Norse sagas, Loki, who is thought to be the son of a god and a giant or giantess. Loki sort of takes a slam at Odin by saying the fact that he practices magic is perverted and makes him feminine. But this is part of what makes women so both respected and in some cases feared. They are spellweavers and shamans and sorceresses.

14:27The three women who supposedly weave the destinies of human beings, the Norns, fall into this category. And there are some who think that there are similarities between many of the different European pre-Christian mythologies because there are figures in Greek mythology, for example, the famous Fates. And the names are similar, the three women. One is named something akin to a version that means the past. Another is named with a version that means something like the present.

15:01And another is named with a version that means something like the future. It's sort of like Ebenezer Scrooge's A Christmas Carol's Ghosts, Ghost of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, Christmas Future. The Norns are somewhat more terrifying. And some of the mythology suggests that they weave the fate of mankind on a loom with the entrails or bloody body parts of human beings. I've also heard that ascribed to Valkyries.

15:31And Valkyries also have been completely distorted by things like comic books and male fantasies into sort of Scandinavian versions of Baywatch women that a man might watch and admire and lust after when the actual accounts from the sagas and whatnot describe looking at a Valkyrie as terrifying and akin to staring into flame.

16:02The entire universe in Norse mythology is held together or girded by a tree, an evergreen ash tree known as Yggdrasil. And the Norns care for Yggdrasil. And Yggdrasil is sometimes thought by some to refer to sort of a version of the Milky Way. And Yggdrasil connects the various realms of existence. This gets us back to our physicist idea of other dimensions or multiple world theories.

16:36I mean, Yggdrasil connects like a interstate highway places like Midgard, which is where human beings live, and which is the term J.R.R. Tolkien used and translated into Middle Earth, connects Midgard to Asgard. And Midgard and Asgard to the realm of the giants, Jodenheim. And the land of Midgard and Asgard and Jodenheim to the lands of fire and ice and all the other different realms. There's an interesting connection between ancient Germanic religion across Europe and this question of this sacred tree.

17:16Because when the Christian bishops are going around trying to convert people like the Saxons or other Germanic tribes or the Frisians or any of those people, they all sort of have a tree that is connected to their worship. In fact, hundreds of years before, when Tacitus is writing about Germanic beliefs, he talks about sacred trees in sacred groves where they have sacrifices that involve the bloody killings of human beings and animals who are then ritually hung up around sacred sites.

17:54In his 11th century writings, Adam of Brayman, who has, as his source, a Danish king, talks about one of these sacrificial places at Uppsala in what's now Sweden. And by the way, when Adam of Brayman says Woden, that's the more Germanic version of the name Odin. When he says Frico, he means Frey or Freyr. And when he says Bjorko, when he's talking about a city, he means the city of Burka, which is the trade center in the island in the middle of a lake that's so famous.

18:31And he says, quote, That folk, meaning the Swedes, has a very famous temple called Uppsala, situated not far from the city of Sikterna and Bjorko. In this temple, entirely decked out in gold, the people worship the statues of three gods in such wise that the mightiest of them, Thor, occupies a throne in the middle of the chamber. Woden and Freyko have places on either side. The significance of these gods is as follows.

19:02Thor, they say, presides over the air, which governs the thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather and crops. The other, Woden, that is, the furious, carries on war and imparts to man strength against his enemies. The third is Freyko, who bestows peace and pleasure on mortals. His likeness, too, they fashion with an immense phallus. But Woden, they chisel armed, as our people are wont to represent Mars.

19:33Thor, with his scepter, apparently resembles Jove. The people also worship heroes, made gods, whom they endow with immortality because of their remarkable exploits. End quote. The scepter that he says Thor has is probably the famous hammer, Mjolnir. Adam of Bremen then describes what the sacrifice at these various places is like. And he writes, quote,

20:03The sacrifice is of this nature. Of every living thing that is male, they offer nine heads, with the blood of which it is customary to placate gods of this sort. The bodies they hang in a sacred grove that adjoins the temple. Now this grove is so sacred in the eyes of the heathen, that each and every tree in it is believed divine, because of the death or putrefaction of the victims. Even dogs and horses hang there with men. A Christian, seventy-two years old, told me that he had seen the bodies suspended promiscutously.

20:39Furthermore, the incantations customarily chanted in the ritual of a sacrifice of this kind are manifold and unseemly. Therefore, it is better to keep silence about them. End quote. Given how little is actually known about what went on at these sorts of Viking religious ceremonies, one wishes Adam of Bremen wouldn't have been so scared or horrified and could have told us what the Danish king told him about them.

21:09But Adam of Bremen's response to this is what you would have expected for most Christians of the Middle Ages, who would have seen these Viking ceremonies as little more than satanic rituals designed to placate or even conjure devils and demons. And the people involved in them as folk who were headed for the fiery pits of damnation. Viking expert and University of Oslo historian John Vidar Sigurdsson in his book Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings

21:44points out two interesting facts about the Scandinavians in this era and their belief system. He says that the worship of deities like Thor and Odin is part of an ethnic religion, meaning it applied to a specific people. Contrast that with something like Christianity, which is a universal religion. Islam is to the idea that anyone can convert to this and it applies equally well to people all over the world. Sigurdsson points out that that's not how the Scandinavians would have seen their gods.

22:15Their gods, their gods were exactly that, their gods. Sigurdsson also says that you could classify this religion as an elite religion, meaning the people that communicated with the gods were people like the kings. And this is key because the biggest threat to this religion in this time period is people like Adam of Bremen, who simply want to keep these people from the fiery pits of hell and stop them from worshiping demons and devils. But to the people of Scandinavia, it's the same as saying that you want to kill their gods and destroy their worldview and make them stop believing in the traditional spirits and the invisible population,

22:56the elves, the dwarves, and yes, the giants and the Valkyries. And as we said in part one, the Christian assault against the traditional Viking beliefs is a two-pronged one, both from above and below. They're able to find inroads in the Viking world through the Christian slaves that the Vikings take who can't help but share their belief system with their slave masters and also through the elite.

23:32As Sigurdsson said, these are the people who communicate with the gods. Well, what if you convert those people? And you can see exactly what happens if you look from a little earlier in this story, when Charlemagne and his Frankish Christians are able to use this same sort of tendency among the German peoples of Saxony to achieve the same sort of result. It's a long-standing tactic of converting the kings to Christianity who then take their people with them. But make no mistake about it.

24:03Odin, Thor, and the rest of the Norse pantheon are fighting a defensive rearguard action against the most dangerous foes these gods have ever faced. It's not the giants and the eventual destruction of Ragnarok. It's the Christian god and the many powerful states and their armies who go to war under that banner.

24:34But the followers of Odin are not the only peoples who feel threatened during this era. The people that threaten the people of Odin are themselves beset by portents of doom in their near future. The Christian states of Europe and their power is more latent than manifest in this era. And we see it more clearly than the people living through this time period, right around 899-900 ADCE when Alfred the Great died.

25:09We see it more clearly than they do. Because like patrons at a movie theater who've already read the book the movie's based on, we know how the 900s are going to go for Europe. The people in Europe during the 900s don't. And they see a quadruple threat on their horizon. The first of which has been plaguing them for more than a hundred years by this time period.

25:39The Scandinavian Vikings have gone from smash and grab piracy raids to full-on colonization and settlement. Historian Neil Price suggests that there were 40,000 to 50,000 Danes taking up residence in Britain during this time and they control about half the island. It's called the Dain Law. They are settling elsewhere as well. In addition, the long-running feud between Islam and Christianity takes a decidedly negative turn during this time period in the Mediterranean,

26:18where the island of Sicily, which had been attacked and temporarily occupied by Vikings at one point, is finally swamped and overwhelmed by Arab conquerors from North Africa. And by 902, they control the island and they are putting great pressure on the Christian Byzantines in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. Add to that the latest and newest threat from the Eurasian steppe breaking like a tsunami on the defenses of Central Europe and penetrating them,

26:51the Magyar Hungarian peoples who will raid into Bavaria and then finally into southern France. And as Tom Holland in his wonderful book, The Forge of Christendom points out, perhaps the greatest threat looming on the horizon for Christians in 900 AD CE is coming at the appointed date, a hundred years in the future, when the long-awaited promised appearance of the Antichrist is expected,

27:24like a giant exponentially worse version of the Y2K virus from the year 2000. All of those things together create a climate of pessimism and negativity that shows up in the sources. In his classic work, The Age of Faith, historian Will Durant in a condensed and edited account from a, a, it appears, monk in southern France, gives a sense of the feeling when that monk writes, quote,

27:57The cities are depopulated, the monasteries ruined and burned, the country reduced to solitude. As the first men lived without law, so now every man does what seems good in his own eyes, despising laws, human and divine. The strong oppress the weak. The world is full of violence against the poor. And of the plunder of ecclesiastical goods. Men devour one another like the fishes in the sea. End quote.

28:29Now, as I always say, I'm addicted to context. And I also have a background in journalism, which some people have said is the first draft of history. And there have always been criticisms about journalism. For example, one is the idea that stories get chosen because of their shocking or violent nature. Maybe you've heard the phrase, if it bleeds, it leads. Well, maybe there's a little of that going on in this story, too, because right after he uses that quote we just cited,

29:02the one about the men devouring each other like fishes in the sea, Will Durant, in his nearly 75-year-old history, notices that maybe there's a little trick history's playing on us about this as well. Maybe it's a case of, historically speaking, something bleeding and so making the history books more than the much more boring stuff like peace and commerce and happiness. And he writes, quote, Perhaps we exaggerate the damage done by the Norse and Magyar raids.

29:36To crowd them into a page for brevity's sake darkens unduly the picture of a life in which there were doubtless intervals of security and peace. Monasteries continued to be built throughout this terrible ninth century, he writes, and were often the centers of busy industry. Rouen, despite raids and fires, grew stronger from trade with Britain. Cologne and Mainz dominated commerce on the Rhine. And in Flanders, thriving centers of industry and trade developed.

30:08End quote. There's another line we used to have in the news business. And it was that another story is killed by overchecking. And what that meant is something that appeared to be a really good scintillating tale. The more you looked into it, the less scintillating it appeared to be. And there's a case to be made that this very discussion on the Vikings falls into this category, because Hollywood and accounts like Hollywood have so transformed the Vikings into this uniquely barbaric and terrible entity

30:42that almost anything you do to put a more accurate sort of cast on top of them makes them look, well, less worthy of leading because of the lack of bleeding, if you will. Also, because I'm addicted to context, the other reason that the Vikings look less outrageous the more you dive into this time period is because compared to the people they're up against, they don't look anywhere near as barbaric, right?

31:12They may score a 10 out of 10 on the barbarity scale. But what Hollywood doesn't often show is that the people they're fighting would often score a 9 or an 8 on the barbarity scale, right? Take the opponents of these Viking raiders in Europe, the proto-knights, as I like to call them. These horsemen from Western and Central Europe who several hundred years after this time period will take all sorts of vows to protect the weak and the poor.

31:43Well, they need to take those vows because that contrasts greatly with the behavior of the proto-knights in this era. People, Tom Holland in his book The Forge of Christendom labels a gang of male-clad thugs. Who prey on the peasantry of Europe in ways that make them sound little different than the Viking attacks. In The Forge of Christendom, Tom Holland writes about these gangs of male-clad thugs, quote,

32:14Month by month, season by season, year by year their exactions grew ever worse. How gruesomely apt it was that their favorite mode of torture should have been a garroting chain, Notorious for inflicting upon its victims, now quoting a contemporary source, Not one, but a thousand deaths, he continues, A literal tightening of the screws, robberies too, and rapes and kidnappings, All were deployed with a brutal gusto by hit squads determined to trample underfoot

32:48Every last vestige of independence in the countryside, And to reduce even the most prosperous of peasants to servitude, end quote. As the old line goes, with friends like that, who needs enemies? And if your enemies are barbaric, how much less do they stand out when your friends are pretty barbaric too? In the 900s, the era we are in this story, there will be such a reaction to the depredations of these gangs of male-clad thugs,

33:26That a movement that I was surprised to read is considered one of the greatest peace movements in world history will get going. It's known as the peace of God. But in the early 900s, we're still seeing the sorts of activities that will create, you know, the equal and opposite reaction that leads to that movement in another century. This is the era of the castellans, as they're known, and Holland talks a lot about them. Local warlords who put up what we would consider today to be rudimentary, small, primitive-type castles wherever they can,

34:03And then fleece the local area that they could now control using these castles, And use the money to hire more and more gangs of male-clad thugs. And to show how history can be seen in multiple different ways, there are different ways to view this development, Whether it's positive or negative. Let's go back to Charlemagne in the late 700s with a united Europe, Which won't happen again for a thousand years after Charlemagne's time, right?

34:34It'll take Napoleon in the late 1700s, early 1800s through war to unite Europe similarly again. This is often seen as a golden age by people who laud all the benefits of centralization, And who see the disintegration of that empire as a terrible tragedy, And the fragmentation of it as something that invited things like Viking attacks, right? When you have something we would call today a failed state, Well, that invites terrorism, doesn't it? And warlordism.

35:06And the era that is the one that Europe is going into now is often... I have a chapter of a book that calls it The Rise of the Dukes. Well, who are these dukes and counts and lords and barons? Well, these are the Castellans and the more glorified, more decorated Castellans, Who will take over areas that used to be all part of Charlemagne's empire, And rule all these little territories themselves. Is this a plus or a minus? History has seen it differently during different time periods.

35:36If you are a fan of centralized authority and that whole thing, Well, you see this as a terrible negative in Europe, Descending into a fragmented, unable to coordinate their activities sort of entity. And you will say something like, Well, Charlemagne didn't have Viking attacks to worry about Because he could fight those things off. He could build all sorts of defenses. And the minute all that, you know, falls apart into anarchy, Well, that's when, you know, you create the conditions of,

36:06You know, it's like taking the police force out of your community And keeping all your doors unlocked. You're inviting robbers, right? And interlopers. But the other way to look at it, And it's been seen this way throughout different eras also, Is that the decentralization here is a reaction to things like Viking raids, right? If the emperor or the king is so far away That by the time they were able to send soldiers to protect the people who were hit by Viking raids, The Vikings are long gone. Well, what if the central authority isn't who sends out the equivalent of the local police force?

36:40What if that's a local Duke, Count, Lord, Baron, or what have you, Right nearby with a little local castle right there on the spot, right? So there are historical accounts over the eras that see this fragmentation not as a downside, Not as a downside, but as a reaction to the need to have local protection and authority and decision-making on site. Because otherwise it's hard to respond to these, you know, quick hit and run raids that the Vikings are launching. But by the time we're where we are in this story, right?

37:13We've gone from the 700s to the 800s. Now we're in the 900s. The conditions on the ground are much different. And the easy pickings of undefended monasteries and all that from the 800s is a thing of the past. Now the Vikings are encountering the equivalent of locked doors, burglar alarm systems, and local police forces nearby. And the 900s will prove to be an entirely different sort of affair. As we said in the last part of this discussion, in places like modern-day France, West Francia, they're starting to fortify the bridges.

37:50Because the Vikings use the river systems as a kind of superhighway to get into the inside of the territory. Well, if you fortify bridges at the mouths of these rivers, well, all of a sudden you have the equivalent of a toll booth or a police bureau or a guarded border. In Britain, kings like Alfred the Great and his successors will start to create fortified cities. They're called burrs.

38:20And they'll do similar sorts of things. They'll put them at important sites where the Vikings would use as superhighways, roads or river crossings. And once again, it doesn't mean you can't have Viking attacks, but it means all of a sudden the defenses are there to make something that used to be considered, you know, a relatively easy score. Something where you can expect to lose people and maybe a lot of people and maybe just lose. Because the 900s start to see a lot more times where the Viking raiders and maybe even larger forces than raiders start losing.

38:54Of course, losing in quotation marks is a bit of an eye of the beholder thing sometimes, isn't it? There's a phrase often used about winning the war and losing the peace. For example, one of the most important cases of maybe winning the war and losing the peace happens in the year 911, when one of the most famous Viking figures in all Viking history and one of the earliest that we can say conclusively actually lived and was a real person.

39:30And there's no doubt about it, is this guy known to history as Rallo. His Viking name was probably some version of Rolf. And his nickname, because those Vikings often had, you know, Rolf the, in his case, it was Rolf the Ganger. And that supposedly was a reference to his size and he was supposed to be so large that he couldn't ride a horse and that he had to walk. He's not the only Viking that that is said about.

40:01But this Rolf the Ganger, the future Rallo, the future Robert is one of the many Vikings supposed to have been involved in the famous siege of Paris in the late 800s that we talked about in the last segment of this discussion. It is not known whether he is Danish or Norwegian. Both traditions exist. The Norwegians often claim Rallo, Rolf as one of their own. But he gets into a scrap, one of many, with the West Francian king, right, what will in the future be France, a guy named Charles the Simple that we mentioned earlier.

40:45And simple doesn't mean, you know, not intelligent. It kind of means sincere, right? Not not simple minded, but he will. Rolf will lose this encounter in West Francia. And as part of the peace agreement, he will be given a territory that in the future will be called Normandy, which is a reference to the people who settled there after this peace agreements. The Northmen under Rolf the Ganger.

41:19Rolf is fully a Viking right out of the Hollywood movie trope. In his book, Powers and Thrones, Dan Jones writes, quote, the creation of Normandy was directly linked to the dramatic siege of Paris in 885, 886. Among the Viking leaders of that expedition was a man called Rallo, who was probably born in Denmark and whose career was described by a later biographer, Dudo of San Quentin, in idealized but undeniably thrilling terms.

41:53End quote. Jones is going to intersperse some of those quotes from Dudo in this next part where he says, quote, Dudo described Rallo as a preternaturally tough and dogged soldier, quote, trained in the art of war and utterly ruthless. End quote. Who could typically be seen, quote, in a helmet wonderfully ornamented with gold and a male coat. End quote. Jones continues, quote, Rallo was one of the most violent men of his exceptionally bloody times.

42:24On one occasion, he prevailed in battle by ordering his men to kill all the animals, chop their carcasses in half, and build a makeshift barricade out of their freshly butchered meat. But he was a canny negotiator, Jones writes. During the second half of the ninth century, Rallo made a tidy living among the Franks, doing as all thrusting young Northmen did, burning, laying towns and villages to waste, plundering and killing.

42:55By the early years of the king. By the early years of the 10th century, he and his Viking comrades had driven the rulers of the Franks to distraction and their people to a state of abject war weariness. End quote. His biographer Dudo then says that the subjects of West Francia were complaining to their king that the land in the realm was, quote, no better than a desert for its population is either dead through famine or sword or is perhaps in captivity.

43:30End quote. So Charles the Simple defeats Rallo in a battle, a siege perhaps. And the peace agreement is one that the people who are the fans of the highly centralized sorts of governments decry is a huge mistake. But those who see the decentralized approach as something maybe more akin to, you know, doing the best with what you have available. If you have terrorists continually destroying and raiding a region and taking off captives and killing the population and robbing everything,

44:09what would you think of turning that area over to the terrorists, telling them that they now owe their allegiance to you, that they need to convert to your way of thinking? You know, in these days, you know, in these days we might make it a rule that they have to then become a democracy. But back in these times, the rule is you have to become Christians and then telling them to defend that territory against other terrorists like themselves, because that's going to be the deal.

44:41Charles the Simple is going to grant to Rallo, the Viking, the areas that Rallo is sort of already controlling and occupying. These areas that will become Normandy around the entry to the Seine River and then tell him that, you know, if you accept this deal, you're my vassal. Which may sound weird, except that this is the era, as we said, when the dukes and counts and lords and barons are going to start to come to the fore.

45:13And what's the difference if your warlord happens to be, you know, a locally grown warlord or if it's somebody, you know, from outside, right? I mean, if you're giving lands to a bunch of barons who are going to throw up their own castles and be, you know, sometimes loyal to you and other times rebellious. Well, why not make it the guy who's already in charge of that area and who knows probably best how to repel Viking raiders because he is himself a Viking raider. And in his book, Northman, historian John Hayward writes about Rallo and this agreement, quote,

45:52In return for his homage, conversion to Christianity, an agreement to defend the Seine against other Viking raiders, Charles appointed Rallo as Count of Rouen. It was a mutually advantageous arrangement. Charles got recognition of his sovereignty over lands he did not actually control, while Rallo's de facto rule over the lower Seine was legitimized, end quote. Hayward then points out that this is hardly a new arrangement and that other kings have done this with Vikings before.

46:26In fact, one can go all the way back to certain Roman practices from the Roman Empire that sound similar, including the way the way the Romans treated the Franks themselves when the Franks were much more Viking-like than they are in this time period.

46:43Famously, Rallo may not be the submissive vassal to Charles the Simple that the peace agreement may have expected. The biographer Dudo tells a story where, at one point during the ceremony, Rallo is supposed to kiss the feet of the Frankish king and instead says he's not kissing anyone's feet and orders an underling to do it for him. And normally you bend down and kiss the feet of the king.

47:15Instead, the Viking underling lifted up the king's foot to his mouth, toppling the king on his back, and supposedly the Vikings all laughed about this. It's a sign of exactly how much respect they have for this agreement and this king. But Rallo did convert to Christianity, but like so many other Vikings who did, first-generation Christian converts from Scandinavia often hedged their bets a little bit. And John Haywood in Northman explains how that worked for Rallo when he says,

47:47Although Rallo was still a pagan when he won control of Ra, it appears he allowed what was left of the church to function in that area under his control, much as the Danish rulers of York had done. Pagan Vikings, he writes, were rarely positively hostile to Christianity. Sacking churches and monasteries and selling their occupants into slavery was just good business. Even after his baptism in 912, Rallo, like many first-generation Viking converts to Christianity,

48:20hedged his bets and worshipped the pagan gods alongside Christ. Shortly before he died, Rallo ordered a hundred Christians to be beheaded as an offering to the pagan gods. But he also gave a hundred pounds of gold to the churches of Rouen. End quote. The interesting thing about this, though, is that you can see the long-term anti-terrorism strategy at work here. What the Chinese would have called in their long-term anti-terrorism strategies,

48:55with their so-called barbarians nearby them, cooking, right? Cooking the barbarians. Because you turn them into people more like yourself. And when that happens, it changes the relationship. It's a good thing for a ruler like Rallo, because becoming a Christian and beginning to organize your society the way the Christian states did, exalts the king, turns the societies into one organized as a hierarchy.

49:25Not so good for the individual freedom-loving Viking farmers who used to get together at their assemblies known as things and make decisions that way, right? If you're freedom-loving and you like a nice decentralized system, having your ruler convert to Christianity, then mandating all his people do, all of a sudden puts you under the control of a much stronger despotic ruler, maybe.

49:55The other thing, though, that it does for the other Christian states is it takes away one of the great Viking Scandinavian advantages in war. All of a sudden, instead of the circumstances being that they can raid you, but you can't go and attack them because they live far away and who knows where and you can't get to them, when the Vikings begin to settle in places, for example, in the Dane Law in the British Isles or in Normandy, they lose the main advantage that they have of mobility.

50:29And now, all of a sudden, their farms, their homes, their families, and their wealth are right next door to the people that they're sometimes making angry with them or vengeful or warlike. And now their foes can do to them what they've done for more than a century to their foes. And one of the really interesting things to follow during the Viking era

51:00are these overseas settlements by these Scandinavian pirates, conquerors, colonists, settlers, whatever you want to call them, because they become part of the societies that they're embedded in over time. They become absorbed. I think we compared the Viking Age in Part 1 to a hand grenade detonating in the Scandinavian homeland and spreading burning shrapnel in all directions.

51:31It's part of why this story is so hard to follow. You're following all those pieces of shrapnel as they embed themselves in the surrounding societies. But if shrapnel doesn't kill you, eventually the wound closes up and skin forms around it. And while the metal may impact your life and cause a lingering amount of influence forever, it just becomes one piece of a larger whole. And there are interesting stories about Rallo, for example,

52:03having dreams of creating a society that is the equivalent of a whole flock of birds that shows up in one place of all different breeds and types, but all bearing the same blood-red left wing and creating what one historian refers to as a mongrel society out of these many different parts, sort of foreshadowing the fusion to come. It reminds me of the American experience

52:34where the United States often referred to itself as the Great Melting Pot or had Latin phrases associated with it like e pluribus unum, e pluribus unum, which means out of many, one. And that is not a bad phrase to describe the Normans. And of course, Norman just means Northman, and Normandy is the land of the Northmen. But these men came from all over and quickly found themselves a part of the society around them, maintaining perhaps, though,

53:04something in their blood or their DNA or their cultural makeup that hearkened back to the ferociousness and the fierceness of their Viking roots because you can hear chroniclers and even historians up until the mid-20th century and maybe even today talking about that weird sort of extra ferocity that the Normans had even when they were Christian and French. And you can see how quickly they're absorbed by the local population. Rollo, who's the first to settle there, right?

53:35This Viking, who is almost the quintessential example of the type, will marry a local woman in the Danish way, we're told, and have a son who's already only half Viking and who speaks French and who's Christian. He will have the respectively French name of William attached to him and get a surname or a nickname. Afterwards, he'll be known as William Longsword.

54:07He will have a rebellion, Rollo's son launched against him by a bunch of his own Scandinavian Viking peoples who consider him already too Frankified. And then he's gonna, in the Danish way, which means sort of like a concubine or a hookup, or what would they say today, a baby mama, he will hook up with another local woman, which means that his kid, who will be named Richard, is only one-quarter Viking. So in the space of two generations,

54:38you can already see the burning piece of shrapnel being absorbed by the much larger West Frankish body. But as we've been saying all along, what happens to Rollo and his pirate Vikings in what will be Normandy is just a continuation of a process that's been going on since long before the Roman Empire fell, centuries beforehand. It's the taming of these Germanic language

55:08pagan peoples. And earlier versions of them, from Goths to Lombards to Vandals to Burgundians to Franks, yes, even these Frankish people, they've already gone through this process. They're being, well, 150 years ago, somebody would have seen a very superiority kind of way of looking at things, said they're being civilized. These savages are being turned into reputable members of the Christian community, answerable to God

55:39and the surrounding other nobles. But if you're an average Viking farmer who goes on these raids, as your ancestors might have, doing a little piracy work to better yourself, go home, marry the girl next door, and start a farm with, you know, your winnings from your pirate affairs, you might look at something like this as being sold out, right? The big guys like Rollo and his Jarls, and Jarl could mean Earl or Lord or anything like that.

56:09Those guys are the ones who benefit greatly from these sorts of deals. It's the average Viking who once upon a time used to be considered sort of an equal who loses. If you want to make the Hollywood movie about the Vikings and you want them to be these barbarian-type pirate, you know, movie tropes, and you want them to be a bunch of warriors involved in an equal brotherhood, that when somebody says, who is your leader, you say, we have none, right? That's a famous line from the old Viking, that we have no leader.

56:39We're all equal here. And you want to set your movie in the 700s or the 800s, because in the 900s ADCE, the Viking world begins to become more like the non-Viking Christian world. And the hierarchies that are taking over in places that will become France and Germany and places like that arrives in Scandinavia. And you can begin to see the consolidation of these

57:10independent, small-time rulers, these so-called petty kings, by the great kings. And it's a bit like watching corporate giants swallowing up small-time businesses and mom-and-pop operations until they create the geopolitical equivalent of a monopoly. And in keeping with history's love of consolidation and consolidators, the men who do this

57:42are often lauded as the founding fathers of the modern-day nations of Scandinavia, right? Their version of a George Washington-type figure. It's worth pointing out that the people who do this in the places like modern-day Sweden or modern-day Denmark or modern-day Norway are figures that you can't 100% confirm or even real. Welcome to the early Middle Ages.

58:13Take, for example, the guy who famously does this in what will become the country of Norway. His name is Harald Finehair, also known as Harald Fairhair, also known as Harald Hairfare. Neil Price, the historian of Viking Times, says that his nickname was Lufa, which means Mophead. And Price points out that these guys often had pirate last names and nicknames. Compare it to something

58:43like Blackbeard from the 16th or 17th century. And Mophead is a famous figure in one of the sagas written by one of the most famous saga writers of all time, an Icelandic writer named Snorri Sturluson. And in his work known as The Heimskringle or The Lives of the Norse Kings, he writes about Mophead and in very storybook-like fashion traces his desire to conquer all of Norway and be the king that unifies

59:14the entire place to a woman that he wants. And he goes to her and basically, you know, proposes that he become her man and she says something like, why would a petty king like you appeal to me? I mean, she says, when we have kings who are unifying Sweden and kings who are unifying Denmark, why don't you go unify Norway and then come back to me when you've made something of yourself? He, in the saga, says something like, oh yeah, thanks for reminding me. I was always going to do that. And then he vows to not cut his hair until he does.

59:45And then he goes around like a mafia don making the sort of offers that the other petty kings can't refuse because if they do, he kills them and all of their top men with them. If they instead join him, as we said with Rallo, all his top men can become his men, Jarls, and they can be bigger than the petty kings of old. But if they resist, he's going to kill them. And this creates a Newtonian equal and opposite reaction

1:00:16that precipitates one of the things that the Viking era is most known for, right? The pushing out and exploring farther and farther away lands in part because these people need to get away from Harold Finehair who's going to kill them if he catches them. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but let's let Snorri Sturluson in his work written farther away from the time that he's chronicling than the American Revolution is to our time.

1:00:46Let's have him discuss a little bit of the career of Harold Finehair to show us what we're dealing with here. I'm using the Erling Monson translation, by the way, and it needs to be pointed out that there are reasons that people would resist what Finehair is trying to do. They often were people who were farmers on ancestral land that had been handed down from father to son from time immemorial, and all of a sudden this great king comes in and says, all this land is mine,

1:01:17and you can stay on it if you pay taxes, and a lot of people said, to hell with you, I'm going elsewhere, and that's described by Sturluson when he says, quote, amid all the unrest when Harold was seeking to subdue all the land of Norway, the pharaohs, which are islands, and Iceland, lands out beyond the sea, were found and settled. At that time also there was a great faring to Shetland, and many great men fled as outlaws from Norway, and they went on

1:01:47Viking raids to the west. In the winter they were in the Orkneys and the Hebrides, but in the summer they harried in Norway and did great scathe there in the land, end quote. What Sturluson means by that is that these people didn't just run away from Harold Finehair and everybody let bygones be bygones, they came back and treated Norway, or what will become Norway, the same way that Viking raiders had treated the rest of Europe.

1:02:18They raided and robbed and took slaves from Harold Finehair's growing kingdom. And this recalls something we said earlier in this story, that before the Viking Age supposedly begins, it was probably already going on in the deep, dark Scandinavian mists before Europe ever knew about them, and it continued probably long after the Viking Age sort of officially in air quotes, ends. The Vikings raided Scandinavia too,

1:02:49and like all the kings of Europe whose main job is protecting their subjects, Harold Finehair's main job was protecting his. And so when Vikings who had fled Norway came back and raided Norway, Harold Finehair goes after them.

1:03:06Sturluson continues, quote, King Harold learned that the Vikings who in the winter were in the Westlands, which means Britain and Ireland, were harrying in the Midlands, which means Norway. He went out to war each summer and ransacked the islands and the outlying rocks. But when his army came near the Vikings, they all fled, most of them out to sea. And when the king was weary of this, it happened one summer that he sailed west with his army across the sea.

1:03:36First he came to Shetland, and there slew all the Vikings who had not fled thence. Next he sailed south to the Orkneys and cleansed them all of Vikings. Thereafter, he went right to the Hebrides and harried there. He slew many Vikings who before had warriors under them, and he held there many battles and most often had the victory. End quote. So Harold Luffa, Mophead, Hairfare, Finehair,

1:04:07adopted the same anti-piracy strategy common in the ancient world. When it becomes too much, you go find the pirate layers, launch the equivalent of marines from your boats, and wipe out all the pirates where they live. Now, if you're trying to clear pirates out, though, the problem is is how do you keep the areas from being reestablished as pirate bases later.

1:04:37If you look at the history of the Mediterranean, for example, and piracy in that area, you can have successive empires and kingdoms clear out pirate layers only to have those places get reinfested later, usually because they're perfect. I mean, they're just, it's easy to hide. They're, these certain islands that become known for piracy are right along important shipping routes. They just lend themselves to reinfestation. So according to the sagas, Harold will put some of his own people in charge

1:05:09of these islands like the Hebrides and the Orkneys and whatnot, and their job is to sort of, you know, create a stable business climate and settle people there and make it one of those areas where there's just too many eyes and too much law and order and too many authorities for it to be a good place for pirates anymore. I don't know if that's true and the sagas are not necessarily all that trustworthy on this sort of stuff. There is another aspect, though, of Harold's rule that more modern histories are taking a much more jaundiced view of

1:05:39than my earlier ones and that the sagas take, which is that Harold's tyranny