Viking Women: wives, weavers and warriors

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Hello, Greg here.

Just a reminder before we get going that episodes of Your Dead to Me are released on Fridays wherever you get your podcasts.

But if you're in the UK, you can listen to the latest episodes 28 days earlier than anywhere else.

First on BBC Sounds.

Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster.

And today, we are loading our loom weights and launching our longship as we sail back to medieval Scandinavia to learn all about Viking women.

And to help us, we have two very special guests.

In History Corner, she's a historian, writer, and broadcaster based at Bath Spa University, where her research focuses on the cultures, literatures, and languages of the medieval north.

You may have read her sensational new book, Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age.

It's a wonderful book.

And you will definitely remember her from our episode on Leif Ericsson.

It's Dr.

Eleanor Barraclough.

Welcome back, Eleanor.

Yay, thank you so much for having me back.

Delighted to have you back.

And in Comedy Corner, they're an award-winning...

Sorry, and in Comedy Corner, they're an award-nominated stand-up comedian.

When it comes to awards, I am famously always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

And what you just did, your mouth typo just cut deep.

So sorry, Chloe.

Okay.

Okay.

And in Comedy Corner.

They're an award-nominated stand-up comedian.

You might have seen them on TV, on Celebrity Pointless, Richard Osmond's House of Games, Jonathan Ross's Comedy Club, or commenting on the women's football Euros on Sky Sports.

Maybe you caught their recent stand-up tour, How You See Me, How You Don't, or than supporting Ed Gamble.

It's Chloe Pets.

Welcome to the show, Chloe.

Thank you so much for having me.

It was so beautiful as well because I get, this is my first time meeting you and I get the impression that you're such a lovely man.

No, monster.

We really felt like your mistake cut you to the core.

Whereas that's probably the funniest thing that's going to happen to me today.

I'm pretty sure you're going to win an award anytime soon.

Okay, okay.

Anyone listening, please give Chloe an award to my look like a prophet.

It's manifestation.

Yes, exactly.

I put it out into the universe and it's coming back to you.

Chloe, first time on the pod.

Yeah.

How are you with history?

Did you like it at school?

Are you comfort zone?

I did like it.

I think I did it for A-level.

Did I do it for A-level?

I think you.

Did I do it for A-level?

You're not that old.

What did I?

You look at us.

Like, we're going to know.

Oh, my God.

Yes, you did it for A-level.

I think I must have because I really liked it.

Did I do it for A-level?

Now I'm going to list my A-levels.

I definitely did English because I did that at uni.

I did maths.

Oh.

History, theatre studies.

Oh, and then I did classics as well.

Double history.

I did double history.

I forgot that I even did one history.

Look, I loved history.

It was probably like my top two subjects were English and theatre studies.

And then history was like my subsidiary.

And I had a great teacher, two great teachers, Miss Swinley, Dr.

Gardner.

Lovely people.

Yeah, shout out them.

And, you know, it must be the classic.

Like, it was a lot of Henry VIII, a lot of World War II.

The area of history that I enjoy the most because I really like consuming history via novels so I'm a big fan of like the Victorian era and the regency gotcha those are my areas of fine specialty so if I say to you Vikings did your brain just go no

um slightly yeah I mean uh I don't have any sort of context of really where they're located in history.

They seem like kind of vacuum packed in their little

in their little section.

So yeah, getting a bit of like context of where they're located in human history will be really interesting for me today.

We can do that, can't we?

All right.

Definitely do that.

So what do you know now?

This is the so what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject.

And I reckon when you hear Viking, you're probably thinking big, hairy men in historically inaccurate horn helmets.

No horns.

But today we're horning, ah, sorry, honing in on the women.

Now, you might be imagining fearsome warriors tossing axes while tossing their immaculate blonde braids.

And maybe you're thinking also of the mythological Valkyries, made famous in Wagner's opera and the Marvel Thor movies, of course.

You might have seen the TV show Vikings with the scary shield maiden Lagatha and her bloody post-divorce glow-up, or you've watched Skade, the sinister sorceress in The Last Kingdom.

But what's the truth behind these pop culture portrayals?

What was life really like for the average Viking gal about town?

And how many people can you incinerate and still be made a saint?

Let's find find out.

Right, Eleanor, let's start with the basics because Chloe said vacuum pack them for it for us.

So

I'll get my scissors out, right?

Get your scissors out.

Yeah, let's seal them up.

Put them in a nice water bath, I think.

They would like that.

Right, let's give some dates.

Okay, so we're talking first raids that we know about.

We think of Vikings being sort of really raidy on the British Isles, end of the 8th century, so like 793 classic raid on Instfan, possibly a little bit before then, all right?

And then how long the Viking Age goes on for sort of depends on how we're defining it, but let's say kind of up to 1100, except a lot of the evidence actually comes from after that, so we're pushing it.

So, if you think of the year around 1000, they're definitely hanging around then, and then like a few centuries either side, yeah.

And then that word Viking, there's an old Norse version of the word, Vikinger, which means a raider or a pirate, but of course, not everyone in the Viking Age is going to be a raider or a pirate.

So it's sort of like, roughly speaking, the age in which that happens.

Then in terms of where we're talking geographically, the homelands are Scandinavia, so Denmark, Norway and Sweden.

That's where it all starts, except a really exciting thing about the Viking Age is that it's all about expansion, colonisation, exploration, quite a lot of sort of, you know, raidy, sort of quite bloody, invasion-y type things as well, which we'll talk about.

But, you know, this is sort of a very culturally sort of you know, people are coming into contact with each other across this vast area.

So, you know, they expand across the North Atlantic, they make it all the way to Iceland and Greenland, even to the edge of the North American continent around the year 1000.

They go east down the waterways of what's now sort of Russia, Ukraine, they end up in the Byzantine Empire, which is centered on what's now Istanbul in Turkey.

And then they end up further east than that, they end up sort of around Baghdad, that sort of region.

So they're really far-travelling, and that's a really important part of what they are.

But also, because it's over sort of several hundred years, there are big changes over that time.

So, for example, they start pagan.

You might have heard of the Viking sort of Norse pantheon of gods like Odin and Freyja and Thor and Loki.

But then around the year 1000 or so, we see this sort of conversion to Christianity, roughly speaking.

So, it's a really interesting tipping point that the Viking Age exists.

Is that sort of sufficiently unvacuum-packed for you?

Yeah, that's amazing.

And I think what's so interesting about history and the way that we teach it in this country, I do think we're really bad at contextualising and localising where things sit.

Because like the fact that you're like, the Vikings went to the Byzantine lands is like...

It feels like a Marvel DC kind of crossover.

We're like, they knew each other.

They knew each other.

Like, they saw the big hairy ginger men.

Yeah.

Okay.

So Chloe, what do you imagine the Viking women women were up to while the lads were on tour?

You know, they're off doing all these gallivanting around half the world.

What are the women up to?

I hope a lot of intense lesbianism, if I'm not exactly.

That must have been more.

There's probably some.

I mean, let's be honest, there's probably some.

Oh, yeah, there's sort of later prohibitions against it, which suggests people are up to things.

Yeah, definitely.

Is that sort of...

The thing that I'm interested in,

why did the Christianity come in?

Or is that something you'll get to?

Well,

so it's like the whole of sort of Western Europe is Christianizing.

In fact, sort of, as far as the Viking Age is concerned, they come to it quite late.

And so, you know, Charlemagne, 800, he's trying to sort of push north from what's now Germany, France, Christianise, going north.

And then above them in Denmark, you've got a lot of contact, and then this spreads.

And so, sort of it gets to Denmark first, then Norway, and then the Norwegian king.

It's sort of like, all right, Iceland, you want to be thinking about this.

Greenland, you want to be thinking.

So it's just part of this big movement that's going on at the time.

We've spoken to a certain extent about men and kings and so on, but we need to talk about women, right?

So we're talking, we're trying to reframe the picture, because I think it's quite easy to think of men in their longboats going off to pillage and to plunder and to settle.

So

how do the women, what is their life like?

How does it sort of fit into that story?

Well, there's no Viking age without the women.

For a start.

So if you, if you, so for a start, it's things like that sound a little bit tedious or worthy if you're into Vikings because they're glittery and cool and fun and dramatic.

Things like textile production, you need clothes, but you also need sales.

To if you're going to go across the ocean, if you're looking to trade or to raid or to settle or to colonize, find new lands, you need wind power to actually get across that ocean.

Without the women, you don't have sales, you don't have clothes, you also don't have children.

And that's because obviously some people are having the children, but other people are also helping bring up the children.

You know, so you need that next generation.

So on a very, very basic level, take away the women and you've got nothing.

Also, they're doing most of the food preparation.

They're looking after the houses when, when, or the long houses and the farms when sort of the men might be on their hunting or their raiding expeditions, whatever it is.

And so take away the women and you've got some hungry naked men in a rowing boat.

Which is a channel 4 documentary that I would watch.

Was there monogamy or did the men have multiple partners?

So it's not entirely clear, but it looks like, yeah, particularly if you're high status and male, you could have more than one woman.

Maybe there's a sort of concubinage system, something like that.

Certainly, the sort of later written accounts, the sagas that are written later on, but look back to the Viking Age, some of them, again, the suggestion is there.

But would it get to the point where like the men were going and like pillaging and bringing women back and then was there like jealousy and stuff?

Yeah, yeah, right.

So, yeah, in the sagas, again, so sagas, sagas, just to say, they're written down in Iceland in the 13th century, but there's a group of sagas called the Isleninger Serger, the sagas of Icelanders, and a lot of them look back to those first centuries of settlement in Iceland.

So, Icelanders settled that the sort of second half of the 9th century.

So, we're sort of in the Viking Age proper at this point.

And exactly that.

So, there's one where, I think it's Laxdeiler saga, where

someone basically goes abroad and he ends up in this slave market, essentially, where, where you know people are bidding for women and he gets really excited because there's someone he really fancies and everyone's a little bit embarrassed he's bidding huge amounts of money for her gets her brings her home to Iceland and his wife is absolutely furious

as you would be

exactly yeah you didn't pay any money for me

but this is it and in fact in that particular example the concubine, the enslaved person, whatever it is, who's brought back to Iceland, she turns out to be, according to the the saga, because of course she's not going to be an ordinary person, turns out to be the daughter of an Irish king, and she, you know, has this child, and it's all very much.

So, but it gives us a sense that, yeah, British Isles and Ireland are very much the context for a lot of these women.

We need to start, I suppose, with the life of women.

Actually, let's start with girlhood, right?

What would you expect of a Viking girl's upbringing, Chloe?

She's probably getting taught just to do the classic stuff: the food making, skateboarding, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

She's somewhat a couple of ollies.

Yeah, yeah, I think probably skateboarding.

Yeah, you took the words out of my mouth.

Sorry, is it skateboarding?

Yeah, skateboarding.

Sorry, I ruined it.

You're making a very sensible point, and I ruined it.

No, no, no, I think it's important.

I think it's important that we allow other intrusive thoughts to win on this podcast.

Okay, skateboarding, Eleanor.

I mean, I think Chloe's point about

food preparation and

domestic chores.

Domestic chores.

So it's really important to say up top, there's no such thing as an average experience.

We've got to think, you know, we've already said the Viking Age extends over hundreds of years.

You've got your homelands, you've got this sort of Norse cultural sphere, but you've also got a really big geographical area as well.

And then within that, you've got lots and lots of different social strata.

And so someone who is very, say, you know, a young child who is enslaved is going to have a very different experience growing up compared to someone who is much further up that social pecking order.

But exactly as you say, yeah, a lot of it's going to be learning from a young age, domestic crafts and sort of textile manufacture.

It's really interesting in what you find evidence of children, young children, in the textile making spaces, you know, across the Norse world in the archaeological record.

There's one from Norway.

It's little bits of sort of...

I think it's birch sort of sap or something, and some child has been using it as chewing gum.

And it's so cute.

You've got these little teeth.

It's a little teeth box.

And again, it's it's in the context of textile production.

So there's that.

There's also slightly less pleasant stuff.

So for example, it looks like there's a higher rate of

in female infanticides.

I was wondering whether that might be the case.

Yeah, that that seems likely it's really hard to prove it.

So just to be clear, that is the deliberate killing of little baby girls because you don't want a girl, you want a boy.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Which is horrible.

You know, we're a comedy show, but that is, you know, we have to talk about this stuff.

It's cruel.

Toys?

Well, this is the lovely thing.

So these are, so not many, but if we're talking about young female children, you know,

it's, it's, again, it's hard to say, okay, this definitely belonged to a little girl.

But there is some evidence of children's toys.

My favourite is from Hedeby, sort of on the border between northern Germany and southern Denmark, as it is now.

And this was a trading town, really early trading town.

And there is this little doll made of probably sort of antler or bone, you know,

and it's, I mean, it's adorable.

I went to see it and all the children in the museum were just gathered around it you you could see they just wanted to pick it up and what and her little hands it it looks like a girl i don't obviously know that it's a it's a female doll but the the doll's little hands are sort of like splayed onto its tummy and it's got this little hair it's so you just it just looks like a doll yeah you know that's what it is but then there's other things you get swords and you get boats and things like that but the little dolls for so was there any culture of play amongst kids that's a really good question well i think there's a very, I don't know what you think, Greg.

Children play.

Play is sort of a universal impulse, partly because it helps you to sort of work out the society, the world in which you live in, you know, your role-playing to some extent, so you're sort of making sense of that imaginative world as well.

The question is, at what point does that stop?

And I think that certainly compared to today, you know, at the point where, yeah, children nowadays might be going out on their skateboards, you know, these girls are probably in there learning how to weave.

So they've already got a job at eight.

So if you survive being murdered at their birth as a girl, they're like, put you to work at eight.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah.

That's great, isn't it?

Does it improve for teenagers?

Like, you know, is it fun?

You know the answer to that.

I don't.

I don't know the answer.

It's not going to improve for teenagers.

If they're killing girls at birth and then putting them to work at eight, I don't think that all of a sudden they're going to be like, okay, off you go into the world now.

You can go to university.

But can I tell you something nice?

They're quite recent findings, right?

Ice skates.

Greg's great.

People think that archaeologists have looked at evidence that ice skates from the Viking Age made from bone, and they now think that it was probably older children and teenagers who were using those skates.

So they had some fun,

which I just think is adorable.

That is charming.

Yeah, right?

But yes, so again,

I'm going to say this.

Basically, I'm just covering my art.

So it's hard to tell.

It's hard to tell, right?

Otherwise, archaeologists will go right in, won't they?

We'll get angular.

That's red ink.

Dr.

Barrett.

I heard it on the radio.

That's not red ink.

That's blood.

There are very angry people.

So, yeah, so essentially,

when you get to sort of be of childbearing age and pretty young, marriage is obviously on the cards.

And that is an important part of

teenagehood as you sort of head towards the latter part of that, if you're lucky.

Yeah.

Do the girls get to pick their hubbies or does dad go, I've chosen Sven.

He's exactly what you need.

Well, I think more to the point, exactly what I need, you know, and I think that's it.

And it depends.

There's so many different contexts in which that could happen.

And I'm sure there are some marriages where it's like, oh, look, they like each other.

They live on neighbouring farms.

This makes sense.

But of course, particularly if you are sort of socially elite, then you want to make good matches for your children because that is strategically advantageous to you.

So there's going to be, yes.

And certainly, once again, when you look at the latest saga evidence, bearing in mind, sagas are not history as we would think of history.

They're stories, but they do sort of reflect something of that earlier time and the time in which they're written.

But certainly, yes, it's I have picked out you're going to be marrying him whether you like it or not.

When that happens, I should say it doesn't usually end well.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, um, oh, there's one really again, lifestyle of saga, mentioned that, Guthrin, who's this badass woman who ends up with four husbands.

Um, and I'd like to hear more about Guthrin, actually.

Oh, Guthrin's great.

We can come back, we can just go back to her.

We'll get to her later.

She's in great.

But her first husband, again,

her father chooses him for her, and she absolutely can't stand him.

And so she makes a shirt for him where she cuts it so low that his nipples poke out.

And this is grounds for divorce because it's sort of effeminacy.

It's like you can't be going around with your nipples on your fingers.

You can't have your nips out.

You can't have your nips out.

Even back then.

Well, actually, men are allowed their nips out, aren't they?

But that, okay.

Only on a hot day in England.

Not in Iceland in the middle of the day.

Yeah, okay, fine, fine, fine, fine.

Okay, so we, but we do have one source from Bergen where there's a sort of, there's a little evidence of a, I don't know if it's it a dad saying, I've found a guy for you, but you don't have to marry him.

This is like it's kind of charged.

It's like it's real like dad energy.

It's like, he's not, he's really nice,

but you don't have to marry him.

It's okay if you don't want to.

So I prefer your reading of it.

Oh, yeah, so I suspect she was not quite as happy as that makes sense.

So this is from, again, I was thinking, like, a lot of the source material is later, and we, we, with this, we're talking about 1300, okay, so this is like pretty late.

It's a runic inscription on a piece of wood, right?

And it's found in a stave church.

So again, we're very much in a Christian context.

So it's from someone called Holvard, and he's proposing to someone, and we only know that her name starts with a G, and possibly a U.

And he basically says, it is my full intention to marry you, but only if you don't want to marry Colbain.

And so there's someone, but what I love about this is that it's found on the side of the church that probably the women sat in because they're, you know, separated.

And someone, probably her, GU, has tried to scribble out these names and has dropped it between the four corners.

Oh, rejected.

Yeah.

That's.

Exactly.

So it's like, I just want to know

what was the tea.

You know, it's like.

So wait, sorry, what did she write it on?

So Halvard writes it on a piece of wood in roots.

And he basically says, I want to marry you, G, whatever this woman's name is, but only if you don't want to marry Colby.

So it's not a dad.

It's a dad.

That was me getting excited as a dad.

It's a boyfriend saying, I want to marry you unless you fancy

Colby.

Well, we say boyfriend, but I mean, just the number of contexts that could be, just like some creep.

And she's like, oh, God, this is so embarrassing.

I don't want to find out.

Is it like that thing where you pass a note and client?

Basically passing a note, do you want to be my

boyfriend?

Yes, no.

And what she scribbles up.

Drops it down a hole.

Perfect.

Right, moving on.

Wow.

There's another lovely rune stick that I love.

It tells us about what happened after a couple have got married.

It's also in Bergen, in Norway, which is a lovely place to go on holiday.

It's great, isn't it?

Lovely, brilliant place to go.

It's from a lady called Gida.

She's sending it to her husband.

What do you think she's saying in the message?

Get home now, you're drunk.

Literally is.

How did he know that?

Because it's a tale as old as five.

And do you know why I knew that?

It's because when I was in Bergen,

I was there with my mate, and she was like, Do you want to go up this big hill and see a site?

And I was like, No, I want to go pub, watch Man United again and get drunk.

Taylor's oldest time.

Taylor's oldest time.

That is literally what it is.

That is literally it.

Was it done?

But on the other side, though, it looks like one of those drunk messages, you know, you send by text or something.

Now, we don't know that they're married.

We don't know that it was a pub, blah, blah, blah, but it's likely so.

But on the other side, someone has tried to reply, it looks like, but you can't read it.

So I'm just imagining him down the pub, basically trying to be like, Yes, fine, shut up.

She'll never know I'm down the pub.

So she's saying, get home from the pub.

Get home.

He's written back, I've got to do it important work, CC.

How many

pieces of evidence do you think of flummunx historians which are just drunken rambling?

People like, there's a new language that's like a new story about.

There's loads of those from the rune sticks in Bergen.

Things like sort of

just, what's it?

Sit down and carve the runes, stand up and fart.

That's a good, Yeah, and there's another one probably from a pub.

There's going to be a big fight in here.

I wish I could go to the pub more often.

I think I would have been.

I'm such a good Viking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What was their alcohol of choice?

Beer, mead.

Yeah.

They're not wine drinkers, really, are they?

They're Vikings.

I mean, later on after Christianity, maybe they are in a religious context.

But

beer and mead.

Ale and mead, isn't it?

Ale and mead.

Yeah.

Ul is a niether.

Like ale and mead.

And mead is made of honey.

So it's a sort of honey.

Oh, God.

I've never tried it, but I love to be honest.

Oh, it's really good.

Because I love beer and I love honey.

Well, you'd probably like meat.

You'd like me.

Maybe I'll just do like a beer with a shot of honey, like a Jaeger bomb.

Oh.

Make my own meat.

Yeah, nice.

You would make the best Vikings.

What else have we got that are giving us insights into relationships?

Primarily giving us, you know, a look into the lives of women in this era.

Well, so there are, we've got, again, we've got literary sources, but as I mentioned, the sagas, those are actually quite important

i mentioned like stylis i mentioned gudhrin right she's a great one again she's she's later on there's all sorts of context for her but when we just look at how she operates within a world that is very clearly frameworked around men this is a great one so i mentioned her first husband she managed to get a divorce from him because she's cut the shirt with the nipples the second one is brilliant so the second one further the the bloke he's already married to someone called oither or oid and basically Gudhrin says, Oh, well, you know, I mean, I hear that she's a bit of a cross-dresser, you know, she gets known as Britches Other around town.

What's good?

And so, you told you, lesbian and

well, it's even better, right?

So, then this, that he divorces Britches Other, marries Gudhrin, and is lying in bed one night.

And Oither is like, right, you're going to accuse me of this?

Well, thank you very much.

So, she dresses up in Britches and she takes a sword and she goes and she basically cuts him across the nipples, nipples again.

Yep.

I don't like that.

That made me upset.

That's going to be very sore in the morning.

That made me upset.

I didn't like that.

Yeah, but I mean, and then the next husband from there,

she basically gets the most Icelandic thing.

She meets this bloke in a hot spring, basically, and she falls in love with him.

But then she ends up married to his foster brother.

And then she gets the foster brother to kill

her original lover.

So it gets...

Yeah.

So you have those sorts of sources, but you've got to think for that.

It's a, you know,

literally we're going to be.

It's EastEnders, right?

It's full-on soap opera.

So more drama than Love Island or Love Iceland, I guess, maybe.

Thank you.

I did not write that one.

So

let's move on.

Can a man divorce a woman easily?

We've said that a woman can divorce a man if he's walking.

Yeah, exactly.

There's divorce legally and culturally accepted.

Yeah, can I ask, just to clarify,

how does marriage and coupledom relate to what we know now?

Because if they didn't have Christianity at this point, was marriage was still an institution?

You marry, it's sort of like that there will be a kind of social context for that.

When we're talking about Gudrun, I should say they're on the cusp of Christianity.

They're around the year 1000.

In fact, Gudhrin ends up becoming a nun or something, you know, so, and is then very upset of all the things she's doing.

She's gay.

So, but she, so, so there is, yeah, very much the sense of divorce is something that you can, you call witnesses and you say, I'm divorced.

And it can be all sorts of reasons.

And this is true, I think, of the men and the women.

So, as far as the, but the important thing is that women can do it too.

So, it can be things like, you know, if he's if he's too effeminate, hence why Guthrin is able to do it when she's cut this shirt.

Um, my favourite one, though, is if you're not satisfied in the bedroom.

And so, yeah, there's one again, we're talking sagas, but you know, you can okay, let's you know, this is the EastEnders version, once again, of it.

But, um, but basically, this woman has to go to her dad because he's the sort of main law giver.

And she's like, right, dad, this is really embarrassing.

I don't know how to tell you this, but essentially, I want to divorce him because every time we try and, I think they say it come together, you know, which is like

a part of his body grows so big that he's not able to actually do anything with it.

Turns out he's been cursed by a witch.

Of course, he's been cursed by a witch.

Who used to be his lover, right?

Wait, hang on.

He's been cursed by a witch with an ob so big

that it's unusable.

I'm assuming this is going the podcast, not the radio 4.

This is definitely not the radio 4, is it?

The Viagra curse.

But, like, pretty much that.

Pinocchio, but like, downstairs Pinocchio.

Every time he lies with her,

his knob gets bigger.

Downstairs Pinocchio is the best thing I've ever heard.

That's amazing.

Yeah, so you could be dumped if you're not good enough in bed.

You could be dumped if you're too

impressive in bed or whatever.

Yeah, exactly, exactly

yeah and that could be quite good for you as well so if you're particularly sort of for for widows they seem to have and we're talking again if you've got the money and the sort of household to back it up you've got once you're a widow you've got more agency I was going to say so the interesting thing about the Viking age historians often say that women in the Viking era were better off than anywhere else in the Viking sorry anywhere else in in the European Christian world like they had more rights more laws more freedom we've heard maybe that's not entirely true there's quite a lot of pressure so on but widowhood kind of is, that's kind of a quite...

That's what you're aiming for.

That's the idea, right?

But you have really, I mean, so for example, we mentioned Iceland being settled second part of the ninth century.

Some of the first settlers, the big settlers, are women.

There's one in particular, she's called Oither or Una the Deep-Minded, and it's only once she's a widow she able, she sort of gathers her family and her followers and

her sort of like slaves at that point around her and takes them off to Iceland, frees the enslaved people and sort of sets up this sort of matriarchy out there.

Yeah, yeah, this community of women, right?

She's the I mean, she ends up, it's it's on the night

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I think it's her grandchild.

On the night of her grandchild's wedding, she dies upright in bed, having basically just sorted everyone out.

Again, she's an EastEnders matriarch.

Yeah, exactly.

Get out of my pub.

Longhouse.

Sorry.

Okay, we should talk about a childbirth, which obviously, you know, you mentioned before that obviously, in order to keep having Vikings going out into the world, you need children that grow up.

We need babies.

I mean, obviously, childbirth is dangerous at any time in history.

In the Viking world, are

kind of rituals, routines, there's magical spells, there's all sorts of ways of trying to protect a woman in childbirth and a baby.

Yeah, can you talk us through some of those?

Yeah, so I mean, yeah, exactly as you say.

So, so mortality rates were huge,

as they always have been.

There's a really touching grave from Orkney, Rousey, and it's a woman, a very high status, again with a little brooch that seems to have once upon a time been sort of from the very beautiful blingy cover of a gospel book.

So, somewhere in the plot, so she's from sort of the, oh, I don't know, like 850 to 900, something like that.

But somewhere in her sort of ancestry, someone was doing a raiding, you know, comes back with this.

But she is, she's buried with an infant who's full term.

And so the likelihood is that she's died in childbirth and so is the child.

So exactly as you say, there has to be measures in place.

One of these is called, they're called Bjag Runer, sort of helping runes, runes of protection.

Those seem to have been used.

We've got like sort of just evidence on the edge.

Often with childbirth, with pregnancy, everything is on the edge because it's female histories and they don't, you know, they just don't get recorded.

But we have sort of a few little runic inscriptions that might

sort of back that up.

There's an amazing, again, it's later, it's very much within a Christian context, but it's a rune stick and it looks like basically the baby's gone over term and is still, you know, inside.

And this runic inscription is to the baby.

And it ends and it says, come out, hairless one, the Lord calls you into the light.

Right?

That's right.

It's beautiful.

I love that one.

Yeah.

But then there's Once Christianity Comes, you know, so it's likely that there would have been sort of pagan goddesses and deities that you would pray to.

So Freyre, Freya, yeah.

Exactly.

That's the likely.

And then in Christianity, it's St.

Margaret famously.

Do you know the story of St.

Margaret?

I don't think so.

It's pretty cool.

She cuts her way out from the inside of a dragon's tummy.

Yes, it's just a sword.

Like it's been swallowed.

And then she's just like, I'm not loving this.

And sort of bursts out the tummy.

Like chestburst alienation.

Like a chest-bursting alien.

She's like, Hello, I'm here.

So she's the patron saint of women in labor and pregnant women, she knows she's, and that's who you pray to, right, in the medieval world.

And the humanity is so mental.

That's the one that you're going to choose, is the woman that bursts out.

She's bad out,

yeah.

But I always feel sorry for the dragon.

I've got to say, having given birth, I'm looking at those pictures in the manuscripts of the dragon, who's just absolutely horrified.

Yeah.

This whole thing bursts out.

I'm like, mate, I hear you.

Okay, so.

Please, can we just clarify what a rune stick stick is?

Yes.

Literally, a little piece of wood with runes written on it.

Runes are that spiky alphabet, sort of it's it's sort of a North Germanic alphabet, it's not just Viking Age, but

they use particularly in the Viking Age and the centuries before and afterwards.

Slightly magical, aren't they?

Yeah, they're slightly

associated with Odin, yeah.

So is it like a is it like a like a prayer thing, a manifestation thing?

It can be.

If I wanted to win an award, for example.

Oh yeah, I'd be able to write a rune stick.

Sylvia rune stick inscription.

Yeah, but you've seen, you know, it's also sort of like text messages come back from the pub, mate.

But not all women wanted to have kids.

And we know this because we have some Viking words, Old Norse words.

Chloe, do you know what a fanfluger is?

I want this bit to be able to go on radio 4, so I will not be sitting and guessing what a fanfluger is.

The context would be a gentleman comes a calling and the fanfluger says,

The fanfluger says,

Do you want to go out with me?

No, the fanfluger says, no, thanks, and runs.

It literally means, what, dick deserter?

You know, someone who

runs away from penises.

Someone who just legs it away from the moment a penis appears.

So that's like, like, you go, you're a fan fluger.

It wouldn't be a compliment, but I think we should reclaim it.

Yeah, I'm definitely re-reclaiming that.

Yeah, I'm going clubbing on Saturday night and I'm going to go around calling a lot of people some fan flugers and they'll be very glad.

And there's an equivalent for a chap who doesn't perhaps want want to have fun times with a lady.

A futflogy.

So futhfliga would be what?

Fannyfliger?

So the Vikings are very uh they're very basic in their language, right?

And it's there's a poetry to it.

Yeah.

But

the interesting thing about that is that we, you know, we talked about sort of like pagan contexts and and sort of gods.

The gods are all

sort of I I liked, you know, what's it?

The the drag queen Bimnibon Boulash, like gender bender, system offender,

right?

Those are the Norse gods, particularly Loki, right?

We've got Loki, who essentially is able to transform himself into a handmaiden to go and sort of rescue a hammer, transforms himself into a mare

to lure away a giant stallion for a bit of sexy time and ends up giving birth to an eight-legged horse known as Sleipnir.

Yeah.

Lone as well?

Slapnir.

Sleepnir, the eight-legged flying horse.

So we're getting an idea here.

In some ways, Viking gender, very, very fixed.

In other ways, kind of fluid.

So it's kind of interesting, right?

but let's get back to a woman's work you know the kind of daily domestic uh she's not just obviously giving birth next generation there's a lot she's got to look after in the house like she there's quite a lot of responsibilities some would say agency and power yes you said when we had our zoom call you said responsibilities yes i think i think agency yes power it depends so it's this idea of you know you you have agency within the household but it's whether that translates to outside so it's and it's not that it never does it's just it's always that thing of like you don't want to say yeah basically the Viking Age was a feminist utopia because it's like I don't think I would have wanted to be a woman there compared to what I can be now you know but yes definitely so they're very much in charge of the household the household isn't just sort of immediate family or relatives you know you've got you've got quite a community depending on how big this farmstead is you've got responsibilities for making sure everyone stays alive throughout the winters you've got to be able to cook but you've got to be able to store food you're going to be looking after the farmstead as i said before you're going to be textile production and medicine Exactly.

So that's the other thing.

And again, yeah, so there's a really interesting episode from Hames Kringler, which is sort of a big group of kings sagas, essentially, where there's a battle.

Someone's injured and they go into the tent and there's a healing woman there.

And she basically feeds them this mixture of sort of garlic and herbs and nasty stuff.

Because the idea is that once you eat it, if you can sort of smell the garlic from the wound, you know it's gone through and it's sort of a fatal wound, essentially.

Because that's one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life.

I would rather just not know.

But that is absolutely.

I would rather just die and not stink in a garlic.

That's what the character says.

He's like, No, I'm cool, thanks very much.

Nah, you keep your garlic soon.

But the fact is, there's women in there doing that.

There's also sort of religious aspects.

There's a type of sort of magic called sathir.

And again, we're back in sort of more of a pagan context here that a woman is particularly meant to practice.

The Old Norse word for a female practitioner of magic or cirrus is a vulva.

So there you go.

Yes.

So is that where we get that?

It's spelled differently.

Spelled really differently.

Probably just go into this, isn't it?

But say the magic would be prophecy, right?

Yeah, predicting the future.

Exactly.

Seeing.

Exactly.

And what's interesting is that within a pagan gods context, who's it doing that?

Odin.

So once again.

There's a lot of sort of fluidity there that we don't see.

And then, of course, there's sort of textile production, which is just like, I know it sounds boring to keep on going on, but it's so important.

Like, if we didn't have textile production, we would all be sitting here naked, right?

It's like we would, nothing happens.

And we'd get a strongly worded email from HR, wouldn't we?

But yeah, but there's a special sort of women's quarters called the dingya.

And the dingya, it's not necessarily just for textile production, but in the archaeological record, all over the Norse world, so Greenland is a really good example of this, you see these sort of textile production spaces where you have women, where you have children.

There's one, and this is from Norse Greenland, where you have this whole sort of knotted, plaited piece of beautiful blonde hair, really long, that's basically like human hair.

It's been made into sort of a necklace or something and tucked into the corner of this dinghya.

Sagas again have episodes where you know women sit there talking about, for example, their former lovers in one case

where one of the husbands here doesn't go well.

Oh, so the dingya is a sort of it's like a stitch and bitch session,

but also but a slightly it's a bit like a sort of the ladies' toilets, maybe on a night out where you're sort of

going into a private space.

And in terms of weaving, it's not just humans who are doing the weaving, the gods weave too.

Do you know what the gods would weave with when they were determining people's futures?

Oh.

Oh, that's charming.

That's beautiful.

I mean, you're so wrong.

No, I'm going to say you're not so wrong, right?

Because you've got these supernatural beings called the Norns, the Nornia, these three, and they're responsible for weaving the fates of humans, essentially.

I like to think, yeah, they're basically just like pulling down threads from the clouds.

So I'm like totally with you there.

Yeah, but that's the first thing.

But there was a nastier one.

Yeah, come on.

Yeah, Yeah, let's have the gory one.

Right, so the gory one, it's Valkyrie's this time.

You know, did it, did, did, did, did, do, right.

That's how we know Valkyries on their horses.

Blah, blah, blah.

Right.

And there is an episode from, again, it's in Nyao's saga.

It's where essentially, on the night before a battle, someone sees these women going into one of these dingyao, one of these weaving rooms.

He peeps inside

and he sees them and they're singing as they weave on this big loom.

But what it is is that the entrails of the dead, and there's like kind of heads hanging from the so that's so the loom weights are severed heads exactly the loom weights are severed yeah

the thread is just guts yeah just yeah viking guts yeah that is well do you still want to be a viking yeah

look

for the beer yes okay for the for the using guts in a loom i'm gonna say no okay i'm out on that do women go out on the ships right so we've heard them at home they're doing the farming they're doing the medicine they're doing the weaving they're looking after the kids but like do they get on long ships and go and settle Iceland in Greenland?

Yeah, absolutely, they do.

This is really important.

So, Iceland, we've already talked about this like matriarch at the beginning, one of the widows who goes out there, Una the Deep Minded.

Greenland is a really interesting thing.

So, Greenland gets settled, first of all, from Iceland in sort of Eric the Red, it's kind of 985 or something.

And there are women absolutely going out there to settle.

There's a rune stick that they found in one of the graveyards from Greenland, and it's not got a body in it, but it says, you know, this woman, she died on the Greenland Sea.

So basically, she died on the journey over.

You also then have women going even further west.

So again, this is sort of sagas, but in the sagas that talk about the voyages from Greenland to the edge of the North American continent, you have a woman called Gudrider giving birth to a child called Snorri out there.

Yeah, exactly.

Very much part of that cultural sphere.

You've mentioned enslavement already.

And, you know, I think throughout history, there's going to be enslavement at some point.

There are stories that we, I mean, we have to sort of talk about them.

They are horrible.

And, you know, comedy podcasts and all that.

But we, just, for a brief moment, if we could just sort of, if we can just hear the very, very nasty, horrible story about what Ibn Fadlan describes seeing.

So he is a...

I mean, he's

an Arab diplomat who meets Vikings.

Exactly.

He's a very important source for us.

Yes.

And he describes a very horrible funeral.

Yeah, exactly.

So this is around 921, something like that.

He's coming up from Baghdad with this diplomatic corps.

And they're on the Volga.

And they come across this group that are known as the Rus.

And the Rus are of Nordic heritage.

Swedish residents or Swedish heritage, yeah, for the most part, exactly.

So that's where they come, but then there's some very big Slavic populations that they very quickly assimilate with.

So we can't say these are definite Vikings in that sort of what we might think of, or Norse, but certainly of that heritage.

And one of their leaders has died, and they're having a big funeral.

And it's one of the very few sources that describe sort of a ship burning, you know, that kind of Hollywood idea of how Viking funerals go.

But it is one of those.

The problem is that what they also ask for is a volunteer with a lot of sort of

air quotes, yeah,

to join their master in paradise.

And

it's

really horrible.

So basically this sort of young enslaved girl

volunteers and she's sort of ritually sort of raped and then stabbed and killed and there's this horrible figure called the angel of death, this woman who basically is responsible for that and then finally she's placed on the pyre next to the dead man, together with all these sort of sacrificed animals and other things, and then it's set fire to.

And Ibn Fadlan is

extraordinary.

There's no other source like it.

He doesn't just talk about that, but it's the level of detail is really

very disturbing to me.

Yeah, it's an incredibly important source for us because he tells us all sorts of things about Viking washing customs and so on, which is really interesting.

But that particular story is so upsetting when you read it.

I remember as a history student just reading it going, oh, that's really, really troubling.

Exactly.

And the thing is, archaeologically, that is then reflected.

So there's Isle of Man, there's a Viking burial of a man, but a woman appears to have been sort of like killed and then put into the pyre with...

So, yeah, so sorry about that, Chloe.

I know we're a comedy show.

But I could have just sort of done some comedy sound effects throughout.

Would that have helped?

Probably not going to help.

Let's get back to sort of comedy mode.

Let's talk about the lives of the rich Viking women, the elite that's been.

I've got a favourite here, right?

Okay, so this is Norway, Osserberg, so sort of southern Norway.

Oh my god.

The classic.

The classic, but it's there's a reason.

It's an oldie and it's a goodie, right?

So this is one of the most sumptuous burials.

It's a shit burial.

It hasn't been burned, but these two...

A what burial?

Shit.

Shit, thank you.

What did you hear?

Really bad burial.

It's like

a rubbish burial.

Terrible burial.

One of the worst I've ever seen.

These two women have been placed in it.

One of them is really quite old, sort of over 70.

The other sort of late middle age, kind of maybe in her 50s.

But there's nothing like it.

You know, there's wagons all like beautifully carved with cats and faces and possibly the cats.

You know, that's sort of classically linked to Freyja, one of the goddesses.

There's wagons, there's

beautiful things like sort of a...

buckets and like sacrificed horses and all sorts I mean it there is nothing like it in terms of the amount of stuff that has been placed into it.

They can even tell exactly what time of year this initial bed.

Yeah,

crab apples have been found.

Oh, beautiful.

Which is just, but also, talking of this sort of organic material, henbane seeds, I think, either henbane or cannabis, one of that, there's basically sort of that have hallucinogenic properties, right?

So you start to think, okay, what's going on here?

Who were these women?

There's also this incredible tapestry, think, beautiful.

Look closely, you see the trees are full of hanging bodies, right?

So, sorry, yeah, these ladies sound terrified.

I know, yes, you think you're a lovely granny.

Hang on, cannabis, hang on, dead bodies, what this is the woman I want to meet from the Viking Age.

I'm like, I could have fun with you, right?

So, but that's it, they're so elite high status.

It used to be thought that one of them was a queen, the other one may be her, we could say handmaiden.

She could be an enslaved person.

A little bit of DNA evidence suggests that her ancestors, the younger one, might have come from somewhere around what's now Iran.

But it's been quite hard to replicate that evidence because there's so little material left.

But so it's very much this sense of these high-status women, possibly with some sort of magical position in society.

Yeah, the sever thing, maybe, or the hallucinogenic medicine.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, obviously, we have rich Christian widows who leave money to the church.

They found nunneries and churches and monasteries, and they build bridges and churches and roads.

You know, they're kind of putting back into the community, which is amazing too.

But we need to talk about Olga of Kyiv.

Of course, we do.

It's very important that we're going to be able to do that.

She's one of the most.

I was was getting antsy.

You were thinking

when are we getting to Olga of Kiev?

I mean again listeners might be thinking Kiev's in Ukraine.

Yes.

I mean the Vikings really get very far afield.

Olga of Kiev.

Chloe how did she get revenge on the men who killed her husband?

I guess she killed him back.

I'm thinking of a sort of I'm thinking of a sort of John Wick's

man army kind of scenario where I think she's yeah she's gathered up all of her weapons like Ballerina like yeah that kind of

exactly like ballerina and maybe she like kills someone someone.

What did what did John Wick kill in like John Wick 3?

He kills them with books or something like that.

I mean, it's not far off.

I mean, if anything, she's more badass than that.

Olga, by the way, sounds like a very sort of Slavic name.

It's actually Old Norse.

Olga is Helga, yeah, right?

10th century, and she is it's sort of her husband is called Igor.

Again, very Norse name, doesn't sound it, but Ingvar, Norse name, right?

Yeah, he is killed by sort of a local tribe called the Drevlians.

They've got beef with them, right?

So So, Olga then says, Oh, ambassadors, please come see me.

Did she make a pie?

Did she make a pie?

There are pies in Norse pie.

Not this one.

There are Norse pies there were women who baked their children in pie.

Okay, we're not even gonna go there.

I'm just gonna get right.

No, no, stick with Olga.

She's cool, right?

Okay, so the first lot, yeah, she basically buries the ambassadors alive, okay?

How?

Well, it's all there in, I think, the um, it's sources from the sort of the 12th century, so it's maybe slightly exaggerated.

But then the next lot, she lures the noblemen.

She's like, oh, please come, please come, have a bath.

Yeah, have a sauna, isn't it?

Come, have a sauna.

Come have a nice

spiking sauna.

And then she locks them in the sauna, and then she sets fire to him.

Yep.

Yep, so that's the next lot.

And then she just, for good measure, burns the whole settlement to the ground.

Yes, giving Dunwick.

Yes.

And then she converts to Christianity and is made a saint.

Well, you know, if you're going to get forgiven...

Like, if you're going to, if you're going to convert to Christianity and get forgiven for all your sins, then I think I would just, like, really sin.

Yeah.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, I'm not just doing like, you know, I've worn mixed fabrics.

I'm doing, like, I've killed.

I've killed all of my husband's murderers.

Yes.

Okay, so Olga's Bloody Revenge leads us nicely to the warrior women who we would have seen in TV shows.

So I mentioned Vikings, I mentioned the Last Kingdom.

It's a bit of a trope,

kind of shield maiden thing.

Is that pure Hollywood?

Do we have any evidence for women going into battle?

Yeah, it's not pure Hollywood.

We've got some sort of later legendary mythological sources where you have this idea of shield maidens coming quite strong.

And they're really cool.

So there's a skeleton found on the island of Berke in Sweden.

Very important sort of trading settlement in that period.

People always thought, oh, well, that's a man because it was buried with weapons.

It was found in the 19th century.

Exactly.

So for well over 100 years, we were like,

yeah, exactly.

Then...

2017, they look at the DNA and there's it's female DNA.

They're like, oh, okay.

So, but the question question is then

that no one checks.

Well,

to be fair, I don't think they had DNA sampling in the 19th century.

Yeah.

To be fair to them, but it's the fact that, yeah, you see one thing and you assume that's what it must be.

Yeah.

Now, that doesn't mean that

she was a practicing warrior.

There's all sorts of possibilities.

She's buried with swords and all the good remote of a warrior.

Exactly, exactly.

And it's possible that she, what we would call, the terms don't really apply, but we need to sort of find she was sort of non-binary, or she kind of presented as more male than you know that's that's there's sort of possibilities there yeah there's also the possibility that yes she was a warrior but it's like there's no evidence of sort of healed injuries and there's no evidence of you know you often see sort of one arm is bigger than the other because they're used to wielding weapons so you don't have that it's possible that say her father was a warrior and she's the only surviving child or something and so therefore she becomes the encapsulation of that warrior lineage.

There's all sorts of possibilities.

It doesn't make it, I think it makes it more exciting.

Yeah,

we don't know, right?

We have this fascinating burial and we've got, and science has gone, it's not what you think, and now we've got question marks.

And question marks are exciting.

Exactly.

But we don't, we can't pin it down.

There could be multiple identities to this person or, you know, one.

But it's really interesting.

And that's how archaeological science is changing quite a lot of what we think of the Vikings in some ways.

I guess what's so interesting also about history is like we're always reading it through our own very partial lens.

And I think we're in a moment now where like we probably want to go the other way and have women as like these like total independent badasses because A, we're sort of like in a feminist rewriting of history, but also I think there's also an element of like men find hot Viking women wielding swords,

titillating.

Yeah.

Especially a niche corner of the internet that's dedicated to that.

Yeah.

So it is simultaneously like

a feminist reading of history, but also quite a patriarchal reading.

Yeah, the lads want blunt warriors.

Yes, exactly, yeah.

Yeah, with like sort of like shells over their boobs or something.

I don't know.

Yeah, but I think what we've learned so far, anyhow,

women could be all sorts of different things.

Yeah,

and the evidence points in different directions.

And we'd like that place on record that women can be all sorts of things.

The nuance window!

Time now for the nuance window.

This is the part of the show where Chloe and I weave in the dingy art for two minutes while Dr.

Eleanor spins us a yarn about something we need to know about Viking women.

My stopwatch is ready.

You have two minutes.

Take it away, Dr.

Eleanor.

But I think Chloe's pretty much done it for me because I want to pick up on exactly that last point that you've been talking about.

And it ties us back also to the images that, you know, Greg, you conjured up at the beginning.

It's sort of like Valkyrie's Shield Maidens, hotness or not so hot.

You know, it's like it's feminist and it's also sort of quite reductive.

And that's

a really

tricky thing because there's a reason we love that right they're badass I didn't go into Viking Age history because I want to sort of look at textile production all the time I mean don't get me wrong plenty of people do but I didn't I like the badass stuff right

but there is an issue there which is

when we look back in time especially at this sort of like stereotypical hyper masculine eras such as the Viking Age It's that idea that almost women are only exciting or interesting or worth talking about if they're aping male role models and sort of like quite extreme ones at that.

And what I'm trying to do in Embers of the Hands, this book, it's like meet ordinary humans on their own terms.

And that's particularly true of the women.

It's a way to find, you know, it's how to bring their stories to life, not by shoving swords or axes in their hands, but, you know, although that does happen, in fact, there's one saga where a woman actually says, put an axe in my hand.

Okay, so that does happen there.

But I think historically speaking, women actually deserve better than that because their lives are so much more nuanced and multi-dimensional, more varied than these cartoon stereotypes.

And so for me, that is my nuance window: that women themselves are nuanced.

And when we look back in history and these hyper-masculine periods of history from our perspectives, it's even more important.

Meet them on their own terms.

Brilliantly.

Any final thoughts on that?

Oh, a clause.

You've got to collapse.

And you've got, I can see you've got 25 seconds left, so I've done quite a long time.

Can we do a really long one?

Yeah,

I want those 25 seconds of clapping.

25 seconds, like a standing evasion at Can, where it's like, very good, very good, new ones, window.

So, what do you know now?

It's time now for the so what do you know now.

This is our quickfire quiz for Chloe to see how much they've learned.

Chloe, how are you feeling?

Confident?

Yeah,

I've been listening nicely.

It's all been incredibly engaging.

I think I've understood everything, and I think it's committed to my short-term memory.

If we did this in a week, it would be a solid zero-out.

ten.

That's a real caveat, that short-term memory.

Yeah, but at the moment, I'm an expert.

For the next 10 minutes, I'm an expert.

You know what?

I'll take it.

That's absolutely fine.

Okay, I've got 10 questions for you.

Good luck.

Question one.

What was done about unwanted female children in some Viking communities?

Is the first answer going to be infanticide?

It is, yeah.

As I said, comedy show.

That's lovely, that.

Yeah, it is infanticide.

Charming.

Yep.

Question two.

What passive-aggressive message did cross-Viking wife Gida send send her husband on a rune stick in Bergen?

You're drunk, come home.

Yes, it was.

Very good.

Come home from the pub.

Question three, which Norse deity associated with cats might pregnant women prayed to during childbirth?

Freyja.

It was Freya and also Frigg sometimes as well.

Question four, name two everyday jobs that an average Viking woman, if such a thing existed, might have done.

Storing food and textiles.

Very good.

Yes, absolutely.

You could add it.

Cooking, healing, looking after the kids.

Question five, what was the dingya?

Oh, no.

What was the dingya?

It was a space.

A place for weaving.

It was.

And chatting and gossiping.

Very good.

Well done.

Yeah, it's women.

It's always chatting and gossiping.

Wherever there's women, there's chatting and gossiping as well.

Question six.

What unorthodox materials do the mythical Valkyries in Yalt saga weave with?

It's not clouds.

It's a...

human entrails.

It was.

I loved.

I really love the word entrails.

I think it's one of the words that I love the most, but hate what it is the most.

Do you see what I mean?

Like, I like the sound.

You like the sound, and then you see it and go, no, thank you.

No, fair enough.

Yeah, I often see it and say no, thank you.

Okay.

Question seven.

What does the old Norse word fanfluger mean?

Like

running away from a penis, sir.

Yes, very good.

A lady who legs it from penises.

Yes, absolutely.

Very good.

That felt loaded.

Question eight.

The two women interred in the Osaburg ship burial were buried with a wagon finely decorated with which animal?

Cats.

It was cats.

Well done.

Question nine.

How did Olga of Kiev allegedly avenge the murder of her husband?

She lured all of the murderers to a sauna and burned them alive.

She did,

and then became a saint, which is

what a classic second act that is.

And this for a perfect 10 out of 10.

Oh my god.

What is one theory about the person buried in the Bierke grave?

Oh no.

They were discovered in the 19th century and thought to be a man, but

they weren't.

They were a woman who might have been a warrior.

That's right, very good.

Yes.

Very inspiring connotations.

Perfect 10 out of 10, Claire.

Wow.

We'll come back in a week and we'll check and we'll see.

Yeah, well we won't be what's about, King.

Who's Greg?

Who's Greg?

What is this?

What day is it?

Well done, 10 out of 10.

You feeling that you learned some stuff?

Yeah, I am feeling really good about that.

I also know that I'm too competitive as a person and I'm trying to really rehabilitate that.

So I think the thing that I won most at was being a really chill guy.

Yeah, I mean, you were great.

If you'd gone 8 out of 10, you probably would have come at us with a sword.

Yeah, I would have flipped the table.

Lot of sin and burned it alive.

Like older achieve.

Yeah, lovely stuff.

As you deserve.

Thanks so much, Chloe.

And also, of course, thank you, Dr.

Eleanor Barakla.

Listener, if you want more Vikings, check out our episode on Leif Erikson.

Also, we have one on Norse literature, which is lots of fun.

K-Curd.

And for more warrior women, why not listen to our episode on Njingo Mndombo and Matamba, which is good fun as well.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please share the show with your friends.

Subscribe to Your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds to get the episodes 28 days earlier than on any other app.

Switch on your notifications so you never miss an episode.

I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner.

We have the excellent Dr.

Eleanor Barraclough from Bathspa University.

Thank you, Eleanor.

Thank you.

And in Comedy Corner, we have the incredible Chloe Pets.

Thank you, Chloe.

That was amazing.

Thank you so much to you both.

And to you, lovely listener.

Join me next time as we unearth more buried historical secrets.

But for now, I'm off the gun suggest entrail weaving as a fun craft activity for my daughter's school.

Bye!

Yours it to me to BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

Hello, my name is Alex von Tunselmann and I want to introduce you to History's Heroes, the BBC's breathtaking, high-stakes, story-led podcast shining a light on extraordinary people and ordinary people who become extraordinary, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers.

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