Leif Erikson

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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 braving the brisk waters of the North Atlantic and following in the wake of Leif Erikssson, the medieval Norseman who might have been the first European to visit America.

He probably was.

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 she's senior lecturer in environmental history.

Her research focuses on the cultures, literatures, and languages of the medieval north, particularly Viking history and the old Norse sagas.

She's the author of various books, including a new one, Embers of the Hands, Hidden Histories of the Viking Age.

It's Dr.

Eleanor Barakloff.

Welcome, Eleanor.

Thank you, Greg.

Lovely to be here.

And in Comedy Corner, he's a multi-talented actor, comedian, and broadcaster.

As well as his fab stage performances in The Government Inspector, you'll also recognise him from hosting TV's The Great British Sewing Bee, or starring in the award-winning sitcoms, Ghosts, Stafflets Flats, and Man Like Mobine, or delighting the nation on series 15 of Taskmaster.

It is the amazing Kyle Smith Bino.

Welcome to the show, Kyle.

Hello.

I feel like I've been slightly blindsided because I didn't know you were a doctor.

I'm not the useful sort of doctor.

I can't.

If you have a heart attack, you're on your own.

No, that's fine.

I know what to do.

But I would have treated you with more respect.

It's a Viking doctor.

We don't deserve any respect.

Oh, okay.

You're good.

All right, cool, cool, cool.

I'm not a doctor, so you can treat me like scum.

All right, we'll do it.

You've not been on the show before, Kyle.

No, I haven't.

How do you feel about history?

Something you enjoyed at school?

When I think of history in school, I remember the module where you have to build a castle.

And mine was going so badly that I turned it into a

dilapidated, ruined castle.

Nice.

And that wasn't what I started out to make.

But then I just went on clip art and made some pictures of fire and then printed it out and stuck it to the front.

Okay.

Yeah.

That's what I think.

Sorry, yes.

That's how I feel about history.

Does that answer your question?

Pretty much.

Yeah, very great.

Okay, so what do you know about the man, the myth, the legend, Leif Erickson?

I know that that's who we're talking about today.

Great.

And that is the end.

I used to have an Erickson phone when I was in school.

Is that anything?

There's Bluetooth named after a Viking called Harold Bluetooth.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

Look at it.

It's the room HB.

There you go.

When someone asks me what I've learned today, that's for the list.

And do you know that?

It's not just because it was first.

It's because Harold Bluetooth united the kingdoms.

And so Bluetooth brings people together.

Harold?

Yeah, Harald Bluetooth.

Hang on, you said something different.

Harald?

Well, yeah.

You've got to say it with an A if you're going to be authentically Viking.

Right, so it's spelled with an O, but said with an A.

No, no, no, you can spell it with an A.

It's about Harald.

Haralder, if you're going to be a very good person.

You've gone absolutely nuts now.

Bluetooth.

That's all you've got to remember.

That was his nickname.

United the Kingdoms.

Yeah.

Is that why it's the United Kingdom?

No.

So, what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what our listeners will know about today's subjects.

And even if the name Leif Erickson is not familiar, you might have heard that a Viking was the first person to probably reach North America.

You might be sitting there thinking, what about Christopher Columbus?

Well, we'll get to him.

But if you're listening from North America, hello.

Maybe you know that in the USA and Canada, the 9th of October is Leif Erickson Day.

You get today, which of course is celebrated in a much-loved episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, an important document.

He also pops up in Netflix's Vikings Valhalla, Leif Erickson, that is, not SpongeBob.

And the Norse presence in North America is referenced with a Viking character in the US remake of Your Sitcom Ghosts.

Haven't seen it.

That's fine.

You were in the the good one.

That's brilliant.

Thank you.

The American one is fine.

It's nice.

It's birthday.

And you said he gets a day as not his birthday, just another one.

Just a ceremonial day.

Yeah, October 9th.

So there we go.

So Leif Erickson.

How do I get one of those?

You've got to discover a continent, ideally.

All right.

Easy.

So Leif Erickson shows up in pop culture.

There's novels.

But how do we separate the truth and the lies from Leif's life?

Did Vikings really make it to North America?

Or is this just a big story?

And how many people do you need to kill before you're kicked out of Norway?

Let's find out.

Kayel, we are talking about the Vikings.

What do you think of when I say the word Viking?

When people die and then they get pushed off in that little, on that raft, and then they light the arrows.

Ooh, you're thinking of the burning boat burial.

That's exactly what I'm thinking of, yes.

Elida, is that a myth?

No, no, I mean, there is a version of that.

It's described in an Arabic text by someone called Ibn Fadlan.

And he does talk about this Viking boat burial.

Funnily enough, not as common as you might think.

Really?

Yeah, what about the horned helmets?

Everyone mentions the horned helmets yeah tell me more well they didn't exist yeah not

you've just told me that something i've never heard of doesn't exist yeah it's a bit of an anti-climax isn't it

eleana what are we when we talk about the viking age what is it how long is it yeah well we can fix ourselves chronologically if we think of the viking age as spanning at least from around 750 ce roughly up to about 1100 ce and it begins in the scandinavian homelands so we're thinking denmark norway and Sweden.

It involves violence.

Wait, why is Finn Morin there?

Oh, because actually that's not a Scandinavian country.

Nordic, they're there, but

not quite in the same way.

But yeah, there's lots of violence.

There's conquest, but there's also trading and exploration and settlement.

So you end up with this Norse diaspora that encompasses parts of the British Isles and Western Europe, Mediterranean, what's now Russia and Ukraine, and then all the way to Constantinople.

They end up in Baghdad.

Then Then, in the other direction, they go all the way across the North Atlantic and they settle the Pharaohs, Iceland, Greenland, and they may get a little bit further as I think we're going to be.

And of course, Britain and Ireland and all that, you know, they get all around the place, Vikings.

They really do.

And there's a sort of bit of a myth of kind of blonde blokes in a boat, isn't there?

Yeah, yeah, there are some blonde blokes.

Oh, now I know what you're talking about.

Horned helmets.

Yeah, yeah.

The bit that comes down the front of the nose.

And then the big.

And then the horns.

Yeah, exactly.

I feel we shouldn't be perpetuating the stereotype.

But yeah.

Now I get it.

Exactly.

But it's not true.

Not true.

Please unlearn it.

Forget that moment.

No, it's kind of too late.

Do you know why we call them Vikings, Kyle?

No.

Fair enough,

thank you.

Eleanor.

Okay.

There's no place called Vikingland.

No, no, there is a place called Vik in Norway, which is sort of might be related to the word, but there's an Old Norse, so that's the language that the Vikings spoke.

There's an Old Norse version of the word, Vikinger, which is someone who's essentially a raider.

There's also an Old English version version of the word, so the language that was spoken in the British Isles, at least parts of the British Isles at that time.

Wieting, and again, that means sort of pirate.

There's a noun, so you go off on a Viking, you go off on a raid.

So it's basically a seaborne raider.

But not everyone who lived during the Viking Age in that cultural context is a raider, so they're not all Vikings.

And even raiders are not always raiding.

And sometimes...

Sometimes they call their children Vikings.

What's a raider doing if it's not raiding?

Farming, mostly.

Farming.

Yeah, fishing.

Farming raider.

Yeah, mostly farming.

You've got to eat before you can go and steal all that.

I'd bully that guy.

So, most Vikings aren't Vikings.

Most Vikings aren't Vikings.

Yeah, and so again, it's a bit like the Horn Helmets.

That idea in the 19th century gets expanded, and Viking becomes a sort of catch-all term for that early medieval Nordic diaspora.

And the Viking Age, we tend to sort of end about 1100.

So about 900 years ago.

So, you know, and today we're talking about a thousand years ago.

So that's where we are.

So, the fact that they're making these voyages for trading as well as raiding, obviously, the stuff that Kyle prefers, but they're settling too, right?

Yeah, exactly.

When we get into the middle of the ninth century, it's much more about settling and more farming, your favourite thing.

Yeah.

Let's talk about Leif Erickson himself, the star of today's episode.

Oh, is that Leif Erickson, you know, when's he born?

And that's it.

So, okay, so Leif, he's probably born in, I don't know, something like 975, 980 in Iceland.

He's a character mostly in two of these sagas.

One's called Greenlandinger Saga, which means the saga of the Greenlanders, and the other one is Erik Saga Roede, which is the saga of Erik the Red.

Now, together they're known as the Vinland sagas because Vinland is the old Norse word for that part of North America, the edge of the continent, that the Norse, spoiler alert, do reach around the year 1000 or so.

And Leif seems to be a very big part part of that.

But I can't believe you spot that for me.

But Leif, his dad is called Eric the Red, but he's Laif Erickson because of that.

So they don't have surnames, they're just named after their mostly.

It's patrilineal, right?

You take your father's name.

Oh, Eric's son.

Yeah, Eric.

Eric's son.

Son, son of Eric.

Yeah, exactly.

So your mobile phone, your Sony Ericsson phone.

Yeah.

Its dad was called Eric.

There you go.

Yeah, but Leif also has some siblings.

And so we have Thor Kettle and Thorstein.

So they'd also be Eriksson.

And he has a sister called Freydis.

So she'd be Freydis Eric's dottir.

So because she's the daughter of Eric.

But Leif is a pretty...

So

the saga's like him.

He's described as promising, tall, handsome, moderate in his behaviour in stark contrast to his father.

Oh, okay.

All right.

So he's tall, strong, handsome, got good connections.

Yeah.

He's a good lad.

So can we trust the sources?

Can we say they're historical documents with real people in them?

Yes, the historian's answer is, depending on your definition of historical documents, good historian's answer.

There you go, just covering all the basics.

But how do you decide what's real and what's

if there's so much of it mixed together?

How do you decide what's real and what's not?

Just on like what you like.

Yeah, this is, yeah, I mean, you're looking for other evidence.

So, for example, the Vineland sagas, these two sagas featuring Leif, they were actually the basis for archaeologists in the 60s realizing that actually the Norse had reached the edge of the North American continent and then they find the archaeological evidence.

And sometimes you've got to think of them in a different sense.

So it's not just a case of, okay, let's sift out the history from the fiction.

We've got to think of them as essentially a kind of cultural storytelling, remnants of how this particular culture thought about the world and their place within it.

And in fact, the word saga comes from an old Norse verb adseja, to say, to tell.

So we've heard that Eric is the father of Leif Eric's.

Eric the Red.

Is he red-haired?

Is he a ginger?

I mean, there were plenty of black.

Or is it blood?

Is he covered in blood?

Sort of more likely, I suspect.

Yeah, I mean, Eric.

It's ketchup.

Yes.

So he's born in Norway and then he's forced to leave Norway because of some killings.

How they put it in the star.

Okay.

How many killings are some killing, Eleanor?

More More than one.

I can't remember that.

It's not good.

The problem is, then he, so he's outlawed and he goes off to Iceland, settles there, and he marries Thjodhilde, his wife, and they have a family, but then it's not long before he's in trouble again.

And this is such an embarrassing story.

This is not how you want to be remembered.

But basically, he gets into an argument with his neighbour about some bench boards, which are kind of carved decorative panels.

And everything goes downhill very fast.

And once again, he finds himself outlawed, this time from Iceland because of some killings.

How many people lived in that house next door?

Well, there's enslaved people there as well.

And I think that particular, and that is, that is a whole other story of the Viking age that people, that's a huge, huge proportion of Viking population.

Thralls, right?

We call them thralls.

Thralls, yeah, or ambalt if it's a woman.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

But then, so once again, now this time he has settled to what's called lesser outlawry, which is the idea that you you have to go away for three years and then you can come back.

And as long as you stay away,

I want to be banished.

Well, it is, I mean, I honestly, I think you could have gone off quite happily with Eric because he then goes off and have some wonderful adventures.

He decides he's going to go off west from Iceland to Greenland.

So he's going to go and have some fun and see if he can.

But for three years.

For three years.

What I want to know is how...

in the 1000s you know what a year is they do sort of keep track don't they there's right so because of these oral stories this this oral narrative tradition is actually really really strong we know what year iceland starts to be settled in because a big volcano goes up and there's ash all over iceland and then the settlement begins on top of that and you can look at the greenland ice cores and count up the layers and see when that ash appears so we know it's about the year 871

But then in texts that the Icelanders are writing in the 12th century, they basically pick exactly the same date and they say, I know this is when Iceland started being settled.

So it was sort of 870 years, they say, after the birth of Christ, when a king in East Anglia is murdered by the Vikings.

And they say, I know this because of this person who had a really good memory, this person who's very reliable, and this person who's my uncle.

Not reliable, and not

just he's my uncle.

Is that enough?

Yeah, so they've actually got a really good sense of that timekeeping.

By the time they're writing, they've also converted to Christianity.

And so there's a lot of that sense of...

Because of the church bells.

They know what's like...

There you go.

Yeah, they don't.

Okay, so Eric the Red was exiled twice, second time for an argument about some bench boards.

You seem like a very chill guy, Kyle, but have you ever gotten to a beef with a neighbour over a lawnmower or something?

No.

Can't have it in the first place.

Get off.

No, I don't think so.

My neighbours recently painted their fence

and some of it's bled through.

Oh.

And it looks horrible on my side.

So what are you going to do?

Some killings.

I've scheduled some killings in the calendar for October.

I don't know what I'm going to do, actually.

I haven't thought about it.

But every time I look at it, I'm like, disgusting.

You could compose some verse.

That's the Viking way.

You just compose some really rude verses about them.

Which, I mean, they can technically kill you for that.

I was going to say,

if you give someone an insult and it sticks, that's a crime

in normal.

It sticks in everyone else's graph.

So if you give someone a nickname and everyone else starts using it, that becomes a crime if the person doesn't like it.

It's pretty good, right?

So,

okay, so Eric the Red exiled to Greenland.

We call it Greenland because of Eric the Red.

Do, yeah, exactly.

So he goes out there.

He's very specifically sort of like the southwestern side of the coastline.

That's important because most of Iceland, most of Greenland is covered in ice.

It's about two million square kilometres in area, isn't it?

It's about like what, nine times the size of Great Britain.

So, but most of it is, yeah, it's covered by this ice sheet in the centre, and much of it's in the Arctic Circle.

Obviously, not great for settlement, particularly because, as we have learned, Vikings, farmers, they like that.

They can't just live on the ice.

So, the interesting bit is that Eric goes to these sort of fjords of southwest Greenland, which are much more habitable.

And it's a period in history where the weather's a little bit more favourable, the temperatures are a bit higher.

And there's also other good things to be found in Greenland, like walrus, and specifically walrus ivory, which is like huge, lucrative and will go for huge prices.

And so Eric thinks, yep, this works.

So, according to the later texts, when his three years are up, he goes back to Iceland, he collects his friends and his family, and he says, Come on, let's go off and settle up, settle Greenland.

And that's about what 985 and he calls it Greenland to get them to come.

Yeah, it's so green, it's so lovely.

But the thing is, it is green.

So, I've done a lot of research out there, and that's you know, you go in the summer, very nice, you can go skinny dipping up there, you know, it's like, yeah, but which I have done with a caribou hunter.

That is my

okay, there you go.

Can you also go swimming?

Or can you only go skimming?

You can only go skinny dipping up.

But, but, but, but, so, in the winter, the problem is the winters are really long and harsh.

And, of course, Greenland is best known for the ice.

And so, that's why people think he was lying, but he wasn't.

Is that one of those places that have like three hours of sunlight in the winter?

Yeah, exactly.

Depending on how far north you go, I mean, three hours they'd be lucky to have the iceberg.

Yeah, because two-thirds of it's in the Arctic Circle.

So, you're properly.

I don't like the sound of that at all.

Go in the summer, where it's pretty much always day and quite nice.

Really?

Yeah, you know, lovely time, time though.

So Eric the Red is a pagan.

Yes.

He's not a Christian.

No.

His son Leif is a Christian.

So we've got a really interesting moment in history where the Vikings convert over and Leif is one of the absolute first.

Well, his wife as well, Eric's wife.

Very interestingly, she stops wanting to share a bed with him when she converts to Christianity.

She causes all the blood.

She causes all the catch-up.

Yeah, but he's really cross about that.

The song is to actually say he was not pleased about that.

But also they found her church.

So we know it's very much this cusp period, but Leif has a very important role to play in that.

How do we know North America is settled by Vikings?

Or at least what do the sagas say?

So the saga.

So we're back with those two Vinland sagas.

Yeah.

The saga of the Greenlanders, the saga of

the red.

They give slightly different accounts.

According to the saga of the Greenlanders, the first person to sight land to the west of Greenland is a merchant called Bjadny.

He gets blown off course.

Often discoveries happen because people have just got lost at sea, but he doesn't explore it, and the sagas are not very pleased about this.

Basically, everyone criticises him because he's shown a lack of curiosity, which is sort of not a Viking thing to do.

And then later, Leif goes back and finds the land.

When you say not very pleased, is that

they kill him?

No, he's fine, he doesn't, but it's just like, oh, okay,

you didn't set foot on there.

All right, interesting.

Passive-aggressive, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So the sagas are extremely passive-aggressive.

Yeah, They'll just say she slightly changed colour, and that means she's absolutely furious.

Wow.

Yeah, so I used to work for a lady who ran a children's entertainment company, and every time she hated something, she'd go, that's interesting.

There you go.

There is a theory that understatement comes from Norse literature.

Yeah.

Because we do it a lot in English, in British culture, in sort of comedy.

We kind of go, this is fine, you know, and the kind of the meme of the flames behind this.

There's a theory that the Vikings invented that.

And it is really funny.

So someone will, again, typical feud type thing, someone will have, I don't know, a spear thrust into his guts and he'll say, oh, I see that they are making the blades in this style these days.

So it's like the, yeah, the cooler you can play it, the more Viking you are, really.

So the saga of Eric the Red says that Leif is blown off course and first sights America, well, North America.

The other story says,

someone else

sees it, but then Leif still.

And then Leif heads out.

So we've got two slightly different versions.

And this happens in the year 1000.

Yes.

Very nice and memorable for us.

Really easy date to remember.

The year 1000.

Doesn't they had a millennium bug?

Yeah.

A cockroach.

Yeah.

Just on the ship.

They did think the world was going to come to an end.

That was a huge thing.

Yeah.

World year 1000, that was it.

The Antichrist was coming to it.

Yeah, it's called millenarianism, which is quite hard to say.

I always thought that was to do with hats.

It was quite disappointing.

Awesome.

Moving on.

Okay, so 1000, Lafe Erickson has found or at least explored a new land.

Yes.

So what does he find?

Well, I should say, not just he, but his followers and the main discoveries, once again, in both sagas are made by enslaved people.

So it's very important.

So one is called Tirkir and the others are two sort of Scottish slaves called Hakki and Hekja.

And they basically find, so, well, before they get to Vinland,

they find other lands.

And one is very sort of rocky and bare and they call that Hetkluland, which means stone slab land.

And they come down the coast and then they find another that has lots of trees and animals, and they call that Markland, which means forest land.

And then they come to this region, which they call Vieneland because of sort of the wild grapes.

The weather is fine, the winters are mild, there's salmon, there's all sorts of nice things.

And they think, Great, this works.

And so they build some temporary houses there.

Oh, lovely, yeah.

Yeah, and they call them Leifs Boothir, which means kind of like Leif's booths, Leif's houses.

Okay, so we've got slab land, forest land, and wineland.

Which one would you want to live in?

I will take the forest land, please.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, I'm not really a wine boy.

Okay.

No, more spirits.

And you're more likely to find spirits in the forest.

They haven't invented spirits yet, I'm afraid.

That comes later.

They do have mead, if that's any good.

Maybe honey.

It doesn't sound good.

It's very sweet.

Oh, yes, it does sound good.

There you go, mead.

That's the best.

All right, I'll think about that, yeah.

Okay, so we've heard about people getting blown off course.

We've heard about shipwrecks.

Kyle, in Taskmaster, you built a beautiful egg boat.

Yes, I did, didn't I?

You were a master shipbuilder.

Yes.

So could you talk me through how to build a Viking longship?

Well, what you want to do

is get some of your neighbour's decorative

bench boards.

And you want to put those, you want to turn them the other way around so your neighbor can't tell that you

used his.

And then knock it together.

Get some mead for the journey.

maybe a pig.

Right.

And because you don't know how long you're going to be at sea.

Sure.

What else do you need?

How are you propelling this boat?

What's the propulsion mechanism?

Pig?

More boards.

More boards.

Yeah.

So we use the boards like oars.

Okay, you're using oars.

Yeah, because I imagine the water's quite cold.

Yeah, so I'm not popping my hand in there.

No.

Right.

So, but that can we can also use some of that to cool the mead.

cool the mead wife

wife

that's my plan.

Tell me about Viking um shipbuilding because they are renowned for oh yeah, they they are amazing.

Oh, you mean it wasn't exactly what I said?

Well like raft with a pig.

So you've got these well for a start you that they're propelled by sails as well as by oars and that is very important because when you're in the middle of the North Atlantic you might need the odd sail and rather than your raft, you've got to try sort of clinker-built style.

So, you've got boards, you've got planks, and then you're overlapping them.

So, they make these very supple, beautiful boats with very shallow bottoms, which means if you want to go raiding, you can sail them into very shallow bays.

And then, if you want to go across the North Atlantic, you're going to need something a bit bigger.

And those are boats that then you can fit your family in, your followers, your livestock.

You can try pigs, but I'd go for goats and sheep.

So these are two different types of.

Yeah, there's multiple different types of boats.

And actually, some of them survive.

So you were talking about this, the Viking flaming boat burial.

Not always flaming, but you do get Viking boat burials that do survive.

So there's one from Osserberg in Norway from about the year 834.

Two very high-status women were found in it.

And they've got these lovely, curly, beautiful prows and sterns.

You can see what that would have looked like.

Another one from Gokstad, also in Norway, a few decades later.

And that one actually contained a very kind of stereotypical Viking warrior who'd been killed violently.

And actually that one was reconstructed to go from Bergen in Norway all the way to Chicago at the end of the 19th century.

So we know those sorts can go across the ocean, but it's still pretty cold.

Yeah, there's no cabins, there's no lower deck, no.

Just benches.

Yeah.

And so it's open sky.

So it's raining, if it's snow.

Exactly.

You're there with your furs.

Yeah, you're there with your, and the furs are probably wet.

I mean, there's also, you know, a lot of sun, too much sun, and not enough wind, also not great.

You can end up just stuck there in the middle.

I'm going to ask the obvious question here.

How do you get to the toilet in a long ship?

Crossing the Atlantic.

It's going to take weeks.

Yeah.

What's the sanitation facility?

So from my friends who have sort of gone in reconstructed boats, it seems very much like over the side, if it's calm enough with a shipmate clinging on to you.

Oh, right.

I'm assuming if it's less calm, maybe a bucket, but then you've still got to do something something with it.

But you need a poo buddy.

You do need a poo buddy currently.

Yeah.

Did you throw away some buddy?

Because you've got to put your bum over the side and the boat will be being tossed in the waves.

You're going to fall out.

So you need someone to hold on to you.

Hang on to you, yeah.

So I would be, you know, hands on your shoulders, Kayell, where you are.

What about the construction?

Can't you

hold on to that?

It's pretty.

They're very low.

Very low sides, the old Norse boats.

I don't like being watched.

Let's get back to Leif Erickson.

So we have the two sagas, the Vinland sagas.

They don't say very much about him after the journey.

No, not a huge.

So there are other sagas that he gets small mentions in.

So there's the saga of Olaf Tryggferson about one of the great Christianising kings of Norway.

Leif is there, but it's very much like Olaf told Leif to go out and convert Greenland to Christianity.

There's another saga where he's very much the

person who is the most important person in Greenland, but then he sort of seems to have died by around 10, 25.

We know about his family, though.

Yes.

Leif's, he's got siblings.

Yeah, he's got siblings, half siblings, something.

Yeah, we're not quite sure.

But yeah, exactly.

And they...

even after Leif comes back to Greenland, then according to the sagas, seem to be making voyages out again to Vinland, as they call it.

So there's one led by Leif's brother, Thorvald.

Doesn't end well for him.

Another by...

First name, though.

Yeah, it's a lovely name, isn't it?

Yeah, so Thorvald, and then he's got another one, thorstein and um

i'm not into that no not but it's it's like thorstone so like the god yeah

i like it

yeah i preferred the first one okay we'll we'll stick yeah

like and then there's there's one led by what was his sister-in-law gutrider with her new husband karlsefni and then there's another one either led by or at least she is there depending on the version by his sister half-sister freydis

And she's, how am I going to put this delicately?

Terrifying?

Should you read it?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, Reidette

doesn't even come close to her.

Okay, but here we're talking very specifically about the saga of the Greenlanders, because this is one of these really interesting things where we've got oral traditions that

end up in these sagas, but her character, it depends on which saga we're looking at.

Saga of Greenlanders, yeah, absolutely terrifying.

She makes a deal with two Norwegian brothers to sail to Vinland, and they're there to gather timber and resources.

But she ends up getting her followers, and specifically her husband, to kill all the men on the other boats.

And no one will kill them.

So she gets into an argument with them, and she wants the bigger of Leifs Boothir, and she wants Leif's booths, and she wants kind of all the resources.

And she's just not nice.

She knows what she likes.

She does.

The problem is...

She's

it gets, yeah.

She also, so no one, there were women in the other party as well, on the other ship, and no one will kill them.

And so she actually, she says, hand me an axe, or literally put an axe in my hand.

She finishes them off.

And it just says in the saga, and so it was done.

It's horrible.

Radis, in one saga, is a sort of psychopathic Tarantan character.

Horrible, yeah.

In the other saga, she's not nearly as terrified.

No!

She's still quite hardcore.

She's hardcore.

She's totally badass.

She's amazing.

She's a raidette.

Yeah, yeah.

So

so she's she doesn't lead the expedition in this one but she's on the expedition and then there's a violent encounter

exhausted oh yeah but well so they get into

an altercation with the local population that they meet there

and so basically all the men run away and there's a weapon on the floor from one of the people who's been killed and she picks it up to face the sort of indigenous people who are coming towards them and by the way she is heavily pregnant at this point.

And she bares her breast and she slaps the sword against it.

And we're not entirely sure why, but basically, the indigenous people are so terrified, they then run away.

That would scare me actually.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, the heavily pregnant lady with a sword.

Yes.

There's a part of me that's running away instantly, automatically.

Just like, you know, that's an intimidating image.

It really is.

And so she is properly badass.

I really like her in that.

So that's Freydis.

Yeah.

So Raidette or Merciless Killer.

One of the two.

You choose.

We've touched on a really important point.

You said, you know, the locals.

So when we talk about the discovery of new lands, obviously they're not new lands.

People have been living there for 25,000 years.

Indigenous peoples in North America, in Canada, the First Nations people.

So what do the sagas say about these interactions between the Norse and the native people

of Newfoundland?

Is it Newfoundland?

Newfoundland.

Yeah, well, and further south.

Yeah, exactly.

And this is really interesting because it's possible this is the first time if we think of the circle as a

if we think of the world as a circle, this is the first time you see the two sides culturally meeting.

Those are the first encounters we've got.

And it's sort of pretty typical.

So depending on the saga, depending on the episode, sometimes they're trading.

And they particularly, so the indigenous people particularly like the red cloth and the dairy products and the weapons, but the North are like, nah, we'll keep hold of the weapons, thank you.

And in return, they give them a lot of them.

You have the yogurt.

Yeah, exactly.

You enjoy that.

But then

the Norse give them

furs and skins.

So it's actually very much like what happens later on when you enter.

Not necessarily, because in other encounters, they basically all go horribly wrong, and there's a lot of violence, and people get killed, sometimes entirely without provocation.

One episode, it's like, they just found three people sleeping, so they killed them.

And there's

not, it's not great, it's really not.

And it's telling.

They describe them.

The word they use is skreilingar.

And skreiling means sort of wretched or puny.

So that's how the Norse are looking at these people.

And they lump them all together, but we're probably talking about, you know, the Innu of Labrador, Markland, that forest land, and the Beotuk of Newfoundland.

And then we've got around the Gulf of St.

Lawrence, which is probably that sort of southern extremity of where they get to, we've got the Algonquins and the Iroquois.

So we've got those various groups that the Norse do seem to encounter.

But ultimately, when they leave for the last time in the sagas, they say we've found a land of fine resources, but we won't be able to settle here.

We won't be able to use it.

So that's the story told by the sagas, these two sagas, the Vinland collection, which is Eric the Red Saga and the Greenland saga.

Yes, Kyle.

Yeah.

Is this making sense so far?

Anything you want to clarify?

I mean, there was a point just now where you said a bunch of things, and the one thing I heard heard was Labrador.

And

that's what I was thinking about throughout.

You said a

whole bunch of other stuff, and I was like, no idea if these are even English words.

That's cool.

It's like when I give lectures to students, that's the same glazed word.

That's why I'm used to it.

In your head, you're just imagining a really cute dog.

It's like, oh, what are those dogs doing?

Do we have any more evidence for the life of Leif?

Basically, those sagas.

Yeah, so

we know he's kind of out there according to one King saga.

We know that he's a prominent person in Greenland according to another saga.

And then by, there's a saga called the Saga of the Sworn Brothers or Fospre, the saga.

By that one, it's probably set in around 1025.

Someone goes off to Greenland.

But by then, another good name for you, it's Thorketr, who's Leif's son.

So he's Thorket, Leif's son, who's living where Eric the Red lived and then when Leif lived.

So it looks like that Leif has probably died by this time and his son has taken over the most prominent man.

From what we know of the sagas he's got to have died somewhere between

around 1018 and 1025 and that's purely because in one of them he's there in Greenland and in the next it's his son and there's no sign of him so he's probably gone.

Definitely dead by 1025.

Yeah it looks like it a thousand years ago a good nice memorable number.

There we go let's stick with that one.

Yep.

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So we've killed off Leif Erickson, right?

We don't know how he dies, but he dies in 1025.

We think it will take ish.

Ish.

Probably of, I don't know, old age or whatever.

Although, you know, maybe he was killed.

Sorry, I've got to put this in my calendar.

We can't say ish.

I need a date.

Okay.

By 1025, someone else is in charge of me.

Yeah.

So he's definitely dead by then.

Okay.

So

let's agree.

1025.

Okay.

Can't be that.

Yeah.

We're not in the right period of history to be really specific.

Okay.

Let's talk about the afterlife of Laith.

The after Lafe.

Yeah, the afterlife.

That's so good.

Thank you.

What happens to his story?

You know, he's dead, but what happens

in the modern day?

Well, so this is quite interesting because the first English-speaking settlers of the US and Canada want to emphasize their English roots.

And we know that Columbus landing on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola takes hold as sort of an alternative origin myth for the US after the War of Independence, particularly.

But Columbus also has never actually set foot in North America.

So then the story of Leif Erickson gets really popular in the 19th century.

And part of that is because Protestant US citizens, they're not, you know, Columbus is a little bit too Catholic for them.

So, what seems to be happening is Viking gets conflated with the idea of Anglo-Saxons.

It implies a sort of ancestral link to modern white Americans.

So, it's this sort of quite uncomfortable racial myth of white Anglo-Saxon colonizers bringing civilization to indigenous populations around the globe.

You know, it's the classic story.

But something interesting also happens because we've got Scandinavian settlers, particularly in the upper Midwest.

Minnesota.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Yeah, and they're very keen to emphasise the fact that medieval Norse explorers make it to the edge of North America way before Columbus.

Even in

the problem is that in reality, of course, we're talking about Newfoundland and Labrador and Baffin Island.

We're not talking about Minnesota or Boston, but they'd very much like to believe that the Vikings visited there town.

Okay.

So Leif Eriksen becomes fashionable for

a bunch of white people in the 19th century.

What's quite interesting is that people start looking for new ways to put Leif Ericsson into the story, and they start coming up with sort of quite bonkers theories.

We've got a little mini quiz for you here, Kayell.

So which of these was not a genuine theory argued by people in the past?

Number one, Christopher Columbus was actually a Norse Villander, so a Viking, who sailed back to Europe and changed his name to Christopher Columbus.

So is that true, yes or no?

Number two, strange metal objects found in Minnesota were medieval Norse axe heads.

That's the second theory.

And number three, Vikings got to North America before Indigenous Americans.

So before, I mean, we're talking 25,000 years ago, but before that, and they were the ones who built the mounds in Mississippi and the Ohio River valleys.

So which of those three do you not think is a true theory that was made by people in the past?

The

last one.

Interesting.

I'm so sorry, Kayell, we've actually tricked you here.

These are all theories that have been put forward.

None of them was not

a theory.

Sorry.

I shall have my vengeance.

Actually, as you read them all out, I thought, all of them.

And then when I asked you.

When I lied to you, you lied.

I thought, oh, okay, no, maybe it's not.

And what's happened here is you've done me.

I have.

I've been done.

I've done you over, like Freydis.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, look,

at least now I know an hour in that you're not to be trusted.

I am very unreliable.

Yeah, so the axe heads found in Minnesota actually turned out to be made by a tobacco company in the 20th century

and they were tobacco cutters.

So that's fun.

But yeah, people claimed that Christopher Columbus was a Viking and that the Vikings had got there before the Indigenous peoples of America, which is ludicrous.

So there we go.

Eleanor, tell us about the other frauds and fakes and mistakes.

Yeah, so these are more interesting in a way because it's people basically wanting to create a history that they believe is true.

It's sort of fake it till you make it sort of thing.

One of my absolute favourites is the Kensington stone, which was found wrapped in some tree roots on a farm in Minnesota in 1898.

So funnily enough, the farm belonged to a Swedish immigrant called Olaf Omen, and the runes claim to date to, I think, 1362.

They start eight Goths and 22 Norwegians on an exploration journey from Vinland to the west.

And so essentially, they are telling another story.

Problem is, it's a total lie.

We have plenty of runes that are not a total lie and do come from the Viking Age.

These are not any of those.

So very conveniently, a very similar form of runic script is still being used in Sweden at this time in exactly the area that Olaf comes from.

Oh, really?

Yeah, so it's like, hmm.

So he went to rune school.

He basically went to rune school and he's got a big library and it's full of these sorts of books.

He kind of writes fan fiction?

Is it romantic?

Is he trying to be like, oh, isn't this cute?

Or is he genuinely trying to pull the wall?

I think he's trying to pull.

Well, so I think he is, but then later on, someone else from the area says, oh, yeah, this was basically meant to be the biggest joke in history.

It was like, a ha ha.

And then it sort of got a bit out of hand, and suddenly everyone's believing it.

And they're like, well, I guess we're in for the long haul here.

Okay.

So

he had to commit to the prank.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and he really did.

Well, it gets more awkward because this runestone then ends up very nearby in Alexandria, Minnesota, which also then becomes home to Big Ollie, who's a 25-foot Viking statue who's built in 1965 for the New York World Fair?

And then he's got a shield with words on it, and it says, Alexandria, birthplace of America.

Right.

Yeah, and there's now a runestone museum, and there's all these like sexy Viking waxworks and a replica long ship.

You know, this is a joke that's got a little bit out of hand.

Right.

Okay.

Kaylee, if you were going to try and fake that you'd been somewhere, how would you fake it?

Photoshop.

Nice.

Photoshop, green screen.

screen.

Just drop yourself in.

Yeah.

Get the picture off Google Images, pop yourself on the green screen, done.

Easy peasy.

I mean, that is the modern world, isn't it?

You don't have to build statues.

You just put a fake location on Instagram.

That's quite good.

Yep.

Okay, so you just play around with the settings on the phone, maybe.

Yeah.

Clever.

All right.

So, Eleanor, you are an environmental historian.

You work with archaeologists?

Yes.

Collaboratively?

Yes.

Okay.

What kind of science have we got that actually goes, yeah, you know what?

The Vikings did get from North America?

We do have that.

And so, and basically, the Windland sagas directed these archaeologists straight to it.

So, in the 1960s, archaeologists started working on a site in Lanser Meadows in Newfoundland, in Canada, and they found the remains of several Norse-style buildings.

So, it looks like there's some that people can live in temporarily.

It looks like there's workshops where people can sort of own things.

So, it's the, what's it?

It's the tip of Newfoundland.

Yeah.

So, it's a place called Lance Lance O'Meadows.

Yeah, so right by the water.

This is temporary.

So you can tell no one's really living there permanently because, yeah, essentially you'd expect to see more rubbish, you'd expect to see some graves, all the rest of it.

You don't have that.

So it looks like what they're doing is essentially using it as a stopping off point, mending their ships, overwintering.

And then they can go further south.

And there's some things that have been found at that site, like butternuts that don't, and butternut wood, they don't grow that far north.

So we're talking the area further south down the s the Gulf of St.

Lauren brought stuff there and left it yeah exactly exactly so Vinland in a way isn't that place Vinland is the whole area going south from there okay so Lanso Meadows is more of a kind of winter stop-off yeah mend your ship mend your ship yeah you know

well and there's no toilets

how quickly can you mend a ship so there there are to I'm imagining there are toilets but the problem is that y if they'd been there for years and years and years you'd expect to see rubbish building up and and like poo, basically.

Right.

And there's nothing that suggests that people are living there permanently.

So there's a couple of years' worth of poo, but there's not a solid hundred years of turds.

Exactly.

That's what you're looking at.

Oh, goodness.

And

the exciting scientific term I'm going to use is radiocarbon dating.

Oh, yeah.

Do you know what that is, Kanyell?

Not a clue.

No.

Solar flares.

That's a bit of a.

That's not helping.

No.

Radiocarbon dating.

Radiocarbon dating is a technology we've had for a long time, but it's got better.

Yeah, so it's looking at specific, there's different forms of carbon-14, so it's a specific isotope of carbon.

Right.

And basically.

An isotope is.

So it's a form of carbon.

Yeah.

There are different types.

None of us are scientists.

We're not scientists.

Types.

I know the word types.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There you go, there you go.

So basically, it ends up in anything living.

And then when that thing dies, it starts degrading and it degrades at a sort of reliable rate.

So you can then count and work out how old something is.

Work backwards.

Exactly.

Yes, exactly.

But

this is a little bit different.

So this is something that's just been found, which is they know that there was a big cosmic storm, so like big solar flares, in the year 993.

And you can see that in some of the wood that has been, obviously, been chopped by the Norse at this site at Lanza Meadows.

So the way we can know this is we know the date of the solar flare, which is 993, and then we just literally count forward on the tree rings.

Every ring is a year, and when we get to the end of the rings, that tells us the year that the tree was cut down.

Dendrochronology.

Dendrochronology, exactly.

Thank you.

And so.

So it's how many rings since the flare?

Yeah, exactly.

And so we know that that wood was cut in the year 1021.

And so that's the one date that we can say, all right, it looks like the Norse were definitely at this site in this year, which is really specific because usually we're talking, you know, a good flabby hundred years or so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's during Leif's life because he died in 1025-ish.

Probably.

Yeah.

His sister might be there.

This could be Freydis.

It could be, or it could be the axe she used.

It could be the murderer, the murder weapon.

Who knows?

Wow.

So this site is called Lance O Meadows.

It's very exciting.

It's very important.

And it's not a big site, is it?

It's small.

It's definitely small.

It's not a village.

And we've got some other, there's other stuff too, other physical evidence.

Yeah, so that's the biggie.

That's the really big one.

But if we go back up north to Baffin Island, so that Hetlu land, that stone slab land,

again, coming back to Vikings equal actually farmers who like raiding sometimes and exploring, they couldn't have settled there.

It's just stony and rocky.

But

there are signs of sort of brief Norse presence, like maybe the Norse passing through.

So there's wool that seems to be spun in a very specifically Norse way.

There's little wooden, I know that's a thing.

Don't get me studded on Norse textiles.

We'll be here a long time.

And the kind of thing they're doing at Claire's Accessories.

Yeah.

It's even cooler than that.

Yeah, and there's little sort of wooden sticks with tally marks.

They might have been used for counting or possibly prayer sticks or something.

Whetstones used to sharpen weapons or tools.

So possibly that's a sign.

There's also really, again, sticking with Baffin Island, there's an archaeological site that's not Norse, it's early Inuit.

And it's close to the sort of southernmost tip of Baffin Island.

And there they found this really lovely piece of carved wood.

And it's a human figure and it's about five and a half centimetres high, but it looks like it's wearing Norse clothing.

So it's got like this very full...

Yes, it's lovely.

It's like this full folds of a skirt and then possibly a kind of yoked hood covering the head and the shoulders.

And what's really lovely is that we do actually know what in the later period at least people in Norse Greenland were wearing because the ground is permafrost, it's so hard and icy, there's at least one graveyard where the clothes, all this organic material still existed.

Oh, because it doesn't rot.

It didn't rot, yeah.

It is unfortunately now rotting because everything's getting warmer.

But, but so you can actually see it's it looks like this little carving might be evidence of cultural encounter.

And we have Norse graveyards in Greenland.

Yes, so we've got a Norse grave, like, and I can't remember if it's stuck in their ribs or something, but it's an arrowhead.

This is not a Norse arrowhead.

The only thing they found that is sort of equivalent to that is over

in the cultures of people who were living on that edge of the North American continent.

And actually, that's how one of Leif's brothers is said to be killed.

So an arrow basically hits him.

So it could be him.

It could be him.

Let's say it's him.

We've got greatest.

It's tough in that wood.

Now we've got Leif's brother.

I'm starting to realise.

Let's say, why not?

That's what history is.

You heard it here first, Kayle.

So there we go.

So that is the end of our history rummage.

How do you feel about Laif Erikson and the Vikings now?

Have you enjoyed that, or was that just way too much information?

I have learned.

I have learned some things.

Cool.

I would have him round for dinner.

Yes.

Yes.

There you go.

He's the one you would have round for.

He might try and convert you to Christmas.

Oh, not Christmas.

Oh, no.

Too much.

No, no, no.

When you're roosting your pigs and putting your meat out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Get him to twist the pig around

on the rotisserie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rotisserie pig.

Get him to pop the apple in, twist it around.

Nice.

Done.

Carve it up.

Yeah.

Lovely stuff.

The nuance window!

This is the part of the show where Kayell and I pull the ship to shore, we get warmed by the fire, and Dr.

Eleanor teaches us something we need to know about Leif Erikson and the Viking Age.

Take it away, Dr.

Eleanor.

Okay, so what I would say is that big names such as Leif the Lucky and Eric the Red are the ones we tend to know about.

But I want to make the case for the everyday people who are just bumping along, living their lives through the Viking Age, because they're every bit as interesting, if not more so, than the larger-than-life characters who end up in the sagas and history books.

We just don't get to hear about them so often.

Although, a book coming out in September called Embers of the Hands, which may be very

much about that subject.

So, it's this idea of looking at the everyday people who slip between the cracks of history and the little bits and pieces of them that survive.

And Greenland is actually a really exciting example of this.

It's my favourite part of the Norse world because its remoteness and that permafrost we talked about means that tons of material from Norse Greenland has actually been frozen in time.

And I'll give you two examples, but they give us more names, names of ordinary humans that we wouldn't know about otherwise.

Now, one of those comes from a coffin in a graveyard.

There's no body in that coffin, but there's a rune stick.

And carved onto this little piece of wood is an inscription that can be translated as, this woman who was called Gudveg was laid overboard in the Greenland Sea.

So earlier, when we were talking about those great voyages across the ocean, we have to remember how many ordinary people and how many women were there and

how many of them may have actually not reached the other side.

The other example, again, runes, this time on a stone found high in the Arctic, hidden in a cairn.

And these runes refer to three men, Erling Sigvatsson, Bjadnir Thoderson, and Eindri the Odsson.

And it says they built these kens the Saturday before Regation Day, which is in late April.

They were probably hunters.

Perhaps they were up there looking for walrus because of that really, really precious ivory.

But if they're there that early in the year, they probably got stranded.

Maybe they overwintered there.

We never know if they got home.

But we don't know what happened to them.

And so that's what I'd say that it's the stories of everyday people that we really need to remember.

Oh, lovely.

Thank you so much, Eleanor.

That's fascinating.

Should I go to Greenland?

Yes.

Well, what do you mean, yes?

Because it's depending on which bit of Greenland, what time of year you want to go, and what you want to get up to while you're there.

And how hot does the summer get?

It can actually, well, particularly now, you know, it can get quite hot.

I've been there when it's, I want to say 25 degrees, kind of t-shirt weather.

Not enough for me.

Not enough.

If you're looking for tropical,

nah, not Greenland.

No.

But they did get, I mean, you can go to Istanbul.

You can go to all sorts of

nice places.

Yeah.

Vikings got there too.

So what do you know now?

Okay, so this is the what do you know now?

This is our quickfire quiz for Kyle to see how much he has learned.

Do you feel like all the information's gone in?

I knew some of the words that were said.

Let's see how well you do.

Question one:

How many years ago did Leif Eriksen probably die?

1,000.

Yeah, very short.

Or 999.

Very nice.

Question two: Leif's dad, Eric the Red, had to leave Norway after some killings.

What disagreement saw him get exiled from Iceland?

It was about the catch up.

No, it was.

The disagreement was with the neighbour.

Yeah, over some.

Over some boards.

That's right, bench boards.

Bed up.

Question three.

Why did Leif's dad, Eric the Red, stop sharing a bed with Leif's mum?

Wouldn't stop banging on about Christianity.

She wouldn't stop banging on.

He wasn't up for.

He wasn't listening to her bagging on about Christianity.

Very good, yes, excellent.

Question four.

Why did you need a poo buddy when on a long ship?

Because apparently, you can't just hold on to the structure of the boat that you're on.

You need to be held by someone else.

You're being tossed in the waves.

It's hardcore.

I think I could do it.

Sometimes I don't even hold on on the tube.

Why are you doing a poo?

Yeah.

Question five.

Vinland or Vineland or Wineland is what the Norse called one of the places in America, North America.

Can you name another of their places?

Yes.

The forest one.

Very good.

Forestland land or slabland.

Helluland and Markland.

Question six.

What was the name of Leif Erikson's terrifying sister?

Freid.

Yes.

Yeah, Freydis.

Yeah, well done.

Yep, I'll let you have that.

Question seven.

According to one of the sagas during the expedition led by Thorfinn Karlselfny, what charging animal panicked the indigenous Americans into conflict?

No.

It was.

It was a charging bowl.

Question eight, who or what was Big Ole?

The

modern-day thing.

The structure that was made in 1965.

Yeah, that's a statue.

Brilliant.

Well done.

Good knowledge.

Question nine.

What is the name of the site in Newfoundland where a Norse settlement was discovered in 1960?

Lance O.

Oh, Lance O'Meadows?

Yay, very good.

And this for 10 out of 10, you could nail it here, Kay.

Come on.

Okay, thanks to new radiocarbon dating informing Scottish.

No, not that bit.

Right, yeah.

What year do we know Vikings chopped down trees with an axe?

I would guess.

If I had to guess, I'd say 1021.

It is 1021.

Wee!

10 out of 10, Kyle.

Amazing.

Well done.

That was more of a 8.5, but I will take that.

No, you got there.

You were kind of in the area.

I just want to let you know what I've written down.

Yeah.

Bluetooth United the Kingdom and the Bluetooth was named after him.

Instead of asking people how old they are, I'm going to ask them how many rings since the flare.

Great.

Finland is not Scandinavia.

True.

True.

And if you give someone a nickname and it sticks, they can kill you.

Yes.

If it's a nasty nickname.

It's a nasty nickname.

Not if it's a cool nickname.

All right.

Okay, well, listen out, if you want more Viking Age adventures, check out our episode on Old Norse Literature.

For more early American history, why not listen to our episode on Sakajoea, who's a very fascinating lady.

And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast please leave a review share the show with friends subscribe to your dead to me on BBC sounds so you never miss an episode I'd just like to say huge thank you to our guests in history corner we have the excellent dr Eleanor Barraclough from Baths Bar University thank you Eleanor thank you this has been so much fun it has been fun thank you for teaching me thank you for learning and in comedy corner we have the master student himself the brilliant kyle smith bino thank you

good viking energy and to you lovely listener join me next time as we sail off on more historical adventures But for now, I'm off to go and fight my neighbour over who gets to keep my lawnmower.

Hooray!

Bye!

This episode of Your Dead to Me was researched by John Norman Mason.

It was written by John Norman Mason, Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Nagoos, and me.

The audio producer was Steve Hankey, and our production coordinator was Ben Hollins.

It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me, and senior producer Emma Nagoose.

The executive editor was James Cook.

Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

Hi, I'm India Rakerson, and I want to tell you a story.

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